The Strange Afterlife of an American Football Story from China
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Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we'll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what's happening in China's politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you this week from Beijing. It is great to be back again. I am at the home of Michael Cherney, the home slash studio of the artist Michael Cherney, who I will talk about a little more in the recommendations section. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

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This week on Seneca, I've got a show that's part sports saga, part cultural exchange experiment, part IP drama, and all heart. You may remember a delightful 2014 piece in the New Republic called Year of the Pigskin, in which journalist Christopher Beam told the story of the Chongqing Dockers, a ragtag group of young Chinese men who fell in love with American football, and with the help of a charismatic American coach, they

improbably clawed their way to a national championship in the newly formed American Football League of China. We talked to Chris about it back when the piece came out, though regrettably I was unavailable at the time. I think it was in Taipei because my dad was sick. And David Moser stepped in to do the interview. Anyway, it was funny. It was touching. It was actually pitch perfect for its time. It was a time when I think a story of cross-cultural camaraderie felt both possible and hopeful.

Fast forward to today and, you know, that same story, well, it's found in Unexpected Second Life, not as a Hollywood film, despite two failed attempts involving Sony and Paramount. Chris Pratt and even John Cena were attached to it at various points, but as a Chinese movie called Clash, produced by ITE and

and released in Chinese theaters, I think it was in May of this year. And while it lifts quite liberally from Chris's article, it ends up telling a very different story, one that says as much about the current state of US-China relations as it does about the evolution of China's own popular culture and maybe even its soft power ambition. Chris joins me today to talk about both stories, the one he lived and wrote a decade ago and

And the one that got, well, retold and maybe even repurposed for Chinese audiences. We'll talk about the original Chongqing Dockers, the brief but earnest Hollywood flirtation with a feel-good co-production with China, and what it felt like to see his reporting transformed into something that is somehow both interesting

Alien and affectionate, I guess. Along the way, we're going to reflect on what this whole improbable journey says about friendship, authorship, and the fading dream of a cultural meeting point between China and the U.S. Chris Beam, welcome back to Seneca, man. Thanks so much for having me, Kaiser. So, Chris, I would be remiss if I didn't start off by telling you...

about the fact that your story back then in the year of the pigskin contributed a really important concept that my family still uses to this day, my kids especially, and that is Chinese YOLO. Huh.

You know what I'm talking about, right? That kid from CN named Wheezy, his kid spent a year at Rutgers. I think he quit after he was robbed at gunpoint or something. He was like slipping on crack vials. So he claimed, yeah. You got to share that little story. What is Chinese Yolo? Well, basically, this was one of the players who came in kind of halfway through the season.

as a ringer because the team was really struggling at the beginning. They didn't have the skills. They didn't really have the equipment. And then they bring in a bunch of new players halfway. And one of them is this...

wealthy kind of international guy who calls himself Wheezy. He'd been studying at Rutgers for a bit and claimed that he had dropped out because he'd been held up while, you know, walking down the street in New Jersey. And I was asking him like,

Did you feel like that must have been a tricky decision to drop out of college? And he was like, no, man, like my diploma or my life.

You only live once, YOLO. Which was amazing to me because that's actually the opposite of what YOLO usually means. Right, right. Thus, Chinese YOLO. You only live once, so live very, very carefully. Right, right. That's fantastic. I felt like that was my strongest personal connection to the piece, so I thought I'd bring that up first. But let's take us back to the beginning.

How did you first hear about this unlikely team of American-style football players in Chongqing? And at what point did you realize you had a story that was, I think it was your own words, you said, so ridiculous it had to be true? Yeah. I first heard about it because I had a bit of a personal connection. So I went to China on a Luce scholarship through the Henry Luce Foundation. Right.

