Aventurina King

I live in Sihuidong Tonghuijiayuan (yes i have to say all that to the cab drivers every single time).  It is a hovering stone platform the size of ten football fields upon which grow sparse but thick, high trunks of concrete.  The colors are all whitish-greyish along with the occasional daggers of rust oozing down.  It's no touristic attraction but to me, it surpasses the flashy foreigner oriented living quarters of sanlitun. Here, I savour the sent of the surrounding authentic unexceptional community of chinese commoners.

I wake early in the morning, totter out of my bedroom with a grateful glance towards the functionning air conditioning (the electricity and water often run out, sometimes i will wake up sweating or thirsty falter towards a dry tap).  An eye rub and a shower later, I emerge on the uncarpeted floor and dingy walls of the 24th floor hallway, the lift doors open on the drousy face of woman. For some reason, chinese can't operate elevators themselves, instead, day and night, a young women leans(there are no chairs) on the side of the metal box punching the floor number the compound dwellers dictate.

I walk into the square nestled between the concrete trunks, and there sure enough is the mythical army of kung fu practitioners.  They are scattered on the ignited dawn pavement like chess pieces, they are ancient, most probably wise, their eyes are ridges.  their faces sunflower the slow mo movements of their hands.

I suppress my laughter.  They remind me of a comic scene on the bbc, three senile scottish men practicing tai ji in their backyard.  Their movements are shaky, their backs dangerously hunched forward as though they were fainting.

Thousands of miles away, in China, the situation hasn't improved much.  the army breaks apart, one leg off in that direction, another off in the opposite.  bodies lose balance.  movements spasmodically halt with bouts of amnesia. 

My smile bit into my breakfast crackers.

It was a sweaty yesterday night.  At 7 o'clock it sticked to me and it felt empty.  So me and a friend settled on Qianmen subway station over a tossed coin.  30 minutes later, we emerged on a sea of sun beaten pavement from which icebergs of ancient chinese architecture towered up.

Drunk on the expanse of empty space, we treaded around one of the stone monsters and on to the avenue which circumscribes Tiananmen square.  My friend pointed upwards.

It was dragon, its body sensually curling up into the sky as smoke creeps from a lip-stick bitten cigarette.  The endless row of its paper rectangles contorted upwards and faded into the darkness above the glittering square.

It seemed a miracle to me, those kites--tens of colored paper rectangles parallely suspended on a cotton string--silently curling up from Tiananmen square.  In fact, it was a mixture of aerodynamics and the 25 kuai ($3) I spent on 90 pieces of paper attached to a string.  The standard length of a kite is that corrresponding to 30 pieces of paper, along with my girlfriend, we bought three sets of 30 and tied them together.

And 10 minutes later there I was, like a child who learns the consequences of "eyes bigger than stomach", a mess of paper and string around me, as unable to fly as as the stone icebergs watching over the square.  We tried again, my gilfriend breathlessly running around the square coaxing the kite up, with me guarding our belongings, laughing uncontrollably as crowds of kite vendors came up and pushed their merchandise in my face.  She was more successful than I was, the kite was up and we were two marathon runners proudly flying our leashed dragon, linking the majestic animal to the ground.  A white van pulled up by the marathon runners, a Tiananmen guard's face thrust itself out of the window and quacked out the inevitable.  We pretended not to understand Chinese, but sign language is international, and the guard knew his gestures were very clear.  So the dragon returned to the bag we had pulled it out of.

