Digital Dave's Photo Galleries!

Back in China

2011-07-12T05:00:00.001-07:00

After a very pleasant (and, at barely ten hours with a very strong tailwind, quick) flight to Tokyo and then a short hop to Beijing, I’m back in the People’s Republic of China, circa 2011. Stayed overnight in a reasonably clean, cheap hotel by the Beijing airport, then took a two-hour flight to Luoyang, a large, but very laid-back city in western Henan Province, where I caught up with Katrinka who’s been hard at work on her archaeological project. Spent a day and a night in Luoyang, then took a 45-minute taxi ride to our old haunt, the ancient Shang-Dynasty capital and modern-day small city of Yanshi. A lot has changed in the four years since were last here and, of course, not much has changed at all.

Luoyang, Henan, P.R.C.

I’m writing this while sitting in a chair in the third-floor hallway of the Yanshi Binguan, the very same hotel in which I’ve spent so many months over the course many visits. There used to be communist-era floor-stations (from where hotel maids or managers would escort hotel guests to their rooms and unlock their doors) right next to where I’m sitting, but they’re all gone now. I got to know and befriend so many fuwuyuans (servicepersons) over the years while hanging out by these floor-stations and writing or editing my photos on my laptop, and now both the floor-stations and sadly, several of my good friends who have moved on from the Yanshi Binguan to other jobs, have vanished. No one here seems to know where those folks are now. The floor-stations succumbed to a major hotel renovation.

A few of Luoyang’s fine citizens

The hotel has indeed been substantially updated since I was last here, yet the place still has a remarkably half-assed quality about it. The rooms look much nicer than before, but the materials used in the refurbishment are clearly cheap. The shower leaks all over the bathroom floor and only some of the lights work in the room. One step forward and two steps back. There’s sill that famous barely-controlled anarchy among the staff and the guests here that seems to be so deeply embedded in the culture that one has the sense that this will be the case no matter how much they modernize the Yanshi Binguan.

This resident of Luoyang went out of her way to color-coordinate with the local buses

In fact, the whole city of Yanshi has undergone quite an upgrade since 2007 and it seems there are even bigger plans in the works. There are many conspicuous new high-rises and “green” factories on the edge of town, and the city’s main drag – a classic Chinese two lane boulevard with a divided service lane on either side to accommodate the usual hodgepodge of scooters, bicycles, motorcycles, motorized carts, and other of China’s many strange jury-rigged vehicles - is already already being dismantled to make way for a modern multi-lane divided highway. Many of the stores and restaurants with which we’ve become familiar have either been completely re-done or replaced with altogether new establishments.

A standard-issue Yanshi apartment house

Still, The little old lady who in years-gone-by has sold us fresh fruit from her street stall is still stationed in the same spot right around the corner from the Yanshi Binguan and the woman who vends bottled water and ice cream from a cart and has become our good friend is thankfully still just across the street. Our favorite driver, Zhr, who has taken us on many a sojourn throughout Henan Province in his aging, black Volkswagen Santana, is still waiting for customers adjacent to the hotel, though now he’s sporting a brand-new, shiny silver SUV.

Yanshi, Henan, P.R.C.

Despite the changes and improvements here in Yanshi, the loess that blows in from the Gobi Desert and mixes with various and sundry pollutants and other particulate matter still covers the city with a a fine layer of dust. Yanshi is solidly working-class, industrial, and somewhat ramshackle. The town is still a pit. I say that lovingly, in part because Yashi’s very essence is it’s heartland aesthetics, and also because I selfishly want Yanshi to always be the pit that I’ve found to be so compelling and, well, real. I don’t think I need to worry about it too much.

A young Yanshi family

Will spend another couple of days here in Yanshi, then head back to Luoyang for a few more days while Katrinka finishes up her Archaeological research. After that,it appears we’ll have the opportunity to perhaps visit some places in China that we haven’t been to yet over the course of our many visits, or maybe revisit somewhere that we haven’t been in a long time, such as Shanghai. Where to go? Where to go?

Ta Zhuang Village on the outskirts of Yansi city

On another note, while in Luoyang, we met a forty-ish woman from Australia who was travelling in China on her own. (Very strange seeing another foreigner in this part of China.) The poor woman was at a total loss for navigating her way around the peculiarities of China. She didn’t speak a word of Chinese, didn’t even have a phrasebook, for that matter. She claimed that she had no idea – no idea! – that people wouldn’t speak a word of English here and thought she’d be able to fake her way through.

Luoyang is under construction just like the rest of China

The woman was completely discombobulated and clearly at the end of her rope – she was visibly stressed and if it wasn’t for Katrinka writing down some key phrases in Chinese for her, I don’t know where that woman would be right now. She wanted to book a train to Xi’an to see the famous Terracotta Warriors, but booking a train in China during the high-demand summer months is extremely difficult even for the Chinese. It often requires a fair amount of haggling and even bribery. To her credit, she eventually managed to get to the train station and book herself a train and, with our help, a hotel in Luoyang for the night. The moral of the story is, don’t come to China - especially the interior provinces - on your own unless a) you speak some Chinese, or b) you’re certifiably insane, or c) both (like us). Hope she’s ok.

Everyone’s watching the old-timers play cards, arguably one of the most common street-scenes in China

Finally, you know how some people in America get tattoos with Chinese characters that combine to form a phrase that doesn’t come close to meaning what the wearer thinks it means? The Chinese corollary to that is the T-shirt with a statement or slogan on it written in English, but is unintelligible to the individual wearing it. Today we saw a nice young woman walking down the street in Yanshi wearing a shirt emblazoned with “Experience Alcoholism.”

Look, Mama, they let a laowai into Luoyang!

There’s some more early photos from this trip in my galleries here: http://www.djdigitaldave.net/China/China-2011. Check back often, there’s lots more to come!

Ollie gets his first (professional) haircut!

2010-09-19T16:22:00.001-07:00

Ollie got a trim at good ol’ Snippity Crickets on Solano Avenue in Berkeley. He was so distracted by the toys that I’m not sure he was aware that he was getting a haircut.

Ollie Attends a Party

2009-11-15T04:07:00.000-08:00

Ollie showed up at Bok Bok’s house ready to party. Well, no, he was actually sound asleep, but he woke up in short order and ended up having a wonderful time working the room and charming the guests.

The kid is really comfortable in his own skin; he’s truly a social butterfly as these photos of the party will attest. Per usual, clicking on any of the photos will open a larger version from my galleries in a new window.

There’s a bunch more photos from the party in this gallery.

Oliver’s Third Birthday! – 10/18/09

2009-10-18T23:28:00.000-07:00

Oliver celebrated his third birthday at Berkeley’s Ohlone Park with a whole bunch of his close friends – a wonderful time was had by all! Below are some highlights from the afternoon’s festivities. As usual, any of the photos below can be viewed in a larger format simply by clicking on them. The entire gallery of photos from Ollie’s party can be viewed by clicking here.

Oliver contemplates a bag of Cheetos along with (from left) Zan, Sean, Jessica and Sommers.

Erin provides some of the afternoon’s entertainment.

Rodrigo, Sebastian & Ollie at play.

Eamon, Elza and Mira confer with Mommy about the day’s festivities.

Sebastian and Zan frolic with Oliver.

Rodrigo gives Ollie a lift.

Ollie wonders why Zan is upside-down.

Ollie and Summers are bonding…

…or not.

Oliver is ready for some soccer.

Elza & Eamon get into some Tschu-Tschu.

Eric is clearly astonished at the bag of popcorn that Eamon just discovered.

The boys have an important conference in a tree.

Oliver prepares to boot the ball….

…Eamon fetches it.

Mom gets Oliver’s birthday cake ready.

Weird Uncle Luigi is in the house.

Katrinka and Eric help Katie prepare the cake.

Eric & Eamon seem satisfied with Mommy’s cake presentation.

Ollie looks on with bemusement as Mommy, Eric & Eamon place candles in his cake.

Time to blow out the candles!

Good job, Ollie!

Oliver makes a play for Eric’s hat.

Sebastian is photographing the festivities.

Oliver runs off with a piece of his cake before Sommers gets to it.

Mira looks like she’s enjoying the day.

Ollie’s birthday cake is a big hit among all his friends!

Sommers ensures that Daddy Sean eats some cake as Jessica digs in to hers.

Jessica, Katie and Erin survey the scene.

Sean tries Ollie’s new hat on Sommers.

Oliver, Zan and Sebastian take the party over to the playground area.

Oliver gives Rodrigo a massage, much to Rodrigo’s chagrin.

Sommers gets a lift from his dad.

Mommy & Ollie greet Ben and Co.

Oliver vigorously attacks his one remaining unopened birthday present.

What could be in here?

Oh Dear…Uncle Billy from New York sent Ollie a remote-control truck for his birthday!

This looks like it’s going to be fun!

Mira & Beth react to the impending chicanery that’s sure to manifest among the kids and the monster-truck.

Ollie, Sebastian and Zan prepare the truck for a trial-run.

Hey! This thing really works!

Weird Uncle Luigi attempts to hitch a ride.

Ollie’s at the wheel!

Keep it pointed straight, Oliver.

Good job, Ollie.

Faster! Faster!

Zan wants a turn at the wheel.

Oliver leads the way.

Ollie & Sean share a moment together.

Mommy, Beth and Jessica enjoy the scene as Weird Uncle Luigi offers up another unsolicited massage.

Jessica strikes a pose before consuming her Cheese Doodle.

Mira makes Rodrigo blush.

Uh oh, Zan, Ollie & Sebastian are halfway to Cleveland with the monster truck!

Heading home after a wonderful afternoon.

Back at Dave’s house with Kate, Ollie and Ruthie.

There’s a ton more pictures from Ollie’s birthday party in my galleries here.

Uncle Trezza comes to town

2009-07-11T23:31:00.000-07:00

Good ol' Bill Trezza, friend for thirty years, has come out from New York for what is now becoming an annual visit with us here in the San Francisco Bay Area. Oliver adored hanging out with Billy when he was here last year and, though Ollie was barely one-and-a-half years old at that time, he seemed to instantly recognize Bill when he arrived this year.

Billy & Ollie had a great time today at nearby Ohlone Playground; we're looking forward to having lots more fun over the course of Bill's visit.

There's a few more from today in my galleries beginning here.

A chilly afternoon at Muir Beach with Ollie

2009-06-24T22:47:00.000-07:00

It was sunny and in the mid 70's when Oliver, Katie, Jessica and I left Berkeley and headed towards Marin County to spend few hours at the beach. Upon cresting the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, it became clear that we weren't going to be getting any tans, as a huge fog bank could be seen rolling in off the Pacific behind Mount Tamalpais, as is often the case this time of year. We were committed, however, and made the most of our adventure at the beach. Kate & Jessica even went for a swim!

More here.

Oliver makes the scene at Stinson Beach

2009-06-17T23:30:00.000-07:00

Ollie debuted his fancy new swimming trunks at Marin County's beautiful Stinson Beach. This was a bit of a warm-up for his impending annual visit to the Jersey Shore. He acquitted himself admirably by playing some ball, taking a dip in the ocean, frolicking in the sand, and -most importantly - making friends with lots of cute girls! Oliver is right at home on the beach.

A few more in the galleries here.

Ollie's Santa Cruz adventure

2009-05-27T23:58:00.000-07:00

This was Oliver's (and Katie's) first visit to Santa Cruz. We started with a ride down Highway 9 through the mountain towns (Boulder Creek, Ben Lomond, Felton) and then began our Santa Cruz adventure at the venerable Upper Crust with some pizza and beer.

Next, it was off to the Santa Cruz Surfing Monument and then Natural Bridges State Park for some beach time (where, per usual, Oliver made lots of new friends).

Finally, Thai food with my dear old friend Marie.

We're looking forward to going back soon for a ride on the steam trains!

Pizza & Beer at the Upper Crust.

Heavy wind at the Santa Cruz Surfing Monument.

Thai food with Marie!

Lots more in the galleries starting on this page.

Ollie has a play-date with Jackson, Will, and Chloe

2009-05-18T23:26:00.000-07:00

Oliver recently made some new friends at one of our local playgrounds and they are some very special friends, indeed. Nine-year old Jackson and his five-year old brother, Will, really hit it off with Ollie last week. It's quite unusual for kids who are so much older than Oliver to take an interest in him to the extent that they did, spending hours indulging his every whim and treating him like family. I don't think Ollie ever had as much fun at a playground as he did with Jackson and Will.

Everyone had such a good time that we all decided to meet again for another round of fun! This time, Jackson and Will brought along their friend, nine-year-old Chloe and, once again, a wonderful time was had by all. Thank you Nathalie & Bob for sharing your very cool kids with Oliver!

Clicking on any of the photos below will open a larger version in the galleries.

Ollie does his special trick of letting out a primal yelp while levitating. ;-)

There are more photos from Ollie's play-date in my galleries, beginning on this page. There are also photos from last week's playground session with Ollie, Jackson, and Will, all of which are on this page.

Ollie & Mei have a footrace at the playground...

2009-05-17T23:35:00.001-07:00

...to see who can jump into the bushes first. Looks like a tie to me.

Ollie's (temporary) new hairdo

2009-05-16T23:59:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when you turn your back for even one minute at a party...

Oliver takes a hike in Muir Woods

2009-05-14T23:45:00.000-07:00

And hike he did - almost all the way to the top of the Oceanview Trail! He would have kept going (in fact, he tried to) but it was starting to get dark and the park would soon be closing, so we had to turn around and head back to the parking area before the ranger came and eighty-sixed us.

Ollie was very curious about all the different types of flora he saw along the trail, and was equally enamored of the fauna we encountered: a baby deer and a banana slug.

A wonderful time was had by all. Ollie got to experience nature up-close, Mommy got to hug some trees, and I got to practice my photography in some very challenging, high-contrast light.

Lots more pictures of Ollie at Muir Woods are in the galleries beginning on this page. Any of the above images can be clicked to view a larger version.

Oliver encounters his friend Mei at the playground

2009-05-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

Oliver was already in a flirtatious mood when we arrived at the Berkeley Marina playground, as evidenced by his little game of hide-and-seek:

Upon arriving in the play area, we ran into the ever-lovely Mei Assalian:

Ollie thought it might be a nice idea to engage Mei in a bit of peek-a-boo:

Mei was clearly not amused:

Sorry, Ollie!

Click on any of the above photos to view the larger image in the photo galleries.

Ollie has pizza with the Weisenbergs

2009-05-09T23:33:00.000-07:00

More fun with Oliver and the Weisenbergs, this time at Berkeley's venerable Cheeseboard Pizza. Mommy came along, too!

A few more photos are in my galleries starting on this page.

At the playground with Ollie & the Weisenbergs

2009-05-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

Ollie and I had the good fortune today to have my old friend Bruce Weisenberg and his lovely wife, Jiang Yan, stop by to spend a couple of hours with us. It had been a good solid seven years since I last saw Bruce, and I had yet to meet his wife. They, of course, had not yet met Oliver, so it was a wonderful opportunity to catch-up with one another in a context that is certainly a ubiquitous one in my life these days: the local playground.

Oliver has always been a social butterfly, but he seemed particularly enamored of Bruce and Jiang Yan, leading them around the playground from swing to slide as if he'd known them his whole life. If Bruce thought it odd seeing me interact with a two-and-a-half year-old (after years of knowing me as...well...someone not likely to be interacting with a two-and-a-half year-old), it was equally amusing - jarring, even - for me to see Bruce pushing Oliver around in a little toy car, looking every bit the bemused dad.

Old friends, new friends, times changing, people's lives evolving ... at the end of the day (and at the risk of over-the-top, cloying sentimentality), aren't these really the moments that make life worth living?

Click on any of the above photos to view a larger image. Additional photos from this session are in my galleries beginning here.

Ollie eats his peas...

2009-04-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

...like a good boy should.

Oops! One got away!

The Magic Hour

2009-04-20T04:05:00.000-07:00

Or, the Magic Hour-and-a-half, depending on who you ask. Some claim it's the hour after sunrise and before sunset plus the half-hour before sunrise and after sunset. Others say its simply the first and last hours of daily sunlight. Either way, the Magic Hour (also known as the Golden Hour) is the time of day when the sun is low in the sky and offers a direct, warm, golden glow while also providing dramatic shadows and contrast. Some photographers only take out their cameras during that time.

Getting the exposure right can be surprisingly tricky during the magic hour, especially when photographing people (and definitely when the subject is running around and moving in and out of the light, as is our little friend in these examples). For landscapes, matrix-metering would give you generally good results, but in this situation I tend to use center-weighted, and occasionally even spot-meteing (usually to keep the highlights in Ollie's golden locks from blowing-out).

Back-lighting can be particularly effective during the magic hour, as in the final photo above, provided you nail the exposure. In this case I used center-weighted metering and didn't worry about the back-lit highlights in Oliver's hair blowing out, because that is the desired effect, after all. Fortunately, center-weighted metering gives a modicum of attention to the areas outside of the center of the scene, so there is still enough detail in the highlights to make this a well-balanced image.

Easter with Oliver

2009-04-12T23:28:00.000-07:00

Oliver was quite surprised when we arrived at Katrinka's house on Easter Sunday. There waiting for him was Katrinka, her father, Dennis, and a whole bunch of eggs ready to be dyed!

