Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

Naked Consumerism: The New Shin Kong Place at Huamao

About six months ago, we moved from an apartment on the north side of Beijing near the Asian Games Village to Huamao, or China Central Place. Huamao is in the central business district, in a cluster of massive newish developments like Wanda International, Blue Castle, and Xin Di. and close to somewhat older developments like Sunshine 100 and Soho New Town, now positively venerable by Beijing standards. Popular place to live: I count at least six or so people I'd known previously who live there, including the founder of this company and two ex-colleagues from my days at Red Herring.

These are (or were) all upscale residential developments with lots of retail shops and restaurants. My wife Fanfan, being the world's greatest bargainer, managed to get us a spacious four-bedroom apartment for very reasonable rent. At the time we moved in, they had only really finished the residential portion: there were three office towers that abutt Chang'an Avenue to the south, a J.W. Marriott and Ritz Calrton hotel, and a mall of sorts under construction. I was already pretty wild about the amenities in the neighborhood: a great sushi place at Blue Castle, a very solid Peking duck place 3 minutes away on foot, the comfort food offerings of the American Cafe, also at Blue Castle, and--so far--the best French bakery/chocolatier I've had tried in town, called Comptoirs de France, in the very compound we live in.

Not a lot of supermarkets in the neighborhood at the time, and that was kind of a pain. There was the Bonjour market in the basement of Sunshine 100, where I'd run into neighbors like former Blue Castle residents Mr. and Mrs. Imagethief from time to time. Problem with Bonjour is that it's too far to carry a real shopping excursion's worth of food home, and too close for a cab ride. A couple of months ago, a Wal-Mart opened at Wanda, and that had everyone in the neighborhood (confessedly, myself included) kind of excited: they offer free delivery of everything within a kilometer, and we were in the radius.

Then, yesterday, the mall they'd been building at Huamao--Shin Kong Place (新光天地) finally threw its doors open. After work, Fanfan and I checked it out. We both felt like we were in some sort of strange, consumption-lust-fueled dream. This place is amazing: pretty much every big international brand I can think of in the seven-story monster mall (think Guomao or Oriental Plaza, but more of it, and done up way more nicely). Not like either Fanfan or I are big luxury brand consumers--we still tend to buy clothes at Ya-Show, I'll admit!--but man, this is something you have to see to believe.

It's huge. Start with the basement: It's got the best food court I've seen; at least a dozen confectionaries, bakeries, cafes and the like; a place serving up the best hot dogs I've had in China (real NYC-style dogs, Louisiana hot links, and more); and--joy of joys--an awesome supermarket that will give Jenny Lou a run for her money with its selection of imported goods (including, to my delight, at least a half-dozen devent single malt Scotches), plus of course all the usual stuff. All just a minute or two from my door. Atop all the fashion and so forth, there's a floor full of home goodies, which for someone like me who loves kitchen gadgetry is Nirvana. End yuppie scum post.

Stay tuned folks, there's more to come

First off, thanks to everyone for the very warm response this blog's been given in various quarters. I'm overwhelmed, and only hope that I won't let you down. Michael out there at the opposite end of China, consider yourself linked to--just gotta get around to a big overhaul of my blogroll.

You know what sucks? Food poisoning, that's what sucks. I've been laid out since early Monday morning with something very nasty, and that's why I haven't been able to post anything. The good news: I've lost 3 kilos.

Bless Leon Lee, managing editor of that's Beijing, for giving me another couple of days to work on my Ich Bin Ein Beijinger column for next month. I still need a fucking idea.

Having children makes you a nicer person, I've decided. Dominic Johnson-Hill, who used to write fairly regular hate mail to that's and take occasional if indirect digs at me in his own writings, is now father to three girls and is now nicer. He wrote a kind comment to one of my posts--after discovering the identity of the poster, I admit I did go back and examine it for hidden barbs, but there were none--and he has now even offered to send me T-shirts from the very cleverly-conceived collection of Plastered. I'm getting a Yanjing t-shirt for little Johnny--start 'em young!--and a black Beijing Subway one for myself, cuz, you know, black's cool. Thanks, Dominic. The past--all just water under the bridge, I says.

Old Tang Dynasty photos (Jan 99) and Reflections on a Watershed Year

This morning my sister Mimi, a professional photographer who co-runs Beijing's Yoga Yard, sent me these pics she took from my old band's launch concert for our second album, Epic (演义). They're 8 years old now, taken just five months before the Great Rift. (I've asked her to collect a bunch of stuff for a forthcoming documentary on global Metal that will feature some Beijing bands, including Suffocated, Chunqiu, and Tang Dynasty. I may be posting more of these--photos of the old rock scene as it was, back to the late 80s and early 90s, as I dig 'em out and get 'em scanned).

