Americans in China

I don't think This American Life is going to have to have to issue a retraction for their most recent expedition in to China.

The radio program, produced by WBEZ in Chicago and distributed by Public Radio International, caused a huge stir this spring when it had to retract its program - Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory - by performer, Mike Daisey. It turned out that Daisey had made up many of the key points of his hugely popular monologue about witnessing abuses at a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Watching the truth come to the surface was a wild thing to witness. I get a sick sense of enjoyment watching people get called out on lying and experienced a great deal of schadenfreude hearing Daisey taken to task as hard as he was by Rob Schmitz and Ira Glass.

Following up their piece from a pathological liar who admitted he knew "fuck-all about Chinese culture," This American Life redeemed itself this week by featuring a line-up of some of the most influential and knowledgeable foreigners living in China. This week's episode, Americans in China, is one of the better This American Life episodes I've heard (although I have to say that my favorite episode is still Somewhere Out There... do yourself a favor and listen to this one that's also China-related).

Kaiser Kuo is the main character in the most recent "Americans in China" episode. He's the host of the Sinica Podcast, a program I've touted numerous times on my blog. His story of being a Chinese American who completely fell for the land his parents came from, moving to China and literally becoming a rock star, having his Chinese band mates turn their backs on him after the Chinese embassy was bombed in Belgrade in 1999 because he's American, and ultimately raising his family in Beijing and working for Baidu is fascinating. I was quite moved by his passion for both China and the US.

The second act of the "Americans in China" episode is from Michael Meyer. His piece is about living in his wife's village in rural northeast China.

I read Meyer's book The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed last year, actually, but never got around to writing anything about it on my blog. I didn't really have anything to say about it. There was nothing overtly wrong or bad about Meyer's book, but I was just, for lack of a better word, bored by it.

My reaction to Meyer's book reminds me of my brother's reaction to Peter Hessler. After a huge amount of hype from me, I convinced my brother to read Peter Hessler's Oracle Bones a couple years ago. Oracle Bones is one of my all-time favorite books. I was so surprised when, a few weeks after he had started it, he told me that he couldn't finish the book. He said that Hessler's seriousness and humorlessness just got to him and that he couldn't continue reading.

I feel that way about Meyer's book and his piece on This American Life. I can't put my finger on it, but I haven't enjoyed his work as much as I have a lot of other prolific China hands'.

Despite not being enthralled with Meyer's piece, it was good to hear such quality programming on Americans in China. Kuo's story, framed by the excellent Evan Osnos, alone is worth listening to. This American Life has gone a long way in making up for whatever it egg it still had on its face from when it featured Mike Daisey.

Wild China

I LOL'd a few weeks ago when I saw this video - China, China:



I didn't really think twice about the clip until I started the TV series Wild China on Netflix. After a few minutes of Wild China, I realized that it was the British-accented source of the viral China, China compilation.



Wild China is a six-part 2008 BBC documentary on the rugged geography and exotic peoples and animals of China. The series is broken in to six episodes:

1. Heart of the Dragon
2. Shangri-La
3. Tibet
4. Beyond the Great Wall
5. Land of the Panda
6. Tides of Change

Heart of the Dragon is mostly about the wondrous karst areas of Guangxi Province and southern China. Shangri-La is all about the intense diversity of Yunnan Province. Tibet takes place in Tibet. Beyond the Great Wall is all about the Inner Mongolian and Xinjiang Autonomous Regions. Land of the Panda focuses mostly on central China from the Qinling Mounatins to the east. And Tides of Change looks at the humongous coast line from North Korea to Vietnam through the prism of China's rapid development.

I liked this entire series. It is top-notch videography of the incredibly diverse wildlife and terrain of China. I repeatedly thought to myself, "I can't believe that still exists. I thought China had killed off every animal like that!" Wild China proves that there's still a whole lot of beauty to be found in China.

The best episodes are the first two - on the Guangxi Autonomous Region and Yunnan Provice. These two episodes will make you want to get on a plane, put on a backpack, and go explore remote parts of China. My personal favorites from this part are the features on monkeys, ethnic minorities crossing raging rivers using rope zip lines, and fly-over videography of karst mountains.

