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• Guangzhou Diary: Week 4
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Guangzhou Diary: Week 1 Written on October 4, 2008, by .

4^th Oct

It’s torrential rain outside. Maybe not a good day to go out exploring. Spent the morning online, updated my diary, and pondered. Ok, here’s what I have so far as a project outline. If the rain eases off, I’ll go in search of the camera market…

Intimate short documentary pieces of maybe ten pages, following the lives of four or five key figures:

a) Chinese Hui Restaurant owner offering Islamic food primarily to Africans/Arabs, shots of buying the Halal food, working in the restaurant, also going to the mosque.

b) An African small business owner in Tianxiu who has “settled” and provides a service to other Africans – hairdresser would be good – visually interesting. Business cards might be interesting too, if the business card is included, prominent and readable.

c) A Chinese business owner in Tianxiu offering African products “Made in China”, traditional African clothing is good. Human Hair extensions of Chinese hair for attatching to African heads is obscenely good.

d) Find the Africans who are living not in the hotels but the low-rent slum labarynth. Their lives, even if they are boring and uneventful, will be interesting, because of where they are. Why is slumming it in China better than whatever it was they were doing in Africa ? How does the rest of the African community, who stay in the nice hotels, view them ? It’s also a window into a fascinating neighbourhood.

e) Canton trade fair is coming up. Follow an African merchant here on a short trip, specifically for that event, from arrival to departure, also capture the buzz of the fair.

f) Perhaps follow the life and daily work of the Tianxiu Building’s General Manager, who will be a Chinese. There must be someone or a group of staff who have such a job.

Ideally I will weave a web of documenting people and places that interlink and overlap, with locations and even people appearing in more than one person’s story.

I might also take street portraits of Africans out and about in the area, on the overpass, outside Tianxia, in the hardcore Chinese slum alley with the restaurants, outside McDonalds etc…

These would be done with a medium format camera & tripod: Usual details, name, age, country, time in China, purpose of travel, goods bought, plus some personal question. A few such portraits throughout the book would break up the other candid shots taken on a DSLR.

3^rd Oct

My legs are tired from spending eight hours a day for the last two days walking around the streets. Have a day off from exploring that area. Sleep late, transfer out of the staff-dorms into proper guest dorms, and spend the afternoon online. I research the abbreviated history of Islam in Guangzhou. Seems the Mosque was built back in the Tang Dynasty by the 100,000 strong Arabic trading community in Guangzhou, a pre-Islamic community that was converted to Islam IN CHINA by the spread of Islam to China, influenced of course by the arrival of other Arabs who brought their new religion with them, but no doubt also by the adoption of Islam among Chinese, the ancestors of today’s Hui. In many ways the Africans and Arabs coming to Guangzhou today mirrors events of the past. The historical precedent definitely adds another layer of significance to the multi-worshipping of Africans, Arabs and Chinese together in the mosque. I want to find the mosque now, and go off with the directions the restaurant owner gave me the previous night to find it, plus other, slightly contrasting location information I find from the internet. I find the old ancient 1400-year old mosque, it’s closed, and the street around it is hardly lively. A couple of Hui restaurants, but hardly different from the rest of Guangzhou. I have a feeling there may be two mosques, this old one, and a modern one, in use.

I’d also been flicking through a Guangzhou listings magazine and came across what seemed a cool art-space, currently holding an exhibition. Well, I could go back to the hostel, or else jump in the tube and try to find it. Find it I did, after a couple of circles. Very expensive coffee and beer, but imported Deutschland wheat beer, so that’s ok. I indulged, and found a nice collection of photography books, stuff from Magnum, Japanese stuff etc. But for the price of coffee and location south of the river, I’d make it my “base”, but it would be an OK place to try and put on an exhibition. I spoke with the cafe-space’s owner, a photographer himself, and he gave me direction to Guangzhou’s answer to Wukesong in Beijing. If I want to do more portraits, I might find myself buying another second-hand Seagull TLR and tripod down here. I’m sure I can sell them again. I also inquired about good fixers/translators, but he wasn’t really a documentary photographer. He suggested Guangzhou university though. He also suggested there were more areas with Africans than just Xiaobei, but couldn’t remember where…just when I was ready to drop that idea…

I walked aimlessly back to the hostel along wide boulevards and through old neighbourhood lanes. I wasn’t sure when the subway stopped running, but was aiming for the Huangsha station 3 km distant. I ended up taking a taxi back to the hostel

Got back to the hostel. Heard from another guest about a different hostel near the train station. That would be less comfortable I’m sure, but most of my online research has been done for now, and it would certainly be closer. I feel a bit isolated across here, needing to take a subway to get anywhere. If I moved hostel I’d be within walking distance of Xiaobei area. I’d eat three meals a day meals there.

