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On The Bund（上海滩）

Posted on May 19, 2012 by June in People//Places | Leave a comment

On the day I was supposed to leave Shanghai, I crossed the river separating Pudong where my hotel was, from Puxi, and walked the Bund for an hour, taking photos on my Diana F (which I have yet to send for developing).

By the second day of my stay in the city I began to realise that I was only being exposed to a highly privileged, hugely constructed sliver of the city. Moving between hotel and convention centre and posh shopping mall (for meals), everything was scrubbed sterile, spotless: Every toilet I visited was flawless and scented, cleaner than the ones that we had back home. From my hotel room I spotted a Ferrari parked in the courtyard of the mall opposite, right in front of the giant Prada store. I spent four days living in an artificial bubble, away from the reality of the city. I was there as a member of the mainstream media, after all, a paid guest of that spawn of capitalism, an MNC. What else was I expecting?

(What I came away with from the summit I attended, after listening to CEOs and SVPs talk earnestly about fragmented markets and how to invest in them, was that foreign businessmen have a better understanding of China and its culture than their thinkers and politicians do. Capitalism is warfare of the 21st century, and the conquerors must know their targets well.)

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Shanghai Soup (上海汤)

Posted on May 8, 2012 by June in People//Places | Leave a comment

I’m sitting in a tenth-floor room of the Shangri-La Pudong, listening to an orchestra of car horns on the street below. Around me, skyscrapers are lovingly caressed by the fog and swallowed whole from above.  It’s my first time in Shanghai and it tastes like home — thriving forests of glass and steel, flawless roads prowled by BMWs and Audis, stores that sell Prada and Gucci and Giorgio Armani.  I don’t feel like I’ve gone anywhere at all.

Yes, the signs are in a different language. Yes, the stars are yellow and the flag is red. Yes, the flowers by the roadside could never grow in the climate at home.

But it doesn’t feel different.

When I was in London, I felt myself moved by something I couldn’t put a finger on. Every sight, every sound, every intake of air, I wanted to treasure and keep as precious. At that time, I arrogantly thought I had made a connection with the city. Now I know it was just London’s way of telling me that I didn’t belong.

When They Said “Assemble”, I Didn’t Think They Meant An Ikea Table, AKA Why I Disliked The Avengers Movie

Posted on May 8, 2012 by June in Film/TV | Leave a comment

A still from Marvel's The Avengers, produced by Walt Disney Co.

I am currently girding my loins because I am going to post an extremely unpopular opinion.

I did not like the Avengers movie.

First off, a disclaimer: I am not a comics fan. While I may dabble in the occasional graphic novel and hang around comics geeks more than half the time, I basically know nothing about the Marvel comicsverse, aside from what I read from Neil Gaiman’s 1602, and what I learned monitoring some of the comics communities on LJ and Dreamwidth while I was working in an ultimately-doomed local comics studio. (Storm Lion, you may have heard of them.)

But perhaps this puts me in good stead to review the film. I’m not emotionally invested enough in the source material to have it eclipse everything else, but I’m also not so detached from the comics fandom that I’ll start tearing apart things that are generally accepted as comic book tropes.

I really wanted to like this film. I don’t head out to the theatres much these days, owing mostly to time constraints, but this was one film I bookmarked as a must-see after the rave reviews given by almost everyone who had caught an advance screening. I sussed out the opening date and marked it out weeks in advance: Must go see this when it opens. Find someone who wants to watch it with you. Cannot miss it.

And maybe that was its problem: It didn’t live up to the hype. Cut for spoilers! Read more

Different Weights

Posted on April 22, 2012 by June in Miscellania | Leave a comment

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I always think it disingenuous for people to look across vast stretches of history and make sweeping statements about the human condition by saying “well things lasted like this for so many hundred years, while this phenomenon we have now did not exist until the last few decades” (in a effort to undermine the current state of things by implying it might only be a temporary fad).

I honestly do not think that the way things worked in the past should have any bearing on the way things work in the present simply because each generation of humanity (in their overlapping, non-finite boundaries) thinks and looks at the world differently, shaped by the ever-changing pattern of the world they grew up in. Culturally we are further removed from our ancestors, say, 200 years ago, than we are from any of our contemporaries. Sure, we may have history to guide us, but we see history through a lens of contemporaneity as well.

