Conversation: Peter Pan talks degeneration, exploration, identity, and photography
Interview by Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally published in Issue #1 “(始) BEGINNINGS”. Read it now on BLURB or as an abridged digital zine.
I like to think of Peter Pan (潘振华) as a kind of typhoon, or a throng of swirling clouds that’s about to become a typhoon. Or perhaps the French verb “bouleverser”, which means “to shake up”, “to convulse”, “to turn upside down”. Or perhaps that famous line from Cen Shan’s Tang dynasty poem about the winter snow:
忽如一夜春风来，千树万树梨花开。
Like a spring gale, come up in the night,
Blowing open the petals of ten thousand peartrees.
Peter Pan is sudden, and surprising, and striking. As a professional world traveller, he’ll crash-land into your life, rearrange everything, and then disappear as spontaneously as he first arrived, off to his next destination and leaving behind nothing but lasting memories and a sense of dismay. At least, that’s how he seems. I’ve never personally met him, but I know his siblings and I have been to his parents’ apartment.
I went to Chinese school with Peter’s younger brother and sister, Jonathan and Nina. I would see them in that small, fluorescently-lit room every Friday evening along with a dozen other six-year-olds, and we’d struggle through characters and texts. Throughout the years, the faces of the children sitting at those worn, graffitied wooden desks shifted and evolved — some dropping out, others moving away — and I lost track of them.
We reconnected as teenagers on Facebook, and that’s where I first saw Peter Pan pop up on my news feed. Nina liked this post. Jonathan was tagged in this photo. It’s not a name you forget. I saw snippets of a life led flippantly and nomadically, moving from place to place sporadically and seemingly without a care. When the website, peterpan.in, was launched, it all came together and began to make sense — the voyages, the cryptic captions. To a sheltered academic overachiever such as myself, his life is baffling: dropping out of school at the age of 16 to self study, then flying off to the other side of the world at 18 to roam indefinitely. After four years of restless adventuring — which, among other things, saw him meet a large collection of dubious personages, be arrested in Myanmar, and participate in a political protest — Peter decided to take a break in order to convert his illustrious experiences into a series of podcasts and sort through his vast library of photographs. An extremely successful Kickstarter campaign followed, and, after having spent numerous afternoons trawling through Peter’s site instead of doing homework, I realised that it was now time to reach out to him in person and find out more.
Peter turned out to be a little different from what I’d expected: a lot more breezily honest, and a lot less conventionally affable. But then again, what was I expecting? This twenty-two-year-old self-described homeless vagabond is at the very outset of what is about to be a long and glorious life, and is bound to have the provocative and contemplative personality to match his swashbuckling deeds. It’s an honor to be able to catch this mass of potentially explosive energy while it’s still going through its first stages. I knew him before he was mainstream. Here’s to the constantly exploring Peter Pan — let’s hope that he never stops being as boyishly curious as he is now, and let’s hope that the biopic they make for him in a hundred years’ time will get all the details right.
The following conversation was conducted via Google Docs in April and May of 2016.
Jiaqi Kang: Hi, Peter. Where are you at the moment? How is it like?
Peter Pan: Hi Jiaqi! I am currently on Graciosa Island in the Azores — the retreat after the madness. We made a little video of the place we have chosen to work in for the first months of this project, which you can find here.
JK: Tell us about the Chinese side of your family. How do you think this aspect of your culture has influenced you?
PP: I am half-American (grand-parents from Poland and Latvia, Jewish people who escaped before WWII) and half-Chinese. The Chinese half of my heritage has impacted me so tremendously it’s going to be hard to synthesize here.
The life of my grand-parents is a(n intense) book on its own — my Chinese grandfather (where the name ‘Pan’ comes from) turned 99 last week. His mind is still sharper than a razor — he’s a plasma physicist and goes to CERN every-so-often, still working on papers he should have published 30 years ago. I call him a modern-day hippie — he doesn’t use drugs (not even alcohol, though he was a heavy smoker for 30+ years) but raves daily about world peace and how love is the answer to human problems. I happen to agree.
