Maleonn's Kingdom of Illusions

from Maleonn's What Love Is

You can still make magic with photography. Of course, you need more than Photoshop. Some hereditary talent never hurts. Maleonn's father was the head of the Shanghai Opera, his mother a famous actress. More importantly, a magician must maintain the imagination of a child. When his parents were sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, Ma Liang stayed behind, alone, and became Maleonn, child-mage, lord of a private universe. The words accompanying his work are his own.

From Forty Years in South China, by Reverend John Fagg, an account of the Reverend John Van Nest Talmage, a missionary in Xiamen from 1847 to 1890.

"This will account in part for the barbarous custom of infanticide which prevails to so lamentable an extent among these heathen. Only female infants are destroyed. While the parents are living the son may be of pecuniary advantage to them, and after their death, he can attend to the rites of their souls, and even after his death, through him the parents may have descendants to perform the ancestral rites. A daughter on the contrary, it is supposed, will only prove a burden in a pecuniary point of view, and after she is married she is reckoned to the family of her husband. Her children, also, except her husband otherwise order, are only expected to attend to the spirits of their paternal ancestors."

"This isn't China," you might well say, should someone lead you off a plane in a blindfold, then remove it after bringing you to Chikan. "A Mediterranean town gone to seed, perhaps." Then you'd sniff the humidity, note a svelte Asian chap rocket by on a scooter. "Vietnam? These buildings could be French colonial." But Chikan is two hours and a world away from Guangzhou, leading to the next question, "Who on earth built this place?"

The Green Hornet: A Pre-Review

We get the movies we deserve. Information has replaced imagination, and worldwide Spiderman receipts guarantee we'll get superhero remakes until the archives have been exhausted. But the upcoming remake of The Green Hornet, due out this December, is a double outrage. That the original show bored in all but one aspect is forgivable; a recycled superhero script is a better bet than an original script, according to obscene Hollywood calculus. That this remake will trample the legacy of Bruce Lee, and his remarkable achievement as Kato, is not.

From the banned book Stick Out Your Tongue, by Ma Jian.

The Ceremony of Empowerment was to be conducted as usual by Labrang Chantso. Sangsang Tashi felt short of breath at the thought that tomorrow she would have to perform the Union of the Two Bodies Ritual with him. She sensed that Labrang Chantso disliked her, and that he hated the thought that his elder brother, Tenzin Wangdu, had been reincarnated in her body. But Labrang Chantso was well versed in the secret doctrines. It was he who had instructed her on the Five Major Treatises, and who had conducted her preliminary vase initiation. Sangsang Tashi pictured Labrang Chantso's face. His forehead was lined with wrinkles which crumpled to the side when he looked up. Large black pupils filled his small narrow eyes. He was a tall and heavy man.

Sangsang Tashi thought of the wall painting in the Meditation Hall that showed Bodhisattva Vajrapani, Wielder of the Thunderbolt Sceptre, locked in sexual embrace with his female consort. Tomorrow Sangsang Tashi would have to adopt the consort's position and sit on the Bodhisattva's lap, her legs wrapped around his waist. A hot, damp feeling stirred inside her. Labrang Chantso's face flashed before her eyes. His expression was cold and stern.

A Farewell to Hutongs

The tourists all have the same poppycock opinion. "How can they tear down the hutongs? The destruction...the loss of culture...so tragic!" Sure, John Q. Westerner, you try living in an unheated, cold-water pile of bricks, padding out to use a public toilet on a brisk January night. It's all well and good to traipse about Beijing's more well-kept hutongs for a few hours, snapping photos and dodging cars, then celebrate your newfound Sino-wisdom with a latte at the Pass By Bar. It's another thing entirely to live in the choking squalor of the Xuanwumen hutongs , slums by any other name.

Then again, not all the hutongs are slums, nor tourist havens; most are just average Beijingers' homes. No matter. Real estate developers are laying waste to all but the most picturesque hutongs with a ruthless efficiency made possible only by tacit government consent. The demise of the citizen's hutong is a foregone conclusion, and a darn shame. But it does not die without protest. The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Center has vowed to draw attention to hutong demolition, the injustice as well as the loss of history.

Gods of the Tea Table

So you've decided to replace some of your daily coffee intake with Chinese tea. Wonderful. And you got yourself a tea kit, and a table to put it on. Even better. A daily tea-making ritual is right up there with long-distance running and mantra-chanting for peace of mind. Until you crowd your tea table with clay deities, however, you're not getting full use out of it. It's like buying a MacBook and not using it at the coffee shop so everyone can see how hip you are.

The tea table is an ideal place for totems, house gods, if you will. Unlike your Livestrong bracelet or lucky scarab, tea table figures get the two things necessary to turn any object into a magical fetish - focused attention, and sacrifice. From time immemorial, the first brewing of tea, - the one with most of the caffeine and impurities - has been poured over the figures. They get fed, and will turn glossy over time, if made from good clay. You, in turn, get whatever juju vibes each figure offers. Here are some of the more well-known.

Peaceful Chinese Dissent

From A Journey Through the Chinese Empire, by French missionary Evariste Regis Huc, first published in 1855.

The Chinese are not in the habit of bowing beneath the rod of their master so unresistingly as is imagined. It may indeed be said, and it is to their credit, that they are in general submissive to authority; but when it becomes too tyrannical, or merely fraudulent, they sometimes rise up with irresistible energy, and bend it to their will.

Land sakes. We just came this close to having the first Mr. Gay China competition. In terms of invisible demographics, the only event more shocking would be a Ms. Courtesan of China competition. Unlike many western countries, where prostitution is relegated to the seedier parts of a city, in Chinese cities one never has to wander farther than half a dozen blocks to find sex for sale. It's an interesting phenomenon, more so in that it's virtually never mentioned in polite society.

Not that anyone here is hypocritical enough to deplore prostitutes; too many can recall hungry times too vividly for that kind of self-righteousness, and there are still far too few opportunities for too many young women to make prostitution anything less than an inevitability. But in a more objective world, there would be a Ms. Courtesan pageant in every country, maybe a Ms. Courtesan Universe. And if there were ever a Courtesan Hall of Fame, Sai Jinhua would be a shoe-in.

Super Traveler Xu Xiake, "Brave as a tiger, dexterous as a gibbon."

World's fastest train aside, travel in China is still not quick and easy. The newly arrived expat who blithely plans a weekend trip to Xi'an ("It's only two hours by plane!") has no idea of all the time-traps in his path. Then again, traveling China at the end of the Ming Dynasty was a sight tougher, what with no C-trip and other inconveniences.

That didn't stop Xu Xiake from traveling the length and breadth of China for most of his life, leaving home at 23 and returning at last thirty one years later to die, body ravaged but spirit unbowed. Historians since have praised Xu Xiake for his bravery and tenacity, scaling mountains and blazing trails alone in all seasons, and somehow managing to record it all in a massive travel diary of more than half a million words. Here are some excerpts and pictures of the places he visited.