The "Other"

In 1993 at the impressionable age of 21 I was sitting in a bar in Lan Kwai Fong thinking about returning to the United States after spending a year in China when I met who appeared to me at the time to be the Obi-Wan Kenobi of expatriates. Mr. Kenobi had spent the better part of 30 years living and working in East Asia and he had a lot of good stories to tell. He even had a British accent like Alec Guinness.

We had a few beers together, he regaled me with his wisdom and I told him about living in Mainland China – a place he had not visited. At the end of our talk, he turned to me and said, “It sounds to me as if you are about to embark on the kind of life that I have had; you are going to have a wonderful adventure. But let me give you a piece of advice…”

Dear readers, I waited with baited breath for this great Jedi Master to impart on me secrets of the Force. What was this one last thing he wanted me to know? And then he said; “One of the most important things you should remember is: never marry a white woman.”

Somewhere across Cyberspace a bunch of guys are laughing if their wives or girlfriends are not in the room while others just called their spouse over to read this. Now, before I lose a certain demographic of readers of this blog, I implore you to please read on as I gallop through the minefield of the topic of interracial dating & marriage.

I’ve always remembered Mr. Kenobi’s advice, mostly because it’s a pretty interesting story to tell. But also because I think I understand where he’s coming from. First, let me interject this: when it comes to love, never say never! In this sense, his advice was really pretty bad.

If you live on the other side of the world for half your adult life it’s pretty hard to avoid dating someone from a different race. I have dated a few Chinese girls, so I’m talking from experience. I also date Western women when they bother to give me the time of day. I have no strong preference either way; if anything I just really like any smart, good-looking woman that happens to also like me. I’m funny that way.

It is only recently that I have come up with a theory on interracial romance. I’m no scientist, but here it goes. What if somewhere in our brains we are hardwired to be attracted to the "other” – someone of a different race, or different hair color and skin tone, or even just someone with a cool foreign accent? The biological argument would be that somehow our bodies know that it’s good to have a deep and rich gene pool.

Early man and woman must have realized that having kids with their siblings and cousins didn’t produce good stock. After all, no one likes a hunchback. So maybe they learned that intermingling with other tribes was a good thing. Unfortunately in early history it was expressed in bouts of raping and pillaging as opposed to speed dating.

I think most everyone can admit the idea of being with someone from a different culture, race, etc. is somewhat attractive. The "other” is mysterious, and that can be titillating, no? I think this is why “gentlemen prefer blondes” and “blondes have more fun”; in North America they are comparatively rare. I bet blondes in Sweden and Switzerland don’t have any more fun than anyone else.

Another argument that suggests we might be somewhat hardwired to be attracted to the "other” is that I notice that people tend to go gaga over kids from a different race. Kids are cute anyway, but in my experience it gets stepped up a notch when people from one race look at kids of another. Of course maybe this is only my perception, but I have discussed this with friends of many colors, and we tend to be in agreement. And, I also think Gary Coleman owes his career to this phenomenon.

But of course there are problems. We are also conditioned by our societies not to trust “the other”; someone who is different than us could be “bad” or “undesirable” for any number of reasons. I mostly chalk all that up to flat out bigotry and jealousy; and I have no time for anyone who thinks like that.

In the end, we can’t help whom we fall in love with, it just happens. But jumping across some imaginary line and being with the "other” can be quite appealing; whether you are a Montague or Capulet, Yankee fan or Red Sox fan, cat person or dog person, or one race or another.

The Year of the Tiger from the Perspective of a Rat

Explosions are tearing apart the night across China, car alarms are blaring and I got a belly full of dumplings and Tsingdao, it must be New Year’s. Welcome Year of the Tiger, good riddance Year of the Ox. I think a lot of people around the world can agree that the ox left us knee-deep in shit - fuck you, you old cow.

I look forward to a feline year. Nimble, compulsively sanitary, aggressive and playful; this sounds a lot better than a bloated herd animal whose flatulence are so plentiful and noxious they even threaten our climate. Yep, I expect in almost every way it’ll be nice to set the tiger loose.

Living in China, there’s a kind of purgatory that takes place between January 1 and the end of Chinese New Year celebrations. Not a lot happens in the country during that six weeks or so, everyone looks forward to the upcoming week-long holiday; and if they can, people put off decisions of all kinds. This is particularly great for us foreigners, because it provides an extended grace period before we really have to pony up and at least pay a little lip service to or New Year resolutions.

