An nonfiction story 
Translated by T. Zhou and D. Barker, May 2009
Part of this article was published in THE SHOPS PROJECT
A art  work& a publication by British  artist Rebecca French and Andrew Mottershead
SITE GALLERY 2010

Although I am wholeheartedly stuck in my own anxiety, I cannot fail to notice that the world is disturbed.
China, Guangzhou

Zhanqianxi Road, clothing wholesale market, street frontage shops

It was just after 8 o’clock in the morning, the stall holders were already busying themselves like sea crabs in the outgoing tide: they were packaging and sending orders, hanging new clothing on the shelves, trying to drum up more business with welcoming smiles and keeping a high level of vigilance under the baking hot sun for the whole of the day. Others, who walked through the sweaty crowd, were Arabs, Indians, Africans, Eastern Europeans and mixed-raced people, you could not tell where they came from and some heavily built Americans. The visitors to the market were all eyeing the endless wall of textiles on both sides of the road, busily searching for the things they wanted. The smell of unwashed synthetic fabric, the looped pop music promoting sales and the distraction of the traffic made them both concentrate and feel exhausted. However, they all understood that this was only the start of one of those ordinary days that had happened over the last fifteen years and would happen for another fifty years. Therefore the stallholders and customers managed to hold out over the day like fresh baked bread just out of the oven. It was a very hard task to attract people’s hawk-like attention away from world-famous branded clothing and cheap goods with the question, ‘Excuse me, sir, we are artists conducting market research for a project called SHOPS. May I ask whether you have a calculator?’ – This was not an easy thing to do, the artists had to speak in a warm tone but be heard over the noisy background, meanwhile keeping reserved in their approach.

I could tell that Rebecca and Andrew were very familiar with this work style, intercepting passers-by on the streets. Although they now stood in a strange street in a third-world country, a street that seemed to have installed pulleys to run an unstoppable world-wide trade, they were still very patient even with the hasty and dismissive glances they were given. They hoped that there would always be people, who although busying themselves with business would be gentle and would show curiosity, would stop and listen to what they had to say? Rebecca and Andrew did not want to give up easily. While Rebecca put the questions to the passers-by, Andrew stood nearby, with a camcorder in hand closely monitoring the situation.

Most of the people on the street were holding mobile phones functioning as calculators; however there was a pleasant and surprising result in that many of the Africans were still using calculators. If they had them in their pockets, they would take them out to show Rebecca and Andrew, no matter whether they were genuine or counterfeit Casio products.

Qin Village, training ground, a piggery on the hill

It seemed that Mo Chuanglun’s pigs had already recovered from the mysterious outbreak of pig’s Blue Ear Disease (PRRS) in May 2007. His face showed no sign of ‘the group anxiety’ caused by the sad news that twenty million pigs (incomplete figures) has become infected. He did as is so often stereotypically described in the press: ‘one of the pig farmers pointed at his pigs and said in a heartbreaking way…’. He turned his head shyly toward his piggery subconsciously avoiding the camera. He had lived on this rubbish-strewn hill in a shabby shed made of asbestos tiles and wood for fifteen years with his wife and son, just like dozens of other pig farmers living in the same kind of temporary ‘home’ on the hill.  Mo was going to send his son back to his hometown for education. He kept his habit of brewing herb tea everyday using dried leaves brought from his hometown. He was more concerned about the continuing price rise of foodstuffs or foot-and-mouth disease than he was of the flies, mosquitoes and grass snakes. Every day, between midnight and five o’clock in the morning, he rode his motorbike to collect pigwash from the nearby suburban areas. The reason he chose to live in Guangzhou was that the restaurants there were always filled with people waiting to eat seafood, frogs, ants, vipers, cats and dogs, peacocks or crocodiles even in the coldest and the hottest nights. Four days after the massive earthquake in Wenchuan, we met up with him. Rebecca and Andrew explained the purpose of their visit and showed him the photographs they had taken all over the world for the SHOPS project. We were sitting in Mo’s shed, which had only one bed and one dining table, drinking the herb tea he had made. Andrew pointed at a slightly reflective object in the dusk of the room and asked gingerly, ‘Is that … a television?’ Outside the door, children, some young and some older, ran wildly about on the hillside like little dogs excited by the visitors for a moment…then everything slowly became quiet again. The hardship was bearable – compared with the people thousands miles away who lay buried under rubble needing to have limbs amputated.

