In Which We Usher In A Beijing Summer

Slightly Pigeon-Toed

by JOANNA SWAN

Davis, California: a veritable Cow-Town where the U.C. Davis Aggies rule the playing field, displaced snowy owls and rabbits foment rage, passionate debate, and press at city council discussions, and Baggins End exists. Davis, California, where greenbelt lanes snake and bike cop citations are a very real threat. Tiny little Davis, my childhood home, where Mom's piano studio was always 98% Asian (to my great delight when Chinese New Year brought moon cakes and recitals brought homemade refreshments and charming extended family).

Yearly hongbao, bi-annual chicken foot-y outings to the New China Buffet, shopping at the S.F. Supermarket in Sacramanto, and a plethora of Guangdong take-out notwithstanding, my small-town schooling could never prepare me for the Mainland itself. From childhood home to college life in Walla Walla, Washington, I traded a small-town high school for a degree in a city known for its sweet onions and Seattle expats, and thus was most green (in the wet-behind-the-ears sense, and also in the where-is-the-azure-sky-and-recycling-program sense, too) upon arrival in Beijing.

Peering out of the Beijing taxi window at endless monstrosities of human engineering, I relished the romantic evocations of Scarlett Johansson's Tokyo scenes in Lost in Translation — and felt very small. This wasn't my first experience with Roth's "man-made sublime that divides and dwarfs," but it was the first time I'd been besieged on all sides by Joy City Malls and Easy Life Malls and Paradise Malls and unfinished subway lines and other things that make David Sedaris' snarky turn snarly.

"Plan of the City of Peking," British LithographIn one of the cafes where coffee is not served to businessmen in a corporate casual atmosphere, I was approached by a small man from a table of The Cools: a Chinese girl with platinum white hair, several subscribers to the black monotone dressing doctrine, and a bald Spaniard who kept giving my boyfriend flirty eyes over his latte. Said small man introduced himself as Juan and asked in adorably broken English if I'd like to model some t-shirts as a "foreigner friend." For want of a more compelling professional life, I consented to do a few jobs for VANCL, a Beijing-based online company that seems to hire hoards of waiguo and nationals alike whose thighs are uniformly much less thunder-y than mine.

This baffling shirt may or may not be an inside joke of the Chinese youth. Either way, it regularly serves as a reminder of why my boyfriend is extra-cool.

VANCL paid better than my teaching job — 600 RMB per 2-or-3-hour job — and visions of free t-shirts with cutesy graphics danced in my head, reminding me that I had yet to purchase a shirt from Threadless.

The first shoot took place at what had been some sort of factory or government compound: firebrick warehouses and snaking alleys now peppered with hints of film and fashion industry gentrification: shiny luxury vehicles, decay-chic rusted doors, an eerie veil of anonymity. The shoot itself was fun, if not a ringer for Bob Harris' "Suntory Time" translation troubles. I was instructed by photographer Han, a most genial young fellow involved with directing and shooting films (many were, he admitted ruefully, "boring propaganda"), to look happy, drunk (I think?) and also that very distinct misty/innocent/pensive pose that's spotted in manga and certain Asian fashion circles — eyes demurely downward or at a thoughtful 45-degree upwards tilt, chin coquettishly jutting, hands behind back, or finger at lips, feet together, or slightly pigeon-toed.

During most shoots, a young man would crouch below me, aiming a hairdryer directly at my head. Half the photos capture my futile attempts to extricate flyaways from my over-glossed lips.

What ultimately inspired the photographers would always be my hair. I'd come with it tied up in a bun, hoping to keep my tresses locked away from the snarls, split ends, and the leonine mane it revels in when freed from ponytail prison; everyone always wanted it down, though — I was to shake, twirl, fluff, flip, twist, braid. I ended up under a curling iron more than once and 45 minutes later the proud stylist would present his creation: Sandra Dee meets Amy Winehouse with bubblegum lipstick.

If I look happy, it's because I thought they weren't going to curl my hair.

I made friends with a girl who'd seen my photos on VANCL, a friend of Juan's. Her job confounded me until I realized that rather than sell clothes, she contracted out photography jobs for companies — they chose the model and backgrounds, she styled and produced the photoshoots. Once, I modeled 60 down coats in June for a big website. It was cool, I got free Victory Vitamin Water.

Sweating under my pancake makeup. Fashion. It's Height.

I took the 991 bus to her studio to model various outfits, and the bus trip alone cost me three hours of my life roundtrip. I'd sit with my magazines and iPod, watching the bus TV and trying to spot horse-drawn buggies on the road and marveling at the tinted, removed insulation of the Audi dashboards and BMW backseats idling at red lights below me. Such insulation was never afforded a bus passenger, leastwise a laowai.

Once, the blue-uniformed ticket collector helped me with some directions and then asked me about my other, less compelling job: how much did lessons cost for each student? (I told her — 100 RMB to me, 300 RMB to boss-lady.) She had a bit of cilantro in her teeth, perhaps from a recent Beijing Breakfast stop, and gestured at my Lapham's Quarterly every time she mentioned teaching or English. On TV there was a video of Michael Jackson performing the Sawing A Woman in Half magic trick while singing "Smooth Criminal." There were also many yelling ads.

Raised voices being frequent and tolerated in most areas except perhaps temples, shrines, and the respectable sit-down restaurant known as Pizza Hut, the promotions heralded the imminent glee of summertime, liberation at hand. Everyone yelled in these ads: old ladies exclaimed about online shopping deals, a young woman called "wu ba dian commmm!!" (online classified ads) to the world through her cupped hands, two young lovers yelled coyly about chocolate popsicles, an actress and popular microblogger rode a CGI donkey and hollered about something that sounded like "ganji-laaaaaa!" All the while, we scuttled past the blue and white corrugated walls of Yah Gee Modular Housing or JH Prefab Housing, the two choices migrant workers seemed to have regarding city lodging.

On the return trip from my last modeling job, I fell asleep and woke up sweaty as from a fever dream, wondering if my stop had already passed. Wrong as always in my evaluation of China's great breadth, I inconspicuously peeled away my false eyelashes, stained my last Kleenex with melted mauve and dripping beige foundation, and settled down to the last hour of the myriad strange smells of public transportation, aircon drips, and a stomach aching for an icy pop to usher in the oppressive Beijing summer.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in California. She tumbls here. Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

"Twenty Seven" - MS MR (mp3)

"Ash Tree Lane" - MS MR (mp3)

In Which We Manage To Make It Work

End of the Trip

by JOANNA SWAN

The dwarfing stones caused the city to be even more gigantic for him than it already was. The manmade horizon, the brutal cut in the body of the giant city — it felt as though they were entering the shadow world of hell, when all the boy was seeing was the railroad's answer to the populist crusade to hoist the tracks above the grade crossings so as to end the crashes and the pedestrian carnage.

- Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Davis, California: a veritable Cow-Town where the U.C. Davis Aggies rule the playing field, displaced snowy owls and rabbits foment rage, passionate debate, and press at city council discussions, and Baggins End exists. Davis, California, where greenbelt lanes snake and bike cop citations are a very real threat. Tiny little Davis, my childhood home, where Mom's piano studio was always 98% Asian (to my great delight when Chinese New Year brought moon cakes and recitals brought homemade refreshments and charming extended family).

Yearly hongbao, bi-annual chicken foot-y outings to the New China Buffet, shopping at the S.F. Supermarket in Sacramanto, and a plethora of Guangdong take-out notwithstanding, my small-town schooling could never prepare me for the Mainland itself. From childhood home to college life in Walla Walla, Washington, I traded a small-town high school for a degree in a city known for its sweet onions and Seattle expats, and thus was most green (in the wet-behind-the-ears sense, and also in the where-is-the-azure-sky-and-recycling-program sense, too) upon arrival in Beijing.

Peering out of the Beijing taxi window at endless monstrosities of human engineering, I relished the romantic evocations of Scarlett Johansson's Tokyo scenes in Lost in Translation — and felt very small. This wasn't my first experience with Roth's "man-made sublime that divides and dwarfs," but it was the first time I'd been besieged on all sides by Joy City Malls and Easy Life Malls and Paradise Malls and unfinished subway lines and other things that make David Sedaris' snarky turn snarly.

"Plan of the City of Peking," British LithographIn one of the cafes where coffee is not served to businessmen in a corporate casual atmosphere, I was approached by a small man from a table of The Cools: a Chinese girl with platinum white hair, several subscribers to the black monotone dressing doctrine, and a bald Spaniard who kept giving my boyfriend flirty eyes over his latte. Said small man introduced himself as Juan and asked in adorably broken English if I'd like to model some t-shirts as a "foreigner friend." For want of a more compelling professional life, I consented to do a few jobs for VANCL, a Beijing-based online company that seems to hire hoards of waiguo and nationals alike whose thighs are uniformly much less thunder-y than mine.

