take a photo of me before my tears are dry
on (home)sickness, grief, and time traveling
“Could you take a photo of me before my tears are dry?” I asked my partner Trin, who came to help me with chores while I was sick with tonsillitis, a pain I’ve been familiar with since I was a kid. After receiving a heartfelt yes, I passed them my polaroid camera, and they took this photo.
“take a photo of me before my tears dry up”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
For a few hours, I had been laying in the burgundy red bean bag I was asked to take care of for my friend Yidi. The bean bag allowed me to sink in with all the weight I was holding in my heart; its contours gently embraced my touch-deprived body as I self isolated for a whole week. My mask was drenched in tears, its edges gently curling from the moisture running down my face.
I had been up since 4 A.M. with intense pain in my right tonsil. It felt like a thousand needles were poking at my throat every time I drank water. It was already an improvement from the 2 A.M. torture from the night before. Staring at the empty ceiling, I felt like the pain was tearing me up from the inside. The same pain when I dreamed of writing poetry and repeating over and over, “I’m so sick of bleeding into myself.” As if I was etching it onto my body so it travels out of my dream, into my tongue.
While my tongue felt tied and my body deliriously in pain, I called my mom. It was 4 P.M. in China. I realized it’s been a while since we’ve spent any afternoons together. We always talk in my morning, their evening – until she almost runs out of time to do her daily English lessons on Duolingo. I miss seeing her in the daylight.
My mom immediately picked up, like she always does, even from the other side of the world. But she never calls me; she only waits for me to call first. It was her first time hearing me in the darkest of night. Earlier in the year, I suffered from periods of insomnia that I barely told her about. It was more boredom than pain. This time, I couldn’t really say anything other than just sobbing.
In some ways, the crying made me feel better. Perhaps that’s why crying is built as part of our body’s survival mechanism: it literally lets more air in and out of my body, reminding me to breathe. Tension rose from my heart and ran through my neck, wrapped around my skull, and finally came down as tears and a warm swell in my throat. The tips of my fingers and toes felt numb and cold. It felt as if a vortex was drilling through my chest and yet all my screams just descended into the void it was creating. I wanted to punch through my chest, to beg it to stop, but I remembered to gently tap on my heart instead.
Crying isn’t weak; it is a whole-body endeavor.
“where do you feel your grief?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
· · · · · ·
My mom never acknowledged the fact I was crying. Between silences punctuated by my undulating sniffles, she offered me a list of things I could do: rinsing my mouth with salt water; boiling hot water to steam my throat; making some sweet honey tea; gently pinching the 少商穴 shaoshang acupoint, just below the right edge of my left thumb nail.
Even in my nightmare delirium, I pinched it twenty times, feeling the simultaneous pain and comfort from steady pressure. I remembered how mama used to gently rub my 虎口 (“tinger’s mouth”) whenever I had a stomachache, and how my hands look like hers, how hers look like my grandma’s. I remembered she used to comb my hair so my headache could go away. The same way my best friend Laura’s mom massaged my head when I visited them in California. It’s the small moments I miss.
“altar, 2025/9/24”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
Mama continued to nudge me to try the many methods she found on the internet. She sounded incredibly calm. Sterile, even. “Can you go boil some water now? Do you still have honey and sugar? Can you get some salt and rinse your mouth now? After you recover, you have to exercise every day so you don’t get sick anymore.”
“Do you think I’d be calling you now if I had the strength to do all of those things?” I cut her off and cried even harder. “I just want to be heard and held right now. When you keep telling me the things I could do, it makes me feel like I didn’t try hard enough. I know that’s not what you’re saying, but it’s how it makes me feel.”
“I never thought you didn’t do enough. You already did everything you could,” she paused for a second, her voice sounding rushed with urgency. “Whatever you have to say, I’m here to listen now.”
I had to wait for the words to come to me. Usually they come pretty easily. Writing, in a way, feels like dream-catching. When all things fail, words are often a magic I could rely on. I know how to make painful things sound pretty. I can make the most potent argument on an issue I care about. I can be gentle and combative. I can be brutally honest and even pretty shady when the situation calls for it.
