Eight students from all over the world sat around a narrow wooden desk at a youth hostel in Shenyang, in the heart of China’s industrial northeast, waiting patiently for the weekend’s storytelling workshop to begin. Meanwhile, we five instructors found our seats in the back of the room, along with a number of Out of Eden Walk project partners and a slew of winter coats. The temperature outside was falling fast. On the whiteboard at the front of the room, a leftover scribble in Chinese read:
用开放和包容的心态去认识世界和自己: Use an open and inclusive mind to understand the world and yourself.
Our New York University Shanghai group has convened to learn about slow journalism from Paul Salopek, a National Geographic Explorer and storyteller. Paul’s Out of Eden Walk project follows the path of human migration from the Horn of Africa to the tip of South America. At walking pace, Paul is collecting and sharing stories about life that are missed in the rush of daily news—step by step, he’s assembling a unique record of humankind at the start of a new millennium.
NYU Shanghai’s Community-Engaged Learning Office, which brings students out of the classroom and into the community to learn through direct engagement, organized the workshop. Each student was asked to replicate Paul’s slow-storytelling approach: Identify a complete stranger in Shenyang, listen attentively to his or her story, and write a publication-worthy profile. All in a single weekend.
Sensing the students’ nervousness, Paul reminded everyone, with the assured wisdom of long experience, that “the best way to build trust with a stranger is to be genuinely excited and curious to talk to and learn from them. Good interviews are conversations, not interrogations,” he said. He also shared advice about how to talk to strangers in a humane, compassionate way: Walk up to them with a friendly smile and empty hands. Don’t settle for an easy answer. Follow up with more questions the next day. “I don’t want a technical biography,” he explained. “I want to know the shape of their heart. I want you to honor their story.”
But what does it mean to honor another person’s story? We carried this question into the afternoon, as the students embarked on their hunt for stories in Shenyang’s streets.
Student Yawen Zheng gets to know a street vendor at a night market in Shenyang.
Raven Cao
Because of her interest in spirituality, Papang Ruckpanich, a media, culture, and communication student from Bangkok, decided to try and profile a priest at a local Taoist temple. But she faced a challenge: “He wasn’t very open and didn’t talk much about his past,” she said, adding that he didn’t want to be named. “Every time I asked him a personal question, he talked about Taoism instead.” Papang came to an understanding that religious leaders often minimize the self in order to emphasize spiritual practice. “It’s his job to teach people about Taoism, but I wanted to learn about him. So I got his WeChat and went back to visit him that afternoon and the next morning,” Papang said. “The second time, I spent two hours drinking tea with him and was able to know him as a person, not just a religious figurehead. He told me he had a very difficult childhood, and I realized he had struggles too.”
Thisis the difference between traditional journalism and slow storytelling. Instead of starting with a topic, interviewing subjects for pithy quotes, and then moving on to the next breaking news, you drink tea at the temple and listen. You sit with the Taoist priest for several hours and visit him again the next day, trusting that if you’re patient and genuinely curious, rich, complex, human stories will emerge, as they always do.
Reflecting on her time at the temple, Papang said, “the more you slow down, the more open you are to things around you. It changed the way I look at how to tell stories. I learned how to see the small picture and connect it with the bigger picture. I learned how to start with the person.”
* * *
After two days of collecting stories, the students feverishly wrote their profiles, working late into the final night of the workshop. “Fellow toilers in the trenches of the story,” Paul called them, as he raced toward his own deadline. Then, on our last morning in Shenyang, we listened to the once sheepish students read their profiles with a lilting pride in their voices.
Papang Ruckpanich (left), a student from Bangkok, discusses her profile of a priest at a Taoist temple in Shenyang with instructor Chunhao Qian.
Will Shan
We heard about the “gossip king” of 14th Latitude Street, who turned a public street corner into a boisterous family table where everyone had a seat.
We heard about the lesbian couple who designed a café together, each object in the place a homage to their budding relationship.
We heard about the lifelong learner, who at the age of 70, now studies history as a way of understanding her divorce.
We understood that this is what it means to honor someone’s story.
To honor is first to seek to understand someone as a complex, unique individual. And then—only then—to share that understanding with the world.
As the weekend closed, Yawen Zheng, an economics student from Chengdu, shared an insight, “I have never gone to a new city and spent my time in such a way. I learned to notice people, not just places.”
* * *
As educators, our weekend in Shenyang was not only a masterclass on slow storytelling but also a reminder that learning can be found in our senses and in the streets, every day. True learning is a somatic experience. It’s one thing to read an academic paper and write a response. It’s another thing entirely to look into someone's eyes and feel the weight of doing their story justice.
“In class, we intellectualize—this is equality, this is poverty,” Papang said. “But when you are actually there in that place, they aren’t just words anymore. Being there in Shenyang, it was so different from the picture I generalized from our readings. It was not as clear as the books made it out to be. I saw more life, more humanness, more messiness.”
Papang Ruckpanich (left), a student from Bangkok, discusses her profile of a priest at a Taoist temple in Shenyang with instructor Chunhao Qian.
Will Shan
We heard about the “gossip king” of 14th Latitude Street, who turned a public street corner into a boisterous family table where everyone had a seat.
We heard about the lesbian couple who designed a café together, each object in the place a homage to their budding relationship.
We heard about the lifelong learner, who at the age of 70, now studies history as a way of understanding her divorce.
We understood that this is what it means to honor someone’s story.
To honor is first to seek to understand someone as a complex, unique individual. And then—only then—to share that understanding with the world.
As the weekend closed, Yawen Zheng, an economics student from Chengdu, shared an insight, “I have never gone to a new city and spent my time in such a way. I learned to notice people, not just places.”
* * *
As educators, our weekend in Shenyang was not only a masterclass on slow storytelling but also a reminder that learning can be found in our senses and in the streets, every day. True learning is a somatic experience. It’s one thing to read an academic paper and write a response. It’s another thing entirely to look into someone's eyes and feel the weight of doing their story justice.
“In class, we intellectualize—this is equality, this is poverty,” Papang said. “But when you are actually there in that place, they aren’t just words anymore. Being there in Shenyang, it was so different from the picture I generalized from our readings. It was not as clear as the books made it out to be. I saw more life, more humanness, more messiness.”
The smiles say it all: Paul Salopek, students, and instructors celebrate after an intense, and rewarding, storytelling workout.
Charlie Ma
Experiential educators Netta Wang and William Shan are teachers with the Program on Creativity + Innovation at New York University Shanghai.
