Focus on Photography by Lee Paine: Zooming in on China

Since I wrote my last article for the Greenwich Citizen, I have been to China and back! I have lots of stories to tell and photos to show for it -- two weeks on the road, including a 6-day river cruise, producing some 2,500 photos -- but for today I want to follow up with some travel tips tied to advice I gave in earlier columns, and I want to introduce you to some adorable children in a little school in Yueyang, China.

First, let me say that this trip to China turned out to be way beyond my expectations. I went on a Viking River Cruise 12-day trip that went from Shanghai to Beijing, including a cruise on the Yangtze River. I visited the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace and the Shibaozhai Temple. I also saw the new Three Gorges Dam and went through two huge locks on the way to sailing through the Three Gorges. I saw pandas in a zoo, as well as saw the Peiking Opera, the Xian soldiers, some Olympic sites, an acrobatic troupe, silk and jade factories, and much more. Each event was outstanding in its own way, and I will write about some of them in future columns, but first, some travel-to-China advice.

If you're planning to go to China, skip July and August. I had read that August is generally cooler than July, so I chose August as the month to travel there. Wrong choice! The first three days of our trip, it got to 107 degrees with incredibly high humidity and dense smog, which made the high 90s of most of the rest of the trip seem cool by comparison. Go before or after the high summer months, which will lessen the crowds of Chinese tourists also taking their summer holiday to visit the famous tourist spots. I will say, though, that my tour group enjoyed interacting with the Chinese tourists -- all of us were frequently asked to pose for pictures with them. Somewhere, many Chinese tourists are showing photos from their summer trip that will have our faces in them, just as we will be showing our pictures with their faces in them, a happy trade-off!

Secondly, I would recommend taking electronic items, especially cameras, that use replaceable batteries rather than rechargeable batteries, because recharging can be difficult to do in China, depending on where you are, even if you bring converters and adapters. I was not the only one who could not get my converters/adapters to work properly. Take plenty of batteries -- it was more difficult than I would have guessed to find the time and/or the place to buy batteries, which are very expensive there.

The main camera I took, by the way, was my new Canon Power Shot IS 20 with a 20x lens, which I reviewed for you a couple of columns ago It runs on batteries, and it turned out to be a splendid choice. The photographer friend I was traveling with had her Nikon D100 with a large fixed lens, an excellent camera that is very heavy, and it attracted much attention and respect wherever she went. While she was drawing everyone's eyes with her camera, however, I was busy firing off pictures much more easily and unobtrusively than she was. I did not want the weight of my larger DSLR, and I think I had more opportunities to take quick, discrete photos without being observed than she did. Her one advantage was that she had a sunshade that protected her lens from pelting rain the day we visited the Summer Palace, and rain was a real problem on the lenses of all my cameras that day. Other than that, the constant smog for all but the last few days was a big equalizer that did not give her camera or sunshade any other advantage.

I'm glad, by the way, I traveled to China with a tour group, because I found China very different from any other place I've ever been. I can't even imagine how individuals who do not speak Mandarin, visiting China for the first time, would successfully negotiate the traffic, the great distances between attractions, the food issues, and the language and health protection problems one encounters in China, which has an incredibly complicated physical and human landscape. It was a privilege to negotiate it by being on an almost flawless tour that educated us all and gave us access that we would not have had as individuals.

This trip was a joy because I've wanted to go to China for as long as I can remember. Its history has always fascinated me, and it still does. Everyone knows China is changing, but you have to see it to understand how quickly the changes are taking place. If you went to China more than 15 years ago, you probably wouldn't recognize it today, and it will look very different even 10 more years from now. Construction is everywhere -- soon much of the old will be gone and almost everything will be new. Millions and millions of people in China have been and will be moved from old housing to new high rise housing that can be seen in every village and city. In areas along rivers that flood, whole cities have been moved to new housing on higher ground and the old cities have been destroyed, disappearing under the rising waters. Population moves of masses of skilled workers to remote regions where industry and mining are being developed are being encouraged by the government as well. The scale of the relocation and building is mind boggling. The scale of recent flood damage and devastation in China is also mind boggling, some of which happened while we were there, but we did not see that first hand, only on television and in government newspapers.

