Be the Ink

You may not recognize the name Steve McCurry, but I bet you have a vivid memory of this photo, and maybe a vague notion of the story behind it. McCurry has made a career out of photographing the world’s faces, many of which have appeared on the pages of National Geographic over the years. The Afghan girl’s eyes are what struck McCurry, and subsequently, the people who picked up the June 1985 issue.

In 2002, the saga of this young woman and the mystery and enchantment she beset upon McCurry continued, when he finally found her again–seventeen difficult years later. I remember reading that story, and the fact that the first picture he took of her was the first time she’d ever seen a camera; when he found her again, it was the second time her photo had been taken. In rural Afghanistan, traditional customs still rule, and McCurry was allowed unusual access to this woman–now married with several children.

What I didn’t realize until now is that McCurry’s photographs are known for their very saturated color, an effect which he gets by using Kodachrome. I have sen hundreds of his portraits, of people across cultures, and never knew what was behind this rich and fascinating quality.

Kodachrome was discontinued last year, and the company gave the very last roll to McCurry. He’s currently working on taking the last 36 shots with this film, and taking his time to ensure each one will live up to the responsibility he has been given. (There’s only one place in the country that even develops them, in Parsons, Kansas.) Based on the book of his portraits, and his lifetime of vision, creativity, and global exposure, he’s got a proven set of eyes.

It’s a bit mysterious to me how my fascination with China began; this far into it, I cant quite retrace the steps back to the beginning. But one of the first books I read about the country was journalist Ian Johnson’s Wild Grass: Three Portraits of Change in Modern China, in which he deftly researches three different cases of citizens holding their own against a government that says a lot of things it does not follow through on. Johnson’s reputation as a reporter and skill with Mandarin Chinese gave him a great launching point for these tales, and the people who spoke to him no doubt wanted to have their stories heard by others outside their native land–where they’d been received coolly. One section focuses on a peasant lawyer’s confrontation of government corruption and its exploitation of over-taxed farmers; another highlights the controversy surrounding Falun Gong, the physical and spiritual practice that was banned and some of its practitioners unduly prosecuted.

The third story captures the overwhelming changes residents of the Old City of Beijing faced as their leaders began razing their artery-like system of winding neighborhoods, or hutong, which are simultaneously a relic of Chinese culture and character and a fast-decaying, dilapidated part of the modernizing city. He emphasizes the evicted hutong residents’ situation, as most are not paid appropriately for their loss, cannot afford bigger, newer apartments–nor the commute hours into the city–and will be unable to replace the strong community that has surrounded many of them for their entire lives.

This third one sprung up in my mind as I arrived in Beijing with a study abroad group in May 2007, and I even got to see one of these tight-knit and close-quartered communities myself, with part of what I’m sure was a choreographed tour for tourists. This didn’t matter so much to me, as the hutong was the most charming thing I saw in the capital city, and I even made their rapid disappearance the subject of a paper for one of my classes while I was there. (Here’s a post from my first encounter with the hutong.)

Unfortunately, the story has only gotten worse since Johnson’s reporting, and since my visit three years ago. Government and business developers see the single-level, “dangerous” housing as an obstacle in the way of economic growth in the city, as things can be built upwards and sold as commercial space for much higher prices than any residential buildings could garner. What acres do becomes private homes will land in the price range of millionaires, out of reach to the hundreds of thousands of men and women who grew up on that same ground.

I happened again upon this subject recently, as Amazon.com had a highly-rated memoir The Last Days of Old Beijing by Michael Meyer, in its bargain bin, and I needed something to accompany me on my summer travels. Meyer lived in Dazhalan, one of the hutong, and worked as a teacher at Coal Lane Elementary, and his neighbors, students, and anecdotes make for a lively portrait of this community that sits at the intersection of its city’s past and future. It is deemed a “historic” area, and is labeled as one of the twenty-five protected parts of Old Beijing; but as he and his neighbors witness, this does not mean their homes and businesses are safe from The Hand, as he calls it– the mysterious force that comes in the night and paints the large, white character on your door, that one that means it’s slated for immanent demolition. There’s not much the residents can do to stop the momentum, and posted advertisements remind each day of the benefit residents will bring to their city by taking their compensation and moving to the ‘burbs–the sooner, the better for all parties.

“Historic” in the eyes of the commercial and governmental developers means razing the dilapidated building that has been neglected for half a century and replacing it with an “authentic” facsimile, with upturned eaves painted classic Chinese colors: reds, golds, greens. Qianmen, a fabled shopping district in the center of the city that has been replaced with a swanky doppelganger, is mourned by urban planning professor Yao Yuan in a July 20 article in the New York Times. “The renovation of Qianmen wasn’t about preserving history, but about creating a fake Hollywood version of it,” he said.

