POST-DUST

My calves are always so fat

I like this process:

1. Roman letters are input in the "spelling out" of a word*,
2. hitting space bar
3. choosing the right "characters"

But it's even better when the 3rd step is unnecessary and the exact words you're looking for appear (what's a better word to describe this process? - make note to research the Asian language input system). This gives me a deep and indescribable satisfaction. I'm wondering whether or not to try and elaborate*, because it seems to be a rather mundane thing.

*Code (ie. romaji, pinyin, etc) gets compiled and runs a program (the character)?

*Maybe it's the machinic accuracy coupled with typing out the combination of words which the machine has already determined to be both correct and commonly used?

Photos from a variety of people, excluding myself. People to sakura ratio was roughly 50:1.

While playing a "name-calling" game at the park with some acquaintances yesterday afternoon (each player assumes the name of the person sitting next to them, someone calls out a name and you have to both 1. remember that you cannot respond to your name when it's called and 2. you must call out another name, excluding the name you've assumed, the non-you, while calling out your actual name, since it is being assumed by someone else, is okay), I realized that hearing my Chinese name spoken out-loud is actually a very strange thing. There are forms in which my name comes in, and these manifestations vary (also in "correctness") from situation to situation, from person to person:

Family members
Verbally: "Fei fei"
Written:
-Mother's side "菲菲" (While these two characters still phonetically can be pronounced as "fei fei", the characters are wrong. I think this is because it was my father's side of the family that chose the characters for my written name, and this is a rare character that many cannot pronounce)
-Father's side "斐斐" (Correct)

Chinese friends
Verbally: "刘斐"
Written: "Fei" (Because they often won't know how to write my name in Chinese characters)

Foreigner friends
Verbally: "Fei"
Written "Fei"

Previous work-related acquaintances
Verbally: "Fei fei" (I dislike this because even though it is my official name, the only people who call me that are family members, and I feel like a comfort level is breached.)
Written: "菲菲 or 刘菲菲" (Incorrect writing)

Preferred American full name
Fei Liu

Official International documents
"LIU FEIFEI"

Official American documents
"FEIFEI LIU"

Kasimir Malevich

"Malevich was obsessed with aerials, which informed his work. He specifically worked to depict the look of what was modern"


Intonarumori

"The Italian Futurists, among other things, were fascinated by the new sounds of machinery — the clacks and cracks. A new way of hearing...."



I am kino-eye, I am mechanical eye, I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it...My path leads to the creation of a fresh perception of the world I decipher in a new way a world unknown to you. -Dziga Vertov

"Of course, photography and moving image meant an entirely new way of seeing. Vertov is known now for developing many camera tricks, but I believe his consideration of himself as an amoral bystander viewing the world with a "mechanical eye" is particularly relevant to this conversation. He is articulating that his device — the camera — sees for him, and he sees for the camera. Together they see what was previously invisible to everyone."


"Going back to Vertov's point of being a bystander, Jon Rafman's 9 Eyes of Google Street View project specifically critiques the amoral lens of this surveillance."

Although the Google search engine may be seen as benevolent, Google Street Views present a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history. For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension.... It is we who must make sense of Google’s record of our experience, for good or for ill. 
— Jon Rafman, 9 Eyes of Google Street View

Source: Joanne McNeil's Seeing Like Digital Devices article (post-SXSW presentation*)

*The presentation was a response to New Aesthetics, a term coined by James Bridle

1. It could be an interesting and maybe worthwhile experience to acquire all the languages of the larger countries which were involved in the Japanese occupation. Namely, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian. And then all the languages (for example Korean and Japanese, there are more, like Arabic) during different periods of American occupation/involvement.

2. I'm not sure what to tell my grandparents (Grandmother in particular) when they ask me how I've been spending my time. Part of me sees no shame in saying outright that I've been studying Japanese. That part is continuously second-guessed by knowledge of my Grandmother's frank hatred (all inclusive and terribly undeserved) of the Japanese population in general. A confession: THINGS I HAVE AVOIDED, though knowing quite well what it means to be ignorant: discussions about the Japanese Occupation of Manchuria, and the consequences those actions had on Harbin, reading the book The Rape of Nanjing, watching The Flowers of War or Nanjing!Nanjing!, etc. Because I don't know how to be comfortable with my Japanophilia (and God, how do you even explain liking eroguro, which by the way probably was inspired by all the disgusting experiments Unit 731 to its captives, to anyone??) and "the sense of being wronged as a nation".