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Because he was illiterate, it was very difficult for Mo Chuanglun to write the characters of his son Mo Liqi’s name on a slip of paper.

Yide Road, small commodities, fine stationery wholesale market

‘Sir (Miss), we are artists, we are conducting market research for a project called SHOPS. Have you ever received any tips that you found useful from people you know, or from people at places like airports or hotels, or from other retailers you have met?”
 

Namulinda opened his full lips, thought of the words that he wanted to say before spelling them out. His swollen and chapped heels, broad joints and thick calluses were all squeezed into a pair of plastic flip-flops. “Yeah, yeah, I get a lot of tips from my brothers and sisters everyday. For example, how to bargain a pair of Adidas shoes down from 50 yuan to 20 yuan; how to pack (throwing the original package and labels away reduces the shipping costs), and there are some other tips about how to deal with the Chinese…”
 

After 2003, the number of African people coming to Guangzhou increased by 30 to 40 percent year on year. Namulinda was one of the hundreds of thousands or more of the floating population of Africans living in Guangzhou. He was also one of the people who had waited resentfully for one of the quota of visas issued by China every year. Although to earn money at full speed and then go back home was the goal for most Africans in Guangzhou, they were still described as being like ‘those Chinese who built Chinatown in America in the old days’, even though the Africans in Guangzhou did not need to sit at the rear of the bus, they spoke loudly over their mobile phones, opened their own barber shops and restaurants, cooking the strongly flavoured onion, potato and chicken dish. After finishing business, they could go to ‘the smaller Notre Dame de Paris’ by the small commodities wholesale market on Yide Road to listen to priests preaching in Cantonese… however a new kind of racial discrimination different from that during South Africa’s colonial times had formed quietly. Chinese dealers were tipped of by their colleagues that the Africans ‘bargained like killers’ - having a fighting style of ‘devil-may-care hay-shakers’; ‘Dealing with them, calculators are enough; you do not need to speak English’.

The level of education and standards of hygiene of some of the Africans, their behaviour in chatting up and asking for the phone numbers of Chinese girls on the streets and their selling of drugs and illegally overstaying their visas, made some Chinese men refer to those Chinese girls who had sex with the Africans as ‘sluts’.

Shipai Village, Stand 13, meat and vegetable market, a shop selling pork

Shipai village was the largest urban village in Guangzhou. More than three thousand narrow, rectangular shaped cheap housing were lined up like untidy dominos. Tentacles of tangled concrete and reinforcing steel bars appeared like worms scrambling above the heads of passers-by. The few twisted rays of sun light that shone into those permanently dim, greasy, narrow alleys were like something bestowed. Compared with the surrounding high-rise blocks of computer stores, expensive cinemas, super-markets and entertainment centres, this 0.73 square-kilometre urban village was like a hornets' nest fallen onto newly grafted skin.  Nearly seventy thousand migrant workers and dawdling punks referred to by the police as a ‘high risk group’ were bunched together in that small, dim hornets' nest with numerous unspoken dreams, breathing the rotten smell in the air of an early spring in Guangzhou.

