Medium Shot

2010 February 2

中景

zhōng jǐng

Been reading some Chinese film scripts and critical pieces from the Republican period. It’s interesting to learn the terminology. “Medium shot” is fairly straightforward but “close-up” is rendered as 特写, which seems to be a borrowed term that conflates literary sensibility with the moving image.


Haute Couture with Chinese Characteristics

2010 January 30

Here’s a video Yang Fudong 杨福东 made for Prada. I don’t know how to feel about this… Halfway between annoyance and intrigue?


In Transit

2010 January 10

It’s a bristling summer afternoon on the Chinese east coast. I’m cramming my suitcase into the back seat of a taxi on Donghuan Road. “Train station,” I tell the driver as I climb in, wiping the sweat off my brow. He grunts in acknowledgment as we make a U-turn and speed away.

Though nicely renovated, the Suzhou Railway Station nonetheless subjects the traveler to a ubiquitous Chinese experience. No matter how expansive they make the waiting halls, there are always people overflowing into the grimy bathrooms. Uncouth countryfolk splay themselves along the walls, bellies bared next to their enormous plastic sacks of grain or what have you. A few bewildered foreigners wade through this sea of humanity, stricken with self-consciousness, trying to remain calm.

In Chinese, they call it chuan liu bu xi, likening a densely populated space to endless flow. This is perhaps a more poetic way to look at it. Grim faced, I squeeze along with the crowd when it’s time to descend to the platform. The sunlight is scorching, even as it turns darker and crisper as the day wanes.

We reach Shanghai and then I’m in another cab, gliding past the sparkling lights of a shopper’s paradise on Hongqiao Road. Night has fallen. I’m supposed to retrieve keys to my parents’ apartment from their friends. Exhausted already, I secretly hope they’ll meet me downstairs, pass off the keys, and let me go on my merry way. But decorum would not allow such a thing. I sit in their cramped living room eating watermelon and making small talk for half an hour.

They look at me with puzzlement and benign curiosity. The husband is one of my father’s college friends, who now teaches in Shanghai. He is a slight man with a friendly disposition. The wife is feisty, unabashed by her thick southwestern accent. They nod vaguely to everything I tell them, signaling approval or merely building an assessment.

At last I am on my way, ready to tucker out for an early flight to Taipei the next morning. My family is away for a brief vacation, so I have the place to myself. They recently moved to a different flat in the same apartment complex. The new place is on the fifteenth floor, with a nice view of the vicinity. I ride the elevator, roll my suitcase behind me, and stop.

Something doesn’t look right. I’ve come here once before but suddenly I think I’m at the wrong door. It must have been the tenth floor, not fifteenth. I try calling my mother’s cellphone before I realize I’m out of minutes already. Heart pounding, I take the elevator down a few flights. Each time the doors open, I find myself in a narrow fluorescent hallway, gleaming austere and nondescript. Everything looks the same, except for a different set of slippers by the door. I try the keys on several apartments, to no avail. I’m wary of looking more suspicious than I already do.

Downstairs in the lobby, I look at the keys in my hand and consider my options. Finally, I approach a teenager about borrowing his cellphone. You see, I live here, I tell him. Or rather, my parents live here. But they just moved into this building, and I’ve been here, but they’re not here now and I don’t know what apartment number they are. But you see, I have keys. I just need to call them to make sure.

He passes the phone to me silently.

I get through to my father after a few tries. I try to speak to him in English to sound more believable. But I’m starting to feel like an impostor, my story more and more strained each time I tell it. “Who is this?” my dad asks several times. “Your voice doesn’t sound right.”

I bark responses impatiently, nerves frayed. It’s me, I tell him. I forgot your apartment number!

After several minutes of this, I am able to wrench the number from him. I was right the first time. But for some reason, the door had looked unfamiliar. I wheel my suitcase inside, spread out my stuff, and pant wearily on the couch. Is this the right apartment? Am I the right person? Shanghai has never been my home. I am a transient in her mid-July swelter. The evening pulses as I close my eyes. The screech of cicadas continues softly, a lullaby for the city.


Smile, Shanghai

2009 December 23

Feeling cheesy? Check out the official theme song of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. Meandering melody and lilting lyrics. Here’s a rough translation:

如果我们就是城市的细胞
请用尽力量来让它奔跑
如果城市就是地球的细胞
一起来让它健康地微笑

世界的心脏在加快脉搏
把新鲜空气送到每个角落

我爱我们的城市
我创我们的天地
今天的坚持是明天的故事
未来得到了启示
幻想变成了真实
让历史成为阳光灿烂的日子

每种语言融合灯火的颜色
地图的轮廓开展新突破
每个笑脸融合皮肤的颜色
让我们发现更好的生活

世界的心脏在加快脉搏
把新鲜空气送到每个角落

我爱我们的城市
我创我们的天地
今天的坚持是明天的故事
未来得到了启示
幻想变成了真实
让历史成为阳光灿烂的日子

[refrain repeat x2]

If we are the cells of a city
Let’s use all our might to make it run
If cities are cells of the world
Let’s try to give it a healthy smile together

The world’s heartbeat is accelerating
Sending fresh air to every corner

I love our city
I create our land
Today’s perseverance is tomorrow’s tale
The enlightenment we will receive
Fantasy turned into reality
Makes history as the era of resplendent sunlight

Every kind of language brings together colored lights
The contours of the earth break new ground
Each smiling face brings together skin colors
Let us discover a better life

The world’s heartbeat is accelerating
Sending fresh air to every corner

I love our city
I create our land
Today’s perseverance is tomorrow’s tale
The enlightenment we will receive
Fantasy turned into reality
Makes history as the era of resplendent sunlight

…wha? The song is equally perplexing in Chinese, to tell the truth. Unless I’ve invalidated my graduate studies in one fell swoop with that statement. Weird that they used “阳光灿烂的日子” in the lyrics – I was just writing about the Jiang Wen film. Does anyone know if this phrase is that popular?


