Cast of Characters

The people in my life tend to influence me a lot. In terms of activities, their participation or lack thereof basically dictates my social life. If no body I know wants to go to the folk music show but they all want to go to the rock concert, I am probably gonna end up going to the rock concert. They also play a major role in my emotional state. After sharing a friend's victorious moment I feel excellent, and after an ambiguous conversation with a female friend I feel confused (which has happened several times recently). So, without more introduction, I will try and set down who the people in my life are at the moment:

Fede is well known in Beijing

Federico is undoubtedly one of the most prominent figures in the life of Joe at the moment. An 31 year old Italian according to his passport, Fede has lived in Beijing for the past six years or so, and is one of the proud owners of Beijing's best juggling shop, as well as the founder of the juggling club. I have been helping Fede out with the editing and the transcribing of his Body Foundation method, which is a health and fitness curriculum that he is forming with the intent of sharing it with NGOs and schools around the world. He is out of Beijing surprisingly often, and is currently back in Italy for a few weeks, after which he will spend a month or two in and near the Central African Republic. He is also putting together the Beijing Performers, and has the eventual hope of making both that and a teaching program (focused around juggling and acrobatics) self-sustaining efforts that he (and I, potentially) can make a living off of.

David is from England, and is either 9 or 11 years my senior (I always forget). I enjoy his accent, and he always makes me smile. Both his energetic humor and his more serious side make me enjoy his company. Although Dave has a PhD in some kind of computer science thing (networking systems, I think?) and he teaches CS at a local university, he shares a lot of my interests and hobbies. He goes to improv and he goes to juggling club, so I often see him twice a week at those events. He also has his own band in Beijing, the Red Pirates. A fan of snowboarding, he has recently started his own advanced improv group, in which he wants more commitment from the participants. He lives in the northwest part of Beijing with his girlfriend, Liz, also British, who works as a scientific researcher her. She has excellent dreads and is also very fun. No wonder they are together.

Ines is invited all over the world to perform

Ines Brun and her boyfriend Julien (both 30 something) work in and run Natooke with Fede, selling fixed gear bicycles and pollution masks. Ines is a world famous acrobat, and also has a PhD in physics. She worked for a German company in Beijing before she decided to start her own bicycle shop. She is very organized and focused, and very committed to her work, often staying at her shop until 9 or 10 at night

Nadia is a 22 year old girl from Hawai'i, and is a mix of Hawaiian, Chinese, and European ancestry. I first met her as juggling club, where she showed up one day to learn contact juggling. She has been coming regularly since then, and has begun to work for Fede in his shop. She has also agreed to be my new acrobatics partner, which I hope will work well. She used to do wushu at Beijing Sports University, and has traveled to fifteen different countries, settling on Sweden as her favorite. She did a lot of WWOOFing, and is currently studying some kind of finance at a university in Beijing. She also wears what I believe to be the cutest pair of white earmuffs in Beijing, which I hold as one of her defining characteristics. Nadia seems to be quite good friends with Xian Hong.

Gus was an international student night MC at his university

Gus, two years my senior, is studying for a masters degree in teaching Chinese as a foreign language at Beijing Normal University. He taught English via the Princeton in Asia program for two years in Guangzhou, and before that he majored in Chinese at a college in the United States. He has excellent Chinese (as would be expected), and he is also quite a good juggler, with a solid five ball cascade. He works for Fede every now and then, and writes a blog of his own about his language and cultural adventures here in China. Gus is a strange combination of calm and goofy, and it is very enjoyable to be able to talk juggling to an American near my age. Oh, and he also plays the Ukulele.

EDIT: Gus has informed me that he did not major in Chinese, but in Computer Science. Oh, and he went to Princeton. This is officially the first person I personally know who went to an Ivy League school. Gus, I am impressed.

