The story of a marginal person in the county, looking for the marginal people

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2024-05-13 09:10Posted on the official account of Beijing People

At the end of March this year, photographer Cai Shanhai came across Fuqing's courtyard and his world on the way to collect wind.

It was the fourth day of the death of the old man Fuqing, and with the consent of his family, Cai Shanhai walked into the courtyard. Fuqing's home is not big, the coffin is parked in the main house, and there are two apricot blossom trees planted in the middle of the courtyard outside, which were bare at that time. A group of funeral bands, separated by trees, stood on the east and west sides, and played boisterously.

When he first entered the door, Cai Shanhai didn't notice the words in the courtyard. After filming the band and preparing to leave through the gate, Cai Shanhai looked up and saw that the door beam read "Kashgar City, Xinjiang...... At the age of 77, can Zhang Fuqing go and see it?" When I turned around, there was a word on the other wall, "How big is the universe?" There are many more like that. Fuqing's thoughts are sometimes very specific, such as "spraying once a year when the apricot blossoms fall, and once after the beginning of autumn", such as repairing the yard day by day for several years. Fuqing is sometimes concerned with big things, such as the widening of the Ahe River near the village, whether the floods that were experienced 60 years ago will happen again, and the temperature on the surface of the sun is 6,000 degrees......

Cai Shanhai's curiosity came up, because this is also something he will think about. Cai Shanhai is 33 years old and Fuqing is 77 years old, spanning 40 years, and their thoughts are the same.

If you look closely, you can see that the broom, the fire stick, and even a small wooden board in the vent and the latch of the door are all written all over the place. The words spread out and became walls. Fuqing's wife suffers from mental illness, Cai Shanhai can imagine that one afternoon, when his wife had taken medicine and fell asleep, Fuqing was in the courtyard, quietly bringing a chair, or squatting directly, recording his life in various postures. The whole courtyard has become a silent witness to Fuqing's life.

Before Cai Shanhai arrived, no one in the village would read the words of the old man Fuqing, and they thought he was practicing calligraphy. In April, Cai Shanhai took a picture of the courtyard wall and posted it on the Internet, which unexpectedly caused a sensation. Some people say that this is Zhang Fuqing's "offline circle of friends", his father's prose poems, and some people commented, "Only words can take on this role and declare that life has been present."

In the middle of 2023, Caishan Customs will drop the county photo studio for 3 years, and at the end of the year, it will not accept commercial films at all, and then re-embark on the photography project to record China that should have started at the end of 2019 - "Three Chapters of Leisure". Starting from January 2024, Cai Shanhai is like a sweeping monk, using the "flat push" mode to travel all over Guangxi and Shanxi village after village, and his lens does not focus on high-rise buildings and famous mountains, but on all living beings. According to his words, this is also a story of a marginal person from the county town, how to find more marginal people along the way.

Along the way, Cai Shanhai encountered many "Fuqing" - they built their own sky castle, they wrote inscriptions on their own walls, they also sang karaoke in natural caves, and they used their personal life stories to form a vivid and peculiar big picture of the present. Under Cai Shanhai's lens, their lives often have a considerable time difference with modern life, and life flows at different speeds, or leisurely, or lonely, or magical, or tenacious, or real.

"People" chatted with photographer Cai Shanhai about his rural experience in the past six months. The following is Cai Shanhai's story about Fuqing, and more than Fuqing-

Text: Li Yuning

Edited by Tian Yi

Photo: Cai Shanhai

1

In fact, before Fuqing, I had met many "Fuqing". I named their collection of stories "Walking Immortals", which means to find the "fairies" scattered all over the place.

At the beginning of the year, on the national highway to Liuzhou, Guangxi, I met the first "Fuqing" since my departure. His name should be "Wei Changjiang", and the wall of Wei Yangtze River is also full of words, but he writes more thoroughly - on the gate, he inscribes a plaque "called Huazi Laowo"; On the gate, he wrote, "Don't open the door/The poor family"; On the wall, he went on to write: "The poorest house/Heaven, earth and hell", and on top of this line, he hung a red hydrangea with a lucky head.

