Story Photographs

A mother’s visit

When I was in the final year of kindergarten, our teachers made an arrangement to invite the parents and guardians to our classes so that they could spend a whole day with us doing all the activities together. What was unique about this initiative was that instead of inviting them all at the same time, […]

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A Pen Case

When I was small, there was one shopping mall in the city centre of my hometown where my mother regularly went to buy clothes and other nonperishable items. In the spring when I was turning six, I accompanied her to the mall and found a large selection of stationary items designed for first graders. A

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Pigeon Biscuits

When I was small, there was a family friend who sent us a box of special biscuits every year. The biscuits were called pigeon biscuits. Huge and shaped like a pigeon, they came in a bright yellow tin box. As soon as a delivery person brought the box to the door of our tiny half-dilapidated

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The shadow on the wall

The summer when I was six, I participated in a five-day swimming program with my two best friends at a local swimming school. We all enrolled in the beginner’s class where we were going to learn how to float and how to kick the water in a proper way. During the week of the program,

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When we used to break the rules

When I was five and lived in a community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments, once a week, my two best friends and I would go to the local YAMAHA music school together for a group lesson. We were always accompanied by all our mothers and our little siblings. Every week, the three adults, the three children

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The scenery I wanted to share

When I was in high school, I took part in the Earth Science Club. Earth science was not at all my interest, but I joined the club because my two childhood best friends were also there and I was intrigued when I heard that the club would organize a regular star-gazing event on and off

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Please leave the light on.

When I was small, I was scared of darkness. My fear used to be manageable when my family lived in a tiny apartment where all the rooms were connected and the only dark room was our storage room. But even then, I used to feel anxious whenever I looked into the storage room in the

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Obsession with Number One

When I was five, my little brother went through a phase when he liked the concept of number one. In the community of tiny half-dilapidated apartments where we used to live in, all six apartment blocks were numbered. Since our apartment block was the oldest of all, its assigned number was the youngest number: number

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