Sex in China 1990

Sex in China 1990。。。。Part 3 in my continuing series.  No idea when I'll write 4 though. 

Upon my arrival to China I had been with a steady lady.  She was a nice girl.  Orphaned as a child, and than adopted.   She was loving, caring, and cute.   She talked dirty.  I loved it.  We had great meals together, long walks through San Francisco.   To this day, she even checks me out via social media..(I can see you,dear).     She simply lacked one thing;  space.   Smothering?  Oh yeah.  

 Give me a woman that will spend the night than leave me alone for a day or so.    She wasn’t that girl, and I saw China increasingly as a salvation, as an escape.   I distinctly recall the tremendous sense of relief I had when I woke up in Hong Kong at 5am my first day away from America.    I was overcome with a soothing feeling of liberation.

Once I got here I was so focused on learning Mandarin, to make the most of my stay before my Peace Corps stint started, that I honestly, truly believe I would not be having sex, or any romantic relationships for at least a year.  I don’t think I even brought anything with me.(I don’t recall)

Class started at 8am, and finished at noon.   Than it was homework.   Our teachers rarely gave any homework, however.   They gave guidance.  Thus one had to be self motivated(I was!).   They say that one year of overseas study equals four years of home country study.  I believe it.  Within one semester, I found I had already mastered those thick textbooks I had brought with me from America. 

Still, I was always in need of companionship, and within a week or so, I began to have regular student visits.   Within a month, I began to have regular female visits.  These were all from the English dept of course.   I don’t recall how I met most of them.   I do recall the first.  She had a fantastic rack, just bursting with vitality and vigor.  I met her on the street, and she spoke good enough English, and we got along well.  I will tell you now she had a very handsome, older boyfriend, and they probably got married.  I heard she stayed in South China afterwards.  She was from Wuhan. 

I’d love to see her again.  My thinking is she probably married a foreigner though, or at the very least made it overseas.   I remember her coming to my dorm to say hi, once in awhile.  I could see her bra strap through her blouse.  It was always on the last clasp.  I always hoped it would break of course.   She was rather mature for her age(gee I wonder why….)

I found as a rule that though sexuality was never discussed in open all that much, sexual frustration, in particular for men was just below the surface.  Simmering.   For women, less so.   They were happy enough just to hold hands.   Or to have some guy hold their books. 

I recall on one trip to Hong Kong I bought a HKG version of Playboy and brought it back to China.  I bought it for my best friend at the time.   He was quite taken aback by it.   In retrospect his knowing me I now know gave him a certain status.    (he’s the one with the laowai friend)  As such, he had access to things no one else did, I guess.

People were on campus to study. No more.   Dorms were segregated by floor.  Boys on one, ladies on the other.    I don’t recall ever seeing any hand holding on campus.  Romantic relationships were discouraged.   I’m sure on college campuses today, sex is probably everywhere.   Not in 1990.  Things were pretty tense in China back than.

Than we foreigners showed up.  The campus saw us as a source of cash flow, nothing more.   Yet the administration was kind.   In retrospect, I was quite the jerk.  But I guess I was a normal jerk.   Us laowai showing up on campus really threw a wrench into the machine.

A French classmate of mine promptly had an affair with one of her Chinese teachers.(he was handsome, too).

A female Japanese classmate, ditto….

The horniest students(beside me) were the Japanese men.  They just couldn’t get laid…(geez, why was that?)

Despite the well intentioned attempts of the University to separate everyone, there was bound to be mixing of one sort between the foreigners and the Chinese.    The administration staff was ready.

At the time in China there was a movement called heping yanbian.   It meant “peaceful evolution”, but what it really meant was “foreigners trying to change and mold China to look more like them”.  (don’t forget to keep investing here by the way.  We want our cake and we want to eat it, too)

So there was a lot of defacto surveillance on us Western students, for “our safety”.  Back than, it was the norm.   The Ayi’s  were spies.  Their chief function was to tell the waiban who was coming and going.  Yet the more important thing was the record.   That is, the signup sheet all Chinese students had to fill out while visiting us lonely laowai.  They kept a copy, and another copy went to their dept chairman.   I thought nothing of it, until the visits began to slow down.  Not from the guys, but from the girls.   Turns out my male visitors never had to signin!  Eventually, the female students would spill the beans that upon visiting us, their Dept Chairman was calling them in for “a chat”. 

