I went dancing by myself that night.

My friend, with whom I stayed in Beijing, refused to

be dragged to the club, even though I had prepared her with several crash courses. She
had been an avid dancer – performing various styles of Chinese dance or “Taichi dance”
– but she wouldn’t go out to salsa with me. “Let me tell you why,” she said. “The dance
clubs in that area of Beijing are all pick-up joints. Many young women, mostly college
students, go there to hook up with foreigners or dakuans (rich men).” Salsa clubs
doubling as pick-up joints, however, were most definitely not new to me; I had had
plenty of experience across America – in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City,
and Chicago. I joked with my friend: “Maybe I’ll find my dakuan tonight. If I don’t come
back by 2AM, you can be sure that I did.” “In that case,” she said, “I’ll call the police.”

My friend was right about the character of that area. Beijing’s salsa clubs – I found four
or five on the Internet – are mostly located in the Chaoyang District, where foreigners,
especially businesspeople, concentrate. The area features glamorous, futuristic
architecture and extravagant, gleaming shopping malls. Foreigners are in small and large
groups all along the streets. I arrived at about 7:30PM, when there was still daylight. It
was too early for dancing, and I wandered the streets, amazed by how international
Beijing had become. However, I rarely heard English; nor did the foreigners speak
Spanish or French, the other languages I could recognize. I set out to determine the
foreigners’ nationalities but soon decided to give up – they could be anything.

At about 9PM, I was at the door of Salsa Caribe, the famed salsa club in Beijing. The
doorman – or more aptly, doorboy, because he was barely into his early twenties – looked
me up and down, and asked: “How many people?” I said: “Just me by myself.” He didn’t
seem to believe it: “Are you here for dancing?” “Sure,” I said. “What else can I do here?”

I paid the cover charge, 30 Yuan (about US$4.50), allowed my bag to be searched, and
surrendered my water bottle before entering. The club was largely empty. In the middle
there was a medium-sized dance floor (the largest in Beijing as advertised) surrounded by
fake palm trees and plastic flowers, creating the atmosphere of a “tropical-island night” in
this over-crowded, heavily polluted megacity.

I sat down at a table next to the dance floor. A waiter approached me quickly. “I’m sorry,
miss,” he said. “All the tables in the front require a minimum consumption of 600 Yuan
(US$90).” He looked at me challengingly, convinced that I was not the right type of
patron for the table, perhaps due to my single status.

He was correct. I gathered my belongings, cursed in a low voice (in English), and moved
to a table along the back wall. I ordered my drink (a piña colada for 35 Yuan, or US$5)
and sipped it slowly. Nobody was dancing. I recognized many of the songs the DJ put on
– they were by Cuban, Colombian, Venezuelan, or New York bands – but there seemed
to be an unusually high percentage of Cha Cha.

I was bored. Actually, I was freezing – the air conditioner had been working relentlessly.
I got up and walked outside of the club. While I stood at the curb, a slightly built man
smoked a cigarette not far from me. I walked across the street to avoid the smoke. He

2
followed me, putting out the cigarette. “I saw you sitting there alone,” he explained.
“Would you like to go for a walk with me?” I agreed. He said he was a veteran of the
club, having been coming regularly for almost five years. He was married, had a
daughter, and owned his construction-material business and an SUV. He described how
once he was drunk and exhausted after a business meeting, and accidentally ran over and
severely injured a bicyclist, but got away with it by just paying a little money. “I have
connections,” he said.

I asked him how he started dancing. “If you’ve been married for more than ten years,” he
began, “you are losing all your passion with your spouse. You have to look for the
vitality of your life elsewhere.” He told me he had been coming to the club, meeting
women, and staying for the night at a nearby hotel regularly without his wife’s
knowledge. I wondered: “How could she not know?” Maybe she can guess,” he said, “but
that’s not important. I’m nice to her; I’m supporting the family. She should understand I
have my needs.” I was shocked by his candor, but still tried to help: “Why don’t you take
your wife out to dance? You can teach her how to dance. That way you’ll rekindle some
of the lost passion…” He grinned while I was talking, as if he knew what I was going to
say but waited patiently for me to finish my sentences. Then he stretched an arm across
my back, lifted his chin closer to my face, and said: “You look nice.”

This was the first time in my life a Chinese man tried to pick me up, though men of other
ethnicities, in various places of the US and Latin America, had done it many times. This
evening I dressed a little more liberally than I would normally do in the US, thinking that
there would be minimum risks because I wouldn’t stand out among a crowd of
overzealous young Chinese women and that, heck, I might really find my dakuan or
whatever. “Keep your hand off me, please,” I said, pretending to grab his cell phone.
“Can I use your phone to call your wife?” Miraculously, he took his hand off me. This
was unexpected – whenever such things happened at a dance club in America, I would
generally have to pry those fingers forcefully off my skin or stop the dance in the middle
of the song; verbal commands never worked. I looked at this forty-year-old father of a
fifteen-year-old girl, unable to believe that he seemed so compliant, submissive, or even
innocent.

He asked me where I learned dancing, and I said San Francisco. “Really?” He stared at
me with newly found respect. “So you must really know how to dance. How long were
you in San Francisco?” I told him I had lived in the US for nearly twenty years. “So you
are pretty much American,” he said. “Then you should be more open-minded.” “I am, but
not the way you would think,” I said, and left it at that.

We walked back to the club. When I entered, I noticed that a middle-aged, heavily made-
up, elaborately dressed Caucasian woman sat at my 600-Yuan table, sipping her drink
and smoking a cigarette, alone. “I’ll have to dance with her,” my companion said, and
wandered off with his dance partner. Meanwhile, on the dance floor, a few young
Chinese women in shimmering dresses executed violent dance patterns with their equally
enthusiastic partners, who were either Chinese or foreigners. The floor was busy, but
certainly not full.

3
A tall, heavy-set Chinese man asked me to dance. I went with him to the floor. Having
determined that I was capable of double and triple turns, he threw me into six (or maybe
seven) spins. While I was trying to cope, his elbow landed crisply on the back of my
neck, causing me to shudder and see images of gold for a few seconds. He didn’t
apologize – and didn’t even stop – but proceeded with more spins. I protested: “I need a
break.” He said: “Fine.” That was the end of my first dance in the evening. I reoriented
myself and happened to see my earlier companion dance with the Caucasian woman
closely in a slow motion, next to a pair of die-hard spinners who would occasionally trip
themselves.

As the evening heated up, things got better. I danced with at least a half dozen partners,
about half foreigners and half Chinese. I realized that the levels of salsa dancing in
Beijing had indeed improved a lot, compared to five years ago when I first visited
Beijing’s salsa scene. The patterns were far more sophisticated, veering towards “LA
style” – for all its virtues and vices. However, the majority of the dancers still seemed to
dance to their “inner drums,” ignoring the rhythms of the music entirely. The dance scene
looked more like a track-and-filed event, with disproportionate emphasis on speed.

The smoke became thicker as the crowd grew larger. I started to feel the effects: I was
developing a sore throat, and my contact lenses no longer seemed to stay at the right
places. The evening felt longer than it was really was. I had run into my earlier
companion several times in different parts of the dance floor; he smiled but didn’t ask me
to dance. Right now he was dancing with a young Chinese woman in a red miniskirt, in
the same kind of slow motion. I looked at the well-dressed Caucasian woman’s watch –
she had been sitting at the expensive table for most part of the evening, besides dancing
with my earlier companion – and it was 10:55PM. I knew the last train would depart in
about twenty minutes from the nearest subway station. I had to run to catch it. There was
no dakuan for me tonight, but at least my friend didn’t have to call the police.