"I Am Somebody" film review - offering a Chinese-American perspective on the early American West

"A Chinaman's chance" means "no chance in hell." Out in the more politically correct mid-Atlantic, I never actually came across this phrase in public conversation. However, I've heard that it's still used in other parts of the US.

The historical plight of Chinese-Americans is less well known than that of other minorities in America. While many Americans may know that it was Chinese labor which helped build the railroads, considerably fewer would be able to tell you of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943), which outlawed Chinese immigration to America and denied citizenship to those Chinese already residing there.

Yesterday, I saw "I Am Somebody" by Aki Aleong, shown as part of the currently ongoing Beijing International Film Festival, a movie which attempts to address this period in Chinese-American history. It's unique in that it takes the traditional Western genre then gives it a refreshing twist: telling the tale from the perspective of a young Chinese coolie, and deals with the sort of violence and discrimination early Chinese in America (among other minorities) dealt with.

The film is important in that it provides a rare insight into the lives of Chinese-American coolies, who helped to build the 17 railroad lines which united the US, a monumental act of intense physical labor under miserable conditions that was pivotal to the country's economic development. The narrative offers a welcome alternative to the traditional 'hero' mythology of rugged cowboy heroes and heathen Indians, instead paying honor to the many Chinese laborers who struggled for dignity within a society so clearly unwilling to confer it upon them. It is styled as a traditional morality film, and as such, pulls no punches about what it wishes to convey: that Chinese in America were treated as non-citizens (non-humans even) by White America, that they were mistreated and murdered without just trial, and that they and other minority groups (and sympathetic Whites) banded together to help one another.

It's plot is typical of such morality tales: In the 1890s American West, Sing, an honest young coolie (played by Reggie Lee, a Philipino-American actor) is falsely accused of the murder of a white girl and must escape from a posse of vigilante white racists. He's supported along the way by a black friend (played by Coolio, interestingly enough, though no rapping takes place), a Mexican love interest, a mixed-race couple and a pastor. Many die: there's cold-blooded murder out on the railroad construction site, the hanging of an innocent old Chinese man, and lots of Western stand-off gun battles.

While Mr. Aleong was able to secure a number of reasonably well-known actors into the film, "I Am Somebody" remains a decidedly B-level production. The acting is over-the-top, lines are painfully cheesy and the script is filled with cliche and lacking in originality. The cinematography and audio production is reasonable, but I still found myself cringing during some of the half-baked action sequences and long biblical passages. The Chinese-English dialogue pandered unfortunately closely to lame stereotypes, with a typical line by Old Sing's character sounding something like: "We must be like water flow into river...you must make money, send back home to China!"

"I Am Somebody" is essentially a personal labor of love of Mr. Aleong, who wrote, directed, acted, sung for the soundtrack of, and probably maintains the website for the movie. After the film, Aleong, who is of half-Chinese, half-Cuban descent, spoke of how the film was essentially about himself - the name of the protagonist and the protagonist's older friend are both his own. It took him three years to complete, and he was particularly interested to see how it resonated with a Chinese audience (from mainland China).

The Chinese in the audience expressed gratitude for the film, and when asked if they understood its message, nodded their heads earnestly.

Interestingly enough, those qualities that would make it commercially unviable in the west: lower production qualities, exaggerated acting and cheesy dialogue/characters, would have no such impact upon its chances of finding distribution here in China, where such characteristics define local productions. I can definitely see a lot of potential for "I Am Somebody" to be broadcast on CCTV: the film would serve as a good introduction to Chinese-American history for the country's mainstream audience, even if the polarized good guy-bad guy characterization may not carry the best timing given the increasingly strained state of Sino-American relations. What the film would provide, however, is historical context for the millions of Chinese here with dreams of America--particularly young aspiring students applying to university there--regarding those who went before them and the injustice they suffered.

At this stage in contemporary movie-making, it's sad that stories and perspectives such as this can only emerge in the well-intentioned though unpolished DIY efforts of individuals like Mr. Aleong. I congratulate him on his accomplishment in creating this unique film, warts and all. Here's to hoping that such stories will one day garner enough viewership and funding support to allow for more films that explore these many buried narratives within American history.

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Links:

Official movie site: www.iamsomebodymovie.com/
Wikipedia article on Chinese-American history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_American_history

Two Cousins, Part 2: Beijing Reunion

Recently my cousin Jennifer, a junior studying Chinese literature, visited me in Beijing. She flew in from Chongqing, from various friends’ accounts a dirty, choking, uncomfortably crowded (even by Chinese standards) megalopolis that lays questionable claim to being the largest city in the world. Recently, it’s been in the news for the refreshingly harsh punishments that have been leveled against its well-connected gangsters, including the deputy police commissioner’s sister-in-law, reputedly the ringleader of a gang and dubbed the "Godmother of Chongqing." A stout, homely 46 year-old, she reputedly kept no less than 16 strapping young men as lovers in her own harem.

Jennifer is from a small town in Borneo, and in addition to Beijing’s classic sights, I made it my goal to present her sides of the city that she wouldn’t ordinarily have the chance to experience in Sichuan, but also those that she might not have expected at all. My own travels have benefited enormously from the generosity of hosts in cities ranging from Delhi to Tehran, who showed me around their hometowns and took me to meet their friends, and from those experiences, I’ve come to believe that the best insider tours of a city involve a mixture of natural beauty, interesting conversation with residents and a dash of the unexpected. Over the course of the weekend, I also had the opportunity to bond with my cousin sister, who I’d never seen before outside of the context of family reunions back in Malaysia.

Friday evening: “Old alleys, young chatter”

Having come straight from the office, I beat Jennifer and her fellow Malaysian friend Kelly, who herself is also studying Chinese literature but in Beijing, to Mao Mao Chong (“Caterpillar” bar), one of my frequent haunts. I’ve befriended the owners, recent parents Stephen and Stephanie, and they recommend a couple of house cocktails that feature home-distilled spirits such hawthorn-infused vodka for the girls, who arrive with gift-stuffed bags from Tiananmen square and shopping mecca Wangfujing. Stephen is a former pizza chef from Melbourne and his wife is from Guangdong: together, the two make a solid business pair—he makes the best (probably the only) gourmet chocolate dessert pizza in the city and Stephanie expertly handles all of the troublesome bureaucracy involved in running a small business in China. Across the walls of the bathroom, she has painted in broad Chinese characters the love story behind the bar’s name.

My girlfriend soon arrives and we take our two Malaysians along Nan Luo Gu Xiang, a traditional “hutong” district that has been renovated and sanitized into the closest thing Beijing has to New York’s Lower East Side. It’s filled with tiny boutique salons housed in sloping slate-eaved buildings that sell ironic pins, Cultural Revolution-era kitsch and bohemian houseware, interspersed by bars where hip folk singers with acoustic guitars sing out on to the din of the main street. Over dumplings, the girls tells us of their experience pursuing literature degrees in China: predictably, Chinese college students are more studious than their relatively relaxed Southeast Asian peers, and they find a lot of their classmates to be parochial and quite ignorant of things beyond their national border.