As I sit here looking out my apartment window and the rockets’ red, white, blue, green and yellow glare from the fireworks lighting up the city, I’m taking stock. I’m not exactly sure what my resolutions are, I still have over a week before I really need to commit. Like everyone else I suppose I just want to be a little bit better in a few small ways - drop a few pounds, make a little more money, be a just a little happier and successful.

In thinking about these things it struck me that there’s a lot of wisdom in the Chinese zodiac and its cycle of twelve animals. I am a Rat; that is, I was born in the Year of the Rat. Now I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but I find it fairly interesting that I happen to be a very good example of a Rat, according to www.chinesezodiac.com:

Rats symbolize such character traits as wit, imagination and curiosity. Rats have keen observation skills and with those skills they’re able to deduce much about other people and other situations. Overall, Rats are full of energy, talkative and charming but they have a tendency to become aggressive.

Also, in their careers, Rat’s are:

…extremely perceptive and wise, Rats can focus on the big picture. That ability along with their good judgment enables Rats to solve problems before they arise. Rats focus on titles because titles translate into status and money; two motivating forces. Rats make excellent bosses. Routine halts their creativity so Rats need flexible positions that allow creativity.

And,

They can at times be tense, aggressive, and full of nervous energy, conditions that can lead to stress.

What I find fascinating about this is that I have taken a few personality/work style-profiling tests and they more or less are accurate, I guess. But a lot of money could have been saved and a few over-priced corporate trainers could have spent their time doing other things if I just told them I’m a Rat and we all moved on. In fact, I think I’ll start putting “Rat” on top of my resume and save some HR departments a lot of hassle.

That was my first point about the wisdom of the Chinese zodiac, it actually seems to know what it’s talking about. By the way, I’m also a Leo, but if I waited until August to write about that if would be a boring blog post.

My second observation is that the Chinese zodiac is cyclical. That is a tautology, I know, but in the West we see our solar calendar as has having a beginning and an end. The years go by in a linear progression, one replacing the next with ever mounting expectations of progress. For example, 2010 is supposed to be better than 1910, right?

In the Chinese lunar zodiac, the animals come back around again; so to roost one might say. The Year of the Ox sucked, well too bad, because it’ll be back again in 2021. In my experience, that’s not something many Westerners think about much, the endless cycle of the nature and the universe - where as it's built into China’s most important festival.

The nice thing about paying attention to cycles is it can help you avoid repeating some of your mistakes. I think that’s why the Buddhists place so much emphasis on reincarnation, if you know you are going to live your life over and over again, you tend to think twice about a doing a lot of stupid stuff that’s going to comeback to haunt you.

So, where does that leave me with my resolutions? I’m not sure, but I hope I’m not making the same resolutions again next year.

My Religious Experience on the Way to Tibet

In my first year in China I realized one of my childhood dreams; I traveled to Tibet. I’m not entirely sure where this dream came from; it might have been from Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks, or W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. But the idea of traveling to the other side of the world and up the Himalayas to catch a little Oriental wisdom and a chance at enlightenment had enthralled me ever since I was about 16 or so.

My friend Sasquatch and I left Beijing one summer day on a train for Xining, the capital of Qinghai province – a part of China so beautiful the PLA tests it’s nuclear weapons on it. On a mutual dare, Sasquatch and I decided to take the 3-day train ride by ‘hard seat’, the lowest class of ticket available. Back then hard seat was double rows of metal and wooden benches facing each other separated by a small table in the middle. At any one time there might have been up to 150 in a car. Mind you, except for two large young Americans, these were mostly peasants and maybe some university students.

Accommodations were fetid; thankfully Sasquatch and I stayed fairly well lit on a steady stream of baijiu, warm beer and Tang on top of a diet of Riz Crackers and instant noodles. These were things that were all readily available at almost any train station in 1993. To this day, I swear nothing will keep you healthier if you happen to find yourself on a Petri dish / cesspool rolling through the desert. Baijiu kills the germs and the Vitamin C in Tang gives a nice boost to your immune system – we created a cocktail mixing the two, it’s called a Wrench.

Sixty or seventy hours later, we arrived in Xining thoroughly done in by exhaustion. My nerves were frayed, I was filthy, and my digestive system wanted to separate from me and fly back to America. When we hit our hotel room Sasquatch promptly collapsed. I was too excited and after a long hot shower I was almost a new man. It was time to see what Xining had to offer, after all we would only be there one night because we had to catch a train to Golmud the next day before jumping on a two-day bus ride to Lhasa.

