My early connection with China is informed by coming of age in the sixties. I am 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, teaching there and at other U.C. systems universities that I began the search for ways other than those of the traditional academic world to communicate, to educate.

I began to photograph professionally while living in Beijing and working for the Chinese government. I accepted a position as editor at the New World Press, a work unit of the Foreign Languages Press. It was the early 1980s and a very, very interesting time to be in China. But then most times are. 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.

These photos date from this period in China. Image "China: Paper and Fan" cover images of The Uses of Literature: life in the socialist Chinese literary system, by Perry Link. Published
Princeton University Press, 2000. Some from this body of work were published in Contemporary Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Post-Mao Fiction and Poetry (M.E. Sharpe, 1984). Michael Duke was the editor and the work was for the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, an organization I had helped found in the late 1960s.

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