Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

I was sent to Beijing to write an article about the Chinese rock scene. Very easy – just going to gigs and talking to musicians; a record company obligingly set up interviews. For the last decade or so, whenever I’m there, I try to check out the rock scene, and I’ve always put a box in the rough guide on what bands to look out for. The bands are great, the scene intriguing, and as they sing in English a lot of the time, it’s accessible.

Bands used to play in dodgy bars with terrible sound, with names like SCREAM and WHAT?; now there are a couple of really good venues that take five or six hundred, and are rammed every weekend. So it is easy to talk it up as a Chinese-60s type moment – you have these bands kicking at the system and talking about their generation, and the kids lapping it up – and the oldsters and the mainstream media just doesn’t get it.

The musicians come across as intelligent sceptics rather than outlaws. Shouwang of Carsick Cars seemed representative, and articulate. He looked like a student, earnest and intellectual, and like all the musicians I spoke to he had excellent English. He professed weariness at the rampant money grabbing that seem to have become China‘s prevailing ideology, but, unlike most critics, does not see the solution in a return to traditional values. ‘we just want to encourage critical thinking’ he says – an attitude hinted at by the subtly provocative title of their 2009 album: ‘you can listen, you can talk.’

All bands have to submit their lyrics for approval to the Ministry of Culture. The Chinese censor is notoriously heavy handed, and it’s quite possible to end up not just silenced, but in jail, for speaking on subjects such as corruption, or appearing to encouraging drug use. Some bands get around the ministry by subtly changing what was submitted in performance; for example, one punk band, which must remain nameless, on stage changes a crucial consonant in its lyric ‘Let’s funk’.

Censorship might be strict but it’s also spotty – deliberately so, as a way of inculcating an attitude of self censure. Apart from the last minute cancellation of the 2008 Midi festival, the rock scene has not yet suffered over much from government interference. Shouwang says they‘re still too underground – but he is aware that he is treading in dangerous waters – the recent arrest of Ai Wei Wei must be pretty worrying.

In common with most of his contemporaries, Shouwang sings in both English and Chinese. ‘English because it’s direct, and Chinese because it’s poetic’. The Chinese language is notoriously ambiguous, and laden with allusion and double meanings – very useful for a lyricisist.
For example, there’s a useful bit of ambiguity in Carsick Cars anthem ‘Zhongnanhai’ which they perform at the end of a set. Zhongnanhai is the name both of the communist party compound at the heart of Beijing and his favourite cigarette brand. ‘Zhongnanhai, zhongnanhai, I only smoke Zhongnanhai’ – what’s this really about? Does it matter? Fans throw cigarettes on stage, and the song ends with a wail of feedback.

Shouwang first heard western rock and punk from so called dakou CDs – waste music CDs were exported from the west to China to be recycled, and nicked at the edge to make them, supposedly, unplayable; in fact only the last track was lost, and these discs with their alien but alluring sounds, were eagerly collected, with ‘dakou’ coming to mean all forms of westernised, underground youth culture.
‘When we started there was no possibility of success.’ There was no infrastructure for their uncompromising music, no chance of fame or money, and not much of an audience. Carsick Cars’ first song was a cover of Iggy Pop’s ‘I want to be your dog‘; it went down badly, as did everything else they did: ‘We’d play gigs to three people, and two of them would go home annoyed’.

Shouwang describes touring the country in a van, and experiencing more profound culture shock in boondock China than he would later get from his trips to the west – having to play cockroach infested venues, unable to sleep in rural hotels cause of the noisy chickens outside.

Still, they persisted, their following snowballed, and now those hundreds of hours of gigging are paying off; as with the other really good Beijing bands, Carsick Cars are notable for the tight musicianship that only comes with lots of practise.

Despite these recent success, none of these kids are getting rich. With illegal downloading now pretty much the norm for consuming music in China, the only opportunity to make money is from gigging and selling t-shirts. Shouwang is almost unique in being able – just – to make a living from rock music. He Yan, the bassist, is studying at Beijing Agriculture College, and has to ask his tutors for time off when they tour, while Bin Bin, Taiwanese drummer, freelances as a writer.

The bands are so diverse that its hard to speak of a Beijing sound. The best gig I went to was by HanggaI, who sing Mongolian folk songs and mix traditional instruments with electric guitars. They put on a great show, dressing up in full military regalia; their guitarists used to be in a thrash metal band, and it shows. They seem pretty popular with foreigners who I would guess like the fact that they’re distinctively Chinese. PK14 are old stagers, refreshingly uncompromising and post-punky. Hedgehog are great, with a pint sized girl drummer, Atom, who is clearly the star of their show. Queen Sea Big Shark do chirpy electronica and have a charismatic front girl. But you could pretty much turn up at D22 or Yugong Yishan any night of the week, and see a decent band in the company of a few hundred students. Is this the crest of a youth culture wave? The beginning of a generational consciousness rebellions or just another form of consumerism? And will it be allowed to grow any bigger? Whatever the answer, it’s one of my new must dos for the city.

