R E A G A N  L O U I E    I N  S E A R C H  O F  A  T R U E  L I F E

Until 1980, when I first traveled to China, I had never thought of visiting my ancestral homeland. In fact, I had never thought of China as my homeland, though my father was born there. For me, California-born, being Chinese was not a matter of place. Being Chinese inhered in behavior, in myth. The following year, in 1981, I returned with my father to his birthplace, Wing Wor. My visit exposed an aspect of my life I had felt but never seen. Time collapsed as my past was continuously reformed by the present. Wherever I turned, I saw the familiar in the unfamiliar. I recall photographing a village garden and suddenly seeing vegetables my father had grown in our backyard, which in Sacramento had looked exotic, out of place. Later, photographing these country Chinese performing ceremonies for various spirits and deities, I remember how the same acts by my family at home had struck me as comic or nonsensical. In China, however, such rituals seemed absolutely natural. By 1987, the year of my fifth visit, the consequences of China's uneasy alliance with the West had become apparent. High-rise apartment buildings introduced modern conveniences but disrupted age-old social patterns. And freer economic policies, while enriching some, squeezed those on fixed incomes with higher costs. For the first time, despite their increased freedom and material gains, I heard people in China openly question if the quality of their lives had improved. The future was beginning to appear no less frightening than the past. I emerged from China with both the art and the sense of connection that I so hungered for. A psychologist might say that my search had been caused by "cultural marginalization." Maybe. Yet, if my education furthered some inner division, it also gave me the means to give voice to it. In emphasizing the autobiographical dynamic of my photographs, however, I do not mean to deny other readings of them-documentary, political, formal. In my journeys to China, I was continuing a voyage begun by my father when he first left his village in 1931. My own passage has been somewhere between East and West, need and knowledge, then and now. -Reagan Louie REAGAN LOUIE returned to China, the land of his ancestors, during the 1980s and traveled and photographed extensively through every province and region. His work, published in the 1991 Aperture book Toward a Truer Life, is at once a study of a nation in the midst of sweeping historical change and a personal chronicle of a young Chinese-Americanís growing awareness of his heritage. Louie is currently Associate Professor of Photography at the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of major museums.

Reagan Louie, Beijing, 1987