1. Art and Diseño

1892 PAINTING
BY GAUGUIN
SAID TO FETCH
$300 MILLION
PAGE 4
|
WEEKEND
WORLD NEWS
36 HOURS:
A QUICK VISIT
TO BEACH-RICH
ANGUILLA
PAGE 21
|
TRAVEL
PAUL KRUGMAN
ON EUROPE’S
SHOWDOWN
TRANSLATION
OF MO YAN’S
BRUTAL ‘FROG’
CREDIBILITY
OF NBC ANCHOR
TAKES A DIVE
PAGE 7
PAGE 20
PAGE 13
|
REVIEW
|
WEEKEND ARTS
|
BUSINESS ASIA
...
SATURDAY-SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 7-8, 2015
Provocateur
tries to take
his brand
mainstream
Escaping
Boko Haram
— and death
on a whim
Asian-American inspires
network sitcom with life
of survival and struggle
MAIDUGURI, NIGERIA
Grim world of abduction,
punishment and killing
described by refugees
BY WESLEY YANG
On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that
many people were sure to ask him in the
months to come. ‘‘What did you expect?’’
For the past week in December,
Huang had been venting about his tor-
BY ADAM NOSSITER
Eddie Huang against the world
From The New York Times Magazine
tured ambivalence toward ‘‘Fresh Off
the Boat,’’ the ABC sitcom based on the
memoir he wrote about growing up as a
child of Taiwanese immigrants in Orlando, Fla. He deployed his gift for pithy,
wounding invective against the show’s
producers and writers — before professing gratitude and love for the same
people he just vilified. He described
what he took to be the show’s falseness
and insensitivity to nuance — before
praising its first episode as the best sitcom pilot he had ever seen. He lamented
the choice he had made to sell his life
rights to a major network — before insisting that the premiere of ‘‘Fresh Off
the Boat’’ on Feb. 4 would be a milestone, not just in the history of television
but in the history of the United States.
He had a point. ‘‘Fresh Off the Boat’’
is the first network sitcom to star an
Asian-American family in 20 years and
only the third attempt by any major network in the history of the medium.
Huang chose to sign with ABC in deference to the residual power of network
television to alter mass perceptions
about race, and he had hoped to portray
the Asian-immigrant experience without equivocation or compromise.
‘‘What did I expect?’’ Huang responded. ‘‘I expected I could change
things.’’ He told me that he thought his
story was powerful enough for ABC to
allow him to tell it his way. ‘‘I thought
that people in network television had
their own conscience about things.’’
Huang, 32, was dressed in an acidwash denim jacket and a black fur hat
with its earflaps folded up, which lent
his large, round baby face a not-at-allcoincidental resemblance to a certain
East Asian dictator. (Huang likes to give
himself nicknames — Kim Jong Trill, the
Rotten Banana, the Human Panda, the
Chinkstronaut — all of which, like the
name of his show, repurpose and reclaim slurs and stereotypes.) He was
sitting on the back fender of a Vice Media van, waiting for two marijuana deal-
HUANG, PAGE 2
CURRENCIES
t
t
t
t
Euro
Pound
Yen
S. Franc
NEW YORK, FRIDAY 10:00AM
€1=
£1=
$1=
$1=
PREVIOUS
$1.1340
$1.1470
$1.5240
$1.5320
¥118.890 ¥117.510
SF0.9280 SF0.9210
Full currenc y rates Pa ge 13
A city official in Donetsk inspecting a damaged building. As the leaders of Germany and France prepared to press President Vladimir
V. Putin of Russia on a deal to end the war in eastern Ukraine, officials in Kiev insisted that any agreement must hold to the terms of a truce negotiated in September. PAGE 5
Architect envisions a clean Beijing
BEIJING
92-year-old’s master plan
has support of Xi and a
decades-long back story
BY IAN JOHNSON
Now 92, Mr. Wu has responded to the
growing problems of China’s great cities
by publishing a new master plan for the
capital area, hoping to promote his longstanding idea of linking it with neighboring Tianjin and the smaller cities of
Hebei Province. It is an idea he has
pushed for 25 years, but it now has strong
government backing after President Xi
Jinping endorsed it last year. He has also
been the subject of two recent museum
retrospectives, and he continues to play
the role of arbiter of major projects.
‘‘He’s a towering figure in China’s urban planning and architectural education, absolutely pivotal,’’ said Frederick
Steiner, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Texas, who has
studied China’s architectural history.
‘‘He seems to have endless energy.’’
Indeed, Mr. Wu’s career is a testament to his willpower. In the 1940s, he
was one of the youngest, and now one of
the few surviving, members of a generation of Chinese intellectuals to be
trained abroad before the Communist
takeover in 1949. He studied at the Cran-
It is a winter day in China’s smoggy
capital, and Wu Liangyong is wondering what went wrong.
For 70 years, Mr. Wu has ridden out
the country’s political storms, including
one that killed his mentor, to establish
himself as China’s most influential architect, urban planner and éminence
grise of China’s cities. But looking out
the window of his apartment in the
city’s northern suburbs, he can only
shake his head at the dim building
emerging from the haze.
‘‘Our environment is unfit for daily
life, and the responsibility is very heavy
on our shoulders,’’ he said. ‘‘The problem will be solved sooner or later; it’s
just a question of the price we will pay.’’
CHINA, PAGE 3
STOCK INDEXES
INSIDE TODAY’S PA P E R
FRIDAY
— The Dow 10:00am 17,884.88
t FTSE 100 3pm
6,861.28
s Nikkei 225 close
17,648.50
OIL
$51.13
NEWSSTAND PRICES
HK$ 25.00
US$ 5.00 (GST Incl.)
