Audiophile: someone who loves music and strives to reproduce music in its purest form.

As someone who bopped around as a toddler to reggae and had huge unrealistic dreams of becoming a top-notch sound engineer traveling the world working every music festival from Glastonbury to Midi, I am arguably someone who fits into the audiophile category.

Without music, I'm pretty sure life, well "my" life at the very least, would be a mistake. It gives our existence meaning and is a constant, through thick and thin. When life is not ideal, music is played to escape. When life is going great, music is played to celebrate. So, back in 2010, when I started studying Chinese and needed to find some way to stay motivated, obsessively seeking out Chinese music was the no-brainer.

As someone with a proclivity for the more underground of musical scores, obscure opuses than popular hits, I found it difficult to unearth music that I could learn from. At that time, my Chinese was not yet good enough to decipher what aspects of the human condition the bands I had found were screaming about or the Chinese history lessons they were preaching. Also, my circle of Chinese friends, equally enthusiastic about music and patient enough to explain things, could be counted on a closed fist.

This all changed with my discovery of 666 Rock Shop. Nestled in the hutongs near the Drum Tower, 666 Rock Shop is a heavy metal music paradise among all the snack stalls, cafes and street vendors peddling their goods. Managed by diehard music fans, it is where you go to for new releases and meaningful conversations with like-minded individuals about anything under the sun. With conversations centered around music, abrupt interruptions by everyone breaking out in song were commonplace. Quintessential heavy metal classics were a favorite to incite shop-wide singing.

A study-abroad-student in the early 2010s, my every Saturday afternoon was spent at 666 Rock Shop nerding out over music and receiving a deeper cultural education. Through my time loitering and the more than occasional chitchat with random customers, I learned a lot of slang terms, as in what is considered lao Beijing (native Beijinger) as well as about China's music history. I got to hear many stories about how people discovered their passion for music. These stories usually began with Michael Jackson.

And though the above combined may suggest otherwise, it wasn't just me spending as much time as possible at 666 Rock Shop. A group of us did. 666 Rock Shop is not just a record shop, it is a community space. Meaningful relationships and memories have been forged there. Several couples have their "how we met" stories firmly cemented in the guiding framework of 666 Rock Shop; one regular customer even proposed to his wife there.

In the fields of social science, such as anthropology, the importance of human connection and community is a major topic of study. As humans, we instinctively seek out and find people like us because the company and support from others help us as individuals and as a group to flourish. Needing a community is part of our human makeup, regardless of differences. So, finding a place where I could be surrounded by compatible compadres proved a huge comfort. It helped create a home over 6,400 km away from my actual hometown. It gave me a family of likeminded people who didn't just look at my physical appearance and write me off. I was not seen as some foreign girl who sticks out like a sore thumb and should be ignored and not engaged with because of it at all costs.

Instead, our shared love for soaring guitar solos, power anthems and profound lyrical concepts transcended any cultural or linguistic differences.

Since being stuck outside of Beijing because of COVID-19 and far away from the community I now call my second family, I have found myself reminiscing about those humid summer nights at 666 Rock Shop debating what we should eat once the shop closed for the day and discussing the one thing that brought us all together, music. BR

The author is an American freelance writer 

(Print Edition Title: Community Through Common Unity) 

Copyedited by Elsbeth van Paridon 

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