iQIYI — which we recently learned is, in fact, more than “China’s Netflix” — just threw its hat into the virtual reality ring in a big way with its new VR headset, the QIYU VR II.
The headset offers 4K resolution, with hardware capability to support 8K down the road. That means it’s way beyond its big name competitors, like the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, both of which offer only 1080p resolution. Its motion sensor tracks three degrees of freedom (3DoF), which can be upgraded to 6DoF with an optional armband, giving users a richer, more interactive experience. It’s also billed as “portable,” meaning the headset houses its own hardware, rather than being powered by a PC.
iQIYI has a few different types of VR content in mind. One would be watching traditional movies in 4K and 8K, and will put users in an immersive personal virtual reality theatre. Another type of content will be 3D video, and another will be panoramic VR viewing experiences. Apparently VR gaming is even on the menu.
Maybe even more interesting than the device itself is what it means for China’s VR playing field. With iQIYI acting as both hardware developer and content creator, the ground for VR innovation has never been more fertile. If even a small fraction of iQIYI’s 500 million-plus users buy the headset, that’s already an enormous boost of incentive for smaller content creators, all eager to cash in on iQIYI’s huge customer base.
iQIYI has also demonstrated the ability to define trends, with their original dramas and runaway hit Rap of China — if there’s anyone who can turn VR from a niche interest into a mainstream phenomenon, it’s them. They could even offer package deals for a subscription + headset.
We’ll be keeping our eye on the headset, and on what we expect will be a sharp increase of activity in China’s VR scene.
This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.
Already in this series we’ve talked about directors and actors, now let’s turn the lens onto another instrumental figure — the choreographer.
Yuen was born in Guangzhou, and entered the film scene with a splash, landing his first director credit on Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow with Jackie Chan. The movie was a hit, and set the tone for Jackie to define his unique style of comedic kung fu. Yuen was the other half of that creative process, and the two recognized their chemistry. They quickly followed Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow with the hugely successful Drunken Master. Interesting fact about Drunken Master: it features the actor Yuen Siu-Tien as the beggar, who is actually Yuen Woo-Ping’s real life father, and an accomplished martial arts star himself.
Yuen’s Hollywood debut came unexpectedly, when the Wachowskis reached out to have him work on The Matrix. His dynamic, visual style of action storytelling kept him as a key figure in the international film scene, earning credits on The Matrix sequels, as well as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Kill Bill.
Also, I would be remiss to skip out on sharing this one-of-a-kind piece of Yuen Woo-Ping handiwork, during China’s first wave of hip hop curiosity, from 1985’s Mismatched Couples:
Yuen Woo-Ping is a kung fu choreographer, action director, and just a powerful film figure in his own right. Today we shout out Yuen, plus thank him for giving us the Jackie Chan we know and love.
This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.
Yesterday we started this week’s series off with the Shaw Brothers. Today, we’re going to smoothly segue into one of the studio’s most iconic stars: Gordon Liu.
Liu was born in Guangdong, and studied Hung Gar style kung fu under master Lau Cham. He managed to star in a couple pretty significant films, but it wasn’t until his signature role as the monk San Te in The 36th Chamber of Shaolin that Liu became a household name.
The 36th Chamber of Shaolin is widely considered to be one of the greatest kung fu films in history, and marked a career turning point for Liu and the film’s directors. It’s the reason Wu-Tang Clan’s debut album was called Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers). Please admire some of the raw beauty we’re talking about here:
Western, non-cult kung fu fandom audiences would recognize Liu from a different franchise: Kill Bill, Vol. 1 and 2. In Kill Bill Vol. 1, Liu played Johnny Mo, leader of the Crazy88 yakuza gang.
Later, in Vol. 2, Liu played the infamous kung fu assassin of legend, Master Pai Mei.
The latter was a special role for Liu — Pai Mei is a recurring character throughout Shaw Brothers lore, and Liu has been on the receiving end of some serious Pai Mei beatdowns, in films from Executioners from Shaolin to Fists of the White Lotus.
Gordon Liu left his mark on kung fu cinema – especially through his style and timing in fight choreography – across continents, cultures, and generations. Today we shout him out, and rightfully so.
This week’s photo theme is Unsung Heroes of Kung Fu — we’re shouting out lesser-known legends of kung fu cinema to expand your mind beyond Jackie, Jet, and Bruce.
There’s no better way to kick this theme off than with the Shaw Brothers themselves.
The Shaw Brothers are probably the single most important phenomenon in the founding of a Chinese film identity. As the eldest sibling, Runje Shaw did the dual jobs of managing the early studio in Shanghai, and also directing their movies. His younger brothers Runde, Runme, and Run Run handled accounting, distribution, and odd jobs. That was in 1925, when the Shanghai-based studio was still called Tianyi Film Company.
