Moving.

While I've, admittedly, been bad about blogging regularly, this has largely been due to the unavailability of blog services over the past half year. Recently, the blog service WordPress opened up, and I decided to make the switch.

The new blog is available at:
http://heinbockel.wordpress.com

I've now got my hands on a new computer and a dedicated proxy service, so I expect to update with some regularity. See you there.

Blood Alley

Old Hollywood movies have a distinct naive charm to them that grants filmmakers significant license. "Blood Alley," from 1955 is such a movie. Hollywood couldn't make this movie today, but not only for the obvious reasons of yellow-face, racism, and sexism. Today, this movie couldn't be made because Hollywood is increasingly reliant on international markets. Recently, "2012" has been a great success here in the mainland, largely because of its positive portrayal of China. But "Blood Alley," a major release from the beginning of the Cold War, is a curious anti-communist movie that could never make it to China, an emerging market Hollywood takes very seriously.

The movie itself is simple: an old China hand Merchant Marine (John Wayne) is busted from Chinese prison and brought to a village where he pays for his freedom by captaining a ferry of villages in a daring escape to Hong Kong. Somehow Lauren Bacall's Cathy Grainger, a woman who lives in the village with her absent, drunk father, manages to fall in love with him. I should add that she falls in love with Wayne's character, Wilder, despite his assertion that he's got "dames all up and down the coast" and a strange incident in which he slaps her in order to make her angry so he can then inform her of her father's death. Oh, old Hollywood!

While the movie is kind of banal, the curious way it flips classic depictions from communist propaganda on their heads, even if the film may not have done this intentionally, is notable. In Shanghai, there is a fascinating gallery of old propaganda posters that I've had occasion to visit twice. 60 years after "Red China's" founding, 50 plus years after this film's release, and 30 years beyond it's initial opening economic reforms, we have more insight into the early years of the PRC via such galleries. The reversal of depictions of various characters in these works of propaganda make "Blood Alley" a more interesting film, retrospectively, than it should be.

First and foremost in the film are Wilder and Grainger, Westerners come to China who become heroes to the people. In 1955, propaganda would have a typical Chinese villager believe that Westerners were greedy, hideous cretins. While Wilder's anti-communist sentiments may have originated in the selfish motivation of lost business and imprisonment, by the end of the movie he has come to side with the villagers, the "bleeding heart of China."

Likewise, the portrayal of the Feng family, villainized as the village's communists, are desperate, selfish people. While the other villagers, fleeing communism for capitalist Hong Kong form a tight, supportive community, the communist Fengs stay apart and indeed try to poison the villagers. The family's patriarch is obese and wears fine garments while other carry him across mud. In any Chinese film, Feng is an archetypal "capitalist roader." The Chinese soldiers, rather than being valiant, strong heroes, are also awful: one attempts to rape Grainger.

The film is commendable for its mostly human portrayal of the villagers and for not giving Wayne a little Oriental plum blossom girl in pigtails and a flowered qipao (at least on screen). However, Susu the maid speaks in awful pidgin (we get it, she likee likee very much) and several Chinese characters are played by white actors. As intentionally bad as Susu's English is, every other character in the movie's Chinese is unintentionally just as bad. This movie is worth watching just to see John Wayne take Mandarin Chinese behind the shed and give it the Old Yeller treatment.

For me, as a China person, this film was an interesting watch and a fun way to spend an evening. But most people will probably pay more attention to Wayne's and Bacall's lack of chemistry and treat it like the middling, goofy old Hollywood action film it is.

Remember The Time?

Since sometime in late spring- around Memorial Day weekend and certain unspeakable events that happened twenty years ago around the first week of June- just about every Western blog has been blocked, leaving me unable to post anything without the help of a good proxy filter. Avoiding China's Great Firewall is not very difficult to do, but it's often a nuisance. I've been using Facebook and Twitter- two other blocked services- with much less frequency than the nearly hourly use to which I was accustomed. Like many other expats here, I was hoping this would all just blow over as the summer passed by notable anniversaries that could be exploited by overzealous internet users. Unfortunately, since then we've seen a steady stream of major blog-worthy events, of which several gave the monitors of the Great Firewall more cause to keep the current bans in place.

