As we’ve done the past several years, we attended the Chinese New Year Festival at the State Fairgrounds in Raleigh today. I must admit that the event has gotten a bit dull for me, mainly because the program has remained pretty much the same over the years and also because the food served at the event has been less than stellar. Nonetheless, the festival is still a good opportunity to satisfy the shutterbug in me. We got there today in time to see the dragon dance, followed by a kung fu performance by a local club. Aww, it’s so cute to see little munchkins demonstrating their ability to bludgeon you and slash you with knives, swords, lances, and spades.

The idea that the raspy troubadour of ’60s freedom anthems would go to a dictatorship and not sing those anthems is a whole new kind of sellout — even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.

My response to Dowd and others expressing similar sentiments: Umm … did you guys just forget about the last 45 years or so?

Let’s put aside for a while the fact that “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” have long stopped being a regular part of Dylan’s sets. As a big Dylan fan, it irks me when I see people still trying to define his career by his protest songs when in reality he only wrote protest songs for the first three or four years of his now 50-year career. Sure, it’s a testament to the timeless quality of those early songs. No one would deny that “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” (which, by the way, he did play in Beijing) or “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” were and still are powerful songs whose words can still be applied to some aspect of some society somewhere in the world today. However, anybody who’s even just somewhat familiar with Dylan’s career surely must know about his famous shift away from political songs and his rift with the protest movement, which happened back in, oh, 1964. Yes, 1964 — 47 years ago, and just two years after the release of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, the album that made him a star on the folk scene and in the protest movement. In 1964, he released “The Times They’re A-Changin’ ” — the last of his protest-song albums — in January and then just seven months later released another album with the ever so slightly obvious title of “Another Side of Bob Dylan”, just in case anyone was missing the point of what they were hearing on that record.

Oh, and remember the hubbub when he went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival? Yeah, talk about disillusionment. But at least back then Dylan’s folk/protest singer image was still fresh in everyone’s mind, so the feeling of betrayal is at least understandable. But this cry of “sellout” in 2011? It’s been more than four decades, people! Did you miss “Don’t Look Back”, the documentary that followed Dylan on his legendary 1965 England tour where he was called Judas for daring to “sell out” by playing half-acoustic, half-electric sets? Or “No Direction Home”, the 2005 documentary in which Dylan, and those who knew him, pretty much said he didn’t want to be a part of the protest movement.

Look, I like a lot of Dylan’s protest songs. Those were my initial exposure to Dylan back in college in the late 90s. I remember being knocked out by the lyrics and being amazed that these were written decades ago and yet still held such relevance and resonance in my time. I remember being wowed by the dark, dreary tone that permeates most of the songs on “The Times They’re A-Changin’ “, because many albums can make you happily tap your toes, but so few can make you fidget uncomfortably in your seat. I also remember popping “Bringing It All Back Home” into the CD player and then wondering “Where are the acoustic songs?” and skipping through the tracks on “Highway 61 Revisited” searching for a trace of his folk beginnings. But once I accepted the fact that Dylan had stopped writing those “finger-pointing songs” back in the mid-60s and started really exploring more of his later stuff (if you can call songs he started writing five years into a five-decade career “later”), I discovered a different — and in some ways greater — type of brilliance in those songs.

Dylan has gone through so many transformations over the course of his career, and I think that, much more than his explosion onto the scene as a folk/protest icon, is responsible for his remaining relevant as a musician over the decades. If he had simply remained a folk/protest singer, his relevance as a musician would have faded into the background like many of his peers from his folk-singing days. He has been many things in his career, but he hasn’t been a protest singer since the first few years of his career. I can understand someone in 1965 calling him a traitor to his status as an icon of the folk/protest movement, but when you are saying that in 2011, it just makes me scratch my head.

Oh, and while we’re at it, please stop quoting “Your old road is rapidly agin’ / Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand / For the times they are a-changin’ ” as a way to tell people to get the $&*@ out of your way because they disagree with some fabulous new idea to which you pray. Instead, consider that the kids who were singing that line back in the 60s are now the people on the receiving end of such sentiments. For me, therein lies the true brilliance of Dylan’s work. If you are looking for a Dylan song to quote, try looking one album down the list in Dylan’s discography. There you would find that he basically disavowed the black-and-white notions of his protest songs in the less-appreciated-but-perhaps-more-brilliant “My Back Pages“:

Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics
Of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists
Unthought of, though, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

A self-ordained professor’s tongue
Too serious to fool
Spouted out that liberty
Is just equality in school
“Equality,” I spoke the word
As if a wedding vow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach
My pathway led by confusion boats
Mutiny from stern to bow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now

Again, this song was written back in 1964. How many years must a man tell you he’s not a protest singer before he’s allowed to not be a protest singer?

While watching the Hong Kong episode of Bizarre Foods the other night, we saw a segment where Andrew Zimmern went to shoot a Hong Kong-style Kung Fu fight scene, and the introduction for that segment included a few seconds from a movie called Kung Fu Chefs. We were instantly intrigued and I just had to go look it up, and like everything else that has ever graced a screen somewhere in the world, it was on YouTube.

The movie, made in 2009 and starring famous Kung Fu movie star Sammo Hung, is basically a blend of Iron Chef (which we love), old-school Kung Fu flicks, and The Karate Kid. It comes complete with a cooking competition in a knockoff of Kitchen Stadium, a main character named Ken’ichi (which had us wondering if this should be called The Chen Ken’ichi Story), a culinary version of Mr. Miyagi, and ridiculously elaborate food preparation. It’s an over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek parody of the Kung Fu movie genre and a send-up of how seriously some people take food.

The plot focuses on … well, actually the plot doesn’t matter. What matters is that the first scene of the movie has chef Sammo Hung slicing his way through a whole pig carcass with just one cut using the Dragon’s Head Blade — a family heirloom whose use must be preceded by the offering of incense to the ancestors — and then getting into a scrum with five guys wielding Chinese cleavers when he finds out someone had sabotaged his pork. The movie pretty much leaves all traces of reality behind at that point — and we’re not even at the opening credits yet — so just strap yourself in for some cheesed-out fun, over-the-top acting, and shots of drool-inducing culinary creations.

Here’s the movie on YouTube in 10 parts. It’s in Cantonese with English subtitles. If you have a really fast Internet connection, you can see it as a higher-quality file here, in Mandarin with English subtitles.

A few days ago, I was poking around in the iTunes Store for something new to add to the collection of podcasts on my iPod. I had caught up with the long-running, outstanding The History of Rome series, as well as the not-as-long-running-but-also-outstanding The History of China series, and I only had a scant two episodes left in the BBC’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. Out of curiosity,  I checked to see what kind of Cantonese podcasts were on iTunes and stumbled across a 27-episode historical novel about Xiang Yu, a prominent military figure who vied for control of China in the late 200s B.C. in the wake of the collapse of the Qin Dynasty. The program aired on a radio station in my hometown of Guangzhou a few years back, and someone had thought to add it to iTunes a couple years ago.

I was hooked five minutes into the first episode, not so much because of how great the story is but because of how it was told. While the program is a bit more structured and polished than a conversational-style podcast, no one would mistake this for a mere dramatic reading of a book or script either. The main voice was more village storyteller than narrator, as he spoke in a very colloquial manner and told the story with more than a little dry sarcasm and dramatic flair. When recounting dialogs between characters, he would do different voices for each part, and every now and then he would interrupt the story and explain something further to put it in a present-day context. He wasn’t merely reading a book to you, but instead was talking to you as if you were just shooting the bull with him by a campfire and listening to him regale you with a tale about the rise and fall of a great historical figure. It makes for a very intimate connection and really pulls you into the story.