 Wei Changjiang is written on the walls full of words

I had a strong curiosity about him the moment I saw the words, but it happened to be the fifth day of the Lunar New Year, and there was no one at Wei Changjiang's house, and the door could not be opened. After that, I squatted outside his door for two days straight. When I waited, I was thinking, people in each province of China have their own characteristics, what kind of person is Wei Changjiang? He may not be tall, with long hair and a scruffy beard. How old is he, an old man or a man in his 30s? Will they be dressed in the same strange clothes as the beggars? Later, while waiting for him, I kept searching in my head......

However, two days later, I still haven't waited for this "Guevara", I hope that he went to a place that is not "called Hanako's Nest" for the New Year.

I continued to drive along the national highway, Guangxi is characterized by karst landforms, and many karst caves are 4A and 5A scenic spots, which are lit up with colorful lights. But in addition to the tourist caves, there are more unknown caves in Guangxi, and I found that many ordinary people live in such caves.

The second "Fuqing" I met was the keeper of a cave wine cellar in Baise, Guangxi.

When I went in to greet him behind the sign of "Cave Old Liquor", he was still drinking, which was his "work benefit", and the boss said that he would not be able to empty a cellar anyway. At first, he thought I was going to buy wine, so he took me to see the big and small altars, and the wine in the cave was made by him, and the boss put him here seven or eight years ago, and from brewing to trading, he gradually became the owner of the cave and the wine.

I turned my camera back and chatted with him like a tourist. Probably the first person in recent times to be curious about something other than the wine in the cave, he pulled me to the table, drank and smoked hookah, and started chattering about his life without asking.

The cellar keeper is seventy or eight years old in Chinese New Year's Eve, and I can't hear his dialect accent clearly. Many years ago, he met his current boss in his hometown of Chongzuo, and followed him out of the small city bordering Vietnam next door, and went into the Baise Cave, where he has been guarding it until now. He hasn't been married for so many years, and he guards a hole alone. He erected a room in the cave, a bed, a table, a few chairs, a stove, and a hammer and a saw hanging on the wall of the cave, and that was all he had lived all these years. The cellar keeper said that he usually went to the village a kilometer away to buy vegetables, which was basically the farthest place he went in his life.

Unlike Wei Changjiang, the cellar keepers did not leave this Spring Festival. That afternoon, every time I talked to him about my hometown, his expression was very solemn. I asked him why he didn't go home for the Spring Festival, he hesitated for a while, looked at my car again, and asked me in turn, "Can you take me?" It seems like a four- or five-hour drive to Chongzuo, and I went to check my phone, and the highway is true, but if I follow the "flat push" way to take the provincial road, it may take a day. I relayed the facts to him, but the cellar keeper did not insist and moved on to other topics.

In fact, the county seat is very small, the roads are developed, and every county in China will look like an intricate net when connected. I guess not to "touch the net" may have been the best choice he made after weighing it. After putting down the topic of his hometown, the cellar keeper was visibly relaxed and drank until he was happy, he got up directly from his chair, stretched out his hand, and began to spin in circles. After dancing for a while, it didn't seem to be fun, and the cellar keeper opened Douyin again, he usually doesn't look at anything else, just continues to dance to the Guangxi folk songs brushed inside.

When he saw my camera, he didn't even have to say anything, but the cellar keeper took the initiative to invite me to take a picture of him. In fact, the cave is not small, I started to take a picture outside, but the exposure distance is short, and when I shoot it from the outside, the light inside is dark and it is black. Now, we were all in the cave, standing next to the dancers, and the sunlight was shining in, and everything was shining clearly. I think I got a good portrait of the environment that day.

