I’m sorry. You are the newest victim of the smash hit Broadway musical Mamma Mia! Honestly, it won’t be that bad. A lot of people really love this show. My mom has seen it at least three times (and that’s just the live show—God knows how many times she’s seen the film), Tina Fey is apparently a fan, Tom Hanks paid to have it committed to film.  People love Mamma Mia! I’m sure many of you will too. After all, it is set to classic ABBA tunes, it’s a romantic coming of age story, a comedy of errors, and features lots of people dancing on the beach.

As far as jukebox musicals go, it’s definitely one of the best. There aren’t any gaping plot holes, the placement of the music generally makes sense, and they don’t assume that you already love ABBA. Many jukebox musicals (and musical theatre adaptations of films) take their audience for granted: if you like 80s hair bands and arena rock, you’ll love Rock of Ages, for example, because it’s basically an excuse to immerse yourself in live music and flashy lights while surrounded by fellow kitsch hedonists.

Please be careful, though; it’s a slippery slope. There is a Broadway producer in China right now anticipating that the “theatrical equivalent of Starbucks or McDonald’s will step forward.” Just say no! Before you know it you’ll be neck-deep in singing witches from Oz, blonde law students, recalcitrant lions, flying nannies, and “final” tours of Les Miserables. Billy Elliot could be interesting in China… maybe you want to revisit Rent? I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but I urge you to exercise your good judgment when it comes to developing your musical theatre culture.

Julie Taymor's The Lion King.

Over the past decade or so, Broadway has become more and more of a pandering tourist trap. I am inclined to attribute the modern Broadway climate to three shows: The Lion King, The Producers, and Mamma Mia!—none of which are bad shows. The Lion King is visually stunning; Julie Taymor’s use of puppetry in her staging and her visual style are remarkable and innovative. She paved the way for future uses of puppetry in theatre, such as in the London National Theatre’s production of War Horse with the South African Handspring Puppet Company. The Lion King also had the appeal of being The Lion King. Families who enjoyed Disney’s classic film could revisit the material in a live show; the artistic integrity and catchy Elton John music drew in the rest. That show has made millions and has been on Broadway since approximately the dawn of time. The Lion King is why we have Broadway musicals of Shrek, Mary Poppins, and The Little Mermaid.

The Producers was Mel Brooks’ musical adaptation of his eponymous 1968 film about a couple of Broadway producers who set out to make the worst musical of all time: Springtime for Hitler (Springtime, ironically, may actually be the best musical of all time). This musical was not only wildly successful but was then adapted back into a film. Hairspray followed fast on the heels of The Producers, not to mention Spamalot.

Then we come back to Mamma Mia! which spawned We Will Rock You, Jersey Boys, Rock of Ages, et al. And while all this is happening, it turns out you can keep shows on Broadway for well over 20 years (thank you Phantom of the Opera and Les Miz). Can you see why the executive fat-cats are interested? Turns out, musical theatre can provide at least 5-10 years of steady income and many, many marketing opportunities for a $50 million initial investment or less. Broadway has been overrun by producers trying to make the next big cash cow, and in the past five years they have also set up camp in London’s West End, possibly diminishing the integrity of London’s theatrical tradition.

That said, I’m pretty sure it can’t get any worse than Spider-man: Turn Off the Dark, or any better than Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and Robert Lopez’s The Book of Mormon.

I hope Mamma Mia! is successful. I hope you do develop a taste for musical theatre.  At its best, it is a rich and fascinating genre. I hope you see Mamma Mia! and are compelled to do better.

Best wishes,
Caitlin

P.S. Let me know when Chinese Sweeney Todd sweeps the nation.

Mamma Mia! in Chinese is at the Century Theatre (closed Mon) from August 12 - 31 at 7:30pm; Saturday and Sunday at 2pm.

My reaction? Yawn. Although some might object to the crass manner in which Mr. Sedaris points out certain facts about China, none of them are blatantly untrue. He has cherry-picked some of the more disgusting facts about China, but many of them are the very things that the Chinese deplore about their own society. I can’t recall off-hand any Chinese person who explicitly encourages blowing snot on the street—however widely it might be accepted.

One could easily point out some similar defects in the Japanese society that he so reveres. For example, squat toilets are still widely used throughout Japan, especially in public areas because they are considered more sanitary than sit-down toilets. Many sit-down toilets still come with signs instructing people not to squat on the toilet seat so clearly there are still people who do that. I’m also not sure that a country where elementary school kids will use an entire roll of toilet paper to wipe their butts with is an indicator of a healthier society than one that treats defecation as an ordinary part of life.

One might also note that Sedaris uses Chinese food as a foil to mock Western gastronomic over-delicacy.

All in all, there are a thousand reasons why many of the comparisons Sedaris makes are unfair or biased in some way. However, I don’t think that his essay was meant to be a fair and balanced look. It sounds to me like he was taken around by a bunch of old China hands to many “authentic” locations. Unfortunately, a streak of perverse masochism runs through China hands. The dirtier, the more disgusting the experience, the more we purport to enjoy it because it’s “authentic.” I still recall my favorite Peking duck restaurant in Beijing—a filthier, more decrepit restaurant I have never met. But I loved the food, and I loved the atmosphere. At the very least, Sedaris traveled widely, and experienced a lot.

In contrast, what I found more offensive was a book I saw while browsing the Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. Titled “Yuck!” or something like that, it was written by someone who was purportedly a traveling food photographer. However, a cursory inspection found that about 70% of the “disgusting foods” were from one night market in Beijing. If you’re going to make a snap judgement about a country’s food, at least visit more than one place. By that standard, Sedaris passes.

At first, I was tempted to rise above this all-too-obvious jibe at one of the world’s great cuisines, borne of one of the world’s once-great cultures. More than anything, I was bemused that anyone would be interested in David Sedaris’ views on food. It’s kind of like asking for Hemingway’s views on leather galoshes. Interesting? Maybe. Irrelevant? Most definitely.

Sedaris clearly subscribes to the Funny Games school of travel writing. He wants people to cough and splutter, to cry “racism,” and to condemn him to burn in eternal hellfire for his bigoted, ill-conceived views. He wants all of this, because it will sell far more books than well-researched, reasoned analysis. I’m not rising to it. In fact, I’d go so far as to agree, in principle, with his views on spitting, animal feces, and the Chinese penchant for allowing their children to defecate in plain sight. Not that these idiosyncrasies, aside from public defecation, weren’t commonplace in most American cities until recently (only intervention from Harvey Milk saw an end to the heaps of dog mess plaguing San Franciscan parks in the 1970s).

