Boy this post has been a long time coming, but I have a excuse, I’ve again been busy and tired turning out a deliverable and getting over jetlag from my trip.
So last month, I completed an ethnographic field trip to the Hebei province in Northeastern China, along with a member of the client team and two very competent and prodigious graduate students from Tongji Daxue here in Shanghai. We performed ethnographic interviews on 8 households at a whirlwind pace. The different districts (counties?) that we went to were Huilai, Huian, Handan. Actually, Handan was a larger town, so luckily we were able to take a train there.
My trip was delightful. I learned a tremendous amount, and I lived to talk about it. The only part that was tough was finding vegetarian food out in the middle of rural Hebei– suffice it to say that I ate a LOT of boiled celery.
A couple highlights:
- I was the first foreigner that people in some of these areas saw. It was crazy. I’m sure they were wondering why the heck a Meiguoren with a video camera and an SLR was walking around in their neighborhood.
- People were generally more than happy to help with the ethnographic study. They loved looking at the pictures that they took and talking about their experiences. We got some great stories- Unfortunately, I couldn’t understand most of it directly because it was in Mandarin but the students from Tongji were gracious enough to translate for me.
- Communities were so close knit that all the neighbors would come by to see what all the commotion was about (especially in the rural areas).
Here’s some pixel love.
This is a picture of honeycomb coal. It’s used quite frequently in rural areas in China to heat homes and cook (power stoves).
A Maufang (outhouse) in rural China. I didn’t use one of these on my trip, except for at a rest stop. The anti bacterial hand sanitizing liquid comes in handy when there’s no soap around.
MaYao strikes the pose *vogue*
This is a typical cooking set up in a rural house
This is what an alley might look like, with entrances to all the houses on a block.
Wang Mingqu, after a grueling long interview. He seems pretty upbeat, surprisingly. I’d be so tired after that!
Used coal. As you can see, there is really no better place to store it.
Plastic is typically used to cover walls (when people can afford it) to keep the smoke billows from marring the walls.
This vehicle is used to transport crops and goods from one place to another. Farm lands tend to be scattered in rural areas.
Celebrating a job well done
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