See China » Media & society

Why don’t they get us? An ongoing debate on the Paper Republic

Jessica — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:31:51 +0000

Wolfgang Kubin, one of the most famous translators of Chinese literature.

Xie Tianzhen, a professor of Shanghai Foreign Studies University.

On March 27, an (almost perpetual) interesting topic was brought up by the Paper Republic on the reception of Chinese literature, or the lack of it, among “Western readers”. After translating a Chinese article published in Liaoning Daily which is deeply troubled by the fact that the “literary bridge to the West… might be said to resemble a plank of wood spanning a wide river. This single narrow and flimsy link to the West is no longer sufficient,” this article attracted a long tread of debates from all sides. For those who are seriously interested in joining the debate, please check it out at the following link:

http://paper-republic.org/dylanking/why-dont-they-get-us/#comment_5585

Slow Down and Open Your Senses: Jiang Xun’s Letters to Young Artists

Sandy Cai — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:58:40 +0000

【Book and People】Jiang Xun: Letters to Young Artists

蒋勋：给青年艺术家的信

Adapted based upon an article by Yang Jian, Dec. 3, 2009

Source: Southern People Weekly Magazine

（Taiwan edition）(mainland edition)

Letters to Young Artists

By Jiang Xun

May, 2009 Sanlian Publishing

Jiang Xun (1947- ) is a well-known aesthetics scholar from Taiwan. He was born in Xi’an, and grew up in Taiwan, where he studied history and arts in Chinese Cultural University Taipei. Later on he went to Université de Paris 1972 for further research on arts. He went to Taiwan in 1976 and taught in Chinese Cultural University Taipei, Fu Jen Catholic University and East Sea University successively. In the mean time, he also served as the chief editor of Leone Fine Arts, a monthly magazine. As an arts critic, Jiang’s writings covered novels, essays, arts history and aesthetics.

A Letter to Young Artists is a book on the Chinese people’s realm of senses, including seeing, hearing, smell, taste and feeling. One could compare it with the Letters to Young Poets by Rainer Maria Rilke and In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki. In my opinion, these 3 books are equally remarkable.

Xie He (AD 470-5020, a painter in the Nan Dynasty (AD 420-589), wrote a book on paintings and graded paintings based upon the tastes and styles expressed by the paintings. On Grades of Poetry, written by literary critic Zhong Rong (AD 466-518), also rated the poems this way. In a New Account of Tales of the World (written in the 4th century AD), integrity and aesthetic tastes were the key words in grading various historical figures.

In terms of Jiang Xun‘s sensory memory, it was strikingly different at different times of his life journey. He could recall the sweet childhood, sour adolescence, and salty experiences as an army man. Generally speaking, cultures that don’t have a long history often prefer sweetness, while saltiness serves as the basis of other tastes. In today’s world, there is sufficient supply of food. Many people limited their salt intake for healthy concerns. Most people sweet less as less manual work is needed and there is little exercise, hence human body does not need that much salt. Gradually people start to forget the importance of salt.

In Jiang Xun’s opinion, it takes many years for him to gain any clue about the true tastes of his life. When Jiang was still young, he had no idea why his mother favored the bitter gourd. The bitter gourd was cut into fine cubes, quickly fried together with black, fermented bean sauce, chili oil, and bitterly salty dried fish cubes. In the kitchen, there is no escape from the haze of stinky, salty, bitter, and spicy smells, all combined in one dish. His mother invited him to try the dish for himself, and he would rather die than embracing the idea.

His mother talked about the war. She tried to escape the war with two young children. The railway station was full of refugees, desperately fighting for a chance to leave the horrifying battleground behind. Clasping two kids, no matter how hard she pushed and jostled, she could not make her way into the train. Outside the train station, dead bodied lying around, some were fragments, there were even pieces of intestines hanging on branches. Finally, she squeezed her two kids into the train through a window, and felt immensely relieved that anyhow her children would at least be safe.

After she passed away, to Jiang’s surprise, he started to fancy the taste of the bitter gourd. The bitterness lingering at the far end of his tongue reminds him of the weight of his mother’s hug at her deathbed. Comparing to this weighty, sobering bitter taste, sweetness is just too frivolous, superficial and insignificant. Tears rolling down to his lips, and he realized tears had it own taste as well. Right at that moment, Jiang started to appreciate the spiciness and bitterness remained in his mother’s mind, and what it meant for his life.

