How did your subjects react to the idea of being in an American book of nonfiction?

The ones I told about it, which was most of them, were incredibly excited. People like to be written about, the people who are doing stuff they are proud of. I’d say the lone exception was the Nigerian drug dealer. I do have vague paranoia but I’m sure he’s back in Nigeria by now. I was down in Shanghai the other day and I kind of asked around, but those guys basically come here for a year or two and then their cover’s kind of blown. They can’t really hang out for much longer.

Who is on the cutting room floor that you wished you could put in, but didn’t?

There’s a couple. There’s one guy who was an incredibly wealthy business man from the city of Chungdu. Basically a multimillionaire with some serious spiritual ennui. He had a beautiful apartment, a country house, four cars, a beautiful wife, a child, a beautiful girlfriend — but was kind of lost. Totally hopeless. That was good, but I couldn’t get enough out of him for it to be interesting.

Then there were these Chinese guys who were trying to study Rastafarianism. There were 10 or 12 of them, and they all had dreadlocks and they were smoking a lot of grass. They had these books in English that they didn’t really understand, and they were trying to do these Rastafarian rituals and they believed they were a lost tribe of Israel. So that was pretty good.

Then there were these guys who were making fake documents, like fake passports and diplomas. Whatever you wanted fake, they could make it. It would be perfect. I hung out with those guys one time and we made arrangements to meet again, but then they obviously got wise and realized, what the fuck are we doing talking to this guy? And they wouldn’t get with me no more.

Most of the characters who are the craziest and most drug-addled – The Slacker, the Uighur Jimi Hendrix – come from middle-class homes. Do you believe counterculture is a byproduct of prosperity?

No, not at all. I think it’s the same as in America. A byproduct of free time, certainly, because if you are working in a factory 12 hours a day, you certainly can’t be smoking that much pot. I think the origin of it is in prosperity, but now it’s come far enough that it extends to where people in the countryside who grow up poor come to the city and fall into a certain scene. Kind of like America.

Growth in China has suddenly slowed considerably as a result of the global economic downturn. How has this affected your friends and the broader underground in China?

I was down in Guangdong recently, which is where the export-based economy is. I don’t really have a lot of friends there but I could feel some serious impact there. I’m in Beijing right now, and people are definitely talking about it, but it’s not like it is in New York. I was in Shanghai last week and at the really high-end places, business is down a little bit, but everything is still going pretty gangbusters. This huge blanket of pessimism that’s currently enveloping New York is not present here, which is interesting. In New York, for example, the construction sites have stopped. The buildings that were going up are not going up any more. Whereas here, they’re still going up.

Why did you start studying Chinese?

Couple reasons. The first one is that I thought it would be hard. I had to choose a language, I was in boarding school and they had Chinese. At that time, I was pretty young, and I had been reading some Chinese philosophy, and I was pretty into it, and I thought it would be cool to read it in Chinese.

And, my father had been studying Chinese in university, but he didn’t get to go to China, obviously, because of the political situation. He was telling me when I was a baby he would show me these cards with Chinese characters on them, and kind of read them to me. So maybe it was pre-programmed into my brain. On the first day of school you have to check which language. I saw Chinese and thought, look at that. And it all went downhill from there.

Copyright Last Exit 2009