Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

The Week-Long Wedding

Forgive my long absence. It's been a crazy couple of weeks, with lots of family in town to celebrate my sister Mimi's marriage to Aaron Deemer. My brother John, his wife Rachael, and their three beautiful daughters all stayed at my apartment for most of the last 10 days, and it's been wonderfully rewarding and brutally tiring at the same time. Now that Mimi and Aaron are off on their honeymoon, the various Deemers and Maclaines and Kuos and Lius are flying back to the half-dozen or so countries they flew out here from, my Guenevere's recovered from the departure of her three cousins this morning, and Fanfan and I have gotten the house back in some semblance of order, regular posting will resume soon. First, some highlights:

1) Johnny's left hand, which he burned rather badly on an unchildproofed drinking water dispenser, is recovering nicely thanks to the ministrations of Dr. Li Yanni at the Beijing United Family Hospital. We actually had to admit the little guy for a couple of nights. I urge everyone with kids in China with an yinshuiji to turn off the hot water! Fanfan had her back turned for just a second and Johnny gave himself second- and third-degree burns. Naturally she's been beating herself up pretty badly over it, but now that he's mending nicely she's back to her old self. The folks at the hospital have seen a rash of one- and two-year-olds with burns from the same source. I'm now a huge believer in this miraculous Chinese burn salve called Mebo (美宝), which has amazing analgesic properties and smells uncannily like sesame oil. Little Johnny's been in virtually no pain since the night of the accident two weeks ago.

2. I'm dumbfounded at what my folks, Aaron's parents, and Mimi and Aaron managed to pull off logistically. They arranged enormous dinners for no less than 70 or 80 guests every night from Monday onward: a big one at the Deemer home at the courtyard at the Xizang Banshichu (the Tibetan rep office, west of the Drum & Bell Towers) where they live, another on Tuesday at my folks' house in Xisi, separate dinners for the stags & hens on Wednesday (the only night with less than 70, I reckon), a lavish hotpot dinner at the Di'anmen Man Fu Lou on Thursday, and the "rehearsal dinner" on Friday at the new Dadong Peking Duck restaurant at Nanxincang, and of course the reception dinner, which was at Dongyuan Xilou, an old opera theater at the park running between Nanchizi and Nanheyan along Chang'an Avenue. There was great wine--a Cote du Rhone for the red, and a Kendall-Jackson Chardonnay for the white--at some of the bigger dinners, as well as the reception. Oh, and there was a dim sum send-off at the very tony Tian Di Yi Jia at Nanchizi on Sunday morning. Everything went without a hitch: even the bicycle rickshaw caravan (88 of them!) that ferried guests between the reception, at the Xizang Banshi Chu, to the reception. I stand in awe. Or rather, I would stand if I had any strength left in me.

3) My younger brother Jay wrote a roast-cum-toast poem in a decidedly Seussian rhyme scheme and meter for Mimi, and delivered it with consummate skill at the reception. I'm just glad he went last: there was no way for anyone to have outdone him. It's sort of his trademark: He read one at John's wedding, and at mine too. This one was his finest work, I must say. I'll see if I can get his permission to reproduce it here.

4) My family is awesome. I don't know that I've ever been more proud to be one of the Kuos. And my new family--the Deemers--are just as wonderful. I look forward to getting to know all of them better. Here's Guennie and Elenora, Aaron's niece by his oldest brother Pete and his lovely wife Leanne. They're expecting their third this fall. Elenora was born, by happy coincidence, on exactly the same day as my Guenevere. They hit it off marvelously, as the photo here attests. Pete and his family live in Singapore, so I imagine there'll be plenty of opportunity to see them in the years to come.

5) Possibly the best part of the whole thing was getting to spend a lot of time with John and Rachael, and for our kids to spend lots of time with their cousins. It was amazing how in just a week Guenevere was conversing, or at least trying to converse, in English. From left to right: Guen (3), Camille (7), Hartley (three-and-a-half), Kaili (12), and John (1).

Got a million things to do--including rehearse for the coming Midi Music Festival, which starts tomorrow. But right now I've gotta run: Guen wants me to read her "Ferdinand."

Happy birthday, Guenevere

We celebrated Guenevere's third birthday this evening at a nearby Hunanese restaurant called 一湖春. She was about to blow out her candle when Fanfan stopped her and told her she should make a wish first. She clapped her hands together as if in prayer, and just after I snapped this photo, said quite seriously, "我想要巧克力" (I want chocolate). Her wish came true mere seconds later.

She can't be blamed for conflating "birthday" with "birthday cake." As we were packing up to go home, she gestured toward the leftover cake, sitting on the table in its box, and said "我的生日呢？别忘了拿我的生日!" (roughly, "What about my birthday? Don't forget my birthday!")

