On The Media

We left mainland China a couple of days ago and have been in bright bustling Hong Kong ever since.

We’ve done about 25 big interviews on this trip and one thing they’ve all had in common is optimism. We’ve waited, day after day after day, for someone to tell us about the bad, the really bad, parts of doing journalism in China. That day never came. At one point we tried to check the website for the Committee to Protect Journalists in order to remind ourselves how many Chinese journalists are currently in jail (more than twenty.) We couldn’t access that website from China so our colleagues in New York had to look it up for us. The blocked website was in itself a reminder of what we came to see in China. But nobody, not our Chinese guests, not our expat guests, would condemn China, the Chinese government, or journalists at the state media in China. They all fall somewhere along the gamut from cautiously optimistic to giddy. Yesterday at Hong Kong University we sat down with American academics in whom we trust and who know their stuff. From their perch in Hong Kong they were able to remind us again about everything we knew before we came - the total absence of free speech, free press, and certainly a free internet in China. But even they, seemed optimistic. The notions of right and wrong that we came with do not apply in China and I for one can get on board. By all accounts China is more open, and Chinese people more free to express themselves then they were 10 years ago. That’s it. Things are in motion here. There’s a long and unknown road ahead but they are on it and don’t want to pull over for an interview about the past. That would only slow the traffic even more.

I came to China not knowing much and I leave knowing only a little bit more, but I have been drawn into the story and will continue to watch it, through the dark blurry lens of that hole we all dug to China in our childhood backyards. Now, back to New York to make a radio show about China. I’m not sure how it will begin but as the Olympic song that plays on the radio here goes, “we are ready.” I hope.

The story of the city of Shenzhen sounds like a fable. Created as a kind of steroidal economic development zone by Deng Xiaopeng in 1979, it was a first attempt at testing the viability of free market capitalism in China - what he called ‘capitalism with socialist characteristics.’ The characteristics didn’t take. What had been a sleepy fishing village just north of Hong Kong is now an economic juggernaut of 12 million people. It’s a test tube city and its success is built on the back of foreign investment in so called joint ventures - mostly in the countless manufacturing factories that ring the city.

Actually its real success is built on the back of the countless Chinese who have ballooned the population, mostly young people lured by the promise of employment. What they find are factories, often owned and run by foreign investors with little Chinese oversight and rather old-fashioned ideas of workplace safety. The population of the city is predominantly young and female - in fact women outnumber men by 7 to 1 - remarkable in a place like China. The set up is factory-town-like with manufacturing and dormitories in one easily controlled space. It looks a little like Vegas and it feels a little like Vegas, a city built unabashedly on money and, like a perpetual motion machine, fueled by people playing the odds.

We came to speak with Hu Xiao Mei. For 15 years she hosted Shenzhen’s most popular radio show - a two hour call in program from 10PM to midnight called ‘At Night You’re Not Lonely.’ Geared towards people like herself who’ve left provincial families and are alone and confused by everything Shenzhen requires - the show is the flip side of the lifestyle media angle we’ve been working in Beijing and Shanghai. Hu Xiao Mei dispenses advice with the kind of knowing tough love that is less about how to be hip in modern China and more about negotiating fundamental questions of sex, love and family.

But to us she’s a surrogate at this point for her listeners - a necessary shortcut in a three week trip that limits our reach. And it highlights a problem with this kind of visit - with probably any kind of trip. It feels liminal - we’re close to the end of gathering stories and seeing what we can see and we’ll leave with a lot of impressions and carefully recorded firsthand accounts. But I’m keenly aware of our limits when trying to reckon with a subject as vast as China. And after months of reading and thinking about what a place like Shenzhen represents, 24 hours leaves barely an impression, barely a way of marrying research and experience.

I can only hope that somewhere there are candid photos of Megan, Brooke and me being used to illustrate a perfect stranger’s blog. We’ll stumble upon them in the future perhaps, curious as to what purpose our image is serving.

In that spirit I’d just like to note that this man was responsible for the audio at a marketing seminar we attended a few days back. You’ll note that he’s wearing a uniform – like a professional.

Part of the process of working in China is relying heavily on our translators. Brooke relies on them to characterize her questions properly and I rely on them to explain to waiters and waitresses that I’m a vegetarian.

Translating interviews from Chinese to English is a multi-part process. First, there is the translation that happens during the actual interview. Then, there’s stage two back at the hotel. We sit and review the tape with our thoughtful translators. We transcribe each answer into literal English and then try to turn it into conversational English all without changing the meaning or the tone of what the guest said. It is an intense back and forth, trying to be true to everyone concerned.

Finally, we choose the parts of the Chinese language tape that we want to use in the show and find someone to do a voiceover. That’s where this video of Jerry comes in. Jerry was the manager of our Beijing hotel. A great guy and our BFF in Beijing, Jerry really went out of his way to accommodate our wacky production needs and he jumped at the chance to do one of the voiceovers. When I explained that he’d be voicing the words of a smooth talking, confident, magazine publisher, well, Jerry got psyched!

Ladies and Gentleman, introducing the Marlon Brando of our production…Jerry:

The large dark red berries in the pails are called Yang Mei. Pitted like a cherry they have a raspberry skin and a interior like nothing I’ve ever had – sweet and tangy and perfect for long audio-editing sessions. We bought a bag our first night here and have been sampling them whenever we can.