Oliver was very helpful. He gently placed the eggs in the dye...

...and helped load them into the egg-carton to dry.

The real fun was yet to come, but first Ollie thought it would be nice to entertain Dennis with a makeshift drum in Katrinka's Backyard.

Finally, it was time for Oliver's first Easter egg hunt!

With a little help from Katrinka, Ollie quickly began finding Easter eggs that were hidden in the yard.

Ollie was very pleased with his excellent detective work and was delighted to show-off the eggs he found to Katrinka and Dennis.

He quickly became very adept at hunting for eggs, searching around the yard until he found his prize. (This went on for quite some time, as Katrinka was equally adept at recycling the eggs that Oliver found.)

He was filled with joy whenever he found an egg!

All in all, a wonderful Easter. Just one minor problem, however. Every time we go to Katrinka's house now, Ollie expects to go on an Easter egg hunt!

There are several more photos of Ollie on Easter Sunday in my galleries, starting here. As always, you can also click on any of the above images to view the larger versions in the gallery.

A Napa Landscape

2009-04-09T23:45:00.000-07:00

By no stretch of the imagination do I fancy myself a landscape photographer, but every so often I manage to produce one that I can live with - even if it's only because the scene itself is compelling.

This photo is not a particularly special or unique composition. It's reasonably well executed in terms of technical aspects such as exposure and acuity, especially given the weather conditions, but ultimately what makes this image work for me is simply the grandeur of the subject itself. The scene transcends the photography, I think.

This is a classic "grab shot" in the sense that I really wasn't prepared for, or even thinking about, taking this photo. While heading back to the Bay Area from Calistoga along the Siverado Trail, I noticed this scene and pulled the car over to the side of the road and snapped away. This was at the tail end of a storm passing through the valley and it was still raining lightly when I took this photo. The view here is facing across the Napa Valley vineyards towards the mountains on the valley's Western flank that separate it from the Sonoma Valley. This is a couple of miles south of Calistoga.

The photo was taken handheld with the Nikon D700 and the new Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-S, stopped-down to f/11. Shutter-speed was 1/250 of a second and ISO was 280. Shot in RAW and converted in Adobe Lightroom v. 2.3. Click the image to view it in a larger size.

Oliver goes for a swim

2009-04-09T23:03:00.000-07:00

Ever since the first time Oliver took a bath, it's been clear that he has an affinity for the water. His mom and I decided that it would be fun to finally get him into a swimming pool so we took a quick jaunt up to the Napa Valley town of Calistoga, which has several nice little places with pools fed by mineral water from local hot springs.

So, even on a cloudy and relatively cold early-April day, the water in the various pools is warm and inviting. Oliver took to the water like a fish, he even seemed to know intuitively how to move his arms and kick his legs as if to swim. No trepidation at all.

Move over, Michael Phelps!

A few more pics from this outing are in the galleries here and here.

Ollie moves into his new home

2009-03-28T23:18:00.000-07:00

When Oliver is determined to do something, just get out of his way. In the following sequence of photos, we see that Ollie has decided that he would look better in this trash can container than the trash can, itself. So he systematically and methodically removed the garbage can, sized-up the container, and moved in for a spell. Who was I to argue?

Move over, Oscar the Grouch...

The larger versions of these photos in my galleries can be viewed by clicking on any of them.

Keep your eye on the puck...

2009-03-16T22:22:00.001-07:00

How does one successfully photograph a fast-moving sport like hockey?

By keeping your eye on the puck, just like the player in the below photos is doing. (Of course it's not that simple, but it's still good advice!)

I've been sporadically photographing my friend's amateur hockey team over the past few years and It's an ongoing challenge for me to come up with well-composed images that convey the essence of the game. It had been just over a year since I last photographed the team and I realized right out of the gate on this latest shoot that my rhythm was off. Hockey is a continual blur of motion, maybe the fastest-moving major sport out there, and a year away from even watching the game was not helpful in terms of my ability to anticipate the action. Muscle-memory eventually kicked in, however, and by the latter half of the second period I felt like I was starting to get dialed in.

Hockey: the Gentleman's Sport

I brought a fairly large arsenal of gear with me to this game, intending to do a little experimentation. In addition to the bread-and-butter D3 with the 70-200 f/2.8 mounted to it, and the D700 with the 24-70 f/2.8 for wide shots, I also brought along the D300 and the 70-300 f/4.5-5.6 to see how that combo would do for capturing action at the far end of the ice.

At these games my shooting position is at the outside end of the players bench (which is really the only place to shoot with an unimpeded view in the Oakland, CA, ice arena where these games are played) so the action at the far end of the ice relative to my position is a bit challenging for a maximum 200mm focal-length on a full-frame camera. The 70-300 zoomed to 300mm on the 1.5x crop-factor D300 gives me the full-frame equivalent of 450mm, of course, but with the penalty of a maximum aperture at that focal length of f/5.6 - a dubious proposition under the marginal lighting in the arena.

I'm wondering if maybe the ref's got an issue with this guy...

Also an impediment to shooting indoor sports with the 70-300 on the D300 is the fact that ISO 1600 is as high a sensitivity as I'm willing to use on that camera, whereas ISO 3200 is a setting that I routinely use on the D3/D700. In fact, for this shoot I had auto-ISO set on the D3/D700 with the maximum ISO set to 3200 and the minimum shutter-speed set to 1/640 of a second. Those settings gave me a shutter-speed of 1/500 of a second for virtually every shot and ISO sensitivities that ranged from 1200 to 3200. With the same settings on the D300, but with the maximum ISO set to 1600, I simply got too many shots with a shutter-speed of less than 1/250 of a second (often as low as 1/125 of a second), which is not quite enough for fast moving subjects.

In the end, however, it was none of the aforementioned issues that caused me to come to the conclusion that I'd leave at least the 70-300 home the next time. The bottom line is that, optically, the 70-300 just doesn't hold a candle to the 70-200. I did get plenty of useable images from the D300/70-300 combo, but when compared against the output from the D3/D700 with the 70-200, which was far sharper, had way more contrast, and exhibited much better clarity and acutance, I determined that it would just make more sense to work with less reach but better image quality and crop if and when necessary. The twelve million pixels of the D3/D700 has proven to be of high enough quantity and quality to do so.

A very heavily cropped image made with the D3 and the 70-200 f/2.8

As far as photographic composition is concerned, hockey presents its own unique set of problems, mostly related to the geometry of the composition but also related to such logistical matters as players skating in front of the camera and blocking the line-of-sight to your subject at the exact moment you're about to capture your "money shot" (though that particular issue is specific to the fact that I'm shooting from the bench and not from an elevated position in the arena, which is often the preferred location for photographing hockey). Both of the aforementioned issues are usually solved with some judicious cropping.

The biggest challenge presented by hockey for the photographer is, of course, just being able to follow and, optimally, anticipate, the action. Naturally, the more I watch and photograph the game, the better I get at knowing where and when to point my camera. It also helps to have a few preconceived ideas as to what type of photos you'd like to end up with (i.e., a shot on goal and its aftermath, a skater racing to the puck, a brutal cross-check, etc.) It's also important to remember that photos of the action itself isn't the only way to tell the story. Sometimes a portrait of a player coming off the ice or sitting on the bench watching his teammates conveys more about what's going on in the game than anything else.

There's more than one way to tell the story:

Of course, none of what I've talked about so far matters very much if focus on the intended subject can't be consistently attained and tracked, so optimizing the auto-focus settings on my cameras to the particular demands of shooting hockey is imperative. After experimenting at these hockey games over the years with virtually all of the myriad AF settings available on the pro Nikons, I'm satisfied that 9-point Dynamic AF is the way to go for hockey. That setting attains focus almost instantly and tracks the subject perfectly without ever jumping to another player wearing the same color uniform or inadvertently picking up focus on an element in the background. This recent shoot was the first time that I did not end up with even one mis-focused image out of a total of well over six hundred that I took. That has never happened before!

Keeping focus on the intended subject with 9-Pt. Dynamic AF

View the entire gallery of photos of this shoot here.

Ollie returns to the Berkeley Marina Playground

2009-03-10T03:06:00.000-07:00

Now that Daylight Savings Time has returned and we get that all-important extra hour of light at the end of the day, Oliver & I are finally heading back to our favorite playground at the Berkeley Marina. We spent time there almost every day last summer and we're looking forward to having lots more fun there in 2009!

On our first visit back to the playground this year we were lucky to run into a friend that Oliver met there last summer, Alicia, who is just a few months younger than Ollie, and her mom. A great start to playground season!

Here are some highlights of our playground adventure. As usual, you can click on any image to view the larger version in my galleries.

Oliver can barely contain his glee when he realizes where we are:

Ollie at the helm:

Oliver thinks it's a fine idea to dump a little sand on his new playmate's shoes:

Ollie basks in the golden glow of an early March evening.

Ollie has graduated to the "Big Boys" swings:

Who is this Berkeley Hippie kid?

Oliver inspects a random baby:

Spending time at the playground can be very exhausting work:

Communing with the Berkeley shoreline:

Oliver runs around with his friend Alicia and her mom:

Ollie demonstrates his jumping skills for Alicia:

Ollie makes his way up the dock so he can give his friend Alicia a nice hug:

A day at the park is incomplete without running through some puddles:

Ollie 'hangs-ten' with his new girlfriend:

Ma & Pa Kettle:

The rest of the photos from this batch can be viewed in my galleries starting on this page.

Oliver pays a visit to his friend Eric's shop.

2009-03-07T02:10:00.001-08:00

Just another typical day in Ollie's World...

Ollie frolics with Christine:

Oliver plays peek-a-boo with a random passerby:

Eric shows Ollie anudder way of looking at things...

Oliver gets to sit in the boss's chair:

There's a few more beginning on this page in my galleries.

Would somebody please explain...

2009-03-06T04:35:00.001-08:00

...why the auto white-balance functionality of my $299 iPhone's built-in camera works dramatically better under mixed artificial lighting than my $3000 Nikon D700 or my $5000 Nikon D3?

Seriously.

As you might expect of a $300 camera phone, there is no way to set the white balance - it relies on an automatic white-balance algorithm to set a white-balance that is appropriate for the lighting in the scene.

We all know that using the auto white-balance setting on our expensive DSLRs is a crapshoot at best - especially under mixed and artificial lighting. We virtually always end up with an image that is tinted and needs to be color-corrected in a photo-editing program. So we set our white-balance control to a preset that (hopefully) corresponds to the lighting in the room, or we take a reading of the lighting that we apply as a white-balance setting which usually gets us in the ballpark. Some degree of adjustment is still often necessary in post-processing.

Now, look at the photo below. It was shot with my new iPhone in a Berkeley restaurant that I frequent and where I've taken literally thousands of photographs with my pro DSLRs. The lighting in this restaurant is a nasty combination of tungsten and fluorescent lighting of various and sundry color temperatures.

While this image does have a very slight, almost imperceptible tendency toward yellow, it is way more dialed-in than anything my Nikons would come up with. The skin-tone is pretty much spot-on, which is always the goal when setting the white-balance for a photo with people in it. Why can't my Nikons do this? What does Apple know that Nikon/Canon/Pentax/Olympus, et al., doesn't?

Maybe at some point I'll post an A to B comparison of a Nikon and an iPhone photograph of the same subject taken under the same lighting to better demonstrate the stark difference between the two auto white-balance algorithms. For now, suffice it to say the difference is substantial.

A few more from the 1.4

2009-03-03T05:20:00.001-08:00

Here's a couple of portraits taken with the new AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G that perhaps will give you a better sense of how this lens does when shot wide-open than the example images I used in my earlier post comparing it with Nikon's previous iteration of the 50mm f/1.4. These examples clearly demonstrate the improvements in the optical performance of this lens over the older version. Note the lack of any perceptible light-falloff at the edges and the sharpness and detail of the in-focus areas of the images. (Bear in mind that at f/1.4, the depth-of-field is quite narrow. Focus was on the subject's eye.) Also note the reasonably clean bokeh (background-blur). It's not especially wonderful, but it's much more pleasing than what you'd have gotten with the older AF-D 50mm lens, which had a sort of mottled appearance.

Not bad for a lens shot at its widest aperture, where its optical deficiencies are usually most apparent.

Both of the above images were shot with the 50mm on the D700 @ f/1.4 with a shutter-speed of 1/125 of a second. ISO sensitivity was 3200. The auto-focus module on the D700 was set to 51-point 3D in continuous-focus mode. The focus-point was selected manually and placed on the subject's eye. The AF- module kept focus on the eye as I moved the camera slightly to recompose.

Per usual, you can click on the photos above to view the larger images in my galleries.

Ollie Checks-In with Uncle Dan McGonagle

2009-03-01T06:13:00.001-08:00

It's been awhile since Dan has seen Oliver in a context other than sound asleep in the baby seat in the back of my car; a good year or so, in fact. Tonight, when we picked Dan up at the airport, it looked like Ollie would stay true to form and snooze away his opportunity to hang out with Dan. But, lo and behold, he woke up when we arrived at Dan's apartment, so we went upstairs to socialize for a bit.

Oliver immediately impressed Dan by turning on my new iPhone and tuning into a video of Thomas the Tank Engine on You Tube. No Luddite is our Ollie.

After spending the next hour or so rearranging Dan's apartment, Ollie settled in with Dan's "dee dee" (better known as a guitar to most of the rest of the world) for a spell.

Having grown tired of rocking out, Oliver decided it would be a good idea to eat one of Dan's DAT tapes that he found while rummaging around the apartment. DATs are old-school, after all, and Oliver apparently felt that he needed to nudge Dan forward a bit in the technological realm.

Finally, Oliver encouraged Uncle Dan to engage in a few rounds of bounce the baby before retiring for the evening..

A wonderful time was had by all (and very little damage was inflicted on Dan's apartment).

Oliver & Mommy

2009-02-25T06:02:00.000-08:00

I love these two photos of Ollie & his Mom. I don't know, they just seem to capture perfectly the wonderful rapport that they share with one another...

There's a couple more from this batch on this page in my galleries.

Shhhhhsh, Ollie!

2009-02-21T23:31:00.000-08:00

The little scamp is often inspired to exhibit his screaming and yelling abilities at the most inopportune times; crowded restaurants are among his favorite places to experiment. Here, mommy puts the kibosh on a particularly egregious demonstration of his vocal acuity at Berkeley's Cheeseboard Pizza.

Oliver visits the Weilands

2009-02-17T23:30:00.000-08:00

Ollie is a big fan of the Weilands. Hanging out at their house is one of his favorite things to do, as there's always something interesting going on there. He especially loves when Aunt Gini sits down at the piano with him and Uncles Gabe & Seth play their cello and violin for him. Of course, Uncle Dr. Dave always has lots of fun toys for Ollie to play with in his office (you know, toxic batteries, very expensive lenses, assorted hard-drives with cool glowing buttons to push, sometimes a mislaid scalpel or two. That sort of thing.) And Charles the dog is always a favorite source of amusement as well.

Ollie and Seth have a particularly good rapport with one another. Ollie always has a wonderful time with Uncle Seth:

A few more photos from this visit to the Weilands can be seen starting on this page in my galleries.

Nikon's new AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G vs. AF-Nikkor f/1.4 D

2009-02-13T06:25:00.001-08:00

Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 AF-D

I've had the new AF-S Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G since it was released last December and I've been using it consistently on my D700 and D3. In fact, it's been the most commonly mounted lens on my full-frame cameras this winter because I've mostly been photographing Oliver, whom I don't usually have until his mom goes to work at 6:00 PM when it's already dark. So I'm primarily shooting indoors in dimly-lit rooms and occasionally outdoors under street lighting.

Of course, the high-ISO capabilities of the D3/700 combined with the wide, f/1.4 maximum aperture of the 50mm, make it possible to routinely shoot in those conditions without the use of flash (a real paradigm shift for most photographers) but it generally necessitates that the lens be shot wide-open at f/1.4, which is not typically the sweet-spot at which a lens attains its maximum performance. So while most of my shooting with this lens has been under less-than-optimal conditions, it's been useful to see what the lens can do wide-open. After all, we buy a super-fast lens to actually use it at its maximum aperture.

50mm f/1.4 AF-S @ f/2.0. Not the world's prettiest bokeh, but an improvement over the AF-D.

Physically, the new lens is somewhat bulkier than the AF-D, though not perceptibly heavier. It takes a 58mm filter instead of the 52mm that was standard on Nikon's 50mm lenses for decades. Also changed from the AF-D, the front element of the new lens does not extend forward past the front edge of the lens body when focusing. And like all of Nikon's newer AF-S lenses with a "G" designation, the new 50mm does not have an aperture ring.

In terms of optical performance vs. the older AF-D version, there's no question that the new AF-S model is a step up in quality. It is noticeably sharper at wider apertures, particularly at f/1.4, than the older lens and it has a more pleasing bokeh (background blur) as well. This is most likely due to the newer lens's nine rounded aperture blades (as opposed to the AF-D's seven non-rounded blades). Vignetting seems to be very well controlled, even at wide apertures, and corner-to-corner sharpness is quite reasonable, especially when stopped-down.

50mm f/1.4 AF-S @ f/5.6.

