“Via Petroni Sette”[1] by Abby Rosebrock

Posted on by

In January they told us Americans, indicating the girls with their eyes, that Bologna was a fairly quiet little city and in our search for apartments we would have only to avoid two particular spots: the area around the train station, predictably, and the Via Petroni. Of the eight apartments I surveyed I chose one in the latter zone, building number seven. The residents were the only ones who hadn’t offered me coffee during the interview, but I supposed they had been nice enough regardless, and there was their dog Brando to consider. Brando took a liking to me right off. He was knee-high and fox-shaped and the pale yellow color of dry sand. He was one of two dogs I fell in love with that year, and, unlike the other, Brando barked in plain English and loved me back.

I wondered what could be so bad about this Via Petroni, which in daylight looked no seedier to me than any of the other streets in the center of town. It was connected to a square called Piazza Verdi and for that reason associated in my mind with the opera, tamest and most charming and decrepit of all the fine arts. In fact I was to notice a few days later that bordering Piazza Verdi was Bologna’s very own opera house, stately yet somehow unassuming. I imagined strolling home through Piazza Verdi in the evenings with violins playing, among wholesome choristers and intellectuals, among suited middle-aged men walking arm-in-arm with their Sofia Loren-lookalike dates and whistling Rossini, sexual impulses appropriately in tact. I imagined that the people of Piazza Verdi would be dapper and inspiring and that I would enjoy walking among them after late-afternoon lectures at the University to my quaint bohemian household on the Via Petroni and to Brando, who loved me. At any rate I did not expect that by mid-February, once the semester was in full swing, the Piazza Verdi would be fixed in my mind as a living illustration of Dante’s hell; nor did I expect that this lot beside the opera house would acquire with the onset of springtime heat an impenetrable stench akin to that of taped-off, waste-ridden sections of zoological parks to which visitors are forbidden access.

I learned not long after moving in that neither the neighborhood nor the apartment would meet the standards I had set for them. Brando, for example, in spite of his charms, was little compensation for his owner and the padrone of Apartment Twenty-Two. Pippo was freakishly tall, approaching seven feet, with crooked front teeth, a face covered in coarse brown hair and a habit of changing his clothes about every fourteen days. He was the victim of a broken leg sustained during some mysterious bout of drunken debauchery in Ferrara not long after my arrival. At first I had thought the seven feet of him charming, the shoulder-length, matted hair and outspoken anarchism all signs of an admirably free spirit. There really was something of the lover in his manner of eating soup like a prehistoric ogre. He called it Zuppa di Bastardo, “fatta da bastardi e mangiata da bastardi,[2] a piccante slop of beans and potatoes he had invented in the mountains of Trentino years before moving to Bologna for classes at the art school he never attended.

The assistant chef was Duccio, Pippo’s long-time friend who had moved with him from Trentino to “study” in Bologna – not officially a roommate but an honorary bearer of the key he refused to renounce on moving out of Via Petroni the previous year to chase after some Ilaria in Florence. Whenever he needed a respite from amorous pursuits he returned to our place, often sleeping on our couch and (to his credit) paying a small share of the grocery bill. Duccio had beautiful, crystalline, cracked-out blue eyes.He was a bit thinner than Pippo and, though shorter, had more trouble carrying around his body, so that he was always hunched-over in a sinister-looking posture. Otherwise the two looked very much alike and were difficult to tell apart for the first couple of weeks. I liked to watch Pippo and Duccio stooping over their cracked earthenware bowls and licking them clean and collecting our bowls to lick after we had finished eating or appeared to have finished eating. I liked when the kitchen smelled more like Pippo and Duccio’s rosemary legume slop and less like cannabis. In fact there were aspects of Pippo that I liked very much, but his injury was a cross for us all to bear.

