I look at the oddly-coloured photograph.

Eyes that are supposed to be black had lightened to a reddish brown. A turquoise sweater had turned purple. I remember that pair of jeans. It was a light denim, but had somehow turned a reddish teal.

The photograph is at least 25 years old. Time and cheap chemistry has turned the memory of that day various shades of bloody.

I take it over to my study and tack it on the huge cork board above my rubber wood desk, this picture of me riding a pony with my hair tied back, beaming down at the photographer, very likely my mother, an avid hobby photographer. According to my father, everyone in the early 20s loved taking pictures because digital cameras had just been introduced, replacing ‘film’ cameras, whatever those were. But my mother, she was obsessed with photography.

I have many memories of Mother going everywhere with what she called her Digital Rebel, which was her first digital camera, a gift from dad. We would be driving along some lonely road in the country and she’d suddenly screech to a halt, scramble out of the car and then spend half an hour snapping away at the scenery. Fiona, my younger sister, and I would sit in the car and watch her. Fiona, who was only two then, would cry when she took too long, and Mother would wait for her sobbing to escalate to an undeniable level before packing her tripod up and moving along. It never occurred to her that someone could come by and take us away or, God forbid, harm us. Mother could never resist a photo opportunity.

Mother’s pictures are all over our family home. While she was obsessed with taking them, it was dad who had them organized, backed up on the computer, printed, framed and hung. And that was how my sister and I knew that my father was a man who was very much in love, for he was, and still is, not an expressive man. Very few Chinese men are, even though he is modern as they come. He is mostly only affectionate to Fiona and me. For Mother, he created a shrine of her photography.

And this is irony: When Mom died, we’d needed a photograph of her for the wake, and there was none. Most were family portraits, and even those were mostly of dad and us, since she was always the photographer. I remember having to go through hard disk after hard disk of family photos, only to come up with three choices that we did not have to crop. One was when she was in her wedding dress, holding up a glass of bubbly. One was a side profile of her and a newly minted me, sitting by a window. And the third was a black and white side profile of Mother, face obscured by her camera, taking pictures of the skyline at Alki in Seattle. And then Dad told us that he remembered taking a proper picture of her, just to test out a new Nikon he’d bought for her about ten years ago, which was to his knowledge, the most recent shot of her. However, that picture was never found.

“Your Mother had a bad habit of deleting most of her own photos because she said I took bad pictures,” said Father, at once angry and sad.

The discoloured picture of five-year-old me on a pony was taken when we were living in Washington, at a farm that also doubled as a school. Fiona attended preschool there for a couple of years before we moved to England. A few years later, Mother found out she had liver cancer. I was twelve and Fiona was nine, when I saw dad and mom hugging in their bedroom. Mother was crying, her back facing the door. They both were, although dad did not shake nor make the painful sounds Mother did. His eyes were red and he simply stared at me for a while through the open door. And then he brought his finger up to his lips, and signaled for me to leave them alone, and had moved his lips slowly to say, “I love you.” I’d nodded, closed the door quietly and gone back to bed, wondering if it was something Fiona or I did.

Mother fought 18 years before she finally succumbed. And even in defeat, her body bore little evidence that she had ever been ill. The miracle of modern medicine and, I believe, contentment with her lot, which is a principle my mother believes is underrated, preserved her on the outside, while only postponing the inevitable on the inside. During the last year of her life, Mother was mostly at home, in bed. That year, she stopped taking pictures. When she died, so did everyone else in my family.

I go back to the box of Mother’s things. In it is Mother’s Canon Digital Rebel, another Nikon camera and the knick-knacks that, I assume, go on either of the cameras. Slowly, I assemble the Canon. Amazingly, the batteries still work. I lift it up and aim at my desk and the picture of me. Adjusting the angle, I click, and then look for the image to pop on the little screen. It still works. As though in disbelief, I stare at the camera.

“I am a Canon man,” my father’s voice breaks my reverie. He looks at me, a faint smile on his lips. It fails to hide the sorrow in his voice and his eyes. I smile at him, and return the camera to the box. He walks in and picks it up as though it is made of crystal.

“Always was,” he continues, looking at the camera and turning it every which way.

“This was state-of-the-art when it was made. But your mother decided after almost 20 years that a Nikon was the way to go,” he chuckles sadly and shakes his head.

“We had the biggest fight over it. In the end, as usual, she won. But she still used this old thing from time to time. It was her way of placating me.”

And without another word, my father returns the camera to the box and carries it out of the study.