What the Hell Just Happened?

I am barreling across China on the Xi’an-Beijing bullet train, watching it all go by—cities, countryside, farmland, and, among the grasses near Zheng Zhou, an awfully close cluster of nuclear reactors. It is day 11 in this most mysterious land; in one day I’ll be on a plane bound for home. I’ve taken pages of notes, snapped a ludicrous number of iPhone photos, talked to strangers and to the eight other travel writers on the trip, listened to our guides, even read about the history, and I’m still not entirely sure of what had happened.

 

Well, I have an idea.

 

I have finally visited a foreign country. I have visited a place so thoroughly of itself and to itself and for itself that even as it takes on the trappings of the capitalist west, its true orientation (had to) is revealed in every gesture, every step. This is a world that kept itself to itself, that has erected great walls literally and figuratively over and over again. Here I am a curiosity, and not a terribly interesting one.

 

Once in a while it really is the trip of a lifetime.

Taking Pictures of Poor People (in China)

The act of representing others almost always involves violence to the subject of representation.

–Edward Said, Orientalism

 

At one point on the broiling afternoon of the first of August, while wandering alone in Xi’an’s Muslim Market, I realized I’d taken a lot of pictures of poor people.

Ah, how picturesque is poverty! So quaint, so very foreign!

I don’t like it, but that’s what happened on this China trip. Old men slicing slabs of meat, old ladies collecting cans, and the lady here, who ran the yurt where I stayed in Inner Mongolia. (I suspect she has a lot of money, as the family owns coal-rich land in mining country, but she doesn’t look like it.) For almost two weeks my subjects (now there’s a word with a darkly double meaning) have been engaged in such charmingly archaic acts as carrying water, herding sheep or riding a bike. Some activity that ensures all who see my snapshots that I’ve gone far, far away.

It is a desperate need to feel superior? Is it a lazy woman’s means of proving the literal and symbolic mileage? These definitely don’t seem like people who will (or can) retaliate if I steal a photo of them. And I probably won’t be judged by others for taking the shot. (Again, the language of photography strikes me as aggressive.)

Back in New York, I’d never take a photo of a woman collecting empty plastic bottles.

In my defense, I’m no photographer and the poor people are the easy shots. Maybe if I had a better camera I could zoom in on a face that revealed its foreignness, its utter un-Americanness despite the jeans-and-tee uniform, the whole-bodied embrace of 20th century consumer fetishism. But I only had a phone camera.

China, forgive me: They were everywhere.

If you ever lose your debit card in China

and you get your fantastic sister to wire you money to Western Union which does still exist, make sure she adds the middle name that is on your passport to the order, or the Chinese teller will not give you your money because of the rule and her boss will not step in and override the rule and her boss won’t even bother to speak to you about it.

So much for American exceptionalism.