American photojournalist Tom Carter traveled to China in 2004 in search of something he felt was missing in his life. After receiving a university degree in political science and trying his hand at politics in his native San Francisco, the young man decided to change course completely and go and travel the world.

The son of a Danish mother and Panamanian father, Carter seemed destined to explore foreign cultures and, as he himself put it, China just happened to be the country that extended him the invitation.

"I realized that I was more interested in the world than just only in America, so I went backpacking for a year and a half across Mexico, Cuba and Central America. And that really opened my eyes to other cultures. On my father's side, my lineage goes back to Cuba and Panama, so it was kind of like revisiting my roots. That kind of inspired me to see more of the world. After that trip I returned to San Francisco, bounced around and did odd jobs, but I didn't really feel comfortable there. I had this itch, this restlessness to get out and see more of the world. The only problem was that I was broke so I accepted an English teaching job in China. I didn't have any teaching background, nor did I have any familiarity with China. It was just kind of an opportunity to get out America and China just happened to be the country that was extending the invitation. So, I took it and just showed up in Beijing with no idea about the country, the people or the culture, and everything I learned in China was baptism by fire."

Carter says that prior to embarking on this adventure, the only contact he had had with people of Chinese descent had been with members of the Chinese-American community in San Francisco.

"I didn't know what to expect. The only kind of inclination I had about Chinese culture was from growing up in San Francisco, because it is home to the largest Chinese-American community in North America. So, I had a vague understanding of Chinese culture, however, Chinese people, just like the country itself, are extremely isolated and don't really open themselves to Westerners. When I showed up in China, it was literally the opposite side of the world in every sense of that expression, geographically and culturally. Just adapting and adjusting to Chinese culture was a real challenge, and I think it usually is for most foreigners, because China is the oldest civilization in the world and their customs and traditions date back 5,000 years. And if anybody is going to adapt to those customs, it's gonna be us, they're not going to bend or change anything. So, it's up to us as foreigners in their country to learn their ways, and it's really hard at first."

Rough landing

Carter says he had applied for the English teaching job online, but unfortunately, not everything went as well as he had hoped...

Carter says he has fond memories of teaching English in southern China. (Image: Tom Carter)"Well, what happened when I arrived in Beijing was that I had a teaching job lined up that I had applied for online. But the problem with China is that their laws are extremely fluid, so there's a lot of scams coming in and out of China. And the teaching job that I happened to apply for was a scam! I realized it literally the moment I got off the plane... So my choices were: go back home and cry about it or stay in China, find a new job and deal with it, and that's what I did. So, I took another teaching job in a small town in Shandong province and so I spent one year there teaching English, learning all about Chinese history and culture, and a little bit of the language and at the same time teaching English to 1,500 primary school students completely by myself. But those children were delightful, each one of those children I have fond memories of. Everyday I was welcomed by them with hugs and they were holding my hand when I walked into the courtyard, and everyone was yelling my name and running up to me everyday for a year, not just at the beginning and the end, it was everyday! I was kind of spoiled by all this attention and love that I got from my students. And that's what made me realize that I was happy being an English teacher and that was the profession that I would take from that point on. That first year in China was really great. It was a great job opportunity and a good introduction to China itself."

After a year of teaching, Carter decided it was time to move to a bigger city, which would provide better prospects for a more stable and financially secure life.

"I showed up in Beijing and I continued to teach English for another year. I was at this point teaching business English at large multinational companies, so I was able to make a decent salary and basically network more with the local Chinese business scene and also the expats there. I did that for another year, so it was basically two solid years of full-time English teaching so I could save my money with the intention of eventually traveling around China."

By 2006, Carter had saved enough money to realize his dream of backpacking across China without following any particular schedule or itinerary.

School of hard knocks

Carter says that everyone who ever goes to China is bound to return home with at least one really memorable story to tell. However, he himself has had more than his fair share of thrills.

"I think everyone who visits China will have at least one really profound and memorable adventure. But for better or worse for me, I just happen to have too many. My first year in China, I caught encephalitis, which is a viral infection that attacks the brain and kills you in seven days. So, I was hospitalized for ten days there, and luckily they were able to treat it with the help of my mother who is a nurse. So, she was able to extend some useful medical advice to the Chinese doctors. But I got through and it never intimidated me as far as leaving China or anything like that. I just figured, heck, you know, I just got unlucky."

Whips for hire. (Image: Tom Carter)"When I was backpacking around north China, I by accident wandered over the North Korean border and was greeted with a couple of machine guns. They asked to see my passport, [...] so I showed them my American passport and they looked at me like, 'do you realize where you are?' – of all the nationalities that should happen to wander into North Korea, an American! (laugh) They could have done anything they wanted to me and nobody would have known, but I don't think people are innately bad, I don't think that just because you're from a country with a hostile government that the people themselves are hostile. And even if you're part of military, you're still a human being, so they must have been wondering what the heck I was doing up there. But deep down, we're all just human, with hearts and souls. I had a tin of Cuban cigars that I had brought with me on my trip, and I extended them the cigars. And they were like 'alright, we'll take these and in return you get to go home, so you need to run all the way back to China in the snow. Don't stop running until you get to the other side!' So, that's how I got out of that situation."

In Chongqing, Carter had the bad luck of running into some belligerent drunkards, who decided to challenge him to a three against one match.

"It was in the middle of the night and they were really drunk and rowdy and that turned into a four-way fist fight, me against them. I had six pairs of shoes kicking me in the ribs and face. I was completely covered in blood. I saw a couple of Chinese security guards in the corner just watching like it was a television program. After getting beat to raw meat, I pushed myself up and I had some mace in my bag and I grabbed the mace, and unloaded the entire can in their eyes, and they just ran into the night and never came back. Then the police came shortly after and took my statement, and then the hotel kicked me out for causing trouble. It was four in the morning and I had nowhere to stay!"

