Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Everything for Du is niubi, ‘cow’s privates’ – a boss, a venue, a magazine – but the term is so fluid it is hard to say what, exactly, it means. Sometimes it is employed exactly like the English ‘dog’s bollocks’, to refer to something that is excellent, the best. But sometimes it is used in a pejorative sense, as in, that guy is so up himself, he’s the real cow’s privates.

We are in a Sichuan restaurant eating ‘saliva chicken’ and spicy fish. Du has come to Shanghai to direct a fashion shoot. The way he bitches about it, you’d think he was breaking rocks, not being paid a huge amount of money to tell a bunch of models what to do. Apparently a Cadillac has been hired for the occasion.

Du looks imposing, tall for a Chinese guy, with long hair and a red Indian-like face. He is from the northeast, up near Russia, and northeasterners are like the Scottish – they’re hearty and direct, big drinkers, bad at business; meat and potatoes people. He makes fun of the slim and artsy Shanghai men, with their interest in fashion and their reputation for being hen-pecked. He also makes fun of my phone; it would seem it’s the brand chosen by peasant entrepreneurs.

He is doing well. He has come from Guangzhou where he has an exhibition and his latest photos – portraits of kids – are selling at a gallery in Paris.

He misses London though and every time we meet he talks about it a lot.

I met Du in a council flat in a tower block off the Old Kent Road. A colleague at my Chinese course, B, took me round. We went to help Du and his flatmates decorate their new place. They rented it from punk R, and actually I don’t think it was R’s to rent out at all, I think he had squatted the flat and changed the lock. But Du and co did not care, R only asked them for forty quid a week.

B was artistic and insisted that we rag the walls. There was a pigeon’s nest on the balcony. The three Chinese guys had only one bed and they slept top to tail. They had all come on student visas and overstayed or just not turned up at college at all.

Du worked cash in hand washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, putting minicab flyers into phone boxes, wearing a cheap suit and a red dickie bow and ladling soup at the buffet of another Chinese restaurant.

He was living on a grim council estate on the grimmest road in London and he was having the time of his life. He spent his money on cameras and film, and all his spare time he took pictures and he developed them in the bathroom at the flat. I took him on a protest march (I forget what we were protesting about) and to art exhibitions and B took him to gay pride and he took photos everywhere of everything. He was shameless, he would even take pictures of people on the tube.

Though he lived in fear of the immigration authorities ironically it was B, the French Canadian, who they came for. While they broke down the front door of his flat in Lewisham he escaped out of the back window. He went round to see his English girlfriend and they arranged to get married immediately. I think it was at B’s rushed wedding a week later that I saw Du in England for the last time. He was, of course, the official photographer.

Du went home. He wrote a book called ‘My Days in London’ – Lundun de rizi – half photos and half text, and it was published and did well and that was how he made his reputation.

He started working for Bejijng magazines and newspapers. He took celebrity portraits – he did Tony Blair – and he was sent to Indonesia to cover the aftermath of the Tsunami. I asked him about that, which I probably shouldn’t have done, and he said he spent a dark two weeks photographing corpses and changed the subject.

He moved in quite rarefied circles. A couple of years ago he took me to a posh Beijing do. His photographer mate was going out with a model, as photographers are wont to do, and it was her birthday party. It was in a swanky but ridiculous Egyptian themed bar. Du’s long haired artist mates sat around complaining that they had had more fun in airport lounges.

I was introduced to three models, amazing looking creatures. I think creatures is an appropriate term because they resembled aliens and they gave the impression that they were looking forward to returning to their rather superior planet. One had Lucy Liu style slanted eyes that were too far apart and white hair in a bob. She was the most famous person there because she had been on the cover of American Vogue and the Chinese bitched that she was a freak. They only looked animated when someone pointed a camera at them.

I had talked to them for about thirty seconds, trying and failing to think of clever things to say, when this loud and annoying beeping noise started up. It went on and on. The models checked their phones – not them. The artists checked theirs – not them. It couldn’t be me of course, as I didn’t have a phone. But the noise went on and on, and it was very irritating, then someone pointed at my jacket pocket. It was my travel clock, the alarm was going off. Going bright red, I fumbled it out and turned it off. The models tutted and drifted away and the artist’s laughed. Oh well.

Anyway, Du. What he considered his real work was photo journalism. That’s a dangerous job in a country that locks up journalists with depressing regularity. There are some things here that I would like to say that are interesting but I shouldn’t as I don’t want to get him in into trouble. I will mention Du’s series on Beijing garbage dumps – he documented the lives of the slum people who make their living scavenging for things that can be recycled.

X turns up at the restaurant. She wants to open a tango club in Shanghai so we go with her to check out the competition. It’s a bar/restaurant but it looks like a country mansion, with lots of dark wood, bar staff dressed like butlers and red armchairs. It’s full of well dressed people, a lot of them Taiwanese, tangoing not particularly well. A man in a suit and cowboy boots wearing a fur coat creates a scene – perhaps he felt that not enough people clocked him and his girlfriend coming in. Du’s verdict on the place is easily guessed – it’s all very, very cow’s privates.