For months he lived on the couch in the kitchen by day and barked at us more loudly than Brando did. Gwladys Guez, the little French coquette from Brittany who shared my room, took to seducing her acquaintances just to get out of the house. Her most tenacious suitor was a man in his sixties who claimed to manage the jazz band we heard every weekend in the underground crypt and who stopped by occasionally to stock our pantry with champagne and coffee cake. Samir, a computer programmer and the flatmate whom Pippo called “Maghreb,” bought a Vespa and took a job delivering pizzas for peace of mind. Anna stopped frequenting her painting classes to take care of her wounded lover. In the mornings she drew up a stool next to Pippo’s sofa and didn’t budge for interminable shifts, taking breaks only to cook Pippo’s meals and brew him coffee. Together they played an American computer game on Samir’s old laptop, and Pippo thundered when the screen cut off every couple of minutes. After a month or so, he became maniacal and spoke to no one until he could conquer “Monkey Island,” with the s pronounced like a z, in the duration between system crashes. Anna continued to brew his coffee. I washed his dishes. Oli l’Olandese,[3] another former roommate in possession of a key, cleaned the apartment every week when she could carve out a break from writing her thesis. She studied anthropology and may very well have hung around the apartment out of an intellectual interest in our living habits. Oli and I took turns walking Brando in the early afternoons and – after he started sneaking in the kitchen every night to defecate on the small patch of floor space where Pippo was known to rest his beer can – in the evenings, too.

All this might have been fine, a tolerable discomfort, until the suspicion occurred to Gwladys Guez and me that Pippo may not have been so incapacitated after all, on the evidence of his nightly, sleep-depriving, earth-shattering sessions of faccendo l’amore[4] with Anna, more than two feet shorter than he and apparently not very difficult to please. Sometimes he played a recording of Jimi Hindrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” to obscure the noise, but an electric guitar was no match for their moaning and acrobatics. These incidences began in March, when the winter chill was dissipating and it became possible to sleep without several layers of clothing, the sheets of cellophane we had duck-taped to the walls in replacement of several broken windows being sufficient to shut out the mild frosts. Around the time the poplar trees began to bloom, Pippo and Anna started having the kind of sex that the poets associate with springtime. It was the kind of sex that made one on the outside feel destined to be alone for the rest of her life, and resentful of doing everybody’s dishes.

In fact it wasn’t terribly long before I gave up on the dishes, one afternoon when Pippo was dictating the recipe for stuffed peppers to Anna and lifting up the waist of Oli’s skirt to examine her backside as she knelt on the floor wiping up spilt red wine.

“You are getting tan,” he told her.

He had beaten Monkey Izland that morning and was feeling satisfied with himself, like some 19th-century mustached game-hunter who had set out in a colonized jungle and caught himself a real monkey.

Oli looked up at Pippo and at Duccio sitting next to him. Then she bent over again and continued scrubbing.

Duccio had explained to me a few nights before that things were strange between Oli and him since he had taken up sleeping with her and with the Florentine Ilaria at the same time. His Italian grammar was such that it remains ambiguous as to whether Duccio meant he was carrying on simultaneous, separate affairs with these women or habitually sleeping with them both at once, with three to a bed, in a jealousy-ridden ménage-a-trois. Regardless, he seemed rather proud of himself. Torn between his best friend and his faithful housekeeper, Pippo had not yet taken sides with either Duccio or Oli and had been deliberating for weeks.

“Oli is profoundly envious,” Duccio had confided me that evening as he helped me find a concert hall I should have looked for on my own. “She is in love, and a woman becomes irrational in such a condition. But she can be a very sympathetic person.”

All this I could read in Oli’s glance to the two men, to the 26-year-old jobless men who reeked of cigarettes and limoncello and made excellent soup and rarely bathed and had worn holes in the upholstery of our sofa. I dropped the encrusted plate I was working on into the sink and said to Pippo in my broken Italian, “It is not done that way. Do not do that. It is maleducato[5] and shows that you don’t respect anyone,” whereupon Pippo became enraged at me for the first and only time during my tenure at the Via Petroni, slammed down the screen of Samir’s laptop to better see my face and said, “Basta con questo moralismo sessuale.[6] Oli is my friend and she will tell me if she doesn’t like me looking at her culo. Until then I look at her culo[7] whenever I want. Mind your own business. Cazzi tuoi.[8]”

I stood silently for a moment and put down my dish with as little clatter as possible and went to my bedroom to start planning a trip to London for the next weekend. And I made a policy of letting the dishes pile up indefinitely.

