Still Life

Below is an excerpt from a movie review in the New York Times for Still Life, a movie about life in China. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full review.

Those Days of Doom on the Yangtze

By MANOHLA DARGIS

Published: January 18, 2008

Correction Appended

A modern master of postmodern discontent, Jia Zhang-ke is among the most strikingly gifted filmmakers working today whom you have probably never heard of. During the past decade he has made some half-dozen documentary-inflected fictions and several documentaries that weigh the human cost of China’s often brutal, dehumanizing shift from state-controlled communism to state-sanctioned capitalism, a price paid in the blood and sweat of people who have, paradoxically, inspired him to create works of sublime, soulful art.

In “Still Life,” which won the grand prize at the 2006 Venice Film Festival, the blood and the sweat run directly into the Yangtze River, where they mingle with more than a few tears. The movie takes place amid the clatter and misery of the Three Gorges Dam, which cuts across the Yangtze in central China. The largest dam in the world, Three Gorges is a site of great cultural and political strife because of both environmental and humanitarian concerns. More than one million people have been displaced because of the dam (more are expected to follow), evicted from their homes by a ravenous hunger for power, electric and otherwise, that is washing them and history away.

This may sound like a prescription for social cinema, but Mr. Jia’s interest lies in visual ideas and human behavior, not agendas. Elegantly photographed by Yu Likwai in high-definition digital video, the movie opens with a series of nearly seamless, seemingly contiguous lateral pans across men, women and children congregated in a boat on the Yangtze near the dam. The camera sweeps across the passengers slowly enough so that you can see each person alternately laughing, chattering and in repose. After exploring the formal possibilities of the long shot in his breakthrough film, “Platform” (2000), Mr. Jia has again started to edge near his characters. In “Still Life” he uses human bodies as moving space, to borrow Michelangelo Antonioni’s peerless phrase, but with enormous tenderness.

Antonioni’s influence on Mr. Jia is pronounced, evident in the younger filmmaker’s manipulation of real time and the ways he expresses his ideas with images rather than through dialogue and narrative. The drifting, rootless men and women in many of his movies, and the wide-open, nominally empty landscapes through which they on occasion wander, further underscore the resemblances between the filmmakers. Even so, when Mr. Jia’s characters roam through the crumbling town in “Still Life” — which is being demolished in anticipation of an engineered inundation — it’s impossible not to think even further back in cinema history to Rossellini’s postwar films, like “Paisan” and “Germany Year Zero,” works in which the director’s moral position is etched into every human face and fallen building.

Like Rossellini, Mr. Jia has found a great subject in his rapidly changing country and its people, who seem to be casualties of a different, more elusive war. The two principal characters in “Still Life,” Sanming (Han Sanming) and Shen Hong (Zhao Tao), land in Fengjie separately and never actually meet, bound only by a shared desire to find their errant spouses. Sanming, a fireplug whose muscular arms and back owe something to his time toiling in one of the country’s coal mines, arrives in Fengjie hoping to find his runaway wife and the 16-year-old daughter he has never met. For her part, the willowy, more overtly middle-class Shen Hong, a nurse, is searching for the husband who stopped coming home two years earlier.

Written by Mr. Jia and two collaborators, Sun Jianmin and Guan Na, “Still Life” unfolds as a series of minor events and incidental bits and pieces with little obvious connective tissue. Things happen, though not necessarily as a consequence of what took place in the previous scene. Almost as soon as he enters the doomed town, Sanming walks into a scam (he answers the con with a flick of a switchblade), visits his truculent brother-in-law (who barely looks up from his rice bowl) and joins the ranks of the local work force by picking up a sledgehammer. After about 40 minutes, Mr. Jia suddenly shifts his attention to Shen Hong, who also comes to Fengjie in time to see the 2,000-year-old town die.

