Big in China

by Alan Paul

  I had been having the same thought, though it made no sense. We had arrived in Beijing planning to stay for a defined time and had never seriously considered doing anything else. Yet leaving felt like a form of surrender. We had been to so many farewell parties for others, had so many emotional good-byes, and one of the many mixed emotions these events elicited was a sense of superiority.

  The unspoken moral was: “They’re abandoning the ship but we are still here, because we’re tough. We’re real. And now we will bond even more closely with the other robust souls who remain.” We are put-down-roots people, loyalists to whatever our cause is, so being on the traitorous side felt deeply wrong. It was wrenching to walk away from the expat life and the community we loved being a part of. Maybe it was ourselves we worried about selling out.

  Chapter 33

  Tomorrow Never Knows

  Cleaning out our kids’ playroom one Saturday afternoon offered a reminder of our privileged positions. We filled a dozen bags with toys and clothes for a local orphanage and a few more with items that seemed beneath donating. When I took the third such bag to the garbage can, I found two Riviera maintenance workers sorting through our garbage. They apologized, but I asked how old their children were and ran back in to get them a bag full of appropriate action-hero figures and games. They thanked me and continued to sort for another half an hour, replaced soon after they left by two other guys; I also brought them better toys.

  When the movers arrived, we were frantically sorting through one room while they loaded another. Our delay was largely a result of the mad dash to do it all before we left, rather than methodically preparing to leave. Despite my urging that she take a few days off, Becky worked until the end, editing stories and meeting with her staff.

  With our house finally emptied, we were right back where we started in Beijing—living out of suitcases in a service apartment. The relief I felt at being done with the heavy lifting allowed me to temporarily overlook what it really meant: our life in Beijing was rapidly coming to an end. The difficulty of the move overrode the emotion; we were just happy to be done with it.

  All that suppressed emotion was bound to bubble up, but it still caught us by surprise. On the last day of school, the Dulwich school honored its twenty departing students at an assembly, calling each one up and presenting a signed picture of the entire student body. As Eli and Jacob stood in front looking a bit bewildered, Becky started sobbing, her bottled-up regret and sorrow pouring out in a torrent. She was hugging our Australian friend Karen, also about to depart and also struggling to hold herself together. The two of them were holding each other as if they would drown if they let go.

  Often worried about how leaving would impact the kids and me, Becky had neglected her own sense of loss, but she too had made irreplaceable friendships and bonds in China. When I reached over and grabbed her hand, she squeezed hard and buried her face in the crook of my neck. I kissed the top of her head and smoothed her hair. I looked up and saw Eli staring at us. Already dazed, he now appeared astonished and a little scared by what he saw.

  When the assembly ended, I jumped up to reassure Eli and take pictures of the boys and their friends, several of whom were crying. Jacob and another departing classmate stood in the middle looking bewildered. The emotions were becoming too much to bear.

  Even Eli was starting to crack. The night before, he cried himself to sleep, breaking his sobs for a moment to ask when we could return to Beijing for a visit. I was happy that he was dealing with the complexity and mixed emotions; the rest of us had been processing this loss for months.

  The next morning, I said good-bye to Ding Ayi, who had worked for us from day one and had a lovely, meaningful relationship with Anna. She had been a big part of our family and now she was sobbing as I handed her an envelope full of severance cash and wished her well. I wanted to hug her but it just wasn’t appropriate.

  We played four gigs in my last eight days in Beijing, which put off my inevitable good-byes with my bandmates as long as possible. During a break at one of the shows, a corporate party for the Wall Street Journal’s Chinese-language website, we sat at a table in a swank Japanese restaurant, with Lu Wei talking animatedly to Woodie while I ate tuna sashimi. I could only understand parts of his rant.

  “Lu Wei said he can’t believe that after we all worked so hard on the CD, we won’t even get to celebrate with a release show,” Woodie explained.

  “Tell him I will come back.” I was speaking impulsively, thinking of Becky’s suggestion that I return for shows. “We will have a CD release concert!”