I take them to a rooftop bar housed in a banking tower in the nightlife district of Sanlitun, where a friend is having his 27th birthday party. There, amongst the elegantly landscapes of the garden bar, I introduce them to the eclectic group of expats and locals that make Beijing’s social circles so fascinating: among them AIDS researchers, political journalists, investors and climate change activists. They are particularly impressed when an American friend named John, for whom I occasionally beatbox, delivers a verse of his smooth eco-conscious Mandarin rap. Later, at “Latte”, one of the city’s utterly over-the-top, gaudy silver nightclubs, I escort the girls around like an over-protective Uncle as they observe an energetic array of live singers cover everything from Gloria Gaynor to Black Eyed Peas.

When I ask what the girls think of Chinese clubs, their reaction surprises me.

“Here it’s a lot more civil than clubs in Kuala Lumpur,” Kelly says. “Even though they’re supposed to be conservative, Malaysian youth are wilder.”

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Saturday afternoon: “Family tales”

After a first day of cultural sites, Jennifer wants to see some of Beijing’s green spaces and I accompany her to Houhai and Beihai, two classic tourist parks that lie along a stretch of lakes just west of the Forbidden City. There, we try to evade the packs of local and American tour groups, some of whom whiz past in rickshaws, snapping photos of “traditional Beijing.” After a winter that lingered months beyond its welcome date, the weather is finally warm and the streets teem with activity: retirees are singing Peking opera on the lake or writing water calligraphy, free-to-join tai chi classes are taking place beneath centuries-old gateways.

Tired from more walking than my sedentary, office-bound legs have seen for several months, I plead for us to rest in the shade in front of a man in his sixties performing various tricks on a Chinese Yo-Yo. There, Jennifer tells me of an older cousin who devoted years of her life to an ex-husband, losing her own identity and falling out of touch with family in the process. When she found out that he had been cheating on her for several years, she left him, but not before finding that she had to rebuild her own separate life once more.

“I think that an ideal woman needs to be self-reliant. She should be able to support herself with her own career, just like those friends you introduced me to last night,” Jennifer said.

It dawned on me that I was having a conversation with my cousin about women’s equality: a topic I have discussed dozens of times with various friends but never before with a member of my family. And while to a feminism-raised audience in the west the topic would sound rather outdated, with her I could still hear the urgency and relevance in her voice. Both in Malaysia and China, where notions of the ideal “passive, selfless” wife remain widespread and associating the term “strong” with a woman can contain both good and bad connotations, Jennifer’s soft soliloquy sounded positively Hilary-like.

She displayed a similarly well-constructed moral compass over the weekend several more times, and each time I heard her deliver such rousing lines, I felt a mixture of both pride and shame: pride in that I have such a passionate, ambitious, responsible cousin sister, and shame that, despite all of my privileged Western education, I haven’t played a larger role in helping shape my cousins’ lives to date. It would turn out to be the theme of the weekend: while I introduced her to some of the city’s sociable, cosmopolitan types—like an Australian-Chinese gay couple who courted in Italy, or a young chef who cooks for the Canadian embassy—and exposed her to the violent theatrics of punk rock and elegant design of boutique hotels, she would provide me lessons in familial devotion and friendship, all the while gently filling in the vocabulary in my non-articulate Mandarin. It was a bit like one of those skill swap gatherings, except free of any weight of expectation.

That evening, over roast duck in a bustling local restaurant, we discussed our two youngest cousins, each of whom lost a parent while in their infancy. Jenny told me about the way that the other kids would tease them, hurling such schoolyard insensitivities as: “You don’t have a dad…that’s why you’re so poor you have to walk to school.” These days, almost all of my cousins have left their hometown for better-paid work, and until she too left home, Jenny would take care of Hua, the baby of our generation, playing the role of big sister and counselor.

“I hope as a teacher that I can both contribute to society but also make a high salary,” she told me at a Malaysian restaurant, shortly before flying back to Chongqing, her eyes flickering. “That way I can help to pay for Hua to continue her studies in the future.”

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Sunday noon: “Return to reality”

“Going to Chongqing made me not like China,” Jenny explained over tea. “Traffic is awful, people are so uncouth…But Beijing is really different. It’s not as crowded; people are more civil.”

I ask her whether she’d ever consider moving here, but she says that teaching Chinese literature as a Malaysian national would be difficult in China, where they prefer locals. Instead, she’s been talking about going to New Zealand after she graduates, to “experience Western life.” I tell her to go to Australia instead, where she could be close to my parents.

Later, we walk through the commercial heart of Beijing: Sanlitun Village, where the consumer class aspires and acquires its Apple phones and Mango jeans. Arriving at the Opposite House, Beijing’s most famous luxury boutique hotel, I asked a local hostess if we could view one of the hotel’s legendary rooms. Though she tells us that the rooms are all fully booked, the English manager must have found enough authenticity in my English to give us a full tour, and Jenny snapped away with her camera while I schmoozed with the manager. Opposite House is the sort of uber-designed hotel where transparent showers are placed in the middle of the suite, every furnishing is hidden away and the USD $3,500 per night penthouse includes complimentary use of the hotel Maserati. She had never seen such luxury and I enjoyed utilizing my cultural capital to allow her a glimpse of it (something my salary certainly won’t provide anything more than).

“In places like those, I find that speaking English provides significantly better service,” I explain to her as we walk out. “They treat me completely differently when they know I’m Western.”

It reminded me of a humorous story that Jenny had told me earlier, from our childhood years in Borneo. When my brother and I were scheduled to arrive from Australia, Jenny’s mother wasn’t sure whether we would eat the family’s standard Asian diet and as such, had stocked up on bread and snacks before we arrived. Back then, my own family had also treated my completely different because I was Western. To be honest, they still do. But hanging out with my cousin in Beijing, conversing in the language of our shared cultural heritage, I saw those early lines that divided Western upward mobility from family belonging continue to fade away. I’ll never be “one of the cousin crew” – an entire life spent in other lands to date has guaranteed that. But I can still be; indeed, still am: “part of the clan.” And I’ll take that offer any day.

Li Daiguo at Yugong Yishan

Contemporary Chinese music can often feel dramatically polarized. On the “modern” side, one could lump all of the sugary KTV Mandopop and simultaneously rebellious and conservative Western-influenced indie rock. Then on the other, more “traditional” side, one could place all the folk, revolutionary period and classical Chinese music. It’s a rough split, admittedly, but one that speaks to the dramatic schism that Opening and Reform’s ensuing influx of Western culture has created within Chinese musical culture.

Li Daiguo, an Oklahoma-raised ABC who has been based in China since 2004, offers a refreshing aberration to this bifurcated environment. His music, played on a mixture of Chinese and world instruments, joyfully mines numerous folk traditions, continuously pushing the boundaries that instruments like the erhu or pipa are generally held within. On a chilly Wednesday, he held captivated what was surely one of Yugong Yishan’s quietest audiences to date.

Li is based in Chengdu, though he spends considerable time touring, and while living there, I was fortunate enough to see him play a dozen or so times. This extended exposure has allowed me to get beyond his virtuosic mastery and further into the probing, open-ended themes that his music explores.

The mastery tends to leave most first-timers dazzled, and often blown away: a Li performance will involve any combination of huqin, hulusi and other increasingly obscure Chinese folk instruments, violin, clarinet, mbira, beatboxing that slides from hip hop to Four Tet-like electronica to tabla-mimicking Carnatic Indian beats and finally, almost casually, over-tone throat singing (from all accounts: an extremely difficult craft to learn).

