Last night, one of my roommates and I went out to a local club. The pickings were slim; most of the male crowd fell into one of the following categories:

• Old Asian men who should have left the club forty years ago
• White men who were looking to pick up Chinese girls
• Men (of all races) who just stood there on fringes of the dance floor, too terrified to do anything but chain smoke cigarettes

Still, we thought not all was lost. At the very least we could try talking to some of the Chinese men by the bar in an effort to practice our Chinese, and perhaps score a free drink or two, right?

Wrong. The first guy we approached on the dance floor had no interest in dancing with us at all. We moved on pretty quickly from him, but further observations led us to discover that the guy didn’t want to dance with anyone at all. No, he was perfectly content bopping along to the music on his own, which is more than unusual in a club setting.

The next guy we approached turned out to be a dud as well. It soon became clear that this guy had no idea what he was doing in a club scene. He didn’t offer to buy us drinks. (Which is his right, of course, but unusual, particularly in the Chinese club scene.) In fact, he asked us why we had no drinks, but in such a way that it was a genuine question – no underlying meaning was applied to the question. He was not a good conversationalist, and he seemed to not understand anything we said as we had to repeat sentences several times for him to comprehend what we were saying.

It got to the point where we were clearly getting nowhere with this guy, as our time talking to him was more painful than anything else. Not to mention that we couldn’t enjoy our night out as two single girls if he followed us like a shadow. When we told him we (making it clear that “we” was my roommate and I, he was not included) were going to go to the upstairs bar, he followed. We then told him we were going to go to the club next door, once again that was met with an enthusiastic, “Let’s go, then!”

It took all of our evasion tactics to lose the guy. Our attempts to evade him culminated in us hiding in the bathroom for half an hour with him patiently waiting for us outside. In the end, we made a beeline for the dance floor from the bathroom and managed to lose him for a bit. But then he found us again, at which point we decided to call it a night and head home. This guy was persistent, and as our entire night thus far had consisted of trying to lose him and failing miserably, we were not going to have a good night.

I still can’t believe he didn’t pick up on any of our hints and signals. Some of them were subtle, many were obvious, but they all had the same glaringly obvious message: you are boring and we are not interested, so please leave us alone.

Tags: lol