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...