I Got A Story To Tell

" if you see a fork in the road, take it.
when the road gives you chopsticks,
pick-it-up pick-it-up pick-it-up"

My life, like yours, has and always has been a bundle of stories.

My father was a goldsmith, could breathe life into gold at an evening's notice, and survived by his wit and alchemy. Mom dukes, on the other hand, pragmatic and clerical, manned the business and legal side of Sun Gallery Goldsmiths. I spent my childhood running: to the corner store for Fritos and Orangina for Pops, to the mediterranean deli for spanikopita and egyptian pizza, through aisles in bohemian record stores, to the nearest comic stand for the latest Amazing Spider-Man, and through streets of people whose tongues i did not understand. I learned the art of storytellin' from a community of artists and entrepreneurs, dollmakers, painters, and musicians unlimited by the vastness of language and medium, or the particulars of cultural difference and artistic expression.

In high school, I discovered the gift of gab. I was praised me for a mastery of academic english and my upper-class cultural fluency, despite being from Southeast DC, where talking 'proper' was a foreign language. ...and you're so well spoken...I was both Minnesota Avenue and Tenleytown; morning commutes from chocolate city's impoverished core to its privelged crust were my culture shock breakfasts.

It was in high school that I first began to learn Mandarin, and, besides what I could make out between the clamor of dishes during Peking Duck lunches in Chinatown with Pops, had never actually heard it spoken. Hundreds of Kung-Fu flicks later, I would go on to study in Beijing during my junior year of college, and need to call on all these things--culture shock, the gift of gab, Mandarin, and the art of storytellin, to make sense of what it was like to be a black american living in China.

...but i'm getting behind myself

I stand here today, finished with my formal education at Boston College, Bachelor's Degree in Sociology somewhere in the mail, forever rid of mundane class requirements, third-degree burnt from Evil Knievel-ing my way through every financial flaming hoop. I'm fast approaching the fork in the road which leads to another academic journey back East and the purpose of this blog, this time to give voice to the emcees, deejays, and artists who compose Beijing's hip-hop scene--whose stories are making up the modern aesthetic of the world's prominent rising superpower. I hope the Fulbright people know what they were gettin in to.

To my regular black folk and my Hutongren, this is for you. Cantonese b-boys and Californian b-girls, this is for you. Parisian deejays and Palestinian emcees, this is for you. Hip hop has homes in alleyways half a world away and halfway down the block.

Party people unite, and lets all get down

--Jam