CUL: A spell-binding letdown

I like to refer to myself as part of the Harry Potter Generation. I discovered him when I was in 5th grade at 10 years old. He was 11 then as it goes. I finished the 7th book, just a day before my 19th birthday and thus we aged together as best literary and living companions can. So I have lots of very strong feelings about the books, all of which I loved. In retrospect, I think the 4th book is my least favorite because it is largely a side story separate from the greater plot and contains within itself a very large plot hole. The 6th book is my favorite though, the one that I read over and over in the long anticipation for the 7th book, where even during my freshman year of college I would go over random paragraphs for the slightest clue to what we could expect in the last book. I wasn't the coolest freshman.

Well I was very excited to see the 6th Harry Potter movie because of all this. While I generally dislike movie adaptations and hadn't been a big fan of these, the 5th movie had been very enjoyable. The trailer looked terrific so I was excited to see how boy Voldemort, Horcruxes memories, Felix Felicis, sexy Ginny and the Half Blood Prince would appear on the big screen. Like I mentioned before, I won tickets to see an advanced screening of this.

Btw, what have any of you ever won in your lives (not merit prizes but just luck of the draw things)? I feel like this is a cool list to make. Mine are 18 speed Mountain Racing Bike, these 2 tickets, a Hoegaarden Gift pack in Beijing that I never could cash in, and a cake tasting raffle ticket in high school. Post yours.

Oh but without giving away crucial plot details, here are some notes about it that help explain why I HATED the 6th Harry Potter movie:

1. This movie deviates more from the book than any of its predecessors. It seems to be a theme around Hollywood to take a celebrated brand and rebrand it with its own story despite the facts that these brands became celebrated because of their stories in the first place. Angels & Demons or any of the comic book remakes are recent examples, and while they aren't all bad, I fear something like Sherlock Holmes might fall flat. I understand that some parts of a book don't transfer well to film, and that it needs to be shortened a lot and rewriting is ok, but it seems that in this movie the changes they made didn't always make sense. They took out a lot of scenes obvious, that's understandable, but they added some too, and that's not.

2. Ginny Weasley. SO DISAPPOINTING. I think we saw this coming though. When they cast the first Harry Potter movie, Ginny had a minor role. Then the books kept coming out and we learned that Ginny grows into a hottie and then Harry's love interest. Well Ginny wasn't cast for that and I think that Warner Bros would trade in Clint Eastwood for a mulligan on her. Not only is she not hot (and she's not even done up to enhance her appearance), but her character is also not written well. In the book, Ginny is hilarious and fun loving, courageous and talented, as well as burdened by her first year mistakes. We see none of that in the movie. As a result, Harry's romance with her is shockingly unwatchable. There's no chase! The two just eventually agree that they both like each other and get together. How realistic. The picture on the right is the first Google image search of her and that's what I leave you with.

3. The fight scenes. All I'm going to say here is they take out the biggest fight scene and add in a completely random one. I can go on for about an hour about how ridiculous this is but first I am going to spend the night trying to think in the shows of the producers and try to understand this decision.

4. The book of the Half Blood Prince. This is a special book within the book and is really integral to the plot. Its doomed from the start in the movie though as it doesn't even look special but instead is more of a thin, somewhat worn schoolbook. I bet it was actually an old Algebra textbook that they replaced the cover. Anyways its a hard thing to show on the screen and as a result, epic fail.

5. Miscellaenous poorly shot scenes or bad writing, such as an omission of Rufus Scrimgeour. Oh and everytime Albus Dumbledore is on, it's like he's trying to make every single line a classic, a line that would sound great and deep in a trailer. But he's a real person in the book, wise but with a real relationship with Harry.

6. Awkward moments. There are many of them in the movie to the extent that silence is not only golden but a full 75% of the film. Harry is given a ton of just blank staring and few lines and I just don't understand it.

7. Helena Bonham Carter. I actually think she's a good actress and plays her part well, but the problem is that she's a big name - probably the actor or actress of the film most famous for her other works. So I think she insisted on having a larger part but her role is really not that large in this movie. So they rewrote in more scenes for her which is stupid.

8. The animators are obsessed with smoky shadows. If you go in knowing this, I guarantee you'll laugh.

9. The tone. The book is very dark and even depressing. The outer world is getting less stable and people everyday are dying or disappearing. This mood is well established in the book and non-existent in the film except for an opening montage of muggle destruction. Someone unfamiliar with the book may completely miss this but to me it was a very big deal. Also, Harry is pretty moody and guilt-ridden in the book (he had just caused Sirius to die) and anguishing over Ginny...in the film he ranges from unemotional to happy-go-lucky.

