A friend somewhat indirectly recommended that I watch the Bill Murray movie Lost in Translation. I knew before that it was a very well-received and critically applauded film; [...]]]> ‘N, to confuse you, because it could be either IN or AND. That was part of the “slang” lesson I taught today, employed for confounding purposes.

A friend somewhat indirectly recommended that I watch the Bill Murray movie Lost in Translation. I knew before that it was a very well-received and critically applauded film; academic pedagogy has even swept it up into its bookshelves and references across multiple disciplines (in the same way, I guess, that Paul Virilio would talk about Mad Max.) (Yay if you understood that.)

I’m about half an hour into it and so far I can say this:

Consider avoiding this film if you are a Westerner currently stuck in the East. Some of the frustrations it portrays will hit a little too close to home.

Seriously consider not watching this film if you are an Asian-American stuck in the East. Those frustrations will be there, but further nettling will be how the film uses the distinct border of cultures and races as an object of ridicule (even though it aspires to inspect it, it approaches it with a gaze through ludicrous-colored glasses.) A bored looking Bill Murray standing in an elevator, a head taller than all the Asians surrounding him in it, a bored looking Bill Murray snarkily picking at his translators’ English mistakes, and a bored looking Bill Murray trying to get rid of a histrionic Asian escort lady with a language lisp are scenes that will just frustrate you even more if you are also yellow and American because while you also confounded by these differences, you can’t mock them because that would be mocking a part of yourself too. Between feeling too alien for one team and too betrayed by another, I wonder if this movie is going to get any better in the next half.

But [...]]]> My post titles are getting intentionally stranger and stranger as I think about what would most poetically capture what I want to say. I disclaimed a long time ago that this blog would be an “experimental prose testing ground,” though so far I’ve kept that largely at bay (both for coherency and intellectual property!)

But there is one thing that I think deserves noting publicly in my thoughts about my nascent novel. Ever since falling in love with many of the superb English works by South Asian authors like Salman Rushdie, Jhumpa Lahiri, Amitav Ghosh, and even Arundhati Roy, I wondered to myself if America owed its growing receptiveness to subcontinental culture in large part to their efforts. I took a look at the Chinese-American literary pantheon and only found a large stack of woeful accounts of the Cultural Revolution and some whining about cultural oppression by Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston. Not that I discount the validity, power and truth of their works; I’m just disappointed by how negative the overall picture is because that is how then we have appeared to the literary canon, whereas the South Asian stories of the difficulties of cultural interchange are much less overtly judgmental and more poetically flavored on both sides of the fence. Of Chinese writers, only Ha Jin’s beautiful denouements and elegant prose has impressed me, and he belongs to a generation whose story rests largely on the Asian side of our pan-Pacific saga. So far, there hasn’t been a single Chinese-American writer who has achieved enough prominence to represent us, the new American youth with Chinese faces.

I mean, think of it: “Kumar” repped hundreds of thousands of young South Asians when he got top billing in “The Namesake.” We can’t even keep the lead role in “21.”

So I was thinking of writing a Chinese-American bildungsroman. I figured, hey, I should be in an ideal position to write a coming-of-age story between two cultures: I was pretty confused growing up as the only yellow face at school, to the point where I renounced my heritage in favor of an individuality that I could account for. And then finding the folly of that in Los Angeles, and coming here to Shenzhen to hash things out – my own year long spirit walk, as it were. Of course I can write a story about a clash of cultures. I lived it and I’m living it now.

Except…there has been no clash of cultures while I’ve been here. Not like what I expected.

The Chinese treat me very well, not like the outcast “half-blood” I was expecting to be vilified as.
I’m more accustomed to the manners, mores, and cuisines here than I thought I was.

There has been no struggle. There will be no “hostility” phase in the “honeymoon, hostility, acceptance, loss” 4-step program of expat psychology for me. There are no four steps of expat psychology for me. They are all ongoing at once; they are all nonexistent at the same time. Other expats complain of certain Chinese behaviors; I shrug as if it is already natural to me. Other expats gush about how exotic China is. It is not that different for me either. Still others speculate why on earth any human being would ever eat moon cake. I happen to like it…a lot. (A lot of my cultural challenges have actually come from the other expats rather than from the Chinese…which was perhaps to have been expected.) As far as the Chinese go, I have come face to face with exactly how little there was to come face to face with in the first place. And then something will set me off and I will get shocked by everything all at once again, and will duly write about it in this blog, haha.

This much ambiguity would amount to some difficulty in writing a book about cross-cultural struggle. But, as I’ve realized, there is a culture war going on in Shenzhen that is metonymic for all of China, and all of the West gets pulled into it by default:

“Yes, come to Hong Kong, we can buy shirts. That’s all there really is to do here anyway.” Herbal remedies. Taking care of your parents. Living with them. Spiky-haired young (Chinese) Turks and sashaying, glamorous ladies lounging in malls for lack of anything else to do. Old men begging on the streets by playing the erhu. My bus friend, who works his ass off every day for the dream of a prosperous future. Who probably hasn’t thought what that prosperous future means beyond $$$. Mid-Autumn Festivals being celebrated by deeply slashed discounts. Girls dressed up in glam and blue eyeliner standing by a stack of moon cakes for your gaze and purchase. Ringtones buzzing in loud, brittle polyphonic melodies, unashamed of their brash kitsch. Filial piety and money: a chicken and the egg story.

