Aventurina King

Yesterday I went to my friend’s place in Union Square, we started talking about “Lie to Me” (a tv series which I watch often in China while practicing my guitar playing), and that sparked a very interesting conversation about the difference between Chinese and American people’s facial expressions.

I talked about how when I look at myself hosting with Chinese people, there is a very clear difference in the facial expressions.  My facial expressions are more emphatic, and I have different expressions, sometimes I pull the left side of my nose up, I also do this annoying thing where when i’m surprised my forhead crinkles up (I don’t think I’ve every seen a Chinese host do that).  When I look at ABC’s together with Chinese, even without hearing them talking I can know immediately who is an ABC (American born Chinese) just by looking at the expressions on their face, there are some expressions on the ABC’s face that don’t exist in the vocabulary of Chinese expressions.

And I’m probably stretching science a bit too much here.  But all of this may be one of the reasons why American’s tend to have older looking faces than Chinese.  Of course some of the reasons is the difference in skin condition (oily vs. dry), and other genetic conditions.  But recently I had started asking myself why I had fine lines under the left side of my eye and not the right side.  Then someone said something to me and I sneared, pulling the left side of my nose up.  I have been doing that for years, and it’s always the left side of the nose, never the right.

It s five in the morning! Grrrrrrrrrr jet lag! The last couple of days I ve been spending the whole day at the broadway dance center. It is so amazing! There is nothing like that in Beijing, a place where u can go and non stop learn from the best dancers in the world.

In other news, yesterday the weekly Chinese newspaper “the Southern Daily” published an entire page on yours truly! I haven t seen it yet, I was afraid ZhangYing, the journalist was going to criticize me, Tracy （my agent) read the article though and told me it was very friendly. Thank u so much ZhangYing for reporting on me!

And last for today, here is a video of the BTV spring global gala which I hosted with David Wu, David Williamson, Robert Wells, Mariah, JiangHua and ChunNi:

Alright, I can do this, I’m going to motivate myself and regularly update my US blog.  It’s not actually as simple as it seems since my blog is actually blocked here in China (so I have to log on to a VPN), and my English is rusty.  But I’m rumbling…

I guess I should add a new picture of me!! (since it’s been a long time, maybe I’ve changed)  I must specify that this picture is photoshopped (by me, for a great tutorial on photoshopping pictures go to www.Lynda.com), but that pretty much any studio picture of anyone today is photoshopped (that was one of the relieving things I learnt when I started out in the entertainment industry over here in China, celebrities and models mostly are far from perfect looking), so I don’t feel as guilty about it as I guess I should.

Hmmmmm so many things have happened recently.  It’s the Chinese New Year’s!  Which means that life is slowly coming to a full stop.  There will be no postal service, no banks open, no stores open, no milk distributing (there was a note on my door that said the milkman will be taking 5 full days of vacation starting today!), for about a week.  I have to admit I’m a bit anxious, I mean what do you do when there are so many things that you can’t do!!!

Well for one, I guess, you can ski on machine-made snow (which I did today, quite anti-climactic), or you can stay at home and watch all these Chinese New Year’s shows, especially the CCTV Chinese New Year’s gala, which I will do.

Work-wise, well there have been some developments, I’m doing more shows (I’m going to be seeing myself on TV a few times over the next few days).  I’ve come to the point where I realize I’m not nearly good enough, I have so much to learn in terms of singing, dancing, TV hosting, Chinese, song writing, piano, guitar, Chinese opera.  It’s part of the process of moving from A to B. Confucius has this saying that I really love: “Live as though you’re going to die tomorrow, learn as though you’re going to live forever.”

OK,  I just have to say something quickly, I didn’t realize until now that I actually had to approve all the comments on my blog before they could be posted, I didn’t realize I had any comments recently on my blog.  To all those who have commented and to whom I haven’t responded I’m so sorry.

And I will try to update my blog more often (I just thought no one was reading my posts so my motivation was waning ha ha).

Alright will try to get a post up later today, many things have happened.  Thank you for all your support

As I wrote in the previous blog post, I haven’t been extremely busy the past few days, but I have had a few TV shows.

I did my first culinary show, not a cooking show, even better, one of those shows where the TV host is eating all-the-time and making people slobber on their TV couches.  It was very very cool, although my agent said we could only do shows like that so often because TV directors are not fans of baby fat.  So it was a once-in-a-fairytime very very cool.  Me discovering a few of Beijing’s culinary hotspots.

Which includes a Chinese cake shop, but not just any Chinese cake shop, and not a bad Western-Chinese cake shop (I have to admit, most Chinese cake shops are really bad, they try to imitate French self-serve bakeries but their over-sweetened bread tends to be spongeously spongy, they also add a lot of weird ingredients like sweetened cheese and meaty sawdust, hhhhhhh), a Chinese Chinese cake shop: a Shoutao cake shop AKA a longlife peach cake shop.

