ZHONG GUO REN

I finally watched Spring Subway tonight. It was very good. The score was really good. Cinematography was also superb.

The reviews are unanimously good. It’s nothing earth shattering, but it makes me feel good to see such a polished film coming out of China.

Jeri told me she saw Green Tea (Lu Cha) at the DC film festival last week. She didn’t say much about it though. Before reading the reviews, I already envisioned it as one of the image-heavy type of movie — really beautiful shots, brilliant colors (thanks to my man Christopher Doyle), but rather light on the storyline. Judging from Jeri’s response, as well as from the reviews, I guess that must have been the case.

I haven’t seen Green Tea yet, but I bet the sky above Beijing must be stunningly blue in the movie; it definitely was in Spring Subway. However, that is simply not true

: the sky is Beijing is nasty. At least, that’s how I remembered it.

Even though I do like the polishness of these movies, somehow, I feel like it is only exposing this one side of China. This article also made a similar comment. This is all consistent with the impression I got from my last visit to China (Shenzhen, December 2003). There is this emphasis on presenting the shiny and the new in Modern China. Everything is brand-new and everything is chrome and glass. They sure look nice, but as my mom says, “these are model homes, if someone really lived there, it wouldn’t look like that”.

I have this image of a woman I saw in Hong Kong stuck in my head: I was with a friend, looking for some hair product at a cosmetics store. While queuing up for the checkout counter, this woman standing at the top of the line just kept on talking to the sales girl, going on and on about her SK II purchase. I knew she must be from China, she was speaking loudly in Mandarin. “How often do I put this on?”, “What happens if I forgot to apply the cream?”, etc.

Just as I was thinking to myself, “Oh, yet another one of these clueless mainlanders, fresh off the boat”

, I saw the price tag on the cashier’s display: nearly HKD$4,000, which translates to just about $500 US Dollars.

Satisfied with the answers to her questions, she picked up her purchases, turned her heels and strutted out of the store with another girlfriend of hers. She couldn’t have been in the store for more than 15 minutes.