Tumultuous

2009 December 11

鼎沸

dǐng fèi

“Like a seething cauldron; noisy and confused.” Featuring the pictographic 鼎 about to boil over (沸). However, I always think the character 鼎 looks like an abstracted human form, sharp appendages raised indignantly in protest. I’ll dǐng you, and your little dog, too!


Hong Lei 洪磊

2009 December 8


I Dreamt That I Was a Woman in My Past Life
我梦见我的前世是个女人
(2003)


I Dreamt I Was Hanging Upside Down While Listening to Emperor Song Huizong Playing Guqin with Chairman Mao
我梦见我被倒挂着和毛主席一起听宋徽宗抚琴
(2004)

At m97 Gallery.


Faint

2009 December 1

The anxieties of paper-writing and application crunch time have converged upon me like a pile of bricks. Or the hot sun beating overhead (日) on the emaciated soldier (军) of my psychological well-being.

正是:

晕!

yūn!

I’m crossing the desert, dizzy, under the harsh glare of an insecure immediate future. Waahh.


Coldly Beautiful

2009 November 22

Almodóvar’s Broken Embraces: a richly layered narrative with sensual cinematography and a lovely score to boot. Nice nod to Belle de Jour. And many exquisite moments, with intimations of danger lurking in every frame… Penélope Cruz and the female cast dominate.

In a phrase:

凄美

qī měi


Helio-Trope

2009 November 18

Finding time to watch films again has been a nice break from quotidian drudgery. It’s inspiring in the simplest and most essential of ways; it also helps me identify recurrent themes or possible linkages I would like to write about in my academic work. I’ve been on a bit of a Jiang Wen kick lately, especially since I plan on addressing In the Heat of the Sun 《阳光灿烂的日子》 in my thesis. Finally got around to seeing The Sun Also Rises 《太阳照常升起》 tonight, which I felt to be stylish – hypnotically so – and quite provocative, though I wouldn’t profess any narrative certitude until I view it at least once or twice more. Both of these films highlight a concern with disjointed memory around the Cultural Revolution era, offering unconventional subjectivities via spaces more or less sheltered from the cruelty and violence wreaked elsewhere. They differ markedly in formal and visual structure, of course, the latter described in terms of “a new aesthetic of magical realism” by at least one critic. There’s also some linguistic and symbolic connection to be drawn here, in the stark absence of any mention of Mao (the “morning sun” of China), and something I’ve been pondering about the proliferation of the character 光 (light) in many Chinese words denoting temporalities: 时光, 年光, 光阴… Hmm. This is a theoretical conceit I’m currently developing for a seminar paper. We’ll see if I can actually concretize it in the next month.


Sartorial/Territorial

2009 November 14

I find this photo from the APEC Summit quite adorable and awkward. According to news sources, the costume designer was going for “Asian fusion” in these “long-sleeved linen shirts with mandarin collars, a style inspired by the blend of Chinese, Malay and Indian culture found in Singapore.” In practice, it looks like the world leaders are rocking out in their jammies. Slumber party at Yukio’s next weekend!

Edward Wong at The New York Times has an interesting piece on China’s posturing as Obama heads to Shanghai in the next few days:

The Chinese government had a special message for President Obama on Thursday: He is black, he admires Abraham Lincoln, so he, of all people, should sympathize with Beijing’s effort to prevent Tibet from seceding and sliding back into what it was before its liberation by Chinese troops: a feudalistic, slaveholding society headed by the Dalai Lama.

For once, I’ve noticed that the issues at stake are represented quite judiciously. Wong deserves praise for actually delving into the historical claims behind China’s territorial conflicts, which usually get glossed over by a curt sentence or two in most reportage on Tibet or Taiwan.

Part of the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party lies in the notion, rightly or wrongly held, that it ousted foreign influence from the country and has tried to reunite fragments of China to return the boundaries of the modern nation to roughly those of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) at its height. That includes Taiwan, Tibet, the western region of Xinjiang and, by China’s calculation, Tawang.

“In most respects, the People’s Republic of China, of course, inherits the fixed boundaries of its predecessor nation-state, the Republic of China, which declared as its territorial boundaries what had been mostly the messy frontiers of the Qing empire,” Alice Miller, a political scientist and research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote in a China discussion forum posting that she agreed to make public.

“Messy” is the operative word here. In the age of empires, there were no hard and fast borders, whether the imperial rulers were the Ottoman Turks or the Manchus or the Moghuls. The seat of empire had its sphere of influence, radiating outward, with tributary states occupying the borderlands but rarely being governed in the same way as regions within a modern nation today.

Trying to define national borders along the contours of an old empire is a daunting task. If, for example, Tibet paid tribute to the Qing emperor at certain points in history, should Tibet be part of modern China? If Tawang did the same with Tibetan rulers in Lhasa, should Tawang be part of modern Tibet?

I think this summary is quite crucial for a lay audience to better comprehend the CCP’s so-called “expansionist” aims. It also serves as a reminder of how modern the conception of nation-state happens to be, and how malleable its justifications.