sushipanda

As we huddled on the steps leading up to the Chaoyang Men Cash Box, steam rushing out of our mouths and noses, the prospects for that evening looked dim.

“How about DVD-shopping,” I proposed to the small crowd, who had ventured out into the blistering freeze to welcome me to Beijing on Chinese New Year’s Day.

“You traveled all the way up here, and all you want to do is to stay in and watch DVDs,” retorted Yuki, slightly incredulously.

I corrected her. “No, I didn’t say watch DVDs, I just wanted to buy them.” I had to remind her that I was the DVD shopping king in Shanghai, but wasn’t that great at actually giving hours of my precious “pounding-out” time to consuming them. “OK, so forget DVD shopping, what else is there to do around here?”

“What do you do in Shanghai,” asked Angela, “on a Sunday afternoon like this?”

“Eat, drink, sing, buy DVDs.”

“Well, that’s pretty much all we do around here as well,” she said.

Then I realized: we are the bored and disaffected youth of China. If we were in the movies, we’d be driving down some residential street with our baseball bats, smashing mailboxes and screaming for anarchy. But, we were the folk that had been accustomed to abusing our cost of living advantage in China; we had been massaged over so many times by luxury and decadence that we were even too lazy to even be rebellious. Here we were, standing in one of the oldest capitols in the world, surrounded by art and culture and pomp, and all anyone really wanted to do (though no one confessed to this) was to go home and jump on the web and chat vacuously with those equally unmotivated.

On my escape from Shanghai, my few days here in Beijing, this would not do.

After imploring them to find a place with a semblance of culture, Steve suggested that we head over to Bookworm, which was a cafe/restaurant with its many walls stacked with paperbacks upon paperbacks. I was taken with this unique place, where expats who were immersed in engaging conversations were mingling with greater novelists along the shelves.

Angela nudged me: “You don’t actually like this place, do you?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s full of books!”

Today we’re going to the famous temple fair for some more culture.

After I spent the first half of my week in Bangalore simply trying to rest and recover from the bender on Friday night, I vowed that I would break the vicious cycle of partying once I returned to Shanghai, simply because my body was visibly breaking down from the constant pounding. Bangalore was a welcome change from Shanghai, with its fresh air and temperate climate (though the deluge of Indian food did its share of damage, I’m sure). The last weekend in Shanghai, with the lethal 7-bottle + 2 mini-keg combo, really screwed me up big time, introducing to m a wickedly sore throat, consistently groggy dispositon, and two nasty canker sores all at the same time.

Finally, with lots of lying around in the hotel room, I boarded my flight back to Shanghai (via Singa-bore), feeling enriched with vitamins and minerals (courtesy of the juice bar at the hotel) and ready to be well and healthy and vibrant for my throngs of fans back home (well, if my a-yi counts).

Surprise surprise, right when I land, I get a text-message literally commanding me to go to Guandii. Alex, who was the genesis of my first brush with death the previous week, wanted to celebrate his last few days in Shanghai, and so I was compelled to make an appearance at Guandii, though not before I made a vow with Mike that we would, at most, contribute to finishing a single bottle and then leaving early.

Little did I realize that we were about three months early for April Fool’s. A couple of bottles and another mini-keg later, where did I find myself again but stumbling out of Cash Box at 6 am in the morning, cursing myself for breaking the vow within 5 minutes, and then laughing at myself for cursing myself. In Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor Samsa finds himself one morning having turned into a large insect. I hope that one weekend morning, I will have woken up suddenly turned into someone who did not get smashed and go to Guandii the previous evening.

So Sunday, I found myself with, you guessed it, a canker and a sore throat. Not even the chili cheese frieds at Moon River could quell the tumult in my oral cavity. And yesterday, for the first time ever, I took a cab to the gym. I always likened something like that to the time I was a kid and saw a woman use food stamps at a supermarket, then walk out and open the door to her Benz. Then again, I guess such hypocrisy runs in my blood; after all, it does flow with Chivas mixed into it.

Just a couple of hypocrites

In the fall of 2002, I took a trip out to London to visit Betty, and during Halloween made the short flight out to Prague by myself for a few days. There’s no point in me adding to the generations-long catalogue of “wow”-type descriptions of the city; suffice it to say that there’s really no other city that I can compare it to in terms of pure haunted romanticism.

On the last night I was there, I found myself in Old Town, drifting amongst a mist of watering holes and restaurants. Prague is famous for jazz, of all things, and I was looking for a place to rest my weary tourist noggin and close my eyes to some memorable music. I found just the right place in a crowded jazz club that rested at the bottom of a cavernous stairwell, its entrance perfectly conspicuous to a seacher’s eye.

Toward the side wall, adjacent to the stage, I found a table with three young women sitting around an empty seat, which they were kind enough to offer me. While the band was setting up, I learned that one of the ladies was from Switzerland, the other two were from somewhere in France along the Switzerland border. The talk was polite but not particularly interesting, and we tried to stretch it out long enough to not have to say too much to each other before the music started.