He was accused of being a Chinese spy in the US and an American spy in China; he had to live through the McCarthy era in the US when China became communist and the Cultural Revolution in China as a high-level intellectual. He had to write self-criticisms daily during the Cultural Revolution and it seriously messed with his mind, and, as a result of this, carries great trauma that he still hasn’t resolved today. I inherited a lot of this, and my relationship to China is in large part my attempt at understanding and healing. I’m not even close to being done.
My Chinese grand-mother is a doctor (blend of Western and Chinese), an acupuncturist and has an understanding of nutrition that today’s hipsters can only dream of. I’m also a decent masseur thanks to her training when I was a kid. She was sent to the poorest areas of China during the Cultural Revolution — her tales about the state of people there and how she could heal them would raise hairs on your back.
She’s the pragmatic side of their relationship, while my grandfather is the ‘lost-in-his-own-world’ idealist. It is amazing to me how he could live so long being so ethically pure.
My mother grew up during the Cultural Revolution, so as she likes to say, she has ‘no culture’. I agree, and the result is pretty fun — she is blunt, jokes about anything and laughs loudly. She has few taboos (except perhaps drugs) and has a very result-oriented mind, by which I mean she isn’t cluttered by too many ideas about the ‘proper way’ of doing things that those of us with rich cultural history tend to carry around.
We also have dozens of relatives in China whom I make sure to visit when I’m there. They are as Chinese as it gets, and it’s always fun to go back and feast on 羊肉串.
Aspects of Chinese culture that influenced me? I wish.
The first country I went to when I left home was China. I spent an entire year exploring the country, trying to find my roots — only to realize they were nowhere to be found. Most of Chinese culture was decimated before my mother was even conscious.
The last place with vibrant, surviving Chinese culture, in my observation, is Taiwan. Of course, they have Japanese influence — which isn’t a bad thing. I found refuge there and was shown how arrogant and inconsiderate I had become during my time in China… by an American Taiwanophile friend of mine. Weird eh.
I know what I’m saying is offensive to Chinese nationals with a strong sense of patriotism. It’s time to wake up.
JK: It’s so interesting that you say that. The Cultural Revolution truly upended all of society and permanently destroyed countless aspects of our heritage, whether it was through the physical demolition of artefacts and architecture, or through a war of concepts. In a way, the persecution that drove intellectuals to suicide also took away whole libraries of potential artistic achievement and academic knowledge. Post-Cultural Revolution, the entire nation has been painstakingly trying to salvage the remnants of the past and repair it. Most people nowadays might see that era as a tangent in the long history of China that has now been “restored”, perhaps, to its rightful course. People tend not to dwell upon the chaos and anarchy of that decade, and focus on moving forward. Indeed, it’s been fifty years since Mao died — why don’t you think that what you call “genuine” Chinese culture has not returned to the mainland? Will it ever?
PP: I personally believe Taiwan is China’s best, if not only, chance at reviving its lost soul. The problem is two-fold with this idea:
- Taiwanese people couldn’t care less for China — looking towards Japan instead.
- China isn’t interested in actual healing. It’s interested in forgetting.
All this economic progress might seem great, but my concern is the soul of China. Where is it?
I believe there is hope. I don’t believe the rightful course has been restored — that course is long dead. The hope now is a clear-eyed view of the past, healing and understanding… which isn’t possible when authority is afraid of it. Censorship in China is pretty much at an all-time high. Their internet is a thing of its own — they live in a huge bubble.
Only with a clear-eyed view of the past can we actually go forward — and the generation that knew China before all of this nonsense has few survivors left.
JK: Legend has it that you were so 淘气 as a kid that your Chinese teacher, Ms. Chu, once threw your backpack out of the door in the middle of class and ordered you to leave. How true is this anecdote? Does it, in some way, showcase your personality?
