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The Red Guard and the Landlady

May 20, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

My landlady drops by unannounced at eight in the morning. It’s a bittersweet surprise. I’m familiar with the early-bird rap-tap on my door by now; the first thing I do before opening it is put on the kettle. Sometimes she comes to collect the rent. Sometimes wants to check if the heating came on, or to write down the electricity meter digits, or to switch off the water supply to the roof so the pipes don’t freeze in the cold, twiddling with hidden knobs under the kitchen sink.

This time, rap-tap-tap, she just wants to talk. She had ambushed my downstairs neighbor for rent while he was still in bed. He asked for an hour to shower and wait for the banks to open. So she came up one floor to pass the time at mine. Sixty-four-year-old Beijingers tend to assume that everyone begins their day as early as they do.

I live in a dazayuan, or “miscellaneous courtyard,” in the hutongs. The complex can hold up to 20 households inside a labyrinth of doors tucked away behind the street entrance. Mine is on the third and top floor of a compact new building, knocked up in the summer of 2012, just before I moved in. My landlady is squat, honest, with plump cheeks and a lopsided smile. She’s also relatively willing to talk about her life. — and I’m nosy by nature and profession.

I was having breakfast in my pajamas when she knocked. I threw on a ratty dressing gown for decency’s sake. She stubbed out her cigarette in the narrow stairwell and kicked off her sneakers before coming in. It wouldn’t do to get ash or dirt on her property.

The first thing that happens when my landlady visits is a short survey of what I’ve done with the place. A new shelf, a painting on the wall, different fish in the tank — any change is commented on with a taciturn “hao” (good) or “bu hao” (not good). No further explanation is offered, and her criteria for judgment are a mystery. This time she asked what the contraption behind the sofa was. I said it was a movie projector, and pointed at the blank wall opposite it. After a nerve-racking pause … “hao.”

To fill the silence as she waited on the couch, I take out some photos of my family back in Oxford. As usual, we talked about my romantic prospects. She’s keen to see me settle down with a nice Chinese girl, and reminds me with a hand on my shoulder that it’s good to marry early, “or else when you’re old who will you have to give your money to?” I ask after her one-year-old grandson, Chen Jiaming, to whom I gave an English name (Jamie).

We talked about Chinese youth, a topic I’m always interested in discussing with older generations. “They haven’t eaten bitterness,” she said, a familiar refrain. “They just think about eating, drinking, smoking, clothes.” The kids these days — if they weren’t kenlaozu (the “bite the old tribe,” living off their parents), they were yueguangzu, spending all their monthly wages. Here was my opening. A nudge, a prompt, and she started talking about her own youth.

Auntie Wang — as she likes me to call her — was born in the spring of 1949, and grew up with the People’s Republic of China, founded in the same year. Her family is from Jiangtai in northeast Beijing, an area now home to the fashionable 798 art district and overpriced Lido hotel. Back then it was mostly farmland; she helped her parents to plant and harvest wheat each year.

Auntie’s memories of those years are of hard times. Her family was poor, she said, and couldn’t afford enough wool for new clothes. She was pulled out of school during the famine of the Great Leap Forward and remains illiterate — something I first discovered when we went over my lease three years ago. When I asked further, she cut me off. “Let’s not talk about it.” After the famine at 17 years old, she joined the Red Guards and cut short her hair. When she was a girl it reached her waist. But she has never grown it out again.

I asked what she did as a Red Guard, and Auntie waved vaguely in the direction of the hutongs to the south. “We struggled against landlords.” They hung heavy wooden signs over the landlords’ necks, denouncing them as capitalists, and made them take the “airplane” position — body bent forwards at the waist like a crowbar, arms held stiff and straight behind the back, one hand clasping the other. Then: “da si tamen le.” We beat them to death, she said.

