PARIS FRIEND - SHUANG XUETAO

Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy - guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn't be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.

- Jeremy Tiang

Even though he was a Beijinger, Xiaoguo didn't have a hint of an accent. He told me he'd sung Peking opera for a few years as a kid, but then he got too tall and his voice broke. It was a shame because not many kids can sing Lord Guan the way I did, he said, as he shuffled a deck of cards. You need an air of dignity. Unfortunately, even Lord Guan isn't allowed to be as tall as I got.

And so, at the age of twenty, he went to study film in France, where he lived in Versailles. Each day, he headed out with one of the school's cameras and shot a bunch of footage, then went back to the studio and tried to edit it into sense. After doing this for a while, he began getting asked to take wedding videos for Chinese people living in France. Mostly Wenzhou people, he said. They love weddings. Perhaps because of his height, everyone seemed to think they were getting their money's worth; such a substantial person came with an elevated point of view. One of the Wenzhou women noticed that he always captured unforgettable moments: a groom's fleeting anxiety, a bride inadvertently revealing her hatred for another woman. Once, he even caught someone stealing a stack of red envelopes from a bridesmaid's handbag. He didn't raise the alarm right away, just sent the footage to the client. That's called letting the film speak for you, he said. The Wenzhou woman was forty-seven years old and owned three antique shops in Paris. Her husband, a Korean gangster, had died of a stroke when she was forty.