Q&A with Alan Paul, author of Big in China

Last month, I read and enjoyed Alan Paul's recently released memoir about living in Beijing, Big in China. Since then, so much more has happened with Alan that is dizzying to keep up. There's now a movie in development based on Big in China, and his WSJ.com essay describing himself as a "Panda Dad" in response to Amy Chua's "Tiger Mother" generated such a response that he appeared last week on the Today Show. Of course, all of this is going on while he is on a nationwide book tour. Fortunately, the book tour has now landed him in a truly familiar place, back to his hometown of Pittsburgh, where he will be enjoying the Pirates Home Opener later today and a promotion event at Barnes and Noble at the Waterfront Thursday, April 7 at 7:00 p.m. For more information about the reading at B&N, please visit this site.

image source: alanpaulinchina.com

Even as busy as he is, Alan graciously agreed to an interview-by-email with me to publish on my own blog. I am so excited to share this, especially delving into some aspects of his book and other writing that deal with similar subjects that I have. I am also pleased to give my blog readers a different view of expat family in China.


Jen: I am grateful to have this opportunity to conduct an email interview with you to explore a little deeper some of the parts of Big in China that really resonated with me. But first, I want to ask you about how you decided to write a China memoir. For me, it was the first book in this rather crowded genre I had read that dealt with a family's experience. Are there really so few memoirs about expat-in-China family life? Did this different point-of-departure factor in your decision to pursue publication of your memoir, rather than just the band?

Alan: Yes. I felt like I had something different to say. I was not really that comfortable with the idea of writing a memoir. I honestly don’t think something is interesting just because it happened to me. I knew from writing my column and interacting with expats and ex-expats all over the world that I was writing about truths and realities that cross a lot of borders and that people who have lived this don’t generally see reflected.

I can’t say for sure that no one else has written about a family experience in China – that seems impossible - but nothing really springs to mind. In One Billion Customers, Jim McGregor does share some great stories about using his then-toddler daughter as source bait while reporting in Beijing in the late 80s, when people didn’t really want to talk to foreign reporters he would strap her on the back of his bike and go for a ride. I’m like the Lorax, speaking for the trees because they have no voice.

The band, Woodie Alan, is an important part of the book and it is what has hooked a lot of press interest – and probably what hooked my editor at Harper to buy it. But I don’t think the book would be as interesting if it were only about the band, and didn’t also focus on the family and on who I am, and where my formation of the band came from.

Jen: Obviously, we have the shared experience of moving to Beijing for our spouses' jobs, but your family's experience of China differs from ours significantly. Parents are often concerned about the pitfalls of the expat lifestyle, as you addressed in the Beijing Kids interview, but what about the benefits? What positive impact on your kids did this living environment have?

Alan: There are so many benefits. The first is the most basic: my kids have a real understanding that it’s big world and there are a lot of different ways to live. Understanding this intellectually and living it are too different things. That applies to living in a different culture, surrounded by people form many different cultures. 

As for the villa/compound thing…one of the advantages was it gave them increased freedom at a young age. They could ride their bikes, run to friends’ houses etc. It was sort of a kids’ nirvana, really, with lots of room to roam, playgrounds, friends… We all had a very supportive network of friends that we relied on and ran in and out of each other’s homes without a second thought. There was a great informality and friendliness that we all loved.

Jen: There's so much about the expat-in-China lifestyle that can lead to an abdication of family responsibilities, mostly because it is easy and relatively inexpensive to hire extra help. In your book, there's one specific instance, when your wife, Rebecca, is out of town and getting the three kids ready in the morning falls entirely on you. What happens will just sound like regular life to many American families, but you ended up sending your oldest son to school on his own on his bike, and you were late getting your middle child to school. Another parent was not very sympathetic with regards to your harried morning, asking why you didn't ask one of your two ayi to come in earlier those mornings, or hire another ayi for the morning shift. You asserted that it was more important to preserve the morning as family time. I found that really admirable, and I wondered if there were other occasions when you found yourself defending similar family practices or choices.

Alan: Oh, probably all the time. This ayi thing was one that popped up again and again. We gave our ayis weekends off and sometimes Saturdays could be crazy and we’d be running all over the place and scrambling for coverage and friends would always wonder why we didn’t just have any ayi work. Maybe we should have, but it just felt like we wanted our family to be together on weekends, and we wanted to keep a foot in our old reality, so that all of us remembered what it was like to have a messy house and have to pick up after ourselves more rigorously.

And you sum it up in the first line of your question: we didn’t want to totally abdicate family responsibilities or lose sight of who we are. For God’s sake, compared to our life here, we had plenty of help!

