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

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

(No) photos from Paraguay (yet)

I apologize for not posting any photos from Paraguay yet. The main reason I haven't is that my internet connection is very slow here, and I can't resize my photos to make them smaller in my new camera, like I could with my old camera. That makes posting photos online very difficult. If I can figure out a way to resize them -- or get a decent internet connection -- I will.

The project is coming along quite well here, I think. I've been able to follow several individuals and a family. Here are some sketches:

Mr. Yu is the owner of Dou Jiang Dian, or Soy Milk restaurant, which advertises vegetarian food and Paraguayan food. Mr. Yu came to Paraguay twenty-six years ago, spurred on by a failed business venture in Taiwan. He apparently tried to open up a business here in Paraguay, but that failed, and for the past ten years, has run Soy Milk Restaurant. The restaurant appears quite successful.

Soy Milk Restaurant is special and therefore successful, I think, for two reasons. Firstly it is the only Chinese restaurant that specializes in breakfast food and vegetarian food. I'd contend the former is more vital for business than the latter; although there are vegetarians here, there aren't many, while everyone needs a good breakfast, especially when you have to wake up at 4 or 5 am. Soy milk restaurant has tons of Chinese breakfast pastries, congee (rice porridge, delicious), oil sticks (also delicious...), and pretty much every other traditional Chinese breakfast food. The Chinese business community here loves it.

Secondly, Soy Milk Restaurant sells Paraguayan food as well. I'd argue that the restaurant is beginning a process of gastronomic syncretism (thanks to my liberal arts degree from Wesleyan, I am allowed to make up obnoxiously complicated phrases for simple concepts), that is, it is beginning to mix Chinese and Paraguayan food. Along Avenida Avay, there are five or seven (depending on how you count a restaurant...) Chinese restaurants, and as far as I can tell, the only one that regularly attracts non-Chinese customers is Soy Milk Restaurant. They sell Paraguay soups and mains, with a little Chinese ingredients and flavors added in.
I think this may be the first step toward a greater melding of cuisines that you'd see in Peruvian-Chinese chifa cuisine or American Chinese cuisine, such as chop suey.

Mr. Yu wakes up every day at 2:30 am to begin preparing breakfast by 3:00 am. I had the sleep-deprived pleasure of accompanying him last week at 3:00 am. For some reason I doubted he'd be punctual for our date, but then I realized that this was his job, whether some American was there to photograph him or not. He prepares the soy milk, the porridge, everything, until his workers start coming at around 4:30 am.

People start calling and placing orders as early as 5 am, and business is open by 5:30. Mr. Yu's wife comes in around 6, and Mr. Yu then retires home.

Hopefully, I'll be able to post some photos of Mr Yu, and continue the sketch, since there's more!

Snakes in a market

Since I've told this story to a couple of people now, I may as well repeat it here:

There's a little alleyway off the main street in El Barrio Chino, quite shady in both senses of the word. The alleyway serves as a produce market where one can get all sorts of Chinese vegetables, including (as I've mentioned earlier) my favorite kongxincai. They also have excellent, fresh tofu made daily (although it usually sells out by 3 pm), and sometimes fish in the mornings. There's also a fruit vendor, from whom I buy kiwis, and who I will talk about later in this blog.

I was talking with the fruit vendor last Tuesday, when some guy starts pulling out this long, taut, but slightly curled thing from a large rice sack. It keeps coming out, and three guys join in to pull the thing out. People start murmuring in the market, when they realize it's a giant boa constrictor. The guys seem to inspect it for a while (I was maybe 20 meters away -- no pictures, sorry), before putting it back into the rice sack and leaving it near the entrance of the alleyway market, on the ground.

As I walk out, I notice that there are a couple more rice sacks with the boa constrictor sack, lying haphazardly on the ground, their contents unknown.

请客 (qing'ke), or, the art of invitation

It is one of the first lessons in college-level Chinese, something described as an indispensable part of Chinese culture, and something I actually attempted to describe in my fellowship interview. My concise Oxford University Press Chinese-English dictionary defines "qing ke" as the following:
"stand treat; entertain guests; give a dinner party; play the host."

