Category Archives: China

China, Green

Crayfish with the Shell

Yangshao


The Chinese find it both amusing and slightly bemusing at some Westerner’s squeamishness at eating non-filleted fish or meat on the bone. If anything cooked and eaten on the bone it is so much more delicious. When you wander through certain supermarkets with their neatly vacuum packed slabs of nondescript meats it is easy to imagine they are some form of injection moulded polymer. Is it this distancing of where food comes from what is resulting in the vasts amounts of food wasted? Lost is the respect of  what we are eating.

Architecture, China, Lighting

Great Impressions

Hangzhou


Impression Westlake 印象西湖
A sad love story produced by Zhang Yimou, music by Kitaro, performed by a cast who dance on water. It may be a tourist attraction atop an artificial lake, but it is impossible not to be impressed.


China, Design

Keys to the Past

Sun Hing


Opening the door to the old family village home, aunty unlocks history and brings it alive. Stories and memories are recalled as we move from room to room, object to object. Your grandma lived here, your great-grandfather made these to catch massive fish…

I had returned to the ancestral home of my mum’s parents, and it was over these 3 days that 3 worlds gathered to dine and laugh together. We had arrived from Hong Kong, a world of stability, in search of stories that linked us to the past. We were looked after by our relatives in Sun Hing, who living in a world sprinting into development, were creating the future. And we found distant relations, who were living in a world that was clearly the result of a complex political not so distant past.

 

China, Design

Full Circle

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As I sit on a mini-bus stuffed 3 times over capacity from Wulingshan to Sanya, I reflect on memorable transportation encounters of the trip. Back in London I would have been somewhat grumpy at the prospect of 3 hours with a rucksack on my lap and 2 medium-framed ladies standing in what technically is the legroom that comes with the ticket of my seat. However being in China, I was instead thankful that not only did I have a seat but also a window to look out of. I had endured worse, much worse, plus these people needed to get home. While for me these episodes were one way trips, for everyone else it was a weekly, if not daily reality.

I have come to understand from my short time in China that for all the negative publicity in the news and the speculative hype regarding its economic development, for most people living outside the sphere of direct political influence, life is just about “getting on with it”. For those lucky enough to be reasonably well-off and well-connected it is an exciting endless sea of opportunities. For everyone else, while decisions made by the central Beijing government (whether right or wrong) may have a direct influence on their lives, all they can they do is adapt  to make the best of their situation. Changes are happening unimaginably rapidly, and the changes are happening to an unimaginably number of people.

It is because of these changes and people that I leave China with mixed emotions. I am torn between the negative destruction of the old and the positiveness of the new. For those living inside, changes can be either sources of opportunity or sources of struggle and disruption. Being amidst such chaos of people and noise has been at times overwhelmingly claustrophobic, but it has also given me the chance to see and experience many moments of surprising community humanness amongst strangers.