I was invited to a karaoke night (or KTV, as it’s called today) by a few friends from my Oral Chinese class tonight.
I haven’t been in any kind of karaoke situation since my last visit to China six years ago, and that was half an hour in a dingy room, with a raspy VCD player and a microphone that added nothing but a tinny weong sound. The music videos were hopelessly cheesy, all consisting of Chinese couples in pretty places staring into each other’s eyes. Add thereto the fact that I sing like a sniffling duck, and it really wasn’t my pastime of choice.
Needless to say, I went more for the curiosity and the hanging out than a sudden passion for making a fool out of myself.
The place was pretty sleek, with lots of service people milling around and generally looking important with their walkie-talkies or earpieces. It was quite nicely decorated and shiny, had a dance floor and an OK bar (with a strong preference for Jack Daniels), and free food, soft drinks and snacks throughout the night. I was ushered through well-lit corridors and into the room my friends had rented.
It was big. It was classy. It may have had leather sofas, but both the sofas and the tables were black, which is acceptable. It didn’t have a wildly clashing interior. It had a sound system to die for. It had microphones that actually seemed to enhance people’s voices. And instead of the old, nicked VCDs of yore, it was now all digitalized, with a touch-screen computer in a corner. And instead of an old TV, there was a home movie theater screen.
And the music! Sure, some songs were still hopelessly cheesy (“You’ll marry me today”, “Shanghai girl”, etc.), but every single music video was cool, touching, funny, engaging or stunningly beautiful – even the cheesy songs seemed to be slight intentional parodies of themselves, which made it much more enjoyable. I honestly became so engrossed in the music videos that I sometimes forgot to listen to the songs; not that it mattered, since they were all in Cantonese, and the lyrics as well.
And boy, did people sing. The karaoke events I’d been to before had consisted of one person singing, and all others politely listening to that person and clapping afterwards. Switch person. Repeat. This time, it was a big room, people were talking left and right, but it didn’t matter, because people sang anyway. They sang without knowing all the words or even the melody sometimes, but they sang and had damn fun doing it. (and I had a blast watching them) One guy was actually quite good, for a while I thought he was the background music.
What is it with Asians and karaoke? I was the only one entirely uninterested in singing - even people who've grown up in the west, like me, did karaoke with a zeal and enthusiasm that just confounds me. But hey, people are having fun and are in a good mood, and so was I, so who am I to judge? Maybe my hibernating karaoke genes will wake from their slumber and I'll be the star at the next karaoke night.
Haha, maybe when I start preferring too cold to too hot.
Also, I got to experience ordering Western drinks entirely in Chinese for the first time. At the bars in Sanlitun, the drinks names are always given in English, but here, they were all translated (more or less freely) into Chinese. Even the word cocktail is translated – it’s literally called “chicken tail drink” and encompasses longdrinks, highball drinks and shots. The drinks were insanely cheap though compared to Sanlitun – under 10 RMB for a generous amount of liquor – and the bartenders actually seemed to know what they were doing. I’ve never seen a cooler B-52, for example. I had a lot of fun trying to translate the various drink names, amongst them Cuba Libre, Black Russian, and Tequila Sunrise, but in the end I got something called “Romantic cute” or something. It was sickeningly sweet and strong, so after that I stuck to good ol’ water.
Then a friend of mine got drunk, as in “spend more time on the floor than upright but insists on dancing”, and I spent most of the evening trying to prevent her from hitting her head as she was falling over. We all (around 13-14 people) took turns.
Still, it was a fun night. Oh, and I got complimented on my Northeastern accent from a fellow Harbiner, yay!