But it took me several deep breaths before I could tell her when I woke up, the first thing I did was looking up the plane tickets to go home in October. Even though I had just gotten my artist visa to stay in the US. All I could think about was leaving.
I wanted to give up everything I thought I wanted, to choose differently. I’m just really, really tired.
“maybe u r tired… exhausted, actually”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
· · · · · ·
Mama has always been an action-oriented person (that’s why I had so much expired Chinese medicine I had to throw away). And sometimes, that makes me feel like I’m left behind.
When I went back home for the first time in 2023, after being in the US for two years, we had the biggest conflict. Looking back, it was triggered by something so small: mom asked me to put my dirty laundry in the basket. But I just wanted some time to sit with my grief, coming back into a house where my paternal grandmother is no longer with us. There is a time for just witnessing and feeling. Without rushing into fixing, without moving onto the next thing. But in our house, that felt like a luxury.
The repeated ask for this tiniest chore tipped me over the edge. So I cried at dinner. I said I felt like I was living in a different timeline. The pandemic, the lockdowns, the deaths on the Guizhou bus, the fire, the protests. My helpless attempts at sending medicine back from the US when everyone got Covid – and being told my 93-year-old grandma couldn’t physically swallow the pills made me realize how far I was from their lived reality. My nainai’s funeral that I witnessed on camera. My skin felt itchy, having been away from the scorching heat of Guangdong’s summers. And it got worse: I got sick a week after getting home. Everyone at home has tried to move on from everything, but I was still trying to make sense of my grief.
Everything looked eerily gray – that was my first observation of my hometown Dongguan when I stepped out of the ferry from Hong Kong airport. Nothing seemed to have changed, yet everything was different. Perhaps living in diaspora is a kind of time travel. To be stuck in-between, and yet with the liberty to leave again. I am always the person who stands on the edge of the shore and chooses to leave.
“If all the Chinese people take time to feel how they feel, a lot of us simply can’t live anymore.” Mama told me before she took the laundry to the washer and started running around in the house again.
Mothers don’t have the time to grieve. She was trying to do the next thing to keep it all together, so even as the world was falling apart, she could hold up half the sky at home. She is the person who stays.
And yet the wounds are right here, haunting us, in the slightest gradient.
Grief is never too slow.
“what are you haunted by?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
· · · · · ·
Mama paused for a minute after I finally told her about my exhaustion, about wanting to go home. I started coughing, feeling like all the held-back tears were stuck in my throat, rushing to get out. Then I heard pulsing noises from her nose.
It was a subdued cry, the kind of noise you make when you’re trying to hide it from somebody. In Chinese, I’d describe it as 呜咽: it’s something more subtle than a sob; softer than a whimper; and more gentle than a snivel. The word itself sounds like the noise you’d make: wu-ye, wu-ye, wu-ye. I can also think of so many dimensions of grief that are simply intranslatable into English. Perhaps that’s why I often feel like my grief is illegible here.
Mama rarely cried in front of me. Only when we got my aunt’s phone call about her father’s death, right before the Chinese New Year in 2017. When I got depressed after spending a year in European racism and didn’t feel like myself at all, in 2018. When my waipo (my maternal grandmother) cried in an oral history interview I did on my taitai recounting my great grandmother’s funeral, in 2021. And on a spring day in 2023, surrounded by cherry blossoms in DC, when I called my parents from the hospital. From their 哽咽 – choked sobs – I knew my nainai had passed away.
I realized her refusal to acknowledge my crying, the sternness in her voice, her repeated nudges, and the long list of actionable items – which I selfishly interpreted as an utter disregard for my emotions – were her attempts at keeping herself from crying. The same reason why I hadn’t called her until now. I knew all my armour would crumble as soon as I heard her voice.
