(I wrote and origionally published this to the web on February 15, 2004)
I spent my Valentine’s Day doing what you should do as a single person on Valentine’s Day: getting beauty treatments with my straight girl friends, and then going to a gay bar with a bunch of despondent lesbians, mourning their lack of girlfriends. To be more precise, it was the Tibetan girl, Chu Mu, lamenting the fact that no one bought her a rose that day, for several hours, that set the tone for the evening. Lamenting lesbians are way more entertaining than the loutish, lecherous, and lame lads who lurk at the Rock and Roll bar. And spending Valentine’s Day at home alone with a cup of tea, while it may be the most “liberated feminist” way of spending a single Valentine’s Day, it is not MY cup of tea; I’m just not that old. I also don’t own a cat. Without some warm living being in your apartment, the whole thing gets too myopic, quickly. I’ve heard stories of friends waking up the morning after a single valentine’s day at home in the middle of the living room, covered in a blanket of Eurethmics, Sarah McLaughlin, Bikini Kill and Ella Fitzgerald records, reeking of hair dilapidator, with absolutely no eyebrows, and a stack of emails from various exes confirming that No, in fact, they NEVER want to be back together again in a million years, and recommending my friend should get therapy or they, the exes would get a restraining order. Like I said, not my cup of tea.
So I was at the only gay bar in town with the dyke posse, we had attempted to go to the only dyke bar in town, but it was closed for the holidays. We five girls were the only women in the bar. If you want to know about the decoration, do a wee meditation on how gay men like to be really precise with decoration, sticking to a particular theme, and how Chinese people like shiny things, particularly gold and tinsel, and you will know what it looked like. It was a very Chinese bar, in the sense that you have to order a quantity of one thing for everyone at the table to share, so like a twelve pack of beer, or a bottle of rum and a twelve pack of sodas, and at some point you end up with a fruit plate. Actually, I’m increasingly down with the fruit plate at the bars, the baby tomatoes go so well with beer, and the pear slices are so nice and crunchy when you start feeling a little tipsy.
Being the only table in the room that had women and foreigners at it, of course we got noticed, and dragged up onto stage by the drag queen who was running the entertainment, a.k.a. singing karaoke, and doing slightly naughty contests. There was this other drag queen, dressed up in female ethnic minority outfits who did traditional ethnic minority women’s dances. For those of you who haven’t seen how Chinese television and the Han majority in general co-opt and commodity the fifty five other ethnic minorities, understand that seeing that part of the performance was like an epiphany on Kunming. “Of course there would be a drag queen doing ethnic women’s dances! This is the most ethnically integrated city in China! I’m sitting with a Tibetan lesbian, and a Naxi lesbian! Why wouldn’t there be an ethnic minority drag queen?” Of course it could be a queer representation of the dominant Han cultural consumptivist paradigm, but it was really entertaining. That’s the other special feature of authentically Chinese bars, they always have entertainment, be it a girl in a see through outfit boredly pole dancing every half an hour for five minutes, or a guy wearing an American flag as a do-rag, singing Guns and Roses songs and holding his Zippo in the air, or a fashion show of gold lam? quincenerra dresses, or pulling the audience up onto stage to perform their talents for the rest of the bar.
Which is what happened to me and the French girl. We got put into pairs with other contestants, and informed that we were family units. Then the drag queen asked “Zai nimen jia, shei shi gong de, shei shi mu de?” Roughly translated: “In your family, who’s the butch and who’s the femme?” But it’s a really funny way to express that idea linguistically because gong is the word that you add to an animal name to make it masculine with balls. Like gongniu is bull, gongma is stallion, gongji is cock as opposed to cow, horse, chicken. Likewise, mu is the word you attach to animal words to make them clearly female: like cow, mare, hen. The gender role difference My (male) partner demurred on that question, and then it was announced that we had to perform talents, my partner said we would be doing the supermodel walk. A talent I guess. I mean if you have to have a talent that you can whip out at any time and can be inclusive of any partner, it might as well be the supermodel walk. Right?