PP: Good research! This was pretty common. I remembered Chinese class as the most entertaining one of the week. We’d go and throw cherries at our teachers, all bring our Nintendo DS and play Mario Kart, or just read texts with heavy accents pretending it was ancient poetry. Fun times.
I was kicked out of the same Chinese school not once, but twice. The director and her daughter are nonetheless still good friends. Chinese school was in the same building as my middle school. So on Friday nights, the Chinese teacher would run after me; on Monday mornings, the Latin teacher would throw my backpack out of the room and try to catch me in class.
Showcase of my personality? Let’s say I like to have fun being irreverent — but sometimes I go too far. I later learned to give people the respect they thought they deserved — I did it for two years to get the grades I needed to get out of school early. Since, I’ve made sure I can speak as I am to all, without false masks.
JK: False masks are indeed a bother. They seem to cover every aspect of social interaction and can help to fuel toxic hypocrisy. This is especially prevalent in China, where the concept of 面子 is so complex that it is untranslatable. But are there times in which masks and the maintaining of 面子 can be positive to society? Or times in which lack of such social instruments have been seriously detrimental? I can certainly imagine getting into massive trouble for doing what you did, and just the thought of it stresses me to no end. How did you deal with the guilt that comes with irreverence (if you felt any, that is) and the punishments?
PP: I feel no guilt for doing what I believe is right — as long as it isn’t selfish. Keep in mind, people will often call you selfish for doing what is right for you — simply because they would have been too afraid to do it themselves.
Are you responsible for other’s ideas about what you should do? Whose life are you leading?
As for 面子: when you are involved in lies, reverting to truth implies the hurt of revealing and illusions breaking. This is painful, but not doing it is either delaying a pain that will be greater in the future or committing to a meaningless life.
How important is your 面子? Would you sell your soul to look good?
Of course, not to be too extreme, there is subtlety here as well. Tact is important to keep peace. I suggest a trip to Taiwan — preferably long enough to mix with the locals — to see what unbroken communication and context culture looks like.
JK: You seem to launch yourself into everything head-on, brimming with confidence. You said that you professionally taught classes of adults with, I presume, next to no teacher training. Please teach me how to avoid the seeping sense of uncertainty and the crippling fear of failure that comes with such spontaneity! I doubt myself even when choosing an outfit in the morning. It’d be of great help.
PP: I know what I’m capable of. I sometimes doubt myself too — I just refuse to let that get in the way. It’s important to come to terms with death. You will die. How do you wish to live?
Do something everyone already knows will work, and you strengthen a status quo that is already too strong. That status quo preys on fear. Do something people think is impossible… and you contribute meaning to society. Doesn’t matter if you fail.
I tried to launch a website when I was sixteen. I realized I knew little of what I wanted to talk about. So I stopped and lived. Five years later, I’m back on that dream.
Perhaps not all is possible, but the only way to figure out what is is to try with all your heart, mind and body.
Just try. I love your current venture with this magazine. Go through with it, do it incorporating as many dreams and ideals as possible. I believe in you.
JK: Going off at the age of 18 to travel the world alone, with such limited resources, is certainly a daunting adventure. Was there a specific instant of clarity that really pushed you to make that leap of faith?
PP: Not really! I had actually spent two years studying on my own prior to leaving my home. I left because I could feel my mother’s angst — self-studying had been the most important mind-forming years of my life, but she felt like I was wasting them. She was very worried for my future and I knew I had to give her space. I originally moved to Beijing to self-study!
I arrived, went to sleep and awoke the next day with a vision of black lungs. I felt like I couldn’t breathe and my lungs were on fire. I researched solutions to this problem, and came to the conclusion that I had to buy an air pollution filtering machine. The machine cost 450 dollars, and I had arrived with 400 dollars in my pocket — and I still had to live for the coming month!
So I called an old friend in Beijing who was managing an English school. I started working for him the very next day, teaching adults already fluent in English specialized subjects, igniting conversations for them to practice their language skills and acquire new ones.
