Man on a Mission

It’s important to stand back from time to time and consider how you got to where you are. China has a tendency to regularly produce very unique experiences, so it’s easy to forget how surreal things are. 

I am at an art gallery in the trendy arts district of Beijing, listening to the ambassador of Finland give a nearly comatose speech about his experience as the subject of a documentary film. I’m sipping free champagne and pacing at the back of the well-dressed crowd, considering the things that come to mind when surrounded by other people’s art.

Stoli makes for a memorable night in Tiananmen Square.  Beijing parliament building in the background. 

Liisa seems nervous standing up on stage beside the stuffy dignitary, which is understandable considering she came down with a stomach flu the day before and was up most of the night vomiting. She’s under a lot of stress as the coordinator of this film festival, but she’s pulled together remarkably well for someone who hasn’t eaten anything all day.

Tryg is out of sight and feeling out of place somewhere in the crowded hall. He’s gotten comfortable with the people he finds while riding his borrowed bike around the undeveloped suburbs of Beijing—so being suddenly thrust into this mixed crowd of affluent foreigners, hipster Chinese students, and modern artists has him noticeably on edge.

A week ago, two days after the panic attack of the decade, I’d tagged along with Liisa to a piece of China I’d never experienced. This corner of Beijing, years ago, was forgotten in the mad dash to modernize the nation. It had been occupied, and then transformed, by artists drawn to the energy of the capital city. As the years went on, eventually the area was marked for demolition so as to construct more of the high-rise buildings that seem randomly placed on every horizon without obvious order or organization—a pattern of haphazard accomplishment that has become the common theme of Chinese modernization. By that time, though, the artists were well-established, and the local officials, excited at any opportunity to shift focus from China’s ancient accomplishments to its present ones, spared the area, leaving it as a strange bubble of relatively free expression in a country where art is often strictly regimented.

Not that there haven’t been conflicts.  



A Beijing taxi driver weaves through traffic with cigarette in hand.  Nevermind the seatbelt, they've been cut out.  

 I sat with Liisa in a little café that first day, along with 12 other volunteers she was working with on the film festival. She told me about an artist who was arrested after he’d constructed a massive art piece made from Sichuan peppercorns. The staple spice of western Chinese cooking was arranged in complex computer code. Local officials had taken a photo of the piece to an encryption specialist, and discovered that it spelled out all the words most censored by the Chinese government. They arrested the artist, and the exhibition shut down. There are apparently a number of stories like this. In this area, more than one person is under house arrest in the buildings surrounding the studios.

The little café we sat in was more akin to the Portland hipster scene than anything I would have expected to find in China. Goldfish swimming in wine glasses sat on the counter, old revolutionary kitsch was hanging from the walls, a distressed stand-up bass hung upside down from the wall behind the cash register. Despite this, the food was authentically Chinese, and some of the best I’d had yet in Beijing.

The volunteers around the table were all talking about the Nordox Film festival. The collection of young students switched easily between Chinese and English.  

“What does this word mean? ‘Nordox?’” one of the newer volunteers had asked Liisa.  

“Well it is a combination of two words—‘Nordic’ and ‘documentaries.’ They shorten the word ‘documentaries’ to ‘docs.’ Then to make it cool the replace the ‘cs’ with an ‘x’.”

“Oh I see, so an ‘x’ makes things cooler?”

Whatever I was feeling then, it is the opposite of the long night a few days prior. Surrounded by people in pursuit of a goal, I felt utterly invigorated. After lunch we all returned to the studio, where some people were designing the posters for the event, and others were translating subtitles for the films. That’s when I wrote my first blog entry. Usually I cannot write when there are people around me, but in the midst of creation I felt totally at home.

Back at the festival opening, the Finnish ambassador’s boring speech has ended and the thank-yous have been delivered. The crowd now funnels into the theater.

The first film, The Extraordinary Ordinary Life of Jose Gonzales, is a breathtaking portrait of the singer/songwriter.  

Have you ever dreamed that you were singing a song, and in the dream it is the most perfect song you have ever heard? And when you wake up you are excited because you think that melody alone could change the world…but of course the song fades away, and you are unable to recreate it in the waking world? Those are the kinds of songs that Jose Gonzales writes.

The film captures Jose, who is, by all appearances, an incredibly dull person living a boring repetitive life as a musician. But the simplicity is so perfectly juxtaposed with his incredibly moving songs and self-recorded thoughts on life and science that you are left feeling he is a person as yet undiscovered by this film. The emotion and the mystery I’m left with as the credits roll unleashes a sudden craving to write for hours, but I’ve forgotten my notebook so instead I try to jam a thousand ideas into my long-term memory.

