In 2023, the world experienced some terrible natural disasters and more horrible wars. On the other hand, China and the rest of the world were emerging from the worst years of the COVID pandemic. International travel was picking up again, and China’s doors were opening wider to international visitors. Colleagues, students and friends were now streaming back to China and spending more time in the country. For me, this was also a year of extensive travels within China (20 cities in 40 days). Some highlights of my year included the launching of my new book Rocking China, an extended visit to Beijing, and hosting a doc series on China’s Grand Canal. Mostly I will look back on 2023 as my year of reckoning as I struggled to survive and recover from a major assault on my life. At the age of 53 (54 now), I must now face my own mortality and better prepare for the inevitable.
For those of us living in China, 2023 began with a bang. After three years of striving to prevent the virus from spreading in the world’s most populous country, the government suddenly and unequivocally put an end to all restrictions and measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. This happened in mid-December of 2022. At the time, I was living in a house by Dianshan Lake, the largest lake in Kunshan, where I live and work on weekdays. My wife and daughter were in our apartment in downtown Shanghai. As soon as the measures were lifted, the virus struck the city and hit the rest of the country like a tsunami. Everybody I know in China came down with it over the next week or two. My wife was down with fever and other symptoms for a week or so while my daughter recovered more quickly. Not wanting to throw myself into this wave of illness, I chose to weather the viral storm in my lake house. I ended up sheltering there for nearly a month as the virus passed like wildfire through the population of China. I holidayed alone at the lake (at least I had my dog for company) and reemerged in early January, returning to Shanghai to be with my family and rejoining a post-viral society. Thus, I avoided the first big wave of the virus since China declared its war on COVID in early 2020.
Adding up that time along with the months that I spent alone in my lake house during the lockdown periods of 2022, I probably spent around four months sheltering there during that year. The year 2023 would be a year of reemerging and reintegrating with society and with campus life at DKU. Once it was clear that the virus was no longer actively passing through the community, I rejoined the social world of Shanghai.
Looking out on the new Phase II campus of Duke Kunshan University
At the same time, the campus of DKU was picking up speed and students and professors were returning from abroad to rejoin campus life. In July, Phase II of DKU opened and we stepped onto a much larger campus with a new library, community center, and sports center.
Having gotten through the worst phase of the virus’s spread, Chinese society was in recovery and people were enjoying the return to a somewhat more normal life without all the restrictions, testing, and lockdowns of the previous few years. Like the rest of the world, Chinese society had suffered in so many ways and the psychological and economic toll of the anti-viral measures of the previous three years were incalculable. Businesses large and small were affected and the city and country were facing an economic downturn. Everyone I know in China had family members who were seriously affected by the virus, and the sounds of ambulances careening through the city were heard for several weeks in early 2023. Yet 2023 also began with a tone of optimism that the worst of the pandemic years were coming to an end and normal life could begin again. Finally we could say goodbye to daily testing in neighborhood stations, to green, yellow and red QR codes, and to endless masking, not to mention the existential threat of being sent to a facility for COVID positive people.
Jud and me playing some songs at Ray’s bar in Shanghai
Over the years, I’ve been working on honing my skills as a musician. I play piano and guitar and sing, and prior to the onset of the lockdowns in 2022 I was fronting a rock n roll cover band composed of other foreign expats, and we were getting some gigs at local bars in Shanghai. Then the lockdowns began and most of our band members escaped China and have yet to return. In 2022, while sheltering in solitude in my lake house in Kunshan, I spent a lot of time working on songs. I developed some daily habits for memorizing song lyrics and worked on them on guitar and piano. After the lockdowns ended in mid-2022, it was time to go back into society and share the fruits of my labor with others. Jud and I, the two remaining members of our band, had been playing in bars and clubs as a guitar duo. We continued to do so in 2023, and we joined a group of merrymakers who ran a nighttime jam session and open mic night every Tuesday and Sunday at different venues in the city.
On a tour of Shanghai’s Former French Concession with my students in early 2023
From January to March, I taught my Shanghai History course at DKU. It was refreshing to have the international students, most of them at least, back on campus, and many international faculty were returning as well. After the previous year of constant disruptions and lockdowns, not to mention the absence of most international students and many faculty, the campus was thriving again.
Filming the Grand Canal doc in Hangzhou, one of 20 cities we visited in 40 days or more. This is the famed Gongcheng Bridge, considered the entranceway to Hangzhou along the Grand Canal.
In late March, I embarked on a long journey to document the story of the Grand Canal, which stretches from Hangzhou to Beijing (there are other sections, but this was the one we traveled on). I had signed on as host for a joint project between Jiangsu TV and National Geographic to produce a two-part series on the Grand Canal for television. With our intrepid director Richard Hughes and a crew of producers and camera and sound people, we traveled to around twenty cities in the span of forty days, following the Canal southward from Yangzhou to Ningbo and then northward from Yangzhou to Beijing. At nearly every town and city we stopped at, I met interesting people who became part of the film as they told their own stories about the Canal and their connections to it. These included fisherfolk, barge captains, artists, designers, hotel owners, landscapers, scientists, and a famous influencer among others. We ended the journey on May 1 in Beijing, and I remained there for another week over the May Day holiday.
In 2022, testing positive would have struck fear in the hearts of anybody in China, since it meant being sent to a facility for recovery. In 2023, it was as routine as catching the flu.
Upon returning to Kunshan, I immediately came down with the dreaded virus, and spent three days with fever in bed. After a week or so, testing negative again, I rejoined my family in Shanghai. The long summer was beginning to unfold.
