I survived last week… just about. I was invited to Okinawa to participate in two-day dialogue on embodied cognition and individual behaviour change, wonderful stimulation for the brain with interesting potential for coaching and teaching practice. The weather was beautiful, and rolled out a sun-laden carpet for two days, but the travel back and forth was brutal, so today’s briefing will be slightly shorter but hopefully no less punchy in content.
Kua Simi Kua
That’s Hokkien (or the Amoy dialect, or Minnan, whichever you prefer) for “whatcha looking at”, the verbal calling card of petty gangsters and wannabes in Singapore. Unlike the Hong Kong triads, which have been glorified and immortalised in film since the 1980s, their Fujian counterparts have not been quite as popularised, probably due to the later, smaller start of Taiwanese cinema. What is interesting to me is that despite the overwhelming popularity of HK mobster movies, Hong Kongers and mainland/diaspora Cantonese people, by extension, don’t really have a reputation as thuggish, conniving weasels… compared to Fujian ones, which have clearly been quite busy being very naughty boys in the past 30 years not only in their homeland but abroad in Singapore.
So much so that a friend of mine cracked a joke that when she read this article (just before surgery) about Fujian crews growing weed and trafficking humans in OKLAHOMA, it was so wild that she thought she was already on drugs. How’s that for a secondhand high?
Naturally, other Hokkiens are pushing back at the reputation their provincial fellows have garnered for them, but that will be slow going, given that it’s a running joke on Chinese social media that Fujian people are some of the most rabble rousing, regressively misogynistic, violently thieving ethnic group in China. Not entirely undeserved, in my opinion, as you don’t have to look far beyond Taiwan’s parliament’s antics to see why.
Three Bodies
I have to wonder if some things are just impossible to translate culturally with high fidelity. I very much enjoyed Tencent’s production of Liu Cixin’s bestselling Three-Body, as I already enjoyed Edward Zhang Luyi’s portrayal of the First Emperor in Qin Dynasty Epic, but of course Netflix had to get in the game. Jury’s still out for me, but everyone seems to have a hot take. All I can say is that reading Liu in the original Chinese, then the other Liu’s English translation, then watching Tencent’s production, and now, Netflix’s, is an interesting bit of context switching back and forth.
“Westerners fundamentally can't accept the idea of Chinese people inventing cutting-edge technology”, gripes a commenter on Douban, and maybe he isn’t wrong, but there is also the equally valid point that a work of Chinese sci-fi now has wider reach through Netflix, even if imperfect. In a time where bridges to cross cultural gaps are ever more urgently needed, I think we should take what we can.