WEEKEND TIME TRAVEL

(This post was actually written a week ago--today is August 21. What is past? what is present?what is future?)

Since I spent some time in my office on Saturday putting last minute touches on a proposal due today, I took the opportunity to pretty much not do anything on Sunday. I passively time-traveled my way through Chinese history, finishing my current wuxia series and three movies that took me from Han China at the time of Cao Cao, to the birth of the Republican revolution in Hong Kong in 1906 to contemporary, post-modern Shanghai.

I'm not completely sure of the time frame of The Handsome Siblings, could be Song, could be Tang, but in the jianghu, the specific dynasty isn't important, it's just old and a little separate.

And irrelevant. In the middle of the last episode, I sent an email to my video vendor..."Do you have The Spirit of the Sword?" another series by the same author with Nicholas Tse. I have become accustomed to seeing him in films, but didn't know he did a lot of these longer TV series. Not unexpectedly, she did, and, "It's on sale!"

Donnie Yen didn't look bad (if a little short and pale) as Guan Yu, a classic general, bigger than life, from the Three Kingdoms Period in The Lost Bladesman. And he also played against his own standard in Beggars and Assassins, about a fictionalized (I think) attempt on the life of Sun Yat Sen in Hong Kong in 1906.

Alas, there was no swordplay or martial arts in Suzhou River--well, some beatings and a knifing--but what do you expect in contemporary Shanghai.

People sometimes comment about this passion/obsession of mine, the Chinese things. "You must have been Chinese in a past life," they say. But I think it may be the opposite. I'm studying to be Chinese in a future life. I wouldn't have fared well as a female in the Chinese past...none of the options are very appealing or likely...as a concubine, a bound-footed tai tai, a peasant, a servant.

The future for women in China looks better. (Assuming of course, I came back as a woman.) It is a truism that education is the key to improving women's status, giving them more options and control over their own social and economic lives. But some studies suggest it may be the one child policy that --despite its application in a society that favored boys--in the end is working to benefit girls (the ones who are born and kept anyway. I recently heard a depressing story about mothers in Pakistan, where policies against birth control keep a woman literally barefoot and pregnant against their will, in terrible poverty. And the face of African famine is usually overburdened women with several starving children. It's easy for us to say, why don't they stop having all these children, but cultural influences--religious values and patriarchy (patriarchal religious values)-- are working against them.

If there is time travel, or reincarnation, I hope I am prepared and aware. Perhaps I'll come back as my own granddaughter, (like Song Il-gook in Muhyul.)