Her tone was casual. If she saw the shock in my eyes, she didn’t let on. To her it was just another memory, common for her generation, told to pass the time while waiting for the banks to open. In Chinese, the phrase she used could have simply been to add emphasis, or it could be literal. I didn’t say anything, or ask her to clarify which. She went on talking as if ambiguously admitting to murder was nothing to comment on.

Auntie remembered Zhou Enlai’s death in January 1976, and how everyone cried. She remembered Mao’s death too, nine months later. That wasn’t so sad — the people remembered how poor they had been under his rule, she said. The Cultural Revolution ended, and in 1978, at the age of 29, Auntie married. She had met her husband through a friend. He was 35, also from Beijing. The land I was living on was his, and when he died four years ago she inherited it from him.

Now she is old, and forgetting things. The changes have come fast in the last decades — health care is so expensive, she complains, and there are too many cars. In the evenings, she said, pointing apologetically to her head, she can’t remember what she did that day. But the distant past is still clear.

I made the obvious point. “The changes really are big, Auntie. Before you were struggling against landlords. And now you’re a landlady.”

“No I’m not,” she said, simply. “I’m not a landlady, I just collect your rent.”

The thought was alien, rejected with ease. Auntie Wang is a landlady, of course. I’ve seen her name on the property deed. But whenever I handed her a fat rent envelope, I also felt her faint unease at the situation, after a life of ingrained prejudices. To her, landlord is a class, not an income source.

I didn’t ask again about her time as a Red Guard. It was hard to bite my curiosity, but felt like too much of an intrusion. What if her phrase really was meant literally? Would I be able to look her in the eye? We chatted idly until my neighbor knocked on the door, cash in hand. Auntie put on her sneakers and went downstairs, telling me she would drop in again some other time, to show me little Jamie. I said I would be sure to be up early, in case.

China is full of stories like Auntie’s. They fade like old clothes, and everyone over 50 has one in the closet. I find it difficult to connect the horrors of the Cultural Revolution as we read about it in textbooks to the people around me. Whether they were victims or perpetrators can be hard to tell; the line between the two, I suspect, is blurred. I’m also fascinated by the collective amnesia which allows this society to put such recent crime behind it and move on.

But those crimes and their repercussions are still in living memory. Last month, an 80-year-old woman told me how she was sent to Sichuan for hard labor for 10 years, along with her three sons, all because her husband was from a “bad family background”: he has Qing dynasty officials in his bloodline. In China in Ten Words, Yu Hua describes how as a schoolboy he and his vigilante classmates ambushed a young peasant who was illicitly selling food coupons, pushed him to the ground, and hit him over the head with bricks until he was covered in blood.

Admitting this past is difficult — especially to a new generation that has no understanding of those times, let alone to a foreigner. Does Auntie’s daughter know what she did? Will Jamie? My distance from it all, in age and culture, means there’s little comment I can give. I don’t have the right to judge her generation without having lived in those times, and any disapproval I feel is muted, a dull banging behind heavy insulation. I still like Auntie, with her enigmatic “hao” or “bu hao” and her lopsided smile.

What I do feel is ever-deepening respect for those older Chinese who have publicly apologized for their actions during the Cultural Revolution. Like Chen Xiaolu, son of a high-ranking general, or Liu Boqin, a former Red Guard from Shandong. In a magazine article Liu named nine victims in particular he had wronged, and tracked down some of them to apologize in person. He’s the same age as Auntie. Here’s what he wrote:

“I want to apologize to all victims and their families to obtain psychological relief. An open letter is simple and clear. … I was naive, easily bamboozled, and never distinguished good from bad. … As I grow older, I have a more profound understanding of the sins of the Cultural Revolution. I cannot forget what I’ve done wrong.”

