Twenty one
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My friend EC is a sojourner, he’s from St. Catharines, a city in Niagara Region in Ontario Canada. In the mid-nineties we met in Hong Kong through photography, and now, twenty-six years later, he continues to evolve, build house, expand his visual horizon to become a filmmaker and cinematographer. These constant movements, these intercultural migrations: while we're relentlessly bent on the West, they're forevermore infatuated with the East. His family name Costadimas suggested his Greek and Italian heritage, yet he was born and raised in Ethiopia. My family name Yellow suggested my own lineage from the legendary Chinese emperor, which also describes the Loess Plateau, and the colour of my race, the yellow people. Yet I was born in the colony ceded to the British by China. Mio Hani 羽仁未央 (1964-2014) was another sojourner who only returned home at the end of her life. At nine she traveled with her director father wandering for six years in Kenya, following his footsteps to become a future filmmaker. At twenty-three she moved, for the love of Hong Kong films and Cantopop, from one island to another, traveling actively between Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, experiencing and reporting on living in the period of the handover. To some, home is an itinerant place, subjects to constant change, with many scheduled, as with many accidental stopovers.