Earthquake near Taiwan broke the internet

...cable under the Pacific, so internet access to U.S. websites was unavailable for a while. But it's back, yes!

I cussed in Chinese just now. When my rabbit 雪糕 Ice Cream kicked something over in my room, I turned my head and unconsciously said to it: 他妈的！ which is equivalent to: fuck! This makes me pleased -- what language you reflexically cuss in says a lot. In fact, I haven't blogged much lately cuz I've been experiencing/thinking about my life in Chinese, which makes it awkward to have to self-translate in order to blog.

I kept turning the idea of staying another half year over and over again in my head the last couple of days. I think I decided finally on not extending my time-off. I think... It'd be hard to pull off, due to a lot of logistics, but it's possible. It'd be a spontaneous decision, but I was really tempted. I have really good friends here... Moments that have been as sweet as it's gotten at school. Saturday night before Christmas, everybody went clubbing. Practically everyone I knew in Shanghai showed up at the same lesbian bar, and I had to run back and forth between groups, trying to socialize with everyone at once :) Besides being hella fun, I also felt such a sense of belonging; when you know enough people in the community to be running into acquaintances everywhere, while having really close friends as your base, it's precious, especially for me, who moves all the time and never gets settled into a place. And i love these people, who are interesting, passionate, pioneering, fun, and hot too.

In the afternoon, before going to the club, I went to Chi Heng Foundation's office, and listened to them answer the lala (lesbian) hotline calls. Then I sat in on their meeting afterwards, and got myself into a long-term commitment of collecting international queer news articles, and translating them into Chinese. This is a task that I can continue even after I leave; I guess I've sorta become a long-term volunteer for Chi Heng.

Christmas Eve I spent at Xiao Yu's place, along with Xiao Shu and Xiao Yan (a couple from Fudan) and others. It would've been an otherwise wonderful, festive dinner, eating w/ so many people w/ some tacky lights strung up around the living room. But the hotpot was really hot!! as in, spicy. The spices totally conqueored me, I was crying and blowing my nose and practically gave up eating.

Now half of us there were queer, the others were straight girls who didn't know, friends of one of the straight roommates. In the middle of eating, Xiao Shu mentioned that she saw 高娅媛 at a restaurant the other day (高娅媛, a singer who got famous through one of those competitions similar to American Idol, who is really obviously a dyke, a T, who's pretty hot too. see her blog http://blog.sina.com.cn/m/gaoyayuan ). A casual statement, us queer ones all knew what she was talking about. She bumped into this lesbian celebrity in public. Cool. Nothing else. But then, this other girl suddenly said, "oh, i hear that she's homosexual." Right then, the table fell silent. We didn't know what to say. The moment was hilarious. I could barely keep from bursting out laughing. Only Xiao Shu kept a straight face, and answered matter of factly:"yes, I hear she is too. I saw here there with three girls too." This whole time, the straight ones happened to be sitting togehter on one side of the table, and we were all sitting next to each other on the other side of the table, looking really obvious, to anyone who knows anything about it at all...

sleepless

I'm exhausted but I can't keep, because there's too much adrenaline in my body. I keep tossing and turning. It's been a really long day. Really enriching, but at the end I'm utterly confused about myself.

I've been at this dyke bar since 1 PM, where the lesbian group met to do interview training for the oral history project. I'm working with someone else to do one of the first interviews. There were a lot of new people, who thought that, besides the fact that I look really young for my age, I also look really innocent, good, like "a blank paper". The annoying thing was, there was this other girl there today, (who has this awesome hairstyle that I want), who was a couple of months younger than me. That's a first, to meet someone younger than me. But they all kept comparing us and saying, well, she looks way more mature than her age, from the way she looks, the way she talks, the things that she say; but you, the way you talk sounds like you haven't had much life experience, and your cuteness will draw out the protectiveness/tenderness in older people. And when we were playing drinking games, hm, truth and dare, they decided to ask me questions that really assume naivety, like "are you a virgin?" Grr... I mean, I don't feel hurt because I know I'm not stupid/immature, but it IS a problem that people think I am when they first see me. I just can't figure out why? what do I give off that makes everybody think this at first?

The girl who's younger than me seems interesting. She says that her parents stopped taking care of her when she was 15, and she's been making her own living, starting from washing dishes, etc. She does sound impressive/mature. But the ironic thing is, I moved out when I was 16 too, and there we are, sitting next to each other, giving such opposite impressions to other people. Maybe it's because she volunteers these biographical information, and talks about herself a lot, but I always feel like it'd be obnoxious to brag and offer people all kinds of information about my life without them asking.

Later on though, this girl suddenly became interested in me because, she says, she can tell that I'm actually rebellious, even though I look really cute and innocent, because she noticed my cartilage piercing. It's sort of a shallow way to judge, but I'll take it :) Too bad I didn't keep talking to her, cuz I got distracted by this German who came to interview the group.

It's a straight German white woman, who doesn't speak Chinese, who's doing her master's thesis on homsexuality in China, by doing a documentary. This is what left me all confused in the end. I really stayed part of the group and just listened to the awkward interview at first. There were several people who could translate for her. And my alliance is with the group, not her. I guess I'm suspicious from the beginning because, first of all, she's a total outsider trying to study a group that she does not identify with whatsoever, besides being female. She brought along this straight German guy, to help w/ the filming, who was so out of place. Plus, she's doing her thesis for a design school, not a queer studies or East Asian studies major; the topic just happens to be this. Which means that she's probably not well-trained in queer theory and stuff like orientalism and standpoint theory, etc. Which means that, after she meets and interviews all these people, who are devoting all their time and energy to do this pioneering work in China, she will go back and submit her thesis. And then what? She will draw up all this human resource, but not benefit the queer community in China in return. Just looking at tonight, this huge group of people stayed at the bar for about 5 extra hrs, after finishing the group training, to wait for her to show up and do the filming.

Well, later on, I started helping translate, and before I knew it, I was speaking some of these thoughts out loud, and by the end, we were pretty much arguing. I said she was an outsider and obnoxious for thinking that she could understand and applying her Western value system here without owning up to it. She said I was in cultural shock and had an inferiority complex and was younger/less wise than her. I got all worked up. I was only trying to make one point: she was talking about all these problems China has, with political censorship, media censorship, gap btw the rich and the poor, and saying such stereotypically Western things like "Communism is completely bad, it's a proven failure," but how many uniquely good things about China has she noticed? I'm not saying that censorship isn't bad, but the bigger picture is, she's so focused on freedom, freedom, freedom, as the most important thing in the world, that she only sees the faults and not the strengths. So you end up only criticizing, and not appreciating. As an outsider, it's easy to see the problems, but how many unique things about China can she name that's good? The problem is that there isn't this balance. So even though she keeps saying that, no, no, she's not saying that Germany is better than China, in reality, that's what she sees. She can name a ton of things that need change in China, but she can't appreciate much of what's already good. So she's only saying the words of a shallow, European liberalism that says "oh, we're all equal," all the while ignoring deep-seated power dynamics, and "of course no one can be completely objective" while saying a while later "I'm doing research, I'm looking in from the outside, but I think you are just protective of China... These things I'm saying [about how freedom is the most important thing and "freedom is life"] aren't Western values, they're my OWN values." Bullshit.

