fartzy.com, blog of Kohn

But I shouldn’t have.  I am doing this now, because I know no one is reading this.  And yet, indeed, I want somebody to read it.  Perhaps many months, many years later.  This is to document the ridicule that I put myself into.

A friend of mine said that I am clouded by my emotions and such is true.  Time and time again, I subject myself to exaggerated feelings only so that I feel alive.  Miserable, but alive.  And he also said I should write, for it is a way in which I release my emotions and come down back to rationality.  That is a goal that I shall attempt now.

This entry has no meaning.  It only serves as yet the beginning of the last cycle.  I am sure of it.  I have come close to know who I am, albeit unable to control the continual alteration of this image that I have come to understand.  But I have a website, I have a blog, and I will write here.  Like a college freshman having so much to say.  At least I have a domain, and it will continue to morph until one day someone comes along that shuts me up completely.

Here’s the transcript which I will modify from time to time to be used as the overarching OS over the documentary that I am shooting.  For now, it will serve as a summary based upon the information I gathered during the shoot.

* * *

I am Taiwanese, or so I think.  I was born in Phoenix Arizona and lived in Taiwan between the age of 2 and 18.  I am also Chinese, but I am not sure if it’s a good idea to feel this way anymore. 

This man is my mother’s father.  He fled from China to Taiwan in 1949 when the Chinese Communist Party defeated the KuoMingTang in the Chinese Civil War.  He is a retired high school teacher that taught Citizenship for more than 30 years, and has lived in Taiwan for more than 60 years now.  Just like me, even at the age of 88, he too, has an identity crisis.

This is a story about myself, my two grand fathers, interlaced with a short history, and the complicated reality of Taiwan.  I am not sure where to begin, but I only know that in my blood there flows a subtle, contradicting irony, that I can’t seem to resolve, or even be comprehended.  This is therefore a story of my attempt to grasp this contradiction that I must live with every day of my life.

People have come to know Taiwan as a stateless nation, a ghost in the international arena haunted by the dominating political and economic power of China, which has so far successfully coerced countries around the world to see and treat Taiwan as a mere ghost, and nothing more.  Taiwan’s lame status-quo may be widely discussed.  What people do not know, however, is the reality embedded underneath Taiwan’s struggle for sovereignty.  In fact, the difficulty for one to even say “I am Taiwanese.”  For there is too much history, pressure, too many tragedies, unfortunate circumstances, laments, for one to proclaim such identity. 

China is Taiwan’s cultural motherland.  Yet it is also Taiwan’s political and military enemy, with more than 980 missiles stationed across China’s east coast line against the island of Taiwan.  How do you embrace a mother who threatens to eliminate your very own existence?  How do one even begin to understand this ridiculous circumstance.  Do we in fact need a mother? 

I traced to my father’s father.  He was born in 1907, during the Japanese occupation of Taiwan.  He lost his eyesight about 10 years ago but he still sees patients in the traditional Chinese medicine clinic that his father established in 1895 in a small town in central Taiwan.  1895, that was the year when the Chinese Qing Dynasty ceded Taiwan to Imperial Japan as a colony, a turning point that forever changed Taiwan.

My grandfather often speaks Japanese to me.  He studied business in Mejiro, Tokyo for 8 years during World War II.  He has a close affinity to the country of Japan. Perhaps it’s also for this reason, I took two years of Japanese in college, and studied aboard at a university in Tokyo Japan during my junior year.  Japan’s legacy on the island of Taiwan has far reaching effects that lasts until this day.

My mother’s father fought the Japanese military on Mainland China during World War II.  Unlike my father’s father, his position toward Japan is completely different.  Japan was a part of the Axis, an evil military aggressor clawing into all corners of the Far East.  When he retreated with the fleeing KMT government to Taiwan, the island was viewed as an ex-colony inhabited with unruly ex-colonists pacified by an alien culture. 

The Chinese government claimed the island without much respect.  The economy was in disarray, society in chaos.  And when my father’s father saw my mother’s father arriving to the shores of Taiwan with the new government, their hope for equal treatment, for better governance was quickly transformed from despair, to distain, later, hatred toward this foreign power.  This was the seed.  Somehow, I was borned, nonetheless.

Who is to blame?  Who will weep for the contension that flows inside the veins of every Taiwanese citizen right now?  I am experiencing it.  We are all watching.

