Big in China

by Alan Paul

  “The thing I really admire is you consider all possibilities on every issue. You taught me a new way to play.”

  I had not taught Lu Wei anything other than how to feel a blues rhythm and that was done strictly by encouragement and example. “You are a great drummer—a far better musician than me.”

  “That has nothing to do with it! There is more freedom playing with Woodie Alan than any other band, and I began to understand why this was such a good idea: the freedom encourages you to perform better. With you, my feeling of playing is different each performance—even performing the same music at the same place.”

  This was natural to me; I had no interest in playing the same songs the same way every time. But it was a revelation for Lu Wei.

  “I love this kind of excitement,” he said. “With other bands, I often feel like I’m just playing to complete the work. But it is quite different with Woodie Alan—every song has excitement, and I always feel highly emotional.”

  Woodie was translating and I was recording the whole fast-moving conversation on my phone, hoping it was capturing every word. Lu Wei was echoing back to me exactly what I thought all music—and even life itself—should be about: playing with emotion, following your gut instincts, retaining spontaneity while being in control, practiced, and professional.

  Zhang Yong was nodding along with everything that Lu Wei said, occasionally adding his own amplifications.

  “You are very tolerant,” he said. “With you, we can do whatever we want to do because you are very willing to try different things and respect our thoughts. We feel really relaxed and enjoy the freedom. Most Chinese bandleaders just want everyone to follow his ideas.

  “Our band is always in a good mood because everybody came to it for fun. We had no rules for rehearsal, and we all drink and eat together—like this. It means a lot.”

  I wondered what Woodie thought about all this, but when I asked, he looked at me like I was a slow child, unable to grasp that two plus two was four.

  “I feel exactly the same.”

  When we finally rose to leave, Woodie said the three of them were going to get foot massages and urged me to join them. “There’s no point sleeping now for you anyhow,” he said.

  He had a point but I needed to digest the conversation and write it down before the feeling was lost. My vision of my role in the band had been completely wrong. I thought that my relative inexperience rendered me the student, but I was also the teacher. I wondered if remaining oblivious about this had allowed me to blossom in the role without self-consciousness.

  I thought about my former teacher. Maybe Yechen and I had more in common than I realized. He had thrived in London, where his attachment to an ancient Chinese way of life, which was out of step with contemporary China, was charming and even cutting edge. In my home culture, I had thrived around the margins of popular culture by being an expert on musicians and athletes far removed from their glory days. I had to come to China to be relevant to the contemporary conversation, and to truly reinvent and find myself.

  Chapter 31

  Tick Tock

  I biked home from a jaunt through a nearby village one morning, with thin plastic bags steamed up with fresh-baked scallion pancakes in my front basket. I was thinking about the ride, about the movers on their way to assess our house, and about those pancakes, which I was excited to get home and eat. I was not thinking about the short remaining ride as I turned the corner onto our circle at high speed and almost ran over my friend and neighbor Deirdre Smyth. Walking just inside the curb, she yelped as I slammed on my brakes and yanked the handlebar to the right, skidding to a halt just in front of her. She laughed as I apologized profusely.

  “It’s OK,” she said, mock-slapping me across the face. “How’s the move going?”

  “Oh, it’s fine. It’s just exhausting and kind of hard to believe it’s actually happening. The movers are coming in half an hour to start calculating.”

  A Venezuelan native, Deirdre was an expat lifer, who had moved to Beijing from Oman a year before we arrived and would leave for Moscow six months after we departed. She had seen hundreds of friends come and go and possessed a keen sense of expat personality types.

  “I’m really surprised you guys are going back to where you came from,” she said. “I expected you to take another posting.”

  “Why?”

  “You just don’t seem the type.”

  “What do you mean? We really like where we come from.”

  “It’s not about that. You travel every chance you get. You love all the adventure of living here. I’ve seen so many people spend all their time abroad pining for home. They thrive going back. It is really hard for people like you who take advantage of every minute they are living somewhere else to go back where they came from.”

  “We’ll be OK; it’s a nice place.”

  “I’m sorry, but I think you are going to struggle. Talk to each other a lot and be careful.”

  I knew what she meant. We had thrown ourselves into life in Beijing, never treating it like it was a temporary stop. I wanted to do the same thing when we returned. I have never been a “remember when” guy, and I didn’t want to find myself in Maplewood pining for Beijing and muttering about how things were there.

  In college, it drove me crazy when people said, “These are the best years of your life.” It seemed insane to write off the next six decades and I was no more ready to throw in the towel at forty-one than I had been at twenty-one. I fought the urge to proclaim our stint in China the highlight of our lives or give in to feeling maudlin about leaving.

  On my blog I wrote, “Feel free to smack me in a few years if you hear me say, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time my band played this big festival in China?’ ”

  But I was far from done with Woodie Alan. After the kids went to bed, I rushed off to late-night recording sessions at the apartment studio of a French friend of Zhang Yong’s who was helping us finish the CD. We also continued to play as many gigs as possible—at our favorite bars, at the U.S. ambassador’s residence, at a series of corporate parties, at an American Chamber of Commerce meeting. We had reached a new level of professionalism where these high-paying gigs felt natural. We also had a record deal, with Guitar China, a company that would manufacture and distribute Beijing Blues—if we could complete the recording before I left.

