July 2008 Archives

I was on The Link, on Radio-Canada International last Friday, along with Rob, on a panel about what it was to be Chinese Canadian, and the upcoming Beijing Olympics.

>> Listen to the entire show (second hour)

Shameless self-promotion of one's piece of web estate. Yesterday, I put the final touches to the interview I did with Roland Soong, the blogger behind the extremely influential blog EastSouthWestNorth (to the point of steering the focus of news about China in some very important media outlets, I found - and regularly quoted in the blogosphere). We talked about the obvious: media, politics, etc, etc, but we also ventured in the more pleasant, like Roland special relation with the Lust, Caution movie (based on a Eileen Chang short story - his parents were personal friends, and their family keeps number of items belonging to Chang), and about running, a hobby that the blogger was practising when he lived in New York City.

CLC: Run races? You mean, just like (upon) hearing rumours of races...

No, no, no, it's like I had a team, and it's like a couple of hundred people. I write gossip about them.

CLC: About the track community?

No, it's just my club - I don't care about anyone else. It was just a little bit weird, it just had a very strong personality because it was a little bit what you call quirky. You know, it's like, a lot of stuff tends to be really really funny. For some reason, the stories that I want to focus are the really weird ones? So, I have one teammate, who was in the business of collecting lost gloves. You know, it's winter, and once in a while we lose gloves, don't know where it went.

CLC: Heh.

And it's lost somewhere, and she just collects them. Then, periodically, she would make an announcement, and say, I am bringing all my gloves down to the playground to the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway. I welcome anyone - you can come down and if it's one of your gloves, take it, even if it isn't, take it anyways. So, she got featured in the New York Times, who wrote this follow-up... Like, why are you doing that? (laughs)

And, this stuff about people running races? You have tons of people running races. These people are runners, and runner do run races. It's one thing for you to... They are mostly New York City residents, so you can run local races - on Thanksgiving, you go race somewhere.

Now, an excerpt of Roland's answers on his appreciation of Lust, Caution:

CLC: Did you like it? Did you see the rendition of it?

I actually saw it here (at Palace IFC - since we were at IFC's Pacific Coffee). Because they had the premiere, so I guess that they felt they had to give me a ticket. (laughs) Actually, when the publisher first told me that Ang Lee was going to make a movie, and I hadn't read the so-called short story carefully before, so, I went back and looked at it... So how are you going to make a movie out of this? (laughs)

So, Ang Lee has actually significantly expanded it, but in a way that, I take, he necessarily had to. Because otherwise, it was way too subtle in an audio-visual media. You can't really communicate... Because you can't really have the kinds of monologues that, you know, a first-person observation, that you could have in the novel. So, you can't express these, can't expect the actors or the actresses to communicate through facial expressions or hand gestures.

Um, so usually people would say, oh, there are those three bedroom scenes that were not in the book. That's somehow, I felt, they just had to be there, because it's not the identical bedroom scenes, because it clearly shows the shift in the so-called power relation, power, politics if you will, as it starts off with the man being dominant, and then by the end, it's really the woman taking charge? But without that, you couldn't really tell what exactly had really changed.

And, you know, it has been asked enough that, how do I feel about that - how do I think Eileen Chang would've thought - I felt sorry? (Editor's note: lost with the recording...) Or let's say even my father would have thought about it. I think the answer is, um, they wouldn't have minded, because both of them were actually script writer. My father was a film producer.

Read the entire interview on Comme les Chinois.

This is the first time that I try this family recipe on my own. I don't know its origin, but it's something that my family has been doing since I was a child. I presume that it may be Chinese, but there isn't anything distinctively Chinese about it.

In a bowl, prepare some ground beef by separating it with very very little water. Add salt, pepper and some chopped green onions. Then add the eggs, and something like 50mL of milk for taste. Mix everything together, and fry it in a pan as seen on the picture.

For quantities, I had about a fist of ground beef for four large eggs.

In early May, I got the chance to meet EastSouthWestNorth's Roland Soong in Hong Kong, someone who I find plays an immensely important role in transferring the information generated in Chinese-speaking territories to a non-Chinese-speaking audience. I've transcribed three interviews in a week and a half. Maybe I can do a fourth one for next week (but this one is twice as long as the three previous combined). So, I suppose that I can announce that this interview should be published on Comme les Chinois at some point in the next two weeks.

In the meanwhile, I invite you to check out the equally interesting interviews that I did on my trip, with Tiffany Wong, Duggar Parrish, Joe Kan, Terry Chan, Raymond Walintukan and Edmond Hung, Patricia Li, Lee Clow, and Fiona Lee. Two more, with Ashley Wong and Derrick Chang, will follow.

After celebrating just six months of existence, this interview with Mr Soong would be my 17th interview on CLC.

The highest peak in nb of visitors was attained on May 12th (I remember it, b/c it was the same day that the Sichuan earthquake hit) when Radio-Canada linked to an entry on my blog, not about the earthquake, but about my realization that Radio-Canada.ca was once again behind the Great Firewall (I was returning from Hong Kong on May 10th).

Comme à l'habitude, vu que le festival ne le fait pas sur son site, voici les films sold-out après le quatrième jour de Fantasia 2008. Les deux séances de "Accuracy of Death", le blockbuster japonais mettant en vedette l'acteur Japano-Taiwanais Takeshi Kaneshiro, sont sold-out depuis la journée d'ouverture, et une séance supplémentaire a été annoncée pour le 11 juillet à 15h dans le Hall.

As usual, since the festival isn't doing it on their site, here are the sold-out movies after the fourth day at Fantasia 2008. Both screenings of "Accuracy of Death", the Japanese blockbuster starring Japanese-Taiwanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, are sold-out since opening day, and an extra showing was scheduled on July 11th at 3PM in the Hall.

My friend Rob started a new movie blog, which starts with coverage of the Fantasia festival. It's called When we see the Ocean.

On Tuesday, I started my musical segment on Radio Centre-Ville (mp3 - starts at the 35-40th minute). That was some really intense editing that Yvonne did.

Tomorrow, Thursday July 3rd, there's an interview that I did for Carmel Kilkenny last week that was aired on Radio-Canada International (English) (mp3 - starts at the 18th minute).

Friday, a panel on Canadianess that I am having with RCI will also be aired on the English-language show.

Somewhat relatedly, a dude that I met and interviewed on CLC was on Radio-Canada's Première Chaîne (Radio One) yesterday night at Ailleurs c'est ici (link - starts at the 6-7th minute).