I regularly bore witness to excessive expectoration from British footballers, friends and family until, overnight, the practice vanished in the early 90s when we discovered organic vegetables and Levi’s jeans. Sedaris is fully aware of this. He went to China, as his first paragraph makes abundantly clear, determined to hate it. Which begs the question, if that was the case, why did he choose to focus on the least-hate-able element of Chinese civilization?

I will not stand for this increasingly frequent dismissal of Chinese culinary art by Westerners who can barely use chopsticks. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to criticize—I don’t like shark’s fin, bird’s nest, or seahorse for example. Nothing to do with ethics, I dislike them because they’re tasteless and only used in cooking because they’re expensive. The popular affection for ingredients based purely on their place on the endangered list is my major bugbear with Chinese food. As is the selective exclusion of certain animals (if you like shark’s fin so much, why not tuck into giant panda or golden langur monkey?) However, I will defend Chinese gastronomy to the last. Why? Because I believe it is China’s only art form to have been in an almost constant state of innovation, development, and refinement, and now stands as China’s only living contribution to global culture.

For an American to be so dismissive makes the criticism all the more difficult to swallow. Sure, American cities may be melting pots of deliciousness, but that’s in no small part due to the contributions of other world cultures. Yes, that includes us much-maligned Brits, though I won’t get started on the joys of British cooking for a second time.

Sedaris’ endless comparisons with Japan are especially grating. I tire of this endless China vs. Japan debate—as if it weren’t enough to put up with the endless political back-and-forth living here, now Westerners are treading that ancient path of comparing two countries which, while admittedly crossing over in many areas, are so divergent in others that they might as well be on different continents. To compare attitudes toward hygiene and social conduct in China unfavorably with Japan is tantamount to comparing attitudes toward universal healthcare and education in the U.S. unfavorably with Cuba. The two nations have very different personalities. You don’t like it, go somewhere else. And, when it comes to food, comparisons between Asian nations are doubly redundant. Japan invented artificial cream, red bean-flavored Kit Kats and raw whale meat. Oh, and they also invented the love suicide. A country is only as refined as your perception allows.

So Sedaris visited Chengdu and Beijing. He submitted an article ostensibly about food but wrote, almost entirely, about piss and shit, unable to drag his mind away from the scatalogical and onto the culinary for more than a few lines. Mainland Asia is unhygienic. Thailand, India, Cambodia—filthy, filthy places. With incredible food, but appalling public bathrooms. But who the hell goes on vacation for the public bathrooms? I wonder if he cut the lines commenting on how the dishes he tried actually tasted. Care to offer any insight into the preparation beyond assertions that animals are simply hacked to death and then boiled up any which way? While his fellow traveler’s remark that “this country might have its ups and downs but it is virtually impossible to get a bad meal here” is hokum of the highest order, I would venture that you’re more likely to eat the most extraordinary meal of your life in China than anywhere else, though you may have to kiss many frogs (hacked up or otherwise) before you find the prince.

The jianbing in action.

I’ve been disappointed by Chinese restaurants many, many times. But I have also been delighted. Anyone can find something they like in China’s endless pantheon of delights. A dear friend of mine, the fussiest eater I’ve ever known, on a recent visit discovered a passionate love for breakfast jianbing. Another two friends, a recently-engaged and resolutely middle-England couple, were less than enthralled by the cuisine forced upon them on their package tour until my better half took them to a Shandong restaurant close to where we live. Now, back in England, they do nothing but rave about hongshaorou (red-cooked pork).

You can dine in China three times a day and never have the same dish twice. If you don’t like it, you move on until you find the perfect match for your taste and temperament. Try doing that at Wendy’s.

Speaking as a passionate chef who spends all his free time in the kitchen, I’ll gladly doff my white hat and admit that China is still home to the world’s most diverse cuisine by far, a fact made all the more astounding by the relative paucity of base ingredients. Most dishes can be conjured up with the meat, fish, fungus, pulse or vegetable of your choice, to which is added one or more of the following: Sichuan pepper, soy sauce, vinegar, cooking wine, salt, sugar, star anise, cinnamon, bay leaf, and, if you’re feeling really flashy, oyster sauce. No Moroccan rose harissa, no buttermilk, no organic kaffir lime. You don’t need to visit Whole Foods and browse for three hours whenever you want to pick up a saucepan. Your spice rack is compact, your kitchen small, your utensils basic, and most all ingredients are available lusciously fresh and seasonal from your nearest wet market. Your repertoire next to limitless.

The phrase goes that French cuisine shows the genius of the chef and Italian cuisine shows the genius of God. But if God were a chef, he’d cook Chinese.

The camera angle here on Kirsten Dunst (star of Melancholia) lets you watch her go through a whole range of emotions as she processes what von Trier is saying. As one Internet commenter put it, it’s like a real-life performance of The Office, with von Trier as Michael Scott issuing forth an awkward stream of verbal diarrhea, digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole while everyone in the room sits uncomfortably, hoping that it will stop. His remarks:

For a long time I thought I was a Jew and I was happy to be a Jew, then I met Susanne Bier [Danish director of In a Better World] and I wasn’t so happy. No, that was a joke, sorry… [the room laughs]. But it turned out I was not a Jew, and if I had been a Jew I’d have been a second-rate Jew, because there’s kind of a… hierarchy in the Jewish population.

But no, I really wanted to be a Jew but then I found out I was really a Nazi. Because my family was German, which also gave me some pleasure. [chuckle] What can I say? I understand Hitler… I think he did some wrong things, yes absolutely. But I can see him sitting in his bunker at the end– [Kirsten Dunst: Oh my God, this is terrible.]

What? There will come a point at the end of this- I will- No, I’m just saying I think I understand the man. He’s not what you would call a “good guy” but I understand much about him. I sympathize with him a little bit. I don’t mean I’m in favor of World War II and I’m not against Jews, not even Susanne Bier. That was also a joke. In fact I’m very much in favor of them. All Jews. Well, Israel is a pain in the ass but… Now how can I get out of this sentence? [laughter] No, I just want to say about the art- I’m very much for… Speer, is it? Albert Speer I liked. He was also maybe one of God’s best children, but he had some talent. It was possible for him to use during… [giving up] Ok. I’m a Nazi.

