It’s 春節! Time to eat Jiaozi and other yummy street food (mmm… luobogao!) and sit on a train for 24 hours.
Category Archives: hong kong 香港
Reading: Seung-Joon Lee — Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice Consumption in Modern Canton
The last of my first stack of books for 2012, and one that has been on my list for a long time, which finally became affordable, Seung-Joon Lee’s Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice Consumption in Modern Canton. Once again a book thick with endnotes, and covering such a specific topic — rice and its role in southern China during the Nationalist and revolutionary era — that it likely won’t grace many bookshelves.
In a quite sporadic and unplanned fashion, I’m managing to read my way into Canton and the south of China, which I hope eventually will cause me to arrive at a book or books that does justice to the history and culture of Canton and Lingnan. Starting with rice seemed like a good idea.
Seung-Joon Lee — Gourmets in the Land of FamineReading: Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845
Continuing my return to reading China, as with my focus on women in the history of China, so too is there a strand which pays attention to the south, Lingnan, Guangdong, Canton.
So much of what is written on China is in fact only a small part thereof — Beijing as China, Shanghai as China, the eastern core. Other parts of the country are so distant as to be other countries, and despite the ongoing Han homogenisation programme, these other parts still retain their individual histories.
Paul A. Van Dyke’s The Canton Trade seemed like a good place to continue, after reading Julia Lovell’s The Opium War a few months ago, and now, more than half way through reading, I can say he hasn’t skimped on thoroughness.
Paul A. Van Dyke — The Canton TradeReading: Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the World
I once stayed a night in Chungking Mansions, when a flight from Canada arrived too late to catch even the cross-border bus to Guangzhou. I was given the address by a woman at the information booth just past the exit gates from customs, and probably told to make certain not to get off the city bus one stop too early. Someone was waiting for me, amidst the hysterical confusion of touts, and led me into the depths, up an elevator and to a small guesthouse, run by an older Pakistani man. My room even had a window, from which I could see the street below, washed in rain, with a throng of bodies like no other.
Another time, after a climbing trip on Hong Kong island, I went with a group for dinner in a Pakistani restaurant. Once more up elevators and along corridors. As we departed, I glimpsed through another door momentarily opened and saw groups of serious islamic men eating their own dinners around wooden tables.
I stayed there because of course living in Guangzhou and having a fascination with the Pearl River region how could I not hear of this place with the dangerous reputation — especially given my taste for Wong Kar-wai’s films. Were I to get stuck again in Hong Kong now, I’d likely stay there again, given at least it’s a name I know.
There is a compulsion in accounts of globalisation and the developing world to make the story about us, we who live in the global north, who either speak english, are of european descent, or both. That there could be a parallel yet predominantly disconnected globalisation, a flow of trade, people, ideas and culture is often seen as irrelevant or incomprehensible to the central narrative, if even addressed.
Gordon Mathew’s anthropology of this building, Ghetto at the Center of the World — Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong appealed to me for more than just what goes on in the confines of its seventeen stories and five separate blocks. As he points out in the introduction, the history and culture of the building is also one of low-end globalisation. This is not a narrative of the developed world’s arrangement with China in providing cheap, off-shore manufacturing, but rather that of a globalisation in which Europe and America are at best ancillary nodes on multiply-layered and discrete trade routes that span from Africa to South-East Asia by way of Dubai, India, and Guangzhou, and more often simply don’t occur at all in the narrative.
I’ve already spent much of the morning perched on the windowsill in the sun, having knocked off half the book in a sitting, which should give an idea of how fascinating I find the topic and book.
Gordon Mathews — Ghetto at the Center of the WorldReading … a 4th anniversary
Another year of books. Not as many as last year; I took a pause for some time, unable to find a rhythm with all that I had to read, and at other times I was too impoverished to acquire even the most insignificant on my want-list.
There are familiar names again — thinking here of science-fiction, ones I know I will buy whenever a new something arrives from them, whose publication dates I note down and await with increasing excitement. New names also, whose discovery has caused much pleasure.
Changes also. When I first began this documenting of whatever I’d opened to the first page, I explicitly chose not to say anything, not to review or write any words — except in very rare cases when moved to do so. I didn’t and don’t want to be in the thrall of feeling obliged to write a review or criticism. What did change though, was to write some paragraphs about how a particular book came to be discovered or acquired; why I was reading, or about to read it.
