Almost Famous: The hardest working man in Nanjing show business

The title of this post was inspired by the 2000 film, "Almost Famous", and of course, the godfather of soul himself, James Brown:

James Brown in 1973. Look how hard he was working.

This is the story of my attempt to become a rockstar in China. I've told this story in bits and pieces in my 2007 and 2009 "Christmas Newsletters", and started writing about it in my never-published 2013 opus, but I've never collected it all in one place before.

So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as I recount the crazy tales and surreal experiences that started with singing for fish in Goa, India and ended with me becoming the Dewey Finn of Zhuhai, China.

In August 2006 I moved to Nanjing, China and set about getting myself a guitar and making some "musician" business cards, with the aim of picking up where I left off in Goa, India (only hopefully getting paid more than fish and beer this time).

I got my first gig playing at the one-year birthday bash of a little Mexican joint called "The Slow Life Café". For my two hour gig, I was paid about $25AUD, a few beers, and as many burritos as I could eat.

Humble beginnings at the Slow Life Cafe, Nanjing. That guitar would end up paying for itself many times over.

Pretty soon I found a regular gig three nights a week at a seedy Taiwanese owned joint called "Taibei Station", where I met a hilariously dodgy Taiwanese musician variously known as "Xiaobao" and "Jacy" who would smoke like a chimney while pretending to play easy listening classics that were actually midi files hooked up to his fake grand piano through a laptop.

Master Class with Xiaobao, a.k.a. "Jacy" - "it's all about the white keys"

Jacy took me under his wing, showing me the tricks of the trade, and encouraging me to back him up with guitar and harmonies. Often, we were joined by Jacy's friends, who were a group of 50­something Taiwanese rock stars and the main clients of the bar. They were a mysterious bunch, whose members included two brothers who had lived in Guatemala and who could sing and speak Spanish fluently, and the ever-elusive “Jesse Tequila”, who looked about 10 years younger than he actually was, played several instruments, and had a seemingly endless repertoire of songs. Almost every night, he would turn up with a new beauty (or sometimes several) on his arm, claiming “this is my girlfriend of the far, far future”. Nobody was quite sure what he did for money, but as long as he kept cracking open those bottles of Chivas, nobody really cared.

During my time in Nanjing as a freelance musician, I played gigs in some random places. I've waited on stage behind white curtains amongst the flowers and angels at a wedding while a host in a crisp white suit announced me, and backstage with Chinese lion dancers at a used car sales event. I've drunk imported wine and mingled with models and the nouveau rich at a Mercedes Benz dinner party, and I've played on stage at a University in front of about 1000 people. I've even dressed up in black, played Spanish songs and pretended to be a European musician at a function that a Spanish trade company was putting on for their suppliers to encourage them to do more business in Europe (I remember the interview I had with the Spaniards when I got the case – they said "well, we originally wanted to find some Spanish dancers, but the costumes were too hard to find, so if we can't find any Spanish gypsies by Friday, you're our man"). It certainly kept things interesting.

Meeting the bride at a wedding gig in Nanjing, circa 2007

The Wedding Singer

Waiting backstage with the lion dancers

Another notable example of this kind of "D-grade celebrity for hire" gigs was when I got a call asking if I could find 5 western men to dress up in military uniforms and pretend to be a marching band at a parade in a 3rd tier city a few hours away from Nanjing. What was challenging about the request was that, not only did they all have to be white males, but they all had to be white males between 170­-180cm tall, and not too overweight, otherwise, they wouldn't fit into the costumes. We didn't end up getting the gig :-)

In the spring of 2008, I got a last-minute call to do a gig at a villa sales event in Changzhou. The money was right, so I hired a driver and set off into the darkness east of Nanjing (it was already the night before the gig). After arriving in Changzhou, the first question the host asked me was, "So, can you make pasta?". "I'm sorry, come again? But what does spaghetti bolognese have to do with any of this?" I asked, thinking I was supposed to be playing a gig. "Well", he explained, "tomorrow's event is the opening for the sales of an Italian Villa complex, and we'd lined up an Italian guy to come and make spaghetti for the audience. He pulled out at the last minute, and now you're it. You can play some songs too if you like", he added.

I could barely contain my laughter, but couldn’t really refuse either, now that I had come all this way. Luckily, I can make spaghetti bolognese Even funnier, they assured me that I just had to pretend that I knew what I was doing and that nobody would actually be eating the stuff, but then during the show, they invited all the kids in the audience up to taste it! I wasn’t even sure if the meat was done yet, and I found myself actually taking pride in my cooking, going “wait, it needs more salt!”, but thankfully, the reviews were neutral to positive, and nobody ended up in hospital.

