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  Big in China

  My Unlikely Adventures Raising a Family, Playing the Blues, and Becoming a Star in Beijing

  Alan Paul

  Dedication

  To Becky

  Author’s Note

  Some conversations and events have been condensed, but all quotes and names are real, with the exception of Yechen. This was my Chinese teacher’s nickname, and how he asked to be identified.

  The RMB-to-dollar exchange rate varied from roughly 8:1 when we arrived in Beijing to about 6.7:1 when we departed. I used 7:1 throughout the book.

  I used China’s standard pinyin romanization method of spelling.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Come to the Edge

  Chapter 2

  That’s What Love Will Make You Do

  Chapter 3

  Across the Great Divide

  Chapter 4

  Beautiful Sorta

  Chapter 5

  Say What?

  Chapter 6

  Key to the Highway

  Chapter 7

  When You Feel It, You Know

  Chapter 8

  Into the Great Wide Open

  Chapter 9

  Sad and Deep as You

  Chapter 10

  No Particular Place to Go

  Chapter 11

  Lonesome and a Long Way from Home

  Chapter 12

  Can’t Lose What You Never Had

  Chapter 13

  Cast Off All My Fears

  Chapter 14

  Let It Grow

  Chapter 15

  Visible Man

  Chapter 16

  Into the Mystic

  Chapter 17

  Bringing It All Back Home

  Chapter 18

  Bit by Bit (Little by Little)

  Chapter 19

  Them Changes

  Chapter 20

  I Will Dare

  Chapter 21

  Teach Your Children

  Chapter 22

  The House Is Rocking

  Chapter 23

  You Ain’t Going Nowhere

  Chapter 24

  Giant Steps

  Chapter 25

  Come and Go Blues

  Chapter 26

  Mountain High, River Deep

  Chapter 27

  Beijing Blues

  Chapter 28

  Games People Play

  Chapter 29

  Big in China

  Chapter 30

  Bittersweet Surrender

  Chapter 31

  Tick Tock

  Chapter 32

  Baby Please Don’t Go

  Chapter 33

  Tomorrow Never Knows

  Epilogue

  I Shall Return

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  XIAMEN, CHINA—I stood in the spotlight at the center of the broad stage, feeling exposed and alone. My bandmates, who were usually by my side, were several steps behind, leaving the eyes of five thousand Chinese people solely upon me. They were ready to be wowed.

  My band, Woodie Alan, was headlining the Xiamen Beach Festival, a big deal in this beautiful southern China port city. The MC had just announced us, in Mandarin, to the sprawling crowd as “Beijing’s best band.” It was a title we had earned in a magazine readers’ poll a few months earlier and that we were now confronted with validating.

  Smoke and bubble machines surrounded us, along with a five-camera TV crew who was filming the performance for broadcast throughout Fujian Province, home to forty-four million people. A kneeling cameraman pointed his lens at my face, which was illuminated by a blinding bank of spotlights. I blinked into the glare and felt my legs wobble and my throat grow tight.

  I stepped to the mic, apologized for my bad Chinese, and gave a short, rambling thank-you: “I am American. My friends are Chinese. Together, we are one band. We believe that with music, there is one people; no Americans, no Chinese, no Xiameners or Beijingers; just people.”

  I knew it was a cheap trick—Chinese people love hearing foreigners speak their language—but I wanted to make the effort to reach out, and I truly believed the sentiments, even if I could only express them in a string of half-formed clichés.

  The loud cheer calmed me as the rhythm section kicked off a hard-driving beat. I shut my eyes and laid into the haunting, slinky opening riff of “Beijing Blues,” one of the first songs I ever wrote and now our signature tune. The crowd responded, though most of them could not understand a word I was singing—something that always gave me a proud sense of transcending language with emotion and music.

  Fifty minutes and eight songs later we walked off to applause and met on the side of the stage, exchanging hugs and handshakes, and then sharing a warm Tsingtao beer. I poured from one large green bottle into four tiny plastic cups, which we hoisted together in a toast to our success.

  It was a scene I never could have envisioned three years earlier, when my wife and I walked off a plane in Beijing with three little kids in tow. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese, knew little about the country or the expatriate life I was embarking upon, and had never been in a real band despite years of playing guitar. Now here I was fronting a band with three fantastic Chinese musicians as the headline act of this festival.

  Following our impromptu backstage celebration, my lone American bandmate, Dave Loevinger, and I rejoined our families, who had proudly watched our performance from the front row. Fans surrounded us asking for autographs and wanting to pose for pictures together. A giant festival poster we had autographed earlier that day loomed behind us.

  “File this under, ‘Never thought it would happen,’ ” said Dave. We were standing next to a smiling woman holding her fingers up in a V, the sign virtually every Chinese person flashes when being photographed.

