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Rite of Recall

in the fairy grove my hand is warmed
by Martyn’s   we’re always
meeting at a conference on vampires
where emergency fire doors hold in coffee’s
bitter scent, tea steam, and a very nice bean salad

we’re always walking
through Central Park at dusk
smelling roses & pansies
of the Shakespeare Garden
we didn’t find that time

and I bring him to the top of Fuji
where we shiver into each other until light
and I bring him to the top of Tai Shan
to show him that red sky I remember
deserving its reputation and its hundreds
who climb or take the ropeway

his hand like crinkling leaves
filters out the horrors, yes horrors
there’s nothing else to call it
when a man you loved has raped you
when strangers hold a knife
against your soft belly for cash

under the hawthorn we’re building
words for Francis Bacon & Edward Hopper
we’re building a home on the edge of loneliness
left since we’re together
to the ashy snow

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In its efforts to present a balanced story, this New York Times article about the conflict in Urumqi leaves out important contextual information. The piece notes the PRC’s official version of the region’s story:

A history exhibition in the main museum in this regional capital goes one step further. “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” it asserts, implying that Beijing or Xian or some other imperial capital has for time immemorial held sway over this land at the crossroads of Asian civilizations.

What it doesn’t mention, however, is that this assertion is made about every disputed region that the PRC claims. My students in China could all recite complicated historical stories about why Tibet belonged to China. The Shanghai Museum features a room dedicated to artifacts from minority groups within the empire, and the explanatory signs claim these cultures as an inherent part of the fabric of Chinese society; the framing goes further to suggest that their very cultural identities would not exist without China.

A reader of the New York Times who is not familiar with this aspect of China will have a difficult time seeing that the claims about Xinjiang are just another form of imperial logic, a subject I’ve written about more broadly at Gender Across Borders.

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Recently, Shared Worlds asked five well-known authors of speculative fiction the following question: “What’s your pick for the top real-life fantasy or science fiction city?”. China Miéville’s answer at least comes as no surprise:

Whereas Paris (certainly in the centre) is the success of a single overarching monomaniacal topographic vision, London is a chaotic patchwork of history, architecture, style, as disorganised as any dream, and like any dream possessing an underlying logic, but one that we can’t quite make sense of, though we know it’s there. A shoved-together city cobbled from centuries of distinct aesthetics disrespectfully clotted in a magnificent triumph of architectural philistinism. A city of jingoist sculptures, concrete caryatids, ugly ugly ugly financial bombast, reconfiguration. A city full of parks and gardens, which have always been magic places, one of the greenest cities in the world, though it’s a very dirty shade of green –and what sort of grimy dryads does London throw up? You tell me.

It’s worth noting that not one of the authors, even those from the US, chose a US city. Certainly, I couldn’t make  an argument for any of the cities I’ve lived in within its borders. Seattle is too much on the edge of now, New York and San Francisco too marked by a too recent past.

The cities for which I could make an argument are in Asia. There’s Tokyo of course with its high-tech towers, trains, and phones as well as shrines and forests for the fantasy element; rearranging the syllables gets you Kyoto, where you have a similar level of technology as well as more famous shrines and temples, most of which have been rebuilt to appear ancient. Nagasaki would be my choice for a ghost story; its violent history did not begin with the dropping of the bomb. 

Moving on to the mainland, Kuala Lumpur could be supported as a spec-fic city for similar reasons: there are the tremendous heights of the Petronas Towers and the rain forest of Bukit Nanas. In Cambodia, Siem Reap has its proximity to the ruins of a lost civilization, which presents all kinds of story possibilities; the ever-present tourists, and the contrast between their lifestyles and the lives of the local residents provide for the possibility of sub-plots addressing social inequality.

As settings for speculative fiction, however, all of these pale in comparison to Shanghai. The obvious SF zone is Pudong with its glistening skyscrapers and the retro-future Oriental Pearl Tower. Across the Huangpu (and who knows what creatures might rise from that river, resulting perhaps from experiments conducted by the naval ships that pass?), towers behind the old colonial buildings of the Bund appear to have been fitted with lasers. Contrasting the lives of migrant workers and residents of Shanghai’s older districts with these glistening futurismic areas provides the same sort of opportunity for addressing social inequality that I mentioned in Siem Reap, only it is heightened by the general dystopian air created by the PRC’s authoritarian government. Moreover, like so many of these other cities, Shanghai possesses the temples and shrines that can serve as entrances for powerful and fantastic entities.

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Especially in light of how increasingly hostile the airport environment has become since 9/11, this is excellent news:

President Barack Obama outlined his plan for “long overdue” high-speed rail on Thursday that would rival air travel, create jobs and help curb the U.S. transportation system’s appetite for oil . . . Obama envisions a network of short and longer-haul corridors of up to 600 miles plied by trains traveling up to 150 miles per hour.

One of the reasons I loved living in Japan was the ease with which I could travel. All I had to do was wake up in the morning and buy a ticket at the station. I didn’t have to worry about arriving early or finding transportation out to the airport. The worst thing that happened was when I accidentally sat in a smoking car on the shinkansen on my way from Tokyo to Hiroshima.

Besides all that, train travel is simply more pleasant than air travel (unless you get stuck on an overnight hard seat during one of China’s national holidays, but that’s another pint of beer entirely). Your body doesn’t have to contend with changing pressures, and you get a much closer view of the scenery. While I admit that there is something to be said for the bird’s eye perspective planes offer, one can get much the same effect from a mountain or skyscraper.

This Wall Street Journal piece about a new book with a title that translates as Unhappy China misses the function of nationalism in the PRC. The government maintains its grip in part by instilling nationalistic pride in its youth (which in itself isn’t especially unique). Disaffected college students and workers then blame local entities (governmental or private) for their troubles rather than blame the national government. Moreover, when issues like Tibetan independence are framed as questions of nationalism (China, the savior of Tibetan slaves, versus the hypocritical West according to CCTV9 broadcasts during the Olympic torch relay), it becomes nearly impossible for students and workers to connect their own causes and issues with other movements. 

Given this function, why have state-run media outlets criticized this book? The slightly better Time article on the subject points to one reason: “the fear is that if the sentiment flares unchecked, it could push Beijing to take a belligerent, isolationist line.” That would certainly be bad for business.

Note, too, that at least some of the criticism is not of extreme nationalism but, rather, of taking advantage of a nationalism that, it is assumed, ought to exist. The Wall Street Journal article quotes China Youth Daily as claiming that the authors are seeking to profit from nationalism, “fish[ing] money from the pockets of the angry youth and angry elderly”. This sort of critique reinscribes the value of nationalism by the very angle of attack.

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