Travel Plans

Thanks to time differences, I can say that I'll be in New York in 24 hours.

At the Games, II

Last night I went with Jiahao to see some of the women's handball competitions (I'll take what tickets I can get) at the Olympic Sports Center. The first match of the night was Norway vs. Kazakhstan; the second, Germany vs. Hungary. Norway and Hungary both brought winning teams to the stadium, accompanied by truly obnoxious fans. The Norwegian fans had a fairly threatening aspect to begin with, which they heightened by dressing up as Vikings——I think they scared Jiahao half to death. The Hungarians were less frightening and less sober, but they did set up some pretty intimidating call-and-reponse cheers across the stadium.

Sitting directly to my right was a student wearing a Yale cap, who it turned out had come to the matches with another Yale man. Both were students at Princeton's program here in Beijing; both were, like most Foreign Devils, desperately ready to get back to America.

Jiahao and I arrived well before the matches begun, so we had a chance to get a good look at the stadium and its grounds. Jiahao photographed everything, explaining to me in his adorable manner——nationalism is adorable in small children——that he needed to "capture this historic moment." And at the stadiums, it's hard not to get caught up in the Olympic excitement...

...especially when the cheerleaders (or to use the delightful Chinese term, the laladui), take the court with the Fuwa and schoolchildren who have just finished a pre-game pee-wee match. The cheerleading squad, by the way, was officially called "The Chinese Honey Bunnies," and they performed to the music of——well, have a look yourself:

The first game was a bit of a blowout, much to the disappointment of a small group of Kazakh fans, who spent the entire second half of the match singing a Kazakh song that sounded like something straight out of Borat; the second game was extremely close, with Germany maintaining a narrow lead until the very end, when, to raucous Magyar exultation, they finally pulled ahead. I was a bit disappointed; the Hungarians had cheered wholeheartedly every time one of their players injured a German, and I'd hoped they would get shown up by the end of the game. Thinking the Germans would win, I took some footage of the German team scoring; if an athlete had ended up on the ground clutching her knee it would have better represented the violence of the match. Handball's more exciting than I expected; but I've only experienced the sport under the iron rod of Mr. Donodeo, where no game is quite like it is in the rest of the world.

On the way out I took a picture of the 鸟巢, the Olympic Bird's Nest, looming over the Fourth Ring Road. When the weather's not awful, Beijing can be a fairly pretty place.

At the Games, I

On Sunday I went to the rowing races at Shunyi, I got there a bit late but I saw more or less all of the quad races. The picture at left is of China beating England by a fairly comfortable margin.

Apart from the races with China in them, the only thing that got the mostly Chinese audience excited was the appearance of the Fuwa, who are really unavoidable these days.

The Chinese would have enjoyed the last race on the schedule, in which America and China were to face off in the eights, but unfortunately the races were canceled due to a thunderstorm. It was some consolation to watch the Chinese basketball team lose to the US later yesterday night, but I would still have liked to see some eights races.

胡萨汤尼克河上

It's very rarely that I write something in Chinese that I'm proud of. My vocabulary is far too small to express any actual emotion or impression, and my command of the grammar, enough for stringing words together, is far from being secure enough for me to produce the subtle and intricate sentences I like to think make for good writing. But today, with plenty of help from the teachers here, I wrote an essay I'm moderately proud of. The similes are a little on the ridiculous side and in a few places my word choice has missed the mark, but it's the first thing I've written in Chinese that I've been very pleased with. I'm not sure if there are many Chinese-speaking readers of this blog——in fact I'm not sure this blog has many readers at all——but since one can't be sure of anything in this sublunary world, I post it here for their entertainment.