One of the reasons this program appealed to me so much is the fact that it instantly brought back fond memories of one aspect of life in Guangzhou back in the 1980s. At a time when the Chinese economy was just starting to emerge from the turbulence and stagnation of the previous decades, television sets were still not yet a common-place household item, and radio remained the primary mode of entertainment for a huge portion of the population. One of the most popular parts of the daily radio schedule was this type of storytelling. Basically, it’s the transplantation of an ancient oral tradition — which dates back to before the Qing Dynasty — from the teahouses, where it had been widely practiced, to the radio realm. Narrators took novels, usually about historical personages or events, and retold them in a colloquial and colorful manner, and it was a huge hit with listeners as people tuned in every day. Think of it as sort of the equivalent of an American family gathering around the radio after dinner in the 1930s and 40s, except this was happening a few decades after that cultural phenomenon had faded away in the U.S. and at a time when America was already singing “Video killed the radio star.”

The most beloved and well-known practitioner of this craft on Cantonese radio from the 1980s was Zhang Yuekai. Every day at noon and 6 p.m., my grandmother and I would sit by our old transistor radio during lunch or dinner and wait for Zhang to come on for his performance. He’d begin every broadcast with “Picking up where we left off last time …”, except the Chinese expression (原文再续，书接上一回，话说) is much more poetic. We would hang on every word, and when that day’s broadcast was over, we eagerly awaited the next day’s performance, even though in the case of many of these novels, we already knew how the plot goes. The point was not to find out how the story turned out, but to hear it told by a master of the craft of storytelling.

I think this excerpt from an entry on the Chinese version of Wikipedia about Zhang’s performance is pretty spot-on:

For the old people in Guangzhou, Guangdong Radio Station evokes nostalgia, just like seeing a rice noodle shop, ice cream shop, or bakery on an old street might.

For four years from 1983 to 1987, Zhang Yuekai, who along with Liu Lanfang were known as “Liu of the North and Zhang of the South”, recounted novels in Cantonese, such as “Water Margin”, “Three Kingdoms”, “Warriors of the Yang Family”, “Mao Zedong in His Later Years”, and this became a program that people in Guangzhou followed religiously. How many “old Guangzhouers” in the Xiguan area of the city remember rushing home to catch his recount of ancient tales? Their devotion can only be described as “forgoing sleep and forgetting meals.” Mr. Zhang’s performance showcased the whole range of his voice. He could sound strong and arrogant, or slow and steady, or angry and saddened, or smooth and harmonious, or snappy and decisive, or full of joy. The vivacity of his voice is something that could be felt but not explained. His opening line, “Picking up where we left off … ,” still echoes in the memory of the old Guangzhouers.

The podcast I discovered on iTunes continues this great tradition, even adopting Zhang’s opening line for each episode. Of course, since it’s being told in a colloquial style, there are elements in there that reflect how the times have changed from the 1980s, such as an occasional English word or phrase being thrown in, just as it’s now often done in normal conversation in China. After just a couple episodes, I found myself “forgoing sleep and forgetting meals”. Well, maybe not quite that far, but I have been listening to this program every chance I get, whether in the car, on the bus, or when I’m just going out for a short stroll during lunch. Nothing else on my iPod has hooked me like this has, and it has rekindled my appetite for such storytelling. The only drawback is that at the rate I’m going, I’ll soon be done with these 27 episodes. To that end, I went searching for recordings of Zhang’s performances, and to my delight, I found a whole stash of them in MP3 format. We’re talking about novels that can be as long as 150-some chapters, so I’ve found a supply that’ll last me a good while. Here’s hoping we’ll see more of such programs. I think they are a great fit for the episodic, conversational-style format that we are becoming more and more accustomed to with the proliferation of podcasts, and perhaps new technology will help breathe new life into an old art form.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at my book blog.

That’s why I was pleasantly surprised to discover Electric Shadows (梦影童年) while browsing through the foreign-language films on Netflix Instant Play. Hey imagine that, a Chinese movie that doesn’t involve martial arts, special effects, a couple hundred thousand extras, or (shudder) Jackie Chan. Electric Shadows, made in 2004, is a nostalgia-inducing (well, for the Chinese who grew up in the 70s anyway) piece of work that uses the story of a single mother and her daughter as a vehicle to take a trip down the memory lane of Chinese cinema and small-town life. There are spots where the movie does give you a rather heavy dose of mushy melodrama, but overall, it’s a delightful film and definitely worth checking out.

The movie is available on Netflix and also in multiple parts on YouTube:

Well, that’s kind of what happened during the Chinese New Year Gala on CCTV yesterday. Watching the gala on TV is the Chinese equivalent of sitting down to New Year’s Eve with Dick Clark — a longstanding tradition. The gala is typically a variety show on steroids that includes a mix of singing, dancing, acrobatic performances, and comedic skits and runs probably a couple hours too long for its own good. This year’s gala included a segment titled “Our Brothers Span the Globe” (四海之内皆兄弟). In it, Da Shan, a Canadian performer who’s perhaps the best known Western face on Chinese TV (mainly because he speaks Mandarin very well), hams it up with a boy from America, a couple young ladies from Russia and Kenya, and a couple guys from Hungary and Australia — all students from the Confucius Institute.

Yes, it’s all in Chinese, but honestly you don’t need to know what they’re saying to get the idea. The five-minute segment pretty much consisted of Da Shan engaging each guest in some inane banter in Chinese to show how well they can speak Mandarin. The Shanghaiist’s liveblog of the gala  sums it up pretty well:

I mean, look – there’s like, five whole Laowai who can not only speak Chinese, but do traditional Chinese singing and crosstalking! Including… *gasp* a BLACK girl.

Watching this segment from an American perspective induced a mixture of ROFL and mouth-agape disbelief at the sheer ridiculousness of it all. I can’t imagine seeing anything like this on TV in the U.S., or if there was, there’d be hell to pay before the segment is even over as people get up in arms over the perceived cultural insensitivity. I don’t think that concern would even register in China, however, due to differences in the two societies’ histories and social make-up. I think the complaint about this segment in China would probably be more about its sheer stupidity and vanity. As one poster in a Chinese forum wrote:

“Our Brothers Span the Globe” is the kind of comedy that you don’t need to see to imagine what it’ll be like — a group of laowais learning Chinese, and they even sprinkle in a few wisecracks. Honestly, aside from satisfying our great country’s vanity, this kind of skit has little meaning.

Aside from a plug for the Confucius Institute, from a Chinese perspective, I think this skit is probably a nice microcosm of some of the insecurity China still feels even as it ascends among world powers — the need to feel that the rest of the world respects you for more than just your economy and your ginormous potential customer base.

On a lighter note, I must say that I’m impressed with how well the laowais spoke Chinese, especially Da Shan and the American boy, who had almost no accent at all. They didn’t even have the regional accents that people from various parts of China have when they speak Mandarin.

On an even lighter note, all  Chinese New Year Gala performances pale in comparison to this one from 1987. BEST … DANCING … EVER!!

If you live in the Triangle area and have a few hours to kill this Saturday, go check out the Chinese New Year Festival at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds. We went last year and had a good time. There’re plenty of stage performances, some good food, and — my wife’s favorite part — loads of cute Chinese munchkins running around. I like the event in part because it’s a great for taking photos as there are lots of vivid colors and interesting stuff happening.

The Chinese New Year Festival kicks off the yearly slate of ethnic festivals at the fairgrounds, sprinkled around the gun shows and the pesticide exams:

• March 15: Persian New Year Celebration
• March 25-27: India Fest
• April 9-10: Lebanese Festival
• Sept. 16-18: Greek Festival

Ok, by now I know you’ve read or heard about the uproar over Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her article in the Wall Street Journal about her Chinese-style parenting. I think anything that can be said about the piece and the style of Chinese parenting it portrays has been said. Personally, I think Chua comes off as extreme in the WSJ article, even for a Chinese parent. I’ve read that the WSJ piece is actually not a good reflection of her book, so I’ll hold off on really forming an opinion until I’ve read the book (if I can pry the Kindle out of my wife’s hands, that is).