Kelvin is a busy man whom I first met at improv. I would guess that he is about 30. He is Chinese and he has excellent English, usually serving as the interpreter for the improv group (which is bilingual). Kelvin is extremely energetic and really fun. He stays very busy with all of his work, and he takes a lot of freelance translation work. He occasionally calls me to ask for help with this work, and I have helped with listen to and understand a couple of British TV shows that he couldn't understand. Mostly slang, but many phrases that are made difficult to understand due to background noise in the show.

Cutler went to Perpich with me for the junior year of high school back in '04-'05. We were both in the theater department, but I switched to the dance department. I hadn't heard from him since high school, and suddenly we see that we are both in Beijing. He is studying to improv his Chinese, doing a year of preparation before starting a masters program in history at RenMin University, for which he has a full scholarship, I think due to his excellent language skills. We have gotten together for a few times to see some live music and to have some dinner. His cell phone doesn't let him send text messages, and he lives with his Chinese girlfriend. His Chinese is a good step better than mine, and he even went onstage to rap in Mandarin at the underground rap battle last weekend!

My first meeting with Lao Zhou

I first met Lao Zhou more than a year ago at the Temple of Heaven, in the winter of 2009, right around the time of Spring Festival. That was back when I was a student. When I returned to Beijing in the summer of 2010 after graduating from college I was very surprised to see him again, but apparently he found Fede and has been coming to juggling club regularly for several months now. He is a 50 something and retired Chinese man who lives a very comfortable life; he once described his daily schedule as waking up and doing some juggling before lunch, then making some food and riding his unicycle for a while before going online to look at whatever is interesting. Lao Zhou is a part of the performance group which Fede is organizing. From a conversation that Lao Zhou and I had about the whole world having a single government at juggling club a week ago, I suspect that Lao Zhou is also quite the idealist.
 
Xian Hong, age 25 (although she looks 21 or 19), was born to Chinese parents in Beijing and went to Germany with her mother when her parents separated when she was ten years old. She never leaves her room without her black hat and her blue scarf, and she rarely takes them off. Gus met her in his dorm, and brought her to juggling club. She does poi, and she has started to learn some contact juggling. She spent a year in France, and she is now spending a year in Beijing to get in touch with her roots. She goes to Beijing Normal University and she is studying Chinese and Directing. She is in China for the full year, so she won't leave until June, but she has a Polish/German boyfriend back in Germany. She speaks English quite well, but prefers to communicate in Chinese. She is really into hip-hop, so we tend to check out cool events in Beijing together. To date we have been to dance classes and an underground rap battle together, and there is a hip-hop event this weekend that we are gonna check out. I tried to teach her some breakdance, but she doesn't have the arm muscles for it. I want to learn the hip-hop dance that she knows. She and Nadia seem to get along very well.

EDIT: Gus informs me that he met Xian Hong at Natooke, only finding out after meeting her that they live the the same dormitory building.

I first met DuoYi at the beijing improv workshop, and she is really fun. She majored in Philosophy in college, and now she works with some kind of an NGO. She like improv and dance, and she tends to go to improv and dance events every week. Unfortunately, she seems to have developed a big crush on me, which makes me pretty uncomfortable, because I desire neither for her to be my girlfriend nor to sleep with her. 

Nassau shows happiness through smiles

Special mention: Nassau is not in Beijing right now. She is one year my senior, and she should be arriving in the first few days of January, though. She went to my college (Kalamazoo College) in the U.S., studied in China, and in addition to some conversational Chinese language ability she has artistic skills too. She is one of the few friends that I ever modeled for (most of my modeling as been for people I did not have a personal relationship with). She has been looking for a change in her life, and she is going to start working at the same preschool that I work at. I am excited for her to come to Beijing, and I expect that since we are already fairly good friends she will easily be included in this list of people who I spend most of my time with.

There are some more minor characters as well. Seamus, the (possible) first Irish language teacher in China who comes to my Spanish Conversation Night every week; The big German guy that goes to improv; ZhangQiang, who is in her final year of college and who I have known since 2008, the Colombians... But pretty much all of the primary players in my social life (read: outside of work life) in Beijing are listed above.