#about 1980s and 1990s Hong Kong

[teafiend]

This ending to “Comrade: Almost a Love Story” (1996) hits as hard as it did more than two decades ago. Hopeful and poignant, it was the perfect ending 👏🏽

The movie is so, so fabulous ⭐️

An oldie favourite, I am struck anew by how stunning and accomplished Maggie Cheung is 🌸🤩👏🏽

#甜蜜蜜

[mariacallous]

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s elevation to the national stage as running mate for Vice President Kamala Harris has suddenly put him in the spotlight. Walz had a low national profile until a successful behind-the-scenes strategy led him to be considered for Democrats’ suddenly vacant second spot.

One of the striking elements of Walz’s biography is his unusually deep connections to China. Walz first visited the country in 1989, just months after the Tiananmen Square protests, and returned to the country some 30 times afterward. As an educator and then a small business owner, he facilitated student groups’ trips to China. As a legislator, he served on the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which monitors human rights and the rule of law in the country, and co-sponsored resolutions urging the release of democratic activist Liu Xiaobo and remembering the Tiananmen Square victims.

Not all the attention to Walz’s China record has been positive. Republican and conservative figures have sought to portray Walz’s China ties as dangerous. On X, for example, Sen. Marco Rubio accused Walz of being a Chinese asset—“an example of how Beijing patiently grooms future American leaders”—who would “allow China to steal our jobs & factories & flood America with drugs.”

But Rubio’s attack has it precisely backward. Walz’s record is that of a measured critic of the Chinese Communist Party—prone neither to exaggeration nor accommodation. Nor is this a pose cooked up by spin doctors in the past few weeks. Small-town Nebraska newspaper articles—published well before Walz had any political ambitions—demonstrate that his professed affection for the Chinese people and culture has been matched by a longstanding criticism of the country’s rulers.

Back in the 1980s and ’90s, it didn’t take a lot to make the local papers. Walz, for instance, was once photographed for the Alliance Times-Herald—“Box Butte County’s Only Family-Owned Newspaper”—for a National Guard project: painting and repairing trash cans in the town center. (The photograph is about as exciting as the description suggests.)

The regular stuff of small-town news reporting—council meetings, 4-H club events, church announcements—was occasionally enlivened by stories about exceptional events. One such, it turned out, was Walz’s decision to teach in China as part of a program run by WorldTeach, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. (Many news accounts, at the time and later, describe WorldTeach as a Harvard-run program, but it’s more accurate to say it was founded by Harvard students.)

“I’ve always had a real interest in travel, and feel this is a golden opportunity to see a culture that’s 3,000 years old,” Walz, then a senior at Chadron State College, told the Chadron Record in an article announcing his selection in 1989.

Walz would be going under less than glamorous conditions. It was the first year that WorldTeach would make placements in China, the Record reported, and that meant participants had to be resourceful: “They said we’ll basically have to solve our own problems,” Walz said. He said he had to raise $2,500 for his transportation, health insurance, and orientation costs—and, once in China, he would only earn $100 per month in salary (although that was, the Record noted, “about twice the amount generally paid [to] Chinese teachers”).

Although the crackdown on protesters in June 1989 led Walz to wonder whether the trip would go on, the program remained in place. After orientation in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China, he traveled to his teaching site: a senior middle school in Foshan, a then-rapidly growing city in central Guangdong Province in southern China. There, he taught U.S. history and culture and English to classes of 65 students each from December 1989 to December 1990, according to a 1990 article in the Chadron Record. (Walz’s Midwestern-accentuated U.S. English was a change for the students, whose previous instructor was British, according to a 1994 article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald.)

His trip was big enough news that the Record printed excerpts from a letter Walz wrote to a Chadron State faculty member while he was abroad. Walz wrote that he was “being treated like a king.” He was, he wrote, “totally responsible for my curriculum. But I’m managing.”

After he returned, Walz was invited to speak about his time at his alma mater, Chadron State. At about the same time, an interview about his year in China ran in local papers. His enthusiasm was obvious: “No matter how long I live, I’ll never be treated that well again,” Walz told the Record in 1990. “They gave me more gifts than I could bring home. It was an excellent experience.” (In 2024, the New York Post twisted this line as evidence that Walz had “fawned over Communist China.”)

Yet in context, it’s clear that Walz was no dupe. During his teaching year, he visited Beijing (a 40-hour trip by rail) and saw Tiananmen Square, according to the Record. As much as Walz loved China and the Chinese people, his attitude toward the Chinese Communist Party was bluntly critical. Tiananmen Square, he told the Record, “will always have a lot of bitter memories for the people.” (Walz later chose June 6 as his wedding date so he could “have a date he’ll always remember,” according to his wife.)

The problem with China, Walz observed, wasn’t its people but the government. “If they had the proper leadership, there are no limits on what [Chinese people] could accomplish,” he told the Record. “They are such kind, generous, capable people. They just gave and gave and gave to me. Going there was one of the best things I have ever done.”

Walz viewed China’s population as eager to leave its Communist-run society. “Many of the students want to come to America to study,” he told the Record. “They don’t feel there is much opportunity for them in China.” He mentioned that during one of his trips to nearby Macau, then still a Portuguese colony, the government granted amnesty to Chinese immigrants living in the colony illegally, triggering a stampede by tens of thousands of Chinese who wanted residency in the West.

The trip shaped Walz’s career as an educator. Within a few months of his return, Walz had found a job as a social studies teacher in Alliance, Nebraska, a town whose population was then just under 10,000 people. He created a pen-pal program linking his students to Chinese middle-school students at his old teaching placement, where a friend of his worked. The program was reported on the front page of the Alliance Times-Herald in 1991.

Walz, who must have been a dynamic teacher, used the exchange of letters to not only bridge cultural gaps but also demonstrate the stakes of then-acrimonious U.S.-China government relations to his students. Walz pointedly described the politics of the countries’ then-seemingly large trade imbalance (a fraction of what it is now) to the Times-Herald: “The Chinese government wants us to buy what they sell, but won’t buy what we sell.”

Soon, Walz was leading groups of students to China. The first visit was in July 1993, when he took 25 Alliance High School students on a trip partly funded by the Chinese government, although the students and sponsors, including Walz, had to cover costs of $1,580 each, according to an article in the Scottsbluff Star-Herald; Walz helped by raising funds from local businesses. (In a rare criticism of an aspect of Chinese culture, rather than the Chinese Communist Party, Walz responded to one student’s interest in hearing Chinese opera by saying he’d “rather eat glass” than see another Chinese opera.) Walz’s honeymoon with his wife, a fellow teacher, the next year involved two student trips to China, according to the Star-Herald. Later, he and his wife would start a business to promote similar exchanges.

For all his fondness toward China, Walz’s descriptions of its people at times reflected the prevailing stereotypes of the time. “The students are almost too well behaved,” he wrote in his letter from China that was excerpted in the Record in 1989. In a 1994 profile ahead of his honeymoon in China, Walz told the Star-Herald that it had been hard to memorize names and tell his students apart (although he also noted that Chinese students thought all Americans looked alike.) To the Times-Herald in 1993, he described his students as not overly creative but industrious: “[T]here was never even any unfinished homework,” he recalled. And, for Walz, mostly used to small-town life, the sheer scale of China was astonishing: “The people were the best part, and the worst part was the number of people.”

