London Anecdotes

Jack the Ripper: I never heard about this famous serial killer. So I was surprised to find a group of earnest tourists at Aldgate station on this rainy November night. Diego brought his cameracoder to shoot some footage for his project, and raindrops, piles of fallen leaves, dark shadows from lampposts, narrow alleys and archways, all fit well to create a horror film atmosphere for the video he was working on. For the outsiders London has always been shrouded with images of intense fog, gory murders and dark mysteries, thanks to Doctor Watson and Dickenson. Jack the Ripper story has all the required ingredients to stigmatize such collective memory of London: Prostitution, disembowelment, royal scandals, and cripples. No wonder it has become quite a selling point. On the following days, I noticed more ads outside various underground stations selling these tours. The ripper certainly achieved immortality and would continue to generate cash way beyond this millennium.
AA: The Architectural Association is located at SoHo, just a block away for G-A-Y, the night club I frequented a few years ago. They take a few nondescript buildings that are connected with each other and with a whole row of others. Who would tell that this school produced some of the biggest names in the current architecture scene? On the night I stopped by, a whole group of UPenn students were partying side by side with their London peels, and fireworks broke out due to celebration for some obscure British holiday. The flames and sparkles were reflected through all these young ambitious and joyful faces around me, and I wondered how many of them would really nake it in this intensely competative field…not surprisingly I made friends with Asian students and spent most of the time talking to them. One of Chinese guys turned out to be from Taiway and is working on the opera house project back in my home city. Guess who designed it? Zala Hadid!

Stonehenge: I was ambitious enough to tour both StoneHenge and Bath in one day, and still managed to get back to London early enough for Greg’s dinner. The image of Stonehenge has been so overly used that I did not exactly know what to expect. But as the bus took a turn, I could already see that group of famous rocks from afar. They looked magnificent from the distance and under a broad sky. As sunlight shone through between the darting clouds, it projected long shadows on the gently-rolling green hills and created an awesome view. No wonder ancestors chose this site for their rituals. There is something mystical and spritual around.

Bath: I once met a fellow traveler who told me Bath was one of his favorite cities in England, but I did not get there until 4 o’clock, when the evening was already quickly falling. With just a few visitors, the ancient Roman bath ruins actually looked grander and more mysterious in that dimming light, as if each brick, each drop of hot spring water tells a story that has been forever lost. After the tour I walked aimlessly in the town, crossing the river and the circus and the Crecsent and walking through thick piles of fallen leaves. I could see lights flickering on the surrounding hills and the after-work crowd drinking in groups or by themselves in the bars. I felt a little lonely at those moments.

Night Buses: London is so expensive that I decided there was no way I would be able to afford taxi. And here we are, standing in the cold and waiting for the night bus after the night outings. Buses towards East London are notoriously crowded after bars are closed, but the atmosphere could be youthful and festive and you won’t mind rubbing with strangers. You are young and you party late and you live at the cheap ethnic neighborhoods populated by college students and foreigners. What else can be better than that? On the last night when we got back from Canary island, we had to take a night bus that took us all the way from Victoria Station to the East, passing through more upscale neighborhoods as well as SoHo and East. Sitting at the top deck and with a full front view, I saw rich ladies getting out of marbled mansions and into Bentleys, and I also saw homeless, drunkards, and street vendors just a few blocks away.

Peace Corps, and a Chinese in Africa

American literature has one unique genre of writing that has not quite been labeled. For decades young graduates from liberal arts majors have been going aboard right after school, teaching or working in oversea programs such as Peace Corp and JAP, and many of them come back with rich experiences and in-depth knowledge of these far-flung countries most of people may have never heard of. Many of them, driven by deep empathy of humanity and literature ambition, start to compose both fiction and nonfiction, portraying characters in exotic settings, providing American readers slices of life that are alien and unfamiliar, helping bridge the understanding of each other. Of course, there are often Americans in the plots: aid workers, Peace Corp members, and ex-pats who are simply lost. They are used to study how Americans look at the world and how world look at them. For reference check website: http://www.peacecorpswriters.org/

I came across a few writers who turned their Chinese experiences into books, and among them, the most famous ones are Vikram Seth (From Heaven Lake: Travels Through SinKiang and Tibet), Mark Salzman (Iron and Silk), and Peter Hessler (River Town). The first two went on and became major writers of our time and stretched their literary careers way beyond travelogues. Mr. Hessler, the youngest and the latest, become a New Yorker correspondent and still focuses his reportage on China, although the day is not far for him to move on and write about something else.

