419, four one nine, kind of sounds like "for one night" hence in Chinese internet slang "419" means one night stand.

Anyway, I recently came back from the Southern Chinese city of Nanchang in Jiangxi province, (江西南昌) and I met the most wonderful guy there. His name is 涂强 (Tu Qiang).

I went with my classmate Spencer, and we were walking around in a public square. I noticed this guy sitting on the steps and I told Spencer, "He looks so gay! Maybe I'll write down my number and give it to him." Spencer suggested that I just go up and talk to him and actually ask for his number.

So I did exactly that, and he was surprised that I could speak Chinese, as with most Chinese people. He then offered to treat Spencer and me to lunch. I told him that he was so handsome, and he told me I was too (not considered gay in China). During dinner time, I laid on the hints thick, for example I said, "看中国帅哥,我乐此不疲" meaning, I never get tired of looking at handsome Chinese guys.

After lunch we walked over to the park, and there was a ride there. Basically, it was a giant circle with padded seats and flooring so that when it bounces around and you fall down, you don't get hurt. Well, you do get hurt, it just doesn't hurt as much. I shamelessly pretended to fall on top of him, and grabbed him to "wrestle" hehe

Even with my thick hints, he still felt the need to ask Spencer and me if we had girlfriends. That's when I told him that I was gay. I was half expecting him to say, "Me too! Let's fuck!" but unfortunately, he said, "Oh, when I worked in Guangzhou (广州) I encountered a lot of gays." In my mind I was shouting out, "WHAT?!!! you ARE one!!!!!!" and then he asked me when did I know that I was gay, which was kind of weird. That gave me clues that maybe he was confused about his own sexuality. I was kind of angry at him for not being gay, or I guess angry at myself for having bad gaydar, but then all three of us went back to our hotel room to chill out for a bit, watch TV, chat, etc.

As soon as I got there, I used the hotel WiFi to go on QQ on my iPhone to look for gay guys. He saw me doing this, and then he suggested I go to his QQ. He got very close to me, on my bed, and was touching my thigh, and kept asking me if he looked handsome in certain pictures, and he looked at me in such a way that immediately made Spencer the third wheel at this point. I thought to myself, "Why are you being such a fucking tease?" A few minutes later, I got a phone call from a guy and I told him that I would see him that night. Almost immediately, 涂强 (Tu Qiang) suddenly had to go. He texted me back saying that it was nice to meet me. I texted him back saying that I was very disappointed to find out that he wasn't gay, and then he texted me again saying that he liked me, I then texted him back saying, "so are you or are you not gay?" and he said, "I would like to be with you, but I don't want my parents to know. My dear! I really like you!" and this point I squealed loud enough to almost burst Spencer's eardrums.

He said that he wanted to chat with me alone, and I told Spencer,
B: SEE! He wants to fuck!
S: Maybe he just wants to chat, like he said in the text message
B: Spencer, you don't know ANYTHING!

So we went out to dinner, Spencer and I, and I told 涂强 that I would meet him at the hotel room after dinner, and he kept texting me every moment, with each text starting with "亲爱的" (my dear)

So I kindly requested that Spencer go to the lobby to hang while I have the room to myself. SEXILED!

As soon as he gets there, he kisses me. SEE! Spencer didn't know anything.

I was his first time experiencing anything with a guy, we just had oral sex because idk I feel like anything more would have been too much for him, and in my mind I planned to see him again and I thought we could lead up to it.

Even still, he was so so nice and caring, I felt completely satisfied just being with him, just hugging him.

So before he left, he kissed me one last time and told me not to forget him.

But then before I went back to Beijing, I sent him a text saying how much I liked him, and that I haven't felt that way towards someone in a long time. Before that, he just sent me a generic "have a nice trip" text, with no "my dear" in it.

So I'm back in Beijing for a few days, no response, except for he's saying that he's busy. Then I stepped it up in a series of text messages:
B:I wanted to go back to Nanchang just to see you.
T:That can't be, I'll keep a precious memory of you. My parents will kill me if they find out. Take care!
B:How about you tell them that we're friends? That way they won't know about our relationship. T:I still don't want to. I will remember you!
B:A lifetime of unhappiness is not ok. You will not be able to take the loneliness, At least give us a chance. Think it over. I'm very low key.
(the next morning) T:No, it's really not ok!
B: Ok, I'm heart broken, but whatever you say is fine. How long are you going to control your desires? If one day you can't take it anymore, just contact me. I'll be waiting for you.

Out of all my 419, I finally meet one guy that I actually want to stay with, but he doesn't want to be with me.

