So in Singapore, a friend who went to grade school and college with me, after letting me pester him for six hours about his country said, “you know, Jordan you’re one of the few Americans who doesn’t show up and immediately start telling me what my country is like.” Well my apologies, Jay, because I’m gonna do that in this update but I hope you bear with me.
Before we get to last month’s travel, however, I want to tell you all about the China hip hop ban. Two weeks ago all hip-hop-related artists and anyone
For more context read this article, but the long and short of it is one of the new hip hop stars got some bad press for sleeping with a married celebrity and a rap about cocaine that the Party Youth League. As this piece says, “it is not actually hip hop culture that the censors care about, but rather its foreign roots and its sudden, explosive popularity among youth. As with most censorship in China these days, what is really being managed is the scale of people coming together outside of the government’s control.”
That said, this more than any other government policy this is the one that most got to me. I started watching the Chinese American Idol “The Singer” (which is way better than American Idol because they only have eight competitors and they’re all already professional, so some are crazy good).
GAI, my favorite rapper who won the hip hop show and is actually the most traditional Chinese style, taking like old folk songs and rapping over them.
What’s funny is that this is a great example of how counterproductive the Chinese government can be. As I think I wrote about in earlier newsletters the show Rap of China, an American Idol for rap this summer, was a huge breakout success and now basically every young person you meet can have a conversation about hip hop. The show also made them not rap about money, cars, drugs, etc. and mainstreamed and defanged the culture. The rappers themselves were taking this as a big responsibility, talking about how they were introducing their culture to China and wanting to put the best face on it. But just as it was about to really get more homogenized (since the money was right) they ban it, presumably pissing off all the rappers and new young fans, only making them more resentful having almost tasted money and fame.
One friend before GAI was kicked off said that “The Singer” is as close to democracy as China gets. Him disappearing only makes the statement more apt.
Jessie J is on the show right now, and I hoped that she would pull out in protest. In response to this idea, a very conscious Chinese friend of mine said to me “well what would be the point of that?” Others thought my shock at such a policy was comically naïve.
Taipei
My family showed up! It was fun and surreal like I was warped back in time to interpersonal dynamics that hadn’t changed at all from New York but also in some alternate reality of Chinese characters and street markets where I was translating for my family in a language I didn’t know six months ago.
We went to a Japanese yakiniku (like bbq you do yourself) chain in Taipei (Japanese colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, and eating mainland Chinese food isn’t cool so there’s a ton of Japanese/Korean food). Their gimmick was that if you kiss someone else in your group for ten seconds with everyone cheering you on you get free meat. We saw someone else getting marshmallows for dessert to roast over their yakiniku and of course got some for dessert. When we were lighting them on fire, the waiter ran over and asked if we wanted help with them (after all, he helped us cook our steaks). I said “没问题，这是一个美国特色,” like “this is an American specialty food, burnt marshmallow.”
In Taiwanese cafes, you would see advertisements for Amnesty International. I got used to checking Instagram and using google. Kids would ask to add me on facebook instead of Instagram. The bookstores had all the books I’d read about the Cultural Revolution you can’t find in the mainland. Falun Gong were everywhere, and in the main square one Friday night, there were all these posters proclaiming that Taiwan was an independent country.
At an internet gaming café, I sat next to a guy who looked a little older than the teenagers and asked if he wanted to play with me. He said ya sure, and then said he wasn’t that good at PUBG (the newest hit game that’s sort of like Hunger Games) because he played a lot of Day of Defeat (a Half Life mod I loved) as a kid. We ended up winning.
One Sunday wandering on a park I stumbled on a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) game. This you may have seen in the US, where people dress up as medieval characters and roleplay while wacking each other with foam swords. One guy in his twenties who spoke decent English said he was studying LARP in Taiwan and hoping to write a proposal on how he could get senior citizens involved I think to counter loneliness with age. Why LARPing was a good outlet I’m still not clear, but I talked him into chatting up some old people who dropped by to watch. Afterwards, the guy sent me an email saying, “It’s very joyful to meet you, since I never study abroad, having such a long talk, perherbs the longest one I experienced also very fun and content.”
There are almost no garbage cans in Taipei since everyone has to do their own recycling separation and bring garbage out to garbage trucks at particular times of the day.
