How high? ShangHAI!
Having never been to Shanghai before and eager to escape the Eskimo’s meat locker that is Beijing, I was thrilled when my friend Tao Yang invited me to wayfare around Shanghai for the weekend. We’ve walked miles around the old city, eaten the most unbelievable soup dumplings, and taken the requisite pictures in which Pudong Tower appears to be growing out of our heads (coming soon…).
As they say in Shanghai, 生活蛮好。 Life is pretty darn good.
oh RLY?! (lolz, by the way. Serious lolz.)
What I find so thrilling about Shanghai, apart from its reasonable temperature and welcome walkability, is the amazing cinematic quality of this city. Maybe it’s because my associations with Shanghai are all from movies (Admittedly, this is case with most places. My entire geographic knowledge of LA is based on the conversation Cher and Josh have in the car in Clueless.), but Shanghai’s reputation as a historic, romantic, dramatic city becomes strikingly apparent as you stroll through the old city. Shanghai has a charm (no matter how reproduced or manufactured, in some cases) that is rare in Beijing and the crowds of moter-bikes, low, stacked houses, and sprawling courtyards are more vivid and visual than any cinematic simulacra.
This Zhou Xuan is not the same as that Zhou Xuan…
This is a total film nerd’s dream*: We’re staying right on Suzhou River, have seen the Paramount Theater where the stars of the 1930s and 40s flocked, the 新世界 signs of old Shanghai, and seen the old gongyu (apartment) of many a famed Shanghai star, including Zhou Xuan. (It’s right beside the old residence of Eileen Chang, FYI. In case you were, you know, really curious about the proximity of residences of, like, famous Chinese women from the 40s involved in the arts…)
Zhou Xuan is looking fierce.
Maybe we’ve lucked out with exceptionally sunny weather, but the light has been soft and beautiful and hits the river and peeks through the clothes hanging out the dry everywhere in an incredible way. I’m certainly no photographer or cinematographer, but I’m all swoony over this light.
It’s all very touristy and fun and the perfect city for a bunch of cinephiles to go roaming around in.
*Okay, a Chinese film nerd, probs. On that note, I am totally missing meeting Jia Zhang-Ke by being here in Shanghai this weekend. I’m trying not to think about it.
This entry was written by , posted on November 22, 2009 at 7:09 am, filed under Uncategorized, adventures, art, chinese, film, style, travel and tagged chinese cinema, shanghai, suzhou river, zhou xuan. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
All of these words justify my reasons for not posting lately (with accompanying Mad Men pictures duh):
懒
LAN
lazy
忙
MANG
busy
累
LEI
tired
This entry was written by , posted on November 16, 2009 at 10:46 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
It seems like blogging and discussing one’s carbon footprint have, as someone I know would put it, “some Venn Diagram Shit going on.” Meaning: they have some stuff in common. Both are kind of non-specifically conscientious and kind of pointlessly well-intentioned. Ergo, I will blog about my carbon footprint.
Let’s put it this way: the only thing that seems bigger than my actual footprint in China* is my carbon footprint. Despite my best efforts, it’s incredibly difficult to make even mundane gestures towards green-ish living in Beijing: a fact that looms ominously over the city as a thick smoggy blanket.
Obviously, there are much more pressing issues at hand when it comes to China’s catastrophic environmental problems, but it would be nice to feel like I have more control over my own ability to consume responsibly, but I feel roadblocked or just devoid of will power in so many ways. The things we’ve all been taught to do as individual efforts: bring reusable bags shopping, try to eat locally, use public transportation etc. feel like much more of an effort in Beijing than elsewhere I’ve lived. Certainly, I’m riding my bike a lot, but this barely makes up for the super cheap taxis at every corner that beckon to whisk me home. Allegedly, Beijing enacted a policy that charges customers for plastic bags, but I’ve literally never seen evidence of this. On the contrary, local food vendors often look confused or even offended when I ask them to just put all the vegetables into one bag. As for eating locally: yeahhh…they don’t really make cheese in China. Or hummous. Or any kind of dessert product that doesn’t taste somehow like slightly stale corn. So, that’s a tough one. There are other factors preventing healthy living here, too: the poor air quality makes it almost impossible to exercise outside and I find myself counting down the days until the coal-powered heating comes on city-wide. It’s bad news, people.
Despite these frustrations and the gloomy feeling that I’m contributing to the post-apocalyptic-looking industrial landscape I can barely make out beneath the dense white fog, there is some hope. Beijing’s air quality is today better than it’s been in years and organizations like Greening the Beige (more on them later) are bringing environmental thinking into the local discourse.
For now, though, it’s a little scary to live with the kind of environment pictured above almost every day. To add even more to this blogging cliche, I leave you with the following: It’s not east being green. And especially in Beijing, 绿色的 生活不容易。
*Ok fine. Not just in China. I have freaklishly long feet.
This entry was written by , posted on November 8, 2009 at 2:58 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Blurb from the DVD of ‘Vertigo’ I just bought:
“Allred Hirchock engalls you in a whirlppol of terror and rension!”