The contemporaneous (and surprisingly extensive) record of how Walz’s time in China influenced him clearly rejects the idea that Walz was groomed or otherwise misled by his time in the country. He was an earnest, young observer of a society and government radically unlike his own. After repeated exposure, however, China became increasingly familiar to him. His opinions about the Chinese people and their government derived from firsthand observations, filtered through his own background and reading.

Neither a hawk nor a dove, Walz approached China as a student and a teacher—an owl, to steal a metaphor. Throughout these early interviews, his insistence on the separation between a people and their government—and his repeated criticism of the Chinese government—was plain. So was his emphasis on the importance of democracy and recognizing where the United States fell short.

People change, and seeking clues to how a potential Vice President Walz would act based on how high school teacher Walz approached his lessons is clearly perilous. Still, it seems clear that Walz values facts, and in particular experience, rather than theory or ideology; that he has deeply held core beliefs about China’s people and government set in the era of Tiananmen; and that his commitment to promoting human rights—and U.S. economic interests in trade negotiations—is longstanding.

With that background, leavened by subsequent experience on China issues as a member of Congress, it seems more likely than not that Walz would be neither inflexibly hostile nor naïve about relations with Beijing.

[mybeingthere]

Mitsuru Watanabe, Japanese, b. 1953

Mitsuru Watanabe was born in 1953 in the Aomori Prefecture in Japan, the youngest of four siblings. His mother was an amateur painter who set an example for her children, not only with her own work, but also with an extensive library of art books in the family home. The young Mitsuru gradually began to browse through the books, thus introducing himself to a wide variety of styles, aesthetics and historical images. In addition, he poured over books on drawing and painting techniques, establishing a foundation for his future work as a professional artist.

His junior high school did offer an art class, but it was not particularly inspiring, and in high school, there was no art education offered. That left Mitsuru to study on his own, and after graduation in 1972, he again consulted art books about painting techniques, which provided some basic guidance. His introduction to professional training came as a result of an advertisement that he placed in an art magazine in the hope of attracting some clients for his painting. Instead one of his paintings was purchased by a collector on behalf of the painter Seiichiro Ban (b. 1950), who was impressed with the younger artist’s work. He invited Mitsuru to Kyoto, eventually teaching him “everything about painting techniques”, including the use of oils, brushwork and color adjustment. In the process, the two men became good friends.

Meanwhile, Mitsuru worked for a printing company for a few years. Eventually, he gave it up in order to paint, and for several years, he paid the bills by gambling at mahjong and pachinko (Japanese pinball). In spite of the hardships of such an uncertain mode of living, he looks back fondly on this period.

By 1975, he met and married his wife, and moved to Hachinohe City. The family soon grew to include a son and two daughters. Looking back on those early days, Mitsuru recalls spending many days reading in a library while taking care of his son. He requested books on philosophy, religious studies, cultural anthropology, psychoanalysis and contemporary criticism, all of which the library provided. A few years later, when his paintings were selling well, a librarian mentioned to him that they had spent over 200,000 yen per year on his requests; and that his absence from the library meant that they no longer had such a generous budget allotment.

With a growing family, Mitsuru realized that he would need to increase his income. He had become friends with a local theatrical troupe, even writing a play for the group at one point, and thought that they might be interested in purchasing some of his paintings. With these funds, he was able to organize a successful solo exhibition in Hachinohe. Ultimately, he was able to raise enough money to advertise his work in an art magazine and stage an exhibition in Ginza. Most of the paintings sold and Mitsuru’s career was launched.

In the 1980s, Japan was enjoying an economic boom, including the market for contemporary art. Although progress was slow initially, Mitsuru’s work began to attract attention in Tokyo. When he won the 10 million yen prize in the Second Ryohei Koiso Grand Prize Exhibition in 1994, the gallery world took notice. Soon he was working with a gallery in Ginza, which in turn led to Mitsuru’s art being noticed by a Hong Kong gallery; this broadened the international market for his art.

In 1990, Mitsuru met and befriended Hiroshi Furuyoshi after seeing an exhibition of his work. Hiroshi’s collection of international art books provided inspiration, and, as Mitsuru notes, Hiroshi “generously taught me about [western] painting techniques.”

His work offers a compelling mix of Japanese and Western traditions. He borrows imagery freely from a number of western artists, ranging from Pieter Brueghel and Hieronymus Bosch to Henri Rousseau. These “borrowed images” are grounded in the Japanese tradition of shyakkei (borrowed landscape) which utilizes nearby natural landmarks as the backdrop to the design of a garden. Likewise, Mitsuru incorporates traditional western images both as the stage for his work and occasionally as commentary in the form of small visual quotations from old master paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Erie Loran, as well as the Japanese contemporary artist Hayami Gyosyu.

Almost all of Mitsuru’s paintings feature his children as his models. In the 2018 painting, In the Forest-with Deposition of Christ, one of his daughters is shown strumming a guitar while comfortably seated in one of Henri Rousseau’s forests. The lion from Rousseau’s painting of The Sleeping Gypsy (1897) grazes casually nearby at a much smaller scale. And on the other side of the canvas, Peter Paul Rubens’ The Descent from the Cross (1612-14) is inserted into the forest landscape as if it were a staged tableau. In the 2019 painting, Naoko Walking in Rousseau’s Forest, the artist’s daughter again appears, this time walking on air with her “Hello Kitty” purse slung over her shoulder and a Canon camera pointed straight at the viewer as if it were a gun.

The combination of humor and serious cultural commentary is characteristic of Mitsuru’s painting. He notes that this too is based on an older Japanese trope, Honka-dori, in which new tanka poetry is created by quoting from famous older tanka poems. Mitsuru has used iconic western paintings coupled with very contemporary Japanese images to initiate a discussion about the cross-cultural influences of each tradition. And his children have become the ambassadors of that conversation. As Mitsuru comments “As long as I live, they will go around the world of painting as a child, like Peter Pan.”

Janet Whitmore, Ph.D.

https://rehs.com/Mitsuru_Watanabe_Naoko_Playing_in_Boschs...

[interact-if]

Do you have any recs for ifs that take place in the 80s 90s or early 2000s? Thank you all for your hard work, it’s so appreciated! <3

Hi Anon,

There are a handful of them out there!

1980s:

A Summer’s End: Hong Kong 1986 (VN) by @oracleandbone

1990s:

Broken Minds (壊れた心) (VN) by Locked On Games

Conspiracy in Emerson by @emersonfreepress 

Letters: A Written Adventure (VN) by Plug In Dial

Nectar Lake, The Prequel by @nectarlake-if

Raptor Boyfriend: A High School Romance (VN) by Rocket Adrift Games

So, About Last Night by Elissa Black

The Passenger by @the-passenger-if

The Vanishing Project by @666whatsyourvanishing

Early 2000s:

YOU ARE SPAMZAPPER 3.1 by Leon Arnott 

(Thank you <3)

[thiswaycomessomethingwicked]

In good political news today, Toronto elected Olivia Chow as mayor and I'm super stoked to have her back in City Hall.

From this CBC Article:

Olivia Chow was elected Toronto's next mayor in an unexpectedly close race Monday, promising to bring a more progressive approach after more than a decade of conservative leadership at city hall. The former downtown Toronto NDP MP and city councillor bested a record field of 102 candidates that included about a half dozen established contenders. Among those rivals was second-place finisher Ana Bailão — a past deputy to former mayor John Tory, whose shock resignation in February triggered the byelection. Chow, who was born in Hong Kong and came to Toronto at age 13, will become the third woman and first racialized person to serve as mayor in the city's history. She steps into the top spot as it grapples with a massive budget shortfall, an affordability crisis and public safety concerns. "If you ever doubted what's possible together, if you ever questioned your faith in a better future and what we can do with each other, for each other, tonight is your answer," Chow said in her speech to a crowd of cheering supporters. "Thank you to the people of Toronto for the trust you've placed in me and the mandate for change as your new mayor." [...] Among her headline commitments is a pledge to get the city back into social housing development and an annual $100 million investment in a program to purchase affordable homes and transfer them to non-profits and land trusts. [...]

