The Beatles & art school

Whether you thought the Beatles were a silly rock band for kids or a group of mature, adult songwriters might have depended on which country you grew up in.

That’s because Beatles albums, especially the early ones, were packaged and marketed in wildly different manners between England and America.

The Beatles’ album sleeves (the British ones) were historic in the way they presented pop music as a legitimate art form. And I’m not even going to mention the music itself. That would be a 10,000-word post in itself; countless others have written about their music in better ways than I ever could, so I will stick with the subject at hand.

Not enough people credit the Beatles as visual artists, and for that reason it was a shame that the American label, Capitol Records, dumbed down the band’s LP sleeves.

To really understand what made the Beatles so great, you have to consider that they had their origins in art school as much as music. They weren’t rebels with guitars – they were intellects who, before they were famous, were immersed in the world of the avant garde. Stuart Sutcliffe, the band’s original bassist, bonded with John Lennon over their love of painting. Sutcliffe was an accomplished artist (a better painter than a musician, the reason he left the band), and later became engaged to photographer Astrid Kirchherr, who captured the Beatles in numerous impressionistic photos, as well as influencing their haircuts and fashions. Then there was Kirchherr’s former boyfriend, Klaus Voormann, a bohemian artist with a classical upbringing, who became ensconced within the clique. Voormann was pitching offbeat album designs to Lennon and Sutcliffe even before the band had recorded a note.

By the time the Beatles released their first album, in 1963, there had already been an established tradition in jazz music to hire painters, designers, and photographers to create album covers that were works of art in and of themselves. In pop music, though, covers were simply products of a label’s marketing department. Record sleeves were designed to grab attention with loud photos and garish typesets.

The Beatles changed that.

As the group’s entire US catalogue has just been released on CD for the first time, there’s a legitimate concern that any commemoration of the American versions of the albums only blurs the artistry of the original UK albums – the only versions that the Beatles themselves crafted and authorized. Let’s look at the differences. (Click on any cover to view them in a gallery.)

Please Please Me: The Beatles’ first LP did not boast a particularly artful cover, being new to the business and not pushing their luck. Regardless, a theatre photographer was brought in to shoot this at the last minute, and despite the repulsive typeset and dayglo colours, the photo has a nice sense of perspective as the band looks down the stairwell of their label’s headquarters. In America, the small Vee-Jay label opted not to use the original cover, going instead for something more staid and uninspiring. A few years later, Vee-Jay re-released the collection with a cover that was more upbeat, but ultimately childish.

With The Beatles: The group's interest in visual arts prompted them to seek out Robert Freeman, a photographer renowned for his work with jazz musicians of the era. For this sleeve, the Beatles were after a cover that was artistic and visually striking. What they ended up with was progressive for its day. The label, Parlophone, initially rejected the cover on the grounds that the boys were not smiling, not to mention the lack of colour. The image went against the norms of pop-music marketing in 1963. But with this cover, the Beatles were making a bold statement – a statement that they were innovators, that pop music could be taken seriously.

At this point in time, the primary medium for rock 'n' roll was the 45 RPM single: one hit song with a throwaway tune on the B side. The Beatles were now telling audiences that when they bought a 14-song LP, they were not just getting a couple of hits plus some filler tracks, they were purchasing a work of art.

In America, though, the suits at Capitol Records were miffed by the lack of a happy, sellable cover, and tacked on blocky lettering complete with tacky colours and an exclamation mark. They also changed the name of the album from With the Beatles to Meet the Beatles! Capitol culled a few tracks and mixed in some singles so that they could create The Beatles' Second Album with the remainders.

The Capitol office in Canada also obliterated the subtlety (above). The 1963 collection was split into two albums, with the second volume, Twist and Shout, appearing with a slapdash cover created from a publicity photo and, apparently, a bottle of nail polish.

A Hard Day's Night: The UK sleeve was clever in its use of film-strip imagery, given that this was the accompanying LP for the movie of the same name. Worth noting that this was the first LP in pop-music history to be written entirely by the members of a band. Thirteen original songs: Side 1 comprising tunes from the film, with Side 2 featuring all-new, non-movie songs. In America, Side 2 was replaced by instrumental tracks, with the rest of the album and some scraps appearing on the ironically named Something New.

Beatles For Sale: Although the cover of the band’s fourth album has a zen-like beauty, some people mock this sleeve as the one with the miserable faces. Probably why Capitol opted to use publicity shots for this collection, which they again split into two records. Interesting how the Beatles had no problem presenting themselves maturely, while the marketers at Capitol clearly found that discomforting.

Help: Again with Capitol's aversion to empty space on an album cover. The blue-on-white made a nice, clean image, with the band forming semaphores to supposedly spell “Help” (though due to the semaphore for "Help" not being so graphically appealing, they tried several poses and ended up spelling NUJV). In America, the cover was cluttered up, and many songs were dropped in favour of the instrumental film score. Meanwhile, Capitol re-packaged a handful of early songs in a tacky sleeve for Early Beatles, once they acquired the rights from Vee-Jay.

