We can draw on Susan Sontag's ideas in On Photography to analyse Denise Chong use of photographs to extrapolate her family's history. States Sontag, "photos…reinstate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life." Furthermore, she sees photographs as a display of both the pseudo-presence of someone who has passed away and a token of their absence.

In The Concubine's Children, Chong recalls the scattered family photographs that used to be held in a tin box and likened them to the same photographs now organized by May-ying into sequential pages of a photo album. Says Sontag, and echoed by the intent of May-ying, the packaging of the world distort reality; the cutout photographs only represent a partial reality because only half of the photograph is left.

Because any photograph has multiple meanings, believes Sontag, May-ying and anyone else who cuts portions of a photograph, is thus imposing her interpretation of the world onto the audience of the photograph. In this sense then, May-ying has limited the knowledge of any person who looks at the family photo album because she has deliberately distorted its reality, and in turn has elevated her power because the reality captured by the photograph cannot be recovered.

I still wonder how the recovery of only two family photographs by Chong on her trip to China enabled her to piece her family's history. Is it because Chong had very few pictures to begin her family puzzle-piecing, so any additions could only bridge the gaps, or is it possibly because May-ying never had the opportunity to falsify its reality?