It really doesn’t take much to impress local Chinese if you’re white, does it? Spotted in Qingdao and posted to the Sina Weibo account of @天璇妈妈, here’s a foreigner picking up trash. “The Weibo post heated up discussions among netizens, racking up hundreds of likes on Weibo,” reports Sina. “Some bloggers said we should learn from the foreign man, even foreigners are help protecting our environment.”

Apologies for the snark in the lede; we actually should applaud this man, especially since this reportedly wasn’t the first time he’s been spotted doing yeoman’s work on Qingdao’s Badaxia shore.

“My friend was taking a stroll on the beach of Badaxia around mid-day yesterday when she saw the foreign man picking up plastic foams and bottles. She felt it was quite moving so she took a photo with her phone and asked me to post it online,” the Weibo blogger “天璇妈妈” told the local newspaper Qingdao Morning Post.

Reporters hustled to the beach but the man was gone.

“There was a blond man picking up rubbish here one hour ago,” said Mr. Zhang, who was fishing by shore. Zhang said the foreign man was about 1.8 meters tall wearing a black T-shirt and gray pants. The man was picking up plastic bottles, crashed wood blocks and plastic foams, things left by tide water, according to Mr. Zhang.

“The water just ebbed. And walking on the slope of the shore risked falling into the sea. The man had to use both his hands and feet to keep himself on the slope before he began to collect rubbish,” said Mr. Zhang. The foreign man left after half an hour he filled the bags he brought to carry the garbage.

If netizens ever discover this unknown foreigner speaks Mandarin, he’ll never go another evening without a date. Sign him up for the Spring Festival gala already!

Foreign man picks up trashes at Qingdao shore (Sina, h/t Alicia)

Sometimes, when life throws you an obstacle, simply call on a dozen people to move said obstacle out of the way. In Tianjin on Sunday morning, a van parked in front of a building blocked a coach bus from leaving the enclosed lot via the only road out. That bus happened to be carrying more than two dozen Beijing Ultimate Frisbee players who were in town for a tournament. They had an idea.

We like this video because of how happy everyone is, especially the man laughing hysterically behind the camera (that would be Ken Dry). Look at all those form-perfect high-fives. You know what, people? Life’s okay sometimes.

UPDATE, 3:56 pm: Disclosure: I play on this team, called Big Brother. We won this tournament, probably thanks to karma.

Also… for the disc geeks out there:

This guy.

After leading Beijing to its first Chinese Basketball Association championship two years ago, Stephon Marbury was given his own bronze statue. We wondered, after his second CBA title, how Beijing would honor its adopted Coney Island point guard, and now we know: by giving him a key to the city.

As CRI English reports:

The Honorary Citizen award aims to recognize and acknowledge the contributions made by foreigners, overseas Chinese and people from Hong Kong and Macao towards the development of the city.

Marbury was honored in a ceremony attended by Beijing mayor Wang Anshun, pictured above. Here he is showing off his key as Beijing’s newest citizen:

Afterwards he went on social media to praise the fans:

The key of the city of BEIJING belongs to the people. I’m thankful that you opened your hearts to me when I first entered the country. The love has stayed consistent and I’m blessed to be here. #LOVE IS LOVE#

Interestingly enough, while he’s been posting consistently on Weibo, his Twitter account has been quiet since March 20. (Twitter’s blocked in China of course, but one figures Marbury has a VPN.) Maybe he simply realizes where his supporters are:

Marbury Becomes Honorary Citizen of Beijing (CRI)

“Several Western journalists who faced expulsion from China were issued renewed visas by the Chinese government Thursday, ending a months-long standoff,” writes William Wan for Washington Post. Yay!

Austin Ramzy, a journalist who previously worked for Time magazine, has not been given press accreditation or a permanent visa since he joined the Times, according to journalists in Beijing.

When his journalist visa expired at the end of December, he was given a temporary visa at the last minute, which does not allow him to report from within China. Once the temporary visa expires at the end of January, he will be forced to leave, after reporting for more than six years from China.

Well shit.

In Ramzy, Beijing is poised to lose a cyclist, trivia-goer, and all-around good guy, though we remain hopeful that something will come through. Obviously unable to comment himself, we asked one of Ramzy’s friends to tell us a little more about the man. Here’s what he had to say:

His uncle Hossam Ramzy produced a version of Khosara Khosara that was sampled by Timbaland for the Jay-Z track Big Pimpin.

On a more banal note, I think most of his problems started when Bolton were relegated in 2012. And when he got kicked out of his hutong home. Those two things may or may not be connected to his current visa problems.

As a postscript, the Washington Post reminds us:

The Times’ bureau chief, Philip Pan, has not been given a journalist visa for China after almost two years of trying. And last year, reporter Chris Buckley was forced out of the country after he left Reuters to work for the Times.

Philip Pan’s very much working though, visa or not, byline or not. Buckley, of course, regularly files articles. There’s hope yet for everyone.

China renews Western journalists’ visas after months-long standoff (Washington Post)

Alison Friedman (right)

Our friends at Beijing Today explore contemporary art and culture. Today, a profile of Alison Friedman, founder of a performing arts company that promotes cultural exchange.

Many foreign students come to China each year, but few are like Alison Friedman.

After studying, working and living in Beijing for a decade, Friedman decided to remain in China to establish Ping Pong Productions (PPP), a company devoted to “bringing China and the world together through the performing arts.”

“The great value of art is its ability to show diversity,” Friedman said. When people talk about American culture, they think of McDonald’s, Starbucks, Apple, Hollywood and Disney. “Performances can reveal other aspects of American history and society.”

For instance, a recent docudrama that the company toured, Top Secret: The Battle for the Pentagon Papers, examines American involvement in Vietnam.

