Brainwashing

and the evolution of language

Ok, before I get into the main content of this newsletter, I’m going to start by pointing out that I have decided to take advantage of the new audio capabilities of substack (as well as the fact that I’m a professional voice over actress/narrator) and I’m also going to record an audio file of this newsletter.

The only downfall, of course, is that you won’t be able to see the delightful images I’m sharing with you in the visual version of the newsletter, but I figure if you’re intrigued enough you might come back and look later ;)

So, today I learned a fun fact about the way that the word brainwashing is currently used in China. This is interesting to me because the word “brainwashing” comes originally from the Chinese propaganda technique literally calling 洗脑 or washing the brain. But now in Chinese the phrase gets used more to refer to things that get stuck in your head, earworms like pop songs or commercial jingles. I discovered this while filming the little video below for our theater’s douyin account with our new hire (sichuan opera actress) Xiya.

That song was stuck in my head all day (as it now might be in yours, haha). Fear not, at least I didn’t RickRoll you ;)

Yesterday was a verrrry long day. As you might have heard, Sichuan is suffering from a drought, and as the province relies heavily on hydropower this means that we’ve had some serious power outages. At a time of record level heat waves (working in a glass building in 100+ F equals whole new levels of work stress.

The night before last, the main breaker for my apartment got fried (as in, completely melted and too hot for engineers to work on for quite some time). With temps in our home rising pretty quickly, we, like most of the other residents in the building, decided to go to a hotel for the night.

But of course waking up a toddler and taking her to a hotel was too terribly exciting for her and she didn’t go back to sleep for quite a while… and cue to the following morning when I had to get up early to spend the WHOLE DAY filming outside in the heat.

It was a production for MangoTV and the main reason I agreed to it was that I would finally get a chance to have a nice little film of myself singing peking opera. I managed to snag some videos of myself during the earlier part of the day as we filmed me warming up my voice at the famed 1800 year old Wuhouci Park in downtown Chengdu.

But of course, once I was in full makeup and costume, I didn’t get around to filming myself and so really am just hoping that the production is true to their word and sends me the footage ;)

Lots of Love from Chengdu,

Elyse 柳素英