Later on, Jiang went to Shaoxing in southeast coast of China, and found the residents there relished smelly, fermented food, such as fermented common amaranth, stinky bean curd, half-hatched stinky eggs, and fermented bean curd paste, etc. A Frenchman once told Jiang that for any ancient culture, in the end, the ultimate culinary enjoyment is the savoring of “smelly food”. So Jiang came to the conclusion that smelly food is the essence for the tastes of ancient civilization.

Jiang’s book talks about the realm of people’s senses. In the above, we had a look on his ideas on tastes. What about the hearing?

It is said that the best material to make the ancient Qin is paulownia timber. The texture of paulownia is fine and delicate, which produces clear and melodious resonances. As the story goes, a great ancient Qin master searched for the right material to make a Qin for a long time without luck. One day, he was roaming the fields, and found a farmer burning firewood. The cracking of the burning wood startled him – it was the sound of the very finest paulownia he was looking for, and he hurried to have the fire stamped out and salvaged a block of wood, with part of the wood already being burned black. He made a great Qin out of this block of wood, and it was named charred rear Qin, to mark the scorches on the rear part of the Qin.

From this story, Jiang realized that it seemed even timber was searching for a bosom friend, a soul mate to rescue it from the cruel fate. The 8 common elements used to make musical instruments in China, including the metal, stone, silk, bamboo, water gourd, earth, leather and wood, were all out there, waiting for people with great insight to reach out to them, and become their soul mates to produce some awesome music.

Jiang also talked about vision in his book. In his opinion, people used to look at life statically for a thousand of years, under the traditional lighting. Nowadays, our visions are tumultuous, and unfocused. There are all kinds of intermingled images in our views and we have lost the ability to “see and contemplate”. Many insects and other life forms that need to sustain and propagate in the shadows are dying out due to exposure to excessive lighting and extended lighting.

For example, extensive light pollution damages the signals sent by the firebugs and they are facing extinction as they were not able to mate. If one sits a while in a room under candle light, he/she could see that the shadowy dark room is actually full of lights, very soft, peaceful, steady and sustained lights. In such a room, one would apply extra care to write each Chinese character, and he would write slowly, in contrast to the way people write hurriedly and impatiently, when he is under very bright lighting.

A poem by Wang Wei (AD 701-741) goes like this: “straight is the lonely line of smoke above the desert vast, and round, the sun that sets upon the long river”. It inspired Jiang to believe that, only after all the visual impurities were disregarded, could we really appreciate such simple, unadorned contours and silhouettes. “This river runs beyond heaven and earth, where the color of the mountain is both is and is not”, is from another poem by Wang Wei. Following more than a thousand years of tests and tries, Chinese painters grasped the skill to take advantage of the fine differences of the ink and it made Chinese paintings looked humble, visually speaking.

Jiang believed that the Chinese developed sophisticated aesthetic views. He said that color has been a critical element for the paintings of any nations. However, since the Tang Dynasty, Chinese painters tried to forget color, and shifted from colored paintings to ink and wash painting. It applies not only to landscape painting, but also to figure painting as well. For a millennium, colorless painting has been the mainstream of Chinese painting, which is a rather striking feature when we compare it with the same art form of other nations. Once being liberated from all kinds of complicated colors, painters in the Song (AD 960-1279) and Yuan (AD 1206-1368) dynasties fell in love with “no color” paintings. More specifically, they achieved “color” from “no color” and distinguished rich colors from the black ink, understood the vitality out of the “dead standing tree” and realized there were infinite possibilities out of the “blank space” in a painting.

Regretfully, our times are featured by hustle and jostle. Jiang reminded us that in Chinese, the word “busy” means “the death of the heart”. The hearts are dying in fast-paced, jumpy urban lives, not in the small towns. If traditional age-old towns and villages are preserved near the big cities, the tense and hasty urban life could be greatly mitigated. If the stressed out urbanites could find no where to escape to from time to time, all kinds of issues will emerge in the cities sooner or later.

In modern households, there are all kinds of machines and appliances to accelerate the housework, such as the dishwashers, microwave ovens and electric ovens. The slow-paced way of life in the past has been put to an end in the pursuit of modernization. There used to be an important form of architecture in China, – the pavilions. Pavilions are places for people to stop, take a rest, and enjoy the view. There is more to life than hurrying on to reach the destination.

