Two Exotic Mystery Tales

The Talented Mr. Ripley

The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995)

This novel from 1955 still reads in a remarkably contemporary way, despite many details that mark it as having been written so long ago. As everyone says, Highsmith’s account of the remorseless interior thoughts of the con man and murderer Thomas Ripley is a tour-de-force in the creation of a thriller. I totally enjoyed reading it, and I admired the subtlety of the other characters as well. 

When the book begins, Ripley had already broken the law in some unspecified way. The plot begins when the father of a vague acquaintance inquires if Ripley has any information about his son, who has inherited a regular income, and thus can afford to live in a beautiful (fictitious) Italian seaside village. The son, he makes clear, has no desire to return to the US, but Ripley manipulates the father to pay him to go to Europe to convince his son, Dickie Greenleaf, to return home. 

Ripley hates the Americans that he meets in Europe: he feels that his peers -- or those who should be his peers -- have all the advantages because of their money, and they treat him that way. Ripley (as all the reviewers say so this isn't a spoiler) realizes that he is the same size, has similar skin and hair color, and very much resembles Dickie, whom he has become very close to. He plots the murder and kills Dickie in a very dramatic way and assumes his identity with great pleasure and cunning. Of course, as he gets deeper and deeper into this deception, a complicated psychological thriller unrolls.

I have always remembered seeing the French/Italian film Purple Noon, which is based on the novel. The vivid scenes on the Italian coast, the deep blue of the Mediterranean, and the dramatic murder scene and its aftermath made an indelible impression, as did the ending of the film. After all these years reading about Patricia Highsmith and later film versions, I finally decided to read the book. 

Purple Noon: Film Version, 1960

I have an amazingly complete memory of this film, which I saw when it had recently been released.

Directed by René Clément
Starring Alain Delon, Marie Laforêt, Maurice Ronet, Erno Crisa
Screenplay by Clément and Paul Gégauff

“As the sun beats down on a boat in the Mediterranean, two men loll back: scapegrace playboy Maurice Ronet and hanger-on Alain Delon (“My perfect Ripley” – Patricia Highsmith), sent by Ronet’s dad to bring him back. Which one’s going to leave that boat alive? And can he get away with pretending to be the other man? Delon’s star-making thriller smash, adapted from Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

Purple Noon, a French/Italian production, was the first of many adaptations of Ripley to the screen — the most recent is a current Netflix series. I have not seen any of these, though I’m tempted to check them out.

The Murder of Mr. Ma

The Murder of Mr. Ma (published April, 2024)

 

Judge Dee was a famous detective in China in the seventh century, and many mystery lovers like me are familiar with his exploits thanks to a series of novels by a Dutch mystery writer named Robert van Gulik. Judge Dee has been reincarnated into the twentieth century in this recent novel by seasoned mystery writer SJ Rozan, collaborating with novice writer John Shen Yen Nee, a publisher and media producer. SJ Rozan is the author of 20 books, especially a series about a woman detective named Lydia Chin and Lydia’s partner Bill Smith — I’ve read several of them.

It’s 1924 in London, as The Murder of Mr. Ma begins.  A Chinese professor named Lao She has the challenging job of making university students appreciate Chinese language, history, culture, and literature. In reality, a Chinese professor and author by that name actually did live in London in 1924. In fiction, he is the narrator of a very suspenseful and violent mystery story, and he quickly meets the updated version of Judge Dee.

The most memorable feature of The Murder of Mr. Ma is incessant hand-to-hand fighting, using Chinese martial arts. Reincarnated into the twentieth century, Judge Dee changes from a rather staid figure to an amazing street fighter, who propels himself along the roof tops and swings from lampposts, from stair railings, and even from chandeliers. Wearing a kind of superman disguise, he fights multiple thugs at once, knocking them out with sweeping blows from his skilled hands and feet. You would think you are reading a film script (maybe you are).

The Murder of Mr. Ma has a point to make beyond the usual mystery story: it is very much about the lack of respect for Chinese people and their culture shown by the Londoners in the story. The indignation of Professor Lao She is expressed in a variety of ways throughout the novel. In addition, the authors introduced  two very real historic figures into the novel, depicting both of them as friends of Judge Dee. The first of these is Bertrand Russell, the mathematician, philosopher, and author of a book titled The Problem of China, which attempted to overcome the prejudice and disregard for China of that era. The second historic person who appears in the novel is the poet Ezra Pound, who admired Chinese culture and published translations of Chinese poetry. Lao She says of Pound: “In truth I found Pound’s translations of classical Chinese poetry took rather too many liberties, but the man was inarguably a great poet in his native tongue.” (p. 72)

While I found the never-ending fight scenes a bit much, I generally liked this novel for its unusual cast of characters, its very good plot, and the many scenes in Chinese restaurants, where the food on offer seemed very much like the menu in a current Chinese restaurant now, 100 years later. In fact, some of the dishes were the same ones that Lydia Chin and Bill Smith eat in the frequent restaurant scened in SJ Rozan’s earlier books. Would these same dishes have appeared at the very few London Chinese restaurants in 1924? I don’t know but I don’t have a problem with any of this — it’s good reading! 