You can watch the entire conference here, including a bit at the end where von Trier desperately tries to salvage the Nazi schtick by making another joke about how “maybe you could persuade me into… to… yeah, the Final Solution, with journalists.” The situation received more prominence when the festival released a statement declaring von Trier “persona non grata” and asking him to leave the festival, although Melancholia remains in competition.

Let’s just go down the litany of ironies here:

• Mel Gibson, who has been recorded as saying, “Fucking Jews… the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” received a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes on May 17.
• Here is a photo of Cannes Film Festival president Gilles Jacob warmly receiving director (among other things) Roman Polanski in 2007.
• In writing their press release on von Trier, the festival managed to summon the incredible cognitive dissonance required to come up with

The Festival de Cannes provides artists from around the world with an exceptional forum to present their works and defend freedom of expression and creation.

The board of directors profoundly regrets that this forum has been used by Lars von Trier to express comments that are unacceptable, intolerable, and contrary to the ideals of humanity and generosity that preside over the very existence of the festival. The Board of Directors firmly condemns these comments and declares Lars von Trier a persona non grata at the Festival de Cannes, with effect immediately.

Yes, it took them all of one sentence to segue from defending freedom of expression to kicking a director out for something he expressed.

As for the actual content of von Trier’s remarks, they approach off-color at the worst; as mentioned before, they’re more Michael Scott than Michael Richards. Anyone who watches the clip can easily see it’s far from hate speech or Nazi worship in any sense. Von Trier has always been provocative, even boorish in his comments outside the space of his films: earlier in the same interview he made another uncomfortable joke about how he was casting Dunst and Melancholia co-star Charlotte Gainsbourg in a hardcore pornographic film that would be three hours of them having “unpleasant sex.”

This isn’t even to the level of Prince Harry in a Nazi uniform, where that act showed a stunning lack of understanding by Prince Harry of his own privilege, his family and national history, and the power of symbolism. On the other hand, the issues that von Trier jokes about in an unsophisticated way form the core of his incredibly sophisticated films; the question at the conference that prompted the whole debacle was about the role that the aesthetics of German Romanticism played in his work.

What von Trier approached with his invocation of Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, were the friction points between aesthetics and politics and how art must be, by its very nature, part of a political dialogue and embedded in political space. After all, his 1991 film Europa was about a Europe shattered and broken by the Nazi regime, and the existential crisis that results from being inextricably implicated in a political horror show. (Incidentally, von Trier made waves at Cannes with that film: upon learning that he hadn’t won the Palme d’Or, he gave the festival jury the finger and stormed out of the venue.)

And the comments about understanding Hitler’s basic humanity and seeing “him sitting in his bunker at the end,” which seemed to be the breaking point where Dunst had to laugh out of sheer embarrassment? That’s the plot and theme of the 2004 German film Downfall (directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel), which was nominated for an Academy Award.

While it doesn’t necessarily excuse anything he said, there’s also this intriguing interplay between racial and political identity; beyond the conflation of German-ness with the Nazis, he’s expounding on his own struggle with personal identity, of thinking that you belong to one group and then realizing that the truth is something different — and those identities on some level shift the boundaries of what one can and can’t say, boundaries which von Trier seems to have difficulty locating. It’s a battle that the Anti-Defamation League noted with their response that “He seems to be struggling with some personal ghosts. This is one way I guess he resolved them, in a very, very bizarre way.”

Overall, the conference debacle is a performance of the tension created by a provocative film from an insensitive filmmaker — the fact that great art may issue from not-so-great people. (Björk was reported to have spit at von Trier while working on his 2000 film Dancer in the Dark). Take von Trier’s crude public persona and compound it with him trying to tackle a complex issue in the adrenaline-charged sound bite space of an international press conference in a language he’s conversant in but not native (note the construction of “there will come a point at the end of this”), cutting off avenues of nuance and shades of meaning: the result is film festival melodrama.

At the end of the above video of the conference, Dunst is still on mic as everyone is wrapping up; she tells her director, “Lars, that was intense.” That’s a better way of describing what happened than what anyone else has tried.

Yesterday morning, the Intermediate People’s Court of Xi’an sentenced Yao Jiaxin, the 21-year-old student at the Xi’an Conservatory of Music who ran over and subsequently stabbed to death cafeteria assistant Zhang Miao, because, as we all know, a “peasant woman would be hard to deal with.”

The verdict comes not three months after the famous “Li Gang Incident” where Li Qiming, driving drunk, ran over two female students before fleeing the scene. One of the students, Chen Xiaofeng, later died in the hospital. Though these two crimes are tragically similar, their outcomes are not. While Li was convicted of driving while intoxicated and vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to 6 years in prison, Yao was found guilty of murder and will receive the death penalty if his case is not appealed. Let’s take a look at the evidence to see if we can’t divine some kind of logic out of these two incidents.

Here’s what I get from all this: if you’re going to kill someone in China, do it right.

First, make sure you have some guanxi, the more the better, and preferably a Party member. Seriously, write this down, you’ll thank me next time you’re driving drunk.

Second, make sure you have enough money to weather the storm. Life is precious, but that doesn’t mean it’s priceless. Don’t let the Visa commercials fool you: the value of a life can be calculated and, if the medieval Catholic church has taught us anything, forgiveness can be bought with cold hard cash. Here’s the math: all together, Li paid 12 times more than Yao for killing someone and received 6 years in jail. So Yao should receive 72 years in jail (6 times 12 is 72!). Right now Yao is 21, and after 72 years in jail he’d be 93, which is pretty much death anyway so why not cut to the chase? See, the system works! Poor Yao Jiaxin, if only his family had scrounged up some more money, maybe things would be different. This is a note for all Chinese parents: when you get the phone call that your child has killed someone, refinance your mortgage, liquidate his college fund, do whatever it takes to get that money into the hands of the deceased, you won’t regret it.

