One or two readings on China per day, chosen by Angilee Shah and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, editors of Chinese Characters
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17
Feb
More pics featuring Li Liao’s performance / installation work “Consumption” - on exhibit at The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing. Here’s our interview with him: The Artist and the Factory.
All images © Li Liao.
15
Feb
Image © Li Liao
by Alec Ash
On October 9th 2012, 30 year old Li Liao reported for his first day’s work at a Foxconn factory in southern China. The colossal electronics contract manufacturer, which makes our iPhones, Kindles and Wiis, provides a livelihood for hundreds of thousands of poor Chinese. It was also the center of controversy after a spate of worker suicides in 2010.
Li Liao was issued his identity card – worker F2356272 – overalls and cap. He was shown around. On the assembly line, he was to help manufacture Apple’s latest gadget, the iPad mini. He worked there for 45 days. Then he quit, bought an iPad mini with his wages, and displayed it and his overalls as part of a contemporary art exhibit in the fashionable 798 art district of Beijing.
His boss, presumably, didn’t see that coming.
10
Dec
14
Nov
Now available at Danwei, the complete chapter from Chinese Characters plus and update from the author
13
Nov
A Tibetan local who works in Xining, however, said this ethnic conflict is in part a veil. A favoured tactic among Tongren’s Tibetans looking to protest against the Chinese, he said, is to pick a fight with a Hui Muslim, knowing that the Han authorities will take the side of the Hui, whose community contributes more to the state financially and causes less trouble. This in turn allows them to protest that injustice, and all that is implied behind it. If their complaints could be heard more directly, perhaps 18-year-olds would not feel the need to set themselves on fire.
10
Nov
Alec Ash revisits the places in his chapter for Chinese Characters.
15
Sep
Danwei excerpts a portion of Alec Ash’s chapter, “Out of Tibet,” in Chinese Characters.
When Tashi calls, I am in a temple overlooking Xining, the capital of Qinghai Province in western China. Loud, slurred, distraught, he asks me to come quickly.
Tongren, or Rebkong in Tibetan, is eight bumpy hours south, high on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau, and the next bus is at noon. When I arrive, it is dusty evening. Tibetans in cowboy hats or Adidas beanies walk the markets, where Hui Muslims in characteristic white hats sell fried chicken and chilled Coke to Han Chinese immigrants. Monks from the Tongren monastery stretch their legs, trainers poking out from underneath their dark crimson robes. Although this region is not politically defined as Tibet (“China’s Tibet,” the autonomous region established by Beijing in 1965, is many miles to the southwest), ethnically and historically, it is firmly Tibetan. It is Tibet out of Tibet.
I find Tashi in a bar on the outskirts, in the middle of a self-hating drunk. He is in his mid twenties, with dark Tibetan skin, brown puppy dog eyes, and a greasy waterfall of black hair. On the table in front of him is a small Everest of cigarette butts and a display of beer and liquor that would make the poet Li Bai, famous for his verses on wine, blush.
“I’m an animal,” Tashi says, looking up. “She left me.”
12
Sep
Alec Ash is returning to China and, he writes, the first place he will go is Shuangpengxi with Tashi, the Tibetan featured in his chapter. He writes:
In Chinese Characters, the editors wanted to look at China from the ground up – the human stories that can get lost in the cracks between the picture postcards and the growth statistics. That much-bandied number of 1.3 billion is, after all, composed of single individuals. It’s a delight to stick with one of them for three years, and tease a narrative out of the life changes that come so thick and fast in this country.
06
Jul
In contemporary China, he writes, painful memories of the Mao years are not only commonplace but essential to confront if the nation is to make sense of the contradictions and discord ‘concealed amid the complacency generated by our rapid economic advances’ over the last 40 years.
27
Jun
Meet the contributors to Chinese Characters: Alec Ash
Tell me about the first time you went to China.
It was the summer after I graduated from university. This was 2007 and I was 21. I was one of a group of six, sent to teach English in a Tibetan village in Western China, which I write about in my chapter, “Out of Tibet.”
We took the scenic route there, through Hong Kong, Shanghai, Sichuan, Xian and Lhasa – during which time I got bitten by an allegedly rabid bat, my bus crashed into a mountain, and I got called a “colonialist” on a train. Somewhere in between, I decided that I would like to live in China.
What was the most interesting thing you learned from working on your chapter for Chinese Characters?
Following the story of one 20-something Tibetan, Tashi, over three years, gives some insight into the dilemma that he and his peers face within China – the trade-off between identity and opportunity. It also reminded me that the broader situation in Tibet is not black and white, but indeed as multi-coloured as a Tibetan prayer flag.
I also learned to carry two memory cards for my camera when travelling.
Where are you right now and what are you working on?
In London, running literary interviews. But China is a drug, and it seems I can’t keep clean of it for long. I will be moving back to Beijing this autumn, to write with a particular focus on Chinese youth.
Alec Ash runs the FiveBooks interview feature at the literary website The Browser, and edits The Anthill, a “writers’ colony” of new narrative, vignettes, opinion and fiction. This photo was taken in January 2009 on a frozen river in Qinghai province, where Alec drank a can of fruit beer with a Tibetan friend. Find out more about Alec’s work at alecash.net.
via lareviewofbooks