The cellar keeper dancing in the wine cave

2

Leaving the cave of the cellar keepers, I continued to walk forward, and soon came across the next cave, another group of people. The first thing that attracted me was the barbecue stall at the entrance of the cave, where people were sitting in twos and threes, and when they saw me get off the bus, the stall owner greeted me warmly. Listening to me say that he was not interested in eating, he didn't care, and waved his hand to point me in the cave, saying that you can go in to see the heavenly palace and the fairy cave, the stalactites are very beautiful, and there are red ribbons sold at the door, which can be tied in it to pray for blessings, five yuan a piece.

There was no blessing to pray for, so I went in and walked around. The heavenly palace is located at the top of the cave, there is no common Buddha statue in the scenic area, and there is no place to worship incense, but there are some colorful lights, but it is different from the dream light in the 5A cave, it is more like the lantern ball color light in the discotheque. I was curious, and walked a little further, and actually heard the singing. I walked to the open place of the Heavenly Palace, and looked out in the direction of the colored light, it turned out that there was a flat ground at the bottom of the cave, with colored lanterns, colored flags and small lanterns hanging on it, arranged like a factory annual meeting in the 90s, and in the middle there was a karaoke order cabinet of the last century, as if it was pulled from a bankrupt KTV. There are also a few speakers around, surrounded by a small projection, and there are about twenty or thirty people gathered behind, and there is really a "cave disco" here.

Over the years, I have successively photographed many dance halls, Shanghai, Zhejiang, and Northeast China, and the customers in them are middle-aged and elderly people over 50 years old. Shanghai has a high degree of aging, the old people like to go to the morning after sending their grandchildren, the busiest time of the ballroom is from eight to ten o'clock, the aunt wears dancing shoes, and the uncle wears a stand-up collar shirt, which has a foreign Shanghainese temperament. I talked to the owner of the Shanghai dance hall, an elderly uncle, who especially wanted more young people to rediscover the dance hall. Seeing that I was taking pictures, he also took the initiative to ask me, can you send us a little red book to promote it? Dance halls in the Northeast are lively at night, and people don't care about attracting the next generation, so it's good to entertain themselves. Now this wonderful cave dance hall is free of charge, anyone can sing a few words, everyone's clothes are not in the ocean, jeans, big cotton jackets, some seem to have finished the work in hand, and the aunt specially carried melon seeds, and sisters and sisters came to watch and eat, and after eating, they didn't stay much, sang a few songs and left.

One thing is the same in dance halls all over the world: people are dancing the same way, one is socializing, and the other is tango. The cave is more like karaoke without a private room, no dancing, and the uncles and aunts just sing the sad song of "long away", "let me sing a song of love you". Everyone sang a lot of songs, and if it wasn't for this time, I don't remember that there were so many sad songs in this world.

After returning from the cave, I went to check it out, and the song I heard at that time was called "Red Dust Love Song", and the first half of the sentence was "There are you and me in the romantic red dust". This may be what I really felt during the "Pingtui" journey: everyone says that it is an era of rapid population movement, but in the corners and corners outside the mainstream, there is still a karst cave KTV, which can make people slow down and sing sad songs that are no longer popular. Now I think that the person who sings karaoke affectionately in the cave is also "Fuqing".

 Cave disco

3

Leaving Guangxi and walking to Guizhou, I met Chen Tianming, who spent six years building a "castle" in the village.

At first, I happened to swipe a photo of a girl on social media, in which she was standing in front of her, the castle in the background, black and pressing, and it felt like it was almost ten stories high, standing so abruptly on a wasteland. Except for a few other photos, Chen Tianming's "castle" did not attract the attention of the Internet, and when I looked for it, the front door of their house was closed, and two big dogs were guarding the door. I didn't give up, and went around to the backyard again, where the owner of the castle happened to be.

 Chen Tianming and his "castle"

Chen Tianming told me that in the past, young people often came to see the house, and when they heard the barking of dogs, most of them did not dare to come closer, and took pictures with their mobile phones in the distance. Ignoring the big dog entering the door, I'm the first one lately. As he spoke to me, he led me into the house. The bottom two floors of Chen Tianming's castle are his ancestral home. At first, he just wanted to build a pigeon house on top of a small two-storey building, but when the pigeon house was completed, he felt as if the vacant space above could be "continued". In this way, he continued to build it layer by layer with wooden boards, the study, bedroom, and tea room, a total of 9 floors in 6 years, which was really out of nowhere. There is also a large speaker on the top floor, which can be heard on the first floor as soon as it is played. When I entered the house, I asked him curiously, "Is there still a radio in your village?" He said no, it was my own music.

