Censorship, and Behind the Kitchen Door

 A Hong Kong made movie, Empire of Silver, directed by Christina Yao just opened in the U.S.  The director Yao talked to San Francisco Chronicle on the themes of her movie and some issues she had had when the movie was distributed in mainland China:

Yao believes there are four elements of entertainment value. "The first is visceral," she says. "Like 'Transformers.' The second is voyeurism: You're a peeping Tom. The third is vicarious experience, which is quite often love affairs. The fourth is spectacle. So I chose as the two elements of my film voyeurism - how people lived - and vicarious experience: the love affair. Then I tried to use spectacle also, with some fighting scenes to spice it up. But from day one I knew I couldn't do it as an action film, even though I know that's what sells a movie now."

Chinese censors OKd the script, but told her to be careful about the sex scene. Then when they saw the film, they cut the scene down to 10 seconds and insisted she take out all the dialogue because since they have no rating system, there may be 6-year-olds in the audience.

"What can you do?" Yao says. "You deal with the system."

It is true that there is no film rating system in China and a kid can "enjoy" any scene an adult audience can see in the cinema.  Sometimes I wonder if that was a deliberate decision so as to give an excuse to censor  without raising any eyebrow.

This reminds me a story I read very recently: Children Watch Revealing Lingerie Show, Netizens Unfazed.  The article reported a lingerie show in the open air stage with several kids gawking with wonder and puzzlement:


Image source: Chinasmack.com

It is very interesting to notice what they shield from children and what not.  When I grew up, sex or sexy images were not even available to adults, therefore I was spared or deprived of such wonderment.

What I do remember were the whispers behind our kitchen door.  My sister and I, like typical children, didn't pay much attention to our parents when they spoke in audible decibels.  However, once their voices dropped to a thread, and particularly when those whispers were escaping from the closed kitchen door, my sister and I would rush in and demand to know what they were talking about.

Usually, it was my father and my mother exchanging political rumors du jour - the political campaigns and intrigues of 1970s and 1980s, dangerous stuff if my sister and I heard their whispers and started to boast them amongst our peers.  What they whispered was branded by the government as 小道消息, Google translation called it Gossip, which was not accurate.  Literally, it was Alley News, stories the government preferred to keep hidden from the people they ruled -- many of them could be false, but many true.

A couple years before Mao's death, the Alley News, and the attempt to weed them out was at their zeniths.  The term of Alley News faded out of daily vocabulary since the eventually death of Mao  in 1976.

However, the Alley News seems to have made a comeback.

The English Edition of People Daily Online reported in article, Why CPC resolutely safeguards political discipline, that

People's Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, released an article titled "Resolutely Safeguarding the Party's Political Discipline" on May 25, which attracted wide attention from various overseas media.

This article pointed out that the Party's political discipline is the rule of safeguarding the Party's political principles, political orientation and political line, and regulating political speech, political actions and the political stand of Party organizations and members. It is the most important discipline of the CPC. The article lists recent incidents of certain Party members and cadres who violated the Party's political discipline.

The central demand from that article was that Chinese Communist Party Members

决不允许在群众中散布违背党的理论和路线方针政策的意见，决不允许公开发表同中央的决定相违背的言论，决不允许对中央的决策部署阳奉阴违，决不允许编造、传播政治谣言及丑化党和国家形象的言论，决不允许以任何形式泄露党和国家的秘密，决不允许参与各种非法组织和非法活动

(must not be allowed to spread among the masses theories and views against the Party line, must not be allowed to publish remarks in contrary the Party Center's decisions, must not be allowed to be double-faced in regard of Party Center's decisions and planning, must not be allow to fabricate, spread political rumors and speeches vilifying the Party's and the national image, and never be allowed to disclose party and state secrets any form, and must not be allowed to participate in various illegal organizations and illegal activities.)

There you go.  The Party Center admitted itself the emergence of political rumors.

If only the kitchen doors were large enough.

"Political Correctness" Running Amok?

I have complained about caprices of some translators often, when they made edits to the books they worked on.  Now, this practice has encroached the books written in English and would be marketed to the American readers.  Julie Bosman reported for New York Times that Publisher Tinkers With Twain.

She reported that a new edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be release the edition in February by NewSouth Books, a publisher based in Alabama is to replace the word "nigger" by "slave," 219 times in all.  The book also substitutes "Indian" for "injun."  She reported that:

Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, approached the publisher with the idea in July.  Mr. Gribben said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

"I found myself right out of graduate school at Berkeley not wanting to pronounce that word when I was teaching either 'Huckleberry Finn' or 'Tom Sawyer,'" he said. "And I don't think I'm alone."

"I'm by no means sanitizing Mark Twain," Mr. Gribben said. "The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact. I just had the idea to get us away from obsessing about this one word, and just let the stories stand alone."

The news set off a storm of angry online commentary, scolding the publisher for "censorship" and "political correctness," or simply for the perceived sin of altering the words of a literary icon. Twain admirers have turned his hefty “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” published last year, into a best seller. 

Some English teachers were less than thrilled about the idea of cleaning up a classic.
"I'm not offended by anything in 'Huck Finn,'" said Elizabeth Absher, an English teacher at South Mountain High School in Arizona. "I am a big fan of Mark Twain, and I hear a lot worse in the hallway in front of my class."

Ms. Absher teaches Twain short stories and makes "Huck Finn" available but does not teach it because it is too long — not because of the language.

"I think authors’ language should be left alone," she said. "If it's too offensive, it doesn’t belong in school, but if it expresses the way people felt about race or slavery in the context of their time, that's something I’d talk about in teaching it."

To criticize this attempt as "Political Correctness" running amok is actually quite mild.  Looking deeper, one can detect something more sinister.  This new edition attempts to re-write history by hiding some ugly truths of our nation's most wrenching past, the truth made some of us uncomfortable, particularly to those who don't want to be reminded that using derogatory terms was once social norm and don't welcome any reminder of that and would be gladly to pretend that those ugly truths never existed, not here anyway.  By substituting words, the publisher is denying readers, particularly less informed young ones, a piece of crucial information.  By looking away from our heinous history, we would have missed a great opportunity to educate people of our history and our values.

If such trends continue, I wouldn't be surprised that one hundred years from now one, people would claim that slavery has never existed in the U.S., as some people, be it in Germany, Iran or America, who have been trying to deny the occurrence of the Holocaust.