Chromatic aberration is also very well controlled, with one major caveat. While the new lens does a very good job with lateral CA (which, when present, is very easily fixed in most advanced photo-editing software), it introduces a quirk not found on the older AF-D lens: longitudinal chromatic aberration. In certain situations, mostly involving very high-contrast specular highlights, color fringing that almost completely encircles the highlight can occur and, unfortunately, it is difficult, if not impossible, to fix in software. On the bright side, it seems thus far to be a fairly rare phenomenon (I've encountered it in less than ten images out of literally thousands I've taken with this lens).

50mm f/1.4 AF-S wide-open @ f/1.4. Excellent sharpness for such a wide aperture.

Another unpleasant surprise is the presence of slight, but nevertheless visible, barrel-distortion, something not really expected on a 50mm lens. This is, of course, very easily remedied in software, but it's a shame it even has to be an issue. There was certainly no detectable amount of barrel-distortion on the older AF-D lens.

50mm f/1.4 AF-S @ f/8.0. Stopped-down, this lens is tack-sharp.

Other than the optical performance characteristics discussed above, the primary difference between the AF-S and AF-D lenses (and presumably the reason that you'd upgrade from the AF-D to the AF-S) is, of course, the auto-focus functionality. The new AF-S uses Nikon's latest, super-fast, built-into-the-lens, silent-wave motor technology to acquire and track focus, whereas the older AF-D is screw-driven by the camera body. The expectation in this regard is a much faster-focusing lens than the AF-D. The reality is somewhat more complex than that.

If you're expecting the type of almost instantaneous, snap-to-focus performance that you are used to with most of Nikon's AF-S lenses, you will likely be disappointed, at least at first. The Screw-driven AF-D is actually faster at acquiring focus than the AF-S, and by a fairly noticeable degree. However, once focus has been acquired, the AF-S truly shines. It tracks focus far more quickly and accurately than the AF-D, especially when the subject is moving in quick, jerky motions (think kids and pets). In this regard, the new lens leaves the older one in the dust.

It's just when the AF-S has to move its focus-elements a significant distance in order to acquire initial focus that it is very noticeably sluggish as compared with the AF-D. When shooting in continuous focus mode, I've gotten in the habit of waiting an extra fraction of a second before firing-off my first shot, and that has largely remedied the problem.

(I've tested the new AF-S on both the D3 and the D700, as well as the D300, and have found it's auto-focus characteristics to be the same on all three cameras. So I'm confident that this aspect of the auto-focus performance is a function of the lens, not a particular camera body.)

50mm f/1.4 AF-S @ f/2.0.

Bottom line? If you already have the older AF-D, the new lens is a worthwhile upgrade, even in spite of its substantially higher price, provided you are aware of, and adjust for, its particular quirks. If you have never owned one of Nikon's fast 50mm lenses, this is a great, lightweight, walkaround lens that opens up low-light environments to your photography. And if you are the owner of one of the Nikon camera bodies that only accept AF-S lenses (D40, D60), you can now have a fast, normal-focal-length, prime lens that actually auto-focuses on your camera!

Ollie goes out for Chinese Food

2009-02-12T02:40:00.001-08:00

Oliver always seems to get into a playful mood when we go out for dinner. I can always rely on him to make his funniest faces for me when we're in a restaurant.

He's an incurable ham...

These photos, by the way, were made with the Nikon D700 using the 51-point 3D dynamic auto-focus mode, which is excellent at tracking focus on a moving subject. Just focus on an eye and the AF module will select new focus-points dynamically as the subject moves around the field of view, maintaining focus on the eye. Considering that the depth-of field is extremely narrow here (given the very large f/1.4 aperture used in this dimly-lit restaurant) it's no small feat for the AF module to track focus on a subject that is not only moving laterally in a very quick, jerky fashion, but forward and backward, as well.

Me & Ollie

2009-02-09T22:57:00.001-08:00

One of the things that invariably happens when one is a photographer is that one rarely finds himself on the other side of the lens. I've been lamenting that I have so few photos of me & Oliver together; last night, Paul, the night manager at Au Coquelet, snatched my D700 and grabbed this shot for me.

Oliver Places a Phone Call on an Avocado

2009-02-07T04:19:00.001-08:00

As you can see, Ollie is engaged in a very serious conversation with an unknown participant via a fresh, ripe avocado. Nobody heard it ring, in case you're wondering.

Underoo Ollie

2009-02-06T03:54:00.001-08:00

While shopping at Target yesterday, Ollie decided it would be a good idea to rip open a bag of Underoos, place one on his head, and prance around the store. Hopefully, this was an anomaly... ;-)

New Look!

2009-02-05T05:12:00.000-08:00

I finally got around to paying some serious attention to this blog. The first order of business was to change my blog hosting service to Blogger, which offers a much nicer interface and far more configurability than Wordpress, my former blog host. That enabled me to integrate the blog into my website much more gracefully, without the need for iframes and scrollbars as in my previous implementation. I think the orginizational structure and overall readability of Blogger pages also far surpasses those of Wordpress, so those issues should no longer be an impediment to the functionality of this site.

Now that I have the blog nicely dressed up and incorporated into my website, the next step is to actually add some compelling content from time to time. ;-) At the very least, I'm going to try to consistently post when I've uploaded new batches of photos to my galleries, and link to them. I may also post and comment on some of those photos here on the blog. I am also planning on writing more about photography, in general, and the gear I use, specifically. This blog is really an exercise in improvisation, so we'll see how it goes. If nothing else, I will definitely use this space as a forum for my dispatches from my routine visits to China and other travels I hope to embark on.

Speaking of China, most of the older content (2004 - 2007) currently posted here is actually a collection of the un-edited e-mail that I sent out to various friends and family describing my experiences and adventures while spending as much as ten weeks at a stretch on some of my visits to that country. Those dispatches are hopelessly overwrought, for the most part, but I love them anyway! At the very least, they are a visceral window into my state of mind while in China.

Photo Processing Notes

2008-02-14T05:31:00.000-08:00

How does Dave Process the photos on his website? Not with an old-fashioned wet-darkroom, as pictured here. Welcome to the Digital Domain!

All images on this site were post-processed in Adobe ACR & Photoshop CS2 and/or Adobe Lightroom2 from the original RAW files, then converted to JPEG and resized and optimized for the web to 800x536 pixels (maintaining the 3:2 aspect-ratio of the original file) via either Adobe ImageReady or Adobe Lightroom. Consequently, the EXIF data attached to each image specifying its 'Original Size' refers to the resized JPEG and NOT the original, out-of-camera RAW image. All other EXIF data (available by clicking on 'More Details' under each image) is accurate and refers to the original RAW image as captured by the cameras.

Original out-of-camera image dimensions:

D70: 3008 x 2000 (06 Mpx);
D80: 3872 x 2592 (10 Mpx);
D200: 3872 x 2592 (10 Mpx);
D300: 4288 x 2848 (12 Mpx);
D700: 4256 x 2832 (12 Mpx);
D3: 4256 x 2832 (12 Mpx).

Random Observation

2007-10-24T20:00:00.000-07:00

For reasons we will probably never know, the Chinese have an inexpicable penchant for hanging out in their hotel rooms with their doors open, thereby allowing their cigarette smoke, the din of their pandemonious and cacaphonous card-playing hubbub, and the nauseating stink of their all-powerful baijiu (hard Chinese liquor) to waft out into the hallway and the world at large, thus amplifying for any of the hotel’s resident foriegners the anthropological insights into the life, times and folkways of the country and people that the foriegners surely came to experience in the first place. Right?

Chairman Sanders

2007-10-23T22:00:00.000-07:00

There are more portraits of Colonel Sanders hanging around Beijing than portraits of Chairman Mao.

The golden arches of McDonalds are so ubiquitous throughout the capital that you almost don’t notice - they blend-in with the Beijing’s visual aesthetic to the extent that they somehow look like they’ve always been a part of it.

I suppose the Chinese go out for “American food” the way Americans go out for Chinese food. Still, it’s a bit incongruous to see these American fast-food icons packed with people who barely a generation ago had never even heard of McDonalds and KFC. I don’t know if it’s the food they like, or the vibe, or both, but these retaurants are always busy and all demographics are represented. I wonder if they’re ready for Taco Bell.

Tian-an-men, I can’t figure out, Tian-an-men, if it’s the end or beginning…

2007-10-19T23:19:00.000-07:00

Tiananmen Square kinda creeps me out. Not specifically because of what happened there eighteen years ago, though that does play a role. No, the square creeps me out more because of the massive security presence and the sense you have that you’re constantly being watched.

Well, you are being watched.

From the moment you step out of your cab or emerge from the Beijing subway steps, you are being sized-up and then guided in the proper direction by various uniformed police, security, and army personnel. Not that they’re impolite, but they ain’t smiling, either. And this is just to get you across the street. Once you alight on the square itself, there are cameras everywhere, of course, as well as public-address loudspeakers and all manner of police and security vehicles. Some security personnel are stationed strategically around the square at various points of interest, while others march around Tiananmen in roving platoons of two or three or four. Granted, the Chinese People’s Congress was in session this October (in the massive, Soviet-style building that abuts the west side of Tiananmen Square), so there was an expected uptick in number of security forces present. But there really weren’t that many more than in previous years that I’ve visited and that ‘Big Brother is Watching’ feeling was the same as always.

It’s fairly common knowledge that there are also numerous plainclothes security officers in the square at all times, and on this recent visit I believe I encountered one. Customarily, Beijing residents who have studied English to any significant degree, recognizing a foreigner, will attempt to strike up a conversation, both to practice their English and to fraternize with said foreigner. This is especially true in Tiananmen Square. But the “independent filmmaker” in his early twenties who, upon noticing me taking photographs around the square looking for all the world like a journalist with my vest and all my gear, approached me and began lamenting the current state of politics in China - well, this guy couldn’t have been more transparent. Under the pretext of being a naive local youngster wanting to commiserate with a Westerner, he asked me a laundry-list of questions relating to my opinions on various hot-button political topics in China - a big no-no anywhere in China, never mind in the middle of Tiananmen Square. By the time he told me how popular George W. Bush is among his Chinese comrades, I was pretty well and good convinced that I was being baited by an undercover government agent.

I played it cool by denying any interest in politics, Chinese or otherwise, explaining that I am just an amateur photographer wanting to photograph his country so as to share the beauty of it with my American comrades. Evidently, he didn’t believe me. He asked for my contact info. I gave him my e-mail address, which he dutifully wrote down on a little reporter’s notepad that he just happened to have in his pocket. The e-mail address I gave him was fake.

After telling me he’d “be in touch” (I should watch for an e-mail from “Tao”) he began to walk away. I shouted to him that he should be more careful about discussing politics with foreigners, or anyone else for that matter, in Tiananmen Square. I wouldn’t want any harm to come to him, I said. I wasn’t necessarily kidding. He chuckled and walked away.

I resumed my photography. It was time for the sunset flag-lowering ceremony at the north end of the square, across the street from Chairman Mao’s giant portrait.

There’s more photos of Tiananmen Square in this gallery.

Who says there's an oil shortage?

2007-10-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Just spend a few weeks eating the local cuisine in China. Seriously.

My 43rd birthday on the Great Wall

2007-10-10T23:00:00.000-07:00

If you really want to get to know the Great Wall of China intimately, you have to go to where the tourists aren’t. The Huanghua section of the wall, in the mountains north of Beijing, is apparently just that place. Huanghua is an unrestored, but very well preserved, length of wall that rambles steeply and precipitously up and over craggy mountaintops and, for one afternoon, we literally had miles of it all to ourselves.

One arrives at this part of the wall without any fanfare: after driving up into the mountains past the usual farms and villages (where older male villagers continue to wear the old green or blue Mao uniforms and everyone still gazes suspiciously at foreigners), you abruptly stop at the side of the road where a handful of middle-aged women from a nearby village are waiting for someone (anyone) to show up so they can sell you an “I climbed the Great Wall” t-shirt and collect a couple of kuai (Chinese money) as “tribute” (it’s their wall, after all). You the clamber several hundred feet up a wooded hillside and finally arrive at the base of a watchtower. Climb up a makeshift bamboo ladder and you’re on the wall.

After admiring the spectacular view from the watchtower, it’s time to begin climbing further up the wall upon crumbling stone steps and even more perilous lengths of wall that are altogether without steps and insanely steep. There are no handrails of any kind and if you slip and fall, you’re going to tumble down hundreds of feet of hard stone masonry. (That next watchtower is only a half-mile or so away. You can do it!) The idea of armies of weapons-laden Ming dynasty warriors scurrying up the wall is incomprehensible. If one soldier were to lose it, they would all tumble off the wall like dominoes. Maybe they did!

In spite of the dire consequences of falling off the wall (on my birthday, no less), we managed to conquer a fairly significant length of it and attain the dizzying heights that the Cinese armies did hundreds of years earlier in their mission to fend off invading Mongol hoards and Manchu warriors. It was well worth it!

The the entire Great Wall at Huanghua gallery here.

It’s gotta be the construction…

2007-10-08T22:15:00.000-07:00

I don’t recall the air-quality ever being worse than it is right now in China. Not just in the interior provinces, where the air is largely expected to be awful, but in Beijing, which seemed to be improving dramatically over the past several years. The Chinese have been on a mission to clean up Beijing in time for the 2008 Olympic games, and that purportedly included the environment in addition to the wholesale renovation and refurbishment of the physical city. Maybe the Chinese figured out that by regressing in the air pollution department, their Olympic athletes would be at a distinct advantage next year in the sense that no foreign athletes that haven’t been training in these conditions could possibly compete in any Olympic events that require even a modicum of physical exertion and endurance.

I thought that all of the renovations of Beijing’s infrastructure would be mostly complete by now, but it seems the Chinese are still going full-throttle, as many new demolition and construction projects are just now getting underway. One would question their ability to be done with everything by next summer, but then one realizes that construction sites in China are 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week affairs (peace & quiet is way down at the bottom of the list of Chinese institutions). Trust me, they will finish.

But, in the meantime, the hundreds of construction projects in progress around town are spewing some seriously noxious pollutants into Beijing’s already challenged air. I don’t know what brand of solvents and adhesives the Chinese are using in their new buildings, but you can smell them a mile away. Anything that you can smell from a mile away generally can’t be good for you, right? All the pedestrians and cyclists who cough up their lungs as they pass the construction sites pretty much answer that question. I’ve never seen locals wheezing and hacking like that before.

Combine the construction chemicals with all the other particulate matter cast into the air from all the gravel, concrete, steel, brick and soil being stirred up by towering cranes and heavy machinery and you’ve got a hell of a recipe for un-breathable air. All in the name of progress.

You get what you pay for.

More pics like these in my China 2007: Urban Beijing gallery.

Bright Primary Colorful China

2007-09-06T03:01:00.000-07:00

One of the things that I particularly enjoy about photographing China is that it’s a far more colorful country than most people give it credit for.

I think that most people, if they have any sense of what China looks like at all, tend to imagine dull, washed-out reds, golds & greys and muted greens & browns. While not entirely inaccurate, modern China certainly has a far more expansive color gamut.

Viewers of my photos are often surprised at the abundance of saturated primary colors that are more remeniscent of Central America than of China. Bright, eye-popping color is especially evident in the interior, rural towns and cities of China, and is exemplified by the all-too-prevalent storefront signage and advertising that seems to line every city street, country road, and back alley. Even many rural villages now are now painted in predominantly bright primary colors.

I’ve even had people ask me if I intentionally increase color saturation during post-processing of my photos, but a close inspection of the images reveals that these intense reds, blues, yellows, and greens simply appear all-the-more saturated when juxtaposed against the often grey skies and polluted air in the Chinese interior.

From a photographic perspective, the often stark contrast between highly luminant and more subdued color in the same scene serve to underscore one of the overarching themes that I try to capture with my camera in China: the dichotomies and contradictions that seem to underly virtually every aspect of life in this country.

Greetings from the Consumer’s Republic of China

2006-08-30T23:30:00.000-07:00

That’s right, the Consumer’s Republic of China, because the Chinese people are consuming like never before. It’s been a marvelous experience to watch China’s social and economic climate morph so dramatically over the course of the past four years. On our first visit in 2002, Beijing was a city that was obviously modernizing at a blazing pace but was still largely stuck in the funk of its previous Socialist/Communist/Maoist incarnation. It felt like it was still the 1950s in most parts of Beijing; maybe the ‘80s in the newer and revitalized sections of town. There was a very distinct sense in ’02 that we were experiencing perhaps the last vestiges of the world’s one remaining old-school communist enclave and, quite frankly, that lent the experience a certain element of adventure and even cachet.

Four years and five visits later, that somehow dangerous edge is now mostly gone; vanished into the whirlwind of the world’s fastest-growing (capitalist) economy. Beijing isn’t so gritty anymore. The sidewalks of Wangfujing Road are now cleaner than those in America. The sprawling three-block-long, multi-storied department stores feature all of the world’s top fashion houses and electronics retailers and, perhaps most amazingly, charge essentially the same prices as in Europe and America. Many commodities are of course substantially cheaper in China than elsewhere in the world because they are manufactured here where the cost of labor is inexpensive. A new Volkswagen Jetta, for example, that was built in VW’s Shanghai factory can be purchased in China for the equivalent of about $9,000 and everything from clothes to housewares can be bought relatively cheaply. But the Chinese are also using their increased purchasing-power to buy the more more expensive goods imported from the West that are now within their reach as well as pricey, higher-quality products made at home.