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Her name was Su Guzhen, she owned a shop selling pork inside the meat and vegetable market. Nearly 50 years old, Su’s Cantonese accent was as close as it could be to those who had lived in Guangzhou for more than 20 years. Her figure was out of shape like so many women who had been obliged to do heavy work after they married. Everyday she wore a scarlet pink rubber apron covered with bloodstains and greasy dirt, standing at the counter selling pork from morning to evening. She had sweet smile, a hoarse voice and chopped and weighed pork in a clean, rapid manner. Her husband was an honest man, short, like a small lean horse. At 1 o’clock every morning, he boarded a mini bus which cost 15 yuan per person from Shipai village, following the northern motorway that circled around the city to reach Gao Tang Shi Livestock Market beside the Guang Shan highway. Between 2 o’clock and 3 o’clock, he would buy two pigs. Even in the days when the price of pork was high, he did not make much from selling the meat from two pigs a day. Because like so many workers who did not get a penny in pay-rise but yet still had to pay the high price of 18 yuan per half-kilo of pork, he had to pay a high price for the pigs when he purchased them. The two pigs that he bought were then sent to the state-operated fresh-meat processing factory to be slaughtered and processed, stamped ‘quality-assured meat’ and left for the food transport company to deliver to Shipai Village in the morning and in the afternoon. He had never been to UK, he said, ‘It seems that I shall have no chance to go there in this life.’ Hearing what Rebecca and Andrew said about the frozen pork in London’s super- markets, all kind of feelings welled up in his heart for the British people who had no fresh meat to eat.

Their son was studying a computer course at the university at that time.

In an imaginative situation, a piglet in Mo Chuanglun’s piggery became a ninety-kilogram pig after being feed for half a year. It passed through wholesalers’ hands several times, then ended up in Su Guzhen’s pork shop. Yuan Xinghuo, the owner of a stuffed buns’ store and his wife Zheng Sengu, came to buy pork at Su’s store everyday. The couple came from the countryside around Suzhou and had lived in Shipai village for five years. Their home was on the dark, damp ground floor of one of the alleyways, a fluorescent light shining on a simple cooker, a table and chairs. We could see everyone in this relationship, the piggery – the wholesale market – the shop selling pork – the shop selling meat-stuffed buns, they all had a similar face, the face of hard labour.

Shipai village underground station, entrance D, Starbucks Coffee Shop

Carrying heavy books, a notebook, calculator, photo-frames, camera, camcorder, tripod, Rebecca, Andrew and I, looking a little battered after travelling for the whole morning and having been caught up in Guangzhou’s spring downpour, it seemed to rain for no reason, were forced to sit on Starbucks’ soft stain-free dark brown sofa. Rebecca and Andrew expressed their straightforward opinions on Starbucks and their self-criticism with an English style of precision. Apart from that, they did not make many compromises in other areas - although this was in Shipai Village’s meat and vegetable market, under the surveillance of those security personnel in uniform during the time of the Olympics, they were still explaining their work and concept to people, “We are artists, and we are doing an artwork about SHOPS….” 

Before we went into the village, I asked them to pretend to be tourists with two fingers held up in the air to form a ‘V’ in order to avoid unnecessary harassment. I even asked them to pretend to be chefs, because this made a kind of sense: chefs would look at the meat on the chopping-boards, wander in the meat market and ask questions. It would be like all the tricks used during all the revolutionary periods of acting deliberately crazily and foolishly. We had got used to this ‘mechanism of using our wits’– being a newspaper seller and an underground party member at the same time, no matter how much it sounded irrational and mentally unbalanced in practice, who could say that would it not ‘work’ successfully? So Rebecca and Andrew furrowed their brows and pretended for a while. They refused to continue do so after less than five minutes. “We cannot do things like this,” they said. They then told Su Guzhen who they really were and their purpose in coming; the reason why they took photographs of the ‘pork vendors’ and the reasons why the ‘pork vendors’ could refuse to let them do so, if Su had said no, they would not have forced her …never mind if the explanation of their art work was well received, at least the pork vendors had given their full agreement to their identity as ‘artists’.  When we said ‘we are artists’, their faces did not display the wan smiles that we often see, the self-mockery, the shame, or the melancholy and evasiveness.

People had gather around us with curiosity, when the two artists showed their work in their well-printed collection to Su Guzhen and the others with their grimy hands and puzzled looks; in Guangzhou’s heavy downpour of no apparent reason and brought their photographs, enlarged, printed and framed and gave a copy to everyone who had been a subject of their photography as they had promised, they won many friendly and kindly smiles which they would not be their reward in the art galleries.​

 

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