How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia

  If you break down the differences in physical traits, Han Chinese men (Han being the ethnic majority in China) are slighter than Western men, on average, and are mostly hairless unless they sport wispy goatees or light moustaches. Many have the fine facial features we associate with femininity like high cheekbones, full lips, and smooth skin. He wasn’t the first man that I had mistakenly thought was a woman since coming to China that spring. I’ve always been attracted to the sexiness of androgyny, so I watched him approvingly from across the room, giddy with the strange liberty of exploring attraction for a man without it being a challenge to my established identity.

  Shortly thereafter, my American friend Traci introduced us, explaining that we were fellow musicians, but I didn’t catch his name before he moved on to talk to others. My eyes trailed after him. At that time, Chinese names took me several tries to remember, so I nicknamed him "Dimple Boy.” I winked at Traci when I told her that I thought Dimple Boy was pretty cute. She winked back.

  It’s true that people express gender differently across cultures, but I noticed Dimple Boy was different from other Chinese boys—more flamboyant and colorful, confident, careless—so different, in fact, that I distinctly remember wondering if he was gay and liking the thought of that. I felt a connection with him. Maybe we were both two queers floating in a straight sea? Maybe we needed to be friends.

  The second time I met Guo Jian was on my second journey to China, less than six months after the first. It was three days into my trip. I had arranged to meet Traci at a popular folk bar called Jiang Jin Jiu. Walking up the narrow hútòng (alley) on foot, I found her waiting for me outside with a big smile of welcome.

  As we swung open the wide wooden doors of the pub, the aroma of sweet popcorn mixed with the sharp smell of cigarette smoke rolled over us like an ocean wave. Traci immediately called out a greeting to friends. By then, I was convinced Traci knew every musician in the city, and we found ourselves seated at one end of a long wooden table with a local band. There were three scruffy guys and beers on offer. Traci was translating. Within ten minutes, two more guys rolled in, laughing and shoving each other like school kids—the last two members of the band.

  And there he was: Dimple Boy.

  I froze, beer bottle halfway to my lips. He was more beautiful than I had remembered. We were introduced again, and he nodded at me with recognition and then immediately left his four band-mates and disappeared to the opposite end of the table, joining another group of people. I self-consciously continued drinking and laughing with the people we were sitting with. We didn’t speak all night. For me, Dimple Boy was simply an acknowledgment of the rare attraction I have for men, nothing more. At least, that’s what I told myself in the moment. After all, I’m queer.

  As the night progressed, even with Traci’s translation I was oblivious to the fact that one of the scruffy guys was flirting with me. Not having spent my early adulthood being socialized in a heterosexual world, straight signals are a complete mystery to me. I did notice, eventually, but only because Traci impersonated his raised eyebrows and the fluttery spark in his eye after he had asked me a question. It took seeing a woman flirting with me in mocking, delayed duplication for me to realize that a man had been flirting with me in real-time.

  Seeing me recoil, Traci quickly suggested I play some music. It was sort of an open jam, and the place had about twenty people in it, scattered about. There was a guitar propped against a chair on the stage that had just become empty. The flirty guy at our table seconded Traci’s suggestion, raising his eyebrows at me again. I may have lunged five steps to the stage and picked up the guitar just to get away from him.

  Traci moved up to an empty front table and I laughingly blurted out that I had "hē duō le” (drunk too much). She quipped back, "mĕi wÈntí” (no problem), and then added, "wŏmen yě shì” (so have we!) while gesturing toward the guys behind her. They all laughed.

  I played three songs. She sang along to the ones she remembered from my first trip. I noticed Dimple Boy moving closer to a table behind Traci’s, further back and to the left, and sitting there alone in the shadows. I wondered why he had broken off from his friends and thought it strange he didn’t join Traci, a person he obviously knew. But the beer and the music were distracting. When I looked around for him after I came off stage, he was gone.