  We had an ongoing series of good-bye gatherings—kids’ parties; an official transition affair for the paper, with sources, dignitaries, and government officials; an evening to meet readers of my Chinese-language column; and a farewell party for our friends at the Orchard. With time running short, Woodie Alan’s final performance was on the same night as Becky’s office dinner at a dumpling restaurant. This ended up creating a happy synchronicity, combining all our different crowds into one true farewell, as virtually the entire WSJ China staff descended on our gig, in a new basement space being run by a friend’s bar, with a sprawling, vintage rathskeller feel.

  I kept my emotions in check, trying to just focus on the music and savor every moment. At the end of our first set, we launched into “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” the song I had used to bid so many friends farewell. The lyrics caught in my throat before coming out in an impassioned wail.

  You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doing / leaving you so far behind. . . . / You’re gonna make me give myself a good talking to . . . You’re gonna make me lonesome when you go.

  I was singing these words, altered to fit my situation, to my friends, to my bandmates, to my day-to-day life, and to China itself.

  We closed with “Soulshine,” with Woodie, Zhang Yong, and I singing the final line in three-part harmony, stretching the last note out as long as we could, before it finally tailed off. The crowd exploded, but I heard only the silence of the band.

  Everyone hung out for a while, chatting and taking pictures, but eventually I had to say good-bye to my bandmates. We embraced in small hugs, with me promising that I would return for a CD release show. Lu Wei and Zhang Yong left with their friends, then I helped Woodie carry his gear to his car. He was struggling through a tough family time, which made leaving him and the band all the more difficult.

  “Hang in there,” I said. “E-mail or call me any time. I know this is a hard time for you and I . . .”

  “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  We didn’t try to recapture our entire history. There was nothing left to say; we both understood how much our partnership had meant and would continue to mean to each of us. We were brothers.

  We shook hands and hugged lightly out on the street, then he climbed into his white compact car and I watched him turn around and drive away, with a final wave.

  Two days later, at 6:30 a.m., we dragged ourselves out into the frigid, dark December morning. We needed two cars to haul all our bags to the airport, so Mr. Dou and Mr. Lu were both there. They went upstairs to lug suitcases down. With everything in the car, I returned and picked up Anna, half asleep and wrapped in a blanket. When I came back down, our friend Ellen Carberry was standing in the lobby hugging Becky. She had run over from a nearby compound to say good-bye, one final teary farewell.

  I joined my family in Mr. Dou’s car—we had filled Lu’s vehicle with bags so we could all be together. I sat in the front seat and reached my arm back to grab Becky’s hand. Jacob, sitting behind me, with his head pressed against the window, reached up and looped his arm over mine, squeezing tight.

  We were all silent as we pulled out into the slowly brightening morning, everyone looking out the windows and saying our own internal good-byes to Beijing Riviera. The place that had seemed so exotic when we arrived now felt very much like home.<
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  Three years ago, when Mr. Dou picked us up, we handed him a camera and asked him to take a picture of us, looking bedraggled in front of our teeming baggage cart. Now, standing in the same airport, we handed the camera to someone else and asked him to snap a family photo with Mr. Dou, who had been by our side through so much.

  As we took off, I leaned over Jacob’s shoulder, holding his hand as we both looked silently out the window, watching China fade away. I turned my head and looked at Becky, sitting directly behind me with the other children. We locked eyes and had a conversation without saying a word. I snaked my arm back through the seats and we took each other’s hands and squeezed hard.

  I was very happy that we weren’t heading directly back to New Jersey. Figuring that we would need time to acclimate and knowing that our belongings wouldn’t arrive for two months anyhow, we scheduled a week in Hawaii and a few days visiting the Camerons, who had relocated to San Diego. This wasn’t as grandiose of a vacation as it sounds—more like time in a decompression chamber. When it was finally time for the final leg of our trip, we were ready to head back and start reestablishing Maplewood as our home.

