HOWARD FRENCH:

Well, I was trying to capture a way of living in the city that was under immense pressure, that was being radically transformed right before my eyes.

These neighborhoods were filled in a hugely disproportionate way with relatively old people, people who the Chinese back then already were speaking of as a lost generation, people who, during the cultural revolution, had not gone to college because Chinese schools were closed, and who had often been sent to the countryside as a way of political training.

And then, so when China opens up at the end of the 1970s and begins to reform its economy and to become quasi-capitalist, these people, just by virtue of their own timing in the last century of their coming of age, they were not, most of them, eligible for these new competitive jobs that capitalism was providing to China. And so those were the left-behind people in those neighborhoods.