Romanticized Sikhs

Although I have only a sample of two, it struck me that two authors of South Asian descent chose Sikhism for the heroic characters in their novels. The first is Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games (published 2007), in which the leading man, Detective Inspector Sartaj Singh, is Sikh and diffuses a grave terrorist threat to the city of Mumbai. The second is Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (1992), in which again the pure, idealistic, generous, almost too good to be true protagonist is also Sikh. Note that both authors are definitely not Sikh themselves.

Sikhism is a relatively young religion, emerging in the 17th century. It came out of the Hindu tradition but absorbs a lot of the concerns and needs in modern life, in response to some parts of Hinduism that may have become outdated or inadequate. In some ways it is very idealistic and deeply concerned about morality and justice, and shares some similarities with Jainism. However, Jainism has a large pacifist component, while Sikh men are raised to be warriors. 

I'm no expert in either Jainism or Sikhism. I am just curious as to why Sikhism is attractive to these two South Asian male novelists who are looking at it from the outside. Perhaps there is a sense or hope that Sikhs have solved the contradiction between peace and violence. Just a wild guess. In my mind, however, the path to dharma is paradoxical and multidimensional. There is no magic bullet. 

I do wonder though: Is this some kind of appropriation? But who am I to say? I'm not Sikh. I'm not even Indian. 

The English Patient

I am not putting on a photo of the movie, released in 1996 by Miramax and adapted and directed by Anthony Minghella. When I first saw it I disliked it a lot without being able to explain my reaction. After I have read the novel, I despise the movie all the more. 

For the novel I have some conflicting feelings. Indeed it is split into two halves: the pre-war years in Cairo and the desert where the extramarital affair between Katharine Clifton and the Hungarian explorer Almasy took place; and 1945 (the present) at an abandoned Tuscan villa where the nurse Hana, her father's friend Caravaggio, a Sikh bomb disposal specialist Kirpal Singh, and a burned, dying Almasy converge. 

The question in my mind was always why these two halves. There is very little apparent thematic connection between the two couples and relationships. One is obsessive and violent and destructive. The other is equal and uncomplicated and healing. One is fundamentally cliched and carries a whiff of rottenness, while the other is raw and young.

The movie gave me the initial impression that Minghella was trying to sell a stale love triangle story as a grand, epic, and simple tragedy. No matter how glossy it is presented, I just can't get the rotten smell out of my nostril. I am not at all against adultery in art, but this is a week-old fish left out of the refrigerator. When you come at such a century-old plot, shouldn't you try to inject some new blood? The "new blood" injected here comes in the form of weird exoticism from Naveen Andrews making love to Juliet Binoche. In the movie, this subplot seems tacked on and awkward. Too much to be a sidebar and too little to compete with the main storyline.

Unfortunately, the novel does not help much in this aspect. The Almasy chapters still leave a bad taste in my mouth. At some point I realized why. These chapters are entirely told from Almasy's point of view. We get none of Katharine's point of view, even though there is a chapter named for her and gives a few pages that appear to be her point of view but have to have been filtered through him. The only thing that could potential save this story from these frustrating and suffocating cliches is the sinister undercurrent that is buried in Almasy's account. He insists that she left him out of conscience and loyalty for her marriage or perhaps fear of her husband (whatever, it's very vague), but her dialogs suggest that she was angry because she could not be more than a secret mistress to him. There is a general feeling of deceit in his overall account, but I won't go there for now. 

Staleness aside, I just find the movie adaptation to be so gigantically ironic. Out of curiosity, I skimmed a number of book reviews, and maybe one out of 10 has a throwaway mention of the unpleasant factoid that Almasy is a Nazi. Throughout the novel, Almasy struggles to conceal this fact, going so far as talking about himself in the third person. That he worked for German spies in the desert for 3 years is revealed only by Caravaggio's exposition. (Yeah, plotting is not a strong point of this novel.) Almasy implies that he decided to help the Axis as a revenge for Katharine's death ("[Rommel] was a brilliant man..."). The real-life Almasy, on which the character is based, was in fact quite active in German army during the war.