But I am still surprised when I found Tony D’Souza’s short story called Club Des Amis in the recent New Yorker. Set in Ivory Coast, it centers on a Chinese man from Shanghai who shares the same last name as mine. The story is heart-wrenching. The main character, whose name is Wu, came to Seguela in the 1990s to make a fortune and eventually brought over his wife and his teenage son. His teenage son ran away with a African girl and died of tropical disease in a local village, leaving the girl a half-Chinese half-black infant. Devastated by this tragedy, Wu’s wife left him and went back to Shanghai. Wu stayed and tried to take the custody of his grandson so that he would not grow up in war and in poverty. But the mother was determined to keep her own son, hiding and running away from the police commissioned and bribed by Wu. Using force, Wu eventually took his grandson away from the mother and brought him back to China.

I traveled extensively and often found Chinese restaurants in the most unexpected places. I wondered how hard and how lonely it must be to be the single Chinese family surrounded by a culture so different from their own. Deprived of opportunities in an overcrowded country, Chinese always looked out and traveled far to survive, and since China opened its door in late 70s, Chinese diaspora has seen waves and waves of immmigration to so many different countries. When cultures clash and integrate, interesting stories are bound to happen in unprecedented circumstances. Unfortunately I have not found any Chinese writers who would dig this goldmine of materials. Maybe they are too busy struggling in their adopted lands? Souza’s new story, however, captured such an unusual situation from the perspective of an aid worker, but it was framed in a larger context of globalization and political turmoil. Wu in the end was ultimately destroyed by Africa, but a new life, together with hopes, was also born out of the ruined lives.


Souza lived in Ivory Coast between 2000 and 2002, and without that experience, who would conjure up such a plot? You have to live first before you can write, and more aspiring young writers will probably take the same path to go to more remote places. After all, life is stranger than fiction, and I only wonder whether there is actually a good ending in the reality version of this story of Wu.

Sykes Hot Spring

Rob told me long time ago there was a hot spring in Big Sur and you got to hike 10 miles up and down to get to it. At Lost Coast, both Dawn and he started to rave on it again on the trail and Diego took his note and decided to plan a birthday trip for me. He knows how much I love backpacking, and surely enough, he got more excited than I was before we took off on a weekend in late August.

Our series of accidents started on the very first night. At the campground Pfeiffer, we realized the tent was not ours and the poles did not seem to match. We thought our friend Mani could have mixed things up since he borrowed it a few weeks ago. But luckily Diego figured out how to set them up before we turned back to Carmel. Anyway, the campground seemed so civilized and well-equipped that we could not wait to get out. Once we hit the road the next morning, as the trail took the first steep climb and started to extend further into the woods, we quickly felt that we were finally in the wildness.

But the trail turned out to be a long and disappointing one. It went up and down with mostly gentle slopes for seven miles before a small branch led to our camp site. The view was not as spectacular as what I expected, and bugs tended to follow whenever we made a stop. But Terrace campsite was quite a good choice. It was nicely shaded next to a beautiful stream and the water was just warm enough for us to take a few skinny dips.

We set up our tent and went on to the Sykes. Thanks to lack of information, we could not figure out the exact location of the hot springs even after we got to the campsite. Diego suggested we climb further up but after half an hour so we seemed to get further and further away from the waters. We turned back and started to explore the downstream. As soon as we started to see the trail marks (piles of stones), we decided we must be heading to the right direction. After a few more turns and climbs up the cliffs above the stream, we finally saw a pool under a rock beside which some rubber pipes were gushing out hot water. It was a tiny pool, and it could barely fit two of us. That was it?

But it all seemed to worth the efforts after we relaxed in the pools and took turns to cool down in the creek. There was a second and slightly larger pool above the rock but we were so thankful that we got this one instead. For an hour it was just two of us, and the sound of woods and water was soothing and mesmerizing. We did not leave until it was getting late and more people started to show up and want to use the pool.

We slept soundly and went down the next day. This time Diego got his ankle all damaged and had a really hard time walking downhill. But it still took only 4 hours to get out. After all, this was not such a hard backpacking trip, and I am eagerly waiting for the season to start again next year!

Three Road Films

I have a preference for road films. My wanderlust can’t be satisfied by this busy work schedule, and films are the best places for me to escape to, if and only if just for those short two hours. I came across three wonderful but obscure road films this summer. It is a shame that they got so little media coverage, even if all of them were directed by renowned directors.

In July is Fatih Akin’s second feature after the success of his debut Kurz und Schemerzlos. He took a break and made this light-hearted romantic comedy before he went on to direct Head On, which won the Berlin Golden bear and was much darker and intense. The story follows a Hamburg teacher (handsome Moritz Bleibtreu) who falls in love with a Turkish beauty and decides to travel to Turkey by all kinds of transportation means, all in company of another girl Juli who tries to win his heart back. It is a well-worn genre with plenty of witty and humorous moments. It shows If you follow your heart, there will be great adventures waiting for you (beware of sexy East European temptress, corrupted customer officer, car theft etc etc).

