Capturing Roots : A Photographer's Journey into Ancestral Identity

Biking up the mud roads of Soon Wall, China, among the crumbling facade of rotting roofs and stone walls with boarded-up windows, photojournalist Mark Leong is led to a house that unexpectedly mirrors his own identity. Emerging from the dark, an older lady who calls herself his aunt invites him inside.

He looks up and sees himself in a shrine of mismatched frames, plastic bags and pin ups of photos with dog-eared corners dedicated to the family that has journeyed from Soon Wall and grown in the United States. It has pictures of his Aunt Shirley and Uncle Louie from Chicago and him with his Chicago cousins from a long forgotten family reunion.

Touched by Soon Wall’s awareness of his existence, Leong raises a camera up to his eye, immortalizing the moment now preserved in the pages of a New York Times Magazine 1996 issue.

Leong’s visual narratives have appeared in National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Smithsonian, Stern, Fortune and Time. Using a combination of fine art and off-jilter street photography style, his palette for “real life” aims to capture the texture of the human experience across communities in Asia. Alongside his photojournalistic aspirations, Leong began exploring his own identity as a fifth-generation Chinese-American, returning to the villages of his ancestral roots. Through his lens, he delves into an estranged connection, capturing a common American experience: being multi-ethnic, yet struggling to forge a connection with his non-American identity.

“I believe it’s useful for everyone to know the different paths, and to know where they come from and who they could have been…I didn’t find the Chinese in me, but the people I would

have been if I had been born there.”

Leong, 58, identifies first as a social documentary photographer, and second as a journalist.

His cameras have entered sprawling cities of millions and remote villages of few, lush jungles and seedy alleys, countryside homes and makeshift yurt camps, campfires and wildfires, military excursions and police ride alongs, and congested airports and crowded schoolhouses. There is not much left that feels “fresh” to him.

For over 20 years, Leong has worked at the Redux Pictures agency and as a contributing photographer for National Geographic. His projects have explored both inner city and rural parts of China, Mongolia, India, Korea, and the United States. Each project is unique, having covered stories about environmentalism, migration, production and consumerism, lives of various Asian indigenous communities, Asian American stories, and his own lineage. In one instance, The New York Times used Leong’s photography and connection to Soon Wall to observe the population losses of small villages to growing Chinese cities and American immigration.

Whether on assignment, or while scouting out destinations and new content, Leong stops frequently to find the street’s “sweet spots”, the intriguing scenes of people, along the way.

“The street is where I feel comfortable… I’ve found that real life is better than anything I could make up, [by] borrowing from what other people could give me.”

Born in Sunnyvale, California to two Chinese parents, both of whom spoke different dialects, Leong grew up speaking English. Though his parents wanted him to attend a Chinese school, he rejected it. His parents had never traveled to China, and much of his cultural knowledge stemmed from traditional Chinese funerals, trips to Chinatown with his grandfather, Gon Gon, for dim sum and afternoon tea at houses of Gon Gon’s friends. Still, dinner usually included a hybrid meal of something American with rice.

It wasn’t until college at Harvard that Leong realized photography would become his life. Before then, he had played around with different cameras in high school, where having “a thing… a machine in your hands was cool.” Originally an English major, he switched after falling asleep in his first class and was encouraged to pursue it after a street photography assignment made him realize he had talent that had not yet reached its potential. He graduated magna cum laude in 1988.

Leong was able to photograph China in 1989 after receiving funding from the George Peabody Gardner Traveling Fellowship, and went back and forth over the next 25 years. He learned some basics of Mandarin at community college and from college age tutors while traveling in major Chinese cities.

Throughout his career, he has received many awards including the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fifty Crows International Fund for Documentary Photography, the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photojournalist of the Year, and awards from Overseas Press Club and The Open Society Foundation.

Leong sees photography as both a dance and a sport, snapping anywhere from a few to 30,000 photos of a single subject. A pocket journal and an app on his phone helps him stay focused on the task at hand, as photography he says, is a constant stream of micro decisions. With no plan, he is frequently sucked into the warping black hole that is his lens, losing all sense of time, space, and self.

On one San Francisco expedition, Leong hit the streets with a journalist to find and record the use of fentanyl by unhoused people. Leong was so absorbed in capturing an angle that the journalist had to warn him that he was getting too close to the fumes, and might get high.

