Transcript | The Strange Afterlife of an American Football Story from China

Below is a complete transcript of the episode. Thanks to CadreScripts for their great work, to Oana Grigor and Natalia Polom for checking and formatting, and to Zhou Keya for the image! Listen in the embedded player above.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China. In this program, we’ll look at books, ideas, new research, intellectual currents, and cultural trends that can help us better understand what’s happening in China’s politics, foreign relations, economics, and society. Join me each week for in-depth conversations that shed more light and bring less heat to how we think and talk about China.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you this week from Beijing.

It is great to be back again. I am at the home of Michael Cherney, the home/studio of the artist, Michael Cherney, who I will talk about a little more in the recommendation section. Sinica is supported this year by the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a national resource center for the study of East Asia. The Sinica podcast will remain, as always, free. But if you work for an organization that believes in what I’m doing with the podcast, please consider lending your support. You can get me at sinicapod@gmail.com. Times are tough. My funding from Wisconsin got cut because of Mr. Trump and all that. But hey, help out. Listeners, also support my work at sinicapodcast.com.

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This week on Sinica, I’ve got a show that’s part sports saga, part cultural exchange experiment, part IP drama, and all heart. You may remember a delightful 2014 piece in The New Republic called Year of the Pigskin, in which journalist, Christopher Beam, told the story of the Chongqing Dockers, a ragtag group of young Chinese men who fell in love with American football and, with the help of a charismatic American coach, improbably clawed their way to a national championship in the newly formed American Football League of China.

We talked to Chris about it back when the piece came out, though, regrettably, I was unavailable at the time. I think I was in Taipei because my dad was sick. And David Moser stepped in to do the interview. Anyway, it was funny. It was touching. It was actually pitch-perfect for its time. It was a time when I think a story of cross-cultural camaraderie felt both possible and hopeful. Fast forward to today, and you know that same story, well, it’s found an unexpected second life. Not as a Hollywood film, despite two failed attempts involving Sony and Paramount, Chris Pratt, and even John Cena, were attached to various points. But as a Chinese movie called Clash, produced by iQIYI, and released in Chinese theaters, I think it was in May of this year.

And while it lifts quite liberally from Chris’s article, it ends up telling a very different story, one that says as much about the current state of U.S.-China relations as it does about the evolution of China’s own popular culture, and maybe even its soft power ambition. Chris joins me today to talk about both stories, the one he lived and wrote two decades ago, and the one that got, well, retold and maybe even repurposed for Chinese audiences. We’ll talk about the original Chongqing Dockers, the brief, but earnest Hollywood flirtation with a feel-good co-production with China, and what it felt like to see his reporting transformed into something that is somehow both alien and affectionate, I guess. Along the way, we’re going to reflect on what this whole improbable journey says about friendship, authorship, and the fading dream of a cultural meeting point between China and the U.S.

Chris Beam, welcome back to Sinica, man.

Chris Beam: Thanks so much for having me, Kaiser.

Kaiser: So, Chris, I would be remiss if I didn’t start off by telling you about the fact that your story back then, in The Year of the Pigskin, contributed a really important concept that my family still uses to this day, my kids especially, and that is Chinese YOLO. You know what I’m talking about, right? That kid from Xi’an named Weezy. This kid spent the year at Rutgers. I think he quit after he was robbed at gunpoint or something, he was like slipping on crack vials.

Chris: So he claimed. Yeah.

Kaiser: You've got to share that little story. What is Chinese YOLO?

Chris: Well, basically, this was one of the players who came in kind of halfway through the season as a ringer because the team was really struggling at the beginning. They didn’t have the skills. They didn’t really have the equipment. And then they bring in a bunch of new players halfway, and one of them is this wealthy kind of international guy who calls himself Weezy. He’d been studying at Rutgers for a bit and claimed that he had dropped out because he’d been held up while walking down the street in New Jersey. And I was asking him, like, that must have been a tricky decision to drop out of college? And he was like, “No man, like, my diploma or my life. You've got to— you only live once. YOLO.” Which was amazing to me because that’s actually the opposite of what YOLO usually means.

Kaiser: Right. Thus Chinese YOLO. And we use these, you only live once, so live very, very carefully.

Chris: Right, right.

Kaiser: That’s fantastic. Anyway, I felt like that was my strongest personal connection