  The five-hour cross-country flight felt short. California, which once seemed too far to live, now felt like a suburb of New York. When we were finally descending into Newark, Jacob looked out at the ground growing closer by the second.

  “There it is, Dad,” he said. “New Jersey. Our adventure’s over.”

  I was momentarily staggered by my ten-year-old son’s pithy ability to get to the heart of the matter. But I couldn’t let his comment stand unchallenged. It sounded too much like admitting defeat.

  “No, Jacob,” I said. “Our Chinese adventure is over. A new adventure is just beginning.”

  Epilogue

  I Shall Return

  By the time we landed in Maplewood, I had a hard drive full of music tracks e-mailed from Woodie, who was working with the producer to finish mixing our album. Throwing myself back into Woodie Alan even as my family went through the process of reestablishing our lives in New Jersey served as a daily reminder of all I had accomplished in China.

  Just as when we moved to Beijing, I was astounded by the ease with which the kids were able to transition into new schools and make new friends. They were also rekindling some dimmed connections. Jacob had attended kindergarten and first grade in Maplewood and was returning in the middle of fifth grade. Eli and Anna had never been in the school system.

  I felt a pit in my stomach leaving my sons in the principal’s office with anxious eyes on their first day of school, but they emerged smiling seven hours later. They felt like celebrities, hailed as kids who arrived in the middle of the year from China.

  We waded through the sixty-four boxes delivered from storage and enjoyed suburban life free of language misunderstandings and tense drives—for about a month. That was the length of our regular return visits and when it passed, we all deflated as the simple reality that we weren’t going anywhere settled in.

  Anna told me daily that she liked her Chinese school better and asked when we could return. Jacob talked about his Beijing buddies and fell apart when he lost his Dulwich College ski hat, which represented his previous life. Even Eli, who had spent eighteen months in Beijing asking to return to America, cried himself to sleep, saying, “When I said I hated China, I really just missed the United States. But now . . .”

  Now he missed Beijing.

  I carried a deep sense of loss I never really felt while living in China and thinking about my American home. Then, I longed for specific people or places, sometimes profoundly, but I never felt truly desperate, because I knew that someday I would return. My Beijing life, on the other hand, was truly gone, a glittering memory in the rearview mirror destined to grow fainter every day.

  Things felt better after our shipment from Beijing arrived six weeks later. The three hundred boxes delivered on a snowy day prompted my aunt Joan to say, “I hope that no one is going to China hoping to shop, because there can’t be anything left.”

  It might have been overkill, but the altar tables, vases, Buddha heads, Miao silver artwork, and terracotta warriors were a great comfort to us. It felt good to see these reminders of China in our New Jersey home, melding our two lives together. We attempted to turn this fusion into our regular existence.

  I got back in touch with Tom Davis, who was settling into life in his hometown of Butte, Montana, and raising his two girls as a single dad. We made plans to meet in Pittsburgh for a Steelers game, and I marveled at pictures of his youngest daughter, Sudha, playing softball and zipping around the bases on her prosthetic legs, with snow-capped mountains rising on the horizon. I realized my friend and his family were going to be just fine.

  Music kept me moving forward, even as it anchored me to my past. The editors at Guitar World brought me back into the fold; I continued to work on the Beijing Blues CD; and my friend Dave Gomberg, a frequent jamming partner from pre-China days, invited me to perform with his Maplewood band. We took the stage in front of one hundred neighbors and nailed “Beijing Blues.” It felt easy and automatic, helping me realize that I could stand on my own as a musician, without Woodie Alan—and so could the songs I had written for the band.

  Dave was amazed by my transformation. “You left for China as a guy who plays guitar and came back a musician,” he said.

  But singing “Beijing Blues” so far from Beijing made me long for my band and our regular performances with a ferocity that startled me and that I really couldn’t share with anyone. I didn’t want to burden Rebecca or make her feel guilty for returning early, and few others could really understand. To paraphrase Neil Young, I hit the city and I lost my band, and I often felt lost without it.

