[Only in Beijing] A White Guy Raps in Chinese to Jay-Z

This evening I took the stage at the open comedy mic at the Hot Cat Club, put on a heavy coat and slung some headphones around my neck, grabbed the mic, and said, “play the music.”

On came the instrumental to “Empire State of Mind,” by Jay-Z. But I wasn’t going to be singing Jay-Z’s lyrics. Far from it. I had prepared something special for the audience: a Chinglish rap song.

Instead of “New York,” I belted out “Huaqing Jiayuan,” which is an apartment complex near Tsinghua that, as it seemed, every foreigner who has ever studied in China has lived in. There’s a little shop in the courtyard, an iron gate to keep out strangers, and a health club. Oh wait, sorry, not health club. I was thinking of the stairwells. See, the elevators are often broken, so you get plenty of physical exercise.

Huaqing Jiayuan’s lyrics are pure Americana, if you replaced America with China (Sinicana?). Out are easy creature comforts: tossing footballs with children and golden retrievers; in are leaning out of high-rise apartment decks and breathing in that crisp, crunchy Beijing air while considering the convenience of getting business cards printed in the shop downstairs.

But while the images themselves bring everyone right back to life in Wudaokou, one of Beijing’s main student hubs, the lyrics I wrote resembled some sort of monstrous half-breed. Indeed, it was an experiment: they contained too much Chinese for most of the foreigners who would be kicking around a comedy bar at 11pm. The Chinese in the crowd would also be bewildered by the rapid English, likely rendered incomprehensible by speed, and the seemingly random addition of certain phrases in Chinese.

(Hint: The Chinese is mostly used for words and concepts that do not appear in everyday life outside of China, and for the backbone of “study abroad” pidgin. Occasionally, I throw in the random Chinese internet meme joke as well.)

I had created the purest type of rap song, one where the lyrics were, in true homage to the style, almost incomprehensible.

This is not to say the lyrics didn’t make sense; on the contrary, I thought that they were quite funny, if one was capable of parsing them.
Consider some of the following gems:

When you 来 to 拜访 meet me at the 门口
So goddamn 多 that you 不知到 which one tho
Man my 生活美妙 man my 生活舒服
Living here is awesome even if youre 忙 like 杜甫。

Or, the translated text, for those of you not yet confused enough:

你 come visit 的时候 咱们在 gate 见面
门那么 many 你 don’t know 应该在什么门见面
我的 life is beautiful 我的 life is comfortable
如果你 as busy as（Chinese Poet） Du Fu 一样还算好生活

The rap was well received. I felt like I was someone’s quirky best friend, and that I had just announced that I’d purchased a koala as a pet. Cool and interesting, no doubt, but also undeniably strange, and whatever gets wrecked or mixed up in my house thanks to said unleashed koala is my own business.

And yet, there was some sort of strange beauty in the performance all the same. The host of the show, Jehan, summed it up nicely when I got off the stage. “That was a white dude rapping in Chinese over a Jay-Z song,” he said.

It’s a brave new frontier out here.