But those versed in the politics of Bologna’s social scene would notice readily that my flatmates were not of the typical Via Petroni crowd we had been warned of, the punkabestia, dreadlocked self-proclaimed “beast-punks” in their twenties, dressed in gothic attire and fond of sitting under the porticos, or out in the open on Piazza Verdi, with their small-eyed, swollen-nippled or grossly-testicled, vicious-looking pitbulls and drinking themselves into a rambling stupor. They were generally harmless, aside from the occasional sexist remarks the more intoxicated male punkabestia would hurl at fair-complexioned, foreign-looking girls, and after a month in Italy we were deaf to such comments, anyways. Various creation myths circulated that explained the punkabestia’s origins. Some say there had been a law in Italy, inspired the culture of Catholic benevolence, that the sole owner of a domestic animal could not legally be sent to jail for any reason, and drug-dealers took to buying dogs as insurance against imprisonment. Others believe that at one time pet-owners were given small stipends by the government, making dogs a popular accessory among unemployed students. Whatever the reason, most locals agreed that about ten years before my arrival in Italy it became all the rage among Bologna’s youth to dress “alternatively” and roam the streets with snarling dogs on metal leashes. (“Bologna has a vibrant student community of cosmopolitan intellectuals,” I once wrote home to my father in South Carolina, paraphrasing a study abroad brochure I had read somewhere along the way.)

My roommates and I found prideful solidarity in our decidedly not being among the punkabestia ranks, and in our not taking them seriously. But their presence around the Via Petroni was enough, for a spell, to make me dread my evening walks home through the piazza that, like so much else in my life, I had romanticized prematurely based on its name, on the engraved marble sign at its entrance, on its title in the index of my map.

But not long ago, at the height of my disillusionment with the place (the kind I’m told everybody goes through for a couple of weeks upon moving overseas), just after I had stepped through a bevy of drunken twenty-somethings, sitting indian-style among broken bottles and puddles of urine and stinking up the Piazza Verdi with the dogs they had bred and cultivated to look as dumb and wretched as themselves, trashing the medieval architecture they felt it their political duty, as anarchists, to disrespect – it was just after I had picked my way through a crowd of these that I climbed up the slippery marble stairs of my apartment building and saw scotch-taped to the wall next to a neighbor’s door the following message in blue ink on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch sheet of white paper:

Ho trovato una maglia nella Via Petroni 7. È VERDE [in green marker] con maniche NERE [in black marker]. Era sporchissima ma l’ho lavata. È molto bella e fa ancora fresco fuori e voglio consegnarla alla person giusta. Se è tua, chiamami!!”[9]

There were a careful sketch of the sweatshirt and two exclamation marks after the text and the girl’s telephone number written large and boldly across the bottom of the sign. I thought for a moment of this neighbor of ours, a friend of the apartment who often showed up asking for cigarette rolling papers or sugar and was one of the few who could be counted on, my flatmates assured me, to return the favor. I thought of her, dreadlocked and foul-smelling, washing the lost sweatshirt, rummaging through her apartment for a blue pen and green and black markers and clean white computer paper and scotch tape and drawing up a plan for this magnificently thoughtful sign of hers. I stood there in the hallway caught up for a few irrational moments by a visceral love for Italy, for Italians, for the neighborhood, for the Via Petroni, punkabestia and all. I loved Pippo’s broken leg and Anna and Gwladys Guez and Samir and Oli and even Duccio and Brando’s diarrhea and the ubiquitous stench of alcohol. I loved the past few months and the next few months to come and I rushed into my apartment and forgot about the James Joyce novel in my purse.

Pippo and I were the only flatmates around that night; we spent the evening on the sofa eating tough-crusted Pugliese bread and olive oil with Brando. Pippo honored my request for his famous impression of the effeminate Frenchman who, years before, had refused him admission to a campsite because he had not pronounced bungalow to the Frenchman’s liking. He thanked me when I got up to fetch him a cigarette lighter. He told me affectionately that he was sure I had not voted for Regan. I ate my bread and drank our good wine and listened politely and contentedly to Pippo’s theories on sexual liberation and even agreed with a sentence or two.

——————————————————————————–

[1] 7 Petroni Street

[2] “made by bastards, eaten by bastards”

[3] Olandese: Dutch. Oli’s father was from the Netherlands.

