Ever the Quiet Burier of Ledes, Global Times published a news item Monday that surely qualifies for Hideous China Story of the Year (Relationships Edition)… although GT went for the more casual “Mom jailed for covert contraceptive.”

It’s a Turducken of a tale – one that gradually reveals more unpleasant layers with every sentence until, eventually, everybody loses. The action begins in 2015 with a young graduate, Zhang Yang, whose girlfriend, “Yanzi,” is pregnant. Unfortunately, Zhang’s mother Zhang Xiuqin does not approve of the match, and not only pressures Yanzi into getting an abortion – she does the procedure herself. Medical ethics are clearly not an issue for Nurse Zhang, though:

Zhang Xiuqin was handed six months and a 5,000-yuan ($743) fine…for implanting [a] diaphragm while performing an abortion on the woman, CCTV news reported.

Yanzi only discovered the device years later while seeking treatment because she had been unable to conceive since.

Zhang told authorities she inserted the contraceptive device to sabotage their relationship and prevent them from marrying.

Zhang said she had disapproved of their relationship because at the time her son was a college-educated and Yanzi was working as a waitress.

Things then take a deeply amoral twist for the worse:

Zhang began encouraging Yanzi and Zhang Yang to get back together after learning the former waitress had made a fortune.

For some reason, Yanzi didn’t fancy another invasive Ob-Gyn procedure at the hands of her meddling mother-in-law and went somewhere else to figure out why she couldn’t get pregnant again. The plot unraveled and the sociopathic Nurse Zhang ended up in jail (whether she is allowed to practice nursing again is another story, but am gonna guess probably… yes). Last, quick twist of the knife:

The couple eventually broke up.

The story is filed under GT’s “Odd” section, but is frankly so WTF-awful, it could form one of the plotlines in Party Members and still come off as a little extreme.

h/t Isabella Steger

Authorities were not happy about that Uniqlo fitting room sex video. Reports the LA Times:

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s Internet watchdog, reprimanded two of the nation’s main web portals, Sina and Tencent, for failing to stop the spread of the video, and police said they were investigating. On Sunday, Beijing police said they had  arrested the couple in the video and four others.

According to Beijing TV, the police investigation is focused on two questions: first, who posted the video and second, whether the tape was a publicity stunt intended to drum up business. A brief police statement said one 19-year-old man surnamed Sun was charged with disseminating obscene material, while three others were being detained, along with the couple. Police indicated the video dated from April.

We hope the couple is okay. I guess public sex is a real threat to society and you shouldn’t do it, but then again — maybe you should.

Porn is “illegal” in China, but, you know — does this need to be said? — good luck stopping it.

I passed by Uniqlo just now on my way home, the infamous Sanlitun branch where a young man and woman had sex in the fitting room and put the video of it online. (You can watch it here.) Maybe that part of Sanlitun Village always has a large crowd of young folks milling about. Maybe there are those who ironically take selfies in front of retail chains, and journalists often un-ironically do work there (CNN!). I don’t know. Or maybe shoppers are lining up for this season’s hottest new item:

I don’t know. A couple had sex, and Uniqlo is by far, now and forevermore, the biggest beneficiary. Come on. That’s kind of bullshit.

Uniqlo says they weren’t behind this, and the fact that they’re probably not lying makes the story all the more disappointing. If a real human being concocted this bit of marketing derring-do, it would justify and vindicate the entire history and field of public relations. Dov Charney – American Apparel’s skeevy founder – hired porn stars and models to attain Uniqlo’s current wildfire of buzz, and failed. Companies sink thousands every year into advertising campaigns without entertaining the possibility that mainstream media will notice. And Uniqlo? Did it spend money to make money? Did it bother to pollute our eyes and ears with subliminal messages of bonking? Did it so much as try to position itself in our subconscious as a place where quickies were cool? No. It did nothing but offer medium-priced everyday wear and fair-quality jeans. And now it’s laughing its way to the bank, because two people had sex. Life isn’t fair.

Well, I suppose there is one drawback: someone will have sex again in a Uniqlo fitting room. Probably not by tomorrow, because there’ll be some Argus-ass eyes affixed to those doors. But it will happen. And may it continue happening until it becomes commonplace, and we can continue to stroll by this store in the heart of Sanlitun without raising our camera phones as if in the shadow of Angkor fucking Wat.

If you’ve been anywhere near WeChat or Weibo today (or China’s corner of Twitter, for that matter), you’ve likely heard that a young man filmed himself having sex with a young woman in a fitting room in the Sanlitun branch of Uniqlo in Beijing recently. The video was uploaded to the Internet yesterday evening and has been making the rounds. It’s out there. Someone was gonna post it. [...] Here it is.

In case you were wondering, as many online have, Uniqlo says this was not a publicity stunt (who do you think they are, American Apparel?). Quote from Shanghai Daily:

In its statement released on Wednesday morning, Uniqlo said it has reported the indecent content to websites where it appeared “immediately.”

“We would like to remind the public to uphold social morality and use our fitting rooms in a correct and proper way,” said Uniqlo.

“We also firmly deny some online allegations saying the video is our publicity stunt.” Uniqlo said in the statement.

UPDATE:

In honor of Cyber Security Week in China — that’s this week, whereupon “China’s Internet police are stepping into the light,” according to WSJ — I thought we’d take a glimpse at the state of Chinese Internet smut through the lens of a recent happening, photographer Wang Dong’s now-infamous Forbidden City photo shoot featuring nude models.

