A Month in Old Peking

 It's frightening to realize that I've now been here an entire month. I spoke with an acquaintance at some length earlier this week, and made the customary protests of "oh, no, I've gotten so little done in all this time," but in actuality I think it's been a month fairly well-stuffed with activity! Here are a few of the things, recorded in anticipation of dark moments of self-loathing in my future, that I've managed somehow to pull off, research-related and not:

-Locate, rent, move into, and make "home base" an apartment that, for its flaws, is a quiet, comfortable, convenient one at a very reasonable cost
- Keep healthy enough to enjoy the briefly delightful burst of autumnal Peking weather with some long runs (a luxury I will never forget to take for granted again)
-Organize and begin follow-up work on nearly all the material I had already gathered and begin work on a digitized archive of all sorts of sociological, legal, and memoir-y goodness
-Get back in touch with all my closest contacts from previous expeditions and obtain letters of entry to archives
-Had my first bicycle stolen (every denizen of Old Peking has to have this happen to them--surely it is a rite of passage when estimates of bicycles pilfered run to over 9 million a year?)
-Apply to go to Taipei in the winter
-Visit a new city (Tianjin--more on my fleeting impression of that town in future)
-Pay filial visits with regularity to grandparents
-Meet up with colleagues and friends, some of whom I had not realized were living in town
-Meet up with--heavens forbid!--entirely new people, some of whom I hope might become friends

Maybe the most important conclusion--certainly the most heartening one aside from the larger realization that this month has been anything but idle--is that I like the city I have chosen. On bad days, its murky, acrid air and endlessly oppressive piles of dull-faced people blur into a bleary Monet fogscape. On a beautiful day, or even at quieter parts of the bad days, I think I love this town.

 Yes, it's the city into which I was born, but I have spent perhaps a total of a year and a half in it--I come to Peking quite unpickled in her brine. On top of that, I have spent most of my life in various spacious, unbelievably safe, and brightly-lit suburbs. It's somehow intrinsically romantic to return to my birth-city for my longest stint urban dwelling, ever, and for my longest research stint, ever. It's like going to live in the house of the birth mother you, the adopted child, only just relocated and about whom you are also planning to write a biography!

Will I leave an old soggy salted Napa cabbage-stalk? Will I leave with another case of imminent pneumonia lurking like a spot of quicksand in my lungs? For now, I relish the transient glory of the Pekingnese autumn as I run around manmade lakes in which emperors once punted. I stare at the tawny streetlights over my head during quiet nighttime bicycle rides home along the twelve-foot moat. I inhale deeply the delightful smell of roasting chestnuts, corn, and sweet potato from vendors' tricycles and carts clogging the mouths of subway stations.

On a night lit by a tallow-colored moon and the haze of fluorescent lights scattered in the dirty taupe sky, if I squint in the direction of the old Inner City as I ride along the moat, I can pretend that the ugly concrete pillars of the elevated Second Ring Road are the dark red City Walls, their gates shut after the evening drums began the night watch.

(Deshengmen, or Virtue and Victory Gate, c. 1880s. One of the few survivors among the city's many gates. I enjoy cycling or running--hobbling more like--past it and imagining it in its imperial glory, but the stink of the public toilet that's been built near it and the burden of avoiding the cabbies pulling out from their break hour--they have claimed the underpass near the Gate as their own--makes it tough to keep up the illusion.)

Of dyed bears and WAHAHA

I have to confess, I've always perversely enjoyed reading about the newest line of fake shit being sold somewhere in the Motherland. I'm just a schadenfreude type. The melamine-tainted milk, however, was flat out evil enough that I haven't been so har har about fake stuff since (especially because I and people I was responsible for consumed plenty of dairy products in summer '08--fortunately all of us were big and strong enough to not get sick from it).

But this post from the Taipei Times made me gasp. What? The "diplomatic gift" pandas from the Mainland to Taiwan in late 2008 turned out to be random forest bears painted with the right colors?! Surely not? Not the bears whose names, when joined together, actually means "reunion"?

Then I followed the post to Paul Midler's site, and whew, it was all an April Fool's hoax. As he rightly points out, though, the fact that the TP Times put up this story signifies a vast gulf between the Mainland (who is probably pulling an Unhappy China about this, if anyone even got wind of it over the Great Firewall) and Taiwan. It's called being able to laugh at oneself. Sure, in this case it's more like Taiwanese reporters laughing at the people across the strait, but what it really takes is the capacity to look at oneself and burst out laughing. I mean, if the bears had actually turned out to be fake, it's not like anyone reading on Taiwan would likely forget that the Mainland really could get away with such jabs--because they can, because the island is not unlike Seoul, balanced not so many miles away from a host of frightening possibilities. So even while the article's making fun of Chinese fakes, it's also a kind of cheerfully cynical snicker at Taiwan's own position in the world.

But now for a real fakes story: the WAHAHA. This was a fate luckily dodged in '08, but according to my bosses, in summer '07, during the scheduled excursion to a "wild" (unrestored) section of the Great Wall four hours north of Beijing, everyone bought extra bottles of Wahaha [literally, "Kids' Ha-ha"] drinking water. They drank the suckers, because the hike is long and very hot, and then everyone puked for the next week. From then on, the brand became an evil totem, its name read as an evil laugh. Wa. Ha. Ha.