So, can the average Beijinger afford a $300 pair of Diesel jeans? Don’t know, but there were certainly plenty of locals browsing in the Diesel store and some were leaving with merchandise. That’s a quantum leap in the economy of scale of life in China versus even a year ago.

It’s not, however, just the economy and aesthetic of Beijing that’s changed so dramatically, it’s also the attitude. Beijingers are embracing consumerism with a zeal and enthusiasm that only a populace that has been for so long economically (and politically) oppressed could possibly muster. Consumer culture has become, particularly among the young, as much a lifestyle as a prerogative, leaving so many old-timers looking a bit lost and bewildered. It’s hard to imagine what those older citizens must think about all the NBA logo-ed basketball clothes the kids are wearing, not to mention the enormous, 40-foot-tall sculpted basketball player that clings to side of a four-story Wangfujing district sports-apparel shop. In fact, basketball is only one of the more obvious icons of Beijing’s new attitude; everything Western is in fashion, from Disney to Dell (the latter ought to completely open the floodgates), and to appreciate the significance of that, one need only to consider that merely 20 years ago, the Chinese were still being indoctrinated to believe that all things Western (read: American) were evil.

This may all be old news for those of you who have been receiving my dispatches from China over the years, but the phenomenal pace of growth and change here really can’t be overstated and it is a major part of the essence of today’s China. People from around the world who attend the 2008 Beijing Olympics will undoubtedly be impressed with the city and its world-class culture and amenities; most will never have known a Beijing other than the modern and clean metropolis that they will experience.

As most of you already know, Katrinka’s ongoing archaeology project is located in a part of China that is the very antithesis of shiny & new Beijing. Henan is one of China’s most rural provinces and it’s also (un-intuitively) China’s most densely populated province. In our little neck of Henan, the air is thick with a noxious mixture of smoke and particulate matter comprised of a veritable smorgasbord of pollutants; on most days visibility is a matter of yards, not miles. The sun, when visible, appears in the sky as a thin, pale, distinctly-defined coronal disc, the rest of its ambient light diffused and swallowed up by the veil of thick, grey, mist that lurks over everything like dirty old threadbare curtains. Welcome back to the heartland of China, the real China. Yes, welcome once again to the fair city of Yanshi, and the dog-eared but oddly endearing Yanshi Binguan (hotel). Oh, and let’s not forget the archaeological excavation site and field station that we share with a family of village farmers, two mangy dogs, a cat, several dozen chickens, a confused rooster (he crows every time I use what passes for the bathroom, which, in turn, gets the dogs barking and the cat meowing, creating a din that only an aspirin salesman could love), hungry mosquitos, at least one lizard, and countless exoctic insects that are mostly unidentifiable to us.

In spite of our not-exactly-utopian conditions, it’s been wonderful to be back in this city where we’ve made many friends and acquaintances over the years and which is by now familiar to us to the extent that we occasionally have the utterly bizarre experience of giving local cab drivers directions around town. The city’s hoard of cabbies are especially happy to see us wealthy lao wai (literally, ‘old outsiders’, a semi-respectful term for foreigners) again; in fact, they seem to be relaying to one another our every move via their car radios in hopes that we may desire their services to run errands around town or, for an even bigger payday, need to pick something up in big city of Luoyang, some 20 miles down the road. While heading out to dinner recently, one particularly deranged cabbie insisted that I sing into his radio for the entertainment and amusement of all his colleagues listening in their cabs. Who was I to argue? Fortunately, I don’t think they understood the English lyrics to the very carefully considered Frank Zappa song that I elected to sing for them. Probably for the best…

As always, it’s all in good and playful fun with the cabbies and just about everyone else around here. It’s really quite remarkable how well we’re generally treated by everyone and it’s kind of amazing to contemplate that, among others, there’s an old, street-corner fruit vendor in this random, third-world backwater halfway around the world from where we live that recognizes us and is happy to see us. At the risk of overt sentimentalism and flagrant cliché, it is rather heartwarming.

Still and all, even after so many visits, it remains difficult to pinpoint exactly what it is about China that is so enchanting and compelling. Obviously, being in this country during a time of great social and economic change, as it emerges from the death-throes of the great social experiment known as Chinese Communism and shakes off the dust of it’s recent past while finding a new direction for itself in the world, is an incredibly valuable experience. As well, China’s amazing juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern and its unique aesthetic is certainly of interest to anyone who has ever wondered what such an exotic and historic culture as this might look like beyond what we know from old paintings and our local Chinatowns. And certainly China’s exquisite natural beauty - its gorgeous limestone mountains and cavernous river-gorges, not to mention the majestic peaks of the Tibetan Plateau, the ‘Rooftop of the World’ - rival the most spectacular landscapes anywhere on the planet. But, ultimately, why should a country that is still largely a rural (more than 800 million people live in the countryside, 100 million of them in cave-dwellings), filthy, third-world, breeding-ground for exotic diseases (it’s not unusual to see kids poop right on the sidewalk), where carbon monoxide masquerades as ‘air’, hold such an addictive fascination?

Perhaps it has something to do with how such a vast number of people, packed so closely together, manage to live their lives so harmoniously on a day to day basis. This is a place where there is little or no expectation of personal privacy, and yet despite so much social and political upheaval throughout their long history, the Chinese seem to have attained an almost Zen-like ability to live together in a symbiotic and palpably loving fashion, with little of the tension and hostility that seems so ordinary in the West. Maybe, as life becomes more and more complex for the Chinese, and the competition among themselves for money and resources becomes fiercer, they will come to know some of that daily grind. I hope not. But for now, this culture exudes the very essence of the word community, and that seems to be the fundamental difference between China and America, where these days it too-often feels like it’s every man for himself.

I’ll have some photos from this visit posted on my website soon; I will send you all a notification and the website link when the photos are online.

Wishing you all well,

- Dave

Reflections on our visit to the People’s Republic of China

2005-05-25T11:00:00.000-07:00

Greetings from China. Our nine-week stay here is rapidly coming to a close. As usual, it has been quite an awesome experience for us and I hope you all find these reflections on our visit interesting. I have posted photographs taken over the course of our stay on the internet at the following address: http://djdigitaldave.smugmug.com. The photographs illustrate much of what is written about below; I hope you enjoy them. Looking forward to seeing you all soon!

Gu is a Chinese word that means ‘ancient’. Lau is the Chinese word for ‘old’. Conjoined, the two words form Gu Lau, which loosely translates to the English phrase ‘Once upon a time, long, long ago’. Chinese culture has indeed been around for a long, long time; it began to take form some five thousand years ago in modern-day Henan Province’s Yellow River Valley, which makes it the oldest continuous society on earth. While other countries have gone through six or eight different languages and have experienced major migrations of population and dramatic permutations of culture throughout their recorded history, China can trace her mother tongue directly back to the Shang Dynasty oracle bone inscriptions from 1300 B.C. And by virtually isolating itself from the rest of the world for several millennia, China has maintained a largely unadulterated ethnic demographic and a way of life that persists to this day.

There has surely always been some outside influence on Chinese culture, (where did those Shang Dynasty chariots come from?), particularly in the last couple of decades; but the notion of Chineseness, an almost proprietary sense of invention and ownership of virtually every aspect of Chinese society and culture, is an idea that the Chinese are understandably proud of. At first blush, it’s easy to assert that modern China has been heavily overcome by Western culture. But the Chinese have an uncanny ability to adapt, even co-opt, Western influences to their liking. When one enters one China’s growing number of McDonald’s or KFC restaurants, one does not wonder where in the world one is standing - one unmistakably recognizes that one is in a Chinese McDonalds. Even if the reason for this is mostly aesthetic - hanging large red lanterns in the front window along with some Chinese characters goes a long way towards making anything look Chinese - it still doesn’t diminish the fact that one of the quintessential icons of Western culture has been so successfully integrated into Chinese society that it barely registers on the incongruity scale when one finds a McDonalds nestled in a Beijing hutong or across the street from a Ming Dynasty drum tower. China has also adopted another Western icon as their own: Mickey Mouse is so ubiquitous a sight throughout China that one half expects the rodent to speak fluent Chinese.

Of course, culture consists of far more than aesthetics; the substance of the collective culture of over 1.3 billion people’s speaks far more to their way of life than just red lanterns, stylized Chinese characters and ancient-looking-pagoda-roofs on top of ultra-futuristic-looking skyscrapers. On this, the fourth visit that Katrinka and I have made together to China for her archaeological dissertation research, a sense of what exactly it is that defines the substance of modern Chinese culture begins to emerge (to the extent that it can with any degree of objectivity; we see this culture filtered through our own, very American, sensibilities). One thing is for certain: the Chinese have a very clear sense of identity that stands in stark contrast to America, where almost everybody can trace their roots back to another country. The Chinese are very comfortable in their cultural clothes and, although a palpable sense of burgeoning individuality appears to be creeping into their society (particularly among the young), the Chinese share the very strong common bond of their ancient heritage. It may be the ultimate example of nationalism and I’m sure that this is what keeps China from coming unglued.

Katrinka, as most of you know, is studying China’s Shang Dynasty (2100 B.C.-1100 B.C.), the second dynasty in China’s historic dynastic system. (Archaeologists dispute whether the Xia Dynasty was really a distinct culture of its own, or actually an early precursor to the Shang. In any event, the Xia is generally given status as China’s first dynasty.) Her examination of one of China’s earliest post-Neolithic societies helps to give context to modern Chinese culture. We’ve spent the past two months here in Yanshi (YEN-shur), Henan Province, the site of an early Shang city that boasted a palace and distinct, well defined, elite and commoner dwelling areas. In performing high-tech residue analysis on pottery sherds from cooking utensils used in both the elite and commoner sections of the Shang city, Katrinka will attempt to flesh-out the emergence of early societal social stratification. Did the elites eat meat and the commoners millet? Did they eat each other? (not so far-fetched an idea). Did they all eat together at McDonalds on Sunday nights? Katrinka’s research will hopefully soon provide the answers to these questions.

Per usual, we began our visit to China with a stay in Beijing before taking the twelve hour overnight train ride to Yanshi. Beijing is a city under wholesale renovation, the 2008 Olympics being the carrot-at-the-end-of-the-stick that is motivating the Central Government to spend hundreds of billions of Chinese yuan on preparing the city for what will amount to a monumental Coming-Out Party that summer. The economy in Beijing continues to expand a pace that would make Alan Greenspan blush (and Chairman Mao do a back-flip in his Tiananmen Square glass mausoleum). The beneficiaries of this rapid economic growth are enjoying a standard of living unprecedented in modern Chinese history and, frankly, it’s gratifying to see. Over the course of three short years’ worth of visits to Beijing, we’ve seen the town transformed from a rather stodgy, rickety and dirty old city to a confident, world-class metropolis. Strolling along Beijing’s upscale Wangfujing Street, it’s easy to forget that it’s barely been a couple of decades since Deng Xiaoping first declared that “It’s glorious to get rich,” and sanctioned China’s first experimental Special Economic Zones near Hong Kong and elsewhere which began China’s march from state-owned industries, collective work-units and green Mao uniforms to its current status as WTO member and world economic powerhouse. Who would have ever foreseen that China would eventually become one of the largest purchasers of U.S. Government bonds – in essence, America’s banker?

Of course, dramatic change such as this doesn’t come without a price: Widening social stratification wrought by China’s rapid economic expansion has developed to the point that it is now one of the priority issues being addressed by the Communist Party. Remarkably, this is being talked about openly in public (a virtually unfathomable notion even a year ago); although no one seems quite sure precisely what measures are being considered to solve the problem. Beijing now has very distinct upper-class districts populated by elegantly-dressed, BMW- & Audi-driving citizens. However, some of the folks driving donkey-carts and pedicabs in adjoining neighborhoods surely feel a bit left out of China’s renaissance. While there is no sense of any simmering civil unrest over this matter (other than whispers of organized protests in some rural provinces), one clearly notices the boundaries between the haves and the have-nots becoming more clearly defined and one wonders to what extent Chinese society can tolerate further stratification at this rate of speed.

It appears that, for the time being, the new, overall higher standard of living and quality of life in China will trump the stratification issues. People are having way too much fun spending their money on all their myriad new consumer goods to get too worked up about the social repercussions. Those on the trailing edge of China’s new prosperity have at least an elevated sense of opportunity and hope. Additionally, China’s very deep nationalistic pride and its long collective cultural history will help to keep this society more or less cohesive (and the Communist Party in power) in the short term. But certainly the question of economic and social polarization must be dealt with effectively sooner rather than later. Here’s hoping that the Communist Party manages this situation with the same effectiveness that they seem to have thus far managed the radical changes to China’s economic system and social structure.

Speaking of the Communist Party, one must question whether ‘Communist’ is even a remotely accurate description of China’s system of government today. The Chinese clearly live under a one-party system that still maintains a zero-tolerance policy toward public dissent of the government, among other freedoms regarded by most of the world as basic civil and human rights. No one will mistake this system for a democracy, but all of the economic, social and political reforms of the last twenty years have, without question, rendered it an unrecognizable form communism. Is this system communist-in-name-only? The government is authoritarian, to be sure; socialist, perhaps; maybe even a mutated form of capitalist – but definitely not communist (at least not as I knew Communism, growing up during the Cold War years of Sino-Soviet domination of the East.) Indeed, it should not go without notice that I’m writing this little bit of political thesis right out in the open in the lobby of a hotel deep in the heart of China, unfettered (or so it seems) by prying or suspicious eyes. But feel free to put aside a few bucks to bail me out of the gulag, just in case…

Unlike Beijing, Henan Province hasn’t so obviously reaped the benefits of China’s economic boom. As China’s provinces go, Henan is perhaps one of its least glamorous. It is not really a tourist destination (unless you are a fan or a student of the many forms of the ancient Chinese art of Kung Fu that emerged about twenty miles southwest of Yanshi at the Buddhist Shao Lin Temple and is still practiced and taught there by practitioners from around China and the world). Henan is primarily an agricultural and industrial province and has little to attract much interest beyond the fact that the provincial capital, Zhengzhou, is a convenient transportation hub to other more intriguing destinations in China. (The city of Kaifeng in eastern Henan Province, the only major city in Henan that we haven’t yet been to, is said to be very beautiful and worth a visit, if for no other reason than it has a sizable population of Jews whom are said to be descended from an ancient band of Israelites that somehow found their way there (probably via the Silk Road)…and stayed. Maybe that’s how we Jews got our penchant for Chinese food.

Henan is not completely devoid of cultural status, however. It is something of an archaeological mecca, of course, and the city of Luoyang, about a hundred miles east of Zhengzhou has a few relatively worthwhile attractions. Luoyang’s major claim to fame is the annual Peony Festival, in which a particularly beautiful variety of peony flower blooms for a period of only ten days in a locally-famous city park, drawing visitors from all over China. If the peonies don’t happen to cooperate with the festival schedule by blooming in time for the April 15th opening day, the Luoyang Tourism Administration cleverly applies fake peonies to all of the park’s bushes (I guess you just have to squint your eyes a bit…) Just outside of town is the Bai Ma Si, or White Horse Temple, where the Bodhisattva, after arriving in China from India, purportedly established the first Buddhist temple on Chinese soil, along with five of his Chinese disciples. Nothing of the original temple remains today, however there is a beautiful Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) pagoda and a Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) temple and monastery on the beautiful park-like grounds. Unfortunately, a bit of the sheen has been removed from this otherwise beautiful site by the surrounding acres of souvenir stalls filled with hundreds of aggressive vendors hawking chincy artwork, fake artifacts, incense, and the telling of fortunes, all at the usual ridiculously inflated prices. Sadly, this is not an uncommon scene at most Chinese tourism points of interest: One can buy a Chairman Mao clock, t-shirt, or statuette from vendors stationed not fifteen feet from the man’s corpse. A little further outside of Luoyang is the Longmen Shiku, or Dragon Gate Grottoes. This is the site where Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534) emperors commissioned the carving of tens of thousands of Buddhas and related Buddhist icons into the caves and cliffs along the banks of a tributary of the Yellow River. They range in size from a few inches to 17 meters, and many, if not most of them, are headless because their craniums were pilfered by nineteenth century foreign “art collectors” (several reside today in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as museums throughout Europe). To add insult to injury, the Red Guards of China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) decimated many of the statues as part of Mao’s campaign to rid China of any remnants of its past and revise its history to suit his efforts to maintain a power-base among China’s youth. Some of the statues are riddled with bullet holes. The site is nevertheless overwhelmingly breathtaking and mercifully free of the usual souvenir hawkers. (There is a gift shop built into one of the riverbank caves but it is nicely camouflaged).

