Writing
Social reporting
NO TIME TO WASTE
As landfills overflow, China’s villages struggle with the impact of the country’s trash problem
The wake-up call came with the tragedy of a newborn boy. In 2008, four-month-old Xie Yongkang was living 190 meters away from the Hai’an Waste Incineration Plant in Jiangsu province when his eyes began to no longer follow movement; doctors diagnosed baby Xie with cerebral palsy and epilepsy. With no genetic cause, experts blamed the incineration plant. But the hazards of mismanaged trash had been signaled long before: Six villagers had died of cancer in neighboring Xiehe Village the previous year; five more cases were diagnosed in 2009. Soon, farmers began dragging dead livestock to the incinerator’s gates, demanding compensation... [Read]
AFTERSHOCKS
Treating the psychic tremors of the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake
In a quiet corner of the Beichuan Rehabilitation Center for the Disabled, 49-year-old Xiao Zhao sits in a wheelchair with her legs propped up as she embroiders a cartoon panda, her needle see-sawing gracefully through a white handkerchief. On May 12, 2008, a Richter Scale 8.0 earthquake turned entire mountain towns in Sichuan province into rubble, claiming the lives of 69,227 people, injuring 394,643, and leaving 17,923 missing in the ruins. Years afterward, devastated communities struggle not only to rebuild their houses and families, but to recover a sense of worth and hope… [Read]
HOUSE OF HOPE
Rehabilitation for mental illness, still rare in China, provides a bridge between hospitalization and society
Rhododendrons, peonies, roses: On the fourth floor patio, counselor Chen Hengsheng hands out rubber gloves to prepare mulch in order to move the flowers, still in their pots, into the planters. The gardeners are members of Hope Clubhouse, a community rehabilitation center for persons with mental illnesses in Chengdu, Sichuan province. Rehabilitation centers like Hope Clubhouse seek to turn the page on the treatment of China’s 16 million people living with severe mental illnesses, including 7 million people living with schizophrenia. [Read]
HUNGER GAMES
Though almost unheard of 20 years ago, eating disorders are silently maiming a generation of young Chinese
Since she was 9 years old, Xuanxuan would lock herself in her room every night after dinner. She would weigh herself, and then lie on the floor in tears. Like an estimated millions of Chinese, mostly young women, Xuanxuan struggled with anorexia nervosa, a psycho-physiological disorder that manifests in self-starvation in pursuit of a distorted body ideal. Despite its lethality, the disorder remains largely misdiagnosed and misunderstood in China, where mental disorders, especially eating disorders, are still a novel concept. [Read]
CLASS ACTION
A migrant community’s 14-year fight to educate its youth
It’s still dark at 6:20 on a winter’s morning as parents drop their children off at Tongxin Experimental School’s green- painted gate en route to work. As the school’s basketball court fills with the shouts of 200 students, planes from the nearby Beijing Capital International Airport fly low overhead, their drone loud enough to drown out the children’s laughter. Tongxin is one of a number of “community schools” in China that try to offer an education to the children of its “floating” population, often in the face of overwhelming odds, and with a future as precarious as those of its pupils. [Read]
TRACKS ACROSS TIME
Once erased from history, the Chinese who built America’s first transcontinental railroad are celebrated with songs and scholarship
In the spring of 1868, as the snow melted on the rugged peaks of the Sierra Nevada, local newspapers reported a chilling sight: the emergence of the frozen bodies of Chinese railroad workers, some with tools still in their hands. This was not unusual. Today, the nation’s memory, too, has begun to thaw, revealing silhouettes of these long-buried figures. Academics, artists, and community organizers have begun to recover Chinese railroad workers’ fragmented histories. This year, for the railroad’s 150th anniversary, Chinese Americans are showcasing these legacies in lively parades and archival exhibitions—replanting seeds of ancestral memory amid the gradual snowmelt of political amnesia. [Read]
On the Road: Places in transition
OF ICE AND MEN
The annual “winter catch” at Chagan Lake revives a millennia-old fishing tradition as a cultural spectacle
For millennia, this 420-square-kilometer lake in the Qian Gorlos Mongolian Autonomous County, over 200 kilometers from Jilin’s provincial capital of Changchun, has been venerated for its plenitude and sacredness. After decades of drought, restored ecological prosperity has brought fresh financing to the ancient fishing communities along its shores. [Read]
LIVE FROM LIANGSHAN
Residents of impoverished “cliff villages” broadcast their lives at 2,500 meters’ altitude
