Taken from my apartment window today, just before the rain came.

The Final Showdown! It’s me, and the (ghost of) Captain Rorschach, in a draggy face-off at CRI. She’s going down by her black bangs. (Edna E. Mode from The Incredibles is a drop-dead doppelganger for The Captain).

The CRI presenter wrote back:

I’m glad to receive your acceptance to our invitation!  And welcome home!

… I used to think that gay or lesbian tolerance is not a serious problem any more, but obviously some people are still not ready to accept this. A friend of mine talked to me on our topic the other day… She is with a college education majoring in English, but still with such little tolerance. How can we expect people with poor education out there be tolerant toward LGBT people? There’s a long way to go.

My HK friend Nick alerted me: “Hey stranger! How are things? I was quite surprised to see your interview in SCMP this Sunday…”

An interview I did a year ago, high on the disbelief that comes with putting a book on shelves, has finally been printed in the formidable South China Morning Post. I would normally link direct to the SCMP article, but you gotta cough up cash. If you’re a good hacker (or for some reason you have a subscription), here’s the link.

Capital gains
James West went to Beijing with a book in mind. He’s fulfilled his dream
Alister McMillan
Jun 14, 2009

James West thought he had the perfect surname for writing an expatriate’s memoirs set in China. But now that Beijing Blur is in the bookshops he realises “W” authors tend to be shelved in the darkest corners, close to the ground.West can ease his angst with the knowledge that his book is likely to appear in a number of sections in the shops and attract plenty of online genre tags - China, travel, autobiography, gay literature. And the ambitious Australian creates the sense that if Dymocks fails to recognise his polymathic potential, he may just go into each shop and stack Beijing Blur in the appropriate sections himself.

West is 27 and promoting a memoir conceived at 23 when, while working as a journalist for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he started a one-year secondment to China Radio International (CRI), the mainland’s overseas broadcaster.

He is now a producer for Hack, a national current affairs programme broadcast daily on Australia’s government-owned youth radio station Triple J. Since leaving China West has completed a master’s degree in journalism at New York University, kept a blog and worked on documentaries.

Writing hard copy seems a little slow and old-school for a driven Generation Y scribe. Men West’s age are not supposed to be interested in books. He should be floating among the clouds in Web 2.0 looking down on complete sentences as the corny artefact of the days when living overseas was a big deal.

But West insists Gen Y is alive to the novel. Most of his reading is literary fiction, he says, because he sees too much non-fiction during a working day in journalism. And while he likes his digital toys, he sees them as new ways of carrying stories. “I think the key to it all is storytelling,” he says over coffee amid the gentrifying hipness of Sydney’s Newtown. “I do think storytelling will continue to exist but in many different forms.

“I am young and I wanted to experiment with a lot of different voices and forms and media. There are various styles in the book as well. So I wanted to experiment with this old-school form and f*** it up a little. I wanted to play with it, write it a bit like a blog, a diary, some reportage.” Continue reading i’m in the “south china morning post”

(CRI 2005; Photos by my friend Tu Yun)

Shocked. Then pleased to my toes. I received this email today from my friends at China Radio International, Beijing.

Dear Mr West,
We are doing a live show — a panel discussion on the status of Chinese gays and lesbians. We know that you have a much better understanding of the situation here, given your book of Beijing Blur. We want to invite you to join our show to share your insights and input with our listeners of the real situation of the community.

I read, blinked, re-read. If memory serves (I think it does), I dished up shit against CRI in Beijing Blur. I described a tyrannical boss, ‘Captain Rorschach’, a daunting psychological test. She was tiny, powered entirely by ideological hatred of James West. I slammed the level of censorship, too. Things were censored at every level: ‘Please don’t make any comments on government policies concerning politics and religion on our program,’ came one email after I mentioned Brokeback Mountain onair. Someone tried to bribe me once, too. Don’t get me started.

Continue reading china wants me back?

one establishment in the cross with a unique blanket ban. (there goes half its clientele?)

Amazing subway video in Shanghai. Watch in situ — then see the whole film.

Traditional painting, modernized, animated, in subway | 八八吧 :: 88 Bar.

You don’t ‘hang’ in Tiananmen.

There’s nothing to see. A dozen vans patrol tourists. It’s hard to get in; with streets petitioned, the massive square is an island. There’s an eerie dialogue between Mao’s eyes and his mausoleum; he watches over his own dead body. I feel like I’m trespassing on a grave. In Tiananmen, you walk through the shadow of China’s struggle for order.

Still, every time I’m in Beijing I’m drawn to the Square by the centrifugal pull of the city. Despite its emptiness, Tiananmen is powerful - a great architectural performance of Chinese identity.

So, 20 years after the 1989 massacre, I’m drawn again.

Do young Chinese know enough about Tiananmen? Yu Hua, author of Brothers, calls it China’s forgotten revolution. Zhao Ziyang’s secret diaries have renewed concern about what has been lost in 20 years. Every one is asking the question. ‘Tiananmen Now Seems Distant to China’s Students’ says The New York Times; ‘China’s students put jobs over democracy’ says Financial Times; ‘… faded from people’s memories’, writes blogger Peking Duck).

The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. And it’s more complicated than whether or not young people ‘care’. The answer has been rewritten for a generation now buoyed by the ability to buy a future their parents never thought possible.

Continue reading forgetting what you never remembered