The city of Yanshi, home to 800,000 residents, is essentially a suburb of Luoyang on its far eastern outskirts; an outpost, really, between Luoyang and Gong Yi, the next big city to the east. Though situated in and among the many villages and wheat fields of rural Henan, Yanshi is nevertheless a colorful, bustling town filled with outdoor markets, high-rise apartment complexes, music blaring from storefronts, and, of course, people everywhere. Not many foreigners pass through Yanshi, let alone stay there for a couple of months, so Katrinka and I have been the focus of much interest among the locals. If people are initially a little dubious as to what a couple of Lau Wai (a more-or-less respectful term for ‘outsiders’) are doing in Yanshi, they are quickly disabused of any concerns when we explain that we are here so Katrinka can study Chinese archaeology at Yanshi’s very own Shang city excavation. (We’ve discovered that a fair amount of locals aren’t even aware that they have a local archaeology excavation. In fact, after the excavation work was completed, a reproduction of the Shang city’s palace foundation was built on the site so that the city of Yanshi would have a bonafide local tourist attraction. No one showed up and the outdoor museum fell into a state of neglect; the palace reproduction is overgrown with weeds. An attempt is just now being made to spruce-up the grounds; time will tell if any interest in the site can be aroused.) Generally speaking, people have been very receptive to our presence, and most have been effusive in their friendship. In terms of our being American outsiders, a few people have asked us why our country invaded Iraq. We tell them to send an e-mail to W and ask him. (In contrast to Mr. Bush, they absolutely love Bill Clinton here; he’s practically a cult hero. Ronald Reagan is also held in high regard). Otherwise, people just want to know what life is like in our country: What kind of food do we eat? (Hamburgers, hot dogs, and ’sandwiches’ are what they assume to be “American food”). How much do things cost as in America, as opposed to China? (Their party line is that America is very “developed” and we all have boatloads of money. We explain that America is very expensive and our boatloads of money don’t go very far.) Mostly, they just want to talk about … well, basketball.

Our hotel, the Yanshi Binguan, was built in 1992, but is in a state of repair more consistent with 1952. It is regarded as the best hotel in town, and it probably is, but you certainly wouldn’t want to put your mother up there (most of you, anyway). The standard of cleanliness at the Yanshi Binguan is nothing remotely close to Western standards; vacuums are unknown in Yanshi. Admittedly, it’s hard to keep anything clean in Henan Province, mostly due to the loess that blows into the province from the Gobi Desert (which is what gives the Yellow River Valley area the unique soil content that has allowed so many of Henan Province’s ancient cities to remain so well preserved under layers of earth containing the remnants of succeeding eras). But it can be tough to spend time, never mind eat, in a facility that has gobs of spit on the floor and reeks of urine because of the hotel’s low-quality plumbing. While the Yanshi Binguan does accommodate a variety of people, from traveling businessmen to local partygoers, and hosts the occasional conference, it clearly also serves as the local brothel (not unlike most hotels in China, even five-star models in Beijing). The hotel’s adjoining “massage parlor” offers a variety of “services” to the discerning traveler (as well as several of our discerning hotel managers, from what we’ve noticed) and its staff can be seen doing their afternoon exercises and playing badminton in the hotel parking lot, just like all of the other hotel employees. Still and all, we’ve been treated very well overall by the hotel’s staff and have made quite a few friends.

If Henan is not ultimately a tourist’s paradise, it may be an ideal province to visit if you want a taste of China’s heartland; hardcore China, if you will. Just as California and New York are not wholly representative of America, China’s fast-growing eastern provinces, enormous cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou that have quickly modernized and benefited dramatically from China’s economic boom, and inner provinces such as Yunnan, Sichuan and Guangxi that are renowned for their majestic scenery, do not the reveal the whole picture. All are worthwhile places to visit, but they aren’t necessarily the best places to explore if you want to get your finger on the pulse of China’s heartbeat. As China’s most densely populated province, and with the vast majority of its residents living in the countryside rather than big cities, Henan is a fairly accurate microcosm of the way that most Chinese people live.

Henan’s two largest cities, Zhengzhou and Luoyang, each have populations of over seven million; a half-dozen smaller cities have populations of five to six million. The rest of Henan’s one-hundred million residents live in an interconnected network of small villages, literally thousands of them, each of which is surrounded by fields of wheat, corn and various other crops that are tended collectively by the villagers. One can travel for miles upon miles through the countryside without encountering any significant break in the network of small towns and villages; it’s a seemingly never-ending trail of humanity and it’s very definitely the Third World. The villages typically each have two- or three-thousand residents living in run-down brick and masonry dwellings, usually with extended families - often four generations worth - sharing a common space. Many of the villages have been built and rebuilt again over the course of hundreds, and even thousands, of years. One can often see the remnants of previous incarnations of a village in the form of centuries-old, disintegrating walls and buildings that are interspersed among the newer ones. In spite of the fact that many of the villages have been refurbished relatively recently, most of them are in ramshackle condition with few or no paved roads and little in the way of modern amenities. Dogs run wild in the streets among children and farmers. There is no plumbing; bathroom facilities consist of outdoor troughs, the contents of which are emptied after a time with buckets and used to fertilize the crops. Also fertilizing the crops are the remains of deceased villagers, who are customarily buried right in the middle of the fields, their graves marked by floral wreaths atop the burial mounds. (When one eats locally-grown vegetables in rural China, one is careful to make sure that some of late Uncle Chen or Aunt Ting-Ting didn’t end up in the dish; never mind the fact that Cousin Du’s doo is all over the soil that is all over the cucumber. This is just one of many reasons why we affectionately refer to our accommodations here in Yanshi as the Hepatitis Hotel). Some of the wealthier villages (generally the ones nearer to big cities) sport televisions and cell sites for mobile phones; the poorer villages do not. In fact the poorer villages, in some instances, consist of cave dwellings carved out of the pliable loess soil that is particular to Henan Province’s Yellow River Valley (which is aptly referred to as the Cradle of Chinese Civilization because of the myriad Xia and Shang cities that existed there). China has a lot of people to feed and much of that food is grown by peasant villagers in the flatlands of Henan Province. Some 700 million people throughout China live in rural villages such as these, cultivating crops and livestock and often never venturing far beyond their village for the duration of their entire lives.

Some villages obtain an economic leg-up in unique and innovative ways. One evening Katrinka and I were riding in a taxi on our way back to Yanshi from Luoyang when the driver abruptly turned off the expressway and onto a dark, long and narrow dirt road in the middle of a wheat field. We tried to query the cab driver as to what exactly he was doing, but his thick, guttural local dialect was impossible to understand. As we approached the village, we saw several men glowering in the distance under the dim lights of a street corner lamp post. Thinking we were about to get robbed, or worse, Katrinka and I began to formulate an escape plan. Speaking among ourselves in English, we decided that we both had big heavy telephoto lenses with us that we could use to bonk our antagonists on their heads with. Or maybe Katrinka could finally have a chance to put her years of studying the martial art of Taijiquan to practical use (while I ran for help, of course.) The driver pulled over to the side of the road just as we reached the village street corner and four or five tough-looking village men approached the taxi and peered inside at us. They exchanged a few heated words with the driver; it vaguely sounded like they were negotiating a price for something. Were we being sold into enslavement, Shanghaied, as it were? They handed the driver a small piece of paper and pointed down the cross-street. Our driver, apparently sensing our concern, blathered on at us in his unintelligible local accent as he made a left turn and proceeded down another long, very dark road. After what seemed like miles but was probably only a few hundred yards, the driver stopped at another dimly-lit street corner where stood another posse of tough-looking village men. The driver rolled down his window and handed the men the little piece of paper along with…five kwai (the equivalent of about seventy American cents). He then made yet another left turn and headed back towards the expressway, down another long, dark road that traversed the fields. We emerged from the road and re-entered the expressway about two hundred yards beyond a toll plaza - one that charges ten kwai for highway access. The driver looked at us with a broad, toothy grin. Katrinka and I breathed a sigh of relief - we finally got the picture.

Another village, this one known as Ta Zhuang (TA-jwong), or Tower Village, because a Tang Dynasty (619-907) pagoda once stood there, has gained economic advantage in different way. It is located at the edge of Yanshi and it just happens to sit atop an ancient Shang Dynasty city. It’s entirely possible that some of today’s Ta Zhuang’s residents are descended directly from the citizens of that Shang City. The Chinese Institute of Archaeology, a central government agency in Beijing, decided to undertake a major excavation there in 1983. It was be an obvious disruption to the lives of the approximately three thousand villagers, as the excavation traversed their crop fields and even parts of their housing areas. The Institute also needed to build two field stations for their archaeologists, one adjacent to the excavation site to store material and equipment, and another one in the middle of the village itself to be used as a headquarters and office. Whatever compensation Ta Zhuang Village received (or still receives) from the institute has elevated its status to that of a relatively “wealthy” village. No one would ever mistake Ta Zhuang for a modern condo complex, but many villagers are sporting brand-new motorcycles, scooters and TVs, and their school is immaculate compared with the rest of the village (nice to see where their priorities lie).

When we came to Yanshi for a brief visit last November, we took some stealth photographs from the Ta Zhuang Field Station gates of Ta Zhuang villagers going about their business. The most gratifying aspect of these photographs is that we’ve now had the opportunity to get to know many of the people in them! How amazing that the nameless guy hauling a cartload of logs through the village in one of the photos turned out to be the Field Station cook, and now our dear friend. Knowing that we’d be spending a great deal of time in and around Ta Zhuang on this current visit, we printed up several of the photos before we left home to give to the villagers as presents. One of those photos in particular paid us back beyond our expectations. A middle-aged man was riding his scooter with an adorable little girl on the back of it through the village. He spied me pointing my camera at him and he stopped and struck a proud pose as the little girl looked on with a precocious expression on her face. I told him as best I could in my broken Chinese that we’d be back again next year and give him a print of the photo. I’m sure he didn’t entirely believe it. When we actually showed up this year with the photo (a nice, big 8.5 x 11), the guy was dumbfounded. He told us he was the village leader and invited us to come the following day to a party and feast that he and his entire extended family would throw for us, along with lots of friends from the village.

The party was quite an experience. A kitchen was set-up in an outdoor courtyard wherein four or five villagers cooked food in dozens woks, pots and several huge vats. To no avail, we tried to sneak a look at what we’d be eating, knowing we were in for a genuine Chinese village meal that would likely consist of “peasant food” of varying degrees of palatability. Katrinka and I were given seats of honor at the dining table inside the house. There we dined with our host, his four brothers, and his elderly mother (who gave Katrinka her prized, hand-made pin as a gift, much to the astonishment of her sons), while his two sisters and dozens of nieces, nephews, cousins, neighbors and friends flowed in and out of the house. We learned that the little girl on the back of the scooter in the photo is one of his younger brother’s daughters. (China’s official One Child Policy, implemented in 1979, did not affect this family for two reasons: The older siblings were all born before the policy went into effect and the young children and grandchildren were all born after the policy was recently modified to apply only in large cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. Two children are now permitted throughout rural China). As dish after dish of mostly really tasty food was brought to the table, we waited for the proverbial Other Shoe to drop. I suppose I knew in my heart that there would come a day in my life that I would eat donkey meat and boiled cow innards; I just didn’t think it would come so soon. Thankfully, our hosts plied us with enough Luoyang Gong pijiu (the locally brewed beer) that the food went down without much resistance. We just pretended it was fillet mingon.

Speaking of food, the aforementioned Field station cook, Wang Zhejun, has a habit of preparing interesting lunches for us that consist of a broth filled with vegetables, rice-noodles, and meat that he evidently is not clear as to the origins of. When we’ve queried him as to whether the meat he has served us is pork, beef, or chicken, he has responded with “yes” or “I think so.” We’ve begun counting the dogs around the village.

Katrinka’s work, in and among the two field stations and the excavation site, has been rewarding but exceedingly difficult. Sampling from among the tens of thousands of available pottery sherds from the Shang City is far more grueling work than one might imagine (which is why Katrinka is at the excavation site at the moment and I am currently sitting in the air-conditioned hotel lobby). Her research is not only an intensive intellectual exercise that requires an intimate knowledge of the minutia of, and subtle variations in, ancient Chinese pottery, it is also a physically demanding job that involves sifting through hundreds of heavy baskets full of dirty sherds for long hours in, shall we say, less-than-optimal conditions. Besides the loess that is constantly blown around by heavy southerly winds, the air is filled with particulate matter from the area’s many coal-burning power plants, steel factories, and other heavy industry. The pollution is so thick and hazy that some days the area seems to be filled with San Francisco-style fog. After a few weeks in Yanshi, we began to realize that the pollution was constantly in our noses and throats, and our sinuses were swollen all the time. We were getting droning headaches that would last for days, until a rainstorm would blow through and finally clean out the air for two or three days. The interior of China has a long way to go to catch up with the progress that has been made in cleaning up the air in Beijing and other eastern cities over the past few years. The smaller field station adjoining the excavation, where Katrinka does much of the grunt-work of her project, is also a difficult place to spend long hours because it reeks of the smell from its outhouse (an extended family of five lives in squalid conditions at the station as caretakers and farmers of a small patch of adjacent land). One day, the smell was particularly strong and offensive and we noticed that it was because an individual was emptying-out the outhouse troughs with two buckets on either end of a pole that he carried across his shoulders. He then poured the contents of the buckets into the little field containing rows of newly-sprouting vegetables, before returning to the outhouse to collect more “fertilizer”. The fellow looked from a distance to be vaguely familiar; when he approached us after finishing his work with a very sheepish look on his face, we immediately recognized him. Turns out our “Village Leader” is also the village poop-collector.

Making Katrinka’s work even more challenging is the fact that she must communicate with her associates in Chinese, which is difficult enough, especially considering that she must employ much arcane, technical archaeological terminology. But this is Henan Province and people here speak the local Chinese dialect. Henanhua, or Henan Language, is not as diametrically opposed to Putonghua (or Mandarin, the official national language, but one of just many dialects spoken throughout China) as, say, Cantonese, but it is still very difficult to understand. Imagine trying to hone your foreign-language listening-comprehension skills among people speaking with what sounds like cotton-balls stuffed in their mouths, let alone trying to conduct a professional and very expensive archaeological research project among colleagues you have to struggle to understand.

(Personally, I have discovered an interesting conundrum with regard to my own Chinese-speaking abilities (I’m not even attempting to learn the written language). It seems that the more I learn, the worse I get. It’s fairly easy to speak Chinese well if you only know a handful of phrases and words that you’ve practiced and tend to use over and over again in conversation, as was the case when I arrived here. But as my vocabulary has expanded and I’ve boldly asserted my self more intricately in conversations with people, I’ve begun to mix up my ‘guas’ and ‘guos’ and confuse my ‘xias’ and “xiangs”. People’s typical response to this is to either look at me like I’m from Pluto, or to drop to the floor in hyperventilating, quivering fits of laughter. Sometimes, only a perfectly annunciated Ni Hao “hello” is required to cause little old ladies to bust a gut and place a call right in front of me on their cell phone: “Hey Agnes, you’re never gonna believe this … are you sitting down? A white guy just said hello to me in Chinese!!! Baaaaaa, ha ha ha ha ha!!” I shall nevertheless not be deterred in my efforts to learn the language and will continue to hope that I do not inadvertently say something offensive or insulting to provoke the proverbial International Incident that always feels like it’s lurking just around the corner whenever I open my mouth.)

Mitigating the difficult conditions in which Katrinka has to do her work are her wonderful colleagues. The archaeology site director, Gu Fei, (pronounced, much to my delight and amusement, Goofy) is an interesting guy who has been very professional and very helpful with Katrinka’s research. He took us out to eat at a banquet with two of his colleagues from the nearby Erlitou excavation, which was notable mainly for the fact that Katrinka and I were then able to say we had dinner that evening with Gu, Du and Xu. Another fellow, Guo Tianping, is basically a fifty-two year-old peasant who grew up around the archaeology excavations at Erlitou. Consequently, he has a visceral knowledge and understanding of the artifacts of the Xia and Shang dynasties in a way that could never be attained purely from an academic education (which he does not have). Like many farmers who grew up around the various Henan archaeology sites, he has been hired as a technical assistant at the Yanshi Field Station. He has gone to great lengths to assist in Katrinka’s work and has genuinely touched us with his generosity and his easy-going outlook on life. He is a product of the Cultural Revolution and his world-view has been profoundly affected by it. Thanks to him, we have gained great insight into the lives, culture, and thinking of Guo’s generation of modern-day Chinese.

Also lightening the mood at the Ta Zhuang Field Station has been dozens of the village children, who having discovered our daily presence at the site, have paid us frequent visits. At the risk of sounding totally clichéd, these kids have filled our lives with joy and sunshine with their laughter and innocence. They are mind-bogglingly intelligent and educated for their ages and economic conditions, and they could give some American kids a lesson in manners and politeness. They want nothing else than for us to take their picture and, believe me, you couldn’t buy this kind of photography opportunity if you tried. These children have touched our hearts in so many ways, and only the most cynical and jaded individuals (well, I suppose that’s most of you) would not be totally moved by the experience of interacting with them.

Finally, China’s ongoing fascination with the NBA bears mentioning. It continues to amaze me. It’s not that there’s anything particularly unusual about a foreign country taking an interest in American professional basketball. It’s just that the Chinese are obsessed with it. It’s all they want to talk about. Yao Ming this, Yao Ming that. They’re all freakin’ Houston Rockets fans. I could barely contain my glee back in April when my Golden State Warriors actually beat the Rockets (albeit without Yao Ming) in a game that we all watched on TV at the field station. And now the kids are all sporting NBA jerseys, wearing their caps sideways, and listening to hip-hop with Chinese lyrics. At parks and playgrounds all over China, there are twenty-foot-tall statues of basketball players where previously statues of Chairman Mao once stood. I shudder to think of what might happen if, God forbid, these people ever discover golf.