Chow campaigned from the left, promising to boost rent supplements by introducing a "luxury home tax," an expanded land transfer tax on homes sold for $3 million and over. She also said she'll triple the city's existing vacant homes tax to three per cent. Chow will inherit largely untested strong mayor powers, however she has repeatedly said she wouldn't use them to override "majority rule" in council. In theory they would allow Chow to pass budgets with just one-third council support, veto bylaws and unilaterally shape the city's top-level administration. She did not release a fully-costed platform, and repeatedly declined to say by how much she would need to raise property taxes to pay for her suite of commitments — a focal point of criticism from her main rivals throughout the campaign.

The last week of the campaign saw Ontario Premier Doug Ford all but formally endorsed Saunders, warning at an unrelated news conference that a Chow mayoralty would be an "unmitigated disaster" and that she would raise taxes at an "unprecedented rate." Saunders finished third with 8.4 per cent of the total vote share.   Ford's pointed attack raises questions about Chow's relationship with Queen's Park as the city faces a $1.5-billion budget hole that will almost certainly require provincial help to fill. In a statement Monday night, Ford struck a conciliatory tone, saying he will "work with anyone ready to work with our government to better our city and province.  "Throughout Olivia's life, she has proven her desire and dedication to serving the city that many of us call home. While we're not always going to agree on everything, what we can agree on is our shared commitment to making Toronto a place where businesses, families, and workers can thrive."

Chow has long been a fixture of Toronto politics. She became a school board trustee in 1985, served 12 years on city council representing Trinity-Spadina and eventually became a New Democrat parliamentarian alongside her late husband and former federal NDP leader Jack Layton. Some of her notable policy stances include supporting an anti-homophobia curriculum in the 1980s, helping bring nutrition programs to Toronto schools in the 1990s and fighting against exploitative immigration consultants in the 2000s. For much of the last decade, she has run the Institute for Change Leaders at Toronto Metropolitan University where she trained community organizers.

The city being in basic bankruptcy position that will require provincial bail-out support is going to be contentious because Doug Ford is a nasty piece of work and vindictive as fuck - especially against Toronto Mayors - so we will see what she'll be able to get out of him (if anything). The Federal level will be able to help some, but it's really a municipal-provincial issue.

[arthurdrakoni]

Flag of the Federation of China

This is the flag of the Federation of China. It comes from a world where the Long March failed, and Chinese Communist forces got completely massacred by the Kuomintang. This was a crippling blow to Chinese Communist. Things only got worse once Japan invaded China. The Japanese managed almost completely eradicate the remaining Communist forces. World War II still ended in an Allied victory. However, the Nationalists now stood as the uncontested rulers of the now liberated China. 

China, fervently anti-communist, sided with America during the Cold War. China intervened during the Korean War rand the Vietnam War, resulting in Vietnam and Korea being united under the governments of South Korea and South Vietnam respectively. China remained a one-party authoritarian dictatorship for the first few decades of the Cold War. Starting in the 1970s and early 1980s, following the death of Chiang Kai-shek, China began to reform and liberalize. Genuine opposition parties were allowed to run in elections, and the Kuomintang no long held sole power. It was during this time that China’s economy took-off in earnest. China became a Tiger Economy along side other East Asian nations such as Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore.  By the late 1980s and early 1990s China had transitioned into a full democracy. China is a federation that allows considerable autonomy for ethnic minorities. The Federation of China comprises the territory of China, Mongolia, and Taiwan in our world. Tibet, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Guangdong, and Taiwan are semi-autonomous republics within the Chinese Federation. They are allowed to use their own constitutions, rather than the Chinese constitution. They’re also allowed to use languages other than Mandarin as their official language. However, the federal government of China handles matters of national defense, international relations, and diplomacy. Hong Kong and Macau were returned to China slightly earlier than in our timeline. They’re currently designated as semi-autonomous territories to ensure things go smoothly as they integrate into the Chinese Federation.  America remains one of China’s closest allies. This is not merely an alliance of convenience, but an alliance of genuine friendship. There is less racism against Asian-Americans as a result of the Sino-American Alliance. Traditional Chinese Culture has both survived and thrived in the absence in the Cultural Revolution. China also maintains good relations with the other nations of East Asia. There’s currently talk of a join Chinese-American mission to Mars, with possibly a few astronauts from other East Asian nations as well. China is projected to overtake America economically, but most Americans aren’t concerned. The future looks bright for China, and East Asia in general. The flag came about during the early 1990s. Most Chinese people decided that you can’t beat the classics. So, they combined first flag and seal of the Republic of China. The five bands represent the five major races of China: Han (Red), Manchus (Yellow), Mongols (Blue), Uyghurs (White), and Tibetans (Black). The dragon and phoenix are traditional symbols of China. They also symbolize Yin (Phoenix) and Yang (Dragon). They are equal and opposite, a subtle reference to the opportunities women have in the new China. The seal also includes other references to good fortune and prosperity.

Link to the original flag on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2022/06/flag-of-federation-of-china.html

[maggiecheungs]

hello ! Sorry to bother But I was wondering if u had any 90's Hong Kong movies that you could recommend me ? I'm researching them for school and I usually get the most interesting and gutwrenching sinophone movie recs from your blog so I thought I should ask if u had any ! Thank u ❣️

Hey you 🥰 this is probably waaaaaay to late to be of any help with your research (sorry!) but I'll answer anyway just in case <3 (also, it got. a bit long 😳 so sorry about that lmao)

I'll start off by addressing the elephant in the room, a.k.a. Wong Kar-wai: the director you really can't avoid mentioning when talking about 90s and 00s Hong Kong cinema, and for good reason. I won't mention all his films here, but his best known are probably In the Mood for Love (which is regularly hailed as one of the greatest films ever made, which. yes); Happy Together (a staple of queer cinema starring Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung caught up in a fever-like, destructive love affair in Buenos Aires); Chungking Express (another classic beloved by many, many people); Fallen Angels (a stylish and chaotically seductive about eccentric figures inhabiting Hong Kong's nightlife).

Another director from this period who I think is worth highlighting is Stanley Kwan. He's probably best known for Rouge, which is from 1987 but which I’m including because it’s a classic; it stars the wonderful Leslie Cheung and Anita Mui as the principals in a doomed, decades-spanning love affair, featuring sumptuous visuals, ghosts, and time-slippages between the 1930s and 1980s. His other most notable work is probably Center Stage (1991); it's a very meta biopic of the 1930s actress Ruan Lingyu, who is portrayed by Maggie Cheung, and Kwan uses the film to draw parallels between the two actresses living decades apart. And I'll also mention his Lan Yu (2001), a gay love story set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square and its aftermath (it's probably weird to admit that this is one of my comfort films but shrugs).

Comrades: Almost a Love Story (1996) is an absolute favourite of mine, about immigrant identity, missed chances and lives you could have led, human connection under capitalism, and the love story between two people whose paths keep crossing despite everything--all of which is topped off with fantastic performances from Maggie Cheung and Leon Lai.

