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.