Clamming Down

Has it been more than two months since I have posted something to this blog?  Yes.  Not that I haven't been indulging in lots of Asian film and serials, but I have been under pressure with a professional project and have neglected chronicling the whimsical side of my life.  So on another three-day weekend,  during which we are celebrating a holiday the rest of the country doesn't, King Kamehameha Day, and having completed the intense deadlined project which had been giving me mild anxiety attacks (thank goodness for Taoist breathing exercises),  I can finally clam down.

Intentional typo that, "clam down."  In my current wuxia series one of the subtitled bits of dialogue admonished a raving character to "clam down."  I have often been advised to "clam up," with its vaguely mafioso innuendo, but no one ever told me to "clam down."  Although I often say I am "happy as a clam," a phrase which usually omits the meaningful part: "at high tide." A sort of Taoist clam.  A bivalve not at risk of being dug up and steamed and drenched in clarified butter.   Maybe that's what clamming down might mean.  Like hunkering down. Clam creeps down.

Still, I would like to have had this as a tool during my project to clam everyone up or down.

Now this is a clam digger!

It's very creepy that this sword allegedly is infused with a spiritual aura as a result of having been crafted with human bones in the mix.  Personally, I would clam up about that.

Spirit of the Sword, typical wuxia, but not the greatest (so far, I'm only at episode 18 of 40),  has been kind of fun, featuring Nicholas Tse with a funky haircut, which distracts from his usual minimalist display of a maximum of two expressions in his acting.  Nick is always very pretty to look at, but his emotional range appears somewhat limited.  Here's a sample from the series:

Since April, I have also enjoyed several Korean dramas (including one with the delectable Bae Yong Jun that my Chinese DVD version's title, Wang 4 Credited Gods, should have alerted me that the subtitles might be truly bizarre: whenever the dialogue would have been "want to" it was rendered, Beijing-inflected, as "wanner").  There are also several movies that I watched, largely as escape mechanisms from the professional project, but I honestly can't easily recall what they were; since I was not particularly clam, I didn't even take time to jot down the titles. (Although it's beginning to
come back to me--fodder for a subsequent post.)  It's as if between the last holiday dedicated to Hawaiian royalty and this one, I have been in some space/time warp, all clammed up or clammed down.

But now I am emerging from my shell.

Welcome Water Dragon

The second new year festival of the year, a yin start-over, and I fail as usual to cleanse the house of evil spirits, barely taking out the trash, let alone scrubbing floors and getting rid of chipped china. (I may however eat jai and gau tomorrow.) Today I finish reading a highly entertaining and useful book about China travel and language and watch Mao's Last Dancer and Kung Fu Panda 2, stories that have a lot more in common than you might at first think..

I'd read the biography that Mao's Last Dancer is based on when it came out, and forgot about it until a couple years ago when the film was showing locally in theaters with enthusiastic reviews. But I rarely go to theaters, so it wasn't until I saw the DVD in that evil purveyor of Chinese goods, Wal-Mart, at Christmas, that I picked it up.  Good story about defection and courage and dedication to craft (although the fact that it was filmed in part in China with a Chinese cast and crew suggests that defection isn't what it used to be), and the film features a stunning dancer, Chi Cao, from China via Britain, in the lead role.

Ballet, martial arts, whatever...levitation is levitation.

On to Kung Fu Panda 2, in which a group of animated stuffed animals skilled in wu shu, voiced by greats like Gary Oldman (the evil character) and James Hong, the panda's adoptive goose father, manage to save China.  With typical, classic wuxia themes of lost orphans, buddies, revenge, and lust for power (why did that White Peacock want to run China...I forget), it was cute and even brought me to tears (well, so did Mao's Last Dancer, maybe I'm just feeling soft these days). And it ends with Po the Panda's real panda dad discovering "My son is alive," thus guaranteeing Kung Fu Panda 3.  But it lacked one element I watch kick flicks for: hot martial artists with sultry expressions and swords and kick ass kicking.  No Vincent Zhao or Song-il Guk here.  CGI pandas just don't do it for me.

At least the ballet scenes in MLD were gorgeous and featured real men, and especially the one wherein Li Cuixin's peasant father sees his son perform on stage for the first time, quite lasciviously, compared to Madame Mao's requirements, in Rite of Spring. How strange it must have been for a peasant fresh from Shandong who probably hadn't even seen Peking opera. Dad hasn't seen his son for some ten years and asks after the finale, "But why aren't you wearing any clothes?" He doesn't need to worry about that, really.  Li Cuixin has since left the dance and become a stockbroker.

But I did get a little satisfaction from The Sorcerer and the White Snake, yet another retelling, with CGI, of the white snake legend, which I have enjoyed on stage in Chinese and English and in Zhang Yimou's Disney-esque light show fantasy in Hangzhou.  Not from Jet Li, though, but the singer/actor who plays the doomed love interest of  the White Snake, Raymond Lam, familiar to me from a few Hong Kong TV series.

OK, back of Ray's head, but Eva Huang is lovely as the love interest too.

Still nothing compares to Vincent Zhao (Chiu Man-cheuk) in Green Snake, where he plays the evil monk causing trouble for everyone.  He could cause trouble for me any time.

Does he look evil to you?