We never used Rebecca’s office driver for personal use, though we could have. I did a lot of driving in Beijing – too much, sometimes.

Jen: In Beijing your children attended Dulwich College, a British school. I thought this was a curious choice for Americans planning to return to the US in a few years. How did you come to pick this school? How did the boys fare changing to a British curriculum, and then back to the US school?

Alan: Dulwich was still the Montessori School of Beijing when we were looking at coming. The transition was just under way. Rebecca’s predecessor and a couple other colleagues-to-be had their kids there and liked it. They actually took our kids' info and registered them. When we arrived for our look-see visits, they had spots secured. WAB basically laughed at us; their kindergarten waiting list for our younger son was 75-deep.

I had some culture clash issues with the British administrators, over things like very religious Christmas shows, but it was a good experience. My oldest son is an Anglophile now and I am happy they had such an international and different experience. The transition back was hard in a lot of ways, but this was not one of them. Kids are resilient and the curriculum isn’t that different. It might be harder for a high school student.

Jen: I want to switch from the book to this piece that was on the Huffington Post website about the first Rosh Hashanah service you attended in Beijing. This happens within the first few weeks of your family's arrival. Most people would not blame you if you had sat out that Holy Day so soon after moving half-way around the world to a city with relatively few other Jewish families. However, you and Rebecca sought out the community and their services. How did you go about getting in contact with Kehillat Beijing? And what did you take with you after leaving Beijing from the experiences with this small group?

Alan: This section ended up being cut from the book. It just didn’t seem to fit, so I took it out. When we were on our look-see visit, we met someone who told us about Kehillat and we looked it up and, I think, met someone who belonged. Honestly, I might have skipped it, at least to start with, but Rebecca would not. She was thrilled to have found it. Once I went, I was as well. There was something very reassuring about going into such a familiar service during the early days, when much of our life was upside down.

The main thing I took away from the experience was just simply an awareness that this was more important to me than I had realized. It’s an important part of my identity, just like being from Pittsburgh or having lived in Beijing. I always knew that, intellectually, but I felt it more profoundly. Being somewhere where we had an excuse to put the religious thing on hold for a few years and then affirmatively deciding not to and getting so much out of it left an impression and I wouldn’t consider doing that again. It’s a great group of people and I miss going there, actually.

Jen: The full title of your book is Big in China: My unlikely adventures raising a family, playing the blues, and becoming a star in Beijing. What about living in Beijing made all of these unlikely adventures possible and not mutually exclusive?

Alan: It’s hard to explain, but from the minute I set down in Beijing, I felt a surge of energy, confidence and optimism and just started doing things. To be honest, part of what made it not mutually exclusive was the economic emancipation that expat life offered me. I didn’t really have to worry about making money. We could afford to live off my wife’s salary, with subsidized housing in a place where everything else was far cheaper. We were also renting out our house at home and making some money. So I was free to just follow my muse and that fed the energy I was feeling from the beginning.

Also, the amount of help we could have, with ayis to help keep things under control and the house functioning, really freed me up, too. Some people are embarrassed to talk about this side of life there, but it was a fact and it played a really positive role for me. I don’t mind housework, but it takes a lot of time. Not having to worry much about things like laundry, cooking, cleaning, gardening, cleaning gutters, shoveling snow… it saves a lot of time to do more fun stuff, including playing with my kids.

Jen: We are both from Western Pennsylvania. It seems where ever we go we are bound to meet others from the Pittsburgh area. Do we all really just start talking about sports within minutes of meeting?

Alan: Yes. It is so bound up with our regional identity. We met online because of the shared experience of loving the Steelers from Beijing. I am writing this on a plane to Pittsburgh and I can’t wait to set down in the land of yinz. These have been kind of wild, tumultuous weeks for me, with a lot of great but kind of trippy things happening – a book published, a movie deal, an appearance on the Today show this morning as my new persona, “Panda Dad”…I need some grounding and I know I will find it in the rolling hills of Pittsburgh. Primantis, here I come.

Jen: Thank you so much for taking time to discuss your book and your life in China with me and my readers. I really hope Big in China finds a wide audience among music fans and parents alike.

Alan: Thank you. I am really happy to do this. I enjoy your writing and welcome the chance to speak to other people who have shared some of the experiences of raising American kids in China – especially a a fellow Yinzer! I am also happy to have Big in China recognized as a book about a family. A lot of people focus on the band and my unlikely success with Woodie Alan. I recognize why this is appealing, but to me it’s not the heart of the story.

For everyone in the Pittsburgh area, Alan will be signing books Thursday night at the Waterfront Barnes and Noble, starting at 7 pm.