MCMP Redux #6
I drafted this back in October, and then promptly forgot about it (it’s been a strange couple of months):
I took this photograph late one morning, or maybe early one afternoon. I was with another foreign teacher at the time, and while we’d been eating we had both noticed that we were being watched by a group of waitresses and waiters in the restaurant opposite. It is quite common in China for Chinese people to watch foreigners, but this group of young people were notable for the intensity of their curiosity: they watched us the entire time we ate our noodles, from beginning to end, unflinching, indefatigable. So, immediately on leaving the noodle restaurant in which I’d been eating some very good beef noodles (it was a Muslim restaurant, I think), I dashed over the road and took a few photographs of our audience. This frame was the last one, and I’m happy that after the initial shock of me walking straight towards them, camera in hand, snapping photographs, they each quickly accepted their sudden metamorphosis from observer into observed, relaxed, and smiled.
Past installments of MCMP Redux can be found here.
Yinchuan, 2008.