World View: Beijing Is Shakedown Street

This weekend will be dominated by thoughts of palm trees, coconuts full of rum, Dirty Bananas, late night disco dance parties, Brownie bombs, water slides, and Watermelon Steve. I will wish that my ears were full of the sweet sounds of Umphrey’s McGee, the Disco Biscuits, and the Atlantic Ocean. I will wish that my nose was full of the smell of the finest local greenery (which, in all fairness, isn’t very good) and Jamaican jerk pork. And I will wish that I were feeling the sand between my toes, the waves crashing into the beach, and the tropical breeze upon my face. Instead, my ears will be full of awful Chinese techno, my nose will be full of the smell of spicy beef noodles, and I will feel the cold, filthy air as it rips through the city of Beijing like the Biscuits and Jake ripped through a 40 minute, dubbed out “Mindless Dribble” last year in Jamaica.

But, being the optimist that I am, I choose not to wallow in self pity over this undesirable situation of me NOT being present at the best party in the world on Runaway Bay. Rather, I will take this opportunity to finally write something that has been on my mind for a while now – living in Beijing is a lot like being at a hippie jam-band festival. Seeing as how I am saddened by my lack of attendance this week at the pinnacle of hippie-jam band festivals (in my humble opinion, at least) because I currently reside in the capital city of the People’s Republic of China, what better time to share my astute observations with the world?

Now, you may be asking yourself, “How in the hell can life in Communist China be anything like a Phish show, or Bonnaroo?” Well, there are clearly a multitude of differences between the two, but I think that the handful of similarities that do exist warrant such a comparison.

Point #1 – A common love for glowing things.

I have never met two groups of people in my life who are as completely and utterly mesmerized by cheesy glow toys as hippies and Chinese people. Take a look around you the next time you are on a head full of something or other, wandering aimlessly around a music festival in your favorite pair of patchwork pants, and you will be hard pressed to find any glow toy free area. The same applies in China, only they have taken this passion for artificial, fluorescent lights to a whole new level. Gaze across the skyline of Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong, and you will see plenty of glow stick skyscrapers. That’s right… China loves glowing things so much that they decided full skyscrapers should be reminiscent of the sight on the lawn at a Phish show during a nasty “Tube” second set opener – the more glowing things, the better.

But, it’s not just the unnecessary glowing sky scrapers in China that reminds me of the scene at a crunchy hippie jam fest; you can also procure all sorts of useless glow toys from vendors all over the place. Stroll through a subway station in Beijing, and you may freak out, thinking you are having a flashback (thanks to the ungodly amounts of LSD you have consumed in one lifetime), as you pass by folks hawking their full array of poorly made glow toys.

“Holy shit… am I having a flashback? I could have sworn I was in Beijing, but now I feel like I’m strolling along Shakedown at Deer Creek.”

Never fear, my fellow acid freaks… the same thought has crossed my mind many a time in this city. It is no flashback – Chinese people really do share an affinity for glow toys with the dreadlocked, patchouli soaked variety of humans. Which brings us to Point #2…

Point #2 – Vendors peddling their wares everywhere you go.

Leisurely walk through the campgrounds at Bonnaroo, and in a short time, you will be offered every mind altering substance under the sun. You will also be offered a variety of clothing, jewelery, art work, veggie burritos, and super-heady-dank brews. Sure, there are rules against this unregulated commerce, but no one follows them; if the rules were really enforced, then hippies would not be able to peddle their wares, and as such, would not be able to afford to attend these events, thus lowering the profit made by the promoters. Everywhere you go, someone has something they want to sell you.

Now, while you won’t hear the familiar call of “Molly. Doses. Rolls.” from the Chinese equivalent of w00kies, you will most certainly find a wide variety of interesting goods (and services) for sale at a reasonable price. As mentioned earlier, subway stations are a hot spot for pushing useless goods, but the fun doesn’t stop there. If you walk the one city block from my apartment to Lush on any given night, you will see dozens of entrepreneurs with a blanket laid out on the sidewalk displaying their inventory. Similar to the tour rat trying his best to obtain the necessary gas money to make it to the next show by selling his lot shirts, these savvy business people have an arsenal of incredible sales pitches. Of course, there is the all too common instance where the sales pitch is not understood. In the case of the w00kie, you may not understand just how “bomb ass” his goo balls are because he is deep in a k-hole; with the Chinese merchants, well, you just don’t understand the language they are speaking. Just as you often find obscure things for sale while perusing Shakedown, you run into all sorts of peculiar items on the streets of China. From bootleg DVDs, to knock off clothing, to cooked scorpions, to “night ladies”, to a box full of puppies (I’m not joking), the street vendors of China really have it all.

In another striking similarity to hippies, these vendors all stress the quality of their product, and the special discount that you will receive for supporting their small business.

“Yo braaahhh, these doses are like, totally clean and killer brah. One drop and you’re super spun for weeks, dude. Plus, I’ll hook you up since you heady brahs totally let me schwill on your box of wine.”

