A Return to Nanjing, After Loss

On January 22, 2023, Emma and I boarded a flight to China. It was my first trip back since the pandemic began. I carried my compact digital camera and decided to shoot only in black and white in Nanjing, the city of my childhood.

My mother passed away two weeks earlier during the devastating surge that began in December 2022 after the abrupt end of zero-COVID restrictions. Within weeks, nearly everyone I knew in China had been infected; countless elders, including my mother, did not survive. My father had died two years before. Travel bans and border closures meant I could not be there at either of their bedsides. I never got to say goodbye. Now, as one of the first “foreigners” to enter China after the lockdown, I was returning not to reunite, but to reckon with absence.

My mother developed a persistent fever on December 25, 2022. I was half a world away at a Christmas gathering that evening, anxiously watching through a video camera installed in her bedroom. She died two weeks later in the hospital.

When we arrived at Nanjing, their beds were empty. My father once slept on the bed to the right. My mother, worn down by Parkinson’s, needed her own.

There was no homecoming — only the quiet ground where they waited for us.

Sifting through their belongings was emotionally overwhelming...

Among them, a local newspaper in England from 1979: my father, second from the left, taking part as a performer in an international cultural event at Cranfield Institute of Technology, where he spent two years as a visiting scholar; a handwritten will in an old envelope, waiting for us to open; airline napkins carefully saved from their visits to the United States, where their son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren lived. Those visits were some of the happiest moments of their lives — and ours as well.

Both my parents were professors at the university. They had met as students on campus, fallen in love, and spent their entire adult lives within its walls. I grew up on the campus, knowing every inch of it - its buildings, walkways and hidden corners. Once alive, now it felt eerily still, emptied of life.

Entry to the campus was restricted. I was denied entry at first. Emma wouldn’t give up. She grabbed a pot from home and posed as a university staff heading to the cafeteria for breakfast. She's such a natural that the security personnel let us in.

We spent the last days wandering, soaking in as much as possible my old neighbourhood.

Amid the stillness, I found comfort in the sight of a group of young men shooting hoops in the shadow of the ancient City Wall.