Big in China

by Alan Paul

  “He wants to do this song,” Woodie said.

  “Statesboro Blues” made the transition from 1928 Georgia to 2008 Beijing with ease, and we worked it up as a duet with Zhang Yong singing the first two verses and me taking the last two. Woodie also immersed himself in the Allmans’ music, altering his entire conception of what he could do with the lap steel guitar. “I need to take it further,” he said. “Now I hear all the possibilities of the instrument.”

  Woodie was inspired by the Allmans’ young guitarist Derek Trucks, whom I knew well, having written many stories about him, starting when he was a twelve-year-old prodigy. Seeing Trucks perform with Eric Clapton in Shanghai had inspired me to want to play with Woodie, who was now being inspired by his brilliant playing. And the Allman Brothers, who had ignited my love for music, were now inspiring my Chinese bandmates. There was some sort of poetry at work here.

  Chapter 23

  You Ain’t Going Nowhere

  One of the strange things about living somewhere for a defined time is the constant sense of a clock ticking away in the background. For us, this was not merely metaphorical. Those large clocks counting down the days until the August 8, 2008, opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games were also targeting our scheduled departure. My relationship with the giant digital displays changed considerably over the years.

  When we first saw the clock at Tiananmen Square, the thousand-plus remaining days made us feel like our time in China was limitless. That was both exciting and terrifying. Midway through our second year I saw the number “499” and was surprised to realize that our stay was more than half over. Returning from our summer visit home to begin our third year, I noted that the number was 348 and was forced to acknowledge that we had less than a year to go.

  I watched the number grow smaller with increasing alarm, thinking about all the things left undone. It felt like the clock was mocking me. Want to see the Silk Road? Only 320 days left. Still want to make it to Japan? You better get busy—289 days until you leave. Think your band is going to play those cool Chinese festivals? 240 days to make it happen.

  I remembered a conversation I had with Kathy Chen shortly after arriving. Entering her final year and possessing the long view, she was already envisioning the end of our assignment. “Before you know it, you’ll be asking for an extension,” she said.

  What seemed like a ridiculous statement as we were trying to get our feet on the ground was now a prophecy coming true. Becky and I had been discussing extending for months, and I began pushing her to finalize a deal.

  “Should we stay or should we go?” was a common expat conundrum, and I knew people spanning the entire range, from counting the days until they returned home to proudly having open time horizons. Some of these long-termers wanted to remain on expat packages for as long as possible, enjoying perks like subsidized private school education, while others had started businesses or otherwise become too entwined in local life to contemplate leaving even when this meant leaving corporate packages behind. Others just loved the daily adventure of living abroad, which had the tinge of perpetual vacation, since even the tough days tended to be interesting. Some people truly feared repatriating to a home country from which they had grown distant.

  We were in the middle of this spectrum, sure we were returning but in no hurry to leave. I was no longer baffled by people with no exit strategy, or planning on moving on in an apparently endless stream of foreign postings, but neither option was really for us. We were too attached to our families. And we were undeniably, thoroughly American, which I no longer took for granted.

  Though I had far more affinity for both life in China and the expat existence than I anticipated, my big-picture thoughts on returning to New Jersey had not changed. Our stay would not be open-ended, and we were unlikely to move on to another country. This strengthened my desire to extend—why hurry back from a life we were enjoying so much?

  Becky was unsure of the career impact of so much time away from the home office, but I urged her to think about what she really wanted after a career spent being a good soldier. She was conflicted; as much as she loved our Beijing life, she had some reservations about extending.

  We had told our families, including our children, that we would be gone for three years and she thought we should honor that pledge. My father’s illness had also truly spooked Rebecca, and she dreaded the thought of enduring a repeat performance from afar. All four of our parents were doing just fine, but every month we stayed in Beijing was pushing our luck. This was true, I said, but a far too defensive mind-set.

  Becky was also concerned about maintaining our torrid pace for another year. We were burning it on every front, working hard and playing hard. Her job was pressure packed and she was working more intensely than ever—which was saying a lot. This was normal for Asia-based Western expats who were on duty 24/7, with the home office checking in just as the Chinese day began winding down. When the kids went to sleep at 9:00 p.m. and she should have been kicking back after a long workday, people in New York were just starting to fire up their computers and wonder what was happening in China.

  Becky often sat in our home office until the wee hours working with editors in New York to shape stories for the next day’s paper. All-nighters were not uncommon, and she always slept with one eye open and her BlackBerry nearby. There was always something happening somewhere in China, and it was her responsibility to be on top of it.

  It was difficult to separate my own desire to stay from my honest opinions about what would be best for Becky, but I truly believed that she would be leaving too soon. After building the bureau into a smooth-running, Pulitzer Prize–winning operation, it didn’t seem right to just hand it over and walk away to a new challenge. She loved living in China, and I thought that she should just enjoy it without feeling guilty about reneging on an agreement that I had never considered binding.

