[drop the red lantern]

I have just seen Raise the Red Lantern, Zhang Yimou's claustrophobic 1991 film about a woman who becomes "Mistress Four" in a wealthy Chinese household sometime in the early twentieth century. The film received a great many awards and is widely considered a classic. I hated it.

Though it presents as a chick flick, centered on female characters and chock full of fancy costumes, it's a decidedly misogynistic movie. The plot is driven by the wives' (and a servant girls') struggle for the attentions of the Master in a ritualized environment where every coupling is formally announced to everyone else through elaborate ritual. To make this plot work, it's crucial that the women have about the same level of characterization you get in a high-end porno: Third Mistress was an opera singer, Fourth Mistress is a college girl who's father was in the tea trade, and so on. As in a pornographic film, the outside world is excluded; everything takes place within the household. Clearly that's an artistic choice meant to heighten the claustrophobia, but the story itself acknowledges that the women leave the house, sometimes unaccompanied: the Master offers at one point to take Songlian out for dumplings at a place she likes, and Third Mistress manages to get caught in a hotel having an affair with the family doctor.

And that's what gives the lie to the whole thing. At the end, Songlian is driven mad by her helplessness in the face of the servants' murder of Third Mistress for her affair. She paces the courtyard, alone and disheveled. There is, first of all, sheer laziness in that. Declaring your lady character insane is much easier than imagining how she might live with her trauma, and also totally unrealistic. And there, again, is the misogyny: depicting women as fragile, with minds that snap all too easily.

And it also goes against the facts we know. We know that Songlian connives. We know that she's unhappy. We know that people come and go from the house. Why does she stay, permitted to pace about the place? Alas, we know too little of that outside world to imagine what she might fear in it. Everything is inward-focused, to the exclusion of reality itself.

OK, so is this some kind of complicated metaphor for life under Mao? Is the hothouse craving for the Master's attention, and the infighting, and the murderousness of the servants, all some kind of allegory about the Communist Party? I don't think it is, or if it is, it's just not good enough.

Raise the Red Lantern is, in the end, a stylized costume drama. And it is, admittedly, haunting and compelling in some of its imagery. But it's an overbearing film that dehumanizes its characters to no particular end.

Also, it's boring.

[national fears]

Because I know a little something about Korea, people often ask me about the Chinese government. I suppose Canadians probably get asked to explain America, so I kind of get it.

In any case, a question that often comes up is why the Chinese government is so terrified of Falun Gong. I don't know from any detailed insider knowledge or anything, but my guess is that it has to do with a vast and little-known war called the Taiping Rebellion.

At roughly the same time that some 600,000 Americans lost their lives in our Civil War, China was going through an epic struggle that cost some 20 million lives — some 30 times as many casualties. (I found one reference to China's population in 1834 as 400 million, while the US had some 31 million in 1860, so the percentage losses are closer: something like 5% in China, and 2% in the US.)

Wars on this scale leave national scars. America certainly hasn't resolved all the racial issues that lay behind the Civil War, and fear of race-based insurrection has continued to haunt the national psyche.

In China, the haunting fear is of a different kind. It's a fear of disruptive religious movements, because that's what Taiping was. Hong Xiuquan, the movement's leader, claimed to be Jesus's brother, and he led what was called the Heavenly Kingdom in a great battle to rid China of Manchu rule and spread a peculiar brand of heterodox Christianity.

So I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that when Chinese officials see a movement like Falun Gong — a religious movement with the power to mobilize great numbers of people — some national memory of the Taiping disaster kicks in. On a gut level, mass religious zeal produces panic.

None of this is meant to justify the abuse, repression, or torture of any group of people for their religious beliefs, of course. The question isn't whether such repression is OK — it's not — but why it happens, why this group in particular gets the Chinese government's panties in a bunch. And I think that maybe it's that legacy of Taiping.

[the plan, as it unfolds]

For a while now I've been thinking about graduate school. Here are my reasons:

• Everyone else seems to be doing it.
• My brother and sister are doing it, which means I'll be the least educated member of my family if I don't (dad has an MBA, mom an MA and JD, grandma a Ph.D., grandpa a JD, sister and brother both working on MAs).
• Barack Obama asked every American to commit to at least one year or more of higher education, and while this obviously meant at least one year past high school, which I have, I'm taking it to mean at least one more year than I already have.
• It might be vaguely useful professionally to have a higher degree, though that sort of depends what it is.

