31.08.2006

So You Want To Be A China Sex Blogger

Sometime this May there appeared a weblog called Sex in Shanghai, detailing the adventures of a British expatriate seducing various ex-students from his English classes. The blogger, who called himself chinabounder, was in his mid-thirties and had been living in China for five years. His sexual experience prior to moving to China had been limited to one long-term relationship, but after initially shacking up with a woman in Shenzhen he had decided to take full advantage of his new circumstances and start increasing his bedpost notch count in earnest.

He was not the first Western guy to treat China as his own personal sexual buffet. To put it in the D&D terms that many of the guys who benefit most from the effect will readily understand, living in China gives you +4 attractiveness. The love handles (metaphorically) shrink, the hairline advances, teeth straighten, previously soupy eyes blaze with a new rakish light. You are in a country where people actually *choose* to have brown hair. You find that things that are off-putting back home have magically transformed into positive attributes in your new environment. You're a computer programmer? You're quiet and like to read? You live with your parents? You never drink? You are sexually inexperienced?

HEARTTHROB!

And not only do your most pedestrian habits and opinions take on the shine of the exotic, but you'll find that expectations of you as a Western man have been conditioned by American movies, American television shows, and whispered stories about minor Casanovas like chinabounder. You're halfway to James Bond before you even step off the plane.

Most guys are able to take this in stride (so this is what it feels like to be a woman!), but there is always the small minority of men who find themselves up at one in the morning, writing blog posts entitled Undressing Tingting.

'Sex in Shanghai' started with big aspirations. It was to supposed to be a pornographic Notes From the Underground (you had the sense that the author wanted someone to call his journal 'unflinching'). Between lurid descriptions of how sore he was making his various conquests there were David Brent-like interludes of introspection when our hero would peer into the spiritual abyss (glancing from the corner of his eye to make sure we noticed), and sigh over his inability to ever truly love. Behold, reader, the noble heart of Man!

Grappling daily with his conscience, Chinabounder unfortunately neglected to grapple with his writing style. As his taste for windy political and social commentary grew stronger, the site began to sound less like the confessions of a soulful libertine and more like Penthouse Forum as interpreted by Rush Limbaugh. Chinabounder found the Chinese press servile, Chinese men undersexed and passive, Chinese society paternalistic, the Communist Party a criminal gerontocracy, the city of Shanghai a loosely-disguised group of peasants, and he was not afraid of interrupting the sexy bits to go on and on and on and on about it.

Less forgivably, he was careless about hiding the identity of his lovers. These were women who never dreamed that their most intimate moments and words would find themselves on one of the most popular sex journals in China. While their names were changed, many details of the encounters were not, and the long verbatim chat transcripts and text messages chinabounder posted were simply mortifying. Where was the admirable, unflinching honesty in letting other people read your lovers' email? So I had no sympathy when the inevitable happened.

Chinese censorship is a bit of a creaky machine. There is no master blacklist of sites that are disallowed; instead, service providers are supposed to use their own good judgement about what hurts China. Naturally this leads everyone to err massively on the side of safety, but still the political mood has its ebbs and flows, and the list of blocked sites grows and shrinks accordingly.

A few days ago, Blogspot sites were taken off the banned list, and then it became a matter of time before someone with a Chinese audience found that weblog.

The lucky winner was Zhang Jiehai, a nutty professor of social sciences at a university in Shanghai who might charitably be said to have some issues regarding foreigners dating Chinese women. When Zhang visited chinabounder's site, he became very, very upset and decided to alert the Chinese Internet to what this 'piece of garbage' was up to in Shanghai. His lengthy post (translated in full at EastSouthNorthWest) was a call to arms to all patriotic, red-blooded Chinese 'netizens' to ensure that chinabounder was expelled from China. Zhang's jeremiad ended with a two point plan:

Chinabounder responded almost instantly with an angry rebuttal that did his prose no favors. But events were moving quickly; Chinese readers had decided to skip straight to Phase Two of Zhang's plan. A Blogspot site called whoischinabounder was launched, with the goal of unmasking chinabounder's true identity based on details culled from his blog posts. This site was so successful that by the first day they had already found three of him, with signs that more were to come. English teachers in Shanghai had reason to be nervous.

