Halloween

I had the fortunate experience to be invited to a staff party this last week.  It worked out well since it was on Halloween evening, and I was worried that I was going to be the only twenty-something American that was not waking up November first with a gnarly hangover.  It was a staff party, so the company was picking up the tab - they booked a VIP room at KTV from 8pm til 8am.  I have been to Asian karaoke clubs before, but nothing yet that compares to this.

We have to play until midnight every day, so I naturally asked if the party was still going to be going on by the time we arrived.  It was explained to me that since people are all working different shifts at the club, throughout the entire night waves of people will be joining the party at KTV.  Ok cool, lets go.

A short taxi ride later we pulled up to a building.  There were all sorts of people out front, most of them dressed to impress.  As I descended the huge escalators to the karaoke club, it felt more like I was entering one of the monstrous casinos in Vegas, Caesars Palace, or the Venetian or something like that.  We got to the reception counter, and I was confused because it really looked like we were entering a five star hotel.  I explained through gestures that we were trying to meet our friends (can you imagine that?) as the workers at reception did not speak any English.  Ten minutes later and a few phone calls, we figured out that our room was 555 (Wu, Wu, Wu).  "Atmosphere party...!"  says the receptionist.  "Isn't that what I have been telling you the whole time?" I respond slightly frustrated.  That is just how things go here, so I am getting used to it.  My secret trick is this:  Smile and nod, smile and nod again, give a high five, shake hands, smile and nod, then repeat from the beginning.  It makes friends every time!  Oh, and my mandarin is good enough to say you are my new friend, "你是我碰育" that works wonders.

Now a little background information:

As a 'very white person' I am only told peoples English names, which often times the owner of the name is so unfamiliar with they do not know I am trying to talk to them.  Anyways, there is this guy Ken that I see every night.  He has been requesting me to play on the piano "Gangnam Style" for weeks, and I keep telling him, there is not much to it.  If I play Gangnam Style on the piano, you will not even recognize it because it is an electronic song, and played on a acoustic piano it sounds so empty, and simple, and utterly stupid, not to mention I cannot sing or rap in Korean.  It is the number one song in the world right now, and I recommend that everyone stop reading this blog for three minutes to go watch the video on Youtube.

We find room 555 and open the door.

Smoke billows out into the hallway and music is blasting, and what do you know, it is Gangnam Style.  Ken is dancing around the room, and thirty other people I know are all doing the dance and going nuts.  Food, beer bottles, liquor bottles, cake and cards are all over this room.  All of our friends cheer when we enter :) and I am quickly rushed to the front of the room to do the 'dance' from the video.  Wow, I need a drink for this! (or two, or maybe four!)

Gangnam style is played three times in a row, then finally onto some Chinese love songs. I can finally breathe the smokey air.  We are in a medium sized room, two 70 inch super nice TV's are on one wall projecting all the karaoke videos, many nice cushy couches line the opposite wall, and there are tables and chairs, and a fridge.  It is a nice room.  The sound system was the most overkill I have ever seen in my whole life as a musician.  This room maybe holds fifty people, and we are talking 8 speakers, bigggg speakers, lots of reverb, lots of delay, really loud, lots of feedback, oh man a sound mans nightmare.  The karaoke machine itself is something out of Star Trek, two touch screens in opposite corners, with wall controls also if you want to turn on the original vocals (is that illegal?) or skip the song, or volume up and down, or effects.  "Beam me straight to the BeeGee's Scotty".  Bottles of Grey Goose are being consumed like water, and some of the people from the morning shift who have already been at the party for hours are passing out.  Everyone wants us to sing, but the English selection of songs was maybe a total of one hundred tunes.  Anyone who goes to Karaoke in the states knows that a typical selection may consist of thousands and thousands of songs, so it was difficult to find a good one out of just a mere one hundred tunes. They did have my go to, which is 'Stayin' Alive'.  They also had Pink, Avril Lavigne, Jewel, Taylor Swift, Linkin Park, and Bon Jovi.  Ouch.  Everyone is waiting for us to sing so we put our songs in the que, the BeeGee's tune and Michael Jackson.  Everyone knows Billy Jean right?  Not true.  Nobody in the room knew it at all as me and Deybis were belting it out - but they did give us some pity cheers and  clapped on beat one and three for the whole tune (hah!).  Stayin' Alive went just as well.

