Archive for the 'Asia' Category

Hanoi’s Hidden Graffiti

May 15, 2008 in Art/Design and Asia Comments

Some have argued that the street art scene in Vietnam is lacking — consisting largely of half-drawn scrawls and stenciled phone numbers promising everything from backyard bike repair to the hair cut of your dreams (for example). But for those who luck into it, there’s at least one place where all that changes.

Hidden in Hanoi’s super narrow back alleys is a special spot that features some beautiful work, flanked by great street food, homes packed on top of one another, and a truly lovely art gallery. Have a look.




I don’t know the artists (do you? drop a comment) and I make no claim they’re all Vietnamese, but it is nice to see this level of artistic expression on the streets of a beautiful country that has suffered so much. One might imagine that the communist rulers would frown on this combination of lawbreaking and artistic expression, particularly in the capital city. My only thought there is that artists stick together and protect each other. Hence the proximity to Mai Gallery.

I’ll have more on Mai’s and the whole gallery scene in Hanoi soon (suffice to say the best galleries there rival Chelsea’s). The city is booming in ways that it wasn’t just 5 years ago (iPhones are everywhere, people seem happier) but there’s a long way to go (the jobless rate remains high). Still, if the emerging art scene is anything to go by, Hanoi’s future is bright indeed.

See more shots from my visit to Hanoi’s graffiti row on flickr.

thanks to nyt for the pointer and to jake for the conversation

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Death (and Typing) in Tokyo

April 25, 2008 in Asia and Games 6 Comments

Eyes squinting, zero light, monsters everywhere, you’re typing for your life. Yeah, you heard me.

The sudden obsessive uptake of a certain competitive typing game called TypeRacer reminded me of a recent visit to Tokyo. You see, it was there that I saw a couple kids playing Sega’s fabulous Typing of the Dead with unusual fervor late one night in Shinjuku.

For those unfamiliar, Typing of the Dead is a refit of the stunningly mediocre shooting game House of the Dead, but where the former provisioned traditional light guns to dispatch monsters, the latter hands you a keyboard. In TOTD, each word you type right blasts a monster, and speed counts — bigtime. That seemingly minor twist makes a boring game brilliant. If you haven’t tried it, you must.

Typing of the Dead has never appeared in arcades outside Japan (it has seen console release stateside). And it was fun to see Japanese players stuck to it like glue when the game really didn’t get much love back home. Good times, particularly since the kids couldn’t stop giggling to themselves as they nonchalantly typed Japanese characters at blinding speed. Competitive typing, cooperative typing. Either way, it’s goofy awesome.

Ah, Japan. And speaking of Japan, where else can you find fresh pastries just outside the door of an arcade?

Holy cow! Has it really been 6 months since I got back from the Asia trip? I’ve got lots of stories to tell. More photos soon!

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Not the Dalai Lama

March 31, 2008 in Asia and Politics 2 Comments

What’s it like to be the Dalai Lama’s brother? Pretty much the same, just less filter. Witness Giant Robot 52, where kid sib Tenzin Choegyal goes awesomely blunt:

GR: At a young age, you, too, were recognized as a reincarnate of an important man, right?

TC: Oh, that’s bullshit. I don’t believe it. From a Buddhist perspective, we are all reborn. But choosing a particular person as someone special and saying he’s a reincarnation of so-and-so is bullshit.

Got that? We all know the 14th Dalai Lama (aka Tenzin Gyatso) and his thoughtful talks about compassion in the modern world (moreso today as he stands in the middle of a renewed Tibetan conflict). Having seen him speak in Central Park and having a Mom who spent a day with him as part of the Buffalo Delegation, I know how easy it is to feel connected to the guy. But you also sense a wry sense of humor lurking just under the surface. For the Dalai Lama, it serves to humanize him. For Choegyal, it makes him hilarious:

Richard Gere is a wonderful person — very simple, modest, and natural with whomever he meets. He’s done a lot for the Tibetan community. And then on the other side of the scale, there’s Steven Seagal. Oh my god. I met him when he came here. He was wearing a funny coat, a Chinese brocade, funny trousers, and funny shoes with a ponytail. I asked him, “Why do you dress in such a peculiar manner?” He didn’t say anything. He’s arrogant and pretends to be a Tibetan reincarnate. But why? He’s a strange man.

Snap. You gotta love this guy. And it makes me totally wish I could be a fly on the wall at the next Tenzin family dinner. Well, there’s always reincarnation!

image via time

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Holidays in Cambodia

December 12, 2007 in Asia, Introspect and Race 5 Comments


I’m going to Cambodia and Vietnam for the holidays, and in some ways it’s like going home. You see, growing up black in a largely white suburb of DC can be isolating. If anything makes differences plain, it’s gotta be the cliquish culture of junior high and high school. And it turns out the groups I fell in with were immigrant kids: Mexican, Ethiopian, Paraguayan, Korean, Vietnamese, more. I never wondered much about why I was so comfortable with them, I just was. But a recent story on Barack Obama got me thinking:

And there are also times when Obama’s experience feels more like an immigrant story than a black memoir. His autobiography navigates a new and strange world of an American racial legacy that never quite defined him at his core. He therefore speaks to a complicated and mixed identity—not a simple and alienated one. This may hurt him among some African Americans, who may fail to identify with this fellow with an odd name. Black conservatives, like Shelby Steele, fear he is too deferential to the black establishment. Black leftists worry that he is not beholden at all. But there is no reason why African Americans cannot see the logic of Americanism that Obama also represents, a legacy that is ultimately theirs as well. To be black and white, to have belonged to a nonreligious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything—this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities. (atlantic)

Then it hit me: spending time in immigrant communities was a way for me to escape (in some small way) the racial confines of America — to be with people who haven’t been quite so fully indoctrinated with the racial expectations we in the US have been taught generation over generation. It gave me the opportunity to define myself as more than one thing. Maybe this poster says it best.

After my African American family at home, then, my second family is Vietnamese and Cambodian, my oldest friend is Vietnamese, my wife is Vietnamese. The sights, sounds, and smells (mmmm… phở, bánh mì) of Southeast Asia have been part of my life for so long it honestly seems a bit strange I’ve never been there. That’s about to change.

For the next three weeks, I’ll be off the grid; traveling mostly in Cambodia and Vietnam, with stopovers in Tokyo and Bangkok. We’ll be back in 2008 with more art, games, change, and everything else. Happy holidays and see you on the other side. Peace!

P.S.: Comments are closed site-wide (damn spammers!) but they’ll be back when we are. Until then, reach us via the contact page.

Update: Comments are open again — more soon!

images via stuckincustoms and infrangible; with apologies to dk

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Asia Rich, Poor, Ever-changing

November 19, 2007 in Asia and Linked Comments

Running to keep up with the ever explosive change in Asia is dizzying. Here’s a snapshot of what’s particularly surprised, shocked, and dismayed us over the past week out east.

Down the Block Badass - gorgeously redesigned Tokyo hair salon stunningly sticks out (via myninjaplease)

Living in Refuse - the flip side of Tokyo’s super opulent hair salons is found in Cambodia’s garbage dumps, where families live day-to-day on what the rich throw out

New Gambling Capital - skid row meeds front row in Macau, the Chinese territory that’s just surpassed Las Vegas as the most profitable gambling spot on Earth

Yao-Yi Trumps Super Bowl - NBA matchup featuring two Chinese players drew more than twice as many viewers as the Super Bowl, most of them in China

Sub Surprise - undetected Chinese sub surfaces amid a US Navy exercise in the Pacific, tweaking the nose of the “vastly superior” American sea force

China Dumps Dollar - Chinese state TV implores citizens to abandon US currency before it tanks

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New Chinese Mythology

October 18, 2007 in Art/Design, Asia and Linked 1 Comment

China Opening Day
Hairman Mao

When we think China, we often think of a place steeped in centuries old mythology. But new myths spring up now and again, too.

