China

Last Train Home

mandy — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

Zeitgeist Films, Canada Council for the Arts

The establishing longshot of this documentary tilts down to show a few policemen in an open, paved space. Slowly the camera pans left, and the entire frame fills with thousands of people standing in a drizzle. Many hold bright, pastel-coloured umbrellas. It’s a beautiful image. The following shot, from ground level, shows that huge crowd rushing in pandemonium past the camera into a train station. These two shots are emblematic of the film: beauty and chaos inextricably interwoven.

Earth’s largest human migration occurs in China at their New Year. One hundred and thirty million people who work in cities scuffle for prized train tickets to return to villages where they were raised. Last Train Home fuses a macro view of this migration as a social and cultural phenomenon with a micro view of one family that makes this annual trek. In so doing, it underscores the high price in domestic turmoil many Chinese families pay for the country’s so-called economic miracle. It also vividly contrasts the lovely countryside with the polluted, teeming, ugliness of urban China.

Changhua Zang and Sugin Chen, husband and wife, work as sewing-machine operators in a factory in Guangzhou. They have two kids—Qin, a girl in her teens, and a boy, Yang, about ten—who live with their grandmother in Huilong Village where the parents were born. The film was shot over a couple of years, so we watch the kids grow up a bit. The parents labour at their dreary work to give their children a chance at prosperity. “You shouldn’t be like us,” they say. To this end, they constantly remind Qin and Yang to stay in school and get good grades. The parents also reveal decidedly mixed feelings about being wage slaves 2,000 kilometres away from their kids. They insist their destiny (etched in their faces) will be worth it if the kids acquire a higher education.

However, Qin, angry and bitter with her parents for their protracted absence, quits school and moves to a city, thus frustrating Changhua and Sugin’s hopes. She goes to work in a strobe-lit dance bar where the music is industrial technopop and employees’ training includes chanting capitalist slogans: “Customers are always right!” and “The boss is always right!” (Mao is turning over in his grave.) Yang, the son, stays in school and remains the light of his parents’ lives. If he quits, their sixteen-year devotion will have been for naught.

A great thing about Last Train Home is how it makes family a common human denominator: the daughter angry with her mother; the likable, hard-working, worried, exhausted, guilty, self-sacrificing parents; the wise grandmother; the young boy who is academically inclined and is his parents’ last, best hope. We know these people. They are us. When Changua finally breaks from his impossibly stoic reserve and slaps his daughter for disrespecting him by using fuck in his presence, we deeply empathize with them both.

A word about the production of this film. Lixin Fan, the director, is Chinese-Canadian. The film was produced mostly by government funds from Canada. It’s a tribute to the country and its art organizations that they have the acuity to fund a film that may seem at first to have nothing to do with Canada. But troubled families, Chinese, Canadian, or anywhere else are legion. And China itself is omnipresent. One need only look at the planet’s retail shelves to see that. This superb documentary allows us inside a Chinese phenomenon to see how similar and connected we all are now.

Finally: Be sure to stick around to hear the plaintive, chilling, gorgeous, acapella aria sung over the end credits.

Written by: Neil Flowers, April 15th 2011

Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China

annette — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Julie Y. Chu

Duke University Press

Residents of Fujian Province on the southeastern coast of China burn spirit money designed to resemble U. S. currency. That stunning confluence of traditional religious practice and modern dreams of western emigration stands as a kind of symbolic center of this book. In her ethnographic study of the people of this region, famous-or infamous, perhaps—for their involvement in “human smuggling” to the West, Julie Y. Chu asks why so many people would honor the dead with images of western materialism. The answers her subjects gave seemed evasive, dismissive: “because so many have relatives in the United States” or “they’re just being superstitious.”

In fact, the spirit money, modeled after American greenbacks, represents a powerful longing that has defined and transformed this region. Nowhere is this desire more obviously monumentalized than in the comparatively luxurious homes, built by “Overseas Chinese” as “vacation homes” or investments, that are springing up throughout the province. For many, those who have miraculously managed all the bureaucratic obstacles and nightmarish dangers to settle in the West have achieved a heroic status that is both idealized and destabilizing for those “left behind.” The culture Chu describes is one that keeps one proverbial eye fixed westward, the other on a provincial life that seems meager and transient. Bags are kept packed.

The book is replete with tales of those still waiting for the call from the “snakehead” (human smuggler) who will expect them to be ready at a moment’s notice to abandon their current lives and embark on a life-threatening journey. Because this activity has so profoundly defined the region and its people, Chu argues that it is part of a “politics of destination,” a pragmatic and forward-looking ideology governed by the prospect of mobility—both geographic and economic.

Because of the frequency of arrests and loss of life in transit, the area is notorious world-wide as a jumping off point for “human smuggling.” Perhaps the worst incident was a tragedy in June of 2000: fifty-eight migrants from Fuzhou suffocated to death in the back of a truck hauling tomatoes from Belgium to Dover. Indeed, the horrifying details of human smuggling bring to mind the inhumanity of the Middle Passage, with the obvious mitigating difference being the migrants’ belief that a better life awaits those who survive. The author writes, “One cannot easily forget the stifling darkness and pervasive disorientation of being crammed into the hull of a ship or into a steel shipping container for anywhere from fourteen to ninety days." She calls it a kind of “entombment at sea,” too literally the fate of many who have attempted the passage.

