Sanlitun Diaries 1: A freak show of pimps, players and hustlersPosted by Jeremy Goldkorn on Friday, November 14, 2003 at 2:15 AM
Kaiser Kuo is an American-Chinese musician and writer who lives in Beijing. One of his gigs is as a columnist for That's Beijing (look here for his columns). He also writes for Time, translates screenplays, acts as a consultant to technology companies, plays ragas on the guitar, collects ancient Chinese weapons, et bloody cetera. Kaiser kindly sent in the complete archives of one of his previous writing projects: The Sanlitun Dairies, a popular feature from the defunct Chinanow.com, which he used to edit and manage. The Sanlitun Diaries were created by Kaiser and Jerry Chan, written about four years ago, but have since disapeared from the Internet. Sanlitun is Beijing's main bar district. The Sanlitun Diaries are fictional. Here is the first installment. The second installment tomorrow... By Kaiser Kuo and Jerry Chan Sanlitun. A freak show of pimps, players and hustlers. A sad, mad press of flower girls and mendicants. A carnival of carnality. Night after night I trudge home along Beijing's infamous Bar Street, weaving my way through the besotted, the benighted, and the gaudily bedizened, soaking in the noise and confusion of that human zoo, trying to preserve some semblance of sanity. Sanlitun. A visual and sensual feast, if you keep your sense of irony. A late spring afternoon, in front of Public Space: Cappuccino-sipping model, dressed to the nines sits in a plastic patio chair, cell phone pressed to her ear, trying to talk her friend into eyelid surgery. Behind her, a corpulent European woman flips through a stack of pirated CDs, deaf to the plaintive imploring of the rag-clad beggar who stands before her. Some rockers I know drinking Yanjing draughts, bullshitting with a screenwriter and a couple of Scandinavian girls. Three close-cropped guys in shirtsleeves smoking 555's play cards with a heavily painted Cantonese woman with five-inch platform shoes -- mine-clearing shoes, I call them. Across the street, shoppers from five dozen nations saunter past clothing stalls, hunting for bargains on name-brand knock-offs, dodging the desperate VCD peddlars and rows of fruit carts. A rare homeostasis, not likely to last. A slow-moving line of cabs clogs the narrow street, honking pointlessly. It's hot out, and tempers boil over quickly. |
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