Range Hood Fan

Summer in London is unbearable in an opposite way from Taipei. In Taipei, one can’t wait to find indoor shelters from the poisoned sun, because air conditioners are life savers. However in London, one can’t wait to walk out from the indoors, whether it’s the underground stations, classrooms, or even one’s own house, since there is no air conditioning in most indoor space in London.

I lived in a poorly designed room in London, with summer sun shooting directly into my window and leaving the heat trapped inside the room. One day I ran into my neighbour, who suffered from the same heat condition as I did, and he offered me a clever advice: “If you don't have a fan, at least turn on the range hood fan. It will help removing the trapped heat in the room.” What a simple idea! But one I would never have come up with it on my own. 

I went home in the late afternoon, turned on the kitchen hood fan and let it do its new job. It actually worked! My room gradually cooled down a bit. With the comfort from a satisfying experiment, I sat by the edge of my bed and lied down, closed my eyes and soon fell asleep. 

And then I experienced one of the strangest sensations. In the early evening around dinner time, as I began to wake up, having the sound of the range hood fan from a distance, with the smell of the fan running (it actually produced some kind of specific smell), and possibly also with the smell of my neighbours cooking dinner…with eyes still closed, my half-awakened mind sensed my surroundings from the sound and smell that leaked into my dream. For a moment I had lost where I was, or when it was. I had an illusion (and was deeply convinced by this illusion) that I had fallen asleep in my grandma’s house in Taipei and was waking up to the familiar sound and smell of my grandma preparing food for dinner.

I visited my grandma’s house for dinner every day after school before entering university. My mom was a modern woman who rarely cooked. The kitchen in my house was just a kitchen, but the kitchen in my grandma’s house was the smell of home. Sometimes when I arrived at my grandma’s house early, I would get to see a glimpse of her final preparation for dinner. And I would approach her to ask if there was anything I could help with, which she would kindly reply, “Don’t worry. It’s hot in the kitchen, go to the living room and turn on the air conditioner.” 

I would arrange the dinner table with chopsticks, spoons and those small, delicate Chinese porcelain bowls, and then go to the living room. The dinner table and the living room were in the same open space, where I could look into the kitchen through a wooden door frame. The door to the kitchen was always open when my grandma prepared for dinner. I would occasionally look into the door frame and see the back of my grandma preparing food, with the familiar smell of beef noodles, dumplings…coming out from the kitchen. And of course, with the background sound of the range hood fan, which I never really paid much attention to. In this peaceful surrounding, sometimes I would lay down on the couch in the living room and quietly take a nap, with the expectation for dinner, and for the arrival of my mother and others. 

I would never have thought of how the summer heat in London, the random encounter with my neighbour, the idea of the range hood fan, and the sound and smell of it…would lead to bringing back this distant memory many years later as I lied in my room alone in a foreign country. Dreams, memory, and imagination really work in such unexpected ways. 

"The door lining that frames a familiar scene."

The Shrunken House

"The LA sunset from the backyard of her childhood house."

Returning to my childhood house in LA, I realised the house has shrunk. When my aunt and uncle were out, I decided to try something silly. I kneeled down and began walking around on my knees (on soft carpet of course), and suddenly the house was back to normal size again. As I wandered the house, other than a few unfamiliar objects added, it seemed quite the same from my childhood memory. The colour tone, the smell, the dryness in the air, the touch of the carpet, the walls, the door knobs…and the sound of how the fridge is opened and closed; the sound of summer evenings, of the quietness in insects chirping, intermittently interrupted by cars passing by…I wanted to convince myself that I could almost feel like a child again, but nope, I was just an adult walking on knees. 

The house probably didn't shrink, but I have definitely grown taller. Seeing a familiar space from an unfamiliar angle was strange. But what was even stranger was suddenly when my aunt and uncle, who took care of me so dearly in this house when I was a child, did not talk to me as a child in the house anymore. And that was when I realised, when the people embedded in my memory for a space changes, the space no longer stays the same. 

I guess we grow old much faster than the space we live in. And childhood doesn't come back when we revisit the place. The place has changed, I have changed. The closest I can travel back to my childhood house is in my own recollection.

The Moving Lines

As a kid, whenever I was in a moving vehicle, I enjoyed staring out the window. I often imagined a thing...it could be anything, a dog, an animated person, a ball...I imagined the thing running fast, following me outside of my window. Like a video game, it had to achieve the mission of always following my speed. Sometimes it stumbled and fell, and was left out of my sight, but soon it would always catch up to the position where it was running alongside my window.

The scene outside the window was everlastingly changing. It was easy to be drifted away by objects along the changing scenes, objects that only appeared so shortly, which I wasn’t allowed to linger on. To have a focus point, I'd stare at the lines—the wires, the train rails, the fence lines and the painted traffic lines on the ground...even though the lines were in fact always changing as well, but at least they were visually continuous and it was easy to find a focus point. I often imagined the thing running and jumping on top of the moving lines, trying its best to complete the missions, with the kind help from the guidelines.

Director's Statement

After my grandmother's funeral, with the overwhelming religious melody still nightmarishly haunting my mind, I asked my mother why she decided to hold the funeral in such a way, since the practices of the event were unfamiliar to us. 

"Because it had to have some kind of...ceremony. Otherwise, do we just say goodbye to her...so lightly?" 

It was a matter of weight, the weight of death, of recognising the loss of a beloved one. 

Sometimes I think time is like an endless line. Without recognising the changes, it just goes on and on, like a book without chapters. To have ceremonies mark out events along the timeline is convenient and understandable. We want to give weight to the event. We want to recognise that it is not just another day. It is the day that something happened, that something changed. We want to remember it.

I have poor memories. Looking back, I don't remember how I have become who I am. I remember various events in my life, but I don't remember who I was when the events took place. My recollections are fakery imprinted by every present me, with less and less ink from the original. A ceremony might provoke me to recognise the event on sight, but it won't preserve what the event means to me. 

What does my grandma's death mean to me? It is a simple yet difficult question. My grandma had been a part of my entire life before her death. Now without her, do I suddenly become a different person? Perhaps...not? I am still an extension of who I was yesterday, with no noticeable change in who I am. I do not really know what it means for me to lose my grandma, but I am certain that it is significant to me. I want to recognise and remember that.

Artistic creation often serves as a good reminder of the artist's stage in life. To make a semi-one-person documentary, to be vulnerable, and to have the attempt at honesty and sincerity, is my way of remembering who I am right now, at this very stage when a most beloved one has just left me. It is my way of marking an end to the important chapter, the chapter accompanied by my grandma. 

Perhaps years later, looking back at this film, I will understand what it means to me.