, Beijing-based man of letters, music fanatic, veteran Asia expatriate, and generally fun guy to get soused with Bob Blunt is launching his latest book at The Bookworm. The Year My Hair Fell Out is a fictional novel loosely based on Bob's first year in Asia. At the time, he was teaching English in the small northeastern town of Chuncheon, South Korea, mixing with the local coterie of Western English teachers and American GIs. The novel, a filtration of Bob's personal experiences through the first-person narrative of fictional protagonist Don Laridis, is a montage of English-teacher gaffes, adjustment to expat life, total immersion into a cultural unknown, a not a few late nights at one of the two bars in town... In short, a 21st-century parable that many Westerners living in Beijing or elsewhere in East Asia can instantly identify with. The Year My Hair Fell Out is Bob's first book since Blunt, a non-fiction, alternative history of the Australian underground rock scene published in 2001. The novel represents a major shift for Bob: he's just quit his cushy university job in Beijing to hit the book tour trail and grind it out as a self-published author. I sat down with Bob to get the facts behind the fiction. Read on to learn more, and check out the official Beijing launch of The Year My Hair Fell Out on Thursday, August 28 at The Bookworm. The first ten people through the door get a free copy of the book (after that it'll be available at Bookworm for 100rmb). *** ***

: I'll tell you one misconception so far: it's not really a factual thing, purely Bob Blunt's first year in Korea, you know. The word that's bandied around is "faction," this idea of fact and fiction. So the story element obviously is not about Bob Blunt, it's about this guy who transports himself from a very comfortable, cultural experience into this totally unknown world, with an unfamiliar culture. This idea of going somewhere that you don't know anything about. I mean, I didn't know anything about South Korea when I moved there in 2003. I knew two things: that it had been at war, and that it had co-held the football World Cup in 2002. I hadn't met many South Koreans growing up. In the story, this person takes a gamble. Everyone's got their own story, right? What interests me, and what comes across in this book, is not so much where people have come from, but why they have come to this place, what events in their lives have shaped them. I'm quite interested in that sort of experience, I guess maybe because when I was younger I used to read those adventure novels, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and all the other writers that are good at perceiving new surrounds and making those surrounds feel like you're there.

: Right, right, that was my story.

: I had the opportunity to, I think. The license to, so to speak. I wasn't tied up with kids and family and a relationship. I'd just finished writing the Blunt book, which was the music book that I put out. I reached a point where I said, "Now I want to do something different with my life, head off somewhere to the unknown." That's what spurred me on to Korea. Originally I was thinking Japan, or maybe Europe, the UK or whatever, but all my friends had done that sort of thing in the '80s and '90s. And I knew nothing about Korea. All I remember was reading one or two things on the internet about how fucked up it was, how bad it was, and how notorious it was for people going there and getting ripped off. I'd heard one or two good stories as well, but as you know, every story's gonna be colored by someone's own way of thinking.

: [laughs] Yeah, that's about it. I just wanted to throw myself into a fucked up situation… No, no. What the lure was, was that it was completely unknown to me. So whatever experience I was going to get was gonna be a completely new one. And unbeknownst to me — and unbeknownst to the character in the story — the character arrives, and the English academy that he's been recruited for is on the brink of collapse. It's fucked. It's run by a really shoddy… I wouldn't even call him a business guy, just a guy who has no idea about how to run a business. And that was the case in South Korea at the time. There were a lot of these English academies everywhere that were run under false pretenses. It wouldn't happen so much now, I don't think.

: I was there for four years. I was only in Chuncheon for one year, my first year. And then I moved out to Seoul, outside metropolitan Seoul, and I was there for three years. I worked at a university, which was the bees knees, because you knew you weren't gonna get ripped off, you got really amazing holidays, that sort of stuff.

: Yeah, well that was kind of weird, because [Chuncheon] had a base on it, Camp Page, which has since been closed. But yeah, that was really strange. You were either two things in this town, if you're a foreigner: you were either an English teacher or military. So the people that you met were a real fuckin' mix curve of different personalities I wouldn't normally hang out with back at home. But a really interesting mixed bunch of people. Meeting these military guys… and I'm a complete pacifist, I'm anti-guns, anti-all that sort of stuff. So it was quite interesting to be in an environment surrounded by these quite big personalities. Teachers, for one. I'd never aspired to teach before. And [also] these kind of big, macho blokes, shooting guns… for what? Oh, to protect South Korea from North Korea. [laughs] But that was all around the time of Iraq, 2003 was when there was that whole thing that happened in Baghdad. So that was quite a poignant memory of my time there.

: A lot of drinking, and a lot of, almost, soul-searching I guess. There's this thing of, "I drank my way through South Korea," this reference to alcohol. But it's not meant to be like that. There was a real drinking camaraderie amongst the people that lived there. South Korea is culturally alive in so many ways, but the town where we were at, and the environment at the time, was all kind of loud, Americana, Eminem-inspired sort of stuff. I guess [I remember] meeting the people, this culture that was coming to grips with modernity and keeping up with the Joneses. The type of people that you'd meet [as an English teacher] ranged from businessmen, airline types, to Christians... big Christianity thing going in Korea. The local people had a huge impact on my first year. And it should be a given that you throw yourself into the language, meeting the people, getting to know them. That was a real insight. I guess little experiences here and there stood out. You know, going into Seoul and seeing that world, just being blown away by the enormity of it. I come from Sydney, and Sydney's, what, an "international city" in terms of five million people. It's considered in China to be a small town. So coming from there and then being hit by this metropolis, the intensity of a big Asian city that heaves. That monster city. You think of Tokyo, you think of Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai. And since then I've really gotten to like that kind of stuff. So I guess that had a real impact.

: No, I went to Tokyo for a year. Another heaving metropolis. And that was amazing. In hindsight I wish I'd stayed there longer. I was doing my Master's at the time, so I came to Beijing because I knew that Beijing offered something a bit easier to juggle. You can do your work and have time to study. So yeah, it was a year in Tokyo and then the last nearly seven years here [in Beijing]. Bob performing with his band Garry David (photo by Leticia Nischang)

: Well, I came to Beijing in 2003 just to visit, and then in 2004 I came with an Australian band called Toydeath. Yan Jun actually booked us and we played a show at 798, before it was so commercialized. So I'd been to Beijing, and I'd had an experience in Beijing, and I thought it was really exciting musically. I think that's one of the important things. That's one thing Chuncheon didn't really have, and Seoul not so much either, was the music quantity. It was there, it was just less compared to Beijing.

: Yeah, beginning of '08.

: Toilets? [laughs] Smells. No… I think just more people. More cars. That's been a huge visual change. And obviously expense, cost of living.

: Yeah, I have been. I've been working at the same university for the last four years. But since then I've stopped doing that. I'm now paying bills by selling books. [laughs] It's really changed, the city's really changed.

: Right. As a fan, with a fanzine that started in the mid-'80s. I never really wrote for the big music papers because I always had this fear that they would cut back what I wanted to say, and my friends' bands, who I thought were really good, weren't getting enough exposure. So I started this fanzine, and like all fanzines it was purely a labor of love. And I'd release cassettes, release vinyl. In '92 I got all academic and went to university and started life as a mature student [laughs], and I ended up writing this thesis on Australian independent music, about the gentrification and commodification of the terms "independent" and "alternative," the way we get this word "indie." And "alternative": what the fuck is alternative? I wrote my thesis on the appropriation of these terms, and also the independent music scene that I knew in Australia, in Sydney and Melbourne, from about '83 or '84 through to the mid-'90s. From about '95 to 2000, I used that and combined that with a bunch of interviews that I did with bands that I knew, and created this book.

: I guess I'd never dabbled in fiction before, or "faction." A historical music book seemed fairly straightforward to write, although, obviously, it involved a certain style as well. But I'd never dabbled in this story style of writing. It took a long time. One of the beauties about living abroad, living in Beijing, is that you can work a 12-hour-a-week job, and you still have time to do your other artistic pursuits, whether it be music or writing. So I just plugged away until I got to the point where I showed a few people, and they looked at it and someone thought, "Oh, that's not bad." And I went through that whole paranoia, fear sort of thing, like, "This is shit." And then re-edits, you keep writing and re-edit, and keep going. And in the end I decided to self-publish it.

: Just because you can these days, you can get it out there on CreateSpace, use Amazon to get it to people that might want to buy it, and stock it in bookstores and stuff. I hadn't any grand illusions, I just kept doing it, and kept doing it, and in the end I just thought, "Fuck it, I'll put it out."

: Yeah, and he's actually spent time in Chuncheon, where the book's set. Which is why I wanted Nevin to moderate. He's got his experience there, and through his knowledge he can picture the type of learning curve of people, food, language, isolation. The format will be a 40-minute discussion, which is how they run their nights [at the Bookworm]. We'll sit down and have a talk about the book, and then we'll open it up to discussion, questions and answers, that sort of stuff.

: Over the next six months my plan is to launch here, and then next month I'm going to Korea to launch in Seoul, and also in Chuncheon. And then following that, the plan is to head back home to Sydney in November, do a launch there. And then possibly a launch in Melbourne. Because the music book did quite well in Sydney and Melbourne, so I suppose there's that sort of follow-up. So I'll be fairly nomadic, really. I like that. Then I'll have to come back and see what happens.

: Wow… That's a big question. I think I'd find it really hard to move back home, to Sydney or Melbourne, as much as I love those cities. It'd definitely be either Beijing or Tokyo, or failing that, some completely new place.

: Maybe I'd have to remove myself from Asia and go somewhere completely different. Maybe Caracas or something. Or Central America. I know Asia really well, I spent a lot of time backpacking in Southeast Asia in my 20s. Although, in saying that, the longer I'm here [in Beijing], the more I still like it. I'm not feeling like I want to run off and go somewhere completely new.

: Oh my God… What would you write about? I'd be quite interested to write something about Beijing. I don't know whether I'd write it based around live music or what… It could be a people observation sort of thing. It could be under that "faction" type of style, first-person. I don't know. So many things to write about. It'll probably take another ten years. [laughs] Maybe five. I think the impact in 2008, arriving and seeing all that change and being told that you're going to be working in Beijing and ending up in Changping, and feeling like the world stopped in 1951 or something. You could write about all the silliness and the fucked up-ness. You could write a great book about punk rock music in Beijing. Although that's already been covered.

: One thing about the ESL community: there's no real ceiling. So the people that you meet, the teachers, there's no ceiling as far as age is concerned. Which is quite interesting. And a lot of these people, you don't choose to work with them, so it makes you have to take a bit of an about-face about your expectations and ego. Because you're all in there together, and you do — within being ripped off, and having a bad experience — you do have a lot of really good experiences, too. So I don't want to paint a negative tone of Korea, and the experiences of [novel protagonist] Don Laridis weren't all necessarily bad. It's just what I observed. *** Check out the Beijing launch of Bob Blunt's 'The Year My Hair Fell Out' on Thursday, August 28 at The Bookworm. Front image is Bob at Seoul's Incheon airport, 2006 (photo by Christ Hampson)