That said, here are some things to look forward to:
1. Cormac McLaggen - hilarious.
2. Horace Slughorn - he's redone a fair bit in this movie but it's not all terrible. He's darker and less jovial but well-played.
3. Boy Voldemort - terrific, so creepy.
4. The Cave where they search for the Horcrux - I really liked how they represented this.
5. Fred and George's jokeshop - its great, but this isn't exactly a big part of the movie. As you can see, the pluses in this movie are kinda few and far between.

So I'm honestly struggling to even tell my friends to see it. I mean if you're a fan, don't you kinda have to? But fans are exactly the people who won't like the movie. People who know the plot a bit but don't really remember it would probably be perfect for the movie. During it I tried to make the effort to act as if I hadn't read the book - it would have made the experience better, but it was too hard.

News commentary

I don't know how often I comment on political news on this blog, but its not often. I do try to stay informed but I generally get quite annoyed with politcos. But I'm reading a lot about the rioting in Urumqi, in the Northwest Xinjiang Province in China. Most people seem to be ignoring the story but even though I've never been to Xinjiang, this news stirred up a lot of thought with me. But first random thoughts:

- New York is about 10 degrees hotter than it should be. Its a combination of lots of cars, lots of skyscrapers trapping air, baked subway stations, exhaust from those subways, and the fact that you just can't take a leisurely stroll unless you're in a park.
- I saw someone wearing a Clippers Nation t-shirt today. I cracked up in front of him. It had what appeared to be the logo of the Los Angeles Clippers, although I can't be sure because I've never seen them on national television.
- Sarah Palin's speech on her resignation from Alaskan governor basically went as follows: "Life's too short to spend on things that aren't truly important." So really she's saying that life is too short to spend it governing Alaska.
- A commentator on Palin said that many people within her party criticized her for lacking "intellectual capital." That is one of the fanciest ways I have heard for saying that someone is stupid.
- Saw Transformers 2. It is a archetypal summer movie. That may or may not be a compliment.
- I saw a flyer on the 4th of July for a texting promotion to win tickets to an advanced screening of Harry Potter. I was somewhat inebriated at the time and thought "what a dumb thing. I might as well text to it." And I won. Now I have 2 tickets for next Monday, let me know if you want to be my date.

Ok now on to Xinjiang. So I learned when I was in China about how diverse the country really is. I had many pre-trip assumptions about China and because you never hear in the US about Chinese people who look different, I assumed that other people didn't exist. Well very quickly I learned about how the Chinese government classified 56 ethnic groups within the country. The big 5 are the Han, the Tibetans, the Mongolians (who conquered China), the Manchurians (who conquered China) and the Uyghurs (pronounced Wee-gers). Now the Han, which comprises most of my ethnic makeup (although my dad's family is actually part Manchurian), make up 92% of the country so it will seem much less multiethnic than the 56 number would imply, and when you go through most of the East where Shanghai and Beijing are, you will be hardpressed to find any non-Hans. But 8% of China means 8% of 1.4 billion which means there are well over 100 million minorities, or a third of the United States.

But the Hans were historically residents of that Eastern half, living mainly in an area maybe 30% the size of modern day China. Various Chinese dynasties managed to conquer large areas of land in the west, including Tibet and Xinjiang which are both gigantic provinces that make up all of China's western border. The steppes in Eurasia of which Xinjiang and many "Stan countries" are a part of have a very complicated history, being a very early place of human settlement but not of human writing. Basically though, lots of Turkish people were conquered by Chinese forces and during the 1949 Civil War, China re-conquered it and established its borders. There had been and still are attempts for Xinjiang to secede and create a separate state called East Turkestan but these have been repressed.

So you have a great number of Uyghur people and nearly all are fully within Chinese borders, and learn Chinese in school and adopt many of its customs though most practice Islam. I've had Uyghur food in Beijing and it is amazing, and one of my goals this summer was to find similar food in New York. However, faced with overcrowding, the Chinese government encouraged Han Chinese to move to the rest of the country, and now Uyghurs are a minority even in Urumqi, the capital city of Xinjiang.

I don't think there's a question that these are examples of Chinese imperialism. A powerful country is taking over land that it can despite it belonging to distinctly different people. Based on classical European definitions of what constitutes a nation, Tibet, Turkestan (or Uyghurstan) and maybe other areas within China can certainly claim to be a nation.