If all of this musicality were strewn together in a “look-at-me” medley of instrumental ostentation, most might probably forgive him. But Li’s performances have never been about showmanship; they are explorations of consciousness and the internal life, with pieces that leap purposefully from a Bach-like contrapuntal melodic line to rapid bluesy-riffing to screeching cat-claw white noise. Through it all, motifs of existential conflict, spiritual yearning and playful non-sequitur appear. Experienced live, his music is often rapturous, while never losing its sense of modest folk tradition exploration.

Dressed on Wednesday in blue worker’s uniform, a red and white striped hat and his signature over-sized owl glasses, Li cut a figure somewhere along the lines of Where’s Waldo, Taoist sage edition. His first set was split between a pipa-like instrument and violin, his beatboxing and throat singing lending rhythmic agency to the sometimes serene, sometimes unnerving mood.

His second set, featuring Beijing-based musician Mi, continued along this more theatrical vein, with Mi’s childlike scat and jibberish interspersed between her gorgeously high-pitched, folk minority-styled melodies. The two have played together for years, and their comfort with one another was clear, as Li slid easily into the background, while Mi, on accordion, lifted the mood to a place of confused hysteria and searching—a sonic exploration so germane to her generation’s current situation, yet one so rarely expressed in public.

Links:

Li Daiguo's Douban (most often updated): http://www.douban.com/artist/love.betternonsequitur.com/
Myspace (not as regularly updated): http://www.myspace.com/specialaffection
Musician's website: http://love.betternonsequitur.com
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published December 17, 2009: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/li-daiguo-at-yugong-yishan-december-16-2009/

Review: Great Lake Swimmers at Yugong Yishan

While waiting for the Great Lake Swimmers, one of Canada’s numerous indie-folk jewels, to take the stage, I found myself discussing the peculiarities of bringing mainstream Western acts to mainland China. This narrow market is built around kids: those middle-class, nouveau-angsty teens who will pay good money to fill out a stadium for Linkin Park but would shrug their shoulders at the prospect of, say, the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan. At the smaller level, however, Split Works, a promotions company based in China, is doing just fine, as it continues to bring increasingly notable indie acts (mostly Canadian) over to tour the Middle Kingdom, culminating at the end of January with Andrew Bird.

“We’re the Grateful Dead Swimmers!” joked Tony Dekker, soon after the group took the stage. The unerringly polite singer-songwriter’s gentle, confessional songs, with their poetic couplets and naturalistic imagery, have been gradually winning over an increasingly large audience in the West.

“We’re so proud to be in China,” he would repeat several times, as the band glided through a two-hour set which wound along at the shuffling pace of their sparse folk tunes. He was accompanied by long-time musical partner Erik Arnesen on electric guitar and banjo, their signature minimalist sound rounded out with Bret Higgens on double bass and Greg Millson behind the drums. Dressed in plaid shirts and tidily groomed, the band looked as tasteful and saccharine as Travis, but for the occasional glimpse of several tattooed arms, a subtle hint at the punk rock past that Dekker has referred to in interviews.

Mid-way through the show, the other band members departed, leaving Dekker to play a few solo numbers.

“Can you play ‘Imaginary Bars’ please?” asked a female member of the audience.

“You’ve got it,” he responded, almost instantly. If only all musicians were so accommodating!

Then, as his reedy, emotive tenor delivered lines such as “When the sun fell down and fell asleep/drunk from drinking all the heat” one young Chinese listener remarked to his girlfriend: “His voice isn’t bad,” and “I can understand the lyrics.” I doubt that when Dekker began writing songs as a hobby—he still considers himself a writer before a songwriter—that he imagined himself winning over new listeners in Beijing.

The crowd remained thoughtfully attentive throughout, though it felt like, after a few of the band’s jangly, more up-tempo numbers, they wanted the Swimmers to switch completely over to rock mode, rather than slip back into more finger-picked melancholia. Still, they demanded two encores, and Dekker closed the night appropriately with “Concrete Heart.”

The song makes reference to Toronto’s CN tower, and its refrain goes: “This is the place where I felt/Like the world's tallest self-supporting tower/Or maybe number two.” Number one, as you might guess, is in China, and was completed last year in Guangzhou.

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Links:

Great Lake Swimmers Myspace: www.myspace.com/greatlakeswimmers
Split Works: www.spli-t.com/
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published January 11, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/review-great-lake-swimmers-at-yugong-yishan/

Concert review: Andrew Bird at Yugong Yishan

There were faces of deep concern at the nefarious smell of a blown fuse from both stage crew and crowd when the sound blew out with a dramatic bang mid-way through Andrew Bird’s set at a packed Yugong Yishan. The Chicagoan singer-songwriter’s visit has been the buzz around town for weeks now and, judging by the squeeze, he could have easily filled a venue twice the size.

But after several minutes, the sound returned and Bird, who had reacted to the potentially concert-halting explosion with remarkable calm, soldiered on to complete his set, tired as he clearly was. In a way, the bang provided an unusual climax to a performance that otherwise lacked one: for all of Bird’s dazzling virtuosity and comfortable stage presence, he doesn’t quite possess the showman’s feel for lifting musical tension to its peak or the fine balance between instrumental exploration and pop execution. As a result, Saturday’s show was stunning without being fully satisfying, beautiful but somehow lacking closure.

What was never unclear was Bird’s gifted mastery of the violin: watching him construct his soundscapes, mixing deep, orchestral foundations with syncopated grooves and floating pizzicato, before launching into constantly astounding solo passages, was worth the price of admission alone. His guitar playing, on the other hand, is heavy-handed and raw, and while it provided his songs with a certain garage rock bite, it just left me yearning for more violin. Holding the ship together between this instrumental juxtaposition was his voice, which was much fuller than on his occasionally sleepy-sounding recordings, extending into grand Rufus Wainwright-like warbles before dropping into grittier, throatier territory during a Blues number.

“Are you guys having a good time?” he asked the crowd with an affable smile, looking casually smart in a faded green dress shirt and dark blazer. “I’m having a good time!”

Having opened with an easy-sounding half-time “Darkmatter”, in which his strummed violin sounded almost ukulele-like, the set picked up pace with “Nervous Tic” and “Fits and Dizzyspells,” both played rough and rocky. Part of the joy of a Bird live show is the faint sense of chaotic danger involved: you start to get nervous as he bounds back to pick up his violin or fling his guitar around his back to squeeze in a glockenspiel line—“Is he going to make it in time for the loop?”

The set pulled heavily from his latest album, “Noble Beast,” disappointing fans looking for earlier favorites. Still, his “Section Eight City” rendition was superb, and the set ended strongly with “Imitosis” (“brought to you by the letter ‘I’”) and a drawn-out, powerful version of “Anonimal,” whose skittering, ruminating-on-existence lyrics are imaginatively squeezed into a complex melodic flow. He closed with “Scythian Empires,” enlisting the crowd’s help in helping him keep time while he syncopated loops. Its majestic melody was entirely re-worked, which, while more fun for Bird, meant that it possessed little of the grandeur of the recorded version.

Despite endless cries for “Simple X”, it wasn’t to be, and he closed the show with an intimate cover of Dylan’s “Oh Sister.” It was a moving end to a show that the crowd was grateful to have had in the first place, sonic mishaps and all.