  I threw myself into finishing up our album from afar, choosing mixes, approving artwork, and writing liner notes. When I interviewed ZZ Top’s bearded wonder Billy Gibbons and told him about Woodie Alan, he was fascinated. He asked to hear some tracks, then e-mailed back,

  This is the best Chinese blues I’ve ever heard. Who knew?

  I stopped the presses to add this quote to the back of the CD.

  I was ready to return to China for the album release shows but held off buying my ticket because I had not heard back from Yechen, my Mandarin teacher-turned-monk. I had e-mailed him several months earlier saying that I was returning and wanted to see him. I remained haunted by how lost he seemed to be the last time I saw him, on Huashan, and by my failure to offer him more honest advice when he was weighing a return to London versus entering a monastery. I meant it when I said that I would try to come back to the mountain, and I wanted to honor my pledge.

  I contemplated the trip at a Grateful Dead concert, watching my old friend, guitarist Warren Haynes, rip it up with a new band. Then my phone vibrated, signaling a new e-mail had arrived. I glanced down and saw the familiar Chinese characters for Yechen’s name. His message was short and simple:

  Leaving mountain to start my life. Like to see you.

  I booked a two-week trip to China, reserving two days in the middle to see Yechen wherever he turned up.

  Landing in Beijing less than six months after we left felt completely natural. I walked out of customs, saw Mr. Lu, our old reliable taxi driver, waiting for me and felt like I had never really left. But as we pulled onto the highway and I gave him directions to my friend’s house in a compound near Riviera, I was overcome by a simple contradiction: though I felt like I was coming home, I no longer had a home there.

  Monochromatic Beijing—grayish brown and covered with dust—suddenly looked rather bizarre; it made Maplewood seem like a tropical rain forest. We turned onto the road that runs behind the Riviera and I momentarily thought that Mr. Lu had gotten lost. The street was unrecognizable. The tall trees that lined it had been removed to make way for the massive construction of a new subway line that now dominated the formerly sleepy lane and had completely trans
formed the neighborhood. I had been gone less than six months, but it might as well have been six years.

  Construction was also under way up and down the nearby Jing Shun Lu, with long stretches of buildings—and even entire villages—torn down to make way for the subway. The Sunhe Kite Market I had frequented so many times stood alone, surrounded by rubble; it too would be gone in a few months. The whole area was unrecognizable from the time we arrived in Beijing four years earlier.

  I dropped my bags and my guitar at my friends’ house, jumped on a bike, and pedaled over to the Riv. I turned into our old circle, and the ayi sweeping the street with a twig broom lit up when she saw me. “Ni hao!” she shouted. “Anna zai nar?” (Hi. Where’s Anna?)

  I braced for a flood of strong emotions before visiting our old house, but it never came. I shouldn’t have been surprised, as this mirrored my experience returning to Maplewood for the first time, when seeing our house occupied by tenants turned out to be an anticlimactic nonevent. Home is where my family is; the building where we live is just there to contain us. But seeing the house did make me miss Becky and the kids ferociously; being here without them made me feel off-kilter.

  I felt untethered, floating through other people’s lives without the anchor of my family. There was only one place where Beijing felt unambiguously like home—on the bandstand with Woodie Alan. When I was performing, I had no ambivalence about where I should be.

  I was nervous driving to our sole rehearsal, worried about whether or not it would be enough before playing ten shows in ten days. I pulled into the parking lot of a dingy strip mall on the tattered, southern fringes of Beijing and was met by a heavily tattooed, peroxide-blond Chinese guy, whose face was obscured by massive white sunglasses. He grabbed my guitar and motioned for me to follow him into the tattoo parlor/music studio he managed. We entered a small shop, where a young Chinese woman sat in a chair getting tattooed by another employee, and he led the way down a steep pair of steps. Inside a basement practice space I found Lu Wei, Zhang Yong, and Woodie behind their instruments.