"Before I started college, my life was really simple. School was my whole world. But the first time I applied to college, I didn't get in. I didn't know what to do next. I realized that it doesn't matter how hard you work. Society can still tell you that all your choices were wrong. The world laughs at you. Anyhow, I couldn't have gotten through that year without rock 'n' roll.

"The first rock 'n' roll sound I ever heard was New Jersey...The only Western music I had heard before was Michael Jackson and Wham! But even that stuff was okay, just because you could hear it. Because there had never been a sound like that in China before.

"Then I met this guy who worked as a DJ on Qingdao TV's music channel. This friend of mine brought back a copy of Bon Jovi's New Jersey from his place. As soon as I heard the first song, 'Lay Your Hands on Me'...it felt like an enormous crawling animal. Like a kind of prehistoric animal.

"Music like that is different from the Chinese music I had heard. People can't possibly reject it, because it's actually really similar to a person. It's completely in harmony with human rhythms like breathing and heartbeats. But back then, I couldn't analyze it like that. I had never heard anything like it, so it was such a fucking shock.

"Back then in a small town like Qingdao, just because you had heard a single song by Bon Jovi, you were so proud that you could look down on anybody. You knew they couldn't possibly have heard that kind of stuff. There was nothing like that kind of pride back then."