Review © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Paris in July for the French film

Ai Weiwei

"Never forget that under a totalitarian system cruelty and absurdity go hand in hand." Ai Weiwei. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows (p. 137)

"In China, if you try to understand your country, it’s enough to put you on a collision course with the law." (p. 147)

"Young people in China today have no knowledge at all of the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and if they knew they might not even care, for they learn submission before they have developed an ability to raise doubts and challenge assumptions." (p. 204)

"It’s a mistake to always take me seriously. (p. 217)

Ai Weiwei's story begins with his father's birth. It's a story of China for just over 100 years, during unimaginable changes from rule by the Emperor to rule by Mao to the totalitarian state of the present. It's both a personal and an intellectual history, set against the background of war, conquest, persecution, and Ai Weiwei's personal development as a startling avant-garde artist in our own time.

1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows on one level is the story of just two people: Ai Weiwei and his father, Ai Quing, who was a popular poet. In 1938, Ai Qing wrote “Toward the Sun,” a lyric poem about north China, where he had witnessed "both China’s miseries and its people’s stubborn vitality. It soon became a staple at poetry readings; as evening fell, students would read it aloud around a bonfire, the light illuminating their faces, and the poem’s passion and confidence would warm their hearts." (Ai Weiwei. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, p. 59). 

Before reading Ai Weiwei's memoir, I had virtually no knowledge of Ai Quing, and only broad outlines about the struggle of the Communist party led by Mao to defeat the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. His father's life is a study of ups and downs, including rejection in China and fame outside of China (for example, a friendship with Chilean poet Pablo Neruda). Sometimes he was an acknowledged leader, at other times, because he stuck to his principles, he was sent to prison camps or far-flung exile. Here is how his life began.

"In 1910, the year my father was born, my grandfather had just turned twenty-one. The Qing dynasty was nearing the end of its 266-year rule, while in Russia the fall of the czars and the advent of the Soviet regime were just seven years away. It was the year that Tolstoy and Mark Twain died, the year that Edison invented talkies in faraway New Jersey. In Xiangtan, in Hunan, seventeen-year-old Mao Zedong was still in school; his first wife, selected for him by his parents in an arranged marriage, died a month before my father was born. But Fantianjiang, like so many other Chinese villages, slumbered on, unremarkable and anonymous." (Ai Weiwei. 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, p. 17).  

Ai Weiwei's father's status varied from early recognition as a national poet in Mao's inner circle to suffering in the a rehabilitation camp for dissidents and other intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution. I really enjoyed reading about his first meeting in 1941, where he has an informal meal with Mao in his army camp, long before his military success. Near the start of the book, we read about one of the worst times: an account of the starvation that was the fate of the inhabitants of the rehabilitation camp many years later.

"In this era of dreary routine and material scarcity, the kitchen served as the focus of people’s imagination, even if little changed from one day to the next. Each morning the cook would mix cornmeal with warm water and place the dough into a meter-square cage drawer, then stack five such drawers inside an iron pot and steam them for thirty minutes. When the lid was lifted off, the whole kitchen would fill with steam, and the cook would carve up the corn bread vertically and horizontally, each square piece weighing two hundred grams. To show his impartiality, he would weigh the blocks publicly. This same corn bread would be served from the first day of the year to the last, except on May 1 (International Workers’ Day) and October 1 (National Day), when the corn bread would acquire a thin red layer, made up of sugar and possibly jujubes. If someone was lucky enough to find a jujube in their corn bread, this would always stir some excitement. The company had large expanses of cornfields, but we never once had fresh cornmeal to eat, only 'war-relief grain' that had been in storage for goodness knows how long: it scraped your throat roughly as you swallowed, and reeked of mold and gasoline." (p. 12).

Eventually, Mao had no more use for intellectuals: "the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957... marked the end of intellectuals as a force in society. From that time on, Chinese intellectuals were confined to a marginal position, and they have been there ever since." And it still burdens the freedom of thought of Ai Weiwei: "Ideological cleansing, I would note, exists not only under totalitarian regimes—it is present also, in a different form, in liberal Western democracies." (p. 83-84)

After describing the experiences of his father, Ai Weiwei continues with his own story. He was born in 1957, when his father was 47 years old, and he lived in exile with his father for a major part of his childhood and youth. Wanting a broader education the young Ai Weiwei managed to get to Philadelphia to go to college. Here, at the famous art museum, he encountered one of my favorite artists: Marcel Duchamp, who along with Andy Warhol became a critical influence on his development as a conceptual and otherwise off-beat artist -- for me one of the most fascinating aspects of the book.

"In one of the galleries, a bicycle wheel was mounted on a wooden stool; two large panels of glass, one above the other, each splintered and cracked, invited you to contemplate the relationship between the “Bride’s Domain” above and the “Bachelor Machine” below." (p. 168).

 

Ai Weiwei's description of his development as an artist and his view of art make up a major part of the rest of the book. He explains:

"Art had long been a consumption commodity, a decoration catering to the tastes of the rich, and under commercial pressures it was bound to degenerate. As artworks rise in monetary value, their spiritual dimension declines, and art is reduced to little more than an investment asset, a financial product." (p. 176). 