Just four years ago, the closest distance between Atulie’er village and the online world was an internet café 70 kilometers away. There was no mobile network coverage in the village, and few residents had a phone, except members of the village committee. The arrival of these channels to the outside world transformed village life indelibly. [Read]
BOOM, BLUFF, BUST
Long a frontier for Chinese investors, Cambodia’s Sihanoukville sees uncertain days ahead
In the coastal Cambodian city of Sihanoukville, Chinese millionaires are being made. From 2013 to 2017, Chinese poured 1 billion USD a year into Cambodia, surpassing the Cambodian government itself as a source of investment as of 2016. In recent years, attention has shifted toward Sihanoukville, a strategic trading post boasting the country’s only deepwater port, and a prospective site for a Chinese naval base on the South China Sea. [Read]
BORDERLANDS
Love, war, and trade along the China-Myanmar frontier
At Nang Kan Sar’s roadside fruit stand outside of Ruili in Yunnan province, across the town of Muse, Myanmar, the border is an imaginary line in the fields—without fence or sign, but increasingly potent as the Chinese government seeks to control migration and trade in an ethnically diverse region. [Read]
MOSUO ON THE MOVE
On Lugu Lake, China’s last matrilineal culture is in chaotic transition
The Mosuo people, who number under 100,000 and have their own language, have lived for over two thousand years at the edge of Lugu Lake. For decades, the perceived exoticism of their matrilineal
culture has been a draw for tourists, anthropologists, and journalists, many of whom portray it as a feminist utopia—a “Kingdom of Women” or “Nation of Daughters”—on the far-flung frontier of southwestern China. [Read]
OVER THE RAINBOW
Thailand draws LGBT Chinese seeking tourism, medical care, and acceptance
Thailand’s openness to sexual orientation and gender identity, especially in its cities and tourist-saturated islands, draws a growing number of LGBT Chinese in search of a place to explore their sexuality, hold hands in public, and receive gender-affirming medical care. [Read]
PURE PU’ER
Yunnan’s famous tea harvest combines legend, history, and high-stakes speculation
For over a decade, Qu has tended to 200 semi-wild tea trees on the slopes of Nannuo Mountain in the southern Yunnan province. “These aren’t your father’s father’s trees,” the pepper-haired orchard keeper says
of his grove, which are said to have been planted two to three centuries ago. “These are your grandfather’s grandfather’s trees.” Pu’er has gained a cult-like following, with some of the costliest tea leaves exceeding their weight in gold. In the last century, the twists and turns of the pu’er tea industry trace the dramatic rebirth of modern China. [Read]
CHASING RAINBOWS
A fishing village seeks “internet fame” against the tides of rural migration
The rise of Xiaonuo village is emblematic of an economic model prevalent in the Yangtze River Delta where entire villages made their fortunes by mastering a single product. Yet as China’s manufacturing rush cools, its leaders have turned their development focus toward rural communities—either by reviving agriculture, handicraft industries, or traditional architecture as vehicles of “rural nostalgia,” or adopting new-age themes like becoming “the ultimate fairytale backdrop,” as some bloggers have described Xiaonuo. [Read]
SHARDS OF HISTORY
In the world’s porcelain capital, artisans try to bring one of China’s hottest commodities into the 21st century
At 81, against the wishes of her family, Yu Ermei took her life savings and built a palace: Two giant rotundas covered from floor to ceiling in glassy porcelain shards, rising four stories tall like mirages in the fields outside of Jingdezhen, the town where she had lived and worked all her life. In the “Porcelain Capital of the World,” the craft evolves as global vessels for personal obsession and national ambition. [Read]
Arts & Culture
Artist Nut Brother collaborates with soon-to-be-evicted migrant workers and their children for his latest performance
The eviction notice came on the last day of June this year. For the residents living in Baishizhou, Shenzhen’s largest “urban village,” the end had finally come. In 2017, the southern metropolis announced plans to transform all its urban villages into “clean, orderly, harmonious, safe, and happy homes” by July 2020. At the beginning of the year, there were 83,000 registered residents—possibly up to 150,000, according to some estimates—living in Baishizhou’s “handshake houses” (握手楼), as neighbors call the multi-story buildings along alleys so narrow one might shake hands across them... [Read]
MOUNTAIN ECHOES
Arts: In conversation with the curators of “Echo of Liangshan (ꌩꁐꇤꉘꉼꃚꐝꄧꀕ)"
