Wounds and Hatred

A newspaper article (South China Morning Post, Hong Kong) sent by a friend piques my interest in Chinese spies and the traitor government during the Second Sino-Japanese War. More than 70 years after Japan marched into large swathes of China, hatred of the invading nation remains strong. Whether it is an attempt to heal old wounds or to establish new ground to sustain this hatred, historians and academics never fail to find ways to remember the horrible tragedy the scale of the Holocaust that took place in Nanjing. In 1937 the Japanese invaded China and set up puppet governments across the country. Many historians have blamed the actions of these spies, or hanjian, which literally translates to Han evil, helped justify torture, murder and oppression on a scale that changed the collective personality of the country, creating hatred and mistrust for Japan that persists today. One of the most well-known traitors is Wang Jingwei, as portrayed in Lust, Caution, who advocated peace negotiation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and set up the Nanjing “Nationalist Government” puppet state with the assistance of Japanese Army. It’s difficult to judge if someone was really a traitor–maybe ambition or sense of public service prompted him to step forward and assert leadership in troubled times.

I read an article that discussed why China loves to hate Japan during my stay in Hong Kong. The problem is that just as Japanese soldiers once dehumanized Chinese, Beijing’s propaganda often paints Japanese as pure monsters. And indeed this is still the case in mainland. You don’t have to look far to see why Chinese grow up learning to hate Japan..Grade school textbooks recount the callous brutality of Japanese soldiers in graphic detail, and credit the Communist Party with defeating Japan.Why keep up the propaganda onslaught 60 years after Japan’s surrender? Many suspect (my father included) China’s unelected leaders hope to use anti-Japan sentiment to buttress their own legitimacy. Ever since the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989, support for the Communist Party has rested on the shaky foundation of economic growth. Nationalism, by contrast, could prove more enduring. Until China’s leaders have some new pillar of legitimacy, I think the Japanese will remain the devils for China.

I’m looking forward to reading this book, the third non-fiction on the roll.

Pockets

Ever since my mother passed away in 2000, Mother’s Day has become an uneventful, remembrance sort of an occasion. I have completely alienated myself from dim sum restaurants and shopping malls and taken refuge in a sanctuary like Mount Davidson in San Francisco. My mother had wardrobe of the size of a model: blouses, pants, dresses, jackets, and coats. When I went through her clothes and wrapped them up to give away, I found humps protruding from pockets of her coats. Tugged away carefully, sometimes in small zip-up bag or origami-like wrappers, are relics that she has kept since before I was born. Jade pendants. Gold earrings. My teeth. Wedding bracelets with carvings of dragon and phoenix. Coins with square holes in the middle. Little bric-a-bracs. Movie tickets from the 60s. Various receipts and invoices. The artifacts that chronologically chart my mother’s life fill up two boxes of the size of laundry basket. I realize she has been a very private person who cherishes moments in life and seeks to capture the beauty of the moment of her life. She chooses to keep these intimate, personal relics in very intimate places, in the pockets of her clothes, and these objects are meant to be uncovered by us.

Untitled

A revelation.

You can fully claim possession of something only if you can endure the pain of losing it.

Six Random Things

Danielle tags me for this interesting meme, which will be be perfect for a ho-hum Saturday (ho-hum means I have nothing to share about my current reading, no book talk). I’m to share six random things about myself that I have never mentioned before.

1. I’m not good at crossword puzzles and Sodoku kind of stuffs. I always think especially for the mind-boggling crossword puzzles you’ll have to be astute like the contestants on Jeopardy. Neither am I a history buff nor a trivia master. So I can hardly get any clues out of a crossword puzzle. A group of regulars at my cafe would work on the New York Times crossword puzzle, which I heard progresses as the week moves on in its level of difficulty. I might hit a clue or two having to do with books and authors.

2. I have a knack for memorizing streets and directions, thanks to my photogenic memory. Usually it doesn’t take me more than a couple days to get my bearing of a new city. This is very handy for traveling independently. Of course I would consult the map ahead of time and get myself familiar with the place and its landmark sights. I’m a walking GPS!

3. I am a neat freak. Anything has to be in perfect array and tidiness. I’m sure my mother has passed on this trait to me and she put in that effort to discipline me when I was a little boy. How neat am I? All my books are shelved in alphabetical order by author’s last names. Recently I start the project to wrap my most favorite books with “Plastik” cover used by libraries. I have make sure the furniture tops are dust-free and I wipe the toilet bowl everyday! I organize my closet by the season and the roll of toilet paper has to be…(I might unnerve some of you if I keep on going)

4. Some of the first foreign artists that I listened to were Madonna and Pet Shop Boys. When the other school boys were busy following the Chinese soap opera and playing ping pong, I was blaring the radio and grooving along What Have I Done to Deserve This? (see the video below) and West End Girls. I wonder what my mother would have thought back then?

5. I think I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Remember Jack Nicholson in the movie As Good As It Gets? OCD is characterized by repetitive behaviors or mental acts that the person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession, or according to rules that must be applied rigidly. Obsessed tidiness, strict adherence to routine, aversion to any disruption to a routine… You get the idea!

