The Confused Filmmaker

On Sunday I went to visit a filmmaker friend whom I hadn’t seen since my long leave of absence in 2006. Unsurprisingly he dropped many curious questions about my absence. Our conversation then stayed on politics. I mentioned the recent sentences of several dissidents, including Hu Jia.

He said, “Don’t you think Hu Jia is a little too much? I watched his documentary online. He was…often inviting troubles himself.”

I asked if he meant Hu Jia had acted headstrong in front of those who had followed him. He nodded yes. “There were good things that had happened to this country and under this government. It’s not right for him to ignore the positives and lash out only the negatives.”

I was taken aback by his confident commentary. I had known him before only as a quiet filmmaker who had graduated from the Beijing Film Academy and opened a film equipment resell/rental business with several friends to support his filmmaking dreams. We had rarely spoken other than discussing technical details of filmmaking before.

“So you think it’s alright to send him to jail even if he had said something incorrect?” I protested out of reflex.

“He will come out of prison faring much better than before,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Surely he will get a visa and financial support to go to America and stay there for the rest of his life. How much better could it get?”

His confident reduction of human motives to such vulgar calculations sent chills to my body. How could he, an out-of-mainstream filmmaker with the obligatory long hair and pensive smile, be brainwashed to such extent? What’s the hope for China if even the bohemians consent to silencing the dissidents?

I remember a writing seminar I had been to two months ago. Two well-known Chinese writers were asked if their writing had any political intonation. Both answered no. Both said that they only cared for arts, not politics.

I could understand them, my filmmaker friend, and my own silent self. There is an invisible gag in the air. It’s better to get used to its prevailing nonexistence.

There was a lull in our conversation. My lips felt dry. I said you sounded very interested in political matters. He said of course, my partners and I are probably “noted” by the Big Brother as well. He described a meeting with some kind old comrades at a certain authoritative bureau; the comrades did not exactly forbid them from making independent films, but warned them against making political ones.

“Of course we won’t touch politics,” he said. “We just want to make films.”

Yeah yeah yeah, repetitive artsy “Chinese” films about AIDS, or poverty, or migrants, or urban alienation that aim for some big award at some Western film festival.

Then he asked for my opinion on a film he wants to make. He said he was really troubled by the bipolarized reporting and emotions on the Tibet issue and the Olympic torch relay, before the Earthquake took over the headlines. He said he had been a loyal reader of CNN and other Western online media before. Like some of his friends, he didn’t believe the Chinese official media and thus often looked to the West for “truth.” The CNN incident told him that the Western media were equally unreliable.

“Now my friends and I don’t know who to trust anymore,” he exclaimed quietly.

He wanted to make a film, about a Chinese guy confused by the issues of Tibet, of protests over Tibet, of Westerners advocating Tibet’s independence despite having never stepped in Tibet and knowing little of the real-life complexities there, of his Han friends clueless of why some Tibetans hate them so much.

“You know how extreme people could get on these issues?” he looked ahead in the air. “Friends would argue so violently over dinner tables that even long-time friendships are difficult to maintain. Some love the West and would argue for the West despite everything. Others would take to arms to revenge the humiliation over the torch relay. You know the government had to police the university campuses to prevent agitated students from teaming up to smash the Carrefours and the KFCs? You don’t believe me? People are ready for violence, and extremism. The society is getting increasingly unsettled. Something is ready to explode. I wouldn’t be shocked to find Al-Qaeda-like Chinese suicide bombers in the next few years.”

So he would like my more Westernized opinion on what kind of portrayal of this Chinese guy’s confusion would be receptive to an Western audience. The film would be banned in China for sure. But the Western audience… he would like to describe the China and the Tibetan issues as he understood, and he would like to… bridge the massive misunderstanding between China and the West. He expressed him ideas slowly but clearly.

I was even more shocked than before—for a non-political filmmaker, how could he consider such a topic innocuously nonpolitical? I said you are crazy to be even thinking about embarking on this. The West…at least the Western media, likely have little room for your confusions and your efforts to sort them out. They have their minds set already.

The only way I could see your film finding an audience, I suggested, is to focus on the main character’s confusion.

“That’s easy,” he said, “I’m still confused as hell.”

Then he added, “but don’t they, the West, understand the severity of the problem? China is rising, and agitated, and ready to explode on being slighted. I’m not kidding. I talk to my friends, my relatives, and kids still in school I don’t know well. Some of them could seriously go out and hack foreigners in the heat of the moments. The government is having a difficult job holding this huge pool of discordant population together. God knows when… That’s what I want to make—a film about the making of a Chinese suicide bomber attacking foreigners.”

“You are crazy!” I took my turn to exclaim. “You will be arrested by the police the day the film becomes public. Better to show the main character getting addicted to a computer game of suicide bombers in the end.”

He liked my idea. We sipped our tea and shifted the converation to more pleasant topics: the Korean Pentecostal missionaries are converting Beijingers in house churches like wild fire; his business is getting very well; people need religion; people need a reason to believe in something…

We parted promising to get together for dinner and drinks in the near future. And I left feeling optimistic again about everything.

Paranoia

One day after I cursed the idiotic Olympics-induced paranoid that triggered the flight restriction to Beijing, I seethed again with anger at the security checkpoint at the Shanghai Hongqiao airport. I had traveled by train from Hangzhou to Shanghai in order to catch a flight back to Beijing, for ever. Now the guards were taking forever examining my toilettery bag, opening and sniffing at everything, the toothpast tube, the tiny cologne bottle, the hair gel jar, and even my dental floss pack.

