The Wrong Hair Problem.

I just watched a Chinese orchestra playing some Brahms, and do you know what was odd? All the women violinists had black hair. I’ve never seen such a thing before.

I’ve often noticed that in western orchestras, the overwhelming trend is for female violinists to have blonde hair. I always assumed it was a required qualification for the job. Cellists are the ones with dark hair. Hair to suit the tone of the instrument, you see. Simple.

But of course, the difficulty of maintaining the tradition now that we are thoroughly globalised is that not many Chinese women have blonde hair.

Noticing the Chinese Tongue.

I think I’ve heard enough women speaking Mandarin by now to arrive at a bold conclusion:

When they speak it soft it’s very sexy. When they get agitated it’s hilarious. I swear I could easily spend quite some time being entertained by a woman speaking Mandarin even though I wouldn’t understand a word of what she was saying.

The Culture Divide and Cracking Up.

I made a joke recently on a YouTube video made by the Tan twins from Singapore. They didn’t get it. I assumed it was because they’re Chinese and that the Chinese have a different sense of humour than we westerners. By way of an example, here is China’s Number One joke:

An old man was walking along a track between two mountains in the region of Jiangnan. One mountain said to the other:

‘Let’s jump on him and crush him.’

‘We can’t,’ said the other mountain.

‘Why not?’

‘We’re mountains. We can’t move.’

‘Oh, no. Forgot about that. Damn.’

I’ve heard it said that when that joke was told on State Radio one morning during the rush hour, the whole of Beijing came to a standstill because all the drivers were immobilised by convulsive laughter. And here’s China’s Number Two joke:

During a particularly bad smog in Beijing, a woman said to her husband:

‘Let’s take a drive out of the city and escape this suffocating air.’

‘We can’t,’ said her husband.

‘Why not?’

‘We wouldn’t know which road to take. It’s too foggy.’

‘Oh, right. Didn’t think about that. Damn.’

See what I mean? And it’s an interesting feature of Chinese jokes that they’re required by law to end with the word ‘damn.’ I gather it comes from the days of Chairman Mao when all statements which carried a note of levity were required to end with: ‘Damn the Yankee Imperialists,’ but that this has now been relaxed to a simple ‘damn’ for old time’s sake and in the cause of economic exigency.

And I must point out here to any Chinese person who might read it that this post is also a joke. I’m something of a Sinophile and have considerable respect for your music, your dance, your art, your sense of civilisation, your quiet and restrained mannerisms, your peaceful outlook on life, your respect for natural forces, your goldfish, your bulgy-eyed dragons, your humpity bridges, your peach blossom, your pepperpot mountains, your attitude towards the sanctity of tea, your noodles, and your maidens – especially the Tan twins from Singapore. And the yangqin happens to be my favourite musical instrument when played in the Chinese style. Greetings Chinese people.

*  *  *

Vis-à-vis last night’s embittered post, it will be noted that I found the computer in the bell tower. Only I have to use it sparingly because Esmeralda keeps hanging around and if she spots me she will probably shriek, and that would hurt my feelings. At least there are no mirrors up here.

*  *  *

And at the risk of being sued by somebody, here are the Tan twins from Singapore:

 And this is one of their best videos:

Chinese Notes.

My choice for a random Google search last night was: When does the peach blossom bloom in China? I learned that it never freezes in Guilin (which isn’t true according to the climate stats on Wiki), that’s it’s very cold in Beijing in January (what has that got to do with anything?), that the Li River scenery is where those mountains that look like salt shakers are (fond memories of The Water Margin), and that the Li River is so full of cruise ships these days that the cormorants have developed a taste for burgers and changed their allegiance. Oh, and the peach blossom in that part of China blooms in March.

It’s also gratifying to note that I seem to be becoming habituated to Chinese music. Last night – for the first time – I recognised a fragment of melody being given one treatment as having the same base as something I heard in a completely different piece about a year ago. I assume it must come from a traditional source, which means that Chinese music is not so much a foreign language to me as it used to be. 

