Aventurina King

It is 2 am in the morning and I just came back from my first photo shoot.  It was eight hours ago that I entered the photographer’s den.  Than three hours of make up later, i was metamorphosized into this (another five hours of shooting and I was let loose)(rest of the pictures are in the fashion photo album):

Following this experience, I have corrected a few of my preconceptions about models.  First of all, concerning the adds for skin cleansers.  There is no way, any of those models on there has clean skin, or they may have, but it’s buried under 4 thick layers of foundation.  As was mine.  Add a body surface 20 minute powdering session and every ounce of skin disappears from the picture.  What you have is pure cosmetics(and I hadn’t even realized that). 
I also must admit, before this photo shoot, I had a tendency to look down on models, or what i considered to be souless lazy creatures, mere products of society’s consumerism.   The latter still holds (heaven knows what I’m turning into), but the former….. I wouldn’t call models lazy.  Ok, there are worse things than sitting straight on a hard chair for two hours while a hairdresser singes your scalp with a red hot curler and a makeup artist pulls up your eyelids by the eyelashes, but when this goes on untill 1 in the morning…..

Yesterday at 9 pm, I entered into the stiff-lit entrance hall of Xiehe hospital.  I haven’t been to any american hospitals so I’ll compare my experience with what I saw on the tv show ER.  First of all, it was silent, almost no one in the halls except for a few people meandering around like lost ghosts.  Not the bubbling emergency scene of ER.  Also, the elevators used in ER to run the protagonists down to the morgue were replaced by staircases with peeling rotting-lemon-colored paint(see illustration up top).
Up to the second floor, only a handful of doctors on duty = wait. (during that time, I played international chess on my friend’s cell phone, for some reason, the bishop stubbornly refused to move diagonally and got devoured by the queen).
enter in to a high ceilinged room.  Doctor examines my tongue.  Says he isn’t qualified to diagnose me, must return on Monday.  At least he gave me a prescription for 5 bottles worth of chlorine-scented mouthwash.
I can’t say it was as bad as I’d expected.  I had been to a hospital in Taipei, where no matter what had happened to you–broken arm, bullet wound, broken nail–you were politely invited to collect your number and step into the one hour wait like everybody else.  Here there was no wait, although, I can’t vouch for what the situation would be like on a Monday morning when the really qualified doctors are in.  Despite some peeling paint, the corridors were clean, and most important, the hospital had western bathrooms (not the omnipresent squat ones which never have toilet paper and never flush).
According to my friend though, this is the best hospital in Beijing, things are unimaginable in other places, and a few years ago, before the sars epidemic the situation was even worse.
“the two places with the longest lines of people in Beijing were 1) hospitals, 2)banks” he entoned.
Monday seems years away, I have therefore refered to my favourite and everpresent-no-wait doctor: the www.  Diagnosed myself, seems I need more food in my stomach and more time with my pillow so I’m staying home today, indulging in oreos (yes, you can actually find them here, you can even find oreos imitation brands, but unlike america where the imitation brands imitate taste, here, they are worlds a way from producing the good old uber-caloric taste-bud high=oreos all the way)

I tolerate spicy food, but just barely.  Last year in Taipei, some friends dragged me to a Sichuan (China’s spice region) Restaurant.  The waitress placed the dish of food right in front of me.  It was shreds of chicken and little red things.  Hmmm what a beautiful color i thought, popping three of those little red things in my mouth.  They were hot peppers.  I spent the next hour in the bathroom washing my burnt tongue.

Curiously enough, even though many people claim that Sichuan food has been spicy since sichuan people walked this earth, the hot pepper was introduced only much later by Portuguese explorers.  How did the Sichuanese spice their food up before?  I couldn t find any answer so I concluded people had lied to me.

Yesterday I discovered everyone had told the truth.  Sichuan food was spicy in ancient times, but it was a different spicy.  I don’t know the spice’s english name,  it looks like pepper seeds and it floated around calmly in the fish soup i naively sampled yesterday.  Instantly, my tongue began to prickle, then it turned completely numb,  I couldn t taste or feel anything I swallowed.  The chinese man seated accross the table slirped up a helping of soup, he split a white touthed smile and then told me “this spice is like a drug, after you’ve had it once, you’ll want to have it everytime you eat”.  I think I’ll lay off the drugs.

