Tag: china

We’re sitting at a table in Rice Paper, the little Asian-fusion restaurant in Linden Hills.

When I asked Jim Harkness, president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, if he would talk to me over dinner he said sure, I should pick the place. His house is in this neighborhood, I reasoned, and he lived in China for more than a decade. He heads up an agency that advocates for family-owned businesses. Rice Paper should be perfect.

The server hands me a menu and I study it for a second. “What looks good to you?” I ask.

“Well, nothing, actually,” Harkness says. He is staring at his menu, eyebrows beetling fiercely. Then he looks up. “Oh, I probably should have told you, I’m kind of an anti-fusion snob. I mean, generations went into creating authentic, regional Asian cuisines. Can’t we just stick to one? Why do we have to mess them up by mixing them all together?”

I have no idea what to say.

Harkness shrugs. “You never know, maybe I’ll be won over,” he says. “But I doubt it.”

He’s a young-looking 45, with a handsome, unlined face and dark hair. I attribute this to the way he’s lived: single, unburdened by so much as a cat, following a career path based entirely upon his whims and interests rather than mundane exigencies such as car payments, children, a 401(k). But no matter how solipsistic his approach, there’s no denying Harkness is doing great work.

He’s just returned, for instance, from a summit in Beijing where he was asked to speak about the trade relationship between China and Africa. I ask him for his position. He begins with a sketch of the history: “China’s leaders came up in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, during the Cold War, at a time when the country’s ties to third-world countries were based largely on the movement toward non-alliance. And a big part of their foreign policy has always been this notion of non-interference.” After several minutes, he shifts to the modern day: “In today’s world, a world of global economies, that’s a sort of naïve view and it ends up dovetailing very conveniently with a trade policy that’s focused on getting resources, like oil.” He launches into descriptions of the various groups opposing China and concludes with: “Frankly, I’m not terribly sympathetic to the U.S. or European countries saying that China’s motives in Africa aren’t pure because of our own 400-year history of plunder and colonialism, stretching right up to the present.”

He takes a breath. The server — who seems to have every table in this busy little restaurant — stops back to ask if we’re ready to order.

“Not yet,” Harkness tells her. “I’m formulating a theory about Chinese foreign policy here. It takes time.”

Finally, we choose two dishes, Plantation chicken and a Curry Plate with tofu, and agree to share. He orders a domestic beer (Rice Paper has obtained a beer and wine license since its “dry” opening in 2003), warning me to avoid imported Asian beers because most of them are awful.

“How did you end up in China in the first place?” I ask.

He looks perplexed again, then begins at the beginning.

Harkness grew up just a few miles away, in Minneapolis near 50th and Girard. His parents both were the children of missionaries — his father born in Mozambique, his mother in Korea — so their lifestyle, even with children, was peripatetic. Harkness attended Minneapolis Central High School when he wasn’t traveling with his family, and took classes in Chinese. In 1976, the year he was 14, he was selected along with a group of other high schools students from the United States to visit China as part of a “friendship delegation.”

“That was the era of ping-pong diplomacy,” he explains. “I think they ran out of other ‘welcoming’ things to do, so they invited this group of high school kids over, wined and dined us, took us to the Great Wall. I thought it was great. Had a mad crush on one of the female Red guards — unrequited, by the way.”

He returned, finished high school, and took up the Chinese again at the University of Wisconsin. In 1981, he traveled to Tianjin as part of an exchange program. But it wasn’t global politics that Harkness was interested in, it was ornithology. He was — and still is — riveted by birds.

While earning his master’s degree in sociology at Cornell University, he signed on as a consultant to the International Crane Foundation, based in Baraboo, Wisconsin. The tiny nonprofit happened to be launching a project in China and they were in need of someone who spoke the language.

Harkness glowers and announces, “In the mountain where there is no tiger, the monkey is king.”

There is a pause. “Which means?” I prompt.

“Since none of these salt-of-the-earth Wisconsin bird nuts knew Chinese, they thought I was some worldly sophisticate. I became their king. They’d find some Chinese scientist who didn’t speak English, and I’d be sent to translate and help him artificially inseminate black-necked cranes.”

