The New Yorker‘s Evan Osnos on writing from China

090305AXLevanosnos.jpg

Evan Osnos: Image courtesy of the journalist

For The New Yorker magazine Evan Osnos recently wrote about Chinese nationalistic youth and Africans in the south.

Formerly the China bureau chief of The Chicago Tribune, he became a staff writer for The New Yorker in September 2008. Osnos won the Osborn Elliot prize from the Asia Society in 2007.

A foreign correspondent who was in the Middle East prior to China, he answers Danwei’s questions about writing, writing from China and his feelings concerning this year’s anniversaries.

Evan’s The New Yorker blog on China is called Letter From China.

Your recent pieces for The New Yorker are in-depth, and thoughtful. Is this because it’s an in-depth sort of magazine, or does it boil down to your methods of reporting?

I was about three days into my job as a cub reporter ten years ago when I realized I was not good at breaking news. Whenever I was cultivating some obscure detail of a story, the paper across town was teasing out the next day’s story from City Hall. I was more suited to slowing down than to speeding up, and I was fortunate to find editors who wanted that. They let me roam around the U.S. and, later, overseas, meeting people with stories to tell. I’m immensely lucky for that.

What are your personal methods of reporting?

I tend to write profiles of specific people, and I need to spend time with them again and again. Some writers are good interrogators with a sense of when to turn on a dime or to press a sensitive point; I am not. I am more like an obsessive tourist who returns repeatedly to the same spot to take more snapshots. Things happen while you’re gone, stories twist, and in the meantime, I try to teach myself more about that person’s world, so that I have better questions each time I go back. Sometimes I ask no questions and just watch. I digitally record as much as people will allow, because they often say the most meaningful things in two-or-three word asides. If you don’t record, you’ll miss them. And I often carry a point-and-shoot camera - not for publishable photos, but to capture tiny details that I miss in the moment. I usually end up with a mountain of terrible but indispensable snapshots of street numbers, necktie patterns, paint colors, wall posters, graffiti, and so on.


Are there any particularly striking differences or continuities between reporting from China compared to the other countries you’ve been to as foreign correspondent?

I was a student in China a couple of times in the 1990s, and when I came back in 2005, I was overwhelmed by the sense of momentum. I don’t mean that a lot of new buildings were going up; I mean China was boiling with ambition and destruction and reconstruction. One of the curious things about living in China at this moment in its history is that we take it for granted that change is the mode of existence. In so much of the world, status quo prevails despite enormous effort to change it. I remember a veteran reporter in Egypt telling me that the same men were in charge of the Arab world, or their sons, as had been in place when he started work in 1970. You couldn’t say that about China - exceptions aside - and that makes it an irresistible target for journalism.

What interests you most about the way that globalization is shaping the world, and what really motivates you to travel around to see this change?

In the last century, understanding China meant understanding what it was doing to itself: the fall of an empire, the rise of a republic, the search for an ideology, and, ultimately, the rise out of poverty. For the rest of the world, China was a brooding, self-contained entity. Writing about China meant writing about little beyond its borders, and many did it brilliantly. Today, so much of China’s energy runs along an international circuit. The farmer who leaves a village in Henan to work in a timber mill in Zhejiang is likely handling wood that originated in Congo and eating rice that grew in Vietnam. I feel as urgent a need to understand that process - the incentives, the hidden costs - as a writer a generation ago might have felt to understand that farmer’s village in Henan.

How do you perceive the government will handle the anniversaries this year?

If I correctly predicted any of it, that would be luck. But the Olympics taught us a few things about how this generation of top Chinese leaders handle moments of visibility and vulnerability. They treat them as strategic pivot points — unlike, say, a political anniversary in the U.S. or Europe - so they will aim to limit embarrassment and maximize the reflected political glory. They care about their reputation abroad and will try to avoid negative imagery, but not at the expense of the overall objective: regime stability. When the goal of improving foreign perceptions clashes with the goal of domestic tranquility, the latter routinely prevails.

What are your favorite blogs on China (you don’t need to mention Danwei here)?

In the English-language world of China blogs, there is a feast of great stuff, including: EastSouthWestNorth, Paper Republic, The China Beat, China Digital Times, and Michael Pettis’ blog. There are many other equally good ones.

What happens in the transition from being a national correspondent to a foreign correspondent, and have you adjusted to not being near home?

I moved overseas as a foreign correspondent a few days before Christmas 2002, and it took some getting used to. I remember the distinct feeling of that first New Year’s Eve overseas - I’d never paid much attention to the holiday in the U.S, but that year I found myself, alone, on assignment in Saudi Arabia, which is a deeply unfestive place. I was walking around the silent streets of Riyadh near midnight, looking at signs that I could barely understand in my first-year Arabic, and I was wondering why the hell everyone seemed to think this would be a good job. But that sensation barely lasted a month and I was soon immersed in learning about difficult places and making mistakes and seeing the world and loving it. I was determined to get back to China, and I’ve savored every minute of it. Every story is an education.

This entry was posted in Foreign media on China and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.