MYJN was an assignment. I was a student, and the brief was to interview a small business owner. I asked my questions, wrote down his answers, and left. I did my internship somewhere else. When I finished college, I came back.

I joined in 2023 and started in the stockroom. You learn the pieces the way you learn anything in a stockroom, by counting them, packing them, and reading what he had written about each one. Then he put a camera in my hands. He showed me ISO, shutter speed and aperture. The rest I taught myself. The photographs people know as MYJN began that year. I used to pack what people had chosen. Now I make the pictures they choose from.

I like a photograph to give you something you did not come looking for. For The Veggie Museum we chose vegetables at the grocer for their shapes, and a pearl rested in the curl of a tendril. Afterwards, we cooked what we could.

What I found when I arrived was a six-year-old name and the one person it belonged to. He had founded MYJN in Penang in 2017, alone, selling at night markets and pop-ups until there was a room, which cost RM300 a month. He built the website himself, wrote every page himself, and for years answered the messages himself, some of them at two in the morning.

In 2022 his relationship ended, and the person who had shared his working life left MYJN. Every morning there were parcels to pack, and every morning it still hurt. He called his cousin, for the first time in years. The call lasted about a minute. Then his cousin called back and scolded him, the way only family can: forgive, let go, get on with your life. He still laughs about it. He went back to work the next day. He could have started again under another name. He kept this one. He keeps the rest private, and so do I.

He says his cousin got him back to work. Getting on with his life took a year, and a student with a list of questions.

There are two pens in this house that are not for sale. They are his father's, a fountain pen and a ballpoint, given to him by his firm after more than thirty years and passed to Rowan the year MYJN began. His father thought MYJN was a mistake. He found him the room anyway. Beside the pens is a notebook that cost three months of that room. There is one line written on its first page. It stays in the book. Nine years of this house are written behind it, in his father's pen.

Rowan told me once that he was nine when a black car passed their street in Penang and he asked his father why they did not have one.

"Those don't come easy, kid."

His father was a man with friends everywhere, and so seldom at home. He left before the boy woke and came back after he slept. Rowan decided, at nine, that he would build something. He did not know what. He knew who it was for.

By August 2018 he had a degree he would never use, a job he could have taken, and a business that was not paying for itself. He gave it one more day. 31 August is Independence Day in Malaysia, and that year it was MYJN's too: the day the shop sold more than it ever had, the day he knew he would stay. If you bought something from a small shop in Penang that day, you were here five years before I was. Every 31 August since, the house has given its best price of the year. People call it a sale. In this house it is an anniversary.

There is more I want to make here. I also share this house with someone I love, and the two ask for the same hours. For years he gave most of himself to the future he was building. I would like us to live in it while it is still being made. There will always be another photograph. I will take it.

His father came to the house this year. He walked through it the way he walks through most places, with somewhere else to be, and did not say much. Near the door he asked how the business was doing. In this family, I have learned, that is how you ask how someone is. It was his second visit. The first time, there had been no house to see. The house is the only answer Rowan has ever given him. His father was right about the car. Those don't come easy.

JX
Creative Director, MYJN