bad metaphor

Thanksgiving break, as usual, was largely unproductive, despite the pronounced lack of things available to do in Wichita for a girl my age and temperament. I can’t say no whenever my mom asks me if I want to watch “just one more scene” of the current Chinese movie of the month, whether or not I have an open book in front of me that I am poring over like the diligent scholar that I am. Yeah. And the movies of course are twenty five hours long on average, and this particular one that I was watching – “Hoang Chau Cat Cat” (sp? eh, who of you reading this would know anyways), the Princess of the Popular People – was in three parts, with six VHS tapes each. Not to mention that you can’t just stop the tape during one of the zillion cliffhangers – you have to figure out what’s going to happen next, whether or not so-and-so will be beheaded, cast out of the palace, or sold to the Mongolians – frequent threats in these movies. They’re actually not so much movies as they are compilations of soap operas. Except no American soap opera you’ve seen takes places in medieval China and features lots of ass-kicking kung fu. (If I’m wrong, please drop me the name and the channel that would host such a wonderful program, and I will knit you a free hat).

One thing that occurred to me while watching the movie was how woman-centric most of the movies my mother watches are. I wouldn’t call them feminist exactly, and certainly never my mother, but considering the rep that Chinese culture gets for oppressing women at every opportunity, it was a bit refreshing to see portrayals of women that were quite empowering. Women not only excel at kung fu, they are experts and run martial arts schools. They fight back when attacked, sometimes even when wearing impossibly unbalanced shoes (as was the fashion during the dynasty in which “Hoang Chau Cat Cat” takes place). There’s no doubt they live within a patriarchal society, through and through, especially in the movies about royal dynasties (which my mother particularly likes) – everyone, even the Queen, kowtows to the King on pain of death. Yet the King, though all-powerful, is not without faults. He’s easily manipulated by sinister First Wives (why is it always the First Wife who is evil?) and unscrupulous viziers. Luckily, he’s also easily manipulated by the good wives and concubines, and at times even the plucky, good-hearted handmaidens that wait on him or work in his kitchen.

HCCC in particular is pretty cool, in that the protagonist is an orphaned girl (played by a ridiculously pretty, doe-eyed woman), who helps her friend get to the palace to meet the King. The friend turns out to be an (illegitimate) daughter of the King, but surprisingly legitimacy doesn’t matter much – all she needs to convince the King of his own blood is to produce a flowery scroll with the poem that he had written her mother, swearing to her that he would send for her to come to the palace to be one of his wives, before he went into battle and promptly forgot about said promise. Through a zany mixup, in which the orphan is shot with an arrow by the Prince (who later falls madly and passionately in love with her), the orphan is confused for the lost Princess.

We learn more about the orphan, that she knows enough kung fu to get by and defend herself, that despite being uneducated and rough around the edges, she has a heart of gold. She breaks into a house of a particular judge which she detests (my mom didn’t say if they told why), and interrupts a girl committing suicide. The girl is the detested judge’s daughter, and is about to be married off the next day to a man she does not love, sundered forever from the man she truly loves, and has decided to hang herself. The orphan leaps forward, cuts the linen the girl is using to hang herself, and works out something with the girl. Then the movie cuts to the wedding day, in which the orphan is posing as the bride – made easier by the fact that Chinese brides do not remove their veils until after the vows are consummated. She then goes about her original business – stealing the judge’s gold and treasures – and escapes by flying over the roof, heavy bags of jewels and trinkets and all, the judge’s guards pursuing her to no avail.

Much later, after lots of wacky Chinese soap opera plot development, the orphan, the Princess, and their band of followers flee from the Palace and roam the country side. Every time they stop in a town, they intervene in some local matter or disturbance, like a rag-tag band of superheroes. In one of the earlier villages on their journey, they come across a huge crowd, gathered around a girl tied to a stake. The villagers are about to burn her, because she is pregnant and unmarried. The orphan leaps into the middle of the crowd and begins a series of passionate arguments to save the girl – “it takes two hands to clap, just as it takes two to make a baby. Why kill the woman, and not the man who did this to her?” The others join her, though their arguments fall on the deaf ears of the bloodthirsty crowd. Then the orphan’s group proceeds to kick everyone’s ass. Awesome.

I guess I’m hooked. Even sane people get hooked on normal soap operas after a matter of hours, and in total, I think I’ve accumulated sixty or seventy hours of Chinese movie watching time since my mom showed me the first one. It’s a nice way to bond with my mother, and to learn a little Vietnamese to boot. Should the Vietnamese government suddenly revert to a monarchy again, I will certainly know how to address the king – “Wang Tung!” – and so forth.