天上都是层层叠叠的云；地上都是灰蒙蒙的雾。在那个秋末的周四傍晚，天气很冷。在山坡上的房子里，人人都躲起来，在享受温暖的热气。山上的树叶已经凋零了，有的像赤裸的人一般显出尴尬的样子，遗憾自己不能穿上像样的服装。有的显出悲痛的样子，像丧失了孩子的父母默不作声地站着。然而在这莽苍的情景中，连最近的树也模糊不清，只能看到其阴阴的影子。


山谷里，胡萨汤尼克河慢慢地流着，其平静的水面下蕴藏着无穷的力量。南边有水坝；河却对此视若无睹，继续往海洋悠游自在地流动。当时，我们八个疲劳的人坐在小船上。我们已经训练了一个小时，把船划到离码头最远的地方。教练喊叫了，我们开始划船了。薄薄而狭长的船体看似一触即碎，但是它像剪刀一般划过水面。船上的运动员用尽力气，有如战场上的士兵，咬紧着牙，拼命前进。我们划得越快，天上乌云堆积得越厚。我们总算完成了这次运动，终于能休息一会。我们喘息着等待教练的下一道命令。


在那一刹那，轰隆隆的雷雨声突然充满了空气，在山谷里回响。下大雨了，两边的山也遮住了夕阳，我们像盲人一样看不见周围的水与山。教练又喊叫了，我们无奈地开始划船。雨越来越厉害，我们的衣服湿透了，雨水与汗水混杂在一起。船飞也似的往船房里的安全去。这回胡萨汤尼克河恨不得露出自己的力量，翻滚的波浪忽然来临，攻击我们的小船。那里的河水，雨水，闪电，我们都视而不见。我们一心一意的划船，舍不得关注别的事。我像狂人一样盯着前面，脑子里却很安静。我问自己，这种运动岂不是荒谬的极端？只当这个问题没有浮现在我的脑海里。此时，我奋力地划船，我感到莫名的快乐，非常满意。

Museums

On Sunday the mother pro tempore, along with her mother, took me on a whirlwind tour of two of Beijing's museums. We had to ride the subway for an hour, walk a few blocks in scorching heat, fend off the Olympic volunteers looking for a foreigner to say something quotable, wait on line, buy tickets, find the decent exhibits, and (in my case) translate the placards. But you, Readers of the Foreign Devil, have it easy:

At the Capital Museum, I saw some of the unusual bronzes unearthed twenty years ago at Sanxingdui in Sichuan, testifying to a previously unknown ancient Chinese civilization. Sanxingdui bronzes are generally distorted depictions of men or animals; their meaning has long been lost to history.

This is a more or less typical example of early Chinese bronzeware, showing the high level of workmanship that modern craftsmen have had little success in replicating.

The Capital Museum also had a few bingmayong, the terra-cotta soldiers and horses found in the tomb of Qin Shihuang, first emperor of all China. They were all individually crafted, and plenty of them have their idiosyncracies: although you can't see it in this picture, the soldier in the back has his left hand put on backwards.

To take this picture of a jinlüyuyi, a garment made of jade worn by the deceased in their tombs, I had to reach over the heads of a crowd of museumgoers.

Next we went to the Military Museum, guarded by military police taking refuge under umbrellas bearing McDonald's ads.

Many of the exhibits at the Military Museum were just collections of old weapons. There were however a few more interesting things....

...such as this placard on the base of a rather ugly Soviet-style propaganda statue. The devils in question are, naturally, the Japanese.

Not everything at the Military Museum hewed to the party line, however. In a little-noticed display case I saw this picture, displaying the Communist and Kuomintang flags side-by-side, from the brief period of coöperation between the two parties. Elsewhere in the museum, of course, Chiang Kai-shek and his party were represented as more or less absolute evil.

Chairman Mao had pride of place in the lobby; and since I hadn't taken my obligatory photo with a Mao statue yet, I figured it was as good a chance as any.

Stranger than Fiction

Readers of the Foreign Devil currently basking in the light of Liberty Illuminating the World may have heard something about the beast called Chinese nationalism, that seems to lurk at the margins of any discussion about this country. Chinese nationalism is neither more nor less frightening or unthinking than the European nationalisms that it cannot admit inspired it——if I keep on writing like this we'll be able to discover how much leeway my political sell-out has bought——and like the Italian and German nationalisms a hundred and some years and a few thousand miles distant, it's driven by a form of irredentism.

Now with the exception of Outer Mongolia (and if we wanted to be provocative, we could say Taiwan as well), China right now owns almost all the land it ever has. What is unredeemed is for the most part not land, since officially Taiwan is a part of China, and doesn't need to be annexed, but rather the national dignity which the greatest propaganda system on earth has convinced the Chinese people was lost to foreign powers over the course of the twentieth century. At a museum today (pictures to follow), my mother pro tempore informed me nonchalantly, as we passed a display of weapons won from the Japanese during the War of Resistance against Japan (we generally call it the Second World War), that she did not like Japanese people. Of course the crimes committed by the Japanese in China are horrific to recall——even if not quite so hard on civilians as our method of ending the war was——but China's bitterness about the matter sometimes reaches nearly incredible levels.

