Idol drama

What sets a singer apart from a truly talented KTV warbler is interpretation. The singer sings somebody else’s song as if it is his own, as if he has never heard the original – and I know as a karaoke enthusiast just how hard that is.

Taiwan is KTV country so maybe more Taiwanese, coming to a talent contest, are able to appreciate how good a contestant is when he sings a familiar song very, very differently. Of course, they then go try the song they have rediscovered at karaoke, trying their best to sound as good as the contestant.

And this year everyone, from the man in the night market to the comic from Everybody Speaks Nonsense, wanted to sing the Gary Chaw song Betrayal very, very sadly – as popularised by Aska Yang, the contestant from One Million Star (click here).

I don’t know how he does it and I don’t know how much of it is instinctive but he somehow opens up the song and lets in a lot more emotional colour. Okay, in English: When he sings it you feel it. Surely the Taiwanese were feeling it (one of his nicknames is Yang-tsung Wei, Onion Wei, a play on his Chinese name and his talent for reducing them to tears) and singing it (Betrayal is No.1 in the KTV charts this year). It helped that there then came Jam Hsiao, a PK contestant who challenged Yang with his very own Broadwayish version of Betrayal; out of the blue there were not one but two interpretations to admire and aspire to (click here). (Onion? Jam? Yes, and there is also a Yoga Lin.)

For coming close to beating Yang, Hsiao became a star overnight. (Okay, over three weeks in the contest.) The 20-year-old has done a duet with A-mei and will release his own record next year. Yang went on to quit the show when he was found to have lied about his age (29, not 24) and faked a Xerox of his IC. Had he stayed in the contest, he would have won it, not that he needs to. He is so preposterously popular now, a capacity crowd would want to hear him sing phone numbers – very, very heartrendingly.

FILM | The day good taste died

Good taste died in Hong Kong cinema in the 1960s the day Loke Wan Tho of the high-class Cathay studio died in a plane crash; bad taste in the shape of low-class Shaw films then dominated the decade.

That is the Chinese film history my father feeds me at breakfast on Saturdays and Sundays which I have always filed away with every intent of checking every fact before I unleash it upon the unsuspecting world as an amateur movie historian.

Now I don’t have to. Grady Hendrix, a true professional, has gone and written that story, fleshing it out with more details and theories than I could have come up with in a zillion years (“Peter Chen plays the romantic lead in Mambo Girl but really, who cares? Actors at Cathay were an endless gallery of nobodies, with the faces of civil servants and spines of spaghetti, no match for the radiant screen goddesses who surrounded them”).

Read him here.

And here. (Post-1997 Hong Kong cinema is slimmer and sexier than ever!)

And here. (Lust and no caution in Japan’s 1960s Nikkatsu action cinema!)

And here. (The Spielbergs of Nippon’s porn!)

And here. (A celebrity has directed a movie based on the book said celebrity wrote - it isn’t terrible!)

FILM | Good Mr Yee, bad Mr Yee

“O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

“O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart” – W.H. Auden

It was chilly in the hotel in Kyoto and my mind fevered, the night I met Eileen Chang’s Mr Yee.

(LUST, CAUTION SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Legend has it that Mr Yee is based on Ms Chang’s first husband, Hu Lan-cheng, a onetime official in the puppet government during the Sino-Japanese war, a writer as cold-eyed as she was. (He once wrote, “I cannot accept all sorts of things about Eileen. She never bemoans the state of the universe and pities the people nor sympathises with anybody nor donates anything at all. In her world no one is aggrandised and no one is aggrieved. She is extremely selfish, extremely cruel. She is extremely severe with good people and good things and with ordinary people and ordinary things she is also this strict. She really is egalitarian.”)