This baffling shirt may or may not be an inside joke of the Chinese youth. Either way, it regularly serves as a reminder of why my boyfriend is extra-cool.

VANCL paid better than my teaching job — 600 RMB per 2-or-3-hour job — and visions of free t-shirts with cutesy graphics danced in my head, reminding me that I had yet to purchase a shirt from Threadless.

The first shoot took place at what had been some sort of factory or government compound: firebrick warehouses and snaking alleys now peppered with hints of film and fashion industry gentrification: shiny luxury vehicles, decay-chic rusted doors, an eerie veil of anonymity. The shoot itself was fun, if not a ringer for Bob Harris' "Suntory Time" translation troubles. I was instructed by photographer Han, a most genial young fellow involved with directing and shooting films (many were, he admitted ruefully, "boring propaganda"), to look happy, drunk (I think?) and also that very distinct misty/innocent/pensive pose that's spotted in manga and certain Asian fashion circles — eyes demurely downward or at a thoughtful 45-degree upwards tilt, chin coquettishly jutting, hands behind back, or finger at lips, feet together, or slightly pigeon-toed.

During most shoots, a young man would crouch below me, aiming a hairdryer directly at my head. Half the photos capture my futile attempts to extricate flyaways from my over-glossed lips.

What ultimately inspired the photographers would always be my hair. I'd come with it tied up in a bun, hoping to keep my tresses locked away from the snarls, split ends, and the leonine mane it revels in when freed from ponytail prison; everyone always wanted it down, though — I was to shake, twirl, fluff, flip, twist, braid. I ended up under a curling iron more than once and 45 minutes later the proud stylist would present his creation: Sandra Dee meets Amy Winehouse with bubblegum lipstick.

If I look happy, it's because I thought they weren't going to curl my hair.

I made friends with a girl who'd seen my photos on VANCL, a friend of Juan's. Her job confounded me until I realized that rather than sell clothes, she contracted out photography jobs for companies — they chose the model and backgrounds, she styled and produced the photoshoots. Once, I modeled 60 down coats in June for a big website. It was cool, I got free Victory Vitamin Water.

Sweating under my pancake makeup. Fashion. It's Height.

I took the 991 bus to her studio to model various outfits, and the bus trip alone cost me three hours of my life roundtrip. I'd sit with my magazines and iPod, watching the bus TV and trying to spot horse-drawn buggies on the road and marveling at the tinted, removed insulation of the Audi dashboards and BMW backseats idling at red lights below me. Such insulation was never afforded a bus passenger, leastwise a laowai.

Once, the blue-uniformed ticket collector helped me with some directions and then asked me about my other, less compelling job: how much did lessons cost for each student? (I told her — 100 RMB to me, 300 RMB to boss-lady.) She had a bit of cilantro in her teeth, perhaps from a recent Beijing Breakfast stop, and gestured at my Lapham's Quarterly every time she mentioned teaching or English. On TV there was a video of Michael Jackson performing the Sawing A Woman in Half magic trick while singing "Smooth Criminal." There were also many yelling ads.

Raised voices being frequent and tolerated in most areas except perhaps temples, shrines, and the respectable sit-down restaurant known as Pizza Hut, the promotions heralded the imminent glee of summertime, liberation at hand. Everyone yelled in these ads: old ladies exclaimed about online shopping deals, a young woman called "wu ba dian commmm!!" (online classified ads) to the world through her cupped hands, two young lovers yelled coyly about chocolate popsicles, an actress and popular microblogger rode a CGI donkey and hollered about something that sounded like "ganji-laaaaaa!" All the while, we scuttled past the blue and white corrugated walls of Yah Gee Modular Housing or JH Prefab Housing, the two choices migrant workers seemed to have regarding city lodging.

On the return trip from my last modeling job, I fell asleep and woke up sweaty as from a fever dream, wondering if my stop had already passed. Wrong as always in my evaluation of China's great breadth, I inconspicuously peeled away my false eyelashes, stained my last Kleenex with melted mauve and dripping beige foundation, and settled down to the last hour of the myriad strange smells of public transportation, aircon drips, and a stomach aching for an icy pop to usher in the oppressive Beijing summer.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Beijing. She last wrote in these pages about living in China. She blogs here and tumbls here. 

Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

"Love Handles" - Akon (mp3)

"Lock Down" - Ya Boy ft. Akon (mp3)

"Freaky" - Mook, Jadakiss and Shella ft. Akon (mp3)

In Which We Spend The Year In China

Letter from Beijing

by JOANNA SWAN

In 1985, 1.4 million tourists came to the Middle Kingdom, perhaps curious to see how Deng Xiaoping's Beijing Spring was moving forward, or how red the East actually was.

In 2007, there were 54.7 million tourists here, buying Mao's little book as a gag gift, queueing as at Disneyland to see the Last Emperor's throne room and conjugal bed, and also to see if there really was a Starbucks in the Forbidden City. (There isn't, anymore.)

Deng ushers in Sino-American relations in a ten gallon hat.54.7 million people isn't negligible by any means, but it stands dwarfed by the incredible vastness of this country. As I planned my year-long stay in Beijing, I'd look at maps on Google and imagine bicycle routes — "I'll get to the middle of the city down this street" and "oh good, the galleries are only a few blocks away!"

The naivete of "a few blocks" in Beijing sounds painfully quaint now.

photo by Galen Phillips

A Swedish friend who studies trends in China lamented the Sisyphean task of ever producing some semblance of a "big idea", as exhorted by English teachers past, from the innumerable voices on micro-blogs and comment forums. Our wits softened from sips of warm 3-kuai Yanjing, we'd have long-winded and tangential conversations about the colossal country, unfathomable like a headcount of all the stars in the universe or all the digits of Pi.

Many of Mom's piano students' parents are Chinese intellectuals, inventors, and teachers who escaped during the Cultural Revolution. I remember eating at the No. 1 Buffet in Sacramento with the Yeung family, inhaling shrimp and plucking up courage to try a chicken foot as Ms. Yeung recounted the public shaming and subsequent internment of her grandmother as punishment for a bourgeois life and factory ownership in Shanghai. I think a lot of people left during that time.

photo by Galen Phillips Now, families take wholly Chinese tours of "Big Plazas, Big Windmills, Big Gorges," they "Visit the New and Yearn for the Past in Eastern Europe," or, like New Yorker columnist Evan Osnos, they opt for the "Classical European" experience. For those wishing to visit this country of superlatives, every year has a different domestic tourism theme. This year it's "Traveling in China and Appreciating Its Culture."

I arrived in China on a day when the country forgot to put on its meteorological makeup when answering the door. The Beijing Capital International Airport is engineered in such a way that, upon leaving customs, one remains "inside" but is suddenly confronted with the atmospheric conditions of the Great Outdoors.

photo by Galen Phillips

With a spring of apprehension and anticipation in my step, I tripped into the humid oppressiveness that characterizes Beijing in August. Bleak, crazy-bad smog (or fog) blanketed the landscape, though thoroughly manicured bushes and well-watered flowers remained visible through wide pane windows. Huddled in the back of a Jeep sans seatbelts, we raced towards town.

Beijing's air on any given day

Frameworks, impressions, and, by extension, appearances are everything; so said some wise man, PR whiz, or perhaps Donald Trump (though a recent Pizzagate may leave some doubt as to the Donald's all-American sanctimonies).

Beijing does its damnedest to keep every stitch in place and even when the exclamations of rock drills, paving breakers, and air compressors fill the air incessantly and inescapably, the city succeeds with surprising frequency. 

someday, it will look like this behind here

I went to see The Beginning of the Great Revival, or 建党伟业(Jiàn dǎng wěiyè), a blockbuster financed by the state and released in conjunction with the Communist Party of China's 90th anniversary. I entered the theatre as I have the Duomo, Taj Mahal, or Yonhegong Lama Temple: moving lithely and solemnly, painfully aware of my Otherness, making absurd attempts to seem smaller and quieter so as not to upset the balance of the hallowed ground.

Behave Yourself being the theme of the night, I reminded myself that many Chinese revere Mao and his party's accomplishments; laughing, revealing my debaucherous imbibed state, or making myself obvious as the sore-thumb foreigner would be ugly at best. Happily, the distractions came not from my murmurs of confusion or the rustling of my wasabi cracker bag, but from the dozens and dozens of cameos in the film.

