A boy leads a goat through the little free market at the end of our road, autumn 1981
First Morning in Xi’an, August 1981
Julie Andrews’s voice warbled through the neighborhood, rhapsodizing about kittens, snowflakes, and female deer. Who knew life in Communist China would sound like this? The Sound of Music had been a favorite of Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, gatekeeper of all things cultural until Mao’s death in 1976. Since then there had been a power shift in the Great Hall of the People, but tunes from this Western movie remained popular.
We’d been awakened a few minutes earlier by a loudspeaker blaring the patriotic strains of The East is Red followed by an energetic male voice barking out the numbers one through eight as heroic music played in the background. “Yi! Er! San! Si! Wu! Liu! Qi! Ba!” Good citizens were supposed to do calisthenics to this beat, although we didn’t witness anyone participating. Middle-aged and elderly folks practiced the slow martial art of tai chi on the packed dirt next to the apartment building across the street, oblivious to the happy drill sergeant’s rhythmic squawking. The sounds of bicycle bells, feet pattering the pavement in cloth-soled shoes, and the singsong tonality of Mandarin drifted up from the street.
Sidewalk tailors, 1982
The Beginnings of Free Enterprise, February 1982
Walking down the street I heard a faint rhythmic whirr. The noise increased as we came to an entire block lined with men and women, shoulder to shoulder at old-fashioned treadle sewing machines, busily stitching clothing. Others measured and cut fabric at makeshift tables. This street of private-industry tailors was one step on China’s journey to a market economy.
As night fell, we again passed the street of sewing machines. Most had been packed up, but operators who had staked out spots under street lamps continued to work late into the night, the chicka-chicka-chicka sound of the treadles echoing off the brick walls of the adjacent buildings. I smiled and shook my head, impressed.
“Maybe each sewing machine is owned by one family,” one of Sarah’s friends remarked. “First maybe the mother sews. When she gets tired, her daughter sews. Then a cousin sews. They sew as long as the streetlight is on. They never leave the machine alone.”
I was startled to think that this was the same China where we waited for weeks to get a padded jacket made at a state tailor shop while apathetic employees called in sick or sat around drinking tea.
Rush hour just outside the city wall, 2005
Reflecting on China’s Transformation, November 2005
In the early 1980s China was at a crossroads. I arrived just in time to see the end of the economic policies of the Maoist era. I could tell, even then, that I had a front row seat to something big, and I took photos to record an important point in history.
The students I taught then had been sent out as China’s first emissaries into the wider world. Those I reconnected with, now department heads and business owners, were the very people who brought the tools back to China to build the country into a global economic power. I realized that I had played a part, however small, in the country’s transformation.
My former students clamored for their own copies of my photos. To them, the pictures weren’t just historical; they were personal. Older people recalled the repression during those drab days of collectivism with bitterness, but they also thought fondly of the quieter, simpler lives they led before China became a major world player. Those who had been children then had hazy memories of the time, and today’s undergraduates, born in the 1980s, knew only what they had been told. All were drawn to the images, which colored in the outlines of their memories and fleshed out the stories they had heard.