Saturday, January 15, 2011

I Want Her to be Fat

By:

Jonathan ‘Cao Cao’ Kos-Read


I have to admit, right up front, that I didn’t write this month’s column. It was written instead by some random Chinese guy.

Below I have translated the best bits of an article entitled “Showbiz’s Biggest Foreigner and How He Was Molded By His Young Wife Into a Chinese Style Husband”. It’s from a Chinese magazine and it’s about how I met and fell in love with my wife. I got it as an email attachment with a cute little note that said: “Hey, we were just like super inspired by your story and so we wanted to profile you in our magazine but, you know, our deadline was like, tomorrow so, like we didn’t have time to actually interview you. But we looked stuff up on the internet. :-)” And with those little seeds of truth, they went to town.

It’s so awesome I’m worried you guys will think that I like added shit to make it funnier but I really didn’t. What you read below is really a verbatim translation.

Cao Cao’s Love Story

Endless, repetitive, monotonous work was drowning Jonathan in feelings of suffering and helplessness. He was desperate to find a girlfriend. He begged all his friends for introductions to Chinese girls. But he found fault in each one. None were good enough.

He fell into depression. His friends criticized him for being too picky. Finally when he pleaded yet again, his friend shot back exasperated, “well what kind of girl do you want?!”

Jonathan said, “I don’t want a naïve girl. And I don’t want one who follows orders. I want her to be fat. “

Ha ha,” his friend said, “I actually know such a girl. Her name is Lizhiyin. She is a junior at the Capital University of Finance. She is fat.”

In short order, Jonathan and Lizhiyin were shepherded to a Sanlitun coffee shop by this friend. Jonathan had made a special and extraordinary effort of personal grooming. And when he saw Lizhiyin for the first time he saluted her in the Chinese, double-raised-fist style. He said in ancient Chinese, “I am Cao Cao, please forgive any obstreperousness or importune mistakes made by my humble self.”


Here it drags for a bit. But then disaster strikes:


Lizhiyin began to feel this American young man was serious and honest so her initial wariness was dropping away.

But then Jonathan told her a story, “When I first told my friends I was coming to China they told me I must bring toilet paper.” Jonathan laughed heartily at the humor inherent in this. “According to these American friends of mine, China –“

But before Jonathan could finish, Lizhiyin’s face turned a dark shade of angry red. She said, “It is true! Our Mother Country is not rich! But we will Self Empower, Self Strengthen and Self Stand Up!” Then Lizhiyin stood up, and proudly and angrily stomped out of the coffee shop. Jonathan desperately followed her saying, “I did not mean that those friends are correct! I was telling you a funny story!” Lizhiyin threw off Jonathan’s hand and said with ire, “If I made a joke about America, what would you do?!” Then she gave Jonathan a dangerous, strong and proud glare. Jonathan was struck speechless and frozen by this.

This,” Jonathan thought, “is a proud girl. I must change the angle of my thinking to be with her.”


We hook up, and everything is great for a while but then, again (if only my real life were so dramatic) disaster.


Unskilled in business, Jonathan was wracked with terrible difficulties maintaining his company for [those] three years. In the end all of the money he had earned with his heart’s blood was lost.

After his bankruptcy he was left only with a heart depressed and a mind frozen. In the beginning he had dreamed of giving Lizhiyin a good life! Who would have thought that now he couldn’t even support himself?! Controlling the agony in his heart, he wrote a breakup letter to Lizhiyin. It said that his business venture had failed.

I even tried to return to be an English teacher again but no one would have me!”

He remonstrated with Lizhiyin to take care of herself, because he must go away - like an ancient, itinerant traveler, to float, to drift alone in the emptiness between the earth and the sky.

When Lizhiyin saw his letter her heart was stabbed with pain. She rushed to his home. But his apartment was already empty! She called him. His cell had been turned off! Lizhiyin wildly dialed all of Jonathan’s friends, every one. Finally she learned the truth – he had left on a quest to discover the true meaning and location of the Three Kingdoms Romance [from which he had taken his Chinese name].

Such an enormous country China! Lizhiyin decided she would first go to Weiwang, the ancient and original Cao Cao’s ancestral home in Anhui, Haozhou. In Haozhou she bitterly and with great difficulty searched for three days. Finally deep inside Cao Cao’s famous tunnel for transferring soldiers, she found a cowering Jonathan, whole body covered in dirt, stained, face fatigued, depressed and defeated.

She yelled, “Jonathan!”

She lifted her bag and struck him again and again and again. Jonathan knelt on the ground cradling his head in his hands and accepted the blows.

Finally with no strength left Lizhiyin ceased her blows. She yelled, “who told you to leave?! What will I do without you?!”

