Before I saw Tom Olden’s video, I heard reactions to it. It was described as a “leap off the deep end” with an “ISIS vibe,” featuring a “headless girl in the background chopping carrots on an ironing board… PUA-style ‘burns’ on manhood, and, of course, that Jigsaw voice.” That’s crazy, I thought. Does the carrot represent neutered sexuality? Is the headless woman some self-aware avowal of misogyny? And what of the knife, that weapon-turned-tool of domesticity, scything away? Is the video menacing or ironic?

Then I watched, and… exactly. Yes.

In case you missed it, last week we published Alec Ash’s funny and incisive review of Olden’s memoir, Shanghai Cocktales, to precipitate this video. Ash’s review was not particularly positive, but it was humorous, had a killer ending, and it was an honest-by-God review — from a frequent contributor to The Los Angeles Review of Books, no less — so on the balance I expected Olden to have been happy.

Was he?

Cue the tape.

Video on Tudou for those without VPNs

I keep picturing, for no particular reason, an incensed F. Scott Fitzgerald underneath a keffiyeh branded with block letters TRIMALCHIO IN WEST EGG telling the camera, Greetings, H.L. Mencken. Greetings, Chicago Tribune, and I think the world would have been a happier, more enlightened place had that happened.

“Perhaps the idea of cuckoldry excites you, no?” he offers.

“An Iranian man and I Chinese-finger-trapped a prostitute, for fuck’s sake!”

“Or do you in fact revel in cuckoldry?”

“Peter Hessler may not have a penis, but I do,” Fitzgerald — unable to know his penis would become a subject of fascination to Ernest Hemingway in the doomed author’s famous memoir — growls.

These are not the lines of a sane man. Said RFH, who edited Ash’s review, “I half-expected to see Alec tied to some elaborate Bateman-esque torture device at the end and being told he’s ‘going to play a game.’” But watch the video again, and pay attention to the progression of tone, notably from lighthearted to angry, and you’ll notice a half-rack of internal logic, I daresay order, a semblance of forethought. It begins with a concession (“Although we don’t see eye to eye, I see the humor in your writing”) and a self-deprecating joke (“You label my book’s title as a ‘shitty 2am pun.’ It was 3am when I decided on this title, Alec”) before the speaker becomes irritated, then irritating, defensive, and nearly angry (the Iranian-Chinese-finger-trapping line is spiked with ire, otherwise it could have been an uproarious punchline). Finally, in the latter stages, the message becomes muddled while sentences elongate like a bad hangover, as if Olden has been tricked yet again into a water-cooler homily with his subconscious, giving us, “I like to make educated choices. For instance, her breasts could be larger, but I’m still impressed with what she’s doing with this push-up bra, so I think I’ll give it a go.” In two minutes, Olden encapsulates 16 years of China life: cheer rotted into cynicism, resignation, and one long interminable howl at the unknowable realities which afflict our existence. Do you just fuck anything? Are you above sexuality?

On the whole, for all its unsoundness, the video is not the work of an inveterate drunk with “the subtlety and ear for language of a horny, deaf-blind goat” — Ash might have been slightly harsh in his assessment there. Olden’s quip, “Sure, I could write my own version of Rob Gifford’s China Road” is somewhat brilliant; and to be fair to goats, they’re goddamn hilarious. I’d also venture the horny lute-playing caprine demigod Pan could scarce do self-actualization better than, “I embrace my hunger for sexual excitement. I embrace my darker side.” No, Olden strikes me as a fun-enough barfly, a harmless middle-aged male who had either the fortune or misfortune of living in turn-of-the-century China — which was exactly like fin de siècle Paris, only without the quality of art. I’m fine with Olden’s response. I’m fine with Shanghai Cocktales. It’s given us all a week’s worth of amusement, topped by this video, which will probably give us a half-week’s worth more.

Then let us never speak of it again.

SHANGHAI COCKTALES (A Memoir)

It’s one of the gifts of China that there’s something to write about on every street corner. It’s one of the curses of China that expats keep writing about themselves instead.

That’s not to say there isn’t rich material in it. Somewhere outside the Fourth Ring Road, a nondescript borderline-alcoholic English teacher might be polishing off the manuscript of the China equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Escape, reinvention, exoticism, disillusionment – it’s all there for a novelist or memoirist, plus baijiu, smog and as many happy endings as you can afford. There’s definitely a way to do it right, make it funny, and say something meaningful about how us foreigners (with nowhere else in particular to go) engage with China, or don’t. There’s also a way to do it wrong, and come across as a goon who can’t write his way out of a paper bag.

By now you should be getting an idea of what kind of a review this is going to be.

As a writerly sort and interested party, I occasionally read books which are memoirs – sometimes thinly veiled as fiction – of the expat in question’s China years. Some are entertaining, others as interesting as a concrete overpass. Many have weird hang-ups about sex. Most feature heavy drinking as a centrepiece. Almost all can be summed up in a single sentence: “Look at this crazy wacky time I’m having in China!” But I’ve never seen one which combines all of the things I hate in China writing between two covers until I read the self-published Shanghai Cocktales: A Memoir by Tom Olden.

Can we dwell on that title for a moment? Shanghai Cocktales. It sounds like some “friend” of Olden’s dared him to write a book based around that single, shitty 2am pun. I’m sure it sounded funny after five rounds at his local, but Olden woke up the next morning and still went with it. The chapters are called “Cocktale One,” “Cocktale Two,” and so on until you wish you were dead or drinking that sixth cocktail. Tom Olden (a pseudonym) has all the subtlety and ear for language of a horny, deaf-blind goat. If he ran this blog, it would no doubt be called Beijing Spunk.

The plot is more or less a blow-by-blow dirge of Olden’s nights out, sexual conquests and job interviews in Shanghai from his arrival as a twenty something year-old in 1999 (“the year of the Rabbit”, thanks for that) until now. It’s billed as a memoir but reads like bad fiction. The second sentence begins “As the only white male on a half-full flight, I gratefully enjoyed the extra attention the nubile air hostesses gave me,” and goes downhill from there. I would happily write off that half-full flight as collateral damage if the plane had only crashed and spared us the rest.

Promotional image for ‘Shanghai Cocktales’

At the airport, Olden meets his mate Alex, who wows him by giving an address in Chinese to their taxi driver. (“‘Whadde’fuck?’” … “‘You speak Chinese? Fuck me!’” … “‘Ching-chong, ching-chong, you’re the man.’”) There’s also some artful exposition when Alex quizzes Olden about why he left everything to come to China and asks about a girl called Marie. “‘She’s over and out. Bitch!’”, comes the reply. (“If it hadn’t been for her,” Olden delusionally muses later,“I could have spent my entire time on campus banging freshmen.”) It’s frequently revealed that Olden has “nightmares where I would wake up, bathed in cold sweat, panting from seeing Marie and Kurt in joyous copulation.” I’m on Team Kurt.

It’s not just snappy comebacks and scintillating interior monologue that Olden puts in italics. It’s every sentence he thinks is clever. On local eating habits: “How the fuck can they eat cold fish for breakfast?” On people he doesn’t like: “I’d party with anyone but her. Even French people.” On his soul-crushingly bland inner life: “You’re here now. In Shanghai. Ready for a new beginning.” His favourite refrain is “Whadde’fuck?” Sometimes he switches into italics for whole paragraphs, just for kicks. He also does that irritating thing where he writes the pinyin followed by the English (“‘Mei you wenti.’ No problem”) because ching-chong, ching-chong, he’s the man.

For someone who lived in China for sixteen years, it’s hard to believe how little of interest happened to Olden. He tries valiantly to keep things topical – the Belgrade embassy bombing, the Internet boom – but inevitably gets sucked back into the dull minutia of his sexpatscapades. In one meat market, he picks up a girl with the sparkling line “Hey – can I buy you a drink?” Her reply is “OK. First, toilet”, and I know how she feels. There are exactly two entertaining moments in the book – one where he is fleeced by the notorious teahouse scam into paying a huge dinner bill, the second where he is scammed by conmen posing as police when he’s with a prostitute. Finally, something worth cheering for.

Every woman Olden meets is immediately judged on her appearance. The idea persists among some foreigners – dare I say, especially in Shanghai? – that China is populated by porcelain dolls just waiting to jump into bed with them. Most of the time, it’s just run-of-the-mill Asian sexpot sophomoric dross, which isn’t worth quoting, although I kid you not that the first Chinese girl he runs into tells him he’s handsome and gives him an “exotic giggle.” Often it’s nastier, such as a bargirl who is “probably in her early thirties and had certainly been a pretty girl at some point in life, but now she looked pale and pinched, her slanted eyes rimmed by darkened circles.” I would give anything for a jacket shot of Olden so I could treat him the same.

Besides his alleged close encounters with Shanghai’s beauties, the rest of the book is Olden’s job interviews and miscellaneous score settling, which is all about as fun to read as drinking melamine from the can. He does the rounds of early city magazine websites and paints thinly veiled portraits of various friends and foes using false names. The climactic moment of the memoir is Olden landing a job that pays twelve thousand yuan a month, presumably vindicating him to all his enemies. There’s a whole paragraph about how boring a meeting was. To quote the master: Whadde’fuck?

