I’ve been trying classify what I am looking at in a way that might be useful for me to do something with it. This is very early days but I have come up with one category that makes sense for me. I could broadly call this images of Westerners in Xiamen. It is useful for me to have this information as it within this matrix that I will be placed.
So, looking back upon the blog, I could for example put the Westerner’s bars and cafes into this category. The twenty or so Western films that are granted distribution rights in China could be added too. I saw to my dismay that Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes was one of last year’s along with Harry Potter. Walking around the train station yesterday I came across a Tesco and a Walmart and an incongruous Arsenal shop. On the musical side it gets more depressing still. The other day I heard the Backstreet Boys booming out from a sports shoe store. I know for a fact that they are big here because I had the strange experience last year of watching them live in concert in Beijing. They pretty much filled the national basketball stadium. I may have to return to them at a later point as they were notable for being able to neither sing nor dance well and now, over 15 years on from their emergence as a fresh faced boy band, they are not even cute in the dumb sort of way they were. It was truly astonishing to see up close something so bad be so popular. Anyway, to return to Westerners, from this perspective what travels most efficiently is corporate culture for mass distribution. I should add that I have also seen a small number of actual Westerners in these two weeks, many of them attached in one way or another to the University. I shall have to monitor, refine and expand this category.
Another category is street performances. Yesterday I was on a very crowded bus and caught out the corner of my eye the sight of a person by the side of the road with a wooden box on their head twisting from side to side. I got out at the next stop and rushed back to see more. It turned out to be a balancing and contortionist act set up on the pavement. It had pretty much finished but there was still a young girl busy with a metal tube.
I learnt last night why the beggar and boy I saw may have been as striking as they were. Apparently begging has been made illegal meaning that people practicing it must, at least ostensively, perform an act or sell something. It may have been this restriction that had the effect of theatricalising them, though it is hard to say that it in any way changed its essence.
