When Cheating Doesn't Matter

^To me, dragging the shutter speed to blur motion of secondary subject is a sure-fire way to give street shots a sense of impromptu with a rather journalistic charm to it.

China is as famous as notorious for many things. Cheating is among one of them. I have bags of stories about cheating concerning the nation.

Walk on the streets in China and you'll see the physical evidence. Here are some.

Mark the well arranged sheet displaying photocopies of newspaper clippings in the first photos which was taken in the street of Shenzhen, the booming town neighbouring Hong Kong. In essence, the clippings told of how bad blind children suffered in China, faintly hinting curious people stopping by to donate money to this child whose blindness was without any clue for me to tell for sure.

I doubted if I was too mean to think it this way until I saw another younger boy at the next road junction.

^For a similar street shot in Hong Kong, such a slow shutter speed would have blurred all the motion regardless of the directions the people are going.

The boy in this second photo was at the age of probably seven. He tried to play blind by keeping his eyeballs rolled up. But he was way too young to keep doing the trick. I saw him apparently look at me at some points of time. And his Erhu movements did not quite match the playback of the recorded music through the speaker.

Then I crossed the road and saw this:

A mother was searching for food in the rubbish bin with her child sleeping on her thigh, using a tiny cardboard as his mat. I was so grieved by the sight that I gave the lady 30 Chinese Renminbi, which is the amount for a proper lunch.

Leaving the sad scene I walked for another five minutes until a suspicion struck me. I returned and observed the lady at a distance. There I noticed a man in white shirt and black pants monitoring nearby the lady and the boy. He reminded of the men in similar clothes standing nearby the two "blind" boys.

I observed the lady for some minutes, finding her not picking a bit of food into her mouth. Then with a mix of indignation and unknown courage, I went up to her and took the picture. As you can see in the picture, the boy was cueing the lady about me photographing them.

Hurriedly, the lady picked up some food from the bin and ate it. I stepped closer and peered into the bin only to find just a foam lunch box with food in it which I was sure somebody bought and placed therein. There was not a tiny bit of rubbish in the bin!

The next thing I did was to verbally warn the lady not to take advantage of the boy and people's kindness to cheat money. I didn't stay for another minute there because I was sane: the man was watching.

And what is my second guess? The boys could have been kidnapped from their real parents to help the nasty gangsters to cheat. A guess, but a fair one cos there have been quite a number of news about kidnapped children in China.

When cheating doesn't matter.... (a deep sigh)