I want to finish this China section up before October, so this is it. My China narrative has been a mess, but so far, nobody has looked at it anyway, so it is OK. I will leave it as it lay.

The Power of Photography

OK. I'm about ready to wrap this up, and I'm sure you are ready for that, too. I am tired and distracted, but I am alone, and that is what I want tonight. I do not want another ego in the room. Just now, the cat's is bigger than I can stand.

There are a lot of images left, so I may not be able to show them all. Tonight I showed them to my mother, and she put everything into context for me. She got back this week from visiting the hillbilly relatives in Ohio. Ohi-a. That is how they say it . My mother had gained a noticeable hillbilly twang when she got back. It was not so much the twang, though, as the forms that her expressions took. The constructions haunt my own writing and speaking. My aunt has a perfectly awful expression whenever things are surprising. It has been a part of my life, but I still laugh when she claps her hands together and yells, "Well shit the bed!" I have never heard another person say those words. There is, I believe, a hillbilly genius in the phrasing.


My mother began the evening by showing me photo-
graphs from her trip. Terrible things. I bought her a photo-
graphy class for Christmas a few years ago and gave her a very nice camera. Two years ago, I bought her a Nikon digital camera and a computer, scanner, and printer so that she would be able to play with her own images. Rather, in Ohio, she used a cardboard disposable camera she bought at a thrift store. The photos were what one would expect, poorly framed, off center images of people who do not fill the frame, heads in the bull’s-eye. "Here's where I went to elementary school, and here is where I went to high school." The buildings don't look old, mom. Did they rebuild them? "I don't know. Here's one of Patty on her porch. Here she's lying on the couch. Do you recognize this guy?" I'd never seen him before, I was certain. "That's your cousin, Teddy." Oh. I haven't seen him since he was six, I think. I gave up on family a long time ago.


When she was finished, I showed her my China pictures. She would grab each photograph quickly and bend the corner so that the shape remained distorted after sort of like she was marking cards in a poker game. She was apparently dismayed by the thickness of the pile I handed to her, for she went through them like they were bad Lotto tickets. "What's this?" she asked with irritation. It's either two titties or a dog eating a bagel. What the hell do YOU think it is, I shot back peevishly. "You watch your tone," she said. I still flinch a bit, expecting a backhand. It's a street sweeper, mother. "Well where's the broom?" Flip, flip, flip. I realized she was irritated looking at these. There were no relatives, nobody she could talk about. "Were there any GOOD LOOKING PEOPLE there?" she challenged. Oh, god, oh god, of god. She looked at a picture of a man in a boat. "Was the water dirty?" Yes, mother, it was filthy. The whole country was filthy and there were filthy little Chinamen everywhere. It was awful. That seemed to make her happier. I was glad when she was through bending and creasing all the photographs I had spent the last two weeks editing and printing.


There is a certain power in photo-
graphy. Good pictures arrest the attention and allow the viewer to enter that frozen moment, to appreciate the color and texture and depth of intention. Not just those educated in such things. A good photograph transcends class and educational lines. It reaches out to everyone.


"Did I show you the picture of Martha all stove up in her back?"


If any of you ever wonder why I am so plagued with fear and doubt about what I do. . . . But in the end, I know my mother has the inside on this thing. I know she is right.

Welcome to Shanghai

Welcome to Shanghai. I loved hearing that. I am full of images from old books and movies. Shanghai was the Paris of the East. It was the place to which the Russian royalty fled after the revolution. The French and the Germans and the Americans came there to trade. It was a place of last chances for those who had failed elsewhere. The Bund is all that is left of that, a few old colonial buildings. Shanghai, like the rest of the cities we visited, is a growing, unsentimental city that looks totally modern. As I walked along the harbor, I was confronted by kids who said they were art students at the University in Xi'an. They asked me where I was from. If you read the guidebooks, you would be warned to stay away from such conversations. Many of the kids on our trip had and believed that these were no students and that they were dangerous. Our guide had told us so. We might be Shanghaied. They did not seem a dangerous bunch to me. I took a lot of Polaroids and got a lot of email addresses. They were nice kids and didn't try to cheat me out of my Leica.

