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Beijing Night Transit

The taxi journey to Beijing Airport was very Chinese: a minibus crammed to burst with pas­sen­gers and luggage pelting down a poorly-​lit motorway at 120 kilo­metres an hour in the small hours of the morning, the only traffic on the road some lorries and a few other passenger-​packed “bread van”-style taxis pelting towards their respective des­tin­a­tions. I was in the front, right next to the driver, oscil­lating my legs to the right whenever he needed to change gear. It was a blast.

I spent half the journey sleeping (he wasn’t changing gears much, once we gained speed), the other half listening to audiobooks (the first few chapters of Pre­his­tory by Colin Renfrew, which was full of inter­esting things I didn’t know, such as the Scand­inavian origins of the terms “Stone Age”, “Bronze Age”, etc., and a little of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, a novel very well-​suited to being heard as a spoken story because it is, like all of Ishiguro’s novels, far more con­cerned with the teller of the tale than with the tale itself) and occa­sion­ally glancing at the driver and the his dash­board (for time check, as I was cramped and thus mildly impa­tient, and for speed checks, as I’m always curious about how fast I’m trav­el­ling through space at any given moment). A good journey, overall, and the two hours flew by (or we flew through the two hours, depending on how you look at things).

I’m now in a cafe in Seoul, drinking coffee (a reasonably-​priced Amer­icano — had to point at the menu, gallingly), enjoying duty-​free Gauloises (the reds, a rarity, for me: have only ever seen them in London, in a small corner shop in a Moscow suburb, and in airports) eating a sandwich (wanted a bagel, but the waitress waved her hands, so I had “white bread” instead), and listening to Korean break­fast radio (random South Korean pop, Taylor Swift, and, a few minutes ago, ‘Unchained Melody’). More on South Korea later; but in short, it feels the same as I remember, only weirder, and more alien (well, I feel very foreign, here, anyway: can’t say much beyond “hello” and “thanks”, and I can’t pro­nounce those very com­pet­ently; and I feel self-​consious as everyone here is so incred­ibly smart-​looking, and I am, cur­rently, the anti­thesis of “smart”).

Beijing Airport (Terminal 3), 2010.

Exploring Today (Yesterday)

Wrote this yes­terday, but didn’t get chance to post it here:

Exploring today: found some deli­cious speakers, but decided they were probably too expensive; also found some very cheap in-​the-​ear head­phones, but decided they were probably too cheap; bought some apples and had a bizarre exchange with the apple-​seller; was told by a lady in a DVD store that I was pretty, then told her that she was pretty too (there was blushing); tasted a nice syrupy cake; wandered around and thought about whether or not I needed a digital camera (pretty sure I don’t, but…); met some amusing, lively people at work, one of whom used to study in Xi’an (“I miss the food”, she said); chatted with a wise lady who remembered being given candy by US soldiers when they lib­er­ated Germany (and last night that same lady talked about how once, while living in Paris and missing home, she had listened to Gounoud’s Faust; her descrip­tion of some of the closing scenes — the depic­tion of The Brocken? — has stuck in my mind). More exploring tomorrow.

Changes

More changes, it seems: in the next couple of days, I’ll be heading north-​easterly. I’m expecting it to be inter­esting. Today the plan is to get some new clothes (it is cold out there), get a train ticket (it is quite far from here), and then drink some whiskey (Becky appar­ently has a bottle). We’ll have to see how it all goes.

The image below is two pho­to­graphs, or perhaps two vari­ations of the same pho­to­graph. On the left is a scan — a lab scan I tweaked, a little — of a frame from a roll of film exposed at the begin­ning of 2007; and on the right is another frame from that roll, but a frame I scanned myself (and tweaked, a little) a couple of weeks ago. I think I was going for a dif­ferent look (steeper curve, deeper blacks), the first time I saw the image. I like both.

Xi’an, 2007.

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.