They basically send Americans to different countries around Asia for a year. They set you up with a job, language classes, travel stipend. So through that program, I met this guy, Chris McLaurin, who was doing the scholarship the year after I was. And he was based in Chongqing, working at an investment company, I think. And I heard that he had started...

coaching American football team because he himself had played football at University of Michigan. He'd been he played tight end and had been kind of on track to play professionally. But then he he got a shoulder injury that in his career. So anyway, he

I flew down to Chongqing to visit Chris and the team was having some practices. So I decided to check it out. And it just very quickly became clear that this was a story that would interest American readers because it was a sport that we're all familiar. The Americans are all familiar with transposed into this place where people are, you know,

know very little about it, if anything. And everything they do know about American football comes from American media. So that's kind of what captivated me in the first place was that these guys, the guys who were playing in Chongqing,

They had gotten into American football not by watching NFL games, but by watching like Rudy and the Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard. They'd come to this through...

almost like a two tier abstraction of what the game actually is. And they, they were obsessed with it. They loved it. They, they loved like the, the trappings of it and the look and the attitude. They just didn't know how to play. So to me, this was just like an amazing setup. That was funny. It touched on all these, um,

issues of cultural differences. A lot of these guys were part of China's sort of rising middle class at the time. So it just seemed like a way to get at a lot of interesting aspects of what was happening in China at the time. So you wrote an Atlantic piece about your story having been finally made into this Chinese film. And you mentioned in there that the original piece that you pitched to the New Republic was

You got it greenlit because you described it as little giants, but with adult Chinese men. Do you remember exactly how you pitched it more formally? I mean, what, what, what do you think, what did you think the story was going to be before it turned into, you know, what, what it became? Yeah.

I think initially it just seemed it just seemed funny. Like these guys were just having a blast, almost like doing drag, like, you know, wearing football like pads and uniforms, you know, walking around like tackling each other. LARPing.

in a way that like was not the way you're supposed to do it. And I just, I mean, this, this is what interested me. This is what fueled a lot of the stories I wrote in China was like,

people doing new things and kind of like trying on new identities. And this was part of the larger narrative of China kind of opening up to the world, getting more access to information and culture about how things are elsewhere and kind of

having disposable income that allows them to that gives them free time and allows them to kind of pick and choose who they want to be so to me it seemed pretty clear that this would be a great lens into that topic in addition to just being funny like one of those first practices I went to the

this character, this guy who, who calls himself fat baby. Oh yeah. Fat baby and Marco and Figo and Wheezy, all these crazy names. Yeah. Like fat baby. Like that was not my name for him. He, he insisted we call him that. He walked onto the field one morning after like a big night of hot pot. And he just said, my asshole is burning. Oh,

And I was like, okay, this is, there's a story here. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it was too good to be true. These guys, I mean, it's, you know, I I've said this before of not just that this piece, but remember you, this really excellent cruise ship piece. And I mean, I'll link to that and to the podcast that we did about, about that. But I always find like you were able to ride this fine line between an appreciation for the, you know, rather conspicuous absurdity in the China that we both knew back then and

And, you know, the kind of the gooey middle, you know, there's like a there's a heart, right? Something that I actually I think that's what makes it all work. I don't. How do you go about balancing, you know, humor and respect with, you know, some gentle ribbing and piss taking when you're portraying these guys? I thought that's, you know, that was your skill. This is why I think everyone really liked your stuff back then.

Oh, thanks. I guess it probably came from just doing my best to see it from everyone's perspective. Like I, you know, when I first got to China, I didn't I didn't speak the language at all. Right. But I tried to I did my best to kind of ramp up as quickly as I could. Like,

I was taking Mandarin classes. I did the IUP program at Tsinghua. And so when I started following this team, I was already halfway through my year at IUP. And so in some ways, I was like at the height of my language abilities, which I think, I mean, I could never speak Chinese.

Chongqing Hua, the local dialect. But, you know, like just being able to be immersed and spend ridiculous amounts of time with people and get to know them as human beings was, I think, the key to it. Like,

As you know, it's harder and harder in journalism to have the budget, to have the time, to really immerse yourself in a world. But I think that's the only way that you're going to understand where they're coming from while also being able to kind of like appreciate the absurdity of the situation. And to be clear, like...

