Adventures of A Bystander vs Lust, Caution
A few months ago, one friend brought to my wife a few books from China. One of them is Peter Drucker’s “Adventures of A Bystander”, already translated into Chinese (my wife is doing accounting, so I have the opportunity to meet people and read book outside physics). It is really a lot of fun to read this book, although I know that sometimes when it is easy and fun to read, it could mean the book is not deep or just used some exaggeration to attract attentions. Anyway I like this book very much, probably because I haven’t seen many books that could explain how the society evolves with time in such clarity and at such a high level and from many first-hand materials.
I hope some Chinese thinker/economist can write down something similar for the past century of China. However, I doubt it is possible because it is a sensitive topic. Most people at my age already knew the history we’ve leaned in school is not objective, and there are very few books out there on this topic. This is understandable since the government worries about its legitimacy and wants people to focus on developing economics. In a society emphasis “harmony”, deep and critical thinking is not encouraged. However, without reviewing the history, it might be difficult to find the right way to lead the country as well as to shape the society norm. (Another bad thing as suggested by one of the best economists in China Heng-fu Zou, http://zou.hengfu.blog.163.com/ (his blog in Chinese), http://www.bjreview.com/newsmaker/txt/2007-06/25/content_67194.htm is that most economists in China are not independent, they work for big companies or government and busy with making moneys.)
In Drucker’s book, there is a story about a girl named Mousie Polanyis, who initialed “rural sociology” and influenced many countries (like Croatia and Rumania etc. even later “kibbutz”), but after her marriage in her middle twenties she just quitted politics. When describing the story, Peter Drucker is really like a bystander, he just described how this little girl affects the history without pondering too much about the reason why she quitted.
A sharp comparison to this bystander attitude is presented in a recent film Se, Jie (Lust, Caution) http://imdb.com/title/tt0808357/ by the famous director Lee Ang. (Btw, this film is again suggested to me by my wife, I wouldn’t know that by myself.) The director is trying to touch the prohibited topic of the love between a traitor and the girl who wanted to assassinate him. This topic could be considered as untraditional or even unethical for people both in Mainland and Taiwan. Ang wanted to try to show in that special time when China is invaded by Japan, there is the mixed feeling between love an hate, the always there humanity and the unpredicted and sometimes ridiculous reality. Although this film has a prototype based on a real assassination. But Ang modified a lot the story and eventually the history is just a background for this film.
In fact, people say that in Hollywood films the real history is always modified to enhance the plots of the film and to get audience emotionally involved, e.g. “the brave heart”. I think Ang is better than that because what he wants to express is the “true” feeling of some people at that time and he is very careful about the details. He hopes the audience will remember the scene of the film as a record of history, which I think he did pretty well.
Over, I must confess that as an ordinary person, I enjoy watching Hollywood films although I would definitely encourage everyone to read books like Adventures of A Bystander, which is closer to true history.