The pavilions are not to be seen anymore, and small towns and villages are disappearing rapidly. Our realm of senses in cities is so crowded, rugged, and hurried, where is our way out?

Theater Review – Bian Xing Ji

Elyse Ribbons — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:09:29 +0000

Bian Xing Ji Play Poster

《变形记》Bian Xing Ji
at the SARS Stage at Chaoyang 9 Theater

Reviewed by Elyse Ribbons

Sitting in the cheerfully decorated small theater on the 4th floor of the Chaoyang 9 Theater compound, the atmosphere was full of expectations. The second part in an ongoing series by Director and Playwright Wu Ran, Bian Xing Ji was a delightfully corny exercise in theatrical comedy. A slapstick commentary on the state of romantic love in modern China, the show began with a critique of the lack of physical social interaction, with the two characters sitting on either side of the stage, forlornly miming a webchat.

This was followed by a brief introduction of how love normally occurs: through Cupid’s arrows. Arrows which are often not aimed very carefully, as two men who get shot start to grope each other after they are shot, much to the fear, horror and joy of the audience. So, two other Angels (who are married, incidentally) decide that they are going to give it a shot, literally, and locate a hapless boy and girl who just happen to be wandering through a park at the same time.

I think I'm turning Japanese

Comedic chaos ensues, as the couple, Dingding and Dangdang vehemently deny any attraction towards each other, and demand that the angels let them go. But, the flamingly exuberant angels try to convince them otherwise with several extended skits.

The first involves the angels going back in time and getting Dingding and Dangdang to fall in love with each other as children, and the audience follows them in their traditionally Chinese misadventures in young love.

After this scenario ends badly, the angels instead try to convince them by pointing out how wonderful and happy a lifetime of marriage could be. Dingding and Dangdang are then magically “married” and proceed to have a sickeningly sweet cartoon romance relationship, with slow motion overacting and candy-coated voices.

A whole day away from each other at the office has them on the brink of desperation, and tears. Again, this ends badly, so the angels try once more, with a mockery of a Japanese couple. The Japanese couple spend so much time in politeness and bowing to each other that they end up never actually having any time to make love. And several further scenes ensue, with the angels trying pretty much everything to get the couple to fall in love, usually causing much misery for the angels themselves.

Angels of... Love?

While each of the skits were funny in their own way, there were too many of them, and the show ran on just a little too long. The director is forgiven, as he created one of the most laughed-at theatrical shows that I have seen to date in Beijing.

A show that was more sitcom than romance, it blended a mix of pop-cultural references – no less than 3 direct allusions to scenes from the 2010 Chunjie Wanhui – and movie and film. The best satires of the evening were undoubtedly the fake advertisements, interrupting the scenes at hilariously inappropriate times.

Overall, it was a lighthearted way to pass an evening. And the smiles on the faces of the sold-out audience were a positive affirmation of a night well spent, and a play well written (and brilliantly delivered!).

As another audience member put it, “if you’re into modern romance, fashionable trends, and comedy, then you have to like this show.” According to the Director, their group is planning several other continuations of these themes in future parts of this series. Definitely worthwhile to check out, though its recommended to bring a Chinese friend along for the show, or you might miss out on a lot of the jokes.

A century of cross-culture magazine: the Eastern Miscellany

Jessica — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 05:31:20 +0000

The Eastern Miscellany (东方杂志), launched in Shanghai by the Commerical Press (商务印书馆) on March 11, 1904, is one of the earliest and most comprehensive Chinese magazines in the 20th century. After being suspended in 1948 and relaunched in 1999, it is now providing full access to its half-century digital database of a rich wealth of texts, pictures and resources for historical studies. Many of the articles within the archive of the Eastern Miscellnay are concerned with China’s relationship with other parts of the world, including diplomacy, education, commerce, fashion, movies and advertisement. The Chinese-language database is now accessible on a payed subscription basis at http://em.refbook.com.cn/.