“Hello! Hello! DVD! Beer! You want?! Sex?? Night lady?? Special friend price!”

The striking similarities between parking lot hippie vendors and street vendors in Beijing don’t stop here, though. For instance, at a larger jam band show, where a parking lot scene is actually going down, you oftentimes find yourself intoxicated and hungry. Luckily, there are plenty of eager vendors ready to assuage your hunger. From the hippie standbys of ganja goo balls and veggie burritos, to massive chicken quesedillas, to homemade pizza, to the fabulous dishes cooked up by culinary school dropout hippies, you can find many ways to fill your stomach on the lot. Of course, you are forced to trust the quality and freshness of the ingredients in the food, which, let’s not forget, you are purchasing off some stoned hippie who has been driving his VW across the country seeing Panic for the last three weeks. Surely, that meat has been properly refrigerated. And, you know what, even if it hasn’t been, fuck it… you are substantially buzzed off of Sierra Nevadas and OG kush; food poisoning is a risk you are willing to take.

Years later, you are roaming the streets of Beijing, and are, again, a bit tipsy. Suddenly, your nostrils are filled with an incredible aroma of grilled meat and spices. You follow your nose, and find yourself standing in front of a make-shift bike-grill, operated by an elderly Chinese man. This contraption really is something else. The man has a three-wheeled bicycle that is hauling a little cart. He lights a fire, sets up a grill, and just like that, he has constructed a late night snack stand. Along with his bike-grill, he has bags upon bags of chuanr. These delicious sticks of beef, chicken, lamb, and pork sit, waiting to be cooked and devoured by drunkards on the street. Clearly, there is no refrigeration whatsoever, not even so much as a cooler. However, you need to put something in your stomach besides 5 kuai tequila shots and Tsingtao, so you happily support the man’s business, and you tear through five delicious sticks of spicy meat on a stick.

Finally, you see quite a bit of vendors appealing to multiple markets. At a music festival, you will find a multi-tasking merchant with a grab bag of goodies, as he hopes to satisfy the needs of many different types of consumers.

Spunions?
“I got killer doses and some gnarly boomers.”
E-tards?
“Blue dolphin double stacks, brah. One of these will have you geekin’ all night. Also got some shards that will knock you off your ass.”
Feel like sleeping instead of seeing music?
“I got some K and Oxys, too.”
Or, are you just shirtless?
“You guys wanna check out these dope shirts I made before I bounce around? Best design on the lot. $20 a pop.”

Take a trip to the other side of the world, and you will find a Chinese shop owner taking a similar approach to his business. That is, the more customers you appeal to, the more sales you will have. Walk outside of your apartment gate, and the first thing you will spot is a tiny stand with a sliding glass window that resembles a gas station blunt wrap and lighter stand in Detroit. Peering into the shop, you notice an interesting array of products. This go-getter business man also appeals to many markets.

Are you thirsty?
He has water, juice, soda, and beer.
Hungry?
A nice mixture of Chinese snack foods.
Tourist?
You surely need some postcards with the Great Wall, or a Chairman Mao key chain.
In need of some double penetration?
Well, you’ve come to the right place, because this quaint little shop also comes equipped with a wide range of double sided dildos!
(I seriously am not making this up. Come and visit me, and I will show you.)

Now THAT’S integrated marketing!

One thing that these local Chinese sales experts have on their hippie counterparts is determination. Whereas your average w00k will stumble around a music festival campsite all night while he swigs a bottle of Sammy Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, in an effort to unload his vile of liquid (while he casually drops a hit on his tongue every 30 minutes or so), only to call it quits because “Keller is on, brahhh!”, an old man in Beijing will go to extreme lengths to offer his goods to you. Case in point – when climbing the Great Wall back in August, there was a man at the very tallest point of the wall selling cans of Yanjing and Tsingtao to thirsty lao wai tourists who find themselves thinking, “It would be pretty fucking cool to drink a beer at the top of the Great Wall.” (Editor’s Note: I did not support this man in his business venture. While I clearly would have loved to consume an alcoholic beverage on one of the Seven Wonders of the World, I just couldn’t bring myself to pay the 1000% price mark up of that can of beer, but I do give that guy mad props for scaling the Great Wall with a cooler just in case I did.) This brings us to Point #3…

Point #3: A shared enjoyment of alcohol and cigarettes.

I do not know two groups of people who smoke more cigarettes than hippies and Chinese people. Look around you at your next Biscuits show, and take note of how many sticks are being consumed at any given time; it really is disgusting. But, while hippies love them some tobacco, nobody comes close to China’s love for those cancerous treats. The facts speak for themselves:

# About 67% of men smoke, and 4% of women.
# Among youths, about a third of male teens smoke and nearly 8% of females.
# One of every three cigarettes consumed worldwide is smoked in China.
# Smoking will kill about a third of all young Chinese men alive (under 30 years).
# About 3,000 people die every day in China due to smoking.
# There are more than 300 million Chinese smokers – more than the entire US population. They consume an estimated 1.7 trillion cigarettes per year – or 3 million cigarettes every minute.

