Flowers are the prettiest people.

Xihutiandi of West Lake.

The willow trees in Hangzhou.

For the lesbians.

The Bisexual Boogie Man
By Dinah Gardner

A Beijing magazine recently launched an online women seeking women personals section. So far, though, it’s been a big disappointment. The majority of ads are either posted by unsuspecting straight girls seeking female language exchange partners (sigh) or the dreaded straight couple out for some bi-curious fun.

Check out one of the latest cringe worthy ads.

“I’m a foreigner girl. I’d like to organise a private party for my boyfriend’s birthday and give him a special gift – You (not Chinese) with me are the gift ;-)”

Give me stilted conversation with an earnest English student any day.

It’s pretty obvious why many lesbians get bi-furious about the bi-curious – we have made our bed and we only want women in it – but why are we afraid of dating girls who play for both sides?

First off lesbians are a jealous breed. We have enough on our plate obsessing our girlfriend might be sneaking off behind our backs with another woman. If we’ve got to worry about her getting funky with a guy then we’d never get enough sleep.

At the back of our minds is that nagging conviction that one day she will leave us for a man – especially when the pressure is on to marry and have a conventional family.

There’s a scene in the 1994 lesbian flick, Go Fish where a jury of gay women get stuck into one of the butch characters, Daria, after she sleeps with a guy. “It was just sex,” she pleads.

But for us, ”it’s not just sex.” Sleeping with a bisexual puts you one step away from sleeping with a man. Like tucking into a vegetarian mapo dofu that has had its pork bits scooped out by the kitchen staff.

You would think that as a group that has been marginalised since time immemorial, lesbians could be more open-minded. We label ourselves GBLT – gays, bisexuals, lesbians and transgendered – in a bid to embrace all sexual minorities, but many dykes still find sexually fluid women are not their cup of tea.

Of course some lesbians have no problem with bisexual girls. A number of local butch lesbians in Beijing treasure feminine qualities so much that even lipstick lesbians are not girly enough for them. I met one Beijing dyke who goes even further and exclusively hunts out straight girls. She became a make-up artist so she could spend all day surrounded by hot hetero chicks.

I had a near brush with the bisexual boogie man myself last week. An evildoer texted me posing as the boyfriend of my partner. Although we have an open relationship, the idea that she is “sleeping with the enemy” made my stomach curdle.

After vehemently denying the boyfriend in colourful putonghua, she put her mother on the phone. In a glorious reversal of the expected parental attitude to homo offspring, this is what Ma said:

“Dinah, I swear to you, my daughter is 100 percent lesbian. She has never slept with boys. I won’t let her sleep with boys. Oh! And by the way Happy Birthday. Why don’t you come over on Sunday and I’ll make you birthday lunch!”

Let’s hope she makes it vegetarian. From scratch.

Are you happy?

"You miss America? I haven't really thought about it much."
"Yeah, I never really appreciated it before. Why don't you miss it?"
"I don't know. I guess I just wasn't happy there."
"And you're happy here?"
"Yeah. I think I am."

It's really late right now, and I can't go to sleep. That and I have to wake up in two hours to take my parents 杭州 (Hangzhou) tomorrow. I've been thinking a lot lately about reconciling my life here with my life back in the U.S. Because I'm not a big fan of leaving your baggage behind only to have it come back and bite you in the ass years later.

I've told a couple people here about my past and about last semester, but when I start to speak too much I have to stop. Because I really can't take it. I had 螃蟹粥 (crab congee) today with a guy who is allergic to shellfish. He said he wanted to build up a tolerance. Maybe, it's the same with me. I have to build up a tolerance to my past.

I don't think most people know how certain points of my life have been for me. I don't think they know that I took Tylenol pills until my body couldn't take it and puked it out last semester, so that I could sleep. But I was really looking for a permanent fix. I don't think they know that I stood in my kitchen a couple of times with a knife pressed to my gut while I told myself, "just push".

Last year, I really wanted to die. There's a difference between wanting to die and wanting to kill yourself though. If I had wanted to kill myself, you wouldn't be reading anything right now because I would have done it. I'd have bought a hose, connected it to the exhaust of my Mustang and driven out to the bay to wait for the carbon monoxide to take over my body. No, I did not want to kill myself... though I did want to die. Wanting to die is different in the sense that you don't actually want to do the work yourself. Either your religious beliefs prevent you from doing it or you're just shit afraid of making such a big decision. I wanted a big fat semi-truck to make the decision for me. It's why I only took 10 pills that night, and it's why the tip of that blade never pierced my skin.

