So a Chinese hipster walks into a bar... (blog-off entry #6)

The other night a couple friends from my program and I were walking to a book-commons/bar around 9 or so, when most of the little shops and such have closed down for the night. On this one particular stretch of street, all of the stalls were closed except for one at the end, glowing brightly with a gaggle of young folk hanging around outside the door.
"I guess that's where the cool kids hang out."
"Yeah, it's a hair salon."
"What?"
Yes, the hair salons of Chinese cities, where all the hip young gunslingers pall around into the wee hours of the night.

And why not? If you wanted to be cool, y'know, like when you were in middle school and your older brother's friend Mikey was just the COOLEST guy: frosted tips, offspring concert t-shirts, Abercrombie & Fitch visors, y'know what I'm talking about. And you wanted to be just as cool as him. This, in a sense, is what the urban Chinese youth is going through. First off, you've got the clothing styles rocked by western pop stars and celebrities. Next you've got the quickly budding car culture (despite the face that there's no room for China to have a car culture), there's the music, etc...etc... the list goes on, and somewhere on there is hair. Hair styles, that is, lifted from (in my opinion) Japanese anime and American hipsters.

Yes, I had thought that I had escaped the American hipster, but no, their presence is felt even here in the staggered-hair-over-one-eye and the peacock-spikes that have invaded the high schools and indie rock concerts of Seattle and elsewhere. But the great irony about the Chinese urban youth, who are appearing more and more like the irony-steeped American hipsters, is that they looooove bands like Sum 41 and Avril Lavinge--aka, hipster-rat-poison.

After all of these observations, I hold this to heart: just like after you left middle school, and realized that actually Mickey wasn't really all that hot shit, and that really, coolness is all about what's in the individual, all that unique and beautiful stuff that you choose to bring out of yourself--not the coolest bands, or slang, or hairstyles. So maybe someday the urban youth of China will realize this, and revel in their uniqueness.

...or maybe they'll just take on the mantle of mindless pop-culture supremacy, while American youth cross their arms at rock concerts and have parties where they do nothing but name off as many obscure indie bands as they and gossip about each other's hip t-shirt collections.

They're sorta the same thing, if you think about it.
-s

p.s. I am generalizing, I realize. While the "Chinese hipster" fashon is rampant in the city, there's also plenty of other ways the youth present themselves. Just like the US.