In my opinion, the castle built by Chen Tianming looks like the "moving castle" in the movie, a bit grotesque, and a little punk. Chen Tianming didn't understand architecture, but just stretched his imagination to the sky. There are a lot of ropes and wood in each room on the "castle", and each upper floor is a little smaller, and only 3 square meters are left on the 8th floor, and the 9th floor is even just a simple canvas canopy, in this sense, Chen Tianming built a tower.

I followed him up the rudimentary wooden ladder. The study is on the sixth floor, which is very stable, the eighth and ninth floors are empty wooden pavilions, and there will be some shaking when the ninth floor goes up. I ended up sitting in his study. Chen Tianming's back and sides are two paintings, and the piles of books are all underneath, and he listened to the music on the two floors above his head, and read Feng Youlan's "A Brief History of Chinese Philosophy" and Stavrianos's "General History of the World" three times in his study. I started chatting with him, Chen Tianming is 42 years old, a college student from the village, who studied mathematics at a university in Nanjing around 2000, and later did a lot of work in the city, and did not get married, and in 2018 he returned to his hometown to do farming.

Chen Tianming told me that his parents and sister, who still live in the bottom two floors of the old house, supported him in building the "castle", and his father even helped him pick up the wood. While we were chatting, his mother happily handed me an apple for me to look at at casually. His sister got married, and his nephew climbed up and down the castle. I think my little nephew will be able to proudly say that I grew up in a castle.

Chen Tianming's castle is built in the middle of a wasteland, with a beautiful view of the airport 500 meters to the east and the mountains in the distance. After I posted this set of photos, I saw people commenting, "Isn't this just a pile of broken wood?" That's right, when I was photographing the castle from afar, my fellow villagers were curious and asked me what I was doing. I said I was taking pictures, and they wondered, isn't this just an unfinished building, what is there to photograph?

In real life, Chen Tianming is a frustrated man who has returned from the city, far away from the village center like his castle, and has lost money in the farming industry last year. At the legal level, Chen Tianming has been fighting with the village for the past three years, they feel that this self-built house is not safe, and they even fought a lawsuit last year, and Chen Tianming lost the lawsuit. But Chen Tianming did not accept it, and he wanted to continue to appeal.

In my opinion, Chen Tianming's story is like a fairy tale, and the castle is an outlet for his life. To be honest, although I grew up in the county and have been photographing the county and the countryside, is the countryside really beautiful? No, the idyllic is only superficial, the specific rural development is slow, the resources are backward, and there are also chicken feathers. I've experienced it, and I know where the truth is hidden, but I really hope that all the people I've met, and their stories, can stay on the bright side a little bit.

Even if you can't escape the end of being demolished in the end, Chen Tianming's castle has existed, and it is already different from never. Recently, there was a strong wind in Guizhou, and I also saw Chen Tianming share his victory in his circle of friends: only the top floor felt a slight shaking, and the castle was very strong in the wind.

Chen Tianming's "castle" in the wasteland

4

The reason why I met all the "Fuqing" was that last year, I closed the county photo studio that had been open for 3 years.

On January 7, 2024, I posted a circle of friends, emptied 20 G's work WeChat, and set off. I only brought three or five clothes, two usual cameras, a computer, and I didn't maintain the car, so I just hit the road. On the first day on the road, I drove directly on the highway for 10 hours, and there was a great ritual of escaping, but there was also a vague nothingness.

I don't look at the map, I don't take the highway. In the past few years, everyone has admired the "special forces" style of fast-moving life, and the purpose is too clear for me, but it has lost the occasional scenery and interest. I started from my hometown of Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, and drove west along county roads, provincial roads, and national highways, passing through Hunan and Hubei, where I had photographed before, and finally walked to Guangxi.

