Here is Part 2 of MFAD faculty member Stephen Doyle’s dispatch from Shanghai:

One day we traveled to the fringes of Shanghai, and even though we drove on highways, it took an hour and a half to get there. Imagine NYC stretching to Poughkeepsie… that’s the scale of Shanghai. When we finally pulled onto the street (alleyway) where our subjects live, we realized that the little front yards of each little house were covered with something. Grain! Inches deep. Yards, steps, porches, driveways were all under a two inch layer of rice. People walked on it, cars parked on it, kids played in it, like an edible snowfall, or a grain storm had blown through town. Three days drying in the sun here, raked and stirred with a six foot bamboo spatelas for optimum drying, it’s then bagged and set in the livingroom, and, in turn, another batch gets its turn in the sun.

Our subject family with little four-year old Yun Han Yang lived in an immaculate but very empty little house. We shot little Yun Han doing a puzzle with her mom, bouncing on the front porch on a bright red bouncy beast, and got some beautiful portraits of mom, dad, and baby perched on the bags of rice in the living room, next to the bicycle, glowing with backlight, and then in the spare kitchen which had a magnificent three-wok stove painted with Chinese motifs. I was concerned for the white bunny we discovered looking wide-eyed in a barrel in the kitchen. We have no word on his fate. (Same room as the wok, if you know what I mean.) A beautiful family. Our hosts were very welcoming, and poured us hot tea in plastic cups, which created an interesting dynamic of the need to drink very hot tea very quickly before the cups melted in our hands. A challenge! After shooting this clan, they gave us oranges from the tree out back in a beautiful gesture of Chinese hospitality, a warm welcome to a foreign land. . .

[Read Part 3 tomorrow]

(The highways are lined with housing that just soars into the sky. The population of Shanghai is currently about 20 million, and some say expected to rise to 50 million by 2050. This unit is located outside of Suzhou, a satellite city of Shanghai. Photos by Stephen Doyle.)