Beijing Memories 2000-2002

1.

My British-Chinese friend, Kim, and I got dressed up exactly the way we normally would to go to a nightclub in either London or NYC. Nothing too risque, maybe some mascara and low-cut blouses. We walked into a common Beijing restaurant, where the women gave us dirty looks.

They thought we were prostitutes.



2.

A child who I taught at a middle school gave me a jar of tadpoles that her father fished out of the river. While we were at KFC, I accidentally threw the jar out with the containers from my tray. I felt guilty, so I wrote a song about it:

"Tadpoles in the trashcan, I don't know what to do,
You gave them with your heart but I'm spoiled so my mind's a mess

Your ma used to say fortune was an egg ration a day,
But this new world won't leave you easily satisfied."

Well, it rhymed in Chinese.



3.

I visited my Beijing Film Academy friend, Fei Yi Qun, where he lived in a dingy basement for 50 RMB a month (less than $8 US) but filled his ears with Puccini to get through it.
I was sick, so he gave me some magic potion. 
I will never know what it was.

But the bike ride home was sweet.



4.

My music friends used to take me to a simple restaurant in Weighur Village that they called "Elvis' (Maowang's) Place," owned by a Chinese dude who had long sideburns, and he'd set up an open mic just for us. Guitars, keyboards, and everything.

Then they'd sing Chinese oldies that I'd never heard before.



5.

When my friend Feng Cheng organized Chris Doyle's Hou Hai slide show, he put my name on the seat next to Cui Jian's. But then Shen Qing (whose brother was Shen Tong, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square movement) took my name off the seat and sat there herself.
We worked in the same office space. I don't know if she was mad at me or what.

I have never told anyone this.



6.

 One of my English students at Beijing Film Academy teased me in front of the entire class for being an inexperienced teacher. But later, he threw me a 2001 New Year's party, western style. When I told him we wanted to invite a bunch of people who didn't know each other, he said most Chinese people didn't do that, but he would give it a try. We did wine and cheese, and all of our guests stayed huddled in very strict little circles with just the people they knew.

There was a duststorm the next morning, and it felt like Armageddon.



7.

It turned out they had just begun producing Zhou Xun's album.
It also turned out the producer was one of the three people whose phone numbers my sister-in-law gave me two years earlier, who I had never bothered contacting.

This was a total coincidence.



8.

Everyone told me I acted too Japanese. Unnecessarily polite. I was shocked. Having been born and bred in New Jersey, I never thought I retained Japaneseness from the culture of my Taiwanese parents. But I did. And we do.

So I did what the Romans did, and I learned how to tell like it was, Momma.




9.

I met Jack Pan randomly through a friend who recognized him in a salsa club, and it turned out he'd interviewed Madeleine Albright for his show on international politics.  I needed a job, so I became his assistant. We tried to get an interview with Bush when he came to Beijing. It turned out the dude was busy.
But we got an interview with Mike Moore, the former World Trade Organization General-Director who had gotten China into the WTO.

The Chinese press called Jack "The First Chinese Gentleman."




10.

When the Hainan spy plane incident happened, the children who I taught and usually got along with all came to class with darts in their eyes and ganged up on me. They started chiming in together as if they'd rehearsed it. They asked me if I knew what had happened to Wang Wei and denounced my being American.

I said there was a difference between people and governments.



11.

I was sitting at a McDonald's during the World Cup that year. When the American team led against another team, all the Chinese in the restaurant cheered.

I was so relieved that I wept.