Late Night Karaoke Quotes

Driving down deserted early morning roads. Round and round. Round downtown. Through naked streets. Lips pursed on two litre bottles of beer, but pursuing the lips of freedom's night. Swapping cars. Winding up at karaoke bars or Bolsi- the best place in town. For the food. For the folk. For the service. For the crema de papaya. And for that late night dawn's whiskey coffee.

We walk the streets of Fuzhou at night, in the one summer when I come back. Streetlights send our elongated shadows tumbling ahead of us, across the neon-tinged storefronts and buzzing lamps. Everyone comes out, the old men in wife-beaters and plastic sandals, the teenagers in fake American Eagle. Senior citizen ladies roll out before bedtime in pajama pants printed with SpongeBob or fake Chanel logos. There is a Mickey D's and a KFC, street dumpling stands, bootleg shops, karaoke bars. Everything is open late, midnight or even later. There are places to get a full-body massage, an eight ball, a happy ending. If you stay on these streets long enough, it's possible you could get everything you want, have ever wanted. Because I disremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories, we walk along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river, we turn down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore, we smoke cigarettes openly even though it's unseemly for women, especially in my family, to smoke in public. But the feeling, the feeling of being in Fuzhou at night, remains the same.

Virtually everything of any value in North Korea originates in China, and it mostly reaches the DPRK via Dandong. North Korean officials and businessmen, like the men I met on the train from Beijing, coming cap in hand on state-sponsored shopping trips are everywhere. Easily spotted by their badges proclaiming their loyalty to the various Kims, at night they haunt the Korean restaurants and karaoke bars within view of the DPRK itself. During the day, they congregate on the street by the border post beneath the bridge that leads to North Korea. From the early morning to the late afternoon, the line of trucks waiting to cross into the DPRK tails back down the road. There are warehouses and wholesale shops all along it and a constant procession of North Koreans going in and out of them. They buy spark plugs and coils of wire, generators and tyres, household appliances and kitchenware. The goods are destined for North Korea’s armed forces, more than a million strong, for the few industrial concerns still working, or for the Pyongyang elite.