I grow tired of this preoccupation with backwardness, corruption and provincialism in Chinese popular culture and contemporary literary memory. Having said that, I despised reading yet another satire, 爸爸爸. It is no different than watching the mindless dramas and TV shows, except just imagine having that told to you as a story in a mocking tone as oppose to watching:
1) nasal gazing historic dramas which falls further into two categories:
a) costume dramas that dulls the viewer's senses, that which not only do not encourage people to look to the future but glorify a backward, hideous, and pitiful past where China was shut off to the outside world
b) pre-civil war 1920-30 Shanghai, whore of the orient, how good it was for the rich and corrupt that pay no attention to the nation's survival. You too, as oppose to the intended revulsion, will secretly admire their decadence
2) imitation of the worst type of schadenfreude western reality TV shows
With a TV I can alway skip it, the unfortunate thing with a novel is that you don't realized how much time was wasted until after you grind through parts or all of the reading. Utterly lacking in the Chinese literary memory are science and pluralism. The world is spinning too slowly. I wish it were fast as to throw Chinese people out of their seats.
