Saturday we went to the Jiashan Market again with Peter. We took a cab with Peter there, and another one home. We're getting used to ordering cabs through Didi. Kerry is more adept at it than I, but it's very convenient and not too expensive. Neither of us likes standing around in cold weather. The market wasn't was much fun as last time, partly because of the colder, windy weather, but mostly because the Lebanese food stand wasn't there: no shwarma, hummus, or baba ganoush. Bummer! Still, we found some good dessert treats, including cheesecake, a Shanghai mug, and a couple gifts for others which I won't mention here. I did some grading/prep mid-day, and then in the evening we went to the drag party at Lucca 390, our first real gay event in Shanghai. Again, we took a cab there. We got there quite early at first--around 9:30--so we just walked around and explored. We ran into Summer Xia, a SISU student who is running the Rainbow Aliens group at school. It seems very undercover to me. Nothing public--everything seems to be on WeChat. There's no real public signage or advertisement for this group. Anyway, we got chased out of the original seats we were sitting in because we were told that "judges were sitting there." Okay... So we went downstairs to see the amateurs perform. The co-hosts were "Miss Banana" and a small Asian drag king. What's interesting is that the drag king always spoke to the audience in English FIRST, and then Miss Banana spoke in Chinese to the audience second. I would have thought it would be the other way around. So we saw the amateur peformerers, and most were pretty good. My favorites were a drag king who performed to the song "Linda Evangelista" and fired up the crowd with his moves and Emily, who Summer knew, who performed a sultry burlesque of a Chinese song. I found out later that Emily won (even though we didn't think her lip-synching was great). The disappointing moment of the experience was when a huge genderqueer performer came on stage wrapped in a white sheet with expressions like "FAGGOT" and "DYKE" all over them. This person was flanked by two individuals, one on each side. They performed "Praying" by Kesha and glitter-bombed the audience at the end. At first, Kerry and I thought it was amusing, but we realized quickly that THERE WAS GLITTER EVERYWHERE. Glitter in our shirts, our hair, our pants, our phones, etc. The amusement factor lowered considerably after that, especially since we were told we had to wait 90 minutes for the professional competition. So we each grabbed our free drink (which was no easy task...the place was jammed), and left soon after. It was impossible to walk around near the end, and we had to escape. I was grateful that there was no smoking in the bar. One interesting thing: very few people were touchy-feely, which is very much unlike American gay bars. Almost no one was touching, not even a hand on a shoulder, except for Caucasians.
Here are some pictures from Lucca 390:
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| This is Erica, Summer's friend, who looked amazing! She won the amateur drag queen competition. |
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| Long shot of the club. |
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| Another shot of Erica, performing. |
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| You can see the glitter all over me in this picture. |
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