like an eyedrop with turpentine

So this month hasn't been composed of much the same exhilarating tales of mountaineering, extreme sports and endangered animal sightings that my time in Nepal was chock full of. What was important for me on this journey was to experience a country, to really feel the life, embrace the people, and familiarize myself with new definitions of comfort. I did that by living the Nepali way, speaking the language as best I could, eating and actually liking dhal bhat for every meal. Here in Chengdu, I am in my birth city, so there is no doubt an elevated sense of familiarity. I am surrounded by people I not only know, but have blood relation to, so although the city is still a strange place for me, my family's presence has eased the process of reacquainting with it.

I often find myself lost in my thoughts here, must be something in the air. When I say lost, I mean its really like a splattering of letters on a NYTimes crossword puzzle, and if I don't record the fragments in my Moleskin I can't make sense of it myself. I think of family alot. My own and the concept of it. I think of fate, one's acceptance of fate, and when to question if there is more than appears to be in the cards. I think about China, and as much as I feel so disconnected from the people my age who grew up here, how much of who I am is shaped by my birth nation. All of this contributed to my exploring this country. Snapping pictures of temples and man-made stone gardens wasn't doing it for me anymore, I wasn' t feeling the country and I needed to change the way I interracted with the environment.

Just in this crucial time, someone came across my path. Let's call her Jane. Through parents and acquaintances I met this girl, roughly my age, photography enthusiast and knowing not a word of english. In discussing photography, I saw that she didn't think like the people who grew up here. The school system here has a way of breaking down its students' independent ability to reason, endorsing repetition and rigid memory excercises over developing creative thinking and deductive ability. That, with the one-child policy that's created a generation of carefully protected offspring, has resulted in many young people who are heavily reliant on their parents financially and emotionally. Part-time jobs are a foreign concept, reserved for the lowest class of society, and my cousins are shocked to learn I have made my own pocket money since I was ten. There is little perspective to be gained when so much of the world outside is still sensored. I believe Australia is the only English movie playing in theatres here, and many blogs I frequent are blocked. With these limited resources, people cannot readily prepare for the complexity of mentally adjusting to a country that is modernizing so rapidly.

What I thought was a rule didn't hold that strong after I spoke with Jane. She had a kind of world view that I've rarely seen even in a place like Canada, and could speak with depth and passion about everything from the essence of a photograph to the urban development of Chengdu. I could keep up with my rudimentary Chinese but would often be thinking OMFG that's what I wanted to say but could never put in prose like that. I was taken on a tour of Chengdu, the proper way. We were both poised, ready with our cameras. And the big revelation was that I ended up taking less pictures that day than I ever did on sightseeing trips, but felt more fulfilled than all those other times I brought home a hundred slides of digitally preserved memories.

I really felt Chengdu that day, breathing the air (less than stellar, but), watching and really seeing life as it went about around us. I felt it the most embodied in the tender scene of a child grasping his grandparents hands as they walked through the park, the sound of mahjong tablets flicked against eachother by eager hands at every teahouse in the city, the silence of pens scribbling across notepads in the city library. I didn't need a wide-angle lens to take it all in, it was the kind of experience that you couldn't capture on film, and even if you could, didn't need to. Of course, when I stopped trying to capture as much as I could within a definitive frame, in a sense liberating my experience from the press of a shutter, the photos finally came to life.