PANDA, PANDA, BURNING BRIGHT. IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT.

When I was waitressing at the Queen Mary I enjoyed seeing the faint traces of stamps from last night’s rock shows on my upturned wrist as I delivered trays of afternoon delicacies and tea in fine bone china. It was for similar reasons that I enjoyed going through the motions of conducting research this week while recalling that in the wee hours of Monday morning I was pole dancing in a panda suit at a Russian nightclub. Allow me to explain.

On Sunday afternoon I met up with Anna, a fellow Fulbrighter working on divination in the Han dynasty.

We attended an indie short film festival at Dos Kolegas (featuring the mural above), where the contributions ranged from uninspiring to painfully awkward, leaving early to meet Dan at my tailor Wu Lin’s. Dan was in the states last month and took the opportunity to appropriate and remove to the motherland a panda costume owned, for reasons not entirely clear, by his father. The panda suit was in good shape but for a large seam rip in the butt. The limp costume slung over his shoulder, Dan entered the tailor’s shop with Anna and I behind him and announced in Chinese that he had just slain a panda and needed to repair its pelt. Wu Lin and her assistants chuckled and stitched the suit up in minutes, refusing to charge us.

We strode triumphantly to the north end of Ritan Park to buy supplies for the evening and seek out dinner. At the restaurant, Aaron and Christine joined us and we shared a delicious meal. Spirits were high. Leaving the restaurant we wandered around the park enjoying the retirees pair-dancing by electric lamp while waiting for an important call. Just after nine the call came and we headed to the north gate to meet the pieman, who delivered into our greedy arms the apple pie he had baked us that afternoon.

All the elements were finally in place. We staked out a low stone table that looked made for a sacrifice and the fixing of drinks commenced. Dan played his trumpet, and we took turns trying on the suit. It was still rather hot outside so we often went only half in.

The park “closed” at 9:30, the cue for a guard with a bullhorn to broadcast this fact and for all the lights to go off. Undaunted, we went south, moving by business district light pollution up the rocky paths to the pagoda at the parks’ highest point. There the pie was cut, served, and devoured, with some assistance from a nearby Chinese couple gazing at the full moon. Christine, who plays in a popular bluegrass band in town and possesses an angelic voice, sang a few tunes for us as we licked our forks. She was accompanied at times by an older Chinese man lying flat on his back on the pagoda’s thick bench seats.

As we descended hours later, Anna and Christine duetted on a song from The Little Mermaid. We made a brief foray to the Stone Boat, a nearby bar, delighting and perplexing the patrons and generally being hammy.

Around midnight we said goodbye to Christine and made our way to a decadent Russian nightclub called Chocolate at the north of the park. Our bags were searched (I stashed the pie knife in shrubbery beforehand) before we descended the escalator into the subterranean club, an enormous space with dozens of tables peopled with puffy Russian oligarchs and the occasional lavishly dressed lady or scantily-clad prostitute keeping them company.

We sat in high-backed velvet chairs and stared at the empty stage, waiting for the show to began. I couldn’t take it. Commandeering the panda suit slung pleadingly on the back of my chair, I took off my shoes, pulled it on, and asked for guidance to the stage (the eyeholes in the panda suit are tiny so the wearer is practically blind). Once there I terrified patrons (or so I was told) danced to Lady Gaga, and tried (mostly without success) to climb a pole with my furry paws. I fully expected to get kicked out but apparently the audience thought it was part of the show. And dear god it was fun.

Finally, disoriented, I fumbled around for my friend and was led back through the tables to my chair (in the picture below, I appear to be a celebrity panda being escorted by bodyguard Dan), where my performance was praised by my comrades and I removed the hot fursuit.

Triumphant, I leaned back, sipped my beer, and beamed with delight at my co-conspirators. No matter where I go I somehow find the most extraordinary people.

The floor show started not long after, a few numbers featuring sexy dancing ladies in skimpy dresses and lingerie.

It concluded with the women moving about the tables, gyrating their g-strings at our eye level in an unsubtle request for tips. That was our cue to leave. Aaron and Anna headed homewards and Dan and I shared a taxi to the treehouse to hydrate and calm down a bit before attempting to sleep. Sophie was off to bed so we helped ourselves to water and went up to the roof, once there, finding it pleasant to lie in the white sand (a friend of Sophie and Wu Jie’s who ran the place for a week while they were out of town had plans to give the rooftop a beach theme) with pillows under our heads. And there, looking up at the tree stretching high above us into the star-less sky, we fell asleep, waking at dawn to brush the sand off our clothes and make our ways home. “You got home late last night, didn’t you?” Auntie Zhang asked me this afternoon over lunch. “Yes”, I said, “quite late”. And I left it at that, knowing that elsewhere in the city, there were four more with visions of a night of childish glee keeping them company as they went about their day.