My book Red Pockets explores questions of inheritance: what we owe to ancestors and to future generations, and what we owe to the places that we inhabit.
It was inspired by visiting my ancestral village in Guangdong in south China, after nearly a century of intergenerational separation due to migration, war and revolution. My grandfather wrote about his childhood stay in this rice village in his unpublished memoirs, and I had always wanted to see it.
In spring 2018, I finally found the chance, during a research trip to study the impacts of petrochemical pollution in Guangdong.