David I. Greenberg

May, 2005

Yanshi, Henan, People’s Republic of China

Greetings from Tokyo, Japan - home of the ten-dollar cup of coffee

2004-08-08T09:10:00.000-07:00

Neither Katrinka nor I have ever been to Japan before. After two months in one of the world’s last great bastions of good ol’ fashioned Communism, it is refreshing to be in Asia’s Old Guard of Capitalism. Man, this place is civilized!

But before I regale you with my observations of Tokyo, I have some final thoughts on China:

Beijing changes so quickly that anything I can tell you about it is only valid for a couple of months or so. Really, the pace of change there is phenomenal. Beijing is truly a world-class city now, and it’s just going to keep on growing. It looks like Katrinka and I will be returning to China in November and I hope we will be able to find our way around Beijing; it will surely be an altogether different city when we come back. Anyang, I expect, will be largely the same, though hopefully it won’t still smell like poop!

Some of my favorite things about China:

1. Beijing Cab Drivers. They are just as opinionated as New York taxi drivers, though substantially more friendly. So much of what we know of Beijing is courtesy of the city’s cabbies. They really take pride in their city and enjoy sharing it with visitors. They especially appreciate the opportunity to learn a little bit of English (which they have been required to learn the basics of in time for the ’08 Beijing Olympics. Fat chance…) Most of all, they love that they can banter with us in their native Chinese, a rarity for them with foreign visitors. Their thick Beijing dialect of Mandarin has made it a bit challenging for us, however. They have a bizarre tendency to replace the trailing-end of words with an ‘R’, so that ‘Wangfujing’, for example, becomes ‘Wangfujar’. We’ve just played along with it and it works. It’s the equivalent of visiting Dallas and talking to the locals in a thick Texas drawl. We came to so appreciate our cab drivers that when we went to visit Zhoukodian, the site of the famous Peking Man caves, we brought our cab driver along with us. He had taken many fares to the site over the years but had never seen it himself. He was pretty blown away by it!

2. The Mountains. China’s mountains are incredibly beautiful and very distinctive. The craggy limestone peaks to the north and west of Beijing look imposing in the distance (on the rare day that they can be seen from the city). Once up in the mountains, the cool air, moss covered rocks, precipitous cliffs, and forested canyons are exhilarating. It’s like being right in the middle of one of those classic Chinese watercolor paintings. Now picture the Great Wall winding along the mountain peaks like a rollercoaster and you can imagine how breathtaking it all is. Henan Province’s mountains at Hongqiqu are equally impressive; their enormous granite rock-faces are reminiscent of California’s Sierra Nevada range but the temples and pagodas on top of them are not! I completely understand why mountains have been held sacred throughout Chinese history.

3. The Culture. The Chinese have found a way to successfully integrate the colorful customs and aesthetics of their long and ancient history into a modern and progressive society. Notwithstanding the factories and pollution left over from the People’s Republic of China’s early attempts at modernization and industrialization in the ‘50s and ‘60s, everything in china is built with ‘Feng Shui’ in mind and is very pleasing to the eye. I can’t imagine a more photogenic country (as my 10,000 photos from this trip attest). Sociologically, the Chinese people have proven themselves adept at rolling with all of the dramatic changes foisted upon them without getting run over. They’ve experienced one revolution after another throughout their history and have managed to keep their sense of humor and charm. This latest bloodless revolution has certainly been a positive one for the Chinese and it is long overdue. It’s gratifying to see them finally attaining a standard of living and status akin to the rest of the industrialized world without losing their fundamental sense of identity and culture. And it is pleasing that they’ve finally begun to embrace us Barbarians from the West!

Some of my least favorite things about China:

1. The Food. Unfortunately, the cuisine in China has been a major disappointment. I had high hopes for a memorable culinary adventure, given China’s famous regional cuisines. But while we certainly had some dishes that were unique and distinctive, such as certain types of very tasty fresh-water fish that are available only in China, most of what we ate was bland and oily at best and noxious and inedible at worst. Northern China is not known for its expansive variety of cuisine like Southern China is; still I had hoped for a far better overall culinary experience. Thankfully, our hotel in Beijing was owned and operated by the French, who know a thing or two about food. The steaks and French pastries served in the hotel’s restaurant was the best food we ate in China.

2. The Traffic. Amazingly, in just two years since we last visited China, automobile traffic has reached a critical mass. It used to be that the only vehicles we’d see on the road - besides the zillions of bicycles, scooters, and all the other funky pedal-powered contraptions - were taxis and the occasional big black Audi sedan with tinted windows (mostly driven by Communist Party higher-ups, rumor has it). Now that cars have become affordable to many average working-class citizens, Chinese cities are experiencing for the first time traffic jams and rush-hours. In Beijing alone, 430,000 new cars were sold last year. I shudder to think of what China’s (and the world’s) pollution problems will be like if all of a sudden 1.3 billion people have automobiles at their disposal.

Now that we’re here in Tokyo, China seems a world away. As a child, I was always fascinated by the aesthetic differences between China and Japan, to the extent that I could tell them apart. Now I’ve had the opportunity to see both cultures closely juxtaposed and the differences are profound.

Japan is, first and foremost, clean. Not only by comparison to China, either. Tokyo is probably the cleanest city I’ve ever been to - anywhere. You can eat off the sidewalks. In China, one uses bathrooms (if you can call them that) at one’s own peril. In Tokyo, my toilet is digital. Honest to God, it’s got a built-in control panel with a Graphical User Interface. I’m kind of afraid to use it without consulting the instruction manual…

The modern architecture here is not nearly as bold and innovative as in China, but it’s in keeping with the classic Japanese aesthetic of simplicity and elegance, and it’s very pleasing. Like Beijing, Tokyo has a vast and imposing mountain range (anchored by Mt. Fuji) to its west, but unlike Beijing, it has a river running through it and a harbor and bay to its south which gives the city a whole different ambiance.

There are millions of people here in Japan, as compared with billions in China. Tokyo is bustling and crowded. But whereas Chinese cities are the epitome of barely-controlled chaos, Tokyo is refined and ORDERLY. Cars actually stop at traffic lights. There are no weird diesel-powered, three-wheeled, awning-covered, hybrid rickshaws barreling down the sidewalk and one need not worry here about getting run over in a crosswalk by a donkey-pulled wagon hauling five peasants, a baby and a cat on top of a nine-foot tall stack of rotting watermelons driven on the wrong side of the road by a shirtless, ninety-year-old man whipping the donkey with one hand and chatting on a cell-phone with the other.

Japan is a train culture, with an mind-bogglingly extensive network of railway, subway, and light-rail mass transit. Consequently, Tokyo is delightfully free of traffic snarls on it roads and it’s really fun to ride the trains and people watch, as opposed to having to be cooped up in a taxi to get anywhere of practical distance in China.

The Japanese people are cultured, impeccably dressed, and very, very reverent. They are also extremely friendly; perhaps not as playful and flirtatious as the Chinese, but good-humored nevertheless. There is a calmness and serenity about them that contrasts sharply with the intensity of the Chinese. There is very little crime in both China and Japan. In China, it is because you can be summarily executed for, well, for just about anything. In Japan, the crime rates are extraordinarily low because, culturally, it is not acceptable. China is, of course, a very secular country; the Communists erased centuries of Taoist and Buddhist religion in their country by basically banning its public practice. But the Japanese have a very strong Buddhist belief system that carries over into everyday life, even among those that aren’t necessarily practicing Buddhists. It’s as much a lifestyle as it is a religion.

I would describe the Japanese aesthetic as elegant simplicity, as opposed to the Chinese’s gaudiness. Some of the ancient temples and shrines in both countries are virtually indistinguishable from one another, but otherwise the differences are stark: Whereas Chinese iconography tends toward bright reds and shimmering golds, brick and metals, dramatically sweeping curves and arches, and bold, highly-detailed embellishments; the Japanese style is defined by wood and rice paper, straight perpendicular lines, minimal embellishments, and earth-tones.

And suffice it to say that the Japanese cuisine that we’ve experienced here thus far has been a treat for the taste-buds. I know this will sound like a total cliché, but we had no idea what sushi was really supposed to taste like until we ate it here - the fish was the freshest and tastiest we’ve ever had. And the fruit here is in a class of its own. I don’t know how they do it.

Tokyo is an impressive city both in scale and appearance, and Japan’s countryside, with quaint little towns and ancient shrines and temples nestled between the mountains and beaches, is fairy-tale beautiful. But ultimately, Japan is a country not significantly unlike most other modern, industrialized nations in the sense that it has for all practical purposes assimilated with the rest of the world…it just happens to be dressed in Eastern accoutrements. In Japan I definitely know I’m visiting an exciting and beautiful foreign country with a lovely and charming culture. But China is so utterly exotic and totally different from anywhere else in the world, so singular in its style and unique in its ways, that it feels like I’m visiting another planet. That, of course, is what makes it so compelling. I can’t wait to go back!

- Dave

Anyang

2004-08-02T22:00:00.000-07:00

Greetings once again from the People’s Republic of China. Apologies for the long stretch between dispatches, but we’ve hardly had a moment to spare over the course of the last six weeks. We’re back in Beijing now after spending just over a month in the city of Anyang, where Katrinka worked on her archaeological research project. It’s been an adventure, to say the least!

Anyang is located in northern Henan, China’s most densely populated province, with ninety million people living in an area approximately the size of Oregon. Henan is also one of China’s poorest provinces and eighty percent of its citizens live in rural villages and on farms. Anyang is one of Henan Province’s “small” cities, with a population of a meager 5.2 million. Probably a million or so live in the central city (which to my eyes appears to be not much larger geographically than Berkeley) and the rest live on the outskirts and periphery of town.

At first glance, Anyang looks just like most other Chinese cities. There’s a central downtown area that is undergoing the archetypal refurbishment (scaffolding and cranes are everywhere) and sports a number of post-modern high-rises and brand-new shopping plazas. There’s a Ming-era (1300-1600 AD) city wall, bell tower and drum tower, typical of many cities in China, and there’s a Ming temple with a five-story pagoda (purportedly the first in China in which each successive level is wider than the one below it so that the pagoda tapers inward from top to bottom) in the very center of town.

The outer sections of the city, wrapped around Anyang’s downtown, are characterized by 1950s through 1970s dorm-like 4- and 5- story residential boxes and broad dusty streets lined with cubby-hole stores selling everything from bicycles and fly-swatters to cigarettes and bottled-water. There are street vendors selling mostly fruit (especially watermelons), but also some of just about everything else you could imagine. Like Beijing, the streets are filled with people and vehicles of all sorts (are donkeys considered vehicles?) but it doesn’t feel in the least bit crowded, just … populated.

Upon closer inspection, however, one begins to see fundamental distinctions between Anyang and Beijing. In the same sense that New York City or Los Angeles isn’t really a complete and true reflection of America, Beijing does not tell a visitor the whole story of China. In fact, many Chinese would argue that Beijing is really an anomaly, both in terms of having undergone such an enormous face-lift over the past decade and because of the fact that Beijing is now teetering on the edge of actually being a cosmopolitan and even fashionable city (at least cosmetically).

Anyang, on the other hand, is the “real deal”, clearly far more reflective of current Chinese culture and society as Anyang is far more similar to the “average” Chinese city than is Beijing and the other Chinese megalopolises, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. Katrinka & I had a sneak peek at Anyang when we visited for three days a couple of years ago, but a month’s stay this time has opened up the books.

The first significant thing that one notices rather quickly is that Anyang is fundamentally dirty. Most cities in China are not clean; Beijing is somewhat of an exception (though it is not by any stretch of the imagination sanitary), but Anyang is downright filthy. The streets and sidewalks are coated with a fine layer of dust which turns to mud after it rains. Black soot clings to the white brick walls of Anyang’s buildings; even heavy rains don’t seem to be able to wash it away. The hotel that we stayed at in Anyang, The Ancai, is barely two years old, yet it is already showing signs of accumulated grime. There are dead bugs lying overturned in the hotel’s hallways and apparently one of the Ancai’s restaurants has a pet rat, because as the critter zipped about from table to table one morning at breakfast, the staff giggled and “shushed” us as we looked on in shock and disbelief. We were also treated to the experience of the Ancai’s resident bats dive-bombing us in front of the hotel in the evenings; evidently they mistook us for giant mosquitoes. The Ancai is a four-star hotel, by the way, if that gives you a sense of perspective on what lesser accommodations in Anyang might be like in terms of cleanliness.

The air pollution in Anyang is epidemic; it’s rare that one can actually see the orb of the sun through the grey haze lingering over the city. The particulate matter in the air is compliments primarily of the steel mill, coal-fueled power plants (which serve Anyang, as well as other parts of China), and hundreds of factories that lurk on the edge of town. The dominant feature of Anyang’s skyline, besides the downtown high-rises and gothic radio masts, are the dozens of skyscraping smokestacks and monolithic cooling towers gathered like sentinels on the northern and western edges of the city. One evening, after a storm had quickly blown through town and cleared the air to some degree, we actually saw the sun appear through the dispersing clouds as it descended towards the western horizon. For a few fleeting moments, it seemed we’d witness a beautiful Anyang sunset. But then suddenly, as the sun dipped behind the billowing black, brown, and white smoke emanating from all the stacks, the sky abruptly darkened and took on a diffuse, eerie brownish-orange glow that looked almost apocalyptic. I’ll never forget it. It was at once stark and beautiful.

Because one of the archaeological excavations that Katrinka worked at is adjacent to the entrance of the steel mill, we had several opportunities to observe up close the consequences of the pollution caused by the antiquated factory. The streets and villages surrounding the mill were literally covered in dark black soot and the air was thick with a strange smoky mist. Convoys of enormous diesel trucks carrying coal, as well as hundreds of smaller diesel tractors, paraded through the mill’s front gates, adding to the noxious mix. The whole scene looked like Dickensian London at the height of the Industrial Revolution. We could taste the pollution in our throats. In fact, one late afternoon as we were leaving the archaeological excavation, we saw a mill worker staggering out the gate grasping his throat and choking profusely. He doubled over and vomited as four of his co-workers rushed over to assist him. It was all quite surreal.

The lack of cleanliness is China is largely a function of the country’s overarching pollution, but much of it is culturally endemic. It became clear to us quite quickly that the standards of cleanliness in China are far lower than one would hope for a country at this relatively advanced stage of its development. Public spitting, while now officially discouraged by the government, is still commonplace. I watched as a well-dressed businessman sitting in the Ancai hotel lobby noisily and quite ceremoniously clammed right on the carpet; no one else in the lobby so much as flinched, though the girl at the coffee bar seemed amused by the expression on my face. Food is eaten here only after careful consideration by the eater. The best food-preparation facilities at Anyang’s finer restaurants were of dubious standards; you can well imagine what the little hole-in-the-wall restaurants, food stalls and street vendors were like. Even the restaurants in our four-star hotel saw nothing wrong with re-using table settings. And food-service workers have apparently not been indoctrinated into the habit of washing their hands after using the bathroom (we have all-too-much empirical evidence of this) and even when they do, one still has to take into account the fact that most of China’s produce is grown on local countryside cooperatives where cleanliness standards are non-existent and the crops are fertilized with human feces, among God-knows-what-else.

The realities of village life came into focus one afternoon when we visited an old archaeological site way out in the countryside. The site is located at a small brick-making facility in the middle of a vast cornfield near an old village. Upon arriving at the village, parking at the side of the dirt road next to the cornfield, and opening the doors to the Jeep, we were immediately overwhelmed by the unmistakable smell of raw sewage. As we quickly slammed the doors shut and proceeded a few meters further up the road to escape the oppressive stench, our driver explained that we had just inadvertently parked at the spot where the collected sewage from the village residents (there’s no plumbing) is deposited and stored for use as crop fertilizer. When we returned a few hours later, the jeep was covered from front to rear and top to bottom with flies.

After hiking a half-mile or so through neck-high corn from the village road to the brick factory, we began our search for ancient pottery sherds in the outcroppings left behind after the fields were dug up to provide clay for the brick making process. I was quite pleased with myself after finding a number of sherds that I was able to distinguish as being of Shang dynasty origin (Katrinka’s area of study), as opposed to one of the many other dynastic sherd samples that abound in these fields, I looked down and saw what I recognized to be a bone sticking partially out of the ground. I unearthed it and ran excitedly over to Katrinka and our guide, Professor Tang Jigen, and asked them what kind of animal they thought the bone might belong to. Was it from a Shang dynasty sacrificial pit? Tang Jigen immediately disabused me of the notion that I found an animal bone as he informed me that what I held in my hand was a human femur. Wow! Did I hit the jackpot? Did I find evidence of a Shang tomb? No, Jigen explained, what I had found was the leg bone of a local villager who was probably buried rather recently. Not only do the countryside farmers fertilize their crops with their own excrement, they also bury their dead in the corn- and wheat-fields. In a nutshell, China’s produce is grown in a combination of cesspools and cemeteries. Can you say, “Hepatitis”?

I hurriedly (but gently) replaced the bone in the ground EXACTLY where I found it, hoping that its former owner didn’t miss it while it was gone for a few minutes, and decided that I’d done quite enough archaeology for one day.

