By Cindy Ziyun Huang
I met her at Club Lai Lai in the late summer of 1986, just two or three months after Priscilla Chan’s Dancing Street became a disco hit that all of us went crazy about.
No need to lower the volume, Priscilla reassured us. Billowing out, her joyful silk scarf brushed aside all our hesitation.
The 1980s was a decade when people would lose their minds discoing. An endless supply of cassette tapes flowed from the stylish Canton region into every corner of my city and blew all of us away. Leslie Cheung’s frisky Monica had been a personal favourite, but later I couldn’t decide whether I was more attracted to the sophisticated heartbreak pictured in his Sleepless Night. Cool kids apparently loved playing Bo Fung Yat Juk with their boomboxes wherever they went. Everyone else was head over heels for Fei Xiang and his version of Winter Fire. English songs were of course insanely popular – Colder than Ice, Brother Louie, basically anything from the revered “Hollywood East Star Trax” albums. The trippy tune of Jimmy Aaja from an Indian dance film was also an absolute hit.
Many of the tracks we danced to at the time were Cantonese or Mandarin covers of songs that had been adapted into so many languages that their originals no longer mattered. Take Dancing Street for example. It was a Cantonese adaptation of Yōko Oginome’s Dancing Hero, which was itself the Japanese version of an English song called Eat You Up by a singer whose name no one cared enough to know. The song also had a lesser-known Mandarin version and another Cantonese version that had been forgotten completely.
Cantonese, Mandarin, English, Japanese, French, Hindi. Unsure and mostly unconcerned about what language we sang along in, we drowned ourselves in the new and simple excitement brought by the pulsating beats. Those palm-sized cassettes were gifts from a vast, faraway world. We worshipped them. We clung to them as tiny spaceships that would take us to another universe.
The 1980s was a dream we had while napping under a tree on a sunny afternoon. We dreamed of chequered jumpsuits, pink faux-fur jackets, gleaming new cars, and chunky Motorola phones. In this fleeting dream, we were on our way to making our names and big money in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York.
Tomorrow seems so far away, and the world is spinning.
Club Lai Lai’s name – “come, come” – laid a spell on all of us. Night after night we found ourselves showing up at the tiny discotheque, impatient to squeeze into the room that had already got too steamy and crowded. Shimmering shoulders and shuffling feet stirred up the sour smell of sweat, mosquito spray, and spilt beer. Cheap tinsel garlands corniced the room. Strobe lights and stage lights pulsed to the music, and our sequined outfit caught their garish purple, yellow, blue, red, and green.
Every night, we glided into a sea of moist bodies like slimy fish returning to their school. Do you wanna hold me tight? Our steps and breaths became synchronised – a kind of synchronisation unlike anything we’d known. It wasn’t like the uniform moves of radio broadcast exercises we had been trained to perform neatly at school. Nor was it like the stylised gestures and over-the-top facial expressions that looked exactly the same in all the stiffening “revolutionary ballets” we grew up watching. It was something new, something brighter and freer. Wilder. We thought it was going to last forever.
When I noticed her on the dance floor at Club Lai Lai, her long curly hair was whipping up and down in the haze like a tangled mass of seaweed in a turbulent sea. She was bouncing around bare-footed. I couldn’t look away from the quivering shiny fringes of her cropped top as she threw her twitching body in all directions. She wore a pair of flared trousers made of dark metallic fabric that I’d never seen before. Slits on each side of her trousers went all the way up to her hips, and her thighs thrust out from the slits as she hurled through the space. She spun and fell to the floor, her arms wrestling with her torso.
Thin beams of light reflected by mirror-balls criss-crossed across the ceiling, walls, and floor, like the imaginary lines that join stars in asterisms. She was floating in space. The rotating mirror-balls were her moons.
I thought I’d seen her somewhere before. Maybe just outside Club Lai Lai, after dancing nonstop for a whole night. She took a drag of her cigarette, too energised to go home and too exhausted to keep herself together. The silver jacket draped over her shoulders made her look like an absent-minded assassin from a Hong Kong crime drama. Or maybe I’d once noticed her on the dance floor during the interval between songs. She was panting. Her body froze at the last pose and gradually grew heavy, looking funny and awkward as the breezy music faded out. A menacing hum of laughter, chitter-chatter, and something else returned to the room.
The music ended before we finished dreaming. She had no name. None of us had or needed a name in the 1980s. The world is spinning; everything is spinning. We found each other and swam together in a swell of lights and sounds. We had small fires inside us, burning out of control.
I never saw her again.