Guffaws and Gut-Laughs

Puzzles are interesting.  You can’t speed through them at least not with five hundred pieces.  Best done with others, you need to communicate, you need to share and test ideas.  You need things to be well lit, and there’s nothing to stop you from having music or food to complement your effort.  My older one wanted to do a puzzle on her birthday and we started this old Beatle puzzle we had in the closet, last night.   Her idea, and I’m glad she had it.  As I suppose she expected, it forced us all to work together on something. 

Last night after eating our fill of dumplings we huddled around the table we’d designated for puzzle production and put the world’s most watched television show on the computer as the New Year’s tradition dictates.  While so much of this country changes with time-lapse rapidity, the 春晚 program seems staunchly committed to stasis.  The male hosts still unerringly sport bad haircuts.  The female hosts must wear unflattering dresses.  The song and dance numbers all extol the wisdom of the Party and the greatness of the nation.  The comedic scenes, necessarily involve famous actors of yesteryear all ringing the door bell and crowding into an apartment one after another while someone's proper identify remains obscured as the tension mounts and the room welcomes yet another new person.  When it’s time for laughter we pan the audience of lucky, adoring cadres who clap and cheer and feign real, guffaws and gut-laughs. 

And so it was and so it shall always be.  Who am I to criticize?  I miss the nuance of one gag or the precise reference of another dance, so I try to just view and consider.  But this year my wife, who has watched these things far longer than I, really got frustrated, complaining to me and the kids, working on the puzzle that it was particularly flat this year.  No innovation.  No evolution, unless you count the crass materialism of Baidu offering viewers red envelopes of gift money or anyone who sent a text.  She was angry about it and couldn’t seem to enjoy the scripted vapidity this year.

I tried to consider our U.S. experience with Christmas.  Everyone knows the revulsion at hearing schmaltzy old tunes regurgitated over and over, in store after store for the month of December.  But there isn't a ritual Christmas television experience.  I haven’t watched a Super Bowl or an Academy Awards ceremony or any other annual American television programing for decades.  The ChunWan is unique, in that it's political entertainment, cultural education, reinforcing national identity and has worked its way into becoming central to the tradition itself.  As an  outsider, it seems almost as if ChunWan TV is Chinese New Year.  Perhaps, like Mao’s portrait in Tiananmen, it is a risky structural pillar to consider moving.  I wondered if tens of millions of other people were enjoying themselves or were similarly sighing at all these predictable routines.  

Tuesday, 02/05/19