I flew into Shanghai yesterday, and met with a flight delay once again. It gets pretty frustrating sometimes. This one was especially bad because it was already scheduled as a midnight flight, and we ended up not leaving Singapore until 3:30 am. Makes for a haywire system when you have that kind of night.

What was really weird, though, was the phone call I got from the travel agent through whom I’d booked the flight. When I had arrived at Changi Airport in Singapore, I hadn’t heard that the flight was delayed, so sat for several hours waiting for the new departure time. But then, at 3:30 pm, when I’d already been in Shanghai half a day, I got this call. “Hello, I’m calling from Misa Travel. We’d like to inform you that your flight to Shanghai on Feb 2, that’s today, is delayed until 3:30 am.”

“Yeah, and it’s now 3:30 pm. I’m already in Shanghai.”

“Yes, so it’s not at midnight, but at 3:30.”

“You mean it wasn’t at midnight. The flight is already over.”

“OK, so I’ll send you the revised itinerary by email.”

“Why?”

“To inform you that there’s been a change.”

“You don’t need to inform me now. Do you understand what I am telling you? The flight has already happened. I am already in Shanghai. It left Singapore 12 hours ago.”

“Yes, I understand. I’ll send the email to inform you.”

“You don’t need to inform me of what’s already happened. I was there.”

I went on then to tell her that she’d called my Singapore number, and I was being charged international roaming fees for a call that was unnecessary.

“International roaming fees?”

“Yes, because I’m already in Shanghai.”

She started laughing.

I didn’t.

I am often approached with this question: “I’ll be in [fill in the city] for two days. What should I see while I am there?”

In response, I feature 2-day itineraries to a variety of Chinese cities here at Tai Shan. At the end of each month, a new post introduces the main sites to visit in a city if you only have two days there.

Today we’ll see how to hit the highlights in Kunming in a 2-day timeframe. Kunming is one of my favorite cities in China.

Day 1

Kunming Municipal Pump House, Yuantong Temple, Tanhua Temple, Daguan Pavilion

Night:  try the roadside BBQ stalls

Day 2

Kunming Zoology Museum, Yunnan Military Academy, Yunnan Railway Museum, Kunming Bird and Flower Market

Alternate activity: Stone Forest (worth the time if you can arrange a day trip), Kunming Nationalities Village, Green Lake Park

If you have a 3rd day:   definitely see the Stone Forest

For kids:  The Yunnan Railway Museum, Kunming Zoo, Green Lake Park,

I’ll be heading back up to Shanghai next week. This spring should be an exciting one as Penguin launches Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls, which I spent a good portion of last year translating.

I hope to be able to update you soon about events I will be at in conjunction with the promotion of the book. If we’re in your area, I hope you’ll be able to stop by and join us!

Happy New Year!

We are at the beginning of the Year of the Dragon, which is considered an especially auspicious year in the Chinese calendar.   Children born in the Year of the Dragon are thought to have very bright futures.  Typical characteristics include:  magnanimous, stately, vigorous, strong, self-assured, proud, noble, direct, dignified, eccentric, intellectual, fiery, passionate, decisive, pioneering, artistic, generous, loyal. On the down side: can be tactless, arrogant, imperious, tyrannical, demanding, intolerant, dogmatic, violent, impetuous, brash.

The order of the zodiac is as follows:

Rat – Ox – Tiger – Rabbit – Dragon – Snake – Horse – Sheep – Monkey - Rooster  - Dog – Boar

I hope the Year of the Dragon is good to you.

新年快乐！ 万事如意！

The Year of the Rabbit is on its way out this week.

It’s been a good year for me, and I hope for Tai Shan readers as well.

During a recent outing a couple of weeks ago, my friend’s daughter was pointing out abandoned rabbits  that people bought during the last New Year holiday.  Having gotten tired of the rabbits before the year was out, many families released them in public parks and similar places.  She said she was a little concerned about what would happen with the upcoming New Year, since it’s the Year of the Dragon.  If the same trend continues, we might have to avoid public parks next year.

[Note: The rabbits pictured here weren't abandoned.  They are a regular feature at the Museum of Gender and Sexuality in Ancient China, which is rather awkwardly worded in its official English name: The Chinese Museum of Ancient Sex Culture.  (The name is naturally shortened to "the sex museum" in conversation.)  I think that's a pretty apt home for them, particularly since it's situated in the most heavily populated nation in the world.  The museum is located in Tongli.]