This was actually a plan I made at the end of 2019. I have been a documentary photographer for many years, and my lens has always focused on people like me, living in counties and rural areas, and I have always wanted to take pictures that truly represent China. At first, I wanted to find the most representative province, but when I thought about it, I was a bit generalized. Later, as soon as my heart was crossed, I simply "pushed flat" one by one and photographed them all, and I couldn't say "biased" anymore.

But then the pandemic made it impossible for everyone to go out. Originally, as a freelance photographer, the main source of my income was to take pictures in various places, and then submit photos and compete in competitions, and the monthly manuscript fee and bonus could add up to 2,000 yuan. But if you can't get out, freelance photography can hardly be carried out. In order to survive, I had to open a photo studio in our county. Many photographers will not choose to cross the line, they usually specialize in one direction, but in the county, wedding photos, portraits, ID photos, I do not refuse to come, I accept everything, a price list can be listed from 10 yuan to 10,000 yuan.

In fact, in the three or four years that I have opened a photo studio in the county, the money is much better than doing documentary photography. People mostly feast or get married on holidays, but I basically have no holidays, and I have had a maximum of 40 days of continuous rotation, and every night when I finish filming, I have to sit back in the car and rest for a while to recover. I am a person with no material desires, I am not married, and I usually have no place to spend money, so I saved nearly 200,000 yuan.

Filming weddings has helped me become more familiar with the fireworks in the world, and this experience of dealing with people has also helped me a lot in the process of "flat push" this year. But deep down, I knew that if I continued to make commercial films like this, my spirit might collapse. Looking back on the past three years, most of the happy time I feel has come from my busy experience, sweeping the streets and taking photos in between wedding shoots. But I don't want to continue to level the two bowls of commercial and documentary water now. When I was able to travel freely again, I wanted to go back to various places instead of sitting in a photo studio in the county and repeating similar scenes every day.

On the twenty-ninth day of the Lunar New Year this year, I came to Wushan, Chongqing. I've taken fireworks photos of many couples and friends in the past, but this time, I was able to slow down, enjoy a firework, and live a little more for myself.

"Shut down the photo studio and go all over China to take pictures" is quite idealistic, I don't know if I will be able to shoot anything in a few years and find a really good story. When I used to go out as an independent photographer, I would be very anxious if I didn't shoot anything for a few days. I'm also worried about the cost, the food and accommodation on the road are in the village, the accommodation is 80 yuan, the meal money is thirty or fifty a day, which is very cheap, but the fuel cost is the big one, and the average cost is 200 yuan a day.

But then I thought about it, the money I saved from filming weddings in the past few years was actually enough for me to do what I really wanted to do for a while. In addition, I was able to take on some shooting projects while walking, and continue to submit manuscripts on the other side, so I was able to almost break even in the later stage. Now on the road, I choose at least eight or nine destinations for myself every day, usually local or interesting places, some by looking at the map, some by looking at social media. In fact, according to my speed, I can't walk four or five times a day, and it often happens that I hit the air, because the countryside is not like the city, there are special scenic spots, and many things are time-sensitive, and it is very common for no one to open the door. In this way, I got on the bus on time at about 9 a.m. every day, and waited until after 8 p.m. to finish work, driving 100 kilometers every day.

Many friends have asked me, why do you find these shooting spots and people every time? I replied that I was lucky. Actually, luck is a big part of it, but I think another reason might be that I've been on the road long enough that not many people are willing to drop everything they have and do full-time documentary photography.

For example, this "flat push" went to Shanxi, there were temples everywhere, and the gods who disappeared in the city lived in various places at will. On the banks of the Yellow River, I took a picture of many statues of gods standing by the river. I asked the nearby villagers, and said that the temple had been relocated and could not continue to make offerings, so I invited all kinds of gods to the Yellow River and let nature make offerings. It's the first time I've seen anything like this. I posted this set of photos on the Internet, and some of the comments said that it was the twilight of the gods, and some people said that it was the gods gathering and chatting leisurely by the river.

