1. Funny, You Don''t Look Chinese Funny, You Don''t Look Chinese When I tell people back home in America that I am a Chinese comedian, the first response I get is usually, "Funny, you don''t look Chinese." Badum tish. Thank you. I''ll be here all week. Try the veal. The second question is: "Why Chinese comedy?" That part is harder to explain, so I''ll start there. "Why China?" The truth is, I really struggle to answer this question.
Seeing as I spent my first nine years out of college in China, I feel like I should have a better answer as to why I''m here. But I don''t. There''s always the "LinkedIn bio" version of things: I love the culture, the challenge of the language, the novelty of forging a career in a context nobody has ever walked before. But that''s really just the application of hindsight to the blur of what really happened. It would be lying to say it''s wrong, and lying to say it''s even close to the real answer. "Why China?" Sometimes I answer by expressing a feeling: that living in China at this period of history is like being perched atop a high mountain peak at the head of a fast-flowing river. Growing up in the United States, a country that felt like its course was firmly set, it never felt like I could be a part of anything big. But in China, at this specific moment, my own tiny contribution might infinitesimally influence its trajectory.
A small thing--a joke, an internet video, a deep conversation in a dark bar--might alter the course of this river by just an inch, a fraction of an inch. but the flow of the future being what it is, moving the river an inch at the source might mean huge changes years in the future, hundreds of miles away. "Why China?" Because from my first day here, I''ve always woken up excited for the next day. The first day I arrived in China, I signed a contract promising to speak no English for six months. The contract was in Chinese. I couldn''t read it. That was sort of the point. I''d arrived in Beijing for six months of intensive Chinese classes.
I''d always wanted to live abroad and learn a new language. Meeting new people and cultivating meaningful relationships with them because you learned their classified code? Knowing another secret word for every word you know in English? It seemed like a superpower: almost impossible. But cool, too. So, instead of spending the summer and fall of my junior year at Brandeis University, I found myself in Beijing. I chose China because I''d studied a bit of Chinese and a bit of Spanish, and it seemed way more interesting to go to China than to Spain. Every day I had to memorize a hundred new Chinese characters. Every day there was a test on twenty of those new characters, followed by five hours of classes. On my second night in Beijing, my pen ran out of ink.
I regarded the cheap pen and its empty barrel with blank, unfocused eyes. I don''t think I''d ever completely used up a pen before without losing it first. I put it aside. By the end of the semester, I had a whole box of empty pens. It was my little trophy case. Each was a cheap plastic testament to a diligence I hadn''t known I was capable of. Beijing Language and Culture University was so large, it almost felt like a village. There were multiple food halls, restaurants, soccer fields, and basketball courts.
The print shop would make copies of any textbook you needed without question, copyright be damned; the avenues between buildings were a slow-moving chaos of bicycles and pedestrians. As a school specifically focusing on the study of language, the campus was packed with international students, mostly from other developing countries like Thailand, Nigeria, and Kazakhstan. While I lived in a tiny--but private--single room, these students lived in dorms of four or eight, eager to get their undergraduate degrees from a better school than they could attend at home, while still being one they could actually afford. No matter where you came from, Chinese was hard for everyone. Yet, the moment you left the school gates and stepped out into the city, language was the crucial skill required to overcome the fear of Beijing''s buzzing madness. Beijing is a hot, delicious, absurdist puzzle box of a city. Everything is simultaneously new and old, fast and slow, loud and unspoken. It was, and still is, an object of my perpetual fascination.
I couldn''t read the signs or understand what people were saying; Chinese pop music crooned out of every store; vehicles weaved in and out of the street in every direction; traffic lights appeared to be more suggestions than anything else. As a foreigner I was sometimes the most interesting person in the room, sometimes completely ignored. I was always fully engaged, never fully comfortable. Nothing was easy, nothing was boring. I loved it. My second day, I visited the Forbidden City, the eight-hundred-year-old imperial palatial complex of otherworldly scale located in the exact geographic center of the city. Mile upon mile of flowing, golden-glazed ceramic roof tiles; nine thousand, nine-hundred, ninety-nine rooms built down the north-south central axis of the city. A remnant of a dynastic age.
A center of power. There was also a Starbucks in there, which was good, because I needed to use the bathroom and it was the only non-squat toilet around for a mile. Beijing was winding alleyways of brick laid down by Mongols that led to the doors of garish dystopian pyramidal glass shopping malls built by nouveau-riche tycoons. Beijing was fashionable women holding loud phone conversations on the street directly next to a table of shirtless old men squatting on tiny stools, drinking giant bottles of beer. Beijing was a bowl of cheap noodles in the morning and sumptuous Peking duck at night. It had a Great Wall and a tech hub, a Tibetan Lama temple across the street from a KFC. Living amongst these buildings that dated anywhere from two thousand years to two weeks ago, I met the most eclectic collection of people imaginable, some of whom seemed to be the product of traits spit out of a video game''s random character generator. I met a man on the street with a long beard and a giant plastic sack full of raw meat.
He told me he had brought it back from Kashgar, out on the old Silk Road, and Beijing marked the end destination of a three-month motorcycle trip he''d taken with friends. He''d kept the meat on ice in a Styrofoam container affixed to the back of his Harley with pink plastic ribbons. I met a woman at a bar who sold medicinal dog water. The water was infused with trace minerals normally used in (human) hospitals as an intravenous infusion for (human) patients with anemia. Her company was, she said both proudly and anxiously, the only one in the world selling such a product to dogs. I think her pride came from being out on the forefront of a new market, and the anxiety from the fact it was clearly doomed to failure. I recommended, as a joke, that they hire a famous celebrity''s dog to serve as a spokesdog. She told me they''d already tried, but the dog''s appearance fee was too high.
"It''s not easy selling dog water," she sighed. "Maybe I should go back to grad school." Beijing was real-life TikTok: a new scene every seven seconds. It was a blaring loudspeaker announcement. It was a tender, quiet conversation. It was a twenty-cent ice pop and a ten-dollar coffee. It was sound and fury. It was lights, camera, and action.
And every day, I stared down one hundred new characters in my textbook. Every day, another test. Every day, no English allowed. A new part of my mind opened. Speaking a new language didn''t split me into English Jesse and Chinese Jesse. Instead, I felt myself dilating, like a droplet of water expanding over a new surface. As I learned the language, a veil lifted off of the face of the city. It felt like passing through a waterfall and discovering a hidden world that had existed all this time--and finally, I could access it.
Learning the language and the culture unlocked stories and dramas playing out in plain sight. Every day, I would get a milk tea from a hole-in-the-wall street stall on my way back from class. The first time, I pointed at the pictures because I couldn''t read the menu. By the time I left, I could read the menu, and I could also talk to the tea vendor. She told me that this stall was part of a chain that a man from her village had started ten years ago. She and all her coworkers were from that same village and slept in bunks in the back of the shop; actually, the more than one hundred branches of the original tea shop were staffed entirely by young people from that village looking for their first foothold in the big city. "Do you like it here?" I asked. "No.
I want to go home. But then I''d just be bored and want to come back." I could also read the "Now Hiring!" sign on the side of the shop and its shameless promise of a $200-a-month salary in a city where my rent alone was $800. I assumed the low wages were not offset by stock options. I thought I had gone to China to learn Chinese. In the end, I learned some Chinese and ten thousand other things. And for every new thing I learned, I actually learned two things. The first was how they did it here, in China.
The second was how we did it back home, in America. Sometimes things were the same. Sometimes they were different. Both seemed significant. Everything--from.