Bangkok reading matter

All this, plus a strange book in the Japan Foundation Library, “Vita Sexualis” by Mori Ogai, the sexual autobiography of Japan’s 1909 Chief military surgeon!

 

Day 1 Ansell & Elliott cafe 11am

Saphan Kwai hipster!

A general theory of oblivion

A General Theory of Oblivion by Portuguese-Angolan author Jose Eduardo Agualusa is a work of fiction based on a startling true story. In the tense last days of Portuguese colonial rule in Angola, an expat colonial woman finds herself unexpectedly alone in the increasingly hostile environment, and in panic and desperation, walls herself up inside her high-rise apartment…not to set foot outside for another thirty years. Through the windows she can look down on the city below, hear the gunshots and see the demonstrations, watching as the once-grand colonial apartment block all but collapses around her. She withdraws into herself, hermit-like, her days an endless stream of sunny, silent days in her penthouse, looking out over the trees and the bouganvillea flowers.

It is  fascinating premise and reading the book, so evocative of the heat and the clamour of Luanda, in the baking Hong Kong Summer is an experience in itself.

Feminist fictions

Fresh from ‘The Handmaiden’ and ‘The Dispossessed’, I think I have found a new favourite fiction genre – late 1970s and early 1980s feminist ‘sci fi’, books set in the future that speculate not (or not only) on developments in technology but in how societies can be run, how gender relations can be regulated and interestingly, in how language can be used as a tool by regimes to institute their worldview. All of these themes come together in Suzette Haden Elgin’s “Native Tongue.” Written in 1984, it is set in a United States where women have been stripped of their rights and become little more than the property of male ‘guardians’. At the same time, contact and trade have been established with alien races and the world’s economy is dominated by an inward-looking cabal of linguists who alone can act as interpreters and in-betweens between humans and alien races. It is among the women of this group, that a new idea emerges, to create a language only for women which will free them from the grip of patriarchal thinking…

Sexual Freedom

  

Over the weekend I caught up with the new TV adaption of one of my favourite recently-read books, The Handmaid’s Tale. It is a dystopian and brilliantly realised series about a woman who finds herself in a new world where women have been stripped of their rights and placed in a rigid, ritualistic hierarchy of oppression: from well-coiffed but powerless society wives to domestic drudges known as “Marthas” and then “handmaidens,” the women whose sole purpose in society is to bear children. The book was originally written as a chilling thought experiment, and the TV series is just as compelling.

It made me wonder afterwards – what is the connection between sexual and political freedom? Can sexually repressed countries ever be politically free? To what extent has the oppression of women thoughout history been driven by the wish to control their sexuality? Or is it the other way around, is that just a “symptom” of a powerlessness that is primarily economic?

Hong Kong: horrible histories

Facts I learned from Jan Morris’s charmingly dated (it was written in the 1990s by an author most interested in British colonial history) book about Hong Kong:

• The pre-colonial inhabitants of the area suffered from a “horror called Xhu Mao Bing, the Bristle Disease,whose victims found spiky bristles like pig–hairs (sometimes apparently fish–scales, too} sprouting through their skin.” Curious, I looked this up online but couldn’t find any other reference to it anywhere.
• In 1857 a Chinese nationalist plot poisoned the city’s bread supply, (presumably few Chinese ate bread in those days so it was a cunning way to target the British administrative elite). The dosage of arsenic was miscalculated however, so that the poisoning lead to mass European vomitting but not death, and the colonial regime survived.
• The first ever hijacking of an aeroplane occurred in 1940 on a Cathay Pacific flight from Hong Kong to Macau by sea pirates looking to diversify.
• Smoking opium was legal until 1940.
• Under the Japanese occupation, Queens Road Central was re-named Naka Meiji-dori and a monumental Shinto temple was planned for construction on the Peak (but blown up when the occupation ended).
• It was not until 1981 that the census recorded more than 50% of the population had been locally born, rather than migrants from the mainland. So in other words, the influx of people (and money) from the mainland is nothing new. Rather, the brief relative lull during the 1980s and 1990s was the outlier.

Fever dream

“Fever Dream” is the woozily disorienting, and quietly terrifying, English language debut by Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin. A five star read.

HK: visual culture

Above, works from Tokyo illustrator Saki Obata at Wanchai’s Odd One Out, and below, the dreamy hyper-colour-saturated Hong Kong of local illustrator  penguin lab.

