Daily Bruin goes to China

Credit to the UCLA student newspaper, which sent a reporter and photographer to China for two weeks for a series of stories that began today on UCLA's presence there as a brand name and contractor of cheap labor. Today's stories in the Daily Bruin include reporter Audrey Kuo's personal description of the trip.

In April, Jessica Chou and I pitched a photojournalism series analyzing the UCLA label’s role in China from two different angles: from the perspective of the consumers who could afford to buy the high-end clothing sold in the Chinese domestic market and from the view of the factory employees who worked long hours to produce the clothes sold both in China and the U.S.

Though we had an idea of what we were looking for, Jessica and I also knew that we wouldn’t be able to fully understand our story until we got to China.

We visited UCLA boutiques in Shanghai and Beijing, and we also spent a week stationed in Shenzhen, meeting with workers in the city’s industrial Longgang District, as well as in neighboring Zhongshan and Dongguan.

When we began speaking with people – factory employees, workers’ rights activists, students, store clerks, the chatty taxi drivers who shuttled us around – we became more and more aware of how connected the different aspects of our story were.

We also realized that our own identities were going to play a role in our narration.

Nearly everyone we spoke to asked where we were from, and everyone who asked had an opinion about whether we were authentically Chinese – Jessica was born in Taiwan, but left before she was 6 months old, and I was raised in California by parents who had immigrated here from Taiwan in their 20s.

The funding for such journalism comes from the Bridget O'Brien Scholarship Foundation, named for a photojournalist alum of the Daily Bruin who died last year in a car crash while working in Ohio. Her parents created the foundation to sponsor photojournalism by the Daily Bruin. Later this year, the Bruin says, it will carry stories on the sex worker industry in Thailand.