Losing my composure

A series of interesting encounters with strangers in bars kept me out rather late last night. When I finally set out for home, I was so tired that I decided to treat myself to a cab (19 times out of 20 I will walk back, because it's only a little over a mile from my apartment to my favoured watering-holes).

It turned out to be not so much of a treat.

"Turn right here," I said.

"Right?" said the cabbie disbelievingly, and acting like he was somehow terribly disappointed that he couldn't go straight on.

Now, Beijing cab drivers will almost invariably repeat the address and/or instructions you give them two or three times, as if seeking confirmation. They're usually not. A gruff dui, "That's right", will get them on their way more effectively than a foolhardy attempt to repeat or elaborate what you've just said. (This seems to be very much a Beijing quirk. I haven't found taxi drivers anywhere else in the country doing this.)

With this guy last night, though, his reluctance to actually do what I told him amounted to a psychosis. At the next junction, he made to turn left - despite having just been told to turn right, and acknowledged as much. At the next lights we needed to do a U-turn. He set off in the right-hand lane - and then made a big fuss about the difficulty of pulling over to the inside lane, even though at 3.30am there was no other traffic anywhere in sight. Even then, he failed to execute the required U-turn, claiming it was "impossible", and waiting instead for the traffic light to allow him to make a left into Gulouwai. While we were waiting - for what seemed like several minutes - another cab squeezed up inside us and made a U-turn. I found that rather galling. I indicated the ease and legality of the supposedly "impossible" manoeuvre to my driver, but he still didn't want to attempt it. However - perhaps to prove to me that a U-turn was within his repertoire of driving skills - he started to perform one at the next junction where I asked him to turn left. More amazing even than that, even when I'd put him right and got him pointed in the right direction, he again tried to show off his U-turn as we were entering my road.

My "taxi driver Chinese" is perfectly adequate, and I almost never encounter any difficulties telling people where I want to go. And it is difficult to conceive of any possible misunderstanding that would prompt someone to attempt a U-turn in the middle of the entrance to a narrow side street.

This guy only had to make 5 or 6 turns in the space of a 5-minute ride; and at every single one of them, he tried to turn the wrong way. Every single bloody one! I gave up trying to give him verbal instructions, and just pointed the way vigorously. By the end of the ride, I'm afraid, my patience and calm had all evaporated - it was not quite a Christian Bale moment, but getting there.

I am usually very tolerant of the foibles and failings of our cab drivers. It's a tough job. He was probably knackered.... half asleep.... maybe even a little drunk (you do quite often see cab drivers taking an extended meal break in the wee small hours of the morning, and fairly freely partaking of beer and erguotou; Jeremiah reported a particularly alarming cab driver experience the other day). But this chap was being so bizarrely, creatively incompetent that I couldn't help thinking he was deliberately pissing me around.

Economic indicators

Pundits are working overtime trying to find more novel, more telling pieces of evidence to help them predict how things are going to go for China in this meltdown year. Oddly enough, I don't think anyone has actually tried reading chicken entrails yet, but it can only be a matter of time.

I gather the People's Daily ran a story a little while ago suggesting that robust firework sales in the run-up to this Chinese New Year holiday were proof of continuing buoyancy in the Chinese economy (ha! more of the phoney optimism that is the country's principal manufacture at the moment!).

Even if this were true, I'm not sure that I would take much comfort from it. The Chinese fetish with fireworks is very much a whistling-in-the-dark superstition: the point of it is to invoke good luck for the year ahead by frightening away all the 'evil spirits' that might bring you the other kind of luck (evil spirits afraid of loud noises?? well, that's the theory). Even if folks are getting anxious about spending their money in such uncertain times, I'd still expect them to have a big blow-out on fireworks at this time of year..... maybe even bigger than when people are mostly feeling fairly confident and prosperous.

However, I don't think that has happened this year. Apart from the huge splurge on New Year's Eve, things before and after that have been mostly very quiet compared to the last few years. And a foreign journalist I spoke to the other day revealed that in a straw-poll he'd conducted of firework vendors around the city, everyone complained that sales were well down this year - some were saying by as much as 30% or 40%.

And this despite a major price war between the main distributors in Beijing this year.

Also, in the last couple of days, several large tents have appeared on street corners around the city selling fireworks for the last 4 days of the holiday over this weekend (the Lantern Festival, the official end of the main phase of New Year celebrations, is on Monday). I've never seen this before; and I think it suggests that the manufacturers have a lot of spare stock on their hands this year and are making a special push to try and get rid of it.

So - my view is that, up to now at least, firework activity has been significantly less this year than last. But is that a good sign or a bad sign?

I think.... if people don't even want to spend money to ward off ill fortune and try to improve their prospects for the year ahead..... then things are very, very bad indeed.

The weekly haiku

Anniversaries
fester in an idle month:
days of emptiness.

I am glad to have January behind me; but the gloom still clings to me....

Saying NO

These days, I find one of my keenest pleasures in life - perhaps one of the only pleasures left to me in my declining years - is saying NO to job offers.

For someone as perennially cash-strapped as me, this is a hard thing to do - but that just makes doing so feel all the more empowering (and more satisfyingly reaffirming of one's integrity).

I have no significant work currently lined up, and my savings are not as substantial as I would wish, but.... I have just turned down a contract for 20,000 RMB. And gosh, it feels good.

This wasn't even a particularly difficult decision for me.

