Kitty, a self absorbed middle class western woman, who was trapped in a loveless marriage and the oriental land of fatal disease and strangeness, finally set her eyes upon death and opened up her minds to life that is more than just polo matches and afternoon teas. All stories can be summarized in three sentences and merely one is needed for “The Painted Veil” by W. Somerset Maugham.  One has to admire Maugham’s talent as a story teller and his delicate sensuality when describing each character is strikingly amazing, notwithstanding his narrow mind and arrogance towards China. Like many other writers, Maugham is observant and somewhat philosophical in the attempt of understanding life and seeking Tao. 

“…But the river, though it flowed so slowly, had still a sense of movement and it gave one a melancholy feeling of the transitoriness of things. Everything passed, and what trace of its passage remained? It seemed to Kitty they were all, the human race, like the drops of water in that river and they flowed on, each so close to the other and yet so far apart, a nameless flood, to the sea. When all things lasted so short a time and nothing mattered very much, it seemed pitiful that men, attaching an absurd importance to trivia objects, should make themselves and one another so unhappy.” 

Sad it is that many draw the same conclusion as Kitty did, yet like her are not able to break the spell and make themselves and one another happy. 

Flipping through a magazine on the flight from Miami to New York, the interview with Edward Norton in the making of “The Painted Veil” caught my eyes. “Prime Fear” and “The American History X” have marked him as a better and more serious actor than most in the mediocre and garish Hollywood circle. His link as a high school friend to a family member intrigues another layer of interest, needless to say. Halfway through the article, his answer to “where would you go for lunch or dinner” in Shanghai is quite unsettling. 

“ There is a bar called the Face Bar in the French Concession. It’s in an old colonial-era diplomatic house, and there’s a terrific Thai restaurant called Lan Na Thai upstairs and a terrific Indian restaurant called Hazara downstairs. It is a charming place to sit. There was a little restaurant we loved called Café Azul. Naomi and some friends and I ate there almost every free morning we had. It’s just a little café. It has some little tables you can sit around, with pillows, and just a fantastic sort of Mediterranean-inflected brunch, which is not what you would expect in Shanghai, but it was really good.”

Strike one. Let along the grotesque expression of “Mediterranean-inflected brunch”, it was quite an amusement that someone would rattle off a long list of cuisines in Shanghai but not one single word about Chinese cuisine. Unsurprisingly, the journalist followed the same logic as the reader and thus questioned, giving Norton a chance to save face,

“How about something more typically Chinese?”

“There is an ethnic minority from the far western part of China called the Uighur. You can find little Uighur restaurants, and they make terrific noodles, especially, but also good little stews and things like that. ”

Strike two. “an ethnic minority from the far western part of China called the Uighur” maybe the politically correct place to eat and promote for the brain washed Americans but it is not what is identified as typically Chinese. Nearly one hundred years have passed by and Edward Norton is just as arrogant as Kitty and Maugham when facing a different culture. 

When will they ever pierce their painted veils?