Michael Winterbottom always has a political edge. After 24 hour Party people he took the project on smuggling of illegal immigrants. He and his production team chose two refugees from an Afghanistan camp in Pakistan and followed them through Iran, Turkey, Italy, France and finally to UK, often improvising the stories on the road. The end film is called "In This World". The central character, a charming and street-smart teenage kid named Jarmal, was a natural actor who brought the film to life. It was mostly shot by handheld camera, with plenty of jerky movements and occasional grainy shot, and it let us witness the entire smuggling itinerary, from bleak deserts to snow-capped mountains to containers and tunnels, from one language to another, from middle-east to west. The movies call on our sympathy of the illegal immigrants, of the great dangers they endured to look for a better life, and on thinking of the root causes of these human tragedies.

I cried a bucket load when I saw Humberto Solas’ Miel Para Oshun (Honey for Oshun). It was an equally sentimental journey for me since many of the scenes and plots reminded me of my own trip in Cuba. Solas created a melodrama in a documentary style, following an embittered Cuban exile returning to his island and looking for his own mother. Wounded and scarred in life, all these characters slowly discovered their common bond and shared identity in this incredible journey. I never heard about Solas before, but he has been a pivotal figure in the Latin cinema who experimented relentlessly over 50 years. In line with all other Latin American intellectuals, his works explored the Latin American identity and social justices with potent political messages. Honey for Oshun delivered such an emotional but optimistic redemption to the victims of history. It is a tear jerker, but it also makes us think.

Raise the Red Lantern (Ballet), Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou is omnipresent these days. Other than making movies, TV commercials, he moves from opera (Turando in Forbidden city) to Olympic opening ceremony, and to ballet (Raise the red Lantern). Lately he has been busy staging a series of spectaculars using real locales in GuiLing, Lijiang, and West Lake, combining stage design, music and dancing in the backdrop of famous landscapes. His next project is opera again, in collaboration with Domingo and Tan Dun and under a comission from New York's Metropolitan Opera. Zhang’s talent certainly hit a jackpot with the audiences. His usage of colors and patterns is overwhelming, beautiful and crowd-pleasing. He borrows freely from many classic elements of Chinese aesthetics and fused a unique style that is easy to bank on. The critics of Zhang have been attacking him for lacking of substances, accusing him of running out of ideas. But Zhang soldiers on, and no one could predict what he would do next, although it is surely not anything too surprising.

The Chinese National Ballet is touring US with “Raise the Red Lantern” at this very moment and I got a chance to watch its Berkeley show with my friend Andrew. The only other ballet I ever watched from the same company was “Don Quixote”, back in 1997 when I was in Guangzhou. Chinese ballet inherited the entire Russian training system and produced a number of award-winning principal dancers. But while it could succeed in techniques, it often failed to deliver . After all, ballet is a very Western art form, and all these ballet classics are stories set in old Europe and how could you expect these Chinese dancers to truly interpret these foreign characters using body movements? There have been many attempts to choreograph ballet with contemporary Chinese themes. The most famous example is probably “The Red Women Bridget”, produced in the heyday of Culture Revolution by Mrs. Mao. Since ballet is a rather confined and rigorous form, I was curious how this one would work out, and how on earth Zhang Yimou could direct a ballet.

The film version of “Red the Red Lantern” is probably Zhang’s best film in his career. Based on SuTong’s original novel, it unfolded a complex social-political drama with clarity and elegance. The ballet, however, departed from the original plot significantly. It eliminated all the side characters, tightened up the story line and made the whole thing a classic melodrama that is emotionally charged but psychologically simplified. Rape, rebel, adultery, punishment, redemption and execution, each plot twist has a clear climax that can be danced. Here Zhang is at his best in creating visuals and tension-filled atmosphere using his usual tricks. Two most famous scenes, the raping scene and the death scene, stand out not because of the choreography but because of the stage effects such as shadow play and fluttering of fabrics and fake snows, which are clearly Zhang’s creation. The opera scenes and the colorful sleeve dance resemble what he did for Athen’s closing ceremony. 

But the choreographers (Wang Xinpeng and Wang Yuanyuan) apparently wanted to innovate on their own. They fused Chinese wushu and other traditional elements into the ballet’s form. The mahjong piece, danced by a group around mahjong tables, broke further away from the classic ballet and ventured into modern dance. The purists may get offended by all these fluffy stuff and wanted something more traditional, but for audiences who do not necessarily need to hold on to the old concept of ballet or appreciate it from old point of view, the performance is surely a powerful and dazzling experience, and for the national ballet company who is so eager to showcase a new Chinese art that is both contemporary and ancient, “Raise the Red Lantern” could not be a better choice to tour US. Whether it can stand the test of time and become a classic, only time can answer.