If you’re a masochist, you can buy the book on Amazon, where there are thirteen customer reviews, all five stars, many of which overuse his full name in the same way. Something tells me the IP log would be revealing. I can’t imagine it sold like hot cakes, as half a year later he started giving it away for free on Twitter.

@Bueller @Bueller @Anyone… @Anyone?

I had an email exchange with Olden – he knows this review is coming – who wrote “I am aware that many people will not appreciate the story, but I wanted to tell it as it was.” He changed the names of people and companies, but everything else is accurate “as I remember it” (unspecified after how many drinks). The motivation to write the thing, he argued, was so that “when someone picks up the book 20-40 years from now, they’ll get a true picture of Shanghai in 1999.”

Curious about this mysterious auteur (Olden’s author bio says he “grew up in a small fishing village outside of Malmo, Sweden”), I asked some friends in Shanghai and we did a half-hearted human flesh search. Eventually, with the help of RFH, I tracked down someone who knows him and was in Shanghai over the same period. “It’s representative of the mindset of foreigners in China in that era,” he told me. “It’s reprehensible drivel, but unfortunately it’s the best record we’ve got.”

You might wonder – I certainly am – why I’m bothering to do a hatchet job on a self-published book with a fundamentally unlikeable narrator that no one except a few of Olden’s remaining mates will read. It’s not the first piece of grot to be written by an LBH (Loser Back Home) who got shanghai’ed into China and thinks his story is unique, and it won’t be the last. Worse books and blogs have been written. As to the offensive sexist stuff, he’s just a minnow in the slipstream of trouts like China Bounder, Robert Black and Isham Cook.

Part of it, I’ll confess, is that writing this is one way to claw some enjoyment back from the hours lost reading the bloody thing. But more than that, it’s because with every tone-deaf sentence I’m reminded of what we might be missing. Again, The Sun Also Rises was also narcissistic foreigners drinking all day. Here’s Hemingway: “You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. … You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate. You hang around cafés.” And here’s Olden, via one of his dolls: “‘Many, many fun in Shanghaijj,’ she lashed on, shaking her head sideways. ‘Yo come anytime and we take care o’yo. Good time. Ayi-yaah. Many fun. Many, many fun…’”

Mostly, I’m reviewing this book because Olden told me that, after sixteen years, he is leaving China in a few months. I want to leave him a memento to remember us by. To borrow his own italicised phrase about a girl he doesn’t take a shine to: “You cannot let bitches like that go without a slap.”

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing, and editor of the Anthill. Information and purchasing details of Shanghai Cocktales are on Facebook or Amazon (includes video). For a much more charitable take on this memoir, the Kirkus Review says it “gives readers plenty to think about.”

UPDATE, 6/4, 12:30 am: here’s our response to Tom Olden’s official response to Alec Ash’s review.

Growing up, Driver Wang’s father thought him a momma’s boy. “Send him to play outside more,” he complained. “The kid needs to get into some scrapes.” Little did Wang Hu know, his son had been through six lifetimes of scrapes. He’d been castrated by a sorceress, strangled by a lover, beaten by roving pirates, and tortured by Red Guards. Yet in his current life as a Beijing taxi driver, Driver Wang is unaware of any of this — until, one day, a mysterious letter falls from his taxi’s visor.

Past lives are the focus of Susan Barker’s latest novel, The Incarnations, based in both modern-day and ancient China. Like the striking mosaic of sketches on the cover, Barker combines the romantic, the metaphysical, the occult, and the Occidental to construct a house-of-mirrors novel that is hard to put down. While it takes a few chapters to get into, one’s patience with its initial lethargy is rewarded once the plot picks up.

On the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a taxi driver receives a series of letters, some of them describing long, elaborate stories, each one a supposed past life. Driver Wang’s current life, bland and fatiguing, is shaken by this periodic arrival of letters. Their mysterious author claims to be his eternal soulmate and determined incarnations biographer. “Who are you? you must be wondering. I am your soulmate,” reads the first letter. “I pity your poor wife, Driver Wang. What’s the bond of matrimony compared to the bond we have shared for over a thousand years?”

With this delightfully strange backdrop, Barker pieces together a mandalic novel, equal parts noir, suspense, and fantasy.

The letters begin to take on an anxious, almost threatening tone. They include long-winded, detailed accounts of two interwoven lives. The fourth letter tells of an imperial eunuch of the Tang Dynasty, castrated by his own sorceress mother for raping his sister, and of the eunuch’s bastard daughter who escapes a sacrificial ceremony and runs off to become an esteemed courtesan of a pleasure district. The letter after tells an equally involved story of two men whose town gets sieged by Mongol warriors, become slaves, and then lovers, while trudging through the Gobi Desert. In both tales, the letter-writer claims to be one of the two main characters; Driver Wang is meant to be the other.

These biographies are what kept me reading. Each is set during a perilous period in Chinese history: the Mongol invasions, the Opium Wars, the Cultural Revolution. In this sense, it is a historical novel, one grounded in past realities of the world. What is history though but a narrative interpreted by individual imaginations? Chinese history through Barker’s eyes, while remarkably gory and cruel, is, admittedly, thoroughly entertaining. The various colloquialisms and euphemisms used during the different time periods are particularly entertaining (such as “Riding the Unicorn Horn” in the concubine letter).

The biographies all follow the same layout: Wang’s incarnation and the letter-writer’s come together under remarkable circumstances; one sabotages the other in a fit of extraordinary passion. All of them end in a violent death.

They’re revealed in chronological order, from the Tang Dynasty, AD 632, all the way to the Cultural Revolution, 1966. Along the way Driver Wang possesses a variety of personalities: an esteemed eunuch, a facially scarred blacksmith turned Mongol slave, a duplicitous concubine, a waolai prisoner of Pearl Delta pirates, and a privileged student leader of the Cultural Revolution at the Anti-Capitalist School for Revolutionary Girls.

But the modern Wang’s story is also absorbing in its own right. He’s the emotionally neglected son of a powerful Ministry of Agriculture official and a socially deviant mother. In college he falls into a deep depression and is admitted to a psychiatric hospital for several months. There he meets a charismatic male prostitute and fellow patient named Zeng with whom he shares a brief but passionate love affair.

The Incarnations will be touted as a China novel, and in many ways, rightly so. It takes place entirely in China, and brings to life some of China’s most tumultuous moments. But unlike other China-based literature from laowai writers, Barker’s work doesn’t fall back on the Chinese-ness of it all. While not always perfectly erect, it stands fine on its own as a suspense/mystery novel. You don’t need to be a sinologist to enjoy this novel; all you need is to like good books.

Susan Barker is the author of three novels. Her latest, The Incarnations, is published by Doubleday and available on Amazon.

Brent Crane is a Beijing-based journalist. Follow him @bcamcrane. 

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I, Penguin China has released a seven-book series on China-focused Great War history. It tabbed Paul French, author of the popular and award-winning Midnight in Peking: The Murder That Haunted the Last Days of Old China, to contribute Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution. The book “explores China’s betrayal by the West, the charismatic advocates it sent to the conference and the hugely significant May Fourth Movement that resulted from the treaty [of Versailles].” I sat down with the author (over Skype) to talk about the “betrayal,” Japan’s role in it, and how it might have been tipped by — of all things — America’s Jim Crow laws.

Let’s start off with a broad question. Your book is titled Betrayal in Paris; who was betrayed and by whom?

Well, if you look at the series that Penguin is doing on World War I, the series of e-books, the first one they published was by Jonathan Fenby on the siege of Qingdao. That’s an interesting story. Of course, Qingdao was a German colony — if you’ve been to Qingdao you’ve seen the German churches and the German architecture, and of course the Tsingtao Brewery –but the thing about Qingdao is that the Germans used it as a base. The Kaiser always wanted to have an empire like Britain and France, always wanted to put “its toe in warm water,” as they used to say. But they also had a few little odd colonies out in the Pacific islands, most of which are now independent countries or are American trustees like Samoa. And the Germans had a lot of those but they needed somewhere closer to Germany to put their fleet. The German fleet has to leave Qingdao and go to Europe to fight in the North Sea against the Royal Navy. So Qingdao was only defended by one division of German troops. The Japanese took advantage, went in, kicked the Germans out and took over Qingdao and most of the Shandong Peninsula for themselves. China was of course pissed off about this. But China was too weak to do anything about it militarily, and the government was too divided to stop them.

During the war they complained. They complained to people like the British. People always forget that it’s not until after World War II that America really counts. It’s not a great power until after World War II, and people sort of forget that. At that time Britain is definitely the biggest power in the world. They were not going to do anything about Japan because Japan was technically an ally. Like the Chinese, they didn’t fight [in WWI] but they did provide escort ships to the Royal Navy. And also, kicking the Germans out of China was actually a good thing because it was like a thumb in the eye of the Kaiser, and it meant that Britain didn’t have to worry about its bases in the Far East, because the Germans had been kicked out of the Far East. So the Royal Navy could concentrate all its ships in the North Sea, between Europe and Britain, and also in the Dardanelles, in the famous Gallipoli Campaign in Turkey. So the British didn’t want to do anything about it. The French were invaded, basically, so they weren’t going to do anything about it. And the Chinese went to Washington.