The drama, first presented in China in 2011 in cooperation with L.A. Theater Works, tells the story of The Washington Post’s decision to publish the Pentagon Papers. It was an important moment in US history, and the subsequent trial pitted the public’s right to know against the government’s need for secrecy.

Cultural exchange is a two-way street, and Friedman is engaged in similar projects abroad.

While many foreigners’ understanding of Chinese culture is as shallow as Peking Opera and acrobatics, Friedman aims to show the country’s contemporary works abroad and build an international audience for Chinese creatives. Part of that is giving young Chinese artists the opportunity to perform in leading world theaters.

“Young and talented artists don’t have established financial support mechanisms in China,” said Friedman. Many culture companies prioritize commercial results, and even government-funded theaters will ask performers to cover venue rental and split ticket revenues.

One of PPP’s main projects is TAO Dance Theater, which it has sent abroad to places like Lincoln Center Festival (US), Sydney Opera House (Australia) and Sadler’s Wells (UK).

PPP handles TAO’s management and production.

“Founder Tao Ye’s physical vocabulary and aesthetic is unique, not just in China but anywhere,” Friedman said.

Treating dance as a visual medium devoid of narrative, Tao expands the body’s limitations and surprises the audience.

CVNC Online Arts Journal North Carolina said TAO Dance Theater “confounds and amazes. It is rare to be able to say, ‘I’ve never seen anything quite like it,’ and really mean it.”

Friedman met Tao while working at Beijing Modern Dance Company.

“Tao is very creative and we recognized a like-mindedness in each other during our early conversations at BMDC,” Friedman said. Both share the same ideas about dance and art.

PPP helped TAO Dance Theater book performances in nine cities this year. It has another 11 scheduled for 2014.

Another Chinese artist with which PPP is working is Wang Chong, the artistic director of Beijing-based performance group Theatre du Reve Experimental.

Wang’s work challenges dated stage techniques to bring the audience a fresh experience

“Wang has a very clear voice and direction that he’s developing,” Friedman said.

Founded in 2010, PPP has  grown to employ four full-time staff and three part-timers this year. Friedman has to fly to different cities – sometimes different countries – for work at least once a month.

The most difficult part of starting her own company was the beginning: “to build something out of nothing,” she said.

In the last 12 years, Friedman prepared as much as she could: she became fluent in Chinese, applied for the Fulbright scholarship to study contemporary performing arts, built media experience at China Radio International and networked with leading artists, art companies and musicians like Tan Dun.

In 2009, she went to Washington DC for a nine-month fellowship in art management at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

“I started the company as something project-based,” Friedman said. At the beginning, she did not have an office or hire any full-time employees. That humble beginning has laid a solid foundation for growth.

This post originally appeared in Beijing Today.

Ed’s note: Our friend Justin Mitchell, who quietly left China last year after a decade here, grew nostalgic upon watching the latest Donnie video and got in touch. He should be in touch more often.

I am not the first or last expat to leave China after a long stretch. Mine lasted about 10 years and while I can claim no special linguistic or unique experience beyond doing PR for the PRC — as I often describe my time working at the likes of China Daily, Global Times, China Radio International and Shenzhen Daily, as well as the best times of my journalistic Asia experience at The Standard in Hong Kong — I find myself homesick and occasionally heartsick.

I can’t bring myself to write the same sort of sensational “working in the belly of the beast” as so many Brits seem to easily slag about, though I often readily identify with what they say. I had my issues with censors and sometimes almost came to blows, though we were often the same creaky age and could have done nothing more than fake a few punches like a couple of bad kung fu stunt doubles.

The best was when it came to a meaningless short story at Global Times about some joyous male college students celebrating graduation by streaking. The censor, who was almost exactly my age at the time, about 55, told me it could not run because the students’ behavior was “disgraceful.”

“You and I were almost the same age in 1971,” I replied. “I streaked and it was nothing but a good time. What did you do? It was your Cultural Revolution. You were probably sent down to a countryside to feed pigs while I smoked marijuana, protested, and listened to rock and roll music for another revolution to end the war in Vietnam. And now you and I are working at the same place. How ironic is that? Let the story run, it’s harmless, just like we were.”

To his credit, he bent and the story ran.

But it leads me to another truth. One thing that drove me outta China besides my declining health was a declining sense of joy and discovery that led me there to begin with.

Now I realize that so much time has passed and the old stories are now new again.

(Image via)

We don’t have a lot of information about this video just yet, but it was sent to us recently by YouTube user Scott AH, whose e-signature suggests he’s with Comedy Club China. It’s a good one, if only for this scene at the 19-second mark:

Rice Rice Baby is not to be confused with Weird Al Yankovic’s song by the same name. Instead, make some room on the shelves of China expat music videos, folks. This wonderfully bug-eyed beat belongs.

Also see: Beijing State of Mind, We Livin in Xi’an, Laowai Style.

UPDATE, 11/6, 12:45 am: Scott is referenced as “a lanky American” in the final two paragraphs of this Atlantic article about stand-up comedy in China:

Back at the Hot Cat Club, a lanky American leaps on stage clutching a chuanr –or meat kebab — in one hand and a microphone in the other. He starts beat-boxing to the tune of Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” then delivers a pitch-perfect rap on the intricacies of catching food-poisoning from eating Beijing street food. The crowd roars with laughter and cheers as he charges off stage.

He might not be Russell Peters, but for the audience at the Hot Cat Club, he’s comedy gold.

