by Alan Paul
“Wait a second. Did we actually win?”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Someone was supposed to call you yesterday.”
I restrained myself from screaming with joy and completed the interview in a state of amused amazement, with my heart beating rapidly. A cocktail of positive emotions swirled through me: I was proud, tickled, cracking up, and just basically blown away. As soon as I hung up, I dialed Woodie’s number and waited impatiently through his Avril Lavigne ringtone.
“Hello, Mr. Paul,” he answered. “How are you today?”
“We won, Woodie. We are City Weekend Band of the Year!”
“Ha ha. Wow. Congratulations, Alan. That’s just . . . incredible. What an accomplishment.”
We promised to celebrate the next day when we already had plans to meet for lunch and discuss the recording session. We entered the studio riding a high.
Modern studio recording is a strange process quite antithetical to a jam-based band like ours. I eventually convinced Woodie and the guys to cut several songs live in a rehearsal space, but they insisted on beginning the process the tried-and-true modern way; recording each instrument separately, then layering them together afterward in a final mix. You start with drums, then add bass and rhythm guitar and finally vocals and solos.
It’s a long, tedious job and after the initial rush of excitement died down, the day grew long and I was still hours from touching my guitar. My phone battery was dead, and I was uncomfortable being out of pocket from my family for so long. With nothing much to do, I drove home to check on the kids and make sure their homework got done.
I plugged my phone in, and it was immediately flooded with text messages. The most recent, from my friend Susan, read,
I hope Jacob’s OK. That looked bad.
I called her immediately.
“What happened?” I tried to maintain my composure. “My phone was out.”
“Jacob hurt his arm playing T-ball and it looks broken. He is with Wyatt.”
I called Wyatt and learned that he and Jacob were on the way to the hospital, where Becky would meet them. Everybody had been frantically trying to call me.
“My phone was out,” I said. “Is he okay?”
“He’s calm and the arm is in a sling, but it’s definitely broken. We will be at the hospital in a few minutes.”
“I’ll be there in twenty.”
I arrived right after Rebecca, just as Jacob and Wyatt were walking out of the x-ray room. Jacob’s skin was ash white, his right arm deep purple and hanging in front of him, his hand dangling at a grotesque angle, as if his wrist had moved three inches up his arm. I hugged him gently and kept my arm around him, guiding him back to the Emergency Room, his mother on the other side of him.
“It really hurts,” he cried, finally letting down the brave front he had maintained with Wyatt. He calmed down after a shot of morphine and told me that he had gotten hurt diving into first base. “I was safe,” he added.
Dr. Wang, a friendly, seventy-something orthopedic surgeon who had trained in the United States decades ago, spoke great English, and reminded me a bit of a Chinese Dixie Doc, came in and popped the x-ray into a viewer. It was obviously a bad break, both forearm bones snapped just shy of a compound fracture. We held Jacob’s left hand as he was wheeled into the operating room to have his right arm set, kissing his forehead and waving good-bye just before the door swung shut behind his stretcher.
As Becky and I sat in the waiting room nervously awaiting news, I reflected on just how close I came to spending the night in the studio oblivious to what was happening to my son. This was a scary intersection of my two worlds.
We picked up our Band of the Year Award at a ceremony inside a half-built luxury mall, one of many similar structures around Beijing. We were asked to perform but Lu Wei and Zhang Yong were unavailable, with a commitment to another band, so Dave, Woodie, and I performed as a trio. Playing in the same minimal alignment with which we had debuted fourteen months earlier made it obvious just how far we had come.
Two willowy models handed us our award, which the three of us accepted with glee. In photos snapped a moment later, we are smiling ear to ear, holding the award plaque between us, our arms draped over one another’s shoulders. Anything felt possible.
We resumed recording in a new studio in Lu Wei’s remote neighborhood. It was inside a house tucked away in a quiet, dead-end alley, close to the last subway stop on Beijing’s Eastern line. I learned the disadvantage of the remote locale when talk turned to dinner.
“The only place that will deliver here is a donkey burger restaurant,” Woodie said.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “How about some fried noodles?”
“Sorry, but I guess it’s donkey burgers or nothing. Will you try that? They’re actually pretty good.”
With my stomach growling, I agreed. I had been open to trying anything since I arrived in China, but I didn’t really seek out exotic food adventures. Southern China was more famous for its eat-anything ethos, and I had skipped Beijing’s famous penis restaurant and passed on a couple offers of dog. Now it looked like it was time to give donkey a try.
Dave soon arrived, wearing a suit, holding a sax in one hand and a briefcase in the other.
“Do we have any food?” he asked. “I’m starving.”
“It’s on the way and you’re in for a treat,” I said, with a laugh.
A few minutes later, the engineer walked in carrying a cardboard box stacked with little sandwiches on wax paper—barbecued donkey sliders. They were surprisingly good, tasting a lot like barbecued brisket on fresh focaccia. Westerners don’t associate Chinese food with bread, but local Beijing cuisine has a wide range of tasty, freshly made rolls. After gobbling a couple down, I entered the studio and finally laid down vocals for my first two songs.
