Book thoughts: On re-reading Momo by Michael Ende [eek tag mess fixed :P ]
"Those who still think that listening isn't an art should see if they can do it half as well."
I finally finished re-reading Momo yesterday. The full title in German is "Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte" which translates as "Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people". What a long title! No wonder they shortened it to Momo :D
The novel was published in 1973 by Michael Ende but in re-reading it, I'm really taken aback at how amazingly relevant and topical it remains. I still love it because Ende emphasises all the things that I personally hold dear - the importance of time, stories, friendship, compassion and the value of the itsy, bitsy, eeny weeny tiny little things that enrich our lives. Even something boring and humdrum when studied with an air of silliness can provide hours of entertainment and amusement :P People always tease me and tell me that a small mind is easily amused, but I merely shrug and say that at least I'm never bored!
When I first read Momo, I was still in school and not working yet. Now after having worked for years in various corporate organisations, it seems even more relevant to me today than it did when I was in highschool because Ende's novel is something of a damning indictment on a society that is increasingly fast-paced, consumer, corporate and materialistic. That being said, it doesn't read like a lecture - it reads like the visionary, fantastical, whimsical little fairy tale it is and to be honest, Professor Dumbledore reads to me like the English version of the German Meister Secundus Minutus Hora (Professor Secundus Minutus Hora).
The little girl Momo is a homeless street urchin who lives in the ruins of an amphitheatre outside an unnamed Italian city. She is friends with the people in the neighbourhood, listening to their problems, coming up with fun games for the children. Her best friends are the street-cleaner Beppo and the tour guide Guido. Although others regard Beppo is simple-minded and a bit crazy and Guido as full of hot air, Momo loves her friends and values them for their quirks and appreciates their wisdom and insight.
One day, the Men in Grey arrive. They claim to be individuals of the Timesavings Bank. They approach stressed, dissatisfied people who believe that they should be making better use of their time and encourage them to 'timesave'. Cut out the useless chatter, pointless activities and fun and the time can be deposited into a bank account which is to be returned with interest. The problem is, the humans remember the resolution to save time, but nothing else and all the time saved, goes to the Men in Grey who are time parasites who devour and consume the time of humanity.
Life becomes greyer, bleaker, more fast-paced and meaningless. Only Momo remains a threat to the Men in Grey and they attempt to eliminate her. Fortunately she is rescued by by Professor Hora who is the personification of time and his adorable Schildkröte Kassiopeia - the tortoise Cassiopeia. I love Cassiopeia - she communicates with the world by words that appear on the back of her shell like some sort of moving, supernatural billboard :) In the end, the fate of the world rests in the hands of the street urchin Momo.
There are lots of very quotable bits in Momo. For instance, the streetsweeper Beppo tells Momo of the philosophy he uses for sweeping a street :D Others laugh at him for his slow, plodding nonsense - but I think that there is a great deal of sense and wisdom in his words.
"You see, Momo," he told her one day, "it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept."
He gazed silently into space before continuing. "And then you start to hurry," he went on. "You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop -- and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it."
He pondered a while. Then he said, "You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else."
Again he paused for thought before adding, "That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be."
There was another long silence. At last he went on, "And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. What's more, you aren't out of breath." He nodded to himself. "That's important, too," he concluded.
The first 'victim' of the Men in Grey is Mr Figaro the barber. He represents the Everyman for he's neither rich nor poor. On a bleak and dreary day, while in a bleak and dreary mood, Mr Figaro is seized withi self-doubt.
"Life's passing me by," he told himself, "and what am I getting out of it? Wielding a pair of scissors, chatting to customers, lathering their faces -- is that the most I can expect? When I'm dead, it'll be as if I'd never existed."
In fact, Mr Figaro had no objection at all to chatting. He liked to air his opinions and hear what his customers thought of them. He had no objection to wielding a pair of scissors or lathering faces, either. He genuinely enjoyed his work and knew he did it well. Few barbers could shave the underside of a man's chin as smoothly against the lie of the stubble, but there were times when none of this seemed to matter.