Philosophical

Men Without Women

It has been a depressing few weeks for gay rights, with an ongoing witchhunt in Chenchnya leading to the imprisonment, torture and murder of gay men while closer to home, an Indonesian university successfully banned any gay people from attending. But there is also hope, this week arriving in the form of an English translation for the lovely, heart warming comic “My Brother’s Husband,” aimed at educating a mainstream heterosexual (Japanese) audience on homosexuality.

You can order it here.

Also out of Japan this week, though not at all gay-related (despite the titled) is Harumi Murakami’s latest!

Dispossessed

Ursula Le Guin is my favourite sci-fi writer. Her immaculately-constructed worlds echo the goals and ghosts of the 1970s – feminist worlds, planets riven by capitalist-Communist cold wars, anarchist moons, environmentalist Vietnam War parables set in outer space – works of speculative anthropology as well as fiction, imagining how things could be.  Her writing is immersive, brimming with rich details as well as fully realised characters. “The Dispossessed” tells the tale of twin planets Uras and Anarres, the latter an outcast society on a barren world which operates without laws or governments as a kind of whole-planet kibbutz, fiercely protective of its non-hierarchical way of life. On its parent planet meanwhile, the wealthy “West” and authoritarian “East” fight proxy wars in developing countries and governments seek to oppress liberty, whether in the rich countries or the poor ones. A visitor from the egalitarian moon of Anarres must decide how to engage with this world or if it is best to leave it all alone and hide in isolation.

Human

I finally finished the thrilling “Sapiens: A History of Humanity”, a book bursting with strange facts and thought-provoking ideas. Among these: can we measure happiness? If not, how can we measure the success of civilisation? Are we happier than our forebears?

The author, Yuval Harari, answers that we may (or may not) be happier since we abandoned life as hunter gatherers, but when animals are taken into account since the advent of the agricultural revolution, the sum of unhappiness on our planet is greater than ever before. Does that make it a failure?

Elsewhere, he ponders immortality, positing a belief in our finite existence as cultural and religious rather than biological. Scientists have shown our body is made up of thousands of systems which could potentially fail, causing death. But one by one, we have made huge progress in finding these “fixes”. What really is standing in the way of us, one day, soon, finding the final solutions to all of them?

Harari argues powerfully that “progress” – a belief in the ability to make life better – is a concept not shared by all cultures, but one which now powers the modern world (generally for the better).

And along the way he throws in some tantalising historical factoids and perspectives; one is that our Earth was once home to hundreds of “worlds” – human communities who believed themselves alone and unique on the planet, whereas over thousands of years we have inexorably become linked together into one giant Earth-sized “world”.

He wonders what would have happened had Manichaeism, an extinct religion which once flourished from China to North Africa, beaten Christianity to become the new favourite of Rome two thousands years ago. How would this have influenced human thought and morality?

And he relays the fact that aluminium, now used to wrap sandwiches, was once one of the most expensive substances on Earth and that at one infamous banquet Napoleon and his guests of honor ate with aluminium utensils while the second-rank guests were forced to make do with forks and knives of pure gold.

A lot to learn, and a lot to think about.

Cavemen and Kristen Stewart

My twin obsessions this week, oddly, were Kristen Stewart in the strangely luminous “Clouds of Sils-Maria” and prehistoric man, courtesy of the surprise hit book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.”

My curiosity for Olivier Assayas’s “Clouds of…” was piqued by the rave reviews for his upcoming “Personal Shopper” (for which I had snagged tickets at the Hong Kong International Film Festival) and which also starred his (rather unlikely) new muse, Kristen Stewart.

The formerly much-derided Twilight star has been amassing accolades. I have seen her variously described as “the greatest actress of her generation” and “a star for our times.” I didn’t get it. What was the buzz about? But halfway through this movie, which I had originally found slight and rather dull before it totally sucked me in, I twigged. Stewart is a naturalistic actress par excellence. She doesn’t look like she is acting. So at first I took her for granted – where were the virtuoso emoting I associated with “great acting”? Where was the transformation?  She looked like she always does, shaggy dark hair, stumbling over her words, willowy frame in clothed in grungy lesbian-chic. But then I realised that despite that, this character isn’t HER. She is a multimillionaire, not Julian Binoche’s ambitious assistant in the Alps, and the fact that I had forgotten that shows what a great performance it was.

“Sapiens” was also something of a revelation. The book, by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, traces humanity from its origins to the present day. Powerfully written, Yuval kicks off with the sensational reminder that although today there is only one human species, used to thinking of itself as the pinnacle of all evolution, we know that once we shared the world with at least six other human “species” – the homo erectus and Cave of the Red Deer people in China, the dwarf-like homo floresiensis of Nusa Tenggara, the Denisovans in Sibeia. the neaderthals in Europe…. The book claims that humanity’s “original sin” was perhaps the genocide of our brothers and sisters, leaving us alone as the sole surviving humans on the planet.