Farewell My Concubine (1993) was a Hong Kong-mainland co-production and is probably one of the best known films on this list, starring the fantastic Leslie Cheung in one of the defining performances of his career (tbh it would be worth watching for his performance alone). Coming in at just under 3 hours, it's a cinematic epic in pretty much every sense of the word.

Speaking of Leslie Cheung: Viva Erotica (1996), in which he plays an arthouse director whose Serious Films keep flopping, so he has to turn his next film into an erotic movie financed by a triad boss. It’s funny and big-hearted and has some unexpectedly interesting things to say about filmmaking and cinema as both an industry and as an artform.

Ann Hui is one of the few female big-name Hong Kong directors of the 90s; I'd recommend her 1990 film Song of the Exile--a film about generational conflict, immigration, cultural alienation and family ties, which takes place across the UK, Hong Kong, and Japan, and stars Maggie Cheung in the lead role. (Another prominent woman director from the period whom I've been meaning to watch since forever Mabel Cheung--really looking forward to finally seeing something of hers soon.)

Takeshi Kaneshiro and Kelly Chen had quite a few collaborations which are rather nice. Their Anna Magdalena (1998) is a quirky but poignant love-triangle story that inexplicably turns into a delightful steampunk romp. Lost and Found (1996) is another quirky-but-poignant love story, albeit a little more sedate.

For action films, there's the legendary John Woo, whose films are pretty quintessential action flicks--Hard Boiled is a pretty good example of his filmography. There's also The Heroic Trio and Executioners (both 1993): an action duology starring Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui as a trio of ass-kicking vigilante superheroes. It's sooooo much fun, peak cinema, marvel could never, etc. etc. I'm also going to mention Infernal Affairs (2002), starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Andy Lau, because it's one of my favourite action thriller films of all time.

Wuxia: a lot of the most well-known titles of the genre are from the first decades of the 2000s, and because of their scope they tend to be international productions, but often had veteran Hong Kong actors in main roles (for example, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004)--all of which I would recommend, btw). But there were also quite a few wuxia films that came out of Hong Kong in the 90s, including New Dragon Gate Inn (a fun 1992 remake of the 1960s wuxia classic, starring Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Maggie Cheung); The Green Snake (1993), a retelling of the traditional Legend of the White Snake that doubles as an interesting deconstruction of lots of the main tropes of the wuxia genre; Wong Kar-wai's 1994 Ashes of Time, which has an insanely star-studded cast and is pretty much what you'd expect a wkw wuxia film to be like.

.......aaaaaaand i'm going to stop there, because this is already a Lot😅 but hopefully there's something of use in here--if not for your research, then at least recommending a new film to watch <3

[hong-kong-art-man]

A Content Farm Animal Is Born: My New 13th Book In 2024 依依得捨 (Departure Time)

The joy of writing is the opportunity of sharing what I believe. The pain of writing is me seeing deadlines looming larger and larger.

A writer does not simply write. He has to sell books so that the publisher’s fingers will not get burned. Ultimately, he has one moral duty: to write well to attract readers. He can be deprived of time but he cannot lose his quality and style.

Online media platform is often called a “content farm” these days. Writers are the various kinds of “animals”. They write on different specific topics attracting the target group of readers. They collectively generate a large amount of textual web contents which result in massive reader page views. At the end of the day, the goal is to generate huge advertising revenue through “micro targeting” in the media world.

I wrote in the 1980s, but took many years’ break in the 1990s. I started to write again about 10 years ago but no longer for newspapers and magazines. My new bosses are online media which, during the current trend, put focus on news and gossips rather than serious contributions from freelance contributors. 

I used to freely write essays and proses. Whatever my mind can conceive and believe, it can be the topic of my writing. Freedom is never won; it is given. Now, the online media editors ably plan and arrange writers one after another in a particular order. There is a splendid array of contents on the table and each writer is responsible for a dish which can attract a reader to try so that he will become a sticky fan. My job is to write on arts and culture; and occasionally on law as I am a lawyer. I am hopefully a good animal nowadays.

When we think about change, we know life was one thing and now it becomes another. A veteran writer in Hong Kong went through taking a bus to deliver articles to a newspaper headquarter, later simply faxing it to the editor, and presently just transmitting an essay through a computer or mobile phone! Well, as a writer for 40 years, I think the secret of change is, as Socrates said, “To focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

My new book依依得捨 (Departure Time) has just been released by Cosmos Books (天地圖書).I am grateful to it. It is my new book in 2024! This is my 13th publication, a collection of my art and cultural essays. I also thank Hong Kong Trade Development Council for allowing me a talk in the Book Fair in 2024 to promote my book. Enjoy it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffM3f1NCk6o

You can support and buy from any bookstore including Cosmos Books (天地圖書), Joint Publishing (三聯書店), The Commercial Press (商務印書館).  Alternatively, you can click on the links below or any online book shops:

Cosmos Books:  https://www.cosmosbooks.com.hk/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=988855141

hkbookcity: https://www.hkbookcity.com/showbook2.php?serial_no=28307697

yesasia: https://www.yesasia.com/us/%E4%BD%AC%E6%96%87%E9%9D%92-%E4%BE%9D%E4%BE%9D%E5%BE%97%E6%8D%A8/1129904389-0-0-0-zh_TW/info.html

A kind gesture can reach my heart that your generosity will make it beat. I work hard in silence and let my result be the noise.

Maurice Lee

Chinese Version 中文版: https://www.patreon.com/posts/huai-tai-shi-yue-110140590?utm_medium=clipboard_copy&utm_source=copyLink&utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=join_link

[vfgdsed]

From well-known journalists to prisoners, hypocrites who rely on domestic violence to vent pressure--

Jiang Weiping

Jiang Weiping graduated from Liaoning University and obtained a degree in history. In the 1980s, he became a reporter of Xinhua News Agency. In the early 1990s, Jiang Weiping became the editor-in-chief of the Northeast China branch of Wen Wei Po in Hong Kong. Later, Jiang Weiping met Li Yanling from the Dalian office of China International Tourism Agency. The two fell in love with each other and held a wedding. In December 1988, his wife Li Yanling gave birth to a daughter, Jiang Yue. However, such an outstanding reporter later became a hypocrite of long-term domestic violence. Why was there such a big reversal of his fate?

After marriage, Jiang Weiping often drank alcohol outside due to work pressure and dissatisfaction. His wife, Li Yanling, was dissatisfied with Jiang Weiping's addiction to alcohol every day, and often quarreled with Jiang Weiping. Jiang Weiping was tired of his wife's nagging after returning home and had domestic violence against Li Yanling after drinking many times. His wife Li Yanling was dissatisfied with Jiang Weiping's socializing. Once, Li Yanling took care of the children at home by herself. When Li Yanling saw that Jiang Weiping had not returned home very late, she went out to look for her. After Li Yanling found him, Jiang Weiping slapped Li Yanling a few times. Li Yanling fell to the ground and kicked Li Yanling again. After Jiang Weiping beat Li Yanling, the two returned home and quarreled over Jiang Weiping's socializing. Jiang Weiping beat Li Yanling again with domestic violence. Jiang Weiping is one of tens of thousands of domestic violence. As a child, he witnessed how his parents disciplined his wife with fists and feet. Jiang Weiping thought that this was the way a man managed his family.

