flatnoseinchina

FniIC profile X: The Entrepreneur - Pan of Hangzhou

2011-12-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

NB: This is being posted for the benefit of the profiled Couchsurfing host, Pan. I'm not sure whether it was posted earlier, but if it was, it has since disappeared. So, here it is again!

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I. The Entrepreneur

Pan is 25 but looks about 19. We met through Couchsurfing: I was heading to Hangzhou, looking to finally see the famed city's sights following a business trip to Shanghai and was looking to meet some interesting locals. While his profile featured very little personal information, he'd received dozens of positive references from other travelers that he's hosted, and so I trusted that he'd be a good host. His apartment is the epitome of sprawling post-collegiate XX: a gun (a traditional Chinese harp) lay on the living room table, covered by various debris; the kitchen table was amassed with books on Chinese e-commerce and bakery price tags; empty drink bottles were scattered like fallen soldiers.

I asked him what he does for a living and received a mumbled answer that involved selling clothing on Taobao, China's eBay, which is going through an incredible period of growth. I thought he said something (we spoke in Chinese, so it occasionally became unclear) about how he didn't have to work, because his parents provided financial support, and so received the impression that he was some sort of pampered single son, a product of the One Child policy. How wrong I turned out to be!

Pan began to open up at a Mexican bar that night which is run by an American who has lived in China for 16 years. This bar owner used to be my boss - I wrote food reviews for the Chengdu branch of his small English-language listings magazine business - and when I showed Pan the magazine, he burst into a long and highly rigorous analysis of the listings magazine market: costs, revenue streams, target audience. His mind is constantly analyzing ways to make money - a classic entrepreneur in a region famous for its business savvy - and he explained that his parents travel around the country constantly, trading in the fish market. He explained that he is opening a bakery next month, partly because he doesn't get along with his partner at the bakery which he currently manages.

As he flicked through another magazine, he peered at an English advertisement for the University of Nottingham in the UK.

“So you can read English magazines pretty well?” I asked him. When I'd asked how his English was, he'd responded instantly: “Not as good as your Chinese!”

“Yeah,” he replied casually: “I was just checking because I studied there…”

“Huh?! You used to live in England? Your English must be great!” I responded.

Thus began his free-flowing tale that unfurled like a handkerchief from a magician's sleeve, each turn becoming increasingly fantastical. Pan, though born in Hangzhou, has lived in over a dozen cities across China, largely due to his parents' work. He researched lilies for his bachelor's degree in biology, before moving to London to study art. Receiving less support from his parents, and having failed as a street-side guqin busker (the humor in such an effort lies in that the gun is, by its nature, a very quiet instrument traditionally played in solitude), Pan moved to Nottingham, completing a master's degree in food processing management. When I asked how he found it, he was honest.

“Incredibly boring,” he said. On the topic of English cuisine, he said he found it “frightful”, instead cooking huge Chinese feasts for his Western friends.

While a lot of young 'boomerang Chinese' - those who've studied in the West and returned to thrive in China's job market - often advertise their worldliness and Western savvy, Pan is the opposite. He dresses in simple, local brand clothing, he prefers to speak Chinese to English, and when asked about the differences between English and Chinese people, he told me that “they're basically the same.” I'm not sure how many English (or Chinese) would agree with his verdict, but such is his outlook.

After three years in the UK, Pan returned to China, where he has since started his flourishing wholesale market on Taobao, managed the bakery that he co-founded and worked as a Latin dance coach. The latin dance coaching caught me by surprise, but I gradually began to predict his response, whenever I asked why he started some seemingly random new hobby or venture.

“I was bored,” he would inevitably say. Bored of the piano, he learned the guqin. Bored in college, he became a trained Chinese masseuse and acupuncturist. Bored after returning to China, he took latin dance, won a championship and became a teacher. His interest piqued by the economic crisis, he is now completing a masters with Fudan University (one of the country's most famous), in economics. He rarely finds time to go to class, but seems to do OK. The next day after our bar conversation, he took a series of exams that began at 9:00 am and finished at 6:00 pm, working his way through one-and-a-half pens' worth of ink in the process.

“Have you ever considered just finding an office job at a multi-national?” I asked him at one point.

“There's not so many of those jobs,” he replied. “Besides, by starting my own company I can provide more jobs for other young Chinese, and give back to society.” Earlier, Pan had explained that the reason he came straight back to China, instead of lingering post-degree in England and building his savings, was that “the Motherland needs my help.” Such altruism though comes muted by a very honest sense of realism. When I ask if his entrepreneurialism is driven more by a desire to cure youth unemployment than simply to make money, he instantly quashes any such idealism.

“Of course my main goal is to make money for myself!” he acknowledges. “You've got to have 'made it' yourself before you can worry about helping others.”

Pan wants to go traveling for a year, and is interested in moving to the US, because “there are many things about the government here that I find annoying.” But he wants to have his businesses up and self-managing before he leaves. On the issue of marriage, he expresses interest in marrying a foreign woman, because “mixed children have better genetic make-up” and he is cynical on the notion of lifelong marriage. I also imagine that, given his freewheeling, omni-committed, city-hopping lifestyle, a lot of more traditional Chinese women would find Pan tough to keep up.

His house, when his parents aren't visiting, is a roundabout of Western and Chinese guests, and when I get back late on the second evening, he's hosting an American college student and his local friend. When we pressure him to perform the guqin for us, he easily relents, and his fingers slide and leap along the wooden instrument elegantly. He gives us a boyish, effete smile as we applaud: “But be warned,” he tells us, “playing the guqin is a deeply emotional experience. And all of the songs are so sad!”

Goodbye from FNiC

2011-07-24T21:05:00.000-07:00

In July 2011, almost four years after moving to China, I returned to the United States to undertake an MBA at Duke University. As I’ve left China (for now), I don’t plan on updating FNiC any longer. For those of you who are interested in following my journey there, I plan on keeping an occasional blog: markhiew.blogspot.com. Through this blog, focused largely on business school, social enterprise and other related affairs, I plan on describing some of the challenges that non-profiteer/social sector folks like myself adjusting to the new world of business.

I started the “Flatnose in China” blog/email series in August 2007, as a young Australian/American-Chinese man about to embark on his first visit to China. Over the years, the blog has been an enjoyable way to share my experiences and thoughts with you, my loyal reader, as I went about the complex task of simultaneously ‘discovering my roots’ and ‘understanding China’ (to say nothing of broader existential struggles like finding a career path and breaking down cross-cultural barriers.)

My stint in China was, like for many other foreigners, an incredibly varied experience, with numerous moments in which I felt utterly intoxicated with the place, and equally many in which I longed to escape it. Among the things I will miss most:

- The food: It bears repeating that Chinese cuisine is not simply the gluggy, battered, “General Tso’s Chicken” Western-Chinese cuisine that one associates with paper take-out boxes and Kikkoman sauce. It is infinitely better. I will miss the diversity of flavors and ingredients and regional variations so readily available in Beijing, and which I have grown so fond of in my time there. In particular, I will miss the cuisines of the southwest, from Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan, and their fiery, delicate brilliance, as well as Chinese-Muslim cuisine, particularly that from the local Xinjiang restaurant across from my old office. 

- The friendliness: Chinese people are, on the whole, very friendly to foreigners. They may not be the most subtle or well-informed on occasion, but they have shown great generosity, openness and curiosity to my foreign friends and me during my time there. One of my favorite memories of China is of long train rides, during which colorful conversations with strangers would unfold, giving me wonderful insights into the lives of locals from all walks of life (as well as much-needed Mandarin practice!). 

- The freedom: This last one might seem counter-intuitive, but in many ways, life in China is a lot freer than that in America. Not in obvious terms, but more in terms of daily life. There is a lack of regulation which, while at times maddening (see: traffic), can feel really liberating, such as the first time one walks down the street drinking from a beer bottle (Americans always get a kick out of that, even though Chinese don’t actually do it themselves). As a young expat in China, one is also freed from the constraints one would normally have to tolerate back home (mortgages, family obligations, general society) while remaining outside the pressures that local Chinese face, as well as enjoying a standard of living far higher than that afforded in the West (endless meals out, affordable taxis, maids, etc.). It’s why some of my foreign friends are staying put in China: they’ve got good jobs, and they’re living the good life!

While I’m not trying to get into a long political rant here, I’ll mention a point that I made both at my work and personal farewell parties: In recent times, I’ve noticed a steady increase in insecure nationalism in both China and the US. Anti-China rhetoric continues to win cheap voter support for American politicians, and the country makes for a convenient ‘enemy’ figure in people’s own political narratives. At the same time, thin-skinned angry fenqing and Chinese exceptionalism (the notion that “China is different” and that foreigners “cannot understand China”) remain the standard in China.

If anything, my four years in China have shown that these caricatures of the other side are inaccurate and unnecessary. I’ve acquired a collection of Chinese and foreign friends who are actively helping to break down these artificial barriers and forge greater understanding between these two critical nations: indeed, between China and the West at large. While indeed very different, it is possible for Westerners to understand China (Peter Hessler is my favorite example) and it is possible, if not politically convenient, for US elected officials to demonstrate a more nuanced perspective toward US-China trade relations.

Hopping off of the soapbox, I’ll end by nothing that I will certainly be returning to China in the future, and am interested in finding ways to support mutually beneficial, sustainable growth between China and other countries.

Thanks for reading,
-Mark

Taiwan travails

2011-07-04T22:55:00.001-07:00

Four years ago, not long before moving to China, I had a brief conversation with a fellow AIDS activist from Kansas.

“Don’t call me ‘Chinese!’” she barked suddenly. “I’m TAIWANESE.”

Unfamiliar as I was in the semantic delicacies of the anti-mainland Taiwanese diaspora, I apologized immediately. It reminded me of the tongue-twisted embarrassment I felt talking to a classmate after I’d just arrived in America, and was still acclimatizing to its racial complexity.

“Is that common amongst Black…I mean, Afro-American…I mean, African-American…” I stammered.

“Just say ‘Black’, man!” my friend interjected, mercifully.

Having finally made it out to Taiwan, I found myself trying to remain sensitive to wording in conversations with locals. Cross-strait relations are an obvious point of discussion, and thankfully, I was able to use the term “mainland” to distinguish between the two groupings. But in contrast to my Taiwanese-American Kansan friend, locals displayed no anger or militancy towards mainland China. Snobbishness is standard—mainlanders are commonly referred to as ‘uncultured’ or ‘barbaric’—though such sentiments are carefully tempered by a more open-minded younger generation. Curiosity is widespread. But by far the most common sentiment I’ve noticed is one of pragmatism.

“I heard Citi just opened up a hundred new positions in the mainland,” Tobias, a local Taiwanese who works for the German insurance firm Allianz, told me. He studied in Germany and speaks the language fluently. “But they hardly have any openings in Taipei.” This exemplified, he told me, the trend amongst multinationals to ignore Taiwan in their obsessive rush to get a piece of the mainland market. I asked if he was frustrated by the situation.

“Of course,” he said, with deep resignation. “We don’t have the English colonial influence of Singapore and Hong Kong, so we can’t compete with them. Basically, it’s hard to get a job with a foreign company here.” He said he was open to moving to Beijing or Shanghai in the future. When I asked if his parents would have any political reservation, he shook his head.

“Before, when China was still ‘communist’, they probably wouldn’t like me to go. But now that it’s opened up, they’d be fine with it.”

It was all so far removed from the narrative of my university international relations courses, where American classmates would go on Cold War-era diatribes about America’s role in protecting freedom and democracy in Taiwan. One classmate, who was in the armed services, talked of how she “just can’t understand how the world can accept Communist rule over China.” At the time, although I’d never been to the region, I had bristled with abstracted Chinese indignation—although my parents were born in Malaysia, I’d been raised to believe that China remained the country of my family’s roots. The brash arrogance of my classmate back then—pre-financial crisis, extended wars and long-term recession—now feels like a distant memory, drawn from those final days of cavalier American invincibility.

Starting from June 28th this year, Mainland Chinese tourists are being allowed to visit Taiwan independently (previously they could only come with tour groups). Local newspapers run stories on night market vendors and holiday spot hotels that are busily negotiating special deals to lure mainland tourist business. According to a friend, the Taiwan government issued a helpful set of guidelines for mainland visitors to Taiwan.’ Top of the list was: “Do not shout ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ in public.”

I think a far more appropriate point would have been: “line up” or “stop at red lights.” Such concepts, while they exist on the mainland, are still not regularly followed. For example, in Beijing, subway riders look upon transport etiquette guidelines the way that many motorists regard speed limits: while technically you’re supposed to line up and allow others to get off before boarding a subway train, common practice holds that one must rugby scrum for a seat as soon as the doors open. I’ve seen riders attempting to disembark from the train get literally thrown back into the carriage by a tidal wave of ferocious seat chasers. For all the government’s efforts to promote civility, such behavior exemplifies how much still hasn’t changed in China: intense competition over scarce resources, a tribal take-care-of-your-own mentality, the constant need to budge as far forward as one can go (metaphorically and literally).

Taiwan is different. Like Hong Kong, people line up. They stop at red lights. They say “sorry” in public. One friend described Taiwan as somewhere in between China and Japan in terms of culture, and though I’ve never been to the latter, the analogy seems accurate (Taiwan was ruled by the Japanese from 1895 to 1945.) Coming from the intense struggle that daily life in Beijing evokes, this past week in Taiwan felt refreshingly easy. Services are plentiful and convenient. There are less people to compete with, and going through one’s day is smoother, cleaner and, in many ways, far more pleasant than in the mainland. People even speak more English.

Coming to Taiwan after four years spent on the mainland has given me the chance to see the country from the other side of the fence. It leads one to wonder, as many must do, what the mainland would have been like if the Nationalists had won. Would they have been able to perform the same economic ‘miracle’ with a population some seventy times larger than Taiwans? Would its sovereignty have been undermined by excessive Western influence, as the CPC claims? How well would these well-established tech and manufacturing companies, like Acer, HTC and Giant bicycles, do at the mainland’s national scale?

Such questions are, of course, in this age of growing Chinese power, merely academic. But I can easily see how Beijing and Shanghai may in the future come to more closely resemble Taipei, in terms of civility and the efficient, urbane culture of its citizens. As economic and tourist ties grow between China and Taiwan, Taiwan’s already heavy cultural influence over the mainland’s younger generation will only grow.

But in the mean time, I enjoyed the friendliness of local Taiwanese and their island’s myriad pleasures. Known as a foodie’s paradise, their xiao chi offerings lived up to my judicious expectations, and then some. Snacking my way through town on local delicacies ranging from crunchy, salty xian doujiang - a typical breakfast broth, to fresh oyster pancakes in the coastal city of Tainan and night market rice sausages, I would have gained another belt inch, but for all of the walking I did in between. And to counteract the humid heat, their ‘snow flake’ ice dessert stands—think Italian ice but served in powder soft layers with flavors like mocha, peanut and passionfruit—are the closest thing to dessert heaven that I have ever come.

In Taipei, I discussed philosophy with a local TED talk discussion group, courtesy of my couchsurfing host, and traversed its national palace museum and Taipei 101. And in Taroko Gorge National Park, I zipped through winding tunnels, carved into the mountainside, opening up into stunning vistas of towering white marble walls and crystal azure water. For such a small, politically complex island, Taiwan offered a stimulating mixture of current affairs relevancy, sensory delight and natural beauty that makes for a well-rounded holiday, and a population that is savvy, capable and deeply accommodating to visitors. I hope it never loses that charm.

On Freedom, In Borneo

2011-02-13T03:52:00.000-08:00

Picture courtesy of Joanne Cotterill of Borneo Dream

I recently read Jonathen Franzen’s wonderful novel, “Freedom”, and this past week in Malaysia has given me the chance to reflect a little more on the notion. I gleaned from the book Franzen’s efforts to demonstrate the limitations of positive freedom (‘freedom to…’ as opposed to ‘freedom from…’ as John Rawls wrote), a prescient reminder in today’s world of short-sighted libertarianism and self-branding.

I spent the past week in Malaysian Borneo split between time with extended family and taking a diving course while staying at a youth hostel. It felt a little awkward, jumping from personal vacation mode to the traditional responsibility of seeing relatives, but I’m glad I did it—I would have felt guilty spending the entire time holidaying and too obligation-laden amongst relatives with whom a sizable cultural divide exists. Also, splitting time made clear the striking contrast between two worlds that exist here: that of exotic expatriates and that of more grounded locals.

For most backpackers in Borneo, Sabah’s attractions have little to do with its people. For the most part, foreigners flock to its world-class dive sites, where sea turtles and colorful fish flourish amongst the warm waters and picturesque islands of Sipadang. Inland, the other major activities involve ascending the region’s tallest peak, Mount Kinabalu, or trekking through its renowned rainforest jungle. If there is to be a human interest, it’s in visiting native tribes deep in this jungle, whose head-hunting, blow dart-shooting evokes an untamed romance.

Staying at a local hostel, I enjoyed the free-flowing range of topics that make up standard Southeast Asian backpacker discussion: transcendental drug trips, exotic festivals and burial practices amongst remote minorities, Thai sex show tricks. One new American friend, an engineer who’s lay-off led to an ongoing two-year sojourn, shared insights into a copper mine in Cameroon that he invested in, after studying the data provided by an ex-stunt motocross mohawked punk rocker that he played poker against in Vietnam. With a Swiss teacher for deaf students, replete with dreadlocks and multi-hued baggie hippie pants, I discussed matters of sign language grammar and cross-dialect intelligibility. I loved every minute of it, precisely because I know I’d never have met these individuals in my normal circles and simply because it tuned me onto altogether new matters: I think good vacations, along with being relaxing, rejuvenate the mind so.

During my dive course, I enjoyed the experience of being surrounded by a tight-knit school of fish, hundreds-large, and simply interacting with an utterly foreign, startlingly intricate world. Sitting aboard our catamaran, speeding out to the islands, I learned from my fellow course participant of expat life in Borneo. Based in Paris, she’d previously had the chance to telecommute, and chose to do so for a year in Sabah, where she had friends. Oil rig workers, resort owners, marine biologists, they all sounded so outstandingly liberated and superior, living out their days in balmy warmth, going on fishing trips and sipping fruity cocktails year-round. She spoke of starting her own communications company and moving out here for good. I wondered what it would be like to switch jobs with my dive instructor.

On the last day, an experienced diver from Los Angeles joined our boat, hoping to photograph seahorses underwater. While donning his dive outfit, his naked back revealed small tattoos of a sky diver as well as a scuba diver. “You sky dive as well?” I asked. “Yeah,” he responded, “I’ve done about 500 jumps.”

He is self-employed, exporting goods between his native Philippines and the US, and spends about four months out of the year abroad, diving in the Maldives, jumping out of planes and the like. I didn’t try to mask my envy of his geographically un-bound lifestyle, with its extensive time for pursuing extreme hobbies and cavorting in the tropics.

Amongst my cousins, however, who were born and raised here, we discussed affairs of a less enchanting nature. My cousin, who works now for a cocoa exporter in Indonesia, described cruel bosses at his previous job, assembling electronics in Singapore over grinding 12-hour shifts. Working at various manufacturing plants or restaurants abroad, the higher incomes they earn are tempered by the increased pressure that city life brings. Those who stuck around or moved back to Sabah—and almost all of them wish to return eventually–do so to be closer to family, and because they prefer its slower pace.

“Many people I meet from West Malaysia like it better over here,” my cousin Joanna, a Mandarin teacher, told me on the way to the airport. “They find that they can have a life beyond work here.”

Given my fellow Westerner’s obsession with the waters in the region, I asked my cousins if they go swimming at the beach. None of them did—many don’t know how to—and expressed both a lack of interest and general fear of the ocean. Malaysia’s national hobby, it wounds like, is cruising around air-conditioned malls, and I did find the most populated areas in Kota Kinabalu city to be its many shiny shopping centers. It always strikes me as a humorous mix: the Westerners one sees on the streets here are generally dressed in either hippie casual or jungle explorer outfits, ready to launch themselves into exhausting white water rafting or mountaineering challenges or otherwise laze along the beach languorously. Meanwhile, locals go about their jobs and then shop. Such is the nature of a tourism-driven city.

Of course, some people fall somewhere in between this rough dichotomy. One evening, I had dinner with Izzie, a local who had returned after a decade in Kuala Lumpur. Not having many friends here, and finding little to do of interest, she passes her time meeting and hosting foreign backpackers through Couchsurfing. She gets excited when discussing plans to move to Korea, whose pop culture she follows. She would have set off earlier, but for her parents’ disapproval.

