Cover photo: Chen Wei, Dance Hall (Metal), 2013. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Photographs by Chen Wei. Courtesy the artist and Blindspot, Hong Kong.
I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.
– Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project1
When in the depth of memory, some image of the past offers itself confusedly to the consciousness, there still remains a task to be accomplished . . . This task bears a name. It is called localisation.
– Georges Poulet, Proustian Space2
1 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999), p. 460.
2 Georges Poulet, Proustian Space, trans. Elliott Coleman (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), p. 16.
FIRST NOTE ON METHODS
There is nothing I would like to write about more than Guangzhou at night. But the city changes quickly. Some of the places I knew are gone, and some have been transformed, and some may never have existed; the places that I found to replace them, or to which I drifted, may, since I last saw them, have changed beyond recognition.
To understand the process of creation and destruction and creation, we are usually forced to rely on the explanations of planners, economists, and developers, or, only slightly better, the critical interpretation of their statements by academics and journalists. The texts produced by these bureaucracies – municipal, corporate, or academic – will outlast the physical evidence of great changes. Modern cities don’t leave ruins. It seems impossible to defy official accounts when they overwhelm popular memory. It is tempting to be coerced – to line up one’s own conception of the city with those ready-made by someone else. This piece of writing about Guangzhou nightlife is a pathetic attempt to resist.
I am not sure how to do it, except to lift from Walter Benjamin his method – making use of the rags, like Baudelaire’s chiffonniers – to remember Paris before Baron Haussmann wrecked the arcades. These scraps to be recycled are ephemeral, unreliable, and composed of memories. I will not be as thorough as Benjamin, nor Baudelaire’s trash pickers. I could not even aspire to the methodical diligence of the recycling men that I watched many afternoons from the shade of the dark ravine between the Yangcheng Center’s two towers. They could reassemble the city from cardboard, newspaper, shredded paper, discarded clothes, wrecked plastic tools, cooking oil, and empty liquor bottles; I can only hope to construct a “beautiful ash heap” – as jǐ nhuīduī 锦灰堆, the Qing-era sketches of personal and commercial refuse, is usually translated – that halfway resembles a few moments, a few places in a vast metropolis.
SECOND NOTE ON METHODS
The elementary particles of memory can be reconfigured infinitely. I might recollect a particular afternoon many years ago that logic and a glance at a map would determine to be irreplicable. I might tell you that Dan and I, on our way to take in the sleazy elegance of a Haizhu spa, got sujuk sandwiches from Chicken Express and ate them while teasing the dope dealers on Xiaobei Lu. That is fine. There are symphonies – the buzz of cicadas, car horns, the rush of wind across ears on a motorbike in Panyu, the patter of the girls in pink headscarves hustling phone cards on the overpass by the Garden Hotel, propane tanks being rolled across asphalt – that could never have been played simultaneously, that must be laid down together in my hippocampus. And in the end, whether it really took place in front of that dive by the Westin, or if the offering was, in fact, a piece of roasted duck, it seems right that my version of the story has a man feeding a pork cutlet sandwich from Queen’s Bakery to the busker who came each evening and stood on his head while playing guitar in front of the Grandview Mall.
THIRD NOTE ON METHODS
I will not flag any of the reminiscences below with dates. Some are from many years ago; some are from this year. It is important to note that they represent different approaches to the city’s nightlife. I would like to take the pandemic as the dividing line – the past is the decade before the pandemic, and the present is what has come after – but I am not sure lockdowns and quarantines are as important as the social and economic shifts brought about by technological changes. So, I will start in what I call the past and move forward to what I call the present.
IN HAIZHU, A MORNING AFTER
Whatever led us there, I am sure of this memory: we were directed to the expansive gallery to which everyone is dispatched after their baths. We joined the dozens of other souls unwilling or unable to go home. We lay in recliners, wearing paper-thin rented pyjamas, smoking cigarettes. We tuned the TVs mounted above us to a channel playing Tyson vs. Tucker, 1987. My ears were still ringing. I had sobered up in the baths. I was hung over by dawn. We went out, then, into the busy streets of the city. I can tell you that there is no shame like that felt when, after staying up all night, you are suddenly flushed out into a city full of good citizens beginning their day.