Finally, and thankfully, it did. The show that night was vocal jazz, and the singer was an American women full of buxom bravado who clearly loved what she was did for a living. Whenever I am asked what would be my dream job, I hardly hesitate in answering “musician.” I say this because I can see at jazz concerts that the music rises up and inhabits the people playing it; I can’t think of a drug more natural and more potent than playing music that you love.

I opened my eyes as one song ended, and the vocalist introduced the following song with an anecdote that I don’t remember at all, but with a name that I’ll never forget. “It’s French,” she whispered into the microphone, “and it’s called ‘Tendresse.’” There was some shifting in the crowd, and I knew that most either understood French, approved of how this song title sounded, or both.

I leaned over to my French table companion, a young blond woman who, aside from some brief murmering with her companion, had been quiet and appeared very drawn to the music. I asked her what the title meant, and in a moment that oddly enough, despite my crumbling hold of the past, will be one that I will never forget, turned to me and translated: “Tenderness.”

I would fail beyond pathetically to try to use my limited descriptive capability to convey how beautiful that word sounded to me when she said it. Her French accent, mixed with the lazy tendrils of smoke, the strum of the bass string, and stirring of the wine inside me, will define what tenderness is to me forever. When I see the word, and more importantly, when I feel the word, it is always with a beautiful French accent in a dark but warm jazz club in Prague.

I bring up tenderness now because, in this very cold winter in Shanghai, it’s what I know can keep me warm and content. It is also something that I crave right now, something that has been missing in the formula of decadence and recklessness that is my whiskey-drenched life of Shanghai. In a string of punches to the gut, from Poe-dah shock to the system back in California to Jenny finding love with someone else in Singapore, I find myself looking for that evening in the wellspring of romanticism that shows itself uninvited at the door of my thoughts every once in a while. In a city with so many millions, what does it take for one to find a blanket of tenderness to keep the nights warm and beautiful?

One torturous thing about having a 5 hour lay-over at the Singapore International Airport when your plane lands at 3 am is that there’s not a whole lot to do but stare at the beautiful boxes of Johnny Walker Blue at the only duty free store open in the joint.

I’m halfway through it so far, and though I made one move to my wallet, my better judgment intervened and I sat right back down. The life of a wandering zombie isn’t as exciting as it sounds; the highlight here at Singapore so far has been listening to Ricky Gervais’ podcast while sitting behind a screaming family of Indonesians. Man, I wish I were into John Grisham again like I was back in 7th grade.

Whenever I take these international trips, I’m always very careful to make sure my laptop is fully charged so that when I’m on layovers like these, I can whip it out and be productive and do some work. Oddly enough, the journeys always end with the laptop fully charged, as I just can’t bring myself to do anything other than space out and eat Toblerones.

The original plan was for me to actually get out of the airport and see Jenny in her element; alas, she’s elusive as ever and will not be in town, which means it’s just me and my unrequited love for a very blue Johnny Walker.

Good Idea: Immersing oneself in a local culture while on travel by daring to sample new sights, talking to new people, and trying out new kinds of food.

Bad Idea: Going to India, stuffing oneself on super spicy chicken dishes and Kingfisher beer, then returning to one’s hotel room, getting depressed about that huge rubber tire that one calls “gut,” and then guilting oneself into going down to the hotel gym and running for 45 minutes, then collapsing from pain as the spice and the beer and the sweat co-mingle into a destructive force, then going upstairs and turning on one’s computer to do critical work, only to get caught up in the 2 hour season premiere of American Idol, and then falling asleep with an empty plate lying on one’s stomach that had brandished two chocolate chip cookies courtesy of the hotel.

My week here in Bangalore is almost over. I’ve got a fantastic flight back home that will call for me to zombie out at the Singapore airport at 3:10 am in the morning for four hours before doing the six hour hop back over to Shanghai. The weather here has been gorgeous, and my field trip two days ago into the countryside to see the good work our company is doing out there was truly enlightening. I’ll be coming back often in the next few months as I try to single-handedly bridge the Sino-Indian divide, but in the meantime it’s important to do a post-mortem and avoid all those bad ideas that seem to follow me around like a pack of horny hyenas (see above).

Last night was Selina’s birthday party at the Class Bar. I was struggling with whether to attend or not, as all I wanted to do was to lie in my bed and stare up at the ceiling and cry after an all-night bender with Eddy and Alex and friends. It had been a while since I had partied this hard, and there was no holding back: 6 bottles of Chivas at Babyface, 1 bottle of black label at Guandii, and then two kegs at Cash Box (btw, I will never invite a drunk Coco to “the Box” at 4 am ever again). I woke up shivering with a raging sore throat (coughed up some blood in fact), and no desire to be upright, let alone venture out into the cold to Selina’s party.

Still, I had spent $43 on a nice duty-free Lancome perfume set at SFO for Selina, and I wasn’t about to let it go to waste sitting my closet. Struggling to shower and change, I kept receiving text messages from Pearl, Clint, Alex: “Don’t stay in tonight, let’s go out!” Crazy fucking kids.