Rubber Soul and Revolver: By 1965, the Beatles had enough clout to insist on their original covers being used in America. However, not enough clout to stop Capitol from altering the track list. An executive at Capitol decided that Rubber Soul should be a folk album, dropping four of the harder songs and adding two gentler ones left off Help, while Revolver had three songs pulled. Missing songs from the US versions of Help, Rubber Soul, and Revolver appeared in America on the blandly presented Yesterday And Today. (That compilation actually had a more interesting cover for its first day on the market before being pulled.) Rubber Soul's cover, with the faces slightly elongated and eyes darting into space, hints at a band somewhat dazed and mellowed (by pot, as it turns out), not an inappropriate visual for the more matured sound found inside the sleeve. Revolver is notable for having fulfilled Klaus Voormann's dream of designing a Beatles cover. What came to be known as psychedelic music was invented on Revolver, and this cover certainly heralded a new, surreal version of the Beatles.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band: Rafts of articles have been written about this album and its cover since the record appeared in 1967, but the nutshell version: the most expensive album-cover shoot in the history of music, to accompany the most expensive album ever recorded to date. The band sought a cover that was inspired and special, to reflect the innovation put into the music itself. The sleeve was a bold work of art that became an emblem for that year's Summer of Love. But did Capitol really have to slap that ugly yellow STEREO banner across the top? Notice how that alteration forced the image to be cropped at the left side and bottom.

Magical Mystery Tour: This was the first instance of the American version of a Beatles album supplanting the official UK edition. In Britain, this soundtrack appeared as a six-song EP (pictured left), split between two 45-RPM records in one package. In America, a collection of singles was added to the package to create an 11-song LP. The cover, unfortunately, was turned into a hodge-podge.

The Beatles: The White Album, as it’s unofficially called. The first pop-music double album, 30 songs running the gamut of folk, ragtime, psychedelia, country, sound collage, and some invented genres (“Helter Skelter” may have been the first heavy metal song). The sleeve was as minimalistic as could be: the band’s name was simply embossed in the corner (as shown at the top of this post), and the only ink found on the cover was a tongue-in-cheek "limited edition" serial number stamped on the first few million copies (look for it in the top-left photo, in the corner of the sleeve). The original UK pressing featured openings at the top. In America, the more standard side openings were used.

Let It Be: This one I'm throwing into the mix for fun. Let It Be appeared in the UK and the US with the same sleeve, but since we're talking about Beatles LP covers, here's a bit of historical interest: Get Back was the intended title, using the cover seen on the left. The idea was that the band was going back to its roots, throwing away all the recording techniques they pioneered, to record an album live in the studio, straight to tape, as they did with their first album. Hence the design of the cover, emulating the first record but showing how the boys changed in the ensuing seven years. Unfortunately, the record didn't turn out as planned. After the work was abandoned for about a year, 1960s producer-wunderkid Phil Spector was commissioned to finish it off (without agreement from Paul). Spector, not surprisingly, used strings, orchestras, and other overdubs to put his own touch on the record. As the "live" concept no longer applied, the title and the original sleeve were abandoned, too. Let It Be was released after Abbey Road, and after the official break-up of the band, though the bulk of it had been recorded six months before.

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Abbey Road: There's no reason to include this cover in this particular article, as Abbey Road appeared the world over with the same cover. For the sake of being a completist, though, I must list it. The Beatles admitted that they knew this would be their last album, even if they never verbalized those thoughts at the time. The original plan was to title this album Everest, with the band flying to the Himalayas for a cover shot to match. Instead, having completed the arduous recording, and wanting to get the rest of their duties over with quickly, the band and their photographer marched outside the studio to complete this session in ten minutes.

How I learned to talk politics with the Taiwanese

When I made plans for my first visit to Taiwan, a friend asked if I needed a visa for that country, then corrected himself. “Is it actually a country? What do I call it?” Despite having lived in Asia for several years by this point, I was a bit ashamed that I didn’t know the answer to that question. Now I realize there was no need for shame – not even the Taiwanese can agree on their status.

Most of us in the West are at least vaguely aware that Taiwan is in limbo, terrified that an outright declaration as an independent country could trigger a war with China, which claims Taiwan as a rogue break-away state that will one day be reclaimed. But it wasn’t until I lived in both China and Taiwan that I really understood the history of this complicated relationship.

The first time I was forced to contemplate the matter in any mindful way was in Shanghai during my first job as an editorial staff member. The magazine was in English with a mostly expat audience. We ran an article on meat-eating habits in China, or something of the sort. What I remember most was the illustration that ran with the piece – a cow with its body sectioned off into its various parts. Instead of being labelled shank, sirloin, chuck, etcetera, they were given names of China’s various provinces.

Every magazine in China is assigned a state “publisher”, which is just a noble euphemism for “censor”. At the last minute before publication of the meat item, our censor noticed that the cow didn’t encompass Taiwan. An amendment was insisted upon.

This incident was regaled for days by the incredulous staff as an example of the most absurd of China’s efforts to include Taiwan in its modern narrative. The joke, of course: What part of the cow could possibly represent islands not attached to the mainland? From what I recall, Taiwan was nonsensically slapped onto the illustration to please the authorities. In the end, though, it rather disparagingly looked like a puffy methane cloud emanating from the cow’s rear.

