The places which make us
What we carry with us, what is precious, what forms us, is often geography.
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What we carry with us, what is precious, what forms us, is often geography, says the writer.
PHOTO ILLUSTRATION: UNSPLASH
The building is broken and gone but in her dreams there is neither rubble nor ruin. Everything is intact. Her family’s one-bedroom flat, where she lived as a child in the 1960s, was in Queen’s Crescent by the railway tracks, and she’d scuttle towards the kitchen window when she heard the first clack of the train. She never made it in time to see it.
Farmers lived close by and came asking for swill to feed their pigs. At Chinese New Year, despite the hardships they encountered, they returned bearing gifts. One year, a live chicken, destined for the dinner table.