While I disagree with the extreme degree to which Chua appears to take her parenting style  and her apparent dismissive attitude toward Western parenting style in the WSJ piece, at least one of her observations about Chinese parenting — the demand for perfect grades — is pretty accurate, and I want to look at that a little more closely.

The demand for perfect grades is something that everyone who, like me, has spent part of their childhood in China can relate to. Your first reaction to getting a 99 on a test isn’t, “Yay! I got a 99!”, but rather, “What did I get wrong that prevented me from getting a 100?” It’s different standard for excellence — basically anything under a 95 was no cause for celebration (I remember crying in third grade because I got a 91 on a test). However, this attitude doesn’t come solely from parental expectations, but also from the teachers and from the students themselves. It becomes not so much striving for perfection because you’re afraid your parents are going to call you “garbage” or make you do 1,000 math problems a night, but because you feel you would be letting yourself down.

Many critics of Chua’s WSJ piece have pointed to the often-cited idea that while Chinese students do well in terms of grades, they often come up short in terms of creativity. I would argue, though, that this is less a result of the demand for perfect grades and more a result of the Chinese educational system’s emphasis on rote memorization. That emphasis has its roots in dynastic China, when the path to success — namely, a government post — is to memorize the Confucian classics and ace the national merit exam, which quizzes you on your knowledge of said classics. So countless scholars over the centuries have spent countless reciting text until they have it completely memorized. In many ways, that style of learning remains embedded in Chinese education.

Having gone to elementary school in China and then done my secondary and post-secondary education in the U.S., I would say that I like the American system’s emphasis on critical thinking rather than rote memorization, as well as its attempt to encourage students to develop a more diverse range of interests. I think that diversified education pointed me to fields that I would not otherwise have explored in China. I do think there’s a measure of truth to the idea that too much emphasis on rote memorization kills creativity. I think the Chinese education system is great for preparing students to do well within an existing framework, but not so great for preparing them to tear down that framework and build a better one.

However, there are several elements that I would like to see the U.S. system adopt from its Chinese counterpart.

1. The demand for perfection (or at least, excellence): To me, there is nothing wrong with holding kids to a higher standard. If you tell kids that achieving 80 percent is fine, then they will be content to just reach that level. Chua’s “nothing is fun unless you are good at it” statement may be extreme, but at the same time, if you are going to spend time doing something, you might as well hold yourself to a higher standard. Even if you don’t reach it, you’d end up doing better than if you aimed lower. Also, it’s not like there aren’t examples of this mentality in America. Think about the athletes who took 1,000 free throws a day to improve his shooting or got the key to the local gym so he can go work out at random hours in the middle of the night. We hold up those as cases of dedication and reasons why they’re good at what they do, so why not apply a little bit of that same dedication to solving math problems?

2. The idea that responsibility for a student’s education rests in no small part with … gasp … the student: For all the things from Chua’s WSJ piece that I disagree with, she is right that Americans are too quick to blame the schools and the teachers when their children don’t do well. Too often, it seems, the blame is placed on anything and anyone other than the student. I always chuckle when I see American parents complain about class sizes. Your kid can’t learn in a class with more than 15 or 20 people? Want to guess how many students were in my elementary school class? Fifty-three. Sure there are times when teachers or schools are to blame, but the American notion of a student’s role in the educational process strikes me as way too passive: It seems the student is supposed to be merely a receptacle waiting for someone to fill him/her with knowledge. In a Chinese classroom, the teacher has a responsibility to teach, but the student also has an equal responsibility to make the effort to seek out and obtain knowledge. “Learning” is an active verb. There’s not enough of the latter in the American system.

3. The passion for learning: This ties into point No. 2, and Nicholas Kristof writes about the Chinese passion for learning in this piece about China’s school systems.

The larger issue is that the greatest strength of the Chinese system is the Confucian reverence for education that is steeped into the culture. In Chinese schools, teachers are much respected, and the most admired kid is often the brain rather than the jock or class clown.

I agree with Kristof that that is one of the biggest differences between education in China and education in the United States, and I think one of the consequences of that difference is the divergence in the two countries’ approach to education and emphasis on grades. In the U.S., because we don’t have a passion for learning that’s ingrained in the culture, we have to turn to enticements to motivate kids to learn, hence the attempt to make learning fun, and hence the idea that you shouldn’t stress getting grades too much, lest it makes the learning process not fun for the kids and turns them away from wanting to l earn.

In China, instead of “You should learn because learning is fun,” the approach is more like “You should learn because learning is important.” For much of China’s history, education has been really the only viable path for most Chinese to improve one’s lot in life, to escape back-breaking manual labor, and to land in a respectable line of work. That’s why when you ask any Chinese parent what their top priority is, you’re likely to get an answer similar to this one by a peasant woman in Guangdong province who’s still living in a mud hut:

“The most important thing is that our girl will study hard and go to high school” Chen says. “We have no education which is why we have to work so hard”. (Chen only speaks the local dialect. Her daughter acts as translator.) The girl’s elementary school fee is only 25 Yuan per term, but that will go much higher next year, when she’ll start middle school in town. This is why Chen stays awake at night in her mud house, making more baskets. Education is the most important thing.

For much of China’s history, learning is not so much an option as it is a privilege that only a relative few have access to. So when you get that opportunity, it is assumed that there should be no need to entice you to learn.

The other cultural aspect to take into account when considering this demand for perfection in academics is the intense competition a typical Chinese student faces as he or she moves up the educational ladder. That competition starts as early as the entrance exams that determine whether you can get into the top-tier middle and high schools, and goes on to college and beyond. For instance, consider the national higher education entrance exam (known as Gao Kao), which pretty much determines whether a high school student gets into college and which tier of colleges you can get into. It would be a mistake to think of this as the Chinese version of the SAT, because there’s much, much more at stake due to the relatively low availability of higher-education opportunities (and even fewer good colleges or universities) in China compared to in the West, resulting in tremendous competition and tremendous pressure on the students and their parents. How you perform on this test will determine your lot in life and the opportunities you will have. That’s a far cry from the United States, where even mediocre students can get into a halfway decent college. When you have that much competition, you kind of have to aim for perfection to stand out. In such circumstances, it’s easier to understand why parent would push their children to excel in school.

This entry is cross-posted at my book blog: thezhus.posterous.com.

My research on 1980s Guangzhou led me to the discovery of a 1984 Chinese film called Yamaha Fish Stall (雅马哈鱼档). It’s a story about a trio of young people who start a fish stall in early 1980s Guangzhou, just as economic reforms were encouraging many people to start their own businesses (although judging by the way the main character, Ah Long, dresses and some of the hilariously bad English subtitles on the DVD, you would swear there’s a “Guangzhou Gigolo” subtext running through the movie). The film was a big hit, in part because it was an accurate depiction of early 1980s Guangzhou, and in part because it advocated for the economic reform policies and showed the results that could come from them.

Unfortunately, I was only able to find little fragments of the film online, and there are no English subtitles in any of them. If you are interested in getting a glimpse what life was like in my hometown during the early years of my childhood, as well as a chance to keel over laughing at the unintentionally dirty subtitles (we’re not entirely sure about the “unintentional” part), I’d suggest buying the DVD.

The thing that led me to the film in the first place was an interview in one of my books with the author of the short novel upon which the movie was based. In it, he discusses the inspiration for the characters, the societal changes that were going on when the novel was written, and the impact of the film. Here’s a translated excerpt:

Yamaha Fish Stall was created against the background of the rapid development of Guangzhou’s private enterprises after economic reform and opening up.

