Warning: This blog post contains super minor spoilers from the movie Kekexili: Mountain Patrol. I don't talk about anything that happened outside the first few minutes but if you want to watch Kekexili: Mountain Patrol totally spoiler free be warned. I guess I should also put a trigger warning that I get into traditional Tibetan forms of corpus removal so if you aren't into that you might want to skip this post.
Today in my Chinese Film class we watched a movie called Kekexili: Mountain Patrol about the volunteer Tibetian Mountain Patrol who, in the 1990s, patrolled the Kekexili region of Tibet to protect the endangered Tibetan antelope from poachers. The move quite successfully captures the harshness of Tibet, giving it a feel somewhere between Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Alaska during the Gold Rush. To help illustrate this point, within the first 10 minutes of the movie we witness one of the Mountain Patrol member's, who was executed by the poachers, sky burial. Tibet has historically been a hard place to dispose of corpses; most of the land is too hard and too rocky to bury a body deep enough to get rid of it. Tibet, unlike many Buddhist regions, also lacks the large amount of trees necessary to cremate bodies before the invention of (and in Tibet's case access to) modern crematory machines. While the lamas (old Tibet's priest class) and other noted figures could be cremated, it was simply not possible to cremate all the dead people. Luckily for the Tibetans, Tibet is home to a large population of griffon vultures who are more than happy to eat anything dead. While Kekexili: Mountain Patrol doesn't show the full process, it shows enough for you to get the idea of what is going on. The naked dead body is brought out to a field by a Buddhist priest, sometimes the body is broken down into smaller pieces but often the body is just left whole. Attracted to the body, vultures swoop down and eat everything except the bones. The bones are then ground down, mixed with millet and yak milk, and fed to the birds who remain after the vultures are done eating. Interestingly enough, this process is not totally unique to Tibet. Zoroastrians (a small but ancient monotheistic religious group) in modern Iran and India previously Towers of Silence to dispose of their dead. Bodies would be left in the Tower for vultures to eat. Like many Tibetans, the Zoroastrians have been having issues disposing their dead using vultures. While in Tibet modern crematories have made cremation cheaper than sky burials, Zoroastrians of Iran face various government regulations and community pressures that drove the practice into disuse. The Zoroastrians of India still sometimes use Towers of Silence to dispose of their dead but, like the Tibetans, are having issues attracting enough vultures to fully dispose of corpses since the vulture population in both places has been declining. Who knows how much longer the rite of sky burial will last for?
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A few weeks ago in my Chinese Cinema class we watched a movie called Farewell my Concubine (霸王别姬) about the world surrounding traditional Peking Opera from the waning days of the Great Qing Dynasty to Reform and Reopening under Deng Xiaoping. While Farewell my Concubine touched on several interesting topics from the Cultural Revolution to gender roles to raising orphans to the relationship of childhood friends in adulthood, the topic that most peaked my curiosity was Peking Opera itself since I actually knew very little about it. Thankfully, my Chinese midterm gave me a great opportunity to do some research, since it is a presentation on Peking Opera and its many meny complexities (可是,我只好用中文为我的汉语口语中考试). Unsurprisingly, Peking Opera has an extremely long history with some of the traditional plays coming from ancient Chinese stories, though what we would now call Peking Opera really developed in the late 1700s. Peking Opera remained relatively popular until the Cultural Revolution, since the Red Guards saw it as old therefor something that should be destroyed. Interestingly enough, Farewell my Concubine actually depicts Red Guards humiliating members of the Opera troupe, a sight still extremely rare in Chinese cinema. While Peking Opera did live on in the Nationalist controlled Taiwan long enough for the mainland to drop the madness of the Cultural Revolution it never regained the popularity it once had. Since most of the operas themselves are quite old, they use archaic language that most modern Chinese can't really understand, even the Chinese in China have to have Chinese subtitles to understand the Chinese. There have been attempts to rejuvenate Peking Opera for the modern age by introducing new shows; apparently you can watch Peking Opera interpretations of Mao's war against the Japanese and Shakespeare. Still the traditional divisions of martial & civil operas, serious 大戏 & fun 小戏, and the four traditional forms of performers (生旦净丑) remain even while the actual costumes, production management, and training have been changed and adapted for the modern world. Chinese films, particularly by the 5th Generation of Chinese Directors like Farewell my Concubine, have come to embrace Peking Opera as a way to help tell their story. Peking Opera has also been embraced by the growing tourist trade, both domestic and international. If you are in the capital of Beijing, why not see the capital style of opera (the 京 in 京剧 literally means capital while the 剧 is some type of theater)? I have read some complaints though that much of this new Peking Opera is a bit gimicky since most people in the audience of a Peking Opera don't actually know what Peking Opera should be like. Still, it is nice that Beijing Opera is kind of hanging on.