Despite all the difficulties, Carter says he does not carry any hard feelings about what happened.

"A lot of these Chinese cities are kind of like in the old days, lawless outposts. Like the wild west, except in China. It makes for good story telling. I don't harbor any ill will towards any of my bad experiences in China, because I can laugh about all of those experiences now. And I can write about them in my book that gets published and people buy them and so they can read the stories, so it's okay."

Immortalizing vanishing culture

In the summer of 2008, Carter published a massive 640-page photography book entitled China: Portrait of a People. He says the project was completely impromptu, although the fact that he had made contacts into publishing when he worked as a freelancer for expatriate magazines and newspapers in Beijing did make taking the plunge easier.

"When I was backpacking around China, I was taking pictures just for fun, I truly had no intention of ever publishing my photos professionally, or doing anything with my photography. The point of my backpacking adventure was to learn and experience everything about China. The photos were secondary, they came after I met the people. What I realized a year and 33 provinces later, was that I had this massive collection of images from everywhere in China, and I had uploaded some of them onto Flickr and I was getting all this feedback from people saying 'you really need to do something with these photos.' It made me think that maybe I've done something groundbreaking here. I was not aware of it while I was doing it, I was only aware of it after people started telling me this. So, I did some research and I realized that this collection of photos that I had from everywhere in China was a first."

Asked about how people reacted to being approached with a camera, Carter says he rarely met a negative response.

“I think that presently, China is one of the most rapidly changing nations in the world, and also one of the fastest changing cultures in the world. It's almost like for 5,000 years they restrained themselves and now they're just revamping everything about their country and their geography and their culture and their way of doing business. It's getting a complete makeover and they're not going to stop until they're comfortable with their new position in the world. From the point that I arrived in China in 2004 up until the present, I have definitely seen a huge change in China as far as architecture and as far as customs and business. Even in the book itself, you can see a lot of these changes and that was one of the things I wanted to capture as far as architecture, the difference between the ancient architecture that was there for the past thousand or two thousand years, compared with the modern skyscrapers that are being built all around the major cities now.”

The face of China's coal industry

Carter sneaked into an illegal coal mine to photograph the miners. (Image: Tom Carter)One of the most famous and stirring pictures in the book is of miners working in an illegal coal mine in Shanxi province. In principle, members of foreign media are not allowed in China's coal mines, which Carter says is understandable, given that thousands of fatal accidents occur there every year.

"It was one of the most difficult times I've had photographing in China, because, first of all, professional photojournalists from the West are pretty unwelcome by the Chinese government, not the people, but the actual government. And correctly so, because the West really likes to run negative stories about China -- unfortunately. So, coal mines in China are completely off limits to foreign photojournalists. But I really wanted to photograph a coal mine for my book, because it's such a major industry. And I really wanted to honor those coalminers in my book, so what I had to kind of hang out in the mountains where all the coal mines are located in Shanxi province."

"Unfortunately, just a couple of days before I arrived, there was an explosion, and a lot of coalminers were killed and that shut down for a couple of weeks or so all of those local coal mines. However, "black" coal mines, the illegally operated coal mines, stayed open. So what I did was, I was with a Chinese friend, and we went around to all the coal mines there in the mountains and eventually we found one that was open illegally, and we knew that if we went in there and photographed, we could very easily get arrested by the police. So, we ran in, we asked some of the coalminers to take their photos, chatted with them, they showed us quickly what they were doing, then we excused ourselves and we ran out of there and we got the heck out of there before any police could catch up."

A picture speaks a thousand words

Carter says he is hesitant to pick a favorite photograph out of all the thousands of shots, but that there are a few that touch him in particular.

Tom Carter currently resides in Beijing. (Image: Courtesy of Tom Carter)"There is one photo in Ningxia of a group of unemployed Chinese men who just stand around on a street corner all day waiting for work. Ningxia has one of the lowest GDPs in the entire country. It's also suffering drought so their primary industry of agriculture of suffering as well. So, I was walking around the capital of Ningxia province and there was a group of maybe one or two hundred Chinese guys standing there looking for jobs and I photographed them. And they all noticed me at the exact same time, and quickly they encircled me. I was probably most likely the first foreigner they had spoken with, cause Ningxia is not on any tourist trail, not at all. The place is completely unvisited and has absolutely no tourist economy whatsoever. At one point they were all just standing around me asking questions and I held my camera up to take a picture of them encircling me. And this photo -- you look into each one of their faces and you can feel a unique and touching story from each one of them. And I made that photo into a panoramic two-page spread at the end of the chapter for Ningxia province. And I think it's a really moving photo, and probably for me more than any other reader. If you look at that photo you'll also see a story in each of their faces."

Ready for new adventures

Since the release of the book, Carter has been on a promotional tour of Asia. He says he would like to distribute the work globally, but at present, his publisher is based out of Hong Kong which limits distribution to Asia only.

"I've been promoting the book in the hopes of having the book distributed to Europe and to North America, cause I'd really like to introduce the Chinese people collectively as portrayed in this book to the rest of the world. That is my intention -- to show China in a very honest, and real and unobjective manner that you don't get from the newspapers. But as far as what I'm going to do next, I don't know. I don't know if I'm going to stay in China forever. I don't know where I'm going next. What I do know is that I'd like to continue photography and I know I would like to make another "portrait of a people" book for a different country. But all that happens step by step and most of these decisions aren't up to me, they're up to the powers that be and up to life itself. I'm kind of in fate's hands right now. And I hope in that way I will find a sponsorship or some kind of investor or funding for my next project because I definitely do not have the money to do it again myself."

For more information about Tom Carter and his work, please visit his website at www.tomcarter.org.