Let’s compare how Chinese Internet censored the above picture — via SCMP — vs. how others did it, shall we?

Here’s The Independent:

Here is The Mirror, not exactly known for its modesty, using thick black lines to cover the woman’s sensitive parts:

Now let’s look at China Daily – technically state media, but it employs so many foreign editors that we can’t call it completely Chinese. Let’s consider this image a bridge into the hinterlands…

…of real Chinese Internet.

Here’s China.org.cn, using a considerably thin black line to cover the woman’s nipples. Cleavage, side boob, underboob, and pelvis are all fine…

…not like the Chinese Internet cops care, right?

WSJ:

Effective immediately, these agencies “cannot send images of [models] in swimwear or black lace,” Weibo Chief Executive Officer Wang Gaofei wrote on one of his verified blogs on Weibo. Mr. Wang also said these agencies won’t be allowed to use Weibo to publicize their online presence on other platforms.

The tone of Mr. Wang’s post took on a hint of exasperation. “If you really can’t” abide by such rules, Mr. Wang wrote, “then just act cutesy or sell bags.”

So with all its controls, smut patrols, campaigns against indecency, surely Chinese editors have received the message loud and clear, yes?

SZHK.com:

That’s basically nude!

Good luck, Net nannies. You have a tough job indeed, but at least it pays well.

SHANGHAI COCKTALES (A Memoir)

It’s one of the gifts of China that there’s something to write about on every street corner. It’s one of the curses of China that expats keep writing about themselves instead.

That’s not to say there isn’t rich material in it. Somewhere outside the Fourth Ring Road, a nondescript borderline-alcoholic English teacher might be polishing off the manuscript of the China equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Escape, reinvention, exoticism, disillusionment – it’s all there for a novelist or memoirist, plus baijiu, smog and as many happy endings as you can afford. There’s definitely a way to do it right, make it funny, and say something meaningful about how us foreigners (with nowhere else in particular to go) engage with China, or don’t. There’s also a way to do it wrong, and come across as a goon who can’t write his way out of a paper bag.

By now you should be getting an idea of what kind of a review this is going to be.

As a writerly sort and interested party, I occasionally read books which are memoirs – sometimes thinly veiled as fiction – of the expat in question’s China years. Some are entertaining, others as interesting as a concrete overpass. Many have weird hang-ups about sex. Most feature heavy drinking as a centrepiece. Almost all can be summed up in a single sentence: “Look at this crazy wacky time I’m having in China!” But I’ve never seen one which combines all of the things I hate in China writing between two covers until I read the self-published Shanghai Cocktales: A Memoir by Tom Olden.

Can we dwell on that title for a moment? Shanghai Cocktales. It sounds like some “friend” of Olden’s dared him to write a book based around that single, shitty 2am pun. I’m sure it sounded funny after five rounds at his local, but Olden woke up the next morning and still went with it. The chapters are called “Cocktale One,” “Cocktale Two,” and so on until you wish you were dead or drinking that sixth cocktail. Tom Olden (a pseudonym) has all the subtlety and ear for language of a horny, deaf-blind goat. If he ran this blog, it would no doubt be called Beijing Spunk.

The plot is more or less a blow-by-blow dirge of Olden’s nights out, sexual conquests and job interviews in Shanghai from his arrival as a twenty something year-old in 1999 (“the year of the Rabbit”, thanks for that) until now. It’s billed as a memoir but reads like bad fiction. The second sentence begins “As the only white male on a half-full flight, I gratefully enjoyed the extra attention the nubile air hostesses gave me,” and goes downhill from there. I would happily write off that half-full flight as collateral damage if the plane had only crashed and spared us the rest.

Promotional image for ‘Shanghai Cocktales’

At the airport, Olden meets his mate Alex, who wows him by giving an address in Chinese to their taxi driver. (“‘Whadde’fuck?’” … “‘You speak Chinese? Fuck me!’” … “‘Ching-chong, ching-chong, you’re the man.’”) There’s also some artful exposition when Alex quizzes Olden about why he left everything to come to China and asks about a girl called Marie. “‘She’s over and out. Bitch!’”, comes the reply. (“If it hadn’t been for her,” Olden delusionally muses later,“I could have spent my entire time on campus banging freshmen.”) It’s frequently revealed that Olden has “nightmares where I would wake up, bathed in cold sweat, panting from seeing Marie and Kurt in joyous copulation.” I’m on Team Kurt.

It’s not just snappy comebacks and scintillating interior monologue that Olden puts in italics. It’s every sentence he thinks is clever. On local eating habits: “How the fuck can they eat cold fish for breakfast?” On people he doesn’t like: “I’d party with anyone but her. Even French people.” On his soul-crushingly bland inner life: “You’re here now. In Shanghai. Ready for a new beginning.” His favourite refrain is “Whadde’fuck?” Sometimes he switches into italics for whole paragraphs, just for kicks. He also does that irritating thing where he writes the pinyin followed by the English (“‘Mei you wenti.’ No problem”) because ching-chong, ching-chong, he’s the man.

