The Beach Mafia

Just got back from having barbeque at Dockweiler beach, and playing a game of Mafia with several Hollywood types. Mafia is a summer camp favorite in which a handful of individuals among a group of twenty are secretly mafia assassins, and the others must rely on their powers of deduction in order to capture the criminals before everyone is assassinated.

What I learned from this game is that I'm an awful judge of character, having made several false accusations, and ignoring the young woman to my right, who masterfuly played the innocent while slaughtering several of my fellow players. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one; the civilians as a whole voted to execute several innocent people in the pursuit of justice.

I myself was formally accused of being mafia late in the game, and was forced to defend myself before my peers. A girl quietly said to me, "I think you're mafia." Which unleashed a chorus of "Kill him!"

But all was eventually forgiven, as the civilians triumphed - the last mafia member was eating a smores, which led to his downfall: "He's eating! He's mafia!"

And the result was a catharsis of relief and joy as everyone gave each other high fives under the moonlit sky. As we were recounting the game's events, I told someone, "You got killed for completely arbitrary reasons."

Someone said, "Everyone did."

Random Photos of Asia

Jonathan getting his ass handed to him in Street Fighter III: Third Strike in Kyoto


My father, my brother, and I walking through the French Concession in Shanghai


Waiting for the bus to leave the government-mandated tourist trap in Guilin


Mountain biking through Yangshuo. I'm wearing the hat backwards because my neck is getting sunburned. Be quiet.


Don't even ask me to identify which shrine this is in Japan. Wallace climbing up stairs.


Bamboo rafting in Yangshuo.


Brian being emo in Japan.


Dinner at a nightclub/karaoke bar in Yangshuo.

Leaving China

Myself at the top of Moon Hill, after a legendary climb. The view is even better in person.

For all my planning efforts, I could never have planned a trip this fantastic; it was filled with wonder and drama and epiphany. And best of all, I got to hang out with one brother, two parents, three former coworkers, a grad school classmate, an old flame, and an alma mater. That is clearly a record.

I can't wait to do this all over again in - ohmigod - LESS THAN FOUR MONTHS!?

Big thanks to my parents, who made the trip so much easier (and cheaper); between the free housing and meals, my stay in China was a much more pleasant one.

Now I return to meet whatever is waiting for me back in Los Angeles. I'm going to put back all the weight I lost, catch up with all my favorite yoga classmates, eat some barbeque on the beach, and most importantly...

Get back to work.

Actually, I've been told that work is SECOND most important right now.

It's an exciting time.

Last Shanghai Tidbits

A glimpse of my last few days:

• Eating roast duck and pineapple curry on the patio at Simply Thai in Hongqiao. Again. And again. And again. It's that good.


• Taking an hour and a half to have my hair cut, ears cleaned, upper body (including fingers!) massaged. All for the princely sum of $5.


• Getting thrown out of the knockoff mall storefronts for being too aggressive in my haggling. Sometimes the vendors are ACTING like they're really upset about your offer, and sometimes they ARE really upset. Telling the difference is something I'm still working on. Then again, it's probably not a good idea to skimp on luggage. Oh well. This is GREAT practice for Pillow Crisis negotiations.


• Reading books, watching movies, writing.


• Chores.

More Notes on Shanghai

It was raining in this city before Stefanie arrived, and while she was here, we had the most beautiful weather. Now she's gone and the rain is back. Sux.

Here's a brief roundup of my time with Stefanie (read more about her visit here) and her BFF Ting (who is very funny in a vulgar, lack of self-censoring sort of way and speaks Mandarin with a charmingly bizarre accent):

1) Do not even look askance at the zebras at the Shanghai Zoo. A few reasons why this is a bad idea: 1) the Shanghai Zoo has decided to install only the most minimal barriers between the animals, which results in animals being in much closer proximity than one is used to. 2) The zebras at the Shanghai Zoo are NOT. MESSING. AROUND. Ting was just casually talking to one of them, when he approached curiously, and then BUM RUSHED her, only to stop short of the fence and say, "Psych!" "Dude!" I exclaimed to Ting. "Your ass just got CHARGED BY A ZEBRA!"

1a) Another note: the lions at the zoo are quite the show. In the space of five minutes, we got to see: pissing, stretching, roaring, and (so adorable!) cuddling. And as always, red panda > black panda.

2) According to some of Stefanie's buddies from USC who spend a lot of time in nightclubs in Asia, Chinese girls will only hold hands for the first fifty dates, but Japanese girls will give up the anal on day one. Note to Japanese women: call me. Just kidding - before I start getting the hate mail, let me just say that the very amusing individuals in question are not exactly what I would call players, in the strictest (or even loosest) sense of the term, so your mileage may vary. A LOT.