This past week in Borneo reminded me that personal freedom (I’m not discussing the political sort) always has a lot to do with economics. Earning US dollars or Euros or likewise means that a primary teacher in Switzerland can take months off to travel around Asia, something a Malaysian primary teacher would struggle to do. It’s also about culture and education: while many might be perfectly capable of discussing sign language syntax and marine life species, it takes a certain level of cultivation and wide-ranging education to even possess an interest in such topics. And for Westerners who come from colder climes, it takes an obvious level of job freedom to acquire the luxury to live somewhere tropical and warm, beyond the nine-to-five.

But freedom is not simply limited to economic means and disposable income. Given my abundant educational opportunities and lack of current responsibilities, I’m free to pursue a wide range of career and lifestyle options that my cousins lack. But there’s a certain freedom of personality, one linked more to long-term relationships and intimacy that I noticed my cousins share with one other. To be completely uninhibited and at ease amongst company—I feel like I sacrificed such freedom to a certain degree each time I moved city, curtailing certain friendships (at least face-to-face) in exchange for new ones. As my cousins chatted happily, I realized how rarely in Beijing that I find myself in settings where I am completely unconcerned with the judgments of company. As with anything, geographical freedom comes with its own set of real costs.

Upward mobility and ambition also carry their own set of costs. I am privileged to even be in a position to apply to an elite MBA program; most people would balk at the application fee, let alone consider strapping themselves to a debt of tens of thousands of dollars, then working some 80-hour, job-as-life position upon graduation to pay it off. Certainly, not everyone takes such a route. Many would consider the work-life balance untenable, others surely have other passions and pursuits they’d rather follow. But amongst many 20-somethings that I know, life is primarily focused on accomplishment, with its emphasis on toil and acquisition and accumulation. A middling position involving (only!) 40 hours of work and relaxed evenings at home is not sufficient; we must be ‘agents of change’, ‘thought leaders’, tacklers of climate change, poverty and corporate effectiveness. Such ambition requires opportunity, but also involves lifestyles with precious free time in between the endless functions, blogs, side projects and dynamic activities that being self-realized and successful entail.

Moreover, such middle-class mobility comes with a broader array of concerns, and sometimes the border between privilege and duty can grey. Around my cousins, I felt freed from monitoring the trends and news and popular culture that I find myself devoting significant time to during my regular routine. Obviously, nobody forces me to read the Times each day, or the most current China politics/climate change screed or classic Russian novel. To date, thank God, I’ve managed to keep distance from the constant buzz of twitter feeds. But the drive towards consuming more information gnaws constantly, like the tyranny of choice. It sounds terribly bourgeois to wonder if I read the Economist because I want to or because I ought to—in truth, a see-sawing combination of both—but it does make me wonder how free that makes me.

For years we’ve been told that we’re becoming knowledge workers. I am sure that in the past ten years, the amount of (largely digital) information that I consume on a daily basis has grown significantly. How much of this information is necessary, or useful, or contributes to, say, my level of happiness? That’s much harder to say. To the old adage that ‘ignorance is bliss:’ while I believe there’s clear limitations to that form of bliss, it’s even clearer how great burdens of mental weight are tied to the freedom to connect online anywhere, anytime. The democratization of information and media might be empowering, but being empowered can be awfully exhausting. My cousins, less plugged in and concerned with current affairs, seemed much freer in their personal outlooks.

Ultimately, this past week in Borneo reinforced for me the need to practice reflection regularly. To be judicious about the decisions I make regarding how I spend my time and towards what ends. To appreciate being conscious and free to think spontaneously, to enjoy the daily process of living a fully-fleshed, ordinary life without treating it as one constantly rotating to-do list. To allow technology to augment my life as opposed to atomizing and isolating it. To better acknowledge those things that bring me joy—community, intimacy, learning—and to consider such things in relation to the weightier matters with which I busy myself (career and personal development, keeping up with scheduled activities, accomplishing lofty goals). To adapt from Spinoza, freedom is more about being free to choose a more balanced path, one that regularly mixes striving with enjoying—the mountain trek with the beach session, the manufacturing stint with time off amongst loved ones—than about simply doing what one pleases. It just took some time off amongst cousins and backpackers to remember.

FnIC profile 2: Hunch of Kuala Lumpur

2011-02-03T23:14:00.000-08:00

PREFACE: Growing up the son of Chinese-Malaysians, my occasional summer trips back to Malaysia were family-oriented affairs. Moreover, they were Chinese affairs, meaning that my exposure to the country was somewhat limited. While integration exists at some level here, for the most part, Chinese do not mix much with Malays. Most of the Chinese living in Malaysia moved here in the 1920s and 1930s from southeastern China. The British, who ruled at the time, neatly divided the country's inhabitants into different economic functions, and following independence, things basically remained that way. Chinese here possess their own hospitals, schools, markets, political factions and cemeteries, and until recently, I'd never actually spent time amongst Malays. That was, until Hunch.

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Hunch is from the rural state of Pahang in eastern Malaysia. A short, slight man of 37, he is warm and generous, with effortless conversational skills that betray a career in customer service. He works two jobs for Petronas, Malaysia's national oil and gas company. During the day, he works in an office, handling staff travel, and in the evening, part-time as a concert usher. The commute between the two jobs is short; both are located within the Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur's impressive national symbol and previously the world's tallest building.

Coming from homogenous China, one of the most refreshing things about Malaysia, as cliched as it might be, is its multiculturalism. While talk of ethnic voting blocs fills newspaper columns, Hunch is a model of exuberant, all-embracing diversity. In addition to his native Malay and excellent English, he also speaks Cantonese, Hindi and a little Arabic. “It's too bad, you just missed this Indian festival last week,” he lamented, as we walked through Chinatown, looking for a red lantern he was purchasing to give to an American couchsurfer for Chinese New Year. He learned the Cantonese and Hindi from local friends, and his constant rotation of foreign guests mean that he can work on Spanish, his latest linguistic effort.

Hunch's Couchsurfing profile is filled with over a hundred glowing references, and I went into my stay feeling confident that I was in good hands. After picking me up at a nearby hotel, he took me back to his room, located in an older complex in the heart of the city. I was immediately humbled by the size of it. Perhaps 2.5 meters wide and 3.5 meters long, it fit a single bed, a TV, some shelves and a little floor space. His friend Zul has shared the room with him for the last four years. Yet despite this shortage of space, Hunch has hosted--by his estimate--over a thousand travelers here, sleeping on the floor while offering guests the bed. I wonder when was the last time he had the privilege of sleeping in his own bed; his mirror features a crowded list of upcoming guests. Incredibly, at one point he slept six people in the room: himself, Zul and no less than four disparate surfers, two on the bed, four on the floor, body to body. It sounded like some kind of social experiment role-play, with Western middle-class backpackers playing the role of bunched-up migrant squatters.

While he enjoys hosting over surfing, he's done his fair share of the latter too. He's surfed the US and New Zealand, and recently completed all of Southeast Asia. He recently returned from a month-long trip through the Middle East, which encompassed basically every country there, including Iraq, though not Israel (he tried to enter twice, but as Malaysia does not officially recognize Israel's existence, getting a visa can be somewhat tricky). Naturally, I had to ask about the safety of backpacking Baghdad.

“Was it dangerous at all?” I asked him, over tom yam soup at Jalor Alan, a famous street of hawker stalls behind his house.

“It was fine,” he replied. “Funny thing was, there were bomb explosions the week before I came, and also the week after, but none while I was there!”

While I wasn't exactly filled with confidence, he did sell me on the safety of surfing the Middle East. He found his time in the Arab world interesting, staying with both locals and American English teachers in cities like Abu Dhabi and Dubai. When I asked about religious fundamentalism, Hunch was frank.

“I met some Shi'ites who tried to convert me,” he noted. Malays are almost exclusively Sunni, and moderate ones at that. “They were quite pushy. But if you just listen to them respectfully, there's no conflict.” Hunch has a unique interest in cemeteries, and was amazed upon visiting one in the Middle East in which a great wall separated Sunni and Shi'a graves.

As is commonplace amongst rural communities, Hunch hails from a big family. He boasts no less than six sisters and one brother, most of whom remain in Pahang. When I asked about his childhood, he grew uncharacteristically sober, describing it simply as 'very sad' and 'very poor.' At the age of 18, he moved to Singapore, where he worked odd jobs, including as a bartender. There, local friends introduced him to drugs and nightlife.

“I did a lot of stupid things when I was younger,” he admitted. One night, he took me to a swanky observation bar in a five star hotel to observe the nightly Twin Towers light show. The bar, with its elegant swimming pool, languorous lounges and cocktail-sipping clientele, was achingly hip. I asked him if he ever drinks.

“Not since I was 30,” he told me. “Before then, I used to drink a lot and take drugs. Then my best friend, who used to do drugs with me, died of an overdose. I stopped, became more observant within my religion, and have been a lot happier since.”

Being happy, at this point, is Hunch's primary goal. It's what drives his endless stores of hospitality: helping travelers--and seeing the gratitude with which they receive his generosity--simply makes him happy. On his bedside table lies a large, laminated poster which he designed himself, spelling out his raison d'être: 'I love you because you deserve it!' The other side states simply: 'Free hugs.' Traveling America, he told me, he found locals particularly receptive to the second message.

A man with this big a heart would make a great father, I sense, and unsurprisingly, Hunch says he'd love to have kids. But he's on a flexible, 'If-I-meet-the-right-person' schedule, and at this point is focused on his own contentment. “I'm thinking of changing jobs,” he told me, during our last night together. “Something where I can contribute more to society.” I can think of hundreds of NGOs who could do with his enthusiasm.

The most remarkable thing I found with Hunch is the purity of his passion for hosting. I've spoken with friends who previously hosted intensely through Couchsurfing, only to burn out after a while. Almost invariably, they grow tired of guests who they feel don't give enough back in return, using their home more like a hotel, in contrast to the community's spirit of mutual sharing and cultural exchange. Hunch feels none of that disillusionment.

“The difference,” he explains, “is that I don't expect anything in return.”

On Sedaris in Beijing

2011-02-03T23:05:00.000-08:00

Last week I attended a David Sedaris reading at the Bookworm, along with seemingly everybody I know within Beijing's closely interwoven expat community. It was a packed house--the event had been sold out for weeks--and the atmosphere was buzzing with excitement at the presence of such an eminent American writer, who'd traveled all the way out to entertain us with his acute observations of middle-class America.

These days, Beijing receives visits from increasing numbers of high-profile Western artists and entertainment stars and business moguls--Mark Zuckerburg recently stopped by, setting off local conversation regarding his Chinese-American girlfriend--but visits from non-China-focused writers remain rare. The previous evening, Dave Eggers had given a talk and mentioned that some of his books had been translated into Chinese, leading me to wonder: What sort of Western-obsessive Chinese reader would find Eggers' unique brand of post-modern, ironic and American self-obsession entertaining? (At least, that from his earlier work.) Similarly, how many locals would find Sedaris' witty remarks regarding middle American couples fighting in Paris amusing?

The answer, it seems, is not that many, seen in the meager handful of Chinese-Chinese in the audience. (There were, however, plenty of Western-Chinese.) Chinese do take to certain fields of Western popular literature: plenty of Times best-sellers show up in Mandarin, and books on finance and self-help are omnipresent. But humor is extremely culturally-specific, and it would take only the most inspired Western culture devotee to bother trying to appreciate this brand of it.

But in this case, Eggers and Sedaris have come because the Bookworm, an English-language bookstore and hub for Beijing's foreign intelligentsia, has paid their enormous speaker sums to drag them over. While China obviously possesses its own rich literary tradition, sadly, the vast majority of us are incapable of appreciating it. Consequently, literary life for the Chinese expat remains fairly barren, other than during the Bookworm's annual festival. Starved for such events as we were, the audience seemed particularly appreciative of Sedaris' presence.

Sedaris' reading went over very smoothly. Most of the stories would be familiar to those who've listened to his 'This American Life' contributions, but he also read out a very funny story that they turned down, about the way self-important Americans pronounce foreign words. He also shared some miscellaneous musings from his diary (excerpt: On seeing a “Marriage is between a man and a woman” bumper sticker on a handicapped woman's car, Sedaris concludes that drivers eligible for handicap spaces should not be allowed political opinions). One story was read off of his iPad, and I feared for the machine's battery life (hold on, glowing orb!). Somewhat oddly, he checked his watch frequently--it looked like something of a nervous tic--but gave the impression that he was keen not to over-run his pricey scheduled reading time. Nevertheless, the crowd gave him a rousing applause at the end of the reading.

What followed was most interesting: Sedaris asked the crowd for advice regarding procuring 'weird' postcards in Beijing, and made several references to his experience of Beijing to date. He had just arrived the night before, and explained that the experience had been quite a shock.

“If I'd come from London, that might have been different, but the fact that I just came in from Tokyo made it particularly jarring,” he said. “I was on the subway and I felt pressure against my back, as if someone was pushing me! I thought maybe somebody had fainted and fell on to me.” The crowd burst into hearty peals of laughter.

“Coming from the airport I'd wondered: 'Why are all these people running into the middle of the street?'” he continued--a reference to China's rather anarchic traffic culture--and the crowd roared madly with mirth.

Sensing that he was on a roll, he turned to a visit to a local supermarket. “At the counter, the lady had said the equivalent of 'Hey Ronnie, would ya pass me some quarters?', and her colleague threw some--overhand, not even underhand--to her.” At this point his face was bright red, a hand half-covering his face, and he struggled to contain himself. “I had to move my head out of the way…otherwise I might have been hit!” The swell of laughter was far greater than anything during the readings, and some audience members struggled to contain themselves.

Now, for some who'd only just arrived in China, or those who have never strayed from their American suburb-like enclaves, perhaps the experiences that he described may have struck them as genuinely unusual. But for anyone who's passed even a few days here, by China standards, the situations he described are extremely mild. As it is, he is staying in one of the country's most exclusive hostels, in it's most Westernized region. If he thought those moments he'd described were 'crazy', I thought, someone should take him out to the city's fringes, where the city's modern surface quickly fades and your average, non-cosmopolitan China emerges. Better yet, take him to the rural southwest, where my travels have brought me face-to-face with roasting dogs on spits and traffic maneuvers that would have looked good in Tron, were they not performed by peasants in bread vans. For someone so capable of spinning good yarns out of the tiniest minutia of domestic life, I imagine that Sedaris would quickly acquire years' worth of material within a few hours.

But the point, I believe, wasn't that the scenes Sedaris was commenting upon were particularly novel to we expats, nor was his delivery especially clever. We were laughing because this was David Sedaris, one of America's most beloved humorists, experiencing a tiny sliver of the many oddities that make up daily life in China, and we were experiencing it through his eyes. Though we ourselves may not normally laugh at such quirks, all of us have at some point and, given Sedaris' fame and innocent, wide-eyed ignorance, are able to indulge in such laughter once again. There was nothing anti-Chinese at all about his tone, or the response of the audience, though I do wonder whether the Chinese audience members might have found the spectacle offensive at all.

Having spent three and a half years here, Sedaris' comments reminded me of how few things that happen in China ever surprise me. I look out on to the same streets that I walked wide-eyed when I first arrived years ago, and all of it now seems so commonplace: the old men in Mao suits chatting outside, the carts of shouting street food hawkers, the freelance recyclers with their bicycle-carts piled precariously high with refuse. All of it, where once so utterly strange, is now the everyday. Even a few years ago, if I'd seen a car pull up on the side of the highway and a man hop out and pee against a tree, I might have uttered “What on earth is he doing?” But at this point, I acknowledge the forthrightness with which he expels his urine and walk by. The ferocity of the crowds that push and shove (in China, one never has to travels far to discover crowds), is met with gruff acceptance, and only the occasional outburst, on my part.

This familiarity extends to individual habits too. That guy in the gym lifting weights in ass shorts and flip flops? I've christened him “Ass man.” The drying cabbage which my neighbor stacks outside his door? Well, what else is one to do with cabbage in winter?! Subtly and only slightly conscious of its happening, we assimilate into everyday life; the cognitive adaptations in our personal understanding of what constitutes 'odd' only become aware to us when new visitors from abroad share their wide-eyed perceptions.

Some of it becomes old very quickly. The same familiar tropes arise, about the hilarity of Chinglish signs (I still find them funny, but only the exceptionally unfortunate ones), and the tackiness of nouveau-riche furnishing and fashion. I generally try to explain the reasons for such phenomena as part of my self-designated mission to broaden others' understandings of China. But it reaches the point where one naturally seeks out other foreigners who've lived here long enough to get beyond these early observations and who seek or possess a deeper understanding of the country. In that way, Beijing's foreign society tiers off somewhat into different levels of China expertness. What many of we young Mandarin-speaking foreigners lack in career experience and salary standing, we seek to make up for this in terms of local knowledge and gossip. Ours is a snobbery of yuppie ethnographers; while many of us would readily admit aspirations to join the ranks of those decidedly non-China savvy elites, we are particularly admiring of those who are able to do so from humble 'foreign explorer in China' beginnings. For many of us, that hero is Peter Hessler, who turned two years teaching English in the Peace Corps in rural Sichuan into a staff writer position with the New Yorker.

But sometimes, it's nice to check the China expertise hierarchy at the door and be united in our appreciation of the vast abundance of things about this society that we find so mind-bogglingly weird. In a way, it's all a bit Jerry Springer-like, where the extreme behavior of the locals makes us feel more secure about our middle-class Western civility. However, it's certainly not one-directional; I've has conversations with Chinese friends in which we've shared laughs over some of the oddities discovered while living abroad (for example: the blandness of English cuisine, the excesses of Japanese etiquette). Finally, it also invites one to ponder how much longer we'll be able to play this role of haughty expat. Who knows? Soon enough, Chinese expats will be doing the same thing, laughing amongst themselves in their literati circles in New York and Delhi about the quaint habits of these 'uncivil locals.' Perhaps they already are.

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

2010-06-26T00:09:00.000-07:00

"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.

--

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

2010-06-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

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.”

--

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.”

--

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

2010-04-19T18:41:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T18:37:00.000-07:00

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.

--

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

2010-04-19T18:13:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T18:05:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2010-04-19T17:57:00.000-07:00

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

2010-04-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

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

2010-02-19T07:46:00.000-08:00

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

2010-02-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-25T07:32:00.000-08:00

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

2010-01-25T07:16:00.000-08:00

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.

--

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.

Kid Koala at Yugong Yishan

2009-10-31T00:38:00.001-07:00

“It’s not against the law to have a good time,” said Eric San, more popularly known as DJ Kid Koala, to a packed crowd at Yugong Yishan this Thursday evening. In a way, it neatly summarized San’s raison d’etre as one of turntablism’s most easygoing characters, and he leapt from one feel-good musical moment to another in a sample-filled set that soon had the crowd as upbeat and enthusiastic as Koala himself.

San is Chinese-Canadian, and his “Lei ho” greeting was warmly welcomed by the Southerners (and fellow Overseas Chinese) in the crowd. Though he may speak Cantonese, judging by his almost exclusive use of English, it doesn’t sound like he speaks Mandarin. It’s doubtful the audience even noticed—it probably didn’t hurt that the number of foreign faces outweighed Chinese ones—and he got the crowd moving early on with some signature old school beats over some fuzzy grunge and ragga tracks. San also threw in a Wolfmother sample, perhaps a nod to his recent side project, The Slew, which features the bassist and drummer from the antipodean rock outfit.

Perhaps one of the appeals of a Kid Koala show is San’s utter lack of pretension. Sporting a 60s kung-fu hero bowl cut, he looked more like a naughty teenager in his bedroom, messing around with his parent’s records—the fire siren-like breakdown of his parents’ beloved “Moonriver” a chief offender—than a street cred-conscious connoisseur of cool. Whether leaping between records—as always, sans headphones—throwing in the occasional goofy voice sample or flexing his remarkable scratching skills, Koala’s cheeky, irrepressible grin rarely left his face as he hustled about his tables, sweat dripping down his face.

Koala has described DJing as sometimes akin to having records that he’s listened to take part in a “dating service,” and if Thursday night was anything to go by, San would make for a most interesting matchmaker. M.I.A. rubbed shoulders with ragtime jazz figures, and harmonica-blowing Delta bluesmen mingled with the cocktail dress socialites out of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

After finishing his first set with signature record-as-trumpet crowd pleaser “Drunken Trumpet,” Koala returned, inviting two other DJs—opener DJ Jamming and a friend—to scratch alongside him.

Finally, after a cheerful, crowd-pleasing set, San ended with the haunting, moody “Videotape,” the closing track from Radiohead’s “In Rainbows.” It was a surprisingly mellow way to close, but perhaps echoed the cynical closing statements made by the ponderous (and talented) Chinese MC in the MLK shirt who opened, when he claimed “people in this world are only a little bit happy.”

