Wudang Woes

My plans to return to Wudangshan this September completely fell apart today.  Thus, although the verse primarily pertains to meditation, I am concentrating on the travel wisdom of Dao De Jing 47:

Without going out of your door,
You can know the ways of the world.
Without peeping through your window,
You can see the Way of Heaven.
The farther you go,
The less you know.

Thus, the Sage knows without travelling,
Sees without looking,
And achieves without Ado.
(tr. John C. Wu)

Well that's wisdom, but for real consolation, last night, in some sort of prescient synchronicity, I had a pleasant surprise.  A movie released just this summer that I thought I might see or buy in China during my trip was made available on YouTube. I have been eager to see Vincent Zhao in The Great Wudang for over a year, when I first heard about it. 

The Great Wudang

So without peeping out my window, just by peeping at my computer screen, I visited Wudang anyway, albeit homesickish the way ex-pat Hawaii people might be when they watch 5-0.  (And equally puzzled when the locations don't always make sense...how do you get from the North Shore to Diamond Head on foot in an hour?...How do you get from Golden Top to Purple Cloud in five minutes? It took me six hours to walk that route down the mountain once.)

Turning away from Episode 66 (of 77) of Yi San, my current Korean escape, I watched my favorite MA star in a kind of typical wuxia story, set in post-Qing/early Republican times.  In the first few minutes, there is a kick-ass fight in an airplane flying over Hubei on the way to a martial arts competition at Wudangshan.   Everything about it--the time, the plot, the romance, the quest--has led me to call it "Indiana Zhao and the Temple of Tao." (Vincent seems to be channeling Harrison Ford a little bit:  motorcycles, leather coats, scholarly spectacles, and a daughter. No fedora. Or maybe there was. Need to watch again. And where was Sean Connery?)

Indiana Zhao

I'd like to have seen this done as a 20-episode TV series (20 hours of Vincent) with more character and plot development, but it's fun anyway. Scenery is all familiar and authentic (except possibly the mountains in the competition arena: they looked CGI to me, more like Hua Shan).  I have mixed feelings to see sacred spots used this way, but it's not the first time...Jackie Chan's Kung Fu Kid and the 2009 TV series, Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre, were both filmed there too. (Contrary to popular belief, CTHD was not.) The Great Wudang was fun if you like the wuxia action genre and Vincent Zhao. (I certainly do!)

It was nice to find it on You-tube just at this moment, and I'll probably watch it one more time before it disappears. Still, I'll buy it when my DVD vendor calls me and tells me she just got it in.  Just for the locations, you know...and Vincent.

Vincent, where are you?

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?

BRUSH AS MIGHTY AS A SWORD
These Korean sa geuk (historical) dramas are completely surprising to me. I thought it was all about swordplay, until in Episode 8, I think, of Emperor of the Sea, the female protagonist, perhaps the first woman I can really identify with, overcomes her odds by deftly wielding a wolf brush.

A dethroned noblewoman raised by a Dragon Lady to become a profitable courtesan to some other Korean nobleman, she decides she doesn't want to marry some rich guy, but really wants to run her own business. To earn her MBA she is lucky to be taken under the wing of the merchant/pirate, played by Jumong's ultra-attractive Song Il-Guk, who is in love with her, the third part of the requisite K-D love triangle. (Never mind that the man she loves is literally slaving to build some extension to the Great Wall off in some desert province of China.) But to earn her business credentials she must pass a test: she must sell five rolls of silk to a nobleperson, apparently not an easy task in 8th century Korea. But she prevails like Melanie Griffith in "Working Girl," with a head for business and a bod for sin, not that K-D ever really shows any of that.

She arrives at her client's palace with her rolls of plain white silk and is quickly rejected by her potential customer who is busy making landscape paintings.

