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Monthly Archives: August 2018

Hong Kong reading list

30 Thursday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in Hongy Wonky, just read, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

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Amitav Ghosh, books on Hong Kong, Hong Kong, James Clavell

So from my reading binge on books on China, I segued into reading books about Hong Kong.

I started with James Clavell’s Asian saga, specifically the Hong Kong books Tai Pan and Noble House.

Tai Pan is set at the dawn of Hong Kong and the island’s transformation from barren rock to thriving port in the aftermath of the Opium War. It follows the fortunes of Dirk Struan, loosely based on the opium trader William Jardine.

Struan is presented as a rakish, devil-may-care person with nerves of steel, who is both ruthless and who has luck on his side. The novel opens with the proclamation of Hong Kong as a colony of Great Britain, and the entire plan is dreamed up as Struan’s project.

Early on, I had some impatience with reading a narrative entirely from a white man’s perspective. It struck me that I should be reading Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy instead, the first book of which I had read years earlier. Like Ghosh’s book, a large part of Tai Pan is written in pigdin of the time and I found that somewhat hard going too, authenticity or not.

I persevered with Tai Pan and managed to get into it, and Struan did grow on me. The book literally charts how Hong Kong came to be and it not but hold fascination from me – from the earliest warehouses on the coast to the Happy Valley racecourse to the influx of Chinese and the settlements in Tai Ping Shan.

What was most fascinating to me was the parallel society of the Chinese, with its own power structures. While Hong Kong today presents itself as an east-meets-west entrepot, anyone who has been here for a while will soon notice (or maybe not, some expats are truly oblivious) that it is less melting pot and more two societies carrying on in parallel with the majority tolerating the presence of the outsiders, who were once the founts of power. Reading this book made me realise that this separation goes back to the very origins of Hong Kong itself.

On the one hand, it is the whites who (apparently) determine the destiny of and control Hong Kong. But the white man’s perspective is complicated by the fact that in some ways they are being influenced, if not manipulated, by Chinese society.

This is apparent in Dirk Struan’s relationship with May-May, his Chinese mistress who he dotes on and who he is unaware is the granddaughter of Jinqua, the powerful Chinese co-hung merchant. There is an extremely problematic scene at the beginning of the novel in which Struan spanks May-May, she fights him but then succumbs and admits that she deserved it (yech!). Yet, Struan basically loves her – when she is sick, he moves heaven and earth to save her, something he didn’t do for his own brother.

I found May-May. the workings of Chinese society and especially Gordan Chen, Struan’s son from his first mistress who goes on to found the House of Chen, more intriguing than the British society.

While Struan wanted to continue trading opium and was firm about defending their right to do so, his justification for the foundation of Hong Kong was construed as more noble – a long-term plan to open up China to the world. The idea was that he loved China and wanted to do what was best for it, even if China didn’t know or realise this – the good old white saviour complex.

I should mention that apart from the interaction between the British merchants and the Chinese, the plot basically turns around the rivalry between Struan and Tyler Brock. While one can’t help getting caught up in who will prevail in this contest – or rather how Struan will prevail – I did not actually care too much about Brock.

The end of the novel, when it came, was, however, a shocker.

***

Having got through but not entirely enjoyed Tai Pan, I felt obliged to read Noble House. And within a few pages, I realised I was going to love it. And reading Tai Pan became worth it because it provided the backstory for the events in Noble House. It is entirely possible to read Noble House without reading Tai Pan, but there is an extra frisson of delight knowing the backstory and seeing how it played forward. Given how much I loved Noble House, I’m pretty sure I would have read Tai Pan afterwards, so I’m glad I read it in the correct order.

Noble House is set in Hong Kong of the 60s, when the colony was well established and opium a thing of the past. Like Tai Pan, at the centre of Noble House is the rivalry between Dirk Struan’s descendant Ian Dunross and Tyler Brock’s descendant Quillan Gornt (I have no idea why Gornt had to have such a weird name). Both are tai pan of their respective business empires, but like Struan, Ian is the tai pan of Hong Kong, the alpha males of alpha males.

Into this hothouse of testosterone (of the stiff upper lipped British variety) lands the very American Casey Tcholok, vice president of Par Con, an American firm that is interested in investing in Struans, and her boss Lincoln Bartlett. The novel is a page-turner from the get go, when guns are discovered on Bartlett’s plane. From then we traverse through not only M&A, takeovers, a run on a bank which threatens the entire financial future of Hong Kong, the drug trade and triads,  international spy rings and the cold war and the looming presence of China and the handover.

Some have commented that this makes Noble House three or four books rather than one, but I loved it. As long as you don’t expect a quick finish and set out for the long ride, you’re good to go.