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Links:

Andrew Bird - official site: www.andrewbird.net/
Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published January 31, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/concert-review-andrew-bird-at-yugong-yishan/

Trippple Nippples at Dos Kolegas

When one considers Beijing’s own No Wave scene, whimsy is rarely one of the first things that leaps to mind. Earnest indie scholarship, with required devotionals at the altars of Sonic Youth and Joy Division? Check. Insightful exploration of their generation’s nihilism and/or search for authenticity in an ownership-obsessed society? Check and check. But what of irreverence? Absurdity? Dressing up as a cow and devoting yourself to the “shooting of miracle magic milk” into audience’s minds? For such specific needs, we should look no further, of course, than swaggering Tokyo: home to a famously odd, vibrant underground arts scene.

Trippple Nippples, or PPP, have yet to release an LP, but their bombastic live performances, soundtracked to glitchy, funky poptronica, are already the source of much enthusiastic online chatter. The crowd was clearly ready for some “Japanese weirdness,” and as such, dressed for the occasion in leopard print and stonewash, sailor hat and grandpa cardigan. In a city like Beijing, in which, regardless of whether you’re a yuppie climber or artsy sub-cultural diver, sensible black or navy are the mode de rigueur, PPP’s show became a colorful celebration of unabashed fun, of wackiness for wackiness’ sake.

It began humbly, with opener Platinum (Bai Jin 白金) leaving some wandering if he was indeed the opening act, or simply a well-dressed man playing electroclash numbers off of his iTunes. After several songs, all utterly devoid of anything resembling “live performance”, he began to shout-sing into a microphone. And after that…hurrah! He put on a guitar and it began to feel as if we were at a concert. Bai Jin’s songs are catchy, well-crafted pieces of post-punk rock, mining themes of disillusioned youth and bitter love. The guy just really needs some band members.

PPP, on the other hand, in addition to nippple sisters Yuka and Qrea, included a band of three hip-looking white boys with tribal-signifying painted faces. They played the drums, turntables and keys with assurance and swing. Half the fun of a PPP show lies in discovering what costumes the sisters will conjure, and on this occasion they wore no shirts, but rather black clouds of tape and gladiator aluminum foil head crests: it was part cow, part Roman gladiator, all tongue-in-cheek, libertine fun.

The gig began like a fashion show, with earnest young DIY photographers and video-camera operators vying to snap the sisters Nippple, whose performance appeared half-rehearsed, half-spontaneous. After the first song, Yuki and Qrea smashed pillows against one another, and the exploding sea of feathers made their way throughout the show from stage floor to audience body. Halfway through the set, with the crowd suitably warmed up, the camera crew gave way to a sea of giddy, moshing revelers, leaving the crowd fittingly sweaty, slightly bruised and covered in goose down.

While undoubtedly a performance-over-craft act, PPP’s songs, with titles like “RIP Meat” and “Cavity”, feature endearing English bubblegum raps over well-patched beats. And while their nonsensical theme songs are a far cry from MIA’s anthems of the oppressed or Santagold’s righteous rap-singing, watching these confident young women leap about theatrically, masterfully overcome technical difficulties, then leap climactically into the crowd for a surf felt similarly globalized, gender-liberated and triumphant. I imagine the after party at White Rabbit only built upon such infectious good vibes.

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Trippple Nippples official site: http://trippplenippples.blogspot.com/

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/trippplenippples

Platinum: http://www.douban.com/artist/bj/

Written for Beijing City Weekend, originally published May 21, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/trippple-nippples-at-dos-kolegas/

Rustic at Dos Kolegas

Around the time of Rustic’s band members’ births, about two decades ago, their country’s doors were just being opened up to the rest of the world. With that came sweeping changes, new opportunity and exposure to alternative lifestyles previously unimaginable in China, especially for three self-proclaimed “poor boys” from rural Hebei. Jump forward to 2010, when Rustic, on their way next week to London to compete as China’s national entry in the upcoming Global Battle of the Bands, are well on their way to their openly stated dream of rock stardom: eyeliner, booze, women and all.

They’re not quite there yet. On Friday evening, they played before a half-full Dos Kolegas crowd, which warmed to their trademark retro rock and roll theatrics without being completely won over. Rustic’s tightly wound pop-punk, which gleefully mines everything from early Sex Pistols-era punk to 80s hair metal, makes for an escapist, hope-fuelled performance, where members announce their starry-eyed dreams as brazenly as bassist Ricky Sixx’s open chest; the stage a platform that lifts them—at least for now—far above the cynicism and irony of the modern world.

“Diamonds are a girl’s best friend…but girls are always a boy’s best friend!” screams lead singer Lucifer, wearing his trademark rectangular sunglasses, a nod to his idols, the British “punk pathetique” band Toy Dolls, whose coarse humor and working class pride present clear inspiration. He continued to throw out a litany of tongue-in-cheek one-lines throughout the set, including “If you say you don’t play rock for girls or money, you’re a liar!” and, in reference to their upcoming contest: “We’re just three boys from Hebei who are going to kick the world!”

They led the set with “Girls Are Not Yours”, a riff-tastic dedication to hedonism, whose fast-flowing hooks and chorus are all Mötley Crüe and Poison, a nod to Ricky Sixx’s glam metal roots. His is an obsession turned way-of-being that flows through his entire soul, from his bleach blonde shag and skin tight cow (niubi) pants to his sensual, phallic bass-playing. Lucifer, who briefly demonstrated his musical prowess with a surprise clarinet solo early into the set, sneers his way a la Billie Joe Armstrong through tales of debauchery like gutter punk-ish “Pay to Cum” and “Rock n Roll for money and sex.” His guitar playing is smooth and assured, and he and Ricky possess a magnetic, naturally flamboyant interplay. Behind them, drummer Li Fang, with his bright red mop top, propels the mythological Starship Rustic forward with swift, deliberate economy.

They closed with “Anarchy in the UK,” fitting given that their next gig will take place there, but also because of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s recent passing. The show was entirely over-the-top, utterly anachronistic and filled with a joie de vivre so refreshing within Beijing’s gloomy post-punk-focused scene. It was also a lot of fun.

Forget the fact that hair metal died long ago, or that most casual observers will see Rustic as a group of country boys playing dress-ups. These three wild boys from rural China—poverty-stricken, naïve and boundlessly talented—are out trailblazing a new path to that of their yuppie peers, but one born of the same ambitious dreaming and dedication.

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Links:

Official Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/rusticpunk

Written for Beijing City Weekend, published April 11, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/rustic-at-dos-kolegas/

DJ Kentaro at Yugong Yishan

There is something innately attractive about the guitar, an intrinsic pull—be it in the promise of flocking groupies or the fan boy dreams of Hendrix-like rock legend. Which makes this listener all the more thankful for DJ Wordy, who put down his guitar, left his rock band, then proceeded to teach himself the art of turntablism, to the level at which he is now one of China’s leading exponents of the digital art.

Opening for DJ Kentaro, his set was both swaggeringly cocky and scientifically precise, warming up the crowd masterfully with a set that, while gliding between Kraftwerk-influenced electronica, old-school nineties hip hop and ragga, maintained an easy, mid-paced tempo which slurred and swayed as much as it rocked. In between, samples celebrated the local—a Mandarin rap was set to MIA’s “Paper Planes”—and the entertainingly pop cultural, such as when he dropped in the Ghostbusters theme song. A three-time winner of the national DMC turntable championship, those looking to work out that hip hop itch would be well-advised to get themselves to one of his monthly Hot Pot parties soon.