Hm, these kinds of discussions are so unfruitful. She wouldn't budge to any point I made and of course, I think I'm right. That's why I said it. I was exhausted by the end, and I had left the woman I'm seeing outside, in the main room, to continue this frustrating debate in the backroom. But what I did learn about myself is that: wow, I really want to belong in this world. I find myself turning to friends to speak in Chinese, when there's a Westerner there, cause I feel like I'm marking my membership; I'm one of them, not one of you. I HAD to correct this person when she introduced me an ABC (American-born Chinese). But it's not all so pretentious. I found it really awkward to speak for so long in English to the German woman. I think, I have an accent in English again. There's something uncomfortable about the way I have to bend my tongue in English; Chinese feels much better flowing off of my tongue. But at the same time, my Chinese isn't good enough to express everything I want to say. There're still all these vocabulary and ways of speech that I don't know. So in reality I don't completely belong here either. But I don't belong in the U.S. completely either. Ay, I don't belong fully anywhere. I can laugh at this comment: self-consciously, I can see that it's such a typical thing to feel for somebody who's a product of migration and uprooting. It doesn't make it any less weighty, though. I sorta have an urge to abandon my life there, and stay here for a few years. I've made good friends, that i will enjoy getting to know better, and if i keep living here for a while, i will get readjusted and belong again. But I can't abandon my life there. Even though it was such hell when I first went over, the last few years had been so comfortable; I understand American culture thoroughly. Even though some Americans might always see me as Asian and foreign, I'm not really affected, I live quite comfortable in my life, with wonderful friends, because I AM culturally fluent in the U.S. Then, something happened, I remembered Chineseness and got back here. I'm afraid that when I get back in February, I will no longer feel as at home as I did half a year ago, because I will have to put behind all the things that I've rekindled in myself here. I don't want to put them behind though -- they're so precious, but they will make me feel out of place, they will make up another part of myself that I cannot share with everybody in my life. The funny thing is that, I'm often unwilling to talk about American society with friends here, because if I say all these details about American life, it will highlight the fact that I have an intimate relationship with this other world, and mark me more blatantly as not the same as them... I really like this quote from Babyji:

"I had split myself like an atom into many electrons and neutrons. Each subatomic particle danced with a different person and led its own life. But all of me, the whole me, did not exist for anyone but myself."
-Abha Dawesar

grassroots movement! impressive people

I wish I could stay longer here. Really, if I could just take a second semester off and stay, then I wouldn't have to leave so soon. People keep suggesting that to me. But I don't think I can. My savings will run out by February; I'm already counting on getting a job back as soon as I get back to Boston, or else, I'll be penniless. Plus, I don't have the immigration status to leave the U.S. for that long. Also, I wouldn't get to see my best friends... But if only I could stay, then I can actually BE in the Vagina Monologues at Fudan; I can get really involved with the lesbian group that's doing amazing work. But I can't help that much if I'm leaving in just a month and a half...

I want to come back. Maybe I can come back in a year and stay for another semester. I've found not just good friends and a lesbian community big enough to exist comfortably in, but also several organized groups doing feminist and queer organizing! I can't believe how I managed to stumble into this circle, first just noticing a flyer for a "Women's movie week" at Fudan University, which was essentially a queer women's movie week, then meeting a couple of awesome people who put on the movie event, and learning that this club puts on the Vagina Monologues each year, then getting introduced to someone from Chi Heng Foundation (AIDS/queer advocacy group), which is apparently right down the block from where I live, learning about another group called Yudan, meeting the famous openly-gay lawyer Zhou Dan (a pioneering activist), then getting invited to the meeting of this small, grassroots lesbian group the next day... While meeting an amazing group of people along the way, people different from the kind that I've been hanging out with, people who are strongly identified and involved and devoted to building a community, people who talk about sex all the time :)

All of a sudden, there's this big world of activism here that I've just found, and somehow, I've been really welcomed. Maybe it's because I'm introduced as someone from Harvard, who's majoring in an unusual major called Women, Gender, and Sexuality, who has a lot of detailed knowledge about female anatomy... I've been wrestling with whether people are perceiving me as an Chinese American who grew up over there, or a Chinese who's spend some time abroad. The responses have been all over the place. One girl asked if I was an exchange student w/in 5 minutes of talking to me; another girl guessed that I went abroad when i was as old as 17 after spending the whole night with me.

The small lesbian group (the other two are mainly gay men), let's call it Nu Ai, is doing an oral history of queer women in Shanghai today, keeping an hotline open on someone's personal cellphone, planning on putting out a zine, opening up a resource center, hosting discussion events, and trying to do so much. All on a non-existing budget. **Does anyone know about how to get funding for a Chinese group that doesn't have registered NGO status? Let me know!**

The group at Fudan has been putting on the vagina monologues for 3 years now. They're really familiar people in a way: smart, talented, ambitious, strong, idealist, feminist, uninhibited with sex, and busy --busy organizing events, running events, booking rooms and publicizing meetings and participating in BBS discussions and hanging out with friends, in between classes. I think I'm not all that useful to them: I'm not familiar enough with Fudan to do most logistics, and not here long enough to take up real responsibilities. But just showing up to their meetings and going out for mid-night meals with them has been an interesting enough time. They're such impressive people. This one dyke is a sophomore, only 18, and majoring in Philosophy, at Fudan - the 3rd ranked school in China. Obviously, she's a precocious genius. We've watched the tapes from the last two years of Vagina Monologues. What's wonderful is that after the first year, when they used a directly-translated script, they've been writing some of their own monologues, which are just as good, if not better, than Eve Ensler's. The only monologue involving queer women in Eve Ensler's script is The Coochie Snorcher that could, which also deals w/ homelessness, race, etc. It doesn't translate very well. I don't like how it mixes up so many things at once either. So Xiao Shu and Xiao Ma wrote their own two-person monologue. Things written in Chinese are much better than things translated over to Chinese; there're a million literary tools in Chinese that doesn't exist in English. This monologue was the show-stopper last year, that made most of the audience cry. It's about the love between this woman professor and her young student, and it all started with them reading Sappho's poems in class. It's written so well...

connections, human meaning, and tragedy

Tonight I met up with this woman introduced by another Shanghainese dyke I know from Boston QAPA, and had a deeper conversation with her than I've had in a long time. She studied in the U.S. for 6 years and plans on going back, and I found a lot of commonality with and interesting characteristics about her. After a group of us had dinner, she invited me back to her place, and we sat on the floor drinking tea listening to music and talking about really personal stuff for a long time. She wrote her Master's on social factors that influence Chinese women's likelihood of compliance with the One-Child policy - I'm totally a fool for academic feminist stuff. Plus she's quite pretty. Then I found out she's married. But she still has this ambiguous relationship with the girlfriend she met in college, 11 years ago. And I thought, there's potential, she's not the overly monogamous type. But then I'm reminded that, even though I don't care, other people still keeps seeing me as a young kid. She kept talking about memories of what she was like when she "was my age"... Ay. However, unlike most other people, she was kind enough to grant that, maybe I'm more mature than she was at my age.

We both had an early-on experience with a passionate, crazy, life-consuming love that ended very badly, but with very different effects. The funny thing is, for her, she says the relationship with that girlfriend was so traumatic that it pushed her towards the straighter end - now she's about 70% straight and 30% lesbian. Her current husband knows about everything, and is actually almost friends with her (ex)girlfriend. When they have a fight, he gets online (from the U.S.) and this girlfriend (from Shanghai) comforts him. I think it's her independent nature that makes them so peaceful. This kind of person makes others feel like, you can't own her, she's so hard to hold on to that if you don't accept the other person in her life, you'd completely lose her. She's been married for 2 years and has spent one of those 2 years living a solitary life in Shanghai. I identify with her so much when she describes how it gets lonely once in a while, but she still likes it better this way. And maybe, we both don't really want/need to be in love head over heels with anybody, anymore, because we've had it and had enough (at least for a while). I borrowed a great book from her, we both like to move cities/countries a lot, don't want kids, and ordered the same thing at dinner, etc.