Like Tai Pan, this book shows the parallel British and Chinese societies, but they are much more integrated now. There are Chinese businessmen and Chinese banks and the two communities mingle socially, but the British hold onto control. Like Tai Pan, though, there is a whole teeming Chinese society underneath that sees and knows all.

Ian Dunross faces everything that fate throws his way with nerves of steel and unflappable class, making him heart-throb extraordinaire. The only off note is his sexism, which is presented as a British thing. Clavell lays bare the chauvinism of British society, through Casey, who is Bartlett’s trusted lieutenant but who struggles with the reactions of the male-dominated world of power in Hong Kong and the strictly separated social spheres in which women are dismissed to powder their noses at dinner parties while the boys discuss business. Ian accepts Casey with more grace than some of his peers, but he also insists of these protocols.

There is a seething chemistry between Ian and Casey that never gets consumated. In fact, Casey feels attraction of several of the powerful men in the novel – Ian, Quillan, Lando Mata (the Macau tycoon) but in the end, her heart is with Bartlett. For his part, while around him mistresses and liaisons with prostitutes abound, Ian remains faithful to his wife Penelope.

Apart from the business shenanigans, the spy sub-plot in the novel and Hong Kong’s place as the centre of cold war politics is fascinating. When whistle-blower Edward Snowden decided to seek harbour in Hong Kong, he was harking back to this history.

Of course, after finishing the novel, I had to hunt down the miniseries, which features Pierce Brosnan as Dunross. The series was shot in the 80s, and it surprised me how many landmarks are still recognisable today. The casting was pretty perfect, but I have to say that Brosnan was a tad hammy in his delivery of Dunross, even if I cannot picture him or anyone else any other way now. The miniseries does a pretty good job of representing many of the novel’s major plot points, though it could not possibly encompass all its fabulous complexity.  [spoiler alert] The one major change is that it consummates the underlying Ian-Casey complexity, which is kind of like seeing Darcy and Elizabeth get it off, and yet, I can’t say I was displeased to see it.

***

Finally, I went back to Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy.

I had read Sea of Poppies some years ago, and like Tai Pan, I struggled through it. I could admire the massive undertaking that it was and appreciate the authenticity of the language but I struggled with it. I found the Deeti plot a bit trying and quite simplistically written in terms of abused wife/Dalit romance. The best part was Paulette and all the botany stuff.

It was an eye-opener to me in the fact that the British empire was basically built on opium trading and how that trade linked China and India. It brought home to me once again the poverty of our history textbooks which basically glossed over this. I was also surprised to learn that this was the original ‘free trade’ doctrine, used to justify basically forcing drugs on another country.

These themes are developed in River of Smoke which centres on the period of turbulence in Canton before the Chinese emperor came down on the opium trade. This book opens with Deeti in Mauritius in again some mysticism in a temple – but I actually liked this part and wanted more of it, but this was not to be.

Instead, the novel takes us through Neel to Canton and focuses on a Parsi trader Bahram Modi, which again was a fascinating perspective of Indian traders’ role in the opium trade and their complicity with the British.

The breathtaking hypocrisy of the opium trade is reiterated through the speeches of British the traders, who insist that free trade is the will of god (even though the sale of opium is forbidden in Britain). Modi, for his part, is much more circumspect about this – his fortunes are built on the trade and yet he is more receptive to the argument that it is evil.

Through River of Smoke and the final novel in the trilogy, Flood of Fire, the interaction between Indians and Chinese becomes more prominent. This strain is present throughout the novel – starting with Ah Fat, the Indo-Chinese character, the Chinese boatman who speaks Bengali, Neel’s closeness to Compton the printer, and most prominently Bahram’s relationship with Chi-mei, the washerwoman, which becomes a symbol of his torn loyalties to China and India. The novel culminates in the battles between the Chinese and the British, in which Indians are ranged on both sides.

This novel parallel’s Tai Pan in being set during the founding of Hong Kong, but the same characters that we accept as the heroic protagonists of Tai Pan are the villains of this piece. There are plenty of interesting heroic details – from the obsession with masturbation as a sin, the sexually repressed English mehmsahib, and the army, the part I liked least even as I admit the importance of the realistic depiction of this battles.

In each novel, I liked the unconventional women the most – Paulette in the first and second novels and Shireen, Bahram’s wife, in the last novel. Ghosh redeems all his female characters, a refreshing change from the woman as vamp novels.

***

Having read all this, I found myself editing a column in which the author tries to argue that Hong Kong was not really colonised. I am noticing a trend of revisionism with relation to colonialism, this idea that it possibly wasn’t so bad, that there were benefits, a notion that Hong Kong, which arguably was built “out of nothing” by the British, is used to buttress and which deep down many English people I have met seem to harbor.