Essays

What Really Happened: Writing a Memoir

May 16, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Morris Dickstein

In recent years, whenever someone asked me what I was working on, I would hesitate a moment. “A memoir,” I’d say, never quite sure of the reaction I’d get. Friends would perk up, perhaps pleased that I was doing something different, “creative” rather than critical. I could see they were curious to learn more about me. Other reactions were more skeptical, though the skeptics were usually too polite to object directly. Someone I knew in passing was less restrained: “What do you have to write about?” It was rude but there were times I agreed with him. Too many people were publishing memoirs: you could say there was a glut in the market. After all, what were my credentials for writing about myself? I hadn’t served as secretary of state, committed high crimes or misdemeanors, or found a cure for cancer. From a lifetime of teaching and writing, I couldn’t report on titanic battles with addiction or any spectacular breakdowns. It’s true that I had lived in interesting times, that accursed fate, but I was an intellectual, part of that rarefied breed, awash in a medium of arguments and ideas.

Though I’d been fortunate in my teachers and colleagues, I’d rarely hobnobbed with celebrities or journeyed to exotic places. London, Paris, Rome, Jerusalem – did they count? The Jewish immigrant culture from which I sprang had often, perhaps too often, been written about. Still, I had a story I wanted to tell — many stories, in fact — about a disappearing world I was eager recapture, a personal past still vibrantly alive for me, one that would engage readers if I could bring it to life for them. Some people I know plow straight ahead, never looking back; for them the past is an ash heap, memory an indulgence. The opposite has always held true for me: even when I was young, the accumulating past was a magnet, a flourishing landscape of memory that drew me in, partly as a way to understand the idiosyncratic person I’d become. It was hardly an accident that I was attracted to psychoanalysis and had spent years on the couch, talking my way through an interminable flow of memories and feelings.

Thanks to this wellspring of emotion bubbling up from earlier times, bits of my life would often surface in whatever writing I did. Reviewing a novel by Bernard Malamud triggered recollections of my father’s virtual indenture to his small dry goods store. Composing eulogies of departed teachers or friends, of course, led me to revisit the times and scenes I’d known with them. When I wrote a book about the 1960s, an era that idealized openness and first-person witness (“let it all hang out,” the mantra went), I dipped inevitably into my own experiences; the era had lit me up and changed my life. Better still, whenever the writing turned more personal I seemed to shift into another gear; I felt empowered, as if tapping into a sensitive region of the brain. I could sense the emotional temperature rising, the prose turning tighter, more incandescent. As I got older I also felt the urge to leave something behind, some of the sentient life that burned brightly in me. Would it simply be an album of memories, a sheaf of anecdotes, or would it carry a freight of meaning for others as well? Would it turn slack with factual recollection or glow with remembered incident and feeling? That challenge confronts any writer but perhaps the autobiographical writer most of all. A memoir, after all, is a form of licensed self-absorption — that’s part of what’s exciting about it for a writer. But how do you make it matter to other people, make it seriously real to them? There are lazy options I had no desire to take. At a time when the lines between private and public seem almost obliterated, for instance, writers are tempted to traffic in the lurid, the grossly unedifying, either to attract attention or simply to connect viscerally with readers. Losing any normal sense of shame, they take a tabloid view of their own lives, flaunting what should remain intimate and private.

Better writers mask such revelations, using fiction to expose yet also to camouflage their emotional terrain. My own memoir, Why Not Say What Happened, actually began as an idea for a novel, not a straight autobiography. Quite miraculously, it arrived in a single bolt of inspiration one morning in the unguarded time between waking up and getting out of bed, a delicious interval that invites fantasy and free association. In the early sixties, as an unhappy grad student in English at Yale, I was offered a fellowship to spend a year in Cambridge, England, working up a subject for a thesis. A wonderful idea: blessedly free time after years of course assignments, term papers, academic pressure. From a distance, venerable and historic Cambridge, Gothic yet pastoral Cambridge, looked like paradise, and in some ways it was. I relished the unstructured stretches of time to read widely; I also worked hard at breaking into a surprisingly different culture, whose social codes I could never quite crack. But much of the time I was miserable: homesick, adrift in a cold, wet climate, missing the girl I had left behind. The novel I imagined in that morning reverie would center on the story of that year abroad, with flashbacks and foreshadowings that evoked other phases of my life — the Jewish childhood in a large, boisterous extended family, the religious education I sometimes loved and sometimes rejected, the intellectual awakening I experienced as an undergraduate, the anxieties that sometimes had beset me earlier but emerged in force during that fretful English year.

