Tom Carter (7)

Even before this book came to press it was already in the thick of polemic and controversy - for all the wrong reasons. Some advance-copy reviews by feminist editors in the expat zines of Beijing and Shanghai have been withering, particularly of editor Tom Carter's own "exploitative" and "juvenile" contributing story on a brothel visit (e.g. http://www.timeoutshanghai.com/features/Books__Film-Book_reviews/11883/Unsavory-..... It is actually one of the best pieces in the book, its slapstick show more style perfectly suited to the tawdry circumstances of a group of clumsy foreigners haggling in the shabbier variety of Chinese brothel. It is the only story in the entire collection, in fact, that merits the book's title. Before I came to the book, I was expecting and hoping for just that, something unsavory, stories of a refreshingly seedy and disreputable nature, peeling back a new layer of reality in Chinese society as more and more foreign pioneers venture deeper into the country. Inevitably, someone would take it upon himself to dredge up a collection of lascivious or discomfiting encounters and slap it together as a book. What we have here instead, alas, is a much more banal take on "unsavory elements": "the communist propaganda machine" use of the phrase (as Carter first recalled it) to describe anyone of questionable, less than revolutionary morals. Foreigners - formerly "foreign devils" - are by definition unsavory; their mere presence in the Middle Kingdom unsavory. It is not possible to be a foreigner in China and not simultaneously bumbling, gauche, vulgar and unsavory. Thus any random collection of non-fiction stories of foreign devils wandering around or working and living in China will do. The 28 contributors represent quite a spread, scattered about the country in pretty much all walks of life, but what cannot be said about them (with a few exceptions) is that they are unsavory. They are, on the contrary, painstakingly polite, respectful and normal. They are strenuously family-friendly; nine of the stories - those by Levy, Paul, Muller, Bratt, Arrington, Washburn, Solimine, Watts, and Conley - concern actual families and children or the teaching of children. The pieces are all good clean fun, worthy of inclusion in Reader's Digest or those bland, antiseptic Intensive/Extensive Reading textbooks for freshmen English majors in Chinese universities.

Inevitably, the collection is uneven. The pieces by Peter Hessler and Simon Winchester are predictably the most assuredly written, though they don't really tell us anything we can't get from their own books about China. Meyer, Polly, Earnshaw, Spurrier, and Kitto are competent writers but fail to particularly stand out, unlike Watts' piece on the German botanist and eccentric Josef Margraf, and Fuchs on Tibetan muleteers, which benefit from their intriguing subject matter. Stevenson mars his intriguing subject matter of life in a Chinese prison with snideness (here I direct readers instead to the extraordinary book Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China by Robert H. Davies of his experience in Chinese prisons). Humes' horrific account of being violently mugged suffers from his gratuitous histrionics while recovering in the hospital; the tantalizing question and cliffhanger of how he was able to pay for the huge medical expenses (without any cash or insurance) is hinted at and then forgotten. Some pieces lack contextualization, like Eikenburg's account of her daring courtship with a Chinese male, but what decade is she referring to, exactly? Interracial relationships on the Mainland are far more ubiquitous and accepted now than two or three decades ago, when I imagine her relationship took place; a reader unfamiliar with China might wrongly assume things are as stringent and racist today as ever.

If I had been given the same anthology project with the same title and the same contributors to choose from, I would keep three. I would start the book off with Winchester's piece as a prologue (instead of its current slot as epilogue), then proceed with the spicy if rather innocuous account of KTV escorts among China's privileged by Susie Gordon, followed by Carter's aforementioned piece. For the succeeding stories, I would have to find alternative, more intrepid contributors willing to challenge bourgeois readerly expectations and really get down and rock 'n' roll in China's seamy, truly unsavory underside. After all, I would only be doing what China's own writers have already done, like Wang Shuo, Jia Pingwa and Zhu Wen back in the 1980s depicting life among hoodlums and lumpen elements at large or the graphic accounts of casual sex and drug use by Hong Ying, Wei Hui, Mian Mian and other female writers of the 1990s. Until that happens, pass on the word of Tom Carter's enticing new collection at the local bake sale or church group back home when queried on a latest wholesome introduction to China to curl up at the fireplace with. show less

Based on the thumbnail image of the book's cover, even with the hot woman and the tasteful design, and knowing only it was some kind of photographic spread on China, I feared "coffee table book" - or worse, cheesy Chinese variety that would actually mar my coffee table, the sort you can find in the tourist bookshops with washed-out reproductions, incoherent English and sappy token displays of ethnic minorities dancing in their costumes.