WINDOW ON THE WORLD
It is important to acknowledge biases. I approached Guangzhou in a particular way. I must admit that, to me, nightclubbing was never a liberatory experience. I believe it is the opposite. I mean that I believe in the distinctly Chinese approach to nightlife, which is to treat it as an activity for a brigade (arrive in a group, buy as a group, celebrate as a group, intimidate as a group), as a place to act out relatively ancient social rituals: as a ‘theme park of traditional gender roles’,3 as a cover for prostitution, and as a venue for flaunting wealth.
I was most satisfied at the rundown discotheques of Panyu, way out in the suburbs. My fondest nightlife memories were made in places like Dalian’s L■■ L■■ Ballroom, where working-class men, most of them itinerant construction laborers, paid ten yuan for three dances with one of the women on patrol in the main room. I wish I remembered more of those nights in Datong with N■■■■■■■, where it was so cold in the winter that the watermelon in the fruit plate that came with our Chivas started to freeze. And I would rather write an essay about T■■■■■ Pub, in a basement north of the intersection of Jiefang Lu and Huaihai Lu in Xuzhou, whose patrons seemed never to leave (their lifestyles tolerated, or maybe required, heroic ingestion of ketamine, as well as nightly attendance at wretched dive bars). However, here, I will continue to write about places to which cosmopolitan youngsters flock. That is a more marketable option, first of all, and second, it would be irresponsible to write about Guangzhou nightlife without acknowledging the centrality of that scene. The Panyu dive is not irrelevant, but it is not, after all, peculiar to Guangzhou.
3 I am lifting here a description by Miura Atsushi of Japanese nightclubs – and cabaret clubs in particular – since I think it applies in the Chinese context, too. See W. David Marx, ‘Kyabajo Japan’, Neojapanisme, 11 August 2009, http://neojaponisme.com/2009/08/11/kyabajo-japan/Miura Atsushi.
Chen Wei, Entrance, 2013. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Chen Wei, Colourful Wall, 2015. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
A NIGHT BEFORE (INTENDED AS A SURVEY OF NIGHTLIFE OPTIONS AT ONE TIME, A SURVEY OF NIGHTLIFE RESIDENTS AT ONE TIME)
I slept all day. I took a shower. I turned on my phone.
S■■■ sent out an SMS blast. He was playing a show in a dingy livehouse in the basement of a hotel in Tianhe. He was celebrating his engagement. We should have gone to support him. We could have learned from him. He was one of those good citizens of Guangzhou, after all. The son of a Syrian entrepreneur who began visiting the trade fairs in the 1980s, he represented the global citizen that the Pearl River Delta needed – a savvy, multilingual broker of trade deals that sent containers from factory towns to underserved global capitals, who, with his jazz band, contributed in a spiritually healthy way to the city’s cultural mosaic. He supported the local real estate market, too: he was set to move his Lebanese-Mexican bride into an apartment built on the ruins of an urban village.
Instead, we went to see Abby at L■■■■■■.4 Unlike S■■■, she was not a model citizen. She was another American student, who – finding in those years most of the world hostile, culturally moribund, or too expensive – had settled on China as the place to run through her Lost Generation fantasy. She was sleeping with a sculptor – Hu X■■■■■ – who worked out of a studio that ran up to the bar on the second floor of L■■■■■■. Although he would someday become a model citizen, helping turn L■■■■■■ from a place that housed deadbeats into a destination for cultural speculators, and no longer sleeping with American students, he was not yet one.
4 I think it would be wise to redact the name of this place, a combination artist’s colony–student tavern that is still operating. The current patrons and residents don’t need their reputations blackened by the misbehaviour of people they don’t even know. I would have taken the same approach with some of the people who appear in this piece. I expect some of them would prefer anonymity. Sometimes, I have even redacted names that I have changed. Take this as thoroughness.
I know it wasn’t Abby who first brought us to L■■■■■■ first. I might have gone there to look for Liz, an androgynous teenaged model whom I might have met at T-union, a livehouse that brought in underground diehards and strivers for mainstream success. I spent two nights with her. There is a picture of the two of us on that second night, on the road out of Party Pier, drinking a bottle of gin that she lifted from behind the bar of the last open club that we could find. I was obsessed with her. A friend told me that she might hang out at L■■■■■■. I never saw Liz there. I never saw Liz again. But I liked that the music was usually quiet enough to talk over. I liked talking to artists.