By August 29th, after a massive spike in traffic, chinabounder closed his weblog. By August 30th, the story had hit many of the major mainland and Hong Kong websites. One of my posts from 2002 is titled 'sex in shanghai', and you can see the spike in collateral search hits that accompanied the kerfuffle:

As of today, Zhang's weblog post (in Chinese) has received almost 100,000 hits, and the story is spinning into one of the predictable storms that race across the Chinese internet. With its perfect blend of sex, politics, race and the inevitable Japan angle (one of chinabounder's rants ridiculed the anti-Japanese obsession here), the story looks ready to become a smash hit.

Net culture in China works a bit the way television media works in the States. People fix on one or two big stories of the day, and these get a national audience. There is also a tradition of online vigilantism in cases where someone has done something particularly vile - had an extramarital affair within the World of Warcraft online game, for example - and people will readily mobilize to defend good morals and the national honor. Chinabounder's case, which hits the trifecta of national pride, sex and Japan hatred, will be interesting to follow.

In autocratic and authoritarian countries there are often folk tales that involve someone with a grievance making his way past evil advisers and local powerful people to get to the benevolent but unaware monarch to seek redress. This is a universal theme - bypassing the Sherrif of Nottingham, reaching the tsar, telling your woes to Comrade Stalin, whomever - implying that justice can always prevail. The internet has added an interesting populist twist to this. Tell your story convincingly, and online heroes will take up your cause and fix your problem. In China, these 'heroes' take the form of stalkers who will work hard to track down and harass the offending party. This is the fate likely to befall chinabounder.

So now we have two sides - an unappetizing sexual taxidermist and a nationalist, racist mob whose response seems pretty evenly divided between blaming the dissolute sluts who allow this kind of shame to descend on their homeland and calling for the head of the filthy foreigner teachers who abuse their station. The only hero of the story is the indefatigable Roland Soong, author of the EastSouthWestNorth weblog, who makes it his mission to translate a river of material from the Chinese language press (mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwanese) into English every day. Having worked for a while as a short-notice translator, I can't begin to understand how he can find the time and energy to translate so much material, let alone provide context and very balanced commentary, but there it is. For anyone who wants to learn more about online culture in China without speaking the language his blog is a superb resource.

15.08.2006

Five Friendlies

The Five Friendlies (fúwá) are the 2008 Olympic mascots whose reign of terror over Beijing will soon spread to all of China and then the world. Their cutesy doubled names collectively spell out "Beijing huanying ni", or "Beijing welcomes you". The air outside any metro station is thick with the cries of merchants selling little dangly souvenir versions of these guys with a morose "Fwa hwa. Fwa hwa"

Engineered for maximum cuteness and symbolic value, the Friendlies look ready to combine into a ruthless Voltron of Olympic hospitality. Wanbro has a nice rundown on their origins, along with a list of other candidate Friendlies who didn't quite make the cut. I particularly regret the absence of Baibai and Jiujiu (baijiu, or whitebooze, is the unspeakable Chinese rice vodka that really welcomes you to Beijing).

As I've never been a big fan of the panda and don't have strong feelings about the Tibetan antelope, I thought I would choose my own five friendlies from Beijing, the things that have made living in the city these past four months worthwhile.

11.08.2006

Dirty Old Town

The best way I can describe the pollution in Beijing is to tell you that I have been here almost exactly three months and only saw the mountains yesterday. They are called the Fragrant Mountains; they stand right outside of town, in three beautiful sawtooth layers. People say they are a lovely place to visit in the autumn, when the colors turn, but I am skeptical. The notion that any kind of leafy plants could thrive here is hard to credit. What would they eat? The Fragrant Mountains butt up right against the city, the same way they do in Phoenix, Arizona, and yet it took three months and a freak windstorm for them to become visible.

