A Nice, Fatty Slab of Man Meat

BEIJING – Here in China, I get what I want.

When I shout "fuyuan," the waitress comes running across the restaurant to see if I need more dumplings. Outside of Beijing's trendiest club districts, the owner of a bar will not only admit me at any time, but frequently take me to the Very Important Person room, complete with free drinks. People line up just to converse with me on the subway, train or even while eating a bowl cold noodles.

There's nothing special about me, I'm just a foreigner in China. People here treat me with a degree of deference that would be unheard of in America. It's outrageous, really, and I found how demeaning it can be to serve rather than be served; I became a prostitute.

Zack arranged the position. My travel mate through South Asia, not four days out of the hospital (and as it would turn out, only a day away from another visit) sat in the middle of Beijing Language and Culture University Bla Bla bar's courtyard, intoxicated. At his table sat Evan, our American friend, and two Asians. I sipped my first beer as our new friends explained why we needed to leave soon.

"Do you want to drink beer, sing song, meet beautiful women and make money?" the skinner one asked me. He claimed to be Kazakh-Chinese, or perhaps Chinese-Kazakh, and went to People's University here in Beijing.

Zack didn't believe him, but he couldn't say "what's the catch?" in Chinese: The four had been talking past each other for some time before I arrived. The Kazakh wanted us to go to a club in the Xizhimen district, about three miles away. We would earn money because few foreigners go this club, and they want us to talk to the women.

I agreed with Zack, it sounded too good to be true. I wanted to sip beer with my friends, share stories recent vacations, of Laotian drug dealers and Indian computer nerds, not blast off to some crazy club. But the more we sat there, and the more the two pleaded, the more Zack want to go. I said no to Zach and explained to the Kazakh
I just couldn’t take him up on his business opportunity tonight.

Thirty minutes later we arrived at the club. It was a massive structure, attached to the Tianfan Hotel off the Third Ring Road. The club – actually a karaoke bar – rose four feet and was covered with neon strips on three sides. There was a massive enclosed valet area, and our taxi was opened by a man dressed in a pressed, starched shirt.

The Kazakh convinced me to come, as he thought I had the best Chinese in the group, and would be needed to translate. Zack really, really, really wanted to go, and Evan seemed up for it, so reluctantly I agreed to go and look around.

"If things look bad," I warned the Kazakh. "We're leaving."

The first room resembled a hotel lobby, with a large arrangement of fake flowers and twisted branches, and a spiral staircase leading up to the second level. We went upstairs and were led into a room overlooking a dance floor. Standing in the room were several dozen Chinese, all male and young.

"These are all nanji," the Kazakh whispered in my ear. The word means roosters, but it’s also slang for male prostitutes. What? If everyone in the room is a prostitute, who were we?

One of the young men came up to Evan and me, wanting a picture. I obliged, sitting on a red couch with the young professional between us. After he finished another came over with his camera phone, and another. Some spoke to us while getting their snap. Where were we from? How did we get to China? Where did we learn Chinese? The usual spiel, but here I found myself talking about my sister in the strangest of circumstances. One broad-shouldered man, much larger than the others, asked if we'd been to Henan Province and said he had studied at the Shaolin Temple.

At 1:30 on the dot, all the men moved across the hall into a small room, some kind of staff lounge for the club. We couldn't get inside, but after a couple minutes the Kazakh tried to led us along with several of the young men into a nearby room. It was a karaoke booth, a small room with a long couch around one wall, an entertainment system opposite and a glass table in the middle. Gaudy brown and white wallpaper peeled on the high corners of the walls and dusty fake flower arrangements were placed at random locations in the room.

Inside I could see three women, all dressed in skimpy dressed and loads of makeup. Their permed haircuts reached the middle of their backs. They looked young and empowered, the men who stood in front of them just young.

The Kazakh explained more as I looked on from outside the door. The men are paraded in, six or eight at a time. The women ask questions, and then choose their entertainer. Soon the former Shaolin monk sat next to a customer with a black patent leather purse.

Our funhouse tour continued. Now we were led into an empty karaoke room. On the couch sat a man around 40, with a squared-off haircut and a black suit. This was the boss, and he began our meeting with a cigarette. "What exactly did these two tell you about this place?" he said, gesturing toward the Kazakh and his silent assistant.

I told him our story so far, how we'd been plucked from the foreign student university's bar and dragged out here just to take a look. The boss seemed pleased.

"You get here at 11," he said. "You can leave at 4, but if you still have a costumer if you have to stay until they leave. Each night you will make at least 500 RMB. You can start tomorrow, but wear nice pants and real shoes."

I looked down at my flip-flips and hairy feet covered in dried, crusty sweat and felt embarrassed. I promised to look better the next time we returned, and thanked the man for his time.

We left the room, and I told our hosts that it was time to go. But instead of taking us toward the exit, they led us into one final room. Now we were the ones on
display, put in front of three hungry women. They wanted man-meat.

"Where are you from?" One asked me. "How old are you?" said another.

"Can you dance?" asked the third.

I felt mortified. To these people I was an exotic monkey with a miniature symbol, a cute toy that would liven up a night on the town. These costumers probably spent years making a fortune in real estate or manufactured, now they wanted to be fawned over. Staring at these ravenous people, I knew that I couldn't never work here at the karaoke club, even if I never established whether or not I would be expected to "entertain" these people back at their hotel suites.

