Photo: Wang Hui.

Just back in Beijing after a wonderful time with Li Manshan in Yanggao (more posts to follow when I find the time), I feel a bit like a newly-arrived migrant, a country bumpkin 土包子.

After a welcome shower and a change of clothes, I try to divest my accent of little vestiges of Yanggao dialect—remembering to say bucuo instead of kabulei (“fantastic”), and using the cosy third tone again instead of Yanggao’s handy substitution with the falling fourth tone. The poor villages of north Shanxi already seem like another world.

First film screening at Beijing Normal University yesterday seemed to go down well, convened by the brilliant Ju Xi, with some bright students making interesting comments. Even though Li Manshan went to great lengths on the voiceover to speak Yangpu “standard” Yanggao Chinese rather than tuhua dialect, I’m delighted when rather few of the urbane native audience find his voiceover comprehensible—so they too often have to follow my English subtitles.

Discussing how painful it is to edit a three-day funeral down to about 40 minutes (and hour-long concerts on tour), I comment “I’m even more radical than Chairman Mao”, which gets a laugh.

Neither in the countryside nor in Beijing do I yet detect much evidence of a cowed population living under the yoke of a sinister autocracy—but hey, I’ll learn…

So I look forward to our further sessions at Beishida over the next week, as well as two more film screenings at People’s University and Peking University, chaired respectively by distinguished scholars Cao Xinyu and Wang Mingming—whose courses, instead, I should be attending:

Further screenings coming up in April and May in London and Berlin—will keep you posted.