In the past year, the mountainous Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture has been declared a “final battleground” in the national campaign against poverty. Its newly built roads were traversed daily by dozens of journalists from around the country, reporting inspirational news of “cliff villagers” moving down the mountain and into new homes. Yet for people growing up in this region of southwestern Sichuan province, the mountains are not a political buzzword, but simply home. Last year, Moxi Zishi (ꂽꌋ ꋩꏂ in Yi script), Mose Yiluo (ꂽ ꌋꀀꆧ), and Shama Shizhe (ꎭꂵꏁꎆ), who also goes by Ma Jianlan, founded the platform “Echo of Liangshan (ꌩꁐꇤꉘꉼꃚꐝꄧꀕ)” in their hometown of Xichang to promote cultural exchange within the region, and between the region and the outside world. [Read]
BATED BREATH
Film: Jiang Nengjie’s Miners, the Horsekeeper, and Pneumoconiosis
In the opening sequence of Miners, the Horsekeeper, and Pneumoconiosis, filmmaker Jiang Nengjie follows the horse caravan up the Yuechengling Mountains in southwestern Hunan province, whose inhabitants are said to have mined the ore-rich landscape since the end of the Qing dynasty. In the distance, explosions sound from coal mines said to be over a thousand meters deep. Local officials are bribed to give warnings before safety inspections, so it’s business as usual in a rural industry that is as popular as it is informal, illegal, and dangerous… [Read]
THE LIGHT INSIDE
Film: Director Khashem Gyal on film as a religion and how real culture is “inner” culture
Director Khashem Gyal stands on the stage in a panel of emerging directors at the Guangzhou International Documentary Film Festival, in front of a screen showing the Chinese characters for his name written in the wrong order. The moderator greets each speaker with familiarity and turns to Khashem Gyal, exclaiming in welcome and genuine surprise, “We don’t know you very well.” … [Read]
A FIRST FAREWELL
Film: Lina Wang’s A First Farewell
The first time Han director Wang Lina laid eyes on Isa Yasan, the Uyghur boy was nursing a frightened lamb with a milk bottle. To calm the beast, Isa laid a kiss on its furry head—a tender act which Wang recreates for the opening scene of her debut film, with Isa playing himself in a script based on his own life… [Read]
DISTANT PASTURES
Literature: Li Juan’s memoirs of pastoral life give glimpses into disappearing livelihoods in the Altai Mountains
To express surprise, 9-year-old Nurgün exclaims “Aiya!” in Mandarin, while everybody else in her Kazakh family would say, “Allah!” This is one of many everyday observations Li Juan makes in Winter Pasture. The book follows a Kazakh family whose children have come home for winter break, subtly transformed by their education at a free public boarding school. Translated into English for the first time, Li Juan’s writings are timeless in their portrayal of loneliness, vastness, and death—yet bear the marks of the times in cross-cultural collisions on a shifting grassland… [Read]
DESERT ECHO
Literature: The late writer Sanmao’s memoir is a humanistic whirlwind through a harsh and poignant landscape
Officially translated and published in English for the first time in 2019, nearly three decades after its author hanged herself by her silk stockings in a Taipei hospital in 1991, Stories of the Sahara no longer has the political relevance or the romantic exoticism that made it a bestseller in Taiwan and the Chinese mainland in the 1970s and 80s. Yet the timelessness that Sanmao loved about the desert has also proven itself in her stories—not for their geography, but for Sanmao’s enduring humanistic passion… [Read]
MONUMENTAL MEMORY
Literature: The late writer Sanmao’s memoir is a humanistic whirlwind through a harsh and poignant landscape
Some historical eras “leave tangible traces like knife marks, while others pass by like rain and clouds, detectable only by a faint scent,” muses 61-year-old author Yan Lianke on the years of his childhood in the opening pages of his memoir. More poetic than didactic, much more scent than scar, Three Brothers: Memories of My Family does not aim for a comprehensive history of China in the 1960s and 70s, but sketches richly sensory vignettes of rural families weathering political storms… [Read]
SCENE CHANGE
Theater: Playwright and composer Jason Ma honors Chinese heritage in American theater
When Jason Ma was crowned math champion of his school in southern California at age 13, he quips that his immigrant father “must have been very pleased.” Yet he claims his math prowess never quite recovered after his parents took him to see his first musical, A Chorus Line, during which “all the electrical activity in my left brain must have rushed over to the right hemisphere” and “thus, a theater artist was born.” … [Read]
Older writings
THE VOICES THAT WILL NOT DROWN
Oceans, fathers and lovers teach painter Maggi Hambling how to die
When Maggi Hambling was a toddler, she would talk to the ocean. “I don’t know what I said and I don’t know what it said to me,” she admits. But there was something about the water that held her captive. More than half a human lifetime later, a month after Hambling’s 57th birthday, the ocean spoke powerfully to Hambling again. It was a November morning in 2002; a violent storm swept over the seawall on the eastern coast of England, whipping the ocean into an angry soup... [Read]