For someone who lived in China for sixteen years, it’s hard to believe how little of interest happened to Olden. He tries valiantly to keep things topical – the Belgrade embassy bombing, the Internet boom – but inevitably gets sucked back into the dull minutia of his sexpatscapades. In one meat market, he picks up a girl with the sparkling line “Hey – can I buy you a drink?” Her reply is “OK. First, toilet”, and I know how she feels. There are exactly two entertaining moments in the book – one where he is fleeced by the notorious teahouse scam into paying a huge dinner bill, the second where he is scammed by conmen posing as police when he’s with a prostitute. Finally, something worth cheering for.

Every woman Olden meets is immediately judged on her appearance. The idea persists among some foreigners – dare I say, especially in Shanghai? – that China is populated by porcelain dolls just waiting to jump into bed with them. Most of the time, it’s just run-of-the-mill Asian sexpot sophomoric dross, which isn’t worth quoting, although I kid you not that the first Chinese girl he runs into tells him he’s handsome and gives him an “exotic giggle.” Often it’s nastier, such as a bargirl who is “probably in her early thirties and had certainly been a pretty girl at some point in life, but now she looked pale and pinched, her slanted eyes rimmed by darkened circles.” I would give anything for a jacket shot of Olden so I could treat him the same.

Besides his alleged close encounters with Shanghai’s beauties, the rest of the book is Olden’s job interviews and miscellaneous score settling, which is all about as fun to read as drinking melamine from the can. He does the rounds of early city magazine websites and paints thinly veiled portraits of various friends and foes using false names. The climactic moment of the memoir is Olden landing a job that pays twelve thousand yuan a month, presumably vindicating him to all his enemies. There’s a whole paragraph about how boring a meeting was. To quote the master: Whadde’fuck?

If you’re a masochist, you can buy the book on Amazon, where there are thirteen customer reviews, all five stars, many of which overuse his full name in the same way. Something tells me the IP log would be revealing. I can’t imagine it sold like hot cakes, as half a year later he started giving it away for free on Twitter.

@Bueller @Bueller @Anyone… @Anyone?

I had an email exchange with Olden – he knows this review is coming – who wrote “I am aware that many people will not appreciate the story, but I wanted to tell it as it was.” He changed the names of people and companies, but everything else is accurate “as I remember it” (unspecified after how many drinks). The motivation to write the thing, he argued, was so that “when someone picks up the book 20-40 years from now, they’ll get a true picture of Shanghai in 1999.”

Curious about this mysterious auteur (Olden’s author bio says he “grew up in a small fishing village outside of Malmo, Sweden”), I asked some friends in Shanghai and we did a half-hearted human flesh search. Eventually, with the help of RFH, I tracked down someone who knows him and was in Shanghai over the same period. “It’s representative of the mindset of foreigners in China in that era,” he told me. “It’s reprehensible drivel, but unfortunately it’s the best record we’ve got.”

You might wonder – I certainly am – why I’m bothering to do a hatchet job on a self-published book with a fundamentally unlikeable narrator that no one except a few of Olden’s remaining mates will read. It’s not the first piece of grot to be written by an LBH (Loser Back Home) who got shanghai’ed into China and thinks his story is unique, and it won’t be the last. Worse books and blogs have been written. As to the offensive sexist stuff, he’s just a minnow in the slipstream of trouts like China Bounder, Robert Black and Isham Cook.

Part of it, I’ll confess, is that writing this is one way to claw some enjoyment back from the hours lost reading the bloody thing. But more than that, it’s because with every tone-deaf sentence I’m reminded of what we might be missing. Again, The Sun Also Rises was also narcissistic foreigners drinking all day. Here’s Hemingway: “You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. … You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You’re an expatriate. You hang around cafés.” And here’s Olden, via one of his dolls: “‘Many, many fun in Shanghaijj,’ she lashed on, shaking her head sideways. ‘Yo come anytime and we take care o’yo. Good time. Ayi-yaah. Many fun. Many, many fun…’”

Mostly, I’m reviewing this book because Olden told me that, after sixteen years, he is leaving China in a few months. I want to leave him a memento to remember us by. To borrow his own italicised phrase about a girl he doesn’t take a shine to: “You cannot let bitches like that go without a slap.”

Alec Ash is a writer and journalist in Beijing, and editor of the Anthill. Information and purchasing details of Shanghai Cocktales are on Facebook or Amazon (includes video). For a much more charitable take on this memoir, the Kirkus Review says it “gives readers plenty to think about.”

UPDATE, 6/4, 12:30 am: here’s our response to Tom Olden’s official response to Alec Ash’s review.

Last November, Bernd Chang wrote about a group of students who created a multifunctional G-string+condom featuring Chinese herbs (cumen, naturally?). We’re now here to give you this stone-faced update: that contraption has attracted more than USD $300,000 in investment from Guangdong Yuezheng Investment Management Limited.

If this Rocket News 24 report is to be believed, anyway:

The Eros Protector will come with a pouch that dispenses specially designed condoms that actually screw into place on the front of the thong. Apparently, instead of standard lubricant, these condoms also come equipped with a Chinese herbal blend lubricant that helps to maintain the pH balance of a woman’s private parts.

Yongxiang and team’s invention apparently shows so much promise it has attracted over US$300,000 in investment money from China’s venture capital firm Guangdong Yuezheng Investment Management Limited, who have high hopes that the risky investment will pay out due to the project’s creativity.

The diagram above looks like the doodle of a bored middle-schooler suffering through a history lecture, but in a country as shy about sex as China, maybe the Eros Protector can serve a purpose. Sex ed can come from unexpected places.

