Jiang Shanshan’s life doesn’t change after Alibaba listed its shares in New York this September.
As the biggest e-commerce company in China, behind Alibaba’s listing, there are 8.5 million active online shop owners. Jiang is one of them.
In 2009, Jiang quit her job as an insurance agent in Shenzhen and started to sell sportswear on her online shop on taobao.com, China’s largest shopping website, which is owned by Alibaba. Every week she goes to Hong Kong to stock goods from outlets.
Now, Jiang and her husband Yingjie Liu are running their online shop as full-time work in Shenzhen. Every day, they get 80 orders on average, which bring them profits about 10,000 yuan.
“My home is my warehouse. I even can’t separate my business and my own life,” Jiang said.
In Jiang’s two-story flat, thousands of sport shoes and wears can been seen in every corner. In Jiang’s closet, sportswear is put mixed with her own cloths.
Jiang works seven days a week but it’s always leisure on Saturday and Sunday since people prefer to go shopping online when they have fragmentary time of their working days from Monday to Friday.
Talking about whether she is satisfied with her life, Jiang doesn’t know how to answer this question. “It seems that we have respectable income but we have to put money in to stock goods. Also, I have to sit before the computer all the day, answering questions from customers which is a little boring,” she said.
Jiang was answering customers’inquiry in her bedroom, which is also her office and warehouse.
Jiang doesn’t think Alibaba’s listing can promote their business. “My husband and I are still afraid that one day Consumer-to-Consumer model will be instead of Business-to-Consumer,” Jiang said.
Now, more than a half of online shops on Alibaba are Consumer-to-Consumer model, which means shop owners buy in goods from other companies and sell then to individual customers. Just like Jiang buys in and sells Nike and Adidas sportswear but there is possibility that Nike will integrate its business and forbid individual online shops selling its goods.
Considering about this potential crisis, Jiang and her husband stared to run two hypostatic stores in different shopping malls in Shenzhen.
“If C2C model may fall into decay, we should have other choices,” Jiang said.
An airplane is landing narrowly almost 500 feet above buildings. Below it, a steady stream of trucks, taxies and motorbikes are passing by a crossroad while people are walking normally, looking ahead.
This photo is 28*40 inches, black and white, hanging in Laurence Lai’s Gallery as an outstanding work in his 10 square meters gallery at Central Ferry Piers. On the back, it says “an airplane landing at Kai Tai Airport”. The photo is shoot by Lai at one noon in 1998. It was in this year that Kai Tai Airport was abandoned.
Lai’s photo: the landing plane
“Cha-cha, cha-cha. It was less than one second but the preparation was three months,” Said Lai, raising his hands in a gesture as pressing the shutter.
Kai Tai Airport, located on the west side of Kowloon Bay in Kowloon, is former civil airport in Hong Kong. Once, in 1996, it was the third busiest airport in the world in terms of international passenger traffic. Another reason makes it famous is that the airport is surrounded by high buildings. Some passengers claimed to have glimpsed the flickering of televisions through apartment windows along the final approach.
Lai regards Kai Tai Airport as one of the most impressing scene of old Hong Kong. In his three months’ preparation, Lai came to different corners of streets in Kowloon, always with four different lenses and two camera bodies. Eventually, he captured the moment at noon with his Nikon F90 film camera and 24mm f2.8 D lens.
Now, this photo has been sold half a million copies in different sizes from A3 to 28*40 inches since Lai’s gallery opened in 2001.
Lai prefers to call himself a street documentary photographer. Sham Shui Po, Sheung Wan and Hollywood Road are Lai’s purlieu for three day in a week, which are also places Lai’s mother always took him to when he was a child. In Lai’s opinion and memory, these places represent real Hong Kong.
Over a half of his photos are black and white. Lai prefers to apply it on historical moments, which help audience concentrate more on the object itself.
“I always feel that I have a mission to record what is happening in the street because it is a kind of culture,” Lai said.
In Lai’s eyes and lens, skyscrapers are always up and down, Starbucks and Macdonald can be seen everywhere, “but these have no meaning, this one is real Hong Kong actually,” Lai said, pointing one photo showing an tailor man is using sewing machine on the street.