Singles #17

One night in the autumn of 2007 I was in a net bar editing some pho­to­graphs when out of the blue I got a call from a Polish guy asking if he and his girl­friend could crash at my place that very same night. It isn’t very often that requests are made by strangers for emer­gency accom­mod­a­tion, but I’d been in similar situ­ations myself and didn’t hesitate in allowing the two of them stay. And it turned out they were incred­ibly close: five minutes away on a bus that was bringing them from the train station to the Bell Tower. I quickly closed down what I was doing and dashed out to meet them. And so began my adven­ture with two new Polish friends, an adven­ture during which I took this, the sev­en­teenth pho­to­graph in Singles.

The location is one I pass through almost every time I return to Xi’an, but the bill­board, as far as I can tell, is no longer there.

Xi’an, 2007.

Prints of this one are avail­able, if you’re inter­ested — email for details — and earlier episodes, if we can call them that, of Singles can be found here.

Singles #16

Last year there was an earth­quake in Sichuan, an earth­quake that killed people, des­troyed homes, and created a wide­spread feeling of panic across many areas of China. I was in China at the time and exper­i­enced it, but luckily did not directly encounter either death or destruc­tion. I did, however, exper­i­ence the panic: my school was forced by the local gov­ern­ment to close for around a month and I was advised by my manager to stay else­where, if I could, as Hanzhong probably wasn’t very safe. I took this pho­to­graph during my short post-​earthquake exodus in Xi’an. The camera was most likely the OM-​2n, the film almost cer­tainly Lucky SHD 100.

Xi’an, 2008.

Singles #14

Some time towards the end of 2006 (or maybe the very begin­ning of 2007), myself and a friend of mine were invited to join the edit­orial team of a new arts and culture magazine being produced in Xi’an. In the end, nothing really came of it (it was a new venture, and nobody seemed to have enough money), but getting involved provided me with a some inter­esting insights into the mindset of small Chinese pub­lishers (one key insight being: often nobody has enough money), and also gave me the chance to do some­thing I’d never done before: take pho­to­graphs of a model who was actually being paid to model.

The shoot took place in a car showroom on a typ­ic­ally overcast Xi’an after­noon, the light flat and fairly inspiring. As I recall, I spent most of the after­noon taking pho­to­graphs with my recently acquired 5D, and I don’t think I produced anything really remark­ably. But then at the end of the day, as the sun began to go down, the light became more engaging: glowing street lamps and hazy pink skies and shadows. I decided to put a roll of black and white film (it was Neopan 1600) through my film camera, a Canon EOS 30, and also decided, on the spot, that it would be a great if the model were holding a cigar­ette. And that is how this pho­to­graph, a favourite of mine, came to be.

Prints can be made, if you’re inter­ested — just email and ask.

Xi’an, 2007.

Singles #13

The majority of Xi’an res­id­ents are Han Chinese, who make up 99.1% of the city’s total pop­u­la­tion. There are around 81,500 people belonging to ethnic minor­ities living in Xi’an, including 50,000 Muslim Hui people con­cen­trated in the Muslim quarter, which is also home to the 1,360 year old Great Mosque of Xi’an.

‘Xi’an’, Wiki­pedia

Xi’an (Muslim Quarter), 2007.

MCMP Redux #4

An art teacher in sec­ondary school told me that if I really wanted to get great pho­to­graphs, I had to wake up very early in the morning and walk some­where. It is good advice, but has always been hard advice for me to follow because I’m not very good in the morning: I prefer the hours of the night. But some­times I do manage to get up early, and when that happens I try to take pho­to­graphs, remem­bering the teacher.

I took the pho­to­graph in this edition of MCMP Redux while heading to work very early one January morning. I remember I was shiv­ering at the time and I think I made about six expos­ures of the same com­pos­i­tion, bracing the camera in dif­ferent ways each time, as I was worried my hand wouldn’t be steady enough to get a sharp image at 1/​15th of a second. Once content I had some­thing on film, I marched down the road, jumped onto a cold bus, and thought about coffee.