In fact, the money would have come to rather less than 20,000 RMB. And the school concerned is such a shambolic, fly-by-night operation that I wouldn't have had any great confidence in actually getting paid.

It would have required delivering 30 or so 1.5-hour lectures in the space of about a month - a pretty demanding schedule!

Oh yes, and I was going to have to produce all the material for this myself, from scratch. In just under a month. For no extra fee. Ah, this is China!

And they wanted me to produce this material in a form which they could turn into a book. Again without offering me any separate fee (although there was a very vague and unconvincing mention of "royalties", maybe, at some point in the far future).

And they wanted to relay my lectures via the Internet to several other venues - and untold hundreds of students - around China.

And they wanted to record these lectures, and sell them on DVD. Again, there was to be no extra fee. Not even "royalties". But they did suggest that becoming "a famous face in China" might help my career. (Yeah, right.)

They did also say that they knew that the money they were offering me for all this wasn't really very much, but since, you know, they had only just founded the company, they didn't have any money. If I could be patient and wait until they became obscenely successful, they might be able to pay me more for future projects.

I said......... NO.

The poor guys are probably quite upset with me. And quite uncomprehending of my objections (although I took some trouble to explain all the problems to them very carefully).

The thing that really depresses me, though, is that they probably will find some unprincipled ratbag to accept this proposition, do a half-assed job of the lecture series, and help them fleece hundreds of students out of a pretty substantial fee. Take the money and run.

Oh, the education biz in China - I despair of it again and again. But I keep trying to fight the good fight.

Questions children ask

Today's gem from the recording studio...... (Sometimes it really is a struggle to imagine how these scripts are generated, just what scenarios the writers can possibly have in mind.)

"Dad, can I ride my bike on the pavement in Australia?"

Possible answers (?):

"How should I know? I've never been there."

"Yes you can, son. It is a decadent Western country, with no sensible laws to protect the health and safety of its citizens."

"Of course not. Do you want to shame China in the eyes of foreigners with such uncivilised behaviour?"

"We're only going on holiday. You can't take your bike."

"Certainly you can, my boy. It is basic individual freedoms like that which we are emigrating there for. It has nothing at all to do with the 100 million RMB I've embezzled from the bank over the past 10 years...."

Maybe this is why they don't ask me to write the dialogues for them.....

Glittering prizes

One of my newer readers, JES of Running After My Hat (a G.K. Chesterton reference and a Coen brothers reference - hard to resist!), has kindly nominated me for a Superior Scribbler Award (please follow the latter link to find the post on The Scholastic Scribe which initiated these awards last October, and maintains a list of the winners to date).

Ah yes, it's a 'meme' (not a real meme, of course, but a blog-meme), and I'm not awfully fond of them, as I've curmudged before.

Therefore, while I gratefully accept the compliment myself, I am not going to lobby too forcefully for any of my blog-friends to take up the chain-letter element of the award (passing it on ad infinitum.... or at least until every blogger in the world has received the award; I'm so lucky to be nominated only three months into its existence!).

Anyway, the 'rules' of the Superior Scribbler Awards are as follows:

You do NOT talk about Fight Club.

(Oh, sorry. I'll start again.....)

Each Superior Scribbler must in turn pass The Award on to 5 most-deserving Bloggy Friends.

Each Superior Scribbler must link to the author & the name of the blog from whom he/she has received The Award.

Each Superior Scribbler must display The Award on his/her blog, and link to This Post, which explains The Award.

Each Blogger who wins The Superior Scribbler Award must visit this post and add his/her name to the Mr. Linky List. That way, we'll be able to keep up-to-date on everyone who receives This Prestigious Honor!

Each Superior Scribbler must post these rules on his/her blog.

Finding five "bloggy friends" to recommend for this award in turn is quite a problem for me. My online reading is mostly confined to fairly serious, newsy blogs focused on business, education, technology, and the media. They're all really content-focused, not the kind of literary outlet which the Scribbler Awards are seeking to honour.

I also fret that I may be something of a blogger "kiss of death": most of the other blogs that I have from time to time developed a fondness for over the past few years have suddenly died, disappeared, or gone into long periods of hibernation.

Amongst my blog friends.... Leah and Tulsa used to write very stimulating blogs, but have both now retired (and deleted the blogs, I think). The Artist keeps an excellent blog, but is diffident about her writing abilities and insists on treating it as a 'friends and family only' affair. My old university chum Tolstoy maintains one of the most diverting blogs on the Net, but it's entirely composed of photos, video clips, and links from elsewhere; he rarely contributes more than a caption or two himself. The notorious Mr Brendan O'Kane, one of my occasional drinking buddies out here in Beijing, writes very entertainingly from time to time; often, however, he goes for months without posting anything at all (he's much more regular, I believe, on his Chinese-language blog, which is highly praised by those who can read it; I, however, cannot, and am therefore hardly in a position to recommend it for this award). The lovely OMG (my adviser/translator whenever I take it into my head to post something about Spanish literature) is about the best writer I have so far discovered out there in blogland - but, since she got 'a proper job' last year, her blog posting, alas, has slowed to a feeble dribble. And JES, of course, is already a winner (nominated by the English writer, Kate Lord Brown)

Amongst the 'China blogs' I like.... Kim of EastWest Station is a smart chap and writes well, but only seems to post once or twice a month. Mutant Palm is the best 'China blog' out there, but, I fear, its author Dave is too dauntingly earnest to appeal much to the general reader. Will Moss of Imagethief (the man who seduced me into this whole blogging lark in the first place - first it's reading, then it's commenting, then it's wanting to write one of your own: oh, it's a slippery slope!) is quirky and offbeat enough to have much broader appeal; but his blog is already one of the most widely followed in China, so I really don't think he needs any further plaudits from little old me.