Runje used to run a theatre, but made the jump to film after watching colleagues of his achieve early success with the medium. His first movies were immediate hits — 1925’s A Change of Heart hit big at the box office, and the same year’s Swordswoman Li Feifei is considered the earliest Chinese martial arts film. Runje had a knack for bringing Chinese culture to the silver screen, from imperial costume dramas to traditional myths.
Right before the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, Tianyi Film Company moved equipment and operations to Hong Kong, and Shaw Brothers Studio was born in earnest. The rest is kind of history — Shaw Brothers became the most iconic name in Chinese or Asian cinema anywhere, and built the identity of the classic “kung fu flick” from the ground up. Thank you Shaw Brothers, for your contributions to the genre. Pictured is a spread of characters from the studio’s films.
[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Zhibo is a weekly column in which Beijing-based American Taylor Hartwell documents his journey down the rabbit hole of Chinese livestreaming app YingKe (Inke). If you know nothing about the livestreaming (直播; “zhibo”) phenomenon in China, start here.
Questionable Proposition of the Week If you geve Me dome doarls I Can sellipe with you
The best I can assume here is that this was meant to read: If you gave me some dollars I can sleep with you. Which, if I’m being honest, is a pretty presumptuous hypothetical.
But then again, perhaps “sellipe” is some kind of newfangled spin class (pronounced SELL-EE-PAY) popular in France and “doarls” is the hottest new cryptocurrency and the only form of payment Sellipe coaches accept. One never knows.
My New Favorite Thing Watching the Audience Argue About Chinese
Language battles
One very useful thing about chatting with 20,000+ Chinese people every morning is that it’s pretty easy to crowd-source the answers to language questions.
At least, most of the time.
Last week, I had the temerity to ask whether or not I could use a certain word in a certain context, and woah it was like I had brought that black/blue/gold/white dress picture into the streaming room. It started with choruses of “yes you can” and “no you can’t” and quickly escalated to so much yelling (well, there’s no such thing as capital letters in Chinese, but it certainly *felt* like yelling) that I quickly shut the stream down lest I risked the ire of any trigger-happy censors.
So while I didn’t get the answer to that particular question, I did get something new to think about: how deceptively tricky it can be to explain something you’ve never really questioned before.
I’m a big fan of the idea that being able to explain something simply and clearly to a beginner is a good litmus test for how well you understand it yourself. This is particularly true of questions about your own native language – there are so many little rules and exceptions and complexities that we have all just intuitively understood from childhood and would struggle to explain to someone unfamiliar with English.
Be honest – could you, without a trip to Wikipedia, explain:
Why Americans call football “soccer”?
Why “tomb” and “womb” sound like “toom” and “woom” but “bomb” doesn’t sound like “boom”?
Why “a big old friendly dog” sounds perfectly normal but “a friendly old big dog” sounds kinda weird even though both sentences are grammatically correct and mean the same thing?
what the actual f@#k the word “literally” means these days?
irony?
Why we write “queue” and only pronounce the first letter?
Our language is weird
But the thing is, most reasonable native English speakers look at stuff like that and think, yup, those are strange things about English that I probably couldn’t explain, then go back to whatever they were doing before a stranger on the internet accosted them about their lack of explanatory gifts.
We – Americans, at least – have a lot of flaws, but overall I’d say we don’t tend to be overly precious about English. Grammar Nazis on forums abound, sure; but I don’t feel like most of us have any particular pride in English in the Platonic noble lie sense. It’s the language we speak and we’d obviously prefer other people to speak it too, but we don’t really make the claim that it in and of itself is somehow special.
Chinese, however, is a different story. Insomuch as one can accuse a *language* of having an attitude, this is a language that makes French look humble – I rarely get more than a minute into a question about Chinese without being told how 博大精深 (boda jingshen, an idiom that means to have broad and extensive knowledge, sometimes referring to people or scholarship, but often applied to a language or culture as a whole) it is.
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And the thing is, I’m not saying that Chinese is NOT a 博大精深 language, just that my simple question about pronunciation didn’t necessarily merit a lecture about how over my head everything is.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with being proud of your linguistic skills – especially if you had to spend the first 18 years of your life copying characters over and over again to acquire them. But in China, the language itselfis treated (by some people) like the one true god before which all else must kowtow (or 磕头) in submission.
But while it’s perfectly-well-understood by everyone that a foreigner will never grasp the complexities of the emperor’s language, it’s a lot less commonly accepted that between the billion native speakers (at least, native on paper) there will occasionally be differences of opinions on word choice, meanings, etymologies, etc. Hence, massive fights breaking out when Chinese speakers can’t give the foreigner the one true answer to his Chinese question.
