Tom Carter (Author of China)

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Tom Carter's Blog: Travel Photographer Tom Carter | On the CHINA Road

Q&A with travel photographer Tom Carter, author of CHINA: Portrait of a People

Q&A with travel photographer Tom Carter, author of CHINA: Portrait of a People

Travel photographer Tom Carter has lived in Asia since 2004, including India, Japan and China, where he spent 2 years and 35,000 miles traversing all 33 Chinese provinces and autonomous regions – not just once but twice. His critically acclaimed photography book, a definitive 888-image volume aptly entitled CHINA:... read more »

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Published on November 13, 2011 23:07 • 45 views • Tags: asia, author-interview, author-q-a, backpacking, beijing, china, china-authors, china-backpacker, china-books, china-images, china-photographer, china-photos, china-pictures, china-publishers, china-travel, china-travel-blog, chinese, chinese-culture, chinese-people, coffee-table-books, expatriates, expats, far-east, hong-kong, hong-kong-publishers, interview, life-in-china, people-of-china, photo-essays, photographer, photography, photography-books, photojournalism, photos, picture-books, portraits, q-a, shanghai, thomas-carter, tibet, tom-carter, travel, travelogues

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Books by Tom Carter

Average rating: 4.72 · 36 ratings · 11 reviews · 1 distinct work

China: Portrait of a People

4.72 avg rating — 36 ratings — published 2008

My rating:

* Note: these are all the books on Goodreads for this author. To add more, click here.

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Tom is Currently Reading

Tom Carter gave

to:

The Great Walk of China: Travels on Foot from Shanghai to Tibet

by Graham Earnshaw

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Tom Carter said: "Graham Earnshaw is a true man of the People. His 30-year tenure in China as a journalist, businessman and, most recently, publishing magnate, have made him a permanent fixture in the Shanghai scene – which is exactly why Earnshaw makes it a point of...more Graham Earnshaw is a true man of the People. His 30-year tenure in China as a journalist, businessman and, most recently, publishing magnate, have made him a permanent fixture in the Shanghai scene – which is exactly why Earnshaw makes it a point of de-fixing himself at least once a month to walk in the countryside and “speak to the Real China.”

It is an ongoing journey that he has tasked himself with completing since 2004, and though not continuous, Earnshaw has thus far traversed over 3% of the earth's circumference between Shanghai and Tibet. ON FOOT!

The Great Walk of China, Earnshaw’s published travelogue, is an account of just a fraction of his epic odyssey, covering the interior provinces of Anhui, Hubei, Chongqing and Sichuan. The walk is a straight line due west through some of China’s most rural regions, which is exactly the serene backdrop Earnshaw, fluent in Putonghua (and at times more literate than the Chinese he meets), prefers in a concerted effort to talk to as many People as possible.

From the spontaneous hospitality of peasants whom have never before seen a foreigner in the flesh, to the paranoid reactions of low-level authorities who simply cannot grasp what he is doing venturing into the countryside, Earnshaw manages to interact with just about every class of citizen imaginable.

Earnshaw also brilliantly illustrates the ironies of modern China’s identification crisis through villagers who exclaim “we are poor” out of habit despite clutching state-of-the-art mobile phones, and students, many the first in their family to be literate yet completely devoid of ambition, who vapidly waste their days away in front of televisions.

Often, the farmers he encounters hope Earnshaw is a reporter out to expose the rampant corruption of rural officials, while officials are worried that he is there to report on their corruption.

“Are you corrupt?” Earnshaw toyingly asks one cadre. “Me, corrupt? No…well…I’m not in a position to be...” A shopkeeper eavesdropping on their dialogue suddenly howls in delight: “So it’s not that you don’t want to be corrupt, ha-ha-ha!!!”

Englishman Earnshaw deftly manages some clever responses to his frequent confrontations with backwoods police, all the while maintaining a pleasant, non-judgmental (and at times romanticized and overly-optimistic) perspective which distinguishes The Great Walk from all the other China travelogues out there.

Our narrator is, unfortunately, reluctant to share much personal insight into Graham Earnshaw the person, and keeps his writings strictly about the Chinese. In between chatting with the proletariat, Earnshaw pauses to comment on old propaganda slogans still found on countryside walls, and muse on tiny animals crossing busy roads – a metaphor, perhaps, for the People of China’s struggle to catch up with their nation’s rapid progress.

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Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People (less) "

Jan 06, 2012 06:07pm · see review

Tom Carter gave

to:

Eating Smoke: One Man's Descent Into Drug Psychosis in Hong Kong's Triad Heartland

by Chris Thrall (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

My rating:

Tom Carter said: "What just might be the funniest if not first autobiography ever penned by a drug-addicted foreigner in China, Chris Thrall's “Eating Smoke” contains more spiritual pollution than all of the titles on the Communist Party's banned books list combined.

I...more What just might be the funniest if not first autobiography ever penned by a drug-addicted foreigner in China, Chris Thrall's “Eating Smoke” contains more spiritual pollution than all of the titles on the Communist Party's banned books list combined.

In a country whose history was irrevocably altered for the worst by the scourge of foreign-imported opium throughout the 19th century, it is no wonder that today’s China has one of the world’s least-tolerant anti-drug laws - including executions for traffickers. Basically, buying or selling drugs in China is a really stupid idea.

Enter Chris “I’m not a stupid guy, just an average guy who does stupid things” Thrall, a 25 year-old Royal Marine who hastily quits the service to pursue a business venture in 1990’s-era Hong Kong, a city “where situations can only get worse,” just to find himself broke, homeless and fulfilling his own ominous prophecy.