 

I bought the movie Sudden Lover off of a dvd street stand because for the past week, ”Liu Ye”, the movie’s main actor, had been echoing accross the mouths of all the chinese movie enthusiasts I know. “Liu Ye, wow, he is such a good actor” “he’s gotten into so many movies” and so on.

Liu Ye is so so.  He doesn’t shine or sink.  He does an ok job of meandering through the scenes, always the same dazed wide-eyed expression on his face, like someone that’s seen a ghost for the 50th time.  This impassive expression greets most tragic news.  His best friend tells him “my wife is leaving me”, reaction: eyes widen slightly and stare into the distance.  He learns that his girlfriend is cheating on him, reaction: eyes widen slightly and slide slowly to the side.

But “so so” isn’t enough to prevent the rest of the movie from crumbling.  I am too critical of movies that I see, and I realized this last week when I saw Sudden Lover, a movie whose main elements (editing, supporting role acting, dialogue) are so bad that they drown what little good there is left (crazy story line…hmmmmmm i can t really think of anything else).  Sudden Lover has turned other film’s mediocrity into sheer skill.

Xiao Xie (Liu Ye) is an easy going beijing cab driver .  He lives with a roomate who disappears, leaving his girlfriend and Xiao Xie to frolick together.  Enters Liu Ba, a 17 year old high school student who falls instantly in love with xiao xie the moment he finds her in his bed.  For some reason, he rejects her sincere love prefering his cutting featured girlfriend–who by this time is already cheating on the man she was cheating with.  Xiao Xie has a best friend, a middle-aged shopkeeper who is abandoned by his bride-to-be shortly after we meet him.  Then, through another schizophrenic switch of the plot, Xiao Xie helps the police catch a dangerous murderer.  The tangled plot line cuts off when xiao xie, for the first time, performs “grief” : his eyes widen, his mouth opens and darts out a cry, he looks up to the sky.  The camera films him from up high, a swarm of ambulances rushing towards him like bulls on a toreador.

The two most annoying things about this movie are the editing and Liu Ba.  Sudden Lover’s editing makes a home video look oscar quality.  The mad paced cuts occur without discrimination, love scenes, action scenes, silent scenes, are sectioned into 1 second shots.  If there is not enough relevant subject matter to justify the cut (i.e. two people falling silent for two long minutes), then the camera turns to irrelevant subject matter: a tea pot, a cigarette holder, scenery outside of the room.

If making Liu Ba annoying was intentional, it sure succeeded.  She mostly skips around the frame with a dreamy smile on her face, uttering high pitched naive questions : “do cab drivers feel lonely?”.  For unhappiness, she falls back on the hong-kong young actress technique: her voice flies even higher, and her pout barely conceals a hint of nervous laughter (her concern for a hospitalized Xiao Xie is thus not that credible).

Mainland China’s press is censored but there are more newspapers in Beijing than I could count on my hands.  The newstands pop up on every block in the city (even more omnipresent than Macdonalds), and I can feel the salesmen and woman struggling to find the space to display the sheer quantity of headlines.  This takes creativity.  There is large table before them, covered with the grey slabs.  Then, they also hang newspapers wherever they can on the sides like wet laundry.  New York only has a handful of major newspapers.  The apple’s newstands can afford to simply pile them up.  But that doesn’t happen here.  You cannot just nip a paper off from the top of the table.  No, tell the salesman which paper you want and they will dive down behind and fish it out for you from their backyard mountain.

What seems to be the general rule for newspapers here: the more the merrier, does not apply to magazines.  There is no variety, the large majority of them are asian versions of western feminine mags (elle, cosmo girl, seventeen).  “kan dian ying” (the magazine “watch movies”) is one of the only beackons of culture.  It has 60 pages of relevant interviews and add-like reviews. 