I also learned a lot about the dyke I know from Boston, who introduced her to me as someone who can help me get to know people in the LaLa (Chinese: lesbian) circle. Well, Sophie (the woman tonight) is not really a lesian or active in the circle. Instead, I realized that my Boston friend contacted Sophie because they once had something and she (the Boston one)'s not over it. It's funny, this dyke from Boston will visit Shanghai soon. Then the three of us can get together, and I can watch some interesting dynamics.

The couple we had dinner together with has been together for 6 years. Apparently, they're married to this gay couple. How hilarious and ingenius! This way, the parents and family are satisfied, and if they have a child in the future, it won't be legally illegitimate.



On a sad note, XA's girlfriend has decided to get married. I don't know how XA is handling this so well; it'd be worse than just getting dumped for me, it'd be like a punch to the stomach, like losing the personal/political war. They had a fight the other night, and XA called me to ask if she can stay at my place for a few nights. I met her up for dinner (Hot Pot, yum, filled with huge pork bones to chew clean. It comes complete with plastic gloves so you can really get your hands into it, and a tiny straw to help you suck the sweet marrow out of the bones). She drank bottle after bottle of beer and complained to me. I'm happy and honored that she'd share these things with me. But at the same time, I don't really know how to advise her. It seems that Chinese people usually try to encourage peace and discourage splits. I tend to default on not advising people explicitly: that'd be applying my own values to other people with different preferences, and I don't want to be responsible for messing up others' lives. Otherwise, I'm pretty ready to advice splits too. Well, XA went home out of convenience and went straight to bed drunk. But she stayed over on Friday night. We did fun, good-friend things like watching movies in bed, shopping for rabbit food, and talking about sex toys. We would've went shopping for sex toys too if we could've found a shop close enough. By the end of the day, my god, I had shown her my strap-on and small collection of dyke porn. The movies were only upon her request. I've never watched non-laughable porn with somebody else before, but it turned out to be quite platonic, and funny, cuz sex is a pretty strange thing if you watch it from an objective point of view. XA leisurely smoked a couple of cigarettes and fast-forwarded thru a lot of parts, and decided in the end that she didn't like them enough to borrow them -- too un-aesthetic, and too hard, she says.

Well, eventually, she went home to her girlfriend, uncertain of what her girlfriend is going to decide. They haven't formally broken-up, but there's no future for sure, since her girlfriend is planning to find some guy and get married. Family pressure. I can't fully sympathize with how tragic this is, because this is not my life, not my circumstances. I can't really imagine it, because I'm so lucky that I have so little emotional attachment to my parents, and I don't ever have to do anything because of them. The worrisome thing is, my mother's been calling and talking to me about feminism/gender expression lately. The week that I spent with my sister (and mother, unfortunately) in Fujian meant that my mother got a glimpse of what I'm like now, and I don't know why I entertained her enough to actually debate a little about gender oppression with her. This hits way too close to home - as in, stuff I care about, stuff too personal to let her criticize me with. Anyways, I thought that XA's girlfriend's family was supportive of them, because her girlfriend's mother likes XA and often came over to their apartment to visit, cook, and take trips together. But I was wrong. The mother only knows XA as a really really good friend living with her daughter. If the actual relationship was spoken out loud, it'd be very different... So since they are having problems already, XA's girlfriend is just going to get married.

It's not all this bad. XA's family knows. Even though they are against it, there's nothing they can do about it. There's this other lala couple I met. They've never spoken out loud the nature of their relationship to their family, but her mother says:" When you two buy a house together, I'll come live with you and help you with the chores (a normal, caring thing for mothers to do for young married couples). It's okay if you don't get married; as long as you have somebody to be your companion and take care you for the rest of your life, then I'm not worried anymore." Just rewriting this has gotten me moved. I agree with them - they don't need to ever say out loud in words what their relationship is. Their parents can't accept the label and the concept, if you name it. But they do tacitly approve, in reality, in action, if you just allow them to stay in their knowing denial.

Plus, there're no hate crimes based on sexual orientation. I don't have statistics or proof, but I'm pretty confident of this fact so far. Gay bashing does not exist here. And that counts for a lot.

whoa, i just realized that it's 11/22, which is warren's birthday. what a freaky coincidence

"androgyny is trendy"??!

That's what Fang Fang keeps insisting: "androgyny is trendy lately." Then she applies it too much, cuz when I point out to her really obvious dykes that we pass by on the street, she says, "no, she doesn't look like it to me. It's just that androgyny has been really popular and there're lots of girls dressed like boys lately." That annoys me. She even insists on denying that 李宇春 is NOT one (Li YuChun is the winner of the American-Idol equivalent here; she's unbelievably popular and still topping the charts, and has millions of young teenage girls as her fan base).

She is partly right, though, in that androgyny is not viewed negatively at all. This is a beautiful cultural phenomenon. Last night I watched a singing-competition on TV with this girl that I totally thought was a boy for the longest time. She talked and rapped with a voice that's lower and rougher than a lot of Chinese men. But then she switches from rap to a melody with a really sweet, girly voice, then switches back again. I was really impressed. I can change a lot of things about myself, over time, but never so instantly. If I sing a song in a high pitch, then my speaking voice is going to remain higher than usual for a while; and vice versa. Well, the host of the show asked her about her "androgynous" look, but of course nobody makes any links to sexuality. That's both an up-side and a down-side: you get this safe and convenient invisibility, but then you're also invisible.

I have to say, I really appreciate how a lot of men care about style and fashion here. So there's a lot of cloths available to me that are not so drab and overly baggy, but colorful and hip. And it makes it really convenient that men's cloths actually fit me. Sometimes I even have to buy a Medium size in men's shirts!

Dream consciousness

As I've been staying up all night playing the Sims and sleeping into the afternoon, in the two days since my cousin Fang Fang left Shanghai, I keep having long, realistic dreams about people from all different parts of my life. So much that, when my cousin A Yu called, I groggily answered the phone with an English "hello" instead of a Chinese "wei", because my mind was floating in the English world.

I dreamt about Warren. That hardly happens nowadays, I never think about him when I'm awake, but I guess 2 and 1/2 years would etch a lot of memory pathways into your brain that resurfaces randomly at night. In the dream, I felt really distant from him, (which is a good thing), and simultaneously full of pity (which I'm not sure if I want). There's no longer hate, disgust, sorrow, anything that indicates that I care, but the dream was still filled with this sad pity for him, who was, well, i can't deny, hurt really badly. It's definitely limited though; I believe really firmly that SYMPATHY has been the downfall of women for thousands of years. Women like to feel sorry for men, feel pity, see the potential for change in men that actively hurt them, and they forget about themselves. It's self-sacrifice, and I hate it. It's why women stupidly let themselves be screwed over time and time again. This is utterly un-Christian of me :)

trans-women in a lesbian club

The lesbian club I went to on Saturday night featured a performance by these two transwomen. They started out with very flowy, feminine, traditional chinese dress, and then stripped down to less and less, to rounds of cheers from the all-girl audience. It's an interesting dynamic. One of the transwomen said that she's done the surgery already and "is a real girl, but my friend hasn't gotten the surgery yet, so you all should look carefully and tell me, is s/he a boy or a girl?" They made themselves into a show, with the pre-operative one strutting around everyone in a skimpy outfit, shaking hands w/ everyone. I thought the general atmosphere was really supportive, with everyone applauding and cheering 'yes' when she asked, "so do i look like a real girl or not?" But when she grabbed this girl in my group to slow dance, the girl from my group was obviously weirded out by the physical contact with this 人妖 (this name sorta means "human-monster" and usually refers only to people who haven't had the surgery and is therefore considered neither male or female).

