I dreamed up this video on a Beijing bus. They get a bad rap, but for those not close to a subway stop and possessing a limber mind, Beijing buses make for a fascinating real-time social-psychology laboratory. Sitting (okay, standing) in one of these sardine cans at rush hour, I watch the city stitch itself together. Forced to slog through a Dongzhimen Wai traffic jam also forces me to soak up the reserved dignity of a grandma jealously guarding her massive cabbage haul, or the feigned disinterest of uniformed high schoolers thieving glances and sharing earbuds. You’ve got Hall of Fame migrant grinders sitting on all the possessions they’ll be bringing home this year, and next to them the offspring of other grinders giggling on their way to blowing some cash at Sanlitun.

What can I say? I’m a total sucker for those scenes and the fictitious backstories that I whip up before hopping off at my stop.

When I paired this people-watching with George Gershwin’s masterpiece the stories around me took on that epic resonance only possible in the echo chamber of one’s own head. It’s a city of grinders, true believers and people who just don’t give a shit about anything except where their next donkey sandwich is coming from. And yet somehow when you throw it all together and cloak it in jazzy trumpet and yearning violin you get something utterly engrossing and beautiful.

Am I romanticizing it all? Yep. Is that way more fun than demonizing the place and the people around you? Oh hellz yes.

My dad introduced me to Rhapsody in Blue when I was in elementary school. He’d tell me that it was a tour through turn-of-the-century New York and he’d narrate the scenery and the characters as we flew from Brooklyn streets up into Manhattan apartments. I’ve loved the piece ever since then, and as Beijing welcomed me into its throttling embrace I kept making Rhapsody in Blue my soundtrack to the city.

Several more months of terrible air, bad publicity and one inspired brainstorm session with my friend Kyle convinced me that this was a movie that needed be made. Beijing right now is one of the most fascinating clusters of humanity in the world and yet it’s almost perpetually shrouded in a layer of physical and public relations pollution. I get that. I’ve read the history, I breathe the air, I eat the gutter oil, and yeah, that all sucks. But at the end of the day this place just has an energy that I’m in love with.

It’s the people, the bustle, the contrast, the audacity, the poverty, the history and the haggling over vegetable prices. Privacy is a luxury anywhere in China, but that means we have the luxury of watching life happen all around us.

So last summer I started roaming the city with a little handheld camera, discreetly (or not) trying to capture the people that give life to Beijing. I spent the summer in a language program at Beijing Normal University and I’d take off most afternoons to sweat through the streets and snag a few extra shots. The video includes lots of bits from my neighborhood (甜水园街北口, holla), my school (北京师范大学, PIB, come at me), and my absolute favorite place in the city: Jingshan Park.

And you know what? It was a gorgeous summer and an elegant fall. Beijing may be coy, but when it decides to flaunt its sun-soaked pagodas or let you lose yourself in its alleyways, the city is flat-out beautiful.

I made Rhapsody in Beijing because I wanted to give this city it’s due and show that it’s more than the butt of some cynic’s joke. I love Beijing and feel so damn lucky to be living here.

Matt Sheehan is a journalist currently writes for The Huffington Post/The World Post. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattsheehan88 or contact him at mattsheehan88@gmail.com. His previous stories for Beijing Cream include Anatomy of a Chinese Airport Rumble.

Republished with permission from Matt Sheehan’s An Optimist’s Guide to China.

As a lover of home-made water crafts, I recently set out to build my own Beijing boat. The blueprint is simple, the supplies are all within striking distance, and the finished product unlocks a lot of free fun in parks, canals and places like Houhai.

Supplies:

• inflatable kiddie swimming pool: ~90 kuai
• flat piece of wood: free (if you can find an unguarded construction site)
• ~4 square meters of bubble wrap: ~5 kuai per square meter
• saw: 15 kuai
• sand paper: 4 kuai
• tape/masking tape: 2 kuai
• a home-made oar: whatever value you place on the sweeping end of a broom, or a frisbee
• camping tarp (optional)

Basics: You are going to shape the wood to the interior of your swimming pool, soften/wrap its edges so it doesn’t pop your pool, and place it on the floor of your pool. Then you’re pretty much set. All a boat needs to do is displace enough water to create flotation, and that’s very easily done.

Step 1: Fitting wood to inside of pool

Inflate swimming pool and cut the wood to fit the interior. When measuring the pool, add a few inches to your tally, because the wood needs to squeeze snugly into the inflated pool’s walls. You’ll also want to round the corners on the wood to avoid any sharp/pressure-applying points.