Simply put, compare Beijing to New York: the latter, a shortage of newspapers, an over abundance of magazines (it takes one whole floor in Barnes and Nobles to display most of them); the former, a battlefield of newspapers, a tiny raft of magazines.  Why?  (I’ll think it over during the next few days)

Movie of the day (or rather of the night since I watched it at 2 am this morning) is Zatoichi directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano.  Somehow, I had always considered his film “Dolls” exemplary of his directorial style.  That film is extremely silent and elliptical.  The actors wander around like speechless automatons through one gorgeous setting after another–there are white cherry blossoms raining from the trees, a moon’s reflection trickling down the black mountain spring.

It is nothing like Zatoichi, a remake of the successful samourai film.  Every scene in it–including the ones where our blind hero slices bodies in zorro-like motion, or saws up the crotch of a terror reaking gang member–is tongue and cheek.  It is not only the merry percussive music which filters through on slaughter–I can’t say fight, our hero doesn’t give his enemies the time to fight–scenes, or the 10 minute long broadway tap dancing show at the end.  Maybe it is the hint of a laugh which flushes through the faces of the samourais as they slice through bodies like cheesecake, or the small humourous scenes that insert themselves between episode–natives bouncing in the rain, a wannabee samourai running around his neighbor’s house.

Whereas in Dolls, Takeshi had left us with only a vague sense of the characters, and a doubt as to the presence of plot, in Zotaichi, both of these elements are crisply delineated.  At the beginning of the movie, one by one the major characters enter the village and the frame.  After a quick glance at them, the camera flashbacks into each of their lives–in most of the character’s cases, this involves sticking a samourai sword into someone’s stomach.  Every scene complexifies the narrative as characters meet up and interact, the plot never stops though, it drives ruthlessly on, there will be a lightning speed showdown, there will be under violent fight scenes and there will be a final broadway tap dance show.

 

Beijing didn’t come highly recommended to me: “dirty,” “dangerous,” “diseased” — my entourage told me. They felt it their duty to lecture me on the various illnesses that plagued foreigners in China —”the worms need to grow three inches then they can lay eggs inside your body”— while reminding me there is no appropriate hospitalization system over here.  I came to believe that if I ate raw food off the street stalls it would turn around in my stomach and eat me … alive.

 

But like any romantic 19-year-old in search of adventures (and unwilling to enroll in the army or the police force), these cautionary descriptions only kindled my anticipation of June 2, when I would crash into the urban jungle of Beijing.

 

In the sweltering heat, I heaved out of my Chinese friend’s car. On my second day in Beijing, they had escorted me to the shopping center of Xiushuijie (Silk Street).  The building wears the mask of a venerable western shopping mall — a western cafe, mannequins in elaborate evening dresses posing behind window panes and stone steps leading up to a set of imposing glass doors.  The inside is chaos: five floors of market stalls and loud mouthed sales people bragging such clothing delicacies as fake polo Lauren t-shirts, genuine silk custom made qipaos, and the most extensive collection of flowery stretch pants I had ever seen.  It seemed like shopper’s paradise, and that impression confirmed itself once I had mastered Chinese price haggling. 

 

The underground shoe stalls spread my bargaining wings.  “320 yuan,” snapped the sales lady, as cutting as a Chinese broadsword.  Faced with this unfair mountain of a price (especially considering I had spied her sell the same pair of sandals for 60 yuan to a Chinese customer), I turned on the worn heels of my sneakers and walked away.  Instantly, the sales person started yelling for me to come back, promising she would offer me a better price.  I didn’t dare face her again.  But later, I learnt to exploit this walk-away-without-looking-back attitude to drop the price of a tailor-made suit by 100 yuan down to a respectable — at least I hear — 500 yuan.

 

The same day, I yet again heaved out of the car, but in what seemed to be a different world.  It was a different part of the city in fact, a haven of silence next to the noise of Xiushuijie — the Guozijian Imperial College neigbouring the temple of Confucius.  Walking through the yard was a bit like walking through a miniature Venice.  The white marble structure seemed to magically float on the water surrounding it.  Hundreds of years ago, aspiring officials took their examinations here (if only today’s students could leisurely look out on wavering willow branches and hear bird songs while working out their problem sets).