Picture Albums on facebook

Here are two photo albums I just uploaded onto the facebook, with a random selection of pictures from my last 2 months in China. Public links for those who don't have facebook:

http://harvard.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050758&l=b7273&id=11288

http://harvard.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2050753&l=147fa&id=11288

I'm not young!

I can't stand being called "young"! Why do people keep insisting on applying their timeline of level of maturity to me? Come to think of it, since the beginning of this year, all the new friends I've met are older than me, from just graduated to 10 years older. But lately, people are so quick to judge and say, oh, you're still a kid, as soon as they found out my age. Which they tend to ask early on, since I look young. In the U.S., the youngest I've been called is a 12-year old boy. They wondered why I was out on the street so late at night! I've attributed that to the Asian factor and the gender expression factor. But apparently, I look young here too. People keep guessing that I'm 16 or so. Telling people that I'm 20, almost 21, doens't help much. One of my apartment-mates said to me, "your eyes look really innocent, like you haven't had much life experiences yet." That didn't actually bother me because she made that ridiculous guess w/out knowing me at all, and I'm confident enough in my own knowledge that I have had a more interesting life and more maturity than most other people my age. I care more when the 27-year old lesbians I've been trying to befriend call me a "young'en" though. If I protest how they think I'm a kid, then I'd just seem more like an insecure young'en who's struggling for adult recognition and approval. But it's not like I can break out into a speech and start listing the "evidences" and life "events" I've had to prove otherwise. That'd just seem obnoxious. Really, I just need them to take me seriously! Grrr.

Vacationing and socializing

That's what i'm doing here, vacationing and socializing. I've been meeting up with different people this week, including a few ABC's (american-born chinese) who are working here, and a different group of Shanghainese dykes. These are two such different worlds. I got a glimpse of what the English-speaking Chinese American live here is like, and I'm really glad that I'm not living that. They teach English in international schools attended by spoiled, rich brats, interact with other expats, who are mostly obnoxious, ugly white business men with a fetish for Asian girls, and eat at/go out to crazy expensive places that are attended by mostly foreigners. In a way, I can't be so harsh cause I can only manage to do somewhat better if/when I go to a culture completely foreign to me. But it is shocking how sheltered you can be. They've built their own buildings with European cafes and lampposts, serving American food, with menus in English, etc.
It feels really inappropriate to go to those places.

I felt really Chinese, really authentic when I'm around these people, but around Chinese people, I start to feel like an outsider too. Like I'm desperately trying to blend in, but once the biographical facts come out, I have to unwillingly divulge the fact that I've been in the U.S. for 1/2 of my life, and I worry that they immediately see me as a kind of foreigner... I spent the afternoon in a KTV (karaoke) with these dykes, who are great fun. But I was embarassed that I couldn't sing, because I didn't know the current popular songs. I was only able to sing an English song and a couple of hella old Chinese songs, that were popular over a decade ago. Now I have to go home and studiously study the current songs.

I joined a wushu class today. It's been my childhood fantasy, but unfortunately it's not as sweet to realize it. I wanted to learn wushu so bad when i was little, but my mother made me take accordion (a concert instrument, its status similar to the violin) classes instead. The accordion class is in the same youth community center as the wushu class, and I'd walk by the courtyard where they practiced and watch with such longing. I vaguely remember this little girl my age who was really good, and did all these cool tumbles with a long spear, that impressed me so much. Maybe a first crush? Well, now I realize that wushu is really an art, for performance. It emphasizes form and isn't really fit for fighting. Today we started out with stretches and all kinds of crazy splits, which I can't do at all. It felt more a ballet class, standing in a row next to a bar and trying to reach my toes. But later on, when the kids that have been at it for years broke out the weapons, swords, knives, spears, I was totally into it again!

back to school

I went to Fudan University for the 1st time on Wednesday. I've been telling ppl, especially relatives, when they ask exactly WHAT do I plan on doing with all this time in Shanghai, that I'm going to audit classes at Fudan. I finally dragged my ass over there, after being here for 3 weeks. It was sorta nostalgic for Harvard. It's great to be in a campus environment with all these youthful looking students, people my age everywhere. I got a meal card and ate dinner in the cafeteria. Though the food's much cheaper, it tasted a million times better, homier, than anything I've ever had in Adams!

I randomly showed up at a class about Marxism (a basic, required core class here). I sat in the back and fell asleep within half an hour... My first class in 5 months and it's still boring :) So during the bathroom break, I grabbed my bag and left. I love that freedom of not actually being in school, so I don't have to sit through anything I don't feel like! On my way out of campus, I saw a poster about the Mexican University of Colima fokloric dance group performing, right then. So I rushed over to the auditorium and saw a great show. It was packed, and apparently, Chinese students were all in love with the brilliantly colored cloths and the exciting atmosphere they generated, even though the technical skills were nothing compared to Chinese performances. It's heartwarming to see this authentic cultural exchange that happens directly between two periphery nations, w/out going through the center of the world/the West. But, they did communicate with each other in English, the common language...

I feel really happy and satisfied that I'm living my life this way at the moment. Not being in school is great. I really had enough of wasting my life in such an academic bubble and getting wrapped up in all the extracurriculars as if they really mattered like the real world. I love this free flowing lifestyle of being able to do whatever I want, waking up whenever, just learning and experiencing and getting in touch with this world of mine that has been so far away for so many years. Of course, I had to prepare for this by working and saving up a lot of money, but it's totally worth it.

A city with constant construction (and demolition)

I finished reading Shanghai Baby 上海宝贝 by Wei Hui today. I randomly picked up a copy, translated into English, at a used bookstore in San Francisco, and it happened to be a controversial bestseller. It's so beautifully written, but it's entirely pretentious and self-conscious. Wei Hui, the author, writes about herself writing the book. It's obvious that every random thing that happens in the book comes from her own life, and she admits it too. But she manages to makes it endearing by being blatantly honest about her self-consciousness, with sentences like "I'm writing a book with metaphysical thoughts and raw sex" and "after I wrote this paragraph, Tian Tian came over"... It's exciting to think that the lives in this book takes place in Shanghai, in the same city I'm living in right now. Cities have such interesting personalities. I've really enjoyed getting to know them: Houston, San Francisco, Shanghai, Fuzhou. Only Boston is the most boring place ever. Shanghai is so alive. Just look outside my window. 成都北路 is a huge highway lighted up with traffic as late as 3 AM, and next to it is an old-fashioned area with clay-tiled roofs, alleys, markets with vegetables and meat hanging out. Because it's near such a busy area, you just know that it won't be long until they're successfully bought out by developers who will build skyscrapers here. Then I'm in this 33-story high building down the block, looking down on this small river, where junk boats will pass by everyday, loaded down with sand and stone. There's the constant sound of construction: drilling, digging, all night long. It's pretty annoying. On the sidewalk downstairs where I pass everyday, these temporary shelters for construction workers sprang up overnight and blocked the whole path. They're these pathetic, thin tin sheets with bunk beds inside. The workers are all migrant workers from rural places, without legal residence cards for Shanghai, camping here right by their worksite. It's a pretty grim lifestyle. Not necessarily the material conditions--I think I could slowly adjust to living with so few luxuries, but the exhausting work and the boring nature of it would be truly unbearable for me. The other day, I suddenly decided to dress up girly, with flowy shirt, dangling earrings, and girly hat to cover up my completely unfeminine haircut. So when I walked by, some of the workers made a pass at me, with a thick, obvious rural accent. That's something I'm not used to getting anymore!