On the wall of the bar that night, the staff – a rotating team of residents earning reduced rent – was projecting Emir Kusturica’s Black Cat, White Cat (1998). The music was a Eurobeat mix on the bartender’s iPod. Abby took us out to a balcony where her boyfriend produced a joint. We smoked it and stared into the bathtub that one of the artists had dragged out there. It reminded me of the first scent of Guangzhou, coming in on the train from Shaoguan, of air perfumed with moist flowers and stagnant ponds. Abby stayed behind to watch Eastern European films, drink imported beer, and argue about human rights, and Hu X■■■■■ took us to K■■■.
He was paying. He needed foreign friends to get him in the door. While the doormen would not have turned him away, he found it uncomfortable to be the only Chinese patron, and to be assumed to be either a cop or an informant. He might have found it difficult to put into words his more complicated need to get inside. He was a hedonistic cosmopolitan of the sort that Guangzhou sheltered. He liked shaking his head to the stomping Eurobeat mixes of Arabic ballads and filmi songs. He liked the overpowering aroma of Sauvage and oud, menthol cigarettes, and body odour. And he especially liked watching the Russian and Uzbek women who patrolled the bar, even if they would never go home with him. The working girls were worried, too, that he was a cop.
When his money ran out, he went home. Dan and I walked to a Lebanese restaurant whose lights were turned off and drank beer until early in the morning.
THEME PARKS AND THE UNPLANNED
I must acknowledge that I am not writing about prehistory. There are no true, authentic public spaces left. There are only theme parks. There is only sneaking a cigarette on the dark side of the Tilt-A-Whirl. Even the ageographical city might have a few unique landmarks.5
5 The ‘ageographical city’ as described by Michael Sorkin in the introduction to Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (‘clumps of skyscrapers rising from well-wired fields next to the Interstate . . . huge shopping malls, anchored by swarms of cars . . . uniform “historic” gentrifications and festive markets . . . endless new suburbs’) is slightly out of date, but the idea still works, especially in contemporary South China. Michael Sorkin, Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), xi.
With that in mind, it would help to put the practices and places of the nightlife into two categories. I am not sure what to call them, except the planned and the unplanned. The latter includes externalities not officially planned for, like a bathtub, abandoned on a balcony, whose only remaining utility – accidentally, unintentionally – is to evoke for a stoned writer the scent of coastal plains; this is the category that includes the dangerous sort of cosmopolitanism to which Hu X■■■■■ fell prey, which meant funding Central Asian sex workers and consorting with European artists and chattering on midnight walks with American slackers.
The former category are things detailed in the plans drawn up by bureaucrats at all levels – to turn the Pearl River Delta into a window on the world, to create a reserve army of labour, to draw from around the nation those whose fingers and minds were nimble enough for a new kind of manufacturing, and, much later, to reorient the axis of the city, to reform the administration of urban land use, to bring in artists to replace the cultural resources lost from the demolition of formerly peripheral villages, to develop the tertiary sector by turning ruined factories into restaurants and galleries. The unplanned creates the necessary romance and energy for the planned to proceed. The unplanned is harder to apprehend. Most participants do not read through the bureaucracy’s multiyear plans, nor would they be invited to analyse the prospectuses and pamphlets of developers.
Nightlife will not always be incorporated into the theme park. The themed city exists as much online as off. I will arrive there in a moment.
Chen Wei, Night Paris, 2015. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
LOVE IS AN EXTERNALITY
Read one more happy story first.
There is so much solipsism in this. That is the problem with this method. Is there any sense in telling you about W■■■■? I hope she can stand-in for the young people of the city.
I met her at an Irish bar in Zhujiang. We walked one night across Liede Bridge as the sun came up, so we could catch the first trains out of Chigang Pagoda. The last time I’d seen her was by chance. I was walking out of the Lujiang metro station.