[4] lovemaking

[5] rude, the result of poor upbringing

[6] “Enough with this sexual moralism.”

[7] ass

[8] Vulgar colloquialism for “Mind your own business.” Literally, “your dicks.”

[9] “I have found a sweatshirt in the Via Petroni 7. It’s GREEN with BLACK sleeves. It was extremely dirty but I washed it. It is very pretty and it’s still chilly outside and I want to give it back to the right person. If it’s yours, call me!!”

Listening to Lenka by Erica Wolff CC ’04

Posted on by

She was not like the others, this Lenka. – not at all like the other Lenkas (the Lenkas are everywhere in Prague, as abundant and prized as the Pilsner beer). It is a testament to an undeclared adversity to diversity that nearly every female one encounters in Czech Republic answers to the name Lenka. Well, there are the Jitkas too – the Jitkas, the Janas and the Petras. But the Lenkas, they are the embodiment of Czech womanhood. They are usually blond (either natural or affected), tall and thin but undeniably sturdy- hard, angular features and old lady eyes set in otherwise youthful faces. They laugh occasionally, though humor and gaiety are not their nearest companions. They are haunted by a brutal past, hardened by a history so gripping that they cannot quite embrace the promising future that lies ahead. They are all short skirts and long necks – barely animated tree trunks trudging through the daily pain they call life.

But she was different, this Lenka – eyes so wide and shiny you could not help but stare. Smile so sincere and unusually permanent, you could not help but smile back.

“So you were here in the 80’s…I mean, you grew up under Communism, right?” I was thrilled that this new American visitor (this Josh from LA) had now replaced me as the most naïve young westerner in the group. It had taken me months to shed that air of skeptical “other.” Only recently had I been able to dull the obvious ignorance and awe that I used to display every time I met a Czech peer who (yes, of course!) had been taught to hate the ‘capitalist pigs’ while I had been buying up Boardwalk and Parkplace and contemplating the life lessons learned in a game like Monopoly.

“What?” Lenka asked with her usual well-meaning smile.

“You were here when the Communists were in power, huh? Wasn’t it…?” Josh could hardly find the word for what he thought “it” must have been like.

“Oh, yes, yes. I was here.” She paused for a moment. “But no, it wasn’t so bad, you know. I mean, it was nice then.”

“Nice?” I asked with obvious doubt and a not too well masked sense of disgust. I had never heard this type of response before.

“Jo,” she nodded. “You know, it was, well, easier sometimes. You know, now, you go the store and you want a pair of shoes. There are like, well, fifty different kinds and you have to choose from them. And back then, it was, well, here, these are shoes. Just one kind. And you wear them. And everybody wears them. They’re just shoes, you know – for your feet. So who really cares?”

None of us were quite ready to respond.

She went on, “And it wasn’t too bad, you know. Everything is simple and you go to school and you have your friends. And it was not like a prison. In the summer you go the cottage in the country. And there are mountains and there is sun- so, you know, this is our childhood.”

Not even prior exposure to Lenka’s unwavering optimism had prepared me for this response. After four months of studying Czech history and reading Czech literature I had yet to hear an account of life under Communism quite like this. I knew about the hardships, the loss of opportunities, the stifling of intellectual life; but the joys of simplicity? This was not a perspective I’d encountered before.

I found her acceptance of Communism unnerving. It seemed to affront every instinct of my democratic soul. She continued to speak about her childhood, laughing uncontrollably about some incident involving her sister and a lake. I stared at her wide, forgiving eyes, wondering why the bitterness was absent from her voice. And slowly, as the stories continued, I began to see the origin of her contentment. It was not so much that she liked living under Communism, but that she liked living as a child…and she just so happened to have been a child when the Communists were in power. Her positive perception of Communism was nothing more than a young adult’s nostalgia for the jollity of childhood.

“But some things were strange,” she finally admitted. “Like being Jewish, you know. We were Jewish but we didn’t really know it.”

“So your family hid it from you?” Josh asked. “They weren’t allowed to say they were Jewish?”

