Absurdity, Allegory and China

This past Monday, December 31, I took the light rail from Tianjin to TEDA (Tianjin Economic Development Area), the largest of the Tianjin development zones and major port for northern China. Six kuai (80 US cents), not a bad ride. There has been and continues to be large amounts of money poured into developing what is referred to as the Binhai New Area (BNA). The China Daily has reported Binhai to be “arguably the most profitable economic zone in the country.” That seems to sum it up pretty well.

But besides being a boom town, it is also an oddly ugly place, an overly-developing immense marshy coastal flat where the only break in monotony comes from sprawling man-made projects that seem to be waiting for someone to show up. The place has a peculiarly disturbed Mattel feel to it, as if it’s a psychotic child’s diorama full of large trucks hauling fill dirt and shipping containers, all wound up as tightly as possible and then set loose to run wild among the Legos.

Though it’s all part of the Tianjin Municipality where I have lived for nearly a decade, I am unsure where Tanggu, TEDA and Binhai each end and one of the others begins. To me it all seems nebulously the same: a confusion of concrete and steel, bad lines and odd spaces, marshy coastal flats in the process of reclamation, a crying out against what has always been swamp and mosquito. Even the light there that day was confusing. I seemed to have lost my sense of direction, which is something I almost never do. In fact, I always make it a point wherever I am to calibrate my internal gyro, to locate myself within the wider imagined world of the here and now, and the over-the-horizon. I always feel the need to be able to point in the direction of some place that I imagine is identifiably Home, though at this point in my life I am not sure where that could possibly be. But if it is, in fact, north or east, west or south, I usually have no trouble pointing it out. If I were Muslim I’d never have a problem knowing in which direction I needed to face five times a day. But there on the flats of Binhai (or TEDA or Tanggu) that day, if I’d unrolled my prayer carpet I could very well have ended up praying to Kansas, and who knows how that would have played out.

It was not disconcerting to be so disoriented, since the light, strange as it was, made up for the perplexity of this directional lapse as I drifted off my chart. I was lost in someone else’s map, but since the map is not the territory, I felt completely, though comfortably, astray. But for me light has a way of compensating for the anxiety of feeling immeasurably misplaced. I was also with a good friend who I trusted would get me back to where I needed to be at the end of the day. So, I concentrated on taking photos.

The sky was brilliantly blue and the air, full of wind, was crisp and clean. Instinctively I set my camera on black and white. I feel at home in the world of greys, the harsh highlights and the deeply layered shadows. It seems to best express, both geographically and psychologically, where I happen to be at the moment: China. Many of the photos were taken from inside a train and a cab, something I almost never do, though I cannot begin to tell you why. Photos