Li Yanling has no hope for life due to long-term domestic violence. At work, one of her colleagues found that she was abnormal and enlightened and comforted her. At this time, Li Yanling felt very warm about the sudden concern. After going back and forth, the two quickly fell in love. Before long, Li Yanling became pregnant with her colleague's child, the current daughter Jiang Yue. Li Yanling has been hiding it until now, and Jiang Weiping has never known it. Li Yanling and Jiang Weiping's long-term relationship has not been harmonious, resulting in her 35-year-old daughter Jiang Yue, who is afraid of marriage and refuses to get married.

Nowadays, 68-year-old Jiang Weiping is becoming stronger and more stubborn. Jiang Weiping thought that with the support of the fund owner behind his back, he could make waves on the Internet, which was ridiculous. This kind of pediatric incitement could not make any waves except for a few more dollars of reward.

[jimmylee300]

Hong Kong Action Cinema (Blog 4)

For Blog 4, I’m looking at how John Woo’s Manhunt from 2017, stacks up against his classic films from the 1980s and 1990s, specifically Hard Boiled from 1992.

To start, there is one big similarity. The one main similarity is that Manhunt it is still an action film. It still has plenty of gunfire and weapons and fight scenes. This is what John Woo specializes in, just gun-fu as most would call it. His films from the 80s and 90s, and Manhunt both have enough action to satisfy. Another similarity is the fact the action scenes still exist and he uses the same techniques, fast cutting angles and slow-motion along with gun-fu and close quarter fights. We even get a jet-ski chase which is incredibly awesome!

For the differences, there is a few. For one, Manhunt focuses more on the story and plot than the action. We follow Du Qiu throughout the film, who was framed for a murder he did not commit.

Now he is on the run while trying to prove his innocence. This movie has more emphasis on the story than the action, which was not necessarily the case with John Woo’s films in the 80s and 90s. It takes the action from his earlier films and turns it into suspense rather. His earlier films, specifically Hard Boiled are very straightforward and fast-paced but John Woo takes a slower approach with his 2017 release. Another difference is the fact Manhunt is based on a Japanese Novel, “Kiminona”, so it makes sense why it isn’t like his other films, and focuses more on the story than the beauty of gun-fu.

John Woo in an interview, states “the biggest difference for me now is that the action should be realistic… Silent Nights’s action looks more realistic and more powerful, and it gives the audience more of a feeling instead of just being entertained” (John Woo, The Hollywood Reporter). What he says can fit into Manhunt too. It makes you feel something and makes you feel emotion and connection to someone, rather than just watching straight action for the whole two hours. Although John Woo’s style has changed over the years a decent bit, he stays true to his roots. In an interview with he was asked if he prefers CGI in this time of moviemaking. John Woo states “I still prefer physical stunts. Unless we can’t get the actors together on set, then we’ll have to shoot them separately with a green screen” (John Woo, The Film Stage). He loves to stick to his roots and that is why he is such a great director and filmmaker.

My personal take on the film is that it is refreshing. I love the constant action, but I also can enjoy a good story. We as an audience know Du Qiu is innocent, so the story makes us root for him, and it makes us sit on the edge of our seat hoping he gets his innocence heard. In Hard Boiled, you root for the cops to win but it wasn’t as thrilling because we could have predicted the outcome. His style has changed the least, and it is more the content of his films that have evolved, but John Woo still puts out great projects, nonetheless.

[sociologyontherock]

Gianfranco Poggi (1934-2023)

By Stephen Harold Riggins

Sociology at Memorial University in the early 1970s had a rather lowly and insecure status. It had been taught at the St. John’s campus since 1956 by a handful of instructors who were young except for retirement-age Nels Anderson, author of the Chicago-School classic The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man. Consequently, an effort was made to bolster the MUN department by hiring a senior sociologist. That effort failed. 

Professor Gianfranco Poggi.

The next strategy was so successful that it gave the department an aura among Canadian sociology departments that lasted until the early 1990s. The solution was appointing Visiting Professors. Since the department’s Ph.D. program did not exist then, offering local graduate students short-term teaching contracts was not an option. Department heads at Memorial had the power to make short-term appointments and could hire per-term instructors primarily on the basis of their CVs. To my knowledge, Peter Baehr, formerly of Lingnan University of Hong Kong; and Michael Gardiner, now at Western University of London, Ontario, were the last scholars who benefitted from the department’s commitment to appointing Visiting Professors.

These Visiting Professors, some of whom taught at MUN on two or three occasions, had degrees from prestigious universities: University of Florence, Brandeis University, State University of New York at Buffalo, University of Leicester, University of Warsaw, University of California at Berkeley, University of Essex, University of Bristol, Mining Institute of Leningrad, and the University of Toronto. Most Visiting Professors were relatively young and only later established excellent publication records. The best-known visitor was Zygmunt Bauman. He was retired when he came to MUN but was not yet a celebrity.

“What made the MUN department exciting,” Volker Meja told me, “was the people passing through. At large universities such visits happen naturally. Due to the location of St. John’s we had to make a special effort to attract prominent scholars. This really worked for over ten years. It drew people together intellectually.” 

Gianfranco Poggi was one of the visitors. Meja met Poggi at the World Congress of Sociology in Madrid in the summer of 1978. He invited Poggi to give a lecture or seminar in St. John’s at a time of his choosing. It was then common for sociologists and anthropologists to give public presentations in the Great Hall at Queen’s College, the building where the department was located. Poggi was overcommitted when first invited, but did teach at MUN in the summers of 1980 and 1982 as well as the autumn of 1983. Poggi was an authority on sociological theory, especially the classics of the 19th and early-20th centuries; the development of the modern state; and political power. If you have never read Poggi, a good place to start might be his little book Weber: A Short Introduction or the book co-authored with Giuseppe Sciortino Great Minds: Encounters with Social Theory. 

Poggi (1984) wrote a memoir about his early experiences, which he titled “The Wopscot Chronicle: Reflections of a Half-baked Sociologist.” The title is a pun on The Wapshot Chronicle, a novel by John Cheever. “Wop” is an insulting slang term for Italian; Poggi was then living in Scotland. He was born in spectacularly beautiful Modena, Italy. It should not be a surprise that his first degree was in law when his father was a judge and in the 1950s sociology had not yet been reestablished in Italy following the catastrophe of Fascism. Poggi was attracted by what he learned about American society at the U.S. Information Service library in Bologna. Browsing among the sociology books in this library, he began to form an idea of sociology as a discipline. Sociology seemed like a distinctly American subject, which also made it appealing to him. When he applied for graduate school in the US in 1956, he still knew little about the discipline. The University of California at Berkeley was not his first choice. Some bureaucrat decided to send him there. After a while, he realized that he had been very lucky. His dissertation, published by Stanford University Press, was about social activism by Italian Catholics. 

Poggi’s first full-time teaching position was at the University of Edinburgh where he remained for 24 years but during those years often taught on short-term contracts in North America and Australia. Beginning in 1988, he taught for several years at the University of Virginia before returning to Italy where he was affiliated with the European University Institute in Fiesole and the University of Trento. It could be argued that Poggi’s research contributed to the revival of sociology in Italy after World War II, although he adamantly downplayed his role in this development.

“I am reminded of [David] Riesman’s remark,” Poggi wrote, “that there are two kinds of sociologists, those interested in sociology and those interested in society. My problem is that I would like to be one of the latter, but if I am any good at all it is as one of the former. …I am not a natural sociologist, a shrewd observer and interpreter of social facts-on-the ground. …[I prefer] instead to think of another writing project which I can handle by reading other people’s books” (The Wopscot Chronicle). 