Sanming and Shen Hong inhabit separate spaces and personal stories but remain connected by context, culture, language and landscape. The same astonishingly beautiful mountains soar above both their heads. The two are routinely dwarfed by their environments, by the ruined buildings and surrounding gorges alike. The connections between the natural landscape and the man-made one, between the easy beauty of immutable nature and the eerie beauty of devastated culture (Mr. Jia is a poet of decay), are powerful and unsettling. The dam may not outlast either the gorges or the Yangtze, but if it does, you can always see the image of one of the gorges printed on a Chinese currency bill , yet another reminder of a disposable, commodified past.

Fortune Cookie

Fortune cookies. They're found all over the world, except apparently in China.

Below is an except from a newspaper article on the history of the fortune cookie. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article. Please pay a visit.

Solving a Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside a Cookie

By JENNIFER 8. LEE

Some 3 billion fortune cookies are made each year, almost all in the United States. But the crisp cookies wrapped around enigmatic sayings have spread around the world. They are served in Chinese restaurants in Britain, Mexico, Italy, France and elsewhere. In India, they taste more like butter cookies. A surprisingly high number of winning tickets in Brazil's national lottery in 2004 were traced to lucky numbers from fortune cookies distributed by a Chinese restaurant chain called Chinatown.

But there is one place where fortune cookies are conspicuously absent: China.

Now a researcher in Japan believes she can explain the disconnect, which has long perplexed American tourists in China. Fortune cookies, Yasuko Nakamachi says, are almost certainly originally from Japan.

Her prime pieces of evidence are the generations-old small family bakeries making obscure fortune cookie-shaped crackers by hand near a temple outside Kyoto. She has also turned up many references to the cookies in Japanese literature and history, including an 1878 image of a man making them in a bakery - decades before the first reports of American fortune cookies.

The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least. "I am surprised," said Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “People see it and think of it as a Chinese food dessert, not a Japanese food dessert,” he said. But, he conceded, “The weakest part of the Chinese menu is dessert.”

Ms. Nakamachi, a folklore and history graduate student at Kanagawa University outside Tokyo, has spent more than six years trying to establish the Japanese origin of the fortune cookie, much of that at National Diet Library (the Japanese equivalent of the Library of Congress). She has sifted through thousands of old documents and drawings. She has also traveled to temples and shrines across the country, conducting interviews to piece together the history of fortune-telling within Japanese desserts.

Ms. Nakamachi, who has long had an interest in the history of sweets and snacks, saw her first fortune cookie in the 1980s in a New York City Chinese restaurant. At that time she was merely impressed with Chinese ingenuity, finding the cookies an amusing and clever idea.

It was only in the late 1990s, outside Kyoto near one of the most popular Shinto shrines in Japan, that she saw that familiar shape at a family bakery called Sohonke Hogyokudo.

“These were exactly like fortune cookies,” she said. “They were shaped exactly the same and there were fortunes.”

The cookies were made by hand by a young man who held black grills over a flame. The grills contain round molds into which batter is poured, something like a small waffle iron. Little pieces of paper were folded into the cookies while they were still warm. With that sighting, Ms. Nakamachi’s long research mission began.

A visit to the Hogyokudo shop revealed that the Japanese fortune cookies Ms. Nakamachi found there and at a handful of nearby bakers differ in some ways from the ones that Americans receive at the end of a meal with the check and a handful of orange wedges. They are bigger and browner, as their batter contains sesame and miso rather than vanilla and butter. The fortunes are not stuffed inside, but are pinched in the cookie’s fold. (Think of the cookie as a Pac-Man: the paper is tucked into Pac-Man’s mouth rather than inside his body.) Still, the family resemblance is undeniable.

“People don’t realize this is the real thing because American fortune cookies are popular right now,” said Takeshi Matsuhisa as he deftly folded the hot wafers into the familiar curved shape.

His family has owned the bakery for three generations, although the local tradition of making the cookies predates their store. Decades ago, many confectioneries and candies came with little fortunes inside, Mr. Matsuhisa said.