And now the lyrics:

All right stop, put down your tea and listen
Time to talk culinary tradition
Stomach starts churning tightly
Flows to my asshole daily and nightly
Will it ever stop? Yo, I don’t know
Ate gutter oil just an hour ago
Too the extreme I rock the chuanr and the jiaozi
Light up the stage, stuff punks like they baozi
Eat. Duck neck to consume
That’s ok to eat, just a weird mushroom
Deadly, if it lacks refrigeration
But saving bad food just builds a strong nation
Love it or leave it, you better gain weight
You better just down it, lick that plate
If they serving Chinese, yo, I’ll eat it
Take it dao bao, tomorrow reheat it

Now that your tastebuds are jumping
MSG kicked in, Sichuan peppers are pumping
Quick to the point, to the point, no faking
Eat that rice with a pound of bacon
Stir frying it, cooked quick and nimble
On the menu can’t read the symbols
We can get some soup near Temple
I’m on a roll, it’s time to go solo
Rolling, on my bicycle
Got to find a place that serves egg rolls
Girlies on standby, waiting just to say ‘hi’
Did you stop? No, I just rode by
Kept on, pursuing to the next stop
I bust a left and I’m heading to the next block
The block was dead, yo, so I continued to
A1A Gulou Avenue
Girls were hot, wearing lens-less glasses
Other lao wei just sitting on their asses
Jealous, cos I’m out getting mine
Niu rou with the beer and hotpot with the wine
Ready to climb the Great Wall
Eat some roast duck then do a pub crawl
Fuyuanr! Shout out like a bell
I ordered fish and it came in shells
Devouring the shellfish real fast
When I left, ass about to blast
Bumper to bumper, the ring road was packed
Trying to get away because my stomach feels whack
Chengguang are on the scene
You know what I mean?
They passed me up, they chowing on some pig spleen
If they serving Chinese, yo, I’ll eat it
Take an Instagram, then I’ll tweet it

Take heed, cos I’m a lyrical poet
Beijing is on the scene just in case you didn’t know it
My town, that created all this great chow
Enough to make me smile wide and say ‘hen hao’
But grease like a chemical spill
Take a break so your colon can heal
Seasoned and fried, this is a hell of a concept
We make it hot, and you want to come taste this
Cooks play with the blades
Slice like a ninja, cut like a razor blade
So fast, other chefs will say damn
If rhyme was a food, I’d eat it gai fan
Keep my composure when my sphincter gets loose
Give up the beer, only drink juice
If they serving Chinese, yo, I’ll eat it
Health inspection? Really don’t need it

Tommy Patton is the latest foreigner to win praise for assisting strangers in need. A former firefighter in the US, according to Xinmin, he helped keep two injured passengers conscious after their car was crushed between trucks on the G1501 Expressway in Shanghai on Tuesday afternoon.

Shanghai Daily reports:

Tommy Patton told Shanghai Daily yesterday that he was not a hero and only did what he could and should do.

“I saw them and helped them,” Patton said.

He left the scene of the accident after helping them out.

More details:

“I saw the foreigner squatting outside the car when I got stuck on the jammed expressway,”  said netizen “kisspengtai,” who claimed he was at the accident spot and uploaded a picture on  his Weibo blog.

Patton kept talking to the injured passengers in the car and tried to keep them conscious,” kisspengtai said.

Patton reportedly works in Taicang, Jiangsu province and plans to stay in China long-term.

Expat becomes unlikely hero for brave deed in highway accident (Shanghai Daily)

A few months back, I landed a once-a-week job teaching English to surgeons in a PLA hospital in Fengtai district. My qualifications were I was American, living in Beijing, and had a pulse. The hospital administrators, who hoped to internationalize, needed a “native speaker” to help their surgeons study a college-level surgical textbook (despite the fact that most barely had enough English to order a Coke). I had received a text message from a flamboyant educational “agent” named Danny, a language-exchange pimp, more or less, who keeps a stable of Westerners at hand to fulfill the weird whims of his Chinese clients. He’s loud and charismatic, dresses in animal print button-ups, scrotum-hugging jeans (usually fluorescent green or red) and knock-off Italian loafers, charming clients with top-shelf cigarettes and promising teachers that they’ll be paid lucratively in cool cash – the Don King of China’s sprawling, dirty educational consulting market.

He gave me the hospital address and told me I’d make 400 yuan for two hours work.

“Just make a powerpoint presentation, and smile a lot,” Danny told me. “They’ll love you.”

Despite no specialized medical knowledge, a general aversion to needles, and a complete ignorance about how best to teach adult ESL learners (when the alphabet song and funny faces no longer work), I accepted the job.

After a Google search, I learned that the PLA-administered hospital specializes in AIDS and other infectious disease research. I showed up to the first class with a PPT about hospital facilities and medical prefixes. When I’d finally found the right building in the mind-fuck of the crowded, disorganized campus, I was a few minutes late. I rode the elevator up to the surgical floor –the stinging smell of sanitizing alcohol heavy in the air – and the reception desk directed me to a back break room, like a teacher’s lounge with empty IV bags stacked in a corner.

A table full of young, grinning men in shirt sleeves and khaki shorts stood up to greet me. They were enthusiastic students, eager to learn cuss words and the goriest ways possible to describe surgical procedures – “Could we tell a patient, ‘You have a pseudocyst, we need to thrash it out?’”

Several weeks in, and I’d gotten to know my students by name and come to appreciate their wittiness and curiosity.

And then one Wednesday, I arrived to the lounge at 6:30 pm, teaching material in hand, but my students were nowhere to be found.

Two nurses (I prayed not syringe-toting) saw me enter and hurried in after me. One was young, with big brown eyes and a pretty face. The other was older and unsmiling – the director of the floor’s nursing corps (Nurse Ratched with chopsticks).

Without knowing what was happening or where I was going, the older one managed to convince me to follow her and several other nurses to her car. “There’s a dinner, a meeting,” she said in choppy English. “You’ll come. Today, no class.”