The gods by the Yellow River

I'm 33 years old this year, I can't say it, I can't say it, I have taken a lot of wedding photos over the years, and the children of my friends in the county town have reached the age of making soy sauce. I closed the photo studio, and once again got out of the life that had gone "on track", and returned to a life of uncertainty and wandering on the edge. In fact, it is this wandering, even in the physical sense, that gives me the opportunity to see people who are on the edge like me.

After the photograph, I would feel that maybe I am essentially the same kind of person as Fuqing and Chen Tianming, we are all strangely "enjoying" the beauty brought by this edge, and we are all happy to live in our own world.

5

Most people who grew up in counties and villages have mixed feelings about their hometowns. On the one hand, people in counties and villages do not have so many possibilities for their imagination of specific life, and my hometown, Yangzhong City, Zhenjiang, Jiangsu, is a small county town with a population of more than 300,000. We are not like the north here, the parents' perception of success is to go into business, in that era the most popular black car, from our county to pick up people to the city, every morning and evening each trip, in the zero years can earn seven or eight thousand a month. Therefore, for my parents, driving a black car is a good job, and there is a way out of business.

Nor did I escape this path. As soon as I graduated in 2012, I went to work as a clerk in a relative's factory. I remember that at that time, the wages in the factory were paid for half a year. But since I was a child, I have been confused about the so-called "successful life", which is the same as the examination and preparation ashore, as if in our small county, people can only have a fixed way of living. Later, I got tired of the repetitive work in the factory, quit my job, and became interested in photography again, taking pictures everywhere with my camera. My family was very supportive, but their expectation was always "you're going to open a photo studio", which is also a business.

But on the other hand, I grew up in the countryside and loved to run barefoot in the village, and this habit was maintained until I was in elementary school. I have a deep affinity for stepping on the dirt, which is very different from stepping on the asphalt road, I can't really say what the difference is, but anyone can feel it if they try it.

Once, our county was one of the top 10 counties in the country, and many factories were set up along the river in the Jiangsu Plain, bringing a lot of money. But for ordinary people like us, building a factory means moving. People of my generation are getting farther and farther away from their hometowns. Growing up, studying, working, I experienced constant relocation in various periods. One of the times I was very impressed, it was to move to the guest house owned by my aunt's house, where there was a large yard, full of trucks from all over the country to pull goods, I like to chat with these drivers who run the rivers and lakes, these growth experiences constitute the most basic and solid values in my life.

Rural people also naturally have a very simple and sincere temperament. I had to go in and shoot when I encountered something white on the way this year, and I was never kicked out. In rural areas, according to the traditional funeral culture, after the death of the elderly, the family members have to shout in the village to tell the people in the village to send off the last journey. Therefore, for the family, the guests who come are the guests who will see the family on their last journey. I also swept the streets in the city, and from time to time people would come up and say "image rights violation", and then I simply stopped taking pictures in the big cities.

Two days ago, I was invited to participate in the film festival, and I went to Shanghai in the middle of "Pingtui". To be honest, from a village in Shanxi to Shanghai, this difference is no less than a trip to a foreign country, to a different world, I need to "reverse jet lag". Shanghai is a very fast-paced city, but its traffic is strangely slow, like the same distance, if you are in Shanxi, you can get there in an hour, but in Shanghai, it may take me half a day to toss around. In the subway, everyone is wearing headphones, swiping their mobile phones with sad faces, as if there are only one or two out of ten people with a smile, but after listening to a few conversations, I realized that they are tourists.

Of course, you say that if you don't live in the city, there is no stress? Of course, there are houses, income, but in the countryside, these are not as urgent and deadly as in the cities. A few years ago, when I was filming a documentary, I also photographed the alien scientific research station in Guizhou, a large plaque that reads "The world is equal/Alien Guanyin", which is the space exploration editorial department in reality. Many people say that the countryside is a magical paradise, in my opinion, one is that the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, and modern urban planning cannot manage these capillaries, and more importantly, they have another possibility of transcending the concrete outside of life.