The moment mama cried, I threw up. Perhaps it was just because of the intense crying and coughing. But I’d like to think that it was more than physiological. The moment my mother revealed her grief to me, I was finally able to release the tension that had been building up in my stomach. I felt connected to her body even though I couldn’t even see her face. I didn’t need her to turn away from her pain to hear mine. Our vulnerabilities could hold each other. Maybe I’m just a hopeless romantic who loves to aestheticize my pain. But what is life without a bit of magic?
“where do you feel your grief?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
· · · · · ·
The magic of sickness allows me to time travel to places I felt nostalgic for but couldn’t remember.
The cold shivers and burning tingles brought me back to the conference hotel room in Bangkok, when I finally fell sick after three full days interacting with other queer/feminist organizers from all over the world. My friend Laura took care of me – having just recovered from a fever themselves during a busy business trip in Japan. It was the first time I ever had anyone take topless portraits of me on film. Beyond body scrutiny or constructs of desirability, there is a deep intimacy in the exhaustion we shared, in documenting the least glamorous moments. The moments when collapse and defeat felt imminent and yet we were held by each other’s care. Just being is enough to be witnessed.
The sweet and cooling taste of the sore throat lozenges sent me to the last few days of 2021. I had just gotten covid for the first time from visiting NYC and self-isolated in a room I subleased in Morrisville. It was difficult to even get tested without my own means of transportation. My best friend in college, Jiayi, dropped off some Chinese medicine for me, only to find out she had covid right before she arrived. So we shared an air hug, two aliens who made each other family on this haunted land.
“what does your grief taste like?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
For the longest time, I thought my photography journey started in the summer of 2022, as an accident-turned-film diary exchange with a friend I had just met then. But now, having Trin take these intimate portraits of me in a vulnerable moment, I remembered the photos I took on my phone that winter in Morrisville. Playing with the duality of fantasy and nightmares, I wrote about how my neoliberal cosmopolitan dream of “everywhere is home” was shattered by the nightmarish reality of “psychic nowhere.” The two photos of the window – the only source of natural light I had at the time – speak to the extreme isolation I felt and the yearning for what’s yet to come.
At the end of 2022, I saved all the boxes from medicine I bought for my family. I put them into different bags for different relatives and carefully labeled dosage. Several friends who went back to China at that time helped me mail these much-needed medicine to my family. Before that, I photographed them. I still keep those boxes in an archival suitcase along with other movement ephemera from the same period. I don’t dare to open the suitcase, as if I am keeping an unmarked grave for all the deaths we are not allowed to remember or mourn.
It was in these moments of disconnection that I felt compelled to turn to photography. Making art was, and continues to be, a means of survival. Sickness and the homesickness it triggers, however painful they may be, have always pointed me towards dreaming beyond and otherwise.
“where is your grief taking you?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
· · · · · ·
Four years have passed since then, and my sickness and grief around unmourned deaths have taken me into many different directions. But mostly, it has pointed me back to love. When I’m sick, the only thing I can focus on is right here and right now. Everything else that seems important to me otherwise loses its meaning. All I have is my body and the people I am holding close.
Like how skin tenders around wounds, these feelings come to me in their rawest form. All I can do is trust that when I fall, my body will catch me. My words will carry me. My photos will witness me. Not “capturing” the moment like an immutable object to be conquered, but catching it as they come to me. Like how whales catch waves, how birds catch the air.
I think about love as a practice of bravery. The courage it took for me to ask to be witnessed, grounded in the grief that washed over me. The bravery of how Trin received my invitation with so much gentleness and care. The bravery of calling my mom and being honest about my exhaustion, asking to be held and not helped, just for a moment. The bravery in my mother’s crying from the other side of the ocean. The bravery of writing these words down now and allowing them to take you to places I didn’t remember existed; the bravery of you, who entered this space through reading. How can we witness our grief for each other as a practice of love?
“could we witness our grief for each other?”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
“thank you for witnessing my (home)sickness & grief”, acrylic on polaroid 600 film, 2025
So now, could you take a photo of me before my tears are dry?
Polaroids: 2025/09/24
Handwriting: 2025/10/02
Writing: 2025/10/02-10/03