Karin Langer | Chairman Mao at the Gates of the Forbidden City, Beijing | Digital photography | 2004

Although she always threatened it, I never thought my mother would ACTUALLY send me to China for not finishing my lima beans as a child.  Last summer she had the opportunity to ship me off when my classmates and I from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago historic preservation department were invited to study and preserve Chinese architecture.  We first arrived in Beijing before setting to work in Weishan, a peaceful village of 30,000 along the Silk Road in the Yunnan Province.  There we investigated a Ming Dynasty temple complex surrounded by a Ting Dynasty palace.  We produced and presented a preservation plan that would revive the little-used religious site, while converting the surrounding buildings into a regional information center, gallery, and performing arts venue.  Our three-week tour ended in Shanghai, an unbelievable city full of activity.  I will never clean my plate again with the hopes of being sent back.
During our travels, I quickly became aware of China’s contrasts and contradictions: it is ancient and ageless, secure and restless, solid yet oddly fractured by isolation.  There are, I believe, three separate and distinct Chinas –the ancient, the Communist, and the contemporary– each jostling the next for position on its busy roads.  Ancient China, though rapidly deteriorating in the city centers, informs all of its tradition while the Communist ironically frees the population from tradition’s boundaries.  Chairman Mao’s famous portrait installed onto the gate of the Forbidden City embodies both revolution against and nostalgia for leadership and guidance.  Contemporary China is limitless and unmitigated, as evidenced by the building boom around the ring roads of Beijing and the Pudong of Shanghai. 
Though I was charged with studying its architecture, most of my favorite experiences were with the Chinese people.  Elderly rural gentlemen still wear their slate blue Mao suits in the fields (I commissioned my own pinstripe version from a tailor), while designer names and Britney Spears emblazon teenage t-shirts.  This restless disparity is less evident in children, however, who have not yet experienced the growing pains of their country.  As Liu Liu tromped through Tiananmen Square, his parents pointed and called me “auntie,” instantly expanding his global family.  At a school yard in Weishan, children were celebrating a holiday which allowed them to wear costumes to school.  Our presence was like fuel on their fire, and we were accosted by waist-high hugs and shouts of “hi hello American!”