Then our friends decided to just pick random English songs and give us the mics.  "Wo Men Bu Jer Dao" supposedly meaning "We do not know" magically stopped working, and nobody could understand all of a sudden...

Brittany Spears, Taylor Swift, Cheetah Girls, some random dance tunes that everybody knows and recognize but not a soul know the names or bands performing them pass by.  Then it is straight onto Incubus, Bon Jovi, and thank god, Maroon 5 (Damn you Adam for having such a high voice).

Check out this giant television ceiling!

I eventually moved to the other side of the room, and the singing went back to being all in Chinese.  At the table some of the girls were playing a complicated drinking game with wagering... some kind of three card Chinese poker, but utilizing lucky and unlucky numbers.   Too much for me to grasp so when the deck came to me, I taught them a very basic, and easy American drinking game.  F*** the Dealer.  It involves predicting the next card.  You get two tries, and between them the dealer gives you a hint, higher or lower.  If you get either of the guesses right, the dealer has to drink.  If you get them both wrong, you have to drink the difference between your last guess and the correct value of the card.  The dealer has to stump three people in a row to pass the deck.  As the game progresses, it becomes easier and easier to guess the correct card because you can see what has been layed out on the table.  Thus, the last dealer gets totally f***ed.  They loved this game, and it was played for litterally three hours.

At about three in the morning, re-inforcements showed up.  They consisted of all of our friends that work while we perform, the night shift.  Throw another twenty people into the mix!  Chaos!

There is a special word used here while people are partying or drinking.  "Gambay" is the word, and it is the ultimate challenge.  When someone says that to you, you have to finish your entire drink.  This is taken very seriously here, its not like in the USA where you can say, "Oh no thanks..." or, "I have had enough".  From a Chinese to a Chinese, there is no backing out of this without a big loss of face.  The seriousness of it has to do with the way people hide embarrassment in this culture.  This also explains to me why there are so many 'pukers' at our club (see above blog post).  Lucky for me, as a 'ignorant' American, I could just pretend I did not know what Gambay meant.  This saved my ass, because it was getting thrown at me like crazy.

The whole face/status/embarrassment culture here also helps to explain the popularity of these private karaoke rooms.  I never fully understood them because in the USA part of the fun is you have to shame yourself in front of a room full of strangers.  Here, the private karaoke room is like a haven where people can let loose and go nuts in a culture that is very in control, and introverted.  It was really cool to be invited and to be a part of.  Eventually everybody started to get tired and at about 6:30 in the morning we all walked home.

The next day, a lot of the girls were to embarrassed to talk to me like normal (I received a lot of drunken "I like yooooouuuuss") and everyone at the club was back to normal, serious, efficient and all business.  I will never forget that experience for the rest of my life, although I had a few similar experiences in Vietnam and Thailand, this one was the most extreme.  I am also having more and more fun, now that I am getting used to living in China.  I am building quite a network of friends here, which is nice.  I am the type of person that has a lot of friends, but those friends might not be friends with each other.  In China, for the first time in my life I am kind of experiencing what it is like to have 'co-workers' (outside of band mates).  While we are playing these first few months at Atmosphere I see the same people every day, and it is nice to get to know them.  Being a freelance musician can be a lonely profession strangely, especially as a pianist where the majority of work and performances are played solo.

Cheers,
M

P.S.  Sorry that my writing lacks structure, I just kind of sit down and blast through these blog posts.  What you are reading is a direct line of thought from my brain... I think I have some focusing issues!!!  : )