I just googled “What is the proper pH balance of a woman’s private parts” and learned, “Bacteria called lactobacilli help to keep the vagina’s pH balance at its normal low level (less than pH 4.5), which also prevents the growth of other organisms.”

Less than 4.5. The more you know.

By the way, the Chinese caption above reads:

1. G-String part, 2. Condom part, 3. Vertical streaks, 4. Anti-skidding microcapsules, 5. Sacs, 6. Elastics

Chinese college student’s bizarre “Thong Condom” invention wins the support of financial backers (Rocket News 24, h/t Alicia)

Data from Spreadsheets, a mobile app that tracks sex stats such as number of thrusts, average duration and volume level (gamifying performance in bed, if you will), has revealed that while Americans unsurprisingly have the most sex, Australian men last the longest, coming at 4 minutes, 3 seconds. What about China, you ask?

According to the chart above, China ranks second in sex frequency, but its men last only 2 minutes and 40 seconds on average. That ranks dead last among the world’s “10 most sexually active countries.” The Italians, French, and British don’t do too well either — only 10 seconds, 13 seconds and 16 seconds, respectively, better than the Chinese.

The more you know.

(H/T Thrillist)

On a crisp September 1st morning in Beijing, I stood before a locked iron door. On the other side was a hutong that led to the streets and eventually my university dorm. On my side was a scruffy courtyard home, a room with no couch and only one big bed – on which slept my Chinese boyfriend. It was dawn, and the hutong roofs were limned by a light morning mist, releasing the heat of the night into a new day. Inside, I was trapped, faced with an undesirable decision: to take a hammer to the door, or to return to the bed and have sex with a person I no longer respected.

Once in a while, when I mention to my expat friends that I’ve dated Chinese men, they show immodest curiosity. They want to know “how it happened.” I’m afraid I can’t succinctly summarize my experiences and opinions, considering the generalizations white women have made in the past while writing about this subject and the assumptions you, reader, will surely draw about me. But I can share one of my stories.

~

My friends in college told me I had an Asian “thing.” This apparently meant I was as equally attracted to Asians as white guys. And since this was not the norm in the US, even after I left white suburbia to attend a progressive liberal arts college, I ended up with that reputation. Not that I cared: I majored in Chinese language and literature. That choice wasn’t related to romantic interests, but it probably also spoke to my distaste for convention, my love of the underdog and frustration with American alpha-males.

My first night in China was on a study abroad program, and we did what any good study abroad students would do and got plastered in one of the city’s seediest nightclubs. One of my few clear memories from that night is sitting on a black-lit staircase steeped in the feeling of expat entitlement. I scoped out every guy that walked past before asking the most attractive amongst them if he wanted to do it. I believe the phrase I used was “做爱” (make love), to which he nodded gravely. I said we’d meet upstairs on the balcony. Then I changed my mind and danced with my friends instead. We still joke that the poor bastard is still waiting there for me.

When I settled in China after graduation, I considered myself an émigré sophisticate. I was ready for experiences more fulfilling than dancing on tables and modeling for textile startups. I committed myself to a summer of Chinese classes and Chinese friends. Don’t speak Chinese? Not interested. Clubs? No. Sanlitun bar street? Fuck that. No VPN, no HBO shows, no English music. Air pollution masks hadn’t come into fashion yet, but those too would have met my scorn.

Beijing’s humid haze hummed electric. It was a season of sweaty bus rides, swimming in Beijing’s public pools, eating greasy-spoon fare, and falling asleep to local radio. The conventional understanding of foreigners as super-citizens in China is true if you’re the type to embrace whiteface gigs and TV appearances, but when I rejected my American identity, I also rejected any first-class privileges. I wouldn’t even engage Chinese people who practiced their English on me, preferring instead to reply in sometimes-grating intermediate Chinese. I was mafan.

But! I was still white, young, and available. And that’s what Xiao Li saw – through soggy drunken vision – when we met at J— Bar, an iconic stronghold for local musicians. Xiao Li was part of a gang of pop-folk musicians that included not just his band mates, all singers, but also their brothers and cousins and mentors and girlfriends and gal pals.

I had gone that night to get my culture on and enjoy some folk music. Awkward but uninhibited, I picked off one of the shy ones to practice my Chinese. We were having a pleasant conversation until his strikingly handsome friend cut in. He said I was really pretty and clinked beers with me. When I replied in Chinese, he slapped his hand on his face – “Wah! I didn’t know you’d understand me!” He then asked for my number, said he wanted to treat me to a meal. That was the next day. It was Xinjiang food and I tried to spin interesting conversation. He texted on his phone, dropped food onto my plate, and said, “Talk less, eat more.”

I told myself to be culturally sensitive, that I was no longer the person I had been in the US, that I was in a new country and needed to play by my hosts’ rules. I told myself all the principles that had been drilled into us growing up, about respecting other people and their cultures. Chalking it up to an “interesting learning experience,” I shut up and ate. I shut up and ate again the next weekend, and the weekend after that.

After a few weeks, I looked up Xiao Li’s band on Baidu. Apparently they had won China’s version of American Idol and were a go-to choice for the Party at official events. They were young and hip, but not rebellious. From the government’s perspective, I inferred, they were handy as a bridge to the younger generation.

Our dates stopped being exclusive. I soon became his arm candy for important gatherings – a dinner with the Sichuan province party secretary, a banquet with his band’s investors, several unexplained feasts in a private club in Wangfujing. At these, many beer bottles were clinked and baijiu cups downed. My Chinese got better, but people were increasingly skittish about talking to me. I was Xiao Li’s girlfriend, not someone to be befriended for fear of offending him, nor to be glanced at for too long or spoken with too deeply.