"But I don't want to sell you this silk for clothes," the literate and art-savvy woman says, observing the wall scrolls on display. "I see you like the landscape painting of Wang Wei...it looks so much better on silk than paper." She is invited to demonstrate her own awesome brush skills on the silk, makes the crucial sale, and earns the respect of the pirate as well as her Madam who appoints her, basically, as CFO for her trade enterprise. I should note she was also skilled in manipulating spreadsheets and creating relational databases that no one had ever thought of before to forecast and plan their business conquests.

I was delighted by this scene. I saw some paintings in the style of the 8th century poet, Wang Wei, in Shanghai on my recent trip (only derivative copies exist). I have actually attempted a couple like this, at right, myself, although not on silk. Korea and China must have been differentiated in the Tang Dynasty mostly by the Yellow Sea, the art and culture are so similar, like medieval France and Italy. The scenes in the marketplace of the K-D actually feature fake 3-color-glaze Tang Dynasty horses and other objets d'art that look lots more Chinese than Korean, not that I could tell the difference anyway.

But the best part was the skill exercised in using a paint brush to win over a difficult client/adversary. You never know what gong fu (skill) is going to get you ahead. And as much as I would really like to study tai chi chuan with Vincent Zhao and swordplay with Song Il-Guk, I think the most interesting skill I may be learning recently is my Chinese brush painting practice with my teacher. The brush may indeed be as mighty as the sword.

LETTING GO OF Go!

The aspiring Taoist in me is trying to let go of the rage over the debacle of Sunday night's cancelled return red-eye flight on Go!, the pesky upstart airline that is held by local folks partly culpable in the death of Aloha, a tradition in inter-island travel. (Although I probably won't fully let it go until I send a letter of protest to the airline, not the sort of thing I usually do, but feel compelled to now.)

It's a tough business, and Aloha was in trouble anyway, the yin or yang, who knows, of a classic Hawaii duopoly. But when cheap flights on small equipment became available, along with some possibly shady business strategizing on the mainland-based carrier's part, Aloha eventually collapsed and the new player in the duopoly was Go! (It's like a board game on tarmac.)

Over the past several years, I flew a couple of the new neighbor island routes, partly because I enjoy the smaller planes, and there is a tropical retro-feel to boarding after walking out on the tarmac instead of marching down a jetway.

Now that I think of it, other places I have enjoyed that unique feeling were Palm Springs and the now defunct Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong where you might disembark a 747 on the runway pretty much in the middle of town. It's more organic, not so homogenized...all jetways are the same, but to be actually out on the ground with the plane stirs my Sagittarian blood.

So for this trip I didn't think to choose the bigger player and even older tradition than Aloha, Hawaiian, opting for the smaller commuter terminal and timing that was convenient for my weekend jaunt to Maui, looking forward to a private film festival with my friend. (She usually has a stack of DVDs for us and her tastes are a little different than mine: she likes British romantic comedies with a twist, and Tim Burton. They're always fun.)

The weekend was over too soon, and my friend delivered me at 8 p.m. to Kahului for my 9 p.m. 20-minute flight back to Honolulu. There was no line at the Go! counter when I tried to check in; I was informed the flight, the last of the night, had been cancelled. I should wait over on some benches while they figured out what to do; she would come and get me. The agent let it slip that there were only 12 persons booked; they had to wait to see if they could get 30 for a flight. Something was up and I think she probably shouldn't have told me that. (It smells illegal. But I haven't read the mouseprint on my reservation.)

I set myself up on the outdoor bench, under a 100% full moon, sent an email and watched part of a Jumong episode on my iPad. At about ten to nine, I thought I might go see if anything was happening. Would they have a plane? Would they put me on a Hawaiian flight? What?

At the counter, the rest of the dozen passengers were gathered (the agent had not come to get me), all in a dangerous mood of rage and resignation. The agent announced the flight was indeed cancelled but they were doing all they could to accommodate us. Which wasn't much. The agents were about as accommodating as the Han emperor when Puyo needed assistance. WWJD? (What Would Jumong Do?)

