For some photos from filming and info about the 1911 Revolution, see:

• We were extras in “1911″ — a big-budget Chinese propaganda Jackie Chan movie! (here are some photos)

You can see all the photos and screen stills at the photo gallery:

• Photos from filming Jackie Chan’s Chinese propaganda movie “1911″

Denver Library scene

1911 movie: Denver Library scene (YouTube)

Sun Zhongshan speech scene

1911 movie: Sun Zhongshan speech (YouTube)

Related stuff:

• We were extras in “1911″ — a big-budget Chinese propaganda Jackie Chan movie! (here are some photos)
• Photos from filming Jackie Chan’s Chinese propaganda movie “1911″

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

It’s maybe not as big as that other big propaganda movie from this year, “The Founding of the Party,” because without the Party reality itself would cease to exist and Sun Yat-sen was into some stuff that the Party doesn’t really go for, but this is still big stuff. “1911″ is a big-budget Jackie Chan Chinese propaganda epic commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution (辛亥革命, see below for historical info/links), with “over 70 famous Chinese actors” including Winston Chao (赵文瑄) as Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) and Lǐ Bīngbīng (李冰冰) as Jackie Chan’s wife.

And we were extras for two days of filming! Or, some friends and I were; Jessica had to stay home. So if we’re reeeally lucky I or someone we know will get part of an appendage in the background of a scene for a split-second.

On our first day of filming they needed foreigners to be political delegates for a scene where Sun Yatsen gives the speech announcing that he’s giving up the presidency of the brand new republic (knowing that he can’t retain power due to Yuan Shikai). Basically we stood around, and occasionally they filmed us standing around, clapping for Winston Chao/Sun Yat-sen, and acting surprised when he makes his announcement.

The second day was better: we were foreigners sitting in the “Colorado Denver Public Library”. Sun Yatsen is in the States on a fundraising trip. He comes into the library, starts reading the paper and discovers in the headlines that revolution has broken out in China. He chokes on his food in surprise, and we foreigners look up from our books at the disturbance.

Here are a couple photos, with more in the photo gallery.

With Natalie on a veeeery cold set.

Dingle (aka James) poses cooperatively so I can get a shot of Winston Chao (赵文瑄).

The “Colorado Denver Public Library”.

The books were real.

More photos in the photo gallery!

Competing 1911 historical narratives

The 1911 Revolution marked the official end of five million years of unbroken imperial rule in China (this other propaganda movie is about the unification of China and the beginning of imperial rule). For a quick history lesson:

• China 1911: The Birth of China’s Tragedy (History Today)
  “…for all the celebrations in the mainland and Taiwan this autumn, the revolution of 1911-12 brought no real solution and left China facing decades of suffering.”
• Reading Round-Up: The Xinhai Revolution, One Hundred Years Later
• The Xinhai Revolution (Wikipedia)
  “The Xinhai Revolution…, also known as the Revolution of 1911 or the Chinese Revolution, was a revolution that overthrew China’s last imperial dynasty, the Qing (1644-1912), and established the Republic of China. The revolution, which began with the Wuchang Uprising on October 10, 1911 and ended with the abdication of the “Last Emperor” Puyi on February 12, 1912, is named after the Xinhai year in the sexagenary cycle of the Chinese calendar. The Xinhai Revolution marks the end of over 2,000 years of Imperial China and the beginning of China’s Republican era.”

And here’s an intro to the battle between Taiwan and China over the 1911 historical narrative:

• What really happened on Oct. 10, 1911?
  “In the run up to the 100th anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution, Beijing has been performing a spectacular tightrope walk. Officials have been told that it should be a grand affair, but must be careful not to upstage the celebration of the Party’s 90th anniversary. This is because even though Sun Yat-sen is seen by many Chinese as the father of modern China, his ideas do not fit the country’s current direction.”
• One revolution, two interpretations
  “Taiwan and China have taken different approaches to commemorating the 100th anniversary of the Wuchang Uprising, which took place on Oct. 10, 1911 and marked the beginning of a series of revolutions that eventually ended dynastic rule and led to the establishment of the Republic of China.
  [...]
  “These differences are created by the complex history of and sensitive political disputes between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, who are both trying to put forward their interpretation of history as definitive.”
• China’s Communist Party celebrates 1911 Revolution in low key
  “Naysayers note however that celebrations for Sun Yat-sen and 1911 Revolution (Xinhai) are low-key compared to those in Taiwan, where Sun is seen as the ‘Father of the Nation’, and an inspiration for the country’s cardinal principles: nationalism, democracy and people’s wellbeing. Others believe that Sun’s low profile is probably designed not to overshadow the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party, celebrated last July.”
• A Century After Xinhai: Whose Revolution?
• 1911: the Xinhai Year of Revolution 辛亥革命
  “A hundred years on the Xinhai remains a controversial period. The year 2011 started with Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 in Taiwan lauding the Xinhai centenary… On the other side of the Taiwan Strait reflections are not quite as sanguine. The previous official monopoly over the interpretation of history has long since been undermined.”
• Profound shift as China marches back to Mao
  “Both the Communist Party and dem0cr@tic activists claim the Xinhai Revolution as part of their historical ancestry.