Since I was so busy bonding with my mother and watching awesome low-budget double-digit-hour Chinese movies, I didn’t crack open a book once when I was home. Leaving me in the same situation I was before break, minus a few potential days of production – 2 research papers due next week, a paper for a class I never go to due on Thursday, a story to write and also submit by Thursday, five finals to study for. Oh, and seventy billion hats to knit by Christmas, because for some insane reason I have decided to knit hats for everyone this year. So…when is the next break?

Imagine this: you’ve decided to adopt a new puppy. You’re an animal lover, so you don’t want to go to a breeder or pet shop or anything, but straight to the humane society to pick up a dog, and thus save it from the chance of being put down. Economical, no? You approach the humane society volunteer at the front desk and, in a fit of bold, compassionate naivete, tell her that you want to look at the saddest, most hopeless cases, the dogs that nobody else wants and have little chance of leaving the wire mesh of their cages before the ends of their unmourned lives.

The worker’s eyes light up quickly, and she jumps up from her seat eagerly – a little too eagerly, you reflect later – and announces that they have “just the dog for you.” She hurries into the backroom, perhaps to get the transaction overwith before you’ve had a change of heart, and emerges with a tiny thing wrapped several times in a dirty, smudged towel. From deep within the folds of the towel, you hear a muffled noise that sounds more like a horse’s whinny, perhaps, or the bray of a donkey. You barely hear the woman as she explains that the dog in question is blind and has a few “other issues” that might make him a little difficult to manage, but that with time and love, these issues can be overcome. Your suspicions spring to alertness at this mention of issues, and you stop the woman midsentence – “Show me the dog.”

The worker does not appear offended at the look of aghast horror on your face, as she’s surely seen this expression several times during her service at the shelter. “I know he’s a little daunting to look at,” she says, in profound understatement, “so, if you’re still interested in your offer – and he is one of our most challenging cases, and has little hope of being adopted into a loving and caring family, as you may imagine – you can take him for 48 hours and see if you’re up to it.”

You look skeptically at the animal, who alerts every primal instinct within you to run out to your truck, grab the shovel in the back, and put the thing out of its obvious misery. Yet the woman’s words plant the seed – “challenge” – within your mind, and you may be a little offended by her questioning of your ability to look past physical appearances and give love to this thing, surely the humblest of God’s creatures. And as you stand there, he pokes his pitiful little head out of the towel and gazes forward with his milky blind eyes – and briefly, you see the dogness inside him. Not the monster that you initially saw, nor the hellspawn that will scare schoolchildren and neighbors later on when you take him out for walkie, the grim spectre that will drive the man you now love to pack his bags and leave. There is a dog inside that unlovable husk of scars, warts and teeth. And then you realize that this dog, this humble beast, will be more of a companion to you than the fluffiest pampered show poodle, the most well-trained Lassie, the cutest clueless Shih Tzu. This dog alone is capable of the purest loyalty.

So R.I.P., ugly dog. Until the day you rise again to haunt the dreams of terrified children.

So today, in class, I got back a reading response assignment. Included was a glowing review by my professor, in which she wrote, “impressive as always. [Your responses] convince me of how strong you’ll be in grad school!” I don’t write this to brag, although admittedly, my ego was certainly not dissatisfied with this comment. I’m writing about this because, after I’d finished mentally going “hooray I am smrt” and congratulationg myself and all, her comments sparked a chain reaction of thoughts which led to me, now, feeling rather gloomy and anxious about grad school, my career, and my general future in life. How’s that for an overreaction?

I’d been wavering between doing cognitive psych stuff and all that research business, following in the footsteps of Chiaroscuro no less, but that’s been ruled out (no offense, Chiaroscuro!) and I settled happily where I belong, in the English department. Then I’ve been wavering between doing lit crit or creative writing – should I be the author, or the critic that analyzes / contextualizes / mercilessly tears apart said author? I decided to go with the former, after long discussions with professors discussing the various options out their for English majors (you can be poor in a great variety of ways, it turns out).

Well, lately, I’m not so sure about that route anymore. Compounding this sense is the rather prolonged stretch of writer’s block that I’ve been experiencing lately. Well, lately as in this entire past year. If you don’t count workshop classes, in which you’re pretty much forced at gunpoint to write or else you will get a bad grade and no one will love you anymore, that adds another two years. That’s three years of writer’s block, in which I have been not even distinguished enough to be a mere blot upon the surface of the world of artists. Oh, sure, I have plenty of ideas for stories, but the critic in me is a little hyperactive, I think, and shoots down each and every single one by the time I make it to the computer or a notebook to write them down: “Right, your “stranger-witnesses-random-suicide-and-then-angsts -for-five-paragraphs” story is going to be an original and clever hit. Eh, call me back when Jerry Bruckheimer makes another movie.” Yes, that was an actual idea I had for a story, and yes, it was stupid, but it never made it out into the harsh world before being cruelly aborted. Some people apparently do not have a similar bitch-device implanted into their brains, an unfortunate fact. Yet I should at least make it to a first draft, as writers like Anne Lamott suggest, and then be able to mangle and whittle it down to something workable, and eventually, publishable.