“Then, the companies realized it wasn’t such a good idea to put pieces of paper in candy, so then they all disappeared,” he added. The fear that people would accidentally eat the fortune is one reason his family now puts the paper outside the cookie.

The bakery has used the same 23 fortunes for decades. (In contrast, Wonton Food has a database of well over 10,000 fortunes.) Hogyokudo’s fortunes are more poetic than prophetic, although some nearby bakeries use newer fortunes that give advice or make predictions. One from Inariya, a shop across from the Shinto shrine, contains the advice, “To ward off lower back pain or joint problems, undertake some at-home measures like yoga.”

As she researched the cookie’s Japanese origins, among the most persuasive pieces of evidence Ms. Nakamachi found was an illustration from a 19th-century book of stories, “Moshiogusa Kinsei Kidan.”

A character in one of the tales is an apprentice in a senbei store. In Japan, the cookies are called, variously, tsujiura senbei (“fortune crackers”), omikuji senbei (“written fortune crackers”), and suzu senbei (“bell crackers”).

The apprentice appears to be grilling wafers in black irons over coals, the same way they are made in Hogyokudo and other present-day bakeries. A sign above him reads “tsujiura senbei” and next to him are tubs filled with little round shapes — the tsujiura senbei themselves.

The book, story and illustration are all dated 1878. The families of Japanese or Chinese immigrants in California that claim to have invented or popularized fortune cookies all date the cookie’s appearance between 1907 and 1914.

The illustration was the kind of needle in a haystack discovery academics yearn for. “It’s very rare to see artwork of a thing being made,” Ms. Nakamachi said. “You just don’t see that.”

She found other historical traces of the cookies as well. In a work of fiction by Tamenaga Shunsui, who lived between 1790 and 1843, a woman tries to placate two other women with tsujiura senbei that contain fortunes.

Ms. Nakamachi’s work, originally published in 2004 as part of a Kanagawa University report, has been picked up by some publications in Japan. A few customers have bought senbei from Hogyokudo, the Matsuhisa family said. But otherwise, the paper has drawn limited attention, perhaps because fortune cookies are not well known in Japan.

If fortune cookies are Japanese in origin, how did they become a mainstay of American Chinese restaurants? To understand this, Ms. Nakamachi has made two trips to the United States, focusing on San Francisco and Los Angeles, where she interviewed the descendants of Japanese and Chinese immigrant families who made fortune cookies.

Taijiquan Training Advice

This was posted on a Taijiquan mailing list that I am on. It was accumulated from various sources over the years. Enjoy.

* We do Taiji slowly in order to be tranquil. Tranquility leads to
contemplation. Contemplation leads to clarity. Clarity leads to
comprehension. Comprehension enables us to dissolve all doubts.

* The best part of Taijiquan is not the external form, but the
internal cultivation. You need to practice the external in order to
find the internal.

* There's no right or wrong in one's practice, only different levels
of understanding. There's no perfection in one's practice, only
different levels of refinement. There's no graduation in the art of
Taijiquan, only different levels of progress.

* Taijiquan should not be a set of habitual movements, rather, moves
consciously. Mindless repetition of physical practice is only a
mechanical exercise.

* The mechanics of Taijiquan can be taught, but the of Taijiquan can
only be comprehended.

* You cannot enjoy the beauty of Taijiquan if you just practice but
don't understand it. Thirty-percent of understanding comes from your
teacher, but seventy-percent from your diligent practice.

* It is our body that calls us to practice, for it wants to be in
balance; Instead, it is our mind that cries out: "Wait---not today!"

* Don't find excuses not to practice, instead find every opportunity
to practice.

* You have to open your mind first, then your body. You have to relax
your mind first, then your body.

* Cultivate your body in order to accumulate skills. Cultivate your
mind in order to accumulate wisdom.

* It is good to have faith in our practice, but a strong faith needs
to be built upon our deep understanding of the art.

