51. Who is willing to be openly exploited

Who is willing to be openly exploited is noble-minded; who is insulted and insidiously exploited is dim-witted.

Master Sheng Yen

A little bit of heartbreak

I wrote not so long ago about “Jiulong”’s pictures of Beijing, and in particular about the picture of Qianmen. It stirred a lot of memories about an area I remember with a great deal of affection, and it seemed to strike a chord, as that post got quite a lot of hits for some reason. I was writing about the community of the area , and my concern about the redevelopment of the area. Sadly, it seems that my worst fears are true. An article in Beijing Newspeak reports the intimidation, cheating and violence that have been used to evict the residents, who are being resettled far from the area. Of course, I’ll go back to visit when I get to Beijing again, but it seems I’ll only find a tourist Potemkin village at best. How very sad.

Wuji 101

Last night I headed on down to Duxton Park for my first lesson with Master Zhou. I’m still digesting it, so I won’t say too much yet. He made it clear that he teaches bagua to be used; he also knows the “pretty” baguazhang used in the “national forms” for performance, but that’s not what he teaches.

We spent most of the lesson trying to get me to do the single palm change at least tolerably well: naturally, it’s different from what I’ve studied before. I have a lot, and I mean A LOT, of work ahead of me just to on this: getting the palm positions right, waist flexibility, gua strength and expansion, weight sinking, chin position, and so on… He’s really detailed in his explanations, talking about exactly where the strength and ‘li’ should be in the hands, very hands on about which muscles should be tense or slack, and so on.

Just from the single palm change, he hit me at least thirty different ways. It got to the point where I could only laugh at my own helplessness. When he says he teaches the use of bagua, he isn’t joking! My oh my…

There’s a scene in the Matrix that goes like this:

Tank: We’re supposed to start with these operation programs first. That’s major boring shit. Let’s do something a little more fun. How about… combat training.
Neo: Ju jitsu? I’m gonna learn Ju jitsu.
[Tank winks and loads the program]
Neo: Holy shit!
Tank: Hey Mikey, I think he likes it. How about some more?
Neo: Hell, yes. Hell yeah.

I kind of feel like Neo did. Hell yeah, let’s have some more of this… Master Zhou originally suggested that we meet on both Wednesdays and Fridays; I counter-suggested just Fridays, in order to keep Wednesday free for other training. After last night, frankly I would be happy to move to twice a week. Even so, I think it may be better to stay once-a-week for a while, simply because these are early days, we don’t really know each other yet, and it may be best to go slow. My reason for saying this is a familiar one: my poor level of Chinese. It’s difficult for both of us, but at least I’m used to it! It was pretty clear that Master Zhou found it frustrating to not be unable to convey everything he wanted to. Luckily, there were a lot of Chin Woo people around, and some were able to help translate, but it’s not something to rely on. So one part of me says, take it slow, get the basics first before increasing the lesson frequency. (The other part says, to hell with that start learning fast!). Hehehe.

Some of his other bagua students, from the group I met before, were also around, and I chatted a bit to them. They invited me to come along to their group revision sessions, but unfortunately I’m not free when they meet up.

After our lesson finished, I went back to my normal training spot, a bit further down the park from Chin Woo, and revised what I’d learned on my own. After that, a cycle through my other forms, and a bit of xingyi revision. The xingyi forms haven’t really gotten into muscle memory yet, so I’m still fairly unsure with them. I need to spend a bit of time reviewing the videos and mimicking the movments, I think.

Finally, later in the evening, back up to where Chin Woo were packing up, to chat to some of the guys there. I’m getting to know some more of them now, and they’re really welcoming. I need to revise to my attitude to aging, I think – some of the most dramatically acrobatic members of the lion dance troupe are guys in their late 40s or 50s!

Want to learn to act?

I’ve mentioned a few times before that I’m hoping to attend an acting course with local media company Dreamforest. The course is six months, once a week. It covers all the usual voice training, improvisation, etc, as well as singing, dancing, and hosting, to cover a full range of media skills. I’ve just spoken to them, and the course keeps on being delayed because there aren’t enough applicants… they need two more people.

So, if you’re in Singapore, and fancy learning acting and media skills, leave a comment or send me an email….

Film Review: Summer Palace

Yiheyuan, 2006. Dir: Ye Lou

I can see why this film was received well at Cannes: it has a Gallic approach to questioning love, life, and what’s it all about, in drawn-out sequences of talking, lovemaking, or both.

Four main characters drive the story: a woman who can’t show affection except through sex, a guy who can’t stay faithful, a woman who won’t let anyone show love for her, and a disengaged man who doesn’t show his emotions. Although there is potentially lots to work with here, the film rushes through events too quickly, without really letting us get to know the characters well enough; the result is that we don’t really engage with them, to the extent that a ’shock’ death late in the film doesn’t really move the audience.