It’s also interesting to note that Chinese musicians – especially the women for some reason – are in the habit of using facial expressions and subtle nuances of body language to compliment the music. You might say that they play the instrument as much with their eyes as they do with their fingers. (Or you might not, I suppose, but I do.) So are there still those over here who claim that the Chinese are inscrutable? They’re not; it’s a silly old prejudice.

And on the subject of prejudice, this is what Sax Rohmer, the British author of the Fu Manchu novels, said of his arch villain:

"Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, ... one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present ... Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man."
- The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu

Yellow peril incarnate? ‘The yellow peril’ is one of those sad little pejorative soubriquets (like ‘the white man’s burden’) that the colonial British Establishment liked to insinuate into the minds of the British public so as to condition them to notions of superiority. As far as I’m aware, the Chinese have never shown the slightest inclination to go empire-building overseas, so I wonder just how they were supposed to be such a peril. (Apart, that is, from kicking the British butt when we behaved high-handedly in their country, for which I think they might be forgiven.)

And for further amusement, here’s a poster for a Fu Manchu movie which demonstrates just how perilous the fictional yellow person can be. (And did you know that he studied for one of his four doctorates at Edinburgh University? What an interesting choice.)

China and the Human Aspiration.

There are things about China which trouble me, like the Yulin Dog Meat Festival and the mean-minded attitude of the Chinese government towards Tibet, for example. But China is also an ancient, sophisticated, highly creative civilisation with a depth of soul which must give us pause.

This video was made in China by Chinese people. It’s about a theatrical spectacle given by performers stricken with a variety of disabilities, and who either use those disabilities to produce something beautiful and meaningful, or at least rise above them to the same end. It encapsulates why I have asked the question on this blog:

Why is the human creature so obsessed with emulating the animals when it could, instead, aspire to be human?

Because what do we see filling the media day after day ad nauseum? Is it this sort of thing full of joy, higher mind, and superlative achievement made for no other reason than to grow a perfect rose on stony ground? Or is it wars, abuses, deceitful politicians, flagrant manipulation for pecuniary ends, terrorist atrocities and Donald freggin’ Trump?

I hope somebody somewhere gives ten minutes of their time to watch it and be moved. One would be enough to please me greatly.

On Rebellions, Humour and Late Good Ideas.

I made reference in a recent post to the Boxcar Rebellion in China. It occurred to me that it might have precipitated a comment thread along the lines of:

It isn’t Boxcar, dummkopf, it’s Boxer.

‘I know. I was emulating Sellars and Yeatman.’

Who are Sellars and Yeatman, and in what way were you emulating them?

‘They wrote, among other things, 1066 and All That, in which they frequently made use of malapropisms – the humorous technique of replacing one word with another that sounds similar but means something completely different. For example, they say that King Henry I of England died of a surfeit of palfreys, when he actually died after being taken ill following an overindulgence of lampreys.’

So why is using the wrong word funny?

‘I don’t know. You’d have to ask a humour theorist that. Why is the white-horse-called-Kevin joke funny? It just is.’

Well, I think you’re stupid.

‘So now you’re casting nasturtiums.’

What?

‘Never mind. You wouldn’t understand.’

But back to the start of it all – Michael Woods’ documentary series on China. I thought last week’s episode was the finish, but it wasn’t. This week’s was, and this week’s was all about rebellions between 1850 and 1950. There was a man called Wong who started the Tie Pin Rebellion, and who was doing quite well until he lost. Then they mixed his ashes with some gunpowder and fired them out of a canon to ensure that he never smiled again. This gave me a good idea, more of which later.

There was an awful lot about Mao – the rise of Mao, the dissolution of Mao, the resurgence of Mao, the Maoist repression, the death of Mao, and how some people in China still think Mao was a pretty good chap and continue to celebrate his birthday. He even inspired a song:

One man went to Mao, went to Mao a meadow.

(I sincerely regret having written that, but I’m a warts and all type.)

Michael’s final summing up was some confusing stuff about how China is now the most successful capitalist economy in the history of the world, is still administered as a socialist state, has a rosy future planned for the next thirty years, and that’s what the world needs most. I had trouble following that bit.