Along with his self-invention as a political activist as well as being an artist, he used provocative actions (or "little acts of mischief") as a way of public expression, influenced by Warhol and others including Alan Ginsberg. Adapting to the modern age, Ai Weiwei became a blogger with a huge following; when the Chinese authorities shut down and destroyed his blog,  he became a Twitter user, always advancing his views of art and political issues with bravery in the face of the repressive Chinese authorities.

Finally, the government subjected Ai Weiwei to 80 days of imprisonment with brutal policemen constantly questioning and badgering him for 24 hours a day. After his release he was not allowed to leave the country for several years, and his artistic endeavors were disrupted. He cultivated attention to his mistreatment in a variety of ways, and was finally released. He has now moved to Europe, where he continues to be a productive artist.

The memoir is illustrated with sketches by the author. The bicycle basket action was photographed
every day, and posted on Instagram as a symbol of his lost freedom.

An Exhibit of Ai Weiwei's Art

A number of very famous works by Ai Weiwei have been exhibited in well-known museums; in particular at the Tate Modern in London, he spread 102.5 million ceramic sunflower seeds on the floor of the great hall. These realistic seeds were created under his direction by a ceramic studio in China. They were in part a memorial to the thousands of children who died in the poorly built schools that crumbled in the earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, but also they meant much more.

While I didn't see the more famous exhibits, in 2017, I did see a beautiful and exciting exhibit of Ai Weiwei's sculptures at the Meijer Gardens in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

In 1995, one of Ai Weiwei's public actions was to drop and shatter a Han-Dynasty urn.
This was the subject of one room of the exhibit in Grand Rapids.

Among Ai Weiwei's very political activities was a campaign to remember by name the thousands
of children who died in the earthquake in 2008 because of poorly-built schools. 
The authorities did everything they could to stop him! This sculpture, titled "Porcelain Rebar,"
recalls the tangled metal rebar visible in the rubble of the schools.

Review and photos © 2017, 2022, mae sander.

Excuse or Reason?

“LIMIT 1”

What is an excuse? Dictionary definitions: 

• "a reason or explanation put forward to defend or justify a fault or offense." 
• "a reason put forward to conceal the real reason for an action; a pretext."
• "something offered as justification or as grounds for being excused."

What is a reason? Dictionary definitions: 

• "a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event." 
• "a statement or fact that explains why something is the way it is, why someone does, thinks, or says something, or why someone behaves a certain way."

I thought about this distinction when I read a comment on my posts about high grocery prices: "Yada, yada – getting quite tired (as most of us are) about the excuses for consistently rising prices of everything." 

This comment implies that there might be a facile explanation for the high cost of goods today: it's somebody's fault and they are covering up with excuses. Is there an entity somewhere that has responsibility for prices? Is someone hiding why the authorities (whoever they are) don't just fix the situation? When something is called "an excuse" there's a suggestion that no real causes and effects are involved. I wonder, is there supposedly someone who could simply restore conditions at the grocery store to what they were two years ago? Who is responsible for empty shelves, higher prices, and difficulties all along the supply chain? Who is to blame for current inflation being at a 40 year high point? Why is there a high increase in the Consumer Price Index? Because commodities and finished products are produced and consumed globally, prices have global as well as national causes. Critical imports particularly come to the US from Mexico, Canada, and China. So inflation is not simply due to events or policies in the US.

I searched for explanations of rising prices other than simply inflation. For starters, sudden increase in demand as the pandemic started resulted in higher prices for some types of goods (and drove down other prices but nobody mentions this). This isn't an so much an excuse, it's more of an economic principle about supply and demand, as I understand it. 

Look at these details about a few specific commodities and what is driving their prices –

• Toilet paper? Like almost all household paper products, it's made of wood pulp, which is scarce now, due to shipping and labor issues. So prices have gone up, and panic buying in April 2020 and in September 2021 also caused some retailers to limit purchases.
• Lumber?  Along with many other building materials, big increases in demand were driven by home repair increases during the pandemic, resulting in big price increases. In addition, lumber prices rose because of forest fires, labor shortages due to covid, and overseas shipping issues. In the fall of 2021, prices dropped, but in December they again increased enormously. (Interesting article here)
• Oranges? They are scarce now especially because groves in Florida are experiencing cold temperatures and diseases of the trees. Harvests are dramatically lower, so orange juice prices are going up.
• Avocados? The price recently doubled. Right now, a threat to a US inspector of avocados in Mexico has caused cessation of all avocado imports from Mexico; that is, almost all the avocados we eat.  So without credible assurance that US inspectors are protected from Mexican organized crime, there will soon be no avocados available here at any price. It's a developing situation, changing even since I mentioned it a few days ago.
• Cocoa, Coffee, Bananas, Vanilla, Tea? All are agricultural imports with various risks from shipping problems, plant diseases, climate change, labor issues including workers infected with covid, political unrest in producer countries, and more. 
• Meat? Costs throughout the entire US meat industry have gone up. The price of chemical fertilizer to grow cattle feed is going up. The number of cattle available to be sold for slaughter is low; there are fewer animals now because of abrupt interruption of cattle ranching at the start of the pandemic. Availability of labor in meat processing plants has been reduced by employee illness during the pandemic (also employer cruelty). Costs of meat-packaging materials like styrofoam trays and wraps has increased. Transporting meat from the processor to the supermarket costs more. Supermarket costs and labor availability are also affected by covid and inflation.
• Gasoline? The price of gas depends on global supplies (which might be hit by a war in Ukraine next week). The price is affected by oil pipeline capacity, by refinery capacity, by weather disruptions like hurricanes, and by local gas station conditions. Vastly decreased demand for gas during the coronavirus lockdowns caused price reductions; as lockdowns end, demand goes up so prices go up.
• Cars, clothing, household utilities, houses for sale or rent, appliances, restaurant meals, snacks, furniture, electronics? Prices of these essentials are all driven upward by increased demand and reduced supplies. A few causes: shipping delays, shortages of electronic components, covid recovery problems in China where many key commodities are manufactured, and labor scarcity.

