NAME-DROPPING IN CHINA
You'd think that after three weeks of Chinese food, Chinese people, Chinese religion, Chinese smog, Chinese rain, Chinese language, Chinese art, I might want to settle in at home with a pepperoni pizza and an Al Pacino movie.

But last night, I was compelled to re-watch "True Legend (Su Qiu Er)" the Vincent Zhao Wen Zhuo (Chiu Man Cheuk) film I had been longing to see for a year, failed to see in Beijing (on 3D on a big screen, long past its debut and widely available on DVD), but scored as a Hong Kong region DVD in Honolulu Chinatown before I left home. It's about the popularizer of "drunken fist," an on-going theme in martial arts classics.  I loved Vincent in it, and refuse to compare his performance with anything by Jet Li or Donnie Yen (Zhao is a decade younger, anyway), although the segment that featured David Carradine (to whom the movie was dedicated, after his peculiar demise) was terrible...if I were Carradine, I might have looked for a less embarrassing way out of the embarrassment of the film role.  What was he thinking?

What I did do in China was drop Vincent's name a lot.  "Oh, yes, he's so handsome," our tour guide agreed. She knew all of his TV roles. Although another male tour guide said he preferred Hollywood movies, like Star Wars, when I told him I liked Chinese film.   Movies and Zhao Wen Zhuo were good topics for conversation with cab drivers.  One said he liked Julia Roberts, whose big grin was everywhere in Lancome advertising all over China, even more prevalent than Mao's kitchy visage.  We agreed that Julia and Vincent both had wondrous big smiles.

So, Vincent's name earned me a little street cred in China, and I had to pay homage on my first movie night back at home. Having done that, next on the agenda is to complete the Korean Jumong series, on my iPad, a pleasant little traveling companion and addictively good story. Too bad it's in Korean, not Mandarin. It sounds really foreign. I was getting used to CCTV in Beijing which featured whole channels devoted to martial arts, drama series and Chinese opera. Returning home one evening after a live opera sampler which included scenes from White Snake, with which I have become very familiar, I turned on the opera channel...to discover an honest-to-Mao revolutionary opera being played out.  It was just like classic Peking opera, but with characters dressed in Red Army uniforms and 1960s peasant chic.