She told me to come visit her in Sanyuanli. She had a rented room above a clothing wholesaler. She was studying design. She had an allowance. She only pretended to need to live in a slum. After a while, she invited me to her parents’ apartment in Xiguan. Her father wanted to serve us dinner. He was progressive. The apartment was small. I got the sense that it could not be sold, even if her parents wanted to sell it. They were not willing to leave Xiguan. In the entryway, I saw layers of pasted-up protest fliers, arguing for and against particular modes of collaboration with the developers and the bureaucracy. The address meant something.
Her room had been given away to her sister, who had only recently come in from the village. W■■■■ was pale and plump; her sister was dark and skinny. W■■■■ was registered as an urban resident; her sister’s status was explained only in euphemisms. I understood very little. The family spoke Cantonese. I did not want to know more about W■■■■. I stopped taking her calls. I pretended I had been sick. She lured me to Liwan Park and served me an elixir of pear and honey from a thermos.
I went back to ignoring her calls and text messages. I saw her again at that dive near the Westin. She was celebrating her birthday. I was already drunk. She called me to sit beside her. The music was making me sick. She pulled me to dance. In a bathroom stall, she asked me, ‘Does this mean you’re my boyfriend?’ The next day, I felt guilty, but I found out that she had decided to ignore my messages.
DEATH IS AN EXTERNALITY
But there are already too many happy stories. The story of my friend N■■■■■■■ won’t be one of them.
It was through him that I experienced another side of the Guangzhou nightlife. I was not in the city anymore. I experienced Guangzhou as you are experiencing it now, through the solipsistic, unreliable account of a participant. He sent me text messages and emails. We had once shared so much, including a cell in a detention facility, where we spent hours entertaining each other with stories of our adolescence, that there were no barriers between us. He freely confessed to me his addiction to methamphetamine. He had stories about clubs, but more often of private parties held by hosts who wanted to avoid prying eyes. He slept most nights in the beds of men who were strangers to him. For a time, he stopped drinking only on Friday mornings, when he prepared for prayers at the mosque.
Even with his name redacted, I can’t bear to tell the rest of his story. Even if the city has become a theme park, with perfect surveillance, it can still tolerate a dangerous amount of bad behaviour.
Chen Wei, Dance Hall (Blueness), 2013. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
FIRST INTERRUPTION FROM THE PRESENT
I got lost exiting Dongshankou Station. Since I navigated Guangzhou most often at night, my mental maps of the city were never reliable. On the surface, not much had changed. Familiar things appeared. I sent a message to M■■■■■■■ to meet me at the KFC across from the library. She told me how to recognize her.
I barely knew M■■■■■■■. She had been, at one time, a friend of N■■■■■■■’s. That was our connection. She met him under a neon tunnel at Party Pier. I was already back in Vancouver. M■■■■■■■ was there on the worst days after N■■■■■■■ arrived from Datong, via Hong Kong, after his brother found out about his habit and tossed him out. He asked her for money. He was charming, so she gave it to him, taking him at his word that he wouldn’t spend it on ice. She sent me a text message from his phone when it seemed like he wasn’t going to make it.
When I needed to go back, everyone I knew in Guangzhou had moved away. I sent a message to M■■■■■■■.
She no longer matched N■■■■■■■’s description of a mousy music student. She wore a pale pink minidress, a dose of Gabrielle, and white combat boots with gold zippers. She talked about the business she ran with her husband. When it was late enough, she led me to a club named A■■■■■. That was my idea. I had read about it on Douban. I wanted her to show me what I might have missed. I was sure something must have changed.
It was bright enough in the main room to snap pictures. Everyone waved phones. That was new. M■■■■■■■ and I observed the scene. She was young enough to fit in. I wondered if I could spin anything out of the fact that young people seemed to have forgotten how to dance. There were few that did anything but sway. I wondered if the omnipresent click of phone cameras had made everyone self-conscious. I wondered if it had anything to do with the fact that young adults reportedly no longer indulged in as much casual sex as a generation before. I wondered if it was attributable to a change in the consumption of illicit drugs. I wondered if everyone was too healthy to drink enough. I decided it was only because the DJ at A■■■■■ was playing spacey breaks that built to nothing. The bathrooms reeked of vomit. The stench was only barely tempered by the disinfectant laid down by the middleaged, uniformed attendant. Having given up my tenuous theory on the decline of dancing, I considered the marketability of an oral history of the nightclub ayi.
