Life Elsewhere

Life Elsewhere is a collection of interviews that journalist Yan Lizhong accumulated over several years, subtitled "20 Portraits of Ordinary People." The book contains twenty character profiles. The subjects are not celebrities but ordinary people scattered across the country, often outside the mainstream gaze: couriers, street singers, rural doctors, miners, managers of people living with HIV, stage actors, prison guards, veterans, track patrolmen, tomb keepers, porcelain painters, environmental volunteers, round-the-world cyclists, a former world champion, guardians of left-behind children, prison guards and reform-school teachers, and so on. Twenty people, twenty identities—that is, twenty ways of living. Yan Lizhong was a reporter at Life magazine and spent years walking the "elsewhere": descending into mines five hundred meters deep, entering communities of people living with HIV, strolling along the tracks with a patrolman, sitting at a pool table listening to someone recount the old days of a factory. His writing is restrained, with little commentary or sentiment; he relies on plain dialogue and reconstructed scenes, handing the reader a person's accent, home, meals, and inner life as they are. The "elsewhere" in the title refers both to distant places and small towns and to ways of living that lie elsewhere: the silent voices and lonely faces drowned out by the era's loudspeakers form the overlooked other side of a "strident, glittering age." The twenty stories stand alone but together make up a miniature landscape and portrait of contemporary Chinese society. With a preface by Xu Zhiyuan.