An unexpected lecture on the politics of European immigration
I went to Amsterdam for two days last week. This was a classic of hallucinatory, placeless business travel, more time on planes than in country, mostly a prisoner of the Airport Hilton Schiphol. All airport hotels are liminal, but at least I had an outside-facing room with sunlight rather than one looking into the atrium, which was a sort of luxury panopticon. I believe Nietzsche wrote, “When you look long into an atrium, the atrium also looks into you.”
The Dutch have splendid cheeses, but don’t otherwise seem to be a big cuisine culture. I recognize this is dangerous turf for an American who was there for all of two days, but when you factor out cheese what are you left with? Stroopwaffels? Bitterballen? Hagelslag? When was the last time you went to a Dutch restaurant? Was it Rijsttafel? Thank the Indonesians!
Even Germany has managed a certain amount of cuisine and we go to our local German place periodically for beer and sausage. Admittedly, beer and sausage is a layup. But the Dutch had a spanning Southeast Asian empire, invented the global spice trade and fought a brutal war with the English over it. All that history, and the condiment hill they’ve chosen to die on is mayonnaise. That’s commitment!
Toy manufacturer Mattel has apologized after mistakenly printing the web address of a pornographic site on the packaging of its newly launched “Wicked” dolls.
Instead of pointing readers to the official website of the movie adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical, information found on boxes of the special edition dolls leads to a page that requires users to be 18 years or older to enter, according to social media users on X.
“Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the US, which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page,” the company said in a statement sent to CNN on Sunday.
“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children,” it said.
People who have already purchased the dolls are advised to discard the packaging or obscure the link, Mattel added.
“Misprint.” Sure. Like the colors were out of registration. Could happen to anyone.
Honestly, this does not seem like a crisis. If Mattel had accidentally printed a porno URL on packaging for Barbie (25 percent of revenue in 2023), that would have been a crisis! And at that point possibly simpler for them to just go buy out the offending domain, though they’d be in a weak negotiating position. But on the “Wicked” movie tie-in dolls? I don’t anticipate a tearful CEO video apology for this, though I suspect some people in the packaging design and marketing teams got yelled at.
And rightly so! It was careless. Site unseen, what are the chances the domain “wicked.com” is a pornography website? Close to 100 percent, right? If you were doing the packaging for “Kinky Boots” dolls, you’d damn well check the URL before printing the packaging. (There does not seem to be either toys or a dedicated website for “Kinky Boots,” so this is academic.)
Cards on the table, I’m a fan of the administrative state. Societies are large and complex, and a little technocratic competence goes a long way in ensuring the availability of public goods and infrastructure. But there are some areas where the administrative state struggles. Sex, for one.
Like China, my adopted home of Singapore advocated for limited birthrates during the 1970s “population bomb” panic, when it was widely agreed we were destined to devour each other like starving jackals. Singapore realized its demographic error in the 1980s, as its birthrate plummeted, and went through policy whiplash. When I arrived, in 1995, there was an advertising campaign encouraging young couples to have larger families. I recall lots of slow-motion video and gauzy photos of attractive young couples with cherubic babies, and an omnipresent theme song. Alas, it was too early to be immortalized on the Internet, but there is evidence of later campaigns.
I’ve been on the road, which is why it’s been a minute since the last post. About a week ago I flew from San Francisco to Taipei. It turns out that all the flights on that route suffer from the same problem, which is that they leave San Francisco at about 1AM and arrive in Taipei at about 5:30AM.
I’m an early-to-bed / early-to-rise type, so going to the airport at 10:30PM is like going to hell. Who wants to deal with the TSA at midnight? Stupidly, I had allowed my pre-check status to expire five days before this trip so it was shoes off, belt off. At that hour, there was some risk I would just keep going, peel off my pants and lie down on the conveyer belt in my underwear. Wake me in Taipei.
My employers are frugal. I don’t blame them! You gotta spend the money on important things and fabs are expensive. But it means that we get premium economy for long hauls, at least at my job grade. This is better than regular economy, but it does not allow you to lie flat which, for me, is the only way I can sleep. I can sort of doze sitting up, but it’s just a rotating set of stress positions interrupted by brief periods of semi-conscious fugue state and fever dreams.
