Backlog -- The Picture of Kaifeng I Never Took

Originally written: Spring 2010

If I were to take a picture to capture all of Kaifeng, the city where I stayed and studied for the majority of my four months in China, I know exactly where it would be. It would be on a street, affectionately labeled “Breakfast Street” by myself and a few fellow exchange students, not far from the South Gate of campus. On this street there is a breakfast stall (one of many) which serves the most delicious dumplings and wheels of flatbread (baked with bits of green onion) for a measly fee of two kuai—approximately 30 American cents. This will get you five dumplings and half a wheel of bread, which will be put in a little gridded plastic basket, and you will take it back to one of the tables set out on the wide sidewalk right by the street. For these tables, some description is necessary. They are rather long tables, each of which could probably sit six to eight people comfortably, and they are lined up three tables in a row, head to head oriented toward the street (it’s a very wide sidewalk). These tables are also, at most, two feet high. If you were to run into one, you would bruise your shins and possibly trip over it or onto it. A toddler might sit quite comfortably at these tables, which in fact they do in large numbers (this stall seems to be one of the more popular for whole families to come and eat breakfast). To facilitate sitting at these tables for all ages there are little three-legged stools with dull red seats that manage to be just a bit shorter than the tables. Sitting at these stools, your knees are bent somewhere up around your chest, above the level of the table, so you’ll have to reconcile that yourself somehow (women often keep both knees together to one side of the table, in a sort of side-saddle position; men generally take a straddling posture). Seated thus, you will pick up two chopsticks at random out of a large tin can whose label identifies it as Baby’s Powdered Milk (they are all labeled this—I don’t know why) and proceed to eat your breakfast crouched out on the sidewalk at a toddler’s table filled with strangers. And it will be one of the most delicious breakfasts you’ve ever experienced.

None of this will appear in the picture. This is all in the background, the setting from which the picture will be taken. It’s a setting I placed myself in most mornings of the week during my stay. For the picture itself, I will be sitting on one of those small, three-legged stools where I eat breakfast, aiming out across the street towards the nearby intersection. Perspective is important to me. The same shot standing wouldn’t work, for reasons I have never fully articulated even to myself. Maybe it’s just a very literal reading of taking the picture “at ground level.” I’ll also need a person standing fairly close by to give a sense of scale. But the conditions also have to be just right. I want it to have rained the night before but be sunny in the morning, so that I can capture the standing water that gathers across swaths of the road and even comes up to fill some of the empty tiles on the sidewalk, while also getting all the vendors that stand out on that same road anyway selling their wares to similarly intrepid customers and pedestrians. The bicycle and motorbike crowd don’t have to worry much about it, they drive right through without raising much of a splash, often with children or other groceries perched precariously on the bike with them. Extra points if I catch one of them in crossing. There will probably be a vendor directly in my line of sight, but that’s fine; the background of the picture has limited interest for me, it’s the foreground details that should stick out. The multi-colored tiles of the sidewalk, very pretty on sunny days but somewhat treacherous right after a rain, when stepping on the wrong one could send a spray of muddy water up your shorts (an experience I still recall vividly from my first day in Kaifeng). The vendors, with their shops or stalls or trailers depending, selling bao zi, fried breads, peanuts and bananas. The customers, impossible to describe them all, often paused on their bikes in front of stalls or standing and talking to the shopkeeper.

There are other variables that should be left open and fluid—the amount of activity on the street; whether or not one of the breakfast stand workers is crossing my field of vision; the little children that swarm this stall and skittish stray animals drawn to the promise of food. In the city of Kaifeng, and in China in general (and perhaps on a scale even larger than that) one should not plan too much. I never took this picture, and I’m not sure why. It may seem that the conditions I was looking for were too specific, too ideal, but they really weren’t—I saw the scene described above many mornings. Maybe I was afraid an actual picture somehow would miss something that I wanted, and the memory would be tarnished by an incomplete representation. Or perhaps I just never really felt like taking a camera to breakfast. Regardless, it is this missing picture that inspired me to put together this “album”, and thus it is the first of the collection.