Big in China Read online

  I often rode my bike over to a village just a quarter mile outside the back gate of our compound. Riding in, I passed a run-down supermarket, a meat store, and a couple of produce stands, where I began shopping, buying huge bags of apples, pears, navel oranges, bananas, and tiny clementines, as well as fresh tofu, noodles, eggplant, cilantro, and mushrooms—all for about five dollars.

  Across the street was a tiny restaurant, little more than a couple of oil drums with stools under a billowing tent. Eventually, I would work up my nerve to try that place, which served delicious, crispy egg pancakes. I would also discover that the grocery store had a small hot food place that made great pork and chive dumplings, steamed buns, and simple flat breads. But I was nervous the first time I ate in the village and so limited myself to considering the two real restaurants.

  I wandered into one, finding it empty at 2:00 p.m., normal for a working-class Chinese restaurant, where most people eat lunch at noon on the dot. Two lounging waitresses looked at me with surprise, then rushed over with a one-page handwritten menu. Unable to read it, or to use the point-and-nod ordering technique I had already perfected since no one was there, I just ordered noodles, because it was safe and was one of the only foods I could say properly.

  The waitresses kept asking me about what kind of noodles I wanted, and I kept answering, “Wo budong—zhe mian.” (I don’t understand—just noodles.) I was speaking single-word, illiterate Chinese, and we were all laughing as they pantomimed all sorts of things. The only thing I could really make out was someone hand-pulling noodles, so I just kept saying “dui, dui” (right, right).

  After consulting each other, one waitress retreated to the kitchen and the other brought me tea, then hovered nearby. I smiled at her. She smiled back, then pointed to the table and said, in remarkably unaccented English, “Desk.”

  “Bu desk (not desk),” I said. “Table.”

  Puzzled, she brought over her pen and pad and handed them to me. I wrote “table,” which she looked at and read, quite clearly: “Table.”

  I took the pad and wrote the following:

  Chair

  Cup

  Tea

  Noodles

  Me

  You

  Alan

  She read them all out loud as I pointed to the appropriate object. All Chinese study English in school and many who cannot confidently say a single word can read and write quite well, but I did not know this yet.

  The cook poked his head out of the kitchen and stared as the other waitress emerged and placed a large steaming bowl of dark brown broth in front of me. I smiled and stirred the soup with my chopsticks. At the bottom was a large serving of fresh, flat noodles. I said, “Hen hao” (very good) and started eating. It was simple, tasty food.

  The broth had a few pieces of stew meat bobbing around some tasty fresh greens, and the noodles were freshly made, something I would quickly get used to in China. A few sprigs of cilantro floated around the top.

  A middle-aged man in a long green army coat wandered in to smoke, sip tea, and stare at me as I ate. I waved off the cigarette he offered and listened, uncomprehending, as he spoke at length, ignoring my insistence that I didn’t understand him. I smiled and nodded while slurping down the noodles, then picked up the bowl to drink the soup, leaving most of the chunky pieces of mystery meat at the bottom.

  My pupil cleared my place, then returned with her sheet. I wrote out more words, as several more people wandered in. I now had a small class, and everyone laughed when one of them called me “laoshi” (teacher). I was writing down every object I could see, then reading the words aloud and pointing.

  “Bowl . . . television . . . spoon . . . shirt . . . clock . . . shoes . . . pants.”

  The first waitress could read the English perfectly and grew more proud and excited with each properly executed word. Everyone else watched and listened.

  Eventually, I picked up the bill, paid 3 RMB (about 40 cents) and rose to leave, saying, “Xie Xie. Zai jian.” (Thank you. Good-bye.)

  My star pupil proudly responded in English: “You’re welcome. Thank you. Good-bye.”

  Wobbling home on my bike, the handlebars tipsy with bags of produce, I felt at peace and full of wonder, excited that such a place was so close at hand. Pulling back onto the main road behind Riviera, I saw the turnoff to the baseball diamond, which seemed like a crossroads between chasing a mirage and living in the here and now.