Minghella was sensitive to the inconvenient element, and skillfully revised it to some harmless excuse for his "collaboration" with the Germans that even the novel Almasy is unable to cook up out of self-interest. He knew that he must protect the audience from any uneasiness. Adultery is already pushing their limits. 

Indeed the movie unabashedly centers around Almasy's love affair. If Minghella really loved the novel and wanted to adapt it faithfully, he could have made a WWII "The Hurt Locker." Hana's storyline equally shares the intensity with Almasy in the first half, but Kirpal Singh's storyline dominates the second half of the novel. Everything is compelling -- the strength of the character, the thrilling details of bomb disposal, the emotional ambiguity, the cultural conflicts -- which contrasts with the tired cliches in Almasy's half. But Minghella did not want that story.

I don't really know why he kept a shadow of the Hana-Kip storyline in the movie at all. Maybe he liked the framing device. It remains the less stale part of the movie, but we also get a clear sense that the two young characters are there to serve Almasy's story. The irony lies in the fact that Ondaatje is making a similar observation in Singh's story. The throughline is how he has served the Allies for 5 years, risking gruesome death every day. This is a betrayal of his own country, India, and his older brother, who is thrown in jail by the British colonial government. But he loves his English mentors and comrades and amiably suffers the discrimination and hostility from British soldiers. Service, intelligence, generosity, courage, all purported virtues of Sikhism. His love for Britain continues until the real climax of the novel, when he finally reaches the breaking point --- 

"American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English."

So he splits. From love, from work, from his comrades and employment, from being used and exploited. He goes back to India, where independence will be won in a couple of years. Although Ondaatje is not Indian himself (born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Canada), the shadow of the empire constantly hovers over the four main characters, none of whom is English despite the title. 

Of course, as an English filmmaker selling to an American audience, Minghella carefully scraped away all of this, every little strand of anti-colonialism and every little bit of heroism in the Indian character. Despite the desert scenes, he kept the movie clean from any sand that may seep into the shoes of the British and American consumers to rub against their delicate feet, with the same meticulous attention as Singh dismantles a bomb.

And he was absolutely correct. Imagine the shock and indignation and rage when they read the novel and see the line "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." Indeed, the rage erupted, making the novel more controversial in the English-speaking market than the movie was.

I wonder how Ondaatje feels about the movie. He couldn't avoid being appropriated and used by the British after all. 

(PS. There is added irony that Almasy is designated as "Count" in the movie, while he is not identified as aristocracy in the novel. The real-life Almasy called himself "Count" but was in fact a commoner. Well, I guess if being a Nazi doesn't stop him from becoming a big romantic hero, what's a little fake news, eh? And then there is also the little issue of necrophilia ... What a guy.)

Burning (2018): Case Explained (Spoilers)

 

Although long and containing many silent scenes, Lee Chang-Dong's Burning gripped me when I first saw it in a theater. I formed an immediate impression of the "solution" to the mystery as it is presented, which is fairly clear and unambiguous. Afterward, I was surprised to read in various reviews and comments that many people felt that the solution is equivocal. On second viewing, it became clear why I felt so certain instinctively. 

Below I'm going to focus only on explaining the mystery of Hae-mi's disappearance but not the artistic and poetic choices of the film, which are abundant and beautiful regardless.

<Spoilers>

Despite the artistic pedigree of Lee, he clearly employed genre techniques and elements in Burning, and centered the plot around a mystery: Hae-mi's vanishing. (I'm using the word "vanishing" to recall the Dutch movie "The Vanishing", which left a deep impression on me, and I'd be damned if Lee had not seen it.) If we look at this movie purely as a thriller/mystery, the question boils down to this: 

Was she murdered by Ben? 

And the possible answers are only two: 

1) Yes, Ben murdered her and hid her body somewhere that cannot be found. 

2) No, Ben has done nothing to her, and she disappeared for some other reason.

Why do I believe that the answer has to be 1)? Because all clues given in the movie support 1), and there is nothing in the movie that supports 2). In fact, there are almost too many clues to point to 1). In a conventional murder mystery, the author would provide some red herrings in addition to the "real" solution or culprit. Here, there is no red herring to suggest an alternative theory. Every little clue always points to Ben's crime. 