Handfuls of famous actors worked gratis on the film, drawing media attention and large crowds. Each time "Zhou Enlai" or "Yuan Shikai" (aka Chow Yun-Fat) appeared onscreen, excitement and amused chortling could be heard throughout the solely Chinese audience. Though perhaps failing to draw revolutionary fervor from its Generation X, China's handlers manage to further the image of a country united, put together, and in line with historical roots.

Morning calisthenics--sometimes there is dancingNot that there isn't a steady seepage of well sought-after Western goods. In fact, if homesickness found remedy in popular culture's libations, my experience in China may have differed dramatically from the one I currently live.

With an upbringing in strictly classical music (that's pre-Stockhausen) rivaling that of David Helfgott, I arrived late to the MTV party and, first (clandestinely obtained) Daft Punk cassette aside, I held piddling emotional attachment to the Let's-Dance-Baby-Baby-Baby-Ooh-Poker-Face-Beat-It radio compendium. Still, when I first heard my small Chinese pupil exclaim "Oh, my Lady Gaga!" I was pretty impressed - mainly because his ability to express himself in complete English sentences was, as we sanguinely told expectant parents, "making great progress."

photo by Galen Phillips

I am also surrounded by a shiny skeletal framework of vaguely-familiar pop culture. Teaching the Vegetables and Fruits unit to my ESL kids was nearly always made facile by their prior acquaintance with the game Plants vs. Zombies (usually played via iPad, a toy most kids in the upper echelons of Chinese social class seem to have these days).  

Is this iPhone 4? was a question repeatedly asked of me by nearly all of my students, as well as a few parents; what could I do but nod ashamedly and admit that in fact, 'twas but a lowly iPod touch...from last year. I don't even know the difference between iPhones 3, 4 and 5. Am I simply démodée when it comes to technology? Is my knowledge of pop culture frumpy and unsexy, like the look my mother gets on her face when I try to watch America's Next Top Model in her living room? From their excellent mimes and quotes (albeit in Chinese), I'd assume that my old Beijing friends, whilst blind-drunk on baijiu, even know more of Ānuòdé shī wǎ xīn gé, maid-diddling ex-governor of my home state, than I. 

experts in the art of chuan'r and Arnold impressions

Hearing "Telephone" thrice daily at the local gym, Burger King and MANGO does little for homesickness, though the usually worst bouts are merely manifest as a desire for vegetarian food without clandestine pork bits, or the ability to see more than a few blocks through the smog.

China is often portrayed as Iron Curtain 2.0 by foreign press — and it surely is a challenge to enter this country as anything but hapless tourist. I find myself here under a most fallacious title of Food and Beverage Consultant due to visa hindrances.

fitting in is hard work  There are many things I miss: being understood without wild gesticulation; potable water; being able to jog outside; a vista revealing more than skyscrapers, construction, and tawny dull skies. But as Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager said in nearly every episode of Season 4, "I will adapt." I did so far faster than I think I expected, transforming from blubbering dupe with weird hair into something resembling a Chinese citizen. I can down baijiu with a "ganbei," I can take public transportation with my nifty bus card, I can navigate sweet, sweet deals on the Chinese eBay; I've even gone the TCM route:

Reasons for Gua Sha: my internal heat was way too high and my yin was in deficiency

Of course, no matter how many propaganda movies I attend, foot massages I receive, or Chinese cabbages I eat, I will always be the selfsame Westerner — at once conspicuous and external and not-really-super-relevant in the scheme of all things Progress. Which is fine for me, really. On occasion I am perturbed by the water waste, destruction of historic homes, and Beijing's treatment of migrant workers; I am, however, conveniently situated on the 16th floor of my apartment building. I can't vote or stroll. I am also a wai guo. The last thing I'd want to do is upset my hosts.

Joanna Swan is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and artist living in Beijing. In addition to writing cryptic restaurant reviews on the Beijinger, she has contributed to Printeresting.org and blogs here. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here. 

Photographs by the author and Galen Phillips.

IKEA: massively massive and massively popular

"Remnants and Pictures" - Mimicking Birds (mp3)

"Subsonic Words" - Mimicking Birds (mp3)

"Cabin Fever" - Mimicking Birds (mp3)

wise words from the mountain