I was born in the tiny farming community of Wuri village in central Taiwan in 1961. There were seven families living there, all related to each other, all with the same last name. My great-grandfather was a sharecropper who moved to this area to work for a local landowner, planting and harvesting rice. It was a very labor-intensive job, but it put food on the table. He passed away when my father was only twelve, and my grandmother was left to raise her three sons and two daughters by herself. It proved too difficult for them; in the end, her youngest son—my uncle—was adopted by a relative to alleviate her burden. And although there were fewer mouths to feed, during the harvesting season all her kids would stop attending school and work in the rice paddies.

		Time Bends Photographs by CHIEN-CHI CHANG

My father worked on the farm after graduating elementary school and learned to be a mechanic on the side to bring in a little extra income. He later got a job at the Singer sewing machine company. He never stopped working his entire life. Nor did my mother, who gave birth to five children and worked all the time except during delivery. "Life was hard in the village," my parents remember.

When I close my eyes and think back to my childhood, I mostly remember our old houses. They were made out of grayish clay, cool in the summer and warm in the winter; perfect for my family since we only had one bed for the seven of us. I remember being afraid of the dark; we had no electricity until I was eight. I remember playing hide and seek around the village with my sisters, cousins, and neighbors; we would hide anywhere except the three public toilet areas, where the smell was unbearable. Outside the village were the endless rice fields, greenish and quite beautiful during the growing season. After the harvest, the fields turned brown and the kids baked sweet potatoes or went fishing in the creek nearby. It was a simple time, but memorable.

I used to go to school barefoot. A third of my classmates didn't wear shoes. I don't remember why exactly but I guess I didn't like shoes, which in my mind were only for city people. I didn't like to go to school either, although my father always pushed me to study. Partly it was because I didn't learn Mandarin until elementary school and the language was totally foreign to me. Most of the teachers were mainlanders and they all had different accents. I had no idea what they were talking about, and what they taught had nothing to do with my farming neighborhood. Worse yet, the teachers would fine us if they caught us speaking Taiwanese. To be honest, I probably spent most of the time thinking what to play after school with my neighbors.

Then all of a sudden, when I was ten, my father decided to move to Taichung City, where he felt there would be more opportunities for work and better education for his children. I left my little village, and my childhood memories of that place were frozen in time. Every once in a while I would think of my uncles, aunts, cousins and neighbors, of our old houses and our rice paddies, and wonder what they were like now. But I always hoped my home hadn't changed much.

I have never stopped thinking about my birthplace, but I have moved further and further away; I went to Taipei for college and then to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school. I now live in New York, and it's kind of scary to realize that I have lived in the States for 15 years. I have changed and aged in that time; so, I assume, have all my old neighbors. But my memories have not—in my mind, Wuri village is still gray-walled houses and rice paddies, and barefoot students coming home from school.

I don't know why I put off revisiting the village for so long, but I finally made the trek home to take the pictures you see here. After seeing it, I wish I have maintained a distance. My entire neighborhood has had a facelift—an ugly one. What happened to the creek where I caught my first fish? Where are the bamboo groves that used to surround our houses? Instead, there are high-rise buildings and apartment complexes sprouting from the old rice paddies. There's even a McDonald's.

There used to be only seven families in our community and I knew every member of every one. Now I walk the unfamiliar streets surrounded by strangers—lots of them. If one of my childhood friends stood in front of me now, on this street, I wouldn't have a clue who he was.

My uncle helped me locate a few neighbors from the old village. One of my childhood friends was surprisingly pleased to see me, although I was as unfamiliar to him as this new village was to me. "If for some reason we got into a fistfight on the street, we would not have known that we used to live in the same neighborhood," He told me. And oh, my—that's exactly how he used to talk!

Slowly I remembered and recognized more faces, my neighbors behind us, in front of us and next door. It's an unexplainable delight to see them again, despite the fact that everyone has aged. But the way they act and talk has not changed much and I can still remember their voices. And there is a new generation of Changs now, growing up on the same land, even if the village is not what it once was. And although I have not met these new nieces and nephews before, I know we're connected; and I hope it will not be too long before I visit them again.