Jonathan, his eyes red-rimmed, said, “I am bankrupt! My own life, I can’t even support –“

Tea!”

Tea,” Lizhiyin said again. “It must be steeped in the hottest water to draw out the deepest flavor! People are the same. Only by facing the hot forge of disastrous difficulties can a man become strong and oriented to succeed. I believe you can succeed!” said Lizhiyin as she held his hand tightly.

But if I can never succeed?” said Jonathan, his face pale and shadowed.

Silly mellon! In that case we will simply live a quiet life. The world is so big, how many people in the world can succeed?! If we can live with open happy hearts, this is enough! Return with me!”


Needless to say, I did.

There is much more awesomeness to this story, but the tyranny of the word count restricts me. So alas, I must chuckle alone.

And so to bring this story to a close, have we learned a lesson, have we gained some deeper insight into the creative process, the mind of the artist?

Some say that the Chinese are not creative, that they simply copy the creativity of others. Psshhaww! This month I was the counterfeiter, stealing the work of another for my own dirty gain. The quiet tinkerer who created this piece was the true artist.

He googled the world for truth and created beauty.



How to be a Jew

By:

Jonathan ‘Cao Cao’ Kos-Read


Why are Jews better than everybody else? Why did people used to hate them so much? Why are they so rich? Why are they everywhere?

These questions were on my mind last month because I just got cast in a show where I play one. It’s this big forty episode monstrosity about the fifty years of Shanghai history between the national and communist revolutions. I play a Jew who goes there to make his fortune but instead finds love. It’s a big, complex, rich, genuinely good role that begs for a serious actor.

And I’m a serious actor. I care about my art. But what does that really mean? This month, a peek behind the silver screen at how a serious actor practices his craft

THE IDEAL

A lot of shit gets written about the lengths actors go to to prepare for a role. We read about ones who go and live with some shitty tribe for a month, or take drugs to paralyze them or like cut off their testicles or, you know, all that stuff actors do.

And when we read about shit like that, a little secret voice inside of us usually whispers, “dude,ahhhh, that’s a little silly”

And it is, but there’s a reason (aside from PR) that they all do it.

To react like a real person, and a person DIFFERENT from who he is, an actor has to answer five questions. They are, in order of importance:

  1. What does my character want

  2. Why

  3. How does he go about getting it

  4. Why does he do it that way

(And finally and sort of separately)

  1. What does he want out of life

So, because I’m a serious actor, I went and got my most serious, nebishy, what’s-the-meaning-of-life-and-what’s-my-place-in-it Jewish friend, treated him to some Nachos in Sanlitun, and grilled him about being Jewish.

I had three questions:

  1. Why did my Jew want to succeed so bad?

  2. Why did he feel guilty about marrying a prostitute?

  3. Why did he go to China?

Here are his answers:

Success: Jews feel a heavy weight of responsibility. They have survived as a culture without a country for two thousand years. They’ve survived both the Romans and the Germans trying to exterminate them. So to be a loser is to betray all those hundreds of generations who struggled so hard to survive just so that you could exist.

Guilt: Sex and procreation are super important and strict for Jews because there are so few of them. The strictness allowed them to survive as a culture without a country for two thousand years. To step outside of that boundary is to betray a lot of history. And even if a Jew doesn’t believe that, everyone he loves and respects does.

China: A Jew is a foreigner wherever he is. So my English Jew would see himself as Jewish first, English second. He would feel natural going off to be a foreigner in China – it’s just another destination in the diaspora.

Not all Jews would agree. That’s okay. Because his answers were knives I could use to sculpt a believable and honest character. My Jew. His Jew. But not every Jew. Who could ask for more? So I hopped on the plane to Shanghai, armed with truth and insight, ready to do battle with my own psyche as I slashed away to the core realities of this character’s heart.

THE REALITY

The first scene of the first day was a love scene. My Jew has just saved a good hearted and lonely prostitute from an evil ruffian. The audience can see we’re meant for each other, two lonely youngsters looking for love in this cold cold world. I bring her back up to my room where she washes up and then, to thank me, bangs me silly. After she leaves I’m feeling a little guilty about screwing a hooker (albeit one of those heart-of-gold-actually-a-good-person ones) so . . . . so . . . . . ha ha ha ha . . .

They have me, the Jew, get down and pray to Jesus about my sin.

I went to talk to the director.

“Hey, Director Li, I don’t know how much weight you would put on this being accurate, but Jews don’t pray to Jesus.” (This is really how you have to talk to directors.)

“Really?”

“No.”

The director thought about this for a minute, “Does everybody know that?”