After the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Party, Guangzhou was a step ahead in reforms. Guangzhou’s private enterprises began developing very rapidly. My deepest impression was that Guangzhou’s streets were lined with peddlers selling T-shirts, socks, umbrellas, shoes. There were many peddlers. Even though the streets seemed very messy, they also conveyed a very vibrant feeling.

You couldn’t see this kind of scene before. Guangzhou may be the land of fish and rice, yet you couldn’t buy fish here. Back then, each family had several fish stamps per year, and still it wasn’t guaranteed that you would be able to buy fish. Even if there were any for you to buy, it was salt-water fish or dried fish. Back then, you would be thrilled to be able to just buy a couple dace. …

After reforms and opening up, control on fish prices were loosened up and you could buy fish anytime. At the time I was living in the dormitories of Guangzhou People’s Hospital on Bailing Road. Next to the dorm there was a market, where people sold fish, roast geese, and there was a hair salon. It was all very bright and colorful. Among all those stalls, the most interesting was the fish stall, because the stall owner rode a motorcycle. On the back of the motorcycle was a water tank, which he used to transport fish to the stall. I still remember that his motorcycle wasn’t a name brand like Yamaha, but rather a brand made in Chongqing. By today’s standards, that fish stall couldn’t be simpler. It was just a simple piece of colorful tarp with bamboo poles on the sides and a fish hanging from it as advertising. The fish was still alive and kept flapping its tail. This showed that society was slowly changing. Overall, society as a whole was beginning to become vibrant, and people’s state of mind was vastly improved as well. …

The inspiration for the main character Ah Long was one of my students. … One day I was walking along the street when suddenly someone tapped my shoulder from behind. I turned around and looked, and it was one of my students from back when I was teaching in high school. This student didn’t look like any special and didn’t carry himself well. He said, “Mr. Zhang, I haven’t seen you in a long time.” I asked him what he was doing now. He said, “I’m doing pretty well. Let me take you out for dimsum.” I tried to decline, but he said, “Mr. Zhang, you have to go. Let me take you to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum.” In 1983, the Eastern Hotel was not somewhere that ordinary citizens could go, and to be honest I hadn’t been there. So I asked him whether he had struck it rich. He told me this: “I’m living like a human being now.” That had a big impact on me, so I went with him to the Eastern Hotel for dimsum. We talked over tea, and it was then that he told me he had started his own private business.

I was this student’s home-room teacher. He used to have a problem: His conduct wasn’t very clean, his performance wasn’t good, and he didn’t do well in school. But I still was very attentive toward him. I asked him what kind of work he was doing now, and he said he was selling fish. He said he could make up to 300-some yuan a month selling fish. Good heavens! At that time my salary was just 80-some yuan, and his income was four times mine. He said he was very grateful for my kindness toward him in the past, so that’s why he wanted to treat me to dimsum. He told me some of his life experiences. At the time I thought, “This wayward kid has found a proper path, become a private entrepreneur selling fish, found a career, and found a pretty good situation for himself. To use his own words, he was living like a human being now. So I was very touched.

Actually, he represented the majority of the people who were starting private businesses. These young people’s way of thinking isn’t too high. To use my student’s words, for them this is scrounging a living. But human beings — if you can give them work, a legitimate job — generally will strive upward. Human beings can change. People don’t want to do improper, immoral things; it’s only when they have no other way out. The problem was that our society didn’t provide such a platform. That’s why once the economic reforms and opening up were implemented, many people changed.

…

Before I wrote Yamaha Fish Stall, I had already published a lot of work. … Because I was publishing a lot of fiction at the time, my work was often published in the newspapers. … Although there were a lot of people submitting their work, my submissions still were often published, such as essays, short stories, one-act plays. … I drew upon my real-life inspirations and wrote Yamaha Fish Stall as a short novel.

Yamaha refers to the motorcycle, with a equipment box on the back. My thinking is relatively liberated. Even now I think my thinking was even ahead of the young people at the time. Liberation of thought is very important to a writer. So why use Yamaha? I was thinking: One, this name sounds good, very unusual, very strong. Second, Yamaha motorcycles is a foreign business. In our reforms and opening up, what we are doing is bringing in things from outside. Later, when we were making the movie, a well-known veteran editor reviewed the script and said the title won’t work. But I insisted that it would. I said you can edit the story, but the title cannot change. So in the end they kept the title. …

The draft of the novel was about 6,000 characters, and I submitted it to the Yangcheng Evening News. A well-known editor at the newspaper wrote me a letter after he read it and asked me to go to his office to discuss it with him in person. He said this story was about a fresh topic and full of life. However, the Yangcheng Evening News only had four pages for submitted content, and to run the entire 6,000-some characters would take up an entire page. So he suggested that I shorten the draft. I asked if it would be possible to run it on an entire page. He said, “You’re not famous. How can we give you an entire page?” … He suggested I condense the story to 3,000 characters. But I felt if I took out that much, the story would lose its flavor. He gave me a few days to think it over. A few days later, he wrote me a very long letter. I was so moved; he was such a dutiful editor. His handwriting was very neat, and he wrote about six or seven pages. His letter said that my view was correct, that to turn 6,000 characters to 3,000 will leave only the skeleton, without flesh or blood, without meaning. He suggested I turn this into a medium-length novel and submitted to the publishing house, otherwise such a good subject would be wasted.

After returning to campus, I collaborated with one of my students and turned Yamaha Fish Stall into a medium-length novel and submitted it to Flower City magazine. Later this novel received the inaugural Flower City Literary Award, and Flower City magazine’s readership base was very large. An executive from Pearl River Films saw this novel and said it was very good.

At the time, Zhang Liang was a nationally known directory. When he saw this novel, he said I should turn it into a movie script because they would like to make it into a movie. Later, Pearl River Films put us up in their guest house to let us turn the novel into a script. We stayed for about a month, and the script was approved after only one round. It went very smoothly.

Zhang Liang’s thinking was very liberated, very innovative, and he embraced new things. He suggested that this movie should be as authentic as possible, so we should use real independent shopkeepers as actors. … Only the main character Ah Long and one other role used professional actors; everyone else was an amateur.

In using amateur actors, I felt Zhang Liang was very brave, very bold. This was no simple matter. What if they didn’t do a good job and ruined the film? So everyone was still a little worried at the time. These amateur actors received one week of training. During the shooting, usually the director showed them how to do something, and then they just went along by feel, and in the process, they showed their authenticity.

…

After Yamaha Fish Stall was released, most people’s reaction was pretty good. They held a film festival at Beijing at the time, and we showed this movie at Beijing University. It played nonstop from 7 p.m. one night to 6 a.m. the next morning. After the movie, many of the leading figures and famous directors on the Beijing movie scene, about 200-some people, all stood up and applauded for a long time. … They said they had never seen a movie so full of life..This movie reflected our lives, our time. This story, these things were happening in Guangzhou. At that time Beijing had not yet had such scenes. Upon seeing this movie, they said it was as if they could smell the stench of Guangzhou’s fish. They joked that it would be great when you can smell that in Beijing as well. More importantly, the movie let them experience something — economic reforms and opening up. Back then the slogan was there, but there still weren’t many tangibles and the people didn’t have a deep impression of reforms and opening up. But movies are imitative, and this movie gave people a strong experience. At the film festival, Beijing University students said, “Guangzhou’s present is our future. We love this kind of life.”

