Being Gay in China

In this world of ours, being gay is rarely easy anywhere. China is no exception.

Chinese gays rarely face any religious opposition, at least in the sense we are familiar with in the West. The government is officially atheist, so secularism is the rule. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism, the three primary religious/spiritual/philosophical doctrines of China don't really have the same concept of "sin" that is found in the Abrahamic religions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

The main problem Chinese LGBT people face is the prevailing Confucian mindset that demands that children must get married and have children to continue the family name; A fact I find a bit ironic since, according to Wikipedia "Although there are thousands of Chinese family names, the 100 most common, which together make up less than 5% of those in existence, are shared by 85% of the population."

Additionally, children are expected to demonstrate filial piety by caring for their parents and grandparents in their old age. With China's One-Child Policy, this naturally means that one child could potentially be expected to help provide care for two parents, four grandparents, any great-grandparents, and, I would imagine, possibly the parents and grandparents of their spouse. This also helps to partially explain why there is so much academic pressure on students here, since they would need a well-paying job to provide proper care for so many people.

I probably don't even need to mention the concepts of Yin and Yang, the feminine and masculine forces. In traditional Chinese thinking, these must be balanced in order for harmony to be achieved.

This hasn't always been the case. History is replete with periods of Chinese history where male-male and female-female relations were accepted, sometimes even encouraged under some circumstances. There were even same-sex marriages, of a sort, in some parts of China during historical times. One of the more poetic terms for homosexuality is "The Love of the Cut Sleeve", referring to a Chinese emperor who cut off the sleeve of his robe, which his male paramour had fallen asleep on, rather than wake him up when he had to go attend to his duties. 

Homosexuality was unacceptable to the non-Chinese Qing Dynasty following their conquest of the Ming Dynasty in 1644; after this, it became far less prevalent. Even then, however, it was minimally punished.

Mao Zedong, like many Communists of his era, viewed homosexuality as Western, capitalist decadence. However, it is unclear that any specific prosecutions for homosexuality occurred under Mao. There are currently no specific civil or legal penalties against people in China, but there are also no protections. Since the liberalization and opening of the 1980s, thing have slowly improved.

Signs of progress are becoming increasingly common. In 2001, homosexuality was removed from the list of mental illnesses in China. Shanghai, by far the most cosmopolitan and Westernized city in China, recently hosted China's first Pride Parade. Legislation for the legalization of same-sex marriage has been introduced to the National People's Congress on several occasions, although unsurprisingly they didn't make it very far. Wu Youjian, known affectionately as "Mama Wu", has become something of a minor celebrity due to her acceptance of her gay son and her media efforts to promote acceptance among other Chinese parents of their gay and lesbian children.

Most gay and lesbian Chinese never come out to their families, and even rarely to friends.There is even a "marriage market" in Shanghai where gays and lesbians can meet for the purposes of entering sham marriages to keep up appearances and fulfill their familial obligations. Although, from what I have read, many of these "couples" lead completely separate existences, often getting divorced or living apart after a suitable period of time has elapsed.

The larger cities are understandably more open and accepting of gay and lesbian people. In  the largely rural Hunan Province, where I live, this is not the case.

I have met many people that I suspected were gay, but I have only had one person come out to me, a college girl who lives in my city of Shaoyang. She surprised me by telling me that she actually tried to come out to her parents, but they didn't believe her (Did they think she was joking?!).

My students are surprisingly intolerant, although compared to American high schoolers,  young Chinese are remarkably naive (or innocent, whichever term you prefer) when it comes to human relations. Just as with "That's so gay" in America, It's considered an insult to say someone is BL (Boy Lover) or GL (Girl Lover). I hear that quite often from my students. If they bring it up, I just give them my disappointed face,  shrug and say something to the effect of "Nothing wrong with that."