 

Natural Histories

  

This week I have been reading the book that accompanies a new BBC series, Natural histories. This traces the cultural history of 25 animal species, and how each animal has been portrayed and interpreted through human history. It is such a rich and fascinating topic and the book is full of interesting tangents, from the 1778 painting above “Watson and the Shark” to the Chauvet cave paintings of lions (below) via bugonia (the Ancient Greek belief that bees were spontaneously created from the flesh of decomposing cows), Medieval beliefs that butteflies – contrary to modern sensibilities – were allied to Satan, and the adventures of the Victorian naturalists.

The Essex Serpent

The “Essex Serpent” by Sarah Parry has been my holiday reading. It is based on a 1669 pamphlet entitled “Strange news out of Essex” which told the story of a dragon-like creature terrorising the swamps of the then-rural English county, now located on the outskirts of greater London. Intriguingly, Parry has picked up this real-life inspiration and re-imagined a story set two hundred years later. In the Victorian era, where Charles Darwin’s ideas are being hotly debated and British high society society has become fascinated by strange specimens streaming in from all over the empire, an upper-class London moves to Essex and hears rumblings of the serpent, said to have arisen in the Essex “Blackwater.”

Barracuda

Barracuda is the ABC television adaption of the book by the same name by Melbourne author Christos Tsiolkas. It tells the story of a young aspiring swimming champion transferred to an elite private school, and expounds on Tsiolkas’s usual themes: what it takes to be a man in a modern, multi-ethnic Australia, how masculinity can be a toxic quagmire of anger or a positive force, and how gay men can reconcile the different parts of their lives as men, as gay men, as brothers and sons, and members of their ethnic communities. If that makes it sound dour though, its not. The series is wonderful – delicate and tender at times, searingly blunt at others, and searching. It was also, I thought, exceptionally well-acted, my favourite character being Rachel Griffith’s all-too-familiar Eastern suburbs harpie.

The Mirror of the World

Created as part of Melbourne’s designation as a World City of Literature, the exhibition “Books and ideas: a mirror of the world” is located in one of the galleries that ring the dramatic high Victorian Reading Room at the State Library. It contains manuscripts from time periods throughout history, such as the Javanese koran below.

 

Zadie’s back

Despite a slow beginning, Zadie Smith’s latest won me over by the end, a return to form after her (I thought) rather forgettable “NW”. It was one tonge-in-cheek line that convinced me, when she described the protagonist looking over the sun sinking of Hamstead Heath “now empty of everyone but ducks and adventurous men”. 😉

Book report

Some of my most recent reads:

The Street of Everlasting Happiness: a journalistic account of the lives of people living along a 2km stretch of Changde Road, “Ever Happy” street, in Shanghai’s French Concession. From a wenqing (Chinese hipster) to survivors of the Cultural Revolution, immigrants and pyramid scheme sales people, businesswomen and families illegally evicted to make way for construction, the book provides a survey of the sweep of recent Chinese history and how it has echoed through the lives of those making up China’s biggest and brightest city.

Swing Time: Halfway through Zadie Smith’s latest so too early to make a judgement.

Parade: After the recent, excellent movie “Rage” I decided to check out a book by the author of the original story, Shuichi Yoshida. In this one, the seedy side of life is revealed in a shared flat of Japanese university students.

The Thai Occult: Finally, this excellent hardcover book recently arrived for me in the post – a present from some faraway friends who know me way too well. By a mysterious author called Jenx, the book lays out fascinating background information on the practising of the Thai paranormal, for example the powers of a woven-skull-fragment ceremonial belt known as a panneng, and the various different kinds of lersi ( magical hermits) or amulets. Armed with this knowledge, I can feel a return trip to the Thai amulet mall in Mongkok coming on…

Urban explorer

Urban explorers are recommended to pick up a copy of “Made in Shanghai”, a self-proclaimed guide to “peculiar buildings” in the city. These include the faux-Tibetan golden palace atop the Marriott hotel (which is describes as “catering to vulgar tastes”), an apartment complex with its own artificial cliff face and a quasi-imperial “dragon pillar” holding up a freeway.

Zhongshuge

The dark mirrored curves of the Zhongshuge bookstore in Hangzhou’s Star Avenue mall.