  “”The left, in the sense of representing anti-dem0cr@tic dictatorship, does not own revolutionary legitimacy in China,” said David Kelly, research director at China Policy in Beijing and a visiting professor at Peking University. “The anniversary of 1911 brings into play the fundamental decision between social dem0cr@cy and revolutionary dictatorship.”"

If any interesting movie reviews come out, or if we get some incriminating screen stills, I’ll post them here.

Scene Clips & Screen Stills! [2011-10-30 update]

The movie’s out, and you can see video clips of the scenes we’re in and screen stills of us in action here:

• Scene clips & screen stills from “1911″ (we were extras!)

The photo gallery has been updated with all the new screen stills.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

We joined the happy crowds last night on Tianjin’s frozen Haihe river 海河 near Ancient Culture Street 古文化街 and launched a couple “wish lanterns” 许愿灯 (usually called 孔明灯) — the candle-powered sky lanterns you’ve probably seen pictures of.

These pictures aren’t great, but it was actually a pretty fun scene. Hundreds, maybe thousands of lanterns were floating around, fireworks up and down the river, lots of people having fun, etc.

Ok, the pictures really aren’t that great, but all those little dots in the sky are lanterns. It looked cool, I promise. Just look at the photos and use your imagination.

You can actually see it better in the video clip below.

Some of the flaming lanterns got stuck in trees, and every so often one would come hurtling down to the ice in a blazing arc of glory. We even launched a couple:

These were the only lanterns to be found at Tianjin’s Ancient Culture Street 古文化街，which was a bit of a disappointment considering it was the LANTERN Festival, but it was still fun to launch fire hazards into the night sky from down on the river. We’ll definitely do this again next time we get the chance!

You can browse the rest of our Spring Festival fun here.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

I’m walking back to work from lunch and pass a group of older middle-aged people watching a man and a woman duke it out on the sidewalk. It’s not your typical vegetable market screaming match; they are full-on kicking and punching each other, furious and out of control. The guy is bigger and has the upper hand. Obviously I’m not going to just walk on by when a woman is literally getting beaten right in front of me.

But the tricky thing is, interfering in this sort of thing has huge potential to instantly make the situation worse and get the third party in a lot of trouble, which is partly why Mainland Chinese typically won’t interfere even in really bad situations. And adding to other people’s grief just so you can play hero is really selfish. Today’s situation is even trickier because this woman is asking for it. I don’t mean she deserves it. I mean that after the guy lands a couple punches or kicks he turns his back to her and starts walking away, but she chases after him, punches him in the face from behind, and provokes another couple haymakers in response. Anger can apparently override our survival instinct, or — and this is more likely — she could actually be trying to get him to beat her up. She might not want anyone to intervene because by provoking the violent man and deliberately making her situation worse she scores more pity points with onlookers or family members. And in their dispute’s bigger picture, winning over the relevant people probably matters more to her than a few bruises.

Anyway, that’s what I see happening in the few seconds from the time I notice them to the time I make it over to stand in between them. I don’t touch or even try to directly engage either one. The sudden presence of a foreigner who appears to not know the ‘rules’ for handling this sort of situation (which are: Don’t Get Involved) seems to throw them off their game a bit — either one would now have to go right over me to get at the other. It’s awkward, but it works. They give it up after a few choice parting words and walk away in opposite directions.

Intervening (or not) in public situations in China is a perennial topic among foreigners, partly because there seem to be more opportunities to do so here, and partly because the typical Mainland Chinese response to such situations scandalizes the resident lǎowàis. Not even the police are willing to get involved in domestic violence; it’s considered a private family thing, never mind if the victims are unable or unwilling to defend themselves. I’ve written before asking about culturally-intelligible, or at least effective, ways to break the ‘rules’ in hazardous situations where you feel compelled to do so. It’d be nice if life gave you a heads up when these situations are headed your way, so you had time to think about what to do instead of having to just act in the moment.