Speaking of annoying men, I'm practically getting stalked by this guy David, whom I met the first week in Shanghai, when I was bored and in need of friends. I couldn't be too picky, I thought, and I got a possible gay vibe off of him, which was why I was really friendly and eager to find out if he really was gay or not. Turned out he's not. I only hung out with him a couple of times. But as soon as I met hot dykes and more interesting people, I really had no interest in hanging out with him anymore. It's exhausting to interact with straight men. Completely unattractive--so there's nothing visually enjoyable, and always talking on and on, as if he owns the air time and always deserves your complete attention. By the 2nd time I went out with him, I had already started making half-joking/half-snarky comments at the way he boasts about himself. But for 2 weeks now, he keeps calling me, sending me text msges, emailing me non-stop. I've never responded, but he keeps on ringing my phone. It's super annoying, especially cause it reminds me of how my mother stalks me and calls me 5 times in a row, without me ever picking up. Don't they get the message? How clear do I have to say "leave me alone"?

queer community thanks to technology

Talking to XA today, i learned more and more about how everyone in the lesbian circle met each other -- through complicated, extended relations, where one person introduces another friend to another friend, who meets another friend... Somehow, you find your way in to the community. I met XA through an acquaintance's friend's friend.

She first came out 7 or 8 years ago, back in '98. That was really the beginning of it all, she says. There were no lala community back then. No clubs/bars, no circles, except for maybe some tiny circle of friends of an older generation that she doesn't know about. She got a computer earlier than most people, and she went online and researched it. Through lala chatrooms, she met people, and then slowly met up in person and became good friends. That's how the community got started. She told me about this one time, at Ren Min Guang Chang/People's Square, where I go practically everyday, she met up with two other women for the first time in person. And from then on, the group acquired more and more people. Sometimes the new people get along with the group, and become good friends, some of whom I met at the bar last weekend. Sometimes the new people don't get along with the group, so sooner or later they aren't welcome anymore, and they're left to their own devices, since there aren't other groups to choose from. There's only one. XA described that first meeting at People's Square, half-jokingly, as a "historic" moment, and it's true. It's unbelievable. I feel like I'm standing in the face of such vital history, talking to a friend who happens to have been there from the beginning of it all, in such a casual atmosphere. It's kinda like a fairy tale, how computers enabled the beginning of a social phenomenon that changes the lives of many women. Technology stimulated the start of a community that's growing like wild fire now.

photography, meat, emotions

My bunny is growing so fast. She's eating bushels of vegetables and doubling her weight. I think it's barely a month old and was probably taken away from its mother way too early. The subject of what to do with after 3 months, when I have to leave, comes up a lot. I keep joking that, well, in the worst case scenario, if nobody will take it, then I'll just have to eat it. I remember once upon a time when my dad threatened me with that, and I was seriously afraid that he would do it, and actually eat my rabbits. But now I'm the one joking about it. I couldn't actually do it though. Even with the meat-eating frenzy I've been having. Even Chinese friends have commented on how much I like meat. Food has been such a major center of pleasure every day. May and I have been eating up a storm throughout Shanghai, and I've been especially keen on having different kinds of meat. At the "Brazilian" barbeque place, I had maybe 2 dozen chicken hearts... absolutely delicious. When we went to Zhou Zhuang 周庄, this touristy, historic town connected by canals and cute bridges, we had blowfish, fresh from the tank by the window. Veal, goat skewers, frog legs, lots and lots of pork... Chicken meat tastes so boring now.









But before I got sidetracked by the thought of food: this bunny is adorable, a great companion now that May went back to Singapore and I'm living by myself again. But honestly, I don't feel as affectionate towards it as I did towards my pets when I was little. I just realized that, I have so much less affection in general than in the past... After hearing all about my dating history, May commented that it doesn't seem like I 惦记/miss/feel attached to people very much. I have to admit that it does sound that way, with the fact that I haven't dated any girl for longer than a month, and I've been traveling and saying goodbyes so much that I'm almost used to it. But I do remember everyone fondly, and care a lot about a few people. It's also been intentional that i didn't want to get into any serious emotional relationships for a while, after getting out of such a long, overly-intense one. And I really value my independence, freedom, and self-reliance. But hearing the way other people described it, it makes me sound quite cold. I don't know what to make of that. Cause I don't plan on getting all sappy and stable anytime soon...

I've been learning a lot of random things about photography from May, who does it professionally. We hunted down this particular kind of houses that she wanted to photograph: houses built exactly like American suburbs, in rows that are all identical and utterly boring, but built in Shanghai. We pretended to be interested in buying in order to get in - it's a gated community with 24 hour guards who live on site. The guards are Chinese and live in these little huts on the edge of the overgrown field, well out of site of the pretend-suburb. Most residents are foreigners, or, to be more precise, white European or American, rich, businessmen, their housewives, kids, and maybe some business women too. This is such a scary neighborhood. It's taken over by rich expats with a lot of financial power, who are living in China in order to do business. They live such an insular lifestyle, separated from normal China, in houses with red rooftops, neat lawns out front, European chandeliers and furniture, with an International school next door to sent their filthy rich kids to. It's funny to think, these are the kind of kids who make-up most of the "international student" population at harvard. They seem sorta interesting, from the surface, cuz they've lived all over the world, following their parents, but all the while they're hella privileged, spoiled brats who have never lacked a good education in English-language schools, wherever they are, and never really became a part of anywhere they've lived. I was really glad when May finished taking her pictures. Just being in those suburban rows of identical, fake-perfect, symmetrical houses made me feel suppressed. Like I couldn't breathe.

to live or to research

This was a really amazing night. On saturday I went to my first lesbian bar in China, and it was more fun than any clubs I've been to in Boston. What a wonderful place! It felt so good to walk into such a place again, after a month and a half since I've last been in a place filled with dykes. There were a few gay boys too, who sang and performed, and reminded me that some, not all, but some, gay boys are quite likeable. God, it makes me so happy to just BE in such a place. Everyone was really warm and friendly. May and I had dinner with XA and her girlfriend first, then met up with a big group at this club. Since it was Halloween's weekend, it was packed to the brim. I've heard before from friends who've been here that the scene is centered strictly around the butch-femme dynamic. But it didn't seem very consistent at all. For example, XA and her girlfriend both seem to fall more in the Bu Fen (in -between) category. And this girl, W, who was really friendly to me, appeared to be completely T in her hairstyle, dress, personality, actions. But she said that she was actually very P... I'm not sure what exactly P refers to then. It's all so interesting. But all of a sudden, I don't feel the intellectual interest I had before in "researching" and learning about what this amazingly dynamic community is like. I felt really happy to be introduced and included so quickly into it, and I look forward to living here for the next coupla months and being a part of this community itself, being friends with these people and living this lifestyle. It's kinda like: you can't study something anthropologically if you are part of it, at least, not in that old, European imperialist/racist/"objective" way...

