Toishan, China: Another Home 8,000 Miles Away by Alan Chin (Archive)

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• published: 21 Sep 2013
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Alan is raising funds to return to Toishan, China, to document his family's story and the larger narrative of Chinese immigration. In order to receive contributions, the project must be funded by 10/28/13 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alanschin/toishan-china-another-home-8000-miles-away From Alan: I need your support to return to Toishan, China, and complete my photographic and historical documentary project tying together my family history and the larger story of the Chinese-American diaspora and emigration abroad. Over the next several years, I will spend six to twelve months in China, photographing and interviewing Toishanese families, many with similar stories to my own. This Kickstarter funding will pay for travel, lodging, and then editing and printing of the images. The final product will be a book and related slideshow/exhibition that I will present both to Chinese-American audiences -- so that we know our own history more -- and in larger contexts so that our story can become more widely shared. Although I was born in the United States, Toishan is my ancestral home. I speak a local dialect of Cantonese that is incomprehensible to the rest of China. Toishan is a county of a million people in Guangdong Province in southern China. I have been photographing there on and off since 1989. It looks at first glance like many other areas: a few gleaming buildings and factories, multi-lane divided highways, McDonald's, new cars and well-dressed pedestrians. It seems to exemplify wealth and economic growth. Behind this facade is Toishan's peculiar history. Until the 1960s, two-thirds of all overseas Chinese, like my family, originated from this one small region. It was poor and over-populated during the 19th century and very close to Guangzhou, where the foreign powers first penetrated China. Thus it was a fertile recruiting ground for the "coolies" who built the American transcontinental railroad, and for the generations who emigrated to become restaurant workers and laundrymen. My paternal great uncle, Sing Chin, left our village of Gongmei in 1927, traveling first to Cuba and then the United States. My father, Fow Sang Chin, followed in 1951. He would not see my mother for 19 years. They worked in family-run laundries in the Bronx and Queens, and I grew up in that now-vanished world of the old sojourners' Chinatown. Those were tumultuous years in China, with the Second World War and civil war between Communists and Nationalists. Contact with the motherland was almost completely severed during the Cold War and the chaos of Mao's Cultural Revolution. The lives of the Chinese in the diaspora diverged radically from those of our relatives back home. Politically and culturally, mainland China disintegrated and rebuilt itself in paroxysms of murderous totalitarianism and then unabashed capitalist reform. Many ordinary social services like schools and hospitals survive only on donations from overseas. State funding has withered. The health system once provided basic, if primitive, care to all. It is now accessible only to those who can pay. Villages have lost their populations as residents seek better opportunities elsewhere. My last remaining close relative in Toishan was a great aunt who died several years ago, not long after I saw her. My father's house and the house in which my mother was born now sit empty, their former inhabitants scattered across the United States, Malaysia and Canada. But when I walk through the rice fields and the paved roads that now lead to Gongmei, villagers recognize me and accept me as a native son — albeit one who is overheard speaking in English on a mobile phone and seems to spend an inordinate amount of time taking photographs. After all, I keep returning. And my name and family's names are on the donors' plaque of the recently built community center. The more time I spend there, the more it begins to feel like some kind of home, illusory as that might seem. Despite the persistent poverty and the vast chasm between Gongmei and my life in New York, I can foresee a time when Toishan might become like Tuscany, a picturesque region rich in history and architectural heritage, a vacation getaway. For now, though, it is still part of the forgotten rural China, engulfed in a crisis that is quiet but sustained. Alan Chin was born and raised in New York City's Chinatown. Since 1996, he has worked in China, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central Asia, Egypt and Tunisia. Domestically, Alan followed the historic trail of the civil rights movement, documented the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and covered the 2008 presidential campaign. He is a contributing photographer to The New York Times, Next City, and BagNewsNotes, an editor and photographer at Newsmotion, and member of Facing Change: Documenting America (FCDA). http://facingchange.org/ http://alanschin.com/