Trip to China Part II

    This photo was taken at my friend's home. These stools and chair put together made an intereting combination of shape and color. 

    New Year is all about family. The new year holiday lasts 15 days and I remember we always had very full schedule of visiting families. Eating family meals is the traditional and the only festive way to celebrate it. Quite a few people have to work for a day or two in the kitchen to prepare the new year's eve dinner for 30 something family members in my mom's side. That is an extremely labor intensive work, since we always cook meals from fresh ingredients, there's nothing like throwing a grocery store bought frozen pizza into the oven and getting dinner ready within 30 minutes.

    I took some photos of the home-made dishes at my Aunt's home, and my little nephew eating. 

Spicy chicken salad;shredded carrot salad; ants in the tree (minced pork and cellophane noodles)

An Uyghur man selling lamb kabobs

Street food vendor and customer

 Chengdu's one of the most famous snack food is sweet potato noodles with pig intestine. Weird as it sounds, it tastes really good and I know where to eat the best in the whole city! I made a tour to visit the neigboorhood I grew up and came back to this diner restaurant to reminisce my childhood memory. For 20 years, it hasn't changed at all. Still an open kitchen facing the street, people waiting in the line at the kitchen to get their food, the staff smashing the dough of sweet potato noodles with his sweat rolling down the face, right in front of waiting customers. It's quite a show!

Non-spicy and spicy sweet potato noodles with pig intestine

    

    No doubt that China is rising up and there's a rapid increase of higher income families, but it's an extremely polarized country with the poor struggling hard to survive. I like to shoot these poor and maybe ignored people who showcase a large portion of the population to remind myself and others that China has a long way to go to become a real good country.

In my parents' neigborhood, this man makes a living by collecting residents' trash and sorting it out. He likes to sit in his shabby chair outdoors on sunny afternoons and drink some cheap booze and maybe take a nap.

     This old lady sells her hand-made stuff on the sidewalk in winter. There's a bus stop right in front of her spot. Although this is a busy business district, few people bother to stop and buy her stuff.

 I am extremely busy packing, contacting moving companies and looking for apartments since I came back to U.S. I will be moving to NYC soon, hopeful in mid April to try my luck to land a job as a food photographer assistant. The one and half years of living in North country NY made me unable to work, but on the other hand, I discovered something I trully love. I am grateful!