The Whisperers

Gosh it takes a long time to read a book these days and this is a whopper. It based on the kind of archive and access that you would give a leg for (you can see a taste of this at http://www.orlandofiges.com/), and much of what it covers you know - or think you know - in outline. But there are sections that are very hard to read. It tells us that women would sometimes deliberately get pregnant in the camps, despite the awful conditions, simply so as not to be alone - but their children were taken away from them and kept in nurseries as they went back to work, and were terribly vulnerable. There is one story of a girl who died at fourteen months that still haunts me. Sometimes history is there to make us see the things we wouldn't otherwise want to look at too closely.

I was expecting more on whispering - it is such an arresting image, but it gets buried in the mass of personal stories - not that these aren't fascinating in themselves, but the whole idea of lives lived with the volume down ..... Have reached the final chapter on memory, and so much of what is said here about the layering of memory and the way in which memories are patched together from the personal and the collective resonates with what one suspects about China. So despite some of the longueurs [oooh, good word] of the mid-sections, ending picks up, and pulls out something that we don't get from the earlier chapters.

It's a hard book to categorise. On one hand, what historian would pass up that material? On the other, who is meant to read The Whisperers and does the intended audience limit what you can do with it? (Check Scopus before we read too much into that...)

To live is better than to die

This is a rare and beautiful film. I had it on my shelves for months before I could bring myself to watch it. It follows the family of Ma Shengyi - Ma, his wife Leimei, daughters Ningning and Rong, and son Zhancao - through one year. The parents contracted HIV through selling blood (in a horrifically unregulated industry), and it then passed to the two younger children.

I talk about blood-selling to my students as a product of poverty in provinces such as Henan, and this film brings home what that means - not just the exposure to risk, but also what that level of poverty means in terms of living conditions and everyday pressures. I suspect some of them don't quite get it.

It is not (and should not be) an easy film to watch - we see very clearly effects of the illness on Leimei (who dies during the period of filming), Rong and Zhancao, and Ningning's growing awareness of what is happening to her family. It is deeply uncomfortable to see Leimei's decline - even when we first meet her it seems almost that she has been absorbed by her sickness and has begun to withdraw from her family - and to see her in death, dressed in her grave clothes, and to compare the costs of those to the normal family income. And then there are passages that are quite stunning visually - the fields in January, the children playing with newly-harvested maize in the courtyard - and it's quite a jolt to go from those to discussions of sickness and fear and isolation.

The film's website can be found at http://www.toliveisbetter.com/

More recently, the plight of China's AIDS orphans has been explored in The Blood of Yingzhou (2006) which I haven't seen - website at http://www.bloodofyingzhou.com/

The Chinese authorities - after first denying the existence, then the scale, of the problem - have moved to position themselves as the saviours of the suffering masses... there's a neat illustration of this in a People's Daily article at http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90782/6313053.html
I tell my students it's important to read the official press because it shows the limits of the 'speakable' but I confess I found this piece left a bit of a taste...

Little Red Flowers

Harry Potter? Pah - lightweight....

I've just watched Little Red Flowers (看上去很美) with my kids. It's a marvellous film - certificate here is '12' (because of one use of the F word), but watching it with smaller children adds a lot to the experience. Reading kids can cope with the subtitles, and even pre-readers can follow the story. First because they identify with Qiang, the protagonist (and the film really draws you into the child's world), but also because talking to children about what you're seeing makes you think more about what you're seeing.

The constant 'Why's he doing that, Mum?' makes you elaborate on the action, and wonder how it looks to other audiences. And I think that even if you take out the 'strong language' ('What's strong language, Mum? Is "poo" strong language?') the whole idea of the boarding kindergarten is quite disturbing for the average cuddly kid. ('No, we don't do that - how could I send my boys away?') Our explanation is that Qiang is acting up because his mother works away from home, his grandmother can't look after him any more and his pilot father is either away or busy; he wants to feel cared for - he wants to go home - and is embarrassed/irritated when he is singled out for not being able to dress himself or for farting in class... how else do we explain that? Are most of Qiang's classmates happy enough to be boarding at the age of 4?

They both found the ending quite frustrating and were convinced that there was a Little Red Flowers 2 to come. They like a satisfying resolution to a story, and I am a weedy sentimentalist who has to feel that even the stroppiest small boy deserves a happy ending (I was the mother who added the epilogue to Angry Arthur where his parents come to rescue him...)

But need to watch it again, without kids, to see how it works then...

And then I watched the extras... and the Making of... documentary is actually quite troubling. You see director and crew walking amongst the sleeping children in the dormitory and they [children] are beautiful... but then in other passages you feel the children are being manipulated to produce effects on screen. In one interview with Zhang Yuan, he comments that it's hard to tell if one child can tell whether what he has experienced is fiction or real life - is there not an ethical problem with that?