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2^nd Oct

I sleep late. I’m currently living in a little nocturnal underworld of my own, i.e the windowless staff dormitories. It’s easy to sleep late. Like midday late. I make it to the bank before it shuts, and return to the hostel to pay my way, and deposit my couple of thousand in cash semi-safely before I go exploring any more unlit alleyways. I get back to the Xiaobei-Tianxia area before dark, and take in a much wider area than my previous day’s walk-through. I’m now partly looking for potential leads into the project, people who stand out. I explore the whole bottom four floors of the Tianxia Building trading market. It’s mostly bored Chinese girls standing in glass boxes lined with clothes, waiting for customers. African customers move around, some are chatting. Honestly, the majority of these shops are not all that interesting. Apart from the customers being African, it’s not much different from other such malls all over China. One or two stalls stand out though, offering African traditional dresses and robes, that could only be for the African market. They must also of course be Made in China. This is a potential lead, to follow the production cycle of these clothes, from factory, to shop, to customer, to suitcase, to airport. Where do they get their designs from ? Is it speculative on the part of the Chinese, or are they made to order ? Another possible lead from inside Tianxia trading centre itself is the one or two stalls run by Africans, offering both goods and services to the community. Another shop offers human hair extensions, not sure whether the hair is Chinese or African (they have clearly put roots here in Tianxia…). I read online about the presence of an African hairdressing salon. I definitely want to find this too. Hairstyles are much more visually applicable than business cards…especially if a Chinese customer got African hair extensions…in China, it’s not impossible to contemplate such a new trend emerging…I need to find out if the hair is Chinese or African. If Chinese, now that would be an fantastic story. Hard-up long-haired Chinese students making an extra buck by going under the shear. Another product-cycle, a new trend for short hair ?

I stop for a coffee in the Moka Coffee shop on the ground floor of Tianxia, hoping that the Turkish owner would be there to chat with, but she isn’t. All the staff are Chinese, the guy who tends the skewer outside defnitely looks North China, so he’s probably Hui Muslim, the female waitresses inside talk Cantonese, and appear to look local too. I order an excellent Arabian tiramisu-style desert. I need to replenish the calories from all the walking somehow…

I walk over the ring-road to the livelier district again, explore more of the labarynth/slum/urban village. I chat to a couple of Mandarin-speakers. One tells me there are foreigners living here too. I ask him if they are African. He says yes. Well, that’s another potential lead into the story, if I can only find where they are living. However the other guy I speak to tells me its all Chinese living in the labarynth. Is this lack of knowledge, or cultural embarassment that his host country would have foreigners living in such circumstances ? Apart from lack of daylight, conditions are not so bad though. It’s not squalid. It seems to have sewerage, and is generally well swept and clear of litter. There is however very little privacy, but perhaps still more than the average youth hostel dormitory ? I take a break from the Xiaobei area, wander east, realise it’s all fairly uninteresting tenements and office towers, start to head back, and stop at one of the tea stalls for some cold bitter tea. A guy strikes up a conversation with me in English. He’s from Hong Kong, here for the Canton Trade Fair on the 15^th. Nice. Knowing this could be useful. Pivotal in fact. Might be of no use at all. But isn’t it strange how random bits of information are borne of the most random of actions. Back in Xiaobei I look for a restaurant to eat at. I’m thinking that the Hui Muslim angle will be useful to explore. I find such a restaurant, the Abdullah Islamic restaurant, run by a Hui Chinese. All the waitresses are Hui Muslim, wearing the little hat (I forget its name). It’s full of Africans, and Pakistanis, and curiously, a table of Koreans. The owner speaks good English, and is the sort of outgoing character you might expect a restauranteur to be. He’s curious about Islam in the UK, and we chat for five to ten minutes. He teaches me some useful words in Chinese, like Muslim, Mosque, Church,and gives me some directions to the mosque. He may be another potential lead to follow. Perhaps better than the Moka Coffee. I wonder how much of a change in his personal attitudes towards his religion there has been upon being reunited with the wider Islamic community. If the Hui now share their mosque with the Africans and Arabs, then this would be a good thing to show visually, assuming I am allowed in with a camera. I call it a night and walk home, west via Huanshi road. There doesn’t seem to be anything happening African-wise round that area, although I will head closer to the train station next time and check there. Still no word of any Hongqiao district, or indeed any “villages around the airport”/ I’m thinking the “village” referred to online must be the Xiatang slum, opposite Tianxia building. As for the other streets that apparently offered cheap rent for 100-200 Yuan, Yongping Street for example, no sign of them, not on any maps, and nobody knows where it is. Maybe it’s time to just forget this online info completely, and begin to trust my own findings.

