Big in China

by Alan Paul

  I asked Jonathan Ansfield, an American journalist who ran one of my favorite bars, the Stone Boat, if we could rehearse there. The Boat was a literal stone boat sitting in a lake in downtown’s lovely Ritan Park. In warmer weather, bands played on a little stage extending over the water, and two patios filled with guests, but it was quiet and cozy in the winter. Without the outside seating, the Boat had just a few tables, with a small bar and a tiny kitchen in the rear. A half loft was accessible by ladder. It had bright red walls and exposed beams painted in the festive, multicolored style of old Chinese temples and palaces.

  I invited Dave to join us, though I couldn’t really picture a sax fitting into an acoustic duo; I imagined the group with him being an entirely different operation, but hoped we could start with a song or two. That night, in front of a handful of people, Dave wailed through the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil,” Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and everything else that I thought would be too acoustic to handle a sax. Having him by my side was reassuring; I felt my panic receding.

  “You guys sound great,” Jonathan said, sitting down to join us. “Let me know when you want to play here.”

  After two rehearsals, we already had a second gig lined up. Becky was amused by this whole operation, especially my chutzpah in inviting everyone I knew to come see me perform at the Orchard. Despite her own success, she had an intense aversion to self-promotion. I probably inherited my brazen streak from my father, who was famous for inviting everyone from the mail carrier to the jurors from court to come see him perform. I had always had a sense that I could pull something like this off, and inviting so many people and promoting my music aggressively was also a form of putting pressure on myself, forcing me to really step up my game. My confidence was buoyed when playing with Dave and Woodie, and I was happy that we had one more rehearsal to polish everything.

  The second rehearsal did not go as planned. I answered the phone in the cab to the Stone Boat and knew something was wrong as soon as I heard Dave’s rough, stress-filled whisper.

  “I don’t think I am going to make it over,” he said. “I unexpectedly have become the focal point of the Six-Party Talks.”

  A banking disagreement had put the Treasury Department—and Dave—in the middle of these nuclear arms negotiations with North Korea, which seemed to drag on forever and go nowhere. Hearing the ambient noise, I pictured him bent over, with his head under the table.

  “Are you there now?”

  “Yes. Can’t talk long. If I get out earlier than expected, I will come over. Otherwise, I’ll just hope I can make it Saturday night. I have been pulled into a vortex.”

  I had invited three friends to the rehearsal to give us an audience and some feedback and to force myself to play and sing under the eyes of people I knew. Alone with Woodie, I stumbled through “Soulshine,” an anthem written by the Allman Brothers’ Warren Haynes, and the Marvin Gaye classic “How Sweet It Is.” We tried to work them out, but the more we broke the songs down, the worse I sounded. When one of my guests suggested that I was “missing the E minor on the ‘How Sweet’ vocal melody,” I began to feel nauseated. I had no clue what notes I was singing. The whole episode was making me feel profoundly unstageworthy.

  The debut performance at the Orchard was two days away, and humiliation seemed likely. The next morning, I followed the sage counsel of an old friend, who e-mailed a list of advice for the gig, culminating in “ . . . most importantly, PRACTICE A LOT!”

  Bathrooms have always been one of my favorite places to play guitar because the acoustics are great in the enclosed, tiled space. I took my guitar into our large master bath, planted myself in front of the mirror with a set list, and sang the entire planned performance, forcing myself to hold eye contact with myself.

  I ran through a dozen songs, then repeatedly returned to “Soulshine” and “How Sweet It Is” until I could finally sing both steadily. I repeated this solo rehearsal the next day, just hours before taking the stage. A year later, Woodie laughed hard when I told him about this. “I had no idea you were nervous,” he exclaimed. I hid it well.

  Dave made it to the gig and we had a huge turnout. We were a novelty act, and this expat life offered up a ready-made, captive audience. One thing I had learned from watching my dad was that people give their friends a huge benefit of the doubt because they enjoy seeing people they know perform. I also learned to keep plowing ahead no matter what and to never apologize for yourself.

  A rational approach would have been to play the songs we felt most comfortable with for forty-five minutes, but I opted to play two sets of stretched out, solo-heavy music, just like the Allman Brothers or Grateful Dead. Reaching high paid off in the long run, and it felt completely natural in our go-for-it environment.

  As my friend Matt Carberry, an entrepreneur who always had an ambitious new project under way, said, “Beijing encourages you to make mistakes in all the right ways.”

  Wading into the crowd to find Becky after our first set, I was greeted like a conquering hero, with friends patting me on the back, buying me beers, and hoisting toasts. No one realized how much insecurity I had defeated by climbing onto that stage. My friends were having fun and accepting me as a performer. This was not being perceived as a joke. I had to relax and let it flow, which I began to do in the second set, after unplugging the monitor speaker in front of me so I no longer could hear my voice booming back at me.

  More friends stopped by on their way home from other outings, and people finished eating in the back and pushed toward the stage. Encouraged by the growing crowd, we played a few songs too many, venturing onto thin ice. But I walked off the stage just before midnight swollen with pride. Dave was less impressed.