…

Later this movie was even selected as one of the 100 most influential movies in the history of Chinese cinematography. … Why? Because it was very representative. It was the first movie to reflect reforms and opening up and acted like a mile marker. Looking at it today, this film also had another special quality — it reflected the lives of the Cantonese people during reforms and opening up in the early 80s. … To understand life in Guangzhou in the 80s, to understand their attitudes toward life, you have to watch Yamaha Fish Stall.

…

Of course, there were dissenting opinions about the film at the time. Some said this movie was about money, and what is money? It’s the source of all evil, and that this was a revisionist film. This showed that at the time people’s way of thinking hadn’t changed completely yet. I felt that such opinions were normal at the time, because people’s views were still relatively traditional.

For a piece of work to be able to illicit such a big reaction from the audience and leave a deep impression, it’s because of one of two reasons: One, it really is a classic, such as War and Peace, Pride and Prejudice, and such. Second, some work can’t qualify as classics, but they were created at certain key turning points in history and carried a big message. Yamaha Fish Stall became such a hit because it was created at such a turning point — the key moment in China’s shift from planned planned economy to market economy.

Note: This entry is cross-posted at my book blog: http://thezhus.posterous.com.

The previous excerpt I translated from the book of interviews with pioneers in Guangzhou’s reform-and-opening-up period looked at one small Cantonese restaurateur’s experience. This time, I’ll offer a glimpse at one aspect of the cultural changes happening at that time by translating excerpts from another interview from the same book. This one is with Lü Nianzu, one of the earliest pop stars from this period. I still remember some of his biggest hits, including the title song from a TV series about the life of a famous Kung Fu master from the early 1900s. The gist of the TV series was basically: Awesome Kung Fu master defends his country’s honor in a time of crisis by thoroughly and repeatedly pummeling cartoonish foreign devils from Europe, Russia, and Japan with his bare fists. Here’s a video of the title sequence, with the song performed by Lü Nianzu, a stirring, nationalistic/patriotic, and incredibly catchy tune called “The Great Wall Will Never Crumble.”

And here’s Lü Nianzu performing the song live on CCTV’s Chinese New Year’s Gala 1985, a performance that played a key role in making him a national star.

Lü Nianzu was special because he was among one of the first singers in mainland China to sing pop music in Cantonese rather than Mandarin, and during the 1980s Guangzhou was a hotbed for the burgeoning pop-music scene in China. Much of that, however, has disappeared since the 90s as pop singers who sang in Mandarin shifted north to Beijing, which offered a much bigger market, while those who sang in Cantonese moved south to Hong Kong and a potential international audience. Still, it is interesting to read about the early days of Cantonese pop on the mainland, which sprang up in the newly created music lounges that were a shiny novelty in China and an appalling sight for many with more traditional mindsets (singers walking around on stage with the microphone?! Perish the thought!).

Here’s the interview excerpt:

When reform and opening up first began in Guangdong, there were many foreigners and out-of-towners who came to Guangzhou for business trips or to work, and most of them stayed at the Eastern Hotel. At the time, the Eastern Hotel was a pretty  high-class place, not a place that commoners could go into. Because reforms had just begun, in the entire city of Guangzhou there were basically no recreational facilities or venues. Even a high-class place like the Eastern Hotel didn’t have any recreational activities. Therefore when those people got off work in the evening, they were bored and could only sit at the hotel and stare at the ceiling.

In order to provide its guests with some decent recreation and diversion, the Eastern Hotel renovated its existing restaurant to create a music lounge where people could gather to drink tea and listen to live music. The new restaurant had a standalone stage and relatively modern audio equipment. During the day the restaurant served food, and at 9:30 at night, it turned into a music lounge.

The creation of the music lounge at the Eastern Hotel caused a big stir in Guangzhou and a lot of people wanted to go. But at that time, music lounge wasn’t something just anyone could attend. You must have a “homecoming certificate” to be able to buy tickets. A “homecoming certificate” is a special certificate that the government issued to Chinese in Hong Kong or Macao who were coming back to China to visit their relatives. After the Eastern Hotel, the second music lounge to appear was at the China tourism bureau’s Overseas Chinese Tower, because at the time many overseas Chinese who were coming back to visit were staying there. Therefore, in some ways, you can say that the music lounge grew out of trying to enrich the night life of the overseas Chinese who were coming back and the Chinese from Hong Kong and Macao who were working in China.

I remember that back then the Eastern Hotel charged five yuan for a ticket, and the Overseas Chinese Tower charged three yuan per ticket. At the time our monthly income was 36 yuan, so a five-yuan ticket was a very extravagant expense for many people back then. Nonetheless, there were a lot of people who came to listen to music. Basically you couldn’t buy a ticket on the day of the show.

When the music lounges first started, a lot of people couldn’t accept them. At the time they saw us as a scourge. For instance, in the past the microphone on stage was fixed in place. But it was different in the music lounge; you could hold the microphone in your hand and walk all around the stage. The newspapers made a big bruhaha over this. A lot of culture critics bashed us, saying we were learning the ways of capitalists. They felt that the stage is a dignified place and that it’s not dignified to walk around with the microphone. In addition, at that time the songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan naturally had a different style than those from China, so someone said the songs we were singing were “simply wasted notes.”

Later even the Cultural Department got involved and began to monitor and regulate the lounges, including imposing some restrictions on the performers’ attire, on-stage demeanor, and song selection. For instance, for every five songs that a performer sings, at least one of them must be a folk song. Each night the Cultural Department also sent a small team to come check for violations. Fortunately, the lounges weren’t subject to any really strict regulations.

At the time I was an actor in the Guangzhou Theater Group. The plays we performed included some songs, and I would occasionally do some singing. I remember singing in a play called “The Prodigal Son”. Perhaps because of my interest in music, in my spare time I would sing the songs from the plays and record it. Later someone discovered that I could sing pretty well, so they hooked me up with a gig at the music lounge.

Back then, you could make 10 yuan for each performance at a music lounge. At a time when our monthly salary was just 36 yuan, 10 yuan was a rather big figure for me, so it goes without saying that I was thrilled!

When we first started, because none of us were familiar with pop music, we performers looked everywhere to collect songs, such as some of the pop songs being sung by stars in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and some Chinese songs from the 1950s. At that time the special economic zone of Shenzhen received the biggest direct influence from Hong Kong and Macao. When we went to Shenzhen, we saw a lot of Hong Kong TV shows. The first time I heard the Hong Kongnese sing a song in Cantonese, I was stunned. I had heard Cantonese operas, but had never heard a Cantonese song before. It was a duet by Luo Min and “Fei Fei”, and it was very pleasing to the ear, so I really wanted to learn. The songs I had heard up till then were basically all red revolutionary songs, and love songs like this was pretty rare, so they were a new sensation to me.

Because I had built a pretty solid musical foundation at the theater group, when I learned these songs and performed them in the music lounges, I generally did pretty well and was often the closing act. Speaking of learning the songs, there is also an unforgettable experience related to that. Back then learning the songs mainly involved listening to tapes, but in Guangzhou you basically couldn’t buy such tapes. A friend of mine, after she went to Hong Kong, used her first month’s salary to buy a tape player and several tapes of Liu Wenzheng for me. I was really moved. She really helped me learn so many songs and made it possible for me to leave an impression on the music scene.

As far as pop singers go, we were the first group in the nation who dared to take on that challenge. There was a lot of pressure, and my theater group also criticized me and cut my pay. But I wasn’t afraid of anything back then. Perhaps ignorance was bliss. I was trying to make some extra money to help the family, and that motivation kept me going. Typically, each night around 7 p.m. the theater group would stage a play, and the subsidy for each play was about four mao (0.4 yuan). The music lounges generally started at 9 or 9:30, so after the play, I would rush to the music lounge to sing. When I was a performer at the music lounges, it was a great help to my family. Each month I could make two or three thousand yuan. Back then 3,000 yuan was probably unfathomable to many people. Through that, I quickly became a “Man of Ten Thousand Yuan”. On our street, we were the first household to buy a color TV. At the same time, I was among the earliest people in Guangzhou to have a motorcycle.

