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?

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?

PRESSURE

One of my reader-commenters has observed that "it's time for a new post" which makes me feel something I haven't ever felt while writing these blogs: the pressure to deliver. I'm a one-time newspaper journalist, and now I manage valuable time-sensitive proposals, so I know about deadlines and time crunches and how to budget my time to get those things done. But I never have had that sense with the TAO 61s...until just now.

I never imagined that my ramblings about Spam and White Rabbit candy and hot Chinese martial artists and Korean swordsmen would result in anyone waiting for a next installment. So where are my ideas, my inspirations now? All awash in current events and global disasters, the heat and humidity of August dog days; writing, painting, working, cooking, all subsumed in a desire to just meditate.

So where do I find a topic? While other people are quaking and furious over everything China does (like preparing to launch a refurbished 30-year-old Ukrainian aircraft carrier or downgrading our credit or wrecking a train or harassing bloggers and artists), I look to China to find a good laugh. Here's one:

Tu and Mao

Perusing a reference book called Things Chinese, in the section that includes discussion of the elegant arts of landscape painting and calligraphy, inside-painted snuff bottles and thangkas (maybe not really a Chinese thing), I find a description of something I thought was just weird when I saw them for sale in Hangzhou: pyrographic renderings of Thumper (for Year of Rabbit/Tu) and Mao and other classic Chinese images like tigers and flying goddesses. I thought they were tacky and they reminded me of my cousin's woodburning set, which I coveted when I was 10 but was not allowed to have because I might do something pyrographic to the house. (Though I did have a small electric stove with which I could actually scramble eggs and bake cakes and burn myself.) These scorched pictures are called "poker work" (huobihua), a technique that Things Chinese says dates to the 17th century. The Chinese invented woodburning sets!

If that isn't amusing enough, I've been watching a lot of old Chinese movies in between marathon sessions with a 30-hour-long series, The Handsome Siblings, typical wuxia with orphaned and estranged (and attractive) twins and their goofy sidekicks (who knew Mr. Evil, Elvis Tsui, could be so FUNNY). It features the ethereal Nicholas Tse and the plucky Dicky Cheung (of Monkey King fame) in a romp through the Song Dynasty which, inexplicably, occasionally includes musical interludes of breakdancing and rock riffs on a guitar. Tse is a character named Flawless Flower, as delicate as a 13-year-old girl (who has formidable martial arts skill), the not-identical twin of Cheung, Little Fish, who sports the most unusual hairdo I've ever seen. I don't know what kind of hair-gel they would have used in the Song to maintain his fishy forelock.

The Handsome Siblings (and some miscellaneous pretty girls)

No matter how zany these plots are, I always learn something useful: in this case, how to bring a truly dangerous power-seeking eunuch to his knees. (You never know.)

You kidnap his "thing"...that is, you truly get him by the balls and then some. For those not quite in the know, and for those who never saw The Last Emperor (where one learned that eunuchs get to take their long-detached private parts to their grave to be buried as whole men), I refer them to the Last Emperor's Last Eunuch's story.

Although the Last Emperor's Last Eunuch was not so lucky:

In one corner of the outer square of the palace, a granite block still marks the spot where some of Mr. Sun's fellow eunuchs were said to have lost their "three precious," as the organs were called in court parlance of the day. Traditionally, a eunuch preserved his genitals in a jar to insure that they would eventually be buried with him, in the belief that this would guarantee his reincarnation as a "full" man.

Yet Mr. Sun was not so fortunate. During the Cultural Revolution, a decade of intense political and social upheaval that began In 1966 - coincidentally the year that the former Emperor Pu Yi died - Mr. Sun's family destroyed his jar. They were afraid of being punished by marauding Red Guards if such a symbol of China's feudal past were discovered.

"He used to joke about it," said Mr. Jia, who recorded Mr. Sun's story in a book titled, "The Secrets of the Last Eunuch."