Here is a clip of the Nu Jiang rope crossing from the Shangri-La episode:



(There are several more clips from Wild China on YouTube if you search for "wild china")

The last four episodes were interesting to me, but a let down compared to the beginning of the series.

The episode on Tibet didn't feature as many towering, snow-covered Himalayan peaks as it did barren plateau. Vast lifeless expanses of land are certainly a big part of Tibet and its topography, but it didn't make for the most interesting viewing. The same is true of the grasslands of Inner Mongolia and the deserts of Xinjiang in episode four (and I say that as a huge Xinjiang nerd). Nothing really stands out from episodes five and six in my mind a few weeks after having watched it either.

I enjoyed Wild China a lot. I'd recommend it to someone wanting to learn a thing or two while killing time on Netflix.

God is Red

Seeing that I'm not a religious person, I wasn't sure whether I would like Liao Yiwu's new book - God Is Red: The Secret Story of How Christianity Survived and Flourished in Communist China. "Christianity in China" in my mind is synonymous with Mormon and Protestant born again Evangelical Americans teaching at Chinese universities who spend a great deal of their time prosthelytizing to eager Chinese undergrads. The topic is not something I'm particularly interested in.

I liked Liao's previously released book in English, though - The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up. Liao's story is most interesting too - he was a state-sponsored writer as a young man, wrote provocative poetry about the Tiananmen massacre in the late '80s and early '90s, spent years in prison for that work, developed his writing more and more, and has recently written books that have been translated into English.

While I had reservations about reading a book profiling Christians in China, I picked it up anyways knowing Liao's dissident and bohemian life story and liking his previous work.



God is Red is written in the same style as The Corpse Walker. Liao uses his friends and connections to meet people on the fringes of Chinese society. Much of the book is written in an interview Q&A format. It's broken into three sections:

1. The Trip to Dali
2. The Yi and Miao Villages
3. Beijing and Chengdu

Dali is a hippie outpost in Yunnan Province, an area in southwest China between the Himalayas and Myanmar. My strongest memory of Dali when I was there in 2006 is being offered marijuana from tiny, wrinkled old ladies in lavish ethnic garb. It's a very chill little tourist town dotted with coffee shops and cafes serving foreign food. It's surrounded by beautiful mountains and an idyllic lake.

The Yi are an ethnic group I've now seen profiled in several of the books I've read on China (River at the Center of the World is a book with one of those profiles). They are one of the most exotic ethnic groups in all of China. They mostly reside in the mountainous and undeveloped areas of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan Provinces.

And then Beijing and Chengdu are two of China's biggest and most progressive cities.

The interviews that Liao conducts with Christians throughout these areas highlight the edginess and rebellious nature that are required in being a Christian in China. Liao interviews old men and women who talk about picking up Christianity from missionaries during the 1940s before the founding of the People's Republic, people who somehow continued to practice their religion during Mao's reign of terror, and younger people who today are picking up Christianity during China's opening to the world. A full spectrum of people and stories are introduced to the reader.

Stories about Mao's persecution of Christians and destruction of churches during his never-ending political campaigns are featured in many people's stories. Liao conducted the interviews for this book around 2005 or so. Many of the people who suffered at that time are nearing the end of their lives. Liao's book is quite valuable in recording several instances of great abuse and sharing them with the world before those events fade into history and are forgotten.

I really enjoy books that go off-the-beaten-path, taking readers to parts of China that are hard to access. God is Red goes really deep into rugged parts of China. Liao takes the reader to some of the most scenic and inaccessible parts of China.

I liked the following passage from pages 143-44 where Liao has a feast with Yi Christians in Yunnan Province a lot:

There's so much passion and life in Liao's words here. This passage illustrates what is special about Liao and his books. He brings both a Chinese and outsider's perspective to the people and events he introduces. Both God in China and The Corpse Walker (a book I read last year but never got reviewed on this blog... hope to get something on here at some point about it) are excellent windows in to the underclass and people on the edges of Chinese society.

I, unfortunately, don't read enough books by Chinese authors. Looking at my bookshelf of Chinese books, there are a few Chinese authors' books, but I see mostly Anglo names there. Not reading many Chinese writers is, obviously, one of the drawbacks of not being able to read a book in Chinese. Liao Yiwu is a Chinese author writing captivating creative nonfiction about China, its history, and its people. And his books are being translated into English. He's worth checking out.

