DJ Kentaro at Yugong Yishan

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Return to Malaysia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparing Ideas About Sexuality in China and the United States

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hong Kong versus Beijing: past and future

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

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

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

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


-- Howard, the New Yorker fact checker: Beijing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--

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

“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

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