It's been more than a decade. I've been addicted to punk rock since I was 15 years old, constantly on the prowl for my next auditory fix, trying to recapture the intense high of discovering a new band.

It's like a first kiss. Your heart beats impossibly fast, your skin tingles, and you step lightly, like you've grown wings. Everything glows as if life has been dipped in a radioactive haze.

The more time you spend chasing this intoxicating euphoria, the easier it is to fall into the trap of cynicism, and I was worried that I was crawling down that path. Eventually the same power chords and songs about girls just didn't cut it. Everything sounded the same. I was spoiled on music.

Then I found myself in a developing rural Chinese town.

Folks still haul buckets hanging from a sloping pole across their shoulders, like the old man who comes by every morning hollering, 'Toe-fah!' He sells tofu out of two small dangling wooden shelves. His deep and scruffy voice carries in between the buildings and up into my third-story window, toe-fah, and it's the only live music I hear daily.

Daniel called.

'You're coming to Changsha and we're gonna go to a punk bar,' he said.

That was all I needed to hear.

I made the five-hour trek on buses and motorbike taxis without even knowing what band was playing, or even if a band was playing. Just the prospect of live music was enough for me to endure the ass-numbing trip. When you're starved, you'll go to great lengths to eat.

Changsha is a developing city mired in old-school Chinese dilapidation. The well-known bars in town blast Top 40 songs from five years ago, and many people go to the clubs only to get shit-faced on cheap liquor. I had never heard of a place to catch live music. Daniel knew the owner of the club, Fang Yao, because both had day jobs at the same school.

Remember when punk rock was dangerous, when you were worried about your welfare and your livelihood because of the music you listened to?

Nope, me neither. I haven't been around that long. I wasn't even born yet when mohawks were sprouting across the heads of the socially disenfranchised.