Holy fucking hell. That’s a lot of smoking. Those stats even shocked me a bit, and I live here. I see people smoking everywhere I go. I can only imagine what would happen if this smoke-loving population was introduced to some headies and RooR rips (Tweedle, that is your cue to move here).

Moving on to man’s other favorite poison – alcohol. Anyone who has been to a Phish show, or a giant hippie jam band festival, knows how much hippies love their booze in any form: flavorful IPAs, shwag 30 packs, boxed wine, whiskey (of any quality), Bloody Marys/mimosas, and even moonshine. Sometimes it seems as if these hippies are stashing another liver somewhere; you just can’t imagine one person drinking that much. And it’s not just the sheer volume of their drinking so much as it is the longevity that is impressive. A seasoned festival going hippie can start consuming early on Thursday morning, and continue on until Sunday night, with only a few hours of rest from the bottle. Insanity, I tells ya.

Now, let’s compare these wily tree-huggers with our friends who live in a place that has very little trees to hug…

Chinese people like their beer. Granted, it is shitty and has very little alcohol, but you would think Tinsgtao produced liquid crack if you saw how much of this crap the people here drink (admittedly, I drink quite a bit of it as well… how am I supposed to, in good conscience, say no to huge bottles of beer that cost about 50 cents?). They throw back these da pings with every meal, which I absolutely love; it is nice to not be viewed as a desperate alcoholic if you drink a few beers with lunch. Beer is just a warm up over here, though. The opening bout, if you will. The main event comes in the form of a rice wine (it is really liquor, I have no idea why they call it wine), called baijiu. I’ve mentioned baijiu a few times throughout my time here, so you should be familiar with it by now. As I’ve stated before, this stuff is rocket fuel. It is absolutely foul. It smells, and tastes, straight up awful. Think of a shot of 151, and then make it taste worse, and burn more, and you’ve got baijiu. Now, I consider myself a rather experienced drinker, but even I have a hard time putting this stuff down. Not so for the locals. They casually fill a glass of this stuff and sip it along with their dumplings. It is so popular, that an entire aisle of my local grocery store is dedicated to it, with a variety of brands, and sizes ranging from a pocket sized bottle to a massive jug that is at least 2 gallons. A common love for booze and smokes is clearly shared between hippies and the Chinese. However, one of these groups is much more skilled in the art of handling their booze. Folks over here in the land of the panda have the tolerance of a 15 year old American girl drinking her first Mike’s Hard Lemonade. This makes for very frequent hilarity when dining out. It is not a rare sight to see two grown Chinese men engaged in a sloppy, loud, drunken argument, because of the four empty bottles of beer on their table. Amateurs.

Believe it or not, our list does not end here…

Point #4: A lax attitude towards cleanliness.

Ok, now I’m not saying that all Chinese people are dirty (that is quite far from the truth), or that all hippies are dirty (ok, never mind, I take that one back… hippies are filthy). For this comparison, I am talking more about the state of the city of Beijing as compared with the state of a music festival site after it has been ravaged by thousands of drug munching, nitrous huffing buffoons. The overflowing trash cans, mountains of cigarette buts, and general uncleanliness of Beijing is reminiscent of the main stage area after an evening at Camp Bisco.

Also, both groups have some funny quirks when it comes to personal hygiene. With the spunions, long, unwashed hair serves as the ultimate symbol of brah-dom – the longer and nappier your dreds, the longer you have been on tour. With our friends in the far East, long finger nails are a status symbol; if you have long finger nails, that means you don’t have to work in the fields or do other various forms of manual labor to earn a living.

In conclusion, both hippies, and China, are known around the world as dirty. Whether this is because you don’t shower regularly, or wash your stinky, muddy tye-dyes, or because your country runs an abundance of real life smog machines (aka factories), it does not matter; for both sides, the stereotype has been earned.

To be fair, though, there are 1.7 billion people in this country, and they make pretty much everything on Earth. They at least have some excuse for the filth that surrounds, whereas hippies are just too lazy and baked to bathe themselves. Let me reiterate, that there are 1.7 billion people here. Could you imagine what would happen if, say, even 1 million hippies inhabited the same piece of land for a week? That is an awful thing to picture. From the way hippies talk, you think that would mean a land full of peace, love, music, and trees. Well, sure, those things would all probably be there, but the place would be a giant mess. Nothing would ever get done. A few thousand hippies can barely keep it together for a weekend. I don’t think there is a music festival I’ve been to that didn’t include an overdose or some catastrophic event. Stupid fucking hippies. So, I think China deserves some serious credit, for handling things the way they do. Now let’s just keep our fingers crossed that my dystopian view of a hippie country never comes true.

So, there you have it. Bet you didn’t think that hippie jam band festivals and China had much in common. Well, you were wrong. And, as a hippie currently residing in Beijing, I couldn’t be happier.