China's Musical Invasion

In what's becoming an annual tradition, Chinese bands will be springing up all over North America this March. Shanren kick it off tonight with a performance at New York's Pianos, the first of their twelve shows in the US and Canada. The other NYC dates are Fontana's (3/8), Dock Street Underground (3/10), and Ran Tea House (3/17).

National Geographic's world music site says their "Drinking Song" is "about as close to The Pogues as we've ever seen a Chinese band get." And the Washington Post's Going Out Guide lists Shanren's Arlington, VA shows among their March best bets, alongside The-Dream, SBTRKT, Public Enemy, and Metronomy. Shanren's Facebook page lists all of the tour dates.

A slew of bands, most from the Beijing labels Maybe Mars and Modern Sky, will be performing at South by Southwest, including Snapline, Carsick Cars, Re-TROS, Duck Fight Goose, Rustic (sans Ricky Sixx), Deadly Cradle Death, Nova Heart, and Soviet Pop.

Pangbianr has a pretty comprehensive list of the Chinese bands performing at SXSW, so I won't type them all out. Some highlights include the Night-People x Pangbianr party with a mix of Chinese and American and post-punkers Re-TROS playing at a showcase for Filter.

Bands from Taiwan are also getting in on things with Wonfu, The White Eyes, and Fire Ex. playing a free show at Soho Lounge on March 15—plus free Taiwanese street snacks.

Consummate hipster new-wavers New Pants will be playing The Creators Project in San Francisco, while Shanren and Nova Heart represent China up in Toronto at Canadian Music Week. Along with their showcases, they'll be appearing at a Toronto Review of Books This is Not a Reading Series event along with Jonathan Campbell, author of Red Rock, and Al Di, the Beijing music personality and manic host of ALDTV (this is my favorite episode).

To round out the season, back in NYC, there are two big shows with Re-TROS, Nova Heart, Carsick Cars, and The Mystery Lights (a really fun American psychedelic/garage rock band managed by Michael LoJudice of Modern Sky) at Glasslands (3/20) and Cake Shop (3/27).

China on Stage: Chinglish and Outside People

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a kind of dorky American guy moves to China and immediately falls into a relationship with a Chinese girl from the countryside, despite the language barrier. A meeting at a Beijing nightclub between Malcolm and Xiao Mei sets the story in motion in Outside People, playing at the Vineyard Theatre in New York.
Outside People nails the details—the club where the couple meets could be any place in Gongti; when they watch Chinese New Year fireworks around Houhai, Xiao Mei snacks on squid on a stick. And the other characters—Da Wei, Malcolm's college roommate from China, who comes back home a big shot and acts as Malcolm's guide; and Da Wei's girlfriend, an African diplomat's daughter who feels more at home in Beijing, where she grew up, than anywhere else—felt real, except for the Chinese guy's inscrutable Mandarin.
The play deals with race, and the cultural and economic differences that the characters face—although Malcolm's character feels frustratingly, sometimes unbelievably, clueless throughout. When Da Wei chastises him for mispronouncing his family name (Wang) by shouting, "You don't listen!" he's almost speaking for the audience. It's definitely funny, and at times cringe-inducing. The playwright, Zayd Dohrn, who happens to be the husband of Foreign Babes in Beijing writer Rachel DeWoskin, creates a realistic portrait of young people in Beijing, even if the play overall feels uneven. Do you need to see it? Maybe not if you've lived in China—you've definitely heard this one before.
And then there's the American businessman who goes to China in search of riches, the subject of Chinglish, which was playing on Broadway until recently. It's a tale as old as Mr. China, or maybe even Marco Polo. In this iteration, the businessman goes to Guiyang (capital of Guizhou in southwest China), hoping to revive his family business with a contract to produce the signs for Guiyang's new performing arts center.
Helped along by a long-term expat English teacher–cum-consultant, Daniel tries to navigate Chinese culture and bureaucracy. He's also being guided—or possibly misguided—by a government official with whom he briskly begins an affair. Of course, despite not speaking the same language, Daniel, like Malcolm, believes his Chinese girlfriend understands him the way no one else can.
Chinglish trades in a lot of the same themes as Outside People, but pulls it out to the larger geopolitical picture: China's rise tempered by American arrogance. In a lot of ways, Chinglish feels like a really good version of what Outside People was trying to do—granted, the comparison isn't completely fair since it's contrasting a non-profit theater show with a Broadway production (The sets for Chinglish were really cool, especially the hotel lobby with an elevator and revolving door. It really looked like a business hotel in some anonymous Chinese mega-city—it's in the montage below).
I saw the plays with friends who'd also lived in China, after both we felt that what we saw reminded us of our own experiences, or people we knew—even if Chinglish and Outside People showed uncomfortable aspects of being a foreigner in China that didn't necessarily make us want to rush back.