The Good Idea:

I wonder why some manufacturer of fireworks doesn’t offer a (seriously profitable) service to the bereaved – send us your loved one’s ashes and we’ll add them to our mixture and send you a selection of rockets back. Then you can watch them light up the sky and go bang and things. Makes a fine accompaniment to fried rice and bamboo shoots at Chinese New Year.

I wonder whether it would take off. That’s a kind of pun.

I expect somebody somewhere, probably southern California, has been doing it for years. I always was the second person to have a good idea.

Humour a la Cathay.

To continue the China theme, I just remembered a little something from when I was a kid. Whenever China or the Chinese came up in conversation, my mother would trot out the same old line:

Who flung dung at Cheung? Or it might be written Hu flung dung at Cheung!

And then she would titter. It kept her amused for years, and it even impressed me at the time. What didn’t impress me more recently, however, was the fact that I never heard Michael Wood in his History of China use the name Cathay. That’s a shame because I like the name Cathay. One of my favourite early blog posts was a one-liner called ‘The Chinese Wuthering Heights’:

Oh Heathcliff! Oh Cathay!

I remember Lucy Wu from Sydney, NSW being amused by it. She didn’t get the white-horse-called-Kevin joke, though, which just goes to show that while Chinese people might not be inscrutable, they do appear to lack the capacity to appreciate oddball humour.

Being Denied the Best Bit.

Here’s what’s annoying:

Having been engrossed by Michael Wood’s documentary series The Story of China over recent weeks, I fell asleep ten minutes before the end of tonight’s final episode (I’ve been up earlier than usual several times this week and I find making excuses very easy.)

Tonight’s episode was about the Qing* Dynasty, who started off as brutal Manchu invaders (yet more barbarians from the north – seems the best place in the world to live would be Svalbard, then you’d never have to worry about being troubled by barbarians from the north since polar bears and the odd lunatic Arctic explorer don’t count) but then produced the very best of emperors and a good time was had by all. Until, that is, the British turned up in the 18^th century and set about trying to turn the Chinese into a bunch of opium addicts.

So why did the good old Brits do this? Well, just standard good old British trading tactics really, and all very innocent. The Brits, you see, wanted China tea and lots of it because Mr Wedgwood had invented the teacup and Brits had gone ape over these new things called ‘hot drinks.’ Ah, but in order to avoid an imbalance of trade they needed to sell something back. Problem: being a much older and more sophisticated culture than anything in Europe, there wasn’t anything the Chinese wanted to buy. They were quite happy to sell us tea, but they declined to buy Wedgwood vases in return because they said Ming ones were better, which they probably were.

Such rank unfairness was not to be tolerated, and so some Brit or other came up with a good idea. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘let’s get them hooked on opium. They haven’t got any of that, have they?’ And so they hadn’t, but the British had lots of the lovely stuff because they controlled the opium fields in India. What a good idea…

…only the Chinese authorities didn’t like it. Having their good people turned into a nation of smack heads was simply not cricket and so they set about giving the Brits a bloody nose, at which point I fell asleep just when it was getting interesting. I suspect, however, that the bloody nose precipitated general fisticuffs and probably had something to do with the Boxcar Rebellion, whatever that was. And it’s probably why the British invented the prejudice that the Chinese are inscrutable, which isn’t true. Chinese eyes are every bit as expressive as European eyes, only in a more subtle way. Learning to read the emotional outpourings of Chinese eyes has been a source of much delight to me over the past few weeks and continues so to do. And now for the footnote:

* I went onto a forum concerned with Chinese pronunciation to find out how Qing should be pronounced. There were five answers given, all purportedly coming from Chinese people. They were:

Cheeng

Ching (which was Michael Wood’s preferred option.)

Chen

Quing

Zhang

I suppose there’s a reason for the variation, but life isn’t getting any easier.

The Wealth:Experience Equation.

I had three posts lined up over the past couple of days, but didn’t make them because I wasn’t in the mood for writing. And now I’ve quite forgotten what they were about. That’s the problem with being impulsive: easy come, easy go.

