BEIJING - Wednesday night at Propaganda, a student bar in Wudaokou, the basement dance floor is packed full of Chinese and foreign students, making and losing friends every song. They're here for open bar night, where $6 buys all the Manhattans, Mai Tais, Tsingdaos and Whiskey Sours one can drink before four in the morning.
Stopping by the bar in the middle of this week's event, I started chatting with a woman standing next to me, waiting for a Blue Hawaii. She studied Chinese at Capital Normal University, she explained in Chinese. Switching to English, she explained that she was on exchange for one semester from Wesleyan, in Boston. I mentioned that I went to Tufts, not five miles away.
"I went to Tufts once," she said, reaching over to get her cocktail. "It was a lecture about adoptees."
I paused, thinking back about a year ago, when a friend took me to a lecture about a Korean women adopted by an American family. "Wait," I said, "Was it about Korean adoptees?"
"Yes," she said, getting excited now. We doubled checked the size of the room (large), wall decorations (periodic tables, it was held in the chemistry building) and after lecture refreshments (cupcakes). They were the same. We had met before, in a manner of speaking.
She grabbed my arm -- thankfully not the one with the whiskey sour in it -- and walked toward the staircase.
"You must meet my roommate," she said.
We went into the middle of the dance floor, elbowing our way past its mostly drunk occupants. There we found the roommate, a Korean-American who also went to Wesleyan.
"I'm from here," she said, pointing near the elbow of her left hand, which was bent in a 90-degree angle. This was the location of her town on Cape Cod. We exchanged memories from that one shared lecture, chatted briefly about Beijing, and then danced to "Buttons" by Pussycat Dolls and Snoop Dogg, "The Next Episode," also from Snoop Dogg, this time with Dr. Dre, and Chingy's "Holiday Inn."
After the third song, the roommate disappeared out onto the dance floor.
"I have to go," she said.
But as she was leaving, she shouted out a final good bye.
"Facebook me!"
And I did. If our first encounter went unnoticed, and our second was by chance, why not have the third be on the Internet?
