Restaurant named Story in Helsinksi, Finland, RT Est Magazine
All of the Lights
Favorite Asian Dramas #6-8
Continuing the series as we count backward, see the previous post Favorite Asian Dramas #9-12
6)Devil Beside You (Taiwanese)
I know some people who love the other Mike He/Rainie Yang drama Why Why Love a good deal more, but for me this was the first drama I saw them in and one of my first Taiwanese dramas ever, and while it could be argued that WWL has a more consistent plot, DBY has my heart. It was love at first fight when Qi Yue(Rainie Yang), after gathering all her courage to hand a letter of confession to her long-time crush Yuan Yi(Kingone Wang), hands it by accident instead to bad boy Jiang Meng(Mike He), the school troublemaker known as “the Devil”. The exchange sparks the Devil’s interest and he begins pursuing her, to her horror, which becomes even greater when she realizes that he’s the son of the man her mother’s going to marry and that they’ll be living in the same house from then on…
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Love Actually and You Light Up My Star Twdrama Reviews
It took me a long time to warm up to Joe Cheng, mainly because he’s never starred in a drama I genuinely loved. However, catching bits and pieces of It Started with a Kiss and a few other dramas, I gradually concluded that he was a good actor (and attractive) so have been more willing to try dramas starring him. Recently I checked out his two latest dramas.
Love Actually. This 2012 drama starring Joe Cheng and Lee Da Hae (whose voice is dubbed) is sweet but unexceptional. It has a fairly standard drama plot: down-on-her-luck woman who is raising her shiftless brother’s child is mistaken for the daughter-in-law of a wealthy family and is taken into their home, while lying about her true identity. It’s all fairly Mrs. Winterbourne, and had quite a bit of potential for romantic and plot drama, but alas it’s written as very paint-by-numbers. Every event is predictable from a mile a way, and all the small factors – lead chemistry, dialogue, small interactional nuances – that can illuminate and elevate a standard plot aren’t present. The Joe Cheng/Lee Da Hae romance definitely has some sweet moments (all of which can be watched in Youtube compilations) but there’s relatively little tension to it and Cheng and Da Hae have good but not crackling chemistry. At 34 episodes, this is cute but forgettable.
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Saudade in Summer Heat
(Madang, Morobe Province)
Every year from May to July I get a humming in my bones. Somewhere between an ache and a pull, a sensation that I can’t quite feel but is always there, like a sound just above the human ability to register. It’s a longing to go home. Or perhaps more specifically and also more generally, a longing for the tropics.
The seasons change between May and July – everything turns slowly to summer. And in that in-between place, as the temperature shifts to a bold blaze of heat but the moisture from spring is still in the air and everything seems to be vibrating yet holding still in place, not quite ready to be in the midst of steady summer heat – it’s than that it feels like New Guinea. And Honolulu. Every place I’ve been in the tropics, for eight weeks or so in the United States as the temperature turns it feels like that.
I’d always get restless, in college and later, at a certain point in the year. It took me a long time to realize when, and why. But it seems to intensify and get worse with every year since I left New Guinea – a pull that creeps up slowly and stays as spring shifts to summer.
And I get this insane urge to make my way somewhere tropical, preferably home, but anywhere really that resembles it, that can promise it, this heavy air, this tease of tropical heat, the warm ocean and the humming of cicadas and or other insects, slow winds in palm trees, the smell of hibiscus and a faint scent of saltwater…anywhere with these conditions. I’ve been dreaming of Hawaii, lately – because home is so inaccessible. Can almost feel it sometimes around the corner, hitting me on a warm afternoon here in the Northwest as I leave an air-conditioned office and the weather can be felt, alive like a slowly shifting beast.
When you leave home, they never tell you that it will be the weather that will make you the most homesick.
I miss sea and saltwater and and especially humidity and a wild green manifesting itself firmly everywhere. Saudade, is what they call it.
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The Light Keeper
A night without ships. Foghorns called into walled cloud, and you
still alive, drawn to the light as if it were a fire kept by monks,
darkness once crusted with stars, but now death-dark as you sail inward.
Through wild gorse and sea wrack, through heather and torn wool
you ran, pulling me by the hand, so I might see this for once in my life:
the spin and spin of light, the whirring of it, light in search of the lost,
there since the era of fire, era of candles and hollow-wick lamps,
whale oil and solid wick, colza and lard, kerosene and carbide,
the signal fires lighted on this perilous coast in the Tower of Hook.
You say to me stay awake, be like the lensmaker who died with his
lungs full of glass, be the yew in blossom when bees swarm, be
their amber cathedral and even the ghosts of Cistercians will be kind to you.
In a certain light as after rain, in pearled clouds or the water beyond,
seen or sensed water, sea or lake, you would stop still and gaze out
for a long time. Also when fireflies opened and closed in the pines,
and a star appeared, our only heaven. You taught me to live like this.
That after death it would be as it was before we were born. Nothing
to be afraid. Nothing but happiness as unbearable as the dread
from which it comes. Go toward the light always, be without ships.
-Carolyn Forche, Santa Clara Review, also published in The New Yorker
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Recommended Viewing: Taiwanese Romance Fall In Love with Me
I impulsively started watching recent Taiwanese drama Fall in Love with Me last week, and was swept away by it. This drama is fast-paced, romantic, and completely charming.
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Hello Gorgeous: Lucy Hale
Coffee and Irony 