Meet Mr. Cao, Skateboarding Hutong Bathroom Attendant

A very cool short video from our friends at Tranquil Tuesdays (artisanal tea brand based in Beijing):

Skateboarding Hutong Bathroom Attendant Mr. Cao

Working in Beijing’s historical hutong neighborhoods, life is never dull in Tranquil Tuesdays’ office and showroom on Fangjia Hutong. These past two weeks in the heat of the Beijing summer, we thought we saw an improbable mirage: a skateboarding hutong bathroom attendant skating by our doors. After days of stunned excitement watching Mr. Cao whiz by Tranquil Tuesdays hutong office and showroom in Beijing, we finally caught up with him (I literally ran out of our office to catch him before he crossed the street) to express our admiration and ask him if we could film him skating down our hutong: Fangjia Hutong. Mr. Cao is from Hebei province and lives on Fangjia Hutong. He skateboards to work at a public bathroom 3 km away, and says he has been skateboarding for a few months.

Via Tranquil Tuesdays Blog

Chinese families’ goods in Huang Qingjun’s pictures

The idea for the series about people’s material goods, now called Jiadang (Family Stuff), came in 2003 with some photos he took for the magazine Chinese National Geography. But the project didn’t really get under way until three years later, when Huang started travelling around China looking for suitable places and people.

“Most people thought what I was proposing was not normal. When I explained I wanted to set up a photo, that it would involve taking everything out of their house and setting it up outside, that took quite a lot of explaining,” he says.

“But almost all of them, when they realised what I was trying to do, they understood the point.”