In which, case, I strongly encourage them to come out in future for some groove therapy with Kid Koala.

Chinese visa processing center in Washington DC

2009-09-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

I just noticed that the Chinese embassy's Contact Us page, including for the visa center in Washington DC, has apparently "been deleted."

So, just in case you didn't know, the center is located at:

Chinese Embassy in Washington DC
Address: 2201 Wisconsin Avenue, N.W., Washington D.C. 20007
Tel: (202) 338-6688, (202)5889760
Fax: (202) 588-9760

It is not located at the Chinese embassy itself. Don't make that mistake, which I know I have!

Office hours these days are Mon-Fri 9:30am-12:30pm, 1:30pm-3:00pm

Concert review: Re-TROS at 2 Kolegas, along with Wu and the Side Effects, 24 Hours and ??? - September 12, 2009 @ 2 Kolegas

2009-09-25T03:31:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Beijing City Weekend

2 Kolegas is an interesting venue. Normally, live music venues tend to be centered around the performer stage, so that no matter where you happen to be situated, the band is central to your bearings. Not so at 2 Kolegas, with its spacious outdoor grounds (perfect for an early Autumn Saturday evening) and comfortable seating, its small stage tucked away in the narrow indoor space behind the bar. As the temperature drops, I'm sure there'll be less appeal to lingering outdoors, but at this past weekend's shows, the bands had to really work to drag punters indoors.

The Mystery Band Whose Name the Web Doesn’t Divulge opened proceedings with a reasonable set of spiky garage numbers. Decked out in matching mop tops, tight trousers and pointy shoes, their mixed Fab Four Brit-pop aesthetics with generic-in-2009 American indie influences. The lead singer, with his Steven Tyler-sized lips, skeletal frame and bangs permanently shrouding his face, did his best impersonation of Julian Casablancas and Caleb Folowill, with excessive emphasis on the hoarse yelping aspect and too little on the actual holding of a tune. Their cover of Kings of Leon's "California Waiting" epitomized the singer's stylistic exorbitance: he managed to convert what is a modern-day pop classic into a tuneless, grungy shriek. Which is a shame, given that the songs, when they rose above the standard lock-step rhythms and angular riffs that have come to dominate contemporary indie rock, were promising and energetically executed.

This is a problem that soon-to-be-household (at least by Chinese rock standards) Xi'an three-piece 24 Hours avoids. Though their British influences are clear--they are named after the film "24 Hour Party People"--they stamp their infectious brand of danceable, precise indie rock with their own distinctive mark. What jumps out at initial listeners is the slick girl-guy vocal interplay between bassist Zhang Cheng and drummer Li Guan Yu, but what has become increasingly noticeable is the central role that Li plays. His expression suggests he's having his balls wrung as he's playing, but his ear drum-blowingly muscular, flexible style and creative rhythm changes are focal to 24 Hours’ appeal, driving their imaginatively-crafted, sassy tunes along. It was another crowd-winning set, and their soon-to-be-released album (on D22’s Maybe Mars label) will surely be one of 2009’s domestic rock highlights.

After the sharp, angsty sounds of the first groups, Wu and the Side Effects provided a rousing set of bluesy seventies rock that stepped further back into rock's pantheon, treating the growing crowd to a more laid back, funky set. Wu is certainly no slouch on guitar, and after so many four note staccato riffs from earlier groups, the crowd was receptive to the axe man’s limber solos, ably shored up by the slap-happy bassist and drummer.

Around one o'clock or so, as the temperature was dropping quickly outdoors, Re-TROS finally came on-stage. The crowd had filled in noticeably; the particularly strong showing from the city’s foreign contingent demonstrated how popular the three-piece is amongst Beijing's young expats. Lead singer and guitarist Hua Dong, the son of Nanjing intellectuals, has remarkable stage presence. He faces further towards bassist and co-vocalist Liu Min than towards the audience itself, and the give-and-take between the two helps to increase the act’s dramatic tension. Hua's speak-sing vocals, at times menacingly enunciated, at others delivered in a manic shriek, gain new intensity in a live setting, his skittish, tic-like movements evoking a younger (and Chinese) version of Ian Curtis or Morrissey. Liu on the other hand seems unflustered, winning fan boys with her good looks and icy, occasionally even melodic singing.

Re-TROS’ name arrived, according to an interview with Hua, from three disparate words, one of which each band member had chosen. From "rebuilding," "statues" and "rights", so the story goes, came "Rebuilding the Rights of Statues," as well as the clever acronym which one can't help but consider appropriate, given how faithfully the band draws from its heroes: namely, late 70s gothic rock and post-punk acts such as Bauhaus and Joy Division. Their sound is similarly miserable and tormented, each song building slowly and steadily upon drummer Ma Hui's locomotive rhythm and Li's deep, slinky bass, filled in by the raw white noise beauty of Hua's brittle guitar lines. And while it may be derivative in many ways, Re-TROS' sound is at least distinct from many of their Strokes-crazed Beijing peers, and carries an artful, intelligent depth that moves beyond mere primal punky expressiveness (not that that's necessarily a bad thing).

The tendency, it would seem, is to take Re-TROS gloomy motifs and discontent noise, and cast them upon a "post-Tiananmen nihilist" stage, where their music might suddenly come to represent all the pain and displacement of China's current generation of increasingly-globalized-but-still-repressed youth. Maybe, for some listeners, or even the band itself, they do. But such labeling proffers too neat a straitjacket, is simply too cut-and-dry for it to come across as anything more than "China can rock too!" journalist hyperbole. More importantly, it denies a talented group like Re-TROS the space to simply make great music, music which might very well be "anti-establishment," but doesn't have to wear the label like a Young Pioneer's kerchief.

That's certainly what they did at 2 Kolegas, and with the show coinciding with legendary Beijing glam rockers' Joyside's final gig, this listener for one would like to imagine that a baton is being passed towards bands as ambitious as Re-TROS, groups as eager to explore and scavenge through rock's past whilst making music that captures a complicated present and most uncertain future.

After the main set, the crowd called for more, and the band obliged with old single "Hang the Police." And while the crowd was largely hypnotized into head-bobbing absorption during the main set, they managed to work themselves into a heady little mosh pit for the finale, spurred on by the song's incendiary refrain.

Venue: 2 Kolegas - www.2kolegas.com

24 Hours: www.myspace.com/nopartypeople

Wu and the Side Effects: www.myspace.com/imnoteasygoing

Re-TROS:

http://www.re-tros.com/face.html

http://www.myspace.com/rebuildingtherightsofstatues

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12847366

Tourism in Jiuzhaigou: between race and commerce

2009-08-02T18:26:00.000-07:00

We hear him before he enters. Our 20 year-old host’s clear, unabashed tenor stops abruptly as he opens the door to re-enter, politely smiling as he resumes his role, refilling our cups of barley tea while we quiz he and his cousin on Tibetan customs.

Throughout the evening, a rotating cast of young performers, dressed in worn outfits of faux-animal skin and silk over their jeans and sneakers; some of them siblings, all of them related, stop by our private dining room to grace us with a song or two. Though all of the songs are Tibetan in origin, over half are sung with Chinese lyrics and when my father asks one of the teenage girls to sing the song in its original language, she informs him that she doesn’t know how, smiling with embarrassment.

For most of the evening, we only pick at the numerous Tibetan hors d'oeuvres laid out before us, skipping the walnut flower and yak jerky for the popcorn-like crunch of their staple cereal: qingke, or barley. Each dish had been formally introduced by our main host, a well-mannered young man just exiting teenagehood, whose dark, mid-length locks would not look out of place in a skateboarder video. He had also taught us how to toast others in local fashion: you dip your finger into your small glass of barley liquor and flick it at their face—a miniature water fight soon ensues—as well as some basic phrases using neat pneumonic devices: the Tibetan for unmarried woman (bimo) sounds similar to “don’t touch” in Mandarin, whereas the equivalent word for a married woman (yimo) sounds like “already been touched.”

Soon enough, however, after his short collection of rehearsed explanations, jokes and phrases had been exhausted, we found the obvious lines that separated us—Han Chinese/Tibetan, customer/performer—had begun to fade, leaving behind four curious foreigners and several similarly curious locals. The mood relaxed, and we quizzed he and his family members-cum-performers on everything from the Tibetan custom of going without family names to the ethnic make-up of his school and the administration of his hometown. In response, his sister asked us what it’s like to ride in an airplane.

His Mandarin is excellent, much more standard say, than my father’s diasporic Malaysian accent or my tone-deaf Anglicized efforts, and he had learned enough Cantonese from southeastern tourists to bluff a conversation with my mother. His English, and that of his peers, however, was non-existent, but for a few key phrases: among them “yes” and “yeah!” When non-Chinese speaking Westerners attend their nightly dinner/performance, “we speak our language and they speak theirs,” he explained. The rest is communicated through sign language.

Halfway through the meal his tone became more downbeat, as he explained the lack of economic opportunities in Jiuzhaigou, the national reserve (literally “Nine village valleys”) around which his hometown sits, and perhaps China’s best known. Earlier, his uncle had told us related stories on our way to their performance house in his small, Chinese-made sedan. A straight-shooting, warm-hearted bear of a man whose eyes appear partially blind (not particularly comforting for his passengers), he had picked us up from the main road outside our hotel, for fear of our tour guide recognizing him and subsequently cutting off any future business.

“I am Tibetan,” he had established immediately. “You can trust me. We Tibetans won’t cheat you like Hans will,” he said, attempting to penetrate our initial skepticism. 80 Yuan per person for a full meal, booze, singing and dancing had sounded too good to be true, given that our tour group had attempted to sell us the exact same thing for 100 Yuan more, and we were grilling him for the catch.

But, true to his word, there was none. He told us we could pay him at the end of the night after he had delivered us back to our hotel, which is exactly what we ended up doing. On the way back, he asked if we wanted to stop to buy some yak meat, and when we had convinced him we were not interested—nor would we buy some when our tour bus inevitably pulled in at a store selling the same goods at inflated prices the following day—he sighed with bitter-tinged satisfaction.

“If you go with me, you’ll see what the real prices are,” he had urged.

For this local ethnic performance business owner, it was as important to discourage tourists from patronizing dominant Han-owned businesses as it was for him to maintain his own living. Such are the unequal relations in Jiuzhaigou between local Tibetans, who are largely cut out of the lucrative tourist industry, and the outsider Han investor class, now reaping serious profits from the perennially crowded park.

Originally, our choice to go with a tour group—something most Western backpackers would rather eat duck tongue than consider doing—was guided largely by economics. My parents, having flown in from the States to visit their son in the distant southwestern city of Chengdu, are not particularly rugged, and Jiuzhaigou’s tourist-ready, stunning combination of azure lakes and alpine slopes, home to the endangered giant panda, seemed an ideal trade-off.

To reach the park from Chengdu tourists have the option of taking either an 11-hour bus journey or a 45-minute flight. Short on time, we decided to fly. But buying the return tickets alone would cost around 2,000 Yuan per person when done by ourselves, whereas tour groups were offering three-day tours, flying in, all-inclusive, for 900 renminbi less. Its such numbers which these tour groups flaunt before price-conscious travelers which make them hard to turn down, even knowing full well of the hefty price inflation and unannounced shopping stops such tours involve (detours which many Chinese tourists, judging by their copious purchases of quartz jewelry, Tibetan medicine and local meats, don’t seem to mind).

The problem, economic inequality aside, is that all of this consolidation leads to a very dry, impersonal experience. Independent tourism is scant, as the town has few, if any businesses that do not depend on the graces of powerful group operators. Tour buses, flag-waving guides and their swelling masses of domestic middle-class tourists, shuttle between airport and stopover, gaudy hotel and park entrance, flowing through the valley in three-or-four day spans in well-orchestrated, rowdy fashion. It’s no surprise that a lot of backpackers choose to skip the park altogether, preferring instead to head for less commercialized—though periodically blocked off—regions of western and northern China, much of which is still very Tibetan in culture, if not political jurisdiction.

This is indeed a real shame, given the marvelous mixture of yet-unsullied natural beauty and richly diverse ethnicities (Qiang and Hui people also populate the area, in addition to Tibetans and Hans) that Jiuzhaigou boasts. The reserve itself is truly stunning. On the initial bus ride within the park, our fellow passengers “waaaah!” with delight at their first glimpse of its trademark sites: crystalline reflection of mountain peaks against perfectly clear, impossibly turquoise-blue lakes.

“Tai piaoliang!” (“Too beautiful!), they gushed to one another, some already pulling out their digital cameras.

My girlfriend and I laugh at such dramatic behavior, throwing our hands up like teenagers on a Six Flags rollercoaster as the crowd continues to periodically squeal and shudder with excitement, eager to disembark and begin constructing their extensive “Me at Jiuzhaigou” albums.

Contrary to some traveler reports, however, it’s still possible to escape the crowds, at least in spring (fall and holiday seasons are supposedly horrendously crowded, with a 150 meter passage taking an hour to cover, according to one friend). Instead of taking the bus between the various highlighted points—most of them lakes with the occasional karst waterfall and Tibetan tourist village—we take the footpaths, and the crowd quickly thins to the point where occasionally we find ourselves savoring moments of precious quietude.

The paths are all painstakingly constructed through the middle of Jiuzhaigou’s natural environment so that the trail traverses steep mountainous slopes, or floods over from running streams located inches beneath. The carpenters’ work —performed by the same migrant Hans that construct towers from Beijing to Lhasa—is quite impressive, and in actuality very environmentally pragmatic. Whereas we Westerners often balk at the idea of having to stick to pre-constructed paths, it makes far more sense when one considers the number of tourists who pass through the park each year, and the heavy-treading threat to Jiuzhaigou’s delicate eco-system they would otherwise present. The laborers go to significant lengths in order to maintain the existing lay of the environment; for instance: cutting the planks into different pieces so that some of the trees within the path remain standing, sticking out through the path from hand-sculpted holes.

Yet even amidst the humbling grandeur of the park, it’s hard to not feel disheartened at the commercial inequity of the entire enterprise. As convenient and impressively well-constructed as it is, with regular buses traversing its smooth roads, world-class facilities and museum, one begins to wonder where the human element resides, if at all, within the park’s rather eerily deserted hills and forests.

We find it, albeit in passively subsisting form, at one of the main tourist villages, its stereotypically Tibetan architecture gussied up with new paint jobs and whose local shop owners offer snacks and cowboy hats, amongst other paraphernalia. We came looking for food, but when we ask about restaurants, one of the shop owners explains the park’s mysterious culinary dearth.

“The park operators don’t allow us to open any,” he explains, offering us packaged snacks as the next best thing.

Instead, we are forced to go to the park’s central cafeteria for serious sustenance, where patrons are forced to pay 50-80RMB for food tickets, or alternatively, to make do on laughably over-priced instant noodles. We choose the latter option, and join the numerous other economizers at a table neighboring a newly married bride and groom. They are both in full costume, having made the trek out to the park with a professional photography crew in order to achieve a more spectacular wedding album.

It was with great fortune, then, that a young woman handed us a business card just outside the park, offering the non-commissioned Tibetan performance. She smiled at our indignant reaction to discovering the level of profiteering which our tour guide had forcefully pushed upon us for an identical performance (“Why not? You should support our local industry!”, the tour guide had chided me, when I’d turned her offer down the day prior), guaranteeing that the show was legitimate.

Which, it turned out, was true. It was not particularly professional, consisting essentially of a dozen young locals dressed in worn Tibetan costume, parading ignorant Chinese tourists around a done-up house, but they were authentic enough simply as themselves, providing us a chance for local interaction that was otherwise sorely absent.

After dinner, we stepped outside and, beneath strung-up prayer flags, danced in unsteady, awkward unison, clasping hands in a circle about a pyre. The Tibetans, converting the widely-held Han stereotype that they all love to sing and dance into commercial opportunity, tried to keep the dance and its dumbed-down steps going, but we outsiders--some having just donned traditional local costume—were simply hapless. Before long, the group dispersed, leaving the young men who’d earlier shared their culture and lives with us so openly, to dance unencumbered with one another.

They moved without self-consciousness, performing the elegant spins and hand waves that characterize Tibetan dancing. But, being the diligent host that he was, our young skateboarder-locked friend soon stopped, approaching us to ask if we needed anything.

“No, we’re fine,” my mother responded. “You guys dance, we’ll just watch.”

Or, as my father had earlier put it over dinner when he had asked us the same question earlier:

“We’re here, you’re here, and we’re talking together. As long as we have these two things, we’re already very happy.”

Concert review: 24 Hours at D22

2009-08-01T20:08:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, I saw the Xi'an three-piece 24 Hours tear up D-22 with their set of sharp, irony-tinged pieces of perfectly danceable indie pop.

One of the points that has garnered a lot of attention in coverage of Beijing's booming rock scene is the prominent role of women. 24 Hours is no different: their bassist/lead singer and guitarist are both women, and their lock-tight playing, bounty of jaggedly catchy hooks and no-nonsense, utterly confident stage presence left the crowd in a state of dazzled awe.

Musically, they recall a lot of the bands that have influenced this past decade's indie sound: the band themselves cite garage, disco and post-punk as influences, and will appeal to fans of Bloc Party, the Long Blondes and (perhaps most of all) Franz Ferdinand. The band's name comes, according to their Myspace, from the film "24 Hour Party People", the 2002 classic that covered Manchester's music community through the late 1970s and 1980s, and their Brit-pop roots gleamed clearly through their set.

They aren't however, slavishly imitative of their influences. For a Chinese band that performs in English, the group's lyrics are surprisingly good. Though it's not something to judge by a double standard, it needs to be acknowledged that writing songs in a foreign language is significantly harder than singing in one, and I strongly doubt that most folks living in Xi'an, central China, get the chance to use English as much as say, those from France or Sweden, other countries whose bands (think Phoenix and Peter, Bjorn and John) often sing in non-native English. Their lead vocalist, Zhang Chen, in a classic retro-black dress and straight-cut bangs, swung between delivering lines with dark, tongue-in-cheek gall a la Alex Kapranakos and nailing speedy bass lines in full rock-out mode. Her voice is already far more filled-out and authoritative than peers; beyond the yelps and shrieks, she’s also able to actually carry a tune. Additionally, the other two band members frequently sing as well, sometimes employing an engaging call-and-response male/female interplay that suggests a more danceable, gender-switched Von Bondies.

Their songs, while not breaking much new ground, are well-constructed, layered three-minute affairs, with plenty of impressive, angular riff exchanges between the guitarist and bassist. Meanwhile, drummer Li Guan Yu glided effortlessly from punishing four-to-the-floor rock to funky disco hi-hat work. And as high-caliber as their songcraft is, what really lifts 24 Hours into rarefied territory is their musicianship: the three-piece are already a ferociously tight, skilled rock machine. If they missed even a single beat, I certainly didn't hear it, and the way they consistently landed genre-leaping, mid-song rhythm changes and breakdowns was quite mesmerizing. That is, except for some in the crowd for whom the band’s rock righteousness was simply too much to contain, pogoing in riotous joy throughout their set.

And though you can get a taste of 24 Hours on their Myspace, just know that the posted tracks do their live shows no justice, which is surely why fans are so eager to hear their upcoming debut album, to be released, I’ve heard, in October on Maybe Mars records.

Bigger Bang followed 24 Hours, and while their musicianship was not at the same stratospheric level, they show a lot of upside, while they continue to develop their sound and presence. Working much in their favor, however, is spry lead singer Pupi who, in her Karen O-evoking eye liner and bowl haircut, staggered and swung around much like, well, Karen O. She dominated the stage with her slightly deranged, smiling clown-girl poses, and though her voice was drowned out by her bandmates, she has an undeniable charm and pull. The band's sound is similarly YYYs-molded, moving from minimalist punky pop nuggets to softer, fuzzed-out ballads.

Earlier on, the crowd was treated to a couple of other decent acts: Defy, a fun, old-school rockabilly group in full greaser get-up whose set included lively renditions of the 50s classic by Eddie Cochran, “Summertime Blues” and the Clash’s “I fought the law,” as well as the proggy, surf-rock tinged jams of Rubber Phonograph Needle, who looked like they’d just walked off the set of a Monkees cover shoot and whose similarly well-dressed girlfriends/groupies stood motionless before the stage throughout their entire set.

24 Hours: http://www.myspace.com/nopartypeople

Bigger Bang: http://www.myspace.com/biggerbangtheband

Defy: http://www.myspace.cn/defys

Rubber Phonograph Needle: http://www.myspace.cn/rubberphonographneedel

Travel information for Shaxi, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Yunnan province

2009-07-04T00:56:00.000-07:00

Shāxī 沙溪 Travel Information

This is a wonderful town and I strongly recommend a visit for anyone out in the Lijiang/Dali region. It's got all of the traditional architecture and ethnic minority culture, with hardly any of the tourists!