So tell us, does everyone in Italy know how to make pasta?

Doing my best Elvis impersonation at another random villa sales gig, circa 2008

At these villa sales gigs, a common request was to supply a "Latin band". Other common acts included magicians, and girls dancing around in mini skirts pretending to play electric violins. One such gig with Jacy at the Zhongshan Golf resort was a prime example. The show was for a corporate dinner; the concept: three Chinese guys and me wearing matching Hawaiian shirts, Panama hats, and oversize pants that had to be scrunched up around the waist and held up by the belt. Backstage, I picked up what I could as Jacy barked orders at his troops in Chinese. Among the colourful shirts, large straw hats and instruments, the dancers painted on their makeup, and the MC practised her lines in a red miniskirt. The gig itself was a blur of flashing lights, maracas, “ganbei” (Chinese for "bottoms up") and lucky prize draws.

Soundcheck with the "Latin" band

Shortly after I met Jacy, I started working with a percussionist from Barbados, 'El Ché' Leon Christopher "Comandante" Corbin. Every now and again Ché would pull something awesome out of the hat, like the Mercedez Benz gig mentioned earlier. We found ourselves surrounded by "nouveau riche" and models, and playing on a spacious stage with great sound support while being broadcast on a huge screen. We pulled together a 4­-piece band for the first time, with the addition of Tino, a big, beefy, long­haired Belgian, on bass, and Jaco, a guitar wizard from Indonesia. We dubbed the band "Coastline" (named after the island nations that three of us hailed from and our reggae-influenced style), and for a while there had an agent helping us to find gigs and even wrote a song. Unfortunately, as I've learned the hard way, the lifespan of expat music groups is inversely proportional to the number of members. You can see some Coastline footage here and here.

Che "El Comandante" and The Captain

Coastline Gig, Christmas 2007

Early Coastline promotional poster

The Pivot - from reggae to country

The Coastline break-up was a bit like the lyrics of "Summer of 69" - "Jimmy quit, Jody got married...I should've known we'd never get far". But I learnt a valuable lesson from that experience, that would change the way I approach doing music gigs to this day. Our agent at the time, “Maoxian”, as she called herself (which loosely translates as "risk") was a thirty-something Latin dance instructor who was running a salsa night at the bar we had a residency at. After Coastline disbanded, she said something to me that made me change the way I thought about the business of playing music. She said it didn’t really matter who else was playing or what we played; as long as I could keep finding foreign musicians, she would keep finding me gigs. I realised I had to let go of the idea of a "band", and instead focus on developing and maintaining a contact list of “zero-practice”, gig-ready foreign musicians.

I had already started grooming a potential "band" member – his name was Terry “Cannonball” Taylor, so named because of his erratic ten­pin bowling style. He had a big, gruff, tenor voice that suited belting out rock­a­billy Creedence Clearwater Revival­-type numbers. He had been hanging out and coming up on stage at my solo gigs since way back when I started in late 2006, so he knew a lot of my tunes already. We had “Cannonball” fill in for a gig in January, where we played a totally different, bluesy rock style of music, with Terry as frontman, me on rhythm guitar and backups, and Jaco on the bass, and in a strange kind of way, it worked.

Based on this initial trial, Maoxian booked Terry and I for a gig (Jaco exited the scene due to visa issues around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics), but I needed to find a 3rd wheel because Terry didn’t play an instrument. Maoxian suggested we bring in Ian, an eccentric, long­time Nanjing resident who was originally from Ohio, and who had a beard that just about reached his belly button. So all of a sudden here I was with these two US country boys, belting out country tunes. It was a complete 180-degree turn from Coastline. Terry, who comes from Kentucky, suggested that we name the band after his home state, because it was close enough to “Kentucky Fried Chicken” for the Chinese to associate it with us, but not close enough for anyone to claim we were ripping off the brand name. It was about then that someone suggested we go out and buy some fake cowboy hats so that wearing them would become our trademark. And so “Kentucky” was born.