He looked at me very seriously backstage: “I’m going first”. I shrugged and smiled. He minced and sashayed all the way down the runway (oh yeah, the stage had a runway sticking out into the audience) and then came back, I decided the only thing to do was to butch it up. I walked out their doing the slow swagger, halfway between the cholo swagger and the cowboy swagger, on the apex of the runway, I did the boy supermodel head side to side thing (like in Zoolander) and the cool boy finger point and walked back stage, to hold hands with him and come back out and do the “pair modeling”. For this display of a complete lack of talent we won. We beat the French girl and the other Chinese boy who modeled but were way less professional than us, a couple where one boy did ballet and the other was the barre, and a really cute couple that sang a love duet together, but I think they were dating cause they had the same hair and the same outfit on. It might have helped our case that when they had us line up for the winner selection, I pulled out my Leatherman and cleaned my nails with the knife (if you have to stick to one dimensional gender roles, you might as well have some fun with it-right?). We won a photograph of a painting of a bowl of pink roses in a shiny gold frame. He let me have it, although I chivalrously offered to use my saw to cut it in half. I gave it to Chu Mu so that at least she could get her roses on for Valentine’s Day and I wouldn’t have to think up something to do with something that tacky.
According to Chu Mu, her problem is that all the dykes in Kunming are “T’s”, and she can’t date a “T” because she is a “T”. “T” means Tomboy, or butch. I think the other is called “G” for Girl, but I could be wrong, because she was way more interested in lamenting the excessive number of T’s rather than focusing on strategies for finding more G’s. Why can’t a T and a T get together? “Oh no, maybe in Beijing or Shanghai, but never in Kunming.” Why can’t you just get together with whoever you like, what does this butch/femme stuff have to do with it? “Because all the T’s are my brothers, you can’t fall in love with your brother.” That’s right, queer language in China uses a partial inversion of gender. Like if you are a lesbian, and you have a good friend who is a “T” and younger than you, instead of calling her your meimei, younger sister, you call her your didi, little brother. However, since they have decided that I’m femme (which is amusing, Gerald suggested they have to all be so butch in their own minds because they are a subaltern group in a fairly repressive culture, like queers in Texas), so I’m jiejie, big sister. And to discuss your social group if it’s a dyke group (regardless of the numbers of butches or femmes) you use gemenr, homeboys, and the gay boys use jiemenr, homegirls. Other interesting language things: coming out of the closet is called chugui, literally to come out of the closet (chu yigui).
So last night when I hung out with them again (it was the Naxi girl’s last night in town, she’s going back to school in Beijing) I found out some things about queer cultural aspects. The girl who’s studying in Guilin, in Guangxi is not out to anyone except for her Kunming posse of homeboys because Guilin is to Kunming what Kunming is to Beijing in terms of socially progressive notions. She’s studying computer engineering, 70% of her classmates are boys, and all the girls have boyfriends. Her dream is to get a good job when she graduates in Beijing, so that she can go to Beijing and have a girlfriend far away from the prying eyes of her parents who are high party officials in Yunnan. When I asked her how she’s going to deal with their social pressure to get married, she said she’s never going to come out to them, and always pretend she can’t find a boyfriend because she’s a computer nerd. Welcome to being queer in China. The Tibetan girl, who was the first one of their posse I met, plans with her girlfriend to find a pair of life partner gay boys, and get apartments near each other and get married to the boys, so that when the relatives come for a visit they can partner swap to have two couples of one boy and one girl. And she insists that she has to have a baby to look after her in the old age, a very Chinese notion, but when I asked her how this would jive with her wife swapping scheme, she got confused. She says that arrangement is pretty common in the queer community, because a lot of benefits only get assigned to people who are married, like housing, and certain types of promotions. Andy, another girl in the posse said that she plans to marry an impotent man, because she’s going to have to get married at some point, so she’s going to find herself an impotent man, or a gay man to marry. When I asked her if she plans to have a child, she said she wants to adopt, which is unfortunate, because the quality of adoptable babies have been going down, because all the “good ones” are getting adopted by foreigners. “Not only do you have to adopt a girl, but she’ll probably be crippled too.” I asked her, would you prefer to have a boy? “Of course.” Does any of this seem crazy? Because it all seems really crazy to me.
Sometimes travel is mindblowing for those of us fortunate to be born and raised in San Francisco. I mentioned to Gerald that I thought it was so weird that none of them ever plan to tell their families, and he said, “You know, it’s hard enough for people to come out to their families in the States, imagine doing that in China.” And I said, that people just come out and that’s that. He smiled in his football player from Texas way and said, “The rest of the US isn’t like San Francisco, Kaytea.” He should know, his best friend on his high school football team said to him once, “You’re Oriental, I thought you was Chinese?”
0=femme ling (P, for "po婆"
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment