Here's a radio piece on Chengdu I didn't like at all. The reporter tells the wide-eyed story of what was obviously her first trip to China, and passes it off as informed reporting on how "[this] backwater city in western China became an urban metropolis overnight."It's filled with:
bogus facts like "Chengdu suffers blackouts for two to five days every week." trite observations like "young couples laughed, nuzzled and walked arm-in-arm in a way that would have shocked earlier generations of straight-laced Communist youth." and (try not to barf!) "Chengdu is a place full of right angles and contradictions."
Wasn't "place of contradictions" banned as clichéd and meaningless in like 1994*? Needless to say, she never mentions any actual contradictons.
I'll leave you with her closing, which I think you'll find deliciously ridiculous and just a little sad, given that this is really all she has to say about "the newest Chinese boomtown".
"In the end, I stopped trying to tease through Chengdu's many contradictions and, instead, embraced the one thing that for me remained absolutely, unvaryingly good and true: the food. Szechwan is known the world over for its fiery cuisine, and no matter where or what I ate in Chengdu, I always ate like an empress. I had one of the best meals of my life in a state-run dumpling house. Sitting on a hard bench surrounded by office workers and students, I feasted on a 75-cent bowl of tender meat dumplings floating in an oily, spicy sauce. I still think about those dumplings, probably more often than I should say."
Awwwwwwww, listening to vapid reporting on Chengdu makes me miss it even more.***Along with "Land of contrasts"
**And not because I think 6 kuai worth of pork jiaozi is "eating like an empress".
3 comments:
wow - rare satire from Mr. Vaughan!
I'm not sure if that was satire, but it was rare, I know. I actually knew that you'd read this before your comment, because I went to my statcounter.com account, which basically allows me to spy on everybody that visits. A little freaky, no? It doesn't know your name of course, but I DID know not only that it was you, but that you checked from work, because the ISP was Christian Science Publishing Society. And it's hooked up to Google maps, so it actually gave me a satellite photo of the building. Did you know your internet host is in a tall building at the corner of Washington and Avery street, next to the Boston Commons?
It blew my mind, too. statcounter, folks.
yow!! I was familiar with statcounter, but the google maps wrinkle was something new... spooooky
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