"You have to check in this jar because it's over the size limit," I was told by this particularly fastidious female guard who held my hair gel jar with outstretched arms as if it was radioactive.

After they wrote down the details of that jar in a record book, I was escorted to the exit leading back to the check-in area. It felt like 911 all over again.

At the check-in counter, while the pretty attendant attached the baggage tag to my duffle bag, I asked in exasperation what had caused this...carefulness. The upcoming Olympics? The unrest in Tibet?

"Earlier this month some terrorists brought a bottle of gasoline onto a flight from Xinjiang to blow up the plane," The attendant smiled at me sweetly. "Ever since then it became really strict."

"Were they Ughigur?"

"Of course."

With the Ughigur terrorists and the Tibetan riot, the government's paranoid doesn't seem so idiotic after all.

The Tibetans

I'm so swamped with work in Hangzhou that I've been almost oblivious to the heated media war between China and the West over the reporting of the recent riot in Lhasa. Only through reading my friends' blogs did I realize that it's actually a BIG deal out there. (Of the few I read, Rebecca's post here I found most close to how I feel.)

Honestly though, I don't understand what the big deal is--don't we know already that media, Chinese or Western, tend to write stories to fit their editorial bias? That the Western media tend to find some particular "Chinese" angles in their reporting? And that our beloved country tends to gloss over, intentionally or unintentionally, the historical wrongs done to ethnic minorities?

My first memory of meeting Tibetans was during a train ride at the beginning of the 1990s. I was in college then and they were highschool students coming home to Sichuan from Beijing. They were chatty sunny-looking kids who genuinely appreciated the chance attending better schools in the big Han cities--there's an entire program of that sponsored by the government. They said that they did not want to go back to their hometowns after schooling. They were eager, like most other people in China, for big-city life ("cultural genocide" was obviously not in their consciousness).

My second encounter with anyone Tibetan was in the mid 1990s in Boston. I was hanging out at Harvard Square. My Chinese friends were excitedly waving little Chinese national flags, waiting for the then-President Jiang Zemin to show up visiting Harvard. Exile Tibetans and Taiwanese were staging protests. Someone pushed a flag into my hand. I wandered by a protest stage. A couple of young Tibetans jumped at me. They yelled--Stupid Chinese, Don't You Ever Show That Stupid Flag of Yours at My Face! I yelled back--This Is America!

For many years after I could not forgive the Tibetans. Perhaps because of that close encounter. Or perhaps because I had an ex who's a Tibetan Buddhist Scholar absolutely loving everything Tibetan. I considered that too--as Lisa Simpson once famously said-- alternative in a mainstream sort of way.

Anyway, after my ex's constant brainwash over a few years, I stopped arguing that there's no ethnic bias towards the Tibetans because Chinese suffered harsh fate as well in the Cultural Revolution. I stopped getting into a fit each time my ex criticized China over Tibetan issues even though I was still pissed.

In the Spring 2004, I ran back to China. In Gansu I visited Xiahe, a big Tibetan town. I met a great Tibetan guy there who took me to visit his wife and his new-born baby girl in the hospital, and then his uncle who's a lama at the Labrang Monastery. They made me sweet Tibetan cakes in the lama's residence.

For a few years afterwards I cherished that sweet memory of Tibetan cakes in Labrang. Like all new-agey Chinese, I woo'ed and ahh'ed at everything spiritually Tibetan.

Then in the Spring of 2006, I met this young armed police guard of Mongolian ethnicity who came from Tianshui, another big Tibetan autonomous region in the Gansu province. He told me rough stories of growing up in that rough outpost region where the only high school in town was divided into two halves--Han and Tibetan. He studied with the Han Chinese who were constantly bullied and robbed by the knife-carrying Tibetan students.

The two sides constantly fought in school yards and in dorm rooms. One night during a particular nasty fight, the biggest Tibetan bully stabbed a broken beer bottle into the waist of a Han friend of the Mongolian kid. The Han kid spent months in the hospital. His friends, including my young Mongolian guard, sought revenge and ambushed the Tibetan bully one night. They beat the shit of him, and then they ran out of town.

The Mongolian guard said that before then, he had excelled in school and he had a beautiful sweetheart in the same class. That incident changed his life--he labored at an airport in Lanzhou before being dragged home by his uncle. The family sent him to the armed police to get him out of trouble. There went his dream of attending university with his beautiful sweetheart.

He told me that his raison-d'etre was to go back and to kill that Tibetan bully one day. His life had been completely ruined in that fateful night, by a swift thrust of a beer bottle held in the hands of a Tibetan. At my repeated requests not to kill, he would reply that he had his Mongolian pride to keep.

The moral of my drawn-out story? That people are stupid and we are all messed up.

So once again, I don't understand how the media and the media consumers can get so worked up over something--the Tibetan-Han relationship--that defies the line between black and white. I find myself again blaming both sides, which ends up feeling like hopelessly defending both sides.

It's complex. So... Am I being too indecisive?

Then at 5pm this afternoon, we got a mass email from the company HR: "Due to the upcoming Olympics, CAAC has decreased the number of flights to Beijing in order to cut down on traffic to the Capital. Please book your flight 4-5 days in advance if you need to travel to Beijing for business."

Ok, here's something so idiotic that there's no defending for it--at least not in my rush to feel decisively opinionated at something.