In Which We Are Vaguely Offensive And Obviously Out Of Place

Substantially Late
to the Party

by JOANNA SWAN

Certain habits of a socially dubious nature are sometimes afforded an aura of Cool when rephrased in an affectedly casual way: thrift store shopping, honky-tonk music, smoking, driving a 1994 Honda Civic, fermenting kombucha.

Most everyone has some such a point of pride, a secret weapon of underdog prestige, of being hip-to-it before "it" was "It." One could count even nominal victories  throughout my junior year of college, for example, I derived inordinate satisfaction from knowing (and sometimes sharing) that I liked certain bands before they genre-jumped from "New Weird America" to a more coherent "Indie Rock" and concurrent commercials for such consumables as Crayola and Outback Steakhouse. Never have I succeeded at reconciling my career as a Girl Scout in such a way. In an inverse relationship to knowing obscure bands before they reach stardom, my Girl Scout membership began before girlhood was quite finished, yet well after it was simply cute.

Even then, at ninth grade maturity level and the height of my love affair with gaudy eye makeup, I don't think I ever really wanted to be part and parcel of what I saw as a more tame, homogeneous and charitable form of the Spice Girls. In my enfance, while neighborhood colleagues were building a Mattel world of pink plastic and bubblegum-scented nail polish, enjoying femininity in its preliminaries: I was tossing Jasmine Barbie in the air until her head popped off somewhere in the Murphy’s ornamental pear tree. My Aryan doll of similar branding received numerous haircuts brutalizing her blonde locks and, more positively, providing nesting material for the backyard finch population.

I played by myself in such a manner, and when I desired sociability I found it independently — in Jack, the circumspect older-kid-neighbor who had a tiny dog and boasted to the 1st-graders about his mythological stacks of homework. Or I basked in the Harrison brothers' decadence: their Nintendo 64 and kid-sized, battery-powered Army Jeep and mother's Chicken Pot Pies and unending Otter Pops supply. Later, I participated in requisite soccer seasons and City of Davis Junior Basketball practices, performing mediocrely and mainly enjoying the shenanigans that ensued when paired with similarly un-invested girl friends.

Emerging thus into an antebellic period of home life post-middle school crises of conscience and friend-crowd, I settled into a complacent year of Wuthering Heights, sines cosines tangents, and short boyfriends. Fifteen years old and ready to leave ninth grade one month in, I skipped tardy and shameless into Girl Scouts, as if the organization were but a transparent caprice.

Of course, I could have joined earlier. Scouting runs rampant in the northern California area, and autumnal Cookie Seasons of my girlhood saw me reconciling my vigorous sweet tooth with a vague jealousy directed at the young verdant saleswoman accepting similarly green currency from my grandmother. Samoa envy notwithstanding, I never found the impetus to Scout-ify, whether for social reasons (too goody-goody, an innate distaste for uniforms cultivated by years in the public school system) or otherwise. Incidentally, there was no bridging from Pantone color 541 to 334C (that recognizable green hue), no chance at phenomenal cookie sales by virtue of endearing Scoutness, no impressive compendium of embroidered emblems, no pledge and certainly no pride. I told anyone who stumbled upon the fact of my membership that "I joined so I could go to San Francisco for free."

That same San Francisco explanation befittingly illustrates my Girl Scout career. Most of the troop slept in regulation Girl Scout cabins on Girl Scout terrain somewhere near Golden Gate Park. My ladies-in-arms and I crept out into the Bay Area’s witching hour and watched in fascination or terror or disbelief as dozens of muffler-less vehicles cruised and revved outside the chain-link fence, racing for hours until sirens forced hasty egress.

For my fifteen-years, this spectacle was more valuable than any Fort or Bridge or understanding of Ethiopian cuisine; I was enamored with 1977, Pink Floyd's "The Wall," and the idea of doing illegal drugs — the latter of which remained by and large a bibliographic pursuit involving trips to the Yolo County Library and such surreptitiously-read titles as LSD: Doorway to the Numinous, The Drug Library's Hallucinogens, and Psychedelic Shamanism enjoyed on the hills overlooking the Blue Devils soccer fields.

