Xindu, July 30, 1999

Friday

Slide show; The Tech incident

On Friday (I am writing from retrospect) I had another slideshow. Just as two weeks ago with the first group, this time I also started by showing pictures of MIT then a few pictures of my house in Cambridge, then Chinese New Year in Boston Chinatown. After that a few pictures from Boston and finally some slides from a camping trip where we did some rock climbing, hiking, etc. Pictures of MIT rarely caused much sensation but people seemed to be genuinely interested when I showed them my house and then James (who is from Uganda) and Nikhil (who is from India). I had already noticed that people are most interested in things that they can relate to. They are only somewhat excited by pictures of Niagara Falls, big mountains, pretty cities or other objectively impressive and unusual things. They, well: we, are much more interested in things for which parallels exist in our own lives. We want to see how other people live, how they interact, what they eat, what their parents look like and so on. We also like to look at ourselves, but that’s a different story.

This is a pretty bad copy of the picture mentioned in the text (from The Tech's photo archive). It was taken in February, earlier this year. On the slide you can really see the smoke in the background

Pictures of James and Nikhil infallibly caused some sensation because of their unusual -- for China -- looks. But my favorite moment comes when I show my first slides from the Chinese New Year celebrations in Boston’s Chinatown. My first slide shows a man rushing towards the camera, his daughter (presumably) on his shoulders. Both of them are covering their ears. Behind them there is a crowd of people and from behind the crowd rises a column of thick smoke. To me it looks very much like a picture from May 1^st demonstrations in Poland from almost 20 years ago. I stop at this slide and try to make them guess what it is that they are looking at. When I tell them, the room gets loud and for a minute or so they all keep commenting the picture, quite amused, as far as I can tell. I guess it comes to them as a slight surprise: here a foreign teacher shows them pictures of foreign sights and then boom! – a more familiar thing comes.

After going through the Chinatown pictures I explained to them that I took the pictures for The Tech – MIT’s student newspaper where I work as a photographer. This time I decided to show them the few issues of The Tech that I brought with me and this was when I got really surprised. I must have made some gesture that got misinterpreted or, perhaps, things are done differently here because as soon as I handed out the four issues of the Tech for people to look at, I noticed that people were taking one sheet of the newspaper each and then passing the rest back to the others. In the end, my four issues of The Tech, that I had hoped to show to the next group as well, never came back to me. I really wonder what they are going to do with those pieces of our newspaper.