The River Can’t Remember

Nov 2023 - Jan 2024

The watercourse the elders called "Hanshui" winds and meanders between towns and villages.

When they softly utter this name, it's as if they are pulled back into fading years—the smell of damp earth, cattle grazing along the banks, low houses roofed in grey-blue tiles, and those mornings when the river would always lap at their feet.

This, then, is what is called my ancestral home. I was neither born nor raised here, only dimly aware of some loose, long attachment. Its story, in my earliest memories, was merely a story of rivers, plains, graves, and death.

By the winter of 2023, as I returned often to this land, I gradually realized that my status as an outsider had long since expired. Those nouns buried deep in childhood stories could at any moment reveal themselves—"This is the place Grandmother mentioned, this dish, this fruit..."

After the winter snowstorms, I walked along the riverbanks, the levees, past old houses, I pressed the shutter. When I did, language abandoned me. The photographs became a way of standing in what I could not name—a place that belonged to me only through the gap between what I was told and what I could see.

Perhaps this is what the river is trying to tell: not oblivion, but a kind of grace. It cannot remember, and so it never has to mourn.

Liú Yíxuán

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