It was all a show, of course. It tasted like shit, and everyone knew it

As the elevator sunk to the underground parking lot, the pretty nurse smiled at me, telling me in Chinese that there was a special banquet at a restaurant nearby, with very important people. I would be their guest, she said, still smiling.

The car ride lasted about 30 minutes and took me somewhere deep into the bowels of the Fengtai district, at least an hour’s drive southwest of civilized Beijing. I rode shotgun, and throughout the entire ride, Nurse Ratched drilled me about my teaching qualifications and whether I was available to teach her primary-school son.

I was in the middle of explaining in tone-deaf, textbook Chinese that I had a full-time job and didn’t have time when she screeched to a stop in front of a banquet restaurant that looked like every other banquet restaurant in China’s capital – stone lions, elaborate name banner, hostesses decked out in red qipaos, bubbling fish tanks in the lobby and knock-off chandeliers with a gaudiness factor that would make Liberace blush. The whole place reeked of smoke and cooking oil.

We got out and were led up a red-carpeted staircase to the second floor. When we opened the door to our private room, about 15 people, mostly surgeons I recognized, popped out of their seats, waving, and smiling, and gesturing for me to sit in one of the prized seats, near the top of the circular table, facing the door. I politely refused a few times, playing the game that in China no one likes but everyone does, before taking my seat. The table was set up so that the men, about 10 of us, sat facing the door, with the same number of women sitting on the other half, facing us. They were nurses and secretaries and young researchers hired to poke at mircrobes and publish the results in scientific journals.

Sitting next to me on my right was Peter, the head of the surgical department. Peter was an irrepressible motor mouth in class, interrupting me constantly to ask questions about everything from Kobe Bryant to the Grand Canyon (while I was teaching vocab related to pancreatitis). When I asked him what his hobbies were, he said having fun with young ladies and driving a motorcycle. I’d have guessed his age at about 40, but he wore a close-cropped military haircut, and had a tall, slim build. He could have been anything from 30 to 50.

On my left was a young surgeon, always the first to class, who only used his Chinese name – Li Zhiwu. When I asked him if he’d like an English name, he told me no, but that I could call him Lee. He was perhaps the most enthusiastic of the bunch about studying, and became noticeably frustrated anytime he couldn’t understand something, or had to stop to tap a translation into his cell-phone dictionary. He was from Shandong province, laughed easily, and bragged to me that he could drink more beer than anyone, period.

After I’d settled into my seat, I was talking to Peter when the door cracked open and a short, barrel-chested man with dark bags under his eyes walked in. He was a cartoonist’s caricature of a government official, wearing a short-sleeved white button-up, black trousers, and polished black loafers. His hair was short, and unnaturally black (dyed?). Everyone stopped talking. Then, just as suddenly, everyone stood up and barraged him with greetings and well wishes. He waved all the attention away, said hello, and sunk into his chair next to Peter, the most esteemed seat.

He asked if we’d ordered (Peter had) and told everyone to keep talking, before noticing me. We both stood up, and I extended my hand. His handshake nearly squeezed the pulp from my palm.

“So, you’re teaching my staff English?” he said in Chinese “I’m sorry, I don’t speak, but I think it’s important. Very important.”

Peter stood up to act as the intermediary. “This is the General,” he told me. “The president of our hospital. Very important, you know? General? You know? You will drink with him. Alcohol. Yes.”

Just a few days before, I’d sworn I’d quit binge-drinking in China. There’d been too many late nights and empty wallets, lost cell phones and shady bargirls. For the first few years of expat life, getting plastered is a fun, even necessary adventure. During those early days, the rules are too loose, the consequences of debauchery too few. It seems like it will go on that way forever, until it doesn’t, and you become crushed by the weight of a few years wasted and a shattered moral compass. Pretty soon you’re old and unlovable, wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the back alleys of Sanlitun gripping a big green bottle of Yanjing waiting for the next Cherry or Sunny to stroll by.

“Christ,” I thought to myself, glancing at a container of about 12 bottles of baijiu in the corner of the room. I knew where it was going.

I told Peter that I didn’t want to drink. He reacted like I’d farted. “What? American doesn’t want to drink with Chinese? Why not? Enemies?”

I tried to laugh the joke away. The arm-twisting was culture too, I knew, and if I just persisted, I could stay sober. But the strangeness of the situation forced me to cave in. “OK,” I said, “I will have one small toast.”

Peter laughed, and before the first dishes started to arrive, poured me a mini serving-pitcher of baijiu – perhaps four glasses worth. “One cup,” he said.

“You’ll be a… hero!”

Our first toast was innocent enough. Even the nurses drank. The General stood, hoisting his baijiu glass in the air, thanking his staff and telling them to enjoy the food before we all clinked glasses, tapped the table and threw the shots back. The game had begun.

It tasted like the pungent sweat scraped from Satan’s balls was mixed with surgical hand-sanitizing solution.

“Tasty,” Lee said, making a performance of turning his cup upside down to show he’d savored the last drop. The nurses grimaced, and watched me for my reaction. I’d done this before, and didn’t flinch.

“From Sichuan,” Peter said, nudging me with his elbow. “This baijiu is… special.” As soon as he said it, the other men gushed in Chinese about how awesome it was and how much they loved its flavor, its complexity, its… heft. It was all a show, of course. It tasted like shit, and everyone knew it.

That led to two more table-wide toasts, in quick succession, the singe of the baijiu becoming less fierce with each shot.

By the time the real food, beyond peanuts and cold tofu, started to arrive, we’d pounded six or seven of the thimble-sized shots, and I was feeling warm. Peter and the General were taking turns talking to me in a strange mix of English and then Chinese, asking me questions about what the English names of our foods were, what I thought of Beijing, and whether it snowed in the US.