Besides this tailor man, Lai has dozens of portraits which showing people selling vegetables or people delivering newspapers. Before taking photos of them, Lai always spends half an over talking with them to understand their work and feeling, which Lai treats as a way to respect them.
“It was people like them that work hard all their lives. That’s why Hong Kong becomes an international city now. So don’t forget history, I want to focus on development of this city to remind people of them.”
The motivation of him is simple. As Lai said, it’s his love for this space.
Before 2001, Lai was not a street documentary photographer yet. He was a businessman who ran his own trade company. Initially, photography is a hobby. Lai stared to sell his photos on Sunday free market in Tuen Mun with a table and an umbrella.
From Monday to Friday, Lai was businessman while at weekends he sold his own photos. “One day, I asked myself, what do you like most,” finally, Lai’s answer was to be a full-time photographer.
“All my friends asked me, are you crazy? Yes I think so, I want to do what I like.”
As Lai said, his confidence comes from his first photo sold on this free market. It’s a photo of sunrise at peak of a mountain.
“Actually, I finished it in 1 second, cha-cha. But I have been there for 13 times. Every time I spent five hours hiking the mountain, with two cameras, three lenses and one tripod, which are almost 15 kilos. For the first 12 times, I saw nothing. I just keep going and the 13th time, I saw the sunrise and the clouds.”
Lai remembered it was a gentleman walked by his table and asked how did he take this wonderful scene. On that day, the man bought a small size one with 100 HKD. After one week, he appeared again, bought a copy of the largest size of 28*40 inches.
“Of course I felt really happy and I thought it worth getting up early and he respected my efforts. What’s more important is that I decide to go on this way and this choice is correct. So dream impossible dream is what I always tell others.”
Lai is in his gallery
It is also from that time, talking with customers about stories behind every photo became Lai’s habit.
“This was the night of 28, September, the day when the police threw tear gas to protestors,” Lai said, showing his photo to his customer.
In this photo, the police stood one by one as a wall with their shield.
Lai insisted that he has no political opinion and he just recorded history of this city as a street documentary photographer. Then, he opened his computer, playing his slideshow work about Occupy Central with the song A Brighter Future by a band called Beyond. This is a song sang by protestors both in Scholarism in 2011 and Occupy Central this year.
Finally, his customer Jo Robins from UK bought this photo. It’s Jo’s second time to go to Lai’s gallery after she moved to Hong Kong for months. She thinks that Lai’s gallery is unique for its recording old Hong Kong culture and she treats it a way to know Hong Kong a little for a newcomer as her.
“It’s interesting that many people from UK like to buy my picture. If they didn’t buy for the first time, almost 90 percent of them will buy the second time they come. People from UK may have special feeling with old Hong Kong for the history of colonization,” Lai said.
For the future of his gallery, Lai want to look for a good place to open another gallery by 2015. Lai thought it a mission to promote young photographers by exhibiting their photos.
“The rule to select photographer is that I have to say, first, there is no rule. Remember, dream impossible dream,” Lai said.
“Time, accuracy and fairness are the biggest challenges,” said the former News controller of Cable News when he gave a lecture at Hong Kong Baptist University.
Fung Tak Hung, who has been a journalist for 30 years, gave his lecture about the professional challenges of 24 hours news by sharing his experience in the Manila hostage crisis with students.
“I hate to say that, but I felt excited when I hear about the news,”said Fung.
On August 23, 2010, the travel bus carrying 25 people including 20 tourists from Hong Kong was hijacked in Manila.
The first thing Fung tried to do is to contact Hong Thai travel agency, but the agency has no information. “Then I held the phone for 40 minutes,” said Fung, trying to avoid other media calling in.
At 7 p.m., a correspondent from ABS-CBN said that the bus driver escaped and he said all the hostages were killed but Fung didn’t have any way to confirm this information, but he has to make a decision. “What would you do?” Fung asked.
Fung’s choice is to put out this news and emphasize there’s report from ABS-CBN, but it still can’t be confirmed. “Because it’s already on screen. For those who know English, they get. For those who don’t know English, they don’t know what happen”.