The tales of horror have done little to dampen the desire, but have only made legal or illegal “visiting” that much more difficult and risky. Residents still fervently study well worn copies of Practical English for People Working in Chinese Restaurants and wait for the call to action. The new foreign-owned homes, left mostly empty by their overseas owners, seem to be proof of a prosperity that, in spite of all obstacles, is still within the grasp of the most resilient.

The book ends beautifully with the clacking of mahjong tiles that, like the spirit money, captures something essential about the Fuzhounese. The author comments on the popularity of the game: “Though winning always entailed personal reward and glory, losing did not necessarily spell individual failure and shame... Sooner or later... the pendulum of luck would swing back in one’s favor.”

Written by: Rick Taylor, April 13th 2011

The Story of Lee (Volume 1)

payal — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Seán Michael Wilson, Chie Kutsuwada

Nantier, Beall, and Minoustchine Publishing (ComicsLit)

The Story of Lee is a graphic novel written by Seán Michael Wilson, the editor of AX: Alternative Manga. Wilson writes mainly for a mature international manga audience, and like most other Japanese style comics, it is serialized: I had the pleasure of reading just the beginning of a larger story arc. Part of its appeal, I admit, was in its being a short and satisfying read that nonetheless offers the promise of continuation in subsequent volumes.

The engaging story, which is set in Hong Kong, advances considerably in less than 160 pages, and the story-telling accomplished through drawings rather than text is a welcome change of pace. One of my favorite “scenes” was an entire page of just moments in a movie theatre, where the deepening of the sweet and touching romance between our heroine, Lee Chan (age twenty-four), and Mathew Macdonald (twenty-seven) was illustrated with a quiet sensitivity that captured the emotions perfectly. Lee ultimately learns much about Western culture as well as her own Chinese culture, by looking at both through the eyes of Mathew, a poetry-writing English teacher from Scotland.

The heart of the story is that over-arching cultural ties between Lee and Mathew (i.e., The Clientele and other popular British music, poetry, and Hong Kong sunsets, to name a few) outweigh their cultural differences (such as Lee’s more hesitant approach to sex). In the background, we have Wang, the suitor that Lee’s father prefers for her, who tries but fails to compete for Lee’s affections. Of course, suspicion from her father and jealousy from Wang make her Chinese culture all the more unattractive to Lee.

Although it follows a somewhat predictable narrative (thus far), The Story of Lee nonetheless does a nice job of illuminating and confronting the xenophobic views of Wang, of Lee’s father Mr. Chan, and of Lee herself. As well, hints of progressive commentary on issues like sexism and women’s rights appear in the first volume, and thus more generous treatment of these issues in future volumes is likely. If The Story of Lee remains true to its form, it will continue to feature love and coming-of-age variety self-realization as its major themes, from a culturally sensitive and understated, yet decidedly feminist, point of view.

This point of view is best represented in Volume 1 by Lee’s paternal grandmother. She embodies the passing along of a “tradition” that somehow trumps the father’s rigid, xenophobic tradition. Without disrespecting her son, Lee’s grandmother expresses a very different life credo that comes across as: “Live! Love! Learn!” but also, "work toward your individual goals and love your family and where you come from." The grandmother’s wisdom redefines the father’s "work relentlessly and unhappily, and obey your family" worldview, and eventually helps inspire reconciliation between Lee and the family regarding Mathew and Lee’s future. In fact, Mr. Chan chooses to support his daughter’s decision to enroll in school at Edinburgh University, which is where the volume ends.

I surmise that The Story of Lee may be considered manga “light” by aficionados. It was printed in New York, not Japan. It reads front to back, rather than back to front. But it is set in a universe peopled with exaggerated eyes and other stylized features common to manga, and it engages with the same familiar themes. So for me, reading this graphic novel about characters in China exploring the difficulties and benefits of intercultural love and relationships, often by sharing various treasured memes with each other (in addition to music and film references, there were haikus by Matsuo and snippets from Rilke, Proust, Borges, and Tolstoy), was a very post-something, contemporary kind of pleasure. And one that I recommend trying.

Written by: Julie Ann, March 22nd 2011

Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China

tina — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Shao-hua Liu

Stanford University Press

Heroin. AIDS. Migration. Development programs. Gender roles. In Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China, Shao-hua Liu examines each of these issues and how they relate to Nuoso youth. An anthropological researcher, the author delves into how China’s evolution from the traditional to the modern intersects with drug use, disease, and development. The book focuses on the Nuoso, a poor and marginalized group in southwest China that has been disproportionately affected by the drug trade and HIV/AIDS.

The author does a commendable job of stressing the interconnected nature of migration, gender, drug use, and political economies. While these issues are naturally linked, too many authors focus on one of these aspects while ignoring the myriad forces that shape cultures and communities. Passage to Manhood features a fresh approach to understanding why heroin use and HIV took over the Nuoso to such a great extent. The author presents an answer that relies on the intersection of marginalization, stigmatization, modernization, and power dynamics within communities.

