The fictional Sanlitun Diaries: republishing continues after a brief hiatus.

By Kaiser Kuo and Jerry Chan (from the defunct Chinanow.com, 1999)

Etiquette. Ritual. Accepted practice. You absorb it quickly in Beijing, learn to apply it to everyday transactions. Someone lights your cigarette and you tap his hand gently twice to let him know it's lit, to thank him. At the toll booth on the Airport Expressway, you hold your 15 kuai between the index and middle fingers so you can take the receipt the attendant hands you between thumb and forefinger: beautiful efficiency, no need to come to a complete stop. Someone pours you tea and you thank him by rapping the table lightly with a finger or two -- a Southern thing that's made its way north. Drinking a toast, you clink glasses with the rim of yours lower than your better's to show respect. I have these down cold. Etiquette, ritual, accepted practice.
Here on Sanlitun, all manner of transactions -- legal and otherwise -- are regularly conducted, and a protocol for each of them has spontaneously evolved. How to bargain for fake Levi's. How to accost a working girl. How to decline when accosted. How to buy pirated disks.
Take this last one. For this one, I do know the drill. You buy a drink at the establishment playing host to the vendor. The vendor rotates five-inch stacks of disks among his browsing customers, keeping careful track of who's seen what piles, so that they all get flipped through. The customers separate them into wheat and chaff piles that the vendor never mixes up. You keep it all low-key and inconspicuous. You don't stare at the other people buying pirated disks -- a tacit agreement like that among men browsing Times Square porn shops.
The pirate disk market functions with incredible efficiency. One rarely encounters price differences between rival vendors. They seem able to keep mental track of what titles are moving, and the market responds to consumer preference very quickly. Expat demand for good video entertainment sustains this microeconomy, after all. So some great classic titles end up in regular Sanlitun circulation: You'll always be able to find "The Godfather," "Apocalypse Now," "Midnight Cowboy." The suppliers to these vendors evidently have good Hollywood intelligence. "American Beauty" wins all these Oscars and suddenly all these Kevin Spacey movies I've never even heard of show up in the stacks. Kubrick dies and "Barry Lyndon" is available on pirated DVD the following week.
On this particular Thursday afternoon, the bony Henanese guy I always buy from wandered past my table in Public Space, caught my glance, shook his head in apology: "Nothing new yet. Next week." I'd flipped through his stacks over the weekend. A couple of weeks earlier, I had asked him if he could get hold of "Gladiator" with Russel Crowe. I described it to him: Roman slaves fighting to the death. Next week he had "Spartacus" for me, which I obligingly purchased. It's a good movie, anyway.
I rubbed my bleary eyes, sipped at my tepid espresso, stared blankly at the screen of my notebook. I typed a few uninspired lines, backspaced over them, opened a new window and started a letter to my sister. Dear J___, I believe I am cursed. I see the tragi-comic end in every beautifully romantic beginning. Witness The D____ Debacle, from which I'm not likely to recover. Will I never find The One? You see, I keep running into this insanely good-looking woman, but I'm worried she might be a...
And then, pausing to choose the word, I hear her voice:
"Ei! Wo kanyikan ni de DVD ba." Hey! I'll take a look at your DVDs. This she says to my bony Henanese friend.
I recognize it at once. Haughty, tough, urbane, thoroughly intimidating: that Beijing bad-ass babe voice I so love. Her voice. I had hoped she'd show up here, and that's why I showed up here. I hadn't seen her come in. I glanced up: It was her all right, sitting two tables away, by herself, a three-quarter view of that gorgeous face. I immediately lost my composure -- racing pulse, dry mouth, churning stomach -- and all I could do was pretend not to see her and keep typing. Etiquette. Ritual. Accepted practice.
So begins another tragi-comedy. Might as well get it over with.