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2002
Slow dancing in Nanjing
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Interesting though the 4 gay bars in Shanghai were (see the article Shanghai:
four bars), the eye-opener on my recent visit to the Yangzi delta was Jin
Qilin in Nanjing.
Nanjing, although a rather large city, is not among the top few cities in China, nor does it get lots of foreign investment and its associated expatriate population. Western influences on social life – and gay bars are a Western idea – aren't as noticeable as in Beijing or Shanghai. This is not to say that homosexual orientation is any less frequent in Nanjing. Homosexuality has always been part of Chinese society, but gay identity, and with it, the demand for exclusively gay social spaces in the Western style, is a relatively modern idea that first originated in the West. While I've been to gay bars in Beijing and Shanghai, and impressed with their crowd sizes weekends, I had never been to any in a secondary city such as Nanjing. Hence, I had no idea what to expect at all.
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Jin1 Qi2lin2 At the first pass, my friend Yew and I missed it altogether, as the house numbers were not clear. Then on the second pass, we saw a guy on the sidewalk finish his cellphone conversation, enter a door and go up the stairs. Yew and I said to each other, almost simultaneously, "that must be it." Our gaydars had beeped. Interesting, isn't it, how gay recognition is almost universal, crossing cultural boundaries so easily? Upstairs, Jin Qilin was a rectangular space about 8 metres by 18. It was packed! There must have been 120 – 150 people within. Every 5 minutes or so, more people squeezed in and by the time we left, there could have been close to 200. The average age was 25 to 35, with a handful of women. What was even more fascinating was on the (smallish) dance floor. At any time, there were 2 to 8 couples dancing cheek to cheek, something I had not seen in Beijing or Shanghai, the leading Chinese cities. And here we were in Nanjing, witnessing it. Throughout the evening, it was all slow dancing. This was because the bar was also a karaoke joint – and people prefer to croon mawkish romantic songs for karaoke – and that's all the music one had for dancing. Nothing upbeat. As more customers piled in, foldable tables and stools were brought out, from behind the bar, and from, yes, the toilet. The dance floor shrank, the couples just embraced more tightly. The noise level increased, but never enough to drown out the (sometimes) bad singing. Before long, however, the smoke pollution index soared, our eyes began to tear, and we had to leave. * * * * * Many bars in big cities today try to stand out in decor. Not this one in Nanjing. It was a basic room, with unremarkable furnishings. As the lightweight foldable tables were brought out, the standard became even more makeshift. It was the middle of January, and the plastic Santa Claus masks that passed for Christmas decorations, were still on the walls. Many bars today try to have a good sound system and a DJ who knows his music. Not this one. It's still karaoke. But in a way, it suited the crowd. They weren't the buffed-body fashion victims we so often see in big-city glamour bars. They looked quite ordinary and middle class, but also unpretentious. When they felt like dancing, they just got up and squeezed their way forward to the dancefloor. It didn't seem to bother any of the couples if they were the only ones dancing. None of that self-consciousness we see so often in Singapore. * * * * * I posted this tidbit about Nanjing to SiGNeL, the email list. Immediately, another listmember reported a similar experience, this time in Saigon, Vietnam (now renamed as Ho Chi Minh City, a name I find too unwieldy, and anyway, Leningrad has become St Petersburg again, so why should I believe Ho Chi Minh City is going to last?)
A few hours before Yew and I set out to look for Jin Qilin, we were on Zhonghua Road, 200-300 metres north of the old city gate, Zhonghuamen. It wasn't a particularly interesting street, until we saw a hair salon, bright and trendy, with plate-glass windows and an English name in neon lights, "Happy Times". We stopped to pretend to admire the décor, but more honestly, to admire the eye-catchingly pretty hairstylists and shampoo boys within. One in particular, whom we referred to as "Red Turtleneck" was especially good looking. "You said, yesterday, you needed a haircut," my friend reminded me, not for the first time reading my mind. "Perhaps we can come back, after we've done Fuzi Miao," I suggested, trying to keep to our itinerary. As it was already dusk, we went in briefly to ask what time they closed. "We're open 24 hours," they said. "Strange," I said to Yew. "Is there enough business to justify that?" Strange maybe, but convenient for us. Two hours later, we were back, went in again, enquired about the price, and almost backed out when they quoted 15 yuan for a wash, cut and blow ("But it's 150 yuan in Shanghai!" whispered Yew to me. "Do they know what they're doing?"). But seriously, I did need a haircut, so I took up the 15-yuan offer. By this time, however, Red Turtleneck was nowhere to be seen, so I settled for Specky, and his shampoo boy Spiky Hair. Yew, not wishing to risk damage to his 150-yuan looks, waited patiently for me on the sofa. There weren't many customers in the hair salon, just one other guy getting a haircut. Yet, every 5 minutes or so, other people would come in, pay something to the (female) receptionists, and then go through an internal door to another zone. I noticed a few of them from the corner of my eye, but Yew, seated where he was, near the reception, was almost in the thick of the action. He noted a man coming in alone, then a straight couple, then 2 men, then a father and 10-year-old son, and perhaps one or two more single men. Intrigued, he asked Red Turtleneck, who had now reappeared and sans client, "What's at the back?" "Come, let me show you," he said. An what an eye-opener it was! There was a men's wing and a women's wing. In the men's wing, there was a small locker room, a kind of lounge where female staff were giving male clients manicures and pedicures, and then in another somewhat steamy section, there was a hot pool and a marble slab, on top of which was a young nude masseur working on the buttocks of an equally naked customer. Yew thought there must have been a steam room around the corner, to explain the source of the steam. Further enquiry elicited the following facts: Entry to the back area was 10 yuan up till midnight, and 20 yuan from midnight to 5 a.m. Yew didn't ask how much the massage cost. I wouldn't have hesitated. All in all, not too surprising. Around the world, barbershops have long fronted for massage parlours or brothels. But what was the father doing taking his 10-year-old son along? Another, alas, unanswered question: do the cute hairstylists and shampoo boys take turns to be the nude masseur within? * * * * * There is also a serious question posed by Jin Qilin, Saigon and Happy Times. These places are recogniseable and strange at the same time. They are recogniseable because we see the same human urges. They are strange because these urges manifest in ways we might not expect in "less developed" cities and countries like Nanjing and Vietnam. Do we equate a lower level of economic development, and supposedly totalitarian systems, with repression, both state-induced and internalised? Yet, they seem, at least within the confines of known hang-outs, less repressed than cosmopolitan Shanghai, or even more cosmopolitan Singapore. It may be that the "gay scene" that originated from the West, and to which non-Western societies aspire, is a very contorted creature. There's too much faddishness, too much drugs, too much muscle-worship, too much snobbishness. And too much of that absurd Judeo-Christian idea [1]: that homosexuality is fundamentally a sin, so even in a gay bar, let's hold back and pretend things aren't sexual -- stand, look, stare, dance singly without physical contact, but no check-to-cheek please; and let's not bring children into this, for they are innocent. Which is to imply that anything sexual is corrupting? If we measure gay liberation by how much of a
recogniseable gay "scene" we see in other countries, are we blinkered?
Is the development of such a "scene" really progress? © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes
Addenda None
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