Red Roulette By Shum Desmond-pdfread.net

denizens of Beijing’s demimonde, Half Moon Café featured live jazz performed
by Chinese musicians who were rediscovering an art form that had been popular
before the Communists banned it as “bourgeois” after the revolution in 1949.
The bar was owned by Jin Xing, a Chinese dancer and choreographer who’d
studied in New York in the 1980s with modern dance legends Martha Graham
and Merce Cunningham. In 1995, Jin Xing had undergone the rst public sex
change operation in Chinese history to become a woman.
Whenever I’d arrive at the bar, the bartender would notify Jin and she’d sidle
over. Unfortunately, she always seemed a little too pleased to see me, so I cut
back my forays to the Half Moon. But that was Beijing. Everyone was on the
make, yearning for something new, often money, but also personal freedom, and
what Chinese imagined to be a Western lifestyle.
Banned for years from leaving China, Chinese began to emigrate in large
numbers. Young, attractive Chinese women weren’t immune to the desire to get
out. At a foreigners’ party, I met one and, searching for a common interest, we
landed on swimming and agreed on a dip at the Olympic-size pool in the China-
Japan Friendship Center on the east side of town.
My date emerged from the changing room in one of the skimpiest bikinis I’d
ever seen. Su ce it to say, in a public pool in 1990s China the masses,
unaccustomed to such bold exhibitionism, were agape. As her escort, I was both
mesmerized and morti ed. Soon thereafter, she married a German businessman
and decamped to Düsseldorf. Experiences like these gave me a avor of what was
happening o stage but also combined to make me feel even more out of touch.
Although I’d been born in the country and spoke three dialects like a local, I felt
I was on the outside looking in.
In late 1999, I met an entrepreneur and son of a general in the People’s
Liberation Army named Lan Hai. Lan was a visionary in the
telecommunications industry and had been a major software provider when
paging was all the rage.
In the mid-1990s, pagers were a status symbol in a changing China, like
they’d once been in the West. While it took months—and often a bribe—to get a
landline telephone from a lumbering state-owned phone company, paging
technology, sold by private rms, allowed people to leapfrog ahead. Scores of