The author’s honest approach to gender stood out in the book. Instead of making sweeping generalizations about gender politics among the Nuoso, the author explains how she approached the subject and details the difficulties she had using male translators to interview women.

Acknowledging that her access to information was limited, the author conveys the basic framework of what she found. While drug use and HIV/AIDS shaped the entire community in some way, it affected men and women differently. The author explains that young men were first drawn to heroin because it was fashionable and demonstrated a particular social status. Drug use overlapped with the definition of masculinity among the Nuoso, which was based on a desire for adventure and mobility. The gender hierarchy, which placed women subordinate to men, played out in heroin politics: Women encountered the drug trade through small dealings and followed their husbands or partners, who were responsible for the larger trades.

The author is careful to note that gender dynamics not only shaped the details of the drug trade among the Nuoso, but also determined the effectiveness of state-managed intervention programs to combat drug use and HIV/AIDS. In a careful dissection of the failures of these intervention programs, the author examines how the program administrators viewed cultural taboos about sex as barriers to their work. Instead of acknowledging the fluidity of cultural norms, state-managed interventions overlooked honest sex education and contributed to misinformation about HIV/AIDS. By ignoring the unique cultural context of the Nuoso and using global AIDS messages from elsewhere, the architects of these programs inadvertently instilled a stigma about AIDS where one previously did not exist. This case study presents a sobering lesson for those working on global AIDS prevention programs; such interventions must be designed as a cooperative exercise between local groups and the program implementers, not cookie-cutter programs delivered from above.

It is difficult to pluck one nugget of information from the author’s interconnected web, but perhaps the greatest take away from the book is that AIDS and drug use do not exist in a vacuum. Gender politics, economics, migration, and urbanization each exact pressure on people’s actions and perceptions. A thorough understanding of drug use and HIV/AIDS within a community must begin with an expansive interpretation of how individuals, families, and societies grapple with these ever-changing forces.

Written by: Andrea Gittleman, February 25th 2011

Dream of Ding Village

caitlin — Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Yan Lianke

Grove Press

Grandfather Ding is the patriarch of the family that founded Ding Village. He dreams of a world that sometimes comes true and sometimes should but doesn't. Both of his sons are ne’er-do-wells, one a crooked, arrogant man who becomes a high level Communist cadre with boatloads of money, the other a layabout who makes nothing of his life. The older son makes his money from being a “blood head," a man who buys and sells blood in the rural communities and ultimately infects an entire Chinese province with AIDS through contaminated blood. As the community dies, the son creates more and more abusive schemes to increase his wealth and moves to an opulent house in the city.

Villagers sell their blood to buy things like a particular brand of shampoo. In the end, all monies are invested in death—buying a casket—and the grandeur of death becomes far more enticing than the reality of living. The future is sold off for the past by blind followers of corrupt leaders.

The grandfather at first follows the directives of the party as much as his son, only he achieves its goals through more humane means: by convincing the citizens it is good for them. Is this better? Does it make his manipulation any less blameworthy? A benign dictator is still a dictator, and is perhaps even worse than an outright hostile one, because the victim doesn’t even know what he's lost and has no way to fight back against an unidentifiable enemy.

Grandfather Ding makes two unsuccessful attempts to convince his son to take responsibility. The more he tries to do good, the worse it gets for him. As the village descends into Lord of the Flies savagery, the one story of true love does nothing to soften the blow. It’s all about money. The grandfather is left with no options to combat evil but a final act of desperation.

While this is a critique of communism, it might as well also be of the U.S. since the “trickle-down” eighties, the “me” nineties, and the “never ending war” of the naughts. At the core of any concentration of power—call it communism or capitalism, patriarchy or religion—is corruption and greed.

The book alternates between the dream states of the grandfather, as told by his dead grandson, and the waking nightmare of a dying village and the shame of his own family. The family conflict illustrates the counterpoint of the extremes of wealth and poverty and the struggle between power and humanity, problems faced in the contemporary U.S. as well as China. The author uses repetition as a rhetorical tool to emphasize the cyclical nature of these problems, but sometimes he uses it too much. Overall, though, the writing is lyrical and often beautiful, with vivid descriptions of the living conditions of rural China.

The village dries up and dies as the people do, and the corrupt son continues to accumulate wealth off the misery of others—in his case blood, death, marriage in the afterlife (in the case of the U.S.—disease, wars, private prisons). The son convinces himself he’s a philanthropist. The father, a janitor, convinces himself he's a professor. What’s real? When is a dream true?

Written by: Dianne Post, December 5th 2010

A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop

mandy — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

Directed by Zhang Yimou

Sony Pictures Classics

I walked out of the screening of A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop feeling vaguely dissatisfied. While the official selection of the 2010 Berlin Film Festival bills itself as a “black comedy thriller [which serves] as an expose of how intense desires can consume humanity,” it neither thrills nor tickles the funny bone. Instead, I found myself repeatedly checking my watch despite the film’s ninety-five minute run time.

