All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
OK, so Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls is beating me out of the top spot at Pudong Airport but here’s the good news for non-philistines, even though the Anne Hathaway boring flick tie in book of David Nicholl’s One Day is beating me out in Hong Kong the chart is divided into fiction and non-fiction making me, yes me alone, the best selling non-fiction book in Hong Kong this week. Take that Hathaway!!
Strolling through Bloomsbury the other week I passed a second hand bookshop with a table of, admittedly rather battered, Penguins. Still, all priced at an honest Queen’s pound per book, and well worth it for the covers alone. This one is Ernest Braham’s The Wallet of Kai Lung. Though published in 1936 by Penguin in the early of their iconic paperbacks, Braham’s book dates back to 1900 and had been reprinted by other publishers pretty much consistently since then. It was a very popular book – a collection of fantasy stories told by Kai Lung, an itinerant Chinese story teller. It’s a little hackneyed for a modern audience to be honest and I didn’t get very far into it before basically giving up and just enjoying the cover but apparently some thought Manchester-born Braham’s comedic work as good as Jerome K Jerome (who’s secretary Braham was for a time) and, apparently, Orwell liked him. Braham is perhaps best remembered today for coining the term, supposedly said by all Chinese sagely, ‘may you live in interesting times’, which of course nobody in China has ever actually said.
Excellent to see Midnight in Peking sitting nicely at No.2 in the Dymocks book sales chart in Hong Kong. What discerning and tasteful readers the patrons of Dymocks Hong Kong (and any derogatory comments I may have ever made regarding the Special Administrative Region and its growing pointlessness I now obviously take back completely!! Long Live Xiang Gang!!)
But damn that Anne Hathaway! – putting on a crap accent but looking lovely in the movie of One Day and giving Nicholls a second bite at the cherry! Should I be annoyed – pipped from the top by simpering romantic date flicks!!My Pamela could have given Hathaway the kicking of her life I can assure you!
As regular readers will know China Rhyming likes to support Shanghai’s young photographers and street photography in the city (particularly when it catalogues social change and the destruction of architecture) and so…tonight (Thursday 13th)
DADABar is hosting the 9th edition of Shanghai Photographer Night tonight, a group exhibition featuring work by Lei Gong, Patrick Wack, Chad Ingraham, Eric Leleu, and Matthieu Belin.
It’ll be an evening of portraits, with the five photographers employing varying approaches to capture subjects like children at Burning Man, Chinese women in their domiciles, and artists working at 696 Weihai Lu in Shanghai.
Judging by work from the photographers’ personal websites, there’s a good chance you’ll see some significant and beautiful images tonight at DADA. Who knows, you might even get some ideas for your next profile pic.
9th Shanghai Photographer Night // FREE // Tonight, 8pm-late // DADA // 115 Xingfu Lu, near Fahuazhen Lu (幸ç¦è·¯115å·, 近法åŽé•‡è·¯) // Closest Metro stop: Shanghai Jiaotong University Station, Line 10
The Midnight in Peking juggernaut (OK, maybe just a large lorry with slightly flat tyres) rolls into Soochow (or Suzhou as some now like to call it) on Sunday October 16th where I’ll be talking about the book, Pamela Werner and how tosolve 75 year old murders to the good folk of the Royal Asiatic Society’s Suzhou branch at the lovely Suzhou Bookworm.
Sunday, October 16, 2011 at 4pm
Inside the Suzhou Bookworm
One last plug for my Midnight in Peking web site (and if you believe that you’ll believe anything). I feel I should really plug this for any Peking residents reading and anyone likely to visit Peking anytime soon. We’ve included a walking tour with audio on the Midnight in Peking web site. Just click here and you can download a guided commentary to your ipod or mp3 device, listen online, print off the guide to read as you walk and also print of a map of the route (though the recording helps you out with directions too).
The walk takes you from Pamela’s old hutong, Armour Factory Alley, to the Fox Tower, along the Tartar Wall, into the former Badlands area and Soochow Hutong, up into the Legation Quarter and eventually to Chienmen. The commentary covers both the general history of these areas of Peking and their relevance to the book and the characters in Midnight in Peking. I’ve structured it so that, as far as possible, you never need interact with the nasty brutishness that is modern Peking and also avoid the worst of the ridiculous traffic the city serves up.
Got to be worth a couple of hours one weekend, surely!
While I’m plugging interesting bits that are found on my Midnight in Peking website I should note that Michael Aldrich, the great historian of Peking and author of the essential book The Search for a Vanishing Beijing, was kind enough to write a short history of the Fox Tower (now the Dongbienmen Tower), the superstitions surrounding fox spirits in Peking and around the Tower and the area around that corner of the old tartar wall. Michael knows more than just about anybody about this stuff and actually this information on the Fox Tower was originally meant for his The Search for a Vanishing Beijing book but got cut due to size limitations. When I first started researching Pamela Werner’s murder and wanted to know more about the Fox Tower, fox spirits and that part of Beijing, Michael was the only person who immediately knew what I was talking about!
The Search for a Vanishing Beijing by the way is now available in both paperback and (a very reasonably priced) Kindle edition
To see images of the Fox Tower and read Michael’s essay on the area click here
So we arrive at the centenary of Xinhai – the Double 10. You can read all the coverage on the internet though the actual history of the event, seems to me, to have been largely forgotten. Rather the centenary is being used by the relevant parties to reinforce their usual agendas – Hu Jintao attacks any notion of Taiwanese independence and calls for a return of Taiwan to the Motherland (something it never belonged to before!!). A public holiday in Taiwan of course though sadly most western cities it seems invited representatives from the PRC rather than the ROC to events!! Such is the kowtowing these days!!
On the mainland the centenary has been downplayed largely except where the narrative can be strictly controlled (i.e. the silly Jackie Chan film) and fitted to the Great Myth of life since 1949. Mostly it seems there has been some internal remembrance of Xinhai but the public has largely been left out of the process and given the glorious 90th anniversary of the Communist Party to celebrate (which, as far as I can work out, has left the public somnambulent this year).
All in all nothing of much interest written on this subject (though if you saw anything interesting do let me know) except perhaps this piece I saw in the Online Citizen (a non-official Singaporean media outlet) that raises the idea of the Sun Yat Sen Memoiral Hall in Singapore as either a travesty or an inspiration – seems to me this article reflects a lot of the confusion around Dr Sun, the KMT, modern Taiwan and today’s PRC and the world (particularly the wider Chinese world) response to it all.
Hu Addresses the comrades with Dr Sun in the background – that whooshing noise if the great man spinning in his grave furiously