As the novel took shape in my mind, it was even clear where it might begin. I was haunted by a creepy incident that played out the day I departed for Cambridge in October 1963. Driving on the Grand Central Parkway, just past LaGuardia Airport, I caught sight in my rear-view mirror of a huge car, a stretch limo or Lincoln Continental, rearing up, leaping the divider, and bearing down on a VW bug, some hundred yards behind me. I had passed through the spot not ten seconds earlier. I looked on in horror as the smaller car veered wildly from side to side to avoid getting crushed. Then, as the road curved, I lost sight of the scene, so brief and eerie that I wondered if I’d imagined it. A few hours later I boarded a plane for England and never found out what actually happened that day on the road. This open-ended memory, framed in the mirror like a movie clip, became an emblem of my troubled feelings all that year, the collision course from which the novel could set out.

I was trying to finish another book, long in the making, but every so often I’d turn this unwritten novel over in my mind, tinker with assorted plans for it. But once I was free to write the book I had a solid hunch it would never come off. My stabs at writing fiction in my 20s and 30s had usually petered out. My doubts grew as I thought back to distant England in 1963 and 1964, watching movies made on location then, wondering whether I could bring that distant, somewhat alien world to life. Writing it as fiction would offer me the opportunity to invent, to enhance or embroider whatever I remembered, but could I make it all fully present? My reverence for the alchemy of fiction might serve to disable me. If I hewed closely to my recollections of what really happened, I might as well come clean and cast it as a memoir. I’d still have to make it a believable world, alive on the page, but I could at least count on the unspoken contract with the reader, a bond of trust that I’d stay close to the facts according to my own lights. If my literary gifts were not really suited to fiction, they could yet provide all I needed for decent autobiographical writing.

I still had to fashion a plot, grasp the narrative arc of at least part of my life. I would also want to probe what attracted me so strongly to the past. A peculiar, deeply irrational moment stuck in my mind and I decided it might serve as a prologue. Instead of the impending crash that I’d glimpsed on the highway, I would lead off with a scene toward the end of my grad school years in New Haven. Once, on an aimless walk, I knocked on the door of a seemingly empty place where I’d once lived, got no response, yet felt compelled to walk right in and wander around, though others were then clearly living there. As an interloper, I thought I might be assaulted at any moment. Trembling with emotion — where did it come from? — I was acting on an impulse I couldn’t resist, as if trespassing upon my own earlier world.

As I conjured up this feverish moment of more than forty years back, it set off a train of memories of that whole period, just before the year in Cambridge, when I was on my own for the first time. From there I could reach back to my parents’ marriage and my own childhood, to college adventures and the travels that followed, just as I had once imagined doing in the novel. Now the book unexpectedly began writing itself, telling me where it wanted to go, even where it had to end. I still needed to sort out what mattered only to me from what might also trigger recognition in others. “Follow the emotion,” a friend advised. If I cared enough, probed deeply enough, others would care as well. “My heart laid bare,” so Baudelaire described it. As a writer and critic, as a teacher, I’d also have to include the life of the mind, the books I’d read, the poetry I loved, the ideas that turned me on. But I felt it should not be a largely intellectual biography, an essay in cultural history, like those that some of my admired mentors had written. It had to be personal as well, something ripped from the gut. I needed to unburden or debrief myself, for there were moments and milestones weighing upon me. Above all I had to create myself as a character, not so different from a fictional narrator, and bring the spark of life to the sketches I drew of the people around me. Would they prove as memorable to others as they were to me? Above all I wanted to tell stories, irresistible stories, without putting the thinking mind to sleep.

