A Reminder

There is nothing important, just a couple of lines to remind myself:

1. Stop using ‘I am not a native speaker’ as excuses for everything.

2. Never. Never again compromise to other people’s taste and requirements if I think the things are worth fighting for. Stick to your heart.

3. When I am down, keep working; when I am happy, keep going.

4. Last one – The most important thing is that I have to have faith.

Good night and good luck.

ps: Candice, feel free to take any one of them if they are helpful to you too. I miss you, girl. I look forward to the day we meet again.

pps: Next week’s reading (finally-free-from-all-the-course-realated-essays LIFE MODE IS ON!)

Benjamin, Metz, Bazin // Kunderla, Iain Banks, Plath // Bakhtin and Baudrillard  on Carnivallesque and the grotesque body

We live and learn

Another offer season has just started as some of my friends heard from schools they applied to. All those sleepless and stressful nights have finally paid off. I was at the same position about a year ago, now it becomes such a remote and bittersweet memory. So what has changed in this year? Except for the obvious geographical movement to Scotland, there are in fact not as many changes after all?

That thought used to bother me a lot, but as I am talking with them now, for the first time, I realized this whole year I am asking myself the wrong question. The question ‘do you want to apply for Phd’ is basically impossible to answer for me at the moment. Yet if someone ask me question like ‘do you want to be an independent researcher?’, I would say yes, no doubt.

So what are these gibberish to do with the current downbeat (if not something I imagined out of nothing)? Downbeat is the best time for self-reflection and self-criticism, especially no one else is going to put all the shit right in front of you saying “Look at the mess, you get to deal with it”.

For one, I didnt know I was repeating my own history until I began to strangle everything by thinking that’s not the person I want to be. It happened four years ago when I got into college. My best friend and I started to plan out the list of things we should do and change in college. We made a promise. That dragged both of us down and we spend the first year of college in full discourage that we couldnt make anything promised happen. That also almost destroyed our 7 year friendship a while later. We ended up to be someone we didnt even expect ourselves to be. It is hard to say whether that’s better or worse, at least we feel a lot happier to look forward to what kind of people we are able to become.

I seem to lost the aspiration to the unknown again, to what surprises I am about to find. If I thought this year is for me to BE who I wish to be, now things are clear to show that this is just another transition for whatever comes next. Come what may, right Tatjana?  

Now I start to look forward to where I can get to next, will you still recognize me then?

(Alright, time to get some real stuff going before this entry gets too cheesy. For those who knows me well, I am glad that you get used to my rambling by now)

She (II)

II.

Bonjour.

她在一片沼泽地里触礁。

沉溺前一秒，她被抽空得只剩下一种陌生的语言。

 

 

Walking through the winter.

The only two things left to get me through this long, cold winter:

1. Robert said over and over again in class today – “Isn’t it a fabulous time for film studies?”. Oh hell yes =)

2. H kept telling me when we were in Beijing this summer – “Be the warm existence in the world, for yourself, and those you care.”

No matter what else I thought I held in my hand before, I was wrong.

How can we waste the best years of our lives?

I love you world. XD

She.

(A story that it’s not going anywhere, I want it to grow by itself. )

I.

She got bored with the sweetness now.

Almost at the same time, she looks for the texture of life, touching the coarseness, feeling the raw tastes of time. It confuses her that how far away she is from her body, like she is floating across a vast field. Perhaps that is what she is hoping for, to get rid of herself, living in a vacuum.

The last book she kept in her memory was about a poet, about the disappearance of “I”. Afterwards, nothing she read really matters. Those words pierce through her, but nothing happened. All she is able to do is going back to the “past that is preserved”, preserved on negatives yet every time she develops something different out of them. She is scared of becoming addictive to these negatives, because she is watching the ghosts of life and her life, gradually, turns into ghost-like.

Speaking of ghosts, another night, pretty similar to tonight, he was telling her the folk stories he collected during the journey. She only remembered one, the one about the hanging man. He said if a man hang himself, when he died, you can find charcoal right under the ground. She kept thinking that must be part of the man’s spirit, and how someday, he would go and dig the ground under the hanging man,  but looking for his own spirit.

Now she doesnt know where to dig, or she doesnt want to find and be found. Then she might be free from time and space.

A History of Famine and “Famine” for Histories

This essay is suppose to be finished for Freya’s birthday, a gift for this child-at-heart but brave friend I am lucky to have at the very last semester in college. I think she is going to be a very inspiring documentary filmmaker/photographer someday. (oh well, I only finish half of it, but will continue)

Famine.