Oh, but I have to choose someone.

All right then, here goes.

I'd better start with my friend Jeremiah's Granite Studio. Like most people who struggle under the burden of 'a proper job', his posting suffers rather from the feast-or-famine phenomenon; but it's worth setting up a feed to his blog so that you can be pleasantly surprised - and occasionally overwhelmed - when new posts turn up (and don't forget to check out the comments, which are often just as thought-provoking as the posts themselves). He's an historian who specialises in the late Qing Dynasty period here in China, so most of his writing is about Chinese history (though he covers more recent events and the distant past as well as the narrower field of his coming-along-nicely doctoral dissertation), but usually with a leavening of humour, and often interspersed with more idiosyncratic personal material. Today's reprinted post on the leading Chinese writer Lao She (February 3rd is the 110th anniversary of his birth) is a prime example of his output.

I'd also like to give a shout out to Stuart and Found in China, a blog that is just about to turn one year old. I happened upon it shortly after he set it up, but then - what with all the distractions last year - I failed to get into a regular reading habit with it. Since he is a Brit of similar age to myself, and similarly suffering through the psychic sausage-grinder that is the education business in China - I really should have been more supportive. He reminded me of his existence by graciously leaving me a couple of comments on here just recently - and is immediately rewarded with a Superior Scribbler gong! You see what commenting can get you? Seriously, though, his blog's a tremendous read, and I'd like to go back over a lot of the posts I missed last year. Just yesterday he provided a definitive summation of the trials of teaching English in this country, a post that is worthy of an award all on its own.

Then - since nobody else seems to have nominated her yet (although I feel sure several of her online entourage must be on the brink of doing so) - I will nominate the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Moonrat, whose Editorial Ass blog is a fund of magpie web-pickings, humour, and wise advice to aspiring authors (and published authors, and readers, and human beings generally). Yes, it's mainly a blog for people interested in the publishing industry, but.... no-one should live in ignorance of those two outstanding wits of our time, Robert The Publisher and The Rally Monkey. And Moonie's post a month ago on the vice of "overwriting" should be required reading for all of us who, er, try to write.

I'd also like to nominate OMG, in the hope that it might goad her into getting back into a more regular writing habit this year. This post about learning to play golf with her father and this one about a visit to the hairdresser's are two of the best pieces I've ever read in a personal blog (but both from over a year ago).

And finally..... I couldn't of course forget Tony of Other Men's Flowers, my happiest blog discovery of the past year. The cranky old so-and-so is a bit of a cheat in some ways, since many of his posts simply reprint amusing pictures, or quote from other blogs or newspaper articles (or dictionaries or encyclopedias), or recycle humorous pieces of his own that he wrote long, long ago, or...... Ah, but we forgive him, because it's all such splendidly amusing stuff. And, when he can be bothered to write, he writes quite beautifully. Watch out for his comment-threads, too. Many of his commenters are his own creations; but his online fan club is such an eclectic mix of eccentrics and polymaths that it can be difficult to differentiate between the fictitious and the merely improbable. This early post of his, brilliantly illustrating the useful French concept of l'esprit de l'escalier, is a particular favourite of mine (I am diligently working my way through his 5 years' worth of archives).

Well, there you have it. My congratulations to these deserving winners (and my thanks for all the entertainment they have provided me). If you would like to pass on the compliment to others of your circle in like fashion, you are most welcome. No pressure, though.

New Picks of the Month

Since I am feeling in a somewhat autobiographical mode at the moment....

On Froogville I nominate as my new recommendation from the archives to put in the sidebar this month 10 Curious Facts About Me, a post from January 2007.

On Barstool Blues my selection is In defence of my 'love life', some observations on my unhappy record with girlfriends (well, not so unhappy, but....) posted just a few days later.

I hope some of you will go and check them out.

A new month, a new llama

Monarch of all he (or she) surveys.....

Traffic Report - the blog stats for January

I was well up to my usual excess last month, with

55 posts and around 23,000 words on Froogville (although a fair chunk of that was reprinted posts from the tail-end of my Christmas Review of the Year),

and

40 posts and just over 11,000 words on Barstool Blues.

The Barstool passed its 1,000th post just over a week ago (with a 'special' about my favourite bar in America - Philadelphia's marvellous T. Hogan's), and also registered its 15,000th visitor (although that's according to Sitemeter; I think the real total might be nearly twice as much). Froogville is closing in on its 1,500th post and its 20,000th ('official') visitor.

Also on the Barstool recently, the Possible Band Names game entered its second year (and, like the world's economy, sputtering but not quite dead yet), and I completed the casting for a projected Hollywood treatment of my life and blogs!!

And, according to Statcounter, we have added Israel, Portugal, and Singapore to the list of countries that have looked in on us - without leaving any record of their visit.

Thank you for watching. It's been emotional.

Bon mot for the week

"People appreciate your frankness about others, but never about themselves."

Froog

Craving MEAT

The second greatest inconvenience of the extended public holiday here for the Lunar New Year - after the incessant barrage of fireworks already complained of - is the sudden difficulty of finding anywhere to eat out.