Getting there: Shaxi is about three hours from Lijiang (Bus: 17RMB), four hours from Dali (Bus: 24RMB). From either, take a bus to Jianchuan. Outside Jianchuan station are minibuses with Shaxi signs in their windows. Rides are 8RMB per seat, and take approximately 45 minutes.

Lijiang to Jianchuan daily bus schedule:
11:00 am
1:30 pm
3:00 pm

Accommodation:
Number 58 Hostel (58号小院)
Tel. 86 872 4721358

Shaxi Cultural Center and Guesthouse (沙溪文化中心)
Telephone: 0872-4722188
Contact: Xiao Yang 13577851576
www.shaxiculturalcenter.com

More information:
General town information: http://www.teahorse.net
Shaxi Rehabilitation project: http://www.nsl.ethz.ch/irl/shaxi
Tea and Horse Caravan road: http://www.silkroadfoundation.org/newsletter/2004vol2num1/tea.htm

Tiger Leaping Gorge

Woody Guesthouse
Tel. 13988712705 / 13988745996
QQ: 849224646

I would recommend Woody Guesthouse for those looking to spend a second night or coming in from Daju. Its located near Sean’s guesthouse towards the far side of the park for those coming in from Qiaotou, about an hour and a half from Tina’s and Middle Leaping Gorge, which I also strongly recommend. The views from the bottom of the gorge are incredible!

The owner is very friendly, speaks English well and the food was excellent.

Interpreting Chinese Youth Sub-culture as a Haughty Expat

2009-05-25T07:52:00.000-07:00

Like many foreigners in China, I find myself spending a lot of time observing and interpreting Chinese culture, particularly its modern youth culture. A lot of the time, I find myself fighting the urge to be haughty and snobby, looking down upon whatever Western food attempt, miscued Chinglish effort, local rock band, modern art display and other examples of contemporary Chinese art and culture through my ‘oh-so-cultured’ Western eyes.

I can almost see the online video about disrespectful Overseas Chinese, where the ungrateful ABC walks around some upscale display condominium, pointing out the inauthentic, "knock-off Western" paintings or a particularly poorly matched choice in bedroom furniture. It's bi-polar in the unique way that being an expat in China so often is, because I feel like I spend a lot of time defending China from the ignorant, outsider opinions of people who write off China without having stepped a foot inside it, do not speak the language, and know nothing of the country beyond Western media coverage. My relationship with China is not so much "love/hate" as it is "defend/critique."

In coming to China, it is easy to look upon a lot of contemporary Chinese culture, particularly that of the yuppie/nouveau riche classes, as tacky, kitschy, derivative and naive, to look upon its interpretation of modernity as simply a sloppy attempt to imitate the developed West. And then, as does happen so often during conversations about this topic, expats (like myself) will bring up the Cultural Revolution, China's rocky past and how amazing it is simply for any of this to exist at all. We’ll continue that though contemporary China may be a long way from Tokyo and even further from London or Milan, it's still a whole lot closer than it was 30 years ago.

I came to Chengdu having heard of a nascent art scene, and was quite sorely disappointed to see just how undeveloped and small it really is. Newspapers frequently run articles discussing how hot Chinese art is in the market these days, yet sadly, when I visited the art warehouse district in Shanghai, I found that the art I saw there which struck me as most original was made by foreigners. Having come interested in discovering youth sub-culture and rebellion, I’ve found that too much of it appears to consist of kids in tight jeans and Chuck Taylors who listen to Panic at the Disco, the more enterprising of them perhaps starting a band that sounds almost identical.

That's not to say that this doesn't happen in the West: it does, in great amounts. But I suppose that's just the point: I'd come to China looking for something different--"Williamsburg-in-Shanghai", but unique in a Tokyo-ish way, was my naïve ideal. And where it is indeed very different, so much of what is deemed contemporary and young here seems directly imported, or bastardized in interpretation, straight from the West. Whether it's young couples eating a “romantic meal” in McDonalds on Christmas, college students imitating Kobe on the basketball court or middle-class kids at a punk show, much of it feels completely lacking in Chinese characteristics. It feels hollow, inauthentic, and lacking the sort of localized, independent adaptation that made rock and roll, punk and the Weather Underground so, well...cool.

In talking to a fellow foreigner about it, we noticed that so many of our young Chinese friends--all intelligent, open-minded and capable--were so devoted to going to America for college and fortune, that perhaps it left little opportunity to concern themselves with developing local culture and art. Most of them study hard sciences, not the humanities, and in their spare time they don't seek out "Carsick Cars" or the latest hip indie band, they practice their English through "Desperate Housewives." The most Chinese cultural activity I can point to is that some of them write Tang style poetry for themselves. Others take an interest in Tibet, minority culture and Buddhism. But even such an interest I've read comes originally from "Shangri-La chic" becoming fashionable first in the West, then being re-adopted by Chinese hipsters via Western media.

When you live in a society thrusting itself head-first towards a vision of development that is so culturally intertwined with being Western, and when so many of the best and brightest spend all their energy competing to get into MIT, it leaves little energy for subculture. My friend suggested that perhaps in a generation or two, the children of a more-established middle class will be more interested in the humanities, art and such things often considered non or less-monetary in nature. Perhaps that will be the case, though given the competitiveness of modern China, I wonder whether even future generations will be willing to take their eyes off the cash prize for long enough.

At this point, I suppose it's just too early to expect much of what the “cool kids” and their subcultures here to have developed its own characteristics. Having only recently gained access to Western media and lifestyles, many Chinese are in a ‘honeymoon’ phase in terms of their relationship with the West, possessing an idealized vision of societies of universal abundance and comfort. In reading Zachary Mexico's enlightening "China Underground," I was struck at how of all the counter-cultural youth he met, few of them seemed to be doing much that I would deem "innovative" or "unique." Whether this is partly due to Confucian, conformist education or other similar “uncreative Chinese” arguments is another argument altogether.

Eventually, when I go out seeking culture that feels sufficiently "Chinese," I find it amongst the elderly, and often enough, in parks: writing calligraphy with water brushes, singing local opera and playing Chinese chess or mahjong. I study kung fu at the local sports university, and though I occasionally do see some kung fu majors practicing, it's more likely that I will see track and field athletes taking a recreational tae kwon doe class. Chinese youth culture, to caricaturize, is more about Warcraft, NBA and KTV than anything uniquely local or particularly different, at least to Western eyes. That's not Chinese youth’s loss at all—rather, it's mine, as a foreign observer seeking out something that this country’s young people are not at all obliged to provide.

One China blogger at the site Lost Laowai has pointed out that more Chinese youth appear to be rebelling through fashion, a sort of baby step towards deeper forms of rebellion, borne of critical thought, dissent and creative communities. I can only hope this is true, but would imagine that such youth fashion circles are, in their own way, as conformist and imitative as mass culture, though admittedly within a much smaller community.

That's not to say there isn't creative, interesting stuff going on here, nor that I'm even aware of all of it. This is, naturally, just one non-expert perspective by a foreigner. Wonderful online platforms like neocha.com expose us to non-mainstream music and creativity that were previously unknown, and I occasionally do meet or hear about locals doing exciting work. But my point is that largely, in my (albeit limited) time here, I haven't seen much noteworthy "contemporary Chinese culture" to date.

Links:

Idealized images of Westerners:
http://www.chinasmack.com/stories/china-does-not-have-any-men-suitable-for-me/

One of the best Chinese bands I’ve heard: http://www.myspace.com/rebuildingtherightsofstatues

Zebra Music Fetival review (Day 3)

2009-05-03T12:00:00.000-07:00

If Day 2 was Zebra fest’s endless party, Day 3 was the comedown, all mellowed out and tranquil. That is, at least, from a crowd perspective, where compared to the previous day, the festival’s finale had significantly less people, and only really started to fill out by evening. On stage, however, things were far from calm. For where the prior day was filled with more poppy, flamboyant groups, the last day’s line-up of buzzworthy bands were generally more angsty and indie in sound: think Queen versus Sonic Youth.

The first set we caught at the main stage was Hedgehog, a highly-regarded garage-punk trio from Beijing with a pint-sized but surprisingly powerful female drummer named Atom. Their tightly-wound fury and knack for writing catchy songs could easily lend them lazy Nirvana comparisons, but seeing as they closed their set with a tidy cover of “Territorial Pissings”, I think it’s only fair. Similarly, at the end of their righteously well-received set, the lead singer somewhat awkwardly pushed over his Marshall with his guitar, and the drummer threw her sticks against the floor, which bounced like a tennis ball. It was by far the most (perhaps only) self-destructive ‘rock-and-roll’ moment of the entire festival.

Following Hedgehog was Carsick Cars, one of the only bands I had heard of prior to the festival. The China blogosphere hypes this group like the NME upon hearing the Strokes, and opening for indie royalty like Sonic Youth can only further such gusts of hot air. But, to their credit, they played a very impressive set, utilizing plenty of white noise and demonstrating the most learned and tasteful influences (they reference Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo) of all the performers. It sounds quite absurd to talk of bands needing to be “learned” in rock and roll, but, after you’ve heard enough local screamo acts, you too will appreciate such ‘high-brow’ sounds. Carsick’s mood, aided by the dark abstract imagery on-screen during their set, is both nihilistic and hopeful, delivered partly as a sneer and filled with youthful exuberance and potential. If I was to postulate: they seem to embody the designer brand-rock subculture of current China’s rising youth urban middle-class, as the fashionable teens in the pit, screaming along to each lyric by heart, would suggest.

In between Carsick Cars and yet another Beijing noise-rock group, Subs, came Ashura, one of Chengdu’s oldest (10 + years) and most established bands. Whereas the previous two trios sound seemed better suited to dark clubs, Ashura’s brand of Red Hot Chili Peppers-inspired, arena-size rap-rock was perfectly suited to the event. The four piece looked immediately at home, and almost upon taking the stage had the packed audience bouncing along to their soaring guitar riffs, fluid rap verses and ubiquitous hooks.

Subs also had the crowd moving, but in a different way. Their sound is far more raw and dissonant, all primal punk energy, and their amps were turned up so loud that they practically blew a path through the park, a la Mogwai. Their vocalist Kang Mao is China's answer to Karen O, leaping and screaming about in slightly deranged-looking make-up and bowl cut. We left early however to catch our friends in Proximity Butterfly at the Deputy stage.

Proximity are mainstays on the Chengdu foreigner nightlife calendar; their shows are like community meet-ups, something that Joshua (originally from the US) and Heather’s (Canada) inclusive personalities help to foster. Compared to the other groups at Zebra, I was struck at how much more ambitious their musical vision is: think Jane’s Addiction and RATM singing of a post-apocalyptic world, they mix Joshua’s philosophical/mystical subject matter with muscular, funky riff workouts. Where it feels like other groups are either in the process of finding their sound or describing more primal states of being such as rebellion and relationship angst, Proximity have already created their own entirely unique musical world.

They were followed by the Trouble, a good-natured ska band, decked out in matching suspender and bow tie black-and-white outfits. And while such music for me will forever be associated with high-school Reel Big Fish covers, it seemed the audience was enjoying the six piece’s cheerful, lighter vibe. Over by the Xiongmao stage, DJ Charlie, originally from Washington DC, was keeping a sizable crowd grooving with his signature mix of 90s hip hop and classics, jumping from Michael Jackson to James Brown to Chemical Brothers with enthusiasm. We left while headliners High Tone, a French dub group, mixed their dated sounding instrumentals before what was left of the slightly bemused crowd.

In talking to a friend about the show, we both agreed that little that we’d seen at the festival would be considered particularly new or ‘hip’ back in the West. But of course, we’re not at Glastonbury…we’re at Chengdu’s first ever serious music festival and so, for most of the thousands of locals who passed through over the past three days, seeing these bands must have been a significant, or at least eye-opening experience. It’s great enough that something like this is taking place here: let’s hope that they’ll make it an annual event!

Zebra Music Fetival review (Day 2)

2009-05-03T00:21:00.000-07:00

Baoli Park, Chengdu

May 1-3rd, 2009

Zebra is the first music festival I’ve attended in China, and apparently, the first music festival in general for many of the attendees who made the trek out to Tulip Park, located next to the Panda Breeding Center in Chengdu’s northeastern suburbs. As it turns out, like everybody else I talked to, I was very impressed with the organization and crowd turn-out and participation.

The festival organizers have clearly done this sort of thing before: the park was well-signed, with ample distribution of port-a-loo and waste/recycling bin facilities. The main stage is truly impressive, with a powerful lighting and sound system, and carried the big-name pop and rock acts. The two smaller stages cater to specific genres—Panda (Xiongmao)—just like its Chengdu club namesake--hosts DJs playing electronic music ranging from drum-n-bass to hip hop, and the Deputy stage, organized by local indie hub Little Bar, hosts alternative guitar bands. Curiously, the festival’s Chinese name is “Robot,” and images of cute round robots abounded on signs and screens.

The crowd, while a good mixture of families and backgrounds, was still predominantly young students and 20-somethings out for a good time. Beyond the music, one of the most interesting ways to pass the time was to scout out the fashion scene. On the whole, classic rocker apparel, including dark drainpipe jeans, and high and low-top Chuck Taylor’s were well-represented. Apparently, pork pie hats are all the rage, for both genders, and for girls, super-teased hair was making a huge comeback, alongside panda eye/Robert Smith make-up. I spotted one guy with a classic Moz-style coiffe and plenty of prerequisite takes on the traditional Johnny Rotten spikes, mohawks and emo fringes.

The best, and most puzzling outfit was undoubtedly a young bloke wearing a full-length Jesus-style muumuu. He’d also gone to the trouble of getting a silver hand printed on to the top of his shaven skull. It made exactly zero sense to me until a friend mentioned that some Cosplayers—in which one dresses up as Anime characters (this is Asia, after all)—were out in costume. Behind the main stage, a hippie-Africana drum troupe was banging away merrily, surrounded by a disproportionately large crowd of people. I figured this was because some of the drummers must have been foreigners, and given the sort of dread-rocking, free-spirited types who often make up such drum circles, they would prove the perfect spectacle to curious Sichuanese kids, a little more insulated than their east-coast brethren, busy forming impressions of these strange, wild-looking laowai all the while. It turns out though that a high-profile Chinese movie star was shooting a scene there, and folks had just swamped the place for a gander.

Music festivals in general tend to attract a diverse brand of folks, and I’m used to seeing plenty of spacey, tripped-out ravers and “permanent festival-goers” at Coachellas and other similar gatherings. But it was a trip seeing the reactions of locals to my fellow foreign friends. I spent most of the afternoon hanging out with friends’ Josh and Heather, who had set up a tent and camped the previous night. Josh and Heather—of the local rock band Proximity Butterfly—both sport spectacular dreadlocks, and locals come up often to have their picture taken with them. An Australian friend, Cam, also happens to have locks. While hanging out by their tent, he would also have locals come up asking for pictures.

“You know I’m not in the band, right?” he would ask.

“That’s OK. Can I still get a picture with you?” they would ask.

And because seemingly every Australian but me has dreadlocks in this city, our friend Jessie, would get the most wide-eyed looks of all. Blessed with fabulously artistic taste, Jessie has pink/blonde dreads, a number of tattoos and piercings, and was wearing a leopard-print dress and pink Docs…in short, she looks about as un-Chinese as you can get. While leaving the park that night, we passed a row of security guards in formation. One by one, as they turned to see her, their jaws would literally drop, eyes wide as a baby visiting his first zoo, in utterly confused, fascinated wonder.

As for the music: overall, it was quite good, without being some display of breakthrough artistic innovation. We came just in time to catch Reflector on the main stage, an energetic pop-punk trio who—from the bass player’s theatrical strumming to the lead singer’s snarling vocals—screamed Green Day. Such music is a good fit for these sorts of events—it requires little prior knowledge of the band or music to nod along, and the band’s fierce attack and tuneful songs carried the audience stylishly. The kids close to the stage were having a blast, bouncing along with double rock-sign fist pumps, and there was the occasional crowd surfer.

The band which followed, Underground Baby, sounded similarly Green Day-esque, if with a slightly more expanded pop-rock sound. It may have been simply that I was standing further away from the stage, but they lacked the intensity and magnetism of Reflector. The slide continued with VC Super VC, decked out in all-white, exposed-chest Bowie-era t-shirts, with hats and boas to match. Their songs moved even further into bland pop-rock territory, including a couple of contrived solo ballads.

All of the bands, however, lacked nothing by way of on-stage theatrics—from extended windmills to timed leaps and back-against-back 80s guitarist camera close-ups—it seems every band that played has earnestly studied footage of Woodstock and Live Aid. Watching these boys with their long hair, matching suits and skinny pants strut about, it felt like what I imagine it might be like attending a Chinese theatrical production of “Romeo and Juliet”: all the moves and lines are perfectly orchestrated, but it feels somewhat second-hand and inauthentic. But, rock and roll has always been about miscegenation and cultural borrowing (some might say theft), so in the end, who cares? The crowd certainly didn’t mind the moves one bit.

The best act on the main stage that night was surely the New Cools, who drew further back for inspiration to the sort of synth-driven quirky new wave of XTC and the Cars. Their lead singer had charisma to spare: wearing a neon multi-colored white tracksuit, he robot-danced and squealed bi-lingual hooks like “Everybody is here now!” (In English) and “I want to be a famous director!” (In Mandarin) As always, it was fascinating seeing how bands, as well as the jumbo-screens before them, split between Chinese and English. At one point, the screens flashed: “Make some noise!” and “Clap your hands!” sans Chinese. There was a delay of a few seconds before enough people caught wind and the crowd kicked into action. Also interesting were the public service announcements, which varied from: “You’re here to cheer on the bands, not to pick a fight!” and “Sing along, but don’t spit!” right through to the rather Chinese: “You follow orders…because you are Zebra music fans!”

My favorite act of the day was Chengdu locals Mr. Chelonian (though I was informed that their name should in fact be “Mr. Turtle”). Either way, as last band on the Deputy Stage, they rocked with a sort of Guns ‘N Roses-meets-Peter Tosh swagger, jumping from bouncy reggae and ska rhythms to Little Richard “four to the floor” and Black Crowes-evoking blues jams. Such a rich mixture of styles displayed a kind of rock literacy and technical fluidity rare among other local acts. The singer in particular, has a smooth verbal dexterity unusual to Chinese singers, sounding like Brad Nowell if the late Sublime singer had grown up in Guangxi rather than Long Beach. I would also have to give their fashion style a thumbs up: the singer, in a loose polka-dot shirt, bandana and long curls, evokes Axl’s glory days, the bass player is all Slash, while both were off-set by the (excellent) guitarists Dali-hippie vibe. In such a way, they seem to neatly summarize the wonderfully eclectic hodge-podge of rock history that comprises China’s contemporary indie scene.

Highlights from Flatnose: the Axis of Post-Soviet Totalitarianism tour

2009-02-19T21:52:00.000-08:00

Ali Khan: From Delivery Truck Driver to Indian Don – Amritsar, Punjab

I met Ali Khan through my host in Amritsar, a pharmacy shopkeeper named Pankaj. He wore long, white kurta pajamas that washed gracefully down his rotund, teddy-bear shape. I had just flown in from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, and was surprised at how refreshed I felt, back in the warm, chaotic streets of India. Having started off my journey at a Sikh wedding reception in Delhi almost three months ago, there was some sweet closure in finishing in Amritsar, home to Sikhism's holiest place of worship, the Golden Temple.

Ali Khan, referred to by others as "Babaji," meaning "Spiritual Leader", quickly took me under his wing. He proved a charming host: instead of crashing on Pankaj's couch, as is generally the case through Couchsurfing, Ali got me a free room at a nearby hotel, and free food at the M.S. Food Plaza next door to it. A powerful "fixer," known to practically everybody in the area, he devoted most of the two days I spent in town driving me around on his Honda motorcycle: to local sites, to client's homes, even to discuss trading opportunities between India and China with local wholesalers. But most generous of all, he opened up to me in a remarkably candid fashion, giving me a depth of insight into his profession, opinions and experiences that far less interesting people would ever care to offer.

If ordinary people have a problem, they talk to Ali. His power comes through his connections to high-ranking officials, and using this advantage, he gets people what they need—for a commission, of course. His three cell phones ring consistently. ("My office," he joked, referring to them.) While sitting in Pankaj's pharmacy, I watched an auto-rickshaw driver and his family come in, kneel respectfully before him, and ask for assistance with getting a doctor to inspect the driver's failing eyesight. They also asked him to visit their home, so that a neighbour they have been fighting with will stop squabbling.

