He walked down the mountain in the dark. The next morning, he called his son. “I don’t need money,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you about the sound.” His son listened for once, or pretended to. When Chen finished, there was a long pause. Then his son said, “That’s actually kind of deep, Dad.”
He took the canister to a coffee shop where, he had heard, young people sometimes projected old films for “nostalgia nights.” The barista, a girl with green hair and a nose ring, looked at him like he had brought her a fossil. “We only have digital, uncle,” she said. “HDMI. You know?” He did not know. He went home. film pingpong
It sat on a shelf in his one-room apartment in Beijing, alongside a few books and a photograph of a woman who had left him in 1995. His son, now living in Shenzhen, called him once a month. The conversations lasted four minutes. Chen did not own a projector. He had not watched Pingpong since 1990, when the last film lab in the city that could process 16mm closed its doors. He walked down the mountain in the dark