I had to wonder why this rather trivial matter became a subject of outrage among our mostly Western staff – “How dare they try to claim Taiwan! In our pages!” – considering that there were far more egregious instances of censorship that we gladly swallowed in every issue. I didn’t see the point of getting riled up over having to play along with China’s claim on the region, despite my support for Taiwan’s independence. Let China try to claim Taiwan or Antarctica or Micronesia for all I care. On this file, China has been all talk and no action – and when you look at what action they DO take on other files (jailing and torturing political dissidents, for instance), trying to occupy Taiwan by means of a cartoon cow should have been the least of anyone’s concerns. In fact, such deeds only underscore China’s impotence with regards to Taiwan. While the government in Taipei issues passports, prints its own money, delivers health care and other programs to its citizens, all Beijing can do is draw the island on its maps. China’s failure to govern Taiwan would be less obvious if they didn’t make such a big deal of it, especially when it comes to cartoon animals in English-language magazines. But I digress.

By the outrage that spread through the office, I realized what a strong knee-jerk reaction Westerners are conditioned to when it comes to Taiwan. For those of us foreigners living in China, we gladly didn’t mention “June 4” in public, because I suppose the fallout from the Tiananmen Square sock-hop was an internal housekeeping issue that didn’t affect us directly. But Taiwan – Democracy! Capitalism! – is just too close to our hearts. Growing up during the Cold War in the 1970s, we were habituated to recognizing any country that stood up to Communism as a nation of heroes, even if they were being governed by their own autocratic dictators.

It’s one thing to learn about an issue in classrooms or documentaries, or to understand an argument by reading different viewpoints. But I didn’t have any visceral sense of the situation until I lived in Taiwan for a few months and spoke with friends and their families about how the split from China has affected their lives and relationships with each other.

The Taiwanese are fiercely political and will deluge you with their views if you express even the most remote interest. While those in China will simply echo the standard “Taiwan is ours” rhetoric, the Taiwanese positions are more compelling because they face more complex issues about whether to claim independence, re-join China, or live with the status quo. Let’s put it this way: the Taiwanese are just as biased as the Chinese, but the Taiwanese biases are far more colourful.

Here’s the history in a nutshell: China enters a modern age of sorts in 1912, with the end of dynastic rule. After thousands of years of being governed by emperors, Sun Yat Sen and later Chiang Kai Shek become the country’s first modern presidents. In 1949, When Mao Zedong and the Communists take power in a revolt, Chiang Kai Shek, his military, their families, and thousands of followers flee to Taiwan, where they set up shop as the exiled government of China. The idea is that this displaced government – called the Kuomintang (pronounced Gwo-min-dahng) – will one day rule China again when the Communists are defeated. Both sides – the Kuomintang and the Communists – consider Taiwan territory of China. The only thing they disagree on is who the legitimate government of China is.

But now several generations have passed, and the vast majority of Taiwan’s inhabitants have only known life under their own democratically elected governments. Meanwhile, the Communists only strengthened their grip in China and show no sign of budging.

Flag proposed by Taiwan's
independence movement

Taiwan is now split between two factions. If you speak with Taiwanese who are descendants of those who came to Taiwan under Chiang Kai Shek in 1949, they are more likely to tell you that their ultimate desire is to reunify with China – however, not under Communist rule. If you speak with those ethnic Chinese or aboriginals whose families have been in Taiwan for hundreds of years, they might tell you stories of the interlopers who stole from the inhabitants and distributed the wealth amongst themselves. To some Taiwanese, Chiang Kai Shek is a hero; to others, he was just as bad as Mao.

Time has blurred some of the lines between these divisions. It was easier to take a clear-cut position back when China was isolated behind the Red Curtain and cut off from modern economies. In those days, Taiwan and Japan were the economic giants of Asia. But China is now open and fiercely capitalist, and they've been able to choke off a large portion of Taiwan's economy. As a result, a massive sector of Taiwan’s jobs and factories are flowing towards the mainland. Given China’s population of 1.3 billion to Taiwan’s 23 million, this has made Taiwan a deferential partner in cozy trading relationships with China.

As a result, Taiwanese are more likely to consider the practicality of their vote. Although a majority of Taiwanese today are pro-independence, enough of them are so concerned about jobs and the economy that they will vote for pro-China leaders. “No reason to poke the tiger,” one friend told me. On the other hand, for those who come from pro-unification families, enough time has passed that many of them don’t feel as strongly as their parents do about the issue, and tend to think that independence wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

Regardless, divisions still exist, and you still find families whose political leanings run through their blood. One of my closest friends told stories about his family’s land being stolen by Chiang Kai Shek’s men 60 years ago. Yet another friend, this one from a pro-China family, talked about being ostracized in the schoolyard by other children who said he was not a “real Taiwanese.” He told me: “My family came here 100 years ago. Their families came here 400 years ago. So what? We all came from the same place.”

In Taipei, with my ardently pro-independence friend and his father, we watched a movie called Formosa Betrayed (Formosa being the name of Taiwan pre-revolution). It tells the tale of a Taiwanese academic assassinated on American soil to prevent him from completing a book he was writing about Kuomintang atrocities. It’s 1980, and a CIA agent takes his investigation to Taiwan, where he gets drawn into more intrigue and gets a few history lessons literally beaten into him.

