投名状 The Warlords

Of all the stories about the crucible of China's 19th century tumult, this one manages to convey well the decadence, corruption, machination of politics, heroism, and the tragedy of power.

Particularly clever is the artistic license the movie used to portray the three heroes of this period: Zeng Guofan, Zuo Zongtang, and Li Hongzhang. They are given different silhouettes and there are three old men in the movie who come across as corrupt bureaucrats. This pays homage to the theory that Zeng Guofan masterminded the assassination of Ma Xinyi in 刺马案, one of the four unsolved cases in the late Qing period.

What impress me the most is the incorporation of Beijing Opera in the movie. I like the nuanced expressions on the opera troupe's faces and how their intensity is transferred to the main actors. Makes me wish I studied about film and how to direct them.

And best friends shouldn't fight over a woman, because whoever wins everybody looses....Unless the woman in question is Xu Jinglei, in which case everything is fair game.

Google Notebook - Good but Not Perfect

I have been using it for quite a while now, and I have to say it is really good. The option that I really wish it has is to save pictures directly to Picasa so even if the source website does down, the notebook will still show the original pictures.

One effect of the notebook is that it cut down the number of my blog posts. But that can be both good and bad.

Course of a Christmas Dinner Conversation

Invited to the annual Christmas dinner at parents' friend's house. Every year, the conversations are somewhat embarrassing if not just out right hilarious. It made my day that I discovered that people of my parents generation have a good sense of humor when it comes to arranged marriages.

So the story went - a person (and if you think this is about to take a ethnocentric turn, you are not wrong. For how could it not? When you gather a bunch of people who were as weather beaten as those of the Cultural Revolution generation, and put them around a family dinner table in America, the subject inevitably turns to how good their descendants in America has it going), he went through three years of college in UoH, did not graduate, and went back to China to find himself a bride. There he listed four conditions in his er... request, I guess.

Bride candidates must be:

1) Not from a big city
2) Not from a cadre family (so no princesslings)
3) Not from a rich family
4) Not from an intelligentsia family

So he found a bride who came from a small and humble village in the Northeast and he and his children lived happily ever after.

This is all told by a person having married a well educated women from a big city. The conditions are a bit medieval, people around the table said, but then everyone went on to praise the person for his pragmatism and insight.

Merry Christmas! Love and well wishes all around, especially for bride candidates!

What Does It Mean to Be Modern?

The mantle of Lu Xun weights heavily, and those of us Chinese left to construct a modernity from a nation that is catching up all live in his shadow.

I think that the Chinese people of this generation is the best to take on questions of modernity. Tempered by a more open environment, all the while having inherited the spirit that passed on by the revolution: that our destiny lies in our hands. Not to say we haven't been confronting this problem for the past century, but if we fail to face this problem now, when we are just embarking on a true awakening of the Chinese people, then how would we develop? I think we should not expect this awakening to be uplifting, rather it would be the realization that we took a step, and another, and another, awaits.

Christmas Gifts

Merry Christmas!

Gifts/or somethings worth revisiting, current goal is to find new things next year, but some of these are due to repeat:

Books:
One China, Many Paths
To The Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman (makes me feel like a child when I compare myself to the people in this book: intelligence, willpower, experience)
The Hedge Knight
A Game of Thrones (He dreamt an old dream, of three knights in white cloaks, and a tower long fallen, and Lyanna in her bed of blood)
Selected Poetry of Rabindranath Tagore

Blogs:
Danwei

Magazines:
The London Review of Books (seems like my education [the parts worth mentioning] consists mostly of this magazine)

Movies:
Bourne
Election, Triad Election
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Smiley's People

Language Police:
"Mikhail Mikhailovich, I challenge you to a duel!"

Revelations

Miss the opening music from Eve: Revelations so here it is.

羊毛出在羊身上

Tenku Senki Shurato

old anime

Al Jazeera - Moving China

Al Jazeera has some surprisingly good China reporting



Reporting on the urbanization's effect on the countryside.

This loneliness is familiar, yet different. After moving here, my parents are always present but ever distant. Perhaps gripped by uncertainty while dealing with the lost of security back home, something like seeing a bridge start burning on both ends while three quarters of the way across. You need to experience it to understand.

My mother is a doctor who would have done well had she stayed in China. I think she dealing with her lost must have be harder than myself dealing with my descend from perfectionist to mediocrity. I just realized that it is no surprise that after coming here, I stopped receiving praises and encouragements and instead only admonitions and terse reminders to do well. So it merely took one year, 3rd grade to fourth grade, for me to transform from a energetic and talkative trouble causing child to a shy and quiet person. Finer points of parenthood was lost somewhere.

Time grew, and inevitably I became detached from my parents emotionally and intellectually. There was nothing I saw in the admonitions other than they being the only efforts that can be afforded from emotional exhaustion. And there is no way I can intelligently tell them what how I think since I refuse to speak to them in English out of habit. Eventually, I just wanted to get away from it all, the choking weariness and the lack of encouragement. But after four and a half years in school I have come to understand what it feels like to have your ambition atrophy and be on life support. Now I appreciate what it feels like to be weary and tired.

Some of us only do well in the most optimum environment, that might be going to the right college, or just having parents around. It is not so much regret as a loneliness.

Drugs bring Beijing into Burma

One of Lindsey Hilsum's thoughtfully written columns

Koyaanisqatsi

I love this movie. It will be the first thing I play once I get a 1080p LCD TV.

Bai Chongxi

Bai Chongxi - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I always heard that Bai Xianyong's father was a famous KMT general, but I didn't really know how significant he was until I started doing research on Du Fu's identification with Zhuge Liang. One thing led to another and I stumbled upon Bai Chongxi.

Banksy

awesome stuff

Metamorphosis One

梦中之情何必非真

"Love in dreams need not be unreal."

In many ways, writing about dreams is about the intimation of something that need not be unreal.

What promise? What shadows? Why such sadness?

Papers of Yesteryear

Was just reading over some of my high school papers and wow... they are so terrible yet so good at the same time. Nowhere has an amalgamation of Victorian style diction explained simple things with such pretense and naivety. The first steps of writing are so incoherent, messy, and infantile. In all respects expressing myself more genuinely as a person than the last minute hacked together papers I write in college.

We don't write for ourselves anymore, even this.