The first order of business was food. There was a kebab stand not far from the front gate of the hotel and I descend on it like a jackal after the carcass of a Cape buffalo. This is where my religious experience happened.

Now you might think that after three days without sleep and plenty of bad food and booze I was ready for a hallucination of Christ himself selling kebabs and demanding penance for my misspent youth. Not quite, it wasn’t that kind of religious experience. Although I once had something like that a Grateful Dead concert in Vermont.

This was another kind of religious experience, not one in which I experienced God, but rather where I experienced religion in a new way. I bought a beer and ordered a fistful of spicy kebabs; after I satiated myself greedily for a few minutes I struck up a conversation with my neighbor at the kebab stand. He was also enjoying a beer and a large quantity of kebabs; he looked like a fellow backpacker. Sure enough he was, my new friend was Japanese and he was also on his way to Tibet; he was also very excited about it because he was a monk.

This struck me as odd, I don’t know many sects of Buddhism in which it’s OK for the monks to swill beer and eat meat. It seems to me that’s how one ends up being reincarnated at as dung beetle or something else equally undesirable. So I asked him, “What gives with the beer and meat? After all, you’re a Buddhist monk.” He rather serenely replied, “That’s true! But I am a bad monk.”

OK, this is not the same thing as the Madonna revealing herself to me and granting the power to lay hands on the sick, nor is it Buddha's Four Noble Truths. But it was a bit of an epiphany. You see, I grew up Catholic, and the whole time I went to Catholic school I never heard a priest, monk, nun or bishop declare themselves a bad one. Maybe that would have undermined their authority, who knows? They all admitted they were sinners, but that goes with the territory. For me, it was refreshing to meet a self-deprecating monk who admitted he was weak, but still trying.

The self-proclaimed ‘bad monk’ and his example helped me realize something. On the road to enlightenment or the path to Heaven, or whatever, it’s more about the journey then the destination. We all have our failings, but it’s the commitment to being better and picking ourselves up after we fall that defines who we are and where we are going.

Looking back on that trip to Tibet, I guess I was looking for something, and it seems kind of wonderful where I found it.

“You Don’t Understand China”

From time to time I’ll give out ‘doing business in China’ advice in this blog. I do not have the credentials of scores of other writers who make a living doing this. I have never blown a multi-million dollar deal, I have not had my business stolen from me by a joint venture partner, and I have never gone bankrupt. But I am still young, I might yet achieve the same elite status others who give business advice in China have.

There are four words that every foreigner doing business in China who hears them should sit up, pay attention and get ready to take action. These words are “You don’t understand China.”

Other foreigners who say these words are more likely than not just posturing and are full of bullshit. They probably want to sell you their consulting services. I won’t waste my time with them. In this case, I am specifically referring to when a Chinese person says them to a foreigner.

I equate this statement by the Chinese to be similar in meaning and intent as the protection offered by the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution. Defendants evoke the Fifth Amendment “on the ground that the answers that would be given could be used as evidence against the witness to convict him or her of a criminal offense.” This is not just a legal term; in pop culture “pleading the fifth” means “I don’t want to answer that cause it could get me into trouble.” Thank you John Gotti.

There are several reasons why a foreigner might be told “you don’t understand China,” in my experience sometimes what the speaker really means is:

• “In fact, you really don’t know that much about China.”
• “I can’t be bothered to come up with a coherent argument or explanation, so let’s just attribute this problem to your ignorance.”
• “I know more than you, let’s keep it that way.”
• “I’ve done something wrong, but it’s ok because I going to try to cover up my actions with my country’s culture, inadequate legal system or pervasive corruption.”
• “This is China, I’m Chinese, let’s just do what I want to do.”

You see why you should pay attention when you hear this? And for those of you who have not been to China or have not been here long, take my word for it, this gets said a lot. In fact, all you have to do is pick up a newspaper and read some headlines. When The PRC is criticized by the West for human rights, currency manipulation, or almost anything else, invariably the argument that comes back in a statement from the Foreign Ministry is often some form of “you don’t understand China” argument.

This argument is convenient because it is based on the logic that China is unique and complicated, and most Westerns don’t appreciate this enough. All of this is absolutely true. No wonder the Chinese love to say it.

What I take issue with is that the Chinese like to hide behind it; it’s too often used as a crutch to dismiss valid concerns by outsiders. When you do business here, if you let anyone say this to you and get away with it, you probably deserve to lose your shirt.

