City Girl

by Kitty Yip Kee Wah

Hey there gang, it's me again. You were probably expecting to see Angel Chu's name up there, but that's not going to happen any more. She got fired after it turned out that the recent spate of thefts in the gou-rou.com office was down to her. Even the layout guy's XL size dinner jacket, which was a bit surprising.

New photo too. But that's not my pic up there, by the way, that's just some bitch from Shanghai, only with her head cut off, like all my Barbie dolls.

Anyway, what have I been up to lately? All kinds of things - there's always something to do in this town. It just isn't always fun. It's been all go at work, I'll tell you that twice.

I was talking to my department colleague Gary the other day. It was his girlfriend's birthday, he told me.
"I hope you've got her something nice," I said.
"Yep," he replied, "some racy lingerie and half a kilo of mutton."
"I thought she was allergic to sheep meat," I said.
"No," he said, "that turned out to be an elaborate ruse on her part, designed to test whether I was sufficiently sensitive."
"How elaborate?" I asked.
"She said she was allergic to sheep meat," he said.

Still, not enough about me, me, me. I went to some pretty cool parties over the new year - first to dinner with a trio of German quality controllers, then to Tango for some twinkly-toed twirling, before going off to a friend's apartment where I made hurtful comments about the other partygoers during the final new year countdown, before returning home alone at four o'clock in the morning and finishing off a bottle of Bailey's I had lying in the fridge.

I did manage to get to one shindig that didn't suck this month. It was way over near Dashanzi, though not actually in Dashanzi itself, at a new cafe-cum-club called Cho-cho Take Bar. It's housed in a former dental clinic that's been renovated to resemble a Mississippi paddle steamer, only they left all the dentist's chairs in place in the middle of the dance floor. The theme was "Seal Clubbing Culture", so everyone turned up in fur-trimmed parkas and we listened to increasingly obscure electronica remixes of Kiss From A Rose. I bumped into a guy I knew from a work conference there, but I think I alienated him by making light of his mother's illness.

I did actually bump into Angel a few days ago. I was out getting absolutely nailed on a mixture of V&Ts and B-52s at Nanjie with my friends Milly and Jocasta. Angel was there with some guy she'd just met. She was very excited about getting us to come along with her to "a really exclusive club" where her beau was "on the guest list". We were too blitzed to go anywhere anyway, but we lost any semblance of interest when Angel revealed the name of this Shangri-La was, in fact, Poacher's. I didn't ruin her fun by telling her.