"You can get a refund and then go find another flight (at 9 p.m. in Kahului) or I can book you for the morning." Someone pointed out, not so politely, that the airline had made no attempt to alert anyone when they KNEW the flight was cancelled (apparently at 7 p.m.); they made no attempt to assist in other arrangements for flight or hotel arrangements. We were advised if we weren't happy, we could write to the head office and "try to get a free round trip or something." WE could try??? This is customer dis-service.

I decided to call my friend, opting to enjoy one more gin and tonic and some more talk, and leave in the morning. I had to cancel a Monday morning doctor's appointment, but no big deal really. (Although that entailed its own struggle with automated messaging...I may have left an obscene muttering on the answering machine when I had trouble navigating the menu with my cell phone.) But I felt bad for the woman who had to return home Sunday to pick up her child from a baby sitter; another woman who had to go to work on Oahu that night;a tourist couple who had already checked out of their hotel and returned their rental car. Maui at night can be desolate and the airport actually closes after midnight.

As the group got more and more emotional --even I complained loudly about the lack of Aloha spirit on the part of the airline that actually wanted to use that name--an airport security officer, a cop, arrived to hover around the 12 angry men and women.

One person opted to take the suggested 8 a.m. flight out

"Well, you 'll have to come in before 7; we'll put you on standby, it's fully booked." WTF??

Several of us waited while others' refunds were processed; I don't know how those folks, some with children, got home. I opted for the open 10:30 a.m flight so my friend wouldn't have to fight the early morning traffic. (There IS a rush hour on laid-back Maui.)

My friend came back to the airport, fortunately from Kihei, just a few miles away, and not, say, very distant Lahaina or remote Hana. We went back to enjoy the full moon from her lanai. "I knew we hadn't had a proper goodbye when I dropped you off," she said.

Next morning, I arrived in plenty of time, about 9 a.m. for the 10:30 flight. I had to be assertive about my checked bag--the only "accommodation" the airline had made for us was to waive the $10/bag charge for us who were inconvenienced (after someone demanded that courtesy), but I had to remind the ticket agent who then had to get manager approval. (I wouldn't have checked the bag except that I'd bought a large jar of expensive and presumably dangerous body butter that wouldn't have made it through TSA security.) Then I settled in at the gate, enjoying free wifi to watch YouTube videos of Vincent Zhao kicking his way through the new airport in Hong Kong, when, despite my noise-isolating earbuds, I heard the announcement.

"Go! Flight 1003 to Honolulu will be delayed. The plane is still on Oahu." It was only a half-hour delay (but really, the flight itself is just 20 minutes.)

Eventually, I got off the rock. Luckily, I work near the airport and my baggage was minimal so I was able to walk -- also about 20 minutes-- to my office. I didn't have my car since on Friday my husband had dropped me at my office, from which I caught a ride to the terminal with a friend. As I walked, I repeated a mantra--"Go! never again." I also thought about the airline's in-flight magazine's letter from the CEO in which he reminisced about the past four years doing business as an ambitious low-fare airline in Hawaii, making reference to "our.. goal..to offer...the highest quality, friendliest, and most reliable service." I mentioned this to a co-worker, even more mellow than I try to be, who routinely flies to and from Maui (on Hawaiian).

"That's just PR," he reminded me. Well, yes, but it does lead to cognitive dissonance, something marketing and advertising departments try to avoid. Go! has yet to make its goal. Maybe that's why corporate America is so goal-focused: something to achieve in the future, not necessary to deliver now. At least they didn't send my bag to Hilo; that would have been the last straw.

Lineage is a much regarded concept in martial arts about credibility and authenticity of training and style. It was a travesty of lineage when Go! actually petitioned to use the Aloha trademark after the bankrupt line's planes were sold and its gates were closed. It would be like some Hollywood pseudo-martial artist-actor killing the last of the Wang family and then claiming Wang lineage.

This airline's lineage is poor. From now on, I choose authentic heritage in the islands: I'll fly Hawaiian.

SEA OR TEA?

The thing about addiction is, I guess, there's a point where you find you just want more, want it again, can't get enough.