I have a solution. It’s not the all-mighty green kryptonite that will solve all your China business problems, but it’s a good tactic to use against any colleague, business partner, government official or anyone else who says this to you. You should respond with a simple “explain it to me”.

If after saying this you are told ‘no’ or confronted with a multi-layered attempt at obfuscation, then you know what you are dealing with. That person has no interest in helping you, which also probably means you don’t share a common objective. You will need to deal with that misalignment as best you can. If it’s important enough to you, it’s time to invest in finding someone who can answer your questions. This is where the high-priced consultants, or maybe different business partners, come in.

On the other hand, if your genuine interest in hearing an explanation about what you supposedly don’t understand is met by a real attempt to enlighten you, then you have found someone who cares enough about their relationship with you to foster it with knowledge. Dear readers, such colleagues, business partners and friends are worth their weight in gold. Find them and reward them.

The Ayi from Hell

Folks, I am not a rich man, but I am sufficiently slovenly to invite the assistance of an ayi, that’s a maid to you non-Chinese speakers. True, I live in a one-bedroom apartment that does not require much housekeeping; I could do it myself. But for less than $100 a month, having someone come in twice a week to make the bed, do laundry, iron my shirts and dust a layer of Gobi Desert off my floor is a cheap luxury. That is, until something goes horribly wrong, and you wake up one day to find Satan with dish gloves and a mop has moved into your residence.

I am not talking about my current ayi; she’s a wonderful woman who barely does a mediocre job and gets paid handsomely for it. Thankfully, she makes my life just a little easier. No, I am talking about the ayi that held my friend and I psychologically hostage in our own apartments with her lunatic behavior. This was a woman who made me live in fear.

In the late 1990s I lived in Huajiadi, which was the local ghetto for foreign trash in Beijing: English teachers, translators, interns, students, and other laowai twenty somethings with their fist jobs out of college. To this day, I still have a set of good friends who were my neighbors at this poor Chinese version of Melrose Place.

Huajiadi was our own little bohemian village of concrete blockhouse apartments. The compound I lived in was decidedly rustic, a family of chickens was raised in the courtyard; so was a small crop of hemp plants. Our apartments were cheap and functional; but even back then my friends and I had ayis.

I will not name the guy who introduced me to her, although he should be drawn and quartered. The woman had worked for him for a year; he very well knew she was a psycho and should have warned me. Instead he mentioned she was a little ‘off’, but a fantastic ayi; he suspected cleaning was some kind of catharsis for her. If that’s true, the woman probably murdered children, bathed in their blood, donned a suit of her victims' decomposing flesh and danced in the moonlight if she didn’t get her hands on a mop and feather duster at least once a day. She had some serious demons to exorcise.

I also share some of the blame. When I interviewed her I could tell right away she wasn’t right in the head. You see, like Gollum in the Lord of he Rings movies, she referred to herself in the third person. Our first meeting went something like this:

Author: “Can you come on Tuesdays and Fridays?”
Ayi: “Yes, ayi can come then, ayi cleans very well! She’s a good ayi…”
Author: “Uhhhh, ummm… ok. Can you start next week?”
Ayi: “Yes, ayi will start on Tuesday.”

I shook it off at the time, but I should have realized then and there I was in danger of having one of my digits chomped off by the crazed woman and might very well get pushed into a pit of lava for my trouble.

Anyway, I hired her, and before things got really bad, I recommended her to a very good friend of mine, we’ll call him Jose. In spite of this, Jose and I still remain friends to this day.

At this point dear readers, you are all probably asking yourself “how bad could she be?” Sorry to keep you in suspense, for starters the ayi’s cleaning uniform was an old-fashion set of full-length red woolen underwear and white sneakers. She looked a little like a matriarchal version of Thing One & Thing Two from The Cat in the Hat. By the way, a handful of the half dozen teeth she still possessed were gold. This is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Here are a few examples of her work before I describe the worst offenses. On a couple memorable occasions I returned home from a hard day’s work to find:

• Most of my dishes taken from the cupboards and stowed in the refrigerator; the ayi figured since I never had any food she might as well put the dishes there because it was the cleanest space in the kitchen.
• My precious few good suits were taken off their hangers in the closet, neatly folded and placed in drawers.
• My pants ironed with broadside creases so when I put them I on it looked like I had two khaki chimneys jutting from my crotch; it wasn’t a flattering look for me.

