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The Strange Afterlife of an American Football Story from China

Welcome to the Seneca Podcast, the weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society.

Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China. I’m Kaiser Guo, coming to you this week from Beijing. It is great to be back again.

I am at the home of Michael Churney, the home/studio of the artist Michael Churney, who I will talk about a little more in the recommendations section. Seneca is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia.

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This week on Seneca, I’ve got a show that’s part sports saga, part cultural exchange experiment, part IP drama, and all heart. You may remember a delightful 2014 piece in The New Republic called Year of the Pigskin, in which journalist Christopher Beam told the story of the Chongqing Dockers, a ragtag group of young Chinese men who fell in love with American football.

With the help of a charismatic American coach, they improbably clawed their way to a national championship in the newly formed American Football League of China. We talked to Chris about it back when the piece came out, though, regrettably, I was unavailable at the time. I think it was in Taipei because my dad was sick. David Moser stepped in to do the interview.

Anyway, it was funny. It was touching. It was actually pitch perfect for its time. It was a time when I think a story of cross-cultural camaraderie felt both possible and hopeful. Fast forward to today, and, you know, that same story, well, it’s found in Unexpected Second Life. Not as a Hollywood film, despite two failed attempts involving Sony and Paramount. Chris Pratt and even John Cena were attached at various points, but as a Chinese movie called Clash, produced by ITE and released in Chinese theaters, I think it was in May of this year.

And while it lifts quite liberally from Chris’s article, it ends up telling a very different story, one that says as much about the current state of U.S.-China relations as it does about the evolution of China’s popular culture and maybe even its soft power ambition.

Chris joins me today to talk about both stories—the one he lived and wrote a decade ago and the one that got, well, retold and maybe even repurposed for Chinese audiences.

We’ll talk about the original Chongqing Dockers, the brief but earnest Hollywood flirtation with a feel-good co-production with China, and what it felt like to see his reporting transformed into something that is somehow both alien and affectionate, I guess.

Along the way, we’re going to reflect on what this whole improbable journey says about friendship, authorship, and the fading dream of a cultural meeting point between China and the U.S.

Chris Beam, welcome back to Seneca, man.

Thanks so much for having me, Kaiser.

So, Chris, I would be remiss if I didn’t start off by telling you about the fact that your story back then, in the year of the pigskin, contributed a really important concept that my family still uses to this day—my kids especially—and that is Chinese YOLO.

You know what I’m talking about, right?

That kid from SIA named Wheezy, his kid spent a year at Rutgers, I think he quit after he was robbed at gunpoint or something, he was slipping on crack vials.

So he claimed, yeah.

You got to share that little story.

What is Chinese YOLO?

Well, basically, this was one of the players who came in kind of halfway through the season as a ringer because the team was really struggling at the beginning.

• They didn’t have the skills.
• They didn’t really have the equipment.

And then they bring in a bunch of new players halfway, and one of them is this wealthy kind of international guy who calls himself Wheezy.

He had been studying at Rutgers for a bit and claimed that he had dropped out because he’d been held up while, you know, walking down the street in New Jersey.

I was asking him, like, did you feel like that must have been a tricky decision to drop out of college? And he was like, “No, man, like my diploma or my life, you got to, you only live once—YOLO,” which was amazing to me because that’s actually the opposite of what YOLO usually means.

Thus, Chinese YOLO: “you only live once, so live very, very carefully.”

That’s fantastic. I felt like that was my strongest personal connection to the piece, so I thought I’d bring that up first.

But let’s take us back to the beginning.

How did you first hear about this unlikely team of American-style football players in Chongqing?

At what point did you realize you had a story that was, I think it was your own words, you said, “so ridiculous it had to be true?”

Yeah, I first heard about it because I had a bit of a personal connection.

So I went to China on a Luce scholarship through the Henry Luce Foundation. They basically send Americans to different countries around Asia for a year. They set you up with a job, language classes, and a travel stipend.

Through that program, I met this guy, Chris McLaurin, who was doing the scholarship the year after I was.

He was based in Chongqing, working at an investment company, I think. I heard that he had started coaching an American football team because he himself had played football at the University of Michigan.

He played tight end and had been kind of on track to play professionally, but then he got a shoulder injury that ended his career.

So anyway, I flew down to Chongqing to visit Chris, and the team was having some practices. I decided to check it out, and it just very quickly became clear that this was a story that would interest American readers because it was a sport that we’re all familiar with.