ShangHai Dreams: Wang Xiao Shuai

Wang XiaoShui has always been hailed as one of the leading directors from so-called Sixth Generation of Mainland Chinese directors. You can at least find three of his films from Netflix (Frozen, So Close to Paradise, Beijing Bicyles), which is a hard evidence of his ascendance in the art-house arena. Characters in all his films don’t end up well. They either go insane, or commit suicide, or get violently beat up, all due to high external pressures and their inability to control their fates. It is easy to see why all his earlier films get banned in China. These external forces eventually all point to the system’s flaws, and to the social injustices and inequalities. His protagonists struggled hard but in the end still could not escape their tragic ends. These stories inevitably made him infamously underground as well as a favorite of all the film festivals.

Shanghai Dreams, Wang’s first film that ever passed the strict censorship in China, was released in Mainland this summer and got abundant media attention after it won an award in Cannes. This year saw a few major art films being heavily promoted by China’s media: Peacock (form Gu ChangWei), The World (from Jia Changke), and Something Like Happiness (from ZhangYang). Shanghai Dreams joined this rank although box-office-wise it fell short of expectation but still did way better than other art films. Film critics indulged in collectively nostalgia, focusing on the autobiographical side of the story and choosing to ignore the political message due to their own self-censorships. Shanghai Dreams is nevertheless a very depressing film that raised poignant questions on the leadership of not-so-distant past. The very fact that this film actually passed the censorship indicated a loosen grip by Chinese government. One of the few daring details in the film included the father sneakily listening to the Voice of America (the film never mentioned the name of the radio station but anyone from those years can easily recognize that), This plot would be unthinkable just a year ago. Wang obviously did not budge.

The Loner in the Sky: Wang Jia Xin

In this information overloaded times, poetry, as one of the most ancient and prestigious literary forms, continues to become more marginal and irrelevant. China, where every child starts with his early education by reciting famous poems from Tang dynasties, where poetry writing was once considered the essential part of being a scholar, is no exception in this crisis. Compared to the west, Chinese poetry did enjoy a few more recent golden years in early and mid eighties. But after the student protests in TianAn Men the entire poetry community suffered and never ever recovered. The very economic and internet booms not only did not help but further diverted more readers to other mediums. While the Chinese avant-garde visual art blossomed in the nineties and attracted more and more international interest, the few well-known poets from the eighties either went exile, or went mad, or killed themselves.

Wang Jia Xing was not the biggest name from that talented pool of poets sprung from those eventful years. He first came to my attention when I read his London poems and felt very moved by them, due to our shared experiences of drifting oversea and missing home. Last year, I finally got a copy of his colleted poems which was published in 2001 as one of the Blue Star Series. After I flipped through the book and reread some of my favorite poems, his whole life and his entire artistic trajectory started to take shape in my mind. Wang’s writing career covered two important decades after the Cultural Revolution. His works are the best testimonials of the opportunities and the predicaments Chinese poets faced in this dynamic time period, and his own life, reflected through his works, is very typical of his generation.

Wang JiaXing entered the poetry scene as a late member of the misty group when it already started to disband. He did not become famous until he published a set of poems titled under “Chinese Paintings”. The series has been used as a representative piece for the “root-finding” movement started from late 1984. All of sudden everyone went back to ancient Chinese myths and philosophy to look for inspiration and spirituality, and Wang seemed to be particularly enlightened by the minimalist and naturalistic philosophy of Zhuangzi and Tao. Here is one stanza from “Blankness”:

You painted the mountains, 
Painted the clouds
But you stopped your brush
At this blank spot
Were you afraid of something
Or this is a puzzle within puzzle
A dream that was dreamed
So you sidestepped
And made the pine tree extending its arms 
From the rock
Towards this emptiness……

Wang in this period demonstrated a very genuine and positive attitude towards every thing he was experiencing. He dreamed an ideal pastoral life in which he could both withdraw from the world yet remain an active participant. These two conflicting and polarized urges are common among Chinese poets. Since ancient times, scholars always wanted to play the role of a public intellectual. When they spoke they wanted the world to listen. But in the meantime they longed to become a hermit. Wang is no exception. On one hand he idolized the reclusive Beat poet Gary Snider, on the other hand, he looked up to Russian public poets such as Pasternek and Mayakovski.