This inclination to the reproduction was already firmly in place when I visited, specifically at the Shaolin Temple–famous for its kung fu masters–where we learned (subtly, this was not widely advertised information) that while the temple was on the location of the original, the one we were visiting was built in the 1980s. That news deflates the excitement a bit. So, it’s slightly older than me? Such reproduction was also obvious in Shanghai, an entire city which aims to please the tourist and attempts to blend its western and eastern influences into something unique. A bustling old-style system of alleyways and tiny stores was less charming with its fresh paint coats, air conditioning, and Haagen-Dazs shop.

I’m not here to pass judgment or even complain, really, because some of those modern amenities made my visit more comfortable, and surely improves the living conditions and salaries of many of China’s urban dwellers. But as many others have asked before me, at what cost are these things forming? Is a newly-built shopping center doing the people of Beijing much more good than its previous shopping center? Is it really a part of the city’s history that could not have been preserved more carefully from the start? Many of these areas, deemed “dangerous” by the government, were named as such in the late ’80s and early ’90s, which means they were slated for demolition or at least known to be in need of renovation and preservation for nearly two decades by now.

Many of these areas did not survive to see the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. I hope there are people in charge who will listen more carefully to the preservationists and historians both domestically and internationally who have been offering their advice on the ever-vanishing character of the city, and I hope what little is left of the city’s pre-modern composition can survive. I hope this for the sake of outsiders who visit, but more so for the sake of its own people.

To end my series on Yangzhou, it is only right to leave you with my favorite image: a hut, full of character, perched on the side of a mountain, overlooking the valley and farms below. Above this humble and beautiful home was a temple that we visited, which was also stunning on the breezy, calm day we were there. If you look closely, you’ll see the man tending to his crop (in the lower right-hand area of the photograph); I didn’t even notice him until someone else pointed him out.

This is my favorite image that I collected that summer, and when I took the picture, I didn’t even really notice the absolutely stunning hut. It is the star of this scene, which became clear to me once I looked back through all my pictures. But when I was standing there in the breeze, the mist that billowed down around the mountain and engulfed the fields and forests was what made me take the picture; it was ephemeral.

When I got back, and stumbled across this hut among the thousands of other images I had, I was taken aback at the yellow roof. I was also reminded of a joke my Dad had long told his wife and children, when the world got overwhelming: he’d say he was going to give it all up, and move to a hut on the side of a mountain, in China. I printed this image big–2′ by 3′–and framed it, and gave it to my Dad as his “hut on the side of a mountain, in China,” for a Christmas or birthday soon after. Now it resides on the wall opposite my parents’ bed, reminding them of the goal for a simpler life.

(Sorry for the delay in this post– I’ve been on vacation and attended a very important wedding, etc.–much needed rest.)

On the outskirts of the bustling city lies some of the newest additions to the area, a modern development area that includes the enormous mall here, as well as the giant new museum that I was standing in when I took the picture. Surrounded by high rises, the mall contains at least six floors begging to be shopped, with ribbons and streamers and lots of busy displays and professional salesmen roaming the atrium at the bottom floor. There is a Dairy Queen, the only one I ever saw in China, and a Starbucks (fairly rare outside of Beijing and Shanghai), and lots of stores selling home goods, like dishes and bedding and child’s play room equipment. The only problem was, the sales people far outnumbered the shoppers; it was a largely deserted mall on the two occasions I visited it. It was obviously a huge investment for the city, or the government, or whoever built it. And they built it for a time in the future, most likely, hoping that within a  few years the population of Yangzhou would find their pocketbooks able to handle consumer spending À la the western model.

I don’t imagine the global economic situation has helped this mall in the years since I last saw it. Notice the many cranes gracing the skyline on both sides of the shopping mall, the ubiquitous sign of expansion and change throughout my time in the country. Every city has this crane skyline. I can only imagine what this mall and this same city will look like ten years from the time of this snapshot, for better or worse. I’ll try to go back in 2017.

We stayed in the international student dorms during our time in Yangzhou, and for a small monthly fee (around 5 dollars), a man would come by and hook up the internet for your computer. This was a huge relief after the horrors of the Zhengzhou computer labs with their limited hours, terribly slow and/or mostly broken computers, and other international students who wanted to play computer games endlessly. We didn’t mind at all paying for two connections, which I’m pretty sure the building staff thought was an extreme luxury.

My desk is on the right, closer to the door. Collections of pantry food, schoolbooks, and schoolwork graced my shelves. The TV was as good as worthless unless you had an ear for Chinese or wanted to try to keep up with the lightning-fast dialogue for a bit of practice; I never even scratched the surface of comprehension when faced with a TV. Needless to say, it remained off.

Our beds were slightly improved from the slabs of wood with medium-thick cushioning that we’d had in Zhengzhou: we had mattresses, at least, but they felt as stiff as box springs. (I would be very surprised if they were not actually box springs.) We had two big wardrobes where we hung and stored all of our clothing and other possessions (not many). We’d keep our room cold, and after a long day of classes and trekking to site visits, it did become a haven of sorts, the way any room does if you live in it long enough.