Think about it.
This entry was written by , posted on at 2:03 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Greetings from the (artificially-created) Arctic Tundra.
In an attempt to warm our poor souls (since we certainly can’t warm our bodies too effectively…the powers that be have decided that Beijingers don’t need heating in their homes or offices until November 15th…), the Beijing Film Festival will be hosting a series of screenings this and next week to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall.
The screenings will occur over the next week at various locations around the city, with a selection of shorts and features playing in rotation each time. While the films, courtesy of the Geothe Institute, the Berlinale Talent Campus, and the German Embassy in Beijing, are not all German in origin, they all relate to walls– as barriers, as objects, as obstacles, as protection, and as the boundaries that define both geography and lives.
A still from the short Teleportation
Watching and working with these movies has been fascinating–not just because they represent so many political histories and stories, as well as some expert film-making–but because the focus on the wall falling has shed some light on (and maybe exacerbated my paranoias concerning) the state in which we live. I’m being deliberately vague here, but it’s interesting and sometimes frustrating to observe the changes and regulations that are apparent every day in Beijing. There’s an expression in Chinese: “山高， 皇帝远。T”his literally translates to “The mountain is high, the Emperor is far away,” but is used today by people outside of Beijing to express their views about the government. Basically, it means: the government is far away, it can’t see what we do
Well, we live in Beijing. The government is not far away. And it’s freezing.
Das Wunder von Berlin
“Movies About Walls, Movies About Berlin” Screenings:
November 5, 7:30 PM 愚公移山 (Yugong Yishan)
November 6, 7:30 九朝会 (Nine Dynasties)
November 9, 6:30 中央音乐学院 (Central Conservatory of Music)
November 10, 6:30 北京师范大学
艺术楼 (Beijing Normal University Arts Building)
This entry was written by , posted on November 3, 2009 at 7:23 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
This word will take me back to China in too few hours:
飞机
FEI JI
Airplane
(Goodbye, America, for another little while. It’s been surreal, but wonderful. And don’t call me Shirley.)
This entry was written by , posted on October 27, 2009 at 2:58 am, filed under chinese, language, travel and tagged airplane, chinese. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Further dispatches from the Hawaii International Film Festival:
HIFF is renowned for its promotion of Asian-American films, as well as American indies with Asian content, and this year’s selection is quite exciting. Two films that have impressed me in particular, both of which have also getting (well deserved) mad awards and press on the festival circuit this year–Made in China and Children of Invention.
Made in China is not, as the title immediately suggests to many people, a profoundly depressing documentary about Chinese factory workers (!!!), but rather a hysterical American-produced comedy about an oddball American entrepreneur on the loose in Shanghai.
Following his lifelong dream to invent novelty products in the tradition of Groucho glasses and slinkees, Johnson (Jackson Kuhne) travels to the motherland of all knick-nack production: good ol’ Zhongguo. What ensues is an always entertaining, often sweet, incredibly original film and one of the most unique American indie comedies I’ve seen in a long time. I may be a teeny tiny bit biased, since this film is about an American (yep) who travels to China (ah-huh) to start a business (mm-hmmm) and encounters a bizarre, inexplicable, frustrating, but sometimes magical world (yeeesh) and I can identify with the story just a smidge, but this is genuine and funny story that also sheds great light on the perils and pitfalls, but also triumphs, of life in China.
The film definitely has the stamp of an American indie comedy, but doesn’t lose itself in superfluous quirkiness. The film has was a huge hit at SXSW this year, winning its Grand Jury prize, which is super exciting for the film and especially for first-time director Judi Krant.
On the other end of the American indie spectrum is Children of Invention, a moving film that shows the American neo-realism movement at its very best. Directed by Tze Chun, the film tells the story of Raymond and Tina, two Chinese-American children who have to fend for themselves when their single mom, Elaine (Cindy Cheung, fragile and startling as a woman who struggles to keep her family afloat) finds herself trapped in a dangerous marketing scam. The film is certainly socially conscious and a powerful immigrant story, but it also shows great heart and prowess as a cinematic work. I was deeply impressed by Tze Chun’s ability to coax such confident and honest performances out of Michael Chen and Crystal Chiu, the respectively twelve and eight-year-old actors who play Raymond and Tina. Children of Invention has had an amazing festival run this year, from Sundance to winning the Puma Emerging Filmmaker award here at HIFF
Children of Invention has definitely garnered comparisons to So Yong Kim’s Treeless Mountain, which was released earlier this year. While the content of the two films is somewhat similar (both present partially autobiographical accounts of Asian/Asian-American siblings abandoned and left to their own devices), I was more struck by the similarities of each film’s calm, graceful pacing and assured storytelling. This films beautifully embody not only the current American neo-realism movement, but also the sophistication and global awareness of today’s American indies.