This morning I woke up to a wall of dust so thick that I could barely distinguish the shape of the residential tower across the street from mine, about two hundred meters away, and I breathed a dusty sigh of relief. Everything was back to normal.

Summer in Beijing is like living in a Woody Guthrie song. The Gobi Desert is very aggressively trying to expand into Beijing's turf, and it rains out of the sky as a constant stream of dirt. Combine this with the bowl-like geography, a stew of other pollutants (100,000 new cars a year in Beijing!) and the general coal haze that covers China from border to border, and you have a unique respiratory experience for the long-term resident and Olympic endurance athlete alike.

The rare days when a Mongolian wind blows and flushes out the dirt cloud with normal, transparent air are almost too much for the eyes to endure. Distant objects leap into visibility, new colors appear where before there was only monochrome yellow, and the urban landscape stretches out to the horizon. Suddenly it's clear that you live in a city of fifteen million, rather than just a thick cloud of local high-rises and parking lots.

The most mysterious thing about the Beijing dustbowl is how it can coexist with the stifling level of humidity. This is the only place I know where you can be coated with sweat and have your skin chapped and cracked from dryness at the same time. The situation doesn't seem stable - I worry that one day the airborne wall of soil will find a nucleation center and the whole atmosphere above the city will liquefy into an ocean of yellow mud.

In light of the Satanic climate, Beijing has asked the Olympic Committee to postpone the Olympic Games by two weeks in 2008, into the middle of August. They will be starting right about a week from now. This seems like a wise but insufficient precaution; it might have been better to defer them until November. Olympians have had to deal with heat before, in Atlanta and Athens, but the signature Beijing blend of dust, humidity, and heat is going to make things especially interesting for endurance athletes.

The temperature has been hovering in the nineties for the last two months. Last night brought yet another thunderstorm, the most powerful one yet. Hot weather and abundant dust seem to be like candy for these thunderstorms, which make a terrific racket and demonstrate that the problem of drainage is still beyond the capacity of Chinese civil engineers.

I knew summer had started for good around the middle of June, when the parasols came out. The Chinese ideal of feminine beauty requires very fair skin, so many women walk under protective pastel parasols. This and the summer dresses give the city a nice retro feel. On the brightest days you can see especially beauty-obsessed women who have forgotten their parasols jogging along in their high heels, clutching a newspaper over their face in an expression of terror. Meanwhile, construction workers who would be proudly shirtless and tubby in the West here modestly content themselves with rolling up their t-shirts to just below nipple level.

In the back alleys merchants put out cots and sleep out in the street by their storefronts, scornful of the slow-flying and somewhat inept Chinese mosquito, whose numbers have been decimated by the thousands of newly-hatched dragonflies patrolling the city. These are impressive insects, the size of a child's finger, and their busy squadrons parody the thousands of uniformed people that also swarm around Beijing, mainly scrawny kids employed to stand on boxes in front of gates and public buildings and sweat.

(That last paragraph I wrote in June, when I was still cocky and elated about the lack of mosquitoes in my new life. In Argentina I had been locked in a nightly struggle with small, Maradona-like Argentine mosquitoes, as voracious as they were fast, who would wait until the lights were out to go on a blood-fueled bender. Chinese mosquitoes, by contrast, seemed fat, slow, and easy to smite. I also thought that living on the fifteenth floor was going to be unbeatable insurance against the beasties.

Little did I know. The summer honeymoon continued for a long time, but the torrential rains of July finally had their effect. Our office manager, a Beijing native, explained that this kind of summer drenching was highly unusual for the city, in a tone that suggested I was the one responsible for introducing it. The merchants stopped sleeping in the streets. And the mosquito purgatory began.

