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Story and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
I just read a piece of…um, journalism…over at unleashed about China. I usually feel annoyed when I read stuff about China. Interesting to me is that stories about China often remind me of stories of Murdoch. “It’s big, it’s cruel, we hate it” often appears to be the crux of the story. This one I just read appeared to have been written in Starbucks after a few nights of, ah, chasing leads. Sweet Chinese girls who answer the phone with a hello.
I’ve never been to China. Only Hong Kong, not the same thing. Only guest houses and hotels, not the same thing. Even a hotel in China is not the same thing. I think it would take about as long to get a story on China as it takes to get one on Japan, and I’m thinking that’s a minimum of 18 years. The same length of time as it would take a person to get through the school system.
One thing that caught my attention about China was the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Partly because it was the first time I ever noticed the Language of Olympic, seeing more than anything else in that great extravaganza a New Improved Version of the Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony.
But what did impress me were the fields of people making something out of almost nothing. Brushing drums to create immense music. Small gestures animating that entire field. I think China might be the only country left with that kind of concentration and discipline. So when I hear these stories of Chinese might, and as always that might rests in the cruelty and calculation of the Chinese Leaders, I think they’re stupid.
We underestimate the population of China. We count only the gazillion inside the country. How many Chinese blooded people have been born outside China? To be always somehow Chinese. It’s that invisible population that gives China the appearance of a Murdoch. China is itself a World Wide Web. It’s maybe the only country that parallels the Internet.
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Nice and snappy, I like the way you write Lehan, I also love your paintings; you are a very talented girl.
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Yes to what H said.
This is the writing of a painterly mind. I find it thrilling. It is an adventure in itself just as a lovely work of painterly art is. (Is that a word? Is now anyHOO.) 🙂
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Great painting. Lets rally Mike for a Lehan Ramsay Pigs Arms t-shirt for christmas, c’mon Mikey? And yes anyhoo is a very common word uttered by Hung in his every growing frustration with Sandy O’Way.
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Sandshoe, Lehan’s writing is pared down, yours is more layered, both equally enjoyable…
I suppose each writer has to find her own authentic voice, it can’t be easy 🙂
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I agree, Japan seems to be in a weakened state. Past it’s real get-up-and-go. But I wonder if that is not also kind of a smart position. And I also think that the structure of the society allows for much more concentrated action if it is called for. I suspect they will just tell everyone that things are really bad, and tighten up money, and people will correspondingly put their heads down and get to work. Even the young ones. Because those kinds of controls are built into the social structure. Australia, I suspect, would be more likely to go the way of European countries, with individuals protesting en masse. Happier for things to break down in a spectacular way than for ordinary life to simply be harder. It seems to me that in ordinary Japanese life there is the expectation that things will or could get harder. At least that seems to be the way it is here, outside of the big cities.
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I was reading about the amount of military spending today…perhaps it’s also a good thing that people refuse to accept government’s austerity measures when they come at the expense of people’s lives.
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There’s a much better piece in the SMH.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/korean-impasse-needs-a-gamechanger-20101126-18ajp.html
This area (koreas, china, japan, russia) seems to be a bit like an earthquake zone. Tectonic plates rubbing against each other because the US is sitting on top of them. Is the US increasing pressure to gain more power? Or is the rest of the world just noticing that they have room to slip out from under it, resulting in some kind of clutching panic grip by the US. It would be really nice if countries like Australia didn’t behave in the way they usually do by agreeing to everything under the pressure of the US. It would be nice if we weren’t afraid of something new happening.
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I feel like this needs a pile of footnotes.
1. Sweet Chinese girls who answer the phone in English are rarely able to do more than verify what the journalist is thinking.
2. If they speak English, you’ll probably hear what you want to hear.
3. The Sydney Olympic Opening Ceremony was following the Trail of Olympic Ceremonial symbolism, picking up the baton from (probably) two ceremonies before it.
4. Other countries have concentration and discipline. They are usually countries in a poor state, through war or bad management. Some time in the next 20 years Iraq and Afghanistan may well have the sense to copy China. Whom, I suspect, is copying Japan from the 50’s.
5. The reason we think Murdoch is strong is because we are a part of his empire. It’s all done with Mirrors.
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I agree with you Lehan. We have been raised to be scared of China. I was as a poor white Irish catholic boy in New South Wales. The nuns would tell us of the “yellow peril”that were coming to cut our heads off. Lovely stuff. Think its called brain washing now.
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It’s interesting to note that in the early part of last century there was discussion about the Northern Territories lack of population and that one of the possibilities raised was to give it to Japan. Another possibility was to give space from the NT and Western Australia to make an Isreali state. I guess that post WWII the strategy was to bring in as many refugees, including the children, as possible and try to do it that way. It never really worked. But surely part of the parcel of that strategy was a fear of someone else taking it. When the Japanese went into Papua New Guinea during the war people were afraid that they were on their way to Australia. It could also have been the case that the resources of New Guinea were what they had their eye on. They weren’t alone there.
There is a great old newspaper site:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/home
you can look at newspapers from page to page. It’s fascinating stuff.
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