Ultimately the most important determinant for getting away with murder is not attracting public attention. Li Qiming might never have set foot in a musty jail cell if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their damn camera phones. (As a side note, you shouldn’t name drop your father and simultaneously coin a catch phrase that encapsulates everything wrong with modern Chinese society.) Look at how public opinion ruined Li. If netizens hadn’t pushed so hard for a verdict maybe his case would have stayed under the radar. What makes some people on the Internet dangerous is that they still believe in and actively pursue justice in a country that has largely abandoned principles like fairness and equality. So lesson learned: you need public opinion on your side. Props to both of these guys for having the guts to go on television and cry but honestly, some acting lessons and glycerine would have done wonders.

Okay, perhaps some of you are thinking I’m being unfair because these two crimes are so different. Yao Jiaxin brutally murdered a peasant while Li Qiming merely ran two people over while under the influence of alcohol, then attempted to flee the scene, leaving a female college student to die in the street like a wounded animal. Point taken. Li didn’t actually murder Chen Xiaofeng, he just created very favorable conditions for her to die. It’s not murder, it’s euthanasia! Foolish Yao, why did he murder Zhang Miao when he could have just hit her harder?

To really get a sense of how fair these verdicts are, let’s compare them with some other famous cases in the last few years.

Activists take note! Stop with the signs and the petitions, they won’t do any good. A better choice is to choose someone who you disagree with and run them over. Don’t kill them outright, but injure them severely enough so that they die in the hospital. (This might take some practice.) Hopefully, just like Li Qiming, you will get charged with manslaughter and go to jail for about the same time. However, this might jeopardize your chance at a Nobel Peace Prize.

I hope you’ve all learned something today. I don’t want to sound cynical but nobody likes an amateur. If you are going to do something, do it right. Next time some girl on a bicycle is in your way and you don’t think you can stop in time, don’t brake—take another shot of Chivas and step on the gas like you mean it.

Sources:
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-04/22/c_13841213.htm
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2011-01/30/c_13713476.htm

I’ve heard this before. Living in France, the nation that invented culinary tunnel vision about the same time they came up with tarte tatin, my nation’s gastronomic heritage was met with similarly disdainful invocation of “that one British dish.” During a meal of roast capon, petits pois, and pommes dauphinoise, washed down with what, to my primitive taste buds, tasted like the angels in heaven (but something my hosts saw as a notch above brake fluid), the bombshell was dropped: “All you English eat is fish and chips.” It wasn’t open to discussion. My 18-year-old self didn’t object, mainly because I had a serious crush on my dangerously handsome and buff French exchange partner. However, on subsequent holidays to Malawi, Russia, Thailand, and Italy, the same sentiment was repeated, almost verbatim, in a babel of languages. “Oh, British food… you mean fish and chips.” My deference changed to defensiveness, which, when an Australian had the temerity to rubbish my nation’s cooks, transmogrified into bile-spitting bitchiness. “At least we have a national dish, you cork-hatted shark-stroker!”

I am here today to set the record straight about the world’s most maligned and least understood cuisine, which has reached far further afield than most nations are even aware, and is now, I believe, poised to finally take the reins from the garlic-saturated hands of Parisian chefs du cuisine. But, as Britishers, we’ll be dignified about it.

British cooking is one of Europe’s most diverse, dynamic, and consistently innovative cuisines. I’m not talking about the legacy of Empire which made curry and chop suey part of the national storecupboard, or even the more recent attempts to enliven a cuisine left hollow and dead after a postwar flood of processed foods (mostly from America) by simply copying the French, Italians or even in our craziest moments, the Germans. I’m talking about the culinary tradition of a multi-faceted and contradictory melting pot, which had access to not only the finest, freshest produce but also ample fuel, solid trade links, and a consistent lack of foreign invasions from 1066 onward. The French, Saxons, Norse, Danish, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh all made their contributions. The British palate and constitution, refined over centuries of immigration and unimaginable wealth, is one of the world’s most robust. We tuned our tongues to spices such as nutmeg and paprika while the French were still working out which way to point a trebuchet. We were the earliest nation in the world to initiate large-scale pastoral agriculture, giving us high-quality, low-cost meat, milk, eggs, cheese, butter, and cream, which offered chefs a chance to experiment. Fishing was a way of life for everyone on the coast; thus it was the British that were among the first peoples to consume oysters, clams, and deep sea fish on a large scale. Our deep forests were rich in game, and our temperate, wet climate ideal for cultivating grains, vegetables, and fruit.

The Tudor accession in the 15th century ushered in relative peace and prosperity which in turn caused an unprecedented flurry of activity in the kitchen. Henry VIII’s banquets were legendary, with several cows, dozens of sheep, and hundreds of fowl consumed per sitting. We perfected the art of cooking game and developed the savory pie, a dish which has thus far even failed to cross the Atlantic. We developed cold storage so that desserts such as syllabubs, sorbets, and ice cream—traditionally flavored with orange water, rose petals, lavender and fennel—could be properly kept. While Catholics and Protestants pulled Europe apart, Elizabeth I’s Act of Uniformity effectively made religious tolerance a law, defusing any chance of an English Wars of Religion. As the English Tudors gave way to the Scottish Stuarts (enter oatmeal, black pepper, and some seriously good home baking), despite political turmoil and a civil war, coffee, chocolate, chili, cinnamon, and ginger from our overseas colonies further enriched the tables of the wealthy. Even the poor got a taste of the exotic, with the non-native potato proving infinitely more adaptable than millet, leading to the invention of myriad spud-based dishes. Oh, and lest we forget that little contribution made to convenience foods by the Earl of Sandwich. We have grown to love our convenience foods. A meal that fits in a hand without burning it was what fueled the Industrial Revolution, and Cornish pasties, pork pies, and savory pastries remain a major part of the British working class diet. Development continued almost uninterrupted into the twentieth century (even the stuffy Victorians, while happy to cover their ankles in public, would be mortified if the fresh Scottish salmon sandwiches and buttered, fluffy scones piled with glistening jam vanished from High Tea, not to mention the spice bread, fat rascals, crumpets, muffins, and pikelets).