“You need to stay away from these Foreigners.  They will bring a bad influence to you”.  他们会带来一个不好影响。

I couldn’t believe this when I heard it the first time around.  And this was at a foreign language institute! Where one would think that mixing with the Evil Empire might not be frowned upon so much.   Apparently, someone thought that the language could be learned without the culture. (“ No wonder we have Chinatowns, I thought to myself’)

When I heard the school was monitoring my visitors, I felt violated.  No one likes to be spied upon.  But it wasn’t happening to any of my male friends, only the few ladies that visited me.   

I promptly solved this by doing one thing:  when a female friend visited I would wait until the Ayi was ready for bed, which was around 9pm or so.  Her bed was next to the ofc, in an adjoining room.  I’d simply wait til lights out, than sneak downstairs to where the signin sheet was, find my friends name(I made sure they wrote in pinyin when possible because I couldn’t read characters),  and quietly rip it out of the book.   Than I’d throw it away the following day, outside of campus.   Why did I do this?  To ensure my room’s wastebasket didn’t leave any clues.    Such was sex in China in 1990.  I had to act like a member of the CIA just to have visitors. 

I realized I stood out on campus like a sore thumb.  I was always carrying my Chinese dictionary with me.  I was most students only opportunity to actually speak to a barbarian as well.    The females didn’t dare speak to me on campus in full view of the others.   Silly rumors would spread.(from a conversation!?)  I guess I was just supposed to go to class, back to my room, close the door, and STUDY! 

By this time, I had been on campus close to 4 months, and the semester was winding down.  I had already spoken my first grammatically correct sentence of Chinese( accidentally of course, and when I was told what I had done, I promptly wasn’t able to repeat it).

Than finally my luck changed.   On the city bus, and by accident.   My campus was so isolated that there were no taxi’s around.   The only way to get into the city was to take a city bus, which ran close to once an hour.   Often it would be late, and we’d just all stand around looking at each other.   Vice versa, one had to take the same bus back, as quite often, taxi’s just didn’t want to travel that far out and not have a fare going back.  

One day in November I was on the bus waiting for it to return to campus.  A girl sat in front of me.   By this time, I had gotten use to people staring at me.    She spoke to me in broken English, and that was fine by me, as my Chinese was still pretty bad.    Turned out she was from Singapore, couldn’t get into school there, and her parents by default had sent her to China.   It was common than for overseas Chinese to study on campus.   Their social status was quite low though, as they hadn’t gotten in via merit, but merely via their bank account. 

We chatted on the bus ride back to campus, and she invited me to dinner.  Believe it or not, it was common than to have Chinese invite me for dinner.   Meaning they would pay.   I’d never let a female pay for my dinner now, but I sure as hell did than.    She wore a mini skirt with roll up stockings.  It was sexy as hell.   I couldn’t wait to jump on her.   People as usual stared at me all the way through the walk to dinner and all the way back to my dorm.   They probably thought the worst.   I sure as hell didn’t care.  95% of those guys staring at me had never seen a naked woman before and as for the women looking at me disapprovingly…well…no comment.   We went back to my room, sat down on the bed, and I froze. 

Awkward.  

I whipped out the old handy dictionary and looked up the word for “kiss”.  I said it and motioned.  She feigned ignorance.   Than I just showed her the damn Chinese word, and she couldn’t feign anymore.

We began to make out.    That was it.  The next day she came over and we consummated the deal.   It was great.   I mean after nearly 100 days without sex I felt…well, I’m sure you get it.   She started to come over on a daily basis.   I loved her attitude.    (I didn’t like her teeth….there I said it!!!)  She was sexy as hell, and had great legs, and a fantastic body.  

Than the Ayi’s got involved.  

But they were powerless. 

You see she wasn’t a Chinese student, and as a Singapore student, they had pretty much zero leverage over her behavior.  (At least until it was time for readmission.)   No chairman was going to intimidate her.  In a way, I felt like I was getting even with the system.    

Than I got tired of her.  (typical men are all creeps comments pls insert here)

It had gotten to the point where she was coming over everyday.   And I was kinda becoming a bit embarrassed by her behavior.

Everytime she came over she kept wanting to wash my clothes.   I really wasn’t expecting this, and I didn’t know how to respond.   One of the tougher things abt dorm life than was that we had to wash our own clothes(Chinese students feel free to unleash a sarcastic sigh).   We had no washing machine.  All we had was our basin and soap.  ( No wonder Chinese women had such rough hands)

My classmates were beginning to notice her presence and teasingly ask questions.