And yet Americans that decry this outright violation of sovereignty and ethnic repression might not be bothering to consider America's own history. Even recent history. Undoubtedly when you consider British, Spanish, French and Dutch settlers tearing this land away from Native Americans and then instituting slavery within it, the history of the United States does not look good to modern day sensibilities. And then there are the jingoist outings in the Philippines, Korea, Vietnam and now Iraq but I won't get into those. I think rather Puerto Rico and Hawaii provide direct comparisons for evidence of recent American imperialism. Hawaii is especially is a pretty similar example of an island with its own great independent history, culture and language that got annexed by the United States and then made into a state for military reasons. China had history in Xinjiang for millenia before subduing it into the PRC.

Ah but in addition, there's a very tricky part when we're discussing imperialism and its one in which people don't bring up enough. The classical European definition of a nation-state is one in which the people share a unifying identity, usually constituted by race, culture and language. What we tend to forget is that those variables are constantly in flux and to an extent all socially constructed. They may all seem clearly defined at any given moment but a group of people can change dramatically over a few generations. There used to be large tribes in France like the Franks, Burgunds, Lombards, the Frisians and the Visigoths, or something like that, but they've long lost their distinctions. I read about this in a book on nationalism. Anyways, they're now just all French. Nobody's talking about discrimination against the Frisians, it just sounds ridiculous. However, if you think about it, they probably suffered the ultimate discrimination because their identity was completely lost. My point is that modern day France has a strong national identity and unifying culture but this wasn't always the case. France certainly used to be an empire but now we look at the current country and we see a nation.

China is really an even better example of the ambiguity between nationalism and imperialism. The reason the Han ethnicity is the largest on Earth is that they assimilated, or Sinicized, many other groups. I believe that there used to be lots of groups within China, including the Wu around modern day Shanghai, and the Yue in Guangdong, that were once distinct from the Han (whom I don't even know where they're originally from). The Manchurians barely have a separate identity anymore and almost exclusively speak Mandarin. Once again people aren't clamoring for an independent Manchuria, they just accept them as being Chinese. (picture to the right is of Pu Yi, last emperor of China, a Manchu and yet another purported relative of yours truly)

So on a deeper level, the situation in Xinjiang has precedent and I believe the Chinese government thinks that given enough time, Uyghurs and Tibetans and everyone else will all be considered Chinese. In an age of celebrating diversity, this seems like an awful belief but you have to understand where they are coming for because it has happened many times before. But the current issues aren't really dealing with that. Though the rioting reportedly began in protest of a factory brawl in Guangdong that killed 2 Uyghurs, it's pretty much understood that tensions had been boiling up for a while due to government policies regulating Uyghurs. I don't know the details of the policies and I take both Western media and Chinese media with grains of salt - I've read inaccurate reporting by both entities. But from what I understand, China has adopted policy that while allowing Islam, seriously hampers it and seems designed to let it die (I've read that they prevent children from attending Mosques and only let people use a state-approved Koran). They're also slowly phasing out Uyghur-language education, although this should be compared to the rest of China where local language education was phased out very quickly. Overall, with regards to China's policies, I'd say I don't know enough about them, but from what I do know, they are very culturally destructive and I understand why the Uyghurs are protesting.

Their other main complaint seems to be that an influx of Chinese immigration has essentially taken over their land, and that most of best jobs in the region are controlled by Han people. In this context too it seems the Uyghurs have a very fair complaint. In Urumqi, protests against immigration are a display of nationalism. However, in the United States, anti-immigration protests in this same vein are seen as racist and intolerant. Basically both people are saying, "I don't want these people coming in, not knowing our language and taking our jobs." In the US the response has been get over it, and economic and cultural advancements are cited. You can make a very strong case for the same argument to be used in Xinjiang. In a sense, Uyghurs should feel somewhat lucky that they do learn Mandarin in school - they are being taught the language of power in that country and at least one barrier between them and social liberty within that country is knocked down.

I want to conclude that I really do believe that China is a racist country. The R-word is a very sharp accusation to throw around but in my own experience I've seen it to be generally true. I know the US to have plenty of racial problems, but I was surprised to find throughout my travels that most of the rest of the world is even further behind us on racial tolerance and integration. We assume Western Europe to be a bastion of liberalness, but you'd be hard-pressed to find Asian Germans and black Italians who consider themselves to be Germans and Italisn first and foremost. England seemed to have the largest influx and best integration of immigrants, mostly remnants of its empire, but it'll be years before they elect a black president. I noticed in Ireland that people were afraid to talk about race - people were hesitant even to ask what ethnicity I was, and most people would assume that I didn't speak fluent English. Furthermore in China, there were many an occasion where I was definitely treated poorly just because the locals felt like I was different.