But today the priestess told me I should go to China. She’s right (she usually is.) I should, but there’s a barrier in three parts: penury, debt and principle. And as Spike Milligan once wrote, China’s a bloody long way!

The problem is, I’ve never been a seeker of wealth but rather a seeker of experiences, and experiences rarely pay in any currency other than their own. I always chose to do voluntary work in an environment which was conducive to my nature than paid work in an environment which wasn’t. It’s an HSP thing.

But it means that now I want the experience of witnessing Chinese culture at first hand, I can’t have it. Isn’t that ironic?

China and the Gaining of Wisdom.

So what did Michael Wood have to say about the Ming dynasty in his series The Story of China tonight? Lots, but it was a general point about Chinese history which most caught my attention.

He pointed out that China never showed any inclination to be expansionist. This was because they saw the country itself as the world and everything beyond as alien. They were happy to trade with the west, but they were never interested in building an empire.

He read some extracts from the memoirs of a Dutchman (or he might have been Portuguese, I don’t remember) who loved the culture so much that he learned the language and settled there, and who expressed the opinion that China’s lack of the expansionist imperative was their only flaw. Says a lot about the European mentality, doesn’t it?

And while I’m on the subject of China (my favourite at the moment as you might have noticed) I saw Coco walking across the town today. She became the latest to demonstrate what is becoming a trend in my associations with young women.

Our eyes meet across an uncrowded marketplace and remain locked for a span of time that is brief and yet seemingly suffused with significance. I wave and they don’t. It can be quite disconcerting.

The Chinese Doing Superior Again.

Tonight’s episode of The Story of China was all about how the nasty Barbarians from the North came down and trashed the beautiful world of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE – that’s for academics who like dates and are also politically correct.) Isn’t it odd how barbarians always seem to come from the north? Maybe it has a parallel with fleas seeking body heat.

What I found myself most attracted to, however, was the ancient Chinese doctrine called Mandate of Heaven. At first I was tempted to suggest a similarity with the mediaeval European concept of the Divine Right of Kings, but then I thought again. As I understand it, the Mandate of Heaven may be summarised thus:

We the undersigned, being from heaven, approve of and will support the Emperor, but only as long as he rules wisely and justly.

The Divine Right of Kings, on the other hand, was the monarch’s excuse for saying:

I’m King because God says so, and that means I can do whatever I want. If you don’t like it, up yours.

Not quite the same, is it? And it’s how this guy went from having three heads to none in one fell swing (or two, as is sometimes claimed. For those who don't know, it's King Charles I who was beheaded in 1649 after losing the English Civil War. He is the only English king ever to have been executed through legal process, rather than assassinated.)

Next week’s episode of Michael Wood’s delightful series is about the Ming Dynasty. I’m looking forward to that one for two reasons:

1. The Ming Dynasty is known for having produced some pretty neat vases, and so is the place where I grew up.

2. Ming was my second exposure to Chinese culture when I was a child. She was a Pekingese dog. (My first exposure was – as has oft been mentioned – Rupert Bear’s girlfriend, Tiger Lily. She had no dynasty, but her dad was a great magician.)

The China Connection.

I want to talk about China, only I can’t quite make sense of my feelings about the place, much less express them adequately in a post. I just watched the first of a series of documentaries called The Story of China presented by Michael Wood, whose sensitive and intelligent insights always impress me.

I got that old déjà vu thing again when he showed images of what you might call a shanty town in the suburbs of Xi’an, the first of the ancient capitals of China. It looked oh so familiar; it felt homely. I get the same feeling when I see those fat lions, and fierce dragons, and oversize goldfish, and pink lotus flowers, and bright red wall hangings, and Chinese characters on banners.

I used to get the same feeling when I was a kid growing up in a grimy industrial city in the English Midlands. And when I was around thirty I saw a photograph of a mountain range in China and thought: ‘I know this place. I’ve been there. How can that be?’ All of which leads me to feel that I really must go to China before I die. But maybe I was already there before I was born and don't need to. How can one know?

