The Bling Dynasty

Lisa called on Thursday night to tell me that we had "business" to discuss. I showed up at the Jack Bar around ten, and she set out my usual two bottles of Bud Ice. She told me to sit so I sat. I was expecting bad news, probably the long-anticipated termination of my duties as the Jack Bar's official court minstrel. But instead, she gave me an offer that I couldn't refuse.

"New apartment grand opening," she said. "Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development. You play two song. Only two song. We pay you $100 U.S. dollar."

Of course, I belong to the monastic order of the Peace Corps, so I couldn't accept the money. But I wasn't interested in making bank anyhow. No, this was the sort of gig I was more than happy to do pro bono - the sort of once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that only comes once a week if you're a foreigner in China. A backstage pass to the heart of Chinese opulence, a journey to the center of the housing bubble, a lo-fi interlude in the middle of a high-tech freak show.

"I'll do it," I said.

The next day, Lisa called me and told me to meet her at the front gate in five minutes. I was naked at the time and woefully unprepared, so I tossed a pair of clean underwear onto the radiator and frantically scribbled some lyrics and chords in my trusty green Chinglish notebook.

I had spent the afternoon deliberating what songs to perform. Theme: houses, apartment complexes, construction. Mood: snide, cheeky, tongue-in-cheeky. I judiciously ruled out "The Roof is on Fire," as well as "Grave Architecture" by Pavement. "Burning Down the House" wasn't going to fly, and sadly, neither would my dad's tasteful suggestion, "The House of the Rising Sun." I needed something sweet and melodic but subtly jeering, the sort of inside joke that only a bona fide laowai would get. Finally, around 4 PM, it came to me: "Our House" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Two cats in the yard. Perfect. It was a bit out of my vocal range, but so are all the songs I sing.

For my second number, I decided to go with "Long Way Home" by Tom Waits - not exactly relevant, but with lines like "money's just something you throw off the back of a train" and "let's go out past the Party lights," I figured I would get a chuckle out of singing it, even if nobody else did. By the time I'd finished writing, my boxer-briefs were hot to the touch and I was ten minutes late.

One of the Inner Mongolians sat behind the wheel, Lisa in the passenger's side.

"We go to banquet first," she said.

"Hao hao hao hao hao," I said. "Good good good good good."

Chinese banquets are the panopticon of dining rituals. Fourteen people in a brightly-lit room, crammed elbow-to-elbow around a circular table with a not-so-lazy susan spinning round at 120 RPM. Everyone can see everyone else, but all eyes are on Mr. Laowai. The Asian world wants to know: can he use chopsticks? Ordinarily yes, but banquet chopsticks are oversized and extremely slippery, so someone eventually claims Mama Bird duty and puts food in Mr. Laowai's bowl. There is an overabundance of beer, if you're lucky, and rice vodka if you're not. Everyone toasts everyone else. If you have fourteen people at the table, that adds up to 91 toasts. Things can get sloppy very fast.

Our guests of honor were from Heilongjiang Province, the beak of the chicken-shaped Chinese landmass. Although Heilongjiang is practically cosmopolitan compared to lowly Nanchong, the out-of-towners were even less tactful around me than my Nanchong entourage tends to be.

"Whoa, a laowai. Can he speak Chinese?" the b-boy in the gorilla sweater asked Lisa.
"Yes," I said. "I can speak Chinese."
"Holy cow, a foreigner who can speak Chinese. Now I've seen everything. Can he use chopsticks?"
"Yes. I can use chopsticks."
"Wowzers. Amazing. Where is he from?"
"I'm from America."
"America. What does he do?"
"I am an English teacher."
"How much money does he make?"

And so on.

I was the center of attention for a short while, but after it was established that I could speak passable Chinese and feed myself without making a mess, everyone seemed to grow bored of me. There was a Cavaliers game on the big screen, so the men zoned out watching it, breaking the trance every so often to shout "Good ball!" or to express their admiration for the legendary Lei-bu-lon Jei-mu-si.

One by one, the men toasted me. I wish you happy every day. I wish you colorful life in Nanchong. I wish you find beautiful Chinese girlfriend. The tempo picked up. The men began touching each other below the belt. Everyone kept poking fun at the b-boy's beer belly, and he responded by laughing triumphantly and beatboxing while playing his gut like a bongo drum. So when it came time for me to toast him, I patted his belly and wished him and his baby a long and happy life together. He chuckled, but he didn't smile. A line had been crossed. Chinese ribbing is one thing, but a fat joke from the obesity capital of the world is another. I made my escape and ran over to toast the elderly couple who were smiling bashfully at me from the other end of the table. I downed my beer and they downed their walnut milk. We all smiled bashfully. Then it was time to go. The Inner Mongolian grabbed me by the arm and yanked me out into the hallway. I shouted a frantic farewell but everyone was too drunk to notice.

The Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development was so bright that, from a distance, the murky Jialing River looked downright resplendent. Searchlights darted back and forth across Nanchong's low-hanging heavens. Faintly audible: a stubborn beat, the voice of a circus barker.

