The Wong Blog

So instead of dining at one of these retro Cultural Revolution-themed restaurants while in China, I decided to get my C.R. fix elsewhere. Namely, by picking up a few propaganda posters from that era. Last summer, when The Hong was visiting the US, he gave me a few of these and they were…how do I put this?…totally absurd. But in a good way.

One depicted, in cartoon form, a Chinese fist coming down from the sky and smashing two figures that looked to be caricatures of Uncle Sam and Vladimir Lenin. Written on the sleeve of the fist was some exceptionally incendiary rhetoric about China crushing the imperialist American running dogs and the false Soviet socialists. When I showed this particular poster to the father of a Taiwanese friend, his reaction spoke volumes: “Whoa… Uh, you probably don’t want to hang this one up…anywhere.”

Actually, yes, I do. Especially if it garners a reaction like that.

When I was in Harbin, The Hong showed me another poster, one that he was going to give to Our Pal Val. Here is a picture of it…

Courtesy of maopost.com

Nice, right? It’s like We Are The World…The THIRD World—a multi-ethnic stew of fierce-looking revolutionaries that are armed to the teeth and ready to GO. The caption reads, People from all over the world, unite and defeat the American invaders and all their running dogs! Note the African, dressed in a sheet and carrying a machine gun. Also, the keffiyeh-wearing Palestinian who’s toting a rocket launcher. I think there’s a Swede somewhere in there, too—look for the guy carrying a grenade and a meatball. (Yes, Nordic countries, you will not be spared when the world catches on fire with revolutionary fervor.)

So when The Hong and I were in Beijing, we headed to the Panjiayuan weekend market to check out some posters. Panjiayuan market is sort of like a touristy flea market where you can get all sorts of Chinese junque—jade, jewelry, fans, chops, paintings, silks, rugs, fake antiques, Mao memorabilia, etc.

One poster that I was seriously considering, but did not purchase, depicted four leaders of the Chinese Communist Party festively celebrating Chinese New Year with a group of young children. The leaders were Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De (founder of the Red Army), and Liu Shaoqi (Mao’s first handpicked successor, who was subsequently purged during the Cultural Revolution as a “capitalist roader,” and allowed to die in agony from medical neglect; irony of ironies, before he was purged, he wrote the New York Times best seller, How To Be A Good Communist—I guess he was wrong. First rule of being a good communist: don’t write anything that you can sell. In fact, don’t sell anything period. You’re Mao’s successor, not Sam Walton.).

Sorry, couldn’t find a depiction of the poster, but it basically screamed “CHINA IS A SOCIALIST PARADISE.”

I was thinking of juxtaposing this happy poster with one of the fiercer ones. For example, there was this poster from the 1960s depicting a group of Chinese revolutionaries who were traveling by boat, ready for an amphibious assault. Can you guess to where? If you said Taiwan, you’d be correct…

Courtesy of chinesepropaganda.com

Note the female communications officer at the top, sporting a hairstyle with Princess Leia-style buns. Also note the guy carrying a missle…with no launcher. Yo, dude, what are you going to do with that thing? Roll it to Taipei and hope Chiang Kai-shek steps on it? Hit it with a hammer and hope it goes boom? Look at the guy in the red tank top in front. He’s got a gun in one hand and a barbell in the other. He is jacked up. And the woman in the pink hat? A member of one of China’s minority groups. Even they’re on board with re-uniting with Taiwan. Finally, note that they’re all facing the wrong way. Uh, guys, I think Taiwan is the other way…

Actually, a better juxtaposition would have paired the “Liberate Taiwan” poster above with this one from 1990…

Courtesy of maopost.com

Apparently, the caption reads, Sisterly love across the Taiwan Strait. Look! It’s bikini-clad Chinese and Taiwanese babes frolicking together! Note the watermelon and Pepsi in the lower right-hand corner. Watermelon and Pepsi? You all know what that means: Let’s get this party started!!

Weird.

Anyway, I ended up purchasing two posters. Here’s the first…

Courtesy of maopost.com

It’s entitled Magical soldiers in a shallow lake. I like it because of the contrast it captures: at first blush it looks like a nice peaceful, bucolic scene set in a lake full of beautiful lily pads. Everything is very still. But it’s still because there are seven heavily-armed hidden Chinese guerillas setting an ambush and ready to pounce on someone or something (the shop proprietor claimed it was the Japanese).

Here’s the second one I bought…

Courtesy of maopost.com

Anytime you have a multi-ethnic melange of people lifting guns into the air…well, that’s a winner right there. What’s more is the caption. Now the caption on this poster is different from the one I bought. This caption says, Long live Marxism, Leninism and Mao Ze-Dong Thought!

Pretty good. But my poster’s caption is in English: Powerty is from gun.

Exactly.

Huh? Powerty??

I think it’s supposed to be the following quote from Mao: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Right…

Anyway, check out www.maopost.com for more absurd Chinese propaganda posters and their translated captions. Good stuff.