Perhaps because I sang pretty well, Li Huayong, Chen Gaoguang, Chen Dong, and I were dubbed the “Four Kings” of Guangzhou, and you could say we were kind of famous in Guangzhou. After you got “famous”, all the music lounges wanted to hire you, so sometimes I would do three or four shows a night, and I’ve been to the Overseas Chinese Tower and the Overseas Chinese Restaurant. Sometimes it was tough running all around. …

…

Perhaps because everyone saw that music lounges were big money makers — they were charging 10 yuan ticket — a lot of restaurant and hotel owners saw this opportunity and opened music lounges. … In the blink of an eye almost all the hotels in Guangzhou had opened music lounges. More unexpectedly, this caught on at the Guangzhou Song and Dance Troupe, the folk music group, and other trade groups. Even the Guangzhou acrobatics group formed a pop music troupe. But the one that was the best and the most influential was still the Eastern Hotel.

Later, even the common citizens could buy tickets to listen to pop music. I remember the first time I performed at a venue that was pretty public — it was at the Friendship Theater. It was also the first time they had invited a star from the music lounge scene to perform on a big stage. That really caused a huge stir in Guangzhou, and tickets were sold out quickly, because people had never heard pop music before. The day of the show, there were almost 10,000 people there, and my rendition of “Childhood” caused an eruption of screams, whistles, and applause from the audience.

The storm that was the Guangzhou music lounges caused rumbling around the country, because at that time, for a lot of people, walking around on stage with a microphone and singing pop music was very new, very hip, so a lot of people came from other places to Guangzhou to see this. CCTV also thought the music lounge was something new and came to Guangzhou to report on it. …

…

Back then the singers who were born in Guangdong generally tended to sing in Cantonese, because a number of them didn’t have very standard Mandarin accents. But I grew up in the north and lived in the south, so I was pretty fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. …

Later, when I began performing in the interior of the country, for some unknown reason, the people there loved to hear Cantonese songs. Perhaps they felt this was hip and that listening to Cantonese songs meant they were “with it,” even though nine out of ten of them couldn’t understand the songs. Because the lyrics, singing style, and pronounciation of Cantonese songs are very different from Mandarin, before I sang a Cantonese song, I had to briefly explain the lyrics to the audience. It’s really hard to picture the craze for Cantonese songs back then, especially in the Hunan area. If you don’t have any Cantonese songs in your repertoire, you might as well not go there.

For me, singing was a very enjoyable thing. Later, I felt that my prospects for development in the theater group weren’t that great, and the market for stage plays was starting to wither, so I left the theater group and joined China Records. During this period, I went on numerous tours with the company’s performing troupe to various places in China and left an influence around the country. I also released a lot of albums, which all sold one or two million copies. Nowadays most stars would have done really well to sell 200,000 albums. I think perhaps the reason my albums sold so well back then was that piracy still wasn’t as rampant. Even though people were recording and copying cassette tapes back then, it wasn’t as well done as now. And back then, the common citizen could also afford a legit tape at five or six yuan each.

…

At the end of the 80s and early 90s, music lounges were gradually replaced by karaoke. Many of us in the first wave of lounge singers don’t perform anymore. … I sang for about 10 years and have also quit. In 1991 I left the music scene and went to Guangzhou Television Station and became a TV host. Even though I occasionally make an appearance on some CCTV “lookback” specials, I very rarely sing these days.

Most of Guangdong’s performers have gone elsewhere, and the locally produced music has gradually vanished. … Almost no one sings in Cantonese anymore. …

As for the reasons for the decline of Guangdong’s music scene in recent years, firstly, I think it’s related to our market. Even though there’s a big market, Guangdong performers can’t command big money for performances. Some of the famous stars from Beijing get 200 thousand yuan for an appearance, while a star from Guangdong would have done well to get 20 or 30 thousand yuan.

Second, I feel that there’s not much unity in the Guangdong pop music scene. There’s no unifying force. Many of Guangdong’s popular singers, songwriters, and composers have all gone to Beijing to build their careers, because Beijing’s market is bigger. It is, after all, China’s center of politics and culture. It not only has a lot of cultural resources, but has also gathered top talents from around the country. This is very advantageous, whether for individual development or the advancement of the industry.

…

Note: This post is cross-posted at my book blog: http://thezhus.posterous.com.

I’ve started doing some research into China, and specifically Guangzhou, in the early to mid 1980s for my book. It’s a particularly interesting time period for me in part because it comprises half of the 10 years I spent in China. Of course, it also happened to be the first years of my life, so even though I lived in Guangzhou then, I really don’t have a strong recollection of those days, much less an awareness of the socio-economic changes that were under way. And there were plenty of changes happening then. It was the beginning of reforms in economic policy and China’s opening up to the world. Guangzhou, having been designated one of the first special economic zones, was on the forefront of the changes that would eventually lead to China’s rapid ascension.

As part of my research, I’ve stumbled across a very interesting book. Its title, roughly translated, is “Recollections by Pioneers of Guangzhou’s Economic Reforms and Opening Up”. The book is a series of interviews with various people from all walks of life who were part of that first wave of changes spurred by the new economic policies in Guangzhou. I think I’ll translate excerpts from some of the interviews and share them here, since they offer an interesting glimpse into how those nationwide changes in government and society were affecting the daily lives of individuals, which is the angle I’m trying to take with my book. The excerpts also shed some light on people’s mentalities at that time.

I’ll start with excerpts from an interview with Yong Zhiren, a man who opened a small eatery in Guangzhou in 1979 — the year I was born. Yong is a member of a large group known as “zhi qing” (知青), or literally “knowledgeable youths”. While the term in a general sense describes young people who have received high levels of education, it also specifically refers to students who, in the period from the 1950s through the 1970s, left the cities and settled in the countryside, either voluntarily or forced to do so by government policies. The irony is that the majority of people in this group actually only received middle- or high-school educations because of their often involuntary relocations. It’s also a group to which most members of my parents’ generation belong.

In March 1979 I left the countryside and returned to the city, going from a valley in Yanghong back to within the Guangzhou city limits. In order to make a living, many among us “zhi qings” began looking for our own work. I, too, went to the neighborhood living services bureau to submit a request to start a business and later received a business license. My original intent was to do something related to art, since painting and calligraphy were my interests and strengths. I wanted to use my specialty to earn money. However, the district I lived in, Xihua, was neither a cultural nor a commercial district, so my neighborhood committee suggested I open an eatery serving breakfast. This small district had many factory workers and students who needed a hearty breakfast, but there was only one breakfast shop, in a nearby restaurant, and every morning there were long lines at that shop. So I decided to open a breakfast eatery.

…

In the beginning I didn’t know how to make breakfast items, so my kind neighbors patiently taught me how to cook congee and make rice noodles. My menu and prices were: Rice noodles without beef tendons, 1 mao (1/10th of one Chinese yuan, or about 1.5 cents) per plate; rice noodle with beef tendon, 2.5 maos per plate; congee, 1 mao per bowl. Because the food was good and the prices low, business was booming from the first day, and the noodle and congee quickly sold out. However, because I didn’t make enough food the first day, I only made 3.7 yuan. The next day we managed things just right and quickly made more than a dozen yuan. At that time, the average monthly salary was only a few dozen yuan, so I felt there was a future in the restaurant business. Firstly, it would improve my life, and secondly it leaves me plenty of time to create art. I’m an educated man, so it would be a very productive and stimulating life to run a restaurant in the morning and then compose Cantonese operas and write essays in the afternoon.