Next on my list of Liu Ye films was Na Shan Na Ren Na Gou (that mountain, those men, that dog; or the official translation: "postmen on the mountain" which wisely loses the dog).  Like Lan Yu, another so-so production. The film opens on the rusty lamp-lit room of a house on the mountain.  An old man is collecting dusty papers and gently depositing them in what could be a lonely planet guide's back sack.  He is the father postman, dutifully preparing the post bag for his successor and son (Liu Ye).  In the glimmering morning both of them set out to deliver accross the mountain.  The rest is scene after scene of mountain greenery stained by the figures of the two men and the faithful post dog.  The music comes straight from the waiting room of a psychiatric ward, inner-peace inducing flutes and bells.  The mountain people are smiling, even though their life is hard--this remains the main topic of conversation between father and son throughout the quasi uneventful journey.  Liu Ye also smiles eventhough his childhood has been fatherless (as we learn from the slow mo beauty lense flashbacks that easily make up half of the movie).  The role suites him well, or rather he suites the role well.  Although the son is 24, he is still a child at heart.  Liu Ye stares up towards the next mountain he has to climb as he does at his father, both reverentially and fearfully.  When interacting with the mountain people, his timid glance darts away, the sides of his mouth barely curl up.  Sometimes he laughs out loud with the abandon of a five year old or unabashedly sings off key and beat along to pop songs on his small radio.

I arrived back in Beijing this morning at 7 and stepped off the night train in a daze (eventhough the beds were much more welcoming than the tattered leather equivalents of the Paris-Venice train I took when I was 12, sleep still didn't settle in).  I'm relieved to be back in Beijing.  Shanghai is beautiful, dazzling, stunning etc... but it lacks authenticity.  It is a city built to project a modern image of China, it is not a city built for the Chinese to live in. 

Gold sheened shopping malls, glass glaciers and Martian-like constructions--the Oriental Pearl Tower--guard the sides of every wide avenue.  They are silent like sentinels, there is no one behind the massive glass curtains.  Behind every tree hides a kodak stand, providing cameras, batteries and film for absent tourists.  This is the modern quarter on the east side of the river.  It is empty, like an extraterrestrial base whose inhabitants haven't landed yet. Accross the river I can see, the Bund, the part of the city that was constructed by the first westerners arrived.  It looks like London with its red telephone boxes, pompous black gates barring the ancient stone walls and their carved golden capitals.

I got a whiff (it was a smelly experience) of the authentic (what I believe to be the authentic) Shangai in the afternoon, walking through one of the Nangtong (slum) districts.  I crouched and slid into a small restaurant on the side of the littered road and drank MaLa Tang (for those who read my Spicy and Spicy entry, it's a soup that has both sorts of spices in it) sitting on chair with a cat underneath it.  Around me, small children were pealing boiled eggs and watching cartoons on a TV positioned right above my head.

1)Taipei: clean (no eating aloud), efficient, spacious, also because people waiting for the train neatly cue up in front of doorway signs on the floor, it reminds me of "Welcome to Aggatica", has large plasma tvs

2)Shanghai: clean but doesn't cover enough of the city, it has doorway signs on the floor but nobody cares, also has large plasma tvs

3)Beijing: clean but doesn t cover enough of the city, doesn t have any plasma tvs

4)France: dirty, beggars seem to cue up to ask you for money, but little can surpass the charm of the parisian metro system with it's crouched ceilings, white old fashioned tiles and towering fashion billboards (often displaying scantily clad top models in provocative or original positions)

6)London: clean, efficient

5)New York: dirty, efficient, definitely unsafe at night although the 24/7 characteristic is a plus, I enjoy riding the express train down to 42 street, it s a bit like space mountain except you don't trust the driver.

Shanghai:

I came, I saw, I wrote ( Scripsi is a wild guess, I don't know one word of latin).

I arrived here yesterday morning at 7 am after 12 hours of train.  The train experience was unlike anything I heard about it.  No there were no chickens running around, excrementing up the ramshackle floor boards, or natives using sheep as pillows.  That isn't to say there were western style toilet seats (which automatically stars a location in my opinion), but there were bunkbeds, clean linen (I stole un extra two quilts and three pillows from the empty cabins), there was even an open bar where I bought a bottle of Kahluah.

Shanghai versus Beijing (the ultimate showdown)

It is more modern (but that had been repeated so many times to me before I left).  I mean, everywhere, there are glass curtained skyscrapers, like in New York.  But then, there are trees which flank the wide avenues, like in Paris.  In fact, it is exactly the same species of trees, I'm guessing they were imported from Europe   It is much hotter than Beijing, Beijing has dry heat, Shanghai has a humid, heavy atmosphere which upon contact causes instantaneous sweat.

