Spain, United Kingdom, Vietnam, Taiwan, China

Although I probably won't go to all these countries, and don't know how much time I will spend, I now have approval to visit these countries for my project. Okay, Taiwan isn't a country. Sorry Taiwan!

I crossed New Zealand off the list. I feel like I just got another Watson with this important approval. The Watson Fellowship is largely about independence and flexibility -- an acknowledgement that plans change and that as a fellow with few outside requirements, I must constantly re-evaluate the trajectory of my project.
All in all, I'm very happy about this change. The only reservation is I am only allowed two weeks in mainland China -- having spent six months in Beijing before, I am not supposed to return to a country I have spent time in before. This policy is a result of the Fellowship philosophy of having new experiences and thrusting oneself into unknown territories. Indeed, I will be spending my time in Taishan county, the county that I have often written about -- the hometown of my maternal grandfather.

*There's an interesting topic in what exactly counts as a country. Is Taiwan a country? Well, not really, but it is enough of a country to be counted separately from China. More controversially, I once was browsing through past Watson Fellows project abstracts -- which list their initial country list. Someone listed "Tibet" as a project country. Of course, I do not support China's current Tibet policy, and believe everybody would be better off if Tibet had real autonomy. But nobody recognizes Tibet as a country, not even the Vatican City/Holy See, which doesn't recognize mainland China diplomatically (and is under no economic pressure to do so, unlike many small countries...) , not even Taiwan, not even India, which hosts Tibet's government in exile.

No lump of coal for Christmas, but...

A PINK SPANDEX SHIRT FOR GIRLS!!!

Yes, yes, this was indeed my only present during Christmas this year. I'm not bitter (I'm really not, I promise), after all, I'm in a new country with no family. And being on the road means that I don't want to be carrying lots of stuff.

At any rate, I wasn't exactly expecting presents. And I'm not really keen on gambling, in any form, so I wasn't going to buy 10 bingo tickets in hopes of winning some prize at the Chinese community Christmas party (skimming over the last four words, "Chinese community Christmas Party," I think I just read "Chinese Communist Party." Maybe I spent too long in my thesis carrel in college). But the father of the Chinese Catholic church in Milan was nice enough to give me one of his bingo tickets, so I could participate. There were tons of prizes, maybe fifty in total, so pretty much everyone could win something (or two or three somethings). All the stuff was donated by some of Chinese wholesalers, so it was a melange of trinkets, clothes, basically a random sample of things you might find in a Walmart. All of course, made in China.

Epilogue: A woman who was trying to be nice offered to switch my present, and I said "no, no, it's fine," but she insisted. I couldn't exactly insist further on keeping a pink spandex shirt for girls -- which might raise some eyebrows -- so now I have a nondescript black hat instead.

Merry Christmas from Milan

Milan, Italy, 2008.

Buon Natale, Feliz Navidad, Feliz Natal, 圣诞快乐, Merry Christmas.

Food (x) versus Photos (y)

I came to the conclusion a while back that the quality of Chinese food I was eating was quite interestingly correlated with the quality of my project photos.

That is to say, the better Chinese food I was eating at the time, the better my projcet photos were. This relationship is shown below:

You will notice that the relationship is not strictly linear. I believe there are several reasons for this:

1) While the quality of Chinese food can keep going up and up, unfortunately, I don't think I can say the same for my photos yet. I'm trying to be critical of my own photos, after all, how can I expect to get better?
To paraphrase a photographer I admire, "To take good photos isn't hard, to take great photos is very difficult, to take exceptional photos is almost impossible."
Maybe the same can be said for Chinese food, but I must have lower standards. Yum.

2) With a small increase in the quality of food I eat, I get great returns on my photos. After a while, I begin to reach my asymptotic line. Sorry large banquets, I'm getting diminishing returns on your delicious food. In fact, when great Chinese food is served, the quality of project photos might even go down as it is usually in a formalized setting with poor light and too many people too nervous to act natural.

So why is there this relationship?

1) I think most kinds of good documentary photography rely on access. If you can get good access to things, your photos will improve immeasurably. Perhaps my project has strayed from street photography in Peru toward documentary photography in Paraguay and Brazil, back to street photography in Italy. This is largely because of my difficulties with access in both Peru and Italy.