The actual book, once in my hands, is unlike any other show more book I've seen, including those in the photojournalism genre. It has a surprisingly small trim size of only 6 x 6 inches, but at 638 pages and over 2 inches thick and weighing almost 3 pounds, it's not a small book (and probably better suited to hardcover than its fragile paper binding). The weight is legitimated on the inside with the high-quality paper stock and what I'd guess approaches 1,000 high-resolution photo reproductions, capturing the author's two years of traveling to every province of China frequently under spartan and the roughest of conditions. Each province is prefaced with a map and a concisely written pitch, along with beautifully succinct, haiku-like captions for many of the photos, demonstrating that the author's skills as a photographer are matched by appropriate writing talent. The descriptions and the variety of photographic subjects - rural and urban landscapes, ordinary daily objects transfigured by the camera, and lots and lots of unforgettable people - seem to form a narrative that pulls one along the lengthy book, though most readers will probably prefer to dip into it at random than go through the whole thing at one shot. Regardless, it fulfills its evident purpose in being a comprehensive and enticing introduction to the country for people who haven't been to China, and equally interesting as well for those conversant with the country (I myself have lived in China for 13 years).

Now for a more critical angle. The gold standard of "intrepid" or "hardcore" photojournalism books and one that will probably never be equaled is surely American Pictures: A Personal Journey Through the American Underclass by the Dane Jacob Holdt. Holdt arrived in the US in 1971 with $40 in his pocket and spent the next 5 years hitchhiking over 100,000 miles through 48 states and living with 350 families, taking 15,000 photos (selling his blood to buy film) and culling them down to 700 in his book, which are balanced by a substantial and moving narrative of his encounters with the many people he met, delving into their lives with a shocking empathy and intimacy (often sleeping with both women and men to dialogue at the deepest human level), and unflinchingly capturing with his lens the most horrific but sympathetic images of poverty and decrepitude.

Personally, I would like to see the Chinese equivalent of Holdt's book. I suspect Tom Carter may even have witnessed some such darker scenarios or ruder encounters with people and made an understandable strategic decision not to include them, inasmuch as he seems to be positioning his book at the more "polite" end of the photojournalism spectrum, calibrated not to ruffle any feathers in China, where only the positive side of things tends to be presented. Thus he does not refer to himself in the first person but adopts the "objective" reportorial "the author," and when he almost dies during extreme weather on the 5,600-meter Drolma-La pass if it weren't for "a Ngari pilgrim woman" who "appeared as my own private Tibetan goddess of mercy, literally carrying me the remainder of the spiritual circuit," that's all we're told. I want more; I want to hear the dark side of travel and see the underbelly of the country, not just the picture-perfect promotional product. The author is certainly qualified to do this, and I invite him to consider these possibilities for another project. show less

A picture painted a thousand words. That was before Tom Carter started taking them. Now, it seems, a pixel portrays a hundred thousand - and that's for those of us with limited imagination!

I first came across Tom's work through his travel writing while doing some background research for EATING SMOKE - a book about the time I spent `roughing' it in Hong Kong and China. Not only did Tom's unrestrained generosity and supercharged positivity towards people and place change the course of my life, show more but upon purchasing CHINA: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE it became immediately apparent how this philanthropic aura extends to the subjects he captures through a lens.

Tianjin to Tibet, Shanghai to Sichuan, Hong Kong to Henan, Tom takes you on a serendipitous journey - river deep, mountain high, citywide, countryside - to reveal the relationship between a vast, enigmatic and relatively unknown land and its incredibly diverse population.

From the birthplace of Chinese civilisation on the banks of the Yellow River, to the birthplace of Shaolin kung fu on the sacred peak of Song Shan, to a proud mother soon to give birth in the Year of the Golden Pig . . . to the growth of the Christian Movement in Hong Kong, rice in the paddies of Nanjing and consumerism in Hangzhou . . . to the demise of traditional housing in Jinan, the death of a puppy in Siberia's frozen wastes and the resting places of honoured ancestors in Macao, his images usher you full-circle through all walks of life in all of the Middle Kingdom's thirty-three provinces.

Tom's discerning eye combines the deliberate, the subtle, the fortuitous, the impromptu and the random to create a candid and affecting collage that juxtaposes young and old, shiny and crumbling, ancient and modern, humble and brash, happy and sad, and beauty with - the occasional - frank ugliness to provide an exceptional up-close-and-personal incite into a proud people whose individuality differs greatly and whose way of life stretches across a millennia, and shows a country so swept up in the paradox of global capitalism that, if not careful, it will look upon CHINA: PORTRAIT OF A PEOPLE in the not-too-distant future with nostalgia as the pre-eminent historical record.

This book took me on a truly remarkable voyage; one that many will be delighted to complete in armchair comfort as they flick through its pages, awestruck by such an undertaking and grateful for its profundity, while others will reach for their backpacks, further inspired to set out and snatch a peek at this extraordinary country and meet some of its colourful inhabitants for themselves.

My only criticism of Tom's contribution is when he says `The snapshots in this book are not meant to be works of art.'

If this isn't Art, Tom . . . then I don't care to see what is.

Chris Thrall is the author of 'Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland' - a best-selling true story show less