Throughout his career as a photographer that has lasted almost three decades, Chou's subject matter has shifted from captivating journalistic events to creatively theatrical scenes, and his style has changed from documentary photography to fabricated photography. In his latest project, Animal Farm, Chou changed the role of photographer as a “hunter” and turned himself into a “director,” and amazed his audience with a bizarre and unsettling sense of existence in his characteristic way.
Chou Ching-hui not only how you work hard to survive just like people outside in society at large, and that he truly entered a different kind of life by capturing your “steadily shrinking bodies.”
Novelist Chang Ta-chun
Letter #1, to Gesaer:
Dear Gesaer
The image of you and your colleagues, who print Buddhist sutras, holding cups and drinking tea, is etched in my mind’s eye at this time. The photographer who shot this photograph is Chou Ching-hui. I’m sure you remember what he looks like, a young man with a conspicuous goatee. On several visits back and forth, he photographed you at your sutra printing monastery up in the Tibetan highlands. As a Taiwanese person working hard and living a modern life thousands of kilometers away on a tropical island, the photographer is one who “sits around getting fat.” If you and your colleagues are willing to think carefully back, perhaps you will recall that when this guy with the cameras hanging all over his body walked into your abbey, judging by his profession and his manner, you wondered if this guy has nothing better to do. “Why doesn’t he help out printing sutras? ”
The Chou Ching-hui I know is a member of a profession commonly known as “shooters,” or more politely known as “photographers” – people who are either sitting around among various props at a salon waiting for customers to come in, or moving about among others’ lives, capturing images he feels are worthwhile and often giving people the impression that he’s “got nothing better to do.” However, please believe me, Gesaer, that if he could etch printing plates, he would have put down his camera, folded up his tripod, tucked away his light meter and done just that during his two visits with you. That’s what Chou Ching-hui is like – a photographer that can easily get sucked up into the lives of his subjects, and who sometimes feels that just depressing the shutter a few times is not nearly enough.
Even running around for several dozen days in an alien environment living an alien lifestyle, living the difficult life that his photography subjects are accustomed to, taking thousands of documentary photographs – at least a certain percentage of them sure to really stir viewers after enlarging them – Chou Ching-hui often still feels it’s not enough. Unsatisfied? How come?
Gesaer, each time I pass by that picture of the seven of you lifting your tea cups together I want to say to you: as Chou Ching-hui snapped that photograph of you he probably wanted to raise a cup of warm tea in his own hands and experience for a moment the ease and relaxation that comes after a day of hard work. Nevertheless, he might have been thinking something else entirely: ‘What else might happen? ”
What else might happen? Often entering other people’s worlds at 1/15 of a second or 1/500 of a second, when Chou Ching-hui presses his brow against his camera and hears the shutter click, he has already said goodbye forever to the reality captured in the previous negative of film. So Gesaer, might you find that, a young man like Chou Ching-hui is not intentionally trying to add years to his visage with that goatee on his chin, and that you said goodbye to him thousands of times during his two visits to your abbot. In other words, one farewell to a slice of reality is bid with each photograph. This must make bystanders feel a bit left out. As for farewells, I still have something to say to old Mr. Yang the herder.
Letter #2: To Old Mr. Yang
Dear Old Yang,
Chou Ching-hui caught the way you look whispering to a mule so perfectly. Then when your transport procession set off, from afar it was a picture of “man and horse slight against the sky / smoky mist thick and billowy.” But you stayed in the compound unloading the goods – you’ll never be a herder again. You’d better just see them off since you’re lame from your fall.
You always used to trail behind the procession, driving the train of mules or horses loaded with carrots, potatoes, salt, vegetables, herbal medicine and leather, rice and brown sugar. In a flash, over a decade has passed. The leading mule back then wore a red tassel with round mirrors, and two bells around its neck. Next was the small stallion with 12 brass bells. Old Yang, you and that little whinnying mare mule always took up the rear; at night she’d let out a whinny every three hours like clockwork. Hearing her assured you and made your sleep more restful.
