Seed Cathedral: UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010

I first heard about the UK Pavilion in early 2009 when my friend Sonny Leong took me and actress Alice Lee along to a meeting with the British Council to lobby for the inclusion of British Chinese artists at the UK site for Shanghai Expo 2010. Coals to Newcastle it may have been, but what better way to show China's contribution to the world than illustrate where we are in the Chinese diaspora? Hey, China, this is one of the ways in which we've developed since leaving the Mothership, bringing it full circle. Don't we scrub up a treat?

My Big Idea was to take my comedy show, Anna May Wong Must Die!, to the Shanghai Expo, introducing the mitochondrial Eve of the Chinese diaspora, Hollywood's first movie legend, to Chinese audiences. And other artists who were using different artistic disciplines to tackle the same major figure in Western culture — whose birth centenary had just passed in 2005 — would show us in our infinite variety.

Over a delightful lunch of dim sum (thanks, Sonny) we presented our case. The two officers from the BC smiled and looked blank. They then got out a portfolio of sketches and photo mock-ups and embarked on a presentation of the UK Pavilion, which looked something like a giant hedgehog. Oohing and aahing, we awaited the expected conclusion: dates, capacity of the venue, that sort of thing. And we waited. And we waited.

The officers concluded their presentation and sat back. "So how many does it hold?" I asked.

They looked at each other and one of them told me, "We expect a through-put time of about two minutes."

Huh? A non sequitur if ever I heard one.

"Yes, but what's the audience capacity?"

Over a tortuous ten minutes or so it transpired that (and how typical does this sound) the UK Pavilion had no practical function. It was merely a thing of beauty to be admired. A bit like the upcoming Labour leadership contest if the Blair/Brown axis has it their own way.

As it turns out, the UK Pavilion — known as the Seed Cathedral — is indeed beautiful. It is a structure pierced by a myriad acrylic rods, each with an illuminated seed where the rods end in the pavilion, so it has some sort of ecological message, like nature is destined to museum status or something like that. And being flexible, the rods move in the breeze, giving the impression of glowing fur.

The British Council is taking British artists to the Expo. Sadly, none of them Chinese. My mate Neil Hornick and his crew (lucky things!) will be committing street-theatre on the crowds queuing up to be two-minute through-put. I am told Queen Victoria may make an appearance.

More on Shanghai Expo 2010 at Ronin

Seed Cathedral: UK Pavilion at Shanghai Expo 2010

I first heard about the UK Pavilion in early 2009 when my friend Sonny Leong took me and actress Alice Lee along to a meeting with the British Council to lobby for the inclusion of British Chinese artists at the UK site for Shanghai Expo 2010. Coals to Newcastle it may have been, but what better way to show China's contribution to the world than illustrate where we are in the Chinese diaspora? Hey, China, this is one of the ways in which we've developed since leaving the Mothership, bringing it full circle. Don't we scrub up a treat?

My Big Idea was to take my comedy show, Anna May Wong Must Die!, to the Shanghai Expo, introducing the mitochondrial Eve of the Chinese diaspora, Hollywood's first movie legend, to Chinese audiences. And other artists who were using different artistic disciplines to tackle the same major figure in Western culture — whose birth centenary had just passed in 2005 — would show us in our infinite variety.

Over a delightful lunch of dim sum (thanks, Sonny) we presented our case. The two officers from the BC smiled and looked blank. They then got out a portfolio of sketches and photo mock-ups and embarked on a presentation of the UK Pavilion, which looked something like a giant hedgehog. Oohing and aahing, we awaited the expected conclusion: dates, capacity of the venue, that sort of thing. And we waited. And we waited.

The officers concluded their presentation and sat back. "So how many does it hold?" I asked.

They looked at each other and one of them told me, "We expect a through-put time of about two minutes."

Huh? A non sequitur if ever I heard one.

"Yes, but what's the audience capacity?"

Over a tortuous ten minutes or so it transpired that (and how typical does this sound) the UK Pavilion had no practical function. It was merely a thing of beauty to be admired. A bit like the upcoming Labour leadership contest if the Blair/Brown axis has it their own way.

As it turns out, the UK Pavilion — known as the Seed Cathedral — is indeed beautiful. It is a structure pierced by a myriad acrylic rods, each with an illuminated seed where the rods end in the pavilion, so it has some sort of ecological message, like nature is destined to museum status or something like that. And being flexible, the rods move in the breeze, giving the impression of glowing fur.

The British Council is taking British artists to the Expo. Sadly, none of them Chinese. My mate Neil Hornick and his crew (lucky things!) will be committing street-theatre on the crowds queuing up to be two-minute through-put. I am told Queen Victoria may make an appearance.