2) In general, most Chinese immigrant communities are relatively insular groups that aren't welcoming of outsiders. If they don't invite you to eat delicious food, you won't be snapping away happily. If you are a welcome presence, you will be offered food and you will eat it. This has proved all too true in six months of project.
2a) As a sidenote, I find it interesting when food gets in the way of photography. Sometimes I'm enjoying a delicious crab (I LOVE CRAB), my hands are all dirty, and I see a good photo pass before my eyes. Shouldn't have been slacking off!

Notes:
a. This only applies to Chinese food
b. This is a preliminary study, results may change with more data points

College, seven months later

I think this comic pretty accurately describes my college years:



From xkcd.com

Get me away from here, I'm dying

The title of the post is just a joke, or more correctly, the name of a song. Anyways, after two weeks in Milan, and unrelenting rain for almost a week now, I need to get out for a breath of fresh air. Frankly, I need a day or two to not think about my project.

Actually, I've been in cities nonstop since I arrived in Ciudad del Este more than three months ago, the only exception being two days on Ilha do Mel (Honey Island) in Brazil. The more time I spend in cities, the greater the urge to get as far away from cities as possible when I take a breather from my project. In fact, while in Brazil, I was planning on having my two day vacation in Florianopolis, a beautiful beach town in southern Brazil. I eventually decided against it, because it seemed too popular and too big. I was happy to hear that Ilha do Mel was "màs salvaje" -- more savage, or rustic -- than most other islands along the southern Brazilian coast.

Now, my project revolves exclusively around cities, and though I've come to appreciate urban living, I do need an escape. I didn't grow up in a city. In fact, Beijing was the first city I felt like I knew intimately after spending about six months there. Since then, I can claim knowing, at least somewhat intimately, New York, Lima, Ciudad del Este, Sao Paulo, and to a lesser degree, Cape Town. Note that I'd probably leave Boston out of that list, despite growing up only thirty five minutes away.

All of which is to say, I decided late today that I'm gonna hop on a train tomorrow and get to the Italian Dolomites mountain range. I've always wanted to see it, and now is a great time -- during the week just before all the Italians go on Christmas vacation and flood the region with tourists, raising price levels. I just need a breather, something refreshing before I jump back into my project, head first.


A few sublime images from my time in South America:

Geysers at sunrise near the Bolivia-Chile border.
Ilha do Mel coast, Brazil


View from the train to Morretes, Brazil, where you then transfer to Ilha do Mel.

Cycling along an incredible lunar landscape in Chile, near Bolivia. The landscapes changed at every corner. Wouter, the Dutchman in front, and I seemed to be the only cyclists braving the winds that day.


My precious time out of cities I want to spend in the most remote, most naturally beautiful places. Perhaps one unexpected side effect of this project is that I'm becoming a naturalist.

America is difficult, English is difficult

"You're from America? Life there is really difficult, isn't it?" An unemployed, single man from Fujian asked me this today in Milan.

I was almost relieved to hear someone say this.

I've been outside of the United States for nearly six months now -- the midpoint of my journey -- and up until today, no one from any of the Chinese communities seemed aware of the many hardships that confront immigrants in the U.S.

To many people, the U.S. is Disneyworld; even some Italians said they were surprised how different New York City is compared to how it is portrayed in Sex and the City.

Is it the influence of American culture and media? Maybe: one bored day in Sao Paulo I spent with a first-generation Chinese family watching American music videos from Mariah Carey to 50 cent, and then watched the first two "High School Musical" movies. Mind you, I had never seen any of the above, and considered the day well spent if for purely ethnographic purposes. One of the kids later told me that when he was in China, Michael Jackson was hugely popular, and he had bought a couple music videos of "Thriller" and "Billie Jean" when he first got to Brazil. American movies, television shows, music, have an enormous influence everywhere in the world, which undoubtedly help create a certain idea of America.

To be clear, I'm not saying that the "American Dream" doesn't exist. I know it does -- at least for a lucky few -- like my family. But it is this fantasy that the U.S. is paradise that is especially striking. Perhaps Europe may seem less appealing to Chinese immigrants, since Europe has only recently become an immigrant destination. Maybe, for poor Chinese immigrants, America's culture of individualism and capitalism are more promising than Western Europe's more socialist-leaning tendencies. I don't know.

