Dawn is just beginning to tinge the horizon blue when a cannon blast shatters the quiet of the small Bavarian town. I shuffle from my bed to the window, pushing aside the paper garlands of yellow Chinaman figures to gaze blearily at the wintry landscape. The tourism office has dubbed Dietfurt, population 6,084, “Bavarian China” and “Town of the Seven Valleys.” The apartment I’ve rented for the week looks out onto one of those valleys, an expanse of untrodden snow fading into a dark hollow cloaked with bone-chilling mist. Were it not for the town’s pride and joy, the annual Bavarian China parade taking place this afternoon, I can’t imagine any reason I’d ever come here.
Fifteen minutes and one coffee later I’m tiptoeing down the icy front steps, following my ears toward the booms. After a few turns, there they are: a motley crew of thirty bedraggled clowns shuffling toward me like zombies. Between them they’re heaving a noise cannon, a marching band’s worth of instruments, and a wagon of booze they’ve been nursing since two a.m.
“Morgen,” I mumble, and fall into step. We proceed down the road, trombones and trumpets ablaze, stopping a few minutes later in front of a tidy house on a cul-de-sac. The door swings open and out steps a rotund, sixty-something white man clad in a floor-length robe of gold lame. It’s Emperor Ko-Houang-Di, the star of today’s festivities.
“Come in, come in!” he cries. We pile into the kitchen, where his wife and daughters are passing around glasses of fizzy wine, coffee, and doughnuts. A stick of Chinese incense sends pungent curlicues into the air. It’s a well-deserved break for the clown wakeup crew, which is tasked with getting the town in partying spirit right from the crack of dawn on this most important day of the year. It’s Unsinniger Donnerstag – Nonsensical Thursday –, the beginning of Carnival Week.
In Dietfurt, the occasion is marked with a massive Bavarian China parade that draws fifteen thousand drunken, Chinese-costumed spectators. It’s a proud local tradition every Dietfurt native holds dear. It’s also the weirdest and most cringe-worthy thing I’ve ever witnessed. “What the hell am I doing here?” I think to myself as I, a writer of proud Chinese heritage, watch the jovial man next to me, an emperor of fake Chinese heritage, sweep aside the tassels on his chintzy headdress to take a bite of jelly doughnut.
I first met Emperor Ko-Houang-Di, a.k.a. Fritz Koller, the afternoon prior in the town’s one-room museum dedicated to Carnival, or Fasching. We sat under the gaze of his emperor predecessors whose portraits and gibberish names lined the walls. A display case held memorabilia from parades past, like a pin depicting a buck-toothed Chinaman caricature riding a panda like a bucking bronco. In one corner hung an embroidered robe of yellow silk, a gift to Emperor Boo-Dah-Washy (reign: 1976-1999) on a Chinese-government-sponsored visit to Beijing.
Being emperor is a big responsibility, Fritz told me. Behind his prim, rimless glasses, his eyes were weary. His parade float and costume took months of work. The bar has been set high: In 2000, he made his debut hatching out of a giant dragon’s egg. Here he paused and cast a studied glance at me.
“And where are you from?” he asked politely.
I knew what he was getting at. “My mother is Chinese.”
“Chinese roots, thought so,” he said placidly, and carried on. “So as you know, the dragon symbolizes good luck.”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but that reaction wasn’t it. Some enthusiasm at encountering some actual Chineseness, maybe, or a touch of humility about explaining Chinese symbolism to a Chinese person.
It was strange to see my culture crudely caricatured and commodified into a hokey party gimmick and to keep my mouth shut. But I came out of curiosity – about what this ritual means for its believers, and how small towns can become incubators for the most oddball behavior. I’m in Dietfurt as an intrepid social anthropologist, I told myself, to observe the locals in their native habitat, withholding judgment.
And it was hard not to be impressed by Fritz’s dedication. He’ll ride in the parade drawn by a massive dragon, then climb up a towering pagoda for his grand finale. To an outsider it sounds purely absurd, but behind the shenanigans is a nostalgic reverence for tradition, even a sense of identity. “Some of my most wonderful childhood memories are of Fasching,” Fritz said wistfully. “This is a tradition we grow up with. Bringing up the next generation of Bavarian Chinese is very important.”