Wartime rationing and then the postwar mess of powdered egg and processed, chemically-laden foodstuffs imported in bulk from America did a lot to undo this heritage. In fact, if I were alive in the 1970s and you had said to me, “British food is shit,” I’d have had to agree, at least in view of the lamentable state of restaurant dining at the time. Somerset Maugham wrote in the context of the period, that “one can eat very well in England, provided one has breakfast three times a day.” Indeed, the “Full English” of bacon, egg, sausage, baked beans, fried bread, black pudding, mushrooms, and grilled tomato remains on all hotel menus throughout the British Isles, though these days we prefer good honest Scottish porridge, or slightly less honest, but very neutral, Swiss muesli. However, while good British meals out were a rarity, the satisfying comfort of traditional home cooking survived largely unscathed. Well, apart from microwave dinners and Boil in the Bag (if you don’t know what this is, don’t ask). All this changed with the foodie revolution of the late 1990s. A new wave of TV chefs rejected the trends of Delia Smith (Britain’s Martha Stewart) and began to play around—not with aping foreign cuisines as had been the case in the 70s and 80s (the era which saw the birth of chop suey and tikka masala, both in British restaurant kitchens)—but with British ingredients cooked to British methods. Traditional fare made a comeback, with refinements to classics like bread and butter pudding, pork pie, smoked salmon, apple dumplings, and Scotch broth, but new dishes were created by new chefs, all with their own fields of specialism. Gordon Ramsay handled haute cuisine, Gary Rhodes, heir apparent to the far superior, and more British-minded, if permanently intoxicated Keith Floyd, handled British favorites. Jamie Oliver appealed to the young and families, and Heston Blumenthal developed molecular cuisine, which has caused a greater worldwide impact than any cooking movement since Julia Child decided to pick up a pen. Thirty minutes from my house, Michelin-starred chef Andrew Pern serves up delights such as seared black pudding and foie gras with carmelized apple and cider, and fluffy Eton mess (homemade meringues crushed with fresh berries and vanilla vodka-enriched whipped cream). Sure, we borrow ingredients from our neighbors, but then, we also gave the French not only creme anglaise (custard) and creme brulee (burnt cream, developed at Cambridge university), but also their champagne industry (a beverage originally exported to Britain as substandard white wine, where it became a hit with the nobility). Many of our ingredients are adaptations of foreign imports (rhubarb, grown and ignored throughout China, is still cultivated en masse in England for delicious sweet-sour pie fillings or tenderly steamed and dabbed with thick, creamy custard). Now, there are more British chefs with Michelin stars than there are French chefs. We have more artisan cheeses than the French, more artisan beers than the Dutch, Germans and Czechs put together. The waiting lists for Britain’s most prestigious cooking schools are among the longest in the world. Even Americans, whom, I believe, love to slam British food because their own cuisine is so roundly attacked by others, are forced to acknowledge the British onslaught in the kitchen. If South Park singles you out for satire (see Ramsay and Oliver in Creme Fraiche, season 14), you know you’re big.

Which brings me to my final rebuttal to that ill-informed young Chinese lady, who, I am almost certain, has never sat down to a British meal with British people in her entire life. Lady, don’t comment on what you don’t know, and haven’t tried to understand. My boyfriend, Chinese through and through, who also studied in the UK for over a year, shared this narrow view of British cooking, until he began to spend holidays with my family. Now, our storecupboard in Beijing has, standing alongside Sichuan peppercorns, Shanxi vinegar and umpteen packs of dried mushrooms, are tins of Yorkshire shortbread, jars of stem ginger in syrup, Marmite, English mustard, and, until we began to make our own (in the English style, naturally), Tiptree jam. We alternate cooking, and he has Britishized many of his staple dishes (baking red-cooked pork in the oven, rather than on the stovetop, enriching soups with butter and white onions), while I have updated British staples like boiled cauliflower with garlic and baked field mushrooms on toast with a few Chinese ingredients. My boyfriend was in raptures at our Christmas dinner table, where my parents served up roast goose, crispy roast potatoes and chipped parsnips, creamed carrot and swede with salted butter, parboiled Brussels sprouts with white wine reduction, and a choice of trifle (the proper kind, rich in sherry, red fruit, light sponge cake, and homemade vanilla custard) or plum pudding with brandy sauce (though he found our flambéing the pudding while singing rather macabre, a little like a burning at the stake). My parents brew their own beer, distill liqueurs flavored with sloeberries and elderflower, and bottle their own wine. My dad grows all his own vegetables, from the traditional (cabbage and potatoes) to the more refined (asparagus, artichokes, and Romaine lettuce). My parents’ pantries are stuffed with homemade jellies, jams, and pickles, and my mother bakes all the family’s bread. And no, they live in an ordinary middle class suburb, not on a thousand-acre farm with a paragraph in the Domesday book.

My point is that British cuisine is simply not something we aggressively export, because we don’t feel we have to. By nature British people are at once arrogant and modest—we simply have so much faith in our own superiority we feel attempting to push it on uninformed outsiders is bad form. We’re the Mormons of national culture, without the immaculate dental work. But that doesn’t mean a British family won’t throw open their arms to a foreigner who shows an interest in our cuisine. If you want to enjoy it, it’s there, and in rich, enthralling glory, but you need to want to connect with it. You can travel to the UK and eat Chinese food your entire stay, and most Chinese students do just that, with an occasional McDonalds meal for variety. We’re not like Italy or Spain—even our most remote rural villages have Indian and Chinese restaurants, thanks to the iron constitution and accepting palate of the Britisher. We love choice in food, lodging, and clothing more than any nation I have yet encountered. The eclectic mix of dishes on the average pub menu—ranging from loaded skins and tomato soup to vindaloo and Moroccan couscous—is testament to this. Just as with our government, we see no contradiction in dunking chips (ok, French fries, though the Belgians invented them) in curry sauce.

And, for the record, fish and chips was developed by Jewish immigrant smallholders in London in the late 19th century. I hereby extend an open invitation to all those who continue to sneer at the concept of British cuisine: let me change your mind.

Amy Chua’s provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal, an excerpt from her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has stirred up considerable debate, and rightly so.  Her strict, even draconian, method of parenting is one that many parents will recognize, though perhaps in diluted form.  She outlines the steps that she, a proud Chinese mother, took to ensure her children’s success.  She doesn’t allow her children to attend sleepovers or playdates, to watch TV or play computer games.  In a tautological flourish she says they are not allowed to “play any instrument other than the piano or violin” or “not play the piano or violin.”  The article contrasts the parenting styles of so-called “Chinese mothers” and “Western parents,” clearly favoring the former.  But while she presents her regimen with confidence and pride, she neglects to examine the drawbacks of such austere parenting.  How would I know?  Because I am a product, or should I say survivor, of Chinese parents.

