Red Ants - Guangzhou, 1993

There were between 25 and 30 foreign service officers at the Canadian mission in Hong Kong back in the early 1990s, but only three of us had diplomatic accreditation to the People’s Republic of China, which we simply called ‘the PRC’. Remember that back in those days Hong Kong was still a British colony, and the PRC was still in the early stages of opening up to contact with westerners. Foreigners living in Hong Kong needed visas to cross the border, and once inside China we weren’t supposed to use the local currency, but were expected instead to buy and use special Foreign Exchange Certificates sold to us at an unrealistic exchange rate. Fortunately everyone at that time in southern China wanted Hong Kong dollars, so you’d exchange only a token amount at the official rate just for sake of appearances.

I held one of the three diplomatic accreditations so that I could travel up to Guangzhou to issue visas to PRC citizens being sponsored by family members living in Canada. The work was not especially difficult, just repetitious. A colleague and I would be dropped off at the train station in Hong Kong with a half dozen enormous hard-shell suitcases full of visa files. The trip to Guangzhou took a couple hours, and was usually uncomfortable but uneventful. The PRC-operated train was quite filthy and infested with cockroaches. One female colleague I travelled with would bring a tea towel to place between her head and the seat back for fear of getting head lice.

Guangzhou has an interesting history. Located in the Pearl River estuary, it was one of the few ports where foreign countries could trade with China back in the days of the emperors (which lasted up until the early twentieth century). During the Opium Wars of the 1830s-40s the British seized Guangzhou (which they called ‘Canton’) from the Chinese, and operated warehouses and trading facilities. Down by the riverfront where many of the buildings of the British era still remain is the part of town most visitors see, and where you’d find the hotels catering to western business travellers. As you move inland away from the river, you’re confronted by modern China and all its noise, traffic smog, and concrete high rises.

My preferred place to stay in Guangzhou back then was a recently built and only partly occupied Ramada hotel located somewhere out in the urban sprawl. This was so that after a long day of interviewing visa applicants through an interpreter I could grab dinner in the hotel’s surprisingly decent restaurant and then shuffle over to the Red Ants for a bottle or two of Pearl River beer.

The Red Ants was a hole-in-the-wall western style bar in a nondescript mall, only you’d not see many westerners in it. The evening clientele was mostly a mix of twenty-something Chinese and African exchange students. In those days China was still actively cultivating cultural exchanges with socialist African nations, and through this the adult children of well-connected Africans would be sponsored to go to Chinese universities. The Red Ants was the preferred watering hole of many of these students – mostly men – and their local girlfriends. The DJ catered to his clientele, so the music was typically pretty good – a few western pop songs interspersed with King Sunny Ade and Bob Marley. To this day, whenever I hear No Woman/No Cry I still picture the seats emptying as the couples rose to slow dance at the Red Ants.

Sidled up to the bar with an oversized Pearl River bottle in my hand was the closest I ever felt to being a character in a John Le Carré novel during my foreign service career. Walking in the door you got the feeling you were doing something just a little subversive, that at any minute the authorities would be busting in to shut the place down and incarcerate or deport anyone found inside. Remember, this was only a couple years removed from the Tiananmen Square protests, where hundreds of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing were killed by their government. But in reality the Red Ants was no hotbed of intrigue so far as I know, and if the authorities had it on some sort of blacklist, they never bothered to take action any time I was there.

The last time I went in was probably in the fall of 1995. The Red Ants was looking shabbier than ever, and there weren’t many people around. A disinterested young woman was randomly plugging worn out old cassette tapes into the sound system. Bob Marley’s voice warbled and cut out.  Where once it had been unique, newer western style bars had opened up in more convenient locations, and many of its denizens had relocated there.

I did a Google search today but could find no recent references to the Red Ants, only a few notes in a Google book about an art exhibit held there back in 1993. While China’s opening to the west and subsequent economic boom was good for many people in southern China, it wasn’t for the Red Ants. Perhaps it’s just as well.