As for myself, there are no gay bars in Shaoyang that I am aware of, so being here and isolated has been rather lonely. I am out with my foreign and Chinese friends, but given the fact that there are no legal protections against discrimination and out of an abundance of caution, for the sake of my job I *very* reluctantly decided not to be out with my Chinese co-workers. This was not an easy decision. Given all the grief I went through in the closet, I always vowed never to go back in. I just keep repeating the words of Brian Kinney from Queer as Folk "It's not lying if they make you."

Thoughts on Learning Mandarin Chinese

Based on what I've seen and heard, Mandarin Chinese and English are probably the two hardest mainstream languages to learn. I am constantly amazed at how English, using the Roman alphabet, has only 26 letters to represent all sounds in the language. Change a letter or two, make a mistake, mispronounce something, people can usually guess your meaning pretty easily. No problem, right?

Chinese, on the other hand,  is a whole different beast. Written Chinese (Hanzi) consists of tens of thousands of characters representing a mixture of ideas, sounds, and pictorial representations that go back thousands of years. These characters evolved from what were essentially caveman pictures carved into animal bones, and over the centuries developed into beautiful but perplexing conglomeration. To make things even worse, many of these characters look very similar, sometimes almost identical. The adding or changing of a stroke, even a slip of the pen, can totally alter the meaning of what you are trying to write. In the eight months that I have been trying to learn Chinese, I have learned a few dozen of the most important characters, and I am able to write a *few* very simple sentences. But for me it takes an immense amount of concentration just to do that.

The Chinese do have a Romanized form of their language called Pinyin, in which the Latin alphabet is used to represent the sounds in Chinese. The large and medium sized cities have Pinyin on all their street signs, and most businesses have at least a little Pinyin on their signs and menus now, so that helps a lot.

From a Western point of view, it would seem that it would make things so much simpler to just adopt Pinyin and stop using the characters. But my impression is that since so many words sound alike and the characters convey ideas and nuance as well (in some cases) the sounds, this would not be as practical as it would seem on the surface.

Fun fact: Most of the Chinese writing you see today is actually considered "Simplified". When the Communists took over in 1949, simplifying the written language was one of their first tasks. (Oy vey).

Spoken Chinese (Hanyu, or Putonghua) is a tonal language. There are four tones I can best describe as 1. high tone, 2. rising tone, 3. falling and rising tone, and 4. falling tone. Additionally there is a "fifth tone" that has no inflection on many words. Change the tone, and you totally change the meaning of the word. For a native speaker of English, as you might imagine, this is something of a nightmare.

One good example of this is illustrated by the fact that the Chinese consider the number four to be highly unlucky, much as many superstitious Westerners consider the number 13 to be a harbinger of misfortune. There are multiple stories and legends as to why 13 is unlucky to us. But for the Chinese, four is simply unlucky because in spoken Chinese it sounds like the word for death. If you get in an elevator in China, you will notice that buildings don't have a fourth floor; They are usually labeled "3A."

Of course, I am referring to Beijing-standard Mandarin Chinese.This is a language I can best describe as "choppy sounding." The words, even if I don't know what they mean, are usually very clear and distinct. But I don't live in Beijing. I live in Shaoyang. The local dialect, or "Shaoyanghua" is a very slurred form of Mandarin where (to myself at least) all the words seem to run together. Instead of sounding Chinese, there have been times where to me it sounds like Japanese, Russian, or even Spanish. The cadence of speech is totally different.

So when I speak Mandarin to the locals, they understand me quite plainly about 75% - 90% of the time, depending on how comfortable I am with the words and whether or not I'm trying something new. But when they answer back in Shaoyanghua, most of the time I am left baffled. I've been here long enough that I can usually pick up enough words to get the gist of what they are saying, but it can be immensely frustrating.

That said, I have come a long way in my understanding of Chinese writing, speech, and grammar in just a few months, and I must say that I am immensely proud of the progress that I have made. Hopefully with enough effort someday I will become relatively fluent!