MCLC: A land China loves to hate (1,2)

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
A land China loves to hate (1,2)
Very interesting and nuanced discussion of perceptions of the U.S. by people in the PRC. In the summer of 2014 I was in Beijing. One day I had the TV on with my coffee and was watching Kaku shao’er (Kaku Kids) a children's station airing (at that time) a pretty good variety of local animated shows and shows from Japan and the States.
That afternoon in between the colorful anarchy of cartoons the station broadcast Yingxiong er nü (Heroic Sons and Daughters, 1964). I happened to catch the scene in which a commander asks a recruit where the heroics of a deceased hero came from, and the answer was hating America devils accompanied with shots of soldiers stabbing bales of hay to stand in for Americans as they shout “Kill! Kill!”
I do not believe images in Media are unambiguous semantic signs for spectators. But I do not know the rationale for broadcasting Korean war films, or as they sometimes did, Sino-Japan War classics (that negatively depicted Nationalists as well) on a station targeted at children. Maybe it had to do with meeting broadcast quotas for local productions or patriotic content.
Every country has wartime productions. But I’ve never heard of Disney or Nickelodeon inserting “Tora! Tora! Tora!” in between episodes of Mickey Mouse or Spongebob Squarepants. I wondered how children would see this kind of programming. Would the cartoons become revolutionary? Would the revolutionary films become cartoony?
Sean  Macdonald <smacdon2005 at gmail.com>
==================================
This year, China's national day came early. The holiday around Oct. 1, starting with Moon Festival on Sept. 27 - a Red Moon noted worldwide - was held as scheduled. But this year there was also the military parade on Sept. 3, reminiscent of the big parade on Oct. 1st in 2009, when tanks also rolled into Beijing and onto Tiananmen Square on a scale that had not been seen since 1989. And before Sept. 3, there was the Tianjin disaster in August. And so Sept. 11 was noted perhaps more than last year, for example, as this article shows. Because it fell in between these two national parade days on Sept. 3 and Oct. 1. Anyway, when I read this text, I was wondering if it was really written by Murong Xuecun. Sometimes foreign writers write something else, something related. And the editor/ translator is interested, but thinks the readers would like something he has in mind. Or other people. But the foreign writer still comes out as the author. Good for everyone, maybe. It's a good article. Cliches abound, but they do in real life. Roughly one year ago, when Yi Sha 伊沙 and I had our reading at Vermont Studio Center, we included two 9/11 poems. Although each of us had only ten minutes. When I read Murong Xuecun's (?) article, Yi Sha's poem immediately came to mind. It has served as his signature piece for a while, he had it on his blog's front page in a video box right above his name. But the poem was not included in Yi Sha's 2008 Bloodaxe collection in English, Starve the Poets, tr. Simon Patton with Tao Naikan. It was also not included in Huang Liang's 黄梁 Yi Sha collection from 2009 in Taiwan, 尿床 (Wetting the Bed). Censorship? Maybe. It's not a nice poem at all. Heather Inwood has translated it in 2012, it is available online in the pages of Chinese Literature Today, along with five other poems by Yi Sha. I like my own Yi Sha 9/11 better, but the others are great. :) That reading one year ago was a very memorable experience. Yi Sha knew at once he wanted to start his first reading in America with this shockingly Anti-American piece. In Murong Xuecun's (?) article, Anti-Americanism in China is the result of state propaganda and nothing else. Is the I in Yi Sha's poem "only" brainwashed by state propaganda? Influenced by prevalent views shaped by decades of history since the Korean war and before, I would say. Decades of history steeped in propaganda, and other things. I like the ambivalence in the Murong Xuecun text. Ambivalence and irony are at play when phrases like "American imperialists" appear in recent Chinese poetry. Yi Sha's son Wu Yulun 吴雨伦 has a poem about his grandfather, Yi Sha's father, who went to America in 1997 to do extensive research in Alaska, but had to return after less than a month because of his wife's illness. The "imperialists" in Wu Yulun's poem - it's like an affectionate term in the context, I think. Just realized I haven't translated 一位老人 into English. No time today, unfortunately. Here it is in German and in Chinese: http://banianerguotoukeyihe.com/2015/07/30/ein-alter-herr-%E5%90%B4%E9%9B%A8%E4%BC%A6/
Best, Martin Winter <dujuan99 at gmail.com>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 15, 2015
You are subscribed to email updates from MCLC Resource Center  
To stop receiving these emails, click here.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.osu.edu/pipermail/mclc/attachments/20151015/7cfc14cf/attachment.html>