I have been in China for one month. The season is cooling down, colder at night with a mild sea breeze, yet people still swim and the cleaners busily prepare for Beach Weekend where fanatics arrive in hoards to the sands and Dylan Thomas’ HOLIDAY MEMORY comes alive as I walk around with my camera.
August bank holiday, a tune on an ice-cream cornet. A slap of sea and a tickle of sand. A wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive waters. A tuck of dresses, a rolling of trouser. There was cricket on the sand, and sand in the sponge cake, sand flies in the watercress, and foolish, mulish religious donkeys on the unwilling trot.
Our beach is no different from Thomas’ messy 1954 Welsh beach. It is an old fashioned family beach with all the fun of the fair. The fair ground is at one end, painted in dynamic florescent bold pinks and greens which wind and encroaching winter invade a tad, so have faded just a little bit, but Ride-em-Cowboy rides still crank into the salty wind. Wide-eyed and hysterical kids, adults too, clamber into the Haunted House, screaming madly before they get inside. Coconut shies and pin the tail on the dragon have long line-ups, while vendors with peanuts and different types of tofu on sticks and candyfloss as big as a baby’s body make great trade; painted, pretty shells decorated by the local village woman in handfuls hang in wooden trinket huts which dot the boardwalk.
This is Jinshatin Beach - Golden Sands beach.
Today, Beach Weekend, Jinshatin becomes the stage where bushy-tailed workers not drunk on woman, but drunk on their one day off, come to play, and families from far and wide and over the Lao mountains, and perhaps Beijing and beyond, will come with a clatter of hats and buckets and spades and litter the beach with sandcastles and picnics, weddings, shy kisses, and women who parade like stars on a 1950’s glam-film set – imitation Gucci glasses, high heels digging into the golden sands, red hats, blue hats, green hats, yellow hats, orange hats, any hat as long as you wear one with me.
They walk alone with selfie sticks dangling; they walk in pairs, they walk in groups, they walk in hordes, posing pretty and nascent.
Janshatin, Janshatin, Janshatin.
I too have been walking endlessly trying to find my subject for the next documentary; what will push me to want it, to continue it, to go to bed with it, to wake with it, to caress and hold it, and then keep it to myself like a secret love affair, and not share it, then so happy that I have to share it, talk all about it.
Will it be that old man who hangs his fish to dry on the tree by the compound?
Will it be a struggling student in the school?
A cleaner?
Or Lulu, the beautiful and mysterious drama teacher who makes me think of Greta Garbo a rags to riches story ?
Who and what will it be?
I ask myself over and over again, as I walk looking outwards to where the deep seas mix and merge, and Korea lies way, way over on the edge of tomorrow.
Who and what will it be?
So I keep on walking to the Beijing Film Academy second campus, which is 7 kilometres along the sand flats. I walk there every day, there and back, picking up shells, filming as I go, practicing camera angles, shots, hats, weddings, spades, buckets and all. One day I see a figure way in the distance dancing on the sands, the sun is slowly coming down and the form is hazed and yellow and rather romantic. As I near the dancer I see that they wear a monkey’s mask and are dressed in brilliant yellow, imitating Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West. I begin to film and little by little, behind me, a group of workers, men finished for the day - linger and watch. Soon a large group is watching our dancer who moves backwards and forwards performing perfect martial art movements with his fighting stick.
Suddenly some-one in the crowd starts to direct the Monkey to move back to the shore line, another man says, “NO, NO, stay here, move right, move right…” The Monkey finally becomes very irritated and shouts “shut-up, shut up, and let her carry on filming me!”
What ensues is a wonderful burlesque show as the men then begin to also direct me on how to direct our Monkey. Between shouts and laughter he dances as if dancing in a vast theatre, full.
When he finishes I take his phone number, as I really want to meet him again and know the face beneath the mask. Whilst pondering this and watching him move off slowly swirling his stick, dancing between lovers, doing his tricks, I knew I had my subject.
Janshatin – Golden Beach.
Which offers this young man a 7 kilometre stage, which gives Wei the fisherman his wage, which fills the restaurants with ample fish, gives film students endless sunsets and sunrises to film, which presides with more authority and presence than any other subject I have yet to meet. Totally omnipresent, always there, will not go away, will not need permission to film it; yet like the perfect subject has mood swings, so sometimes will be indifferent or sullen, sometimes kind and pretty, sometimes wild as the winds that crash over its body, sometimes serene and calm, silent, sometimes mysterious as Lulu’s smile and deeper than deep eyes, and sometimes like a hot night in the tropics: balmy, sticky-sweet and forever lasting.