A Chinese re-telling of the Coen Brothers’ classic debut, Blood Simple, A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop is set in a desolate area of northern China during the Late Imperial period. The action opens on the employees (Cheng Ye, Mao Mao, and Xiao Shenyang) looking on as their boss’ wife (Yan Ni) purchases state-of-the-art weaponry—a handgun—from a band of wandering Persians. The boss’ wife is having an affair with Li (Xio Shenyang), a clownish man with a “soft spirit.” After buying the gun, the boss’ wife (she’s never given a name, incidentally) makes it clear that she expects Li to help her kill her abusive and miserly husband, Wang (Ni Dahong). When Wang discovers the affair, he hires Zhang (Sun Hunglei), a patrol officer to murder the two. Greedy and cold-blooded, Zhang has plans of his own—plans that will result in even more bloodshed.

This film is sort of like pectin-free jelly; it has all the right ingredients except something that would firm it up and give it texture. And several hours after leaving the Sony Pictures screening room, I still can’t think of what that indescribable something may be. Better character development? A slightly more sympathetic Zhang? More background characters to give the film more local flavor? Real acting on Xiao Shenyang’s part as opposed to his constant mugging and gesticulation? Genuine comedy or, perhaps, more of a neo-noir feel? Or maybe a tender love scene between Li and the boss’s wife that would have helped me understand why she was willing to tolerate such a cowardly buffoon?

Then again, this film had too much of some things as well: slapstick, time-lapse montages, all of its characters hatching schemes and working at cross purposes. A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop also has plot holes galore. How does Wang amass such a fortune as a proprietor of such an out of the way business? Aside for the imperial police who stop by early in the film, this shop never has any customers. And why do Wang’s employees stick around when they aren’t being paid? For that matter, how does Zhang find so much time away from his patrol duties and from where does he get the blood-stained clothes?

This is not to say that A Woman, A Gun, and a Noodle Shop was a total waste of time. Many of its early sequences have a colorfully frenetic quality. A scene where employees twirl around like whirling dervishes as they handle noodle dough was beautifully inventive, and the Persian gun dealer’s swordplay was transfixing. The cinematography granted the film’s arid landscapes a bleak sort of beauty.

I admit that I’ve never seen this film’s source material, but given that Blood Simple had the Coen Brothers sharing the director’s chair and a pre-Fargo Frances McDormand in the lead, I am tempted to conclude that this retread isn’t worthy to undo the original’s sandals.

Written by: Ebony Edwards-Ellis, September 14th 2010

Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary

admin — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Fran Martin

Duke University Press

The study of female homoeroticism in Chinese media is a small yet evolving academic discipline. It is, therefore, of great importance that Backward Glances was written. Exploring popular media produced during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, author Fran Martin addresses the ways in which same-sex love between women is commonly depicted, and the ways in which those depictions simultaneously reinforce and challenge the conventional discourse on homosexuality in China.

On the surface, many of the novels, television dramas, and films Martin analyzes do not appear to be particularly transgressive. A common theme among the media she explores is memory; stories of same-sex desire between women are often presented as a fleeting childhood fantasy, something that perpetually exists in the past and can never be fully realized by adults in the present. This memorial mode is also tied to what Martin calls the “going-in" story. Unlike “coming-out” narratives, which depict homosexual identity as the final stage of an individual’s struggle with sexual identity, “going-in” stories start with same-sex desire and end with heterosexual marriage. None of these tropes disturb the status quo of Chinese society, where homosexuality remains incredibly stigmatized.

But Martin contends that there is more to these texts than immediately meet the eye. The protagonists of these stories tend to be overly feminine schoolgirls who fall in love with other feminine girls or tomboys. When that love is not ultimately realized, the lead femme becomes sad and nostalgic, leading to her remembering and recounting the story of her love over and over again. The stories are written so that the audience will identify with the lead femme character; as a result, homoerotic attraction is represented as a natural, universal feminine quality. It is depicted as tragic, if inevitable, when such love is not actualized, and the audience is meant to share in that sadness. Although few of the texts discussed disrupt Chinese societal order by depicting a fulfilled, long-term romantic relationship between women, the depictions of love between women as idyllic, universal, and tragic when prevented from closure suggest an innate acceptance of homosexuality as something natural and expected in young women, if also socially taboo.

What is particularly interesting is the contrast between the complex and, at times, subversive images of love between women in Chinese popular culture and the lack of acceptance of actual lesbianism in Chinese society. Martin frequently mentions this discrepancy, though she rarely explores it as it might relate to pro- or anti-LGBTQ legislation in China. Her primary focus is on the media itself, rather than the ultimate significance of the media in a real-life political context. I most appreciated Backward Glances when it touched upon the audience responses to the texts. Should a follow-up be written, Martin may want to explore the interactions between the viewers and the texts in greater detail, as a way of exploring the impact homoerotic media has (or could have) on Chinese politics and queer acceptance in China.

Though academic in style, Backward Glances is quite approachable. Written as a scholarly text, it can also be of interest to and easily enjoyed by anyone interested in the topics of queer representation, media, and Chinese culture. The book covers a wide range of material, but never feels overwhelming or dense. It may not remain the definitive text on the subject, but until one exists, Backward Glances is a well-written, critical exploration of a newly emerging field of study.