OK, none of this is that bad, right? The worst was when I came home a little early one day after the ayi had been working for me for over a year and I saw her cleaning the toilet… with my back brush! Pause a moment and think about it. It was an honest mistake on her part; she saw a brush in the crummy little bathroom and drew a conclusion. But, God!

So obviously she wasn’t the world’s greatest ayi, why didn’t I fire her? Because I was afraid what would happen if I did. She knew where I lived and I was fairly sure she was unstable; events unfolded later that further heightened that suspicion. Also, by this time I was only a few months away from leaving China and going back to the US, I figured I could just stick it out.

Jose had his own problems with her. First, there was the cat. Jose was cat sitting for a month or so while a friend went home during the summer. The ayi took one step into the apartment and gave the animal a disapproving look and immediately asked how long the offensive pussy would be on the premises. The ayi, it appears, was afraid of the cat; so much so she might have very well tried to frame the cat in a bit of domestic dooty terrorism.

One day Jose came home to find an enormous turd on the windowsill inside his bedroom. At first glance he assumed it was the cat’s, he was pretty sure it wasn’t his. But after careful inspection, he concluded it could have been the ayi’s. There was no evidence; a team of crime scene investigators didn’t take a DNA sample. But the simple fact was the turd was roughly half the size in length and diameter as the cat, and it would have been a miracle for something so small to poo something so big.

At this point, we started suspecting the ayi was capable of anything. I was grateful I was leaving the country. This leads me to my last ayi story. A couple of weeks before I was to leave China for the second time I took a vacation to hang out with some monks in a Tibetan lamasery and practice my chanting; really. While I was away, the ayi came to my apartment, saw a lot of my stuff boxed up and assumed I’d skipped town without paying her for the last month. She then called Jose at the office and demanded to know my whereabouts. Being the helpful friend he was, he said I left town. Jose’s Chinese was functional, but not great. I think a little might have been lost in translation.

The ayi whirled herself into a fury! She wanted her money; no American slacker was going to cheat her out of her hard earned wages. She demanded the money from Jose, who is a genuinely good guy, so he quickly caved in and agreed to pay. Great, she was on her way to the office to collect. Two hours later, the ayi shows up at a place of business after ridding roughly 10 kilometers on her tiny flatbed tricycle on a hot day. The ayi was dressed in her woolen red underwear and sweat rolled off her face in streams as she berated Jose and cursed me. Jose paid her quickly and got her the hell out of the office.

Within a few weeks I out was out of the country and safely away from the Ayi from Hell. Jose dealt with her in his own way. He moved to the other side of Beijing and told her he didn’t need an ayi anymore.

To this day, I have never bought another back brush.

Either/Or

From time to time the author leaves China, sometimes he goes home for Christmas, other times he travels the world looking for romance, wisdom and a really nice beach. I remember having one of the best conversations I’ve ever had with a woman in a restaurant in Jakarta. I will pass on the fruit of this conversation to you. Those of you who are single can use it on your next date, those of you in a relationship may want to think twice; the author is not responsible for ruining any relationships other than his own.

First some background, although my new lady friend had recently moved to Indonesia she previously lived in Beijing and a mutual friend introduced us, so we had something in common. The woman in question, who I shall call Regine for literary reasons, is a tall blond with long legs who looks great in a miniskirt; she also has a fantastic… brain. Seriously, the woman is sharp! And I like that. I’ve never been overly attracted to bubble headed bimbos, I’ve ogled a great number of them in my time, and will continue to do so, but they are not what sets my heart on fire. For the record, I prefer a nice ass piloted by world-class gray matter.

So we were having one of those ‘get to know you’ conversations. We discussed living in China and Indonesia, our childhoods, and we discussed torture a fair bit. Regine worked in the field of Human Rights and legal reform, so she was a bit of an expert. I, on the other hand, have delusions of grandeur about writing suspense novels, so the subject had mutual interest. For the record, we are both against torture for anything other than a good plot device, but light spanking on any occasion was not entirely ruled out either.

Anyway, the first hour or so of the evening passed quickly, the conversation was stimulating, the food and drink were good, and we enjoyed each other’s company. But we were starting to run out of things to say, when one or both of us came up with an idea for a game. I really can’t recall how it originated, my apologies to Regine if it was totally her idea.

I’ll call this game ‘Either/Or’. It has nothing to do with the book of the same name by the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard, although the chapter ‘Diary of a Seducer’ is at least a little relevant. By the way, Søren had the hots for some young woman named Regine Olsen, and that’s the origin of my friend’s pseudonym.