Our introduction to Shanghai interviews came from a man you’ll never see because he insisted in speaking off the record. A programming vice president at the Shanghai Media Group, he’s responsible for programming at a sizable and influential (we’ve heard) television network. It’s a direct competitor to CCTV, the state-sanctioned and controlled television broadcaster.

We spoke to him in the building maintenance break room. We weren’t allowed upstairs, we were told, for terrorism reasons.

We’d been told that it’s a rather sensitive time for the media in China, with the recent protests convincing many executives that conducting interviews with the Western press isn’t worth the trouble. And so our interview began – Brooke asked general background questions about what was on the network. For example, name that show now playing on the TV in the break room?

Silence. You realize in moments like this that there are so many different kinds of silence. This was rich, pregnant, I think-we-both-know-what’s-going-on-here silence. And that was pretty much it. He gazed thoughtfully off into space, furrowed his brow, stroked his chin, shifted positions and in the end told us next to nothing. We’ll never know for sure if he was anxious, or diffident, or following orders but it was an interesting opportunity to wonder about all the various forces weighing in on our time together.

A night later our stellar Shanghainese translator/fixer Ed Sheng assembled a group of his friends and we talked for an hour and a half about their China – one we’ve heard a great deal about. Outspoken, wholly thoughtful and eloquent – they couldn’t have been a starker contrast to the fraught staring contest of the night before.

Like New York, Berlin, and really any city I’ve visited, the cutting edge artists in Beijing show their work in a converted warehouse/factory neighborhood, in this case known as 798.

We stormed the studio of Zhou Bandi, a renowned artist who manipulates the Panda, a proud symbol for China, in order to turn societal norms on their head.

There is more, a lot more, to say about Bandi and 798 but it’s curtains for me, we have to get ready to head to Shanghai in the morning. Over and out from Beijing, OTM moves on!!!

So Sunday we decide to go to the Great Wall. Jeremy Goldkorn, editor of the indispensable Danwei.org (and a fluent, 15-year resident of Beijing) instantly offers to supply a driver, a lonely stretch of Wall, and lunch straight from the garden of a local farming couple. So we arrive at his door at 8 am and pile into a well-worn van with two of his Danwei crew and a driver named Wong aka Mr. Yellow (his name, translated) and speed off into a cerulean morning. Then we stop. The Bejing traffic jam, like China, is eternal. Later, our fixer Joy tells us that last year on that stretch of highway motorists were trapped for TWO DAYS.

Not this time. After about a half hour of furious smoking, some enterprising drivers (including Mr. Yellow) edge their cars around inch by agonizing inch until they are facing backward in the middle of the three-lane expressway, creating yet another lane in the opposite direction.

Soldiers arrive to facilitate this vehicular improvisation. Finally we spill out onto a side road and arrive at the Wall where the wind blows continually, cool and clear. Every week, Jeremy hikes this stretch, or others equally rough and uninhabited. He climbs and skips across the broken, perilously steep rubble like a mountain goat. I have a bum knee, so I perch on a promontory and imagine what it must have been like to build all this.

The wall never did provide the security the emperors hoped. The land is too vast, the invaders too numerous and determined.

We pass some beekeepers on the way back to the van, and buy some honey, pale yellow like the wildflowers blooming amid the ancient shards.

Then lunch in the cement courtyard of a simple home. Lettuces, scallions and radishes pulled from the garden in front of us, washed and served. Then chicken and rabbit dispatched that morning. Yikes. I accidentally pull the chicken head out of the stew. I’m still traumatized. Beans, cucumbers, pumpkin, cornbread, savory parsley (cilantro?). Three kinds of tofu. Peanuts boiled with star anise. Hot, salted almonds harvested from their own trees.

And beer. Some clear liquor that tasted like NyQuil. (Jeremy says you get used to it.) Hours pass. The skies open and we move inside. More beer. Jeremy says some important stuff about the media he didn’t say in our interview earlier in the week. That counts as business.

Finally, some haggling over the bill - the couple thinks we’re over-paying. Then home on the highway where earlier we blazed that backward trail.
Thanks for this day, Goldkorn.

The Kungfu fast food chain uses Bruce Lee as a mascot. Meg and I had take-out boiled lettuce in beer/vinegar sauce, my first ever fast-food broccoli cup and cold soy milk. American fast-food companies avoid sports star/killing machine endorsements for a reason, most of their fare is inherently anti-performance. Kung Fu boiled lettuce and soy milk to-go made me feel like I could fight most of East Beijing for hours afterwards.

My favorite breakfast so far consists of spicy vegetable dumplings dipped in vinegar. I take them with a great deal of coffee. I’m convinced that for the rest of my life I’ll be able to conjure up China instantly with the smell of coffee and vinegar.

My favorite dish so far has been a plate of garlicky grilled & fried (fried & grilled?) string beans on a bed of something unrecognizable. Within seconds the mystery ingredient turned my mouth numb and made it water uncontrollably. More beans were necessary to appreciate the original taste. And so forth. A confusing but brilliant culinary tactic, like salting food to increase thirstiness but as a much more efficient loop.