Li Tai Pe Drinks and Drowns

THE spray splashes on the petals of the anemone

Creasing the water to a mesh of magic circles moving outwards:

The petals shake like the notes

Of a woman singing.—

Then Li Tai Pe lifts back his cup

And the red scimitar goes back to its sheath.

The magical rings move further away

Till they shake the ivory towers of the water-lilies.

Now, as a finger shuts the notes of a flute,

The petals fold together.

Then Li Tai Pe with reeling mind

Sees the moon as an ivory mask

Hung from the belt of Fate the Histrion.—

With such a mask, the princesses will deem him of the

dragon-blood.

He jumps to catch it.

The moon-stained water runs into his mouth.

With open arms he sinks

And through the jade-cold water seeks his diadem.

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A few notes:

Bohea – a tea growing area in Fujian

Sir Joshua Jebb – who was a British army engineer in Canada and then designed some of Britain’s most famous prisons – not sure why he pops up here but he did have a lot of daughters as indicated

Joppa – the city now more commonly known as Jaffa in Israel

En famille – Edith Sitwell

In the early springtime after their tea,

Through the young fields of the

springing Bohea,

Jemima, Jocasta, Dina and Deb

Walked with their father

Sir Joshua Jebb -

An admiral red, whose only notion,

(A butterfly poised on a pigtailed ocean)

Is of the peruked sea whose swell

Breaks on the flowerless rocks of Hell.

Under the thin trees,

Deb and Dinah,

Jemima, Jocasta, walked, and finer

Their black hair seemed (flat-sleek to see)

Than the young leaves of the

springing Bohea;

Their cheeks were like

nutmeg-flowers when swells

The rain into foolish silver bells.

They said, “If the door you would

only slam,

Or if, Papa, you would once say “Damn” -

Instead of merely roaring “Avast”

Or boldly invoking the nautical Blast -

We should now stand

in the street of Hell

Watching siesta shutters that fell

With a noise like amber softly sliding;

Our moon-like glances through

these gliding

Would see at her table preened and set

Myrrhina sitting at her toilette

With eyelids closed as soft

as the breeze

That flows from gold flowers

on the incense-trees.

The Admiral said,

“You could never call -

I assure you it would not do at all!

She gets down from table

without saying “Please”,

Forgets her prayers and to cross her Ts,

In short, her scandalous reputation

Has shocked the whole of the

Hellish nation;

And every turbaned Chinoiserie,

With whom we should sip

our black Bohea,

Would stretch out her simian

fingers thin

To scratch you, my dears, like a

mandoline;

For Hell is just as properly proper

As Greenwich, or as, Bath, or Joppa!”

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Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell

The Sitwell’s all had a relationship with China in one way or another and for Edith and Sacheverell both wrote Chinois inspired poems – reproduced here today and tomorrow. And to start a short excerpt from John Pearson’s biography of the Sitwell’s followed by an untitled poem from Edith…

When Osbert Sitwell went to China in January, 1934, it was with the conviction that little of what he would see could last and because he wished to experience ‘the wonderful beauty of the system of life it incorporated before it should perish.’ For three months he and his companion David Horner rented a small house in the middle of Peking’s Tartar City. It amused Osbert to spend each morning writing about the charms of the chinoiserie Pavilion in his latest book, a social history of Brighton, while the winds brought the yellow sand from the Gobi Desert onto his work table. Through his friend Harold Acton, dandy aesthete turned Chinese man-of-letters, Sitwell and Horner had an entrée to a vanished Peking that Sitwell would bring vividly to life in Escape with Me!: An Oriental Sketch-Book (1939), hailed by Hugh Walpole as one of the half-dozen best travel books in English of the previous half-century.

When May came, and the peonies were over, it was time to leave. One of the last visits Osbert made before departing was to the ancient college of the imperial eunuchs. He spent some time talking to the oldest of them, a wrinkled, hairless man with a piping voice and an inquisitive manner: ‘Tell me, young man, the old castrato said, ‘do you have no group of people like us where you come from?’ Osbert thought a while then answered gravely, ‘Yes, indeed we have. We call it Bloomsbury.’

See John Pearson, Façades: Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell (1978)

Untitled – Edith Sitwell

The King of China’s daughter She never would love me,

Though I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

For oranges and lemons

The stars in bright blue air (I stole them long ago, my dear)

Were dangling there.

The moon, she gave me silver pence;

The sun did give me gold:

And both together softly blew

And made my porridge cold.

But the King of China’s daughter

Pretended not to see,

When I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

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Midnight in Peking was also the USA Today’s Weekend book pick last weekend.

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Dri­ven by a life­long lack of Chi­nese Amer­i­can hero­ines to emu­late, film­maker Robin Lung goes on a quest to dis­cover the real life equiv­a­lent of a fic­tional Chi­nese Amer­i­can female detec­tive. As she fol­lows clues she runs across a fas­ci­nat­ing mem­oir writ­ten by a Chi­nese woman from Hawaii named Li Ling-Ai and unearths a 1941 Oscar-winning doc­u­men­tary that Li worked on called KUKAN – an epic color film about war-torn China that has been “lost” for over half a cen­tury. Lung’s hunt for a hero­ine takes on a new dimen­sion as she tries to track down the story behind KUKAN and prove that Li’s role in the film went beyond the Tech­ni­cal Advi­sor credit she was given.  She quickly dis­cov­ers two other peo­ple who have their own rea­sons for dig­ging into KUKAN’s amaz­ing past: Ed Carter, the doc­u­men­tary cura­tor at the Acad­emy Archives who’s seek­ing the miss­ing cor­ner­stone of his col­lec­tion; and Michelle Scott, the grand­daugh­ter of KUKAN cam­era­man Rey Scott, a young artist who longs to know more about her dead grand­fa­ther and the mys­te­ri­ous pho­tographs he left behind.

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Application forms and Residency Guidelines, plus all relevant information can also be found on their website ~ http://www.m-restaurantgroup.com/mbund/Ms_residency.html or facebook page ~ https://www.facebook.com/m.literaryresidency
Applications close on July 1, 2012.

The M Literary Residency Programme was established to disseminate a broader knowledge of contemporary life and writing in India and China today and to foster deeper intellectual, cultural and artistic links across individuals and communities.

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RAS WEEKENDER

Saturday 12 May 2012 at 4.00pm

Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road, Shanghai

兴国宾馆上海市兴国路78号

JAMES PALMER

on

Unnatural Disasters: The Tangshan Earthquake and the End of Maoism

On July 28, 1976, the city of Tangshan was obliterated by the worst natural disaster in modern Chinese history, killing at least 250,000 people. In Beijing, the dying Mao, whose long illness had politically paralyzed the country, was wheeled into a shelter as buildings shook around him. But the quake was only one in a long series of calamities for China in the 1960s and 1970s. Politics and nature interacted to rock the foundations of the country, expose the gulf between the Chinese people and their leaders, and eventually end 30 years of Maoism.

This talk will discuss the events around the disaster and how the power struggle of the 1970s still echoes in Chinese politics today.

James Palmer is the author of Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: the Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China. His previous book, shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys prize, was The Bloody White Baron. In 2003, he won the Spectator’s Shiva Naipaul prize for travel writing. He lives and works in Beijing.

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