In summer '06, I actually partook (fortunately without incident) of some sketchy Wahaha. The little store in the "downtown" bit of the village we were living in carried 24-packs of water, and, too spoiled to drink the excessively mineral-rich hand-pump water boiled in an ancient, disgustingly crusted kettle, we opted to buy these. Anyway, the one time we sprang for a good deal on some Wahaha it turned out to be a suspicious imitator--same red and white label, but all the graphics seemed a little...pixellated. And the name was very similar-looking, but not quite there. We tried it anyway. It tasted like old flour. We trashed them. I still kind of wonder what the hell was in that stuff--surely not real flour? How is that a better profit margin than just selling boiled tap water, anyway?...

I think someone might be turning in their grave

What with lousy weather and a case of pests in our apartment, this past week has been pretty terrible and totally un-conducive to work either serious or bloggish. Today, though, things seem to be looking up, so I thought I'd just talk about this ridiculous bit of historifandom (sort of?) that I have just witnessed.

Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.

Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:

A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE.

Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging early modern medical encyclopedia is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:

You can't cut the deer horn too thin,
you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.
Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder
and dried caterpillars,
your own music, your own medicine,
the amounts are just right.

Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,
copying out formulas is even bitterer,
you better open up that Ben cao gang mu and read you some fair-copy editions.
Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the jianghu*,
these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.

I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, FAIR-COPY EDITIONS? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?

(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)

*Jianghu-a term in martial knight-errant (wuxia) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."
**Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...

Hmm...

Bit of news from Jeremiah: apparently bodies of six people with long queues have been found in Xinjiang. He's got a pic from the Daily Mail linked, and I was going to paste it here but it is a bit icky if you're not into preserved corpses.

My first reaction was "what if they're faked?", which is really sad. Then again, considering the recently leaked photos of what at least seems to be a shopping center with all-fake stores (see here), maybe that initial cynicism is well-warranted.

If the bodies are authentic, however, I'm excited! They could be an excellent chance to do some historical forensics and object-driven history in the late imperial period, the novelty of which continues to surprise me.

So this is burnout

If I see one more instance of blantant bias in scoring, deliberate falsification, prejudice against one's own citizens, tacky all-we-care-about-is-image pretense, or syrupy enthusing about improvement and progress related to this Olympics thing, I am probably going to explode like a red giant collapsing upon itself.

At least I'm not suffering through the astronomical prices that've been installed for these weeks. Rah rah for foresight in getting the heck outta there.

Contemporary Stuff (gasp!)

A couple of things related to that ol' favorite of business-minded folk everywhere: China Today.

First, I though Professor Baumler's post, "Chinese History sucks," over at Frog in a Well, was spot-on. I guess it's helpful to some degree that I'm less interested in working on the early periods (motivated, I'd say, in not insignificant part by pragmatic considerations exactly in line with the post--more sources, more "relevance," etc.), yet I feel a bit guilty about it. Who knows, change is possible. But I can't imagine trying to read Han-period texts or seal-script steles. Face explode. Then again, even the Ming-Qing's called "ancient" by some folk (cough certain politics professors of my acquaintance cough), since they predated 1949.

Speaking of sweeping, digit-abundant history, Professor Barnett's Q&A in yesterday's NYT answers some burninatin' questions and points that people in forums from Facebook to the NYT itself have been raising. I especially like this bit:

"Q: Whenever we write about Tibet on this blog, we get many comments from Chinese readers that refer to the Dalai Lama as a slaveholder. What is that about?

RB: First, we can see that as just propaganda that lodges in certain people’s heads, because it’s not even what the Chinese government says. The Chinese government uses the word “serf” — it technically imagines that Tibet is full of serfs, but very few slaves. It was a mistranslation that has circulated and gained some purchase with the Chinese public, including intellectuals, and now they’ve got hold of the slave idea, which was never the case.

The Communist Party sees history in terms of a set number of facts, in this case the party says that 5 percent of Tibetans were aristocrats or landowners, 90 percent were serfs and 5 percent were slaves. I don’t think any of these are actually what you and I would call facts.

[...]

But those laws were made in the 14th century or so and had hardly been used for hundreds of years. But the Chinese cite these old laws, which are really horrendous in writing, and use those as the main basis for these histrionic claims about slavery."

The Chinese suppression of decent scholarship--in content or in method--is horrible, but what's truly disgusting is how history has been reduced to a set of fill-in-the-blank factoids, tinged by nationalism and a staunch refusal to consider alternative points of view, not to mention the totally irresponsible use of sources. And then young intellectuals and bourgeoisie today parrot these tidbits with the greatest pride--which merits the proverb “哭笑不得.”

Issues relating at all to gender and sexuality frequently involve enormous hypocrisies, but the sexual hypocrisy of contemporary Chinese-made history and cultural studies is of course complicated by the whole Marxist-Leninst-Maoist line (in case the dear reader, in hir zest for teh cashz, had forgotten that we're discussing a real live unitary authoritarian government) and its concomitant self-contradictions regarding love, sex, and gender. I'm sure someone learned and wise has written on this somewhere, but why haven't we heard more about these things? Where, O Media, are the more probing inquiries into not just the political or economic oppressiveness of the system, but the crushing effects it has had on people's conceptions of themselves and of the past? No, let's publish yet another story about how materially wealthy those elite young Chinese are, yay! And wow, gee whiz, they're really good at science and math and overseeing semi-illiterate people make shoe bottoms all day, aren't they! Okay, I admit that last one's a bit cheap, and probably motivated in part by my personal grievance with most things numerical, but seriously. So tired of history and culture seeming to take a backseat in these ubiquitous discussions of (mythical narrator voice) China.

Enough ignorant rambling for now. Less of that and more sexies next time!