Americans are all familiar with it transposed into this place where people know very little about it, if anything, and everything they do know about American football comes from American media.

So that’s kind of what captivated me in the first place. These guys, the ones who were playing in Chongqing, they had gotten into American football not by watching NFL games, but by watching Rudy and the Adam Sandler remake of The Longest Yard.

They’d come to this through almost like a two-tier abstraction of what the game actually is, and they were obsessed with it.

They loved it. They loved the trappings of it, the look and the attitude. They just didn’t know how to play.

So to me, this was just like an amazing setup that was funny. It touched on all these issues of cultural differences. A lot of these guys were part of China’s rising middle class at the time.

So it just seemed like a way to get at a lot of interesting aspects of what was happening in China at the time.

So you wrote an Atlantic piece about your story having finally made it into this Chinese film. You mentioned in there that the original piece that you pitched to the New Republic was greenlit because you described it as “little giants, but with adult Chinese men.”

Do you remember exactly how you pitched it more formally? What do you think? What did you think the story was going to be before it turned into what it became?

I think initially it just seemed funny. These guys were just having a blast, almost like doing drag, wearing football pads and uniforms, walking around, tackling each other. LARPing in a way that was not the way you’re supposed to do it. This is what interested me. This is what fueled a lot of the stories I wrote in China—people doing new things and kind of trying on new identities.

This was part of the larger narrative of China opening up to the world, getting more access to information and culture about how things are elsewhere, and having disposable income that allows them free time. It allows them to kind of pick and choose who they want to be. So to me, it seemed pretty clear that this would be a great lens into that topic.

In addition to just being funny, one of those first practices I attended involved this character, a guy who calls himself Fat Baby.

Oh, yeah. Fat Baby, and Marco, Figo, and Wheezy—all these crazy names. Fat Baby was not my name for him; he insisted we call him that. He walked onto the field one morning after a big night of hot pot and just said, “my ass is burning.” I was like, “OK, there’s a story here.”

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s too good to be true. These guys—I’ve said this before, not just referring to this piece but also to that really excellent cruise ship piece. I’ll link to that and to the podcast we did about it. I always find you’re able to ride this fine line between an appreciation for the rather conspicuous absurdity in China that we both knew back then and the kind of gooey middle. There’s a heart, right?

I think that’s what makes it all work. I mean, I don’t know how you go about balancing humor and respect with some gentle ribbing and piss-taking when you’re portraying these guys. I thought that was your skill. This is why I think everyone really liked your stuff back then.

Oh, thanks. I guess it probably came from just doing my best to see it from everyone’s perspective. When I first got to China, I didn’t speak the language at all. I tried to ramp up as quickly as I could. I was taking Mandarin classes and did the IUP program at Tsinghua.

So when I started following this team, I was already halfway through my year at IUP. In some ways, I was at the height of my language abilities, which I think is important. I could never speak Tsinghua, the local dialect, but being able to be immersed and spend ridiculous amounts of time with people, getting to know them as human beings, was the key.

As you know, it’s harder in journalism to have the budget and time to really immerse yourself in a world, but that’s the only way you’re going to understand where they’re coming from while also appreciating the absurdity of the situation.

To be clear, the Americans in this story come off as just as ridiculous as some of the Chinese characters. A lot of expats living in China are kind of quirky and strange, and I hope that part comes through too.

Let’s talk specifically about Chris McLaurin. He is a huge presence in the original piece you wrote in The New Republic. He’s a real born leader, a coach, a motivator, and then occasionally, apparently, a projectile vomiter.

What kind of rapport did you guys build over the course of the reporting? I mentioned he said in the Atlantic piece that you’d become quite good friends in the years since. Tell me a little bit about him.

Yeah, Chris is one of those people you kind of want to be president—just a very decent human being who has every reason and opportunity to be a jerk but isn’t somehow. That’s all I want in my president. He went to Michigan, played football. He did a White House fellowship for a while. He studied at the London School of Economics and then came to China on the Lu scholarship.

Yeah, you can’t spend a year on and off with someone writing about them and not develop a rapport. In this case, he really just opened up his world and let me hang out with him, hang out with the team. He spoke in a very unguarded way about the team, his background, and his life.

I mean, as you understand, when you’re reporting a story, you can both develop a kind of friendship or relationship with someone, but you’re also playing the role of the journalist. This is what Janet Malcolm talks about at great length in The Journalist and the Murderer. You can’t fully invest yourself in a friendship really until the piece is done.