"They just have to see that Babaji knows (the family), and their neighbours won't cause them any more problems," he explained, with a dash of boastfulness.

Coming back from the Pakistan border, where an evening show of patriotism runs nightly, we stopped at the home of a widow, whose husband was killed by terrorists. She sought a promotion in her government teaching job, but if she asked her superiors directly, she risked them demanding a huge sum of money or worse, to sleep with them. Ali could get her the promotion whilst saving her significant face.

Not all the requests he gets are major. When leaving a restaurant, the owner's son asked Ali to talk to his father about getting him a motorbike.

"I'll get you your bike," he responded.

In all the dealings I witnessed him attend to, Ali was never distracted or dismissive. He grants everyone an attentive, kind audience, and it is partly through his immense, natural charisma that I think he has become so powerful. Everywhere we went, people approached him and lightly tapped his knee, a sign of respect afforded to seniors in India. Some seemed to look upon him wearily, but most, even if they might fear him somewhat, displayed sincere affection towards "Babaji."

"Some people call me a criminal, because I deal in bribes and with goons (hired thugs)," he told me, unapologetically.

"But without me, how would all of these average people be able to solve their problems?"

A native of the troubled Kashmir Valley, Ali spent 13 years in the Middle East, working his way up from delivery truck to manager within the fast food industry. But after meeting his current wife, he moved back to Hyderabad in eastern India in 2003, hoping to work in a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) center, using his fluent Arabic and English, or to open a fast food restaurant. After an unfruitful year of searching, he was unemployed when his sister-in-law asked him for help. A local don was illegally building on her land, a practice most people without connections in India are essentially powerless to stop.

Ali went to the illegal construction site, where he said he encountered about 25 goons, intimidating men who earn their livelihood through violence, or its implicit threat.

"You may be able to hurt me," he told them. "But I am from Kashmir Valley, and my family will send men to come down and destroy all of your families."

He was bluffing of course, but the local don bought it, and Ali was able to save his sister-in-law's land. Word spread fast of a new don in town, and soon people were approaching him asking for assistance in their own affairs. Without trying at all, Ali became a broker between the local dons--the same ones he had stared down previously--and ordinary people.

As his power grew, he took the extreme step of having a police officer fabricate a charge against him, imprisoning himself for 21 days in India's largest prison. There, he became friendly with five major dons doing time inside, and it was partly through them that he learned some of the extortion-and-blackmail methods he explained to me.

"I don't keep enemies," he explained outside the pharmacy. "I either make peace with them, or destroy them completely."

One method he has employed involves calling in false charges against an enemy, each charge being called in to a different police station. After being released from one prison (a good beating having taken place inside), the person is immediately arrested by the next station, and so on each day, until he agrees to submit to Ali. The police stations take the bribe, and people learn not to make trouble with him.

In a drunken rage, his neighbour in Hyderabad once tried to attack Ali with a sword, narrowly missing. Ali had charges pressed against him in Punjab, on the other side of the country, where the neighbour was detained for five months, while his family begged Ali to release him.

Exploiting the country's inefficient bureaucracy and utterly corrupt police force is fine and well, I thought, but how does he establish such high-ranking political connections, those through whom his power ultimately rests, in the first place?

Often enough, he laughed, through the same bluff he used against the local don in Hyderabad. Ali will call up a police superintendant or similar official, telling them that he knows their superiors, even if he does not. He doesn't disclose his intent to them, but merely takes them out for meals, and later on, drinking whisky until 4 am. By about the third or fourth session out, in the midst of their drunkenness, the official will have revealed some dark detail about himself that Ali can later use for leverage when asking favors.

"Illegal property, women, booze, drugs...every man has a weakness," Ali smiled. "And I am very smart at finding a man's weakness."

When chatting inside the hotel, waiting for Pankaj to open his shop, Ali showed me a photo of a young woman he kept on his cell phone.

"You see the mark on her neck?" he asked, unusually sombre for someone extremely convivial with those he meets.

"They used telephone wire to strangle her."

The woman was 19, a young bride who Ali had cared for like an uncle, buying her saris when her single mother could not, even sleeping in the same bed and washing her when she was already 17. Ali had helped to arrange her marriage to a very wealthy family. The bride murder though, was not over a supposedly insufficient dowry amount, as with other cases he has dealt with, but education. He believes the girl had gotten into a fight with her host family over continuing her schooling, and they had beaten her. Shamed and afraid she would complain to outsiders, they decided to murder her, then bribe the police and cover up the investigation, claiming it was a shower accident.

When the girl's mother called Ali after finding out what happened, he gathered 200 people to go to the groom's home. There they lay down on a nearby highway, stopping all traffic, whilst chanting the provocative slogan: "Pakistan! Zindabad!" ("Long Live Pakistan!")

But why chant "Long Live Pakistan?"

"Because if the media comes and senior police find out that there have been some pro-Pakistan protests in this district, the local police will be in serious trouble," he explained.

Having turned the police over to his side, Ali had the bridegroom arrested and the 200-odd crowd stormed the station, beating him. Presently, his family is paying huge sums of bribe money to keep him from imprisonment, and have hired a powerful lawyer (Ali knows him) to represent them. Yet for now, Ali thinks they will try to keep the groom inside for fear of revenge murder. Every 14 days after temporary bail, he sends a group of people to hurl insults at the groom outside court.

Ali took the murder personally, like losing his own daughter, and the rage is subdued but still clear as he retells the story.

"I broke every piece of glass in their house. The windows, the kitchenware, the TV...everything."

And even though he usually doesn't believe in killing, he has discussed the matter with the bride's mother, who has a 14 year-old son. As a minor, if he shot the groom himself, the boy would only be in jail for seven years, particularly given the connections that Ali can pull.

For a man who doesn't read or write Hindi, Ali wields remarkable influence over the handful of cities which he constantly travels to and from. But when I asked whether he preferred his current job to, say, an ordinary white collar profession, he responded immediately.

"If I could choose, I would like a family life like Pankaj's...maybe to own a restaurant. I don't want much from life," he confided.

"But I'm in too far now. If I don't do anything, people call me. If I sit at home, the police will ask for me."

It sounded surreally like a scene from a "Godfather" movie, except shouted over his back through the dusty, crowded streets of Amritsar, whilst he took me to the train station.

Besides, what would the cities that Ali works in be without him?

For me, a traveller who grew up with the chance to live and work in a society that offers opportunities and a system of rule of law that most Indians could never imagine, I find it difficult to consider the sort of brute street justice he metes out desirable. Yet for the hundreds of ordinary people that he has helped, sometimes on commission, but sometimes on donation basis, Ali gets them the dowry sum, the reduced hospital payment sum, the promotion...the small benefits that allow them to get by a little easier in a system where normally only an elite few pull every string.

On my second day in town, Ali took me to visit a former client, who was feeling unwell. Her husband and children treat him like family, and his concern for her, like his concern for Pankaj and many others that I met, went well beyond that of some stereotypical, cold-hearted gangster. I asked him if this empathy for others comes from his Muslim faith (A heavy smoker and drinker, he considers himself a "bad Muslim.")

He shook his head. "I've always had it inside me, ever since I was a child."

"Call me when you get to Delhi," he requested, before leaving me at the station platform. "Otherwise, I'll be worried all evening."

But before the train even arrived in Delhi, he was already checking in.

Mohammad and Mike: Escape plans, from the Mythic Cities of the Silk Road – Khiva/Bukhara, Uzbekistan

Mohammad and Mike are both keen on emigrating to the West. But where one has a plan, the other is simply hoping for something special.

Mohammad is Uzbek, but his English flows with a natural, American accent.

He studies English in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, which is an independent republic within Uzbekistan. I had just come from Nukus the previous day, having separated from the travelling friends I'd made first in Esfahan in Iran, then bumped into in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, and who were also travelling on to Uzbekistan. Nukus is home to the famous Savitsky Art Museum, which houses thousands of paintings by Uzbek and other artists that were considered unfit by critics during the period in Soviet history when only official Stalin-approved Socialist Realism artwork was allowed. I'd gained a quick, fascinating introduction to a land few people have heard of, let alone pronounce. We'd agreed to meet up in Khiva, famous for its slave trade during the mythic days of the Silk Road.

Mohammad makes money as a tour guide there, but had agreed to show us around free of charge to see some lesser known sites, outside the iconic mud-thatch walls that enclose Khiva's old town, from which the European tour groups that flock rarely step out from.

"Some of the old people complain that things were better during the Soviet times, but that's because they are lazy. They expect the government to give them a job," he told us, as we walked towards the Emir's old guest palace.

"Look at that girl over there. All she can do is manual labor, carrying that bucket of water. But I can earn money through my language skills."

As he showed myself and some backpacking buddies around, effortlessly rattling off facts all the while, he begun to quiz us on moving to London. Cost of living, opportunities as a Russian teacher, getting a student visas...in exchange for his insight into local Uzbek life and a free tour of town, Mohammad was learning how to make it to the promised land. A good trade, all in all.

In contrast, Mike, as he had us call him, was less smooth about his intentions. I met him through his friend, Sukhrob, the only local in Bukhara that agreed to meet up with me, a few days after we left Khiva. We went to a bar near Lyabi-Hauz, the peaceful square around a pool in the city's famed old town.

After less than an hour, Sukhrob left suddenly, apparently to take care of some sort of business. When we had first met, I asked Mike what his job was.

"Personal trainer," he'd responded with some hesitation, and Sukhrob had interjected to help him explain he works in people's homes. But soon after, he told us he was a school teacher, and invited us to speak to his class of 14 year-olds tomorrow. My travel partner Caroline and I agreed to go the next morning.

When Stalin carved up the Central Asian states, he handed them national identities where previously only semi-nomadic tribes and loose ethnicities used to exist. In Uzbekistan, Bukhara and Samarkand, two of the most famous cities of the Silk Road period, are majority Tajik speakers. So it was interesting to see how Mike, a native Tajik speaker who considers himself Uzbek, referred to Tajiks from neighboring Tajikistan.

"I don't like them. Tajiks are wild," he told me. "They don't know how to behave properly."

Hungry for a taste of Uzbek club life, I headed out with him, after dropping Caroline back at the hostel. Soon we were walking in the pitch darkness, out from Bukhara's winding, narrow old town streets, away from all the tourist restaurants and handicraft stores and hotels, and into the main political center, that separates old from new Bukhara. The utilitarian Soviet football stadium was on our left, new monuments, celebrating the rule of President Islam Karamov, and stark, rectangular glass government buildings stood on either side of us.

There was hardly another soul out, it was extremely dark, and I was walking towards a club in some posh hotel with a man I hardly knew. At some point, I wondered, will my good faith in strangers I meet online in Russian and Tajik-speaking, post-Soviet Uzbek dictatorships land me in harm's way?

The club felt seedy and desolate, and charged a cover I wasn't willing to pay for both of us. Mike had apparently neglected to bring any money, and on my shoestring budget, I decided it was time to head home.

After giving up his efforts to get me to walk to another club, Mike agreed to accompany me back, and soon the topic shifted to overseas friends. He spoke of two acquaintances that had made it to Australia, and begun to ask about his prospects of finding work there. Not wanting to get his hopes up, as with the many people who ask me to help them go to Australia that I've made on this trip, I told him that they only take skilled workers in particular fields, and that even then, it's very competitive.

"But what about other jobs?" he asked. "Like a construction worker, a car washer...jobs like that?"

Mike claims to have taught himself English alone, which would be quite an achievement given his relative fluidity. He begun to curse the Uzbeks who'd made it to the West for failing to help people such as himself to come over. This in turn led to a more general screed about how the people today are "too wild, rude and selfish."

As we neared the hostel, all I could mutter feebly is "Good luck with your dream," as he referred to it. But he continued to press me on the topic, using the euphemism "selfish people" to imply, well, me. Just as we reached the steps of the hostel, he gave it one last pitch:

"I'm still waiting for some one person to make my dream come true," he continued. "Maybe I can give that person a gift, like some money, and they can write me a letter to go to Australia..."

I looked to him, a young, pimply-faced man, hardly 20, likeable enough and with English skills far superior to most of his peers. He saw in me some golden opportunity he had to push for, and though there are millions of others just like him, just as there are millions of beggars who yearn for your change, I thought for a moment of saying something other than outright refusal.

Something along the lines of: "I can see if I know somebody," or "I'll see what I can do to help."

But instead, I awkwardly spouted: "Well, I'll see you tomorrow morning then," in reference to our earlier agreement to talk to his class.

Caroline and I waited for him the next morning for half an hour, and when Mike didn't show up, neither of us was surprised.

Hossan and Hassan: Smoking in an Empty Club in Tashkent

Where Mohammad and Mike are working on getting there, Hossan and Hassan have already made it. Well, at least out of Uzbekistan, which is no small achievement, given the amount of activity one sees at Tashkent International Airport, the most desolate, emptied airport I have ever seen. There, you cannot even buy goods in the local currency, Som, but must use Euros, Pounds or Dollars.

It is surely a symbol of the country's continuing struggle for national identity, when the national opera house, in staging its traditional Uzbek dancing performance, uses Russian to introduce performers, rather than Uzbek. But later that evening, having attended the performance, a mix of traditional dance with sporting efforts at belly dance, flamenco, samba and pop idol, I met Hossan and Hassan, twin brothers, at Diplomat-S, a club in the heart of Tashkent, Uzbekistan's Russified capital.

It was not quite midnight, and few people had arrived that Halloween evening. Almost all of the tables were reserved, and as the evening wore on, we were shuttled about by bouncers and bartenders telling us the few locations within the club at which we were entitled to stand.

"90 percent of the girls here are prostitutes," Hossan explained, and proceeded to educate me on prices and tastes.

"I don't like Uzbek people," he told me, "even though I am an Uzbek. They just want to f*ck each other all the time, for money...Kazakhs are better. I don't look Uzbek, so if I talk English to them, they think I'm a foreigner."

When I asked what he does, he told me he is a model and an actor. He pulled out an iPhone, and fast-forwarded through a video to show me clips of him punching a bag, talking to girls and other scenes from a film released in 2007 throughout Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. When Hassan came over, he showed me a popular Sprite commercial in which Hassan jumps into a pool.

He spoke of the model girls he slept with while modelling for over a year in Bangkok, of working for Diesel in Dubai, even of a short-lived stint as an English teacher in China, which happens to be my most recent job. Yet I can claim no affiliation with Christian Dior or Brazilian models, as Hossan does, with almost effortless cool.

"Why did you come back to Tashkent?" I asked, if he disliked the place so much.

"To get married," he said, matter-of-factly. At 26, he felt already past the ideal age for Uzbek youth to marry (23 for men, 19-20 for women) and he wanted an Uzbek wife.

"Uzbek wives are better," he went on. "If you marry a Russian or a Korean, they will want more things. But an Uzbek wife will cook and clean for you."

Park, North Korean refugee to Trinidad and Tobago, Coconut Product Seller

I have a penchant for providing biographical details to strangers that are outright false. In high school, I convinced my entire grade that I was moving to Perth, two hours away, and would never see them again. The morning back from holidays, one of my best friends punched me so hard in the arm I struggled to write in class. Different professions, unusual hobbies, the riding of kangaroos to work in Australia...if there's an audience gullible enough to believe it, who am I to deny them a good yarn?

So it was a match made in backpacker heaven when I found out that James, an Englishman I travelled in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, had successfully conned the Chinese into believing he was the drummer in an Eagles' cover band. Why the drummer? So he wouldn't have to sing for curious locals, of course.

In Iran, I found that many people thought I was Afghani, due to the large number of Afghani refugees and immigrants working there. In Uzbekistan, try as I might, people refused to believe that I am from Australia, continuing to tell one another that I am Korean. So, rather than fight it, I decided to become, in a story developed with James, an honorary North Korean.

Over pints in the Blues Cafe, an American-inspired bar in Samarkand, once capital of the legendary Timurid Empire, we hatched our tale. A refugee from North Korea, I had arrived on the shores of Trinidad and Tobago, where James, a native there, was a coconut farmer. We had gone into the coconut industry with a fellow travel partner, a half Sri-Lankan Englishman named David, who we concocted to be our spiritual guru. His sect, an obscure offshoot from Sikhism, replaces the Sikh turban with half a coconut, and we three were currently business prospecting in Uzbekistan.

"What's your name?" asked a friendly Russian at the bar.

"Uhh...Park," I replied after a lengthy pause, having decided on the spot that "Park" worked well in the case that I accidentally spurt my actual name.

The next evening, when James and I were delivering our pseudo-biographies to another bartender, she responded "Korean? Oh, our bartender is Korean too!" The back door swung open and sure enough, out she came, looking vaguely Korean. It was only then that I recalled that Uzbekistan, amongst other Central Asian countries, has a significant numbers of Korean immigrants that had been brought over during Stalin's reign.

My face dropped. The only Korean I know is "Anyang haseo!" and I doubted that would cut muster before a native Korean speaker. The game was up, and I was about to send our merry ship sinking, ever so embarrassingly, to the bottom.

"Speak Chinese!," James whispered frantically, seeing how speechless I had become.

Of course! I am a Chinese-speaking North Korean!

So, after asking if she was Korean in Chinese, the bartender didn't respond. But she wouldn't have known anyway. It turns out, thankfully enough, that she, like many young Koreans who grew up in Central Asia, does not speak Korean, (nor Chinese), but simply Uzbek and Russian. Off the hook! But only narrowly.

In their inability to speak Korean, with Russian names like "Sergey," who was my Korean-Uzbek taxi driver, I felt an abstracted but distinctive solidarity. I too did not speak any Chinese at all before moving back to China in order to learn it, and was quite happy to assimilate into Australian society, much in the same way that Koreans in Central Asia seem to have there.

But next time you're in Uzbekistan, if you're ever hankering for a change of diet, having tired of the plov (pilaf) and shashlyk (lamb kebabs) that form the staple of Central Asian cuisine, you can thank heavens they didn't stop making their own cuisine as you tuck into some delicious kim chi and bi-bim-bap!

And as for Park and his fellow enterprising coconut sellers, they too have been left behind in Uzbekistan.

(Written originally in November, 2008, during travels through Central Asia and India)

Flatnose On the Road presents: Dispatches from India!

2009-02-19T21:18:00.000-08:00

The following were originally sent out as emails, but I thought I'd put them up for those interested. They're not technically about China, but I figured that this being my main blogging venue at present, I'll place them here for your perusal.

I traveled in India for about two months from August to September 2008, before heading for Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. For more on Iran, please visit my site: couchsurfingiran.blogspot.com

--

"Dinner with the Commissioner" - Jodhpur, Rajasthan

When Arvind, my Couchsurfing host in Jodhpur, a city of 1.2 million located in the western state of Rajasthan, found out that I was invited to dinner with the Kiran Soni Gupta, he was amazed. He'd seen her name mentioned in local newspapers. At the time, I had no idea that she was the District Commissioner of Jodhpur, maybe the equivalent to being mayor of a city. At the time, she was just an interesting profile on Couchsurfing, who sounded like she was involved in good work regarding women's empowerment and poverty relief.

At first, we weren't sure if he should come along to dinner. I offered to call, but he rejected the idea firmly. But after his brother-in-law, who worked with her, vouched for her character, he decided to come and meet her, planning to then excuse himself from dinner. Excitedly, we washed and changed into our best clothes, before riding out by motorcycle to her house.

"Commissioner's House, Regency Road," she had told me, when I asked how to get to her place. "Everybody knows it."

The guards opened the gate, revealing a lush, shaded residency, redolent of Indian civil service opulence. It was grand by Western standards, positively other-worldly compared to regular Indian housing. We were seated in the waiting room, filled with Kiran's own artwork, images of her with George Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, Amartya Sen and other notable figures in international poverty relief, and a collection of degrees and awards. One of Kiran's personal servants brought out two glasses of water. After taking them off of the platter, the servant stood there awkwardly, bent half over, motionless. His pose resembled that of a crooked flamingo, if flamingos held silver platters. It took us a moment to realize that he would wait in that very position until we returned the glasses to the platter.

We knew that the Commissioner herself was coming when another servant returned to place three cell phones on a sofa. He lined them up precisely; parallel to each other, with one separated from the other two, before leaving the room. Arvind and I looked at each other incredulously, and I fought back a grin at the absurd pomposity of their service. In an earlier time, they probably would have worn penguin suits and bow ties, but in this day and age they were more casually dressed in long-sleeved shirts and trousers.

