Scan your old photos

And send them to people

Hello from my childhood home. I’ve been asking my parents for stories that I only know in bits and pieces, like how my dad proposed, their honeymoon, how we fled the Jakarta riots in 1998. There must be photos of all these, but there were no digital evidence of their memories.

I got to work.

Piles of photos have been fed through my dad’s new black Epson scanner. 40 photos per album, scanned three at a time.

I've never seen most of these photos, including those from my childhood. I was too young to remember those memories. Apart from my mom’s favourite photos that are framed around the house, most of these photos are new to me.

I'm lucky that my parents still live in the same house. It’s comforting to see two-decade-old photos and being able to look at that same wall, door, garden.

Some things don’t exist anymore. I saw an American-looking mall with a JCPenney store that was burned down during the 1998 riots. I had always known that May 1998 was a scarring memory for a lot of Chinese Indonesians. I’m only beginning to uncover just how deep the personal connection is.

The scanner sees all. Frame by frame. Year by year. Apart from sending chubby photos of me to my friends, I'm also using these scans as a good excuse to get in touch with my extended relatives by texting them the pics. It’s a great stroll down memory lane for them, too.

Some photos have also become damaged. Humidity, time, and the ruggedness of life got to them. I preserved what I can. I managed to scan 50 albums of ~40 photos each. All uploaded to a cloud-synced drive for me to access all the way from Hong Kong.

In what is becoming a full circle moment, I’m taking many pictures of my parents with my film camera.

Some things never change.

If unscanned, the world will be deprived of this cuteness!

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Looking back: From 1912 to 1954, the Olympics awarded medals for Fine Art. An Olympian could compete in painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, and music as long as the work that was submitted was sports-centric. — Source: The Goulet Pencast and The Smithsonian

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Update log:

• 🗺️ I switched over my passport to an electronic one. I’m writing a guide on how to do it in two hours in Jakarta.

• 🚗 Went on an 11-hour road trip with my parents. Some tips: Starbucks has clean bathrooms. Find restaurants in cities you’ll pass by along the way. Bring enough water and snacks.

• 😋 I’m devouring all my childhood-favourite foods like ikan kerapu bakar (grilled grouper fish), kepiting bawang putih (fried garlic crab), and nasi gandul (rice in savoury soup). Nothing fills a heart like a full stomach.

• 📖 Reading The Millionaire Fastlane by MJ DeMarco (85% completed).

• 🙅‍♀️ Discovered that Indonesia’s main book publisher’s ebook sales is very limited to domestic phone apps. Disappointing. I’ll have to read books the paperback way.

• 🎥 Am convincing my dad to create content around his Indonesian coffee expertise. That is a niche. It’ll do so well on the internet.

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