"I'm an utter failure," thought Mr Figaro. "I mean, what do I amount to? A small-time barber, that's all. If only I could lead the right kind of life, I'd be a different person altogether."
Exactly what form the right kind of life should take, Mr Figaro wasn't sure. He vaguely pictured it as a distinguished and affluent existence such as he was always reading about in glossy magazines.
"The trouble is," he thought sourly, "my work leaves me no time for that sort of thing, and you need time for the right kind of life. You've got to be free, but I'm a lifelong prisoner of scissors, lather and chitchat."
A Man in Grey appears and sums up Mr Figaro's life in mathematical equations, identifying with brutal cruelty time that is supposedly 'wasted'.
For instance, he says:
you live alone with your elderly mother, as we know. You spend a good hour with the old woman every day, that's to say, you sit and talk to her although she's so deaf she can scarcely hear a word. That counts as more time wasted -- fifty-five million one hundred and eighty-eight thousand seconds, to be precise. You also keep a budgerigar, a needless extravagance whose demands on your time amount to fifteen minutes a day, or thirteen million seven hundred and ninety-seven thousand seconds in forty-two years."
"B-but --" Mr Figaro broke in, imploringly.
"Don't interrupt!" snapped the agent, his chalk racing faster and faster across the mirror. "Your mother's arthritic as well as deaf, so you have to do most of the housework. You go shopping, clean shoes and perform other chores of a similar nature. How much time does that consume daily?"
"An hour, maybe, but --"
"So you've already squandered another fifty-five million one hundred and eighty-eight thousand seconds, Mr Figaro. We also know you go to the cinema once a week, sing with a social club once a week, go drinking twice a week, and spend the rest of your evenings reading or gossiping with friends. In short, you devote some three hours a day to useless pastimes that have lost you another one hundred and sixty-five million five hundred and sixty-four thousand seconds."
Then this:
"Look at the matter rationally and realistically Mr Figaro, and answer me one thing: Do you plan to marry Miss Daria?"
"No -- no," said Mr Figaro, "I couldn't do that. . ."
"Quite so," said the man in gray. "Being paralysed from the waist down, she'll have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, yet you visit her every day for half an hour and take her flowers. Why?"
"She's always so pleased to see me," Mr Figaro replied, close to tears.
"But looked at objectively, from your own point of view," said the agent, "it's time wasted..."
The Man in Grey then tells Mr Figaro how he can save time.
The agent raised his eyebrows. "Surely you know how to save time, my dear sir? Work faster, for instance, and stick to essentials. Spend only fifteen minutes on each customer, instead of the usual half-hour, and avoid time-wasting conversations. Reduce the hour you spend with your mother by half. Better still, put her in a nice, cheap old folks' home, where someone else can look after her -- that'll save you a whole hour a day. Get rid of that useless budgerigar. See Miss Daria once every two weeks, if at all. Give up your fifteen-minute review of the day's events. Above all, don't squander so much of your precious time on singing, reading and hobnobbing with your so-called friends."
The end result of this discussion?
When the first customer of the day turned up, Mr Figaro gave him a surly reception. By doing no more than was absolutely necessary and keeping his mouth shut, he got through in twenty minutes instead of the usual thirty.
From now on he subjected every customer to the same treatment. Although he ceased to enjoy his work, that was of secondary importance. He engaged two assistants in addition to his apprentice and watched them like a hawk to see they didn't waste a moment. Every move they made was geared to a precise timetable, in accordance with the notice that now adorned the wall of the barbershop: TIME SAVED IS TIME DOUBLED!
Mr Figaro wrote Miss Daria a brief, businesslike note regretting that pressure of work would prevent him from seeing her in the future. His budgerigar he sold to a pet shop. As for his mother, he put her in an inexpensive old folks' home and visited her once a month. In the belief that the gray stranger's recommendations were his own decisions, he carried them out to the letter.
Meanwhile, he was becoming increasingly restless and irritable. The odd thing was that, no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished. Imperceptibly at first, but then quite unmistakably, his days grew shorter and shorter. Almost before he knew it, another week had gone by, and another month, and another year, and another and another.