  I knew that extending would only mean kicking the moment of truth down the road for a year, but we simply weren’t ready to leave. After debating the pros and cons, Rebecca asked for and received approval to extend from her bosses in New York. Now she had to make up her mind. With our tenant’s lease on our Maplewood house up for renewal, our moment of truth arrived—we had our deadline, something we both always respected and met. After all the angst, the final decision was easy; the long process had allowed Becky to work through it and commit with a clear mind. We would be staying in Beijing for another year.

  We had prepped our kids about the possibility, and they took it in stride, immediately asking which of their friends would remain through the next school year. That was the way expats thought. Eli was alarmed at some of his looming losses, but we tried to turn the conversation around to those who would stay.

  I never could have made a long-term commitment to living in China, however, because of the pollution, which could be mind-bendingly bad. Rapid economic growth spurred massive construction and an explosion in car ownership, overwhelming other improvements and keeping the air a thick stew of particles and pollutants.

  We always knew what we were getting into; a few days into our look-see visit, the skies became hazy and the air began to smell. The “fog” grew for two days until we couldn’t see the high-rise construction project outside our hotel-room window.

  “It’s good that you’re seeing this,” our guide said. “The pollution’s not like this all the time but it does happen regularly and you should know that.”

  We were too excited to pause and really contemplate the potential health effects on our whole family. That lack of attention sometimes seemed foolish. I often saw a brown mist hovering above the city when I flew into Beijing, even on days that were crisp and blue on the ground. Many people complained about a “Beijing cough” that lingered for weeks. If we didn’t ride our bikes for a few days, we would find them covered in dust and dirt. The school kept kids indoors on particularly bad pollution days, and Eli looked out
side one nasty day and said, “Aw, today’s not going to be any fun. It’s too foggy to play outside.”

  Spring sandstorms were also regular occurrences, sometimes mixing with light precipitation to rain mud from the sky. It didn’t rain actual water for our first eight months in Beijing until the sky opened for a thirty-hour drenching that evoked Noah. It felt like a rebirth afterward, with everything looking and smelling fresh and clean. The city had taken a shower, washing away a heavy layer of grime. I stepped out onto our third-floor balcony and stared dumbfounded at mountains gleaming on the horizon, visible for the first time. A sunset-painted sky reflected off ranges to the north and west, creating a vastly different landscape.

  After a couple of atrocious pollution days, a friend told me that she had heard of someone finding out that their lungs had been damaged by years of living in Beijing. “Living here is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, you know,” she said.

  That sounded like an urban legend, but I couldn’t shake the thought, so I asked my radiologist father-in-law to take a chest x-ray on our next visit. The good news was that my lungs looked perfectly normal. The bad news was that they would have looked the same if I actually had started smoking a pack a day two years prior.

  “Smoking causes cumulative damage and it probably wouldn’t show up in that short a time,” he said.

  There was no way to measure the damage that breathing in Beijing had done to any of us, but there was certainly reason to worry. The Asian Development Bank released statistics showing that Beijing had the dirtiest air of all major Asian cities, with a pollution level seven times higher than what the World Health Organization had deemed safe. I could sometimes feel the pollution in my lungs and in my eyes, as my contacts fogged up.

  I spoke to an American environmental expert based in Beijing who said simply, “When it looks really bad outside, it’s really bad.” Still, she urged me to not overthink the problem, insisting that the air was no worse than it had been in the United States or Europe forty years earlier.

  “Air pollution is a real problem here, but I think it’s a disproportionate expat concern compared to all the other risks they take every day,” she said.

  She was talking about driving, which was a valid point, except that driving was optional, and breathing was not. Toward the end of my first year I had a persistent cold that became a hacking cough that lingered for weeks and had me expectorating huge gobs. I finally went to the hospital, where I saw a hip, good-looking Indonesian Australian doctor with an earring and nicely groomed, pointy sideburns.

  He looked concerned listening to my chest. “Do you have a history of asthma?”

  “No.”

  “Well, your breathing is very asthmatic. It’s quite distinct. Are you short of breath?”

  “A little.”

  “But you can exert yourself?”

  “Yes, I went to the gym today.”

  “OK, good. Your lungs sound like you would get out of breath climbing a flight of stairs.”

  “Uh, do I have asthma now?”

  “Probably not, though it is quite common for people who have never been asthmatic to become so in Beijing due to the atrocious air quality. Most likely, your cold has become a bacterial infection in your lungs and possibly your sinuses as well, causing restrictive airway disease—temporary asthma. I am giving you antibiotics, and I think you should have a Ventolin inhaler in case your breathing becomes more labored.”

  As he wrote the prescriptions, he told me that he had only been in Beijing for three months and that it had reinvigorated his passion for medicine.

  “How so?”

  “I was in private practice in Sydney for fifteen years and getting a little bored. You see the same things over and over. Then I came here and started seeing all these fascinating cases—things you only read about in case studies or see once a career back home.”

