China’s new teenagers

Press, 5 July 1985, Page 18

China’s new teenagers

From

JONATHAN MIRSKY

in Shanghai

They are Deng Xiaoping’s “children.” With money to burn and dressed to the nines, they dance the night away under spinning mirrored globes in China’s new night spots. “Everyone in Hangzhou is crazy about dancing,” says a young selfemployed taxi driver. “I go to a dance in some hotel almost every night. It costs me about 20 yuan a night, with entrance ticket, some food, and a taxi.” Twenty yuan, about $l6, was until recently about half an urban worker’s monthly wage. For the young at Hangzhou’s Huagang Hotel it’s peanuts. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo described Hangzhou, capital of Chekiang province on the southeast coast, as one of the finest cities in the world. In 1985, the city is making a determined effort not to be left behind.

“I sell freshwater seed pearls,” says a 24-year-old woman, tossing the long straight hair which falls to the shoulders of her white silk blouse. She wears eye shadow and lipstick, a black pleated skirt, and white high-heeled shoes. “I travel all over China buying themed then sell them in Canton

to foreign buyers who embroider them on sweaters. I love travelling. I can’t buy enough stuff in China. I’m dying to go to America, it’s so wide open.” , At the next table, three young men from Manchuria, 1000 miles to the north, are watching the dancing and pouring out tumblers of French brandy. “We’re in our own business,” says one. “Wholesale electric fans. We go to dances everywhere we travel.” They wear close-fitting shirts, tight trousers, and thin leather slip-ons. Under the mecca-lights and the streamers, the band — trombones, trumpets, and percussion — pounds away on 1950 s jazz, to which the dancers stamp their feet, or pour out tangos and waltzes. Couples, often of the same, sex, glide through the shadows, cutting elaborate figures last seen in the West in films of the 19505. A secretary in a red lace blouse and plenty of matching lipstick sips Paul Masson California Ruby.”

She makes 350 yuan monthly in one of the new special economic zones where wages are usually triple the national average. “Are you surprised that we dance like this in China? You should try Shanghai. It’s even better.” Perhaps it is. In what used to be the East’s wickedest city you can choose your dancing from nightclubs in five different firstclass hotels. While foreign tourists at the circus watch a lumbering panda and two exhausted tigers go through manoeuvres which would horrify the World Wildlife Fund, down the road at the Shanghai Hotel local young people have paid eight yuan — twice the Hangzhou rate — to dance to a moonlighting band of eight elderly members of the Shanghai Symphony. They play “Chattanooga Choochoo,” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” and “Hold that Tiger.” When the dancers are not jiving or two-stepping, they sit two to a chair, cuddling, peanuts, and

drinking orangeade. The selfemployed mechanic next to me prefers the lights at another hotel but likes the music better at this one. “I come here twice a week. If I dance more than that I get a headache. It’s easy for me to afford this.” The singer gets up and, winding the microphone line around her wrist, launches into “Down on the Bayou,” very brassy and bouncy, but in fractured English. During her break she says that her father is a professor of music, who prefers Brahms. All this was forbidden until last year, and even in early 1984 would have drawn; the charge of “spiritual pollution.” Although Chairman Mao had indulged himself in occasional West-ern-style shuffles during the guerrilla period, and had a notoriously roving eye, once in power he became suspicious of fun. Now, Deng Xiaoping, once one of Mao’s closest comrades, is prepared to let things rip a bit. “It’s because of Deng Xiaoping that we can do this,” says a Shanghai hotel swinger. “Are you going to Nanking in a few day? Try the Jingling Hotel.