With Chinese New Year being celebrated by Chinese communities across the globe, one can come to expect many families making visitations between homes during this festive period to reconnect and catch-up with one another, as tradition calls. But in the case of one Singaporean man, his Chinese New Year reunions take a different approach by means of using Google Maps.
In a bittersweet video that was recently uploaded to TikTok, social media user retroridersg would make a point of taking a stroll through the Huoguang district in the city-state of his native Singapore. However, this would not be a trip that he would have to make on foot, but rather through his smartphone screen.
SG man uses Google Maps to ‘time travel’ & ‘visit’ his late grandmother every CNY
Stopping at a traffic intersection, he would then proceed to ‘time travel’ by scrolling back through Google Maps image archives of the same intersection, before stopping at February 2009, where his late grandmother could be seen standing and waiting for the stop light with grocery bags.
In speaking with Singaporean portal MS News, he said that his grandmother had passed away two years ago from cancer during the Covid-19 lockdowns. He adds that he was able to share a sweet moment with her prior to her passing when he showed her the image and asked if she spotted the Google Street View car at the time.
As a matronly figure in the family, the netizen said he misses his grandmother’s cooking most of all and that the sight of her holding on to so many plastic bags filled with groceries helped to keep that memory of her alive.
For those not in the know, ‘Street View’ is a feature on Google Maps that enables users to virtually ‘visit’ areas of their map that have been photographed and stitched together digitally to form interactive panoramas.
“Every Chinese new year whenever I miss my late grandma, I would come to google map and she will be there. miss you grandma.” he explains.
Netizens left teary-eyed
The bittersweet video has since gone viral across the social media space in both Malaysia and Singapore, having been viewed 95,800 times as of writing. Many netizens were left touched by his story, and recount similar memories of their own family members.
Some even say that they too were able to relive memories of their late relatives through Google Maps.
Others reminded him to save the images, in case Google updates their servers and deletes them.
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