On the fourth day I stopped caring about time. I thought it was the fourth day, but it might have been the third. Beijing was a receding memory, Moscow impossibly distant. I had slipped into the habit of sleeping for four hours and then getting up for four hours, it didn’t matter whether it was light or dark. Life inside the train bore no relation to the outside world -Siberia- which barreled past, cold, unwelcoming and as predictable as wallpaper; birch trees, hills, birch trees, plains, birch trees.

‘I hate those trees,’ said the elderly German in my compartment, ‘I want to cut them all down.’

Occasionally we passed an untidy village of wooden cabins but mostly the only human touch to the epic landscape was the telegraph poles at the side of the track.

My first Russian was a young guy in a shellsuit with a moustache and an anarchy tattoo. ‘The Beatles,’ he said, on hearing I was British.

‘The Rolling Stones,’ I countered.

He nodded. ‘The Doors.’

‘Pearl Jam?’ I inquired.

‘Nirvana,’ he asserted, ‘Napalm Death.’ Which seemed to seal the matter.

Once or twice a day the train stopped and I’d emerge for fresh air, dizzy and blinking, onto a platform swarming with frenzied shoppers. Traders stood in the carriage door and the townsflok, who had waited all week for two minutes of consumerism, rioted to get to them. To save time the traders threw money over their shoulders into the corridor to be collected by colleagues. They sold world cup t-shirts, plastic jewellery and Mickey Mouse umbrellas. Even the man from the dining car had a cupboard of trainers, which was perhaps why he could only offer gherkins and soup in his official capacity.

I played cards then slept, battleships, slept, charades, slept. It was an invalid’s life – a long slow delirium in comfortable confinement. But on the seventh day, or perhaps it was the sixth, when grey housing blocks started appearing and Moscow was imminent, I felt nostalgic for that easy sloth. When I finally got off, something felt terribly wrong; it took me a while to figure it out – oh yes, the ground wasn’t moving.

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A teacherish voice called from the train loudspeaker, exhorting the passengers to wake up please, we would soon be arriving.

I grew conscious. My eyes felt toasted, my bottom tenderised, and my shoulder, having been rammed against the window bracket for hours, seemed to have relocated to my ribcage. It felt like my left leg was being jabbed with spikes and someone had stolen my feet.

I shared my bench with a pair of cobblers, father and son. Under the seat they had a sack with two chickens inside. The chicken heads protruded from holes and pecked at discarded sunflower seed shells. Now the son, beside me – in fact, much of his body was in contact with mine – yawned and grunted and stamped.

He had a foppish, asymmetrical haircut that would look cool in a London nightclub but was odd in combination with his peasant uniform of ‘Lining’ trainers – white with red flash – and a shapeless brown suit. I felt guilty for the anger thoughts I’d directed at him during the night, when he’d slid into my patch.

Outside, the low sun tinted the mist pink. Hills had been chopped into bite size fields, a cubist landscape. The fields were divided by mud ridges just wide enough to step along. A woman ladled urine from a bucket onto rows of veg and a man sprayed pesticide from a backpack. A white egret, skinny and with bent back, like a fashion model, posed by an irrigation stream. The mud walls of houses were the colour of the red soil, as if they had grown from it. Their tiled roofs curled at the ends. That seemed a characteristic Chinese flourish, you saw the same upward gesture at the end of a calligraphy stroke, in the flick of an opera singer’s wrist. A man was leading a water buffalo. What a head a water buffalo has, sports car sleek with go-faster horns.

On the facing bench, the seamstresses were waking. In daylight they’d played cards joylessly, taking it in turns to present their laps as a table. Beside them sat one of those mysterious Chinese businessmen, well dressed but carrying nothing but a mobile phone and a jam jar of tea. In between us on the floor the cabbie snored away. Last night he’d drunk a bottle of whisky then wrapped himself up in a plastic sheet and lain down. In the moonlight I’d fancied he resembled a mummy, and the fruit peel and wrappers around him were his grave goods. He didn’t look like that now, he looked like a bum, perhaps as much as I did.

Everyone seemed to have had a lovely sleep. I marvelled, as I had during the night, at that peasant ability to hunker down and switch off. They’d slept in positions I would not endure for more than a few minutes.

A guard wheeled a trolley up the aisle, selling breakfast and socks. I bought a couple of eggs boiled in tea and pointedly dropped the packaging on the floor rather than out of the window. A girl swept rubbish into a pan, barking at passengers to raise their feet. One of her epaulettes was loose and flapped like a broken wing. Now a patriotic song was playing. How I loathed that loudspeaker. In the more expensive classes you could turn it off.