Most of the smaller restaurants and snack food stalls close down for at least a few days, if not the whole week. This seems to be especially true of the Muslim places, which are usually my favoured destinations for cheap eats. There didn't seem to be a single one of them anywhere in my neighbourhood that was open all week. In most of them, the owners were quite obviously still around (they usually hang quilts over the doors and windows, but through the chinks you can see lights on inside and people moving around), but they just couldn't be bothered to open. You can't really blame them. This is probably the only time of the year when they get a chance to take any sort of a break at all, and it must feel pretty miserable not quite having the time or money to spare to go home and see your family, as most of the rest of the country is doing.

Yes, around my way, it has been completely impossible to get rou chuanr - the mini kebabs which are the leading street food here - this past week. It also becomes impossible at this time of year to get jiaozi, another of my favourite snacks (my buddy The Chairman and I used to lunch on these little dumplings almost daily during our first year here in Beijing).

This may seem somewhat paradoxical, because jiaozi are one of the main traditional foods of this festival and most Chinese families - or the womenfolk, anyway - spend the last day or two before the New Year manufacturing enormous quantities of them to feed all the family and friends who will visit during the holiday. However, because of this, the streetside jiaozi merchants assume, probably quite rightly, that people have had quite enough jiaozi at home and there's thus no point in them continuing to ply their trade during this period.

Even the foreign restaurants often close for at least a couple of days for this holiday. The only places that stay open throughout are usually the slightly more upmarket Chinese restaurants. These are not generally the kind of places I enjoy eating; and during this holiday they are usually packed out, and you often need a reservation.

Knowing that this is the way of the world, from the bitter experience of my last six years here, I made plans to cook for myself for four or five days and stocked up on food before the holiday. Unfortunately...... I omitted to buy any meat.

I like vegetarian cuisine well enough, but I'm not especially adept at cooking it. And I am too much of a meat-lover to ever give it up, I fear. After even a few days of deprivation I start to develop a serious hunger for it. The restaurant shutdown in my neighbourhood did seem to be especially severe this year as well. Friends and I were expecting some of the Muslim places to open their doors again by Wednesday or Thursday, but no.

I had thought the "five kuai pie place" might be my salvation. I noticed with relief that that had opened again on Friday evening..... so I planned to make that my 'meat stop' on Saturday. On Saturday, the swines weren't open. Well, perhaps they had been and they just closed early. Their opening times have always been a bit eccentric, but I've rarely seen them still in operation much after 9pm; and the foot traffic on their street is so low at the moment that I can see why they wouldn't want to make any extra effort effort to stay open just to satisfy the mid-evening munchies of eccentric foreigners like me.

And still today, Sunday, my favourite chuanr places remain stubbornly closed. I had to treat myself to a rather pricey 'English breakfast', hoping that two squitty sausages and a few stringy rashers of bacon could assuage my meat-craving. It did, but not much.

This is becoming a crisis. Tomorrow I may need to go to a very expensive foreign restaurant for a steak.

Film List - never before seen in China!

All right, I can't authoritatively claim that these films had never been seen by anyone in China before, and that I was the first person to show them here. However, as I have lamented before, most Chinese - even youngsters who purport to be really interested in film, even in these days of cheap, good quality DVDs and readily accessible free downloads - have usually seen no more than a handful of foreign films. And almost always the same ones (Forrest Gump, Titanic, Life Is Beautiful, Braveheart.... yawn...). Almost everyone has seen Waterloo Bridge, Roman Holiday, The Sound Of Music and The Wizard Of Oz (and much of Charlie Chaplin) umpteen times over, because, until a decade or so ago, these were about the only foreign films that could be shown on TV here. And, since the coming of the VCD/DVD age a decade or more ago, most reasonably well-off city-dwellers have been able to keep up with the latest blockbusters. However, there is a huge black hole in people's cultural awareness about foreign cinema here: most of them know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the films of the '60s, '70s, and '80s. The Godfather is usually about the only film from those decades, the only film of a slightly 'edgy' or difficult character that anyone has ever seen (and just the original, rarely 'Part II').

And most of them, sadly, aren't all that curious to find out about what they've missed. When I was put in charge of a 'film class' in one of my university teaching jobs here a few years back, it was obvious that most of my predecessors had just shown recent blockbusters, and that was what the students expected. But I wasn't having that. Oh, no. I was going to try to educate them.

Here, then, is a list of......

Films I have most enjoyed challenging my Chinese students with



Lawrence of Arabia
(Dir. David Lean, 1962)

La Veuve de Saint-Pierre
(Dir. Patrice Leconte, 2000)

Men With Guns
(Dir. John Sayles, 1997)

Brazil
(Dir. Terry Gilliam, 1985)

La Cité des Enfants Perdus
(Dir. Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995)

The Princess Bride
(Dir. Rob Reiner, 1985)

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?
(Dir. Sydney Pollack, 1969)

Raining Stones
(Dir. Ken Loach, 1993)

Local Hero
(Dir. Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Spartacus
(Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1960)

One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
(Dir. Milos Forman, 1975)

Barton Fink
(Dir. Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991)

Catch-22
(Dir. Mike Nichols, 1970)

Touching The Void
(Dir. Kevin Macdonald, 2003)

La Battaglia di Algeri
(Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966)

In The Bedroom
(Dir. Todd Field, 2001)

Cabaret
(Dir. Bob Fosse, 1972)

Bowling For Columbine
(Dir. Michael Moore, 2002)

Dr Strangelove
(Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Citizen Kane
(Dir. Orson Welles, 1941)

and..... my absolute favourite making-their-brains-pop moment....