They thought that Washington was a place they should go. Remember, this is 1914, the Chinese Republic is only a few years old. And they appeal to the Americans and say, “Look, we’re a republic, you’re a republic; you should help us. We are a fledgling Republican system along the lines of yourself.”

Woodrow Wilson was very encouraging to the Chinese and said, “Look, you know we will sort this out, but it will have to wait until the end of the war. The war is going to consume everything and until the war in Europe is finished, we’re not going to be able to do anything.”

In 1917, German submarines start sinking ships in the Mediterranean and elsewhere and they sink a couple of American ships — which is one of the reasons Woodrow Wilson used to get America into the war in 1917. And what he said to the Chinese was, you should declare war on Germany as well. So the Chinese did everything that Woodrow Wilson asked. They also condemned the use of submarines in warfare — it’s hard to remember this now, but submarines were seen as a very sneaky way of fighting a war — it was almost illegal. Of course, then everyone else got submarines. But everyone [at the time] thought that it was cheating to sink a ship with a submarine rather than by a classic naval battle. So the Chinese said, “We oppose all submarine warfare,” and then the Chinese declared war on Germany. It didn’t send soldiers, but as you will know from one of the other books in the series, Mark O’ Neill’s book, they send 100,000 of what was called the Chinese Labor Corp, or the “Coolie Corp” — this is very little known, even in Europe. These are the guys who cleaned the battlefields, who helped in logistics and loading ships and stuff like that.

So China sent men, China declared war when they were told to by Washington and they opposed submarine warfare when they were told to. They had every reason to believe that at the end of the war, when the Paris Peace Treaty meeting took place, that Woodrow Wilson would argue their case against Japan. This is clearly sovereign territory that has been snatched. Shandong was a land grab. There was every reason for them to get it back. And Wilson was supposed to be the champion of the smaller, weaker nations. There were other groups that had arguments [for territory]. But China had a very, very good case. China had been a formal ally in the war. So when everyone sat down in Paris in 1919 to discuss what was going to be the peace treaty from the war, they had every reason to believe that Wilson would defend them.

They hoped that the British and the French, the other two big powers that were there, would support them as well, but you couldn’t be sure about that because they knew that the British and French were old-school Europeans and would only really do what was in the interest of their own empires. But there was no reason why the Americans shouldn’t have supported them, and ultimately the betrayal — which was by everyone of China, but most of all, and certainly the Chinese felt this, the betrayal was most keen from the United States.

You write that Japan originally took Shandong for “influence, empire and profit.” How had the Japanese been governing Shandong? And what did Shandong mean to the Chinese?

Fairly liberally, actually. They wanted it for trade, they wanted it for a base in China. They were looking at it from a 19th-century imperialist point of view. They were looking at how the Europeans had carved up Africa; they had looked at how the Europeans had carved up the treaty ports in China; the British in Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya; the Portuguese in Macau; the French in Vietnam (Indochina); they wanted their own empire. They felt that China was naturally theirs. Of course, in 1911 they had annexed Korea and kept Korea until the end of the Second World War. So they had already started empire-building.

But they were sneaky: while the rest of the world was concentrating on Europe, they tried to force greater concessions out of China, some of which they got, some of which they didn’t. But this loss of territory in Shandong was a very deep hurt to the Chinese government. It was a stability issue; if the government didn’t oppose Japan on Qingdao and Shandong, it looked weak, in the way that today if the Chinese government looked weak on Xinjiang or Tibet, it could be accused by its people of being weak overall; and they were worried about that. But this was something that they really wanted — add to that that it is one of the great heartlands of China; it is the birthplace of Confucius and Mencius, the great belief systems of China. In Paris everyone else had a lot of issues that they wanted to discuss; China really only wanted to talk about Shandong.

You praise Wellington Koo’s defense of Chinese sovereignty as “robust.” The response from many other delegations, the international diplomacy crowd in Paris, as well as the Chinese students there, was exuberant. From a debating standpoint, the Japanese were quite plainly defeated. With such a strong case then, and a well-argued one at that, how was it that Japan was eventually able to coerce Wilson into siding with them against China?

There are a number of ways they did it, but one was very clever. You see, Wilson didn’t really want territory like the Europeans — the French wanted Alsace and Lorraine; the Belgians wanted a little bit up by Luxembourg; the British just wanted to keep their empire intact (British foreign policy is quite simple: keep France and Germany apart and we win; divide and conquer).

But Wilson’s one great aim was not land, it was not territory, it was nothing like that. What he wanted was this great international organization: the League of Nations, which of course morphs into the United Nations. The League of Nations, from the First World War to the Second World War, really tried to act in the way that the United Nations does now, over territorial disputes and big multilateral issues. He really, really wanted the League of Nations and he wanted America to be a power in the League of Nations. Wilson felt that America had fought in the war; America was a rising power, New York had all the money, Chicago the manufacturing — this was America’s moment, this was America’s century, and it had to be launched from somewhere, and he felt that it should be done that way. Wilson was a democrat — he wasn’t like Teddy Roosevelt, who almost gave America an empire with the Philippines and Cuba. The Americans were never any good at running an empire, but they sort of had one for a while (not forgetting, of course, staging a coup in Hawaii).

What Wilson wanted was the League of Nations. The Japanese said, very cleverly, and knowing exactly what they were saying, “If we’re going to have a League of Nations, and adjudicate fairness around the world between groups of people — races, tribes, countries — no one should be allowed to be a member of the League of Nations if they have discriminatory policies in their own country. And by that the Japanese knew that the one thing that Wilson could not do was overturn segregation in the United States. There was of course also the Chinese Exclusion Act, and there were restrictions on the number of Japanese that could come into the country, but they knew that it was a fair argument that you could make with the Europeans: how could you adjudicate fairness when you have segregation between black and white in America? Wilson did not have the power to overturn segregation, certainly not in 1919. So Japan threatened to veto, with a lot of other countries as well, who were not supporting Japan but thought that this was a genuinely good idea, particularly emerging black nations. How could you adjudicate fairness when you won’t even let black people into the same theater as white people in America? So the Japanese knew that this would force Wilson to comply.

With America they said, “We will wreck your dream of a League of Nations if you don’t give in on Shandong.” I think it was a very hard thing for Wilson to do. He’s still the president who went away for the longest duration while he was president: six months in Paris. That’s a long time for a president to be away from Washington. Remember, Lloyd George could always just pop home back to London for the weekend, and Clemenceau was in his hometown anyway. But Wilson was really stuck there. And in the end he caved. With secret agreements with the Europeans who supported Japan, Wilson caved and China was betrayed.

So after this betrayal, news gets back to China. What happens on May 4th?

May 4th is a seminal date in China. Word got back that despite the fact that everyone could see — everyone could see! American academics could see it, journalists could see it — that China had a great case, it was an obvious win for China, but they were defeated by the Great Powers and America. Young Chinese students, intellectuals first of all, started to protest around Tiananmen. And they called for many things — one of their primary calls was for the return of Shandong — but they called for other things: for the government to start representing the people; they called for elections; they called for all sorts of things. The point being, not what they were calling for necessary, but that this was really the first time in China — even the 1911 Revolution had been done by a relatively small group of people — that there was was broad-based, participatory and democratic demonstrations.

Shops refused to stock Japanese goods and there was a boycott of anything Japanese. Workers came out on strike, proto-socialists, not-yet Communist movements, left-wing anarchist groups joined in as well; ordinary people. Things spread to other cities; there were boycotts in Shanghai, Canton (Guangzhou) and elsewhere. And this is really when Chinese politics does one of these 180s and people say we want something more, “We’ve made a revolution, we’ve made a republic, now what do we do?” And one of those things is that what they want — a lot of the stuff that you’ll hear now — is, “We want China to be strong; we’re patriotic; we’re nationalistic; we’re not going to be bossed around by Japan; we’re not going to be told what to do by the Europeans, the Americans”; all of that goes on.

And really, if you look at the sort of people who a couple years later start becoming prominent left-wing activists in the trade union movement and the labor movement, and also of course in the formation of the Communist party in the French concession of Shanghai in 1922 and all of that, these people all really get their political education and launch their political careers around the May 4th Movement.

But the May 4th Movement is something bigger as well. It’s unlike actually what goes on in China now — which is rather sad — but it is a lot like what was going on in June of 1989; it was also about being a part of the world. A lot of the Chinese stuff now, to me, is about ultra-nationalism: “close the doors, we’re going to be number one.” It’s almost like American isolationism but with Chinese characteristics.