Recalling the commando’s motto of “cheerfulness under adversity,” Thrall tries to make the best of his lowly situation by spending his time dancing in discos or hanging out in the notorious Chungking Mansions, “the world’s all-time greatest craphouse.” The immigrant ghetto of Kowloon is not, however, the best influence on Thrall, who befriends all the wrong people, including a hebephile drug dealer from Ghana and a Filipina working girl, and soon succumbs to that favorite of Chungking pastimes – drugs.

To fund his new crystal meth habit, our detritivorous narrator forages the South China city-by-the-sea like a bottom-feeder for any job that will hire a white face. From cubicle fixture to phone-book scams, English teacher to nightclub DJ, businessman to bouncer, Thrall manages to get fired from every gig dumb enough to hire a spun-out “chi sun gweilo” (crazy foreigner in Cantonese) who doesn’t sleep for 9 days at a time and tends to forget his own surname.

By the time Thrall reaches his last-resort of a job – as a doorman at a bar operated by the 14K, the largest Triad (Chinese crime family) in the world – he has been reduced to a hyper-paranoid shadow of his former self on the verge of drug psychosis. “I would listen to the radio phone-ins, suspicious of the Cantonese conversation and wondering if people were calling in to report my movements,” he describes during one of his many speed-soaked conspiracy theories.

What ensues is a hilarious amphetamine-paced cautionary tale of what NOT to do when addicted to drugs in Wan Chai gangland, “where the Dai Lo's rule is law, pride is everything and life means nothing.” Chris Thrall’s true story evokes Gregory David Roberts’ “Shantaram” and Alex Garland’s “The Beach,” both of which have been licensed to Hollywood, as Eating Smoke is sure to follow.

###

Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People (less) "

Nov 06, 2011 12:51am · see review

Tom Carter gave

to:

China: Portrait of a People

by Tom Carter (Goodreads Author)

bookshelves: currently-reading

read in March, 2010

My rating:

Mar 24, 2010 12:08am

Quotes by Tom Carter

“The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: art , china , chinese , photography , photography-book , photos , portrait , tom-carter , travel

3 people liked it

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“I drift like a cloud,
Across these venerable eastern lands,
A journey of unfathomable distances,
An endless scroll of experiences...
Lady Zhejiang here we must part,
For the next province awaits my embrace.
Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East,
Where do you go?”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: asia , china , chinese , collecting-poetic-lines , hangzhou , ji-ju , non-fiction , photography , poems , poetry , quotes , shanghai , tang-dynasty-poetry , tang-poems , tom-carter , travel , travel-photography-books , travel-writer , zhejiang

1 person liked it

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“Hair salon doorways in the capital city's pink light district. Working as a xiaojie is an alternative, albeit illicit, means of income for these underprivileged girls, who are known in Jiangxi as "porcelain with cracks" and in Ningxia as "wilted flowers".”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: asia , asian , books , china , china-prostitution , chinese , chinese-prostitutes , non-fiction , photography , photojournalism , pink-light-district , prostitutes , prostitution , quotes , sex , sex-workers , travel , travel-photography , xiaojie

1 person liked it

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See all Tom Carter's quotes »

Topics Mentioning This Author

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Tom Carter featured on the cover of Beijing Today newspaper!	1	1	Apr 18, 2012 03:00am

Quotes Tom Likes

“Collect adventures and experiences to reminisce about…go to far places, meet new people, eat exotic foods, enjoy all varieties of women, look on unfamiliar landscapes, see new things.”
― Gary Jennings

tags: gary-jennings

7 people liked it

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“The snapshots in CHINA: Portrait of a People are not meant to be works of art. I was too preoccupied with participating, with reveling in the moment, to worry about their perfection. Their purpose, then, is to form a candid portrait of China exactly as China presented itself to me.”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: art , china , chinese , photography , photography-book , photos , portrait , tom-carter , travel

3 people liked it

like

“A peek inside the city's many nightspots reveals a Shangri-La-di-da of tiny Shanghai socialites in even tinier outfits dancing provocatively with well-to-do Westerners. But while such sights may draw gasps from some people, the truth is that this kind of thing is nothing new for Shanghai, the Orient's original opium-den of iniquity.”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: asia , china , chinese , non-fiction , photography , quotes , shanghai , tom-carter , travel , travel-photography , travel-writer

1 person liked it

like

“I drift like a cloud,
Across these venerable eastern lands,
A journey of unfathomable distances,
An endless scroll of experiences...
Lady Zhejiang here we must part,
For the next province awaits my embrace.
Sad wanderer, once you conquer the East,
Where do you go?”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: asia , china , chinese , collecting-poetic-lines , hangzhou , ji-ju , non-fiction , photography , poems , poetry , quotes , shanghai , tang-dynasty-poetry , tang-poems , tom-carter , travel , travel-photography-books , travel-writer , zhejiang

1 person liked it

like

“Hair salon doorways in the capital city's pink light district. Working as a xiaojie is an alternative, albeit illicit, means of income for these underprivileged girls, who are known in Jiangxi as "porcelain with cracks" and in Ningxia as "wilted flowers".”
― Tom Carter, China: Portrait of a People

tags: asia , asian , books , china , china-prostitution , chinese , chinese-prostitutes , non-fiction , photography , photojournalism , pink-light-district , prostitutes , prostitution , quotes , sex , sex-workers , travel , travel-photography , xiaojie

1 person liked it

like

More quotes Tom likes…