You got it, all this cake shop sells is peaches made out of sweet bread.  Because peaches in China represent longevity.  So its a good present for your elders.  And if you really really love your grandmother/grandfather etc… and you have lots of money to spend (like 200 USD and up), you can buy the creme de la creme of long life peaches: a HUGE bread peach with inside of it, 99 smaller peaches.  Ignorant me, I thought the 100 peaches represented 100 years of longevity, in fact it represents the 100 children of the emperor who started the long life peach thing (he had lots of wives I guess).

Oooooo and then the exploration ended on something really neat, especially for a vegan like me: an Imperial meat restaurant.  Oh man oh man, that day just about did away with any vegan pretentions I had.  Meat is just too good, got to work on keeping the cute cows out of my mind.

So what’s so cool about this place.  Well it’s not only meat, it’s healthy meat.  No no it’s not organic meat, it’s medicinal meat, as in meat that’s cooked for 6 hours in a Chinese-medicinal-herb-soup whose recipe is 400 years old.  Chinese medecine says that the meaty ingredients you eat go directly into your liver and some other place which I forgot, so why not have the Chinese medecinal herbs surf on the meat and go directly to the core of your body’s health and work some magic.

I have to admit, the theory is interesting, but not as much as how good this actually tastes.  Man it is so tender inside, and after the cooking is done, they pour molten hot oil over the fat part of the meat to make it golden and crunchy.  So when it comes on the table and into my mouth, it goes CRUNCH! and then SHLUUuuuuurmph. Mamma mia!

It’s just after the Chinese New Year’s, people are partied out, therefore it’s been a slow couple of weeks work-wise (although there were some hearty blips on the radar). I have therefore maximized my time by fengshuing my house.

Which I guess, means believing in a lot of weird Chinese divinatory stuff, such as BaGua, which is dividing your home in eight squares and decorating them with the appropriate colors and elements. So the farthermost corner of the playroom now has a FaCai tree (a “make money” tree in English), orange curtains and an orange pig (a piggy bank), because it’s the “money” part of the house.

The center of the house, the “health” part has lots of healthy plants. Well they are supposed to be healthy, but somehow I guess I don’t have the green thumb, the leaves are getting dangerously yellowish. There is also a yellow tablecloth, yellow napkins and a red curtain. I have to admit (and I am NOT a weirdo), that when I finished cleaning out this part of the house my recent breathing problems went away! So yippee for fengshui. Havent’ seen any other major changes yet.

I also bought two goldfish, I named one “Singing” and the other one “Dancing.” Needless to say my cat is intensely interested in Singing and Dancing, as a matter of fact, he doesn’t spend any time with me anymore. It used to be in the evenings we would snuggle up, but now he sleeps in the chair next to Singing and Dancing’s fish tank. I think it’s because he is expecting that at some point, Singing or Dancing are going to go suicidal from being in proximity of a hungry cat (added that Davy is on a diet), and jump out of the unscratchable fish bowl.

And I’m back in Beijing.

Today was an uneventful pleasant first day home that near convinced me to become a housewife.  I spent the first half of the day cleaning my apartment (with the help of my cleaning lady), and the second half in the kitchen applying facial mask after facial mask in the hope of returning some suppleness to my post-trauma face skin (see previous post about the potato nightmare).

One of my recent hobbies has been kitchen beauty products.  I have this Do-It-Yourself obsession with proving that I can do it better than those big corporates out there.  So I used to DIY websites (which worked out quite well) and DIY clothes (which turned into a disaster when they fell apart at the office).  Now I am into DIY-ing beauty products and into turning my nose up at the beautiful and expensive Dior, Lancome and Biotherme bottles.  So far I’m convinced that the DIY beauty products work at least in a mild way to moisturize my skin.  This week I’m going to challenge my skills further by trying to make my dark circles disappear with a mixture of tomato, lemon, turmeric and cornstarch.

Alright two things:

1: That potato was supposed to be an anti-inflammatory! One of those magical home remedies which make Western medicine obsolete!

Arghhhhhh So much for that! Yesterday evening, my room-mate and co-host gave me one of her olive oil facial masks to try on. At the time, I noticed I was feeling a bit prickly around the eyes. And this morning, tadaaam! I wake up and I have a huge, itchy, pimply red rash on my face. And our big performance is this evening. Nothing a little foundation couldn’t fix, but man this itches.

Unluckily, I remembered I had read in some Chinese medicine book that potatoes are anti-inflammatories. Feeling very cunning, I sneaked down to the hotel kitchen and got me a sliced potato which I delicately applied to my face once back in bed. Did it work? For a moment there, the potato peels really had me, but then I took them off and I looked in the bathroom mirror. Gasp!! It’s even worse, and 20 minutes later I feel like my peripheral eye skin is swelling into my eyes. And it itches!!

Oh dear… well there’s foundation!

