When we left our young hirsute hero in part 1 he was trying to avoid flashbacks to his unfortunate stint as a ‘minority’ dancer, his abortive attempt at water sports, and the head wound incurred in the act.

Guilin, the night before we got on bumpy little plane to Shanghai: we were headed out for dinner with the Chinese director of our program at Guilin Normal University and who knew what else. We were dressed up in our finest – which in my case involved my extra short shorts and a fanny pack (bum bag for you Brits out there) and my friend Danny, along with his fanny pack, was trying to compensate for my lack of shorts by wearing two pairs. We had also purchased the elbow guards the women sweeping the street wore and were rocking these as well. The concentration of conflicting patterns was high.

On the way to dinner, we ran through the puddles covering the pedestrian street, arms aloft, as if finishing a marathon. In a few days we’d be heading back home. We were acting our age, so long as you factor in a generous margin of error, say, 15 years. Nineteen days in Guilin looking at rocks shaped like lions and stalactites shaped like dragons had gotten to us, badly, and our brains were becoming waterlogged from the storms and oppressive humidity.

At the restaurant I was promoted to the ‘grown ups’ table because I was deemed most able to schmooze with the Dragon Lady, our name for the program director, which should tell you something about our small group. Unfortunately, she had heard about my love of dance (probably because I’d been frequently bellowing tiaaaao wuuuuu with a Tourette’s-like passion) and was determined to get us up on the slightly raised linoleum stage normally accompanied by performers doing ethnic Chinese dance/belly dance. Whether her determination to make this happen was out of malice, or something else, I will never know. I’m going to hedge my bets and say at least 50% malice.

I did my best to put it off – ‘I have to eat first’, ‘I’m not warmed up’, ‘I pulled my groin in Tai Chi practice’, ‘I have Parkinson’s,’ and I believe I even offered up some prayers to whatever deities I could think of. She continued to negotiate with the waiter in what I hoped dearly was some kind of practical joke. Then, before the main dishes even arrived, the music provided by the ‘ethnic’ musicians and their Discman stopped, all 150 people in the restaurant turned to look at us, and the Dragon Lady turned to me. I tried not to fixate on her moustache as she commanded, ‘you dance now.’

Have you ever seen the Saturday Night Live skit where Adam Sandler croaks out in desperation, “Give me cancer now, God!” Yeah. I was praying for spontaneous combustion. My ‘friends’ remained glued to their chairs; no one was willing to join me on that linoleum square of death. I hoped optimistically that the fog pouring out of the free standing air conditioners aimed at each table was cyanide. Only my friend Danny stepped up. If you have ever been in combat and saved by a buddy, you know how I felt, and the undying loyalty I have to him to this day.

 

The musicians took this opportunity to lean back in their lacquered chairs and turned on the Discman, serving us up the special 9 minute disco remix of a Shaanxi folk tune. Stuck on the stage with 150 eyes glued on us, we had nothing to do but go for it. Danny’s second pair of shorts quickly ended up on his head. We pranced about, and I saw on his face the kind of the expression normally only seen by truck drivers, moments before their 18 wheeler demolishes a family of deer.

 

Around the 15 minute mark of the song I ran out of tai chi inspired moves and flung myself onto the cold white tiles. As I lay there listening to the Shaanxi folk equivalent of a drum break, I wondered how I ever thought glaciers moved slowly. The song had been playing for 2 trillion years and was clearly only half way done. Empires had risen and been reduced to dust. A series of meteor showers had riled up dust clouds that had blocked out the sun. I hoped that by the end of the percussion solo someone would have had the good sense to call the police and have us arrested. Danny hauled me back up onto my feet.

Finally, someone pressed the little indented square on the Discperson and the music stopped. We bowed to a surprising amount of clapping – I don’t think people realized what they had just witnessed – a 19 minute, nearly fatal clown-car pileup set to ethno-disco – and we returned to our chairs. I resolved to never say the word dance ever again. In any language. Not even sign language. I thought about stabbing every one of my ‘friends’ and ‘classmates’ with the shards of the shattered Shaanxi Disco Bangers disc. I stilled my shaking hands, grabbed my chopsticks in a death grip, and launched a vicious attack on the vegetable dumplings.

Fortunately, and unsurprising to anyone who knows me, I ate a lot. Luckily the massive emotional trauma I had just undergone did not prevent me from fortified myself nutritionally because later that night, after a whole lot of aerobic activity (I’m not going to say the d-word), I fell rather spectacularly and lost a decent amount of blood.

Tune back next time for the third and final part of the saga.

***

Related Links
How I Became Known to Guilin as 'The Naked Guy', Pt 1
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