My friend and his father paused the movie at various points to add their own anecdotes to the movie’s narrative. “Yes, this is exactly what happened to us under Chiang Kai Shek!” was the gist of their message. The film ends with a closing scrawl: “Because of the events depicted in this film, Taiwan is now a democracy.” My friend teared up a bit and said, “Please show this movie to your friends in Canada so they understand Taiwan.” When I watched the movie later with a Taiwanese friend from a pro-China family, his reaction to the closing scrawl was, “What bullshit!”

What I found delightfully captivating about these types of conversations was that I had never heard my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver speak so passionately and politically. I suppose there was no reason for them to talk shop about their mother country among Canadians like myself. Even when it came to the whole Taiwan/China dispute, it was something that my Chinese and Taiwanese friends seemed indifferent about, at least on the outside. But in Taiwan, it was revealing and somewhat enthralling to witness the political fervour that bubbles on the surface of their daily lives.

There were times when I felt compelled to take a side. Really, though, it was not any of my business as a foreigner, but this is who I am – I like to know a country by planting some roots and embracing as many aspects of local living as possible. That includes understanding the nation’s issues and politics. As the famous phrase goes, “the “personal is political”, and the Taiwanese are a magnificent example of this adage. Understanding a nation’s politics well enough to form an opinion was my way of feeling a sense of belonging and engaging with the country around me, so wherever I lived I'd pick up the paper and start talking about what I read. (Some friends I made in these places admired this penchant; others found it annoying.)

Nowadays, whenever I read an article in the Canadian press about Taiwan, I don’t react with, “Well, that was interesting.” I’m either agreeing or calling “Bullshit!”

The latter category is how I reacted to this article in a Vancouver weekly newspaper. In it, several Taiwanese immigrants to Canada complain about the gutlessness of powerful nations to stand up to China and officially support Taiwan independence. Reading their statements, I was reminded of something one friend in Taipei told me. When I talked about how my Taiwanese friends in Vancouver seemed so different from the Taiwanese in Taiwan, his explanation was that those who leave to hold foreign passports are more inclined to lay low in a safe haven until the dust settles in their homeland. This means being apolitical and a little bit "disloyal to the cause," or so I was told. So when I read these types of comments from Taiwanese Canadians, such as that Taiwan is “virtually an orphan, and this goes on because all the strong nations tolerate that,” I can’t help but think that it’s not just strong nations that are to blame – you could also say that those who abandoned the cause and fled Taiwan are just as culpable.

Many Taiwanese, such as those quoted in the aforementioned article, want the powerful countries of the world to cut ties with China in support of Taiwan. They want our governments to officially open embassies in Taipei, and our businesses to stop trading with the world’s second-largest economy in favour of the nineteenth largest. This is hypocritical, though, since Taiwan itself has formed many rewarding trade agreements with China, and they've done so with the backing of the people – the ruling Kuomintang party has won two elections in a row on a pro-China platform. Even the pro-independence party, the Democratic Progressive Party, softened its stance toward China to win two elections in 2000 and 2004. Why wouldn’t the DPP declare independence, despite that being their raison d'être? As one friend put it, nobody wanted them to “poke the tiger”.

This is where both sides of the Taiwan/China argument ring hollow. I don’t fault the Taiwanese for being cautious with regard to China. But they must also live with the fact that their approach leaves them open to being claimed by a more powerful country, and currently that’s China. If the Taiwanese want other nations to poke the tiger, they must poke the tiger first and make a clear declaration for the rest of the world to rally behind. I’m not suggesting that it’s easy – China’s official position is to attack Taiwan if it tries to secede (I don’t think it would come to that, but who really wants to find out the hard way?). It’s ludicrous, however, to ask other nations to antagonize China while Taiwan continues to profit from their own cozy relationship with the tiger.

Beijing itself is just as full of hot air. If Taiwan belongs to them, then why don’t they send their bureaucrats there to collect taxes, issue passports, supervise the military, print money, and plant their flag on every government building? A country is defined by its ability to control its borders, service its armed forces, and provide for its people. Beijing is unable to do any of these things in Taiwan. So how can they claim it as their territory?

I think it’s inevitable that Taiwan will be forced to re-join China at some point in the near future. Not through hostile means, but economic ones. The more reliant Taiwan becomes on China and its market, the more influence and power China will have in Taiwan’s affairs. Taiwan is already in China’s tentacles, and the merger will be a slow and gradual one. (But I’m also naively optimistic that China will transform over time and adopt some characteristics of a democracy, which would only encourage the reunification.)

For those reasons, I’m uncertain how I’d feel if I were a Taiwanese citizen with a real stake in the game, not just an opinionated foreigner. I would certainly be pro-independence, but I wonder how hard and how loudly I’d fight for it. As much as I’d fear getting too close to China, I’d have the same basic concern about my job and living standard, not to mention a potential war. Although I like to think the personal is political, the modern corollary to that saying should be, “... and the political is monetary”. As governments the world over are taking on more characteristics of being business managers while letting the free market chip away at our social programs, the day may soon come when it doesn’t matter which country we’re a part of. As for China, they're taking a very business-like approach to Taiwan: instead of attacking, they're simply buying them out.