Well through this all, I've come to the belief that outright racism doesn't just appear in violence and slurs - I can't recall coming across any flagrant incidents like this in any travel - but rather in the true mindset that what race you are matters. The people I encountered in China really believed that there are concrete differences between races. Stereotypes are laughed at or preached against but rather looked at analytically, even scientifically. The Chinese government subtly quantifies these in their Gao Kao test for admission to college. I can talk about how ridiculous that test is for days but in this discussion, the significant note is that different races are scored on different scales. In order to have more Uyghurs in their good colleges for example, they set a lower threshold score for them. This is state-mandated affirmative action. Whereas I think affirmative action is good for our country, I see it in China as serving a different purpose and not so much as contributing towards diversity but rather distinguishing differences. The only times I saw true diversity, when people of different races hung out together, in China always involved foreigners congregating.

So I don't know what the correct policy should be in Xinjiang. I do see the case as a microcosm of many important historical processes and am following it with great interest. I have seen a real riot like this with uncontrolled violence and burning, and I really hope that the world sees less of it. I hope that everybody in China can learn to live together, a simple notion common to Confucianism and Islam and one that is easily within our natural human capacity.

Tourism in America

First off, update notes:
1) I saw one of the rarest sights in New York this weekend. No it wasn't a meteorite or a giant ape climbing skyscrapers. Rather, I got into a yellow cab driven by a white American male.

Seriously, I've probably seen a driver from just about everywhere, but never a guy who talked like me. The dude had gotten a Master's in Education so I wasn't quite sure what his story was but he made for a very entertaining cab ride. I asked him how many other American cab drivers he knew, and he said 20, out of a total of around 30,000. Perhaps Cash Cab is among these. So that was pretty cool. Along this note I just want to say something about cabs here in the U.S. - I hope I didn't put off the impression that I ws disparaging immigrant drivers or anything. That would be pretty counter to the theme of this blog. I generally really enjoy getting into the car with someone from another country and routinely ask people about their experiences in Ethiopia, Sudan, Pakistan or Yemen (the last 4 that I can remember). Its just that the taxi driving trade has evolved into an immigrant one in recent years to the point that a white guy deserves mention in this blog post. I would also like to point out that our cab industry is very uniquely American. Every cab driver in China was Chinese and most drivers in Dublin were Irish, and so on for the rest of Europe. In addition, I have never seen a driver abroad talk on the cell phone during a ride. These two points might be related, because if I was abroad somewhere where I didn't speak the language well, driving a cab 12 hours a day, I'd want to shoot the shit with my friends every so often rather than listen to the bitchings of some overpampered passenger. But on the other hand, it can be really rude.

2) It dawned on me recently that Koreans have somehow subtly but steadily entered my life for about a year now. In Beijing, I lived in Wudaokou, which in addition to being a very Western part of town, is also the Korea-town of Beijing. I sang karaoke at a Korean place and had my first dog at a Korean restaurant. In Dublin, my roommate Sanghyup, who turned out to be one of the coolest people I had ever met, was straight from Seoul. Back at Georgetown, my roommate had a Korean girlfriend (this one's a stretch). Now in New York, I'm living a few blocks away from Korea-Town and do my grocery shopping there. I don't know what this all means, but perhaps I'm meant to study Korean and prevent nuclear war.

3) I went down to the waterfront with my roommates Griff and Streeter on Sunday. It took a while for us to get up but we finally set out at 3. Luckily these are some of the longest days of the year so we had great light the whole time. We got off at City Hall and checked out that building for a little bit, grabbed a bite at Blimpie's, then searched for the World Trade Center site. The whole site was compellingly massive and all under a maze of construction. The sheer size of the rebuilding puts a physical context to the severity of 9/11 - metaphorically, the 3 acre gaping hole still present in downtown Manhattan shadows in comparison to the gaping hole still present in our nation. We didn't make it to the memorial, we somehow walked by it, but I'd like to go back sometime.