Their lives coincided because of history.  Needless to say, both sides opposed to my parents’ marriage.  My grandparents have only seen the other family once, on the wedding ceremony.  And I, the product of this history, travel between the two, balancing awkwardly, often, unsuccessfully within the ideological prejudices that two groups have toward each other until this day.  But they are my father and mother.  They are my reality.  They are now Taiwan, too late to be changed.  And perhaps that is tragedy of this reality.

I am writing again

She walked through the door and the floor started to cave in

The air around me heated and cooled to a gradual standstill

Into a kind of concrete substance suspended in air, waiting to be touched, to be felt

I inhaled, breathing heavily, gasping madly, savouring

As if such is the fruit spawned finally from my unconscious

Taking me back all the way to that singular thought

That had made me aspired to speak

My hands are moving again, faster

Speaking in motion, taking on a form, a life

A little confused, maybe

But nontheless speaking, living, in tears

The ground continued its breaking away,

Clearing a dark path where I shall walk on then fall

And as I continue to fall, my hands will wave in that air

Struggling, speaking, with my will or without.

Lockers of Man (48mb, requires QuickTime 7 to watch) is my first film shot on 16mm!  Filmmaking is tough and I am glad to say that except one shot, all the other ones are in focus.  Thanks so much to Kiara, Dechen, and the actors so I pulled this one off.  I also think the story is more comprehensive and this does feel like a short.  I would appreciate any feedback as I really want to submit to some obscure film fests.

Text Me Silly (53mb, requires QuickTime 7 to play) is my 6th short, the 4th I made at new school.  I think I have made enough shorts so I am going to drop the numbers in front of the stuff I make.  I will have to say that this one is by far the best in editing, but the shots are still not very creative.  But I think they get the point across.  I want to really thank Eubin and Heather.  They did a great job without any rehearsal.

 Text Me Silly is a working title, it’s a feature-length project which I will write a script about.  The premise of the first scene is that a woman makes lunch for his boyfriend, with whom she lives.  The mundanity and jadedness in their relationship creates repetitive and unnecessary contentions between the two.  After the boyfriend leaves without having lunch, due a minor silent argument, the woman receives 2 phone calls, one from a friend, one from her ex-boyfriend.

Relics  (39mb, requires Quicktime 7 to play) is my first attempt to properly document interactions between 2 people.  This is a silent film without a single word spoken.  I am not sure if it actually gets the point across.  I would appreciate any kind of feedback.

I used to wonder what’s the big deal with children, these naive, useless younglings whose purpose of existence is to spend their parents hard-earned money, pose adorably in front of camera, for the parents’ bragging rights.  Oh, and to carrying on (somewhat) of the blood line.

Yes they are innocent and pure, but eventually, they will all grow up, start buying make-up, things, create dramas, destructions, and they will not be innocent anymore.  So tell me, what’s the big deal with these precious little 15 years of short-lived facade of cutesiness?  I could care less about children, about being a child, only because back then, childhood was right around the corner.  I knew if I wanted, I could close my eyes and these images of me being a 6 year old, holding onto my grandpa’s hand going to a store to buy a toy truck will pop into my head, just like yesterday. 

But one day I woke up in my bed in my apartment in New York City, and I realize, my childhood was gone.  It has sneaked out from the back of my head, and I couldn’t picture my grand father that clearly anymore.  Was he wearing glasses that day?  Did he ever buy me that yellow toy truck?  Did it actually mean anything at all?  These memories, images, are fading like cheap photographs left out in the sun, yellowed, tainted, and I had become an adult, just like the rest of the world. 

I once read an article claiming that a child is a true human being and all that one could ever want, is already in a child.  Now I agree, and now I understand.  I felt an honest, an undeniable happiness when I was a child.  The moments that are still lingering in my head, they seem so much bigger, meaningful, believable.  I was a $2 piggy bank that only wanted pennies.  Allow me to rephrase that, a small capacitated container of trivial, but completely happy, wonderful things.  That’s what a child, being a child is about.  To be happy just play cards with cousins.  Completely emersed in what life offers.  Better yet, a child does not even know “life,” he just is, living it, with the utmost sincerity.  Now, I am talking about those lucky bastards who have decent parents that provide and protect.  And yes, today is the day that I vow to be such a father, not to spoil him, oh no, but to protect my child’s childhood, so that one day when he wakes up in his own bed, he will think back and smile.

Tomorrow is Chinese New Year, and I want to thank you, my parents, for providing what you did.  My childhood was there, I am now merely lamenting its slow decay, my slow death.