By the time Kentaro took to the stage, momentarily partnering with Wordy, the crowd had filled out thoroughly. “This is a journey into sound!” announced the sample, and the turntablist—the first Asian DJ to win the World DMC Championship—wasted no time demonstrating his considerable scratching ability, a performance the live video feed projected for the audience to observe. Even when one table quickly went out of order early on—a problem swiftly rectified by staff—he kept the crowd engaged with some golden era hip hop.

In addition to his obvious skill, what separates Kentaro from other DJs is his engaging, confident stage presence. Wearing a black bowler hat, he frequently held one pointer up to the crowd, as if saying “Wait for this!” before dropping one perfectly timed beat after another. Otherwise, he exuded utter control, reinterpreting and reshaping tracks with eclectic originality, as well as a healthy dose of flair, such as when scratching around his back.

While the crowd seemed most receptive to Kentaro’s slower, sing-along reggae jams, those looking to dance were less impressed by the occasionally lengthy beat-holding, scratch-indulgent passages. Regardless, all would have admired the ease in which he silkily led followers from the syncopated glide of dancehall and hip hop into a powerhouse middle section of pacey drum and bass. By that point, he had won over most of those who had previously been too sullen or self-conscious to move, and punters of every calling—from stiff-collared suits to the baggy jean-ed, and everyone in between—were grooving along gleefully to a set both crowd pleasing and jubilant. Particularly hypnotized was one attractive young lass at the front of the stage, positioned directly in front of the turntables, who didn’t seem to stop moving once, and would occasionally throw herself against the stage walls in barely-concealed adulation and longing, arms outstretched in a virtual embrace.

This is 2010 after all: could it be that turntables are the new guitar?

--

Links

DJ Wordy: http://www.douban.com/artist/djwordy/ DJ Kentaro: http://www.myspace.com/djkentaro

Written for Beijing City Weekend, April 19, 2010: http://www.cityweekend.com.cn/beijing/articles/blogs-beijing/the-beat/dj-kentaro-at-yugong-yishan/

A Tale of Two Cousins: on the role of chance and the privilege of migration

Of all the cousins I hung out with on this trip back to my father’s homeland of Borneo, BJ was by far the most affable. Timidity, according to my father, runs in the Hiew bloodline, but both BJ and I are genealogical aberrations in this regard. Before this trip, I have little recollection of our earlier relationship, but for a single task that I performed for him six years ago, while we were both living in England. While I was off attending plays and debating Marxist theory on a semester abroad in London, BJ was hiding from the immigration police in Birmingham, slaving away in torrid conditions in one of those shady Chinatown restaurants. He needed a bank account in which to deposit his savings, so he could send them back home, and I, being the one legally resident in the UK, duly set one up for him to use. Over the holiday, while reading Jared Diamond’s “Guns Germs and Steel”, I began to consider: What sort of factors led to BJ and I, born of the same grandfather, living in such perversely different situations? Why did I get the lucky end of the global opportunity fortune cookie?

BJ is a large man by any standards. Built like a Samoan rugby player, his tanned, square face carries an omnipresent grin, intimating his laid-back, gentle nature. If he were an animal, he’d be a giant teddy bear, custom-engineered for hugs. We got to know each other over games of Rummy, sitting out on the cool veranda of his stilted wooden home, hand-built by his father and uncles many years ago. We never brought up that time in England—I wasn’t even aware of his being there until my father explained the purpose of the bank account. Besides, we were both back for Chinese New Year, and the holiday climate, coupled with the area’s lethargy-inducing humidity, discouraged soul-searching, economic inequality-questioning dialogues. Instead, we kept to gentle chatter about more recent changes and munched on rose apples, casually tossing the cores over the balcony and shuffling the mahjong piece-like cards between games, our rhythms as relaxed and languid as the jungle that surrounded us.

But having finally gotten around to reading “Guns Germs and Steel”, which argues that natural environment was the chief cause of our European-centric world, I had to wonder about BJ and mine’s disparity. Related to Diamond’s belief, I think that our current social positions have much less to do with any pre-disposed differences so much as the social environment in which we were born into, selected by that most random and unfair of ball-hoppers: birth.

For one, BJ was born to my Uncle Kon Loi, the third child of sixteen. Kon Loi came into the world in 1943, while Borneo was still under Japanese occupation. My grandparents were illiterate, hard-nosed farmers, and of the many sacrifices they had to make in order to survive, Kon Loi’s education was one of them. In fact, of Kon Loi and the seven other siblings who precluded my father’s birth, all left school early. They worked in the fields, tapping rubber trees and tilling crops. Thus, Kon Loi came to be a blue-collar worker in the logging industry and cash crop farmer, and BJ was subsequently born into a family of comparatively limited resources.

On the other hand, my father Michael had the good fortune to be born in 1952, when the political context was by no means easy but relatively better. Most importantly, while his siblings were tilling the fields, he had the option of keeping his nose in textbooks, studying by kerosene lamps and occasionally—when teachers at his lackluster school failed to show up—teaching himself. I don’t doubt that my father’s natural ability had a lot to do with his success—he ended up topping the state of Sabah—but of course, who knows whether Kon Loi, if granted the opportunity, could also have done similarly? Additionally, when my father considered taking a regular-paying job as a cinema manager while waiting to hear back from foreign universities, an elder brother, Choi, urged him to pass on the immediate option and go abroad instead. This brother, whom we stayed with over Chinese New Year (his house is on the same original Hiew clan plot of land as Kon Loi and several other uncles’), later contributed significant savings to support my father’s studies in New Zealand.

My father put things simply: “Your uncle has done more for me than I can ever repay.”

The rest of the story goes smoothly. My father completed a Master’s degree in metallurgy in New Zealand, where he met my mother, and their two children were raised eventually in Australia and the United States.

Another significant advantage I had over BJ is that, being born in Australia as an ethnic Chinese, the government treated me no differently than say, a citizen of British or Italian descent. On the other hand, BJ and my other cousins, just as was the case with our parents, face significant discrimination within their homeland. Malaysia has an ethnic quota system designed ostensibly to “pull up” the ethnic majority Malays, but that in turn results in Chinese and other non-Malay citizens facing enormous competition for the comparatively scarce university slots the state allots for them. While my father’s O levels were among the highest in his state, his matriculation was far from guaranteed. Meanwhile, his Malay peers, whose results paled in comparison, breezed into college and the cushy civil service careers the government provides them.

So in addition to being born to university-educated parents who have successfully made the climb from village peasants to private schools and suburban stability, perhaps my biggest advantage compared to BJ was simply not being burdened by state-policy discrimination. Where my playing field can be considered quite fair, BJ’s has been stacked from the start by local elites, soaked in ethno-religious politics and corruption.

This combination of factors has now manifested itself in our current polarized situations—what one might describe as “inverse immigration.” While BJ was willingly having his labor rights abused in England, in order to send back remittances to his family, I was jaunting around Europe looking at cathedrals. He now works in Singapore, which is much closer (and less lucrative). I, however, unsatisfied with my white-collar job in Washington, voluntarily moved to the developing world, where my income is substantially lower than it was in the West. From a practical perspective, my move to China must strike my relatives as utterly illogical—highly wasteful even—but given that it has finally forced upon me a language in which we can converse, they appeared very supportive of my decision.