In a scene not quite what I would have expected for prime time TV, the clever Dicky Cheung threatens the evil Eunuch Liu with an unusual sort of blackmail. (Like the Red Guards.) If he doesn't cause trouble for him, Dicky (really) will return the precious parts to Eunuch Liu; this deal takes place in a lovely palace room which is decorated with dozens of sausage-shaped red silk bags hanging from the ceiling. One would think that after the initial procedure, it wouldn't much matter where the parts went...unless you are the sort who worries that some black magic practitioner will do something with your hair and nail clippings.

And I thought a blog post was pressure! Next topic...footbinding!

Speaking of feet, I realize that Nicholas Tse has the same ethereal charisma as a massage therapist I had in Beijing.

Nicholas Tse: Flawless Flower

A Feel for Feet

If you're ever tired and need a little attention, I highly recommend a Chinese foot massage by a nice looking, strong-handed guy...who probably isn't a eunuch. Although I can understand why the old emperor preferred the eunuchs to look after their concubines' bubbling well points.

Da Bai Tu!**

I've been challenging the temporary crown I had placed last week on pre-molar number 20 (my dentist always talks about my teeth with reference to the numbering system) with some of the curiously addictive and very chewy White Rabbit Creamy Candies I bought in Hangzhou in May during a brief and slightly pointless stop at a huge grocery and dry goods purveyor: Trust-Mart. (Perhaps "Wal" means "Trust" in Chinese?) Our expert interpreter and guide insisted we stop there to get "dunnage," which puzzled us. She said it was a word she found in the dictionary. So in addition to stocking up on bottled water and some fruit (cherries were in), I picked up a small bag of White Rabbits to complement my big solid brown Easter rabbit (da qiaokeli tu) I'd brought from home with an eye to celebrate "Year of the Rabbit" at some auspicious moment.

I never did open the bag of White Rabbits in China (although we demolished the Easter bunny in a hotel in Beijing). Only yesterday I re-discovered them among some tea snacks I'd also gotten in Hangzhou: tiny tasty dried and sugared kumquats and plums to enjoy with my longjin.

I was going to send the White Rabbits back East with the Wizard as a gift for his sister's middle school class but I selfishly broke into the bag and consumed seven of the little milky sugary buttery taffies and then thought, maybe I can buy them online (if not Chinatown--I need an excuse to go to the video store). So Googling, I find a big Wikipedia entry about the iconic sweets along with the disturbing news that, in 2008, they had been recalled all over the world because the milk powder used in them was also contaminated with melamine. I was in China when that scandal broke, but I didn't think too much about it: I was drinking tea and beer and eating mostly rice and cabbage. Hmmm...maybe not so good to send to Auntie's students.

Contemplating the little pile of wrappers crumpled on my desk (I knew enough to not eat the outer wrapper, only the inner edible rice paper one), I wondered if I'd just poisoned myself. (None of my wuxia dramas has ever mentioned an antidote for melamine.) I did learn they have just 20 calories, and most people willing to eat them agree their mild flavor is curiously comforting. Not cloyingly sweet, a whole bagful could be consumed before you know it.

Determined to save myself, I looked for a 2011 update on the White Rabbit story. It looks like the company has recovered from the incident and entered Year of Rabbit just fine. According to AFP:

The scandal bankrupted Sanlu, once one of China's largest milk firms, after six infants died and nearly 300,000 fell ill - but White Rabbit survived. The sweets, which contain 45 per cent milk powder, were relaunched in China a month later with 'melamine-free' labels and banners in stores reading 'a healthy White Rabbit is jumping back into a big market'.

I only wish I hadn't thrown away the bag, not that I could have read the expiration date. I hope these were fresh. But at least I got them at Trust-Mart!

**Big White Rabbit

POSTSCRIPT

We stopped by Longs (CVS) on the way home tonight and what did I find but a HUGE display of White Rabbit candy in the center aisle where all the weekly specials are. Was I channeling White Rabbits today or have they been there all along? Now I can do a taste test, comparing my Hangzhou Trust-Mart stash against Hawaii imports! Feed my head indeed! Get high on melamine?