Kentucky's first-ever gig

Over the next few months, we would do some wacky gigs in some far-out places, piling into minivans and performing for the locals in small Chinese towns (I must stress here, they were only small by Chinese standards), which seemed very appropriate for a band called “Kentucky”. Along the way, I added members to the band as I needed them – I found Corey, a Canadian accordion and keyboard player, a very professional musician who really got into his country yokel character; Sebastien, a German violin virtuoso out on a university exchange program who lowered himself to playing country fiddle, and “Diamond” Dave, whom I met when he was instructing a yoga class; he was an old sea­dog of the Japanese, Hong Kong and Shanghai ex-pat music scenes, and at the time, (luckily for me) anchored in Nanjing because he had found a well paid, steady teaching job. He was an amazingly versatile musician who knew so many classic tunes, had all his gear sorted, and even had his own cowboy hat already!

From left to right: Corey, Ian "Uncle Jeebers" Clark, Benson "Captain Corndog" Wallace, and Sebastien

"The tray biens"

On the road with Kentucky, around about the time of the bird flu epidemic

Kentucky promotional shot circa summer 2008 - Terry "Cannonball" Taylor is on the left

'

"The Don Quijote Sessions", summer 2008, Nanjing. "Diamond Dave" is on the far left

Almost Famous

In September 2008, just before I moved to Shanghai, we had started to gig quite regularly, and a Nanjing TV station ran a story about us.

After moving to Shanghai and a quiet 2009 on the music front, things picked up again in late 2010 through early 2011, and I started getting called out to Nanjing more often to do “quasi-Kentucky” gigs with Ian. Working with Ian gave me another opportunity to be on Chinese TV (here's the first time, if you haven't seen it yet), this time in a one-off special called “Jiangsu's got foreign talent”, which was a staged competition for foreigners living in China who could sing Chinese songs. You can see our performance, which was filmed in December 2010, here.

There is an amusing story behind it (as if those Chinglish subtitles weren't amusing enough to begin with), being that during the preliminary rounds (only the final was broadcast on national television), we sang quite slow, pentatonic versions of what were supposed to be traditional Chinese folk songs. Jiangsu Television's resident musician and composer, tasked with arranging the soundtracks to be palatable to the national audience, had different ideas. After diligently practising our traditional folk versions, we rocked up for rehearsal only to be told that we would no longer need to play our instruments (yes, we were miming – and in the interests of disclosure, I should add that the vocal soundtrack was pre-recorded also; I can't really jump around on stage like Flea and sing harmonies that tightly), and that the composer had produced these hilarious pop-funk-rock versions of the songs for us. Ian was initially resistant and tried to maintain his artistic integrity, saying things like “this is not my style of music”, “it's not how I want to be broadcast on national television”, and so on – remember that Simpsons episode where the Red Hot Chili Peppers play in Moe's bar and are asked to tone down their lyrics (“no way man, our lyrics are like our children”) -  but eventually he just let go and had fun. I felt very comfortable channelling my inner Chili Pepper – listen out for the Keidis-inspired “uh” right at the beginning of the track. 

In the final of "Jiangsu's Got Foreign Talent", December 2010

In Autumn 2011 I even started to break into some Shanghai gigs with my old buddy “Diamond” Dave, who was in Shanghai on weekends at the time, because that's where his wife was based. We started playing cushy gigs at villa openings in various outer suburbs of Shanghai, where we got to sit down and play a few sets to no one in particular and take regular breaks to sip coffee and graze on the snack buffet. Those gigs were fun and challenging because Dave played a different style of music to the set Ian and I did; more like a fusion of Western Classics and Chinese Pop, and so Dave asked me to play bass instead of acoustic guitar. I say challenging not just because I had to get back into bass guitar again, but because Dave was the kind of guy who didn't believe in practice; he would rock up to the gig and hand me a few pieces of paper with song titles and chord sequences written on them, and then say “Ok, let's do soundcheck”. So it was often a case of sightreading/fumbling my way through the first verse and chorus, consolidating what I played the second time through, and then trying to pick out some harmonies over the last few choruses. In contrast, practice for Ian and I was all part of the fun, it was a good excuse to hang out on the weekend, whereas Dave, whose wife and daughter were in Shanghai while he worked Monday to Friday in Wuxi (an hour's train ride plus a suburban commute away), didn't really want to spend his Friday nights with me practising Eagles, Carpenters and C-pop.

