entertainment is educational.
ムっ I want my favorite series on onemanga.com to be updated. (Hourou Musuko, Piano no Mori, Family Compo.) I could (finally) finish Bokura No while I'm waiting, but... I really like these three D:
There is something about seinen manga that I really love, esp. when it features adolescent protagonists. (If only Kaijuu no Kodomo hadn't been dropped - I was really interested in that one, esp. since it included one of my odd hobbies, learning about deep sea creatures like oarfish.)
I want to go to Japan and find an Internet cafe and just sit and read them. I loved hanging out at the bookstore in Iwate for just that reason, even when I couldn't actually read the books because of the surplus of kanji.
So... scanlators, when you update, I'll be so, so happy. <3
I am reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I love, love love love it. I am currently enjoying this book more than I have any other in a while. Hopefully it continues to captivate me. I'm not quite halfway through. Desai's writing style is awesome - quirky and full of black humor which never detracts from the seriousness of the story she's telling. The characters are also quirky, but also completely believable.
Recently I watched two Chinese movies - Xiu Xiu and Zhang Yimou's To Live. I have seen To Live before, in eleventh grade, when I watched it alongside reading Jung Chan's Wild Swans. (Another fabulous book. It's a mix of biography and memoir, detailing three generations of the author's family history in China, from the imperial age, to the Kuomintang, to the rise of Communism and the present. In spite of mostly being walls of text with no dialogue for hundreds of pages, it kept my attention with no trouble.)
I would not have guessed Li Gong played Jiazhen in To Live, if only because she ages so well throughout the movie. (At the end, Jiazhen has to be in her forties or fifties, and it's completely believable - Li Gong does a fabulous job with the middle aged female mannerisms.)
It's a very sad, dramatic movie, but I think it's one of Zhang Yimou's best, because it portrays an average family's struggle to live normally within the powerful machine of communism, without fully (or even slightly) understanding it. We watch Fugui swear absolute loyalty to Communism, but it's clear his devotion stems from a mix of fear and desperation to believe in the future. To some extent, his faith pays off - the existence of Little Bun, and the dreams Fugui and Jiazhen have for him, perpetrate the message of hope. (One reviewer on imdb complained that there was no hope in To Live. I truly think they were wrong, that while the movie's main purpose wasn't to inspire the viewer, it wasn't to depress them with the idea that the world is an unsalvageable mess. It's mostly thought-provoking. I don't know that I can say it's an intellectual movie, but it's certainly not genre or trash, and most of what happens in it fits in very well with Chan's accounts in Wild Swans. I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of Chinese history now.)
Also, this was very interesting to me - Fugui is a shadow puppeteer for much of the movie. I had never seen Chinese shadow puppets before. They look very similar to Indonesian wayang kulit puppets. I'm now gonna research shadow puppetry more, too. After seeing an Indonesian performance in a class last semester (plus my prof brought in actual puppets he owns), I thought they were so interesting.
Sad as To Live is, Xiu Xiu, for me, is even sadder. This story is set during the 50s-60s, I believe, when Communist China's agenda included purging the intellectuals to make way for the era of the working class. Students from cities were sent to rural areas to be workers around their late teens. I've seen this in movies before, such as in The Little Seamstress. Wenxiu is the main character, a fairly coddled city girl with a love interest and dreams for the future. She is sent to a rural town and becomes a helper to Lao Jin, a horse herder whose penis was hacked off during a war in Tibet. He appears to fall in love with her (at least that's my reading). Wenxiu is a very innocent girl in the first half of the movie - at first I thought I'd rented a Chinese Communist chick flick, lol. Then in the middle, the story becomes extremely dark. Wenxiu is misguided by a man into thinking that the only way she'll get a permit to return him to the city is through making connections. Her first "connection" includes sex with this man, whom she thinks genuinely cares for her. When he never comes back, but another man, making the same claims, comes in his place, she is hurt and confused. Eventually she does sleep with this man too. After that, she becomes very jaded, sleeps with every man who promises her a permit home, and makes life miserable for her and Lao Jin. It's important not to judge Wenxiu harshly. Her story is supposed to express what happened to a lot of China's "Educated Youth" who were sent off on these rural missions and never returned. She was just a child faced with the prospect of never seeing anything she knew again, and she was powerless to understand her role in the Communist society. She dies at the end of the movie, after asking Lao Jin to shoot her. He then shoots himself.
Both these movies are set between the 50s-70s. China is a different place now, and I'm not one to judge how accurate the portrayal of this period is in these movies. But they are very interesting, and like I said, do seem to fit in with other Chinese media I've seen about this period, and also what I've learned in asian studies courses. They are fascinating.