Oh, and about English being hard: I got asked a bunch of English grammar questions by a first-generation Chinese immigrant, who at age sixteen, has only been in Italy for three years. The questions were mostly about distinguishing prepositions such as on/above, on/over, through/across, etc. As a native speaker of English I know instinctively what is right and what is wrong, but found it nearly impossible to explain these differences. I took comfort in the fact that the textbook was in Italian and I was trying to explain it in Chinese. But nevertheless, it made me remember how hard teaching English is. I did it for a few months when I was eighteen, in Nicaragua, and ffter that informative experience, I decided I could never do it again.
Kudos to my friends teaching English as a second language!

Living in a Buddhist Temple, Sao Paulo

As you may know, I lived in a Buddhist temple for nearly three weeks upon my arrival in Sao Paulo. The temple, 中观寺 (Zhong Guan Si), celebrated its fifteenth anniversary during my stay there. It was opened by a monk from Taiwan; now, it is run by four nuns. Three are from Taiwan, and one is from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The temple is located in an upper middle class district of Sao Paulo, Vila Mariana. Almost all of the people that go to the temple are Taiwanese -- the first large Chinese group to settle in Sao Paulo during the 1960s and 1970s.

Sao Paulo, first generation

Shopping Center, Mogi das Cruzes, Sao Paulo

Li Jinwang's apartment, Sao Paulo

Cantonese Fish market, Sao Paulo

Senior Citizens Dance, Sao Paulo

Senior Citizens Dance, Sao Paulo

Mogi das Cruzes, Sao Paulo

Rain and snow

Today I had my first snowfall in Milan. I love snow and rain (in small doses, of course). People who have grown up around snow know there is a special feeling when you wake up to a world of white.
My apartment when I woke up. You can see the snow on the building across the street; this is a color photograph, no joke.

The tram-tracks by my apartment.

Snow has a way of cleaning things up, before making them all dirty again.
I love the sort of moody film noir feeling one gets when photographing rain in low light. Rain creates new worlds, through reflections, puddles, raindrops on windowpanes. Now if only I had a weatherproof camera and could shoot at ISO 3200 or 6400.... maybe Christmas??

I like to photograph in the late afternoon and early evening, when light is subdued, when people are subdued, when natural light mixes with the artificial.


Curitiba, Brazil

Next time it rains, go outside and pay attention. Just look and see, look for patterns, for light, for the way light hits raindrops. Sometimes beautiful things appear.

Can anybody figure out who this is?

Monochromatic Milan (Where I live)

Remember how I was saying how Milan has no colors, and everything is black and white, or in between? I was being serious.

Exhibit A: my beautiful, if monochromatic apartment.

From the entrance to the apartment: bathroom and wall. Notice black scarf on the right.

Plant life always manages to mix things up and reaffirm the existence of the color palette.

The bedroom. Look closely and you'll realize it's a color photo, although the same can't quite be said about the apartment.

The kitchen in the afternoon.

My awesome apartment mate Sergio. Sergio is a furniture designer for Antonio Citterio in Milan, but is originally from small town in Puglia, in the south of Italy. Note the white clothing (weekends), which is contrasted from the black clothing he wears to work (weekdays). Also note the video projector that he uses to project movies onto the white canvas he has painted on the opposite wall.
Me, being monochromatic and preparing for the cold. This is Sergio's black jacket against the white wall.

Me on the balcony. In an act of restrained rebellion against the Milan fashionistas, I am wearing my red Oktoberfest shirt (from Blumenau, Brazil) under a black v-neck sweater.

Samba in Sao Paulo

Sorry about the high-compression images; my mini-computer can't handle anything else.

Retired Chinese people dance samba

Daude from Bahia performs on Black Consciousness Day
At the Ó do Borogodo bar in Sao Paulo. Samba group at right.

samba

Multicultural Milan

The first Italian restaurant I walked into was owned by a family from Wenzhou, China. The second one as well. The third, a pizzeria called "American pizza" (but my Italian host assures me they have great pizza), is run by Egyptians. The hostel I stayed at is run by Lebanese youth.

These are just my direct direct experiences, which doesn't include the many West Africans and South Asians I see on the streets selling various things. On the city trams, I see ads for "migrart.it," a site apparently where immigrants can post art relating to their immigrant experiences. Europe is changing, and the face of Milan, the economic heart of Italy, is changing as well.

This was perhaps the most startling observations upon my arrival in Milan, Italy from Sao Paulo. I was expecting Milan to be quintessentially European, if not Italian. To a certain degree, it is: beautiful buildings, art, parks, a clean and orderly city (at least in comparison to many South American cities!). But as immigrants begin to stream into European cities, the face of Milan will change noticeably.