I sang her to sleep a little over an hour ago with "Hush Little Baby." She's constantly stopping me now during the song to ask "looking glass 是什么?." I'm able to answer most of her "What's a so-and-so" questions pretty easily in that song, except for "jumping jack." Daddy, what's a jumping jack? "It's a toy that kids played with a long time ago. They're made of metal, and daddy doesn't remember how they were used, but it was a game where you bounce a little ball and you grab these little metal jumping jacks, and you never want to step on one barefoot." Those little things were like caltraps used in medieval warfare to take out horses, and it's astonishing to me that anyone ever let kids play with them.

How did one play with jacks, anyway? I really don't know. Or tiddly-winks, for that matter. Don't know how that was played either, except that it involved little swallowable discs of plastic.

But there were planes to catch, and bills to pay

Yes, he really did learn to walk while I was away, just like in the Harry Chapin song. Okay, little Johnny can't quite walk--it's more a stumble, lasting anywhere from four to fourteen wobbly paces taken with arms outstretched--but still, I hear "Cats in the Cradle."

But the travel's been worthwhile. SXSW was wonderful on balance, though admittedly I didn't have the best of luck in my last night at SXSW, and ended up guessing poorly based on advice of various half-drunk indie-music geeks. I've noticed that indie music geeks can't describe bands without reference to the Velvet Underground, which I suppose is the archetypal indie band anyway. The very last band I saw was the biggest downer: soundtrack to a suicide, I thought, plagued by the poor musicianship and odd combo of narcissism and excess self-pity that's so common among post-rock bands.

Bad luck with luggage, too: I spent much of last weekend fretting about a suitcase containing dozens of irreplaceable photos lost somewhere in the vast expanse of the American Midwest. It turned up intact, at last, in Madison, and wasn't enough to ruin things. Had some fun jams in Madison with my two best friends, including some with me playing banjo however ineptly. I find I enjoy playing old time/bluegrass stuff, I've found. Ate hearty German food, attended a Tequila tasting, threw an impromptu dinner party where I cooked seven or eight Chinese dishes, went out and threw a frisbee, and had a generally terrific time. To cap it off, Drew--not that this surprised me given how happily and profoundly in love he's been--informed me that he popped the question and got a "yes" from his lovely girlfriend Rachel.

Home to Beijing for a day, long enough to install WIndows Vista and play around with it for a bit. (I'll write something up on my Vista experience at some point).

Then it was off to Taipei for--I know, it's inexcusable--the very first time. I've been living in this part of the world for this long, and for some reason I've just never gotten over there until Thursday. I suppose what I'm struck most by is the similarity to the more developed (especially Southern) Chinese cities: I somehow thought it would feel more different. Just felt, well, like a fantizi version of Shanghai, but with mountains ringing it and slightly older roads. They even use reasonably standard Hanyu Pinyin on road signs: I saw few vestiges of Wade-Giles. My Ogilvy and ERA colleagues were most gracious hosts, and packed my schedule full of very productive meetings and delicious meals. Head of PR Dr. Joseph Pai even accompanied me to the Academia Sinica at Nangang, where I visited the library named in honor of my paternal grandfather, Kuo Ting-yee, who was head of the Academia's modern history bureau. There's a memorial room in an adjacent building (picture by David Spindler), where I spent a good hour reading about a life I knew so little about. (He died in New York when I was just 9, but I saw him often as a boy and my memories of him are very clear).

Fathers and sons. Growing up, somehow I was considered to tilt toward the distaff side, probably owing to stronger expression of Liu family genes in me. But I've grown very close to my father in the last ten years, what with him living in Beijing (and, especially since I quit Tang Chao and found something like professional direction in life). The man we once knew as "Old D&T" (Old Dour-and-Taciturn") has become downright cuddly as a septogenarian. He probably won't have a memorial room or a library named after him, but he'll be my model for fathering, that's for sure. Something he once told me about his own father haunts me: that until his funeral in 1975, he never remembers having touched him.

My Brother John

My parents aside, there's no individual I owe more to in my personal intellectual and ethical development than my odler brother, John. From my earliest memories, he took a proactive role in teaching me: the basics of grammar and spelling, mathematics, and above all, the natural world. He read Ranger Rick as a boy, and knew the flora and fauna of the hilly, deciduous woodlands of Upstate New York where we grew up. He had a knack for finding Indian arrowheads, for cracking open rocks to reveal fossils, for trapping rare butterflies. He took me along with him, never treating me like the tagalong that I was.

He taught me my respect for science. He taught me the scientific method--not the simple version we learned in school, but the epistemology behind it, the skepticism that must pervade it. He was always a big thinker: while still barely into our teens, he would hold forth on theories that later took root in the works of sociobiologists and evolutionary psychologists, about the ways that human behavior has evolved, bound up intimately in our very biological being.