I remember as I was finishing up the story, he really wanted to read it. I kept saying no. I was trying to maintain that distance. But after it published, that was no longer an issue. He was okay with the way it turned out. He ended up doubling down on American football in China.

He was building this national league. He ended up staying in Chongqing for a bit and then moving to Shanghai and consulting for the NFL. He spent a few years in China trying to promote and build American football there, which, as you can imagine, ended up failing.

You write about the Dockers and their attraction to football as a kind of masculine ideal. You got that, you know, the chest bumps and all the trash talk and the war paint.

• How did you interpret that longing for manliness in the context of the China of the time?
• Do you think it was more about Westernness?
• Was it more about a specifically Western idea of masculinity?

I think it probably was. Obviously, there are plenty of Chinese representations of masculinity, like warrior ethos or wuxia knighthood, whatever you want to call it. I kept thinking that there would be an inverse version of this movie or this story where there’s a bunch of goofy Americans trying to do wuxia and the Chinese are back home sort of yucking it up.

But I do think that American movies, particularly American sports movies, have a version of masculinity that’s about aggression, but also smart aggression and camaraderie above all that really resonated with these guys.

I don’t know that it was interesting that football was almost part of a package. Something that I hope came through in the original article is that a lot of these guys listen to hip hop, and a lot of them kind of dressed in a way that’s, you know, American—like black. They embraced certain aspects of American culture that they felt resonated with them.

This is kind of what I meant by drag; it was almost like they weren’t seeing this particular version of masculinity or self-presentation in Chinese culture. I think they seized on the American one.

I would also add that at the time, there was a bit of a prestige element. People around China would idealize or worship America in a way that was oversimplified. You probably see a lot less of that now. It was a moment where people saw this as aspirational.

There is this moment where one of the guys on the team says, “Football isn’t like any other sport. You can’t depend on one person.” It’s interesting that they see in American football a kind of de-individualization that was communal. They recognized something in that team spiritedness, which was pretty cool, I thought.

One thing I would add is that at the time, there was this narrative in China that China is not good at team sports. They excel at swimming or track. But why does the Chinese national soccer team suck so much? A lot of people would say it’s because China had become too individualized. They didn’t emphasize teamwork enough.

It was interesting that instead of falling back on soccer, some other kind of international team sport, these guys seized on American football. And so it’s another one of these things that I look back on and I’m going to regret that things took a more nationalistic turn. Eventually, this love of Americana kind of fades right around the time of that story.

You know, it started to see this shine coming off America. But anyway, everyone should go back and read that story. I want to advance our conversation here and talk about, you know, the film that wasn’t—actually twice—and then the film that actually was, right? So the story went through.

I remember hearing, right after this, I read it somewhere and passed it around. I said, “Oh, my God, Chris’s story got optioned by Sony.” We all thought it was a huge deal. Many of us pronounced your piece in 2014 the best China story of the year. I mean, it was so heartwarming and great. It felt like it captured something about the essence of that time.

But yeah, so Steve Tisch, Chris Pratt. There was even a moment when the NFL was quite enthusiastic about it. What was the wildest meeting you had in that whole Hollywood roller coaster? The wildest conversation or meeting during that?

So I personally didn’t have that many crazy meetings. I got one phone call from the producer who wanted to put the deal together. I was in Beijing, and he was like, “Hey, do you have an agent?” I said, “No.” And he was like, “Great,” which probably should have been a red flag. But you know, he put it together. He lined up the rights to the article, the rights to Chris McLaurin’s story, and he got Sony on board, specifically this production company called Escape Artists.

Chris McLaurin himself was the one who had all the crazy meetings—Sony literally sent a limo to his mom’s house near Detroit. They flew him and his mom to L.A., where another limo picked them up at the airport. They met with Steve Tisch and other producers. An executive asked Chris if he himself had considered acting, and I think Chris felt like this was kind of a game changer for him, but also for American football in China. He ended up meeting with NFL execs who wanted to talk about promoting the sport there.

The thing to understand is that 2014 was basically the peak of froth when it came to U.S.-China cooperation. Everyone saw this as an opportunity to essentially create a new industry in China, which is unimaginable amounts of money that could potentially be kicking around if you could replicate what the NBA did there, for example. There was certainly enthusiasm on Chris’s part about teaching people in China about football. There was also a lot of enthusiasm from executives about making a ton of money in China, as there always is.

