I recently made a short trip to the capital city of the consumerist communist country. The last time I was there was in the summer of 2005, and there is a marked difference since the Olympics trundled through town. Was very pleasantly surprised to see trees lining the roads, flowering pretty spring blossoms in vibrant colours, and displaying that lovely mild green of early spring. The historical buildings we clustered around to gaze at still have shiny coats of paint. But air quality was still shit. And I have my traditionalist/romanticist misgivings about the glossification/swankification of the city. A whole bunch of sleazy little low-rise bars had been bulldozed to make way for a hulking new commercial development. A tiny little patch of restored and protected hutong houses cowering in the shadow of yet more shiny skyscrapers are now occupied by posh restaurants and bars.
I’d like to dig out my old blog post on my 2005 trip to China, but can’t do it right now because I’m typing this on MS Word at work. >.>
I’m afraid I had a few hours of playing the awful voyeuristic tourist when we went into a hutong and I snapped pictures of the ‘quaint dilapidated environment’. This whole conscience of the tourist like thing bugs me sometimes. >.<
On the trip, I had the (mis)fortune of spending an evening being made the plaything of a couple of uber bourgeoisie (uber) brats. One was 5 and a half years old and the other probably something like 7. The little terrors were vaguely cute, but then would sneak up behind me when I was eating and tickle my neck. Like, hellooo, I’m not your cat, damn it!! And I had to grin and bear it because their parents were treating us to dinner. Then they’d insist I accompany them to the lobster tank, and when I told them not to bash their fists against the glass by trying to appeal to their milks of human kindness and compassion, they just paused for a while and continued their banging. And then they dragged me out into the lobby and this takes us to the point of my even mentioning them – they proceeded to attempt to entertain me with a series of ‘performances’. To be fair, it was actually rather sweet of them.
But yes, the ‘performances’. First some calisthenics-like dances, then singing, then they started reciting stories! They go to school in China, and apparently they make them memorise stories complete with suitable intonation/emoting, and hand actions/gestures, body movements… … The full works! It was… scary! Impressive, but just ever so slightly scary! And totally put me to shame. I never excelled in dictation. I hated the little exercises they put us through in school; never succeeded in putting any literature quotes into my brain for extended periods of time for exams (I scoffed at the idea of memorising quotes); and totally resented being made to recite/memorise our texts in Japan. My recent one claim to memory work was the lyrics to Placebo’s “Every You Every Me”, and as I sat there watching the two girls, I realized that I couldn’t get by the first 3 verses for that too! O.o I think my brain is just so far gone in its laziness it refuses to retain any information in verbatim. According to the father, education based on dictation is the way to go. A year ago I would have screamed my violent disagreement. But now I’m thinking – if I could rattle off the classics, the beautifully crafted texts, the twists and turns of wordplay, why, it’d be amazing! And I’d be able to have the intricacies of language in much more profound order internalised in my brain. And of course there is that side of me that wishes to flaunt knowledge and display learnedness/culturedness/what-not-ness by being able to memorise stuff.
The sad thing is that even though I listen to a lot of music, I can’t recite/sing the lyrics to almost all of them! I think it’s because when I listen to music, my mind takes off on many different directions as well, and even though the instrumentation and words go in, they don’t bury themselves into the whorls of my brain and take root. And as illustrated by the ‘Every You Every Me’ example, even if I do memorise some of them, I can very well forget as they get overwritten with the tonnes of data and information I expose myself to each day. Graah.
---Back Home---
I am falling ill. T-T And stupid shitty shit has been coming in at work for these two days. Oh woe is me.