All the while, the nurses, Ratched especially, watched me closely, wondering, I was sure, whether I could hold my liquor.

Not long after, Lee, the beer-drinker, propositioned me to drink the rest of my baijiu pitcher in one go. He’d do it with me, he said. “You’ll be a… hero!”

In what would become a refrain for the night, he said “No problem?,” then, before waiting for me to answer, replied himself “No problem!”

The nurses caught wind of the challenge, and cheered me on. The pretty one was especially vocal, asking in English if I was a real man. I stood up, grabbed the pitcher, clinked it with Lee (making sure it was lower than his) and chugged. It felt like a warm, vile-spewing snake was slithering down my throat, but I finished, and watched Lee as he swallowed the last of his. The nurses cheered, and the General clapped and reached across Peter to pat me on my shoulder.

“One more?” the General said, grabbing my pitcher and filling it again with baijiu. His was full. I wavered, shaking my head, trying to decline.

“No, no… America!” the General said, in what little English he had. “America?” his inflection rising.

I didn’t know whether it was a challenge, a question, or a toast, but whatever logic was embedded in those words prompted me to clink the pitcher of baijiu with the General and guzzle. This time the liquor disappeared smoothly. The General choked his down, taking a time out to breathe. His eyes watered, and his face flushed drunk red. As soon as he plopped his empty pitcher down in a show of triumph, the table began to clap, and Lee said something about being a hero in Chinese.

Over the next hour, the Chinese game of individual toasts began. While we ate boiled fish and plates of Dongbei delicacies (gongbao jiding ordered special for me, the white dude), each dinner guest made the rounds around the table, offering a toast to every other dinner guest, the most emphatic, of course, saved for the General. Inevitably they made a stop at my seat, and insisted that I cheers them with Baijiu in my cup, regardless of what they were drinking. By now, they understood the game. If I was hesitant, they said, “America?” prompting me, in some sort of displaced patriotic fervor, to show them America, by slamming down a shot of Sichuan’s foulest booze.

By the time everyone had toured the circle, and most importantly flattered the General, my head was spinning. I pulled out my phone and attempted to text my girlfriend –

“Withc the surgeranos. 2 much Baijius. I might die.”

I thought that if I ate more, I’d be able to sober up a bit, so I began to shovel noodles and bits of hong shao rou into my mouth.

“Look at him,” the General said, in Chinese. “Still hungry. What time does he want to go home?”

Peter asked me the same question in English. It was maybe 8:00. Not thinking, and already deep into a Baijiu buzz, I said 10:00.

The table erupted into laughter, the General’s the loudest. “Good. Good,” he said. “We have plenty of time. Drink more.” He poured me a new pitcher of baijiu and the game began anew.

Again, I toasted Lee and gulped the whole pitcher. This time he backed away, downing half, putting it down, and waving his hands in defeat. “I have to give surgery tomorrow,” he said, already irredeemably drunk. A white lie, I figured, but a good one.

“Mei nu,” pretty girl, the General said, teasing Lee. “Are you afraid your daddy will find out?”

Lee blushed, and grabbed his cup. “One more,” he said. I poured into his cup from his half-full pitcher of baijiu, attempting to fill my cup next, but the General stopped me. No, no, he said, and filled my pitcher before pointing to his own full one.

“In China, this is our method,” he said. “Not in America?…”

Challenged and blind-drunk by now, I grabbed the pitcher, and we hoisted our drinks. The General and I drank the pitchers, Lee drank the cup. No one clapped.

The nurses looked on with something close to horror. They knew the game, knew it wasn’t won until someone was vomitous or unconscious. Joan, a shy researcher who sits silently through class and hands me my payment at the end of each lesson, met my eyes and shook her head, pleading with me to stop.

Peter, siting to my right, had stopped drinking for some time, and began to encourage the General and I to slow our paces. “Are you… OK?” he asked me.

“No problem!” Lee answered for me, dumbly encouraging.

“OK,” Peter said. “No, how about we drink beer… beer?”

The General reluctantly accepted, and I said “No problem.” The waitress brought in a box of cold Yanjings and handed out three — to me, the General, and Peter.

As we poured beer into our baijiu pitchers, the General asked me if I had a girlfriend. He was smiling. He might have winked.

I told him that I did, in fact. She was from the Philippines, of Chinese descent.

He nearly gagged on his food.

“No, no, no,” he said, in Chinese, “That won’t do. Let me find you one. A real one. A good one. Do you want?”

Before I could answer, Lee barked in, hiccupping between words. “No, Americans don’t do that. They’re afraid of AIDS. Look at him… afraid of AIDS.”

The nurses giggled, and I pretended not to hear, picking at some loose peanuts on my plate, a surprisingly tough test of drunken dexterity.

“He must have some Russian blood in him,” the General said, deftly changing topics while appraising my tolerance level. Peter asked if my mom drank while she was pregnant. “Makes sons able to drink more,” he told me.

Slamming down a shot of Sichuan’s foulest booze to show them “America”

Throughout the meal, the General had been chain-smoking an expensive brand of Chinese cigarettes favored by Deng Xiaoping. As he prepared to light one more, he asked me if I smoked. I didn’t.

“Of course,” I said in Chinese, awkwardly reaching across Peter to accept a cigarette. No, no, the General said, reaching into his pocket to pull out an unopened pack. Take these. My gift to you.

I was clumsy in my drunken movements, my tongue heavy and thoughts foggy, but I knew I had to, somehow, maintain composure. Save face. Become a hero.

I took the pack of cigarettes, and tucked them into my pocket, knowing that I’d never open them. I said thank you, and proposed a toast. I offered up my baijiu pitcher that was now full of beer. The General said, No, and reached for his full bottle, hoisting it up.

