The first thing you notice are the straws: long, bright, pink-and-purple-striped, with bent necks reminiscent of childhood parties. They’re all over the place, on benches, tables and trays, being passed around like lemonade. Otherwise, the room is exactly as you’d expect a private karaoke room would look like in Guilin, known as south China’s most beautiful city, if you were to wander in at two in the morning.
A rumpled Taiwanese businessman makes eye contact. As his friends gear up for the next big song, he enthusiastically bids me enter. There’s a lot of collar loosening and hugging, flabby, middle-aged male bellies and toasting. A couple of women have lost their tops. Everyone takes a big hit of the enormous lines on the tray, and then they ignore me.
A couple hours later, I’m in a very different part of the house. Not untypically for a Chinese KTV nightclub, it features a large, neon-soaked dance floor and several bars that no one is paying the least attention to. The main draw in this cavernous area is a network of concealed VIP rooms squirreled out back among a warren of identical corridors and floors accessible only to paying guests—and the very curious.
Down one of these hallways, there’s another party happening, this time with a more extreme crowd. They’re brighter-eyed and drunkenly energetic. It is a half-male, half-female crew, all around the same age. In front of a gigantic plasma TV blaring Korean pop videos, a young girl sallies forth to claim her song, watched by the stupefied group. The women are in black tops and skirts, the men are stripped to the waist and near skeletal thin; several are tattooed. All of them are off their heads on ketamine.
[h/t: JG Vibes]
PN 