Passing by a valley or a dam on a plane, you would always start singing a song that would make the young girls by the roadside bashful, like: “Pomegranate’s ripe, so full so full / little girl don’t marry a horse herder / attack your food like you’re starving / return home only twice a year.” Listening to these songs, the little lassies cast their gazes downward. When you pass by them you leave a thin residue of conceit and a bit of self-deprecation in your song. You sing out, but swallow at the same time a world of hardship. Remember, Old Yang? Some of the songs you sing for yourself, like “Herd the horses towards the barbarian lands / where the road is perilous and afflictions many / the grass is a silky green carpet / the cobbles pillows of flowers.” Out in the vast and barren lands, these songs echo back on you, and you sing until you sleep through the dawn. Don’t you remember, Old Yang?
Perhaps you might think it best not to work any longer at such an arduous living. After your crippling fall, not only you but the entire procession and all its members will be forced to cease forever and ever. When Chou Ching-hui came to capture you on film, you happened to be transporting explosives to dynamite a mountain. Your mates in the transport team surely felt bittersweet about the mission, as the dynamite was used to blow hills and open up roads, and once the hills and forests are opened up, the territory around Sichuan, Guizhou, Kunming, and Guilin will never be the untamed terrain it was for so many millennia. When that eight-lane highway, 100 meters wide and a thousand miles long in two directions opens up it will make your industry extinct. Chou Ching-hui told me how, observing you carrying those sacks of explosives with English abbreviations written on them, he choked up for an instant at the thought that your final mission was to destroy and bury your profession – one you toiled at your whole life long and which was passed down generation after generation for thousands of years.
Speaking of farewells, whenever Chou Ching-hui, that young photographer with the goatee appears, he seems to bring bad luck, doesn’t he? That’s because when he shows up it means that something important is about to disappear. Or maybe we can look at it this way: photojournalist Chou Ching-hui reveals our stubborn faith in the farewells along the way of modern civilization’s progress, for we believe that lives we’ll never return to or that will never come back can be revisited through the ritual of gazing at a still image.
Old Yang, the way you whisper to your mule has always been a riddle – one that from the looks of things will never be unraveled. I’ll never know what you commanded that beast to do, nor will Chou Ching-hui know that your beast imparted on you. At any rate, that photograph has hung on my wall for over two years now, and whenever I take an extra long look at the two of you I am reminded of how common and warm a farewell can be. In the course of our lives, we bid farewell forever to things all the time.
As for gazing at still images, I have a few words to say to Guan Er.
Letter #3, to Guan Er
Dear Guan Er:
When I first learned of you, and how you keep a sickle hanging from your waist and bound up to a train, chasing the ripening barley thousands of miles from east to west, going wherever there are husks to harvest. And when the barley in your home town on the Guanzhong Plane is read, you just make it there for the harvest. Like a migrating bird, your itinerant lifestyle, determined by the best harvests, both shocks and confuses those of us living our modern lives in this concrete jungle on this island nation. Why don’t you use machines and save manpower? I’m sure if someone asked you that question, your eyes would bulge and you’d retort, “What are we supposed to do for a living if we don’t harvest barley?” Chou Ching-hui, who followed you the whole way photographing you probably seems like he is wasting manpower to you, for the several dozen kilos of camera equipment he lugs around has a lot less to do with labor, work and real life than a sharp, light sickle.
Real life is quite simple: feed the barley you just cut to the harvesters, no matter how much they can stomach. I have heard you can polish off a bowl of noodles as big as a washbasin, stuffing your gut so it bulges like a calf’s head. Then you take a rolling pin from your farmer host and roll it vigorously over your ballooned abdomen. Chou Ching-hui once did some furtive observation of a “fecal specimen” left by one of your crew. Holding his hands out as wide as a washbasin, he said in a mixture of respect and awe, “There was that much! Can you believe it?”
I believe that his work is not just about taking pictures. When he enters a new environment and confronts an alien lifestyle, squinting with one eye as he focuses and composes his shot, he must wonder if this is real life. Almost 30 years ago, I chased up and down the island of Taiwan with my camera in search of aging visages, moribund professions, decaying buildings or desolate lives, I often found myself with one eye closed, the other wondering in that moment: should I be so sober in this, so that I might even somewhat pretentiously be unable to hide my amazement and reverence at those vistas steeped in hardship and tinted in nostalgia.