2001: A Space Odyssey
(Dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

An American colleague of mine and I were both rather keen to see if we could get away with showing The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but...... well, I lost the job before I could get hold of a copy! That piece of 'subversion' will have to wait till another day. Harold and Maude, too....

Another upsurge

After a couple of days of comparative lull in firework activity, yesterday things went crazy again. There was a fairly significant amount of rat-tat-tat-boom-crash from quite early in the morning, and after nightfall it soon became apocalyptic - possibly even more extreme than Sunday, in that it went on steadily for hours, rather than being concentrated in one great cathartic outpouring around midnight.

There were so many people letting off huge strings of firecrackers on the sides of the streets yesterday evening that the sidewalks were virtually impassable. Time and again you'd find your progress halted by another burst of explosions, and have to wait until your path ahead was "safe" again (some of these longer strings take upwards of a minute to do their thing). Impatience led me to take a few too many chances, scurrying past strings that were not quite finished. I got hit in the side of the head by a large, burning firecracker casing - that I thought for a moment had set fire to my hair. I wasn't being that reckless: I was passing by on the road, a good 7 or 8 ft away, and shielding my eyes. It's really not safe out there.

I gather Day 5 of the first lunar month is considered to be the birthday of Tsai Shin Yeh, the God of Wealth (that's a Cantonese spelling; I haven't been able to find out what they call him up here). Thus, the intensification of firework activity on this day is intended to honour the god and ensure his goodwill during the coming the year - perhaps particularly important in these days of meltdown!

Writing about Tiananmen

This week, having nothing else to do with my time, I finally got around to reading Ma Jian's Beijing Coma (I gather its Chinese title is the more obscurely allusive 土肉, tu rou, which means something like 'flesh world'), and I wrote an extended review of it yesterday over on Moonrat's BookBook review blog. Since I devoted much of an afternoon and upwards of 2,000 words to this piece (quite restrained, really, considering that the book is something like 300,000 words long), I feel I should encourage as many people as possible to go and take a look at it.

Be warned, though: this is the most overwhelmingly negative assessment I have ever produced. I found this novel soporifically tedious and embarrassingly badly written, and would only recommend it - hesitatingly, and with significant qualifications - to people who are passionately keen to learn more about its core subject, the student protests in Beijing in 1989 (even then, my advice would be: skim).

Even as an insight into history (a largely concealed and these days, sadly, largely forgotten corner of history) it is disappointing. On one of the key issues - whether or not there were any shootings in Tiananmen Square itself - the author seems to take an equivocating position; he largely follows the official account that the Square was cleared without loss of life, but makes much of some shooting incidents at the entrance to the Square when the troops first arrive, and later throws in a claim (without any further comment) from a panic-stricken student running from the direction of the Square the following morning that a 'massacre' is then in progress, some hours after the main clearing process had been completed. He does seem to be taking issue with the official death toll in a scene where he suggests that a single hospital has seen well over 300 fatalities, which might put the city-wide total into the thousands (most sources I've seen now seem to agree that the death toll was around 200; although the number of serious injuries was probably at least 2,000, and this total may have been significantly under-reported as a result of doctors and hospitals concealing treatment records to try to protect the victims from further reprisals). I felt frustrated that there was no discussion of how closely Ma Jian was attempting to record the actual events, or what his sources were and how far they might be at variance with accounts given by the Chinese government. In the original Chinese version, I gather, there is a Preface, but I don't know if it touched on these points; and, strangely, it was entirely omitted from the English translation.

However, the one worthwhile thing I took away from the book (something I omitted to mention in my earlier review) was its portrait of the student protest movement and its leaders - which is hardly very positive, but very realistic. There is a natural tendency for us Westerners, with our liberal democratic traditions, to idealise these protesters and their cause, to assume that they had a coherent reform programme to promote and that it was based on concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights that would be familiar to us. Ma Jian portrays the movement more as a phenomenon of mass hysteria, with the students' motivation - at least early on - being mainly a naive competitiveness and institutional pride ("If Tsinghua University is bringing 1,000 students on the march, our university should bring even more!" "If the Foreign Languages Faculty has 50 students joining the hunger strike, why doesn't the Science Faculty have as many?"). There never seems to be any very clear agenda. Many of the protesters embrace a rabid extremism - forming "suicide squads" determined to put themselves in harm's way, vowing to starve themselves to death or to set fire to themselves, advocating armed resistance to the soldiers who are approaching to clear the Square. Even the more rational leaders who emerge are constantly indulging in petty squabbles with each other (and occasionally suffering allegations of embezzling of support funds donated by the public), and seem to be driven as much by the sudden thrill of power and the flattering attention of the domestic and international media as by any political ideals.

It's not at all a flattering portrait of the movement, but it is nevertheless a sympathetic one, and, for me, it had the ring of truth about it.

I couldn't help but think - though this is not something that Ma Jian explicitly considers in the book - that the students' sudden upswell of political fervour was a very Chinese phenomenon, conditioned (though they might not have realised it, and might not have been comfortable with the fact if they had) by the revolutionary rhetoric of the Mao years. I also get the impression that the driving force for this movement, the root of the young people's anger, was not really any considered critique of the ills of the present government but a legacy of bitterness from the traumatised generation that had raised them. These students had all grown up during the hellish years of the Cultural Revolution. Most of them would have been too young, perhaps, to feel its effects very directly themselves, or at any rate to fully comprehend them at the time; but the physical privations so many of their families would have suffered, and the climate of fear and brutality in which they had spent their early childhoods must surely have left their mark on them. Ma Jian suggests that his protagonist's political zeal is born of the sufferings of his father (condemned to years in a labour camp as a 'rightist'), and of his later discovery of the full scale of the atrocities committed in that era.