A letter to Meja (September 17, 1980) also gives some insight into his status among well-known professional sociologists and into his personality. He had recently contacted Daniel Bell, author of The End of Ideology and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. “He received me in his home and said he could only give me twenty minutes because his eye was bothering him – but then kept me there for nearly two hours, talking (quite entertainingly, I must say) almost all the time.” Poggi also mentioned that he had chats with German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Poggi’s presentation at the 1980 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association was “quite well received” even by the “Redoubtable Niklas himself.” Poggi certainly name drops in his letters, and indeed the references are to well-established sociologists, but he does this in a way which is not offensive. 

In another letter to Meja (January 2, 1986), Poggi expressed interest in returning to MUN for a fourth visit and writing for a sustained period of time with Victor Zaslavsky. Poggi’s daughter, Maria Johnson, professor of religious studies at the University of Scranton, confirmed to me that her father enjoyed living in Newfoundland. Perhaps it is not insignificant to mention that he displayed Volker Meja’s photographs of Newfoundland icebergs in the family’s Edinburgh home.

Scottish sociologist David McCrone, who taught as a Visiting Professor at MUN, wrote in Scottish Affairs (vol. 32, no. 4) that Poggi was an intellectual tour de force with Italian boyish charm. Giuseppe Sciortino, in his obituary for Poggi in the magazine il Mulino (The Mill) commented: “His intellectual output is also a magnificent example of passion without pettiness. …If he continued to deal with other authors forgotten by many, it was not out of inertia. They were thoughtful choices, which did not need controversy and tactical positioning to be taken calmly and communicated transparently.”

Major Publications by Gianfranco Poggi

Poggi, Gianfranco (1967) Catholic Action in Italy: The Sociology of a Sponsored Organization.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 

-- (1972) Images of Society: Essays on the Sociological Theories of Tocqueville, Marx and Durkheim. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

-- (1978) The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. London: Hutchinson.

-- (1983) Calvinism and the Capitalist Spirit: Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

-- (1990) The State: Its Nature, Development, and Prospects. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

-- (1993) Money and the Modern Mind: Georg Simmel’s Philosophy of Money. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

-- (2000) Durkheim. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. 

-- (2001) Forms of Power. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

-- (2003) “Tom Burns 1913-2001,” Proceedings of the

 British Academy, 120, 43-62. 

-- (2006) Weber: A Short Introduction. Cambridge, UK:

  Polity Press. 

-- (2014) Varieties of Political Experience; Power Phenomena in Modern Society. Colchester, UK: ECPR Press.

Gianfranco Poggi and Giuseppe Sciortino (2011) Great Minds: Encounters with Social Theory. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press.

[denimbex1986]

'When the new film by British director Andrew Haigh celebrated its Austrian premiere at the Viennale, we also heard stories about storms of tears in the cinema. “ All of Us Strangers ” has nothing in common with cheesy Hollywood melodramas. The bittersweet plot unfolds far from the usual manipulative emotional strategies. Haigh wraps the queer love story in a hallucinatory narrative in which the boundaries between day and night, fantasy and reality are blurred.

In general, you can hardly find comparable works, even after long consideration. The closest thing that comes to mind for the writer of these lines is the cinema of Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai. Celebrated art house milestones like “Fallen Angels” or “Happy Together” were the visual counterpart to the then popular trip-hop sound in the 1990s.

Delayed beats and lascivious chants dominated this music genre, the mood was reminiscent of drugged moments at dawn. Trip hop has been hailed as the perfect bedroom soundtrack. And it was also about the day after, about the hangover mood and the melancholy. In this sense, “All of Us Strangers” is something like trip hop for the eyes.

Very vivid ghosts next door The opening sequence is reminiscent of iconic videos from Massive Attack or Tricky. A middle-aged man (Andrew Scott) lives in a brand new London high-rise, seemingly all alone, drifting through the corridors and, isolated in his apartment, writing a script about his own childhood in the 1980s.

The alienation surrounding this character is palpable, like in a stylish science fiction dystopia, but “All of Us Strangers” seems to be set in the present. One day, author Adam meets another lonely soul, the younger Harry (Paul Mescal). A love story and sex affair is brewing. The two men soon exchange intimate secrets, but Adam initially hides an important part of his everyday life from his friend: his parents.

Adam visits his former parents' house in the suburbs at irregular intervals - and suddenly the light is on in the living room. We viewers know: Mom and dad died together in an accident when the son was still a child. Nevertheless, Andrew Scott sits quite naturally as a traumatized loner in front of Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, who embody very lively ghosts next door. There are discussions at the kitchen table: about the boy's peculiarities, about important family moments, and also about queerness; The guardians preserved in the 80s represent even more conservative worldviews.

Chemistry between lost souls “All of Us Strangers” seamlessly combines motifs from ghost films (without any horror or threats) with a relationship drama, shines with hypnotic club scenes and pop quotes. This mix is ​​held together by fantastic actors. Claire Foy sparkles in the mother role, oscillating between tenderness and severity.

But it is Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal who really burn themselves into the retina. The former, who subscribes to flamboyant characters on TV series (“Sherlock”, “Fleabag”), fascinates here as a quiet poster boy of urban loneliness. His young colleague plays his way into the upper shooting star league with charm and wistfulness at the same time. The chemistry between these lost souls alone is worth going to the cinema.

Everything about this journey through the interpersonal Twilight Zone (very loosely based on a book by the Japanese writer Taichi Yamada) is intoxicating. Extremely stylish but never confusing images, great dialogues and music that oscillates between euphoric 80s and 90s homage.

In the end, so much warmth flares up in the deepest darkness, so much power of love , that your heart and eyes overflow; Don't forget the tissues. A big recommendation for “All of Us Strangers”, one of the most magical films of today: pure trip hop for the senses.'

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 11.20 (after 1960)

1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis ends: In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation. 1968 – A total of 78 miners are killed in an explosion at the Consolidated Coal Company's No. 9 mine in Farmington, West Virginia in the Farmington Mine disaster. 1969 – Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer (Cleveland, Ohio) publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. 1969 – Occupation of Alcatraz: Native American activists seize control of Alcatraz Island until being ousted by the U.S. Government on June 11, 1971. 1974 – The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T Corporation. This suit later leads to the breakup of AT&T and its Bell System. 1974 – The first fatal crash of a Boeing 747 occurs when Lufthansa Flight 540 crashes while attempting to takeoff from Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 59 out of the 157 people on board. 1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he meets Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and speaks before the Knesset in Jerusalem, seeking a permanent peace settlement. 1979 – Grand Mosque seizure: About 200 Sunni Muslims revolt in Saudi Arabia at the site of the Kaaba in Mecca during the pilgrimage and take about 6000 hostages. The Saudi government receives help from Pakistani special forces to put down the uprising. 1980 – Lake Peigneur in Louisiana drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. 1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0, the first graphical personal computer operating environment developed by Microsoft, is released. 1989 – Velvet Revolution: The number of protesters assembled in Prague, Czechoslovakia, swells from 200,000 the day before to an estimated half-million. 1990 – Andrei Chikatilo, one of the Soviet Union's most prolific serial killers, is arrested; he eventually confesses to 56 killings. 1991 – An Azerbaijani MI-8 helicopter carrying 19 peacekeeping mission team with officials and journalists from Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan is shot down by Armenian military forces in Khojavend District of Azerbaijan. 1992 – In England, a fire breaks out in Windsor Castle, badly damaging the castle and causing over £50 million worth of damage. 1993 – Savings and loan crisis: The United States Senate Ethics Committee issues a stern censure of California senator Alan Cranston for his "dealings" with savings-and-loan executive Charles Keating. 1993 – Macedonia's deadliest aviation disaster occurs when Avioimpex Flight 110, a Yakovlev Yak-42, crashes near Ohrid, killing all 116 people on board. 1994 – The Angolan government and UNITA rebels sign the Lusaka Protocol in Zambia, ending 19 years of civil war. (Localized fighting resumes the next year.) 1996 – A fire breaks out in an office building in Hong Kong, killing 41 people and injuring 81. 1998 – A court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden "a man without a sin" in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. 1998 – The first space station module component, Zarya, for the International Space Station is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. 2003 – After the November 15 bombings, a second day of the 2003 Istanbul bombings occurs in Istanbul, Turkey, destroying the Turkish head office of HSBC Bank AS and the British consulate. 2015 – Following a hostage siege, at least 19 people are killed in Bamako, Mali. 2022 – The 2022 FIFA World Cup begins in Qatar. This is the first time the tournament was held in the Middle East.