Step 2: Sanding, wrapping wood

Sand down the edges of the wood, and then wrap it in bubble wrap. The more layers you add, the safer and more comfortable it will be. I think Zhang Wen and I went with three layers, which was plenty.

Step 3: Reinforce pool floor with tape (probably optional)

This is my unscientific approach to reinforcing the plastic of the pool. I use tape to create something of a spider web that I hope will distribute the weight from the edge of the board. The bottom of the pool is soft, so my fear is always that there will be too much stress where the wood is essentially dragging the pool down. Go with your own method here, I’m making this up as I go along, but my boats haven’t failed me yet.

Step 4: Grab a makeshift oar and get out on the water

I was originally working with the sweeping end of a cheap broom, but found that it worked best when complimented by a frisbee. Below are pictures of my boat’s maiden voyage on the creeks and lakes of Chaoyang Park. It was a lot of fun, though eventually cut short by the repeated warnings of the lake police (湖管?).

Next stop will probably be Houhai and a great night of drinking out on the water.

Optional add ons:

When some friends and I slept in a similar boat one night we wrapped the exterior of the swimming pool in a camping tarp, which we then tied off around the top of the swimming pool. That relatively sturdy exterior shell protects the boat from the greatest threat: a tiny prick that deflates your pool and sinks your boat. I didn’t add one to the Beijing version, but it still proved more than seaworthy.

Questions? Comments? Contact Matt at mattsheehan88{at}gmail{dot}com or follow him on Twitter @mattsheehan88.

“Hello, today’s flight ____ to ____ has been delayed because of ____.”

It’s 8:40 pm on a Friday. We’re lined up at the China Eastern Airlines counter a full ninety minutes before takeoff, and I have everything I need for a great, just-quit-work weekend: passport, check; cleats, check; Frisbee, check; baijiu-Fanta mix, check. But just then, China decides to remind me where I am. Ahead of us in line, an argument begins to stew, froth, and bubble. The verbal combatants are an elderly couple, possibly from the countryside, and two overdressed, overly made-up, and apparently overconfident young women.

The initial dispute is over whether a luggage cart bumped into an ankle, but it gets ugly fast: one of the girls taunts the old man’s ability to speak standard Mandarin Chinese. Airline employees break up the verbal sparring as quickly as they can, but the tone for the evening has been set. At the counter, a friendly but frazzled attendant tells me my flight doesn’t yet have a gate, and I already have an idea of what I’m in for.

“Does that mean the flight is going to be delayed?”

“There’s no way to know right now. Just head through security, take a seat and wait.”

“Okay…”

~

By 10 pm I’ve slumped into chairs around the corner from the China Eastern counter along with 30-plus fellow travelers to Ningbo. There’s a collective nervousness about the total lack of information, but a sense of safety in the knowledge that they wouldn’t leave without all of us. As the minutes tick by, most people have their eyes on the flight monitor, but mine keep wandering to the company whiteboard that sits upside down and untouched in the corner:

“Hello, today’s flight ____ to ____ has been delayed because of ____. We are very sorry for all inconveniences. This sign will be updated every five minutes.”

At 10:50 the television monitor makes its opening play: 32登机口. Gate 32. The news travels via murmur through our group, and we show detectable optimism as we head down the causeway. What greets us on arrival at Gate 32, however, kills that flicker of hope. The expansive gate is populated by a few men in cheap suits who are slumped creatively around the arms of airport benches.

Our group hasn’t sat for more than ten minutes when the flight monitor makes its second play: Gate 19. The number flashes for a minute before settling into a steady neon blue. Our fellow travelers, with their luggage and their discontent, now make their way back down to the far end of the terminal. Gate 19 forms a cul de sac at this end, and the geography matches the mood. As we sink into our seats, people begin fearing the worst and getting ready for the long haul. Instant noodles are purchased, playing cards come out, pillows are unpacked, and you get a moment to appreciate how good Chinese travelers are at settling in wherever they find themselves.

My frame doesn’t fit well on airport benches, so I abandon any expectation of rest and concentrate on worrying. A delayed flight is expected in China, but there’s something eerie about the ever-changing gates and the fact that they’re still advertising a 10:40 pm take-off at 11:45. The airport is fast emptying of staff, and our group hasn’t had contact with China Eastern employees since they were last seen two hours ago.

