My Life As... Chinese Photojournalist Wen Huang

By Adam Peck
SBU J-School Reporter

A young Romanian girl was transferred to a hospital in Belgrade for a particular surgery in the late 1990’s. But upon arriving, she found herself embroiled in the Kosovo Conflict, her life threatened by bombings nearby. Her story might have been lost to the world, but Wen Huang, a Chinese photojournalist, was there to cover the war, and she captured the girl’s face on film.

On Oct. 10th, Huang showcased this photograph and many others to several students and faculty at Stony Brook University. She was the latest guest—and the second photojournalist—in the school of journalism’s “My Life As…” lecture series.

Huang, who has been a photojournalist for 16 years, works for the Xinhua News Agency in China, one of the largest news agencies in the world with more than 40,000 employees operating in 110 offices worldwide. Huang has mostly worked in Beijing, interrupted by a two-year period when she was based in Germany as well as her time in the Balkans.

From March 1997 to May 1999, Huang was in Yugoslavia to cover the Kosovo conflict for Xinhua. She spoke of the experience she gained in covering a war. “When you see human suffering, you will never be a simple observer,” Huang said. “The uncertainty of the surroundings during war time is scary.”

Huang also described what it takes to be a photojournalist. A journalist’s job is “not to become a member of [the culture],” she said, “but to be fair.”

At the start of the Kosovo War, Huang and other reporters from Xinhua were the only journalists to remain in the city of Pristina after the first round of bombings began. The photographs she displayed depicted the hardships faced by the people of Kosovo, the destruction of buildings and the disruption of life as usual.

Huang’s photographs from her time in the Balkans have all been published, she said, mostly in China through the Xinhua news wire. But some have published in other countries, including here in the United States in Time magazine.

“It was my big dream to be published in Time magazine,” Huang recalled. But when Time published her photograph of a colleague who had been killed in a NATO bombing, Huang said, “I didn’t think it would be in [those] circumstances.”

That bombing, in May 1998, changed her view of the United States for a long time, she said. “In the Chinese language, we interpret the United States…in a very beautiful way,” she said, referring to the direct translation of the word “America” into Chinese as "sharp, strong, beautiful."

“I had a lot of good impressions" of the United States, she continued. But after the bombing, which killed three Chinese journalists including her friend, she “couldn’t understand why a country like the U.S would do this."

In 2002, however, she was awarded a Knight Foundation scholarship, and she studied at Stanford University for a year. That experience, she said, improved her opinion of the United States and Americans. She said it was "precious" to get to know a place “instead of listening to what other people are saying.”