Silent witness to vanishing worlds

Inside, two mahjong tables stood before a stage of barely six square meters. Chairs, pots and gas cylinders crowded the room. Behind the curtain, troupe leader Wu Zhengbin, 75, lay on a bed, showing Ma old clippings and recalling the days when a performance could sell more than 600 tickets. Before he could finish, his wife barged in and cursed him for talking about "useless things" that no longer made money.

The interruption changed the story Ma thought he had found. The troupe was not simply a group of noble elderly artists defending a fading tradition. Beneath its apparent harmony ran rivalry, wounded pride and arguments over tiny earnings.

Ma kept returning for eight years. During one performance, Li Furong, 62, raised a plastic cup instead of a porcelain one during a show, afraid it might shatter on the cramped stage. Around her, mahjong tiles clattered as only a handful of elderly spectators watched.

Wu inspired equally mixed feelings. Some performers believed money always came first for him, and his family remembered a husband and father who left little warmth for them.

Yet Wu had kept the troupe alive for more than 40 years, moving it from one temporary home to another. Without him, there might have been no stage at all.

"Where there are people, there is jianghu," Ma said, referencing the term — not as a romantic realm of martial heroes, but as the gritty, unwritten social underworld of favors, debts and unspoken rules through which marginalized wanderers survive.

That contradiction was what held Ma's attention. He would not turn Wu into a cultural hero by hiding his selfishness, nor dismiss the value of the troupe because its leader was flawed.

"My questions are like a sharp scalpel," Ma said. "They cut open the skin and expose the good and evil, the beauty and ugliness hidden inside."

Wu died in a nursing home in 2024 with no family beside him, and the troupe came to an end.

"I believe changes in the lives of people at the bottom reveal social change most clearly," he said.