From Austin City Limits to Beijing

I’m a New Yorker, a Beijinger and a Texan, in that order. I had the great pleasure of living in Austin, Texas for 5 years and my life is much richer for it. Austin is an oasis of culture in the Lone Star state. It’s home to the Austin City Limits Music Festival and South By Southwest, two amazing cultural events that everyone should attend if they get a chance.

Austin bills itself as the ‘live music capital of the world’ and with good reason. The Austin Chronicle lists 792 venues for music, which is a staggering number of places to be able to go out and catch a show for a city of only 1.7 million. In comparison, Beijing Municipality would need to have about 10,000 venues to meet the same ratio. Keep in mind, that while the two cities’ populations are vastly different, their size is not, Beijing is 16,801.25 km2 and Austin 11,099.91 km2.

The reason I show you the numbers is for some perspective and so that you can believe me when I say you can pretty much move 10 minutes in any direction in Austin and run across some good live music. Of course ‘good music’ is in the ear of the beholder; the city serves up a smorgasbord ranging from country/western to rock and jazz. If you are looking for rap, house, drum and base, classical, etc., go somewhere else.

Living in China I’m pretty much out of touch with the music scene back in the States. I try to keep up, but it’s hard. The fact that I’m not as young as I used to be might also be a factor, but I try really hard to ignore that. Anyway, if you live in China and are anything like me, you’re probably starved for good music—you can only shuffle your iPod so many times before your 10,000 favorite songs start to get really boring. So here’s 4 good suggestions of amazing musicians from Austin you’ve probably never heard of. All have found some national success in the Sates, but they haven’t made it big; however they remain institutions in Austin. If you like what you read below, run to your nearest media store or website to buy or download these artists.

Bob Schneider – An incredibly versatile musician, from hard driving punk & funk to straight rock and acoustic ballads, Bob Schneider has created an impressive body of work. My advice is to listen to three of his albums before you make up your mind, each one is more different from the last. His early band, The Scabs, was known for its funky rhythms and raunchy lyrics, but Bob’s latest album, Lovely Creatures, is a schmaltzy guitar laden folksy affair. My favorite albums are Californian and Lonelyland.

The Asylum Street Spankers - The band almost defies description, but I’ll give it a try. Led by Wammo and Christina Marrs the Spankers create a crazy combination of blue grass, jazz, swing, Tin Pan Alley, rock and occasionally rap. Sometimes they are plugged in and sometimes they are completely acoustic; with yukalaylee and kazoo. While many of their songs are about drugs, sex and political protest, they also found the creative where with all to do a children’s album. The Spankers are hysterically funny and musically sublime.

James McMurtry – In the tradition of Townes Van Zandt, James McMurtry (son of famed novelist Larry McMurtry) strums, moans and blasts a lyrical fusion of country/western, blues, folk and rock. WARNING: If you are allergic to the slightest bit of twang stay away. However, if you like the occasional Johnny Cash or Willie Nelson song, or Neal Young or the aging and melancholy Bruce Springsteen, you’ll like James McMurtry. My favorite album is Where’d you Hide the Body

The Gourds – Although sometimes labeled ‘alternative country’ I think they are far more rock n’ roll, but with Zydeco mandolin, banjo and accordion. Their big claim to fame was a cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin N’ Juice, a favorite that is often repeated on my iPod. If you are fan of the Grateful Dead, Phish, or Little Feet, the Gourds are for you.

This by all means is NOT an exhaustive list of the wonderful talent orbiting Austin’s musical galaxy. I left the city over five years ago to return to Beijing, I wonder what I’m missing…

P.S. Please write to me with suggestions of new or old music to check out, I am always looking for more.

Sasquatch is Never Going Back to Shanghai

Beijing and Shanghai have a long-stemming cultural rivalry a lot like New York and Los Angeles. However, considering the Chinese sense of history and belonging to their native birthplace, the rivalry between the Northern Capital and the City on the Sea is heightened to an extreme degree. Sometimes Beijing people and Shanghai people flat out don’t like each other.

