Reading
Separating the strands of a 'work in progress'
By Chitralekha Basu (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-11-24 10:53
Drawing inspiration from the transitory nature of their subject, the editors designed the book in the form of page proofs with serrated edges, complete with color bars, highlights, wide space in the margins for notes leading to other stories, sketches and photos with the appearance of being loosely stuck or mounted on to the pages. The idea was to stress the unfinished and open-ended nature of the content.
"I wanted a totally new version of what had appeared in the magazines," says Jiang. "I wanted to link the matter in the old issues with the new, and put a new layer of comments on the original material."
Says McGetrick, who designed the look of the book, replete with inter-textual references, linking most of the articles in it to each other, "The extrapolation in the form of the material in the margin provides a personal connection, rather than just a definition or a cross-reference. Often, there's a story in it."
For example, in page 149, in the article, The Chinese Family and its Sex Trade: an Analysis of the Image of Mother, Wife and Concubine, by Zhang Nian, the author quotes Confucius, saying, "Women and base persons are the most difficult to deal with." The editors cross-refer this to the article, The Layout of Power in Houses of Ming and Qing Dynasty, by Zhu Dake, on page 134, where the author is talking about wives and concubines fighting for the attention of the master.
On the same page, there's a stamp-size image - the cover of Zhang Yimou's film, Raise the Red Lantern, based on Su Tong's book, Wives and Concubines, about roughly the same theme. A comment on the margin about the social background and status of concubines leads to page 151, from where it is taken.
An unusually poignant image of elderly Zishu women, natives of Guangdong province, appears on the facing page. These women, now wrinkled with age but fortitude writ large on their faces, refused being lorded over by a man through the token gesture of not giving into the pre-nuptial ritual of letting others comb their hair - the perfect antithesis of concubinage.
Urban China challenges the normal front-to-back reading practice, tickling the reader's sensibilities to access it any way they like. It lends itself to an unrestricted route of entry and exit and an infinite number of combinations that the reader might want to experience. This is probably as close to an interactive online database as a book could get.