 

Small alleys ran around the temple like capillaries to a heart.  There again, the setting was other worldly, like that of a scene in Zhang Yimou’s To Live.  Glimpses through small doorways in the alleys revealed people kindling their stove fire in low-ceilinged huts.  I was overtaken by a cycling water seller yelling out his trade in the brick silence of the hutongs.

 

I slid into a ramshackle red taxi to pick up my 500 yuan tailor-made suit on a rainy day.  An hour later, I was still in the cab’s backseat, inhaling the gasoline fumes which seeped out of its cracks and out of all the other gas guzzlers in the mile long traffic jam.  (I learned never to take a cab on a rainy day, and later, a driver advised me that the best cab hours were during mid-day and in the evening.)

 

This was not to happen again.  I purchased a bright pink bicycle and set out in the unknown.

 

Riding a bicycle in Beijing has been a worthwhile life-threatening experience.  Beijing is one of the few places in the world that suffers from an embargo on standard traffic regulations (other zones include Naples famous for its ignored one-way street signs and Germany, for its absent highway speed limits).  Drivers feign both color blindness — a red light equals a green light but not vice versa — and total blindness concerning the other vehicles.

 

On the other hand, only on my bike was I able to feel the relaxed pulse of the city.  I saw middle-aged men with brick-colored features gazing over the traffic horizon, or adolescents leaning back in chairs (some take pictures of me with their cell phones, I guess there aren’t many foreigners riding bright pink bicycles around); at times, friends or family members sitting on the back of the bicycle amazon style and calmly conversing with the driver.  Peacefully riding a bicycle on the side of the road was miles away from the nervous driving on the road.

 

Some lazy evenings, I believe I even immersed myself in the pulse.  Outside a small street restaurant near Changchunjie Park, I sat back, chewed on steamed soy beans and picked at the steaming dishes.  Around the table rang laughter interrupted by sips of Tsingtao beer.  We strolled on a path into the park (the grass is unfortunately forbidden territory) and discovered tens of Chinese people ballroom dancing. Only the far off street lights illuminated the twirling figures and their blurred moving shadows stretched across the golden pavement.

 

Then there’s my favorite bike moments, in the cool evenings when I ride up north on Huixin Dongjie cross the third ring road and enter a cloud of blinking nylon signs.  That is when I feel closest to my native Paris, nicknamed the city of lights.  Of course here, the lights aren’t the same pale halos as in Paris.  Their colors are shouting and tacky, straight out of Lou Ye’s Suzhou River.  Yet their twinkling is also endowed with the same nostalgia as the movie, as if they foresaw that they soon would be relics from the past.

 

And that could well be.  Beijing is a city in the sporadic throws of modernity, BMWs and AUDIs crawl the streets, the latest gadgets crawl into its inhabitants’ pockets.  Internet has become such an invasive part of adolescent’s lives that the government has placed age limits on Internet cafes. 

And yet, despite its lunging towards the future, the city can’t help but dart Orpheic glances on its past.  Alongside the BMWs stand mule carts.  Internet cafes pop up on uncemented roads.  The hutongs around the Confucius temple nestle among the glass curtained skyscrapers and construction cranes of the schizophrenic megalopolis.

 

My first two weeks in Beijing haven’t completely disproved my entourage’s “d” list of adjectives.  Beijing has unrecommended tap water, markets home to many a fly and threatening drivers.  But Beijing also has so much more.  It has dreams of white stone and vast avenues bursting with light.  It has old men water-painting characters on the pavement at dawn while young clubbers stagger back to their rooms for a good day of sleep.  Everyday, I keep on adding adjectives to the initial “d” list I was provided with.  I don’t know when I’ll start repeating myself, but I doubt it will be anytime soon.

thought i might put this on the blog

May 29, 2005
Shakespeare Brushes Up on His Chinese
By AVENTURINA KING
TAIPEI, Taiwan

MACBETH does a back flip from a 10-foot-high city wall; his queen
sings a lament as she wipes imaginary blood from her hands; and the
courtiers enact their coup in Han dynasty dress. It is no typical
production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” that Spoleto Festival U.S.A.
is presenting on Thursday and Friday in Charleston, S.C.

