Something old, something new 2

In the first few frames rolling hills roll, undulating waves undulate, mournful music mourns, impressing on us an impression of pastoral China-ness. Now we see a village sign. Now we are in the village. Now we see and hear a band, men and women in white uniforms, playing and working their way past paddy fields, up steps, to a house. Now we are in the house and near a transparent box, nearer – face to face with the star of the show, my uncle, 80, mouth agape, as if he is amazed to be in the air-conditioned comfort of his coffin on a summer’s day.

It came in the mail the other day, his funeral, an all-out seven-day send-off deep in the Chinese countryside, on DVD. We didn’t know what to think. Ma, who I think loves her older brother more than she likes him, had visited him on his sickbed in the village last month but didn’t want to watch his funeral, not all on her own. Fei and I wanted to watch Bourne, Jason Bourne, not two discs by a village Zhang Yimou. Well, we watched the funeral and I came to admire Mr Auteur’s long continuous takes, which set us shoulder to shoulder with all the action. With my cousins, who are crying as they circle the coffin in multicoloured clothes (don’t they have to be in solemn colours, eh?); as their sire is covered with cloth to be spared the indignity of having his decay on display; as they are handed, while pillars built of brown cakes loom on the altar in the background, the mourning – white linen gowns that are Ming-dynasty fabulous (ah).

My uncle’s one and only son died young. Having lived with the Cultural Revolution and learned nothing from it, he believed sons to be more equal than daughters, the daughter whose other half renounced his family name to bear my uncle’s to be more equal than the other daughters and the grandsons bearing the family name to be more equal than the other grandsons. So we watch as the renouncer is anointed as the chief mourner and handed a short staff…

But now the soundtrack has become a swelling song. I have never heard it before but let me bet you 10 yuan the title is The Good People of the Plum River or something. Mr Auteur pans to the yard and I see it isn’t the radio. It is someone in the multitalented band singing with keyboard accompaniment. I have never seen a busier funeral band, actually. Now they are ambling halfway across the village, drums a-banging and trumpets a-blasting, to grandly receive guests. Now they are ambling out again to grandly take delivery of garlands. Night falls and they are not only singing but also dancing in all their getai glory. Four women are swirling around in Chinese costumes, then twirling sleeves that have been tacked on their band uniforms, then swirling around in slips – to the Alishan song by Teresa Teng, she who still reigns supreme in Chinese hearts. Seeing the show are chattering children, nattering women and twinkling men, one of whom has just fingered his armpit. “You saw what that man said?” Ma says. “What did he say?” “He is laughing at that dancer’s hairy armpits.” Mr Auteur pans back to Mr Armpit and I see it now. “But he has hairy armpits himself!”

All the village are here, bushy armpits and all. Hell, it is the funeral of the year. They will be here too for the finale. They are the finale - an all-encompassing procession at dawn that encompasses dozens of children, two by two, shouldering banners on bamboo poles, the band and everyone else. At the end of the procession - after my uncle is carted to a crematorium rather than a cemetery, one of the few times the funeral breaks with tradition to not break the new laws - the closing credits come on. Somebody has brushed on New-Year-red paper all the contributors to the funeral fund and as the camera pans down and up we see, satisfyingly, each and every name and number - a round of applause, please, for the village Zhang Yimou.

Something old, something new

In 笑傲江湖 (sorry, there is too much meaning in the title for me to translate it), Linghu Chong, swordsman in a secret operation, takes a wine test at the Plum Villa by the West Lake. To advance to the next challenge and the next (it is a long compelling chapter, vintage Louis Cha), he has to taste his host’s wine and analyse it. So he takes a sip. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the wine tastes as if it is more than 100 years old, yet three years old.” His host cannot believe his ears. He won the wine from a Turk in the West three years ago and the Turk, gracious in his defeat in the duel, told him the wine would not keep after his journey back to the East and he would need to distil it again, which he did. So the old wine was old-new, or new-old, and Linghu Chong could tell…

When I think of China now I think of that new-old wine. If you bear in mind the new-oldness of China you won’t be taken aback at the news of boys being abducted to become slaves and women being murdered to become corpse brides. The Middle Kingdom lives feudally on, side by side with the People’s Republic of China that chats about such scandals on the Internet. Cultural DNA dies hard.

