Nightlife in Hangzhou

There is something magical about Hangzhou. Just like Kyoto and Ubud in Bali, it’s a city shrouded in history and physically enveloped by Mother Nature. Hangzhou is totally a green city, with over 60 percent of the place covered with ancient trees.

As a young Chinese boy, I read voraciously about the place, and was fascinated by and fantasizing constantly about Hangzhou. In fact, the novel that I have yet to give birth to is set in that city, during the Southern Song, my favorite dynasty. Beijing, with all its imperial glory, is still a relatively young metropolis in the span of Chinese history, with just a measly 600 hundred years. Hangzhou as an urban area, on the other hand, was established approximately 2,000 years ago. With the natural beauty of the West Lake, it rose to become the “First District in the Southeast.” Around 1,000 years ago, it became the capital of Song China, after the court fled from Kaifeng up north, where fierce hordes of semi-nomadic Jurchens (ancestors of the Manchus) were all up in their territory.

Students forced to endure Chinese history taught by inept teachers in Hong Kong high schools bitch about how feeble the Southern Song was, and how stunted the map of China was back then—“Xinjiang, Tibet, Vietnam and Korea weren’t even under Chinese control, for fuck’s sake.” But the poor misinformed twits fail to realize that when money isn’t squandered on military invasions, what flourishes is economy and culture. Hangzhou soon became the nation’s political, economical and cultural center, as well as PARTY central.

Hello, HZ is where Nightlife in the contemporary sense started: speakeasies, bars, ginormous restaurants and nightclubs, any kind of service or entertainment you could imagine sprang up along the West Lake. All the famous classical poetry, lyrics of ballads sung by singsong girls and courtesans, came from this era. And Hangzhou was where paper money was first issued—you didn’t have to barter for a bottle of vintage Huadiao (in that bar of Zen minimalist décor) with your chicken like you’d have to in godforsaken medieval Europe; you just paid with cash.

But in the second-tier modern Chinese city of HZ, nightlife just wasn’t my cup of Longjin. I had taken an RMB11 cab ride to Baochu Road (named after a pagoda) and arrived at this entertainment complex—all gaudy glitz, chandeliers and neon. I heard Gaga and that retarded Kingston song (duh duh duh duh danceflo’). Why is that fat bastard a hit? I HATE his ditties. BPSTFU.

The clubbers were all brunettes dressed like Taiwanese pop stars. They were all very curious about my faded denim field cap, shiny matte black shirt underneath an oversized denim shirt, aubergine skinny jeans and black sequined FitFlops. But the narrative was completely different from the sophisticated banter I got two nights ago in Shanghai. It was like, in HZ, the clubbers and the clubs all dressed the part, but something was missing.