A few members of the group are dialing airport help lines when the television monitor makes another bold change. At 12:15 am, the monitor informs us that our flight will be departing from Gate 32… at 10:40 pm. Several passengers rise to the bait, but while we’re gathering bags, our collective angst turns into action. The group quickly coalesces behind some very vocal middle-aged women who have had enough. As they spout off, the loose gaggle of passengers transforms into a posse out for blood.

With the China Eastern desk long-since abandoned, the mob rounds a corner to find a break room where employees of another airline are eating Ramen. At this point, anyone wearing a uniform is deemed guilty by association. On the defensive, the workers deny any connection with our airline. Asked where the China Eastern people are, they reply, “They already clocked out.”

“LOOK AT THE GOD DAMN SCREEN BEHIND YOU!”

Fresh blood on a shark snout, that comment. The middle-aged women — we’ll call them the Aunties — are beside themselves and immediately pull out the big guns. “Everybody send out Weibos! Everybody send out Weibos!” Nervous anger and microblog posts begin to emanate out from our group. We demand that our two hostages contact China Eastern people, and we only leave when reports trickle in that our airline’s people are back at the counter.

Marching down the concourse for the third time, our posse is riling itself up for confrontation. As voices grow shriller, distinct sub-groups begin to emerge. At the front the Aunties are feisty and feeble at the same time. They’re dressed and hair-dyed in a way to showcase their (or their husband’s) moderate financial success. Creeping through their 50s, the three women appear to have channeled decades of quiet emotional suffering into indignation over the 800 meters they’ve been forced to walk tonight.

On the other hand, one of the words you keep hearing bounce around their conversation is “rights,” e.g., “consumer rights.” Now that’s something that’s rarely brought up in China (outside of CCTV’s exposes of “malicious” foreign firms), and it’s one that could use a little more play. Consumer rights in China are abysmal, with a company generally considered socially conscious if it doesn’t poison or outright defraud you. These Aunties’ tone may be shrill, but there’s a kernel of a legitimate complaint in there.

Behind them is a loosely assembled group of half a dozen young men. Nearly all wearing black jackets and tacky shirts, the guys look like the kind of people who hang out on street corners and try to sell you receipts or stolen Motorola Razrs. A Chinese person with strong regional prejudices might guess that the men were from Henan. We’ll call them the Goodfellas.

The rest of us are tag-alongs, sharing in the ire but unsure what to make of it. As we approach the China Eastern counter, now populated by three female employees, the Aunties’ wrath finds a target.

“Where the hell have you guys been? We’ve been marching back and forth for hours with no sign of what’s going on!”

“We’ve been here the whole time.” (Lie.) “And why have you been marching back and forth? The flight is delayed and departing from Gate 40.” (Infuriating, but interesting tact.)

As the employees persist with a combination of bald-faced lies and potential half-truths, the outline of our conflict takes shape. China Eastern’s position is that after a brief delay in information, the flight has consistently been set to depart from Gate 40 once the plane arrives. Our claim that monitors have been displaying a revolving stream of gates is met with absolute denial from the employees: the monitors have always displayed Gate 40.

This unfortunate employee has wandered in past her depth here, and she realizes she’s in trouble when the Aunties, Goodfellas, and tag-alongs cry out: “TURN AROUND!” “LOOK AT THE GOD DAMN SCREEN BEHIND YOU!” “READ ME WHAT IT SAYS ON THE MONITOR!” Oohhh. That’s going to be a tough one to wriggle out of, so the woman takes a bold stand: she will not turn around and look at the screen.

Cue: Frenzy Feed.

“You know what, respect goes both ways”

Everyone gets in on the action, with even the most reserved members of the posse spewing venom across the counter. Company policies are being cited, compensation is being demanded, and someone’s character is being called into question. Camera-phones are snapping pictures of faces, name tags, and television monitors. Cornered and argumentatively crippled, the woman calls for reinforcements in the form of a mid-level manager.

When back-up arrives, it is calmer, friendlier and about 125 pounds heavier. The man appears to be in his early 30s, and has probably sat through a few graduate classes on customer service. His hair is dyed and styled to appear slightly more Western, and his healthy potbelly also takes after certain aspects of Americana.

A fresh perspective and some diplomacy buy the man time, but in the end he’s fighting a losing battle. The Aunties quickly work themselves into a frenzy, citing a litany of health issues aggravated by tonight’s regimen of waiting and walking. One with dyed red hair and a complexion to match begins pounding the counter and lecturing Mr. Middle-Manager on her high blood pressure.

The Goodfellas have taken up positions safely behind the Aunties, contributing nothing except a periodic “Yea! She said it!” and the occasional slander of someone’s mother. One member of the gang makes his first real foray into the debate by wadding up a newspaper and throwing it at the manager’s head. It’s a bullseye, granted one without a whole lot of force.