I was surprised how many Taiwanese I met hadn’t visited mainland China. The questions they asked about it were the same Americans would’ve asked, about pollution and internet censorship.
I think this is a giant mural of Kyrie Irving.
I went to the national museum and saw one older Taiwanese woman giving a tour in English to three other older Taiwanese women. After tagging along, they explained to me that the tour guide was a longtime leader and they were just putting her through the paces. But once the other women left, the tour guide leader filled me in on the story. After getting a complaint that her tours were too simplistic, they lead tour guides were checking up on her to see if she still had it. She was worried they would force her only to do Chinese-language tours, which she thought were more boring because rote education left them asking very predictable questions. After getting this off her chest, she proceeded to take the next three hours to give me a personal tour, explaining how she would change her descriptions of the pieces based on the age and size of her audience.
There were lines to buy movies in Taiwan presumably because apps to buy tickets aren’t ubiquitous like they are on the mainland.
There was a subway public announcement that was, I think, about letting women with periods sit?
Bangladesh
Oren messaged me out of the blue in early January asking if I was up to going to Bangladesh with him. He had been there for work on the Rohingya crisis.
I’ve never been to anywhere like Dhaka before. Bangladesh is the world’s most dense country in the world (over 1000 people per square km), and you feel it in and outside the capital. Slums abut nicer neighborhoods, though the nice neighborhoods don’t measure up to KL, Bangkok, and presumably Delhi/Bangalore. The pollution is worse than Beijing, and the dust too is overwhelming, but very few wear masks.
Meeting Oren for breakfast at the fancy hotel he was staying in, we saw the Bangladeshi national cricket team. Then we went to their match downtown–it was half empty because all the fans left since they were playing so terribly. A “day and night” game ended before sundown because Bangladesh scored so few runs.
My Bangladeshi classmate in Beijing took me around for two days. We met some of his friends, all in the NGO world, who said that the best job opportunities in the country were not working in businesses but for international NGOs.
Dhaka has the worst traffic in the world.
That said, even Dhaka, a friend who has spent a lot of time in the developing world described to me as “the single worst city I ever visited” has redeeming qualities. Unlike Jakarta, which almost completely lacks sidewalks, street life in Dhaka is vibrant with shoppers and vendors galore. The fact that there aren’t crazy bougie walled-off neighborhoods and malls like I saw in Jakarta, was also sort of refreshing. And around a recently de-polluted lake, young couples were walking around holding hands.
For the last two days, we went down south, driving for five hours through two cities. One night the third largest city Khula we wandered out to find a street concert with some aggressive four to the floor beats.
The following two days we got driven to a town “Knowledge Fair” where we got taken to the table of honor and met the local minister, whose gave off that universal creepy “I’m a local politician with too much influence for my own good” vibe.
The next day we stayed in their mangrove forest next to which the Chinese were funding a road. There we had some milk from a cow named Ruma.
I tried betel nut at the airport, which was awful.
Singapore
There isn’t a pair of cities more dissimilar than Dhaka and Singapore. The city lived up to Tyler Cowen’s billing and, particularly given its neighborhood, is hands down the most impressive place I’ve been.
Walking around the center of feels like you’re one of those little people in a glorious styrofoam architectural model of a city that would never get built for lack of funding/eminent domain. You stumble on little parks everywhere and traffic isn’t too annoying. It feels even more diverse than New York, perhaps since given that it’s smaller you run into different neighborhoods faster, and housing policies forced different races to live on the same floors. So many different cuisines are offered at world-class level. There were public water fountains. And, unlike Taipei, it has garbage cans.
Reading about the history (I got the party line through a LKY memoir and a graphic novel for kids, the left from a solid podcast by a guy who wants to but will never get to be PM and brilliant adult graphic novel) The more I read the more I felt the country had a China-lite vibe to it.
vs. 
My favorite policy was in the casino. Lee Kuan Yew swore that he would never allow gambling on the island, but a few years after he gave up power the government, in order not to lose out on Chinese tourists, opened one up. Entrance is free for foreigners, however, if you’re a Singaporean you have to pay $100usd per day just to enter it. As prude as the place may be, the casino’s roof was pretty suggestive.