Nobody can say for sure why, but Dietfurt has been nicknamed “Bavarian China” for centuries. The legend goes like this: During the Middle Ages, a bishop became angry the town wasn’t paying its feudal dues. When he sent over his treasurer, the townspeople shut all the gates to the little walled town. He reported that the Dietfurters had barricaded like the Chinese behind their Great Wall, and the reputation stuck.
Carnival is a big deal throughout the west and south of Germany. In Catholic Bavaria, it’s a chance for the straight-laced populace to let loose. But nowhere, as any Dietfurter will proudly tell you, does Carnival quite like they do – that is, in yellowface makeup and Confucius beards. It was back in 1928 that someone, no one remembers who, suggested the local brass band take inspiration from the town’s nickname and wear Chinese costumes in the Carnival parade. The idea caught on, and a tradition was born.
After parting ways with the clown crew, I soon find myself wedged onto a pub bench with the emperor and his entourage. Pia, the bubbly young blonde who runs the Dietfurt tourism office, invited me here for a press breakfast, but I seem to be the only journalist who showed. The emperor’s right-hand man, Kai-Ho-Gei, is decked out in a maroon velvet outfit that I can only describe as campy kung fu warrior. On his head is a gold-painted hardhat, dripping with tassels and topped with a red lampshade. Then there’s Kai-Ze-Mei, clad in Tibetan monks’ robes with a shaved head to match.
Breakfast is a pretzel, grainy mustard, and bulging weisswurst sausages. Tradition mandates eating these by biting a hole at one end and sucking out the filling like meat Jell-O, but I choose decorum over street cred and use knife and fork. Kai-Ho-Gei, the one with the lampshade on his head, nudges over his weissbier and insists I drink.
“I have to pace myself,” Fritz says. “A drunk emperor would not be tolerated.”
Here’s Pia, clad in a silky black top with a Mandarin collar. Swishes of makeup shape her eyes into almonds, and a rhinestone sparkles on one of her front teeth. The emperor has pre-ordered her a beer, which she throws back in a few gulps. I finish my sausage and decline more beer. Time to parade: T-minus three hours.
Back on the square, men are barricading the bank with planks. On the pavement, vendors are frying spring rolls and stacking doughnuts, each one daubed with chocolate icing to give it a slant-eyed Chinaman face. I spot a group of Chinese twenty-somethings and make a beeline for them, the first actual Chinese I’ve spotted since arriving in town.
“Those lions look weird,” Wang is saying, pointing at the papier-mâché animals flanking the square, which look like a preschool craft project. Along with his friend Qiling, I soon learn, Wang is studying for his master’s outside Nuremberg. They’ve come here with three friends after learning about the parade on Facebook. Unlike Yin, who’s darting around taking selfies with the Germans, Wang doesn’t seem to be having all that much fun.
“Why do they think this stuff looks Chinese?” he gripes to me in Mandarin. “They’ve mixed up stuff from the Qing and Ming dynasties. And why all the pointed hats? Nobody in China wears those anymore.”
“We have Oktoberfest in Shanghai,” Qiling reminds him.
“At least people there don’t dress up like Germans,” Wang retorts.
A couple walks by, she in Japanese geisha attire and he in a Genghis Khan getup, with a full face of yellow makeup.
“They think we have yellow skin,” Wang says, bemused. He points at his winter-chapped face. “But I’m more red than anything.”
We duck into a pub to escape the February chill, and before the door has even swung shut, the room falls silent and swivels to face us. It’s like a slow-motion scene from an old spaghetti western. “The Chinese are here!” a voice cries.
“Servus!” Yin calls out cheerily, the informal Bavarian hello.
“Servus,” responds a jovial chorus.
We scrounge seats in the back room, across from an oma and opa who stare in stunned rapture. Yin offers them a Prost, and they break into grins. Unlike me, my Chinese blood diluted with WASPy Canadian-Britishness from my dad, these “real” Chinese kids are the celebrities of the day.
As Wang plows through a currywurst sausage, he takes the opportunity to pick my brain. How did I learn Chinese, he wants to know, and what was it like growing up in Taiwan as a mixed-race kid, caught between cultures?