We arrived. The Inner Mongolian parked illegally and a policeman came running over to scold him. But he indicated the laowai in the backseat and the policeman nodded and walked away.

We made our way up the red carpet.
"Did you drink too much?" asked Lisa.
"Chinese beer? Impossible," I said.
"Are you nervous?"
"Me? Never."

If the former was a slight fib, the latter was an outright lie. Even by Chinese standards, the crowd that had assembled to christen this residential behemoth was truly gargantuan, in the thousands, easy. The Volkswagen insignia was plastered up everywhere, and there was a trio of Volkswagen SUVs rotating on platforms, barely dressed xiaojies caressing their aerodynamic curves. The jumbotron on stage was looping a montage of a Volkswagen GTI Hatchback skidding up and down a rain-slick mountain road. The circus barker was whipping up a frenzy, but the only word I could make out was Da Zhong Qi Che - Volkswagen.

There was a visible divide between the people on the inside of the velvet-roped stanchions and the people on the outside. The out crowd was the same riffraff I usually encounter down by the bus station: old timers in filthy suitcoats wielding bamboo sticks and swollen duffel bags. Wielding ducks, wielding chickens. I passed an old man chewing a quid of tobacco - a quid of tobacco! The out crowd was very Ming Dynasty. Meanwhile, on the inside of the stanchion, it was all champagne and mini-cigars: The Bling Dynasty.

My opening act this time was a magician. At least it wasn't a pole dancer. But he wasn't too well-versed in the ways of magic. He just about strangled himself with his own neverending handkerchief. The MC saw me and came rushing over.

"Hello, please to meet you," he said. "I am MC Li Zhong Bo. What is your name?"
"You can call me Pan Da," I said.
"Oh, you speak Chinese."
"Sort of, yes."
"What is your American name?"
"Keith," I said. "K-E-I-T-H."
"K-I-I-G-H."
"K-E-I-T-H."
"Okay! Okay! Kitty!"
"Keith."
"Kitty!"
"Kitty."

He noticed my Chinglish notebook.
"What is this?"
"My music," I said.
"Cannot use. We have no," he said, searching for the word. "We have no ... thing."
No thing. Shit. I would have to play two songs from memory. So much for the two cats in the yard.

The magician, deeply ashamed, left the stage with his neverending handkerchief between his legs. It was my time to shine. The MC summoned Kitty to the microphone, and I Obama-trotted up to the stage.

"Our foreign friend has come tonight to entertain us with a few songs!" he said. "Now, what is your name?"
"My name is Pan Da and I am a laowai," I said into the microphone.
"This is Pan Da and he is a laowai. Very good. Pan Da - is that your Chinese name?"
"Yes. I am a national treasure."
Someone coughed.
"I see. Well, Mr. National Treasure - what kind of music will you be playing for us tonight?"
"American rock and roll."

There is footage floating around of Bob Dylan performing "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. He was young back then, and widely believed to be the Second Coming. So the crowd is awestruck and silent for the whole seven minutes, all these bucktoothed boys with wheat-colored hair sitting at Dylan's feet, blowing dandelions and musing quietly to themselves. The haunted, frightened trees? - one hand waving free? - circus sands? - what does it all mean? Meanwhile, a dust bowl wind blows havoc into the banners and stage curtains, and warbles the hell out of Dylan's already warbly voice.

Now, I'm not comparing myself to Dylan by any means, though I am disheveled enough these days to bear a passing resemblance to some of his latter day incarnations. But for all the glitz and pyrotechnic Volkswagen displays, the grand opening of the Heavenly Peach Blossom Lifestyle Development turned into the 1964 Newport Folk Festival the moment I started playing. Which is not to say the audience was awestruck. They were perplexed, slightly bored, somewhat uncomfortable. And they were dead silent. I played two Beck songs that featured a combined total of three chords. I played them because they are dear to me, and because they are simple - in front of all those people, I just wanted to leave the stage with my face intact. At the end of Jackass, the MC had to bark at the crowd until they applauded, and midway through Beautiful Way, he barked at them again, so that the second verse was drowned out by microphone feedback and a listless round of clapping. And then it was quiet again, just me and Lisa's beautiful thousand-dollar acoustic-electric, me and my three chords, and my warbly voice warbling in a wind that had come down all the way from the Himalayas just to mess up my hair.

I bowed and left the stage. I put the guitar away and the Inner Mongolian grabbed me by the arm.

"Now you play at Jack Bar, okay?"
"Okay," I said.

The next act passed me in the aisle: a very tall man with a very small bicycle. Later, at the Jack Bar, my opening act was a pole dancer.

The Heart of Saturday Night

It's Saturday night and there is nowhere in particular I'd like to go. Maybe if they opened a Denny's just off the Nanchong exit, I'd head out there on a night like tonight, order me some smoggy-side-up pigeon eggs and sit there pounding coffee, giving the Wuhan waitresses Sichuanese sass 'til the Tibetan bus boys buffed my bum right out of the booth. But there are no Denny'ses, no Perkinseses, no Country Kitchens or Waffle Houses, no Roy Rogerses, no IHOPs, nary a Village Inn to be found: so here I am, sitting in my war-torn apartment with a Nalgene bottle full of Nescafe between my legs, listening to Nighthawks at The Diner by Tom Waits. It is the first night of my two-month vacation. I could walk outside and hail a cab. I'd be downtown in ten minutes. That would make things interesting. But things will get interesting whether I want them to or not. For the moment, I'm thinking I'll conserve my energies: do some writing, use my newfound internet connection for neither good nor evil but inane, eat some oatmeal and recover from finals week.