Other adventures in sticking our noses into other people’s volatile business in China:

• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.1): examples
• The Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.2): explanations, excuses, & scapegoats
• (How to be a) Good Samaritan with Chinese characteristics (Pt.3)
• Altercation

P.S. – This post is brought to you by the verbs 干涉: to interfere, to meddle; and 管: to manage, to control, to take care of. (I was using 干涉 when telling this story to some students this afternoon, and they said I should use 管 instead because 干涉 sounded too formal.)

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Photo Gallery: Mountainside Great Wall Corn Jungle Village Hike

Along the way a woman invited us into her hillside home to have look around.

Click a photo to go to the photo gallery.

We’ve done this hike before, but never when the crops were above our heads. The previous galleries have better village shots and people shots, especially this one: Happy Forest village — 2008 June 6

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

The photos come from all over: partially abandoned and bulldozed hutongs in Tianjin’s less developed districts, the Great Wall in northern Tianjin, street markets, etc.

Click a photo to go to our Tianjin 2010 — Spring & Summer gallery.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Breakfast is an especially big deal in Tianjin. Many people don’t like to cook breakfast themselves and the sidewalks are filled from early to late morning with folding tables, plastic stools, and crowds of people enjoying their very public meals.

Last week my sister came from Canada to see us, so I took her out before 6am one morning to sample both the local daily exercise scene and some breakfast. We took pictures, so here’s breakfast, Tianjiner-style, in no particular order. See the warning label at the bottom. Most dishes cost around two kuài ($0.30).

When Tianjiners travel overseas and get homesick, this is the stuff they miss.

1. 锅巴菜 gābacài

I like this stuff, though I wouldn’t have a clue what it’s made of just from eating it: maybe some sesame sauce, strips of something, some pink sauce, thick brown broth, and you can throw in some cilantro and crushed hot peppers in oil if you want. Apparently gābacài (锅巴菜) is a Tianjin original, and it’s seriously high-energy food; you feel like running a few miles afterward. According to this online recipe, it’s made with a mung bean-&-millet broth, strips of chopped, crepe-like jiānbǐng (煎饼), some of kind of gravy made with over ten kinds of seasonings, sesame paste, chilis in oil, pink fermented tofu sauce and cilantro. In standard Mandarin it should be guōbacài, but in Tianjin it’s gābacài — people often think it’s funny if the foreigner knows to use the local pronunciation.

2. 老豆腐 lǎodòufu

My students rave about “old tofu” (老豆腐) or “tofu brains” (豆腐脑) whenever I bring it up in class, but even they admit that it looks disgusting.

From what I can tell, it’s slimy lumps of tofu in an oil bath with some brown (sesame?) sauce thrown in. For me, the taste doesn’t come anywhere close to making up for its appearance. Of all the Tianjin breakfast foods, we liked this one the least. I think my sister stopped after the first or second spoonful.

3. 油条 yóutiáo

Two small strips of dough pinched together at the ends and deep fried, “oil sticks” are pretty much donuts without any sugar or flavouring. I honestly don’t see the point, unless you were trying to consume as much oil as possible without actually drinking it straight, though for some reason I still eat them occasionally. These things are everywhere at breakfast time, perhaps the most ubiquitous of all Tianjin’s breakfast offerings, maybe because they travel easily. 5 máo ($0.07) each.

The wider thing in the fry pot in the above photo is called a guǒbìngr (果饼儿) in Tianjin (薄脆 báocuì in Beijing). Guǒbìngr are thin and crispy rather than donut-y.

4. 面茶 miànchá

If you cooked it in less oil and traded the salt for brown sugar, you could slip bowls of miànchá (面茶) onto a Canadian family breakfast table and no one would notice (assuming that some Canadians actually still have family breakfasts). According to this online recipe and my Chinese-English dictionary, it’s made from millet, sesame paste, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Unsweetened porridge, basically. I don’t know how to translate the name; the characters are the ones for “noodles” (面) and “tea” (茶), but I’m not seeing either in this dish [see comment #14]. Anyway, I’ll definitely be eating this again on a somewhat regular basis, though I can’t say the same or the “tofu brains” in the right half of the photo above.

5. 煎饼果子 jiānbing guǒzi

This is more or less the Chinese breakfast burrito, except that other than having a thin crepe-like wrapper, it’s (sadly) nothing at all like a burrito. The styles can vary and you can sometimes choose for yourself (see a list here), but a standard jiānbing guǒzi (煎饼果子) will be a green onion crepe lined with egg wrapped around a yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) or a crunchy guǒbìngr (果饼儿 — stacked overhead in the photo below), with some sauce and crushed red peppers in oil, and then folded twice. These transport well, and I often see them on the subway in the morning.