I met Fredrik Egerstrand, the director of this film, days earlier. He was stopping in Beijing for a few hours on his way to a film festival in Taipei, and Liisa needed to get the hard-drive with his film on it for Nordox.  We sat down with Fredrik for coffee in the airport and talked about his movie, his past work, and the festival. I was enthralled.

I’m becoming very envious of artists. It’s never something I’ve wanted to be before—in fact, I’ve generally been a creative hermit, writing in the dark corners of the internet. But Fredrik was a man surrounded by stories. He’d created music videos, documentaries, and was in the midst of making his first feature film. He spoke so easily of the people and projects that each sounded amazing. 

I’m almost certain I was asking too many questions, considering he hadn't slept in over 24 hours—but, as had begun to happen regularly in the last few days, I found myself caught in a stream of thought with far too strong a current to resist. By the time Fredrik left to check his bag and get on his new flight, I was radiating energy like an atomic bomb, ready warm the world.

Despite all this excitement, the anxiety from that first night is still present, rises up from time to time, and the next day came out in force.



A rough brick wall being built in the Beijing 798 art district.  

 Tryg and I were having issues trying to get the images sent to Lupin so she could assemble the blog. The problem, at first, was that the images were so big that sending them in an email took a prohibitive amount of time.  This is where the conflict began between me and Tryg.

Tryg has very high standards for his pictures—so high in fact that out of the 250 pictures he’d taken he only felt that five of them were good enough to post on the blog for people to see. This also means that he insists on shooting his images in the largest, most detailed format possible—which makes a lot of sense if you really want to produce the best image. Tryg is a very good photographer, and I understand that someone creating his own art has the final say in how his work is represented and displayed. Tryg is trying to create an experience with his photos, which requires very high standards. It’s something I really appreciate about how he works. However, Tryg did not bring a computer, or any other equipment to deal with these very large images, making them very hard to send, slowing down the production of the blog significantly.

Suddenly confronted with all these complications, and the fact that I was only going to have five images to accompany what I’d written, I started getting very agitated and left to go on a walk. I was gone for a little over an hour of concentrated of brooding. I was pissed at Tryg, angry that he was insisting on being such a perfectionist. I felt like he was doing what he imagined a “real” photographer would do, rather than what was practical given our difficult situation. I was angry that he’d had the option to bring a computer, but had instead chosen to bring a bottle of beer. By the time I got back, I was near the boiling point, but Tryg was gone.

I resisted venting too much to Liisa, who was doing some work for the festival. I tried to rest and calm down on the futon that lay against the wall. When Tryg finally returned, I told him I wanted to use more than five of his pictures in the future for the blog. He said no, and we started to fight.

  

There is nothing like clashing vision, and we both quickly realized that the two of us had been conceiving of very different blogs. I wanted a blog that told simultaneous stories: my story in words, and Tryg’s story in photos. And while Tryg in theory wanted the same thing, his idea of a photo story was very different. He wanted a select few pictures that each in themselves told an entire story, while I wanted a montage capturing the broader visual environment of China, including more imperfect pictures that captured the day to day experiences we were having.

Like the tricked-out Jeep we found with a massive “Ron Paul 08” sticker covering the passenger side door.  Or the warning sign at the front of a restaurant that sounded like a 1950’s insult: “look out, knock head.” All these pictures Tryg had taken, but he did not want to show them to the people on the blog, because they were not photography, they were just pictures.

Of course neither of us were speaking so clearly or rationally, and eventually Tryg refused to continue the conversation, while I considered if kicking him in the face might help. Liisa continued working on the computer a few feet away.



Bricks.

 When we got back to Liisa’s apartment we restarted the conversation, again trapping Liisa with our relationship issues. This time we talked a lot longer, and managed to cover a lot of important topics. Most important of all, I let Tryg know that I still had no idea what I was doing here in China. That I didn’t have the passion I had for this place the last time I was here.

In the past, my idea of traveling always involved finding myself. Discovering who I am as a person. Once I know who I am and where I stand, then I can move from that position into the world. Once I have that stable foundation, I can create the person I want to be—that’s what I used to think. But in the midst of fighting with Tryg, I started to realize that I no longer had that craving for self-discovery, not like I used to. I began to realize that, for the most part, I was confident in the fact that I knew myself pretty well now, and that self-awareness had given me the tools I needed to move on. I had the desire to begin creating, making things, developing myself into the person I want to become.

The problem with all this is, of course, that it suddenly made me wonder why it is I’m traveling at all. I have been developing a very strong desire to stay put. And the place I want to stay is this community of artists in Beijing. Being around them was sparking a sense of fulfillment I hadn’t experienced in a long while. Without that feeling that I am actually creating something, and moving towards a future, I can’t see how I’ll last through a year of this.  

