“After they caught me for the third time, there was no getting around it.” Will prepared a pot of his father’s favorite tea and set it out on the living room table. Then he called his parents together and told them he was gay.
“My dad didn’t say one word, just leaned back and stared at the ceiling. My mom said, ‘If you’re sure, we can only accept this. We’ve already prepared ourselves.’”
Our bus pulled to the side of a bridge to let passengers off. William bounded off the bus and into Chengdu’s packed bike lane. Electronic mopeds whizzed past. He breathed deeply and exhaled, nodding his appreciation. “The air is good today. Good for practice.”
We had arrived in the old part of the city, the less developed northeast. The southern end of the city had turned into a high-tech zone during the previous five years, with glimmering steel and glass climbing higher and higher above the concrete apartment buildings erected years before.
“You know mapo tofu?” William asked, as we weaved through the foot traffic on the sidewalk. I nodded—he was talking about one of Sichuan’s most internationally renowned dishes: tofu set in a numbingly spicy chili and bean sauce and cooked with fermented black beans and minced pork. Legend has it that the tofu used in this dish is named after a “MáPó,” a pockmarked grandmother who used to sell it from her shop. “The pockmarked grandmother originally lived a few blocks away from here,” William said, gesturing north. I blinked at Chengdu’s hazy skyline, trying to imagine a ruddy grandmother hawking her spicy specialty in a time before these concrete apartments and metallic high-rises dominated the nightscape.
Soon William’s determined gait whisked us across the bridge, dodging electronic bikes and street vendors selling knock-off iPhone cables and selfie sticks that they had laid out on tarps on the side of the street. Chinese music from the 1990s blared from a portable amplifier providing the beat for rows of dancing middle-aged women who were getting in a streetside aerobics workout after dinner. A car honked, a child cried, and then William slipped around a corner and out of sight, engulfed by the activity of a Chinese city at night.
* * *
After William had come out to his parents, days passed before his father voiced any reaction. Finally, he pulled William aside to ask one question: “What have you planned for kids? What about the next generation?”
William shouldered a particularly consequential role in his family. Grandfather Zhao had had three sons, a major point of pride. “With so many sons, it should have been easy to continue the family line. Plus, that many sons would mean my grandparents were well taken care of as they aged.”
Then the one-child policy changed everything for the Zhao family. Now those three sons could have only one child each. Two already had daughters. Only William’s father produced a son, making William the sole hope for continuation of the family line.
William was gay but nonetheless responsible for producing the next generation. His dad had thought the issue through. The issue wasn’t marriage or spouse but bloodline and genetics. “You’ve got two options: adoption or a surrogate mother.”
William was relieved. The conversation meant his parents would not try to force him to get married. He too wanted children; he wanted to take part in the Chinese tradition of family, of having a child to continue the Zhao family line.
Father and son agreed: A surrogate mother was clearly the best option. That way, the genetic material would still be Zhao, and their bloodline would remain intact.
Many comrades William knew were less lucky, including the young man he was seeing at the time—his gym mate and friend with benefits named Josh. In China the word for friend with benefits is 炮友, pàoyǒu. 炮, pào, means “firecracker” or “cannon.” 友, yǒu, means “friend.” It’s a new word, invented out of necessity.
Josh was twenty-five; gay, not bi; smart; handsome; and, by the often transparent system of matchmaking in China, exceedingly eligible (read: tall, rich, and handsome). Josh’s parents had been pushing him to get married.
Marriage is a family affair in China—parents take an active role, and then grandparents, cousins, second cousins, and the so-called cousins a family acquires through long friendship. Josh’s family saw him as their pride and joy, and they talked constantly about wanting to “hold our grandson”—a Chinese set phrase that parents leverage to urge their children to have kids. In Chinese sitcoms about wacky marriages, the story lines are less about the ins and outs of a couple’s relationship and instead focus on the balancing act of the young couple that wants to pursue their passions and careers while their kooky parents want to hurry up and “hold our grandson!” Josh’s parents would call him regularly, not to ask how he was doing but to cut right to the chase: “Do you have a girlfriend yet? We want to hurry up and hold our grandson!”
