The Dianying Diaries, part 3

Part of a series dealing with Chinese cinema. 电影 (diànyǐng) is the Chinese word for movie, the two characters literally meaning “electric” and “shadow.”

颐和园 (yíhéyuán, Summer Palace)

Once again I’m visiting a Chinese film not widely known in China. Multiple theories exist as to why it’s been effectively banned (I believe it’s just been refused distribution, but the filmmakers were officially chastised, receiving five-year work bans), and I’ll avoid speculation. It was screened at Cannes in 2006 without the approval of Chinese authorities, a definite no-no, but there are several other “problems” with it, as you’ll see.

This was the fourth feature film for director Lou Ye (娄烨), and he had encountered problems with the authorities on two of his earlier works (Weekend Lover 周末情人 and Suzhou River 苏州河 ).
Summer Palace is the story of a young woman named Yu Hong (余红), played by Hao Lei (郝蕾). She comes from a provincial city to a university in Beijing in the fall of 1988, leaving behind a boyfriend and her father. After an initial period of remaining solitary (even in her four-person dorm room), she meets Li Ti (李缇, played by Hu Lingling 胡伶伶), whose boyfriend is studying in Berlin and whose roommate is often not around. The two girls develop a strong bond, and after Yu Hong meets Zhou Wei (周伟 ), played by Guo Xiaodong (郭晓东), and starts dating him, Li Ti volunteers her room for them to share, and it becomes the scene of relatively explicit sex scenes.
This inclusion of full frontal nudity (both male and female) and the appearance of sexual activity is quite unusual in a film from Mainland China, but it is integral to the plot. Yu Hong provides narration from time to time, explaining her feelings, which are confused and a little odd at times. Several of the couple’s dates take them to the Summer Palace, where we see them sitting on a bench and looking at the lake.
Yu Hong makes it clear that she believes Zhou Wei is the love of her life, but nevertheless comes to the conclusion that she must break up with him – I won’t go into her twisted logic for this decision. She does so by convincing him that she has slept with her psychology tutor, which she may or may not have actually done. After the breakup, she drifts through some other boyfriends, but nothing serious.

In the meantime, the spring of 1989 has arrived, and with it massive student protests. None of the main characters are involved directly, but the chaos of marches, canceled classes, and the uncertainty of the government’s response to the situation forms a poignant backdrop to the emotional turmoil within Yu Hong.
Of course, the filmmakers weren’t able to re-enact these huge public scenes, so actual documentary footage from the time is used, and given the somewhat grainy appearance of the normal film, the combination is seamless.
At some point during all the confusion, Li Ti and Zhou Wei start having an affair.
Shortly after these events, Yu Hong decides to drop out of school and return to her home town. The friends scatter, with both Li Ti and Zhou Wei relocating to Berlin. We get a series of brief scenes during which Yu Hong has several affairs, including a married man. From her narration, it is clear that whenever she feels lonely (still pining for Zhou Wei), she finds a man to have sex with, and during the act is the only time she feels content. Various world events play out on the sidelines, including the handover of Hong Kong. We also get some scenes set in Berlin, where we see that Zhou Wei and Li Ti occasionally have sex but don’t really feel anything for each other.
The static situation ends when Li Ti suddenly jumps from the roof of a building, prompting Zhou Wei to return to China. Once there, he tracks down Yu Hong and arranges to meet her.

But when they finally meet, they hardly speak to each other, just drive around and walk on a chilly beach. In the end, they part without goodbyes.
This story of am emotionally unstable woman has some immensely appealing aspects. The first part of the film, up to when Yu Yong leaves Beijing, is really quite good. The scenes set during the Tienanmen student protests were quite moving given the knowledge of what was going on offscreen. But from there on, it just becomes fragmentary and disjointed. The inclusion of the scenes in Berlin further confuses the focus. In a film so centered on Yu Hong, even to the point of including her inner thoughts, it is jarring to suddenly be watching scenes that are completely outside her experience. The scattered second half of the film actually becomes a bit tedious as we wonder how many times this girl is going to screw up her life and those of others.
The portrait of student life in the late 80s was fascinating, showing China’s early encounters with Western music and more individual freedom. But just as those trends came to a crashing halt after June 4, 1989, so did the sense of enjoyment in the movie. At first I really enjoyed Yu Hong’s rebellious nature and sense of fun, but as the story proceeded her problems became more and more apparent, and eventually ended up being kind of tedious. Maybe this was intended as a subtle commentary on the changes in Chinese society, but if so, it’s too subtle to be sure of. And that doesn’t alter the fact that it became so uninteresting towards the end.
All in all, I would say that this is one half of a really good film edited together with one half of a not very good film. As you can tell from my description, there are several aspects of the film which might cause displeasure to the Chinese authorities, including the nudity, the inclusion of film of the student protests, and the lack of an uplifting ending. My problems with the film don’t involve any of these issues, but the lack of coherence and focus. The running time of 140 minutes would not seem excessive if the story justified it. As it is, I can’t really recommend it, though I commend Lou Ye for having the courage to make it.

