Gaokao Exodus in Wuhan

Great picture in the English People's Daily today: 

CAPTION: "University aspirants walk out of the No 6 High School in Wuhan, Hubei province, after finishing the morning session of their college entrance exam yesterday."

See, of course, ChinaSMACK's photos from the deluge here - much paperwork thrown onto the street.  One of my favorite articles on the madness of the entrance exams from Time, last year, here. 

(All About Women/女人不坏): Tsui Hark + Sex And the City = ?

Originally pinned as Tsui Hark's big comeback film, and poised as a follow up to Peking Opera Blues, this film was panned, doing somewhat poorly in the box office despite lots of lead up.  (It looks like there is not a US distributor lined up.)

Now Tsui Hark comes from (or more adamant defenders would say defines!) that slapstick tradition of the Hong Kong action film where you often find the juicy combination of femme fatales, eunuchs, cross-dressers and other such gender-bending. [See Stephen Teo's treatment in the Film Cultures Reader, here.]

So, I was a bit shocked when the film was marketed as an analogue to Sex and the City. The Sex and the City  film release also released a deluge of somewhat stale commentary on how it fits into the general discourses on gender and feminism. [EG In the Guardian, Alice Wignall asked "Can a Feminist Really Love Sex and the City?" (I more or less fall on the side of finding it an "orgy of consumerism and triviality.")]

So whither the women in this film, particularly given that Peking Opera Blues and The Swordsman II have been read so positively by feminist film scholarship? 

In either case, the film ultimately loses any possible emotional content to the explosion of camp - one ultimately senses from viewing (as you do with Wong Kar-Wai) that the script was rewritten everyday....in part because (as with Wong Kar-Wai), it was. Regardless, it is really, really fun to watch, with explosions of color, costume and stylized artifice giving the flat caricatures that run through the film a miasma of character. (Or, again, maybe just camp.) Based on just my limited knowledge, one could place it in an aesthetic category with with Tsai Ming Liang's A Wayward Cloud, in turn situated in earlier films like Tati's Playtime, Demy's Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Schraeder's Mishima. But where the gender politics goes is a difficult question, and (as with Wong Kar Wai), the ultimate destination may be the great revolving nebulae of Tsui Hark's ego. 

 

Where are the 21 Most Wanted Students from Tiananmen Now?

Skipping right back into things today. Had been wondering whether there was a list compiling the 21 "Most Wanted" list after Tiananmen and where they are now, and it turns out there is quite a well done, comprehensive one done by the Human Rights in China group, compiled by one Stacy Mosher. The report - "Tiananmen's Most Wanted - Where are They Now?" - is at times heartening but strangely depressing to read. No 1, Wang Dan (pictured at the protests in 89 below), wrote a piece today that ran in the LA Times and HuffPo, and just finished up a PhD here in Cambridge last year. Most seem to have scattered, with some running "internet companies," at least one in a hedge fund, and two untraceable. Many of them, like Wang, have continued onto a life of activism abroad, and done quite well, particularly considering what they may have faced. Yet, reading it, I got the feeling that I suppose one might have when you go to a high school or college reunion, and nothing seems to fall in place, and you meet those bright young shooting stars that have hit the end of their burning light and fizzle out into mediocrity, and you suddenly see in a flash (cheaper yet, montage) all those wide-eyed days you wasted. 

As another note, the NY Times Lens blog surfaced a new picture of Tank Man.  The video (below), is mindblowing. I toyed with an entry tracing some of the various ways that Tank Man has gone viral, but the only entertaining and juicy bit I came across was a "Tank Man Tango" (described as "a memorial of dancing bodies") that went on this year in Australia to commemorate events. 

As child of the diaspora here, I primarily remember the set of events as a series of panicked faxes. The onset of the fax machine had been crucial in helping organize the protests, and getting a record of what had happened out of the country and out of sight of censors. (By one account, guards had been posted by all publicly available fax machines the morning of June 5.) I've yet to see [though I certainly haven't dug deeply] a good account that captures this dynamic though - there is not so much action, of course, in the clicking, whirring noises of a fax transmission. But to that nerve-wracking noise, many abroad received their handwritten notices sometime twenty years ago, far before the news stories broke, and anti-climactically felt the tide turn. 

Shepard Fairey's rendition of a picture by Ed Nachtrieb above. 

Trek II: CNSA Logo, and "My Friend is Obviously Chinese"

So, two connected thoughts before my weird, re-invigorated Trek madness evaporates and I incriminate myself and this nascent blog further. 

1. "My Friend is Obviously Chinese" 

Episode: The City on the Edge of Forever (Aired April 6, 1967)

Spock: "You were saying you'll have no trouble explaining it..."
Kirk: "My friend is obviously...Chinese. I see you've noticed the ears. They're actually easy to explain...."
Spock: "Perhaps the unfortunate accident I had as a child...."
Kirk: "The unfortunate accident he had as a child....He caught his head in a mechanical...rice-picker. But fortunately there was an American...missionary living close by who was actually a ...skilled plastic surgeon in civilian life...."

2. Was Spock Obviously Chinese? 

After an embarrassing run through my Baidu skills, I was finally able to run searches on Spock [史巴克] and Vulcans [瓦肯] "Live Long and Prosper"? "Only Nixon could go to China"? That Confucian combination of altruistic ethics and repression? Striking of the gong before Pon Farr? Plausibly impossible at the height of the Cold War, yet see The Journal of Cold Warstudies, even, for their treatment. 

3. Final exhibit of evidence, the Chinese National Space Administration Logo, as pointed out by this blogger: 

My mind is burnt from work - updates on thoughts on Ai Wei Wei and Mei Lan Fang ASAP.  

The World of William Shatner: Oriental Sex (Playboy)

After a terrible hiatus, and in celebration of the forthcoming disaster of the resurrection of the Star Trek franchise (sex'ed up Vulcan grips and all!), here is a tidbit from Playboy 1959 feature "Oriental Sex."

Covered are productions of The World of Suzie Wong - where Shatner headlined as the love interest of that hooker with a heart of gold (left, not looking so fun now) -  and the Flower Drum Song (below, Nancy Kwan singing in the 1961 film). The news hook

"Gone, happily, are the days when the showbiz idea of Asian beauty was Myrna Loy with upswept eyebrows as the Daughter of Fu Manchu. Now, the legitimate stages of Broadway and the desert casinos of Las Vegas have become truly oriented to the Orient and are featuring Far-East femininity which is (if we may be allowed to shift gears and invoke the name of another Irish gentleman) the McCoy."

Let it be said: UHURA HAD IT BETTER.