Having no recollection of the gray stranger's visit, Mr Figaro should seriously have asked himself where all his time was going, but that was a question never considered by him or any other timesaver. Something in the nature of a blind obsession had taken hold of him, and when he realized to his horror that his days were flying by faster and faster, as he occasionally did, it only reinforced his grim determination to save time.
Mr Figaro is just one of many who fall beneath the spell of the Men in Grey and their time-saving conspiracy. To be honest, the following description is a scarily accurate description of what it's often like to be in the workforce.
Admittedly, time-savers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes.
I get it quite a lot. I am so busy at work sometimes and people are often mildly disapproving - when one is so busy working, why waste one's precious free time doing insignificant, time-wasting things. For some reason the established, acceptable passtime is frequently drinking because it's cool, socially acceptable and relaxing. I don't enjoy it and prefer to 'waste' my time doing things that others consider dorky.
Ende sums it up beautifully when he says:
But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
I'm sure he's not saying that saving time is necessarily bad, but saving time for the sake of saving time is pointless. What's best is to use the time one has to do things that one enjoys or benefits those that one loves. My view is that so long as the way you use time does not harm anyone else (including yourself) - then it cannot really be considered wasted.
I was also really chilled by the indictment of modern toys. Don't forget that this was written in 1973 - I can't even begin to imagine how Ende would describe the toys of today.
More and more often these days, children turned up with all kinds of toys you couldn't really play with: remote-controlled tanks that trundled to and fro but did little else, or space rockets that whizzed around on strings but got nowhere, or model robots that waddled along with eyes flashing and heads swivelling but that was all.
They were highly expensive toys such as Momo's friends had never owned, still less Momo herself. Most noticeable of all, they were so complete, down to the tiniest detail, that they left nothing at all to the imagination. Their owners would spend hours watching them, mesmerised but bored, as they trundled, whizzed or waddled along. Finally, when that palled, they would go back to the familiar old games in which a couple of cardboard boxes, a torn tablecloth, a molehill or a handful of pebbles were quite sufficient to conjure up a whole world of make-believe.
To a certain extent I'm exceedingly grateful for the poorness of my childhood. My bro and I were very much television children, but we also had very active (possibly over-active) imaginations and we were able to spend hours and hours coming up with imaginary scenarios and situations based purely on the somewhat basic toys we had and source material from television and books. :D I'm not saying we should take away all toys and leave children to play with rocks and pebbles - but there is something to be said for the more simple toys of times gone by.
I think I'm very old-fashioned in my thinking. I even feel this way about video games. When I was wee, I used to play video games with their very, very basic graphics or the adventure games that had no graphics at all, just text. My brother always laments the fact that I don't play them anymore when I used to be quite good at them as a wee koala. I suppose I find that the new games overwhelm me a little - they're so full of sight and sound - not half so much scope for the imagination as the old, bare bones games used to provide.
More beautiful Momo quotes are in my earlier post.
Hmm, I have one more post to finish - about Buffy :D
I am very full of Stupid Thoughts today :P
I have to laugh - one of the questions I'm frequently asked is how I manage to post so much - especially given how horribly busy I can get at work :P The truth is that I post the same way I do everything else whether it's work or play. A bit frenzied and nuts. I can type very fast, I'm normally juggling a few things at the same time. While I wait for some documents at work to be finished I can quietly and quickly type something up. If something is devouring my brain, it doesn't take long to type up a post on the topic.
I do have extended periods of Quiet Introspective Contemplation but these usually resuilt in even more frenzied, disordered stupid thoughts so it's kind of an endless cycle. Nonetheless, I am real. I am not a brain in a vat. At least four people on my friends list have met me in person - I don't think I'm much different in person than I am online - less furry perhaps :D
* who is kung fu chicken?
