This is the only blog of mine.

The main purpose is to write on my life in Hawaii for my friends and family. Since most of the audience are Chinese, the bilingual blog grows into monolingual. For English writing, check the earliest entries in 2006.

However, you may get a sense of my areas of interest, writing length and frequency, and format style by looking at the pictures, publishing dates and layout. There is a category "Look" on styles, not particularly Hawaiian, but about general trends. I talked about bubble skirt and color trends. This session does not show much of my fashion sense, though.

I could have written more frequently. But the past year of school and life is especially challenging. I resume writing now and it is great to have a voice online to be heard by infinite number of people. It is so liberating...

Slogan: "Mixed Plate under the Rainbow"

Programs:

- Korean Drum

- Sri Lanka Dance

- Karate (Martial Art)

- Indonesian Dance

- Tahitian Dance

- Filipino Dance

- Vietnamese Dance

- Japanese Musical Instrument

- Cantonese Hip-hop

- "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" Finale

 

 Truly, I enjoy each one of them. The dances from Asia are simply enchanting. You can find the element of down-to-the-grass people's daily life, mostly working in the farm, in their display of dance: the red sticks used by Sri Lanka plump dancers (who look like female farm-hands, but they sway, circle, stoop slowly to enjoy the restful moments in the field), the large cone-shaped grass hat by Vietnamese slim girls dressed in gleeful colors (who definitely confers the bright sunshine overhead in the rice crops), the long bamboo sticks claped rhythmatically when the dancers jumped in and out of the two rods (isn't it the fun and merry moment aside from tills all day?).

Three dances are not about farming, but in a broader theme, such as entertaining, worshipping, and marching, as exemplified by the following three:

Tahitian Dance is very alike to Hula Dance, with female dancers shaking and swinging their hips very fast. You just see their waist curves so sexily and elastically turned and twised. What makes the four girls so hot, besides their feminine movements and expressions with their waists, arms, eyes, and the whole body, is their costume: coconut-shell bras, fresh orchid lei hanging in the front, down-the-waist skirts with leaves around it. And you feel like swaying and drifting away in the soft and lively womanhood, celebrating their feminity by the ocean.

Indonesian Dance is my favourite. There are 8 dancers, dressed alternately in green and yellow, and 1 singer, who hums a pious tune and sometimes echoed by the dancers. They have great harmony and rhythm, growing fast or slow. At a time, the dancers are grouped into 3 positions and rolling with their hands linked and upper body stoop or straight, just like a dynamo or steam engine. In the end, everyone erects and closes palms, like in a prayer.

Tibetan Dance is, well, quite Chinese, or a hanized version of how Tibetan people celebrate. The group is large, about 30 or something dancers, in bright colors and head decorations. I guess none from Tibet, all Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group. It's a shame that it seems whenever China shows to the world what it can dance, it's always snatched from minority groups. This almost makes me think that Han Chinese don't have their own dance. But how can it be possible, throught thousands of years? Anyway, the hilarious-looking dance displays some hard techniques and disciplines, but it doesn't feel like a part of people's life. It's artificial, fake, pretended. You can see that these dancers may not have a connection with what's expressed in the dance, because they are so different from Tibetanese.

 

The music instruments from Korea and Japan are good. But I think they are too simple. You just have rhythm and force in drums and similar thing plus a vague tune in the Japanese instrument, with several strings and played by a metal pad. You can feel the emotion, the mood, but no nuances about meaning or any further imagination.

On the cultural dispaly booths, I find a 1-string thing from the Spain and 4-string thing from Japan. These are very similar to Chinese instruments and people from Okinama admit a strong influence from China. But they make innovations, such as play it while sitting on the ground and turn the instrument rather than the bow for a change of string with the help of a long foot under the resonance box.

I find proud about how China exports its culture, but shameful for today's feebleness and paleness. Seems China's art is cut from people's life and thus malnourished. And the heritage or any legacy we had just vanished somewhere in the history so that today's Chinese know little about how people amuse themselves by dance, music or poetry generations ago. Yet, what can we do? Maybe someone already starts to revive Chinese Culture, but little impact and involvement from the common people.