In such a way, I am making up for the non-material costs that my life in the world of abundance involved: the cultural schism, the poverty of my extended family disconnect. Growing up, I considered myself apart from my ‘bumpkin’ relatives: I was Australian, and as such noblesse oblige. It was only during college, having developed an understanding of the inter-dependent nature of our lives, that I really began to appreciate our connection. BJ and I exist within different economic spheres and cultures largely because of the random timing of our births—to different brothers, born into different times, as well as the sacrifices they made for my father. But just because our professional lives span divergent paths doesn’t mean that our emotional and social ones must too. After all, we are the Facebook generation.

When the subject of life goals has come up, for years I have grandstanded earnestly on themes of social justice and poverty eradication, on expanding devotion to the wellbeing of my tribe (and thus studying something like engineering, as my brother does, rather than politics) to that of my species and planet. But life in China has helped temper such singular idealism; I now feel a responsibility to perform both.

Coming from a migrant family like my own is not about guilt or burdensome self-accomplishment as it is about recognizing and embracing that privilege. That very uncle who funded my father’s education—and subsequently my own opportunities—has a son, Damon. My father brought him to Australia to live with my family for several years, attending the same high school as me. He is now a CPA in Brunei, and is planning to settle back in Australia. Similarly ambitious is his younger sister, Jenny, who is currently studying literature in China. She is 21, beautiful, and dazzlingly bright—the jewel of our family. Over dinner the other night, she shared with me her aspirations to be a professor and a novelist. I plan to support her in whatever ways I can from Beijing (she lives in Sichuan), and in so doing, continue this legacy of providing mutual support, as well as simply develop our own friendship.

This trip home to celebrate the New Year also involved the sensory thrills of diving off Mamutik island and climbing Mount Kinabalu. But when it comes to the true value of the holiday, my time spent together with BJ, Damon, Jenny and our other cousins revealed even deeper depths and greater heights of understanding.

Return to Malaysia

I used to loathe coming back to Malaysia. In past trips back to this house, I remember hiding upstairs with my brother, listening to my Discman, allowing it to transport me away to a world of self-tortured grungey rock songs and the familiar culture which they embodied. Together, my brother and I would lament our predicament: the odd food, the cold bucket showers, the over-attentive relatives and the heat…that relentless, humid Borneo heat. Summer trips back to our parents’ homes were to be endured, not enjoyed. We had long since shrugged off any efforts to teach us Chinese, and Malaysia’s combination of poverty and foreignness repelled us long before these same characteristics would, somewhat perversely, draw me back to it years later.

Four years ago, fresh out of college, I returned to Malaysia with a newly discovered desire to re-connect with the very roots I’d actively ignored in past trips back. I wrote posts that leapt from solemn immigrant story to ethno-political analysis to exuberant travelogue. In the mean time, I began to consciously attempt to develop friendships with my myriad cousins—on my Dad’s side alone I have 13 uncles and aunts, meaning dozens of cousins. In a certain way, it planted the seeds for my move to China: I had found my inability to communicate utterly frustrating, and had yearned to learn more about my ancestral origins.

Now, almost four years after that last trip, I am back once again and still trying to develop those family ties that never really grew in the first place. Prior to coming, I’d spoken excitedly to friends in Beijing of how nice it was going to be to actually communicate with my extended family for the first time, now that I speak Mandarin. My tutor and I coined the term “immigrant’s tragedy” to describe the irreconcilable disconnect between me and my long-deceased grandparents, with whom I never shared a single sentence, and I arrived eager to unveil my newly acquired tongue with all of my relatives, but particularly my cousin brothers and sisters.

On my father’s side, other than himself, no other siblings emigrated, and so most of my cousins all grew up together. One another’s best friends, they make for a tight knit young generation of Hiews: the boys sit around betting over late night card games and watching ESPN, the girls go shopping in town together. One lives in Brunei with his wife, a number are migrant workers in Singapore, and despite limited economic opportunities, many have stuck around Sabah. Though far from being wealthy, they are on the whole far better off than our parents, who grew up malnourished, my Dad’s older siblings sacrificing their education at a young age to help their parents to tap rubber for income.

While only a few days in, I’ve found this re-integration process harder than I’d imagined from back in my frozen Beijing home, where I’d romanticized the approaching trip as much for the emotional warmth of a Chinese New Year spent amongst family as the meteorological type promised by their equatorial location. I’d somehow neglected to consider the first problem: just because I speak Chinese does not mean I have solved our communication impasse. Naturally, when the clan gets together as they do over New Year, they speak our mother tongue, Hakka, which is much closer to Cantonese than Mandarin. While I can often guess what the topic of discussion is (Malaysian Chinese scatter their speech with seemingly random English phrases, like “open-minded” or “second hand”, words that have definite local equivalents), Hakka is different to the point where I can’t pick it up simply by listening. It’s only in one-on-one conversation that I can get them to speak Mandarin with me. And even then, of my uncles and aunts--some of whom spent little time learning it in school--they speak it with such a heavy accent that I struggle to understand them.

If I had to choose one thing I envy of my cousins, as the supposed ‘lucky one’ whose parents made it to university and the West, it would be their natural bond, the obvious close-knit camaraderie that they share together. The mischievous eight-year-old cousin brother I recall playing hand-drawn dice games with is now toughing it out in an electronics manufacturing plant in Singapore, but at least he has a number of other cousins there to support him. Tragically, my two youngest cousins—now 16 and 11—lost a father and mother respectively (from different families) while mere infants; thankfully, the extended family has helped to fill the void as well as possible.

This is what family used to be all about, ever since hunter-gatherers first got together around the fire to discuss Aunt Mildred’s divorce. It’s what the various Asians in my hometown sought to replicate through the community ‘Chung Wah’ association group dinners and events that we’d put on. It’s what expats like myself find ourselves instinctively recreating, having consciously left our previous social circles behind. Ironically, I had to first try to connect with the citizens of the P.R.C. and then various backpacking hosts across India and Iran before I decided to come back and do the same with my own blood.

And yet, after forging cross-cultural friendships with mafia bosses in Amritsar and young freedom fighters in Mashad, I have found it surprisingly difficult to break the ice with those supposedly so close to me: my own cousins. Somehow, my global citizenship can involve a loose Facebook network that spans the five continents of abstracted “one human family” goodwill yet can’t remember all the names at the “one Hiew family” New Year dinner. On one hand, it’s still a language and culture barrier issue. But it’s also in large part simply the fact that, for the last 25 years, I have been only an occasional blip upon my cousins’ otherwise closely connected lives, and all the ambitious family-embracing intent in the world can’t make up overnight for all the emotional capital that they have built up with one another over this time.

And so I start from the beginning, getting to know my cousins’ English names and learning about their careers and lives. With those living in Singapore and Chongqing, we find commonality in our perception of Mainland Chinese (in an example of diasporic snootiness, we agree that they tend to be noisier, spit a lot and have less manners). With Ken--who I taught dribble moves on the basketball court four years ago--I discuss his favorite NBA team, the Los Angeles Lakers. And with Hua, the beloved youngest cousin of the clan, I rehash our one shared trip to a crocodile farm four years ago. There’s certainly no revelatory “So that’s what your childhood was like!” discussions taking place, but gradually, I am establishing a rapport with each of them.

For some of my fellow immigrant friends in Australia and the United States, they have lost touch with their extended family back home and are not particularly concerned with reclaiming it. That’s fine. About 10 years ago, when my family stopped here en route to our new lives in America, I was still unequivocally that way as well. But, like so many of us carrying hyphenated identities, somewhere amidst America’s multicultural mash-up I acquired the compulsion to explore questions that had always felt half-answered. In Washington, when people enquired as to my accent, I’d robotically respond: “I’m from Australia, but my parents are Malaysian-Chinese.” I often wondered if I knew what that second clause truly meant. About what sort of historical and cultural depth I could fill in for myself, beyond the token exoticism that my answer might have offered to others.