Fumbling my way through a gig with Diamond Dave, autumn 2011

Just as I was about to leave Shanghai, in late 2012, I had one of those “almost made it” moments, playing a Christmas gig with a professional Brazilian performer from the Shanghai Jazz/Latin scene, Veridiana Pereira. I had gotten her contact details through Diamond Dave, during preparations for a previous gig that ended up falling through, and couldn't believe it when she told us she had the free time (this was a 23rd of December gig and Christmas is a busy time for gigs) and was willing to travel to Nanjing to sing with Ian and I. This was someone whom I'd seen on stage with the JZ Latin Band at the Shanghai Jazz festival just two months ago, and who was doing 3 or 4, 2000RMB+ gigs per week in and around Shanghai. Although I was very nervous when we first started practising (in the whole hour of spare time that we had before the gig), the gig went very well, and Ian, Veridiana and I pulled off some awesome 3-part harmonies. Alas, that has to this day been the only gig I have played with Veridiana, as she returned to Brazil for her Southern hemisphere summer break, and by the time she returned I had already moved away from Shanghai.

Prologue - The Zhuhai School of Rock

In 2013 I decided to stop trying to be a rockstar and focus on being a STEM Education Warrior. Nonetheless, I've still been able to mentor some student bands at the schools I work at, as part of my extra-curricular offerings, and I still do some duo and trio projects with other musically inclined colleagues now and again.

A special mention must go out to "Watts the Frequency", the student band that I started at Zhuhai International School in late 2014 with a handful of reluctant middle school kids, which matured along with the students until they graduated.  Eventually, we grew into a respected band in the Zhuhai music scene that got invited to play at charity festivals and popular expat bars. 

With Watts the Frequency, a.k.a WTF, at our school production rehearsal in June 2015

As you can see from the poster above, I've gone full "Dewey Finn" - blasting it out on stage with my students, and living vicariously through the band I was never quite able to put together myself.

So what does the future hold music-wise for me? Well, since moving to Ho Chi Minh City, I haven't managed to get much traction with either student or teacher bands, but I'll keep chipping away at it. Have I given up on the rockstar dream then? Well, not entirely. The Burns Marquee bass is still sitting in the corner of my apartment, and I'm just waiting for an excuse to dust it off. So if you know anyone looking for a bass player in Ho Chi Minh City, tell them to call me, or Facebook message me...or whatever app it is I'm supposed to be using these days :-)

A day on Chinese television: going behind-the-scenes on a dating show

(published in Map Magazine, Nanjing, August 2007) 

 

The prologue to this story begins on the balmy beaches of Goa, southwest India, when I was about 7 months into a one year trip around the world. There, I bought a “travel guitar” and began earning a keep as a musician by playing and singing easy listening classics in tourist bars and restaurants in exchange for beer and food. Since my music had been quite well received, and I had always wanted to be a rock star, I resolved to continue on this career path, and hopefully, start getting paid more than fish and beer. 

 

Singing for fish and beer with my brother Lachlan (right) in Goa, 2006 

Go East, Young Man

After nearly 4 months in India, I decided that it was time to head east again, and I flew out of New Delhi for China in early March 2006. Starting in Beijing and working my way south, I continued on my path towards “stardom”, by visiting my contacts around the country and attempting to peddle my travelling musician wares around various bars as I went. 

I didn't know it at the time, but destiny had set my rock star trajectory on a collision course for Jiangsu Television and their weekend variety show, “非常周末” (Feichang Zhoumo – Extremely Weekend). I got the gig somewhat by chance when I was visiting my friend Adam-Paul Smolak (a.k.a. AP), an American businessman who was at the time CEO of an on-line, English learning, “edu-tainment” company called “Enjoyabc.com”. 

AP and I met in Yunnan Province during an earlier trip to China in 2001. He had set up shop in Nanjing in 2003, and had worked hard at establishing his 关系(guanxi - connections) around town, so it was with envy that I watched his recent TV appearance on the Jiangsu Television talk show Small Talk as “CEO of the week”. AP assured me that getting on TV around here was easy, and true to his word, two days later he'd been asked to appear on a weekend variety show on the very same network. 

Me (far left) with AP (second from right) in Yunnan, 2001

The gig was for a foreigner who spoke a bit of Chinese to participate in a matchmaking game (one girl, two local lads, and a hapless foreigner) that was to be one segment of the show. AP wasn't really interested, and nor did he have the time, so he called out to me from his office, “Hey Benson, you said you wanted to be on TV, right?”. The rest was history. 

Comic Relief

The next day I met with the producer of the show, and my travel guitar found a use for itself again - I was to be pitched on the show as a travelling musician and sing a Chinese song to try to “woo” the beauty. On arrival at the TV station, I was ushered backstage and greeted by a scene of busy make-up artists and some rather attractive lasses practicing their dance moves. We were briefed on the format of the show, which was best described as semi-live and semi-scripted, and it quickly became clear that I was to be the comic relief. 

