Mark Leong, Cabbage-seller's lunch, Beijing, 1994 Once upon a time, my ancestors left the Guangdong Pearl River Delta for America. More than one hundred years later, and a decade since I first returned to this country, my China is more of a learned territory than a natural homeland. Slowly I try to gather clues from the morning cry of the rice seller, the tangle of arms at a ticket window, the fumes of a coal-burning stove, the overnight journey on a bus crowded with frogs and songbirds. The herbal doctor feels my pulse and examines my tongue; At the market I bargain with the knife sharpener and test my light bulbs before purchasing. Meanwhile, all around this dream-simple sense of passing days, buildings, neighborhoods, and entire industries are falling and rising with sudden swiftness. I sit here, leisurely poeticizing in my Beijing courtyard house, and then go out for lunch to find only rubble where my favorite noodle shop had been yesterday. In the alleyway, the neighbors are pouring over developer's plans posted on the lampposts. Even my own charming but shabby courtyard (where a merchant's mistress lived during the Qing Dynasty and the men's get date table tennis champion played with the local kids after Liberation) is scheduled to be leveled, along with the rest of the block, to make room for a future office/shopping megaplex. I bicycle east on the Avenue of Eternal Peace. To the left, migrant workers expand the highway twenty-four hours a day, but never quite enough for the ever-expanding stream of cars. On the right, roadside vendors sell TV schedules, shoelaces, internet access, ear cleaning spoons, mobile phone holsters, and puppies. Hungry and noodle-less, I get my lunch at a global junk food chain. Photography gives me the patience to peer through the relentless flurry of progress into pockets of quiet, to gain understanding-or at least contact-that I might not otherwise find. If not for the desire to take pictures, perhaps I would never have come back to China in the first place. But I still linger and wander, a blinking shutter negotiating the tension between motion and stillness. -Mark Leong, June 1999 MARK LEONG was born in Sunnyvale, California in 1966. He first visited China in 1989 on a graduate fellowship from Harvard University. Since then, he has worked on a long-term project entitled "China Obscura," which documents everyday life during a time of momentous change. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. He is a represented by the New York photo agency Matrix.