Charles Custer: Underground Hip Hop Artist & ChinaGeeks Founder

ChinaGeeks first caught my attention about a month ago when Charles Custer, the founder, sparred with the notable but wily Chinese blogger Hecaitou over the issue of Racism in China. I’ve been subscribed to their RSS feed ever since, impressed with the excellent writing and insights they’ve offered on China, though the relatively young English blog about China has been publishing since early January. Earlier today, I had a chance to interview Charles and ask him to tell us a little more about ChinaGeeks and his thoughts on China and living in China.

The Blogger

CNReviews: So tell us, just what the hell were you doing at Little Bighorn?

Charles Custer: Oh, you know, just looking at the scenery and stuff. I had no idea there would be so many indians there. (Actually, I’m not related, or so my parents claim.)

CNR: It wasn’t until today that I learned that the “C” in “C. Custer” stood for Charles. Tell us a little bit about who you are, where you’re from, and what you do.

Custer: Well, if it isnt obvious from the site, I’m American, born and raised in New England. In college, I studied China quite extensively. My major was East Asian Studies with a focus on China, and during my time there I set departmental records for the most courses taken in-department, etc. Now I’m teaching English in Harbin, as well as pursuing some other side projects. The blog is one of them, of course; I’m also, believe it or not, an underground hip-hop artist with three albums under my belt, currently working on my fourth and firth. I’m headed back to the States for the summer at least, but my long term plans are…well, let’s call it “up in the air”. Either way, the blog is here to stay for quite a while, I think.

The Blog

CNR: The About page for ChinaGeeks gives a fairly typical explanation of wanting to provide articles, original essays, translations, news, and relevant links about China, and creating a community of English-speaking people interested in China, you know, so you can all have conversations and stuff. What about your personal or professional reasons for starting ChinaGeeks? Do you have ambitions for turning this into a profitable venture or building up your own reputation? Where do you see ChinaGeeks heading?

Custer: Well, the idea of ChinaGeeks as a blog actually came about just as an anchor for selling t-shirts with Chinese on them. You probably haven’t noticed — no one has — but there is a store on the site that currently sells one t-shirt, with an excerpt from one of my favorite Lu Xun stories printed on it.

The reason you probably haven’t noticed that is that I stopped caring about it fairly quickly when I realized that the blog part of the site, originally intended as sort of a sidenote, was a lot more fun than the main part. In fact, it’s a lot more fun than my actual job. So I started posting a bit more frequently and a bit more seriously. Roland Soong once said about ESWN that the blog was just a way for him to learn more about China, and really, ChinaGeeks is doing the same thing for me now. When you first come to China you’re learning something new, ten new things every day, but eventually that slows down and as life became “normal” again for me I was looking for a way to dig deeper into things without constantly harassing my Chinese friends about politics and culture. I quickly realized the blog did that for me, too.

I do intend to go to graduate school and continue my study of China, probably studying modern Chinese history, and I don’t deny that having a blog like this might help somewhat on that front, but that wasn’t the reason for starting it, and I wouldn’t bother to keep posting every day if all it was was a bullet point for the resume.

In the future, I guess I do have some ideas. I’d like a few more contributors, as having Chris Hearne on the team has worked out tremendously well, and given my other projects and, you know, real job, I don’t always have the time to write a post. (Or review things as carefully as I should, see the recent post about Zhejiang University girl I translated from Hecaitou’s site but completely missed his follow up post about how the whole thing was a hoax). So having more people — reliable, talented people like Chris, who I can pretty much just ignore and be sure they’re going to bring great stuff to the table — is one thing I hope for. I guess I’d love to see some way to make some money off the site too, whether it be through advertisements or selling t-shirts or whatever, but that isn’t really a priority at the moment. I’m willing to pay what I currently pay in hosting costs out of pocket because I enjoy running the blog. If our traffic goes up to the point where I need to buy more expensive hosting, at that point I might be a bit more concerned.