The Americans in this story come off as just as ridiculous as as some of the Chinese characters, like, as you know, a lot of expats living in China are kind of quirky people.

and strange and um i hope that that part comes through too yeah let's talk about in particular about chris mclaren i mean he's a huge presence in the original piece that you wrote um in the new republic he's a real born leader he's a coach he's this motivator and then occasionally apparently a projectile vomiter uh what kind of report do you guys build over the course of the reporting because you know i said he said in the atlantic piece at the top of that that you'd become quite good friends in the years since tell me a little bit about him

Yeah. I mean, Chris is, he's one of these people who you kind of want to be president, just like a very decent human being who has every reason and every opportunity to, to be a dick, but isn't somehow. Um, he, that's all I want in my president. He, um,

He went to Michigan, played football. He did a White House fellowship for a while. He studied at London School of Economics and then came to China on the Luce Scholarship. Yeah, we...

You can't spend a year on and off with someone writing about them and not develop a rapport. In this case, he really just opened up his world and let me hang out with him, hang out with the team. He spoke in a very unguarded way about the team and his background and his life. I mean, this is, as you understand, when you're reporting a story, it's

you can both develop a kind of friendship or relationship with someone, but you're also playing the role of the journalist. So, I mean, this is what Jenna Malcolm talks about at great length in The Journalist and the Murderer. Like, you can't,

fully invest yourself in a friendship really until the piece is done. And so I remember as I was finishing up the story, he really wanted to read it and I kept saying no. Right. And I was trying to maintain that distance, but

After it published, that was no longer an issue. He was okay with the way it turned out. And he ended up doubling down on American football in China. He was building this league, this national league. He ended up

up staying in Chongqing for a bit and then moving to Shanghai and consulting for the NFL for a bit. So he ended up spending a few years in China trying to promote and build American football there, which, as you can imagine, ended up failing, essentially. Yeah.

You write about the Dockers and their attraction to football as a kind of masculine ideal. You know, you got that, you know, the chest bumps and all the trash talk and the war paint. How did you interpret that longing for manliness in the context of, you know, the China of the time? And do you think it was more about westernness? Was it more about like a specifically western idea of masculinity? I think it probably was. I mean, obviously there's, you know, there's plenty of Chinese

of Chinese representations of, of masculinity and, you know, you know, warrior ethos or like,

you know, Wu Xia, knighthood, whatever you want to call it. Yeah, I kept thinking that there would be like an inverse version of this movie or this story where, you know, there's a bunch of goofy Americans trying to do wushu and, you know, the Chinese are back home sort of yucking it up, you know, them and they're aping. But yeah, go on. But I,

But I do I do think that American movies and particularly American sports movies have a version of masculinity that's about aggression, but also but like smart aggression and like camaraderie above all that that really resonated with these guys. I don't I don't know that.

I mean, it was interesting that football was almost part of a package, like something that I hope came through in the original article is that a lot of these guys listen to hip hop.

a lot of them kind of like dressed in a way that's sort of like, you know, American, like, like black urban, like, you know, they would, they kind of embraced certain aspects of American culture that they felt like resonated with them. And so this is kind of what I meant by, by drag. Like it was almost like,

they weren't seeing this particular version of, of masculinity or self-presentation in Chinese culture. And so they, they I think seized on the American one. I would also add that at the time there was a little bit of a prestige element, like people around China were,

would would kind of idealize America or worship America in a way that was, you know, a little oversimplified. And you probably see a lot less of that now. But it wasn't it was a moment where I think people saw this as I won't I won't use the word like superior, but like aspirational. Sure, sure. Yeah.

I mean, there's nothing, yeah, I mean, that's nothing to be embarrassed about in that it was of the moment of the time. There is this moment where one of the guys on the team says, you know, football isn't like any other sport. You can't depend on one person. It's interesting that they see in American football a kind of de-individualization, you know, that it was like communal, right? I mean, they recognize something in that team spiritedness of it, which

which was pretty cool, I thought. Yeah. One thing I would add there is that I'm sure you know, at the time there was this narrative in China that China's not good at team sports. Right. You know, they excel at swimming or track. Yeah, exactly. But the, you know, why does the Chinese national soccer team suck so much?

