I've been holing a lot of things up in my brain for the past three months, so I figured I should get it out in writing before I start to forget things. We'll start with Mike. Some of you already know about him, but in a large part I've kept kind of quiet about this new person in my life. Part fear of announcing a relationship that wasn't concrete, part determination to not make the first news heard from me always about another guy.
Sometime back in October I got so bored I started replying to random responses on craigslist. I got tired of dating random people off the internet that I could barely communicate with, and in my search for a hetero male language partner, I came across an ad by some socal chinese american guy looking for more friends to hang out with. A couple weeks later, I finally met this guy, Max over at what is now our little group's favorite late-nite hangout, Guandi (the club with what I have now come to consider the highest concentration of good-looking asians below 30... yummy straight boys, hehe). As it turns out in my quest to distance myself from falling into the routine of living only to find a man, I end up finding one. A friend of Max's, fellow Harvard alum, Mike, shows up. And I'm back to square one.
We hit it off. And the past couple of months have been my favorite in this city. To be honest, my favorite couple of months in a lot of cities. Watching ripped off DVDs of American TV shows while waiting for our pizza to arrive. Dining at one of the 100+ fun restaurants in the city, always admiring the design and smirking at the varying standards of service in this confused third world country, first world city. Shuttling between our apartments via taxi in the middle of the night. Warm hugs for morning wake-up calls...
I had always said that I would tell my family about my sexual orientation when I found someone to tell them about. So when my brother visited from November to December, it was Mike I told him about when I walked into his room drunk off of who-knows-how-much sake. My brother replied while riding on a cat in World of Warcraft, "Yeah, I know".
We had taken a trip to Beijing while he was here... my brother that is. The city frightens me. In the center, monolithic in size and symbol, in a straight line from south to north lies Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Living in Shanghai, I had almost forgotten that China was communist. But Mao is far less hidden in the capital. But that's not really what scares me. In the middle of the night I took a walk through the streets to see the nightlife, and on the way I walked across a drive-thru fast food joint. It reminded me of LA and then of how much I missed it. Five years ago all I could think about was leaving but I find myself thinking more and more lately, if in the end it is the right place for me.
In the morning we rode a taxi to the nearest section of the great wall. Mao said once that you're not a great man until you've climbed the great wall. And at the top, the wall is littered with souvenir salesmen and tourist traps--vendors selling pictures and fake medals exclaiming "I climbed the greatwall". And though everyone knows it's a sham, because everyone took the same cable car to get them up the first 80% of the hike, there is still pride in reaching the top for most chinese. That day I thought a lot about what it meant to be a great man, a 好汉.
When we came back to Shanghai, I was supposed to meet someone that night... an old fling of mine. But he cancelled and late at night, Mike called asking to come over. Already feeling guilty, I let him and with him in my bed I cried that night, but never really told him why. All he did was keep apologizing to me, thinking he had done something wrong. I guess that night I realized I wasn't a great man, and that I wasn't going to be happy with him... at least not completely.
I broke it off with him a couple weeks ago, but we see each other as if nothing had happened. A big part of me prefers it that way, because as I'm typing this, I crave his presence... and how safe I feel when I'm around him. And I miss him a lot, even though he's just a taxi ride away.