Seeing MIC, Children of Invention, and even Treeless Mountain, and meeting the fantastic director, producers, and actors who worked to make these films so compelling, gives me enormous faith in the future of American indie cinema. The remarkable ingenuity of these films more than makes up for their minimal budgets and I find it fitting that both the films incorporate themes about invention and innovation. Just as MIC’s Johnson longs to be a novelty inventor and Children of Invention’s Raymond and Tina make and sell toys and inventions to finance their dreams, so do these filmmakers who, even when the odds are stacked against them, rely on great invention and improvisation to create great work.
This entry was written by , posted on October 22, 2009 at 6:41 pm, filed under Uncategorized, adventures, art, film, travel and tagged children of invention, hawaii international film festival, hiff, judi krant, made in china, treeless mountain, tze chun. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
ALOHA! THIS IS A TAXI.*
(As promised…)
Greeting from the Hawaii International Film Festival, where life is really really difficult. Having to choose between going to the beach and seeing movies is harrowing, you guys. Harrowing.
HIFF has proven to be a great festival–really well organized. congenial, and teeming with young, enthusiastic, international filmmakers. I feel very luck to be here, and not just because I got to go surfing yesterday.**
I have seen some great films, including the festival opener–the Korean drama Mother, in which director Bong Joon-ho provides yet another sterling example of how contemporary Korean films can blend dark humor and complex sadness like no other cinema.
I’ve also seen several films about Hawaii–Hawaiian history and statehood specifically, which I knew nothing about until recently. Pidgin, The Voice of Hawaii was screened last night at a sunset beach screening where both the sunset and film showed the best Hawaii has to offer. The film discusses the history and anthropology of Hawaiian pidgin or Creole–one of the last commonly-spoken “local” languages all around Hawaii.
Growing up literally as far away from Hawaii as one can possibly get in the US, I knew admittedly very little about Hawaii’s history and culture (apart from some hula and pineapple stereotypes), but I’ve gotten to know a little bit about the real Hawaii recently–the diversity, the development, and the concerns of Hawaiians as residents of a US state and a unique cultural area. The documentary State of Aloha, while slightly fragmented in narrative, also provides a compelling history of Hawiian statehood and a controversial movement to assert autonomy.
Though I’m essentially staying in a seaside Mall: the Vegas-Disneyworld-Japanese-tourist-Mecca neighborhood of Waikiki (Konichiwa Frat Boys and Japanese chicks wearing taffeta and pink Ugg boots!), I’m hoping to explore some of the older and/or more natural areas of Honolulu.
More to come later…but for now, let me also just say: facebook, avacados, blue skies, The Daily Show=America the Beautiful.
*Except not. Taxis are crazy expensive here. Everything is crazy expensive here.
**It was not what I would describe as a successful surfing adventure, per se, as much as frantic paddling and falling into the water excursion.
This entry was written by , posted on October 20, 2009 at 3:20 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I wrote this a while ago and forgot to post it. Just file it away under Strange Retail Experiences Are Things Best Forgotten.
When I first arrived in Beijing, I was agog to find that there was, of all things, an American Apparel store in this fair city.
I was agog not because I would ever underestimate Dov Charney’s plans for evil world domination, but because the central thesis of American Apparel is thus
a.) irony
b.) sex
The Napoleon of creepiness and leggings.
Suffice it to say that these things are not the central thesis of Chinese culture. In fact, they are kind of counter-intuitive to most facets of Chinese culture.
I decided to investigate:
It was all there. So strange, so florescent, so tight! The body stockings and sweatshirts and the vaguely bitchy salespeople and the dressing room mirrors that make anyone feel like the fattest, most repulsive person on the planet!
It was all there except…customers.
So, your average hipster Americano heads over the AA on North 6th and picks up a little number that says I lack imagination, but I can still earn the respect of my peers by appropriating the aesthetics of working class America to fit my svelte frame and obliterated gaze.
As far as I can tell, when a hipster Chinoise walks into AA, they possibly think: OOH! Gold leggings! I will wear these to work, which by the way is a respectable job and not stripping. WAIT, 600 KUAI FOR LEGGINGS WTF I THINK NOT.
This entry was written by , posted on October 12, 2009 at 9:32 am, filed under chinese, style and tagged american apparel, wtf. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The other day, I was at my friend’s house and happened to noticed that she had an email open in her inbox, the title of which was “Holy Shit! Midgets! We’re totally going to Kunming!!!”
I didn’t really want to pry.
But! It turns out that there is a real life dwarf commune in Kunming, China.
More Evidence
Apparently, the citizens of said commune live in little mushroom-shaped houses and dress up to perform for tourists. Either this is Chinese kitsch reaching new and horrifying heights, or a really sly stab at irony.
Is this an actual refuge for little people? A blatant tourist trap? A backwards attempt to glorify vertically-challenged Chinese while actually kind of exploiting them? Totally weird? Something that would probably only happen in China?
Yes.
This entry was written by , posted on October 10, 2009 at 11:00 pm, filed under Uncategorized, adventures, chinese, travel and tagged china, dwarf, kunming. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.