by Jim Yardley
To reach Taiyuan, I had left Beijing in the morning and also left behind the notion of municipal restraint. Beijing was hardly a pyrotechnical slouch, but it did restrict where and when people could buy and blast their arsenals as an ancient city’s precaution against fire. Taiyuan was an ancient city with no such policy. From my room on the twenty-eighth floor of the World Trade, I watched men bend over and touch the sidewalk, fiddling with matches before quickly stepping back and craning upward as another bottle rocket shot off the ground, spiraling, spiraling, spiraling up to a wobbly summit where it exploded in a puff of smoke. Puffs of smoke floated in every direction. Because all the factories and mines were closed for the holiday, the air was unusually clear of pollution, revealing the skyline of a city curled inside a ring of mountains: the yellow glass tower of the Howell & Johnson rising a few blocks from People’s Square; the jagged steel tips of the new downtown skyscrapers; the high-rise apartments peering over the park of stunted, brown trees along the frozen Fen River; and the grids of old, flat-roofed socialist-era apartment buildings, square and depressing, conveying the institutional gloom of a prison.
Ren Hongbing collected me at 10:30 p.m. Midnight marked the New Year, the moment when the full arsenal was unleashed, and we would celebrate with his extended family. He was tickled that I was joining them as an honored foreign guest on this most auspicious evening. He greeted me as Yangge, or Older Brother Yang, the honorific bestowed on me by the Chinese players. We squeezed into his small car and moved through the city until we arrived at a housing block of government apartments. Every apartment had a small balcony, from which people were lighting long strands of firecrackers that crackled like machine guns: Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! Pow! In the narrow dirt alleys between the apartment buildings, fathers were firing Roman candles as children bent so close to the flame that their faces glowed in the yellow light. I could feel a light sprinkle of ash falling from the sky.
Ren Hongbing was laughing as we ducked into a dingy stairwell and climbed up to his family’s apartment.
We had first met before the season. I had seen him in the front office and had assumed he was one of Zhang Beihai’s minions. These were the handful of guys who unlocked the gym, renewed visas, ordered food, dealt with sponsors, booked travel, and managed the books. When Boss Wang was around, they organized his pickup games, playing if needed, and generally cowered in his presence. Individually, they had different jobs, but collectively they served, along with the general manager, as an institutional buffer between Boss Wang and everybody else. Inevitably, this meant they had to clean up his messes. When paychecks were late, as was more common than not, the accountant bore the complaints and threats and whining of the players. The money is coming, the accountant would promise, never mentioning that he hadn’t been paid, either. There was an assistant general manager who carried around a lot of keys and sometimes drove the van for the foreigners. There was a media man, the two farm women who swept the floors and cleaned the toilets, and the old man with the angry scowl who locked and unlocked the front gate and apparently represented security.
So when the season began, I was surprised to see Ren Hongbing behind his soundboard at the corner of the court. I was flabbergasted after first experiencing his show. It was consciousness-altering. Typically, the role of music during a basketball game was similar to the role of music during a movie, which was to manipulate the emotions of the audience at critical moments. In movies, music conditioned and prepared the audience for whatever plot twist was coming. Certain types of music signaled danger. Others signaled romance or sadness. Another was designed to quicken the pulse—the cavalry is coming! The same principle applied to a basketball game. A game deejay used one type of music to excite the fans when the home team was rallying and another type to reawaken the fans if the team was struggling. The deejay might use one noise for a 3-point basket and another for a dunk. Doing all this required coordination between what the audience was seeing and what it was hearing. It hinged on conditioning, so that the audience equated certain musical cues with certain emotions, the way Pavlov’s dogs were conditioned to equate the sound of bells with dinner.
I was not conditioned for Ren Hongbing, at least not at first. I felt dizzy as I tried to connect what I was seeing on the court with what I was hearing as he twisted knobs on his soundboard. My emotions felt more pummeled than manipulated. In theory, the music or musical prompts should play a supporting role to the game itself, yet the music never seemed to stop, regardless of what was happening on the court. Ren Hongbing had a completely different catalogue of musical cues and a completely different sense of timing. The music was so loud that I found it hard to hear Journalist Li beside me on press row. Worse, I couldn’t tell how the music was supposed to make me feel at a particular moment of the game. It seemed, initially, without any logic or shape. There was some screeching Peking Opera, some saccharine Chinese pop ballads, some techno stuff from Europe, and some hip-hop from America. And, of course, the Wave. It was all a raucous, incoherent mess, or so I thought.
Once I had visited other arenas, where the deejays usually played only the music approved by the league, I slowly realized that Ren Hongbing was thinking quite a lot about what he was doing. He was experimenting, trying to find out how musically to best blend something Chinese with something Western. His experiments could be excruciating at times or, as I would come to appreciate, they could be small moments of genius. He could even be considered an artist.
As a teenager, he had been rebellious and his parents pushed him into the People’s Liberation Army to drum some discipline into him. When he was discharged after two years, he went on a walkabout, drifting around the country, without a job or money or prospects—yet, unbeknownst to him, with the benefit of very good timing. It was 1992 and China was about to take off. His wanderings carried him to Guangzhou, the city of hustlers and fast fortunes on the Pearl River, where social attitudes were far less constrained than in Taiyuan. One night, he went to a disco. He would later say his life was forever changed.
