The Big Blue

Photo & words: R.

The record was sitting on top of the piano and my roommate casually told me when I picked it up, "Oh, that's his mom, she used to be a singer."

The cover reminded me of an old French movie which I remembered only because a very dear friend of mine was so fond of it and kept bringing it up during some of our conversations in the early 2000s - The big blue. The title stuck with me ever since, over a decade already; not that the movie was relevant itself.

I took the picture of the record out of mere admiration. She looked like a Shanghai classic beauty. I never saw his mom in person. I only moved in with my roommate through a channel of friends and less-than-acquaintances and he, a Chinese-born American guy named William, was only one of my roommate's brief relationships. We hung out a couple of times, she pretended to be a good girlfriend, he was always way too emotional, I didn't even speak Chinese.

It was a decade ago. I still sometimes wondered about his mom's story and her glorious past. What made her leave William by himself since so young in America? And then I would imagine how the story's still vivid and significant to her, how it's a wonder to her son, how it's just a fraction of life among millions of our generation, only existed in the form of a novel, a cinematic detail, a dusty old record, but nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.