Take the chauffeur of my cousin’s then-bureaucrat husband in Shenzhen. He would charge through a traffic jam as if he owned all the roads, cycle paths and footpaths. Hey, if he didn’t own them his boss or boss’s boss did. I remember the bumpy, up-kerb down-kerb rides in his Jeep from the time I went to Shenzhen with my mother in the 90s. It didn’t feel like we were in an action film, no. It felt like we were in a Chinese costume drama, driven about by a mandarin’s dogsbody who would crush all the carts in his way – because he could. His Jeep might have been new but the assumptions that his behaviour was based on were as old as the hills.

Lost and found 2

Back at work after three days off. As some 72 hours of mail came in my eye caught “Grady Hendrix” and “Re: zeeyee and tcheky” and my heart pirouetted. Oh my –

History: Mr Hendrix manned a rollicking blog on Asian gossip and Asian movies at Kaiju Shakedown. When it closed I wrote him to say that I missed the blog and that if he missed the gossip here was the news of the day on Zeeyee Zhang’s hot date with either Tchéky Karyo or his clone (it was multimillionaire Vivi Nevo actually – naturally). He wrote back to thank me – he wrote back! – so why would he write again?

Oh…the blog is back. At Variety Asia. Okay, so it was a mass mail for the eyes of all who had ever emailed him – not for mine only, aiya – but the blog is back!

Lost and found

You are you. An IC is an IC. You aren’t your IC, it isn’t you and you shouldn’t need it: Why should you need more proof of you than you?

Pardon the outbreak of third-rate philosophising. I lost my IC for a few hours yesterday (with my wallet – with my Party World KTV gold card! which I was to record reflexively as a very important personal object when I filled in a lost-and-found form) and it has been a whole heap of work.

I have a Taoist vaccine against reality (things aren’t lost; when they aren’t with you they are still somewhere in the cosmos, where they have always been – er, doesn’t Zhuangzi say so?) so all I felt at first was mild alarm. “Hold the sashimi?” I told the Ngee Ann Sushi Tei staff as soon as I established the wallet had escaped. I searched my mind for the last time I had touched it: Party World? Heeren? “I’m going to get my wallet back. I’m coming back.” “You can cancel…?” “Could you hold? I’m coming back.”

I did go back to the sashimi after an hour, wallet-less, IC-less, gold card-less; I had $50, a loan from Fei’s girl, who happened to be near (a drop of luck for me in the ocean of not-luck); I needed my fix of fish. Reports of the loss had been made to the mall, the bank…what more was a girl to do, right?

Wrong. When I came home Pa piled on the paranoia. What if someone sold my IC to snakeheads? Used it to borrow money from loan sharks? Buy mobile phones? That someone wouldn’t even have to look like the woman on my IC. That someone could be a man. Those telcos wouldn’t care. So I had to go phone them and ask them not to sell anything to anyone using my IC. I had to go to the police: a sweet young policeman with small eyes who spelt Ngee Ann “Mgee Ann”. I could have corrected him. But he seemed such a sweet young man, oh, and he had a gun.

To tell the truth, I am a veteran in the wallet-losing department. I misplaced it twice in my schooldays, in the pre-9/11, pre-paranoia age. The first time it was sent back to me. The second time it was sent to TransitLink, which eventually gave it back to me when I eventually went to reapply for a concession card. I am truly not a terminal optimist so I didn’t bank on getting it back a third time. The call came from Heeren, however, after I went to the police. A cleaner had found it in a rubbish bin. The cash was somewhere else in the cosmos, the ez-link too. But everything else was safe. It was really raining luck.

So, you know, I have told the police to hold their search. Now there are notes to send the telcos so they won’t have me arrested when they find me in their shop using my IC. It’s a whole heap of work – I haven’t had time for Secret!