The action of the film takes place in two broad chapters, with a short preamble that introduces us to the character who is the film’s prime focus. In the first section, the four are all young students at one of China’s top two universities, Beijing University [my own university, Tsinghua, is the other, and plainly the better of the two ]. Here, they cope with freedom, new experiences, and exploration of themselves and their own development. This process of growth takes place against the backdrop of a period of debate and political engagement, that eventually ends with the massacre in the summer of 1989.

Graduating that same summer, the foursome split up. The female lead begins a slow downward slide into poverty and emotional isolation; the others go to newly post-Wall Berlin, where they spend most of the next decade in arty, bohemian circles (what exactly they were doing wasn’t clear). Eventually, the male lead decides to return to China in order to seek some stability in his life. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to a death, and to a new encounter with his unhappy ex-lover.

The film was shot on a small budget, and it shows in several ways. In an effort to keep out anachronisms, many of the outdoor scenes in the Beijing sequences are shot close-up; this has the unfortunate effect of giving us hardly any sense of the city – even the Summer Palace isn’t really shown, except for the lake. The budget issue also shows up in some of the sequences during the clampdown on the student protests; some sections here – such as the burning truck – do look a bit cheap. (To be fair, this may not have been a budget issue: obviously, a film touching on a topic which is still officially taboo would have to be shot quickly and without drawing too much attention).

The biggest problem with the film was the pacing, though; it was a bit too draggy, and spread over too long a time period. The repeated use of subtitles to summarize what happened during several years between scenes was a bit clunky, and not particularly engaging. Even so, the film dragged on rather too long; quite a few people walked out of the viewing I went to, and despite my best efforts, my attention wandered quite a few times.

So was there anything good about this film? In fact, quite a lot. The acting was natural, and I certainly know quite a lot of people just like these characters. Each of the two ‘chapters’ was strong. The university period had a very, very strong sense of place and period when the action moved into the crowded university dormitories, and to the student bars where political talk and activism rubbed shoulders with pool games, 80s disco, and folk music. There was a real feeling of idealistic youth discovering themselves and groping to discover the world. The second, more mature, segment, also had strong settings, and the melancholic feeling of getting a bit older, realizing that life hasn’t turned out as we imagined, and wondering what to do about it.

Unfortunately, neither segment was really given time to develop or breathe, and that’s the real failing of the film. The characters, settings and themes are strong enough to work; ideally, this would be two films – a Chinese version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset (and I love those films, so the comparison is a vote of confidence in Ye Lou’s basic material).

Overall: a good concept, that doesn’t quite work. I think I would like to see it again, as fragments of the music, of the conversation, and faces (especially actress Hu Ling!) keep on resurfacing. Don’t go to see it with too-high expectations, but do see it if – like me – you’re an angsty thirty-something with an interest in China!

Wuji is go

Got a phone call just now: it was Master Zhou’s landlady, acting as his interpreter! Basically, the upshot is that I am now going to start studying wuji baguazhang with him, every Friday night. He did suggest Wednesday night as well, but I have to keep some time free to keep on practicing the other styles I’m learning! So… this should be interesting; I don’t know much about wuji style, but I do know that it’s unlike any of the Cheng-style sets I’ve studied so far…

This is the only thing that comes up when I search for a video of the wuji form:

and this, from the same guy:

Guess I do have to join Chin Woo now!

The down side is that I had to make a choice between this, and learning Drunken Sword with some of my classmates (and friends) from Madam Ge’s class. Tough choice… but I don’t know, I think my path is the Chinese internal styles, and Drunken Sword may be a distraction, as capoeira was last year… not that I wouldn’t like to learn them, but I can’t do everything just now!

Religion in China

• A visitor to the Shaolin temple is horrified by what appears to be exploitation of visitors by the temple administration, led by “Abbot Shi Yongxin [who] has good business skills. If he had not entered into religion, he would have become an entrepreneur or perhaps a high-level Communist Party leader … “
• However, Buddhism is China is thriving, and is no longer the religion of just old women and peasants. According to a study by Renmin University, Buddhism now has 100 million followers in the Middle Kingdom.
• I just found this by chance: the BBC has a radio program available online about Buddhism and Daoism in China. The reporter visits the Daoist White Cloud Temple in Beijing, and tries to visit the Shaolin Temple, but runs into obstacles. Some discussion of whether Shaolin is still authentic or a commercial venture. The file is available here in Realplayer format; the program appears to be part of a series, so I’m not sure how long that link will remain valid…

Meeting Master Zhou

I’ve got a cold again; well, more of an itchy cough that’s migrating down to my chest and is probably going to get worse over the next few days. Last time I went out to practice with a cold, it just made things worse and I was sick for a week, so I decided to skip my usual Friday night practice session.