  “Really? Like what?”

  “Oh, lots of things—TB, malaria, lots of pulmonary emboli, even medieval stuff like leprosy.”

  “You’ve had leprosy in this hospital?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “You know what, Doctor, I don’t want to hear any more about what you see here.”

  He laughed and we shook hands. The next day I was running around the soccer field encouraging kids at high volume and gasping for breath. I took several puffs of the inhaler, though I had never had respiratory issues before.

  Still, I never really worried about myself—but my kids did not have a choice about where they lived, and we had just committed them to another year of sucking in Beijing air. They had actually been unusually healthy since arriving, with few of the normal colds and flus that strike most houses every year, but I was concerned.

  Their pediatrician, Dr. Alan Mease, told me that the real issues and questions were all long term. “We just don’t know what the effects will be when these kids are seventy or eighty,” he said.

  That was a scary thought, but I was mostly concerned about what it meant for the Chinese who would live and die there; our stay was going to be relatively brief with or without the extra year. Maybe that was just a rationalization. Maybe I would have come up with another one if the opportunity to stay in Beijing long term had presented itself. I was just happy to have that fourth year guaranteed.

  Chapter 24

  Giant Steps

  I hoped that another year would be long enough for everything, including the band, to come to its logical conclusion. We were still on the rise. Woodie, finally confident that we were a “real band” with a growing repertoire of original tunes, had begun promoting us on Chinese-language websites and forums, which quickly paid off. A prominent music blog sent a reporter and photographer to interview me at Yugong Yishan for a feature on Woodie Alan, a name that lacked the humorous subtext to most Chinese but worked simply as “the Woodie and Alan Band.”

  As the opening act performed, I sat on a ratty couch in the dressing room behind the stage noodling on a guitar and talking to an eager, nervous young reporter as Woodie translated and Zhang Yong and Lu Wei listened in. It was my first interview from the other side of the recorder and answering questions felt a lot easier than asking them.

  A few days later, a lengthy story about us appeared on the site, along with some great pictures from that show. It proclaimed us “Beijing’s premier blues and jam band”—my marketing ploy had worked. It also praised the way we integrated Chinese and American songs and called attention to our mix of expat and local musicians, which was unusual.

  A photographer from City Weekend, one of two prominent English-language magazines in town, was at the same gig, and pictures of us ran in the next issue’s gossip-y “Beijing Seen” section. We were becoming acknowledged as stalwarts of Beijing’s music scene, playing virtually every weekend in front of crowds that were no longer dominated by our friends.

  I enjoyed every gig, every rehearsal, every appearance in a magazine, every band meal, and every time someone approached the bandstand after a show wanting to shake hands or talk about music. I had grown used to being recognized and becoming a semi-public figure because of my column, but being known as a musician was different. I had been working as a writer for my whole life and expected myself to produce work that could touch people. Communicating some of the same thoughts and feelings with music was more like a fantasy, and I never ceased to appreciate the unlikely situation.

  I began to feel like every show was our best one ever. I said that walking offstage so many times over the next six months that Woodie started laughing at me. But I was buoyed by this constant sense of improvement, which pushed me to see how much further we could go. The more a band plays together, the more familiar with one another everyone grows and the easier it becomes to take chances, confident that wherever you head, your bandmates will be there waiting. Confidence that you can steamroll over little errors encourages risk taking and allows the mus
ic to pulse with life.

  I understood all this intellectually, and as a listener I had little use for groups that didn’t take chances. But it was thrilling to feel it happening in my band. I was beginning to think we could achieve the high standard to which I held others. We were inching toward the elusive goal I had laid out for Woodie after that first Yugong gig: loosening up while retaining the tightness we had worked so hard to obtain.

  One night, I brought the volume down low, trying to draw listeners in. Then I hit my strings hard and raised the volume of my voice. Lu Wei was right on top of my move, slamming his snare drum at precisely the right moment, creating a dramatic effect. I toyed with the dynamics for the rest of the song, hitting the strings harder and softer to see if Lu Wei would follow. He was right with me every time, and I knew that we had reached yet another peak. I felt like I was steering a freight train, with an incredible degree of control at my fingertips.

  Our improvement was being noted, which became clear when I received e-mail notification that we had been nominated as Band of the Year in the City Weekend magazine reader’s poll. I had to read the message three times and actually go see the online ballot before I could believe it was real. Our three competitors were all young, hip Chinese bands with record deals and European and American tours and profiles. I didn’t think we had a chance to win, but having our name on the ballot was a great honor, which I immediately began trumpeting in promotional e-mails.

  We had been talking about recording some original music for months and this honor pushed us to finally get going. Woodie booked a basement studio owned by one of China’s best-known session guitarists to record five songs. Two days before the session, a City Weekend reporter called, asking to interview me for the Best of Beijing issue.

  “Tell me how you all met and the keys to growing into Beijing’s best band,” he said.