Generation Z is weird about cars but I’m totally normal
In what should be an epochal household shift, my son got his driver’s license a few weeks ago. This culminated months of begrudging participation in one of the main rituals of American young-adulthood. He didn’t really want to do it. Some of this resistance was on principle. He’s the president of the Public Transit Club at his high school. But there was also generational ennui. Apparently the Zoomers just aren’t that into driving.
“Look,” I said, after his sixteenth birthday, “you live in California. You need to know how to operate a motor vehicle.” After all, reliable public transit only exists in tiny, Marxist enclaves where public services haven’t been repudiated as against the natural, Hobbesian order of American society.
I also said that, since he lives in the United States of America, where the sweet lord Jesus wants everyone armed to the eyeballs with military-grade weaponry, he also needs to know how to safely unload a firearm, should he encounter one. But first, driving.
My son is thoughtful and careful behind the wheel. He easily passed the road test and now he is a licensed driver. But he has yet to ask to use the car. To a Gen-X father, this is deeply weird, and it makes me want to search his room for drugs (not a chance) and anarchist literature (maybe?).
A heady mix of raw sexual energy and whiskey marketing
In retrospect, the mistake was going to a concert in Concord on a Thursday evening. We live in Redwood City and the 50 mile rush-hour drive to Concord took us two and a half crawling hours. But we’d bought the tickets six or eight months before, when the prospect of the drive was remote, and my son was excited to see a double bill of ZZ Top and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Yes, this was my 16 year-old son’s choice. He may be a half-Asian zoomer, but he has the musical tastes of a white boomer from Little Rock. His playlist is a mix of 70’s prog, southern rock and classic country.
I didn’t do this to him! If my influence won, he would be playing non-stop Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. I went to the University of California Santa Cruz in the 1980s and they wouldn’t give you a diploma until you could recite the discographies of both bands and debate the merits of their various eras. Was it all downhill after Syd Barrett left Floyd? These are the questions one grapples with in the ivory towers of the academy. Often as one also grapples with a four foot tall bong.
This is one of the greatest things I have ever read in a press statement:
First and foremost, our investigation has identified the root cause of the contamination as a specific production process that only existed at the Jarratt facility and was used only for liverwurst. With this discovery, we have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.
The emphasis is in the original and it sells the paragraph.
This comms masterpiece is from a statement released yesterday by the food company Boar’s Head, which is dealing with a crisis regarding listeria contamination of liverwurst manufactured at a facility in Virginia.
One general rule in crisis communications is that you should clearly explain the actions you will take to remediate the problem. “We have decided to permanently discontinue liverwurst.” That’s an action! This step was so important that it was the first of three remedial steps covered in that press release. The second was that they are permanently closing the facility and apparently laying off several hundred people. Naturally, that’s the headline the press went with. Still, if you’re going to bury the lede, bury it under liverwurst!
A little over 20 years ago, a man I respected offered me a job I was interested in. This sent me into a panic.
I had been living in Singapore for eight years and was going stir crazy. Following two imploded Internet startups and the collapse of the dot-com bubble, I had switched to public relations, where paychecks were more reliable. Singapore is great, but very small. In those days you could reach the entire Singapore technology press corps by standing on the right street corner and shouting, though this was frowned upon.
In the early 2000s, if you were casting around Asia for The Action, there was only one answer. China had just acceded to the World Trade Organization, was open for business and on a globalization rocket ride. A Singaporean friend of mine from startup number 2 had spent some time working in Beijing and came back with tales of adventure. It was big! It was booming! Keep one hand on your wallet!
I was a freshman at Palo Alto High School in 1981. My parents were divorced, which was compulsory for kids of my generation. After a few years of living alone with my father in San Francisco, I had moved to Palo Alto to live with my mom and younger brothers.
With the exception of one lost junior-high year in Los Angeles, I had spent grades 1-8 at a small private school in Marin County. I was not popular (headgear, right field, the works) and didn’t have a big social circle. Bussing across the Golden Gate every day meant that I also didn’t have classmates living nearby. I spent a lot of time at home alone in the afternoons reading science fiction and comics and watching just the dumbest possible stuff on television. No regrets.