* When you are puzzled, your teacher is the answer. When you have
comprehended, everything is your teacher.

* Indeed, some people feel more relaxed in a couch than at Taiji
lessons, however, they cannot take the couch along with them.

* The success of many ancient Taiji masters was not from reading but
training hard.

* In the old days, students were told to practice first, understand
later. Nowadays, students want to understand first, practice later.

* To study with a famous master does not guarantee that you will be
a successful disciple; you have to make success of your own practice.

* A master is to teach us to be a student of Taiji, not his.

* A master's virtue should be more important than his powerful skill.
Skill dies with the master, but his virtue gets passed down.

* A master's personal interpretations often became a lineage's secret
transmission, and with a theory behind them.

* All masters believe in their own interpretations, there's no point
to compare their differences.

* Tension is like hard knots hidden in our muscles, in our minds, and
deep within our hearts. We practice Taijiquan in order to discover
those hidden knots and dissolve them.

* A relaxed body is a body that does not hold onto things. A relaxed
mind is a mind that does not hold onto things.

* If you want to be relaxed, practice Taiji. If you want others to be
relaxed, practice Taiji (on them).

* There are four levels of relaxation:
Level one: relaxing the shoulders and arms
Level two: relaxing the waist and lower back
Level three: relaxing the knees and feet
Level four: relaxing the mind.

* It is easy to see "what," easy to show "how," but takes true
understanding to explain "why."

* Taiji does not eliminate stress; it only helps you to manage it.

* You have to master yourself in order to master Taiji, and Taiji is
about mastering yourself.

* Don't try to surpass another's ability; instead, surpass your own.

* Taijiquen practice is a slow fix; sometimes it is so slow that the
need to fix the problem is no longer important.

* It is not how many rounds of the routine you've done, it is how
deeply you've worked on it.

* Don't just do the movements---feel them.

* Don't let the unconscious body steer your mind, instead, Let your
conscious mind steer your body.

* You are not doing movements wrong, you are just doing them
unconsciously.

* The common fears of learning Taijiquan:
fear of falling behind
fear of being ignored
fear of being incapable
fear of losing face
fear of physical pain
fear of learning the "wrong way"
fear of showing the "wrong way"
fear of giving commitment
fear of false fantasy

* One bad thing about Taiji is that it is difficult to understand.
One good thing about Taiji is that once you understand it, there's
more to learn.

* The rich contents of Taijiquan are hidden within the transitional
movements.

* Any posture in stillness can be considered a Wuji stance---Not
moving but ready for any action.

* Qi sinks to the dantien is only the midway. Qi sinks to the feet
is the final destination.

* The highest level of Taijiquan has no need of form and
movement---It is a state of non-intent.

Cane Fighting and Sherlock Holmes

Over at Martial Views there is a recent article about using cane for self defense. This of course led me to think about Sherlock Holmes.

The fictional detective was not only known to be a pretty decent boxer, but also practiced a martial art known as Bartitsu, which actually existed. Bartitsu was a combination of Jujutsu, Boxing, and Stick Fighting.

If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the Bartistsu Society website. There is also a Wikipedia article here.

Bartitsu was practiced in the late 1800's, and early 1900's before sort of petering out. The founder of Bartitsu, Edward William Barton-Wright, left behind quite a bit of written material, and the art has been recreated. You can find out more about this at the Bartitsu Society website.

Finally, here is a video clip of jujutsu being performed in Europe in the early 1900's:

Wu Style Taijiquan Qigong

I’ve learned that Wu style taijiquan has something called the 24 Forms. This is the qi gong set of exercises for the style. I’ve been introduced to the first 10 of them. The first 5 (at least) can be practiced as simple warm ups (our 5 Warm Ups that we learn in the very first class), and I am told they can also be practiced as qi gong exercises. In fact all of the 24 Forms can be practiced in a variety of ways. Over time, I’ll learn more about these and the range of how they’re done.

