Chinese Community Forum (CCF), Issue 9755
CCF Editor
===+==+==+== C h i n e s e C o m m u n i t y F o r u m ==+==+==+===
Wednesday, October 8, 1997
(Issue No. 9755)
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Chinese Community Forum (CCF) is an e-journal published on China-Net. CCF is
dedicated to the discussion on the issues related to the Chinese community.
The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of the
Editorial Board of CCF. Contributions to the discussions and suggestions of
new topics are very much appreciated.
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Table of Contents Author | Lines
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-- Love and Marriage --
1. What Will You Do
If Your Significant Other Cheated on You? ................ Ray Zhang 73
2. Make Love and Cave .................................... Haiteng Deng 38
-- Letters and Correspondence --
3. Comment on Hong Kong's land development .............. Rong Win Cai 38
4. Response ................................................. Luo Ning 22
-- Remembrance --
5. Remembrance of My Revolutionary History ................ William Liu 107
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-- From the Editor --
To forgive or revenge in case of spouse cheating is a century old subject.
Still there exists no easy answer. In this issue, Ray Zhang tries to
illustrate how the Chinese tradition has been dealing with this issue by
and large. And further, as we step in this amazing electronic age, to
revenge can now be achieved in a very efficient and inexpensive way. Read
Ray's article and you will find out how. Is that a right thing to do?
Your comments are much appreciated.
Haiteng Deng brings his interpretation of a hot subject, hey, you know
what it is. If not, read and find out. Will you be able to find a third
positive function of this daily, weekly or monthly exercise? Let CCF know
and share your thoughts, feelings and what not with all of us, will you?
Years back, this editor was deeply moved by a Taiwan movie entitled "We
All Grew Up That Way" which vividly depicted the naivete and naughtiness
that we have all been through, and had hoped for a mainland version of it.
Now, the hope comes true with William Liu's rememberance which someday
could become live on screen.
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1. What Will You Do
If Your Significant Other Cheated on You? ................. Ray Zhang 73
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Actually, the real question I want to ask is what will I do if my
significant other cheated on me? I had to change the pronoun in the title
since I don't want to be the subject of the discussion. Sadly, though
some say fortunately, I don't have a significant other now, not even an
insignificant one. Nonetheless it's still a useful question to ponder.
Just in case ...
It all started with a forward I got from someone. It's a lengthy lengthy
article posted to TPC last week, or maybe the week before. (I can't
remember anything nowadays.) In case you don't know, TPC stands for
talk.politics.china -- a filthy filthy and noisy noisy place, I might add.
It has nothing to do with TCP -- for all you tech nerds out there.
Also in case you have not read that lengthy lengthy post, here is my
condensed version. A guy met a gal and fell in love with her; the gal
said she was alone, or at least that's how the guy understood; then the
gal left him; the guy later found out that the gal had a fiance, who was
also cheated and dumped by the gal; so both unfortunate men shared their
pain as well as emails they sent to and received from the gal.
In the post, the guy listed the gal's Chinese name, English name, DOB,
height, weight, the names of the school and department she is studying in,
home address, and etc. Maybe SSN and credit card numbers as well. I
don't remember. But you get the drift, right? Email exchanges between
him and her and her and her fiance were attached and annotated with his
feelings at the time and analysis now. Time stamps on emails were
carefully studied and used to show how the gal had cheated them both at
the same time, which was used to support his claim that that gal is a
chronicle liar, evil, and someone to avoid at all costs. There were also
some juicy bits in the story - as one of my friends put it -- detailing
the gal's anatomy to show that he didn't just make up the story. So much
for my condensed version, I guess.
Out of curiosity, I passed that forward to some of my female Chinese
co-workers and wondered what their reactions would be from a woman's point
of view. I was very much surprised, actually startled, to learn that most
of them think that that guy's action is understandable and justifiable. He
was obviously very much pissed off, and wanted revenge and therefore used
a very cost-effective way, plain and simple -- just to quote one of them.
So, revenge, that's what it's all about. That revenge (or maybe it's not
a revenge if that gal doesn't mind the publicity) obviously wouldn't bring
her back to him or do him good in any other ways. But nonetheless he
chose to do that -- to channel his anger perhaps. And my pretty and sweet
and ever so innocent-looking female Chinese co-workers thought he did a
justifiable thing. Shivering. This is a scary thought, ya know.
