Nights out in Beijing are like this: You, along with your going-out crew, and the fuerdai and the hip hop kids and the foreigners and the posers and the players all make your way down to the Workers’ Stadium, Gongti, around 1AM to pile into the clubs: Mix, Vix, Arkham, and the others.
You meet up around 11ish at Heaven’s Supermarket (which is not actually a supermarket) to split a shisha and beers and maybe get the cheap margaritas from the place out back. Then you head to the strip by Sirteen, stopping by the gay club in the basement of the mall where the floor is always sticky and they blast 2010s K-Pop anthems all night. When you enter there is already someone slinking around the pole in gold mini shorts, and the whole place twists in drunken synchronization, shrieking “gee gee gee gee baby baby baby.”
You jump to another place a little later — most likely PlayHouse — push onto the dance floor and writhe, chain smoke mint flavored cigarettes, and drink diluted liquor. Even in winter, when the temperature falls well below freezing, you take breaks outside the club to cool off, to fight, to see and be seen. (You hock a loogie, Beijing-style, just to compete with the bouncer.)
Outside the club kids are wearing this: silver rings, belt chains, earrings, and lip piercings. Bright puffer coats slung over tattooed shoulders, oversized t-shirts, slouching track pants, and leather thigh garters. Faces are half-hidden, swallowed under bucket hats and baseball caps. The headgear features a jumble of snipped phrases in bold block lettering: “Dance to that 90s RnB”; “不感兴趣” (“Not interested”); “Son of beach”; “Sorry not sorry”; “PLEASE CHILL.” The red-and-white propaganda poster across the street responds: 伟大的中国共产党万岁! “Long live the great Communist Party of China!”
A bottle smashes. Broken glass sparkles under streetlights, the remains of discarded baijiu bottles, Nemiroff vodka, and Yanjing beer. Blue-illuminated faces are bent over phone screens, fingers typing rapidly on WeChat or scanning each other’s QR codes. You murmur “wo sao ni” over the thump of the bass and add people who you will inevitably forget in the morning or block several days later.
No matter, though. It’s 3AM and it’s dark and cold and it’s about connection, guanxi, the tying of us together. No matter, that these interactions will disintegrate in the light of day, grow thin and blurry. The point is here and now, it’s acceptable to huddle close together and press into the pack of bodies on the dance floor and seek intimacy, to reach out and say jia ge Weixin ba.
The whole scene, it’s a mix of fake things — jia de — and real things. The rich kids look glossy, nose bridges heightened and jaws trimmed from plastic surgery, boobs shaped and eyelids altered. They wear the real brands with the fake faces, Balenciaga sneakers and Versace t-shirts, Chanel bags and Cartier watches. The other kids, they wear the Taobao knock-offs that look just about the same as the real stuff in the dark, except the names go through a food processor and come out the other end a bit mangled: Balenciaga becomes Blanccxiaccta and Versace becomes Vecsaxi. The thing is, no one cares about the difference.
Meanwhile, inside, when the Higher Brother’s MaSiWei spits out the chorus for “Made in China” the crowd whips into a frenzy, the floor trembles, and you shout with everyone:
“My chains, new gold watch, made in China
We play ping pong ball, made in China
给bitch买点儿奢侈品 made in China.”
Crisp Benjamins rain down from the ceiling, marked with the characters “道具专用” — “props only.” Before you can stuff some bills into your pockets, you’re tugged by gravitational force to a fuerdai table, the kind with bottles of Hennessy and a platter of dragon fruit and cherry tomatoes.
You’ll spot at least one person you’re avoiding, one you want to meet, and another who looks like a wanghong. At some point you’ll kiss someone and say see you later, but never see them again. The thing is, when you’re down at the Workers’ Stadium at 4AM there are things that are jia de and things that are real, and it just depends on the time of day to understand which is which.
When it’s too-late-too-early you grow hungry. You traipse out onto the streets with a new, agglutinated crew, people who have slung into each other’s orbits for the night. You’re all chatting in a slurry of Chinglish-Russian-Spanglish-Korean about nothing at all (but your arms are linked, you put your hand in someone else’s coat pocket to keep warm).
You go buy hot skewers of chuan’er, spiced barbecue lamb, from the 24-hour halal spot nearby. Or you go to the noodle shop and buy the wide, oily strips of biangbiang mian. Or you skip around the corner to the ramen place where they sell tiny bottles of water but charge you 10 RMB for each one. You buy them anyway.
For the students in the strict dorms, you hang out on the streets until 6AM, waiting for when the subway runs again and the curfew ends. Others take a DiDi home, and the fuerdai drive their Maseratis back, and the newcomers and visitors get ripped off by the unregistered cabbies.
If you’ve done the night right, by the time you head home you’ll see the grandpas and aunties ambling down the street, bright and early, wheeling shopping bags to the open wet market to buy jiucai, or stopping by the bakery to pick up freshly steamed baozi and mantou and shaobing.
You’ll emerge from your transportation of choice in the weak light of morning, reeking of smoke, clothes askew, and leaning on your best friend. Your feet will ache. You will feel lighter than you have in days. And your head will be empty but for visions of a face you glimpsed once that you’ll never see again.