I first came across Todd Williamson’s work when it was featured at an exhibition in Shanghai several years ago.  I was very impressed by the work.  I see that he has an exhibition coming up in LA, and thought it might be of interest to others who might have come across him in China in the past (as well as those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of seeing his work).

follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend | http://toddwilliamson.com

This is the first “Crosstalk” post to appear at Tai Shan.  The aim of these posts, as described last month, is to show some connections or parallels between English/American literature and Chinese culture (mostly pop culture).  The notes are compiled by Lily Sun, who has for many years been using this sort of activity to help her undergraduate and postgraduate students get a grasp of English/American literature.  I appreciate her allowing me to post these thoughts at Tai Shan.  We hope to see a similar entry each month, with each post focusing on a different text.

The full text of “Rip Van Winkle” is available online for free.  A brief overview of Lily’s thoughts on the text and its connections to Chinese (pop) culture  follow:

Rip Van Winkle (Rip: rest in peace)

* Motif: memory & the loss of memory
Memory is precious because it is where our experience of life is stored.  It is the evidence that life is lived.  The loss of it is the loss of part of our life.  By forgetting / choosing to forget, we’ve chosen to remember, and vice versa.  Either way, the scar is there, always.  ”Rest in peace” is a dream that never comes true until, hopefully, the day of death.  Identity is a mere illusion.  We are floating, on a path of constant (de)construction.

Themes:

- a man who has difficulties facing his advancing age (misfit); the loss of identity

- escape from one’s responsibility / worldly confinement

- conflicts between the new and the traditional (adjustment of the past and the future)

- conflicts in marriage / power struggles among human beings

Chinese Movies that parallel or intersect with “Rip Van Winkle” (with links to where they can be found online):

河东狮吼（The Lion Roars, 2002）– The heroine, dismayed and disappointed with her husband’s disloyalty, drinks a kind of magical fluid, trying to forget the past.

我是谁？(Who Am I?, 1998) starring: Jackie Chan — A story of a man accidentally losing his memory and trying to retrieve / rebuild it.

Chinese pop song:
刘德华 (Andy Lao)’s: 忘情水 (Forgiven Love) – a song about memories, and about forgetting

Hen-pecked husbands are also a standard stereotype in Chinese pop culture, such as in Liu Liu’s novel (and the television series based on it) 《蜗居》 (Romance of a House).

As a sort of “bonus material,” Lily has also included several movies from outside of China that are worth a look.

Korean Movie:
我脑中的橡皮擦（A Moment to Remember, 2004)

American Movies:
谍影重重 (The Bourne Identity, 2002)

记忆碎片 (Memento, 2000)

穆赫兰道（Mulholland Drive, 2001）

The Shanghaiist posted some amazing photos this past weekend.

Take a look at these two especially:

The Great Wall

Yangshuo

Perfect images to remind one of how vast and how beautiful a land China is.  Amazing stuff.

I love the images shown here.

And I’ll leave it at that.

Liu Liu’s Shanghai-based story 《蜗居》(wo ju, or “Romance of a House”) has proven to be quite popular with Chinese audiences, mostly in the form of the television series based on Liu’s novel.  There’s a nice series of thoughts about the TV series in this blog post (but be aware that there are spoilers toward the end of the entry).

The novel touches on a number of important issues in contemporary China.  The look at family dynamics is especially interesting, including the way parent-child relationships function across three generations.  And no look at family dynamics in China would be complete without a good examination of husbands, wives, lovers, and mistresses.

Underlying all of the relationship issues is the social situation surrounding the ownership of property and the social problems caused by the skyrocketing cost of housing in China, especially big cities like Shanghai (where the story is set) and Beijing. The entanglements that swirl around questions of love, money, and power are at the center of Wo Ju.

The novel follows the lives of two sisters, Hai Ping and Hai Zao, who have moved to Shanghai when they were studying and are now working in the city.  As the tale opens, Hai Zao and her husband send their newborn son to live with her parents back in her hometown, far away from Shanghai.  Not satisfied with seeing her son only once or twice a year, Hai Ping develops an obsession with buying a house.  This obsession leads to all of the entanglements that follow, not only creating problems for Hai Ping and her husband, but also dragging Hai Zao and her boyfriend into the drama.

One easy answer for a girl facing money problems, of course (!), is to find a rich sugar daddy.  That’s where Song Siming comes in.  Hai Zao figures out that the best way for her to help Hai Ping is to hook up with the wealthy, powerful Song.  The close-up look at the mindsets that underlie the trend of powerful Chinese men keeping young mistresses is put on display in Wo Ju, and those mentalities (of everyone affected by these relationships) are a big part of what makes reading the book interesting.  The (relatively) casual acceptance of such infidelities might feel foreign to many non-Chinese readers.  Reading Wo Ju offers some insight into why such arrangements are so common. To my knowledge, there’s no English version available, but it should be easy to get your hands on the DVDs of the series… hopefully with English subtitles.