I think deep down we Chinese are all rooted on the concept of revenge --
just to varying degrees. We have a proud 5000 years history of revenging
and being revenged. That human (or inhumane rather) quality has been long
imprinted in our DNA. Nothing can change that. Love your enemy is by no
means a Chinese concept. All the teachings of being kind and loving and
caring only stay in books or at most are left to monks and nuns. Nobody
practice that in real life.
Don't you often hear the familiar Chinese expression: Ten years is not
too late for a gentleman to revenge. You may think it's teaching us to
cultivate patience; but I say it's teaching us to never forget to revenge.
I am reminded of one story I read somewhere. There is this Chinese
businessman who will always go see Japanese prostitutes whenever he
travels to Japan. He thinks it's his way of revenging for those helpless
Chinese women who were raped and killed by Japanese soldiers during the
wartime, since the government isn't too thrilled about the idea of
war-crime compensations. When I read it, I was speechless, but wasn't
particularly sickened by that idea. Guess I've already become numb.
So, what will I do if my future significant other cheats on me? I don't
know and dare not to think. It's much easier to fool others than to fool
your own heart. I know I am a Chinese, and therefore I don't know what I
will do.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
2. Make Love and Cave ..................................... Haiteng Deng 38
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Although Elaine on the Sitcom, Seinfeld, thinks that this sex thing is
totally overrated, experts tell us that the thought of sex occur most
human beings every minute. As we all know, for some people to live is to
eat; but for some others, to live is to have sex. Although some Chinese
don't like this notion, it is really hard to drive the evil force out of
our minds. And only a few people had succeeded, such as Applegate and his
classmates who castrated themselves for God's sake. It is for sure that
they are having a nice walk with their creator after the last supper.
Nevertheless, this sex thing does have two positive functions -- to make
love and to have some relaxation.
We understand this love-making aspect perfectly. Imagine that two bodies
are so closely tangled, if no baby is made, what would it do? Of course,
it is love. But making love is different from having tried to relax. I
could provide you a good reason. The more love you make, the more
selfless you become, and the more you want to do for your partner. At the
end you could become exhausted, physically.
However, I did not understand this relaxation-making mechanism until I
watched an interview in the Larry King Live. Howard Stern was very intense
that evening since he called his interviewer a frog. Hey, how could he
call a guy who married seven times a frog? Then he admitted that he was
intense, and said that he would get relaxed after the show by watching a
porno movie and by having a self-sex in his hotel room. You may say,"Oh,
No!". But this is what I saw. Is there a short name for this
relaxation-making process?
Meanwhile, stay with me. In one episode of Seinfeld, I found that they
frequently used the word "cave." It seems that Elaine got a sweet sleep
after she caved for J. F. K. Jr., and Cosmo Kramer also had a sound sleep
after he caved for a nude lady in an apartment across the street. On the
other hand, Jerry and George could not sleep every night since they had no
one to cave for. So, cave, what a beautiful word!
Nevertheless, I do not know which one of these two functions of sex is
better. Do we have a choice? As long as you could get up early and could
concentrate on how to get rich, or famous, or rich and famous, you would
be perfectly fine with this world.
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3. Comment on Hong Kong's Land Development ............... Rong Win Cai 38
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like to comment on the Hong Kong land subject.
I follow the author's feeling toward the side-by-side contrast between the
mass concrete and the green mountain on the Hong Kong land. However, I
think it would easily mislead the audience to romanticize (the word quoted
from the second article. :-) ) the Hong Kong land management skills.
One simple fact is that the neighboring Guangdong has been supplying part
of electricity and almost all of the fresh water to Hong Kong. Put these
two plants on the Hong Kong land, Hong Kong wouldn't have looked so
romantic. And these are only two plants! I need not imagine the look with
the existence of other plants on the Hong Kong land.
The name Hong Kong has a distinctive position on the world stage, as if it
were an independent nation. It is not wrong for Hong Kong to enjoy such
international favor, for its important contribution to the world economy.
