Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  Ju Chao received a scholarship to the Minerva Schools, an education start-up founded by a former Harvard dean in San Francisco, an initiative meant to disrupt the overly expensive elite education system. “Our first year is in San Francisco, and then every semester after that we live in a new country,” Ju Chao told me excitedly. All the classes at Minerva were online, led by elite professors teaching remotely. They were highly interactive and the class size was small. All the students would live in dorms, and the professor would beam in. Because all the students’ faces were on screen, and the professor could call on them at random, each student sat fully engaged. It lacked a human touch, but for Ju Chao, who had been taking online classes for years, it was a perfect fit. “I’ve always wanted to be part of something cutting edge, something experimental,” he said. “Plus, we really get to see the world.”

  In addition to his coursework, which takes Ju Chao only about twelve hours a week to complete at his blistering pace, he does another ten hours of coursework for an edX class. “Advanced astrophysics is more difficult than any of the classes I’m taking at school,” he said. “But, hey, it’s not going to learn itself, right?”

  9

  The Good Comrade

  Being Gay in the Middle Kingdom

  Two meaty bouncers stood guard outside Destination’s concrete gate. They checked bags, backpacks, and purses, of which there were several, before allowing clusters of men to make their way into the stone courtyard outside the club. William chuckled as he watched the bouncer sift through his backpack, knowing the check would reveal only lube and condoms. On the subway ride over, William had insisted he was not on the prowl that night. He preferred Funky for that, but the owner of the trendiest gay club in Beijing had closed its doors during the Chinese Spring Festival so he could go home and see his parents. Therefore we chose Destination. Voted trendiest comrade club back in 2008, Destination had matured to popular. From outside the gates the vibrations from the club’s bass pounded through Beijing’s gray sidewalk, the thump-thwap-thump-thwap quivering up through the soles of my shoes.

  Comrade, tóngzhì, 同志, literally means “someone of the same ambition, dream, or aspiration.” The address is emblematic of Mao’s China during the Cultural Revolution, which saw all Chinese citizens transform from being neighbors, cousins, brothers and sisters, and even spouses into political allies.

  Today the term comrade no longer refers to Communist revolutionaries; it has been co-opted by China’s gay community to describe its members. Posters pasted on the walls of buildings along Beijing streets no longer read, COMRADE, SHATTER THE OLD SOCIETY, BUILD THE NEW! Instead, a poster inside Destination asks, COMRADE, HAVE YOU BEEN TESTED RECENTLY?

  A hundred or so men milled in the courtyard outside the club. Brightly colored outfits began to poke out from under thick winter coats. Within the courtyard walls no one risked being seen by a coworker, family member, or neighbor while waiting to enter the well-known gay bar on one of Beijing’s crowded bar streets. The secluded courtyard served as a depressurization chamber, a type of cultural airlock that facilitates the transition from Beijing’s gray-skied world to the sultry red burn behind the club doors. Tall, short, heavy, thin, femme, butch, built, glitz—the full array of looks, types, and attitudes inched forward in line, everyone posturing and checking out other clubbers with feigned indifference. Yet a significant number, what William called day walkers, displayed no style at all. “You wouldn’t be able to pick these boys out of a lineup of straight guys. Your gaydar might not work so well in China,” William told me while he scanned the crowd.

  William, who was in his early twenties, was one of the youngest in line. He stood tall, his posture sturdy. A black T-shirt clung to his well-muscled shoulders. By early morning he would peel it off on the dance floor. William was a philosophy student at Sichuan University, one of the best in his class. He wore his hair in a bun secured with a dark wooden hairpin on top of his head. “Not like your dirty hipsters,” he explained. “Like a Song Dynasty scholar.” Take out the pin and his hair would fall over his broad shoulders. Will had been to the gym a few hours earlier. “I wanted a pump before hitting the dance floor.”

