Xiaomei Chen: Puzhu

Photo © Xiaomei Chen-All Rights Reserved

Hands in Chinese Hakka culture are often a metaphor for the ability to work and survive; a symbol for diligence. "If you have hands, you never beg" the Hakka say.

And so reads a caption under one of Xiaomei Chen's photographs in her Puzhu gallery.

Xiaomei Chen had to choose between a Phd and a camera, and the camera won. Since 2006, she has been documenting human lives with it, using her background in anthropology. She's currently living in the US, and works as a contractor at The Washington Post. Having been a teacher in south China, she's fluent in Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka.

She embarked on a visual project documenting Puzhu, an obscure and shrinking village of 45 people in south China which mirrors what China has been going through in the past century. Farmers are leaving their land to earn better pay in the big cities such as Shanghai, leaving their centuries-old houses and way of life.

Puzhu In Transition was produced in partial fulfillment of a Masters of Art degree requirement for the School of Visual Communication at Ohio University. It consist of stills, video and a book.

The book is available for sale on Blurb.

POV: Passport Renewal

Here's a statement which could irk all the Libertarians and Tea-Party grumblers: I had an excellent experience with the US State Department's Passport renewal process! Yes, a government office!

I had to renew my soon-to-expire passport, and I decided to jump the gun a month or two earlier than necessary.

I wanted my old one back as it still has a number of valid visas....and as I suffer from acute separation anxiety if I don't have my passport within reach (no, I'm not making this up nor is it hyperbole),  I chose the expedited route to speed up the process, and downloaded/filled the necessary application, and included a note saying that I needed the old passport back.

As I also wanted  extra pages, I spoke to a State Department employee to clarify whether I needed to pay extra. She checked and responded affirmatively.  I enclosed the fees required, and sent it off by Priority mail.

A few days later, I get a call from the State Department informing me that I had overpaid. We resolved the snafu in a couple of minutes, and within a few days, the new passport arrived along with the old one.

Easy, simple and very efficient.

Of course, my passport photograph looks like a mug shot...but that's a different matter.