“Like, what if I marry a German woman?” he asks between bites. “And we had a kid? They wouldn’t really belong anywhere, not here in Germany or in China.”
What I don’t say to him because it’s not the time or place, and because my Chinese skills are not quite up to the task, is that he’s right: Sometimes you end up not belonging anywhere, neither in the country where you were born or the ones your parents came from, and at some point you have to accept that your identity will be forever complicated. But then again, maybe it’s always complicated, as illustrated by Exhibit A, an all-white town in the Middle of Nowhere, Bavaria, where the people have built their identity upon pretending to be Chinese.
Instead of saying this, I tip back the last of my beer and reluctantly say goodbye. I’m due at a reception hosted by the mayor, which turns out to be a dud. I head back into the cold alone. The parade is about to start.
After a long morning of beer-swilling, I’m ready to get the show on the road. And then, with a sudden cacophony of cheers, we’re off. Here they come, the brass band in coolie hats trailing one long, faux braid each; the ninjas; and the “Chinese from Mars” wearing beer mugs on their heads. Here they come, the “Chinese Indians” in feathered headdresses. A dragon fills the air with belches of yellow smoke. A bevvy of blondes sashays along in dirndls fashioned from Chinese brocade. The spectators press in; they cheer and roar and swig beer. I spot the emperor’s daughters, grinning ear-to-ear as they twirl orange parasols.
The local soccer team and hip-hop dance group are in the parade, the bikers’ club and the youth gun club too, and the town kindergarten. They keep on marching past, one costumed group after another, though my ice-cold feet are aching by now for the parade to be over. I duck inside the town hall to warm up. A drunk couple makes out furiously next to me, smearing his Fu Manchu beard across his chin.
I’m back outside just in time to see another dragon peering around the bend, this one drawing a tall wagon on which the emperor rides, raising his arms benevolently like a pope in his popemobile. He looks beatific and even through the torrent of streamers dangling from his headdress, it’s clear he’s beaming with pride.
His wagon halts on the square, where he climbs the steps to his throne with great ceremony, heralded by oom-pah-pah music and flanked by the dirndled dancers. This is the parade’s climax, but rather than a regal speech, what comes next is a call-and-response performance, something like the chants I learned at summer camp when I was ten. The music swells, the emperor delivers a few rhymes, the crowd roars and drinks, and so it goes, one boozy verse after another. I want to feel the reverence for tradition that Fritz enthused about, but this is actually reminding me of a Halloween frat party. Wang, Qiling, and their Chinese crew are nowhere to be seen.
By the time nightfall descends, Dietfurt is absolutely heaving. Security guards frisk passersby, and an ambulance stands at the ready. Teenagers skulk down dark alleyways, emptying bottles of vodka down their gullets. At the entrance to one party, a sign announcing the entry fee, eintritt, spells out “eintlitt” instead, replaced the “r” with a big, mocking “L” in red marker to make sure no one misses the racist punchline. For the first time, I feel a hot surge of anger. This anthropological experiment is over.
Thankfully, there’s wine waiting in my apartment. As the people of Dietfurt drink their way into oblivion in their silk pajamas and pointy bamboo hats, I fall asleep on the couch, Merlot on my lips and Steve Urkel dubbed into German on the TV.
Next morning, I’m up early again. The town is dead quiet as I walk to the bus stop, treading on sodden confetti and sidestepping a Chinese takeout box, its noodle innards splayed out like greasy roadkill. Everyone is still in bed, nursing hangovers and dreams of next year’s parade.
I didn’t finish that bottle of wine, but I’ve got a different kind of hangover. Smiling gamely in the midst of madness takes a lot out of a person, and I’m more than ready to flee this Twilight Zone where cultural appropriation is a way of life. Still, I got what I came for: a culture-clash encounter like none other. Also, the confirmation that however complicated my mixed Chinese identity can sometimes feel, there are people out there – namely a town of 6,084 people in Bavaria – who are far more confused than I will ever be.
It takes two trains and a plane before I’m back home in Berlin, and throughout the journey, the refrain from the Dietfurt anthem repeats in my head like a broken record: Chinesen aus Bayern, wir wollen immer feiern… We Bavarian Chinese, we always want to party.
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