I Am God (posted by Roland Soong)
The boring thing about culture-related websites is that they can be pedantic, pedagogical and therefore quite boring. You should have no fear about the EastSouthWestNorth Culture blog, because you will often get some quite unusual cultural ideas. We are individuals, and we all grew up with very unique cultural experiences, not all of which are conventional.
Here, I will relate some cultural experiences as a teenager growing up in the 1960's. Please note that these experiences are quite extraordinary and unusual, and that is why people get fascinated when I start to talk about them. I do not consider them as more or less privileged or exceptional; they just happen to be different.
Back to the story -- we are in the 1960's. I was a boy about 15 years old living in Hong Kong. My father was in the film industry, first as the executive producer at Cathay Films and then later in charge of script production at Shaw Brothers. This meant that my father got into constant contact with many important culturati figures back then.
Recently, I was reminded that while my father was executive producer at Cathay Films, he still maintained close contact with Raymond Chow at the major competitor Shaw Brothers. My father and Raymond Chow were good friends way back at the United States Information Services in the 1950's. At the time, Cathay Films was the dominant player and Shaw Brothers was really a wannabe. So Raymond Chow was having problems with coming up with high-quality and competitive products. It was probably by pleading that Raymond Chow got my father to tutor a novice Shaw Brothers director. This person was known to me as Little Ting ( 小丁, even though he was physically sizeable) would show up regularly at my apartment to receive instructions from my father. However, when Cathay Films people showed up at our apartment, Little Ting was sent into the kitchen to wait because he could not be seen by the competition! But that is another story and one of the reasons for starting the EastSouthWestNorth Culture blog is that I would like to be motivated to go down to the Hong Kong Film Library and research/resurrect my childhood memories.
Meanwhile, there was another infinitely more influential figure in my life (known to me as Little Qiu (小邱)). It is likely that this name would be quite obscure in film history, but his influence on me was tremendous. That would not be for any personal contact. Little Qiu came regularly to our apartment to talk to my father about the progress of the many Shaw Brothers film scripts. I have no idea about those details and I would guess that they were quite trite and uninteresting given the highly commercialized nature of those products at the time.
However, Little Qiu had literary aspirations independent of his regular job and he published in certain avant-garde publications that he gave freely to my father. My father was probably indifferent and inured to such ideas and he just stashed those giveaways on the bookshelf. There was a bored 15-year-old boy who read and then re-read all of that stuff over and over again.
As I recall, some of that stuff was totally unreadable -- under any standard and with due respect. Little Qiu wrote an essay in which the phrase "I am God (我是上帝)" was repeated again and again for multiple pages, as in:
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝, 我是上帝,
...
Those pages were also tied in with descriptions of masturbation and other 'objectionable' content. None of that made a real impact on me (or, at least, I did not think so). But these publications also contained translations of film scripts from foreign movies, and that was how I learned about Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergmann, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffault, Luis Buñuel and others.
The most influential script that I can remember was Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldat. How so? These were not great cinematic moments as such, and I had only read the film script and I did not see the movie itself until many years later. Instead, Le Petit Soldat contained free stream-of-consciousness citations of a whole bunch of literary and cinematic references that a 15-year-old boy in Hong Kong could not have been aware of at all before. Faced with this challenge, I was motivated to track down those references, if not immediately then later on in life.
Thus, I know that the character Bruno in Le Petit Soldat said:
Genève, 13 mai 1958, quels étaient ces vers d'Aragon : "Mai qui fut sans douleur et juin poignardé" (translation: "May which was without sorrow and June was stabbed)
What was it about May and June? What happened? That would involve understanding the German invasion of France in WWII, the rapid dissolving of the French army and the psychological impact on the French national psyche and the individual citizens.
Elsewhere, Bruno quoted:
Ô mois des floraisons, mois des métamorphoses,
Je n'oublierais jamais les lilas ni les roses.
and then wondered:
Pourquoi étais-je obsédé par cette poésie? (transation: Why was I being obsessed by this poem?)
I don't know about Bruno, but I was obsessed with that poem and the poet Louis Aragon for the rest of my life. I can be standing on Victoria Peak and staring at Hong Kong harbour but the words that come to me may be about the lilacs of France when the soldiers went to fight in May and the roses when they died in June.
Tout se tait L'ennemi dans l'ombre se repose
On nous a dit ce soir que Paris s'est rendu
Je n'oublierai jamais les lilas ni les roses
Et ni les deux amours que nous avons perdus[in translation]
All is silent. The enemy waits in the shadows.
They tell us this evening that Paris has surrendered
I will never forget the lilacs nor the roses
Nor the two loves that we have lost
There are plenty more allusions and references in all those Godard film scripts. As a young chlid, I was inquisitive as well as impressionable, and so the pile of books and periodicals that my father filed away made a huge impact on me. I learned a lot about things that I never ought to by actual circumstance, but I did so by chance. Dear reader, what were the unusual influences in your life? You will probably start off by saying that you are boring and interesting, but you may be surprised if you think hard enough (and it does not have to do with exotic people speaking/writing in a different language).
Reference: Jean-Luc Godard: Cinemaste-Écrivain