  Looking back at that night, I remember struggling to explain to everyone, including myself, why I had come back to Beijing so soon after my first journey. More language study felt like a superficial excuse. The city had this ineffable magnetic force and I was powerless to resist it. Now, I think I may have come back to find him. Maybe I was powerless to resist him.

  Was it because he was so pretty, I asked myself? Was it the charming way he sought me out (again, through my friend Traci) and then started to show up at places he knew I would be? Was it the dimples? Was it his patience with my Mandarin and his pleasure in teaching me about the culture that I loved so much? Maybe he just became a symbol of China, the country I was already in love with? Despite the many questions I asked myself, my head still couldn’t understand what my heart had already decided.

  I was grateful to be so far away from the women’s community who would surely notice this man in my heart. I worried that I would be seen as a traitor. Or worse, that I would be viewed as betraying the LGBTQ movement—a heartbreaking thought for someone who had spent her life and career as an activist. What would my friends and fans think of me for looking forward to his knock on my rented room’s door, or poring over his Chinese text messages with my dictionary, not wanting to miss a single subtlety?

  I focused on the friendship we started building, sweeping aside the ever-increasing attraction I felt for him. A month went by in which we spent a lot of time using music as our common language and sharing platonic space. We proved that words are overrated; our mutual musical fluency linked us. We jammed together and played songs for each other and those conversations flowed beautifully. They rose and fell in intensity and emotion. They spoke without needing to.

  Being inept at heterosexual courting practices—those pesky straight signals—I was unsure of his feelings towards me beyond friendship and musical camaraderie. I could see the crescendo of attraction growing between us, but I had rationalized it away, because surely he must be gay, I told myself. Aren’t most of the beautiful men gay?

  We had spent the whole night jamming. We were switching between instruments (guitar, bass, hand drums, keyboards), and he’d been showing me how to pluck the gŭzhēng, a traditional Chinese zither. Guo Jian had also pulled out a gorgeous traditional tea service—tray, mini teapot, utensils, the works—and had been endlessly refilling my mini tea cup with pŭ’ĕr, a deep and intense black tea filled with enough caffeine to chase yawns away. Each time he filled it, I politely sipped it back in one or two gulps before it got cold. It wasn’t long before the dim light of dawn was sneaking around the curtains.

  I stood up, gesturing at the morning light, placing both my palms together and then laying my head sideways against them like they were a pillow—the universal symbol for needing to sleep. "Wŏ hĕn kùn” (I’m sleepy), I said, adding a playful pout. He stood up, too, contesting my departure in one of his solid English words ("No, No, No!”) and reaching for my arm.

  I didn’t expect the kiss, even when he leaned his face forward and found my eyes with his. It wasn’t until his smooth lips were against mine, dreadlocks cascading around my face and enclosing our kiss like a curtain, that I acknowledged what had been happening between us all those weeks. All of the longhaired women I’ve kissed came to mind with fondness. I immediately relaxed.

  After our blissful trip to southern China, we returned to Beijing and then, two days later, I boarded a plane for Canada with a teary goodbye and a promise to stay in touch. Predictably, when I returned to my home country, an identity crisis attacked me with cold winter winds. Some things were clear: I am queer. I love women. I prefer women. I love the company
and community of women. But I had fallen in love with a man. Proud queer or not, he was in my heart. Multiple truths had managed to maneuver themselves into my life and I couldn’t deny any of them. The mirror was mocking me. Who am I, I kept asking myself?

  *

  While I weathered the winter winds of questioning, memories of climbing the Dali gate in the sunset glow kept my heart from freezing over. City gates in China used to serve as guard towers where straight-backed young men watched over the city threshold. Their role was to keep outsiders out. It was about safety. We build walls to keep ourselves safe, but when we open gates to risk, great learning often greets us. What’s more, new cultures don’t always overtake and transform us; sometimes they strengthen us, widening our perspectives, expanding our identities.

  After I spoke those fateful words and bit my lip in waiting, the orange light in the inside of my eyelids held me suspended for a few stretched seconds, the echo of my whisper floating in the breathlessness between us.