Those are my reasons for thinking about grad school. So I talked to a few coworkers who'd done the whole master's thing, and one of them told me to study something I love, because it's a ton of work, and I won't want to see it through if I don't feel passionate about it (he has an MFA in creative writing).

So that got me thinking about specifics. An MBA is right out, 'cause I completely don't give a shit. International affairs? Maybe. Central Asian history or linguistics? Off chance. Asian studies?

Duh.

I mean, look at what my plans were for the weekend: go to a lecture at the Korean Cultural Service on Friday night, by myself, to learn about traditional Korean music; meet a new Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet an old Korean conversation partner on Saturday and study; meet a friend from the Korean Mission to the UN on Sunday; go to my Korean dance class.

Sure, I read articles from time to time on foreign policy. And sure, I'll slog my way through tomes on Central Asia. But I waded through nearly 5,000 pages of East Asian history and translated political and philosophical documents as a self-study program. And on weekends I study the Korean language and go to lectures on Korean culture for fun. When I arrived in Seoul in October, I was ecstatic to discover that here was an entire city completely dedicated to my hobby. For reasons I've never been able to pin down, the study of Korea has become my passion.

You knew that. I knew that. But I only just realized that this had a direct bearing on what I should study.

An obvious practical question arises: What will I do with an MA in Asian Studies? And a practical answer: No idea. Yes, it's a lot of work for no concrete result. Yes, it's expensive. But I want to do it. And the advantage of being passionate about the subject while not needing the degree is that I can drop out without feeling like the whole thing has been pointless.

My plan, then, is to do this ... eventually. I'm hoping to move to Manhattan when my lease is up, in September of next year. Starting grad school at the same time that I move strikes me as pointlessly exhausting. So I'm going to shoot for spring of 2011 to begin my studies. Between now and then, I'd like to make substantial progress on the language. I'll also need to talk to people at the Asian Studies programs at Columbia and NYU, and also maybe CUNY. And study for the GREs. And that, in sum, is the plan so far.

[the cup]

Many years ago, I saw a lovely Tibetan film called The Cup. It has been a long time, but I finally watched it again, and I found it just as sweet, moving and lovely as before. It's the story of some monks in a Tibetan monastery in northern India — refugees, mostly — and one young monk's passion for soccer during the 1998 World Cup.

I guess I don't have all that much to say about it right now except that I would encourage you to see it if you can.

[many legs of destruction: a haiku]

Mighty terapede
Coming to destroy Tokyo
I, in terror, peed

[nuclear progress]

Excellent news.

[swastika hysteria]

Fashion house Zara has gotten itself into trouble by accidentally selling purses with swastikas on them in the UK. Denis Fernando, national secretary of Unite Against Fascism, responded forcefully: "Fascism and racist symbols are sometimes legitimised in popular culture, this is one of those times."

Except it's not. As a nice Jewish boy with a swastika on my living room wall, I'd like to explain.

Like most people in the West, I grew up associating the swastika strictly with the Nazis, and I was appalled by any display of it, in any form. It had a kind of radioactive power that compelled disgust — an entirely appropriate response to any attempted glorification of Nazism, however crude. When my German-descended high school classmate drew them on his desk (in pencil, crookedly and backwards), I took it as a personal insult, and that's how it was intended.

It was my trip to India in 1997, just after college, that changed my perspective on the swastika. Again and again during my four months in the Subcontinent, concepts I had never thought to question turned out to be completely contingent on cultural context, and swastikas were no exception. In Nepal, I was amused to find that the swastika was included with the hammer and sickle in a pro-communist graffito, a juxtaposition unimaginable in the West. In India, I saw swastikas branded on camel's butts, put on goofy stickers for kids, painted on people's faces. I even saw snacks arranged into swastikas. Three years later, in Korea, I became even more used to the ubiquity of swastikas, which tended to mark Buddhist gathering places or shamanistic fortune tellers' shops in otherwise nondescript streets of three-story brick suburbia.