I finally finished re-reading Momo yesterday. The full title in German is "Momo oder Die seltsame Geschichte von den Zeit-Dieben und von dem Kind, das den Menschen die gestohlene Zeit zurückbrachte" which translates as "Momo, or the strange story of the time-thieves and the child who brought the stolen time back to the people". What a long title! No wonder they shortened it to Momo :D
The novel was published in 1973 by Michael Ende but in re-reading it, I'm really taken aback at how amazingly relevant and topical it remains. I still love it because Ende emphasises all the things that I personally hold dear - the importance of time, stories, friendship, compassion and the value of the itsy, bitsy, eeny weeny tiny little things that enrich our lives. Even something boring and humdrum when studied with an air of silliness can provide hours of entertainment and amusement :P People always tease me and tell me that a small mind is easily amused, but I merely shrug and say that at least I'm never bored!
When I first read Momo, I was still in school and not working yet. Now after having worked for years in various corporate organisations, it seems even more relevant to me today than it did when I was in highschool because Ende's novel is something of a damning indictment on a society that is increasingly fast-paced, consumer, corporate and materialistic. That being said, it doesn't read like a lecture - it reads like the visionary, fantastical, whimsical little fairy tale it is and to be honest, Professor Dumbledore reads to me like the English version of the German Meister Secundus Minutus Hora (Professor Secundus Minutus Hora).
The little girl Momo is a homeless street urchin who lives in the ruins of an amphitheatre outside an unnamed Italian city. She is friends with the people in the neighbourhood, listening to their problems, coming up with fun games for the children. Her best friends are the street-cleaner Beppo and the tour guide Guido. Although others regard Beppo is simple-minded and a bit crazy and Guido as full of hot air, Momo loves her friends and values them for their quirks and appreciates their wisdom and insight.
One day, the Men in Grey arrive. They claim to be individuals of the Timesavings Bank. They approach stressed, dissatisfied people who believe that they should be making better use of their time and encourage them to 'timesave'. Cut out the useless chatter, pointless activities and fun and the time can be deposited into a bank account which is to be returned with interest. The problem is, the humans remember the resolution to save time, but nothing else and all the time saved, goes to the Men in Grey who are time parasites who devour and consume the time of humanity.
Life becomes greyer, bleaker, more fast-paced and meaningless. Only Momo remains a threat to the Men in Grey and they attempt to eliminate her. Fortunately she is rescued by by Professor Hora who is the personification of time and his adorable Schildkröte Kassiopeia - the tortoise Cassiopeia. I love Cassiopeia - she communicates with the world by words that appear on the back of her shell like some sort of moving, supernatural billboard :) In the end, the fate of the world rests in the hands of the street urchin Momo.
There are lots of very quotable bits in Momo. For instance, the streetsweeper Beppo tells Momo of the philosophy he uses for sweeping a street :D Others laugh at him for his slow, plodding nonsense - but I think that there is a great deal of sense and wisdom in his words.
"You see, Momo," he told her one day, "it's like this. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept."
He gazed silently into space before continuing. "And then you start to hurry," he went on. "You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop -- and still the street stretches away in front of you. That's not the way to do it."
He pondered a while. Then he said, "You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else."
Again he paused for thought before adding, "That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. And that's how it ought to be."
There was another long silence. At last he went on, "And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. What's more, you aren't out of breath." He nodded to himself. "That's important, too," he concluded.
The first 'victim' of the Men in Grey is Mr Figaro the barber. He represents the Everyman for he's neither rich nor poor. On a bleak and dreary day, while in a bleak and dreary mood, Mr Figaro is seized withi self-doubt.
"Life's passing me by," he told himself, "and what am I getting out of it? Wielding a pair of scissors, chatting to customers, lathering their faces -- is that the most I can expect? When I'm dead, it'll be as if I'd never existed."
In fact, Mr Figaro had no objection at all to chatting. He liked to air his opinions and hear what his customers thought of them. He had no objection to wielding a pair of scissors or lathering faces, either. He genuinely enjoyed his work and knew he did it well. Few barbers could shave the underside of a man's chin as smoothly against the lie of the stubble, but there were times when none of this seemed to matter.