  "Wŏ zhīdÀo, wŏ zăo zhīdÀo le,” he said, telling me knew and had always known. Then he took my hand. When I opened my eyes and found his, they were as warm as the dusk. I could settle into those eyes, I thought. I sighed into their brown depths as the anxiety rose from my shoulders and fell away from the tower, disappearing into the perfect evening air.

  His eyes were open—he was open—wide. To me.

  Ember Swift is a Canadian musician, songwriter, performer, and writer. She has released eleven independent album recordings since 1996, one live DVD project, and continues to perform regularly in both North America and China. Now based in Beijing with her Chinese husband and two children, she maintains three popular blogs through her website: www.emberswift.com and is a contributing writer for Women in China Magazine, Herizon’s Magazine, Mami Magazine, Beijing Kids Magazine, China.org, and InCulture Parent, an online portal for cross-cultural parenting.

  WAITING FOR INSPIRATION

  By Coco Richter

  It’s 11:00 am and I’m sitting on my sofa, tapping my fingers on the creamy brown leather. I’ve already been to the gym, read two newspapers, and downed three cups of coffee. I’m starting to regret declining that lunch invitation until I think of the ever-growing bulge forming in my midsection.

  My kids are at school. They stream out the door five days a week with backpacks weighing twenty kilos, one with a violin, the other with a trombone, forging into the lift with such determination. They will not miss the school bus, not because I’d mind driving them to school but because the school bus is where they get their best information.

  As I sit, Zeny is no doubt scrubbing the bathroom tiles for the third time this week. When I came in from the gym, she was vacuuming the already-spotless living room floor. Zeny’s phone rings and the sound of Tagalog fills the flat. It’s a thundering loud language filled with staccatos, more Hispanic to my ear than Asian. Zeny has lots of friends: the ones she walks the dog with in the morning; the ones she meets at the grocery store; an expansive network of friends she gathers with on Sundays at the malls and cinemas, parks and beaches. She’s been in Hong Kong nearly twenty years. It’s more home to her than her native Philippines and yet can never truly be her home.

  I try not to think too much about the fine line between her world and mine. The one that allows me to sit here enjoying an unobstructed view of Repulse Bay while she inhales fumes from the bathroom cleanser so that she can send a chunk of her wages home to an ever-growing circle of siblings, cousins, nieces, and nephews. I chew on my lower lip as the next thought inevitably arrives. Zeny’s days have purpose while mine do not.

  I look away, the sun now beaming into the room with laser-like focus. I draw the sheer curtains, preparing my defense. My days have purpose, but that purpose is less defined than it was a year or so ago, before I moved here, when I had a job, a title, an income, an office, file cabinets, a computer network, a webpage, secretary, bookkeeper, client meetings, lunch engagements, professional seminars, and a leather desk chair on wheels. My nails dig into the sofa. I’ve left a mark—a gouge really—the sliver of a moon shape, a marking of expat angst.

  I’m about ready to get up and do something—just what, I haven’t quite gotten to—when my mobile phone rings. I wait to pick it up until it’s rung three times, feigning breathlessness. It’s my husband. He calls me several times a day, just to be sure I’m still here, that I haven’t packed it up and moved back to Boston in the three hours since he left for work. It’s sweet. He knows it’s hard to start over, to build a life from scratch without a network of friends or family in the same time zone. I assure him I’m fine, that I’ve already been out of the house, and that I have plans for the afternoon. I hope he doesn’t ask me what they are because I’m making this up as I go.

  "So that rash I told you about,” he says, "you know the one on my arms?”

  "Hmm,” I say, vaguely recalling an outbreak the day before.

  "Well, it’s really painful now. It feels like pins sticking into me, and it’s spreading.”

  "Really?” I say. My husband is a bit of a hypochondriac. Whenever he gets the flu, he thinks he has cancer and may only have three weeks to live. "Maybe you should see the doctor,” I say, knowing he’ll agree.

