Big in China

by Alan Paul

  I thought there was a big difference between interviewing someone for a magazine article and talking to a friend. I respected the boundaries he was setting and tried not to pry. Asking questions and being a good listener were essential skills for being a good journalist, but I never wanted my friends to feel like they were my subjects. I was particularly sensitive to this in Beijing, where several people had admitted that they felt self-conscious around me, worried that something they said or did might end up in a column. I never wrote about anyone without their permission, but sensitivity to this issue may have heightened my reluctance to push Woodie for more information.

  I did tell him how often I had heard similar stories, and how guitarist Jimmie Vaughan had related virtually the same tale about his little brother, Stevie Ray—the fiery guitarist whose face graced Woodie’s arm. I wanted him to know that his heroes had wrestled with the same demons and proved that they could be vanquished, but I treaded carefully.

  The part of Woodie’s struggle that was clearly relevant to me was that he had channeled his anxiety into something very productive for the band; he had arranged those songs and driven us to rehearse them. That prompted me to finish writing a song, which we were already playing to applause. Maybe this change in Woodie’s lifestyle would be good for all of us.

  A couple of hours after dinner, we took the stage at Jianghu Jiuba in front of a packed crowd celebrating the great little club’s first anniversary. We welcomed a steady stream of guests to the stage, including Tianxiao, who played tenor sax; three different harmonica players; and five guitarists, including shredder Powell Young.

  We took a short break and as we returned to the stage, Woodie was excited. “Hang Tian, a really famous singer, is here,” he said. “He quit performing but said he wants to sing. Let’s call him up before he changes his mind.”

  Woodie introduced him, the crowd roared, and a professorial guy with a wispy beard, a tweed jacket, and long hair pulled back behind his ears shuffled up to the stage with a little wave.

  Woodie looked at me and said: “E major shuffle.” We laid down a hard-charging rhythm and Hang Tian started singing “Hey Hey Guniang” (basically “Hey There Ladies”), a Chinese jump blues that had the whole place singing along. When Hang Tian forgot the lyrics everyone else seemed to know, Zhang Yong, who had been singing harmony, took over lead vocals. I marveled again at his singing voice.

  Hang Tian began the blues standard “Stormy Monday” before forgetting the lyrics and holding the mic up for me to finish the song. He walked off to applause, and we played the rest of the set without any guests, as everything we had been working toward came together. We were embodying the musical ideals I sought in everything I listened to: tight but loose.

  We caught a groove and rode it hard for an hour. People were running in from the back room to see who was onstage. We were the great band in the hole in the wall that I had spent my life searching for. Something changed during that show; I saw a vision of what we could become, instead of just being happy with what we were. I thought I had been overly ambitious about the band, but now I realized that I had not been ambitious enough.

  Nobody considered Woodie Alan a silly diversion anymore. Becky wouldn’t complain about the gigs again. We both understood that this had outgrown my dreams and I had to see just how far I could take it.

  Chapter 21

  Teach Your Children

  “THIS. IS. BORING!”

  To make sure I got her point, Anna flung herself up and landed hard back on my lap. We were jammed into the backseat of a cab with Jacob and Eli by our sides cruising through Shanghai’s fetching French Concession in search of a park. Becky, seated in the front, looked back and we exchanged a meaningful stare conveying concern, consternation, and confusion.

  We were wondering how our pint-size adrenaline junkie was not finding enough stimulation on this outing. We both would have struggled to combine the words Shanghai, French Concession, and boring in a meaningful sentence. After two and a half years in China, we were still not jaded by our surroundings.

  But this life was normal for our kids: Beijing was where they lived, Shanghai was just another place to jump on a train and visit, and our vacations were consistently fantastic. Their expectations seemed awfully high after a couple of years living like this.

  We had traveled to Shanghai with several other families and attended one megaevent after another: the huge Special Olympics opening ceremony, where Yao Ming waved at them; a fabulous acrobatics circus; and the Women’s World Cup soccer finals, where we sat with the families of the American team. Each was a thrilling spectacle, making this little jaunt through the French Concession seem kind of lame, at least to Anna.

  The moment encapsulated a concern I had since moving to China—that we were training our kids to expect too much with our new, internationally fabulous lifestyle, which included both frequent travel and a day-to-day existence that was far more grandiose than our lives back in the United States. Our fake rich lifestyle included daily household help, the gated community, regularly hiring drivers, and a general sense that access to anything was just a phone call away. I worried that this would warp their values and perspectives and instill a sense of entitlement—a trait for which Rebecca and I had little patience. I had already heard seven-year-old Eli and his friends discussing the relative merits of Thai and Malaysian beaches.

  Becky and I struggled to make sure our kids felt the same sense of wonder we did every time we stepped off a train or plane in Asia. Sometimes it seemed to take hold—they grasped the wonder of feeding sea eagles in a Malaysian mangrove river and riding elephants through a Thai jungle. Other times they whined or begged to play Game Boys on the bus rather than visiting a Tibetan temple or taking in a stunning Sichuan mountain vista.

