Pretty Woman Spitting: An American's Travels in China Read online

  Dear Leanna,

  Thank you for buying us the dinner. I had a wonderful time with you and Margaret. I felt it was very easy to talk with you guys. I was free to talk about anything. In a moment, I felt that we were in a TV drama like “Sex and the city”. Just our girls, chatting, laughing.

  I got tell you it was one of best chat I’ve ever had. Thank you.

  Next time, Helen and I will take you to some real Chinese restaurant. They gonna serve the authentic Chinese food.

  Eva

  It was the first time in months of teaching in China that I felt like I had done something right. Getting this email from Eva was like the ultimate reward for my hard work. Although Margaret and I were afraid of what “authentic Chinese food” we would be eating next time. Luckily, they took us to another hotpot restaurant.

  FLESH EATING MONSTERS

  The mosquitoes in Wuhu closely resemble dragonflies. By early springtime they had come out like snakes being flushed out of a field. It happened overnight along with the intense heat.

  I knew that Wuhu was in a malaria zone – that’s why I’ve been taking a Larium pill once a week and going half crazy from the Freddy Kruger-ish nightmares it gave me. I’d been wondering if it had all been worth it – Wuhu wasn’t West Africa after all. The scenes in my drug-addled dreams were so graphic, I felt like I was writing horror films in my sleep.

  One night I dreamt I saw a nanny, who was working for a paranoid woman, convinced that the nanny was sleeping with her husband. The nanny knew something was up when she saw that the woman watching a graphic movie about how to skin a human while sharpening a butcher knife in the kitchen. That’s where I’ll end that nightmare for now. I’ll only say that there was a chase and I went from being a witness in the dream to being the hunted nanny.

  My students had started to bring me presents to repel the mosquitoes. I had coils to burn giving off god-knows-what harmful chemicals in my apartment and a device that resembled an old, wooden, tennis racket that I was supposed to swat the beasts with at which point they would fry like bacon bits. Only problem was that those prehistoric buggers were too damn quick for me. They’d have a glob of my blood in their gullets before I could pick which device to thwart them with. At first, this was just annoying. I thought, Wow these are some big damn skeeters. They soon became as dreaded as my Larium nightmares.

  They started to wake me up in the night, buzzing in my ear like gigantic bumblebees. It got so that I began to slap my own face when I heard them in my ear.

  It took me a solid week to figure out how to systematically kill them. The instrument I used was my blue, travel, neck pillow. By sitting on the end of my bed and waiting for them to land on the far white wall, I could see the big black monsters briefly. It was then that I would lurch up to kill them; pillow in two hands, and smush them against the wall. This wasn’t always foolproof. If they landed too high, I might hit just under them, missing a key chance. If I don’t press hard enough, those iron-backed creatures would live to bite me again. I had to do this every night until I couldn’t hear the buzzing anymore. It took hours sometimes, but I had to do it or I couldn’t sleep and when I got out of the bed in the morning I’d have bites the size of dimes all over my face, neck and hands – the exposed areas of my body. My pillow began to resemble a smurf with chickenpox.

  Walking around in the muggy Wuhu heat during the day, I got stung on the rest of my body. My legs began looking like pizza sticks, heavy on the pepperoni. I’d been wondering why my students didn’t have these same bites all over them. I thought maybe Americans are sweeter than the Chinese from years of eating complex sugars. I asked Charles about the mosquitoes and found out that the students use mosquito nets over their beds. With all the amenities I had that the students don’t, (AC, a washing machine, a kitchen) I would have traded them all for a mosquito net.

  PRETTY WOMAN…

  One afternoon, Margaret and I were sitting on a bench near a lake in downtown Wuhu, enjoying warm weather and magazines we’d gotten from care packages. We looked up to see a thirty-ish-year-old Chinese woman wearing a baby blue cable knit sweater, a short grey tennis skirt with tan pantyhose. She was six feet away from us laying spread eagle in a patch of grass with her skirt flipped up over her stomach and her bush showing through the hose. We couldn’t help but stare at her and imagine how hot she must be in that getup. She finally woke up with her hair disheveled, rolled over onto a walkway nearby, squatted down, jerked her panty hose to her ankles and proceeded to defecate. She did so much that the pile couldn’t grow up any further and was touching her bottom. Like a sand crab, she sidled a foot over and finished her business.

  While she was doing this we saw nicely dressed townspeople walking on the street nearby not phased. We, on the other hand, couldn’t tear their eyes away from the woman.

  In America you could see such a thing happen, but I doubt if everyone walking by would ignore it. It was amazing to us that we were so fascinating to the Chinese and a well-dressed woman taking a dump on a sidewalk wasn’t something to even glance at. Next thing you know, that same group of townspeople had stop to point and stare…at us.

  THE HORIZONTAL TAI CHI

  I’m not sure when in my life it occurred to me, but at some point I just knew – gay men create all things beautiful and sophisticated in large cities and, by extension, in countries. Homosexual men are like a nomadic tribe that beautifies urban areas and then move on and spread their taste to other areas in need.

