My plane touched down in Shanghai about a month ago. Everything has been a blur since then. I think I’ve found a reliable way to penetrate the Golden Shield, so hopefully I’ll be in touch more often.

The photos were old and washed out. A red Kodak haze had begun to creep into the images, smoothing out details that been captured long ago. They were snapshots of Paris, taken by my grandfather during a trip he took in 1979. My grandmother gave them to me with the hope that I could save the memories before they were lost forever.

Fortunately, I had a mouse and keyboard at my fingertips. I scanned the photos into my computer and began to cut through the haze so she could see what my grandfather saw. These images are only fragments of his trip to Paris – and they were nearly lost – but they will live forever as a series of ones and zeros.

I had a hammer in one pocket and a fistful of nails in the other. The hot molasses sun pressed down against us. We skated on cracked asphalt paths that wound through forests and around playgrounds. I’m no stranger to spraying paint on concrete, but this time we were leaving our mark on nature itself. We were filling the forest with plastic animals.

A pixelated owl is perched midway up a slender pine tree, silently observing a busy intersection. An 8-bit worm slithers along a set of wooden stairs. The YOMAN idly addresses passersby while waiting to be swallowed by the bark that surrounds him.

A few days later, I went for a long run through the forest. Eventually I encountered a deer – a real one. I stopped to stare. The deer stared back. I started to dance. The deer kept staring. Plastic cats and birds held up by steel nails watched us from above.