As I soon discovered, the point of entry into my room was not some kind of gap or hole in the window screens, but the very source of life itself - the air conditioner. Connected to a little hose and fan assembly outside the building, it would actively suction mosquitoes into the room and cool them to a comfortable 25 degrees. My nights soon became a choice between unbearable heat and unbearable itching. Lately I have settled on a compromise - 29 degrees and about seven mosquitoes to kill before being able to sleep, but it is not a happy one. When dawn breaks (it sometimes takes until dawn to find the last guy), I can see all the other mosquitoes pressing up against the window screen outside, drunk with carbon dioxide lust, waiting to take their turn. I torment them with a nice slow puff of Sichuan garlic breath through the screen and watch them go crazy. Then I collapse on the bed, mosquito netting wrapped around my head, and contemplate my sins.)

05.08.2006

I Spy

There comes a moment in the back of any police van when your thoughts turn to the chain of events that has brought you to this moment in your life, and with perhaps more urgency, to any potential chains of events that may help lead you someplace else. Whether it's the softness of the cushions (designed for beefy men who sit all day), the gentle rocking of the van, or that feeling of absolute cocooning safety that can only come from being surrounded by police, there is something about the police van that encourages quiet contemplation.

My only previous ride in a police van had been marred by a somewhat tight suspension and a feeling of vague unease connected with the large number of guns sliding back and forth under the seats, whanging against the van walls. The Beijing police van, by comparison, was an oasis of comfort and safety. The thoughtful driver didn't even turn on the siren or utter a single expletive as he drove me and ten police officers in restful silence to my office, where I hoped to reunite with my passport and perhaps even get a chance to introduce my new friends to my late-working boss.

I had penetrated Beijing's top-secret aerospace complex (near Zhichun Lu, Haidian district, take a right between the Jade Hotel and the McDonald's) through an ingenious ruse. Posing as a simple American tourist out for a walk, I had followed a man on a decrepit cargo bike and an old worker carrying a bucket as they turned down a normal residential street. To get past the sentry in the almost invisible guard booth, I had cunningly omitted walking up and banging on the glass to wake him up, instead following the creaky bike, which was delivering the habitual Beijing bike cargo of three pieces of scrap wood and an old rag. Eluding detection by the basketball court full of army guys in tank tops, I continued after the bike and the bucket, pretending to head toward the main road that would take me home.

This tour-de-force of tradecraft soon paid off. The cargo bike turned a corner, the man with the bucket disappeared into a doorway, and I stood face-to-face with my first intelligence coup. The Beijing Aerospace Center had imprudently left a key motivational banner suspended over the street:

A lesser spy may have called it a day right here, but I smelled greater glory ahead and knew that I had to press on. So I continued pass this banner (a classified relative of the big "DO NOT CHEAT ON YOUR EXAMS!" banners hanging at nearby Beijing University) and took myself deeper into the heart of China's aerospace industry, so cleverly disguised as a through street.

The complex was full of low, squat buildings in the usual mild state of disrepair that characterizes the quieter parts of Beijing. There were no people around. Each little street I followed ended in a fence or closed gate with a frustrating view of the main road I was trying to get to, right there on the other side. This also wasn't that unusual; Beijing is a city of gratuitous fences. Undeterred by repeated failure, I moved like Pac-Man in my maze, trying to find an exit.

Turning one particuarly desolate corner, I hit the mother lode of military intelligence. Right there before me, painted in four giant red characters on a peeling plaster wall, stood the secret directive at the heart of China's space program:

My pulse racing as I absorbed the import of these words, I turned frantically in search of an exit. NASA had to know about this! But right then I heard that most dreadful sound, the feverish clapping of a man running towards me in flip-flops.

Caught!

I tried to fake it. Still wearing the mask of a bored and lost tourist, I walked idly past the man, pretending I didn't know he was after me, pretending to be innocently trying to find my way out of this goddamned tangle of identical streets. But this laughable ploy failed. The clapping slowed and he stood red-faced in front of me, trying to catch his breath while pouring questions at me in Chinese. He was a worried-looking young guy with the unmistakable look of someone who has just woken up from a sweet, sweet nap. He was dressed in a red mesh tank top and shorts, with a black walkie-talkie in one hand.