However, I am moving on, and what I am left with after that argument is a commitment to this blog. It may not be much, but I really want to see if it can become “something.”  I hope people read it, care about it, tell their friends about it. I can’t ignore the fact that there is a certain amount of arrogance to that, the desire to be important in other people’s lives.  But I do know that of all the things that have ever made me feel fulfilled, effecting people around me in a positive way has been by far the most potent. If I can use this blog in that way, it would be a wonderful thing.

The after-party for the festival opening is at a bar in the Hutongs. The Hutongs of Beijing are some of the oldest dwelling-places in the world, with people having lived in them continuously for nearly 1500 years. They are made of narrow walkways and stone walls that allow for foot traffic and maybe a bike or two, but make car passage very difficult (though not entirely impossible). This makes the Hutongs one of the quietest and most peaceful places in Beijing, despite existing at its very heart.

The bar we are in, however, is pounding with Western club music as a mix of young Chinese and foreigners hold mixed drinks and chat. I’m sitting with three good-looking (mostly blond) photographers from Sweden who are part of a Nordic photo exhibition running alongside the film festival. They are talking business with the main director of the event, so I sit back with my glass of wine and watch the people around me.  

I met the Swedes—Andrea, Chris, and Johan—the night before at a dinner held in their honor. We ate at a rather fancy Yunnan restaurant that served a very different style of Chinese food than we’ve become used to. Most notably, a plate of fried mealworms and bee larvae. They were still exhausted from their flight, but interested in the weird food and new people. I talked with them about their work a bit, and where they’d been, too.  



Pulled noodles 拉面  (la mian), a common offering in noodle restaurants of Northern China.

 Andrea’s exhibit in the show was a photo series on the small northern towns in Greenland. My favorite shot had been of the northern lights glowing at night over ghostly wooden buildings that looked hundreds of years old. Johan had a series that he’d taken of albino Africans in Tanzania. It was a very vivid series, with many graphic images of lives so painfully effected by the sun.

Again I found myself talking a lot, trying to dig up stories from these adventurous artists of the world who traveled to find their subjects in distant places. I felt as if I could identify with them, or at least, I really hoped I could.

“So what is your mission?” Andrea had asked, after we’d described our plan to travel across Asia for a year.

I found myself caught off-guard and babbling for a second. After all, this had been the trouble all along—I’d had no mission, from the several weeks before I left America, until that first night in Beijing when my anxious mind had taken control. It suddenly seemed absurd. After I couldn’t come up with anything useful to say, Andrea had answered for me.

“Well, maybe your mission is to find a mission then?”  

At the after-party, Tryg and Andrea are talking about nerdy camera stuff, so again I find myself only half-listening to the conversation. Tryg’s favorite picture of Andrea’s is one of a seal that is being butchered on a kitchen floor by one of the villagers. The woman in the shot is eating a portion of the raw meat looking down at the body of the animal. The red blood strikes out in contrast while at the same time blending in with the dingy kitchen.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at your blog yet!” she shouts over the loud music.

“Oh, that’s fine—it’s actually blocked in China so you won’t be able to see it till you get home!” I shout back “Besides, I didn’t really like the last entry so I’m hoping to get a new one up in a day or two.” 

            

“What was wrong with your last post?”

“I don’t know, it just wasn’t that interesting, I don’t really know what I’m writing about yet, I guess I’m still looking for a theme, I still need to find my mission!”

She smiles.

The rest of the night is short. I’m tired, and Liisa is still feeling sick, so we find Tryg and the three of us head home.



Oyster mushrooms in one of the many open air markets around Beijing.

 Tomorrow will be the last full day we are spending in Beijing. I’m still not sure how I feel about leaving. I loved the people I met here. It was amazing getting to know Liisa, who seemed to mesh really well with the crazy that me and Tryg can exude. I’m afraid of leaving all the creative people that I met in such a short time, not to mention that soon it’ll be just be me and Tryg, and I’m not sure if we’ll be able to stand each other too much longer.

I’m still hoping to get one new blog entry a week, but after this I won’t have regular access to a computer, and will no longer be able to get around the Great Firewall of China that keeps me from viewing Facebook or Blogspot. I’ll be flying completely blind, depending on Lupin and Gary to keep the blog afloat. There are so many unknowns coming in the next couple days, which would be fine if I had any idea what I was looking for in the void.

But I suppose I feel a little better. A mission to find a mission is better than no mission at all, and China has already proven it can still stir up some pretty crazy adventures when called upon to do so.

Next we are headed to Suzhou, in Jiangsu province. It’s far enough south, very near Shanghai, that the culture should be noticeably different.  I’ve never been anywhere near there before, so it’ll be a whole new experience.

Thanks to everyone who is reading along. Your comments have been awesome, and I’m still amazed at how many of you are showing up to read these posts.

Here's a link to Jose Gonzalez's song "Teardrop": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9B-h1EEsKDA&noredirect=1