The scruffy traveller as comic relief

The two other guys were given trendy shirts to wear, while I was left in my scruffy travel clothes (they did, however, put me through the make-up production line, which I thought made me look like a zombie, but apparently turns out well under lights). After this I was made to wait backstage for several hours while they filmed the other parts of the show (we were last, and the audience was live), so I nervously strummed my guitar and tried to memorize the words to “对面的女孩儿看过来“ (Dui mian de nü hai kan guo lai – which translates roughly as “Girl over there, look over here”), and the rest of the Chinese punch lines that we'd agreed on, while sweating my make-up off. 

The basic plot followed that of most dating shows – the girl, looking for “Mr Right”, would ask us some tough questions and put us through a few “tests”, in order to determine which of us was worthy of taking her out on a date. During the first “test”, we had to see how many needles we could thread while being distracted by a couple of dancing “辣妹” (lamei - "hottie" - hey, that's the term I was told to use!), which, to my delight, turned out to be the above-mentioned attractive lasses. 

Getting down with the "hotties" on semi-live TV

The Eye of the Needle

I was instructed to give up on the needles and start dancing with the girls. To make up for this mishap, of course, I then had to offer to sing a song to the girl to try and win her heart, and my guitar magically appeared from offstage – cue the Chinese love song. When show time came and the lights went up, my Mandarin was hopelessly inadequate. I couldn't follow the flow of the show at all and often just had to hope that I was nodding and smiling at the right time. What's more, my song lyrics came out all wrong, and when I was given a chance to speak, I stumbled over my sentences. Thankfully, they had a skillful editor, and I think I came off quite well in the final product. 

After a few more elimination rounds, I was part of another pre-scripted gag where, in a Chinese play on words, I deliberately wrote the wrong (but identical-sounding) characters when we were asked to write the names of the four city gates of Nanjing (们 – plural for people, vs 门 - gate, both pronounced "men"). Simple stuff, but the Chinese audience seemed to love watching this “foreign comedian” sing, dance, and write Chinese in child-like handwriting. 

They're both pronounced "men" - get it?

Did I get the girl you ask? Alas no; that was scripted too. Not that I was overly upset. There wasn't even a dinner-for-two prize on offer for the winner. More to the point, I got the girl's phone number anyway! And so it was with much satisfaction that I collected my first paycheck in China – 200 Yuan and a free dinner for 8 hours' work (albeit mostly sitting around backstage practising guitar). It's a long road to the top, but you have to start somewhere, right? 

To see my appearance on the show, visit my Youtube channel. 

To read more about my failed attempts at Chinese rock stardom, see my post "Almost Famous: The hardest working man in Nanjing show business".

The STEM Warrior Awakens - surviving the Ya'an Earthquake and soul searching in the foothills of the Tibetan Plateau

Paro Taktsang, the monastery in Bhutan where Batman received his Ninja training and the inspiration for this post 

(from peregrineadventures.com)

It began as a low rumble in the distance. I was trying to make the most of the trickle of hot water coming out of the showerhead in my temporary home, a guesthouse in Anren old town; my suit jacket was laid out flat on the bed. It was a Saturday, but the school was holding an important event, so foreign teachers had to be on display in their Sunday best. Very quickly the rumble got louder and the floor started to shake left and right, almost in perfect simple harmonic motion, with an amplitude of almost a foot. Dust started to fall from the ceiling. I had barely managed to turn off the tap, throw a towel around myself and start contemplating my options when it stopped as suddenly as it started.

Outside on the street, people who had reacted faster than I did were already making phone calls, half-dressed or with make-up half-finished. There was no obvious damage to any buildings I could see, so I got dressed, dusted myself off (literally and metaphorically) and strolled down the road to school. It slowly began to dawn on me that I had just survived one of those infamous Sichuan earthquakes!

Ya'an Earthquake survivors, April 2013.

You would think the school would cancel the event, but Mr Kong, the Confucius International School's owner and namesake (he claimed to be a distant relative of the famous sage) would have none of it. The school was still standing, wasn't it? The government officials were already on their way (those that weren't stuck in Chengdu due to road closures, anyway). I didn't really care. I felt invincible, like Jeff Bridges in the opening scene of Fearless. We found out later that day that we had been about 80km from the epicentre, where things had been shaken up pretty badly. Nearly 200 people died. Luckily, the pandas were unscathed.