1989 was a year of political turbulence, and it also turned out to be a critical year that put a final end to the prospering and noisy post-culture-revolution poetry scene. Almost over night, Wang changed his style. Gone with that child-like joy and calmness, instead his poems became increasingly dark and emotionally charged and showcased a tortured romanticist in all his nakedness. The same image of snow, which used to be a symbol of wonder, repeatedly appeared in his new poems as an image of repression, clinical pain and shattered hopes.

Pasternak
It is you who has found me, put me through trials
Through countless catastrophes
And inject pain into my bloodstream
Against the snowy sky I am reading your poems
On the roaring bus in Beijing
I am crying out those noble names
Those exiles, sacrifices, testimonies, those,
Trembling souls gathering for the final Mass

Poets are often the most vulnerable under the authoritarian government, and the whole Chinese poetry suffered collectively after the student protests of 1989 ended in bloody massacre. Following the suicide of Haizi, Luo Yihe died of a sudden stroke when he was barely 28. Other prominent poets went to exiles: OuYang JiangHe and Ju YongMing went to New York, BeiDao ended up in California, and Gu Cheng drifted around in Australia and eventually settled in an isolated island outside New Zealand. Wang joined the migrating flocks and went to England. The change of environment, and the close distance to observe the Western world from an underprivileged position, seemed to have affected Wang profoundly. The intellectual freedom came with homesickness, loneliness, marginalization and prejudice, and the suffering was no less inflicting than the oppression back home. Melancholy and solitude were prevalent in the poems of this period, echoing the gloomy weather and grey skies of London. While images of the British landscapes and references to Magarite, Picasso, Auden and Yeats made their presence in his works, Wang also missed China intensely: 

Now you can recognize
That china man who is walking through the West End:
Through rose garden and Lady Chatterley’s white villa
You speculate on the discreet charm of the bourgeois
In the midst of the chopping sounds from the basement kitchen
You think of Marx and his On Capital
The family letters arrived frequently
Passing false news
You don’t remember who you are
Until you wake up in the heavy sweat
You have seen everything
A China man, a loner in the sky
Still wanders in the West End…..
On your own departure you don’t need to say goodbye
But you have to go to the art museum 
Tucked under the heavy fog
You finally understand that one man’s pain
Can brighten up the entire hall
And your own future…

Wang wrote these lines two years after he left London. He saw his lonesome self drifting rootlessly in a country that was not his own, and this unease finally made him come back to Beijing. Wang never ceased to look for connections and the reconciliation with his surroundings, but his refusal to copromise destined him to be the loner in this rapidly commercialized world. Not surprisingly, Wang also failed in his personal life while his marriage disintegrated shortly after he came back to China and his only son was taken away from him. Relationship dramas could be particularly powerful for poets. Some were ultimately destroyed (such as Gu Cheng, who killed his own wife and himself), and some gave up poetry completely. In the end of 1997, Wang got a writing grant from Germany and spent two coldest months in a Stuttgart castle. It was two prolific months. The isolation finally made it possible for him to sit down and focus on writing, and it was only through writing that he could vent out the pain, the anger and the sadness. The following stanza is from a long poem titled “Replies”, which could be read a letter addressed to Wang’s divorced wife:

For a long time I have been accompanied 
By these nonexistent women
Now I understand: 
These fake angels
Have destructed my life, poisoned my heart
But could never be the protagonist of this book
My only lead, is destined to come from a small alley
In Beijing. 
What we have known since our childhood
Made what is the present, and the shared pain we were never aware of
Made us come together:
From the very beginning
We compromised neither to life, nor to each other
It made us alike yet so different
It brought us the dark night which we still have not walked through
It writes on us, loves us, threatens us 
-----It is violent, but we are as loyal as a dog.

Life would never be easy for a poet. The muse brings in both wine and poison. In late nineties Wang moved to ChangPing, a small town close to Beijing. Here he built his own house with a yard and seemed to become increasingly reclusive, just to live up to his earlier admiration for Gary Snider. But his withdrawal was more motivated by a disillusion with the real world rather than an urge to calm his own ego down, and he could not stop writing even if he knew fully well how useless this is: 

As if in a dream, in this long but beautiful summer evening 
When I look up to the sky
Another plane is flying by 
But I already know,
The miracle will no longer come
I am no longer holding flowers 
And waiting at the airport
My heart has been hardened to a stone
In the evening of silence, with scissors in my hands
I am repeating the ancient and useless craftsmanship
Until the night falls

But are all that all totally useless? I hope Wang would feel a little comfort if he knows that someone in San Francisco have reread his poetry collection again and again and spent hours typing this blog piece.

