Welcome to Dalian

For the next month, J and I will be in Dalian visiting with her parents.
Also, I hope in the meantime to get a better handle on the Mandarin I've
been studying on-and-off for the last year or so. I started listening to
an audio series by Pimsleur, which has it's benefits, especially for
someone with an ear for music. However, at the end of the day, I need to
have something visual as well, and it's best to study a language from a
number of different aspects. So a while back I decided to invest in a
set of software by the company Fluenz, which is a more interactive
method of self-study, similar to the more well-known Rosetta Stone
series. Fluenz has gotten me a pretty good basis for sentence structure
and some vocabulary, and J has been practicing with me here and there.
Now that we're in Dalian, this is my best chance for immersion in the
language, so I'm planning to not only continue with the Fluenz program
(reviewing it a few times to really get down the vocabulary it covers),
but also attend a school for a couple of weeks.
Of course, that is a practical reason to be in China for now. The other
reason is to celebrate the Chinese New Year with family here, and also
as an intermediate launching stage for our next move, which will be to
Chicago. More on that later, but I wanted to try out a blog post from
here, where I can record this trip and keep people up on what we're doing.

Romance on Rye

The two movies we watched last week could hardly have been more different; a fact which was amplified by the fact that we watched the second one part-way through the first one. Sandwiching the movies like this--a whimsical romance sandwiched by a dark, introspective drama--most likely contributed to our opinion of them, but for what it's worth... 

The first movie was titled "Tsotsi" (meaning "Thug"), an Academy Award (2005) and Golden Globe Award (2006) winner set in Soweto, Johannesburg. The first third of the movie we watched, before a glitch in our copy caused us to abandon it, showed a gang of four thugs leave their shantytown, go to the city and mug a man, stabbing and killing him in the process. The main character, who is known only as Tsotsi/Thug, goes on to rob a vehicle, throwing a woman out of it and shooting her, then driving away before he realizes that her tiny infant is in the backseat. It was at this point, at the hight of the movie's tension, that our copy flubbed. 

Unable to simply call it a night, we opted to go on to our second movie, a Japanese drama-romance titled "Be with You". The opening scene proved that it would be in somber contrast to Tsotsi. The film features a family of two--a father and son--a year after the wife/mother, Mio, had died. The movie shows the two struggling at everyday tasks; the father clearly in over his head with career, housework and child. The son son is good-natured and understanding though, and when the father apologizes for the terrible tasting dinner he prepared, the son declares the goop tastes great. After that, things get weird when at the start of the rainy season, the dead Mio somehow returns to earth. She has no memory, but falls back in love with her husband and son and begins to do the housework almost immediately. The movie, at this point, transforms into a mystery, drumming up questions less to do with how this is possible, but why it is happening. During the month-long rainy season ends, the reason is slowly revealed; we find out that Mio had discovered her destiny many years before her death, and all of this had been written in the stars, so to speak. The wife says good-bye and vanishes back into the afterlife, leaving the father and son reassured of her love and giving them closure.  

After "Be with You" finished, we were both feeling somewhat dumbfounded. Although we were told the movie was a tear-jerker, we simply sat on the sofa blinking our dry eyes. Although we could accept the general arc of the storyline, I had lots of questions for the screenwriter, not least of which: From what hell had Mio returned to want to spend her last month on earth folding laundry?! But in Japan, such questions are likely left unanswered.

The next day we resumed "Tsotsi". The young thug decides to keep the baby and care for it. Unsurprisingly, he does a terrible job of it--changing the baby's diapers with old newspaper and leaving the baby in a paper bag with an open can of condensed milk which results in an insect attach. But Tsotsi manages to recruit a local single-mother (at gunpoint) to clean up and breastfeed the infant. Through caring for the baby, though, Tsotsi is somehow transformed by the presence of this innocent baby; a point that is subtly underlined since the baby is soothed whenever Tsotsi cradles him. In the end, however, justice is served. Tsotsi decides to return the infant to his father and now-wheelchair-bound mother and turn himself in. The grieving family may now start to heal, and they even show some understanding of Tsotsi's transformation, ordering the police not to shoot him. But Tsotsi's transformation is proved to the viewer when he shows the police no resistance, putting his arms in the air, surrendering less to them and more to heaven. 

Last Amazonian Tour...

for now at least. I'm leaving for Brazil again for my final assignment, but will be back in Japan in less than two weeks. Check my {Heart of the Amazon} blog for updates.