---

The interrogation facility in China's top-secret aerospace complex consisted of a little room filled with mosquitoes. For maximum psychological impact, it had been built next to the large street I'd been trying so unsuccessfully to reach this entire time. The flip-flop guy began the interrogation by sitting down and grinning at me. A few minutes of close questioning revealed that I did not speak Chinese, and he did not speak English. He pointed to a logo of a rocket on a piece of furniture, by way of explaining where I was, and then we basked in each other's company, both nodding sagely, as skinny guards filed silently into the room.

In China there seems to be a direct relationship between authority and waist size. Beijing is full of skinny young guys in uniform standing on various boxes and in small booths, watching the world go by. Their purpose is unclear - none has ever been observed to prevent anyone from entering any building or courtyard - but they do lend the city a certain martial flair. The security guards entering now definitely belonged to this category, and so everyone ignored them as they shuffled in and sprawled on the various sofas.

After thirty minutes of amiable sitting I heard the siren of an approaching police van, the gate rolled open, and a sharp squeal of brakes told me that Beijing's finest had arrived.

The cop who walked in was, judging by his girth, in a position of great authority. He did not immediately address me, instead pouring his wrath out on those unfortunate enough to be standing in or near the building. Then he turned to me, introduced himself, and pointed at my pockets. He was accompanied by another authority figure, a man in civilian clothes whose job consisted of takng pictures of all the guilty parties with a digital camera and browbeating those poor security guards that the big cop overlooked.

They divided the interrogation task between them - the fat cop started digging his way through my belongings while the angry photographer went into the sentry booth room to lay into the hapless guards there. Every so often he would pop out to take some pictures of me and my entourage of skinny guards, who straightened visibly for the camera.

Now that I had activated the factory's immune system, more and more of these guys were coming in to sit with me in the little waiting room, clustering around me like bored antibodies enveloping a particularly foul virus. I had a mental image of all the gates to the secret complex now standing unguarded and open.

The fat cop scowled as he navigated his way through the phone, reading through the many mystery text messages that had periodically arrived for the phone's mysterious Chinese owner. With nothing better to do, I began to wonder what it was all those text messages actually said. I hoped they were along the lines of:

hey where r u 2nite loooooonely lol xoxoxoxo lulu

rather than:

yo japanlover and falun bong just scored some primo 
tibetan weed meet tonite under the bridge death to 
the oppressors 420 4evr

By now it was dark and my evening was beginning to drag a little bit. The fat cop grunted at the phone and walked outside again. Someone offered me a bottle of water (with an astronaut on it), but soon the conversation was flagging again. It was clear that the eight skinny guys in cheap security uniforms, belts wrapped twice around their waists, didn't have much in common with me, an imperialist spy. Outside I could see the bright red glow of cigarettes and the blue glow of cell phones, bobbing around in agitated counterpoint.

A very long time later, the gate opened again to admit a much smaller cop car, and a skinny cop who looked barely out of his teens came into the room. Despite his lack of embonpoint, the mass of sprawled out limbs and lolling heads on the sofas around me instantly reassembled into a row of guys at tiptoe attention.

The skinny cop introduced himself as Claude. He spoke good English and was extremely polite, expressing a deep curiosity about my reasons for being in China in general and one of its most restricted aerospace facilities in particular. He seemed particularly interested in seeing my passport. I could not satisfy him on this point, offering the feeble excuse that I had left it in my office to go on a ten-minute walk, and that is how I eventually ended up in the van.

I took Claude's rebuke about not having my passport in stride - it was true, I didn't like to walk around with it because of my knack for losing important documents. But I was hurt when he took me to task for not having registered my address with the local police. Here I was, a white guy, living in the middle of a highly technologically sophisticated police state, speaking no Chinese, surrounded by willing informants, adhering to a rigid daily routine. How hard could it be to figure out where I was? Granted, keeping the gate of their secret aerospace facility closed apparently lay beyond the capabilities of the Chinese secret police, but did they require this level of handholding in everything?

