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Fear and Loathing in Shenzhen
It's not called a special economic zone for nothing
By TERRY McCARTHY
December 15, 1999
Web posted at 8 a.m. Hong Kong time, 7 p.m. EDT
So you think a bar crawl around Shenzhen is a self-indulgent exercise in depravity, Hunter S. Thompson on a bad trip of maotai and razor clams? You would be very wrong, gentle reader, for the discerning traveler can learn much about the human character behind Shenzhen's neon lights, and not all of it decadent either.
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Shenzhen, you would discover, is the city where you can be anything you like in China. Start with the waitresses in the Kaiyue Hotel bar who are dressed in bright blue, red and yellow dresses with Elizabethan bustles and half-moon-shaped boards behind their heads, who tell you in all seriousness that these are costumes from Shanghai in the 1920s. "Or sometime around then in China," says Marian with the very large eyes. She points to the old black-and-white prints of Shanghai actresses on the walls. None of them are wearing anything resembling the Elizabethan garb on show tonight. She adds, "It is the old-fashioned theme, I think."
Marian is from Liaoning in northern China, 24 years old, and has never been to Shanghai or anywhere else apart from Shenzhen, where she arrived one year ago. She is here to make her fortune--somehow. In another six months she might be a software writer for an Internet startup--maybe.
Money is the lowest common denominator--as low as the gutter where the city's numerous beggars display horrendous stumps, malformations, skin afflictions and worse to touch the hearts and pocketbooks of Hong Kong tourists. But it's also the highest common goal, creating millionaires who might be electronics exporters, real estate sharks, clothing manufacturers or entertainment kings.
Shenzhen plays as hard as it works--it is not called a "special economic zone" for nothing--and the entertainment industry is almost hyper-inventive. The 1897 bar has girls in leopard skins dancing on tables while the waitresses dressed like sailor girls serve drinks, the pool-table assistant sports a uniform like a policeman and the live singing act turns out a perfect rendition of "Hotel California" with only a keyboard as accompaniment.
The business of having fun is big business indeed, aided by the constant flow of Hong Kong businessmen seeking cheap diversions (and no right of abode for any unplanned offspring) in the numerous karaoke bars. There are droves of Hong Kong youth, too, who make the city's discos rock all night. If they miss the 11:30 border closing, they have no choice but to continue partying until it opens again at dawn.
And it's not just Hong Kongers--Shenzhen's colorful population of ambitious young dream-seekers from every province in China gives the city a wonderful sheen of shifting reality, a constant fluctuation of dialect, attitude and cuisine that is just crying out for a gonzo-like novelist to document it in all its improbable fecundity. Shenzhen is every bit as lively, self-renewing, money-driven, gangster-ridden and irredeemably tacky as Las Vegas, and it calls for nothing less than Hunter S. Thompson himself, who could probably develop a taste for maotai and razor clams, given time.
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