For everyone who believes that the movie still leaves open the possibility that Ben did not kill Hae-mi, the next question is inevitably "Then where is she?" The only possible answer is that she is hiding from the debt collectors, which Lee Chang-Dong tosses out there in one scene, and she has told no one, including Jong-su and Ben, anything about her escape. Keep in mind that this is a theory from an acquaintance. There are no other scenes to suggest that Lee has any interest in this possibility. We don't see Hae-mi talking about fearing the debt collectors or being threatened. We don't hear about anyone else being disappeared by debt collectors (not even a news fragment). We don't see anyone harassing Hae-mi for her debt or threaten to kidnap her or break her legs. 

That is the heart of the matter. This is not a true-crime documentary, where the truth may or may not conform to the clues presented in the movie. This is fiction, in which all the characters and scenes are the creations of Lee Chang-Dong's mind. What could have happened to Hae-mi outside of what Lee shows us is immaterial. All we care about is the author's intention for the story. And his intention cannot be more apparent. 

Of course, I am fully aware of Durrenmatt's "The Pledge", which argues for the unknowability of real life occurrences, and the indifference of the universe toward a person's perception or knowledge. That's valid, but Burning is obviously not that story. Even The Pledge came out of one man's mind with a point --- Durrenmatt's point. Lee too had a point to make, and he made this movie to support his point. He gave us no indication that the point is nihilism. As the audience, it is our responsibility to try to receive his signals and understand his intention. Otherwise we might as well write our own stories. 

So yes, what I should and do care about is his version of the truth, and he is obviously telling us that Ben murdered Hae-mi. 

In addition to the physical evidence of Ben's collection of cheap trinkets and the cat who answers to the name of "Boil," the more decisive clues are in the portrayal of the character. Early in the movie, before we suspect any criminal behaviors, Ben would drop lines that suggest his psychopathic personality, like "I don't remember ever shedding a tear" and "You have a stone in your heart; that's why you can't feel anything" (paraphrases). The latter line is transparently talking about himself, even though he is saying it to Hae-mi, who obviously does not have a stone in her heart. The exact same contempt (yawn) he shows to both Hae-mi and the subsequent girlfriend (ie, victim) is clearly a demonstration of his game, as he clearly is not interested in these women as individuals.

Many commentators made a point of questioning the veracity of Hae-mi. Is she a liar? Why does no one remember the past events she mentions? Is the cat real? Did she really fall into a well in childhood? She is so good at eating a nonexistent tangerine, perhaps the cat and her memory of the well are both fake as well? And, by extension, maybe her disappearance (or existence) is fake too? 

Here we are again faced with two possibilities: 

1) Hae-mi has lied about or imagined some or all of the things.

2) Hae-mi is telling the truth about everything. 

If 1) is true, then we can allow ourselves to discount everything she says and does, including her disappearance. Maybe her obsession with the "little hunger and great hunger" and her dance in the sunset are a performance or delusion. Both JS and Ben are fooled. There is never a tangerine or cat or anything else there. The most charitable reading is that she has no grasp on reality, so much so that she never bothers to contact JS after running away from the debt collectors. A less charitable interpretation is that she is just like JS's mother, who disappears and shows up 16 years later asking for money.

If 2) is true, her story in this movie is about the erasure of a young woman, full of yearning, loneliness, spirit, and life. When she was a child, she fell into a well and no one even noticed. She did not tell her family after being rescued and her family did not care enough to ask where she had been. It is one of many signs of her family's indifference toward her, consistent with the exchange in the eatery ("tell her not to come home until she's paid off her credit card debts") and Ben's casual slip that she had no contact with her family (note that both corroborate each other). In the context of the movie, she has figuratively "fallen into a well" and disappeared again, and, again, the only person who cares is Jong-su. The rest of the world just moves on as if nothing has happened. She tries to express her yearning for the meaning of life and her sense of beauty (the trash-filled parking lot in Africa where she was moved to tears by the sunset), and others look at her with awkward chuckles and yawns.  