Lanzhou, 2008.

MCMP Redux #3

Lanzhou is usually quite cold in January and February, but in the January and February of 2008 it was par­tic­u­larly cold. My strongest memories are of walks while wearing layers of thermals (one thin and one thick, at least — mobility was limited), sudden retreats into warm res­taur­ants (my glasses would always steam up), and feet-​stomps at the entrances of shops (sticky snow and ice would cake itself to everything). In the evenings, Liu Bing and I played Company of Heroes (LAN battles, one-​on-​one — immense fun) in a small and smoky net bar (our tem­porary accom­mod­a­tion was warmer but lacked internet), fuelling ourselves with one kuai cups of coffee. In the days, we would go on excur­sions, tramping down icy streets in search of elusive targets we’d marked on our map, rarely finding what we’d set out to find, but usually finding some­thing. It was during one such excur­sion that I found a bookshop full of yellowed foreign classics, buying (or rescuing) a col­lec­tion of Joseph Conrad’s sea stories (this one — I recom­mend it very highly), some Sherlock Holmes (beau­tiful and inex­pensive Chinese editions), and some­thing else — possibly another Conrad, maybe Nostromo; or possibly Bleak House.

And there were pho­to­graphs, too. I took the pho­to­graph below (the third install­ment of MCMP Redux) on the way home one night. Liu Bing and I were waiting for some street food (Lanzhou had some very good street food, but it wasn’t always easy to find) and I was circling around the stall trying to keep warm. The lit curving struc­tures (the example in the pho­to­graph is but one: there were others dotted all over the city) fas­cin­ated me, and after I read Typhoon or The Shadow Line I may have fancied them to be the broken ribs of some ancient sunken wreck; or maybe that is just how I see them now.

Lanzhou, 2008.

MCMP Redux #2

Yinchuan is the captial city of Ningxia, an autonomous region created for the Hui people (China has five autonomous regions, the other four being Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang). I lived and worked in Yinchuan for about three weeks in 2007, exper­i­en­cing a little of the local culture and pho­to­graphing some of its people and places. This pho­to­graph captures some­thing of how I remember it feeling to be there: white light and open space. If it had a soundtrack, it would be the Stanton Warriors remix of ‘Feel Good Inc.’, a track by Gorillaz that I first heard while wan­dering through city one bright winter’s afternoon.

Some back­ground on MCMP Redux can be found in the first install­ment of the series.

Yinchuan, 2007.

Stills #2: Up the Yangtze (2007)

I’ve been in China for almost four years, but there are still many places here that I have yet to visit: The Great Wall (I saw part of it in Ningxia, but that isn’t quite the same), and Yunnan Province (Liu Bing and I fre­quently plan to go there, but some­thing always happens that stops us), and Beihai (whenever I see Beihai on a map I feel an urge to go there; but it is a trek, and a trek that needs to be done properly), to name but three. Another very notable place I have yet to visit is the Three Gorges Dam, not to mention the vast area affected by its con­struc­tion and oper­a­tion. Thank­fully, though, there exist films like Up the Yangtze to help fill in some of the blanks.

Up the Yangtze is a doc­u­mentary that uses the lives of two young Chinese people to tell a story of the modern Yangtze river; or, if you look at it another way, it is a doc­u­mentary that uses the story of a river, a river central to live­li­hood of millions of people, as a way into the lives of its two prot­ag­on­ists. Whichever way you look at it, the film is remark­able, providing the audience with a candid and engaging glimpse at the textures of life in today’s China. I couldn’t find a still that really captured how the film felt, and so opted for a plainly descriptive image; but I hope that anyone suitably intrigued will seek out a copy and watch it for them­selves: it is def­in­itely worth your time.

A still from Up the Yangtze, a doc­u­mentary film directed by Yung Chang.