As I look at him across the sea on my computer screen, displayed in so many pixels, Alex Rich looks a lot like he does in his Facebook photos. He’s a nice looking, 20-something Caucasian, with long dark hair, full lips and a bit of stubble. A face you might’ve seen around campus these past few years. Compare this to pictures on his fan page, MySpace and personal website. In them, half-dressed and high-contrast, he looks like a perfume ad, specifically a scratch-‘n’-sniff in a Chinese fashion magazine. He looks like the Asian pop-star — the white Asian pop star — he’s aspiring to be.
“I’ve got you kind of perched here,” Rich says with an easy smile, “On this like, tower of things. It’s the only way I could get the light, the reception, everything to work.” Within seconds the call is dropped and I’m scrambling with Skype for another peek at the Beijing skyline. “Bright, bright blue,” he tells me, winking at the glaring white overcast.
Rich majored in Chinese at Stanford, taking two years of courses and the intensive summer Mandarin program. That’s when he first went to China. He didn’t return until this spring when he was flown out by “Super Boy,” a televised Chinese singing contest inspired by the “Pop Idol” series. Rich lost the contest but has since started talks with national record labels. If he makes it big, he believes he’ll be the first white singer ever to do so in China. When I talk with him, he is practicing to record his first demo. I ask what it’s like for him to write songs in Mandarin. He laughs. “It’s basically impossible.” He’s in a highly improbable situation for a non-native speaker. For anyone, for that matter.
He never would have even heard of the contest if a friend hadn’t, in passing, asked him to be an extra in a video shoot. When he found out that the video being filmed was for a Chinese singing contest, Rich knew he had to compete. He has been singing since childhood, and by the time he graduated, in winter of 2010, had decided to pursue music as his “one and only career plan.” If he ever thought about being a professional musician in China it never once seemed like a real possibility. That all changed with the show. The producers liked his audition enough to move him along the competition, and when he was named among the top five in North America out of seventy finalists, the idea started to look a little less crazy.
At home, news of Rich’s endeavor receives a mixed reaction. Some are critical. Two Chinese-American girls, watching videos of him online, balk. “His Chinese isn’t good enough to write songs,” one says. “It’s just because he’s white!” But they’re glued to their laptop. On the screen, Rich is against a background of Chinese script, crooning a Mandarin ballad into a microphone, and surrounded by bubbles. “I’ve definitely seen him around, though,” one mutters. The other says she has too. A third student watches over their shoulders for some time before finally saying, stone-faced, “He was after my ex-girlfriend for a while, while we were dating.”
I share their fascination. While I interview him, I keep getting tripped up on these details: we have 40 Facebook friends in common, he was in Everyday People, that’s Theta Delt in the background of one of his early promotional videos. But in his headshots, in his aspirations, he’s become an image, an icon — not a person. At least with a Western celebrity we have a hard-sought sense of their lives, either through their art, or through tabloids and reality television shows. But I can little more personify the celebrity models in Chinese advertisements than I can the miniature household appliances they’re holding. A Chinese pop star? That’s so strange! So foreign! So far away!
And yet, there it is. There he is, I should say. And thus, there we are. The roads out of the Stanford bubble lead not only to start-ups, laboratories, professorial seats and political office: some forge deep into places we haven’t even thought to fathom. Alex Rich is scouting out new territory in an evolving world. Before he blips off the screen one last time, he tells me about how he spent hours one afternoon in the teashop across the street. He serenaded the shop-keep, who he asked to critique his Mandarin lyrics, then he stayed to discuss America, music and then the tea trade with the curious throng that gathered. So this is what a Stanford student does when he graduates. Even Alex sounds a little incredulous.
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