A less frequently updated blog means a busier, funner life. I'm living such a luxurious lifestyle right now, with no work, no school, for now, enough money saved up, and plenty of fun and intellectual stimulation. It's kinda shocking what a good deal this is to take time off. I got a bunny. I've been dreaming about a kitten, even though it'd be pretty irresponsible to get a kitten for only 3 months. But a bunny would be easier to take care of when I leave. I got it on an impulse when I saw a woman 挑着 / carrying all these little cages of bunnies and birds, walking down the street. For the first 3 days, it only ate and didn't poop, and we were quite worried that it's gonna die w/in the week, but it's better now. It's soooo cute. It fits in my palm, and it tackles down piles of vegetables that's 3 times its size. I named it 雪糕, it means "ice cream," and it literally means "snow cake," so it has the connotation of "white". This bunny is gonna keep me company when I'm by myself later on.

My friend May from Boston/Singapore and I have been going to all the touristy things and art shows around the city, ranging from both the ultra-modern to the ancient. I've been to the Bund 5 times now. The skyline with the futuristic looking buildings, and 东方明珠 / the Pearl of the East Tower, has gotten old already. The Yu Garden, from the Ming Dynasty, was this huge recreational garden with suh classic rocks, ponds, goldfishes, winding paths and bridges. Quite a visual feast, with incredible details everywhere, intricate wooden window carvings, figures on the roofs, and designs on the tile on the floor... But after 3 hours of exploring the garden, we got bored cause it just went on and on, never endingly. This governor who built it must've had a lot of money.

I'm having a really annoying problem with a guy who won't leave me alone. He's a friend of my cousin's friend, and sorta more interesting than the other random people I've been meeting, who're all working in boring, high -stress jobs and living domestic, boring lives. I've been feeling more flexible than usual in the type of people that I'd hang out with, a lot more open to people who I'd find really boring in the U.S. And I was only really friendly to him at first cuz I thot he might be gay. But after a lot of probing around, I don't think so. Now he calls everyday to ask me to go do stuff and emails me and IM's me... Men are quite annoying.

Rain

I woke up this afternoon to a different world outside. Apparently it rained this morning. You can tell, everything's changed. Shanghai has taken on a crisp, fresh color. Everything's clean. The tiles on the roof of the old-style houses are red, no longer brown. You can even see the subtle colors on the skyscrapers. I didn't realize before how gray this city is, constantly covered in a thick layer of smog and car horns. But gray would imply that it's slow. It's just the opposite. I guess it's a lot like New York, a giant city that's constantly moving, expanding, building higher and higher up. Kinda like the tower of Babel, too. It's hard to fathom 9 million people here. I don't wanna imply that China is completely environmentally unfriendly, though. Sure, there's plenty of pollution, but at the same time, there're unexpected ways of conservation everywhere too. All except the oldest toilets have 2 flush settings: less or more water. There're these cute little electric motorcycles running around that doesn't use gasoline. And all the people from my mother's and grandparents' generation would never allow the water to be left on and wasted. This mentality doesn't come from the most "forward", "progressive" liberal thinking. Instead, it's rooted back in the old world when things were scarce.
I ate lunch at a little restaurant downstairs opened by a family from XinJiang province (Uyghurs). I never knew the English word Uyghur was for XinJiang people until I looked it up just now. When I was little, my conception of the XinJiang ethnic group was this exotic, beautiful people who would sing their distinctive songs while picking grapes. The girls all had long, thin braids. My sister had this really cute baby cap lined with purples beads that was in the XinJiang style. The family who ran the restaurant wore Muslim head scarves and caps. I know so little about what their lives might be like, as a plain Han person, part of the dominant ethnic group here. But at the same time, I wonder, do they feel the same living in Shanghai as I do in the U.S? In this city, they're also a minority, far away from their homeland, obviously stands out from everyone else, looking Chinese, and yet different somehow

Random Funny Story:

For some reason, the airport was 1.5 hours outside of the city of Fuzhou, in the little city of ChangLe. Unnecessarily far. On the way there, I casually complained about the distance, and learned the reason why. Back when it was being built, the governor of the province was from ChangLe, so he had the airport built in his hometown, wanting to stimulate the local economy. But it didn't work so well. So now, everytime everyone flies somewhere, his name will get cussed out. :)

Introduction to Dykes and Revolutions


It's been 3 days since A Yu and her boyfriend left Shanghai to go back to work, and even though I was kept busy shopping and getting my room set-up, I was starting to talk to myself. Telling stories in my own head. But I spent today with an acquaintance from Boston. A is a Chinese dyke who's from Shanghai and happens to be visiting. And sure enough, she introduced me to this other dyke who lives here, who will in turn take me to local lesbian stuff. It's good to be in the company of fellow dykes again, after a whole month! Even though, I've passed by hella dykes on the street here. Over a dozen I'd say. And I'm not counting any femmes or androgynous ones that I'm not sure about.

When I first met up with A, we talked in English. It's also been a month since I've conversed in English. It felt so strange, and for a moment there I thought I had an accent again, which really frightens me--can I only maintain one language at the expense of another? But after a while it felt slightly more natural. She had some free VIP tickets to an opera show by some soprano black American woman named Jessye Norman. It was decent, but we got bored pretty quick and left at the interval. After we left, we noticed on the program that apparently, she's the world's first ranked soprano?!

Also walked through a show at the Shanghai Art Museum. There was a black/white charcoal-drawn short film that told the story of human kind's destruction of the world through industrialization and war. It featured a scene near the end where two giant evil birds flew into the new york twin towers. Also, battle tanks were tub-like elephants whose shoot out of their trunks. It's cartoonish and creepy at the same time.

(I realized that I default on journaling about my personal thoughts, but leave out the interesting external stuff that I learn. But there's no reason for that).

A. and her friend (let's call her XA) are 29. Once they learned my age, they kept referring to me as a "kid" 小朋友. They both automatically assumed that I'm a baby T, interestingly. (background: T=tomboy=butch, P=po=婆=wife=femme, Bufen=不分=inbetween=androgynous. Those are really approximate equal-signs, of course. The specific gender role implications aren't the same.) They also assumed that I had never been with boys before, for some reason. When I corrected that, XA happily clapped my back and said, wow, here we have a real lala 拉拉 (lesbian)!" What i gathered from the conversation today is that a lot of queer women here get married once they reach a certain age and family pressure gets intense, especially the P's (femmes), a lot of whom are bi. After getting married, a lot of them goes back out and secretly finds girlfriends again. But some will not get divorced, leaving many T's frustrated. So these two thought that the best kind of dyke is one who's married and divorced - tried men/marriage and firmly rejected it.

We ate dinner at XA's little apartment, where she lives w/ her long-term girlfirned. XA cooked a delicious meal, with vegetables and meat bought fresh (and cheaply) from the market near by. Nothing frozen or dead. Live fish, live clams, freshly cut meat, newly picked vegetables. It's quite a nice little domestic life they have. Sure, XA's parents know and strongly object. But they have their circle of lesbian friends to hang out with, and an automatic invisibility in greater public that affords them complete safety. I've yet to hear of a gay bashing/hate crime in China.

A month ago I would never even have entertained the possibility of moving back to China -- that'd be like moving to a new culture again. But now... It's not that i want to move back, but it's not as remote of a possibility anymore. The culture may not be that much of an obstacle. But my activism would be.