Which leads me to wonder this "in the name of science" thing. Were the results of this "scientific" inquiry worth the guilt? If so, how did other countries achieve the same effects, with or without having to test on unwilling (or did a monetary incentive create willing) subjects?*

* Note: visit Unit 731 Museum when I'm in Harbin next
* Wikipedia link to Human Subject Research

And now onto:

Russian ties to Northeastern China



Paraphrased timeline sourced from Orthodoxy in China

The Province of Heilongjiang 黑龙江, was once referred to in Manchurian as "a place for drying fishing nets". The Han word for Haerbin 哈尔滨 originated from "Khaabin". This piece of land disrupted what otherwise could have been continuous land owned by the Russian Federation and therefore provided a snag in the Russian Trans-Siberian Railroad project. The Sungari (松华) River ran across this area.

1895: Japan defeated China in the Sino-Japanese War and was persuaded by Russia, France and Germany to give Russia rights (which should have belonged to Japan in the post-war treaty) to start the Chinese Eastern Railroad (CER) across Manchuria, in order to complete the Trans-Siberian.

1896: A contract was signed between the Chinese government and the Russo-Chinese Bank allowing not only for the building and exploitation of the railway, but also for a rather wide strip of land on both sides of the Railway line to be placed under Russian administration. This was to remain in force for 80 years following the completion of the line, with the proviso that China could buy back the railroad in 36 years.

1903-1917: Harbin transformed from a makeshift camp for railroad workers to the "Paris of the Far East". Events in Russia also raised Harbin's Russian population threefold.

1924: Soviet Union became the dominant partner of the CER. This brought about a tremendous influx of Soviet citizens as well as pressure on those Russians who had been working for the railroad to apply for Soviet citizenship (which means they, until then, had still retained the idea of the Tsar as ruler?).

1927: Victory of the anti-foreign Kuomintang Party in China caused the Sino-Soviet partnership to sour; the three basic forces—Soviet, anti-Soviet, and nationalist Chinese—vied for power. Animosity grew when evidence surfaced of Soviet leadership's plan to eventually dominate Manchuria. The Chinese arrested and deported many top local Soviet officials. In spite of this, the 1920's could be regarded as the heyday of Russian Harbin. Just about every aspect of life in Russia was transplanted to this ready-made city—it was truly a "community in exile", set apart from the surrounding Chinese society in many respects. Orthodox churches grew in number and started playing a larger role in helping the poor, the aged, the infirm, and the orphaned.

1932: The Japanese overtook the city on February 5, 1932, having gradually overtaken the rest of Manchuria since the previous fall. Manchuria became Manchukuo. A puppet Chinese government was set up and headed by the child emperor Pu Yi. The Soviet Union sold the CER to Japan, and 20,000 Soviet railroad employees (13,000 of them Harbin residents) were returned to their homeland. Life for the remaining non-Soviet Russians was difficult. Harbin in the 1930's was described as "a worn-out, decadent, almost desperate, but still charming beauty...but step by step being taken over by the new Japanese masters." Japanese settlers slowly took over the best jobs on the railroad. By then many had immigrated either to North or South America, or to major Chinese cities such as Shanghai, Tianjin, and Beijing.

(...will be continued)

Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests (1989); John Powers, Proposal for Tiananmen Square (2012)

Sculptor John Powers' proposal to erect nine colossal buildings on the "underdeveloped" site of Tiananmen Square. "It would seem that a free society must protect itself from political protest by foreclosing on the possibility of mass gathering. China, as it continues to liberalize, should take a page from American urban planners. Just as American cities and universities have divided and built-in the large civic spaces that hosted political protests in the 1960s; China should avoid the embarrassment of another violent crackdown by replacing the possibility of mass dissent that Tiananmen Square presents...If the Chinese are to develop into a vibrant commercial society like the U.S. they need to start avoiding the possibility of direct democratic processes of accountability now. The first step can be the creation of 24 million square feet of office space and destination shopping."

1. "Soft monuments" at "Double Zero"

Soft Power: Jeff Koons, Puppy (1992); Tiananmen Square Olympic flower arrangement (2008)

"In his book Remaking Beijing, the author Wu Hung describes the formation of Chinese end of this symbolic East-West axis:

By relocating ‘zero’ to Tiananmen Square, the birthplace of the People’s Republic, the city would acquire a new identity and a vantage point for its architectural restructuring. Beijing’s centre of gravity would automatically shift southward, and the avenue running east-west through the square would become its new axis.

Hung’s book discusses what he calls 'soft monuments;' large scale flower arrangement and other temporary displays. Unlike a "'hard monument' from the previous era that commemorated history and demanded faith, a 'soft monument' of the 1990s and 2000s is deliberately short-lived and goal specific.” Now according to Hung, the intention is to displace dissent, depoliticize the space: 'Instead of empowering the Chinese people to carry out political or military campaigns against domestic and foreign enemies, images in the Square now express citizens’ happiness and unification.' In other words, the world’s largest public square is now inhospitable to protesters due to strategically arranged flower displays."