…

My eatery kept doing better and better, and I faced the problem of not having enough help, since I had to not only make the noodles and cook the congee, but also bus tables and disinfect utensils. The mentality of those times was only slightly liberated, not yet completely liberated, so you couldn’t hire more than seven employees. It’s because Marx said hiring seven or fewer employees doesn’t count as exploiting the value of others’ labor, but rather still qualifies as socialism. Therefore in the beginning I was afraid to hire anyone. Fortunately the students who ate at my shop voluntarily came in small groups to help me bus tables. They said, “Uncle Yong, we’ll help you.” Every morning there were eight of them there to help. I tried to give them free breakfast, but they refused and insisted on paying.

…

When I first started operating, I ran into the problem of not having enough coal. At that time we were depending on coal obtained through coal stamps from the government, but that was only enough for personal use, not for a business. Our earliest solution was to barter: Customers could trade one coal stamp for one plate of rice noodle with beef tendons and a bowl of congee. Some families that didn’t cook breakfast themselves tended to have spare coal stamps, and they were willing to trade them for our food.

It went on like this for two years, then on August 28, 1981, the provincial secretary met with twelve young people from the province who had started their own businesses, and I was one of them. … I recounted my experience to him. … The secretary was very happy when he was done listening. He smacked the table, stood up, and said, “Great! Yong Zhiren, you are doing a great thing!” He told me that it’s terrific that young people have the courage to start their own businesses, and that the party and the government want to help us get started. He felt that our private businesses weren’t capitalist, but instead socialist. … He even asked us what problems we encountered in our businesses. I told him about the coal shortage. The secretary had people from many departments there at the time, and he told each department to take care of us. From then on the government gave me a lot of help. My coal problem soon fell to the Yuexiu district office, and that department appropriated four tons of coal to me at once. The government even sent the coal in separate shipments out of consideration that my house was small and couldn’t hold all that coal at once.

…

There was a derogatory name in Guangdong for private businesses — “small-time peddlers”. “Small-time peddlers” were not a respected group. At that time the common view around the whole country was that only working in a company was respectable, and that running a personal business was not honorable. In the beginning I also felt that way, since educated people have the pride that comes from possessing artistic skills. Later, my thinking gradually changed, and I felt that the career I pursued was an honorable one.

After reading about how many people in China are forgetting how to write Chinese characters because of the rise of electronic gadgets on which people simply pick the characters from a list, I decided to brush up on my Chinese writing. I was writing at a fifth-grade level when I left China, but by now I’ve forgotten how to write most of the characters I knew due to lack of practice (reading Chinese and writing Chinese are two very different things, with the latter being much more difficult). So one night last week, I found the text to the Chinese textbook I used in first grade and started copying the chapters by hand.

Once I got going, a surprising number of characters came back to me, and I was able to remember how to write most characters in the (albeit simple) text by the second or third time I encountered a particular one. In about an hour or so, I filled up two-and-a-half pages in a spiral notebook and actually felt pretty proud of myself. The experience also gave me a new (or rediscovered) appreciation for the Chinese writing system, especially how visual it is. Obviously, being a system that began as ideograms, there are some very obvious examples, such as this character, which means mountain:

But the visual nature goes well beyond that simple resemblance between the character and the object it represents. For a good illustration of this, take this character, which means “to break apart by hand”:

As you can see, it’s made up of three distinct components. Let’s look at the left and right parts:

If they look similar, it’s because they are both stylized versions of the same character:

… which means “hand”.

As for the component in the center, when by itself, it means to split apart:

So put the three together, and you have a character that literally says:

Left hand — split apart — right hand

When I see this character, I can literally see two hands pulling something apart.

Another example

Take this string of characters from another chapter:

These are six characters grouped into three pairs, with each pair consisting of what you would consider to be a word in English. You probably notice that these six characters all share a common component:

The translation of each pair of characters: butterfly, dragonfly, centipedes.

And that left component that all six characters share? It’s a stylized variation of this character:

… which means “insect”.

Now, take the first character in the sequence and compare it to this one:

The right two-thirds of each character are identical, so there’s got to be a relationship between them, right? In this case, the only similarity between them is the way they are pronounced (hu). In fact, the right two-thirds of each character is pronounced hu. As for their meanings, while the first one means butterfly, the second character means lake. Just as you can guess at the meaning of the first character by the component that means insect, you can guess the meaning of the second character by its left component:

… which means water.

This is how one can often deduce the approximate meaning and pronunciation of Chinese characters.

I’m currently reading a book about the education system in China from 1960 to 1980. It kind of reads like somebody’s dissertation (which it probably was), but I’ve found it to be an interesting read with some nice insights (and it specifically looks at the schools in Guangzhou, my hometown). One part of the book discusses how the classroom curriculum in the 1960s emphasized political ideology starting from primary school. While doing some additional research into the topic, I came across some images of Chinese textbook covers from different eras in the last 60 years. These are textbooks for first-grade Chinese class.

1950s

1960s

1980s to 90s

2000s

It’s interesting, and kind of disturbing, how clearly you can deduce the political mood of the respective eras just by looking at the covers of first-grade textbooks. Also quite telling are the first sentences of the first lesson in each of these books (translations below the original passage):

During the Great Leap era (late 1950s to early 1960s):

爷爷六岁去放羊，爸爸六岁去逃荒。今年我也六岁了，公社送我上学堂。

When my grandfather was six, he went to herd goats. When my father was six, he fled famine. I’m six this year, and the commune is sending me to school.

During the mid-1960s (beginning of the Cultural Revolution):

毛主席教导我们：在现在世界上，一切文化或文学艺术都是属于一定阶级，属于一定政治路线的。

Chairman Mao teaches us: In the world today, all culture or literature and art belong to a certain class, to a certain political line.”

1970s (latter stages of the Cultural Revolution):

最高指示：学习马克思主义，不但要从书本上学，主要还要通过阶级斗争、工作实践和接近工农群众，才能真正学到。

Highest directive: In order to study Marxism, one must not only study from books. Only primarily through class struggle, practical work and being close to the workers and peasants can we truly learn Marxism.

According to one source I found, the “highest directive” was at the beginning of every chapter in Chinese and math textbooks from the era.

1980s-90s (Beginning of new economic policies and China’s opening up to the world)

冰雪融化，种子发芽，果树开花，我们来到小河边，来到田野里，来到山岗上。我们找到了春天。

The ice and snow have melted. The seeds are sprouting. The fruit trees are flowering. We come to the bank of the stream, to the fields, and to the hills. We’ve found spring.

2000s

一去二三里，烟村四五家。亭台六七座，八九十枝花。

远看山有色，近听水无声。春去花还在，人来鸟不惊。

Both of these are classic Chinese poems and they are the first lessons in the reading and literature sections of the first-grade Chinese textbook for the new millennium, respectively. The first poem, which was written in the Song dynasty and is about a sightseeing trip, goes something like this:

Without realizing it, I had already gone two or three li. In the distance I see four or five houses with smoke coming out of their chimneys. As I walk, I see six or seven pavilions on the side of the road, and eight, nine, no, ten flowers on a branch near me.

The second poem, a Tang dynasty piece titled “Painting”, goes something like this:

From a distance, I can see the colors of the mountains, yet when I get close I cannot hear the sound of the waters. Even after spring has passed the flowers still remain, and when one approaches, the birds are not startled.

Perhaps the most striking thing about these two poems are the lack of political undertones in them. Both of these poems, by the way, are brilliant examples of classic Chinese poetry in terms of efficiency of words and the vivid imageries they convey with a meager 20 characters.