  I had already met expats who spent most of their time trying to re-create their home life in China, and they were often seething with complaints and disappointments. Like that baseball field, things would never be quite right for them; the best they could achieve was a second-rate imitation. Thriving expats accepted life in China for what it was and tried to take advantage of it all. I knew what my choice would be.

  Chapter 6

  Key to the Highway

  We began the process of getting our driver’s licenses almost immediately after arriving in China. It was maddening to be stranded in a suburban compound, unable to drive for the first time in twenty-three years—particularly since we had a free car waiting for us. The bureau’s 1992 Beijing Jeep Cherokee would never be replaced and probably should have been retired long ago, but its presence in front of the house was a tease.

  I took it out for a few spins around the Riviera. The clutch balked, and the dead shocks allowed each of the compound’s many speed bumps to rattle my innards, but I wanted to drive it in the worst way. Unfortunately, there was no shortcut to getting a license.

  Many of my friends and neighbors had family drivers, often paid for by their employers. Some companies actually prohibited their employees from driving at all, because of liability fears. Rebecca had Mr. Dou, a company driver who usually took her to and from work. But we were otherwise on our own.

  Sick of waiting a half an hour for a cab to take me a mile, I gave in to temptation and started driving the Jeep. We restricted our outings to nearby places but that still meant cruising up and down Jing Shun Lu, the crazy, busy road that some longtime expats had dubbed “blood alley.”

  The basic rule of Chinese driving seemed to be: never stop unless you absolutely must. If there’s the slightest opening, a car will try to slip through. If there is a sliver between vehicles on a pulsing, busy thoroughfare, a line of cars will turn left into the teeth of swarming traffic in a frantic game of chicken. Driving in Beijing is a full-body experience, one that I actually enjoyed from the start. You feel alive behind the wheel, maybe because of the very real possibility that you could soon be dead.

  For all the hyperaggressive drivers—including chauffeured German sedans moving at hyperspeed—the roads were also clogged with slow-moving vehicles. These included souped-up tractors dragging enormous, overhanging payloads and cars piloted by nervous, freshly minted drivers. In a few years, Beijing had gone from busting with bikes to crowded with cars, and the result was countless inexperienced drivers who drove at half the speed limit.

  We quickly got used to navigating this morass, and the undertow of guilt and panic we felt about unlicensed driving began to ebb. Then one night we drove up to meet friends, including one U.S. Embassy official who knew China well.

  “You are crazy to drive without a license,” he said. “If you get into a small accident, it is going to cost you a lot of money. If you get into a bad one and someone is hurt or killed, at best you will have your visas taken away and have to leave the country. At worst, you’ll end up in jail.”

  It’s easy to feel above the law living in a foreign culture, so I applied a simple rule that I would turn to regularly in coming years: just imagine the reverse situation. I pictured an unlicensed Chinese national mowing down an American kid and imagined the uproar that would follow. Besides, we had only been in China for a month and things were going impossibly well. Rolling the dice like this was foolish. We stopped driving and dove into the lo
ng process of getting our licenses.

  To begin, Mr. Dou drove us thirty minutes south to a hulking bureaucratic building, grandly labeled “People’s Republic of China Office of Traffic Safety Compliance and Road Rules.” To the left of the main door another entrance read “Foreigner License.” Mr. Dou filled out countless papers, handed over a stack of passport-sized photos, and called us up to sign a few things, before handing us study books and telling us that the next available appointment was in three weeks.

  On the way back, we began looking over the books and started getting concerned. The book included 750 questions, all in badly translated “Chinglish” that required careful reading. We would have to correctly answer 90 out of 100, randomly selected by a computer. About half were obvious and another 25 percent were fathomable, which left 25 percent you simply had to memorize, because they made little sense.

