The other day someone told me about an interesting guy called Heinz Insu Fenkl, a literature professor at the State University of New York (SUNY),who’s been translating and studying North Korean comics. The comics are certainly fascinating as is Fenkl’s analysis of them – see here a good article on him and his work with a slide show of DPRK comics in translation from the Global Post.
Before reading this post – a warning – if you listen to this song I’ll bet you can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the week.
Arsing around aimlessly on You Tube the other day I came across this marvellous old 78 of the popular ‘Oriental Foxtrot’ Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai from 1928 recorded in London by the (at the time) much respected Herman Darewski and His Covent Garden Dance Band. Cavan O’Connor is the vocalist; Darewski (1883-1947) was a White Russian who made his way to England, became well known in, of all places, the seaside resort of Bridlington and then moved to London and became a bandleader.
Cavan O’Connor (below), by the way, was a bit of a Robbie Williams of his day – a smooth heart-breaker the ladies loved. A hero in World War One, he always wore a smart white suit and would wander onto the stage to sing his numbers and then wander back of again. He often sang with an Irish lilt that just drove the ladies to even greater heights of adoration. Even though he started out singing in the pubs he managed to get accepted to the Royal Academy of Music to study musical notation. There’s a full obituary of O’ Connor’s ‘Wandering Vagabond’ life here.
Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai was a very popular tune in the late 1920s when the vogue for Oriental Foxtrots was running high in London (and in Shanghai too for that matter – nowhere loves a bit of Orientalism more than the Orient after all). Here is a slightly posher version from Jack Payne and the BBC Orchestra. Like Darewski, Payne (below) was a popular bandleader in London having started out touring around the fronts of the First World War to entertain the troops. After the war he had a longstanding engagement at London’s Hotel Cecil before becoming the BBC’s Director of Dance Music (rather alarmingly this job would now presumably be filled by someone with a large collection of hip-hop records!).
It’s rather marvellous to think that people all over Britain sat down for a cup of tea and a scone on a cold evening in 1928, turned on the wireless to Jack Payne and the BBC band, and tapped their stockinged feet to Sing Song Girl of Old Shanghai.
It’s also worth thinking about the fact that in 1928 the term ‘old Shanghai’ was already being used – more on that another time I think.
My co-author Sam Chambers slipped a neat little op-ed into the New York Times this week, re run in the IHT and worth a plug I feel. The book, of course, remains available to purchase.
A nice in-depth piece from CNNGo on the former Cosmopolitan Apartments (1934) on the old Bubbling Well Road (Nanjing West Road). Nothing to say, except thank God it hasn’t yet succumbed to the bulldozers and property developers who would obviously dearly love to either a) take it down or b) rip it out and put it back together far worse than it originally was. Take a look, there’s a gallery of pictures of this Shanghai art deco classic. Click here.
Officially – the Orwellian named Revision Project on Twenty-Four Histories and the Draft History of the Qing (ultimately set to be fully rewritten by 2015) is rewriting the official history – The Twenty-Four Histories – a collection of Chinese historical books covering a period of proto-history and history from 3,000 BC to the Ming Dynasty in the 17th century. The entire set contains about 40 million words. The Draft History of Qing covers the Qing Dynasty from 1616 to 1911.
Problem is history keeps changing – the first historical revision took 20 years and ended in 1958 – then came the Cultural Revolution, not a good time to be a historian in China (or anything else really). So, when considering Chinese history, or any history for that matter, take note of the guidelines just issued by the Revision Project on Twenty-Four Histories and the Draft History of the Qing:
(NB: all matters of historical reinterpretation were submitted to Wen Jiabao and approved by him personally* – I kid you not
All sentences used to praise feudal kings, generals and ministers should not end with exclamation marks
texts describing peasant uprisings should be reduced to a single paragraph
it is now official that ‘the Cultural Revolution brought great calamity to the country and resulted in massive losses to the people.’
the CR ‘cleansed the government of “liberal bourgeoisie’ to prevent China’s return to capitalism.’
So now you know!
*= Wen Jiabao has an academic background in geology and engineering – but don’t let that put you of
Even I thought I’d never been excited and fascinated by a telephone exchange – but I decidedly am!