One day Josh’s mother called him and announced: “It has all been arranged. We’re coming to Chengdu today.” Sure enough, his mother arrived that afternoon. In her wake came Josh’s father and another family made up of two parents, a grandmother, and a very pretty daughter. “We’re going to lunch,” his mom said. Josh knew better than to disobey his mother and break the plans.
They all had lunch, and Josh, like a good son, went through the motions in public. In private later that day, he had it out with his mother.
“I’m not ready. Let me figure this out for myself,” he said. “It’s the twenty-first century.” His mother wouldn’t hear of it.
Her reaction forced Josh into a workaround. China’s LGBT community has had to adapt to deal with social pressures, especially those around the issue of marriage. The most popular solution has been a 形式结婚, xíngshì jiéhūn, or “shape marriage,” or an “appearance” or “formality marriage”—a marriage that looks traditional but lacks any substance. They’re often called mutual help marriages.
A shape marriage is the union of a gay man and a lesbian. After the discussion with his mother, Josh, William’s pàoyǒu, reached out to a lesbian friend. The two were considering marriage just to stave off the pressure from both sets of parents.
“The hardest part is that his mother is doing this because she loves him,” William noted. “She’s doing it because that’s what good Chinese mothers do. It’s what they’ve always done. It’s tradition.”
* * *
One of the stories most read and passed along from the gay-oriented website Friend, Don’t Cry was often described to me as required reading for Chinese comrades. “Two Peking University Comrades’ 10-Year Love Story” is about two hardworking young men, Ted and Fred, who meet at Peking University.* They fall in love and decide to study abroad in America. They win places at Columbia and Notre Dame, respectively, and keep up a long-distance relationship. After graduation, Ted gets a job in finance on Wall Street, and Fred moves to New York so they can be together. They travel during vacations from work, posting romantic pictures of themselves at the Grand Canyon, by the fountain at the Monte Carlo Resort and Casino in Las Vegas, and sitting in the Rocky Mountains. Then they get married.
That’s it. The story isn’t about revolution or radical acceptance, fame or abrupt fortune. It is about a peaceful couple who work hard and make a successful life of their own, no shortcuts, no excuses, but also no pressure or intrusion.
Many of the comrades I interviewed expressed the simple desire to not have their sexuality derail their efforts to achieve their dreams.
Ted and Fred were more fiction than fact to most comrades. Chinese pop culture seemed to have no one who was publicly gay and happy, gay and successful, gay and proud. Because China had criminalized homosexuality for so long, the public sphere had no gay role models. William and other kids his age could not see homosexual men or women on TV (except on the news), in movies, or in business.
“In mainland China it used to be that there weren’t any role models in the LGBT community. No one stepped forward,” Li Yinhe told me. “Hong Kong, though, had one.”
I had a pretty good idea who that was. “Zhang Guo Rong?�
�� I asked.
“Yes, Zhang.”
We shared a moment of silence, unsure how to proceed. If what Li was saying was true, China’s sole hero in the LGBT community had committed suicide in 2003. Zhang was a singer and actor, extremely popular both on the mainland and in Hong Kong. Because of his popularity throughout China and extending across the globe, he was voted the third-most-iconic musician of all time, behind Michael Jackson and the Beatles, in an online poll by CNN.8
In 1997, the year Hong Kong was returned to China and the hooliganism law was lifted, a Chinese investigative reporter outed Zhang. His sexual preference became a national issue at a time when most Chinese still believed homosexuality was criminal and perverse. The country had reeled in horror at this news about Zhang.
Six years later, Zhang committed suicide by jumping off the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong. People often speak of his suicide as a warning to China’s public figures: life outside the closet is dangerous, even life threatening. A friend of mine from Guangzhou Province explained, “Zhang was exceptional, outstanding, charming, and gay. In the end he was killed by public opinion and media. If he couldn’t come out, who could?”