Maybe it's a mystery, whether price increases have identifiable causes or are created by some sort of conspiracy or ineptitude. When I look for solid evidence about prices rising, though, I feel as if I'm being provided with some solid causes, many resulting from the vast number of working people who had covid, others going back to climate change, still others from various specific events. 

Once I started down this rabbit hole, reading articles about shortages and inflation, I couldn't stop, so forgive me for my amateur wanderings in economic theory. I'm no good at this.

Economist Paul Krugman (a real expert with a Nobel Prize!) writes about economics in the New York Times. Recently, he discussed the way people get their news and form their economic beliefs. He pointed out that the right wing is being primed by sources like Fox News and worse, to believe that the economy is terrible and it's the government's fault. He says: "a substantial part of the electorate has economic perceptions quite far from reality; even if things improve, they probably won’t hear about the good news or will be regaled with other negative stories." (source)

Gish Jen: More Stories

Caution: this is a long post that's mostly summary. Not really a review!

Gish Jen, Thank You, Mr. Nixon.
Published February 1, 2022.

Gish Jen's new collection of short stories portrays a number of characters at different times of their lives. The action spans the history of China from the date Nixon's visit in 1972 until now. It illustrates the lives of Chinese immigrants to America in the 20th century, and the fate of their relatives who did not leave. Every story stands on its own, and every story connects to the others. All reflect both irony and a kind of bitter sorrow. The descriptions of the suffering of the family members who were left behind is especially vivid and poignant.

The first story, which gives the book its title, is a letter to President Nixon (in hell) from a Chinese woman named Tricia Sang (in heaven). As a child, Tricia had greeted Nixon when he visited. She then lived a long life under changing conditions in China. Her description of her life readies the reader for the vast changes that happened as China opened up and changed over the decades. "The more we thought about it, the more we felt you were the best enemy we had ever had, Mr. Nixon," she wrote (p. 11). 

The second story, "It's the Great Wall," takes place shortly after Nixon's visit, and describes a visit to China by an American couple, Gideon and Grace, and Grace's mother. Her mother, Opal, had fled China, and raised Grace in New York, and Gideon was not Chinese at all -- he was a descendant of Dutch Jews from the Caribbean. These tourists are required to take a guided and heavily chaperoned tour, but allowed briefly to visit Opal’s family and her mother's final resting place in a hall filled with tens of thousands of urns with cremated remains. Gideon and Grace's daughter Amaryllis is a pre-schooler left behind, but reappears in the later story "Amaryllis" at the age of 40. 

The contrast between the life Opal has had in America and that of the relatives left behind is evident — 

“The stories were hard to believe—not only of people being humiliated and terrorized in every way but of people being turned in by their own children. Who were these animals that had broken into Opal’s father’s study and ripped up his priceless paintings? What were they, that they had thrown her father into the river and left him to drown, that they had bound the hands of her mother and sisters, and forced them to watch as his body floated out to sea? And could all this really have been happening while Opal was trying to figure out what a Jell-O salad was?” (p. 46)

“Duncan in China," the next story, is about Duncan Hsu, an unsuccessful child of Chinese immigrants to America in contrast to his brother Arnie, already mentioned as a business partner of Tricia in heaven. "Almost as soon as Duncan reached Shandong, he knew that he had come for naught, that the China of the early 1980s had more to do with eating melon seeds around a coal heater the size of a bread box than with Song Dynasty porcelain." (p. 55). 

"A Tea Tale" is about a couple who want to create a tea-importing business — and get rich. Characters, including both Tricia and Duncan, from the earlier stories are involved, as the couple give up trying to deal with Chinese entrepreneurs, business practices, and legal issues. By now, it's the era of Tiananmen Square protests, so the background politics and characters' awareness are different. The story continues four years later. And the following story begins "Arnie Hsu the success, brother of Duncan Hsu the failure, had his own import-export business." (p. 118). And we see what patience with Chinese ways can accomplish (I guess).

"Gratitude" is about parents and children  – obviously. It begins at about the time of the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong in 2003. The family of Tina Koo, who has three daughters, will figure in many of the subsequent stories. Her daughter LuLu has already appeared: wife of Arnie Hsu. Tina's daughter Bobby is running away from her successful job, and Tina is chasing her. 

