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July 05 David Mamet's Oleanna - a parody of sexual harassmentOn my day off on Thursday, I took myself to the theater to see a David Mamet play, which sounds more glamorous than it was. Reflecting the city's absolute lack of interest in live theatre, it was held in the basement of the Hong Kong Arts Centre, in a room with 50something seats and 20something people, almost all of whom were gweilos. To add to its small-town school performance feeling, the girl collecting my ticket said, "Do you have to go the bathroom?" "Uh, no. Not right this minute." "Because it's 45 minutes before the intermission," as if 45 minutes of non-stop English play watching was some trial to be endured. At least I got to sit really close to the actors. ***** Oleanna is a pared down play. It is set in a single teacher's office and there are only two characters: a kindly professor named John and a disturbed student named Carol. But, if done well, Mamet's brilliant, terse writing can become an explosive performance -- one that starts quietly and builds up with tension and outbursts, twists and turns. The two actors - Howard Paley and Kesty Morrison -- did not have much to work with in terms of space or props, but they had the audience sitting on the edges of their seats by the end, and that is no small task. Carol is failing a course and has dragged herself into John's office. Her character does not seem to be particularly attractive, confident or smart. When confronted with her academic performance, she becomes consumed by self-pity. She complains about her disadvantaged background and agonizes over the fact that she "understands nothing" despite all her efforts. She tells the professor, in the most pleading tone possible, that she did "everything you told me to," including reading his own book and taking many notes, something she continues to do with great concentration throughout their conversation. Yet, a slightly aggressive or manipulative side is already apparent, particularly in the way she keeps interrupting him. It's impossible to tell whether a crying, shaking breakdown she has over her own perceived flaws is real, or just theater. The professor is the opposite. He starts off calm and rational, despite the fact that his phone keeps ringing, drawing attention to some personal drama he and his wife are having over the purchase of a new house. A teacher who obviously loves his job and his students -- possibly too much -- he gets drawn into sympathy for the girl. He asks her to sit down and puts a hand on her shoulder when she begins to cry. He offers to boost her grade with private tutorials. He speaks of breaking down the barriers between teacher and student, tries to break the ice with an off-colour joke and -- in an attempt to show her that everyone has problems -- shares some of his own worries about having to go before a committee to see if he will get tenure. Most of seems to go over her head, and she doesn't seem to appreciate that he has delayed his own appointment (with his wife at the new house) to comfort his distraught charge. Immediately, in the next scene, the tables are turned. Carol had been taking notes for a different reason. She had compiled a list of quotes from him that, taken out of context, make it look like she was the victim of sexual harassment. The pat on the shoulder has now been interpreted as sexual assault. The joke has turned into "pornography." And, thanks to his own honesty and openness, she has gleaned his weak spot-- an accusation to the tenure board could make him lose his job, and even the mortgage for the home he wants for his wife and child. Their conversation is more heated this time, fueled partly by the fact that Carol still seems unintelligent enough to grasp this professor's dense, theoretical defenses of himself. Very quickly, the professor's life falls apart. Carol becomes emboldened by a tragically misplaced sense of feminism and political correctness, and a sense of fury not backed by any clear thinking. She becomes cocky and bullying. She mocks and torments him while his wife is on the phone. She sits in his office knowing that she has sent the police out for this "rapist," but does not say a word about it. Even if I went out of my way to pen the most irritating fictional character, I don't know if I could do a better job than Mamet. At one point, just after the professor has found about about the student's false rape accusation, the phone rings and it's his wife, worried about him. He screams at the student to leave him in peace, but she hovers over him as he tries to comfort his wife saying "baby, it's OK, everything will be fine." "Don't call your wife baby," the student snips. "You heard me." Morrison nails that line. Even as a woman who has found herself condescended to or pushed aside by men, I found Carol so annoying I wanted to beat the crap out of her. And [scene spoiler here], the professor is finally driven to the point that he does. And then she gives a knowing look to the audience, because she knows she has finally got him. ****** I so liked this performance that I read up on what the critics thought. I was surprised at how many earnestly compared it to the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case. (The play debuted in the early-90s, at about the same time that was happening). After all, wasn't it clear that the case was a serious one of harassment (in which a disagreeable, aggressive man gets away with bad behavior despite testimony from multiple witnesses) and the play was a parody of PC gone wrong (in which a