I think I described it in my Watson interview when posed the question, how exactly are you actually gonna get to know all these Chinese people? I tried to describe how during my times in China, as well as with my family back home in the U.S., relationships are made and cemented through "qing ke." Basically, one asks another (or a group of people) for a lunch, a cup of tea, a beer, or really any other social activity. I'm not well versed in the specifics, but I'm pretty sure some sort of monetary exchange is necessary, in order to demonstrate that one is actually treating the other person (So, inviting someone for a walk in the park doesn't count, but paying for the post-walk teahouse does). When the bill eventually comes, the appropriate parties spend a good amount of time fighting over the bill. If one is particularly determined to treat, he or she makes prior arrangements (with the restaurant staff, for instance) so the bill doesn't slip into the wrong hands.
Of course, once one has treated another, it is the guest's unspoken duty to treat the host the next time.

I should mention that I tried to "qing'ke" the second day in Lima, with a chain-smoking Tianjin guy with stained yellow teeth, a leather jacket, and a thick Northerner accent (which stands out against the Cantonese-inflected Mandarin that most others speak here). It was like I was in Beijing all over again -- visitors of the Chinese capital have probably all noticed the large groups of such men in restaurants rowdily downing beer after beer, shirts rolled up and faces red, cigarette stumps littered across the floor. After noting we were living in the same neighborhood, I invited him out for a beer, as befits this seemingly stereotypical northerner. He politely agreed, but nothing ever came of it, and for some odd reason, I haven't seen him in his shop since that first day.

It's now been nearly two weeks since I got here, and I finally had my first two "qing'ke" exchanges in the past three days. I failed to pay both times, perhaps reflecting my novice bill-fighting abilities. I would like to note that I was also quite clearly playing against a home-field advantage: the first time, it was the restaurant owner who was treating me. I tried to force the ten soles bill (about $3.40) into her hands, but it simply wouldn't take. It's amazing. I tried a couple times, but she refused and simply said "next time."


The second time happened today. Roxane, who I think I mentioned in a previous post, invited me and her son (who is the same age) out for lunch at Chifa Canton. The food was delicious, a great vegetable dish with my favorite mu'er, a fungus literally translated as "tree ears," and a local fish steamed in classic Cantonese style with a healthy amount of ginger and scallions. I kept thinking, there is no way I can let her pay for this. Unbeknownst to me, however, Roxane had apparently made previous arrangements with the restaurant owner (who is her good friend) to pay for the lunch, so when I asked for the bill, they said it had already been paid. Even worse, Roxane had slipped out to work, so I couldn't even fight with her for the bill.

But I think that these two "qing'ke" incidents are good signs. They may have treated me this time, but no matter how much they fight for the bill next time, eventually I'll win, and I'll pay. It's an unspoken rule. And it signifies that at the very least, a kind of personal relationship is forming.

Food in Lima

Food in Lima has been great. I was expecting to cook a lot more, but with such delicious and relatively inexpensive food everywhere, I've been eating out quite often. I often eat Chifa, Peruvian-Chinese food, in Chinatown or elsewhere. Someone quoted that there were approximately 4,000 Chifas in all of Lima, quite a large amount, even taking into account Lima's size (estimated population of 8 million, about a third of Peru's total population!).

Limenos (Lima residents), it appears, are carnivores, and it's difficult to order dishes that feature vegetables and not meat. Most of the Chifa menu items are quite meaty, which can get overwhelming at times. Because I'm a cheapskate and because I normally eat by myself, I order off the "El Menu," which is basically a set-price, 2 or 3 course meal. Chifas usually have a "sopa wanton" and a main dish, such as "pollo tamarindo," chicken in tamarind sauce, and maybe a small desert or drink if you get the "menu ejecutivo." This all costs about 6-9 soles, or about 2-3 dollars.

I've also been able to get a good variety of Chinese vegetables in a sidestreet market in the Chinatown here. They even have kongxincai (literally translated as "open-heart vegetable... the stalks are hollow), my favorite Chinese vegetable. I bought some homemade tofu today as well, and it was quite delicious.

When people ask me what I eat here, the other thing I usually mention besides chifa is ceviche-- raw seafood-- which is famous in Peru. The fish ceviche is the classic dish and my favorite, although the conchas negras (black clam) ceviche is also delicious. Its normally served dunked in lime juice and with red onions, as well as corn and sweet potato on the side. All told, I'm quite happy with the food here!