"I know a lot of people like you. You move around a lot and you can't stay in one place for more than a couple of years. You get there and everything seems perfect for a while, but as soon as the dust settles, you remember you have to deal with your problems again."

I think I'm not as naive as I used to be. At least not enough to believe that in the six weeks that I've been here the dust has already settled, and I'm ok. But regardless, today I told my parents that I'm going to stay here. After I get my degree this summer at Berkeley, I'm going to come back and stay here indefinitely.

Something about Shanghai tells me to let the dust settle here. Here I can be lost among the millions of people, and as long as I don't open my mouth, I melt into the background. Here, I have a new start and I get to use different decisions for the same problems. It's hard to explain without sounding a little granola, but I just feel at peace here... and I feel safe. And in my lowest lows, I feel like somehow the world still cares about me. It makes me know that I will never try to hurt myself again.

请你不要打碎我的玻理心。

"So are you... a player?"
"No, I don't think so. Well if I am... I'm not a very good one."

Before I left Berkeley, my doctor told me, Zoloft is not a drug you want to just go off of. I nodded my head, but to be honest I didn't really know what she meant until last week. Anyone who has spoken to me online or on the phone knows that last week I was incredibly sick. Thought it was a flu for a while that gave me the dizziness but after the coughing went away I couldn't even turn my head without feeling all the fluids swishing around my brain.

Which is when I remembered those little pills I stopped taking shortly after I arrived here. I know I should be on them, but I've decided yet again to quit taking them. This time I think it's for a better reason, however, I don't really want to say the reason right now. But in my mind it makes sense.

So I went back on to make the pain go away, and now I cut my dosage down day by day. Dating boys in Chinese is incredibly difficult, especially when they can't understand english. I think my english-speaking chinese friends here take it easy on me, because they usually know what I'm trying to say. Some boys aren't as forgiving on my pronunciations. Words that I thought I could easily say... are more or less incoherent.

Luckily for me, my desire to date guys here has also dwindled. Tons of cute Shanghainese boys, but strangely enough at the end of the day I'd rather stay at home and study mandarin. My teachers compliment me in class, about how well my pronunciation is. They keep asking me if my parents speak mandarin at home which makes me feel pretty damn good. Maybe I just need to speak louder. I wonder how my friends will react if I return to home as a louder me. Quietness has always been one of my defining characteristics.

I went out into the city last Saturday on my own. It was one of the only times in my life that I've ever felt truly comfortable being alone. I think back in the states I feel pressured to be social and have friends around, when most of the time I'm happiest at home in bed. I think I always feel pressured to have something interesting to say about who I'm dating or how my sex life is. Less than a week after I've arrived here I already had several friends ask me if I had met anyone yet. And for some reason, reminding them that I had only been in Shanghai for a couple of days really didn't alter their curiosity... so I went out that weekend and got laid.

And now I don't really give a shit anymore about how long I go without having sex. Always felt like I was on a timer, as if people expected me to have a lot of sex and if I didn't then I was some kind of loser. I don't think it was other people's fault really... I'm pretty sure that I convinced myself of those opinions.

I wonder now if maybe I'm supposed to be alone. If maybe there isn't someone out there for everyone. After all what are the odds of that happening. Realistically speaking there should be several people out there for some people and no one out their for others. People get married and divorce mid-life to live the rest of their lives alone, yet content.

Walking around the city, I see that there are lots of beautiful places, and there are lots of things that I would like to show to some friends, some things I want my parents to see... and a couple things that I would want to share with a boyfriend. But I think that I would very much like to start finding places that I don't mind keeping for myself.

McDonald's meets IKEA. I'm loving it...

Drive through art at 115 km/h.

A futuristic structure enclosing a freeway. This work of art was part of many improvements celebrating 复旦大学 (Fudan University's) 100th Anniversary. Also part of the celebration were several free on-campus concerts... even one featuring Andy Lau!

Communist China and the Internet

Living in Shanghai as an expatriate can give many foreigners the illusion that China has reached grandness on the level of Tokyo or Taipei. While incredibly beautiful as a country and as a people, sometimes I forget that communist China is in fact... communist.