The game is played by asking a series of questions with only two possible answers, the person answering the question must pick ONLY ONE of the offered answers. It’s usually more interesting if you explain your answer.

For example; “Who is better, the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?” If I recall correctly, I answered the Beatles because I love their lyrics and musically they extended themselves further than the Stones. We discussed how the Stones had better guitar rifts and were better party music.

Another question was, “Where would you prefer to vacation, at the beach or in the mountains?” I am a confirmed beach person, lots of good books, an endless supply of cold beer and a sunny beach is my idea of paradise. Regine, I was surprised to find out, preferred the mountains. I remember coming to the conclusion that almost all mountain people are very active and sporty vacationers, they want to hike and rock climb, etc. I think beach people on the other hand tend to be lazier. This is valuable information when men and women are considering each other.

By the way, I believe Regine has the metabolism of a humming bird on crack, she is constantly on the move, she works hard and plays even harder. In stature and behavior I’m probably more like a grizzly; large appetites and bursts of activity heavily punctuated by cozy sloth.

I’ll give one more interesting example from the game, I asked “Who do you prefer, Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant?” For women, this question is which guy (screen persona) do you want to be with? And for men, “which of the two do you want to be?” She said Bogart and I said Grant. Here’s why; we both agreed Bogey is cooler, and he’s a tough guy. But Bogey is usually a dark, brooding, remorseful man who lets the girl get away (e.g. Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon). I’d rather be Grant, star in more romantic comedies and bag Grace Kelly (To Catch a Thief), though I’d prefer to be slightly less metrosexual.

We played this for an hour or two and had great fun, especially when our answers surprised each other. We quickly discovered the two of us have a lot in common and got to know each other as well as a guy and girl can over one dinner. I suspect the danger of the game, if there is one, is that you can very quickly learn if you have no earthly reason to be with the other person, and that can make for a short evening.

For example, I won’t be with a girl who doesn’t like dogs. For that matter, the more cats she has the more likely I think she’s probably an ax murderer. I guess this leads me to the conclusion that if Jessica Alba was as dumb as a box of rocks and had 5 cats I wouldn’t even consider dating her; well… maybe.

Please enjoy the game; I hope it works out well for you.

My First ‘Last Night in China’

Expatriates are essentially global nomads. One facet of living in Beijing is the annual round of going-away parties; I have had two of my own. The first was an unforgettable experience, primarily because I witnessed the closest thing I’ve ever seen to an actual miracle or Jedi powers. It is also memorable because I was right when almost everyone around me was wrong. In my book, that makes for a good story.

It was a cold December night in 1993, my first year in China was coming to end and a few fellow North American laowai and I were out to make a night of it. I had arrived in Beijing roughly twelve months earlier to study for one semester; one thing led to another and I took a hiatus from college, traveled to Tibet in the summer and then found a job teaching English in Beidaihe from August to December. For those of you outside of China, Beidaihe is the Hamptons of the PRC; the beach wasn’t at all bad and it had the added bonus of containing a mediocre strand of hemp that grew just along the roadway leading to the shore. More about my tenure in Beidaihe in another posting.

So I was back in Beijing for a few days before heading to Hong Kong and back to New York. Back then we didn’t have Sanlitun, or ‘bar street’ to the uninitiated, we had Uighurville. As the name suggests, it was a section of Beijing where ethnic Uighurs had a conclave, it was in the Weigongcun area of the city and close to the university where I had studied.

I will not go into a long exposition on who the Uighurs are, that’s why God made Wikipedia. But I will add my own footnotes to their history in Beijing. Their cuisine it excellent, it comprises of hardy noodle dishes, roasted lamb and nan bread. For Westerns surviving on steady diet of Chinese food, it was a welcome change to something a little more familiar.

So, as students we tended to congregate in Uighurville, we went for the food but stayed for the nightlife. And what a nightlife it was! The area was a couple of square blocks with a main drag of two dozen or so restaurants that stayed open late into the night. During warm weather, tables and chairs where placed on the street so everyone could eat their kebabs and Yanjing beer in open air and watch a certain amount of mayhem unfold.

Dear readers, if you detect nostalgia in the author’s words, you are right to do so, sadly, Uighurville no longer exists. In 1998 or 99, my memory fails, the city fathers decided to eradicate what was probably Beijing’s only ethnic neighborhood. Ostensibly it was because the whole area was being renovated and a giant shopping mall and new residential buildings were to be erected.