  Atlanta, as the story goes, was a sad wreck of a city with crumbling buildings and crack heads on every corner in the early 1980s. However, it was also a large enough city to be a safe haven for homosexuals in the South. They could be anonymous and find likeminded allies. Gay men slowly moved into a rundown section of Atlanta called Midtown, an area teaming with crime, rundown buildings and very few upscale restaurants. Then, they single handedly beautified the area, driving out the criminals.

  Overtime, as the neighborhoods in Midtown were cleaned up, restaurants moved in and Midtown’s stock rose, thus attracting the moneyed people into the area. The hoity-toity started coming slowly and then in droves. They bought up houses and land prices soared. They built McMansions and then they slowly pushed many of the gay men out by driving up property values and displaying their buxom trophy wives.

  This only forced these stylish nomads into other areas that needed their special touch, which they then revitalized, thus attracting the wealthy into those areas. And on the cycle went.

  According to my students, China does not allow homosexuality. Of course there are gay men, women, girls and boys in China, but it’s not a legal lifestyle. I had several students talk to me about homosexuals in America. They asked questions like,

  “What do they look like?”

  “How do you know a gay when you see one?”

  You can imagine their surprise when I told them that I had countless gay friends and I’d lived with a gay roommate.

  “Whoa? It couldn’t be,” one exclaimed.

  In public, students and strangers alike asked me if I had a boyfriend. When I told them I did, they asked me why I left him instead of getting married. They were amazed that I was twenty-six years old and not married, but because Margaret was twenty-eight, they were more concerned about her finding a boyfriend than me leaving mine behind.

  In private conversations, I noticed that the students’ favorite topics were sexual orientation and my views on marriage and living with a lover out of wedlock. The Chinese seemed to believe that Americans are all nymphomaniacs with little respect for the institution of marriage. The Chinese, however, believed that they were different. I believed this at first, too. My students seemed so virtuous, always talking about living the traditional life of their ancestors. Then I accidentally walked into a bedroom of a student’s apartment and saw two students doing the horizontal Tai Chi. Shortly thereafter, I learned that many students rented hotel rooms off campus with their significant others. As far as I could tell,
the Chinese were just as sinful as we nympho Americans are.

  I suspected that some of my students might be gay. Jackie was a doted on daughter who seemed to have been brought up like a favored son. Her family had been wealthy for several generations. Jackie was much larger than most of her classmates, and preferred men’s clothing to women’s, liked sports, the spiky haircut that the men often wore and a small classmate named Rose. Not that these things meant that she was definitely gay, but without thinking much about it because it’s a natural thing, I assumed that Jackie was probably gay. Another boy, Dan, who wore red horn-rimmed glasses, hung out with girls all the time and spoke his broken English with the token gay lisp also seemed as if he might be gay.

  Those thoughts were only disconcerting to me when I found out that the Chinese don’t tolerate such a lifestyle. I wondered what these poor kids would do if they were gay.

  When I asked the students about this they would tell me,

  “You see, we don’t understand that kind of life. We live the traditional life of our ancestors. It is only in Beijing or Shanghai that you find a man living with a man, but it is forbidden there, too.”

  When they made statements like; “We live the traditional life of our ancestors,” or “China has a long history” in that singsong way that seemed robotic to me, I couldn’t help but wonder if they had been programmed through years of chanting the same lines to say these things.

  I’m not saying that no one in China has innate taste or flare, but whole communities in America have been beautified through the efforts of flamboyant gay men and those very types of men are desperately needed in China. They would do what I wanted to do in many of the cities I visited like organize neighborhood clean ups and come up with town ordinances like Everyone must keep their trash in trash bins and take it out twice a week and No one is allowed to spit in public places or while riding public transportation.

  When I lived in Atlanta after college, my property managers, John and Terry, told us that it was absolutely a neighborhood law that the lawn be mowed at least once every two weeks and that garbage cans had to be taken off the street after the morning the garbage was collected.

  Over time we noticed that our heterosexual, next-door neighbors did not follow these supposed ordinances. They were doing well to get the yard mowed once a season and put garbage out in cans that lived on the street. But our property managers were extremely anal and wouldn’t allow us to have a yard that looked unsightly.

  Outside of many apartment complexes in Wuhu, I saw piles of trash at the entrance to the buildings. I would see immaculately clean, if minimalist, interiors of apartments and dust on the hand railings of the building’s stairs. It seemed that everyone was too concerned with getting their children married off to an appropriate opposite sex mate by the age of twenty-two to have any concern for the appearance of their neighborhood.

  I even saw Charles finish a bottle of water and promptly begin to throw it into the grass near the spot where we were having lunch. When he raised his hand to throw the bottle, I unconsciously sucked air in between my teeth and grabbed the bottle out of his raised hand. He looked stunned.

  “Wha?” he asked.

  “Charles, you can’t litter.”

  “What is ‘litter’?”

  “You can not throw your trash on the ground,” I said slowly.

  “Where will we put it?” he asked, confused.

  “In the trashcan.”

  There’s a lot that the masses need to learn in China and I’m convinced it will take openly gay men to beautify that country.