The weirdest thing she would say whenever she came over was “I’m a good Chinese girl.”    She would say this as she undressed.  (Not to editorialize.)     I had no idea why she would utter this phrase.   It was apparently important for her to remind me of this, though.

She wanted to cook lunch for me as well, until she realized we had no gas cylinders.

Still….hanging out with her greatly alleviated my sense of isolation.    My Chinese to her credit greatly improved.   She was lovingly patient.  She would endure my Chinese phrases, and attempts to get to the 5 year old level of mandarin. (if you read one of my earlier posts on my blog you’ll know having a gf is the best way to learn mandarin, assuming one has regular lessons) There were no movie theaters than, no dvd’s, and sure as hell no internet.  All I had was what friendships I could make(in English!), and my books.  Having a gf was a lifesaver.    But after a month or so, I needed to put some distance between us.   

Our relationship became much more casual, and infrequent.    Eventually, it just became a booty call for her.   She would show up abt once a month, completely unexpected, unannounced.

It was around this time that our department of foreign students started to hang out with the “self paying students” 自费生.    These were the mainland Chinese students that didn’t take or couldn’t pass the state entrance exams.   Thus they had to pay tuition to get into school.  They lived on campus, in dorms, just like we and the other 国费生。All three groups were segregated.   Obviously, they never congregated together, and there was a clear condenscension from the latter towards the former.   The latter thought the former were 2^nd class citizens.  Not smart enough to get into school on merit.  They had to pay to get in.   

The university obviously saw them as a source of revenue though, and there were many of them.    Not sure why we never had mixers with state students.  Only the self paying.   I guess they considered the state students as more representative of China’s future, and didn’t want to contaminate them with our foreign ideas.(turns out the self paying students were the entrepreneurial ones, and those who in future thus wound up starting businesses, creating jobs, and hiring the state students)

So we had our mixers, and we even went on an overnight trip with them.   Turns out these folks were great.  More laid back, more confident.   More mature.   They were the party on campus.   You see…these self paying students were all local students.   All from the Guangzhou area.   They knew where the fun spots were.    Think Will Ferrell to Mr. Bean.  I’d rather hang out with Ferrell.    I was pretty easy.   I just hung out with the first person that spoke to me in English.    Turns out though most of the guys couldn’t speak English as well as the girls.  So  after awhile I met a couple of cool Cantonese ladies with English skills that were good enough for me(I said I’m easy, right?). 

One of them eventually turned out to be my new gf.   Her English was much better than the Singapore ladies English.   And though initially shy, our relationship lasted til I left the following June.   Her parents were wealthy, and owned property.  She had family in NYC.   I think it was her goal to emigrate as well.  She was low maintenance, a bit passive,  and mature enough to give me space.   None of this “I’m a good Chinese girl” mantra, and she never volunteered to wash my laundry.     I loved hanging out with her and spending the night at her dorm.   We’d help each other out with homework.   (She was usually half naked while we studied.  It was sexy.) She only had one roommate.   This roommate was a bit homely and always went home on weekends.   The complete opposite of my new gf.

My new gf helped me quite a bit with my Mandarin, and I with her English.   One habit she always had was making love with her thigh high stockings on.  I had never experienced this in America, and here I was again, seeing this trait with a Chinese woman.  I asked here why?  Expecting some sexy reply, she instead said it was simply to protect her from mosquitoes.   When making love she always also kept her ribbon in her hair.  (just an observation)   She was great at oral sex, which surprised me.  (1990 remember?) Yet staying at her dorm had it’s risks.  

She could get thrown out because of me.   (Couldn’t stay at my place.)   I made it a point to leave her dorm as early as I could in the morning.   The Chinese are early risers though, even on a weekend.   

You should’ve seen the looks on the faces of her classmates when they saw me walking out of their dormitory on a Saturday morning at 7am.   They all had these “who on earth is he and where in the hell did he come from” looks on their faces.    The Chinese love to sing.  One time a guy was singing full throttle and when he turned the corner and saw me he stopped singing and just froze.   Me?  I just played the ignorant hick and kept on walking.

The hardest part abt leaving my chick’s place was exiting the gate.  There was a 60 something year old man there, and he would just shit a brick when he saw me.   I found out later I’m supposed to sign in and out when I visited.   Today when a Chinese want’s your attention they’ll just shout out “hello!”  Back than they’d just call me out in Cantonese….good luck with that!