3) Speaking of USC, Stefanie managed to actually drag me to - the horror! - a USC alumni event. "I am not a Trojan!" I said. "Stop saying that!" said Stefanie. To be fair, the event was staged at a nice restaurant, with plenty of decent food on hand; not to mention that my former graduate school gets style points for even holding events in Shanghai. But no matter how good an alumni association USC has, there's simply no compensating for the fact that the University of Texas at Austin has a better football team, and that Matt Leinart is a complete tool. And I can write that because Stefanie is in Xian now and she can't smack me! Yay! (PS. UCLA is really the better school, by the way. I couldn't get in there, so I had to settle.)

4) If you want to get someone pregnant in Shanghai, a good place to start is New Heights on the Bund. It's a stylish rooftop bar/restauarant located on the top floor of an elegant 1920's building on the Huangpu River. There's a gorgeous view of the river and the Shanghai skyline, and you get a nice breeze up there. The food is very decent. The best thing about the place are the elevators, which are shrouded in darkness, with only a slight hint of accent lighting. You can barely see the face of the person across from you, and the elevator is intimate in size to begin with. It is dark, mysterious, and as sexy as elevators can be, which is usually not very.

5) Stefanie had her hair Japanese straightened in Shanghai for the absurdly low price of about $30. And yes, it looks quite lovely. The usual price in the states is in the hundreds, and Stefanie also received treatment from two stylists at the same time. The procedure took a few hours, and Stefanie had to sit very still for all of it, which pretty much guarantees that I will never, ever have my hair Japanese straightened. Oh wait - I'm Asian. I've got Japanese straightened hair FO' LYFE. I get this for free, ninja.

What A Depressing Song :(

Man, that Beck song at the end of the Stefanie post is a serious bummer. We need something to exorcise it from the room RIGHT NOW. Something a little more emblematic of the present moment. Something like:

Download: Get Ready - Ella Fitzgerald (MP3)

That ought to do it. Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.

The Train To San Diego

Stefanie at the top of the Empire State Building, 2006


So my friend Stefanie is in Shanghai. This is kind of a big deal.

But not for the reasons you might assume when a girl you used to be absolutely crazy about makes the most random and unlikely reappearance in your life, and you suddenly find her walking around your apartment in a towel. No - this is not a story about the rekindling of an extinguished flame.

It's about reckoning with the past.

I don't mean to elevate the story of Stefanie to the level of myth. After all, the story of the girl who broke Stefanie's spell over me is just as significant in my life, if not more so. (That the girl broke Stefanie's spell - and the ease with which she broke it - and that it remains broken - suggest a magic more powerful than Stefanie's.)

But I am writing about Stefanie here. Mainly because she has two things going for her. 1) She and I share a near-legendary anecdote in which I kidnapped her, threw her on a train, and took her to San Diego. 2) She refuses to go away. And believe me, I've tried to get rid of her.

But it's simply not happening. It was six(!) years ago that I kidnapped her. Four years ago that she decided to let me back into her life after that stunt. In total, we've known each other for seven years, a duration that astounds both of us. Our lives have diverged wildly in that time - and here she is knocking on my door, in a city seven thousand air miles from home.

I told Stefanie that receiving a visit from her in Shanghai, of all places, is not unlike receiving a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past. I kept a wary eye on her, wondering if she'd tell or show me something I didn't know. Something I missed. Something that might reveal an inner purpose to her visit.

There was a point in which she settled down into my couch, and talked with me for a couple hours when she was supposed to be sleeping. Stefanie's extreme sleep-deprivation lowered her guard just a touch, and we began to have a conversation. And even as we eased into that talk, I knew that this was the moment I had been waiting for.

Stefanie and I tend to cover a lot of ground when we talk, mainly concerning the fine contrast in our ultimately similar approaches to life and everything. And it was a good conversation - one that makes me happy, because it confirms that I was not an idiot for liking this girl, and any confirmation of my lack of historical idiocy is always a plus. But it wasn't so much the content of our conversation, but rather the subtext.

The subtext was: whom are we kidding, we're only going to be friends, and we know it. And this is not the newest realization for either of us, but it was the first time we could sit down with the idea and be fairly comfortable with it. To be near it and not feel its emotional charge, to see it without the fog of the past.

That's not to say there aren't still lingering questions that will never be answered, or old feelings which miraculously and briefly resuscitate themselves for a flash, or regrets over missed opportunities. To this day, I still do not know what happened in Stefanie's head and heart in the scant two weeks between her kidnapping and her decision to eject me from her life. And I also don't have an answer for the question, "What if we had...?" And I might never. But those are questions asked when one is about to get back on the horse and ride after that girl again. And at this point, the only thing I wanted to sit on was the easy chair in my living room. So I didn't ask.

As we talked, I realized that this conversation would most likely be the very last time we would ever speak seriously about the past. We would never go there again, would never revisit that old place. After all, how much more could we say about events that were receding and shrinking into the past so quickly? This was it.

So I told Stefanie something Judy had said about her long ago, something to the effect of: "What this girl wants to do is put you on a pedestal and then run away from that pedestal as fast as she can." And I don't know if Stefanie agreed with that or not - there was a significant silence in the air at that moment. All I can do is note that Stefanie is ever so quick to intensely verbalize her disagreement, and her silence is always telling. She says so much more with quiet than she could possibly know.

I had expected Stefanie to tell me or show me something, but in the end, it was the silence I had been waiting for. And it was a necessary silence; on some level, both of us had travelled around the globe to have this talk, to share that silence, and finally - to get on with the rest of it. On some level, my life had paused for this moment, and now, having seen it, could resume at full velocity.

Pausing was sad, but speeding away is thrilling. I know that Stefanie and I will never again set foot in Union Station together, will never again sit side by side on the Pacific Surfliner, will never again visit San Diego in each other's company. But I am on a new train, sleek and fast, charging towards a new destination at a mile a minute.

As is Stefanie.

Download: Judy On Stefanie's Signficance (2004) MP3

Download: Ship In A Bottle - Beck (from the Japanese release of Sea Change) MP3

On Travel

There is a seductive falsehood advanced by Hollywood that an entire life is decided in a single moment. A moment in which a stand is made, a course of action decided, all things thrown to the fates. This is the moment everyone in the audience is waiting for, because it's precisely the moment we all wish we had the courage to manifest in our own lives. It's a moment in which a movie character feels - if only briefly - free.

But a movie is at best a rough compression of a life's story, and earning a sense of freedom outside of a movie theater is difficult at best. You might very well enact a dramatic moment of your own - quitting your job, kissing that girl. You might then experience a brief moment of creative and revelatory power in which you feel the boundaries of your existence slightly redrawn. But then what?

You get bored, and you call upon yourself to do it all over again. And repeating yourself is too easy, so you have to do something more new, more difficult.

What I'm saying is that quitting your job is not enough. It's, as I've learned, only the first step of a very long job. Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage: "To be free is not the result of a moment's decisive action but a project to be constantly renewed."

The most important thing I've learned from this trip is that the process of confrontation can never end. By confrontation I mean directly facing that which scares you, that which discomforts you, that which you do not know. In a sense, I must summon the same nerve required to quit a day job, and deploy it again and again and again.

There were so many times on this trip when I was one word away from missing some of the most intensely new experiences of my life. That word would be one of the most common: no. I could have turned away from the peak at Moon Hill. I could have declared it too hot to go biking in Yangshuo. I could have shunned the inherent cheesiness of a bamboo raft ride down the Li River.

The simplest example I can give of a necessary confrontation is my willingness to make a complete fool of myself in a foreign culture, by slaughtering the local language and customs. How simple it is to buy a pair of shorts in Los Angeles. To buy them in Yangshuo, however, requires one to question every assumption one has about nature of transactions and one's relationship to them. I have to get a receipt stamped somewhere else, and I leave the shorts here, and huh?

This is a confrontation one can easily avoid: just buy all shorts in Los Angeles. But there is something valuable I discovered about buying shorts in Yangshuo, something I find valuable in all my traveling experiences: the recovery of senses and faculties that are all too rarely called into action. Foremost among them: a willingness to get lost, to screw up, to stumble into something new and unknown. But also: the ability to constantly head into confrontation, and feel stronger for it.

For me, travel is ultimately a series of small adventures that beckons, awaiting your answer to its repeated call. I have invoked Hayao Miyzaki repeatedly on this trip, and it's because his films proclaim a simple truth that bears repeating: we are all children wandering into the woods, hoping to find something new.

China: Chilling In Full Effect

For the past couple of days, we've been chilling around Hongqiao, the expat section of Shanghai, and we might as well be back on Larchmont. We're running into American high school kids everywhere, eating in yuppie Thai places, and catching up on Entourage by means of completely legitimate DVDs we purchased at full price from the local video store. Yesterday, we hit the local Japanese gaming lounge and rented an hour in a room with leather-cushioned walls, enjoying some four-player Wii.

