Cholon, Ho Chi Minh City

Cholon is the historical "Chinatown district" in Saigon, now officially known as Ho Chi Minh City.

In case you hadn't realized already, most Chinese immigrants are good entrepreneurs. Hence, when the Communists came smashing through and closed all the free markets, many Chinese people fled Vietnam. With markets opening up once again, the Chinese people are once more beginning to show off their entrepreneurial talent.


Funny thing. After arriving in Vietnam from China, I've been making many comparisons between the two. I've been surprised how tolerant most Vietnamese people are with having their photo taken, at least in comparison to their Chinese counterparts. Most don't seem to mind, and there are rarely angry security guards that make up arbitrary rules prohibiting photography in public places.

Nevertheless, when I got to Cholon, I noticed immediately how much more camera-shy the Chinese there were. Originally, I would have liked to take a portrait of this trio, apparently grandparents and their grandchild. But the man and woman casually covered their faces while allowing me to photograph their child, with little protest. The result seems somewhat funny to me.


Since I'm travelling alone I don't get many photos taken of me. My college photography professor required us to take at least three self-portraits on each roll of film (remember those?), and I've gotten in the habit of taking them. Here I am wearing my new blazer and shirt I got tailor-made in Vietnam, because apparently that's what you do when you go to Vietnam. It's quite incredible, really, little shops can spit out an entire suit in less than 12 hours of you walking into the store.

A map of the Chinese diaspora

My friend Julian sent me this link, a world map of the Chinese diaspora. I met Julian nearly a year ago in Lima, Peru -- incidentally, Julian is also a Chinese-American.

http://www.wallpaper.com/madeinchina/diaspora

The map shows the major Chinese settlements of around the world. What seems to be missing is a more updated version showing Chinese immigration in Africa. Nigeria has upwards of 100,000 Chinese people, and Ethiopia has between 40,000-50,000.

Three months left

On April 1 I left New Zealand (did I say I went to New Zealand? I went to New Zealand for a brief and glorious two and a half weeks.) for Taiwan. April 1 marks the nine month mark of my fellowship, and also means I have three months remaining. It also means I have to send a "quarterly progress report" as required by the fellowship, which is a sort of informal report on how I'm doing, one of the few concrete requirements of the fellowship.

After writing my report, I began to realize why I was having some difficulty with photography when I got to Australia. I spent most of my time in Sydney, which has a huge Asian community. Up until Australia, I spent most of my time in cities with a proportionally smaller Chinese community; although the Australian census doesn't collect statistics on ethnicity, Sydney has a huge Chinese population, and Mandarin and Cantonese are together the most widely spoken second language. Now that I am in Asia, I will continue going to countries with even higher proportions of ethnic Chinese people (Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam are obvious examples) -- countries where the influence of the Chinese is even stronger. And the Chinese food will be better.

The way I'd approached photographing "the Chinese diaspora" up until Australia had largely been to focus on the Chinese immigrant experience, which meant documenting a minority ethnic group in a very different cultural environment. Now, however, I can't really do that. Simply put, the Chinese are everywhere!!

In other news, I've been taking some photos of beautiful light.

Sunrise on an alpine meadow in the Dart Valley, New Zealand


Rainforest in Australia

In Sydney's Chinatown:


Some pretty spectacular light in Chinatown: simultaneous heavy rain and sunshine (didn't see any rainbows, though). That's Sydney's monorail in the second photo.

And just some pretty things:
Some beach area on Australia's east coast


Cascade Saddle, New Zealand.

Kea, the notorious alpine bird in New Zealand. Because of visitors feeding the kea, they are quite curious and can get aggressive and will start picking at anything of human origin. Like the camera. weeeth theeer POINTY beeeeeks.

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.

"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.

A few photos

So I realize that I haven't posted any photos of Chinatown streets or the big gate here in Lima. Part of the reason why I haven't is because those kinds of photos are readily available on the internet, and my photographic contributions aren't new or original. But maybe I've been spoiled, because I get to see these streets everyday.





Vegetable market


Calle Capon, the main drag:

Tung Sing, Ancestral temple in Barrio Chino, Lima

Tung Sing （同型, Mandarin: Tong Xing is a temple near Barrio Chino, in the Central Market area of Lima. Barrio Chino is essentially a series of streets in the middle of the Central Market, and the concentration of Chifas (Chinese restaurants) and businesses peters out as one walks further from the main drag of the Calle Capon street and the perpendicular Jiron Paruro street.

The temple is not visible from the street, it is tucked behind a nondescript alleyway, and its main facade is facing away from the street.

The temple is mainly used by immigrants and descendants from Zhongshan (中山）, an area in Guangdong province. It seems as if most Chinese here are from Zhongshan, and to a lesser extent, from Taishan county (where my mother's family is from), Guangzhou city, and Nanhai.






In the corner is German Koo, the "priest" of the temple. Apparently he has some sort of qualifications, but I am told by Chinatown residents that he is quite a greedy character. Indeed, he immediately asked for a donation upon my arrival in the temple.


Photos of Sun Yat-sen, considered one of the founding fathers of modern China, are popular in El Barrio Chino. Actually, Zhongshan was named after Sun Yat-sen (who's name in pinyin is Sun Zhongshan).

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.

Things go poorly sometimes

A few days ago I went out to try and find the Peruvian-Chinese Association, an organization that appears to be geared mostly towards the tusan Chinese -- those born in Peru. I had been in email contact with them while applying for the Watson Fellowship, and they had been very helpful in their emails. After hearing back from the fellowship committee, I wrote them again, but they did not respond. At any rate, I decided I would try to seek out their actual association building, having gotten their address. Several things went wrong:
1) Street names had changed -- all maps I consulted gave the street name "Republica de Panama," whereas the actual street name had become something like "Avenida Roosevelt." I walked about an hour too far before realizing that I had probably missed it.
2. Building were not numbered.
3. To top it all off, when I finally got to the correct building, I was told by the security guard the Association had moved not too long ago (Their phone number wasn't working, either).

I have yet to try and find the new location, and although I will make it there, I am not going to be terribly optimistic that it will contribute significantly to my project. I'm interested in people, not organizations. And I am also still fine-tuning my "photo-interviewing" skills, so that people will be as they are and allow me to photograph. Many people have been very open to sharing their stories, but many also put up their defenses when I begin to photograph. Actually, I have had great opportunities to get to know a lot of people here, and many go way out of their way to help me.

Finally, my pocket-sized camera appears to be out of order. The lens won't slide back into the camera body or slide all the way out; I'll visit the Canon shop in Lima, but for now it's a no-go.

An introduction to El Barrio Chino in Lima, Peru

"Chifa" is the word used to describe Chinese food in Peruvian Spanish, a slight corruption of the Chinese compound chi-fan, literally translated as "Eat Food." Chifa seems to be ubiquitous in Lima, even outside the Chinatown area. In my district, Miraflores, there are two Chifas only two minutes away from my apartment building. It appears as if the Chinese influence in Peru has at least permeated its cuisine, and foods such as sopa wanton and chaufa (fried rice) are found everywhere. Often after attempting to explain my project to Peruvians, I ask them if they've had Chifa, and if so, if they like it. I have yet to meet a single Peruvian (or more specifically, someone from Lima) who isn't aware of the Chinese population here, or who hasn't tried Chinese food. They have all said that they like it, but that may be a different matter.


The Chinese have settled in Peru for over hundred years, and continue to do so today. Lima's Chinatown is one of the most established in the Western Hemisphere, and is perhaps the most famous Chinatown outside of the United States. Geographically, however, "El Barrio Chino" (the Chinatown) is quite small -- it is composed of only two perpendicular streets, Calle Uyacali and Calle Capon.

I arrived in Lima one week ago, and I quickly obesrved that the Chinese community here in Peru isn't really a unified entity. Similar to the Chinese community in, say, New York, the Chinese community in Lima is an eclectic mix of recent immigrants, first-generation Chinese (such as myself), and descendants of Chinese immigrants who arrived here as early as the mid-1800s.
Cantonese immigrants were the first settlers in Peru. Many of their descendants are already well-integrated into Peruvian society, no longer speak Cantonese, and seem to separate themselves from the more recent immigrants. These different groups don't necessarily interact on equal terms, either.