I thought of him just now because he posted a comment on a recent blog entry about my time in Austin. "Bro, you have to check out the bats," he said.  The Bats. Couldn't find a band by that name among the hundreds playing here. So I pinged him again, and he sent me this link. Oh--real bats. Pity I'm not going to have the time to see them.

John taught me a love of books, and though our literary tastes have diverged--he's still an avid sci-fi and fantasy reader, while I rarely touch the stuff--he still points me to excellent science writing, concerned to this day that my liberal arts background is a handicap to understanding the realities underpinning our universe.

Of the four siblings In my family, John is easiily the most Confucian in character: scholarly, fierecely familial, ethical. Filial too--though in his own way, and my parents might not see it that way. Ironically, he's the one who's probably least interested in China--in actually living in China, at least.  For that reason, we've fallen somewhat out of touch. I understand: he has a wife and three daughters, a busy job at a software startup in Northern California. But you don't know how I'd value some quality time alone with him, for one of those talks like we used to have lying there at night in the room we shared.

Happy birthday, son

This is just going up here because I don't want you, 6 or 7 years from now, when you're looking through ancient blog posts by Daddy, to notice that he neglected to put up a picture of you from your first birthday. So here you go. Happy birthday, son. When you're reading this years from now, know these things: At age 1, you had an unhealthy fascination for garbage, and ate anything you could pluck from an unguarded waste-paper basket. You defoliated many houseplants, popping leaves in your mouth. Your favorite song was Bad Company's "Shooting Star," probably because the protagonist's name is Johnny. You had a vocabulary limited to "mama," "dada," "baba," "jiejie," and, oddly, "tiger." And you were cute as a fucking button. (Chinese modesty forbids me to say same about your mom. Plus I don't want you gettin' all Oedipal on me).

Photo by Aaron Deemer, my soon-to-be brother in law!

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.

Brother Jay's Big Gay Musical Nominated for Best Original Script

My brother quit his job as a high-flying lawyer in San Francisco to write musical theater, and he's doing well in his new career. His first original show, Insignificant Others--I'm not counting something he wrote with the quaintly 80s title Upwardly Mobile while at Stanford--just nabbed a nomination for best original script from the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle. Says Jay:

This honor comes as a total surprise, especially considering the musical was still in workshop in 2006 and has not had its commercial release yet.  In fact, we didn't even know we would be up for consideration or that any BATCC members came to see the show.  (They usually don't attend workshops or in-concerts.)

The other nominees in this category are Morris Bobrow for Shopping! The Musical  (now in its 10th month at the Shelton Theatre in Union Square) and Stew and Heidi Rodewald for Passing Strange at Berkeley Repertory Theatre.  Curiously, Vanities by David Kirshenbaum (world premiere at Theatreworks) was not nominated, and that show is moving to Off-Broadway soon.

In any event, we are very happy with this unexpected recognition by this body.  (Incidentally, Homeland was not up for consideration given its limited four day run at the end of the year.)

The little fucker's always been more talented than I. His stuff is very moving. If you're in the Bay Area and get a chance to see any of his shows, do go. Funny how we once played together in what was, bar none, the world's worst rock band, called Fallout.

The Women in my Life

I thought I'd post a picture of this Fanfan I keep talking about, and of my little girl Guenevere. Here they are. The Fanfan photo's from the trip we took to Italy for the wedding of our good friends Mauro and Vanessa. Mauro is padrino to Johnny. In front of me is the best plate of Bucatini all'Amatriciana I had in Rome. Mauro taught me how to make it, though the real thing calls for the jowls of a pig, and I don't quite know how to find those in Beijing, so I just use Hormel bacon. But I don't skimp on the Pecorino Romano by substituting mere parmesan. Mauro also taught me his carabonara recipe, which rocks.

Some time ago, following that trip, I wrote something in that's Beijing that pissed off all these Italians--and many of my non-Italian friends--for the perceived dis on Italian cuisine the column represented. I probably deserved part of it, but let me say in my defense that I honestly do love Italian food, and made it clear in that column that we were traveling on a tight budget and were therefore limited to primi piatti. I do know that there's a world of great Italian food in the segundi range, but hey, at the time we just couldn't afford to venture into that territory. We had another kid on the way. And for the record I'm ashamed of anyone, irrespective of how good the food is where they come from, who won't do their honest best and sample as much of the local cuisine as they can when they travel. There, Fanfan gets full marks.

Photo credits for this picture of Guenevere, taken around Christmas, go to Fanfan. So, pretty obviously, do genetic credits.

What can I say? Guennie's absolutely the apple of my eye, and if I've spoiled her a bit, so the fuck what. Believe me, you'd be putty in her hands too.

