Amy Adoyzie

From Razorcake #38.

Survival of the Punkest

It's been more than a decade. More than ten years of sweatin' it at shows, flipping through bins of vinyl and inundating my eardrums to maxed-out amps and speakers. I've been addicted since I was 15-years-old, constantly on the prowl for my next auditory fix, trying to recapture the intense high of discovering a new band.
It's like a first kiss. Your heart beats impossibly fast, gushing blood to every square millimeter of your body. Your skin tingles and you step lightly, like you've grown wings. Everything glows as if life had been dipped in a radioactive haze.
The more time spent chasing this intoxicating euphoria, the easier it is to fall into the trap of cynicism. Everyone knows that jaded old punk dude, who's fed up with the lack of good music and won't stop reminiscing about the good ol' days. I was worried that I was crawling down that path in my geriatric stage.
Eventually the same power chords and songs about girls just don't cut it. Everything sounded the same and bands were touring through all the time. I was spoiled on music and nothing less than Greg Cartwright would suffice. I'd whine about not wanting to go to a show because I might have to take two busses or the bike ride was going to be more than 30 minutes.
Then I found myself in a developing rural Chinese town.
Folks still haul buckets hanging from a sloping pole across their shoulders, like the old man who comes by every morning hollering, “Toe–fah.” He sells tofu out of two small dangling wooden shelves. His deep and scruffy voice carries in between the buildings and up into my third story window, toe-fah, and it's the only live music I hear daily.

Daniel called, instead of a hello he said, “Four six nine eight.”
“Hi Daniel.”
“Four six nine eight. Si liu jiu ba.” Jiu ba, depending on your tones can mean either the numbers nine eight or bar. Daniel continued, “It's the Four six bar.”

“Okay?” I was puzzled.
“Or you can flip it around. Ba jiu liu si. Eight nine six four is 1989 June fourth.” It's an infamous day in Chinese history involving something that starts with the letter “T” and ends in the sound “quare.” Look it up.
“What's this mean?” I asked.

“It means you're coming to Changsha and we're gonna go to this place because it's supposed to be a punk bar.”
That was all I needed to hear.
Door-to-door, from my place to Changsha number one middle school, it's a five-hour ride on busses and motorbike taxis. I made the trek without even knowing what band was playing, or even if a band was playing. Just the prospect of live music was enough to have me endure the ass-numbing trip. In the past seven months, I've caught two shows in China- both of which were in cities that are plane-rides away. When you're starved, you'll go to great lengths to eat.
Changsha is a developing city wanna-be mired in old school China dilapidation. The well-known bars in town blasts Top-40s from five years ago and Chinese folks only go to the clubs to get shitfaced on cheap liquor and then vomit all over the sidewalk. I had never heard of a place to catch live music.
Daniel knew the owner of the club, but he didn't know he knew. Fang Yao is one of the IT guys at the same school that Daniel works at. The punk rock double-life doesn't just inflict those of us who had buttoned-down office day jobs in the States, it's an universal secret superhero identity. They were surprised to see each other across the bar.
Fang Yao is an unassuming and eager dude, who opened the Four Six Bar a year ago. When asked about why he decided to start this club, he strained through his limited English vocabulary and uttered a great understatement, “It's my hobby.”
Setting up a punk club in China isn't like collecting stamps or kite flying. It is an endeavor not to be taken lightly, especially in a country with state-controlled media that euphemizes social unrest and government corruption, and that's when it reports it.
Remember when punk rock was dangerous? Like you were worried about your livelihood and the welfare of yourself and your family because of the music you listened to?
Nope, me neither. I haven't been around that long. I wasn't even born yet when mohawks were sprouting across the heads of the socially disenfranchised.
Being called a weirdo and a freak because you had green hair in high school doesn't count, especially since punk rock has been dolled up, comodified by tattooed rockers on MTV's TRL and sold back to us by clerks with heavy eyeliner at Hot Topic.
Dangerous? Not unless you fear choking on your own vomit after a long night of chugging Sparks and eating shrooms at the Fest.
But in the Four Six Bar, there was a flicker in the air flashing below the dim lights and within clouds of cigarette smoke. In a country where you're constantly surrounded by a mass of people, we found solace at an underground club with a couple dozen punk kids who were seeking the same escape. It felt like a secret, a place for like-minded folks who were all there for the music and the message, and it overwhelmed me. I felt like I was 15-years-old again, touched for the very first time.

