1. When Jean-Jacques Annaud's Film Wolf Totem Came out in 2015, An
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NOTES NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. When Jean-Jacques Annaud’s flm Wolf Totem came out in 2015, an ethnic Mongolian writer Guo Xuebo claimed that the “movie, released at Lunar New Year and showing folk traditions, rituals and lives of the ethnic Mongolian nomads and their bond with wolves, distorts the truth.” See Laura Zhou’s “Wolf Totem: writer blasts hit flm over ‘fake’ Mongolian culture” in the South China Morning Post on February 24, 2015. 2. See Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, particularly Chap. 7, “On the Sublime”. 3. J. Gerard Dollar in “In Wilderness is the Preservation of China” labels Jiang Rong’s novel as “‘neo-naturalistic,’ a Chinese novel in the spirit of Jack London” (412). 4. Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (1929) suggests the lineage from European to American cultures. Hesse’s protagonist resembles a “wolf of the Steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd” (18). The steppes would take the fgurative “werewolf” (62) all the way across Central Asia to the Orient. But it is a mere Orientalist gesture to increase the polarity within the protagonist, a device to sharpen the contrast of “God and the Devil” within Christianity, goodness and the temptation © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 203 S.-M. Ma, Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-58033-3 204 NOTES of evil. “There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement were the wolf and man in Harry” (48). The wolf is, needless to say, a fgure of speech. 5. This dichotomy of wolves and sheep is common in “recent Chinese writings,” according to Chengzhou He in “Poetic Wolves and Environmental Imagination.” Many Chinese writers, such as Jia Pingwa in Huainian lang (Remembering the wolves), portrayed wolves “in an unusually positive and appreciating manner” (398). 6. J. Gerard Dollar in “In Wilderness is the Preservation of China” asserts that the exile is “a radical dislocation from Beijing, an exile so extreme that it leads to the death of an old self and the fashion- ing of a new pilgrim self … an important part of each pilgrim- age is the attempt to fnd and recover the wild” (417). However, Joan Chen’s flm Xiu Xiu:The Sent Down Girl (1998) presents an urban woman willing to give up her body repeatedly to obtain offcial approval to return to the city, alas, to no avail. Chen’s bleak portrayal of a corrupt and woman-eating Maoist China accounts for the flm’s total ban in China. 7. Chengzhou He in “The Wolf Myth and Chinese Environmental Sentimentalism in Wolf Totem” describes these “new arrivals” as “most of them Han Chinese” (787). 8. Chengzhou He in “Poetic Wolves and Environmental Imagination” argues that it is because of defeats in the early part of the twenti- eth century that the Chinese began to study this “foreign, alien but vital image in Western culture,” including Jack London. He con- tends that “the Western wolf images were brought in and praised in order to break down the centuries-old feudal ideas of passivity and obedience that had confned the minds of Chinese people and sup- pressed their natural desires and feelings” (399). 9. See Tessa Thorniley’s “Andrew Simpson: The Wolf Whisperer” in The Telegraph, 25 June 2012. 10. See Qiao Meng and Noritah Omar, as well as the Wolfgang Kubin entry in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Kubin# cite_note-10. 11. See Tennyson’s In Memoriam: “Who trusted God was love indeed/And love Creation’s fnal law/Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek’d against his creed”. NOTES 205 NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. That elsewhere ranges as far as Africa, “China’s Second Continent,” and “Ghina.” Peering into Chinese ethnocentrism from outside, Christine Choy gives her 2014 documentary of China’s migrants in Ghana that wry title of Ghina; Howard French also favors a fg- ure of speech no less neologistic for his 2014 book subtitled How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. Both Choy’s coinage and French’s metaphor suggest Chinese neoimperial domination of Africa, a new scramble for the “dark” continent. The scramble stems from a self-identity as a victim of history, struggling to achieve its, so-called, Manifest Destiny in the new millennium. 2. See Jing Yang’s “Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War”. 3. See Hu and Zhang, p. 1. 