This was also a cultural movement. That period involved translating lots of writers; H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf. People had started to go abroad to study. [You saw] the growth of Chinese, technology, research and development. People started to embrace the ideas of psychiatry, sociology — things that are not traditionally seen as really worthy of study in China — things like that. That’s why I call it the “long revolution” in China, which is really on the May 4th Movement — really on 1911, but May 4th accelerates the process of 1911; it democratizes it; it massifies it (capacity-building, I guess we call it now). From that point China goes into the 1920s and of course the bloodbaths in Shanghai between left and right, the pull to the left of Guomindang, the continuing anti-Japanese activity around the annexation of Manchuria in 1932 and 1937, the Second World War. Right through to 1949 and the Communist victory. And you could argue that that process is still continuing. And you can’t deny it now. If you just look at Sino-Japanese relations right now, they’re still in the toilet. This stuff goes all the way back.

Let’s shift gears if we may, and talk about the making of the book. Why this topic?

Amazingly to me, just about every book on Versailles misses the China bit, or plays down that negotiation. If you go back to the newspapers at the time, it’s a massive story! It was one of the big fundamental questions to be sorted out at Versailles in Paris and now it’s kind of played down. It’s not really thought about because I think if you say to the average man or woman on the street — “Shandong, Qingdao” — well, people don’t have much idea about these places. It’s sort of been a bit forgotten, so I wanted to sort of recover it a little bit, and also to make it interesting. It’s a courtroom battle really.

You have two great debaters here, particularly Wellington Koo, the great Chinese diplomat, who was a champion debater at Columbia, very Americanized, very Anglophile. He had been Chinese ambassador to America, very young, was to become during the Second World War Chinese ambassador to Britain, was to be China’s first lead delegate at the League of Nations, and so on. He really was a great debater, and he fought this cause, and it was a passionate cause.

Baron Makino, who was lead negotiator for Japan, was a much more traditional, older character. But he was a great debater as well and a great player of go, Chinese chess. So he knew his strategy very well.

So these two come together in a clash. And of course, like any great courtroom drama, everyone is trying to make sure that the press reports it the way they want it to be reported. All the backchannel stuff is going on and everything; [I thought] you might be able to turn this into a decent sort of courtroom piece. I’m not saying it’s To Kill a Mockingbird or something, but it must have been a classic clash to see it. And they’re doing all this in front of a table at which is sitting Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Clemenceau; the Prime Minister of Britain, the President of France, and the President of the United States. This is a pretty serious judging panel that you’ve got in front of you.

It must have been a very tense atmosphere to have witnessed. Harold Nicolson, the great british diplomat, saw some of it and he said that it was a fantastic clash of debating techniques.

Brent Crane is a freelance journalist based in Beijing. Follow him on Twitter @bcamcrane, or shoot him an email at bcamcrane@gmail.com.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of a turning point in modern Chinese history. In the run-up, around 20 key intellectuals and campaigners have been been detained, and security around Beijing heightened. And who knows how many warnings and threats have been issued to the family and friends of conscience-driven citizens across the country.

Such policies are part of the Chinese Communist Party’s comprehensive attempt to eradicate the memory of June 4, 1989 from this country’s history. Louisa Lim, veteran NPR correspondent in Beijing, focuses on this policy and its impact on Chinese society in The People’s Republic of Amnesia. The title of the book comes from an essay penned by a soldier-turned-novelist and fearless government critic, Yan Lianke, in 2003. He wrote that in contemporary China, one must be “willing to see what is allowed to be seen, and look away from what is not allowed to be looked at… our amnesia is a state sponsored sport.”

Lim investigates this state-promoted amnesia through interviews with those involved in the Tiananmen Square protests, such as prominent student leader Wu’er Kaixi, the brave and resilient Tiananmen Mothers, a young soldier ordered to clear the square on that tragic night, a senior member of Deng Xiaoping’s government, and a number of people from younger generations, to whom any knowledge of the events must come through deliberate and determined searching within a restricted realm of information. From these diverse perspectives, Lim builds a complex picture of the significance of the brutal events of 1989 to Chinese society today.

Most apparent from these series of profiles is the generation gap in knowledge and government approach. The last 25 years has seen government strategy move away from the active suppression of information to the careful cultivation of a situation where ignorance is the status quo. Lim sees this shift reflected in official rhetoric. Originally labeled “counter revolutionary turmoil,” the events of June 4, by way of “political storm,” are now called an “incident.”

This strategy has also seen official policy on June 4 move from confrontation to all-out avoidance. In the immediate aftermath of the events, the government drew up a list of most-wanted culprits, a number of whom escaped through a network of human smugglers via Hong Kong, and foreign embassy sponsors and triad organizations across China. The government now avoids contact with them. When in 2009 the exiled Wu’er Kaixi tried to turn himself in to the authorities, they simply refused. “Like football players on the bench, the overseas activists have been removed from the field of play,” Lim summarizes. (Good luck to Murong Xuecun, who last week announced he would hand himself over in an act of defiance against the state.)

Other than the rare opportunity to hear all these perspectives, the real coup of the book is Lim’s investigation into one of the numerous parallel protests and suppressions, Chengdu, an event largely forgotten both within and outside of China.

Through conversations with relatives of the Chengdu protesters, Lim paints one of the first pictures of the brutal crackdown that happened there. “Lacking an independent media to amplify their voices, [Chengdu’s] short-lived scream of fury became a cry into thin air,” Lim writes.

It is estimated that student protests took place in at least 63 cities across the country that summer. That 1989 was about far more than just Tiananmen is a part of history almost totally conquered by China’s state-sponsored amnesia.

For Lim, 1989 marks a watershed in the CCP’s rule. She believes the consequence of the government turning guns on the people and its sinister attempt to erase this fact from history is an ever-growing moral vacuum at the heart of contemporary Chinese society. Her words echo those of Bao Tong, a senior government minister who was purged in 1989. He sees June 4th as having laid the groundwork for a form of governance based on coercion, threat, and violence at all levels. “If that was possible at the highest levels, then why not at the lower levels? … How many little Tiananmens are there every day?’

The People’s Republic of Amnesia concludes on a radical note. Lim, believing facts can never be fully conquered, quotes the fiery language of Lu Xun: “Lies written in ink can never disguise facts written in blood. All blood debts must be repaid in kind.” The People’s Republic of Amnesia is a fearless investigation and survey of the post-Tiananmen era. The government may prefer an epilogue never be written, but it will be — it’s just a matter of when.

Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based freelancer writer. He is also co-founder and editor of Concrete Flux, an online journal on urban spaces. You can follow him @TomBaxter17. His previous piece for BJC was a review of Adam Minter‘s Junkyard Planet.

Also see, from June 4, 2013: The Conversion Of Liao Yiwu: How A Poet Becomes A Dissident.

Stagnant Water and Other Poems, 87pp; BrightCity Books. Read sample poems: Stagnant Water | Tiananmen

The temptation, when evaluating a poet gunned down by his government, is to start there, with the politics that led to his murder. But Wen Yiduo (1899-1946) was much too complex and heterodox to comfortably wear the martyr’s robe, his works too nuanced and unsettled to be a paragon of any revolution. His poems explore religion and rickshaws, contain the chrysanthemums of Chinese folklore and the mud of contemporary times, and dare readers to challenge prevailing conceptions, even to render their own cynicism as hope.

This stagnant ditch is hopeless. Clearly
not a place where beauty thrives.
Better cultivate its ugliness. Perhaps
its ugliness will create a world.

Mao blamed the Nationalists for Wen’s death, thus elevating him to model — if not mythic — status, yet the poet needed no such validation. He resisted easy classification. He was a writer whose ballast was in ideas and logic, while remaining fresh to the point of innovation.

That makes his poetry both a challenge and a thrill, one that a new generation of readers can now tackle thanks to the work of poet-translator Robert Hammond Dorsett. Stagnant Water and Other Poems, recently released by BrightCity Books, contains all the poems from Wen’s second (and last) full collection, Stagnant Water (first published in 1928, rendered by previous translators as Dead Water), plus 29 other poems compiled and translated by Dorsett. It represents a long overdue attempt to bring international attention to one of China’s preeminent 20th-century writers.

Born into a well-to-do Hubei family, Wen studied fine arts and poetry in the United States for three years, including at the Art Institute of Chicago, before returning to China in 1925 as a professor and critic. He co-founded a literary society that promoted formalism and deemphasized political content, yet the politics of the time would soon sweep Wen and a generation of scholars into the breach. His outspokenness put him in a line of bullets on June 6, 1946.

Wen’s abbreviated but remarkable literary career was characterized by internal contradiction, as he resisted both what the world had become and his own role in shaping it otherwise. He also knew grief: some of Stagnant Water‘s most powerful poems are about his young daughter, who died while he was studying in the US. But that was the Chinese experience in the 20th century, filled with sacrifice. The representative voice may well belong to the rickshaw puller’s, who exclaims in a poem titled “Tiananmen” about the violent crackdown of student protests:

It’s the living who suffer; to hell with the dead!

Last week I spoke with Dorsett, who began reading and translating Wen more than 20 years ago, to talk about the poet’s life, death, and legacy, and the challenges of conveying it all to an English-language audience.

