Green dragons coil on the painted walls of a cave. Green fields terrace a hillside almost bare of trees, where apartment buildings are now overshadowing older cave dwellings. A mailman on a motorcycle travels a rural route, and children look up from their desks at school to see who has just walked in.
Li Ju has just entered their classroom with his camera. In the pages of “Through Shên-Kan: Revisiting the Loess Plateau,” Li takes a trip through northern China, and he offers a perspective unlike anything I’ve seen before. He tells the story of his travels in his reflections, and in conversations with the people he meets — a folk singer, an opera company, a professional umrella dancer leading a wedding ceremony, women working in the fields, children in the streets, shop keepers.
He writes with the warmth and curiosity of a good columnist or a blog. And he chronicles, at every step, 100 years of history. Li retraces in photographs a route Sterling Clark followed in 1908 and 1909. The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown has honored their founder’s trip, and his interest in China, with this summer and early fall’s exhibits.
Photograph by Li Ju, courtesy of Clark Art Institute
The Clark displayed some of Li’s photographs this summer, alongside images from the 1908 expedition, to show the changes — or sometimes the lack of change. The photographs were striking. They called out conversations. Everyoen around me, looking intently at growing cities, dwindling rivers and mountain roads, found something to point out to their friends. See the terraces? In this picture, the hills are bare. In this one, they are all planted.
But the book moves me still more. I think of Roxana Robinson and Suketu Mehta at Wordfest, earlier in September, talking about writing a world hey knew, or got to know. Li Ju tells the story of these places in simple, concrete images. He shows the challenges of rapid change in the piles of trash along a flood chute. I feel the daily worry and warmth and ordinariness of living in these places, cities or towns or villages. He brings them close enough to walk into.
Not all of the route has changed.
On pages 120 to 123 of the book, he tells his search for a photo of a “village near a ravine.” The expedition had passed many villages, he said, and it took him many trips, determination and serendipity to find the place where the earlier photographer stood with his camera. It is a small, country village on a river bank, and it is called Shihepu.
“It was a sunny day with a clear blue sky, full of life,” he writes in the book, “and the landscape had changed dramatically since my last visit. Once again I went down to the stream and, leaning on the old tree, had a closer look: it was a willow, vigorous with abundant foliage. I confirmed that it was one of the two trees in the old photo, and it seemed to me to be like a lonely old man who had lost his partner; happily, he now had another, and I was pleased to see a young willow growing beside it, like a child accompanying a father. I was impressed by its great vitality. Today was the same day as the old photo was taken,100 years earlier.”