Wikipedia entry
IMDB entry

It is available from Netflix.

Running up that hill

West of Beijing’s flat expanse rise some prominent hills. The Summer Palace is close to their base, and you can see them in some of my pictures from there.

(from April 2007)

Given the city’s long history and the significant portion of it when it was an imperial capital, it’s not surprising that emperors took an interest in these hills. Beijing’s climate is notoriously unpleasant at many times of the year, which encourages those with the means to get out of town. Add to that the fact that it’s really pretty up there, and you can bet the rulers appropriated big chunks of it for their personal use.

The park today called Xiangshan (Fragrant Hills) is one of those chunks. According to the brochure, it dates back to the Jin Dynasty in 1186. It has served as a royal resort for summer hunting and other activities for other subsequent dynasties based here. The famous emperor Qianlong ordered much expansion and building in 1745. And like many ancient things here, it’s had a variety of different names through the ages.

As with the Old Summer Palace, much damage was done to Xiangshan by English and French armies in 1860 and by the allies of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. It was opened as a public park in the 50s, and much of the destruction has been restored.

It’s quite a distance from the center of town. Taking the subway to the closest point still leaves you a bus ride of an hour or so.
The second bus is the one to Xiangshan, and almost all of the people were waiting for it. Note that although it appears warm, the sky is a uniform color that is not blue.
This is the park entrance, with the titular hills behind it. The highest one, on the right, is where I’m headed. Beijing’s elevation is 143 feet, and the top is at 1827.
This is half of Yanjing Hu (Spectacle Lake – spectacle as in eyeglasses) with a little artificial waterfall. From near here, there is a cable car to take you to the summit, but that’s for wimps, and I’m not a wimp.
If I remember right, this is the front of an old monastery (this part of the brochure is only in Chinese, and not any characters I know). I think it was built by the emperor for when the Lama visited from Tibet. I like the tree growing out of the wall.
This is Liulita (Glazed Tile Pagoda, pronounced oddly like “Lolita”), which managed to survive the destruction while most everything else went down.
From there on, it gets kind of steep. This is one tiny fraction of what seemed like an endless stairway. By this point I was starting to wonder if the cable car might have been a better choice. But imagine the feeling of accomplishment that lies ahead!
Yes, that’s the top way up there. Would it take longer to go back down and catch a ride?
There is even some wildlife to be seen.
Very near the summit now, seriously out of breath and thankful for the extra bottle of water I bought from a lady a few hundred meters below. Notice how people react to a sign that says Dangerous! No coming close! And no, that is not the Great Wall in the background, just an old park boundary fence.
This is the top. Finally made it. My legs were on fire, but I can now count myself among those elite few who have done the climb. All ten million or so of us.
You’ll have to take my word for it that Beijing is down there. The air at this height is actually pretty good, and we were in bright sunlight. The “haze” was so diffuse that you couldn’t see it in a layer from this height.

After a lengthy breather, it was time to head back down, which involves a somewhat different set of leg muscles. Equal opportunity aches, you could say.
It’s quite a pleasant spot for a picnic or just relaxing. The park is most famous for its fall colors, with a number of different species of trees contributing. I’ve heard it can be extremely crowded at that time of year. But it’s pretty nice in early summer as well.

As you can tell, when I went up this hill, I was not running, but I couldn’t resist a Kate Bush reference for the title. But I am not a wimp.

For some shots of Xiangshan on a clearer day, check out this page. Just my luck, the day after I went was clear and blue, at least in the morning – thunderstorm at night.

Sidecars, Monkey Kings, and Kite Eating Trees

Sunday afternoon, weather’s nice, nothing that absolutely has to be done at work today, what to do…?

It’s “Get out the Map” time, of course.

This time I picked Yuyuantan Park over on the west side of Beijing, not quite as far out as the Sculpture Park or Wukesong, but in the same direction, and conveniently situated near a subway station.

On the way from Seasons Park to the subway, I took the opportunity to snap a picture of something I’ve been seeing frequently for a long time.
I first noticed this thing not long after I moved into my apartment, and it has not moved since. Note that the sidecar seat has become storage space for something – I don’t know what’s in the can.