1^st Oct

I spend the morning online, picking through all the articles on the subject I have for Chinese placenames, and trying to locate them on the streetmap. I don’t find anything relating to Hongqiao, and nothing in the Baiyun area that the airport is located in. Perhaps this is bad information. Another article I find mentions a building called Tianxia, on Xiaobei Road. The orginal article also mentions these names, along with a lot of others. Might be worth a try. I’m able to find Xiaobei Road on Google. Maybe if I meet Africans on Xiaobei they will know where this Hongqiao District is. I need a few days for all these place names to bed themselves down in my memory. Right now they’re still all flying around and bits of words swapping into one another.

Plan is to go to looking for Xiaobei Road and Tianxiu Building, but first I need to find a branch of the Bank of Communications, the bank I am with. I get off the subway into a crowd of shoppers unlike anything I have experienced before. I’d forgotten. It’s national day. All the banks are closed in any case. I spend my last 2 Yuan on bottled water. I’m starving, and its impossibly to walk for 100 metres in this city without being tempted into a restaurant by the food boiling or hanging outside. My only option is to go back to the hostel and try to persuade them to give me back my deposit money. Unfortunately I get to the subway station and realise my subway passcard is gone. Probably not stolen, more likely fell out when I brought my map out to look at it. The hassle of being in a new city…I should have been making my first exploration of Xiaobei Road by now, but instead I have to walk 6 km back across the city to the hostel. Big paces, passing everyone, getting belched on by ring-road fumes but just not caring. Then I realise that the only way to the other side of the river is by Tunnel. no pedestrian bridge or anything, got to take a ferry. I explain my situation, and the ticket woman tells me I can pay the 0.5 Yuan fare “next time”. Great. That small gesture probably salvages the rest of the day.

Got my deposit back in exchange for my student card, but its now 6.30 pm. After eating, and crossing the city again, I pick my way through the sprawl onto Xiaobei Road. I grab a coffee in McDonalds and see two black guys sitting among the Chinese faces, eating burgers. I go to the toilet, come back, and there’s another black guy, speaking English to his Chinese girlfriend, in an African accent. It seems I’m getting warmer. I continue up the street, and it become clear that this part of town is definitely THE part of town. By the time I reach Tianxia Building, 70 % of the faces around me are black. Some are young, and engaging in banter with the Chinese, but most are older, and business-like. Most of the signs around me are in English, although people are speaking in their own languages. It’s a sudden shock to be transported out of a feeling of Chineseness to which I am now adapted into a sense of foreign-ness so swiftly. Of course I’m used to seeing dark faces, from visiting London and Paris, and wherever, and from having friends over the years from Africa, India etc, but it’s always been in a familiar context. With the change in languages, the vibrantly coloured clothes, the perfumes, it really feels like I’ve stepped out of the China I know, and into a whole new country yet to be invented. Perhaps it would feel the same for an African suddenly hitting a Western expat bar in China, although I’m not sure there are any areas so concentrated with so many Westerners. The feeling of foreign-ness is good though. It’s what I wanted to find. It means that there is a project here worth doing. It means that simply by documenting in a raw and transparent fashion, my photos should have enough visual impact.

I move on from Tianxia Building, following the trail of Africans on an overpass over the Huanshi ring-road, under a futuristic double-tiered raised motorway, and down into a more run down neighbourhood. Elderly women from Chinese ethnic minorities, in traditional clothing, Miao perhaps, sit by the edge of the road, begging from African merchants walking past, also in traditional clothing. There are one or two larger buildings, hotels, another overseas trading mall, and then the road narrows to a lane, with small Chinese stalls on both sides. Africans everywhere, confident, dignified, and talking into mobiles. The original article I read talked of young guys arriving “off the boat” to try their luck in the new China, as if China offered them their chance to make it. Wishful thinking on behalf of a paternalistic Chinese writer perhaps ? Most of these Africans appear to have “made it” already, with or without China’s help. It definitely seems a win-win business opportunity for both sides. I notice two restaurants proclaiming “African Food”, “Fried Fish” etc. which seem to be Chinese-run, and more signs, in English, welcoming “foreign friends” and competing with one another to offer all manner of services sign printing, business-card printing, cheap flights to Africa, goods storage, shipping deals etc. A Chinese kid approaches me and tries to sell me a passport. A vendor to the right offers Halal meat. The Hui Chinese Muslim presence is noticable. It seems that as well as being an African neighbourhood this is also something like Guangzhou’s Muslim quarter. Which come first though ? Did the African Muslims and Arabs converge here because of the existing supply of Halal meat, and a mosque perhaps, or did the Hui Chinese move here from elsewhere to cater to the foreign Muslims.

