(Sony A55)
It seems that every night when I switch off the camera, go into the bedroom and turn off the lights, what have become the reminiscences of the day in the memory card will start flickering from one electron to another in my head, interspersed with question or exclamation marks about the day’s conversations and observations. This will go on and on as I tuck myself into bed, turn from side to side and look around the faintly discernible whatnots on the side table until my eyelids feel so increasing heavy that the brain automatically comes to a temporary shutdown to put me to sleep.
Then last night when the flickering stopped, I dreamt a dream about a Beijing ren (meaning “person” in Mandarin), a lead waiter in a hotel restaurant to be exact, catching a Caucasian madam red-handed with a bread and an apple on her hand which the lead matron believed to be blatant food smuggling after breakfast. The Caucasian madam was blocked from her way out, given a lecture on the restaurant rules and finally directed by finger-pointing to put back the food to where they belonged. The lead matron made quite a scene of it, and the madam was really crossed from the expression on her face. Embarrassed in front of other patrons, she kept her manners, put back the food and left.
This morning I immediately knew that it was actually a mental caricature of a similar scene took place some eight years ago, which I mentioned to the founder of the HK Cover Magazine at the cocktail party on Monday. That incident happened during my second trip to Beijing, to be followed by two more to add up to four in ten years. During those four visits, I met different people from Chinese officials involved in the WTO entry negotiations, news anchors in the China News Agency, ballet teachers from a renowned capital academy to taxi drivers. From their manner and conversations invariably wafted an omnipresent smell of a patronising quality. It is that they talked and articulated in a way as if they felt themselves a notch above others, above people from outside of the capital and probably above the rest of the world.
Where does this quality come from? Could it be the thinking registered in their DNA that it entitles one to natural superiority for being a native of the great capital of the middle kingdom? On my last trip to Beijing, every piece of negotiated arrangement was changed in the last minute. It seems that when there are more than one party involved in an negotiation with or among the Beijing people, there has to be a single shot-caller calling the shot at will: the "I". The gist is that when a Beijing party or Beijing ren says something is good, it must be the best.
Back to my conversation with the magazine boss. I was asked about the mindset of Beijing’s photographers and the impacts on their works. I replied that honestly I didn't have any personal contacts with a single photographer in Beijing. But from some of the commissioned shots by the Beijing photographers on display, I felt the same sense of "shot-caller calling the shot at will". While commenting on the topic at the party, I ,to be polite, managed to touch on this lightly and not to pinpoint any shots despite the urge of frankness arising from some glasses of wine gulped into an empty stomach. I don't really know the right words to say my comments, but you can go over there and see for yourself those commissioned shots taken by the Beijing photographers with the Leicas.
Well, well, well.
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