The swastika on my wall is on the palm of the Hindu god Ganesh, in one of four extraordinarily beautiful posters I picked up for a few dollars on the street in Mumbai back in 1998. It's a symbol that can mean death, horror and destruction, but also means welcome and good luck to millions upon millions of people in our world. (In this respect, it's not unlike the cross or the crescent.) Ganesh's swastika is not the Nazi black outline on a white circle in a red field. It's red, trimmed with gold, hand-painted with affection. Likewise, the Zara swastikas were a cheerful green, enclosed in a red sunburst.

What interests me in all this is the way this fundamental shibboleth of Western culture makes absolutely no sense in the context of a globalized world. This won't be the last time some Asian swastika sneaks its way into the West. At the same time, the whole Danish-Muhammad-cartoon crisis makes it clear that these kinds of misunderstanding can run in every direction. What is necessary on all sides is a ratcheting down of the knee-jerk rhetoric, a consideration of context before the declarations of outrage.

I recognize that this won't be easy. Some jackass is always willing to scream bloody murder just to get attention. But we should remember that any symbol sent from one culture to another is in need of translation. A swastika from India is no more an obscenity than a Vietnamese person named Phuc.

[choices]

I have a lot of free time at work, and what with the upcoming move and the general stress of pulling my life apart, I haven't been able to devote myself to one of my productive intellectual projects — studying Korean, reading East Asian history, attempting to write a novel, etc. Instead, other than trolling for jobs, I have been filling my days with video games.

I don't consider myself a gamer — the only console system I ever owned was a Nintendo Entertainment System — but I have in fact devoted significant chunks of my life to video games, most prominent among them the Ultima series. I feel a certain amount of shame around my gaming, maybe because it feels uncomfortably compulsive, and also because it's really not what one is supposed to be doing at work (although, to be fair to myself, I do work hard on everything I'm expected to, and have gone well above and beyond expectations generally).

Nevertheless, with a gaping afternoon of empty hours and a head full of emotional disaster, I have gratefully turned to Jay is Games, an excellent blog and website devoted to "casual gameplay" and the wonderful world of Flash-based gaming.

I've discovered that I'm partial to the point-and-click subgenre, whose games are forgiving of sudden pauses for work, don't call upon too much hand-eye coordination, and give a sense of progress and completion. Favorites include the Hapland, Submachine and especially Samorost series, but I was particularly struck by the intriguing beauty of the Chinese game Choice. It won't take you long, and it really is quite lovely. It helps me get through my day. Maybe it'll help you get through yours.

[un to nepal]

After UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour culminated a tour of Nepal by calling for war crimes trials, the New York Times reports that the UN Security Council has decided to send a political mission to Nepal to oversee the ceasefire.

This is the first time since my arrival in UNistan that the organization has begun a serious involvement with a country I actually know something about. I'm certainly not a Nepal expert, but I've been there twice and followed its story over the years. And I'm not at all certain that the fragile new order needs outside interference.

Like Thailand, another tourist favorite, Nepal was never colonized. Certainly it has deep-seated problems, but they are not the problems of post-colonial societies. The thought of Western good intentions going awry in Nepal fills me with dread; I imagine Nepal's warm hospitality — which, let us not forget, is its only really viable product for foreign trade — curdling into the bitterness and resentment of the colonized.

On the other hand, my concept of Nepal's internal sensibilities comes from visits to the Kathmandu Valley, one particularly tourist-favored stretch of the Himalayas, and one small town on the edge of a lowlands national park. The angry part of Nepal is down there, in the area known as the Terai, where the draining of malarial swamps has opened up new land for farming, but where the zamindar system of landlordism keeps most people impoverished and powerless, just as it does in some neighboring Indian states. Or so I have read. Maybe these sections of the country feel just as colonized as anyone else ruled by people who speak another language and see them as less than fully human.

In any case, it's a test for the UN and for Ban Ki-moon, and one in which I feel a personal sense of anxiety over its outcome.

[hermit kingdoms]

In a New Yorker article on Burma, John Lanchester notes that "Burma ... has long been preoccupied with isolation, and the desire to be cut off from the world recurs in its history."

