Without translation
During my trip to northwestern China, I wrote that the Ganjia grasslands looked like “clay molded by a child’s capricious fingers, or yards and yards of hastily-unspooled velvet.” Such overindulgent description didn’t make good prose, I knew, but I wanted to preserve Gansu in its entirety — the yaks and prayer flags, the brilliant green expanses eliding into sky, the sky’s unblemished hue. A similar excess beset my photography. Why rely on the vagaries of memory when there was always a camera at hand? That summer, as I traveled from city to city with my global seminar, the number of photos on my phone ballooned into the thousands. So too did the pages of my journal fill. I wrote about my first time navigating Beijing’s subway system, the sensation of being squeezed against double doors and coughing kids, jockeying wordlessly for space. I wrote about Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou. Even in my dreams, I can see every detail with a startling clarity.