For me, this seems to give a slight sense of completeness that just posting the title and author, along with the cover didn’t quite manage. Especially also as there have been some books this year which I’ve felt very happy to have begun.
As with last year, I’ll start with the disappointments. Last year it was William Gibson; this year, Neal Stephenson. Reamde could have been exquisite, if it had been anything comparable to the Baroque Trilogy. Instead it was tired, riddled with clichés, endless hyperventilating over gun-tech and battles … It’s the kind of book that would appeal to a specific North American white hetero male type, who is still angry at the (perceived or real) slaps in the face from Islamic terrorists, Russian Mafia, United States government, Chinese in general … In the same way the content and premise of the book read as though it should have been published six years ago, this type fails to realise the rest of the world doesn’t really care about him or find much interesting in his self-absorbed world-view. A pity, because Stephenson’s writing can be beautiful, yet there was scant substance here; nothing that inspired me to turn over new thoughts.
Last year said much the same about William Gibson, with the caveat that I would nonetheless likely read him again. This year, when there are so many truly brilliant science-fiction writers I have yet to read, I don’t see the point, especially for some long-past fondness. To be plain, I’m not wasting my time on white, North American hetero male writers whose vision has become increasingly small, when there’s the whole rest of the world.
Contra that, Charles Stross’ Rule 34, which covered similar territory to Reamde, is close to being re-read. The difference perhaps is that Stross, along with China Miéville, and unlike Gibson or Stephenson understands the point of shifting the attention and point-of-view away from the above-mentioned, and when he does so, it reads believably.
Along with Rule 34, Miéville’s Un Lun Dun and Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier both remain in my mind. All three have females in the leading roles, or are written from their perspective, and all of them have this believability that is necessary for me to say, “Oh, you should read that”. Miéville also published Embassytown, which also has remained swirling in my head; thoughts of language and meaning; science-fiction as written by Derrida.
A critical thing for me in books — fiction and non-fiction — that transcend being just a good read, is that I can see the world imagined or written about through the words. It is visible in my mind’s eye as clearly as any other imagination. Without this, it’s rare that I can finish a book. Perhaps it is something of a representation of the writer’s empathy for their subjects; for the people who populate and live their written words.
I’ve been fortunate to have read several science-fiction works this year that have had something of this; Hannu Rajaniemi’s The Quantum Thief, Reza Negarestani’s Cryptonomicon, and (still reading) Chingiz Aitmatov’s poignant The Day Lasts More Than One Hundred Years, as well as the others I’ve mentioned. What separates the books of the year from these — all of which I’ll probably re-read at some time — is a specific imagination they instil.
I remember these as I do a colour or feeling or texture. The thoughts and ideas they generate seem to recur over time, as a spring or well. China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun and Joan Slonczewski’s The Highest Frontier both have these things in abundance. I can’t really separate them even though they are completely different works, one set a hundred years from now on a space-hab at the end of an anthrax tether hooked to Ohio, the other a parallel world of objects beside/between/against London; one speculative sci-fi written by a professor of biology and Quaker, the other speculative horror written by a Phd in Marxism and international law.
What is perhaps curious, Miéville’s is probably aimed at readers around 12 years old, and Slonczewski’s late-teens to early-twenties. Perhaps to say, given the minds behind both it’s no surprise they are deceptively subtle and thoughtful. And they are both superb.
Away from science-fiction.
As usual, my non-fiction reading has been China, Central Asia, Afghanistan, with some theatre and ‘other’ thrown in.
The biggest disappointment, given it was based on the monumental research of Joseph Needham and his Science and Civilisation in China, was Robert Temple’s The Genius of China: 3,000 Years of Science, Discovery, and Invention. Without wishing to say too much, the sycophancy in this book (notably towards the Chinese Government) makes for difficult and biased reading, and while China does have a long history of invention, the scope covered by this book is only possible and true if the border of China was to extend to the farthest cumulative reach of all dynasties across the entire 3,000 year duration.