"I'm an utter failure," thought Mr Figaro. "I mean, what do I amount to? A small-time barber, that's all. If only I could lead the right kind of life, I'd be a different person altogether."
Exactly what form the right kind of life should take, Mr Figaro wasn't sure. He vaguely pictured it as a distinguished and affluent existence such as he was always reading about in glossy magazines.
"The trouble is," he thought sourly, "my work leaves me no time for that sort of thing, and you need time for the right kind of life. You've got to be free, but I'm a lifelong prisoner of scissors, lather and chitchat."
A Man in Grey appears and sums up Mr Figaro's life in mathematical equations, identifying with brutal cruelty time that is supposedly 'wasted'.
For instance, he says:
you live alone with your elderly mother, as we know. You spend a good hour with the old woman every day, that's to say, you sit and talk to her although she's so deaf she can scarcely hear a word. That counts as more time wasted -- fifty-five million one hundred and eighty-eight thousand seconds, to be precise. You also keep a budgerigar, a needless extravagance whose demands on your time amount to fifteen minutes a day, or thirteen million seven hundred and ninety-seven thousand seconds in forty-two years."
"B-but --" Mr Figaro broke in, imploringly.
"Don't interrupt!" snapped the agent, his chalk racing faster and faster across the mirror. "Your mother's arthritic as well as deaf, so you have to do most of the housework. You go shopping, clean shoes and perform other chores of a similar nature. How much time does that consume daily?"
"An hour, maybe, but --"
"So you've already squandered another fifty-five million one hundred and eighty-eight thousand seconds, Mr Figaro. We also know you go to the cinema once a week, sing with a social club once a week, go drinking twice a week, and spend the rest of your evenings reading or gossiping with friends. In short, you devote some three hours a day to useless pastimes that have lost you another one hundred and sixty-five million five hundred and sixty-four thousand seconds."
Then this:
"Look at the matter rationally and realistically Mr Figaro, and answer me one thing: Do you plan to marry Miss Daria?"
"No -- no," said Mr Figaro, "I couldn't do that. . ."
"Quite so," said the man in gray. "Being paralysed from the waist down, she'll have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair, yet you visit her every day for half an hour and take her flowers. Why?"
"She's always so pleased to see me," Mr Figaro replied, close to tears.
"But looked at objectively, from your own point of view," said the agent, "it's time wasted..."
The Man in Grey then tells Mr Figaro how he can save time.
The agent raised his eyebrows. "Surely you know how to save time, my dear sir? Work faster, for instance, and stick to essentials. Spend only fifteen minutes on each customer, instead of the usual half-hour, and avoid time-wasting conversations. Reduce the hour you spend with your mother by half. Better still, put her in a nice, cheap old folks' home, where someone else can look after her -- that'll save you a whole hour a day. Get rid of that useless budgerigar. See Miss Daria once every two weeks, if at all. Give up your fifteen-minute review of the day's events. Above all, don't squander so much of your precious time on singing, reading and hobnobbing with your so-called friends."
The end result of this discussion?
When the first customer of the day turned up, Mr Figaro gave him a surly reception. By doing no more than was absolutely necessary and keeping his mouth shut, he got through in twenty minutes instead of the usual thirty.
From now on he subjected every customer to the same treatment. Although he ceased to enjoy his work, that was of secondary importance. He engaged two assistants in addition to his apprentice and watched them like a hawk to see they didn't waste a moment. Every move they made was geared to a precise timetable, in accordance with the notice that now adorned the wall of the barbershop: TIME SAVED IS TIME DOUBLED!
Mr Figaro wrote Miss Daria a brief, businesslike note regretting that pressure of work would prevent him from seeing her in the future. His budgerigar he sold to a pet shop. As for his mother, he put her in an inexpensive old folks' home and visited her once a month. In the belief that the gray stranger's recommendations were his own decisions, he carried them out to the letter.
Meanwhile, he was becoming increasingly restless and irritable. The odd thing was that, no matter how much time he saved, he never had any to spare; in some mysterious way, it simply vanished. Imperceptibly at first, but then quite unmistakably, his days grew shorter and shorter. Almost before he knew it, another week had gone by, and another month, and another year, and another and another.