That night--an incredible high point in my life--was also marred by tragedy: Ding Yi, older brother of TD's lead singer/guitarist/co-founder Ding Wu (with the black Gibson), overdosed in the early hours and never woke up. Ding Yi, who had been resentful of me to begin with, was especially so that night, and not without reason: he was ill-treated by security people and initially prevented from going back stage, while my family was ushered in and treated like VIPs, right in front of him. Apologies from me didn't help at all.

When I talk about my departure from the band I often make half-joking reference to our "Yoko Ono problem"--Ding Wu's girlfriend, with whom I had an awful relationship--and more seriously to the immediate catalyst, the Belgrade embassy bombing, over which let's just say there was some disagreement within the band. But there was a lot of other deeper stuff too--things that had mostly to do with me being an American. It started early: I could up and leave in June of '89, I never faced real economic pressures, I could always treat music as largely a hobby. No matter how good my Chinese got, I was never living in the same world that the rest of the guys were.

Reflecting on the month following the May 9th '99 incident in Belgrade, I realize now what a major watershed it was in my life. My circle of friends changed practically overnight, from preponderantly Chinese to preponderantly expatriate. I went from living with a Beijing-born singer to dating an ABC (American-born Chinese) reporter. I plunged headlong into the world of the Internet: literally days after I formally quit, I had a job offer as editor at for an Internet start-up. I stopped playing music and didn't rejoin a band until early 2001. That's about when I managed to re-establish a sort of balance in life--vocation/avocation, Chinese/expat circles of friends, comfort with my (aspirationally) bicultural identity.

And that's about the time I realized that for me, living in Beijing was going to be about existing normally--having a life in which I didn't feel like a sojourner, someone observing from a dispassionate distance, where I felt like I was integral to the world around me. I ended up dating, then marrying, a Beijinger--a girl I knew from the rock scene, but who married me in spite of my affiliation with it. When I realize now how normal my life is now--a career, a family, very comfortable digs, a city that feels genuinely like home, some wonderful musical outlets, and now this blog--I gotta say I think at least it's going in the right direction.

It's my son John's first birthday today. I sat him in front of the computer just now and showed him some of those old pictures of Dad in his rock get-up, and he giggled and pointed. Probably the right response. My response was harder to understand: I felt a little like crying, but I felt incredibly satisfied, too.

Thanks, Rocky!

A delightful gift (pictured right) arrived at my office today, with a note from my friend Rocky Lee, a very talented lawyer at DLA Piper Rudnick Gray Carey here in Beijing. I was very touched: he'd bought this with me in mind, knowing my weakness for single malts. And he suffered through an hour-long lecture on peat roasting, malted barley, and the mysteries of Port vs. sherry vs. bourbon casks, all delivered (doubtless in a nearly uniintelligible brogue) from a "bearded Scotsman" in the duty free shop. Forgive me for my inability to banish the image of Groundskeeper Willie that formed as I wrote those words. There's an even better bottle, Rocky assures me, waiting for us to share when he gets back from the States--though I reckon given his infamous aldehyde dehydrogenase deficiency, I'll probably drink more of it. Wille said it was his very favorite, after all.

Infamous? Who else could know of Rocky's missing enzyme? Why, readers of The Red Herring, where I once published the tale of how the good Mr. Lee played Virgil to my Dante in my descent into the depths of the Beijing nightlife scene. (Registration required, I fear). Lots of tech deals get made, you see, between happy hour at Centro and the wee hours at clubs like Vics, Babyface, and Tango.

Rocky's note marked the final release of what tension may have persisted between us in the year-and-a-half since I wrote that story. Understandably, he was a little freaked out by it, even though he really was exceptionally well-behaved through the whole thing--I played fly-on-the-wall on many nights out with him--and even though I took pains to show just how in-the-know he is when it comes to tech deals going down in China. He's often the first person I'll call still when I want the skinny on a start-up. I never intended to get him in any trouble. And so I was enormously relieved when a partner at DLA Piper, which had hired him away from the firm he was with during our adventures, told me that they hired Rocky in part because of, and by no means in spite of, what I'd written.

If you like that one, check out my pentultimate swan song, "Taking the Plunge," in which your erstwhile correspondent tailed a Valley venture capitalist during an extended stay in China.