disagreeable aggressive woman gets away with bad behavior despite having no evidence of her claims). I was also surprised that mainstream sources (like Wikipedia) saw the play so differently than I did. They did not see the professor sympathetically, and left it open whether or not sexual harassment had taken place. In the play itself, Carol links what she sees as his didactic, paternalistic manner (and his use of vocabulary words she cannot understand) to bullying and exploitation -- a sort of figurative rape. Last I checked, being didactic and paternalistic and using big words is not against the law. If it were, all of Oxford would be in jail. ****** At one point in the play, the professor pleads with Carol to drop the charges, obviously for his own interest, but also because it is the right thing to do. Does she have no feelings? Does she have no sense of forgiveness? What good will this do her to ruin his life? She says something odd: Even if her feelings told her she was wrong, even if she did forgive him personally, it was her duty to "her group" to go through with her accusations. The play leaves it vague whether "her group" is a women's support group, or women in general. It is not an uncommon thought, and a dangerous one. Every time a woman makes an accusation of rape "on behalf of all women" because she woke up hungover and regretful, she diminishes the chances that a real rape victim will be taken seriously. This is particularly true in PC-mad America. The confusion between rape and "sex I decided later was a bad idea" exists on both ends of the spectrum. To simplify things, rape is either violent (like getting beaten up in an alleyway) and/or coercive (being forced to hand over your wallet to a mugger). So date rape is when a woman goes on a date and is then forced to have sex against her will, either through violence, drugging (say, with Rohypnol) or some other form of coercion. Date rape is not when a woman agrees to have sex, and then decides she was a drunk fool, and it's all the guy's fault. The former is a conscious criminal act, the latter is not. The confusion comes when rape is defined only by sex, and not by violence. On the far right, there is the argument, for example, that a wife / girlfriend / prostitute cannot be raped, she since would be a sexual partner anyway. But that's because the focus is on the sex, not on the violence and coercion. But anyone can understand a wife / girlfriend / prostitute being beaten up or having her money stolen, and that being a bad thing. On the other side of the spectrum, some who see college campuses as running rampant with date rape sometimes also confuse a violent crime and mere unfortunate intercourse. That's why some colleges ridiculously have "permission forms" that boys and girls have to sign together before doing the deed. When you have girls running to the campus women's center crying because they did it with Bobby and now he's dumped her and, boy, is she going to get him back -- pity the poor thing who really has been attacked. And never mind the "rape claims" of jealous boyfriends of girls who do it with rugby teams. When I once brought up the subject of sexual harassment in the workplace with Marc, he explained a case of a female sous-chef in America who everyone knew was lazy. A French male supervisor snapped at her to "move her ass," and the next thing he knew, he had a job suspension and court case on his hands. Sure, it's not a nice thing to say to someone, but it's the way chefs talk all the time, male or female. It was ludicrous. Perhaps she felt she was doing it to empower all women, but in fact the opposite happened. After that, the French chefs working there poo-pooed all complaints as symptomatic of annoying American women, and if there was an actual serious case of continuing harassment that made someone feel threatened at work, nobody would have taken it seriously. July 02 Canada Day, Part 2 -- Finding Poutine in Hong KongI was disappointed in my Canada Day efforts yesterday, so I tried again.
I didn't expect to find much in North Point, where my office is. While there are the beginning signs of gentrification (a Genki Sushi opened, and Starbucks is on the way), it's a neighborhood that never has anything I'm looking for: No New Yorker magazines, stationary without cartoon characters, underwear without cartoon characters, my particular brand of vitamins, Clinique products or decent latte. Why, it's like most of Kowloon.
So I was surprised when I walked into the new "gourmet burger" take-out, Big Bite, and found poutine, that French-Canadian dish I was going on about.
The place was overpriced and run by Filipinos, just like every other gweilo-orientated joint in town. But they didn't do a bad job. Of course there were no cheese curds, just the sort of pale shredded cheese one gets in plastic packets at the supermarket. But the fries were crisp enough to hold up to all the junk dumped on top (perhaps they coated the outsides in potato starch first, or perhaps they fried them twice, or both -- that's the trick). Plus, they used proper hot, smooth, beef gravy. By the time I got back to the office, the two essential ingredients had melted together into a creamy, gooey, lovely mess. The cheese was stretchy instead of squeaky, but one cannot have everything in life. The other Canadian girl in the office came over to peer at it, and I was sad we couldn't take a photo of this important occasion for Joyceyland. I ate it quickly before the 4:30 news meeting and was happy with it. (Poutine must be made and eaten a la minute; otherwise, it goes soggy and gross).
