The Right to Bear Witness
Tackling the loaded topic of gun rights in America with fresh eyes
When Yue Wu first came to the U.S., it was a strange place—specifically Ames, Iowa. It got cold, and in winter the flat expanse of prairie was covered in a blanket of snow. In the mountains of Wu’s home, where the Jialing empties into the Yangtze, it rains a lot but rarely snows.
Even when her school, Iowa State University, was in full swing, Ames seemed tiny and empty compared to the streets of Chongqing where some eight million people live in towering apartment blocks.
And aside from the veggie burgers, the food was much better back home, too. But Yue Wu felt lucky to have landed in such a foreign place. She made friends and discovered her calling at school: Photojournalism. The feelings of culture clash subsided as the novel became new routines.
Then Sandy Hook Elementary was splashed on every television, and gun control was on everyone’s lips. Mass shootings don’t happen in China, where even this year’s massacre at a Kunming train station was perpetrated by knife-wielding maniacs. Kids there have war toys, but people don’t keep a pistol in the house. Having grown up in a radically different environment, Wu had to start from scratch just to wrap her head around the second amendment debate.
“America. This is a country where you’re allowed to have a gun,” says Wu. “Whatever you think about gun control, it’s not going to happen right away. So what do the gun owners think about those shootings? I started to ask questions of my professors, of my roommates. Do you guys have guns? Do you feel safe around guns?”
No one was packing, but her professor knew a family who was open to have her over and discuss their own beliefs. They hung out and talked, they went to a gun store and Wu met other people who shared their values. Bo, the five-year-old son, showed off his small arsenal.
The family’s basic stance was that everyone should have a knowledge of firearms, and a profound respect for what they can do. Know how to handle them safely, know how to be comfortable around them, know the inherent dangers. Wu fell out of touch with Bo’s family but there were always others happy to weigh in.
The personal conversations Wu had afforded more nuance than the polemics employed by public figures on both sides. She photographed the Iowa State trap and skeet club blowing clay pigeons out of the sky, and met a hunter who took her tramping through the woods. Everyday people doing everyday things.
All of the rifles and pistols, and bullet casings hitting the ground, didn’t intimidate Wu. Her father was a policeman who brought his service weapon home after work. But she chose to never squeeze the trigger herself.
“I don’t want to,” she says. “I’m not confident enough to try to fire one. I don’t think I should be touching guns.”
America’s a large place and small town life in the heartland is just one pocket of the national fabric. In some ways it’s as different from urban areas as it is from China. Wu graduated and took an internship with The Washington Post. Editors sent her out to cover monster truck rallies, demolition derbies and county fairs, far away from Iowa State but somehow closer to a particular vision people associate with this country. Fresh out of college and working for a major paper — everything was going great.
Then one night a series of explosions erupted in the street outside her apartment. At first they sounded like the firecrackers she grew up hearing, until she realized that this wasn’t China. This was America where people have guns. Someone could be seen from the balcony laying on the sidewalk.
“I went out with a camera and I had people yelling at me, ‘Who are you? Why the F are you here. You better F off before I knock you out.’”
Blind instinct sent her hurtling into a completely different reality of what guns mean in America. Already rattled by her first taste of inner city violence Wu was sent reeling further when the neighbors turned hostile. No one wanted to be photographed. No one wanted to talk to her.
Wu is tiny. People think that she’s a high school student, not a twenty-five year old photojournalist. She’s Chinese and speaks English with a pronounced accent. In the past these things helped make people feel at ease. It made security guards let her sneak onto stages and behind the scenes. In the middle of the night on a corner in DC, with a man laying in a pool of blood, the novelty of her being from different country wasn’t winning her any favors.
Shootings like Newtown make the headlines and stick for weeks. People can’t wrap their heads around how someone could walk into an elementary school and gun down children, while everyday kids who are not much older are being gunned down on street corners and in parks, in parked cars or sitting on their front steps.
Wu didn’t understand the disconnect between what she had seen on TV and the reality which has taken hold in poor neighborhoods across the country. She didn’t know that people could be horrified by Newtown and ignore what was happening in neighborhoods like hers. She didn’t know that people don’t want to be identified as potential witnesses. She didn’t know that in the U.S., some victims seem to be worth more attention than others.
At the crime scene, someone asked if she got paid more for covering breaking news. There was no way of knowing whether the paper would even run the pictures, and if they did there was no bonus pay.
“They said — and it really made me start to cry when they said it — they said, then don’t even bother to take the photos because nobody will report it because it’s a black person who got shot,” says Wu. “That really hurt me so much. I’d never heard of this. I was so shocked.”
After a sleepless night Wu brought her photos to the editor. She apologized for not getting a shot of the victim, who survived. The editor chastised her for putting herself in a dangerous situation by chasing after gunshots. The Post didn’t pick up the story.
That night there was another shooting outside of her apartment. One second she was on the balcony with her roommates and the next second they were inside laying on the floor. No one was hit this time, but she could’t keep from thinking that she’d only gotten home from work half an hour ago, that if she’d been any later she would have been on the street when it happened.
Even with back-to-back shootings and the cold dose of America’s racial legacy, Wu hasn’t wavered on neutrality when it comes to the right to bear arms. Keep them out of hands of criminals and the mentally ill, she says, but beyond that she refuses to judge someone who keeps a gun.
If you’re going to make them available, if it’s legal to own them, then make sure people know how to use them and how to store and use them safely. People need to respect the intractable damage they can do, and accept the responsibility of owning one. People need to appreciate the power they bring, and know whether it’s something they can control.
Her photo project will continue, with a narrowed focus on kids who grow up with guns. She wants to compare the opinions of a five-year-old like Bo with a ten-year-old, and with a teenager, and she wants to see how boys handle guns compared to how girls do.
Her tenure at The Washington Post ended this summer and Wu has struck out as a freelancer for as long as her visa allows. She’s already worked for the San Francisco Chronicle and picked up several awards working for student publications back in Iowa.
Being away from family has been a strain, as has confronting the ins and outs of a still-mysterious culture on a daily basis. Life would be easier at home. Her grandmother — her best friend — is there. The food is better. But being a journalist in China is another matter.
But Wu has been impressed with work being done by foreign photojournalists in her own country, and despite the problems and needing to swallow her own fear, it’s where she should be working.
“In the beginning I really wanted to stay in the United States because of all the censorship by the Chinese government, and what I learned in the United States was different than what I knew about journalism in China,” Wu says.
“So I feel that America has a really good environment to be a journalist but I’ve actually kinda started to change my mind lately. I always visit home once a year so I also did stories when I visited home and I started to get the sense that I’m doing some stories that relate to me as a person. I understand.”