The future is…Tumblr

Although I'll continue to update the China blog from time to time, I'm mostly posting to Tumblr these days, including interesting bits about Chinese bands.

Here's one thing I'm cross-posting—I'm doing Shanren's PR, so I want to spread their message far and wide.

Excerpt from the press release:

In 2011, Beijing-based indie folk band Shanren traveled across China’s Yunnan province to take in and film the rich indigenous musical traditions. While joining the villagers in song and dance, they found the music so tied up in the drinking culture—downing copious amounts of the local equivalent of moonshine, fiery homemade liquor distilled from rice or sweet corn—that they turned the boozy footage into the video for their “Drinking Song.”

Based on a Yi minority folk song, the lyrics to “Drinking Song” translate to, “you have to drink whether or not you want to.” As the band found, when you’re a guest in a rural village, that’s pretty much your situation—the hospitality can be overwhelming!

The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Leaders

Like God. Shadowy. Always there, but never seen. Those are the sort of characterizations of the Chinese Communist Party that you take away from The Party.

Written by Australian journalist Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Leaders relies on interviews with academics, anonymous party members, and whatever records the author could get his hands on to delve into the notoriously secretive organization. Although China has embraced capitalist economic reforms, the party is still enormously influential, reaching into every level of government and even publicly traded state-owned enterprises and major media outlets.

Chapters deal with the Central Organization Department (kind of an HR department for the party), the military, responses to crises (like the scandal over tainted milk), and how power is transferred. Intentionally opaque, the party’s actions can be hard to get a handle on even within China, so this book sheds much-needed light on its operations.

Read an interview with McGregor on The China Beat blog and the Washington Post here.

Dinner and a (Cultural Revolution) Show

Performers in Miao minority (I'm pretty sure) garb in Guizhou.

All over China, you'll find massive theme restaurants serving up teeming plates of specialty dishes and a song-and-dance show, like the restaurant featured in The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World. But for those who've grown tired of Peking opera or the usual "ethnic" shows (like the one pictured at left), there's a growing number of what have been dubbed "red restaurants"—eateries with performances based on the Cultural Revolution.

I really enjoyed this article in a recent issue of Newsweek about the restaurant Red Scene. Melinda Liu writes, "at Red Scene, the waiters and performers are all dressed as Red Army soldiers, Red Guards, workers, and peasants. And the skit is showcasing the persecution of an evil landlord, who is being beaten and forced to wear a dunce cap—a scene straight out of China's Cultural Revolution, one of the most tumultuous times in the nation's history." Really, you never know what you're going to get when talking about the Cultural Revolution (which took place during the 1960s and '70s) with Chinese people: during a job interview right when I arrived in Beijing, my interviewer revealed that he'd been shot back then.

Cultural Revolution kitsch is certainly easy to find these days. You can buy mugs, T-shirts, and change-purses emblazoned with old propaganda images in areas frequented by Chinese and international tourists, like Beijing's 798 Art Zone and the strip of shops along Nanluoguxiang. As one waiter says in the article, "we simply want our customers to be entertained and to recall their old experiences without thinking too deeply of these social issues."

Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong

Somewhat intimidating but insanely fascinating, Chungking Mansions seems dropped from the Third World onto Hong Kong’s "Golden Mile," a luxe shopping strip in Kowloon. It's a place filled with cheap guesthouses, cell phone shops, money changers, Pakistani restaurants, and a swirl of people you're not likely to see together anyplace else.

In Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, Gordon Mathews explores what's going on inside the gritty complex, including following traders to their home countries, describing the different types of goods that come through the building, and profiling the overlapping populations: Africans taking goods (often knock-off or low-end cell phones made in China but also watches, cheap clothing, and other items) back home to sell, tourists staying in the guesthouses (mostly adventurous Westerners and bargain-hunting Mainland Chinese), property owners from the Mainland, South Asians who own businesses or work for the various businesses in the building, Nepalese heroin addicts out back (descendents of Nepalese brought over by the British), and asylums-seekers with more or less legitimate claims. According to a rough estimate by the author, about 20 percent of the mobile phones recently in use in sub-Saharan Africa passed through Chungking Mansions. In part, the building and the ecosystem it fosters is owed Hong Kong’s lax visa policy and customs inspections—the region’s business-above-all-else ethos.

The writer is an anthropology professor, so there’s a lot of “in this chapter, we’ll discuss” and “as discussed in chapter X"—and there’s a lot of relying on extended quotes. There’s little of the colorful detail you’d expect in a non-scholarly work. Still, having only spent a little time in Chungking Mansions (and nearby Mirador Mansions), I was interested to read more about the building, and this is by far the most comprehensive work I've found.

If I might take a trick from Mathews's own book, I'll deploy an extended quote to explain low-end globalization, the phenomenon that creates Chungking Mansions' unique environment.

This book is about Chungking Mansions and the people within it, but it is also about “low-end globalization,” a form of globalization for which Chungking Mansions is a central node, linking to an array of nodes around the world, from Bangkok to Dubai to Kolkata, Kathmandu, Kampala, Lagos, and Nairobi. Low-end globalization is...traders carrying their goods by suitcase, container, or truck across continents and borders with minimal interference from legalities and copyrights, a world run by cash. It is also individuals seeking a better life by fleeing their home countries for opportunities elsewhere, whether as temporary workers, asylum seekers, or sex workers. This is the dominant form of globalization experienced in much of the developing world today.

Although the academic tone of the book keeps it from being a very entertaining read, the interesting subject matter mostly makes it worth it. And Mathews has obvious affection for the building and its denizens. While that sometimes leads him to brush aside the seedier aspects, it does make the place come to life. It's beyond the scope of Ghetto at the Center of the World, but, as the book points out, Chungking Mansions has cleaned up a lot in recent years. I'd love to read more recollections from the even more freewheeling old days.

Random Chinese Music Bits

Hedgehog has a new-ish album out called Honeyed and Killed. They were in NYC last month to record their next album, and I took them to dinner and to see the building where CBGB used to be.

Also passing through, Queen Sea Big Shark recently played at The Creators Project in New York, though like in Beijing, it was a hassle to get into the Creators event. You can read the definitive article on them here (PDF). And the band was photographed by Mario Testino for an article on Beijing in the October issue of Vogue. (American Apparel tweeted the image.)

Plus, Beijing DJ and remixer Liman has this cool Queen Sea Big Shark remix and some other tracks on his Soundcloud.

QUEENSEA BIG SHARK_E OCEAN (LIMAN Remix) by LIMAN


Speaking of Beijing's electronic music scene, City Weekend interviews local scenesters on the state of the scene—it's much less developed than the rock scene.

As far as folk music, Maybe Mars just put out Lanzhou, Lanzhou from Low Wormwood. Most of the songs are up here, and the label says it will be on iTunes and amazon.com soon. It's beautiful, and just a little weird (Xiao He produced.) And Shanren, who play something like Yunnan hippie dance party music, are probably going to be playing several dates in the US early next year.

You know you've made it when you've been knocked off in China, and some people have taken a cue from the fabulous Take Away Shows done by La Blogothèque: DaBaoGe (more or less "to-go song") films Chinese musicians performing in unusual places. I'm having some trouble getting the videos to load on their site, but here's their clip of Shouwang performing on a rooftop on YouTube and Hanggai in a park in Shanghai.

And for those who want something a bit more experimental, the "underground noise collective" Nojiji out in the eastern suburb of Tongzhou is made up of artists like Meizhiyong and Li Yangyang.