She's in pre-school now, which for an American would seem sort of strange as she wasn't even two when she started. The school she's at isn't exactly prestigious, but hey, we've already plopped down a year's tuition so we're gonna keep her there until that's up in September. Aside from bringing home every cold virus prevalent in Beijing in any given day, I think it's been great for her to get socialized, and learn to be a hypercompetitive overachiever like all proper Chinese-Americans. 

Newfound Respect for Single Parents

It's the fifth day of the Lunar New Year--po wu as it's called in Chinese. It's not quite 7 pm as I begin this and already it sounds like Baghdad out there.

Since the evening of the first day, with the exception of the other day when we had dinner at Fourth Aunt's house, it's just been Guennie and me alone, 24 hours a day. Fanfan has Johnny at her folks' place, but I would have gone stir crazy out there, and besides, the outsize bed they generously provided was still too small for the four of us to get a restful night's sleep. So it's just me and my little 2-years-and-ten-month-old princess. I had somehow imagined that she would keep herself quietly entertained with the various toys she's accumulated. She knows how to work the DVD and the remote, so I figured I might have time to catch up on reading, scour the news for interesting things to blog about, and do some work. No such luck. Single parents out there, my hat's off to you. I don't know how you do it. (The drawing on the left, by the way, is her most recent rendering of me. She did it this afternoon. The one further down was also supposed to be me, but she decided just now that it's a warthog. Thanks, Guen.)  (It's now me again).

I'll admit I've tended to spoil her, and now the bill's come due. She sees this as her chance to put into full practice all the manipulative techniques she's mastered. So no noontime naps, a minimum of walking (why walk when you can be carried?),very late bedtime, and dinner in the living room watching one of several Pixar movies she's obsessed with (or the Disney Lion King trilogy--thus the warthog?). And Dad just sucks at saying no.

I've failed, also, to keep up my end of the language education deal. She's so conversant in Chinese that I reflexively speak to her in that tongue, and not, as I'm supposed to, in English. Lazy fucker that I am, I'm just counting on the boxed DVD set of Sesame English Fanfan bought to get her English on par with her Chinese. I take some solace in knowing I'm doing a better job of speaking only English with John.

Tomorrow I'm taking Guenevere out to pick up Fourth Aunt and her husband, and then we head out to the in-laws' place up north for lunch, then finally come back with Fanfan and Johnny. What a relief it's going to be. I've managed to mop and pick up all the toys, but there's a scary pile of dishes I need to get to as soon as Guennie goes down. That's not likely to happen soon, with all the fireworks.

Anyone reading this may have noticed the family-heavy nature of posts. I don't intend for that those to continue dominating, so do come back once the holiday's over and I'm back to work and thinking about things other than my kids, the in-laws, and the extended Kuo, Zhang, Liu, and Nie clans.

The Amazing Nie Family

One of the unexpected perquisites of marrying Fanfan was the huge and happy distaff side family I inherited. Fanfan's mom, pictured here top, third from right, is the third of seven siblings including six girls. Last night, the third day of the lunar New Year, we had a fantastic meal at the home of Fourth Aunt (四姨), who's usually regarded as the best-looking of the bunch. As you've doubtless guessed, she's the one with the pigtails and the Red Guard get-up. The whole family was or still is in the entertainment business: First Aunt （大姨）, who still lives in the family's native Shanghai, is an exec at Yang Guang TV, Second Aunt was a performer I think and lives in Nanjing, my mother-in-law teaches directing at the Central Drama Academy, Fourth Aunt was part of a drama troupe and is a talented pianist. And so on. They're all very good cooks--especially the three sisters just mentioned.

The family gets together pretty regularly, usually in Shanghai for the Nie family patriarch's birthday. Nie Yuehan is the stuff of legend. He was a Whampoa Military Academy (黄埔军校) graduate, an underground Party in Shanghai member during the War, and rode a bicycle from Shanghai to Wuhan while in his 70s. He just turned 90 last September and is still in fine health. We video-chatted with him on Skype last night from Fourth Aunt's house. Here he is with his great-grandson and namesake, my son John (Yuehan is usually how "John" is rendered in Chinese).

The highlight of the family gatherings is when the daughters, accompanied by the one son on accordion, all sing. They have a whole repertoire of stuff worked out in three-part harmony, and the "Six Phoenixes of the Nie Family" really do it up.

In order, left to right, are Nie Sisters numbers 2, 1, 5, 4, 3, and 6. This was taken at the home of Fifth Aunt, where Fanfan's grandfather now lives.

Fanfan definitely identifies with her Beijing roots and can't speak Shanghainese at all (except, strangely, for the word "nipple," and I really don't want to know why), but I'm mighty glad for that side of her family, and that Guenevere and John will have the chance to grow up with a clan like this.