Anarchy in the People’s Republic

Three years ago, I received the most outlandish of all corporate grants: for three months I would get paid to live in Beijing and play punk rock.

    My benefactor was a stationery corporation that manufactured address labels, file dividers, and now, apparently, anarchist youth. The corporation’s founder had taken a life-changing trip to China as a college student, and decided to promote “cross-cultural understanding.” Cross-cultural understanding, indeed. All I really wanted was a little travel money.

    But my proposal read like a neo-con memo, a missive from Lawrence of Arabia: I would liberate the youthful masses from the pernicious influence of hard rock and heavy metal, supposedly spreading faster than the avian flu. I would lead the Beijing counterculture in glorious battle against the State and MTV. I (and the band I needed money for) would smash bottles of Tsingtao over the heads of the Public Security Bureau, then puke my guts out in the middle of Red Square.

    The day I learned my proposal was approved, I realized nobody had actually read the thing. Not even me. Sure, I liked leather jackets and mohawks, and admired, in an anthropological way, the heavily pierced gutter punks who spare-changed outside my local shopping mall. I harbored dreams of reliving Manchester ’76. But since college (and my days in an ill-fated band called Slobberpussy) I’d enjoyed punk music about as much as dental root planing. I missed being a musician, sure, but as I packed up my old studded bracelets and ripped jeans, the inconvenient truth lay before me: I hated punk rock.

    I got to Beijing not so much carrying my guitar as dragging it. Having spent half my grant money on a drinking binge during the three-day stopover in Tokyo, I decided to move into a cheap student dormitory where I’d heard I could meet some proles. Instead I descended one level further into musical purgatory.

    My new neighbors were Korean high school exchange students in the thrall of kissy-faced Korean boy bands, and French business students devoted to Alanis Morrisette, whose songs I’d studiously avoided in

Slobberpussy’s thrash-punk days, and still did. I could only pray that the Chinese wouldn’t adopt her music as they’d done other pop stars, such as John Denver and Karen Carpenter. Every time I walked into a hotel or restaurant, “Leaving On a Jet Plane” hung in the air like a cloud of unclaimed flatulence.

    Isn’t it ironic, Alanis taunted me through the thin dormitory walls every night.

    So where were the punks? On the Internet I’d seen photos of mohawked Chinese kids, screwing up their faces in front of the Forbidden City. I’d heard rumors, later confirmed by Time and The Guardian about China’s linglei, the alternative-culture generation, the first that dared sport tattoos or dyed hair. I’d pictured Williamsburg or Silver Lake, but in Beijing the underground seemed to be, well, underground.

    Then one day, stumbling around the sprawling and smoggy city, I found Beijing punk’s epicenter: Kentucky Fried Chicken.

    It was just an ordinary KFC in the foreigner’s district, San Lit Tun, but there I managed to have my first cross-cultural exchange with members of one of Beijing’s most prominent punk bands, Brain Failure while they snacked on such local KFC staples as Happy French Fry shakes and Old Beijing Chicken Roll. Only the singer, Xiao Rong, spoke English, and not much at that. For twenty minutes, we grasped for common ground, the old-fashioned way I remembered from junior high:

    “You like Minor Threat?” I asked.

    Brain Failure shrugged, collectively.

    “The Dead Kennedys?”

    More shrugs.

    “Alice Donut?”

    More shrugs. “Alice in Chains?” tried Xiao.

    Okay, I thought. Sure, Alice in Chains. I nodded.

    “Very good,” Xiao agreed, translating for his bandmates. Everyone nodded, smiled. I could tell I’d touched a Hooksexup, so I pressed on, making progress incrementally. I felt, I admit, a little like Lawrence sweet-talking the bedouin.

    “I came here to start a band,” I explained. “A punk band.”

    “Punk?” said Xiao, shaking his bleached head. “Finished two years ago. There aren’t many of us left. Now everyone listens to nu metal. You know, Limp Bizkit?”

    “Limp Bizkit?” I coughed. I’d slipped one more level into the inferno. For a moment, I tried to envision playing on stage with a Chinese Fred Durst. No. My stationery giant patron wanted me to break down cultural barriers, but there was one I wasn’t willing to breach. There had to be some middle ground.

    “What about the Strokes?” I suggested.

    More shrugs.

    As the weeks passed, I saw shows nightly at Beijing’s far-flung bars. I listened to bands with such names as Confucius Says, Stinky Tofu, and Wooden Pushmelon, but my poor (well, non-existent) Mandarin thwarted my efforts to find like-minded musicians and fulfill my grant requirements. For a while I jammed at a local practice studio with an insane and earnest kid named Yang Yang who had been barred at most of the local venues for trying to confiscate the microphone from whatever band was playing. Things were going well. Then I found out Yang Yang was Japanese. Disqualified.

    Anxiety gripped me as the weeks passed, and I still hadn’t recorded the 7″ I’d promised my sponsors. Would I have to

give the money back? I fretted about this until one night, remembering my conversation with Xiao, I had a vision. I’d do the one thing no white boy, with few exceptions, would ever be able to accomplish back in the States.

    I’d start a hip-hop crew.

    I emailed Ry, a rapper-artist friend from L.A., and explained my predicament. I needed to form the crew fast. It had to be subversive and promote cross-cultural understanding. And, most importantly, it had to have a cool name: the Far Eastsiders.

    To my amazement, I persuaded Ry to fly out to Beijing. More astonishingly, within forty-eight hours he had befriended every rapper in the city. (Admittedly, there were only three or four.) On his fourth night, we traveled to the university district to smoke hash and freestyle with a local rap phenom we’d heard about, named MC Webber. I listened to three Chinese kids beatbox and bust fast rhymes in Mandarin between bong rips. I had no idea what they were saying, but I thought: Damn. That sounds good. We sound good.

    Ry was undaunted. Occasionally he would drop in a flow of his own: Where’d you get that? / It was made in China/ Brand-new sneakers and a red recliner.

    We were sealing the deal. I could already see the album cover: the five of us throwing signs in our gold chains and jerseys, outside the KFC, the Colonel in the background. Would it be an import record, or an export? Would Dre produce our American debut?

    Then came my turn.

    Where’d you get that? I rhymed. It was made in China.

    My rap crew brothers listened politely, bobbing their heads.

    Damn, I’m tired of these noodles, I struggled. Yo, anybody know a diner?

    There was more, but I’m sure it sucked. Ry kept freestyling, but I collapsed, creatively spent, realizing that I would never achieve musical influence on either side of the Pacific, in any genre. The Chinese I’d met had no taste, but I had a bigger problem: no talent. I dragged myself back to my dormitory and spent the rest of my trip listening to my French neighbors blast Alanis. By the end of my China adventure, American cultural hegemony had succeeded after all: I knew all her songs by heart.
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