Manila PesoHong
110.00 KongSingapore
Indonesia RP 30,000 (PPN Incl.)
Bangladesh
135.00
E-mail:[email protected]
China
Peso
110.00
SydneyPhilippines
A$ 8.25 (GST
Incl.)
Myanmar US$
4.50RMB 30.00
&:HJKLNC=UVVUUV:?a@m@k@h@b
Bangkok Baht 85.00
Jakarta RP 30,000 (including PPN)
Macau P 25.00Taipei NT
Taiwan
NT 120.00
120.00
Nepal NRs 19.50
Brunei B$ 8.00
Japan Yen 210 (Tax included.)
TaiwanPrinting
NT 120.00
Pakistan RS Printed
20.00 by Superflag
and
Cambodia US$ 3.50
Macau P 25.00
Communication
Limited,Baht
1/F.,
8 Chun Ying
85.00
Philippines Peso
110.00 Thailand
China RMB 30.00
Malaysia RM 7.50
US$ 4.00 Hong Kong.
Seoul Won 2,000
Tseung Kwan O,Vietnam
New Territories,
Street, Tseung Kwan O Industrial Estate,
EVENING AND DAY SALES 12 & 13 FEBRUARY
30 BERKELEY SQUARE LONDON
ENQUIRIES +44 20 7318 4010 [email protected]
+$1.75
Europe lures Syrians and smugglers
A trafficker who organizes cargo ships
for migrants says the motivation is a
desire to help. WORLD NEWS, 4
IN THIS ISSUE
No. 41,026
Art 16
Books 20
Business 10
Crossword 15,21
Review 7
Sports 14
CONTEMPORARY ART
AI WEIWEI Zodiac Heads, 2010
Estimate £2,000,000 - 3,000,000
unch.
–0.07%
+0.82%
NEW YORK, FRIDAY 10:00AM
s Light sweet crude
NEWSSTAND
PRICES
TO SUBSCRIBE,
CALL:
Bali RP 30,000 (including PPN) Hong Kong HK$ 25.00
(852) 2922 1171
MAXIM SHEMETOV/REUTERS
Formidable obstacles in Ukraine
AYMAN OGHANNA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
SIM CHI YIN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Wu Liangyong at home in Beijing, in a room where he draws and does Chinese calligraphy.
Abbott to fight leadership challenge
U.S. economy adds 257,000 jobs
Prime Minister Tony Abbott of
Australia faces a motion at his Liberal
Party meeting on Tuesday to declare
leadership of the party vacant, but Mr.
Abbott said he had a strategy to turn
back the challenge. WORLD NEWS, 3
The portion of Americans in the work
force rose slightly in January, a positive
sign although the unemployment rate
rose to 5.7 percent. Hourly wages rose
0.5 percent, and the December job gains
were revised upward. BUSINESS, 10
Luxury firms set sights on U.S. rich
The best decade? The 1990s
As the American economy turns
around and upper-income spending
falters in other countries, luxury
companies are chasing American
millionaires. BUSINESS, 10
Nostalgia for that time is more than
mere nostalgia: The Cold War was over,
the economy was booming, the web
was blooming — even TV was getting
better, writes Kurt Andersen. REVIEW, 7
They came in the dead of night, their
faces covered, riding on motorcycles
and in pickup trucks, shouting ‘‘Allahu
akbar’’ and firing their weapons.
‘‘They started with the shootings;
then came the beheadings,’’ said Hussaini M. Bukar, 25, who fled after Boko
Haram fighters stormed his town in
northern Nigeria. ‘‘They said, ‘Where
are the unbelievers among you?’’’
Women and girls were systematically
imprisoned in houses, held until Boko
Haram extracted the ones it had chosen
for ‘‘marriage’’ or other purposes.
‘‘They were parking’’ — imprisoning
— ‘‘young girls and small, small children, parking them in the big houses,’’
said Bawa Safiya Umar, 45, whose 17year-old son was killed when her town
fell under Boko Haram’s control. ‘‘They
parked 450 girls in four houses.’’
Refugees flocking into this besieged
provincial capital describe a grim world
of abduction, punishment and death under Boko Haram in the Islamist quasi
state it has imposed in parts of northern
Nigeria.
Mass open-air prayer sessions, conscription at gunpoint and occasional
handouts of stolen food are the tools of
its outreach, they say. Forced marriage,
slavery and imprisonment are vital institutions in its way of life. And casually
meted-out death — by shooting or beheading — is the punishment for men
who refuse to join.
‘‘They tied their hands behind their
backs, said ‘Allahu akbar’ and cut their
head off,’’ said Shuaibu Alhaji Kolo, 22,
recounting how captured men were
swiftly beheaded after the militants
cried, ‘‘God is great.’’
As Boko Haram terrorizes the area
surrounding this city, as many as
400,000 people have fled to this island of
tenuous government control.
The peril these refugees have escaped
is pressing in on Maiduguri — the city
has sustained three Boko Haram attacks
in the past week, and explosions can be
heard here every night — providing a
rare glimpse into the militant group’s
dystopian vision of Islamist rule.
‘‘You would see bodies everywhere,’’
said Yagana Kabani, 42, who stayed in
the town of Bama for three months after
Boko Haram took it over. ‘‘They killed
many. They would take their money.
They said it was infidel money.’’
This past week, Boko Haram insurNIGERIA, PAGE 6
O N L I N E AT INY T.COM
Security flaws at U.S. insurer
A cyberattack on Anthem points to the
vulnerability of health care companies,
which security specialists say are behind
other industries in protecting personal
information. nytimes.com/business
More genital cutting cases reported
The number of women living in the
United States who have undergone
genital cutting has grown, creating
challenges for doctors. nytimes.com/us