6. I keep most of my books unless they are ones that I cannot get into. I have tried Bookcrossing but I lose track of most of the books. When I weed my book collection, I usually put the unwanted books in a box and bring it to the library. I estimate about 2500 books in my collection so it would be a pain (and a lot of money) if I’m really moving to Hong Kong.

Breach?

Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK), a government-owned broadcasting agency, aired an episode of Hong Kong Connection last summer that stirred up some nasty controversy last summer. The Broadcasting Authority, pressed by Christian groups, ruled that RTHK had breached the Generic Code governing their operations for not providing an opposite viewpoint when it aired Gay Lovers, the episode in which a lesbian couple and a gay man shared their life, discussed same-sex marriage and addressed the challenges they faced.

Yesterday the High Court overturned the Broadcasting Authority’s ruling that the program was deemed to have breached broadcasting guidelines for not including anti-gay views. The judicial review was sought by one of the documentary’s subjects, Joseph Cho, after the Broadcasting Authority announced its ruling that would in effect require RTHK and all other broadcasters to include the views of the anti-gay lobby in every future documentary program discussing LGBT issues. So it’s a victory on our part

We all know what the Christian churches’ stand on homosexuality. Do they really need to get their 15-minutes fame of a shout-out in a program that objectively examines a real social issue and real people who just deserve as much love and respect as anybody? These loud-mouthed homophobes are probably not even in for moral justification but rather fearing that the churches will lose membership and thus seeing a drop in contributions.

On Burma, Another Memoir

Chance encounter with a visiting professor from Cambridge changed the life of Pascal Khoo Thwe, a member of the remote Burmese tribe known for the giraffe-necked women. They struck up a scholarly correspondence that would take Pascal from the brutal hardships of guerrilla warfare to the hallowed world of Cambridge University. I just started the book which has a brief history of Burma–the rise of Burmese Socialist Programme Party and the Burma Nationalists, the latter being responsible for helping the Japanese Imperial Army invade Burma, hoping in reward for Burma’s independence.

In 1962 U Ne Win, claiming that the unity of the country was in danger, seized power in an almost bloodless coup. But he regarded himself as the Father of the Country, and made no distinction between his own and the national wealth. His regime was marked by hostility to educated people. When he set up the one-party system, he banned all other political parties, shut down independent newspapers, and outlawed all student organizations. All these helped army become the super-privileged body.

This is hardcore reading. It requires con-cen-tration! Not that I usually don’t concentrate when I’m reading…

Manual Labor

Writing guides, grammar books, punctuation how-tos . . . do you read them? Not read them? How many writing books, grammar books, dictionaries–if any–do you have in your library?

A great deal of my shelf space is devoted to these guides. I have my Webster Collegiate Dictionary, the pocket-size Webster New World Dictionary, the Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, a thesarus, and The Chicago Manual of Style which comes in rescue in so many occasions for writing term paper. I turn to my English/Thai dictionary for useful phrases and expressions before I travel to one of my favorite countries. I also accumulate two English/Japanese dictionaries being a sensei of nihongo for six years. Recently I acquired the illustrative, hardback edition of The Elements of Style to replace the yellowed, brittle paperback. Another one that often thumb into is A Concise English Grammar, gift of my then English teacher when I left Hong Kong for America.

[134] Gweilo: A Memoir of a Hong Kong Childhood - Martin Booth

“I thought about it. I had been happy in Hong Kong. It had been an exciting place in which I live and I was sure it had much to offer that I had yet to uncover. However, there was more to it than that. I felt I had grown up in Hong Kong. I could recall little of my life prior to the Corfu. It was as if my memory—my actual existence—had begun the minute my foot had touched the dock in Algiers.” (371)

For an eight-year-old who has to leave his home country for a far-flung unknown territory, Martin Booth fares really well, aside from the fear that his hair might be put into a braid upon arrival in Hong Kong in 1952. Homesickness doesn’t seem to have a clutch on the amicable boy, besides his grandparents with whom he maintains a scrupulous correspondence in letters, who scrapes pleasant acquaintance with locals everywhere he goes. The beauty of Gweilo: A Memoir of a Hong Kong Childhood is the recreation of a city that had long vanished through the curious eye of a boy, his inquisitive mind, his penchant for urban adventure and a desire to understand its people and culture. His blond hair is what makes him the Congeniality Boy—for the golden color bespeaks good fortune. Amazingly this physical attribute gives him a passport to many a nook and cranny of Chinese life. Locals lay their hands on the head of this walking talisman.

