Across the mainland there’s an impressive seriousness with which China's youth are pursuing fun. In the clubs, the musical selection is earnest and up-to-date. The dancing, while still generally awkward and unnatural, is improving rapidly. Night after night, groups of young, attractive girls bypass their considerably drunker Western contemporaries with nimble, well-considered dance moves. They congregate in tight circles and move almost in unison; their timing and sensuous gestures look studied, seemingly honed at home, before a TV screen.
The white man - all full of cocky gracelessness, drunk on an exaggerated sense of sexual potency and many beers – remains the scourge of East Asian nightlife. Though he is one of its most hapless inhabitants, the white man invariably positions himself at the dance floor’s centre. His motions are cartoonish – wild and theatrical – to ensure that the world knows he isn’t “serious”. When not doubled over in spectacular laughter, he confidently surveys the room for an appreciative audience. There were more than a few of these men in attendance that night.
Disgusted by the spectacle, I made a way to the seating section. I found only one seat available, among a group of Western tourists, mixed men and women, clearly backpackers. With a deep sense of disappointment and self-loathing, I approached them. They were in good spirits; the seat was offered readily, I was assimilated.
As I took my seat, the group was in the throes of a passionate debate on China’s current condition. The prevailing sentiment was that Beijing is losing its distinctiveness by embracing antiseptic, comfort-driven Western lifestyles.
A worked out alpha male type in a hemp necklace, dress shirt, and construction books was speaking with conviction about the luxury apartments now dominating the city’s skyline. “The traditional Chinese housing was the courtyard,” he said authoritatively. “The houses were communal.” He pronounced the word slowly, elongating the "u" sound in manner that implied onomatopoeia, but for me at least, delivered no additional meaning. “Mao’s socialism was based on a similar communality,” he continued, “but – like Terry said – maybe he went too far. But look around you. The whole city is being remade for some monster middle class. Those new housing estates have armed guards. They’re basically gated communities where people drive around in Range Rovers and drink Starbucks, like some vile suburb of Sydney.”
“McMansions,” his friend added knowingly.
“Look around this place!” The alpha male was getting more worked up. Against the dance floor’s lilac neon, his straight-angled, stubbly face had a demonic quality. “If I wanted to see kids in big jeans and baseball hats, I’d go to… Florida.”
A pretty, provocatively chubby girl with large, overexposed breasts and a Scottish accent chimed in. “At least there," she proclaimed, “it would be authentic.”
The word stung my ears. I looked around the room. I counted seven boys and a girl wearing basketball jerseys, and was overcome by a deep anxiety about the Chinese embrace of Western sports. In a daydream, the downfall of Chinese ping-pong played out before me. It progressed in fast-forward and culminated in a dystopian vision of an endless warehouse populated by dusty, lopsided tables with ragged nets. Rickety table legs groaned beneath the weight of mounds of discarded paddles; their dimpled rubber faces had been ripped off, stripped and recycled, presumably into basketballs.
When I returned to the discussion, the alpha male was bemoaning the destruction of Beijing’s hutongs and gesticulating wildly. It was a tragedy, he said, made worse by the passivity of the displaced. “They’re just letting it happen,” he said in a voice that was all contempt and still didn’t seem to contain the load of contempt and hatred that he felt. “They’re letting some empty promise of a better life suck them out of their homes and into horrible apartment buildings somewhere outside the Fifth Ring Road or wherever.” His tone was imbued with a wild incredulousness that suggested violence. I began to offer an objection, but failed to make an impression.
I paused to consider his breast pocket. It was cocked at an angle of 45 degrees, rendering it practically useless and marking with impressive precision the meeting point between teenage subversion and white-collar luxury. As if to state emphatically which side he claimed, the pocket was punctured by an antique red star pin.
When I looked up, he’d moved on. “But Beijing isn’t even an accurate… Have you been outside of the city? Take a train twenty minutes out of Beijing. There are people living in caves.”
“Literally,” added a small, pleasant looking man to my right. “And they have carpets. Carpets in a cave.”
“Brilllliant!” cried the Scotswoman, clearly invigorated at the prospect of capturing a glimpse of this exotic backwardness.
I attempted another interjection, but was drowned out by a collective cheer as the opening strains of Fatboy Slim's "Rockafeller skank" bound out of the system. Perspiring and slightly embarrassed, I rose from my seat.
In line for the toilet I met a woman in her thirties. Her English was confident and casual. She had on white sandals and white jeans; her shirt was turquoise and said “Juicy” in hot pink letters, she had turquoise clips in her hair. She was slightly drunk and keen to speak. I listened as she told me an abbreviated autobiography.
She was born in Xi’an, the daughter of a mathematician. She grew up on a university campus, in a kind of Socialist academic compound. She peppered the account with details of “Old China” deprivation that, it seemed to me, she’d told before and had identified as poignant to the Western ear.
“When I was little, we used to play a game, ‘Pick up the rice’. My mother would spread some rice on the table and I would have to pick the pieces up, one piece at a time, as fast as possible.” I grunted some form of surprise. She was expecting it. “It sounds strange to you, but actually it’s quite fun! And now my fingers are very strong,” she said, then illustrated with a slightly absurd crab impersonation.
She’d studied architecture at university, then, in the mid ‘90s, she moved to Shenzhen, the gaudy heart of Deng’s Special Economic Zones, then China’s fastest growing city. She was successful. Four or her designs were realized, an impressive figure for an architect in her twenties – it generally takes her European counterpart one or two decades to match the figure.
She took the money and furthered her education abroad. She was married; her husband stayed at home, building his office. She moved to America, Texas as all places. “How was that?” I, a New England yankee who had, in fact, never set foot in Texas, asked expecting to form a bond of shared contempt for the lone star state. “It was fun!” was her reply. “I mean, I doubt I'll ever go back there, but it was interesting. I was mostly there for school.”
Originally published in UNIT Magazine March 2006