I knew that there was rock music in China, and I was determined to get as involved in it as I could—which turned out to be not very much, since I have the Chinese vocabulary of a three-year-old child. It doesn’t help that Chinese people are, as a rule, very polite and complimentary to foreigners, so if you are able to say something like “thank you” to a waitress or “Please don’t stick that Q-Tip so far into my ear” to a barber, you will invariably be met with some variation of “Wow, your Chinese is so good!”

In a lot of other contexts, this would be patronizing, but in China it becomes a compliment—even when it isn’t true.

Unfortunately, it is really easy to start believing these lies about yourself: that you, as a foreigner, are special, that the country you are in is lucky to have you there—and you get the idea that maybe you will somehow become famous.

This is a country that has a TV show called “Foreigners Sing Chinese Songs,” and where my white teaching colleagues regularly appeared in commercials and soap operas. I considered myself “above” this somehow—so instead, I decided to audition for a metal band.

Joining a Chinese metal band was maybe one of the worst ideas I have ever had, for many reasons.

First, I have never actually listened to metal on purpose for any reason other than looking up a YouTube video of Slayer so I could understand John Darnielle’s book Reign in Blood, which is based on an album by that band.

I just find it really unpleasant. Also, the band was looking for a bass player, and not only had I not played the bass for about two years, I also did not have a bass with me and was therefore unable to practice the one song the band had a recording of. Plus there was the language thing, and the fact that I was being too honest, when I emailed them, to make the members very confident about my enthusiasm or ability. (“I don’t really listen to metal, but I think it could be interesting,” was the best I could muster).

The only thing I had going for me was that, as far as I could tell, I would only be required to play one very low note, over and over. Most of the technical skill would be handled by the drummer, a Japanese guy who worked as a salesman for a well-known drum manufacturer and therefore had about five hundred cymbals, and the guitarist, who was the only guy I met in China who actually had a so-called “Fu Manchu” moustache—not because it was a “Chinese” facial hair style, but because it was a metal one.

I met other people in metal bands—for reasons not entirely clear to me, considering that I am a person who owns more than one Lisa Loeb record—including a kid who played in a band called Death God, but even with a bad-ass name like that, they looked like office clerks.

This guitarist, though, was the real deal. The band’s singer was a soft-spoken woman who had recently changed her English name from Lily to Amanda. Lily-Amanda, who worked as a mild-mannered assistant for a PR firm by day, had completely mastered a vocal style I would call “really, really scary and evil, especially considering that it is coming from a small Chinese woman and not a 300-pound white guy with Satanic tattoos.”

Her guttural growls were another reason I started thinking the band was maybe not the best fit for me. Lily-Amanda and I had a conversation over instant messenger the day before I was to come to the audition, and I desperately tried to find some common ground.

ME: How about screamo? Do you guys like screamo?

LA: Not really. We listen to thrash and metalcore.

ME (trying not to admit that I don’t know what those are): OK. Well, do you do any singing?

LA: I sing a little, but it’s mostly screaming.

ME: I see.

I showed up for the audition dressed like a prep-school English teacher, which is not something I recommend, fashion-wise, for a metal band audition. Everyone else was wearing black metal t-shirts (they could have been Black Metal t-shirts as well, but I wouldn’t really have known). The band rocked out on the one song I knew while I diligently played a low E as quickly and menacingly as I could.

I got an email from Lily-Amanda the next day. “You’re a really good bass player,” she wrote, “but you are not fit for metal, just as I am not fit for country music.”

She was right. Even though you can make something of a life for yourself in a country that people like me see as the epitome of “foreign,” even though you can feel confident enough to argue over the price of a DVD in a new language and order and eat the marinated head of a duck, some things cannot change.

I was never meant to be in a death metal band.