Sao Paulo to Milan

I was thinking of all sorts of witty things to say, all kinds of astute observations to record on my transfer from Sao Paulo to Milan. It's now 11:30 pm in Milan, and although only 8:30 pm in Sao Paulo, I'm really tired. Slept about three hours on the twelve hour plane ride, after dealing with Brazilian bureaucracy/airport security.

Apparently the immigration officer in Foz do Iguacu in Brazil only gave me forty days in the country, even though my visa explicitly states I could stay for ninety days. As a result, I "overstayed" my visa by about two weeks, which amounted to about a $50 USD fine, payable on my return to Brazil. Either that, or I can petition it at a Brazilian consulate here in Italy in the next five days. Both options are less than ideal.


Anyways, I am now in Milan, where I feel safe walking around alone at night with my camera. But I must say, Milan lacks the kind of vitality that is pervasive in the streets of Sao Paulo, for better or for worse. Everyone in Milan walks around in monotones, in different shades of black and brown. They just walk, almost nobody hawking anything, no music, no colors. Nevertheless, it is still beautiful in that kind of elegant European way, and the cathedral is awesome. Witness:


I walked down the main Chinese street, Via Paolo Sarpi, and chatted with a little eatery owner. To my surprise, she also insisted that the U.S. was infinitely better than Italy. What is it about the mystique of the United States?

Milan, Italy

... is where I am going on Monday, December 1st.


It's a hard life I lead, I know.

Loving and hating São Paulo

São Paulo, the ultimate megacity, is a city of contrasts. I feel great affection for the city just as much as I loathe it. Sure, it is a cliché, but as I approach nearly two months living in one of the world´s largest cities with roughly 20 million inhabitants, I must admit that my relationship with the city has developed into a love-hate relationship.

I arrived in São Paulo with an ambivalent attitude, feeling lost in the giant metropolis and scrambling to try and find my bearings. Part of me wanted to go back to Curitiba, the pleasant capital city of Paraná province, with its pleasant parks, smaller size, and already some promising contacts in the Chinese community. But I knew that São Paulo was the big prize of Brazil, where tens of thousands of Chinese immigrants have flocked to over the past couple decades. How I was going to tap into this community was a challenge, quite honestly, I wasn´t sure I was capable of meeting.

My experiences in the city are reflective of these conflicting feelings, contrasting environments. Within my project, I have been able to witness and follow many strands within the Chinese community -- everything from living in a Buddhist temple to watching the Chinese mafia sing karaoke. I´ve followed both the Taiwanese and mainland communities -- which share as many similarities as differences.

There are many things I love about this city -- the amazing music, the multitude of cultural events available every day and nearly every hour, the vitality of the city. Of course, I´ve also seen the dark underside of the city: the violence, the fear and suspicion, the coldness that great cities seem to create from too many humans living too close to one another. I think whatever your feelings are about São Paulo, like any great photo, it will make you feel something. Maybe it is disgust, maybe joy, maybe anger.

I´ve got two more days left in São Paulo, and over these two days (and probably more), I´m sure I´ll be thinking a lot about all that has transpired here, and over these past five (FIVE!!!) months in South America. Five months have gone by remarkably quickly, but at the same time my arrival in Lima, Peru, seems like lightyears ago.

Sadly, I´m now on my third camera (first one stolen, second one broken and in the U.S. being fixed). On the other hand, I think my photography has improved a lot, and my hair has grown to a previously unimaginable length.

A lack of photos and posts

I realize that I haven't been keeping up with my output of photos or blog posts of Peru or Paraguay. The main reason is my poor access to internet in Sao Paulo, i.e., my house doesn't have internet. I can go to an internet cafe, but that gets expensive, so if I want to spend an hour on the internet, then I will go to a cafe and use my computer.

Regarding my photos, I've run into an interesting problem. Aside from not having a good camera for about three and a half weeks, my camera is now "too good." The camera my dad loaned me, a Canon XSI, has twelve megapixels, which produces files so large that my little computer says "not enough memory to complete this operation" when I try to resize them. I will have to find another solution.

