CHANG
Ting Chen
 

My encounter with family photographs begins with a touch, an attempt to trace back to moments of genuine contact with those captured in the frame: three profound embraces with my mother, and my younger self, arms flung wide before the lens. Among them, a photograph from a graduation trip to Southern Taiwan caught my eye. My mother—then unmarried—sits in an elegant slant, a stark contrast to a woman standing rigidly in the distance. These two personas, both unfamiliar to me, share the same filmic plane; in this space, their strangeness is equal.

Following the visual cues of the photo, interwoven with the exotic trends of that era, I arrived at the Amanda Hotel in South Bay—a Moroccan-style retreat named after a Greek goddess. But who is this Goddess Amanda? The front desk staff replied only with "trade secret"—a mystery as elusive as the unidentified woman in the photograph.