Kendrick Lamar, A Dying Italian, All the Cheese in China
As I’m struggling to download Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. over Starbucks Wi-fi, I can’t help but think back to my memories of acquiring and experiencing his last album. For me, the day of the release of To Pimp A Butterfly was the single most memorable music event of my life.
I know. The “where were you when you first heard…” piece is boring music journalism. We’ve all read the pieces on hearing “Where Is My Mind” for the first time out of the speakers of your cousin’s hatchback and your life never being the same. We get it.
My experience with TPAB wasn’t so much life changing as it was life threatening. It starts with an Italian professor getting hit by a car while crossing the road in Beijing.
From January to June of 2015, I studied in an exchange program at Beijing’s Capital Normal University. The efforts of my patient teachers turned my terrible Chinese skills into mediocre Chinese skills, and the four Naval officers I studied with tripled my alcohol tolerance. Not bad work for a semester. Like all college kids during that time, we were counting down the days for TPAB together. The week of March 15 (the release date), I took responsibility for jumping over the Great Firewall, downloading the album, and distributing it on USB to my comrades.
However, on March 14th, I received a WeChat message (China’s Whatsapp) in the group chat for our class of exchange students. In Chinese, English and French, it read (approximately):
Luigi Massimo*, Professor of Italian at Capital Normal University, was struck by a car while crossing the road last night and is currently in the ICU of Beijing United Family Hospital. Because of Chinese regulations on blood donations to foreigners, he is very low on the list for the blood transfusion he needs to undergo urgent surgery.
I remember eating a pork bun for breakfast as I read this. That detail is not strictly relevant.
However, if you could find it in your heart to go to a donation facility and give his patient registry number, they will direct your donation directly to him. Please, if you are of blood type A-, consider contacting Mrs. Massimo to arrange for a donation.
Well, shit. That’s my blood type. Hmm.
The message popped into my life so suddenly that it felt a bit like fate. Not that I’m an ardent “God has a plan” type, but everyone can be swayed by a meaningful coincidence. On the other hand, there are a million horror stories about the blood banks in China. I was trying to avoid getting needles stuck in me while in Beijing — or I was, until I got the prerequisite “look at me, I studied abroad” tattoo.
I was unsure of the right course of action; it’s not often you’re confronted with a decision where two possible outcomes are “save an Italian’s life” or “get hepatitis in the stupidest way possible.”
After talking to Mrs. Massimo using a combo of WeChat and Google Translate, I decided to go. Truth be told, the deciding factor was that To Pimp a Butterfly was out tomorrow, and the hour-and-a-half long subway ride to the blood bank was the perfect excuse to listen to it back-to-front.
Hang tight, Luigi, I’m coming.
I hopped on the train and fired up “Wesley’s Theory.” Perfect hype music. It’s hard to blend in on the Beijing subway, twice as hard when you’re 6’2 and bobbing your head like you’re on Soul Train. The next three tracks got me to a station change: the full-auto delivery on “For Free,” “King Kunta” (had the single already, didn’t care, too funky), and by the time the beat switched on “Institutionalized,” I was sitting pretty on the train towards Chaoyang Park, where I was told the blood bank was located.
Things got weird around “Hood Politics.” After letting out a long “OOooOOO” when I heard “Demo-crips and Rebloodicans” for the first time, I realized I could taste the air. Not a good thing in Beijing. If you forget to check the forecast before you leave the house in America, you might get rained on in the afternoon. If you forget in Beijing, you might miss news that, say, the winds coming off the Gobi desert have shifted and the pollution levels are going to be 250 points higher by sundown.
Getting caught in pollution without a mask sucks, but it won’t kill you in the immediate sense. It’ll make you feel dizzy and generally disgusting, but you’ll shower and cough it out at home. What worried me was that I was about to be down a pint and a half of blood. Walking into a blood donation lightheaded is, medically speaking, fucking stupid, especially when you have to navigate your way across a city of 26 million people to get home. Not helping matters was that the “blood donation facility” I had been given the address to was a trailer set up outside an amusement park, with a sign in Chinese that said “Donate Blood Here,” and a sign in English that said “BLOD”. It looked more like a home for two carnies and a ferris wheel operator than anything medical.
But I had come too far. We gon’ be alright.
The clinic staff were awfully polite when they found out an American wanted to help with the blood drive; less so when they found out my blood would be flowing into their facilities and directly into another foreigner’s veins. They poked me in my right arm and made small talk as things flowed along. Small talk in Mandarin in 2015 usually consisted of questions about the local food, whether or not I was married, and someone giving the thumbs up and saying “President Ao-Ba-Ma!”
One of the nurses offered to play me some music, so I offered to my some of my own. My commitment to listen to all of TPAB back to front became a bit of an issue when “The Blacker the Berry” began to scare the shit out of the nurses; they smiled politely until “You Ain’t Gotta Lie” came on and lightened the mood.
Sitting up after the bag was full, I realized that the combination of eating a single pork bun for breakfast, the blood loss and the polluted air had left me effectively drunk. The donation staff watched me wobble down the stairs and offered to call a cab; I replied with a polite “没问题“ and began to waddle towards the subway home.
+ + +
I was awoken suddenly at 9PM by five or six of my friends, wondering why I hadn’t spent the Sunday with them drinking the $1.50 gin and tonics at Huxleys, as any sensible human would have. Mumbling about dying Italians and reaching for the water on my bedside table, I instead grabbed something squishy, wrapped in plastic. It was a roughly half-eaten wheel of Humbolt Cheese.
Jesse, a gorgeous Californian student from my program, pointed out that I was lying in a bed of recently purchased cheeses of varying sizes and nationalities. This caused the group to collectively freak out. Cheese is the single biggest thing an American misses in China: it’s not part of the cuisine there, and you don’t realize how much of it you consume until it’s gone from your life entirely. As the midshipmen devoured Manchego and I had a few more exploratory bites of the Humbolt, I flipped through my phone and wallet and tried to piece together how the hell I got home.
The evidence presented to me was:
- An absurdly expensive cab receipt — fine, a given, maybe the right call given the pollution
- A receipt from a food import store, which Google would tell me was in walking (waddling) distance of the blood bank. The torn paper itemized the purchase of a simply shameful amount of cheese, totaling more than any of my grocery bills before or since
- A fraud alert email from MasterCard wondering what the hell I was doing buying that much cheese in China
- A decent bottle of red wine, which paired well with most of the cheese I was sleeping on
- A note in my iPhone which read:
“HOW KENDRICK GET TUPAC ON ALBUM
When home googl if 2Pak Alive”
* * *
If you’re out there, Luigi, I hope you’re okay. Thanks for a hell of a day.
— — —
- Name changed, but not by much
