Border Patrol

The Museum recently screened the film Dooman River and since it centered on my twin fascinations, China and North Korea, I stuck around after work to watch it. It's 90 minutes long, with very little dialogue, and I found it to be completely mesmerizing.

The film takes place in a small Chinese town, which sits across the border from North Korea, separated by a long stretch of frozen river. The inhabitants of the town are ethnically Korean, but have little in common with their starving brethren across the divide. Given the proximity, North Koreans constantly cross illegally to find food and, with any luck, freedom. With these social and political factors simmering under the surface, two boys from each side strike up an uneasy friendship. While there are one or two unfortunate instances of heavy-handed symbolism, for the most part, it's a beautiful, tough, spare film that left me reeling.

I'm now extremely eager to see Zhang Lu's other films. A recent interview with the director can be found here: Elusive Filmmaker Opens Up

Connections

As tragic news events go, I've been pretty affected by the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and the reactions across the country. There are a lot of factors involved and in an attempt to wrap my mind around them, I tend to see things through the prism of my own experience. With that in mind, I was on the subway when I saw this public service announcement poster:

So, supposedly, in New York City, it's illegal to paint a real gun to look like a toy, and it's illegal to sell a toy gun that looks real. While it had never occurred to me before, that must have been why, when I was in China, I always felt a tiny blip of panic when I saw kid toting around a toy handgun. In China, they're painted to look real. And they do look real.


Of course, no confusion exists around this issue in China, because it is illegal for citizens to have guns. Despite being a terribly hostile environment for political dissidents, the lack of available guns really does have a tangible effect on one's safety, or at least one's perception of safety. I felt very, very safe in China. Indeed, this might have been for a couple reasons. Part of me probably operated on the widely-held cultural stereotype of Asian men being meek and passive. Part of me probably felt protected by my status as a white foreigner. But part of me also knew that if I took a taxi to a hostel in the dead of night in some random Chinese city, there was a really good chance that my cab driver did not have a firearm. And you know what? That made a big difference.

While gun control is a big part of this national conversation, how we deal with mental illness has also taken center stage. My mom wrote a powerful letter to The New York Times on this issue. It probably won't get printed, but - hey! - that's why I have a blog.

To The Editor:

With all the media attention given to the horrific events of Saturday's shooting in Tucson, the emphasis, to me, is much skewed in the wrong direction. This is not about our nation needing to "come together" or even political affiliations. It is about untreated mental illness. The severe paranoia and mood disorder as described in January 10th's New York Times article, "Suspect's Odd Behavior Caused Growing Alarm," coupled with the ease in which people in this country have access to deadly weapons, enable tragedies such as this.

For those who doubt, picture the following: If Jared screamed in pain from a vital organ each time he had a paranoid outburst, the response would have been different. Let us encourage a legislature which supports, rather than denies, funds for mental health, as well as bans the use of such weapons. These are not cases that undermine individual rights, as some would have us believe. Our government's first mission is to protect its constituents.

Ruth Obernbreit Glass
Larchmont, New York

And lastly, while it seems unrelated, all of these many thoughts and events overlapped with my watching the entire first season of Hoarders this week. Some of the storylines are very moving and I couldn't help but connect these people's situations with the incredible lack of mental health services in this country. Many of the hoarders had suffered terrible losses, abuse, and neglect in their lives. Many of them only began hoarding after a significant incident rendered them unable to deal with life. If people had access to affordable, manageable, stigma-free mental health services, then perhaps they wouldn't find themselves hoarding bags of garbage, or sexually abusing their children, or shooting nine-year-old girls in supermarket parking lots in Tucson, Arizona. I don't know. Maybe.

Movin' Out

So, it turns out that if you do a Google image search for "dream home" you get a really gruesome-looking Chinese horror film. According to the internet, it's a violent and grisly critique of the high prices of Hong Kong real estate.

Awesome.