Which one do you think is Lee Chang-Dong's intention? I have seen one other film by Lee ("Secret Sunshine"). Between these two films, I sense zero cynicism from him. Instead, I feel a barrage of humanism, as in, he loves human beings in their natural state of existence. What is the probability of such a humanist devising Scenario 1? I'd say it hovers right about zero. 

Some people watch Hae-mi's pantomime and infer that she invents things and events that do not exist and perhaps cannot tell the difference. I think the pantomime has an entirely different meaning. It's about poverty, deprivation, and the absence of the things you need. Obviously, this is a feeling that Hae-mi and Jung-su share but Ben knows nothing about --- except that Ben too has the same feeling. We cannot pretend that what's lacking in HM's and JS's lives is not money. Their despair and shame and isolation, and their reluctance to engage in a full-blown romantic relationship, all have to do with their poverty in a city of casual wealth. And yet there is so much more missing, not the least family, not the least a meaning. JS's yearning for mother, and HM's yearning for anyone. Their most basic needs are not met, and the only way to keep life going is to "forget that it's not there." 

Ben has his own missing piece in life, and we can surmise that he too has a yearning for it. This absence is intolerable to him, and he refuses to tolerate it, unlike how HM and JS tolerate their unmet needs. Hence he burns greenhouses. In both the source materials (Faulkner and Murakami), it is barns that are burned, and barns symbolize food and wealth. Here, however, it is greenhouses, which symbolize life. Not quite the same thing. 

----

As a co-owner of two cats, I just want to make a note about the "Schrodinger's cat" here. Is the cat a part of Hae-mi's imagination? Compare the two parallel scenes depicting its absence: When JS goes to feed it when HM is in Africa, he sees that the food and water bowls are empty, and the litterbox contains cat poop. When he goes back to the apartment after HM's disappearance, there were no bowls and no litterbox at all.

If there is poop, trust me, the cat is real.

Communication in Middlemarch

The question of whether a person can actually, truly understand another is one that I think about all my life. Within psychological sciences, it appears that this impossibility is now well established. What a person goes through is to receive signals from another person (e.g., language, behavior, facial expression, vocal sounds, body language) and interpret its meaning to oneself, using his own set of tools, including the memory he associates with the signal and the learned meaning of a concept. For example, Person A eats a lychee fruit, says "ah, sweet," and Person B in her presence can only know what it means by conjuring up his own memory of eating a lychee fruit. If he has never eaten one, he's out of luck. The sensation cannot be directly transmitted from one to the other. 

For more abstract feelings, such as happiness and sadness and fear, the same principle applies, even though we tend to imagine that emotions are universally the same in every person and forget the specificity of each occasion and memory. The point is that we understand the external world completely through our internal machinery, and other people is a part of the external world. To date, we have no way of truly "walk in another person's shoes" or living in their skin, despite some science fiction that proposed such possibilities.

Of course, this impossibility to share thoughts and feelings does not stop anyone from trying or believing the illusion that we understand each other. This illusion is rewarding, irresistible, and perhaps absolutely necessary to our emotional health --- I know, the thought is a little disturbing, that our life and sustenance depend on an objective falsehood. What can you do. We can't handle the truth because the truth isn't always good for us. 

This is not to say that the self-derived signal-interpretation process is useless. At least we have the ability to evoke our own knowledge, memories, and feelings in an attempt to interpret the signals from another person. And this process is able to facilitate an incomplete but real amount of communication. Heck, we can even simulate other people's emotions to some extent, ie, empathy, drawing on our own emotional reserve. However limited, this is good enough to create interpersonal bonds so strong that we have built massive human civilizations encompassing millions and billions of individuals. 

While reading Middlemarch, I was struck again and again by the meticulous description of how people understand and misunderstand each other's thoughts and intentions, how things go awry because each character has his or her own motivation and logic. It's almost a high-definition dissection of the above-mentioned mechanism. To use a cliché, there is no villain in this book. It's not because the author started out with a plan to make every character good or neutral. Rather, she mapped out every character's motivation and then took it down its logical path, which then clashes with another character's logical path. This is the most elevated kind of conflict-making in fiction, and to do it to such a massive extent with so many characters must have been an enormously complex undertaking. 