However, many assume the neighborhood was ‘gentrified’ because it was a thriving center for the drug trade and the scene of many late night brawls. Also, in March 1997 ten people were injured in a bus bombing in Beijing, this was only weeks after three simultaneous bus bombings in Xinjiang (the region of China Uighurs come from) and the death of Deng Xiaoping. Uighur separatists were widely suspected for the Beijing bomb and it seems likely city fathers where happy to get rid of a whole neighborhood of what they potentially saw as would-be criminals and terrorists. The PRC government really can be a spoilsport sometimes.

One quick note on stereotyping Uighurs, the author’s favorite Uighur kebabmonger was a man with a nasty scar running diagonally from his forehead across an eyebrow, nose and lip. Rumor has it he sold hashish; I will neither confirm nor deny that veracity of that rumor. While munching on kebabs and tossing back a couple beers together one evening I asked him, “What happened to the other guy.” He very coldly responded, “I won the fight!” My point is some Uighurs are badass mothers.

Anyway, back to my last night in Beijing. So there I was, a worldly 21 year old who just spent his fist year in China, fell in love with the place, and was celebrating his impending departure with a night out in Beijing in a neighborhood local Chinese considered to be something akin to 125th St. in New York or Compton in LA. Me and three other guys had just finished a round of beers and were chewing happily on our first course when a wild man burst into to the restaurant.

Although it was a cold winter night, the man wasn’t wearing a coat and his shirt was ripped and half hanging off him, he was also covered head to toe in dirt and patches of blood. In any other neighborhood this would have been bad for business, to foreigners in Uighurville, this was just some more local color.

As it turns out, my friends knew the guy, he was a friend or cousin or whatever of the restaurant’s owner. The owner impressed upon us we would be doing him a favor if we let this fellow sit with us and keep him from leaving the restaurant. The man in question had just been in a fight in a nearby alleyway and there was concern that if he went back out on to the street something very bad would happen. We all readily agreed this was just the dinner companion for us.

More beer and food was ordered as we quizzed him about the fight. He happily showed us various scrapes and bruises, including bloody knuckles and a series of viscous bite marks on his back that did not appear to have been delivered affectionately. We all congratulated him and stood in awe; this was a man!

By the way, I would be remiss if I forgot to mention that this fellow was heavily intoxicated on God-knows-what. When I looked into his eyes I definitely got the impression that the hamster had slipped the wheel. This makes the next turn of events all that more extraordinary.

After hearing about the high points of the fisticuffs in the alley, we laowai settled into chattering with each other, more beers were ordered, and more conversation ensued… in English. He didn’t speak the language, and I think our friend was frustrated in no longer being the center of attention; he changed that in a momentous way.

He snatched a porcelain bowl from the table in one hand and with the other stretched out his index and ring fingers and waved them in the air. He then proclaimed “I can pass these two fingers right through this bowl. Do you want to see my try?”

This caused a lot of muttering among us. Did he mean his fingers would magically pass through the bowl without breaking it? “No! Don’t be stupid,” was the reply, but he could force his two little fingers through the bowl with a flick of his hand.

I rapidly said that would be amazing and I’d like to see him do it. My companions were bigger humanitarians than I; they all quickly disagreed with me and suggested I shut up. Our friend had obviously suffered enough for one evening; a couple of broken or cut fingers weren’t going to do him a bit of good. Besides, he was obviously off his head on something; it would be cruel to goad him into attempting anything stupid.

I agree; I was cruel. I slapped a hundred kuai note on the table and proudly stated he could do it, so the others should put up or shut up! My character was called into question, but money was put on the table, half of us for and half against.

I have read tales of intrepid explorers marching into the darkest regions of obscure countries and befriending local tribe by saving the offspring of its chief from a terrible fate, or curing malaria with a gin and tonic, or singlehandedly wiping out the enemy tribe armed with only a smart horse and a six shooter. These daring exploits win the undying loyalty of hard, savage men; the explorers become blood brothers and honorary members of the tribe. Dear readers, this was just such a case. When I threw my money down and sided with him without hesitation, our Uighur friend turned and gave me such a look of gratitude and loyalty I think I could have asked him to kill for me. It’s a pity I don’t know what’s happened to him since.