I'm sure we can all think of a close shave we've had in our lives that's made us reflect on the Stoic mantra "memento mori", and perhaps for a while, it changes the way we act. Or maybe it invokes a reflection on our direction in life, our chosen career, or our priorities. In my case, that change of direction had already happened 6 months earlier.

In the Spring of 2011, after teaching an Australian Engineering Diploma course in Shanghai for nearly 3 years, I was given 18 months or so notice that I would need to find a new job, due to the programme being discontinued (it had been a Queensland government initiative to funnel students from Shanghai vocational colleges into Queensland university engineering programmes, but hadn't achieved the intended results). I was in a fairly unique position of having some "runway" to reinvent myself. Should I try to transition back into engineering, perhaps with a Sino-Australian joint venture that would value my Chinese language skills? Look for similar programmes elsewhere around the world? Move into vocational education programme management? I cast the net wide.

The engineering options I was finding were underwhelming. I think the only offer I received was from an American company manufacturing water features (of all things) somewhere in Guangdong province. By the end of 2012, I was deciding between a programme coordinator job with an Australian mining training outfit in Ulaanbaatar, and a secondary Physics and Maths teaching position at Confucius. Despite the UB job paying double what Mr Kong was offering, once I did some research on the Mongolian capital's climate, the decision was made.

And so it came to pass that after a series of life and career decisions that began with me deciding to move to China, I found myself celebrating being alive and savouring the Sichuan spring sunshine with my new teaching colleagues at a street food vendor in Anren, China. Those first few months at Confucius were halcyon days - there was balmy weather, bonding with new friends who were all in the same boat and had nowhere else to go but the street food BBQ chicken wings stall of an evening (to date, those are still the best chicken wings I've ever eaten), the romantic notion of leaving the hustle and bustle of Shanghai behind for a quiet life in a Chinese village, and working hard but enjoying the process of learning to teach a new curriculum. 

The corner of the world where the events in this post took place. The Tibetan border is the dotted grey line, and Myanmar and India are at the bottom left of the map. 

That summer, my sister Sabella and her husband Michael came over to visit, and we embarked on a sometimes patience-testing but very unique road trip through the Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture to the west of Chengdu. As you can see on the map above, Chengdu is kinda like the last Han Chinese outpost in central-west China before you hit Tibetan cultural territory. Indeed, many independent travellers hang out in Chengdu's guesthouses and hostels while they wait for their Tibetan travel permits and train tickets to Lhasa, and if you're short on time, you can get your fix of authentic Tibetan food and culture in Chengdu's Little Lhasa without having to deal with all the red tape.

However, we decided to take matters into our own hands, and drive my wife Nan's Toyota Camry straight up the mountain to Kangding, for a taste of the real Tibet.

Oh what a feeling, Toyota! Taking a break with brother-in-law Michael at a mountain pass (altitude approximately 4000m) somewhere near Kangding

This turned out to be not such a good idea. The road conditions deteriorated markedly once we passed Ya'an (duh, there had just been a 7.0 earthquake there like 10 weeks earlier), and the road up the range was torturously slow, full of trucks crawling along in 2nd gear and really bad for the suspension. Although we couldn't cover as much ground as we wanted to, we made it as far "up" as Tagong, and drove some scenic routes around the Kangding region that afforded some great views of Mt Gongga (well, bits of it) and plenty of yaks.

Hanging with the locals, somewhere between Kangding and Tagong

Yaks doing their thing

When I returned to Anren and Confucius after that summer break, the honeymoon period gradually began to wane as the weather grew colder and the growing pains of joining a newly established school became evident. By February I found myself searching for jobs again, and by late April I had signed a contract with Zhuhai International School (ZIS) to begin a new chapter in my life as an IB (International Baccalaureate) Physics and Maths teacher, a role that I have thrived in to this day.

In fact, it was during the summer break after my first year at ZIS that I first began to refer to myself as a STEM Education Warrior. And that brings us back to the reason for this post - the STEM Warrior origin story. The ideological shift can probably be traced back even earlier than my Anren "hardship post", to when I first read Carl Sagan's "Demon Haunted World" in 2011, but just like Batman, I had to go into exile for a while and hone my skills before I could return to civilisation and execute the mission.

That 15 months I spent at Confucius International School was my equivalent of Batman's time at Paro Taktsang. It's where I cut my teeth and learned how to set up a physics lab programme. It's where I learned from maths and science teacher colleagues who'd done their training in rough parts of the UK how to engage a room full of teenagers who didn't share my enthusiasm for the subject. And it's the reason I was able to get into IB teaching, and ultimately, move to Vietnam, and why my career can now take me just about anywhere in the world. So thank you, Anren, for teaching me those valuable lessons. 