The best example is the drama in Rosamond and Dr. Lydgate's marriage. Initially, my mind was gliding along the well-tread path of how a beautiful but immature or stupid young woman who causes the disillusion of her man, recalling Louisa Musgrove's relationship with Captain Wentworth ("Persuasion"). The more it went on, however, the harder I began to laugh at the one-upmanship between Rosamond and Tertius. Rosamond may be young and naïve and a bit of a ditz, but stupid she is not. Despite Lydgate's repeated yelling and threats, pulling his hair out, she goes off and thwarts him every single time. Each is stubbornly committed to their own way of coping with the debt situation, to which both had contributed. Hilarity ensues. Marriage hardly improves one's ability to read another's mind, Eliot seems to say, good luck with trying to change one another. 

No kidding. Who hasn't gone through the futility of trying to change one's spouse, so that two think as one? But what appears to be marital harmony due to a mind convergence is but an illusion. What really happens in a seemingly harmonious marriage is illustrated in the Garth family, in which Mrs. Garth grumbles, either inwardly or outwardly, but sighs and lets Mr. Garth go off to do his own thing. If we can't make peace with our fundamental differences ... then we are just banging our heads on the wall until they explode into bloody pulp. Oh well. 

The discussion on the limitations of our mind goes beyond marriage in Middlemarch. The novel is full of characters who believe they have a firm grip on reality, only to be proven wrong. From a particular perspective, Middlemarch is an exploration of the limitations of mind, and the illusion of control, with scientific insights based on clinical observations of real people, that is later proven correct by systematic and rigorous research. 

The Thrills of Middlemarch

 

Although the novel does contain some digressions and commentary, as George Eliot was prone to include in her novels, it is not a stiff and slow reading experience most of the time. Besides her dry humor, she also wrote some rather suspenseful chapters, which induced me to read deep into the night sans sleep, turning the pages with a mix of anticipation and apprehension, eager to discover the fate of the characters involved. 

One early example is Fred Vincy's odyssey to pay off his debt, from his scheme of flipping horses (as in "flipping houses") to his emotional rollercoaster. Even though his failure was not difficult to foresee, the suspense, for me, lies in how he would confess his failures to the beloved Garth family, and what would come of it. Through this plot arc, we see Fred as the hapless and impulsive guy who is not too smart, but he does not lie, neither to others nor himself. In a sense, Fred is a danger to himself and others (more the former than the latter), and his journey into emotional maturity reminds me of, of all things, a Robert B. Parker novel early in the Spenser series (yes, I know, comparing Middlemarch to pulp fiction) titled "Early Autumn." In that novel, Spenser saves a boy abused by his parents by teaching him to build a house. Similarly, Fred's central relationship is less with Mary and more with Caleb Garth. Mr. Garth also taught Fred how to build a house, well OK, figuratively. 

Two other suspenseful chapters were both scenes of death. The first involves Mary Garth at the deathbed of Fred's uncle Featherstone, who may or may not have left a large amount of money to Fred. I did guess the eventual outcome on the inheritance question, but the process is plenty eerie, and the depiction of his last internal conflict rivals the best gothic novels. The second is Dorothea's viewpoint of her husband's last days. Mr. Casaubon has been stewing in the fear and jealousy of a younger man's attention to the oblivious Dorothea for weeks and months. Feeling his end is near, he wants Dorothea to make an oath sight-unseen. Dorothea says I don't promise anything without first knowing what it is. The hilarity is that he wants her to promise never to marry Ladislaw after he is dead, and she thinks he wants her to write his magnum opus for him after he is dead. She spends all night dreading that she may be pressured into a tedious and meaningless labor, until they have that talk in the morning ... Ah the buildup is so good and delicious, and the resolution so unexpected, that I nearly laughed out loud.