Thankfully, I have read some very strong scholarship on China in the last year: Vera Schwarcz’ The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement of 1919, Frank Dikötter’s Mao’s Great Famine, Julia Lovell’s The Opium War. Richard Wolin’s The Wind From The East stands out for the analysis of Maoism and the Cultural Revolution and their influence on the ’68 movement. It’s a compelling and conflicting read, for the disgraceful romance of some European philosophers with Mao who should and did know what was really going on in China under the communists, and for the unequivocally positive influence the idea of a ‘cultural revolution’ transposed to Europe had post-’68.
A book I started before last year’s anniversary, Nazif Shahrani The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan, is another superb work, and has really been responsible for pushing my interest into a very specific region where Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Tibet, and Tajikstan all meet. A conflicted area certainly; one also replete with mountains, and for a long time the passes of which formed nodes of long-lived trade routes. I expect to be reading a lot more on this region in the coming years.
Liao Yiwu’s God is Red – The secret story of how Christianity survived and flourished in Communist China, despite the religious focus of which I have a visceral aversion to, is as profound as The Corpse-Walker, and there is little I can say other than he is the most important writer I know of in China. Or rather, now in exile in Berlin. Had I been making a book of the year when I read The Corpse Walker, I’m fairly sure it would have been that. As it is, God is Red is very near.
Returning to Afghanistan, I’ve just finished Rodric Braithwaite’s Afghansty: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89. Perhaps the timing of its release, when the United States and allies have reached their own ten-year anniversary of war in Afghanistan is not coincidental. I wonder if it will be in twenty years from now a similar work will be written on this war, with a similar epilogue. The feeling for me throughout, deeply unsettling at the parallels, one which I suspect was intentional on the part of Braithwaite. is there is little doubt the shape of the coming years for Afghanistan will be found as a repeat of the years after the Russians had left.
And so, how do I choose? Different works, different fields of study; no work alone or springing fully-formed from nothing. Paul Hockenos’s Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin should also be mentioned, as with others … is this book of the year making a competition out of my wandering reading? Maybe to say that what this is, is an attempt at a description of the works that have lingered in my thoughts. To that then, Nazif Shahrani’s The Kirghiz and Wakhi of Afghanistan is a fitting examples.
china miéville – un lun dun
richard wolin – the wind from the east
frank dikötter – mao’s great famine
hannu rajaniemi — the quantum thief
paul hockenos – joschka fischer
vera schwarcz – the chinese enlightenment
china miéville – embassytown
charles stross – rule 34
julia lovell – the opium war
chingiz aitmatov – the day lasts more than a hundred years
liao yiwu – god is red
rodric braithwaite – afghansty
nazif shahrani – the kirghiz and wakhi of afghanistan
Joan Slonczewski — The Highest FrontierReading: Julia Lovell – The Opium War
Canton. The idea is romantic, and unavoidably one of Orientalism. Still, I lived there on and off for a few years, known now as Guangzhou. Whatever centre of the world Canton once inhabited, it has long been overshadowed in China by Beijing and Shanghai to the north, and that city of internationalism and projected fantasies to the south, Hong Kong. It is a city with a history though, and a very long one. I feel an affection to that place I called home, and hoard what I might find on its history, as however much it might be inside China, it has always been the outward-looking southern barbarian.
The Opium War. Drugs, piracy, smuggling, empires and colonialism in Canton from the 17th Century till the communist dictatorship. That’s enough, no?
Places
Because I seem to spend so much time in Brussels, and also have lived in several cities which until now have only been tags …
Berlin, Brussels, Zürich, Vienna, Guangzhou, Taipei, Adelaide, Melbourne. Countries also. How does living in Switzerland or Germany differ from the city within which I reside? Or rather, how does it differ here, where I write?
Because there’s no way to make things neat, to allocate everything according to its place; categories, tags, uses, definitions change over time and even from post to post, I decided to stick with the cities I lived in as sub-categories for the Places category. Countries, other cities I have spent time in or have a connection to have remained free-floating.
Another way to regard the issue: these cities should have been categories all along, and by making them so now, I’m merely anticipating the addition of new cities (or places) in which I shall reside.
Anyway, more importantly, it makes it easy to see where I (will) (might) (have) be(en). There, in the sidebar.
reading: vera schwarcz – the chinese enlightenment: intellectuals and the legacy of the may fourth movement of 1919
新年快乐！！！
家家兔年好！