Christmas Eve 2011

I should be wrapping presents, but I've gotten lost in updating of my Netflix queue.  Despite the furor over the DVD/streaming cost differentials and changes, it's still a pretty cool service. I never had Netflix until I got my iPad, which came preloaded with the App.  I didn't find a lot to add to my queue among the new releases, but the Chinese region offerings are overwhelming, both DVD and streaming.

I put a Wudangshan documentary in the queue, then I realized I'd gone over the edge when this screamed "Queue me, queue me!":

Star Appeal...Chinese filmmaker Cui Zien directs this gay-themed sci-fi drama about Xiao Bo, a bisexual man who discovers a stranger by the roadside, naked and claiming to be from Mars.  In Mandarin.

It's only got a 1.7 member rating, about as low as I've seen, but really, how can I pass it up?  I've never seen a Chinese gay-themed sci-fi movie.  I think I have to move this one up to No. 1.

They Say It's Your Birthday

And it came and went, with a little help from my friends.  Although that's probably the wrong song.  This is the right one. This is the first birthday I have experienced where I have not prematurely rounded up my age to get used to it, to exploit it, in the coming year.  No, this one was a little more hesitant, the year of rabbit can continue a little longer for me before the dragon arrives; then I will acknowledge reality.  I celebrated less than I contemplated the aging process.  Birthdays are milestones, but meaningless really, except in that they give an opportunity to review one's progress and destiny.  Are we older AND wiser?  If the Taoist is actually returning to childlike innocence, immortal fetuses and all that, I only hope I can achieve it while maintaining control of bladder and bowels.

I spent my day in a fog, really, getting ready for acquisition of the Christmas tree -- my actual birthday present.  As I predicted, this year we scored a perfectly satisficing one in less than three minutes at the lot at Ala Moana Shopping Center.  These are not decisions that should require agonizing dithering. The next decision was equally easy: an party-of-two afternoon in both of our downtown Irish pubs, literally across the street from one another.

The day after the day, I tested my new all-region DVD player which failed to play my gift from my friendly Chinatown DVD vendor, Andy Lau's Future X-Cops, (what was she thinking?) which seems to coded be for a region beyond the Milky Way.  Perhaps just as well: I was bleary-eyed after finally completing Jewel in the Palace, a popular Korean drama about cooking and medicine, with some restrained romantic and political intrigue with an uncharacteristically happy ending.  My own trusty laptop has suffered--I hope sustained--a logic board failure, so I was using the Wizard's older one to access Dramafever.com.  His Mac drops signals and has some display issues, but I finally can say I have enjoyed this 54-episode classic of K-D. (That's 54 Korean hours, which are just about 60 minutes, more or less.) Since starting it some months ago, I see by my own reckoning, I have watched at least 40 other films and several Chinese series. Why can't I speak fluent Mandarin yet?  But the DVD player did let me enjoy a strange double feature:  The Magic Blade, a 1976 Shaw Brothers classic, and Chen Kaige's Together.  Still I can't get the haunting theme from Jewel in the Palace out of my mind.  Here is the same theme, in the "sad" mode.

I don't know why anyone would waste time with reality TV or the sitcom trash available on your standard cable lineup, when you could enjoy this:

Handsome and beautiful characters, engaging plots, scenery, costumes and soundtracks.  And that's just the historical stuff!

NOT AS EASY AS YI, ER, SAN (1,2,3)

I've been in a kind of wordless state the past few days, an in-between feeling, looking back on a few months of activity, engrossed mostly in reading and videos and Chinese language study. I am a little anxious because I am starting a new Chinese painting class this week, with a new teacher, a Korean nun whose style seems to be very different from that of my teacher of the past two-and-a-half years, a traditional Chinese bird and flower painter. It looks like she may be retiring; fortunately I have access to a new venue. But whether it is tai chi or wu shu or painting, we get attached to our teachers, our shifus. Eventually one of us moves on. The student feels humbled.

So feeling a little like Xue Rengui greeting his shifu in The Legendary Warrior, my latest Chinese series, based on a historical figure, I gather my energy to move on.

I didn't feel like painting today. I have no picture in my mind, and besides I've been reading about painting too much to focus on a particular subject, and I really don't even feel like writing. So I picked up a brush to try something different. Building on a few rudimentary lessons from my former teacher, I consulted a couple of fine textbooks on calligraphy and decided to jump into it.

Learning calligraphy is painting with no subject (although that's a stupid thing to say, really, a Chinese character is a picture, though practicing strokes is like practicing scales), writing with no words...learning it is like learning to dance. I remember my teacher's advice, I follow the 1,2,3, turn, press, and lift instructions in the book, and splatter and dribble like an uncoordinated moron. Over and over and over. Until eventually, I feel the rhythm of the brush stroke. I become one with the brush, and occasionally execute a stroke that looks almost acceptable. Never mind that there are many strokes to master, and characters are built up from them like a ballet. And then characters with characters to make a phrase or a poem. I practice the basic bone stroke*, the component of the characters for one, two, and three, recalling the fluid grace of the swordsman in Hero; the old monk who paints sutras on a wooden deck with his cat's tail in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and Spring; Sammo Hung doing kung fu calligraphy in The Prodigal Son (go to 54:50 in the video), or the water painters on sidewalks I saw in Chinese parks:

Solo Running Script

Two-Handed Couplets

And I am still stuck on the simple bone stroke. "Practice, practice," my teacher says. "Slowly, slowly." For years and years.

