The Anal Effect

My modeling exam just ended, and I haven’t had much time to look at anything lately, so I’ve just tidied up a few notes from the past several days — call it a bit of “more trouble than it’s worth” leftover sentiment, offered as a coda to an earlier post.

One.

In the days right before a school break, or right before exams, we always feel there’s a pile of things we should have done but haven’t — like holiday homework that gets crammed into those last few days, or exam review that gets squeezed into those last couple of weeks, while everything else just keeps getting pushed off to “tomorrow.” This process is rather like the body digesting a great deal of waste, passing it through one organ after another, until it finally lingers at the anus, right on the verge of coming out. So I call this the anal effect.

Two.

When we use set phrases, we’re always just using them out of habit, never out of habitual analysis. It’s a bit like how a lot of people learn Photoshop — they just copy the parameters in the tutorial without ever asking why those settings are used. And so “spouting blood from one’s mouth to slander someone” gets reinterpreted as “a woman giving birth,” “wind rising from an empty cave” becomes “a bare-bottomed woman running,” and with the even more absurd case of “the day will come, the road is long,” people’s attention lands squarely on the second character… This sort of thing happens constantly, too much to list. But looked at from another angle, expecting people to dig through dusty old allusions every time they use a set phrase is, frankly, unrealistic.

Three.

In The Lover, Marguerite Duras describes the Chinese man who gave up love for the sake of family and money like this: “He must have, through deceit, found himself again within this woman, and through deceit fulfilled everything that family, heaven, and the ancestors of the north demanded of him — namely, the continuation of the family name.” Love yields before marriage just like this, and reality discards the ideal in the same breath. I don’t know what it meant for Duras to receive that phone call. Thinking it over, if it had been me, I think I’d rather have just hung up — better that than to keep thinking about it, better that than to keep remembering.

Four.

No one born into this world escapes the fate of “comparison.” The moment you’re born, your mother is delighted if your cry is louder than other babies’; in school, the kids with good grades always get more praise; once you start working, earning more than others gets you more of the complicated things in life… even in death, a grander funeral or memorial service than other people’s is supposed to bring more comfort to the soul. Take a moment to really turn this over in your mind — what does comparison actually bring? And what does it take away? As for me, I think a little restraint is for the best.

Five.

There’s a Chinese saying: “Raise sons to provide for old age, store grain to guard against famine.” Analyze that sentence a little, and you’ll see that both “sons” and “grain” are being treated as a kind of commodity, stockpiled to ward off bad things that haven’t happened yet. This is exactly the old-fashioned Chinese philosophy of raising children. There have been posts circulating on the campus network calculating, say, the “cost” of marrying a Beijing girl, going on about how much marriage costs and so forth. And yet — even though a daughter is supposedly “water poured out, never to return,” she turns out to do a pretty decent job of providing for old age too. Does that count as equality?

Six.

Speaking of which — the wolf disguised as the grandmother, is it really a wolf, or is it the grandmother? Only the wolf itself knows for sure. And what’s even scarier is that someone can be a kindly old grandmother one moment and a vicious wolf the very next. Following this line of thought, I find myself increasingly doubtful about what art-house films are even supposed to mean. Maybe they’re just a bunch of awkward films that don’t fit anywhere else, lumped together into a little pile, given a name to make their existence seem reasonable — and that’s what we call an “art film.” But then the question comes right back: once you peel off that label, what’s left underneath?