  For an open abdominal wound, such as protrusion of the small intestine tube, we should:

  a. put it back.

  b. no treatment.

  c. not put it back, but cover it with a bowl or jar, and bind the bowl or jar with a cloth belt.

  The answer is C.

  There were also fifty questions about penalties, fines, and points docked for various offenses, few of which were intuitive.

  When a driver on probation drives vehicles loaded with explosive goods, inflammable and explosive chemical goods, highly toxic goods or radioactive dangerous goods, the penalty is __ points for each violation.

  The choices were 1, 2, or 3 and the answer was 2, the same as talking on a cell phone while driving. I could only hope that probationary drivers driving “radioactive dangerous goods” are less common than the ubiquitous driving while chatting.

  Three weeks later, we crammed in the backseat of Mr. Dou’s car on our way to the test. When we arrived, we were ushered upstairs with a group of twenty-five, entering a large room proctored by five uniformed police officers. I chose English from twelve language options, instructions popped up, and a little clock in the upper right corner began counting down my forty-five minutes.

  I guessed on three of the first fifteen questions and realized that my odds of survival were low. I felt like the walking dead. I was moving too quickly through the test, sure that the ones I didn’t know wouldn’t benefit from extra analysis.

  A frowning red face appeared as soon as I hit send without rechecking any answers. A cop shooed me to the front, where an unsmiling woman officer scribbled “82” on the bottom of my form and handed it back. I actually thought that was pretty good.

  Downstairs, I handed my paper to Mr. Dou, who frowned and shook his head with a look that could have indicated either pity or disgust. All my hopes were pinned on Becky. If she got her license, at least we could use the car right away. One person after another emerged, most of them frowning, before my wife finally walked out, looking despondent. She had scored an 87. The next available appointment was in three weeks.

  We drove back to town in dejected silence. While Rebecca went to work, where she had to swallow her pride and admit failure, I headed for a sports bar to watch the Steelers on Sunday Night Football (Monday morning in China). Ten a.m. wasn’t too early for a pint of Guinness, which helped sweep me away to another world. As much as I was digging China, sometimes I needed a dose of Pittsburgh, and nothing provided it quite like my beloved Steelers.

  Three weeks later, we again walked into the licensing bureau, just as the previous hour’s test takers were coming downstairs. A beefy American guy in a Carharrt jacket approached his driver, who was standing next to me. “I am not coming here again, no matter what,” he said, in a thick southern accent. “Do you understand? I am not taking this test again. No way, no how. I will just hire cabs and drivers. This is ridiculous.”

  He was looking at me, clearly wanting someone to feel his pain. He said he was from Tennessee, here with five other guys to install giant turbine engines all over the country.

  “The first four guys came in here and flunked, so us two have been studying our asses off for three days,” he recounted. “I got an 87. This is ridiculous.”

  He grunted when I said that people were making fun of us for failing—my blog was ablaze with flaming posts. “Show them this damn book.” He waved it around. “Then see who’s laughing.”

  Every Chinese person we discussed our failure with had been far less sympathetic, finding our difficulties laughable. Each of them had scored between 95 and 100 on the test; they considered this kind of straight memorization to be child’s play.

  Upstairs in the test room, my confidence returned as I breezed through the first fifteen questions. I finished, reviewed my answers, changed three, and hit “Done.” A dancing smiley face immediately appeared. I had scored a 90. I felt like jumping up and spiking my study book.

  I gave Rebecca a thumbs-up, mouthed “good luck,” and walked out grinning. Another guy entered the stairs with me, also smiling maniacally. When I congratulated him, he answered with a thick Eastern European accent.

  “I went to four years of university and many more of advance degree study but I have never stayed up all night studying until last night. This test is unbelievable!” It was his second time taking the exam as well. I told him we should celebrate tonight.

  “We must, we must!” He patted me on the back and shook my hand. “This is a great day.”

  Downstairs, I handed my paper to Mr. Dou, who smiled. He kept asking about Rebecca, apparently wondering if we had shared answers, not understanding that was impossible. We both waited anxiously for ten minutes until she emerged with a big smile. She had scored a 94.