Visual contrasts in China are everywhere. In airports and large city hotels, extremely fashionably dressed people, especially the young, drive up in the most expensive European and American cars. Beijing and Shanghai have elegant, incredible skylines and stores with all the most fashionable and expensive designer goods. Yet back behind the main streets of these cities, poorer citizens cluster outdoors at night to talk and play cards in the light of the open stores on the block, to avoid using the electricity they have in their own buildings -- because they don't want to or can't afford to pay for it. In the countryside, in cities clinging to the sides of steep mountains, men still earn their livings by carrying heavy loads balanced on their backs on bamboo sticks, as they have for centuries before. Everywhere there is still evidence of how the new is impacting and changing the old. This is rich photographic material.

One of the things I liked best about Viking Tours is that they try to present a fairly realistic and broad-based view of China, and that they are "giving back" in China by sponsoring an elementary school in Yueyang, a small/medium-sized town, by Chinese standards, of about 500,000 people located in Central China on Lake Dongting. The Viking tourists are given the opportunity to visit the children and to help the school. While the town seems to have the typical mix of mostly old but some new buildings on its main street, the school is in appalling physical shape by American standards. When we arrived at the elementary school, some of the children greeted us with drumming and singing routines at the entrance, and then others danced short but clever routines for the more than 200 enthusiastic tourists from the cruise ship. Afterwards, we were invited in small groups into individual classrooms to hear a brief presentation by a teacher or tour guide, followed by a song by a student. The tourists were asked to sing a song for the students and each group managed to crank out an impromptu song, which caused much merriment on both sides. In our classroom, we then had a mutual question and answer period with the children speaking and understanding some basic English. It was a win-win situation for everyone.

Attached to this article are photos I took at that time. The children in my classroom, at the 5th grade level, were very relaxed and natural acting, and in excellent spirits, as you can see in the pictures. The classrooms, though, were all on the second floor of a school that was either being demolished or rebuilt -- one could not tell by looking. There was construction debris everywhere and empty and crumbling classrooms were mixed in with active classrooms. In the classroom I visited, the walls were sooty looking, the windows had bars on them but no glass, the desks were very old and damaged, and there were few decorations and no amenities -- like books. There was one piece of chalk and one very worn eraser for the classroom. The doors were falling off their hinges. There was no air conditioning or even fans in the high heat, but there was laughter and energy in the classroom and bright eager faces filling the seats. It's clear that good learning is taking place there despite the physical conditions. We were told that in China, the children learn by rote recitation rather than by interaction and that only the brightest get to go on to college, so it is very competitive. The future success of a family many depend on the success of their student in school, so of course I donated what I could to the school, as most of the tourists seemed to do.

And we were given permission to take photographs, some of which accompany this article. One of my photos shows three girls sipping juice just before dancing in the welcoming ceremony. Another photo shows a serious young man studying me as the rest of the class settles down for learning at the end of our program. One photo is of the interesting blackboard at the back of the classroom. As I left, I caught the three boys through the window bars as they giggled good-bye to me. And then I had to take a photo of what was immediately next door to the classroom I was leaving -- a room that was either being constructed or destructed, I don't know which, but the concrete dust and construction debris was everywhere, including in the air. It was a powerful image to leave with.

There is so much more to tell and so many wonderful photos to show you. I will spend the next weeks condensing it all into a just a few more articles to illustrate the amazing experiences of this trip. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do creating them.

Lee Paine, of Riverside, is a professional freelance writer and photographer. She teaches, lectures and judges in the photographic field. You can visit her Web site at www.leepainefinephotography.com.