Renamed “The Kingdom of Desire,” it is a creation of the
Contemporary Legend Theater of Taiwan, which has fused
Shakespeare’s plot with the mise-en-scène of Beijing opera. The
verses are in Mandarin (with English titles), and the words are
accentuated by the actors’ flowing patterns of movement. While
plotting the king’s murder, Wei Hai-Ming, as Lady Macbeth,
elegantly twirls the long sleeves of her dress. Wu Hsing-Kuo,
meanwhile, as Macbeth, twists his body in snakelike fashion and
flutters his hands in circles. His movements intensify as his
strong tones resonate throughout the auditorium.

In Beijing opera, a 200-year-old dramatic medium and long the most
popular form of entertainment in China, actors, clothed in ornate
silk costumes, perform stylized movements on a more or less bare
stage. Traditional string, wind and percussion instruments
accompany the performers through sequences of acting, song, dance
and acrobatics. Like Broadway players, the actors excel in these
different skills and often perform them simultaneously.

The Contemporary Legend Theater was established in 1986 by its lead
actor and artistic director, Mr. Wu, in an attempt to usher Beijing
opera into the 21st century. The company made its debut with “The
Kingdom of Desire,” which it has since performed widely, notably at
the Royal National Theater in London in 1990 and at the Avignon
Festival in France in 1998.

Over the last two decades, the company has produced a series of
plays interpreting canonical Western dramas - “Hamlet,” “Medea,”
“Oresteia,” “The Tempest” - through the Beijing opera lens. In
2001, Mr. Wu performed “King Lear” as a one-man show, alternately
playing Lear, Cordelia and the other principal roles.
(Cross-dressing is a longstanding tradition in Beijing opera.)

Purists of a certain stripe might see these adaptations as further
evidence of the East’s capitulation to Western culture, whether
popular or classical. Mr. Wu, however, sees them as a way to help
preserve Beijing opera tradition.

“As I grew up learning Beijing opera, I realized that every day the
audiences grew smaller and smaller,” he said in an interview. “The
times were changing quickly. So I asked myself how I could make
Beijing opera flourish again.”

But when he set about to fuse Eastern and Western drama, he and his
collaborators found that it was no easy task. Ms. Wei, the Lady
Macbeth, explains: “Beijing opera portrays beauty. Western drama
depicts life.”

Aesthetic qualities of a rarefied sort are paramount in Beijing
opera. Actors train intensively from childhood to achieve a perfect
fluidity of movement. Stage scenes are organized to produce the most
exquisite impression. Sometimes, during a martial sequence, a gong
will suddenly sound, and the performers freeze their bodies into a
beautiful sculpture adorned in silk.

Onstage, there is no ugliness. Actors’ faces reveal little emotion,
even through death and war; grief is expressed through stylized
gestures. Nor does anything interrupt the smooth choreography.
Everything is done to please the eye.

This ideal is very different from Western drama, which, beginning
with Greek tragedy, does not hesitate to plunge into the depths of
human suffering in a wrenching, realistic manner. The goal of
involving the audience emotionally often supersedes that of giving
visual pleasure.

These differences in representation reflect the differences in
subject matter. “Beijing opera only portrays virtue, illustrates
high ideals,” Mr. Wu said. “Shakespeare’s plays and the Greek
tragedies talk about human weakness caused by love and hatred.”
Indeed, Chinese opera heroes and heroines, like the charitable Bai
Su Zhen in “Madam White Snake” or the naïve Du Liniang in “The
Peony Pavilion,” are paradigms of innocence. The leads in “Macbeth”
are murderers tortured by ambition and then by guilt.