*A quick search on this term yielded some hits I really wasn't looking for!!!

BACK IN MY OWN BED

How I missed my Tempur-pedic (and no one is paying me to say that).

I got very sick with something respiratory on my last day in the mountains, (Kong Shan Ling Yu, indeed) and spent one full day back in Beijing in a very fine hotel, cuddled under two fluffy warm quilts, supported by a pile of pillows, on a rock hard lumpy mattress. This is the real mystery of China for me. What's with the mattresses?

But there was a remote control to a nice TV, so it was CCTV 11 (all-Chinese-opera, all-the-time) and CCTV 6 (martial arts movies and historical dramas, occasionally subtitled). Not a bad way to kick back and recover, supplemented with Chinese medicine, foot massages (which include somewhat more than feet), cupping/moxibustion (my back still looks like it was run over by a military vehicle) and tea and sympathy from my Chinese guide/interpreter who says I got sick because I didn't wear socks with my hiking sandals.

"I'm from Hawaii. What are these things called socks?" And she said I needed to go outside and get some fresh air. Visibility in Beijing was about a quarter mile. I had doubts about that advice. But I did it anyway, and survived.

So while the trip was all about serious qigong and meditation practice, and looking at a lot of Chinese paintings, I did have some interesting video moments. CCTV was fascinating, as usual; one evening there was a feature about Taoism, curiously about exactly the place we had just visited, Ge Hong's Temple in Hangzhou. And then there was the Pepsi ad that kept turning up on CCTV 6. I can't find this on YouTube (yet); Pepsi does some very amusing and innovative ads in China.

How to sell Pepsi in China: Open to a handsome Han Dynasty swordsman, top-knoted and decked out in military armour, just like the guys I like to watch in my dramas who project CGI-generated qi to overcome their enemies. Gege is calm and serious, seated crosslegged on a bridge with a bottle of Pepsi in his hand. An army gathers to attack from the other side. Gege flashes a sultry look (or maybe it just looked that way to me) to the opposing force, takes a long swig of his Pepsi, and then...burps...a really big one. The opposing army retreats as big waves of burped qi overwhelm them. He raises his bottle in triumph and his soldiers come forth to finish what the Pepsi energy didn't. (Terra cotta Pepsi bottles in Xian?)

Then there was the very fine video offering on Korean Airlines' A330-300. (I've never been a big Airbus fan, but this widebody was a nice plane. KA seems to be upgrading and replacing its 747s.) A host of films to choose, all individually digitally controlled with a touchscreen at the seat. I watched a Korean tearjerker (there's a redundancy there) outbound that I have since forgotten, then discovered Andy Lau's new Shaolin...I remained on board until everyone else exited the plane in Seoul to see the end. I was able to do that. I watched it a second time on the flight home and decided I liked it a lot, especially the part when Jackie Chan says, "I don't know kung fu."

Not limiting myself to the martial arts genre, I also used the KA DVD player to watch a romantic comedy/drama that featured not only an elaborate ceremony for a divorce, but also a pre-death funeral, If You are the One, Two, a sequel to If You are the One, One (which I have never seen, but expect my video vendor to press on me when I see her again.) It starred the very fine Ge You, who I know mostly from The Emperor's Shadow, but I was intrigued by Sun Honglei, very big in Chinese film right now. No wonder I recognized him. Another strong stunning Northerner like Zhao Wen Zhuo, from Harbin.

I saw his face (right) on a billboard passing through Shiyan (not to be confused with Xian), a gritty town where the only industry seems to be cars and trucks and parts for them. The Detroit of China. (Although judging from the everyday restaurants we stopped at there, Chinese auto workers really know how to eat.) I've never seen so much public signage for gears, distributors, axles, and assorted nuts and bolts. Sun Honglei's face was welcome relief. (Although Andy Lau was all over the place too.) "Who is that? I know him," I asked my interpreter about Mr. Sun. "An actor, he plays bad people...he has a bad face," she said. Actually, I think he is quite attractive, but Eastern and Western standards of beauty and handsomeness seem to be a little different.

I still dropped Zhao Wen Zhuo's name whenever I could, though I got a sense that he is a little over the hill now, not new, like a Tom Hanks or even Robert Redford. Still, a guy in Hangzhou, when I mentioned my muse's name, stroked his own face and smiled. "So handsome," he agreed.

CAPSULE REVIEWS

A little under the weather with a late winter cold, enjoying a few capsules of Alka Seltzer Plus, I turn to the Chinese medicine of videos. Finished Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber, the wuxia fantasy set in part in Wudangshan, nearly as familiar to me as my own neighborhood. The double-edged plot swirls around the acquisition of two important magical weapons in the Yuan Dynasty, and the plight of Zhang Wuji (or Chang Mo Kei, for the Cantonese speakers), the ultra-cute top-knotted orphan, who has a bad habit of promising to marry any woman he meets along the way. He has extraordinary kung fu and leadership skills, but is a little blind in the relationship area. (He has over-committment issues, and celibacy seemed not to be an option.) Of the four fiancees, one returns in self-exile to lead her monastic sect in the jianghu; another conveniently, but poignantly, dies (or so everyone thought); the third carries out some revenge missions that both help and hinder Wuji/Mo Kei, and the fourth, the most unlikely, but perkiest, a Yuan princess, disowns her Mongol heritage to become his life-partner. This all suggests that arranged marriages may have been a good idea. But who speaks for an orphan?