Chinese students and young people today, growing up in a period of dawning prosperity and optimism in the '80s and '90s (and, yes, even a certain amount of political liberalisation - not much, but some), don't have that vengeful spark within them to get their motors turning.

Well, not unless their parents or grandparents have been following the wrong exercise programme, anyway.....

No, I don't see much prospect for such a mass movement arising out of the universities again. I'd like to see some kind of commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the '89 movement, but I rather doubt if anything will happen.

Anyway, please go and read my review, and let me know your thoughts - on the book, on my review, or on these wider issues touched on here.

A shell-shocked haiku

Air thick with gunsmoke;
Ringed by distant explosions:
City under siege.

I am a nervous soul. I sometimes wonder if in a previous incarnation I didn't suffer bombardment in the First World War trenches, or some similar hellish artillery barrage. I am acutely sensitive to loud bangs and bright flashes: words like 'flinch' and 'cringe' seem inadequate for the violent physical reaction they induce in me; it is only with the greatest difficulty that I restrain myself from ducking, cowering, or spreading myself on the ground.

The nearly continuous onslaught of fireworks during these two weeks of the Chinese New Year's holiday is very mentally wearing for me. I've endured five days of it now, and the end is still nowhere in sight. Much of the time, I feel like a startled kitten who'd far rather stay at home all day, curled up on the sofa, hiding under a duvet..... trying to ignore that dreadful din outside.

Maintaining one's 'essence'

Moonrat was worried the other day that she might just have imagined that story about Mao Zedong having slept with lots of young virgins to increase his health and strength, and more specifically to boost his longevity, and was asking if anyone could confirm.

I threw in my two-pennorth - I believe the principal source for this story to be The Private Life Of Chairman Mao, a notoriously iconoclastic biography by The Great Helmsman's long-time personal physician, Dr Li Zhishui. Although much of this book is to be taken with a large grain of salt, the 'virgins' allegation seems to be widely accepted, and I gather there are some other sources in support of it.

Just last night I was chatting with a friend who specialises in Chinese history and he contributed another fascinating little nugget to the discussion: apparently, Chinese beliefs about the effect of sex on health and longevity stem from the Daoist tradition, rooted in the concepts of Yin (female) and Yang (male). These vital energies are believed to be released and transmitted through bodily fluids, and are therefore much more easily transferred from the male to the female than vice versa.

In short, if Mao - or any other man - should seek to prolong his life indefinitely by sleeping with a lot of virgins, he must ensure that they achieve orgasm, while avoiding ejaculating himself.

This, of course, put me in mind of the League of Health and Strength.... and also of the batty "precious bodily fluids" theory of Jack D. Ripper, the deranged USAF general who tries to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Russia in the great '60s black comedy Dr Strangelove (a film I love, love, love; if it ain't the best film ever made, it's certainly very close - in the top five or so, I'd say).

Stranger than fiction

A companion piece to this (recently pinched by my mate Tolstoy).

Both of these fine cartoons are, believe it or not, genuine examples of - surprisingly surreal - late Victorian advertising. I found them in an album of reproductions of such adverts which used to be one of the great browsing favourites in my university buddy The Bookseller's secondhand bookshop (often kept under the counter for his own amusement). It disappeared some years ago, alas. I presume somebody must have bought it. I'm disappointed I never got around to doing so myself.

One of its most hilarious, most credibility-straining items was a full page advertisement for a charitable organisation for young men named The League of Health and Strength. I gather that the League had broad aims of improving the physical and moral robustness of Britain's youth, but this advertisement was directed more specifically at the evils of masturbation - or 'beastliness', as it was obliquely termed - and included dozens of testimonials from grateful youngsters who had escaped from this vice and transformed their lives by joining the League. I used to have a photocopy of the page, but it's long since lost now.

Tremendous stuff, honestly. I wouldn't make something like this up, you know.

Beijing firework mayhem - illustrated

The first time I visited Vancouver I happened to find myself arriving there just as an international firework competition was ending. Three or four of the world's largest firework manufacturers had one evening each to mount an enormous, elaborately choreographed display of about 40 or 50 minutes' duration. I caught the last competitor's show, and it was pretty goddamned awe-inspiring.

However, the festivities, I discovered, were not yet over. The next night, when the winner was announced, all the participating companies were allowed to mount a a short recap of their competition display. They were only allocated about 15 minutes for this, and the expectation of the organisers was clearly that they would put together a 'highlights' show. What in fact happened was that each company basically put on its entire display again at triple speed. It was dazzling. It was deafening. The last display in the series had the disadvantage of being considerably dimmed, indeed almost at times blotted out, by the vast fog of gunpowder smoke that had accumulated over the bay in the preceding hour.

I think that is still the most intense, the most over-the-top hour of firework activity I have ever experienced. But major Chinese cities on the Lunar New Year run it very close. In fact, they must exceed it overall, since the whizz-bangery goes on city-wide rather than in a single location and can continue for several hours.

