The author, in The Den circa 1999, wearing a wig for reasons unclear and not committed to memory.

Beijing has no use for your nostalgia. But when news that The Den was closing reached abroad last week it warranted a moment of reflection.

I have not set foot in The Den since 2002, and from the sounds of reports from Beijing this week, that was for the better. The Den, a European sports bar? That’s what Hidden Tree was for. Then again, Zhang Yimou makes CPC propaganda now.

Early Sanlitun was a dynamic, rogue, multicultural municipal experiment. And The Den, for a time, was its prince.

When The Den opened in 1997 it was a fresh, sexy, low-lights nook that evoked both opium den romance and illegal speakeasy raucousness. Today this bar-with-Mandarin-characteristics design — red lacquer and carved wood — is replicated in countless pubs across China as well as every Shanghai Tang boutique. New York City’s Pearl River Market sells for cheap the design elements that made The Den unique when it opened. In 1997, Beijing’s framed 1920s cigarette girl antique ads were all real and Alan Chan was just some guy in Hong Kong making retro postcards.

The Den combined two things Sanlitun revelers had already proved they wanted. The refinement of Jazzya and the drunken youthful abandon of Poacher’s unfussy dance floor. (This was the first, illegal, fire-trap Poachers on north Sanlitun before it moved into Chaoyang Park.)

The rugby brutes listening to Van Morrison had Durty Nellie’s, and the moody sophisticates giddy to bump into Cui Jian or Kaiser Kuo had Jam House. The horny old men had Maggie’s (and, honestly, 90% of the other bars in Beijing). The expats blinded by the optimism of youth and excited by a future in which their adventure in China was meaningful had The Den.

The Den’s owner, Meng Tong, was the closest Beijing will probably ever have to Rick. A friendly and handsome Chinese rake with a mysterious backstory, Meng was a presence over whom even the foreign girls swooned. (Too bad, ladies, at the time Meng was dating the daughter of the US ambassador.)

I spent no small amount of time with Meng in those early years. My roommate and I launched a monthly networking event — Young Professionals Happy Hour — and often held it at The Den. For a time, The Den also sold some of our hats and bags under the label The Chopstick Factory. More than once I jumped behind the bar and served free drinks to crowds swaying shoulder to shoulder, all with Meng’s blessing. One night, we convinced a traveling Hawaiian hula troop to drop by The Den and perform. To promote the event we “borrowed” a neon palm tree from the theater department at the International School of Beijing (then at the Holiday Inn Lido). The crushing crowd and ensuing half-riot ended with the Hawaiians fleeing into Ernie’s next door (formerly Frank’s).

And the dancing. Oh the dancing. The Den doesn’t have dancing anymore? What good is it then?

Unlike the cavernous, airline hanger dance halls popping up then (Big Ball; Nightman), The Den was tight. In fact, The Den was too small with ceilings too low to really be a dance space at all, which is what made it a perfect dance space. It was before good DJs came to Beijing, so dancers pinballed off each other in the tight upstairs to whatever the terrible hits of the day were, from the Spice Girls to Ricky Martin. If you bet me The Den played “Mambo Number 5” eight times in one night I would hold my money. Santana and Rob Thomas provided the soundtrack for tipsy young lawyers grinding on diplomatic contractors hoping to someday pass the foreign service exam. Nobody could tell what was the sweat and what was the spilled gin and tonics, and nobody cared. When Chumbawumba got knocked down (but got up again) the floor felt like it might collapse. And it being China, it might have been close. And if it did, well, we were going to the downstairs bar for a refill soon anyway.

The Den’s momentum was not sustainable, of course. Even by 2000, its popularity was ebbing, eclipsed by nearby haunts in the shadow of Workers Stadium, like the Havana Club and Vic’s, the latter having been opened by Meng himself.

Fun at the early Den was not just its unpredictability but also its inclusion. Unlike the predator-prey dynamics of most of the period’s expat bars, The Den was home to young professionals both Chinese and foreign. Students who grabbed a miandi (面包车 taxis) over from the west side universities rubbed shoulders with Chinese junior associates at foreign firms, expat interns at NGOs, and China Hands-in-training. Chinese and expat colleagues now often socialize together, but in 1997 that was rare. But not rare at The Den. Unlike the crowds at other Sanlitun nightspots, a surprising number of expats in The Den spoke at least a workable amount of Mandarin. The in-it-togetherness of the early Den created an atmosphere of respect, if a naughty one.

Abe Sauer has lived on and off in China for a quarter of his life starting in 1987. He’s an author and on Twitter @abesauer.

“The other sort of big summer movies often feel to me like it’s about one race, one credo and one country saving the world, and I wanted to make it about the world saving the world, no matter what skin color you have, what race you have, what belief you have — everybody in the movie saves the world, and we created a very equal structure…” — Guillermo del Toro, speaking to Salon.