Thinking back, the most significant aspect of my three or four years as a kind of photojournalist is not how many pictures I objectively snapped, but how much emotional self-reflection and enlightenment I experienced inside myself during that time. It could even be said that when an intruder with a camera repeatedly captures the unvarnished appearance of others’ lives with the lends, thereby stroking the self-congratulatory egos of onlookers, and allowing cheap aesthetic pretexts or social missions to obscure the essential primordial fact: photographers cannot enter the true lives of their subjects. This realization can drive one to freeze and never depress the shutter. This is in fact why I could no longer keep shooting, sensing my own pretension. Yet precisely because the gazing of the eye at a still image is an exceptionally momentous ritual, I am unable to withstand the burden of standing behind the camera’s viewfinder.
Yet Chou Ching-hui can. Taking the example of the harvesters eating a wash basin of noodles for instance, if it had been me back then, with my bulky mechanical shutter Nikomat camera, if I’d seen someone eat such a massive pile of noodles I would sense that person’s hunger in that moment. This would lead me to speculating on their long-term deprivation, and even allowing myself to feel guilty over my blessing with three square meals per day. Ultimately, this would lead me to feeling disappointment and frustration at the inability of photography to achieve true intimacy and empathy. But Chou Ching-hui is different, for he is immune to the self-projection of social involvement; directly, purely, tangibly, and resolutely, like a guileless child, he strides into the inner details of his subjects’ lives, finding convincing answers in the significance of someone’s consumption of a hyper-large helping of noodles: “Can you believe how much shit that guy made?”
Guan Er, your life made up of drifting from west to east and back again on a nearly fixed route. In this life, how many things can we take along with us? Perhaps not much, or none at all. Of this much you are profoundly aware, for I recall you saying: “In this line of work you have to be able to put anything down.”
Pondering over the meaning of this phrase, being able to put anything down, it sounds like one is prepared to pack up and enter into a different kind of life at any time. Speaking of entering other kinds of lives, I have some things to say to Uncle Ye Number One.
Letter #4, to Uncle Yeh Number One
Dear Uncle Yeh Number One,
You are a reserved man, one who won’t just spill his guts to someone he doesn’t know well, and who would rather save his talk for the great collection of cats and dogs you have. You died once, a story I’ve heard Chou Ching-hui tell more than once. That tale is a summary of sorts, but I’d rather take a romantic perspective and think: you lepers, who will have all died out in another few years, have really in a sense experienced rebirth, so you’re no afraid of death. This enables you to maintain an insulated aloofness from the various plights, pursuits, and yearnings of normal life, because that’s how the world has treated you all along. Nevertheless, such isolation does not keep you quarantined completely in your sad paradise away from all contact with the old world. What kind of contact is that?
The day Chou Ching-hui related the story of your death and subsequent “resurrection” to me, he also told me how Happy Life residents crowd together to share tricks for betting on the lottery, how they raise fashionable dog breeds to make a handsome profit, how they play card games clutching wash basins in their amputated limb stubs, swearing loudly, and how they collectively provide for a prostitute who provides them bodily and emotional warmth in turn.
From the looks of things, they are able to mimic almost down to the smallest detail the normal life of so-called normal society; that is, except for their incurable disease, their decaying features, and the limbs that diminish with age and multiple amputations. And thanks to the unusual character of lepers, you are able to cede bit after bit, relinquish piece after piece, and endure the torturous peeling away of the body in order to realize the most primal desire to live. Recalling how my own father, paralyzed in bed, frequently begged me to open the window by his bed to let him put an end to his torment with one final fall, I asked Chou Ching-hui, “Do they really live at such peace with themselves? Do they really want to keep living? The response I got was, “What reason is there for them not to keep living? For them, removing a piece of flesh today and another the next day just means there is less of their body. That’s all.”
