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This is a shot from our first day there -- our walk to the village. The taxi driver would only take us so far. He refused to subject his cab to the conditions of the road leading to the village. So we had to get out and walk, and lug all the stuff we'd need for the month.

The story that Baifan set out to create for the doc is that Tianshu, my Chinese teaching partner, and I are eager teachers wanting to witness first-hand what education in rural China is like while we teach the children and share some of our teaching ideas.

If you look closely you can see Minnie with a boom mic and the cameraman Wang Wei standing out there in the middle of China. They were getting shots of Tianshu and me, the intrepid teachers, making our way to the village. Like most Chinese youth during the Cultural Revolution, Minnie's mother had been "sent down"... sent from the city to the countryside to learn from the peasants. A lot of twisted history to that period, of course. Minnie's mother feels that what she learned was valuable and she was very happy when she found out that her daughter was going to be living with the peasants for a month. Like me, Minnie had never seen a rice paddy before and her mother thought that was a terrible thing that should have been rectified long ago. We took care of that soon enough.


We had just gotten out of the cab when this dude came walking by with a huge bundle of stuff on his back, looking very much like a peasant. An iconic image of this sort of place but one that none of us had ever seen in the flesh so there was a lot of hustling to get the shot. Of course, like many other things here that we'd never seen before, that soon became a very familiar image to us. Unfortunately for that very reason -- the familiarity -- there are some good shots I never got because I always thought I'd have another chance.