I made my way into Class Bar by myself, and after giving Selina a birthday hug and handing her my gift, I plopped down onto the chair next to Sandy, who was gracefully sipping red wine and flashing her trademark Angelina Jolie smile at me. I had seen her at Babyface the night before in a haze of smoke and whiskey, and I asked her how long she had stayed after we left for Guandii.

Sandy: I didn’t stay too long. I realize now that I shouldn’t be partying out of control. It may not feel like a problem now, but once we hit thirty we’ll start feeling it.

I was in shock. Was I hearing this correctly? Did Sandy just recommend that we start curtailing our free-wheeling ways and start taking care of our bodies more? This was the same girl that, after I had vomited half my guts out after a binge, tried to get me to wash it back down with a pitcher of screwdrivers. This was the same girl that once ate a dinner that consisted entirely of bottles of Corona.

I let her words sink in. She was right, it WAS foolish to behave so recklessly. It didn’t hurt that at that moment, my throat was killing me, and I had felt like a huge piece of porcupine turd for most of the day. I sipped from my glass of warm water (yes, you read correctly, warm water), and nodded. It was time to be more in control, to be more concerned about my health. Although I had said this exact same thing many a time, and was laughed at many a time, this time I was dead serious, and no one would be laughing at me.

Moments later, Sandy stumbled toward me, glass of champagne in one hand and a half-finished joint in the other. She tripped and fell at my feet, and as I leaned down to help her, the drunk/high girl looked up at me, pointed, and started laughing hysterically.

Joke’s on me, I guess. The party must go on.

So, everything’s new again. Fresh phlegm on the pavement, new pollution in the air, and a palpable sense of misdirection and aimlessness that always floats around my head during this time. I’ve killed the my resolutions before they’ve even gathered the hint of momentum. I’m still jetlagged though I’ve back in Shanghai for a week. Nothing seems to work right in my house or in my head, and so 2006 doesn’t really feel like it’s taking off with flying colors.

Well, I did see some flying colors on Tuesday, mostly blood and snot, as I set off on my well-thought out plan to commute to my new job. Finally free of waking up at 6 am and cabbing over to my shuttle stop, my new shuttle stop is a hop, skip, and a 15 minute bike ride on Julie away. Perfect, I had thought; riding my bike to and from work signaled a proletariat Chinese ethic in me that meshed very well with my San Francisco eco-friendliness. I had become the perfect human; what a great way to start 2006.

Of course, just because the clock strikes midnight to usher in a new year doesn’t mean that I turn into a a new person; me being me, I’m as much of a pumpkin as I ever was. Waiting until the last minute to make sure my hair was well groomed and I smelled like Aqua di Geo, I set off on Julie for my first day on my new shuttle, to my new office, to my new job saving the world. THIS would be the starter I was looking for, the one thing to make me feel awash in newness and excitement.

Things sure change fast. Not only did my nose start bleeding right when I got to the entrance of my complex, someone decided to lay down a huge highway right in the middle of my route. I know Shanghai is growing super fast, but I was only gone for three weeks! After lifting Julie over the railing and into oncoming, psychotic traffic, I realized that I only had 5 minutes before the shuttle was to leave, and I was still 10 minutes away. I started pedaling furiously, somehow deluding myself, much as I often do when I tell myself that girls find small but abundant patches of hair on a man’s chest to be attractive, I tried my best to make it. Of course, the bag that was strapped to the back fell off in the middle of the road, and once I bent down to pick it up, my body heat and breath fogged up my glasses. Standing there, blind, sweaty, physically steaming, and imminently late for my shuttle bus, I finally stopped rushing and paused in a moment of reflection: why did the panda bear go into the bar, eat a burrito, shoot the man next to him, and then walk out the door? We may never know.

After a harrowing pre-new year’s experience, I was prepared to accept the fact that everything would be different. Now that it’s a few days past the new year and I’ve had a chance to gain my footing, I realize that some things just don’t and will never change.

- Life with friends in San Francisco will always consist of lots of beer, lazing around the television, Texas Hold’em, and recollection of old stories and jokes that don’t quite seem to get stale
- I will never be able to resist the last bit of melted cheese on a plate of nachos.
- I will never be able to resist nachos.
- Burritos will forever remain the best thing humankind has ever created.
- My family will always worry about me.
- I will never stop making lists at the beginning of a New Year.
- People will always make fun of the fact that I once was Mormon.
- I will always have a monstrously huge head that will make it difficult to purchase any sort of normal-fitting hat.
- I will always have chub.
- I will never under-indulge
- Hearing old songs on the radio that have significant sentimental meaning will always give me chills.
- I will always love San Francisco.
- I will always miss Shanghai
- I will always look after wiping.
- Joe will always be one of the most generous friends anyone will ever have, Harsha will always be one of the most sarcastic friends anyone will ever have, and Wil will always be the puppet master.
- I will always love certain people

Some things never change