And a lot of people would say it's because China had become too individualized. They didn't emphasize teamwork enough. And so it was interesting that instead of falling back on soccer or some other kind of international team sport, these guys seized on American football specifically as, I guess, a...

Yeah. And it's another one of these things that I look back and I'm kind of regret that things took out this more nationalistic turn. Eventually this love of, of Americana, you know, kind of fades right around the time of that story. You know, it'd be, it, you start to see this shine coming off America, but,

But anyway, everyone should go back and read that story. But I want to advance our conversation here and talk about, you know, the film that wasn't, the film that wasn't actually twice. And then the film that actually was, right? You know, so the story went through, I remember, I remember hearing like right after this got, I read it somewhere and I passed it around. I said, oh my God, Chris's story got optioned by Sony. We all thought it was a huge deal. We're like, oh, well, I'm,

I have to say, I mean, there were many of us who pronounced your piece in 2014, the best China story of the year. I mean, it was so heartwarming and it was, you know, it was great. It felt like it captured something about the essence of that time. But yeah, so Steve Tisch, Chris Pratt, there was even a moment when the NFL was quite enthusiastic about it. What was the wildest

meeting you had in that whole Hollywood roller coaster thing. The wildest conversation or meeting that you had during that. So...

I myself didn't have that many crazy meetings. I got one phone call from the producer who wanted to put the deal together. I was in Beijing and he was like, hey, do you have an agent? And I said, no. And he was like, great, which probably should have been a red flag. But, you know, he he put it together. He lined up the rights to the article. He lined up the rights to Chris McLaurin's article.

And he got Sony on board and specifically this production company called Escape Artists.

Chris McLaurin himself was the one who had all the crazy meetings. Like Sony literally sent a limo to his house near Detroit to his mom's house. He and, and, and flew him and his mom to LA where another limo picked them up at the airport. They met with Steve Tisch. They met with other producers. An executive asked Chris if he himself had considered the

acting. And I think he Chris felt like this was kind of a game changer for for him, but also for American football in China. Like he ended up meeting with NFL execs who wanted to talk about promoting the sport there. So the thing to understand is that

2014 was basically the peak of froth when it came to U.S.-China cooperation. Everyone saw this as an opportunity to essentially create a new industry in China, which is just unimaginable amounts of money.

that could potentially be kicking around if you could, you know, replicate what the NBA did there, for example. So, you know, there was certainly like enthusiasm on Chris's part about like teaching people in China about football. There was also a lot of enthusiasm from executives about making a shit ton of money in China.

As there always is. Yeah. So what brought that to an end? What was the source of, I mean, was it just the victim of politics? Was it, I mean, because this is around the same time that we start seeing this serious decline in things like co-productions between Hollywood and Beijing or studios in China. This is around the time that, you know, obviously,

US-China relations start to sour right around that time. Was it a victim of geopolitics or what?

What do you think brought this to an unpleasant conclusion? So Sony hired a screenwriter, a guy named Ian Helfer, to write a draft of the script. And it was largely loyal to the original article. At least that's what Ian told me. And he sent in the draft and the feedback that he got, he said, was positive and

But then apparently they sent the script over to Sony's China office. And again, this is Ian Halfer's version. Apparently Sony's China office vetoed it. And they were basically like, Chinese audiences don't want to see an American protagonist teaching Chinese people about stuff, which, you know, you'd think that would be someone that they would consult personally.

earlier and have that conversation, but apparently that didn't happen. They were okay with Matt Damon coming over and saving China from hordes of monsters on the Great Wall? But with help from plenty of Chinese stars, as I understand it. I don't think I ever saw the Great Wall. Neither. I'm just

But yeah, so that, I mean, there were other factors that I can only speculate about. You know, the Sony hack happened in late 2014, where there was the disclosure of all these embarrassing emails, executives got fired. You were a victim of geopolitics. It was just, you know, the Kim family rather than Obama. Totally.

I gotta say, though, Chris, the tone of your Atlantic piece is really forgiving toward, you know, this movie Clash, even though they, you know, they clearly lifted the idea. Talk about what it was like to see that film. I mean, you actually flew to Rotterdam. You flew, you know, you bought a ticket, you flew over there to see the film open at a Rotterdam festival. What did it feel like to watch this thing?