  "I have an appointment this afternoon,” he says. "It’s really weird. Are rashes supposed to do that?”

  "Do what?” I ask.

  "Spread.”

  "I’m sure it’s fine,” I say, knowing he’s headed toward a global pandemic. "Probably just an allergic reaction to something. Did you use a new soap or skin cream?”

  "No,” he says, "I’ve done nothing different. It’s just completely out of the blue.”

  Without any further thoughts on the source or migration patterns of his rash, I tell him I’ve got to run, and, fortunately, he doesn’t ask me why. No sooner have I put the phone down when it rings again.

  "Itchy fingers too?” I say.

  A woman’s voice comes over the line. It’s Helen, the mother of a friend of my daughter’s. She doesn’t ask about itchy fingers and I don’t offer an explanation. After a minute of chitchat, she gets to the point.

  "I work for a headhunting firm,” she says.

  "Hmm,” I say, trying to remember if I’d ever seen her wearing anything other than yoga pants.

  "I don’t usually cover the legal sector but something just came up and I immediately thought of you, given your legal background.”

  "Really?” I say, trying to sound more casual than I feel.

  "It’s a part-time role,” she says.

  This is getting better by the minute.

  "It’s to head the training department for a large UK firm. Essentially you’d be preparing training materials and sessions for their young lawyers in Hong Kong. What do you think?” she asks.

  Where do I sign, I want to say, but instead I play it cool. "It could be interesting.”

  "I think it would be a great role for you, particularly since it’s part-time and, let me tell you, part-time roles are hard to find in Hong Kong.”

  "Hmm,” I say.

  "If you’re interested at all, why don’t you come by my office tomorrow and talk with Yuki. She’s the one handling the search for us.”

  Yuki? I debate telling her I’m busy for a half-second before eagerly agreeing to see Yuki the next day. As soon as I put the phone down, I grab my computer, typing in the firm’s name, absorbing everything there is to know about them from a Google search. Four hundred lawyers with offices in four cities, everyone smiling in conference rooms kitted out with complete book sets of statutory laws and judicial opinions, looking more like Brooks Brothers models than any lawyers I’ve ever known. I envy them their suits and office towers, their days filled with meetings and deadlines.

  I run to my closet, assessing my wardrobe. Two suits hang at the far end, one navy and one black, a fine layer of dust resting along the top of the shoulders. I select the black one and try brushing off the dust. It
doesn’t move. It’s now a film that’s seeped into the fabric. I take a damp cloth and scrub the film away. Nothing can stand in my way. I pair it with a silk blouse, royal blue in color. I’m ready. I can already see myself, coffee cup in hand, glasses perched on my nose, pontificating to eager young faces about the perils of cross-examination.

  My phone rings again. It’s nearly one and I’m meant to be out. I answer it just before it goes to voicemail. It’s my husband again.

  "You’re never going to believe this,” he says.

  "Try me,” I say.

  "Well, the rash has now spread all along my sides. I look like a leper,” he says.

  "Hmm,” I say.

  "Anyways, I went to the doctor and he kept asking me if I had a new laundry or bath soap, or shower gel, and I told him no, nothing was new. So after like thirty minutes of this he says to me, ‘Do you work a lot on the computer?’ and I tell him yes, and he asks me if I have a new desk!”

  I eye the custom-made wood desk he purchased from a high-end furniture store on Hollywood Road the week before.

  "Can you believe it?” he asks. "That blasted new desk of mine, it’s coated in Chinese lacquer and the doctor thinks I’m allergic to it. That’s why the rash is concentrated on the underside of my arms.”

  "Of course,” I say.

  "So can you get rid of it?”

  "Get rid of what?” I ask.

  "The desk,” he says.

  This seems extreme, not to mention wasteful, but I wasn’t going to debate it with him. He has pins digging into his skin and a doctor’s diagnosis in his pocket so I tell him I’ll take care of it.