I was born in Shenzhen, a city built by migrants and defined by constant reconstruction. My mother moved there from a small village in the 1990s; decades later, I moved to New York with a temporary visa. Between these two cities, I never felt grounded.

My memory of Shenzhen is inseparable from typhoons. Every summer, the city braces for storms that sometimes might not arrive. That feeling of waiting and suspension always haunts me. This film takes its structure from the life cycle of a typhoon, as both an environmental and emotional system that gathers, breaks, and dissipates.

I started this project when my partner’s visa was expiring. I felt we were sharing the same storm of many others. I shot mundane urban spaces, searching for traces of movement and waiting. 16mm and thermal imaging became two ways of seeing: one tangible and physical, the other almost invisible and detached. Distance and presence were marked for a hostile environment to be a migrant, to be queer and to build a home.​