I had to think for a minute. I mean I assume everybody in America would know, and Europe, and the whole Middle East. “I think a lot of people would know.”

“Well this is a Chinese show. Chinese people won’t know.”

You always walk a thin line when you, as a foreigner tell a local he is wrong – especially when his mistake comes from being lame and retarded. Locals (anywhere) are tre touchy about that shit. So you have to be like super polite and pretend that it’s a common mistake or that like it’s just a question of preference and usually you can get what you want.

I said, “True, that’s why I asked you how much you care. It’s up to you. But it won’t be, like, you know, super accurate.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. He wasn't stupid. He understood that it was a problem, and that in some world of platonic ideals we would care about things like this. But he had this pretty shot in mind where the crane swoops down and the music swells and I’m kneeling there praying my semitic heart out to assuage the guilt of a sin that I do not feel because love is overpowering my heart. So he basically wanted the problem to go away but he felt just guilty enough to not say so. We just kind of sat there in silence for a little while. I looked back at the big oil painting of Mary (haloed, weeping and virginal) and Jesus (bloody, full of holes and stoic) that I was supposed to pray to. I decided to make one more jab at it.

“It would sort of be like if we made a Hollywood movie about China where everybody was wearing Japanese uniforms.”

“Hmmm,” he said, pretending to think about that.

“So it’s up to you I guess,” I said.

The director looked around for help, somebody else to be a dick and not care about art and accuracy so he wouldn’t have to feel like an asshole. A fuckwad. The producer was standing next to us. He (sigh, I know, it’s a cliché, but what can I do but record reality) manned up.

“Well there maybe are Jews who pray to Jesus right, I mean there must be some who pray to Jesus too right?”

(There are as it happens, I used to walk past this weird center called the “Jews for Jesus” on my way to classes in New York but I don’t think they’ve ever been very common especially in Shanghai in the 1930s and anyway, it always seemed kind of like it defeated the purpose of being Jewish - like “Christians for Allah”. I figured mentioning it would confuse things.)

“Not really.”

The producer said again, “Well there must be some so you’re just that kind of Jew, or like you’re just praying to Jesus today. Ha ha Cao Cao, you’re so artistic and serious.”

The director, “Yeah, because there are like all kinds of Jews in the world, you know?”

And what are you gonna do. It’s the first day. If I stuck to my guns the following would happen: The crew would hate me because I would make them work late because they would have to reset the whole scene. The producer would hate me because everyone would go overtime. The director would hate me because I would make him lose face. And it was the first scene of the first day.

* * *

So after praying my heart out to Jesus, we started the next scene; where my Jew takes his family to Church. And there I was sitting in the Church pew soundstage with my hooker wife and halfbreed son (who was Chinese with bleached hair because they couldn’t find a mixed kid). Above us was an enormous crucifix. Below it in both English and Chinese was written inexplicably, “Father have eaten a sour grape.”

And I thought: Jews were kicked out of their country, hunted, killed on pogroms, thrown to lions, blah blah blah. All that terrible shit, for two thousand fuckin’ years. I looked at my watch. I, the serious actor, had lasted one hour and twenty two minutes.

I felt like a nudnik.



Hustlers & Slags

by:
Jonathan ‘Cao Cao’ Kos-Read


A hustler sings for a fat producer.

The slags all look up from their cell phones, do the god-what-a-whore look then go back to pretending they have people calling them.

I’m at a party organized by my agent. We are in a Babyface karaoke room. My agent is pimping her actors to the director of this big thirty episode action series that starts shooting next month.

I don’t go to these parties very often. First, I’m married so there’s no point hitting on anybody, second, I don’t need to because my deals get done (usually) in a more civilized way, and third well, people don’t invite me.

So I get to sit there and be very anthropological about it. Here is my little science report from the showbiz gutter.

THE SCENE
The room itself is about ten feet square, full of smoke and gold paint. A huge U-shaped couch curls around three walls. The third holds an enormous TV on which “karaoke-video-people” run along beaches, glance at each-other in castles and long soft shots of candles serve as the backdrop to the inexorable yellow tide that sweeps along the lyrics. Above us is a ten foot wide chandelier.

The room is packed – probably fifty people crammed into this little space. Everybody is either extremely beautiful or ugly. The ugly people sit on the couches while the beautiful people sing or snuggle up against them. They people break down into these types.

1) Hustlers
2) Slags
3) Powerful Guys
4) Everybody Else

They all have different goals, all in opposition.

THE DIRECTOR
The director is the only Chinese person I’ve ever met who has an afro and (I know this sounds like I’m making it up) he has decided that, well, that just isn’t enough, doesn’t distinguish him from the pack with sufficient élan, so he has dyed it blonde. And he sits there, under this bushy halo, in one corner of the karaoke room, a little gay Chinese kid on one side and an older, more butch Uyghur gayboy on his left.

