I didn’t know how to begin my life back then.
Everyone around me seemed to have a direction
a plan
a next step that made sense.
My classmates were preparing for further studies
collecting applications
choosing safer paths.
And I was standing somewhere between wanting more
and knowing I couldn’t keep taking from my family
not money
not expectations.
I didn’t want to start working immediately either.
It felt too soon
too sudden
as if I hadn’t even understood myself
yet I was supposed to understand the world.
So I left.
Not to escape
but because I needed something different to happen to me
something that could open a window
a door
anything.
The Silk Road was the first place I chose
not because I knew it well
but because I didn’t know it at all.
I wanted my first step into the world
to be an unfamiliar one.
When I arrived in Central Asia
everything felt mixed, layered, strange
and somehow honest.
It was a land I had only seen in pictures
yet standing there felt like touching the edge of another version of myself.
A version I didn’t recognise
but wanted to.
Maybe that was why I began taking photographs.
Not as a photographer
not as an artist
but as someone who didn’t want to forget
the moment the world first opened itself to me.
I didn’t know then
that these fragments
would one day become a book
or that “between strangers”
would start here
on a road where I didn’t recognise anything
including myself.
“I still remember sitting on that train from Xi’an to Xinjiang for forty-eight hours. The whole trip felt like time was stretching just to see how far I was willing to go. When I first boarded, the officers checked my passport a few times, and later at the border they went through my bag and even scrolled through my messages. It felt odd, but I guess that’s what happens when you’re somewhere completely unfamiliar and you look like you don’t belong.
Crossing into Central Asia was another kind of strange. I kept seeing faces I couldn’t really label. Some people looked Asian with European features, and some looked the opposite. Everything felt mixed, like the place itself didn’t care about categories. There was also this quiet Soviet feeling in the air, not old in a nostalgic way, just something that stayed even though the world had already moved on.
And then there was the architecture. Seeing Brutalist buildings for the first time in real life was honestly a little shocking. They looked heavy but honest, like they were built to hold memories instead of people.
Everything felt new to me. The people, the cities, the way the air moved. None of it felt familiar, but instead of pushing me away, it made me realise there are so many parts of the world, and parts of myself, that I haven’t met yet.”