But this time something happened. From what I can piece together, Amy, an intern at Sinica, read it and sent it to Kaiser Kuo, who, among other things, writes the back-page column of the Beijinger. Kaiser put out an APB and got my e-mail from his cousin Arvin Chen, who was my TA in film school. Small world. Kaiser, who had been looking to step down as the back-page columnist, asked if I was interested in taking over the column and I almost shat myself before saying yes. After some back and forth with Jonathan White, the managing editor of the Beijinger, I was confirmed as the new back-page columnist on September 22.

During this time, Kaiser also put me in touch with Holly Chang, the founder of Golden Bridges. One of their projects, Project Pengyou, seeks to create a social network of Americans who are living or have lived in China. They needed writers so I signed up.

All of this happened in three months, and none of it would have been possible without the witticisms of one David Sedaris. So thank you David Sedaris. And thank you Amy the Sinica intern, Kaiser Kuo, and Arvin Chen for making the kinds of simple connections that change and enrich our lives. Thanks to fellow writers Caitlin Cashin and Oscar Moralde for their wonderful edits that contributed greatly to the tone of piece. Thanks to everyone over the years who has supported my writing or edited my work or helped me relax during bouts of writer’s block. Thanks to all of you, people now give me money to put words together.

What This Means

I have had noticeably less time to write for The Hypermodern since taking these two jobs, though I plan to post some of my writing for the Beijinger and Project Pengyou here. I’m not the only writer here to feel crunched for time. Others are busy with school or their jobs and I don’t feel comfortable pressuring anyone to write. So, updates to this site will likely become less frequent (though they have never been frequent) but the posts will still mainly be carefully-crafted essays about China and expat life. Our writers now back in the States will cover everything else.

Writing a Wrong

Since so many people read my satire, a couple standard deviations more than anything else I’d ever written, I’d like to clarify a couple things:

First, I do not hate David Sedaris. In fact, I regularly read his work in the New Yorker.

Second, I don’t deny that everything he wrote in his piece in The Guardian is true, and some of his formulations are quite splendid. But just writing what is true does not make said writing funny or responsible.

What prompted me to write my satire was the lopsidedness of Sedaris’ piece. As GoChengdoo put it perfectly, “It’s like reading a China-newb’s first blog post, but with more sophisticated writing and copyediting.” I agree with everything except the editing part. You can compare, for example, Sedaris’ piece in The Guardian, which was published July 15, with his piece in the July 11 & 18 issue of The New Yorker, which details the author’s struggle to learn foreign languages. The latter is unrelentingly funny, self-deprecating, and never malicious. The closest Sedaris gets to offending is a Holocaust joke which is quickly qualified. To me, this is Sedaris at his strongest, using humor not to discredit, but to highlight the absurdity of our lives.

It is unsurprising, though no less disheartening, that those who have praised Sedaris’ piece in tweets and comments share many of the qualities of his piece: an obliviousness to Chinese history, an obliviousness to Chinese cultural history, and more than just a little pride in being a Westerner. They defend whingeing about China as “classic Sedaris!” as a Bolshevik might praise the deportation of millions to gulags as “classic Stalin!” Forgive my bluntness but just because you were dragged to a book signing by someone smarter and more well-read than you does not make you an expert on Sedaris’ writing.

I don’t want to make my bones through the denigration of others. I meant my satire piece as an admonishment, not a slap in the face. It is a reminder that as writers we should try our best to place things in perspective and empathize with our subjects, especially if we expect a lot of people to read our work.

This website is now blocked in China, but not for any heroic attempts at muckraking or exposes of official corruption.  Almost no one visits this site; it is just another of the thousands of webpages lobotomized from the Chinese internet every day.  My first thought was: who can I talk to?  Who can I ask about this?  Can I appeal this decision? But the government rarely comments on censoring the internet—pretending everything is fine is what they do best.

Life in China is often Kafkaesque—a decision is made by some higher power and you, a citizen armed only with reason and indignity, thrash about but ultimately learn to live with it.

Censorship, of course, is not uniquely Chinese.  Even websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and China’s equivalent, YouKu, employ legions of people to peruse flagged content for violations.  The difference is these sites have terms and policies that users must agree to and follow and are informed of in advance.  Internet censors in China are much more like the MPAA—an invisible, undemocratic group of people who are imbued with the power to pass judgment according to the caprices of their superiors.

So why did this site get blocked?  There’s no knowing for sure but I imagine two scenarios:

One: the fiercely critical opinions on this site caught the attention of Chinese censors who, fearing a populist uprising, deemed this blog a security risk.