  Over the next few days on our continuing tour of south-central China, we would do four radio interviews, perform live on the air on the largest station in Hunan Province, sign life-sized posters, and have drunken Chinese mobsters insist on sharing their cognac and Cuban cigars as thanks for our music.

  I smiled for the picture, then turned to look out over the exiting crowd on the moonlit beach, the Taiwan Straits stretching behind the stage. Waves crashed onto the shore where Chinese lanterns had gently floated out to sea earlier that evening in a celebration of the fall festival.

  I took it all in and wondered just how I had gotten here.

  Chapter 1

  Come to the Edge

  Three years earlier, I’d looked at my wife, Rebecca, through feverish eyes, cold sweat plastered over my forehead, and told her that I wasn’t quite ready to sign on the dotted line. I couldn’t agree to pack up our three kids, abandon life in idyllic, leafy Maplewood, New Jersey, and move to Beijing. Not just now.

  I shifted in my sweat-soaked coach-class seat and put down the book I couldn’t focus on anyhow. I struggled to explain why I was hesitating. “I’m not sure this whole thing is such a good idea. I need more time to think.”

  We were thirty-five thousand feet up, in the middle of a fourteen-hour flight back to the United States from a weeklong “look-see visit” to Beijing, undertaken to decide whether Rebecca would acce
pt the job as the Wall Street Journal’s China bureau chief. I had pushed her to explore this opportunity and I was extremely enthusiastic about it all week, loving everything about China: the energy, the culture, the sites, and the food. Even the pea-soup pollution didn’t give me second thoughts. Within two days we were both ready for her to accept the job.

  We started taking pictures to show our three kids: Jacob, seven; Eli, four; and Anna, twenty-one months. We wanted China to look like a fun, inviting place rather than a scary, exotic destination so we visited parks, playgrounds, their future school, our house-to-be, and perhaps the world’s largest ball pit at the wonderfully named Fundazzle play space.

  Now I was having second thoughts, my wavering triggered by the very thing that had fueled my fervor: food. I had eaten my way through Beijing, throwing caution to the wind once I realized just how different—and how much better—the cuisine in Beijing was compared with any other Chinese food I had ever tried. I wolfed down bowls of wide handmade noodles, meat pancakes, dozens of dumplings, crispy Peking duck, fiery Sichuan beef sliced thin and dunked in a tableside bowl of scorching oil, and huge, earthy wild mushrooms sautéed with giant heads of garlic and hot peppers. I loved it all—until it caught up with me.

  I spent my last two days in China mostly lying on my hotel bed, running back and forth to the bathroom and dispatching Rebecca to scrounge for Imodium. My diet was reduced to dry toast and tea.

  I didn’t feel much better on the long march home. I was drenched in sweat, clutching my armrests and sucking down sodas as fast as the flight attendant could bring them. Moving to Beijing suddenly seemed like a very stupid idea.

  “Don’t commit to anything,” I said, staggering weak-legged off the plane. “What are we getting ourselves into?”

  I was putting Rebecca in a bad spot. She had accepted the job in Beijing and begun working out details. My enthusiasm had gotten her to raise her hand for the job; it had driven our whirlwind week touring Beijing; and it had allowed her to start imagining herself in the position.

  Now I was hedging and she was understandably confused. It seemed like all this fuss was over an upset stomach, but it was deeper than that. The illness had shaken me, causing me to truly doubt the wisdom of moving.

  We had a house we liked in a neighborhood that we loved. Maplewood, New Jersey, is a tree-lined town of colonial homes, filled with a diverse mix of families. Just a half-hour train ride from Manhattan, it is an island of peace and calm, with chirping birds and a friendly, interesting population that belies most suburban stereotypes. Writing contracts with Guitar World and Slam magazines provided a flexible freelance lifestyle backed by the stability of steady money, allowing me to make a living writing about two of my passions, music and basketball.

  Most importantly, moving would mean cutting the cord on a fantastic network—a pair of aunts and uncles on the block, my sister and her family ten minutes away, and two sets of parents who visited often and with whom we were very close. We often called our family cluster “the commune” or “shtetl,” evoking the European Jewish ghettos where our ancestors lived. This old-fashioned way of life suited us beautifully.

  Our support system permitted us to maintain our balance and allowed Rebecca to work long hours without me growing resentful or feeling isolated. I had previously discouraged her from pursuing Journal jobs in San Francisco, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., because moving just seemed too risky. Yet neither of us was ready to acknowledge that this was where we would spend the rest of our lives. It was impossible to imagine moving, and equally far-fetched to contemplate spending the next thirty years in the same house. It felt like we had at least one great adventure in us.

  Scratching that itch with an overseas posting had simply never occurred to us. Rebecca had not even told me about the China opening, assuming I would refuse to make such a move with three young kids. I heard her casually mention it to a friend, who had asked about the scope of the Journal’s operations over lunch.