A big steaming pot of freshly-made noodles with mushrooms and cabbage; add some cayenne pepper flakes and a soy-type sauce and you’ve got a delicious, satisfying dinner. That whole pot would cost me 8 yuan, about $1.14. Plus a few yuan for a cold water. YUM.

Our group ate regularly with various groups of our Chinese friends, including the boys’ sports buddies and a girl who was studying abroad from California (so she sounded completely American). Food is always ordered for many, you order lots of dishes, and then it’s served on the spinning lazy Susan in the center of the table, so everyone has access. It’s a good way to try a lot of dishes and it’s also so affordable to split. This restaurant was down a back alley, and filled with Christmas/Santa Claus memorabilia, but it was extra delicious– and also very close to the store we liked that sold ice cold soy milk.

It was Team China versus Team USA one hot day, and we were the sideline cheerleaders. They had kept this rivalry up for a number of sports: basketball, table tennis, and most certainly, soccer. We, the girls, were not the most cheery crowd, but we tried to be present when we had the time. Out of nowhere, this guy came across the soccer field, mid-game, on his bicycle, and we thought surely something important had happened, and he was either coming to tell us or the guys, or perhaps just trying to get somewhere quickly. None of the above. He pedaled lazily all the way across the field, right through the game, stopping to talk to no one and continuing on through the campus leisurely. It was moments like this that I appreciated and marveled most at the Chinese way of sharing space; who were we to say this green patch was entirely ours, anyway? It’s kind of exhilarating and a bit frightening too, to live within a cultural sense of community space that is unheard of in my own country. No one cared at all, and the game was not affected.

I saw it on the Great Wall, I saw it on dusty temple walls, and I saw it in the concrete surrounding any oft-visited site throughout China; but the graffiti on the members of this lush bamboo garden won the prize. It was a dewy, inviting, and enchanting garden–and it never takes too long to spot the evidence of visitors bygone.

It’s the same human proclivity for wanting to claim and object in nature, or to prove our presence in a space, but I was surprised and charmed by it in Chinese characters, almost like they were somehow more respectable than the English “I wuz here” scratched into a bathroom stall (for the record, I did not, to my recollection, find Chinese phrases scribbled in bathrooms). And that’s probably all the Chinese is saying too, but it has more innate beauty, for sure.

It was a regular afternoon, and Stacey and I were either sweaty or exhausted or (probably) both, and we decided to spring for the 3-yuan (42-cent) rickshaw ride back to campus. He was confused, rightly so, by our feeble Chinese language skills, and we had tried to tell him we wanted to go to Yangzhou University, but were less successful in communicating which entrance. I don’t remember all the details, but I recall that he was stubbornly determined to get us as close to campus as possible as soon as he could–which in this case meant that we rode the length of the campus (it’s behind the trees on the left, in the photo) right at the edge, on the wrong side of the road.

Now, Chinese roadways are already overwhelming to an American used to driving with ample road laws and safety measures, and the concept of a right-of-way. Chinese roads function under the general rule that if you think you can make, go for it–and do it fast. This applies both to number of lanes as well as intersections and stoplights. I actually found it exhilarating and pretty easy to navigate; and if I was in doubt, I just tagged along with a group of Chinese people when they crossed the street. And since there were enormous lanes for pedestrians and bicycles running on the edges of the actual roads (think of sidewalks but equally as wide as the whole road), there was plenty of space for everyone to share the road. More than a few times, I saw actual cars driving in those pedestrian/bike lanes, and no one seemed to mind.

But this particular day, we were rendered pretty nervous when our driver did not simply turn and then adjust his lane. Nope, he rode on the wrong side of the road for about two miles, heeding no car, bus, truck, or motorcycle that stood in his way. Cars swerved past us and we sat embarrassed and half-laughing as we flew past them. Eventually, we made it to campus and gratefully wished our driver farewell, no worse for the wear but laughing all the way to our dorm.

The very first day that the whole group was together, we spent a disgustingly humid day at Shouxi Lake that almost made us forget the sticky heat. Little enclaves were built in random spots, with wide-open window frames and benches and tables; old Chinese men were playing checkers and women could be spotted chatting in a shady corner. Bamboo grew alongside the water and the paths wound unendingly around the lake and its greenery and gardens. Right up there with temples, gardens were a common destination for us visitors, and if I ever mentioned visiting any of them to a Chinese friend, they would beam with pride at their nation’s beautiful entities and the care the collective people took to preserve them.

Suzhou, a city we spent several days in near the end of our trip (after leaving Yangzhou), is famous for its gardens. Chinese tourists come from all over in trains, planes, and even cars to revel in their world-renowned beauty. This was something I never knew until I went, but every Chinese person I heard speak of gardens had either seen or desired to visit Suzhou’s. Having seen several of those as well, I think this one in Yangzhou rivals them; and it has a personality all its own.