So Grandma Thinks She Can Dance, huh?

I go to the gym every morning before work. It gives me energy for the day and most importantly, it wakes me up and thus prevents me from coming to work with a stank ass attitude. When I get to the gym, I’m all about business. I don’t want to make small talk. I’m not trying to make new friends. I’m not even try to make eye contact. I’m there to come thisclose to a coronary attack and then limp my way back home. That was until last week. 

 

Where it all went down

So I don’t really have a group of friends in Hong Kong yet. Normally, I’d make friends with people in my work group but everyone on my team is a lot older with a family so they’re not eager to go to the club to do the Cupid Shuffle with me. I have the other Princeton in Asia people but they get off work really late so we hang out on the weekends but on the weeknights I pretty much fly solo. It’d be whack to go to a bar by myself. And I’m certainly not going to chill at the office. So for a while I would just hang out at a cafe or stay in my apartment watching old episodes of The Office on tudou.com. But one night last week, I decided that I would take one the classes at my gym so at least then I could be around other people. I took a class called “Body Pump,” thinking that it would focus on pumping iron and thus I’d be one step closer to completing the 4th stage of The Emancipation. 

After work I went home to change and then ran to the gym for the 7:30 class. I got to the aerobics studio a few minutes early and stood around with everyone else waiting for the instructor to arrive. At 7:30 on the dot, a flamboyant Chinese man bursts through the door, without saying a word he walks up to the front of the class, gets in position, throws his sunglasses to the floor and while vogueing in between each word begins: “Who (pose) is (pose) the (pose) QUEEEEEN? (pose) Beyonce!” Crazy in Love comes on and he starts to do Beyonce’s signature booty-hop. And he was so serious. 

So what I thought was going to be a weight lifting class is actually a hip-hop/international pop dance class–populated from everyone from young Chinese B-boys to old women in their sixties, all with an oddly attuned sense of rhythm. People talk about having a “return culture shock” which makes the transition back “home” difficult. I think I’m having that culture shock now, but ain’t nothing difficult about it. 

See, mainland China is sooo very homogenous, but not just racially. That, I can deal with. But for a number of reasons (including China’s recent history of purging all those who challenged the status quo, and Confucian thought which opposes standing out in any form), the overwhelming majority of people express the same thoughts, dress the same and have the same hobbies (playing computer games, singing karaoke and/or watching movies). This is especially true for the smaller cities like the one where I was stationed. So, it sounds silly, but standing in that class I was just in awe to get of a reminder of 1. how diverse Chinese people can be and 2. that globalization did, in fact, occur–so that although we’re from different countries we can appreciate the same songs. 

I know I sound really provincial right about now. But let me tell you, you don’t know from where I’ve come. I am just starting to get over the shock of people NOT staring and pointing when I walk out my house everyday. As I’ve told a lot of you, going to Dalian was literally like going back in time 100 years when it comes to social issues and political ideology (you know, the only things I really care about). And although I knew in the back of my head that there was a more evolved discourse happening in other parts of the world, after a while I sort of became a product of my environment. And crazy just became normal. So now that I’m back in the 21st century, I am pleasantly surprised by and grateful for some of the simplest things. 

But I had another shock in this class. One that rocked the very core foundation upon which I have built everything I know to be true. I don’t know how it happened, or when, or why, but somehow I have become rhymically impaired to the point of retardation. As I watched myself practice the moves on the mirrored walls I was just shocked and appalled. I was so stiff and uncoordinated. And you know who I blame for this: YOU! This didn’t just happen suddenly; there was a progression. You saw me dancing in the club, on the streets, in the supermarket aisles, and you must have noticed my atrophy. You had to. But you sat and watched silently as the only thing I had going for me was taken away. And for that, I hate you with a rage that burns like an inferno. 

 

I could learn a thing or two from her

This isn’t just in my head either, in the class we were doing Soulja Boy’s “Superman” dance. Well, they were doing it, I was being done in by it. After class this short, gray-haired Chinese woman approached me: “You no know how do Soulja Boy. I show you. Do like me,” and then she proceeded to do a blazing rendition of Superman, with the “Yoooooouuuus!” added for effect. I kid you not. Call me paranoid, but I think she was trying to show me up. Now I am hell-bent on challenging her to a dance-off in 2 months time. Until then, I’m practicing everyday. I’m going to make her rue the day she tried to upstage me. 

At the end of class I told him the instructor, whose named I found out is Frank, that I’m coming to every class he has. He was really excited. I should’ve never came up and introduced myself because now he focuses on me all throughout class, “Give me drama, TG!” “I don’t have it to give, Frank.” That is, until I see that old bat shoot me a smug look out the corner of her eye, then I start dancing like my life depended on it. 

Rue the fucking day, she will. Just wait.

TG