2: Continuing this streak of superficial comments ……….. what is this?!:

Photoshoot of Rob Pattinson in Details magazine

And here I thought he was this young, innocent, vampire type character! But he is actually a sexy carnivorous ladies’ man!

Which I think is the effect that Robert Pattinson’s agent was going for when she/he planned the article (thus typecasting him into the sexy-leading man-category which caters to more big paying movie roles). That along with “shock” : it gets pictures and names around on the internet and on people’s lips.

Yesterday, the American Eagles Tour Bus drove 7 hours to get our group from San Francisco to LA. It was interesting watching the landscape transition from green hills, to thoroughly cultivated plains and then dry mountains as we drove South down California’s center

Ahh yes, I don’t think I mentioned the “our group” part before.

Officiously, I came to the US to see my family and my friends on the East Coast. Officially I came with a Chinese Hunan cultural group to MC their performance – part of a cultural exchange program between the US and China – in LA. The first five days spent with my family and friends was a fantastic blessing, I realized how much I missed the States, but also that I still need to remain some time in China, I think I still have more growing up and singing to do. The last few days with the Chinese group have been, well very interesting.

Yesterday we toured Hollywood, which meant taking pictures with Marilyn Monroe in front of Tussauds, and shopping shopping shopping. I bought a short trench coat in Zara (I’m very into accessory clothes which make my usual joggings and hiphop shoes look OK). And I panicked in the dressing room when I couldn’t fit into the size 10 jeans. And I am sure and positive (don’t laugh at me) that in Hollywood Zara’s jeans sizes are extra small because there are so many fit celebrities running around. With that excuse in mind, I had a slice of mango cheesecake today.

This evening after an entire day at the hotel, I MC-ed, or attempted to MC the group’s preview performance for tomorrow’s performance. It took place in a huge Chinese restaurant with a makeshift red felt stage and a very VERY bad sound system. Actually the highlight of the evening for me was the amount of time one of the organizers spent trying to get this one microphone working. Every time he thought he had it just right, one of us MCs would begin speaking in it and suddenly it would make this horrible screeching sound, and I would have to rip it from its cable to stop the audience cringing. And then the leader would go back to trying to make the mic work and the ordeal would start over again.

It wasn’t a very successful event, the 400 guests were eating and constantly babbling in loud Hunanese dialect while children were playing traditional Chinese instruments and Chinese adults were performing Latin dance and Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” And by the middle of the performance there were so many changes of who went on stage at what time, as well as who could steal our microphones and improvise MCing instead of us, that me and my female co-host just sat down at a dinner table and I opened my book “What All Americans Should Know About the Middle East.”

I’m back! At least, I’m back on my English blog, might take some time for me to be back in the states, I mean for good, because right now I’m back in the States! And I’m in San Fransisco! For the day!!
Ok this is getting confusing, hold your horses! I’ve been back on the other side of the Pacific for a few days, and in a few I’ll be back in China. Just visiting. And, with the distance, thinking over my past year in China becoming a singer.
Man, what a ride, and it’s not over yet, which makes me half wince/half hopeful.
But before I go into the specifics (possibly the topic of another blog), San Francisco

I was actually very proud of myself today, made the one hour and a half trip from Union City (where I’m staying in the Crown Plaza hotel) to Downtown San Fran via public transit, and (I think) raaaaaather successfully winged my single day in the city.
First I visited the Cartoon Museum (haha out of all the Modern Art museums, the Modern Jewish museums, the Asian museum, I had to visit THAT one) which was great, for one I learnt that Japanese manga artists were much better at drawing the Batman comic strips than American artists (I think if I remember correctly during the 1970s a Japanese manga publishing house bought the rights to create original Batman content, it looks … amazing!). The museum was small, and I actually didn’t get through half of it before I got hungry, oh well, at least got to see the Batman room.

Oh and did I mention it was raining today! (A cabdriver mentioned that under the influence of climate change San Francisco was having its first monsoon) It was cold and it was raining, and I bought the cheapest umbrella which was constantly threatening to turn double-jointed on me. And when I was walking down Market street, I saw a queue of people waiting to get on the trolly, and just then the trolly came, so I got on the trolly too! (Which was a mildly good idea since there was seating room only in the rain exposed part of the trolly)
The trolly in San Francisco is far from the roller coaster ride the hilly pictures of the city make you think it could be, grabbing onto a cable which loops under ground, the trolly moves in a slow and steady rhythm. But my heart did jump a little when we started on the unusually sloped hill down to fisherman’s warf.
And then: a quick ride up to Union Square (in taxi, thank heavens), a salad/shopping at Borders (I bought What All Americans Should Know About the Middle East) and Walgreens (I bought three huge tubes of my favorite Arm and Hammer toothpaste) and Sephora. Back on the BART ( the Bay Area Railroad Transit) and back to my cozy hotel room with the spoils of my day out on the rainy battlefield.