More on Shanghai Expo 2010 at Ronin

Chopsticks At Dawn: This Time It's Personal

Chopsticks at Dawn - BBC Radio 4

Anna with Ben Chan and Jane Ng at the BBC

I finally got all my links done for my Radio 4 programme, Chopsticks At Dawn, which goes out at 13:30 on Tuesday 8th June.

This was no mean feat, hobbled as I was by a bad bout of bronchitis brought on by hanging about in enclosed spaces with dear friends who love their smokes and will fight to the death for their right to indulge. Even if it's someone else's death. Thank you Roy Castle, wherever you are, for campaigning for smokers to keep their evil weed to themselves even as you were dying of cancer, the most famous passive smoking victim in the world — we wussies with weak lungs salute you.

A decoction of Chinese herbs twice a day seem to have held total vocal breakdown at bay. (I'll spare you details of the morning ritual of clearing my chest of gunge. Suffice to say it involved Loved One playing me like a pair of congas.) I sat there getting through the studio's stock of Twinings lemon and ginger tea with a big dollop of honey, relieved to find my chest and sinuses opening up under the influence of hot gingery goodness.

Fearing a croak might replace my usual warm, rich and resonant tones, I'd done plenty of vocal exercises and used the time before my studio slot to quietly declaim how Peter Piper had picked a a peck of pickled peppers whilst wondering if Peter Piper had done such a thing, how many pecks would Peter Piper now possess. Whatever a peck is. A fraction of a bushel, I'd venture.

A timing mix-up meant I was there nearly two hours early. So by the time I was sat behind the microphone, trying to avoid spraying the pop-shield with germs, I practically knew the script by heart. Pretty good considering I'd taken it to the wire and only finished the script in the early hours of the morning. Ending with a joke. That's always a good idea.

Breaking off only to cough in the ladylike manner which befits a BBC presenter, I did occasionally have to warn the studio to turn the speakers off at their end as I was about to vesuviate the contents of my thorax into a wodge of tissues in the manner of the volcano wot we can't pronounce. Attempting to actually pronounce 'Eyjafjallajokull' would have ended up with my innards decorating the sound booth.

I trust the pop-shield was removed with sterilised implements and ceremonially burnt. The Terror Of The Tongs.

Oh, you might be interested in the content of my latest magnum opus. (There have been several and will be many more.) It's about orientalism in Western music and I get to have a go at all those toons that were the bane of my young life with their Chop Suey riffs. Yes, about as authentically Chinese as a Vesta Chow Mein and almost as tasteful.

Enjoy.

Chopsticks At Dawn is written and presented by Anna Chen with Dr Jonathan Walker. Produced by Chris Eldon-Lee and Culture Wise.
Broadcast 13:30, Tuesday 8th June 2010
BBC Radio 4

Also featuring Derek Scott (Leeds Uni), Rachel Harris (SOAS). Plus the fabulously talented Sarah and Liz Liew of Chi2, Ben Chan (Big Yellow Band) and Jane Ng

More on Chopsticks at Dawn here

Chopsticks At Dawn: This Time It's Personal

Chopsticks at Dawn - BBC Radio 4

Anna with Ben Chan and Jane Ng at the BBC

I finally got all my links done for my Radio 4 programme, Chopsticks At Dawn, which goes out at 13:30 on Tuesday 8th June.

This was no mean feat, hobbled as I was by a bad bout of bronchitis brought on by hanging about in enclosed spaces with dear friends who love their smokes and will fight to the death for their right to indulge. Even if it's someone else's death. Thank you Roy Castle, wherever you are, for campaigning for smokers to keep their evil weed to themselves even as you were dying of cancer, the most famous passive smoking victim in the world — we wussies with weak lungs salute you.

A decoction of Chinese herbs twice a day seem to have held total vocal breakdown at bay. (I'll spare you details of the morning ritual of clearing my chest of gunge. Suffice to say it involved Loved One playing me like a pair of congas.) I sat there getting through the studio's stock of Twinings lemon and ginger tea with a big dollop of honey, relieved to find my chest and sinuses opening up under the influence of hot gingery goodness.

Fearing a croak might replace my usual warm, rich and resonant tones, I'd done plenty of vocal exercises and used the time before my studio slot to quietly declaim how Peter Piper had picked a a peck of pickled peppers whilst wondering if Peter Piper had done such a thing, how many pecks would Peter Piper now possess. Whatever a peck is. A fraction of a bushel, I'd venture.

A timing mix-up meant I was there nearly two hours early. So by the time I was sat behind the microphone, trying to avoid spraying the pop-shield with germs, I practically knew the script by heart. Pretty good considering I'd taken it to the wire and only finished the script in the early hours of the morning. Ending with a joke. That's always a good idea.

Breaking off only to cough in the ladylike manner which befits a BBC presenter, I did occasionally have to warn the studio to turn the speakers off at their end as I was about to vesuviate the contents of my thorax into a wodge of tissues in the manner of the volcano wot we can't pronounce. Attempting to actually pronounce 'Eyjafjallajokull' would have ended up with my innards decorating the sound booth.

I trust the pop-shield was removed with sterilised implements and ceremonially burnt. The Terror Of The Tongs.

Oh, you might be interested in the content of my latest magnum opus. (There have been several and will be many more.) It's about orientalism in Western music and I get to have a go at all those toons that were the bane of my young life with their Chop Suey riffs. Yes, about as authentically Chinese as a Vesta Chow Mein and almost as tasteful.

Enjoy.

Chopsticks At Dawn is written and presented by Anna Chen with Dr Jonathan Walker. Produced by Chris Eldon-Lee and Culture Wise.
Broadcast 13:30, Tuesday 8th June 2010
BBC Radio 4

Also featuring Derek Scott (Leeds Uni), Rachel Harris (SOAS). Plus the fabulously talented Sarah and Liz Liew of Chi2, Ben Chan (Big Yellow Band) and Jane Ng
More on Chopsticks at Dawn here

China school killings: capitalism and mental illness

It takes a lot of anger to drive someone to enter a school and kill the most precious, most vulnerable members of a community. The repository of our hopes for the future, children are our greatest investment as a species.

In the West we've had our share of sorrow with Dunblane, Columbine, Beslan.

Now the phenomenon has struck China in a spate of school killings — five in the last two months. The latest case was unusual in that this was no desperate loner or nihilist grouping. It was a pillar of the community, a 48-year old man with social status who'd been known to show charity himself. Full of fury over a property dispute, Wu Huanming walked into a kindergarten in Xinzheng, Shaanxi Province, slashed seven children and two adults to death with a kitchen cleaver, walked home, smoked a cigarette as he watched his panicked neighbours rushing to the school, and then killed himself before vengeful parents could do it for him.

Is that the ultimate act of cowardice? To choose death but want to take others with you?

Few have missed the additional cruelty that in the land of the one-child family these killings devastate concentric circles of victims and continue destroying way beyond the act itself.

There had been self-harmings and suicides over the past decade or so but this method of protest probably lost its usefulness the day a pensioner scaled the bridge where a young man had been threatening to jump, and threw him off, spawning a YouTube hit. The message was clear: no-one cares. Or at least no-one feels empowered to help even if they do care.

The anger has turned outwards in an inchoate rage against those who reflect the powerlessness of the perpetrator.

China is a nation with 4,000 unbroken years of civilisation behind it. Centuries of upheavals, revolutions, uprisings, invasions and famine have never seen such mad malign acts of individual cowardice: it's a Western import. But, as with other feudal societies closer to home, warring and invaded China had its own form of barbarism, notably in the periods when Legalism ruled. One of the reasons many were drawn to communism in the 20th century was the desire to replace feudal values with something more humane. For example, my father used to speak of the horror of the vendetta, when an individual slight would result in the slaying of entire families unto the last babe, a familiar trope for anyone who reads the Bible. However, it has taken the superficial stability of the markets to give us the present mutation.

Although there is a rising urban middle-class, many of the Chinese workers and peasants who gained an iron-rice-bowl security under Mao, with jobs, housing, education and medicine guaranteed, have seen it clawed back by the new capitalists. Naomi Klein says that of 6,000 yuan billionaires, 90% of them are the offspring of the communist cadre who once ran the state assets and now practically own them.

This massive disparity in wealth distribution has a price to pay. Part of the price is mental health.

It's no good simply writing off the perpetrators as "evil". That's a word that prevents you from understanding what's going on and thereby nipping it in the bud. In the Chinese classic, the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu urges us to:
Tackle things before they have appeared.
Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in.

He also tells us that:
A tree as big as a man's embrace starts from a tiny sprout.
A tower nine stories high begins with a heap of earth.
A journey of a thousand leagues starts from where your feet stand.

So what's behind it and what can we do to prevent its repetition? The government's immediate answer is to employ security guards, dealing with the symptom and not the cause.