Roxane Lok, who works at a foodstuffs store, arrived from Guangdong less than ten years ago. She was friendly with me on my first day in Barrio Chino, and was willing to pose for a photograph with her boss, Julia, a Peruvian-born woman of Chinese descent, called tusan, another Peruvian Spanish term that is derived from the Chinese tusheng, or locally-born.

Roxane appeared quite aware of the disparities between these two groups. I asked the two where they live, and Julia replied San Isidro, a posh suburb where private guards and electric fences are the norm; whereas Roxane replied El Barrio Chino, which despite its touristy veneer, is the first stop for many newly-arrived immigrants. Roxane simplified the difference between these two groups as symbolic of her relationship with Julia, "La duena y la trabajadora" (The Boss and The Worker).

Most recent immigrants have also arrived from Guangdong, but many more have come from another southern coastal province that has historically sent many immigrants abroad, Fujian. Mr. Lu, an acupuncturist in the Barrio Chino, estimates that within the past eight years the Fujianese population here expanded from only 200 to over 5,000. I don't know whether that is true, but many of the new Chifas that are popping up around the two main streets of the Barrio Chino are run by Fujianese.

Mr. Lu

Mr. Lu, however, does not fit into either of the two predominant categories of Chinese here; he is neither a part of the recent migration from the southern provinces nor is he a descendant of early settlers. Mr. Lu is from Shanghai, and at the age of fifty-five, he managed to get a visa out of China in 1987 (do the math... I did). Unlike most of the other Chinese here, too, Mr. Lu seems enamored of his adopted country and highly critical of his country of birth.

Mr. Lu almost immediately began describing to me the great freedoms he had in Peru, that although China's economy has opened up, its government still hasn't, and that the Chinese are all after money whereas the Peruvians are much more humane. More than once, Mr. Lu grandly described the "libertad" in Peru, which he asserted was near-absent in China.

Mr. Lu's age already hinted at the fact that he undoubtedly lived through some of the most traumatic periods in Chinese history -- the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Lu's iconoclastic comments further contributed to a suspicion that he must have endured unspeakable hardships in China. One common theme that will undoubtedly run through this project is attempting to understand why people left China, and perhaps more historically, under what conditions they left.

Because of my thesis work on China's barefoot doctors (Chijiao yisheng) during the Cultural Revolution, I was interested in whether Mr. Lu had trained any doctors, since he had already finished medical school (in Chinese medicine) by 1961, at the Medical University in Anhui province. While writing my thesis, I learned that China was able to rapidly train over 1.5 million "barefoot doctors" -- minimally trained rural paramedics -- largely through the help of forced rural conscription of urban doctors.

He said that he was "sent down" (xiaxiang) to the countryside in the late 1960s, which was quite common for urban residents with the wrong politics, and yes, he trained many barefoot doctors in rural Anhui, as well as "worker's doctors" (gongren yisheng) outside of Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution many political undesirables -- intellectuals, "capitalist roaders," teachers, doctors -- were forcibly sent to the countryside to engage in grueling manual labor.

Mr. Lu also indicated that he would not have been able to go to medical school later on, because as he put it, his parents had a "hacienda." The nice thing about talking with these Chinese-Peruvians is that when my Chinese fails (i.e., I had forgotten had to say "landowners" in Chinese), we can often switch to Spanish. Both Chinese and Spanish are currently occupying the very small space my brain has allocated for foreign languages, so mixing up the two is inevitable. Back to the Hacienda. Shortly after Mr. Lu must have entered medical school in 1957, class struggles would have made it impossible for Mr. Lu, the son of landowners, to attend a medical school. On the other hand, those who had grown up as peasants or landless laborers would have had a far greater chance at higher education.

Mr. Lu is spritely and in good spirits at 75, and seems to have adapted to Lima quite well. He has a Peruvian wife and his three children (I assume from a previous marriage in China) are scattered across the world -- one in Canada, one in China, and one practicing acupuncture in you guessed it, Cote d'Ivoire. I told him that this was a little strange, going to Cote d'Ivoire, and he goes "Yes, it's hard there, but it's still good."