The "From the Archives" Series Episode 2 - Life on the road as a Chivas Regal Brand Ambassador

It all started with a business card. Or maybe it's the other way around. Maybe I was supposed to make the business card so that I'd start looking for ways to turn the vision it outlined into a reality. Depends on whether you believe in synchronicity or not I suppose:



I guess I should start by explaining the term "老外". In pinyin "laowai"; it's the word the Chinese use to refer to a foreigner, sort of in a tongue in cheek way; like "farang" in Thailand, "gwai lo" in Hong Kong, "gringo" in Latin America, and “gaijin” in Japan. And so "老外" (Laowai) Extra­ordinaire (24h Service), then, is like a Chinese version of the "Anything, Anywhere, Anytime" slogan coined by The Goodies (I’ve had this printed on a business card too!) -­ referring to the kind of foreigner who hangs around developing countries, and perhaps, some would say, capitalising on their foreign­ness, picks up all sorts of odd jobs where talent and actual qualifications and experience take a back seat to the requirement for a foreign face. The "socialite and celebrity for hire" line, then, follows from participating in these kinds of jobs and building up contacts over a period of time. Some of the bizarre requests that I'd had and jobs that I'd done during my 18 months in Nanjing (see previous post) -­ which made me realise that it was actually possible to achieve D­-grade celebrity status as a Chinese­-speaking foreigner if you chased it -­ were the inspiration for that section of the card.

Socialite and Celebrity For Hire

In March 2009, a colleague of mine who was doing some part-time work for the British Council forwarded me a job ad. They were seeking a Chinese-speaking caucasian male to give presentations about Chivas Regal 12YO Whisky and run Whisky tasting sessions for Chinese customers, all while wearing a kilt. I didn’t think twice. The gist of my email application was something like "my last name is Wallace, I speak Chinese and I like whiskey. And my legs will look great in a kilt". I'm pretty sure I sent them a copy of the business card too.

I remember telling Nan (my wife, who was my girlfriend at the time) about the job and saying “now that’s what ‘celebrity for hire’ means” (she had been involved in helping me translate the final version of the card after we just met, and was ridiculing me at the time for calling myself a celebrity for hire). It was almost as if the business card had become a self-­fulfilling prophecy. At the end of the shows, I even got to shake hands with the guests as they left, and sign Chivas gift packs. It was all so wonderfully D­-grade-celebrity­-style cheesy.

Putting on my cheesiest smile, 2009

Showing a bit of knee - what's under that kilt?

"Dr Chivas" in the Whiskey Lab, circa 2010

That ain't workin'...

Now, while flying around China on your weekends drinking Chivas in a kilt might sound like fun (and it was), it was also a lot of hard work. I had to learn a fairly complicated Chinese script with a lot of whiskey vocabulary, and be able to deliver it all at a sharp and witty pace alongside a Chinese MC. Often, my Saturdays would involve an 8am flight to a random Chinese city, followed by a dress rehearsal, then three 45 minute shows in the afternoon/evening. The day would then finish with the obligatory marathon Chinese dinner/drinks/karaoke, which would often involve more Chivas.

The job was, of course, not without its perks (as if free single malt whisky wouldn’t be enough of a perk for many people reading this). After being selected for the job, we had to undergo a whisky training day, which included sampling fine whiskies from all over the world, including a 25-year-old and even a 50-year-old whisky. To match the brand's image, we usually stayed in nice hotels too.

Frank, the Chivas product manager for China, was often quite generous with the company account, even after I’d finished all the shows. One summer, a friend was visiting Shanghai, and I was looking for a way to impress him with my “man about town” connections, which hadn’t yet developed to the point they once had in Nanjing. Thankfully, Frank came to the rescue. I casually inquired what he was doing that night (it was a Saturday after all), knowing full well that, as a man in his position, he was likely to have tickets to some alcohol sales promotional event involving lots of models serving free booze.

My hunch proved to be correct, and Frank got us tickets to a Bacardi pool party, complete with models in bikinis splashing each other in a pool, and lots of Shanghai’s beautiful people (a.k.a. “glitterati”, according to the invite for the next party that we were given as we left) mingling with expensive drinks while DJs spun subtly mixed retro tunes. Unfortunately, the Bacardi cocktails were also priced for the glitterati, but Frank, bless his heart, forbade us to pay money for a competitor’s drink, so he graciously bought yet another bottle of Chivas 18YO (in addition to the many that he'd bought for the crew after Chivas shows), which the three of us proceeded to polish off. And then it hit me that the final piece of the puzzle on my business card was now in place – I had become a Shanghai socialite!