****
Many regional dishes are so tied to a particular people and place that the experience of consuming them is compromised anywhere else. The ridiculously heavy side-dish of fried potatoes, cheese curds and gravy works well in Montreal, where it can snow from November till March, where the wind is so strong it makes your eyes hurt, where there's a term meaning "colder than cold." (Frette is plus froid than froid.)
This is your typical Montreal winter dinner experience. The sun set hours ago, at 4, and all you can see are old grey looming buildings covered in snow. It's so frette outside, all you want to do is drink yourself into oblivion or maybe just die. The harsh weather makes you perpetually hungry six months a year. You can't feel your feet. You wonder if you will be able to find a cute stranger -- or really, anyone who emits body heat -- and just crawl under a duvet with him.
But across the street are the golden lights of a St-Viateur or a Schwartz's -- cheap, traditional places packed with crowds with funny accents and padded coats. You force your way over a banque de neige in your giant snow boots and make your way towards the promise of warmth and food.
At the former, they boil their bagels in honeyed water, coat them in poppy seeds, sesame and garlic, roast them in a wood-fired pizza oven, and serve them warm; these are not the inferior bread-shaped-like-a-doughnut "bagels" of Hong Kong's gourmet supermarkets. At the latter, they slice the smoked meat right for you, depending on how fatty you want it. Even I, who eat so little meat, jump up and down shivering in front of the counter and beg for drippings.
But what's it like eating this food in a Hong Kong summer with 30-degree weather and 90 percent humidity? Suffice it to say that after gorging on poutine, I felt sick all through my meeting. I couldn't even look at the accompanying hamburger sitting on my desk for at least another two hours. At 6:30, I tried to eat it, and threw half of it away.
Maybe my ability to eat poutine would be different if I lived in Sweden. But, so long as I continue to live in the tropics, I'm sticking to light Asian stir-fries until the next Canada Day.
I don't get back to Canada much, because it's so far and I have no family left there. I have so many other obligations eating up my holiday time that it seems extravegent to take two weeks to go back to Montreal just to eat. In the meanwhile, this New York Times slideshow of Montreal food will have to hold me over. As a Canadian-Hong Konger, do I have 2 national days, or none?Today is both Canada Day and, uh, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Establishment Day (doesn't have quite the same ring) -- two holidays celebrating two of my nationalities.
I had lunch with Hong Blog before work, and he asked if I had patriotic feelings for either.
Not really, I said. The national day of my youth -- the one I associate with BBQs, hot dogs, flag waving and firecrackers -- is Independence Day, the 4th of July. But not being an American citizen, not having lived there since the early 90s, and not having any family left in the U.S., the feeling rings hollow for me.
I feel more Canadian than I do American, but I never really celebrated Canada Day, as I spent 10 of my 12 Canadian years in Montreal, which has mixed feelings towards the holiday at best. (We Quebecers do have the 24th of June, which is our Fete Nationale, or the fete of St. Jean-Baptiste, our patron saint, but that's so obscure). "Oh Canada, terre de nos aieux. Ton front est ceint, de fleurons glorieux...."
I didn't do much. But I insisted that the waitress at the faux French bistro in IFC2 bring me maple syrup with my pancakes. That's pretty Canadian, never mind that it was that imitation "golden syrup" stuff. Really, who eats pancakes with strawberry jam? And yesterday, I discovered that one of our new staff members is a Torontonian. We had a quick chat about a new restaurant called Canuck, which I haven't tried, and bemoaned the fact that one cannot get proper poutine with cheese curds in this city. Then, our Canada celebration was over. Maybe that's what I like about Canada -- lovely, neutral Canada -- its lack of fervent nationalism. Ooh, and also the way Montreal girls dress.
*****
As for "Hong Kong Day," it's a pretty artificial construct. It's hard for a city to have deep feelings for a holiday that's only been around 11 years and marks a handover that was viewed with ambivalence anyway. Lunar New Year, Gweilo New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival ("Mooncake Day"), Christmas ("Shopping Day"), Boxing Day ("More Highly Discounted Shopping Day"), Easter, Ching Ming, even those holidays I always forget about, all have more meaning here.