What attracted you about Wen Yiduo’s work?

RHD: There’s so much I loved about the original work. It’s architectural in the sense that it’s almost like one of those gothic churches in Europe: the outside is beautiful and symbolic, and when you go inside, much more opens up, layer upon layer, and it depends on whose eye is looking.

Does labeling him a political poet undermine his artistic value? Does not calling him that lessen the recognition he might receive on an international level?

RHD: Both those statements are true, and what makes Wen Yiduo such a powerful poet is he did not resolve his conflicts. He kept his conflicts, they gave him a spark, they gave him the power and gave him the driving, lyric power of his poetry.

It’s hard to label Wen Yiduo as anything. You have to look at the conflicts within him. He was a classical poet that turned to the avant-garde but without giving up the classics. He’s a person who brought the past into the present. To bring the past into the present, you can make the future – not by staying in the past and not by staying in the present for long. He became a people’s poet, but he also was the well respected classical scholar.

You’re making the case that Wen is one of the most preeminent Chinese poets of the 20th century, but his name, at least among English readers of Chinese poetry, isn’t very well known. Would you agree with that statement? 

RHD: I do, and we’re trying to rectify that with this book.

Why do you think he’s remained obscure?

RHD: Because most of the translations are done from Indo-European languages, that’s why. And I think it’s much more difficult to translate from an Asian language into an Indo-European language than it is to go between two Indo-European languages.

Another language I can translate from is German, and if I take someone like Rilke or Novalis and just translate it word for word, you get something. It sounds good. But if you do that for Chinese it sounds superficial or odd. And one of the overlying principles that I try to use is what one of our critics, Marcia Falk, said, to not make the foreign sound strange – to take that Chinese poet and make him sound like a living poet in the language he’s being put into. And that’s a little difficult.

Did you struggle with that? It obviously came together very well, but what was the process like?

RHD: You can have an idiom in Chinese that sounds very usual when it’s spoken but it sounds very strange when it’s put into English. [For example,] the poem “Quiet Night,” sometimes it’s called “My Heart Leaps,” and in Chinese when you say my heart jumps, it doesn’t have that kind of sentimental feeling that it does in English, so I think the better translation is, “I was afraid.”

The process of my translation is, I start with the text itself, I look at all the characters, and even if I recognize them, I look them up, and I get sounds. Then sometimes I get help from other people, what they think, look at other translations. Once that’s done, all the decisions, I work from the original language itself. That’s a point of integrity with me because I think it’s been in practice now for people to have other people give them an English version, and then they rewrite that version and call it a translation. I try to make sure, for myself, it’s from the original.

Have any China scholars talked to you about the book and given feedback?

RHD: Orville Schell has gotten a copy and he wants me to come to New York to do an on-camera interview. I got a letter from Phil Levine (former US poet laureate) about this book, and he said he had not heard about Wen Yiduo before but after reading the book he became a fan overnight. That was quite kind of him.

How do you think Wen’s works have stood the test of time? How have the Chinese taken to his work, and how do they feel about it now? 

RHD: For all indications that I have, I think he’s a very popular poet. Most Chinese people in the United States that I speak to immediately light up when I mention Wen Yiduo. Orville Schell said he was one of his favorite poets.

As far as the test of time, he’s such a powerful poet that I think he’ll be known for as long as we’re translating, for as long as we’re reading, for as long as we’re speaking Chinese and English.

Does Wen have an American corollary, i.e. he is to Chinese poetry as blank is to American poetry?

RHD: I could fill in a lot… I think he’s to China as Wallace Stevens is to American poetry. They’re different poets, but we’re talking about reputation here.

Do you care to surmise what he might write if he were alive today?

RHD: He’s someone who would never be completely at ease. And I don’t think our times, our politics, our philosophies, are ever at ease. He would be a wonderful poet right now.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

RHD: Like all strong poets, when you get to the substrata, when you get down to the depth of the poem, [Wen Yiduo] reaches the human. When you get down that far, he’s not specifically Chinese, he’s not specifically American, he’s just human, and that’s a mark of all strong and all great poets.

Robert Hammond Dorsett was a medical officer in Vietnam before studying Chinese at the Yale-in-China Program at the Chinese University in Hong Kong. He holds an MFA from New York University and has been published in The Literary Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. He is also a licensed medical doctor.

Stagnant Water and Other Poems can be purchased from Amazon or BrightCity Books.

The top-ten-list format has its limitations as a vehicle for instruction and dialectic, but The Nanfang has a great one you should check out: top 10 translations of quotes from the novelist Qian Zhongshu (yesterday was the 15th anniversary of his death). Our favorites come in a clump, Nos. 5-7:

• If you’re not crazy when you’re 20, you’ll never amount to anything. If you’re still crazy when you’re 30, you’ll never amount to anything.
• Can pigs experience joy the way people can? We don’t know. But we see evidence every day that people can be as content as pigs.
• Foreign scientists make progress, Chinese scientists make social capital.

Also check out Brendan O’Kane’s case for why Qian should’ve won the Nobel Prize in literature, and this oldie but goodie from The China Beat that calls Qian “the best Chinese writer you’ve never heard of.”

Buy Fortress Besieged.

China marks 15th anniversary of novelist Qian Zhongshu’s death (The Nanfang)

Ed’s note: China’s first-ever expat anthology, Unsavory Elements, probably broke a Reddit Books record this past Friday night for the largest group AMA (“Ask Me Anything”). In honor of the 20-plus contributors who joined in, here are the highlights from this historic AMA.

As the editor of this anthology and a “6-Year Club” user of Reddit, I feared the worst: like mosquitoes to warm breath, trolls are invariably drawn toward discussion threads on China, and I envisioned my intended friendly discussion on literature and culture being hijacked by political arguments and anti-China brigades.

To be honest, a moderator-endorsed cross-post of our AMA onto r/China was immediately down-voted to oblivion (haters gonna hate, and r/China expats tend to eat their own). We received 260 total downvotes.

But with a 76% (610 points) final approval rating and more than 450 questions/comments (helped along by an announcement from James Fallows in The Atlantic), the overall session was an unprecedented success: since our AMA, Unsavory Elements has remained a top-10 best-selling Kindle for books about China.

Unsavory Elements was published by the legendary Shanghai-based Graham Earnshaw, whose boutique press, Earnshaw Books, is categorically snubbed by Big Media reviewers. But word-of-mouth from netizens (including Beijing Cream’s own brutally honest review) have given my humble grassroots project a kind of cult status, and for that I am sincerely appreciative.

Following are highlights from the various discussions – some contentious, some snarky – on everything from books to prostitution to drinking to history, occurring simultaneously throughout the thread. Said one Reddit user: “Most populated country creates the most populated AMA. Sheesh!”

The entire thing is archived at r/Books.

On my controversial teen prostitute story, which closes the book:

Matthew Polly: “The politically acceptable tone to write a story about foreigners visiting teen prostitutes is moral outrage or ethical hand-wringing. ‘My god, how reprehensible!’ Instead, Tom went with satirical glee. I believe in so doing he gave a much more accurate portrayal of what happens all the time in China than if he’d chosen to moralize. Nothing offends me more than Western liberal piety applied to the Chinese as if they were some hapless people who need to be defended from themselves.”

On “Westerners are flocking to China in increasing numbers to chase their dreams”:

Random Redditor answering on our behalf: “I think he’s specifically referring to 20-something white middle class brats wanting to ‘find themselves’ in an exotic place, where people worship the ground you walk on (if you’re white, that is). Those are the dreams he’s specifically talking about.”

On being a “bitter expat” in China:

Alan Paul: “Some people just trail bitterness wherever they go. People have a fundamental misunderstanding that when they go somewhere new they will be new people. You do have an opportunity to reboot, which can be fantastic, and was for me. But you do not suddenly abandon all your flaws. That realization can lead to bitterness and be turned against your new home.”

On the reverse diaspora of Westerners to China:

Susie Gordon: “It’s about following wealth and opportunity. For some Chinese people that meant migrating West. For Westerners these days that means flooding into China and opening shitty pop-ups on Shanghai’s Yongkang Rue.”

On cultural taboos of interracial dating in China:

Jocelyn Eikenburg: “While there are exceptions, most Chinese generally approach dating more seriously than a lot of Westerners — and may date with marriage in mind. You shouldn’t jump into a relationship with the assumption that it’s a casual ‘just-for-fun’ kind of dating situation.”

On being a Westerner with Chinese in-laws:

Bruce Humes: “Living with my in-laws in HK, we tended to sit around the TV. One night I tired of the Cantonese fare and ducked into another room for a rest from the TV blabber. My wife came in. ‘Is something the matter?’ she asked. A few moments later, my mother-in-law came in: ‘What’s wrong?’ she queried. I didn’t know quite what to say. That’s when it struck me: in the typical Chinese family, it’s normal to be together. The urge to be alone — when there is no identifiable or socially acceptable reason — is a cause for concern.”