While it was a bit unnerving to find the human bone, it should have come as little surprise because many of these Henan province villages and farms have been in use for over 4000 years. The particular village we were visiting is known to have been in constant use at least since Shang dynasty citizens lived there in 1700 B.C. That’s why we were there in the first place; each successive Chinese civilization was built on top of the previous one, leaving a multitude of well-preserved artifacts buried in the loess soil that is characteristic of China’s Northern Plain.

Loess soil is a type of earth defined by accumulated sediment blown in from elsewhere, in this case Inner Mongolia’s Gobi Dessert. The loess has a very pliable, clay-like characteristic that makes it a natural preservative of ancient Shang cities and also a wonderful substance with which to build the cave dwellings of central Henan province wherein some several million folks currently reside! (Along with local custom of crop-burning and the aforementioned exhaust from countless factories and coal-fueled power plants, the windblown loess is also a major contributor to the region’s unimaginable pollution.)

The city of modern-day Anyang is literally built on top of Yinxu (pronounced “Yin-shoe”), the former capital city of the Shang dynasty that was buried for millennia under the loess soil. It was here, between approximately 1700 B.C. and 1050 B.C. that the Shang kings, queens, and elites held court over a populace of lesser elites, commoners, and peasantry before being ultimately conquered by the Zhou (pronounced Joe”) dynasty that followed. Katrinka is in fact hoping to flesh out the emergence of social stratification in this early civilization by determining through the process of residue analysis and other procedures what the various Shang social classes ate (including the distinct possibility that they ate each other).

As there were Shang villages and burial grounds that radiated out from the central Yinxu site for miles into the modern-day countryside, anytime a new development of some kind is proposed in the Anyang area, a ‘salvage excavation’ is performed so that any archaeological artifacts can be removed before the construction begins (“Cultural Heritage” is again in vogue after many years of the government ignoring and rewriting China’s history, particularly during Mao’s Cultural Revolution). There were two such ‘salvage sites’ underway when we arrived in Anyang and it was a very lucky time for us to be there. One site, known as 220-KV for the old power plant next door, revealed several Shang house-foundations, a number of ash pits (basically communal garbage pits) containing fabulous pottery samples, and some tombs that held various human and animal sacrificial victims along with beautiful bronze vessels. The Shang buried their dead with various accoutrements for the afterlife; the higher one was in the social hierarchy, the more stuff they got buried with. One of the fellows whose tomb was unearthed at 220-KV must have been pretty important because he was entombed with no fewer than four sacrificial horses, an absolute rarity in the Shang dynasty.

The other salvage site currently under excavation, known as Dasikongcun (pronounced “Da-see-kung-soon”) for the adjacent village of the same name, was even more impressive. Here, in addition to several tombs (including a rare un-looted specimen), and a network of terracotta pipes (use uncertain), three totally intact chariots were found, complete with a full compliment of sacrificial drivers and horses. (Some of the human sacrificial victims, incidentally, were thought to have been of “foreign” origin; captured warriors from rival states and kingdoms, etc. Others were apparently willing participants, fulfilling their duty to follow their lords and masters into the afterlife). It was astounding to watch as workers at Dasikongcun gingerly dug around a big square block of loess earth in a deep pit, barely exposing the hub of one of the chariot’s wheels. A week later, that big square block in the ground had metamorphosed into a fully unveiled chariot.

More impressive, the excavators at both sites are local villagers who are so adept at their work that many of them can tell what manner of artifact lies beneath the earth simply by how the ground feels. This is a useful thing to know, as exemplified by the unusual incident of a buried horse skeleton being sliced in half right through it’s skull by excavators who didn’t realize it was there. Most of the local villagers are descended from ancestors who lived in the villages hundreds and even thousands of years ago; they all seem to know where to dig and what to dig for around Anyang.

Neither the 220-KV excavation, nor the Dasikungcun dig, would even exist if it wasn’t for the fact that developments were planned at both sites: an upgraded power plant at 220-KV and a new textile facility to replace an old cotton factory at Dasikongcun. One of the perils, however, of salvage excavations such as these, is that there are often competing interests that are trying to rush along the process. In the particular instance of Dasikongcun, a construction company was in a hurry to get started on their project. A grand total of only 53 Shang-era chariots have been unearthed over the course of a hundred years of Chinese archaeology and the three dug up at Dasikongcun were numbers 51 through 53. They were the first discovered in a long time. Number 53 was lost, however, when a construction crew waiting to build the new textile factory jumped the gun and snuck into the excavation late one night to do some preliminary work and accidentally crushed the chariot. Now that so many industries in China have been privatized, time is money and it’s commonplace to see construction crews working around the clock. If it had been a government construction crew, the accident never would have happened because government workers in China are like union workers in America: they don’t work one minute longer than they’re supposed to. Needless to say, there were a lot of enraged archaeologists and threatened lawsuits flying around the field station the day after the chariot was lost. Another incident, in keeping with the mythos of cursed archaeological digs, occurred at 220-KV several days later when a worker fell into a 29-meter deep tomb and ended up hospitalized in critical condition. Thankfully, he stabilized after a few days and his prognosis is good. It’s unbelievable that he didn’t end up paralyzed.

Part of the process of doing business in China, archaeological or otherwise, involves “guangxi” (pronounced “gwong-she”), a Chinese word that loosely translates to “networking”. It is important in Chinese culture to socialize with the people that you’re doing business or working with. Thus, Katrinka and I were feted with many a traditional Chinese banquet or dinner over the course of our stay in Anyang.

These banquets generally take place in a restaurant or hotel, often in a private room. Everyone is seated at a big round table with a rotating server on top. The host, who always sits at the seat of honor opposite the entrance to the room, orders a number of dishes for everyone in attendance. Depending on how many people are seated at the table, various meat, fish, and vegetable dishes will be served. When they arrive, the dishes are placed on the table’s rotating server, which the host spins around so the guests can help themselves to the food. Everyone just digs into the same dishes with their chopsticks; at big banquets you have to be quick with the sticks or else a dish you like might spin right past you before you have a chance to grab something off the plate.

One nevertheless must be careful in choosing the dishes from which one eats, as Katrinka learned one night at dinner when she ladled a spoonful of soup out of a bowl, brought the spoon to her lips, and halted just in the nick of time when she realized it contained a foot (of unknown origins, I might add). At another dinner, a dish was brought out and we were told it was gou rou (“go-roe”), but I mis-heard it as giu rou, which means ‘pork’ (and is pronounced, ironically, “jew-roe”). I dug in, thinking that it was a little tough, but not altogether bad. Katrinka, I noticed, was looking at me with an expression of disbelief and disgust. What’s the problem? This giu rou is pretty good! As Katrinka clarified for me that I was eating gou rou, not giu roe, I excused myself from the table and headed for the lavatory, wondering what breed of dog it was that I just ate.

Guests are expected to eat as much or as little of a given dish as they like, no one is offended if you take a pass on the donkey meat on a bed of jellyfish. However it is de rigueur to participate in the prolific toasts proposed by the meal’s host. This is unfortunate, as the beverage of choice at Chinese banquets is the notorious “Baijiu” (pronounced “buy-joe”), a clear liquor known as “liquid lobotomy” that tastes like licorice combined with gasoline and shoe polish. Baijiu contains a minimum of 52% alcohol, the better varieties up to 67%. It is customarily served in a little miniature shot glass, but some hosts, particularly those who like to see innocent Westerners become incomprehensible in a matter of half an hour or so, insist on serving it in wine glasses. Baijiu is NOT to be sipped; it is to be slammed like a shot after each toast is made. Typically, four or five toasts are proposed before any food is served; as the evening wears on and more baijiu is consumed, more and more toasts are proposed. By the end of the banquet, just about anything is reasonable to toast to: Today is Wednesday! Drink up! Where baijiu is concerned, hosts do not take “no” for an answer. On the occasions where we tried to politely decline, our hosts spouted off on long soliloquies in barely intelligible colloquial Chinese, with the few understandable fragments of their speeches containing words like “communist party” and “or else!” This, combined with the glowering looks on their faces and their feigned incredulity that we would dare even consider insulting them by not partaking, convinced us that participating in the baijiu ritual was in our best interest. Bear in mind, please, that our hosts were mostly prestigious international archaeologists and renowned professors of anthropology (though in some cases they were local city of Anyang dignitaries and even a CCTV documentary producer) and each and every one of them put down enough baijiu themselves to induce coma in “ordinary” drinkers. Most of them handled it with aplomb, though a few of them became embarrassingly, staggeringly drunk. Katrinka and I tended to handle it surprisingly well, given our novice baijiu status; I will spare you the gruesome details of the occasion in which I most decidedly did not handle it well (mainly because I don’t remember them…what I do know I was told the next day by a very sympathetic and clearly amused hotel staff.)

Drinking seems to be deeply ingrained in the Anyang culture; not surprising considering that the Shang dynasty’s Queen Fu Hao was entombed with enough wine and drinking vessels to last for several after-lifetimes. Rarely a night went by that we did not witness someone staggering drunk through the hotel lobby, helped along by friends. Invariably, someone would come up to me at my table in the lobby where I was working on my laptop and, with an ear to ear smile on their face, drunkenly try to talk to me in Chinese about where I’m from and what I’m doing in Anyang, while unknowingly flicking their cigarette ashes in my coffee. Another not-uncommon sight was a taxi parked in front of the hotel with a pair of legs flailing out the window while two or three doormen attempted to push them in. Muffled female cries of “Bu! Bu! Bu!” (“No! No! No!”) could be heard emanating from the cab.

Nevertheless, Anyang’s citizens’ enthusiasm for baijiu, as well as pijiu (beer) and hongjiu (wine), has not mitigated their fundamental character. I simply can’t over emphasize how lovely everyone has been to us (even the inebriated folks). The Chinese are a supremely gentle people and their genuine friendliness is contagious. If people in almost any other country were as nice as the Chinese are, it would almost certainly arouse suspicion. But here, the friendliness is so obviously sincere and genuine that it’s almost impossible to ignore. It’s not just toward us, either; they are incredibly affectionate with one another.

For me, the most fun aspect of interacting with the Chinese is enjoying and sharing their playfulness and sense of humor. Even across the language divide, it has been easy to share a laugh with most people. Those moments of mutual understanding have comprised my fondest memories of this trip. I know my spoken Chinese has improved because I can now elicit laughter because of what I said right, as opposed to what I said wrong! Still, one must be careful of what one says in China. One facet of Chinese culture is that if you tell someone that you like something that they have, they will sometimes give it to you. At breakfast one morning in the Ancai Hotel, Katrinka and I noticed that a waitress had a little pink plastic cat attached to the key chain on her belt. It was one of those little trinkets that come with some brands of baijiu. Katrinka told her how cute it was and the waitress gave it to her. The next morning at breakfast, Katrinka again thanked the waitress and told her how much she loves cats. The waitress told us that she had another cat that she wanted to give to us and she would bring it the following day. The next afternoon there was a knock on our hotel room door, and standing there with a broad grin on her face was the waitress with a cardboard box inside of which was a real live tiny white kitten named Mi Mi. I had to pretend to be allergic in order to worm out of this one.

Unlike the citizens of China’s largest cities, the residents of Anyang have not had much, if any, contact with foreigners. One has to bear in mind that whereas an American could visit most of the world’s countries and easily blend in, a Westerner in China stands out like a neon sign. China is not a multi-cultural state – its 1.3 billion people are virtually all Chinese – so when a foreigner of any ethnicity other than Chinese shows up in a city like Anyang, it’s a major spectacle. Katrinka and I could hardly walk 10 feet down the street without attracting a crowd, or at the very least, eliciting calls of “hello!” People in Anyang are quite curious about foreigners and are particularly interested in Americans. Overwhelmingly, the two competing impressions that the Chinese seem to have about America are, 1) America is a very beautiful place, and 2) America is a very dangerous place. I can’t necessarily argue with either point. China is certainly every bit as enchantingly beautiful as America, but not nearly as dangerous in terms of street crime. It’s really incongruous to me that Katrinka could safely walk the streets of Anyang or Beijing alone at night, but would be taking a serious risk doing the same in Berkeley, one of the most educated cities in the wealthiest nation in the world.

It was this curiosity of foreigners that precipitated one of our more interesting adventures in Anyang. I spent one Saturday just walking up and down Zhongzhou Road taking photographs of street life (little kids and the elderly always prove to be the most intriguing subjects). I sat down on a park bench in a plaza where several hundred people were whiling away the afternoon and quickly became the center of attention. Twenty or so people, including eight or ten school-aged children, gathered around and began interrogating me about America. They tried gallantly to converse in English, which is a favored endeavor among the Chinese. They’re particularly interested in distinguishing between American English and British English pronunciation. Soon enough, one guy insinuated himself to the front of the crowd and began speaking to me in semi-cohesive English. He claimed to be a schoolteacher and since he appeared to be associated with the schoolchildren gathered around, I had no reason to think otherwise. Then he dropped the bomb: He asked me if I would be interested in teaching English for a few hours one day to local middle-school children, and offered to pay me. I told him that I’d love to do it, it would be fun, and he certainly didn’t have to pay me. I told him about Katrinka, that she and I were here to do Archaeology, and that I was sure Katrinka would love to join me in teaching English at the middle-school. I gave him my hotel room number, not really thinking that he’d actually call (if he did, I figured, I could always have some fun by teaching the kids grammatically incorrect English, just to mess with their heads!)

Sure enough, a couple of days later he showed up at the hotel with an ENTOURAGE, and Katrinka and I met with them in the lobby. It quickly became clear that the guy, Chen was his name, wasn’t actually a schoolteacher, but in fact worked for some local Anyang company that wanted to sponsor the English lessons for the Anyang kids. His boss had come along with him as part of his entourage and though she didn’t speak a word of English, she made it clear via Shen’s translation that she was extremely excited about our agreeing to teach the kids and hoped we could do it as soon as possible.

Obviously, something was fishy about this thing, but Katrinka and I nevertheless conveyed that we would try to schedule something as soon as time permitted. We were very busy with Katrinka’s archaeology, however, and couldn’t commit to a specific date until we had a better picture of what Katrinka’s work would entail. We told them we’d be in touch within a few days.

Well, the entourage showed up at the hotel every subsequent evening for a week, trying to pin us down to a date that we’d teach the class. Our schedule was still packed from morning to night with Katrinka’s work and that was our priority. We just couldn’t commit to a date yet. Shen’s boss became increasingly arrogant and demanding, claiming that they’d had signs made for the event and that the kids were anticipating it with much enthusiasm. They pointed out that the students would be leaving for summer vacation in a couple of days, so we just had to do it soon or else we’d send the kids home disappointed. Not wanting to offend them, we said we’d see what we could do.

By this point we were so suspicious of these people’s motives that we were about to tell them to get lost. At the very moment Katrinka and I were about to walk away in frustration, one of the Archaeologists working in Anyang for the summer field season walked into the hotel lobby with his students from Canada’s University of British Columbia in tow. They had been out for dinner and had been drinking (guess what?) lots of baijiu and so Professor Jing Zhichun was in a pliant mood. We thought, great, here’s an opportunity to have Jing help us get out of our awkward situation, but before we could get a word in edgewise, the boss-lady was all over him, blathering away in Chinese. Jing smelled a rat, too, but figured it would be worth a roll of the dice for us to go to the middle school and teach the class. Jing would come along with us and bring a handful of his students as it would potentially be a good experience for them, too. If we got to the school and it turned out to be a total scam, we’d make a break for it. Katrinka and I were happy that at least we weren’t going to have to deal with this ordeal by ourselves!

The following afternoon, we all taxied over to the middle-school, which was located on the edge of town near all the factories and power plants. It was located in the middle of what was obviously a very poor village, but when we pulled through the front gates we were greeted by a welcoming committee of well-dressed students and teachers. Upon disembarking the taxis, we saw the first sign of trouble, literally. A huge red banner with white Chinese lettering was strung across a wall. There was a smaller one underneath it. We asked Jing to translate and he told us what the larger sign said:

“Number 25 Middle School Welcomes Dr. David I. Greenberg (from America) and Miss Katrinka Reinhart (from Russia) To Our School.”

(As to where they came up with idea that Katrinka is from Russia, we can only guess. As far as where they came up with the idea that I’m a doctor, I don’t know and I don’t care. Just because my doctorate has been conferred by a middle school in no way diminishes its value, thank you very much. Henceforth, I should like to be addressed as Dr. Greenberg.)

In spite of our better judgment, we proceeded on into the classroom and surveyed the scene: 100 or so kids packed into the tiny room, a dozen teachers, and…a TV camera. Professor Jing had by this time figured out what was really going on, but he felt we couldn’t just walk out and disappoint all the children. So, after a ceremonious introduction, I dutifully climbed up to the podium, sweat pouring off my brow, and faced the wide-eyed kids (thinking to myself that my English is really nothing to write home about and, man, everyone’s gonna really regret this!)

Just then, Shen handed me a book that was opened to a page filled with a list of various English words, such as ‘green’, ‘mountain’, and ‘lake’, with the different vowel sounds underlined for emphasis. On the opposite page was another list of different words with the varying consonants underlined. All I had to do, Shen whispered in my ear, was recite the words out loud so that the kids could hear them pronounced properly by a native English speaker, and pause after each word so the kids could recite them back.

