Inward and Eastward
Sitting in a dining carriage halfway between Beijing and Chongqing, caught in a flurry of sharp-tongued Mandarin, I never could have imagined Chengmei (Tami) Xiang to be anything but the confident, self-assured photographer I had met a week earlier. I was busy building a balsa model of Tiananmen Palace when a rail hostess informed me that I had the choice to vacate my table and make way for other diners or purchase another meal. Before I could respond Tami had sprung to my defence and the carriage erupted in quarrel. I would have gladly ordered another fried rice and cucumber salad, but Tami forbade me. She is used to being told her place, but seldom content complying.
From growing up in a remote Chinese village to working and residing in Perth, Tami is the exception to the rule; a needle plucked from the haystack of systematic poverty and granted a chance at tertiary education and class mobility. What sounds like something out of the Hunger Games is normal for tens of millions. The gaokao, China’s national college-entrance exam, is notorious as the world’s toughest yet it is skewed against rural students. There is a 10-year lag in rural versus urban education, provincial intake quotas and a household registration system that governs where students may sit the test. These combine to stack the odds against rural students from provinces that lack major universities. Despite being a child of precocious intellect, Tami was routinely told that her aspiration to ace the gaokao was futile; that even if she could make it into university, her family would never afford to send her. In the face of so many hurdles, Tami adopted the fiery competitiveness I was exposed to on that carriage, along with a mantra “when somebody says you can’t do it, do it twice, and take pictures.”
The hurdles did not stop after Tami’s graduation as an English major from Guizhou University. Studying photography in Australia, Tami was on the receiving side of the hostility of Australian students; from an aversion to collaboration to racially fuelled taunts. One such remark from a peer, that “you are Chinese, you don’t know how to create [an] authentic project, you only know plagiarism and how to copy” [1] ignited Tami’s competitive flame while prompting the deep introspection that has guided much of her practice. Realising her own naivety to Western culture, Tami turned inward and Eastward. Nüwa Reawakening (2013) considers the changing role and perception of women in China as ideologies have competed and dethroned each other within the zeitgeist. In Chinese mythology, Nüwa is the goddess of creation, the first being capable of procreation and the creator of all humans. After mending a hole in the heavens, torn amid a tiff between the Fire and Water gods, Nüwa was revered, and women respected and held in high regard as nurturers of life. [2] As Confucianism emerged as a favourable ideology, promoted by the state, women were limited to subservient roles – as daughter, wife or mother serving father, husband and son. The later reign of the one-child policy, consequent rise in abortion and skewed sex ratio only deepened the plight of Chinese women.
Tami Xiang, Nüwa Reawakening, 2013
Nüwa Reawakening (2013) laments the degradation of women in China. Littered with traditional Chinese iconography, the twelve-photograph series employs a conceptual approach to photography in creating a ruler-subject narrative. A plump, tea-drinking man wears a smug-faced opera mask and changshan, a traditional men’s robe popularised by the highly-Confucian Ming Dynasty. In one hand he holds a bird cage - a collector’s item noted to portray a playboy [3] - while in another he uses a red-and-gold cloth to mask the face of an otherwise nude lady on all fours. The female subject is made to kneel in praise of the male, perform household tasks and adorn her own brooding opera masks to entertain him. She is seen restrained inside the birdcage, slumped against a chair in exhaustion and writhing in a state of panic, hands firmly pressed to her ears. Ultimately, hope is restored as she appears in the last photo to take off in flight, freed from her cage and liberated from her oppressor. Tami’s criticism is strengthened by her provocative use of the nude in criticising its persisting taboo in China. Importantly, Tami’s work synthesises her own heritage and her growing awareness of Western culture to approach an old issue with a new framework. Nüwa Reawakening enlists a Western feminist lens in order to approach the vastly unequal perception of genders in a nation that has lacked independent and mass feminist movements comparable to the West. [4]
Returning to her home in Chongqing, Tami’s latest project furthers her introspective work, shifting concern toward the experience of millions of rural Chinese citizens while simultaneously moving away from conceptual photography toward a brutally sincere portraiture. Since China’s globally unprecedented and unrivalled decades of economic growth following Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 announcement of economic reform policy, hundreds-of-millions of rural Chinese have relocated to cities in search of employment opportunities. Under China’s household registration system, the Hukou, access to state welfare services – including welfare, healthcare and schooling - is closely linked to a person’s place of birth, making family mobility a logistical and financial impossibility for most rural registrants. Consequently, some 69-million Chinese children live away from at least one parent; a generation dubbed China’s ‘left behind children.’ Most are raised by their grandparents or great grandparents, product of a vastly different China. Though the moves have granted many an increased wage, the overall impact of rural-urban migration on the wellbeing of migrants and left-behind children are largely concerning.
Tami Xiang photographed more than 300 "left-behind" children and their families in rural China. (Supplied: Tami Xiang)
Peasantgraphy’s first instalment considers the elderly in rural China, an undereducated generation raised in an unrecognisable China. Their Mao-era upbringing has been left behind by the nation’s prosperity since opening its economy to the rest of the world. Those who are not left to tend to their grandchildren are often left completely alone as their families seek prosperity in cities. Tami tells the story of a couple who died in their house, not to be found until their corpses had rotted, the stench eventually carrying through neighbouring homes. [5] Growing old and incapable of working labour-heavy jobs many turn to pension payments of 88RMB (about $19 AUD) per month, ironically a lucky number in China. Though the payments are meagre, and a few dozen times less than one might receive in urban China, the recipients are highly appreciative. They are a welcomed benefit in the most peaceful period of Chinese history the elderly have lived through, yet simultaneously a symbol of their compliance in systematic poverty.
