It was late by the time Matt, Sang and I arrived back at Qianmen for a meal in a backstreet restaurant, where Sang's excellent and my basic Chinese managed to convince the staff to charge at local prices for a change. We'd read the Chinese prices on the menu outside, but were handed the menu in English once seated, upon which the figures had been trebled. Sang took off his coat as we were about to eat - it was only then that I noticed that he was wearing a Maori pendant, the last thing I expected to see on a Korean in a Beijing diner. Apparently, he had studied English in Auckland before starting his degree in Chinese.

Matt was interested in learning about Beijing nightlife, so Sang and I conferred on the possibility of taking him to Sanlitun. By the time we found our way there, it was close to ten and the bars were swimming in foreigners. We set out to find an appropriate midrange venue.

The touts descended upon us within minutes, and in the absence of female company, their propositions had become far more direct. We were promised hostesses, massages, and bare sex by the touts who swarmed around us in groups of five or six. They assumed that Sang was our Chinese host; I heard them desperately trying to convince him that he would make his foreign friends very happy by bringing us to their establishment. They tried their rehearsed English phrases on Matt and I, 'Very beautiful Chinese girls only 100 Kuai', 'Very good massage', and 'All our waitresses speak English'. I answered one in Chinese, asking, 'If we don't speak English, what use is that?' which seemed to perturb him a moment, before he switched to Chinese with the same enticements. Matt explained to a pair of women that we were Buddhist monks, which impossibly worked - the girls ran away smartly.

We were looking for a drink, however, and had to choose one of the bars, so we settled on one down a side street which looked relatively uncrowded. Inside, I was rather taken aback to be surrounded by young women in indecent uniforms, unconscionably short miniskirts and long leather boots, all cooing about how handsome I was and how nice my clothes were. I sullened, my shyness taking on the disguise of moral outrage, ordered our drinks, and we were led to a small table.

The guests were all waiguoren; Koreans in one corner, fat Americans in the other. One moustachioed chubby yank was twisting on the dance floor with an elegant woman who was sensuously snaking her hips as he stared greedily at her crotch. Occasionally, one of the girls would squeal and run up towards the dancing pole on stage to slither down it to the cheers of the patrons.

A girl sat next to us and introduced herself as Candy. She looked around 28, her English was passable, but her manner was desperately lacking in sincerity. She asked us a few teasing questions, which we answered pointedly and uninvitingly, before she moved on to work on the Americans again. 

She was soon replaced by a second girl, who was involuntarily assigned to our table. Her English quickly proved to be genuinely good, as opposed to the rote learned cheesy seductive lines the other girls had memorised, and so I started asking her questions about the job and why she was here. She cautiously offered that she didn't like her work, so I probed a bit further until she relaxed and spoke candidly for the rest of the evening.

Wang Xiao Li came to Beijing from her home in Ningxia province, the smallest province of China which borders on Inner Mongolia. She is a bright and dedicated student of English who is determined to pursue success in America, where she hopes to earn enough to return to Ningxia and invest in the province's future. The hostess job was a recent low point in a difficult struggle to survive in the capital - she had left a job in an Italian Restaurant to come to the Cross Bar, where she was told she would also be working as a waitress. It wasn't until after she had started work that she had been told about the additional responsibilities. Her job is, in short, to make the foreign customers drink as much alcohol as possible in the evening. She had been given exacting instructions as to how this should be done - touching the men on their legs and chests, dancing sexily, seductively slipping her arm around the man's back and the drinks menu out in front of him.

All of this she can't stand, and as it turns out, she is considered to be the worst at it there. Despite this, she appears to have affected some resolve to continue the job despite the inherent seediness she has to put up with as a result. Her boss, who turned out to be Candy, had recently been chiding her for refusing to visit the customer's hotel rooms after closing time, which was considered bad for business. Wang Xiao Li confessed an open dislike for Candy, who had prostituted herself at the bar for a couple of years now. I asked how old Candy was, and was surprised to discover that she was just 21 - I glanced across at her and she smiled invitingly, plainly aggravated by Wang Xiao Li's not having persuaded us to buy drinks.