For the final exam, I decided to interview all of my students one by one. It was a terrible idea on paper. On paper, it meant 350 interviews. At five minutes apiece, that added up to some thirty manhours for yours truly. But I hadn't seen half of my students since the first day of school, so I figured the whole process wouldn't take me longer than a couple of days. But lo: all 350 of them turned up for the final. They came from the four corners of the Chinese mainland, from internships in Xi'an and factory gigs in Shenzhen, to sit for five minutes on Dr. Panda's big red couch. Every morning, I showed up at Room 209 to find a line of college kids snaking around the corner, all the way down to the men's bathroom at the end of the hall. I'd conduct forty interviews in one sitting and the queue would only grow longer, and louder. For two weeks, for four hours a day without so much as a pee break, I sat and interviewed one kid after the next. Under my bed is a notebook full of Wangs, Lees, Zhangs, and Zhous, with their final scores written first in Arabic numerals, then Korean, then Spanish so as to keep their curiosity at bay.

I gave my students four interview questions to choose from.
1. What is your most valuable possession? Describe it and tell me where you got it.
2. In your opinion, how are Chinese people and Westerners different? How are they alike?
3. What do you see yourself doing after graduation? In five years? In fifteen years? In thirty years?
4. You are stranded on a desert island. There are wild pigs on the island, and some coconut trees, but not much else. If you were stuck on the island for five years, how would you survive? What would you do to amuse yourself? When you finally came back to China, how would you have changed?

Having survived all 350 interviews, I am forced to conclude that either my students were cheating, or they are tapped into some kind of beelike collective consciousness, a vast telepathic database of Chinglish.

1. A) My most valuable possession is my parents. They give me the love ...
B) My most valuable possession is this watch. My boyfriend give it to me. He give me the love ...

2. Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes. Westerners are white and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. Chinese people speak Chinese. Westerners speak English. Chinese people like delicious food. Westerners like nutritious food. Chinese people are very shy. Westerners are very outgoing. But Chinese people and Westerners are both humans. We both like the happy life.

3. After graduation, I will be a green hand, but I maybe teach English in the middle school. In five years, I will find my Mr. Right. [slight chuckle] We will have two babies, one boy and one girl. As time flies. In fifteen years, I will be old. I will open a restaurant because I want a colorful life. In thirty years, I will be retired. I will take my moneys and use it to travel the world. I will go to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou ...


These were the answers I got from hundreds of college seniors, more or less verbatim. Nobody tackled the island question until the third-to-last day. I have one student who is flamboyantly gay. He speaks better English than most of the teachers here. "Well," he said, "I'd like to answer the island question. Since it's hypothetical, I imagine you want me to use the subjunctive mood ... " A moment of English. The score I gave the kid made him giggle and throw his scarf over his shoulder. By Christmas Eve, the rumor had spread. Then, all of a sudden, everyone was shipwrecked with a bunch of wild pigs, and explaining themselves for good measure: "Mr. Panda, I know many other students answer questions one, two, three. But I want to be creative, so I answer question four."

Christmas morning was so foggy that I had to feel my way down the street with a pair of chopsticks. I arrived at the teaching building to find a line of college kids snaking from Room 209 to the men's bathroom. I sat on the couch, a yule log of Christmas cheer metabolizing in my gut. By then, I was a kind of machine. I seldom made eye contact, slurped loudly from my coffee, scribbled cryptic little notes to myself. Next! I'd bark. My most valuable possession is my parents ... Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes ... I will find my Mr. Right ... as time flies ...

Apples are the traditional Christmas gift in China, and thirty minutes in, my desk was heaped high with cellophane-wrapped fruit. I interviewed 65 students in a row. After five hours, there was a lull. I rose from my chair, my legs atrophied to the point that it sapped all my strength to totter to the window and look: the coast was clear. Finally, at long last, the semester was -

- the door flung open and in came a very small little boy whom I'd never seen before. He sat down on the sofa across from me. I had him sign his name in my notebook. When he spoke, I found myself, for the first time in several days, on the verge of laughter. The poor kid was a contralto. Permanent helium voice. Like Tiny Tim without the ukulele. The semester was ending on a pipsqueak. But this kid had my undivided attention. In China, I have come to relish and admire the oddballs and misfits, for I am one of them.

He cleared his throat like a revving Vespa ...
"Chinese people are little and yellow with little eyes," he explained. "Westerners are big and tall and fat with blue eyes and many hairs. ... That's all."
"Good job," I said, and shook the kid's hand. I showed him his score. He was so happy with an 82% that he bowed five times rapid-fire and darted out the door before I could change my mind. I jumped up from the couch, tossed an apple skyward and caught it in midair. Merry Christmas.