Having private time was always a challenge.  Especially later on after I eventually did have a Japanese roommate.   He was a very nice and quiet guy.   Still, not living alone anymore through a wrench into things.   I just couldn’t have private time with my gf when I wanted.    As such she and I were forced to find alternative locales.  We wound up having to have sex in the “community room”.   This was the one place in the dorm where we had TV’s.   We had furniture as well.   Official meetings would take place there.   Blah blah blah.    I’d simply find an excuse for the key to this room, claiming I wanted to watch TV.  Once inside we did what adults tend to do. 

During one session I had a flashback and reminded myself that I truly hadn’t known what to expect, sexually in China.  Indeed, I had anticipated a whole school with no action.  I realized I was rather ignorant about the whole thing.  It was than at 23 I had an epiphany;  women are the same all over the world, regardless of their environment, and all have the same basic needs and desires.   They just need the opportunity for expression.  This particular lady was eons ahead of her smarty, stuffy elite counterparts.   

So was my teacher.  My teacher was a recent Fudan graduate, and hailed from Shantou, a small port city in Guangdong.   She was dark, with a round face, and well endowed.   She spoke good English, and had big eyes.   I found her rather intelligent, and I enjoyed our conversations.  I remember she liked to drink beer.    Class was always formal, and I found her to be a good enough teacher. 

One may wonder what on earth a Fudan graduate was doing teaching laowai of all things, but in 1990 this was considered a prestigious job.   There were no job fairs than, no resume building seminars.  Everyone was assigned a job, and this was her assignment.   It would be akin to an Ivy League grad teaching an ESL class today.

 Finally, one day after class we were talking and I realized she lived in the building across from my dorm.   I was curious to see how teachers lived so she invited me over.  It turned out to be a simple room, no better than mine.   I was a bit let down.  I guess I had been hoping to see something a little more regal than just a plastered square with the smell of mildew.   (everywhere I went I just couldn’t get away from the damn smell of mildew)

It was a quick visit and I left.  I had noticed on my way down the stairs though that like everyone else she hung her laundry out to dry in front of her door.  I could see her panties.  I was a bit taken aback by how risque her lingerie was.    It felt awkward knowing what kind of panties my teacher wore to work.   A short while later she casually invited me over again.  In no time we were making out.  Things heated up and suddenly I had a problem on my hands.

Though I only lived 20 seconds from where she did, I realized I had been locked out of my dorm.  That actually wasn’t the problem itself.   I had become a bit practiced at coming back late, and had learned to keep the 2^nd floor window unlocked.  When coming back late I would just climb up to this window and let myself in.   The trick was to sneak out and not let the ayi see you, than when going back to the dorm, to not let the police on their bicycles notice you as you climbed up.(we had a canal that ran through the center of our campus.  It had long been rumored that a student had been murdered there.  I didn’t believe it, but folks even more so liked the presence of the cops)

I told my teacher I’d be back in a moment, the moment catching me a bit unprepared.  She said when I left and came back, to make sure her ayi didn’t see me.   Good grief, I thought to myself, what’s up with the ayi’s in China?  Turned out she had missed curfew once, and her ayi had turned her in. ( I use the term ayi here loosely.  She was a peasant cleaning lady, around 30, with a room in the same building.  She had the look of someone that always did what she was told, and had always a serious look on her face!) She had been criticized heavily for this, and almost fired.    (in future, I always made sure I visited her after her ayi went to bed)

Two things stand out from my first encounter with my teacher;   One was she mentioned casually that her underwear kept getting stolen.    This confirmed what I’d always suspected.   I thought weird as hell that the males and females would hang their laundry out to dry in public for the other sex to see.   It just seemed weird.    It also confirmed to me the nature of repressed sexuality in men during that time.   

To be a male college student in China during this time frame was no worse than being in jail, in America, I thought.   No fun allowed.  No PDA.  No girlfriends.  No living together.  Nowhere to get a room for a night.  The repression must have been suffocating.    Having everyday to see the panties of the girl you had a crush on must have been absolutely unbearable.  Compare that of course to being a college student in the West.    The college students in China today lead a decadent, (albeit more normal) lifestyle compared to the students than.    

The 2^nd thing that stood out during our first encounter was both how open she was during sex(see my epiphany above), and how during the heat of the encounter she suddenly burst out a long string of words, none of which I understood.    I asked her the next day what she said, and she told me she was moaning in her local dialect.  I thought that was kind of cool.

I grew up a lot my first year in China.   Living amongst the Chinese obviously goes a long way towards understanding their way of thinking.   But it wasn’t until the opposite sex was involved that I really was able to see the sensitivities of the powers that be.