Singapore, Apr 07: Every Saturday night Chen Kuo Wei is out on the town: belting out "God blessed Texas with His own hand" and dancing in his straight-cut blue jeans and knee-high cowboy boots. Never mind that he's never been to Texas, or even the United States. Chen, a 55-year-old retired businessman with a long silver pony tail, loves to line dance.
He's not alone. Thousands of Singaporeans are fans.
There is something about dancing to the music of the Old West that resonates in the Far East, especially in this tightly controlled tropical island where people are constantly hectored to keep in step.
Enthusiasts in the Southeast Asian city-state trace the phenomenon back to the late 1990s when a Japanese dance instructor introduced line dancing.
Some 12,000 Singaporeans even boogied their way into the Guinness Book of World Records in May 2002 by turning a dance floor the size of eight football fields into a giant hoe-down. But they were unseated months later by Hong Kong, the current record holder for the "world's largest country line dance" with 12,168 dancers.
Bureau Report