I wander on, into a labarynth-like slum alley about two metres wide,, overhead a jumble of wires, and concrete balconies, and security railings, with hardly a drop of skylight from the orange city clouds reaching the ground. It’s reminicient of a Hong Kong’s infamous self-built Kowloon Walled City. I’m offered sex, fake Adidas, and phone calls from glass booths. There’s suddenly no Africans anymore, it’s all Chinese, a mix of Han and Hui. I hear more Mandarin than usual for Guangzhou, but the enclosed underworld environment, a mass of colour and light from consumer goods and neon signs is as much a rush to the senses as entering the foreign sector before. Various tunnels and alleys radiate out on either side, named and unnamed, a metre wide, faint light reflecting the presence of human activity in the shadows. I’ll save exploration of these areas for daytime, not mind you that there will be much more light. As open space beckons on the far side of the 300 metre “tunnel”, and I pass an Indian restaurant. Out on the street is another Indian bar-restaurant. I walk right, passing African, and now more Arabic faces, on the way back to the main ring-road. Lining the block, under the 60 metre stilts that support the various roads, are upmarket looking Turkish and Middle-Eastern restaurants. There’s an upmarket Xinjiang restaurant or two as well, no mere hole-in-the-wall meat-on-a-stick joint. I wonder if living and working in such a cosmopolitan part of the city makes a Uygur Muslim feel more Chinese or less ? I head back to Tianxia Building, and order a kebab-like pitta from the meat skewer being roasted outside the coffee shop on the ground floor. The owner comes out to speak with me. She’s from Turkey, has been running the coffee shop here for several years. She hurries inside again to tend to mostly African customers, but she seems friendly and approachable, and I hope to speak to her again about the area. With my kebab in hand, I wander the 20 minutes back down Xiaobei Road towards the subway station.

30^th Sept

I transfer to a different youth hostel, across the river, even further from the city centre, but still on the subway line. They don’t have any dorm beds left, but have space in their staff dorms. Most importantly though, this hostel has wireless internet in its lounge and the other one didn’t. I need to sit down to do some serious research. None of the staff at the hostel seem to know anything about this Hongqiao District, or any of the streets like Yongping Jie. Part of the problem is that they will know the Cantonese pronunciation of the characters, and not the Putonghua variant. I write the characters out, and try again. No, they still don’t know it, and though they know about Africans in the city, they don’t know where.

I did see one or two Africans myself when out shopping yesterday, but haven’t seen anything so far that would come close to an African “neighbourhood”. I should maybe just stop the next African face I see and ask them, but what if they are a Londoner ? To have “racially profiled” someone like that would be embarrasing. I’m sure if the area exists I will eventually find it if I keep walking around for 10 hours a day, but I’m sure there must be quicker ways. The main Southern Metropolis Daily article talks about it being a 40 sq km area. How much of the details in this article are accurate ? Is this the size of the whole of Baiyun District, or specifically the African neighbourhood. The article suggests the latter, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was the former.

It might be useful to find a “base” in the city centre too, serving coffee and offering with wireless, not a Starbucks sort of place, but a more intimate place, where I can get to know the locals, leave my laptop safely behind the bar, maybe find fixers/translators with an interest in photography, and get in contact with the Guangzhou creative crowd. After all if the project is successful I should really try to hold an exhibition here in this city. Some Chinese friends from Dalian have texted back to me about a couple of such venues. I’m in the city centre anyway, and may as well go in search of one place. It’s ok, has live music in the evenings, but not really the sort of place to hang out daytime, and a bit out of the way as well. I’m running out of money and need to find a bank machine.

29^th Sept

Get sorted out, cleaned up, clothes washed. I also need to get online. There are only two computers in the hostel, so I pick up my laptop and head to a nearby Starbucks. Guangzhou is a big metropolis of 10 million people, so as well as the main built-up city centre on the north bank of one fork of the Pearl River, there are numerous other suburbs spreading out in all directions across the islands of delta. The original article I read mentions Hongqiao and Baiyun Districts, villages around the airport apparently. I know already that the airport’s name is Baiyun, so that sounds about right, but I really need to get a detailed map.

I walk into the city’s main shopping district to get a map and also flip-flops, and in great late afternoon light, fire off a couple of street photos. I take another 250 in the next five hour stroll around the centre. Got some good ones, one or two portfolio-standard ones even ? Maybe ? Maybe not…Anyway, the rush of being in a big 24 hour city is exciting after slow sleepy North China and I want to feel it while it lasts. I find my map, but no flip-flops.

28^th Sept

I take a flight from a 13 degrees and rainy afternoon in Xi’an into a 30 degrees and balmy evening in Guangzhou. Summer is back again. But does that also mean lethargy and laziness ? Better not be, because in 5-6 weeks from now, I want to be heading back North with a project about an apparently 80,000 strong African trading community based in Guangzhou, the largest and most distinct such community in China. If I was a black-skinned Cantonese speaker, it would surely be so much easier.

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