In addition to my built-in bitch-critic device (BIBCD? I’ve got to come up with a more acronymable term), there are a host of other things that keep me from writing stories. There’s always papers to write, cats to feed, hats to knit, and sleep to dream. And blogs to update, and templates to tweak. None of these activities, not even the school papers, involves putting myself and my creativity and talent or lack thereof out on display for others to judge, kindly or harshly. So the writing just, well, sort of goes off to the side.

Also pushing me towards going for a more literary-criticism oriented route is the fact that I think I’d be better at it. Especially criticism with a focus on gender, sexuality, and minority issues. I find myself analyzing gender implications in almost everything I read now, and instead of having it kill my enjoyment of literature, it actually enhances it. Cons for going this route: having to read HUGE stacks of literary theory papers all the time (which are of course totally fun and easy to read, right, Hannah?), publish zillions of papers until tenure fun-time, and then teach. I had thought that I would want to teach, but I’m not so sure anymore. Even for college level students. I take class with these people, and usually I end up feeling sorry for the professors. I don’t know if I would really want to put myself in that position. Cons notwithstanding, I really would like to study more criticism.

But then, I got to thinking, do I really want to study literary criticism, or gender and sexuality issues in general, which would be sociology? Women’s studies? Well, if I got into that bit, there’s tons of stuff I am very interested in studying. If I were somehow inclined to take a sixth year of college (which I’m not, at the moment anyhow), one thing I’d do is take some Latin American Studies courses. And some environmental studies courses to boot. Wetland ecology definitely. There’s also an environmental historian here, one of the top in the nation, that specializes in prairie ecology and history. Then from there it’s a whole can of worms, Pandora’s box, insert any trite metaphor here that involves exploding things beyond control, because I’m interested in lots of things. If I specialize in one thing, say, wetland ecology research, that would take time from learning about the conflicts in El Salvador and Guatemala and the role that indigenous women played in resistance to the military juntas. Or learning about chemical and neurotransmitter interactions in treating Parkinson’s disease.

Sooo….I guess that takes me back to square one – creative writing. If I just write about the things that I’m interested in, I can study them all without being too deeply involved in one to be flexible. I won’t have to take ten years of grad school, be dependent on a tenure schedule, unless for some reason, I have a change of heart and want to teach. And that way I won’t have to be a sixth-year senior.

Ahh, I’m so confused. I guess I’ll go back to not-writing, for now.

Back in the 17th century or so, some British merchants decided that they were tired of eating nothing but the same old fish and chips and moldy bread pudding. So they set out in their ships, in search of better-tasting food, and in addition, better-looking women. They sailed east to India, and found, on both accounts, what they were looking for. Not only that, but they discovered a tasty beverage called tea which, in terms of popularity and utility, far surpassed the cholera-infested river water that had heretofore been the national beverage. They kept staying and drinking up all the tea and eating all the pakoras, like rude houseguests, until Gandhi, an upstanding young law student, politely sent the intruders on their merry way. Oh, and a bunch of other stuff happened in the interim that I don’t know much about, because my high school world history class stopped just before the beheading of Louis XVI. I would find about that business much later.

Anyway, the colonization of India is often seen as the hallmark of the British Colonial Empire, mainly because it enabled the flow of tasty foods into a country distinguished by its profound dearth of flavor. The Indians themselves were generally none too happy about the situation, especially Indian men, who got tired of the British merchants swooping in and stealing their wives and daughters – and so there was a bit of resistance here and there. As it turns out though, the best resistance that Indians could have offered was through the food, the very prize itself that the British were after in the first place. The food that, to this day, destroys countless hours of work and productivity of the descendants of colonizers. The food that keeps us coming back for more.

How would the Indian resisters of 1857 known such a thing? That chopping up women and throwing them into wells was in fact unnecessary and a bit superfluous? That all they had to do was set up a giant restaurant, with extended buffet hours, and lace their traditional dishes with cream and butter and tryptophan? That the British soldiers would come in droves and stuff themselves into oblivion? That the soldiers would afterwards be utterly useless in conflict or other colonizing activities? That then the Indians could just chuck them into a well if they liked, or send them back to whence they came from on boats (that is, if the post-buffet weight of the soldiers wasn’t enough to sink them)?

As I type this, even though I am nowhere near being hungry still, and will not be for another twelve hours (after eating lunch at 12:30), my mouth is watering for more chicken tikki masala. Mmm, sweet heavenly colonial revenge.