From China With Film

Ho got photos, slides, and 16mm film.                                           screen shot

Call it Finding Missionary China, to borrow from a wonderful documentary whose story it resembles, called Finding Vivian Maier (http://somanyinterestingthings.blogspot.com/2012/09/wit-and-surprise-and-playful-spirit.html). It's the tale of one Joseph Ho, who, like the protagonist of the other, was in the right place at the right time. In this case, the place was San Diego's Chinese Historical Museum and the time was the moment an elderly man walked in with artifacts from pre-revolutionary China. The man's parents had been missionaries there and, as it turned out, had taken many photos of their sojourn in that country from the 1920s to the early 1950s, as had another family to whom the man introduced him. "Some of the most striking images were of American family life in China in the '30s and '40s," Ho says. What makes these pictures so unique among the many taken during that period, explains University of Michigan associate history professor Par Cassel, is that most include details of location and subject. Until now, he says, this particular aspect of Chinese history got short shrift, "seen as a branch of church history rather than Chinese history" (story, video): http://global.umich.edu/2015/03/forgotten-photos-and-film-provide-unique-view-of-china/