The Eastern Miscellany is a literary hub for such groundbreaking thinkers such as Liang Qichao (梁启超 one of the forerunners of modern Chinese journalism and leading advocate of constitutional monarchy), Cai Yuanpei (蔡元培 educationist and chancellor of Peking University), Yan Fu (严复 scholar and translator who first introduced Darwin to China), Lu Xun (leading Chinese writer and critic and one of the founders of modern Chinese literature) and Chen Duxiu (co-founder and first chairman of the Communist Party of China). Having witnessed the demise of the Qing Dynasty, the founding of the Republic of China, the end of the first World War, rise of the Communist Party of China, the Japanese invasion of China and the Second World War and the Civil War of China, it is valued by historians as an “ultimate resource and archive center” for modern Chinese history, and lauded as “magazine of magazines”.

Columns of Eastern Miscellany first started from digests and then developed into a wide range of topics including editorial, social comment, royal decree, domestic and civil affairs, diplomacy, military, education, finance, industry, communications, commerce, religion, records, documents, research, translations and fiction. The digitized database now contains the entire collection of this magazine with altogether 819 editions in 44 volumes, covering a total of 30,000 articles, 12,000 pictures and 14,000 advertisements.

A glimpse of some of the titles of this significant magazine gives us a sense of how the Chinese people, or the literari, looked at their world of that time:

In commemoration of the 600th anniversary of Danti, Albert Einstern and His Theory of Relativity, History of British Labour Movement, Constitution of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, New Educational Systems in Hamburg, On the Necessity of Establishing Meteorological Observatories, Special Edition on Agriculture and Farmers in China, Paintings of Houhan Dynasty, Poems in Ancient Meters, Women and the Profession of Dentists, and the Annual Amount of Heroin Consumed by Hollywood Stars.

Feb. 21, International Mother Language Day

Jessica — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 07:37:09 +0000

How many mother tongues do the Chinese speak? Since Feb. 21 was proclaimed by UNESCO as the Intenational Mother Language Day, it is befitting to introduce the 80+ dialects and spoken languages now used by the 1.3 billion Chinese population across this vast land (and 30.66 million Chinese expats too!).

Roughly speaking, Chinese spoken languages are used by 56 ethnic groups spanning four main linguistic families, namely Sino-Tibetan (Mandarin, Southern, Tibetan, Kam-Thai, Miao-Yao), Indo-European (Tajik, Russian), Austro-Asiatic (Mon-Khmer) and Altai (Kazahkh, Uygur, Kirghiz, Mongolian, Manchu-Tungus, Korean). And for the Han people who constitute over 90% of the overall Chinese population, there are seven main Chinese dialects which can be totally distinctive and indecipherable to each other. The seven dialects are: Mandarin/putonghua/northern 普通话/官话/北方方言 spoken as the official language based on dialects of Beijing, Wu 吴语 spoken in the eastern regions such as Shanghai，Cantonese 粵语/广东话 spoken in the south including Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao, Hakka 闽方言/客家话 spoken in Fujian and Taiwan, Xiang 湘方言 used in Hunan and Gan 赣方言 used in Jiangxi in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River.

Linguistic diversity of China has given rise to a variety of regional jokes, rich repertoire of local folklore, literature, theater and movies. Not only are the Chinese fond of “looking for town fellows” with similar dialects which immediately bring them close to each other, there are also many academic studies on the “cultural/personality differences” among different dialect regions. If you are able to understand the cultural connotations and nuances between different Chinese dialects, you’d deserve the name of a real “China buff” （中国通）. But of course, if you have picked up the tone of a too local Chinese dialect too readily, it may give your Chinese friends great amusement just as if you hear a Chinese speak Texan English too well.

References:
A very useful map of Chinese dialects made before 1998, from >San Diego State University.
The Chinese Pear Stories, a project recording different dialects by Professor Wallace Chafe of the University of California.
Wiki on Chinese dialects.

Spring Festival Spectacular 2010: a review

Omar Jones — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 03:32:25 +0000

The pixy songtress Wang Fei

The annual Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television (CCTV) is watched by more people than any other annual TV event on the planet.

It’s loved and hated in the same way Christmas specials and other regular TV events in the West have their boosters and their detractors.

Below is a review of the 2010 Spring Festival Gala, by Roddy of Chinese Forums. You can read other takes on the Spring Festival Gala at The China Daily and The Global Times.

************************************************

The 2010 Spring Festival Gala wasn’t very good. The two discoveries of the 2009 show – comic Xiao Shenyang and magician Liu Qian – both returned but failed to add last year’s value, and nobody else – newcomer or old hand – picked up the slack.