Two and a half years after I set off to satiate that nagging curiosity, I’ve gleaned plenty of insight into just what those obligatory ethno-cultural identifying tags actually represent. I’ve devoted significant time to learning about my family at a broader level, through studying Mandarin and visiting my grandparents’ Chinese hometowns and reading books about Chinese emigrational history. Now I just need to spend a little time getting to know who my family is at the individual level, each with their own dreams and struggles and distinct personalities. And that, at a most fundamental level, may be the most satisfying discovery of all.

Comparing Ideas About Sexuality in China and the United States

Originally posted on Advocates for Youth site: http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=1552&Itemid=835

At dinner in Beijing recently a Chinese friend, a sharp 23 year-old woman named Wu, asked some Australian friends when we learned about sex.

“When we were about five,” we replied, and she went on to tell us that growing up in China, she didn’t know what was involved in sexual intercourse until college, when she had the opportunity to look it up online. Through high school, she had no idea that her father was at all involved in her creation, and she knows female friends her age who, to this day, do not understand the physical nature of standard sexual intercourse: the exact means through which males and females bond physically.

It gets better. As this discussion was taking place, another Chinese friend, Guo, a male artist in his late forties, showed up. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when sexuality was a truly shameful thing of which nobody spoke and the only sexual education offered was public notices condemning convicted rapists.

They would read these notices with curiosity, knowing that rape involved sex—something that as teenagers, they were naturally curious about—but still had no actual understanding of. Once, when moving through a crowded street behind a woman, one of his friends—through way of sheer pent-up sexual repression—accidentally ejaculated. The woman saw this, reported him, and the man was thrown out of university, effectively ending any chances at a decent future.

Guo was 24 when he lost his virginity. Before that, he had spent six years with a girlfriend, both of them eager to have sex, nobody stopping them, but simply having no idea how to actually do it. They were living out the opposite of a one-night stand—a six-year undesired abstinence born out of pure ignorance. One can only imagine the frustration.

When they masturbated, Guo and his friends would fantasize about non-physical things. While guiltily performing this most natural of activities, they were not drawn to the vagina, but to more subtle female elements: the shape of a classmate’s wrist, a certain scent, swimming through a female teacher’s legs during Physical Education. It was a very Austen-period sort of sexuality, as a friend put it, and having learned about the penetrative nature of intercourse from a young age, it re-conceptualized the boundaries and elements of the male erotic experience for me in a way that I had previously never considered.

As teenagers, Guo and his male friends, as with other societies, were physically intimate in the sense that they masturbated together, sometimes yanking on one another’s willies. But to them, this was not homosexual behavior. They were into girls; they were just giving each other friendly assistance with the task at hand.

In fact, they had no notion of homosexuality to begin with.

But when Guo moved to Sydney to begin his career as an artist, he started to hear people throwing around the word “gay.” When he learned what it meant, he was struck with a surprising existential crisis: “Am I gay?” he would ask himself, having previously never known that such a thing was possible. Many girlfriends later, it turns out that he isn’t, but China remains a society in which many people do not know or deny the existence of non-heterosexual people.

As the board member of an organization that advocates the early provision of a comprehensive, sex-as-a-natural-part-of-life education to young people, talking to Wu and Guo helped me to re-consider just what is “natural” sexuality within different societies. In the United States, we oppose Abstinent until Marriage education policy largely because, as results show, it simply does not work. During its enactment, teen pregnancy and STI rates increased. At a philosophical level too, we find it disempowering to young people as intelligent, capable member of societies, who should be given the knowledge and power to make informed decisions about their lives.

But with this too is the notion that, at least in the West, perhaps in part because of our sex-obsessed media and pop culture industry, young people are going to have sex, whether or not adults consent to it taking place. The question is simply do you educate them on how to do it in a safe and responsible manner.

But in China, which is undergoing a sexual revolution or sorts but in which sex largely remains a taboo subject filled with ignorance, that’s not necessarily the case. According to most of my Chinese friends—during the few times when sex is ever discussed (as a general rule of thumb, it is not, even amongst friends)—they say that while sex amongst pre-collegiate youth does happen, it is very rare. It is more common in college, but still, not at anywhere near the near ubiquitous levels at which it takes place in Western campuses.

What this means is not that we are wrong to be educating young people about sex, and that in so doing we are “enabling bad behavior,” but that sexuality within societies contains different elements. Where we in the US have struggled for decades between Puritan conservatism and the counter-cultural sexual revolution, China has and remains a very Confucian society, where sex is only just beginning to acquire its own value as something greater than procreation.

That China’s population remains woefully uneducated as to the basic nature—let alone myriad pleasures—of the sexual experience, and yet does not have the sort of teen pregnancy and STI rates that accompany such non-education in the West is not some sort of revelation that comprehensive sex education is unnecessary. Rather, it offers further example of the myriad sexual taboos that various societies have developed, and, in considering the sort of hardships and confusion that Guo and Wu faced in recent periods, hope that our world is moving towards a more tolerant, informed and empowered society.

Hong Kong versus Beijing: past and future

One of the shared battles that foreigners in China face is securing and maintaining a valid visa. Almost anyone who’s been here for a while eventually finds him or herself on a “visa run” out of the mainland. And although some people take the path less traveled and head for Mongolia or Southeast Asia, most of us head to Hong Kong, traditional port of entry to China, and these days, shopping haven for those yearning for vegemite or other tough-to-procure Western goods.

It doesn’t take long to feel the difference between Hong Kong and the mainland. Looking to save money, I flew into Shenzhen, a two-hour bus ride from downtown Hong Kong. As soon as you cross the border, the signs change from simplified to traditional characters. And although in southeastern China they also speak Cantonese, culturally they share far more with other mainlanders than Hong Kong Chinese, many of whom consider themselves distinct (read: superior). After all, they only joined the rest of the country 12 years ago, and the island’s British heritage is clearly visible in everything from school children’s blazers (much more becoming than the mainland’s nylon tracksuits) and its men’s fondness for spending their Saturdays betting on horse races.

Having come in from Beijing’s minus ten degree, record-breaking snowstorm, I basked in Hong Kong’s clear blue skies and balminess. At traffic lights, I was stunned at locals’ proclivity to wait for signals instead of dashing in front of oncoming vehicles and, while riding its hyper-efficient subway, their preference for allowing disembarking passengers off before entering, rather than the rugby scrub methodology I have become so adept at in Beijing. In its nightclubs, I was impressed with the confidence that local men displayed when approaching women, using a directness less often seen in shyer mainland boys, and when walking past their neo-classical legislative building, I took cathartic pleasure in the lively protest against an expensive high-speed railway project taking place on its steps. It stood in stark contrast to the tanks and rifle-toting forces outside my apartment during the lead-up to last October’s 60th Anniversary commemoration .

But after my short stay in this most Westernized piece of China, as I headed back into the mainland, visa successfully processed—with its air pollution and anarchic traffic and insecure striving and authoritarianism—I felt excited. For despite all of its shortcomings, there is still something so magnetic and emotionally drenched and compelling about living here at this moment. Having given it some thought, I found that two people best help to capture what makes Beijing, and the mainland overall, the future-shaping place that it is, while glittering Hong Kong, though not going anywhere soon, feels like it’s prominence, and much of what it represents, is cresting.