Being robbed in Sao Paulo

"Assalto! Assalto!" (Assault! Assault!) It was somewhat eerie listening to the entire congregation at the Chinese Baptist Church in Liberdade (the "Asian" district), Sao Paulo practicing their Portuguese, with these violent words. The church is made up of almost entirely mainland Chinese immigrants, including the Fujianese man who was murdered a fortnight ago.

The Taiwanese pastor was having the entire church practice saying "assalto" for two reasons. Should the churchgoers be robbed, they would (1) know that they were being robbed -- robbers always say "assalto" -- and (2) they would be able to call 190, the police, and inform them of the robbery.

(The first point shouldn't be taken for granted. A Buddhist friend told me of a robbery of a Buddhist congregation in Aclimacao district in Sao Paulo, when two men came in with guns yelling "assalto." The Buddhist service continued without interruption, the monks reciting from sutras, unaware what "assalto" meant. Only my friend spoke Portuguese, and had to inform the Chinese congregation that they were being robbed, and later had to serve as a translator for the robbers when they tried to extort money from the monks. She had to explain to the robber that Buddhist monks have very few possessions or money.)

"Say 'Assalto,' as clearly as possible. Do not say 'Asado,'" the pastor said half-jokingly and half-seriously. "'Asado' means barbeque."

* * *

"Assalto! Assalto!"

About five seconds passed before I realized that the restaurant was being robbed, and I was in it, and there was no escape.

In fact, my first thoughts when these two men came running in were that I recognized one of the men. Hey, is that Nivaldo, the nice man who has been attending and working at the Buddhist temple for ten years? Who puts his hands together in prayer every time we meet? No, that can't be, this guy's got a scar on his left cheek. It was not in fact Nivaldo, the guy from the temple. Noticeably more aggressive. Oh. Crap. He's robbing the restaurant. Crap.

* * *

I hopped on the back of Li Jinwang's motorcycle, a friend of a family friend, and rode down Cons. Furtado street in Liberdade. I normally try not to walk down the street; it is somewhat desolate during the day, and noticeably dodgier than the main streets of Liberdade. But as we rode off, I noticed Chinese restaurants here and there, which I had never seen because of my avoidance of the street.

Parking outside a nondescript Chinese restaurant, we went inside, into a quiet Hot Pot restaurant. We chatted with the Taiwanese owner for a while, going through the list of usual conversation topics:

1) The economy and local business
2) The wildly fluctuating exchange rate (It was 1.8 reais to the dollar when I got to the Brazilian border in Paraguay, and now it is 2.4 reais to the dollar.)
3) How much better the U.S. is than Brazil (with my futile attempts to convince them otherwise)
4) The recent spate of robberies and murders in the Chinese community

At about 10:30 pm, as the restaurant was closing up and the security guard had already packed up and gone home, the two men came in screaming that word the Chinese have come to fear and recognize.


My second thoughts, after realizing we were being robbed, was that I had my camera on me. Not any old camera, but the camera that I had only gotten two days ago when my parents left Sao Paulo and my dad left me with a fine, working digital SLR. How awful would it be to have this camera robbed, just two days after finally having a working camera, after all the bad stuff my cameras have been through? Luckily they didn't take it, they were after cash and not much more.

Both men had one hand in their shirts, as if to conceal a firearm. They never showed it during the entire robbery, which was to last less than ten minutes; I seriously doubted they had guns, but it was not something I could do anything about.

One man kept lookout at the doorway while the other, with the scar, ushered all the restaurant patrons -- maybe fifteen in all -- into the back room and had us put our hands on the ground. He yelled at all of us angrily, most of which I couldn't understand. He demanded our money, especially dollars. I had about 35 reais (about $17 dollars) and about five U.S. dollars on me, which wasn't anything I was terribly concerned about. I handed it over. The Chinese man behind me, who let out a sigh, handed over more than 50 reais (about $25 dollars); Li Jinwang handed over 20 reais. An old Chinese family handed over a measily 6 reais, or three dollars. They were clearly smart and perceptive. I should have been smarter, these guys clearly weren't pros, and handed over some pitiful amount of money.

He then demanded our phones; I think all of us caught onto the fact that this guy didn't know what he was doing, and I don't think anyone handed over their phones, even though all of us had them. He pointed to me demanding my phone, and following the lead of Li Jinwang, who showed the man an empty cell phone case, I said "Nao tenho," (I don't have it), shrugging my shoulders. I gave myself a mental pat on my back.

Unfortunately, the guys made off with about 800 reais from the poor restaurant owner. I felt really sorry for her, and her workers. As we left about five minutes after the robbery, all I could say was "I'm really sorry" and patted her on the back. Li Jinwang offered to pay by credit card, which she declined.

Being put out twenty dollars is no big deal, but the psychological effects of such an episode can be far greater. A range of emotions overcame me that night -- anger, a desire for vengeance, fear. I wanted some sort of justice, some sort of karmic retribution for the two men. I mainly felt for the poor restaurant owner and her workers -- how hard they must work to earn money, only to have it taken away in blink of an eye!

But as dark and despicable these acts of violence are, I cannot let them cast
a shadow over my time in Sao Paulo, or my life in general. So many people have been victims of robberies here -- Li Jinwang said it was his fourth or fifth -- that there's no point in whining about it. Life goes on, business as usual; I will keep shooting photos; the Hot Pot restaurant will open tomorrow.

Qin-Qi! (Relatives!)

This post is probably an inaccurate description of my relations, but that doesn't seem to matter because however tenuous the relation, we're somehow relatives:

Today I met up with distant distant relatives; I think it goes like this: my mom's dad's distant cousin's child married a woman, whom I call Goy yi-yi, who is also a distant relative of my mom's, but has a different last name (Li as opposed to Rong, my mother's maiden name). Apparently the government moved Goy (Li) to the "Wang" village after a dam was constructed flooding her village, and the "Wang" village shunned her, and she asked my mom's family (Rong or the Wu's... my maternal grandmother's family) to get her out of China. My mom's family in the U.S. had a distant relative who was willing to marry Goy and thus bring her to the United States. They now live in New York City; Goy sells fruit on the streets.

Goy is close to my mom's family, she shows up at all of the family gatherings in NYC. She is an extremely generous person, despite what little has come her way. Goy's younger brother's wife is the younger sister of a woman who I am staying with her. So there you go. We're Qin-qi (relatives)!

I think I've complained here more than once how conservative and "closed off" the Chinese community is, just about anywhere. I'm not saying they aren't nice, but in general, they aren't the sort of people who will let acquaintances or even friends into their personal lives easily. I've found this insularity is both somewhat lessened and exacerbated within the diaspora. For instance, one family in Curitiba was extremely open to me, even after knowing me for just a couple hours. I'd hypothesize that it might have to do with the relatively small Chinese population in Curitiba -- to see another Chinese person was cause for great excitment. When I insisted on paying for a drink and they refused, they said "You're Chinese! Chinese people must help one another!"

On the other hand, in a big city like Sao Paulo, where there are many clans and subcommunities within the Chinese population here, people tend to be more suspicious. You can't just be "Chinese," you have to be "Li," "Wang," "Xie," and not only that, but from the right clan of Li Wang or Xie. Throw in the recent violence (and the likelihood of complicity within the Chinese community) against the Chinese, and everyone has slammed the door, and probably locked it, on the gringo-Chinese dude who popped out of nowhere with the funny accent. And the funny last name (Bien is extraordinarily rare... as is Rong, my mother's last name).

On the other hand, if you have Qin-qi, you're golden. Even if the relationship is as unclear as it is to them as it is to you, most Chinese people will treat you like a long-lost child/sibling.

"Who's killing all the Chinese people?"

"Who's killing all the Chinese people?"


This isn't the question you want to hear asked of you, especially when you're researching the local Chinese community.

Yet after explaining my project at a bar in Sao Paulo, I was asked this very question. Not a good sign, eh?

I don't know the answer to this question, but it's a fascinating subject. Four Chinese merchants have been murdered in the past two months, and forty to fifty have been robbed. The circumstances are usually more or less the same: someone breaks into an apartment, usually at night, perhaps knowing who is living there, takes the cash. Whether or not violence follows seems completely unpredictable. Apparently it is well known here that many Chinese immigrants keep their money (in cash) at home, rather than putting it in a bank. Many carry loads of cash around themselves in the first place. I've heard some people claim that this is a cultural difference, but it may also be a very practical thing -- many immigrants here are illegal, and therefore don't open any sort of account.

I happened to stumble upon the crime scene of the last murder, which didn't fit this profile at all. A Fujianese man was beaten to death in the early morning of a Saturday, inside of store on a quiet street in Pari, a commercial district. He was just a worker, and not the owner -- and given the strangeness of the crime -- the murder seemed completely random. Other Chinese merchants around the area knew about the murder, but didn't know him nor any details. One Taiwanese family two streets down was good friends with him, and said he was a very... "straight" and "abiding" man (terrible translations, sorry). Apparently he used to live in Ciudad del Este with the Taiwanese family, and were regular churchgoers in Sao Paulo.

