The first house I seriously mapped was a small apartment located in the hills of my hometown, where the city of Zhuhai receded into a semi-rural stretch. On every landing, something was always flaking: walls streaked with gray paint like molting snakes; red and gold fu signs (for good fortune) that detach from the last new year. I started by drawing the living room, marking the front door with an arch, then a box for my bedroom, in which I drew a window that I still dream of, even now. Like most other gated suburbs in China’s medium-density cities, ours was a group of nondescript buildings, countless lives huddled in the sky. The views were constant: stark vistas of concrete blocks, sometimes meandering through mist. But my window faced a stone wall and the dark hill beyond, dense with enough forests and omens that for years I remembered it as a looming mountain claimed by wolves.
Sometime in the last decade, that neighborhood was swept away by a taller and brighter future. Since there are practically no photos of the houses I lived in after childhood: our apartments shrank and their clutter bloated, the novelty of my growing bones faded; Back then, the camera wasn’t yet a shiny new member, but something you sought out for a royal occasion: I can only walk through the front door of a dream. Usually I drift from room to room like a cloud, blown by a strange wind that leads me back into old life patterns: coming home after school, say, and making a sharp detour to the kitchen for a snack, then through the hall to my room, which had my favorite window. These nocturnal visits are my only way back, which means my memories of those homes are defined by how I moved through them.
Even when I see images from early childhood, they lack a sense of relatedness. A snapshot of my melon-cheek pie on a table says nothing of the back door shortcut to our kitchen, the route I later took to sneak further out. As mnemonic devices, photographs are intimidating in their mimetic perfection. If Vermeer conjured up a corner of my childhood bedroom on canvas and asked me to finish the rest, I’d have a hard time. I have never been interested in flawless replicas, but in preserving what remains.
Only floor plans have given my memories of movement a tangible form, a form for the routine movements that made up my days. Since then, I have mapped most of these houses, although there is one that I still avoid: my grandparents’ old apartment, which is located just a few meters from the hospital where I was born. They moved away a long time ago, so I’ve already forgotten too much. When I try to imagine it, the rooms dissolve into shadows or recede into impossible horizons.
The week my grandfather died, I dreamed of that apartment for the first time in years. It was banal, as most dreams are when you’re in them. I went through the front door and into the living room. I looked out the window and saw my grandfather in the street below. But I remember when the logic of the dream began to unravel, when this sight turned out to be exceptional, because in our world of entropy, people die and are never seen walking again. A floor plan is the only way I’ll retain anything from that route to the window. So someday I’ll make a map of that house, though the walls have faded, though nothing can comprehend how it feels to walk through a dream home and see someone you love walking across the street on an ordinary day.
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