I mean, it was obviously surreal to see this team and these people who I'd become so familiar with depicted on screen. I saw it twice. The first time, I would say I didn't really like it. I think I was just kind of annoyed at the whole...

depiction. It's not that it's not that it was bad. I think I just couldn't really get out of my own head and notice all the things that, that didn't quite line up. But the second time I watched it the next day, I, I had a much more positive reaction. I mean, this is, it's just a, it's a classic sports movie. It's formulaic. It hits all the beats of, of any other sports movie you've seen, but it, it, it,

the elements are Chinese and specifically like local to Chongqing. And I think, I mean, the differences from the original story are to me fascinating. Like instead of an American coach, they now have a Mexican coach.

And the backstory of the Mexican coach is that he wanted to play professional football in the U.S., but they didn't let him. They forced him to be a water boy because in the U.S., they only let Mexicans have subordinate roles.

Which is kind of true. I mean, this is accurate commentary on the Trump administration. Not totally off. So that was one big change. So the protagonist instead is a young Chinese guy. He delivers tofu for his family's tofu shop.

His dream is to play American football. The main conflict is between him and his father. And that's true of the other characters, too. They kind of have these mundane middle class conflicts. You know, one of them named Rock wants to wants to connect with his daughter. Another guy is having like performance issues with his wife and wants to become more manly. I mean, these are problems and storylines that are

America has nothing to do with it. And I think that the first time around, I was kind of irritated that it wasn't about international cooperation or cross-cultural communication or anything. But the second time, I realized that this is just its own thing. There is one American character, and that's the villain, which is, as you'd expect, kind of the way...

Chinese movies have changed over the years. Americans are no longer as welcome as the heroes. You make the astute observation that in a way, both you and the director Wu Tao, you were packaging the same kind of raw material for two very different audiences. Did that realization come to you while you were watching Clash? Was it brewing before? Did it

Did it take some reflection after watching the movie to come to that? I think that that occurred to me later once I really kind of sat down to write the piece and think about it. I mean, you know, like it did force me to rethink a lot of the pieces I wrote.

which at the time felt very organic. You know, I was just writing about what interested me and what caught my attention and what my friends were talking about. And obviously this was a hyper American cosmopolitan perspective, which was also the perspective that most American magazine readers were interested in. So there was a real alignment there. I think now watching this movie again,

in 2025 and seeing the same story, but just from a fully kind of Chinese perspective, it, it made me,

rethink a lot of those pieces. And it's not that it, cause you know, like you said, I wrote about the cruise ship industry. I wrote about standup comedy in China. Yeah. That was people too. Yeah. There's a piece of the magazine that the standup piece was in. I can't remember. That was in the New York times magazine. Right, right, right, right. And you know, all these, all these pieces I, I'm still proud of, but yeah,

I do think it's undeniable that it's the perspective of a white guy in Beijing kind of looking around and being like, hey, what's something that I and my readers can get a handle on? And then writing about that. Well, I mean, that sounds admirably self-aware and all that, but I think that that's how I felt about it too. I'm not a white guy. I mean, I just felt like

something drew me to this piece and to the Atlantic piece and to your reflections on this. Something made me immediately want to write to you and get you back on the show to talk about this. And that, I think, I haven't tried to articulate this before, so I'm sort of thinking about it just now, but I feel like

It's because I had that same kind of fantasy of cross-cultural brotherhood that was sort of at the heart of that, that we can really understand each other. I don't think it had to do with privileging the American position like the Chinese only want to be more like us. Not at all. I think that that wasn't the story. I don't think that you're guilty of that.

