Getting up close for the real story

Over 20 years ago, photographer Ma Hongjie broke into a cold sweat as he hopped a freight train for the first time with a group of street monkey performers bound for other towns.

It was getting dark. To avoid the railway police, the men slipped toward a locomotive that had just rolled onto the track. Zhu Siwang, one of the performers, climbed quickly onto the roof of a carriage. Above him ran a 27,000-volt power line. At that distance, a person could be electrocuted and burned to ash.

Monkey performing was always a dangerous trade. Live animals were not allowed on passenger trains, and tickets cost money, so the performers often hid on freight trains with their monkeys and luggage. In the 12 years Ma followed them, he heard stories of men cut down by trains, legs crushed or sliced off, and monkeys killed when freight cars braked suddenly.

Two months later, near the Chinese New Year, Ma climbed onto another freight train with the performers on their way home. The winter night was bitterly cold. He lay in an open car loaded with ore, unable to sleep, waiting for morning sunlight to touch his frozen body.

When the driver learned that Ma was a journalist, he invited him into the warm locomotive. Ma thanked him, but stayed where he was.

"If I had gone, they would have felt the distance immediately," Ma said. "They would not have trusted me anymore. I would rather freeze there. I had to be with them."

That choice changed what he could see. At first, the monkey performers were wary of him. But after he rode the trains with them, followed them through streets and towns, and slept rough beside them, they began to open up. He visited their families. They introduced him to other performers. The story widened because he had stayed close.

That is the kind of presence Ma believes cannot be replaced, even in the age of artificial intelligence. AI can generate polished images and fluent text in seconds. "But it cannot reproduce the sense of being there," Ma said. "AI only generates according to your instructions."

A story in the real world does not follow instructions. Years after Ma first followed the monkey performers, the trade that had seemed doomed did fade. But their knowledge of monkeys found an unexpected second life. Many turned to macaque breeding. By 2021, the daughter and son-in-law of monkey performer Yang Lingui were raising more than 100 monkeys on a small farm.

For Ma, the change was unimaginable. That, to him, is why the scene still matters. Reality keeps escaping the patterns people set for it.

"Reality is more absurd than fiction," Ma said. "Fiction still follows a certain logic. Reality does not."