But when we pick on one topic of Hong Kong, such as the land management,
it would be inaccurate to ignore its significant dependence on its
neighboring region. When we combine all facts together, Hong Kong is
hardly different from NYC or Tokyo on the broad sense.
However, I still think Hong Kong land management is worth studying,
whatever its goodness is. In the article, author used a number of
comparisons. To me, it seems to suggest Hong Kong land management a model
for others to learn. I think for the purpose of learning, much more
analysis will be needed. The end result of the analysis might be as
simple as that HK's special geographical location, its unique
international position, and a bunch of other attributes altogether do not
apply to other places on this globe.
Similarly, in choosing any other topic on Hong Kong or any "city-state",
the author should easily find the subject's strong dependence on others
and therefore should point that out. And this principle of identifying the
interrelationship between the subject of study and others should be
applied to ALL analysis. Thanks.
Note: I use Hong Kong instead of HKSAR throughout my comment because HKSAR
is too
new to take the credit on this subject. It is not meant to create any
political bias.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
4. Response ................................................... Ning Luo 22
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thank you for the comments.
In response to your specific point that the electricity and water supply
of Hong Kong are from outside, I have no disagreement. However, few, if
any, of the world megacities have there E&W supply plants within the metro
area. NYC's major fresh water supply reservoir is in New Jersey (not near
Hudson River), Shanghai has Qinshan Nuclear Power plant in Zhejiang. Well,
Beijing's are within great "Beijing", but still far away from the city.
Therefore, the point still stands that there should be no technological or
geological reason that why other megacities in China could not preserve
environment much better than it is now, other than lack of development
strategy.
My criticism to the poor land management of other cities in China was not
merely based on my impression of the recent travel. It is shared by both
official account and the sentiment of ordinary people. For example, if
you ask Beijing residents, had they know the traffic would be so jammed
even with the Third Beltway now, would they still think the dismantling of
the ancient city wall of Beijing was worthwhile? The answer is most
probably negative.
As for the reference to HKSAR, I intentionally put it in two places: One
for border control I passed, which was after July 1, 1997, the other in
asking whether the current government of HKSAR could manage land well in
the years to come. Regards, Luo Ning
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5. Remembrance of My Revolutionary History ................. William Liu 107
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
0. Cat Shit
I think it was grade 5. Our Chinese Language course had a few lectures
devoted to Lu Xun's nostalgic essay "From the Garden of One Hundred Plants
to the Study of Three Flavors." We all thought the essay sucked hard at
that time. If not for Lu Xun's demigod status at the time, some of us
would have written wall posters criticizing its lack of a really martial,
proletarian hero in the genre of Mr. Li Kui. Thank Chairman Mao, Li Kui
was not far behind Lu Xun in his revolutionary significance at that time;
his "chopping heads like melons and vegetables" style was definitely more
to our taste, than Lu Xun's "Confucianism eats people" sensationalism.
Then we all grew old.
Marcel Proust smelled a cherry (or some other kind of) flower, and thought
he had got to write down something. And that something had absorbed that
big (and very old) cry baby Ba Jin's whole post-CR life to translate. Then
the other day, I came home late and stepped onto some cat shit. I didn't
bother to smell it, but it tickled something inside just as inexplicably
as the cherry did to Proust. So I decided maybe I should also write down
something, trivial as it may be, of my childhood. I just hope that my good
friend Wang Shuo will learn English and spend his post-punk life
translating my writing into Chinese.
As always, this is also an invitation for all the readers to contribute to
this project: Write our childhood. It may sound trivial, but that's life
as we lived it.
No, I am not a revolutionary hero; I am not bound for greatness (or
smallness); I am not a candidate for the Fourth-Generation Leadership
Nucleus. For God's sake, I have been trying to join CCP for 20 years, and
they still say I don't write the correct application by ending the letter
with "I vow to consecrate my whole life to the realization of communist
enterprise." But still, remembrance of childhood constantly endears me to
the preciousness of life. Even silly things we did in childhood sound
oh-so-smart now. Alas, the Heart of a Child. Let it beat. And also,
through this project, I want to prove the fallacy of the so-called
Universal Principle of Life pronounced by my buddy Harry Wei, in jest, in
drunkenness, or in any other twisted mental manifestations.