I blog to this page using a proxy server based in the U.S. Why you ask? Because the Chinese government has effectively banned BlogSpot and several other online blogging sites with the exception of Xanga (I have absolutely no idea). Maybe you Xanga folks are slightly less opinionated. =P

A proxy server works by redirecting my internet inquiries to a server in the United States, (or possibly any varying country that does not impose similar restrictions on their citizens). Therefore when I request access to an internet site, the servers are somehow tricked into thinking that it is an American computer contacting them. This bypasses the restrictions on China, because they don't see that I am looking at sites such as BlogSpot, or Google.... or anything involving Taiwan. Haha. Instead it appears that I am really really interested in this American site... which in actuality is the proxy server.

Though I'm not afraid of getting caught for any of my blogging, since I am not calling forth a revolution from within China. Several internet bloggers, which have effectively exploited this from of free speech have actually been imprisoned for as much as 10 years.

Here's a quote from Guo Liang from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing: "Mao Zedong said that to have power you need two things: the gun and the pen ... The Communist Party has the gun, but the Internet is now the pen. If they lose control of it, something will happen to challenge their authority."

They've in fact responded drastically to the new threat closing down hundreds of internet Cafes in Beijing after one cafe had a fire accident. They claimed that having several computers in one room was a serious fire hazard. If this were truly the case, no one would ever play Counter-Strike... because they'd all have died 5 years ago in America.

I've noticed that a vast majority of the foreigners studying here at Fudan treat it as a semester long vacation, which I find a bit annoying. However, I have to remember that most people aren't like me and actually look forward to vacations. I doubt many people have travelled the way that I have though. I doubt many visitors to New York have walked through Alphabet City past midnight. Or that many people living in Boston had tutored kids in the impoverished suburb of Dorchester.

Probably the difference with me is that I've always known that I was gonna leave home. So every where I go I kinda scout the place out and that's why it's important to see the worst areas. From the Bronx to the very worst of Oakland, you have to look. Because the only time you can tell that you're in love with a place is when you want to see it--and help it--get better.

I have a lot of faith in the People's Republic and I think it will get better in the coming years. The blatant capitalism now visible in the country's major cities although not entirely welcome by everyone is at least a great way of thwarting the communist (but more accurately fascist) government. Communist societies are built on the principal of a classless society, whereas the efforts made by the PRC government to censor the internet are efforts to maintain power and oppress opposing views. It actually sounds a little bit like... america. Anyone hear of the Patriot Act? Or the more geeky news of Blizzard Entertainment temporarily banning the in-game advertisement of gay-friendly guild recruitment in World of Warcraft? The only difference is in the way that these efforts are organized and centralized. I think that there are problems with almost every government, though.

I don't have faith in governments really, but I have faith in people. I have faith that the demonstrators that died at the hands of the Chinese army 15 years ago in Tiananmen Square did not die in vain.

I look forward to the day that I can walk through the streets of Shanghai and feel the city's tremendous wealth spread beyond the Western expats that flood the richer areas. I look forward to seeing Chinese-born enjoying the same luxuries that I receive so easily here... I look forward to getting access to www.wikipedia.org back.

Twenty days in Shanghai.

Today I have been in Shanghai for roughly twenty days, and I'm realizing that my blog is in desperate need of an update, before I disappear into the vast emptiness of travel like I tend to do... this blog shall act as a tether from me to the United States.

As always, too much to write not enough time... so I'll start with a summary of my experiences and you can fill in the blanks for now. In 上海(Shanghai), I have:

- said 听不懂 (i don't understand what you're saying) a total of 130 times.
- been to about every shopping street in the city and bought no clothes.
- eaten until my stomach cried uncle just about every day.
- had a "thai massage" from a shanghainese boy.
- been hugged in a club by a chinese money boy.
- fallen knee-deep into a large pool of wet cement.
- dreamt I was in a city that was crumbling down.
- unwittingly been on half a dozen dates.
- used the phrase 我们做爱吧 (let's have sex) although not in the context I had originally anticipated.
- actually said to a person "no, I will not take a picture of my penis for you"
- bought a bike to ride to school every day
- learned the meaning of 帅.
- been disappointed in myself.
- stopped my medication for the sake of rationing out my remaining pills.
- leveled my priest to 60 and bought an epic mount.
- picked out the first chinese song i'm going to learn on the guitar.
- come to terms with the failures that are my past relationships.
- eaten with three japanese students who spoke little to no english or chinese.
- been kissed.
- hit on my first shanghainese boy.
- was promptly rejected by my first shanghainese boy.
- watched the sun rise and set over 浦西。
- had a $0.25 dinner
- ordered my first meal from a menu with no english.
- realized how happy i could be when i'm alone.
- fallen in love for the first time with a place.
- believed that i could fall in love for the first time... with myself.

I hope everyone is doing well.