  We finally reached the ticket counter. When the heavy doors pulled open to let someone in, waves of bass rolled out and tingled the nerves on my cheeks. The doorman was handsome and manicured, dressed in a sleek black suit with a black shirt unbuttoned to show a smooth chest. The pink-orange club light glinted off his swooping hair and reminded me of a Taoist painting of an ocean wave at dusk. “Two, please,” William said. On the wall behind him a large poster on the all-black wall announced: BEAR HUNTING, WEDNESDAY NIGHT and featured a bulky half-bear half-man leaning suggestively against a wall. William pointed to the sign and yelled, “God, I wish it was Wednesday!” Then, turning to me, he added, “Don’t forget: tonight, steer clear of potato hunters. They’re everywhere!” With that, he shoved me toward the door, and we squeezed into Destination.

  * * *

  Two weeks earlier William and I had pushed into a bus in Chengdu at rush hour.

  William was born in 1992. At that time in China homosexuality was regarded as a crime against the state and a psychological disease by the Chinese Society of Psychiatry. From 1979 to 1997, the first twenty-eight years of post-Mao China, male homosexuality was criminalized as hooliganism, 流氓罪, liúmáng zùi. Hooliganism was a type of catchall criminal charge for what the Communist Party deemed morally unsavory activity. It became emblematic of China’s “severe crackdown,” which began in 1983, against the moral laxity associated with opening China’s doors to the world and foreign influence. Acts deemed hooliganism included premarital sex, dancing to Western music, sexual harassment, petty theft, disturbing the peace, fighting in public, and engaging in homosexual sex, among others. The punishment for hooliganism could be lifetime imprisonment or even death.

  Gays in China tells stories from the antihooliganism days about comrades who gathered in parks, public restrooms, under bridges—any public place that got dark enough at night to afford some privacy. Older comrades tell stories about love affairs cloaked in anonymity, furtive romances consummated quickly in the dark, movements rushed, voices low for fear of being caught. They set up their own types of sexuality speakeasies in cities as safe spaces to sit, talk, and feel normal for an evening; everyone understood that flirting, much less hooking up, was out of bounds. “If you lived in the countryside, which most people did then, you were living on an island,” an older comrade told me. Today Internet forums have largely supplanted that normalized space. So when William said he wanted to take me to a gathering, I had no idea what he had planned for us.

  When William was a young boy growing up in Beijing, he had not known what homosexuality was. “It was brought up casually in the news, movies, the media,” he said. “They would mention 同性恋, tóng xìng lìan, but I never knew what it meant. Does it make you sick? Does it hide under your bed? Will it take you to jail?”

  Chinese use the same word, tóng xìng lìan, for gay and lesbian. The first character means “same.” The second character primarily means “sex” or “gender.” The third character means “to love.” The problem is, the character for gender sounds the same as the character for surname. Both characters are pronounced with a falling fourth tone. In written Chinese the difference is as small as a changed radical on the left side of the character—性; 姓. When first meeting someone in China, it is polite to ask what their honorable xìng, their honorable surname, is. Though it sounds identical, you are not asking, “What is your honorable gender?”

  Because he had never seen the word for homosexuality in writing, William misunderstood the two characters completely. “Eventually, I sort of understood that it was two people who had the same surname and so would have a special bond. We would joke around at school with other classmates, ‘Your last name is Zhao. My last name is Zhao. We are homosexual!’”

  William was five when the government abolished the antihooligani
sm law in 1997, but that did not change the way people talked about sex. Chinese sex education is notoriously sparse. Ye Su, a twenty-two-year-old lesbian from Jiangxi Province, told me, “Our sex-ed teacher, the school nurse, wouldn’t talk about it with us. She put on the [video] Mysteries of the Human Body and then walked out of the room.” When I asked what her parents had told her about sex, she said, “My mom told me she found me in the dumpster.”