How do I know that I really love him? I had just finished having sex with another guy in Nanchang, and I still thought about 涂强(Tu Qiang). That's pretty serious.

So, the only song that best describes my feelings is Stevie Wonder's "Overjoyed", especially the lyrics:

"I've come much too far, for me now to find, the love that I sought can never be mine." . . .
"and though the odds say improbable, what do they know? For in romance, what true loves needs is a chance, and maybe with a chance you will find, you too like I'm overjoyed, over love, over you"

I just came out of the closet about two months ago while I was here in China. After I turned 28, two years away from being 30, I thought to myself, "How many more years am I going to pretend to be straight?"

I've always had attraction for both males and females, but my attraction to males has always been way stronger. This took a lot to admit it to myself, and finally to other people. I would have random encounters on the Beijing subway, or other public places, of some guy looking at me, but not the curious foreigner stare, just looking a little bit too long. I looked back, and I wanted to follow them, but I was scared. Scared of what? I don't know. Also, my first instinct is to check out guys first before girls. I remember when I was in Zhongshan, Guangdong (广东中山) in the South, My friends got together and we met a group of girls. Later they would talk about which ones they would fuck, and which ones they would only get a blow job from, and it occurred to me that I never even thought about that, or even which one was the most pretty.

After the loneliness, and denial, I couldn't take it anymore. If I didn't at least tell someone my strong attraction for men, I was probably going to commit suicide from holding back this secret for so long. So I told one classmate over the winter break. Not that I trusted her so much, but that she was pretty much the only person there, as everyone was away over the break. lol She advised me on the local gay bars.

I had been reading this gay Chinese online novel called "北京故事" (Beijing Story) which was made into a movie called "蓝宇" who is the name of a character from the story. I guess I got carried away with the fantasy of my life being like a movie. I live in Beijing, dammit! I should be experiencing my own Beijing story!
So off to the gay bars I went. Since that time, I've met a few guys and I don't think I can ever go back to girls again. Girls just don't give me the same feeling. Going out and exploring is the stuff I should have been doing in my early 20s, but at least I didn't turn 30 without ever having had sex with a man. Better late than never. I especially like Chinese guys, which is why I had even more of a desire to come out in China.

Attitudes of homosexuality are very different, and dare I say, better than in the U.S. and especially better than in Panama.

The stigma with being gay here is that you will not get married and not have children which is very important in Chinese society. That's pretty much where the gay negativity ends.

It's not like in the the U.S. or in Latin America where calling people gay is an insult. The fact that using gay slurs is synonymous with insulting someone shows through the language how it's inherently not acceptable in a certain culture. In China, people do not call someone gay just for the sake of insulting them. Such gay slurs just don't exist in Chinese. Even when I told my friends who are villagers that I was gay, they still didn't have a problem with it. Quite the opposite from most people in the U.S. from small towns. When I tell Chinese people that gays have been victims of violence in the U.S., or get their car windows broken, they can't even believe such a thing.

Basically, in China, society doesn't put pressure on you to be straight, only your family. Since I don't have a Chinese family, I pretty much have it pretty good here as a gay man. If anything, Chinese people are often more curious about me when they find out I'm gay. The thing is that Chinese society doesn't have the same gay prejudices or stereotypes like in the West, so they view us with an open mind and a clean slate.

For the above reasons, I feel like I won't be able to bear living in the homophobic U.S. or in my even more homophobic home country. After I graduate, I will be determined to get back here as soon as I can, and live my life.

So me and my British friend Ashraf got to the train station 5 minutes late for our train from Wenzhou to Guangzhou. I'll never forget the words, "kai le" (the train has taken off)

The next train available was three days later, and the next bus was two days later. These people outside were advertising buses to Guangzhou, so I called my roommate, asked if they were safe, he said, "yeah" and off we went.

We got into this tiny van and the unlucky bastard that got on last had half his ass hanging off the little piece of seat that was left. Then we waited at a turnpike to get on a sleeper bus, only to discover that there were no beds for us, so we slept on the floor. When I finally got to sleep, the guy woke me up and told me to put on my shoes. We then got off the bus, with all my stuff still on it, and they had to hold me back when I asked them in Chinese, "What about my stuff" and there was a chorus of meiguanxi (it's no problem) going around, so I KIND of figured if Chinese people are ok with it, then I should be. They tried to tell me what it was, but I didn't understand, but I ended the conversation by saying, "The bottom line is, we are going to get back on that bus, right?" and yes the could tell me that was the case. So then we were back in the little van, and the Chinese people discovered that they paid more for their ticket than us, only because since it was the two of us, they give us a discount. The weird thing is that they asked me if I was from Guandong. I know it was dark, but come on, I'm obviously a foreigner. When I seemed confused by the question, he asked me, "Do you have yellow skin, or white skin?" I felt like Pat from Saturday Night Live getting interrogated on whether he/she was a man or a woman.