On raising expat children in China:

Rudy Kong: “There is institutionalized racism, the constant comments about their otherness, etc. The pressure to succeed academically when your parents can’t help you with your homework because they can’t even read it was tough. Interestingly, they both have made comments about how they prefer some Chinese teaching methods, especially in science and math.”

On speaking the language:

Deb Fallows: “You can, of course, survive in China with no Chinese at all. But every bit you learn changes the quality of your experience. Chinese is a very difficult language. Try classes, watch TV, talk to taxi drivers and shopkeepers and neighbors. You’ll usually get a response meaning ‘Oh, your Chinese is so good!’ Even when it is not. But that is a nice reflection of recognition by the Chinese that you are at least trying.”

On being a Singaporean Chinese in China:

Audra Ang: “Everything was at once oddly familiar and frustratingly foreign. Many customs, nuances and language were often lost on me. I wasn’t used to the equally no-nonsense personal approach of the Chinese, who thought nothing of asking the amount of your salary or rent and didn’t think that telling you you had gained weight was rude.”

On being Jewish in China:

Michael Levy: “There’s one officially kosher restaurant in China. It’s terrible.”

On being a Westerner in a Chinese prison:

Dominic Stevenson: “There was no segregation in the prison so it was a wide cross section of Chinese society of all sorts of people, from rich to poor, local Shanghainese to country folk, political people to regular thieves, rapists, gangsters and fraudsters etc. There’s a hugely privileged monastic dimension to prison life as many people who’ve written on the subject have acknowledged. Even so, I don’t recommend it, largely because of the trauma it inflicts on loved ones outside.”

On our biggest WTF moment in China:

Derek Sandhaus: “I decided to splurge on dinner at an upscale shopping mall and, while I was waiting for my chicken at the deli counter, I felt a hard slap on the back of my neck. I looked behind me and nobody was there, but several women and their children were looking in my direction with horrified expressions. Others were pointing. Then I saw it — the bloody corpse of the rat that had fallen from a considerable height onto the back of my head.”

On the most interesting period in China’s history:

Bruce Humes: “Definitely at the height of the Tang Dynasty in the capital Chang’an. The music and the arts — there are thousands of beautiful paintings still extant — thrived. And no one harangued the foreigners about ‘unequal treaties…’”

On finding beauty in China:

Mark Kitto: “There is nothing beautiful about life and culture in China, except for the people, and their opportunities to ‘be beautiful,’ if we can put it that way, are sorely limited.”

On traditional versus self-publishing (the most debated topic on this AMA of authors):

Tom Carter: “There’s still too much stigma attached to self-published works, and, more vital, it will never be reviewed by a major media outlet or stocked by a major retail chain or distributor. I think boutique presses (e.g. Earnshaw Books in Shanghai and Blacksmith Books in Hong Kong) are a more viable alternative to self-publishing.”

Kay Bratt: “I started with ONE self-published book and a handful of readers. I worked very hard to build from there and now have tens of thousands of readers and 10 published books. If I built my career with a self-published book and made a go of it, others can too.”

Derek Sandhaus: “The sad reality is that while the writer makes only a small percentage of the cover price for each copy sold, the publisher generally pockets much less and bears most of the expenses. Self-publishing does work for some authors in some circumstances, particularly if an author has a well-established platform for moving copies of the work.”

On Peter Hessler’s absence from this AMA and being the only Unsavory contributor with a reprinted essay:

Matthew Polly: “Let me know if Peter posts an original answer to this question or if he reprints an older post.”

On if the expat experience has fundamentally changed along with China:

Jon Campbell: “The world started to pay more attention to China, and, as a result, more people saw China as a place you could go, like anywhere else. More and more students studying Chinese at a growing number of universities making partnerships with Chinese schools came and got a taste of life there, and many chose to stay/return. And the more China has been in the spotlight, the more eager a greater range of people are to go.”

On mistakes, regrets and if we’d do it differently:

Tom Carter: “I think the unpredictability and sheer chaos of daily life in China is the best part about it, and pretty much everything I’ve tried to plan here has gone awry to various degrees. Case in point: the teaching ad I responded to on Craigslist back in 2004 turned out to be a scam; But that “bad” experience led to other things that set me on an entirely different course, which brought me right here now.”

Matt Muller: ‘If I had known that some stupid teaching gig I was about to do would lead me to throwing down on the page and perhaps, years later, publishing it, then I would have taken better notes. Was that smell of methane and cooking oil coming from the sewer or from that guy’s street meat cart?”

One word of advice for new expats arriving in China:

Kaitlin Solimine: “I say live outside of the city because these are the places where you can have what I believe to be some of the most honest encounters with Chinese life. And by ‘city’ I really just mean the first tier cities. Second- and third-tier would be a more enriching experience. In the big cities, you won’t challenge yourself as much nor your way of thinking.”

Alan Paul: “Embrace the chaos.”

On leaving (or being asked when you are leaving) China:

Bruce Humes: “I AM at home in China. What I find a bit bizarre is being asked daily when I’m going home…”

Audra Ang: “I had a love-hate relationship with China when I was living there. There’s nothing like it — crazy highs, shattering lows. I miss the buzz of unfulfilled potential and even the grind. It’s a place that reminds you of your mortality. I’ve returned twice since I left in 2009. It’s like simultaneously slipping into your favorite pair of old jeans and — back into a crack habit.”

Tom Carter is the author of CHINA: Portrait of a People and editor of Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China. He lives in Shanghai.

Junkyard Planet, the first book by Bloomberg Shanghai correspondent Adam Minter, offers a look at the often unheard and unseen $500 billion global scrap and recycling industry, which has formed in the shadow of burgeoning Western — and increasingly Chinese — consumerism. Minter is himself “a proud junkyard kid” from a Minneapolis scrap trading family that established themselves through hard graft in the post-Depression period. This background provided him the connections to offer an invaluable insider perspective on this unknown trade — and also informs his somewhat Romanticized, American Dream-inspired perspective.

But a personalized voice keeps the book from sinking into tedium. Minter first came to China in the mid-90s while working for his family scrap business. It was a time when American consumption and its inevitable byproduct, waste, was skyrocketing, and a time when China, opening up to the world, offered willing and cheap labor for the dirty work of recycling. Since then, the shipment of American waste to China has come to form the foundation of China’s huge recycling industry.

Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, American scrap that came to China was broken down into its most useful elements and sold as raw materials to Chinese factories which would then use it to make products such as toys, tools, and car engines for resale to the West. This is a neat ecosystem, which Minter presents with unceasing enthusiasm.

In the last few years, however, the path of this scrap material has been changing. The products made, wholly or partially, from recycled American goods are increasingly sold within China. And one key metal, the electricity-conducting copper — the main recyclable from Christmas tree lights — is finding its resting place in China’s high-speed train networks and in the wiring of her sprouting high-rise metropolises. In 2012, China accounted for 42 percent of the world’s copper demand.

Minter is in admiration of the scrap trade, its truly global reach and its ability to create wealth from junk –modern alchemy. But he’s also concerned with the side effects, in particular the environmental tragedies for which recycling is responsible, such as the transformation of Wen’an county in Beijing from a “bucolic… agricultural region renowned for its streams, peach trees, and… rolling landscape” into a plastic-scented “dead zone.” There are also devastating health effects. The township of Guiyu, Guangdong, a hub of “e-waste” recycling, reportedly has seen 88 percent of its children under six suffering from some form of lead poisoning.

All of the above is to say the author’s own views are more than a little ambivalent. It is hard to square fears of environmental pollution, labor conditions and health risks with Minter’s statement, “Whether I need the upgraded iPhone of not (and I really don’t), I want the upgraded iPhone.”

Moral ambivalence characterizes the book throughout in part because of the complexity of the global system Minter describes, and in part because of his personally ambivalent position as both “junkyard kid” and journalist. But not one to shy away from a strong opinion, he rails against Apple for its concerted efforts to monopolize the repair and recycling of its products by making them too complex for untrained workers to dismantle.

Junkyard Planet offers an informed insight into a massive global system of trade, of which very few of us are aware. The book is littered with surprising examples of what happens to our junk. In the end, we’re offered a positive portrait of the unglamorous, often filthy, and sometimes wealthy industry of recycling. Ultimately, “if China didn’t import… resources, it’d have to dig and drill them.” And we are all fully aware of the environmental damage that can cause.

Tom Baxter is a Beijing-based freelancer writer. He is also co-founder and editor of Concrete Flux, an online journal on urban spaces and the experience of urbanity in China. You can follow him @TomBaxter17.

A book called Those Who Don’t Read It Upside-down Are Pigs, among others, has been seized for “spreading pornography,” according to Xinhua, as edited by Global Times. And two publishers, China Pictorial Publishing House and Shaanxi Normal University Publishing House, have been suspended for three months.

