Water Ink

It is a bit strange to find Rob Gifford’s China Road in the travel section of my local bookshop. Route 312, where the author traveled from end to end, is not exact your typical tourist route. Nor is it associated with some significant historical events, for example, the Long March – which has become popular lately. However, Route 312 does connect Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city of China, to Urumqi, the provincial capital of the most remote part of Northwest China, two very different social and natural landscapes indeed.

Rob Gifford is not a normal tourist or explorer either. He’s been living in China for many years as a journalist working for BBC and American public service radio network NPR. This trip, which he did just before leaving China for a new job in London, not only reveals a society of huge diversity which is undergoing rapid social and economic changes, but also summaries the author’s understanding of Chinese people, culture and history. The contrasts in terms of cultural and economic development neatly reflect on the way Gifford travels, by train, car, taxi, imported 4×4 and overloaded truck. In one instance, the car he traveled on was caught by police for speeding, resulted in a strange encounter with the law enforcement and hot discussion of English Premier League.

You would be disappointed if you are looking for tourist attraction in the book. What the author attempts to do, however, is to inject his insight of Chinese society into the travel story, which really distinguishes this book from other similar travel logs. The subtitle gives it away: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. It’s combination of travel writing and commentary of culture and history. The down side of this approach is that the author could not write about one issue for too long, because the journey has to move on. Unlike another recently published book about present time China, Duncan Hewitt’s Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, the social observation in China Road does look scattered sometimes.

This is a funny and insightful book. An enjoyable read.

I love BBC TWO’s Springwatch. Today will be the last of the programme, or this ’season’. Small birds have to grow up and fly away - if they could survive the attack from mink and so on, so perhaps it’s better to let it go.

I have my mini-Springwatch though, just down to the local park.

The parent:

The child:

In the introduction of his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (Chatto and Windus), Duncan Hewitt wrote that when he sat at the cafe of Shanghai IKEA, he can see cars and trucks were rushing around outside the window in the three level elevated roads which also tangled with a light weight train rail. When I was reading this, I was sitting beside a window in a quiet corner of one of the large Waterstone’s in Edinburgh. Outside the window is the cobbled back street, where a pigeon was fighting hopelessly against a seagull for some leftover chips. Incidently, Edinburgh is where Hewitt’s journey started, as one of the students learning Chinese in Edinburgh University who were about setting foot in China in late 80s.

An often heard complaint among the youngests who came to the UK from China is that this place is just a bit dull. People can cite me many things they used to do in China, eating out at a newly opened restaurant, karaoke at a new KTV, or exchanging some latest American tv series are just the common ones. There seems to be endless supplies of new ways of consuming and entertaining. Things are moving rather fast there.

This fits well what Hewitt said, that it almost like the 60 years of post war development in the West has been compressed into 20 years in China. BBC’s Andrew Marr, in his History of Modern Britain, describes the make over of Birmingham in the 60s - the old Birmingham almost completely disappeared while people can’t wait to see a New Britain. Imagine that in a much bigger scale, repeated every five years. That’s what’s happening in China.

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BBC Four’s The World has an imaginative new name, World News Today, and a new slot at 7pm, which is a shame, because I’m a fan of its presenter Zeinab Badawi. I watched The World. Unlike other news programmes, The World doesn’t have to cover every news, thus allowing more time for each story, sometimes with discussion and debate, which is informative. But I have to say it hasn’t reached the status of untouchable, so when BBC Four decides to change it to the suicidal slot of 7pm, the unmissable Channel 4 News is the certain winner for me. So I’m afraid there will be one less viewer of World News Today.

Guardian’s Emily Bell defended the new front page of Guardian Unlimited website. “The shining new front door” as she put it, is currently only the front door. No doubt the make over of the whole site will take a while.

The Guardian Unlimited deserves a make-over. The old design of Guardian Unlimited isn’t the best I’ve seen. I often had difficulty to locate the contents and the fonts are too small, although the search facility improved a lot recently. The problem of the new design is, it makes the website indistinguishable among other British newspaper websites. Guardian Unlimited is renown for its unique contents, but a shining new front door is in danger of making itself look generic.

Comparing the front page of the “quality” newspaper websites, you will see the designs look too similar, only Independent has a slightly different look - but not for the better in my opinion. They all seem driven by the same ideas, perhaps dominated by framework of the same content management system (CMS). It’s all very well to improve the backend, but the front page design shouldn’t be undermined by the convenience of the backend. Surely a paper which produced such a wonderful, instantly distinguishable design for its print version, could invest some creative thinking and generate a web design innovative enough to matching its paper version?

