It's beginning to look (a little) like Christmas...

The holidays have arrived at the Shatin mall, and this year's decoration concept is, well, special. Baby Santa Claus.

Thanksgiving 04

I've made cranberry sauce every year since I was about five years old. It's the only thing I know how to cook.

Fotanian Open Studios/Diesel Party

Friday night I went to a massive art opening in Fo Tan. For the past few years, HK artists have realized the abundance of empty (and cheap) warehouse-space in this old industrial district, and have begun setting up studios here. They now number over 20. I just got to see a few on Friday, but it was enough to make me a fan. The feel of the place is so exciting-- raw walls, industrial elevators, aching neon corridors and then softly lit interior studios, that have been molded into human form. I like it when people take an inhospitable space and turn it liveable. Tailoring the world to human scale. I must say the place itself was more exciting than much of the art, but some pieces were quite fresh, like a chair with cut-out holes in the seat, and a little loft area (accessible by scary, swaying, freestanding staircase) that was a dream-evocation of a diorama interior. For some reason the opening only lasted two hours (not nearly enough time to see all the blocks), but I'm planning to go back soon.



Not nearly as exciting was the party for Diesel clothing I went to afterwards. My journalist friend Robin invited me since he was supposed to cover it for the newspaper, and it sounded appealing for one reason: it was on a helicopter pad. The location was pretty sweet-- the West Kowloon HeliPad right by Victoria Harbor, with an amazing view of the Central skyline (and all the new, gaudily festive Christmas lights adorning the buildings). But the party and fashion show was kind of ridiculous. Highlights included: bright green cocktails that tasted like Strepsils, brownies cut into the shape of stars and served on long wooden toothpicks, drag queens, capoeira dancers, ugly clothes, badly dancing models, space-ship sound effects (?) and thousands of blue balloons set free into the night sky with "wishes" attached to their strings.

Changsha

Went to a teaching conference in Changsha over the weekend. Changsha is in Hunan Province, and is where Mao Zedong grew up. It was cold there. Now I have a cold.

Notes:
-Hard-sleeper overnight train Shenzhen-Changsha. Not as bad as expected. It was like a very public sleepover.

-Genuine sleepover at the ELI house in Yali Middle School. Super-fun sitting in on classes. Some English names of Yali students include:

Yuki Juice
Email
Rubbin
Tasty
Allen Iverson (there are two of these)
Killer
Killik
Smiler (pronounced "Smeeler")
Winkids (pronounced "Win-kids")
Fashion Words
Snakie (alternately pronunced "Snackie" or "Snakey")
Coker
Genius Jeffson
Jackrary (combination of January and February)
Angel King
Pepsi
Unicorn (a husky 13-year old boy)
Small Bat
No Foot Bird

- In true Hunan cuisine, there are usually more chili peppers than actual food.

- Intense badminton in a gym in the middle of what appeared to be a construction site.

- Sudden fireworks going off as we walked down the street (my Los Angelan instincts making me duck for a drive-by)

- Saw a cooked dog at a roadside snack stall which looked surprisingly like a giant, skinned rat.

- Poshest KTV (karaoke bar) I've yet been to. My set list included "Sweet Child of Mine," "Heart of Glass," "I Just Called to Say I Love You."

- Please Tight The Safebelt. Back to HK. The last few weeks of term await.

Star Ferry Cheung K

I may have mentioned that recently I was in a short play that comprised the half-time show of the Andrew Parkin Cup, an English drama competition held every year at CUHK. It was basically a series of funny sketches, one of which was about ridiculous displays of public affection between couples on the MTR (Hong Kong metro), and featured a couple singing a Cantopop duet on their karaoke-enabled cell phones. Well, art imitates life and all that. This morning I received an email with the following link.
Star Ferry Karaoke

Last Life in the Universe

Last week I saw the most recent film by Thai filmmaker Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Last Life in the Universe. Beautiful, textured, intentionally evasive, but worth every frame (well duh, every frame is shot by Christopher Doyle). The production design is almost too good to be true (kind of disturbingly retro-photo-trendy). Also the ladies (like me) will like it because it stars actor, singer, artist, director, and god-among-men Asano Tadanobu. Anyhow. I've been interested in Thai cinema for the past few years, and even applied for a Fulbright Grant last year to research with the Thai Film Foundation in Nakornpathom (I didn't end up getting it). Last Life in the Universe just shows again how exciting the Thai film scene is right now. I'm hoping to go to Thailand for lunar new year break... maybe I can stalk some of these directors then.
Watch a (French) trailer here.