Pull all the characters into one large net - swoosh - Wei the fisherman who lives at the end of Janshatin in a world which drifts in and out of seasons; the catch, the nets, boat building, mending; the village, untouched perhaps for centuries, a rough and hardy world with tales of sea monsters and mermaids. Further east the beach drifts to modernity and beach sundry, little shacks and restaurants offering delicious, mouth-watering sea recipes, abalone crushed fat with the tiniest shrimps, large fish heads drowned in sesame seed oil, ginger and garlic, laid on a bubbling hot platter; raw crab legs dribbled with alcohol, seaweed of varied colors and shapes, textures and smells …
The net tightens as we come nearer to our home in the compound hidden by fig trees.
The fishermen’s wives bring the catch early to sell at the bottom of the compound; they gather day in, day out; with shrimps and octopus and fruit and vegetable. The other day we bought live octopus and left them on the counter. Later when we came to make them, they had escaped across the counter and were heading for the sink. We just could not bring ourselves to eat them, so we packed them up in a dish and took them back to the sea. It was full moon and we waded in as far as we could and we could almost see the gasp of life as they slipped and struggled out to the water, then gone.
So the net fastens around the characters of Janshatin and the seasons which slowly move in slow rhythmic change from winter to summer and back again.
Between these musings I had my tooth fixed at the local Chinese medicine hospital in the old part of Huangdao, an hour from home. The dentist did not want to give me an injection – she laughed at my tears, she was incredulous that I needed to be numbed – but I begged her via Ying, so she gave in, telling me very sternly she really had heard nothing like this. Most Chinese went in, she drilled, without a moan, without a tear, and that was that.
I felt ridiculous, sweating in the old chair as a mother and her baby watched patiently, waiting to be treated next. It took one hour, she patched the tooth which I had been told in Canada would have to be whisked out or an implant or the like at a cost of 2,000 dollars.
It cost $60. I was very impressed, even though she wrote in my hospital book that I was a wimp!
August bank holiday, a tune on an ice-cream cornet. A slap of sea and a tickle of sand. A wince and whinny of bathers dancing into deceptive waters. A tuck of dresses, a rolling of trouser. There was cricket on the sand, and sand in the sponge cake, sand flies in the watercress, and foolish, mulish religious donkeys on the unwilling trot.
Our beach is no different from Thomas’ messy 1954 Welsh beach. It is an old fashioned family beach with all the fun of the fair. The fair ground is at one end, painted in dynamic florescent bold pinks and greens which wind and encroaching winter invade a tad, so have faded just a little bit, but Ride-em-Cowboy rides still crank into the salty wind. Wide-eyed and hysterical kids, adults too, clamber into the Haunted House, screaming madly before they get inside. Coconut shies and pin the tail on the dragon have long line-ups, while vendors with peanuts and different types of tofu on sticks and candyfloss as big as a baby’s body make great trade; painted, pretty shells decorated by the local village woman in handfuls hang in wooden trinket huts which dot the boardwalk.
This is Jinshatin Beach - Golden Sands beach.
Today, Beach Weekend, Jinshatin becomes the stage where bushy-tailed workers not drunk on woman, but drunk on their one day off, come to play, and families from far and wide and over the Lao mountains, and perhaps Beijing and beyond, will come with a clatter of hats and buckets and spades and litter the beach with sandcastles and picnics, weddings, shy kisses, and women who parade like stars on a 1950’s glam-film set – imitation Gucci glasses, high heels digging into the golden sands, red hats, blue hats, green hats, yellow hats, orange hats, any hat as long as you wear one with me.
They walk alone with selfie sticks dangling; they walk in pairs, they walk in groups, they walk in hordes, posing pretty and nascent.
Janshatin, Janshatin, Janshatin.
I too have been walking endlessly trying to find my subject for the next documentary; what will push me to want it, to continue it, to go to bed with it, to wake with it, to caress and hold it, and then keep it to myself like a secret love affair, and not share it, then so happy that I have to share it, talk all about it.