BBC Radio 4 last week broadcasted two programs about China and Chinese. Anna Chen tracked the lives of early Chinese migrants in the UK in her 10-part series Chinese in Britain, while Duncan Hewitt read his new book Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China in Book of the Week program. The two programs provide sharp contrast: one is about how the early settlers from China survived and adopted to an alien land, the another is about how the young and old at the present time struggled and prospered when the old rules and value gone out of the window. And yet, both programs give some clues of how Chinese deal with changes, our fondness of “progress” and embrace of the “new”.

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I want to praise Edinburgh’s Cinema China 07’s organisers to choose Centre Stage (a.k.a. The Actress) as the opening film. Not only this gives them a good reason to invite Maggie Cheung, of whom I am a fan, to come to the festival, but also this is a fitting opening for a festival that celebrates a century of Chinese cinema.

I first watched this film more than ten years ago in Hong Kong. At that time I was already interested in the history of Chinese cinema and had begin working on my project Chinese Movie Database. The impact of this film on me, looking back now, was that it made me realise that the early (1930s) Chinese films could be attractive and sexy. The beautiful and enigmatic Ruan Lingyu became this focal point of my interest in early Chinese cinema. This film tells the history of the Shanghai era of silent cinema through Ruan Lingyu, with great passion. I guess there must have been some influence from Peggy Chiao, the film producer and critics from Taiwan, who provided the concept of this film. We saw the director and actresses interview the characters they played, and be interviewed. Scenes of the lost films were re-constructed. And when Zhang Damin visited Ruan Lingyu’s new home unexpectedly, I could almost see a glimpse of The Goddess.

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A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers
by Xiaolu Guo
I have to admit I didn’t read the whole book. I borrowed a copy from my friend but only had enough time to have a quick glance. I read the beginning when the protagonist Zhuang Xiaoqiao is on a plane to the UK, some bits in the middle, including an excerpt appeared on The Times, and the last several pages. So this is not a review, rather my impression on this book.

The plot is simple. Zhuang Xiaoqiao, a young woman comes to the UK to study English, with little knowledge of the country, and the language. She meets an artist in London. They becomes lovers and she moves into his flat in the rough side of London. She explores the culture, language, and sex through him. She feels increasingly lost when she knows better about the English (in the broad sense) and decides to go back to China. The circle ends. The story is narrated solely from the Zhuang Xiaoqiao’s point of view, using a dictionary-like structure, hence the book title.

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I’m very proud of the fact that I had watched Fei Mu’s 1948 masterpiece Spring in a Small Town (小城之春) in cinema. I can’t help keeping telling my friends at every opportunity that how I watched it with excitement, how I love this film and how I fell for the leading actress instantly. My friends probably have been tired of my bragging, half of them having no faintest idea what I talked about.

I watched Spring in a Small Town Hong Kong, during a retrospective of Fei Mu’s work held in Hong Kong Arts Centre in mid-90s. That was a rare event, because this movie disappeared from the public sight after initial release in Shanghai and was only re-discovered in 80’s, which makes it extremely difficult to locate a copy. The copy I watched was in excellent condition though. After the screening,
I approached Fei Ming Yi, the master’s daughter and one of the organisers of the retrospective, asking her where she got the copy. She said she borrowed it from Beijing Film Archive and, certainly used her influence to get the deal, had to ‘garantee the return on my life’. Afterwards, I always take it as a badget of honour as being in that cosy small theatre that evening.

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Ghosts (2006)
Director: Nick Broomfield
Cast: Ai Qin Lin, Zhan Yu, Wei Zhe

I saw the poster of Nick Broomfield’s Ghosts in Edinburgh’s Filmhouse cinema some time ago. There have been more press coverage when it released recently, but I wasn’t sure I could bring myself to watch this film. In the evening of 5th February 2004, I was travelling on a train from Manchester to Edinburgh along the west coast line. As in early February, it was dark outside. When I arrived home I heard the news about the missing Chinese cockle-pickers in Morecambe Bay. The next day it was clear 23 Chinese illegal immigrants were found dead or missing there. Looking at the map, I suddenly realised that on that cold February night, when my train was travelling in Lancashire countryside, I was not too far away from my fellow country men and women who were about to be swallowed by the rising tide.

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