Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I finished work and went down the road to check out Mao’s Livehouse. Its logo is Mao Zedong’s distinctive hair, which has nothing to do with what it is about, which is local bands. Usually there’s about twenty people in there but that night it was rammed. On stage was a Chinese skinhead band, wearing docs and braces and singing Sham 69 covers. The audience were all Chinese kids and some waved Union Jacks. Another band came on and did Cure and Blur covers. What was it all about? Of course, I had stumbled upon ‘English music night’.

I felt proud of being from the same country that Suede came from, which is something that you would never think back home. It is a phenomenon I have observed before. For example, back in the UK, Manchester United football club are, as far as I’m concerned, just another faceless corporation. But when you come here and hear a Chinese cabbie speculate about their new signing, you feel a surge of affection for those distinguished ambassadors. And it’s better than being known for starting ill conceived wars.

At the gig I bumped into one of Y’s friends, this style magazine writer, and ended up in a bar with a bunch of Chinese intellectuals. It turned out that two of them had studied art at my college, Goldsmiths. They were quite high brow. Like this one girl told me her English name was Sabrina. I said, ‘So were you a teenage witch?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Did you name yourself after Sabrina the Teenage Witch?’
‘Huh?’, she said, a little frostily I thought. ‘I am called Sabrina after a character in Milan Kundera’s the Unbearable Lightness of Being.’

We played a drinking game. I think only cultures where people don’t really like to drink play drinking games. In the UK having to drink two fingers of tequilla as some kind of forfeit just wouldn’t work because nobody would think that was any kind of punishment at all. We like drinking, and getting drunk, and need no cajoling.

In this drinking game you think of a famous person and other people ask you questions to which you can answer only yes or no, and they have to guess who you were thinking of. I play this with my family every year at Christmas, which is about as frequently as a person could want to play it I feel.

When you were guessed, you had to drink, and also if you guessed someone else and got it wrong.

When my family play, it’s all Princess Diana, JFK, Donald Duck and so on. But not with these folk. The first person was Yoji Yamamoto the fashion designer. Then we had Ang Lee the film director. Then Haruki Murakami the writer. It got so that the first questions asked of a new interviewee were, ‘Is it a he?’ then, ‘Is he a living person?’ then, ‘Does he work in the cultural industries?’

I was Santa Claus, which took them quite a long time to get. It was Sabrina’s turn next, and I got her straight away. She was, of course, Milan Kundera.