The next day after going to the Best Beautiful Club, I was walking through Hu Po on the main road, and suddenly I heard
someone call my name. I looked down the street that was between my apartment building and the police station that went
straight back to the pavilion at the end of the street that stood in front of the pond, and I could see someone running up toward
me. I couldn’t see very well, but finally they came close enough for me to see who it was. It was Ting Ting, and she looked
very happy and surprised to see me there. I was also surprised. How in the whole city was I going to run into her like that by
chance after I just met her? She looked just like a miniature version of Chun Li from the classic arcade game “Street Fighter
2”. She was exceptionally beautiful and uncommon. I told her using the little Mandarin I knew that I was on my way to eat
lunch, and she decided to come with me. We walked to the 24-hour Yong He restaurant on the corner where they had two
stone Chinese lions on either side of the entrance. The restaurant became a new favorite place to go for several reasons.
First, it was the only place to go eat late at night near my apartment when Dushan, Spela, and I would go out to enjoy life with
the other foreigner friends we had made there. And second, the food was slightly of higher quality than most of the other
restaurants along the road. I usually ordered fried beef dumplings, or beef and egg rice and a small pumpkin pie, which is not
like the kind of pumpkin pie that would first come to my mind. It is small, flat, round, and orange, and it is very hot and chewy.
Ting Ting ordered a bowl of hot milk. She kept making calls to someone on her phone chatting about something as I kept
eating my meal. It was very nice of her to take the time to eat lunch with me even though I had only just met her, and since
she couldn’t understand anything I had to say. Throughout the meal, she kept giving me suggestive looks, but I pretended that
I didn’t know what she was doing. I took every opportunity I could to tease her about anything I could find. She would then say
some words in Mandarin that seemed to indicate that she was disgusted by me and snarl at me, but it only made me laugh,
and she had to laugh too after that. There isn’t much that can be said between two people who don’t speak the same
language, but who still consider each other to be friends. After we left the restaurant, we walked back down the street toward
my apartment, when a taxi came around the bend and stopped on the other side of the road from us. I could see that there
was a middle-aged man in the passenger seat. She pointed to the taxi and said, “My friend.” And then waved and said, “Bye
bye,” and got into the taxi and left. That raised my suspicions of her. I wondered what her association was with this man who
probably could have been old enough to be her father.
     The foreigners named Tom and Nina whom I had met only several weeks earlier indeed got connected to the foreigner
community just like I told them they would. They met Dushan and Spela somewhere on the streets, and invited all of us to
their house-warming party. They just moved into a new apartment in Hu Po about half a mile down the twisting main road
away from us. On the night of the party, as we were walking to their new apartment, Dushan bought a mop from one of the
small shops along the street, and he was surprised that I didn’t buy anything for them. “It’s polite.” He said while carrying the
mop over his shoulder as we continued on to the party. “I don’t know them very well, so I don’t feel that it’s necessary to do
that.” I said. Dushan had a very strong personality and stubborn will that he often used to try to control situations and people
to his own desired outcome. I was equally as stubborn, but I was a bit softer than him in heart, not weaker, which meant that I
cooperated with him most of the time, but there were times when we clashed dramatically when I got tired of letting him have
his way. Spela was similar in attitude as Dushan, though she was not very stubborn. She was just all-out aggressive when a
situation did not go her way, and used force and harsh language rather than persuasion to get what she wanted. I was not
intimidated by either of them, but I felt like I could swallow most of their harshness out of the desire not to lose my own sense
of balance. We had our times when things ran smoothly, but all it would take was some small unacceptable detail to bring out
the beast in them. But we were a family of three living in an apartment together in a place that none of us could call home yet,
so it was necessary for us to at least try to work together.
     Upon entering Tom and Nina’s apartment, immediately we could see a table with wine and beer bottles, some of which
had been taken down by others there. There were about 20 other foreigners there from different countries. Among them was a
young lady from Russia named Olga who always had a warm smile on her face and was quite friendly. There were three
foreigners from the United States, a young man named Chris from California, and two young ladies from Chicago named
Amanda and Sara. Chris was very outgoing and comical, yet his eyes looked a little intense. Sara was slightly withdrawn and
dressed like a beauty queen, and Amanda was loud and somewhat obnoxious. She seemed to me like the kind of girl that
goes to college just to drink and party and act loud and crazy, but sometimes first impressions are not accurate. Tom and
Nina seemed to know more foreigners than I, even though I had been living in Hefei for months longer than either of them. I
talked to a foreigner from Bulgaria named Eliezer in the kitchen. Their kitchen, like most others, was long and narrow, and
had all the basics except for a microwave and regular oven, though there usually were gas stoves. Eliezer’s attitude was
“Drink more and be happy”. He was very laid back for being an ex-soldier of the Bulgarian army. He made many cheers that
night and continued drinking well past when he was red in the face. There was also a young couple there from Ukraine
named Alex and Masha. They were both very friendly and full of enthusiasm. Masha always liked to hug everyone, and Alex
was always very agreeable. Later, I sat down on a chair near the entrance, and someone who I hadn’t seen for a while sat
down on another chair across from me. He looked at me, and the first thing he said was, “Do you want a cigarette?” and then
laughed. It was Bernd from Germany who I hadn’t seen since I went to the dance club called 39 degrees with Herman from
Canada and my friend Frank. I apologized to him. “I’m sorry that the first thing I ever said to you was to ask you for a cigarette.
That wasn’t even polite.” “Ah. Don’t worry about it.” He said. He went on to tell me about what he was doing in China. His
construction company had a contract and several projects in China. Not every foreigner there was teaching, but most of them
were. We were all united in our common purpose of being there. We all had our own kind of business to do.