And in all fairness to both the White Rabbit Candy Comapny and Jefferson Airplane, there is another story behind the Chinese white rabbit: it is part of a folk legend. We see a man in the moon, or perhaps green cheese, but to the Chinese, there is a rabbit in the moon. The mid-autumn festival involves a rabbit on the moon pounding herbs to make a pill of immortality. The Chinese found centuries ago that mercury wasn't the right ingredient to achieve such a goal..maybe try melamine?

And it is no surprise that White Rabbit did intend to market the new healthy product as Golden Rabbit, the special icon for 2011. Although the candy I just bought is classic White Rabbit. Maybe I have to go to the mainland to find the Golden Rabbit.

Okay. I know I'm beginning to ramble on about this...one rabbit makes you bigger, one makes you small....

DEATH AND TAXES

Managed to make it in time to Ash Wednesday Mass, though cutting off someone in the right lane to enter the church parking lot, free and conveniently located across the street from our tax accountant, where I had to deliver papers following the service, rendering what is his to Caesar. I was a little distracted on the drive in after a meeting I thought would never end, listening to a Teaching Company "Philosophy, Religion and the Meaning of Life" lecture about Elie Wiesel and his father during the Holocaust, painted as a tragic modern saint figure as a complementary bookend to Abraham and Isaac. Well, that put me in a perfect mood for the imposition of ashes.

I composed myself for proper cathedral behavior, and managed to follow along nicely in the service. I haven't been to a proper Anglican mass for a while. Maybe five or six years. I was charmed when the Bishop's homily referred to Saint Francis of Assisi, recalling to me the movie I watched recently where I perceived Taoist themes of yin and yang, nature and compassion. The Bishop told a story, almost as mood-altering as Elie Weisel's, about a woman with terrible face cancer (like St. Francis's lepers) in a nursing home he had to visit while a seminary student. Depressing, these ashy stories.

Which lead to the "Prayer over the Ashes." All solemn and pious, quietly settling in for a little meditation, surreptitiously experimenting with Taoist mudras while kneeling...and then my phone went off. My friendly reliable mechanic was calling. The ring tone I have assigned to his number is..."Start Me Up." Mick Jagger in the Cathedral. OMG. (At least it wasn't "Sympathy for the Devil.") Fortunately the phone was readily accessible in my bag, so I silenced it. Which was fine, until the voice message alert went off a minute later. Ring tone: "Like a Rolling Stone." Bob Dylan in the Cathedral. "Once upon a time, dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime, in your prime...didn't you.?" Silence! At the next convenient moment I retrieved the phone to turn it off. I do this for the opera; why didn't I think to do it for a mass?

When passing the peace, I apologized to those around me. No one seemed to care. I think I was forgiven.

A dash to the accountant. "If you have questions, don't call me, call my husband, I don't want to know." Back to the church parking lot. I'd left a sizable offering in the plate, but I didn't want to over-exploit my stay in the garden. I did take a moment to contemplate the fountain in front of the Cathedral. A big bronze image of St. Andrew and his fish, but the pond was empty of water, full of writhing snaky cables and copper wire. A couple of workers were standing around, doing something to the display. They thought it was funny when I took a photo.

"Spirituality is a work in progress, "I said. They laughed.

One more stop while I was in the neighborhood. My Chinese DVD vendor called me last week about the big sale she had on Tai Seng DVD sets.

She was talking to an older retired Japanese woman when I arrived, and we all started to chat about the DVDs. The retiree likes Taiwanese and Korean dramas and the historical epics I like too. "Those guys are all so handsome," she said. She assured me that retirement was great, she was busy and only regretted not retiring even sooner so she could take classes and watch DVDs. I wonder what her cellphone ringtones are.

I took her energy to heart as wise Ash Wednesday advice. Emily the vendor asked what happened to my head, there was black stuff on my forehead. "I've been to church," I said. "Oh, I thought you'd bumped into something." In a way, I did; spirituality is a work in progress.

I made my selection, buying enough for a free movie, increasing my backlog of DVD series that will carry me well through Lent, to say nothing of probably all the way to Advent. In 2012.