And here’s an interesting thought: Let’s suppose that reincarnation is true; and let’s suppose that I had a previous life in China; and let’s suppose that I do go there before I die. I might meet my own descendants; I might even accidentally tread on my own grave. And then some grizzled old man struggling under the draconian social rules imposed by the Tang emperors might shudder and exclaim: ‘Somebody just walked over my grave.’ What a lot of fun that would be.

There’s just one problem with all this: I could never for the life of me (this life, that is) get on with chopsticks.

Peril Over the Spratlys.

According to the media, (especially the American media which insists on playing advertising videos on its web pages while you’re trying to concentrate on the bloody words) WWIII is about to break out over some islands called the Spratlys in the South China Sea. The Chinese are building an airstrip on a piece of reclaimed land by way of demonstrating their sovereignty over the area, and the Americans are falling back on good old gunboat diplomacy in response.

(We Brits are quite jealous, actually. Gunboat diplomacy used to be one of our very favourite hobbies, and we haven’t been best mates with the Chinese ever since they tried to sink HMS Amethyst – one of our very favourite gunboats – in 1949.)

But anyway, there’s something I don’t quite understand here. This piece of reclaimed ‘land’ appears to be actually just a big beach, which hardly seems substantial enough for a military landing strip, and leads inevitably to the line:

It’s sand, not land, and hard to understand (sung to the tune of the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.)

I can’t help wondering, you see, whether a sand bank sitting in the western Pacific Ocean would be a very sensible place to be eating breakfast the next time a tropical typhoon routinely passes by. And then there’s the Ring of Fire which produces tsunamis… and so on and so forth. But I’m sure the Chinese engineers know what they’re doing, and maybe what they’re really doing is building a mere token and aren’t actually intending to station a dozen or so real aeroplanes which cost a billion yen apiece on a beach in Destruction Alley.

Or are they? I don’t know, do I? No, I don’t.

I do, however, have a solution to propose. Why don’t we stop calling it the South China Sea, and instead call it the North Indonesia Sea? Then the Chinese could go back to eating their American burgers, the Americans could go back to wearing their Chinese shirts, and the world could breathe again. The alternative hardly bears contemplating:

If a Sino-American war really does break out over the Spratlys, I suppose the rest of NATO would have to get involved. And then I wonder how long it would be before Mr Putin, who probably loves a power vacuum, would become Emperor of Europe.

That’s today’s fantasy, for what it’s worth.

Countering the Dragon.

Is China really such a watery place? My most abiding image of China is the pre-eminent presence of water – rushing streams, placid rivers, lakes, canals, the sea and fishponds. And the feature of the classic willow pattern design which always most draws me is the little bridge over water with the three men crossing.

Cutural Circumspection.

I just watched a video of a CBS feature on ‘Leftover Women’ in China. According to the report, women in China are considered fit only for the scrapheap – not even worth dating – if they’re not married by the time they’re twenty five.

As you can imagine, the CBS journalists were aghast with the sort of indignation which commonly follows the time-honoured notion that only the mores of Our Culture are worthy. Any divergence on the part of The Others is reprehensible by default. Well, I can see that the Chinese attitude might create a notable difficulty for Chinese women, but cultural variation and complexity are worth a little more in-depth consideration than a five minute piece on CBS, I think.

But do you know what really bugged me? The comments on this video were pretty brainless even by YouTube standards, and the one I particularly remember came from some American guy who said:

‘Chinese women are ugly anyway. Some Japs are okay.’

There speaks a redneck of taste, intelligence and refinement.

A Hint of Paradox.

In keeping with my current fixation on all things Chinese, I just watched a video about Shanghai on YouTube. Included among the comments was one from Kelvin Wang (note: Kelvin Wang) who is presumably a native of the city. It said:

‘All f..king foreigners go back home china is not for u f..king foreigner dogs shanghai for shanghaines china for Chinese kill the foreigners !’

So, here is a man who not only wants foreigners removed from China, but even advocates the killing of them. And yet he has a European given name, writes English – punctuation excepted – rather better than I write Mandarin, and has sufficient sense of reserve that he abbreviates the expletive.

Isn’t that interesting?

Facing the Dragon.