After a month of working there, I earned enough to get the machine, a bunch of N95 air masks (the usual ones are no use) and still had so much to spare I didn’t know what to do with it.
I tried going back to studying, but even when pointing the machine towards my head or sleeping with air masks on, my mind was so unclear and my memory so impaired that it was impossible to learn. My stress levels were off the hook.
So I worked an additional two months, brought a friend over from the UK to help him start a new life, got him a job at the same company and gave him the private students I had and left Beijing to explore China. When I would run out of funds completely I would return to Beijing, work a few weeks, then leave again. That’s how it all started.
I explored China for an entire year, then started expanding across different regions of Asia, the Europe and the Middle-East. Just trying to understand the world while making friends on this little blue planet we call ‘ours’.
JK: I agree with that part about the pollution. When I was in Beijing last Christmas, the Air Quality Index was in the high 500s. To put that into perspective, air in Switzerland usually hovers around the twenty mark. But we put on those uncomfortably humid air masks and did what we had to do. I’m sensing some cynicism towards China from you, though — where do you think that comes from? Did you have it already before you travelled there and went through the experiences you’ve just described, or did it arise from later reflection?
PP: Hm. Traveling in China made me much more racist — I know that’s intense to hear. Growing up in Geneva, I was of course completely egalitarian and loving of all cultures. That’s how I was when I got to China.
I have a propensity to go straight to the taboo, the dark parts of society that people try to keep under the rugs. Doing this in China made me understand many things I cannot unsee, and I still haven’t fully recovered.
I see it as the most inhumane society on earth, that I have visited, at least. People who aren’t directly related to you there are not even considered human. I believe that’s why capitalism and communism work so well in unison — easy to make money from people when you have zero concern about their wellbeing. Food safety scandals are a great example of this.
Anything for more money, because it’s the only thing worth living for. Love, community? Empty words in China. Friendship? Often another word for business connections, a way to get something.
JK: I understand what you mean. When people say that the new god of the modern age is money, it is especially resonant in China where most people are atheists and truly worship no deity. Happiness is sought through success; success is sought through profit; profit is sought through any way possible. However, I don’t think that it’s racist to despise such a system — it has nothing to do with race, and a lot to do with the consequences of history and the desperate desire for China to re-emerge from the turbulent 20th century as a capitalist superpower. As Deng Xiaoping, mastermind of the economic reforms in the eighties, famously said, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” As economic growth is set to slow down from here on, let’s hope that people can stop, look around, and reflect upon the artificial values of contemporary Chinese society.
PP: Very pragmatic of you, Deng Xiaoping… but the cat’s color matters to me. I’d be worried of having a black cat inside my house in eighties China, because no reliable power would mean I’d be likely to step on it and hurt it.
I think there’s big economic trouble looming ahead for China, and it’s likely why Xi has been working so hard at consolidating power — though power’s main goal tends to be more power.
As for reflecting upon artificial values… let’s hope. What I see is that people in China know this — but they simply don’t see what else to fight for — what else is there?
Meaning lives in society. In interaction. In love, fun, friendship, caring and courting. For that to thrive, you need to have meaningful things to talk about. To have meaningful things to talk about, you need an open society — one that isn’t afraid of looking at itself, naked, in the mirror.
There’s a reason people in China just want to leave. They understand the state of society there. But I’m going back. My Chinese name is 潘振华.
JK: Confucius said: “三人行，必有我师焉。择其善者而从之，其不善者而改之。When I walk along with two others, they may serve me as my teachers. I will select their good qualities and follow them, their bad qualities and avoid them.” You’ve evidently walked along with a great range of interesting people from all over the world. What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned from one of them?
PP: Persistence, from the crazy Russian genius with whom I shared what I consider to be my first real trip outside of China. He was intent on getting somewhere, and simply never second-guessed, kept pushing forward, immediately finding alternative solutions when one wasn’t working. He had one goal, and all his efforts were entirely directed towards it — and that made him incredibly powerful.
