Before leaving for Fujian, I carried collective life in the vocabulary of research. I wanted to understand how cooperation, obligation, and care persist through migration – what becomes of mutual aid when it is carried across different social and political worlds.
Those questions returned as weather: settling on my skin, drifting through streets and shops, gathering around meals, and lingering in conversations that seemed reluctant to end.
A conversation in a shop became a WeChat 微信 post, sent out like a paper boat, hoping someone might know a family, or a name I should meet. In several cities, I met three Chinese Indonesian women whose families had long histories in Indonesia and who later returned to China, becoming part of its returned overseas Chinese communities. All three had returned decades earlier, around the same period, and had since built lives around small restaurants and food businesses. Memory remained legible: in recipes, family stories, remembered places, photographs, and the social worlds that gathered around their tables.
Almost every day, a small opening appeared.
People lingered longer than they needed to, visibly lit once they understood why I was there. A restaurant owner’s son carried me somewhere on a motorbike. In one place, I was simply trusted to return and pay the next day. A grandmother pressed snacks into my hands to take home. Someone gifted me a scarf; someone else, a drink, a charm, and other small things. Food was shared. Introductions multiplied. Gifts kept finding their way into my hands, until I began photographing them – an incidental archive, modest objects holding the memory of a person, a gesture, an afternoon.
I had arrived thinking analytically about mutual aid. I knew it lived inside everyday life; still, I had perhaps become too preoccupied with tracing its forms, its histories, its vocabularies.
In Fujian, its presence in everyday life became impossible to miss.
What stays with me most is how seldom I felt alone, though I came to Fujian a stranger to every face. Warmth was not an exceptional event. It was almost an atmosphere – a quiet social infrastructure through which unfamiliar places became more familiar, one encounter at a time.
P.S. I’ve attached collages of the incidental archive: snack packages, gifts, brochures, and other small things that found their way into my hands.
