Absurdity, Allegory and China

One World, One Dream had another nightmare today. It took awhile, but the inevitable finally happened: Steven Spielberg pulled out from his participation in the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, and Beijing is … quiet. According to the IHT article, the two spokesmen for the organizing committee were working on a response. This one should be good!

Yesterday morning while speaking with my wife about the high level of privilege some ex-pat kids grow into here, I mentioned Spieleberg’s Empire of the Sun and one of my favorite movie scenes. Jamie Graham (Christian Bale), the young boy who is separated from his parents as they flee Shanghai ahead of the Japanese, returns alone to his home and finds his ayi (nanny) carting off furniture that formerly had clearly been ‘The Grahams.’ Jamie, full of the propriety that once fueled an Empire, asks them what they were doing, and the Chinese woman who had to suffer under the weight of Jamie’s privilege, slaps him, a getting-up-to-speed-in-a-flash crack that has a here ‘n now-ness to it that drives the rest of the story. I love that slap. It’s the instance of pure education, that life as you’ve lived it has gravely veered, the information delivered perfectly, effectively. Life-long learning, indeed. A Chinese woman who knows exactly where things are headed gets young Jamie focused on the open page at the end of his nose. Great stuff.

(As an aside, I must say that I am neither condoning nor advocating corporal punishment. I am, in fact, strongly opposed to it after having been the young recipient of some pretty serious thrashings administered by adults, many of them ‘people of religion.’ God clearly whispered some weird secrets into their twisted ears to allow them such a dissimilar vision than the one I was in the process of doing my best to form. For the record, I remember every single one of those cocksuckers, and have often entertained getting even with all of them, until I realized they are all either dead or fixedly staring down the barrel at it.)

Maybe ayi slapped her own kids in anger, but young Jamie received something quite clearly different. Despite attempting to live alone as he had before things unraveled, young Jamie has slipped off the knife- edge, and at some deeper level he knows it. The slap was punctuation, an exclamation point, a hard sign that nothing would ever again be as it was.

So, once more Spielberg is involved in a slap, though it is one that has caught the Chinese off-guard. I’ve been wondering how this would play out – would SS follow the course or bail? – and now that he’s committed to not signing the contract, we’ve gotten a little closer to finding out how China will retaliate, for surely there’s a loss of serious face on this one. How the State’s weight will finally come down will probably work itself out in much the same fashion as the USS Kitty Hawk being refused entry to Hong Kong as a nah-nah for any number of perceived diplomatic jabs. I suspect Spielberg should prepare himself for never playing China again, but, then again, how much money does anyone really need. He will walk away from this one, and due to some level of Chinese reciprocity, take some sort of bath, though I feel as if he’ll get through it okay. Some others who are living as if they cannot get by without China, need to pay a little attention here. There are things that take precedent over profit.

A person who is moderately mentally healthy has a fairly good idea of how they are perceived by others who they interact with everyday. I believe that a convincing argument can be made that countries and their leaders can also be judged by how well they understand how they are seen by those who are not them. China’s flat-footedness, as IHT puts it, at this pullout is indicative of how little they are able to understand how they are perceived by the world beyond their borders. This latest incident and China’s slow reaction to it is evidence enough that there is a lack of imagination at work here, and that the World with its multiplicity of Dreams is not quite ready to have it distilled into only one, especially one that’s defined by China.

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