Food in these stories is often very vivid -- here's a passage from Tina's meal with Bobby when she's trying to get her to return to her successful life in New York:

"They had noticed that the fish in the tanks were not like the fish in Hong Kong, jumping out of the water; and sure enough, this fish tasted half dead, as if it had been eating hamburgers. The lobster, too, was strangely chewy, and who had ever seen such shrimpy shrimps? Plus it wasn’t only the seafood you didn’t really want to eat. An egg white dish that in Hong Kong would have been soft as a cloud was here more like a doormat. You had to chew chew chew before you could swallow one bite." (p. 143). 

Several of the later stories are about a different character, Arabella, who is studying law. Her law school colleague narrates the story "Mr. Crime and Punishment and War and Peace," about her efforts to get a job. Another food passage:

"I had picked a local hippie restaurant with every variation of tofu and brown rice possible, and with four kinds of kale smoothies. We tried all four. Then we tried three of the Buddha bowls, and then an udon-miso thing, and all the world glowed with warmth and antioxidants until I told her about the grease." (p. 158). 

Arabella becomes an immigration lawyer and plays a role in a later story, which has new characters and also connects a bit to Tina and her husband.

"No More Maybe" is more of a stand-alone story, which appeared a few years ago in the New Yorker. (I blogged it here.) It has one little connection to Tricia and her successful business, and how she taught students and aspiring entrepreneurs about business of clothing manufacturing. "We were all so sad when she got sick." (p. 226). 

And the last story is once again about Tina, her good daughter Betty, and her lost daughter, Bobby. The time frame comes right up to the present.

Why did I write such a strange synopsis? Because I found the incredibly numerous threads of connection so challenging, although every story was so satisfying and insightful. Every story tells a story! And I haven’t given away a single plot.

Blog post © 2022 mae sander.

"The Emperor's Feast" or What Did Chinese People Eat

Chinese history overwhelms me! 

The Emperor's Feast, published 2021.

I've tried to learn about the archaeological finds, the invention and refinement of pottery, the territorial conquests and consolidations, the multi-ethnic courts, the political and military rivalries, and the alternating peaceful and chaotic eras throughout the thousands of years of Chinese history. I've tried to grasp the many food innovations and adoptions throughout these varying eras. 

Each time I read more, I think I understand and grasp a bit more of this history, but I never feel as if I have any real mastery of names, dates, places, and rulers. A new book, The Emperor's Feast: A History of China in Twelve Meals by Jonathan Clements challenged me once again. 

The author's focus is broader than just twelve meals: in fact he summarizes food throughout Chinese history, beginning:

"Shennong, the legendary ‘Divine Farmer’, was one of the great pioneers of Chinese food, who fashioned the first plough and taught early mankind how to rear animals for food." (p. 17). 

The existence of food histories that were recorded very early in Chinese eras offers a starting point for the author's work, and I found it quite amazing that there are such written sources. For example, he writes:

"The most widespread dish in ancient China was a vegetable broth (geng), which combined seasonal legumes in boiling water. ‘Soup and boiled grain were used by all,’ says the Book of Rites, ‘from the princes down to the common people, without distinction of degree.’" (p. 19).

The idea that there were five tastes -- sweet, sour, bitter, acrid, and salty -- was a very early culinary theory in China, and seems to come up throughout each era of history. Clements explains much about the food ways and food inventions in each period, right through the colonization endeavors and Opium Wars of the 19th century and the revolutions of the early 20th century. We learn about the Communist era, Mao's great famine, and some of the international political eras seen through the lens of food, such as Nixon's visit to China and what they offered him to eat. There's a detour to the USA and the emergence of Chinese restaurants and their particular brand of Chinese food, as well as information about overseas Chinese influence in other countries. We even learn about protection rackets where Chinese gangs demanded payment from restaurant owners in Chinatowns. 

The author documents his own adventures during many years in China, where he seems to have tasted a wide variety of foods very mindfully. He also tried many fusion foods involving Chinese overseas restaurants:

"I found myself pursuing the strangest possible cul-de-sacs on menus all over the world, not least in Edinburgh, Scotland, where I felt obliged to order the Haggis Spring Rolls on the menu at Bertie’s Restaurant. Much like the cheeseburger spring rolls of Detroit, they seem to me like a pointless gilding of the lily, a clickbaity tricking out of a local food purely for Instagram shares and talking points. That’s the only explanation I can think of. I love haggis, and I certainly don’t mind cheeseburgers, but by what perverse contrariness would you want to wrap them in pastry and deep-fry them?" (p. 169).

The last chapter takes us up to the present moment. We go from Imperial and high-level Communist banquets to widespread misrepresentation of foodstuffs for the common people, including the memorable disaster with adulterated baby formula, and other instances of cynical, profit-seeking poisoning of foods, and ultimately, the question of how food and food markets played a role in the coronavirus pandemic As the coronavirus took hold, the author says, the Chinese tried to reduce the danger:

"The reaction, however, does not seem to have been heavy-handed enough in Wuhan in 2019, where the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market achieved global infamy as the alleged source of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, believed to have reached humans by passing and mutating through a snake, which had caught it from a bat, or possibly a pangolin. A blanket ban on the buying, selling and eating of wild animals, for real this time, was announced in February 2020, although pundits immediately warned that it would merely drive the multi-million-dollar bushmeat industry out of the public eye and back underground. Tellingly, by June 2020 the Beijing Health Commission was proposing severe penalties for anyone who dared to ‘defame and slander’ traditional Chinese medicine, suggesting that any anti-bushmeat legislation might soon be de-fanged by new laws that prevented anyone from complaining about the sale of ‘medical’ remedies." (p. 181). 