Violence is a strange thing, which has unfortunately touched the heart of the Chinese community here in Sao Paulo.

Hard times in Sao Paulo

It has been over a week since I've last posted. I've been living in the guesthouse of a Buddhist temple here in Sao Paulo, which has been a fascinating experience. There are four nuns that live here, and one other person who lives in the guesthouse. Overall, I have been very glad to have had this experience. I am about to move to student housing after an unsuccessful quest for a Chinese homestay (see below). The guesthouse will be needed in the next week for a convocation of monks coming from the United States.

My time in Sao Paulo has been wrought with difficulties. My SLR camera has failed and it looks like the shop -- an authorized Canon dealer -- will not be able to fix it. I believe the problem is with the camera software, and not the actual camera itself, which means that probably only Canon will be able to deal with the problem.

On the project front, the Chinese community here is in crisis. There has been a recent spate of robberies, and more alarmingly, four murders in the past two months. All the murders have been of Chinese merchants in the 25 de March area. There is much speculation as to why this is happening: distrust between the Chinese merchant community and the Brazilians who work for them, distrust among the different Chinese clans; distrust within the different Chinese clans -- with the added twist of the Chinese mafia. These events have put the entire community on edge, perhaps reinforcing the clannish tendencies of the Chinese community.

Obviously, this makes for a fascinating case study of the Chinese population here, but has also made it doubly difficult for me to make way into a community deeply suspicious of outsiders, and made it impossible for me to find a homestay with a Chinese family.

In case you haven´t noticed, I have craftily changed the title of my blog. My Portuguese is getting better, but is still really just a translation of the Spanish, or speaking Spanish with a Portuguese accent.

Three month progress report

Lima, Peru. July 2008.

Curitiba, Brazil. October, 2008

In other news, my main camera, the Canon XS SLR has died! It won't turn on now! I was out shooting last night with some monks in Liberdade (formerly Japan-town, now Pan-Asian town), and it suddenly stopped functioning! And my "guarantee" from Paraguay is only good in Paraguay! Hopefully someone here will be able to fix it.

Concrete jungle

Sao Paulo is a megacity. I have never seen anything like it. I took this photo on the 35th floor of some old bank building modeled after the Empire State building.

As you can imagine, it's all quite overwhelming. I'm sure one could do (or has done already) a whole photo essay on the concrete jungle quality of Sao Paulo. I give you one more photo from inside Galeria Page.

Sao Paulo

For the record, I am in Sao Paulo now. I expected I might escape the chaotic streets of Ciudad del Este in coming to this city, but I was sorely mistaken. The street "March 25," a major commercial street in Sao Paulo (and where many Chinese immigrants set up shop), is strangely reminscent of Ciudad del Este. Heck, there's even a Galeria Page, even bigger and badder than the one in Ciudad del Este. Tons of people selling all sorts of things on the street. I suppose one difference is that there are lots of police here, and every time a police car rolls around, everyone scrams and picks up all their stuff, and sets it right back down on the ground when the police car drives away.

Sao Paulo is a concrete jungle. I have never seen anything like it. Photos to come.

Oscar Niemeyer

"It is not the right angle that attracts me.
Neither the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man.
What attracts me is the free and sensual curve. The curves i find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the clouds in the sky, in the body of a beloved woman.
The Universe is made of curves, Einstein's curved universe." -- Oscar Niemeyer


The first thing I learned about Brazil I learned from a book at the Concord Public Library, where I worked in high school. I was shelving books in the 700s under the Dewey decimal system, which is full of art and architecture books. Before the library was renovated in 2004, the 700s were located in the Thoreau room, a beautiful room with large windows, magnificent light, and great art books.

I came across an architecture book on Brazil's capital, Brasilia. I started flipping through the book, which had many photos on the construction of Brasilia, a capital that was created during the 1950s under president Juscelino Kubitschek. The main administrative buildings were designed by the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, who worked with the famous Swiss architect/urban planner Le Corbusier.

The architecture of Brasilia, an entirely planned city, amazed me. Today I had a chance to go to the Museu Oscar Niemeyer, a great art/architecture museum here in Curitiba.

