Kristi Heim: The World in China

Seattle Times reporter Kristi Heim explores a changing China on the world stage.

August 16, 2008 7:15 AM

Scenes from Beijing Nightlife

It's a good thing I don't live in Beijing. I might never sleep.

Everything that goes on in any hip city around the world is going on here, only pumped up on EPO.

Club Suzie Wong is designed to look like an old opium den, but somehow it also hosts "Riviera Pool Parties." GT Banana, a megaclub that holds 2,000 people, boasts a decor of "Hollywood meets luxury space shuttle" (no economy class space shuttles, please).

Factory 798 took an old East German and Chinese factory compound and transformed it into an artist mecca with more than 100 galleries and performance spaces. Beijing also has hundreds of spas, massage parlors and tattoo shops, but many of them have been shut down around the Olympics for the intolerable crime of appearing seedy.

I started one evening's entertainment at a Xinjiang restaurant. That's the province in the far northwest of China home to the Uyghur ethnic group. The sprawling place had two floors of seating and a stage. When the band came on play "Xinjiang music," they turned out to be very well versed in the Gypsy Kings.

Next stop was the grand opening of a nightclub inside a huge new shopping mall (actually there are no shopping malls in Beijing that are not huge and new). The club put on a "high heels contest" and local would-be models and actresses turned out in droves. I met a guy who was getting rich as a middleman in oil sales, who said he met a table full of people in the same business.

A woman sitting next to me kept flashing her Mercedes car keys, and a guy with low-slung pants kindly bent down right in front of me without my having to ask. Are those Spiderman boxers? But come on, if you don't need an extra hand to hold the jeans up, they don't even count.