  I was confident that the travel had at least opened my kids’ minds as it had mine, helping them understand that the world is huge and interconnected, with an endless choice of places to go and people to meet. They were developing a far broader, more international outlook than I had as a child. I just didn’t want them to think it was normal to bang around from one fancy Asian resort to another.

  The easy solution would have been to slow down our traveling, but we were hell-bent on making the most of our time in Asia. We tried to balance the luxurious vacations with trips into rural Chinese places like Guizhou and western Sichuan. When we were first contemplating whether to move to Beijing, Becky pointed out that we had reached a stage in life where we were unlikely to undertake a lot of ambitious travel. “We can go see China and these places now or wait until we’re retired in twenty-five years,” she said.

  I wrote a column on being worried about spoiling the kids that struck a nerve, flooding me with e-mail responses and even prompting NPR to interview me about my concerns. I was feeling good about myself, confident that I had tapped into a deeper truth about raising kids abroad.

  Then I got a dose of reality.

  When the column actually hit, we were on our way back to China from a Christmas-break visit to the United States, and the children were pouting on the plane. Even as I worried about them becoming pampered by fancy private schools, household help, and Asian beach vacations, they were longing for aging public schools, cleaning up after themselves, and trips to the Jersey Shore. My kids were starting to miss home and with each visit back to the States it became more difficult for them to accept the fact that they lived in China and we had no plans to move back soon.

  When this job opportunity came up for Rebecca, we both understood that the timing was perfect to make an international move and that it would only get more difficult as our kids approached adolescence. Now Jacob was a veritable tween and was becoming more aware of what he was missing out on, realizing that life elsewhere didn’t stop while we were on our adventure. Every time Jacob had had to say good-bye to someone, he gave them a big weepy hug and said, “See you in a year.”

 
He was literally pained every time he bid farewell to a beloved cousin, developing a toothache whenever such a parting loomed. His mental state continued to affect his senses upon our return. We were groggily waiting in the passport line in Beijing when Jacob started complaining about extreme thirst. He walked to the water cooler, only to return spitting and gasping. “The water in China tastes horrible!” he said. We bought a Diet Coke on our way out the door and he reacted the same way. He was clearly sick about returning to China, and everything he put in his mouth reinforced the feeling. On the way home, he said he had to throw up twice and got out of the car, where he spit on the ground. All the while, he was muttering about “living on a different continent than everyone else.”

  Despite this wrenching reentry, he and Eli settled back into their old routines within a few days. Jacob’s best friend, Kerk, who lived across the street, got a new puppy, and the three boys spent hours rolling around on the ground laughing as the dog licked their faces. Their simple delight reminded me how young they still were, no matter how adolescent Jacob sometimes acted.

  He was nearing the end of the simple stage Anna was still enmeshed in—a phase of childhood where you really only need a stable home and your parents nearby to be happy anywhere in the world.

  Jacob loved almost everything about living in China, but he was old enough and smart enough to begin understanding that he was also giving something up. Even as he settled into life as an international citizen, the transitions back and forth became more wrenching each time we visited the United States.

  I thought my children were in an interesting position: we had gone back frequently enough for them to maintain close relationships with their nine first cousins and several dear friends, and to maintain strongly American identities. And yet we lived in China.

  I was just beginning to realize that there was a phrase for children raised overseas: Third Culture Kids (TCK). As David Pollock and Ruth Van Reken explained in their definitive book, Third Culture Kids, these children come from one culture, move with their parents to another, and end up feeling like they don’t quite belong to either. Instead, they create a “third culture” and can most closely relate to others growing up in similar situations.

  Before moving to Beijing I never realized how alienating the question “Where are you from?” could be. I had since met many families with children who held two or three passports from countries where they had never resided.

  I was fascinated by this whole world, which had been right under my nose since we arrived in Expat Land, but which I was just learning about. The more I read up on it and talked to experts in the field, the more intrigued I became with the realization that our kids were betwixt and between. They would probably not be overseas long enough, or quite old enough, to fully become TCKs, and yet were perhaps too removed from daily life back home to be fully American.

  As I sat alone at the kitchen table surfing the Internet and reading up on TCKs, Jacob walked downstairs, said he was thirsty, and asked if we still had “that Diet Coke from the airport.” Happy to learn it was still in the refrigerator, he went over, poured himself a glass, and took a long drink. I never thought it could feel so good to watch one of my kids drink soda. The same bottle that had tasted poisonous to him upon arrival in Beijing now quenched his thirst and seemed to soothe his soul.

  Chapter 22

  The House Is Rocking

  The band began meeting regularly at our new rehearsal space, a studio inside Lu Wei’s duplex apartment in Tongzhou, on Beijing’s eastern fringes. To get there from my place, you drove out of town, through some countryside, then reemerged in a sea of high-rises. It was a reminder of just how sprawled out Beijing was.

  With over one million residents, Tongzhou felt like a separate city, one few foreigners in Beijing even knew existed. The first time I went there, I hired a driver; the second time a friend who speaks excellent Chinese accompanied me and spoke to Lu Wei all the way. After that, I drove myself, feeling proud every time I arrived at my drummer’s run-down compound.