As I noted the other day this pops up in the Mr Wong detective series c-movie Phantom of Chinatown (1940). I’d never heard of it and don’t know much about it but I love the idea. In the movie it appears to be a small office called the Chinatown Exchange and employing about half a dozen Chinese telephone exchange girls and from 1894 to 1949 they ran a Chinese language telephone service which operated independently of the central San Francisco exchange.
According to the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce in 1914: “These girls respond all day with hardly a mistake to calls that are given (in English or one of five Chinese dialects) by the name of the subscriber instead of by his number — a mental feat that would be practically impossible to most high-schooled American misses.”
Here’s a pic of the girls hard at work:
It gets better – according to the Chinatown: San Francisco web site - “Since people were often asked for by name rather than by number, telephone operators memorized and knew each subscriber by name. This made telephone numbers unnecessary. The Chinatown community felt it was rude to refer to people by numbers. Operators also knew the address and occupations of subscribers so they could distinguish between two people with the same name. In addition, they had to speak five Chinese dialects and English.”
And it still gets better – there were also several public phone boxes in Chinatown connected exclusively to the Chinese Exchange which had a pagoda look about them and several remain preserved in San Francisco
The building is located at the Bank of Canton, 743 Washington St., Chinatown, San Francisco. It’s a marvellous pagoda-like building on the corner of Grant Avenue and Washington Street built in 1909 as the Chinatown telephone office.
I’ve never been to San Francisco but do have to pass through on business in October so expect more on the Chinese Exchange!!
I was listening to a discussion the other day about foreign China apologists these days – one particularly gross and regular apologist was outed the other day on a TV show. He’s a prime example of an opportunist of low to mid intelligence who lacks the historical, ethical and ideological background to understand the country he talks about – there are plenty more who allow themselves to be flattered and gain an elevated opinion of both themselves and the environment they operate in – I meet them regularly sadly. Then I came across this documentary series on the BBC World Service – Useful Idiots. The second part deals closely with the useful idiots who praised Mao.
One of the weirdest books I’ve read in a long time is Nikolai Lilin’s Siberian Education. It’s basically a book about a group of people who don’t really exist living in a place that doesn’t really exist – except they do and it does. The people are the Siberian Urkas who are essentially bandits and for centuries attacked mercantile transport and the government forces who defended it. The place is the republic of Transnistria, pretty much unrecognized by anyone and sandwiched between Moldova and Ukraine. The Urka culture is one of those slowing dying hidden cultures of Europe – like Romany – that outsiders have little understanding of and where anthropologists are not really welcomed. Bandits the Urkas may be but they are so much more than just another shabby bunch of post-Soviet crims and washed up Zeks – the Urkas have codes, traditions, standards – bizarre perhaps to most of us but interesting all the same.
I’m not quite sure what to make of Lilin – Urka bandit, Pushkin lover (as apparently all good Urka’s are (literary bandits!) and ex-Russian Special Forces in Chechnya as well as now being an Italian residing writer. Could all be too good to be true but the book’s a gripping read. Blurb below as per usual and here’s a link to Irvine Welsh’s review in The Guardian.
Set in a small and tight-knit community of ‘honest criminals’ in a remote part of the former Soviet Union, this is a tale of an extreme childhood – exotic, violent and completely unique. Nicolai Lilin gained his ‘education’ as a member of the Siberian Urkas – a self-contained criminal fraternity – in a forgotten corner of Eastern Europe. It was a remarkable upbringing, defined by an elaborate set of riuals and strict codes of honour. The community had a deep distrust of outsiders – especially the police and state authorities – and split itself into ‘honest’ and ‘dishonest’ criminals. Even their youngest children were taught to understand violence and when it was appropriate to use it. By the age of six, Nicolai Lilin is given his first ‘pike knife’ by an uncle and by the age of twelve he has been convicted of attempted murder. A huge bestseller in Lilin’s current home country, Italy, Siberian Education is an extraordinary snapshot of a violent world.
As someone who divides his time pretty evenly writing about China now and China back then this seemed like a place to throw all the interesting bits that fall through the cracks somehow and never get used anywhere else. It's basically the stuff that doesn't get used in my writing about modern China or in the books I do about old China — i.e. probably of little interest to anyone but me and therefore ideally suited to an obscure blog up a dark cul-de-sac of the Internet. I'm also adding the odd 'Deviation Posting' about non-China stuff that interests me — Paul French