I had straight A’s until the 6^th grade.  I played the violin, though it was my choice.  I was forced to attend Chinese school for ten years to learn Mandarin.  I was not tall enough or strong enough.  I was not allowed to get any grade lower than a B.  I was pressured to major in computer science or medicine, any major that made money.  I was forced to retake the SAT until I scored higher than 1500 out of 1600.  For a while my mom outlawed television, but she got this idea from white parents whose children were smarter than me.

Still, my mother drove me to sleepovers and birthday parties.  I chose my electives.  I acted in plays.  I got into fights with kids from my neighborhood.  And in the end, I majored in film production.  I thought it was bad growing up, but compared to Amy Chua my mother was Mary Poppins.

Today, I am thankful that my mom made me study Mandarin.  I live and work in Beijing and my language skills have helped me immensely.  But I haven’t touched an instrument in years.  I remember fighting with my parents over college.  I remember that they didn’t care what I was interested in.  Though we are on great terms now, I have to live with the fact that when I needed my parents the most, they weren’t there for me, or they didn’t know how to be there for me.

Achievement is easily visible, even flaunted—but pain, less so.  Underneath achievement and success lies a foundation of failure and struggle, hidden like the base of an iceberg.  The question for a parent is, should a child choose this path himself, or should it be chosen for him?

As a teacher here in Beijing, Chinese parent ground zero, I have seen the beneficiaries of so-called “Chinese parenting”: brilliant young minds, accomplished and driven, fluent in English and on the fast track to a “top school.”  Yet I have also seen its victims: students with no dreams to call their own and no idea why they are studying or pursuing something; children who have their passions stomped out or are barred from pursuing them.  “My parents told me to,” is their mantra.  Unlike the author, I am not so foolish as to believe that all children turn out alike if you raise them the same way and teach them the same things.  Some will be thankful and happy, content in their ability to be a computer programmer or violin virtuoso.  But others will live with untold emotional and psychological scars.

This forceful parenting style pervades in China partly due to beliefs about filial piety (you must obey your parents) and education (education equals social mobility and a greater chance at success) and partly because the large population and the one-child policy create immense competition.  In current Chinese society, if a child wants to get into a good school—more precisely, if a parent wants their child to get into a good school—he must study nonstop.  There is no time to make mistakes or “find yourself” or get a part-time job.  There is only rote memorization and repetition.

But America is a different country with different rules.  Ideally, America’s strength lies in individuals with varied talents and a society that nurtures them.  Western education is predicated on the notion that children are unique and parents should tailor themselves to their children.  Eastern methods are more about filing down square pegs to fit round holes: children must conform to societal standards or face ostracism and failure.  This pedagogical gap was formed by thousands of years of history, society, and culture and it’s impossible to say which is “right” or “better.”

Chua says Chinese parents believe “the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future.”  If a parent’s duty is to prepare their child for the future, then preparing a child for a hostile society by being hostile is forgivable.  But it seems the author is preparing her children for the wrong future.  Many immigrant parents share Chua’s inflexibility: having grown up in a different culture they cannot, in mid-life, understand another so they raise their children the way they were raised.  Indeed, Chua recounts how her parents called her “garbage” when she was young, how it “worked really well,” and how she did the same thing to her daughter.  It doesn’t occur to her that maybe not everyone is like her and that her ideas about parenting might actually undermine her children’s ability to succeed in the future by restricting their social interactions.

Naively, the author conflates and confuses achievement, success, and happiness.  She doesn’t seem to understand that not everyone measures life by rankings and resumes.  The fact that the “vast majority of the Chinese mothers said that they believe their children can be ‘the best’ students” is not only a mathematical error (as it is statistically impossible), but also a philosophical one—everyone has a different definition for “the best.”  It is not that Western parents don’t want their child to be the best—it is that mature parents do not measure their children by such a simplistic metric.  Not everyone will be accomplished, and not everyone can or should be.

The author doesn’t understand that a parent cannot control what their child will become, as much as they may try.  The only thing a parent can and should do is provide love and security.  I think it’s poignant that for all the talk about grades and achievement, Chua offers no emotional or moral standard by which to measure her success as a parent.  Do her children love her?  Are they thankful for her?  Are her children moral human beings?  These questions do not seem to enter into Chua’s parenting philosophy.

In fact, her children’s opinions are hardly mentioned.  I can’t help but wonder what they think about their own lives.  Does playing at Carnegie Hall make Sophia happy?  Did she realize her own dream or her mother’s?  Do the Chua children love what they do or fear the consequences of not doing it?  And where is the kept husband in all this?  In the end Chua is no better than those domineering white parents who force their children to become little league sluggers.  It’s not about race; it’s about being a terrible legal guardian.

The author is also blind to the arbitrariness of her definition of achievement and success.  She forbids her children to play “any instrument other than the piano or violin.”  What’s wrong with all the other instruments?  In Chua’s world, the New York Philharmonic would contain only violinists and pianists.  And why instruments instead of chess or Olympic math?  If the author is trying to make her children a stereotype, all she needs to do is make sure they drive poorly.  Chua requires her children to be “the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama” but offers no explanation why gym and drama are inferior to other subjects.  There are no reasons for her predilections other than an atavistic and deep-seated belief in things she has not examined personally.

What Chua doesn’t understand is that it doesn’t take skill to be a parent like her.  Being an autocrat is not hard.  Forcing powerless human beings who are totally dependent on you to do your bidding then bragging about the results should not impress anyone.  It is not parenting—it is bullying, and anyone can do it, provided a requisite lack of intelligence and humanity.

I am not arguing for laissez-faire parenting.  Parents should serve as guides, but there is a fine line between encouragement and browbeating; between caring and control; between education and indoctrination.  Chua seems to believe that nothing short of constant vigilance is necessary to ensure that children succeed and Western parents who “are concerned about their children’s psyches” produce feeble human beings.  What she doesn’t get is that parenting is not a binary system.  There are ways to encourage, motivate, and support your children without spoiling or pampering them and there are ways to teach your children the value of hard work and practice without sending them to a labor camp.  Parents care about their children, but that doesn’t justify anything.  You can curse, beat, berate, and abuse your child in the name of love but what good is love if your child can’t feel it?