There is something about seinen manga that I really love, esp. when it features adolescent protagonists. (If only Kaijuu no Kodomo hadn't been dropped - I was really interested in that one, esp. since it included one of my odd hobbies, learning about deep sea creatures like oarfish.)
I want to go to Japan and find an Internet cafe and just sit and read them. I loved hanging out at the bookstore in Iwate for just that reason, even when I couldn't actually read the books because of the surplus of kanji.
So... scanlators, when you update, I'll be so, so happy. <3
I am reading The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I love, love love love it. I am currently enjoying this book more than I have any other in a while. Hopefully it continues to captivate me. I'm not quite halfway through. Desai's writing style is awesome - quirky and full of black humor which never detracts from the seriousness of the story she's telling. The characters are also quirky, but also completely believable.
Recently I watched two Chinese movies - Xiu Xiu and Zhang Yimou's To Live. I have seen To Live before, in eleventh grade, when I watched it alongside reading Jung Chan's Wild Swans. (Another fabulous book. It's a mix of biography and memoir, detailing three generations of the author's family history in China, from the imperial age, to the Kuomintang, to the rise of Communism and the present. In spite of mostly being walls of text with no dialogue for hundreds of pages, it kept my attention with no trouble.)
I would not have guessed Li Gong played Jiazhen in To Live, if only because she ages so well throughout the movie. (At the end, Jiazhen has to be in her forties or fifties, and it's completely believable - Li Gong does a fabulous job with the middle aged female mannerisms.)
It's a very sad, dramatic movie, but I think it's one of Zhang Yimou's best, because it portrays an average family's struggle to live normally within the powerful machine of communism, without fully (or even slightly) understanding it. We watch Fugui swear absolute loyalty to Communism, but it's clear his devotion stems from a mix of fear and desperation to believe in the future. To some extent, his faith pays off - the existence of Little Bun, and the dreams Fugui and Jiazhen have for him, perpetrate the message of hope. (One reviewer on imdb complained that there was no hope in To Live. I truly think they were wrong, that while the movie's main purpose wasn't to inspire the viewer, it wasn't to depress them with the idea that the world is an unsalvageable mess. It's mostly thought-provoking. I don't know that I can say it's an intellectual movie, but it's certainly not genre or trash, and most of what happens in it fits in very well with Chan's accounts in Wild Swans. I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of Chinese history now.)
Also, this was very interesting to me - Fugui is a shadow puppeteer for much of the movie. I had never seen Chinese shadow puppets before. They look very similar to Indonesian wayang kulit puppets. I'm now gonna research shadow puppetry more, too. After seeing an Indonesian performance in a class last semester (plus my prof brought in actual puppets he owns), I thought they were so interesting.
Sad as To Live is, Xiu Xiu, for me, is even sadder. This story is set during the 50s-60s, I believe, when Communist China's agenda included purging the intellectuals to make way for the era of the working class. Students from cities were sent to rural areas to be workers around their late teens. I've seen this in movies before, such as in The Little Seamstress. Wenxiu is the main character, a fairly coddled city girl with a love interest and dreams for the future. She is sent to a rural town and becomes a helper to Lao Jin, a horse herder whose penis was hacked off during a war in Tibet. He appears to fall in love with her (at least that's my reading). Wenxiu is a very innocent girl in the first half of the movie - at first I thought I'd rented a Chinese Communist chick flick, lol. Then in the middle, the story becomes extremely dark. Wenxiu is misguided by a man into thinking that the only way she'll get a permit to return him to the city is through making connections. Her first "connection" includes sex with this man, whom she thinks genuinely cares for her. When he never comes back, but another man, making the same claims, comes in his place, she is hurt and confused. Eventually she does sleep with this man too. After that, she becomes very jaded, sleeps with every man who promises her a permit home, and makes life miserable for her and Lao Jin. It's important not to judge Wenxiu harshly. Her story is supposed to express what happened to a lot of China's "Educated Youth" who were sent off on these rural missions and never returned. She was just a child faced with the prospect of never seeing anything she knew again, and she was powerless to understand her role in the Communist society. She dies at the end of the movie, after asking Lao Jin to shoot her. He then shoots himself.
Both these movies are set between the 50s-70s. China is a different place now, and I'm not one to judge how accurate the portrayal of this period is in these movies. But they are very interesting, and like I said, do seem to fit in with other Chinese media I've seen about this period, and also what I've learned in asian studies courses. They are fascinating.