  THE SEXY WOLF

  Not many of my Chinese students liked to talk about politics. I found this out when I taught a chapter on American politics from our textbook. It was the most boring lesson yet for the students. At the end of a class, one of the few students that was still awake, Dean Lu’s daughter, Jessie, asked me,

  “You like politics?”

  “Yes. It was my major in college and I find it very interesting.”

  “You care about politics?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very much. It’s really important in my country. Do you not care about politics?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “We have one party,” she said.

  She put it so simply and it made so much sense when she said it that way. The one party would decide who was going to be a leader and who wasn’t or what policies would be enacted or not, so, why would the people care?

  As much as my students liked to talk about pop music and Chinese food in public, and personal and religious issues with me in private, few of them ever seemed to want to talk about politics. Ever. The one exception was a student that was also in Jessie’s class. His name was Salon. All of the other students would groan and then chatter at him in rapid staccato Chinese when he would bring up any topic that was political.

  Without thinking, I’d assumed he’d named himself after a beauty salon. But he told me that he chose this name because of its archaic meaning – a gathering of people of social or intellectual distinction to discuss important issues.

  Salon had a thick head of black hair that stood up in all directions. He was taller than most of my male students, but his clothes seemed a few inches too short. He moved his arms and body in quick, jerky motions that reminded me of actors in old kung fu movies. Something about this jerkiness also made Salon seem manlier than some of the other male students. He would seek me out after class on Thursday afternoons and we would sit under the pagoda near my apartment discussing current Chinese policies, American views of the Chinese and the future of both countries.

  Salon was the son of a produce farmer. He told me that his family was considered to be peasants and that his father worked hard all year long growing fruits and vegetables and selling them at roadside stands. Salon wanted a different life for himself and his family. He was driven academically by the fact that the government was forcing small farmers to give up their lands and find other work like jobs in factories. This also drove him politically; he wanted to improve the rights of the small farmer, but he told me that not many people dared to go against the government in any way. He said that many government officials were corrupt, but because of the one-party system those officials would be in power for life, no matter what.

  Salon was determined to make a difference in China, even though he knew that not many in the party would share his thinking. I wondered how he had come to open his mind to these thoughts when others did not or would not.

  Once, Salon and I started discussing China’s long history and we got into Tiananmen Square. This was the first and last time that I spoke of it with a Chinese person. At one point I said to him,

  “What do your parents say about what happened at Tiananmen Square?”

  “They do not talk about it,” he said, shaking his head. “It was a hard time for them.”

  Then he looked at me with his huge brown eyes and said,

  “Will you tell me what happened?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I know some people died.”

  “Do you know who or how many?” I asked.

  “I know it was some students, but I do not know how many.”

  I explained the history to Salon briefly. He seemed enthralled and horrified at the same time, hanging on my words. Then I said without thinking,

  “Salon, the whole world saw what happened.”

  “The whole world, except for China.”

  It was such an honest and pitiful answer. Salon and I continued to have our deep conversations the whole time I lived in China. From my limited view, he was the only student I had that was interested in making a difference after college. This made Salon seem the most adult to me. Every time we talked, it felt like we were having a kind of United Nations summit. I had come to China for these talks. Not being able to speak freely or easily with people about the things that I was most interested in was the hardest part about living in China for me.


  I was used to criticizing my government whenever I wanted and I had expected the Chinese to do the same. It was like desperately wanting to eat cake and only being able to look at it. I could see their culture and yet I could only talk with my Chinese co-workers about the positive aspects of it, leaving out the parts that were most interesting to me.

  Salon and I were alike in that we both admitted to our countries good points and the bad. I admitted I felt the United States probably butted into other countries affairs too much and he said that the Chinese were too blindly obedient. I constantly worried that he would be one of the men I would read about in the underground newsletter – ZGBriefs – that reported on dissidents being jailed without a trial or found dead.

  Every time I went to my Thursday afternoon class, Salon was always sitting on the front row, stuffed into a small seat, eager to learn about America and get into an in-depth discussion with me, and the class, about American versus Chinese culture. The whole class seemed exasperated with Salon for extending class time and bringing up politics, but they also seemed to genuinely love him, whooping anytime his name was called.

  At the end of the year Margaret gave Salon a final oral English exam and asked him the question we had both been wondering about,

  “Salon, why does the class laugh every time I call your name?”

  “Okay, I will tell you,” he said. “I choose the name Salon from a book because it means having talks and I am the philosopher, so I choose this name. My foreign teachers last year were Indian and they say, ‘Sa-lon.’ So, I think, this is a very good name. When you Americans say my English name you say, ‘Se-lon’ which means ‘sexy wolf’ in Chinese.”

  DO NOT FALL ASLEEP ON THE BUS

  The Chinese were very protective of us foreigners. They could not believe that I would walk around Wuhu alone, much less that I would ride the bus somewhere by myself. Margaret and I were both independent types, though, so it was common that they would find us by ourselves out in downtown Wuhu. Dianne tended to let students tag along shopping with her or she would go with either Margaret or me. She could stand the broken English conversations longer than we could. Her patience seemed endless.