Or maybe not, as seen in In the Wild Mountains (Ye Shan), another hilly escape, this time to the Shaanxi countryside, where the lifestyle is undergoing Deng Xiaoping's economic transition. Here, the setting also looked familiar to me; in 1988, the Wizard and I took a train for a weekend in a remote area three hours out of Beijing in a peasant's guest house to wander about the mountains, eat noodles and ride horses. Last spring, I mentioned to my guide in Beijing that I had been to Ye Shan Po, but I was never quite sure where it was...west, north, south? "How do you know about Ye Shan Po," he asked, as if I had discovered a state secret. He told me it has become much more developed as a tourist destination. I feel partly responsible. (I was part of the rising of the Chinese middle class?) It only occurs to me at this moment that the movie's Chinese name is the same as the area I visited: Ye Shan. Wild Mountain. Don't know what the "Po" might be, a yin, earth spirit maybe?

In the movie, two brothers, one traditional and lazy, the other, fired up by the idea of money-making schemes, are married to the wrong women. In an effectively legal wife swap, they manage to live the lives they were supposed to. If you're an entrepreneur, probably a supportive equally driven spouse is a good match; if you just want to kick back and smoke the tobacco and make babies, a quiet domestic partner is probably more suited for happiness. The movie explores the changes in social and economic structures that were (and still are) happening as a result of economic reforms in rural China, but the landscape was what really grabbed me.

I picked up My Son, a more recent Korean film, at the going-out-of-business sale at my neighborhood Blockbuster (everything must go...no one seemed to want this one but me). The tale of a father, imprisoned for life for robbery and murder, gets a day's leave to meet the son he hasn't seen since the boy was an infant. That leaves a lot of room for emotional drama and some comic moments too (mostly rendered by the guard who accompanies the prisoner on his visit home). Compassion in the face of great tragedy is the theme of this, and if you liked Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, you will enjoy this one as well. Pay close attention the first time around; it has a completely surprising twist that you will only be able to experience once.

Lightening the mood with some martial arts, The Prodigal Son, not a Biblical epic, but a 30-year-old and fabulous kick flick by Sammo Hung (rendered as Samo in the credits) with his buddy Yuen Biao in his first big break...all these actors who were younger then, but still kicking. I especially like a scene, Chapter 12 on the DVD, the "Drunken Calligraphy" demonstration: Sammo Hung performing with a huge inky brush, not quite the way my Chinese painting teacher delivers her lessons. This is hard to find to buy (even Netflix had to get it from another location), but in a simple search I found it for you to watch here. (For a calligraphy lesson from a master, start at about 56:50 in the video.)

WORLD VIEW

While I have been enjoying a 36-episode mainland-produced Chinese TV-series about Sun Tzu and Sun Bin (The Art of War and the 36 Stratagems), I've taken a break now and then from the slow-paced drama, (by Korean drama standards), a little didactic at turns, even though the characters are interesting and attractive, and the Mandarin is slow and simple enough to make me think I can speak and understand it. I bought this set of DVDs in Hong Kong a couple years ago thinking it was an academic PBS kind of exposition about the Art of War, but I was wrong. It's a TV play. It has a quality that makes me think of peasants sharing a TV in a village and enjoying a cultural rendition of their heritage from 2,000 years in the past.

I was poking around on the Wizard's shelf of Teaching Company CDs which include pretty much the entire history of Western Civilization back to Mesopotamia and wondered why he never wanted to listen to my set of "From Yao to Mao," the only real Asian history course available from the company.

"I'm interested in where I came from," he said. Which leads me to wonder if I was Chinese in another life.

The entertainment breaks I take from Sunzi Bingfa are kung -fu movies. In a curious completion of a series, I watched Kung-Fu Master (called something else in Chinese) with Yuen Biao, an unintentional (?) third part of a trilogy by the intricately connected Three Guys (above right): Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and, Yuen Biao. Maybe not as holy as the three pure ones, but it might be fun to see them in a film as Fuk, Luk, and Sau, (below left) the Chinese Gods of Good Fortune.***

I kinda detested Jackie Chan's recent remake of Karate (Kung Fu) Kid, as much as I kinda liked his Wushu with Sammo Hung. Both had kind of the same theme, masters somewhat reluctantly bringing along young students.

But I wasn't quite sure what to make of Kung-Fu Master, with a more classical historical theme, which opened with some creepy scenes (kung fu with a coffin?) that blended an ambiance of King Hu's A Touch of Zen with surreal 1960s Avengers action. I rented the DVD from Blockbuster, watched about 15 minutes and returned it. But I added it to my Netflix queue, and gave it another shot.

The film is basically one long fight, with an incomprehensible plot. However, I understand it is an abridged version of a TV-series, which may explain why it was marketed as a film, for people who like to see the kung fu without caring why the action is taking place.