In other words, I realized, the real culture war in China and America is not about whose parent complex is stronger or how hard it is to eat with chopsticks or even comparing nose and dick sizes. It’s a contest for the value of your secular soul, in a pan-Pacific marketplace where everything can be sold for a fee, including your traditions, and nobody knows what to do next when all the transactions are done. Where people will always reach for the stars because SELF-CONFIDENCE REJECTS HESITATION and everyone is READY FOR THE WONDER, except the wonder turns out to be a shopping mall, and nobody knows what to make of that, exactly. And Shenzhen, well-meaning, open, friendly place that it is, is ground zero for this feeling.

This should be plenty to work with.

“But Andrew, you majored in comparative literature!” people sometimes say when I tell them of my difficulties with creative writing. [...]]]> You’d think that having a typhoon pen me up in my room all day would at least get me started on that book, but nope, I have no idea how to actually write fiction.

“But Andrew, you majored in comparative literature!” people sometimes say when I tell them of my difficulties with creative writing. Yeah, that was kind of the problem. I’ve become used to (and damn good at, if I may say) a certain observational style of written inquiry that is suited for situational and textual analysis, but now I’m very uncomfortable with affecting pretense – kind of crucial for fiction. To try to get some ideas I’ve attempted to immerse myself with guides and examples. I brought with me from America three “how to” books on dialogue, characterization and plot and on public buses sometimes I’ll take them out of my bag and browse through them (much to my own amusement when Chinese people do a double-take of what I’m reading). But their advice and recommendations are largely on how to write a kind of novel that ends up being read either on the beach or on the toilet, and while I know that I’ve been conditioned to reading more literary-type pieces that are possibly more rarefied than is practical, I still have enough comparative lit elitism to want to write something a bit…grander. So today I dug up an essay written by Zadie Smith, one of my favorite authors who herself may be able to explain some secrets of her fictional craft in the critical terminology that I learned how to understand.

She quickly introduces two “antipodal” novels whose opposition to each other in style and substance represents, in her words,

a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies.

In other words, everyone’s advice to me about how best to write is probably just an attempt to validate their own way of writing after all, and I should just do my own thang. Actually, this is likely not what she intended I take away from her essay, but to be honest I kind of stopped reading it after I remembered that I had downloaded the film Old Boy last week.

What the heck, I figured. If I couldn’t write anything of my own today, and if I couldn’t even pay enough attention to read about writing on my own today, then I’ll watch a really good movie and call my day of artfulness good. Maybe I could sap and leech some creativity from watching the high achievements of others.

Old Boy is a violent revenge story directed by the famous Korean director Park Chan-wook, and is widely regarded as one of the best films of Asian cinema on par with anything from the West. While I was watching I glimpsed a whole lot of scissors in the mise-en-scen, obviously to foreshadow the ending where the main character cuts out his own tongue (sorry for the spoiler.) It made me think about how that same kind of foreshadowing would work in writing: all the film medium has to do is quietly and plainly show those symbols, because objects will always naturally be present in any visual scene. But I feel like if I were to try to insert those same things into writing, it would be heavy-handed and contrived, as the authorial effort to insert an object into a text always stands out more than just simply seeing it as part of the scenery would in a movie.

During some of the movie’s most visceral scenes – the corridor fight and two shocking incidents of torture by tooth pulling that he somehow is able to portray artfully (although after the advent of the torture-porn genre, the bar for that has been set pretty disgustingly low) – Park chose to play the Summer portion of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons concerto on the film’s soundtrack. Park seems to be extremely good at using juxtaposition and contrast like this, since despite all the disturbing scenes in Old Boy the film still deserves its fame because of its emotional poignancy. I remember watching one of Park’s other films called I’m A Cyborg But That’s Okay and noting the same effect with its balance of an innocently happy child mentality in an asylum setting of schizophrenic insanity. I feel like a lot of this oppositional effect is created by the music in each film, which I may be overly sensitive to because of my own musical training – but I have no idea how to get or duplicate that on paper.

Ach, I wanted to try to get something creative out of this, but I just ended up analyzing somebody else’s work again.

To wrap up this thematically failed post with my favorite paragraph of the day, from the Wikipedia entry on Old Boy’s production:

“The octopus being eaten alive was not computer-generated; four were used during the making of this scene. Actor Choi Min-sik, a Buddhist, said a prayer for each one. It should also be noted that the eating of live octopuses (called sannakji (산낙지) in Korean) as a delicacy is not unheard of in East Asia, although it is usually cut, not eaten whole. When asked if he felt sorry for the actor Choi Min-sik, director Park Chan-wook stated he felt more sorry for the octopus.”

Edit: Actually, I guess I really did get the central premise of Zadie Smith’s essay after all!

Second Edit: Which do you think would make a better band name – “Dry in Rainfall” or “Koppu!”?