And the really amazing thing about this phenomenon is that it is NOT an organized show. (When I was in Harbin during Spring Festival last year, it did seem that many large restaurants and department stores around the main shopping street of Zhongyang Dajie were sponsoring small displays of rocketry on the side-streets outside their premises; but that doesn't happen in Beijing.) No, this is entirely the result of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Joes (or Zhous, if you will) blowing a stack of money on fireworks (in some instances, I would guess, getting on for a month's salary - certainly over the whole holiday period, it must get to be a pretty substantial expenditure for many people; and probably nearly half of it goes up in smoke on just the one day, New Year's Eve, and perhaps half or more of that in the hour either side of midnight).

So, in case you didn't believe me, here's one of the best YouTube clips I could find of the festivities here last Sunday night. I particularly like this one because it's shot over Houhai, the famous lake area near where I live.

This one is quite cool, too; and also this much longer one (if you're really starting to get into it now). And here is one that was shot on Bell Tower Square, where I was (yes, one of those shadowy figures in the crowd must be me; but if I can't spot myself, there's no way you can).

Ennui

The Chinese New Year firework fiesta on Sunday night was really quite exhilarating. I had a fabulous time wandering the streets of my neighbourhood in the midst of all the whizz-bang-pop-pop and taking vicarious enjoyment from the exuberance of the local people's celebrations.

But now..... it just limps on and on and on in exactly the same vein..... for another two weeks.

No sense of proportion, the Chinese.

Chinese people LOVE me! (23)

"Chinese people love me because.... I endure harangues with remarkable good grace."

China (and here I am using the country to stand for its people), as I must undoubtedly have mentioned many times before, is one of the most insecure nations on earth: its people all seem to feel desperately ashamed and inadequate because they are so far short of being the No. 1 Country In The World they feel it is their birthright to be, and they have huge chips on their shoulders about being patronised and dictated to by outsiders; particularly by the colonial powers during the so-called "century of humiliation" from the 1840s to the 1940s, although they are intent on seeing this as a trend that continues to the present day, and thus - viewing all foreign relations through this prism of historical resentment - they are apt to be very suspicious and hostile towards other nations at all times. And every once in a while, they will vent this hostility on any old representative laowai who comes within range.

It is quite astonishing the ease with which the Chinese will take personal offence at the actions or statements of foreign politicians, very disconcerting the vehemence with which they will express this sense of offence, and positively flabbergasting the inappropriateness of the targets and occasions on which they will choose to unleash one of these rants.

Although I like to tease and provoke sometimes in the anonymous haven of this blog, I assure you that I am much more circumspect in my relations with Chinese friends and colleagues, and seldom or never do anything to invite such outbursts. But still they seem to come my way pretty often.

The other week, I was having dinner with a group of Chinese lawyers - all well-educated, well-travelled, mature professional women. And one of them just went off on one at me for about 10 minutes (with her colleagues intermittently joining in a slightly more muted supporting chorus of "Foreigners don't understand China, why don't foreigners keep their noses out of Chinese affairs?").

"Er, well, as a Brit, you know, I don't really associate myself with any remarks made by officials of the US Treasury Dept......"

All that stuff about the Chinese not liking to display strong emotions in public..... well, I think that's mostly bunk. In my experience, they pretty routinely get furiously angry..... over nothing.

But I'm very good at dealing with it. Oh yes. I stay calm. I respect their point of view. I talk them down ever so gently.

I would much rather, though, be able to enjoy a dinner without being subjected to one of these rants.

I relish a good debate, and I'd love to be able to discuss issues of the day with highly educated Chinese people like this. But.... it would be nice to find Chinese interlocutors who were open to alternate points of view (sadly, that is a bit of a rarity). It would be nice if they didn't get so hyper-emotional about these topics. It would be nice if they didn't take things so personally all the time. And it would be nice if they had the good manners not to launch into one of these tirades in the middle of dinner. Oh yes, it would be so nice......

Reclaim the Square! (2)

No, not that Square. What do you take me for?

Just before the Olympics, I commented on how nice it was to have my local square, the rectangular space between the historic Drum and Bell Towers (just under a mile from my apartment), suddenly denuded of tourists and returned to the sole possession of local residents. It's a great spot for people watching, a wonderfully friendly, happy place - when it's left open for the folks in the 'hood to just wander about doing their thing in it.

Sadly, this freedom-to-hang-out is often interrupted, either by the incessant convoys of tourist coaches, or - on major holidays - by the closing of the square while viewing platforms, stages, and sound and light equipment are installed for special shows (to which, of course, only party cadres and other 'VIPs' can get tickets). In the last few years, the western New Year's Eve has regularly been blighted by such 'festivities'. And last year, Chinese New Year's Eve was as well. I had feared a repeat this year, but.... well, perhaps last year's event was part of the pre-Olympic build-up. This year, they did something similar on December 31st, but not last night. Hooray!

The square thus became a major centre for revellers to set off fireworks. For an hour or so either side of midnight, it was just crazy - perhaps even bigger than the last couple of years (although I think 2006, the first year of the lifting of the firework ban in the capital, is unlikely ever to be surpassed - that was just a continuous, all-day barrage).

And there were no accidents, fortunately - although there were some close calls with a few rockets fizzing horizontally across the width of the square and crashing into crowds of onlookers on the other side.