It was strange singing in a quiet room all by myself, listening to the music on big headphones. In this sterile environment, it was hard to attain the same level of emotional involvement and intensity I reached onstage, but I did not feel nervous.
Dave played parts until after 1:00 a.m., then Lu Wei called us a driver. As we stood on the street waiting for him to find us, Dave was furiously pecking at his BlackBerry, as he often did until moments before we took the stage, sometimes taking orders from the treasury secretary. As the U.S. Treasury Department representative in Beijing, his job was to meet with Chinese officials and explain official U.S. economic policy.
Now the financial crisis was exploding and he was in the middle of the fire. I realized how little I knew about what he had to deal with as I watched him standing in this remote outpost of Beijing in the middle of the night intensely discussing complex issues of vital importance to the world economy. We were friends and neighbors. We shared many meals with our wives. Our sons played together and ran in and out of each other’s houses without a thought. No one else had shared the experience of being Americans in Woodie Alan. Yet we had rarely discussed his job or our internal lives. We shared an intimacy that seemed to transcend the need to talk about anything much.
The driver finally showed up, we climbed into the white subcompact car, and I offered directions to Riviera. We pulled into the silent, dark compound after a traffic-free half-hour drive, with the car shaking and shimmying anytime he pushed it past 50 miles per hour. I cranked down the window and told the guard who stopped us my house number. He smiled at me—the guards always seemed amused by my rolling home in the middle of the night in all sorts of vehicles—and opened the gate. As we pulled in, the driver whistled at the sight of the huge, dark houses and laughed. “You guys are rich!” he said in Chinese. I laughed nervously. I really had nothing to say to this.
The next day, when Woodie and I returned alone to the studio to finish our vocal and guitar tracks, I brought along some instant coffee and snacks. We had almost finished recording five original songs and were well on
our way to having an album done.
Chapter 25
Come and Go Blues
June is the cruelest month in Expat Land. The transient community undergoes an annual end-of-school turnover that never really gets any easier. Each member of our family lost a dear friend every year, often a soulmate without whom Beijing was unimaginable.
By our third year, I had adopted an attitude reminiscent of my grandmother’s perspective on outliving most of her friends. As we celebrated her eighty-fifth birthday, she told me, “After a while when you hear the news, you think, ‘What a pity. Thank God it’s not me.’ ”
What a pity. Thank God it’s not me.
That’s exactly how it felt every time my band took the stage at a farewell party and launched into Bob Dylan’s “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” This song had become my signature way of saying good-bye while also morphing into a Woodie Alan centerpiece. We had completely rewritten the music, with an extended introduction featuring Zhang Yong’s distinctly Asian solo, making the piece our most successful East/West hybrid. It felt more original to me than the eight songs we had written and played every night.
Resetting our own clock to stay for another year lifted a burden from our shoulders, but it didn’t alter anyone else’s time frame. We were saying good-bye to some stalwart friends whose companionship had marked our time in Beijing.
Eli was particularly devastated that the Camerons were leaving; their son, Race, had been like a brother since we arrived in Beijing, and their house was his second home. Their departure only reinforced his view of expat living as an endless series of heartbreaks, a perspective formed when a great friend left for Singapore a year earlier.
“We are stuck,” he said as the two of us drove home from a friend’s house one afternoon. “Wherever we are now, we’ll be away from people we want to be with.”
“You can’t look at it that way,” I said. “Everyone in America is still there and we still love them and they still love us. And now you also have all these great new friends. After we go back to America, we’ll have friends in Australia, Hong Kong, China, England. . . .”
This was a kids’ version of “it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” and he saw through it as clearly as everyone else nursing a broken heart always has.
“No,” he insisted. “We were fine before, but now we’ll always feel sad about someone not being close to us.”
I couldn’t really disagree with him. We were knee-deep in planning farewell parties for two couples, both of whom we would miss dearly. I thought we would discuss these events over a dinner of Hou Ayi’s gong bao chicken and sautéed greens, but Becky had something else on her mind. The paper wanted her to return to New York to become the international news editor. The fact that this was the precise job I had just recently suggested would be an ideal post-China gig only made the news harder to digest. I couldn’t really resist, but they wanted her back in New York immediately, which was simply unacceptable.
Rebecca had always been an extremely loyal company solider, but I suggested that maybe it was time to step out of character and flex some of those Pulitzer muscles. Wrapped up in our friends’ impending departures, it was unfathomable that we too might soon be packing up our house.
Though Becky had struggled with the decision to extend, she had felt a great sense of relief and never looked back once it was finalized. She wasn’t ready to leave and felt horribly guilty about the prospect of suddenly uprooting the family and especially me from a life she knew I loved.
The Olympics also presented a major logistical hurdle. They were just six weeks away and we were both credentialed to work the Games. The Olympics had loomed over our entire stay in Beijing and leaving before them was unthinkable. I had worked for years to get a gig as an NBC.com blogger, while Becky was not only covering the Games, but also overseeing logistics for the Journal’s entire team.