I have been shown one zhan zhaung form that resembles the wuji posture. I haven’t received a lot of directions about it, but the one thing that is different is that the hands are closed. Fold your fingers over your palms, with your thumbs outside of your fingers, pointing down. The purpose of this hand form, I am told, is to keep the energy circulating within the body rather than rolling off the ends of your fingers. Also the idea is to build pockets of heat up in the palms.

Building up heat in the body is a recurring theme I’m seeing in the Wu style. When doing the form, you are weighted 100% on one leg, and then the other. You’re pushing a lot of blood around your body, and really get warm. Even in winter, we tend to be pretty sweaty after doing the form in class; and during the summer, some of the advanced students are drenched.

I’m going to begin to introduce standing into my personal training again, doing it their way.

Over 100,000 Chinese Dead in Work Accidents Last Year

This appeared in Yahoo news. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed there.

Over 100,000 died in China work accidents in 2007

Fri Jan 11, 3:48 AM ET

More than 100,000 Chinese died in workplace accidents last year, including on the roads and railways, but the figure was down one-tenth on 2006, a senior official said on Friday.

Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety, said 101,480 people died but that government education and publicity campaigns were paying off.

"The national production safety situation continues to steadily improve," he told a national meeting, carried live on central government Web site http://www.gov.cn.

Accidents in coal mines and on the roads showed the largest improvement, Li added.

China's coal mines are the world's deadliest, with fatal accidents taking place almost on a daily basis as mine owners push productions beyond safety limits to pursue profits.

Li said many problems remained.

"One is that the implementation and propagation of the concept of safe development and of safe production policies is not deep enough," he said. "The work of some localities and work units is still superficial."

Supervision and safety inspections were carried out unevenly, Li added.

"The results have not been consolidated, and there can easily be localized rebounds," he said. "It will be hard to maintain the downward trend in 2008."

Last year's death toll was still unacceptably high, added Zhou Yongkang, the former head of public security who was raised to the Politburo Standing Committee in October, the Communist Party's most senior group of leaders.

"It ought to be said that 100,000 people dying in accidents every year is a serious social problem," he said.

Natural disasters including floods, landslides and lightning strikes also took their toll last year, killing 2,325 people, the Ministry of Civil Affairs added.

More than 1.46 million houses were destroyed and 48.67 million hectares of arable land affected, the ministry added in a statement on its Web site (http://www.mca.gov.cn).

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)

How do you look like your martial art?

A question on a martial arts forum asked how do you make the way you fight look like the style you are studying. That’s an interesting question. What does a pure taijiquan guy, or a karate guy, or whatever, really supposed look like in a fight?

A martial art is based on a philosophy, has principles derived from that philosophy, and a training method which is meant to imprint those principles into your body. What we tend to think of as a martial art is really it’s associated training method.

Fighting is fighting. You’ll fight the way you are trained. To the extent that the training method has had an impact on us, how we fight will be influenced by our training method.

In the larger sense of how we live our lives, if we really want to live up to some of the hype of the benefits that taijiquan (or karate or zen; you name it) is suppose to bring to us, we have to open minded and let the training method mold us.

Without any gaps, water fits the container into which it was poured.

I once read an interview with a martial arts master. In the interview he said that before studying the martial art he had mastered, he had trained diligently in something else. When he took up his current martial art, his teacher had him do nothing but the standing exercise for several years, to “erase” the previous martial art from his body, while still doing something that would help him make progress in his new study.

When I was young, I trained very intensely in aikido for a number of years. For the last six months or so, I have been studying taijiquan. If someone were to take a poke at me right now, how I respond would probably be a lot more like aikido (having left a strong imprint on me) than taijiquan.

With my new study with the taijiquan people, I have been scrupulous about doing things “their way.” I have not retained any martial arts practice I’ve learned from any other source, in an effort to allow taijiquan to leave an imprint on me.