And there were a couple of Chinese guys who conducted an experiment I've long been eager to see. After waiting patiently for several minutes for there to be enough of a lull in the firework lighting around them for them to have a chance to fully unravel the enormous wagon-wheel coil of firecrackers they'd brought along..... well, they discovered that although this string of crackers was very, VERY long, the firecrackers themselves weren't all that big - and were not making themselves very well heard above all the other ordnance being let off in the square. Moreover, the string was burning down awfully slowly. So, they picked up their 10-metre string of firecrackers, looped it up again, and flung the coils on top of the bit that was already lit. Result? HUGE F***ING EXPLOSION!!!!! And seared eyebrows. Who'd have thought it?!

Last night was so noisy that I think it may have damaged my hearing. Really - it was worse than a rock concert.

And it's just starting to get going again tonight.

Where are those earplugs??

Falling from grace...

I'm afraid I lapsed in my adherence to the 'Four Noes' campaign after just a few days - although only on one element: I watched part of CCTV's notorious Spring Festival Gala last night (in a favourite neighbourhood music bar called Jiangjinjiu), although I didn't listen to it (the sound was turned right down, and completely drowned out by all the fireworks exploding in the square outside), or contribute to it (I have been in the audience a few times - but that will have to stop!). Whoops - I suppose I have just broken another of the commandments by talking about it on here.

I can't help feeling that it was a tactical blunder by the promoters of this 'Boycott CCTV' initiative to launch their crusade just before the Spring Festival. CCTV's annual special (first broadcast on New Year's Eve, but then extensively repeated, in part or whole, throughout the remainder of the two weeks of holidays that follow), a cheesy variety show of truly epic proportions (cast of thousands, 4 or 5 hours long, and apt to seem longer), is the biggest TV event in the world - watched, for at least part of the evening, by just about everyone in the country who has access to a television. The advertising slots are regarded as gold dust by manufacturers, and are allocated in a blind auction which generates enough cash to keep the network going for most of the year.

Trying to figure out what's going on with my negligible Chinese can be quite a challenge (the 'international' channel CCTV9 shows a version with English subtitles, but no-one's ever showing that; although last year I did catch quite a bit of it on the other international channel - a French/Spanish service that I can't get on my TV, and whose channel number I therefore forget - with Spanish subtitles..... which worked a little better for me than Chinese, at least). Without any sound at all, the experience becomes positively surreal.

I was particularly fascinated/horrified last night by a long comedy skit that came on shortly before 11.30, in which one of the characters was a screamingly camp waiter wearing a kilt!! I can't even begin to imagine what that was all about. I'm hoping one of my fluent-in-Chinese buddies will enlighten me in the next few days. It appeared to be simply about deriding homosexuals - a rather too common vein in Chinese humour, I fear. And yet the theatrical effeminacy of this comedian was really not so very much more pronounced than the behaviour I see from a lot of supposedly straight Chinese men. I mean, even that Wen Jiabao is rather exaggeratedly fastidious in his movements sometimes, rather elaborately dainty.... And he's definitely at the more macho end of what I'm thinking about! Some Chinese men really are as camp as a row of tents.

I'd better stop now - before I get my visa revoked.

A blockage in the pipes

I use China Unicom, the cheaper and crappier of China's two mobile telephone network providers. Thus, I am used to having a pretty unreliable service at any time of year. However, around the major holidays, things can become completely unworkable. And I rather doubt if China Mobile is all that much better during this seasonal peak of all seasonal peaks.

The problem is mainly with the SMS system. There are supposedly some 300 million mobile phone users in China (I take these figures with a large pinch of salt, because I don't think they take account of the high rates of multiple phone ownership); and on Chinese New Year's Eve almost all of them are sending dozens of messages of goodwill to friends, neighbours, colleagues, old classmates, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if the number of text messages that people in China attempted to send yesterday ran into the billions.

And the system was completely overwhelmed. I got a number of messages coming through late yesterday evening - after a delay of exactly three hours. Several more came through shortly after dawn this morning, although I surmise that they were sent shortly before midnight last night. Many more, I'm quite sure, simply dropped off the network. The call service wasn't much better: a couple of friends I was trying to hook up with last night reported repeatedly getting a 'busy' message on my line, but I hadn't tried to call anyone all night. It does make it rather difficult to co-ordinate your celebrations when the country's entire telecommunications system breaks down for the day.

It's altogether more socially responsible NOT to send any New Year's text messages at all, I feel.

Mind you, I imagine that any country in the world would suffer similar problems with this kind of peak in traffic. Just how much surplus capacity is there in the networks in Europe or North America, I wonder?

A Chinese bon mot for the Chinese New Year

"Better to die for speaking out than live and be silent."

Fan Zhongyan, a scholar and official of the Song court (989-1052)

Happy New Year!

What? Again?!

YES - today is the biggest holiday of the year here in China, New Year's Eve in the Chinese Lunar Calendar.

In the Chinese zodiac, the coming year will be The Year Of The Ox, the second in the twelve-year cycle of zodiac animals (the Rat won first place by a despicable subterfuge). In your own animal year (work backwards in multiples of 12 years to see if you are an Ox: 1997, 1985, 1973, etc.) challenge and ill fortune tend to threaten. You are therefore advised to wear lots of 'lucky red' to ward off this possible doom. Red underwear is especially recommended.

I think the Ox is about the coolest of the zodiac animals (not non-existent, like the Dragon... or in imminent danger of becoming non-existent, like the Tiger... or vermin, like the Rat... or irritating, like the Monkey... or merely dull, like the Sheep and the Dog...). Unfortunately, I am not an Ox. But then again, I don't have any red underwear, so perhaps that's just as well.

Gongxi facai, everyone!!