A traumatic memory which in itself is collective and personal.  It is also a crippled memory, a history of impotence. This incapability to historicized Famine is appalling, that a negation to memory from the masses goes hand in hand with a hierarchy of what should be historicized and who comes first, second and so on.  A history from bottom up/mass memory is hopefully not a brand new idea now, in fact, to see it becomes a “common sense” that people act upon, one must consider the role of media in its formation. However, the term “common sense” generates a skepticism and deformation unless we revitalize the attempt/action into new questions under changing circumstances. Always standing on quick sand, I should say.

Digging into one’s personal experience (sometimes) helps, in this case, to trace how a bottom-up history goes into public sights. Back to my history classes high school, thanks to the still going-on education reform, we changed two versions of text books, one published by a Southern university, the other by the centralized national publishing house. Either version has no more than one paragraph about the Three-Year Famine from 1959 to 1961 in China, and the way it had been portraited evokes less a memory of suffering than a memory of how the determination of Chinese people overcome natural disasters (which is a description that worth challenging). And it was crossed out in our brick-like teacher’s notes because it won’t be in exams. Pragmatism erases that part of history, among others. By that time, around 2004, visual images become so pervasive that one can hardly miss the contradiction among various forms of histories. History textbooks, historical fictions/TV series/films, family histories, and among which I particularly remembered some tv programs on historical figures and events. It wasn’t only because they ‘attempt’ to give a different perspective on the same event we read about that was narrated and commented in the exact same way at school, but it brought together historical materials that are once in museums, libraries, archives or even private hands. The appeal of jigsaw puzzle can best depict the attraction to make something out of these pieces. It almost feels like a famine for history from the public. So there are a tremendous amount of these programs made, but that hunger staggers between the lines, not entirely top-down and not bottom-up either.

The similar pragmatism seems to follow me in later years, and when I got to college, I was told that the history department “disappeared” because it provided no pragmatic value, jobs so to speak, for students. In contrast to this gloomy and disappointing picture, the DV images, in my opinion, has pushed a formation of public memory and thus establish a bottom-up history as a contemporary common sense, especially in popular culture. When DV first came into China in 1994,

only a small group of people had the privileges to get access this new form of technology. As we now understand, this group of people, including students/professors in Beijing Film Academy (eg. Jia Zhangke) or people who had experiences working in state-run TV channels are now the leading figures of The New Chinese Documentary Movement. Almost two decades later, we find ourselves drowning in the enthusiasm of DV usage and images. I need to be cautious to point out that they were by no means the only group who have been using DV technology to create their own version of visual history, and the fact that this huge amount of dv image makers are unknown, unheard of and their images are either lost or neglected seems to contradict with its own popularity. Perhaps starting with this popularization of DV images, I might be able to get closer to the title itself – A history of famine and “famine” for histories.

Here and Now.

Perhaps three words can conclude my state of mind: here and now.

I must apologize for changing my blog again. Well I have an excuse this time – they shut down my last one when I have no time/energy to find out why. Or just I unconsciously want to erase certain memories during that period. Either way, I am here.

By saying “here”, I am not really here in that I fail to acknowledge the existence of this “self” comes with my new stage of life. A denial to hannah the second, thus a rejection to “now”. At certain moments, one needs to accept that he/she is in trouble. Yeah, to use a universal term, I am in this horrible 2nd and 3rd stages of culture shock. Some people who know me in a less intimate way think I am joking – they dont believe ME having problems in adjusting. People, I am right on the spot. To be fair, this might not be a bad thing, but I simply dont expect it come in such an intense way.

I was walking through the worst few days this week, and not sure getting to an end already. Couple of weeks ago, I thought I touched the bottom already – obviously I was wrong. I was very sick last year around this time, for two weeks, but I wasnt sad at all when Gaelle made me Chai at night, watching Glee, and we took a walk in the afternoon sun in STU. These details came back to me when Cody told me on the phone, “whenever you want to cry, I would cry with you here”.  That was the last straw. Things have come to an edge where nostalgia is about to take over, and I know it is time to move on. Their heartwarming hand did reach me in time, and help is one rare thing that I am not allowed to waste it. Those who care will stay eventually – distance and time wont take them away.

I havnt come up with a plan to tackle this, yet the best thing to do is to get to know the Hannah “here” and try to reevaluate its very existence. Then, I can sincerely begin conversations with the world around me “now”, at present.

ps: An apology to London, since it was a wrong time and wrong person to visit you. It is possible that I wouldn’t go again for quite some time, but for this particular hardship, you are a special city to me.