But Burma is not alone in one sense: it is hardly the only nation in the world that has sought to isolate itself from all outside intrusion. Korea was long known as the Hermit Kingdom, and North Korea maintains that tradition to this day. Bhutan is less militantly cloistered, but it strictly limits its contacts with the rest of the world. For many centuries, Tibet and Nepal held themselves aloof, as did a number of the kingdoms of Central Asia, and not only from Europeans, though from Europeans more intently than with close neighbors.

Indeed, dotted across Asia, from Japan and Korea to the landlocked mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, were forbidden kingdoms. I have studied Asian history more closely than some other regions, but I wonder whether Asia is uniquely rich in hermit states. Certainly the territories of Persia and Rome, whatever the ruling state may have been at the time, have not lent themselves to such isolation. Nor has the easily traversed European peninsula, with its superabundant coastline and its many rivers flowing to every sea. About other parts of the world, I'm less certain. But I do wonder whether there is anything in common among the hermit states beyond geographical potential.

[the spirit of clumping]

Katamari Damacy is a surreal Japanese video game whose name means "the spirit of clumping," or more simply, "clump spirit." The goal of the game and the mode of play are fairly simple but different from anything else I've ever played: you roll a ball (the katamari) around various environments, picking up all kinds of objects as you go — paper clips, people, elephants, chopsticks. As you collect objects, the katamari grows, allowing you to pick up ever bigger items. (You can see what this actually looks like here.) The game is presided over by a king whose speaking voice is record scratching and who either praises your success or shoots lasers out of his eyes when you fail. (He also has great legs and a psychedelic cylindrical pillow permanently lodged behind his head.)

What makes the game so compelling is the elaborate, creative, surreal universe in which you operate — not to mention its zany, sometimes dark humor — and part of that effect is achieved by the music, which consists of thoroughly loopy J-pop and a pair pieces for full orchestra, recorded with appropriate theatrical bombast.

I wish I could tell you who the artists are, but I can't find that information anywhere. Still, you can buy the soundtrack at YesAsia.com.

01. Introduction
02. Katamari on the Rocks
03. Overture II
04. Katamari on the Swing
05. Kurukuru Rock
06. Everlasting Love
07. Tsuyogari Katamari
08. Beautiful Star
09. Heaven's Rain
10. Houston
11. Blue Orb
12. Katamari Holiday
13. Baby Universe
14. Disco x Prince
15. Killing Hot Savannah
16. The Royal Academy of Katamari
17. King of Kings' Song
18. Untitled

Thanks to DKNY for the link, and for introducing me to the game.

[orientalism]

I am reading the book, and I am seeing signs of it everywhere. Said provides a revelatory symptomology of Western intellectualism, arguing that Western intellectual efforts to understand the East ultimately create a kind of imaginary Orient whose purpose is to give the intellectuals power over the actual Orient and at the same time cement the role of the intellectuals as revealers of the true Orient.

Said's narrow focus on the Western intellectual approach to the Orient causes him to overlook two important factors that undermine the charged anger he brings to his book. The first is the degree to which all of the Western scientific effort has been a struggle for mastery over the subjects under investigation, whether they are viruses, Muslims, Native Americans, steam engines, the working classes, the French, etc. The second is the degree to which all intellectual endeavor, Western and non-Western alike, has the effect of reducing raw actuality to categories and types.
Nevertheless, his insights into the particular journey of European scholarship are profound.

Said sees modern Orientalism beginning in about the eighteenth century, or the transition from the seventeenth. He does not explain particularly well why this should be the starting point, but an article on the witchcraft trials of baroque Germany reminded me that the latter half of the seventeenth century was marked by the resolution of the longstanding warfare between Protestants and Catholics (the Thirty Years War ended in 1648), and also by renewed Ottoman warfare in Europe. The long period of intra-Christian conflict sustained a divide between us and them that would need to be supplanted by some renewed sense of Christian unity. A shift of focus onto the more distant menace of militant Islam could certainly have served that purpose, just as it had in earlier centuries, during the Crusades.