“Goat”, I said meekly, addressing the smiling schoolchildren.

“GOAT!!!,” replied the kids in unison, almost knocking me over backwards.

“Barge,” I recited.

“BAAAAAARGE!,” came back the reply. I was getting the idea.

“GIRRRRL!,” I said.

“GIRRRRL!!!,” the kids responded. I was having fun now!

“Televi-SHHHH-ion,”

“TE-LE-VI-SHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-ION!!!”

And so on, and so on, until I had worked my way through the list. Upon finishing, Shen asked me to say something in Chinese to the kids, so I said the only thing I could think of at that moment:

“Wo bu shuo Zhong Guo hua.” It means, “I don’t speak Chinese.”

Now, Shen invited Katrinka up to the podium. Professor Jing, sitting with his U.B.C. students in the back of the classroom, looked at Katrinka and shook his head; he wanted us to get the hell out of there. But the lights were on, the camera was rolling, and the kids were all looking with anticipation at Katrinka, so up to the podium she came and read through the same list of words that I did. She made it a point to have a little fun with it; when she arrived at the word ‘hello’, she pronounced it the way someone with an exaggerated German or Yiddish accent would say it. We could barely keep from laughing out loud when the roomful of Chinese kids retorted with a deep and throaty,

“Xxxchxx-ello!”

Now that we were done with our English pronunciation lesson, Shen and company asked us to come along with them so that they could take some film footage of us by the red signs outside, then we’d come back in and teach another lesson. No way. We were getting out of there at all costs. As Professor Jing distracted the boss-lady by yelling at her in Chinese (as the camera continued to roll, by the way) the rest of us made a break for it. Shen and his cohorts literally chased us out the front gates of the school, through the village, and all the way out to the main road where we were able to flag down a couple of taxis and make our escape.

Now Jing had his chance to explain what the scam was all about. Shen and his boss were operating a company that is putting out a book of English lessons that they’re trying to sell to the Anyang schools. They figured the book would have a great deal more credibility if it was endorsed by some authentic American English speakers. Our adventure at the middle school was their attempt at filming an info-mercial for the book!

Jing phoned Shen the following day and threatened him and his company with a lawsuit if they went ahead and broadcast their info-mercial, which was clearly made in covert and dishonorable fashion. Tang Jigen, the director of the Anyang Archaeological Field Station, had a good friend at the local Anyang CCTV station, whom he called in an attempt to pre-empt the broadcast. A few days later, as Katrinka and I were working away at the field station, some workers came up to us laughing, explaining that they saw us on TV, along with Professor Jing, and that we looked pretty darn silly. Foolish, even. Turns out that the book people pulled an end-run and went to the Anyang County TV station after being told by the city station that they wouldn’t broadcast the info-mercial.

In spite of it all, the experience was fun and a lesson learned for us all. Plus, we got to take an inside look at a rural Chinese middle school. But what, I was curious to know, did that smaller red sign underneath the big one at the middle school say?

The sign, Jing explained, was his big clue to what the scam was all about. It was an advertisement for the English book! So if you’re ever in the Anyang area and you’re looking for a good book of English lessons for Chinese people, I highly recommend - and with God as my witness, this is the actual title - “Dave’s New Concepts of English.” Let the buyer beware…

Alright…enough of my rambling. Hopefully you have a pretty good sense of what our experience in the heartland of China has been like at this point (those of you that actually read this far, anyway. Maybe I’ll send out a spot quiz…) I’ll leave you with one more little tidbit that should complete the picture of Anyang for you all.

The Ancai Hotel pipes music throughout the building. It can be heard in the hallways, lobby, restaurants, and even in the rooms if you flip a switch on. The problem is, they play the same four tunes, all day long, every single day. That, in and of itself, would be maddening enough. But, inexplicably, one of the four tunes is the theme from “The Godfather,” of all things. I don’t think the hotel management has even the slightest idea what the song is! Now, imagine spending a solid month in one of the most Chinese of Chinese cities while being constantly bombarded with this most incongruous music. Try as I may, I simply can’t wrap my brain around the idea of Don Vito Corleone hangin’ out in China. It just doesn’t work…

- Dave

Boomtown Beijing

2004-06-13T11:00:00.000-07:00

June 13, 2004 Beijing, P.R.C.

Beijing is booming! It’s really astonishing just how far this town has come in the two years since we were last here. We’ve been here a week and I get it now: this is a Market Economy. In fact, China is seeking world status as such and its recent admittance to the World Trade Organization has clearly hastened many of the changes that have occurred here over the last couple of years. Beijing is a vast, sprawling city of 16 million people and the skyline is packed to the horizon in all directions with scaffolding and construction cranes. Dozens of new developments, some the size of downtown Oakland, are springing up all over town. When Katrinka and I took a taxi to visit the Great Wall at Badaling, an hour and a half drive north of central Beijing, it seemed like there was no end to the city rolling by. Two years ago, there was at least a rural buffer between Beijing and the majestic, craggy-peaked green mountains of Badaling.

Beijingers clearly now have substantial disposable income and lots of new consumer-goods to spend it on. They seem comfortable with their new buying-power, though some locals have lamented the downside of the new Market-Economy. One woman complained of now having to pay for certain goods and services that were heretofore provided or subsidized by the government. Liu Ching Zhu, Director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Archaeological Institute (who, by the way, took Katrinka and I out to what I would have to say was the best meal I’ve yet had in China), summed up much of the recent developments as an “invasion of Western culture” (but he said it with a smile on his face). Nevertheless, the Chinese have adapted to millennia of competing and rapidly-changing economic and political philosophies. For a people that only thirty years ago were living in the hell of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and as recently as 15 years ago were still wearing green Maoist uniforms, it’s remarkable how smoothly they’ve transformed themselves yet again.

If the economic and social changes here are readily apparent, the political changes are not so overtly obvious. Politics are still not a subject readily discussed by the Chinese, but one surmises from the looser, more permissive atmosphere in Beijing that the new Chinese Communist Party administration has fostered a political climate, at least domestically, that is perhaps less oppressive than in recent years. Beijing, being the capital of China, appeared two years ago to be noticeably more conservative and traditional than other cities we visited. It was as if Beijingers still weren’t quite sure how to behave so close to the seat of power in China. Those tentative steps toward a more open society in the capital are now great leaps that seem mitigated only by the ubiquitous presence of the green-uniformed Chinese People’s Armed Police Force (a spin-off from the People’s Liberation Army that is charged with keeping the peace, suppression of political dissent and quelling uprisings, among other things) who are still stationed virtually everywhere. They just don’t seem quite as threatening as they once did (not that I’m about to test the issue).

One gets the sense that Chinese efforts at modernization have an irrepressible momentum at this point, up to and including the wholesale destruction of many of Beijing’s storied hutongs, which are quickly being replaced with modern high-rises. At least the architectural sensibilities of the new developments are thoughtful, innovative, and pleasing. Still, the remaining hutongs (in which one quarter of Beijing’s citizens still live) represent a significant aspect of Beijing society, as they provide the setting for so much of the festive nature of life in this city. With their central courtyard, narrow alleys and multiple compact living-quarters, these interconnected neighborhoods, some of which are more than 600 years-old, foster an intensely strong sense of community. Hutong residents all live close together and interact with one another on a daily basis, some in the same hutong for their entire lives.

Beijing is a city that is truly alive and life here is lived on the streets, which are virtually never deserted. As Katrinka and I negotiate the labyrinth of a hutong’s alleyways, it conjures thoughts of a simpler life, a simpler time. Residents sit in little storefronts selling watermelons and ice cream or cigarettes and bottled water (the tap water in China is still unsafe to drink, even by the locals). A group of old-timers are gathered at folding tables on the sidewalk playing cards and Chinese checkers while others are napping in the back of a makeshift three-wheeled motorized cart. A young couple is playing with their toddler, who waves with the help of his parents as we walk by. Giggling teen-aged girls chat on their cell-phones, a middle-aged man pedals down the street with his son straddling the front of the bike and a 4-foot-tall stack of cardboard balanced on the back. A gray-haired woman wearing a sundress is sweeping the street. A kid no more than 18 years old stands stiffly, dressed in the green uniform of the Public Security Bureau, staring straight ahead and trying hard to look very serious. Many folks just sit on steps or in doorways, smoking cigarettes and looking quite content. Most people say “Ni hao”, Chinese for hello, as we pass by. Some say “hello” and make valiant attempts at conversation, as one of China’s most popular pastimes these days is practicing their very limited English. More often, we end up chatting in Chinese (well, Katrinka chats in Chinese, I just nod and say, “Dui, dui, dui”, the Chinese equivalent of “right, right, right…”)

At 9 PM on a Thursday night, men are getting haircuts and women are being made-up in tiny hole-in-the-wall storefront salons. Groups of people are gathered under the orange glow of tasseled Chinese lanterns in restaurants large and small, classy and dank, eating dumplings and drinking beer. Two or three hundred people are settled in the plaza in front of one of Beijing’s two old Catholic churches, listening to three musicians play classical Chinese music on Ming-period instruments, while across the street, teenagers are hanging out in front of a small shop selling NBA accoutrements (basketball is HUGE here) as American rap music is emanating from a portable radio (earlier, we passed a beauty salon in which youngsters were listening to rap music with Chinese lyrics). Young couples stroll in the evening heat with their infants and young children, eating ice cream while elderly women lounge in random chairs and dilapidated couches set out on the sidewalk, appearing for all the world to be just exactly where they belong. A man wearing a red hat and apron deep-fries scorpions for Katrinka…

Beijing’s broad boulevards and narrow back-streets are also the setting for the daily Zen-ritual of millions of people transporting themselves through the city. Like a great dance, they walk, ride bicycles and scooters, and drive all manner of improvised and cobbled-together vehicles - with little attention to traffic regulations, which seem to be regarded as mere suggestions rather than actual rules. It’s as though if one pedestrian, car driver or bicycle rider were just a millisecond off the timing of his role in the dance, the whole city would simultaneously crash into itself. Yet somehow it all flows as though perfectly choreographed. A bicyclist rides by on the street in the direction opposite the flow of traffic and disappears harmlessly into an onrushing sea of cars and bikes, just as a little Citroen automobile drives down the sidewalk, parting pedestrians like Moses parted the sea. Nobody seems particularly surprised by it, let alone disturbed.

At the risk of making a very broad generalization, I find the Chinese to be playful, sincere, flirtatious, and warm and I’m completely charmed by them. The Chinese haven’t been jaded (yet); they have a youthful innocence about them that’s unfettered by naivety. These people have been through a lot; they’ve just mutually agreed, it seems, to get along with each other and to be for the most part happy. Despite the fact that oceans of people are constantly competing for space and resources, the pace of life is unhurried and civilized. No one appears frustrated or uptight; on the contrary, people seem to be rather enjoying their experience and living good-naturedly in the moment. It’s disarming and it’s infectious. I suppose that if one is accustomed to living among over a billion other people, one simply accepts it as ordinary. Still, it’s remarkable to realize that I never feel claustrophobic or crowded, surrounded by so much humanity. Indeed, I generally feel quite at ease. Katrinka and I have been treated with nothing but genuine respect since we’ve been here (which comes as a relief given the current nature of America’s political position in world affairs). But more significantly, the Chinese treat each other with real and palpable respect. It’s refreshing!

One of the highlights of our stay in Beijing was a visit to the enormous Beijing Dirt Market, where acres of antique Chinese furniture and art are sold and tens of thousands of stone, ceramic, and bronze statues of everyone from Buddha to Chairman Mao are lined up in formation like sentries along with lions, tigers, dragons, frogs, horses, and bizarre creatures that combine the aforementioned with human bodies. We had lunch that day at a nearby McDonalds, where Dinosaur McNuggets and Shrimp pies were featured on the menu.

Another highlight was a day at the Beijing Zoo. Nothing could have prepared me for the experience of standing six feet away from a Giant Panda. All of a sudden, it dawns on you: Wow, I’ve never actually seen a panda before! These glorious creatures are even more beautiful and amazing than you would imagine. The pandas have an admirable lifestyle, too: they eat copious amounts of bamboo, rub their tummies for a few minutes, then they eat some more bamboo. This goes on for hours. I could’ve spent hours more watching them do it.

We’re off to Anyang now to get started on Katrinka’s dissertation research. We’ll be in touch from there.

- Dave

Greetings from the People’s Republic of China

2004-06-06T22:41:00.000-07:00

June 6th, 2004 Beijing, P.R.C.

Greetings from Beijing. It’s wonderful to be back here in China two years after my first visit to this amazing country. I feel an unexpected and very comfortable sense of familiarity; this place feels like mine!

It took a full twenty-four hours to get here, from the time I left my house in Berkeley to the time we checked into our hotel in Beijing. Included in our travels was a stop in Narita, Japan, near Tokyo. I had hoped to get a sense of what Japan is like from our three-hour layover at Narita, but, alas, the scenery outside the airport terminal windows was more reminiscent of suburban Houston than of Tokyo. Just as I was despairing of the lack of Japanese ambience, however, a platoon of sumo wrestlers in full ceremonial regalia seated themselves in the terminal (see attached pictures). You want ambience, Dave? Here’s the ultimate! We also were treated to another surprise: while flying over Japan on our way from Narita to Beijing, we flew right over Mt. Fuji (see attached pictures). So we did end up feeling like we got a reasonable ‘taste’ of Japan. We’re hoping to be able to stay a few days in Japan on our way home in August so we can get more than a taste. My initial observations of Japan, a fleeting first-impression from three hours in an airport, is that it’s a very *clean* place: you could eat off the floor of the lavatory (and unlike back in the Bay Area, no one was actually doing that).

The moment we stepped off the plane in Beijing, we instantly recognized the Chinese smell. Not a good smell, not a bad smell, just a very distinctive smell that immediately triggered familiarity. Japan didn’t have it. China *definitely* had it. It reminded me that there’s so much more than visual imagery that defines a place. I wish there was a way to capture the sounds and scents with each photograph we take. I guess the camcorder will cover the aural aspect when we get around to figuring out how to operate it.

We are staying at the Peace Hotel at the Wangfujing, the same place we stayed for much of our last visit to Beijing. We’re five or six blocks away from the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square (which, incidentally, my Uncle Bill reminded me on the phone, was the site of historic tragedy fifteen years ago to the day that we arrived here). Things have certainly changed around here since then. In fact, I’d say things have changed dramatically even since our last visit just two years ago. Whereas when we were last here, Beijing seemed like a city in evolution, it now seems to have evolved:

Socially, Western fashions and advertising are ubiquitous. Some people are wearing things that would have been considered dangerously risqué two years ago, at least around here. We’ve even observed some teens wearing t-shirts emblazoned with American heavy-metal band insignias; this just blocks away from the seat of the central Chinese communist government. There’s generally a sense of “permissiveness” in the air that we definitely didn’t feel here the last time.

Economically, Beijing is rockin’. The sheer volume of consumer goods available here (including high-end, big-ticket items such as expensive cameras, TVs, and even cars (we saw a Roll-Royce dealership) is mind-boggling. And people are lined-up buying them. There is a book store nearby that has seven floors (it prominently features a Chinese translation of “The da Vinci Code”) and in addition to vast numbers of books (so much for censorship?), the store carries a plethora of consumer-electronics (much of which I’ve never seen in America) and even a selection of ten-thousand dollar pianos. The place was so packed that we could barely move in it! Everyone has a cell-phone here and the selection of different models is twenty times what’s available in the U.S. The populace here certainly has money to spend.

This is not to say that there is no stratification here; we’vetraveled through some parts of town that are clearly not as prosperous as others. However, we still haven’t seen anything that would pass for a real slum in the U.S. Some of the hutongs (old 19th-century neighborhoods characterized by winding alleys around a central courtyard that are rapidly being torn down and replaced with modern high-rises) and even some of the mid-20th century-built districts may be in somewhat of a state of disrepair and resemble tenements, but I don’t see any abject poverty, save for the occasional beggar on the street (which, by the way, we saw virtually none of the last time we were here). It will be interesting to see if the rural provinces of China have evolved economically to anywhere near where the big cities apparently have.

We’ll have that opportunity on June 11th, when we travel to Anyang, Henan Province, where Katrinka will begin compiling sample and data for her research. We met on Friday with Jiang Bo, a professor at the Chinese Archaeology Institute, who received us with a warm welcome (and requested that Katrinka give a presentation to his students when she’s finished with her research at Anyang!) Jiang Bo has made our arrangements for travel to and accommodations in Anyang and we’re looking forward to going there. In the meantime, we have several days to experience and enjoy Beijing. We’re going to try to get to the Beijing Zoo to see pandas! We’ve already been to the Beijing Dirt Market, sort of a flea market for Chinese antiques. Photos will be forthcoming.

Just being here, walking around this vast and still rapidly growing city, is a phenomenal experience. It’s exhilarating in a way that not much else in life is. I am so lucky to have this opportunity to be here (and lucky that Katrinka brought me with her in spite of my natural inclination to trigger International Incidents, intentionally or otherwise…)

Finally, I have to say that my inpressions of this culture from my last visit have been subsantially reinforced: These people are warm and playful and sincere in a a way that is refreshing and inspiring! I really, truly love it here.

Will be in touch again soon.

- Dave