The final truth is that following a 90-minute gun battle, the perpetrator and eight of the hostages were killed and several others injured.
“We want to be fast, but we don’t want to be wrong, ” Fung said.
The winner of 2013 Pulitzer Prize Kurtis Lee said although journalists want to ask questions and get answers but they also want to be human on class sharing at Hong Kong Baptist University on Monday.
Lee won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news coverage of the Aurora Theater shooting when he worked at The Denver Post in 2012.
In class sharing, he shared his experience and feelings as a reporter when delivering the Aurora Theater shooting and the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting.
The movie stared at 12:05 a.m., it’s a Friday night that young people went there to see a movie. When the shooter came in people thought it’s a part of movie until the shooter shot in the air, it was 12:39 a.m.
Lee got a call around 1 a.m. in the morning from the editor, after which he jumped from bed and drove to Aurora Theater.
It was 1:20 a.m. Lee got there and a press conference was about to start outside the theater. Sitting down on the ground, he started to tweet what he saw on Tweeter.
“I remember they said there was 13 people died. Someone asked, where are they? Have they been rushed to hospital or medical center? They said no, they were killed on the scene, they are died,” Lee still remembered.
After the press conference, Lee came to a nearby high school where people were trying to find their love-one, many of them left their phones in the theater. “It’s very emotional to see people rush to find and see their love-one, I stay there for 12 hours just take notes,” Lee said.
At the high school, he met Tom, who lost his son Alex that night. Alex turned 27 on 22th, July. He died on his birthday.
After the shooting case, people are discussing about whether the Aurora Theater should close or not. Some people don’t think they will go to see a movie there while other people said if they close the theater the shooter wins.
Finally, the Aurora Theater opened six month after the shooting.
When asked about how he controls his emotion when he is covering this kind of event, Lee said, “It’s very emotional, the human side just comes out. But this is your job you need to do. This is public service, you should separate yourself.”
“As a journalist, you just know how to react. It’s professional, you know the right time, when to step back and when to ask questions,” Lee said.
Xu Quan said he loved Hong Kong because he could feel dignified and calm here.
Born and growing up in Yancheng, Jiangsu province in mainland China, Xu is a journalist working in a newspaper which was thought to be pro-Beijing in Hong Kong. “I love Hong Kong but I don’t love my work actually, I really want to leave,” Xu said.
Now, Xu has been a journalist here for four years. He prefers to describe his job as an officer in a propaganda department from mainland China. “You know, we rely on the propaganda department，I can’t say anything I want to say,” he added.
After Xu graduated, a friend of his father recommended him to the newspaper. Like many graduates, he chose this work for staying in Hong Kong at least for seven years to become a Hong Kong permanent resident
Xu’s office is located at Wan Praya Road in Hong Kong island, but he resides nearby The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 25 kilometers from his office. He thinks living far away from downtown can keep him sober and critical, which he loses a lot when he is working. Everyday, he spends one hour on bus, another hour on MTR.
After two hours’ journey, Xu starts his work with reading kinds of newspapers especially The People’s Daily, which is provided every day in the office. Then, he waits for notice of reporting different conferences. “My work is more like killing time,” Xu said.
On one occasion, Xu went to Sheung Shui to write a explanatory reporting about people deliver commodity between Hong Kong and mainland China. He found that in the morning, most of them are people from mailand. In the after noon, most of them are Hong Kong people.
“But my editor inferred that I should make story only concentrate on Hong Kong people who are doing this,” Xu said.
When he wrote reasons for the phenomenon, he referred to the welfare system in Hong Kong cause many of them are young people drop out of school who can’t find job and elders. But he was told that they could not show people the defects of Hong Kong society, which would destroy the harmonious relations.
Things like this happened to Xu almost every time in the first three month he started working in the newspaper.
“Now, I adjust to the writing style here，and I know how to write a satisfying article,” Xu said, with his TV opening, reporting news about Occupy Central .
He has been watching news about Occupy Central everyday this week, “Our newspaper are covering people are against Occupy Central but as a journalist I have to know the truth. I don’t want to see any bloody clashes cause I love Hong Kong, I want to stay here,” Xu said.
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