...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...
Friday, December 29, 2006
Sunday, December 10, 2006
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
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
Friday, December 08, 2006
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...
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...
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