Choosing Christmas in Beijing

Multiple cops visited my bar on Christmas Eve, disrupting our dinner service, as part of a "routine" check, necessitating an interrogation at the station until past midnight. Then I went dancing.

Choosing Christmas in Beijing

            December 24-25, 2023

What feels like ages ago, though it was only
a few years before the pandemic, a giant dancing Santa
flashed from the façade of a tall hotel
in the city’s main entertainment district,
low-res animatron wiggling its legs on loop.
Sometime later, someone said no more Santas,
no more pine trees trussed up with lights;
were this country’s own holidays not enough?
The half-dozen cops that shouldered in on Christmas Eve
didn’t say as much, but they didn’t have to —
A routine check, they said, going table to table
inquiring of IDs from foreigners.
An Australian chef and I were brought
to the station.             Four hours later, back
at the bar, the two of us and four stragglers
took shots and two bottles of wine, toasting
to the interesting stories Beijing gifts us — because,
as I had made myself think in the unheated waiting room,
thoughts otherwise curdling at the edges, why else
would anyone choose this?                We negotiate
our reasons for happiness, choose when to risk heart-
break and when to say loneliness is just a phase,
like the moon, trusting it will come around some night
in a backdraft of euphoria and gratitude, empathy.
You can never plan for the unexpected but
the expected can’t plan for you, either — dervish,
dancer, proprietor of spirit. And on this holiday,
what a blessing that we choose our own family,
our own symbols, our own reasons to let loose.
An hour later, two women burst in, aghast
we were open. Together we went to our church,
Queenie’s, where bodies bumped and spun,
low-res animatrons, legs wiggling, light shaking within,
Chinese and American and Polish and Swiss
and Turkish and Korean, choosing a common language
to say an exuberant benediction
from the very bottom of our hearts,
Celine Dion and Mariah Carey and Wham!
blasting in the background, because we are here
and what else can anyone do?

At the Golden Weasel bar, Beijing