Near failures
Inarticulations by TC Lin
Ask me anything! Well, almost anything.
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teachu asked:Where are you from?
That depends on how you define where someone is from. Where was I born? Where did I grow up? What is my nationality? Where did my ancestors live? Which ones?
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Many shops and vendors in Taiwan are family businesses, overseen by the big boss, usually the eldest living male, but in practice the day-to-day running might be handed over to younger, even more capable hands. There is a balance of real power and apparent authority, a struggle that is at times neither successfully hidden nor even subtle.
I’m not saying that was the case here; I know nothing of this family or their business. I was just passing through a day market in Xinzhuang, and old market with decades if not centuries of history, a dark, wet, bustling warren one sheet of corrugated metal from the open sky above. The old patriarch sat serenely, overlooking the alley, with its streams of unidentifiable goop, rats, its bicycle-borne wares and styrofoam boxes held aloft by sweating men and women. Behind him, ever busy with the comings and goings of the shop’s produce, stood the real power of the store. She seemed ill at ease with her position behind the throne, but she stayed put as I took the picture, as well as when I moved on.
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I was in Quanzhou, on the southeast coast of China, not too long ago. We’d traveled there by ship from Taiwan; a great portion of the Han people living in Taiwan in modern times are descended from this area, so I could communicate with the locals not only in Mandarin but also the local Minnan dialect. In fact, my traveling companions often masqueraded as locals in order to get better rates.
We were walking around the city one cold night during the Chinese New Year break, and I paused to take a shot of a man getting his hair cut by a barber who seemed so preoccupied with a phone call that she could only snip away with one hand. It was hard to tell if his expression of utmost loathing was confined to either her or me; most likely, when he saw my camera in the window, he was simply thinking that this day was just going from bad to worse.
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I was taking the bus along Nanjing East Road one day when we stopped at a traffic light. I looked over to see another bus right next to mine, and a young woman sitting across from me in the other bus with her hand on the bar in front of her, framed nicely by the purple curtains, intricate laced seat covers and similarly colored stripes on the bus’s side. Light streamed through the windows on the other side.
I raised my camera to shoot just as the light turned green, and she looked at me an instant before our buses pulled apart, hers off heading straight towards the river, and mine turning downtown.
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It’s a bit difficult for outsiders to understand why Taiwanese people tend to block up their windows, regardless of the view outside. Waterfront property is cheap here, and often is given over to factories. You can even spot luxury buildings, where people have deliberately spend truckloads of money for a nice apartment with a view, only to stack boxes and other detritus in front of the window, barely letting our the stark glow of white fluorescent lights inside.
This place, no luxury apartment, of course, looks out over the Xindian River, not far from the scenic Bitan. It’s on the second story so there’s little danger of someone peeking inside. It’s a tin structure, and quite hot in summer, so there’s that, but the only redeeming feature of such a place, I’d think, would be the view and the sound of the babbling river outside. Still, when you look at traditional Chinese structures, all looking inward towards the courtyard, with only small, mostly bricked-up windows on the outside if at all, you can see where people are coming from. And, for most people, the only view is of their neighbor’s equally unadorned wall. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle of ugliness avoidance, though it’s getting better with newer buildings with codes restricting residents from covering their windows with bars to keep them from escaping fires.
I took this with the very Sigma DP1 I maligned in the last post. In good light, with stationary objects, it shined. I was riding up the river one fine day on my crazy bike, and the deep blue of the sky, the pale green of the tin walls, and the newspapers over the windows just begged to be photographed, and the DP1 probably did a better job of rendering it than any other camera I could have chosen, even had I taken a big, heavy full-frame Canon with me…not likely on a long bike trip.No, the little Sigma was in its element at that moment. Nothing else has been able to touch it…not yet anyway.
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