48th San Francisco International Film Festival Part 2

Although mainland director Tian Zhuang Zhuang is most famous for Blue Kite, one of the best films ever made in China that summed up the tragic years of political movements under communism, he first gained international recognition in late eighties for two earlier films, “On the Hunting Ground” and “Horse Thief”. Tian seems to have deep interest in China’s ethnic groups and the ways they survived in some of the harshest environments on this earth, and these two films used Mongolia and Tibet as the backgrounds where he applied many wide angle shots and slow pacing to bring out the bleak landscape and its human stories. It came as no surprise when he decided to make a documentary (Delamu) about the Tea Horse Trail, the highest caravan route that cuts through the edge of Tibetan plateau and down to the north India. Regardless of the spectacular scenes of snow peaks and rivers that run deep down in the gorges, the film really focused on the human stories that Tian uncovered along the road. Here he offered an ensemble of local characters of various ages and religions, which included a 104-year-old woman who recalled how she outlived two husbands and all the hardships, an aged pastor telling stories of missionaries and his own imprisonment, a Tibetan young man who shared a wife with his brother, and many more. In the end we realized that these people who seemed to be living so remotely also have to deal with the same problems as we do, struggling through love and loss and pain. And the larger history, such as the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, the religious cleansing after the republic, the Dalai Lama’s escape to India, and China’s rapid modernization, did not spare these common people either and is still constantly changing their lives.

Interesting enough, another film legend, Wener Herzog who was once one of the representatives for German New cinema, also made a new documentary (White Diamond) on an equally remote area, the Amazon jungle in Guyana. Herzog apparently also has some attachment to jungles. Aguirre, the wrath of the God, the film that brought him to the world fame, was shot entirely in jungles. But once again, even with all those breath-taking shots of canopy, waterfall, reptiles and flying swifts, the new film is really about humankind, about how human dreams and conquers the nature but nature forever holds its mystery. Herzog is drawn to human stories much as a scientist drawn to unsolved puzzles. He shows them in a specific setting and studies them as an anthropologist. In this film he followed a British aeronautic scientist named Dr. Dorrington who built small airship to fly through the jungles. Funny, self-deprecating, idealistic, sentimental, mistake-prone, Dr. Dorrinton by default became the perfect central character much of the film is based on.

There has been a lot of hype for Jia ZhangKe’s new film The World. It was hailed as the first “above-ground” film that was made by him through official channel in China after he already made three other underground films, all of which were critically-acclaimed festival favorites and firmly positioned him as one of the youngest film masters. But the film opened to box office disappointment in China. I personally think this is his best film. Using a world miniature theme park as the setting, the film slowly unfolds the story of two main characters, both of whom came to Beijing to look for opportunities from a provincial town. The fantasy and falsehood of the locale contrasts absurdly with the real struggles these small people face. Jia avoids quick sentimentality and tells the story with restrains only until the very end. His meticulous attention to details made these characters so real. Jia’s favorite actress Zhao Tao deserved an acting award for he excellent performance too!

I chose the Moroccan film “In Casablanca Angels don’t Fly” partly due to my own fond memory of Marrakech. How often do we ever see a Moroccan film anyway? It also tells the plights of migrant workers, and in this case, they are the Berbers who left their native villages to make money in Casablanca. The film followed three waiters who all worked in the same restaurant, although the three stories don’t quite fit together. One subplot that really stands out is a tear-jerker, but a good one. I only wished that the director could have focused on this single thread and elaborate more on the few characters, but in the end we only got a glimpse of them.

48th San Francisco Film Festival Part 1

It was exactly ten years since I first attended the San Francisco International Film Festival. Thanks to an old school acquaintance at the time, not only did I get a chance to chat with Jiang Wen on the back of my friend’s car (he was showing his directorial debut “In the Days of Sun”), I also happened to crush Joan Chen’s dinner party in her beautiful Pacific Heights house. I no longer remember any details of these encounters other than the arrogance of both celebrities. I could not blame them anyway. What would possibly make them curious about me?! I was then a Stanford geek who goofed away a lot of time in front of my VCR watching tapes after tapes of foreign films (checked out from our media library). I thought I would be able to talk about films with them, but little did I know what a stupid brat I was.

Since then I have been a loyal patron of this festival, devoting some of best sunny days in Kabuki within those two weeks. On weekends I could watch three in a day. Voyeuristic by nature, I enjoy escaping into these alien cultures and faraway landscapes. But I also tended to select films from directors I had heard about, or films that were in competition in Cannes or Berlin film festival, just to reduce the “miss” rate in these hit-and-miss gambles. Over the years, the ticket price also crept up, outpacing the inflation rate, but the number of films I watched did not decrease accordingly. As a film buff/snob, film festival is a ritual I need to hold on to.

