Wanderlust: Expat Life & Style in Thailand Oct / Nov 2017: The Travel Issue | Page 8

I realized: These
a tree with her
that have been
were photographs
foot and looks
abandoned,” he
off into the
told me.
of ghosts, of souls
distance. Did
I let that sink
her boyfriend
in. As an unre-
set to wander.
take this? Did
pentant archi-
they end up get-
vist from a family
ting married? A
of archivists, I find
group of young
the notion of leaving
people   —  appearing
family photos aban-
in the lone color print in
doned to be unfathom-
the batch  —  poses together on
able and melancholy. And yet for
the steps of a building. Do they still
much of my adult life, I have found, in
know each other? Were any of them
flea markets and garage sales, piles
still around here, maybe even on this
of old images that leave me with a
very block at this very moment?
sense of vague, undefined longing
The multiple mysteries tanta-
about the people depicted in them
lized me. Some of the subjects surely
and the journeys the images (and
were still living, but there was really
their subjects) have taken.
no way to know.
Where once they were cradled in
I asked the proprietor, Mr.
hands that valued them deeply as
Zhuang, how he came by these pho-
talismans of life’s important intersec-
tos. He told me the images came
tions, now they are unanchored, or-
from Penang houses that were left
phans, floating in the massive pool
behind and torn down. The pho-
of miscellany that moves around the
tos were found and sold to him in
planet. As they inched through time
odd lots. “I just get phone calls, and
in slow motion, they became un-
people say, there are old photos
tethered from the sentiments that produced them, the events that moti-
vated someone to capture a moment
and hold onto it. Significant, but now
unsorted.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a market
for this kind of stuff. Some people
have taken to calling such photos “in-
stant ancestors” —  people whose
images you can put on your wall
and pretend they’re your own rela-
tives. Forget “Modern Family”; here’s
“Postmodern Family.” In an odd way,
it makes a lot of sense; there is some 
— what?  —  symmetry to the notion
that an image, a person, a moment,
can resurface in a different con-
text entirely. It is, I suppose, a form
of photographic reincarnation. Your
soul comes back, but you are floating,
separated from your past life, with
only certain echoes remaining.
I ask Mr. Zhuang if he expects
more such photos to come in. He
nods. Many of Georgetown’s old-
er Chinese houses are being torn
down, he says, and others are under-
going a historic-preservation pro-
cess that means they will be emptied
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