I’m now on Facebook which is ridiculous. If blogging is the cocaine of internet time wasting, then Facebook is crack. Seriously. Last night I spent an hour of quality research time creating “Simpson-character” likenesses of YJ and me. Yikes.
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I’m now on Facebook which is ridiculous. If blogging is the cocaine of internet time wasting, then Facebook is crack. Seriously. Last night I spent an hour of quality research time creating “Simpson-character” likenesses of YJ and me. Yikes. From Variety: Producer Steven North is seeking approval from Beijiing authorities to use Chinese extras and locations to film “Challenging Heaven,” a movie about the rise of Mao Zedong and the creation of the PRC. The screenplay by John Goldsmith is an amalgamation/adaptation of two books: Philip Short’s biography Mao and Sidney Rittenberg’s 1993 memoir The Man Who Stayed Behind. Rittenberg, a young American GI who made his way to Yan’an following World War II and became acquainted (more or less) with the CCP leadership, especially Zhou Enlai. Never as much of an “insider” as he and some others believed, Rittenberg remained in the country after 1949 as an interpreter/token/prisoner. He returned to the United States in 1977. In an interview for Variety, North said: “This is a very positive portrayal of Mao, and we are hoping that one the script clears the approval process, China will come up with services and support.” I’m not sure how I feel about trying to sugarcoat any film version of Mao, (For a recent painful depiction of the Mao years, Fengming: A Chinese Memoir about the torment of a young journalist’s wife during the Anti-Rightist Movement and after) but if one had to Danwei has a great post on why the Ming (1368-1644) is so hot these days. (And they’re not talking about the hobbled Yao, either.) Joel Martinson asks, “Has the Qing been mined to exhaustion as a source for popular culture, or have people simply grown tired of historical teledramas featuring costumed characters wearing queues?” One of the books mentioned in the Danwei post is the Ray Huang classic, 1587: A Year of No Significance. It has its flaws (not the least of which is the translation of the Ming court diaries used in the English title) and the anti-CCP subtext is hard to ignore. (Huang belongs to that school of historians that views history as an effective tool with which to whip contemporary governments into shape. Sima Qian is somewhere smiling.) All that said, it is one of the most accessible books on Chinese history for the non-historian, well-written and full of information about a fascinating period: the end of the Ming. The division of the book into biographical sketches (another homage to the historians of China’s past) also makes it a great book on a plane or train. I feel the Ming gets overlooked a little bit by historians At the risk of slipping into what China Law Blog refers to as a “noodle” blog, I had some thoughts while wandering around Tianjin the last couple of days before the Spring Festival. YJ’s mother is the sweetest human being on Earth. She really is. But like an evil genie, when you are in her presence you have to watch what you wish for. Two weeks ago, in the course of a conversation about food, I mentioned that I really liked hongshao rou. You can guess what happened. The next morning, YJ’s mom went to the market and bought two kg of meat. For the last fourteen days, hongshao rou has been served every lunch and dinner. Don’t get me wrong, I love hongshao rou, but a fortnight of marinated fatty pork is a lot for anyone. It’s getting to the point where I need a couple of EKG paddles and a heart stent just to get out of bed in the morning. In order to compensate for my creaking cardiovascular system, I have taken up morning exercise namely, basketball. Each morning around 6:30, I pay my 3 jiao to play basketball at the local park. It’s early but the Chow Yun-fat is starring in the third installment of Pirates of the Caribbean as Chinese pirate Sao Feng. (Whose name refers to the classical Chinese poem: “The Asian market, he whispered/at a board meeting for Disney/how best to capture it/hire a Chinese guy/said the marketing rep softly.”) Piracy in China has a long, long history. Koxinga was a famous example (though his dad was more of the pirate.) And pirate crews operating along China’s coast in the 16th and 17th centuries could be surprisingly multi-cultural affairs with mixed crews of Chinese, Malays, Japanese, Europeans, and even escaped African slaves. AP has the story on the new flick along with some other interesting fun facts on 19th century piracy around the island of Lantau. (Though the line between “pirate” and “opium smuggler” on 19th century Lantau was probably razor thin, for AP’s purposes, “pirate” sounds cooler than “drug dealer.”) Global Voices Online looks at Cambodian scholar Keng Vannsak’s recent remarks during a radio interview that have sparked a historical controversy in the Southeast Asian nation. Keng argues that 12th-century King Jayavarman VII, a famous Buddhist sage-king in Khmer history, was actually “an utterly ruthless monarch” whose devotion to building temples |
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