Yuen Biao, right, who is just wonderful, if like Jackie and Sammo, maybe just a bit long in the tooth, (like myself) works his way through a kind of test by an evil general who has some sort of grudge against the Shaolin Temple. Eventually, the Temple is destroyed and Yuen Biao, "Omitofo," and his band of brothers vanquish the evil forces and, since their temple has been demolished, one can only surmise they go on to perform shows on stages in Beijing, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

I was a little frustrated with an inexplicable reconciliation with one of the assassins who are out to get Yuen Biao, I think it was Nicholas Tse, and I eagerly waited for him to return to the action, but he never did. There was a scene, reminiscent of the guqin-accompanied imaginary duel between Jet Li and Donnie Yen in Hero, where the 7-stringed lute is used as a lethal weapon. And in a very Avengers surreal nightmare scene, Yuen Biao negotiates a HUGE tangled pile of Chinese benches. (I liked this, at left, a lot; it reminded me of when I broke the Taoist hermit's stool. And how I usually feel about housework. Not that I'm so skilled at it.)

My first impression was this was the worst kung fu film I'd ever seen, but the scenes are lingering in my mind, as hard to ignore as the strange mole on Yuen Biao's forehead, more noticeable than the burn scars on his scalp which identified him as a Shaolin monk.

With this still on my mind, I paid a visit to The Dragon Gate Bookstore where my video vendor read my thoughts and laid out for me copies of Tsui Hark's Detective Dee, and Donnie Yen's Legend of the Fist: Return of Chen Zhen.

I paused watching Detective Dee (which features Andy Lau as a character initially as raggedy as Vincent Zhao's drunken master in True Legend/Su Qi-Er...is this a trend?) to jot these thoughts down. Detective Dee, set in the Tang Dynasty during the coronation of the only female Son of Heaven of China, Empress Wu, opens with the frequent spontaneous human combustion ("self-burning") of some guys involved with constructing a REALLY HUGE Buddha in her honor, way bigger than Yuen Biao's pile of benches...this CGI Buddha makes Hong Kong's Big Buddha look like a lawn ornament. Andy Lau is retrieved from prison (and nicely cleaned up and shaved) to solve the case, where the Buddha is intended to literally topple the empire, and the most significant clue in which is highly poisonous "fire turtles," the seeming opposite of the medicinal ice toads, about which I have previously commented. I might note the fire turtles look remarkably like a delicacy I avoided in Xian a couple years ago.

I've recently watched a few Korean and Chinese dramas of a forensic detective nature (The Four, Damo), and I can only hope this will live up to those standards. Such as they are.

***And now I am getting a concept for a screen play about the Three Pure Ones; the number one of them, Yu Huang, the Jade Ruler or the Pearly Emperor, was said to have been so "super-eminently beautiful ...that none became weary when beholding him." So do I cast Vincent Zhao or Song Il-guk? Well, since there are three protagonists, I can throw in Tony Leung Chiu-wai and have a truly dazzling fantasy epic with all three, gods representing the entire Hong Kong, Mainland and Korean film industry.

SHEN YUN SCAM?

While beginning (and possibly, hopefully, completing) my holiday shopping at the mall last night, I bought a present for us, me and the Wizard, or more accurately, myself, two tickets to January's performance of Shen Yun. I'd just selected a couple of Aloha shirts at Macy's (the former Liberty House, as most of us who have been in Hawaii for some time still call it) for him and his father, choosing them in less time than it took me to pay for them. Was it my current preoccupation with K-drama that drew me to some really very nice shirts made in Korea? And 40% off. Which I discovered after I pulled them off the rack. I am at my most decisive, and lucky, at Christmas. (Read about picking out a tree over on the Yang Side.)

Then a stop at Sephora whose $20 discount coupon was burning a hole in my complexion. (Only Sephora discounts cosmetics; the big department stores like Macy's/Liberty House never do.) I have largely overcome my obsession with maquillage et parfum, but every now and then, I succumb to a girly desire. It was my birthday, more or less; they promised me a birthday gift. But the clerk forgot to give it to me. It is a test of my obsession: do I go back to claim it?

Still, good scores in hand, I was feeling a little drunk on plastic money when I was attracted to a kiosk promoting a big Chinese performing arts spectacular to occur in January at our concert hall where we have season tickets to the opera. On the signage, a leaping Chinese guy in a topknot with an archer's bow--that will stop me in my tracks any time. Two Chinese women were touting the show..."a visually dazzling tour of Chinese history and culture." Having missed Zhang Yimou's big production at Hangzhou's West Lake, and as an afficionado of shows like the Shaolin Monks (in Beijing); a bizarre Las Vegas/Disney-esque survey of 5,000 years of Chinese history in a different venue in Hangzhou; Cantonese, Peking, and televised Revolutionary Opera (in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Honolulu), to say nothing of the various odd Chinese vaudeville extravaganzas that come through Honolulu every year around Moon Festival and Chinese New Year, I was intrigued.

A very nice Chinese woman chatted with me about the show. I said I traveled to China frequently and had been to Wudangshan several times. She knew where that was. "Lots of Taoist culture there," she said. I told her I enjoyed the local Phoenix Dance Chamber performances. She knew who they were.