For a better grasp on Taiwan's political realities, this article by Canadian historian Gwynne Dyer, posted just after Taiwan's 2012 presidential elections, gives a succinct and modern perspective on the thinking behind their current relationship with China. 

The meaning of citizenship

I was an editor between 2009 and 2010 for a small magazine aimed at Westerners living in Singapore. Given that it was a lifestyle magazine whose goal was for readers to “join your mates” for “fun, friendship, sports, community,” my editor’s letters were not cerebral critiques. I tried to keep it light, but once in a while a bit of cynicism would seep out. On this occasion, I addressed something that was on the tongues of the expat community for about a week or so. I was expecting a rebuke from the publisher – “Readers would be offended by your stance, this isn't what we're about,” or something like that. But my article was printed and it passed in silence. However, the next month’s December editorial was almost pulled because I said I was indifferent to Christmas. Go figure.

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Is the editor ready to take citizenship?

The government set a few tempers alight when it announced that it would be requiring many Permanent Residents to take up citizenship or risk not having their PR status renewed. Letters flew to the daily papers, and not one PR-holder I knew wasn’t at least a little upset. One correspondent to Today newspaper’s letters section summed up much of what I heard. Peter Wadeley wrote that he has a Singaporean wife and two children, one of whom he said would one day be doing his National Service. But no matter. Even though Singapore is his “home country”, he stated that he "does not feel Singaporean" enough to take citizenship.

That makes me curious. Why not? Well, I can understand. I have been here for three years, and the longer I stay, the more apparent it becomes that Singaporeans in general will never accept a Caucasian as a true-blooded local. I can imagine Mr Wadeley’s son will one day complete his National Service and perhaps speak fluent Mandarin, but will forever be seen as an “expat”. One mixed-race friend of mine, a local citizen who looks Chinese but has a British surname, is often chided by cabbies when they arrive at his call expecting a white guy: “Aiya, you not Singaporean, lah!”

But I can see the other side of the issue. Back in our own countries, those who land on our shores have to abide by strict immigration laws, and are usually given a “love it or leave it” response if they complain about the rules and responsibilities they must comply with. So I can imagine the kind of affront Singaporeans might feel when we prosper from their country’s resources and lifestyle, and then turn around and say that citizenship in their nation is simply inferior to ours.

The unspoken truth is that we want the de facto benefits of dual citizenship. We want the jobs, low taxes and standard of living offered by Singapore, while keeping our birth citizenship as a safety net “just in case.” We want the free (or heavily subsidised) health care offered in most of our countries in case we take seriously ill, and the government pensions due to us upon retirement, and so on. Fair enough.

But so long as we fight to hang on to the best of both worlds, we should accept that this gives our host country the right to define the terms of our stay. Personally, I am unsure that I would become a Singapore national so long as dual citizenship is forbidden. But if citizenship were offered to me, I would feel honoured, not angry, and it is something I would not refuse lightly. Living abroad has helped me appreciate the true meaning of citizenship and the responsibilities of belonging to a country – whether that is here in Singapore or the land that issued my passport.

Note: Two years later, Singaporeans would be forming mass rallies in Hong Lim Park to protest against the influx of foreigners to their homeland. One of their key grievances was related to expats dipping into Singapore's wealth and benefits without having to take part in National Service. 

Beggars, choosers, and the new media

I just finished reading a piece in The Globe and Mail by an unemployed graphic designer who is now on welfare and struggling to regain her dignity. "Curious, powerful, capable; pushed down, scolded, reduced," is how she summarizes her current state.

The pathetic irony of this article is that The Globe and Mail, a highly profitable newspaper jointly owned by Canada's wealthiest family (the Thomsons) and the BCE conglomerate, states in its essay guide, linked at the top of this woman's article: "There is no payment if your essay is published."

And there you have it. A media professional whose job was outsourced to India, a single mother on welfare, writes about her plight in Canada's newspaper of record, which does not pay her a cent for her work. Thus continues the cycle of this "curious, powerful, capable" professional being "pushed down, scolded, reduced."

This practice is not unique to The Globe and Mail, though. The paper is only adhering to current market rates for talent, which is zero. It never used to be this way. Blame the internet, I suppose.

I was first exposed to this practice while working as a magazine editor in Singapore. I thought it was abhorrent, but at the time I thought it was just the ethics of media in that region of the world, and I'd have to suck it up until I returned to Canada. The first time I was asked to solicit contributions for our magazine while offering no compensation, I was mortified. I countered to our publisher that no half-decent writer would contribute a travel article or a personal story without being given at least a token payment. And even if they did, I simply had a problem with the ethics of being an editor for a lucrative magazine and not even offering a token honorarium, especially when we're the ones asking for the work.

But what did I know? The publisher informed me that this was the way it had been done since long before I arrived, and she wasn't about to submit to my idealism. As it turned out, my call for submissions yielded a small flood of decently written pieces. What was in it for the writers? The chance to see their names in print and show it off to friends. That was enough.

