hong-an tran

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Not far from my parents’ place is a wee sushi place called Taihei.  It’s a pretty popular, but unpretentious, place that caters both to families — whenever I’m there, at least two tables order those giant sushi boats — and to more intrepid eaters, like my parents.  They always sit at the sushi bar, in front of Chef Nakamura, who will tell them what’s good that day — and he knows because he’s the one who gets up every morning at 5:30 to head to the fish market to pick out the fish himself.   Every trip home involves a drive over to Taihei, and it is an excellent time.

The restaurant is on the corner of a block that includes a beauty salon, a gas station on the other end, the Don Johnson Insurance Agency (pretty sure not that Don Johnson), and a few other random shops.  Right next to the restaurant is — or was, I guess — a shabu shabu place that did not last very long, alas.   The past Sunday evening, after we parked the car in front of Taihei for one last meal before I was to head to the airport, I snapped a few shots of the abandoned shabu shabu parking lot and the alley ’round back.  Afterwards, as my father and I joined my mother at the sushi bar, she asked what we had been up to.  “I think she took photos of … poles,” my father replied, scratching his head.
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Up until this weekend, I hadn’t tried any slide film with the Hasselblad; my 35mm experiences with both Fuji Velvia 100 and Kodak Elite Chrome 200 have been mixed, at best: slide film is very finicky when it comes to exposure, and I’ve found the grain quality to be inconsistent.

The photo taken above, of my uncle outside the restaurant where we celebrated my father’s retirement, as well as the photos taken around my parents house in the last post, were all taken with Velvia 100.  As you can see from the house photos, in the right light the tones are just about spot-on; slightly underexposed (as with the photo above) and everything turns a bit violet. Slide film is not forgiving if you’re not careful with your metering.

Weirdly, though, I kinda dig it.  Maybe it’s because with the Hasselblad, there’s a crispness to everything that I didn’t really have with my 35mm cameras.  Maybe it’s because there are tons of different textures and patterns in that photo of my uncle, so combined with the purple tones it just feels a bit loopy anyway.   Or maybe it’s simply because I have a better scanner now, so the richness of slide film is finally coming through (in which case I’ll need to rescan all of my 35mm slides … or maybe not).   This is one of the first times I’ve really been pleased with transparency film, violet tones be damned.

Will pick up another 5-pack this week, to experiment on my weary friends this weekend.  Weary friends, you are forewarned.
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The house where my parents live now is not the one I grew up in; this one is in Montebello, in a hillier part of East LA, where the ground is a bit drier and the native plants a touch hardier.   My parents rent this place, and the landlord, an acquaintance of theirs, handles most of the landscaping, so whenever I’m home there’s a slightly surreal quality to wandering around the front and back yards, almost like being in a stranger’s home.   That the house is in a mostly-unfamiliar area of town to me adds to this feeling; then again, this might just be the feeling of being in the suburbs after a long stretch in New York City.

Separately: if you hail from an Asian immigrant family and don’t have a house filled with cheapo plastic or rubber slippers laying around the front and back doors of your house, I would like to meet you.

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A couple of really great, leisurely walks through the woods by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton over the weekend helped keep the madness of tax season at bay.  It’s amazing, too, how one month can transform a place from something out of Tarkovsky into something a bit more lush and idyllic.
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