John Stanmeyer for TIME.
Fai on the prowl in Hong Kong's 'Home' nightclub.
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Night Of the Hunter
He loves the ladies, and the ladies, he assures us, love him. So why is our Hong Kong Casanova going home alone?
By BRIAN BENNETT Hong Kong
Lau Hiu Fai makes a pistol out of his thumb and forefinger, cocks his wrist and aims at an imaginary target across the room. "Locked and loaded," he says, looking over with a wide, confident, closed-mouth grin. It's 11:35 p.m., and he's ready for sport. This is a night for kau lui—a woman-hunting night.
After a few beers on the couch in his apartment in Hong Kong's Wanchai district, Fai stands up to adjust his carefully unkempt clothes—gray T shirt and navy cotton flat-front pants worn low on the hips. He's wearing a pair of black-frame glasses and a black terry cloth wristband with a green ganja leaf design that he says lets the ladies know, "I can get you high." With his close-cropped hair, wide cheekbones and enormous grin, Fai may not be the most attractive representative of his gender—he also has the chronic slouch and bob of a beat poet—but looks aren't everything. Confidence and a smooth tongue can take a man much farther than a pretty-boy face. Fai knows it and, apparently, works it. According to his friend Luca, "He has an intuition to know when a girl wants to be approached." If that doesn't make him enough of a babe magnet, Fai has the hippest job around. He's a graphic designer, and already, at the tender age of 23, he has designed album covers for the knight and lady of the Canto-pop world, Nicholas Tse and Faye Wong.
Fai and the gang are ready for the chase. With a flourish, Fai slaps on a cool, floppy plaid racing cap, like the ones worn by Cuban jazz trumpeters. It's a bold hat, but it's a bold night and the glint in Fai's gaze makes you think his magnets are spinning full tilt.
11:55 p.m. At the artsy Fringe Club in the trendy Central district, Fai has barely sat down with his bottle of Tsingtao, when a bright-eyed girl dances up to him out of the jazz-band din. The hipster aura is already working, but Fai plays it cool. He smiles his big, gummy smile and lets the girl sway back into the jiggling crowd. He turns to the table of men and toasts, "kau lui!" He puts down his bottle and takes the dance floor. But the prey has moved on. Fai has misjudged, and now she's dancing with another, quicker Lothario.
1:03 a.m. The band at the Fringe packs up, and Fai and his mates head out into the street to find out where the women are. They decide to stop at Home, a Plexiglas and stainless steel dance club several blocks away. There are a few tightly packed groups in the place, but none of those wandering eyes Fai is looking for. "Might as well enjoy the music," he says and goes into the corner to smoke a joint with his friends.
He hasn't kept exact count, but Fai has slept with more than 20 women since he lost his virginity at 16. His flatmates never know who is going to walk out of his bedroom on a Sunday morning. He says he always uses a condom when he has sex—to avoid getting the girl pregnant, not as a precaution against AIDS. "Healthy people don't have to worry about that," he says, breezily.
2:18 a.m. Giving up on Home, the group heads over to Cage—a karaoke dive for those in-the-know. Downstairs is a noisy bar replete with TV monitors and bubblegum Kelly Chan tunes. Fai sits down, surrounded by guys. Beers and shots come and go. The expert hunter offers a few pointers for approaching women. "The first thing to do is to look like you're having a great time with your friends. So the ladies know you're there for fun. Then you look for eye contact. And if all of that fails, you can always pretend you're really drunk and get close that way. If she's interested, you go home together." Quite a plan. He looks around. Nothing.
4:52 a.m. It's getting late—or early—and still Fai hasn't found a worthy target. After much deliberation, a few swaying laps around the tables, he concludes that the three girls left dancing in the club aren't up to his standards. "They are all ju par [pork chops]," he says. "Let's go smoke."
Out on the street Fai and his friends smoke the last joint. "I like drugs more than girls," the stud man jokes as he toes the burned-out spliff and, in the electric-blue morning light, slouches toward his apartment. In a few hours his roommates will be surprised not to meet another of his conquests stumbling into the living room for breakfast. Not this morning—this morning Fai is high and happy but alone, heading back to his stack of Japanese porno DVDs and his trusty remote control. This morning, the hunter's coming home empty-handed.
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