I’m not sure what I was expecting to see in China. I’m sure I was thinking of the China I knew from photographs I had seen and the reading I had done. A nostalgic view of a place I’d never been. This of course left me completely unprepared for what I found. These photographs represent some of the people I met living in the fastest growing economy in the world, and the changes they face in the years ahead.

As an American who tries to avoid the trappings of western culture, it was hard to see China adopting many of them. It gave China a sense of Dichotomy. A Ferrari dealer blocks away from nearly third world conditions. Advertisements with Western faces, yet I was so “exotic” that people would stop me to pose for a photograph with them. Lines outside of Pizza Hut. There was a western Façade that hid the China I wanted to see.

While walking through the hutongs of Beijing and the alleys of other Chinese cities, you are in the heart of the city. The enormous sense of community makes you feel as if you are home. Other than the peoples faces and the motorized scooters, these are places that haven’t changed much since they were built. In Beijing, some are still named after the products made in their shops for the palace. The Alleys are crowded and dirty, but full of life. Children going to school. Street vendors selling all sorts of goods and food. Men on bicycles offering their services to fix anything broken you might have. People coming and going.

But Chinese cities are growing at a frantic rate. During the height of construction in Shanghai, there weren’t enough cranes in the country to keep up with production. Today there are more than 4000 buildings in Shanghai over 18 stores tall, almost all of them built in the last 10 years. But it’s not only Shanghai that has seen growth. Traveling through any city in China reveals housing complexes being built one after another, huge rubble fields where villages once were and red symbols painted on block after block telling everyone that the area is condemned. The people I photographed live in one of these condemned alleys in Nanjing. Many of them have lived in this alley all their lives, and some are part of families that that lived there for over 120 years. Most of them don’t know where they will go and won’t be able to afford living in Nanjing once their homes are gone. They will be relocated to someplace outside of the city, though they don’t know where.

In the end many of these homes are in serious disrepair, so moving is a good thing. But seeing how these people live, the community they are losing, and the pressures that the growing economy are putting on them, it is easy to see that they are not prepared. In a way I felt like they were in a foreign land as much as I was while visiting China. The only difference is that their home is beginning to look a lot more like mine. In an inexplicable way it made me homesick. Not for home, but for a place without Starbucks, Wal-Mart, Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Chanel and Ferrari dealers. A place where there are more bicycles than cars and a business doesn’t have to be a chain. That’s when I realized I was ten years too late in my visit to China.

These small prints are reminiscent of a package shipped from China, surrounded by and peeking out from “craft paper” or the “Box” they might have been shipped in from China, reflecting the naïve impressions I took with me to China and left there.

In the end these photographs tell a simple story that is repeating itself everyday in China. As the country modernizes with astounding speed, its people try to keep up and find a place in this new China.