Comfortably Uncomfortable

My Photo scholarship 2011 entry

India | Sunday, October 30, 2011 | 5 photos

This summer, I traveled to India for an internship, and although I was based in Bangalore, every weekend I bought bus tickets directly from local bus companies and went on an overnight bus to explore a new place. I had wanted to go to India for a long time; half of my high school friends were Indian-American, and through them, my growing up was shaped by experiences like knowing how my school's bhangra team was doing but not how the football team was doing, and eating samosas and dumplings on Thanksgiving. Going to India would be going to a "motherland" that I had no apparent connection to. It would be lifechanging, I just didn't know how. I didn't expect that my travels around India would lead me to question my own identity as a Chinese-American. Although I lived in India (7 weeks) longer than I had ever been in China (2 weeks), China, would always own more of my identity. So for me, photography became a chance to open up a conversation with locals and go beyond assumptions. Instead of assuming I was from somewhere, they would ask and in turn, I would ask them about their story. Though I'm an economics student by day and designer by night, I began exploring photography because I loved how the process of trying to tell a story through an image was both an art and a science. I'm as indecisive as any college student, so I'm not sure where I want to go with photography, but I know I love how making pictures lets me seek out experiences that make me comfortable with being uncomfortable.