Cross-posted at Gender Across Borders

Written by: Carrie Polansky, July 13th 2010

A Thread of Sky

admin — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:01:00 +0000

By Deanna Fei

Penguin Press

Six Chinese American female characters form the main narrative perspectives of Deanna Fei’s ambitious first novel, A Thread of Sky. There is family matriarch Lin Yulan, once a revolutionary for the nationalist party in China, and her daughters Irene and Susan. Irene is a bereaved widow looking to herself reconnect with her three daughters: Nora, a finance and marketing success; Kay, the one most connected to her Chinese ethnic roots; and Sophie, the youngest who struggles with an eating disorder and was just accepted to Stanford University. Irene’s grand plan to unite the family is to plan a trip to China, a venture in which only women will be invited.

Lin Yulan’s revolutionary past is one that sets the tone for the generations that follow, as she raises both Irene and Susan to be independent women who strive for careers of their own. When Irene’s career as a scientist begins to find a renaissance after the birth of her first two children, she discovers she is pregnant again. Irene’s mother wants her to abort the child, but Irene does not, and yet, despite Irene’s own commitment to raising a family, the values instilled in her by her mother regarding the importance of self-sustainment are also ones she hands down to her daughters.

There are many complications on the trip, and all revolve around romance and relationships (perhaps with the exception of Sophie). Nora’s crumbling relationship with her Caucasian WASP-y husband leaves her in an escapist mindset when she assents to go on the tour. Having arranged a meeting with her grandfather while she was in China previously, Kay possesses her own agenda about the impending trip. (Lin Yulan and her husband, Kay’s grandfather, parted on bad terms when she left for the United States, making Kay’s overtures both risky and somewhat sentimental.) Sophie would rather stay at home preparing for her freshman year and developing a relationship with her African American boyfriend, Brandon. She also finds herself dealing with an eating disorder that arises not long after her father dies. Susan, a poet, although seemingly happily married to Winston, still finds herself thinking about an ill-conceived affair with a former creative writing student named Ernesto.

At one point early on in the novel, The Joy Luck Club is referenced. It is an apt moment that recalls the self-consciousness of many Asian American writers publishing today. In that novel, Jing-mei returns to China, sets foot on what is believed to be a kind of homeland, and finds some sort of resolution within the last handful of pages. This kind of return journey is not the one that Fei has planned. Indeed, the tour of China is just the beginning of a narrative about the complications of intergenerational relationships between these Chinese American women. Fei lets her characters find footing by exposing their flaws and judiciously characterizing their various goals and motivations. The novel finds its surest stride within character construction.

There is, of course, one other major “character,” which is the way Fei configures China. The Chinese American women struggle to find clear and transparent attachments to nation and place. China is not a landscape that yields easily to them, but Fei is clear to mark these women off differently than other tourists and mobile elites. Indeed, there is a large discourse related to China’s modernization that is being interrogated any time the six women find themselves in bazaars or markets, where global capitalism is ambivalently represented.

There is a delicate balancing act in the characters' desire to root out problematic inequities arising from China’s modernization while simultaneously discovering that such problematics are difficult and thorny to address. The most compelling parts of the novel are rooted here, especially when Kay attempts to constitute a mode of transnational feminism that is thwarted at almost every turn by the way upward mobility becomes one of the ways by which China’s future is brokered. It is clear that Fei’s novel does not broker to presenting China as an exotic, unchanging landscape that can be claimed by the credit card. Rather, it is complex and shifting, a place that is constantly being razed and rebuilt, preserved in some locations, but disintegrating in others.

A Thread of Sky does not conclude with easy answers and, instead, leaves many open questions. In this suspended state of expectance, the novel resolutely moves outside of sentimentalism and resides in a domestic drama that unfolds unceasingly and with admirable restraint. In this regard, A Thread of Sky manages to offer a visually stunning tableau of China’s evolution in the twenty-first century without shifting into the superficiality of a travelogue, letting the reader’s sense of an already complex geography change as her characters do too.

Cross-posted at Asian American Literature Fans

Written by: Stephen Hong Sohn, May 25th 2010

Abby and Jules

admin — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Lia Quince

Finial Press

Early in Lia Quince’s novel Abby and Jules, adolescent protagonist Abby steps onto a street in Beijing on her own for the first time. She is conflicted, carrying both the naïve adolescent confidence that she can survive alone in any city and the awareness that she is a white woman in China. The swirl of teenage emotions is thoughtfully captured.

Unfortunately, this one moment is the high point of the novel. Abby and Jules is a poorly conceived and poorly executed work. Some of the difficulties lie in the prose, such as when a masturbation scene refers to “the spot of exquisite pleasure.” Some problems lie in poor narrative pacing; some lie in character inconsistencies, as when Abby, described as an “eco-chick” on every other page, is driven into an environmentalist tailspin when asked what to order at a coffee bar (pesticides in the rainforest, disposable cups, processed and sugary syrup), but fears receiving a “recycled” engagement ring without even a cursory nod to the politics of the diamond trade. Literary and cultural references are shoehorned awkwardly into the prose, which leads to forced comparisons between Quince’s characters and more established historical or literary figures that make little sense and do nothing to enhance the plot.

