“Chen Hao Ran is also a very skilled classically-trained clarinet player, and was admitted as a youth into New York’s prestigious Juilliard School of Music; though he was ultimately unable to attend, as the American tuition costs were impossible for his working class Chinese family to maintain. “I toured China with an international youth orchestra”, he told me, “I took the Western conductor and other foreign musicians to eat famous Chinese meals, and they just sat there horrified, watching me chew on different meats and animal parts they simply couldn’t imagine eating”. We laughed a lot, together.”

Jie-Song Zhang, writer and photographer