  Chinese society firmly discourages experimentation and relationships among young people. But there was a loophole. Because no one ever even mentioned LGBT issues, they were uncharted moral territory. William had his first homosexual sexual encounter, oral sex with an older classmate, before he knew what homosexuality was. “We all knew that sex was bad, something for adults when we were younger. But we also knew that sex was something you had with a girl. We truly did not know what we were doing was a sexual act.”

  The Chinese Society of Psychiatry removed homosexuality and bisexuality from its Chinese Classification of Medical Disorders in 2001. Notably, the psychiatrists failed to strike gender dysphoria from the list of psychological diseases, and it remained on the list in 2017.

  William was in elementary school when being gay no longer meant having a psychological disease, but that did not change the way his sex education teacher would describe homosexuality. All the way through middle school, William remembered, the school nurse would tell students that being gay was “akin to being mentally retarded, having something psychologically wrong with you.”

  He probably would have believed his teachers, he said, were it not for the Chinese sexologist Li Yinhe, one of the most famous intellectuals in modern China. William read in detail about homosexuality in her book, Their World: A Study of Homosexuality, originally published in 1992, when he was 12 years old. He had found it tucked away in a Beijing bookstore and sat down and read it right there, too afraid to buy it and take it home.

  * * *

  China probably has the largest homosexual population in the world. Specific numbers simply do not exist, but experts estimate that 3 to 5 percent of China’s population, or forty to seventy million people, are homosexual.1* China is not a religious country by nature, so neither sin nor God stands in the way of full social acceptance for the homosexual community in the Middle Kingdom. And yet, according to surveys from Danlan, one of the biggest Chinese gay men’s social networks, only 3 percent of China’s gay male population are fully out of the closet to everyone—friends, parents, and colleagues. A full one-third have not told another soul. For lesbians the numbers are only slightly higher: 5 percent are fully out; 80 percent have come out to some friends; and only 9 percent have not come out to anyone.2

  For decades Li Yinhe had dared to talk and write about life behind the bedroom door when sex before marriage was still a crime and homosexuality could get you locked up for life. A hero in the gay and lesbian community, she continues to push a measure to legalize gay marriage, an issue she first broached in 2003. As one friend told me, “If you are LGBT in China, Professor Li’s writings likely taught you about who you are.”

  As I discussed in chapter 5, Li Yinhe graciously met me for tea in Beijing. The professor, born in 1952, is nearly the same age as the People’s Republic of China; she was born three years after Mao won the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party. She is short with close-cropped graying hair and big glasses and has a heavy Beijing accent. We settled down to talk in the second-story tea room.

  “You can learn a lot about the way Chinese people see the world from the way they see homosexuality,” she said. “In Chinese history people didn’t look down on homosexuality as unnatural, as going against the laws of nature or God. They saw it sometimes as silly, sometimes as a shame, and mostly as a missed opportunity. ‘A healthy young man like him should be making children, not messing around!’

  “In China, we have a saying,” Li Yinhe continued, intoning one of the most quoted lines of Confucianism in modern China:

  不孝有三， 无后为大*

  This sentence comes closest to Chinese scripture. It describes the importance of family continuity. Morally speaking, not having children isn’t just a personal choice: it makes you a bad person.

  The saying has become particularly relevant since the one-child policy was abolished. Throughout all the discussions I’ve had about Chinese culture, this Confucian principle stressing the importance of children has been brought up more than any other law or value. A young man from rural Shaanxi said to me at a gay bar in Chengdu, “Westerners drink the blood and eat the flesh of their God every Sunday—and they say homosexuality is unnatural! Chinese are far more practical: Where is the next generation?” Chinese men who decide not to come out of the closet most often cite pressure from the family as the reason.3

  Professor Li said Chinese culture teaches people to deal with sexual urges by suppressing them. Confucius famously said that when he turned seventy he could finally follow his heart’s desires without violating his moral code—it took him that long to train his body’s impulses to fall into line with the ethics he taught. China’s gay community chooses to suppress their sexual orientation or at least conceal it. Li Yinhe believes that 80 percent of China’s gay male population, twenty to thirty million men, marry women.4 Another of China’s pioneering sexologists now retired from the University of Shanghai, Liu Dalin, has gone so far as to say 90 percent of male homosexuals in China marry women, compared with 15 to 20 percent of American men.5

  * * *

  At the beginning of the summer of 2012 Luo Hong Ling, a lecturer at Sichuan University, heard her new husband’s phone buzz while he was in the shower. She answered it and found a text message from a man she did not know. Official reports later said the text was of a “dubious nature.”

