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.