Shanghai was more modern than either Bejing or Xi'an, more upscale. That is not to say that the others didn’t have McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Pizza Hut. But there was a more obvious international flair in Shaghai. Here is the girl who sold me my first Starbuck’s coffee.

Japanese fashion had an influence in Shanghai that I did not notice elsewhere, though that does not mean it wasn’t there. I could have simply been in all the wrong places to find it. Here are two Chinese Lolitas.

And others.


Outside a restaurant, I came across a group of waitresses in training. They were being instructed on how to stand and present. I asked them if they would pose for a group shot, thinking that the head waitress would tell me to bugger off, but to my great surprise. . . .

The Chinese government began limiting the number of children a family can have some time ago. That policy is becoming more liberal, but it is still difficult for poor or even middle-class families to afford more than one child. As a result, our Shanghai guide informed us, there is an only child syndrome in China. Children who have been very spoiled by parents and grandparents have grown to think of themselves as very special, and they have had trouble dealing with the competition they face in adult life. Some malady. But it was weird to think that of the hundreds of thousands of children I came across on my trip, I was never looking at siblings.

I got sick of walking around the American style outdoor mall that was full of American style Chinese shoppers, so I ran down some side streets until I was not very sure I could get back where I would need to be to meet the tour group. Here was the familiar “drip, drip, drip” of wet clothes hung between buildings in narrow alleyways to dry. Here were the repair shops and hair salons, the hardware stores and neighborhood grocery stores of everyday life. I smiled at a family—mother, father, and son—and took some my last Polaroids.

Faux-Imperialist

While in Xi'an, our group was taken by rickshaws through one of the hutongs to a local family's house where dinner was being prepared for us. No one rides in rickshaws. We looked like fools being pedalled through the streets of a working class neighborhood. Here is a picture of my driver. This is one of the most embarrassing things I did.

The Monastery

In Xi'an, we stopped at a Buddhist monastery, one of several Buddhist sites we had seen. It was terribly hot and we were left to wander the grounds at our leisure. The place had been turned into a minor Disney exhibit. Our guide made it clear that there is no religion in China, but that people's superstitions are tolerated. I poked around the grounds sticking my head into kitchens and dorm rooms where the monks lived. Those parts of the monastery presented to pilgrims and tourists were polished and maintained. The rest of the structures were like the rest of China, worn, frayed, and in need of attention. At the rear of the monastery, the furthest piece of ground from where we entered, I came upon a ceremony in a large, sparsely decorated room. There, ten monks sat a long wooden table, five to a side, chanting some service or prayer. They each had a book in front of them and they would occasionally turn a page, but never at the same time. They chanted in unison, sort of, but there were variations that went ‘round and ‘round the table taking a different cadence, a complimentary “melody,” a bit like the call and response in American field blues. An older monk sat in a high chair above the others. He, too, turned the pages of a book in front of him, but only occasionally did he join the chant. In the opposite side of the room where I sat, there were benches and some tables with food where two families sat about listlessly.

After college, I had become interested in Buddhism and had tried to learn about it on my own. There were no Buddhists in my small town that I knew of, no temples or ashrams or bookstores, only strip malls and car lots and laundromats and bars. I struggled with the books and tried to meditate at home, sitting on the floor, my legs crossed, trying to let my mind flow like a river, like the meditation I read about that took place in Tibetan temples where young monks would sit for hours on cold stone floors, unmoving, seeking the truest enlightenments. I was not very successful on my own, but I had continued to carry those romantic images with me all the way to China. There in that room I came face to face with Buddhist monks, sleepy eyed, bored, chanting by rote, minds drifting, drifting, endlessly on. They looked sleep deprived and I imagined that their day started long before dawn. It is probably the best way to keep young men compliant with the meditative life. I sat with them fascinated for as long as I could, but I knew I had to get back on the bus, so reluctantly (for even though those monks had shattered my romantic ideals, the strange chanting in the sultry, incensed air produced the intended effect) I left the chapel. Outside, I saw an old monk in saffron robes sitting by himself, staring ahead. He seemed to my imagination to be the Head Monk. I wanted to take his photograph, but I thought that I would be committing some blasphemy. Then I recalled from my Zen readings (these were not Zen Buddhists) the old refrain: "What should you do if you meet the Buddha in the road? Kill him." Emboldened by the teaching, I asked if I could take his photo. And just like many others I had met in China, he sat up tall, straightened his robes, and looked formally into the lens. I took the picture and we waited wordlessly for it to developed. He smiled and chuckled as his image emerged, so I took a second one and left it with him. I bowed to him with supplicant hands and said "Namaste," but he was busy putting the photograph away in the folds of his robe.