So what brought that to an end? What was the source? I mean, was it just a victim of politics? This is around the same time that we start seeing a serious decline in things like co-productions between Hollywood and Beijing, or studios in China. This is around the time that U.S.-China relations start to sour.

Was it a victim of geopolitics, or what do you think brought this to an unpleasant conclusion? So Sony hired a screenwriter, a guy named Ian Helfer, to write a draft of the script. It was largely loyal to the original article, or at least that’s what Ian told me. He sent in the draft, and the feedback he got was positive. But then apparently, they sent the script over to Sony’s China office.

According to Ian Helfer’s version, Sony’s China office vetoed it, stating, “Chinese audiences don’t want to see an American protagonist teaching Chinese people about stuff.” You would think that would be a conversation they would consult earlier, but apparently, that didn’t happen.

They were okay with Matt Damon coming over and saving China from hordes of monsters on the Great Wall, but with help from plenty of Chinese stars, as I understand it. I didn’t think I ever saw the Great Wall. I didn’t either.

But yeah, there were other factors that I can only speculate about. The Sony hack happened in late 2014, where there was a disclosure of all these embarrassing emails, and executives got fired. You were a victim of geopolitics. It was just, you know, the Kim family rather than Obama.

I have to say, “Look, Chris, the tone of your Atlantic pieces is really forgiving toward this movie Clash, even though they clearly lifted the idea.” Talk about what it was like to see that film. I mean, you actually flew to Rotterdam. You bought a ticket, you flew over there to see the film open at a Rotterdam festival. What did it feel like to watch this thing?

I mean, it was surreal to see this team and these people who I’d become so familiar with depicted on screen. I saw it twice. The first time I would say I didn’t really like it. I was just kind of annoyed at the whole depiction. It’s not that it was bad; I just couldn’t really get out of my own head and notice all the things that didn’t quite line up.

But the second time I watched it the next day, I had a much more positive reaction. I mean, this is a classic sports movie. It’s formulaic; it hits all the beats of any other sports movie you’ve seen. But the elements are Chinese and specifically local to Chongqing.

I think the differences from the original story are fascinating. For instance, instead of an American coach, they now have a Mexican coach. The backstory of the Mexican coach is that he wanted to play professional football in the U.S., but they didn’t let him. They forced him to be a water boy because, in the U.S., they only let Mexicans have subordinate roles, which is kind of true. This is accurate commentary on the Trump administration.

So that was one big change. The protagonist instead is a young Chinese guy. He delivers tofu for his family’s tofu shop. His dream is to play American football. The main conflict is between him and his father. That’s also true for the other characters, too; they have these mundane middle-class conflicts.

• One of them named Rock wants to connect with his daughter.
• Another guy is having performance issues with his wife and wants to become more manly.

These are problems and storylines that America has nothing to do with. The first time around, I was kind of irritated that it wasn’t about international cooperation or cross-cultural communication. But the second time, I realized that this is just its own thing.

There is one American character, and that’s the villain, which is, as you’d expect, kind of the way Chinese movies have changed over the years. Americans are no longer as welcome as the heroes.

You make the astute observation that in a way, both you and the director, Wu Tal, were packaging the same kind of raw material for two very different audiences. Did that realization come to you while you were watching Clash? Was it brewing before? Did it take some reflection after watching the movie to come to that?

I think that occurred to me later, once I really sat down to write the piece and think about it. It forced me to rethink a lot of the pieces I wrote in China, which at the time felt very organic. I was just writing about what interested me, what caught my attention, and what my friends were talking about.

Obviously, this was a hyper American cosmopolitan perspective, which was also the perspective that most American magazine readers were interested in. There was a real alignment there.

Now, watching this movie in 2025 and seeing the same story from a fully Chinese perspective made me rethink many of those pieces. It’s not that, because I wrote about the cruise ship industry or stand-up comedy in China, I don’t think those pieces are valuable.

Oh, yeah, yeah. That was people, too. There’s a piece of the magazine that the stand-up piece was in; I can’t remember. That was in the New York Times Magazine. Right, right, right. All these pieces I’m still proud of, but I do think it’s undeniable that it’s the perspective of a white guy in Beijing, looking around and being like, “Hey, what’s something that I and my readers can get a handle on?” and then writing about that.