  Like many couples, she and her husband had been introduced by mutual friends. Luo Hong Ling was quite familiar with the tradition of matchmaking—the title of her master’s thesis was “An Inspection and Comparison of ‘Matchmakers’ in Chinese and Korean Literature.” But married life was not what she had imagined. She sought help in online forums. After her online friends learned that she and her husband had been intimate only a handful of times in their several months of marriage, they told her she might be married to a comrade.

  As Luo flipped through her husband’s phone, she was shocked to find that he had accounts on several gay social apps.

  Twenty-five days later, on an early summer morning, Luo Hong Ling sent out a status update on Sina Weibo, a popular microblogging website: “This world is truly exhausting. Might as well end it all.”6 She then walked up thirteen stories to the roof of her university apartment complex and leapt to her death.

  The media picked up her story, and the net erupted in outrage at her husband. “He tricked her, lied to her, all just to protect his identity from his family!”

  Luo’s parents took her husband, Cheng Mou, to court, leveling a charge of piànhūn, “scam marriage,” an accusation originally written into law to protect those whose spouses have stolen marital assets, typically money or land. This was the first time a scam marriage had been associated with what Chinese call simply “gay wives,” tóng qī, women who unknowingly marry a gay man. But from a hard legal perspective, Cheng Mou had nothing tangible to gain from the marriage. He did not steal property or money, nor did he entangle Luo Hong Ling’s family in business-related debt. What Cheng Mou had gained from the marriage was an opportunity to not disappoint his parents, to be a good son. With no evidence of stolen property or money, the court rejected the case.

  Marriage is often the gravitational center of a Chinese person’s life, the vehicle for creating a family legacy, and family is the social fabric of traditional China. For tens of millions of Chinese women like Luo Hong Ling, their gravitational center is based on a scam.

  * * *

  As our bus headed north through Chengdu, William began to talk about the Internet and how his parents had learned he was a comrade.


  The first email from within China was sent in 1987. It said, “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world.” Internet became available to the public in 1994.7 Because of his family’s connections, William’s was one of the first homes in his neighborhood with a desktop computer connected to the Internet. He was about twelve when his mother noticed that his Internet history led to the Friend, Don’t Cry website, one of the earliest forum websites in China—and devoted entirely to explaining homosexuality. He found the site poking around on the internet after discovering the work of Li Yinhe. “More than anything else, it was a site that told me, for the first time in my life, really, that being gay is a real thing,” William said. The forums were especially useful. “The forum described gay lifestyle, the feelings involved. But it was the stories that hit home. I saw those and was like, ‘Oh shit, I’ve been gay this whole time.’”

  William’s voice rolled out smooth and deep. His Mandarin was crystal clear and extremely standard, unlike most of the Sichuanese-tinged Mandarin spoken in Chengdu. “It was a new age, an Internet era, and I didn’t understand how to cover my tracks,” he recalled. When his mom asked him about his use of the site, William explained it away as curiosity, saying, “I just wanted to understand the peculiar gay society better.” The China of 2003 was experiencing a surge of interest in the novel field of psychology. To William’s rational, academic mother, his curiosity was intellectual and therefore justifiable.

  Then he got worse at covering his tracks. When he was fourteen, his mother found his chat history on QQ, a social website with a chat function similar to instant messaging. He was part of a gay group chat with weeks and weeks of gay-related conversation. William once again fumbled through an excuse. Then, a year later, his mother looked through his texts and found him sexting, talking dirty in a text message, with a classmate.