Having no recollection of the gray stranger's visit, Mr Figaro should seriously have asked himself where all his time was going, but that was a question never considered by him or any other timesaver. Something in the nature of a blind obsession had taken hold of him, and when he realized to his horror that his days were flying by faster and faster, as he occasionally did, it only reinforced his grim determination to save time.
Mr Figaro is just one of many who fall beneath the spell of the Men in Grey and their time-saving conspiracy. To be honest, the following description is a scarily accurate description of what it's often like to be in the workforce.
Admittedly, time-savers were better dressed than the people who lived near the old amphitheater. They earned more money and had more to spend, but they looked tired, disgruntled and sour, and there was an unfriendly light in their eyes.
I get it quite a lot. I am so busy at work sometimes and people are often mildly disapproving - when one is so busy working, why waste one's precious free time doing insignificant, time-wasting things. For some reason the established, acceptable passtime is frequently drinking because it's cool, socially acceptable and relaxing. I don't enjoy it and prefer to 'waste' my time doing things that others consider dorky.
Ende sums it up beautifully when he says:
But time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart. And the more people saved, the less they had.
I'm sure he's not saying that saving time is necessarily bad, but saving time for the sake of saving time is pointless. What's best is to use the time one has to do things that one enjoys or benefits those that one loves. My view is that so long as the way you use time does not harm anyone else (including yourself) - then it cannot really be considered wasted.
I was also really chilled by the indictment of modern toys. Don't forget that this was written in 1973 - I can't even begin to imagine how Ende would describe the toys of today.
More and more often these days, children turned up with all kinds of toys you couldn't really play with: remote-controlled tanks that trundled to and fro but did little else, or space rockets that whizzed around on strings but got nowhere, or model robots that waddled along with eyes flashing and heads swivelling but that was all.
They were highly expensive toys such as Momo's friends had never owned, still less Momo herself. Most noticeable of all, they were so complete, down to the tiniest detail, that they left nothing at all to the imagination. Their owners would spend hours watching them, mesmerised but bored, as they trundled, whizzed or waddled along. Finally, when that palled, they would go back to the familiar old games in which a couple of cardboard boxes, a torn tablecloth, a molehill or a handful of pebbles were quite sufficient to conjure up a whole world of make-believe.
To a certain extent I'm exceedingly grateful for the poorness of my childhood. My bro and I were very much television children, but we also had very active (possibly over-active) imaginations and we were able to spend hours and hours coming up with imaginary scenarios and situations based purely on the somewhat basic toys we had and source material from television and books. :D I'm not saying we should take away all toys and leave children to play with rocks and pebbles - but there is something to be said for the more simple toys of times gone by.
I think I'm very old-fashioned in my thinking. I even feel this way about video games. When I was wee, I used to play video games with their very, very basic graphics or the adventure games that had no graphics at all, just text. My brother always laments the fact that I don't play them anymore when I used to be quite good at them as a wee koala. I suppose I find that the new games overwhelm me a little - they're so full of sight and sound - not half so much scope for the imagination as the old, bare bones games used to provide.
More beautiful Momo quotes are in my earlier post.
Hmm, I have one more post to finish - about Buffy :D
I am very full of Stupid Thoughts today :P
I have to laugh - one of the questions I'm frequently asked is how I manage to post so much - especially given how horribly busy I can get at work :P The truth is that I post the same way I do everything else whether it's work or play. A bit frenzied and nuts. I can type very fast, I'm normally juggling a few things at the same time. While I wait for some documents at work to be finished I can quietly and quickly type something up. If something is devouring my brain, it doesn't take long to type up a post on the topic.
I do have extended periods of Quiet Introspective Contemplation but these usually resuilt in even more frenzied, disordered stupid thoughts so it's kind of an endless cycle. Nonetheless, I am real. I am not a brain in a vat. At least four people on my friends list have met me in person - I don't think I'm much different in person than I am online - less furry perhaps :D
* who is kung fu chicken?