I’m walking in my East Vancouver neighbourhood making photographs, mid-day in August. A woman calls “Hey, hey” at me as I cross 15th avenue at Prince Edward street. Immediately my mind goes to a few days earlier, when a man got my attention in a similar manner and briefly confronted me, asking if I was “stalking homeless people to take photos of them.” “No,” I calmly replied, “I’m just walking my neighbourhood, respectfully photographing what I see.”
Today, I turn to find an older Asian woman standing on the corner, smoking a cigarette.
“Do you want to take a photo of my 111-year-old mother?”
The woman’s name is Kay. She’s 80 years old and Japanese, although she’s often mistaken as Korean, Vietnamese, or Mongol, she tells me later.
“My mother is one hundred and eleven years, one hundred and three days,” she says, smiling and holding up corresponding fingers and her cigarette for the final digits.
Kay invites me into their apartment to meet her mother, Shige Mineshiba, who was born in Nagoya, Japan, on May 18th, 1909. Shige is the fourth oldest living person in Canada.
I don a face mask and follow as Kay leads me through a few hallways to apartment 111. Inside the small one-bedroom, Shige sits upright and very still on her bed in the living room. A small television plays on mute in the corner, but Shige’s gaze rests on the wall opposite her, adorned with family photographs and mementos.
Kay brings me into the kitchen, intending to show and tell me what they eat that is the secret to their health. Boiled kelp is a favourite, as she shows me, going as far as to give me a pinch of dry kelp to put in my pocket to cook later at home. They like matcha as well. Most interesting though is a concoction that Kay mixes in a take-out soup container: Captain Crunch cereal, a pinch of soybean powder, milk, and a dollop of thick plain yogurt.
Kay offers the bowl to me; I politely decline, citing a truthfully sensitive stomach that I don’t think is prepared for such a mix, no matter the vitality it might bring me. She laughs it off, later also offering me a handful of peppers and a tray of gyozas during my short visit.
At this point, Kay suggests I go in and photograph her mother. I quietly move into the living room and do just that.
When we step back out into the hallway of the building, I ask to photograph Kay. She happily obliges, posing primly for me outside of her door. She tells me that she has an “ancient face,” saying that her family goes back so many generations, and that’s why she has such a uniquely shaped face that people find hard to place in terms of origin. Kay excuses herself to step back into the apartment for a photo album she’d like to show me. When she returns to the door and opens it up, a wallet-sized photo falls on the floor. As I bend to pick it up, Kay tells me that it’s a photograph of her father. She then turns to the page she was looking for, of her grandmother posing beautifully at the age of 18.
As we walk back out of the building and up to the bench on the corner, Kay amusingly but seriously keeps telling me to find a way to make some money off the photo of her mother. She’s convinced people would give ten dollars to see it and learn what it is she’s been eating to live a life this long. I tell her that regardless of money, I just enjoy being out and making photographs, along with talking to people like her. She inquires as to what I do for work, and I tell her that I work in skateboarding mostly, as a photographer, writer, and magazine editor.
“I’ve seen you skateboard by here really fast before,” she laughs. And she most likely has, as it’s a corner I’ve skated by many times over the last nine years. After a conversation about ninjas, I thank Kay once again for her time. She smiles, lights her cigarette, and tells me to buzz her if I ever want to stop by again. She’s always around, she says, as she’s been taking care of her mother for most of her life.
“Apartment 111, of course, I’ll remember that,” I say.
“If I don’t answer, it’s probably because my mother died,” Kay says matter-of-factly.
Earlier, as I photographed Kay in the hallway, I’d asked if their apartment number was just a coincidence with her mother’s age. “I never thought of it,” she said. “I’m thinking ahead to one hundred and twelve, one hundred and thirteen.”