I haven't seen Beijing's national museum yet (shame on me) but I don't think it could beat Shanghai's art museum.  It has the most extensive collection of Chinese artifacts I have ever seen.  Five floor of jades, ceramics, paintings, calligraphy samples and clothes.  The ceramics are the most impressive collection and I have fallen in love with Chinese porcelain(see the ceramic photo album on the blog).  I have decided to write a summary of its history on my blog.  Coming soon...

This is an ancient Chinese pillow.  I can't imagine what the beds must have been like, predecessors of the wooden beds that welcome tourists in Beijing. I don't have a quilt because I sleep on it.

Take Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education (or Desire), remove its screaming colors, its fragmented story line and the hint of self-derision from its exagerated melodrama and you get Lan Yu, the placid, painfully straightforward movie about true love between two men.

When he is not in his stuffy office raking in millions, Chen Handong enjoys and spoils his lovers.  Both lustful and matronly, he brings the latest one, 16 year-old Lan Yu (Liu Ye) to expensive Japanese restaurants, buys him a house and a car for his graduation and three bags of checkered cotton shirts for New Year's eve.

Short explanation.  Why am I seeing another of Liu Ye's performance when his Sudden Lover had less than impressed me?  Well for one I'm writing a feature on him for the China Daily.  Also, I could understand Chinese movie-goers doting on a bad actor, the american teenage population (including myself) enjoy dancing on Britney Spears after all. But I can't understand why Chinese movie directors would do so.  Liu Ye's has starred in over ten movies including Chen Kaige's The Promise, and Lou Ye's Purple Butterfly (both are directors I admire).  Moreover, with Lan Yu, Liu Ye has definitely taken a risk with his carreer.  Na Shan Na Ren Na Gou stamped him with the title of acclaimed actor in China.  Lan Yu, with its taboo theme of homosexuality (it is still not accepted in China), could have compromised what he had achieved, but he chose the challenge anyway. 

But back to the checkered shirts.  One gets the inkling that even if it weren't for the checkered shirts, Liu Ye would show up as usual, punctual and shining at Chen Handong's door.  Is it the same for Chen Handong?  It certainly is.  But the script writer likes drawing out the suspense.  Chen Handong has to cheat on Liu Ye, break up with him, get married for seven years, end up in jail and get bailed out by Liu Ye before they can become mutual lover aka pennyless love birds.

Love and its realization are all Lan Yu leaves us with.  Everything else subsides.  The subplots--Chen Handong's marriage, his illegal financial manoeuvers--are gimmicks to catalyze, or delay the happily-ever-after with Lan Yu.  Chen Handong's brilliant, beautiful and understanding wife makes him realize how much he misses Lan Yu.  Chen Handong must land up in jail for Lan Yu to bail him out and prove his love. 

Like Chen Handong with his lovers, Lan Yu raises points and drops them soon after.  "A man should get a wife and raise a family" Chen Handong justifies his marriage to Lan Yu.   Does that still hold seven years later?  Chen Handong seems to have forgotten he even said that in the first place.     Does everyone need to settle down sooner or later? Is commitment necessary for everyone? Appropriate questions that the movie turns away from like a dog with its tail between its legs.  Chen Handong and Lan Yu simply start living together.  Is that the family life that Chen was talking about in the first place?  Or has he just relinquished it?  What then does Lan Yu represent for him?  These unanswered questions discredit their love.

For Liu Ye, Lan Yu is an improvement on Sudden Lover.  He has lightened his grip on the deer-in-the-headlights stare.  At 16 years old, Lan Yu punctuates his silent timidity with giggles, teethy grins and hesitant bursts of indignation and tears. Ten years later, Lan Yu has shrugged off some of the giggling, but still remains his bashful, quiet self.  He never dons adult cynicism.  And so much the better, Liu Ye cannot portray cynicism, which looking back on it, might have been the problem with Sudden Lover.  There is too much excitement, fear and innocence in his stare to flatten it down to that of a blased cab driver.  The deer-in-the-headlights stare was his attempt to force a lid on his brimming youthfulness.  The lid was smacked on, but it blocked his nuanced acting inside in the process.