When I took sole editorship of the company's travel guide that year, a huge chunk of it was made possible not only by generous writers, but by semi-professional photographers who were happy to donate their work. When I needed, say, a photo of an impecunious little girl selling postcards in a Cambodian market (to go along with a story that one of our scribes had related), Flickr came to the rescue when our own stock photo sources failed to deliver. In every such case, I would contact the owner of the photos for permission, and to my surprise, they were always (with one exception) enthusiastic and thrilled. I would offer a free copy of the magazine as compensation.

The irony is that the "old media" (printed magazines) that we were publishing would not have been possible without the advent of "new media". Digital cameras made it possible for our writers to take their own quality photos while on assignments. The internet made it easy to solicit writers who were happy to get exposure for no pay. Blogs also made it simple for good writers to make themselves known to us, who didn't want to get caught up with sticky matters like invoices and cheques. Google and Wikipedia made it easy to check facts and perform research in a matter of seconds or minutes, whereas such tasks would have once required a trip to the library. And while we paid our graphic designers, technology like Adobe InDesign made it easy to crank out multiple titles a month using a couple of overworked design grads, especially when editors such as myself were giving them a head start by doing some basic layouts of our articles in advance.

The reliance on donated labour and DIY technology was even more dramatic in my next position, where I was editor-in-chief of a free custom publication that was distributed to members of a Singapore social club. Where in my previous job we relied chiefly on staff writers, at this new job I was the sole full-time staff member. The only other employee, our graphic designer, was half-time (though often worked full-time hours). The modus operandi here was to never pay for anything, ever. (I exaggerate: we did throw a few bucks a month to a stock-photo agency, which we used sparingly.) When the publisher wanted me to stock up on "stand-by" articles that might never be published, I drew a line and said that it was necessary to offer the writers something if we couldn't stroke their egos by publishing their work in a timely manner. After all, they were only doing this to build a portfolio and see their names in print. If we were going to sit on their contributions for six months or forever, then the least we should do is offer a gift certificate donated by an advertiser. No-go, the publisher said. Didn't want to set a precedent.

The trick to getting people to submit free articles and photos was to be overwhelmingly nice and gracious. Promise a prominent layout, a byline in large typeset, and a free copy of the magazine. And when their work was good enough to ask for more, then I'd pay a huge compliment: "Wonderful article, very poetic and descriptive. Thanks for doing this. I'd be happy to print your next article if you can keep them coming." For the most part, this relationship-building worked well. Until the publisher wanted me to be more demanding and less nice; then I knew my position was untenable.

Here's the thing. There were many significant experiences I had in Singapore where I'd shake my head and say, "That would never happen in Canada." Yet I came home only to find that nothing was really that different here, either.

The way media talent has been devalued is one such example. I started to hear stories about print media in North America relying far more heavily on unpaid internships, with some even charging their workers a fee for the privilege. I accepted the new reality and I pitched my own essays to Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. To no avail, but I kept trying. Being on the other side of the equation now, I too would have been happy to see my name in print and build a portfolio with some major-media clippings.

I eventually caught a small break when an editor for a local newspaper found my blog. He liked one of my posts and wanted to put it up on the paper's website. No compensation, of course. I agreed, hoping it would lead to paid assignments. It didn't. Some months after the article went public, I had a change of heart, as I was anticipating the necessity of looking for work in Asia again, and some of the opinions I expressed could be a barrier to employment in certain parts of the world. I contacted the publisher and asked if the article could be taken off the site. (I realize that the accepted wisdom is that once something is on the internet, it's there for good. But the article hadn’t been reproduced elsewhere, as far as Google told me, and I expect the cached version to disappear over time.)

The editorial team said, "Our policy is to not remove content," but after a couple of polite exchanges, they said they would delete the article. However, I got a little lecture in the final e-mail. This "represents a waste of our time, money, and energy to devote to something which then gets deleted."

How soon we forget about the days before the internet, when time, money and energy would be devoted to putting something in print and then get thrown in a recycling box and completely disappear from public view after a day or a week. Not only that, every single word in those pages was paid for. Now we're in an age when someone gives us an article for free to distribute on a world-wide network forever, and publishers get their shorts in a knot when the author asks for the delete key to be struck after several months of availability.

The final note concluded: "We will make an exception in this case. However, this would preclude you from writing for us again." That kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not because I want to write for them again, but because they asked me for the piece.

I think back to the gratitude I showed our volunteer contributors in Singapore, because, really, they kept me employed. The more of their work I stuffed into my magazines, the better I looked. "Here's the quality work I can produce on zero budget." If one of my volunteer writers had asked for an article to come off our website, I would have happily complied. After all, their part in enhancing my profile was done, and if my company had been so concerned about time and resources being wasted, then I'd think we could have prevented that by paying a token amount for the work and agreeing to ownership ahead of publication. In the end, we had gotten far more than we paid for.