“Drink it all,” he said. We clinked glasses and I chugged the full bottle like I was at freshman frat party. The General forced his down, too, pretending to be refreshed when finished. “Tastes good, one more?” he said. He didn’t want one more, and neither did I.

The entire table had stopped drinking, and had stopped talking. No one left, they were just waiting for one of us to give in and quit drinking so that everyone could go home. It was coming up on 10. I was seeing double, a sure harbinger of bad things to come.

“No, no… no more,” I stammered. “I’mmm not drunk, I jus have to work tomorrow. Early…”

The General held his chin up and laughed, then patted me on the shoulder. “I like you very much,” he said in Chinese, reaching out to shake my hand.

I was driven home by a surgeon named Mike who hadn’t drunk during the banquet. Throughout the trip back, I drifted in and out of a drunken sleep, the world spinning each time I closed my eyes. When we finally pulled up to my apartment complex, a gallon of baijiu and boiled fish suddenly erupted from somewhere deep in my stomach. I couldn’t open the door in time. I hurled the noxious mix all over Mike’s door and his floor. He grimaced, but I was in no shape to do anything about it, my eyes unable to focus, my head rolling on my shoulders.

“No problem!” he said, as he nearly shoved me out the door. “Get good rest.” How I made it into my bed is a mystery, and how I made it up for work the next morning lost in the throes of the worst baijiu hangover known to man is a miracle.

The following week, when I strolled into class, Lee and Joan greeted me in the lounge, both with broad smiles painted on their faces.

“Would you like something to drink this class?” Lee said, “Some beer, wine… no problem!”

I told them I was sorry for drinking too much at the banquet, and sorry for making a fool of myself. Lee asked me if I remembered throwing up in Mike’s car, and Joan told me I shouldn’t give into pressure so easily.

I listened and nodded, and asked about the General.

Yes, Mike said. He likes you very much. “He thinks you are…” — he pulled out his dictionary to look up the word — “…outlandish.”

Nick Compton is an American journalist living in Beijing. You can reach him at nickcompton1@gmail.com.

This video’s three weeks old, but we just saw it thanks to Reddit, and isn’t it nice to see a person help someone else?

Just after the 30-second mark, a man behind camera says in Chinese, “You’re not afraid, you’re a foreign friend, you’re not afraid.” We assume he means afraid of getting sued, which, sadly, has happened here before. (Counterpoint: people also help others, quite often, actually.)

“You’re lying on gasoline right now, do you realize?” another Chinese bystander says in that scolding tone in which every word is sharply enunciated. The man continues to be drunk.

The foreigner (tourist, we’re guessing, judging by his lack of Chinese and the camera slung over a shoulder) insists on helping with the man’s motorized three-wheel bike. More and more people gather to watch. We hope the man arrived at his destination safely.

The tourist probably got a better story out of this than any he could have hoped for from the Drum and Bell Tower.

The talk of the day has been Mark Griffith and Andrew Dougherty’s brilliant music video Beijing State of Mind, a tribute to this city of ours, set to the beat of Jay-Z’s famous homage to New York. The Brooklyn native’s Empire State of Mind has, of course, inspired countless spin-offs, about Chinese cities other than Beijing, too.

In fact, there was one just last week by the folks at NMA TV, which we encountered over the weekend (had it all set to go for tonight’s links edition, actually). It’s not bad, but, um — how do I put this nicely? — it’s about Taiwan. No offense to those of you who prefer Taipei over Beijing, but obviously we don’t. The video is embedded below, and here’s the webpage on which you’ll find lyrics.

Another Empire State of Mind parody, also pretty good, is about FC Guo’an, our hometown soccer team. (Dougherty sort of dissed them in his version: “Catch me wid my boys at Gongti at a Guo’an game // I made the Guo’an shirt more famous than the Guo’an can.”) This one was written by local rapper Nasty Ray, who performs in Chinese. Wild East Football has the story for you (with a hat tip to the commenter on the Griffith/Dougherty post). Youku video here.

And finally, here’s “Beijing State of Mind” by Iron Mike and Up, with footage from 2011. It has nothing to do with Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind, actually. The song used is Ray Charles’s “Mess Around.” Youku video here.

ROLLING UPDATES: There are, obviously, more Empire State of Mind parodies out there, and if you know of any, send em along, or leave a comment like kgincq did. Here’s a song about that “mountain city where dreams are made of” (“there’s nothing you can’t see…”), Chongqing:

(More info about the song here. And here’s a live performance.)

Here’s Hong Kong State of Mind, aka SAR State of Mind (pick one and stick with it, fellas), with credits to Soo Jin Koh, Shao Ong, Simon Li, Charity Battad, and Brandon Koh.

Drop what you’re doing and watch this, Beijingers. Mark Griffith, a photographer and videographer who used to live in Beijing, has just released the fruit of 15 months of work, “Beijing State of Mind,” set to Jay-Z’s Empire State of Mind. The project was the brainchild of Andrew Dougherty, an expat who’d lived off and on here for five years. Rapping alongside Princess Fortier (in the role of Alicia Keys), the duo take us on a trip from the Forbidden City to the hutongs to the Great Wall to The Place, and so many other places in between that make our Beijing experience what it is.

Griffith details the project’s development on his blog:

Andrew mapped out a set of locations and he first recorded the track with a local artist so that when shooting he would be lip syncing to the same audio track in the video.

We set out on a Saturday in April 2012 with Helen and Stephanie from Andrew’s work and Peter as our driver.  Peter was a friend who drove taxi in Beijing that Andrew had been using for years. That Saturday we shot at Temple of Heaven, The Birds Nest, Workers Stadium, the Hutongs, ZhongNanHai, Tiananmen Square, Andrew’s apartment outside of Central Park and then over at Andrew’s work at World Trade Center building. Andrew’s assistants would clear the area of people, hold a iPad with the track qued to the right point in the song and I would set up my camera on the tripod, get focus and exposure right and we shoot the scene a couple of times. I did virtually no direction, Andrew changed outfits and did his thing.