So last night, when my latest swordplay acquisition arrived in the mail, it didn't take me long to get hooked. The Korean TV drama from 2004 , Emperor of the Sea, also stars the highly addictive Song Il-Guk, this time in a role that promises to be less benevolent and magnanimous than his performance as Jumong. But already, the first three episodes, where he has

yet to appear, have set up the background, two young kids, ( SIG as an already accomplished pirate, and his protege and rival, a gladiator-to-be), and the inevitable tragic love triangle (two sides of which shown here.) It's Pirates of the Yellow Sea, with a Korean playing Johnny Depp, without the childish Disney-esque wit. It's bloody serious, and based on some real history.

In the tortured English of the DVD description,"Drama 'Emperor of the Sea' will show historical figure Jang Bo-go's growth, the emerging as Emperor of the Sea and love, and add artificial figures madam Jami and Jeong-hwa to add more spices." The historical Jang Bo-go is not Song Il-Guk's role: the former Jumong is an "artificial figure" and pretty spicy really.

Also in the mail was something from my Amazon wish list, Condor Hero, based on a Louis Cha novel. Hard to choose. I have a sort of warm feeling about Louis Cha, pen-named Jin Yong, a highly popular wuxia novelist from Hong Kong, shown at left, drinking Longjin (Dragon Well) tea in Hangzhou. When I saw this photo at the tea plantation we visited in May (where other notables were also memorialized sampling the famous cha, including Zhou Enlai and Li Peng, I think) I felt a connection while developing a bit of an addiction to the qing ming-picked green tea. I really want to make a joke about doing the "cha cha." But it's not coming to me.

Probably some pesky Freudian among my readers will wonder, "What's with this old woman and her preoccupation with Asian swordplay?" (Let's not go there.) In any case, Emperor of the Sea opens with a flashback, not on the sea, but in the desert, in scenes reminiscent of Tsui Hark's Seven Swords TV Drama (also based on a wuxia novel, not written by Mr. Cha). Song Il-Guk is the most attractive man to sit on a horse in the middle of the desert, even in Emperor of the Sea, since Richard Boone as Paladin (not quite have sword will travel). And SIG gives serious competition to my other obsession, Vincent Zhao, who also looks damn good on horseback, although his specialty is serious kicking martial arts, not really archery and swordplay; not sure this clip shows him on a horse, but it is romantic.

Some time-manager among my readers will also wonder, "Where does she find the hours to watch these long extravagant soap operas?" In my defense, I would point out that I never watch real commercial television; this is intimate engagement with DVDs on my laptop, fortune cookie-style, in bed. And I do read, quite a lot really (you can review my reading list on the Yang Side), usually in the morning, unless I'm writing. This video entertainment is a night-time (down, silly Freudian) thing and serves to populate my dreams with things far more interesting than the spreadsheets and proposals which occupy me during my day job. Who wants to dream in Excel anyway?

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.

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.

LANGUAGE LAB

I've been busy with the 9-to-5 work duties I must fulfill in order to finance the China trip I have planned in less than two months (all I need now is visa and travel insurance) but I still have found time to watch Chinese movies--for their language support. (Yeah right. New heart-throb -- Kun Chen, here from Hua Mulan. Yes, he's reviving her with blood from his own wrist vein. Sort of a yin take on yang vampire flicks.)

I never was much good at foreign language study, particularly German, chosen in my academic youth (for those of us planning, if not actually achieving, careers in science, or possibly, in my case, philosophy). After the requisite two years of Latin, as dry and dreadful as the teacher who taught us, I endured four of Deutsch in high school and college, and while I could now probably translate a passage with a dictionary at hand, or make sense of simple instructions, I have no fluency and can't say I much like to hear it spoken. The pre-Rosetta Stone "language lab" exercises were boring (sitting in a cubicle with earphones when I would rather be out and about, doing and talking about interesting things like intoxication or sex).  I never watched German movies -- not sure there were any available (this was pre-Blockbuster and Netflix) and if they were, they were probably dreary. The only REAL exposure I got to the language was listening to my Swiss great-uncles when they lapsed into German while smoking their pipes and drinking beer.  I had some German Christmas carols on a record I once sang along with my Swiss grandfather; tears came to his eyes. My father, like most immigrants' children, had not been encouraged to use the native language, although he had a few quirky pronounciations that clearly reflected his heritage.

