A Chinese professor trashed Wolf Warrior 2 and now might lose her job.
Badminton
Before leaving the states, I talked with a handful of American expats to get their advice on moving to China. One said I should pick some hobbies to help make friends. When I mentioned that I played tennis, he told me to keep it up since “the right type of Chinese person” picks that sport. So I thought, fuck that, now I have to learn badminton.
First, I geared up. In middle school, I thought it was obnoxious to have colorful soccer cleats if you weren’t actually good (mine were gray…). Thankfully, have I aged out of that psychosis, and after visiting four badminton stores to find shoes large enough, bought a neon yellow pair.
Then, in Guilin, I found a coach and started playing with her a few times a week. She is 24, works part time at a gym, majors at her graduate school in badminton and is writing her thesis on “how to win at badminton” (or at least that’s how she dumbed it down so I could understand). She once asked me if I had any friends with eyes bluer than mine (note: my eyes are very blue).
I without much thought accepted her 200 kuai ($30) an hour initial price offer. This is maybe $10 above market rate, and I resented it far too much for far too long.
I thought after learning badminton in the middle of China for two months I’d get to tell some story about how intense Chinese training techniques are. But my coach and the other coaches I saw giving lessons were maybe even more laid back than American ones. We would do an easy warm up, review old strokes, chat, and then learn new ones. After a drill, she would talk at me for a bit, trying to explain what I was doing wrong with my stroke, then eventually mime my mistakes. Then I would go home, watch youtube videos of this guy teaching badminton, and understand what I was supposed to do.
Learning at 27 goes so much faster than it used to. I don’t get discouraged by setbacks and know how to pace myself. But most importantly, I actually listen when I’m getting corrected. That awkward knot of external criticism kept me from reading professors’ comments on my essays, internalizing professional reviews, and even taking tennis lessons. Not caring about this sort of thing I have my concussion to thank.
I get approached most often when folks hear me speaking Mandarin with another Chinese person. Every hour-long badminton lesson got interrupted two or three times. Kids would chuckle at my strokes, scream “hello,” giggle when I answered in Mandarin, and run away. Teens and twenty-somethings wanted a foreign friend they could take a photo with and add to WeChat.
I’m into badminton as a sport. Since the points go longer and you have no time to catch your breath waiting for the ball to go over the net, it’s much more cardio intensive than tennis. There’s also an element of acrobatics and dynamism with all the stretching for drop shots and leaping for smashes that even squash doesn’t have. But my sense is that the cool kids nowadays play basketball, not badminton. On the Chinese American Idol for hip hop, one of the freestyle topics they were thrown was to rap about badminton. Most of them said something along the lines of “hah, I haven’t played that since middle school the only sports stuff I do is watch NBA. But I guess China wins gold medals in it, so that’s cool.”
Learning to Freestyle
It’s scary to think of what percentage of the day I have an input. I wake up and roll over to read the prior day’s US news, fill up dead time with podcasts and go to sleep with audiobooks. Aside from showers and the occasional day when I meditate, iPhones have taken away almost all of my empty time.
Living in China, however, has built a new thirty-minute block of no-phone time into every day. With college kids on electric scooters staring at their phones and mini-trucks carrying really long rods, listening to music or podcasts is dangerous on a bike. Forced to unplug and surrounded by people that had no idea what I was saying, I started to freestyle about the random stuff happening on the street.
It’s super fun! Freestyling is a flow state that forces your mind to relax, shed self-consciousness, and be aware of your surroundings. I have a new little party trick, albeit on that can only impress ESL speakers for now.
Beatboxing in Dali
After having good Yunnan food in Beijing and heeding Tyler Cowen’s advice, I spent this past week in Yunnan. The province borders on Burma, Laos, and Thailand, and over half of its population isn’t ethnic Han Chinese.
One day in Dali I went on a hike. Yunnan has California’s always-spring climate, complete with wild-growing marijuana. A gondola to the top cost an outrageous $40 round trip (upscale meals cost maybe $10) that the Chinese tourists all didn’t blink at. Nearly every developed trail I’ve found so far has a stone path.
There was a ton of wild marijuana. This is a fascinating article on weed’s Chinese history. An excerpt: “The Divine Farmer’s Classic of Materia Medica, a pharmaceutical text complied in the first or second century AD, warns: ‘A person will see a ghost after an overdose, [and] run around like mad … After moderate long-term intake, [he or she] will be able to communicate to God.'”
There are farm plots even in the middle of the town, and a five-minute bike ride outside of Dali brings you to full-on rice paddies. A Chinese tourist biking by got a kick out of me talking with a farmer.
Most non-westernized bars in China have some young folk or rock musician. Walking down the bar street for the first time, I got my hopes up after seeing some teenager wearing a Gucci Mane t-shirt.
And sure enough, three minutes later I heard a hip hop group rapping inside a venue. The bartender sat me next to the artists and they got a kick out of my Migos tee. I knew enough about Chinese hip hop from the tv show to chat for a few hours with them. The lead singer could speak no English so could only judge American rappers by their flows and beats. He said his favorite rapper was ODB and other old school east coast music. But since most Chinese people don’t “know real hip hop,” they made half their set trap music.
During their next show, I beatboxed for the freestyle portion of their set.
To Not Change China
I recently finished another Jonathan Spence book called To Change China. In it, the historian profiles a handful of Western priests, doctors, diplomats and generals who came to China with a “standpoint of superiority” stemming from their “technical skills and sense of moral rightness.”
Even in my tutoring classes, I’ve fallen for this missionary conceit. It’s way more interesting for me to learn about Chinese culture and hear what a Chinese person thinks about the wider world, but I often couldn’t help myself for taking over conversations with my own opinions. 
At the end of the book, Spence writes of these advisers, “by what right did they go? A clue to the answer surely lies in the fact that the advisers themselves did not think of posing the question. They were confident. They were sure that their own civilization, whatever its shortcomings, had given them something valid to offer, something that China lacked.” Since the PRC opened up, now may be the time where Americans coming over here have the least to brag about. China’s economy is still on track to outpace America’s. China’s firms have begun to demonstrate innovation on par with Silicon Valley. And, of course, Trump.
While I certainly still believe that the US has “something valid to offer,” unlike the advisors, I’m here as a student. So as I meet my new classmates tomorrow, I’ll be hoping to lean back, talk less, and listen more.
Back in Beijing with Ariana Grande
This week I made it to an Ariana Grande concert. She didn’t even learn to say “ni hao” or “xiexie.” Mick Jagger, on the other hand, even hit the tones.
The Chinese crowd was older than that of Ariana show I went to at MSG. I have a hard time distinguishing between 17-30-year-old Chinese people, but there were very few teens and preteens. All of the moms escorting their daughters were white.
For the first thirty minutes, the entire 15,000 person arena sat. Occasionally a drunk American couple in their early thirties tried to dance, but guards came over and told them to get back in their seats. This got old fast. So, I talked a few folks around me into standing for the next dance number. When we got up, slowly a cone of folks whose view we blocked started to get up as well. By the end of the song, while everyone in front of me was still sitting, a few thousand fans to my back were out of their chairs. The floor of the arena stayed sitting until the encore.
I’m back in Beijing staying in the same hutong I did in early June. In Guilin, things gradually started to make more sense. how confused I was back in Beijing to how functional I am now is night and day. 
Outside of Tiennamen square is now a Bellagio-esque water show.
I just got a hutong street shave. The guy didn’t use a safety razor but rather some ancient blade he sharpened every couple of strokes. It hurt, but I guess now I know what it felt to shave in the 1800s. I wanted to look nice for meeting my classmates tomorrow, but now my face is all irritated.