6. 豆浆 dòujiāng

“Bean broth” (豆浆) is better known in North America as soy milk, only the Tianjin variety is unsweetened and served really hot in a brimming bowl, scooped out of a big pot. Dòujiāng to-go comes in a bag with a straw. Sometimes they’ll add sugar to it if you ask. I like dipping the yóutiáo (油条 “oil stick”) in it, but I get funny looks from my Chinese friends when I do this.

This post doesn’t include every single kind of Tianjin breakfast food (there’d be no end; Tianjiners love them some breakfast!), but these are all the biggies. Hungry?

P.S. — Warning

Adventure eaters, be ye warned: This kind of local food is pretty much guaranteed to use the cheapest, poorest quality ingredients, and in China that means something different than it does back home. If, for example, you were deliberately trying to consume “gutter oil” (地沟油), which is discarded cooking oil that’s been skimmed off the sewer slop that was scooped out of manholes and resold in used containers back to restaurants and street vendors, you would eat things like yóutiáo (油条 “oil sticks”) or lǎodòufu (老豆腐 “old tofu”) at places like those pictured above, or you could go to an average local restaurant and order shuǐzhǔròu (水煮肉 “water boiled meat”), which is basically meat and vegetables in a serving bowl filled with oil. Most Chinese dishes use incredible amounts of oil, but the ones I’ve mentioned here use even more than usual and are therefore thought to be the most likely candidates for gutter oil.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

The Beijing Airport Express Train
We walk out of Terminal 3 toward the platform for the Airport Express, which connects to the Beijing subway. A friendly young woman who looks like a recent college grad motions for us to put our backpacks through the scanner. Turns out that gun looks fantastic on the scanner screens.

“You have a gun in your bag,” she says, turning the screen toward me.

“It’s just a lighter.”

“OK,” she motions us on. No inspection, and nothing about the brass knuckles. Those express train passengers are lucky we didn’t decide to go postal on them.

Beijing Subway: Dōngzhímén (东直门)
They make us scan our bags to enter the subway. No one says anything. We pick up our packs and move on, hoping that the stifling rush hour subway crowds don’t trigger our claustrophobia in a bad way.

Tiananmen Square
We exit the subway and head down the underpass to enter Tiananmen Square. Finally some security that cares! :) They immediately spot the gun and the brass knuckles, don’t feel like taking my word for it that it’s just a lighter, make us take them both out for examination, and temporarily confiscate the brass knuckles. No Canadians will be hauling off on anyone in Tiananmen Square today, at least not these Canadians.

We leave the Square to find lunch and re-enter at a different checkpoint, the gun is still in my sister’s backpack. They catch it again and make us take it out for inspection before letting us repack and continue on.

Beijing Subway: Tiānānmén Dōng (天安门东)
We return to the original checkpoint to pick up the confiscated brass knuckles on our way out of the Square. Then we enter the Tiananmen East subway station. Scanned again, ignored again, and we’re on our merry way.

Beijing South Train Station
Honestly can’t remember if we had to scan our bags entering Beijing South Station from the subway or not. We didn’t get searched, in either case.

We have to do it again when I take her from Tianjin to the Beijing airport, which means going through the high speed train, Beijing subway, airport security checkpoints. After that we’ll wait and see what Canada customs does…

[Update: Aug. 12]
On the way to the Beijing airport from Tianjin we’d made the gun and brass knuckles easily accessible, thinking we’d need to take them out for inspection.

Tianjin Train Station
Scanned again. Ignored yet again. Had to fight through some overly-anxious fellow travelers who were nervous about leaving their bags on the conveyor belt a split second longer than they had to.

Beijing South Train Station subway entrance
It looked like they were staring at the screen, but nobody blinked and we sailed right through.

But even with the apparent holes in Tianjin and Beijing’s subway and train security, I have to say it’s a lot tighter than what I remember of the security on Vancouver’s Skytrain, where you can walk right on without paying. But to be fair to the Skytrain, we did see the security in action last time we were in Vancouver and it seemed to work pretty well.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.

Click the photos to go to the gallery, or click: Tianjin 2009-2010 — Fall & Winter.

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.

Then I decided to go back through the other way for a different view:

More about Chinese markets and traffic:

• Crossing the street (video)
• Stayin’ Alive Part 2: Learning to cross the street
• Our Neighbourhood càishìchǎng
• Flower-Bird-Fish-Bug Market
• Local Wet Market
• Keelung Night Market
• Shilin Night Market
• Bike trip to the marriage market
• Tianjin: more colourful in the rain, more marriable in the sun
• Marriage market, Eric Liddell, weekend slogan
• How to: Ride a Bike in China (Part 2)
• Metaphors for Tianjin Traffic
• How to: Ride a bike in Tianjin (Part 1)

©2012 China Hope Live. All Rights Reserved.