I fell ill and was treated at a Chinese hospital, giving me valuable insight into the current American health care clusterf*ck.

Michael Jackson died, which was a bummer but ultimately not world changing. His influence lasts, but them man was essentially irrelevant.

Chaos and violence in Xinjiang Province. The western province home to a substantial ethnic minority has been in a state of unrest due to ethnic and political tensions that spilled over into violence this July. Twitter got blocked again in the wake of this. I spoke to a guy from Xinjiang I know recently about this. He said that things out there are bad, but that his people are treated well in Shanghai. I found this curious, since many Chinese people I've spoken to stereotypically talk about Xinjiang people in racist stereotypes.

Friends and I formed a band and have our first concert scheduled for Novmember 4, the one year anniversary of the election of Barack Obama.

More ethnic tension across China as stabbings involving syringes and ethnic minorities occur.

I started working a second job as I learned the true face of working in China. Don't believe what you've read in the NYT or AP regarding working here. They're aloof.

Soon, we will have a major holiday: the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. Things should get ridiculous.

The Yankees made it back to the playoffs.

Keep alive.

The Hardware Store

Shortly after waking up today, I started thinking of the best way to spend my three day weekend. (China marks today, May 1, International Labor Day, as a national holiday) Looking about my apartment, I was discontented with the more or less bare walls and decided to take action. With visions of grandeur, I went off to the hardware store and the intention to embark upon an art project that would drastically change the decor of my apartment.

While the art project itself is still in the envisioning stage, I knew that to get what I wanted I would need a big canvas made of wire screen. This project will, you see, involve of papier mache.

Thus, I marched though the doorway and down aisles of porcelain toilets and various other decorative fixtures to the "raw materials" department. With rough dimensions of the project in mind, I first set about converting from standard measurements to metric. At this point, I can convert from Farenheit to Celcius well, as well as miles to kilometers and pounds to kilograms. However, other units of distance, such as inches to centimeters or feet to meters, is still a bit beyond what I can do. In the end, I simply ended up spreading my arms and asking "How many meters is this? This is how wide it should be." After a short discourse, what I wanted was clear and it became time to bargain. Not really knowing the price of wood, screen, nails, and staples, etc., I doubt I fared well. I think in the end, I probably netted free delivery. However, not having any tools of my own, my position to negotiate the cost of having it all put together was rather weak.

None of this is very noteworthy. Outside of the bargaining, it had been up to this point a rather typical American hardware store experience. Then, the assembly began and suddenly I was in China again.

People who have not been to China expect it to be a crowded, noisy place. And, of course, it is. Here in China, we foreigners also enjoy groaning about the annoying Chinese cultural nuance of basically ignoring strangers- unless, of course, that stranger is doing pretty much anything. Naturally, as assemblage of this canvas frame began, what seemed to be half of the store crowded around us to wonder outloud "What is the laowai (a slang term for foreigner) doing?" And so there I was, instructing the store worker as per my specifications while a peanut gallery of smoking Chinese men proffered their own advice and made jokes about how the store worker should make me pay even more.

While this all sounds annoying, it was actually rather fun. The hardware store felt kind of like a circus. As tired as I am of being so regularly the focus of the center ring, the atmosphere was jovial enough that I could laugh with them throughout the afternoon and the experience lacked almost all of the frustration that typically comes with trying to get anything done efficiently here in China. Next time, however, I will bring a bargaining partner.

Do I Know You?

Chinese New Year is apparently so crazy that it took me just over two months to recover. Whoops?