Last Friday my Chinese film class watched Beijing Bicycle (十七岁的单车), a film in part about the struggles of a bike courier trying to make a living in Beijing. While the movie isn't really about planning the optimal path for making deliveries it does highlight the ubiquitous nature of couriers in China. In the US, if I want to send a letter I will probably send it through the US Postal Service. The Postal Service actually has a monopoly on most first class mail (letters and the like), unless you need to get a letter somewhere extremely quickly or with extra preconditions you will probably just use USPS. I am not sure if China Post has a similar legal monopoly to USPS, but what I do know is courier services are far more common in China than in the US. While most courier companies ship large packages and envelopes like FedEx and UPS do, they also ship letters for very affordably prices. Chinese couriers will even ship small letters in relatively small cities. My friend's husband works for a courier company in a small Hunanese town. American cities and towns of equivalent size probably don't have companies willing to sent your letter form one side to another within the day. Last semester in my Chinese Economic Impact class, we discussed how easy it is for online marketplace companies, like Alibaba or Amazon, to ship stuff since they can just assume that every city has in place already a large courier system. Since dealing with couriers is something you probably have done if you spent a good deal of time in China my Chinese class had a whole unit on mail.
I am a man who likes a good stew, a dish that is somewhat hard to get in China. Forentually last weekend, a friend of mine felt like bangers and mash so we went off to find Irish/British food. We found an Irish-American style pub and dug in. According to my Irish friend, real Irish pubs don't feel the need to hang Irish flags, buy signs that say something like "☘ It's Guinness Time ☘", and serve Irish Car Bombs. Still, my Steak and Guinness Stew was nice and my Flying Fish IPA (Chinese flying fish not American flying fish) was cold so all was well
Today a friend of mine invited me to take an extra ticket to Beauty and the Beast his teacher bought for one of her former students who couldn't come. Having heard nice things about the movie from some of my Disneyphile friends, I decided to accept and check it out. Interestingly enough, most English language movies to be shown in China are shown with subtitles, not dubbing. This makes it easy for an American like my self to find something to watch. I couldn't see dubbing working for a musical like Beauty and the Beast since you would have to write Chinese lyrics for all the songs that made sense, fit with the music, and worked with the plot. If you don't like princess movies. you won't like Beauty and the Beast. While it does some things differently and is a bit darker than the animated Disney Princess films it is still unabashedly a princess movie. Beauty and the Beast is most similar to Into the Woods, down to the overall tone and mix of CGI and live action actors. I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast more than Into the Woods though, the plot is more interesting and the songs are better. My biggest issue with Beauty and the Beast is the rather slow beginning. The movie really picks up after Be Our Guest but that happens just after Beauty and the Beast's speed started to annoy me. It is also best if you treat Beauty and the Beast more like an animated film than a live action one. The often overly idealized provincial country village, the outrageously aggressive wolves, and the occasional painfully contrived excuse to continue the plot bothered me a bit when I still though of Beauty and the Beast as a totally live action film. It got into it by the end when I started treating Beauty and the Beast like a Disney Princess movie that just happened to use live actors instead of animation. Overall I enjoyed Beauty and the Beast far more than I thought so I guess I can recommend it.