It is however not an academically tenable position, and frankly akin to Kanye saying slaves benefited from slavery. There is enough research on how colonialism did not benefit the colonised territories from economic, psychological and social perspectives.

Clavell’s and Ghosh’s series take somewhat different positions on this question.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy Rich Asians – a bookish view

26 Sunday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in Uncategorized

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Read my thoughts on the film here

Are travel photos the new food pics and other musings

24 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in le weekend, Pet rant, Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

bbq, social media, travel photos

So: Are travel photos the new food pics?

By which I mean, not simply that they are ubiquitous but also that people are starting to tire of them.

The reaction to travel photos posted on Facebook, I sense, is increasingly less “wow” and more “so?” or at best “too many”.

Too many is a common failing and some selectivity would go a long way towards the mitigating of the “so?” reaction.

Increasingly I find myself giving travel photos a miss because do I really want to look you and yours on a beach (these are probably the worst) or in some other scenic locale? I guess photos of places less travelled like say Slovenia would pique some curiosity but in general, no.

Travel photos (and food photos) seem to work better on Instagram because the audience there has specially signed up for Le Pretty and also because it’s rare to get a whole dump at one go but rather they tend to get interspersed with other slivers of pretty on the feed unless you follow only travel peeps in which case your bad.

Travel photos on Facebook do seem to beg the question “wherefore?” What is the purpose of them? Well in the past my rationale has been it’s a way of sharing with family (including say cousins) who I figure are the only people who care about where you went and how your children are in combination. Maybe this does hold true. When my sister-in-law did her one month crawl through the UK with the nieces, I did follow their travel photos. In a way, instead of telling us, the SIL showed us. But even so, after a bit, I lost interest. Clearly, less is more and there is really a limit to “lookit here I’m having fun” one can take. I’m thinking a limit of five photos per trip.

What do you think? Travel photos (on FB?) yay or nay?

***

So you guys probably know my feelings about barbecues and more recently picnics.

But what about hotpot or Korean BBQ in a restaurant?

Last weekend, we went to a Korean BBQ place – lots of meat to grill. I found myself thinking – why is it that I, who barely makes a cup of tea in her own house, has paid for the privilege of cooking food? I really don’t see the point. The whole time we were stressing about turning the meat over so it didn’t get burnt, then swallowing something before rinse and repeat. Out of all the meat, a few pieces are perfect. The others are slightly overdone or underdone. You eat mediocre grilled veggies and feel thrilled somehow. This makes no sense. It’s BBQ all over again, except mercifully without the waving newspaper over coals and the heat and smoke.

So I’ll have to say no to this one. Though the kids and V do love it, so I guess I’m just going to have to grin and beat it sometimes.

 

Three posts of chick lit blog

22 Wednesday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in Uncategorized

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  1. A mini-post on Reading in India
  2. On a Chinese (somewhat) chick lit novel: A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers.
  3. On Nirupama Subramanian’s Keep The Change

China reading list

18 Saturday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in Great escapes, just read, Uncategorized

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Tags

#books #kindle #reading, books on China

Some time ago, I came across this reading list on China. I got hold of several of the books and started on them in the run-up to our China trip.

1. Oracle Bones: a journey between China’s past and present (Peter Hessler)

I read this in drips and drabs until midway when I really started getting into it. What seemed to me at the start as a series of personal essays on China turned out to have fine interwoven threads running through it. I believe I came away with a wealth of knowledge about China’s past and present and how the past has shaped the present. I would highly recommend this one – it is a great way to dip one’s toes into China via an author who really knows and love the place.

2. Empress Dowager Cixi: the concubine who launched modern China

The title pretty much says it all. This is a historical look at one of the most powerful Chinese women ever. Cixi has a bad rep – my kids even have a picture book on a legend of her evil – but don’t most powerful women? Jung Chang reinstated her, and has been critiqued for whitewashing the reign of a cruel ruler. I don’t believe this is what Chang does, but she does contextualise Cixi’s rise and portray her more sympathetically. Again, apart from the fascination of the person herself, this is an introduction to China’s transition into ‘modernity’.

3. Leftover Women: the resurgence of gender inequality in China (Leta Hong Fincher)

4. Factory Girls: Voices from the heart of modern China (Leslie T. Chang)

5. Leftover in China: The women shaping the world’s next superpower (Roseanne Lake)

Read my thoughts on these three novels on my chick lit blog here.