Besides the fact that Booth’s narrative, sometimes very novelistic for a memoir, is full of color and anecdote, wit and originality, this book strokes my heart-string because his first residence in Hong Kong, on Waterloo Road near Soares Avenue in Ho Man Tin, is right across the street from where I used to go to school. The disparate expatriates at Four Seas Hotel on 75 Waterloo Road find themselves living in proximity of locals. The alleys and streets on which Booth is centered are the very same that I have trundled for a decade en route to school. The food stalls, known as dai pai dongs as Booth fondly recalls his patronizing, are typical sights of Hong Kong back in the 50s and eventually disappeared in early 80s. They are shanties made of wood with corrugated tin roof. Served underneath these shanties are noodle soups, milk tea, and other local savories. A thin pall of smoke hangs over them. I’m amazed how well a little boy could fit in and assimilate to living in a neighborhood that is not traditionally an expatriate quarter. He is not even a bit dismayed at the staccato rattle of mahjong tiles at nights, the humming richshaw traffic, and the stench of pipes.

I won’t be guilty of hyperbole to say that young Booth has taken Hong Kong for what it is—the ubiquitous bamboo poles on which hung drippy laundries, the burning joss-sticks as thick as cigars with which ladies hedge their bets on good fortune by being on the good side of gods, the signs erupted in numerous shades of neon color in twilight, the live hens in bamboo cages that clank with aviary irritation, and the narrow cobbled streets infused with aroma of herbs in Western District—and has seen more of what Hong Kong has to offer than many of us natives. His escapades take us to secluded sites like the walled city ghetto, Islamic cemetery, and even the typhoon shelter where sampans with arched awnings under which live a whole family of fishing folk.

Gweilo, with all the vivid details and comic elements, reaches out to my heart. That the colony and its culture pique the little boy’s interest makes this book a very engrossing read. I’m not surprised that Martin Booth has become a native who roams around the city and befriends the locals after living there for only three years. His mother, who puts herself at equal level to the locals and her servants, without ever condescending, imparts a very positive lesson to him in commanding respect. Full of color and packed with incident, this book is evocative of the noise and bustle of Hong Kong half a century ago. Most of the landscapes that Booth depicts in the book still remain today so it will make a great travel companion.

Click here to see my latest pictures from Hong Kong.

Twenty-Five Books: A to Z

I snagged this meme from Iliana who got it from Danielle a while ago. Make an alphabetical list of some favorite books and authors. For some letters, I had a lot of authors to choose from and for others I had to really think about it. Many of the selections here are repeats of the Moleskine Top 10 on the left side of the blog page. Here it goes:

A: Atwood, Margaret - The Handmaid’s Tale
B: Bulgakov, Mikhail - The Master and Margarita
C: Cao, Xu Qin - The Dream of the Red Chambers
D: Dostoevsky, Fyodor - The Brothers Karamazov
E: Eco, Umberto - The Name of the Rose [It's about time to re-read this one!]
F: Forster, E. M. - Maurice
G: Garcia Marquez, Gabriel - Love in the Time of Cholera
H: Hartley, J. P. - The Go-Between
I: Ishiguro, Kazuo - The Unconsoled
J: James, Henry - The Wings of the Dove
K: Knowles, John - A Separate Peace
L: Lahiri, Jhumpa - The Namesake
M: Maugham, W. Somerset - The Painted Veil
N: Niffenegger, Audrey - The Time Traveler’s Wife
O: Orwell, George - Burmese Days
P: Padilla, Ignacio - Shadow Without A Name
Q: Quinn, Jay - Metes and Bounds
R: Russo, Richard - Straight Man
S: Sarton, May - The Small Room
T: Tolstoy, Leo - Anna Karenina
U: Urrea, Luis Alberto - The Hummingbird’s Daughter
V: Vidal, Gore - The City and the Pillar
W: Waltari, Mika - The Egyptian: A Novel
X: -
Y: Yoshino, Kenji - Covering: The Hidden Assault of Civil Rights
Z: Zafon, Carlos Ruiz - Shadow of the Wind

Hong Kong Once More: Peak Panorama

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One of the most spectacular walks on earth would be the trail that circumnavigates the Peak in Hong Kong. It’s a 3-mile roundabout walk that begins and ends at the foot of Mount Austin Road to the left to the Peak Tower when you get off the bus or taxi. It’s one of Hong Kong’s best-kept secrets. Tour groups usually would have skipped this scenic walk due to the press for time. I’m rather glad that they do or this quiet retreat from the observatory deck would have been disturbed. I set off clockwise this time, walking beneath overhanging trees alive with butterflies and the twittering birds that ate them, passing a waterfall and arriving at the place where soldiers used to lay down to shoot across a valley at the butts.

Holding more or less to the same contour, the trail continues around the mountain, sometimes as a viaduct, at others cut into the rock, and at one point struts out to midair on top of a supporting scaffold of metal beams. Bit by bit, an incredible vista unfolds, first the western harbor approaches with merchant vessels awaiting a docking berth or discharging cargo into junks. Then to the right, in another hundred or so yards, stand modern skyscrapers populating Central, the heart of Hong Kong’s financial and business district. Then the eastern districts come to view, the lower slopes of the hills dotted with houses and the red brick block of what used to be Bowen Road military hospital in the 1940s. Beyond across the harbor in Kowloon are the range of hills that resemble nine dragons. An hour later I arrives at the other end. I walks into a coffee shop strutting put on the Peak Tower to drown in the view over a cup of coffee. Below my feet lay Hong Kong and a slight grumbling noise of people working hard.