Every picture tells a story, don't it.


As I walked back to the bus, I came upon a street cleaner plying his trade and asked to take this photograph. Fresh from my Buddhist experience, I found him truly enlightening.

Flea Market Mother

I came out of the Great Mosque n Xian at dusk one day and had a few minutes to rummage through a flea market before I had to get back on the bus. It was the most fascinating flea market I saw on the trip, but I didn't know that it would be the best at the time and I did not bother to buy the things I wanted thinking I would see them again at the next bazaar. I walked past an alleyway and saw an old bike that I wanted to photograph. As I was framing up the bike, a young girl asked me, "What are you doing?" I said I was taking a photograph of the bicycle. "Why?" she queried. I told her that it must be quite common to her but I didn't many things such as this old bike at home. She cocked her head and said laughing, "That bike is not old." She was a student at the university, and she ran one of the stalls in the market. We chatted a few moments before I asked if I could take her picture. Once again, the Polaroid drew quite a crowd. Suddenly a man ran up and started speaking to me excitedly in Mandarin. The young girl explained, "He wants you to wait. He wants you to take a photograph of my baby." Sure. He was gone quite a while, but when he returned, he had both the baby and the baby's grandmother with him. "Is this your husband?
i asked the girl. "No, he is my brother. I do not have a husband." I asked her if that was alright, if everything was OK. She told me yes. "You know, I am a student at the university. . . ." I left some Polaroids of the family with them. I have the email address of the fellow who owns the stall across from hers so that I can send her these copies. Mother and Daughter.

Moslems in China

To my surprise, I found that there were millions of Moslems in China, ithe relics of those who came up the Silk Road to trade and later, for a while, to conquer.


In Xi'an, we went to the Great Mosque, a wonderful sanctuary in the bustling city. Here are Polaroids of two men I met at the gates. I am afraid that accidentally and unintentionally I insulted the man in the first photograph. After I took his picture, he told me that the U.S. was a great country and when we were done, I reached out and shook his right hand. He shook, but his face had fallen. I remembered right away that Moslems shake only with the left hand. I hadn't prepared myself. I felt terrible.

To my surprise, I found that there were millions of Moslems in China, in part a result of the ancient Silk Road trade route, in part due to Moslem conquest.

Chines Mosque

To my surprise, I found that there were millions of Moslems in China, in part a result of the ancient Silk Road trade route, in part due to Moslem conquest.

Self Portrait

After using the Polaroid for awhile, I began to realize that in a strange way, all the photographs were a form of self-portrait--that is, my presence was always reflected in the image. These are the only images that you will see of me there.

Chinese Diversity

One of the things that most struck me in China was the diversity. I asked our guide how many ethnic groups were encompassed by China and he answered something like 130. The Polaroids show that best. Look at the eyes, the skin tones, the shapes of faces. Mongols look nothing like Manchurians, etc.

Polaroids at the Great Wall of China

Taking the Polaroid camera to China was genius. Taking so little film was foolish. I didn’t realize that I would not be able to buy Polaroid film there. At first, I would take two photos keeping one and giving away the other, but too soon my film supply ran short. People were wonderful about letting me take their pictures. I would dance a pantomime with my camera, pointing and smiling like an idiot, and most often, once subjects, people would smooth their clothing and pat their, then stand formally and handsomely while I framed the shot. The “whirr” and “kerplunk” of the camera as it spits the picture out the front seemed always to catch them by surprise. Often, they looked disappointed at the blank image, and I would try to make up some sign language that indicated they must wait and see. Then a crowd would begin to form and the image would pass from hand to hand. Someone, usually an older person, would begin to wave the photo in the old Polaroid manner and it was impossible for me to tell them it would not help. Once the image began to develop, the fun began as I tried to get the photograph back, chasing it from hand to hand through the crowd. All the while, others would offer themselves up for the camera. I was a shaman with a magic box. Funny, I thought, as they all carried digital cameras with them. It was not the instant image, then, that created the excitement, but something else. There is a magic in Polaroids that has not diminished, it seems.