I am a confirmed Beijingren (aka ‘Beijinger’), or as Kaiser Kuo writes in flavorful soda pop prose "Ich Bin Ein Beijinger". And I am a proud Beijingren primarily because I’ve lived in the city a long time and can see it for its charms. I’ve got past the smoggy air you can cut with a knife, the landmines of phlegm on the sidewalk, and cab drivers who seem to freebase garlic everyone morning before going to work with its odor oozing out of every pour and orifice. You can say I’m lucky.

When I compare the two cities for other Americans I tend to describe Beijing as being 50% New York and 50% Washington DC – it’s the political capital, but also a traditional cultural center because of its historical landmarks, also universities as well as news & entertainment media are clustered in the city. Shanghai, on the other hand, is 50% New York and 50% Los Angeles – it’s the business & financial center of the country and a critical port, but also a lot of fashion and pop art is created there. Beijing is very ‘Chinese’ while Shanghai is decidedly cosmopolitan.

They are both great cities, but as I said, I prefer Beijing. And one of the reasons I do is that on my very first visit to Shanghai I was kicked out of the city within 12 hours after arrival. Dear readers, if you think I am proud of the fact that I can boast being kicked out of the world’s most populous city, well you’re right. By the way, I probably also did it in record time!

As with most good stories, it starts with the words “It wasn’t my fault...”

In fact, I blame my friend Sasquatch. I‘ve mentioned him in a previous posting about traveling to Tibet. After experiencing our own version of Misty Mountain Hop in Lhasa, my hairy friend and I made our way for Shanghai. The following is what happened and why Sasquatch will never go back. But before I get in to the whole drunken fisticuffs, running amuck in the hotel, police interrogation, “get out of town before sundown” story, let me first describe Sasquatch.

In high school Sasquatch was captain of the football team and the wrestling team in a Podunk Midwestern town where such lofty stations were hard won by corn fed farm boys. In college he transferred his athletic skills to rugby; a sport as far as I can tell he loved to play because it is within the rules to drink on the sidelines and deliver an occasional knuckle sandwich to an opponent as long as the referee didn’t notice. In summary, Sasquatch was a big, tough son of a bitch.

Big and tough doesn’t do him justice; he was a force of nature. Sasquatch’s consumption of food, beverage and chemicals was something to behold. For example, he chewed tobacco, but he never used a spittoon. That would have been uncouth. No, instead he swallowed the tobacco juice. And when he was hell bent on numbing himself again Chinese realities, for example while traveling ‘hard seat’ for three or four days at a stretch, he could chew (and swallow) tobacco and smoke cigarettes while simultaneously throwing back baijiu and warm beer. All of this was on a stomach fortified by the magical mixture of Tang and Ritz Crackers; a perfect traveler’s diet that I swear by. I also suspect he had a healthy appetite for mind-bending plants and fungi, but I cannot confirm this.

OK, so Sasquatch was big, strong and had insane appetites, well that’s not all. He also has a threshold for the sight of his own blood that would have made Rambo proud. Once while working a summer job as a welder on a construction site, a large I-beam swung dangerously out of control and gave him a glancing blow across his big square mug. The heavy steal object caught him right behind the ear and ripped half his face off. Surviving damage that might kill mere mortals, Sasquatch was in shock, but conscious. Most people I know would have lay down and waited for the ambulance to arrive. Not Sasquatch, he decided this was a rare opportunity to see what his naked skeletal face looked like. So he and his workmates walked to the bathroom and watched in the mirror as he pulled his face back to check out what lay beneath. That’s a true story by the way.

Yep, a real sicko. Sasquatch was great to hang around with; we had many adventures together. They include gunplay in Yunnan, bicycle jousting in Beijing, an encounter with the world’s ugliest prostitute in Lhasa, and getting thrown out of Shanghai.