Well, I mean, that sounds admirably self-aware and all that, but I think that I felt that way too, and I’m not a white guy. Something drew me to this piece and to the Atlantic piece, and your reflections made me immediately want to write to you and get you back on the show to talk about this. And that I think I haven’t tried to articulate this before, so I’m sort of thinking about it just now. But I feel like it’s because I had that same kind of fantasy of cross-cultural brotherhood that was sort of at the heart of that. We can really understand each other.

I don’t think it had to do with privileging the American position, like the Chinese only want to be more like us. Not at all. I think that that wasn’t the story. I don’t think that you’re guilty of that. I mean, you were absolved, Chris. Thank you.

I keep wondering what version of a film like this you think could have worked for both sides. Could there have been a version of this film today that Chinese audiences would have liked and American audiences would have liked? This is the thing that depresses me; I feel like there’s just been such divergence now that it’s aesthetic. It’s in modes of storytelling; it’s in the values that are presented on the screen.

There’s just this weird divergence, and it really sits badly with me. Is there a version that might have worked for both sides? Is that too naive? You know, I think narratively there absolutely could be. I mean, there’s nothing stopping someone from making a great movie that’s just a kind of classic fish out of water story.

I’m not going to say that the movie Iron and Silk from the 80s, about a guy going to China and learning wushu, is a great movie, but I think you can make a better version of that. I actually think the Karate Kid remake with Jackie Chan made in the 2010s was pretty good.

• Like Will Smith’s kid in that.
• Yeah, I think it was Jaden Smith.
• That was actually good.

I like that. I think you can draw characters who kind of don’t understand each other at the beginning and, by the end, come to some greater understanding, even if it’s not perfect while drawing equally from different cultures. That movie can be made, and I actually think it probably should be made. I should put my mind to that instead of this podcast; I might get more done that way.

But I just don’t know that there’s a market for it or not as much. When I spoke to Wu Tao, the producer who also wrote the screenplay for Clash, he was saying that there’s just no appetite right now in China for American heroes, particularly American heroes teaching things to the Chinese. As you know, there’s been this wave of nationalistic, jingoistic movies in the mold of Wolf Warrior and other kinds of war movies.

Where did you learn that from, though? Of course. Yeah, I mean, they’re all kind of remakes or spiritual remakes of American movies in the 80s with Sylvester Stallone. But yeah, I think it’s just a matter of timing. Maybe if Clash had been made a few years earlier or, knock on wood, a few years later, it could have been more about cooperation.

Interestingly, Wu Tao mentioned to me recently that it’s doing terribly at the box office, which is sad but may be expected. There’s something irreducibly American about football anyway, so it’s a black mark against it.

You guys joked about suing, but did you or Chris McLaurin ever actually consider legal action, or did you both kind of just shrug and chalk it up to the surreal logic of intellectual property in China? We talked about it semi-seriously. I mean, Chris, like, has a lawyer who looked into it. Chris is a lawyer himself now, so we discussed it. I think he has much more standing to sue than I do.

They actually did in the version of the movie that I saw use images of Chris at the end, coaching the team, pictures from the magazine story. So I think he has a sort of narrow case that they infringed on his name and likeness. I think I would have less of a case; my understanding of IP law is pretty shaky. But you can’t copyright facts. You can copyright patterns of facts.

But I think Clash did its own thing. It has enough original material that even if the frame is the same, even if it’s about a football team in their first season, starting from the bottom, getting better, and finally winning the championship against the foreign-dominated Shanghai team, I don’t think that’s enough to build a case on in the U.S. Especially in China, it would be my guess. Certainly in China, it’d be pretty tough.

So, Chris, I mean, in some ways, this is a story about a lost moment. But it’s not just Hollywood in China. It feels like it’s a story about a version of globalization that no longer really feels tenable. I did writing that second piece, the piece for the Atlantic, that felt to you elegiac or cathartic or what was your feeling about that?

I mean, I appreciate the emo question and maybe I’ll give you an emo answer in my face when I was asking it. It was all contorted in this really emo expression.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, and that may include you, spend a lot of time after they spend time in China and then leave. You spend a lot of time trying to make sense of it and process it and understand what that was. Because it could be so intense, it could be so formative, but it’s also very confusing.

So, you know, I have a friend who spent time in China a few years and then wrote a novel, which may or may not get published. But she needed to process this. And I think I’ve probably been looking for ways to understand what that was, especially now that I’m back in the U.S., I’m in New York. I’m only writing about China occasionally.

