Caesura

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Worldwide | Saturday, October 16, 2010 | flickr photos

I went on a short trip to Beijing during the first week of October 2010 and I was blown away by how the city's deep sense of history affects its citizens. I was encouraged to delve into street photography as it was a national holiday, with a lot of people about, and since the smog and forest fires around Beijing reduced all my landscape photos into impossible shades of grey. And the people in Beijing are generally interesting with lots of stories in their faces.

The citizens of Beijing are a hardy lot, they still have that sense of pride in their history and tradition, while standing on a precarious balance of modernity and progress. Prior to the trip, I had misconceptions about Beijing, thinking it is a grey cold city underneath that smog. On the contrary, everything about Beijing is alive and vibrant with life. In fact, everything about Beijing is a mix of familiar and strange. Familiar because the influence of the Chinese culture has spread far and wide up to its neighboring countries in Southeast Asia, where I come from. Strange because everything, despite its familiarity, is still a very different mix of ancient and modern, especially for someone like me who came from a culture of mixed heritage and more Western influences.

And on that trip to that ancient capital was all about about learning. It was about developing new perspectives of a country that seemed so large and threatening (with all the news about China that came out on the international media). I used to tell myself that I am at my most happiest when I have everything I need in a backpack with the blue skies in the horizon because it signals a start of an adventure. Beijing, with all its smog and grandeur and the odd mix of strange and familiar, was an adventure all on its own. And I was happy.