  “That was a good start,” he said. “When are we going to get a rhythm section?”

  I was going to point out that we were developing a unique acoustic trio sound, but Woodie agreed with Dave.

  “I know some people I can contact,” he said.

  As we sat down with friends to celebrate, Lisa’s husband and business partner, Ertao Wu, joined us.

  “You guys were pretty good,” he said.

  A musician himself, he was no doubt most impressed simply by the number of people who showed up, but that was fine. “Call Lisa about another date; let’s do it again next month.”

  Chapter 14

  Let It Grow

  I kept hearing from people who enjoyed our debut, including one Australian friend, who thanked me, saying, “I haven’t seen my husband move like that in twenty years.” Within a week, we had booked another gig at the Orchard and one at the Stone Boat, as well as two private parties. Things happen fast in Expat Land.

  Seeking to expand our sound, we added a bassist named Mr. Li and played with a rotating cast of percussionists, including a Mexican, a Canadian, and a Ugandan. One beautiful spring night, Woodie strolled into the Stone Boat accompanied by a tall, lanky guy wearing a traditional Chinese linen jacket.

  “This is Zhang Yong,” Woodie said. “He is going to play bass with us tonight. I couldn’t find Mr. Li.”

  Zhang Yong looked like a terracotta warrior come to life, with a dignified, classical demeanor and long hair tied into a bun on top of his head. Only the Fender bass slung over his shoulder looked modern. He flashed an easy smile.

  We quickly ran through skeleton outlines, and I handed him a few chord charts I had, but the bassist was basically flying blind and he soared. Zhang Yong’s limber, funk-infused style immediately had the rest of us on our toes.

  “That was a happy accident,” Dave said afterward. “He’s great.”

  Woodie told us that Zhang Yong had just left the pioneering band Zi Yue (Confucius Says) after seven years and they had also met through an instrument repair. We were all pleasantly surprised that he was willing to keep playing with us. His presence made us reach a little higher.

  We
were still wobbly, though, and only I could tighten things up. I had to overcome my instincts to defer to everyone else because a band needs a leader and everyone was looking to me. I slowly accepted this responsibility, while also beginning to write some original music. I started by playing a simple blues progression and penning a meditation on the city’s noxious air. I wanted to express that Beijing was a dirty old town but that it had a grip on me.

  They say the sun is shining, but I don’t see it anywhere . . . I’ve got the Beijing Blues / I just need a gulp of cold clean air.

  There’s stars in my eyes, but I don’t see them in the sky / This place is under my skin and I wonder why oh why.

  We settled into a nice routine, playing the Orchard and Stone Boat each once a month. This seemed like the right number of shows to maintain a balance between the band and family life. Becky liked Woodie and knew how much fun I was having. She thought the band was a grand caper after years of hearing me warbling in the living room. She became our gigs’ social director, bouncing from table to table, drinking wine and making sure that the wide mix of friends was having fun.

  My whole family was getting a kick out of the band and my new role. One night I even lured Jacob up onstage to play hand drums and sing background on “Soulshine,” which both of us loved. But I realized that if the music was going to fit with my family lifestyle, I couldn’t treat every gig like my twenty-first birthday party, no matter how many people wanted to buy me drinks.

  This became obvious when I found myself dragging around the house on a Saturday afternoon following a late-night gig and early soccer wakeup. My head pounded and I longed to crawl into bed, but Eli wanted me to go bike riding with him. When I snapped at him in reply, fear flashed through his eyes and a deep sense of shame washed over me. I decided that moment to quit drinking for a month. Life in Beijing had been one big party, and it was time to give it a rest.

  My self-prohibition was interrupted after three weeks by a series of champagne toasts and celebratory parties, fueled by some extraordinary news: Rebecca’s bureau had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for a series called “China’s Naked Capitalism.”

  Winning such an award was fraught with politics, luck, and flukiness, but you have to play to win and Becky had been in the game for a long time, doing great work across a wide spectrum of topics. She had not written the stories but had steered and edited every piece. I viewed the Pulitzer as validation of every grueling hour she had worked, and the care she put into everything she had done since she started her first job in Florida.

  Of course, many great journalists do great work for decades and never receive a Pulitzer. Something was in the air. The previous international award had gone to the New York Times for its China coverage, and these back-to-back wins confirmed what we had felt since day one: we were in the right place at the right time.

  We had been swept up in a giant wave on our first day in Beijing, and the crest just kept rising. We needed to see how far we could ride this thing, and the only way I could see to do that was by keeping our eyes focused directly in front of us.

  We had not arrived at this peak as a result of any grand plan but through some holy mixture of luck and pluck. No formula could explain what was happening, and pausing to analyze felt like a recipe for a crash. I messed up a song the second I let my mind wander, and I was certain the same was true for our lives. We had to stay in the moment every moment.

  I recalled the wisdom contained in a favorite B.B. King song, which now became my mantra:

  You better not look down if you want to keep on flying.