“Oh, no, no,” Lenka explained, “No, we knew we were Jewish, you know. Sometime, they told us, like, well, ‘we are Jewish.’ But really, I didn’t know what that means. Well, sometimes my grandmother did some prayers. But that was it. And no one taught us about it. So now, it is like, oh, this is what it is to be Jewish.”

She was referring “now” to our group – to the way we all met. We had come to know each other by going to the Chabad House here in Prague. These young people – Czechs, Americans, Israelis, whoever – we had all been going to the Shabbat services at this orthodox synagogue. Not one of us was orthodox (not even close). I suppose we all had our own reasons for going there – to connect to other Jews and to Judaism, to find something welcoming and comfortable when so far from home, to learn a bit more about our religion and our culture in a place where that tradition had deep historical roots.

I’d never gone to synagogue regularly when living in the U.S. I hadn’t seen the point. Well, I hadn’t exactly looked very hard for the point, either. But since I’d been living in Prague, I’d been going to Chabad nearly every week. It hadn’t changed my lifestyle tremendously. The rest of the week I was my old secular self. But come Friday evening, I gave myself a little reminder- you are Jewish. You are here in Europe, thousands of miles away from your Jewish home and your Jewish family, but you are still Jewish. Perhaps it was because those reinforcements were absent that I needed Chabad. I needed it to remind me I was Jewish and more so, to explain what Judaism was. Because I, like Lenka, had always known I was Jewish, but I (like Lenka) had not always known what that meant.

Listening to Lenka, I began to realize that oppression comes in many different forms. It is not only by the punitive hand of a totalitarian government that religion and personal expression are suppressed. Sometimes it is something as subtle as an attractive dominant culture that keeps us from practicing an inherited tradition or from understanding the origins of the self. I had been looking at these people with such assumed superiority. With my proud western perspective, I alone (among these Czech friends) knew the joys of liberality, the value of a democratic tradition. I, the veteran of a democratic state, looked with pity upon these virgin capitalists, these poor, struggling people trying desperately to shed the memory of oppression and rebuild their nation in the model of my western utopia.

And here was this Lenka, this child of an “underprivileged” nation, showing me, for the first time, that what she had suffered was perhaps not terribly different from what I myself had experienced. We had both known suppression in varying forms. We had simply been inhibited by different forces. And perhaps I had needed to come this land where religious expression was historically restricted in order to recognize how the freedoms of my homeland had somehow kept me from fully practicing my religion.

It was not so much that I was equating the horrors of the Communist regime with the smaller inadequacies of my own political system. But by understanding the limitations of my great American upbringing I was somehow able to conceptualize the realities of forty plus years of Communist rule. What was once, to me, merely an episode of historical trauma, a chapter in the history of a foreign peoples – distant and surreal – was now a sort of personal reality. People not only suffered through the Communist era, they actually lived through it. Someone my age had had a childhood under this a regime; and more than that – she had fond memories of her childhood under this regime. She, like I, had enjoyed her upbringing despite obvious challenges. And now, from our vastly divergent childhoods, we were together, as young adults, trying to recapture a tradition and a culture that, for varying reasons, had previously been denied.

Arrival

Posted on by

When we first arrived in Shirazi, a rural village my SIT Kenya program stayed at for 10 days, it was chaos. About 100 villagers swarmed around my classmates and me as we got off the bus, excited to inspect their new sons and daughters. Us wazungu (the Kenyan term for white people/foreigners) lined up, and our director called out the name of a host, and then a student. “Fatima,” he called, “and Eric.” I looked over and saw this old woman walk towards me. She would be my mama.

As we had been told to do, I went in for a hug. In Kenya, though, people hug the opposite way we do (going to the right instead of the left). As I hugged her, about 95 villagers laughed hysterically. Apparently I was doing something wrong–it was a great welcome to the village. My academic director handed me my mosquito net and 2 gallons of water. Things had just gotten real.

Mama and I walked about 5 minutes till we got to our house. It was a mud house with a roof made of palm tree branches. She showed me my room–it was clearly the master bedroom, and the only bedroom. It took up about 1/3 of the house.