Sorry, taking things a little bit out of order, but I wanted to mention one huge difference between this most recent trip to Beijing and my first trip about ten years ago. Although on both trips there was a lot of running around the city looking for various shops, restaurants, and sites, generally we were much more successful finding things this time. For example, on that first trip, we tried finding some Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant and the People’s Liberation Army surplus store, but all we came across was like an empty field and a construction site, where those two things were supposed to be.

This time, after much effort and persistence, we generally found what we were looking for (unlike U2—try looking harder, guys), whether it was a PLA surplus store (yes, finally found it!), some weirdo store selling North Korean art/propaganda (which, frustratingly, wasn’t where the guidebook—the guidebook that was printed earlier this freaking year—said it would be because it had just moved), or some funky t-shirt shop deep in a random hutong.

In some ways, we should have been more successful on that first trip to Beijing simply because we were like a cultural strike team. We had just spent six-weeks together in a hostile, highly-urban foreign environment, and we were operating like a well-oiled machine. Each of us knew what every other person would do, say, or think, even before they did it. Plus, we had essentially native-level Mandarin speakers, two demolitions experts, and a rainbow coalition of ethnicities, including (most importantly) three ethnic Cantonese (if you have three Cantonese, you can do almost anything; with four, you can take over the world—or at least up-end a sclerotic imperial dynasty). Yet we still encountered a construction pit where a restaurant should have been!

This time, I was accompanied by two Korean-Americans, who essentially hate China. But we were persistent, and it eventually paid off. I guess that was the lesson I learned from my first trip to Beijing (and The Amazing Race): never give up, “add oil,” and always carry around the latest guidebook, preferably one whose ink is still moist.

(And even that’s no guarantee! Cf. North Korean propaganda store.)

My journey from here to Harbin? Brutal. Three legs and nearly 24-hours of travel (including layovers), commencing on a Friday evening, right after a crazy work week. And, because I want you to feel my pain, I’m going to recount the journey here in excruciating detail. It was like the Long March…except worse.

You’ve been warned.

The first leg was from here to L.A. Not so bad except my flight was delayed for an hour, arriving at LAX around 9 p.m. My parents picked me up and we had a mediocre dinner at a nearby hotel’s restaurant (airport hotels = depressing). We decided to eat near the airport because, for some reason, we were worried about time. Except we ended up having too much time since my flight to Beijing left at 1:40 a.m. In hindsight, we should have followed my father’s inclination to drive to Cerritos (20 minutes on the 105 & 605) for some better quality ethnic food (read: Chinese, the type of cuisine I would be consuming over the next week—so I mistakenly vetoed that idea).

One good thing about dinner was when it ended: we caught the last minute of the Lakers playoff game in which they closed out the Utah Jazz. The hotel sports bar was packed with airport employees.

After my parents dropped me off at the Air China terminal, I got my boarding pass and spent about two hours sitting in a stupor at the gate. Bad times.

It was even worse times after I boarded the plane—the 747 was packed and I was assigned a middle seat. The half-hour before we took off seriously sucked as I stewed over my plight: stuck in the middle seat at the beginning of a 13-hour flight to Beijing, with still another two-hour flight to Harbin ahead. Sandwiched in between would be a bout with Chinese customs & immigration and a 2-hour layover.

Fortunately, I couldn’t mope for long as it was nearly 2 a.m. I eventually lost consciousness and have no memory of takeoff. By the time I awoke, we were already airborne and the cabin crew had started serving dinner.

It was 3:30 a.m. and there were major horrors ahead.

To be continued…

Happy Tiananmen Square Incident Day!

According to the Chinese government, nineteen years ago today…

Nothing happened.

Absolutely nothing.

Just another day…

For some reason, I couldn’t access this blog for a while. Is that you, Chinese Communist Party-Sponsored Hacker?

Anyway, I’ve been back in the States for a while now and am slowly reviewing the recordings and tapes of my trip. So far, I’ve come to this conclusion: The Hong has a pretty sweet pad. I stayed in the guest “suite,” which was apparently sponsored by Snickers. (There’s a stolen Chinese banner promoting Snickers hanging in the guest room.)

Two things in particular about the bathroom. First, you can’t flush toilet paper, so after you wipe, you dump it in a garbage can. Very interesting.

Second, there’s no designated shower area, like a tub or a stall. There’s a drain on the floor, a handshower on the wall, and tile pretty much everywhere else. So when you’re showering, you’re hanging out with the toilet, the sink, and the standalone washing machine (no dryer), and everything gets wet.

But the freedom is marvelous.

You can stroll about the bathroom as you’re showering. You can lift your hands and spin around. See the light that I have found… Buy crack cocaine by the pound…

Seriously, it’s amazing what you can do when unconstrained by a shower curtain or a tub. Jumping jacks, calisthenics, Pilates, yoga, capoeira, eskrima, parkour, etc.