A never ending procession of beautiful and powerful people come and worship him for the opportunity to be in his show. Most directors I know are like this. You sort of have to be to succeed. Without megalomania, the job wears you down.

He wants to be treated like a God. He is succeeding.

THE PRODUCERS
The producers do nothing. They sit there like blobs while the girls slither all over them. Most of them are ugly or fat – a cliché but a reality. In fact it is probably why they became producers. It was the rocket fuel in their veins that drove them so hard to succeed. When they were young, women were disgusted by them. That’s hard on the soul. And when you look disgusting, there’s only one way into a woman’s heart.

They want women. They are succeeding.

THE HUSTLERS
What can I write that hasn’t been written before? Do these girls fuck the producers? They do. Do they fuck the directors? They do. Are they facing, for the first time in their lives, proof that they are nothing special, that their beauty is common? They are. “How can they sell themselves like that?!” it is asked. “How can they be exploited like that?!” It’s all been said before. What can I add?

To be honest, nothing. It’s just like you think it is. These impossibly beautiful, perky talented girls get up one by one, belt out a song for all their little twenty two year old hearts are worth, then sit down again with a Powerful Guy. They pour his drink. Laugh. And out of the corners of their eyes, watch the next impossibly beautiful girl get up and sing, then the next, then the next.

They want to be stars. All but one will fail.

THE AGENT
She is the ultimate hustler. She’ll make fifty thousand RMB on every actor and actress she gets into every show. With ten or twenty actors on her roster, that adds up to a chunk of change over a year’s worth of shows.

She is this weird person. Ten years ago she was this mole-like intellectual, a writer of biographies and movie reviews. Then one day her husband got sick and she had to become rich to pay the bills. She stepped out into the world, became an agent, built up a business. Now she peers out at the room from behind her coke bottle glasses. She has arranged it all: the room, the booze, the girls. And she stands alone, this short, forty year old woman in her frumpy terribly chosen “young girl” dress. The lights of the karaoke flash around her. She’s like a scientist in a whorehouse.

She needs to be rich. She is succeeding.

THE SLAGS
Actress years are like dog years. So if an actress is thirty four in the real world, this means she’s about fifty in dog years – so around the couches sit these old clapped out hags in their mid thirties, their hair pulled back in a tight poor man’s face lift, the crow’s feet starting to claw their way out from their hard eyes and frowning mouths.

You really can’t imagine what their lives used to be like. From the time they were thirteen, guys are buying them cars and even houses. They were loved and worshiped. Why, you ask, would somebody do that? I mean there are lots of beautiful girls in the world, even lots of beautiful hookers. Why spend three million rmb buying some little chickypoo actress a house when you could have a model for the price of a few dinners. The answer is: guys compete. “Damn this bitch I’m fuckin’ is fine,” pales in importance to: “Damn I’m so cool cuz all my rich friends know I’m fuckin’ this famous actress – more famous than the ones they’re fuckin.”

So for a few years those few lucky actresses have it good. But they make a mistake. They think it’ll go on forever. But obviously it doesn’t and these slags are the proof. The sit, ignored on the side, staring into their cell phones, hating the hustlers and loathing themselves.

I even know some of the slags. One of them is an actress I did a show with six years ago. Back then she was a hustler. She walked in and we did the, “Hey!” “Hey!” kissy face, but then she sat down next to me. When I showed her pictures of my daughter she cried.

She left twenty minutes later.

The slags want to hide their bitterness. They are failing.

IN SUMMATION
The only girl in the whole place who actually looks mildly happy is one I run into when I go out to pee. She’s just sitting there by the bar kind of bored but basically not desperately hustling or face stretched back in a horrible mask of hidden unhappiness.

“Are you having fun?” I ask.

“Not really,” she says, “It’s kind of boring.”

We kibbitz for a little while. She’s only here because she got caught up in the dragnet: “Hey, there’s a party! With some producers and directors! Do me a favor and round up some girls!”

“I saw you on TV, she says, “you and your wife.”

“Yeah, married for ten years.”

“Me too,” she says.

“What does your husband do?” I asked expecting ‘producer’ or at the very least ‘import-export’.

“He’s a scientist.”

And there it is right there: the key to happiness for an actress. She married a guy she loved. With a real job that doesn’t make him rich. One who appreciates her beauty as a gift, not as a cheap, shitty commodity. Tonight, I’ll go home to my wife and daughter. She’ll go home to her husband. Everybody else:

Blowjobs and misery.

About Me

My photo
I play white guys on Chinese soap operas.