This coming Tuesday evening we will all leave for Shenzhen, so our time [...]]]> Edit: I had finished writing this post very neatly and then lost the second half of it when the “Publish Post” button led me to a 404.  I rewrote the second half, but I don’t think it was as good as it was.

This coming Tuesday evening we will all leave for Shenzhen, so our time here in Beijing is almost over. Yesterday I was really feeling like doing some filming, so later tonight I might walk around and get some shots of Haidian District. I would love to try making another montage video, but I know that the connotations I’d infuse into it would be largely ignorant since I’m still super new to Beijing. A montage video done in Shenzhen after I’ve been there for a few months would be better…but only a few more days to take advantage of it here!

When I do this later today I could well be the one weird guy walking around with a camera (maybe I’ll take some white people with me so people treat me nicer), but in other trendy areas of Beijing, at least, I don’t think anybody would take a second glance. The artists in the 798 district, or Qijiuba (literally 798), would be out there with not only their cameras, but also their hipster vests and thick-rimmed glasses.  When we got off the bus the cityscape seemed like the normal Beijing street (dusty, dominated by the road running through it, with stands and shops scattered about) but as soon as we turned the corner into Qijiuba it was like I was back in downtown Olympia.

Well, that’s hyperbole, really – Olympia doesn’t have the humidity, tropical forestation, or dusty cramped feeling of Beijing.  But this part of Beijing felt bohemian!  Graffiti, before unseen anywhere in Beijing, was strewn all over walls in tastefully outrageous murals, and the Chinese there walked with a jaunty cockiness and flaunted their clothing and their company, looking more like put-together Asian-American or Taiwanese scenesters on their way to an independent movie shooting.  There actually were a couple people posing for a photo shoot on a neighborhood fire escape.  We wandered into a dark alleyway with walls covered in stylized portraits of nude female aliens and up a dark stairwell until we popped into a well-lit and neat hostel.  There was a European guy sitting in the kitchen with his back to us, surfing the net and munching on a bagel.  The proprietor had the beginnings of a potbelly under his t-shirt and sported a long, black ponytail – and not the kind that Jackie Chan wears in period movies.  The kind that aging guitar hippies wear in Olympia.  We thanked him for letting us walk around his space, and moved on.

My favorite space there, however, was a large gallery called “postcapital,” and we spent most of our time there browsing through its exhibits.  Like most of the other large gallery spaces in Qijiuba, postcapital was situated in an abandoned military factory designed by the East Germans in a time of international Communist cooperation.  I did some research and found that the name “798″ was the entire district’s designation from the time when it was completely given to military factory use, and the Germans fought with the Soviet and Chinese planners to include a type of architectual modernism distinct from the angular utilitarianism of the latter two’s designs.  The result were wide open rooms with gently curved dome-ceilings full of high windows and light – the effect making for a kind of semi-Bauhaus, semi-Andy Warhol feel in postcapital.

That mass-produced Warhol feeling may have been evoked by the place’s former factory usage, but in postcapital it was definitely a deliberate effect.  After all, the gallery’s focus was social theory and metadiscursivity, using current-day capitalism’s manifestations in media and ideology to track the course of late capitalism and theorize the beginning of a new “postcapital” society.  (Of course I would love this.)  The entryway decorations to the exhibits pulled no punches – large tablets lit from within, etched in text on the one at left were the names of every Marxist organization and doctrine in the world, while stamped on the tablet at right were the symbols and logos of the world’s top 500 global corporations.  Communism and capitalism, neatly framing your entrance.  It was almost a little too cute, and the exhibits themselves also varied between being a bit trite and being fairly insightful.  This even split made it seem that postcapital was all the more self-reflexively aware of its own potential fallibilites as an exhibit – which subtly pointed to both the fallibilities of communism (think too hard and you become trite) and capitalism (don’t think at all and you start trite).  In places like this everywhere, postmodern hipsters are too cool for set ideologies and static symbols (excepting thick-rimmed glasses), so I am surprised that such an academically distanced flexibility could exist in the capital of Communist China.

Then again, while I have heard a lot about how artists in China are having their edges blunted by CCP censorship, I actually saw a pretty free and liberated art district at Qijiuba. Granted, yes ,the place still seemed mostly about revenue instead of art (in every gallery there were gift shops with exhibit-related trinkets that totally reduced and minimized their significance) – but I wasn’t sure whether this could also be another ironic, satirical backhanded slap at the way things are in China.  That such a place exists here is, to say the least, interesting.

———–

The next night I went with the other teachers to a beer garden in the student district Wudaokou, then hopped across the street to a dance club glibly entitled Propaganda.  Inside: dark lights, corner booths, open bars, and nationals of all skin colors pressing against each other to the rhythms of Eminem and Kanye.  Not much to say about it as a club; I wasn’t there for long and stuck mostly to my friends.  The fact that it exists in Beijing at all, and with that name, though, is weird.  It is geared to the expatriate community, and as such represents a flippant attitude on the part of both the host nationals and the expatriates towards each other.  But I’m not sure which comes out winning.  I don’t think anybody in Beijing can really tell, either.