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.
And this is where I live. Right smack in the middle of the goddamn Sanlitun Bar Street. Living behind bars.
I've lived here for months now, but still I wake up every morning in a state of semi-schizophrenic confusion. My bedroom overlooks the chaotic, decadent strip, while my living room faces a middle school playground. Day after day I'm surrounded by the noises of honking taxis on one side, and the giddy laughter and screeches of school children playing on the other. So much for zoning laws. Night time brings the raucous din of local bar cover bands playing their torturous renditions of that freakin' Titanic song. For the love of God, please make it stop!
And more honking.
At times it seems a bit much -- wading through the "lady bar" xiaojies beckoning you to some sleazy nightclub-cum-brothel, packs of prepubescent flower girls way, way past their bedtime, and various drunken louts who eye me belligerently. Making my way home through all this every night can get old fast. But living in the middle of Sanlitun has its advantages: Chiefly, being able to waltz upstairs after a night of hard drinking and to roll out of bed for that life-restoring cup of coffee the next morning.
But ultimately what's most interesting is the never-ending stream of drama -- comedy, tragedy, and farce -- that comes with living in Beijing's nuttiest neighborhood. Sure there's the usual offerings of drunken revelry, projectile vomiting, bar brawls, and primitive courtship ritual that one usually associates with such environments. But it's those "special moments"-- the ones so utterly surreal, they defy all logic -- that really make the difference between frequenting the bar street and actually living here.
Like the bizarre scene to which I was witness last Friday night...