Finally, another international policy of the Chinese governrment:

"That food security is an essential element of China’s international outreach makes sense, as a way for Xi Jinping to keep his promise to his people to look after the fundamental building blocks of Chinese society. This has led to a bold and long-term overseas land grab, which has seen, for example, the wholesale purchase of multiple Australian dairy farms to provide milk for the Chinese market, and the cutting of production costs by shipping in 2,000 Chinese labourers to work on them.  ...

"China’s efforts to secure its food supply have led to some scaremongering and doomsday scenarios, but for the Chinese themselves might be considered in context, as the act of a smart leader who understands the true meaning of the phrase uttered to the founder of the Han dynasty: ‘For the people, food is Heaven.’" (p. 188 -189)

As I say, it's an overwhelming book, and I've hardly offered a sampling of the amazing history of food origins throughout Chinese history. Not everyone would find it readable, but it's remarkable in how much information is packed into less than 200 pages of text plus many pages of notes.

Review © 2021 mae sander. 

"Outside the Box" by Marc Levinson

When a massive container ship blocked the Suez canal for the week of March 23-29, this year, there was a lot of talk about the blow to global manufacturing because the 200 or so waiting ships carried components from one side of the world that were needed by factories on the other side of the world. I think we are all conscious of the way vital electronics, household gadgets, cars, trucks, and industrial goods are assembled from parts that are sourced in dispersed manufacturing sites, but we don't necessarily know the details.

In the book Outside the Box: How Globalization Changed from Moving Stuff to Spreading Ideas, author Marc Levinson traces the history of internationalized sourcing of materials, as we are accustomed to thinking about it. He traces several waves of globalization that altered the production methods for goods that our lives depend on, including food, cars, iPhones, and many other commodities and products. He explains the way that shipping companies exploded the size and speed of container ships until the economies of scale were distorted, and the way that demand for their shipping services first grew and then shrunk, until now many of the ships are vastly under-utilized, and the biggest companies are in trouble. According to Levinson, a backlash against globalization has been changing many features of worldwide manufacturing and distribution endeavors.

Present-day manufacturing, Levinson explains, involves much more than just assembling parts procured through tightly-organized supply chains, as was done in the twentieth century. He traces the development of "value chains" that in the mid-20th century created a much more complex web of dependency among international manufacturers, and relied on entities in complex and loosely-organized chains. Levinson outlines the ways that this concept worked, including the major role of cheap shipping on ever-increasing container ships. He explains the benefits that derive from value chains, and also the many disadvantages -- not the least of which is a shipping incident like the one in Suez last month. Interestingly, he shows how the interdependence of factories on far-flung sources of parts has been diminishing in what he calls a "fourth wave" of globalization.

Above all, the driving force behind value chains came to be intellectual property. The design of complex products, the planning of how to build them, the calculation and negotiation of how to source their parts, and the creation of internal software for many types of modern goods means that there is often much more value from intangibles than from physical components. An important consequence is that old views of import and export surpluses and trade balances no longer illustrate the real economic impact of multiple countries' and corporations' roles in production and design. Politicians often fixate on only the physical components that may be manufactured outside their countries and their tax base, when the major value of a modern product like a car or a smart phone is in intellectual property, not in hardware. Levinson explains a great deal about the way that globalized value chains work and how this is changing right now. A new global model for manufacturing is emerging, so I guess he will be able to write a third book. (His first was called The Box, and is a history of container shipping.) 

Outside the Box is a complex work of economic history. Sometimes when reading it, I felt bogged down in too much detail. Other times I just didn't feel sure I understood the big picture. Overall, it's a book worth reading. I don't feel as if I can do it justice in a review, but here are a few more thoughts.

The Old Way: An Integrated Supply Chain

A Model-T Ford at Greenfield Village in 2012. 

"Any business faces risks, and supply chains inherently pose risks aplenty: fire might strike the plant of a key supplier; a problematic lock on a river might block shipments of an essential raw material; a gasoline shortage might make it difficult for production workers to reach their jobs. Once, manufacturers managed this risk by controlling their supply chains directly. The exemplar, Ford Motor Company, owned forests, mines, and a rubber plantation; transported raw materials to its factories on a company-owned railroad; and built blast furnaces, a foundry, a steel rolling mill, a glass factory, a tire plant, and even a textile plant at its vast River Rouge complex near Detroit, where sand, iron ore, and raw rubber were transformed into auto parts and assembled into Model A cars." -- Marc Levinson, Outside the Box (p. 153). 