It was odd to find myself doing research not in texts but in the corners and folds of my own psyche. I soon discovered there were vexing clauses in the all-important contract to tell the truth. What about the embarrassing stuff I’d discussed with virtually no one: episodes of panic attacks and physical symptoms, years in psychotherapy and then full-scale analysis? And what about the harsh or painful memories, crucial to any three-dimensional work, which might prove upsetting to others, uncles or cousins, teachers and friends, even their children and grandchildren, people I had no wish to anguish or harm? I didn’t intend to trace my own coming of age at their expense, except where honesty demanded it.

Strangely, I took heart from Orwell’s injunction not to trust any autobiography that didn’t tell us something discreditable — he actually said “disgraceful” — about the author. If nothing else, such details would add drama to my tale, lay out conflicts that would make up for the dearth of nail-biting melodrama. I could rely on Montaigne’s justification for writing about himself – that each man’s life potentially bears the whole form of the human condition. The trick was to grapple with it honestly, wherever it led, at some risk of looking bad or foolish. I would never allow it to become a confessional debauch, but I wondered: was there too much neurosis in my memoir, or not enough? Only the reader could judge. Some discretion was inevitable but I tried hard to avoid turning it into censorship. It took some inflation of ego to think I was worth writing about, but also a willingness to be exposed, to be vulnerable. Part of the story would be the reversals, the disappointments and serious losses, though surely Orwell exaggerated when he said, “any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Whatever those setbacks were, I’d have the dubious pleasure of living through them again, savoring some past experiences, regretting others, revisiting indelible moments and trying hard to make sense of them at last.

Morris Dickstein’s memoir, Why Not Say What Happened: A Sentimental Education, has just come out from Liveright, along with a new edition of his cultural history of the 1960s, Gates of Eden. His previous books include Leopards in the Temple (2002), A Mirror in the Roadway (2005), and Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression (2009).

Lead photo by Nancy Crampton.

The China Blog

Copycat Travels

May 13, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Jeffrey Wasserstrom

While traveling last summer, I asked for directions to get to the room in which I would be staying for the night, and was told to “cross the Bridge of Sighs” and make a right. I wasn’t in Venice, in spite of how it might sound, or in China —a country now famous for faux architecture sites, one of which, Thames Town, features a church and a fish and chips shop that look just like doppelganger locales in England. I wasn’t in Las Vegas, the American city most closely associated with shanzhai (copycat or counterfeit) versions of European iconic structures, thanks in part to a miniature Eiffel Tower. I wasn’t attending a World’s Fair-like international exhibition or visiting a theme park, such as Epcot Center — two settings often rife with replicas.

Where was I? Cambridge, England. The man directing me to cross the Bridge of Sighs worked in the porter’s lodge of St. John’s, the college where the organizers of the local World History Seminar had arranged for me to stay while in town to present.

I had come to Cambridge from Oxford, where I spent part of last summer as a Visiting Research Fellow at Merton College. I mention this because, had I come to Cambridge directly from the United States, being told to cross a bridge with the same name as one famous in Italy would have seemed very strange indeed. As it was, it seemed only a bit strange, for earlier in that same week, when asking directions in Oxford, I had also been told to use the Bridge of Sighs as an orienting landmark. Yes, that university town also has a shanzhai version of the same Italian icon — though curiously, one that spans a road, not a waterway.

During my month in England, I didn’t mention my interest in faux Italian bridges to anyone, but my guess is that if I had, those to whom I told the story might well have found it curious that I found it curious. After all, some old English estates contain follies meant to call to mind ancient Roman ruins. But given my interest in China and having read many articles over the years about the craze for shanzhai buildings in that country, which boasts replicas of structures ranging from the White House to Sydney’s famed Opera House, the case of the bridges seemed worth noting and pondering.