OK, so now I look up at the ceiling and ask ‘Is this the test? Is it? Is this to find out whether I really did learn what was shown to me back in the summer of 2011?’

Right then. Give me a day to prepare, and then Blow wind! Come wrack! At least we’ll die with harness on our back.

Who out there has a clue what I’m talking about? Good.

Right now I’m going to watch a Chinese horror film, and I might find a way to celebrate Chinese New Year this year. Unlike our New Year, it’s a movable feast based on astronomical factors (like Easter, you know?) which puts it rather more up my street.

Where did China come from? You look down at your plate and it’s suddenly full of China.

Hurrah for the Yellow Peril.

When I was a boy there was still a fair amount of prejudice applied to foreigners and all things foreign. Older generations still remembered the days of Empire, you see, when Britain was Top Country and everything to the south and east of Europe our footstool. In particular, I remember there being two notable characteristics which were said to apply to the Chinese:

1. They were clever, but in a sneaky sort of way. We Brits regarded ourselves as having the monopoly on honourable cleverness; anybody who didn’t play cricket, but who had, nevertheless, to be acknowledged as clever, could only be sneakily clever. That’s the imperialist attitude at work.

2. They were inscrutable, which I suppose fits neatly with being sneaky. The game of poker – in which inscrutability is deemed a laudable attribute – was never highly regarded here. We were more inclined towards honest, open pursuits like charades, polo, and shooting big animals.

So, the first of those can be dismissed as merely silly, but the second warrants a note.

I’ve been watching an awful lot of Chinese people on YouTube lately – in films, music videos, dance productions and so on – and I have to say that I haven’t noticed the slightest hint of inscrutability. What I have noticed is that the Chinese appear to be rather more subtle in the way they express emotion than we westerners. And it’s a characteristic which this old, post-colonial Brit finds both fetching and effective.

The Matter of China.

Given my current preoccupation with China and all things Chinese, I thought I’d look at a few websites about learning Chinese languages. I already knew that Mandarin is the major language and Cantonese the main variant. I also knew that Chinese languages are tonal. What I didn’t know was that Mandarin is easier to learn since it has only five tones, whereas Cantonese has nine.

That still makes it a bit tricky, though, doesn’t it? It seems that even in Mandarin, wa-a, for example, can mean…

Hello

Go away

Turned out nice again

Is this seat taken?

My dog’s just been sick

…depending on the inflection.

I suppose it would make sense to leave it for now and just make sure I’m born there in my next life. I have to do that anyway since I have an appointment to meet somebody in the mountains (the only problem being that we never said which mountains, and China is a damn big place…)

Oh, well. In the meantime, I just watched nearly an hour of Chinese dance on YouTube. It appears that the Chinese are particularly good at dancing. I suppose it’s to do with them being so skinny and supple, an’ all. And Chinese women seem able to get their legs into places where wise men fear to tread. Better make sure I’m not too wise in my next life.

Being Chinese and Singular.

I was wondering today where my fascination with old China comes from. It’s been apparent ever since I became infatuated with Rupert Bear’s friend Tiger Lily when I was about seven. Maybe it’s because there’s something singular about both Chinese women and Chinese ghosts. And then there are those wide sleeves in which mandarins used to hide their hands (at least, Tiger Lily’s dad did.) I was always doing that as a kid. It seemed right and proper, somehow. And despite all the negative propaganda towards Communist China to which we in the west have been subjected over the past sixty years, I never gave up on them.

And then there’s this little story:

When I moved house in 1986, I decided to go to the local chip shop to get dinner, rather than cook after a hard day’s labour. I wasn’t particularly familiar with the locality, and I’d certainly never been into the chippy before. I walked in to find a perfectly traditional British chip shop, and yet I somehow felt I’d walked into old China. And do you know what? The proprietor came into the shop from the back, and he was Chinese. I didn’t know him from Confucius, and yet he said to me: ‘It’s been a long time since I last saw you.’ Isn’t that strange?

Anyway, you can watch a bunch of singular Chinese women dancing if you like. I must try searching ‘Chinese ghost stories’ in YouTube. Might be in for a good bit of post-midnight entertainment.