Yesterday evening, when the journey had begun, I’d had a fine time. Cigarettes, fruit and beer had been pressed upon me, and I’d fielded questions concerning my origin, occupation and salary. I’d handed round my lucky five pound note and the queen had been much admired. Having scandalised my audience by revealing how much cigarettes cost in my country, I’d had to admit I had no idea of the price of a cow.

Then the lights had gone out and they’d all gone to sleep. I’d grown obsessed with finding the one position that would be comfortable and remain so. I would think I had it then ten minutes later have to shift again. Round about four a.m. I’d forgotten my pains in a delirious flush of ideas. I’d decided that someone ought to genetically engineer a goat that could eat plastic, to clean up all the rubbish along all the railway lines of Asia. Many brilliant observations had followed, none of which I could recall now.

Following that, I’d replayed Monty Python sketches in my head, until I’d realised I was giggling aloud. I think it was shortly after that that I’d passed out.

The cabbie unfurled himself and a chicken pecked at his foot. The seamstresses got their cards out and the cobblers brushed their teeth. The cleaning girl recovered my book, now covered in banana, from under the seat, and emptied her pan out of the window.

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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.

J said he had to get an early night as he had an exam in the morning. He is German, studying at a Chinese film school, I assumed the exam would be on Hitchcock or Truffaut or somesuch and he had to hit the books. No; he wanted to go home to practise basketball, which he had never played before in his life. Because it was a sports exam. Which he had to pass. Every student in China, whatever their subject, has to have a certain basic competence at sports.

I said fail, what does it matter? Qualifications don’t matter to a filmmaker, and he agreed, but he was still desperate to pass the dumb sports exam. Because otherwise, he said, what was the point? He had done the crazy thing of learning Chinese, and then going to a Chinese film school, which was even stupider, and what was the point of it any of it if he didn’t even pass the exams?

We’d met to discuss a script and were sharing a bottle of wine in a French restaurant by my hotel. I said I would help him write a ten minute film which he would shoot and use as a pilot to make money to make a feature. The feature was based on his girlfriend Chun Sue’s novel, Beijing Doll.

Bejing Doll was a cause celebre when it came out in 2000 because it was banned for being immoral. It’s a teenage girl’s confessional, about dropping out of school and dying her hair and becoming a punk and annoying her parents and so on.

Because of all the hoohaa she got famous, regarded as a spokesperson for China’s Gen X; she was on the cover of Time Asia. The publisher changed the title from ‘World of Ice’, (probably a good idea), and the book was packaged in a pink cover with yellow ransom-note writing, in pastiche of the Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks, and it sold hundreds of thousands of copies all over the world.

J asked me if I had read it. I said I’d read half of it, which was an exaggeration. It was well written but it didn’t go anywhere. I had reviewed it for the guide; I said, ‘A rambling roman a clef about a confused teenage girl who has unsatisfactory sexual encounters with preening rock and rollers – though if it wasn’t China it wouldn’t be interesting.’

I told J that the fact that the book did not have a story does not matter. The title and the controversy would be enough; someone somewhere would pay money to have it made. Probably not by him, of course. They would just go straight to Sue and buy the rights and give it to a more experienced director. Still, it was worth a shot.

Chun Sue came round to say hello. Mostly she looked like the voice of a discontented generation, with spiky hair and a pop art t-shirt with guns on it, but like many successful twenty something Asian girls she carried a Louis Vuitton bag. I pointed out that it didn’t fit her image and she said she’d spent a couple of thousand dollars on LV stuff but now regretted it cause she couldn’t afford to go on holiday.

She was celebrating; she was to become singer of the band ‘Demerit’, and had just come from Modern Sky records and they had given the band a record deal. I asked her how many songs they had, she said three. But it was okay; their first gig was in a couple of months and they’d have six by then. She ordered another bottle.

Her third novel had just come out (Red Children) but she was stuck on her fourth. Like most confessional writers she had continued mining her life, but it seemed she had enough material to keep her going.

The fourth book was to be about this time she went to Thailand to see some American guy she’d met on the internet and he turned out to be really fat (every story that begins ‘we met on the internet’, ends ‘but he/she was really fat’). And not just fat but mad, and he locked her in a hotel room and threatened to slit his wrists. And she called the Chinese Embassy and they said, ‘well what did you expect’, and she called J and… but she didn’t know where to take it as what really happened after this wasn’t satisfying.

I thought it was obvious; get all the principals in the same place, bring J and the man’s wife (oh yeah he was married) out to Thailand too, bosh, there’s your book. Doesn’t matter that that’s not what happened.

More wine appeared. They were a sweet couple but I could see she was hard work; J said she was like a hyperactive kid, always demanding attention. He said she only focused when she wrote, between 8pm and 3am every day. I left them to it. I shouldn’t think he got much basketball practise in.