  “The paper has bureaus all over the world,” Rebecca said. “They just posted the China bureau chief job in Beijing.”

  “Beijing?” I perked up, tuning into the conversation from the pizza I was eating with my kids at an adjoining table. “Are you applying for that?”

  She was shocked. Though even I didn’t fully understand my reflexive reaction, I had a nagging “now or never” sensation as soon as I heard about this opportunity; a move out of the country was only going to get harder as our children got older. And my desire to remain in Maplewood long term actually made moving to China more appealing because a foreign posting was understood to be for a limited time, unlike a more definitive domestic move. We could even keep our house, allowing us to maintain a solid safety net.

  I never wavered from the first moment I heard about the opening—until that illness knocked the confidence out of me. As I sulked, a rare silence set in between Rebecca and me. Friends and family who had enjoyed my enthusiastic, passionate e-mails about the great Chinese food now teased me about getting sick. I did not admit my new hesitations to anyone else as I began to work through them.

  Maybe I had been viewing the whole thing backward by focusing on how much my career would suffer in a move. Beijing could well open more doors than it closed. During our visit, I had hatched a vague idea about writing a column about my expat life and put together an imprecise, but inspired, pitch. When the editor of the Wall Street Journal Online quickly showed interest, I was reminded that there were a lot of opportunities hidden amid the uncertainties.

  I had to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth that I was growing restless, stuck in a velvet-lined rut. I was finally starting to feel a simmering resentment toward Rebecca’s career, which was thriving while mine meandered. I worried about this festering problem after a long, easy relationship based around supporting each other’s work while carving out very different niches.

  I had never really followed a career plan, trusting that something new and exciting would come up. This worked for years, but I was now in a long stretch of promising ideas leading only to dead ends. The future no longer seemed limitless as I approached my fortieth birthday. A new Guitar World owner wanted me to start coming into the office every day, threatening my routine. Our whole family structure would crumble if I also began commuting into New York. I had happily assumed primary child-care duties when Jacob was born, but managing three kids’ schedules was increasingly complex.

  I thought about a conversation I had with my father a few months earlier, just after the Beijing job had presented itself. We were riding up a Colorado chairlift on a blustery day, and he wondered why we were hesitating at all. I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, toward the end of a three-year adventure my parents took over their own families’ objections. This was one of the best decisions they had ever made, he said.

  “It still defines us in some ways forty years later, and you’ll probably end up saying the same thing,” he said. “It seems to me that you can’t say no to this.”

  I had embraced those words then and I came back to them now.

  You can’t say no to this.

  Rebecca had come around to this way of thinking under my prodding. Now it was her turn to push me, by reminding me of my own growing restlessness in suburbia. “We can spend the next three years in China,” she said. “Or we can spend them talking about kitchen renovation.”

  Chapter 2

  That’s What Love Will Make You Do

  Rebecca—Becky to me—and I met at the Michigan Daily, the University of Michigan’s student newspaper. I watched her rise to the top of that intensely political, balkanized organization while creating virtually no enemies.

  After graduation, we traveled to Florida in search of jobs, each interviewing at six newspapers. She got five offers, while I received a half of one—for a part-time position at the smallest place we visited.

  Becky’s intelligence and composure were obvious
. What really made her different was that burning ambition did not prevent her from being ready to put her shoulder to the wheel of any job, no doubt a testament to her roots in blue-collar Bay City, Michigan.

  I, on the other hand, radiated ambivalence. My passion lay in music writing, and I had already had some freelance success, even interviewing Eric Clapton. After that, it was hard to feign great enthusiasm about covering small-town school board meetings, but I needed a job. I eventually turned down a part-time position in metro New York to move to Tampa Bay with Rebecca, following my instincts and believing that if I trusted in the relationship, good things would happen.

  I wrote a series of music stories for small magazines and hooked on as a stringer for the St. Petersburg Times. I was honing my craft but after earning $8,000 my first year and despairing of ever moving beyond Ramen noodle wages, I applied to graduate school, intent on becoming a teacher. Then I was offered a job as managing editor at Guitar World, which a new editor ambitiously planned to turn into the leading musician’s magazine. It felt like winning the lottery. I started work in New York while Becky began looking for a new job that would allow her to join me.

  She was following our unspoken agreement that we would each pursue job opportunities and move for each other as necessary. This subtly shifted over the years as her career at the Wall Street Journal thrived and I settled in as a freelancer. Ten years before the China move, we had relocated from Manhattan to Ann Arbor, Michigan, when Rebecca was hired by the Journal’s Detroit bureau. I became Guitar World’s online editor and senior writer and soon was also writing for a host of publications, from Slam to the New Yorker.