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Why one Eagles song really gives my heart wings

By Xiao Hao (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-10-22 11:20

I didn't even notice when the broken stereo system started playing Hotel California.

Most coffee shops in Nanluoguxiang likely had the Eagle's Greatest Hits on their play lists. But my expat friend Cindy sneered, "all self-respecting musicians and rock fans in China appear to know this song".

It wasn't my first time hearing such anti-Hotel California sentiment in Beijing.

Another American friend, a performance artist named Alex, once organized a 24-hour non-stop performance of this overplayed song with many friends to "butcher the song to death".

I first heard Hotel California after arriving in the US as a graduate student. I was feeling stifled by the whitewashed walls of the biology laboratory and also by the invisible walls of not knowing much about the US but living there.

A Korean lab mate introduced me to the Eagles.

I couldn't claim to be an Eagles fan, but I fell in love with Hotel California immediately. I never studied the lyrics. Frankly, I had no idea that others had dissected the song into readings about sex, drugs, decadence - even Satanism. But Wikipedia tells me so.

It was the fragments of the half-understood lyrics that mesmerized me: And I was thinking to myself/This could be heaven or this could be hell We are all just prisoners here/Of our own device You can check out any time you like/But you can never leave

In our lab, we had three graduate students, a few undergrads, and three technicians from Russia and Poland.

We kept the rock music low during the day for fear that the technicians would switch the music to classical. After they had all left at night, we would blast the music while continuing our work on DNA and proteins.

One night, Eugene, the oldest of the technicians, stayed late. Unaware of his presence, I started blasting the Eagles. Two minutes into Hotel California, Eugene casually asked me, "What's the name of the song? It sounds nice."

His interest intrigued me.

We had long considered him part of a bygone generation, although he was only in his 40s.

I showed him the lyrics on the album insert. After the song ended, he only said, "Nice. I'd never thought rock songs could be so interesting." He didn't say anything else as I played the CD on repeat through the night.

The next day, he asked me where he could buy the album.

For a long time, my memory of Hotel California was that of Eugene's face when he held the album cover as the song played - his gray hair, his crooked plastic-framed glass, his eyes that wandered with his thoughts.

Perhaps it was the sense of displacement over a fate of our own choosing - something I thought the song expressed so poignantly - that made me feel close to him that night. I wondered if he was thinking about his future - menial research jobs for a once-prestigious Soviet scientist taken to support his two kids' American dreams - as I pondered mine.

It has been a long time since Hotel California sent my heart wandering.

Still, I felt uneasy whenever my expat friends looked down on the Chinese rock fans who overanalyze and overly revere the song. At some point in our lives, we all had or will have our moments of Hotel California, which, however superficially, mirrors some truth of our existence.

Oh, well.

I guess that sentiment might be exactly what my foreign pals would poke fun at.