  When we headed south for a three-city tour that began in Zhang Yong’s hometown of Nanjing, his parents invited us over for dinner. Their apartment was in a large complex of identical buildings a half hour outside downtown. It was an impeccably clean two-bedroom, decorated in white. I expected Zhang Yong’s father, a retired military college instructor, to be tough and flinty eyed, but he was quiet and friendly, flashing the same kind, bemused smile that I had seen on his son many times.

  His mother, a tall, handsome woman, stood in her small kitchen wearing an apron and cooking continuously, putting dish after dish down on the table, talking a mile a minute as she cooked. The food was simple, fresh, and tasty. She surprised me by pouring a nice bottle of cabernet into elegant little crystal glasses.

  As she spoke about the pain of having a musician for a child, Zhang Yong ate and smiled, unperturbed by his mother’s litany of disappointments. He had clearly heard it all before.

  “I encouraged him to be a musician,” she said. “But I thought it was a hobby, a great thing to do, but not for a life. I kept waiting for him to grow out of it, get a real job, and settle down, but he just kept riding his bike and playing music!”

  Zhang Yong had lived all over China, always finding steady work as a musician before growing restless and moving on, sometimes just leaving a note on the kitchen table for a live-in girlfriend to find in the morning. He still rode his bike to most of our shows, his bass secured on his back, despite living at Beijing’s northern edge, about twenty miles from downtown.

  A few yea
rs earlier, his parents had used much of their savings to buy him an apartment close to theirs. Then they spent more money remodeling it. Zhang Yong thanked them, spent a night in the place, and sold it the next day, using the money to buy a small apartment in Beijing, providing stability as he returned to his itinerant ways.

  As she told this story, she came up behind Zhang Yong and playfully smacked his head. He kept eating. His father was sitting in a comfortable recliner a few feet away, laughing. Whatever pain Zhang Yong had caused his parents, they were clearly a loving family.

  “We should have had another one!” she exclaimed. Zhang Yong was born before the one-child policy had taken effect, so they could have had more children. “But this one was enough to keep us busy! I tried to keep him in line with regular spankings but nothing worked. He was naughty.”

  She turned to me. “You people don’t believe in hitting your kids, do you? How many do you have?”

  “I have three. No, we don’t hit them.”

  “Ai! I don’t know how you could do that. Impossible!”

  “What kind of job do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m retired but guess what I did; it used to be the most respected job in China, and now it’s the least respected.”

  She stood before me, hands on her hips. I hesitated and thought, while everyone ate and drank and she looked down at me, waiting for an answer.

  “You worked in a factory?”

  “Exactly! The foreigner knows! Ha! Very good. Eat some more pork!”

  She picked up a tray of sautéed sliced pork and handed it to me, then asked Woodie if he had “a real job.” Pleased with his affirmative response, she turned to Lu Wei.

  “And you?”

  “No. No job. I’m a drummer!”

  “Do you own an apartment?”

  “No.”

  “Do you own a car?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have a wife or kids?”

  “No.”

  Lu Wei was smiling, enjoying this parry, and maybe missing his own mom. But Zhang Yong’s mother was unsparing.

  “You have nothing! You need to grow up. You are not a child anymore.”

  She was hectoring, but with a smile. She was irresistible, and we were all enjoying this performance. When Woodie and I first got together, I was thrilled to have found such a great musical mate. I never could have guessed that he would end up bringing me so deeply into Chinese life.

  The immersion was part of what I enjoyed on our tours. We stayed in simple business-class hotels that cost about $20 a night and were located in solid, quiet middle-class neighborhoods. I woke up hours before my bandmates, strolling the neighborhoods, just watching people go about their lives. In Suzhou, I walked the streets alone for an hour, before stopping in a local noodle shop for a big breakfast bowl of spicy soup noodles. A three-year-old at the next table, with a shaved head except for a rounded patch in front, pointed at me and said, over and over, “Wei gou ren chi mian!” (The foreigner eats noodles!) His father shushed him, embarrassed, but I laughed, gave a thumbs-up, and said, “Hao chi!” (Tastes great.)

  We ended the tour with three shows in two days in the lovely lakeside town of Hangzhou, including appearances at a packed jazz club and at the Asia Pacific Harmonica Festival. We took the stage of a grand two-thousand-seat theater after a tiny old Japanese man in tails playing classical music to prerecorded tracks and before the eighty-member Hong Kong Orchestra played Beethoven under the direction of a flamboyant conductor. Other performers included a pair of stout, lederhosen-wearing Eastern Europeans playing duets of Hungarian folk songs and a young Malaysian group who performed with a fantastic break dance troupe dressed in wild fluorescent outfits.

  After our three-song acoustic performance, we ran through the rain to a waiting van, which whisked us across town for the last gig of our tour.

  “When you asked me to come jam at the Stone Boat last year, I never could have imagined a year later I’d end up performing at the Asia Pacific Harmonica Festival,” Dave said with a laugh. “I’m glad I walked through that door when you opened it.”

