The Heart Of The Day

Since Hillary is now Secretary of State, I thought it would be interesting to watch this video, made during the primaries, of my favorite China Watcher in Beijing…Sexy Beijing’s Sufei.  Catch the irony at the very end!

Watching the Olympics in Beijing has got me to thinking about China again.  I’d like to make a point about the legacy of the damage done in the last 50 years.

You might like to read “The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up” by Liao Yiwu.

Master Deng Kuan, abbot of the Gu Temple, established in the Sui Dynasty sometime around the turn of the sixth century, was 103 when the writer Liao Yiwu met him while mountain climbing in Sichuan Province, in 2003, and Yiwu’s oral histories begin with him.

This is from a review of the book by Howard W. French, a former career foreign correspondent for the New York Times, who covered China from 2003 to 2008 and who teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism:

We know the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, the party went on a nationwide witch hunt for supposed liberals, reactionaries and capitalist roaders. Relating the Chinese experience amounts to a way of averting one’s eyes from something that may seem too hard to comprehend. It also encourages a kind of blurry forgetting, a storing away of things on a high, musty shelf that has been officially encouraged by China’s leaders, who are most keen to manage this story because they have the most to lose from a more vigorous and thorough telling. Thus the famous posthumous verdict by Deng Xiaoping, who judged that Mao had been 70 percent “correct” and 30 percent wrong. Yes, Mao’s errors, like the 30 million or more deaths from starvation caused by the crash industrialization of the Great Leap Forward, were doozies, but by and large he kept the country on the right path, avers Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s past has also benefited from studious airbrushing to avoid mussing up the standard portrait of him as a kindly, strong and nearly infallible second father to the nation. His enthusiastic role in violently suppressing “rightists” in the late 1950s has been placed out of bounds by the gatekeepers who determine which subjects can be researched and which cannot.

Master Deng’s life, and almost every other oral history in Liao Yiwu’s new book, appropriately subtitled Real-Life Stories, China From the Bottom Up , gives the lie to this entire vision, making this a deeply subversive book. I do not mean the reader should expect a tract or treatise on Chinese politics. Instead, Liao casts aside the official “facts” of events and replaces them with “memories”–with the resulting contrast between the censored record and interior consciousness revealing a post-1949 China that has never stopped being a traumatic place. At their root, all of Liao’s “real-life” stories share something fundamental: a fantastic, dreamy and nightmarish quality. Each story provokes a moment’s thought about its relationship to the truth.
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With an unlimited budget, China's most illustrious film director has achieved a lush multimedia feast that I cannot imagine will be surpassed anytime soon. As expected it was embedded with the political...for local consumption as much as for ... [Continue reading this entry]

The world must not forget. China's Grief, Unearthed NYTimes.com June 4, 2008 By Ma Jian FOR three days last month, China’s national flag flew at half-staff in Tiananmen Square to honor the victims of the devastating earthquake in Sichuan. It was the first time in ... [Continue reading this entry]

My son the chef! Here is a picture of me and my chefs!! The two in the grey are myself on the right, chef de cuisine of "One East On Third" Restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in ... [Continue reading this entry]

Already, one-third of China's land mass is desert and it is losing 1500 square acres more a year to overgrazing, deforestation, urban sprawl and draught. Looking out the window of my plane from Beijing to Kunming, for the ... [Continue reading this entry]

Too cold to do anything in Kunming so am flying out today to Jinghong in the south of China where it is reportedly warm. Was in Jinghong in the tropical Xishuangbanna Region in December 2004 when it was much warmer than this ... [Continue reading this entry]

Hard to believe I was in Beijing for two weeks. But you know what they say about stinking guests if they stay too long. So today I flew to Kunming in Yunnan Province in the south ... [Continue reading this entry]

This week Josh and I went to the Beijing Exhibition which is a miniature replica of the city in a huge building. Josh says they have one of these in every major city. Very well done! Then we ... [Continue reading this entry]

The two most impressive Olympic venues are the National Aquatics Center or simply the "Water Cube" and the "Bird's Nest." The "Water Cube," a palatial structure with an area of 80,000 sq meters that is white in the daytime and blue ... [Continue reading this entry]

Chinese New Year's Eve Wednesday February 6 2008. Words cannot do justice to the fireworks we viewed across the city from the rooftop of the Hilton Hotel at midnight so I will just show you here. It was so ... [Continue reading this entry]

Last Friday I went to the Yew Chung International School of Beijing with Amy, my daughter-in-law. Seventy five years ago an optimistic young woman, Madame Tsang Chor-hang, barely graduated from a teacher's school, emerged from a calamitous time ... [Continue reading this entry]

In the airport, while waiting for my luggage to show up, I scanned the crowd of people in the waiting area and had no trouble spotting Josh...three heads above all others. Eye candy for me! This is the first time ... [Continue reading this entry]

Email from my son who is chef de cuisine in one of the restaurants in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing...to his friends and family: On Nov 19, 2007, at 5:24 PM, Ryan Goetz wrote: Happy Thanksgiving! I write this now because in two ... [Continue reading this entry]

My sons and daughters-in-law, Luk, Doug, Josh and Amy on Koh Samui in Thailand for a week. Bob, their dad, took the picture. Doug and Luk live on Koh Samui. Greg, in Las Vegas, and I, of course, ... [Continue reading this entry]

My son Josh is Chef de Cuisine of "One East On Third" in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing. He was sent by the Executive Chef to Bangkok last week to check out some restaurants there. Luk, a delightful Thai ... [Continue reading this entry]

Amy's (son Josh's wife) last blog post: "For the new edition of Timeout Beijing they listed the top 50 restaurants in the city. And, yes, you guessed it - One East on Third was on the list!! It was ... [Continue reading this entry]

My youngest son, Josh and his wife Amy are living in Beijing. Her entries are best read from the bottom up. Nov 25, 01:45 AM The first week I was here Josh had a huge ... [Continue reading this entry]

On the e-hotelier.com web site a friend found this description of son Josh's restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing where he is the Chef de Cuisine: Hilton Beijing stars as Lord of The 3rd Ring Jul 31, 06 | 1:57 am Catch ... [Continue reading this entry]

My son Josh Goetz, 33, who has been a chef in Manhattan New York for the last five years has accepted a position opening a new restaurant in the Hilton Hotel in Beijing China. He starts the third week ... [Continue reading this entry]

I take a taxi to the upscale Lufthansa shopping center in Beijing to see if a bookstore had the Lonely Planet "Shanghai." They didn't of course...there were a few Lonely Planets ... [Continue reading this entry]

I had read that Tiananmen was the biggest square in the world. However, Mao's huge Mausoleum takes up about a third of the square...almost right in the middle...so the area doesn't ... [Continue reading this entry]

Video E found the website (www.wildwall.com) and the adventure offered intriguing potential...off the beaten track, away from the Chinese tourist groups that follow a guide with a microphone and colored flag held high ... [Continue reading this entry]

Quin-dynasty Beijing was redesigned with mazes of mud and brick walled courtyards after Genghis Khan's army reduced the city to rubble and is "now the stomping ground of a quarter of Beijing's residents. ... [Continue reading this entry]

The last time I was in China it was freezing cold in January 2003. The weather is fantastic this October day in 2004. After slogging it out across Russia and Mongolia, we soak ... [Continue reading this entry]