2. No place to park, no place to bark?

"I spent a few days moving around LA by myself on foot, observing the city in lock down. I remember finding it interesting that in a city dominated by cars, the police were able to contain and close down the possibility of riots by closing all public parking. Without a place to park their cars Angelinos couldn’t congregate in large enough numbers to intimidate the police."

3. Digital "backends" of protests

"One audience member spoke up to say we didn’t need to protest in person any longer; that large rallies were a thing of the past, an artifact of the 1960s. That we could now make our voices heard on the internet. No one was talking about Social Media yet — Virtual Reality was still a really big deal back then. Virtual Presence and Virtual Space were assumed to be around the corner...

The Arab Spring was a series of mass protests that self-organized online (a bit like a digital model – liquid, fast, easy to modify), but manifest themselves physically (point by point, almost like a 3d printer, into a solid mass) as very real protests in very real spaces. It was in those open spaces –Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt; Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, Tunisia; and the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, Bahrain—flat open spaces very much like the ones I had proposed, that whole populations were able to move together as a mass and doing so were radicalized and authorities intimidated. Likewise the Occupy Wall Street protest here in New York had a digital 'backend', but owed its success to a group of hardcore protestors who hacked the American Political landscape: rather than form a large mass for a brief protest, they made a small protest last months."

today i was told by somebody that i was "sneaky". when pressed, the person expanded upon the description: i hint at my depression but never explain anything. which is to say, i leave in my wake, tasty morsels of self-doubt for the curious to feast on.

in truth, yes i suppose i do have something to hide.

the fear of being "no-one". NOONE, NONE.

i fear that when i leave this place, or any place at all, if say, i died, or disappeared (or no, that would be too much of a reason to say something dramatic and poetic in my eulogy- thus raising my worthiness in the cultural market), and a microphone with an invisible hand attached interviewed all those i came in contact and "collaborated" with that i helped them out* and that i was really talented* but they know that i am a butter spread too thin. not thick enough to taste, not thick enough to leave anything behind.

i want to be the "fei-of-something".

what is it that i can do but no one else can?

the train heads south. line number 5. an almost clear vertical intersection of the city, where it divides the north to south ring roads. a seam.

female college student playing some song i didn't recognize. her voice is shakey, slightly flat and out of tune. her guitar chords are simple. she's carrying a big bag, slightly open, waiting for change.

she starts playing a new song, the subway goes through a particularly loud part of the tunnel, can't hear her anymore.

we stop at zhangzizhonglu, she's still on my left side.

but i hear something from the right. the sound of a creaky erhu used in a way that i wouldn't really call "playing". the two compete for volume.

the girl starts playing the cranberries' zombie. the erhu's strings are being scratched by two people begging for money. i dont see the player, but i see an old lady.

almost tempted to hear the sounds when they meet in the center of the train. where i'm standing but i get off at the next stop.

"...highlights one institutional purpose above all: the necessity, as articulated in article 7 of the National Regional Autonomy Law, “to place the interests of the state as a whole above all else” (p. 25). Potter points out how the Communist solution to the problem of ethnic diversity in a nation-state carries its own tensions. It exemplifies “the basic quandary faced by the Handominated regime—how to gain legitimacy by appearing to grant autonomy, while at the
same time restricting that autonomy so that it does not pose a threat to the power of the Party/state” (pp. 28–29). It is not so easy, in other words, to combine the ethnic strategies of empires and nation-states. Since the reforms, the government has hoped that economic development along market lines would ease ethnic tensions in these areas, but Potter points out that, in practice, this secondary institutional purpose has carried its own tensions and limits.

Zizhi 自治 (self-governance, which is the word used in “autonomous region”), zizhu 自主 (self-sovereignty), and zijue 自决 (self-determination). Any of these might plausibly translate the English word autonomy, and this creates the possibility of significant slippage as China interprets international law. For China, only a nation-state has all three—no single region of the country could possibly have that much freedom. Autonomous regions have only the first, the right to govern themselves, which means in practice only the right to have significant representation among government cadres. It does not guarantee representation in other crucial arenas, especially not in the Communist Party...

Potter makes another interesting connection when he shows that policies on the
“inner periphery” (Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia) run parallel to those on the “outer periphery” (Hong Kong and Taiwan). In all cases, the national laws of China still hold sway over any proposed form of autonomy, whether as an autonomous region or as a second system within a single country. That is, we remain in the realm of zizhi only.

The sole exception is the economy, where businesses from Taiwan appear to have the
same kinds of privileges as those from outside the country—the right to be their own masters (zizhu)."

Source