For Lucky 88 (2018) Tami gifted a group of farmers 88RMB to spend as they wish and took their portraits, alongside their purchases. Staples including rice, noodles, eggs, oil and water are prevalent though most have also spared some expense for a luxury; juice, sweet teas, milk drinks and more than one lollipop. On one hand the purchase of necessities is expected, yet that is somewhat undermined by their praise of the pension and their usual subsistence on it. Moreover, it reveals a life starved of agency and any concept of luxury. Growing up through the treachery of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, some recount eating mud, bark and grass to survive and lollipop is an understandable extravagance. Only one lady’s haul of fertilizer seems useful beyond its immediate consumption. The humble portraits reflect the reality that China’s steep increase in wealth inequality since the 1980s is often justified by a relatively improving standard of living, while conditions remain dire. The compositional sameness of the images that comprise Lucky 88 highlight the regularity of these cases; they are simply a minute sample of an immense population living in similar conditions.
Family Portrait (2018) stays true to Lucky 88’s compositional sameness while further refining the portraits, stripping them of any symbolic iconography or prop. Tami photographed hundreds of left behind children with their guardians and, separately, their parents; temporarily back for the Spring Festival, commonly the only time of the year, if any, that rural-urban migrants will return home. The two portraits are severed by the parents’ train tickets, which simultaneously divide and connect generations. The images derive their power from the inherent honesty of the photograph, its innate journalistic quality and that primal urge of any photographer to illuminate something that is ‘out there.’ Contrasting fresh and weathered faces illustrate the incongruent generations; children and their grandparents, a generation hardened by a conservative, Maoist upbringing. This disjointed guardianship has nurtured a plethora of problems. In a video accompanying the photographs, the effects of 22-year-old Wan Jun describes the lonely predicament of a left behind child;
If I meet something unhappy in my life, I wouldn’t tell my grandparents. I hardly communicate with them… I don’t like to tell my parents either because they live too far. Our relationship is not close. If I have any problems, I force myself to keep [them] in my heart. [6]
Beyond loneliness and limitations on communication and council, left behind children become more likely to fall victim to sexual abuse or suicide attempts, while their rural-urban migrant parents are found to be financially better off but ultimately less happy. [7]
Though the photographs were initially intended to be shown unedited, they came under state scrutiny in preparing for an exhibition in mainland China. To avoid their censorship, Tami has since sliced the images into strips and reassembled them using a traditional Chinese basket weaving method. The result is a delicate balance, where the raw emotion of the subjects and their needy backdrops are still discernible; though they are marred, just as the familial relationships they depict are. The haziness of the weave becomes a metaphor for the treatment of rural Chinese, that they are best hidden in the country’s periphery. Perhaps it is similarly emblematic of the way that Western nations, including Australia, choose to approach contentious Chinese issues; peering through their fingers, like watching a horror film, but refusing to act and threaten their relationship with the world’s emerging power.
Tami’s photographic practice carves out a role for herself that hangs delicately between artist, activist and journalist. In the honest portraiture of Peasantography pictures become a storytelling vessel. They long to give a face to millions who are too often outcast to the periphery of their own nation and others. Confronted by those faces I am taken back to the dining carriage where my balsa palace became the centre of chaos. A lifetime of being told what she couldn’t achieve fostered the defiant spirit that leapt to my defence. It nurtured her drive to represent those who have been disadvantaged, disenfranchised or forgotten by their government.
Bibliography
1. Xiang T. When Someone Says You Can’t Do It, Do It Twice and Take Pictures. Presentation presented at the: 2019; Centre for Stories, Perth, Western Australia, Australia.
2. Xiang T. Nüwa Reawakening. LensCulture. https://www.lensculture.com/projects/1050200-nuwa-reawakening. Published 2013.
3. Zhangbin Y. Analysis of Traditional Chinese Bird Cage. Information Is Beautiful Awards. https://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/3118-analysis-of-traditional-chinese-bird-cage. Published 2018.
4. Yifei, Shen. Feminism in China: An Analysis of Advocates, Debates and Strategies. https://www.fes-asia.org/news/feminism-in-china-an-analysis-of-advocates-debates-and-strategies/. Accessed May 13, 2020.
5. Xiang T. Lucky 88. LensCulture. https://www.lensculture.com/projects/1050199-peasantography-lucky-88. Published 2018.
6. Xiang T. Left Behind Children In China.; 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igk7dzaiCVc&t=117s. Accessed May 13, 2020.
7. See: Wang C, Tang J, Liu T. The Sexual Abuse and Neglect of “Left-behind” Children in Rural China. J Child Sex Abuse. 2020:1-20. doi:10.1080/10538712.2020.1733159;
Chang H, Yan Q, Tang L et al. A comparative analysis of suicide attempts in left-behind children and non-left-behind children in rural China. PLoS ONE. 2017. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0178743;
Denyer S. China’s peasants left for the cities to seek their fortune, and it made them miserable. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/15/chinas-peasants-left-for-the-cities-to-seek-their-fortune-and-it-made-them-miserable/. Published 2018.