At Paly, my freshman class was the same size as the entire student body of my old school in Marin. This was great. I had known all thirty kids in my old class in Marin and pretty much hated 27 of them. In a big public high school, you can find your tribe. After about two months skulking at the fringes of the Paly cafeteria, I found mine. And I could bike to everyone’s houses!
My high school clique was a sprawling Venn diagram of overlapping communities. A motley agglomeration of science fiction fans, science and proto-computer geeks, goth-lite theater kids, and other assorted weirdos. It was glorious. I wore a literal anorak and a ten-foot Tom Baker-era “Dr. Who” scarf and fit right in. Photos of that era are amazing. Just an explosion of feathered hair and regrettable fashion choices. In other words, the 80s.
Scott’s not in the picture, but this is a chunk of The Gang, ca. 1982. I am second from left in the (really) anorak and amazing nerd scarf. There were girls in the group, but they were smart enough to stay out of the photo. Left to right: Bob, me, Mike, Clive, Gordon (top), Paul (bottom), Colin, El.
One of the circles in the Venn diagram was the fantasy gamers. They spoke of arcane rules and systems, and things I’d never heard of. Champions? Call of Cthulhu? Dungeons and Dragons? OK, that one I’d heard of. By sophomore year, I was deep into the games. This would end up influencing my life in surprisingly profound ways. And it was how I met Scott.
For someone who figured so hugely in my high school experience, Scott and I didn’t really overlap. He was four years older, a senior when I was a frosh; normally an unbridgeable chasm. But the fantasy game clique transcended age and even graduation.
The age difference was part of why Scott made such an impression on me. Also, in a world of high school poseurs, he was a bone-deep eccentric. Physically large. Bombastic. A military fetishist and low-wattage firearms enthusiast. Scott once introduced me to another friend of his, who popped open his car trunk to reveal a Vietnam-era M-60 machine gun. Reminder: this was Palo Alto. The M-60 wasn’t his, but Scott rocked aviator shades and a U.S. Cavalry hat in the style of Robert Duvall’s character in Apocalypse Now. It was a vibe.
But there was a core of soulfulness under Scott’s bluster. And, most important, he was a talented artist.
In a 1980s fantasy gaming clique, being a good artist was the Platinum Card of social currency. With a few flicks of his trademark brush-tip pen, Scott could make real and tangible the images we had in our heads of characters, scenes, jokes and even each other.
I oozed with jealousy. I wanted to be able to draw, and sweated over it, often trying to imitate the Anime style we were infatuated with. (We were those kids.) But I sucked comprehensively. Every time I see an AI image where Dall-E has screwed up the hands or ears, or created a nightmare facsimile of a human being, I sympathize with the machine. You and me, buddy. Once, during a gaming session, I was laboring mightily on a sketch of a spaceship. Scott peered over my shoulder and damned my efforts with a curt, “Nope.” It’s a testament to him that I remember this moment with affection.
It helped that Scott was generous with his talent. Most of us couldn’t draw, so Scott drew for us. Scott drew my gaming characters, but he also drew characters and concept art for the stories I wrote. Forty years later I still have much of this art, tucked into binders alongside my character sheets and my own lame works.
During all-night D&D sessions fueled by two-liter bottles of Coca Cola and packages of Mothers Iced Oatmeal cookies (honestly, it’s a miracle any of us lived into middle age at all), Scott drew rapid-fire cartoons. Fred Flinstone pointing at a bird with an enormous dick perched on Barney Rubble’s head: “Hey, Barney, isn’t that the bird that fucked your wife?”* Uproarious. Many of Scott’s cartoons were mock comic book covers that he billed as “Falbo Comics.” Almost always tasteless, generally hilarious. We were teenage boys, what do you want?
Scott also had a car. This was a Big Deal.
For a long time, the principal car owners in our gaming clique were Scott and another kid his age, Pete. Scott and Pete were very different drivers. Pete drove the Green Machine, a rattling avocado-green Ford Granada, with a death-wish. I once was a passenger in the Green Machine as Pete rammed it down Alma Street at 90 in the wee hours, ripping through desolate suburban intersections in a cloud of gaskets and bearings while I watched my crushingly virginal life flash before my eyes. The Green Machine eventually died in a cloud of smoke outside my mom’s house.
