not at my sharpest this morning, apologies
So yesterday was the opening ceremony for the Taiwan International Documentary Festival. I cobbled together an outfit that looked somewhat decent, or at least looked like I’d made an effort, and headed out around noon. The girl doing the actual mc’ing, another friend of another organizer, who had about as much experience in hosting as I, was so nervous that she was a little bit surly. I tried reminding her that even if we completely screwed up nobody would remember it the next day. You’d think that recognizing your own insignificance would ameliorate the terror of being the object of attention, but it didn’t seem to work. She had more reason to be nervous than I, since she had to say things first. I had a script to go from but if I forgot it, I could always just do an on-the-fly translation. I was more okay than I thought I would be, though I discovered, when taking someone’s card at the afterparty, that I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking. Ever so slightly. It might have just been hunger, though.
There were maybe a hundred to a hundred fifty people in the audience, with special guests the director of the Chinese Taipei Film Archives, which is the organizing agency this year, and the Minister of the Council for Cultural Affairs, which is the sponsoring government agency. I did on the fly interpretation for them, and discovered once again that translating stuff with content is much easier than translating politeness. How many ways are there to say, “Welcome, we’re happy to have you here, we hope that this will be a fruitful international exchange, and please make more movies”? Apparently there are at least twenty minutes’ worth of ways of saying that. The Minister of the Council for Cultural Affairs, Chen Qinan, who has a degree in anthropology from Yale (1984), is also the architect of a lot of the community planning programs that are now national and local level government policy. The woman in charge of his movements—I don’t know if she’s a secretary or what—gave me a big sheaf of papers[1] about five minutes before the ceremony started, saying, “Minister Chen may use some special terms in his talk; why don’t you look this over so you can get a sense of the kind of terminology he may be using and how we usually translate it.” It had a couple of brief essays in Chinese with English translation, and a talk that “is actually the President’s speech but Minister Chen may use some of the same terms.”
I was called over to his side before the ceremony started, and was quite proud of how quickly and thoroughly I slipped into bowing and scraping mode. I’ve been working on refining my outrageously subservient politeness posture and expanding the range of my obedience vocabulary—small things like saying “yes” instead of “right” or “good;” never using the second person as a form of address but always the title; and certain respectful-girl physical habits like the slight bend in the shoulders that pulls the neck down toward the torso; holding up the right hand next to the neck and lightly pinching the skin under the chin with the index and middle fingers; and making as though to pat down the hair on the back-right side of the head when asking a question or expressing doubt (always phrased as a failure to understand), make a noticeable difference in people’s reactions to me. Minister Chen assured me that he would not use any of the terminology that his handler has just printed out for me, but that we would go along sentence by sentence and he’d try to keep it simple. The speeches that Minister Chen’s handler had given me laid out his idea of “cultural citizenship,” which as far as I can tell is yet another version of wanting the state to establish a vibrant civil society. Honestly, I don’t know what they teach them at Yale.
This ceremony was different from most ceremonies in that it was not utterly boring from start to finish. The amount of boringness overall was no different from that of any opening ceremony, but to break up the boredom they had decided to screen some films. We saw the world premiere of Naomi Kawase’s tear-jerky Shadow. Beautifully done, lovely plumage, but kind of a cheap shot—a woman is told by a man who is inexplicably filming her that he is actually her real father; we see her absorbing this fact on screen, with lots of crying, and finally coming to terms with it, the terms being a scarf she makes “for father.” She’s a very attractive woman, which makes the film nice to look at but a little bit…well, sure, how can you not sympathize with a beautiful woman who has her world disrupted on camera? The part I liked was that you couldn’t figure out how many cameras were there: there were shots from the camera held by the man who reveals himself as the father, shots from a camera filming him and the woman, and then, you realize only toward the end, shots from another camera, which occasionally catches the cameraman shooting camera number two. I thought it was pretty cool. A member of the competition jury (Andrei Uljike, I guess a film critic, who for some reason came up and started chatting to me and my mc after the ceremony was over) responded to this with, “Well, yes, perhaps ten years ago it was new.” So, good thing I’ve barely watched any movies in the last ten years, because I can still enjoy this.