Then we got back on the bus and I was sleeping on the floor and with two people sleeping on both sides of me, some elbows and knees were freely resting on my body. Later, some guy woke me up to help me translate to some foreigner who I later found out was from Guinea. He just wanted me to tell him to put his shoes somewhere safe so they don't fall on top of him. When the sun started coming up and my back was aching, some people got off and I suddenly had a bed. I slept pretty well, as the A/C was pretty cold in the hot southern China summer. Later, we were told to get off the bus to take another one to Guangzhou and I got off in such a hurry, I left my Teach Yourself Cantonese book on the bus, but by the time I realized it, it was too late. We also had to pay extra for this bus just to take us where we originally paid to go.

And to think, we were worried that we were going to be bored on the train. . .

So my adventure in China is soon coming to an end.

My roommate Sandra and my American friend Kurt have already left town with each other. Sandra is going back to Germany, and Kurt is going to the nearby city of Ningbo to work when they are done vacationing.

The term is over


I suddenly felt depressed going in that school and knowing that I'll never teach the students again.

Also going into Sandra's room and knowing that nobody lives there anymore. I still remember the first day when I got here, and I was trying to respect her privacy and she was like, "No, come in in." and I saw all her Chinese vocabulary words posted on her wall. They're still on there.

and when I tell Chinese people that I'm going back to the States and then they ask me when am I coming back to China, I can't just tell them "maybe never" like they don't get how hard it was for me to get here in the first place. I just tell them that I don't know. I think it's so naive, yet, endearing that they actually think that I have plans to come back here.

Chinese people love Obama. Anyway, some guy was riding a bicycle next to me and kept yelling "Obama" and kept saying random stuff that I did not understand. My Chinese friend was with me and she didn't even understand what he was saying, except "Obama" in Chinese which sounds almost the same in English.

So it was like

OBAMA gibberish gibberish gibberish OBAMA gibberish gibberish gibberish OBAMA

Then he rode his bike away some place and came back 30 seconds later only to do the same thing

I just said, "加油奧巴馬 jia you Obama" (go Obama)

ok so I called my roommate's cell phone, and a Chinese person picked up. I tried to meet up with her to get my roommates cell back. Anyway, I really didn't know what she looked like, so I saw someone with a cell phone in hand, and I asked her in Chinese if she had my friend's cell phone. She obviously had no idea, so I told her, "suan le" (forget it/never mind).

Then she kept turning and looking and asked me if I was Chinese*! ! !

Needless to say, that was the happiest I've been in a while.

*there exists some minority Chinese groups that mainly live in western and northern China. They might have thought I was a Uyguir minority Chinese from Xinjiang pictured below.

These were all done by local high school students. One of the themes seemed to be 反對暴力 （to be against violence)











Here is some "Creative Chinese Character Art" as John Pasden, writer of Sinosplice calls it. Although, not exactly like the ones he showed, they're still pretty cool:




These characters are 家庭暴力

These say 中國加油

A while back, I went to Fujian province to see Tai Mu Shan （太姥山）and it was one of the most incredible (and cleanest) places I have seen in China. It gave me the impression for the first time that China is not just a place with overcrowded and dirty cities. Also, some Buddhist monks treated us to lunch at one of the temples on The Mountain, and I bought some of their tea that they grow and process themselves.






Was your tea brewed by monks? I don't think so, muthafuka!

OK so my friend Kurt's teaching assistant Catherine (李苗苗）asked Kurt if he could talk to her brother and his friends in English. Kurt agreed, but Catherine had to pay for dinner.
I joined later, and when we were done, they asked all of us to sign our names in their notebooks. I told them that I could write my Chinese name too, and so I did. Then I just wrote some random sentence in Chinese on a dirty napkin and they were fighting over who got to keep that. I was surprised, because Chinese is nothing "exotic" to them, but still. . . a foreigner wrote it, so it's automatically cool, I guess. I wrote a sentence in Chinese for each of them. Of course, they wanted to take pictures with me.

What can I say? I love reading hand-written Chinese too!

So, I went to buy some new contact lenses and the guy working there just talked to me in Chinese and didn't care where I was from, where I work, or how long I've been in China. Just like every other Chinese person asks me.

No smile on his face, bad customer service, a bit of an asshole, just how we would act to Chinese people. He even explained to me that the "R" is short for the English word "right" which means, youbian ("right side" in Chinese).

Yep, that was pretty cool.