I do realize how fortunate I was. I'm aware that if I had been dealing with a major organization like The Globe and Mail, my request likely would have been ignored. But this is the thing that gets me: This particular weekly is a left-wing paper that continually challenges the behaviour of major conglomerates, including their competition. This paper helped shape my values when I started reading it as a young adult, and all of the ethics that I carried into my media work were developed by years of reading principled journalists – including the ones in this newspaper, which remains one of my favourites. So to be given a little bit of lip and banished as a future writer, over work that I volunteered to them at their request, just made me shake my head in sadness to realize that this is what all media has been diminished to. Even this paper, which has been a steadfast supporter of labour movements, can afford to alienate contributors over minor matters because they probably have no difficulty finding other unpaid correspondents.

The lesson I've learned from this is that it's not worth it for any writer to give away free content that ends up on the internet. There was a time when a journalist, photographer or fiction writer could break into the industry by donating work to publications. Nowadays, you're not really breaking into anything but a competition with bloggers and Flickr members who will be happy to undercut you to see their name pop up in search engines. Besides, if you're never paid for your writing and you're not one of the lucky ones who gets offered a movie deal for your blog, you'll have to make a living somehow, and whatever you're writing about will only be open to judgment by HR personnel and managers who Google your name.

I've had another thought about that welfare recipient who donated the story of her plight to The Globe and Mail. Maybe she was being clever. Perhaps this was her grand, last-ditch effort to get noticed, and possibly someone will take pity and give her a job. We think that beggars can't be choosers, but the reality of the new media is proving that cliché wrong. So if an unemployed graphic designer is going to take advantage of that to do some begging herself, then good on her for playing the game.

But I have to say, if this is the new paradigm in the freelance racket, where begging and choosing is turning into a defeating feedback loop, I'm not that keen to fight my way into it.

Update, Oct 16, 2013: I am aware that my story is just one tiny drop in a very large, quickly filling bucket. The pattern of writers being insulted and shunned for putting some value on their work is endemic throughout all hemispheres and various levels of media. Here's just one example (Academic calls Philip Hensher priggish and ungracious for refusing to write an introduction to his guide on Berlin). If widely respected authors are enduring this, there's no hope for freelancers or those trying to make a name for themselves.

Dear Taiwanese friends; here's why we can't pronounce your names

It's easy for us in the West to take for granted that Asians feel compelled to assume English names when immigrating to our countries. In fact, our culture demands it. While we're accommodating to all the Diegos and Stanislavs and Gethsemanes who come from other distant corners of the world, for some reason we refuse to cut any slack to Dong Hyun, Zhen Yi, or Yusuke. "Can I just call you John?" is what most of us would ask.

I've generally been sensitive about the names I use for my foreign friends. When I become close to someone, I'll ask what their native name is. Half the time, my acquaintance prefers his English name. "Don't ever call me Ming Han. Only my mom calls me that, and usually when she's mad." The other half the time, I get a response like, "I love my Chinese name. I only picked an English name because I felt I had to, so I'm really happy if you call me Wei Cheng."

"Patrick" and "Alan"

There was a telling moment when I was staying in Taiwan. My friend from Malaysia, Shen Siung, came to visit me and my friend Tzuching. These were the names I had always known them by. Yet when they met, they called each other Patrick and Alan. Here I was trying to respect their culture by using their proper Mandarin Chinese names, but even with each other, these two Chinese men reverted to English names. I was astounded. I looked at them both and asked what was going on.

Shen Siung said, "You Westerners don't know how to pronounce our names properly." But you guys aren't Westerners, I replied. After some more probing, I got what he meant: Western culture imposed on them spellings that even they couldn't understand. The confusion was borne out of the antiquated and byzantine system of romanization that Taiwan and Malaysia had adopted. During the discussion, I came to realize that I had been mispronouncing their names since the days when I first met them, and they were too polite to correct me.

Learning Chinese in Taipei

The method of romanizing Mandarin Chinese used by the Taiwanese was invented in the mid-1800s by academics named Wade and Giles, and thus it was unsubtly christened the Wade-Giles system. However, the system recognized by the International Organization for Standardization is a creation from the mid-1950s called pinyin. Because it was developed by China's Communist government, the Taiwanese shunned pinyin to distinguish a separate identity from the mainland. Fully adopting pinyin would have been seen by many as a form of linguistic treason. (Pinyin has been used to some degree in Taiwan for the past decade, but more about that later.)

Consider the grief that this stubbornness causes. Coming back to my friends Shen Siung and Tzuching, here are their names in pinyin: Shan Xiong and Zi Jing. Actual pronunciation: Shan Shee-ong and Dz-Jing. Neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin represent an exact phonetic transliteration (the linguistic term for "translating" a character-based language into a phonetic alphabet), but which one do you find more accurate?

Learning pinyin, a writing
assignment from week-one
of Chinese class.

To be frank, there is actually no single perfect system of transliterating Mandarin Chinese into our Roman alphabet. That's because there are subtle sounds in Mandarin that don't have an English equivalent. (In linguistics, these sounds are called phonemes.) For instance, our ch phoneme comes from placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth, coming out like chuh. In Chinese, there are two ch phonemes – one similar to ours, and another made with the tongue extended closer to the teeth, sounding like chee. It's the same with sh – one from the front of the mouth, another from the back.

The challenge in romanizing Chinese is to imagine new letter combinations that represent these different phonemes. Between Wade-Giles and pinyin, the most accurate in many people's opinion is the latter.