Soon enough, Kiran herself arrived, along with her 11-year-old son, Vishnu. Despite our initial apprehension, we found her to be incredibly inviting, convincing Arvind to stay for dinner despite his polite protestations. Dinner was suitably immense, with over a dozen different dishes that varied from local Indian to Chinese to Western, from vegetable Manchurians (Indian-Chinese-style veggie meatballs) to penne pasta to daal and chapatti. Kiran was warm and genuine, happy to speak at length about her accomplishments but also asking—and actually considering—our own careers and concerns. Her school-age daughter and son sat with us most of the time, though her husband, District Commissioner of Jaipur, a neighboring city, was not around.

We discussed her decision to return back to India after completing her graduate program at Harvard, while most of her peers choose to take on better-paying jobs in America.

"There's no other job in which I know I can make such a difference in people's lives," she explained. Such a line, so clichéd in the hands of ordinary public servants, sounded so genuine coming from this radiant woman. She also talked of the difficulties involved in getting villagers in Rajasthan—regarded as socially backward by other Indians—to let their girls leave the village to carry on their education.

Remarkably, she hosts and meets Couchsurfers often, despite her busy schedule. Even when away on business, she makes an effort to have some of her servants show guests around town. And beyond us foreigners, she regularly hosts local citizens, such as my own host, Arvind, explaining that "her door is open to everyone." And while elected officials regularly make such claims, I got the feeling that Kiran actually meant it.

On the way home, Arvind was grinning from ear to ear.

"This is the first time I've seen someone from the government like that," he gushed, explaining that all his previous encounters with public servants have been negative.

They normally treat you as if you're below their "dignity," he said.

"If India had more people in government like Kiran, even just 10 percent, this country would be so much better," he gushed.

"Black Town/White Town" - Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu

Arriving in Pondicherry, a former French colonial possession on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, the heart of India's south, brought difficult questions to mind. It is split, historically, into "White Town" and "Black Town," where the French and the locals respectively stayed, and the schism remains stark today. What they now call the French district, is a charming seaside village of neat, elegantly maintained cathedrals, hotels and homes in delicate pastel hues, all built in an architectural style unmistakably French. Its quietude and beauty immediately felt a world away in the Tamil part, split off by Canal Street, which is as loud, crowded and dirty as any Indian town, where beggars constantly hound and a combination of open sewers and piles of rubbish combine to form a smell quite undesirably memorable.

To be in a town in India where you actually want to linger on the street, rather than get to where you're going as quickly as possible, is a rare treat. And so we lingered, taking pictures of glorious overgrown flowers and gliding in zig zag patterns through the French town on our rented bicycles.

But in talking to Judy, who is Chinese-Canadian, about why we enjoyed the French district so much, dark post-colonial thoughts of race and inferiority were difficult to stymie. Were we merely worshipping our former oppressors in preferring their tranquility, their fresh pain au chocolat, or their language, still spoken on its streets? If so, were we acknowledging in some way that French, and with it Western culture, is better than Indian culture? And so that colonialism was in part justified, that India was better under the British, that we yellow and brown people of the Orient are still only playing catch-up to the White man?!

Such a train of increasingly-extreme concerns pored forth, as we sat in the main park of the French town with local Tamils, in a suddenly uneasy leisure. Our multi-cultural Obama-era educations taught us that black is beautiful, and my Caucasian friends often downplay their ethnic heritage as "boring." Yet my time in China and India has exposed, through its white skin-bleaching beauty products and fair-skinned Bollywood and Hong Kong superstars, a distinctly colonial-aping worldview, where if White isn't necessarily superior, it's certainly looked upon with a chip-on-the-shoulder and an ever-present acknowledgement of greatness.

I was reminded of a time walking through Sichuan university, when Ai Yan, a local friend, pointed out the foreign (mostly Western exchange student) dorms, which are significantly better kept and equipped than the ones for Chinese. When I asked why foreigners necessarily got better accommodation, her response was simply:

"Of course they do. They're foreigners."

Later, Judy argued that this wasn't necessarily the case, and that it's a matter of what one is acculturated to like. That being products of Western upbringing, it was natural for us to find the French district and its European heritage more to our liking, though not necessarily superior to India. I wanted to agree with her, looking out across the rocky shore as a homeless woman slept beneath a bronze Gandhi statue. We travelers must constantly check our conclusions: genetics and race as inherent causes should not be tied to culture and history, in considering the differences between two countries. Surely, if anything, the post-colonial era has taught us that much.

But in traveling these stretches of East and South Asia, in observing the relationship between global trade, nationalism and racial identity, I feel like these complex questions of moral righteousness and economic power are easier to rationalize and deconstruct from the Ivory and Corporate Tower, than when living within, or merely passing through, its gross divisions in India.

What happens in Mengla, stays in Mengla

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China’s southernmost town of any reputable size, Mengla sits an hour away from the border with Laos, with Burma to its southwest and Vietnam its southeast. The Lonely Planet described it simply as “dire.” But after having spent the requisite day here in transit to the idyllic, thatch villages and yet-to-be-clear-cut mountains of Laos, I would have to disagree. For following our brief night on the town, it turns out we’d reached China’s own miniature Las Vegas, as in: “What happens in Mengla, stays in Mengla.”

Staggering off the bus, still wiping the grogginess from my eyes, we began the hotel search. We ended up choosing a “love” motel, as signified by the hourly rate listed behind the front counter and the two condoms that sat on the TV table inside our room (definitely not standard practice here). At 40 RMB for the night (about 6 dollars), for a decent room and en suite, it’s hard to complain. I did, however, find myself dodging more gobs of phlegm on the stairwell than usual. Though spitting is still a universal habit for many in China, a moral code appears to exist, holding that saliva should be released outdoors, in a gutter, or at least, not on the polished floor of a hotel. Not so in Mengla, unfortunately.

Later that evening, we were walking to our room from dinner—the town having not shown much to date as far as potential nightlife—when we were alerted to some sort of spectacle, by way of ear-jabbing techno pop, thumping out from a side road. At first, Judy thought it was “old lady group exercise,” found across China, whereby dozens of old women perform a series of gentle aerobics, usually in parks, to an eclectic range of tunes. In Shanghai, perhaps, but this was Mengla! Down a rocky dirt path, into a yet-to-be-rebuilt clearing, a traveling family circus was mid-show, their tinny speakers blaring, trailer truck parked behind. This is the sort of amateur entertainment show that travels year-round through scrubby Chinese towns like this one, entertaining suntanned laborers in worn, dusty suits.

A girl no more than eight years, wearing a pink tutu over faded black tights, was doing a backward arch upon a pyramid of chipped stools. That they were so crooked and poorly constructed only enhanced the act, as the stools barely managed to stand upon one another, let alone support a person. The girl, in painfully slow backward rotation, picked up a flower off the stool with her mouth, then just as slowly returned upright, holding up the flower in what should have been a dramatic posture, but which in this case only announced: “There…look, I did it again, just like I did the night before, and the 500 nights before that,” her bored scowl meeting the halfhearted applause.

Next, two boys on unicycles took to the stage, basically a small square mat of tarpaulin, wearing bright polyester that vaguely evoked, without even trying to pass for, a traditional male silk tunic. They cycled around in jerky circles, picking up a cardigan and hat that the MC, probably their father, threw to the floor. Many times they fell off, but the crowd just laughed, and the boys hopped back on. After enough circles, they began to motion to the crowd for cigarettes. After a few punters obliged, they requested lighters. The smallest one, perhaps nine, managed to light his and blow smoke at the crowd, all the while jerking around atop his unicycle, drawing some course laughter from the gradually growing ragtag audience.

We left the circus behind, traveling a few hundred metres before I stopped at a tiny dive bar to inspect the ethnic minority music video that was playing inside. Like all music videos, it featured several buxom young dancing girls. These ones, though, instead of underwear and booty shaking, flogged traditional dress—lots of metal jewelry atop head, rainbow colored clothing—tame dancing and singing in a dangerously high, whiny voice. Somehow, it seems almost all Chinese folk traditions, regardless of minority, have had the misfortune of inheriting this vocal style. One of the owners came out to convince us to drink, explaining that this was an Aini ethnic group bar.

We sat down in the shabby darkness, having decided to try Xishuangbanna province’s local brew: “Kingstar.” It was, even by Chinese standards, unappealing. Chinese beer, compared to good European beer, tends to be light, weak and flat. By custom, you drink it down in one go in small glasses while playing dice games or belting our earnest C-pop ballads. Kingstar takes all these attributes, then adds the additional quality of tasting vaguely of urine*. Bad luke-warm beer aside, we were there out of ethnographic curiousity. Aini language, at least in Romanized form, looks like a cross between Aztec and Thai, with generous amounts of playful consonant-marriage.

“Qaz qwza nga lkuxay,” the karaoke subtitles flashed, as images of made-up Aini lasses in sashayed amid palm trees and tropical flowers, or sat timidly with boys on floating bamboo barges. “Sing a song for us!,” I asked the bargirl, who got through a quarter of the song before being drowned out by the rousing interpretation of some beered-up Aini boys, probably migrant laborers. We clapped before taking leave, leaving behind our half-drunken Kingstar. In China, there are no laws about carrying alcohol, and we foreigners revel in this freedom, often swilling booze straight from the bottle en route.

Continuing home, we passed a handful of brothels, staffed by various minority girls, according to our guide, who’d taken us through several different minority hill villages the previous day. According to him, some minorities don’t possess the concept of prostitution, making it easier for them to end up in the trade. Finally, we arrived back at Love hotel, located next to a nightclub, if the music was anything to go by. But now, what was this? Music pumping from inside our hotel as well?

“It’s gonna be a loud night,” Judy predicted. Where earlier we’d been discussing how sleepy Mengla seemed, it turns out the town had been primping for some wild clubbing action.

In the mini-nightclub on the first floor were ten or so dancers, bouncing around against the epileptic trance of lights. They jumped about as if on happy pills, the men in their forties and fifties, the girls half their age. The song ended, and the dancers retired to their booths. “He jiu, he jiu!” (“Drink booze, drink booze!) the owner shouted, his shirt lifted to his chest, proudly displaying a Laughing Budda-size gut. Out in the stairwell, a john, his drunken eyes closed, had wrapped himself around a bored-looking prostitute. We wound past them, dodging the saliva gobs as we went.

It turns out that Mengla, a border town on the edge of China and Southeast Asia, could be described as a number of things. “Seedy?” Without a doubt. “Quirky” also works well. But never “dire.”

*How do I know what urine tastes like, you ask? My answer: you just do.

NB: These pics, sadly, are not from Mengla but rather Kunming and Jianshui, other places in Yunnan.

Jianshui Roast Tofu: from factory to table

2009-02-19T20:33:00.000-08:00

Despite Jianshui’s 1200 year history and prominence in the history of southern Yunnan, it remains largely anonymous. It is here, in this town of around half a million residents, with its large clumps of intact hutongs filled with pre-modern Chinese life, that inquisitive food enthusiasts can sample as well as learn the process behind “roast tofu,” a simple yet delicious snack unique to Jianshui, and eaten ubiquitously in homes and eateries throughout the town. A large grill slowly roasts the small, bitesize cubes to golden perfection as diners pick them off to dip into small sauce bowls, spiced with a combination of peppers, peanut sauce and MSG. Meanwhile, the house “roaster” tallies each customer’s tally of tofu cubes by throwing a single grain of corn into that customer’s counting bowl, constantly replenishing the grill with fresh cubes. At two mao per cube, Jianshui’s roast tofu makes for an affordable, nutritious addition to the bowls of noodles that they accompany.

A leisurely walk around Jianshui’s numerous hutongs will easily offer more quintessentially traditional sensory experience than entire months in China’s urban bubbles might provide. Rattan baskets, fried frogs and vegetables drying stand outside of crumbling wood and brick houses, narrow doorways tempt the curious into ramshackle courtyards. Down one street, just outside one of the town’s renovated gate towers, we discovered a series of Jianshui tofu cube manufacturers.

The process of making these cubes is quite remarkable to watch, similar in some ways to watching a skilled Hui noodle maker as he pulls his “la mian,” or observing miniature dumplings being kneaded and sealed. These are some of the more readily watchable (and often mesmerizing) skills of the Chinese culinary arts. Jianshui tofu cubes, handmade by women ranging from girls to the elderly, provide a similarly delightful spectacle, moulded with prodigious speed and uniformity using a simple cheese cloth.

Whilst wandering this lane, stopping regularly to peer in on more women at work, we spoke with a local who invited us to observe the process at his neighbor’s factory, located in a narrow building that, from the outside, could easily pass as another home. Outside, a leper was begging, a horse drawn cart was filled with leafy greens freshly picked from the fields behind the street. At Mr. Sou’s factory, we were shown the vats in which the soy beans, imported from Shandong, are soaked overnight. They are then ground into the soft tofu-like matter which we consumers recognize. From small buckets of this soft cooked tofu, the shapers take small handfuls, adding them into the cheesecloth, which they then wrap around and squeeze, removing excess water. The newly shaped cube is sat down on a tray, in eight by eight rows of 64. She then unwraps one of the previously wrapped ones, which have been left to set for a short while, before repeating the entire process. Shapers estimate that they can manufacture between three to four hundred cubes per hour.

I’ve been able to find Jianshui-style roast tofu in Kunming, Yunnan’s capital city, but nowhere outside of Yunnan. If anyone has found restaurants elsewhere selling this delicious snack, let me know!

White Would Be Better

2008-12-29T04:06:00.000-08:00

Being Overseas Chinese in China has numerous advantages. Clothes here fit me better than they do larger foreign friends, I escape the constant ogling and unwanted attention that others face and, if I were to choose to do so, I could probably settle into a more permanent life here with greater ease. But most recently, on multiple occasions, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of more racist discrimination than I ever experienced in the United States. The irony being, of course, that it’s from people of my own ethnicity. Chinese people are passing me over because I’m Chinese.

When going in to apply for teaching positions at a nearby English school, we were informed that there were no full-time positions available at that branch, contrary to what an Australian friend had told us the day before. When another friend, who is Caucasian, went into their office a few days after to enquire about openings…what do you know?! A position had just opened up again.

Soon afterward, I received a text message from a musician friend, Tim, looking for other foreigners to play some concerts around Christmas. There exists in China what we laowai refer to as “foreign monkey” work: where foreigners are paid (very handsomely, by Chinese standards) to play music, dance around in a club, model, and do promotion for businesses. The main requirement for such work is not talent or experience—most of the work is done by English teachers or foreign students--but ethnicity. Work does exist for Blacks and non-white foreigners: a woman working in entertainment showed me a video of some Black friends performing “traditional African dance” in stereotypical African clothing for a local event. But most of the time, they want White folks.

In the case of this Christmas gig, I told Tim that I’d be interested, but to check with the agent if I would be able to play. Though Chinese have tended not to say: “Whites only” up front, at this point I figure it saves both parties more trouble if I, in a nation as supposedly proudly nationalistic as China, to admit that I, though born and raised in the West, am--should I be ashamed?—in fact, yellow. Tim called back, apologizing for his agent, who said that “they already had one Chinese,” and that they were not interested in another.

“Maybe in a few years they will be more interested in how well people can play their instruments, rather than just having any White guy who doesn’t even know how to play,” Tim, a German who plays drums, said, trying to console me.

“It’ll take a lot longer than that,” I told him.

It can feel odd, discovering that the time when my skin color tends to matter least is when hanging out with foreign friends, despite being the only non-White one. Within our small bubble of liberal, college-educated Western outlooks, we laugh at the absurdity of such situations and consider at what point does the “foreign monkey” work become too close to corporate whoredom. One friend drew the line on a “Foreign Santa” competition sponsored by a giant Wal-Mart-wielding mall, which invited foreigners to dress as Santa and say “a phrase in Chinese (!)” for cash prizes.

Until recently, I’ve considered this mostly at the behest of consumers. I don’t think shifting the blame on to society relieves a nation of its racism, but in some way, it softens the blow of this now all-too-familiar snubbing. English companies charge extremely high rates, and for parents shelling out hard-earned cash toward their child’s future American degree, they want a charming, handsome young foreigner teaching little Kevin how to pronounce “these and those.” Somebody from one of those rich, developed Western nations. That somebody, to their minds, is White.

An American recruiter for one of the major English companies in China told me over brunch of a particularly tough new visa officer in Dalian, in northeastern China. Whereas the requirements for English teachers were higher than normal there—China is a haven for less qualified teachers: a bachelors degree, a proper TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate, two years of education experience—there was one, surprising new kicker. You have to be White. African-American, Singaporean…Overseas Chinese? “Forget about it!,” he told me. This was the first case in many years here that he’d seen such racism at the official level.

Whiteness, as we know well the world over, holds a great deal of privilege. And while many of the foreigners who come to China bring with them some sort of “global village” openness and a desire to break down racial and national distinctions, we quickly realize how differently, and in many ways how deeply conservative, Chinese society regards race.

So what is one to do, as an Australian-born Chinese seeking a piece of the action, as so many foreigners are currently doing, in this supposed future world super power? Study as I do, my Mandarin is a long way from fluency. Beyond that, also, is the remarkable cultural chasm that, though shrinking, still exists between Westerners and Chinese. (Try as I could, I struggled unsuccessfully to get the Western concept of “muzak” through to my normally savvy tutor.) Simply put, there’s no going around it: I’m not from China. But, whereas I will never pass as Chinese, I’m not quite foreign enough either.

There’s little point in trying to single-handedly change the mindsets of 1.3 billion people: that’s not my job, and besides, people trying to change things in China who aren’t officials tend to walk on thin ice.

Part of me is ready to go home: to return to the comfort of fluent self-expression and Fox serials and, though we love to bag “PC” culture, good old anti-racism legislature. And yet, with the West’s decidedly uninviting job market, and having already gotten this far with what is, by all accounts, a difficult language to learn, I continue to stick it out. It’s hard to ignore, as well, the sheer leisure and freedom that being a foreign teacher in China provides: many jobs offer comfortable salaries on two days of work per week.

Still, there are moments at which I simply shake my head. This afternoon, my company called to invite me to a celebratory dinner, asking that I also invite a foreign friend. My girlfriend—a Canadian-born Chinese—piped up: “I’m foreign!”

“Can she be ethnically Chinese?” I asked.

“Uh…White would be better,” my Chinese colleague informed me. At this point, more out of humor than anger, I prod a little further.

“Can they be black, or brown…or yellow?” I continued, with perhaps a hint of ridicule.

“Um, I have to ask the boss,” he replied.

Flatnose introduces: Couchsurfing Iran, a blog about couchsurfing, in Iran!

2008-09-29T21:36:00.000-07:00

I am currently in Iran and have started a blog specially about this intruiging nation. It's at couchsurfingiran.blogspot.com. Come check it out!

Notes from India: from "Flatnose: The Axis of Evil Tour"

2008-09-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Spa life in Rishikesh

"I'm in Rishikesh, Dad! They call it the 'yoga capital of India!,'" exclaimed the girl sitting next to me at our internet cafe.

Forty years after the Beatles came to this traditionally holy town on the Ganges for their famous studies with the Maharishi, Rishikesh is now a full-blown "spiritual tourism" center. Avoiding the cow dung and ignoring the begging of the town's many religious mendicants, one soon realizes that almost all the stores around Swarg Ashram and Laxan Jhula cater to foreigners. Even the ashrams, Hindu traditional communities, seem filled with backpackers as much as local pilgrims, who have been using the town as a staging point for pilgrimages to Hinduism's holiest sites just north in the Himalayan ranges.

Ayurvedic massage and reiki, rafting and trekking, yoga and meditation: the town's billboards are a backpacker's vision laid out, or as my guesthouse neighbor Mary aptly put it, a budget "spa life" getaway from the stresses of travel in India.

But like many of India's most popular tourist locations I've visited so far, it sometimes feels like I'm in Tel Aviv, not some sacred Indian site. Hebrew letters are pasted onto the keyboards and spoken by seemingly all the foreigners around us, Israeli food is served everywhere. Upon entering the backpacker-geared "Little Buddha" cafe in town--decked out tastefully with a thatch roof and mattresses with cushions as seating--my travel partner and I, who is also ethnically Chinese, were stared down icily by several tables of young Israeli female travelers, leaving us feeling like we were second rate in the unofficial "International Hierarchy of Backpackers." I asked an Israeli-Australian hiker at the base of a Sikh pilgrim's site, Hemkund Lake, whether there were some sacred locations or some historical connection between India and Judaism.

She shook her head. "Israelis just like India!"

As do all manner of New Age spiritual sorts. Dreadlocks are more common in shades of blonde than black, and coffee table conversation resounds with comparisons of yoga instructors, meditation bowl colors and general karmic togetherness. In bookstores, Osho's treatises on sex sell next to William Sutcliffe's "Are You Experienced?"