And... (update July 2008) it made an impression... last time I asked Insomniac Kid why he comes to visit every night, he said he was afraid (a) of the monsters under his bed and (b) that we would send him away to boarding school. When I said we wouldn't do that for a kid of his age, he asked 'What about the Chinese boy in the film?' I've ordered Cave of the Yellow Dog, but I will watch it without them first, this time.

Kawashima Yoshiko

Troubling combination of the wooden and the hysterical, this film...

Kawashima/Aisin Gioro Xianyu/Jin Bihui (a Qing princess brought up in Japan after 1913, who returned to Manchuria to work with the Japanese and was executed after the end of the war as a traitor) may well have been a more interesting character than Pu Yi, but she's not well served on film. She appears in The Last Emperor as a rather bizarre caricature ("I'm a traitor and I don't care who knows it!"), and here - where she holds centre stage for a full 96 minutes - she is neither appealing nor even particularly interesting.

And she should be fascinating. While Pu Yi is holed up in the Forbidden City she is being educated in Japan; after she returns to China she moves (or is moved) into the forefront of Sino-Japanese collaborations in Manzhouguo, and by the end of the film she is identifying herself as Japanese. Although the film chooses to portray her as an independent actor, it doesn't explore the implications of that portrayal and she is generally shown through her relationships with men (dull and shouty affairs).

The contemporary films are piling up on my shelves but this month I have mostly been watching historical pieces: Last Emperor, Devils on the Doorstep, To Live, and 55 Days at Peking (bit incongruous that one, but I was sort of asked to show it). 55 Days is quite a beast. I was quite surprised at how late it was made - having caught part of it on TV, I imagined it was a 1950s production, but, no, they were still making films about the Boxers in 1963. I was showing it for the Boxer images, but it contained a whole mush of references to films of every genre you can think of: Charlton Heston as John Wayne; heroic young soldier who doesn't want to live if he loses his leg; noble wives; acres of stiff upper lips. And you look at the whole thing and think that by this time the US had troops in Vietnam...

Not really about Postmen in the Mountains

I loved this film (slow, gentle, beautiful... set in Hunan) - like Sunflower it revolves around a father-son relationship, and it also considers the changes that rural China is beginning to see under reform - practically and in terms of values. It is also a deeply moral film (maturity, responsibility, community)... And it reminded me in a completely dumb way of my various encounters with other outposts of the post office experience in China. Every visit I have made there since 1984-85 has ended with visits to post offices, this being what happens when you have serious book-buying habit. The only time that I think I encountered a blatant attempt at fraud in China was in a post office in Nanjing, but otherwise post offices have seemed like oases of calm and certainty (how sad is that? but how true?)... even though rules can vary from one place to another (do we wrap books in cloth or paper? what are we allowed to put in a box and how heavy can each box be?) there is a strong sense that those rules are stable, and that they work. Compared to, for example, railway ticket offices (in spring 1985, I heard someone behind me in a queue in the foreigners ticket office in Beijing station declare "Communism's ruining this country" ['cos it was lovely before 1949, eh?]), post offices are a paradise of public service. Watch me eat my words and big chunks of carpet if I lose a parcel of books on my next visit, but right now I love the Chinese post office.









I'm also quite fond of NHS paramedics, but that's another story.

Soul Haunted by Painting 画魂

Where were we? Yes, La Peintre (Huang Shuqing, 1995), based on the life of Pan Yuliang (1895-1977). One of China’s first generation of western-style painters, she attracted controversy not only as a female artist and painter of nudes, but also for her background – she was sold into prostitution after the death of her parents and became the second wife of an official before training as a painter. China Daily referred (2002, ref below) to the trad Chinese influences in her work, but the images that I found had a strong flavour of Gauguin – see Christies catalogue at http://www.christies.com/promos/nov05/2203/promo_gallery.asp?page=2

As she develops as a painter we see some of the familiar tensions of 1920s/1930s China refracted through her career, from the opposition that the painting of nudes provoked, to distrust of working women, as Pan is parachuted into a prestigious post at Nanjing University. Eveninghawk, another blogger writing on the film, commented that many discussions of Pan have focused on her past, sidelining her significance as a painter (see post at http://www.eveninghawk.com/links/index.php?p=70&c=1 and a China Daily article on exhibition of her work at http://www.china.org.cn/english/33608.htm). The film, on the other hand, gathers momentum as Pan’s attention shifts from home to studio. The earliest brothel passages seem stilted and theatrical, but the style and colour of the film change as Yuliang marries, moves to Shanghai, and begins painting.