Some of the worst aspects of the novel lie in the skewed reasoning on which the plot turns: when Abby learns about her father's involvement in an illicit sexual relationship, she endeavors to understand her father. Even as her understanding ostensibly becomes more nuanced, she holds onto the view that he is not to blame. Still other challenges lie in the blatant lack of editing of the manuscript. The problem reveals itself most hilariously when, in a novel about Chinese-American relations with no sense of irony, Abby considers a recent one night stand and wonders: “Was she too much out of character as the wonton [sic] whore last night as the she [sic] emulated the bad girl Julie Yang?” This is only the most humorous example, but several blatant typos appear on nearly every page, giving the piece an air of rushed neglect.

Written by: Gemma Cooper-Novack, February 18th 2010

The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Hannah Pakula

Simon and Schuster Press

No one will fail to notice this giant red book on your bookshelf. Nearly 800 pages long, containing two sections of photographs and spanning 137 years, Hannah Pakula’s biography of Soong May-ling, The Last Empress, better known to the world as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the most famous wife of Chiang Kai-shek (the nationalist general who briefly united China before losing it to the communists organized under Mao Tse-tung) is a formidable conglomeration of information about many of the characters who had a hand in moving China from imperialism to communism. Readers looking for a concise, tightly organized, strategically written account of Madame’s life should look elsewhere: this book is dense with the stories of those whose lives and histories were entangled with the Chiang-Soong families and is as much a story of China as it is of Madame Chiang Kai-shek.

Unfortunately, Pakula’s style is not well suited to explaining concisely the complexities of Chinese political history in the early part of the twentieth century to the average, educated reader. This is not to say that Pakula obscures what is otherwise and elsewhere perfectly clear; the events and attitudes that initiated and characterized China’s shift from imperialism to nationalism to communism are difficult to outline cleanly.

Pakula takes a chronological approach to this biography, dividing the work into nine sections, each covering a span of several years. These sections, which are titled only according to the years they cover (which may be as few as two or as many as twenty-plus), are further broken down into chapters, the titles of which are only numbers. This chronological division is the only explicit structuring move Pakula makes, and she rarely offers her readers authorial ‘anchoring points’, which help the reader to orient her- or himself within the narrative structure. Certainly there is an overarching narrative—the intertwined trajectories of Madame Chiang Kai-shek and modern China—however, Pakula repeatedly interrupts her overarching narrative in order to insert interesting and gossipy anecdotes which can only be (thinly) justified by their chronological placement. This has the effect of flattening much of the narrative movement—important events don’t anchor the narrative or push it forward when surrounded by so many non-essential tidbits.

The story, whatever the flaws in the storytelling, is an enthralling one. Even when I grew frustrated with Pakula’s prose, I continued to read on... and on... and on. Pakula, who is carefully sympathetic to Soong May-ling, sometimes portrays her as a kind of feminist sympathizer, reinforcing May-ling’s articulate recognition of the political implications of women’s subordinate status. At other times, there are revelations of Madame’s hardness and cruelty: asked how China would respond to a difficult union leader, Madame remained silent and simply slid her hand across her throat. Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, whose political speeches charmed billions of dollars in U.S. loans to China; whose translating work for her husband helped to delay world recognition of some of his personal and political shortcomings; whose sex appeal was the subject of some amusingly purple journalism (“her teeth are visual symphonies of oral architecture.” Wow. Just wow.); who worked to improve conditions in hospitals and orphanages but spent thousands of dollars on furs and shoes and wore diamonds the size of buttons; who lived to be 105 and whose life spanned the entire twentieth century was a fascinating woman whose story could well fill several books. Pakula’s The Last Empress makes for a sometimes juicy, sometimes frustrating, but always eventful read.

Written by: kristina grob, February 8th 2010

Chosen By Desire (The Guardians of Destiny)

admin — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Kate Perry

Forever

Kate Perry is a pretty kickass chick. Her childhood dream was to be a ninja, and she's now a seventh degree Kung Fu blackbelt. The serious study required in kung fu appears to have colored her novel, giving the 'paranormal' elements of this paranormal romance a more grounded feel than most Asian-inspired material written by Westerners.

Second in The Guardians of Destiny series, Chosen By Desire continues the modern legend of the Scrolls of Destiny, ancient writings that impart elemental powers on those who study them. Our heroine, Carrie, is a doctoral candidate looking for something to spice up her dissertation. On a tip, she travels to a Chinese monastery where her snooping uncovers exactly what she's looking for. Frantic not to get caught, she stuffs the scrolls in her bag to study later. To ease her conscience, she promises herself she will return them as soon as her paper is approved, and she's won a coveted position at her university.

But the legend is true and the current Guardians are onto her. Max, an American tapped to hold the power of Metal, follows her to California. Convinced that she is working with his rival to damage him, he invites Carrie into his home to translate the texts in his collection, giving him a chance to study her and learn her plans.