But in a few important regards, Shakespeare is well suited to the
Chinese stage. “Shakespeare wrote most of his plays in verse, like
Beijing opera,” Mr. Wu said. “His stage is also relatively sparse.
The actors are responsible for conjuring up the setting.”

He added, “We want to use well-known masterpieces because everyone
understands them already.” That is how traditional opera is
generally presented in China, where operas may last up to 20 hours
but are typically shown in isolated excerpts, requiring the
audience to be familiar with the larger context of a given scene.

Mr. Wu began intensive training in Beijing opera at 10, in Taiwan.
Eight years later, he entered the Chinese Culture University and
started studying Shakespeare. After graduation he performed leading
roles for the Cloud Gate Dance Theater and the Lu Kuang Chinese
Opera School. In 1983, eager to revive the form, he and a group of
friends began discussing the possibility of a Beijing opera
interpretation of “Macbeth.”

This was the genesis of the company. The challenges were immense. It
had no script, no sets, no costumes, no rehearsal space and no
financing.

“We had trouble finding someone to adapt the script to Beijing
opera, because a lot of people opposed our use of Beijing opera as
a means to present a Western drama,” said Lin Hsiu-Wei, the
producer of “The Kingdom of Desire” and Mr. Wu’s wife. “Finally, a
college student accepted, and turned the verse into Beijing opera
style poetry in one year. At the end, it was too long to use, so we
had to edit it extensively.” The text was set to traditional
melodies from Beijing opera.

The sets and costumes were produced by volunteers. “The people
making the sets put up their own money,” Ms. Lin said, adding that
the costume designers did the same.

As for the role of Lady Macbeth, the company looked outside its own
ranks. “At the time,” Ms. Lin explained, “in the Beijing opera
world, the two best accomplished artists were Wu Hsing-Kuo and Wei
Hai-Ming,” a star of the Hai Kuang Chinese Opera Company in Taiwan.
“They were therefore the perfect match onstage.” Mr. Wu called Ms.
Wei and offered her the role of Lady Macbeth - but without salary.
(The company is now fully professional.)

Beijing opera is highly codified. Movements function as symbols that
can represent either the physical situation or the thoughts of a
character. A thrust of the leg and the character is suddenly
swimming in a river. A dismissive wave of the hand, the character
is angry.

The code is made more complex by traditional opera’s character
categories. Like Western opera, which categorizes its roles
according to vocal range (sopranos and tenors as heroes and
heroines, mezzos and basses as heavies), Beijing opera divides its
characters according to sex, age, rank and function.

The term “wusheng,” for example, designates all the male military
roles. “Qingyi” describes the virtuous lady, whether a dutiful
daughter or a devoted wife and mother. Each category has its own
repertory of stage movements from which the characters choose to
express their particular situations.

Because of the difficulty of the movements, a Beijing opera
performer will generally master only one or two role types. As Ms.
Wei, who began training when she was 10, explains, “I was raised as
qingyi, which means that all my movements had to be very tender,
very soft.” So when Mr. Wu called, she assumed that her role in
“The Kingdom of Desire” would fall within that category, too. “I
accepted the offer without having read the script,” she said. She
added with a laugh, “I hadn’t suspected his plan.”

But Lady Macbeth does not fall into any of the traditional character
categories. Ms. Wei had to discard her qingyi movements and create a
new body language to depict Lady Macbeth’s devious personality - a
process that exemplifies the modernization of Beijing opera in the
production.

“I created new movements, like this one, where my palms are facing
toward the sky and my hands are at different levels,” she said.
“The palms facing upward indicate that Lady Macbeth wishes to
elevate her status and the status of her husband. But you would
never see a movement like this in traditional Beijing opera.”

She demonstrated other movements she had created for her role. “When
I walk, I move my dress so that it is like the tail of a snake,” she
said. “When I plot the king’s murder with Macbeth, I emphasize the
vicious words with the lashing movements of my dress.”

And unusually, the Beijing opera performers are required to depict
suffering realistically, to contort their made-up features into
scowls and frowns, to produce tears.