Side note: The book covers from the 1980s triggered a bout of nostalgia for me, as those were the books I used while in elementary school. Looking at the scans of the inside pages and reading the text from the chapters that people have posted online, it’s amazing how much of it seems so familiar to me even though until last week I had forgotten about all of it. There might be another blog post on the topic of Chinese textbooks as I scroll down memory lane.

The Los Angeles Times had a recent story about how some are worried that the increasingly frequent use of electronic devices in place of pen and paper is causing Chinese people to gradually forget how to write their native tongue. This is something I can definitely relate to. When I moved to the United States at age 10, I was in the fifth grade and had a decent grasp on Chinese writing. However, due to the lack of practice, it only took a few years for me to forget how to write a significant chunk of the characters I knew.

This doesn’t mean that I can’t read Chinese anymore. I can, in fact, read and comprehend probably about 65 percent of the Chinese text I come across on news sites. However, recognizing Chinese characters on sight is quite different from being able to write them out from memory. Last year, while we were visiting family in China, I was talking to one of my cousins and setting up a time to go visit his home. He handed me a piece of paper and a pen and told me his address, and somewhat embarrassingly, I could only write out two of the characters in the address (thankfully, my cousin wrote the whole address out for me).

As someone who has struggled to remember how to write his native tongue, I’m quite thankful for computerized Chinese character-input programs (such as this one) that allow me to punch out a comprehensible (if somewhat simple) e-mail to my relatives just by typing in the way the character is pronounced and then picking out that character from a list of homophones. This process does take a while, but it sure beats not knowing how to write a letter or not being able to trade IMs in Chinese with my relatives. On the other hand, it’d be a real shame if more and more people end up forgetting how to write Chinese characters because they are too used to picking them out from a list on a gadget. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen.

During the group tour portion of our trip to China in 2008-09, we were frequently trucked to touristy souvenir shops, where the tour would stop for 30-45 minutes while salespeople tried to fleece us. This was part of the package because the cost of the tour was kept low to encourage more tourism, and these “partnerships” with stores are the only way the travel companies can recoup their money. So we stopped at porcelain factories, traditional pharmacies, tea shops, jade factories, etc. Most of the time, we didn’t have much problem. We were traveling with a group of close to 20 people, and at least a handful of us usually ended up buying something at one of these stops. When we were visiting Wuxi, however, it was just the four of us, and the pressure-sale tactics at the pearl refinery there did get kind of annoying.

However, nothing we experienced in mainland China or Hong Kong can compare to this: A Hong Kong tour guide berated her group of tourists from mainland China on the bus for not buying enough swag at one of these tourist traps. Someone on the bus recorded the tirade, though it was just all shots of the back of the seat. As for what she’s saying, if you don’t speak mandarin, the video doesn’t tell you much except for the tone of her voice, which ricochets between angry and passive-aggressive. I’ve included a translated excerpt from a BBC story.

The female tour guide shouted that there is no free lunch in the world, meaning that the 1,000-plus yuan each visitor paid for the tour doesn’t even cover airline tickets, much less lodging and meals in Hong Kong.

She fussed at the tourists, saying, “I provide food and lodging for you, yet you won’t contribute. If you don’t pay me back in this life, you’ll still have to pay me back in your next life.”

The female guide even made a threat: When they stop for 1.5 hours at the watch shop, if the tourists don’t buy more stuff, they won’t get food or a hotel to stay in.

She also ridiculed the tourists, saying: “It’s fine if you are poor at home, but don’t act like this when you’re out.”

Some other tidbits I picked up from the video:

You’re the ones who owe me! I don’t owe you anything!

Next we’re going to a watch store. Anybody got any objections?! … This stop isn’t just for window-shopping; you need to buy something. Don’t just go in and walk around. Just now, you left the store before the allotted time was up. The other group spent 100,000-some yuan and was still in there. We only spent about 10,000 and yet we came out before time was up.

Wow! Just … wow!

Here’s a clip of the show. There’s a lot of talking at the beginning of the clip. Skip to about the 2:30 mark and the excitement starts.

Playing with sharp objects, wanton slaughter, ground littered with the slain corpses of your enemies, and one of the good guys getting a knife in the back (which, by the way, wasn’t in the novel). Now THIS is theme-park entertainment. Of course, if they did something like this at a family theme park in the U.S., somebody would probably lose their mind over it and cry about the “inappropriate” violence. It’s just another one of those reminders from daily life about how different cultures have different levels of tolerance for various vices, whether it be violence, sex, drugs, or rock & roll.

Also, apparently Qingming Riverside Landscape Garden isn’t the only place where you can watch this scene acted out. Here’s a clip of a different show in Hangzhou, a much higher-quality production than the show in Henan:

Here’s that same scene from the TV series based on the novel. Skip to the 3-minute mark. It’s in Chinese, but as you can probably guess from the previous two clips, you don’t really need to speak the language to know what’s going on in the scene. Warning for the faint of heart: Heads literally roll in this one.

In the wake of Spirit Airlines announcing that it will start charging $45 for carry-on bags that don’t fit under seats, five airlines have pledged that they will not follow suit. While this is sort of good news for travelers, it also underscores our desperate need for more transportation options so that there would be real competitors to keep consumers from being at the mercy of the airlines’ whim and greed.

Right now, if you need to travel relatively expediently between two places within the United States that are more than a couple hundred miles apart, airplanes are really your only option. A couple weeks ago, just on a lark, I looked up rail service between Durham and Providence, R.I. We make at least one trip to New England every year to see my in-laws, and we always fly into Providence. We would probably make that trip more often if not for the rising airfare (our last trip was about $400 for two tickets on Southwest around Christmas time, and we booked those well in advance), so I would be open to a different mode of transportation that costs less, even if it takes a few extra hours (flying usually takes about three to five hours including stopovers).

An Amtrak itinerary for the Durham-to-Providence trip

What I found was pretty disappointing. Two tickets on Amtrak from Durham to Providence cost about $200 to $260, which is $100-$200 less than flying. However, the travel time was simply unacceptable. The trip would have spanned two days! We would have to leave in the morning, and it would take more than six hours just to get from Durham to Washington, DC, where we would have to wait until 10 p.m. to catch the connection to Providence, which would not arrive until 7 a.m. the next day. While I’m willing to spend, say, up to eight hours making that 600-some-mile journey, I’m certainly not willing to turn this into an overnight trip, and I doubt many travelers would. Instead of taking the train, I might as well just make the 12-hour drive, save myself a few hundred bucks, and get there a lot sooner. Heck, I can even use some of that money for a hotel room en route and spend the night in a more comfortable place than a train cabin.

Compare that to China, which is busily putting together a high-speed rail network that will eventually run from Beijing in the north to my hometown of Guangzhou on the southeast tip. The section from Wuhan to Guangzhou opened last December and it takes only three hours to make that 600-mile trek. Fares for the high-speed rail are about $70 for second class and $110 for first class (and if the conditions of the cabins are anything like other trains in China, you want to be in first class if you can afford it). That’s pretty comparable to flying, where a plane ticket from Wuhan to Guangzhou costs anywhere from $80 to $160 for economy class. While the travel time by train is doubled (90 minutes flying vs. three hours by train), you’re still talking about just a three-hour trip. Now THAT is a truly viable alternative to flying and real competition for airline companies. Granted, that’s a line between two major cities, so it’s more like Atlanta-to-DC than Durham-to-Providence. Nonetheless, if it only takes three hours (instead of 24) to travel 600 miles, that’s going to make people more willing to drive an hour or two from wherever they live to a bigger city that would be on the high-speed line. If the U.S. can build a competitive high-speed rail network spanning the continent, I think a lot of travelers would flock to it, leaving air travel for mostly oversea or coast-to-coast trips. If nothing else, it would make the airlines have to compete and refrain from constantly screwing their customers by finding new, ridiculous things to charge for.