In thinking about the situation, I was reminded again of how easy it is to overstate the exoticness of contemporary China, and of the need to differentiate carefully between things going on there that are utterly sui generis, on the one hand, and those that represent a recurrence, sometimes with very distinctive features, of things that have happened or are happening elsewhere. Is Thames Town peculiar? Yes. And so, too, is the faux Great Wall that Wuhan University is building. But can such fakes also be fit into a long tradition of look-alike structures scattered in locales far beyond China, such as the massive Parthenon dating from 1897 that was built in Nashville, Tennessee, for a World’s Fair-like international exhibit? Again, yes.

Well before I went to England, I already had shanzhai buildings on my mind due to a trip to China I had made the previous March. I still haven’t managed to make it to Thames Town (maybe next time), but I had stopped in at unusually interesting replica sites in three different cities. While in Shanghai, I’d gone to the 221B Baker Street Café. This, as its name suggests, is a shanzhai version of a place that never actually existed except on paper, in the theater, in film, and most recently on television. That globally famous address, of course, is one that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle invented to go with the place of residence for his fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. This particular example of Shanghai shanzhai was not based on the flat described in Conan Doyle’s books. Rather, it was inspired by the one featured in the BBC contemporary-set series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman — something that showed through in many ways, including the presence of some memorabilia associated with the recent films based on The Hobbit, in which the two actors also have roles.

The second shanzhai site I saw in March 2014, which also had a “Britain transplanted to China feel,” was in nearby Ningbo. I went there with fellow China Blog editor Maura Cunningham to give a tag-team talk on the 2013 edition of China in the 21^st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, on which we had collaborated, at the local branch of the University of Nottingham. One of the main sites we saw on the brief campus tour that preceded our talk was a building with a clock tower that is a replica of the one on the original British campus.

Last but far from least, while in Beijing, I went to a mock-up of the Central Perk coffee shop made famous by Friends, the American sitcom that, as regular readers of this blog know, has many fans in China. Located in a shopping center in China’s capital, it replicates several features of the show’s set — though, unlike the Central Perk seen by viewers of the show, this one’s orange couch sits in front of a television set. When I visited it, some young Chinese sat at tables chatting or working on their laptops, while others lounged on that couch watching the eponymous friends — Chandler, Monica, Ross, Rachel, Phoebe, and Joey — making jokes and getting in and out of scrapes.

These sites, when taken together, reveal the extent to which China and the West have become intertwined. It is worth noting, though, that a full account of shanzhai architecture requires moving not just outside of China but also back in time. Many decades before Shanghai got a café inspired by a BBC show, it had a Big Ben-like clock tower. And several centuries before Beijing got its Central Perk, it had the Yuanming Yuan complex, also known as the Old Summer Palace, which was, as works by Geremie Barmé and others show, a wondrous copycat-rich theme park avant la lettre. Spending time there, the Emperor, without leaving his capital, could take virtual tours of the world, viewing mockups of everything from Hangzhou gardens to Tibetan temples to, in the middle of one lake, a miniature version of Venice. There’s just one question about that last site I wish I could answer: Did it include a replica of the Bridge of Sighs?

How far back in history can we take the tale of shanzhai architecture? I’m not sure, but a recent trip to Rome convinced me that no discussion of the topic will be complete without bringing in things built long before the first Jesuits went to China. Scattered throughout the Italian capital’s ancient core are buildings roughly two thousand years old that were inspired by — and sometimes intended to reproduce exactly — Greek ones that predated them by several centuries. One particularly interesting structure located a bit outside of the core district, meanwhile, is a faux version of an Egyptian structure: a pyramid. It was built by a local man who wanted to be buried in the grandeur of pharaohs of old; one can imagine his plan inspiring some of the same eyebrow-lifting and disparaging comments about crude emulation of another place’s elite that has been generated lately by the nouveau riche Chinese man who has built a replica of the White House in which to live.

Perhaps the most interesting Roman shanzhai sites of all for me, given my interests, were the obelisks scattered around the city. Some of these are not fakes, but simply objects brought to Rome from Egypt. Others, however, were built outside of Egypt in an Egyptian style, something that could also be said of the Washington Monument, the most famous American obelisk. Still others are part genuine transplant and part fake, a reminder that the line between authentic and shanzhai creation can sometimes be fuzzy.