Another Way: The iPhone 3G

My iPhone

In contrast, Levinson has a detailed analysis of the value chain for the iPhone 3G that was sold a decade ago, as an example of how the modern manufacturing arrangements work, and how they affect international trade. In particular, he uses this example to illustrate the fallacy of simple-minded views of trade balances:

"Consider how the iPhone 3G’s complicated supply arrangements registered in merchandise trade statistics. China exported approximately $2 billion of the phones to the United States in 2009. Apple, on the other hand, exported no goods directly from the United States to China, and other US-made components shipped to the iPhone manufacturing plant were worth only $100 million or so. Thus, if either country had published official statistics covering trade in iPhone 3Gs, they would have shown China to have a $1.9 billion trade surplus with the United States. Yet in reality, the US-China relationship in iPhones tilted in the other direction. The total value that was added in China to all the iPhone 3Gs shipped to the United States in 2009, at $6.50 per phone, came to about $73 million, or less than the value of the US-made components shipped to China. Almost ten times as much of the phone’s value originated in Japan as in China, but when those iPhones were shipped from China to the United States, they did not affect the official US trade deficit with Japan at all." (p. 135). 

Subsequently, Levinson explains, China tried to make their share more profitable: "A dozen years later, nearly two-thirds of the value of Chinese manufactured exports was created within China." (p. 168). 

The Anti-Globalization Backlash and its Consequences

"Is globalization over? Not by any stretch. Rather, it has entered a new stage. While globalization is retreating with respect to factory production and foreign investment, it is advancing quickly when it comes to the flow of services and ideas." (p. 224).

Outside the Box traces the development of global production, which relied on new agreements on tariffs and taxation, as well as relaxing many obstacles to exchange of goods among many nations. He describes both the advantages and the harms done by these changes in protective behavior by various governments. In his final chapters, Levinson documents how there are new barriers developing to totally free flow of goods, as well as new doubts about the reliability of long-distance transport of vital components and necessary goods. Distrust of the agreements both in developed and in developing nations has created new ways to do business. He cites major events such as the vote for Britain to exit the common market, and the election of Trump who restored a large number of tariffs and restraints on international trade. He writes:

"Around 2011, as the result of independent decisions by some of the world’s largest companies, trade patterns began to shift as multinational companies reconsidered their value chains. The effects showed up not only in export and import figures, but also in a set of obscure calculations that track the extent to which one country’s manufacturers use inputs that were imported from another country. In 2011, these OECD data show, 42 percent of the value of South Korea’s exports—things like Hyundai cars and Daewoo tanker ships—came from imported materials and components; six years later, the corresponding figure was only 30 percent. For China, imported content was 23 percent of the value of manufactured exports in 2011, but only 17 percent five years later. The United States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Sweden all experienced the same trend. So did Taiwan, Indonesia, and Malaysia. There are only two likely explanations. One is that manufacturers in these countries cut back on exporting goods that used a lot of foreign inputs. The other is that they decided to obtain more of their inputs at home rather than sourcing them abroad. Either way, manufacturing became less global." (pp. 214-215). 

In China, there are thousands of KFC outlets.

A "fourth wave" of globalization is now in process, Levinson writes. The third wave, he says, could be called "the age of stuff;" manufacturing was the driving force. In contrast, the fourth wave is more about lifestyle choices, and reflects the aging of the population especially in developed nations, but also in the less developed parts of the globe.  For example, American fast food is vastly popular and widely sold everywhere -- even China. 

"Companies in industries whose products are intangible—software, accommodation, real estate, computer services—accounted for a greater share of the largest multinational enterprises, while major industrial companies shrank under relentless competitive pressure. In the emerging Fourth Globalization, moving ideas, services, and people around the world mattered more than transporting boatloads of goods—and seemed likely to create very different sets of winners and losers." (p. 219). 

The conclusion of the book takes us almost to the present moment with the question of how the Covid-19 pandemic will affect the future.

"By bringing international travel almost to a stop after airlines cancelled flights and governments directed arriving passengers to spend two weeks in quarantine, COVID-19 forced firms to manage their foreign interests without customary site visits and face-to-face meetings, and travel-weary executives may not be eager to return to the old ways even after the virus is a distant memory." (p. 227). 

Levinson obviously can't predict the future, but he offers quite a lot of economic history to help envision how life may change and how it might go on with some of the same relationships and ideals among countries and within corporations. It's a difficult book to read, but very interesting.

Review © 2021 mae sander for maefood dot blogspot dot com.

 

Learning About Street Art in China

Is there a clear distinction between graffiti and "real" art? A photo essay titled "Great walls of China: Beijing's burgeoning graffiti scene," published in the Guardian a few days ago, definitely made me think about this question. The graffiti images in the article are amazingly beautiful and expressive, not at all like the defacing tags that I usually think of when I think of graffiti. The Chinese artists were influenced by the development of graffiti art in the West, which had appeared in Hong Kong by the 1990s. The Hong Kong artists introduced the practice to other Chinese cities, I learned from the Guardian article. 

Cultural exchange programs brought artists from Hong Kong, the UK, France, and elsewhere to Beijing, so some of the murals depicted in the Guardian are by Westerners or are international collaborative efforts. Graffiti artists' work seems to be tolerated more in China than in many cities in the west, though the artists avoid politically unacceptable topics and they do not paint on historically important buildings. They often paint murals on buildings that will soon be demolished.