Father-in-Law in new John Woo Three Kingdoms flick

More family film news: My father-in-law, Zhang Yi, was cast as one of southern potentate Sun Quan's military advisors, Zhang Zhao, in the John Woo epic The Battle of Red Cliffs which will start shooting this spring. I'm trying to get him to finnagle me a part in it--just a walk-on, I don't care, as long as I get to put on some cool armor or ride around on a horse. Dad says Woo is a real gentleman, totally down-to-earth and not at all arrogant. As one who's been uniformly disappointed with China's costume epics of late, I'm not getting my hopes up too high for this one, though how could they fuck it up? It's the best battle in the entire Three Kingdoms, they're basing it not on the Sanguo Yanyi version but rather on the more historically faithful Sanguo Zhi, and as far as I know, Zhang Ziyi is not attached to the picture. Alas, on the other hand, Zhao Wei is; and Chow Yun-Fat plays Zhou Yu, who's really the main character in this.

Cousin Arvin Wins a Silver Bear

  Holy Shit. My first cousin Arvin Chen (my mom's younger sister's older son) won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for his short film Mei, which he shot in Taipei. It's a nice piece set in a noodle shop about the owner, his daughter who helps him out there but longs to study abroad, her young co-worker who's in love with her.It's just what a short should be. He'll be working on a new feature soon, which I've seen trailers for, and now that he has Das Bear, he's bound to find funding for it pretty easily. It's sort of Woody Allenesque (he compares it to Manhattan), and it promises to be very good. Arvin's a USC Film School graduate, and apprenticed under Edward Yang Te-ch'ang. He won't admit it, but he''s a heck of a good guitar player too. He's always been quiet and pretty modest, but he's actually one of the funniest individuals I know--savagely witty when he wants to be. With my younger brother Jay writing and producing musical theater in the Bay Area now--his second one, Homeland, just debuted in December--I'm betting I'll have a brother with Tony and a cousin with an Oscar before it's all over. (My Grammy hopes perished long, long ago).

Speaking of films at Berlin, one Chinese film I helped out on (translated the screenplay) was then called Lost in Beijing, but screened in Berlin, as I understand it, under the name Pingguo (Apple, the name of the female lead played by Fan Bingbing.) I haven't seen it yet, but read one pretty nasty review of it from the Hollywood Reporter, but the reporter lost credibility with me when he called director Li Yu a "first-time director," when she's done at least two films I know of--the Lesbian film Fish and Elephant and another festival success called Dam Street (or Hong Yan). I personally liked the "Lost in Beijing" screenplay quite a bit. Anyone seen it yet?

CNY Injury

See that red blotch between my eyes? That's a shrapnel wound from a pebble or nail or something kicked up by firecrackers we lit off in front of my folks' house in Xisi on CNY Eve. I've gotten lucky with wounds like that: When I was five, playing cowboys and Indians with my brother John (then seven), I took an arrow from his Sioux Warrior playset bow--a wooden arrow that had lost its suction cup--in just about the same spot. Dad snapped that little bow right in half he was so pissed off. I still owe John a million dollars, though, because just days before I'd I bet him that sum that the word "Sioux" wasn't pronounced "Sue."

Injury and crushing debt aside, CNY in Beijing was amazing this year. I drove from Xisi out to the northern 'burbs where the in-laws live, arriving just about midnight, and the whole city was lit up. Anyone got a good link to the eye injury tally for the night?

Recidivism

A new year, a new blog. It's Day 2 of the Year of the Pig--as auspicious a day as any to get back into the blogging thing. It's been a nearly 2-year hiatus, so some explanation is due. At Red Herring, the magazine I worked at for the last couple of years, we were discouraged from keeping personal blogs, so I stopped posting to the LIveJournal account I had going. It's still there but don't bother reading it; I may transfer some of it over here at some point.

In the news: A dream job at Ogilvy China fell into my lap late last fall, and after convincing me that I wasn't, in fact, likely to muck things up too badly despite my total lack of agency experience, I resigned from Red Herring and finished up there in mid-December. I've been at Ogilvy now since January 4 as group director, digital strategy ("Group" means my position's horizontal, and not in one of the disciplines, i.e. PR, the agency, the activiation unit, or OgilvyOne, the interactive division.)

In the coming months, once I get some other folks on board, look for an Ogilvy China digital blog, which I hope will be faithfully bilingual and will present our take on what's happening in the world of digital media. I'm looking forward to everyone's feedback.