I looked at the brochures, curious that the performance was presented by The Falun Dafa Association of Hawaii, but you wouldn't know this without looking at the mouseprint. I know who Falun Dafa (Falun Gong) are. I said I'd think about it. "It has nothing to do with Falun Gong," she assured me.

Then, in a Costco/shopping network moment, get-it-while-it's-available, I caved and bought two tickets. The Wizard buys the opera tickets; I drag him to the odd Chinese culture events.

At home in a fit of shopper's remorse, I poked around the net for reviews and comments about the show, just starting its 2011 World Tour, which will not include the really big chunk of the world known as the People's Republic of China. Apparently Shen Yun has everything to do with Falun Gong. Shen Yun was banned in Hong Kong (now part of the PRC as an SAR; it is not banned in Taiwan) because its association with Falun Gong puts it in an adversarial position with the CCP. The reviews boil down to, on one hand, amazing art with a spiritual message, and on the other, propaganda (for Falun Gong) and mediocre art. (The Chinese invented propaganda. I say this while watching Sunzi Bingfa, a Chinese TV series about Sun Tzu, Sun Bin, and the 36 Stratagems, all of which is basically about deceitful strategy and propaganda, or The Art of War.)

But now I am committed. No refunds on the ticket. So, I look forward to the event as another research point in my ongoing independent study of Chinese history and culture. It's real-life drama, a little like Perhaps Love, an excellent Chinese movie I just watched, a movie about making a movie, with two levels of the same story. (I highly recommend it.)

I am caught in a yin/yang moment. Though, had I read the reviews and various commentaries prior to swiping my credit card, I still would have bought the tickets (but maybe only one, and a cheaper seat) just to find out for myself. I look forward to observing this, and will post my own opinion come January. Probably on the Yang Side.

5,000 Years of Chinese History in Hangzhou

Hong Kong 2008

NEW KID ON THE BLOCK

After so many hours this summer with long Korean dramas, it was probably time to return to a regular Chinese kung fu flick. My video queen reserved me a copy of "The Legend is Born," the prequel to Donnie Yen's homages to Ip Man and Wing Chun, the martial art form he developed and passed on to Bruce Lee. I watched it last night. (What, only an hour and a half??? Seemed like there should be at least 25 episodes in this ongoing Ip Man saga. There have been rumours of a fourth, where Bruce Lee comes under the tutelage of Ip Man, but Donnie Yen is denying it.)

The prequel features Dennis To as Ip Man, a wu shu champion and virgin actor, who resembles Donnie Yen so much that I thought it was him on the DVD cover. But not. So new there is not even a Wikipedia entry about him. He was good, very gentlemanly, cultured and a little naive, well cast as the young Ip Man. In the film, which also features Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao (but no Jacky Chan), To actually has a couple of fight scenes with the real Ip Chun, Ip Man's oldest son, now 86, not really an actor, but a serious scene stealer. (So agile: here is proof that martial arts may keep you young. I can't imagine my father, who died at 86, doing any of this physical stuff at that age.) Ip Chun was in fact Dennis To's actual sifu for eight years. These scenes made me want to travel to early 20th century Hong Kong in a kind of dreamy nostalgia. Was this a previous life of mine?

One of the interesting things about Wing Chun is that it was developed by a woman, at least according to Ip Man; in the film, the kung fu academy Ip Man is attending includes a lot of hot shot girls, leading to the plot's tragic love triangle. Don't know how much is factual, but it was a good plot and an interesting introduction to this martial art and the culture of kung fu studies. Dennis seems to be channeling Bruce Lee in his attitude toward his work:

"I hope to spread Chinese Kung Fu around the world (through his films). In a way, I do feel like I'm representing the Chinese, just like Bruce Lee did," he said. "Someone who isn't Chinese can practice Kung Fu and even be good at it, but they can never be as authentic.** Kung Fu is one of the most precious things in Chinese culture."

As for me, I am too old and busy with a job to do much more than some qigong practice and meditation (and watch a lot of kung fu film); maybe when I retire I can concentrate on some tai chi chuan, and I would love to learn some basic tai chi sword, even bagua. But I will always be a beginner and inauthentic. (And sometimes I see Westerners practicing these arts and they look a little silly, like hippos doing ballet; it gives one pause.) My interest in these martial arts came from my deepening interest in Chinese culture in general. So if as To says, kung fu is a precious element in the culture, it at least deserves some consideration and study, like brush painting, tea and the Tao Te ching. To is certainly a new kid on the scene and has lots of time to develop; I'll always be an old kid.

**I used to work with a guy, one of the hundred names, who was a Wing Chun student. He was compact and wiry, a little shy and modest. But I always sensed a strange strong power radiating from him. Like it would be best to have him on my side in a fight.

LIVER QI UNBLOCKING?
The weather is weird (voggy and rainy and humid and oppressive) but I feel great.  It could be due to some medication I was in need of, but the stagnant feeling I've been suffering just recently has evaporated.  It could be because in less than a week, I leave for a three-week spiritual/cultural vacation in China.  In any case, the energy is flowing.  Unblocked qi?  Wu wei?