In some senses this is a May Fourth liberation story: Yuliang finds happiness with a man who believes in marriage for love and does not hold her time in the brothel against her; and despite the hostility that her painting attracts, it gives her independence and status. But it also shows the continuing vulnerability of women at the hands of self-consciously ‘progressive’ artists in Paris as well as the conservative establishment of Nanjing University. That conservatism forces Yuliang back to Paris because she cannot paint what she wants in China, and it seems more plausible than Zanhua’s tolerance of Yuliang’s painting, which runs out only when she includes a nude self-portrait in her Nanjing exhibition.

Zanhua’s story, on the other hand, which runs in the background of Yuliang’s shows some of the stresses that men experienced – again the Lu Xun problems (what is art for? freedom of expression &c &c) are quite familiar to us, but Zanhua’s problems are different. We first meet him as an official (important enough for the brothel staff to offer him Yuliang), and later see him leaving to fight (Yunnan?), but it is obvious as the film progresses that his career is stalling, and his professional decline mirrors Yuliang’s blossoming as an artist. After 1949, Zanhua remains in China, navigating the new political landscape, in which Yuliang’s teacher and Muni are condemned as rightists. So while Yuliang wins autonomy through her art, Zanhua’s life is – throughout the film – a negotiation with necessity (is that Dorothy Ko on footbinding?) of the kind that was more commonly imposed on women.

What really struck me about the film, though, was the portrayal of the marriages – Zanhua, first wife and Yuliang. We are often given the Lu Xun line on first/arranged marriages in this era (that an unwilling young man was shackled to a woman who was unfit, emotionally or intellectually, to be a true companion; who was, functionally or essentially, part of the oppressive old order … and that he was not only entitled but also in a sense obliged to escape from the marriage in interest of abstract progress as well as own happiness) but this was a much subtler picture, and we see the cohabitation of husband and two wives as a situation that is stressful and at times demeaning for all three. While, emotionally, Zanhua’s attachment to Yuliang appears unchallenged, he is shown as experiencing genuine conflict between love and his obligations to his first wife. There is a beautiful passage after Yuliang returns from studying in Paris in which she is trying to build bridges with Zanhua’s son Muni, and thinking – on an idyllic boat trip one afternoon – that she is succeeding; but his joy on seeing his mother when she returns to Nanjing is a reminder that relationship with Yuliang is built on convention, not love.

I’m not a serious Gong Li fan, but I think this shows what she can do when she is given a role that goes beyond muse or decoration.

Mei Ah, on the other hand, deserve a fat smack for making a DVD that simply stopped playing in the last ??half hour of the film. Sigh.

Fathers and sons – Sunflower

‘Why don’t you start a Chinese film blog?’

‘Because I don’t have enough time to watch Chinese films.’

‘Hm.’

Possibly a little unfair in the circs – sorry, love. I'm actually developing a bit of a backlog of films to write about, and more are (YesAsia assures me) in the post.

Sunflower (Zhang Yang 200?) should be powerful and engaging. However. (Are we getting negative in our old age?) Xiangyang’s father, Gengnian, coming back to Beijing after years in countryside during Cultural Revolution, is dismayed at nine-year-old Xiangyang’s unruliness and determined that he is not going to waste talent as painter (Gengnian himself is a former painter whose hands were ruined by beatings). After Xiangyang (nearly?) blinds son of neighbour with catapult, Gengnian forces him to stay in drawing and drives him on through art school. Teenage Xiangyang resists father’s plans – skips class to sell greetings cards, tries to escape to Guangzhou – but Gengnian retrieves him and compels Xiangyang’s girlfriend to terminate her pregnancy. Twelve years later, adult Xiangyang and his wife end another pregnancy because – Xiangyang tells his father – he does not feel ready to be a good parent and does not want to blight his own child’s life by being as bad a father as Gengnian. Resolution and a form of reconciliation come only once Gengnian disappears, allowing Xiangyang to think of him as a benign absence rather than a suffocating presence.

The film shows us the pressures of China in transition – fractured families, tensions between neighbours, conflicting desires (Do we want a model child? Do we want a new apartment? Do we want love or do we want our own way?), battles over authority; but in the three central characters (Gengnian, Xiangyang, and his mother [always a bad sign if you can’t remember a central character’s name]) we see three people who seem to change only to become more fixed in their ways, on divergent paths. Gengnian’s relationship with neighbour Old Liu (who wrote the appraisal that led to his exile) is more compelling, but develops largely off-camera.

In themes and setting, Sunflower invites comparison with Blue Kite (Tian Zhuangzhuang) and Together (Chen Kaige) but lacks the strong central relationship that characterises and humanises those films. Sunflower is honest in showing the long-term damage that the Cultural Revolution could do to families and to individuals (not that Blue Kite was coy on that point as far as it went), but it does not draw us (me) in. It is as if we see the worst in each of the central characters – we can see signs that they must have a warmer side but the film rarely shows it.







Who was it who said you have to blog every day? What kind of a life...............?