I think the way we approached language studies in the U.S. was all wrong (maybe it's different now); either you should get exposure in some depth--immersion--at a young age, or there should be a kind of survey approach like the Wizard had when he was doing his master's in library science: six languages in twelve weeks, in order to translate title pages to catalog foreign materials. After the survey (replacing that old pre-req Latin) then one might pick a language that appealed or was useful.  Just a few years ago, as a middle-aged adult, I took some conversational French classes, for no reason except that I wanted to be able to understand wine and perfume labeling, to pronounce these things with some degree of grace.  I met the teacher at a party and enrolled as a whimsical challenge to myself. It was the most satisfying learning experience I had had in years, and I came away with some proficiency.  No grades, no pressure (except to not waste the considerable money I invested), no drilling (except when we had a Parisian guest teacher who complained about my teacher's Spanish accent.  My teacher was from Biarritz. The Parisian taught me how to count.)

In addition to a subscription to French Vogue and reading Le Monde on-line (although I understood Le Figaro better, maybe a lower reading level), my teacher also encouraged watching movies--the French love cinema.  I still need subtitles for French films, but it is more and more comprehensible.  So it is to film I turn to tune my ear for Chinese.

Where I have learned some likely useless phrases. If someone kowtows to me, I know how to tell them to get up. I can salute the emperor. (Wan sui, wan sui, wan wan sui!) I can say "Weishenme ni bu sha wo?" (Why you not kill me?) I have "come" and "go" down pretty well, but not quite sure if I'm urging horses on or telling my people to get out of a dangerous situation. I watch the movies with two dictionaries, three phrase books, and a guide to characters. No popcorn. I humbly refer difficult questions to my Chinese painting teacher and Mandarin-speaking classmates. (My teacher has actually offered to teach me Mandarin, but I think it's because she wants to improve her English.)

But with film, there's the problem of WHICH Chinese. Since my most recent travels are in Putonghua-speaking China, I am trying to grasp Mandarin, but a lot of the movies I watch are originally in Cantonese--Mandarin dubs just don't quite work aesthetically.  No quite as bad as the disappointment in my copy of Brigitte Lin's The Bride with White Hair, dubbed in English, with no Chinese audio track. It's a lovely movie but loses some of its charm in English. Dubbing is unnatural and awkward in any language.

So over the past week or so, not quite ready for another multi-episode wuxia fantasy epic (The Sword and the Fairy is still unopened), I brought several Asian-themed films out of their retreat in my DVD library, forgetting they were in Japanese, Korean and French.  No language lab here, but I highly recommend these:

• Zhang Yimou and Yasuo Furuhata's Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (in Japanese and Mandarin, sort of a Chinese-Japanese Love Story).
• Takashi Miike's The Bird People in China (in Japanese, and some Mandarin, extraordinary funny  sad beautiful magical realism).
• Kim Ki Duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (in Korean, nothing Howdy Doody here, a Buddhist story by a Catholic director, emotional and gorgeous, hardly any dialog).
• Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Lover (in French  (L'Amant), tres sexy, with Tall Tony Leung (no slouch), a period piece in early Colonial Saigon).

Not much Chinese learned to speak of, so to speak, but still lots of beautiful scenery, heart-rending emotion, some sex (in French and Korean), and ... very pretty actors. Although I should say in this recent home film fest I also watched Donnie Yen's Painted Skin, (the 2008 remake of King Hu's 1993 comeback film) and 2009's Chinese-produced Hua Mulan, (hardly Disney, see above), also featuring Painted Skin's Vickie Zhao (no particular relation to my muse Vincent, I think) and Kun Chen, (in which movie a human-heart-eating fox fairy drives them apart, in contrast to the scene above).  Perhaps he was cast because who would ever think that Ms. Zhao was actually a man unless playing opposite this ultra-attractive prince!