I’ve started reading Empires In World History: Power and the politics of difference by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. I am on the first chapter; ought to be an interesting read (part of background research for this year’s NaNo project, in which I will attempt to actually churn out a Real Proper Novel). Probably more thoughts on it as I go along.

I have another blogpost to get through today, this one for the spec fic blog, in conjunction with the Ayam Curtain open call. I have no idea how to begin.

My BEDA efforts were killed by my attempt to finish up a submission for a local anthology, which I’ve now been asked to modify fairly extensively. It’s a good thing, but I feel time creeping up on me The amount of things I have to write over the next couple of weeks — both work- and fiction-wise  – daunts me. It’s like a weight on my chest that won’t go away.

Why I Became An Atheist

Posted on April 11, 2012 by June in Miscellania | Leave a comment

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be Christian.

Growing up, my family subscribed to that strange mix I call Chinese pagan culture, something which mixed ancestor-worship with scraps of Taoism and Buddhism and a larger Chinese mythological pantheon. When I was in upper primary, and miserable and lonely, I was approached by a teen at a shopping mall while skiving on the way home, and given a pamphlet that said I could have order and peace and happiness if I accepted Jesus Christ into my life.

I was eleven. It sounded nice. I took the pamphlet home and hid it in a drawer and decided I wanted to become a Christian when I grew up and moved away from my parents’ house. Until then, I was going to be a secret Christian. I didn’t have a Bible, and I had not read any scripture except for the four Gospels I had pretty much been  forced to review for school (for English! for crying out loud!) and had subsequently completely forgotten. But I believed in God and I believed that he would somehow save pathetic little me. I even made up a little prayer I would recite to myself in bed, sometimes over and over: Dear God please forgive me for all the sins I committed today and let me not repeat them again tomorrow, amen.

As I said, I was eleven. And I was making it up as I went along. Read more

No $2.50 Burgers Anymore

Posted on April 7, 2012 by June in People//Places | 1 Comment

I was finishing a hasty meal at McDonald’s, on the way to meet a friend, when she came up to me. She was Chinese, and old, and wide-hipped in the way old women can be while still appearing brittle.

She said to me, in Chinese, “I would like to eat a hamburger.”

It took my mind, at that point mired in one of my stupid personal dramas, several beats to realise she was asking for food because she probably didn’t have enough to eat. I only had a few scattered fries left, which don’t actually count as food, and I generally don’t feel good giving others my leftovers anyway. I said, “I can give you some money to buy one.” Read more

How hard can it be?!

Posted on April 6, 2012 by June in News | Leave a comment

Starting a new blog/website, you should be able to do it with your eyes closed, right?

Yet it’s taken me an entire day to port my old website over onto a WordPress engine, buy it a new theme, install said theme, customize theme, design headers and banners, import selected content from two of my WordPress blogs that henceforth shall continue living our their purposes here…

Why I thought I’d manage to do it in a couple of hours entirely escapes me.

It wasn’t helped by the fact that my hosting provider is slower than WordPress’ servers, and their file management interface is a bit dodgy. I had to rip out my existing WordPress install and put a fresh one in. And I still had to open a support ticket when the theme I wanted to upload exceeded the filesize limitation that they’d set. (To their credit: It took them less than two hours to respond to the support ticket and up the limit for me. Thank you, FatCow!)

On the other hand, I have to give major credit to WordPress for making it so easy to take content from one WP blog and import it into a new one. Everything came along with the XML file, attachments, comments, pingbacks– everything! Super neat, WordPress. I like.

(No kudos, though, for letting me think I’d accidentally managed to delete the open call page for The Ayam Curtain, sending me into an hour of panic and self-recrimination.)

In effect, I’ve transferred some content from The Magical Harkow (the recent Blog Every Day April posts), as well as most of the op-ed pieces from my defunct mainstream + digital media blog, Mainstream Mediacrity. Those two blogs will now remain ghost blogs, digital archaeology– I will consolidate my blogging efforts here. My fiction blog, Mischief. Misrule. Misshallelujah., gets to stay where it is, though. I will keep my real-life thoughts away from my imaginarium.

To give this post some sort of redeemable content: Here, have this amazing, gorgeous video of Singapore shot by a Russian photographer. Yes, we really do move like that in this country. The flow of time here is different, like it is between the Heavenly Court of the Jade Emperor and the mortal world.

Singapore’2012 from zweizwei |motion timelapse| on Vimeo.

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