September 2026
Discovering Annie is a piece created to celebrate my grandmother’s still ongoing journey through life. For as long as I can remember, Annie, whom I affectionately call Popo, has simply been my maternal grandmother — someone I would turn to when my mother made me angry, and someone I would call every week without fail to ask what she is cooking for Friday's dinner. I have always known Popo for who she is to me, my grandmother. And she’s always known me as Xiao Bu Dian (小不点), a term of endearment for her favourite grandchild (yes, I’ve confirmed my status with her more times than you could ever imagine).
But come to think of it, I have rarely ever wondered what she was like as Annie. As I began looking through her countless photo albums that had been sitting in plain sight in her living room all these years, I discovered sights of her I’ve never seen before. A whole life that existed sixty-four years before mine, and even a name, Annie, that I never knew she went by.
This is my attempt to discover Annie.
We were asked to “…present your understanding of an aspect of “family”, for example contextualising the issues of change and continuity through the decades, exploring culture and heritage through family recipes etc.” Naturally, I began asking myself who in my family I wanted to photograph. I have three grandparents who are still around, so why Popo?
To be honest, she has always been the grandparent I am closest to. (Let’s hope my other grandparents don’t see this…) But there is another reason. In 2020, Popo had a health scare, and I became increasingly conscious that the routines that I had grown accustomed to — Friday dinners and weekly phone calls — would not last forever.
Admittedly, I’ve started compiling some of these pictures since January 2025, after I finished my military enlistment — way before I started this photography module — as a way to remember her before she leaves. Each time I tried piecing the photographs together, I would give up quickly. It was really strange to turn someone who was very much alive into a memory. I didn’t like that thought.
So some of these photographs remained in my archive. Until now.
I’ve been trying very hard to understand why my memories of Popo are so deeply attached to the space in which I’ve spent time with her. I understand the concept of place attachment, how our emotional bonds are deeply intertwined with the places that we experience them in, but there is this strange feeling I get when I’m in her home and she’s not there.
In moments like these, I find myself envisioning what the future will be. How this same space would function without her, how life would move on, how people would forget, and how I know I will be remembering for a very long time. It is kind of like an involuntary rehearsal that my mind puts me through in hopes of trying to lessen the emotional burden I will go through when the time comes.
As I walk around her home, I notice the unorganised piles of things she leaves everywhere. Her vanity. Her bed where I used to nap when I was much younger. The blue and yellow cushion that she rests her head on when she’s on the couch. The blue cup that she uses for her afternoon coffee, where each time she’d add two scoops of Anlene. These objects would probably seem very ordinary to you or anyone else, but to me, they are the very things that connect me to her.
Yet strangely enough, when she isn't there, these objects seem to lose that warmth. They seem to only serve the purpose of reminding me that she is absent. Maybe what I was attached to was never really the house at all…
