I heart Jing Jing

What’s not sexy about Beijing?

iheartjingjing — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:04:36 +0000

My friend Sufei of ‘Sexy Beijing’ fame has reached ever higher levels of fabulousness. Last night (Friday morning New York time) she was on the Today Show chatting with Meredith Viera about love and marriage in the sexiest city in the world. She was amazing under the hot lights with the Bird’s Nest and tons of raving Americans in the background. She even got to sneak in a reference to all of the bare man-bellies that come out in the summertime. If you haven’t seen her show, see it at www.sexybeijing.tv! Not only was she on the show, the piece on calligraphy I’ve been working on aired too, complete with a live demonstration done by a pushy calligrapher who exceeded his airtime and battled with MV over a giant paintbrush. And the scantily clad beach volleyball cheerleader girls were on too. The green room was a-burst with calligraphers, sexy dancers and sexy sexy Sufei.

Mr. Iheartjingjing is decamping for Beijing today. Do you want to take his place and help post things? Email me if you do! Very good Jing Jing paraphenalia for you if you do.

Please pour some cold buttermilk over my head

iheartjingjing — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:02:34 +0000

Shawn Johnson

Yesterday was an excellent day. I tagged along on an afternoon scouting trip to the Great Wall for a morning show shoot. We took the cable car up and rode the toboggan down. Then at night I watched some individual gymnastics events, including the women’s balance beam event. Gymnastics is my favorite Olympic sport but what I didn’t realize is that in basically every event, at least one person falls off the equipment onto their face or back. I guess that’s where the suspense comes in but there’s something awful about seeing it in person along with the other 100,000 people – who all gasp! It’s jarring. Then it was into the Bird’s Nest for some track and field events. The Olympic Green was bustling and all of the Olympic spirit that we’re NOT sensing in the city was finally there, even though the area is closed off to people without tickets. FF had nosebleed seats and I sat up there with her in the stifling heat though I could have sat courtside with my press credentials. (Such a loyal friend…) There were so many events going on at the same time and the athletes were tiny. I went to so many events to kill time before the morning show wrap party at 11 pm. The booze flowed, everyone danced, and we got to have the party that we’d been waiting years to have.

Today I crawled off to see synchonized swimming in the Water Cube and afterwards outside I saw an inflatable Jing Jing kicking people.

Let the Games end!

iheartjingjing — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 03:49:41 +0000

A stupid Chinese medicine doctor insulted my Chinese when I was helping the digital correspondent get diagnosed at China’s oldest and most renowned herbal pharmacy. He said that we hadn’t done our homework and Chinese medicine was too deep to explain in the shallow way we wanted to (true but still no need to insult me) and we should come back later and bring a better translator. I was holding a heavy camera and trying to translate and getting more and more furious by the moment. Just a month of ‘Your Chinese isn’t very good, is it?’ just pushed me over the edge (because actually my Chinese is pretty good). Arrogant doctors exist in all cultures, I guess. Plus we had butted to the front of the line to see him and I was feeling like we were big American assholes – or the correspondent was at least. I’m just a Chinese-American, caught between two cultures, and feeling like a fool. He kept going on about how superior Chinese medicine was to Western and at the end, said that we had just come there to play. My leonine pride rose up and I stormed off without saying goodbye. Maybe I should have told him that he was a bad person. I should write about the good people of China. Tomorrow.

Temple of Hell

iheartjingjing — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:20:43 +0000

