Ich Bin Ein Beijinger

China Dirt: Ain't it the truth, though?

Jeremy at Danwei alerts us to a blog of recent vintage called Fuck! (tagline: Could the men living in China get any more retarded? Here are the horror stories from the front lines). It's collectively authored by women writing under the name "Chinadirt," and if you're an Anglophone Beijinger of either gender, it'll certainly get you thinking. The writing's very good, the subject matter juicy and controversial, and the point of view--well, as far as I can tell, it's pretty much spot-on.

Let's face it: Beijing--hell, any city in China--tends to ruin men. Not just expat men but just about any man with a little spending power and too little will power. How many of us does that exempt? The loser-back-home is transformed into an Adonis by the adulation of the kang yang qiang contingent--Chinese women who "shoulder foreign rifles." It's hard not to lose your soul here. Temptations abound. Morals are very lax. One guy I knew who'd spent a couple of years in Chengdu told me that after he'd gone back to the States, he "couldn't walk past a barber pole without getting a hard-on."

I look forward to the reaction from men to the Fuck! posts. My suspicion is that most of them will only make pigs of themselves and confirm the authors' opinions--as one "Ousted" already has in the comments to Jeremy's post.

Remembering Guo Fen

This was one of my personal favorite that's Beijing columns, which ran in the October 2002 issue. It's a eulogy for a departed performance artist named Guo Fen, a relative of mine--and a figment of my imagination, I should add: To my great consternation, lots of readers just didn't get that this was a piss-take on the Beijing art scene.

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Guo Fen, one of Beijing's most versatile, prolific, and controversial artists, passed away on August 17 at the age of 36. As a distant relative of the artist's and an avid collector of his works, I have been asked by the editors of this publication to write a few words about the man, his life, and his art.

Guo's life in art was a direct, unflagging, and conscious challenge to entrenched and outmoded notions of "talent" and "good taste." True, his detractors have labeled him variously as a cynic, a fraud, and an exploitative pervert--an artist only of the confidence game, it was said, who pandered shamelessly to wealthy foreign collectors and courted controversy through cheap sensationalistic stunts. But these barbs bounced off Guo like water off a duck's back. He was secure in his uncanny commercial acumen, the exercise of which--like the exercise of his art--was well served by his freedom from the fetters of conventional ethics.

Guo Fen was born in 1966, in Wuyang County, Henan Province. That province, cradle of Chinese civilization (and this writer's ancestral home), has produced artists and craftsmen now famous across China for the fidelity and sheer variety of their reproductions. As a teen, Guo learned to cast excellent reproductions of Shang Dynasty bronze vessels, whose verisimilitude was such that he was able to place, for a time, bronze installations in several municipal museums in Anhui and Jiangxi. His forced absence from the art world--resulting from a misunderstanding over Guo's alleged misrepresation of those bronzes as genuine--gave the young Guo the opportunity to hone his skills in other media: carpentry, plastic injection molding, and textiles. It should be noted that the bronze vessel incident was Guo's only criminal conviction; the other offenses with which he was charged--the highly publicized incident inovlving the seven-year-old girl and the moray eels notwithstanding--either never came to trial or were dismissed on technicalities.

After losing the pinky finger of his left hand to a power loom in 1986, Guo was released from prison. Undeterred from pursuing his artistic vision, he soon made his way to the capital, where the resourceful 20-year-old audited courses at the prestigious Central Academy of Arts. Exhibiting the rare combination of daring artistic originality and uncanny market savvy that would come to characterize his career, he pioneered the combining of Chinese socilalist realism with western pop art themes, creating, almost single-handedly, the celebrated "McStruggle" school of art. The commercial success of acrylic paintings like "Red Star over Golden Arches" (1987) and "Colonel Sanders Addresses the Yan'an Forum on Chicken" (1988) spawned innumerable imitators. Sadly, his contributions to the genre--one that has come to define modern Chinese art--have gone largely unacknkowledged.

In early 1991, following a brief sojourn in Fujian Province, Guo Fen moved to New York, where he gained notoriety for exhibiting a series of photgraphs depicting a severed finger planted upright in a flower pot. In all fairness, Guo never made the claim that the finger was his missing digit: He stood before the exhibit, his four-fingered left hand raised, and did not force viewers to draw the conclusions that they did. Talk of legal action (the finger and photos thereof, it turns out, belonged to another Beijing artist named Sheng Qi) convinced him to return to China. But he carried with him many influences from his months in New York. Greatly impressed with the prices the Saatchis and other collectors were then paying for pieces by Damien Hirst and other avant-garde artists, Guo began experimenting with alternative media--a period that culminated in his seminal and disturbing series, "Misanthropology 101: Studies in Phlegm, Bile, Excrement, and Ear Wax."