But there was one who was not afraid to talk to me: Xiao Li’s older brother by fifteen years, Li Ge. He had been the original breakout musician from his clan back in the ’90s, and his national popularity had paved the way for his kid brother’s band to find fame several years later. With ability and charisma, Li Ge was the true star, but while he had talent, he lacked youth, and thus was resigned to the mantle of godfather.

At banquets, Li Ge would pull out his six-string and spin beauty in his native dialect. After the applause and the bottoms-ups, he would always find me – usually sitting alone but conspicuous in the corner.

“How are the studies going?”

“All right,” I’d say. “Slowly improving.”

“Certainly improving!” He’d clink bottles with me. “Do you sing?”

“Not well.”

“You should sing Chinese songs to learn Chinese. Xiao Li can help you learn.”

Teaching did not seem to be a forte of Xiao Li’s, but I smiled anyway. Li Ge said I was beautiful when I smiled and that’s reason enough for me to be happy. He was forty and overweight but he was genuine. He looked at me in a way that none of the others dared to – straight in the eye, warmth emanating from dark sockets and soft wrinkles. I have to admit: I wished then that I could have been on his arm instead.

But it was Xiao Li with whom I was having sex. When people ask me about it, I think what they’re most interested in is the initiation: who made the first move?

The answer isn’t straightforward. I came from a hookup culture rooted in partying, with a clear progression of: meet at school –> meet at party –> exchange glances –> drink more –> get close –> drink more –> hookup –> maybe repeat… and if it works out over time, introduce to parents. I couldn’t count on that with Xiao Li, so I had to improvise.

It was two weeks into our “talk less, eat more” dates that he took me to his band’s danwei, a sort of dance studio with a piano instead of mats. He asked what songs I knew and I said 童话 – “Children’s Story” – a Chinese song we learned in college because of its easy lyrics and theme of innocent love. He told me to sit next to him while he played. I couldn’t handle the cheesiness, so I kissed him. In an instant, he dropped the lovey-dovey act and tried to rip off my clothes. I jumped up, forgiving him with an awkward laugh. Then his band manager walked in. Xiao Li introduced me as his “English teacher.” His manager nodded in approval. I inwardly forgave him for this as well, and excused myself for a walk.

Later that day, as he was hailing a cab for me, he said he’d see me Saturday. “There’s a banquet I want to take you to. Then after that, you can come home and sleep with me. Does that sound good?”

I was stepping into the cab, tongue-tied. “All right,” I said.

His first reaction to seeing me with my clothes off was an admiring exclamation of, “So white!” I forgave him for this, too, doing so with an awkward laugh that meant, “Well of course!” I understood then why some local girls strive for that pale complexion. He asked if he could take a picture. I said no. He had surely seen naked white women in porn before, but I had a feeling I was his first real one, and in that moment I recognized myself as the embodiment of a fantasy – his – an objectified ideal come alive in his Beijing hutong apartment. Actually, I enjoyed it. Post-orgasm, I was the first to laugh. Then he laughed. Then we were laughing together.

But you can only have that kind of sex for so long. The better I got to know him, the less I wanted to know. He was not an intellectual by any stretch, yet he talked to me like I was a child. If I made a joke or sarcastic comment, it was always lost in translation. One such time he tapped me on the head and said, “My dear, you must use this when you talk.”

I was trying to straddle the line between going along for the ride and going for something of meaning. But this was a quintessentially uncommunicative cross-cultural relationship, which allows little room for either option. I realized that dating Xiao Li meant I would have to cede my autonomy to him. Attraction is based on power – when it’s in the right kind of balance, it’s electric. When mutual needs are not fulfilled, it’s over.

On the last night of August, there was a party on a rooftop bar in Gulou. Xiao Li was drunk and flirting with a beautiful Chinese girl in a slanting, willowy white dress. Li Ge saw me, conspicuous in the corner as usual, and handed me a beer.

“What’s wrong?”

I paused, then decided to fuck pretenses. “I’m not happy.”

“How can you not be happy? You’re too young and beautiful to be sad! I’m old, only I can be unhappy!” We clinked beers. He took a deep swig. “Now, my little brother is a handsome guy, but he’s not the smartest. But he really likes you.”

I clinked beers again and smiled so that he’d go away. Li Ge, with his honest eyes, was the more desirable of the brothers, even at his age and size. I knew this and I knew that I had lost myself.

Back at his place, Xiao Li was too drunk for sex that night. Relieved, I dove into the words I’d been chewing on for weeks: “I think we should break up.”

“We’re not breaking up,” he replied. I said, “But I want to.” He said, “But I don’t.” And then he spoke in English for the first and last time, saying, “I love you!” and I knew without a trace of doubt that he didn’t love me and that I would never love him. He rolled away from me and said he was too tired for this, sorry he couldn’t have sex, we would do it in the morning. That’s when I planned my escape, certain that I’d not let him have me again.

And then, that iron door.

It was too heavy, the lock was complicated – it was the first of many doors in China that would defeat me – and after twenty minutes of quiet twiddling, I slinked back to Xiao Li’s room. I wanted to tell him I wanted to leave, but I was gripped by a frightening possibility: what if he forbade it? What if I had to… struggle?