4. One example of how Ha Jin dramatizes Vautrin’s failure to per- ceive sexual crimes against young students who seemed to return unscathed, occurs in Hu and Zhang’s “Appendix.” In Vautrin’s record of “The First Ten Days of Japanese Occupation, December 13–23,” Vautrin attributes the miraculous release of six girls to “prayer”: “six of the girls came back at fve the next morning unharmed—both of these we believe were wrought by prayer” (179). Vautrin’s “royal we” does not include Ha Jin’s Anling, who, although a Christian, keeps mum about her suspicion of the girls’ harrowing experiences. 5. See Sheng-mei Ma’s Alienglish (2014), especially Chap. 11, “New China Hands: The Ugly Chinese through Ha Jin’s Fourth Wall of English”. 6. Harman’s radical changes to Yan’s original are endorsed by Glen Jennings’s review “The High and the Low”: Nicky Harman “makes substantial and effective choices in the way she presents the narrative voice and the structure of The Flowers of War. She dispenses completely with Yan’s plot device from the original Chinese novel (金陵十三钗 [13 Flowers of Nanking]) of using the narrator’s adult aunt to look back on events as a source of histori- cal information and refection on character and intent. Instead, Harman keeps attention focused tightly on the action as it unfolds, especially with the thirteen-year-old school girl Shujuan 206 NOTES as she experiences war from the threatened church compound. Harman’s decision to concentrate on the moment of initial expe- rience renders the narrative voice immediate and engaging. We sense the visceral fear and horror of the Nanking massacre as it wounds or destroys the individuals we come to know”. 7. Zhang’s flm was selected as the Chinese entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 84th Academy Awards in 2011, but it did not make the fnal shortlist. It was a big blow to Zhang and to the Chinese audience. 8. See Jing Yang’s “Rewriting the Chinese National Epic in an Age of Global Consumerism: City of Life and Death and The Flowers of War,” 249. 9. The conceit of concluding at the moment when the Rape of Nanking is set to engulf the city resembles Aharon Appelfeld’s Holocaust fction Badenheim 1939 (1980), except that Appelfeld’s satire and critique of European Jewry’s wishful thinking stems from a Holocaust survivor’s frsthand experience. 10. To borrow from Mizumura’s The Fall of Language in the Age of English. NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. See Chap. 4, “My Aspergirl: Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy and Visualizations,” in Sheng-mei Ma’s Alienglish: Eastern Diasporas in Anglo-American Tongues (2014). 2. See Stuart Murray’s Representing Autism (2008), which contends that autism has become “badges of personality, signs of eccentricity” (1) through “sentimentalizing narratives of mainstream news media” (4). Autism turns into a “cause célèbre,” a “fashion” (11), rendering “autism and savantism … synonymous” (65). Murray also advances the notion of “idiot savant” (66). 3. Ian Hacking in “Humans, Aliens and Autism” notes that autists routinely make no eye contact with others, nor do autists’ eyes show much emotion. “Some neurotypicals are frightened by the blankness,” Hacking continues, “for they feel that maybe there is no soul there” (52). 4. A favorite Zen koan, the fnger pointing at a moon that is not the moon. This is used by Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon (1973) when NOTES 207 Lee urges “emotional content” in kung fu kicks and the need to “feel” certain spirituality beyond the body’s extremities, be it one’s foot or one’s fnger. 5. In “Humans, Aliens and Autism,” Ian Hacking theorizes an egalitar- ian relationship between “neurotypicals” and autists in a “neurodiver- sity movement” (46). Naoki Hidashida, an autistic thirteen-year-old, also advances that autism is normal to people with autism (The Reason I Jump [2007] 45). 6. Henri Bergson in Laughter (1900) argues that mechanical inelastic- ity or the inability to adapt constitutes comical performances. For the audience, readers, and spectators to laugh at the comic’s misery and faux pas, it requires a distancing of compassion, even heartlessness. 7. Even the satirist-novelist Yu Hua uses Archimedes’ maxim in the Preface to China in Ten Words (2011), which goes to show how prevalent the drive for earth-shaking excellence is in contemporary China that even someone with as iconoclastic a streak as Yu Hua would fall for Archimedes’ rhetorical infation. 8. Photographic memory is a trait often attributed to fctitious char- acters with Asperger’s Syndrome, such as Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s millennium trilogy. Bartleby in Herman Melville’s epon- ymous story is a scrivener, a copyist, who predates cameras and Xerox machines. Temple Grandin’s Thinking in Pictures (1995) professes that her autism dictates not only photographic memory but also a thinking process in pictures.