Chou Ching-hui entered your lives, living and dining with you, coming and going with you, while I have only glimpsed a bit through the cheap saccharine sentiment of the Hollywood film, Escape from Alcatraz. If my memory serves me correctly, a convict sentenced to life imprisonment on the frightful island goes as far as to kiss a leper in order to gain the kindred sentiment of his fellow prisoners. As a young man I was truly moved by the fortitude and resoluteness in the face of illness and torment, firmly believing that such great sentiments simply cannot be reproduced in real life. Yet when I learned that Chou Ching-hui had rented a residence at the Happy Life Leprosy Hospital in order to be on hand for the last breaths of patients in this Shangri-la unto its own, the shock of reality hit me with full force.
Like you, Uncle Yeh Number One, Chou Ching-hui is not fond of big talk and pretension. In the decade that I’ve known him I’ve never heard him express moralistic pity for people less fortunate than he; rather, he is always wondering ‘what are now or never topics, what images will soon be gone forever, what places will one never be able to go to again.’ Otherwise, he’s thinking about what kind of weather he’ll encounter in what season, or what kind of incidents can he wait for to happen in a particular place, or what his subjects might do, as well as such picayune concerns as where the light will come from, will he have time to focus, and what kind of composition does this picture call for?
A photograph taken at Happy Life hangs in the short corridor outside my bedroom doorway. In focus in the foreground is an old cat ambling on the ground in a sunlit yard. Behind the cat and to its right is a pile of leaves bulging like a burial plot, and to the cat’s left is a human figure on a bench, limbless like a pupa, of indeterminate age and sex, looking as though “it” wants to do something. Uncle Yeh Number One, the cat is yours but the person is not you. Who is it? I asked Chou Ching-hui, who did not know, either, but the instant he depressed the shutter he was struck by the thought that a human being more tiny and frail than a cat is focusing his/her entire energy on trimming what just might be the last toenail he/she will ever have.
Uncle Yeh Number One, as I wrote earlier: “Such isolation does not keep you quarantined completely in your sad paradise away from all contact with the old world. What kind of contact is that?” I learned from Chou Ching-hui not only how you work hard to survive just like people outside in society at large, and that he truly entered a different kind of life by capturing your “steadily shrinking bodies.” This guy who checked into Happy Life with his cold, heavy camera equipment over his shoulder was not a stealth interloper, not someone who died old and alone next door, but one of your own – one who mends the shards of your shattered lives, collects the lost lives and memories of your fellow Happy Life residents, and over the course of his collecting a man who knitted himself into your midst.
Letters to Chou Ching-hui’s Photographers
Letter #1, to Gesaer:
Dear Gesaer
The image of you and your colleagues, who print Buddhist sutras, holding cups and drinking tea, is etched in my mind’s eye at this time. The photographer who shot this photograph is Chou Ching-hui. I’m sure you remember what he looks like, a young man with a conspicuous goatee. On several visits back and forth, he photographed you at your sutra printing monastery up in the Tibetan highlands. As a Taiwanese person working hard and living a modern life thousands of kilometers away on a tropical island, the photographer is one who “sits around getting fat.” If you and your colleagues are willing to think carefully back, perhaps you will recall that when this guy with the cameras hanging all over his body walked into your abbey, judging by his profession and his manner, you wondered if this guy has nothing better to do. “Why doesn’t he help out printing sutras? ”
The Chou Ching-hui I know is a member of a profession commonly known as “shooters,” or more politely known as “photographers” – people who are either sitting around among various props at a salon waiting for customers to come in, or moving about among others’ lives, capturing images he feels are worthwhile and often giving people the impression that he’s “got nothing better to do.” However, please believe me, Gesaer, that if he could etch printing plates, he would have put down his camera, folded up his tripod, tucked away his light meter and done just that during his two visits with you. That’s what Chou Ching-hui is like – a photographer that can easily get sucked up into the lives of his subjects, and who sometimes feels that just depressing the shutter a few times is not nearly enough.
Even running around for several dozen days in an alien environment living an alien lifestyle, living the difficult life that his photography subjects are accustomed to, taking thousands of documentary photographs – at least a certain percentage of them sure to really stir viewers after enlarging them – Chou Ching-hui often still feels it’s not enough. Unsatisfied? How come?