Is that why I was able to score a 3G iPad just an hour after the store opened to distribute them?  The coolest toy I've seen since an Etch-a-Sketch, which I never had. (Except a teeny tiny one attached to a pen, a sort of mini version, the nano-iPod of an Etch-a-Sketch.)  And now, after a weekend of "downloading apps," (I don't have an iPhone-but-now-I-want-one, so I've never done this), I have a Mandarin phrasebook that TALKS (in a voice that sounds like Vincent Zhao), a nice travel alarm clock, a way to update my blog on the road (China willing), visit Facebook, check weather and news (BBC and China Daily**).  A little piano.  Mahjong games.  Access to a lot of free literature. (So far, a collection of "Asian Wisdom" and Leaves of Grass.) And all my music and photos and the internet and .... the world.  Just hope I can get a China Mobile micro-sim for universal wireless access in the Middle Kingdom.  Seems to be difference of opinion as to whether they will be available.   But they make them there!

Moving on from 3G to 3D, do I credit unblocked qi for acquiring a DVD today of True Legend, the Vincent Zhao movie I have been obsessing over for nearly a year?  I should be watching it right now -- real soon now, the anticipation is delicious -- but I am still reeling with knowing I don't have to waste any time searching for a cheap copy for a buck in Shanghai or Beijing.  Although, if it is on a big screen there, I may just have to buy a ticket.  I understand some scenes are in 3D...Vincent in 3D! Vincent in the mountains.

I finished Bi Chun Mu, a good wuxia series, with some surprises, although as usual, pretty much everyone dies (martyred really)  in the end.  Since I am going to be in China very soon, I decided to follow-up with something not quite so Chinese.  What could be less Chinese than...The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, based on the novels of Alexander McCall Smith, set in Botswana.  I love those books, but was a little leery of seeing them translated by HBO to video.  But they are perfect.  (And you learn to pronounce those Botswana words. Rra and Mma and dumela.)  Then it came to me: this is just the yin version of House, M.D.  A gifted person who has their own sense of justice, their own intuitive way of solving problems, and their own internal suffering to overcome.  I think Precious Ramotswe, a "traditionally built" lady, does it better than the skinny drug-addled doctor.  No drugs required, just a lot of compassion.

Why am I writing this?  I must go pop True Legend in my DVD player.  Now.  The African bush is beautiful, but China is calling.

**China Daily has a headline in my first look-see on the iPad,  Shanghai Welcomes World Leaders for Expo.  I have made news already!  Actually I'm hoping everyone will be at the Expo so I can roam the Shanghai Museum's landscape painting exhibit in peace and leisure.

RETURN TO WUXIA
My festival of feature-length films recently left me with the feeling you get after you read a lot of short stories: you want a big novel to really sink into.  So I have found another Chinese TV series, 33 episodes based on the original Korean feature film Bi Chun Mu (which usually seems to be referenced in tandem with Musa, as "not as good as").

Oh, how I have missed the sword play by attractive young men in long robes and waist-length hair and a loose top-knot ponytail. It seems so elegant, compared to the violence of a couple of non-Chinese films from my festival of the past week or so, Al Pacino classics, Scarface and Carlito's Way.  The contemporary godfather of the American criminal and cop genre, Pacino owns those roles as the eponymous protagonists...the New York Italian playing a Cuban and a Puerto Rican. I'd sorta like to see him with a sword: "You wanna play rough? Okay. Say hello to my little friend!"  Not sure the hairstyle would work though, the eyes are all wrong, and he's too short, really. I think he might look like Yoda in a Ming-era robe.

In Bi Chun Mu (Dance with Sword), the TV series, I find all the usual wuxia elements--hidden identities, mysterious motives, common people  pitted against the nobility, secret sword techniques, bamboo forest choreography, revenge, and unrequited love -- at least at episode 8 it looks like it will be that way.  And it's a Chinese production; I thought it would be Korean as Bi Chun Mu the film was.  So, some Mandarin exercise.

And a new face to contemplate, here, the Chinese Wang Ya Nan, outstanding among the Koreans in the cast, plays a rich boy wastrel who develops a strange deep affection for the apparent commoner-orphan,  Joo Jin Mo (who comes across a little like the young Jackie Chan). Little do either know the orphan is really the prince of Korea.  The orphaned royal heir brings Ya Nan's character out of his drunken womanizing to proceed to feel real love for his new best friend's paramour. "I feel like a beast," the well connected and wealthy Ya Nan says. "I want my best friend's girl."   She wants nothing to do with him, preferring the orphan whose father, so predictably unknown, was killed by hers. (She is his daughter by a concubine.) There is a vague bisexual element in Ya Nan's performance that leaves open the possibility for another story line --he loves both his friend and his girl deeply. I doubt such modern sexual intrigue will become part of the plot.

So I'm hooked again. Not quite a Korean soap opera, but close.  I found the Tai Seng videos for a very good price at my rarely visited WalMart, purveyor of everything Chinese-made if not necessarily Chinese in character.  Don't know if you can find these things at YOUR Wal-Mart.  But they are easily found on line.

