奥普拉

Can't believe it took me so long to discover the television in my room. Tonight I have watched:

1. A New Agey Taiwanese artist explaining how he locates and repurposes Taiwanese driftwood into large abstract sculptures. He had long salt and pepper hair and a long salt and pepper goatee. He spoke with an atrocious Taiwanese accent (Hs for Fs, Ls for Rs, "uh"s for "er"s) and dramatic pauses. He told a story about how his childhood was filled with love and how he can't sleep at night if he comes across a nice piece of wood and doesn't buy it.

2. A lottery drawing. The final number was 18.

3. Some domestic drama where a woman was arguing with another woman in front of the second woman's parents and brother. Woman 1 slapped Woman 2, causing Woman 2's mother to yell at Woman 1 for hitting her daughter. Then Woman 2's brother confronted another woman at a beauty salon and held a pair of blunt scissors toward her, demanding to know who was spreading rumors about Woman 2. This woman, in curlers, swatted away the scissors and explained that Woman 2 had been having an affair with a married man for four years, waiting for his divorce, which he never intended to seek.

4. A fantasy television series from Yunnan taking place at some floridly-garmented period in Chinese history. The main characters were a coquettish girl and her companion, a man in an iron mask that she called 铁丑 (Ugly Ironman) whom she ordered around like a servant. Ugly Ironman appeared to die, and his body was dragged into the woods by some lazy soldiers to be buried, but they were too lazy to dig a grave and just left Ugly Ironman out saying that the wolves would take care of the body that night. But Ugly Ironman woke up, discovered a kung fu book near him, trained himself in a day, and then returned to the coquettish woman. She was delighted, and then she ordered him to reach his hand into a jar containing a poisonous spider. He writhed around in agony after the bite, but otherwise appeared eager to please. Then she ordered him to capture a magic, forearm-sized silkworm that had the capability of freezing large snakes.

5. Six people wearing glasses sitting around a table discussing, in great detail, something called 奥普拉. The set design suggested entertainment news (zany patterns, big text sculptures in the background, starry animation in the scrolling text at the bottom), but the people were speaking in earnest, without interruption by sound effects, without uproars of laughter, with only the most unobtrusive use of the studio's cameras to capture each person as he or she made a point. It wasn't until they flashed to images of Oprah Winfrey from age 7 until 50 that I understood that this was some sort of popular culture salon. So far they have been talking for twenty minutes, marveling at Oprah's ability to influence American tastes and her ability to express empathy, and then they started about Chinese culture and I lost track of the conversation.

Now it is a commercial for a television series. There are alternating images of people walking slowly, with purpose, toward the camera, and people with tears slowly trickling down their faces.