Gesaer, each time I pass by that picture of the seven of you lifting your tea cups together I want to say to you: as Chou Ching-hui snapped that photograph of you he probably wanted to raise a cup of warm tea in his own hands and experience for a moment the ease and relaxation that comes after a day of hard work. Nevertheless, he might have been thinking something else entirely: ‘What else might happen? ”
What else might happen? Often entering other people’s worlds at 1/15 of a second or 1/500 of a second, when Chou Ching-hui presses his brow against his camera and hears the shutter click, he has already said goodbye forever to the reality captured in the previous negative of film. So Gesaer, might you find that, a young man like Chou Ching-hui is not intentionally trying to add years to his visage with that goatee on his chin, and that you said goodbye to him thousands of times during his two visits to your abbot. In other words, one farewell to a slice of reality is bid with each photograph. This must make bystanders feel a bit left out. As for farewells, I still have something to say to old Mr. Yang the herder.
Letter #2: To Old Mr. Yang
Dear Old Yang,
Chou Ching-hui caught the way you look whispering to a mule so perfectly. Then when your transport procession set off, from afar it was a picture of “man and horse slight against the sky / smoky mist thick and billowy.” But you stayed in the compound unloading the goods – you’ll never be a herder again. You’d better just see them off since you’re lame from your fall.
You always used to trail behind the procession, driving the train of mules or horses loaded with carrots, potatoes, salt, vegetables, herbal medicine and leather, rice and brown sugar. In a flash, over a decade has passed. The leading mule back then wore a red tassel with round mirrors, and two bells around its neck. Next was the small stallion with 12 brass bells. Old Yang, you and that little whinnying mare mule always took up the rear; at night she’d let out a whinny every three hours like clockwork. Hearing her assured you and made your sleep more restful.
Passing by a valley or a dam on a plane, you would always start singing a song that would make the young girls by the roadside bashful, like: “Pomegranate’s ripe, so full so full / little girl don’t marry a horse herder / attack your food like you’re starving / return home only twice a year.” Listening to these songs, the little lassies cast their gazes downward. When you pass by them you leave a thin residue of conceit and a bit of self-deprecation in your song. You sing out, but swallow at the same time a world of hardship. Remember, Old Yang? Some of the songs you sing for yourself, like “Herd the horses towards the barbarian lands / where the road is perilous and afflictions many / the grass is a silky green carpet / the cobbles pillows of flowers.” Out in the vast and barren lands, these songs echo back on you, and you sing until you sleep through the dawn. Don’t you remember, Old Yang?
Perhaps you might think it best not to work any longer at such an arduous living. After your crippling fall, not only you but the entire procession and all its members will be forced to cease forever and ever. When Chou Ching-hui came to capture you on film, you happened to be transporting explosives to dynamite a mountain. Your mates in the transport team surely felt bittersweet about the mission, as the dynamite was used to blow hills and open up roads, and once the hills and forests are opened up, the territory around Sichuan, Guizhou, Kunming, and Guilin will never be the untamed terrain it was for so many millennia. When that eight-lane highway, 100 meters wide and a thousand miles long in two directions opens up it will make your industry extinct. Chou Ching-hui told me how, observing you carrying those sacks of explosives with English abbreviations written on them, he choked up for an instant at the thought that your final mission was to destroy and bury your profession – one you toiled at your whole life long and which was passed down generation after generation for thousands of years.
Speaking of farewells, whenever Chou Ching-hui, that young photographer with the goatee appears, he seems to bring bad luck, doesn’t he? That’s because when he shows up it means that something important is about to disappear. Or maybe we can look at it this way: photojournalist Chou Ching-hui reveals our stubborn faith in the farewells along the way of modern civilization’s progress, for we believe that lives we’ll never return to or that will never come back can be revisited through the ritual of gazing at a still image.
Old Yang, the way you whisper to your mule has always been a riddle – one that from the looks of things will never be unraveled. I’ll never know what you commanded that beast to do, nor will Chou Ching-hui know that your beast imparted on you. At any rate, that photograph has hung on my wall for over two years now, and whenever I take an extra long look at the two of you I am reminded of how common and warm a farewell can be. In the course of our lives, we bid farewell forever to things all the time.