It’s a slightly long read because, again, the filming, production, and editing took 15 months, featuring more than a dozen versions, so perhaps you’d like these screenshots to speak for a bit:

The full lyrics are pasted below, via Griffith’s blog. If we have just one quibble, it’s that “concrete jungle” would seem like a more fitting description for Beijing than “commie jungle”; in fact, one could say Beijing is the world’s foremost concrete jungle, all ring roads considered.

But really, this is an inspired piece of work. It joins the ranks of other superb paeans to Beijing by folks such as Peter Laermans, Jake Fromer, and Jason Chu. (Matt Sheehan and Matt Allen, who wrote a rap about Xi’an, now live here, so maybe expect a follow-up from them in due time.) The bar keeps getting raised.

UPDATE, 11 pm: Is Beijing State of Mind the best China-related Empire State of Mind parody? The poll’s now open.

Beijing State of Mind

Verse 1
Yeah I’z up at Beida, now I’m down in Guomao,…
I started as a student, but I run the show now.
I’m the nouveau expat, livin’ in the CBD,
Ridin’ on my dianpingche, everybody stare at me.
It ain’t because I’m laowai, it’s probably cause I’m handsome,
Yeah I’m the only pimp wearing’ seer sucker pants, and,
Did my share of modelin, acted with Ge You,
I’m dropping mad tracks I be hotter than Jay Chou.
Cruisin’ down to Houhai, people drivin’ slow I,
Can’t believe the traffic or the awful drivin’ so I,
Hop onto the subway, the smell it ain’t so lovely,
But at just 2 kuai I don’t mind getting cuddly.
I say what up to Jintao, Hu defines the in crowd,
But don’t forget about Jiabao, when he gonna change his hairstyle.
My boys be chillin over there in Zhongnanhai
When I get the invite then I’ll know that I’ve arrived in…

CHORUS
In Beijing, commie jungle where dreams are made of,
There’s nothing you can do
Now you’re in Beijing.
Taiqi will make you feel brand new
The sites will inspire you, let’s here it for Beijing, Beijing, Beijing.

Verse2
Catch me wid my boys at Gongti at a Guo’an game
I made the Guo’an shirt more famous than the Guo’an can
Yeah I watch the Dragons, I’m court side at the Ducks,
Even though the halftime dancing show really sucks.
But that ain’t important; that ain’t why I came here.
I came for the history, like the Tiananmen Square,
Forbidden City, hutongs always gritty,
Tiantan is hoppin’, dancin’ like P Diddy.
15 million people, half the dudes is naked,
Pullin’ up their shirts, cause the summers they can’t take it.
Long fingernail pinky on the right hand,
Cause the left won’t pick your ear as well as the right one can.
Babies on the prowl defacating on the pavement;
I just wanna scowl, sayin’ son why don’t you save it.
But that’s the way it is, that’s how we do it here,
If you don’t like it you’re welcome to steer clear of…

CHORUS

Verse3
Migrants they come here, kids they are shunned here,
Can’t get a hukou, so out of pocket health care.
No fear.  They leave their kids for the year;
Grandparents take care, no one sheds a tear.
Gaokao it’s over, pressure done abated,
So off to university to get edumacated.
But he becomes jaded after he’s graduated,
Cause he can’t find a job that’s well compensated.
So he hops on Weibo, he surfs kaixin wang,
And he gets on Baidu to download my son.
Head to Dongdan, hoop it up forget your problems.
A plate of hot jiaozi on the corner might solve them.
We come here with dreams, then reality hits us.
Bendi, waidi, laowai drifters.
But we love the energy, that’s why this city’s great,
So we all work late to “protect the Eight” in…

CHORUS

BRIDGE
One hand in the air for the old city.
Gugong, Bird’s Nest all lookin’  pretty.
No place in the world that can compare.
Fly your kites in the air everybody say Yeah, Yeah.

CHORUS

(H/T Mark Dreyer)

China watchers already know this, but longtime China correspondent Evan Osnos, who has written for the New Yorker since 2008, has moved back to the United States. “A Billion Stories,” published Friday in the best China blog in the business, amounts to his farewell, and it’s a typical Osnos piece: descriptive and instructive, poetically constructed from graf to graf, perfectly allusive in the way that the world sometimes is, and keenly humanizing.

When I moved to Beijing, in 2005, to write, I was accustomed to hearing the story of China’s transformation told in vast, sweeping strokes—involving one fifth of humanity, and great pivots of politics and economics. But, over the next eight years, some of the deepest changes in the lives around me have been intimate and perceptual, buried in daily rhythms that are easy to overlook. A generation ago, foreigners writing about China marvelled most at the sameness of it all. Chairman Mao was the “Emperor of the Blue Ants,” as a memorable book title had it. But in my years in China, I have been seized most of all by the sense that the national narrative, once an ensemble performance, is splintering into a billion stories.

Living in China at this moment, the stories bombard you with such fantastical vividness that you can’t help but write them down and hope to make sense of them later. Writing about China, in The New Yorker, for the past five years, I’ve tried to capture something of this age, to grab a few of these stories out of the air before they slip by. The complexities of individual lives blunt the impulse to impose a neat logic on them, and nobody who stays here for some time remains certain about too much for too long. To impose order on the changes, we seek refuge, of a kind, in statistics. In my years here, the number of airline passengers nationwide doubled; sales of personal computers and cell phones tripled. The length of the Beijing subway quadrupled. But the longer I stayed, the less those impressed me than the dramas that I could never quantify at all.