I really do want to build a community though, something like what chinaSMACK has managed to do but, you know, a bit more focused on real issues and less on internet memes (not that I don’t love the internet stuff, but that’s their niche and they do it better than I ever could). You may have noticed, I just added some stuff yesterday, or maybe the day before, so that readers can rate posts and comments. We’re also going to try to end most of our posts with discussion questions of a sort, to encourage commenting, which is something your site does too, and which I’ve seen applied to great effect on one of my favorite blogs, Kotaku. (They cover video games, not China, but they regularly ask for readers input if the post is suitable for it, and it seems to work very well for them. It’s one of the only blogs I’m actually registered to comment on, and the reason is that after a long time as a reader-only, I saw a question that really appealed to me and threw in my two cents. Hopefully, we can get a few more people to comment on our site in that way, as well).

CNR: What are the difficulties or challenges you’ve faced or still face as you build up ChinaGeeks? How did you overcome them or how are you trying to overcome them?

Custer: Well, the first difficulty is obviously getting people to read it. You can write as well as you like, but if no one is coming to your site, what’s the point? Early on, I’d say the first twenty posts or so, we had a readership of pretty much nobody. Overcoming that was mostly just a matter of linking other sites (and commenting there) so that our link was around the “China blogosphere” (I hate that word), and ensuring that we weren’t just writing the same stuff as everyone else, so that people had a reason to keep coming back. We were lucky (or Roland Soong was nice), and got some links from ESWN fairly early on, which helped traffic, and then the Hecaitou thing, Chris’s English teacher scandal post, and recently the Zhejiang girl post, have all directed large amounts of traffic our way; some of which hopefully stays. Obviously we’re always trying to increase traffic, but at this point, we’re just trying to do that through good posts. If we post something worth reading, “big” blogs link it.

The other difficulty is just finding stuff to write about and doing a good job with it every day, or as close to that as we can get. Being a new blog, we can’t really get away with taking a break, nor can we get away with posting crap. But since I have other stuff to work on as well, it can be difficult to maintain that schedule and also maintain quality. Especially if we’re translating something. My Chinese is OK, but it isn’t perfect; I’m certainly not at the level of a professional translator so translating things takes me a while and is sometimes pretty difficult. As you can readily see, sometimes this problem is evident in the results and sometimes it isn’t. Hopefully, I’m getting better at this as we go along, but I’ve really never done anything like this before (it’s certainly a far cry from academic writing about China), so who knows.

CNR: I know this is something of a trite question but, what has been a post, or perhaps a turning point, that has been significant to you with regards to ChinaGeeks?

Custer: Well, obviously the “Racism in China” post and the follow-up to it were huge, although I genuinely didn’t expect that to explode the way it did, because I didn’t realize how Chinese people were going to interpret the word “racism“. We got a lot of traffic, but what was more significant to me was that it gave me an opportunity, and our commenters an opportunity, to actually interact with the Chinese language blogging community, which I thought was really cool. It wasn’t always the prettiest discussion, granted, but I certainly learned something from it, and I think other people probably did too. I still agree with everything I wrote in the original and follow up posts, but through email correspondence with hecaitou and reading the comments, etc., I do feel I understand their side better. And really, that’s the point of all this, right? Understanding?

So that was one post, or one moment where I realized that something could really come of this beyond it just being a way for me to to force myself to read China news every day.

CNR: I know you’re always looking for good writers to contribute to ChinaGeeks and one of your contributors is a certain Chris Hearne. Do you have any other contributors I’m missing? Would you like to take this opportunity to tell Chris or your other contirbutors how much you appreciate them or how many children you’ll bear them?

Custer: I will have as many children as Chris wants, and stay at home cooking and cleaning up after them until they’re in college. Seriously, he’s been a huge help. He seems to have an innate ability to post something right when I’m sitting down at the computer thinking “Crap, I’m exhuasted, I just want to watch some TV but we really need a new post.” Suddenly, Chris posts something, and I go sit on the couch. It’s great. The fact that what he posts is always, always excellent is just icing on the cake, really.

We don’t have any other contributors yet. We do have a graphics guy, kind of, but he’s so busy with his real job that, thus far, all the graphics and web design have been done by me. But I really don’t know what I’m doing. Help!

Advice, Insights, and Recommendations

CNR: I presume you’re an expat living in China so you’d definitely have plenty of genuine first-hand experience with Chinese people, society, and culture. What are are your top three pearls of wisdom or pieces of advice you’d like anyone living in China or thinking of coming to China to heed?