China does not forget——and if they did the party's there to remind them that China is a nation that has been taken advantage of by the West, by Japan——in short, by everyone——and which the party can restore to its rightful glory. This psychology of national victimhood has some truly fascinating expressions, like the following commercial, in English no less, which was not made by the government (they have better standards) but put out by a sports network. Any foreigner who has watched a basketball game here has probably seen it; since many of you have been denied that pleasure, I reproduce for you, esteemed Readers, in all its Chinglish glory:

Mother

The world laughed at you for being backward;

The world was full of envy and anxiety when you opened up and
progressed into a financial powerhouse;

The world condemned you when you put law and order into the
upheaval and lawlessness created by followers of a self proclaimed Robin Hood in
Tibet but failed to applaud when you used your influence to save the lives of
Burmese monks;

The world threatened to boycott and disrupt the August
Olympics on ground of your violations of human rights standards set by the West
who by apartheid policies and discrimination of coloured people blatantly
violated for ages the same standards set.

Let me tell you Mother as a dragon seed brought up outside
China:

They fear you Mother as you out compete them;

They fear you Mother as you are set to replace them at the
healm of word order faster than they can accept;

They fear you Mother as you have refused to take sides in
every international dispute as you believe that to each his own and from each
his best;

They fear you Mother as you have by hardwork hastened the
failure and decadence of self assumed western supremacy system;

And finally for the period 12th May to eternity, you have
shown the world the tenderness, love and care of the best guardian government
and leaders the Chinese People can ever have contrasting greatly with the
aftermath of the Florida and Burmese cyclone.

Mother, words of praises and admiration will never come from
the West as they have painted you falsely as a hardcore monster with no feelings
for your own for too long and the Western World is watching with total disbelief
on CNN,BBC,Fox Media, live, the search, rescue, care and rebuilding operations
to restore life and normalcy into the millions of displaced victims led by
brothers Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao demonstrating love care and simplicity with no
political agenda whatsoever.

Mother, we whether in or out of the Great Wall are lucky and
proud to be descendants of the ever Supreme Dragon.

Amen.

Mr. Ben 吕律师

Chairman / CEO,

Bensports Satellite TV

May 2008

To which, apart from some caustic comments about the importance of commas, this Foreign Devil has nothing to say.

Two Pictures You May Like

The skies have been clearer lately in Beijing, thanks to a shutdown of industry around the city and the halving of cars on the roads. For the first time ever in this city, I saw a wonderful sunset last night. As a young westerner I was taught to thank God for such things; here at least credit goes to the Communist Party. For most people in Beijing it is an established fact that the party can control the weather, either by controlling the amounts of pollutants or by seeding rainclouds. These days they've proved they can provide blue skies and wonderful sunsets; but what will people here think after the Olympics if the party turns the smog back on? For the past few years, China has been preparing for the next few weeks. Every aspect of government policy has been designed to fit in with this country's Olympic plans: after the Olympics, China's future is an absolute cipher.

I went to the famous market at Panjiayuan today and entertained myself by arguing with shopkeepers on behalf of the Americans they were trying to cheat. Some of the American members of the Olympic Orchestra (there's an Olympic everything, more or less), just arrived in Beijing with their families, were touring the market, and I was able to prevent a few of them from paying ten times what they should have for what they bought. As a foreigner I got ripped off as well; but at least not as badly as those unfortunate musicians. Among other purchases, I had this piece of calligraphy made for next year's dorm room:

It's not a masterpiece of calligraphy, but it's done in a fairly standard modern interpretation of the Small Seal script, a bit more whimsical than the sort you'd stamp on a document; which I think is very pleasing and apt, given the meaning of the characters. The characters are drawn from the Chinese language's vast archive of four-character descriptive phrases, referring to——

But why would one have something written up in Chinese, and in the Small Seal script to boot, if he wanted everyone to know what it meant?

But is it a fake?