Filmmaker Statement

I have this memory from the mid-90s: the phone rings, and my grandfather is on the other end. My father, flustered, repeatedly says “no” before hanging up. He tells my mom that my grandfather wanted to visit his childhood home in China—his street, his house—one last time before he passed. By then, his eyesight was failing, and he relied on two hearing aids. I know little about his life. His father, likely killed by Bolshevik Russians in 1917, was a Ukrainian who was working in Siberia at the time. His mother, Olga, escaped with my grandfather as an infant through Mongolia to Beijing. He grew up there, married, fled during the Chinese Communist Revolution, and spent four years in a Philippine displacement camp before immigrating to the U.S. As a young man, I traveled around China many times, often In Beijing, I skateboarded through streets, imagining his neighborhood, though I knew it was unlikely. This film reflects that longing—a memory I wish we had shared.