Jianbing

Part of the 2018 The China Project photo contest.

An old migrant worker running a food cart around Dongzhimen station as I was walking to Sanlitun. I took this photo in 2016 on my first trip back to China in six years. There was a tension in the air that I hadn’t felt before in my previous visits. From talking to migrant workers like her I learned that, with the combination of stricter law enforcement and rising costs of living, life for those on the city’s margins had started to become precarious and difficult to bear.