For example, at the top of the Spanish Steps stands a menhir — known officially as the Sallustiano Obelisk but also called the Trinità de Monti Obelisk, in honor of the name of a nearby church — that was apparently brought to Rome from Egypt, but has a hieroglyphic inscription that is a later addition, carved by Roman rather than Egyptian craftsmen. In chiseling it in, they used as a model the inscription on another obelisk that had made the journey from Egypt to Rome. They were not, however, as meticulous as they might have been, for errors snuck in, as sometimes happens in any form of shanzhai work. In this case, some images were carved upside down, meaning that they looked like hieroglyphics but, like the fascinating faux Chinese characters created by the artist Xu Bing, were actually nonsensical symbols. I will think about that inscription the next time I see a T-shirt for sale in Shanghai that is emblazoned with a slogan in Chinglish that verges on gibberish, or see a Westerner anywhere sporting a tattoo made up of Chinese characters that are drawn incorrectly or grouped together oddly.

The shanzhai story is a complex, long, and global one, and new chapters are being added to it continually. This is especially true in years, like this one, when World Expos are held. The 2015 Expo will take place in Milan and be the first since Shanghai’s in 2010, which broke records for numbers of pavilions and visitors.

When the World Expo came to Shanghai, it gave a city already rich in permanent doppelganger objects a host of temporary new ones. The Indian pavilion, for example, was topped by a dome modeled on the one at a World Heritage site dating from the 3rd century B.C.; those taking a virtual tour of Switzerland were able to ride on a mock Alpine chair lift. As a visitor, I saw replicas of ancient Southeast Asian temples in Cambodia’s exhibit area. These were modeled on the Angkor Watt temple complex, but as someone who has never been there, they gave me a sense of déjà vu, not for any past trip to Southeast Asia but rather a past stop at Disneyland where a shanzhai version of the same site exists. (I wish I could say that the Venice city pavilion at which I stopped had a Bridge of Sighs, but it didn’t, though it did boast shanzhai canals.)

What curious new chapters to the shanzhai story will this year’s far more modest World Expo, which opened May 1, add? I am planning to visit Milan in September to find out. And although I saw little while in Rome in April to suggest that locals were excited about a World Expo starting soon in another part of their country, there were some posters scattered around the city drawing attention to the event. Fittingly, one of the largest billboards I saw promoting a spectacle that will surely have its share of copycat dimensions was directly behind that obelisk atop the Spanish Steps that is adorned with upside down hieroglyphics.

The China Blog

In The Gulou Days

May 6, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Alec Ash

Nostalgia is hard to keep up with in China. That old bar, that old neighborhood, that old friend — memories accrue quickly along with the fast turn-over here, silt at the bottom of a swift river. Circumstances change, people come and go. Just count the number of new restaurants on your street. The way we talk about last year is the way folk back home talk about last decade. The constants — rent hikes, food poisoning, strangers taking selfies with you — are almost comforting.

The space I feel most nostalgic about in Beijing is the courtyard between the Drum and Bell Towers. I first saw it in the summer of 2007, a fresh graduate on my first trip to China. I was meeting my brother’s schoolmate Max Duncan (a videojournalist still in Beijing), the only person I knew in town, and the taxi dropped me off right in the middle of honking traffic at the south side of the Drum Tower. But just around the other side was a rectangle of quiet green fringed with stone slabs and grannies dancing to a boombox. Max was squatting to one side with a cigarette, nattering away with a grandad in Chinese. The next summer, I came back to learn Chinese and stayed. Continue reading →

Essays, The View From Here

A Song in Two Voices

May 3, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Image: Steven Turville