In the interests of international harmony, however, I neglected to press this point with Claude. Instead I handed him my New York driver's license, which he took ginger hold of before heading out into the night.

At some point the fat cop walked in again to make another attempt at the cell phone, guards springing back to attention around him. Having suffered the slings and arrows of the phone's outrageous user interface for three months, it gave me a secret thrill to watch this battle. But as confident as I was of the outcome, I worried that the cop might accidentally squeeze the button on the side of the phone and thereby discover the phone's built-in camera.

By my estimate the phone had about fifty photographs stored on it - two of my bewildered face squinting at the phone, one of my hand, and forty seven of the inside of my pocket. I had no way of verifying this, though, because the built-in photograph viewer was not navigable by mortal man. Only the pure of heart, to whom the user interface would open like a blushing rose, could activate the picture viewer. I did not look forward to having to explain this if the fat cop hit the wrong button and heard the shutter's distinctive click. "Hang in there," I whispered into the phone's little camera eye, while the fat cop mashed its buttons.

And the brave little phone held firm.

---

Living with someone continuously for several months, it's easy to assume you know all their foibles. But the expression that appeared on my boss's face when I walked in to my office at 10 pm trailed by a dozen uniformed guards and police was one that I had not previously seen.

There was a momentary, awkward silence as the angry photographer took his photos and the fat cop sat down to more comfortably leaf through the papers on a colleague's desk. But then Claude broke the ice by asking us how the Lakers were doing this season, and whether we thought Chinese girls were cute, whether we liked Chinese food, and who exactly the office belonged to, the names and business cards of all relevant and irrelevant parties, and our names, and the names of our staff, and photocopies of our passports, visas, and anything else that could fit in the office copier. A minion started to make copies, and again there was a bit of a lull in the conversation. For a while all that could be heard was the sound of whirring paper.

Then Claude turned to my boss.

"我爱你 (I love you)!" he said， somewhat unexpectedly. His face was radiant.

My boss beamed back at him. Two of the skinny guards woke up from their stupor and exchanged glances.

"我爱你!" Claude repeated. I took a step back. "Do you know how to say this in Chinese?"

"He's saying 'I love you', I muttered to my boss.

"No, no, no, I speak very little Chinese," my boss said. "Zher!" he cried, demonstrating his entire vocabulary. The word "this", combined with a pointing index finger, had served as a potent food procurement strategy.

"我爱你?" asked Claude, hope fading. "Chinese girls not pretty?"

"No no no, Chinese girls very pretty." said my boss. A picture of his meaty finger pointing at the chest of some young lovely in a Sanlintun bar, punctuated with a lusty "Zher!", appeared in my mind. I suppressed it.

"Chinese girls pretty?" Claude wondered.

"Yes, very pretty." My boss looked towards me for corroboration.

"Yes, yes, pretty girls. And strong space program!"

Fortunately the scanning finished before this conversation could go much further. With no further reason to trouble us, the police made their farewells. We shook hands with great joy and wished each other a good night.

In his parting comments, Claude thanked me for my time and suggested that, in the future, I be more careful about where I walk. This finally exhausted my patience, and I suggested back that the relevant authorities seriously consider closing the gate on their high-security, top-secret urban Area 51. This was duly translated into Chinese and brought forth a hearty, those-responsible-are-already-on-their-way-to-xinjiang kind of laugh from the group.

Our friendly camaraderie restored, and with assurances that he would not forget to come visit us and make sure hadn't had any problems remembering to register with the local police, Claude and his entourage left, leaving my boss and me alone to discuss the captivating story of where I had been for the last four hours, and how I had come to bring such a delightful assortment of Chinese law enforcement professionals into our lives. Then I took off my shoe and called my controllers at the U.S. Embassy.

And that is how I lost my walk-taking privileges in Beijing.