China isn’t generally a country of hand-to-hand bribes. But there’s a first for everything! We got up early on Saturday to go to the Temple of Heaven to shoot old men painting calligraphy on the ground with giant paintbrushes dipped in water, for a story on calligraphy we’re working on. It’s one of those classic Chinese sights that never seems to get old. The Temple is surrounded by a huge park that fills on the weekend with oldsters singing Peking Opera, or spinning Chinese tops, or practicing the latest paddle-n-ball dance craze from North Korea. The sun was shining, the sky was truly blue, and we (me, producer, cameraman, soundman) were happy to be out shooting our story. During the Olympics the regular restrictions about where you can shoot have gotten much more relaxed. Even shooting on Tiananmen Square is allowed. I’d waltzed into the park the week before and shot for hours in plain view, but the cameraman warned that he’d had trouble with one Mr. Xing, the park’s minder, who had stopped them from filming once, and then the next time when they hadn’t notifiied him, he appeared out of nowhere like a ghoul. We arranged to meet him and told him we’d need an hour for the shoot. He appeared a very mild-mannered, bespectacled man, but after 1/2 an hour he took me aside and said, “I’m working overtime today, since I’m not usually supposed to be working on Saturdays. I’m wondering if you can pay me some overtime.” When I said that we didn’t usually do that, his manner got a shade meaner and he said he didn’t care what I normally did, he needed to be paid. I said I’d ask, and walked away, figuring that he was just trying to throw his weight around. (The shoot was going well – the calligrapher was one of those wonderfully garrulous Beijingers who said he came and did calligraphy to keep his mind active and his qi flowing.) A few minutes later, he came to my side urgently and said that I needed to ask right away – or we’d have to stop shooting. At this point I realized that he was trying to shake us down. A huge kerfuffle ensued, resulting in our normally sweet-tempered Russian cameraman saying to him, “I’ve been in Beijing 25 days to shoot the Olympics. It’s been fantastic. I haven’t met a single bad person. You are the first bad person I’ve met.” The look on Mr. Xing’s face – a slight smile of disbelief – was priceless. No one who lives here and knows/cares about face would dare to say that. “Did he just say I am bad person?” “Yes, I think he did.” The cameraman held up a piece of calligraphy that he’d just been given as a gift and said, “This is Beijing. You – not Beijing.” It was so shockingly confrontational, especially for China. Our producer told him that we’d pay him overtime if we could go to his office and get a receipt for it, and he backed down, then bummed a ride back to his office with us! Our cameraman was right. Beijing is normally a fantastic place, there’s often just one idiot…

Gymnastiness

iheartjingjing — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:16:18 +0000

After that US-China gymnastics team competition match-up, my poor muscles were in knots for a day. I’d been really nervous for both teams and was picking up on all of the nerves on both sides. The whole venue was uncomfortably tense during the whole competition and it really made me feel like sports are a type of torture – physical activity completely devoid of joy. All of my co-workers were for the American team, and I couldn’t figure out where I stood, or even if I stood anywhere. (After an Australian friend said that “to root” means something much more salacious in their freakish form of English, I’ve not felt compelled to “root” for any team). I feel attachments to both sides, but also repulsion from both. Part of the muscle pain was wanting them both to win, wanting them both to lose, and feeling torn in both directions. I prefer underdogs and neither is one. They both seem like big bullies most of the time.

Then the next day the network starting running with this story about the underaged Chinese gymnasts and it really felt like sour grapes to me. Like we were doing the dirty work for the American team. If China hadn’t won the gold, we wouldn’t have been planning to send a correspondent down to her village to poke around, etc. It seems like we could be spending time doing much, much, more worthwhile stories, such as the jailing of would-be protestors. I didn’t think anyone would actually apply to protest in the official protest zones and I really didn’t think they would get jailed for doing so.

Just desserts

iheartjingjing — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:37:09 +0000

Post: I finally got in to see some events – and what events they were! The women’s gymastic team finals, where the Chinese team wiped up the Americans. And beach volleyball! Watching gymnastics was incredible. Much of being in Beijing during the Olympics has been a pretty abstract affair – the city has been so clamped down that you wouldn’t really know that there was a major international event going on here – and even working in the media hasn’t necessarily brought me to the heart of the Olympics. Until standing in that enormous gym looking down at four events going on at once, tiny girls flipping like springs in the air (and flipping out inside!), the crowd going wild especially when China creeped towards the gold. Watching was almost painful, I could feel all of the pressure and tension in their tiny muscles. I got to/had to interview the Americans afterwards. The one who fell cried!

And beach volleyball – it was a happy party with a DJ and cheerleaders wearing asymmetrical bright chartreuse swimsuits and an inflatable Ying Ying (mascot) doing dances between matches. The DJ played snippets of songs between points, often playing the first line of a song and pausing so the crowd could sing the next line. The audience was much more animated than the usual Chinese crowd, but were still pretty stiff. The DJ played, “Who let the dogs out?” and a few people solemnly responded, “Whoot whoot whoot whoot whoot.” They did get animated when Cuba played the U.S. and started pulling ahead. Huge clumps of the crowd chanted, “Go Cuba go!” and stamped like crazy.

And I saw Kobe Bryant and other basketballers wandering around the Olympic Green taking pictures of each other….

