My Edenic Hometown

This work is a story of memory, belonging and change. My hometown is Guangshan County, Henan Province, a small
county in the central plains of China. In the 1990s, China was experiencing a boom in southward employment, many
young people in Guangshan County chose to leave their hometown and seek work in the developed cities in the far
south, hoping to change their destiny, at a time when the group identity of Guangshan County seemed to be
stripped away. I was born in this era. Shortly after my birth, my parents need to work in the southern city of
Guangzhou, so they entrusted me to my grandmother. From infancy to childhood, Guangshan County was the only
world I was exposed to. After many years away from my hometown, I returned to my hometown before studying
abroad. Nowadays, Guangshan has become modern, but I keep recalling the past. My hometown still looks simple
and gentle to me and still feels familiarly like home, and this memory has formed my own Eden-style hometown, where I seem to have gained a sense of belonging and identity. So I used my camera to record some details that are
memories, changes and my roots.