Who am I?

By Erik Nilsson (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-08-12 09:52

Norwegian Oyvind Aamot says his first memory in life was speaking Chinese on a train in China at age 27. He didn't realize he was on a train, that he was speaking Chinese or that he was a foreigner. He didn't know what any of these things meant.

He also didn't remember who he was, where he came from or anything about his identity or past. "People would point to me and call me a waiguoren (foreigner), and I'd say, 'OK, I'm a waiguoren', but I didn't know what that concept meant," Aamot says in an articulate manner, which doesn't reflect his wild and woolly appearance.

The nearly 20 brain specialists who later examined him described his retrograde amnesia as a "wiping out of his hard-drive". But he'd have a long way to go before his diagnosis and an even longer journey to reconstruct an identity.

Six years later, he'd return to retrace his 2000 route to discover what had happened in the three missing weeks before his memory vanished for which he had no record. He also hoped to learn how he got amnesia.

This journey was filmed and turned into the recently released 80-minute documentary Hunting Down Memory. The film was shown at a small, private viewing at the Nordic Film Festival in Beijing last month and will be screened at the Guangzhou International Documentary Festival in early December.

Soon after he got off the train in Zhangjiajie in 2000, several strangers sifted through his possessions for clues about his identity. He says it was only several years later that he developed a sense of gratitude for these strangers' help.

"It wasn't that I wasn't grateful to them; I just didn't know what (gratefulness) was and what they were doing," Aamot says.

They explained to him that his passport and money were important. They put him on a bus to Hubei's provincial capital Wuhan and told him to call a number they'd found in his backpack when he arrived.

"But the last thing they said before I got on the bus wasn't necessarily the first thing I thought of when I got off the bus," Aamot says.

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