The next film they showed was Amos Gitai’s [2] House, a 1978-1980 documentary censored for Israeli TV in which he talks to various people connected a house that is being rebuilt—the Arab owner who was there until 1948, the Algerian Jewish resident who had it for a while after that, the Israeli professor who is now expanding and reconstructing it, the Arab workmen doing the work, and the Israeli construction company owner and his son, the foreman. I thought it was pretty cool, not half as tear-jerky as it could have been, with a surprisingly light touch. I got agreement from Mr. Uljike but the British reporter for Variety at the afterparty complained about boring it was, unedited, long, black and white, before asking if I wanted to get a drink.
The final movie was Herzog’s new documentary, The White Diamond, which was universally adored. It’s like the comedy-documentary version of Fitzgeraldo, moving in some very strange way—moving like some parts of you are being moved that you’d never isolated as movable parts. But I was kind of disappointed that Herzog seems to have shaved his moustache.
People at the afterparty kept coming up to me and saying how good my English sounded. The director of one of the documentaries that will be shown at the festival—a Taiwanese guy who made a movie about Taiwanese rice growers—handed me a dvd of his film. “Why?” I asked. “Because your English sounds so good,” he said, and ran away. A couple who has a small world music label guessed that I was raised in the Northeast because “your English doesn’t sound like most Americans’, it sounds so good.” Random women in the bathroom cooed “Oh your English sounds soo goood.” And finally the guy from Variety, an English speaker himself, came up to tell me how good I’d sounded. I find this a little bit puzzling but, hey, I just live this stuff, I don’t have to understand it. Maybe I should write a thank-you note to Mr. Reese, my high school theater director, who forced me to pronounce the “g” at the end of “ing” words.
The other girl, the actual mc, continued her mild, aggravated freaking out throughout the entire event, insisting afterwards that she hated doing this and never wanted to do it again and was going to refuse to do the closing ceremony on Friday. What closing ceremony on Friday? I asked. Are we supposed to do that too? Oh, she said, they didn’t tell you? Next Friday’s special guest will be the President of the Republic of China, Chen Shuibian, for whom it now appears that I will be interpreting. I’m a little intimidated by this prospect, of course, but as usual the comedic potential outweighs my reservations. My main worry, as usual, is what the hell to wear.
By next Friday, President Chen might or might not be over the bad mood he must be in today. Taiwanese party politics groups people in a couple of different ways: there are about five or so main parties, two of which are really main-main parties, and then there are two opposed alliances of the parties, the Blue camp (with the KMT, the People’s First Party, and the New Party) and the Green camp (with the DPP and the Taiwan Solidarity Union). (There is actually also a Green Party, as in an environmentalist party, but it is very small and does not, as far as I know, belong to either of these camps.) The main difference between them is that the Blue camp wants political power for the Blue camp, and the Green camp wants political power for the Green camp. Other differences include: the Greens have a rhetoric of independence and the Blues have a rhetoric of unification (from/with mainland China); the Greens want to introduce a new constitution to replace the one that was written for the Republic of China when the KMT still nominally held the mainland, and the Blues don’t (this is read as being just another way of saying independence and unification, of course); the Greens used to be concerned with economic equality and environmental protection, and the Blues used to be into dictatorship (neither of these seems to be the case any longer).
Anyway, with the lowest voter turnout in Taiwanse history, the Blues won the majority in the legislative elections yesterday and Chen Shuibian made a point of conceding right away. Since the last presidential election in March, which is still technically unfinished insofar as the Blue camp has not yet conceded defeat, people have become very sensitive about concessions. (Several people have spoken to me with admiration about Kerry’s quick concession in the US election in November, saying more or less, “What a man!” and giving a thumbs-up.) I just hope President Chen does not stray too far from the draft speech that arrived in my inbox at 4 o’clock this morning; I find his Mandarin a little difficult to understand and his cadences are really weird. It’s one thing to stumble a little in trying to translate something correctly; it’s altogether more facelosing to actually not understand what the guy is saying.
posted by blahgstein at 9:45 PM
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