Seth Coleman in Beijing

It’s been ages since I posted last, but I’d like to throw some of my video projects from the second half of 2013 up here before I forget to entirely. These stories were all done for China Radio International (the website) where I’ve been employed for the past year. My contract ends in February at which point I’ll be doing freelance video and photo work. I’ll still be based in Beijing but aiming for more of a pan-asian focus for this year than 2012.

For the new American school year in September I started following a group of American study-abroad high school students with a program called School Year Abroad. So far I’ve done 2 videos on them. The first was just days after they arrived, the second a couple of months later. Have a watch:

A Year in China from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

SYA2 dc from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

As fall set in, I highlighted the work of a Swede named Linus, who brought the Swedish ‘sport’ of Heyrobics to Beijing. It’s good fun.

Heyrobics from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

Later on I was sent to Yunnan for a one-week trip and produced several videos. The best of the bunch was probably about cormorant fishing – or fishing using a special bird – in Erhai lake near the city of Dali.

Fishing with Birds from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

As winter set in, I did a couple videos using prime lenses and slider – more eye candy then any kind of real news report – but kind of cool nonetheless.

Preparing for Winter from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

Park Sports from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

I haven’t gotten around to uploading all of the 2012 videos yet, so as I put the rest up on vimeo I may choose one or two to say a bit more about. If you have any questions on any of these videos, feel free to ask in the comments.

We went to visit the tightrope walking school of Adili Wuxor while we were in Kashgar. Though he still performs from time to time, he’s let himself go a bit judging from his surprising plumpness. His students on the other hand are taught and muscular – they’re the ones doing most of the intense stunt work. Adili’s most recent major stunt was his 60 days of tightrope walking over the Bird’s Nest in Beijing back in 2010.

At the school, the indoor area has plenty of ropes of different heights, with a safety cushion below the highest one. Outside however, there is a massively high rope, and when one of the students demonstrated up there, complete with chair-sitting and unicycle riding, it made me nervous. The winds were blowing pretty hard, and the one lone cushion didn’t seem sufficient in the case of a fall. It’s scary, says Adili – even after doing it hundreds of times.

Adili treated us to fruits while we waited to film – some of the best melons I’ve ever had – and even graciously drove us in his SUV to and from his training camp, a good 30 km outside the city in the town of Yengisar, famous for it’s knives.

Here’s the full video:

Uyghur Dawaz from Seth Coleman on Vimeo.

Lulu Galore and the rest of the talented cast at Moonglow Burlesque/Cabaret are giving once-conservative China something new to try on, or rather, take off. Over the past few weeks they’ve brought their show to audiences at Beijing’s upscale LAN club, and the more man-on-the-street, casual crowd at Modernista. Have a watch:

The unbelievably talented Beijing Dance LDTX group presented a series of dances at the beginning of April, called Grain Rain. Anyone who says there’s no good modern dance in China doesn’t know what they’re talking about – these young artists, who compete all over the world, have been choreographing and performing some amazing work. Here’s my video on them:

For more on these groups, check out their websites.
Moonglow Burlesque
Beijing Dance LDTX

Enjoy!

In the first half of 2012 I worked on three separate stories which related to bicycles. China’s transition from bicycle to car culture is well under way, but bicycles are starting to take on a cool factor among some groups. Fixed gear bikes, for instance, are establishing themselves as a must have item for young hipsters here in Beijing. My first story was about an alley cat bike race, organized by some brave expats earlier this year. Here’s the video:

I met the subject for the second story, French artist Niko de La Faye, at the alley cat. He told me about his plan to ride his sanlunche, the Chinese word for the three-wheeled workhorses that transport all manner of goods across China, from Beijing to Shanghai. Niko’s cargo was a kinetic sculpture that he had spent much of the last 2 years building and exhibiting. He calls it ‘a representation of the universe’. You be the judge.

As a quick update to that story, Niko was scheduled to arrive in Shanghai yesterday, May 29th, to exhibit his project there. He can be found on facebook here.

The trilogy is rounded out by a more classic Chinese bicycle tale, that of Tianjin Flying Pigeon Bicycle Company. It’s a company intricately tied into China’s recent history, and was a must have item during the first several decades of Communist Party rule. Families saved for years to buy one, and any family that had two would have been considered very well off, at that time. Buying one wasn’t simply a matter of just having the cash – a voucher giving the bearer the right to purchase one was also needed. I visited the company headquarters and factory in Tianjin, and met with a man who had worked for Flying Pigeon for more then forty years, and he told us what life was like in those days.

I am trying to avoid bicycle stories for a while, lest I get a reputation for obsession. Hope you enjoyed them.