I didn’t want to stay at home though, so I headed up to Orchard Road in the hope of catching Summer Palace, a new Chinese film set in the Beijing of 1989. That was on my mind anyway, because I’d been discussing a video of the Tiananmen massacre earlier that day, and was feeling a bit melancholy about it all. In the event, when I got to the cinema the film was sold out. Here’s a trailer for it from when it was shown at Cannes last year (warning: mature content):

I hope to catch it some other time; if not, I’m sure I’ll get to see it in Beijing when I go in June. Even watching the trailer makes me feel a bit old, and bittersweet about looking back to 1989 which in so many ways was such an idealistic time. A few weeks after the Tiananmen massacre, I took a solo train journey across Europe, arriving in Poland days after the first Solidarity government captured power from the Communists, and missing my only chance to see the Berlin wall, which fell shortly afterwards… Even more, it makes me miss Beijing’s energy and that mix of arty bohemianism and intellectual buzz… sigh…

Anyway, having missed the film, I headed back towards home. On the way, I realized that the Chin Woo people would be finishing their training about that time, so I popped in to say hi to my friend there. Most people had actually already left, but Master Zhou happened to be there. Apparently (I’m told) he is now here long-term to teach with Chin Woo. This was the first opportunity I’ve had to talk to him, so I asked him about the Wuji baguazhang. He is teaching it, and has a slot available to give me classes… As per usual with my martial arts teachers, he doesn’t speak English, and his Mandarin accent is quite different from the Beijing and Singapore versions that I’m used to! So, we chatted for a while; I asked him if wuji was in fact a Yinfu derivative – but, in truth, I couldn’t follow his answer! Anyway, there are still a lot of things I need to clarify – but the opportunity is certainly there to start learning this style… Heheh, he mentioned that I’m certainly going to have to improve my Chinese, but he doesn’t think my low level is necessarily going to be too much of a problem. Nevertheless, it’s probably just as well I’m already talking to a couple of private tutors about Mandarin lessons…

Alex Kozma stops teaching?

I only went to the one workshop with Alex, but I learned a heck of a lot in that short time. He said then that he was planning to come back to Singapore to teach for an extended period; I was really looking forward to that, as not only is he incredibly knowledgeable, he’s also a great teacher – plus, of course, he can explain and teach in English, which is a great help to non-Chinese speakers like myself.

We were in sporadic email contact while he went back to the UK, but a couple of months ago he stopped answering. I was wondering what was up. Now, by chance, I’ve stumbled across the reason: Alex has decided to stop teaching. I guess I need to get hold of his DVDs and books – IF I can find a way to contact him…

A rare find: Pa Kua Chang Vol 2

There was no bagua class last night, so I had a rare chance to just chill out in the afternoon without carrying around my gear and trekking up to the East Coast. Late afternoon, I popped up to Orchard Road to visit the bookshops. In fact, I wanted to check out a book on software development that I’d read about online, but of course I also -as always – checked out the martial arts sections as well. And boy, was I glad that I did: in Kinokuniya, I found a single copy of Park Bok Nam’s Fundamentals of Pa Kua Chang, Volume 2. This is quite a big deal, I think – Vol 1 is often on the shelves, but I’ve never seen volume 2 before. I did try to order it through Borders once before, and was told that it was no longer available. Even eBay only had a couple of copies, from people who didn’t ship outside the US.

Anyway, no way was I going to let the opportunity pass, so of course I bought it immediately! I speed-read it last night, and it’s great; I’ve already gained a lot of insights, and I definitely need to read it again more slowly. Excellent!

Also on the shelf was a copy of Classical Northern Wu Style Tai Ji Quan: The Fighting Art of the Manchurian Palace Guard by Frank Allen and Tina Zhang of the New York Wu-Tang Physical Culture Association – from whom I recently bought that bagua DVD. I don’t see myself buying this book, as Wu style taiji isn’t something I practice, but it does seem pretty well written – and that makes me more inclined to buy their bagua book Whirling Circles when it eventually comes out…

Some of my bagua classmates went to see the sanshou competition at Ngee Ann City, but it’s not really my scene. Instead, I went to the cinema: I had hoped to see either The Wind that Blows the Barley, or Summer Palace, but the first was sold out and the second wasn’t showing due to technical difficulties. So, I wound up going to see Spiderman 3, which was OK – better than some of the reviews I’d read, but ultimately just mind candy.