  Chapter 32

  Baby Please Don’t Go

  We pushed our move-out date back a week so we could host our fourth and final Thanksgiving in Beijing. Every year we filled our house with a mix of friends, always including at least one group celebrating the holiday for the first time. We had Israeli, Chinese, Austrian, Kenyan, Ethiopian, and Australian guests.

  Hosting this event and cooking our own turkey made me feel like an adult more than anything else ever had. No matter how old I got, I still felt like heading for the kids’ tables back home at Thanksgiving. But in China, being in charge of the meal, explaining the rituals to our guests, and cooking and carving the bird had made me feel distinctly grown up. We enjoyed one last grand gathering in our Riviera house, raising a toast of Riesling to friendship and to the expat life.

  As much as we enjoyed this gathering, it was hard to shake a grandiose, melancholy feeling that we were gathering for our Last Supper. Not everyone was sympathetic to my dramatic sense of impending loss, however. I learned this the next day when I stopped by the Orchard for lunch with owner Lisa Minder, who scoffed at my angst.

  “These are rich people’s problems,” she said dismissively. “Keep some perspective.”

  It was true that we were trading one privileged existence for another, but I didn’t think we should feel guilty about mourning our loss. It was weighing particularly heavily on Becky, who felt responsible for plunging our family into chaos, a feeling reinforced by Anna’s daily asking, “Why does Mommy have to move back?”

  “I hate ripping you away from here,” she said late one night as we lay in bed. “It feels rotten making the kids leave in the middle of the school year and being the Yoko Ono of Woodie Alan—the wife who ends the band.”

  “That’s nonsense.” I sat up and turned toward her. “Your job brought us here; your success gave us all this opportunity and now it’s taking it away. It’s how it had to be.

  “And you’re not ending Woodie Alan. I don’t know how, but we have more life left in us.”

  “You can come back and play shows,” she said hopefully. “It’s just a plane ride away.”

  I laughed at her typical insistence that we could do it all if we just tried hard enough. It was an attitude that could be exhausting but that pushed us far and always helped me feel that anything was possible. I owed a lot to my wife’s can-do optimism.

  “It’s a long plane ride, but maybe I can come back for some festivals or special shows. We’ll work it out.”

  When Nik Deogun, the Wall Street Journal’s foreign editor, came over for dinner in the midst of a China visit, we told the kids to be on their best behavior. “The guy on his way is Mommy’s boss,” I explained.

  I proudly watched all three children politely shake hands, hold eye contact, and say hello. The boys scattered, but Anna sat down with the adults as we dug into Hou Ayi’s dumplings.

  She looked Nik in the eye and asked, “Why does my mommy have to move back to America?”

  For months we had been answering this question with, “Her boss says she has to.” Now the boss was here and Anna wasn’t going to let him slip away. When no one answered the question, she asked it again, louder.

  “Because people in New Jersey don’t know enough about China,” Nik said. “And we need you to help us understand this place.”

  I thought I saw Anna rolling her eyes as she got up and walked away, but maybe I was just projecting.

  I paid visits to the doctor, the tailor, the rug store, and the “leather lady,” who was making me two coats. I finally took a cooking class with Hou Ayi because I didn’t want to return without knowing how to make those great dumplings; she also taught me how to prepare gong bao chicken and spicy tofu. I used to be a pretty good cook and I needed to sharpen those
chops again after three and a half years of having most of my meals prepared for me.

  Eli was still counting down the days until we moved, seemingly without a second thought about what we were leaving behind. Anna remained somewhat sad and frightened. Jacob was marching bravely forward but also dreading saying good-bye to his extraordinarily close group of friends. He had fully embraced his British education, speaking with a slight accent and saying that he wanted to “attend university at Oxford or Cambridge.”

  One evening, I leaned against the metal gate in front of our house and watched Jacob and his best friend, Kerk, cross the street. They walked in lockstep, Kerk’s left leg moving in sync with Jacob’s right. “Waddle!” Jacob yelled, and they both laughed, pointed their toes out and walked on, swaying to the sides like penguins, still perfectly in sync.

  Kerk and his Chinese Malaysian family lived directly across the street and the two boys were practically roommates, running back and forth to and from each other’s houses. They rode the bus to school together, were in the same class, and spent every possible minute in each other’s company, developing their own private language, which required few words to convey a world of meaning. It was beautiful to watch, and my heart ached thinking about the upcoming demise of this day-to-day interaction.

  I admired Jacob’s stoicism. My family also moved when I was ten—from one end of Pittsburgh’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood to the other. I threw fits, cried myself to sleep, and threatened not to honor this one-mile shift away from my gang of friends and into a new school zone. Jacob was much braver. He fully understood what the move would mean for him, but he was not allowing it to ruin his last weeks in Beijing.

  We met a group of friends for an extended multicourse dinner at Da Dong, one of Beijing’s best duck restaurants. We enjoyed a succulent modernized version of our adopted city’s signature dish and a great spread of scallops, eggplant, and salty beef. Afterward, we climbed into the back of a cab and began zipping home.

  Becky seemed lost in thought before speaking. “I feel like a traitor for leaving,” she said. “It’s like we are abandoning the team.”