Communist Opening - the majestic visuals surrounding Communist Opening Day belies a political agenda that’s anything but

Hairman Mao - Zedong’s hidden history comes out of the closet in a Yuan retrofit for the ages. Bald to Bouffant in 60 seconds

New Mao / No Mao - speaking of Mao, Shanghai’s Guangci gives two sides of the man: one in mythmaker sterling silver and another melting grotesquely under the bright lights of historical scrutiny

And shedding light on myths around the globe:

Daily Deforestation - paper dispenser hack connects consumption with its environmental effects

Visualize World Health - lovely visualization highlights where doctors are needed most

War and Weddings - photographer forges credentials and sneaks into places officials would rather forget to shed light on world issues that desperately need solving. It’s people like Mark that make sure we remember

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How China Works: Life in 24/7 Factories

July 24, 2007 in Asia and Linked 3 Comments

Where do all the hot new electronic gadgets really come from? Who builds them? What is it like to work in China’s new engine: the 24/7 factory? Last week, we wished aloud for more in-depth stories about the people in the trenches driving China’s new revolution. Since then, some fabulous links have turned up. Here are a few…

Shenzhen Seen - richly colorful photos show us the face, pain, and beauty of life in and around Shenzhen’s factory towns

Life of a Gold Farmer - video from the front lines of low wage work in the world’s top online games

21st Century Carrier Pigeon - following a day’s work for “Mr. Wang” as he plays a fascinating role in global supply chain

Blogging Factory - the skill, the food, the environment, the scale — Andy Huang’s blog gets up close and personal with video, photos, and discussion straight from the assembly line

China Blue - important, touching, haunting documentary gets behind the propaganda and into “camera free zones” to show us how things run when the inspectors go home (show website)

Best reaction: “Wow - that is intense. I am sitting here looking at everything digital in my room, and realizing the most of it probably came from factories like these.” Couldn’t say it better.

image by bob croslin; with thanks to mefi

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China’s Booming, But Where Are The People?

July 18, 2007 in Asia and Politics 6 Comments

The one thing I’ll always remember about China is beauty — in the clothing, the architecture, but most of all the people. There seemed to be a story in every face I saw, but the cultural gap (not to mention language) was too wide to traverse. So I’ve used films to see what life is like for a local. Still, that leaves a lot of mysteries unexplained. I want more.

These days, many seem fascinated with what makes China tick, and The Atlantic has been one of the best at feeding that curiosity. (Most recently with their China Issue.) It’s engaging stuff, but it deals largely with big operators (Liam “Mr. China” Casey, Zhang Yue), big factories, and big business. And we’re left wondering about the “regular people” who make those booming operations what they are — the kinds of people I saw on in the backstreets of Beijing and Shanghai, and in countryside villages. Here, we often find them discussed only in aggregate. Like so:

At 8 a.m. in Shenzhen, the young women on the night shift got up from the assembly line, took off the hats and hairnets they had been wearing, and shook out their dark hair. They passed through the metal detector at the door to their workroom (they pass through it going in and coming out) and walked downstairs to the racks where they had left their bikes. They wore red company jackets, as part of their working uniform—and, as an informal uniform, virtually every one wore tight, low-rise blue jeans with embroidery or sequins on the seams. Most of them rode their bikes back to the dormitory; others walked, or walked their bikes, chatting with each other. That evening they would be back at work. Meanwhile, flocks of red-topped, blue-bottomed young women on the day shift filled the road, riding their bikes in.   (full article)

And that’s invariably where the story ends. I wish more writers would pick one of the faces in the crowd and go home with them. See how they live. Meet their families, their roommates. See what they eat, how they think. And then find another worker in a different factory and do the same thing. Or a waitress, or a rickshaw driver, or a welder, or a young artist.