Scott rolled in more stately fashion, in a bronze Oldsmobile 98, the pinnacle of mid-century Detroit naval engineering prowess. Window open, elbow out, Cavalry hat and aviator shades, gently goosing his boat down El Camino to the sounds of the Nails, the Stranglers or maybe Ebn-Ozn. Did I mention Scott had cool taste in music?
Measured against today’s Yukons and Hummers and the absurdly jacked pickup trucks that serve as prosthetic testicles for a certain kind of contemporary man, the 98 was probably modestly sized. But, in the time of the Honda Civic hatchback, it seemed immense and it embraced Newton’s laws of motion like a lover. I remember driving it once, furiously cranking the wheel to make the turn from Page Mill into Peter Coutts Road, the car leaning way out of the curve like the body might simply separate from the undercarriage and float into the stratosphere in a straight line like a vinyl-top B-52.
Scott and Pete’s cars gave us freedom (if poor actuarial math), which we embraced with 1980s innocence, rolling to the multiplex on Shoreline in Mountain View to watch The Terminator for the nth time, or our favorite burger joint near San Antonio Shopping Center where we would feast and play coin-op video games. Or perhaps to downtown Palo Alto to catch the always popular double-bill revival of Mad Max and The Road Warrior at the Varsity Theater.
In those days we had a long-running D&D campaign with a dozen or more core players who rotated in and out. The dungeonmaster, Jade, was also slightly older and often convened us in a conference room at the company he worked at. You could just take Coke out of the fridge! A perfect Saturday night for us was rolling with Scott or Pete to a “Jade Game” session and smiting skulls until three or four AM on Sunday, followed by a devastating breakfast at Denny’s (always finish with a shake!) and then crawling into bed at 6AM or so and sleeping until Sunday afternoon. I am sure my mother thought I was torching my brain. She may have been right.
In 1985, after graduation and The Summer that Was**, my cohort atomized off to college. I went to UC Santa Cruz, along with a few other members of the gang. The Jade Game kept rolling and we convened when we could. The climactic session unfolded in my apartment in Santa Cruz in 1987. One of the players had written a computer program (gasp!) to resolve the statistics of the massed army battle that ended the campaign.
The summer after that year, I worked at a guest ranch on Mount Lassen. Many evenings, after the guests had gone to bed, the younger staff would take mushrooms and skinny dip in the volcanically heated swimming pool. Naturally, Scott memorialized this experience in Falbo Comics, sketched on the back of stationery from the Apple Computer Fall 1986 Developer Conference.
Scott’s Falbo Comics cartoon commemorating my summer working on Mount Lassen, ca. 1987. Sketched on the back of the 1986 Apple Fall Developer Conference stationery.
One day in Santa Cruz, my buddy Dave and I walked into a game and comic shop in the basement of a grand Victorian building on Pacific Garden Mall. There we met Mike Pondsmith. Mike had written Mekton, a fantasy game based on Anime giant robots like Gundam. We bonded over anime fandom and gaming and Mike pulled Dave and me into his orbit as he built his company, R. Talsorian Games.
Mike’s next big project was called Cyberpunk and Dave and I became part of his core team of writers. Scott joined the stable as an artist, helping me bring to life the mega-corporations of the Cyberpunk universe. Scott, Dave and I worked GenCon, the big fantasy gaming convention, for Mike for a few years in the early 90s. Flying off for a few days in Milwaukee felt amazingly grown up. I remember Scott and me wearing neckties for some ridiculous reason and using pen caps as tie clips. Why? Who knows. Nobody else at GenCon in Milwaukee in August was wearing a collared shirt and a tie.