Prostitution is dehumanizing. Being any kind of servant, required to dance when someone says ‘dance’ and bark out an awful version of Aerosmith's "I Don't to Miss a Thing" on cue is terrible too. Even services that I take for granted are vaguely unsettling. Why should a woman run across the room just because I need a package of salt? Maybe I don't always need to get what I want.

Meeting Friends Can Pay

Beijing - My speaking teacher dismissed class last Friday with an unusual assignment. He wanted each student to meet two new Chinese friends and one foreign friend. His gave us a short list of questions to ask, including name, age, hometown and profession and said the data would be collected on Monday.

Groans echoed through the classroom. Students don't like additional work five minutes before the week's final bell.

"When you come to China, of course you want to meet Chinese people," our teacher said, and dismissed the class.

My first friend I met at a bar. Wang Winxin is 27, a computer programmer in central Beijing who lives out here in the city's northwest. He hates Zhang Yimou movies and most recent Chinese historical dramas, preferring to watch Tony Jaa action movies from Thailand. I saved his phone number in my address book and wrote down the rest of the information the next morning.

Saturday and Sunday passed, but I made no new friends. I passed thousands of possibilities on the streets of Beijing, but not once asked the necessary questions. "How much is this," slips easily out of my mouth; "What's your profession," less so.

After dinner on Sunday I became desperate. I remembered a couple additional instructions issued by my teacher two days earlier. "Don't meet taxi drivers. Don't meet fuyuans." He meant that the class should try to meet other students, not service workers. But I was low on options; I went downstairs to see the fuyuans.

A fuyuan (服员) is a general category of customer service worker. In my life here, they're the two dozen or so people who clean my room every day, guard the building against theft (not very well - where's my bike??), and constantly converse with the building's 100 or so residents.

Working downstairs on Sunday I found two ladies and a man, each dressed in crisp uniforms, a tan and red pant suit for the women, a dark navy jacket and slacks for the man. The man appeared to be in charge, as he sat confidently behind the desk while the women played cards in front. I approached the desk and soon found myself in conversation with Li Ke (李刻), 23, a native of Beijing. He is an only child, currently single and residing in on-campus service housing.

I asked Li Ke if he had any hobbies. He responded in unfamiliar Chinese words. We fumbled around a little, trying to establish meaning until Li Ke switched to English. "Collect money," he said. His coin collection included American, British, Italian, Australian pieces, and others from more exotic places including the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Iraq. This collection came from friends, Li Ke said.

Then I had an idea. "Wait a second," I said, and hopped on the elevator up to my room. I grabbed a few roubles from my desk. I have dozens of these rouble coins, they continue to fall out of strange corners of my luggage. I went downstairs and gave Li Ke one, two and five rouble coins. He looked thrilled.

The next day Li Ke called me over coming back from a class. "I have a little gift for you," he said, and pulled a small envelope with two bills inside. They were two multicolored bills from Afghanistan. One was 5,000 Afghanis, the other 10,000 Afghanis.

Back in my room, I looked up the current value of 15,000 Afghanis out of curosity. According to XE.com, the current mid-market trading rate is $306.21.

But before I booked a vacation to Afghanistan, I went to eBay where I discovered these multicolored notes were issued by the Taliban and are no longer legal currency and fairly common. Current asking price: $1.50.

Oh well. I finished my homework on time and made a new friend in the process, and my life's a little richer thanks to that.

The Worst Thing You Can Say To a Kazakh

BEIJING - One joy of studying in a Communist country is meeting students from different countries. In my travels, I've met plenty of Brits, Australians and Germans. Now I take classes alongside Georgians, Mongolians, Lebanese and even Kazakhs.

I'm not sure how big the Kazakh contingent is at Tsinghua. I've became chummy with Madi, a short man with frosted blond tips in his black hair and a vague hip-hop sense of style.

I met Madi on the first day of class, wandering in our dorm lobby. He didn't know his class name, Chinese name or a word of the language.

"I just got here from Kazakhstan," he said, explaining missing nearly a week of orientation events.

Madi works for computer company, specializing in Information Control and Management. He's been dispatched to China by his company, which is paying for 18 months of language training, because he's been told that he won't rise out of middle-management without Chinese. Unmarried, Madi was chosen to learn the language of most of the company's suppliers.

That's right. The first person I ever meet from Kazakhstan works in information control, has just been sent to a strange country to learn the culture and the language for a vaguely absurd reason. You might be wondering why I haven't made a joke about the world's most-famous non-Kazakh Kazakh, Borat. Let me tell you about the other Kazakh I know.

Nadam is 18 years old, and studying here for a year before heading back to Kazakhstan for university. He wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Moscow, with a modern, if Russian-influenced dressing style. He's nice but quiet, rarely saying anything unless called on by our Chinese teachers.

Borat is the elephant that is always in the Kazakh's room. I want to ask, or make a joke or at least say "Very Nice!" in their presence, but I'm afraid of the consequences.

One American classmate had less concern. She asked Nadam if he'd heard of Borat.

Nadam was indignant. "Everybody in Kazakhstan hates this man! Why did he make this movie? He has never even been to Kazakhstan."

Embarrassed, the American pretended to look over new vocabulary words before our next class began.

The next day the American changed class. Her nominal reason was that she couldn't understand our level, and wanted to change to an elementary class. While true enough, I wonder if she feared any further Kazakh wrath.

The moral here is even though it may be incredibly tempting, don't ask a Kazakh about Borat. Ever.