The era of daily posts has come to an end, as the moving around and doing exciting stuff all the time portion of this trip has clearly concluded. That being said, I'm still in China for about two more weeks. Here's what to expect:

1) A thoughtful post or two about any semblance of meaning I've gleaned from this trip. Also some nice photos I missed the first time around.

2) My family members and friends depart in a few days. Wallace and Brian are currently visiting West Lake / Hangzhou, so we'll see what they have to report when they return to Shanghai.

3) Then a brief visit from a Very Special Guest Star (who was way down on my list of people most likely to come to Shanghai, and yet here she is). I don't know how much time I will actually spend with her, given her, uh, ambitious expectations regarding how many things and people she can see in four days, but we'll see. We may both have our hair did simultaneously at the same salon, so stay tuned.

4) Work resumes on Lobsters vs. Butterflies. I have my laptop, I have my notes. I'd better have at least two action sequences blocked out by the time I go home to LA. And then I finish this thing by the time I run out of money.

5) Hardcore cocooning: Heroes season 1, a season or two of Naruto, and six books: Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami, The Half-Mammals of Dixie by George Singleton, The History of Love by Nicole Krauss, North by Frederick Busch, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios by Yann Martel, and Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer.

6) Lots of meditation and contemplation regarding various aspects of my existence. Some of the things Judy said a month ago to me weigh heavily on my mind, and let me tell you, I am going to be watching the next six months of my life with great interest.

China Day 9: Billionaires, Bamboo Rafts, Banana Pancakes

Our original plan was to go mountain biking again, but our plans were stalled by the first real rainfall of the trip.

Since any given activity in Yangshuo is weather-dependent, we were grounded. I spent some time in a cafe, reading Geoff Dyer's Out Of Sheer Rage while one of the restaurant workers dozed at a nearby table. Later, the others joined me at the restaurant and I had a one dollar grilled cheese sandwich, and Wallace had banana pancakes. (More about the pancakes in a bit.)

Finally, the weather cleared up, and we hired some bikes and a guide to take us bamboo rafting down the Li River; she took us down an easy bike ride, and deposited us at the wharf for the bamboo rafts. The boatmen threw our bikes on the back of the rafts, and we were off. The boatmen navigated by pushing long rods into the water - the Li is shallow and clear, and you can often see the bottom from the raft.

A short raft ride down the Li River lasts about an hour, and is extremely pleasant experience, assuming the weather is nice. We saw the scenery that China is legendary for: limestone rock formations shrouded by wisps of fog. Meanwhile, the raft hit some occasional rapids, and we would have to raise our legs to avoid getting our feet wet.

The amazing thing about the relatively underwhelming rapids of the Li River is that stationed at every fall is a photography raft, outfitted with a working PC and photo printer. That's right - we saw Dell workstations floating on the Li River. And we could even hear the Windows alert noise as we floated downstream. Wallace asked his boatman how they managed to get electricity on the river, and the answer was simple but unsettling: very long extension cables run from the nearby villages into the river.

After the boats dropped us off, our guide met us and led us to the site of the 1000 year old Banyan tree. There was some internal debate about whether paying $2 US to see a tree was actually worth it, but we were there, so why not. Unfortunately, all four of us got lost looking for the tree, which caused our guide to loudly question our intelligence in Mandarin.

The Banyan tree, you see, is quite big. It has a tremendously large canopy, shielding its enormous limb structure from the elements. Stepping inside its leaves is like stepping inside a cave. Legend has it that if you visit the Banyan tree once in your life, you will become precisely 20,000 times wealthier. Also, if you walk once around it, you will live to be 99 years old. Our longevity and financial security is now assured.

In the evening, we had dinner at an obnoxious nightclub/cafe, trying to eat while a group of Chinese tourists sang karaoke to histrionic Chinese love songs. Brian and I felt like having banana pancakes, but we wanted them with ice cream. So we went back to the site of Wallace's pancakes, and had Wallace instruct the waitresses to make the pancakes and top them with ice cream. This simple request BLEW THE WAITRESSES' MINDS. "Have you ever had this before?" they wanted to know. "Banana pancakes with ice cream! This is crazy!" they exclaimed. But they dutifully went into the kitchen, and returned with two banana pancakes: crepe-like desserts made with thin banana slices. And topped with vanilla and strawberry ice cream. The ice cream was a perfect complement to the pancake, and we congratulated ourselves on our culinary genius.