This is where our pudgy middle manager truly shines, if just for a moment. He bows his head, takes a deep breath and says, “You know what, respect goes both ways,” before plodding ahead with his analysis. Unfortunately his position in the argument isn’t proving quite so flexible.

“The flight has always been scheduled for Gate 40… No, I won’t turn around and look at the screen… No, there won’t be any compensation for you passengers. OK?”

The last rhetorical “OK” is uttered in English over his shoulder as he turns to walk away from the counter. The man doesn’t make it two steps before a half-full plastic water bottle sails out of the crowd, over my shoulder and directly into the left cheek of Mr. Middle-Manager.

BOOM.

The man turns on a dime and lunges at the counter as the Aunties retreat. His pudgy fingers grasp at the culprit, a darker man in a grey jacket who is smirking from a safe distance. Slowly awaking to the public relations disaster on their hands, two male employees grab Mr. Middle-Manager by the arms as their female co-workers whip out camera phones and snap pictures of the culprit. The better restrained the big man becomes, the bolder our water-bottle thrower grows. He steps up to the counter and wags fingers accompanied by curses in Mr. Middle-Manager’s face.

“Everybody send out Weibos!”

By this point there are enough camera-phone angles on the scene to accommodate a Matrix-style freeze-frame 360. Each side is hoping to gather evidence for the coming trial to be waged on Chinese social media.

Unfortunately, our manager isn’t doing his side any favors. His initial composure has given way to an elephant seal battle for male supremacy. In struggling to free himself for the offensive, the man exposes his ample belly. Pushed up against a wall he grabs for the only large projectile on hand: a metal stool. Cursing the stench of his assailants’ mothers’ reproductive organs, Mr. Middle-Manager lifts the stool for launch. Lucky for him, one of his co-workers manages to get a hand on it, deflecting the missile onto the counter. The China Eastern staffers hold tight as the aggrieved manager rages and wriggles. Weaponry and energy deprived, Mr. Middle-Manager contents himself with a purely verbal assault as he’s ushered away.

As China Eastern’s lone combatant is dragged off to a back office, some female employees have managed to get around the counter and directly photograph the water bottle thrower’s face. Soon the argument re-centers around the bottle thrower, the Aunties and a gaggle of female employees. By constantly upping the ante and baiting the employees, one cunning Auntie manages to get a woman to swear at her. They all immediately seize on the lone curse word, wagging their fingers in the face of the embarrassed woman who knows she’s slipped up.

The chaos has finally garnered the attention of a higher-up who comes down to fill the role of our fallen middle-manager. He takes a similar tack, apologizing and even bowing. But our impassioned defenders of customer rights are not to be so easily placated. Despite inciting the scuffle, both the Goodfellas and the Aunties are now demanding financial compensation and a direct apology from Mr. Middle-Manager.

As it becomes increasingly clear that neither of these will be forthcoming, most of the tag-alongs begin the slow walk down to Gate 40. Some time between 1 and 2 am, our 10:40 pm flight finally begins boarding. We take our assigned seats along with around a hundred other customers who somehow did get the memo on Gate 40. In the end, the final delay comes from the Aunties and the Goodfellas who defended their honor until the bitter end. They trickle onto the plane after half an hour, empty-handed but determined to give off the mien of victory. The Aunties’ conversations are dialed up four notches as they give a blow-by-blow retelling of the most exciting thing that’s happened to them in a decade. When the emotional hollowness of the conversation really starts to grind my gears I pipe up with a simple, “That’s enough, thanks.” It earns a stink face from an Auntie, but voices are lowered.

Four hours after our scheduled takeoff, China Eastern Airlines MU5177 gains speed down the runway and finally takes off into the black Beijing night.

Matt is a journalist living in Beijing. You can contact him at mattsheehan88@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @mattsheehan88.

An eerily similar incident happened in 2011, also involving a China Eastern flight leaving for Ningbo from Beijing. And while we’re talking about airports, who can forget this official in Kunming?

Normal expat whining is grating and graceless, but let’s face it: it has its roots in something that we can all identify with.