The fact that Chua equates her own personal, sociopathic anecdotes with parenting advice is frightening.  The “story in favor of coercion” she offers where she forces her child to learn a song on the piano through verbal abuse (“I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic” which Chua calls “motivation”), explicit threats (“I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents…”), and physical torture (“I wouldn’t let Lulu get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom.”), which leads to eventual success and a conciliatory moment between mother and daughter, would be criminal if she weren’t genuinely insane.  Does she truly believe that results are the only thing that matter?  Does accomplishment really justify physical, emotional, and psychological abuse?  Even if it did, is it worth it?  Chua’s pathological lack of sympathy is matched only by her paucity of logic, which leads me and others to believe that this is an extremely well-disguised satire.  She outlines everything wrong with overbearing parenting, then does it anyway.  I sincerely hope that no one treats her article as advice; it is not a parenting fable but a cautionary tale.  In fact her article, an excerpt from her book, reads like a bad standup routine: Chinese parents are like this; Western parents are like this.  I have not read her book, and can only hope that in the other 250 pages Chua details her journey toward discovering that her idea of parenting is morally and ideologically bankrupt and then profusely apologizes to her children.

What I want to see is a follow-up 10 years from now, checking in on the Chua progeny.  If they don’t hate their lives and resent their mother; if they don’t become suicidal or depressed when they realize that they never had a choice (besides violin or piano) and that their childhood has served as nothing but bragging rights and a book deal; if they don’t rebel once they discover freedom in college or beyond; if they don’t become untethered and lash out against inculcated rules by engaging in dangerous or irresponsible behavior because they have not developed a personal moral compass, then perhaps Ms. Chua is onto something.

The grand fallacy of Amy Chua’s article is that she believes parents are no more than assembly line workers presiding over interchangeable lives.  Attach an arm here, a second language there.  She believes that there is one superior way to raise children that is independent of the children themselves; that there is one magical Chinese recipe for success.  And all this based solely on a collection of misanthropic anecdotes.  Amy Chua is not original.  Her ideas are a distillation of generations upon generations of feudal Chinese thinking.  I am not a parent and do not long to be one.  But it is obvious even to me that the choice is not between Chinese and Western parenting—it is between respecting your children as human beings or treating them as living dolls.  One of the few sane thoughts in the piece is this: “All decent parents want to do what’s best for their children. The Chinese just have a totally different idea of how to do that.”  I agree.  Western parents have one idea, Chinese parents another, but Amy Chua has no idea.

Update: This article has been reposted here with permission.  Thanks to the asia! for their support.

I know you think you did the right thing giving the Dems a “shellacking.”

You didn’t. You have doomed your own country to stagnation. The goal was to “make Obama a one-term President.” Good job. Thanks to an ill-timed but decisive drubbing (the worst since Truman’s back in the forties), you’ve almost guaranteed him a second term. You wanted him out, and in a glorious example of obstinate Republican folly, have chosen to get stuck with him for even longer. The left are spooked, and are going to do everything they can to shore up a Democratic party that needed a shot in the arm. The Republicans are good at fighting dirty when out of power, but have yet to come up with a single electable individual who can speak for them all. The Democrats have retained their bruised figurehead. Now watch the donkey kick. Strike one.

You think a Republican majority in Congress is likely to be productive? Get a grip. Name a constructive thing they’ve done, or attempted to do, in opposition. You taught us Brits how to run a real democracy – don’t turn into our shambles of a Parliament and run with the notion that an opposition is simply the Party of No. The right to legislate ultimately rests with the White House, and the President retains the veto powers that your old messiah George Dubya wasn’t shy about using. But it’s too late to win the Dems over – they’re never going to believe in reasonable Republicans (despite the fact they exist) thanks to the juvenile political sniping the entire party has engaged with throughout this presidency.

Instead, you can look forward to the White House going over your heads on the issues that matter (i.e. government getting bigger), and throwing a few pieces of do-nothing bureaucratic fluff to the elephant to keep the Capitol wheels turning. We all know the GOP isn’t going to work with the Democrats – not while the White House and the Senate remains in their hands. Your newly-elected reps will simply oppose anything that comes out of a Democratic mouth. This will not lead to compromise. This will stymie Congress and leave it to the Senate to make the decisions. You won’t be able to roll back healthcare reform, or the bail-outs, or the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and by the time your candidate sits in the White House (thanks to your idiocy this will be in 2016 at the earliest), it’ll be too late, and you can bet your boots that when the poor and ignorant have easier access to doctors and medication, the last thing you’ll do is disenfranchise them. Strike two.

Now, the Tea Party. Cry “victory” all you want, as did Ralph Nader. This movement will never be endorsed by the mainstream who, Reps and Dems alike, universally reject the nut-jobs at the ballot box. Where’s Sharron Angle now? All the Tea Party are doing is creating a schism the Democrats will now be fighting tooth and nail to exploit in the hope that the Republicans could rupture across the board, separating into moderate and reasonable conservatives and gun-toting Jesus freaks who don’t believe in gravity. President Palin? Not unless she secedes. Strike three, and you’re outta there.

Now was not the time to deliver your verdict on two years of Obama. He is by no means infallible, and 2012 would have offered ample opportunity to humiliate his administration without mortgaging the economic future of America at the same time. Instead, thanks to your fatal inability to accept even a moment’s hardship under the Democrats, you could very well have driven the American SUV directly into the quicksand pit of a deadlocked legislature. America was moving in a direction, which is surely better than no direction at all. You couldn’t wait, could you? Couldn’t give the Dems the benefit of the doubt. You forgot the miseries created under Bush, you ignored all the positive changes the last two years have made to American life, and didn’t even register the first one-off tax cut for almost all Americans to be effected in a generation.

In effect, you’ve done the modern equivalent of reelecting Hoover and knocking FDR’s teeth out. You utter, utter fools.

Just the opposite.  Xia Lin, the deputy editor-in-chief of Xinhua, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party of China, was giving a lecture entitled “Understanding Journalistic Protocols for Covering Breaking News” at the Tianjin Foreign Studies University in which he defended the practice of massaging the truth when it comes to news, citing the critical role of media to maintain societal stability.  The examples he gave were shocking, but only confirmed what most skeptical human beings believe: that their government lies to them on a daily basis.

