Long Wings of Fire Have Covered the Moon
an informal 🟣⬆ (roundup)
I know there’s an early-70s revival in fashion and interiors like every 2 years, but we need another one. We specifically need to revive the humble wooden lattice/fresh flower/perfume collection/Tudor neckline combo. When this film - best-kept-secret of Hong Kong cinema - leaks into the general consciousness, there’ll be no getting away from it!!! (evil villain laugh)
Mina mania
A 1968 Mina song I’m obsessed with. Originally sung by American soul singer Wilson Pickett. When Pickett sings ‘Good time walkin’ down Broadway’, Mina sings ‘Long wings of fire have covered the moon’. I like this album because it’s basically a compilation of soul music with an ethereal Juliet of the Spirits twist.
I talk about Mina’s 60s TV spots to anyone who’ll listen - they’re preserved very well on YouTube through her official channels! This one is directed by the Oscar-winning set designer of both 8 ½ and La Dolce Vita!
My Beloved (昨夜夢魂中, 1971)
I am one of three people on Letterboxd to have ever seen Patrick Lung Kong’s melodrama, about a woman torn between her wealthy husband and a kind-hearted fashion designer. I don’t think it has ever been released with English subtitles. It’s worth a watch anyway just for Jenny Hu’s bedroom, which is the best thing I have ever seen on film - like a ‘60s Petite Princess Fancy Furniture doll’s house enlarged for a human. Like a saturated camp parody of the Valley of the Dolls soundtrack sleeve. Like the brothel sequence in a Li Han-hsiang film I watched once. Where can I get a bed like this?
(I put this screencap in one of my class presentations. On the slide about Notes on Camp. Next to a picture of Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford.)
It’s clear Douglas Sirk had an influence on the Hong Kong melodramas of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s - Torrent of Desire, another Jenny Hu vehicle which I write about here, is a remake of his Written on the Wind. The same Sirkian impulses, taken in a totally different direction by the contemporaneous Fassbinder, are visible in Lung’s filmmaking: hospital beds, glowing mood lighting, distinctly feminine visual pleasures.
Some books I have read (in Chinese)
The Sadeian Woman
I read Angela Carter’s The Sadeian Woman in Chinese for practice (wanted to read actual Marquis de Sade in Chinese, could not find a copy). It has definitely pushed my academic comprehension along, as well as coming with the excellent benefit of teaching me two different words for ‘castration’.
(Whose decision was it to open this 2012 music video with a Marquis de Sade quote? Do we think Cheryl of Girls Aloud fame is a Justine or a Juliette? Did you know Lana Del Rey wrote one of her songs? Did she have secret mythic meaning all along? Is she entwined in the Web of Correspondences?)
Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
Intended to read the entire Sea of Fertility trilogy in Chinese, but decided by the time I’d finished this book to try something new instead - Mishima (translated, ofc) is already the author who makes up the largest share of my Chinese reading, which I attribute to an early obsession with obscure ideophonic nature vocabulary. I will probably finish the other two books in the next few years, because they’re the kind of thing I’d devour in a week in English - longitudinal family chronicles with traditionally spiritual underpinnings. I am still captivated by the portrayal of nature in this messy Taisho drama - as in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love, the seasons and elements intervene at will in the human action.
(P.S: Gore Vidal blimey!! Read here for a review of Sun and Steel by the Myra Breckinridge author himself. He also notices the links between Mishima and Lawrence, but says that there is no evidence of deliberate intertextuality.)
Love in a Fallen City + The First Incense Burnt by Eileen Chang
Background: I had to spend my second term at language school doing a 3 hour per day (!) class in ‘’’newspaper reading’’’ that was so ineptly taught, I ended up just doing most of my Chinese reading on my phone under the table every day. The girl next to me did her share, too, but brought a massive physical book in instead, which I thought was an amusing visual aid. Lots of us were angry about our predicament. My UK university is effectively forcing me to take formal language classes to pass the year, and it’s also a requirement if I want to keep my Taiwanese visa - however, when you reach a C1-ish level in a language like Chinese, finding a class that suits your needs and interests can be like pulling teeth. Especially if you are more invested in the written language and its literature than the vernacular. This is ironic and feels like a cosmic punishment for actually doing work. Maybe the gods are telling me to chill out, or to reduce my chengyu-related hubris levels?
Basically our language school decided that they didn’t want to organise anything more advanced than ‘’’newspaper reading’’’ for the next term, so some of us got together and formed our own class, Dead Poets Society-style. We chose ‘Eileen Chang’ as a theme. I genuinely love my current classmates - I knew it was a good sign when everyone was unanimously pro-Eileen. Also a third of us are Jewish - never before have I studied with this many fellow-travellers at once - which confirms my suspicions about the link between Semitic ‘word-fetishism’ and Sinitic sound-symbolism (while also raising interesting questions about Ezra Pound).
We read Love in a Fallen City (individually, then line-by-line as a class), and then I got duped into reading all of The First Incense Burnt before our teacher decided he actually didn’t want to cover it. Then, for three weeks solid, we read some crime narratives translated to Chinese from German (?) and now we’re reading our teacher’s own commentary on a particularly gory bit of Pu Songling*, which I am enjoying very much. The bait-and-switch act of offering a class ‘on Eileen Chang’, then switching gleefully to a curriculum of True Crime material, is already forgiven because it’s actually hilarious - I’m already strategizing about how best to include it in a sitcom pilot. Also, Chang is an author I’d like to appreciate in my own time.
Love in a Fallen City is a story about modernity, told in one slow-motion burst - from crowded apartments to bombed-out harbours. The story is already out of time as it begins: the clocks have literally been changed in Shanghai. This is played out against a backdrop of traditional Chinese music and traditional matchmaking. What follows is a Gone With the Wind-esque tale of female independence in the face of war, and all the directionlessness that unhelpfully comes with it.
My photo from Kowloon, Hong Kong - everyone was like ‘Is this a visa run??’ when I actually just wanted historical background for Love in a Fallen City! I found quite a bit of historical background at the slimmed-down Hong Kong Museum of History. Generally preferred the vibe in Mong Kok to that of Taipei, which is cleaner, safer and cheaper, but seems comparatively new and ‘placeless’ (and has less neon).
The best bit: the main character and her new lover share a stilted connection via telephone, but when she tells him to look out of his window at the moon - Nature’s all-purpose connector of the estranged and exiled - it’s invisible, sheltered by a trailing plant. This is a brave new world. Modernity lets its people communicate - at the cost of their ties to the Earth itself.
Some requests
I’ve retooled the general graphic design for this newsletter (ie. pored over Fonts in Use to try and find a brand identity that would scream PINK MOD!). Any feedback is very welcome!
Does anyone have Taiwan-related questions to be answered in a future issue?
*My favourite Pu Songling moment came 2 years ago when I tried translating one of his stories involving a yaksha, a sort of Buddhist sprite written with the characters for ‘night’ and ‘fork’, as in the item of cutlery (夜叉). I had never seen this word before. In my translation, the sentence came out as ‘He was poised like a fork in the night’. I was like ‘Yes, this sounds right!’...