Monologue is a collection of graphic non-fiction stories centered in Chengdu. “Happy All the Time” is revised and adapted from a section of Ellie Csepregi’s blog, entitled “The Long Shell – July 30, 2020.”
Ellie has a published poetry book entitled Tiers. It can be found here.
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Jacob’s Notes:
When taking photographs of this piece, I had to retrace Ellie’s steps roughly 5 months after she had taken them. I found everything roughly as she had described it, with only slightly different details. The teahouse had migrated from beneath the commuter bridge to beside it. The singers were in an open roofed gazebo, and the birds were in wicker cages rather than metal ones. People were still lining up for sweet cakes, dancing, and chatting away. There is no way to know if they were the same people, the same birds being hung out in cages in open air. There is a timeless consistency to life in this city which you can feel, even as the apartment complexes and malls seem to spring up from the ground.