I'll post more ideas as they come up, as they certainly will. A couple quickies: Last night, in a nature show about Yellowstone in winter, a wilderness photographer spoke precisely the language of Orientalism, positioning himself as the one who is able to reveal this landscape to the wider public so that they can set about preserving it in its timelessness, or even restoring it to an imagined ideal, and also prepare it for the future. It is a language of essentialism, paternalism and romanticism, and it occurs to me that environmentalist adventurism remains one of the few traditional endeavors of romantic imperialism that remains respectable within the liberal establishment. (The others are the delivery of aid, and to a lesser extent, the grand tour.)

Or this: Said's fervor often feels overblown, but then I run across passages that remind me of the intellectual universe in which he was operating when he wrote the book in 1977. For example, at one point Said declares that the study of imperialism is essentially a taboo in the academe, hardly discussed, particularly by American Marxist scholars. Marxist scholars? Right! I forget that just a few decades ago, serious intellectuals of the left were expected to be able at least to navigate the minefields of Marxist thought, even if they ultimately rejected Marxism. Meanwhile, by the time I reached college, the subject of colonialism was everywhere — most certainly a result, at least in part, of Said's groundbreaking work. This intellectual earthquake, and the entrenched worldview that prevailed beforehand, explain many of the more baffling ritual insistences of our professors in college. Jenny had an East Asian literature professor who devoted considerable class time to debunking the theory that Chinese people are sluggish because they live in a hot climate. To students raised on post-Civil Rights-movement curricula, in a world of Japanese high-tech goodies, the whole idea of racial essentialism and sluggish Asians seemed as absurdly archaic as Lamarckian evolution or epicycles, but these ideas were rendered ridiculous only as recently as our early childhoods.

[peace in nepal]

Fantastic news! After ten years and 13,000 deaths, Nepal's civil war is over.

The leader of Nepal's Maoist rebellion, Prachanda, today renounced the path of violence and agreed to dissolve his parallel government that operates across much of Nepal once a new constituent assembly and constitution are adopted.

In return, the rebels will become the second-largest party in the new assembly, which will decide the fate of the king by simple majority vote at its first meeting.

I sincerely hope that this is really, truly a new dawn for this lovely, welcoming, beautiful country.

[koreans in uzbekistan]

There is a beautiful shot about a quarter of the way through the South Korean film Wedding Campaign that captures as well as anything the dislocating loneliness of the foreign. Man-taek, an aging bachelor farmer who has come to Uzbekistan in search of a wife, is standing at his hotel window, gazing out into the Tashkent night; a trolley crawls along the street below, its cables giving off irregular showers of blue-white sparks that light up the empty, alien street. The dancing shadows, the sensation that even light has become something strange and incomprehensible, sent a little chill of recognition through me, and I thought of our first night in Korea, gazing out the car windows at hundreds upon hundreds of red neon crosses floating in the night, their meaning obscure.

Wedding Campaign — the Korean title, Naui Gyeolhon Wonjeonggi (나의 결혼 원전기), more literally translates to "My Arranged Marriage" — is the story of Man-taek (Jeong Jae-yeong/정재영) and his best friend Hee-chul (Yu Jun-Sang/유준상), a taxi driver. They are nearing 40 and unmarried, a near-hopeless situation in Korea, especially in the countryside, whose towns have come to resemble old-age colonies as the young have migrated to Seoul in search of education and opportunity. The opening scenes, which are very funny, introduce us to Man-taek's aimless, pathetic life of nocturnal emissions, drunken binges and bad karaoke over civil-defense loudspeakers.

Fate intervenes when Man-taek's grandfather discovers a mysterious being who speaks Korean but looks white, or sort of white, and has to ask about the meanings of certain words. It turns out this strange creature is the new wife of someone in town and is from an unpronounceable place far away: Ooz-bek-eess-tuh? Something like that. Soon Hee-chul is arranging a journey for the two bachelors, through an expensive matchmaking service, to this mysterious country far away where there are Koreans who apparently want to marry aging men from the motherland so they can move there. (The film gives a cursory explanation of how Koreans ended up in Uzbekistan: basically, Stalin deported 172,000 ethnic Koreans from the Far East to Central Asia in 1937 as part of his broader policy of genocide through deportation.)