The path from Muxidi Station to the park lies along this canal.
I paid my ¥2 (about $0.30) and went in.
I’m not sure if this was volunteer karaoke or a set performance, but the guy had a very good singing voice.
This is a very popular pastime here. It’s called jianzi, sort of a Chinese version of hacky-sack, only instead of a little beanbag it’s a weighted feathery thing.

Like many of Beijing’s parks, Yuyuantan features water.
This lake is mostly manmade, though the park dates from Imperial times when there was a spring here, so water was around, if not in this form. And like most of Beijing’s parks with water, you can rent boats. In the background is the China Central Radio Tower, which can also be seen from the Summer Palace. Maybe someday I’ll go inside to check out the view.

It has been noted elsewhere that though Beijing will be hosting the Paralympic Games, it is notoriously difficult for disabled people to get around here.
Here’s one of the reasons why. Not only are sidewalks made of tiles that can be uneven, but there are sections under repair all over the place. My personal observation is that they wouldn’t have to repair them so often if they built them better in the first place, but that’s the way it’s done here.
There’s a “bridge” across the lake, and right now it’s decorated with a “dragon” – I put it in quotes because if you look at it closely, you’ll see that the individual discs behind the head are decorated with Olympic mascots.

Yuyuantan is home to a large garden of cherry trees, and it being about the right time of year, I figured I could catch some in bloom.
Me and several thousand other people. As it turned out, this tree was the only one in full bloom. So much of the park is under construction or renovation or expansion or something that it’s hard to even tell where the other trees are supposed to be.

Regular readers will probably already have noticed that I’ve been to quite a few of the city’s parks, and many of them have little rides for the young ones. (See Chaoyang Park, Tuanjiehu, and so on – heck, even the Sculpture Park had a ride.)
Here’s a water ride on the theme of the Monkey King, who is a very popular figure here.

One last shot from the park proper:
A little traffic jam on the lake. Note the green boat in the middle, which is decorated like a Red Army tank, and the little flying saucer shaped one in the background.

Just south of the park is the China Millennium Monument.
It looks like there’s some kind of art show going on inside: Master Pieces of the 19th Century European Paintings at the Perez Simón Collection. (That is what the sign says.)

But all in all, I’d say the area gets more use as a place to fly kites.
This tree sees a lot of action. It might be hard to tell from the picture, but there are about a dozen kites stuck in it. Charlie Brown had it easy compared to the kids in this area.

New Old Shanghai

I’ve written about Shanghai a number of times. You can click on the “Shanghai” tag at the end of this entry to see the others. On this trip, I managed to see a part of the town I hadn’t visited before.

Not too far from the historic Bund and the frenzy of Nanjing Lu’ s modern shopping orgy is an older part of town. In English it’s called Old Town, and in Chinese Nanshi, which means South Town.
There are lots of buildings in an older style, though I’m pretty sure most of them are reconstructions if not simply modern buildings made copying the old style. I don’t know if any of it is actually old.

For the most part, it’s filled with tourist stuff and restaurants, though the side streets not far away are much more like “real” Shanghai, with bicycle repair shops, cheap non-name-brand clothes, and so on.
It’s also been invaded by Gumby.
That’s the mascot for the 2010 Shanghai World’s Fair. I have mentioned the Gumby similarity to Chinese people, and some of them have even heard to the character. I’ve not met anyone who actually liked this mascot.
In the middle of the area is a pond with this picturesque tea house.

For a ¥30 entrance fee, you can wander around in Yuyuan, a lovely garden dating originally from 1559. It has been ransacked and rebuilt numerous times since then, most recently (if I remember right) in 1853. It was private property rather than imperial.
Spring comes to Shanghai a little earlier than Beijing, and many of the trees were in bloom.
Lovely scent in the air.
It is home to numerous cats, including this little pregnant female with very uncommon (here at least) markings.
While smaller than such immense parks as the Summer Palace in Beijing, it’s still pretty extensive. Somehow it seems bigger on the inside that it did on the outside.
As usual, the roofs are decorated elaborately.
I guess it’s off-season still, since a guy came around at 5:00 to tell everyone it was closing time.

I have a few other miscellaneous pictures of other parts of the city, but since Nanshi and Yuyuan make a nice package, I’ll save them for another post.

Now you’ve gone and ruined it

More time travel, this time to 13 October 2007. Photos by D & me.

In case you hadn’t noticed, Beijing is a big city with a long history, and there are enough interesting things here that even tourists who devote more than a week to the city are going to miss things. Even a foreigner who’s lived here almost a year can discover new things. Yuanming Yuan is a case in point. The guide book calls it “Yuanming Yuan (Garden of Perfect Brightness, sometimes known as the Old Summer Palace)” which clears up nothing, and certainly doesn’t make it seem special enough to be at the top of anyone’s list. I don’t even know any locals who have been there.