I came away from that trip much stronger. I disregarded opportunities to complain and was much more aligned with my goals. I did understand, however, that he had one missing key in his life: compassion. He doesn’t care for people… yet. I intend to change that for him — power is meaningless without love.
I tend to become like the people I am with. This is so powerful that when I was younger, an afternoon engaged with someone would result in me BEING that person for hours after. I would think like them, even see my physical face as theirs. I would need to detox afterwards, by spending time alone. I felt like any time with someone was a form of intoxication.
This was very useful in many ways. My life is about people, and being able to become like them allows me to understand from the inside. Compassion on steroids — the best way of learning, for me.
I’ve since become more comfortable with this ability and I use it more than it uses me. Think about it — I’ve nearly never been alone since I was 18. The key is to find the center of the storm — who you are when everything else is changing.
JK: Henri Cartier-Bresson famously wrote that “To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression.“ As such an extensive traveller, it’s safe to assume that most of your photographs aren’t staged, and are instead more likely to capture what Cartier-Bresson was after, which he described as “the decisive moment”… Do you see yourself as a sort of hunter-gatherer who pursues images, or are they more of a coincidence — a byproduct of your general experiences?
PP: Photography was born out of my desire to share what I was experiencing, and as a form of diary — I simply didn’t have the time or will to keep a written one. I was working, studying and traveling — all at the same time. I bought my first camera for that purpose, and it had the simple task of documenting my experience, in high quality.
It took a year of saving to get it, and I meticulously compared different models in an Excel spreadsheet in extreme detail, before choosing which one I wanted. I then traveled the world for over a year with it.
I came back to Switzerland that summer — just like every summer. I found my father’s old camera there — a crummy Canon 1100D worth a third of the price of my camera. I found a super small prime lens (the 50mm F1.8 ii lens), worth 100 dollars, attached it to try it out for fun. I then put a tab of LSD in my mouth, and stepped out the door shortly after sunset.
That lens, on nearly the simplest DSLR you can get, was what made me fall in love with photography. The prime, manual focus, wide-aperture lens, combined with my sensitive state, resulted in a whole night of experimentation. That night, photography went beyond documentation, becoming art.
I believe that specific lens was slightly dysfunctional — I could never quite get what I was seeing with my eyes represented accurately on the camera. The colors were a bit off, the focus was very hard to get… so I had to put in time and effort to take each picture, instead of having the camera do it all for me. This time and effort made me realize how much impact the composition of the picture had on the final image — how each picture is actually a meeting of reality and creation. It’s about what you choose to show, and how you choose to show it — there is no such thing as objective photography! We choose what we show, and how we show it!
With this renewed breath into photography as both art and documentation, I left for my third year of travel.
So photography for me was really born out of a desire to share my experience and chronicle it, but the experience of taking 60+ thousand pictures in so many places with so many people certainly has made it mean more to me than that.
I have an album of my selected pictures on my smartphone, and I often show it to people on the road. Their reactions mean a lot to me and it makes me understand how people look at them.
JK: One of my favorite pictures of yours is one you took in Oman, I believe, of two men smiling up at the camera from what looks like a boat at sea. The use of white is absolutely stunning, not to mention the artful perspective similar to that in Paul Cézanne’s Mont Saint-Victoire with Large Pine (1887): the image has depth and three-dimensionality upon first view, but when parts of the white-tiled deck are blocked, it suddenly becomes dizzyingly flat — just like how the foliage of the post-impressionist’s pine tree, initially in the foreground, melts into the faraway sky when its trunk is cropped away. Another parallel between the two works is those dots of red that contrast against, and help to emphasize, the vast green hues and without which the beauty of the images would not be as exhilarating… Okay, I’m done gushing now. Can you tell us about the story behind this photograph and what led you to take it?
PP: First off, thanks a lot Jiaqi. It means a lot to me. I love seeing people over-interpret my pictures hahaha. (I over-think them too.)