M■■■■■■■ texted me to say that she was outside. It was too loud for her. She wanted to take me to a cocktail bar around the corner.
With her iPhone, she snapped a picture of the crystalised lavender on the foam of her cocktail.
I returned to my hotel long before dawn.
SECOND INTERRUPTION FROM THE PRESENT
In my notes from a few days later, after visiting an Irish pub on the gentrified, renovated wharf, I wrote some version of this:
In other cities, the marketing of cultural nostalgia is focused on the resurrection of high imperial romanticism; in Guangzhou, a port town, it is based on reimagining in a way more favourable to local players than the Century of Humiliation. This is a fantasy of the ugly days of the city, seen through the experience of Reform and Opening. It must make sense to bureaucrats and developers looking for a unique angle. But nobody here is fantasizing about the interactions of Hong merchants and East Indiamen. Given the age of most patrons, they must be, like me, nostalgic for some period in the early-to-mid-2000s. They are remembering the days of evading police urine checks outside of C■■■■■■. Those were the glory days. It’s no wonder the late Swedish house DJ Avicii’s biography is a bestseller here.
THIRD INTERRUPTION FROM THE PRESENT
Age makes it hard to draw any clear comparisons. Maybe young people can dance. Still, it seemed that there was less energy bouncing around the nightlife. However, maybe I was only noticing a dearth of outlaw impulses in young people. The demographics have shifted. The traders of the Third World have moved on, either going home, moving to Foshan, or decamping to Yiwu. There are fewer foreign students. There are fewer dives, as well. The real estate market didn’t tolerate them. The schemes of municipal planners to develop nightlife districts have shaken out: the upscale operations have survived, and the downmarket operations were swept away by development.
Chen Wei, In the Wave #4, 2013. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
Chen Wei, Fragments, 2013. Image courtesy of artist and Blindspot Gallery.
A CONCLUSION FOR THE PRESENT
I will make a prediction that even the deformed version of the nightclub as a venue for social media portraits and handouts of promotional items will be gone within ten years. Planners will no longer need to organise redevelopment or gentrification around nightlife spots. There will be no need for night clubs in the theme park. I think back to the crowd at A■■■■■ . . . A few participants consciously revelled in partial disconnection from the digital world, I suspect. They went out because they wanted to experience something unavailable through haptic feedback. But I suspect most were uncomfortable. I fear that I am becoming like the majority, like those who kept their phones activated not to catch any potential content, but because the screen was comforting.
A CONCLUSION FOR THE PAST
The people and places are gone, or they have been changed past recognition. The past does not need a conclusion. Even a eulogy is risky, since it might lead someone to mistakenly consider the utopian appeal of regression, even to a point five, ten, fifteen years prior. What can be done with these rags?
A CONCLUSION ON THE METHOD
There are limitations. Perhaps most of what was saved, or salvaged, or even composed by the chiffonniers in Paris long ago disappeared into the clay and mud beneath the city, waiting to be ground to dust, eaten up by microorganisms, or shifted into a landfill; their histories of the city have been erased. The recyclers behind the Yangcheng Center are still there, I know, but most of what they have saved from the flows of waste has been incinerated, melted, or otherwise processed past the point of recognition or traceability; the treasures they occasionally pluck from the streetside are not artefacts and relics but, usually, repairable home electronics, which have only earned a temporary reprieve from being shredded and bailed. The Qing literati painters that collected the detritus of the early modern city for their jǐ nhuīduī did their best, but most of their works were lost, since collectors preferred evocative landscapes.
The ephemeral is more fragile: most memories of Paris before Haussmann-isation went unpreserved or unrelated, and, records in ink and charcoal turned to ash. We still read Benjamin, but he was lucky – and he was good.
Most memories of Guangzhou will evaporate, and those recorded will be lost to bit rot, or deleted, or melted down to feed artificial intelligence. We will still read Renke – the rock singer who writes about scavenging cassettes in the urban villages of Tianhe – but only if he gets lucky, too.
Monuments, municipal histories, and stone steles are more durable, at least measured against human lifetimes. We have to admit the limitations of our method, even if it’s the only one that seems utopian and moral.