In 2009 Wang Feng joined a memory club at Wuhan University, where he studied land resource management. He was curious, he says, whether he could improve his memory through training, which at the time was “very average”. His teacher in the memory club is a memory Grand Master, and under his guidance Wang Feng made rapid progress. In just two weeks, he had surpassed other members of the club who had been training for many months. Just 7 months after starting, the 2009 World Memory Championships were held in London, and Wang Feng’s final score ranked him 5th place. The following year, when the competition was held in Guangzhou, China, Wang Feng took first place. He won the competition again in 2011, breaking world records in three of the ten memory disciplines at the event.

Wang Feng specializes in remembering numbers. Five of the event’s ten contests are related to numbers, “So if I want to be the champion, I have to be good with numbers,” he says. In one hour, he successfully memorized 2,660 random digits, one of his world records. He can’t explain why he is better so much better than others, “I guess I’m just really devoted to the training, or my accuracy is better.” He spends three months training intensively before a competition, following a strict daily schedule, waking at 7 and sleeping at 11. He also pays attention to food and exercise, “I eat more fish, nuts, and milk, which benefit the brain, and do aerobic exercise, which help also helps.”

That’s not to say that Wang Feng’s home is filled with almonds and treadmills. In memory training, there is no substitute for simple, time-consuming practice. The basic strategy that Wang Feng uses is not fundamentally different from that used by others, he says – he’s just adapted the well-known techniques for himself, and for the Chinese language that he operates in. The building blocks, as described in books like “The Art of Memory” by Frances Yates, are to convert things like numbers, and the order of playing cards, into information easily remembered by our brains.

The bread and butter of contemporary mnemonics is a technique known as the ‘method of loci’. Because our minds are well suited to remembering locations, the mnemonist first visualizes the thing to be remembered, then puts it into a discrete place, in a familiar location. To remember a shopping list, one puts the cheese on the bed, and some bread by the heater, perhaps some asparagus in the doorway. When the time comes to recall the list, one must simply take a walk through the location, and the items will easily be remembered.

Part of the training for Wang Feng is preparing these locations, getting to know them intimately in his mind. Another part is associating numbers with images. It won’t do to put an 8 on the bed or a 2 on the floor – the information must first be converted into imagery. A common technique, and the one Wang Feng employs, is to create a unique image for every 2 digit number, from 00 to 99. Wang Feng tends to use a number’s Chinese pronunciation to generate his imagery – 49 sounds like a convict sentenced to death in Chinese, and 19 is medicinal alcohol – which are much more memorable items to have around your room than random digits.

But even with a memory as impressive as Wang Feng’s, the technique has to be ‘turned on’, to be consciously used in order to be effective. Even he can forget a name, or where he left his keys, if he’s distracted. It doesn’t work automatically.

After winning the championship two years in a row, Wang Feng says he’s satisfied with his competitive ability and is ready to focus on teaching others the technique. He has his own students now, and is helping some of them to compete in the 2012 WMC, which will be held in India. He graduated from Wuhan University this year, and has been traveling to different Chinese cities to give lectures at schools, to demonstrate the technique and teach it to others. He says there’s a big demand for memory training in China, “A lot of people could use it to prepare for tests,” he says.

In the age of Google and Baidu, we have unimaginable amounts of information at our fingertips. Some may argue that we’ve reached a stage in human history where we don’t need to train our memories. There techniques were developed by monks and scholars in the time before the printing press, but Wang Feng and many others are pushing to bring some of the work of remembering back to our minds. With the deluge of data most of us process in a day, we sometimes become lazy, and our minds and memories suffer.

Those looking to train their minds, the way many of us train our bodies, would do well to try a bit of memory training.

Want to try mnemonics for yourself? Here’s a few resources.

websites:
mnemotechnics.org
official site of the world memory championships

books:
Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
The Art of Memory, Frances A. Yates

I’ve recently become employed by the Chinese government, which has introduced me to a whole new world of ridiculous policy, absurd paperwork, and a complete lack of logic and efficiency. Awesome!

Today I was obliged to visit the entry-exit bureau in Beijing to have my one month visa converted to the more permanent resident permit. I was provided with a stack of paperwork by my employer, including a very official looking ‘foreign expert certificate’ – a book that looks something like a passport.

After a short wait my number was called and I trotted up to a desk to offer my documents – all carefully prepared with the necessary duplicates and photographs. After a short inspection the officer directed my attention to the foreign expert certificate. Several of the fields had been left blank, including the all-important ‘valid until’ date. I frantically phoned up my workplace and was put on with the lady who made the certificate. Her mistake dawned on her, but she had a solution in mind.