1. Sister Lin
I think it was grade 3. At that time, I first started to read the "Dream
in the Red Chamber." Although I was clueless about, for example, what
"Yun2 Yu3 Qing2" meant, I nonetheless had the eye to appreciate Mr. Xue
Pan's blunt theory about "Happiness of Girls". I was, of course, not
advanced enough to appreciate the many poems sister Lin and her cousins
wrote. I knew that the poetry contest between Lin Dai-yu and Shi Xiang-yun
by the pond was a thing of almost divine beauty, but I couldn't really
understand what was actually said in the poem. I meant to ask my old man,
but balked because I knew he would either give me stuff I could get from
Selected Works of Chairman Mao myself or silence. My mother had no
literary bone in her. In fact, she had to come to me for sentences and
ideas about wall posters she had to submit on a regular basis. Sometimes
it got really frustrating to explain to her that Li Kui and Lu Zhi-sheng
were not the same guy or Wu Song killed the tiger with his bare fist not
automatic rifle. Yes, in public, I was a 100 percent "Water Marsh" boy,
reciting the ranking and nicknames of 108 heroes in the same way
businessmen recite their account receivables today. But privately, I was
totally seized by the "Chamber." And then I met my sister Lin.
Her name was S. She transferred to our school from a northern city. She
was taller than me, as was typical of girl-boy height differential at
grade 3. But I was higher than her. I forgot my exact official title
then, but it was to the class pecking order roughly as a Da Jiang to the
PLA hierarchy. She was shy, thin, pale, and coughed occasionally. She
seemed to be always under some sort of melancholy, an elevated
lonesomeness. She liked to do artwork. I don't really remember her face as
it was then, although I met her last year in China (but how merciless is
time!). She was my sister Lin.
So I decided to like artwork, too. I was moderately endowed with some
artistic talent in drawing. At that time, paper cuts were rather popular,
but most patterns were of the very revolutionary kind, either a Li Tie-mei
holding that lantern high above her head or a Wu Qing-hua kicking class
enemy's ass. So I would sit at home, worked till, I am sure, Chairman Mao
went to bed, and copied diligently from a nature book in which hundreds of
butterflies were displayed. Every morning, in the self-study class, I
would shuffle my artwork to her, eyes barely open from nightly labor. She
smiled quietly, not looking directly at me (but that was how I wanted it).
She would make my drawings into beautiful paper cuts, in all colors,
purple, golden, red, orange. She would give me some. I was so elated. I
took out the "Chamber" and tried to find whether there were places where
sister Lin made special things for Jiao Bao-yu. It didn't take me long. In
their first meeting, sister Lin made a little purse for Bao-yu, but that
heartless playboy gave it to someone else, making sister Lin cry her eyes
swollen. So I swore to Chairman Mao that I would never give her paper
cuts away, even to Chairman Mao himself.
But then circumstance forced us apart. Not tuberculosis, which was curable
at that time, but a guy by the name of Sun Gui-feng. I can remember the
names of less than 10 of my grade-3 classmates, but this fellow's name I
am going to carry into my grave. He was infatuated with S, too. But he
neither had the brain nor look nor talent to capture her on merit. So he
went out to spread the words that S and I were a "pair." And the rumor
mill ran overtime, and some hospitals' maternity wards were checked for
S's name. It just got so very unbearable to her that one morning, she
stopped receiving my drawings. She looked at me, this time directly, her
eyes sadly expressing her hurt innocence, tears rolling out. Oh, she was
so pretty! I said with my eyes: "Yes, I shall honor thee with my last
breath." I knew she got what I meant. She ran out and missed the whole
self-study class.
Last summer, I was back in China. I asked my mother for some old
collectibles from grade school. I wanted to see her paper cuts. My mother
thought that I was nuts. "I sold it to the garbage collector." Oh, my vow!
Fortunately, Chairman Mao has long died, and no one will hold me
responsible for breaking the vow. But my heart is a flower. Sometimes it
dreams about its youth. It dreams about the butterflies.
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+ Executive Editor: Lei Xu Associate Editor: Newton Liu +
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