     I would often see the man who used to run the restaurant with his son and daughter that closed down shortly after Chad
became my roommate. He was always cruising around Hu Po on his bicycle with cart attached like a dozen others during
daylight hours to find plastic bottles, cardboard, and other materials he could trade in for money. Whenever he would see me,
he would say ,”Hay!” and then we would stop and hang out for a while and tried to say something to me. Sometimes he would
ask about Chad using his Chinese name “Wen Bo”, and I tried to tell him that he went back to America. I would say the
Chinese name for America, “Meiguo” and make airplane gestures with my hands. His son, after being absent from the scene
for so long, also started to appear again. Both of them still had their big smiles. They hadn’t been broken from losing the
restaurant and living on the verge of bankruptcy. Sometimes I would see them around the streets doing odd jobs like
demolition on the insides of old shops and busting up the road in areas that needed to be fixed. The daughter’s whereabouts
were still unknown to me.
     The time came when Dushan would go to the Best Beautiful Club to become their new main DJ. The owner of the Club
gave him the nickname “DJ Deuce”, and put up advertisements with his picture on them in Bai Cheng in the walking street to
attract some attention to the club. The word was spread around the foreigner community that one of us was going to play
music at the club, so we were going to see who decided to come and show their support for him. Dushan, Spela, and I went
up into the Best Beautiful Club with a little anticipation of what would happen that night. Dushan carried his DJ supplies,
mostly music CD compilations that he put together after they accepted him. No other foreigners were there yet because we
were early, but Lucky greeted us immediately. They still had a Chinese DJ playing Chinese dance songs at the DJ booth. The
DJ booth was on the opposite side from the entrance, which was hidden by a rectangular service area in the middle of the
place. Against the wall behind the DJ, there were panels of different colors of light that illuminated and then faded to black
going across and up and down as the DJ continued to play his music. There was also a disco ball, and some green laser
lights that were visible when smoke would blow past them emanating from the DJ booth. Some different colored strobe lights
also spun around from the ceiling. Next to the service area on one side, there were about five booths with comfortable red
velvet couches that formed a half circle around a small table in the middle. People could do some serious lounging there. On
the other side, there were tables that stood high from the ground with stools where people casually listened to the music and
drank alcohol. There was an elevated platform with railings and small areas with couches and tables on the opposite side of
the club from the velvet couches where some people were standing and looking over the side at what else was going on
away from the groups they were with. The Chinese music was loud and thunderous, with a quick and monotonous rhythm,
and sometimes a young man would sing songs to it with a microphone, and pause at times to let the crowd sing a couple
words just as the music would stop for a second. There were also dance songs with women singing Chinese lyrics with a
high pitched voice.
     This place was truly unlike any place I had ever been before in my life. The atmosphere seemed very complex of different
elements that stretched across time that still lingered and fused together to make the place what it was. Anhui province has a
history of 3,000 years, and so many changes had happened in that place. It existed in the ancient days of emperors and
dynasties, through the iron-fisted communist rule of collective prosperity in the 20th century, and now in the modern age
where everything was developing at an accelerated pace, and the country finally began accepting foreign cultural influences.
Though Hefei was not a wealthy city, the cultural richness was evident in the surroundings all across the city, and also
reflected in the people to varying degrees. In the bar, as well as other places, there were cheerful young people that bounced
around full of energy and happiness, but also there were the laidback and serious conservative types, some trying to act
cool, and others just shy or cautiously wise. There were also middle aged men who were a little heavy with stone faces and
squinty eyes and short flattop hairstyles. They usually wore dark-colored business suits and seemed almost like they were
gangsters. One such person invited me to his table using only hand gestures and pointed to what looked like a line of
cocaine sitting right on top of the table for anyone to see, but I politely refused. People loved to drink with foreigners, and I
often had to sit down with people I could not speak to and drink a small glass of beer or whiskey and coke. They also gave
me cigarettes and urged me to start dancing. At least I did not feel unwelcome there. A lot of young women liked to dress in
dark colors, and had kind of a mystique quality about them. It was popular for them to have hair of slightly longer than medium
length with the bangs trimmed perfectly evenly across.
     At 10:30, the Chinese DJ left the booth, and Dushan moved right into his place after he was shown some things about
operating the equipment. One of the workers introduced Dushan as the DJ, and Dushan began mixing through his playlist. His
dance music must have been something from Europe, because although the lyrics were in English, I had never heard any of
it before. Most people in the club were reluctant to dance, but two rather tall and thin Chinese girls got onto the middle of the
dance floor and started dancing while swinging their long hair around. I also started dancing, and then other foreigners began
to show up. Many of them I had met before, but there were some others I hadn’t seen before. Elvis from Cameroon, who was
the very first foreigner I had ever met in Hefei, arrived with more friends of his that were also from Africa, Evnas, Rodney,
James, Paul, and several others. I didn’t know Elvis was still in the city because I hadn’t seen him for about six months.
Soon there were between 20 and 30 foreigners there. Everyone started dancing in their own way and as they liked. James
had some nice moves. He was wearing a cap and light jacket, and he was dancing moving his shoulders up and down
alternately in the middle of the other foreigners that were dancing around him. As what happens many times in dance
situations, everyone had a chance to step into the spotlight for a minute and then leave the floor to another person. The club
itself had several dancers that stood up on small platforms in front of the DJ booth and in the center of the bar service area.
Most of the Chinese bar patrons stayed at their tables and watched us foreigners dancing wildly to the music, but several of
them were brave enough to join us. We all danced for hours until there was no dance left in us. This was the beginning of a
new day in the city for all of us foreigners, and anyone else’s lives that were touched by the exciting changes that were
pouring into the city from many different sources.
China Dispatch/Andrew Gramling

Changes in Hefei: Foreigners rule!