Notes:

• I got promoted (kind of): I am now no longer an "academic specialist" but rather an "academic supervisor."
• My oldest friend- at least in my recollection- came to visit China while she was teaching in Thailand. During her stopover in Shanghai, I built upon the lessons of my last guest and tried doing almost no touristy stuff at all. Instead, we tried out random restaurants I had always wanted to try, walked around, and went to the brand new Barbie store. The Barbie store was kind of like a girly Niketown, maybe. It's six floors, slathered in pink, and has an overpriced bar up on the top floor. That being said, it's actually really well decorated.
• More rock concerts, including the group Battles all the way from NY and Hedgehog from Beijing. Battles was outrageous, while Hedgehog was spoiled by the crowd of obnoxious Chinese hipsters apparently unfamiliar with deodorant and toothpaste, not to mention standard rock concert protocol.
• Wow, Bush administration, you just make it easier and easier to paint you as awful villains, don't you? Really? You waterboarded the same two dudes over two-hundred fifty times? I don't imagine I'd take too kindly to being tortured, but I suspect somewhere around the fortieth time, I'd start to be a little nonplussed by the whole affair.
• Baseball season is here! Go Yankees! The managers of my company are all from Taiwan, where baseball is much more popular than it is here on the mainland where you're lucky if people even know what baseball is. One of the managers, being from Taiwan, is a big fan of Wang Chien-ming and the Yankees. I don't think I'd ever spoken to him in the nearly one year of time I've been around him (between my intership and my current tenure) until he approached me after Wang bombed again in his second start to say "Wang Chien-ming..." while shaking his head. I took the chance today to approach him and do the same today, following Wang's third blowout.
• The weather's getting nicer, so I'm taking more opportunities to wander around as a pedestrian instead of as a passenger. It makes the city a lot more interesting, and it's amazing how much closer everything is than you might think。
• I'll officially be returning to the States, although only for two weeks, in June. So, start making preparations now.

And, just like that, we're back in business.

Not So Sure About This Place

A new beauty salon opened up next to my apartment complex recently. I'm not sure they're going to stay in business, though, with the kind of... unconventional... services they advertise:

That was too good to not share.

Can Bud Selig Get Kicked Out of Office Already?

Bud Selig sucks. I mean, how can he always act so surprised about steroids in baseball when it is so obvious that he and the owners were complicit in all of this? If baseball really wants to move on past the steroid era, Selig has to go. And while we're at it, Don Fehr, the player's union chief, is a weasel, too.

These guys clearly don't really care about the integrity of the game, or the bad example they set by turning a blind eye to this cheating. Their reactions to the pressures from the media in dealing with this are blatantly just affectations, and are nothing short of nauseous. Today he announced that he was considering punishing A-Rod for his failed drug test six years ago. This is the wrong move for two reasons: 1) it was not against the rules to use PEDs when A-Rod failed the test; 2) there are 103 others who failed that year and evidently will not be punished.

Don't get me wrong. I understand the magnitude of the game's biggest star being nailed for this. He plays for my team, so it hits especially close to home. But it's incredibly unfair and unproductive to turn him into a scapegoat.

If they really want to send a message, they should release the other names and start making the rules prohibiting PEDs stricter. The costs of using PEDs has to outweigh the benefits of using them, and "the good of the game" is unfortunately not enough to stop players from juicing; the humiliation and official consequences of being caught need to be more intense to create such disincentive.

Baseball also has to expand the scope of these consequences. Players alone should not be punished. Coaches and owners should be punished, too. Even if they aren't aware that a player is cheating, if the consequences affect more than just the individual, he might think twice about acting inappropriately. Not only that, but baseball should make it a requirement that any player with paid endorsements must have in his contract a clause saying that being caught juicing will lead to an automatic termination of that contract. Again, it's all about taking away the incentive for these guys to cheat.

None of this will happen, though, as long as Bud Selig is in charge because he has no spine for it. He knows exactly how much he gained thanks to players using PEDs and is too reluctant to see it go. This is supposed to be a new era of change upon we as a nation have embarked. And as the American pastime (screw you, football), baseball needs a change in leadership.