After getting back on the road, I tried to pull myself out of the concrete, and I filtered out the real and fragmented parts of life in the county through the lens, like a layer of frosted glass, leaving a more timeless background about the land and people. Of course, Fuqing's yard records the bits and pieces of chickens and dogs discussing with neighbors about where to build the courtyard wall, and Chen Tianming's lawsuit is still going on, and every acre of land can still cause disputes. But I deliberately put this part on the mosaic, and I hope that what people can see more is the beauty and lightness that they transcend from these concrete lives.

The rhythm in the big city is unnatural, and the difference between the rural and the urban is that the speed of time flow in the two places is different, and the thousands of people who live on the land like Fuqing still have a lot of time and more possibilities to think about the nature of life.

6

After Fuqing's post was posted, it did get tens of millions of views, but my plan remains the same, in mid-May, I will continue to return to Shanxi, last time I walked west of Taiyuan, this time I will start from Yuncheng, and finish the rest of the place. Next, I will go to Shaanxi, Henan, and Gansu to expand and complete the territory little by little.

In fact, before the photos of the walls of Fuqing Courtyard became a hot topic, I was a little worried that no one cared about these things anymore. Like the characters I've photographed, they live on the fringes of modern social geography, and they are often referred to as "little people", and even the neighbors in the village don't know what he's documenting. There is also the post of the old man Fuqing, I remember that I sent 18 pictures, plus dense text, and it may take ten minutes to read them all. In the city, ten minutes can do a lot of things, eat breakfast at the workstation, take a subway stop, deal with a work handover, and an old man who is not famous at all, I can hardly imagine that so many people are willing to stop for ten minutes for him.

A lot of young people come to me and ask me, can I become a documentary photographer? Actually, my answer has always been "no recommendation". From the end of 2013, when I quit my job and started to take the road of photography, it was not until the beginning of 2016 that I got my first manuscript fee, 800 yuan, through photography. I often say that three years of documentary photography is a hurdle, many people can't last three years, and I've seen many talented photographers gradually lose their work and become depressed, and even fewer can do it full-time for three years. For a while, I was also the editor of a part-time photo forum, and there was a young man who took very good pictures, and I always accepted his photos, but then there was no news of him during the epidemic, and I also asked him on WeChat, are you still taking photos recently? He said that he couldn't shoot anymore, and now he is working as a trailer driver who runs large shipments.

But the post became "popular" on the Internet, along with the stories of more than 50 counties and two or three hundred villages I visited this year, all of which were "seen" to varying degrees, and even my own story was seen. It's not an easy task to do what seems to be "not doing business" in the county, and in the past, the neighborhood only cared about what this person was known for, but now there are finally people who see what we care about through the lens and are even willing to listen to my life story.

This feeling of seeing and being seen has greatly dispelled my confusion about the meaninglessness of life. All the way down, the cellar keeper, Chen Tianming, and Fuqing, everyone is doing their own big or small things, maybe they have also had doubts, but they are still living day after day, and then looking for new ideas in repetition.

A cultivator in the depths of Taihang, Shanxi

I remembered the first time I encountered the world of Fuqing: his yard was not big, and there was a small field in the middle of the courtyard outside, where two apricot trees were planted, and the trees were bare and did not bloom.

It was about April 7 that I returned to the courtyard of Fuqing for the second time. The last time I just photographed the text, I still have too many questions about Fuqing to ask his family. When I entered the courtyard again, the arrangement of the white things was removed, and I really saw the whole picture of the courtyard for the first time, the words were written all over the courtyard wall, and without the presence of the band, the courtyard was spacious, and in the middle was the apricot tree that Fuqing was worried about.

Fuqing was buried on April 1, and it took two days for the post on Xiaohongshu to go viral. A week later, when I went there for the second time, the apricot blossoms had already bloomed all over the yard, and it was very lush, and there were butterflies flying on the side.

Fuqing's courtyard full of apricot blossoms

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