Sinocism

Bill Bishop's blog/newsletter Sinocism has become an absolute must-read for anyone wanting to keep up with these interesting times in China. I suggest going to his blog here and signing up for the daily email via Feed Burner. The daily email makes sure you get every post he makes.

Bishop (aka. niubi on Twitter) is a fluent Mandarin speaking American who's lived in Beijing for years. He's an entrepreneur who co-founded CBS' Marketwatch. It's obvious from his work that he spends a great deal of time these days working on Sinocism.

Sinocism has been an excellent guide for the many recent controversies in China - Bo Xilai, Chen Guangchen, and the recent crackdowns on foreigners among others. His commentary and news curation is extremely wide-ranging, but I find his writing on China's economy and internet to be most enlightening.

There's no blog, Twitter feed, or news website out there better than Sinocism when it comes to China news and commentary.

Eating Bitterness

I told my brother the other day that I was reading a book about migrant workers living in Xi'an that just came out last month - Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China's Great Urban Migration by Michelle Dammon Loyalka.

"Wow, that's esoteric," he said.

"Yeah," I responded, "I think the author wrote this book especially for me."

He laughed.

It's true, a book about migrant workers and China's rapidly developing economy set in my Chinese home city of Xi'an is right up my alley. When I heard of Eating Bitterness on Twitter a few weeks ago, I knew it was something I had to check out.

After having read the book, I don't think my brother's and my initial reactions were correct, though. The book is not esoteric. There's nothing technical about the sociology of urban migration or anything inside baseball about Xi'an in it. The book is about human beings trying to make their lives better. Anyone can relate with that.

Seeing that there are more than 100 million migrant workers in China right now taking part in the largest human migration in the history of the planet, this book is something anyone can and should read. It gives great insights into a truly massive demographic of the world's population.

 

Dammon Loyalka for her book embeded herself in the lives of migrant workers working and living in a city village (城中村) on the outskirts of Xi'an's High-Tech Zone. She shadowed a number of different types of migrant workers for weeks at a time. In her afterword, she said she spent upwards of three weeks, on and off, with each person she profiled. Because of her tireless shoe-leather journalism, an intimate portrait of each character's hopes, joys, and fears is painted for the reader.

The characters in her book are as follows:

1. The Veggie Vendors  

2. The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener 

3. The Teenage Beauty Queens 

4. The Ever-Floating Floater 

5. The Landless Landlords 

6. The Nowhere Nanny 

7. The Opportunity Spotter 

8. The Big Boss

Each one of these migrant workers with countryside roots living in the big city show a remarkable ability to "eat bitter" (吃苦). "Eating bitterness," the title of the book, is a phrase that Chinese people use to describe one's ability to deal with hardship.

A farmer toiling the fields during flood or drought in ancient China had to eat bitterness. A young girl sold to a warlord to be a concubine had to eat bitterness. Nearly everyone in every part of China had to eat bitterness under Mao.

Even today during China's economic miracle with all of its glitzy skyscrapers and black Audis, many in the bottom-rung of society have to eat more than their fair share of bitterness. China has come a long way in the past thirty years, but not everyone is enjoying the fruits of their hard labor equally. Dammon Loyalka's book shows how life is for those at the bottom of today's China trying to follow their dreams and trying to make life better for their families.

I really liked getting to know each one of these characters Dammon Loyalka introduced. Although I liked all of these stories, my favorites were #2, #3, and #6.

The Impenetrable Knife Sharpener was probably my favorite character in the book. Wang Quanxi is an illiterate old man trying to scrape by a living in Xi'an by riding his bike around advertising that he'll sharpen whatever knives you have for a couple yuan each. He lives in complete squalor so that his fixed costs are as low as possible and he can send back nearly everything he makes to his family living in Henan.

I particularly liked this passage where Quanxi spent hours sharpening knives for a restaurant:

An owner of a restaurant intentionally screwing over this old man, who broke his back making sure his knives are sharp enough, out of three yuan (or $.48) really hit me. There were plenty of times in Xi'an where I argued with a motorbike driver over two yuan or someone selling vegetables over .5 yuan. That's certainly different than reneging on an agreed upon price, but getting to know Quanxi makes me question some of the energy that I put into nickel-and-diming people with so much less than I have.