The book starts out well. Perry is good with scenes of action and tension (including sexual), but when times are good and everyone's relaxed she tends to lean on cliché. Max is the alpha male who is unable to trust, but I don't see why Carrie calls him arrogant, except that that's a stock description for that archetype. Due to the Power of Lourve, he makes an awfully fast switch from suspicion to loyalty. Then there is my least favorite Conflict Trope: everything could be resolved if people just talked to each other. Given, Perry does a much better job establishing why these people are close-lipped, but Carrie holds on to crucial information for way too long, even after she and Max are all but together.

Though I enjoyed the book for what it was (read: escapist fiction), I find myself dwelling more on its problems than its strengths. Carrie is a confused character. She has to be a Middle American Good Girl. Believably flawed, a serious doctoral candidate worthy of a professorship, and a sassy slang-slinging modern heroine all at once. Ultimately, she doesn't solve the mystery, save herself or anyone else's life, and she definitely doesn't find personal power (paranormal or otherwise). Things are just a little too easy for Carrie, sliding in and out of trouble without any lasting damage or lessons.

This is a shame, because Perry is not a terrible writer. I think she got caught up in what this sort of book is "supposed" to be like. She cut off her natural ability to render her characters as dynamic, interesting people. Writing romances is much more challenging than people think. I'm not going to give up on Perry, but I hope she gives herself the freedom to go a little wild and throw the formulas out.

Written by: Richenda Gould, January 14th 2010

China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing’s Expansion in Africa

admin — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 23:17:00 +0000

By Serge Michel, Michel Beuret

Nation Books

In China Safari: On the Trail of Beijing's Expansion in Africa, Serge Michel and Michel Beuret invest a lot of time and energy in examining China’s presence in African countries. They travel to various places to interview different people in order to find out what affects Chinese business has across the continent. China is quickly colonizing African counties with a speed that must make Western colonizers like America, England, and France (to name a few) burn with envy.

The environment doesn’t matter, the people don’t matter, and future generations certainly don’t either. What is important is the almighty dollar—er, yuan. Nobody and nothing is indispensable. Even the average Chinese laborer who travels from the mainland to work the fields, factory, pipelines, and mines is expendable. He makes more money in the Congo than he ever could in China, and as an added bonus, if he dies in a work-related accident, it will net his family back home a few extra yuan—so his death isn’t seen as a complete waste, but an honorable sacrifice.

It isn’t just the natural resources that China is trying to take as it competes with Western countries for contracts. African governments favour doing business with China and give construction contracts to Chinese companies. In return, all these nations have to do is hand over a bit of oil, which then increases the need for construction of more pipe lines. (More contracts for China!), or other enviable resources—like Niger's uranium. China may give out loans to build dams and highways, but the money comes with a cost: Chinese labor is preferred instead providing jobs for local people, the construction quality is poor, and there are no unions to protect the workers.

Also, Chinese businesses have made, and continue to make, a lot of money off of selling their cheap manufactured goods to African consumers. Whatever the consumer needs, from Islamic prayer mats to plastic souvenirs sold by the Nile River to rifles and handguns for regional warring, China makes all of the items at a cheaper cost than its competitors.

The information China Safari offers about the Chinese exploitation of African (and Chinese) workers is a hefty wake up call for those in the pursuit of global fair trade and environmental and human rights. The bleak reality of industrial “progress” in places across the African continent are well-documented in this book__. The authors leave no stone unturned. The amount of research they did for this book is staggering, and I was shocked to read just how deeply China has sunk its claws into the world's poorest continent.

Written by: Nicolette Westfall, October 13th 2009

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China

admin — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 16:57:00 +0000

By Lijia Zhang

Anchor Books

"Socialism Is Great!": A Worker's Memoir of the New China is an account by journalist Lijia Zhang, who came of age in China during the ‘80s. Documenting her life from ages sixteen to twenty-six, Socialism Is Great! follows a revolutionary spirit through the dreary politics of factory work, her insatiable pursuits for education, and last but not least, a dramatic and taboo love life. This page-turner has a great storyline involving the democracy movement leading up to contemporary China.

Zhang’s memoir has an incredible sense of place, and without any background in Chinese history or culture, I found myself easily absorbed into the world she creates. In one respect, the dehumanizing environments and relationships she navigates hardly seem foreign. Yet she simultaneously portrays communism as a distinctly oppressive system exercising extreme control over her everyday life. Ultimately, Zhang succeeds in writing a sharp critique of communism China without catering to a capitalist readership.

The plot starts unfolding when the precocious teenager is pulled out of school by her mother and put to work in a government factory. From her family’s perspective, this is the opportunity of a lifetime, as the government has given workers a limited window of time to retire and offer relatives their enviable position. To Zhang, who excels in school and has her hopes set on becoming a journalist, it is devastating. While she has no choice but to accept the job, she does anything but resign herself to her situation. In fact, Zhang goes on to eventually lead the largest demonstration by workers in Nanjing, China during the entire democracy movement.

