Photographs of my Parents (Maxine Hong Kingston)

In Photographs of my Parents, by Maxine Hong Kingston, she looked though her parents’ picture for the purpose of finally making sense of her present.

Given that Kingston spent her childhood in China and a bigger part of her life living a Chinese – American culture, she was able to write both the familiarity and the strangeness of her parents’ photographs, and effectively drew a picture of her past.

The descriptions that she made were not like the ones that you would maybe hear in a photo journalism, or photography workshop. It was not the angle, the lighting, the view, and the technicalities of capturing a moment through some techie lens. What she made was an illustration of the story that was printed on that photo paper. Reading this, one can already visualize how the photographs really look like, without the need to pore over those pictures.