As for gazing at still images, I have a few words to say to Guan Er.
Letter #3, to Guan Er
Dear Guan Er:
When I first learned of you, and how you keep a sickle hanging from your waist and bound up to a train, chasing the ripening barley thousands of miles from east to west, going wherever there are husks to harvest. And when the barley in your home town on the Guanzhong Plane is read, you just make it there for the harvest. Like a migrating bird, your itinerant lifestyle, determined by the best harvests, both shocks and confuses those of us living our modern lives in this concrete jungle on this island nation. Why don’t you use machines and save manpower? I’m sure if someone asked you that question, your eyes would bulge and you’d retort, “What are we supposed to do for a living if we don’t harvest barley?” Chou Ching-hui, who followed you the whole way photographing you probably seems like he is wasting manpower to you, for the several dozen kilos of camera equipment he lugs around has a lot less to do with labor, work and real life than a sharp, light sickle.
Real life is quite simple: feed the barley you just cut to the harvesters, no matter how much they can stomach. I have heard you can polish off a bowl of noodles as big as a washbasin, stuffing your gut so it bulges like a calf’s head. Then you take a rolling pin from your farmer host and roll it vigorously over your ballooned abdomen. Chou Ching-hui once did some furtive observation of a “fecal specimen” left by one of your crew. Holding his hands out as wide as a washbasin, he said in a mixture of respect and awe, “There was that much! Can you believe it?”
I believe that his work is not just about taking pictures. When he enters a new environment and confronts an alien lifestyle, squinting with one eye as he focuses and composes his shot, he must wonder if this is real life. Almost 30 years ago, I chased up and down the island of Taiwan with my camera in search of aging visages, moribund professions, decaying buildings or desolate lives, I often found myself with one eye closed, the other wondering in that moment: should I be so sober in this, so that I might even somewhat pretentiously be unable to hide my amazement and reverence at those vistas steeped in hardship and tinted in nostalgia.
Thinking back, the most significant aspect of my three or four years as a kind of photojournalist is not how many pictures I objectively snapped, but how much emotional self-reflection and enlightenment I experienced inside myself during that time. It could even be said that when an intruder with a camera repeatedly captures the unvarnished appearance of others’ lives with the lends, thereby stroking the self-congratulatory egos of onlookers, and allowing cheap aesthetic pretexts or social missions to obscure the essential primordial fact: photographers cannot enter the true lives of their subjects. This realization can drive one to freeze and never depress the shutter. This is in fact why I could no longer keep shooting, sensing my own pretension. Yet precisely because the gazing of the eye at a still image is an exceptionally momentous ritual, I am unable to withstand the burden of standing behind the camera’s viewfinder.
Yet Chou Ching-hui can. Taking the example of the harvesters eating a wash basin of noodles for instance, if it had been me back then, with my bulky mechanical shutter Nikomat camera, if I’d seen someone eat such a massive pile of noodles I would sense that person’s hunger in that moment. This would lead me to speculating on their long-term deprivation, and even allowing myself to feel guilty over my blessing with three square meals per day. Ultimately, this would lead me to feeling disappointment and frustration at the inability of photography to achieve true intimacy and empathy. But Chou Ching-hui is different, for he is immune to the self-projection of social involvement; directly, purely, tangibly, and resolutely, like a guileless child, he strides into the inner details of his subjects’ lives, finding convincing answers in the significance of someone’s consumption of a hyper-large helping of noodles: “Can you believe how much shit that guy made?”
Guan Er, your life made up of drifting from west to east and back again on a nearly fixed route. In this life, how many things can we take along with us? Perhaps not much, or none at all. Of this much you are profoundly aware, for I recall you saying: “In this line of work you have to be able to put anything down.”
Pondering over the meaning of this phrase, being able to put anything down, it sounds like one is prepared to pack up and enter into a different kind of life at any time. Speaking of entering other kinds of lives, I have some things to say to Uncle Ye Number One.