"Socialism Is Great!"'s strength lies in part in its genuine complexity. This is not a perfectly PC memoir: we learn about faulted characters and their relationships to one another in the midst of a dictatorship. What makes the book both gripping and empowering is that Zhang is always stretching herself to move closer towards her aspirations. Each love affair is a unique experience and life lesson, as the obstacles she faces are simply changed routes in the path to her inevitable success. That this autobiographical work is about a suppressed intellectual living through intense political turbulence makes this an important historical perspective in addition to an excellent memoir.

Written by: Kathryn Berg, September 13th 2009

Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:14:00 +0000

By Tiantian Zheng

University Of Minnesota Press

It’s easy to disregard sex workers, to relegate them to the margins of society and pretend that they don’t exist in the perfect little world that is uncomfortable with the idea that there are members of our population who have sex for money. Often considered an untouchable part of society (no matter what culture we’re talking about), sex workers are often overlooked in anthropological or sociological studies with many researchers content to look at the more accepted members of society rather than delve into the seedy underbelly of urban life. Luckily, the sex workers of Dalian, a bustling metropolis in Northern China, had their voices heard by Tiantian Zheng who writes a beautiful study of the realities facing these women.

Red Lights shows that not only are these women a vital part of society, their work is inextricably entwined with China’s rapidly changing economy. The hostesses that Zheng follows are not the stereotypical submissive Asian sex goddesses that are so often a fixture of the porn industry. Nor are they unwilling sexual slaves, sold into a world they don’t understand. Many of the women enter the trade willingly, seeing hostessing as the only way to make enough money to support their families back in the rural villages that they call home. But, this is not a female empowerment story either.

Zheng does an excellent job of showing the reader all sides of the story. The struggle to stay safe in an incredibly unsafe profession. The violence and fear that are often a daily part of life for the hostesses. The conflict between their new lives in the city and their rural pasts and the difficulty of “going home again” when the city has hardened the hostesses view of life and the way the world works. The thrill of making their money versus the shame of a profession that isn’t looked kindly upon by family—even though for some of these families, it’s often the only source of income.

Like so many decisions in life, the decision of these women to become hostesses and to willingly serve men isn’t an easy one and it isn’t easily understood. This book adequately portrays these women as real people. We learn how they feel about their jobs, how they relate to their families and how they survive in the dangerous world of sex work. Unsurprisingly, the real world is quite a bit more complex than the stereotypes let on.

Given the serious nature of the subject, one would expect Red Lights to be a tough read. However, Zheng handles her subjects with a delicate touch, showing readers the hostesses’ pain, as well as their happiness. While the lengthy breakdowns of the Chinese economy and the effect of decades of socialist beliefs on the Chinese citizen may be a little too long and too in-depth for a casual reader, overall I found the book engrossing. The hostesses’ stories scattered throughout added a human element to what could have easily been an overly academic tome. Those interested in the social ramifications of sex work or the effect the post-Socialist economy has on Chinese women should pick up this book.

Written by: Jennifer Lee Johnson, August 31st 2009

24 City

admin — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:25:00 +0000

Directed by Jia Zhangke

Cinema Guild

24 City, a film that expertly mixes documentary footage and fictional reenactments, follows several generations of women living and working in Chengdu City for Xinda Machinery’s Chengfu Group. Factory 420, a not-so-well-kept state secret, has since been turned into residential housing. The film chronicles the lives of several women whose personal and professional lives are inextricably linked to the longstanding behemoth factory cum apartment complex, a throwback to Mao’s communism.

Director Jia Zhangke is perhaps best known stateside for his 2004 film, The World. He is also one of the leaders of Chinese cinema’s Sixth Generation movement, a loosely connected group of independent filmmakers responsible for some of the more innovative works coming from China’s underground and state-sanctioned mainstream.

To add to the striking archive footage in 24 City, the film stars several well-known actresses, including Joan Chen. Best known for her role in TV’s Twin Peaks, Chen also starred in 2007 films Lust, Caution and The Sun Also Rises. Zhao Tao, Zhangke’s longtime muse and frequent star of his films, also has a leading role.

As beautiful as 24 City is, it overwhelming appeals to film buffs and cinema theorists. It’s also helpful to have working knowledge of Chinese history and communist labor. The necessity of knowing so much back story left me and my viewing partner a bit confused at times, as though we’d missed an introductory interview or establishing footage. The film was nominated for the 2008 Palme d'Or at Cannes, and knowing this going in, I hesitated to find fault. Yet 24 City moves slowly and sometimes lacks audio precision. It is a truly gorgeous film, expertly framed, but no one should expect an action-packed adventure from the docu-narrative piece.

More than mainstream appeal, or relying on special effects, the film offers a meditation on dystopian modern life in post-Mao China. After 4,000 workers were laid off from the factory, many tried to make ends meet with odd jobs. One seamstress profiled explains that more than income, she believes, “If you have something to do, you age more slowly.” One unemployed worker illegally sold flowers on the street. Another tells of gathering old work gloves from the factory, only to unravel them and send the thread to her sister so new clothing could be made from the remnants.

An important, visually stimulating film, 24 City tells a meditative, multi-layered story about work, personal space, home, and gender across generations. Its uneven pace likely won’t charm mainstream movie lovers, but it’s worth a viewing for cinema geeks.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, August 18th 2009