By accident or by trend, my favorite three films from this festival are all from female directors. Clair Dennis, who always surprises audience with her unconventional styles, pulled another interesting film (The Intruder) together by constructing suspense, fragmentary scenes, and conflicting story lines. It leapt from French mountains to Pusan and ended up in Tahiti, following an old man with secret identities who went through some heart surgery and had some issue with his son (first we thought we saw the son, but in the later part he was looking for the son who was left in Tahiti). Clair seemed to have cut and paste the plot and deliberately made it inconsistent and baffling, but this freedom at will opens up all kinds of possibilities to create very atmospheric and spectacular scenes, with mysteries lurking behind. Like David Lynch’s “Moholland Drive”, the film can be interpreted in many ways, while the real theme remains elusive, or Claire may never have a clear one except for a set of ideas and moods and visual impressions. The film was not made to entertain. It aims to take you through a meandering global journey, through gorgeous landscapes, through tropical storms and winter blizzard, through uncommon events, through solitude and memory and pain and loss, through what is called life.

I watched Argentinean director Lurecia Martel’s first film “La Cienaga” in Castro Theatre a couple of years ago and still remember the opening scene vividly. She has the uncanny ability to frame the most ordinary scenes with full tension and suspense, and her characters tread through daily life as if they could step on landmines anytime. Once again she pulled the same tricks in her latest film “The Holy Girl”, and instead of using a rundown swimming pool, she put the characters in a hotel and around a thermal pool, where sounds echo and dilapidated interior harbors forbidden desires and wakening sexuality of girlhood. Lots of close-up shots and unsymmetrical camera angles are used effectively to observe all the nuances of the psychological changes. But the new film can’t measure up to her last one. The directing is flawless, but the story is narrowly-focused and too intimate study of the girlhood struggles. It lacks the broader appeal of her previous film, which gives more context and sense of places and time. 

Ever since Central Station and City of God came out, Brazil immediately brings to mind images of Samba and gangster fight and poverty of children to people’s mind. The new filmAlmost Brothers from another female director Luica Muratplays into these clichés but it is nevertheless another impressive endeavor to tap into the same fertile story ground of racial polarization, violence and political repressions. Film makers in Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world, feel obligated to portrait a society in chaos, either to fight injustice or to reveal the root of their alarming social problems. Murat herself has spent time in prison during the 70s and this film, although spanning through 50 years, really centered on the prison period. The two protagonists, one white and one black, grew up together from two different backgrounds and reunited briefly in the prison but eventually drifted apart. One would wonder how a female director can make a film about male prison, where machismo is on its ultimate extreme. But Murat proved that she could just do this job as well, with a toughness and cool-headedness that can rival a man.

Morning Sun

Cultural Revolution is probably one of the most misunderstood periods of Modern Chinese history that has been greatly simplified in Western eyes when it was frequently used as proof of brutality and failure of communism. Thanks to a handful films that made into the international scene (To name a few, Farewell My Concubine, Red Violin, Blue Kite and Xiu-Xiu), popular images of Cultural Revolution are often about red guards smashing cultural heritages or denouncing and torturing innocent elders. Within China itself although much have been written and said, few dared to break the party lines and give more thorough unbiased studies. As early as mid-eighties, Ba Jing, the most prominent literary figure in China, proposed to build a Culture Revolution museum to commemorate lost lives and lost innocence. Not surprisingly, the government never took it seriously.

Thirty years have passed and Cultural Revolution seems such a distant memory. China is already an entirely different country from what it used to be. Even if little research has been done, do we still need to bring back the old ghosts and all those painful memories when the country is currently rushing through a major capitalistic boom? If history does repeat itself, would something like Cultural Revolution ever happen again in China, or in any other countries? What lessons can we learn from such a large-scale manmade catastrophe? Morning Sun, a new film from Long Bow Group and funded partly by PBS, is an ambitious project aiming to answer some of these questions. In fact there is no better time to embark on a project about Cultural Revolution when enough time have passed so that we can discuss it more objectively and when some main witnesses and participants are still alive.

Carma Hinton, one of the three directors, was born to American parents in 1949 and grew up in Beijing. She left for America in 1971 and at one point studied history in Harvard. As so-called "the new generation born with the republic" and a member of "old three classes" (referring to the high school students graduating from 1965-1968, who made up for the majority of red guards and were sent down to countryside without college education), she witnessed all the twists and turns of the mass movement in the early phases. Her intimate knowledge and wide connection network made the film both informative and thought-provoking. Rare cameo interviews of major historical figures from that period, such as Luo XiaoHai (founder of Red Guards), Song BingBing, Mao’s secretary Li Rui and his daughter, Chairman Liu Shao Qi's widow and daughter, plus other thinkers and writers from that generation, were pieced together by propaganda film clips and documentary footages. Its attempt to dissect this movement from personal angles proved to be very rewarding to audience, giving the film an emotional charge when these characters seemed to have suffered, grieved and grown out with dignities.

