The patriarch sits alone in his apartment in Wuhan, China, contemplating his life and legacy in-between visits from neighbouring family members, while yearning for his rural hometown. 

This photo of my maternal grandfather was taken during my fieldwork in China in 2023. It won the Area Studies in a Picture photo competition, hosted by the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies at the University of Oxford. 

As part of my research on the Chinese diaspora temporarily returning to China, the “homeland,” I listened to participants share the distance and dissonance they had with their families in China. Cultural and linguistic barriers became reasons that they could not connect with people they were expected to, and so desperately wanted to. Disappointment, frustration, and strange feelings of foreign comradery, participants expressed ambivalence towards their identities and migration background. 

Reflecting on their stories that paralleled my own, I paid a visit to my maternal grandfather, who was at the auspicious age of 88 at the time, and witnessed how my distance, both literally and culturally, separated me from my extended family. And while his capability and youthfulness show in his poses before the camera, moments in-between revealed the strain of his age, and signs of needed care that my uncle’s family, now three generations in, had performed alone in the absence of my family.