@freddint FAQ
All the time people are asking me, Fred, what makes you tick? And tick I do, like the 38 kuai Lolex I bought from the guy with a briefcase full of them in Sanlitun while I was watching the coed pole dance routine through the window of one of those clubs across from The Village.
Obviously I can’t fit it all into my Twitter profile, but I do wear a lot of hats besides my vintage pleather yarmulke. I’m a social media marketer. I’m a moody foody (copyright pending bitches) — so-called because of the time I nearly used the thing they make guacamole with to bludgeon a waiter at a “Mexican restaurant” to death over a missing burrito; if my strength hadn’t been sapped by low blood sugar it would’ve been ugly. I’m a black belt level twitterbator and also very good at Taebo. I’m at least a purple belt by now in Krav Maga which is a kosher kind of whupass. I’m a neural networker. I collect avatars like so many ears on a string around my neck so when I say ‘good morning Twietnam’ like the rappers do it’s no joke. Apple products make me hard. Speaking of hard, I love Sting’s recent work and totally know Lady Gaga is not a man. I don’t #followfriday, Friday follows me. Obviously I’m also a SEO genius: type in Fred Dintenfass and guess who comes up first? Yeah, I thought so. (Actually I know so since I Google myself every few minutes.) I spend a lot of time massaging my personal brand and boy has it paid off. Not only in the social sense — I used to have 394 followers on Twitter until I culled it down to just the essentials (@tilatequila and @perezhilton — it’s like black hole vs black hole and could end the world as we know it), and Britney is always trying to hook up with me online by sending me racy pictures — but also in the financial realm (and I should know, VC VIP is yet another one of the hats I wear): Should I choose to auction off my personal brand, accompanying domain name and vanity plate for my fixed gear bicycle, I’ll be able to get my nom on for at last two courses at the local chuanr place. Provided I don’t order a beverage or squid. Lately I make videos with animals.
I also get a lot of DMs asking me why do I do what I do and that’s confusing to me. Is the pope Roman? Would you ask a panther why it hunts its prey or Putin why he swims with dolphins? No, you wouldn’t. Especially because Putin might judo you, and then what? It’s like the Ying-An quote I memorized before the Buddhist retreat I attended, “When you pass through, no one can pin you down, no one can call you back.” Obviously this was before Google Voice (or maybe he just wasn’t cool enough to get an invite) but it’s still really deep. It’s certainly more useful than Buddha’s last words, “All conditioned things are impermanent. Work out your own salvation with diligence,” which really doesn’t have much use beyond the beauty salon.
Since I’m keeping my personal brand really elite and underground and I owe quite a bit of money to the State of California over an unfortunate misunderstanding, I have a day job. On my business cards it’s says Editor/Writer but I’m so much more than that. I’m a cultural mediator. I build bridges between the East and West, Mandarin and American English, Madison County and the Middle Kingdom. I howl at the moon, whisper to horses and have a way with white girls wearing overalls — I’m the freaking Robert Redford of rewrites.
I don’t usually do this, but let me give you an example of the magic I summon from the digitally rendered page like some sort of hairy Harry Potter. Sometimes you get a passage like this one:
Zhenbutong Pickle真不同酱菜
Zhenbutong Pickle contains 40 Jinlin-menu-listed products, among which are: pork, barbecued pork, pork elbow, carbon baked pork tripe, baked chicken, fried chicken, carbon baked Corvina, carbon baked dry beef and Zhenbutong Nanchangcai. The production center of Zhengbutong pickle is at the pickle store of Sima restaurant on Yongchun Road.
Actually that one’s perfect already. So’s this one:
“TCT” has become the diversified concentration camp of international delicacies in Shenzhen.
And this one, which honest to Yaweh comes from a translated restaurant review:
Any insolent girls coming here for the first time would be dominated.
These cannot be improved, even by someone with my skills, but fortunately for my food porn habit, which wreaks havoc on my cable bills, there are plenty of English sentences which can be tweaked to make them sing. Mentality is key in this line of work, and to my mind there are no duds out there, only phrases that, like the main character in that movie Shine, are waiting for a large mature woman to clutch them to their bosoms and transform them from bipolar, alcoholic wrecks into concert pianists. In this metaphor I am the large mature woman.
Here’s an example of the maestro at work:
Kunshan’s Beer Festival includes lots of tents, live and entertainment programs for you to come together, enjoy this special event and promote cooperation within China.
Now who doesn’t want to hoist a lukewarm one for harmonious society from time to time? Yet this sentence fails to appeal to the heart of the expat in China — that enigmatic, completely homogenous, pale faced entity. So I give it a squeeze, a whisper and a carrot and voila (yeah, I’m both a polyglutton and a polyglot):
Kunshan’s Beer Festival includes lots of tents, live entertainment, and… you guessed it – plenty of beer.
Witness the fitness.
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