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Lyn thumb-wrestling with Beat
Stara Polska Polish restaurant, Marylebone Lane, London. January 2010.
Daddy, with love
Antigua, Guatemala. June 2007.
Here is my father in a pseudo-Chinese restaurant in the colonial town of Antigua, in one of those rare photographs where he is able to relax before my camera. At the time I hadn’t thought that it was extraordinary that my parents had come to visit me in Guatemala but on hindsight I know that it was, especially after J and various friends made me realise the magnitude of their taking that long and arduous trip more than halfway around the world when they, being Chinese parents, hadn’t approved of my decision to travel alone in the first place. I guess they had come to at least find out what it was about the restless continent their daughter found so magnetic. I don’t think my dad ever completely understood my reasons for wanting to travel though, and I don’t think he was very impressed by the places I chose to go to, but it was the effort made that now seems to me invaluable. And come to think of it, there were in fact moments of shared understanding and appreciation for the people and the land that I had come to inhabit for a little while, which makes me think of the kind of young man my father might have been before he became simply ‘Dad’.