No doubt Guo Fen will be best remembered for his bold performance pieces and accompanying video installations. "Puppy Chow," his clever satirical inversion of an infamous piece by a contemporary, in which Guo fed his dog's aborted fetal pup to a young working girl from Dongbei; the multi-sensory "Great Wall of Mollusks," in which Guo pioneered the new genre of olfactory art; and his highly controversial, cannibalistically-suggestive "Tastes like Chicken."

Perhaps the greatest work of Guo's brief but brilliant career was his last---a final, if accidental, sacrifice for art. "Slaughterhouse Sluts," a performance protest against cruelty to animals and the exploitation of women, had all the hallmarks of Guo's work: Rich irony, unabashed escess, and a high asking price. I know that Guo Fen would not want us to blame the women with the chainsaws for the accident; he knew that he was taking a risk when he climbed into the eviscreated carcass of that ox. Guo had hoped that this work would get him invited to the Venice Biennale, and in one last cruel irony, the invitation did arrive, albeit postumously. As the performance was captured on digital video, Guo and his life's final work may yet make it to the Biennale, where surely he will gain the critical acclaim that has so long eluded him.

Ode to a Foot Masseuse

This little bit of doggerel should be out in the magazine in a day or two, if it isn't out already.

Goddammit, now I have to come up with another idea and write something before next Tuesday. Maybe I should go get a foot massage.

Ode to a Foot Masseuse

They call it "reflexology," and with brief apology,

I confess I only learned the word quite recently.

What they call it, I don't care: 'round these parts, it's something rare—

A massage where neither party acts indecently.

Here in China, as you know, from Heilongjiang down to Guangzhou,

Or the Lhasa Valley's Himalayan ice,

It's hard to find a town where you can't get your feet rubbed down,

And enjoy it at a bargain-basement price.

It's a pleasure so sublime it really ought to be a crime

But I'm awfully glad the foot-rub biz is legal.
When you're seated in your chair, the feeling's just beyond compare:

I think the word I'm looking for is "regal."

They're from Henan or Anhui—not from Zhengzhou or Hefei*

But from little county towns you've never heard of

These friendly country lasses from the agronomic classes

Off'ring service that your feet can be assured of.

When those foreign guests come calling and you've spent the day Great Walling,

Or strolling Kunming Lake at Summer Palace,

Nothing's better for the feet—a major podiatric treat

That keeps those tender heels from going callous.

Corns and bunions she'll endure, toe-jam smelling like manure

Athlete's foot, or even fouler forms of fungus

But she won't so much as sigh, and it costs but 80 kuai,

That is why, my friend, my gratitude's humongous.

There's a fascinating chart, describing how each body part

Is linked to certain sections of your feet

For your spleen or for your gonads, or your Grand Primordial Monads

There's a spot to increase qi or quell the heat.

Soak your trotters in the tub, as you ready for the rub

And accept that this is going to hurt at first

There's no pleasure without pain, her ministrations will make plain

And you'll praise the fingers which, just now, you cursed.

It's a universal fate, that when guys begin to date,

They'll play the back-rub card at their first chance.

It's a hackneyed first-date ruse, and to women, this ain't news:

The masseur vamooses once inside your pants.

But our dour and faithful lass will prove she's of a better class

And your tired 'taters are the benefactors

She'll go that extra mile, and she'll do it with a smile,

And she's free of such crass motivating factors.

It's impossible to capture how from pain you come to rapture

As she kneads those knuckles up and down your sole,

I'm not waxing metaphoric when I say that it's euphoric

When the angel breaks you down, and makes you whole.

* Zhengzhou and Hefei are the provincial capitals of Henan and Anhui, respectively

Genghis & Me

For some reason, the censors at the magazine didn't let this one get by. I think it had more to do with the cover story on Genghis Khan, Man of the Millennium, than with my silly little column. Here it is, though, in original form.

So I was just minding my own business, hauling a cartload of millet as tribute for the local Jurchen grandee when I caught the unmistakable whiff of a Mongol horde. "Oh, shit, not again," I thought, and tried to hide in a sack of millet. But then the horde and its overpowering stench were upon me. Two leathery Mongo bruisers hauled me out by my ears and slammed me on the ground before the man himself. I made all obsequious—Great Khan this and O Man of the Millennium that. I also apologized for soiling myself, something of which I'm not proud, but man, I was scared and you would've done the same.

"Get your Han ass up off the ground and tell me why I shouldn’t just let my men use you for target practice," said Genghis Khan in a voice that was surprisingly high and tinny—not what you’d expect from a legendary butcher of men.

