Ziyo

Last Saturday evening, I went with a few of my friends to a bar called Dos Kollegas to see a Chinese indie band named Ziyo (www.myspace.com/ziyo) which my friends had been raving about. The venue felt like it could have been out in the boonies of Ohio. It was next to a drive-in movie theater and had a backyard with tables where people sat and talked. Ziyo was even better than I had expected, though they didn’t play for very long since there were a number of other acts on the program that night. In addition to Ziyo and other bands, there was a girl who did a fire-twirling routine, and a DJ who used some German software turned his Game Boy into a mixing board. After Ziyo played we sat down on the grass in the yard and talked to the guitarist and lead-singer. The guitarist told us that they had been playing for three years, and were frustrated by the fact that most Chinese people only liked to listen to the “shit music” (one of the few English phrases he knew) that was popular in China and didn’t appreciate their style. However, he seemed hopeful that in a few years Chinese taste would catch up to that of the U.S. He said they had been signed by Warner recently, which I was surprised and impressed to hear, but that they still hadn’t put out a CD. In addition to the pressure to change their music and sell out put on them by working with a big label, they said that the government was pretty strict about underground culture and that it wasn’t so easy for a relatively unknown band to release a CD. One of the guitarist’s friends joined us and said that he was in a metal band. He asked us what kind of music Americans were listening to these days, and when he hadn’t heard of the bands we mentioned, he kept making suggestions like, “What about Korn?”, “Isn’t Limp Bizkit pretty popular?”, “Do you guys like Linkin Park?” That night I also unexpectedly ran into one of my teachers. He’s always pretty shy and nervous in class, and it was fun to get a chance to talk to him when he didn’t feel pressured and wasn’t afraid that the head teacher would kill him if he spoke English. . After we left the bar, we headed to a pizza place that I’d heard was supposed to be the best in Beijing. It was delicious, made even more so by the fact that I hadn’t had cheese in seven weeks (The Chinese aren't big on cheese. One of my teachers didn't even know it was made from milk.).