Great Wall

It was cool and drizzling the morning we arrived at the Great Wall. From the bus window we would glimpse the ancient stone through the tree break and mist winding its way through the valleys and hills, ragged, broken, twisting, sentinel towers standing as punctuation marks, lonely stone buildings inviting us to explore. Rather, we made our way to Tourist Central and queued up with a throng of other buses waiting to discharge their crowds. Hundreds of people milled about a central courtyard lined with shops and food courts. Hawkers aggressively touted their wares. Most of the tourists were Chinese, so I was able to maintain some illusions, and after walking uphill for twenty or thirty minutes, the crowd had thinned considerably. And then, seemingly, I was alone walking through those Chinese mountains atop the greatest structure ever built, marching across the bones of those laborers who were buried there.

Polaroids in China

To China, I took an old Spectra Polaroid camera that I bought a few months before on eBay and about eighty pieces of film. I had forgotten about the camera until I was coming down from the Great Wall one day. Remembering it then, I took it quickly from my backpack. A little girl in a red pajama outfit was posing for her parents, and she was so charming, I asked them if I could take a picture. They spoke to her and suddenly she struck a serious Kung Fu pose. Her parents were fascinated by the Polaroid process as were others around us. Soon there was a big crowd and I took another photo of the little girl. The first one came out so well that I left it with her parents. They seemed awfully pleased and very, very proud. It was by far the better of the two photos. I am not a generous person by nature, I think, and I have had to learn the practice from people I admire. It is a good practice and a satisfactory one, but I must admit I still wish I had that photograph back.

Perception

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson

I am tonight, once again, at a loss. I feel but cannot articulate. China becomes a memory, that infamously inaccurate mechanism. I turn to what I wrote to friends just after returning home.

"Your sensibilities have to change in China. Everywhere there is human suffering. People on the streets are missing limbs or are bent double by some ancient malady. Some are covered by burns or have had their legs bent backwards. I refused to photograph any of that. There seemed no point but to highlight human misery. I'll leave it to others. One day in Shanghai, Rachel and I were having beers at a sidewalk cafe in a nicer part of town near The Bund. A street artist stood at a distance sketching my portrait. A man with thalidomide hands stood closer, begging me for money. The artist finished and showed me his work. It was pretty good, so I gave him fifty or a hundred yuen. I watched the crippled fellow and commented to Rachel, "You know what that guy is thinking? He is thinking,'Mister, if I had two hands, I would rip your self-absorbed throat out and take all your filthy money.'" It was a terrible moment. Of course, I gave the crippled man money and we got up to go, but the cripple came running after me, calling out something to me in Mandarin. I figured he wanted more money, but rather he was trying to tell me that I had left my pack with three Leicas in it at the cafe. Those cameras were worth a life's fortune for him. I am ashamed to admit that I did not give them to him. But that is the way of China, as they say. If you were a diplomat or a corporate executive, China would hold undefinable luxuries and pleasures for you. With tremendous capital and billions of poor people, China must be the most fearsomely twisted country in the world.

It seems the street portrait did not make it home with me.

But I recorded none of that. I have my own form of perversion. I am a Romantic Imperialist with a camera. Here is some evidence of that."

Perception

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
Henri Bergson

I am tonight, once again, at a loss. I feel but cannot articulate. China becomes a memory, that infamously inaccurate mechanism. I turn to what I wrote to friends just after returning home.