In lieu of a national role model, the Chinese LGBT community found inspiration abroad, and few people were more recognizable in China than Apple CEO Tim Cook when headlines in 2014 read, “Tim Cook: ‘I’m Proud to Be Gay.’” China was stunned. Cook was quiet, considered “normal,” and had achieved success on a global scale. His sexuality had not derailed his ability to achieve his ambitions. He was both Ted and Fred from Friend, Don’t Cry.
Cook’s sexuality was a major eye-opener for conservative Chinese who still believed homosexuality was a disability. China had long considered Apple a standard of excellence and innovation. Could its leader really be gay?
After the Tim Cook revelation, message boards hummed. Homophobic trolls posted nasty comments about Cook: “No wonder the iPhone 6 can’t stay straight.” Netizens fired back: “What phone are you using to post this comment?” The response? “I have to comment using my computer now!” But the gay community was ready for that one, riposting: “Your computer? You can thank gays for that too! Alan Turing was also gay!”
Cooke’s coming out either energized or coincided with a normalizing of LGBT life within Chinese society, especially in big cities. People no longer had to search far and wide to find signs of gay or lesbian community life. Gay representation in the media was increasing. For a while on WeChat, the hashtag #hestoogoodtobestraight was getting a lot of play after several articles featured the hunks of the gay community. One popular Weibo blogger posted, “They stay in shape, they groom themselves, they know how to dress. Man of your dreams? Too bad. Definitely gay.”
Rong, a young man I met on Blued, a social app for gay men in China, had recently moved from distant Gansu Province to Chengdu. There he found he wasn’t looked down upon for his style, interests, way of talking, and mostly not for his sexuality. In fact, he was considered cool. “We’re interesting, curious, and modern, like Korean soap operas or something. We’re in—the most tapped in to what’s hot, what’s cool, what’s fashionable,” he told me.
Popular TV shows began to include quietly gay characters. Most often the role was the stereotypical gay best friend of the female protagonist. This character was never explicitly homosexual on the show itself, but each actor managed to convey the sexual identity of his character nonetheless. Media conglomerates under the watchful eye of the government could not openly acknowledge the gay community, but they also were not ignoring it.
This half-acceptance was what upset William the most. The government had never said that it supported the LGBT community—but recently also had been careful not to condemn the LGBT community, either. “It is their full lack of acknowledgment that kills us,” William ranted to me. “We were invisible. We didn’t exist.”
In China, to be ignored by the government is often to be permitted. When Li Yinhe last asked the State Council to consider her LGBT marriage law, she told me, she was not rebuffed for its lewdness but questioned about its necessity. “Why do we have to be leading the world on this?” the government officials asked her.
Meanwhile, the government was quietly accepting China’s changing sexual landscape, at least to a point. China’s early Internet was more heavily controlled than it is today, but even in the mid- to late 1990s the government had not censored Friend, Don’t Cry. Back then radio talk shows in China that approached the topic of sex were beginning to proliferate, like the famous At Night You’re Not Lonely. Years later it came to light that these shows were sponsored by the Communist Party and that their genuinely popular and sincerely beloved hosts were Party members. They worked for the government. Still, they delivered something essential: an introduction to sexuality in the modern world. It was a way for the Party to disseminate information without publicly condoning acts that many Chinese still considered shocking. The Party and the media talked endlessly about how China’s economy was changing, how skyscrapers, train tracks, and highways were remaking the landscape. Friend, Don’t Cry and government-funded talk shows about sex were tacit acknowledgments that Chinese attitudes about sexuality were evolving too.
Today the Chinese homosexual community is gaining recognition as a market opportunity. “There are more than seventy million LGBT people in China,” said Geng Le, CEO of Blued, the world’s most popular gay networking app, “equivalent to the UK’s population.”9
Blued’s CEO hoped that the business opportunity represented by China’s LGBT community would make them understood in the term the rest of China could understand: money. Although many Chinese were still getting used to the social implications of recognizing China’s gay community, no one needed time to adjust to the business opportunity.