GREAT WALL STREET
A visit last week to my local Chinese DVD vendor (a side trip from dropping off tax forms for my preparer) yielded a couple of interesting, non-wuxia/kung fu films.  First, another quasi-propaganda piece, Confucius, with Chow Yun-Fat as the sage, who actually winds up at one point having a heart-to-heart chat with Lao Tzu.  It was a pretty movie, but left me feeling like I'd watched a Chinese version of "The Greatest Story Ever Told," with CYF in the Max Von Sydow role.

I also revisited an old video tape of Bertolucci's "Last Emperor" while I made soup from the remains of my usual solo Friday night Costco huli huli chicken.  When the Wizard's away, I cook as I may...and that usually means several meals from one pre-cooked chicken.  I'd forgotten that that was a pretty good movie, even if a lot of it is made up.  I'm thinking maybe I need to read Twilight in the Forbidden City which was used (in the film at least, along with some issues of Time Magazine, eternal source of history and truth) as evidence against Pu Yi by the re-educating Communists.

Then I put Empire of Silver, the other recent item my video vendor insisted I watch, in the laptop. Despite opening with some fabulous scenes of camel caravans in the desert, evoking Dragon Inn or Seven Swords,  it turned out to have no elements of kung fu or wuxia...but a choppy plot about filial piety (there's that Confucius thing) and...banking. I didn't know that Shanxi province was the center of banking in the Qing Dynasty. Great Wall Street. A lot of guys with queues hauling around taels of silver in the late Qing and early Republic, fighting off warlords and cleaning up after incompetent bank managers.  (Well, there was one swordfight, but a gun put an end to it.) This was strangely au courant.

And there was a romantic element that could have sustained at least 24 episodes of HK TVB: the number three son (Aaron Kwok, can't hold a candle to Vincent Zhao in the desert, or even Pierce Brosnan in Noble House), is a lazy playboy who had a serious coming-of-age affair with the woman who later becomes his father's second wife. Still, the playboy bounces back to save the banking dynasty (while fighting off wolves in the Gobi and praying for advice in the ancestral hall). Tragically, his romantic interest goes off to Mei Guo with a lady missionary (who helped her get a prophylactic hysterectomy and fake her funeral), oddly, inexplicably, played by Jennifer Tilley, not so sexy really, in a cameo role.

This film, by a Taiwanese director and produced by interests in China and Hong Kong, was featured in the 2009 Shanghai Film Festival.  I think the Great Wall Street of China has moved south from Shanxi.

SOAP OPERA...PROPAGANDA...AND ART
I have completed the lengthy indulgence of the Hong Kong soap opera, Into Thin Air, where the outlandish plot involving twin sisters and a man who can't tell them apart until when literally tripping down the wedding aisle the wrong one says, in Cantonese, "Deui-m̀h-jyuh" (which sounds something like "dum chia") instead of "sorry"...well, he should have just married them both Chinese style; there really was a number one and a number two.  Power Chan was charming in the only backstory of interest to me, because he was playing a former journalist, and unrequited love is always compelling (as long as it's someone else's).  He graciously relinquishes the object of his affection to his rival in the bustle of a Lan Kwai Fong evening...ah, if only I'd been there to carry the plot forward!

Concluding this series I was glad to watch King Hu's Legend of the Mountain, filmed concurrently with the hard-to-find Raining in the Mountain, a far superior piece of art; and then Musa -- which would have been more enjoyable if I had had the Chinese audio track.  I watch these things to learn language, and English dubs cheapen the experience.

But "Founding of the Republic,"a 2009 government-sponsored film commemorating the 60th anniversary of Mao's victory as the real last emperor of China, was in Mandarin. You may or may not like it.  Interesting take on the Communist triumph of 1949, as heartrending as the soap opera, featuring the very pretty Kun Chen (also of the 2008 Painted Skin and Hua Mulan) as the son of Chiang Kai-shek (and president-to-be of Taiwan) , and with cameos by practically every other Chinese actor of renown, including Jackie Chan, Donnie Yen, Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi and Andy Lau. (And this was not a Hong Kong kung fu film.) I can't remember any particular movie that deals so very specifically with the Chinese civil war.  If you already know something about the tensions and politics of the period, you will enjoy seeing this; the casting of Mao and Zhou Enlai (who I always thought was very handsome) is uncannily accurate.  China versus Japan has gotten a lot of attention (e.g., Ip Man, Lust-Caution, Red Sorghum, even Bertolucci's Last Emperor, and some others...and I fully expect someone will do a film version of the Rape of Nanjing--not something I would really want to see). But Founding of the Republic, dealing with a particular optimistic moment in China's history, beginning and ending October 1, 1949, is probably worth seeing if you are a student of modern China. Just take it with a dash of shoyu, and remember, it has nothing to do with the 25 years Mao was actually in power as Chairman; consdering the school of 70 percent right/30 percent wrong, as Deng Xiaoping said, this is about the 70 percent right part.

Followed that with Yellow Earth, a 1984 Chen Kaige film I know I saw some years ago, with cinematography by Zhang Yimou, about a Communist soldier in 1939 out in the Shaanxi countryside collecting folk songs.  It was  recommended to me by one of my Chinese painting classmates...gorgeous landscapes.  A touching story, a work of art.  But hard to find; I scored an old video tape on eBay.  It was worth every penny.

There is a fine line between soap opera, propaganda and art.  As long as you know where it is, I think it's okay to cross it now and then.