Clever ancient Chinese tricks: 03 (遗矢如冰)

 

遺矢如冰 / 遗矢如冰

yí shǐ rú bīng

“leave-behind excrement like ice”

This is from 晉書 / 晋书 / Jìn Shū / the Book of Jin (/ History of the Jin Dynasty), published in 648 A.D.

    This version is my own summary.  

    Army X was being pursued.  

    Their general asked the men to pour water over the horse dung in the tracks, which froze in the cold.  

    When the enemy soldiers arrived at that spot and saw that the horse dung had frozen over, they read it as Army X having passed that way ages ago, too far away for them to pursue, so they gave up the chase.

Clever ancient Chinese tricks: 02 (草船借箭)

 

Clever strategist 諸葛亮 / 诸葛亮 Zhūgě Liàng (aka 孔明 Kong Ming, 181–234 A.D.) was a contemporary of, but on the opposite side to, 曹操 Cáo Cāo (mentioned in Clever ancient Chinese tricks:  01 (望梅止渴)).

    This is my summary.  You can google for the full version on the historical background and details.

    Zhūgě Liàng was tasked with producing 100,000 arrows within ten days in a battle against Cáo Cāo.  He said he’d do it in three.

    He had the men make human effigies out of the reeds around them, and stick them upright on boats.

    When it got foggy after dark, they pushed the boats out.  

    Cáo Cāo’s soldiers saw these shapes moving about on the water among the rushes, and started shooting (arrows) at them.  The arrows stuck in the reed effigies.

    Zhuge Liang’s men then retrieved the boats and pulled out the arrows.

Chinese sayings: 34 (望梅止渴)

 望梅止渴

wàng méi zhǐ kě

“expect plum stop thirst”

This saying is based on a trick that famous historical figure 曹操 Cáo Cāo (/ Ts’ao Ts’ao, 155–220A.D.) used for getting his soldiers to carry on marching.

    Cao Cao’s army, on their way to the battleground, had run out of water and were flagging.  

    To keep them going, Cao Cao told them that ahead was a grove of plum trees.  Thinking about the plums, the men started to salivate, which quenched their thirst. 

NB:  This is also logged under Clever ancient Chinese tricks:  01 (望梅止渴)

Clever ancient Chinese tricks: 01 (望梅止渴)

 

望梅止渴

wàng méi zhǐ kě

“expect plum stop thirst”

This saying is based on a trick that famous historical figure 曹操 Cáo Cāo (/ Ts’ao Ts’ao, 155–220A.D.) used for getting his soldiers to carry on marching.

    Cao Cao’s army, on their way to the battleground, had run out of water and were flagging.  

    To keep them going, Cao Cao told them that ahead was a grove of plum trees.  Thinking about the plums, the men started to salivate, which quenched their thirst. 

The right time will come

 

Retired teacher student makes some mistakes in her putting together a sentence, saying she was doing it on the bus.

    I replied saying, “Multi-tasking and Chinese don’t seem to work well together,” in an attempt to comfort her — that she was making those mistakes (which were minor) only because her attention was divided.  She came back saying, “Not for me anyway.”

    So, I tried a new approach.  Below is my response to her (and it applies to all students who might think they won’t get to the point of fluency [just purely not confident enough]).

    Think driving:  same thing.

    At first, there'll seem to be an overwhelming range of things to touch/press/tread/look at, e.g., mirrors (rear view; wing); levers (gear stick for manual; indicator; windscreen wipers); pedals (accelerator; brake; clutch).  All while the car is moving.

    Once you've reached the right point, you won't be aware of controlling all those things.  You could even be chatting to your passenger(s)!

Film continuity

 

From googling:  

Quote 

In film, continuity is the notion that a sequence of shots all need to feel as unified and fluid as if they were a single shot. If a director chooses to cut from one shot to another, audiences should feel like nothing has changed in terms of time and space. 

Unquote

I’m watching a mainland Chinese drama on YouTube at the moment.

    In filming terms, whether it’s documentary or drama, continuity is very important.

    I’ve only ever worked in documentary film production, so I shall speak from this angle.

    In 1988, I was in China as a member of the crew filming an American motorcyclist working his way across China on the Silk Route, from Shanghai in the east to Xinjiang in the south west, exiting China into north Pakistan.