After putting my stuff down in my room, she gave me the traditional African welcome of fresh, hot tea. In 95 degree weather. As I sat in the darkness of the house sweating and drinking my hot tea, Mama and I tried to communicate. But couldn’t. She spoke no English, and I spoke very limited Kiswahili. We sat there silently, staring at each other. Without a smart phone to look down at and pretend you’re texting, there’s no out during awkward situations. You just have to deal with them.

Then Baba (my homestay father) came over. He was an 81-year-old man, the elder of the village. Of course I only found this out a week into the homestay due to our communication barriers. Meanwhile, we smiled and stared.

Dinner came a little after. My mama was in the room next to me, leaning over the fire preparing something. I asked if I could help, but was told no. Men, she explained, were not allowed to be in the kitchen or help with household duties. For me, a boy who had grown up believing that all work should be shared between men and women, and that sitting while someone else is working for you is wrong, I felt almost as if I was betraying my values by not helping. But this was her house, not mine. So I sat still, trying to be culturally sensitive but feeling uncomfortable about doing so.

When dinner was ready, Baba and I sat on a mat on the floor. Sitting on the mat was a challenge, though. I was wearing a kikhoi, basically a man-skirt (we were told to buy clothes to make us look like culturally appropriate, but looked ridiculous both to us and to the villagers). I wore spandex underneath my kikhoi to make sure my inability to manage my kikhoi wouldn’t lead to more socially awkward situations, and had to learn from how my father sat down the proper way to sit without exposing yourself to the world.

Mama put a giant metal platter down in front of us with coconut rice and chicken. And a bowl of water next to us. Baba passed me the water, so I washed my hands. Both hands. Then he gestured to start eating. And I did. With both hands. Woops. Being overwhelmed, I naturally forgot that, in rural villages, it’s culturally taboo to eat with your left hand. Wipe with the left, eat wit the right. Baba stared at me. I got the hint.

As I started eating with my right hand, I dropped rice everywhere. Baba had this awesome balling technique down where he’d roll the rice and then eat it. I couldn’t seem to do it, so I just kept making a mess. Baba then pointed towards the chicken and grunted. I guessed I should have some?

I picked up a piece of chicken meat, and as I did so, I suddenly became aware of my surroundings. Sitting on the floor next to me was a live chicken. Not one, but 7. And about 10 chicks. I was about to eat their brother. Or father. Or mother. Who knows. All I knew is that I could feel their eyes on me. I’ve never been a vegetarian before, but I’m used to a separation between my meat and its production. Baba grunted again at the chicken, insisting that I take a bite. After all, eating chicken was a rare occasion in the household—it meant killing one, removing the family’s ability to get eggs. I took a bite. The chickens kept looking.

Baba and I ate as much as we could, and then Mama took the dish off the matt and called in my four sisters. She split whatever was left of Baba and my meal with them. From that point on I tried not to eat a lot, as I felt like the more I ate directly decreased the amount of food for everyone. Mama wasn’t okay with my doing this, though, and would often insist that I keep eating until she thought that I was full. Only then would she stop insisting that I eat, and take the food for herself and the girls.

After dinner, my brother (I use “brother” loosely here, as I found out at the end of the week that he was actually my “nephew”) came over and took me to the dock. About 70 people were there, filled with excitement. I asked him what was going on in my broken Kiswahili. Apparently, a fisherman from the village had drowned 2 days before, and someone had just finally found his body. We were waiting by the dock for them to pull it out of the water so we could see it. Kids were everywhere. People were everywhere. They kept craning their necks, staring at the ocean to see the fisherman’s body. Luckily for me, turns out that the body hadn’t been found. Unluckily for me, it would be found the next day, and I would see it at the funeral.

As my “brother” and I walked back to our home in silence, I looked up to the stars above me. They were brighter and clearer than I’d ever seen. Being out of my element, being across the world from my family and friends and everything I had ever known, I could finally take a deep breath. This was why I had left New York City and Columbia for 4 months. These experiences that I would never forget, these people who I was meeting and forming relationships with, this culture that was so foreign to me that I had to adapt to, this language that I had never heard until 3 weeks ago. The beauty of the Indian Ocean, the opportunity to live with nature in a way I never had before. This was my time to experience everything. This was my semester abroad.

