Essays

Looking Back

Lauren Teixeira

Nostalgic youth films in China – Lauren Teixeira

The release of Feng Xiaogang’s high-profile film Youth, a swoony romance set during the late Cultural Revolution and China’s brief incursion into Vietnam, was dramatically halted in the lead up to the 19th Party Congress last October, touching as it did on a historically sensitive period. Meanwhile, a nostalgic coming-of-age film set at a vocational college in 1997, We Roared Past Youth (the Chinese title translates as ‘That Fleeting Period of Youth’), quietly entered theaters on October 5. On the surface, the film bore a number of similarities to Youth: unrequited teen love, family drama, and the hazy burnishing of an era goneby. But whereas Youth sought to grapple with China’s history – in its own perhaps overly rose-tinted way – We Roared Past Youth did not engage with its historical backdrop beyond a few nostalgic touches.

Video

Portrait of a Beijinger: Raise the Red Flag

Tom Fearon

A car collector builds an empire of Communist relics – Tom Fearon

In the final episode of the four-part series ‘Portrait of a Beijinger,’ Tom Fearon and Abel Blanco profile Luo Wenyou, a classic car enthusiast who leaves the civil service in his rear-view mirror, instead collecting the classic “Red Flag” cars that were the stalwart of Communist officials. The video is on Youku for streamers in China, and on Vimeo as embedded below. Keep reading for Tom’s essay about Luo.

Chinese Literature Podcast

Children of the Revolution

Rob Moore

Rob Moore and Lee Moore on the enduring legacy of Hua Tong's Yan'an Seeds

Pumpkin seeds are the reason Mao and the People’s Liberation Army won the civil war in 1949, and the generations that followed pretty much rocked. Or so says Hua Tong’s Cultural Revolution-era short story 'Yan’an Seeds.' It’s Communist propaganda, so why bother? As Lee argues, it’s some of the best dang propaganda you’ll ever read, providing an invaluable lens on how Mao and the CCP used art and literature to shape the way people thought:

Chinese Corner

The Said Unsaid

Karin Malmstrom and Nancy Nash

When Mandarin means more than you think – Karin Malmstrom and Nancy Nash

It is always said, and it’s usually true, that méiyǒu is the first phrase a visitor learns in China. So often is it heard, it may be the only Chinese phrase that many visitors remember. But méiyǒu can mean more than “not have”…

Méi yǒu (没有) – “not have”

  • There are none.
  • We have some, but are saving them for special customers.
  • I cannot be bothered to find any because I have no incentive to do so.
  • If you are persistent enough to hang around and ask a few more times, I may be able to locate some.

Reviews

Cosmopolitan Colonialism

Jeremiah Jenne

Jeremiah Jenne reviews Robert Bickers’ Out of China

In the summer of 1945, during the final months of World War II, a concert at the Grand Theater in Shanghai hosted a jazz symphony inspired by American composer George Gershwin, played by an orchestra founded by the British consisting of Chinese musicians as well as Russian and Western European Jewish refugees. The music was contemporary, with a boogie-woogie beat, performed in a modernist hall designed by a Hungarian architect. The principal vocalist was Li Xianglan, a famous singer born Yoshiko Yamaguchi to parents who had settled in Manchuria from Japan. Such an improbable mashup is a fitting tableau in Robert Bickers' new book Out of China: How the Chinese Ended the Era of Western Domination.