Here is a photo of Brasilia:


There are some great photos of Brasilia during the 1960s here

BRAZIL (Brasil)!

I am in Brazil! Just got into Curitiba, after hanging out in Foz do Iguacu for a few days. Curitiba is a pleasant city, with a great public bus system, sidewalk cafes and restaurants, art galleries, bookstores, cobblestone streets, old restored colonial buildings.

There is a small community from Taishan county, China, which happens to be the county where my mother is from. They seem to own small sandwich shops around the center, and a few import clothing shops. That's it, though, nothing compared to Ciudad del Este or Lima.

In the throat of the devil

"Galeria Page" is a shopping mall anonymously tucked inside one of many busy streets in the commercial center of Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Although Galeria Page is busy with commercial activity all day, it is a hidden cove obscured by a barrage of signs advertising Adidas footwear, electronics, fishing gear, and batteries. All told, Galeria Page appears to be one of many shopping centers in Ciudad del Este, with little to offer.





But Galeria Page is special. The owner of Galeria Page is a member of the Lebanese terrorist organization Hezbollah, who apparently uses the Galeria as a front for all kinds of illicit activities -- such as money laundering, trafficking, and organizing of terrorist activities.

I knew that Hezbollah (and the Chinese mafia) had found Ciudad del Este to be a friendly place for their evil operations, but all the Chinese I talked to said the mafia had come and gone with the fortunes of this frontier town. That is to say, since business started souring about five years ago, the mafia has seemed to have left the area. But I had no idea where Hezbollah was -- nor did I particularly have any good way of asking. Despite living in the Lebanese part of town (Two shawarma and hookah cafes, "Edificio Lebanon" a block from me, as well streets "Mohammad Hussein Taiyen" and "Rahal Canan"), the last thing I was going to do was ask my neighbors if and where Hezbollah was in Ciudad del Este.

Anyways, I started talking with two Brasilians who worked in the area, and they brought up Galeria Page as the center for Hezbollah activity. Of course, I had to pay a visit -- it wouldn't exactly be guarded by terrorists armed with AK-47s (although a guard or two with shotguns is standard in CDE) -- as I learned in Ciudad del Este, organized violence is bad for business, and worse yet, draws official attention to the city. Better to keep things discreet and under the table.



I tried to locate the Galeria Page a few times, but even after asking around for it, I was unable to find it. It was simply far too anonymous for me to find by myself; few people could recall what street it was on, and if they did, there were far too many signs to be able to distinguish it.

Finally, I found out that Mr. Huang, a major figure in the Taiwanese community in Ciudad del Este, happens to own a business very near Galeria Page. I asked him what he thought about his neighbors, simply saying that there were suspicions they were involved in "bad activities." He simply said, "I don't know, I don't want to know. I've been here for over twenty years, and I've done perfectly fine here."

Perfectly fine indeed. I visited his house, located in a private neighborhood called the "Parana Country Club," where Ciudad del Este's wealthy own sprawling mansions within a guarded, gated community. I'm hesitant to post photos here, but Mr. Huang's place (not exactly a house, nor a mansion, but a giant building) was so big, that at first I couldn't believe it was actually a house. Perhaps even more ostentatious was the house he built for when his "mother or guests come visit," as big as the mansions in Concord, Massachusetts. I think there must be some sort of contest going in the Parana Country Club, because even though the house was enormous, most of it seemed empty and unfurnished. But like most things Chinese, it is perhaps all about "saving face," or perhaps showing it off, of putting on a beautiful facade and showing off your success, especially in a commercial city like Ciudad del Este.

But now I'm getting off topic. I believe my only interaction with my Hezbollah hosts was when I asked permission to photograph their hookahs (permission denied), but being the intrepid photographer that I am, I took a photo, no, TWO photos anyway! Eventually the angry/suspicious stares won over, however.






In other news, "The Devil's Throat" (Garganta del diablo) is the most stunning area of Iguazu Falls, the part that lies on the Brazilian/Argentine border. Funny how accurate it seems to describe some of the illicit activity around here. Here are some photos of the Devil's Throat, which are not stolen from Google images, taken with my very own camera, straight from inside the throat of the devil.




Brasilian webpage with a list of accused Hezbollah members in the Tri-border area.


BBC page (unfortunately, in Portuguese... can't seem to search in English here in Brazil!) on the same topic.