Um mundo, um sonho

iheartjingjing — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 05:47:21 +0000

On the subway on the way home I saw two Chinese guys speaking…. Portuguese. It was clearly their native language and I stared gape-mouthed at them. Chinese-Brazilians! They were wearing Brazil soccer jersies and I’m guessing they were in town for the Olympics. They were the most normal-looking Chinese guys, but taller and plumper, and one had food stains (I think it was food) dribbled down the front of him. It’s only when I see other diasporic Chinese that I get a sense of how weird I must seem to Chinese people, and how weird the whole situation is. My first diasporic friend was Chinese-British. This was back when i was really enamoured with British accents, and I loved watching her speak. I think she found me equally disconcerting. In that same way, I enjoyed seeing these guys. I wondered about their stories, how they decided to come to China, what they thought of all they saw, what their childhoods had been like, all the stupid questions I hate when people ask me, that can’t be answered so easily. As if one sentence will do, when unmarked people get whole literatures to explain. For a moment I really loved the Olympics just for bringing these guys speaking their weird, gorgeous language onto my subway car. I wondered what it would be like to grow up with the repressive, Confucian rigidity of Chinese families but instead of the righteous, peppy puritanism of America, to be surrounded by a body-beautiful, hypersexualized Brazilian culture (my stereotypes here). It sent my mind reeling. They got off and two Chinese guys standing nearby looked at each other and one asked, “What the fuck language was that?”

P.S. Evidently at 23 I was a completely miserable neurotic who loved to quote Joan Didion. In a way I wished I hadn’t opened the letter. In it unopened form, it held all of the intense joys and sorrows of the past 10 years, and now it’s all just spilled all over. I guess that might be 33, spilling it all on the ground and starting over. One remarkable thing about the letter was that I hadn’t anticipated all of the happiness and fulfillment I would feel over the next few years. Oh god, it’s a lesson for looking forward. Birthdays, groan.
P.P.S. My birthday was brilliant and wonderful. I had a big party at a Stone Boat bar in a park run by an old friend and the sky was beautiful, bright, sweet and clear, and so many of old friends and new co-workers were there, and the drooping willow trees and the shimmery lake seemed so unreal, all part of my special Beijing summer.

The Games have begun

iheartjingjing — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 00:19:39 +0000

As you may have heard, the Olympics started in Beijing. I’ve been going out every day to shoot the mayhem out there plus ‘man-on-the-street’ reactions (my old employer used to call them ‘vox pops’ which I find more jazzy). For the day of the opening ceremony, the streets were virtually empty, as everyone had the day off, but then around big venues like the Bird’s Nest there were huge crowds, the like of which China specializes in. Many people had come from all over the country just to be in Beijing for the event, while Beijingers have left the city in droves. We waded into the crowds to shoot but everytime we pointed the camera at anyone for an interview, masses of people would ring us, taking photos of us. Then I would turn to them for an interview, and they would scatter. It was very 1980′s, a real country bear jamberoo. I forget how much Beijing has changed, how much more cosmopolitan it is now. I had a very grouchy cameraman in tow, who growled that it was going to be really long day. I was on the verge of agreeing when I realized that in these situations, you can either resist and feel miserable, or give into the chaos and excitement of it, and have a really good time, so I opted for the latter. A few people gave peppy responses to my “How are you feeling?” question. (“Excited robots,” said the cameraman, who has been in China too long.) Tiananmen Square was closed because Bush was lunching at the Great Hall of the People nearby and so we went to Wangfujing to shoot more. The street is usually packed but that day it was exploding, thronged with people wearing red headbands and I Love China t-shirts and red heart stickers on their faces, plus tons of foreign tourists. I’d never seen anything like it in China. It was like a once-in-a-lifetime holiday.(Needless to say it was also steaming hot with a heavy dollop of pollution.) There’s definitely been an uptick in patriotism this year. I don’t like patriotism and I don’t like how much money they’ve spent on the Olympics and I don’t really like sports but I do like seeing Chinese people not feeling ashamed and inferior like they can do. I was orchestrating groups of red-clad people to scream “Go China go!” (you thought these things just happen spontaneously?) which was rather difficult because most Chinese people aren’t very good at screaming out in public without a crowd of thousands to back them up. But then just as we were leaving a tiny guy with an enooorrrrmous flag came marching down the street leading the crowd behind him in a chant of “Go China go!” It was great TV, but mighty creepy. I was just happy to get the shot, which I think became the opening shot of the piece (on the morning show Friday morning), but the cameraman shook his head and said, “The idiots will rule the day. What a waste of time it was to come here.”

Did you see the opening ceremony? Wasn’t it like an afterschool special about Chinese history? Didn’t it put you to sleep? Zhang Yimou is so unbelievably dull. Impressive but dull. We watched until 11 pm in one of the few parks that had public screens, and the streets were fantastically empty driving home. It was such a peaceful end to a crazy day.