So, when we arrived in Shanghai it was about five in the morning after a three-day train ride from Xining that was miraculously cut short by tiny white sleeping pills bought over the counter at the train station. We were bedraggled and travel funked, but ready to see the sites when we hit town. Being good backpackers we decided it was a waste of the cost of one night in a hotel to check in at that late hour. So we decided to go for a walk through the French Concession, have breakfast and start drinking.

First we gorged ourselves on baozi and beer while watching the early morning taiqi practitioners in Renmin Park as the sun came up. And for one reason or another we decided it was a good idea to raise the stakes to Bloody Maries made with ghetto Russian vodka and tomato juice heavily spiced with Tabasco sauce swiped from some five star-hotel. For obvious reasons, I forget the details about how and why we procured all the ingredients. But I assure you it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Anyway, a few hours later we were quit foxed; and I mean blotto! It was noon, a perfect time to check into a hostel and get our money’s worth, so we started looking for accommodations. Unfortunately, we encountered a kind of hostel we hadn’t banked on.

We tried three or four places, no dice; everywhere was full. Facing the prospect of passing out in the gutter, we began to worry. However, one hotel recommended another, and unfortunately I can’t remember its name, because that’s where Sasquatch met his doom.

As we were checking in my friend needed to relieve himself, he was directed to take the elevator to the nearest men’s room on the third floor. After twenty minutes or so, Sasquatch had still not returned to the front desk. I was left waiting and wondering how a guy that big could misplace himself. Then I asked the desk clerk to watch our bags as I went upstairs to look for him.

When the elevator doors opened I was faced with a sweating, bleeding, battle-crazed Sasquatch with his fist cocked ready to knock out the first person in sight. Needless to say, parts of my body puckered. When I asked what happened he told me four men with clubs assailed him the moment he stepped on the third floor and then proceeded to try to relieve him of his wallet, watch and other valuables. Sasquatch took several blows but managed to curl up into a ball and protect his jewels and other prized assets.

My wild friend was raised to believe if you fall off a horse get up and shoot it. Once Sasquatch regained some of his senses he took it upon himself to deliver some Texas-style justice to the perpetrators, including the staff of the hotel - who he was convinced must have been in on the ambush. Insults were thrown, weapons brandished, and my short life flashed before my eyes. It was utter mayhem; I loved it, especially because no one beat me up.

The cops arrived on the scene. I remember being relieved by that, and then I realized they weren’t on our side. For about an hour or so we were on the receiving end of ‘good cop / bad cop’; I guess some things are universal. However, the scrupulous occidentals confounded the police. You see; we didn’t lie. Separately, we gave them our story straight, but they just didn’t want to believe two foreign exchange students got mugged in a Shanghai hostel. I guess they feared it would end up in the Lonely Planet and the flea trap would have been deficit a star, whatever.

The leading municipal storm trooper on the seen insisted Sasquatch and I were drunk. OK, guilty as charged. But he also insisted we made up the whole story and that Sasquatch was mentally unstable. Well, that wasn’t a case I wanted to defend in front of a jury, but we were highly insulted nonetheless. Sasquatch was the victim!

He wasn’t about to take it lying down either. As long as I live, I’ll never forget hearing the words “Run! I’m gonna’ hit the cop.” Well, if that had happened, I wonder if I would be so willing to write about this today. Quickly and diplomatically, I threw my scrawny two hundred pound frame against my monstrous woolly friend and reminded him that they held our passports in one hand and cattle prods in the other. Where was I supposed to run to?

I talked him down, and then the cops were ready to let us go, on one condition. That’s when I heard the equivalent of “be out of town before sundown” in Mandarin. We were driven to the train station and told that as far as the Shanghai police were concerned we never need to cross the Yangtze again.

I don’t hold a grudge against Shanghai. I’m over it. But Sasquatch swore never to return. I miss that freak; the last I heard of him he was a cuckolding collections agent with pending applications to law school. I pity the debtor or opposing attorney who ever runs across him.

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.

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.