No one thinks porn — or explicit content — in children’s books is a good idea. If a book is marketed for children, you probably shouldn’t include pornographic material. The problem here is we have no idea where the line is, who’s setting it, and what we’re really talking about. Xinhua certainly doesn’t clarify:

Boasting explicit phrases and branding ancient scholars as “rogues,” the book “Those Who Don’t Read It Upside-down Are Pigs” published by China Pictorial Publishing House is full of vulgar content with shoddy editing quality.

“Explicit phrases” is “pornography”? And where do I begin with “branding ancient scholars as ‘rogues’”? Bullshit, maybe. History is so sacrosanct that we can’t risk letting funnymen pollute our children’s minds with non-state-sponsored pedagogy, is that right?

That’s the cynic in me speaking, of course, but help me out here, State General Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television: make me a little less skeptical of your motives.

Speaking of shoddy editing, check out People’s Daily’s editing of Xinhua’s story, which begins:

With a cover teeming with cartoon pigs, a hit Chinese book reads, “Taxi driver said, ‘There are many beauties in your school, but they are expensive.’ …The student answered, ‘You get half off with a teacher’s certificate.’”

Boasting explicit phrases and branding ancient scholars as “rogues,” the book “Those Who Don’t Read It Upside-down Are Pigs” might not be a children’s classic, but online commenters claimed they bought the title for their kids, and their kids liked the book of humorous stories.

We’re not necessarily supporting Those Who Don’t Read It Upside-down Are Pigs, or recommending it, but here it is on Dangdang, where it costs 16.40 yuan and has a product rating of five stars with a recommendation rate of 97.7%. Several of the 263 product reviews I saw were variations of “not bad” and “funny.” Buy it while you can.

(H/T J., Helen Gao)

Offbeat China has translated, in full, a Chinese adaptation of a popular fairy tale found in a children’s book. The story is amazing, complete with amazing illustrations, and generally reads like an amazing version of a Brother Grimm tale, only funnier. Here’s an excerpt:

“Today, I will teach you a beautiful story,” the duck professor said to the ducklings, “The story is about a little swan that was born into a duck family. He wasn’t recognized and thus regarded as the ugly duckling. But he was a swan after all. In the end, he grew into the most beautiful swan.”

All the ducklings were attracted to the story, even the duck mom. After going back home, the ducklings started to discuss the story they just learned. But there was one duckling, the ugly duckling, who stood alone and was deep in his thoughts.

Duck mom walked towards him and asked: “What’s wrong with you, my kid?” “I must be a swan,” the ugly duckling replied. Duck mom was shocked: “You are a duck. You dad can testify to it, too.”

Your dad can testify to it, too, is not, by a long shot, the punchline. This is the picture that accompanies the end of the story:

If that doesn’t make you go read all of it, maybe consider this: Chinese Internet users seem to hate the story, saying, “The darkest thing about this story is that it teaches kids not to be themselves and to follow the masses.”

Well, people: stop following the masses, GO LOVE THIS STORY.

The Chinese ugly duckling (Offbeat China)

“The most unbearable thing for a political prisoner is to fade into oblivion.” – Li Bifeng, a.k.a. LBH in For a Song and a Hundred Songs

Liao Yiwu was a fledging poet without a formal education, a hot-tempered philanderer prone to fights, a dreamer who actively despised politics — until the early hours of June 4, 1989, when, from the living room of his home in the river town of Fuling, he listened with Canadian Michael Day to shortwave radio reports of Chinese troops opening fire on students around Tiananmen Square. “The bloody crackdown in Beijing was a turning point in history and also in my own life,” he writes in his prison memoir For a Song and a Hundred Songs, the book that won him the German Book Trade’s Peace Prize last October, for which an English translation was made available today by New Harvest. “For once in my life, I decided to head down a heroic path, one on which I advanced with great fear, scampering at times like a rat with no place to hide.”

His secretly recorded post-Tiananmen poem, “Massacre,” composed in the style of his beloved Beat poets, was cathartic but incomplete, only serving to stoke his revolutionary fever, which burned fiercer in part because it had been ignited so late. “Art was my protest,” he writes, and so it was that he and friends began production on a movie called Requiem. It was ultimately this project that led to his arrest in February 1990 and subsequent four-year incarceration — three months locked in an investigation center, twenty-six months in detention, eighteen months in prison. The title of his book is a reference to one of the many horrific episodes he endured, when a guard punished him for singing a song by forcing him to sing one hundred more. Unable to continue, an electric baton was inserted into his anus. “I felt like a duck whose feathers were being stripped.”

There were countless similar degradations, which Liao renders in ghastly detail. (If there are any poetic embellishments, he is much too skilled a writer to have them show.) Prison is its own hierarchical and overcrowded society, divided into classes with people filling roles, marked with cruelty, madness, and, yes, sexual assault. “As Wang Er thrust back forth violently, Big Mouth yelped in pain. Blood trickled down his thighs and the back of his knees in two distinctive lines. Inmates stood around, astonished. I sat on the edge of the bed and tears welled up in my eyes for the first time in a year.” Others are disciplined with psychological torture, manual labor, beatings; two misbehaving detainees find their hands shackled together, prompting one of the book’s funnier moments: “At the end of the bathroom break, each person would bend forward with two legs parting, waiting for the other person to reach underneath to wipe his partner’s butt. As one can imagine, mishaps occurred frequently, giving rise to bitter recriminations.” And then there is the infamous “menu” of corporeal punishment, with items such as “pig elbows braised in herbs” (“enformer jabs the inmate’s back with an elbow repeatedly until it is covered with bruises”), “saw-cut pork” (“enforcer soaks a thick rope in oil, ties it around the inmate’s calf, and pulls it back and forth until it cuts the flesh like a saw”), and “mapo tofu” (“enforcer sticks a dozen peppercorns in the inmate’s anus and stops him from pulling them out”), among many others. In this environment, Liao twice tried to kill himself — his most shameful moments, he writes, because the attempts were so futile.

Yet the book abounds with tender moments of unfailing empathy, stories of colorful characters who have done and continue to do deplorable things yet are no less human because of it. “You are right. We deserve to die. But even bad people have feelings,” a heroin smuggler on death row, Dead Chang, pleads with a guard who threatens to report he and his cohorts for protecting an inmate who has tried to commit suicide. Another death row inmate, Dead Skin, describes how and why he killed his wife, punctuating his story with this line: “I had to kill her to grow up. From now until my execution, I want to live with dignity, free from humiliation.” No one, under Liao’s observant eye and bottomless pathos, is all good or all bad. He calls Wang Er, the rapist, a friend, one who looks out for him and vice versa. After the prisoners stage a comic and somewhat tender funeral for Wang Er at his request, he and Liao have this exchange:

“I don’t believe that humans can completely turn into beasts. Don’t try to prove me wrong,” I said. “You don’t have to have the whole cell turn against you and hate you before you die.”

“But I don’t want to die. I’ve only had thirty years in this life. I wanted to stay longer in this world,” Wang Er said.

“Spending your long life in a labor camp? What’s the point?”

“I can risk my life and escape, or I can settle down and serve out my sentence,” Wang Er mused. “If they put me in jail for twenty years, I would be released at the age of fifty. I can still get a wife.”

“So, you would rather suffer twenty years to gain back an ordinary life?” I asked.

Wang Er’s face reddened with anger. “I want to live.”

And there is poetry in Liao’s stark descriptions of prison. In the detention center, “I closed my eyes and the world morphed into a colossal buzzing fly that I couldn’t chase away.” Standing before a judge, “I felt like a food particle trapped in a big empty mouth.” To illustrate the stench in the air after a constipated man finally relieves himself: “We dabbed toothpaste around our nostrils.” And to portray the ennui of a caged existence: “Like in a swarm of honeybees, each day swirled in a kind of frenetic repetition, a manic and oppressive sameness.”

The utter shame of China’s crackdown on those who participated or editorialized on the Tiananmen Square Incident, the arrests of student leaders and writers — ’89ers, as groups of them in prison are called — is that powerful, original voices such as Liao Yiwu’s will never be heard in their home country. (Liao wrote For a Song and a Hundred Songs three different times, thanks to government interference.) His status as a dissident supersedes his artistry, to no one’s benefit. Even the book jacket does Liao disservice when it claims the book “will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.” That’s unlikely, considering the intended audience is probably Westerners who retain an easy image of Orwellian China. What the book is capable of doing, if it could at all be viewed outside the context of dissident lit, is elevating the reputation of Chinese writers, who are oft criticized for being stale, uninspired, and unimaginative, plus all the things said about Mo Yan.

Liao burst onto the international scene with the publication of The Corpse Walker, wherein he displayed remarkable talent for recognizing that what is sharply, heartrendingly flawed about us is often what makes us most human. His latest work is deeper and fuller. It has all the stories of China’s underclass that made The Corpse Walker a success, but they are told with a stronger narrative voice unafraid to let us know more is at stake, both for the protagonist and the writer in real life. Liao references the likes of Jack Kerouac, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Marcel Proust, Milan Kundera, and, of course, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an unsubtle attempt to place his own work within a literary tradition.