Once the pair arrives in Tashkent, along with two other bachelors whose stories (and terrible suits) provide additional comedy, there are plenty of twists, turns and complications, but it's obvious from very early on that Man-taek will forgo the various pretty girls paraded in front of him in favor of his translator, Kim Lara (Ae Su/애수). Indeed, the film falls back on a number of romantic-comedy conventions — the oaf who turns out to be loveable, the agonized howling of separated lovers, the inevitable romantic success of the protagonists — but there are two things that make it all hold together. The first is the unusual plot and setting, involving not just the community of Korean Uzbeks, but also the sleazy business of marriage-fixing for the sake of visas and the precarious situation of Kim Lara, who turns out to be a North Korean refugee who hopes to earn enough to buy a forged South Korean passport. The film was actually shot in Tashkent, and the strangeness of Koreans among mosques, and of mosques among Soviet buildings, lends an atmosphere of unpredictability.

The second strength of the movie is Jeong Jae-yeong's performance as Man-taek. I've always been annoyed by movies about losers or unpopular girls who suddenly get a makeover and get the boy or girl of their dreams, because the character in the initial loser phase is usually played by an attractive, talented actor and is typically more attractive and fun than your average real-world non-loser. The actor just has to switch gears, from playing an oaf to playing a romantic lead, which is something that any capable actor should be able to do.

Jeong Jae-yeong manages to avoid this clichá by playing an oaf who remains an oaf, yet somehow manages to be believably attractive to Kim Lara. Man-taek never ceases to be the sweaty, stuttering, stubborn, sloppy-eating, binge-drinking fool, yet he manages throughout to express an underlying dignity that the audience believes well before Kim Lara falls in love with him.

Adding to the believability of the central romance is the film's layered examination of what it means to be alone and alienated. Man-taek is never alone — he has a best friend and a family and lives in a small town — but he is nevertheless a man apart, aging into a role for which his society has little respect. His experience of Uzbekistan is, of course, all about being somewhere alien, while Kim Lara, as a North Korean refugee, is also alone in the world, living in fear of discovery by the authorities.

That Lara is North Korean adds to the layers of alienation. In some sense, the Uzbek Koreans are a proxy for the lost Koreans of the North: a group of people who are Korean in a way that is recognizable to South Koreans, yet who are obviously from a different world. There's a touching moment when Kim Lara takes Man-taek to a Korean restaurant, where the half-starved bachelor wolfs down a meal that is at last familiar. He asks Kim Lara what she thinks of the food and whether it's too spicy for her (Koreans rightly believe that a lot of foreigners can't handle the amount of pepper paste they slather on everything). She says it's delicious, using the formal mode. Man-taek corrects her, telling her she should say it in the informal mode appropriate between friends. Then he grins, with a mouth full of food, and declares that he's never taught anyone anything before. Kim Lara tells him that whoever he takes back with him to Korea, he should teach her all about South Korean manners and customs.

The obvious emotional subtext, of course, is that Kim Lara secretly wants to be that woman. Less obvious, but perhaps more important, is her own sense of awkwardness in terms of South Korean manners, to the point that a South Korean could mistake her for someone foreign-born. Has the North really drifted so far from the South? It's hard to know for sure, but we are approaching the time when there will be no one left alive who remembers Korea as a unified entity. (Even today, Koreans who remember an undivided Korea are recalling not a unified independent country but an annexed territory of Japan.) As the language of each country moves in its own direction, as the cultures drift ineluctably apart, will North Koreans become as foreign as Korean Uzbekistanis?

I don't think they will, but Wedding Campaign manages to hit on a number of Korea's fears: that its farms will be abandoned, that the countryside will be emptied of young people, that the population as a whole is aging too rapidly, that the North is drifting away. Still, these themes never weigh down the movie, which stays funny and light on its feet while giving its main characters enough depth and complexity to keep the viewer sympathetic. If you have the chance, go see the second showing this Sunday afternoon at BAM Cinematek.

[chingis!]

When Ghengis Khan died, his legacy was so powerful — and so disputed — that his family homeland was closed to all outsiders and remained closed until after the fall of the Soviet Union nearly 800 years later. This and other fascinating and bizarre facts about history's most prolific conqueror can be found in Jack Weatherford's engrossing if somewhat undercritical biography, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. And what better time to learn about this astonishing figure, who really did reshape the political landscape from Manchuria to Central Europe, than now, as the Mongolians celebrate his octocentennial?