Here’s a bit of trivia. If you’ve played any version of Cyberpunk (original box set, 2020, Cybergeneration, Red…), or played the CD Projekt Red computer game Cyberpunk 2077, or watched the Netflix series Edgerunners, you’ve encountered the Arasaka Corporation, one of the ur-villains of the Cyberpunk universe. Scott is indirectly responsible for the name Arasaka. Among his militariana, Scott had an Arisaka type 99, a Japanese rifle of Second World War vintage. When I was casting around for a name for a villainous Japanese super-corporation I borrowed the name of Scott’s rifle, though I misspelled it.
Through a wildly improbable sequence of events, my work for Mike Pondsmith led to me moving to Singapore in 1995 as part of the first (and catastrophically doomed) attempt to make a Cyberpunk computer game. This was shortly after Singaporean authorities had famously caned a young American for vandalism. Naturally, Scott commemorated my impending move to Singapore in a Falbo Comics panel. Dave and Scott also both went into the video game industry, with rather more success. I eventually drifted into other parts of the technology world.
Scott’s cartoon from November, 1995, when I was about to move to Singapore. A young American had recently been caned for vandalism and the prevailing sentiment was that this would happen to me, too. Also, I had long hair by this time.
I’d like to tell you that Scott and I stayed close in the nearly two decades I was abroad. But, as far as I can remember, 1995 was the last time I saw him in person. I have a photo of that day, and one of my friends, José, is holding a baby. To be honest, I am not sure whose baby it is, but I don’t think it’s José’s.*** What’s remarkable to me is that the baby in the photo is now older than I was when the picture was taken. That’s how time works, of course, but it just floors me.
Top row, left to right: Scott, me, Dave. Bottom row: Pete, Bob, Jose, mystery baby (Dave’s son?). Bob isn’t mentioned in the post, but he was a member of the Jade Game and is far left in the first photo, with big hair. This is 1995, the year I moved to Singapore. Wish I’d kept that Steve Young throwback jersey. Sigh.
After the rise of social media, Scott and I intersected from time to time on Facebook. So I guess it’s appropriate that Facebook was how I found out last week that he’d died. This is how it happens these days. The Algorithm reveals the stages of life (and death) of my friends. It’s mostly posts celebrating the high school graduations and college matriculations of friends’ children. But in the last year it’s also been three deaths of old friends about my age, in the gap between 50 and 60 when you don’t consider yourself “old,” but you can see old coming.
It’s not necessarily bad to find out about the deaths of your friends through social media. It was completely appropriate to the status of our attenuated relationship. While I lived abroad, social media was the thread that kept me connected to people far away, including my old high school and college friends. Where else would I find out?
But social media made me lazy. It laid a simulation of intimacy over throwaway, one-to-many blurbs. It let me feel connected and stole the urgency from my intentions to get together with old friends. I’ll get to it, I said to myself. There’s time.
And then there wasn’t.
And I still don’t know if I am going to do anything different. I’d like to think so, but the track record is pretty dismal and people are scattered and busy. And. And. And. Well, you know.
My son is 16, the same age as I was when I was playing in the Jade Game and hanging out with Scott, Pete, Dave and all the other members of my sprawling clique of weirdos. A few days ago, three of his friends came over and they spent a raucous few hours in the garage playing video games, winding each other up and having a great time. Just, you know, hanging out. I watched with some jealousy. Enjoy those teenage friendships. 80s, 90s, 2020s, there is nothing like them.
So, to all my old friends, I miss hanging out with you. I don’t know if we’ll do it again, and even if we do it won’t be like it was forty years ago. But I remember those times fondly and, while there’s still time, I just wanted to say that you’re all weirdos, and I love you all.
###
*I may remember this backward. It might have been Barney pointing at Fred. But you get the point.
**IYKYK.
***Now confirmed to be Dave’s (upper right, in the Sharks jersey) then infant son, now in law school.
Note: Yes, the last two posts on this blog have been obits. I guess that’s just where we are now.
David in his natural environment. From his Instagram.
In June 2004, I quit a perfectly good job at a little PR firm in Singapore and went to Beijing to do a three month language program. Eight years in Singapore had made me a bit stir crazy and China, freshly through WTO accession, seemed like the place to be. Astoundingly enough, Mrs. Imagethief, who had been my wife for all of two years, blessed this batshit scheme. To this day, I think her willingness to say, “Yes, by all means, fuck off to China for a while,” explains the healthy state of our marriage.