Despite talk of Xiao Shenyang getting his own skit in which to shine, he was left supporting a Zhao Benshan effort which got a few laughs but none from the belly. Whether or not Xiao Shenyang could have carried an act himself is up for debate, but either way he was under-utilized here. Even those who despise him didn’t have anything to get their teeth into.

The other comedy pieces were lacklustre. Looking back, Jiang Kun, Dai Zhicheng and Zhao Jinsheng’s threesome and the Feng Gong-led sketch stand out as respite from what seemed like a lot of long skits about husbands and wives, but at the time they didn’t split any sides.

Liu Qian magicked coins and then his arm through solid glass. But once you’ve seen a man put a ring in an egg as we did last year, he can’t really surprise you. The performance part of the act perhaps needs
work – he leaves us impressed, but not entertained.

Wang Fei (王菲 aka Fay Wong) performing at a Spring Festival Gala always seemed a bit odd, and she looked somewhat unsure about the idea herself. Regardless, her performance of Legend was one of the better parts of the evening and thankfully she dodged the indignity of a few dozen dancers in lime and pink confections. Song Zuying wasn’t so lucky, but still managed to look like she was enjoying herself.

The geographically-motivated quartet of Wang Leehom ( representing Taiwan) Sun Nan (P.R.C), Joey Yung (Hong Kong), and Chita Yu (Macau) made a strong argument for a return to miming, at least for performances thrown together using a map.

A tribute to the China’s U.N. peacekeepers killed in the Haiti earthquake was of course expected, but bringing the bereaved families into the studio . . . well, it served as a not-in-Kansas-anymore
moment.

Add in the usual politics (“Party Policy yakshi”, went one song), ethnic minorities (yakshi is Uyghur for good) and randomness (a song about taking photos?) and you’ve got a pretty forgettable evening.

Which is, of course, what we all expected.

China’s net lingo

Daisy Wheeler — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:13:25 +0000

The popularity of Chinese language classes is at an all-time high, as more and more people sign up to xuexi putonghua (study Mandarin). However, China’s 400 million Internet users have some phrases that new students won’t find in any dictionary or language textbook.

Just as the development and increasing use of the Internet put words only formerly used by technology professionals or geeks into mainstream English, so has Chinese adapted to describe the new situations and lifestyle of a wired world.

One of the most distinctive phrases is qiang shafa, or “grabbing the sofa.” This describes the first person to leave a comment on a new blog post.

How is commenting on a blog post like sitting on the couch? One netizen said it this way: “the first person who sits on a sofa is always the most comfortable. Similarly, the first person to leave a comment on a post generally sets the tone for the discussion that follows.”

More commonly now, old words are given new meanings. A very simple example of this is the use of “88″ during online chats. In English, this would be pronounced “eighty-eight.” In Chinese, the number eight is said ba. Saying it twice would be “ba ba.” Over time, this has become shorthand for “bye bye,” commonly used even by Chinese who speak little or no English, and now serving to end a chat or announce the user’s departure.

From classical Chinese comes the word jiong. In its proper context, the word, little used in modern vernacular, means “bright.” However, it is used in an entirely different way online. Because the character resembles an unhappy face, it has taken on the meaning of “sad” or “frustrated.”

So popular has the character’s use become that it has moved from the online world into the physical, with some companies using the phrase in their marketing, and some clothing and bag designers incorporating it into their products.

Other symbols can be ascribed meaning based on some combination of their Chinese meaning, their spelling in English or in hanyu pinyin, China’s official romanization system. For example, the phrase “FB” can mean both “food and beverage,” suggesting a date to meet for a meal (“Want to FB tomorrow evening?”), drawing on the first letter from an English phrase. It can also refer to the Chinese phrase fubai, or corruption, with which excessive spending on food and drink is sometimes associated.

Some words have no particular meaning at all in their original context, but are now imbued with netizen fervor. Someone who likes to shai shows off their things, usually some type of collection, or something newly acquired. A few Internet users who have particularly good taste or are quick to buy new items or gadgets find large followings on their blogs, as the audience waits to see photos of each new product uploaded.

Learning Chinese may be challenging, but to take those skills online and use them in Chinese chatrooms and instant messaging — now that’s fluency.

So, anyone want to grab the sofa?

See China » Media & society

Why don’t they get us? An ongoing debate on the Paper Republic

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