By Joanna Chen

The only sure thing on polling day in Israel this year was the holiday atmosphere. Even my village joined in, with a cozy open-air market that was just being set up at the entrance as we walked by that morning on our way to the polling station. Organic vegetables, gold jewellery, scarves from India, hand-painted wooden toys, all made locally. Polling day doubles as family day, as the grown-up kids throng home to vote, walking along with their parents to the voting hall. One of our daughters is still registered in the village, and she joins us on our stroll. We take the dogs, and they run ahead, happy we are all together today. Only my son, who is too young to vote, seems low-spirited this morning. He walks a little ahead of us, head down, in sandals and a dirty t-shirt. We go early, because we have two invitations to see friends today. It’s a holiday, after all. Continue reading →

Events

The 2015 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts

May 2, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

Herb Alpert said of the 2015 HAAIA winners, “It’s exciting to be able to support these five unique artists who are always on the hunt for something they don’t yet know, something real that touches us in a deep place. Whether they are writing a concerto, making a film, an installation, a ruckus or a dance, they always look for something special and original to say. These are artists with the passion, talent and the restlessness that never makes them stop. They HAVE TO make art not just for themselves… but for all of US.”

The awards recognize past performance and future promise to artists working in Dance, Film/Video, Music, Theatre and Visual Arts; an outstanding candidate in each genre receives a prize of $75,000. Continue reading →

The China Blog

The Man Who Stayed Behind—At Chinese Central Television

April 29, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Austin Dean

Chinese Central Television (CCTV) likely provides more news to more people than any other media organization on the planet. As a 2012 book, which Christina Chiao reviewed for this site in 2013, put it in its title, CCTV, across its various channels, has the attention of “Two Billion Eyes.”

Recently, though, CCTV is making headlines as well as presenting them. A few weeks ago, Bi Fujian, long-time host of the network’s much watched and much mocked annual New Year’s gala, was taken off the air after a video emerged that showed him making snide remarks about Mao Zedong during a private dinner party whose attendees included foreign as well as Chinese guests. Before Bi’s off-hand comments, “at least 15 senior network employees” had “disappeared into the maw of party and state detention,” as part of a wider crackdown against corruption at the network. Continue reading →

Reckless Reader

Chevalier’s Books

April 26, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

LARB’s Naked Bookseller Program is a collaboration with independent bookstores to help tell their stories and broaden their visibility across the country and around the world. A basic membership to LARB gets you a 10% discount at our participating partner stores through our Naked Bookseller card. By becoming a member, you support both the Los Angeles Review of Books AND independent booksellers. Below is the story of our newest partner in the program, Chevalier’s Books in Los Angeles, told in their own words.

This year Chevalier’s Books will be celebrating its 75^th anniversary as an independent bookstore, located all these years on Larchmont Boulevard, in the heart of Los Angeles.

With its many restaurants, coffee shops, ice cream parlors, boutiques , an old-fashioned barber shop and even a yoga center, the Boulevard has become a popular spot for LA flâneur’s from nearby neighborhoods – Hancock Park, Koreatown, Hollywood, as well as visitors from all over the world.

The two new owners of the store, Bert Deixler and Darryl Holter, are longtime customers of the store who wanted their neighborhood bookstore to survive and flourish. They completely revitalized the store in November of 2014 with thousands of new books and a beautiful new design perfect for book browsing. Continue reading →

The China Blog

Two Views of a Beijing Hutong

April 22, 2015 LARB Blog Leave a comment

By Christina Larson

“Two dogs?”

A girl came up behind me wearing the bright blue and red track-suit school uniform of Beijing Number 5 high school, situated to the side of the alley I live on in central Beijing. She admired my larger dog, who came up to sniff her hand. In any country, walking dogs is a good way to meet strangers.

We heard a horn behind us, and moved out of the center of the narrow alley to the steps in front a small grocery, busy restocking.

“People are so aggressive these days!”

“These hutongs (alleys) aren’t really designed for car traffic,” I said, blaming the wealthy parents of her classmates for bringing their SUVs down our pedestrian streets. Continue reading →