I want to go to China in May, but my plans are a bit tentative. This may be the closest I get. After all these videos, I should be able to speak Mandarin. Language -- like spirituality, also a work in progress.

WUDANG 5-0

On one of my returns from Wudangshan, a skeptical friend asked me about the monks and nuns who lived in the temples, "How do they support themselves?"

I wasn't sure how to answer, but contributions, patronage, and tourism, seemed to be the source of cash.

Although, I suspect there may be something else, the same way Hawaii brings in revenue from TV and film: Magnum P.I., Hawaii 5-0 (then and now), A Man Called God (Korean drama), some highly successful TV programs like Lost, and others long forgotten. And of course movies like From Here to Eternity (I have swum at that famous beach); Six Days Seven Nights, ( I know that place where they jumped off the cliff), and Jurassic Park, filmed on Kauai. (There are a lot of movies filmed in Hawaii. And TV series.)

While visiting my Chinatown video vendor last week during the festivities welcoming the Year of Rabbit, she pressed on me a couple of Hong Kong TV series, one a precursor to Condor Hero (which I have seen and enjoyed)--"This one's about about their parents," she said--and another I had actually made a note to find, Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre*, the third part in the Jin Yong (Louis Cha) Condor trilogy. I swear the proprietress of the Dragon Gate (Longmen) Bookstore reads my mind. Or I am completely under her spell. Whatever.

So, after finishing Sweetness in the Salt, a curious romance in which I learned something about salt trading in the late Qing, and a study of the poorly received Wu Ji, (The Promise), **a film by Chen Kaige, I popped in episode one of --OMG-- forty (40) of Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre.

And then had a Hawaii 5-0 moment. "Those mountains look really familiar," I thought, watching a gu qin player against a stunning background. "And wait, that's Betel Nut Palace...Purple Heaven Temple...the gate below where the old hermit lives...Golden Top." I have photos of myself with the big gate lions where a scene was shot. We practiced the Eight Brocades in the same courtyard at Purple Heaven. Indeed, the story opens with some sort of Shaolin-Wudang conflict (Buddhist vs. Taoist conflict), but I never expected to see the actual scenery in places I have come to know and love so intimately.

I once watched a Magnum P.I. episode being shot on the street just below where I lived some years ago in Honolulu. I only hope the owner of the local chicken shop and bodega got paid sufficiently for their appearance in the episode, as I hope the monks of Wudang have been recompensed for using the very sacred locations in this classic wuxia story. I had just come to terms with the exploitation of Wudang in Jackie Chan's Karate (Kung Fu) Kid, where constructed sets live on as attractive tourist attractions. But now to see these even more sacred spots, temples and mountains in film, I am conflicted.

And this is only in episode one. Like an insider, I had some moments of wonder: "How can you get there from there?"

*Although I am intrigued to find that my favorite Tony Leung, Chiu-Wai the Tiny, was in the cast of another version, back in 1986. These stories have an incredible power for retelling.

**Concerning Wu Ji, The Promise. This is a Chen Kaige film from 2005, very poorly received. This is the director that did Yellow Earth, Farewell My Concubine and The Emperor and the Assassin, movies worth watching, I think. Wu Ji was dismissed, but I think because it was misunderstood. It is not quite a martial arts film, not quite a wuxia or historical Chinese drama. It is an Asian-themed fantasy romance, maybe Shakespearean or Chinese-operatic, very pretty to look at and maybe a chick flick. If you rent it, say from Netflix, watch it once, then be sure to look at the deleted scenes, and maybe the "making of" feature. Then watch it again. I hate to think that this movie, which cost something like $35 million US, one of the costliest ever Chinese films, is not worth watching. There are some lovely performances -- by Nicholas Tse, Hiroyuki Sanada, and Ye Liu, in particular-- don't pay attention to the naysayers. This is worth it.

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?