The reason I even conducted the search in the first place was to celebrate my new Astoria apartment! I officially got the keys today from the nice-but-frazzled tenant who was moving out, and the friendly super, who speaks very little English. The next step is painting the walls a fun color and getting furniture and attempting some semblance of design. All my design-minded friends, I will be soliciting advice from you in the coming weeks...

Things I Did In Schenectady

1. Visited my friend Liu Xin a.k.a Lucy Liu

On Sunday I drove upstate to see Lucy, my friend from Dalian, who is currently on a Fulbright teaching fellowship at Union College. The drive was beautiful and traffic-free, seeing as it was 8:15 on a Sunday. It's easy to become NYC-centric, but whenever I explore the rest of New York, I'm struck by how beautiful and awesome it is. And it was great to see Lucy, who was so instrumental in my having a wonderful year in China.

2. Ate in the cafeteria

Before we did anything, we ate brunch at one of the campus cafeterias. All the college kids were decked out in Union gear, lining up for food, and shouting about how drunk they were last night. "I totally blacked out." "Oh my God, you were soooo wasted." I was unimpressed. There's nothing more boring to me than hearing how drunk someone was the night before, unless they did something interesting while drunk, like get into a fight or steal a boat. That said, the food was pretty good.

3. Checked out the campus

Union is small, pretty, and quiet, especially on a Sunday.

4. Saw some great art

After walking around and doing some cartwheels, we checked out the Nott Memorial, a beautiful and bizarre dome in the middle of campus. The building housed an art exhibit called Critical Stitch, which "engages and critiques a gamut of social, cultural, and political issues using needlecraft." I loved it. This one is called PMS Quilt:

Thank You X7

Christopher Dodd

5. Explored the Stockade Historic District

Schenectady is like many cities and towns in upstate New York, in that you can drive around and see what it must have been like when it was in full swing, maybe eighty years ago, but is now in a period of stagnation and decline. While I certainly don't want to romanticize joblessness and poverty, there is always something eerie and magical about empty, ghost-town Main Streets that appear to be stuck in time. (Too late! Romanticized!)

That being said, Schenectady has a well-preserved and interesting historic district, which was fun to explore.

6. Played school

7. Went ice-skating

I'm a terrible ice skater, but I forgot how much I love it. It's hard to find cheap places to skate in New York, but there are a few in Flushing and Long Island City, if anyone wants to go with me this winter.

8. Shopped at the Asian Market

Mark, Lucy's friend, drove us to an Asian grocery store in Albany, which had a variety of great offerings, from Tsingtao beer to Pocky sticks to cabbage to frozen dumplings.

9. Made hot pot

We picked up some hot pot ingredients, which we took back to Mark's apartment in Amsterdam. It brought me back to China, which felt great, since we often went out to hot pot for special occasions throughout the year. My plan is to try to do it at home one night, but no guarantees that I'll actually get my act together enough to go through with it.

10. Drove home

By the time we had eaten our hearts out, it was close to 9 pm. I chugged a Diet Coke (I'm pretty hardcore) and began my 3-hour journey home, which was powered by Fever to Tell by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and a jumbled mix CD I made. It had some good songs on it, but I found myself blasting "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on repeat whenever I started to fade. All in all, a wonderful trip. 谢谢纽约, 谢谢 刘鑫, 谢谢80's的音乐!

Last Train Home

I saw "Last Train Home" the other night. Maybe it's the fact that I just returned from China, but I was pretty blown away by this film. It's meticulous and beautiful and honest and painful and just an incredible work of (documentary) art. If you want to see me use more adjectives to describe it, you can read my review at Critic's Notebook. Warning: I get unnecessarily verbose. To make a long story short: if you get a chance to see this film when it's released in September, I recommend it. Then we should all get together and talk about it.

Oil Spill #2

Dalian is rarely in the news, but there was a pretty bad explosion and oil spill there just this past week. Tae alerted me to some incredible photographs in The Big Picture, some of which are below. They rescued a man who had started drowning while attempting to fix an underwater pump, but I don't think anyone died in the explosion, which is pretty remarkable given the size of that fire.