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.”Much of Beijing Blur is about putting these aggressive little twists on old conventions. Instead of using his passport to search for romance and adventure, West heads to the Far East to work, leaving behind a healthy relationship with Nick.

Rather than explain the intricacies of an organisation as huge as CRI, West seems determined to follow one of his predecessors and is fired for trying too much western-style journalism. He succeeds within eight months after stunts such as standing up at the International Business Ethics and Eastern Wisdom Conference to return the 300 yuan (HK$340) each journalist received for “expenses”.

With the tape rolling at a press conference, he asks: “I find it strange that at a conference about business ethics I should receive an envelope of 100-kuai [yuan] notes … Are you trying to bribe me?”

West pursues families affected by corporal punishment, politicised rock bands and a thriving gay culture in which not one man considers himself homosexual.

He is less judgmental of the general youth of China. West accuses the old folk of fear, ignorance and smothering answers from the all-knowing young. And if the young people seem a little too caught up in materialism, West forgives them for being too young, innocent and full of promise to know better. He saw few signs of revolt among China’s youth.

“I didn’t meet any young people who thought about revolution. If you were to judge the future of a country by its young people – and that’s the premise of the book – then I didn’t meet a single person who had that idea.

“People want to enjoy the progress. The people I met, while we might think they’re politically apathetic, they’ve never had politics to be apathetic about. It’s just not something in their lives. Whether China becomes a democracy is not a question young people are asking. They’re asking: what university can I get into? What job can I get to make my family’s life better?

“It was described to me once as a massive brokering relationship. The government gives you a bit of money for a bit of freedom. A bit more money, a bit more freedom.

“But I saw a tension between opportunity and expectation. For the first time they had the chance to go to university and buy Ikea. But then they have this expectation from their parents, a real burden. They can’t leave the home too much. They can’t experiment too much because they have this expectation.

“The most progressive guy I met, a blogger who’s in the book, made a documentary about religion and was jailed for five months. He didn’t think [revolution] was possible. He said democracy has to come from all these different places working together. It has to come from the media, it has to come from society, it has to come from the arts, the grassroots. I saw none of that happening. There are pockets of dissidence here and there.”

West makes no apology for writing a book about China when he spent only eight months in Beijing and four more travelling as a freelance writer for Time Out magazine. “I hadn’t read a book about China that wasn’t by a Sinophile or an old-school expat journalist who’d lived there for a long time,” he says.

“It’s easy to write about the rest of the world in a cheesy, romantic, A Year in Provence kind of way. But China has these big gates on it saying: if you don’t know about it, don’t write about it. I wanted to open that up and say: my Mandarin may not be fluent and I only spent a short time there but here’s what I saw.”

West arrived in Beijing with vague hopes of writing a book. He is now one of few Australian memoirists with a US publishing deal. “The agent and the publisher picked it up really quickly,” he says. “They saw a lot of potential in a book about young people in China. Penguin wanted something that wasn’t about politics or the economy. They wanted something about what young people are thinking in China. They wanted to know what was on my friends’ bedroom walls, what was in the gay clubs, the punk dens. And they wanted it to be personal. These were all the sorts of things I had done, so I just had to … write it.

“In the editing process there was a lot of discussion about how I could develop my own character in the book. Their reasoning was that the reader needs to know who you are and to trust you, they want to know they’re going to be in good hands throughout the whole book, whether they’re openly gay hands or straight hands.

“There was never any problem with the gay issue. From the first meeting with the publisher in Beijing I was very open about the fact that I wanted to write about that and be out in the book. There was no questioning of it. Some of their favourite scenes are when I was in bed with Nick or talking about culture shock, the gay culture and not being able to understand. They were really looking for a different perspective on the city.”

The bigger challenge was overcoming the journalist’s aversion to writing in the first person. West wrote a lot of Beijing Blur while studying a journalism course that encouraged reporters to be objective, slash adjectives and emphasise researched information. He would return from classes in New York to write at night about himself and his ideas on a country he had only visited.

“That was the biggest challenge: I never had to come out as gay, but I had to come out as a writer during this process.”

Writer’s notes

Name: James West
Age: 27
Born: Sydney
Lives: Sydney
Book: Beijing Blur
Genre: expatriate memoir
Other jobs: journalist
Next project: “I want to do a documentary about the Chinese in Africa. I’d like to tell the story of a Chinese family living there. There is huge emigration to Africa.”
What the papers say: “What makes Beijing Blur stand out from the crowd is West’s unique take on China, a perspective that’s different enough to be refreshing and enlightening at the same time.” The Cairns Post
“It is inside his sexual affairs of state that West truly revels with definitions. When he isn’t hungover, West’s voice rings with insight.” The Courier-Mail, Brisbane
“While West’s synthesis of personal and political storytelling is some-times disjointed and the dialogue can be clunky, he offers fascinating insights into the Chinese music scene, gay and lesbian culture, the death penalty and the spirit of Beijing.” The Advertiser, Adelaide

Agenda is a bi-weekly events listings magazine for expats and tourists. I’m returning to China mid-march for the Bookworm International Literary Festival 2009. More on that to come.

1) What were your expectations of Beijing before you came here and were they met or was your experience completely different to what you had expected? How so?

When I thought “Beijing”, I expected old-school murals, public squares, and a tight-lipped approach to the truth. I discovered all that and more when I first came to China at 23. I found a choking city that dwarfed my home town Sydney. Across the vast expanses of the Ring Roads – a city the size of a small country – I saw a place on the brink of change. This was pre-Olympic Beijing. Spitters were being told not to spit. The Opera House, the CCTV building, the Olympic stadia were all but concrete foundations. Cabbies were learning English. Chinese people were very excited that their city was going global, and the world was here to watch the coming out party.

But the most surprising discovery was a stranger, darker China of vibrant subcultures hiding out in the nooks and crannies of the city. I saw punk bands, hollared ‘niu bi!‘ (cow’s cunt!) at the top of my lungs, and danced til dawn in one of Beijing’s gay bars. There are 300 million adults in China under 30. They are increasingly rich and happy. And that meant the party had just begun for a bright-eyed expat boy like me.

2) What was your most bizarre experience in Beijing?

Beijing dished up ‘bizarre’ as often as taxi drivers swore: regularly, and with abandon. Bizarre experiences include catching waves at Beijing’s fake beach in Tuanjiehu Park, getting pissed on bai jiu with Commuist party officials at the Beidaihe coastal resort, getting pissed on in a subway carriage by a happy toddler (twice) and raving like a crazy person on the Great Wall of China to Chinese hip hop. Every day offered a mind-popping array of experiences I’ll never forget.