“Where were you?” he asked.

“Outside,” I answered. I took off my clothes and willed myself into enjoying it. I had to prove that I was never going to be owned, not me with my American college degree, not by him, a simpleminded shadow of a more capable elder brother.

We shared a cab out of the hutong that day, him to his danwei, me back to school. I told him I was moving – that I been accepted into a Master’s program in another city and was going to leave immediately. It was true that I had been accepted, but the move wasn’t imminent. Still, I told him it would be a two-year program and it didn’t make sense for us to keep dating.

“When you come back to Beijing, we’ll get married,” he said without looking up from his texting.

I laughed awkwardly. I could only wonder what the driver was thinking.

“Sound good?”

“I’ll think about it.”

“We’ll marry.”

When we pulled over at his danwei, he dropped a 50-kuai note on my lap. “For the cab fare,” he said.

Several years have passed and I’ve managed to avoid running into Xiao Li and his gang. I’ve long since reestablished myself as an expat. The dance floors from my study-abroad semester are still bumping, and the laowai gigs still abound. I keep a steady 9-to-6 job and hit up Sanlitun on the weekends and browse the English-language China blogs in my free time. I live in a hutong courtyard home with an easy-to-open door. Almost all of my friends are foreigners.

But now, when I suggest swimming in a public pool, my friends tell me I’m insane. When deciding where to grab dinner, we compare which shops use less oil. When I think about seeing a show at J—, the cover charge deters me. When I open my computer in the morning, it’s my newsfeed that informs me of Beijing’s unfortunate air.

At these times, I grow nostalgic for that first summer here, for my wide-eyed curiosity and softhearted leniency. Recently, I got on Youku and looked up Li Ge’s music videos. I found a song about love and loss. It was trite, but his voice was good. “Love is perhaps just a tragedy,” he sings. “We lose ourselves in it.”

I never loved Xiao Li. But there was love that summer, in the humidity and haze and the clinking bottles and the warmth of so many glances. I am the expat I am now because of those things. Their lingering presence keeps me rooted here – an entitled laowai, sure, but a Beijinger all the same.

Some names in this account have been changed to protect individuals involved. Hannah Lincoln took the pictures that appear above. Her previous piece for BJC was, “Religion, Rape, Murder: When The Expat Experience In China Was Interesting.”

The 11th Adult Care Expo*, i.e. Shanghai Sexpo, ended on Sunday, and if you weren’t there for any of the three-day extravaganza of awkward gazing/touching/posing and shameless mobile recording inside the Shanghai International Exhibition Center (INTEX), we’ll fill you in: there were a lot of sex toys and aphrodisiacs, a lot of phalluses, a few AV stars but way more scantily clad girls — sometimes dancing, sometimes doing something… we don’t know — and a lot of QPR codes, often on skin, because sexpos have gone digital, baby. Judging by the pictures, it was all very goofy, like PG porn or sanitized sex approved by marketers for 13-year-olds. Nonetheless, what follows may not necessarily be suitable for viewing in the workplace.

Via Youth.cn (these pics also appear on NetEase, but Youth.cn seems more suitable), here’s a look at some of the expo’s more awkward moments:

Look at this next one – an editor blurred out this mannequin’s left nipple!

But this is totally okay, right? (From the same website’s slideshow.)

There were also live dancers, like this gal below. We’ll leave you with a couple of these videos. Try to watch them with a sober understanding that sex has been thoroughly commodified in this setup. Maybe you should watch this in the office: you’ll not find better tips on making money anywhere else.

* The full name of the event is technically the China International Adult Toys and Reproductive Health Exhibition. Here’s a logo:

Ran E. of the the Chinese food appreciation blog FOODragon witnessed something interesting recently when he typed the Chinese character “eat” into Baidu: the autofill / auto-complete function — which incidentally also likes to reinforce the stereotype that Americans love sluts — suggested this as the top hit: “吃了精子会怎么样” - Eating sperm can lead to what?

The last suggestion was, “Eating what is good for sperm?”

As Ran, ever the academic, observes:

From an academic point of you this is quite interesting because in Chinese there are strict rules about when use the verb ‘eat’ and when to use the verb ‘drink’. The verb eat is only used for actual solid food which requires chewing. Even soup and Porridge are not eaten but drunk in Chinese.Therefore it could be argued that the verb ‘to drink’ is more appropriate linguistically speaking. Then again, in Chinese babies “eat breast milk” (吃奶) so maybe the rules are different for liquids with high levels of vitality…

I’ve taken it a step further and actually pressed ENTER on “吃了精子会怎么样.” Let’s just say the results were unsurprisingly NSFW-ish.

The top two hits were the anodyne 120ask.com and Chinese Wikipedia (zhidao.baidu.com), but some of the answers were, um, less than helpful. “There’s no cure,” one person wrote.

And then, somehow, I was led to this – my translation below — and I realized: people are earnestly asking what happens when you eat sperm because they want to know if there’s pregnancy risk. Of course! Lacking sex-ed in most places, where else but the Internet are people going to turn for such answers?

What happens if you eat sperm? Lots of people want to know if eating sperm can cause pregnancy, if it’ll make one pretty…

Wait a minute. Make one pretty?

Let’s learn together what sperm is made of, find out what will happen if you eat sperm.

The website is baike.PCBaby.com.cn. I just don’t know anymore.