"Mighty Khan, the Empire may be conquered on horseback, but cannot be ruled on horseback," I said, my voice cracking. I was in the throes of puberty, you see. It occurred to me the horde thought I was mocking the Khan’s girly voice. Some drew their swords and snarled. But then this effete-looking Khitan dude with a braided forelock pushes forward and says, all indignant, "Excuse me, kid, but the horseback bit? that's my line, okay? And besides, it was a total non sequitur." It was Yelü Chucai: I recognized him from his campaign posters from when he ran for mayor of Beijing. "Your mama!" I shot back, and for some reason that cracked all the Mongols up, and Genghis Khan most of all. After that the Khan's horsemen chased me around whipping my buttocks for a couple of hours, but in the end Genghis suffered me to live and let me clean up.

Turns out that it really was Yelü Chucai first said that thing about ruling on horseback, and I reckon he was right about it being a non sequitur too. I told him so, explaining that I was scared and it was the first thing that popped out, it being so quotable. Later, he sent his thugs for me, had them pull out a couple of my fingernails and torture my feet with a red-hot poker for a couple of days, and after that Chucai and I were cool—friends, even, and we would privately snigger together at the Mongols when they would leave camp to "go among the sheep."

The Khan had some real hotties for daughters, and in a bid to get close to one, I figured I’d make friends with his sons. The eldest, Jochi croaked early—he went among the sheep and caught something, I’m told—but I was tight with Ogodei and Tolui, the youngest boy. Chagatai was a nasty bugger and even his brothers shunned him. He would hot-box the lot of us in his yurt—he’d seal up the flaps and the smoke hole up top, and fart nasty mutton farts. Then he’d wave his scimitar around and threaten to behead anyone he thought was breathing through their mouth.

Genghis Khan had the dopest of yurts. Whether we were chilling in Karakorum or out in the field on campaign, the man’s decorator knew how to pimp a yurt: the finest wool carpets of Persia and the Caucuses, silk from the lands south of the Yangtze, copper and brass wares from the smiths of Anatolia, the grinning skulls of princes and satraps foolish enough to oppose him. I taught Genghis to play the board game Risk and we often stayed up playing all night in that stylin’ yurt, me and Genghis, Oggie and Tolui, sometimes Chucai and the general Subotai too. We regulars always let the Khan win. But one night, after imbibing a bit too much of single-mare, this general named Jogdach (who was a nice enough guy when he wasn't catapulting rotting corpses into recalcitrant Chinese cities he happened to be laying siege to) attacked the Khan in Kamchatka from Alaska. He rolled a bunch of sixes and took him out. Genghis kicked the board over, and while Tolui and me sorted the armies and put away the game, poor Jogdach was trussed up, rolled into a carpet, and dragged behind horses until he was tenderized to death.

The years went by. We wiped the floor with the Jurchen, who’d gone soft from a high-carb Northern Chinese diet, took out Western Xia, conquered Khwarezmia, and laid waste to the great Silk Road cities of Samarkand, Bukhara and Merv. I started to get the hang of the looting and pillaging. I wasn’t the best rider in the horde, but pretty soon I was as surly and bow-legged as the next guy. I developed a taste for fine, single-mare kumiss, which I’d loot from duty-free shops.

The daughter I was keen on, Magda, seemed to take a shine to me, too, and so after some deliberation I asked her out to view the Mountain of Skulls we’d made after the sack of Samarkand. When I went to pick her up, the Khan was there, and while she got dressed, I had to endure the third degree from her old man. "What is best in life?" he asked in his weird falsetto. Ordinarily I was supposed to answer with some variation on "To kill your enemy, ride his horses, and hear the lamentations of his women," but something told me that wouldn’t work before I took Magda out, so I answered with some half-remembered, goody-goody Han stuff about studying the Four Books and Five Classics and becoming an upright official. He thought about this for a while, then said, "Okay, you may take my daughter out, but if you are set upon by our enemies, you bend your bow, and slay them without mercy." Roger that, O Great Khan, I said, and we rode off.

The Mountain of Skulls was oddly depressing for Magda—lots of flies and carrion fowl, still—and as we trotted back to camp, she said she thought I’d make more money as a Southern Song prefect than as a mere lackey for her dad. She said she’d always wanted to open a tavern where she might profit from the famous hospitality of the Mongolian people. Maggie’s, she’d call it. I thought about Chagatai’s cruel pranks, and poor Jogdach in the carpet, and decided maybe she was right. So we turned our horses south and east, toward the Jade Gate, and rode toward a new future south of the Yangtze.