She instructed me to leave the desk, find a Chinese person, and give them the phone and my documents. I didn’t ask questions and did what I was told… except that the person I found was Korean not Chinese, which I did not realize until some time later.

Over the phone, she instructed the impeccably suited Korean (I should have known by his clothing he wasn’t Chinese) to fill in the appropriate details. She must have assumed my hanzi writing skills were not up to the task. He filled in the dates, and proceeded to fill in other details – only near the end he wrote my address on the wrong line.

I was then instructed to go back, but to apply at a different desk to avoid the possibility of the original officer putting the brakes on our little hoax. When my turn came, the empty desk was indeed the same lady officer as the first time around, so I, picture of courtesy that I am, offered the person behind me to jump ahead.

The ploy went off famously in the end, and I was told to come back in a week to pick up my passport.

It’s amazing how things work deep inside the beast of officialdom . Everything is made to look very well organized, but in fact everything is horribly inefficient, and the only way anything gets done is by constantly operating on the fringes of the rules.

Bronchitis has aged me so

A bout of bronchitis dashed my hopes of a celebratory tropical escape and replaced them with weeks of battling a killer cough, a bronchitis the likes of which I have never known. I’m quick to place the blame squarely Beijing’s wretched pollution situation, and at the very least the semi-tropics and humid airs of Hainan proved a lovely place for recuperation.

Then, as my sick-cation was drawing to a close, the realization dawned on me that my Chinese visa expires with 2011, on Dec. 31. A quick flight to Guangzhou, during which my eardrum ruptured due to sinus pressures, and a fast train to Hong Kong later, I was safe from Chinese immigration, still sick, and half deaf.

Luckily, I found a lovely place to stay on remote Lamma Island in Hong Kong, an excellent choice for those on a shoestring budget China visa run. Between a broom closet room in the infamously overcrowded and slightly dodgy Chungking or Mirador mansions, and a cosy but airy room on this car-less island paradise, the choice is clear.

Thus New Years was spent, still sick, recuperating on one of Hong Kong’s remote islands, far from the fireworks and celebrations across the bay in central HK.

A couple of days later, feeling better and with new China visa in hand, I took the 24 hour direct train back to frigid Beijing, to resume my Chinese life in 2012.

I’m escaping Beijing’s frigid and polluted winter from next Tuesday. First stop is Hainan, known rather optimistically as the “Chinese Hawaii” – we’ll see – nevertheless I’m greatly looking forward to it. Surfing and sun should take the edge off my wintery whiteboy paste.

Next stop will be Hong Kong to pick up a new Chinese visa. It may be mid to late January before I make my way back north to Beijing.

It’s just in time as the trials of Beijing life are beginning to get to me. Maybe it’s the perpetual grey skies – I’d take genuine overcast weather to the polluted ‘fog’ of Beijing any day – but the Beijing winter can be rough to handle. Northern Chinese are a hardy lot.

Follow me here for updates on travel and projects.

The blog has hit a slow spot lately, so here are some other ways to follow what I’m up to:

My Instagram has been getting lots of play. My name there is @beanboi
Chinese People Looking At Me should be getting updates again shortly. That’s here.
Flickr should pick up again soon over here.

There are a couple of long term video projects in the pipeline now too – more on them later.

I’m hoping to get away to the far south of China, possibly a bit of surfing in Hainan.

The last month since coming back from the States has been taken up with studying Chinese but I’m ready to get back into production mode and tackle some projects. My camera misses me!

As always, feel free to get in touch if you’re in Beijing or coming to Beijing, and want to talk about photography, journalism, video production, etc. I’m now looking for new projects to tackle.

Recently I’ve been thinking about food safety and food security in China. Stories like this one about the special organic farms for VIP’s, this one about the use of reprocessed oils dredged from drains by cheap Chinese restaurants, and the video at the bottom of this post where Al-Jazeera’s Melissa Chan has a go at the popular restaurant practice of turning pork into beef, have gotten me thinking about doing a video project on the subject.

It’s strange because I’ve always been one to try the local foods, eat the grilled meats from the sidewalk vendor, or the weird hot dog on a stick from the subway kiosk. But living in China for the past year has changed me, and now I find myself avoiding local low-end establishments in favor of a 7-11 lunch, a fast food joint, or maybe just starving. Cooking at home is likely to be a big feature of my life in the coming year.

In the systematic pursuit of cost-cutting across the business spectrum in China, the food industry is no exception, and it pops up from time to time in the international media like the milk-melamine scandal which surfaced in 2008. For those of us living here, it’s an issue that we come face to face with everyday.

EDIT : This might be the best one yet – used condom found in school cafeteria food.