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.

Chinese people in Ciudad del Este

I finally figured out how to resize images in my computer (I'm using a non-conventional, stripped-down version of Linux). I know you may be wondering what the City actually looks like, and I will put photos up of the city later. But here are some people.



Buddhist temple

General update

Hi readers,

Sorry I have gone AWOL over the past week. I'm still in Ciudad del Este, wrapping up this stage of my project; it's now been a month since I came here.

Although Ciudad del Este is not a particularly pleasant city, I have had a wonderful time here. I met many incredibly kind people, who have helped me understand this place and invited me into their lives.

I spend most of my time trying to document daily life, banal as it may be. In order to make things more interesting and to focus the scope (avoiding the "lens" pun, or not) of my project, I've dabbled in various themes of documentary, which I won't get into now. Nevertheless, the major event I did cover this past week was the 97th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China (ROC) which was celebrated here with a big banquet dinner, dance performances, and in typical Chinese fashion, karaoke.

Fang sheng

I also attempted to cover the Buddhist practice of Fang sheng, or "releasing life," in which one buys condemned animals and sets them free. They usually aren't big animals -- nobody (to my knowledge) goes out and buys a cow and set it free on some pasture -- instead, they are usually birds or fish.

Alas, the releasing of animals was cancelled due to inclement of weather: torrential rainstorms all day on Saturday. Hopefully I will be able to witness it before I leave Ciudad del Este. Maybe the fish will end up condemned down Iguacu falls or the Itaipu dam -- the world's largest hydroelectric dam before the Chinese outdid them with the Three Gorges Dam.I suppose I'm being pessimist.


New Zealand out, Southeast Asia in

In other news, I've been thinking over the past couple weeks of making some slight changes to my original itinerary. I was planning on going to New Zealand in April, but have now decided that my project time would be better spent with more time in Southeast Asia. Malaysia is the last designated stop on my itinerary, but I will likely add Thailand, Vietnam, and/or Indonesia. Of course, I probably cannot cross of New Zealand and add all those countries, so I'll have to pick and choose. It's all up in the air -- I need to think about this more and do more research before proposing such a major change.

Brazil... photography... China... gender...

I normally don't post about photography-related things, but since I spend a lot of time taking photos and looking at photos, I'm going to make an exception now for a really cool photography exhibition. French photographer JR , has an awesome public photography exhibition in Rio de Janiero on women. Yes, he's too cool to have a real name, apparently he's an "underground" photographer that first gained fame (or notoriety?) through his illegal exhibition of mural-sized photos in public spaces; later, his stuff became recognized and received positive reviews. The exhibition displays blown up portraits of women in Brazil's notorious favelas -- slums or shantytowns within Brazil's big cities such as Rio and Sao Paulo. Favelas are infamous for their high murder rates, drugs, and poverty.

Although I haven't seen any of JR's stuff in person, it is really impressive; it is socially-conscious photography that is made even more impressive by its public, mural-sized exhibition. The first stuff that I saw was a series of portraits that he took following last year's riots in Paris's banlieues, which were then exhibited as large mural-sized photographs around Paris. You can see an awesome short film on the project, I highly recommend viewing it on youtube here:
The 28 millimeter project

I hope the exhibit might still be up in Rio when I make it to Brazil. You can see photos of the exhibit here at the photography website Lensculture.

Here's a photo of the favela at night:
On gender

On a similar note, I first became fascinated with gender equality in college in my development-related classes, and reading about the Nobel Prize-winning Grameen bank's microlending to Bangladeshi women. The Grameen bank famously found that women were much better clients for loans -- they used money more wisely, and also contributed to many beneficial externalities (better child health, education, etc...).


A woman's position in society is not only a good index of a country's economic development, but also a good index of it's social development as well. My own thesis work also examined gender equality initiatives under China's communist government, which found a positive relationship between political emphasis on gender equality and improved child health. But I was also disturbed by the phenomenon of China's missing women: the phenomenon that since economic reforms began in 1979, the sex ratio of China's population has become far more biased toward males. For instance, in most normal populations the sex ratio at birth is about 105 to 107 male births for every female births. In China this has increased to about 116 male births, and this bias is pervasive in other cohorts as well.

In fact, many Asian and Muslim countries have this problem, including economically developed countries such as Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. The most basic explanation is that in these countries male children are more valued than female children, and hence practices such as sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and selective neglect has lead to imbalanced sex ratios within these societies. Strangely, Latin America doesn't seem to have the problem of sex ratio, despite being an infamously "macho" society. I would hypothesize that this might be partially due to the cultural and religious abhorrence toward abortion; of course, this doesn't explain everything. Anyways, this is a subject that I have found fascinating, and I still do not fully understand the underlying reasons.

Another phenomenon is that of China's extraordinary rate of female suicides: in most countries, the male to female suicide rate is about 4:1, in China, it is 1:1. What is driving China's women to commit suicide at such an alarming rate? Are the pressures China's women (or for that matter, East Asian women) face similar to those among Chinese women abroad?

Consider this an introduction to a future post about my observations on gender within Paraguay's Chinese community.