It turns out that finding inner peace in India is big business, propeling the ever-growing commercial industry built around assisting in our attainment of true enlightenment. Or at the very least, a three-day Keralan detox session. A local reiki teacher named Soma, who grew up in an ashram here and whom I'd befriended through Couchsurfing, lamented the changes at the same time as he lived off of them.

"Fifteen years ago, nobody charged for yoga. You would just go in and ask to do it, nobody would care. Now, everything costs money," he told me matter of factly.

"Western people took our yoga knowledge and sold it for $20 classes in their countries. Of course, you can't expect to come to India and not have to pay." He also told me of how, when studying reiki in Dharamsala, he would see numerous young Tibetan men to switch clothes, donning monk robes in order to impress Western girls, then sometimes going home with them: literally, as in moving to Europe on the strength of their new girlfriend's passport and eschewing monastic life. Earlier, I'd met one of his friends, a local yoga teacher who'd moved to France to teach there, along with his French girlfriend.

"But is it also common for local guys to do the same here?," I asked cautiously, hoping not to offend.

"Yes," he acknowled. "It's common here too."

Even in the ashrams, for decades centers of Hindu learning led by famous spiritual teachers, Western influence has waved its ugly wand. According to Soma, almost all of the leadership are in-fighting, following the deaths of many of the original gurus. I asked if they were fighting over interpretations of their gurus' teachings or other questions surrounding their faith.

"Only land and money," he answered. After a while we were silent. "Things were so different before," he said simply. We shook hands, and as I walked off to continue my comfortable "spa life" in the same hills where sadhus continue to live out ascetic lives of meditation, I wondered whether he thought Rishikesh was better or worse for my being there.

--

There is a dialogue that I have with locals here on a daily basis.

"Your country?," they ask, sometimes gently, sometimes more demandingly.

"Australia," I respond, occasionally throwing a list of famous Australian cricket players at them in order to convince them that I am, despite my appearance, Australian.

"But you look like…"—and then they pause—"Japanese!"

Increasingly, I meet other trans-national floaters such as myself from other countries. A Vietnamese Frenchman working in China, a German of Indian descent studying in Washington, a Korean Kazakh on her way to Liberia (she had the hardest jumble of ethnic-national-residency for me to process). So I can understand, especially in a place where we such folk are rare, how confusing it can be.

--

"Dinner with the Commissioner" - Jodhpur, Rajasthan

When Arvind, my Couchsurfing host in Jodhpur, a city of 1.2 million located in the western state of Rajasthan, found out that I was invited to dinner with the Kiran Soni Gupta, he was amazed. He'd seen her name mentioned in local newspapers. At the time, I had no idea that she was the District Commissioner of Jodhpur, maybe the equivalent to being mayor of a city. At the time, she was just an interesting profile on Couchsurfing, who sounded like she was involved in good work regarding women's empowerment and poverty relief.

At first, we weren't sure if he should come along to dinner. I offered to call, but he rejected the idea firmly. But after his brother-in-law, who worked with her, vouched for her character, he decided to come and meet her, planning to then excuse himself from dinner. Excitedly, we washed and changed into our best clothes, before riding out by motorcycle to her house.

"Commissioner's House, Regency Road," she had told me, when I asked how to get to her place. "Everybody knows it."

The guards opened the gate, revealing a lush, shaded residency, redolent of Indian civil service opulence. It was grand by Western standards, positively other-worldly compared to regular Indian housing. We were seated in the waiting room, filled with Kiran's own artwork, images of her with George Stiglitz, former chief economist at the World Bank, Amartya Sen and other notable figures in international poverty relief, and a collection of degrees and awards. One of Kiran's personal servants brought out two glasses of water. After taking them off of the platter, the servant stood there awkwardly, bent half over, motionless. His pose resembled that of a crooked flamingo, if flamingos held silver platters. It took us a moment to realize that he would wait in that very position until we returned the glasses to the platter.

We knew that the Commissioner herself was coming when another servant returned to place three cell phones on a sofa. He lined them up precisely; parallel to each other, with one separated from the other two, before leaving the room. Arvind and I looked at each other incredulously, and I fought back a grin at the absurd pomposity of their service. In an earlier time, they probably would have worn penguin suits and bow ties, but in this day and age they were more casually dressed in long-sleeved shirts and trousers.

Soon enough, Kiran herself arrived, along with her 11-year-old son, Vishnu. Despite our initial apprehension, we found her to be incredibly inviting, convincing Arvind to stay for dinner despite his polite protestations. Dinner was suitably immense, with over a dozen different dishes that varied from local Indian to Chinese to Western, from vegetable Manchurians (Indian-Chinese-style veggie meatballs) to penne pasta to daal and chapatti. Kiran was warm and genuine, happy to speak at length about her accomplishments but also asking—and actually considering—our own careers and concerns. Her school-age daughter and son sat with us most of the time, though her husband, District Commissioner of Jaipur, a neighboring city, was not around.

We discussed her decision to return back to India after completing her graduate program at Harvard, while most of her peers choose to take on better-paying jobs in America.

"There's no other job in which I know I can make such a difference in people's lives," she explained. Such a line, so clichéd in the hands of ordinary public servants, sounded so genuine coming from this radiant woman. She also talked of the difficulties involved in getting villagers in Rajasthan—regarded as socially backward by other Indians—to let their girls leave the village to carry on their education.

Remarkably, she hosts and meets Couchsurfers often, despite her busy schedule. Even when away on business, she makes an effort to have some of her servants show guests around town. And beyond us foreigners, she regularly hosts local citizens, such as my own host, Arvind, explaining that "her door is open to everyone." And while elected officials regularly make such claims, I got the feeling that Kiran actually meant it.

On the way home, Arvind was grinning from ear to ear.

"This is the first time I've seen someone from the government like that," he gushed, explaining that all his previous encounters with public servants have been negative.

They normally treat you as if you're below their "dignity," he said.

"If India had more people in government like Kiran, even just 10 percent, this country would be so much better," he gushed.

--

"Black Town/White Town" - Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu

Arriving in Pondicherry, a former French colonial possession on the east coast of Tamil Nadu, the heart of India's south, brought difficult questions to mind. It is split, historically, into "White Town" and "Black Town," where the French and the locals respectively stayed, and the schism remains stark today. What they now call the French district, is a charming seaside village of neat, elegantly maintained cathedrals, hotels and homes in delicate pastel hues, all built in an architectural style unmistakably French. Its quietude and beauty immediately felt a world away in the Tamil part, split off by Canal Street, which is as loud, crowded and dirty as any Indian town, where beggars constantly hound and a combination of open sewers and piles of rubbish combine to form a smell quite undesirably memorable.

To be in a town in India where you actually want to linger on the street, rather than get to where you're going as quickly as possible, is a rare treat. And so we lingered, taking pictures of glorious overgrown flowers and gliding in zig zag patterns through the French town on our rented bicycles.

But in talking to Judy, who is Chinese-Canadian, about why we enjoyed the French district so much, dark post-colonial thoughts of race and inferiority were difficult to stymie. Were we merely worshipping our former oppressors in preferring their tranquility, their fresh pain au chocolat, or their language, still spoken on its streets? If so, were we acknowledging in some way that French, and with it Western culture, is better than Indian culture? And so that colonialism was in part justified, that India was better under the British, that we yellow and brown people of the Orient are still only playing catch-up to the White man?!

Such a train of increasingly-extreme concerns pored forth, as we sat in the main park of the French town with local Tamils, in a suddenly uneasy leisure. Our multi-cultural Obama-era educations taught us that black is beautiful, and my Caucasian friends often downplay their ethnic heritage as "boring." Yet my time in China and India has exposed, through its white skin-bleaching beauty products and fair-skinned Bollywood and Hong Kong superstars, a distinctly colonial-aping worldview, where if White isn't necessarily superior, it's certainly looked upon with a chip-on-the-shoulder and an ever-present acknowledgement of greatness.

I was reminded of a time walking through Sichuan university, when Ai Yan, a local friend, pointed out the foreign (mostly Western exchange student) dorms, which are significantly better kept and equipped than the ones for Chinese. When I asked why foreigners necessarily got better accommodation, her response was simply:

"Of course they do. They're foreigners."

Later, Judy argued that this wasn't necessarily the case, and that it's a matter of what one is acculturated to like. That being products of Western upbringing, it was natural for us to find the French district and its European heritage more to our liking, though not necessarily superior to India. I wanted to agree with her, looking out across the rocky shore as a homeless woman slept beneath a bronze Gandhi statue. We travelers must constantly check our conclusions: genetics and race as inherent causes should not be tied to culture and history, in considering the differences between two countries. Surely, if anything, the post-colonial era has taught us that much.

But in traveling these stretches of East and South Asia, in observing the relationship between global trade, nationalism and racial identity, I feel like these complex questions of moral righteousness and economic power are easier to rationalize and deconstruct from the Ivory and Corporate Tower, than when living within, or merely passing through, its gross divisions in India.

What the Games mean to the Chinese: Some Local Opinions

2008-08-12T21:29:00.001-07:00

Last Friday evening, having secured two tables at a 600 RMB (about $80) minimum charge, I settled in with a group of friends, both foreign and local, to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony. The whole city—nay, country was shut down as even the taxi drivers stopped on the riverside bar street to watch the theatre, projected on to outdoor screens.

“Just for one night, I will let myself be brainwashed by the propaganda,” Luxi, my tutor, who recently returned from a month backpacking in Laos, said jokingly.

Earlier in the week, when I asked my students to give an example illustrating the term “blanket marketing,” their response came immediately: “Olympics.” This entire year leading up to the event, throughout my travels in China, “Beijing 2008” has been utterly unavoidable. From storefronts to taxi radios, revolutionary monument gift shops and ethnic minority trinkets, the government’s messaging system has comprehensively penetrated every corner of the country.

At remote Qinghai Lake in China’s northwest, an area very much ethnically and culturally Tibetan, I was bemused to find a giant statue of Jingjing the panda, one of the five fuwu mascots, standing behind bronze statues of local women churning yak butter. In a Miao minority village in Guizhou, in the country’s southern interior close to Vietnam, old women in colorful costume shoved tacky trinkets of the five rings in front of me. North of Hong Kong in Guangzhou, I stumbled into a painting academy where the students’ work was being hung: all of their paintings of course, were Olympic-themed. And whilst riding a train back into Sichuan, the speakers play “Beijing Welcomes You,” the official theme song, in between C-pop ballads and hip-hop.

The Games have been described as many things by the media: as China’s “Coming Out Party,” as the setting for the resentful host nation to demonstrate its mettle by winning the highest medal count, as an example of the West’s toothless inability to stop continued oppression and mass human rights violations.

For many Chinese, the Games does indeed provide an opportunity to take pride in their collective accomplishment, in their overcoming the dramatic missteps of Mao’s past rule to now--so improbable a few decades ago--be considered a legitimate challenge to American hegemony. The Games are as much about earning the world’s respect—particularly that of the West—as it is a celebration of progress.

But others showed less concern. A guitarist friend named Xiao Di, who I’d been playing in a short-lived Beatles cover band with, could not have been more apathetic when I asked if he planned on watching the Games.

“I’m not interested in sports, so I have no reason to watch the Olympics. But if it were a band competition, then I’d definitely watch!”

Some of my local friends are eager to see China win the most gold medals. Whilst watching the U.S. roll over China in Sunday’s men’s basketball match, Aaron, an administrator at a local university, described it as a golden opportunity for China to display it’s ability before the world.

“It would be the first time that we beat America,” he noted.

Whilst changing money at a Bank of China branch—the only bank where changing currencies is authorized—I sat in the waiting area benches, where all eyes were fixed on the blurry television above us, watching the men’s synchronized diving. They watched the other competitor’s with mild interest, but everyone—even bank staff—stopped to cheer each time the Chinese pair (who ended up winning the gold) took to the boards. You could almost feel the weight of the nation’s eyes on these two young men, as they walked out to the edge, steeling themselves before they leapt.

Nobody feels the pressure, however more than Liu Xiang, who won the 110m hurdles gold in Athens and whom people are expecting to win again in Beijing. But my students said they feel more sympathy than expectation toward him.

“I’ll just feel sorry for him if he loses, because everyone expects him to win,” Jane said. “It’s not important if he doesn’t win.”

Her comments were a good example of the reasonableness and ambivalence of many ordinary Chinese in the face of the Olympics juggernaut—so promoted by states and companies here in China as outside. Where power politics and nationalism are the dominant roles that the Games tend to act out, there are many Chinese, like my student George, a troubleshooting engineer at Canon, who look beneath the hype, and view the Games simply as a chance to watch the greatest athletes in the world competing together.

Motherland/Homeland

2008-08-11T06:41:00.001-07:00

If China is the motherland, Guangzhou is the homeland.

Or at least, that's how it felt upon initially arriving. The Cantonese, the grocery store goods, the tropical air and low tree-lined streets, the smell of durians wafting out of fruit stands…this is the China I know! The China of New York and Kuala Lumpur, of Paris and Sydney, the cuisine the whole world knows as Chinese. South China, including Guangdong, Fujian and nearby provinces, is the place which the majority of overseas Chinese (including this one) can trace their roots back to, and after spending ten months living in the locked-in southwestern interior of Sichuan, it feels refreshing to be once again in a place so outward-facing and global.

Where as the people in Chengdu look much like the ones I grew up knowing as "Chinese," they sounded completely different, both with their incomprehensible dialect and their thick local English accents. They ate dramatically different style cooking. Even their opera songs sounded foreign.

In Guangzhou, locals not only look, but sound, dine and sing the same way that I knew from family trips to Perth's Chinese grocery shops on weekends, or summer trips back home to Malaysia. And so walking around the city, known these days more for its go-getter capitalist drive than its exported diasporic culture, I felt like, for the first time since coming to China, I'd actually, truly "returned to the homeland." It actually felt like home, sensually, rather than merely abstractly, and I embraced the feeling. Having began the process of acculturation and learned to get by in Mandarin, I was able to savor the return more fully than had I just gotten off the place from New York.

I had previously written the city off in a way. Guangzhou, and nearby overnight-superstar Shenzhen, are China's export factory capitals, where cheap plastic goods and 90 percent of the disposable crap that fills up homes throughout the West originates. I had preconceptions of a city of mere commerce and hustle, of crooks and mobsters and squabbling for pieces of the pie. But it has revealed itself, of course, to be so much more. It's a large, top-tier city, with a first-rate subway, significantly larger and more diverse expat population and—most welcomingly—excellent food.

So with such rash biases thrown aside, I'm looking forward to plunging face first into the intoxicating aromas of home, here in Guangdong.

Income Disparities: Considering the Other in Guilt-conscious Tourism

2008-08-11T06:37:00.000-07:00

For me, living and traveling in China is a constant reminder of the fact that its people are still largely poor and needy, and that at this stage in its economic rise, there are few, if any rules of etiquette when it comes to getting ahead.

As a traveler from the West, many locals find it difficult to understand why I would choose to leave a country like Australia or America in the first place, and why, if given the choice to go somewhere like England or France, I would choose to come to live, of all places, in China.

After the earthquake struck, those of us in Chengdu--so close to the epicenter yet so fortunately unharmed--felt idle in the face of so much suffering on our doorsteps. Not being picked to go out to one of the towns reduced to rubble in the initial rescue efforts, I made do with visiting some survivors brought in to Huaxi Hospital, supposedly Chengdu's finest.

I met an eight-year-old who has lost a leg and a sixteen year-old who was slowly losing sight in her left eye, her hand having been pressed against her eyeball for 72 hours by a concrete slab that had fallen on top of her. They had lost most of their classmates. Most wrenching however, was a pretty 22-year-old who had lost not only her legs, her friends and her family, but also her still-alive boyfriend, who, upon discovering what had happened to her, decided to break up.

When we talked, on the limited subjects that my Chinese permitted, she was courageously upbeat, given what she'd recently experienced. In their colorful, soft doll-filled hospital room with the two others, each with a personal helper—all volunteers, I learned—they had formed their own family of sorts. Martin, my English colleague who had allowed me to tag along, comes to see them each day, and during my stay they were frequently visited by well-wishers bearing gifts. It was both tragic and inspiring, and gave me some hope for times to come.

Naturally, when an opportunity to go entertain children at a refugee tent village arose with a local volunteer group, I jumped. And, at first, it actually felt rather magical. The kids were ecstatic upon our arrival—in no small part, though, due to the group's mostly Caucasian foreigner body. My group presented some of them with letters written in English by students from other nearby towns—assigned by their teachers in English class—and they wrote moving responses detailing their will to recover and achieve their goals. Parents and older refugees stood behind watching, broad smiles across their faces, grateful for our presence it seemed.

The following week, problems began to arise as the group's goal—to play with and entertain children for a few hours on Sunday—took a subtle, crucial twist. One volunteer, with all the good intentions of every foreign aid program that has exacerbated problems in Africa, took out the Pandora's box: a bag of sweets. The children immediately swamped her, arms outstretched, and she reacted by throwing the sweets into the quickly-gathering crowd, where they fought crazily, like children without access to candy.

Things got nastier the following week, when, upon arrival at the camp, the group attempted to hand out t-shirts it had purchased for each child. The line they originally created quickly devolved, and soon adults were involved, pushing and shoving for t-shirts. Instantly, curious "brothers" and "other children in the tent" were dreamed up, and some of the more entrepreneurial hoarders got away with perhaps ten or so shirts. For the rest of the day, the magic was not only lost, but a new mood had swept the crowd. When playing badminton, a man came up asking not to play, but simply for our rackets. When getting the pre-schoolers to draw pictures, adults came up asking me to procure shirts for them, and one boy kept asking for volunteers' watches. Relations had, as they so often do in China, been reduced to a matter of wealth. We had things that they didn't, and they realized now that they could get some of them from us, a proposition that for many seemed much more lucrative than our mere distracting their children for a few hours.

On the road, we visited Wulingyuan, a national park as great as the Grand Canyon, if not as famous, located in China's belly in Hunan province, home to Mao. It's sheer, towering karst-formed pillars of sandstone are the most dramatic I have ever seen; from a cable car to the top, it's a scene as dramatic and transcendent as a natural landscape has perhaps ever made me feel. But besides the brief moments of respite from the tour groups and hawkers, when we could appreciate our solitude and smallness in the face of such majesty, the trip was an extended hustle. Everybody, from the park authorities themselves, to the drivers, hotel staff, and service providers appear connected in a complex web of commission-based networks. All of them, from the second you stepped out of the park, were chasing your dollar. It might not have been as aggressive as some of the hawkers in Bali or Cambodia or other poor tourist destinations, but when you've paid an enormous park admission fee (245RMB), I quickly lost patience with having to constantly dole out extortionate prices on everything else.

We had decided to go rafting, one of the park's heavily marketed attractions, but upon seeing the site originally recommended to us, it's route unremarkable and its operator's shady, we decided to take a park official's suggestion. We paid 180 RMB for a supposedly two-hour raft trip about half an hour away. The journey ended up being closer to an hour and a half, and an hour's drive away. However, it was indeed, as beautiful as we'd hoped: idyllic, verdant countryside and sheer cliffs, eroded in intricate, diagonal lines, with only dragonflies and fish to bother us.

Traveling with two Canadians, we got onto the topic of national anthems, giving renditions of our own, before asking our raftsman if he'd mind singing us a bit of the Chinese one. A shabbily-dressed man, perhaps in his late-sixties, he declined. He had been silent for almost the entire trip, when he abruptly revealed his anger towards us.

"Tai shao le, tai shao le," he kept repeating, ("Too little") explaining that the rafting company wasn't paying him enough to make his job worthwhile. He was paid for each person he steered: three in our case, whereas normally he steered eight people at a time. His pay for each person? Four RMB, or about two percent of what we had paid the company.

It was, as with many times prior, another stark reminder of the realities of contemporary China. But floating along this stunningly tranquil river, having gotten as far away from the hustlers as we could, now juxtaposed against the simple sorrow of an elderly man toiling away for a pittance in the most dog-eat-dog capitalist society I've known felt particularly crushing.

Changing Money in China

2008-08-11T06:34:00.000-07:00

I changed 2,000 RMB to US Dollars today at a Bank of China, the only bank I know that is authorized to convert money.

Outside the bank, a woman approached me soliciting money. At another chain, a security guard had offered to do the same for me when I realized I needed my passport in order to change money (Duh!, I know).

The whole transaction took about 45 minutes.

