Posts

On the road to Suzhou, finally! Months of silence in my journal. History will take its turns but the core will not be lost. From February this year, China has been locked down, with the rest of the world following in its wake. This is all due to the outbreak of nCoV-19, a coronavirus that…

Eyes closed. Eyes open. My daughter sits bent over in the snow, she just got a carrot from grandpa and grandma. The nose. Her posture is recognizable and timeless. Exactly the way she squats right now, she was squatting on Hokkaido on Lake Shikotsu. On the beach in Xiamen, on the riverside in Worcester. And…

I’m re-reading my own WeChat post, posted with a photo from a bridge where I cross a water channel every day on my way to the lab. “Riding the train in the crisp morning to Suzhou clears the mind. A fisherman probably catches more tranquility than fish, even though it’s the steamed lunch in sight…

Recurring theme: propagating ideals. In a conflict between the world and the universe (“peace in space!”) and the world between 6 walls, a door and a window (“dreams can only come true at home!”). In times where bad, shocking and filtered news is reported at the speed of light, my brain sometimes seems to imagine…

A first real autumn day. Suddenly I feel the cold through my coat, my doorstep is covered with crackling leaves, drizzle falls from a gray sky at regular intervals. From the subway station where I get off in Suzhou, I walk briskly to the university, gasping for oxygen through my stuffy nose, occasionally emptying my…

Just a flashback. Will this orange notebook now become a diary for and about my daughter Emme, just like the gray notebook in my office at home? Or, I just write whatever comes to mind and most of it is a memory of, an inspiration from, a story about, my daughter. Which also plays a…

On the train, among a lot of people. Whereas the day before yesterday people of all stripes were still running onto the train carrying suitcases, bags and buckets, the crowds are now beginning to thin slightly. The aftermath of the population migration around the 70th anniversary of the country where I live is still very…

Unbelievable! More than 2 months with no update in this progressing book, 2 months is a gap that remains covered throughout our family history. Emme’s great-grandchildren will confuse in disappointment that the building tension in the preceding writings got truncated without explanation. The thousands of stories that took place in a second summer within China’s…

This orange booklet was actually supposed to be a diary. But it is, maybe in part. Waking up in the hope that the congested bronchus and abrasive throat, accompanied by periodic fevers and sweats, would be over, I experienced my first disappointment of the day. Disappointment connects this morning with a straight line to last…

The first morning in Yixing. Emme is back at sailing camp. A half-hearted flu half-holds me… I sweat all night, I struggle to fall asleep, but in the morning there seems to be some energy under my clammy skin. Emme is at sailing camp… and so is her friend Marisa. We are first reminded of…