Many of the depicted murals were on the Jingmi Lu wall: "a stretch of wall greater than 1km that runs alongside the main road from central Beijing to the capital’s airport in the northeast of the city. The first pieces appeared around 2010 and it became a ‘tolerated’ graffiti zone. Many of the early pieces went untouched until last year when the entire wall was cleaned."

This work is by Kwanyin Crew, painted in 2007. There are four main crews painting murals in Beijing, using traditional imagery: "China has an extensive art history reaching back thousands of years, and many of its particular characteristics have appeared in local graffiti."

The Guardian article includes a series of around 20 photos of these intriguing murals, with brief descriptions of the work, the artists, and their influences. The photos in the article were from a recent book, Beijing Graffiti,  by Liu Yuan Sheng (the photographer) and Tom Dartnell (a graffiti artist), published last month by Schiffer Publishing. 

Here is the book description  of Beijing Graffiti at amazon.com:

"A complex and contradictory graffiti culture has been brewing over the last few decades in one of the least expected settings—China’s capital. Through an unparalleled collection of one local photographer’s images, as well as interviews with 25 prolific artists, see how Beijing has developed its graffiti movement against the backdrop of the once-secluded nation’s rise to global economic might. While Beijing graffiti artists take their cue from the subculture’s Western origins, the local scene has also been highly influenced by both foreign visitors and traditional Chinese art and culture. Profiles of significant artists explore the dynamics of creative self-expression in such a perceivedly authoritarian setting, including the surprising amount of freedom they have to make their art undisturbed compared to Western counterparts. A must for graffiti enthusiasts, Sinophiles, and anyone interested in how this colorful subculture is still growing half a century after it emerged."

I'm sharing this with Sami's Mural Monday blog event (which starts on Sunday morning in my time zone). I hope the many mural enthusiasts who link up their photos at Sami's will enjoy this very interesting exploration of street art in a far-away place.

Blog post  published 2021 by mae sander for mae food dot blog spot dot com.

“Little Gods” by Meng Jin

Meng Jin is a first-time author. Her book Little Gods was published early this year. I read it this week, and found it very appealing because  of the setting, which is both familiar and unfamiliar. The book begins in Beijing at the moment of the Democracy Movement of June, 1989. I remember this well not because I was there, but because my husband had students who were passionately interested in democracy for their home country of China, and during the month-long demonstrations they were in contact as much as they could be with friends and fellow students who were engaged in the events and in the tragic ending of the protests. 

Little Gods presents several points of view about the protests, mainly the views of individuals in Beijing who were much less committed to the protests than the students who told us about what was happening. The book begins with the birth of a baby girl, Liya, in a Beijing hospital not far from Tienanmen Square where the protests were happening. 

A series of vignettes  reveal the first seventeen years of Liya’s life, along with the history of her parents, friends, and caregivers. Her father, a committed supporter of the democracy movement, disappears into the void of violent repression of the Tienanmen Square protests. Her mother, Su Lan, didn’t agree with him. “Democracy fever, Su Lan called it, mingzhu bing. She hated that her husband had caught it. She did not believe he actually understood the issues or even cared. She accused him of using political fervor as an excuse to look away from a weakness inside himself.” (p. 136)

After Liya’s birth, her mother manages to return to her life as a physics student, and to move to America where she’s able to pursue her research while bringing up her daughter. The mother’s physics research is about the nature of time, which the daughter applies to her life and her search for identity. Although it’s not stated explicitly, the mother’s repeated changes of research advisers and schools suggests that her ideas are not accepted or respected, and she eventually gives up her goals for a more ordinary job.

A key to the lives of Liya’s parents and their fellow students in the 1980s is that being selected as a student of physics was a possibility only for the very top students, and was desired because it created a chance to study in America as few other disciplines did. This too is familiar from the lives of my husband’s physics students, some of whom moved on to fields that they found more appealing after they completed their PhDs. Also, after 1989, some of them were never able to return to China because of their open support for the protests, another part of history that helps understand Meng Jin’s book.

A hand-made statue of the Goddess of Democracy — a version of the Statue of Liberty — towered over the vast number of protestors in 1989, and this is the image that sticks in my mind, along with the destruction of uncounted lives at the hands of Chinese soldiers from far outside of Beijing. The memory of this protest means something quite different to the people in the story, and for this reason, I enjoyed learning how a modern Chinese-American, Meng Jin would write about the events that now seem far away and not in her personal memory. (Image from Wikipedia.)

One slogan of the protestors, printed on the t-shirts that we bought in 1989 in support of the students’ organization, was “You cannot massacre an idea.” Reading the book, I’m not really sure that the reality of another 31 years of Chinese history proves this hope. In a way, the fading of Liya's mother’s dreams of a career in physics seem to parallel the fading of the dream of democracy and a number of other characters’ dreams in this readable but rather sad tale. Unfortunately, the novel's ending is a bit fuzzy, not written as effectively as the well-thought-out early chapters, but it’s still a very interesting novel.

Blog post © 2020 mae sander.