Leaving just after the Olympics was also problematic, since by then school would be on the verge of starting in New Jersey. When she told her bosses that she couldn’t possibly leave before the school term ended in December, she thought she had put them off without quite saying no.
They called her bluff, however, by saying that she could start in January. There were a lot of details to work out, and she dragged her feet in formally accepting the job, but leaving early now seemed inevitable.
As much as I wanted to stay longer, I never suggested that Rebecca turn down the job, because it was clearly perfect for her. I got a lot of credit for moving around the world for my wife’s job and I was not above basking in it, but I never lost sight of the fact that her success had opened this door and would inevitably close it as well.
All corporate expats serve at someone else’s pleasure. Our little community was rife with people being yanked around like yo-yos by the invisible hand of the home office. I watched friends live with tremendous uncertainty, unsure until the final days of their contract whether they would be renewed for another year and, if not, where they would be headed. We were being granted the opportunity for a civilized departure.
But being intellectually understanding did not mean that I was not emotionally roiled. I knew how fast the time would fly. We were in the middle of a steady stream of visitors, which would end with Jacob and Eli returning to the United States to spend three weeks with relatives as Becky and I worked twelve- to fifteen-hour days throughout the Olympics. By the time the kids returned, we’d have four fast-moving months left.
The idea of leaving Beijing now heightened every sensation. It made me treasure every moment and every experience and begin looking at everything with new eyes and renewed interest. This is the state I was in when I got an e-mail from Kristi Belete, who had recently moved, asking me to go over to their house and pick up a few things they had left behind. Walking into their emptied house shook me up. All signs of their vibrant household were gone, and I recoiled when a management rep asked if I was the new tenant. The very idea of someone else moving in to my friends’ house offended me.
That empty building reminded me why stuff didn’t really matter: we make the inanimate objects come to life. My expat experience had largely liberated me from an attachment to specific places and things. I thought leaving our house in New Jersey would be difficult, but I had rarely thought about it. I had no idea what was in the container of belongings we had left in storage and knew that I wouldn’t have missed anything if it all just vanished.
Walking through Nathan and Kristi’s former house searching for their missing items, I was also overcome by the realization of the extent to which my fond feelings for Beijing and the Riv were wrapped up in the people. There was no charm to these bare walls, studded with hooks where pictures of a vibrant, smiling family used to hang. The friends I loved were gone and this was just a structure now. I began to contemplate what for me had been unthinkable: how all this would look when I was gone.
We wanted to wait until we were certain about the move before telling the kids. But it was impossible to put it off any longer because too many people were beginning to discuss it and we didn’t want them to hear secondhand. We kept everyone in the kitchen after dinner one night and told the kids that it looked like we’d be heading back to New Jersey in December, at the end of the fall semester, instead of July.
Anna burst into tears. She didn’t remember living anywhere other than China. Her only memories of Maplewood were our visits home, and she lacked the great friends there that her brothers had retained.
Eli pumped his fist and only had one question: “Is it for certain?”
He had been counting down the days until our departure from China for the last year, ever since that trip to D.C. Once, when we told the kids that they could each pick one thing to buy at the massive Panjiayuan Flea Market, packed with Chinese knickknacks, Eli found an American-flag-clad Apollo moon landing glass. I feared that he had idealized
America and his life there.
“It’s not going to be like when we visit,” I reminded him. “You are going to go to school and have homework and everyone isn’t going to rush over to see us every day.”
“I know,” he insisted. “That’s fine.”
Jacob had the most complicated, nuanced reaction, both because he was the oldest and because he truly had mixed emotions. He understood not only what he was gaining—all those cousins he struggled to say good-bye to—but also what he was giving up. As hard as it had been for him to return from our last trips to the United States, he loved almost everything about living in China.
He loved the regular trips to the Great Wall; the beautiful, fascinating parks teeming with people; the travel; the baked sweet potatoes bought for a dime from migrants pedaling around with giant, coal-heated oil drums on the back of their bikes; his British school and its sports teams; and his terrific crew of international friends. Leaving it all behind was going to be difficult and he knew it.
In the midst of all this turmoil, my parents arrived for their second visit, joined by Aunt Joan and Uncle Ben and my brother’s son Jesse, who would spend the summer with us. These kinds of visits were always a mix of great fun and high stress, as we felt pressure to keep everyone entertained. We used a tour guide to escort visitors to Beijing sights, but I also loved taking visitors to my favorite spots.
My dad joined Woodie Alan for two gigs, as we transformed ourselves into a Dixieland band for a few songs. The Chinese guys enjoyed the change of pace and the opportunity to meet my father, whom they treated with great respect. He was equally impressed with them.
“These guys are really good,” he said, sitting on the patio of the Stone Boat, just before he was to join us for our second set. My father was famous for carrying his horn with him everywhere, ready to jump on any stage, but now he hesitated, though the previous night’s performance had gone well.