So the SpeechOcean guys form my last two voice acting jobs have been expanding what kinds of things they want their personal assistant type of entity to do. I thought it was going to be a Siri-esk voice controlled only sort of program but as I found out they also want it to read human handwriting. So last Monday, a friend of mine and I went over to their offices to do the other random tasks they want done. I was handed what looked like a large iPad and a stylus and was told to write down whatever the computer told me to. For example, the computer would display “A” and I would have to write “A” five times. This got a bit confusing when you had to write numbers; for example I accidently wrote “6” six times instead of five which apparently the computer wasn’t happy with. Another task was it would display a section of writing taken form a famous piece of English literature, like a random section of Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carrol, and was told to write that down. It is somewhat shocking how bad my handwriting looks when using the stylus thing. I think because there is less friction between the glass screen and the stylus as compared to a pen and paper it was very hard to actually write neatly, or what I describe as neatly. Furthermore, since there was so much to write I didn’t want to spend a significant period of time neatly writing each individual letter. I think they are teaching their computer program slightly wrong though, they wanted very specific characters sometimes. So for instance, in normal written English a dollar sign can be written with ether one or two lines going through the middle. They didn’t like the two line version I do so I had to rewrite it at the end. Since this is a common variation, it seems like anyone who writes a dollar sign with two middle liens will have quite a problem when trying to use their handwriting recognition tool. Normally here I would make a joke about the impending robot takeover but it feels like if the samples they are taking will be used for anything nefarious it will be Chinese government hacking, as one of my fellow handwriting samples joked. Some of the random strings of numbers we had to write seemed like they were trying to find someone whose handwriting was close enough to Secretary of Defense James Mattis’s so the Chinese Ministry of State Security can take control of the United States’ nuclear arsenal before the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service can get to it. Still, 200RMB is 200RMB even if I will eventually have to explain to the CIA why my handwriting was involved in a Chinese hacking scandal.
Yesterday, I was trying to sign up for ECNU’s field trip to ether Xiamen or Guilin. Before you signed up you needed to fill out a form detailing who you are and your project proposal for the field trip to a city you might never have been before. Now we weren’t told much about this project, other than the basic requirements and the rumor that it is a way to prevent the frequent drinking that was common on last semester fieldtrip to Beijing. You also needed the full fieldtrip fee in cash (a topic I have went into several times before) and a copy of your passport. For some reason, they implemented a rule that only 40 people can go on each trip given out on a first come first serve basis, the quality of your project proposal didn’t seem to have any bearing on this. I got in line at about 12:30 and I was about the 60th person in line. It took me until about 3:00 before I got to give my paperwork to the one person checking in forms. She asked me a few questions about my project before giving me a receipt, another form to fill out, and sent me on my way. I got lucky, I heard at least four students spent more time in line than me and didn’t get a trip since both trips were filled by the time they go to the front. This second form asked for much of the same information as the first form, except the second form asked if you were vegetarian or Muslim so you could get special meals. Thankfully this form was all online so I didn’t have to get back into line to turn it in. Now, you might be wondering why we couldn’t skip all this bureaucratic mess and just have everyone who wanted to go on a trip fill out one online form that included the project proposal and let people come anytime within the next week to answer questions about their proposal and pay the fee. Even if you wanted to enforce the hard 40/40 split of students you still could since you could have your form software can likely keep track of the order people signed up in. That is a very good question, what is more perplexing is that this system was what they did last semester and it worked great. I guess it is another attempt to discourage drunkenness since anyone who wants to just drink that badly would skip the line and just drink in Shanghai. Still, even heavy drinkers might want a change of scenery for their drinking and waiting in line drunk might have made it more bearable. It is all alright though in the end. Some of my friends, classmates, and I got a trip to the city of Xiamen. Stay tuned for that when it comes.
There is one guy in the building across from mine who has taken to learning how to play the trumpet. Sometimes when I leave my windows open I can hear him practicing. It seems like he only plays American music. One time last semester I walked into my room to the rousing sounds of Dixie which was a somewhat strange experience. A few days ago he was playing My Way and I am please to say he has gotten better since he started. I guess rock on trumpet man!
Note: I really don't have much rhyme nor reason for sharing this, I just though it was kind of fun. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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