I don’t mean to be overly critical. There’s a huge amount of ground to cover in China and the high-level stories are as good a place to start as any. But I do hope that, before authors like James Fallows leave China, we get just as close with the blood and guts workers (who travel hundreds of miles to work 12 hour days, 7 days a week) as we have with the ultra wealthy captains of industry who employ them. It might be a little grim at times but, to my mind, that’s the only way we can truly begin to see China’s heart, and its soul.

image by cao fei

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Cliff Top Daredevils Take Flight in China

June 7, 2007 in Asia 2 Comments


I’ve seen high wire acts but never quite like this.

We saw a lot of amazing things in China, from obviously awesome places like the Temple of Heaven, Pudong, and the canals of Suzhou to the understated beauty of Hutong backstreets. But the most unexpected sight came when we took an afternoon trip down a small tributary of the storied Yangtze River.

As we rounded a bend, our guide started yelling from the front of the boat and pointing straight up. I craned my neck, followed his gaze, and my jaw went slack. A tightrope stretched from cliff top to cliff top some hundreds of feet in the air. A unicycle stood right smack in the middle of it, fighting crosswinds — one person pedaling and another dangling underneath, draped in color.

What are we seeing? Is riding the tightrope a religious rite? A method of transit from high-ground to high-ground? A stunt for tourists? (Here’s a shot of their launching station.) Nobody seemed to have the answer. A central scene in the Yangtze-filmed Still Life features tightrope walking between buildings as the backdrop. Perhaps it’s a local tradition, then. No matter the reason, it’s a sight I won’t soon forget.

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Three Gorges: Love and China’s New Ruins

May 4, 2007 in Asia and Film 2 Comments

China’s Three Gorges Dam will displace over 1.2 million people and put a massive swath of land underwater. But it won’t happen all at once. And in the in-between, there’s a strange kind of limbo for those who live there — between places not quite lost but soon-to-be and an uncertain future bearing down as sure as the water rises.

It’s this dramatic backdrop that Jia Zhang Ke chooses for his understated, gorgeously shot film Still Life (Sanxia Haoren). We watch the loosely intertwined stories of Sanming and Tao as they search for the past (a daughter, a husband) before the water washes away all trace. The metaphor works and it’s used to heartbreaking effect in a scene where Sanming arrives at the last known address for his family only to find it long submerged. You feel the quiet rumble of history in every frame — waterline marks written on buildings as if to say: next week, everything you remember will be underwater. But there are light moments, too. An elderly innkeeper entertainingly chastises a government worker for “rudely” marking his hotel “OK for Demolition” and a certain character’s fixation on Chow Yun Fat never gets old.

When I sailed through the Three Gorges last year, I saw lovely old villages being torn down brick by brick and shining modern cities built just across the river, the new cities perched in places that seem unreasonably high, but will soon be at river’s edge. The stunning scale of the project was driven home over and over. But what I missed was the human story: what this kind of change does to the people that live there, their families, and their dreams. Still Life is that story. It captures people at a singular moment in history in a place that, once lost, can never be regained. We see the lives of poor demolition workers and the camaraderie they develop in the ruins, we see the lives of the rich construction contractors and the impressive engineering feats of the New China, we see luminous celluloid jam packed with gorgeously lit conversation and culture. I felt like I was back in China, this time as an insider, a local.

But as close as you feel to the place and the characters, you slowly realize you aren’t just watching a beautifully composed film set against a dramatic backdrop but a historical document of a time that will not come again. After all, most of the locations shot in the film are now underwater. And the film quietly wonders if things aren’t better left that way.

Still Life is showing at the Tribeca Film Festival this Friday and Saturday. It won tops in Venice. Find more at Memento Films and grab the presskit.

We last wrote about China’s tomorrow in Future Found.

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