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30th March, 2001.

Children In Longzhou Whom The Writer Met During Private Visits To Chinese Families.


My first visit to Longzhou, which is near the Vietnamese border, was in 1990 travelling for five and a half hours by service bus from Nanning. The seats on the bus were certainly not built to accommodate the western physique, and any spare space was piled with luggage of one sort or another.

Chinese girl enjoys ice lolly.At the time, Longzhou was not an "open town" so immediately on arrival, Zhong had to take my passport to the local police station and I was given leave to stay for three days, but I was not to visit any other families. Apparently I was the first westerner to visit the town for more than ten years, so it is understandable that my presence attracted some interest, particularly from the children, who would gather at the open door of the family home, to take a closer look at the strange foreigner. I got to know quite a few of them by sight, if not by name. The young girl with the ice lolly was a frequent visitor, and I used to practise my few words of Cantonese with her, which almost always made her laugh, as I doubt whether my pronunciation was correct.

Street boy startled by camera flash. For the children who were not attending school; education was not free, the streets of the town was their playground. They behaved in the same way as children in the western world; playing out their games of fantasy, having gang fights, gathering to laugh and giggle with each other, and generally make a lot of noise. One young boy saw me with a camera in my hands and made it quite clear to me that he wanted his photograph taken. I think that when the flash fired directly at him, he had the biggest surprise of his life ! He rushed off to tell his friends what had happened, then a few minutes later his gang were at the door, all wanting their photos taken.

Young girl poses for photograph.Whenever I am travelling in China I have never been able to get into the habit of writing notes or keeping a log of my travels and tend to use the camera as my easy note book. On the last evening of my visit after our dinner I was taking quite a number of photographs of Zhong's family, neighbours and friends, when a young cousin asked Zhong if I would take a photograph of her. When I said I would, she rushed back to her home to put on a party dress. When she returned, she stood with her back to the open door with a very serious expression on her face, for such a special event in her young life. It might even have been her first photograph.

One of the happiest memories of my second visit to the town in 1993, was finding that the children I had met on my first visit, still remembered me. There had been many improvements in the town during the years, Zhong holds up his niece. with new houses being built, and I stayed at Zhong's sister's house which, like many other houses in the town, had a first floor balcony. One evening, Zhong brought his young niece on a visit and the photograph of her, being held by Zhong, was taken from the balcony. She was only a few months old on my first visit, but in 1993 she enjoyed listening to my English nursery rhymes, and called me "grandpa" !

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