As a boy, Ren loved singing and playing the guitar, but music was hardly a career. His parents were factory workers, and China was still untethering itself from the old, planned economy in which the state assigned jobs. Doing something solely because it made you happy and fulfilled, especially if it was unconventional, was a fairly daring concept. At the disco, Ren was transfixed by a Dutch deejay named Johnny who stood behind a board of switches and blended together music of different styles and nationalities, creating something original, if not wholly unfamiliar. Ren was transfixed. He approached Johnny at the end of the show but they could not communicate; Johnny did not speak Chinese. The following night he returned with an interpreter and a proposition: He wanted Johnny to be his teacher. Could he apprentice under him?
Johnny took measure of this strange man whom he could not understand and without hesitation said no.
“I didn’t know this kind of thing could be a career,” Ren would recall. “When he said no, I went to his apartment every day for a month to ask him to be my teacher. He was moved by my passion. We became teacher and student.”
Johnny eventually took in his new student, too. Ren was homeless and practically penniless, except for money sent by his parents. Johnny played gigs until early in the morning and arrived back at the apartment to find Ren awake, having bought Johnny hot food. They would eat and experiment on the soundboard until dawn.
“He would sleep all day,” Ren said. “I would practice during the daytime on his soundboard without turning on the sound because I didn’t want to wake him. If I made mistakes, I would go to the club and listen to my teacher and then return to the apartment to practice.”
He first learned how to mix two songs together. When his dexterity improved and his imagination expanded, he began mixing five different tracks and his apprenticeship ended. He played at popular discos in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Hohhot and earned a following in the underground culture of Chinese pop music. When he
made it to the final round in a national deejay competition, Johnny offered to take him to Europe and expose him to other musical influences. Ren said no.
“I felt some regret, because in China I couldn’t learn the newest techniques and the equipment wasn’t the best,” he said. “But I didn’t want to leave my home, my country.”
He was born in Taiyuan, toward the end of the Cultural Revolution. During the Maoist era, parents often named their offspring after whatever patriotic campaign was under way. In the 1950s, during the country’s first five-year economic plan, many babies were named Jiangu, or Build the Country. During the Korean War, babies were named Yuanchao, translated as Aid Korea. But the Cultural Revolution left perhaps the biggest mark. I befriended a farmer from central China who during the Cultural Revolution had renamed himself as Zhandou, or Struggle. In Beijing, I occasionally rode with cabbies named Wen Ge, short for Cultural Revolution. Ren’s parents had also chosen appropriately revolutionary names. Their firstborn, and only daughter, was Hongying, or Red Heroine. Next came Hongyu, or Red Fighter, followed by Hongwei, or Red Guardian. Last came Ren Hongbing, or Red Soldier. These names would later seem like strange historical artifacts, and it said something about the pace of change in China that a baby named Red Soldier grew up to be a man who made a career by mixing tracks of Sweetbox with tracks of Taiwanese pop.
Ren’s chosen occupation perplexed his parents. They had financed his apprenticeship, but traveling the country to mix records together at discos didn’t seem like stable or even normal work. “They thought it was strange,” he admitted.
His break came when the Brave Dragons moved to Taiyuan in 2006 and approached him to be the game deejay. He almost turned down the job, fearing he knew too little about basketball, but he auditioned during a game and proved so popular that he was hired. He loved the atmosphere, and the excitement, but the job was initially less creative than he had hoped. The CBA restricted what a deejay could say and also provided teams with digitized cheers that closely emulated those in the NBA. Deejays could play an English track of “Deeefennse! Deeefense!” when the visiting team had the ball. Every team also had the same halftime ritual in which two fans competed in a shooting contest. Many of the cheerleaders danced to the same songs, no matter their team. It was Big Brother saying: We need to be hip; here is the approved guidebook on how to get there.
Ren was too restless for that. Early in the season, he invited a famous deejay from Taiwan who spent three days in Taiyuan and cajoled Ren to put his creative juices to work, to let loose.
“He told me that I could have my own free style of play,” he said. “He told me to put my personality into playing the music. But he didn’t tell me how. What you hear is all me.”
Profanity was forbidden, and he couldn’t cross any political lines, but he decided to use the game as his canvas. He already had a style but he was searching for a new language. He wanted to blend the mix of the team into his mix of music. He asked every player his favorite music, movie, or video game, especially things from their childhoods. Kobe remembered a favorite childhood video game with a catchy techno track. Ren found it. Olumide loved to dance and liked Russian disco from his teenage career in Siberia. Ren found Russian disco. He played part of the Hallelujah Chorus of Handel’s Messiah whenever Bonzi made a 3-pointer.
