On a crowded Shanghai bus, two African American students from Nanjing University chat to each other in English. But their conversation is interrupted when one of the students, Morgan Alexander Jones, AKA MoJo, overhears a local woman's comment to her boyfriend: "Notice how many black people there are here," she says.
MoJo replies: "Yes, and they understand Mandarin too," much to the woman's shock.
Incidences such as this don't bother MoJo, he says, because "people are just curious, they don't mean anything by it".
"Actually, in Shanghai people sometimes stare more at my beautiful Shanghainese wife than me."
For MoJo, who is one third of the hip-hop trio Redstar (the other members are 21-year-old MC Tang King and 27-year-old DJ Sickstar), the combination of his two passions, China and hip-hop, was no coincidence.
"I was born with beats in my blood," says MoJo, who was heavily influenced by jazz, R&B and hip-hop as a youngster. At the age of 9 he picked up the art of beatboxing (creating rhythm and imitating sounds using only one's voice).
With Redstar, MoJo raps partly in English and partly in Mandarin.
American rapper MoJo believes that hip-hop will be the next new thing in China.
"Being fluent in Mandarin gives me face. Now I am not just a foreigner. To my Chinese friends I am also their brother."
Fluency did not come without hard study, part of which was at Middlebury College in Vermont, where MoJo majored in Chinese language and culture. Here, he also arranged college break-dancing workshops.
In 2004, he completed the graduate program for Chinese and American Studies at The Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, Jiangsu province. The program is jointly coordinated by Nanjing University and Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, United States.
"It's a misconception that being smart and rapping don't match. Because without understanding of the market or mastering rhythm and rhyme, you can't produce good hip-hop," MoJo says.
"My passion for everything Chinese initially started as a fascination for what I find to be a most interesting culture.
"Asian fever. That is what my friends back in the States sometimes teasingly claim I suffer from.
"I'd love to go back to America with my wife for a couple of years to get an MBA degree, but afterwards I will return to China."
Aside from MC-ing in Redstar, MoJo hosts an expat-related radio show, MoJoisms, on Soulfire Radio, which is broadcast in Zhejiang Province.
Through the show, MoJo says that he has discovered a few things about his young listeners.
"Many young people want to look and dress cool, and hip-hop culture is ideal for that. Also, they strive to be 'linglei', different.
"It would be great if people in China could get more points for being different."
More of MoJo's insights can be found on his blog. Here he shares his views on life as a foreigner in the most populous nation in the world. Aside from China, his readers come from Europe, Canada and America.
The blog started after MoJo worked as a translator on the movie Nanking. An insightful conversation with the producer of the film, Ted Leonsis, the vice-president of AOL (American On-line) gave MoJo the idea to start a blog to share his ideas.
One of his entries tackles questions often asked by locals, such as: "Is your hair real?" "Just imagine the questions I was asked when I had dreadlocks," he laughs.
MoJo seems to get a kick out of examining stereotypes, such as explaining what it's like to be in a mixed marriage.
"She is almost more American than me, just as I, in some ways, am more Chinese than her."
Other preconceptions have to do with his two main pastimes, hip-hop and language studies.
"It is a myth that Mandarin can't work in rap because of the tonal character of the language. Actually, the fact that each character is one syllable makes the language perfect for the rhythmic rhymes of rap," he says.
According to MoJo, his lyrics, delivered with New York City attitude, capture the spirit of today's urban life in a positive way.
"In Redstar we provide a clear alternative not only to gangster rap but also to the watered-down and overtly soft pop-rap and southern crunk music (club music with repetitive, catchy refrains that make it easy to chant along)."
Redstar was formed after the three young artists met at The Lab, a non-profit hip-hop studio co-founded by China's first DMC champion DJ V-Nutz, aka 35-year-old Gary Wang. The Lab aims "to promote and educate creative and conscious urban music in China".
"Look at which bands have come to Shanghai in the past year - Linkin Park, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce - none of them play hip-hop in the traditional sense, still they have traits of the genre," MoJo says. "The next new thing here in China is hip-hop."
MoJo says that some of the local artists to watch out for are Beijing's MC Webber and Blakk Bubble, as well as Lao Zheng.
The increasing interest in hip-hop in China was recently examined in a segment on the American noncommercial station NPR (National Public Radio), in which Redstar was interviewed.
"As China is playing a larger part on the international scene, Chinese people are reaching out and knowing more about other countries, just as more countries start to understand Chinese culture," MoJo says.
(China Daily January 11, 2008)