And not just because I found myself socialising with the young, well-to-do Shanghai hipsters who ran the advertising agencies. Indeed, in working for Chivas I found myself coming into occasional contact with C-grade celebrities - the kind who were actually scraping a living out of their celebrity hustle and making regular appearances on Shanghai television. As an example, I went through my initial "ambassador training" with Dantes Dailiang, a French musician based in Shanghai who writes songs in Chinese - this video summarises his career nicely. Alas, I wasn't able to make the transition from D-grade celebrity to C-grade celebrity myself (see Table 1) before I left Shanghai in early 2013. 

 Table 1: Celebrity Grading Rubric (produced by author).

	Income	Media Exposure	UK football league equivalent
A-grade	Stupid money	Blockbuster Movies, Madison Square Gardens, etc.	Premier League
B-grade	Enough to live the stereotypical “rich” life - 6-7 figures	Straight to video movies, regular gigs at large festivals etc.	Championship
C-grade	Full-time hustle, enough to live well	Regional TV stations, indie films/albums	League 1-2
D-grade	Side hustle	Occasional regional TV appearances, Youtube Channel	Part-time National League Conference

Questioning the trade-offs

The novelty of working for Chivas as a Brand Ambassador - “customer mentoring” they called it – while wearing a kilt, sporran and long socks began to wear off after a while. Usually, we had to present and mingle with the clients in Chinese, but sometimes they wanted us to pretend that we didn't speak Chinese (presumably because it would seem more plausible that a whiskey expert from Scotland wouldn't know Chinese), which was surprisingly hard to do and could even be annoying at times. Without the challenge of delivering a Chinese script and wowing everybody with my Chinese, waiting backstage in a kilt, smiling for the camera and having to pretend to rely on Chinese colleagues for translations that I could do better myself got a bit stale after a while, and around about the spring of 2011 I began questioning the loss of free time vs extra money tradeoff. Sometimes they asked me to pretend I was from Scotland too, which could get tricky when audience members started asking too many questions. Here's my hilarious attempt at a posh accent - I hastily made the video after a Chivas contact invited me to apply for a Ballantine's promotional gig. In case you can't tell, I was reading from a teleprompter. 

After a hard day at the office, circa 2011

The magic returned; though, when I got a call from a different events management company, asking me to be the Brand Ambassador at a series of Chivas 25YO fine dining events. Apart from the fact that I got to drink 25-year-old whisky all evening, it was a sweet deal because the kilt was replaced with a suit, and I spent less time on stage and more time socialising with guests. After the initial nerves of the first night, subsequent shows were basically like getting paid to have fun. Sometimes they would even bust out cigars at the end of the dinner. And that's before I even start talking about the great nights out at some awesome jazz clubs in Beijing and Chengdu that were had with the Chinese jazz musicians who came along on the tour to provide the live music for the evening. 

All aboard the good ship Chivas 25!

The name's Wallace...Benson Wallace

It's a hard life being a D-grade celebrity.

Slange Var - it's Scottish for "Cheers".

Out on the town in Chengdu, 2012

Like a cricketer enjoying a return to form in their golden years, during that final 2012 tour of duty I was at the top of my Chivas Ambassador game, and I was putting runs in the bank while I still could. Sure, charging 3000RMB to go drink 25-year-old whiskey and socialise with rich people for a few hours was a great gig, but like all good things, it had to come to an end. One could argue that leaving Shanghai when I did killed my momentum and prevented me from making the leap to true C-grade celebrity status(!), but if I'm honest with myself, the writing was on the wall anyway. I could see it in the final Chivas training session that I attended, where I met new ambassador recruits who were younger and hungrier than I was, with better Chinese, and who I'm sure were willing to do the job for much less than I was. The job, much like the product it was promoting, was becoming commoditised, and it was time for me to stop chasing fame and start focusing on something more meaningful and sustainable.

Today, my kilt hangs on the wall (metaphorically speaking) as I sit by the fireplace (also metaphorical) sipping my single malt whiskey in a highball glass with a spherical steel ice cube (that part is real). If anything, "The Chivas Years" have given me some interesting stories to tell when sharing a scotch with someone. So look me up next time you're in my part of the world - I have a second steel ice cube ready for such occasions. Slange Var everybody!