"How do you always have so much passion?" the usually staid Mickey Zhang asks.

It's 2 AM on a weeknight, we're both at White Rabbit, and I've been the only one on the dance floor for about the last half-hour, grinning from ear to ear, undisturbed by anything but the music. It's a long story, man.

I walk, I talk, I laugh, I write. I travel the world and the seven seas. I go to parties. But before I did any of them, I danced. Or so I've been told. Squarely cradled on the hip of an elderly Afro-Cuban woman in a working-class Miami immigrant neighborhood sometime in the early 1980s, toothless and half-bald, that's me getting down. My grandmother never really cared that she was living far away from home, that she had to show up a penniless refugee in a foreign country, or that she'd most likely die before she ever returned to a smoky salsa club on her native island.

Cubans have been getting a raw deal for decades now, but what makes the most salient impression on travellers to both the country itself and to Miami, home to its largest community in exile, is the fact that they never really stop dancing. While I don't generally like to promote stereotypes based on ethnicity, this happens to be one instance where I'll make an exception. My grandmother, god bless her, is pushing ninety and in a wheelchair now, but she'll never be anything but Cuban, so she still raises her fists in the air whenever there's anything soulful playing. The apple doesn't fall too far from the tree, I guess. What is this, you ask, that pumps through our blood? It's a little something we in the Cuban Spanish-speaking world like to call tumbao.

What is tumbao? Miami-based Cuban jazz hound Marc S. Tara explains: "Technically, the word refers to repetitive bass and/or conga drum figures employed in Cuban music. But, in my weird world view, the word "tumbao" carries other inferred meanings of an almost mystical sort. If some cat plays "con tumbao", it means he moves the music forward in strong, rolling rhythm with deep feeling or 'con alma'."

How a Cuban-American girl ended up in Beijing is anyone's guess, but I like to use the music as an explanation for why I stay. Beijing has a hell of an electronica scene, so it's easy for me to satisfy that perpetual need to spend a night on a dance floor. Lately, however, I've been running out of steam. I initially blamed it on illness, then on exhaustion. But while I'm in attendance at one of last weekend's parties, I actually start feeling a bit melancholy. The DJ is casting long zig-zags of shadows over stark, desolate landscapes; the throbbing beat leaves me with a dull, persistent ache. I walk around the club chit-chatting with some friends there, but the music simply fails to move me quite as much as I crave.

Feeling more like an extra on the set of The Seventh Seal than someone at a party, I have to leave. But to go where? It's not that late, and I know that the next party will have much more of the same.

While I'd love to say that Beijing has a diverse and variegated electronic music scene, I really can't: from where I stand, techno has completely saturated the musical atmosphere. There seem to be half a dozen techno parties each week, and half the DJs who come into town are doing so to spin dark, minimal techno. Even so many of our local DJs don't seem to be playing anything else.

Maybe it's the winter chill of the last few weeks that's also getting me down, but I'm (gulp) growing weary of techno.

Or am I really? Of course, it's a detached, mechanical beat that characterizes the genre, but techno is still a sound that has its roots in the city better known as Motown. Torn apart by racial tension, burned to the ground during riots, and shattered by the demise of what was once America's greatest industry, Detroit is the kind of city that produces music to uplift the soul, because the people who live there will lose their minds otherwise.

Long before I even imagined I'd ever be calling Beijing home, I lived in a midwestern college dorm room with a girl who used to pump Derrick May from the stereo and irritate people who lived across the hall. I haven't seen her in almost six years, but she's still one of my favorite people in the world. It's hard to forget the kind of friend with whom the Cuban in me danced up such a storm: a fellow party girl par excellence with existential sadness in her eyes but a rowdy, infectious laugh, and a hell of a lot of rhythm. After graduation, I wasn't too surprised that she moved back to Detroit.

Recently I've wondered if the prodigal in me should also return to my former stomping ground for a visit. Then again, I know that I'd miss Beijing. At the end of the day, it's still techno, shamefully under-represented in Miami, that begs me for a dance: I just want to hear it smooth, hear it bright, hear it groove in my heart. I've spent the night dancing to quite a few sets that did it in the past, so I'm hopeful that the current Beijing trend is just that.

It can be dark, stripped-down, and distant, but techno isn't techno without tumbao.