ANOTHER WORLD

As I recall, this was the title of a soap opera I watched for a time in the early '80s when I was living in Appalachia, on a six-acre "farmette" with a small child. I was indulging a weird fantasy that fluctuated between Chinese peasant to back-to-the-land hippie, while the Wizard had a busy job running a county library system (supporting more or less illiterate families of a coal mining culture). To escape from the isolation and boredom (which, quite frankly, I would welcome at this point in my life) there was the soap opera--Another World.

I suppose it is no different that I should now be escaping into another world of 37 B.C. Korea, the historical epic/soap opera of Jumong, the 81-episode tale of the founding monarch of an early kingdom of Korea.

Korean history, whatever, it's still wuxia. Swords and chivalry and swords and familial conflict and loyalty and weird father/daughter, mother/son relationships and swords and very interesting hairstyles. Did I mention swords?

The father/daughter-mother/son themes frequently come up in wuxia. I recently read something in a Taoist commentary on the I Ching that explains this. It's a yin/yang thing. (And if you don't think old Korea was under the spell of yin and yang and the bagua, just look at the flag, to say nothing of the tail art on Korean Air 747s.)

According to Master Alfred Huang (no relation to Master Chungliang Al Huang), when the mother seeks a union with the father for the first time, she recieves a son: the Arousing, Thunder. When the father seeks a union with the mother for the first time, he recieves a daughter: the Penetrating, Wind. This can go on for generations. Mothers get sons, fathers get daughters. This is all about family relationships in the bagua. But it explains something in all these Asian family dramas.

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.

ANY WAY YOU SLICE IT

Not a bad way to bring in the Year of the Tiger, spending a few hours with another pretty boy with a sword.  Up to episode ershi san (23, of sanshi, 30) in "Sword Stained with Royal Blood," my current epic wuxia series,  based on a novel by Louis Cha, the Louis L'Amour of China. This one is an end-of-Ming story starring the charming, pouty-mouthed Bobby Dou Zhi Kong, right, a young Taiwanese actor, who has four sword-wielding women in love with him in a formulaic story about his little band of kung fu experts, including a monk, a reformed bandit, some mysterious uncles and one of the adoring women.  They are out to kill the last corrupt and stupid Ming king (whose daughter is one of the lovestruck maidens) and save the country in the face of Qing attacks. (There is real history here.) Bobby plays a moral and very agile character, although I keep thinking the role calls for Vincent Zhao, supported by Power Chan as the reformed bandit. (But that's just me. I think maybe Bobby is channeling Vincent a little.) Original language here is Mandarin, so I've been training my ear and learning some useful phrases.

A surprise element in this story (to me, maybe it's a well known Chinese thing) was the magical "ice toad," which looks like a marzipan amphibian that sucks poison (a common wuxia element) out of anyone so afflicted; the opposite, really, of the tropical bufo.  Googling "ice toad" I find that, apart from its appearance in some fantasy games, there actually are toads in Alaska that freeze and thaw; they create their own antifreeze.  Sounds like Chinese medicine; I've seen those geckos on a dipstick!  Click here for some fascinating toad-related stuff.

Taoist Immortals Dancing with Toad

TECHNOLOGY

Sometimes it sucks.  I have a new Tai Seng DVD wuxia series I am watching, but the first DVD in the set has some problems. (May be all six of them do, but don't know yet.)  A few minutes in, it completely freezes my Apple DVD player forcing me to shut down, restart, and execute a special command to eject the disc.  To return the flawed product (the receipt for which I have since discarded), I would have to go back to Wal-Mart, where I shop like twice a year (for the huge container of berry-flavored Metamucil I can only get there). When I'm in Wal-Mart I'm never quite sure where I am...they're exactly the same in Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, possibly even Beijing (although the cast of characters is probably different there...I'm not sure what Chinese Wal-Mart shoppers might look like). 

