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186 C H A P T E R 9 Ning Hao’s Incense A Curious Tale of Earthly Buddhism In the summer of 2006, Crazy Stone, a low-budget black comedy directed by Ning Hao, was an enormous success in China’s domestic movie market and “an unlikely mainland hit” that “even brushed aside” Hollywood blockbusters such as Superman Returns and Mission: Impossible III.1 China Daily, the Chinese government’s English-language newspaper, hailed Crazy Stone as a film that “makes audiences laugh” and “Hollywood cry.”2 Ning Hao is a talented young filmmaker who before his triumph of Crazy Stone was unknown to a Chinese audience that had been bombarded with Hollywood offerings for a decade. The director’s two previous works, Incense (Xianghuo, 2003) and Mongolian Ping Pong (Lü caodi, 2004), were only shown abroad at internationals film festivals or in “art houses” in the West.3 In his first public interview with the CCTV anchor of Xinwen huiketing ,4 Ning was teasingly called “a 29-year-old obscure director.”5 Yet the interview touched a serious issue that critics and movie audience had ignored, which is the director’s “intense concerns with social problems—from peasant laborers’ living conditions to laid-off factory workers’ living environment.”6 As the CCTV anchor asked Ning, “There is a very realistic [social] background to your film, including the crime of fraud, the bankruptcy of a state-run factory, and the problem of capital . Were these issues related to your own life? How did you observe such things?” He answered, “I grew up at Taiyuan Iron and Steel Plant....Many of my friends are factory workers, including a lot of my parents’ friends. As a matter of fact, I know very well about the factory and I don’t think those issues are really new to me. Just ask everyone: all of us understand the factory’s current situation and see those problems which are not complex at all. So I film what I saw.”7 When the anchor inquired about the director’s choice of Chongqing, a city in Sichuan province where his film was shot, Ning replied, “The glaring absurdity of the story [of Crazy Stone] can only be found in a place full of big changes and antagonistic contradictions....Chongqing became a zhixiashi8 [in 1997], which is Ning Hao’s Incense 187 developing rapidly. Against this background interesting things are taking place, and anything can happen here in the city. When we were looking for a location to shoot the movie, we sensed at once such an atmosphere there and hence the choice.”9 But the director’s choice of location is not only sociopolitical but visual; he continued, “I sensed that atmosphere directly from the city’s architecture. Looking from Luohan Temple (Luohansi), I saw instantly all kinds of buildings from three hundred years ago up to the present. Luohan Temple was probably a building from the Republic of China (1912–1949) or the early days of the People’s Republic. Behind it are the glass walls [of skyscrapers]. The temple was not torn down so it coexists with those of [modern architecture]. Under such conditions, there must be people of all social strata living in those buildings, old or new. Because of this there is a possibility of contradictions and a story as well.”10 Clearly, a striking contrast between an old Buddhist temple11 and new glasswalled high-rises in Chongqing had inspired Ning Hao. In fact, his Crazy Stone starts with a Buddhist “cue.” In a scene after the title credits, a developer asks a factory director to sign a foreclosure contract because the state-owned factory is bankrupt and unable to pay back the loan from the developer’s firm, which is buying the land of the factory. Saying that the workers have not been paid for eight months, the developer advises the director, “Lay everyone off. This is doing a good deed to them (zhe caishi zuo shanshi). The sooner they die, the sooner they reincarnate ” (zao si zao chaosheng). In this speech, the developer appropriates the Buddhist concept of “reincarnation” (chaosheng) to justify his wanton disregard for human life.12 For him, the laid off workers will “shorten” their journey to the Buddhist heavens if they soon symbolically “die”—that is, their lifelong employment under socialism is terminated. No matter how callous the developer’s discourse may seem, it conveys a grim reality in Chinese cities today. In a bestselling book...

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