Mark Leong Photography

Chicago, 1987. Kids in Chinatown play Chinese jump rope

Boston, 1988. Lion dancers perform in Chinatown for the Lunar New Year

Kunming, 1998. A couple in a hard sleeper compartment

Taishan, 1990. My cousin makes offerings to our ancestors to let them know I returned to the family village

Guangzhou, 1997. Newly arrived young people from the countryside emerge from the train station, looking for jobs in the big city but sometimes falling victim to thieves, cheats and kidnappers

Shenyang, 1998. Ceremony for new traffic patrol members in front of the city’s Mao statue at Zhongshan Square

Beijing, 1999. Young martial art students from the countryside, recruited to learn rollerblade tricks to perform at shopping mall openings

Zhejiang, 1997. Performers in a rural tent peep-show that travels from town to town

Chongqing, 1993. Child waits for mother washing clothes on the banks of the Yangtze River which is scheduled to be submerged upon completion of the Three Gorges Dam

Kunming, 1998. Rocker Xie Tianxiao plays a guitar solo in a show in a packed bar

Lanzhou, 2002. Drug user opens a pod of heroin on a 100-yuan note

Beijing, 1992. Migrant workers from the same provincial hometown doze in Beijing Station while some of their party are out looking for a construction site that will hire all of them

Shenzhen, 1999. Young married woman tries on a bridal dress at a photography studio, having finally saved enough to get her photos wedding done

Beijing, 1997. Documentary/art filmmaker Zhao Liang screens one of his experimental videos

Shenzhen, 2001. Dang Jianjun, 21, lost both arms when he fell asleep at a punch press whose safety gate had been disabled to speed up the assembly line

Beijing, 2004. Empties in the early morning at club Cloud 9

Guangzhou, 2005. Migrant workers on an adidas assembly line

Tianjin, 2004. Li Xiang, 14, gets ready swim at Aimin Fat Reduction Hospital. He weighed 290 pounds when he arrived at the center; in six weeks he was down to 240

Shenzhen, 2010. Tan Yue, like virtually every woman in her urban village, works at the New Balance factory about a mile away. She hula hoops during the Lunar New Year holiday break

Shanxi, 2005. A young urban ad executive, dressed in white for her maternal grandmother’s rural village funeral, has a cigarette during a break in the mourning. Her government official father does not attend for fear of appearing to support ritual and superstition

Lishui, 2006. On the barely finished streets of this Zhejiang industrial boomtown, there is very little for the factory and construction workers to do at night except watch free outdoor screenings of action movies

Shanghai, 2004. Guzhou Xinyu, 13, got new braces at a private dental clinic at a time when more regular oral health maintenance was just beginning to establish itself in urban China

Lishui, 2006. Migrant worker couple from Hunan sleeps on the floor of an unfinished apartment unit down the street from where he is working on a construction crew

Fuling, 2003. Student listens to English tapes in a college classroom

Hong Kong, 2010. Mongkok District

Hong Kong, 2014. The three month Occupy Central protest by the student-led pro-democracy Umbrella Movement included a "study hall" tent to allow students to continue their exam preparation while protesting. These middle schoolers took shifts riding exercycles rigged to provide electricity for the lights and laptops.

Hong Kong, 2011. Artists do street performances commemorating the Tiananmen Square demonstrations that ended in a bloody crackdown twenty-two years previous

Hong Kong, 2015. A year after the first phase of the pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, a HK University student calls for others to attend an assembly supporting academic autonomy

Berkeley, 2023. Members the Berkeley High School Robotics Team test a traffic cone launching subsystem prototype

Berkeley, 2023. Member of the Troy High School chemistry team competes at the Golden Gate Science Olympiad

Mountain View, 2023. Members of the Mountain View High School 971 Spartan Robotics Team prototype a suction subsystem for picking up cones. This was ultimately passed over for a silicone roller based method. Failure and re-grouping as a team is a huge part of competitive robotics

Mountain View, 2023. Member of Mountain View High School Science Olympiad Team constructs a bridge out of balsa and basswood. Only about 8 grams, it is designed to support up to 15 kilograms in competition

Mountain View, 2023. Member of the Mountain View High School Science Olympiad Team prepares for the flight event, testing her airplane out in the school gym