In spite of Pacific Rim director Guillermo del Toro’s diplomatic observations about the sad racial and geopolitical architecture of Hollywood’s summer blockbusters, his Pacific Rim does not want for just such stereotypes. There is the fact that an entire hour of film passes during which only a few lines are spoken by a woman – this in a film whose marketing materials sell it with a female co-star. And there’s the stereotype-affirming white guy-submissive Asian female duo (alternative film title: South Pacific Rim). It seems, in del Toro’s “very equal structure” of world-saving, a vagina is as much a threat to the world as the “breach” on the sea floor from which monsters crawl forth.

Then there is the China problem.

With a name seemingly leftover from what was supposed to be a China scene from Real Steel, Pacific Rim’s Chinese “jaeger” robot is called Crimson Typhoon. (“Red Typhoon” was maybe too over the top, and anyway it had already been used in a Lily Cai Chinese Dance Company production commentary on the 40th anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.) It’s manned by three Chinese jaeger drivers who are identical triplets (played by Toronto’s Charles, Lance and Mark Luu). Yes, while every other jaeger in Del Toro’s culturally-sensitive world of Pacific Rim is operated by a pair, China’s bot is piloted by three men who quite literally — get ready for it – look the same.

Proving how little movement American pop culture has made with regard to China in the last century, the casting of the Crimson Typhoon terra-cotta army of three calls to mind Five Chinese Brothers, Claire Bishop’s 1938 children’s book for Americans.

Five Chinese Brothers‘s plot turns on five Chinese siblings who hatch a plot to save one of their own from charges of negligent homicide. The key to their scheme is that they all look so identically alike they can confuse authorities. The book features illustrations as culturally informed as Little Black Sambo, and was a fixture in US primary school classrooms as late as the 1980s. In many places, it still is.

But then, what can be expected from a film that casts Ron Perlman as “Hannibal Chau.” (Not for nothing, the original script described Chau as Asian.) On the bright side of progress, Pacific Rim is no Dragon Seed, Conqueror or Tea House of the Yellow Moon. And, anyway, to paraphrase Pacific Rim supporting star Charlie Day’s regular gig, “A lot of great actors have done Asian face.”

It’s a testament to Del Toro’s range that it’s difficult to decide which is worse, the identical Chinese pilots or the white man who’s been cast to deflect charges of prejudice from a Chinese villain that embodies every Chinese Exclusion Act-era, Fu-Manchu, wake-up-without-a-kidney trope about the underhanded Chinese. Chau black markets in powdered kaiju horn for male potency — hint hint! — and opines on how his Chinese customers are more or less savages, treating the kaiju as gods. Just to make sure the stereotypes sink in, the one Chinese extra who gets a line in the underground shelter with Charlie Day is dressed in a traditional peasant jacket with her hair in pigtails straight out of the Cultural Revolution era. The Chinese elements of the film are not “ninja pussy”-level stereotypes, but then, when that’s the yardstick… And let’s not even get into the ironic flipped script on the American nuclear metaphor underlying the most famous kaiju of all time (Godzilla) and the uncomfortable “immigration” walls and Pacific menace metaphor floating just under the waves in Pacific Rim. (Of course it was just coincidence Pacific Rim’s kaiju first appears in San Francisco, the site of Angel Island.)

The triplets were given no lines in the film — something a few Chinese viewers have complained about — though there appears to be a good reason for that decision. Their lack of language skills makes the decision to include them just a little bit more pitiful.

After one day’s screenings in China, feedback from Chinese audiences was generally positive, with some showing excitement for Crimson Typhoon and a recognition of the undeniable handsomeness of the triplets. But many others weren’t impressed. As one Weibo user wrote after seeing the film, “The Chinese elements are all ‘soy sauce,’ it’s a little nauseating.” “Soy sauce” — Chinese slang for throwaway roles in a film — was a common comment about the China-ness of the film.

Last year, the LA Times got in a snit and called out Hollywood for “conspicuously flattering or gratuitous additions” of Chinese and Asian characters and locations in a naked attempt to appeal to Chinese audiences. That condemnation came as a result of several Hollywood films trying to incorporate Chinese themes or locations. One of those films was Men in Black 3, which, despite the modern-day setting, featured a Chinese restaurant owner dressed like a character straight out of Five Chinese Brothers.

This suspicion that Hollywood is — what’s the word… – kowtowing to China by injecting its films with China-friendly themes is now at the point of tin foil paranoia. One popular movie website speculated Pacific Rim’s basketball playing scene was added because it’s “a wildly popular sport in China.”

If “Hannibal Chau” is one of the flattering additions for the Chinese, the largest film market in the world may just tell Hollywood in the future, “Thanks, but kindly stop.” In fact, there are signs they already are as domestic films have begun regally outperforming Hollywood imports.

Finally, in case you were wondering, Five Chinese Brothers rates four-and-a-half out of five stars at Amazon and remains on the National Education Association’s list of Teachers’ Top 100 Books for Children.

Abe Sauer is the author of How to be: North Dakota.