My early morning walks are sacred to me. It can make me fall in love with any city, the way one might sigh over the form of a sleeping woman in some fragrant room, before the harsh light of day rips through the blinds and turns everything into an old crone’s mirror. In your average Chinese metropolis, this rosy window of pastoral calm is incredibly small. You can amble up a desolate street in one direction just before dawn, quietly contemplating the mystical promise in the hush of snoozing concrete, your thoughts roaming free under the heavenly gaze of a zillion blinking surveillance cameras, only to find on your way back a few minutes later that all hell has broken loose.
Retracing my steps on Chongqing Nan Road in the wee hours of one silky autumn morn, doing my feeble best to dodge the oncoming rush hour crowds that always seemed to appear out of nowhere, I saw an old man sitting on the pavement. He wasn’t there when I passed by earlier.
Languidly perched on a makeshift stool, he cut a pillar of calm among the masked hordes filing past him to the beat of a banker’s drum. He looked to be the very embodiment of Zen, that ancient Oriental mindset of lofty non-attachment that’s been torn from its roots as the world’s largest nation is sliding into the glitzy abyss of technocratic zombiedom (coming soon to a theatre near you). His walking cane was standing neatly next to him, leaning against some tacky kindergarten wall art on the metal siding like a quaintly ironic exclamation mark.
Our eyes met and he held my gaze. As I walked closer, strangely drawn by his resigned air, it suddenly struck me that he must have seen it all before. Death, disease, poverty, greed and political fuckery, constantly rehashed into racy fear porn and shoved down all and sundry’s throats, shit, it was probably all old hat to him. He seemed to know the score and that the game was rigged. Sitting quietly on the sidelines, he looked more than happy to watch the garish parade go by, quietly noting that the emperor is not wearing any goddamn clothes.
I timidly reached for the Nikon on my hip. After all those years of photographing big shots in the limelight, I still get nervous when trying to take a candid portrait of someone on the street. My crippling shyness aside, asking permission tends to ruin the moment, and in this case, given my crappy Chinese, striking up a conversation was not an option anyway. I decided to just go for it.  I steadied myself against the flood of bodies rushing past, quietly hoping that the wise old sage would not shoo me away as I raised the camera to my flushed face. He simply continued to eye me with a sense of doting amusement, like a grandpa watching some clumsy kid on a lonesome summer’s day trying to drink from a water pistol. Moments after the shutter clicked, I had no choice but to give in to the rising swell of the sidewalk crowd and was swept away.
A few days later I returned to the same spot in the hope that I would see him again. In the top left pocket of my tattered earth suit, which is slowly coming apart at the seams, my heart could somehow not find rest. It felt like something had been left unsaid between us, our mute conversation in the utter absurdity of that time and place still far from over. He was nowhere to be found. Not that morning, nor the countless other mornings I went back looking for him, my camera gathering dust at home. Even if I knew how, I didn’t know who to ask about him or where he might have gone. In the end, it was as if he was never there.
Perhaps he simply rat-tat-tatted three times with his cane on the gaudy placard next to him, opening the doorway to the fountain of youth and went swimming for that distant shore where east and west does not exist and everyone’s rapping in Chinglish to the silent hallelujah beat. I just don’t know. Wherever he went, I can’t seem to shake the feeling that, with dawn’s silver light slowly fading into Dusk, I’ll be joining him out there soon enough to gaze beyond a world marching blindly on the sun.

Photography, words, narration © Copyright Jac Kritzinger.

Music © Copyright Albertus van Rensburg.