7. The People’s Republic of Desire (Annie Wang)

Read my thoughts here

6. Red Sorghum (Mo Yan)

Mo Yan shot to global fame when he won the Nobel prize for literature. Controversially, because he was accused of collaborating with the government, a government that has cracked down on so many other writers, artists and thinkers, most famously Liu Xiaobo, also a Nobel Prize winner from China. One of those who led the attack on Mo was Salman Rushdie, which really made me roll my eyes because during the Rushdie affair, Rushdie himself caved and apologized and he wasn’t even in the same country that the threat originated from but rather being protected in London. If anything, Rushdie should know what it is to live with fear.

Anyway, it made me determined to see for myself what Mo Yan’s work is about, but I never got around to it. Reading it in China was perfect.

The novel centres on a rebellious village during the period when Japan colonised China and it is extremely powerful and violent. After the first chapter, I was consumed by the horror of what transpired and an understanding of the intense antipathy towards Japan among some quarters in China. (Pachinko does the same from the Korean perspective). In fact, I was so nauseated and angry that V had to gently remind me that there comes a point when one cannot hold the present generation responsible for the sins of the past.

Mo Yan’s style has been described as magical realism and I did see elements of that, but there was also an extremely realistic depiction of the suffering of war. After a point, the reiteration of this grim reality got a bit much for me. Nevertheless, I soldiered on and this says something about the power of the writing.

I can see how this narrative would work for China’s government, but in its portrayal of sexual desire it was groundbreaking and even in its portrayal of rebellion it did not stick to the official narrative, showing instead how different factions fought against each other.

I’d recommend anyone interested in China read one Mo Yan novel and this is the most famous one.

Read why Mo Yan receiving the Nobel Prize was condemned by some here.

On identity

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in Amazing Insight, Losing my religion, Pet rant, ruminations, Uncategorized

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Tags

identity, Indian identity, nationalism

Listening to this podcast, I was transported to my childhood, to a geography of bakeries – of freshly baked bread that earned my community the moniker ‘macapao’ to more hybrid offerings – springs rolls doused in crimson Szechwan sauce that no one in the Sichuan I visited this summer would recognise and the most perfect salted wafers. More than the food, it was the cadence of speech that called to me in the podcast, the tangential telling of stories, the “I tell you” and “men’.

As I ponder the question of belonging and the irrelevance of nationalism except for the most prosaic and political purposes, I realise that, new yuppie cafes and restobars notwithstanding, it is this corner of the world, this suburb where even the grocer spoke to us in English, is where I can claim to somehow forever belong to. At heart, I am a citizen of Bandra.

***

I sent a message about dance classes for the children to the wrong member of the Indian ladiz whatsapp group of my estate.

“Who is this?” she asked.

“C, from the Indian whatsapp group,” I replied.

“C is not an Indian name. Are you Indian?”

“Yes.”

“But were you born in Hong Kong.?”

“No.”

“Which tower do you live in?” As if I would fake being Indian to be a member of this whatsapp group.

Isn’t it curious how the people who demand patriotism from minorities never also fail to other us?

***

“Where are you from?” My children are asked.

“Hong Kong.”

“No where are you really from?”

They name the suburb of Hong Kong we live in.

My children’s geography of taste is also different. When they are in India, they tire of the local food and ask grandma, “can we get siu mai?”

***

I read that Portugal is one of the few European countries soliciting migrants.

“Hmmm, maybe I should apply, then at least I don’t have to explain my name.”

“Who do you have to explain your name to?” my Indian colleague asks in surprise.

I roll my eyes. The idea of India has grown smaller and smaller.

***

I listen to this podcast and learn that middle-class Muslims in India are thinking twice about giving their children Muslim names to avoid the inevitable bullying on the playground.

This is what we have come to.

***

Hong Kong was where I lost both my religion and nationalism (nationalism to my mind is a kind of religion in the “opiate of the masses” sense anyway). I recall reading about an artist who was invited to participate in the national pavilion of another country and her saying that she accepted the invitation expressly because it was not linked to national boundaries (I believe it was Dayanita Singh at the German pavilion of the 2013 Venice Bienale but I can’t be sure). I remember thinking that this was a sensibility I aspire to, even as I struggle not to root for countries at the Olympics and World Cup.

Five years ago, I wrote about how my sense of nationalism has faded. What has changed since then or while my affinity to the idea of the nation has eroded, ironically at a time when the idea of Hong Kong nationalism has been floated, my sense of belonging to certain places, my safe places – one dot in the corner of India’s west coast and one dot on China’s southern coast – has solidified.

Two posts on chick lit blog

10 Friday Aug 2018

Posted by The Bride in chicklit, just read, Uncategorized

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Tags

chick lit, reading

Read about You Are Here on its 10th anniversary here and The People’s Republic of Desire, a Chinese chick lit novel, here.

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