Go read all of it, then comb through his archives. The first Osnos piece I ever encountered in the New Yorker, “Angry Youth,” remains one of the finest examples of how journalism can deepen understanding and inspire the desire to learn more. And here, too, a gentle reminder that while there will always be room for skepticism and anger and all the precipitate emotions from wanting a place to be better, because the possibility is there, we would do well to be tolerant of the ambitions and daily striving and foibles of those around us, that characterize us all. Because in China, at this current juncture in history, you never know what tomorrow will bring, which is why we stay.

The best part of this video is definitely when the Swedish man, a tourist visiting China for the first time, jumps into the water to save a drowning woman.

But if we had to pick a second best part, it would have to be the heavily accented voices of the locals saying, “And it’s a laowai!” The shock of what they just witnessed, we’re sure, could have made their heads explode.

The townsfolk have begun calling the man, identified only as 53-year-old “Harald,” according to Go Chengdoo, as “Foreign Lei Feng.” The woman he saved on December 6 near Jinjiang Bridge has yet to speak on the record, but an eyewitness from Shanghai was so moved that she presented him a bouquet and said he had “changed her life.”

Go Chengdoo also reports:

[Harald] told the reporter that he was in Chengdu on a 10-day business trip, and that although this was the first time he had rescued somebody from a river, it was not a big deal, in part because the river in Chengdu in wintertime isn’t as cold as Sweden’s rivers in the summer.

So, swimming in the cold river: no big deal. Saving someone’s life?

Well done, Harald… if that is your real life.

Longtime China resident Cam MacMurchy, who ran the well-respected Zhongnanhai blog for several years before co-founding The Nanfang earlier this year, is nothing if not a reasonable and fair writer. We’ve watched from afar as The Nanfang, a community-driven website covering the Pearl River Delta, has steadily grown, expanding its listings every week while continuing to produce interesting content on its blog.

But you know what they say about media: you haven’t made it until you’re notorious, and you’re not notorious until you’ve pissed people off. This week, The Nanfang has made it.

Here’s a story of honest words, hurt feelings, empty threats, and expat blowback — and wrapped up in all of it, perhaps a cautionary tale for restaurant owners everywhere. As MacMurchy tells it: 

One for the Road has contacted us regarding our review, in which one of our staff visited One for the Road and wrote about their experience. In our view, the review was fair and based on the writer’s impressions of the food quality, ambiance, price, and service. The review attracted several comments, with some explicitly disagreeing with the review’s conclusions. Those comments all remain on the site and can be reviewed here.

The owner of One for the Road, Jason Cakebread, contacted us to dispute the review and requested us remove the bar’s listing and event information from The Nanfang.

A few emails were then exchanged, in which Cakebread slowly but surely loses his composure. It’s like watching water boil. As documented on The Nanfang, Cakebread’s first email to MacMurchy begins:

You are entitled to write any form of review you wish about what ever establishment you wish.

However, I never gave you idiots permission to place One for the Road or her events in your website.

We do not want our good name associated with your sorry excuse of a website/magazine.

And then he drops a curse:

As I said, write any review you wish as the people who have gone to One for the Road know it’s full of shit.

Followed by, of course, a threat (Ed’s note, 6:44 pm: for clarification, the threat here refers to Cakebread’s desire to have The Nanfang remove his establishment from its listings, a strange request that reeks of nose-cutting to spite the face):

If this is not done we will pursue the matter further as we have consulted our lawyer who says we have grounds to sue.

MacMurchy responds with a kindly written albeit slightly long email, in which he states:

We hope to work cooperatively with One for the Road going forward. We receive substantial traffic from overseas and Hong Kong, specifically from people who are unfamiliar with Dongguan and are looking for a place to eat, have a beer, and relax. Many of these people stumble upon your bar’s listing page, and I have no doubt that many have visited your bar as a result. We have the legal right to list your bar’s information on our website, however would regretfully remove it as a courtesy should you restate your request to do so.

For a second, or a minute, there is hope for a tenuous truce, a belated understanding. Cakebread’s anger thus allayed, hatchets buried, the respective parties put their heads togeth…

Your review was absolute shod, we are not just here for hangovers greasy food burgers and mash!

Oh. Nevermind then.

You can see the place this is headed, and that place is all-caps:

PLEASE BELIEVE ME I HAVE ALREADY CONSULTED OUR LAWYER AND ANYONE THAT KNOWS ME WILL TELL YOU I WILL FOLLOW THROUGH!

We’re guessing MacMurchy chuckled a little before sending his reply, another long, polite email that concludes:

I’d like to reiterate that we have a legal right to list public venues in a database of bars and restaurants. We do this as a service to both our readership and our bar and restaurant partners. As of today, we have over 1,000 venues – many of which are in Dongguan – comprising the largest English-language bar and restaurant database in the Pearl River Delta. Our readers have found us to be a very useful resource, and we will continue to be so with or without One for the Road in our listings. As a courtesy and according to your request, will will remove One for the Road listings and event information within the next 24 hours.

Best of luck with the restaurant.

Regards,

Cam.

Do you want to take a gander on who comes out of this looking better?

If you are ever in Dongguan, never ever visit One for The Road bar / restaurant bit.ly/TSGMWP @zhongnanhai

— Jeremy Goldkorn 金玉米 (@goldkorn) October 24, 2012

But could Cakebread have known, all along, exactly what he was doing? As a businessman, his response certainly makes him look overly sensitive, childish, and petty, but might his restaurant come out stronger for it? You know what they say about publicity, I’m sure. There’s no such thing as the bad kind.

Perhaps time will tell. In any case, we want to give One for the Road a fair shake — here’s its website.