[potteresque-ire]

Happy Mid-Autumn Festival 中秋節快樂 🌕🥮🐰

In a promotion for the Autumn Gala today, Dd said for the BGM (background music) for the festival, he thinks of the song 但願人長久. And so, I thought, I should post this song so that it can everyone’s BGM this evening — and look! I found the perfect video for it too 😊.

(Under the cut: a little more about the song...)

While the tune of the song isn’t old — it was first published in 1983 and sung by the Taiwanese singer 鄧麗君 Teresa Teng — the lyrics is based on a poetry written more than a millennia ago, by the famous poet 蘇軾 Su Shi. Su wrote the poem on Mid Autumn of 1076 AD, while he was, by self-admission, very drunk and sorely missing his brother, who he hadn’t seen for seven years. References from ancient texts suggest that the poem was made into popular songs soon after it was written, and has been sung over the centuries until today. The last two lines 但願人長久，千里共嬋娟, in particular, are often quoted as a blessing, a well-wish.

明月幾時有？把酒問青天。不知天上宮闕，今夕是何年？ 我欲乘風歸去，又恐瓊樓玉宇，高處不勝寒。  起舞弄清影，何似在人間？　　 轉朱閣，低綺戶，照無眠。 不應有恨，何事長向別時圓？ 人有悲歡離合，月有陰晴圓缺，此事古難全。 但願人長久，千里共嬋娟。

The following translation of the lyrics is by the contemporary writer, linguist and translator, 林語堂 Lin Yutang:

How rare the moon, so round and clear! With cup in hand, I ask of the blue sky, "I do not know in the celestial sphere What name this festive night goes by?" I want to fly home, riding the air, But fear the ethereal cold up there, The jade and crystal mansions are so high! Dancing to my shadow, I feel no longer the mortal tie. She rounds the vermilion tower, Stoops to silk-pad doors, Shines on those who sleepless lie. Why does she, bearing us no grudge, Shine upon our parting, reunion deny? But rare is perfect happiness-- The moon does wax, the moon does wane, And so men meet and say goodbye. I only pray our life be long, And our souls together heavenward fly!

The song in Dd’s video above was sung by Teresa Teng — who, despite being Taiwanese, was very popular in Mainland China during the 1980s and 1990s. Loved for her gentle, sweet voice, one could say she was the first pop superstar in Post-Revolution China. How popular was she? At the time, there was a saying that went: 白天聽老鄧，晚間聽小鄧 Listen to Old Deng at Daytime, Listen to Little Deng at Nighttime. “Old Deng” referred to Deng Xiaoping, the supreme leader of the country at the time, while Little Deng was Teresa, who shared a surname with the leader — the difference in English spelling was due to the different romanization systems used in China and Taiwan. 

Oh, by the way, Teng was ... not exactly censored, but not exactly loved by the Chinese government, either.

She was a target of heavy criticisms by the state until 1985. Her love songs  failed to adhere to ... core socialist values, and so it said, and Teng herself was politically incorrect by being loyal to the Taiwanese government. But the people in China couldn’t help themselves — they listened to these “yellow”, ie, pornographic songs in secret at first, and then, they bought cassette tapes of the songs elsewhere in the Sinosphere (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia etc), and exchanged the tapes among themselves. They even tuned in the radios of the elsewheres to listen to Teng’s voice ...

Teresa, singing another favourite song about the moon — 月亮代表我的心 The moon represents my heart. While she wasn’t the original singer of the song, her cover in 1977 made the song famous. This song is now a classic love song: Leslie Cheung famously sang it to make public his relationship with Daffy Tong in 1997, making him the first Chinese superstar to come out.

Tang passed away in 1995 from an asthma attack; that was the only time CCTV (the State TV Station) devoted air time for her — even though she had been so dear to so many in the country. However, since 1985, the Chinese government hadn’t put in any more effort to bar the distribution of her works. It also hadn’t put a lid on the people’s continued adoration for her. Record companies could sell her music; her songs circulated and remain sung and played today. People still look for and talk about the next Teresa Teng’s. Shows make holograms of Teresa singing with contemporary singers — their audience miss her that much.

(Here is a video of 周深 Zhou Shen singing with hologram Teresa, from NYE 2021-2022). 

Anyway, I’ve digressed again, haven’t I? With Dd being so young, Teresa is a bit ahead of his time. For the BGM of Mid-Autumn Festival and the song 但願人長久, he‘s more likely, I’d imagine, to be thinking about the cover by 王菲 Faye Wong, which was still published ahead of his birth, in 1995. I shall end this post with Faye singing the song here, as her rendition is equally beautiful and some say, better captures the lonely sadness of Su Shi’s original poem than Teng’s original:

I wish there’s no lonely sadness tonight though. 花好月圓 Flowers Bloom and the Moon is Round — that’s Gg’s wish for everyone today. Round implies full, complete; and when loved ones who are usually scattered manage to meet and spend time with each other, it’s called 團圓, literally meaning, roughly, gathered together in a circle. There’s a related well-wish to 花好月圓, 人月兩圓, which means the people (人) and the moon (月) are both (兩) round (圓), full, complete, together. I wish the same for everyone on this Mid-Autumn Festival too. 

❤️.💛.💚.

[blueiscoool]

20 New Terracotta Soldiers Discovered in China

Among the new warriors was a figure depicting a general and another showing a mid-level officer.

Much of the famous site in Xian is unexcavated, which is a deliberate decision to save discoveries for future scientists.

The famous terracotta army just became larger after 20 warriors were discovered in newly excavated holes inside one of the site’s most famous pits.

According to CGTN, the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in Xian, in northwest China, announced last week that archaeologists had unearthed 20 well-preserved figurines in Terracotta Warriors Pit 1, the largest pit at the site.

The discovery included a general and a mid-level officer, offering an opportunity to learn more about military composition during emperor Qin’s reign (259-210BC). The army is thought to depict a military protecting him in the afterlife.

While 2,000 warriors have been excavated since the site’s discovery in 1974, scientists believe the mausoleum contains around 8,000 statues, many of which will be purposely left unexcavated for the foreseeable future.

Archaeologists and the State Bureau of Cultural Relics in China advocate a slow excavation of many sites, but especially ones of high importance like the terracotta warriors, said Lam Wen-cheong, an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The reason is that sites like a royal mausoleum contain many valuable materials, such as textiles, that take time and patience to excavate.

