Cheapness is a crime

Chip Tsao on The Photos:

But in the thousand or so leaked pictures, be they standing, lying, caressing their breasts or parting their legs, the female stars strike poses that are traditional and not in the least creative – postures that have been in magazines from Lou Ye Che in the 70s to Lung Fu Pao later. There is no attention to light and colour in the works. The bedroom is disorderly. Please, couldn’t the toy bears and such have been moved out of the way? The photos are too cluttered and slightly too cheap, any bleach-blond boy in Yau Ma Tei, Tsim Sha Tsui and Mong Kok could have taken pictures of the same standard.

Some may say, “These are but hasty works of life, don’t have such high expectations.” They would be wrong. Since it is a celebrity, a son of a wealthy family who went to the West to study and who comes from a film and television background, why shouldn’t the public have higher expectations? Entertainment is a specialised line. When taking photos of the human body is your hobby it isn’t easy, you have to be passionate. While you are at it do it diligently and do it well. As it is the author’s talent doesn’t show in the leaked pictures. Learn from Lee Ang, okay? Uncle Lee Ang is in his 50s and a senior but in his Lust, Caution, Tang Wei and Tony Leung Chiu Wai’s sex scenes are dangerously creative – gentle and yet intense. Hong Kong entertainers in their 20s and their generation have pretensions to being current, in and young. In these thousand or so leaked nude photos, however, the lighting and angles are unimaginative and the poses, old hat. This is the sin. (Apple Daily)

BEIJING | Day n

Even in Beijing I am a creature of habit; every night I have to come back to TV. To countless marriage-and-the-city Chinese shows that are not so much watchable as native-spoken listenable, to ads that make up for their visual simplicity with their verbal sophistication – and to Shankou Baihui (Yamaguchi Momoe).

I have been hypnotised by her 80s serial, Xie Yi (Akai Giwaku), since I found it on a Chinese channel. Boy meets girl, she’s going to get leukaemia, he’s going to find out that he’s her half-brother – I can foretell it all but I can’t bear switching channels.

“Eh, you don’t have to bathe, meh? Haven’t you seen this show?” says my room mate for the week, Fei.

“Yes, but I was too young.”

I was six or maybe seven: too young to remember her going to Paris, getting a wedding gown and looking rosebud lovely in a red beret. “Did you see that? The French look never goes out of fashion.”

“But the skirt is so 80s,” says Issey Feiyake.

“But the colour is so not 80s.”

Seeing and hearing it anew now, I am also intrigued by how in the Chinese dubbing she is described as a guniang. Not nuhai, not nusheng, but guniang. Quaint, isn’t it?

Sometimes we do hop to the news or something. Although you don’t get stories about China’s ban on the film Lost in Beijing, you do get weather reports and stories about the comrade of the day. (“Today, a tourist reported losing his comb on the train on the way from City A to City B. Rail workers in City A combed through the train for the comb and sent it to City B…”)

“You are right. This is so fictional,” says Fei tonight. (He is right more often than me, okay, so when he says I am right – ahem.)

“Why do you think I watch those serials? You might as well watch real fiction, right?”

BEIJING | Day seven

It is freezing outside but warm in the Beijing airport, where we are waiting to fly home. Two of us are silently boiling. My father is angry at something his children might or might not have done and my aunt, at something her husband and child might or might not have done. The boys – Bak, Y, Fei and my uncle – look like they cannot be bothered. My mother is annoyed that it has not snowed in Beijing. (The snowstorms would start after we went home.) I have been PMSing for a few days now. I have yelled at my mother and even my brother Fei, whom I have not raised my voice at for about a decade. We have been noisily travelling together for a week – nattering, nagging, nattering and gratuitously swearing – and here we are now, slouching in silence in what might be the calm before a couple of family storms. And yet. And yet. My mother and I are, for once, on the same secret happy wavelength.

“The next time we go anywhere as a family, it isn’t going to be just us,” she says.

“I know.”

Our Fei will marry P next month: We won’t be monopolising him on the next trip.