Despite any attempts to get good prices with the migrant workers I encountered while living in China, I was constantly taken aback by the migrant workers I saw everywhere when I lived in Xi'an. Whether it was a little old lady pulling a wheelbarrow down the bike path of a street or construction workers literally building the new China, I was always aware of that a great number of people in China have incredibly difficult lives.

Eating Bitterness gives me a lot more context for those images of migrant workers that I have in my mind. Knowing the stories behind at least a handful of those faces is really valuable, in my opinion.

I really liked Eating Bitterness. Much like Factory Girls by Leslie T. Chang, it really opened my eyes to a group of people in China that I was very aware of but didn't know with enough depth. Eating Bitterness is written beautifully and is full of great information. I highly recommend this to anyone wanting to look beyond the gaudy GPD numbers and see the full picture of China's rapid development.

Big in China

Big in China: My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing by Alan Paul is a book about finding one's self while living abroad.

Paul, a journalist with Guitar World and Slam magazines in the US, went with his family in 2006 to live in Beijing because of a job opportunity that came up for his wife. Like so many westerners who go to China (myself included), Paul finds expat life in China to be the stuff that dreams are made of. Big in China is his chronicle of taking full advantage of almost every second he lived in the Middle Kingdom.



Paul, his wife, and kids knew hardly anything about China before they went to live in the country. They had no language skills, no real cultural background, and no idea what they were getting in to. It was particularly interesting how Paul's children, normal suburban kids from New Jersey, adapted to life in China. Not too surprisingly, the kids found things easier in a lot of ways than the adults did.

Paul and his family were provided a nice living space on the outer edges of Beijing in a community where other foreigners living long-term in China were placed by their companies. I saw countless foreigners come and go when I lived in Xi'an, but I didn't have much of an understanding of how such expat communities are set up in Beijing. I appreciated reading about how the expat life goes down - where their kids go to school, interaction with people from all over the world, etc. - for many expats in China's capital. It's much different than what I saw in Xi'an.

A majority of Paul's book focuses on the band he starts in Beijing - Woodie Alan. Woodie is a talented Chinese musician that Paul is fortunate to meet early on during his time in Beijing. Woodie introduces Paul to other Chinese musicians that Paul can start a band with.

Although Paul had been a writer for Guitar World magazine in his previous life living in New Jersey, he had never really transformed himself in to a proficient musician. He could jam out no problem, but he had never refined himself in to a guitarist who could play in a band or pull the music that was in his soul out to the surface. Paul had been more interested in interviewing and writing about the likes of Gregg Allman than playing guitar or singing like him.

Watching Paul develop confidence as a musician and, ultimately, as a person with his Chinese band mates was a really cool thing to witness. China was a land where Paul felt he could try anything and didn't feel as though he had to worry about making mistakes or failing.

The following passage from page 143 really captures the sense of fun and excitement and experimentation that Paul developed the longer he stayed in China:

This passage is what China is all about. My friends and I in Xi'an used to use the expression "livin' the dream" when experiencing what Paul is describing here.

I can completely relate to this notion of "livin' the dream" and Paul's story of developing confidence through experimentation in China. I, like Paul, had a few "Big in China" moments while in Xi'an.

Long-time readers of my blog and friends of mine will remember that I too was part of a music project in China: The Xi'an Incident (an explanation on the name). I went from being a truly terrible guitarist who couldn't keep time or play scales worth a lick when I went to China in 2006 to playing lead guitar at live shows and on a studio album in 2007.

The Xi'an Incident formed after a friend of mine from London who I met in Xi'an, Natan, and I wrote a few songs together in the early months of 2007. We took a few ideas he'd been working on and a few chord progressions and ideas that I'd messed around with and melded them together into nine original tracks.

Working with Natan on the early stages of our songs was something I'll never forget. Natan is a great musician and a particularly gifted song writer. Watching him weave together the fabric of a song - lyrics, chord progression, chorus, etc. - was a thing of beauty.

As we were writing and reworking these songs over the course of a few weeks, we met up with friends of ours to see about getting a band going. Will, a drummer from Boston, and Zhang Ke, a bassist from Xi'an, were co-owners of a jazz bar in a central part of Xi'an. Natan and I brought what we'd worked on and played what we had with Will and Zhang Ke. Being formally trained musicians with a background in jazz, our rock tunes were a piece of cake for Will and Zhang Ke to pick up quickly and add a lot to.