Many aspects of Wade-Giles resemble a bit of a linguistic joke. Take, for instance, Peking. That was the old spelling of China's capital city before the nation formally adopted pinyin in the 1970s. (Peking was actually a French-missionary spelling, not Wade-Giles, which would have been Peiching, but still an interesting example.) I had always been curious as to why China changed the name to Beijing. But, in fact, bay-jing has always been the pronunciation. 

In Taiwan, however, they continue to insist on phonetic spellings that often bear no relation to actual pronunciation. The city of Kaohsiung is one good example. Kow-see-ung is how I always spoke it. In fact, it's closer to gao-shee-ong. And did you know that Taipei is actually tai-bei? In fact, there is a method to the Wade-Giles madness, a formula to explain how "k" becomes "g" and "p" becomes "b", but it's not worth explaining here, as it remains understood only by academics. The Taiwanese layman generally has no clue as to the workings of the nation's transliteration system.

This is not to say that pinyin is flawless. With the example of Kaohsiung, the pinyin spelling is Gaoxiong. The "x" would throw off native English speakers. It's not easy to intuit that it represents a sh phoneme. However, here's what pinyin does to make the learning and intuition of the system easier: it makes use of redundant Roman letters to represent phonemes that aren't replicated in English. While the letter combination "sh" in pinyin represents its English equivalent, "x" represents the softer sh with the tongue extended. Similarly, "ch" is self-explanatory, but "q" is the letter that represents ch with the tongue moved toward the teeth.

Wade-Giles is misleading by taking common letters and changing their vocalizations. Let's look at Kaohsiung again. The sound of the letter "k" in English is made with a burst of air but no vocalization. The letter "g" is like "k" but with a vocalization. Why should the "g" phoneme end up being represented by the letter "k"? Again, we can look at Peking (Peiching) and Taipei – the "b" phoneme (made with vocal chords) ended up being represented by the letter "p". You will find this replacement of vocalized and non-vocalized letters and phonemes all throughout the Wade-Giles system.

When pinyin needs to use a letter to represent a phoneme not found in English, it uses letters with similar English phonemes, making the pronunciation of a word easier to intuit. With that in mind, look at the difference between Tsingtao and Qingdao, the same Chinese city before and after pinyin was adopted. Neither has a completely intuitive spelling for native-English speakers. But the former version uses "ts" for a soft ch phoneme, and "t" (non-vocalized) for d phoneme (vocalized). In pinyin, the temptation might be to pronounce Qingdao as king-dow, but once you learn that the "q" is a soft ch, it's not as hard to wrap your head around that as it is to think of "t" forming a d phoneme. The old spelling of Tsingtao has the potential for a reader to misunderstand two phonemes, whereas the pinyin Qingdao only offers one misleading phoneme. It's not perfect, as no language system is, but it does the job more efficiently.

So that explains the problem Westerners have pronouncing names that use the Wade-Giles system. We meet Mao Tse-Tung and we pronounce his name phonetically. In fact, it's not t-see-tung but dzeh-dong. (Wade-Giles even changes the phonemes of the vowels by using tung for dong.) The pinyin spelling, Mao Zedong, is more likely to elicit a correct pronunciation, making Mr. Mao less likely to say, "Just call me Dave."

Try it with this Wade-Giles name: Hsien Chiu. Did you say huh-see-en chee-oo? Now in pinyin: Xian Jiu. I bet you're closer to the actual pronunciation: shee-an jee-oh.

I am not a linguist and I have not done any studies or serious readings on this subject. I am in no way an expert. However, I think my layman's observations are probably more relevant than an expert's opinion, because you shouldn't have to be an academic to pronounce the name of the street you see on a map, or a city you want to visit, or to greet a new friend or employee.

I should also state that I have simplified Taiwan's linguistic predicament in this post for the sake of clarity. It's actually more of a mess than I let on. Taiwan did adopt something called Tongyong Pinyin between 2002 and 2008, which was a sort of compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to ditch Wade-Giles while not conforming to mainland China's system. Standard pinyin (called Hanyu Pinyin) has since been adopted officially, but the government continues to abide with a jumble of systems – in Taipei (Wade-Giles) you can find Jhongjheng Road (Tongyong Pinyin) and visit the Xindian district (Hanyu Pinyin) or take the train to Tamsui (Wade-Giles). Birth certificates and passports in Taiwan, as far as I can tell, are still being issued mostly with Wade-Giles transliterations.

All of this just creates unnecessary stumbling blocks for those of us who are learning Chinese and must use some form of romanization to grasp pronunciation. Westerners living in Taiwan can regale you with stories about the inanity of signs being replaced and re-replaced, and systems being adopted, modified and reverted, depending on which party (the pro-China KMT or the pro-independence DPP) is in power, which county or city you're in, or which constituency is most vocal about its preference at any given time.

In the meantime, here's my advice for any Chinese person dealing with Westerners. If you absolutely want to ditch your Chinese name, by all means, take an English one. If you like your Chinese name and you have a Wade-Giles spelling, adopt a pinyin rendering (or even something more phonetic if necessary). And if we still can't pronounce it, teach us. After all, if you took the time to learn our entire language, we can take the time to learn your name.