In Lust, Caution the short story the heroine has seduced (and been seduced by) Mr Yee, a collaborator, to spy on him for a few amateur actors turned amateur Resistance assassins. The tale is told through the stream of her consciousness and he breaks in only twice. The first time we hear his thoughts he is at a jeweller’s with her and feeling slightly sorry for himself: He thought she was drawn to him, not only to his power but also to him. He knew women would want presents, oh, he knew, but he thought… He thought he could indulge a little longer in his middle-aged man’s fantasy of love. (She doesn’t hear his thoughts but when she sees his sorrowful smile…she wavers. She dies for it.) The second time we hear his thoughts he is at home and fearing for his safety after the botched assassination, blaming his missus for bringing home the spy…and feeling somewhat smug: So she did love him. She had to have hated him before her execution. But he who has no venom is no man. Were he not such a man she couldn’t have loved him. Anyway, alive, she was his woman and dead, she is and will be his ghost.

This Mr Yee is ruthless and remorseless. Drop-dead hot somehow. He occupied my mind for two entire days as Ms Chang’s words played in my head over and over. She had slept with the enemy, hadn’t she, and known the warm hands that came with the cold unrepentant heart.

I wonder what she would have thought of Lee Ang’s Mr Yee (Tony Leung), who slinks home in Lust, Caution the film after his lover’s execution, steals into her bedroom and sits on her bed pensively. This Mr Yee is the picture of ageing romantic regret, the latest in a long line of men of non-action from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s reserved swordsman Li Mubai to Brokeback Mountain’s lonesome cowboy Ennis Del Mar. He isn’t the man I pictured. Being also middle-aged and male, might Mr Lee have been too sensitively sympathetic?

Yes way

We won, I think.

When BVI said last month they were releasing Lust, Caution without Tony Leung’s bits I declared war on them. I was as indignant as I had been in my teens, when I would write in to the broadsheet to complain about avaricious distributors who had cut movies to sell more tickets. No I was more indignant than I had ever been. Didn’t BVI realise a movie like Lust, Caution was more than a movie? A movie that is Eileen Chang, Lee Ang and Tony throwing caution to the wind, a movie that has been the talk of Greater China, a movie that is making front-page news in Shin Min, is not just a movie. It is an event. It is as important this year as Beijing 2008 will be next year. Did BVI think nobody in Singapore would notice the missing bits? Could they be that out of touch? But they were and I couldn’t write in to complain, being inconveniently in the employ of the broadsheet. So I held a council of war with S, who is smarter than me, then sold an idea for a story to KC and DT: Let’s go after BVI, let’s go after every movie-cutting distributor, let’s go to town on every movie that has been sneakily snipped by a distributor. The plan was to get everyone mad so they would get even with the distributors, boycott BVI, boycott Lust, Caution (NC16). “This is your NKF,” I said to DT. But the clock was ticking; he was taking an eternity with the story; I couldn’t leave things to chance. Shin Min had announced to all and sundry on its front page that not a lot was left of Lust, Caution (I heart Shin Min). SF had stated in her review that Lust, Caution (NC16) was a lesser movie (I heart SF - and I checked with the editor, who checked with KF, that the review would make front-page blurbs). I then mass-mailed my boycott appeal, which made the news in a Chinese freesheet and a Chinese broadsheet the day DT’s story was published.

When the movie opened at No.1 it looked like we had lost. Then it fell to No.4, then No.7. Its gross of about $500,000, on 20 prints, is nothing to write home about. Re-releasing a movie is costly. Would BVI be putting money into the R21 re-release if they had been making money in the NC16 release? I think not.

Am I over the moon? No. But it is nice to have a thing that went wrong go right.

No mood

The editor has intuited that Tony is Chinese cinema’s best leading man sometime between seeing some stills of Lust, Caution and investigating the truth about his sad childhood on Wikipedia. So in the thrill of her discovery – and because nobody else had the time – I ended up having to write a “why Tony’s the bestest” story for Sunday in 24 hours flat.

And I didn’t write the bestest story, I know, but I had a nasty feeling when she said to send it to the rewriter, a former Fleet Streeter who is intelligent but has a tendency to overwrite. Soon enough the story came back with comments like, “Why are we writing this story?” So I told her the ed wanted a “why Tony’s the bestest” story, 60cm, and this was my attempt to rave meaningfully. Like I said, she is intelligent. She gave me an “ah, that kind of story” look and said I should rewrite the intro to better contextualise Tony and the story would be okay. So I thought maybe I was wrong about her.