I watched the film at Roxie two weeks ago. It made me cringe and cry and laugh. Although born in the end of Cultural Revolution and bearing little memory of its actual events, I am familiar with many of the propaganda film clips, songs and Mao’s quotations. The specific Mao’s paragraph where the film took its title from, was in my second grade textbook, and I probably have seen East is Red a million times. What struck me the most is the feverish passion and self-righteous attitude of the Red Guards. The rebellious spirit of the youth is universal, but it can be both destructive and constructive. Under the manipulation of the higher orders, the selfless dedication to a cause bettering the society could easily be derailed towards something sinister. Yet in the current time of extreme commercialism, we also feel nostalgic of the sanitized society and revolutionary spirits.

Mao was the central character of Cultural Revolution, during which a God-like worshipping of him reached the highest order. The film did not paint Mao as neither evil nor God. By the end of the film he came across as a very complex character, a brilliant political schemer who could ruthlessly destroy his foes while remaining a romanticist and peasant poet in his heart. That also explains why he was never so hated in China, and up to this day, he remains a symbol of good earthly omens. The movie suggested that Mao launched Cultural Revolution to purge people who were against him. But he did not stop there. His essential goal was a single-sighted social re-engineering, mobilizing millions and creating a senseless Utopian vision in this biggest country of the world. It proved to be more devastating and more dangerous than any power struggles.

Peacock: Gu Chang Wei

Growing up at the outskirt of a provincial capital in 70’s China is not such a unique experience among Chinese of my generation. Mao died right before we hit the school age. The ensuing changes, gradual but radical, were confusing at times but were never questioned by us. The old way of life, a very austere existence based on universal poverty and inflated ideology, slowly disappeared, until one day we find ourselves living in modern high-rises and driving Japanese-made cars but somehow nostalgic of such a recent and prudent past that was forever gone.

Peacock, the debut film from renowned cinematographer Gu ChangWei, presented this bygone era with meticulous details and a infectious glumness. However, its somber tone and repressive theme did not stop it from becoming the highest gross art film in China after it won the Silver Bear at the Berlin film festival. Its very success in the domestic market indicated that watching film is not just an escape to a fantasy world. It is also an experience to reflect on where we come from, to be connected with a powerful and collective past, and to identify oneself through the suffering and dilemmas of the others.

Told in three separate segments, Peacock narrated through stories of three siblings. The sister, a dreamer who was never satisfied with her job, struggled and married out to change her situation but only ended up in ultimate disillusion. The older brother, slightly mentally retarded and constantly abused by his peels, accepted everything with stubborn optimism and naiveté. The youngest brother, seemingly shy and absent-minded, became a runway kid but returned year later with a wife and a kid, a missing finger, and a withdrawn attitude towards everything.Both Gu and Li Qiang (who wrote the screen play) repeatedly told the critics that the three characters represented three types of life philosophies: romanticism, pragmatism, and escapism. But the film seems far from being contrived, and the characters were so real that we really fall for them, and eventually see part of ourselves or our own families in each of them. It can be argued that the obstacles these siblings faced in life were specific to late seventies and early eighties when opportunities were scarce and hopes were dim, but on a closer look, their struggles and their tragic fates are much more universal since life itself can be cruel regardless of time and places. And in the end, people do survive, even if their dreams are shattered, their hopes are lost and misfortune does not necessarily spare them.

I could not quite sleep after the film and had to phone my own siblings and parents just to talk about it. The film brings back much of my own memories living through that period, and it also makes me appreciate my own family. There are many understated but touching moments in the film that haunted me. It made me think how much sacrifice parents would give to help their kids, but more than often their efforts only lead to their own frustration and more misery for the children.

Gu rose to international fame after making Red Sorghum in late eighties. He became the leading cameraman for some of the most prestigious film in 90s such as Farewell my Concubine, In the Days of Sun, Devil on the Door Steps, etc. For a while he lived in Hollywood and shot a few bigger-budget films but the commercial studio system eventually drove him back to China so that he could make his own films. Peacock is a very impressive debut that could redefine his place in the Chinese film history when art films are on the verge of extinction due to the box office pressure. Gu used neither special effects nor big stars. He proved that humanistic stories with profound messages can draw audience back to theatres, especially when it is done with observed eyes and a nonjudgemental attitude towards our own common history.