And this seemed like an opportunity to kind of reflect back on the last decade and how much things have changed. Especially like what was that moment in the early 2010s when Xi Jinping had just come into power and people were still talking about him as a possible liberal reformer and that we would be entering a new era of U.S.-China friendship and cooperation.

That played out on the personal level too; you make so many friends and it feels like you’re kind of riding a wave together, whereas now, almost all my American friends have left Beijing. And it’s hard not to be nostalgic about that time. A lot of cool people here still.

I had to say, I believe that I think people would still remember you. Chris, it is such a pleasure to talk to you about this story. I mean, everyone, please check it out. I will put links both to the original New Republic story and to the Atlantic piece, as well as links to previous appearances by Chris on that, that the cruise ship story.

I was listening to bits of it yesterday, and it was a really fun episode. Let’s move on now to our paying it forward segment.

Who do you have? Who do you want to name check for us, Chris? I’m worried that others have name checked this writer, but I just wanted to shout out Viola Joe at Rest of World; actually, she has been name checked. And I think this is the third time. So that’s actually a good sign that, you know, I dig her. Everyone digs her. She’s doing great work.

Yeah, I mean, maybe then in that case, it’s worth shouting out Rest of World generally. Like, I just think they do such terrific work covering stories that otherwise are getting completely ignored. Absolutely. And doing it so smartly. They have just a great sensitivity to the on-the-ground reality around the world, and also the sensibility of American readers. They really thread that needle beautifully, I think.

OK, so two people I’m going to ban from further because they’ve already won the award for having been paid for three times. Viola Joe is one, and the other is Kyle Chan. OK, so no more Kyle, listeners, no more Kyle Chan, no more Viola Joe. But I absolutely heartily endorse both.

And what about recommendations? What do you have for a recommendation this week? This might also have been mentioned. I hope not, but I recently read the short story collection called Rejection by Tony Talithamudi.

It is one of the most shocking, reviling, horrifying, visceral reading experiences that I’ve had ever. And I absolutely loved every page. It’s basically about being a writer. Each short story is about a character who has experienced a different form of rejection, often romantic, and responds to it in their own way.

It’s this glimpse into these really distorted minds and psychologies that I thought was absolutely beautiful and transporting. I would highly recommend it, although it kind of has the Chuck Palahniuk problem where if you’re sensitive, you might end up having a bodily response.

Right, right, right. You know, that sounds to me like the literary equivalent of death metal. But so you’ll love it. Yeah, I’ll love it. I love that stuff.

Cool. I’ve got a couple of recommendations. Mine on the plane coming over to China, I watched only one thing. That was the Led Zeppelin documentary called Becoming Led Zeppelin.

Fantastic. A little hagiographic, but hey, it was great. It was sanitized. I mean, if you’ve read the unauthorized stuff like Hammer of the Gods, you know a lot of the nasty stuff. But this is the sort of PG version of Led Zeppelin coming together. But it’s a real focus on the music. It’s great. It’s fantastic.

And the other, I want to really shout out my friend Michael Cherney. I was just here at his house, and he gave me this personal tour of some of his recent work. It’s just astonishing. Check it out at Qiomai.net.

Q-I-U-M-A-I.net

He is a calligrapher and a photographer, somebody with a profound understanding of Chinese art and a way of talking about it that is just, it’s incredibly impactful. Very, very meaningful. It’s just amazing.

I won’t spoil too much, but do check out his work. We’ve just been talking about doing something, collaborating on something to showcase his art on maybe my YouTube channel or on my website. So check that out. You’ll see it one of these days.

And, you know, the real irony is it’s hard to just, on an audio podcast, talk about a visual art form. But it’s been a source of frustration for me because I’m such a fan of his work. But we’ll figure out something now that I’ve got a YouTube channel.

All right.

Hey, Chris, what a pleasure to talk to you.

You too. Thanks so much, Kaiser. Really great to catch up and discuss. Get yourself back to Beijing, man. You’ll see it. It’s not over, man.

Part two. Yeah. Part two. Part two. I’m starting part two right now.

You’ve been listening to the Seneca Podcast. The show is produced, recorded, engineered, edited, and mastered by me, Kaiser Guo. Support the show through Substack at www.sinecapodcast.com, where there is a growing offering of terrific original China-related writing and audio.

Or email me at [email protected] if you’ve got ideas on how you can help out with the show. Don’t forget to leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Enormous gratitude to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies for supporting the show this year. Huge thanks to my guest, Christopher Beam.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week. Take care. We’ll see you next week. We’ll see you next week.