Custer: Well, whatever you expect coming in, just forget about it. If you’re coming from the West, and haven’t traveled much before (when I first came to China it was also my first time abroad), I think it’s better not to have expectations one way or the other. That leads right into my second piece of advice, which is keep your mouth shut for the first month or so. Meet people, ask questions, watch life unfold around you, but refrain from offering up any platitudes about “what China is like” or “what Chinese people are like”. The third one, I guess, would be keep an open mind. As I’m learning from the blog, even when your everyday life has become “normal” and China as a place to live doesn’t really surprise you, there’s lots more to learn. Just like the language, studying China is a lifetime endeavor, not something you can ever “finish”.

Oh, and also, learn Chinese.

CNR: As a China observer, and at the risk of oversimplifying what is undoubtedly a huge topic, what is the most poignant issue that you see with regards to China or the Chinese?

Custer: Well, that’s an impossible question, so I’ll give you an equally huge answer: the future. I think what everyone is concerned with is where China is going. Some Chinese bloggers want to approach that issue through corruption, English bloggers want to approach it through talking about dissidents and human rights and Tibet or whatever else, but the question we’re all hammering away at from our own angles is, where is China going.

One thing I’m very interested in, and this probably isn’t the most poignant issue or anything, is international communication and understanding. Chinese people get angry when Westerners start protesting Chinese “internal” issues, but as I see it, the international attention is something that comes with being a superpower. It’s unavoidable. So the question then becomes, how is China going to address and interact with the international community. There are people who want to just ignore it, but the government seems like they’re working to address it in their own (perhaps misguided) way. Just as a foreigner living in (and interested in) China, that’s one issue that’s interesting to me. But I don’t know if it’s the most poignant issue.

CNR: As an up-and-coming English China blogger, how do you feel about the English China blogosphere? Any observations, criticisms, or…challenges?

Custer: I think overall it’s pretty good. I think the criticism everyone has, and that I would even level at my own blog, is that too often we don’t have any real interaction with Chinese netizens or the Chinese blogging community. We address an issue or we translate a post and say “here” and we discuss it amongst ourselves, and it ends there. That’s another thing I’m going to try to work on in the future: developing connections with some of these bloggers I translate, to deepen the level of analysis and broaden the spectrum of opinions being represented. That’s also why we stole chinaSMACK’s comment-translating idea. If you look at Danwei, arguably the most respected English language China blog out there, that’s one of the things they offer that no one else really does. If a Chinese blogger says something interesting, they might translate it, but they also might call him up and interview him, or ask him to clarify a point or something.

Developing sources, calling people and interviewing them, these are the sorts of things professional journalists do, but — as lots of people have noted recently — the amount of good, professional English language journalism on China at the moment is sparse, and with the economy as it is, very few media outlets are in a position to increase their overseas correspondents, so to some extent that may be up to us amateurs. But generally speaking, I’ve been really impressed with the stuff I see on a lot of other China blogs, and the quality is really only getting better as time goes on.

CNR: Finally, and without sounding like a sycophant, what are your favorite English China websites that you both regularly read and strongly recommend to any person interested in China or the Chinese?

Custer: Well, the long answer is here, at our recommended readings list. Believe it or not, I check every one of those blogs more or less every day, and I think they’re all worth it, although some of them don’t update that frequently. (They’re not in any order except the order I discovered them in, more or less). If you want more specific recommendations than that — and that’s a lot of China for most people to absorb every day — I do have my own favorites, I guess. ESWN is, obviously, essential. Everyone says so, and there’s a reason. Shanghaiist is good for a quick fix because they update more frequently than anyone else, but it’s probably more useful to people who live in Shanghai than it is to me. All the “professional” blogs (Evan Osnos, James Fallows, the TIME and WSJ blogs, etc.) are worth checking just because these are people who are working on China more or less full time, and are apt to have connections and access the rest of us don’t. Granite Studio and the Useless Tree are favorites of mine because they appeal to my academic interests somewhat, but that’s probably more personal, some people might not like them as much. Really, all of these blogs are worthwhile, I think, and with China blogs especially it’s better to check a bunch of them then just check one. Danwei is great and a few years ago they were more or less all I read, but there’s interesting stuff they miss that you (CNReviews) catch, or that ESWN catches, or Black Cat catches, or whatever, and all of that is important. So, in conclusion, read everything!

For more creamy Custer goodness, check out his music at Sun Zoo or read his insights at ChinaGeeks.