For a Song and a Hundred Songs documents how a poet’s soul descends into the body of a dissident. Liao spares no punches for himself. “How can you claim to be a poet? You are such a dick,” an officer yells at him while he masturbates. Later, a cellmate shoots him “a look of pity and disgust” after watching him kick an inmate begging him for mercy. “I deserved his reproachful look; years of living with the thieves, murderes, and rapists had transformed me.” Throughout this process, however, Liao tries to stay loyal to the truth. As an old poet and friend, Liu Shahe, advises him about his writing: “You must write honestly. That will be a perfect ending to your story. But remember to tell the truth. False testimony will be condemned by the future generation.”

Bitter and angry and vengeful as he must be, Liao only allows himself the briefest of denunciations of the Communist Party of China: “Sometimes I wonder, am I still in jail or am I a free person? It really doesn’t make any difference in the end because China remains a prison of the mind: propserity without liberty. Our entire country might as well be gluing medicine packets all day. This is our brave new world.”

He has earned the right to say that. The state has robbed him of four years of life, severed ties to his friends and family, even made his wife and daughter hate him — he has been with Miao Miao, born when he was in prison, less than two months in the last twenty years. Under threats of another arrest, Liao fled to Germany in 2011, and chances of him returning to China within his lifetime are slim. “I am my own shrink,” he writes. “I am a writer.” But is it enough? Art has been known to sustain lives, but what about happiness? “These words, which I have shared with you, the reader, form the most sincere and truthful expression of what I have seen and learned. Passing it on has given me a sense of dignity.”

On this, the anniversary of the events at Tiananmen in 1989, China could take a lesson from Liao Yiwu, if it at all understands or cares about the meaning of dignity.

Liao Yiwu’s For a Song and a Hundred Songs, released today, can be purchased on Amazon. He will speak on June 13 with Wenguang Huang, his translator, at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building of the New York Public Library.

The problem with gringo lit about the gringo experience in China is it inevitably and unsubtlety reinforces the foreigner’s sense of Otherness while feeding his inflated sense of importance. In doses this is not necessarily bad – it can be therapeutic to read, even for lesser voyeurs – but in bulk it becomes obnoxious, not least of which because it is both disingenuous and vapid to pretend that foreigners don’t relish, if not secretly rejoice at, their entitled status as Other.

“From the moment we step foot in the Middle Kingdom,” editor Tom Carter writes in his introduction on the opening page of Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China, “foreigners are subjected to an extraordinary range of alien experiences, ranging from appalling to exquisite.” The use of passive voice – are subjected to – places the emphasis strictly on “foreigners,” who are subjects protraying themselves as objects, assailed. The next sentence begins – emphasis mine – “We contend with seething masses of humanity,” and it becomes abundantly clear who are the looked-upon They.

The stories in this anthology, to the writers’ and Carter’s credit, steer safely from ethnocentricism, but the conflict in many of them basically arise for one reason alone: China. You can see how this might exhaust even astute readers who understand the difference between an amusing travel yarn and a white-person complaint. Perhaps there’s no better example of the embrace of Otherness than in the orientalization of language: writing “Meiguo” when “America” would do, or rendering an easily translatable phrase – “哪儿哪儿哪儿,” meaning “Nah” in context – as a jarringly literal, “Where? Where? Where?”

These are minor sins, but they detract from a book that genuinely attempts to approximate something akin to the foreigner experience, variegated and unique. Carter has pulled together an impressive cast of writers, established and amateur alike. Among the good reads are Aminta Arrington’s essay about the long shadows of history, Dan Washburn’s profile of a golfer’s rural family, Kaitlin Solimine’s portrait of her “Chinese mother,” Rudy Kong’s account of a hockey brawl in Dalian, and Pete Spurrier’s reminiscence of a wide-eyed traveler headed south; and big-name works from the likes of Peter Hessler, Simon Winchester, Jonathan Watts, and Michael Meyer don’t disappoint (Hessler’s story is a reprint from The New Yorker, the only non-original item in the collection). You want to root for them.

Yet the fact remains that you would really have to force yourself to care about their problems (with notable exceptions; Dominic Stevenson spent time two and a half years in prison, after all). Simply by virtue of their status as outsiders, they are able to notify foreign consulates to forestall danger, play rock ‘n’ roll on the Great Wall or a goat farm, sit at banquets as guests of honor, get away with a host of delinquencies, and party as recklessly as princelings. These privileges, more than anything, define the expat experience, but they require a writer of considerable self-understanding, tact, and honesty to convey. In the stead of wry irony, arch observations, and restrained pathos, Unsavory Elements contains “alien experiences,” blunt descriptions of zhege and nage, probably one too many pieces on gastronomy, and morals that are well expressed but slightly obvious, like saying “pollution is bad” and “treat others as you would want others to treat you.” There is excessive narrative handholding (every time “guanxi” is explained), so that even stories that show great promise, such as Nury Vittachi’s “You Buy Me Drink?,” suffer from over-explication; e.g., do we really need a page to spouse the platitude, “China’s religion is money”?

And where are the actual unsavories, those who are truly “on the loose,” floating without visas, running from responsibility, those who piss their pants on barstools or schmooze with nouveau riche in road-racing Ferraris? Why isn’t Mark Kitto smearing his former business partners, Susie Gordon doing ketamine, Derek Sandhaus rhapsodizing on the postcoital shame of baijiu-induced hookups, Bruce Hume letting us ride shotgun on a Memento-like manhunt for his Shenzhen assailant? Where is China Bounder? One almost yearns for the unapologetic and refined shamelessness of the literary antiheros found on the Beijinger’s forum.

Backpackers, gadabouts, journalists, parents, rakes, rockers, teachers, tokers, and trenchermen convene between the covers (a wonderful cover, by the way, by Nick Bonner of Koryo Studio and Dominic Johnson-Hill of Plastered T-shirts), but there’s no clear reason for them to be gathered like guests at a cocktail party waiting for stiffer libations. They are disconnected from one another, and likewise from us, the reader. To borrow from one of the more baffling sentences that appears in the book – “Like Boxer, the cart horse from Animal Farm, most would be shipped out to a glue factory – themselves becoming glue, that other magical ingredient that holds China together” – …where’s the glue?

They’re all expats, seems to be the common bond. As a card-carrying expat myself, I tell you: that’s not enough.

Unsavory Elements: Stories of Foreigners on the Loose in China can be purchased from Earnshaw Books and at Bookworm Beijing and Garden Books Shanghai. Tonight at 7:30 pm, Tom Carter will speak alongside Graham Earnshaw and Aminta Arrington at Bookworm Beijing.

Google chairman Eric Schmidt has a new book ready to debut in April, The Digital Age, co-written by Jared Cohen, formerly of the State Department. As the Wall Street Journal puts it succinctly, the book is clear about one thing: “China is the most dangerous superpower on Earth.”

Specifically, Schmidt writes that China’s hacking culture — New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Washington Post have all recently fallen victim — will give it a strategic advantage:

“The disparity between American and Chinese firms and their tactics will put both the government and the companies of the United States as a distinct disadvantage,” because “the United States will not take the same path of digital corporate espionage, as its laws are much stricter (and better enforced) and because illicit competition violates the American sense of fair play,” they claim.

“This is a difference in values as much as a legal one.”

The book says the US’s hands aren’t exactly clean:

The U.S. is far from an angel, the book acknowledges. From high-profile cases of cyber-espionage such as the Stuxnet virus that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities, to exports of surveillance software and technology to states with bad human rights records, there is plenty at home to criticize.

But they’re not engaged in the same scale of corporate (and media) espionage. Should they be? Here’s the controversial part:

In this roundabout way the pair come close, on occasion, to suggesting western governments follow China’s lead and form closer relationships between state policy and corporate activity.

Take the equipment and software that comprises the Internet. Most of the world’s IT systems were once based almost entirely on Western infrastructure, but as Chinese firms get more competitive, that is changing, and not necessarily for the better, they say.

The authors probably won’t find a more vociferous critic than WSJ itself: one editor, in a rather breathlessly written editorial, recently stated, “The Middle Kingdom might once have been the center of human civilization. But in the digital world, the Chinese are the barbarians at the gate.”

And then you remember that all non-Romans, to Rome, were “barbarians.” We know how that story turned out.

Exclusive: Eric Schmidt Unloads on China in New Book (WSJ, image Wired)

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War has been around for more than 2,000 years, and it may be a timeless classic, but it’s about time it got a reboot.

Enter Kelly Roman, whose graphic novel The Art of War is set in a dystopian future and samples from the ancient military treatise. Explains China Daily‘s Kelly Chung Dawson, the book “overlays Sun Tzu’s text against a revenge story set 20 years in the future, in an imagined time in which Wall Street has become militarized and China is the dominant global superpower. The eponymous hero, Kelly Roman, has returned from serving time in prison for a friendly-fire incident in military combat, to find that his brother has been murdered while working for Sun Tzu, the head of a powerful financial company controlled by Chinese interests.”

If that’s not enough of a synopsis, check out some panels over at Brain Pickings, or just watch the trailer. Youku video for those in China after the jump.

(H/T Alicia)