Not that I was delinquent — one fellow member and host of our 2006 Secret Santa Gift Exchange was obliged to join as a result of her DUI. Another used pharmaceuticals. Several others’ sordid sexual conversations furnished entertaining weekly meetings for a girl who practiced piano on either the Steinway or the Mason & Hamlin for at least forty minutes a day (though ideally two hours); worked silently on Algebra II/Trig while AIMing an erstwhile boyfriend, absconded with a carton of ice cream and returned it to the freezer, half-empty; and fed herself the untenable truth that a thirst for company and camaraderie is quenched with dreams of Edward Scissorhands, self-reliance and snacks.

There were always more established and well-patched Scouts focused staunchly on high school courseloads and how the GS Gold Award might look on admissions applications down the road; I wore black hoodies from Mervyn's, knitted knobby scarves throughout meetings and forgot whether to knit or purl, and joked with Marie or Noelle about older boys we'd never date. I often felt in Girl Scouts meetings like the skinny little girl with bare, asphalt-stained feet in the company of my Barbie'd cohort; vaguely offensive, obviously out-of-place, an incongruous Puck in a sea of serious young Athenians.

It was easy to play the Fool when faced with resuscitating plastic babies for CPR certification, but decidedly more difficult when we Scouted north and south. I took community service as seriously as a teenager with little-to-no experience in anything less than lower-middle-class can. There was Habitat for Humanity in Oxnard, though all I remember are strawberry fields and working vigorously in a vain attempt to negate the caloric result of gorging on peanut M&Ms. In Davis, we planted a memorial tree for a girl I never met, a Girl Scout member and cancer victim. And how the PBS fund drive organizers must have perceived us as we traipsed into their Sacramento offices! All too-tight jeans, awkward glances, uncontrollable fits of giggling peppering our hours at the phone bank.

Did we offer any valuable service markedly more skillfully than a ragtag group of desperado pubescents? Why Girl Scouts? More a mercenary sent to infiltrate the unit and in the meanwhile strike up some friendships, I enjoyed the meetings, the home-baked brownies that Girl Scout Moms make (my mother, not a Girl Scout Mom, preferred instead to share in the spoils of what snacks I returned home with), the capaciousness of conversation. As if in this system of social gathering — organized by and populated with other women — I had more permission to express what is perhaps the decadence of being teenaged — that awkward, unbridled ridiculousness, outlandishness, sometimes-rude, energetic freedom.

Misguided or no, I felt that Girl Scouts affirmed this freedom. That is to say that if acting like a doofus is ever acceptable, it seemed especially so in the comfort of the Scouting environment. I sought out Girl Scouts to cure teenage malaise. Perhaps it didn’t empower me any more than did running barefoot behind shrubbery or climbing roofs or realizing that I could beat any boy at Mario Kart 64.

I stuck it out through high school and graduated as a Senior Girl Scout patch-less and Award-less, with an acquired taste for out-of-box brownies and pasta parties. Upon graduation I also received a CD of photos spanning 1st through 12th grades, of which I am in approximately 12. Of course I judged each of these dozen with my "cool/uncool"-binaried eye; of course, I am the disparate element, a Plain Jane among the Blanche Ingrams of Girl Scouts. But perhaps such disparity lies not with the Joanna in the photo, but with the group as a whole. A messy essence of awkward, uncool, diffident teenagers with too much makeup on bound together sometimes with a pledge, sometimes a patch, sometimes a Girl Scout Promise though, in my case, left unmemorized — and sometimes simply the mutual permission to be weird.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. She last wrote in these pages about the saxophone.You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She blogs here and tumbls here.

"Silver Bells" - She & Him (mp3)

"Baby It's Cold Outside" - She & Him (mp3)

"Sleigh Ride" - She & Him (mp3)

In Which The Saxophone Travels Extremely Well

The Sensual Experience

by JOANNA SWAN

Atop the Great Wall the other day, savoring the great silent woods below, I was assaulted by Kenny G. His music was coming from a transistor radio clutched by a security guard, who smiled so graciously that I couldn’t bear to ask him to throw it over the edge.

— notably disgruntled New Yorker China correspondent Evan Osnos

Kenneth "Kenny G" Gorelick (in China known as Ken Ni Ji 肯尼基, a name Mr. Osnos observes is disturbingly similar to the Chinese loanword for Kentucky Fried Chicken — Kěn Dé Jī 肯德基) has enjoyed mammoth success in China. The smooth, smooth tones of his alto sax enjoy an intimate auditory rapport with elevators, mega-malls, subways and wet markets alike.