When last buying that Metamucil, since I was in le plus grand magasin  (a nod here to Target), I also was checking out the cheap DVDs on offer ( where I found Jeremiah Johnson, a truly great  movie, kind of Western wuxia, with Robert Redford, that I believe I saw in its premiere** in 1972 in Pocatello, Idaho, (which geologically is really part of Utah), and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I have never seen, but maybe it's time to find out what THAT is all about.) Then I discovered that our local Hawaii Wal-Mart has a respectable section of wuxia and kung fu videos. (Maybe I wouldn't have found this stuff in the Ocala, Florida, Wal-Mart. But then I wasn't looking, I was buying cheap household supplies for my aged father.)  On my Metamucil run, for a good price (the price you pay for enduring Wal-Mart) I bought Shaolin Grandma (subject for a whole 'nother blog post); a not half-bad Korean movie called Shadowless Sword, and a couple of multi-disc Tai Seng series. (I feel really guilty because for these I should have patronized my Chinatown vendor, but I will be back there soon, before Chinese New Year, and will certainly spend some bucks. Maybe I will ask her to stock Metamucil.)

Alas, Sword Stained with Royal Blood is giving me trouble. The Wizard, not a fan of the Mac DVD player, suggested I view it with VLC.  But I decided to test it first on the DVD player connected to our rarely used TV, where it plays just fine.  Except that the DVD player remote control doesn't work, so I can't select subtitles or control the DVD in any way. I asked the Wizard to investigate.  Indeed  something's wrong.  Why would anyone design a device controllable ONLY through a remote?  He can't determine if it's the remote or the IR sensor on the DVD player.

"I need a detector.  I need to order a new tool!"  Which he is enthusiastically now doing on line.

In the meantime, I have learned that the DVD DOES play on VLC on my Mac, (so I don't have to go back to Wal-Mart) although it occasionally burps and reverts to the Cantonese track from the preferred Mandarin, and loses the English subtitles. I can easily recover, but really something is wrong.  I hope it's only this first DVD.

In any case, it's a good story, from a Louis Cha wuxia novel.  They didn't have technology in that setting...except for fine sword production.

I wonder what would happen if I greeted the Wal-Mart greeter with a sword in hand?  Ideally with the receipt for the faulty (Chinese) product impaled on its tip. Prease to lefund this?

**I have the idea that I saw this movie in a theater in Pocatello with Robert Redford actually introducing it.  It was sort of a big deal.  But I could be imagining this, or conflating it with some other event. This may be why I now like to occasionally order shoes and bags from Robert Redford's Sundance catalog.

GAINED IN TRANSLATION?

One of the advantages in watching subtitled videos is learning a little something about a foreign language, so I have been engaging in a wuxia extravaganza, partly to train my ear and pick up a few useful phrases in Mandarin. By relying on subtitles, I can catch lots of ways to say hello, thanks, goodbye, all right, not all right, some counting, an occasional obscenity and so on.

But subtitles themselves can be quite entertaining. A few months ago, I enjoyed an old Chow Yun-Fat movie, where he was being advised as an American CIA operative not used to peasant fare, that he needn't eat the unsavory food being offered; he said, in the subtitle, "I'm not worried. I've eaten a lot of INEVITABLE food." Needless to say, he was puking in the next scene.

Which brings me to my most recent amusement, the 39-episode TV series of Seven Swordsmen, produced by Tsui Hark, and probably what he really had in mind for "Seven Swords (Chat Gim)," his elegant but choppy movie that was cut down from four hours to two-and-a half. Unless you know the book it's based on, the plot and the character development seem a little sketchy.

In the more developed, if less extravagant, TV series, Vincent Zhao Wen Zhou (Man-Cheuk Chiu, his Cantonese name, which means I think, Man Chicks Drool Over), playing Donnie Yen's character from the movie, goes on a search for food for his hobbity band of swordsmen, becoming a little distracted in the inn by an exotic dancer after all those ascetic years in the mountains. He orders take-out: a jug of wine and some GLUTTONOUS rice. His hungry buddies from Mount Heaven are delighted. Sticky rice is certainly far from inedible!

Vincent continues to be charmed by the dancer and later rescues her from a slave sale. In the movie, she was Green Pearl, Donnie Yen's counterpart Korean exile. In the TV series, Green Pearl appears to be a Kashmiri expat. I guess I'll have to read the book to find out what's really going on. I'm expecting inevitable gluttony.