After waiting the 25 minutes or so for my number to be called, the teller sent me to another counter to fill out a form and copy my passport. They explained that the exchange rate was (August 2008) 6.8: lower than I’d expected. They had me wait another 5-10 minutes or so before sending me back over to the teller. Originally, they handed me another number slip, explaining: “Sorry but you have to line up again.”

Then—maybe after seeing my expression—the service woman said I could see if the teller would allow me to go ahead, avoiding the line. He was nice enough to do that, and after going through the paperwork and having another teller count the greenbacks, I had the net result: $290 USD finally in hand.

In Guangzhou, a trader acquaintance showed me an illegal money converter tucked into the back of a clothing store shop front. Skipping the bureaucracy, I would have gotten the money in a fraction of the time, though with greater risk of counterfeit dollars, or worse yet, getting in trouble with the state. Such are the risks that people take.

National outpouring and Earthquake curses

2008-05-25T22:14:00.000-07:00

On Monday, May 19th, one week after the Sichuan earthquake struck, the first of three national days of mourning begun at 2:28 pm. I was at Chengdu’s Sports University, and stood behind a small assembly of university staff, lined up in rows, heads solemnly bowed, facing the Chinese flag atop one of the campus’ administrative buildings. As had been planned, emergency sirens, joined by car horns, filled the air in mournful chorus.

That evening, a large informal gathering took place at Tianfu Square, Chengdu’s answer to Tiananmen. As is common practice in Chinese urban centers, it is—as its name infers—a giant concrete square, headed by a statue of a waving Mao and dotted with fountains and large wire coil-shaped lights. From the outside, it looked like people had organized a giant vigil of sorts, with candlelights glowing both in hands and a number of gently ascending helium baskets. But upon entering the square, we could immediately see that the gathering was far less organized, and far more raucous.

Long chains of spontaneous marchers weaved through, filled mostly with students and young adults. Many were quite fashionably dressed in heels and colorful dresses; others wore more casual garb. They pumped their fists in the air as they chanted passionately, their voices heavy with emotion.

“Zhongguo Jiayou!” (“Go China!”) they chanted, followed by “Sichuan Chungsi!” (“Go Sichuan!” in Sichuanese).

Meanwhile, others set up small memorials of candle arrangements and flowers, on the ground and in existing flowerbeds. Wherever they were set up, a huge crowd of interested watchers surrounded the small vigil in concentric circles, digital cameras and phones snapping and filming away.

Perhaps most interesting were the wax clean-ups. I have never seen anyone scrape wax off of the floor—in a public square no less--as vigorously as these small half dozen-sized groups of citizens who took it upon themselves to clean off any candle wax left on the ground, from a memorial or otherwise. When asked why they were cleaning the floor, two young women replied: “Because we saw other people doing it.”

They used their hands, and often credit cards, to get beneath the wax, which was collected into small piles and quickly thrown out. This, in a country in which it is not uncommon to see children take dumps on the sidewalks (though sometimes newspaper is placed out beneath them first); where spitting is an unofficial national pastime. If this surge of national pride means less filthy streets, I think many will welcome such change. Somehow, though, one can’t help but feel that broader changes than street sanitation may result from all of this year’s events.

My group, finally managing to reunite due to limited cell phone service, decided a patio drink at one of the city’s riverside bars would be nice on this, a pleasant spring evening. It took a phone call to remind us that all bars were closed during the three days of mourning, and then a security guard at our apartment door later than evening, to inform us of the government’s (ill-founded) prediction of another major earthquake. In the ensuing pandemonium of traffic and blankets, we slept beneath a large One Child Policy statue.

Many Chinese see the earthquake as linked to a series of cursed events, often using numbers and local superstitions as proof. 2008 is seen by some as a cursed year, just as 1998, 1988 and 1978—the year of Mao’s death—were before it. From May 12th to August 8th—the start of the Olympic ceremony—are 88 days. The day of the earthquake, May 12th, as well as the Lhasa riots, April 13th, in sum total eight. When I asked my tutor why eight might be construed as cursed when it is also commonly linked to prosperity—the two words are similar sounding in Chinese—she wasn’t sure.

Even those ever-present, stuffed doll-ready Olympic mascots have been tied to the curse. Of the five, Jingjing the panda represents the earthquake, as pandas are found here in Sichuan. The Tibetan antelope mascot represents the recent Tibetan unrest, the kite mascot represents the city of Shandong, where a recent train crash occurred and the flame-red mascot represents recent tumult surrounding the torch relay. The only remaining mascot is Beibei, a sturgeon fish, linked alternatively to the Yangtze and to Beijing and the Games themselves.

Earthquake Diary

2008-05-17T10:23:00.001-07:00

Earthquake Diary

Less than an hour’s drive from here is Dujiangyuan, the small town--previously famous only for its ancient irrigation system--that has become the focus of headlines the world over.

Here in Chengdu, only four days after what has been dubbed “The Great Sichuan Earthquake”, life has essentially returned to normalcy. Though most schools remain closed, some universities have resumed classes, and many shops and businesses have already restarted.

The earthquake at this point, for many Chengdu residents, is a psychological game of probability and worst possible scenario. Against the background of everyday life is the constant preying on the nerves of the possibility of another large quake. Jitters kick in with each successive apartment-jiggling tremor, lasting perhaps a few seconds but strong enough to remind us of what can—and has already—happened. The questions residents ask one another: “Is it alright to sleep inside tonight?”, “Should we still stay together at all times by this point?” are pondered over unrelenting waves of rumours and prophecy.

Text messaging—as with increasingly organized, rapidly mobilized protests—is the key instrument of viral rumors. They continue to spread, almost invariably warning of the “next big one.”

“My uncle works for the government’s earthquake bureau and he said there will be a big earthquake at 2:00 and 10:00 P.M.” one of them read. And, with people as shaken up and fearful as they are, they continue to react accordingly. They brace themselves for round two of the original quake, at whatever time it is supposed to strike, then, according to the next rumour, the following one, and again, a few hours after that, ad infinitum. To date, these wild speculative flurries have proven completely untrue, but not enough for those who cry wolf to stop calling.

Let’s hope the wolf does never come again, given how hungry for lives the first one was.

On Wednesday the water was turned off in parts of the city, due it appears to the leaking of toxic chemicals into Chengdu’s water supply. The rumour mill immediately kicked in, whispering that it would be off for a week. Within minutes, shops all over the city sold out of water as rampant hording began. A trip to the supermarket displayed bare beverage aisles a la past decades of patchy Soviet goods provision. With water no longer available, shoppers filled their carts with soda and orange juice: surely not the best way to combat dehydration in the event of a water crisis.

The rumours, yet again, proved to be unfounded.

Outside, from university campuses to parks and fields to any possible suitable space, makeshift villages of canvas have formed. Many have pitched hastily bought tents; others have made ingenious use of tarpaulin and rope, as thousands continue to sleep outside for fear of their home collapsing. Walking around camps earlier on there was a certain sense of adventure in the air. A friend described the evening of the quake as “like being at a music festival.” With work and school on hold, people found themselves on “emergency holiday,” and wasted no time in doing as the Sichuanese do so well: breaking out card decks and Mahjong tiles for some camp-out leisure and conversation.

But more recently, as days of sleeping outside with limited access to amenities lengthen, a sense of lethargic desperation has crept in. Some have begun to return to their apartments and dorms, but others have still been denied entry by cautious authorities and landlords. Others, stripped down to shorts and sandals, beneath canvas shade and supplies of instant noodles, choose the relative peace of mind of remaining outside, weathering the uncomfortable humidity of late Spring.

Meanwhile, the relief effort carries on, with fundraiser benefits, donation drives, volunteer sign-ups and the like. At a benefit event on Thursday evening, foreigners donned “I love China” t-shirts—perhaps to demonstrate their equal concerns for victims and the desire to take active part in the relief work--as they bid on wine auctions and filled in volunteer forms with relevant technical skills. In addition to the Red Cross and other NGOs heavily involved in the rescue effort are individual, self-motivated efforts, such as that of some of the Israeli students living in Chengdu.

I caught up with one of them, a Krav Maga instructor who I previously interviewed for a magazine article, who has been personally involved in the rescuing. When two Israeli travelers went missing and the country was considering sending its own rescue team for them, Eliran and a friend traveled out to the town where the women were supposed to have been traveling. They found the girls, in shock and attempting to walk back--a delusional idea--and took them back to Chengdu for surgery. One of the women had her broken jaw operated on and another lost a few fingers. It turns out that a restaurant had collapsed while they were inside.

My Chinese teacher has gone to a hospital in Deyang to help out with providing care and basic assistance to the many victims. Less direct in form but equally valuable are the many people who are dropping off blankets, sleeping bags and non-perishables at desperately under-stocked hospitals and field sites.

Despite all of these efforts, it’s difficult not to feel increasingly skeptical of the chances of pulling out more survivors from the rubble, this long after the initial quake. The death toll, well over 20,000 people at this point, is estimated to reach 50,000 people by the government.

On Rising Chinese Nationalism

2008-05-17T10:07:00.000-07:00

Here in Chengdu, signals of China’s rising nationalism are everywhere.

In Sichuan University, Chinese flags hang from the windows of college dorms. Until recently, this was something one rarely ever saw.

A middle school student of mine told me he and his classmates want to plaster “Made in China” across their chests, as a symbol of pride, an inversion of the label commonly found on consumer goods available overseas. Another student of mine, who works for Nokia in Chengdu, told me that before the recent Tibet flare-up, many young Chinese didn’t feel particularly nationalistic, until they realized, following the Western coverage of Tibet and the torch relay, that there were “so many unfriendly nations” against China.

Rising Chinese nationalism is a common motif of Western foreign correspondents, up there alongside food and product safety scares and Tibet. They often talk about how nationalism has replaced Marxism as the country’s ideology, and of its rising potency as a force for democratic liberalization and a subsequent weakening of the Party. They also describe a sort of intense furor, one that infers future aggression in its relations with outsiders, such as through the country’s foreign policy.

The Olympics in China is, as one might imagine, a huge deal. I’ve never lived in a country during the Olympics and it’s to be expected that they would make a fuss over it, but the Olympics logo can be seen plastered on everything from ice-cream wrappers to television cartoons starring the Olympic mascots. For China, its government and its people, the Olympics is their coming-out party of sorts, in which it announces to the world its place as a global superpower, celebrating its rapid rise from poverty to prominence.

In addition, perhaps more so than people in other countries, Chinese take criticism of their own nation personally. A colleague of mine estimates that 80 percent of Chinese genuinely, passionately love their country, far more I would say than those from many Western countries. This is instilled at a young age in school, when students learn the “We Love China” pledge and reasons are plastered up on classroom walls. To me such nationalism is similar in zeal to the sort taught in American schools, both of which are far heavier than the comparatively cynical Australia.

So, in a situation such as this, where the Olympics has involved such enormous investment of national pride and international “face”, this more recent burst of negative press in the Western media was taken as a serious insult. The biggest case in point: when a Chinese wheelchair-bound athlete carrying the Olympic torch was attacked by protesters in France.

Following this, a nationwide boycotting of the French supermarket chain Carrefour took place on May 1st, a national holiday in China. According to a local, people stood outside the store encouraging potential patrons to shop elsewhere, and pictures were posted online of empty supermarket aisles.

Some might wonder what’s the big deal they’re making? It’s not like they were attacked and had thousands of people die, such as with 9-11, right?

Though true, I think that gives a severely reductive, almost mathematical explanation to a much more complex force. Nationalism is inherently emotive, and in China, it feels to many people like much of the world, not just a group of fundamental Muslims or a terrorist organization, are out to get them. In such circumstances, considering how ethnically homogenous and often ethnocentric (all non-Chinese are often lumped together in discussion as “waiguoren” – “foreigners”) China can be, it’s no wonder the tides of opinion towards the outside turns so quickly.
--

I’ve not heard of any actual incidents of violence. One widely reported story of an American volunteer being attacked outside a Carrefour was later found to be false, when the alleged victim wrote into the newsblog himself, in order to correct the sensationalist version of the incident being reported.

But what does seem more common is for Caucasians in China to be treated much more wearily: whilst shopping, a British friend overheard a sales assistant say “I can’t believe that Frenchman has the nerve to show his face here,” and “I’m going to kill that Frenchman” from a man when in a public bathroom. He hasn’t been attacked, however, and does not fear it occurring. Outside my apartment complex, a Caucasian and a Chinese man were involved in a crowd-drawing shouting match, before the police took the Caucasian man away--to where I’m unsure.

--

From discussions with locals and following online discussions, I think the major issue that irks young, educated Chinese about foreign relations is the ignorance and faux-sympathy of Westerners towards China. They’re agitated by the way may Westerners smugly hold that Chinese citizens are controlled by state media, mere blind pawns being drummed into a nationalistic fervor by their evil leaders. More so than anything else, it is this stripping of any sort of individual agency, as if they were passive machines, that outrages them.

They remind me that whilst they read both Chinese (state-run but also independent blogs and independent media) and Western (English-language) outside media, most Westerners do not read Chinese media (many are incapable of doing so).

They talk about how many of them have studied, traveled to and are reasonably knowledgeable about the West, but how little Westerners know about China, beyond the negative coverage they read about human rights and trade deficits.

One student said she used to believe that Western media was more trustworthy and balanced as a source of news, but following the Tibet coverage, her opinion was greatly lowered. Now she considers it not much different from Chinese media.

These young professionals are the more intellectually nuanced and well informed of Chinese society. Surely, other segments of the population are less thought-out and more non-discriminatingly angry and weary of the West at present. Much, one might notice, like it is in the United States or other Western nations.

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Interesting articles:

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0501/p09s02-coop.html

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/JE07Ad02.html

http://ieas.berkeley.edu/shorenstein/1996.10.html

http://shanghaiist.com/2008/04/24/volunteer_in_ch.php

How to 'Experience' an Ethnic Minority, and Other Difficult Tourist Questions

2008-04-12T04:12:00.000-07:00

This past weekend was Grave-sweeping Holiday (Qingming Jie), when Chinese families visit their ancestors in cemeteries to pay their respects. Seeing as mine are buried either in Malaysia or unknown Chinese locales, I took a last-minute trip with two friends to southern Guizhou province, one of China’s most remote and poor. Our goal: to see some ethnic minority villages.

Following a 19-hour overnight train ride from Chengdu to Guiyang, the capital city, we traveled another two and a half hours east, to a haphazard town named Kaili, which is billed as the gateway to Guizhou’s numerous ethnic minorities, including the Miao, Dong, Shui and Baoyi. Finally, after a scenic 40 minute cab ride, we arrived at Langde “Lung-de”, a popular Miao (Hmong) minority village. It proved to be a very mixed experience, more a reaffirmation of social realities than a diversion from them.

Upon arrival, we were greeted by a welcoming parade of Miao women, ornately dressed in their traditional embroidered clothing, who appeared to spend their day just hanging around, greeting tourists. The village itself is quaint and charming, all cobble stoned paths and stilted wooden homes, with thick bushels of corn hanging against the walls. As an early clue into just how touristy contemporary Langde is, tri-lingual wooden signs and informational posts were stuck up throughout the entire town in Chinese, English and Japanese, using a carved, hand-written type that evoked some hammy reality TV show set in a jungle.

We found ourselves gathering in the town’s Drum tower square, as a dance performance, the meat and potatoes fare of any standard ‘ethnic tourism experience’, was about to begin. A large tour group of Han Chinese was already seated. They stood our starkly in their heels and jeans, they’re video cameras and fashionable haircuts. Some of the twenty-somethings, perhaps art students, were drawing sketches of the town into their sketchbooks.

The performance was interesting enough. The men played the drums and lusheng—a traditional, ethereal sounding flute, and the women’s dancing was elegant and visually arresting. A man in plain clothes kept asking me to buy a 20 kuai ticket. I wasn’t sure whether this was indeed necessary or whether he was simply trying to scam me, and when I asked other tourists seated nearby, they told me they hadn’t purchased one, and thus figured that I didn’t need to. Finally, another man, in Miao clothing, approached one of my companions, and we reasoned that we had to pay because the other tourists had pre-paid through their tour group. We paid up, and I felt somewhat sheepish whenever my gaze fell near the man I had continually refused.

During the performance it became increasingly clear that the performers were simply “going through the motions.” The children taking part acted much like they were at a middle school end-of-year concert for parents, giggling and ribbing each other when not performing. An article on Miao tourism explains that such dances are merely a show for tourists, and that all meaning and tradition associated with the music, dance or dress are kept separated from this commercial activity, in spirit if not in appearance.

Afterwards, the hard sell begun, and middle-aged and elderly women began peddling their wares: cheap jewelery, Miao-costume dolls and various other pieces of common tourist bric-a-brac. When I decided to purchase a piece of jewellery for my girlfriend from one lady, within seconds there were another half-dozen, shoving almost identical versions before my face. I bought a necklace from the first lady, selecting one that didn’t feature an Olympics symbol or some other entirely non-Miao-related iconography. I apologized to the others, telling them “you all look very beautiful” as meager placation. Judging by their gazes, it offered little appeasement.

We’d come looking to “experience” some minority villages, but when I asked the reflective question: “What does that actually involve?”, none of us could provide an answer. We agreed, however, that roughing it in very basic accommodation sounded like unnecessary privation, with little “minority-ness” attached to it. We decided not to spend the night and drove back to town, where we stayed in the damp “Petroleum Hotel,” run by Mandarin-speaking Miaos dressed in Western clothes.

In Shitouzai (‘Stone Village’), a Baoyi minority village famous featuring good examples of stonemasonry, the experience was far more tempered. The Baoyi are of Thai origin and are noted for their skill in wax print manufacture. Only the older women were wearing non-Western dress, and by the time we arrived near dusk, everyone was eating dinner. We wandered through the village’s stone and slate homes, built into a karst mountain as seems standard practice for such villages. We’d originally planned to stay in one villager’s house—a fairly modern place with her daughter’s pop idol posters still on the bedroom walls—but craving a hot shower (rather than bathing in the river) and more modern bathroom, we ended up staying in a guesthouse operated by a young Han man.

Both of my companions, an American and Colombian, are female. Earlier, after learning that it was against Baoyi custom for unmarried men and women to share a bedroom, we’d talked amongst ourselves of the likelihood of a villager raping a foreign woman. Unlikely as it was, that evening, just after I’d drifted off, I was woken by my friends, looking to sleep in the same room for security. Wailing animals kept Kira up most of the night.

The next morning we hiked up a nearby mount for breathtaking views of Guizhou’s hilly karst landscape, with its rice terrace farming. On the way, we passed two men roasting dogs on a spit. Dog is commonly eaten in this part of China, and we’d qualified home-cooked meals by mentioning politely: “we don’t eat dog.” At the foot of the mountain were three middle-aged women literally breaking rocks with wooden cudgels.

“I can’t believe they don’t have a machine to do that,” Kira said.

Tourism, still in its infancy in this Chinese hinterland of sorts, is undoubtedly a boon for Guizhou’s local communities, many of whom are ethnic minorities. Whereas the eastern flank of China attracts huge numbers of foreign tourists, Guizhou is visited largely by domestic tourists who tend to go with large tour groups. For those looking to eschew the well-worn Eastern roads and see another, non-Han side of this diverse country, you can certainly find authentic, distinct travel here. But, after only three days of wide-eyed stares—even in the cities--and being extorted by seemingly almost everyone we met (including our taxi driver, en route to the airport), I was ready to get back to Chengdu.

In a place so poor and far from China’s mad money grab, it shouldn’t come as a surprise for locals to see foreigners as giant walking dollar signs. And nor should it surprise, in a world where commerce and western culture penetrates even the remotest of regions, to see tennis sneakers and NBA jerseys on kids playing on dusty basketball courts in tucked-away villages. Rather than provide an escape to a simpler, agrarian hideaway of sorts, hiking around Guizhou reaffirmed the inequality and materialism of the urban world I’d sought temporary refuge from.

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*Interesting article on Miao village tourism: www.hmongstudies.com/HSJv3_Wu.pdf

Welcome to FNiC 2.0!

2008-03-25T04:18:00.000-07:00

Hello from Chengdu!

This blog begun on Wordpress at flatnoseinchina.wordpress.com, but has moved to Blogger. Why?

Because I can't access my Wordpress account through the Chinese firewall, that's why! For some reason, though, Blogger isn't blocked for those trying to post. Only when attempting to view other blogs is it blocked, though ways to go around it are simple and widespread.

For those unfamiliar with FNiC, it carries largely China-related coverage from Chengdu, Sichuan, written by me, a 20-something Australian Chinese currently studying Mandarin Chinese (and kung fu) and teaching English. I've been in China since August, 2007.

For those interested in previous posts, please visit FNiC 1.0 at flatnoseinchina.wordpress.com.

Cheers,
Mark