That photograph was taken on a ferry from Masirah island back to mainland Oman.
We had hitch-hiked quite a distance to get there with my Taiwanese girlfriend, on an empty, single highway with mountains and the desert on one side, the ocean on the other. The ferry was free as we brought no car on it, and there were very few people on it. There were some camels, though.
The Omanis were, of course, fascinated to see us. A mixed fellow and his Taiwanese girlfriend… bound to get the locals intrigued.
I was wearing the Omani dishdasha that an Omani friend had just gifted me in the beautiful Wadi Bani Khalid, where, the night prior, we had camped in a valley of white rocks with crystal-clear water that was home to some of those fish that eat the dead skin from your skin — the kind that, in Southeast Asia, they put in a pool into which ‘backpackers’ (i.e. tourists) can pay for sticking their feet.
I was taking pictures on the ferry with the camera that made me fall in love with photography — the simple DSLR with the prime lens.
I met those two Omani guys, spoke for a bit making them laugh with the few words of Arabic I had learned, asked them for a photo. I was about to take it, then lowered the camera. I just saw the opportunity offered by the geometry of the deck of the ship’s second floor and asked the guys to get on both sides. Framed, then shot the picture. Here’s another you might enjoy, from that very same boat ride.
I do a lot of what I call ‘urban geometry’ photography. Playing with artificial shapes to make picture look like paintings.
JK: Do you think you’ll ever settle down? Is this a question everyone asks you?
PP: Yes! By which I mean I am often asked this question. I just settled down for this project! For a few months, but…
Here’s the thing. I believe the life you lead — whichever it is — reinforces itself. It is natural to become entrenched in our ways of being, and this is not necessarily a bad thing — it all depends on whether you are enjoying it deeply — physically, mentally and spiritually.
The thing with travel the way I do it though, is that ‘travel’ is really a false container. It’s really many ways of life, experienced without becoming too used to any.
I want to be able to settle, and I am doing it right now. But I want to maintain this freedom of packing up to explore, only to come back for ‘work’ (i.e. sharing) — traveling with a portable studio and a fixed studio in one or more homes.
Really, even before I traveled I would go through wild life experiences, cycles of a few months (for example experiments with polyphasic sleep schedules of 2 hours of sleep a day), living on a tree, meditating for entire days, etc.
You don’t need to physically move to travel either. Watching a movie, listening to an amazing album lying down on your bed with your eyes closed, meditating, taking a psychedelic, or exploring the internet. These are all travel experiences.
JK: In a way, this process of different ways of life that you’ve described is experienced on a daily basis by everyone in the world. As we navigate distinct spheres: school, work, friends, and family, we learn to behave by different sets of rules — thus, to be different people — depending on which environment we inhabit. At the end of the day, though, we return home, a sort of middle ground that can unite these different worlds. What you’re doing is essentially a much larger-scale version of that.
PP: Cool! Yeah, the key there is the homelessness — the absolute and complete immersion, all while being your truest and fullest self possible. It’s like an experiment in what it’s like to be you in the wildest scenarios imaginable, all around the globe.
My goal is really to encompass the human experience, what it means to be human. But I’m also just a human junkie: I love people.
I’ve learned as much about the world as I’ve learned about myself through all this — and it’s only just begun.
JK: What can we expect from you in the coming year from July onwards?
PP: Oh boy. July is precisely as far as I can see right now — which is quite something for me! I used to only see the next week or two of my life.
What you can expect however, is the unexpected. If I don’t even know what I’ll be doing, chances are it’ll be worth tuning in!
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang. Medium article edited and uploaded by Jiaqi Kang.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
WEB: sinetheta.net
BLOG: sinethetamagazine.tumblr.com
FACEBOOK: facebook.com/sinethetamagazine
INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/sinethetamag
PINTEREST: pinterest.com/sinethetamag
DONATE: paypal.me/jiaqikang