Two (and the more likely scenario): is that the arbiters of the Chinese internet threw up a blanket ban on search sensitive terms like “Liu Xiaobo” or “Nobel Peace Prize” and this site turned up a positive result.  But other sites, big and small, that comment on the Prize are still accessible.  So another possibility is that the government blocked a site hosted on the same server as mine.  (I have put in a request to transfer this site to another server to see if it will be unblocked.)

Whatever the reason, this site cannot be viewed from within mainland China without a proxy or VPN.  I wish I could say that censorship doesn’t work and that people will find the information no matter what because they have a desire to know the truth.  I wish I could say that the Chinese government’s attempts to control the online social consciousness will fail because the internet is just too fast or too widespread.  But for this site and many others, it works.

UPDATE: This site is now unblocked after a server transfer.  It is unclear whether the block was caused by this site or another site on the old server.

I can understand why blogs are met with such skepticism. It’s the same reason why I used to roll my eyes when someone said they had a LiveJournal or listened to Linkin Park. It’s a bandwagon thing, and unless you were on the bandwagon before it became a bandwagon, you’re a poser. So I quickly make the distinction that it’s an intellectual blog, and that I’m not the only writer. Although, as you’ll see, this is only marginally true.

The idea for an English-language blog about expat life in Beijing first came to me while I was researching an article about the Beijing Playhouse. I looked at a few sites that had written about the Playhouse but got little more information than where it was, what was showing, and how much tickets were. But I wanted to know the history of the Playhouse and what drove the actors to devote massive amounts of time (rehearsals are four hours a night for five weeks) to perform English-language theatre in a country where only a distinct minority could understand it. So when I did the interview that’s what I found out (article will be posted here when finished).

Despite the preponderance of English-language blogs and periodicals, there is a lack of in-depth reporting in China. Whether it’s due to caution or censorship (official or otherwise), I’m not sure. This is more an observation than a criticism, but it is a gap we here at “The Hypermodern” hope to fill.

“The Hypermodern” is ostensibly aimed at the expat community in China with Beijing as the epicenter. But more generally, I hope this blog will appeal to anyone who wants to learn more about life in China, aside from the sometimes popular and sometimes antagonistic articles found in major papers.

But life in China is not just Peking Duck and Peking Opera. Most people underestimate the amount of Western culture in China. Japan, and to a lesser extent Korea, are seen as Westernized Eastern nations but anyone who’s walked down a Chinese street knows that Haier and Lenovo have as much stake in the Middle Kingdom as McDonalds and Louis Vuitton. And though only ten or so American films are shown in Chinese theaters each year (apparently none now), the majority of Chinese have large collections of (pirated) American DVDs. My point is, reportage on China is often inextricable from mention of America—especially when there are some 380,000 expatriates in China, and especially as these two superpowers head toward an uncertain future.

Thus, the content on this blog will be devoted to China and America, with writers on both sides of the Pacific commenting on events at home. Content itself will be separated into two categories: original content in the form of articles and reviews, and blog content in the form of comments on outside articles and short blurbs about whatever.

A word about the writers. he talent on this blog is composed mostly of amateur writers, which is not to say the output is amateurish. The writers for “The Hypermodern” are some of the most intelligent people I know. However, we are all novices when it comes to blogging. Do not be alarmed if we don’t get it right the first time—be alarmed only if the quality of writing on this site does not improve in the coming months.

I’ll refrain from further speculation as to the future of this blog because it’s anyone’s guess. I hope that this blog finds an audience. I hope there are people out there interested in and intrigued by what we have to say. I hope that this blog can foster intelligent discussion on issues on both sides of the Pacific. Wish us luck.

“a paradigm-shattering gift to chess… The lesson of the Hypermodern revolution was that anything was still possible… Hypermodernism was not about fear, but about the love of intellectual adventure. It was, in fact, archetypal modernism–the spirit of breaking decisively with past styles in order to make a new aesthetic contribution to the world,”

and to the view of contemporary society described by Gilles Lipovetsky and Sebastien Charles in their book Hypermodern Times as a historical context

“where no ideological discourse makes sense any more, and when the disintegration of society has reached its peak. Of course, society is being reconstituted, but in a way that starts out uniquely from the singular desire of individuals.”

In normal-talk, Hypermodernism is a school of thought that believes life in today’s world is evolving at such a rate that history has become an unreliable narrator. Thus, a break from the past is needed, making room for a future crafted by unique individuals. Hypermodernism, according to Wikipedia, also inheres

“a deep faith in humanity’s ability to understand, control, and manipulate every aspect of human experience. This typically is manifested in a forward-looking commitment to science and knowledge…”

That, metaphorically, is the goal of this publication. To provide multiple points-of-view from within and without China, commenting on its amalgamated culture and varied lifestyles in an effort to make sense of the human experience in what could be the most interesting cultural, economic, and sociopolitical battleground of the 21st century.