The point of all these is?

It was drizzling in the evening. I started jogging back before the droplets on my shirt joined together to form a big wet patch. Between panting and stitches and thinking how beautiful the sun is when it’s at it’s softest, I thought of the Laos kids playing in the rain. Dipping themselves in the newly-created pool, hair wet, bodies cold, playing those jumping games they always play.

It was a happy and sad thought, being able to re-visit and not relive. There is an old man in the documentary: Invisible City who showed black-and-white photographs of police hitting students from the Chinese schools then, and he retorted something of the like to the black video filming his angry face, “If something is not recorded, did it not happen? Read all the history textbooks, they say Chinese students were violent. Tell me who is violent, look.” Last week’s lecture on Lim Chin Siong being erased from the official history in our secondary school education and the whole issue of alternative histories ties together with memories and perhaps our obsession with documentation.

“If something is not recorded, did it not happen?” We need to click away, to capture an emotion or an ambience, so that there comes a day when we can look at the photograph in it’s real, glossy, physical form and say, “It happened. I remember now.”

-But technology is very dangerous. Cameras, vidoes, blogs, they leave some traces of flavour behind, without being able to record it's entity, so that on that one day when you re-visit, it becomes an exaggeration or a romanticization.