Yet in “The Kingdom of Desire,” the performance loses none of its
beauty. The grimaces, the stabbing and the contracted limbs, all
that is normally ugly and cathartic in Western drama, is infused
with gracefulness, a constant hallmark of the form. And emotions
are externalized with a new intensity through the performers’
graceful use of their entire bodies to express their feelings. (Ms.
Wei and Mr. Wu will give a lecture-demonstration on “The Kingdom of
Desire” on June 8 at the New York Library for the Performing Arts.)

As Mr. Wu had hoped, “Macbeth” has given Beijing opera new
expressive possibilities and a new opportunity to flourish. Maybe
Beijing opera will do the same for “Macbeth.”

Today, I waltzed into the dongzhimen subway station and found myself in front of (what a coincidence), a 6 yuan-each-pirated-dvd saleswoman.  I dived into her box.  Only after I had ripped out about ten dvds from the row did I notice the saleswoman intently staring at something behind me.  For a moment, I thought she had entered the same mental state as the brick featured chinese men who spend all day gazing at the cars on the road.  But then I turned around and beheld two beijing policemen.

They were pacing towards the pirated dvd stall and I felt like a misplaced witness of a western gunfire dual.  The policemen moved in closer.  The saleswoman’s nose started twitching (like that of a rabbit when it senses danger).  Somewhere in a corner of the subway hall, a spider crawled along the wall.

Then one of the policemen nonchalantly picked a dvd up and asked how much it was.  He complained about the price, haggled over it, asked if there were any other good movies out.  Both policemen sauntered off.

There was a recent comment on my blog asking me to introduce it, why, where, how, when, who (there’s 7 of them but i don’t know the rest):

I initially started my blog because I wanted to get published, and that’s not an easy thing to do as a young writer in New York (unless you get published in your school paper, but then you have to wait in a line of 20 other skilled aspiring writers to get your byline and 300 words).  I didn’t yet know what direction I wanted to take the blog in, I was just writing about my thoughts on different cultural events in new york. 

Right now, I m just doing the same thing in fact, only it’s in Beijing.  So I’ve implanted another section in each one of my cultural criticisms, before I dive into my descriptions, I reassess the past few days in Beijing, trying to isolate the moments which most characterize my experience of the city.

I m especially interested in comparing different cultures.  Coming from two separate cultures myself (born in france with american parent), it’s practically a reflex for me to analyze these differences, to start from objective observations–there are tens of soap operas set in historical times on chinese tv, almost all the soap operas on american tv are set nowadays–and work back to the essence of that culture–is it because the chinese audience needs to be reminded of their history? for what reason?. 

Well, I try at least.  In the coming weeks, I hope to deepen my dip into chinese culture and provide more competent entries.

Saturday night I went clubbing in Beijing.  one adjective to describe it: civil.

I arrived early, at 11 pm along with a gigling pair of chinese friends.  Up the steps, through columns of trees and straight to the entrance.  No long wait for a doorman to notice you and dismissively hail you forward (typical experience in New York clubs).  It was tickets: 5 dollars. Stamp on the hand and “welcome” in and down onto the dance floor.  Then two and a half hours of dancing to straight hip hop music, the beyonce-sean paul-nelly kind that I feel guilty downloading but comfortable dancing on.  On the dance floor, it’s all “hello, how are you?” yelled in your ear over the deafening base, “let’s dance together”.  Mind you, the only ones that asked me this were girls, guys don t even bother dancing with girls they don’t know (yet again, trully on the other side of the world from New York)

The day after, that’s yesterday evening, I had another dance experience, although I didn’t exactly participate in it.  Out late in the tepid evening, on the side of the park sipping qing tao beer.  I suddenly heard music (cheesy old song instrumentals) coming from inside the park.  I strolled into the vegetation and came upon a square with tens of old chinese people ballroom dancing.  Eventhough some of them didn’t know what they were doing, it was a delightful scene and I felt like a forest wanderer who chanced upon a party of elves.  Only the far off street lights illuminated the twirling figures and their blurred moving shadows stretched accross the golden pavement.