In winter: All’s still, and the sun’s scanty rays
Filter downward in pewter and silvery grays.
I find myself strolling down memory hutong
To Beijing in winters when life was more putong.

Glazed roof-tiles girded in glistening icicles,
Sonorous bells on still-plentiful bicycles,
Cabbages, coal smoke, and good shuanyangrou,
And sidewalks all covered in soot-blackened snow.

The winters seemed colder. Shichahai would freeze,
And the snow would collect on the boughs of the trees.
It’s rare now to see baicai stacked on the stoop,
Which by springtime would rot to gelatinous goop.

I’m not what you’d call an environmental role model. I have no idea how big my carbon footprint is, but I doubt I’ve shed the wasteful habits learned in 30 years of life in America, so we’re probably talking Sasquatch proportions. Air conditioning, beef consumption, incandescent lighting – my sins against Gaia are numerous.

Regular beijinger columnist Kaiser Kuo reflects on those "sonicky" aspects of speech that give our words meaning...

Thanks for your time. I’ll try to make this quick. Picture Little Miss Sunshine meets National Lampoon’s Family Vacation meets Lost in Translation, but set in China’s Henan province and featuring a Chinese-American family. We’re talking a cross-cultural slapstick pic, but generous in spirit – generous especially to the on-location sets in Henan since the Henan Tourism Bureau is ponying up the big bucks. I see Ang Lee helming this. My thinking is he wants to get away from all the pretentious and soporific Merchant-Ivoryesque stuff he’s been doing. You with me so far? Good.

Dear Reader,

The publishers of my recent collection of columns neglected to include an index, so I’ve provided one here for your convenience. Apologies for the additional trouble.

Also, please note that I’m completely kidding you and this isn’t actually an index to anything. But there is an actual book. Go out and buy it.

Yours,
Kaiser Kuo

Get another round, dude. I’ll be right back. Gotta milk the xiyi.

I tell ya, you don’t really buy beer – you rent it. Oh, this camera? It’s for the blog, dude. What, you don’t read my blog? No, man, it’s www.dontshithere.com. Dude, I’ve been doing it for five years now – where you been? I’m on a mission to document every “please don’t shit here” sign in every bar bathroom in Beijing. Dude, it’s classic. I get mad hits.

Fuwuyuan! Fuwuyuan! Gei wo lai four Jägermeister shots. This round’s on me, courtesy of Google AdSense. Here, dude, say “Qiezi.” Sweet.

What were we just saying? Oh yeah, no, I totally agree. They don’t understand China. They’ll never understand China, not like we do. Seriously man, these noobs, they don’t know what life was like here before all this. Man, Beijing was so much better when there weren’t all these other laowai all over the place.

Given rock music’s comically bleak beginnings in Beijing twenty-odd years ago, it’s a wonder there’s such a surfeit of hipness on the scene today. Hip, like decent beef, was in short supply back in the early days. Sure, Cui Jian had it, what with that whiff of dissidence always about him and that red blindfold ever at the ready. Ding Wu, who would go on to front Tang Dynasty, was cool – maybe not hip, but decidedly cool. That was pretty much it. No one else I remember from the old scene qualified. Ding Wu’s cool wasn’t consistent, either; he often rehearsed this stage move in which he’d drop down into a hurdler split, then bounce back up to resume singing or playing. That’s about as cool as back-to-back guitar solos. Even Lao Cui had his shameful moments (his early hits included an execrable cover of the Michael Jackson/Paul McCartney song “Say Say Say”).

When he lived in Beijing about ten years ago, my brother Jay had a friend named Zhang Yi. They struck me as odd companions. Though he’s a fair bit more urbane today, back then Zhang Yi was very much the guileless, small-town naïf. My brother, meanwhile, was silver-tongued even as a child, and his already formidable rhetorical skills were only further honed in law school. Jay had left his high-powered San Francisco firm and come out to Old Chokey, hoping to cash in on China’s first dotcom boom. His mastery of Mandarin, however, had never progressed far beyond the kitchen Chinese that many ABCs acquire in early childhood: household nouns and very basic verbs, an underdeveloped syntax wrapped around rudimentary grammar.

Not long into their friendship, Jay began to suspect that Zhang Yi regarded him as rather stupid. And not just hobbled by language, but quite possibly retarded – a simpleton, lacking a grasp of basic facts and concepts about which Zhang Yi would, with patient condescension, instruct my poor brother.