We did make it to the Waterfront and probably walked along it for a good 15 blocks all the way to Battery Park. The area was really nice and very serene - for New York - and really could have been any number of places. It brought me back to both Portland and Hong Kong. The view was nice although it would have been nicer if we weren't staring at Jersey, and the harbor had a few very expensive boats including a sick speedboat. Really though, I had decided to go down here in order to see the Statue of Liberty. I'd done the whole touristy thing of walking to the torch (now not allowed) when I was like 7, and while I don't really want to do that again, I really appreciate how great a symbol that green girl is. I think it's a symbol of immigration that is unfortunately no longer really present in the American consciousness. I might take the ferry to Staten Island sometime to get a better view cause it's pretty hard to see from Manhattan.

We walked back up to Wall Street. Despite being another symbol of New York, this area really reminded me of Boston. (That picture on the right of a waterfront restaurant seems very New England too.) The crammed office buildings, the way the subway entrances meld into the surroundings and the remnants of colonial architecture all made me wonder whether I had accidentally teleported to Government Center. Also near Wall Street is a giant metal statue of a large bull, the symbol of reckless capitalism. Evidently, Wall Street planners decided against building a corresponding bear, although if I ever have the capital to buy real estate in that area (some of the most expensive land in the world) I think I'd open an FAO Schwartz and plant a giant Teddy Bear staring at the bull. Btw, the bull has gigantic balls and many tourists were making lewd poses involving them.


Ok so that leads me to a theme that I've been thinking about for a while and the title of this blog post: Tourism in America. Basically I've been a tourist on and off for most of the existence of this blog. Any time you live somewhere you don't know too well and have the curiosity to know more about it, you can be a tourist - you don't need to be wearing a giant Canon around your neck or spend half your time squinting at a map. Since I returned to the U.S. in December, I haven't left the country, but I've realized that my perspective has changed and that I see everything in my own country differently now. After observing the practices within foreign nations, I'm trying to be very aware of cultural ramifications within our everyday actions. I've noticed how quickly Americans adapt to new technology, how resistant we are to physical contact with strangers and how impatient we are. When I'm in an elevator now and someone presses a button to a floor in my way, I get legitimately peeved!

So I think it was a Sunday in March at the beginning of Spring Break when I was out exploring DC. Seeing more of the city was one of my main goals for the semester and while I probably saw more of it in that 1 semester than I had in the first 4, it was still a failure. But that Sunday I walked through Eastern Market into the Capital and whatnot and I realized that I don't think I had ever been that close to the Capital before. I had never taken a tour of it (or the White House), not with Georgetown or in high school or with my family. I had played Ultimate by the Monument but hadn't been up close to this gigantic iconic building. Nonetheless, I felt that I was very familiar with it because it had probably been in my consciousness for most of my life. Its on schoolbooks, money, posters and the backdrop of most presidential addresses. I was staring at it throughout the whole inauguration but was too far away to see the details. So on this Sunday, very few tourists were around and I was right up next to the building, and it dawned on me how amazing it was. I thought back to Europe and how impressed I was with many of the buildings there. And yes those buildings are older and connected to great history and built by cultures that really valued art. I remember being particularly impressed with the Reichstag, the German house of Parliament that had housed Kaisers, then Hitler and then redone upon unification by Norman Foster and remade into a great building with modern and baroque themes. Its a very nice building. And it doesn't even compare to the U.S. Capitol. That building is stunningly immense, a very well-crafted and not overstated testament to American values. It's all white and not too fancy, which I think represents a lot about our country. It's a stately society that spun off from Europe and while we can't recreate the long history and master artistry here, we can create a new powerful style that spins off from the old and instead of nostalgically gazing back to the past, steadily looks to the future. At least that's what I got out of it. The Capitol houses the leaders of America and thus the leaders of the free world, so it better be fucking impressive.

Its amazing how much we take for granted in our country. I actually first noticed this in Europe when I see Europeans walking by their awesome monuments not giving the slightest care and I'm just like how can they not be so proud of this place? But when home is home, everything is going to appear ordinary.

I got a better perspective on this over Easter Break, when I met up with Ilana and Clarisse, two French girls who were studying abroad at Georgetown, in Boston. We walked around Charles Street, Back Bay, the river and went up to the Prud and whatnot. Its a pretty standard bumming around day in Boston, but for them they thought it was "supercool." I strained to see how this streets and sights could impress when compared with the places they saw in Europe and came to the conclusions I expressed above.

So its very strange now going through New York and even though I have the same desire to see cool things, I feel as if the game is very different. I don't remotely stand out here, not with my dress, appearance or accent. I don't have difficulty following the laws, hailing a cab or walking the streets or whatnot, but yet I'm still completely unfamiliar with the terrain.