Chinese stories

There’s a new show on TV here that I’ve been following recently called the Golden Marriage (金婚). It stars Zhang Guoli (as Tong Zhi, a homophone of ‘Comrade’) and Jiang Wenli (as Wenli) as husband and wife. The concept behind the show is one I haven’t seen before, as every episode takes place one year after the previous one. It goes from 1956-2005. Chinese TV is different from American TV, in that they already have the whole series filmed and play 3 hour-long episodes a night. That way you can watch the whole thing in about a month. It lets you get more into the story I think, than the US way of playing episodes once a week over 8 months (that is if the show doesn’t get cancelled). It also makes a TV series become related to a period in your life. When I had mono I had nothing else to do, but watch 五月槐花香 (can’t think of a good translation at the moment) every day, and I was thankful there was something to take my mind off being sick.

I think the series Golden Marriage is important, because I have never seen a popular TV show here portray the pre-80s period (and I think this one is getting very high ratings). It also does not shy away from some of the serious issues from that time, and even pokes fun (in a very dry, Chinese way) at the social/political climate of the time without playing down the seriousness of the situations. Some of the funnier parts I can remember are when Tongzhi and his buddy do not know what it means to be a ‘rightist’, and when they joke about having to write criticisms of plays they have never seen. During the Cultural Revolution Wenli goes to have an abortion, and her mother-in-law goes to stop her because she thinks it will be a boy. She suceeds in stopping the doctors by threatening to write a big character poster denouncing them and parade it through the streets. There is also a few funny scenes when Tongzhi and a young lady converse by quoting lines from Mao Zedong back and forth at each other.

The names they want to give their children are funny, too. For their firstborn, if it was a boy, they wanted to name him Gesi (格斯) after Engles, but it was a girl, so they named her Yanni (燕妮) after Marx’s wife, who’s name was Jenny.

The series is also important because it shows the continuity in Chinese society that we don’t get to see from accounts of the turmoil of the 50s-70s period. I think it’s hard for us non-Chinese to imagine what it might have been like living during that time, and here is a completely plausible story of one family. In a lot of brief China histories from western news stories one gets the feeling that China did not really exist before 1980, or that it was this backward, chaotic place, but people really did live through that time. The series shows that even though many ideologies were thrown about, people still held on to old beliefs. For example, there was supposed to be equality between the sexes, but the family clearly favors having a baby boy over a girl.

There are some things in the series that would never fly in the US, like getting an abortion and parents slapping their children, though.

Another interesting thing about the series is that it does not shy away from the difference in sex education within the family between the generations. Wenli has no idea what to do on her wedding night, but her daughters are educated in school, and she feels foolish for trying to explain it to them.

Zhang Guoli is great in the series, too, and has really broken out of the Ji Xiaolan mold unlike his other co-stars from that series, Wang Gang (who always plays Heshen, or the not completely evil adversary willing to do anything to get ahead) and Zhang Tieling (who always plays the Emperor). Recently Zhang Guoli has been in another good TV series “Brothers” (亲兄热弟), and in his recent roles has played complex, flawed characters.

At one point in the series the couple’s daughter is going to get married, but doesn’t want a big, traditional Chinese wedding, because it would be too su (俗), which means something like common, conventional or vulgar. I found that interesting, because in the US people of the same generation may give the same reasons for not wanting a big church wedding.

In any case, I think this series will be a big hit. The only drawback about it is that there’s so much yelling and fighting between the husband and wife, and if you are in a bad mood it will only make things worse.

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By far Mao Zedong’s mausoleum has to be the strangest place I’ve been to in Beijing. The Ikea here probably has to be the second strangest. We have been meaning to get there for a long time just to check it out and get a dresser for baby things to go in, and we finally went there yesterday.

The place is like an airport, you have to drive to get there just about, and there is a line of taxis dropping people off and picking people up. The place is three stories high, and whoever designed it must be some sort of evil genius skilled at getting people to spend. We took an elevator up to the third floor, and decided to get a bite to eat at the Ikea cafeteria. So we followed the signs that pointed straight ahead, then left, then right, then straight ahead, then left, then left again… We felt like rats in some sort of weird experiment, surrounded by other aimlessly wandering middle-class Chinese shoppers, sales reps demonstrating different products, and bins full of cheap toys and accessories. 

After what seemed like forever we found the giant cafeteria, which is probably there so that people can come and spend an entire day at the store. I’m suprised they didn’t have bunk beds or something for people to spend the night on. It turns out the cafeteria was right behind the elevator we got out of, and would have gotton there if we would just have turned around in the first place.

After eating we got what we needed, then decided to get out as fast as possible. That isn’t so easy, however. First we tried the stairs. They only went to the second floor and stopped at what appeared to be the entrance to a maze like the one on the third floor we had just escaped from. So we tried getting in the elevator and found it only goes to the third floor. When we got out I overheard a lady saying to her husband “Hit 1″. He said, “There’s only 2!” “Hit 1!!” “There’s only 2!!!!” In the end we escaped by going back down the elevator we came up on, then down to the big warehouse to pick up a baby mattress, over to the checkout to pay, past the hot dog stands to the delivery center to give them our address and pay for the delivery fee, then out to the taxi line.

It wasn’t until we got home that in all of the confusion we had forgotten to take our things out of the storage locker in the store! Damn

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