  It looked like it had been built as a scaled-down version of Riviera but had never taken off. Weeds grew through the cracks in the asphalt, and many of the units were unoccupied. The raggedy young guards waved at me as I drove by.

  As distant as the place felt, Lu Wei’s house was immediately recognizable as a slacker band crash pad. I could have been in Ann Arbor or Austin. A couple of roommates lounged on a little couch in the middle of the day watching soap operas with their girlfriends. A small drying rack sat in the living room hung with laundry, including a pair of leopard-spotted panties. An overflowing ashtray sat on the coffee table, and a stack of Chinese drum, bass, and guitar magazines sat atop the rickety upstairs toilet.

  One bedroom on the second floor had been converted into a studio, with a big sound system, nice monitors, and multiple microphones. Here we transformed Woodie Alan into a real band, ironing out the details of six new songs and transforming “Beijing Blues” into a true composition, which quickly became our theme song. Dave, busy with a real job, missed most of the rehearsals, marveling at the way we showed up for each gig with a new song or arrangement to show him.

  We had played Hang Tian’s “Hey Hey Guniang” at every gig since we learned it and I loved the song. Wanting to feature more Chinese singing, I translated verses from “Beijing Blues” and “Come to the Edge,” a new song I had written, and told Zhang Yong that I wanted to try alternating verses in English and Chinese. He took the lyrics with him, but told Woodie that he did not want to do this. He had his own song he wanted to perform instead, and at our next rehearsal he picked up my acoustic guitar and played “Wo de Baobei” (“My Baby”).

  It was blues based but with a catchy pop essence and a depth that dwarfed its simple, poetic declaration of love—“You’re my treasured love and always will be.” We rehearsed it for an hour, debuted it the next week, and played it at every subsequent show.

  Adding “Wo de Baobei” turned out to be the smartest thing we ever did, and not just because it made us a truly bicultural band. It also completely altered our relationship with Zhang Yong. At thirty-five, he was a musical giant who could make any stringed instrument sing and had been playing professionally for sixteen years. Woodie Alan had been another in a long list of gigs, but now he had an ownership stake. He had written “Wo de Baobei” twelve years earlier, but this was the first time anyone wanted him to sing it.

  Becky fell in love with the song the first time she heard it, moved by the melody, Zhang’s impassioned vocals, and the unspoken power of having a mixed Chinese/American band perform a great Chinese love song. She joked that if “Wo de Baobei” ever hit the American airwaves, it could help repair U.S.–China relations. Our combination of expats and locals had always been unique, but it became much more pronounced as Zhang Yong stepped to the fore, making it clear that the band was not just a foreigner frontman with hired gun Chinese musicians. We were a true collaboration, which was essential to my understanding of what it took to be a real band.

  I offered Zhang Yong a lift home one night after a late rehearsal. As I started up my van, the sound of prime Allman Brothers boomed through the stereo. I always loved the sensation of blaring über-American music while driving through China and had been listening to a vintage recording at high volume on my way there.

  Zhang Yong’s face lit up when he heard “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed,” a monumental instrumental penned by guitarist Dickey Betts, whom I had interviewed many times.

  “This is the Allman Brothers,” I said in Mandarin. “Do you know them?”

  “No, but I like,” he replied in halting English. We listened without speaking for few minutes as the music washed over us—utterly familiar to me, amazingly fresh and foreign to him, even though it was almost forty years old.

  “Two drums?” he asked.

  “Dui.” (Correct.)

  “Two lead guitars?”


  “Dui.”

  I clicked ahead to “You Don’t Love Me,” an original take on a traditional blues song, with Gregg Allman’s whiskeyed blues vocals leading into inventive guitar soloing. Zhang was listening intently, astounded by what he was hearing.

  Next up was the sweet, country-tinged “Blue Sky,” with Betts’s high, lonesome vocals leading into one of my favorite guitar solo sections in all of rock, as Betts and Duane Allman take flight separately before swooping back down to hit heavenly harmonies. Zhang Yong turned to me, grinning madly.

  “Wow. Good! Different band?”

  “Bu shi! Yi yangde!” (No, the same!)

  “Oh wow. Two singers!”

  We listened without speaking for a while, then he simply said, “Oh, so good.”

  It would be unthinkable to come across an American rocker of Zhang Yong’s age and talent who did not know the Allman Brothers’ music, which had so permeated classic rock radio. Turning him on to it felt fantastic. My musical connections with my Chinese bandmates had been so easy and complete that I had forgotten about the vast differences in our backgrounds.

  No wonder I had not been able to quite communicate what I wanted or explain what I meant by “staying tight but loosening up.” I was trying to describe the Allmans’ music. It was grounded in the blues and built around perfectly executed riffs and licks, but the solos headed off on wild rambles, always managing to parachute right back onto the riff. That was the kind of approach I wanted us to take.

  I burned three CDs of my favorite Allman Brothers tracks and handed them out at our next gig. A week later, Zhang Yong came to rehearsal and started playing and singing “Statesboro Blues,” one of the Allmans’ best-known songs, written eighty years earlier by Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell.