In 2006 I moved to a small city in China called Zhuhai, home to a small expat community of perhaps a hundred or so. One of the first thing I heard was the story of an English teacher called John Wieja from the USA who had been rushed across the border to Macau to have emergency brain surgery just a few months earlier. This local legend returned later in the year, and I got to know him a little. He was an expert on moreorless everything, spoke not only Mandarin and Cantonese fluently, but also knew the obscure dialect my girlfriend spoke. Not that he ever considered himself above low culture – I would see him at late night bars and street barbecues. Later I moved to other cities in China and with another friend we started a small chat group on the Wechat app where we would leave each-other voice messages. John alternated between expounding on length about the many subjects on which he knew a great deal and complaining vociferously about the format. When I lived in Guangzhou from 2013 to 2016, we would meet up sometimes, usually in the bar on the ground floor of a hotel. John would have a bottle of vodka (preferably Grey Goose), a case of soda water, a bucket of ice and a plate of sliced lemons. Sometimes they kept the bottle behind the bar for him. In 2016 I moved back to the UK, we did keep up the voice message chat group, but now only intermittently. John, never a well man, died on Christmas Day 2017, a couple of weeks before his 42nd birthday. I was able to download an hour and a half of his voice notes, a small fraction of the total, and present selections here, accompanied by music by John’s lifelong friend Zac Dunn. I hope this can give you a flavour of the man.
Music selections are from Uziego’s HODORI LP, available at https://uziego.bandcamp.com/album/hodori
Zac also made a music mix for John, which can be found here – https://soundcloud.com/uziego/requiem-for-john-weija