So although I generally have a pretty positive symbiotic sort of relationship with the Inke audience, I must admit to experiencing just a bit of schadenfreude when people start criticizing each other’s Chinese instead of my own for a change.
Weird Thing That Keeps Coming Up A Fascination with Eye-Rolling as Some Sort of Talent
When I started streaming on Inke, I figured that keeping the open displays of contempt to a minimum would probably be pretty important to building an audience. Which is a shame, because – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before – people tend to ask the same dumb questions over and over and over again.
[Editor’s note: you have mentioned this several times now and it’s starting to get “ironic”]
But every once in a while, someone asks if I’ve managed to figure out chopsticks after three years in China or tells me that cold water will shorten my lifespan or asks if Americans know what “livestreaming” is (because of course, China invented it!) and I throw out the kind of eye roll that would lend genuine credence to the age-old concern of one’s face getting stuck like that.
The audience reaction is just the damnedest thing, though. Almost every time, I get a few dozen of these:
哈哈，你的翻白眼好厉害
haha, your eye roll is so 厉害
“厉害” is a truly odd word. It sounds like “lee-hi” and the literal translation would be “severe harm” or “strict evil” or something like that, but together it technically means “fierce” like a tiger or “terrible” in that “Lord Voldemort did great things… terrible, but great” kinda way. But that’s all a moot point because the way people actually use 厉害is to mean something is good. Or great. Or talented. Or cool…or epic, awesome, amazing, neat, super, super-duper, mind-blowing, or just about any other word that you might use to complement someone or something.
And people use it to describe EVERYTHING. Your Chinese is 厉害. The kung fu panda is 厉害. That explosion was 厉害. You swim so 厉害, you talk so 厉害, the teacher is 厉害, the students took the test so 厉害, you cook food so 厉害, the food you cooked is 厉害, your use of chopsticks (woah, you can use chopsticks?!?) is 厉害.
And apparently, my eye-rolling abilities are 厉害. I’ve tried to push back and point out that rolling your eyes is just about one of the simplest and effortless physical actions there is, but people keep saying it. Some people have attempted to make the case that they’re complementing the, erm, “believability” with which I roll my eyes. Because, you know, I’m just acting and not really annoyed.
Setting aside for now why my audience seems to be impressed with the art of eye-rolling, 厉害 bothers me for two reasons. First, for all the complexity and artistic nature of Chinese characters, the actual spoken language can be almost scarily Newspeak-y. If things are good, they are 好 (hao, pronounced how). If they’re great, they’re 很好 (very hao), and if they’re excellent they’re 非常好 (really really hao). If they’re bad, they’re 不好 (no hao), if they’re… you get the point. Or, just take a look at how the members of a group chat respond to messages:
Pictured: me, trying to be a special snowflake
厉害 is a classic example of this. Basically, it’s 厉害 for anything on the excitement/talent end of the compliment spectrum and 辛苦 (laborious bitterness, or xinku) for anything on the hard-working end. But you know what? Americans are no strangers to overusing words. Just ask “literally” or “epic,” two perfectly good words the internet has ruined for us.
What REALLY bothers me about 厉害 is how it gets applied to everything – even my dumb eye-rolling.
To paraphrase Syndrome: When everything is 厉害, nothing is.
In celebration of International Record Store Day, which falls on April 21 this year, our photo theme this week is Record Shopping in China. Though vinyl culture never quite caught on China in quite the same way as it did in other parts of the world, it’s on the rise. This week we’ll put the spotlight on some of the best shops in China to pick up new tunes.
Out in the shadow of the Tencent and Microsoft buildings in Shenzhen’s Software Industrial Base one can find two havens for record lovers: M Hotel and Vinylhouse. Vinylhouse — which is unrelated to Vinyl House in nearby Guangzhou — acts as the city’s best vinyl store/bar, and also sells DJ accessories for interested folk.
In the same building is a vinyl-themed lodging called M Hotel (pictured up top). Though it only opened recently, M Hotel has attracted quite a lot of interest for its inclusion of LPs in rooms that are categorized into genres such as Jazz, Pop, and Classical. On any given day you can walk into the lobby and spot musical visitors plucking away on guitars.
Also of note on Shenzhen’s vinyl-slinging scene is Old Heaven. Located in the city’s OCT Loft art complex, this charming space from the same owners as adjacent live venue B10 combines a cafe with a shop selling a host of records, cassette tapes, CDs, and books — all with an independent/alternative slant.
Old Heaven’s Record Store Day event will actually take place on Sunday, when all experimental vinyl records will be 20% off and Goat will play an in-store DJ set.