SERENDIPITOUS SAYRAM
A two-day Kazakh-Han wedding transforms pastures of western Xinjiang, as change comes to local herders’ lives
Kazakh herders have a legend that Sayram (Sailimu) Lake was formed by the tragic tears of two separated lovers. On this special day, though, the azure pool reflects only the joyous tears of two distant lovers united on its shores. The slope around the lake is dotted by the white wedding yurts of Li Yunping and Shalkar (Xialiha), who met two years ago on a midsummer’s day just like this.... [Read]
FACTORY FAIRYTALES
Cao Fei at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
It is fitting that Cao Fei’s studio is housed in an abandoned 1970s Beijing movie theater slated for demolition. Upon entering, one is greeted by musty light and a long hallway mirror emblazoned in bold red characters, the favored typography for official slogans: “The arts are the torch of the national spirit [and] the bugle of advancement of our times.” The outmoded socialist banner somehow jibes with the spirit of a Contemporary artist whose works look relentlessly forward as much as they look sharply inward. Cao’s oeuvre is saturated with dreams and anxieties, whether of marginalized youth living on the outskirts of a city, Internet users who live second lives online, or alienated workers… [Read]
VOICES OF ASIAN AMERICA IN THE SPOKEN WORD MOVEMENT
Migration and Memory in the poetry of Jess X. Chen, Cathy Linh Che and Sabrina Ghaus
The genre of spoken word liberates poetry from the page, breathing life into verse at the nexus of literature, theater, oral history and political activism. Performed intimately before a live audience, each piece is firmly situated in a community and sociopolitical context in a way that a written book of poetry is not. Often representing the voice of the marginalized, the spoken word tradition simultaneously entertains and empowers those who speak and witness it; it is hence impossible to talk about spoken word separately from the communities where it is performed. I will focus on the Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA) spoken word community in Boston and the role poetry serves as a vessel for uplifting immigrant narratives here… [Read]
WHAT LOVE AT MY GRANDMOTHER'S AGE LOOKS LIKE
Photo essay // 伴侣 is a Chinese term that means something like “person-halves.” When my grandfather is diagnosed with cancer, my grandmother teaches me what 伴侣 means — and also what it means when you love someone who is sick in a country with a struggling hospital system.
The morning begins with oxygen, pills and water. My nainai, who has struggled with learning how to use an iPad for years, has somehow learned how to operate a respiratory machine for my yeye. “At this point, it’s not out of passion or anything,” nainai says. “It’s plain and simple gratitude. Your yeye and I have sacrificed for each other all our lives…” [Read]
A DREAM WE DARED TO DREAM
How social media fueled activism in the Arab Spring
When Mohammed Bouazizi doused himself with gasoline and lit his fatal match, he ignited not only his flesh but the spirit of a revolution that would transform the face of North Africa and the Middle East. His last words—“How do you expect me to make a living?”—resounded with the Arab world in which, according to the UNDP, 40% of people live in poverty and young people make up over half of the unemployed. Even with a college education, economic desperation and political oppression seemed to be an inescapable reality for the frustrated, demoralized youth. A different Tunisia was, as Bouazizi’s mother described it, “a dream we dared not dream."
Yet the world watched one government topple after another as crowds gathered to demand a voice in politics. Connected in new ways by social media, broad-based anger metamorphosed into an organized movement that dramatically redefined the relationship between citizen and government… [Read]
From activist to apocalyptic and encyclopedic to absurdist, the finalists of the Hugo Boss Asia Art Award vary widely in spirit and style. Four distinct visions of a continent converge in one kaleidoscopic exhibition: Old and new works from Li Ming, Tao Hui, Robert Zhao Renhui and Yu Ji are on display in Shanghai’s Rockbund Art Museum through January 7, 2017. The winner of the award will be announced in November.
All four artists belong to a generation born in mainland China or Singapore during the 1980s, a decade of rapid regional trade liberalization. The Chinese video artist Li Ming reflects that “their ‘puberty’ coincided with that of the country.” Growing up a decade after the Cultural Revolution attempted to wipe out all vestiges of traditional culture, Li observes that “common ‘national’ memories were gradually disappearing and being replaced by fragments of personal memories…” [Read]