This morning, in the cab on the way from Hung Hom to the TST MTR, the driver and I listened to a radio program (RTHK?) about the ceremony at the Bauhinia statue. They tried to do a vox pop of residents who had gone and taken their kids, but seemed to have a hard time finding anyone who didn't have a mainland accent or spoke Putonghua. Finally, a little girl with a Hong Kong accent came on, but when asked what she was supposed to be celebrating, she flubbed it.
I asked the driver, who had a faint mainland accent himself, if he was going to the democracy march at 3pm, but he said he had to work. (He used the slang phrase which literally means, "I have to find rice to eat.") He asked if I was going, and I said I had to work, and we had a laugh about the fact that it was putting food on the table, not politics, that rules Hong Kong. He didn't voice any strong feelings for the march one way or another, and said he didn't see any concrete thing to demonstrate against. I guess, with no Article 23, Tung Chee-hwa or Regina Ip, there's no more obvious Big Bad Wolf to rally against.
All he said was that he was glad we weren't quite so violent and insistent as the South Korean protesters who have been carrying on for a month.
I remember what Ching Cheong said recently about Hong Kong's peculiar brand of patriotism, which was, ironically, pride in our critical newspapers, demonstrations and general non-patriotic nature. ****
Some random stuff:
The most emailed IHT.com story over the past week has been "San Francisco may name sewage treatment plant after Bush". The article itself is not that interesting, a bit jokey, but the comments are. Who knew such vitriol existed against San Francisco, the city of the Golden Gate Bridge and good sour dough, of trams and gay parades, of America's most authentic Chinatown and "Gold Mountain" immigrant hopes? Who knew that San Francisco was a hotbed of Bush-hating Commies who should just move to the U.S.S.R.? (Not that it exists anymore). Or that every other American just wishes it would fall off into the Pacific Ocean, killing all of its inhabitants in a horrid watery death? That's not patriotic at all.
****
I've tried, with this post, to get away from all the oh-so-serious Chinese politics stuff that has recently taken over my brain. But I can't resist reporting that, to prove that China's Olympic site algae problem is not at all poisonous or caused by pollution, the Chinese authorities have been transporting the icky green stuff "to farms as feed for pigs and other animals, according to news reports." Let's take a gamble at whether that's ever going to show up in the food chain again. The article also says: "Photographs in the Australian press showed an Australian team seemingly stuck in a carpet of algae during a training run." OK, ew. Coverage about the subject has focused on how the heroic, hardworking, volunteering masses have come together to fight the algae, for the good of the nation and the Olympics. So here's to Hong Kong Day, and a city that might have equally gross algae blooms and red tides, but at least doesn't try to put a patriotic spin on it. ****** OK, you've got to love this. I mean, this must be the nicest, gentlest military video ever. "Look at us! We can do the backstroke in a pool!" I also love the fact that it's paired with the French version of the national anthem, which is all overwrought and Catholic compared to the English version. "Car ton bras sait porter l'epee, il sait porter la croix...." ("If your arm can bear the sword, it can bear the cross....") June 28 "Medals and Rights": An Olympics-themed book reviewAnother Sinophile friend sent me a massively long book review by Andrew J. Nathan, titled Medals And Rights: What the Olympics Reveal, and Conceal, about China, from the newest issue (July 9) of The New Republic. Nathan has crafted an intricate, cohesive, dynamic essay about a topic that's been on every Sinophile's mind, while also working in six related new books: * Beijing: From Imperial Capital to Olympic City by Lillian M. Li, Alison J. Dray-Novey, and Haili Kong * Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China by Susan Brownell * Olympic Dreams: China and Sports, 1895-2008, by Xu Guoqi * China's Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (a collection of works) * Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China, by Anne-Marie Brady * Owning the Olympics: Narratives of the New China (a collection of works) It's awfully nice for people to send me things, because I can fill up Joyceyland without even trying. But I'm not going to reprint the whole thing because it's an astounding 14,000 words, or I guess about 30 pages. I fear this review might want to pull a veni, vidi, vici, and eat up my whole site. The review starts generally, basically telling an American audience the background of politics and problems surrounding the Olympics -- nothing regular readers of this blog haven't heard before. "What remains of the old-style houses and streets, crafts, means of transportation, and ways of life is mere outdoor museum displays, according to Lillian M. Li and her co-authors in their narrative of the city's lost past. Visitors should carry this readable book with them as an aid to imagining what is no longer there, and to understanding the political sources--including hubris and corruption--of what they see....." It's a nice reminder for foreign visitors who drop in, wonder at the Great Wall and the new buildings, and leave thinking they've seen the real China. The review then gets