  As we walked back to the car holding hands, I told Becky that I didn’t remember feeling such joy since our kids were born. It must have been an exaggeration, but she did not disagree. She had saved some serious face in the office, where her large Chinese staff was waiting to see whether or not the new boss had failed again.

  Chapter 7

  When You Feel it, You Know

  With our driver’s licenses in hand and things falling into place, I was able to concentrate on smaller pleasures, like finding someone to play music with. I had come to Beijing with high hopes of establishing myself as a musician rather than a musical observer.

  I had always been tentative playing guitar around my family and friends, because they didn’t think of me as a musician, and around others because they often expected me to be great due to my long association with Guitar World. Singing in public was even harder. I overcame some of these insecurities when I joined a friend’s band for three songs at a big farewell party before we left for China, and I hoped to build on that in Beijing. Since no one knew I didn’t sing, I could sing.

  Despite playing for fifteen years, I had not advanced beyond solid intermediate status. I had been listening to music with serious intent since I was twelve, but didn’t really start playing guitar until I became Guitar World managing editor at age twenty-four. I took just enough guitar lessons to allow intelligent conversations with both my colleagues and the many guitarists I interviewed for the magazine, which we were establishing as one of the country’s top music magazines filled with in-depth features that gave me tremendous access.

  These meetings were consistently thrilling; Guitar World offered me fly-on-the-wall access to many of the musicians I admired most. I ate lunch with blues greats B.B. King and Buddy Guy and listened to them discuss how much it pained them to see “them kids” smash up guitars, the very things that had given them so much. I met with Eric Clapton in his hotel suite; got drunk with Metallica’s James Hetfield years before he made a well-documented trip to rehab; interviewed Albert King, my favorite blues guitarist, backstage just months before he died; sat in on many recording and rehearsal sessions; and watched the Allman Brothers Band perform from a perch behind Gregg Allman’s organ.

  Being close to the music—not the celebrity, but the music—was in
valuable, and I couldn’t imagine giving it up, even when some of my family and friends thought I was slumming. I was fulfilling a childhood vision I first had as a twelve year old spending hours lying on my brother’s yellow shag carpeting listening to the Allman Brothers Band’s Eat a Peach and studying the psychedelic artwork inside the double album’s gatefold.

  In eighth-grade English class I chose the late guitarist Duane Allman as the subject of my biography of a great American. Duane had died in a 1971 motorcycle crash at age twenty-four, when I was five years old. My teacher returned the paper with two grades: an A and an incomplete with a note to see her. “This is very good,” she said. “Frankly, it’s hard for me to believe you wrote it by yourself. Did your brother lend a hand?”

  Twenty years later I was writing historical essays about the band for Allman Brothers’ CD releases. It felt natural, but had I followed my passion or simply taken the path of least resistance? I had ended up with a career I knew I could do in junior high.

  My deep immersion in music and my experiences with great musicians actually made me take my own guitar playing less seriously—why bother if I couldn’t live up to my heroes’ standards? Having a collaborator with whom I felt the spark of inspiration could break this feeling. I had several over the years, and my playing improved in radical leaps during these periods. Otherwise, I stagnated despite good instincts because I found playing music by myself uninspiring and boring. The potential for something exciting, maybe even transcendent, existed only in the interaction with others, and I never knew where I might find that inspiration.

  The most knowledgeable, helpful poster on the Guitar World Online message boards was “Tragocaster,” a Michigan guitarist who persistently invited me to his Sunday night gigs at the rural Otisville Hotel. I finally took him up on it one summer night while visiting Becky’s family in Bay City. My father-in-law insisted on joining me for the hour-long drive down a dark two-lane road. Just after the Otisville town limits sign, the shoulder of the road became filled with Harley-Davidsons. The ramshackle wood frame hotel sat at the town’s only intersection and was completely surrounded by the big bikes.