“This is a shitshow!” Daniel hollered at me over the choppy drone of buzzing guitars. We watched a group of shirtless dudes flail at each other while the hardcore band, Last Chance of Youth, blasted through their set. I had never been so stoked to see a pack of sweaty yellow bodies running into each other, like their sanity depended on how hard they could mindlessly jerk around. It was punk rock poetry in motion.
I had to talk to Fang Yao about this came to be.

I've written about how laughable it was when friends back home would ask if I've seen any good shows because, in Huarong, k*ds still defecate in the streets and that's as good of a show as I get. China isn't one to disappoint, while I interviewed Fang Yao on the dry lawn across the way from his club, a 5-y**r-old g*rl squatted five-feet from us and sprinkled the grass with her p*ss. She reminded us of where we were.
Even though we just watched a band calling for revolution with a record titled Kill or Be Killed, we were still in a communist country where you watch what you say and to whom.
The preface: Fang Yao is an awesome dude, but there was an undertone of reticence in his answers, which I could sense even through a translator. It's understandable considering that speaking with me might jeopardize the future of his club. He didn't know who I was and simply took my word that I wrote for a punk zine.
It began years ago, Fang Yao was an 18-year-old university student when he discovered Nirvana, which was a gateway band to Green Day, The Ramones and the Sex Pistols. His friends shared a love of music and together they delved into the underground scene that was seeping out of Beijing.
My students are singularly obsessed with contemporary pop, Chinese kids have been born and bred to think alike, so how did he deviate from this?
“Pop music is shit,” Fang Yao's replied. He confessed he was also a victim of the pop-listening populace, “but there are many Chinese students that will listen to different music but they don't talk about it.”

Was it difficult to open the club? What types of obstacles are there?
“It is difficult. It's expensive. But I like it. It's my passion.” We were surrounded by a small groups of show-goers who spilled onto the lawn, nursing warm beers as an elderly woman waited nearby to collect the empty Tsingtao bottles. “So many people love pop music. Only a little people like punk music, so it's hard to get people to come. It's too underground.”
He feels that the direction of punk in China will continue to grow “because the music belongs to the world. Because they will be more free to listen to it. The Chinese people will get to know more music.”
When asked about the name of the club, the historical political implications of it, all he said was that it sounded good and “you can think whatever you want.” He was holding back.
Lots of Americans enjoy punk rock for its message, what about him?

“I like good music and the message of peace and love. I'm against war.” I pried a bit more and mentioned that the majority of punk music is anti-establishment and he replied, “I know there are a lot of punk bands that are against the government, but there are many types of punk music.”
We also talked about Brain Failure, a Chinese punk band who worked with a jeans company in an advertising campaign. I explained the notion of selling out and how in the States there are lots of punk kids who feel that it's a bad thing.
“It's just for survival,” he explained. “In other countries they have money, but we don't.” When a punk band in China gets plucked out of obscurity and a multinational company (who uses sweatshop labor in their country) wants to throw money at them to use their song, it's praised as an accomplishment. This ought to give first-world punk kids a pause for thought, that perhaps the notion of selling-out is based on privilege and inane scene politics.
I felt so young and naïve, scribbling notes beneath the orange glow of the streetlamp, while Fang Yao struggled to express the attitude and essence of our collective punk music collection in English. It was and is about survival, but the message wore thin, like a threadbare band t-shirt, as I grew older and more content with my discontent.
But punk rock is still a threat. Just read Fan Yao's final words.

“Punks not dead,” he declared.

[UPDATE]
If you're into a publication that was once described to me as the Reader's Digest for the feel-good left, you might find yourself enamored with The Utne Reader.
I had never heard of the magazine until a few months ago when they asked to reprint my column. When you flip open the September/October issue and turn to the “Mixed Media” section, you'll find my story about discovering a punk club in Changsha, Hunan.
I'm pretty stoked about being published in the Utne, even though they edited out the part about the significance of the club's name, re-titled the story “The Prodigal Punk,” and that the subheadline says “Visiting a Chinese club revitalizes a jaded scenester”. I've never been called a prodigal scenester before, and it doesn't feel that as bad as it sounds.
In addition, apparently I have a very authoritative voice when it comes to the topic of punk rock in China. As a companion piece to my story, I was interviewed for the UtneCast, where I sound like the premiere expert on all things China, loud and fast. Like woah!
Daniel says that I sound like a foreign correspondent on the front lines. Front lines of what? you ask. Front lines of hanging out with the Chinese! Cause they's dangerous.

The audio is pretty intense because Leif and I spoke about my experience for almost an hour and he had to condense it into a 10-minute segment. He cut and spliced and sped me up. I assure you that I was not tweaking out during the interview. Maybe.
Enjoy!