The killers ceased to see others as themselves, only as a reflection of a hated impotence. To me, this is glaring proof that there is such a thing as society. And this is why it is so dangerous to acquiesce to the pessimistic neo-con view, as espoused by Margaret Thatcher and her Tory progeny, that we are all atomised individuals fighting for our own advantage. If that's true then there's no hope for us as a civilisation.

Will China be as ineffectual as the West has been in investigating the causes of such monstrous behaviour? If the conclusion is that dog-eat-dog devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism is a sickness at the heart of the way we organise ourselves, this surely demands a rethinking of values. The capitalist system turns us into rats in a sack, fighting each other, powerless to organise and stop the real threat in society which, across the globe, appears to be coming from the top echelons eager to maximise exploitation.

Lao Tzu also writes:
Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can no longer be guarded.
Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.

That goes for all of us.

China school killings: capitalism and mental illness

It takes a lot of anger to drive someone to enter a school and kill the most precious, most vulnerable members of a community. The repository of our hopes for the future, children are our greatest investment as a species.

In the West we've had our share of sorrow with Dunblane, Columbine, Beslan.

Now the phenomenon has struck China in a spate of school killings — five in the last two months. The latest case was unusual in that this was no desperate loner or nihilist grouping. It was a pillar of the community, a 48-year old man with social status who'd been known to show charity himself. Full of fury over a property dispute, Wu Huanming walked into a kindergarten in Xinzheng, Shaanxi Province, slashed seven children and two adults to death with a kitchen cleaver, walked home, smoked a cigarette as he watched his panicked neighbours rushing to the school, and then killed himself before vengeful parents could do it for him.

Is that the ultimate act of cowardice? To choose death but want to take others with you?

Few have missed the additional cruelty that in the land of the one-child family these killings devastate concentric circles of victims and continue destroying way beyond the act itself.

There had been self-harmings and suicides over the past decade or so but this method of protest probably lost its usefulness the day a pensioner scaled the bridge where a young man had been threatening to jump, and threw him off, spawning a YouTube hit. The message was clear: no-one cares. Or at least no-one feels empowered to help even if they do care.

The anger has turned outwards in an inchoate rage against those who reflect the powerlessness of the perpetrator.

China is a nation with 4,000 unbroken years of civilisation behind it. Centuries of upheavals, revolutions, uprisings, invasions and famine have never seen such mad malign acts of individual cowardice: it's a Western import. But, as with other feudal societies closer to home, warring and invaded China had its own form of barbarism, notably in the periods when Legalism ruled. One of the reasons many were drawn to communism in the 20th century was the desire to replace feudal values with something more humane. For example, my father used to speak of the horror of the vendetta, when an individual slight would result in the slaying of entire families unto the last babe, a familiar trope for anyone who reads the Bible. However, it has taken the superficial stability of the markets to give us the present mutation.

Although there is a rising urban middle-class, many of the Chinese workers and peasants who gained an iron-rice-bowl security under Mao, with jobs, housing, education and medicine guaranteed, have seen it clawed back by the new capitalists. Naomi Klein says that of 6,000 yuan billionaires, 90% of them are the offspring of the communist cadre who once ran the state assets and now practically own them.

This massive disparity in wealth distribution has a price to pay. Part of the price is mental health.

It's no good simply writing off the perpetrators as "evil". That's a word that prevents you from understanding what's going on and thereby nipping it in the bud. In the Chinese classic, the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu urges us to:
Tackle things before they have appeared.
Cultivate peace and order before confusion and disorder have set in.

He also tells us that:
A tree as big as a man's embrace starts from a tiny sprout.
A tower nine stories high begins with a heap of earth.
A journey of a thousand leagues starts from where your feet stand.

So what's behind it and what can we do to prevent its repetition? The government's immediate answer is to employ security guards, dealing with the symptom and not the cause.

The killers ceased to see others as themselves, only as a reflection of a hated impotence. To me, this is glaring proof that there is such a thing as society. And this is why it is so dangerous to acquiesce to the pessimistic neo-con view, as espoused by Margaret Thatcher and her Tory progeny, that we are all atomised individuals fighting for our own advantage. If that's true then there's no hope for us as a civilisation.

Will China be as ineffectual as the West has been in investigating the causes of such monstrous behaviour? If the conclusion is that dog-eat-dog devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism is a sickness at the heart of the way we organise ourselves, this surely demands a rethinking of values. The capitalist system turns us into rats in a sack, fighting each other, powerless to organise and stop the real threat in society which, across the globe, appears to be coming from the top echelons eager to maximise exploitation.

Lao Tzu also writes:
Fill your house with gold and jade,
And it can no longer be guarded.
Set store by your riches and honour,
And you will only reap a crop of calamities.

That goes for all of us.