Your sensibilities have to change in China. Everywhere there is human suffering. People on the streets are missing limbs or are bent double by some ancient malady. Some are covered by burns or have had their legs bent backwards. I refused to photograph any of that. There seemed no point but to highlight human misery. I'll leave it to others. One day in Shanghai, Rachel and I were having beers at a sidewalk cafe in a nicer part of town near The Bund. A street artist stood at a distance sketching my portrait. A man with thalidomide hands stood closer, begging me for money. The artist finished and showed me his work. It was pretty good, so I gave him fifty or a hundred yuens. I watched the crippled fellow and commented to Rachel, "You know what that guy is thinking? He is thinking,'Mister, if I had two hands, I would rip your self-absorbed throat out and take all your filthy money.'" It was a terrible moment. Of course, I gave the crippled man money and we got up to go, but the cripple came running after me, calling out something to me in Mandarin. I figured he wanted more money, but rather he was trying to tell me that I had left my pack with three Leicas in it at the cafe. Those cameras were worth a life's fortune for him. I am ashamed to admint that I did not give them to him. But that is the way of China, as they say. If you were a diplomat or a corporate executive, China would hold undefinable luxuries and pleasures for you. With tremendous capital and billions of poor people, china must be the most fearsomely twisted country in the world.

It seems the street portrait did not make it home with me.

But I recorded none of that. I have my own form of perversion. I am a Romantic Imperialist with a camera. Here is some evidence of that.

Images and Myth

"All cultures nurture myths and fantasies, wonderful paragons with qualities absent in one's own culture or else nightmarish visions of evil from which deliverance or protection is sought. Paragons of beauty or visions of evil were at times transformations of one's own past in a search for roots as models to imitate or to avoid, as memories to praise, venerate, or curse, as those foundation myths which, from time immemorial, defined and at times even justified the acts and beliefs of a nation or civilization. At other times, they were associated with different cultural realms altogether, as though the psychological need for myths could better be met by contrasting one's own world with different ones, with the "empires of evil" of recent political rhetoric or with all these "others" that have populated philosophical and sociological arguments since Jean-Paul Sartre's celebrated l'enfer, c'est les autres (hell is others) of over half a century ago. Whether recollections of beauty or evocations of evil, cultural myths and fantasies lend themselves to images—in order better to be publicized but also because they are in fact images (albeit initially only mental ones)—and are thus easy to transform into representations."

Noble Dreams, Wicked Pleasures:
Orientalism in America, 1870-1930
Edited by Holly Edwards

Disorder

I am posting photos in no order now. I thought to write about China, to illustrate the writing with the images, but I have given up on that. We went from Bejing to Xi'an, from temple to oddity, from palace to antiquity. The air was as hazy as my memory. It was hot, the roads crowded. In Bejing, we stayed at the Red Wall Hotel. The first floor had a disco of ill repute. In Xi'an, we stayed a block from the train station. On the fifth floor was a massage parlor of ill repute. We opted for massages from university students recommended by our tour guide. This from my journal:

"One night, however, our Chinese guide, John, told us that the University of Xian gave degrees in massage and that he could arrange for some of the graduate students to come to our rooms to provide us with their services in this most famous style. Cheap. We had been on the bus for days, so everyone in the group leaped at the opportunity. After dinner that night, I waited eagerly for my masseuse. I had asked John if he would be sending up a boy or a girl and he asked which I wanted. "A girl!" I laughed. I was hopeful when I heard the knock on at the door. I opened it to a short, heavyset woman who looked as if she were eager to get grimly on with business. She had no massage table. I wondered what I was supposed to do. She motioned to the bed where I compliantly lay down in my clothes. She told me to turn around, to put my head at the foot of the bed, and then she kneeled on the floor and proceeded to massage my eyeballs. It was awful. She dug her fingers deep into my sockets and moved them all around, then stuck her fingers in my ears and did something that felt terrible, after which she decided to massage my lips. It didn't get better. I would have believed that she made the whole thing up if everyone at breakfast the next morning didn't have the same account. One fellow on the trip, a thick, heavy man with a large belly, said that his girl rubbed the hair on his arms and called him a monkey, then pulled up his shirt, laughed, pointed and said he looked like a Buddha, after which she climbed on top of him and farted three times. It was definitely the weirdest part of the trip."

Embrace the New.

I'm at wits end tonight. I've been reading and thinking about Modernism. What the hell. Embrace the new.

Enterprise