UPDATE, 5:17 pm: Our friend Kaiser sends along this reading suggestion: Natural Harvest: A collection of semen-based recipes.

The bawdy and good folk of That’s Shanghai have published the three winning entries from its erotic fiction competition held earlier this month at Glamour Bar as part of the Capital M Literary Festival. (You might remember Jacob Dreyer’s review of the event for this site, which was heavy on Bai Ling.) As That’s editor Ned Kelly so delicately summarizes:

Sam Gaskin, champ in 2012, got all Tang Dynasty sex texty with us, Eric Fung Chen did it in a hospital, Jamie Fullerton imagined scenes of intimacy happening at the Camel Pub Quiz, Aymeric Fraise had a thing for a tattooed lady and Shanghai soul man Carlton J. Smith talked about anal sex in threesome done in relationships (and got away with it, but only because he is Carlton J. Smith…)

…Best Story was a shared between Danielle LeClerc, with a tale about Sapphic love, and Anthony Tao, with a tale so revolting you’ll just have to read it for yourselves.

But the big winner of the night – the huge throbbing winner of the night – was Meredith Yarbrough, whose Invasion of the Ferns was a tale of intergalactic automaton love coming a cropper in Shanghai, earning her Best Performance and People’s Choice, and two vibrators (and probably Best Story had we not felt the need to share the honors out a bit).

Danielle LeClerc’s “Pink,” Meredith Yarbrough’s “Invasion of the Ferns,” and my story, “The Biwalkers,” are all on the That’s website, so go on over there for a read. The Biwalkers is also republished below with permission. “So revolting,” says Ned Kelly.

~~

The Biwalkers

We are simple, we are persistent, and we are like you in every way except one. We are spirits unafraid to transgress, to truly love those who are different. We are biwalkers. Or, as the world calls us, beasts. I prefer that designation. Save the linguistic flounce and ribbed crepe for Valentine’s Day poems. We’ve been driven from the traveling circuses of the American south, the ranches of Mexico, and the petting zoos of northern Europe. We’ve offended Russian mobsters, been banned from temples, and beaten up by Southeast Asian sex workers. There is only one place left on this earth that would harbor our kind, one enclave where we can safely express our malformed rapacity and harpy lust: Shanghai.

Through one of my zoo connections, I was introduced to a woman known as Madame S. I arrived as instructed, at a back entrance precisely ninety minutes after closing, along with Hector Madagew, a friend I met on a SHEXpat online forum. As we waited, he nervously flicked cigarettes, half-smoked, onto the pavement, where he crushed them to embers with the tip of his boot. Eventually a rotund figure, like the shadow of a blimp, appeared out of the leafy shades.

“I’ve been expecting you,” she cooed in Chinese. I imagined her breath smelled like tar. A wicked smile like a knife wound spanned her pudgy face.

I grunted and walked ahead to indicate we were not men for words.

I felt her ghastly, vile smile directed at me. She caught up and overtook us. We were guided off the main path, through bushes. She snapped on a flashlight, likely for our benefit – I suspect she’d made this trip before. Finally, she put out an arm to motion us to slow. We had reached the edge of the pen.

We lowered ourselves down the embankment, grabbing at the bamboo to keep steady. I don’t know how, but that whale of a woman deftly, soundlessly joined us. Her light directed my vision toward a back wall, where I saw them, closer than in dreams: the brown of their eyes rippling with the water of desire, their snouts wet enough to sniff our warmness, soft like a gentle uncoiling, hard like a spring-loaded release into the pleasurable and unspeakable. One of them was turned to a side, its rump like a sumptuous moon ten thousand miles from here to nowhere. I imagine they must have shivered, sensing the eruption of our pheromones as we approached.

“This one is Cao Cao,” Madame introduced. “And that one over there is Sao Sao.”

“The little one is mine,” I said.

“Now, now, you have all night.”

“Which I’ll need.”

“Goodness, you biwalkers are as they say. Your lust is as imponderable as the jungle.”

Was she teasing, that bloated beast?

“Would you prefer the boy panda or the girl?” she asked.

I grimaced.

“Do you prefer one hole or…”

I hastily waved off her question. “No need for such vulgarity.”

Hector shifted where he stood.

“You have arranged the payment?”

“Yes, yes of course.”

“Good,” Madame said, again contorting her face. Normal people turn the sides of their lips upwards to smile, but hers went the other way. “Give me a smoke, now that we’re friends.” I elbowed Hector and motioned at his cigarettes, and he obliged. She took two. “We will go inside, where your suits are, and you will give me the money. Cao Cao and Sao Sao will then be let off their chains, per instruction. And then” – this next part she said in English – “the hunt begin.”

~

I know all about you: you who retain, in your immaculate marrow and God- or death-fearing bosom, traces of humanity. But imagine, for a moment, your heart not as an 11-ounce pump of life and blood but a caged gerbil you both loathe and adore. Watch it run. Watch it pursue its reflection in the glass, for otherwise shame seizes it and drowns it with unqualified love.

Ah, the hunt.

“Put out that cigarette, Mad,” I snapped. He did so. We hardly breathed as we tiptoed in our panda suits.

A rustling made us freeze.

Hector switched on his torch: the shaft of light landed square on his mark’s face. “Ah-ha!” he shouted, his voice like a pistol shot. He rushed off, and I knew better than to follow. The next five minutes were a mad scramble. I was assaulted by scents of displaced twigs, damp leaves, and the sound of scurrying feet. Just as quickly as it started, it stopped, again with Hector’s voice: “I got you now, ha ha!” There was a sharp, ursine cry, some punching or pounding, a bout of heavy breathing, a squeal, and then Hector again – “OW! ha ha!” – before he and his prey – lord help that panda – found their rhythm.