As you walk down the narrow hallway into Frank Sander’s
sunlit studio in Lowertown you’re greeted by an entryway table piled with
cables, cast-off camera bits, miscellaneous video equipment, and a couple of
discarded microphone heads.

On the walls are personal treasures the German-born artist
has picked up during his twenty-odd years of travel. He takes down a recent
prize from a wall near the galley kitchen: a weathered, conical straw hat he
bartered from a farmer on a recent trip to China’s Yunnan province. "Can you
see the sweat stains along the strap here? Look at the fine weaving work; the
swirls and patterning in the straw are just stunning. I love that this bears
the evidence of his labor, the time he spent in the fields," Sander said. "I
think it’s just beautiful, it’s so human."

Sander studied carpentry and architecture, along with visual
art, in Germany; it’s clear he’s an itchy sort of artist, resistant to the
fetters of just one discipline. Finding carpentry and architecture too precise
and measured, he turned to sculpture and painting. He’s also noodled around
with filmmaking and photography since childhood, experimenting early on with
Super 8 cameras, and graduating over time to videography and digital
photography.

In his twenties Sander wandered throughout Europe, living in
Spain for a time, then the Netherlands and Denmark. On a trip home to Hamburg
in 1979, his train was caught in a week-long blizzard. "After a couple of days,
I started to look around for ways to pass the time." He recalls wryly, "I kept
thinking, surely there’s a young woman around here who needs some company."

You can guess the rest: a fellow passenger was an attractive
American. They hit it off and Sander followed her home to Minnesota, where they
were married. That relationship eventually fizzled but his affair with the
North Star State did not.

In fact, Minnesota’s landscapes, especially the wilds of the
Boundary Waters, have indelibly marked his artwork. Sander may be best known
for his critically hailed installation, Human Nature, which premiered at the
Minneapolis Institute of Arts in 1999 and also showed at the Daum Museum of
Contemporary Art outside Kansas City. In Sander’s landscape, fish enrobed in
resin hang from the frame of an upturned fishing boat; and scores of beaver
skulls sit in government-issue file boxes in witness to the destruction of
their habitat. The entire work was a sort of sculptural reliquary for Upper
Midwest wildlife displaced by industrialization and sprawl.

Sander, however, now has mixed feelings about large-scale
public art. "It takes so much time and money, and so much time applying for
grants, to put something like that together. No one really buys work that
large, so in the case of Human Nature it sat around on my property deteriorating
for years, just getting in the way. I’m more interested in actually making
artwork than in shopping my artwork around."

His current passion, videography and film, marries well with
his wanderlust. Currently he is documenting the tribal minorities and austere
beauty of Yunnan Province, in the mountains near the Tibetan border. Typically
for Sander, he arrived at this latest work through both luck and a Zen-like
acquiescence to the vicissitudes of his curiosity. He stumbled on these insular
enclaves last year while sightseeing in China, and, intrigued by their singular
cultural histories, struck up a friendship with a local university professor
who introduced him to some locals.

Sander was smitten with the people and their communities,
poised between agrarian life and industrial modernity. Armed with just a
camera, he returns every chance he gets. Sander’s video footage is immediate
and intimate. There’s over-the-shoulder access to the mountaintop homes of
boisterous young dancers, and walks along narrow village streets on festival
night.

With the ongoing collaboration of his Chinese partner, He
Lujiang, Sander is working to raise money for an ambitious film project that
would chronicle these peoples’ fast-disappearing stories.

"We have the opportunity to preserve something of this way
of life before it’s gone," he says. "Imagine if we’d been able to do something
similar to capture Native American life before the days of reservations. These
are communities on the cusp of modern life, and every day they lose a bit of
their heritage to the conveniences of new technologies. If I can document their
way of life, I’d like to post the whole film for free online. He Lujiang and I
want their chronicle to be our small contribution to the world."

The medium may vary, but Sander’s consistent theme is
preservation. His is the proverbial (and literal) voice in the wilderness
urging us not to forget who we were and to be mindful of the natural wonders
being sacrificed for the manufactured comforts of modernity.