I had done a couple of years with a Mandarin tutor in Singapore but I needed a forcing function to get me to Beijing. I signed up for a summer program with a fairly bullshit and now defunct language program that was near the famous Beijing Language and Culture University without, you know, being actually affiliated with it. The language instruction was mediocre, but the program got me a visa and put a roof over my head for three months. I’ll never forget the orientation speech. “Don’t eat the roadside chuans. You have no idea what they’re made from.” I ate a lot of roadside chuans because I reject authority.
At the end of the summer, I lined up some job interviews. I had only been in PR for a couple of years (after two imploded Internet startups in Singapore) and was still learning the trade. It says something about that go-go era that a PR newbie with zero China skills could even dream of landing work beyond the evergreen English teaching gig.
As it often is, the secret was a connection. The then head of Burson Marsteller Singapore had tried to recruit me that spring. Over coffee I told him my China scheme and he said he would make an introduction when I was ready. I got the introduction and the interview. Four years later, during the 2008 melamine crisis, he and I would spend a National Day golden week miserably locked in the Beijing office of a global food corporation with a big dairy business. Good times.
On a hot August day, I flagged a cheap Xiali taxi in Wudaokou and took the forty minute ride to China World Trade Center, at the intersection of Jianguomen Wai and the Third Ring Road. When you see aerial shots of traffic in meltdown in Beijing, it’s often that intersection, which looks like a freeway cloverleaf imagined by Heironymous Bosch. During the ride I sweated through my white dress shirt. The sweat leached years of accumulated grime out of the seatbelt and I walked into Burson China for the first time with a greasy, diagonal black stripe across my chest. Roger, the head of HR, yanked me aside and said, “Next time take an air conditioned taxi. We’ll pay for it.”
I had four interviews that day, black stripe and all. In three of them, I was acutely aware of, and perhaps slightly defensive of, my ignorance of all things China. But David did what he was so good at; he put me at ease and drew me into a thoughtful conversation. He radiated enthusiasm and curiosity and it was easy to feel comfortable and engaged. I forgot about my Xiali tattoo. Later, David would tell me, “you aced that interview,” so I’ve always assumed he was an advocate for my hiring. Regardless, Burson hired me and David and I started working on technology accounts together.
David was large in body, personality and voice – a head taller than me and, in those days, quite a bit wider. If my career in China were a bad movie, he would have been the grizzled veteran who showed me, the green-ass rookie, the ropes.
And, man, I was as green as a shamrock shake. China was incomprehensibly huge. Beijing was incomprehensibly huge. The district I lived in had the same population as Singapore. My language skills were crappy. I was elated every time I managed some aspect of normal life, like shopping (I’m sorry – where do I weigh the vegetables?), buying bed linens or taking the subway. The biggest press event I’d ever run in Singapore had been eighteen reporters (the local launch of Microsoft Office XP), and I thought I’d belted that shit out of the park like Barry Bonds. In China we’d have hundreds.
As I was staggering around, punch drunk and ignorant, David was my guide and coach. He taught me the craft and showed me how we, as foreigners, could be useful to our mostly international clients and our very talented Chinese colleagues. He showed me how to navigate the murky ethics of China’s media environment and instilled in me the value that one of our essential roles as PR counselors is to be the conscience of the organizations we work for, a lesson that has been a touchstone of my career. He was also a connector of people. Breakfast or lunch with David and [this person you gotta meet!] was a staple of my life in Beijing.
I admired David’s experience and connections in China. I admired his rainmaking talent (the same talent had put me at ease in my interview) and the trust he inspired in clients and prospects. I admired David’s command of the language. He would joke in Mandarin with our Chinese colleagues and banter effortlessly with taxi drivers. When they complimented his Mandarin, he would tell them, “It’s good enough to fool the Japanese.” This line killed.
David wasn’t the only person I learned from. I was absorbing lessons from our boss and from my Chinese colleagues, who rescued me on several occasions. In those days we could hire the absolute best and brightest; young professionals who had propelled themselves through China’s brutal educational system and into the most elite universities. They were a huge amount of fun to work with. But David was who I returned to discuss and process the torrent of stuff that I was absorbing.
