Blind Massage (推拿), the award-winning new film by the enfant terrible of Chinese cinema Lou Ye (婁燁), throws a rare spotlight on those who cannot see for themselves in a country where the disabled are often marginalized.
Lou has previous tackled a slew of forbidden subjects, including gay sex and the 1989 Tiananmen protests, and his latest work went on general release in China last Friday.
Based on Bi Feiyu’s (畢飛宇) wildly popular novel Massage (推拿), the low-budget feature tells the story of a small blind community working in a therapeutic massage parlor in the eastern city of Nanjing.
Photo: AFP
In China, home to some 85 million disabled people according to state media, the stigma surrounding disability is marked. Schools often deny admission to disabled pupils, contributing to an estimated 40 percent illiteracy rate in the community.
For the 17 million blind, massage offers an escape from poverty and ostracism, and several hundred thousand work in salons and parlors across the country.
“It was a taboo subject — but not anymore, it seems to me,” Lou told AFP at his film’s premiere in Beijing last week.
Photo: AFP
Even so, he still had to contend with China’s state censors, who have repeatedly banned his previous works.
“We managed to get it through after four or five months of discussions,” he said.
“The version that the [Chinese] audience will see is a bit different from the original. We had to take out the most sexual and violent images. I can understand why we had to do that, because Chinese cinema doesn’t have an age classification system,” he added carefully.
ON THE FRINGE
Starring both sighted and unsighted actors, Blind Massage explores the lives and loves of the masseurs, with some scenes deliberately blurred to give the viewer a sense of having poor vision.
Desperation is never far from their lives, and some parts of the film — including mutilations — are undoubtedly shocking.
The blind see themselves as outsiders to mainstream society, a narrator explains in a voice-over, and their own community is divided between those who had the ability to see and gradually lost it and those born without sight.
The question of who is beautiful becomes a matter of huge curiosity even as they spend their lives in the dark. One character is taken to a brothel where he becomes infatuated with a prostitute, but their dynamic shifts dramatically when his sight begins to return. Corrupt officials, loan sharks and callous family members who abandon their blind kin also get an airing.
It has echoes in the life of Fu Chiyou, who expertly pummels his customers’ feet while perched on a tiny stool in a Beijing hairdressing salon.
The 38-year-old was born blind into a family of farmers in Heilongjiang, China’s northernmost province. Forced into a relatively solitary existence because of his disability, he spent his childhood and adolescence in the company of just his family and two friends. Few blind manage to marry or secure stable employment, he says.
“I never had anything to do, and my parents worried about my future,” Fu told AFP.
“So I thought of going to a massage school for the blind.”
It took Fu five years to perfect the art of massage under the traditional principles of Chinese medicine, learning the secrets of the human form and its pressure points.
“The blind have a more developed sense of hearing, as well as a more developed sense of touch,” he said.
He works from 3pm until midnight every day, with the salon owner providing his lodgings as well as his modest salary.
BEHIND CLOSED DOORS
Lou, a Shanghai native, has faced repeated bans on his work in China and is used to having to screen it behind closed doors.
He was banned from directing for five years after making Summer Palace (2006), which depicts relationships against a backdrop of the Tiananmen protests and has never been released in China.
His other films include Spring Fever (2009), which portrays a clandestine gay affair and was shot in secret in defiance of his film-making ban.
But the Beijing premiere for Blind Massage was packed after the film scooped top honors at last month’s Golden Horse film awards in Taiwan, touted as the Chinese-language Oscars.
It also fared well at the Berlin film festival earlier this year, winning the Silver Bear prize for Outstanding Artistic Contribution.
Fu will never see the movie, but is very much aware of it.
“For the first time there’s a film that talks about our lives,” he said as he dug his thumb into the sole of a customer’s foot.
“That can only be a good thing.”
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
For many people, Bilingual Nation 2030 begins and ends in the classroom. Since the policy was launched in 2018, the debate has centered on students, teachers and the pressure placed on schools. Yet the policy was never solely about English education. The government’s official plan also calls for bilingualization in Taiwan’s government services, laws and regulations, and living environment. The goal is to make Taiwan more inclusive and accessible to international enterprises and talent and better prepared for global economic and trade conditions. After eight years, that grand vision is due for a pulse check. RULES THAT CAN BE READ For Harper Chen (陳虹宇), an adviser
Traditionally, indigenous people in Taiwan’s mountains practice swidden cultivation, or “slash and burn” agriculture, a practice common in human history. According to a 2016 research article in the International Journal of Environmental Sustainability, among the Atayal people, this began with a search for suitable forested slopeland. The trees are burnt for fertilizer and the land cleared of stones. The stones and wood are then piled up to make fences, while both dead and standing trees are retained on the plot. The fences are used to grow climbing crops like squash and beans. The plot itself supports farming for three years.
RSS