After about a month of song writing and jamming, Natan, Will, and Zhang Ke, and I played a few shows at the jazz bar and recorded an album in the summer of 2007.

Indulge me and let me post the following two videos. They're my favorites from the show that my brother sat in on drums for (Will was in America visiting and my brother, a drummer, happened to be visiting me in China) that we played in front of a full bar of about 75 people:





The first pages of the introduction to Paul's book talk about playing music on TV in Fujian Province in front of millions upon millions of TV sets. That is big in China. The music experiences I had in Xi'an are pretty small potatoes in comparison. But they are my big moments in China and I'll always treasure them.

I haven't played tons of guitar since this period of my life and have not played in a band since The Xi'an Incident. I'm not sure I ever will rock out like this again (admittedly, I've got a bit of time left to see if this will be the case). These memories I have of developing confidence in my playing, writing songs, and playing shows - experiences that Paul writes about in great detail in his book - will always mean the world to me. I have no doubt that these experiences had positive impacts on my life well outside the realm of music as well.

Back to wrapping up the review of Paul's book, I enjoyed it a lot. I really only had two issues with it.

The first issue I have is the cover. It just looks, well, hokey. I heard some hype about Big in China several months ago on the Chinese blog and Twitter-sphere. I remember looking it up online and, after seeing the cover, thinking that Paul looked like some sort of Neil Diamond-esque musician (ie. lame). I decided to pass.

This first impression I had was completely wrong and I'm glad I eventually picked up the book. Paul jammed out to raging psychedelic Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead-inspired tunes all over China. He's no Neil Diamond! I wish the energy of those bands that inspire Paul had been captured in the cover. For better or worse, I didn't bother reading this book based upon my initial negative first reaction to how it looked.

My second issue with the book is with Paul's countdown to leaving Beijing. Paul loved living in Beijing. That was obvious. It's completely understandable that he was sad about his eventual departure from China. But his anxiety about his leaving Beijing felt like it began halfway through the book and only intensified as the book drew to a close. The last several chapters are all about how hard it was to leave. Leaving China after living there for years is difficult; I know this from experience. But this leaving China theme was too dominant in the book, in my opinion, and wore on me.

All in all, Big in China is a fun, quick read. Paul lived life to the max for almost every second of his time abroad. I'd especially recommend this to someone who is on the fence about going to teach or live in China for a few years. After reading Paul's book, you'll have a tough time saying no to "livin' the dream" in China.

Europe

I’m writing this post from a train between Liege, Belgium and Köln, Germany. Qian and I are using her two-week spring break and almost all of my vacation time for the year at work on a European sojourn. A week in to the trip, it has been incredible.

So far we’ve been to Amsterdam and Maastricht, a small town in the south of the Netherlands. My brother is in the second year of his master’s degree program at the University of Amsterdam. We spent four days in Amsterdam doing the touristy stuff – the Van Gogh Museum, Rijks Museum, and Anne Frank House – and hanging out with my brother and his girlfriend. We then spent two days taking in Maastricht.

Maastricht is my European hometown (in a similar fashion to Xi'an being the place that I hold dear in China). I spent four months studying abroad in Maastricht during my junior year at Saint Louis University. Being in Maastricht was my first real time abroad (save for a spring break trip to the Caribbean my senior year of high school). Maastricht blew my mind. Studying abroad as a twenty year-old without a care in the world was a whirlwind, truly the time of my life. My positive experience there certainly primed me for wanting to go abroad after I graduated, which is when I went to Xi’an.

Qian and I had a wonderful time these past couple days in Maastricht. We couldn’t have asked for a more storybook romantic European experience. We strolled up and down the city’s cobble stone streets, took in the Roman-era architecture and city wall (a cool fact of my life is that I’ve lived in two cities with city walls built centuries ago), window shopped, bought chocolates, fruit, and bread at the city's Friday market, and rented bikes that we used to ride over the border to Belgium where we imbibed on delicious Belgian beer (when in Belgium…).

We’re going to spend the next two days in Köln and then will have five days in Paris. I’m confident that the second half of the trip will live up to the great time we've had the first half.