Guangzhou

I spent the weekend in Guangzhou, China. Rachel and I caught the through-train from Kowloon on Friday evening, and had fun changing the lyrics of "Midnight Train to Georgia" into "Midnight Train to Guangzhou". We arrived a few hours later, met up with Seiji, Luke and Diana (the other Yale-China teachers), and ate amazing, spicy noodles on a side-street near Zhongshan University. The people who ran the noodle shop were Chinese Muslims-- a minority I knew existed but had never seen until this trip. They look-- different. More Central Asian. So weird to see ethnicities your brain doesn't know how to categorize. After dinner we watched the Amerified remake of The Grudge on pirate DVD-- funny to see Sarah Michelle Gellar (trying to) speak Japanese. Even more horrifying than the movie was the thought that I must look like that when I (try to) speak Cantonese. The next two days saw ample opportunities to do so, as Guangzhou is part of Guangdong, land of Guangdungwa. Most people speak Putonghua (Mandarin) also, but it was exciting to try to speak Canto in its home turf-- and usually without the option of English (that is more widely spoken in Hong Kong).

Guangzhou was also great because of...

- Dirt cheap DVDs (including really unexpected finds, like Tarkovsky, Fassbinder, Beat Takeshi box set, all for 6 quai each, about .75 US cents)
- Amazing food (spicy noodles! daan-tat [dim sum egg tarts]! the best boba tea i've yet had in asia!)
- Little white pekingese-faced dogs everyplace
- Cute babies
- Very few Western tourists (I think I saw maybe 5 white people in 3 days, besides Luke and Rachel and myself in the mirror)
- Old pretty colonial buildings on Shamian Dao
- Visiting the awesome gallery Vitamin Creative Space where they're installing a new show by Zheng Guogu
- Going to a bar called "E.T. Space". Yes, like E.T. the Space alien. The decor made it feel like the inside of an insane clown's brain. And when Luke came back from the bathroom, he related that while at the urinal an "attendant" came up to him and placed hot towels on his neck and massaged his shoulders. While he was peeing. How thoughtful.
- Meeting some of Seiji's students
- Hanging out with chicks named Lion and Keanu
- A reflexology foot massage that was better than drugs

On the other hand, there were some disturbing things I saw in Guangzhou...

-The insane pollution. I thought Hong Kong was bad, but in GZ we were trying to hail a cab in the middle of a freeway (don't ask), and I looked up and suddenly realized that there was this skyscraper on the other side of the road that disappeared into the smog about two-thirds of the way up. Although the Pearl River didn't smell as much like feces as I had remembered.

- A bizarre stand-off between a bunch of cops and a bunch of ethnic minorities. These men in blue fezzes were standing around on this busy shopping street, surrounded by cops who were trying to arrest them (?) for not having hawking permits... or something. But there was a huge crowd and I felt like any minute it was going to escalate into violence (maybe I was being paranoid because of the fierce clashes between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities in Hunan last week). Eventually it dispersed.

- Police apprehending a criminal on the street and proceeding to beat him. Then take off his shoes, drag him across the street by the hair, and use his belt to tie his hands. We didn't watch the rest.

- A child being beaten with a badminton racket by her grandmother. On her face and back.


Overall, it was a good trip. The last time I was there, in March of 2003, it was raining, it was cold, I had some kind of flu, SARS had just started (they had barely named it, it was just "this virus" that was spreading around and killing people), and then, to top it all off, in the middle of a round-table discussion with Zhongshan legal students, about the ability to protest your government, a Guangzhou girl answered her tinkly-cute cellphone and then reported to the group: "Excuse me everyone, but, uh, the war has begun." President Bush had just declared war on Iraq. We all filed through the rain to a television so that we could watch him on Pearl TV dubbed over in Mandarin, breaking the news to the world. We all felt helpless and upset. It was pretty bad times.

Then again, so are these. Even though I was upset about the American election last week, I have been trying to have hope. I guess that's also my luxury, being out of the country at the moment. But I think that helps me have perspective, too. Being in China over the weekend made me realize again how privileged I am to be able to criticize my government anytime, anywhere, anyhow. And how far we've come that we even have the concept of "police brutality". The scariest part of the take-down I saw on that busy Guangzhou street was not the cops' overt (and excessive, I thought) use of force to subdue what appeared to be an unarmed man, but how all the bystanders just gathered to look in voyeuristic glee, or turned away in resignation.

(Then again, what would I have done had I seen this on the streets of L.A.? Probably the same thing. Nothing. But at least America has lawyers. Ahh, lawyers.)