He knew everything would fall apart if the audience felt excluded, if the language of his cues was too disconnected and unfamiliar, so he sprinkled snippets of culturally iconic Chinese music throughout every game. When an opposing team called a timeout, he played a famous song—synonymous with a dullard—from the movie Da Hua Xi You, a Hong Kong parody of the Chinese classic Journey to the West. He dabbled so often that he occasionally got lost in his own musicultural mélange. Against the powerhouse Guangdong team, he played a track from Huang Fei Hong, a popular movie, before realizing that the movie was in Cantonese, the native language of the Guangdong team. He had committed musical treason.
“No one complained,” he said, “but it was a mistake.”
He became a little bit famous in Taiyuan. Professionals and friends praised him and said nice things to his parents. They started coming to games and seeing how much fun everyone was having and how the crazy noise their son was making was integral to the fun. Soon Red Fighter and Red Guardian became regulars, and Red Heroine came, too. Their baby brother, Red Fighter, was the musical madman of Taiyuan.
“We are the only team now to have individuality in our music,” he would tell me, “to have our own musical style.”
Red Guardian was in the kitchen, wearing an apron and pinching dumplings. New Year’s custom in northern China called for serving dumplings after midnight, and Red Guardian and his wife were pressing the dough into little crescent moons. He was short and muscular, like a wrestler, and he grinned and welcomed me to the apartment. I was feeling a tinge guilty for invading the family during the Chinese equivalent of Christmas and Thanksgiving blended together, but I could see I was regarded as one of the unexpected, if pleasing, novelties of what Ren’s career had provided the family: a foreign guest on New Year’s Eve.
The apartment was small but pleasant, and other than Red Heroine, who was spending the evening with her husband’s family, everyone was there. Ren steered me to the sofa, in front of the television, where a seat of honor had been prepared beside his other brother, Red Fighter. Then he started pushing food on me. There were nuts, hard candies, sesame seeds, and slices of dried beef on the glass coffee table.
“Eat! Eat!” Ren demanded.
I ate. Red Fighter pointed to the plate of food and grinned. I ate some more. The terms of engagement for the evening were established.
Ren’s pregnant wife brought me a glass of soda. At twenty-five, she was almost a decade younger than her husband and usually helped him during games. They met on the Internet, as part of an online video gaming group that matched experts with novices as a mentoring exercise. She was a dancer in Henan Province and a video game novice. He was an expert and they spent two years communicating through instant messaging, never meeting or seeing a photograph of one another. When she messaged to say she was going to travel around the country, he invited her to stop in Taiyuan. They were married soon afterward.
I nibbled on a slice of dried beef and hunkered down beside Red Fighter and Ren’s father to watch the CCTV New Year’s Gala. The closest experience in the United States was watching the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving Day and, like the Lions, the Gala had its share of critics. It was a variety show of singing, dancing, skits, and stand‑up comedy that managed to be the most complained about television program in China even as it was arguably the most watched television show in the world, with an audience of anywhere from 400 million to one billion. The carping, which usually boiled out of Internet chat rooms, generally focused on the show’s determined lack of creativity and daring. Ultimately, the show was accountable to government censors, and the Communist Party understood enough about propaganda to use a captive audience of hundreds of millions of people to its benefit. Last year, the Gala featured a long panoramic shot of the unsmiling nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee as well as a gentle reminder of the unfinished business of reuniting Taiwan with the motherland.
Certainly no one in the studio audience dared express anything but happiness with the show. In 2007, with midnight drawing near, the hosts completely bungled and mistimed their lines, interrupting one another and growing visibly annoyed. At least the audience was on cue; everyone burst into applause. Yet, like the Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving, the show was an indelible part of Chinese New Year. Minutes before midnight, Ren’s parents were laughing at all the jokes, as the rest of us hurried down the stairwell with fireworks.
Outside, it was Pearl Harbor. People were lighting strings of firecrackers that dangled out the windows of their apartments, snakes that crackled and hissed. People squeezed into the narrow alleyway, blasting bottle rockets or Roman candles. I could hear every sound: the booming thuds, the ins
istent whistles of the bottle rockets, and the rattle of the firecrackers. The noise was so deafening that I covered my ears as gunpowder and burned paper rained down on top of us. I checked my watch. It was midnight.
“This,” Ren shouted into my ear with glee, “is Chinese New Year!”
It was astonishing. Ren bent over beside a parked car and lighted a string of firecrackers. The thought occurred to me that this was not the safest thing to do, but the thought passed. I had never heard or seen anything like this. Beijing was for pikers. Colors flashed overhead, and the dull windows of the apartments shimmered in the reflected splashes of yellow or green or blue light. The whole city seemed to be shaking in joyous celebration.
We returned to the apartment as the shelling continued, and I took my seat. Now it was time for dumplings. My own bowl of dipping sauce was on the table, and Red Guardian placed a huge plate of dumplings in front of me. Then another plate, a molehill of dumplings. None of the ten other people who crowded into the apartment was eating yet. That was my job. Everyone smiled and nudged me as still more food arrived on the table: nuts, dried raisins, candied kiwis, cookies, blackened sunflower seeds, chopped shoots of garlic, and more sliced beef. Ren nudged me toward the slices of beef. His father had cured it. Red Fighter pushed a dumpling at me. I dipped it in my sauce bowl with my chopsticks and swallowed it whole. I ate another, and another, and another.