8-7-08

iheartjingjing — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 03:10:27 +0000

You’ve probably heard about the driving restrictions in Beijing – odd and even license plates have to alternate days – but it hasn’t really helped the traffic very much. Partly because on many roads they’ve reserved the left-most lane for vehicles with Olympics passes. So while the hoi polloi crawls along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, our vans fly down the roads. It’s wonderful but terrifying! The drivers are ecstatic to be driving 80 mph down the road and you can just feel the people stuck in traffic wanting to pull out into the open lane to pass a few people – and smasheroo! It would all be over. (Knock on wood.) We’ve heard rumors of horrible accidents – one Thai official reputedly got into a smash-up and lost his two front teeth.

Well, the Olympics starts tomorrow. A day we’ve been waiting for for seven years. Beijing feels downright funereal, and the newsroom is relatively quiet. I can’t tell if it’s the calm before the storm, or if I’m living in a bubble, or if they really do have the city under control. It’s hard to figure out. Lots of my Chinese friends have left the city for the month. I think the world I’m living in is pretty warped but it’s starting to seem normal – the neat beds of flowers everywhere, the new shiny subway with airport scanners on the way in, the newsroom full of non-Chinese speaking white people, cops and know-nothing volunteers in blue shirts on every street corner, alternating days of blue skies and noxious pollution. I’ll be out all day tomorrow, and will report back.

I worked on preparing b-roll for a story about Dubya’s upcoming visit to a state-sanctioned church this Sunday & got to interview a very interesting pastor, though the rest of the story is completely out of my hands. I’m remembering the pleasures of news – the instant gratification of finishing a 2-minute story in 2 days. Someday I’ll find the balance between that and spending 5 years writing a 100K-word book.

Begone, exogenous wind

iheartjingjing — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:03:57 +0000

For years FF has been talking nonstop about this magical pharmeceutical product called Smecta which she claims cures ‘diarrhoea,’ ‘funny tummy’ and ‘trapped wind.’ If you happen to know her, you will know how hyperbolic she can be and she reserves the highest levels of fantastic! and amazing! for Smecta. Hence, whenever she begins talking about it, I tune her out. For years I’ve been refusing to try the white powder. Until now, that is. Two days ago we ate an enormous meal at Rumi, a new swish Middle Eastern restaurant, including a chicken and pomegranate stew that may have gone off, and the next day we both woke up feeling a bit iffy. She took Smecta and immediately felt better while I’ve been walking around town dogged by a persistent feeling of mild ‘will I barf?’ Today it got so bad that I marched myself into a pharmacy and laid out my problem for the woman in the little white medical cap. Going to a pharmacy is fun because you tell themthe intimate details of your bodily dysfunction (as all of the other white-capped ladies stand around listening and tittering) and they pull something off the shelf, you scrutinize the label (in Chinese), nod sagely and pretend to be able to understand it all, then you buy it, ingest it and hope for the best. I always ask for Chinese medicine because it’s so mild that it couldn’t kill you even if it was meant to. Today I ended up with these tiny soft plastic vials of noxious brown liquid. It’s called Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui. I’d actually had it before my first year in China, I forget what for. It smelled and tasted like scorched bark and I threw down the vial at work, and began reeking from the inside out like a smouldering stink tree, all afternoon. I think it was poached in alcohol. But slowly I started feeling better.
I googled Huoxiang Zhengqi Shui and found that its main ingredient is Huoxiang, or Agastache, and its functions are:
1. To transform dampness
2. To dispel summer-heat
3. To stop vomiting
One of its indications is: Internal injury caused by raw and cold food and invasion by exogenous wind and cold in summer manifested as chills, fever, headache, epigastric fullness, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Agastache (Huoxiang) is used with Perilla leaf (Zisuye), Pinellia tuber (Banxia), Magnolia bark (Houpo) and Tangerine peel (Chenpi) in the formula Huoxiang Zhengqi San.

Perfect! I love Chinese medicine. It makes connections between the most disparate things: the damp, humid weather is related to your nausea is related to the dodgy chicken you ate is related to your little toe. Just drink this, you’ll feel better. Truly profound stuff!

However, FF still won’t stop talking about Smecta, which she researched and found out is made of fine clay, and was developed by the French. It also has a pleasing almond flavor, she says. I was just telling her about my medicine and she said with an exasperated finality, “Bring Smecta into your life.” She brought me a packet and now she has just sat down across from me and ordered me to, “Quit blogging and eat some!”

Eating almond-flavored French clay doesn’t appeal to me, so I am going to stick with my Zhengqi Shui for now, but come tomorrow morning…. Smecta it may be.