Later in the book, there are multiple plotlines leading to multiple mini-climaxes, intricately woven and acutely described, with unexpected payoffs, each with subtle irony and wisdom upon reflection. Her skills are absolutely breathtaking. Sometimes I wish Eliot had written a few mysteries, if only the genre had existed in her time. I am certain she would have killed it.

No Middle Name

 

Lee Child

There is just one thing that I have in common with Lee Child, the author of the Jack Reacher series. In the past three years I have been working my way through the series via library audiobooks, as audiobooks tends to be less of a page-turner, so to speak, than paper books. 

Yesterday I finally picked up a paper version of his short story collection "No Middle Name," published in 2017. The third story in the book, "High Heat," confirms my suspicion that Mr. Child, like me, has a particular fondness for people beating each other up with their bare hands. Certainly, there were plenty of guns in the Reacher series, and he devoted one full book ("Persuader") to the study of various guns. But description of hand-to-hand combats is salt to his books. There have to be multiple fight scenes in each book. 

In High Heat, he even devised a plot point to get rid of all the guns the bad guys may have, just to allow the 16-year-old Reacher to beat them all up. It's pretty clever, but a little far-fetched for organized crimes in New York City in 1977.

I have to imagine that Mr. Child's choice to put bare-knuckled fights into every book he writes reflects a real personal interest. (It must be difficult to avoid completely repeating oneself though.) Out of all the different types of violence on screen and on paper, I too most prefer this type of fighting scenes. Sure, the gun battles in John Wick are nicely choreographed and impressive, but they are inspired by unweaponed combat choreography too. There is an intimacy in these scenes that can better portray characters than any other types of fighting. The cold efficiency of guns offers less room for characterization and emotional, as well as visceral, impact. 

The Prophecy of Middlemarch

 

Some years ago I read Daniel Deronda on a whim. Two things, or rather two characters, in the novel left a lasting impression: the fervent Zionist Ezra Mordecai Cohen and Daniel Deronda's mother, a Jewish actress who gave her son up, so that she can continue her career on stage. More than anything, it tipped me off to the origin of Israel that predated WWII, even WWI. 

I have not even finished reading Middlemarch, but some elements really blew me away with its modern resonance. It was written in 1871 and depicted an earlier period around 1830, so I never dreamed that I would see so many concerns that I had thought belonged strictly in the 20th century, at least.  

First, one of the main characters, Dr. Lydgate, was a young physician trying to change the way medicine was practiced in the country. Not content with treating local patients for their common illnesses, his ambition was to do research and unravel the pathology of diseases. He had microscopes and experimental apparatuses at home and kept up with new scientific discoveries in the field from the Continent. 

Moreover, he broke from the traditional practice of selling medicinal products (mostly tinctures and potions back then), because he recognized it as a type of conflict of interest. Physicians were incentivized to give patients their own concoctions because they could make more money selling medicines than diagnosing and caring for patients. Who cares if the medicines were effective? 

Oh my God this is so modern. Neither concerns have been completely resolved in medicine today. We are still doing research and unraveling pathology of illnesses. We are still struggling with nudging physicians to do the ethical thing in the face of greed. Both remain front and center in medicine. 

A second main character, Mr. Will Ladislaw, has an even more contemporary profession: campaign manager! I have never, ever seen this profession mentioned in classic literature, until "All the King's Men", which was published in 1946 in the United States. Ladislaw not only wrote speeches and opinion pieces in the partisan newspaper for his boss, Mr. Brooke, he also devised campaign strategy for him and coached him in his campaign! 

Alas, poor Mr. Brooke liked to veer off script and blab to anyone "You have a point there." There is a hilarious campaign rally scene that could happen even today. At one point, Will and the doctor had an argument about whether a politician should be sincere and say what he believes in. The doctor, talking from a scientist's perspective, found Will's cynical approach of saying whatever to keep voters happy appalling. I almost fell out of the chair laughing.

I don't know why George Eliot was so much better at seeing the future than other novelists of the same period, but she seemed to have acute insights into social trends and political sentiment roiling underneath the surface. No, she was not writing about what is often called "universal and timeless human nature," whatever that means, but rather a prediction of the tides to come and wash us away in the new millennia. And she was spot on.