  Chapter 15

  Visible Man

  “I’m glad you made it back in one piece.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I had no idea what this guy was talking about, but I was pretty sure I had never seen him before, and certain that we had not traveled anywhere together.

  We were standing side by side, playing catch with our sons, warming them up for a baseball game on the fields behind the International School of Beijing. My head was a little foggy from spending the morning coaching two soccer teams, then rushing fifteen minutes north to get Jacob to this baseball game.

  He laughed at my confusion. “I’m glad you made it back from your trip to Sichuan. It sounded really scary.”

  He was referring to my recent column about a perilous bus trip through the sixteen-thousand-foot mountain passes of Sichuan’s wild west.

  “Oh, thanks.” I smiled and threw the ball back to Jacob. “Thanks for reading.”

  It should have been obvious that he was talking about my column, but I wasn’t used to strangers recognizing me or knowing details about my life, even though I shared them widely in my WSJ.com columns and on my personal blog.

  I wrote everything desiring readers, but pretending they didn’t exist. I had been an open book from the minute I landed in China, but if I pondered my audience too much I would grow self-conscious and hesitant. Though my blog was publicly available, I treated it as an ongoing letter to my family and friends. My openness was puzzling to some, who urged discretion and privacy.

  “Stop the madness and think about what you’re putting up here,” one friend e-mailed. Why, he wondered, was I so willing to post details of my family’s ups and down and pictures of my children? I ignored him and anyone else who raised such questions. As a writer I process my thoughts and feelings through chronicling them, and the posts were helping me make sense of everything. Being in China also protected me from becoming overly self-conscious about what I was posting; the website that hosted my blog was usually banned there, so I couldn’t read it without a fair amount of effort and neither could anyone else in Beijing. That made it easy to pretend I had no readers.

  I wrote about things that interested me without pondering the implications too deeply, and I carried that same spirit over into my WSJ.com columns. Though they were intended for a much wider audience, I still pretended that I was just writing for myself.

  This became a progressively harder illusion to maintain as it became clear that Beijing’s expats were reading my columns. A friend thinking about transferring her kids to Dulwich visited the school and was handed a copy of a column I had written about my experiences there. This shook me up because I had never intended to pen ad copy. Although happy with the school, we also had plenty of culture-clash annoyances with the administration’s British emphasis on athletics, its tone deafness to other sensibilities, and its insistence on uniforms and tucked-in shirts, which I thought represented a more profound emphasis on style over substance.

  I could have asked the staff to quit handing out the columns, but I was also flattered and pleased that it would alert newcomers to my work. This typified my deep ambivalence; I wanted everyone to read my column, but I didn’t want to be singled out. I wanted my work to be recognized, but I didn’t really want to be recognized.

  My picture ran with the column, however, and strangers began saying hello. One day I was swimming with Eli and Jacob in the Riv’s indoor pool when I noticed a guy staring at me. He finally approached and politely asked, “Excuse me, are you Alan Paul?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, wow. I’m so honored to meet you.”

  “Uh, thanks.” Honored? Did he say honored?

  “I love your column. We just moved here and we were so excited when we realized that you lived in Riviera too.”

  “Oh. Wow. That’s really cool. Thank you.” That’s weird. Did he say he was excited to live in my compound?

  This meeting was both freaking me out and stroking my ego, but Eli and Jacob just wanted my attention.

  “Daddy, throw me!” Eli jumped on my back.

  “Yeah,” my fan said, as my son climbed up my neck. “We were trying to decide between a few schools and then we read your column about your kids going to Dulwich so we sent them there.”

  People were
actually choosing their kids’ schools based on what I wrote? Maybe I need to weigh my words more carefully.

  Eli leapt off my shoulders. Now he and Jacob both jumped on me, their impatience growing.

  “Come on!” Jacob walked his feet up my back.

  “Daddy, throwww meeeee!” Eli shouted.

  “Well, I better attend to my kids,” I said, with one child hanging off each side. “It was really nice to meet you. Thank you for reading and for your support. It means a lot to me.”

  We shook hands.

  “Oh, thank you. I was hoping to run into you at school. This is great.”

  I went back to playing with the kids, tossing them around, but I was distracted. I valued my anonymity—the feeling of nobody knowing me was one of the truly liberating things about moving to Beijing a year earlier. It was strange to feel like people were watching me, but also flattering that anyone cared.

  When my boys ran off to get ice cream, I found Becky in the outdoor pool playing with Anna. She laughed at my recounting of the conversation.

  “My, my, my,” she said. “What have we created?”

  Her amusement grew as more people approached me, including once at the airport luggage carousel and another time at a downtown restaurant. Interest grew when the Journal’s Chinese-language site began translating the column. On one flight back to New York, a Chinese investment banker across the aisle said he read my column religiously. Most of his colleagues read it as well, he said. They all worked with foreigners but didn’t understand us, what we were thinking, or how we were living. I was providing them a valuable window into a strange and mysterious culture, and they enjoyed the chance to view their own country through an American’s eyes.

  Several times, Rebecca met with Chinese business leaders who asked if she knew “a man named Paul.” With different last names, our connection was not obvious.