Letter #4, to Uncle Yeh Number One
Dear Uncle Yeh Number One,
You are a reserved man, one who won’t just spill his guts to someone he doesn’t know well, and who would rather save his talk for the great collection of cats and dogs you have. You died once, a story I’ve heard Chou Ching-hui tell more than once. That tale is a summary of sorts, but I’d rather take a romantic perspective and think: you lepers, who will have all died out in another few years, have really in a sense experienced rebirth, so you’re no afraid of death. This enables you to maintain an insulated aloofness from the various plights, pursuits, and yearnings of normal life, because that’s how the world has treated you all along. Nevertheless, such isolation does not keep you quarantined completely in your sad paradise away from all contact with the old world. What kind of contact is that?
The day Chou Ching-hui related the story of your death and subsequent “resurrection” to me, he also told me how Happy Life residents crowd together to share tricks for betting on the lottery, how they raise fashionable dog breeds to make a handsome profit, how they play card games clutching wash basins in their amputated limb stubs, swearing loudly, and how they collectively provide for a prostitute who provides them bodily and emotional warmth in turn.
From the looks of things, they are able to mimic almost down to the smallest detail the normal life of so-called normal society; that is, except for their incurable disease, their decaying features, and the limbs that diminish with age and multiple amputations. And thanks to the unusual character of lepers, you are able to cede bit after bit, relinquish piece after piece, and endure the torturous peeling away of the body in order to realize the most primal desire to live. Recalling how my own father, paralyzed in bed, frequently begged me to open the window by his bed to let him put an end to his torment with one final fall, I asked Chou Ching-hui, “Do they really live at such peace with themselves? Do they really want to keep living? The response I got was, “What reason is there for them not to keep living? For them, removing a piece of flesh today and another the next day just means there is less of their body. That’s all.”
Chou Ching-hui entered your lives, living and dining with you, coming and going with you, while I have only glimpsed a bit through the cheap saccharine sentiment of the Hollywood film, Escape from Alcatraz. If my memory serves me correctly, a convict sentenced to life imprisonment on the frightful island goes as far as to kiss a leper in order to gain the kindred sentiment of his fellow prisoners. As a young man I was truly moved by the fortitude and resoluteness in the face of illness and torment, firmly believing that such great sentiments simply cannot be reproduced in real life. Yet when I learned that Chou Ching-hui had rented a residence at the Happy Life Leprosy Hospital in order to be on hand for the last breaths of patients in this Shangri-la unto its own, the shock of reality hit me with full force.
Like you, Uncle Yeh Number One, Chou Ching-hui is not fond of big talk and pretension. In the decade that I’ve known him I’ve never heard him express moralistic pity for people less fortunate than he; rather, he is always wondering ‘what are now or never topics, what images will soon be gone forever, what places will one never be able to go to again.’ Otherwise, he’s thinking about what kind of weather he’ll encounter in what season, or what kind of incidents can he wait for to happen in a particular place, or what his subjects might do, as well as such picayune concerns as where the light will come from, will he have time to focus, and what kind of composition does this picture call for?
A photograph taken at Happy Life hangs in the short corridor outside my bedroom doorway. In focus in the foreground is an old cat ambling on the ground in a sunlit yard. Behind the cat and to its right is a pile of leaves bulging like a burial plot, and to the cat’s left is a human figure on a bench, limbless like a pupa, of indeterminate age and sex, looking as though “it” wants to do something. Uncle Yeh Number One, the cat is yours but the person is not you. Who is it? I asked Chou Ching-hui, who did not know, either, but the instant he depressed the shutter he was struck by the thought that a human being more tiny and frail than a cat is focusing his/her entire energy on trimming what just might be the last toenail he/she will ever have.
Uncle Yeh Number One, as I wrote earlier: “Such isolation does not keep you quarantined completely in your sad paradise away from all contact with the old world. What kind of contact is that?” I learned from Chou Ching-hui not only how you work hard to survive just like people outside in society at large, and that he truly entered a different kind of life by capturing your “steadily shrinking bodies.” This guy who checked into Happy Life with his cold, heavy camera equipment over his shoulder was not a stealth interloper, not someone who died old and alone next door, but one of your own – one who mends the shards of your shattered lives, collects the lost lives and memories of your fellow Happy Life residents, and over the course of his collecting a man who knitted himself into your midst.