Author: Christopher Wang

Categories
Fiction

太虚幻境

This is a Chinese translation of my short story “The Dreamers” by 轻歌慢语 (“Breathed slow language”). The translator compared his translation to a “砖” or a brick, which I thought was an endearing image.

对于侦探庄Z来说，在这样晴朗明亮的一月里，在这样窗明几净的房间里等待死神的降临，是一件很不合情理的事。他的一生都在感受着香港狭窄的街道，拥挤的人群，令人窒息的热浪。但现在他渴望能再重温一次那气味和感觉，完完整整的再体验一次：夹杂着树脂和苔藓味的前调，那是迎面扑来的360度全方位裹挟着你的潮湿闷热的空气；热情但被污染了的中调，那是源源不断涌入大气中的黑色汽车尾气颗粒物；蜂拥而来的压抑性尾调，那是由人类、工业与拥堵所带来的感觉。

    他最近一次近距离接近死亡是在35年前，当时他已完全感受到，每一次充满血腥气味的呼吸都将是他的最后一次。当时他识破出一个黑社会组织的阴谋，并揭露了他们的罪恶行径。毫无悬念地他被射中心脏。一串冗长的机械部件各就各位、连续的咔嗒声音，扳机向后拉，向前推，终于点38式左轮手枪开火了。那是一个相当不错的死法，然而下面要讲述的可就不怎么样了。

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Categories
Essays

The Genesis of Solidarity: The Trinity of Wałęsa, the Workers, and the Church

Lech Wałęsa’s autobiography, A Way of Hope,offers a unique first-person perspective from one who has shaped the history of modern Poland. It traces the emergence of a moral dimension and authority by Wałęsa, and explains the distinctive structure, principles, and success of Solidarity. As the titular “Genesis” might suggest, Solidarity is seen here through a distinctively Christian lens. The Catholic Church offered an inclusive and universal structure based on morality and solidarity, one that Wałęsa was quick to associate with and could use to reconcile the workers’ divisions and surmount the state’s authoritarianism. Catholicism had the powerful benefits of an omnipresence and omnibenevolence, of an alluring virtue in both past and future. There is then, an amorphous and indistinguishable trinity between Wałęsa, the workers, and the Church that explains the particular genesis of Solidarity as it arose.

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Categories
Fiction

The Dreamers

It did not seem right to the detective Z. Zhuang that he should be dying in such a clean and sterile room on such a bright January day. He had lived his life in the malarial heat of the narrow Hong Kong streets among the human fauna. He yearned for the smell and the feel of it all again: the resinous, mossy head notes, that solid wave of damp air that crashed into you when you stepped outside; the ardent, polluted heart notes, black particles of exhaust spiraling into the atmosphere endlessly from engines; and the final, swarming, oppressive base notes, of congestion and people and industry.
The closest he had been to death before, that time when he had utterly been convinced that every blood-stained breath he was drawing would be his last, had been thirty-five years ago, when he had deciphered the designs of a triad lieutenant, unveiled treachery, and in the end, been shot in the heart as all the interminable mechanisms clicked into place, hammer drawn back then sprung forward, and a .38 revolver fired. That would have been a good death—this, not so much.

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Essays

Maoism and China: How Mao Zedong Thought United and Divided a Nation

When the People’s Republic of China was founded, Mao Zedong was faced with a nation divided on every level, having been ravaged by a century of external foreign invasion and internal civil wars. Like Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor, Mao Zedong had the difficult task of consolidating and unifying China ahead of him. Maoism should be seen in the context of this unifying task: Mao Zedong Thought was the political and ideological fruit of Mao’s efforts towards a unified nation.

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Blog

PC

My laptop is getting up there in the years, so I decided to build a PC.
IMG_20141021_143010

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Essays

The Politics of Islamic Immigration: How Muslim Identity and Citizenship Reversed Societal Models in Germany and France

Introduction

The twenty-first century in Europe is increasingly concerned with Islam on all fronts. On an internal, domestic political level, Muslim populations in Europe are growing and entrenching at an unprecedented rate. Islam’s relationship with the West and Europe has become particularly relevant and scrutinized with the September 11 attacks in 2001 and the attacks on the London bombings in 2005, particularly because these attacks were attributed to Muslims fighting in the name of Islam. It should be emphasized that this is not simply a security concern over violence, but a much deeper cultural and identity crisis, which has been dubbed “Islamophobia” or “Eurabia.”

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Essays

Text and Topography: The Agency of Yseut and the Queen in Nature

Béroul’s The Romance of Tristran and Marie de France’s Chevrefueil both use the natural world to explore the complex relationship and power dynamics between the respective two lovers. However, their approach in text and topography is very different, heavily influenced by their respective genre and structure. Romance is a more “primitive” fabliau, expansive and external, while Chevrefueil is a more “courtly” Breton lai, focused and internal. The scope of the topography matches the scope of the text: thus, the natural world for Romance is likewise large, with multiple characters and actions that are explicit and literal, while the natural world in Chevrefueil is small, with only Tristan and the queen and actions that are implicit and symbolic. Nature can primarily be seen as a male space, created and sustained by the male characters, but this does not mean the power dynamic is tipped towards Tristran or Tristan. The text and topography in both stories are nuanced in their exploration of the two lover’s relationship, and there is a subtle undercurrent of female agency that reveals the relationship to be more symbiotic and reciprocal than initially evident. Romance and Chevrefueil are a sort of human geography: text, topography, and the two lovers are mapped, and their mutuality and equality elucidated. For convenience’s sake throughout this essay, Tristran and Yseut will be used to describe the two lovers in Béroul’s Romance while Tristan and the queen will be used for Marie’s Chevrefueil.

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Blog

McGill

So I graduated from McGill University with a B.A. in English Literature and History on June 3rd.

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Blog

McGill Orgy

“I propose an actual orgy. We’ll get a hotel room near campus, some champagne, condoms, lube and make a night of it.”

It started eight months ago, with a post on the online community of /r/mcgill.
A newly created account, under the imaginative name of mcgillorgythrowaway (now deleted), made a text post asking the two thousand /r/mcgill members to join him in an orgy.

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Categories
Essays

In the Shadow of the Soviet Structures: Transformation Crisis in Russia and Europe

The transition from communism to capitalism following the revolutions of 1989 was unprecedented.1 Generally speaking, post-Communist states suffered a transformation crisis in moving from state socialism and a planned economy to a free and global market, resulting in hyperinflation, unemployment, and lower standards of living. Why was this?

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