A flyer for my Beijing book talk made by DJ BO
In late May, my new book Rocking China came out in publication. I was invited by old friend DJ BO to join him for a book talk in Beijing. Though my mother-in-law warned me not to go, having just recovered from my recent bout with COVID, I travelled once again to the national capital where I gave a book talk to a small yet highly engaged audience. My plan was to stay in Beijing for three days, then fly back to Shanghai. What’s that they say about mice and men?
On the third night of my stay, I was hanging out with a colleague and some of his friends in one of my favorite live music bars in Beijing. Some of them were musicians and they were playing acoustic guitars and singing songs on the small stage of the bar. After they finished, I was called up to the stage, borrowed a guitar, and sang a few songs with my colleague B--, and a few more on my own. My heart was flying, but I attributed that to nervousness. Not that I had any reason to be nervous, I’d been performing songs to crowds large and small for a while now. When I finished my set and walked off stage, I was suddenly hit with sharp pains in my stomach, upper back, shoulders, and arms. At this point, alarm bells should have been ringing in my brain, but I attributed it to having eaten something foul as well as fatigue from not having played that vigorously in a while. Amazing how the brain rationalizes just about anything.
Despite my colleague B—offering to take me to a hospital, I told him I’d go back to the hotel and rest and see if my body calmed down. It didn’t, and I found myself tossing and turning a while and then realizing I had to get myself to a hospital and quick. Long story short, after arriving at the wrong hospital, I was taken by ambulance to the right one. The diagnosis was crystal clear: acute myocardial infarction.
B—arrived at the hospital along with another friend and colleague J—and they helped me get through the preliminary paperwork as I waited anxiously for the doctor to roll me into the operating theater. There, the doctors performed a routine procedure that saved my life. Known as an angiogram, this painful procedure involved running a thin tube up my artery from my arm to my heart. “The procedure was a great success” announced the doctor in flawless English. I was now the proud bearer of a stent in the spot where my coronary artery had been blocked.
They wheeled me into the ICU as I high-fived B—and J—who waited in the hall. My wife arrived later that evening. For the next two weeks my body fought to survive and recover from this vicious attack on my mortality. I was in one of the best hospitals in the country and under great care from the team of doctors and nurses who treated me. I was extremely fortunate to have ended up there.
The first week was all about survival. All my key bodily functions had gone on vacation, and I was struggling just to breathe. I found it extremely difficult to eat and sleep. I was forced to lie down for several days and could barely move. Yet gradually, and through tremendous will power and effort, I began to recover and eventually was able to sit up and eat some food. The second week in the hospital went more easily and I found myself recovering by degree of magnitude each day. By the end of my hospital stay, I was eager to be released back into the world.
Since then, I’ve been on daily medications. The first two months of recovery were a bit touch and go, and I found it easy to fall ill if I overtaxed myself. But the past three months have been better, and I feel my health and energy steadily rising. I’ve been seeing a cardiologist in Shanghai, and signs of recovery are looking good. Still, since this terrible episode happened, I’ve had a feeling that a Damocles sword is hanging over my head and not letting me forget my mortality.
Movers shelving books in my new apartment in Kunshan in August 2023
July and August were mostly spent moving. We decided to move to an apartment, a townhouse really, located close to our daughter’s new school, Shanghai American School. At the same time, I had to move out of my cherished house by the lake and find an apartment much closer to the DKU campus. I ended up moving back to the same building in Kunshan that I left in 2022, where I’d lived the past seven years. After living in solitude by the lake, nearly an hour’s drive from campus, I was very happy to be back “home” in another apartment in this building and neighborhood, and to be a ten-minute car ride from campus again. Naturally, I missed the lake, but I would return to it now and then to continue a documentary project with students filming the people who continued to live in an old water village by the lake, which was slated for immanent demolition. Mostly I was happy to be reintegrating into campus life again after nearly a year of lockdown-enhanced solitude on the lakeshore.
Over the fall of 2023, as I continued my journey of recovery, I became steadily more involved in campus life. In addition to the usual advising, I was mentoring several students engaged in various stages of their Signature Work projects. As the advisor to the Jazz Club, I started a blues workshop, which continued off and on to the end of the semester. Along with the student president of the club, I started an open mic night on campus in our Student Performance Cafe, the first of its kind. These events gained some traction over the fall and we will continue them in spring.
Posing with students in the cast, crew and band after the performance of the musical play Now Here This in the DKU Student Performance Center, Dec 2023
Meanwhile, some students convinced me to join in a musical performance on campus. The Musical Club was staging a performance and they needed a guitar player for the band. I didn’t have much time to learn the songs, which are of course much more complicated to play and perform than typical pop/rock songs. Somehow, it all came together for the two shows, even though I wish I’d had another solid week to practice the songs. The two performances got their deserved applause from the audience of students and at least one administrator. I hope this is the beginning of a long trend on campus of live music and stage performances by our talented students.
The Grand Canal documentary series I hosted was broadcast in October on Jiangsu TV. We are still waiting for more news of its international release, but I was very happy with the production and grateful to have the opportunity to work with such a talented production team and the director Richard Hughes.
In mid-December, I traveled with my wife and daughter to California. Over the past two weeks we have been catching up with our relatives here, some of whom flew out from the East Coast to see us. Given my condition, we were happy to meet them “halfway” rather than having to fly all the way over to the East Coast. We also enjoyed a visit to our elder daughter’s campus, UC Santa Cruz, where she is in her second year.
All in all, it's been quite a challenging year for me and for the world. Let’s hope 2024 goes better for us all. Peace, love, and joy to the world and Merry Xmas from California!