David and I only worked together at Burson for a bit over a year, but we stayed in touch after he left to set up his own shop. In 2010, I left Burson and joined Motorola Mobility to lead their regional comms, a job I came to through a David connection. I became David’s client. He and I flew to Hong Kong together for a meeting. We landed in the teeth of a typhoon and suppressed our nervousness by talking so loudly that a guy in the row in front of us had to tell us to STFU. We went to Seoul and the head of Motorola Korea took us out for a cracking traditional meal where I, always up for a culinary challenge, tried fermented stingray. The next morning, my innards melted as we were stuck in a town car in a traffic jam over one of the bridges across the Han River. David talked me through it like I was having a bad LSD trip. We made it to our destination before I [choose one] comprehensively defiled the town car or made social media history as the foreigner relieving himself on the Mapo Bridge in front of the aghast commuters of Seoul.
David would not eat fermented stingray. He was an observant Jew, and kept kosher. Fermented stingray did not meet the rabbinical bar. I am from a non-observant family, so I am eating the damned fermented stingray wrapped in fatty pork, or the mystery chuans they warned us about in language school, because I have the freedom to and because I am also an idiot who can’t back down from a culinary challenge.
As long as we both lived in Beijing, David and I would meet for lunch every month or so. No stingray. Wherever we went, it had to serve something that, even if not technically kosher, wasn’t obviously transgressive. That ruled out a lot of Chinese food, so our usual maneuver was Pete’s Tex Mex, in northeast Beijing. After a while, the waitresses knew both our orders, which was kind of tragic. The food was adequate, but the conversation was always excellent. I would walk in and, invariably, Dave would already be there, at his usual table, colossal 17” Macbook open, greeting me with a huge grin. Often, he would have been holding court for a while, with appointments before and after. But, just as in the job interview years before, he had the ability to make me feel like the center of the world when it was my turn.
A decade ago, David and I both moved back to the US, me to the Bay Area and him to Southern California. We’d still get together when he was in the Valley. China receded, slowly at first, and then, during covid, rapidly. The last time I saw David was shortly before the pandemic. In a pleasing bit of symmetry (or, depending on how you look at it, an act of blistering unoriginality), our last meal together was at a mediocre Tex Mex place near my office in Santa Clara. Old habits. He was much thinner, but he still towered over me, and his voice still vibrated the windows. And he still made me feel like the center of the world.
I didn’t have much contact with him after that, other than the occasional text message or back and forth on Twitter. I could blame covid, I guess. But covid didn’t stop email and my life is full of people I should be keeping in better touch with, especially as the actuarial funnel begins to narrow to Keynesian inevitability. David was only three years older than me. There’s a lesson there, if I grope for it.
David was a connector of people. In China in the mid-2000s, he was the node at the center of a generation of comms pros, foreign and Chinese alike. After his son shared news of his death, the old network emerged to remember him. David had the ability to make you feel special when you were with him. But he was expansive with his friendship and support, in the best way, and you could see that in the threads. You could also see how much of his network had moved on from China in the last ten or twelve years. Some are still there, but many are now in California, Washington, DC, Singapore, London…
Times change. When I think back on the most intense period of my friendship and work with David, it was very much a product of those go-go post-WTO years. China was growing 10 percent a year. The technocrats were ascendant and the Olympics were coming. One could be unapologetically optimistic about engagement. And a doofus like me could appear in Beijing and, with the help of someone like David, build a meaningful career and some lasting friendships.
That time is over, I guess. I tell people that I miss China, but I don’t regret leaving. I feel like there was an arc to my life there and it ended when it was supposed to. But I am nostalgic. David was a huge part of that experience, and a connection back to those days of adventure. Now he’s gone, and it’s a different world.
See also: PRovoke’s obituary of David with comment from me and many others who knew and worked with him.
Trans-Pacific spin doctor. Head of Global Media Relations at TSMC. Occasional writer of humor and PR analysis. This is a personal blog and opinions are my own. More information at “About Imagethief“.
Also on Substack (where full posts live now), Bluesky, the usual places.
Imagethief 