The key to capturing such intimate moments requires that Leong take on a confrontational style, and shove his 2 pound piece of equipment in the faces of his subjects. After a while, people become accustomed to or bored of Leong’s presence, where he is able to straddle the line between being a novelty, and annoying, to blend in and “that’s your friend”.

“There’s something about showing up somewhere often and leaving and nothing bad happens… Somehow that builds trust. And sometimes people will invite you to take [their] pictures.”

In a project for National Geographic about China’s illegal animal trade, a group of men harvesting snake skin invited Leong inside to photograph them at work. Dozens of dead snakes hung by their necks from ropes attached to the ceiling.

While the street is Leong’s “comfort zone”, he is often plagued by the awkwardness and unease of the social situations that his job requires. He admits that he is not inherently outgoing, describing himself as someone who is “sometimes awkward at parties.”

“I asked myself, ‘Am I going to be a social creature or a photographer?’. I value the photos I take for whatever reason, and that goal drives me, it makes me step out of my shell to force myself to be vulnerable…I learned it was okay to be awkward.”

There are many places, Leong claims, he would never have entered if not for his job, one of them being his ancestral villages. While it is possible he may have embarked on the trip regardless, he is certain, if not for the camera, the time spent exploring them and the depth of his experience would have been woefully insufficient.

It is the end of winter, 1990, and the chilly days in Guangzhou are interspersed with short bursts of comfortable weather. Soon Wall, Leong’s maternal ancestral village, is less than a 2-hour bus ride away. As Leong climbs onto the bus and shifts into his seat, he realizes just how trusting he has been up to this point. From Chicago, Uncle Louie has sent a letter to the village using stark red paper symbolizing good fortune, that the grandson of Fong Quong Zon, who had emigrated to America, or Gon Gon as the grandchildren call him, would be visiting. By now, Leong has spent enough time exploring China’s countryside that he has adjusted to his role as a photographer and is lugging ziplock bags stuffed with hand-rolled film canisters, nervous about how they will fare during his travels.

When the bus arrives, Leong has only a short distance to go. Around him, several motorcycle “taxis” idle. Men wear construction hats, wicker baskets, or a combination of the two as helmets atop their heads. Only some offer one to their passengers. While most people in Soon Wall speak a Taishan dialect, Leong communicates well enough with basic Mandarin, securing his ride into the village.

The village is a network of stone houses of about 500 people, many of which are named “Fong”, who are relatives of Leong. Many Fongs spend their entire lives waiting for their turn in line to move to America. In the center, people hull and dry rice, surrounded by layers of houses tucked discreetly in the countryside surrounded by mountains. No matter where he stands, Leong feels the end of the village is near.

When they see him, aunts, uncles and cousins pour out of their houses and crowd Leong, erupting into laughter and pointing at him. Unsure what to do, he stands awkwardly until one of his aunts drags a cousin out before him. They begin pointing first to Leong, then his cousin, as if to say, “Look! You both look the same!”. Leong does not see the resemblance, but is stricken by the fact that the cousin they’ve brought out is nearly the spitting image of one of his cousins from Cupertino, California.

He spends the night in Gon Gon’s old house. It has no windows.

Clutching his camera, Leong is very aware of his Americanness as he wanders the village in the day. Cousins who are younger and understand more Mandarin show him parts of the village and introduce him to more family. The camera gives Leong a way to interface and absorb his background despite the language barrier.

One afternoon, the wind picks up a smell that is intensely familiar, but can’t be placed. Following his nose, he is steered to a room where 5 or 6 are gathered. When something interesting happens in the village, he notices, people gather. A small boy holds his arm out in pain while an old man wraps a bandage around it, slathered with an herbal sauce.

“That’s it!” he thinks. Gon Gon used to carry a bottle of the same medicine whenever he came to visit. He would make it in his basement and top off their reserve on his trips. Leong’s Chicago cousins called it “the bump medicine”.

In that moment a once forgotten, deep smell memory was unlocked. One that unknowingly tethered him to Soon Wall all these years, in lieu of the fact that Leong had never hooked onto feeling Chinese.

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Leong now lives in San Francisco with his wife and has four children, all of whom have visited Soon Wall. His kids, he says, felt strange fitting in and were shy during their visit.

He doesn’t tell people what he’s working on, but has several projects lined up for the upcoming years. Even if his photos never have an impact on people, he says, he will always be a photographer. His passion for capturing the human experience gives him a connection to the world he never thought possible, and he wants to do the same for others.

“I can show you people you’ll never meet and things you can relate to, and that’s what social photography is all about.”