The word "revolution" is hella confusing right now. Back in the U.S., I considered myself more radical than most people I knew. I was committed to my causes and felt ready to do almost anything. I loved the word "revolution." That's where people of color rise up, queer people, poor people, and women rise up, where oppressed people fight back. Like the Tracy Chapman song, "Talkin bout a revolution." But here, the ideal of revolution, 革命 is not really a minority. It's been said and done before! It's the logan that rules! It's strange to think that several decades ago, there were enough people who wanted a revolution, who wanted to overthrow the class system and give women rights, with enough dedication and momentum to fight a real war, where countless people who professed marxist ideologies and literally died for it. They were actually successful, in taking over political power. They actually won. But this is not inspiring -- this is rather disillusioning. It's been tried and done. They won, and yet they failed... Cause this country that we've got right now is certainly not perfect. It makes me feel like--a revolution may not be the solution! But intellectually, my ideology hasn't changed. Also, there are people, not very different from me, who had visions for society and specifically chose to die for it. I thought that I had the same dedication to my politics, but, looking at this choice up close and real, I'm not so sure anymore. It's so easy to sit at school and theorize, and feel all pumped up about fighting oppression, no matter how much it takes. It's also easy to theorize about how ivy towers are sheltering, while sitting in them, and write in every paper we write that we're in a position of privilege and little risk and apologize for it. But it's chilling to hear that, someone i know had co-workers who were in the Communist Party, way back when it was an illegal underground party whose members certainly faced the death penalty if discovered. They refused to let this person become connected in anyway, because this person was the only child (keeping in mind the utter importance of Chinese families leaving progeny and continuing the blood line). This is an example of how ultimate that choice is: how joining the party equals almost certain death... I don't know if I could also make that choice!

I'm not too wary about my privacy and political persecution, but from time to time I will be intentional ambiguous and change names. You never know. I'm politically vulnerable in plenty of ways.

Everything is coming back to me like magic. They were playing some older popular songs on TV, like 九百九十九朵玫瑰 (999 roses). This song hasn't crossed my mind in so many years, but as soon as I heard it, it was so familiar. As long as I had the words on the bottom of the screen to follow, I could sing along. They also played 千年等一回, the theme song to the tv series I loved to watch, 白蛇娘娘 ("white snake goddess/fairy"). Today, I couldn't get it out of my head.

I'm suffering from insomnia on my first night in Shanghai. My new place is amazingly luxurious! Somehow I ended up renting a room in the very richest, busy downtown center of the city. I'm on the 27th floor. My room has a porch with a gorgeous view of the city. You can see a great field of lights and skyscrapers, and a river close by. I still haven't had a chance to be lonely yet. My cousin A Yu and her boyfriend came w/ me for the weekend. It's so spoiling. They bought 1000RMB (almost $150) plane tickets to come here for 2 days. We got picked up from the airport by their friend, met another friend for dinner, who offered to show me around the city, etc... My first thought when I got out of the airport was, damn, another new city to navigate, why did i come here again? why do i keep moving to new places? But then I remembered, there's really nowhere else in China for me to be for such a long time. My hometown is so little, everything is less than a 15 minute ride on the 3-wheeled bicycle/rickshaws. Fu Zhou is much bigger, but there's still not much meaningful things for me to do. After walking around the city tonight, I'm pretty excited. It's so huge, cosmopolitan. And expensive. Apparently real estate in the area I'm renting right now is 2000RMB/$3000 per square meter!

I've accumulated pictures numbering in the thousands already. They'll be uploaded (some of them) on the facebook at some point, but here're a few random ones.

This is my sister, Huang Yan Dan. We were playing at the little wooden bridge in the village my paternal family is from. Every single kid in the family has walked across this bridge when they were little, including me. I can't really remember though. That day, we climbed trees, crossed little streams and rice paddies, and climbed this hill nearby, which I explored when I was little too. It seemd so much more intimidating when I was a kid. My sister was supposed to lead the way, but she totally lost the path, and I ended up finding our way back. It's hardly a challenge; there're vegetable groves that people planted on the hilltop, and you never lose sight of the brick roofs and chimneys down the hill.

a statue of Confucious, in the Confucious Temple in my hometown. The ceiling in this place is breathtaking. This picture doesn't capture even a corner of the elaborate designs above your head. The front of the temple was deconstructed and rebuilt as a teen community center, where I took accordion centers for years.








My grandparents (maternal, the ones that I've been talking about). My sister on the left. Somebody's mother in the middle. Me. After ten years, my grandparents' little apartment hasn't changed at all. They finally agreed to add a fridge and microwave, but the dish cabinet, table, silverware, coal stove, are all exactly the same. Even the pots of flowers on the porch haven't changed.








By the Pacific ocean. My lovely cousin Fang Fang on the left. Cousin A Yu on the right.

丹丹 (my sister) is going to enroll at Paul Revere Middle School tomorrow, in Houston. She's now living with my aunt, my dad's sister, Pei Hong. I didn't really involve myself much in this drama the last few days, being so far away anyways, but it turned out alright. Pei Hong is probably better for Dan Dan than both my father and my mother combined. It's a good thing that my mother did such a ridiculous thing, coming here to pick up my sister and taking her over here, only to not want to care for her (or believing that she doesn't have the ability to care for her) at the last minute and try to push her off to live with my dad. What bullshit. But now, I'm finding myself looking up Revere Middle School online and reading about their dress code and bell schedule, thinking of calling the school myself tomorrow to make sure that she gets put into good classes... There's so much I can do, if I was in Houston, and none of them, my sister/parents/aunt, knows how to navigate that system at all. I want to offer all of my knowledge to her, but that's hard to do. Nevertheless, she's got so much more support than I did ten years ago. We talked on the phone for half an hour and chatted online too. The first time that she called since she left, we all happened to be at my grandparents' house, taking turns on the phone, all so happy to hear from her. Apparently, she cried the whole night. Nobody knew where she was going to live, who she was going to live with, and she cried wanting to come back, never having wanted to leave. But my aunt, who's lived with her and pretty much mothered her for the last 5 years, told her that she's welcome back here, anytime. My aunt said that she'll pay for the plane ticket, and she won't yell at Dan Dan for playing video games anymore. Whenever Dan Dan feels that she can't handle America anymore, she's welcome back here. Even Xue Ming (the cousin who gambles and is always broke) offered to provide her with 50 bucks of spending money each month when she comes back. --God, she has so much love from so much family! I had nothing like it, nothing at all, when I went over. How much I cried by myself and wanted things to go back to normal... with nobody to talk to, nobody to comfort me, and certainly no possibility of going home! Phone calls once a month to my mother didn't count. Of course I only told her that everything was fine, not to worry (I think I did understand the logic of covering up painful things to protect your loved ones, the natural act of bearing painful burdens yourself as the way of showing care for your family). My aunt pointed out that a lot of it was the difference of 10 years of technology. My mother was ahead of everyone else for having a phone in 1996. Of course I couldn't talk to anybody else. It's ironic, isn't it? Technology on an unabstract level. No phone=suffering. What a joke.

I find myself advising my sister to avoid ESL (English as a Second Language) classes as much as possible, because this school is 50% Hispanic, and that most likely means that the ESL classes will be filled with Hispanic kids who will speak to each other in Spanish, and my sister will understand Spanish even less than English and never hear enough English to learn it. Is this problematic for me to do? I don't know. It's reality. She's already picked up enough racist sentiments from my mother to make some really stupid comments, and I can only tell her that's not true, black people are not worse, both are fine, I have both good friends who are black and Hispanic. Well, she'll learn.

my cousin A Yu and I went to soak hot springs today. Fuzhou is famous for its natural hot springs. What a luxury it was! We also got Chinese foot massages that lasted an hour long. Half an hour on each foot. Actually, a lot of it was pretty painful, especially when they would push sharply right into a spot between bones. I had to try really hard to relax and learn to enjoy it. I understand the logic -- it's like that chinese proverb, loosely translated to mean that whatever's good for you is sure to be bitter to take in. A Yu yelled at the girl who was doing my foot because she couldn't tell me which blood points/chi points on the foot were supposed to correspond to which parts of the body.