But I wasn’t. In a matter of mere minutes she came to the ed and me with an idea: Why don’t we sex things up with sexy stills of Lust, Caution, sexy allusions to the sex scenes, sexy Lust, Caution puns? Okay. So I wrote about Tony’s testes, nudity, emotional nakedness, which no one in Singapore would see in the NC16 cut. But the ed said, “Let’s not rub it in.” She had a go at the story. The rewriter had a go at it. By the time it came back the intro was a long Lust, Caution pun I didn’t get. Who would start a story about Tony’s greatness with wordplay so meaningless? Oh foreign talent would. Also the ed had made Ms M call Mr and Ms Expert then beefed up the intro with two quotes on Tony’s greatness. I felt sick.

“Er isn’t it like quoting experts on how powerful the MM is?” I said.

“Not everybody knows Tony’s great what,” the ed said. Right. She hadn’t known before she saw those stills of Lust, Caution so how could Singapore know? Infernal what?

Anyways there was no time for me to unwrite the rewrite. It was out of my hands. All that could be done was to have my byline deleted. Tony deserves a better story that I could write within 24 hours, I know.

The dresses are alive…

It’s all too much, and that’s where the loveliness – the couture moment – begins. The clothes are extravagant and unreal, but they don’t seem camp. They don’t seem artificial or out of this world, just symbolic of a common human hope that the world could be something other than it is – younger and more musical and less exhausting and better lit. It proposes that the little moments of seduction on which, when we look back, so much of our life depends could unfold as formally as they deserve to, and all dressed up – Adam Gopnik

The day I had my first period and became a woman, so to speak, I was 13, coming home from the Pasir Ris chalets with the clan. I was wearing my favourite white cotton blouse with epaulettes (made in Japan; found in the $10 bargain bin in Isetan by Ma; fits me now), red berms (…don’t fit me now, no). For my first date I travelled to Melbourne; then I tried to look like I couldn’t be bothered in crazy hair, crumpled slacks, off-one-shoulder top that was sliding this way and that crazily. The day I was interviewed for my first job I was wearing Ma’s close-fitting black sheath. Awkwardly, under an ugly beige jacket - I used not to know better.

We all have them, the vital, voluptuous moments – the little emotional events that become our history. And although I have not always been fashion-conscious (in my benighted Before-L years I didn’t know Miu Miu was by Prada, Miuccia Prada, and associated the label with kittens) most of my memories of those moments have always been tinted, textured by what I was wearing. Sometimes it was the moment that was so singular, my body memorised it down to how my dress was hugging me. Sometimes I was so in love with the dress, my mind hugged all my self-romanticised moments in it.

Some garments, as we know, have soundtracks. Maybe it is the flounce of the fabric, the swish of the skirt, the ping, ping, ping of light ricocheting off that glistening goldish dress. Maybe it is the murmur of the name that came to us when we zipped up that skin-tight dress for the first time in the fitting room, the name that came with a million dollar question: Will he love me in this? It may even be an actual orchestral soundtrack.

There is a navy and white slightly stiff boat-necked sheath that was my 2046 dress. After seeing the achingly beautiful set-in-1966 show twice in two days I wore the 60sish sheath to work and all I could hear in my head, particularly while negotiating a narrow aisle between cubicles crammed with computers and phones, was the swaying soundtrack. I was at work but not. My steps were not mine but Faye Wong’s. And then the music died one day, when after an angry call from a boyfriend I distractedly dressed for work in the sheath. Little did I know that there would be increasingly livid calls and finally a nail-in-the-coffin voice message. By noon I could not be at work any more but couldn’t quite be at home. My clearest memory that day was asking a cabbie to stop some distance from my block. Bending stiffly in the stiff dress I squatted uneasily and pressed the phone to the ear to hear the break-up message. I played it 10 times, 20 times. Then deleted it, straightened up, smoothed down the sheath and tried to walk free. It has been two years and I am okay. But the dress hasn’t got its music back. Last week he wrote asking to be let into my life again. I refuse to reply; I refuse to even remember what I was wearing while reading that email.

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!