In a flash, the man’s arm ripped through the air and with a neat jerk of his hand, two finger cracked through the bowl and knocked a perfect delta shape chip out of it two inches long, sending it tinkling across the floor in one of the most triumphant sounds the author has ever heard in his life. It was simply amazing. Winners and losers of the wager cheered in admiration. More beer was ordered, a lot more, the bill was paid by the winnings.

How did I know he could do it? Well, truth be told, I really didn’t. I was mostly just drunk and thought it would be an interesting thing to do. However, I did think the odds were on my side. First, never bet a man against his own trick, you’ll probably lose. Second, Uighurs have their own version of Central Asian machismo which is usually backed by some serious conojes. So, I was fairly sure this guy had done this trick before and wasn’t talking out of his ass. As it turns out, I was right.

And that, dear readers, was my first ‘last night in China’. No wonder I came back as soon as I could.

Why I Love Living in China

I can’t count how many times I’ve had someone remark to me “I just can’t understand why you choose to live in China.” It’s interesting to note nearly as many Chinese say this to me as Americans.

For my American friends and family, images of choking pollution and Orwellian totalitarianism immediately come to mind when they think of the PRC; which, if their experience with China is solely via commentary from US cable news outlets or brief visits to the country, is somewhat understandable. My impression of New Jersey based on views from the Garden State Parkway and The Sopranos or the Jersey Shore is not flattering.

I intimately understand why Americans think I’m nuts, we assume everyone in the world wants to live in America. If you prefer a small dose of socialism, binge drinking and the metric system, Canada and Australia are fine alternatives to the Home of the Free and Land of the Brave, but only if you are willing to settle for second or third place.

When the Chinese comment on my choice of country of residence it strikes a chord. They are echoing the sentiments of many Americans; they look across the Pacific, or only as far as pirated DVDs of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives, and they see the United States as a form of middle-class bliss with the possibility of upper-class Nirvana. And I admit, they have a point. Swimming pools, strip malls, blue skies and uncontaminated milk are indeed nice things. I enjoy them whenever I can.

But then there’s the Siren song of the gritty, vibrant and intoxicating China. In the Jazz Age, when prostitution and opium were till fashionable, Shanghai earned the name the ‘whore of the Orient’. Well, hey, we all have a past.

Nearly a century later, after political and social revolution in many forms, I think China’s status can be upgraded to ‘the MILF of the world’. She’s all grown up now and has her children to look after. With money in the bank and some self-assurance, she’s half respectable; but make no mistake, she’s still a saucy, lustful animal that knows how to show a fellow a good time.

Comparatively speaking, Uncle Sam seems like a wheezing octogenarian high on his own stash of Viagra and cough syrup. But we’ll leave that rant for another time.

Mind you, when I say MILF, I mean it. Every Fortune 1,000 company would like to have her spread eagle and asking for more. But China is no tramp; she can say no, she can play coy, she can even two time you with your closest friend or competitor and still make you buy her dinner later in the week. China plays by her own rules. This, my friends, makes the place really interesting.

Like the sea, or the Wild West, China is a frontier. It’s an incubator for green technology, a battleground for cyber warfare and free speech, it’s one of the last great under-exploited markets for fast moving consumer widgets, and it’s the site of the largest infrastructure projects in world. Whatever you are into, chances are it’s happening in China. And if you don’t know it, look out, because you could get run over.

And that’s what keeps me here. Not only do I have a front row seat to the greatest show on earth, sometimes I even get to participate in a small way. Quality of life is in the eye of the beholder. A four bedroom / three bath in the Rancho de Grassy Knoll subdivision is nice, God bless the American dream. But for a soul that seeks a little adventure, that relishes the prospect of being at the epicenter of momentous changes in human history, one could hardly do better than being in China at the dawn of the 21st Century.

For better or worse, the “interesting times” as mentioned by one famous native of the state of Lu are happening here and now. And being an American adds a certain perspective; awkwardly straddling two great world powers and influential cultures, I am fortunate to see the world through a strange and exciting set of bifocals. I can hardly wait to see what will happen next.

Since I’m rambling, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not alone. There are hundreds of thousands of foreigners living in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. Sure, many are here because this is where the money is. But if you find a laowai who has been here a few years or more, I bet you that’s not why they stay. Watching a billion people transform a society from Confucianism to Communism and then to something else is more alluring than a gold rush and more tragic than a freeway accident. The world can hardly keep its eyes off.

I suppose I’ll make it home some day, but for nearly twenty years now I can’t shake the feeling I’m in the right place at the right time.