One song in particular plays a singular role throughout the country — "Going Home." As closing time rolls around in the market and vendors roll blankets over their wares and roller doors over their shopfronts, this hit from Kenny's first live album begins to play. Sedate and unobtrusive yet disturbingly grandiloquent, the soft tones of a saxophone piped through myriad megaphones signal me to hasten towards the nearest exit or, alternatively, snatch up impulse buys posthaste like my knockoff Minnetonka ankle moccasins, a real rip-off at 140 yuan. Luckily, repetition is also a musical theme in Mr. G's work, and while still usually seeking rapid egress from the premesis, I learned that one usually has ample time to bargain up a storm before closing time.

There is something wholly surreal about walking through aisles of fake (and real) fur at the Muxiayuan Fabric Market — polystyrene particles floating through my nasal passages, grandmothers cajoling fretful toddlers with butt-less trousers, workers pulling canvas sacks around pillow fill, the rhinestone shop-owners sifting their wares and bedazzling orders — as mawkish tones of an alto sax suggest peace, homecoming and other harmonious motifs.

When people ask me about China, I find myself tongue-tied and usually blurt something about Delicious Food and So Much History. Depending on my audience, I also act wise and add sagaciously that the country is, like, full of paradox. I am not sure exactly of what I mean here, but I think it is something like the "Going Home" Sensual Experience.

While altogether absurd to American Joanna, the juxtaposition of Kenny G and shrimp-sellers hawking their wares is a wholly normal and expected state of affairs on the mainland, as are also: migrant workers who make less than $80 a month building Beijing's next Chanel boutique while the rest of the city sleeps; karaoke for 5 hours that easily costs a month's Beijing rent; the adoration of a man who entertains thousands in his waxen postmortem circumstance and also, deliberately or no, "let" several million of his comrades go hungry to the point of expiration.

I'm unsure where Kenny G stands in both Eastern and Western cultural repertories.  If anything, though, the Chinese engineers of public  ambiances seem to have successfully appropriated a Beverly Hills jazzman into a wholly unique, non-Western system without compromising the Chinese-ness of it all.

Beijing is a city where, on the same block, I'll spot a vintage Rolls, a legless beggar recumbent upon the ground muttering "xie-xie," and a group of audacious French kids with their heavy backpacks and mannered glares. What the city lacks in racial diversity (I lost count of how many times I've received curious stares, blatant finger-pointing, unapologetic picture-taking, and christening of "waiguo" or "laowai") it makes up for in diversity of experience. And while Kenny might not play a Dizi or paixiao, there seems to be something more to his ubiquitousness in China than simple appreciation of a Western celebrity. Indeed, this latter title itself tenuously holds water; for many (myself included), smooth jazz inspires a pro forma aversion, its deleterious status as saccharine elevator music relegated to the Woody Allen corner of our comedic cultural repertory.

Going Home, Muxiayuan Fabric Market, Beijing

In a society where 7-day workweeks are not uncommon and the phrases "business casual," "work from home," and "self-employed" don't really exist in the working world's lexicon, Kenny G makes time, forces time, to relax, decompress, steel oneself for the next harrowing onslaught — whether it be unloading the poultry shipment from Guangdong, waiting in line to buy Spring Festival train tickets, placating the privileged young Chinese patrons of The Learning Center (which often called less for a jazzy sensation and more for a long swig of Johnny Walker), or just enduring the two-hour subway/bus commute through Beijing. In a sense, "Going Home" feels like the mandatory song/dance routines of primary schoolchildren or the 90th anniversary cinematic blockbusters funded, released, and produced by the Party — like Kenny G taking his place in China's propagandic mythology, keeping the peace with insipid intonations.

Dulcet demagoguery may seem harsh judgment; I've felt oppressed by such tractable tunes in locations not under the shadow of a one-party system, though, and can vouch from a most objective stance for their powerful nature to instill, as Evan Osnos notes, a certain feeling of assault and the keen desire to Go Home. Audi caught on long before I did, casting Mr. G as riot supressor in last spring's Super Bowl campaign.

In any event, the tooter himself has embraced his Sino-stardom and has plans to build music academies in China. And why not? As Slate notes, the sax is back. Beware — these are strange times indeed.

Joanna Swan is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about the end of the trip. She blogs here and tumbls here.

"When We're Dancing" - Twin Shadow (mp3)

"Law Years" - Ornette Coleman (mp3)

"Midnight City" - M83 (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)