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Everywhere in China you can find people playing badminton. With or without a net. Usually without. And wherever they happen to find themselves... outside work, home, in the park, on campus. It seems almost as ubiquitous as bikes are in China or at least as representative of China as bikes are to a non-badminton-playing non-bike-riding Westerner's eyes. This picture was taken on the campus of my university. The bulletin boards on either side are where the day's newspapers were posted, page by page. This used to be much more common in China but you still can see it here and there.

I'm not much of a student of Chinese history so I might not be quite accurate here but I'm pretty sure that had it not been for this tradition of newspaper posting then what is familiar to some western students of Chinese history as the "Democracy Wall" would never have happened. And without the "Democracy Wall" the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests would never have happened. The "Democracy Wall" preceded the Tiananman Square massacre (or "incident" to use the language of the Chinese government) by only a couple of years or even only a matter of months and can be viewed as a precursor to the Tiananmen Square protests. I don't know how familiar this is to students in China where information about this is suppressed, though not as much now as it used to be. Still, very few Chinese students are aware of the iconic photo that's so familiar to the rest of the world of that lone guy blocking a line of tanks moving through Tiananmen Square.

You could always see a handful of people reading the day's newspapers at this spot. This was in a bucolic little stretch of campus and I liked to study there with my tutors and language partners. On either side of the bulletin boards in this photo you can just barely see the benches where we used to sit and from which I'd sometimes zone out on a pair of feet moving methodically through the day's news as I struggled with some new (or old) aspect of the Chinese language.

If you can't quite make the badminton connection, the squirrely white thing trailing up is the birdie (shuttlecock, I believe, to the purists) and the other whooshes are the racquets swinging. I had just made a resolution to start carrying my camera around more so that I could be ready for anything when I saw these two women playing. Of course the resolution hadn't stuck and I had to race back to my apartment on my bike (which was at that time only days away from being stolen) and get the camera. When I came back they had just stopped playing but I asked them if they could play a bit longer which they did though they thought it was kind of strange.



It was also at this spot that I met Yan Yuqian. This happened in the middle of my third trip to China and it was a very lucky day.

That's Yuqian in the picture. She was camped out at BLCU, staying at the hotel on campus until she found a foreigner who could speak Chinese for the documentary she was working on. It was about education in China and this was one of her assignments. And if you need to find a foreigner who can speak Chinese in Beijing, BLCU is known as the place to go. I'd already been approached a couple times to be in TV shows that I passed on but what Yuqian described to me was something else... a month in a remote part of China that not many Westerners see, staying with the locals and teaching the children who lived there.

BLCU is also known as the place to go to find foreigners with money.

One night a girl who was about 19 or 20 stopped me and asked if she could use my cell phone. She was stranded far away from home with no money and needed to call home and ask her brother to come and get her. It didn't take long to figure out that this was not a scam. She had been doing farmwork in her hometown. She and her family and the region itself were very poor and she had come to Beijing to find work. But after about two weeks of trying she had spent all the money she had and had found that there is no work in Beijing for a woman from the country with no education. Later that night she told me that she had just dreamed that there would be work for her in Beijing and that's why she came.

Her brother couldn't come to get her for another two days but he was coming. She was very grateful when I gave her enough money to stay in some relatively safe place until then but when she saw how much I had given her she said 'the train ticket doesn't cost much more than this'. Well, long story short, before the night was over I'd paid for her train ticket, treated her to a meal at McDonalds (it was where she wanted to go... she was pretty excited about it. McDonalds is actually relatively expensive in China) and bought a sweater for her because it was kind of cold and she didn't have much to keep her warm in the small knapsack she was carrying. It sounds like a perfect sob story but it was true. I've been in touch with her many times since by text message. She keeps inviting me to visit her and her family in her hometown and I hope I can take her up on that someday. Her gratitude to me for the little thing I did for her is overwhelming. She will never forget me, she says.

Since she made it back home she's gotten engaged to the boy she left behind (she actually sort of ran away after a fight with her parents over that) and been flooded out of her home by the rains that swept through southern China near the end of the summer. And she's gone back to farming, and that's probably what she's going to do for the rest of her life. But she's able to say she's been to Beijing. Even though she was angry at her parents, she was going to get up early the next morning before the train left to make a pilgrimage to Tiananmen Square to buy a little something for them just to show that she'd been to Beijing, to Tiananmen Square, the heart of China.

If it feels like we're whipping through a lot of time with no pictures, the truth is I sort of stopped taking pictures. I think that's because after a while I was no longer a tourist but a resident and most residents don't carry cameras. And besides, if you're carrying a camera around all the time I feel that you're always one step removed from the event. My friend who painted the picture of our professor [see "Learning Chinese is Fun!"] carried his video camera and his late grandmother's chair around with him everywhere he went in China every day for six months. This was for a film he was shooting. I think the story behind it is that his grandmother had always wanted to go to China but never made it and this chair of hers which she used to sit in all the time was very connected to my friend's fond memories of her. So he took it all over China and got it into various settings and situations and shot video of it... He had a blind musician play cello while sitting on it on the Bund in Shanghai... He convinced workers to hang it from a towering crane and had it flown high over a construction site. I've only seen bits of the 40-min movie but it looks really good. If you're in Switzerland it's playing now at an installation there. Maybe I'll add a link later if he's got one or I'll at least add a shot of the rare Chinese stripper that he finally found to dance on the chair. But the point is, after six months of carrying a camera around he, like me, had no interest in carrying a camera any more. So I don't think I took any more pictures until I left for Hunan.