A Couple Club Reviews, Strange Experiences, and "White Monkeys" Pt. II

5 March Saturday
This was the day I went bra-shopping so my outfit wouldn't be wildly inappropriate. After wandering around all day doing so, Donald called me and we spent the next hour or so trying to find each other. I thought I would be able to walk to my dorm and to where he would be to drop off my bag, but clearly not. Walking outside of campus is not really quicker. He took me to Sabrina's, an expat import store - I bought butter and he bought pop-tarts. Yay. After we returned to my dorm, Ken joined us and I immediately started getting ready to go out again. Since it was Ladies' Night at Paname, we first went there - weak, weak, weak, as I've said. We left after 20 minutes and took a cab to Tai Ping Nanxin* Jie.

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We started at the West-most end of the street and made our way towards BABI II, stopping in each bar before continuing to the next, which became an extremely unpleasant experience. As soon as we approached the door, it's as though the door people took immediate guardianship, sweeping us in past everyone, even moving Chinese people away from the bar. Some things on the menu were 4-digits long, so we left, rather bewildered. This street epitomizes the class contrast here - on one side, you have opulent buildings with ridiculously expensive drink menus. On the other, there are cheap restaurants selling food until the wee hours of the morning at 8-12 元. Many nights, there are about 4-5 shabbily-dressed people carrying around monkeys. They charge 1元 to take a picture with it - probably more if they can manage.

Either way - we settled between BABI II and Muse that night, switching between the two several times
(Muse, BABI II, Muse, BABI II).

This night at Muse, there were no go-go dancers (unless you count us) - instead, we got kicked off the stage so poppers could perform, which made me incredibly sad and lonely. They were kind of found wanting, but I complimented them anyway. We got invited several times to people's booths, and someone even began speaking extremely random Japanese to me (which they do a lot here for some reason), to which I responded in my own broken manner. This guy in particular studied Japanese and said he loved the culture - an extremely rare sentiment here, I'm sure. However, this is where the whole "white monkey" issue actually begins.

If you hadn't noticed before, Westerners get a lot of unnecessary VIP treatment. While this does provide us with many privileges and benefits, in places all about face and status, this becomes a form of pacifying subordination. Everyone wants to take a picture with us, show it to their friends, buy you drinks, try to give you cigarettes. You have the white (or non-Asian) monkey, you have status. It bothers me very much, as I am constantly worried about tokenization - brown people chasing white people for status (though mostly black men chasing, or choosing to date only white women) and white people chasing brown people for an exotic flair (specifically white women speaking of their love of black prowess). Or anyone chasing any ethnic group because of their own misconceptions, stereotypes, and self-subordination/hatred. After several randomly began taking pictures of/with us, we started taking pictures as well. Here are some that Ken got on his camera:

Ken, me, random dude, Donald.

Look at the chick on the left!

Groper. I was definitely only posing. -_-'

Things were okay at first, until a particularly ungentlemanly fellow began attempting to grope me - as I mentioned in my previous post, such public physical contact is a resounding no. As his English was pretty good, I expect he knew damn better than to do such a thing in any cultural setting. Rather than laying my hands on anyone, we promptly left for BABI II - to stay.

This club receives its own special mention for several reasons:

• The music isn't shitty, at least towards the beginning of the night.
• It provides a sexual anomaly via a Western cultural icon: the stripper pole.

I'm sure many people know already of my fascination with pole art - I see it as an intense gymnastic medium that often goes misunderstood and underappreciated because of the sexual label it carries due to its origin in the sex industry. Really, it belongs in the Olympics, but I'm sure most people reading this would disagree. Regardless - they treat it completely differently here. The concept is a sexual one, of course - they're not totally ignorant to its meaning. However, it is very much as Donald described it: constantly surrounded by men, and when approached by women, they are chased away so the men can continue with their own awkward sexual pursuits (grabbing the pole, loosely oscillating, and grinning widely).

I've never really seen anything like that, not even on YouTube. And on a random note, "Russian" in China apparently means you're likely to be a prostitute.

So, "white monkey." I heard this term for the first time later that night (early that morning) from an Italian fellow. He used it to describe a student passerby's job as a face in front of an office (to attract visitors). But why white monkey and not just a monkey? It's a concept completely separate from the American notion of monkeys, imo. But what happens if you're black in China and get this treatment - or a job exploiting your non-Asian-ness? It seems most of the black people here are African, and work as a DJ of some sort. The only black American I know here is a teacher.
So... Is it really just another failure to accommodate the concept of non-white Westerners? Or non-Westerners? Or is it an expression of this culture's exoticizing values? Why is white still right?