I mean, you were absolved, Chris. Thank you. I keep wondering, you know, what version of a film like this you think

Is it possible that it could have been a version of this film today that would work for both sides, that Chinese audiences would have liked and American audiences would have liked? This is the thing that depresses me, is I feel like there's just been such divergence now that it's aesthetic, it's in modes of storytelling, it's in the values that are presented on the screen. There's just this weird divergence, and it really...

it really sits badly with me. Is there a version that might've worked for both sides? Is that too naive? You know, I, I think narratively there absolutely could be, I mean, there's, there's nothing stopping someone from, from making a great movie. That's just a, a kind of classic fish out of water story. I mean, I, I'm not going to say that like,

The movie Iron and Silk from the 80s about like a white guy going to China and learning Wushu. Like, I'm not gonna say that's a great movie, but I think you can make a better version of that. I actually think the Karate Kid remake with Jackie Chan that was made in the 2010s.

I thought that was pretty good. Like Will Smith's kid in that? Yeah, yeah. I think it was Jaden Smith. Yeah, yeah. That was good. That was actually good. I liked that. Yeah, I think you can draw – you can have these characters who kind of don't understand each other at the beginning and by the end come to some greater understanding even if it's not perfect. Yeah.

while drawing equally from different cultures. That movie can be made, and I actually think it probably should be made. I should put my mind to that instead of this podcast. I would maybe get more done that way. But I just don't know that there's a market for it, or not as much. When I spoke to Wu Tao, the producer...

who also wrote the screenplay for Clash, he was saying that there's just no appetite right now in China for American heroes, particularly American heroes teaching things to the Chinese. I mean, as you know, like,

There's been this wave of nationalistic, jingoistic movies in the in the mold of Wolf Warrior and other other kind of like war movies. Where did you learn that from, though? Of course. Yeah. I mean, they're all kind of remakes of spiritual remakes of American movies in the 80s with Sylvester Stallone.

But yeah, I think it's just it's a matter of timing. And maybe if if Clash had been made a few years earlier, or knock on wood, a few years later, it could have been more, more about about cooperation. Interestingly, Wutao mentioned to me recently that it's doing terribly in the box office, which is sad, but maybe expected. Yeah.

There's something irreducibly American about football anyway, so it's a black mark against it.

You guys joked about suing, but did you or Chris McLaurin ever actually consider legal action or did you both kind of just shrug and chalk it up to the surreal logic of intellectual property in China? We talked about it semi-seriously. I mean, Chris has a lawyer who looked into it. Chris is a lawyer himself now. So we discussed it. I think he has much more standing to sue than I do. Yeah.

They actually did in the version of the movie that I saw, they did use images of Chris at the end, coaching the team pictures from the magazine story. So I think he has a sort of like a narrow case that they infringed on his name and likeness.

I think I would have less of a case. Like my understanding of IP law is, is pretty shaky, but you know, you can't copyright facts. You can copyright patterns of facts, but I think this, I think clash is,

did its own, it has enough original material that even if the frame is the same, even if it's about a football team in their first season, kind of starting from the bottom and then getting better and then finally winning the championship against the foreigner dominated Shanghai team. I don't think that's enough to build a case on in the US, especially in China would be my guess. Certainly in China, it'd be pretty tough.

So, Chris, I mean, in some ways this is a story about, you know, a lost moment, but it's not just Hollywood in China. We've talked about that one before. It feels like it's a story about, you know, a version of globalization that no longer really feels tenable. I did writing that second piece, the piece for the Atlantic that feel to you, elegiac or cathartic or what was your feeling about that?

Um, I mean, I appreciate the emo question. And maybe I'll give you an emo answer. I can see my face when I was asking it. It was all, you know, contorted in this like really emo expression. Yeah, I think I think a lot of people and that may include you like,

spend a lot of time after, if they spend time in China and then leave, you spend a lot of time trying to make sense of it and process it and understand what that was, because it could be so intense, it could be so formative, but it's also very confusing. So, you know, I have a friend who spent time in China a few years and then wrote a

novel, which may or may not get published, but she just needed to process this. And I think I've probably been looking for ways to understand what that was, especially now that I'm back in the US, I'm in New York, I'm only writing about China occasionally. And this seemed like an opportunity to kind of reflect back on the last decade and how much things have changed

And especially what was that moment in the early 2010s when Xi Jinping had just come into power and people were still talking about him as a possible liberal reformer and that we would be entering a new era of US-China friendship and cooperation. And that played out on the personal level too. Like

You make so many friends and it feels like you're kind of riding a wave together. Whereas now, you know, almost all my friends, all my American friends have left Beijing. And it's hard not to be nostalgic about that time. A lot of cool people here still, I ought to say. I believe that. I think people would still remember you.