China Through Its Movies

Posted on by

The cinema of China has a rich and troubled history that intrigued me even before I studied abroad in Beijing. In the past, most Chinese movies that have made it to the states have been lushly illustrated martial arts numbers (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hero) or quirky Jackie Chan comedies. However, a number of lesser-known Chinese films have been shown in international film festivals and at arthouse theaters since the 1980s, and they offer much more compelling portrayals of Chinese people and events throughout China’s turbulent modern history.

During my semester abroad, I interned at a Chinese film distribution company and had the opportunity to learn more about Chinese cinema and issues of media censorship. Chinese cinema is often divided into different “generations” chronologically. Many of the extremely diverse films that have been made since the twentieth century have explored and captured the sentiments left by cataclysmic events in China’s history, particularly the Cultural Revolution. Their political overtones have led them to be banned by the Chinese government, even to this day.

Besides meeting locals and exploring hutongs, it’s also entirely possible to learn about China within the comforts of your own bed with a bag of popcorn and some juice. From the thick rich depths of Chinese cinematic history I’ve dredged up a list of Chinese movies that are not only great movies in and of themselves, but also formative films that capture pieces of China’s modern history:

Yellow Earth (1984) was one of the first films made after the Cultural Revolution and is considered the signature piece of the Fifth Generation of filmmakers. It was directed by Chen Kaige, and the cinematography is by Zhang Yimou—both of whom would become prominent filmmakers in their own right. The vast, parched landscape of Shaanxi province is the backdrop for the journey of a Communist soldier through impoverished villages searching for rural folksongs to turn into propaganda for the Communist army.

Farewell My Concubine (1993) is the only Chinese-language film to have won the Cannes Palme d’Or. Directed by Chen Kaige, it explores the relationship between two men in a Peking opera troupe and a woman who comes between them, and how the effects of China’s mid-20th-century political turmoil permeates their lives.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991), directed by Zhang Yimou, is one of the most iconic movies of Chinese cinema. Noted for its opulent visuals and sumptuous photography, it tells the story of a nineteen-year-old girl who becomes the new concubine of a wealthy lord, and the tension and intrigue that arises among her and the lord’s three other wives. The film was interpreted as a metaphor for the fragmented civil society of post-Cultural Revolution China and was banned in China for a time.

The Last Emperor (1987), directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, is a biopic about the life of Puyi, the last emperor of China, from his early royal upbringing to the foundation of the early Chinese Republic, to his exile and eventual return. It won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Director in 1987

Unknown Pleasures (2002) is a film about three aimless, disaffected youths growing up in China as part of the new “Birth Control” generation, fed on a steady diet of Western and Chinese popular culture. It is directed by Jia Zhangke, a Sixth Generation filmmaker widely lauded as perhaps “the most important filmmaker working in the world today.”

Repetition

Posted on by

Some of the most beautiful encounters that I had in Paris came from visiting the same place more than once.

There was a bakery around the corner from my university that sold the most mouthwatering desserts and sandwiches (I’m lying: almost every bakery was mouthwatering), and I would visit sometimes twice a day. There were generally three people who worked there—an older woman, a younger woman, and an older man. I would rush in almost every morning and quickly ask wide-eyed for a pain au chocolat before scurrying up too many flights of stairs to a grammar class. The bakery moved at such a fast pace during rush hour. Every customer knew exactly what he wanted, and, unlike me, he knew exactly how to say it.

I spent a great deal of time finding the right words before getting to the front of the line. I wasn’t comfortable until after the first month. What surprised me though is that despite the hustle of early morning crowds, the younger woman had seen my face so much that she would begin to notice when I was tired or sick. She would always greet me (Salut Madamoiselle!) and ask me if I was well (Ça va?). If she had a difficult customer while I was in line, she would give me a knowing wink. I realized after leaving Paris that she’s one of the people I wish that I could have said goodbye to. If I were to write a novel about my about my time abroad, she would be a constant character that floated in and out of scenes filled with baguettes (viennoises) and sleepy mornings. She, unintentionally, has seen me in my worst head colds and at my brightest afternoons. Who would think that out of all the relationships I made while abroad, I would want to say goodbye to someone like this? It’s amazing how almost every person helps to shape your experience in a different place whether they realize it or not.