ZHONGGUO

A lot has been happening here in China. It's mostly been things like art openings or parties or dinners and bars, with occasional shows or other more unusual events. For instance, spending a night in a half-built castle, the centerpiece of an abandoned Thai-invested Disneyworld rip-off amusement park called "Wonderland". The locals had commandeered the land and had begun growing crops over the unfinished construction. The sight of a concrete castle towering over golden fields of crops, surrounded by mountains, is a "Wonderland" in its own way.

The particular art/music/fashion ("culture", I guess we'd call it, although reserving that term for only these activities seems to belittle everything else about this place) scene here is relatively small. It feels that way, at least. Earlier this week I went to a launching party for a magazine. Last night I went to an art award party run by this high-end cognac brand (Martell or something, I can't remember…clearly the cognac was fairly effective), and afterwards went to a rooftop club/bar's grand opening and then went to a Russian club with some models.

The most fascinating thing about this place is the juxtaposition in both time and space of radically different things. I suppose this is characteristic of many large cities, but for whatever reason it feels more obvious and poignant here in Beijing, maybe because of an emphasized clashing of cultures. One moment I am overstimulated in a skeezy club watching Russian girls dancing in lingerie, then thirty minutes later I'm passing by small, quiet gatherings of people cooking food on sidewalks. Even in that latter instance is some strange contrasting situations. On the way to my place out in west Beijing, I always pass by a small group of four or five people on the sidewalk, sitting around a small fire cooking and eating together. It's 3am, and they are on the next block from my apartment, an area with the reputation as Beijing's electronics center. Here they are cooking kebabs over an open flame in a way that could be described as "primitive" (I don't mean it in any condescending or offensive manner although it's hard to use that word without those implications) underneath these silhouettes of monolithic electronic department stores.

But as I was saying before, the "culture" scene here is relatively small and fairly easy to break into, especially if you're a foreigner. The "culture" scene here is run almost exclusively by foreigners and it almost seems like a form of cultural imperialism, these Westerners imposing upon Chinese youth what's "cool", and funny thing is that Chinese youth are all to eager to accept the teachings of these arbiters of hip. The (young) Chinese tend to romanticize foreigners in a perverse sense. Perverse in that this reverence is so potent that it almost turns into some kind of reverse-racism where other young Chinese people get the blunt end of the stick. For example, Chinese guys are no competition against white guys, because Chinese girls look up to white guys and down on Chinese guys. This doesn't affect me personally, but it's still infuriating that Western culture has penetrated so deeply into Chinese culture (pun intended).

In so eagerly accepting being told what's "cool", they altogether miss out on the fundamentals of "cool", that to be cool is to be your own and do what you want to do. I'm oversimplifying but basically, doing what other people tell you to do isn't "cool".

Anyways, it is easy for a foreigner to break into the scene here. That is precisely the reason why a lot of foreigners end up coming here. It's called "LAH", or "Lame At Home". If you're lame at home, come to China and you'll be considered cool. I can't say this is true for all foreigners (I'm cool at home too, duh). Most of the foreigners I know here are genuinely awesome people and came to China for different reasons than feeling like a loser at home. But there are certainly some that you meet that clearly escaped to China so they could live out ridiculous fantasies of fame and prestige that are so easily played out here.