China takes a lot out of you, demands a lot of you at times. Sure, there are those skating by with an absurd income-to-work ratio, people to whom China is a paid vacation punctuated by occasional encounters with the indigenous people who for some reason haven’t learned to speak English. But in any expat experience, there are certain unavoidable facts of life: you’re often out of your comfort zone, ostracized or just generally unable to make things happen. If the cultural chasm doesn’t get you, it’s virtually guaranteed that the crush of 19 million people out to get theirs will. It’s that post-Line-1-at-6-pm decompression, or the why-can’t-they-understand-my-broken-ass-Mandarin desperation. Having just been told that the document you absolute need stamped is 办不了, having been unceremoniously spit out of a bus operating as a human flesh compactor, you’re faced with a choice: retreat or charge ahead?

The retreat is easy: curse the infuriating illogic, the unspeakable injustice, the utter total bullshit of this subway/government department/taxi driver. Go home to a spacious apartment equipped with filters for both pollution and unfamiliar culture. Send out a status update so all your friends in America will see how totally crazy your life in China is, pop in a pirated DVD and call it a night.

That’s an understandable response to a frustrating situation, but it’s not the only one.

Instead, you can choose to charge. Embrace the crowd, wallow in the chaos and say yes to everything around you. That rush hour subway ride transforms itself into a sea-of-humanity surf session when you just let go and roll with it. The cab driver isn’t your enemy, he’s actually a normal dude, and one who can tell you a little about what it’s like to work 12 hours a day, 350 days a year. Even trips into the belly of the bureaucratic beast are more satire than tragedy if you take that second to retell the story to yourself in the right way.

It takes more physical and emotional energy, but when you throw yourself into this madhouse, the rewards start rolling in. Smiles get returned, seats are given up, aunties stuff an extra piece of chicken into your jidan guanbing, and you’re making friends, really wonderful friends. When you open yourself up to China, this country does the same to you.

Who is Frank Turner and what does he have to do with any of this? He’s a musician, a guy from England, and his music is pure unadulterated fuel for this charge. He usually gets categorized as something ranging from post-punk to (insert qualifying adjective)-folk, but the theme that runs through it all is one giant YES to life. He’ll get pretty literal and explicit with his lyrical message, but it’s done in such unabashed, no-nonsense earnestness that you’re on his side from the very beginning.

When you’re teetering on that edge between charge and retreat, wandering dangerously close to just saying “fuck this” and climbing back into your shell, he’s there to kick you off your ass and say, “Go do something worth remembering!”

Frank’s music is about embracing this world, this place, these people. And most of all it’s a reminder of a life lesson that China reaffirms every day: you get back exactly what you put out.

Frank Turner is playing at Mao Livehouse tomorrow (Friday, March 22) at 9 pm. He’ll be speaking at Chill Bar later today at 8 pm. Details and tickets are available here. Here’s the Youku version of the top song, Photosynthesis (part of this playlist). Also see: If Ever I Stray (YouTube / Youku).

Matt is a journalist living in Beijing. He’ll be getting goosed and then going to the Frank Turner show on Friday. You can contact him at mattsheehan88@gmail.com or follow him on twitter @mattsheehan88.

In many ways, it’s a story that combines everything that makes the Chinese media gush: pandas, tea, X-thousand years of culture, little children wearing cute costumes…

And poop.

Panda poop.

That’s the recipe behind what some are calling the most expensive tea ever created. Selling for an eye-popping 440,000 RMB per kilogram (about $32,000 per pound), the “Panda Tea” is the brainchild of artist/calligrapher-turned-amateur-botanist An Yanshi of Sichuan province. He’s been brewing this idea for a couple of years, and finally got it on shelves recently at a price he says will set a Guinness World Record for “most expensive tea leaves.”

So what role does the panda poop play? Professor An used it to fertilize plants whose leaves were eventually picked and dried for the tea. He set up operations around a panda refuge, allegedly pouring nearly 10 tons of panda-based fertilizer into the project.

The result, he claims, is a cancer-fighting tea made from a “national treasure.” An says that pandas eat leaves that contain cancer-fighting elements, and since the pandas themselves are unable to fully digest those leaves, the anti-cancer agents remain present in their droppings. Bury that poop near a bush, and leaves from said bush will naturally combat cancer… right?

Even the Chinese media aren’t biting. There’s a bit too much gooey cultural nonsense even for them. The creator even went through the trouble of photographing kids in panda hats picking the leaves, but what kind of publicity did this generate? The good people at Hualong Net titled their article, “Don’t make children sales props for ‘Panda Tea.’” Caixun has also written a takedown. Journalists who took a sniff of the fabled Panda Tea probably came away looking like this:

Matt Sheehan is a broadcast journalist in Beijing. You can reach him at mattsheehan88@gmail.com or @mattsheehan88.