Will it be that old man who hangs his fish to dry on the tree by the compound?
Will it be a struggling student in the school?
A cleaner?
Or Lulu, the beautiful and mysterious drama teacher who makes me think of Greta Garbo a rags to riches story ?
Who and what will it be?
I ask myself over and over again, as I walk looking outwards to where the deep seas mix and merge, and Korea lies way, way over on the edge of tomorrow.
Who and what will it be?
So I keep on walking to the Beijing Film Academy second campus, which is 7 kilometres along the sand flats. I walk there every day, there and back, picking up shells, filming as I go, practicing camera angles, shots, hats, weddings, spades, buckets and all. One day I see a figure way in the distance dancing on the sands, the sun is slowly coming down and the form is hazed and yellow and rather romantic. As I near the dancer I see that they wear a monkey’s mask and are dressed in brilliant yellow, imitating Sun Wukong, the Monkey King from the Chinese classic Journey to the West. I begin to film and little by little, behind me, a group of workers, men finished for the day - linger and watch. Soon a large group is watching our dancer who moves backwards and forwards performing perfect martial art movements with his fighting stick.
Suddenly some-one in the crowd starts to direct the Monkey to move back to the shore line, another man says, “NO, NO, stay here, move right, move right…” The Monkey finally becomes very irritated and shouts “shut-up, shut up, and let her carry on filming me!”
What ensues is a wonderful burlesque show as the men then begin to also direct me on how to direct our Monkey. Between shouts and laughter he dances as if dancing in a vast theatre, full.
When he finishes I take his phone number, as I really want to meet him again and know the face beneath the mask. Whilst pondering this and watching him move off slowly swirling his stick, dancing between lovers, doing his tricks, I knew I had my subject.
Janshatin – Golden Beach.
Which offers this young man a 7 kilometre stage, which gives Wei the fisherman his wage, which fills the restaurants with ample fish, gives film students endless sunsets and sunrises to film, which presides with more authority and presence than any other subject I have yet to meet. Totally omnipresent, always there, will not go away, will not need permission to film it; yet like the perfect subject has mood swings, so sometimes will be indifferent or sullen, sometimes kind and pretty, sometimes wild as the winds that crash over its body, sometimes serene and calm, silent, sometimes mysterious as Lulu’s smile and deeper than deep eyes, and sometimes like a hot night in the tropics: balmy, sticky-sweet and forever lasting.
Pull all the characters into one large net - swoosh - Wei the fisherman who lives at the end of Janshatin in a world which drifts in and out of seasons; the catch, the nets, boat building, mending; the village, untouched perhaps for centuries, a rough and hardy world with tales of sea monsters and mermaids. Further east the beach drifts to modernity and beach sundry, little shacks and restaurants offering delicious, mouth-watering sea recipes, abalone crushed fat with the tiniest shrimps, large fish heads drowned in sesame seed oil, ginger and garlic, laid on a bubbling hot platter; raw crab legs dribbled with alcohol, seaweed of varied colors and shapes, textures and smells …
The net tightens as we come nearer to our home in the compound hidden by fig trees.
The fishermen’s wives bring the catch early to sell at the bottom of the compound; they gather day in, day out; with shrimps and octopus and fruit and vegetable. The other day we bought live octopus and left them on the counter. Later when we came to make them, they had escaped across the counter and were heading for the sink. We just could not bring ourselves to eat them, so we packed them up in a dish and took them back to the sea. It was full moon and we waded in as far as we could and we could almost see the gasp of life as they slipped and struggled out to the water, then gone.
So the net fastens around the characters of Janshatin and the seasons which slowly move in slow rhythmic change from winter to summer and back again.
Between these musings I had my tooth fixed at the local Chinese medicine hospital in the old part of Huangdao, an hour from home. The dentist did not want to give me an injection – she laughed at my tears, she was incredulous that I needed to be numbed – but I begged her via Ying, so she gave in, telling me very sternly she really had heard nothing like this. Most Chinese went in, she drilled, without a moan, without a tear, and that was that.
I felt ridiculous, sweating in the old chair as a mother and her baby watched patiently, waiting to be treated next. It took one hour, she patched the tooth which I had been told in Canada would have to be whisked out or an implant or the like at a cost of 2,000 dollars.
It cost $60. I was very impressed, even though she wrote in my hospital book that I was a wimp!