All the news that's fit to print.

Lin recounted the “live broadcast” of the Shenzhou 5 landing, in which Chinese viewers saw astronaut Yang Liwei emerge from the space capsule smiling and flashing a victory symbol.  But actually when the capsule was opened Yang had blood all over his face due to a cut on his lip.  Workers wiped the blood off his face and shot the second reveal for the country to see.  Lin also mentioned the “July 5th incident” in Xinjiang when state media underreported Han deaths for fear of mob reprisal and, when the reprisal happened anyway, omitted mention of Uighur casualties.

The revelations are startling not because of the obvious fact that news in China is manufactured, but that its top officials are unrepentant about it.  In fact, they see careful management, or manipulation, of the truth as not only justified but integral to their job.  Reporting is not in the service of facts but rather facts serve reporting, and can be airbrushed and edited to benefit those in power.

Though this seems immoral and propagandistic, there are two cultural factors that contextualize the government’s mentality.   First is the Chinese preoccupation with face, and no one is more vain than the government.  Chinese leaders, from emperors to demagogues to its current politicians, have always taken pains to appear irreproachable and by now it has become a part of the fiction.  Every misstep is seen as potential ammunition for those who might want to challenge the incumbent power.  Thus, mistakes are admitted only posthumously, for fear of damaging the reputations or political fortunes of those still alive.

Second, the Chinese government is willing to sacrifice much for stability: ideals, lives, even fundamental tenets of their own party ideology.  If they are willing to abandon their own beliefs for stability, then why shouldn’t every branch of the government, including the media, the military, and the legal system, be used toward that end?

Recently, one can see their point.  In March, the state media reported the first of what has now become a rash of kindergarten stabbings.  Likewise, the reports of factory suicides in Shenzhen have led to nothing but more suicides and a belated pay increase.  If suppressing the news of that first stabbing could have saved the lives of children who died in subsequent attacks, wouldn’t we all think twice?  But denial of death is on some level a negation of life.  Not reporting the deaths of those children would mean they died for nothing and would be an affront to their memory and the grief of their families.  And yet, what is the point in honoring death when it only leads to more of the same?  Truth is lofty and eternal; lives are earthly and transient.  How does one weigh the two?

We can’t.  And maybe we don’t have to, because the news itself is not as important as how we act in response to it.  If we look for easy answers to tragedies, then those who died did so in vain.  If we settle for easy explanations—the killers were mentally ill; the young people who jumped from buildings were heartbroken—then we should not be surprised if these things continue to happen and have one to blame for their proliferation but ourselves.

The furor over the factory suicides have made amounted to some small victories—a pay increase at Foxconn and in Beijing—and has raised awareness of issues like poor factory conditions, the growing income gap, and the dark side of economic development.  However, the response to the epidemic of kindergarten stabbings has been and will continue to be characteristically simple.  The murderers responsible for the stabbings will be executed.  Their point of view will not be reported.  Their reasoning will be lost along with their lives and we will get no closer to knowing, let alone understanding, what would drive them to take the lives of defenseless children.  Even if we are reluctant to understand their reasons, aren’t they the most important piece of this puzzle?

The worst thing about edited news is not the deception or the misinformation—it is the lack of information.  Information that can help us prevent further incidents.  Information we can use to ensure long-term stability, instead of settling for short respites.  Instead of knowing less about these tragedies, we need to know more.  We need to know, truly, why these things happened, because only then can we ask the right questions, the hard questions.  And though we might not like the answers, at least they’d be honest.  People want the truth; the government just needs to believe that they can handle it.

—

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/world/asia/04china.html
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/06/xia-lin-夏林-xinhua-deputy-chief-editor-reveals-secret-details-of-old-news-stories/

Of course, after the wildly successful opening of Alice in Wonderland, rumors began flying about what Burton’s next project would be, the most pervasive rumor being that he was lined up to direct Maleficent, a live action film about the bad fairy in in the Disney classic, Sleeping Beauty. This rumor took root quickly because people have always been keen to label anything even vaguely gothic or darkly whimsical as Burton material, but it seemed to me extremely unlikely. Burton may no longer be my beloved director of dark and funny fairy tales but surely he had not fallen so far as to helm another of Disney’s schemes to squeeze every last penny out of their classic properties—and one that would so obviously be a caricature of his own aesthetic?

The importance of Tim Burton’s sense of humor when dealing with his antiheroes is consistently underestimated—Large Marge, Edward covered in Avon products, little children screaming their heads off as their Christmas presents begin to attack (you have to admit, those scenes are pretty hilarious in Nightmare). Burton’s humor, which consists largely of sight gags and one-liners, gives his characters dimension and humanity that all the eyeliner, striped clothing, and rattiest hair in the world could not achieve. His humor gives his work heart. It’s no mistake that Burton’s best film, Ed Wood, employs none of Burton’s visual trademarks (clichés, if we’re being cynical). It’s also probably his funniest film, though Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure is a pretty close second. Alice had very little of Burton’s humor; the jokes that were there were obvious, even cheap—the “Fudderwacken” was embarrassing. I don’t see how Maleficent could benefit from Burton’s sight gags and one liners. I don’t see how it could be funny without being camp, and quite frankly I don’t see how it can steer clear of being simply an imitation of Wicked. I don’t think the Disney company has a problem with reducing a film that was one of Walt Disney’s great artistic triumphs to camp, but I hope Burton does—I hope he finds it uninteresting. The only thing Maleficent could really benefit from that Burton has to offer is dark eye makeup and a color palate that’s heavy on black—all the pretty images and none of the heart.

Surely Mr. Burton knows better. This week’s Tim Burton Google Alert (yes, I have a Tim Burton Google Alert… old habits) included articles from The Guardian and The Telegraph about Tim Burton’s attachment to Maleficent. The Telegraph claimed Burton was “dancing around the project.” Other films Burton wasn’t sure about making? Planet of the Apes and Alice in Wonderland.

Did Burton sign some sort of Faustian contract with Disney, or did he take a few too many sips of the Kool-Aid? I had always anticipated that the end would be quick and quiet, that I would simply walk away from a new Burton film and know the spark was gone. He would still make movies, and I would still go see them, but it would never be like it was. Now I think I may have been wrong. Perhaps the darkest parts of Tim Burton’s career are yet to come.