    The final copy that goes out is almost never ever shot in the same sequence.  Often there’re extra shots filmed later as fillers-in / cutaways.  

    For example, we might film the man entering a village, walking around the market and buying a watermelon.  A crowd would predictably gather in no time at all, to watch, sometimes even out of thin air if we were filming in the middle of nowhere, so we might have to get out as soon as we’d done the main shots, filming his departure. 

 

    We might then decide it’d be good to add a shot of him eating the watermelon he’d bought, but it might have to be done somewhere else or even a day later when we’d have a bit more time without having to do crowd control.  

    This is when continuity comes in:  we must make sure the motorcyclist is still wearing the same clothes as when he rode into the village, if we wanted to make it look like he was eating the watermelon there and then.

    The YouTube Chinese drama I’m watching was set and aired in 2016, so it’s very modern, with the female protagonist sporting hair dyed orange and curly. 

 

    In episode 14, she falls down a great height, is found unconscious by two passers-by and taken to hospital where she remains in a coma for a few days.  

    When she wakes up, her hair is still orange, but now straight.  So who would’ve combed her hair while she was lying in a coma in a hospital bed, never mind to the point of straightening out the curls?

    At the point of leaving the hospital, her curls are back.  This bit might be a bit more believable, as she could’ve dolled herself up again just before stepping out into the wide world, although the plot didn’t actually need this detail. 

    This is sheer sloppiness in continuity.  (Occupational hazard on my part, always noticing such things…)

Casting

 

As a child, I’d always thought that playing the baddie is much more fun.  

    When I was 11, I wrote a short play for the school’s arts festival (or some artistic production competition), called 小玲的生日 / xiǎo Líng de shēngrì / Little Ling’s birthday.  The protagonist was a spoilt brat who was arrogant and given to boasting, and ended up with the cream on her birthday cake smeared all over the front of her fussy frilly top at her birthday party.  It was my 11-year-old self having a bit of fun at taking such people down a peg or two.  I played Little Ling and had good fun.

    In the second half of the 80s, when I was working at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) on two Chinese computer research projects, a white British film producer turned up one day looking for two Orientals for a seedy Chinese gambling den scene in her film.  

    Mr Tang, the Chinese friend from Taiwan, who an English chap had said “looked like a Beijing taxi driver” (i.e., thuggish, in the experience of that Englishman with Beijing taxi drivers during his Year Abroad in the early 80s), got the part of the bloke.  

    The producer thought my face would do, but my finger nails were too short for the kind of image she wanted to project in the role (not Fu Manchu enough, I got the feeling), and there was no time to wait for them to grow.  (Those were the days before the now-ubiquitous nail bars where you can get a new set of nails within one sitting session.)  After she left, I thought, “So, my face looks right for a seedy gambling den with dodgy dealings, does it?”

    Over the years, as a film fan, I’ve thought often about being cast for particular roles, wondering, “If I get cast as a selfish person, for example, is it because I actually look selfish?!”

    I’ve just finished watching a mainland Chinese series on YouTube where there is one nasty character:  small minded, mean spirited, conniving, lying and cheating, manipulative.  How does it feel to be chosen for such a role?

    There was a famous Hong Kong Cantonese film star in the 50s and 60s, called 李香琴 Lee Heung-kam.  I’d only ever seen her play nasties:  the jealous cousin, the cruel step-mother, the conniving imperial concubine trying to climb up the imperial social ladder.  

    Lee Heung-kam had started off in Cantonese opera, and she did play quite a few period dramas as well, a lot of the time as the imperial concubine (西宫娘娘 xī gōng niángniang / “west palace madam”) who was always scheming for power and making trouble for the empress (东宫娘娘 dōng gōng niángniang / “east palace madam”).

    In an interview in the 60s, she said the down side to her being so good at acting was that people would recognise her, so she’d return to her car and find it scratched, or the wing mirror twisted off.  Sometimes, if they caught her in person, they’d start shouting abuse at her: for being cruel to her step-child in a particular film, or for sabotaging her male cousin’s love affair with the lovely girl in another film.  EVEN for poisoning the empress in a period drama set in ancient China [when this was the 60s in the 20th century!], calling her “死西宫娘娘 sǐ xī gōng niángniang / goddamned imperial concubine”!  

    Talk about getting totally sucked in!  Haha.