MOONLIGHT AND OPERA
An impressive moon tonight, biggest and brightest (because it's closest) --and the first full moon -- of Gregorian Year 2010. It's called the Wolf moon, and is chasing away the Year of the Ox, plodding through its last days, until February 14 when the White Metal Tiger appears.  I wonder what happens when the Wolf and the Tiger meet.  I suppose I'm mixing cultural folklore here. Next year we'll see about that!

Seems like an auspicious moment for the first opera of the season, tonight's Marriage of Figaro (Mozart).  Will be a change from kung fu/wuxia dramas. But another opportunity presents itself:  Beijing Opera at the Unversity of Hawaii (UH)! Next week, White Snake debuts.

Not Mozart

From UH's website: "This well known Jingju (Beijing "opera") in its English language world premiere enacts the famous legend of the snake spirit who descends to earth as a beautiful woman. Guest Artists from China have been in residence since August training the UH student performers."   I certainly enjoyed Vincent Zhao in Tsui Hark's Green Snake (which is related in plot**), so I must make a point to not miss this, even without my favorite taijiquan inspiration. (Though, Green Snake was really Maggie Cheung's movie; Vincent played a very weird character, a megalomaniacal monk.) Our qigong group may go see White Snake as an extracurricular activity.  Lots of good qi moves in Peking opera!

I was privileged to have seen "Peking" opera in "Beijing" some years ago.  My host offered a running commentary through the endless and convoluted plot involving emperors and concubines and generals and corrupt officials, all while the audience was chatting among themselves, cracking melon seeds and spitting them on the floor, and wandering around the theatre.

At one point, as a female character performed a lengthy aria (if that's what they're called), my companion was silent. Finally I said, "So what's going on now?"

"She is singing much, but saying little," my host said.  Which led me to think opera -- the ultimate in multi-media--is the same world-wide.  A wolf moon, an ox year... opera season everywhere!


**The White Snake (Bai She Zhuan) relates the famous legend of a snake spirit who descends to earth as a beautiful woman, marries a handsome young man, and then must fight to restore his life and save their marriage in the face of supernatural attacks from a powerful monk who believes that she is an evil demon.

COMPARE & CONTRAST :
The Sword and the Scalpel
(Morning after Autumnal Equinox)

Now I remember why I gave up on network television. Watching an interesting program with commercial interruptions is like walking through a gallery that assaults you with advertising billboards between the fine art. Distracting and shameless.

While watching the season opener of House, I began to have a wild feeling, like Chu Zhaonan (Vincent Zhao Wen Zhou), caressing the hilt of his sword and trying to restrain himself from unleashing its power:

I'm going to have to figure out where to download House sans advertising, or wait until the DVDs come out.

So House is in and out of the institution, where he confronts the concept of compromise with the system to get his own life in order. And don't we all.

It's the same conflict in Seven Swordsmen: Chu/ZWZ kills all the people he was trying to save from the evil establishment and destroys his own self in the process. It's hubris, stuff of tragedy. House and Chu are both trying to overcome it. I have yet to see who really succeeds. (I think we already know hardly anyone really does, as seen in Greek tragedy,the Bible and Shakespeare.)

Last night I left Chu at the Buddhist Temple where he is trying to come to grips with what he did (while the girl whose love for him was unrequited is arriving with a sword to avenge her father, who was accidentally killed when Dad fell on Chu's blade. But of course in these things -- soap operas, really --no one learns the truth until too late, if ever.) I have a feeling House will be back at Mayfield at some point; it seemed too simple last night (or it was the commercial interruptions). I have yet two more commercial free episodes with the Swordsmen; I'll watch them tonight; unfortunately I know what happens. There is more hope, for House.

And yes, there was blood spurting out of mouths in both shows.