In years to come, if I continue to apply myself, my response will gradually resemble aikido less and less; and taijiquan more and more. This is the outcome I am working towards.

Pollution, Safety, in China

Below is an excerpt from an article in the New York Times regarding the appalling working conditions that are present in China. If you click on the title of this post, you'll be directed to the full article.

National Geographic Magazine this month has an article about how recycling is largely off shored (big surprise there). This recycling generally goes on in third world countries using very primitive technology and is extremely dangerous to the workers, and ends up putting toxic materials into the environment. A link to the article is here.

In Chinese Factories, Lost Fingers and Low Pay

By DAVID BARBOZA

GUANGZHOU, China — Nearly a decade after some of the most powerful companies in the world — often under considerable criticism and consumer pressure — began an effort to eliminate sweatshop labor conditions in Asia, worker abuse is still commonplace in many of the Chinese factories that supply Western companies, according to labor rights groups.

The groups say some Chinese companies routinely shortchange their employees on wages, withhold health benefits and expose their workers to dangerous machinery and harmful chemicals, like lead, cadmium and mercury.

“If these things are so dangerous for the consumer, then how about the workers?” said Anita Chan, a labor rights advocate who teaches at the Australian National University. “We may be dealing with these things for a short time, but they deal with them every day.”

And so while American and European consumers worry about exposing their children to Chinese-made toys coated in lead, Chinese workers, often as young as 16, face far more serious hazards. Here in the Pearl River Delta region near Hong Kong, for example, factory workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year, according to a study published a few years ago by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

Pushing to keep big corporations honest, labor groups regularly smuggle photographs, videos, pay stubs, shipping records and other evidence out of factories that they say violate local law and international worker standards. In 2007, factories that supplied more than a dozen corporations, including Wal-Mart, Disney and Dell, were accused of unfair labor practices, including using child labor, forcing employees to work 16-hour days on fast-moving assembly lines, and paying workers less than minimum wage. (Minimum wage in this part of China is about 55 cents an hour.)

In recent weeks, a flood of reports detailing labor abuse have been released, at a time when China is still coping with last year’s wave of product safety recalls of goods made in China, and as it tries to change workplace rules with a new labor law that took effect on Jan. 1.

No company has come under as harsh a spotlight as Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest retailer, which sourced about $9 billion in goods from China in 2006, everything from hammers and toys to high-definition televisions.

In December, two nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, documented what they said were abuse and labor violations at 15 factories that produce or supply goods for Wal-Mart — including the use of child labor at Huanya Gifts, a factory here in Guangzhou that makes Christmas tree ornaments.

Wal-Mart officials say they are investigating the allegations, which were in a report issued three weeks ago by the National Labor Committee, a New York-based NGO.

Guangzhou labor bureau officials said they recently fined Huanya for wage violations, but also said they found no evidence of child labor.

A spokesman for Huanya, which employs 8,000 workers, denied that the company broke any labor laws.

But two workers interviewed outside Huanya’s huge complex in late December said that they were forced to work long hours to meet production quotas in harsh conditions.

“I work on the plastic molding machine from 6 in the morning to 6 at night,” said Xu Wenquan, a tiny, baby-faced 16-year-old whose hands were covered with blisters. Asked what had happened to his hands, he replied, the machines are “quite hot, so I’ve burned my hands.”

His brother, Xu Wenjie, 18, said the two young men left their small village in impoverished Guizhou Province four months ago and traveled more than 500 miles to find work at Huanya.

The brothers said they worked 12 hours a day, six days a week, for $120 to $200 a month, far less than they are required to be paid by law.

When government inspectors visit the factory, the young brothers are given the day off, they said.

My Tai Chi Blog

No, not *MY* Tai Chi Blog, another blog entitled "My Tai Chi Blog."

If you click on the title of this post, or on the link over on the right, you'll be directed there. "There" seems to be the UK (my favorite foreign country), and the owner seems to be another Wu style guy.

Please pay a visit.