In 2018, Jeffrey and I collaborated together for the first time. We acklowledged each other's backgrounds and exchanged our ethnic identity experiences. Jeffrey told me about his father’s story. His father was a railroad worker, who would take chances to take photos with his Kodak camera when travelling to cities in Malaysia and Singapore. Through photography, he visited relatives in different cities and took their pictures. The camera captured Jeffery’s family in the diaspora. Jeffrey would considered himself inheriting his father’s expedition and  carried the journey forward, exploring the knship and other ethnic groups.


When Jeffrey's father knew that Jeffery was about to visit Taiwan, he showed him some photos of his trip to Hualien City. The picture was taken long ago before he got married. Jeffrey’s father stood in front of the Ami Culture Village, a place once prosperous in the 70s and 80s. I laughed and said it was the classic period when Indigenous folk songs and dances were turned into tourist attractions. When we traveled to Hualien in our free time, we went to visit the desolated Ami Culture Village. Symbolizing the continuation of his father’s exploration of ethnic identity, Jeffrey stood in front of the gate with similar poses and costumes as his father did. We half-jokingly took the picture with the same background and the same angle as in the old photo.

In 2019, Jeffrey and I embarked on another journey in Malaysia again. On our first night in Kuala Lumpur, we went to see the confluence of the Sungai Gombak (Gombak River) and Sungai Klang (Klang River). As Jeffery grew up in Kuala Lumpur and I had just arrived there, he introduced the starting point of the city’s development. Various ethnic groups such as Chinese, Malays, and Indians live in different areas of the city and take rivers as their boundaries. According to official documentation, the history of Malaysia can be traced back to a thousand years ago. However, Kuala Lumpur is actually a young city. "There used to be Indigenous people. Yet, other people came and the Indigenous people had to leave. I don’t know where they lived before..."

A few days later, we visited the Temuan people who lived in Desa Temuan (Temuan Village). The village is in the suburbs of Kuala Lumpur, next to Lanjan hill. One of the villagers Anuar Azman told me: "We are from Bukit Nanas (Pineapple Hill). See, it’s just next to the Kuala Lumpur Tower.” 

I thought of our drive last night, we passed through the residential areas of Bukit Nanas and the confluence joined by two rivers. I also thought of the Kuala Lumpur city view described by Jeffery. On the way leaving Desa Temuan, Jeffrey told me his memories of this area when he was a child. His aunt lived in the nearby community. He sometimes would come along to his aunt’s house with his family and live for a few days. In his memory, he always knew that there was a mountain there, but what’s inside the mountain? Who lives there? What has happened there? Nor did his family or his aunt know the answer. “Just like you drive, and to a point, you hit the jungle, so you stop there. You see the jungle as the end of the journey, so, the space behind the jungle will always be blank for you.”