more theoretical, and draws an interesting link between the physical architecture of buildings, and the figurative architecture of power. "The main Olympic site north of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square sits at the top of the city's cosmologically significant north-south axis explains Susan Brownell in her book on the anthropology of Chinese sports. It thus expresses the unity of sports and politics that the Chinese authorities and the International Olympic Committee have been at such pains to deny. Brownell says that planners at one point wanted the main stadium, referred to as the "Bird's Nest" because of its lattice-like construction, which was contrived to accommodate 11,000 VIPs so that the whole hierarchy of power could display itself before the people on this most auspicious occasion. The still secret opening and closing ceremonies that have been designed for the arena will be global and glitzy, but they need to convey the same power, dignity, and order as did the old PRC aesthetic of massed gray suits, red ties, and primary-color potted flowers...." "...The Olympic buildings are diverse, and some of them are innovative. Yet in both the process of their construction and, I expect, in their use, they embody the dominance of the state. The public scale overwhelms the private scale, national power trumps personal comfort, and society's interests supersede individual rights. China's systems of land ownership, construction approvals, contracting, and labor discipline allowed quick and efficient displacement of residents (often through police and court collusion with developers, and the threat and use of violence), along with quick decisions on design, quick letting of contracts, and quick completion of projects. The buildings together announce that this is a society able and willing to consummate the Hegelian overcoming of its own past." "So, too, at the human level, China offers a political and social landscape in which those who are not part of the future make way for those who are. The individual fits in or gets out. Job ads for bank clerks and office workers specify sex, age, height, and good looks..... " "....The 380 hostesses guiding the athletes through the Olympic awards ceremonies will all be about the same age, height, and weight, and they have been trained to walk and gesture in standard ways." Not too far in, it reflects an ominously Reich-like way of thinking. (As a funny aside, take a look at this Hong Kong Chinese sign which assumes that eugenics is a good thing). But back to the mega-review: "The Olympics have been designed to showcase the upside of this dialectic: glass towers, modish people, prosperity, and health of every kind--economic, political, and physical. As Xu Guoqi points out, when China was the "sick man of Asia," many of its people were ill as well, and social thinkers of the time were obsessed with the connection between the two problems. They understood the relationship through the theory of social Darwinism, an idea then popular in the West, which held that human history was the story of competition for survival among the races. A Chinese elementary-school textbook of the 1920s explained that "Mankind is divided into five races. The yellow and white races are relatively strong and intelligent. Since the other races are feeble and stupid, they are being exterminated by the white race. Only the yellow race competes with the white race. This is so-called evolution." Mao Zedong's first known published essay was on physical culture, and his theme (borrowed from contemporary thinkers such as Liang Qichao) was that a strong nation must have strong people." The review goes on to list some jailed dissidents: Yang Chunlin (whose petition was called "We Want Human Rights, Not the Olympics"), Lu Gensong (anti-corruption campaigner), Wu Lihong (environmentalist), and of course Hu Jia (AIDS activist; definitely not be confused with the Olympic athlete of the same name). The review sums up their situations: "This must be especially terrifying when the bullies run the country." You can access this excellent, but epic, review, by clicking on the link at the top. Reading it is a little like having to climb a really big mountain before benefiting from the enlightening view at the top. Andrew J. Nathan teaches at Columbia. He is a co-editor of How East Asians View Democracy. My fellow bloggers post videos on China Ed Lee of Chinese Blood, Irish Heart, a SCMP videographer who has been reporting out of Beijing, writes a bit more openly than his employer does out of the capital. Recently, he posted: "Holy shit! My blog's been uncensored in China! Well, that certainly takes the air of mystery away... poo. Um, might as well post something productive then! Check out my latest Beijing vids." Some are the same vids done for the password-protected scmp.com. The one on the North Korean Mass Games is aesthetically amazing, as well as amazing disturbing in its symbolism of young performers giving up all sense of individuality for the "greater good." The usually not-so-political Mat B of Cantopopped has a post and vid of the car commercial that "offended China." I watched it, and found nothing that could be offensive, except that Richard Gere (who doesn't say a word for or against China in it) uses feel-good, eco-friendly Tibetan spiritualism to sell cars. But I somehow doubt Beijing's ire was over the commercial's lack of self-awareness about its inherent irony or crass commercialism.
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