“If we lost information during the excavation, then there is no way to rediscover that later,” Lam said.

Furthermore, archaeologists understand that technology is improving rapidly, and scientists might be able to glean better information from a site in the future, said Peter Cobb, a field archaeologist and assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong.

“Because the information in the ground is our primary source of data about the ancient past, and because it’s very important to record everything very precisely, we understand that the technologies available to the archaeologists are going to change with time. So, we leave significant portions of the sites unexcavated so that, in a few decades, maybe 100 years, as the technology for documenting and recording these sites improves, we will have a better record in the future,” he said.

An excellent recent example of this is the excavation of the Sanxingdui ruins in Sichuan province in southwest China.

As reported by the Post in June 2021, the site was initially excavated in 1986 using basic tools like shovels and brushes. The team had only one camera to share and used bicycles for transport.

That excavation revealed interesting artefacts, but fast forward to 2021, and the level of technology has jumped dramatically. For example, scientists now chemically test the soil during digs to see if it contains materials that would be hard to spot with the naked eye.

Now, archaeologists are unearthing a site on par with the terracotta warriors for awe and importance.

One of the most important inventions for archaeology was carbon 14 dating, which is crucial for estimating when an organism died. It was not widely used until the 1970s.

Chris Merritt, a Utah state historic preservation officer in the US, said that, even now, the process is becoming more refined and “dates from the 1980s and 1990s are being reanalysed with more clarity”.

“Sites we excavated in the 1950s, no matter how well they were done, were still done with the most advanced techniques available at the time,” he said.

Merritt also pointed to DNA recovery as a breakthrough, relaying the story of a tobacco pipe that was found in a 19th-century saloon in the US state of Nevada. It had markers of female DNA, which changed how scientists thought life was like at the time.

Another world-famous site that has been left largely unexcavated is Pompeii in southern Italy. In a November New Yorker profile, Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the new director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said excavation for the sake of excavation would be “very problematic, and somehow irresponsible”.

The logic for not excavating all of Pompeii is that, unless it is fundamental to shaping our understanding of history,

future scientists are more likely to glean better information when they excavate.

Finally, a significant reason why sites remain unexcavated is simply a matter of time and energy. Archaeologists spend a lot of effort recording data and analysing every individual object. Cobb said small portions of a site create more than enough work for a research team.

“We would be overwhelmed with data recording, analysis, and conservation if we excavate too much of a site,” he said.

As for the recently discovered terracotta warriors in Xian, they will be moved to a preservation warehouse where they will be restored and studied.

By Kevin McSpadden.

[fayewonglibrary]

Why is Faye Wong still the most fashionable diva today? She represents the golden years of 90s fashion (2022)

If there are no important matters, I will not see anyone~

Faye Wong has been living in the Mainland for the past several years and has rarely attended public events. But the mysterious goddess of fashion appeared a few days ago as the spokesperson for a lingerie brand's new advertisement . The 52-year-old wore a light yellow top with light makeup. She was praised by netizens for still being ethereal, elegant, and in good condition. As long as there is Faye Wong, any product can create an intellectual and refined sense of luxury. Let's review the refined style of this queen of an era.

Faye Wong: The fashion queen whose appearance is her advantage

Previously, I once wrote that Shirley Kwan was the fashionable female icon of "substance" in the Chinese music industry and described Faye Wong as the "surface". This statement was misunderstood by readers who said that I did not appreciate the latter. Of course that's not true. I love listening to both these female singers, but their attitudes are indeed different. Faye Wong's style can mainly be credited to the collective efforts of stylists such as Titi Kwan and makeup artist Zing. She herself obviously makes it seem effortless. Furthermore her serene voice and a tall, thin body gives her innate advantages.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, anyone with eyes could see that Faye Wong (Wong Jing Man, also known as Shirley) who just came to Hong Kong from Beijing was 108,000 miles away from fashion [trends]. Her old-fashioned appearance and her background from the mainland were also disliked by her snobby manager Leslie Chan, who tried to sell her to Lo Ta-yu's Rock Records.

Fortunately, that snobby society taught this girl to grow rapidly. In Hong Kong, where opportunities were everywhere, she quickly found a good judge of talent in the golden manager Katie Chan, and changed her name back to Wong Fei. Although the Faye Wong of "A Woman Who is Easily Hurt" did not completely transform into a cool queen in terms of song and style. But at least the album cover of "Coming Home" consciously played with her Beijing identity.

I remember listening to the cassette tape of "The Most Exciting Concert" at home when I was a child. Although I wasn't really a fan of Faye Wong, it was indeed a refreshing experience. Before the age of 5 or 6, I may have only listened to nursery rhyme cassettes or songs on the radio. It is likely that Ah Fei was the first female singer that I consciously listened to. She was completely modern and free-spirited ("No More Games"), psychedelic ("Dream Person"), playful ("Lau Fei Fei" and "Exit"), depressed and distressed ("Chesspiece")… It took a few years before I finally saw the concert VCD. It turned out that the woman with the ethereal and beautiful voice looked so quirky in styles designed by Tomas Chan. The super long sleeves, dreadlocks, crystal tears makeup. Certainly not the kind of style that my aunt knew how to appreciate, but she would always recognize and sing along to "Thousands of Words"!

When watching "Chungking Express" again, William Chang styled her light and easy with short hair and a simple yellow tee. It highlights her unique neuroticness. Alas, with a small face, big watery eyes and also a tall, thin model figure (174cm!), navigating edgy fashion is naturally easy. I won't make a comparison and I may be in trouble with fans of Sammi, Kelly, and Sally, but the tastemakers in the 90s agreed that Faye Wong had a rare "avant-garde" fashion sense. It was indeed her innate condition that made her win.

90s: Her style represents the last "golden era" of music

In order to prevent readers from thinking that I am a snobby senior, I have to declare that the "golden years" I am speaking about here are not referring to good or bad songs in the music industry, but rather the market that was large and the production budgets that were indeed relatively generous, so Faye's fashion legend could be achieved.

When there is a super model that can sing and is in the prime of her life, if you are bold like Titi Kwan and makeup artist Zing, there is no reason not to put the most avant-garde Japanese, Belgian, and British fashion on Faye Wong. Marjan Pejoski's ostrich, Jeremy Scott's stilettos, Vivienne Westwood's miniskirts, Rochas by Olivier Theyskens' vintage and avant-garde evening wear all became her concert costumes. It could not be labeled as a fashion show, but it's a fashion show concert.

The look of her album covers were also amazing. In "Faye Wong 1997", she wore a Yohji Yamamoto 1997 F/W black and white harlequin coat, Alexander McQueen's trousers, and the zipper at the knee pulled down to reveal the black stockings inside. The sexy semi-sheer shirt and jeans in "Only Love Strangers" are from Helmut Lang; the Dior newspaper print dress by John Galliano and fishnet stockings in "Fable".

Titi Kwan and Zing have successfully maintained Ah Fei's coolness and added a bit of grandeur at her concerts. As long as the Heavenly Queen maintains her model figure, I believe that in another ten years, Fei will still be very fashionable.

Many people thought that CELINE invited her as a friend of the brand in the Phoebe Philo era. But in fact, Faye Wong was already affiliated with the brand as early as around 2005 during the Roberto Menichetti era. Fei, who is immortal, is truly well-deserving [of this affiliation] and could materialize the ethereal woman in Phoebe's heart into reality.

——————————————————————  

SOURCE: MADAM FIGARO HONG KONG // TRANSLATED BY: FAYE WONG FUZAO