-- Howard, the New Yorker fact checker: Beijing

A few weeks ago, I was invited to the dinner party of a friend, Deng, a Michigan-raised ABC who is researching Chinese healthcare on a Fulbright fellowship. He also makes a mean gourmet burger. With us for dinner were several other Americans, two doing Fulbrights and a pre-med student in Beijing studying Chinese over winter break. The conversation was quintessential Beijing half-pat—ranging from the quirks of Chinese psychological therapy to Sino-Arab relations, Ivy league grad school applications and irreverent banter, the sort of intellectually heightened but always lighthearted conversation that I love to lounge into after spending a lot of time amongst Chinese peers, stepping more cautiously along culturally and linguistically foreign territory.

Also digging into burgers alongside us was one local Chinese. I’ve found that in such foreign-party situations, the local contingent often consists of Chinese girlfriends. But on this evening, it was a sharply dressed young man named Howard. He introduced himself as a “journalist’s assistant.” It turned out that the journalist he referred to is none other than the New Yorker’s Evan Osnos, whose reporting out of Beijing has been consistently excellent. Both Howard and I have studied at Sichuan University. Howard’s English listening is excellent, but while his spoken English is fine, he has a pretty strong accent.

At several points during dinner, Howard made comments that were unclear, largely due to his pronunciation. At one point, through a mouthful of pumpkin, he made a comment that another dinner guest completely misunderstood.

“Oh, I thought you said ant,” the other diner said.

“That’s because I have pumpkin in my mouth,” Howard replied.

There was the slightest moment of hesitation amongst the others around the table, before we quickly moved to confirm that it was indeed the pumpkin’s fault.

It was true. He did, indeed, have pumpkin in his mouth, and that very well may have influenced his pronunciation. But the truth of the matter is that, pumpkin or not, Howard’s pronunciation was unclear because he is Chinese, and English is a second language. There is nothing wrong with this fact. I can only envy speaking Chinese as well as he does English. But he didn’t say: “That’s because I’ve got pumpkin in my mouth and also I’m Chinese, and my English isn’t perfect.”

As Howard would have it: the pumpkin was the reason for the misunderstanding: not nationality, not educational background. Because Howard, as he listened to our slang and pop culture references with remarkable comprehension, while he goes about his day job translating and checking references for one of the world’s most reputable magazines, is gaining a Western fluency that many of his peers strive for. He is already “in” with a group of select, accomplished young Westerners, and they are welcoming him into their social circle not only as “a Chinese friend”—something that carries a different set of assumptions and social etiquette—but simply as ”one of them.”

Not all young Chinese want to spend their time hanging out with foreigners, trying to fit in and understand our sense of humor and cultural minutiae, but of those who do, Howard does it with conviction and an admirably smooth style.

-- Rez, Jardine Executive Training Future Tai-pan: Hong Kong

Rez is smooth. His dark hair is slicked back, his tie is perfectly tied, and his pinstriped suit is tailor-made. We sit down to Nepalese in a restaurant in Soho, and he explains his complicated background: Welsh-American and Chinese father, Malay mother, born in Saudi Arabia, raised in Hong Kong.

After stints at Johns Hopkins and LSE, Rez is now in the executive training program with Jardine Matheson, one of Hong Kong’s most storied trading companies.

“We’re the ones who started the Opium War,” Rez tells me, “and we don’t hide that fact from anyone. In fact, we take pride in it.”

Jardines is involved in basically any sort of large commerce you can think of, and Rez rotates between various management positions. Presently, he manages gate services at Hong Kong International Airport, from which he has acquired the ability to ignore yelled threats and learned, with some regret, that ethnic stereotypes tend to ring true in passenger behavior. (The only time he’s had to call the police in was when, after a two-hour delay due to technical issues, irate Shanghainese passengers started pouring water over the gate staff’s computers.)

Rez went to international school, where the students were forbidden from speaking Cantonese, and so he understands but does not speak the local language. He acknowledges that foreigners and Westernized Chinese in Hong Kong live in a bubble, rarely traveling beyond the CBD and its endless malls, restaurants and nightlife. When I asked him about differences between Hong Kong Chinese and mainlanders, he replies: “There is no real difference.”

He hopes that the next management rotation will net him the coveted position of executive assistant, through which he can meet all the right people while assisting the company’s current “Tai-Pan”, the traditional Hong Kong term for foreign businessmen or “big shots.” To be selected requires good guanxi, which Rez possesses in abundance.

“My family and the Jardines owners associate with similar society,” he explained. My friend had earlier mentioned hanging out on Rez’s yacht, and while he currently lives with his parents on the Peak, the highest, most exclusive part of Hong Kong, he has purchased an apartment in Soho and owns another in New York.

Before we part ways, I ask Rez if he hangs out with his colleagues.

“I sometimes hang out with other executive program trainees. Beyond that, though, all the other airport staff are very local Hong Kong Chinese.”

By this, it is understood immediately, that he means they are beneath him. It is hardly conceivable, absurd even, for a member of Hong Kong’s established class, western-educated and on the corporate fast-track, to associate with the commoners of his homeland, those who make up the vast majority of its population.

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Obviously, I draw an extreme comparison here, but in considering what makes China so compelling, I found these two cases to be the clearest examples. While Hong Kong is a place that maintains a strong colonial legacy: there, the white man remains king, and an international versus a local education will in large part determine your entire life. It’s racial hierarchy, while more inclusive that in past times, remains far more rigid and exclusive than the mainland. As one Hong Konger living in Beijing explained it to me: “It’s not so much about how much money you have but simply who you are…who your parents are.”

Of course, there’s plenty of snooty superiority within the mainland as well, something that the Shanghainese in particular are well known for. But on the whole, the mainland gives off the sense that—despite all of the inequalities and corruption within the system—there remains genuine opportunity for upward mobility. In social terms, the mainland possesses a large and growing class of newly enfranchised middle class professionals who all came from humble beginnings, possessing much less of the ensconced smugness that Hong Kong retains. I sense this from the way that my colleagues interact. Their generation, which came of age following Reform and Opening, carries a vision that is not quite the American dream—although in their earnest striving to own a home and car one certainly sees a strong resemblance—and it’s certainly not the Maoist classless proletarian vision, but a fully understandable, defensible and exciting one. We China-observing foreigners often voice our concern over the environmental Armageddon of every middle-class Chinese family owning a car, but through my work, I am meeting university students and professionals fully aware of their society’s problems, and diligently attempting to address them with the sort of innovative, entrepreneurial solutions required.

Hong Kong in many ways symbolizes the accomplishments of Western civilization, with its efficient infrastructure and glamorous old hotels and endless new malls. These material accomplishments are all things that Beijing and Shanghai are feverishly working to attain and display, in a David toward Goliath gesture of come-uppance that China can acquire all these things without having been colonized by the West. I don’t enjoy the country’s overly defensive, victimized self-identification, but suppose that given the choice, I still prefer it to the smug superiority of Hong Kong’s elite. In Howard’s ambitious social climbing and steadfast acquisition of Western cultural fluency, I see my own parents: I see myself. He belongs to a generation that will redefine his country and world in significant ways, and I hope that while here, I too can help contribute to that redefinition.