Our task was to find an old object with a story of its own. At the Sunday flea market I stood beside a table for ten minutes, feeling — I had no idea how to start a conversation with a stranger.
Lin had no such problem. She walked up to an old man selling cameras and asked about every one of them. Most of them, he said, were copies. But the black one he handed her was the only one on the table: its original receipt was still inside the box. It had once belonged to a newspaper photographer. We had that such a camera would cost a fortune, so we thought we had misheard his price.
Eighty yuan was a real : the same model sells online for over a thousand. We carried the box back to school like a trophy. There our teacher asked us to its value, not in money but in what it could teach us about the people who had used it.
To answer that question, we planned to film the old man. But nothing could be filmed at school without permission, so the head teacher had to the plan first. We expected a long discussion, but she read it twice and said one word: “Fine.” By Friday we were allowed to start. Then the trouble began. To our , the old man had closed his stall and left no phone number, and his corner of the market stood empty for three weeks.
When he came back in November, we invited him to the school. There was just one in our way: he spoke a local dialect that none of us could follow. Luckily, Lin’s grandmother had been born in that village. It was she who finally us: the strange word on the receipt was simply the dialect word for “light”. The interview went well. As we listened to the recording that evening, it became that our project had never really been about cameras.
One thing still worries us. The market is damp, and months of damp air had already affected the camera: the leather case is now covered with a thin green mould. The camera sits in a glass case in our school hall, a little damaged but very much the real thing.