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Published: September 23rd 2010
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Mini-Cycles
The "Dwarf King" and his army sometimes ride around on these custom-made motorcycles. There is an attraction, a sort of park, in the south of Kunming. Originally, an ambitious developer decided to make Kunming the site of China's largest botanical butterfly garden. Apparently nobody got very excited about the garden, which is perhaps less than half an acre in size, and the developer decided to expand. A little over a year ago, the owner began to hire little people to dress up in costumes and entertain guests in the park. These performers proved a lot more popular than a seasonally temperamental butterfly garden, and the Dwarf Empire was born.
Today, I'm told the park has several dozen little people, probably soon to be 100 of them. The "freak show" school of entertainment, as it stands in China, is about where I imagine it was in America about 80 years ago. I surely hesitate to say that China is backwards or behind the times in this sense, but I
can't shake the persistent notion in my head that, when it comes to how Chinese and Western societies view freak shows, the difference is progress. I'll preempt the risk of going into a long, conflicted analysis by just saying that moral relativism is an extremely
Concrete Village
Personally, I think I'd take these over the employee dorms. complicated subject, and leave it at that.
Mom and I did go to the Dwarf Empire while she was in town, and its accompanying butterfly garden. It only felt about as weird as pretty much anything else in China! The botanical butterfly garden was ho-hum before the clouds broke, and rather pretty after the sun came out. After the fact, I realized we neglected to take any pictures of the butterflies, though, which I guess speaks to where our interests really lay.
From the butterfly garden, we trekked up the path in the flowered Kunming hillside to the site of the Dwarf Empire attraction. There were snack stalls, a large terraced stage with an excess of seating in front of it, and behind it all, the "home" of the dwarves. This is where the Dwarf Empire gets even weirder. See, it's not enough to arrange the little people for the crowds to gawk at. It's also not enough for them to sing and dance on stage (more on that later). The park actually runs on the very silly premise that this is a real society, a "tribe" if you will. I'm sure that nobody who comes to the
Fire Eater
He did fire spinning, breathing, and eating, and was friendly enough to point out the restrooms to us at the end of the show. park actually believes this to be true. But just as there are plaques in the butterfly garden identifying each exotic flower, there are signs around the Dwarf Empire explaining the "habits" of these people. Like, how they pray to the Butterfly Goddess. The business of freak shows meets China's well-established
gonzo anthropology.
The "home" of the dwarves consists of an artificial village of tiny concrete huts. In the afternoon, before the performers put on their song and dance show, some of them wander around this area in plain clothes. As far as I can tell, they are not bound to maintain the image set up by the Bizarro World plaques, and will engage in normal conversation that doesn't involve promoting the Butterfly Goddess. The "huts" are mostly used as staging space, as the performers actually live in dormitories in the back of the park.
A little while before the show, Mom and I came across a group of performers relaxing by the snack bar. One of the women is from Beijing, and so speaks Mandarin that is especially standard, and thus very clear to me and my formal education. She was a very outgoing conversationalist, and explained that she
Chatting with the Performers
The woman in the striped shirt is from Beijing and was eager to lead the conversation. In the purple shirt is the farm boy from Jiangxi who adores Bruce Lee. and the others had been recruited from all over China. Before she came here, she said, she worked in a sweater factory. She is proud of her sewing skills, but also aware that her size was a limiting factor in her utility there. Another boy hammed up his kung fu skills for me, and was thrilled to learn that I come from Bruce Lee's American home of Seattle. He is from a farming family in Jiangxi, and felt he was a hardship on his family because he was not cut out for farm labor. Like many of the "inhabitants" of Dwarf Empire, he doesn't express feelings of being exploited, but rather pride that he can pull a decent wage for his family while doing this sort of work. The biggest complaint among the performers was just the relocation aspect of the job. Many of them come from areas of China where they are not accustomed to eating food as spicy as what they get here, and the women don't like how the sun wreaks havoc on their complexions, at this altitude.
Some of the performers had already worked in entertainment, many as karaoke singers. The show they put on, on the stage, consisted mostly of singing and dancing, with a little bit of fire-eating thrown in. All of the performers also line up on stage for a little bit more pretend anthropology, as an announcer introduces the "king," "princess," "soldiers," etc, of the Dwarf Empire. Cute.
Next time, on the exploitation entertainment series: I achieve an extremely modest degree of hugeness, on Chinese TV.
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Lynda Fitzpatrick
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More fun than farming
I'm so glad you wrote about this. It doesn't get any less bizarre with repeated telling. But what struck me in your blog was how I would rather be signing and dancing than sewing in a factory.