IT'S 10.30 pm at Manhattan West World in Wan Chai, and the dance floor has already begun to fill with synthetic fog, churned by flailing limbs. Beside the bar, a Chinese girl in a bright orange mini skirt clutches her cocktail and giggles. Encouraged, the men hovering over her inch closer.
From the other side of the room, a cluster of women in avant-garde leather patrol the club with their eyes. This is Ladies' Night in Hong Kong.
Every Thursday, from 9.30 pm till close, the fairer sex can come here and ingest all the beer, wine and high balls their livers can bear. The concept is not unique to the territory: beer-hungry women and women-hungry men converge in similar bars for similar evenings all over the world.
But Ladies' Night in Hong Kong is different. Chinese and expats form a strange social cocktail that is part see-and-be-seen, part drink-and-get-drunk. While Westerners admit they are drawn by the siren song of freebie beer, locals claim their motives are purely aesthetic.
'All the pretty girls come here, so it's more interesting,' Michelle Li says, smiling at her two Western suitors. 'It's so exciting.' But 22-year-old Louisa Mace is not remotely interested in other women or their finery. 'Free drinks, that's the reason I'm here,' she says.
And her male friends? 'Free women,' Mace declares. 'The ladies are here and the ladies are pissed, and pissed ladies are better than sober ladies.' Frenchman Bertrand Jubault agrees with the Mace analysis: 'Let's face it, I came because it's ladies' night and I'm a dirty ...' But whatever their motives, followers of the event are legion. Well-dressed youths are shoe-horned into the enormous club, and a line of hopefuls is clumped outside. The club's door staff ensure the waiting tide is old enough and sharply dressed enough to cross the threshold.
'At one time we had 1,600 people,' West World's director of marketing and promotions, Christina Chang, says.