This morning I finished watching Peacock for the second time.  I was trying to find out why I enjoyed the movie so much, and I think I've isolated the essential reason: freshness.

Everything about the movie smells fresh.  The subtle cinematography, the unpredictible yet endearing characters, the ambivalent story line.  What is Peacock about? The second shot displays a family of five huddling around a stone table eating dinner.  The sedated voice over of a young boy tells us we are in a summer of the 1970 s, that this his family.  Cut to his sister,  her marble face and ebony braids, playing accordion alongside a screaming tea pot.  Then an elliptical waltz through her bitter and quiet life, her shattered dreams of becoming a soldier parachutist, her timid glances towards her first love and cold confident stare at her husband. She seems schizophrenic.  At first silent and head-bowed, she suddenly breaks out in a run to catch her parachute's stealer or she emotionlessly announces her marriage out of the blue. Yet instead of falling apart, her character acquires depth.  She is my favorite female  protagonist, silent, seemingly timid, she refuses to compromise and displays ferocity when  determined to get what she wants. The rest of the movie provides a similar form of description of her older and younger brother.

But Peacock is more than just about individuals. The first shot displays the dirt street almost concealed by the grey rooftops.  After having watched the movie, I felt like I had lived in that small village.  That I too had treaded on the gravel, had bicycled through the swaying wheat fields and rested my head on my hand in the musty classrooms.

Maybe the most praise worthy element of Peacock is its cinematography.  Director Gu Changwei was the cinematographer for Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine and Life on a String.  Every frame of those movies is Mondrian painting-perfect, flamboyant planes of contrasting colors colliding in rigid geometrical compositions.  Peacock is also constantly aesthetic, but in a more subtle, humble way.  It has dipped its predecessors' screaming tones into a cool bucket of water and blown fog over the rigid lines.  Geometry and color are no more dictators of the frame but spirits that gently whisper advice.  The subject matter becomes the new priority.  Another added feature to Chen Kaige's works is fluid camera movement.  In Peacock, beauty wafts through the individual pictures and into their actual sequence as the camera gracefully traces an ark over rooftops and around doorways, revealing the sister spreading vegetables to dry out over a red carpet or the older brother bathing geese in the pond.  At another moment, it slowly circles around an open window, reluctant to enter the dark room where the mother is being chastized.

In the most striking scene, the sister nonchalantly paces accross the street towards a leather skinned man crouched on a bicycle.  Years ago, he had been her first love, now, he is a father who can barely keep his rice ball in his mouth.  With silent confidence, she murmurs "I was just telling my brother that you will love me forever." A piece of the rice ball falls out of his mouth as he asks "Excuse me, what is your name?".  She smiles demurely and slowly treads back to the other side of the street.

"I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists" declared singer Chris Martin of his band Coldplay.  And it may be true, musically wise the last album X&Y doesn’t surface above the other British rock—Oasis’s Don’t Believe the Truth, The Verve’s  This is Music--that has washed over the charts in the past few years.  There is the same catchy cosmic wall of percussion and synthesizer, electrical guitar wails and a sedated voice that dart out over it all—Talk.  There are also quiet tear-jerking ballads—What If.  What distinguishes Coldplay from the other British rock bands, is their ‘unrock-like’ attitude.  They avoid the scandalous tabloids and the classical blunders with authority.  Their lyrics too are infused with innocence.  They are almost as straightforward as Disney--“What if you decide/that you don’t want me there by your side”.  Their rimes are predictable and their verses, clumsily rhythmical like a limerick.  But then again, why does rock have to be about rebellion, drugs, violence and sex; lyrics whose murky meaning can only be waded through and not understood?  Why couldn’t it just be pure expression, clear ideas imparted through music?  That is what Coldplay achieve.  They trust you to shake off preconceptions, sit back, relax and receive.  And once you do that, the album becomes as fresh and raw as only great rock albums are.