It’s a huge park adjacent to the more famous Yihe Yuan (Summer Palace) in the northwest part of town. We visited there towards the end of a very long day of running around town.
We started out by taking the subway to Tiananmen Square, hoping to get to see it this time – the last time we tried was a couple days before the National Day festival was to start, and the square was roped off while they set up some special decorations. As it turned out, on this day we had similar luck. The Central Committee was meeting in the Great Hall of the People and the whole square was roped off and had soldiers everywhere guarding it.

Also on our agenda was trying to find a music store that D had read about in the American media – a place where independent Chinese music was sold. We only had and address, not the name of the store, so I located the general area on the map and we rode the subway to the nearest station. We ended up walking over a mile along the street before we came to the specified address, and it was a closed-up doorway.

By this time, we were feeling pretty hungry, so we continued walking towards what seemed to be a commercial center searching for a place that looked good for lunch. What we found was a whole district devoted to selling musical instruments, with dozens of shops featuring everything from Chinese traditional instruments to electric guitars and the latest hi-tech keyboards. I will definitely be going back there. After wandering for a while in amazement (seriously, there were several blocks containing nothing but instrument stores on both sides of the street), we finally settled on McDonald’s, which was the only reasonable-looking food place we came across.

After a quick meal, we found a taxi and asked for Yuanming Yuan. I guess I didn’t pronounce it very well, because the driver asked to see my map. Or maybe it’s just that nobody ever asks to go there. I think we must have taken an indirect route (or maybe he missed a turn), but we eventually got to the entrance.
It was all decorated with the same kind of fabric-on-frames structures I saw back during the Spring Festival. We paid for our Through Tickets and went in.
It’s very nice looking at the entrance, and like many parts of town, is augmented by arrays of plants in plastic pots. It’s a lot easier than actually putting the things in the ground, I suppose.

It was a clear, chilly afternoon, and there are lots of ponds suitable for lotus.
And mosquitoes, unfortunately.
The signs were a bit confusing, and we found ourselves walking along a long path decorated with various animals and characters overhead.
Eventually we got to the ruins. Back in the Qing Dynasty (the last of China’s dynasties), the emperors had built a complex of European-style structures at his Summer Residence. Obviously the originals do not survive, but from the descriptions and drawings from the time, it was quite spectacular, and said to rival Versailles in France. They were constructed over the periods from roughly 1750-1850. Please forgive my fuzzy history.
In 1860, during what is called the Second Opium War, British and French forces captured Beijing and destroyed the palaces, knocking down the beautiful buildings and breaking up the carved marble.
Over the years following the sacking, locals salvaged much of the building material for their own purposes, leaving a stark collection of blocks and columns.
We watched with a little sadness to see how poorly today’s locals treat the site. There are signs that say not to climb on the ruins. We also watched in amazement as a woman wrestled with a tree, pulling and twisting a branch until if finally came off. She then stripped off all the twigs and handed it to her young son to use as a walking stick, leaving the poor tree sagging and damaged.
This is what remains of a huge water display. The emperor would sit on a throne located about where this photo was shot from, and watch as the massive fountain in front of him spouted in some kind of show.
This upside-down looking structure is what remains of the water tower. There was a large cistern on top of it, and it’s at the right elevation to have been used to supply water to the fountains.
As you can see, it was starting to get dark, so we began to make our way towards the exit. As we walked, the lanterns along the path came on in a sporadic fashion. One string would light up, then another off in one direction, the one off the other way. There was certainly no central control of the lighting.
D caught sight of something unexpected on the sidewalk, and I popped the lens cap off the camera to get a portrait. That’s qingwa in Mandarin. Pretty big one too.

As we walked along, we started catching sight of cats. First one would dart across the sidewalk, then we’d see a movement in the bushes.
Eventually we saw a whole bunch of them hanging near on a bridge. Yes, there were fish in the water.
Then there was a commotion and most of the cats came rushing towards us. There was a lady dropping some cat food onto the sidewalk. Must be a regular occurrence – the cats all knew what to expect.
At seemingly random times, the fabric decorations lit up.

If you’re thinking this is slightly goofy, you’re thinking exactly what I was thinking as we walked along. Of course, I saw the same kind of stuff in Chaoyang Park during the Spring Ffestival, but I’m easily amused.
Speaking of goofy, here we have miniature glowing replicas of two of the most famous venues being built for the 2008 Olympics – the Aquatics Center (aka Water Cube) and National Stadium (aka Bird’s Nest).