‘Beijing Blur’ by James West (2008)

When Sydney journalist James West lands a job at a state-run radio station in Beijing, he imagines he knows a lot about China.  Then he arrives, and finds himself at a rave…on the Great Wall.  But is this one night of hedonism an accurate reflection of the ‘real Beijing’?  …Beijing Blur is an intimate account of one young Australian’s year abroad…and also the story of modern China – a nation poised at one of the great turns of the global historical tide.

The recent surge of interest in all things middle kingdom has led to a slew of books on the country published by various ‘China experts’, and we’ve seen the good, the bad and the ugly.  So does this one mine a new and genuinely interesting vein on the subject, or has it simply been published because it has the word ‘Beijing’ in the title?

This tale follows an intrepid, tousle-haired young journalist around his Chinese gap-year in roughly chronological order, and tells of the ordinary people – both Chinese and foreign – that he meets along the way.  The stories of his encounters are at times touching and extremely personal, and well written in a direct, to-the-point style that I’ve noticed with some Australian writers.  Is that stereotyping Aussies?

That's not a knife...

There is also some genuinely interesting discussion of the recent drastic changes in the Chinese media, the Beijing underground music scene and especially about the Chinese view of same-gender relationships.  This last point on its own would have actually made for a much more enlightening and attention-grabbing book than this one!

Sadly, the title does a pretty good job in reviewing the book for us: in terms of focus it’s all over the shop, with topics strewn around as randomly as a Tarantino plot, but without the violence or snappy dialogue and even harder to follow.

It also – most frustratingly in my opinion – zips from one China stereotype and cliché to the next.  The Beijing Punk scene, the Cultural Revolution, Chinese food and capital punishment are all picked up, vaguely touched upon and then thrown aside like an ADHD suffering toddler playing with his toys after ten bags of skittles.  Some may disagree with me on this point, but certain subjects can be taken lightly and treated in this fashion, but others – including some mentioned in this book – you just cannot.

The dramatic conclusion to my critique of this book was to have been that each individual chapter would have been much better off as a blog entry.  Unfortunately, further research led me to Mr. West’s website, where I stumbled across the last chapter of his book.  One click later and I was onto the second last chapter, the third to last and so on.  The mystery of the plot was now at least in part solved, but my book review’s conclusion was shot to pieces…

I appreciate the irony of criticising someone’s published blog on my own humble site.  If someone was to drive a truck-load of money up to my front door offering to publish this blog (that’s not a hint – or is it?!) it would be tough to refuse.  It’s also a genuinely interesting diary of a year’s events, and the author has to be congratulated for getting it written and out there, and for adding a fresh, young voice to the maddening crowd of ‘China literature’.

However, you wonder if it had been written about any other country (or even China a few years ago), how successful it would have been, and in the unsympathetic light of the world of publishing it doesn’t really stand up to some of the more well-informed books out there, but that’s not to say it shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Until next time blogwatchers stay cool, good luck and good tasty, zaijian!

To push, or not to push: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

A 4-foot grandmother to jump the queue in the supermarket

Or to take arms against a sea of queue-jumpers,

And by opposing, confuse them? To squat: to spit;

No more; and by a spit to say we end

The head-ache of a thousand different vehicles in the street

All trying to run you over

It’s not something I wish’d to see. To squat, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to be woken by thy neighbour doing DIY at 7:30 on a Sunday morning:

ay, that’s annoying;

For in the sleep of a shop assistant after lunch, what dreams may come?

When we want to buy something in the shop,

We must pause and go to pay at another counter: before we collect our purchases

There’s the respect;

For who would bear the whoops and “harrow”s of men on the street,

With rolled-up t-shirts, smoking and eating lamb kebabs

The pangs of smelly tofu, the smell of baijiu,

The insolence of staff who turn up an hour late.

That patient merit of the mother takes,

When she herself her baby makes

With a bare bodkin? Dangle over a drain,

To whistle and sing to encourage the baby to urinate,

But then the dread of something after that…,

The just discover’d country from whose bourn

Like to question travellers, puzzle their will

And ask them about their personal finances and marital status

Even though they know them not?

Thus politeness does make cowards of us all;

And thus we eat the pigs trotters given to us at the banquet

And drink the sickly baijiu

And regret it for 3 days.

With this regard some cowards turn away,

Leave this country and lose the name of laowai.

Soft you now!  The fair Ophelia!

Nymph, why are you carrying an umbrella when it’s sunny?

And wearing outrageous hot-pants…