Bed 31 is covered with a thin white blanket, awaiting the post-surgery arrival of Deng Yilian, 52, native of tiny Malu in southwest China’s Hunan Province. To the left, on Bed 30, Deng’s daughter Cotton, 29, now of Shanghai, is seated, legs crossed; to the right, on a bed inexplicably labeled 31+, her son Mondy, 27 and also of Shanghai, is lying down. It was to be the weekend of his wedding, and his bride—Wenwen, 27, a willowy native of Shanghai—is sitting on a chair across from 31+, watching a kung fu soap opera on the television in front of windows overlooking a boulevard in Changsha, Hunan’s capital city. Just down the hall, three surgeons are working to repair the damage done by a botched back surgery from fifteen years earlier that has suddenly threatened Deng Yilian’s spinal cord.

I had been invited to the wedding, and when it was postponed at the last minute, the family invited me to accompany them to Changsha. They were among my first Chinese friends five years ago, and now they are among my best. On the window ledge is a plastic bag containing cigarettes purchased for the wedding dinner in Malukou, an eight-hour drive into the mountains. Cotton and Mondy speak their native, incomprehensible Xiang dialect for much of the morning, and at one point, Wenwen and I smile knowingly at each other, bonding as unlikely compatriots in outsider-dom.

“Let’s walk,” Cotton says to me, suddenly, shifting into the peculiar jagged dialect of English that she calls “Cotton-ese.” We descend five floors to the wide, dusty street, surrounded by tenements with first-floor shops and restaurants. Cotton, barely five feet tall but with an outsized charisma and beauty, squints at pockets of street life, miniature maelstroms lost in the boulevard’s broad spaces. She left Hunan ten years ago as a village shoe-shine girl; after graduating from art school in Guangzhou, she migrated to Shanghai, where she waitressed at an American-style café and now owns a beloved restaurant and bar located in a colonial-era French villa. Though not exactly the queen of Shanghai’s nightlife, she is certainly one of its princesses. “But I don’t feel like a princess in Hunan,” she tells me as we round a corner where wiry, sweat-soaked workers crouch with their rice bowls, eating. “That’s why I can’t come back here.”

We wander through a market that sells second-hand refrigeration equipment, televisions, and motorcycles. My presence—a white face in a run-down section of Changsha—is cause for smiles and finger-pointing. “The life is hard here,” Cotton says. “Nothing to do but be bored and worry about the money.” She reminds me that the high school where Mao Zedong was a student, and later taught, is just a few minutes away. But her mother’s surgery, which was supposed to last five hours, is in its fourth, so we head back to resume our vigil.

In the hospital room, Uncle Zou—second husband to Cotton’s widowed mother—is laying across 31+. He will sleep there for the next two weeks, caring for his wife, and generally fulfilling the functions of a nurse. In a Chinese hospital, the concept of visiting hours is foreign. Chinese families, no matter how fractured, won’t leave a sick family member alone. Uncle Zou will handle the bedpan and hospital staff will handle the blood pressure. So we sit, and we wait. Cotton goes to the front desk and inquires about her mother’s progress. She is told that no news is good news. “Worry if we want to see you,” the head nurse says. A short time later, a doctor enters the room with a small white box that under other circumstances might hold earrings. He speaks softly to Cotton, and as he leaves, Cotton and Uncle Zou open it. Inside, she tells me, is a piece of one of her mother’s vertebrae. They gave it to her, she explains, to prove that they actually did the surgery. It’s a common practice, made customary by the profiteering and outright fraud that has rendered much of China’s public health system inaccessible to its residents. Cotton, however, can afford a private hospital for her mother. “Most Chinese families would be totally ruined by this,” she tells me. “We’re lucky.”

Finally, six hours after she was wheeled into the operating room, Deng Yilian is returned to her bed. She is unconscious, and her pale white face causes husband, daughter, and son to look helplessly at each other. Mondy takes his mother’s hand and I slip into the hallway.

Later that night Cotton calls to tell me that her mother woke up hungry, and when I arrive the next morning Deng Yilian is sitting up in bed, being fed muesli and yogurt by her son. On the table opposite her bed, in tinfoil, is a spicy Hunanese duck cut into pieces for Uncle Zou. After a brief, sharp Xiang exchange between mother and daughter, Cotton turns to me with an exasperated laugh. “She wants the duck even though it’s bad for her stomach,” she exclaims. “Hunanese woman is strong.”