Cats in Shenyang, China

When I grew up in China, pets were extremely rare, if it was not fish or birds.  When I was in high school, I visited a friend's home and I declared that he was weird because his home had a cat.

That was how I grew up, absolutely without contact with dogs and cats.

After I've lived in the US for many years, I discovered my great love for cats.

In May, when I visited my parents in Manchurian city Shenyang, I was delighted to see cats.  At the beginning a lone cat from the window, then more near an artificial creek in the huge gated compound and then numerous feral cats in the evening during the daily feeding time.  It was a visual feast for me.


A lone cat hunting, seen from 6th floor window

Below are the pictures I took when I had my morning stroll one day near the creek:





















And finally, the night before I returned, I took another walk with my mother and we saw the amazing feeding frenzy - according to the women who fed the cats, there were near hundred feral cats they fed together.  Some of them were shy and some more assertive.  All quite healthy looking and beautiful.  Very sweet.

































Label: Shenyang, Shenyang Trip 2012

Twenty-Two Years Later - on the Fourth of June (1989.6.4)

It is hard to believe that twenty-two years have passed since that fateful fourth of June. It was a most disturbing day I've ever lived and but the memory of it was rather hazy now. Perhaps, I have tried to suppress the trauma?

I cannot help wondering now that since that day, how many people have passed away and how many have been born. How many still have memories of that day or any knowledge of it at all and how many have totally forgotten or are ignorant of it?

How many have become richer and how many poorer? How many have lost their humanity, courage, conscious and reason and how many have traded their innocence for advancement?

How many have been troubled by conscious and how many remained gleeful of the pain of the others? How many have been trying to remember and remind and how many have tried to erase any trace of it from their own minds and history? How many have been mute and how many have been speaking with almost no audience?

I do not know. Probably I will never know. In the end, i hardly matters. What matters is that someone will remember and remind.

It is raining in Berkeley, California - unseasonable and unreasonable - rationality seems to do not belong to this day. I have nothing to offer, except for my dimming memory and some images of flowers - pictures of flowers in May - to the suffering souls.