MUSIC MEMOIR: ROCKING IN ASIA
Big In China
by Alan Paul
With Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber ruling the charts, does the blues have a U.S. audience anymore? If this uniquely American genre needs a new home, former Wall Street Journal online columnist Alan Paul’s “Big in China” (Harper) makes the Middle Kingdom sound like a great choice.
“Remaking yourself — just hitting the reset button and starting over — seemed like the most natural thing in the world,” writes Paul, who moved to Beijing with his wife and three children when she became the Journal’s China bureau chief. Paul slipped out of his ex-pat bubble to co-found a blues-rock band with a Chinese friend, the hard-drinking Woodie Wu. Not long after its inception, Woodie Alan was voted 2008 band of the year by a Beijing weekly, garnering up to $2,500 per gig and jetting across the country on tour.
Of course, success won’t solve Paul’s authenticity problem: He’s a white guy fronting a mostly Chinese band that plays black music for Asian audiences. Still, he shows insight. “China is a raging dragon about to gobble us up; China is a land of faceless peasant drones riding bikes in Mao jackets,” he writes, criticizing the West’s stereotypes of his adopted country. “The truth is, China is a huge, fast-changing, incredibly diverse place; there was no way to summarize it.” Maybe this is a good thing. After all, there are 1.3 billion Chinese; if just 1 percent of them buy a Woodie Alan record, the band will have a bigger hit than “Thriller.”