Chris, it was such a pleasure to talk to you about this story. I mean, everyone, please check it out. I will put links both to the original New Republic story and to the Atlantic piece, as well as links to previous appearances by Chris on that, the cruise ship story. I was listening to bits of it yesterday, and it was a really fun episode. Let's move on now to our Paying It Forward segment. Who do you have? Who do you want to name check for us, Chris?

I'm worried that others have name-checked this writer, but I just wanted to shout out Viola Jo at Rest of World. Actually, she has been name-checked, and I think this is the third time, so that's actually a good sign that I dig her, everyone digs her, she's doing great work. Yeah, I mean, maybe then, in that case, it's worth shouting out Rest of World generally. I think they do such terrific work

covering stories that that otherwise are getting completely ignored absolutely and and doing it so smartly and and they have just a great like we've been talking about sort of sensitivity to on the ground reality around the world and also the sensitive to the sensibility of like American readers they really thread that needle beautifully I think

Okay. So two people I'm going to ban from further, because they've won, they've already won the award for having been like paid for, paid for three times. Viola Jo is one and the other, the other is Kyle Chan. Okay. So no more Kyle, listeners, no more Kyle Chan, no more Viola Jo, but I absolutely heartily endorse both. And what about recommendations? What do you have for a recommendation this week?

This might also have been mentioned. I hope not. But I recently read the short story collection called Rejection by Tony Talithamudi. It is one of the most shocking, revile, like reviling kind of stories.

horrifying, visceral reading experiences that I've had ever. And I absolutely loved every page. It's basically about... Being a writer. Each short story is about...

A character who has experiences a different form of rejection, often romantic and and responds to it in their own way. And it's just it's this glimpse into these really kind of distorted minds and psychologies that.

I thought was absolutely beautiful and transporting. And I would highly recommend, although it kind of has the Chuck Palahniuk problem where if you're sensitive, you might end up having a bodily response. Right, right, right. Yeah, you know, that sounds like to me the literary equivalent of death metal. So you'll love it.

Yeah, I'll love it. I love that stuff. Cool, cool. I've got a couple of recommendations. Mine, on the plane coming over to China, I watched only one thing. That was the Led Zeppelin documentary called Becoming Led Zeppelin. Fantastic. A little, you know, hagiographic, but hey, it was great. It was sanitized. I mean, if you've read the unauthorized stuff like Hammer of the Gods and stuff like that, you know a lot of the nasty stuff, but this is, you know, the sort of

PG version of Led Zeppelin coming together, but it's a real focus on the music. It's great. It's fantastic. And the other, I want to really shout out my friend Michael Cherney. And I was just here at his house and he gave me this

just a personal tour of some of his recent work. It's just astonishing. Check it out at Qiumai.net, Q-I-U-M-A-I.net. He is a calligrapher and a photographer, somebody with a profound understanding of Chinese art and a way of talking about it that is just, it's incredibly impactful, very, very meaningful. It's just,

amazing i i won't spoil too much but do check out his work and i we've just been talking about doing something collaborating on something to showcase his art uh on maybe my my youtube channel or on my website so check that out you'll see it one of these days and uh you know the real irony is it's hard to just you know on an audio podcast to talk about a visual art form but um

It's been a source of frustration for me because I'm such a fan of his work, but we'll figure out something now that I've got a YouTube channel. All right. Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to talk to you. You too. Thanks so much, Kaiser. Really great to catch up and discuss. Get yourself back to Beijing, man. You'll see it. It's not over, man. Part two. Yeah, part two, part two. I'm starting part two right now.

You've been listening to the Seneca podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through sub stack at www.senecapodcast.com where there is a growing offering of terrific original China related writing and audio or email me at Seneca pod at gmail.com. If you've got ideas on how you can help out with the show.

Don't forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Christopher Beam. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. Take care.