About the Work

China

My early connection with China is informed by coming of age in the sixties and being formally trained as an historian of Modern China, with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. It was after completing a post-doc at U.C. Berkeley and publishing the thesis at Harvard that I began the search for ways other than those of the traditional academic world to communicate, to educate. I accepted a position in Beijing as editor at the Foreign Languages Press, a work unit of the Chinese government. It was the early 1980s and a very interesting time to be living in China, but then most times are.

I began to photograph professionally and at the end of the contract, I spent two months traveling Chinese style (ying-wo) on the trains over a good part of China. It was an intense and singular experience. Returning to the United States, I re-entered by teaching at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, printing, exhibiting, and getting it together to go to Nicaragua. The Contra War was on.

"China: Paper and Fan" cover image of The Uses of Literature: life in the socialist Chinese literary system, by Perry Link (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Selected images from this body of work were published in Contemporary Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Post-Mao Fiction and Poetry (M.E. Sharpe, 1984).