Few months ago when I talked with B. about our next long-trip&photo destination, China came up. Usually we have few options and we take time to decide, but when I've mentioned China, we both agreed in a second. I've spent next few months in some kind of preparation. Besides taking time to get the plane tickets and visa (which here in Berlin required a paper with a sexy name meldebescheinigung$%??#$???) we had to decide which route will we take. It is for sure that visiting China will happen in Part2 also - fuck, it so hugeeee. We took some time to decide (Lonely Planet helped) we'll be flying to Beijing and than, a bit touristy, we will head to Pingyao, Xian, Shanghai and some places around.
Next stage started when I realized, again, that all my years of education did not provide me with any working knowledge of China, besides few facts about WWII, and some Ming stuff. So I decided to take things just a bit more seriously. That meant that preparations for the trip became like discovering a totally new planet, of which you just don't know a shit.
I asked my friend, who is also anarchist and speaks Chinese, to recommend some readings and he told me about Ba Jin and well known Lu Xun.
I have managed to get some Serbo-Croatian translations of 3 books by Ba Jin : Family, Garden of Repose and Cold Nights. The thing is that most of his books were revised in one point so many anarchist topic were removed, but still, the reading was challenging and it left me contemplating for days. I would definitely recommend. Even though, apparently, Ba Jin denounced anarchism later in his life, (as Emma Goldman once wrote about older comrades leaving the movement "Let them go, we had the best of them"), the books strongly resonate fight against the patriarchate and old system. I was most happy with the women characters in all three books. The Garden of Repose was extremely brutal novel, so if you are looking for something to "touch" you, here's the stuff (the book was banned in China for being too depressive for the time) . There is also a beautiful old movie based on the most popular Ba Jin's book Family, and it has English subtitles, click HERE. What is also interesting is that Ba Jin, even though he was an anarchist half of his life and in one point was banned from writing and so on, he was later a nominee for the Nobel, he is one of the top national witters now, and it is possible to visit his house which is made a museum after his death.
As Lu Xun is a Chinese classic on the west, it was easy to get Penguin's Classics. I found a lot of use of a word "acerbic" when reading about the author on the internet, I liked that. This reading required a lot of Google besides the texts, cause in almost every story there is a reference to some historical event or custom. Besides being a literary journey, it helped me discover some quite disturbing information like THIS or THIS. One of the stories, A Madman's Diary , I would put besides Orwell's 1984 or Kafka's The Trial, it can make you feel very uncomfortable and nervous while reading, scratching and questioning your own (in)sanity. Here is a decent short presentation of Lu Xun.
Next bite was Julia Lovells The Opium War. I remember we mentioned the topic in high school when talking about colonialism, but really, just mentioned it. Another one of the Europe's many to-trow-up-colonialist stories, this one can guide you to a bit closer understanding of East-West relations and some understanding of the delights of opium consumption... Before starting reading the book, I've menaged to watch a popular and high production Chinese movie The Opium War (HERE with english subs).
Arif Dirlik's Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution is another book I've menaged to get. Here is the online version if someone is interested. Although it is written in that classic academic way, with quotes from Hobsbawm etc, it surely gives a lot of information about the beginning of anarchist movement, people involved, its problems and its end.
I watched quite a number of documentaries and lectures, I think I've already forgot some of them, but here are few decent ones:
BBC's Wild China was easy to watch and quite fun, you can find it on Youtube (I can't do it for you cause Germany's copyright stuff).
China, a century of revolution: 3 part documentary with great archive footage and heavy facts.
A crash course on Taoism with some info about other eastern philosophies by Alan Watts
Three part documentary, about The Wall, of course...
Documentary about Forbidden City, of course...
Documentary about famous Terracotta Warriors, of course...
Documentary about tallest building in China (well, soon another one will be finished), your hands will sweat, I promise.
and so on... well, I think this was enough for our first trip to China... I could put on the list some masterpieces of Chinese cinema like Raise the red lantern, but lets leave something for another time...
No comments:
Post a Comment