October 2006

INTERNATIONAL NEWS

Back Roads and Bus Stations: Alum Captures Essence of China's 32 Provinces

Tom Carter in Tibet   photo by Eelco Florijn

“I’m as broke now as I was after college,” says Tom Carter, SPA/BA ’97. “I live out of a backpack, wear the same tattered clothes every day, don’t bathe for days or a week at a time (not by choice), have grown a beard, subsist on street food, and sleep in cardboard boarding rooms or the floors of bus stations.”

That’s quite a life to lead after college, but Carter is enjoying every minute of living in China since traveling there in 2004 after backpacking through South America. Carter’s new goal is to explore all 32 of China’s provinces, a rare undertaking he hopes to accomplish by this winter.

Carter has been living off the income he makes as a free-lance photographer and journalist. He contributes to some of China’s largest foreign publications, including the Beijing Today newspaper, Beijing Excursion Guide, and China Daily online. He isn’t backpacking just for the adventure, but to share the Chinese culture with Americans by compiling his writings and photographs in a coffee table book he hopes to publish.

“Like the time when I…” Carter has stacks of stories on the tip of his tongue. For instance, he was hiking through Changbaishan

Aba Woman   photo by Tom Carter

Mountain near North Korea when he came across a desolate, frozen lake. Carter decided to walk straight across it, “but then, out of nowhere, two North Korean soldiers had their machine guns pointed literally in [his] face,” Carter recalls. He had unknowingly crossed the border to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

In addition to stories about Chinese people and culture, the San Francisco native also has many personal tales, too. During his first year in China, Carter recalls being a few days away from death when he contracted encephalitis, which causes an inflammation of the brain. He blames himself for not getting vaccinated before he went abroad, like the U.S. State Department warns all travelers to do. “Dying is really painful, and it sucked at the time, but now it's just another good story to tell,” says Carter, who seems to let nothing come between him and his goal.

That first year he arrived to China, Carter taught English to 1,500 first through fifth graders by himself at a primary school in a small province in East China. He remembers these students fondly. “They were all like my little best friends. Every day when I walked into the schoolyard I was met with a thousand smiles and hugs and hand-holding, everyone calling out my name.” A year later, he relocated to Beijing where he worked as a business English trainer for multinational corporations. Even though Carter enjoys teaching, he says, it served as a means to an end, to travel the world.

Sewing Circle  photo by Tom Carter

Those who knew Carter from 1994-1997 during his AU days remember him as the outspoken conservative who stirred up controversy through his articles in The Eagle, his racey WVAU radio show on Friday nights, and the media circus he created on campus in 1995 when he drafted the “Pledge of Allegiance Bill” as a member of the General Assembly. At age 22, Carter, assistant campaign manager for the Pat Buchanan presidential campaign, seemed to be well on his way to a life of politics, but that all changed after graduation when he ventured to remove himself “from the fenced-off way of American thinking and learn about the world and its people first hand” in 2000.

In the Mandarin language, America is translated to Meiguo, which literally means “beautiful land,” says Carter. His travels throughout China have offered him multiple perspectives about the world, but the most valuable thing he says he's learned is that the rest of the world may look to America because of its beautiful, rich culture and environment. “We ought not forget that the USA is a society only as beautiful as the people and customs from all over the world that comprise it,” Carter says.

-Tara Shlimowitz ‘08

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