It's 3 AM and there's a rooster crowing somewhere off in the distance. Which is strange, for such a big city like Fu Zhou. I'm still overwhelmed by the traffic here. When I cross the road, I follow other people and cross right next to them, for fear of getting run over by a taxi, bus, people, bicycle, and motorcycles all at once, if I tried to navigate myself.

It seems like I've been getting stares from people here and there, and I couldn't figure out why exactly. My cousins have assured me that I don't look like a foreigner at all. I blend in perfectly. This guy told me the other day that I actually have a really strong Pu Xian accent when I speak Mandarin (the accent from speaking the local dialect of my hometown, Xian You). So my relatives finally told me today why they think people stare at me. A Yu said, sure, first people will notice me and take a second look to figure out whether i'm a boy or a girl, but that's just out of curiosity; what those people in the restaurant were discussing had to be about one thing: the fact that I'm not wearing a bra. The hilarious thing is that A Yu thought that instead of just me, it was all Americans who didn't wear bras... I worried so much before coming to China about whether I would stand out as an American somehow, but I was so far off. When I went back to my 老家，the original village where my dad grew up, people kept commenting on how modest/earthy/simple I dressed. I guess they were expecting cosmopolitanism. My cousin's wife even offered me some of her cloths to change into that she thought was more appropriately pretty and fancy. But, no way I was gonna put on something with flowers and lace!

It's getting a bit annoying, every new person I come across, the first they say is, oh, I thought she was a boy. This used to make me quite secretly satisfied, but now it's getting tiring. With almost no exception, that's always the first comment. But the good thing is, as soon as it's brought up, it's also casually dropped. Nobody links it to sexuality, or anything dangerous. People simple don't understand why. At the wedding banquet I went to with my little sister, who's 13, someone who sat at our table asked her halfway through the banquet about her 弟弟 (younger brother). That gave my sister quite an ego boost.

My grandfather came to Fuzhou also today for a check-up. The first one since he finished chemotherapy 2 months ago. The results were fantastic, almost all gone. A Yu managed to get a hold of a doctor she knows, who's the #1 doctor in the whole Fu Jian province for this kind of cancer. The whole gang of us (A Yu, me, my aunt and uncle who's accompanying my grandfather) grabbed my grandpa and rushed to the visa office where this esteemed doctor was getting some paperwork done, so that he could take a look before he leaves the country in a couple of days. It's quite something, this Chinese system of getting things done through connections and personal relations. I have to admit it's pretty damn nice of the doctor to voluntarily see a patient in his own time, in a random public place somewhere, for free, just because my cousin knows him and we're from the same hometown. Then it's a whole charade of continuing to keep the cancer hidden from my grandpa. He believes that it's some kind of esophagus infection or something like that. It's a good thing that he's partially deaf and his hearing aid was out of battery. It's a continuous struggle for my aunt and uncle to arrange things for him, take care of his hospital visits, get the diagnosis w/out letting him detect anything, while my grandpa is trying to stay in the middle of it all, hear what's going on, and direct what should be done. He doesn't know what's going on at all, and he can't hear, so he writes down a huge list of questions beforehand to show to the doctor, and we all half cater to him and explain details patiently, and half lie to get it over with. The doctor writes down the answers for him, and because the CT scans today came out so well, he wrote at the end, "can live for another 80 years!" (He's totally in on the whole cover-up thing. Apparently it's a pretty common thing for family members to do). My grandfather was really happy. Suddenly, I feel so unusually 孝顺 (the complex, deathly important idea of children caring for/respecting/obeying their elder genearation). Like I'm willing to do a whole lot to make him happy or well. It's strange, what your physical space do to you -- in the U.S., I've lived for the past many years as the most heartless/kinless/familyless/obligationless person for miles around, because I resent these things so much; but here, standing on this yellow/ancestral soil and breathing this yellow/polluted air, I feel like I can almost, almost understand why my relatives would unanimously decide to keep his own cancer a secret from him, out of concern for him!

My grandfather is so proud of the Harvard insignia stuff I gave him (t-shirt, pen, and umbrella). But today, he gifted the pen to the doctor. That's a heavy gift for him, seeing that he's been carrying it in his shirt pocket everywhere he goes lately. He was even ready to give the umbrella to the doctor too. He read this article about the --fuck, can't think of the English word-- mission of colleges to educate their students. The article called Harvard the #1 ranked school in the U.S., right above Yale, and thus #1 in the world, and called each and every one of Harvard's students "a kernel of gold" waiting to be polished to shine. Something like that... I didn't finish reading it. My grandfather liked that idea so much, he photocopied the article for all the grandchildren to read, and quoted it to everyone, calling me "gold," and repeated the story to that doctor too! Each time I hear it, I fear being seen as the obnoxious cousin, the enemy. But it makes him really proud.

Before I knew it, I've been in China for two weeks now. My sister should have arrived in Houston by now. It's such a whirlwind. She's in a different world now. I feel sorry for all the hardship she's gonna endure for sure. But she should have an easier time than I did ten years ago. Instead of a little town in Louisiana w/ only white and black people, she's going to be -- no, she IS in Houston, where she's gonna have the luxury of Chinese people, people she can actually speak to for the first couple of years.

I've been sitting in bed, watching Jing Du Yian Yun, w/ my cousins A Yu and Fang Fang. We're on episode 25. It's hard to concentrate on anything else when this really enticing soap opera is on. It's hard to think about the other world, the American world, when I'm here.

Tomorrow is Mid-Autumn Festival. We're in Fuzhou right now. Tomorrow we'll go back to my hometown, Xian You, for the family holiday. Then I'll come back to Fuzhou and then go on my way to Shanghai. I feel like I haven't spent enough time in Xian You. This little town, where I grew up, is really home. The old stone building where I lived for 10 years is still there. I went there to take a look. It looks a lot smaller than I remembered. Two small rooms side by side, one for living space, one as the bedroom. The sink outside on the porch. The area downstairs that's still green and mossy from all the dirty water people poured out all those years. The little brick rooms ahead where the round coal pieces were stored, and where I kept my bike. A lot has changed, new buildings have been constructed, many have been destroyed, but the path to my grandparents' house nearby is still the same. I can still lie down on my grandparents' old wooden bed, on the hard wooden pillow, on the reed sheet, and watch TV with the cousins that I grew up with. This place that feels so natural, so unnew -- how can I just pick up and leave, again, and leave it behind for ten more years? It's hard to imagine what it'd be like when I go back to the U.S. I've long thought that I didn't remember much from my childhood, but once I got here, everything just came back. I recognized the little desk I used to use, the sweaters my mother knit me, the statue that I used to climb... It's like, once you physically step onto this soil, the spirit of the place, the soul of this history just naturally comes back into you. And you belong again. Last semester when I took a Chinese class at school, I could barely express myself. But all of a sudden, phrases and expressions just form out of my mouth unconsciously. If I think about it, it won't come, but if I relax, all of a sudden I'm saying things that I can't remember how to write at all. The food is great. The people are old. There's an instant sort of intimacy with my family. Even though I thought of myself as having essentially no family for the past many years, I actually do. I know all these people, even though I don't. Within a week of being back, they're comfortable enough with me to fight and scream in front of me, break out family drama in front of me, and even yell at me like a family member. No one thinks that I look like a foreigner/American.