Grindr, the top gay social app in early 2014, boasted more than five million users worldwide.10 Blued had two million users at the time, not bad for a two-year-old app. It was a proud moment for Geng Le, and it signaled a very real awakening to China’s “Pink Market.” Geng Le was feeling cocky, so confident in fact that he declared Blued soon would have ten million users. Pundits scoffed.
As of late 2016, Blued boasted twenty-seven million registered users.11 It is easily the largest LGBT app in the world. The size and scope of Blued has opened up conversations in China about the market potential of the Pink Market, and so it has earned the comrade community a bit more acceptance and normalization. Plus, they created an online space that wasn’t confined to China’s more progressive cities. Clubs like Destination found their place in Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, and the other big metropolises, but apps like Blued have created a gay community across all of China.
* * *
In the club Destination, I quickly learned that a potato hunter is a Chinese person who is looking to hook up with a foreigner, gay or straight. “Because, um, Westerners eat potatoes.” I sipped a Long Island iced tea as I navigated the different floors, watching men dance and play a popular dice drinking game, hand drinking games (intricate versions of rock, paper, scissors in which the loser has to take a drink), and any other type of drinking games someone knew. Heavy techno boomed through bulky speakers.
Here in Destination, no one seemed psychologically imbalanced, as the Chinese textbooks used to say, unless a healthy sexual appetite merited that classification. Security guards were posted around the room to make sure things didn’t get out of line. They didn’t have to intervene once. Compared with other big clubs in China, Destination, at least from a drama perspective, was tame.
We left the club at two in the morning. On the way out we passed a Chinese day walker who was making out with a Caucasian guy who looked to be eastern European. William rolled his eyes. “Potato, hunted,” he said, then added, “You Westerners have terrible taste in men. Did you see that guy?”
We entered the courtyard as we emerged from the club. William put his black shirt on again as well as his heavy coat, and we talked as we reentered into Beijing’
s gray night. Haze glowed under the streetlamps as we sat on the curb and waited for the car we had called through one of China’s Uber-like phone applications. William was going back to his parents’ apartment. They had not asked where he’d be spending the evening, and he hadn’t offered any information. I then asked William a question I’d asked most comrades in China, once I felt they wouldn’t object. Of all the social issues, from scam marriages to Li Yinhe’s attempting to get marriage legalized in China, which did he think was the most important?
William did not hesitate. “Education,” he said. “Our sex education doesn’t teach us anything about sex, and its treatment of comrades remains terrible. I don’t want any young boy or girl to grow up like I did, not knowing who they were or why they felt the way they did.” With that, he got into a cab and went home to his parents.
10
Learning to Play
From Eating Bitter to Eating Hotpot
“Food is the god of the people,” Zhang Wei intoned. With that, he gracefully scooped up a soup dumpling, cradling the delicate casing gently between two chopsticks so as not to puncture it and lose the broth within. We sat in a lunch canteen in Suzhou, an ancient capital of China and one of two “earthly paradises,” according to Chinese literary history. A Suzhou native, Zhang had promised to take me to all the best local eateries that remained from his childhood. He took me to traditional restaurants, stalls, and eateries around the city, expounding on the merit and complexity of Chinese food culture. Zhang spoke of food passionately, detailing how each province and each town has its own food culture, and how there really are “four big cuisines” within China, Shandong cuisine in the North, Cantonese food in the South, Sichuanese food in the West, and, of course, Jiangsu food, of which Suzhou is the capital, in the South.
The place that day was authentic and low key, an “old one-hundred names”—the phrase used to refer to the common people—eatery: plastic cafeteria chairs and simple tables for easy wiping, casual and food forward. Bamboo baskets stacked at Dr. Seuss-like angles reached just below the ceiling fan, towering over the middle-aged and elderly men and women in white smocks who were mincing meat, packing it with chives, folding it into its delicate casings, and then storing it into a bamboo basket to be steamed. Each basket contained four tender xiǎo lóng bāo, better known as soup dumplings, one of China’s most famous culinary exports.
Young China Page 18