My ardor gained expression then and there, a fire blossoming into conflagration. I aimed my light in all directions with no discretion. It passed like a flash, or a delirium: a muzzle, a mat of black and white. I imagined moist marbles for eyes filling with resplendence upon my entrance. I took four quick paces, dropped my light, and leapt.

The panda resisted only perfunctorily, oddly silent. I dragged it to the base of a massive tree on an incline and bent it across the bough. “You like it dirty, I hope,” I crooned. And then I began.

What has become of me? What transformation? Is it possible to become what you so desperately seek? I am a panda, I said. I am a panda. I am a panda. I am a panda. Three minutes or so later, we were done. I rolled off that mound of fur and flesh and exhaled into the crisp night’s cover.

“That was a lot of fun.”

I froze.

I listened with my eyes, hoping my other senses could undo the mistake of my ears.

The silence persisted. Blood flushed into my cheeks. The gerbil in my chest ached for breath.

“But,” I began. I did not know what I meant to say. I heard the click of a lighter. Once. Twice.

“You’re…”

Squinting, I rubbernecked, my nose twitching, and in that antic dark which concealed everything, even desire, one pall of moonlight swept across like revelation over a hairless surface: copper, peach, lustrous like saliva, or the calk of plastic bamboo, her dermis glabrous and sickly like that of a… biwalker. The smell of tar infested my nostrils before I could see: cigarette smoke; an aslant, grotesque grin.

The lovely judges (from left to right) Bai Ling, Monica Liau, and Linda Jaivin (photo by Anthony Tao)

It’s not just every night that I walk into Glamour Bar and hear someone talking about figs mixing with the juices from their crotch. Well, all right, pretty much any time that I went I could hear that, but it’s too expensive for my nightly apertif. Still, an old friend was in town and wanted to meet there, and after all, it was only five minutes from my office, so I found myself at 3 on the Bund listening to all of the erotic fictions that Shanghai — and even one from Beijing – has to offer.

Boredly gazing through the crowd, next to That’s editor and emcee Ned Kelly, who was wearing a suit made out of red tablecloths, and judges Linda Jaivin and Monica Liau, I noticed a familiar face: actress Bai Ling, a pioneer of Asian erotic journalism — in fact, the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Playboy [NSFW]. Some friends of mine who do fashion are obsessed with this person, partly because she has a face from outer space. My evening immediately gained coherence: I would take a goofy photo with Bai Ling and send it to my friends in New York. The stories continued… about pandas, about whores with hearts of gold who nonetheless give corrupt cops AIDS, marking this on the mirror with lipstick (so basically, a page from the copy of “101 urban legends” from the middle school library, plus Hengshan Road in the 90s), and most vividly, about aliens who had sex with strangers in M1NT. As the competition heated up, Danielle Leclerc and Anthony Tao got physical, playing rock-paper-scissors to resolve a tie for the rights to a vibrator. The writer of the story about aliens, Meredith, rightly won the performance and audience prizes (both vibrators); although I would have liked to hear the famous shark tank in M1NT get a shout out.

Things wrapped up, my dream of Bai Ling giving me a photo op came true… J. and I headed to the burlesque club where she’d danced for years, as I began, ever the romantic dreamer, to send Weixin messages to Bai Ling. And on to another year of erotic fictions…

Jacob Dreyer’s first book, The Nocturnal Wanderer, is upcoming from Eros Press. You can reach him at jacobaugustusdreyer@gmail.com.

The author with Bai Ling

That’s editor Ned Kelly in his very red suit

Adapted with permission from Hug China.

Four female students from Wuhan University in Hubei province demonstrated on February 14 to call for respect for sex workers in China.

One student held up a pair of underpants as a metaphor for the Big Underpants building in Beijing, i.e. the headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV), which has been pejoratively called “CCAV” (AV being adult video) by Chinese netizens.

The four students held pictures of blurred female faces to their heads, which they called “mosaics.” The two placards in the above picture read:

Sex jobs are also jobs; sex workers also have dignity.

CCAV needs big underpants; sex workers need mosaics.

The performance art has won the praise of Chinese netizens. Here are the two top comments from NetEase:

Sex workers are by far cleaner and more dignified than CCAV.

What Big Underpants cover up is much dirtier.

Guangdong police arrested 67 people and shut down 12 entertainment venues in a massive raid late Sunday night after CCTV revealed several hotels in Dongguan — China’s “sex capital” — were involved in illegal sex trade.

Both the CCTV program and the nationwide crackdown on prostitution have inspired heated debate, with some human rights advocates calling for the legalization of the world’s oldest occupation in China.

This isn’t the first crackdown on prostitution in China, or the media’s first time reporting about it. But what was particularly galling was that sex workers were exposed without reservation, and some were even shown naked in footage that aired across the country.

Wuhan students perform action art to protest… (Hug China) (Image via Icpress)

According to a recent study by the communications consultancy MSL Group, around half of Chinese women would rather abstain from sex than give up their mobile devices.

Shanghai Daily reports:

The report was the result of interviews with 3,600 women between the ages of 18 and 64 in China, Brazil, Britain and the United States.

The connection between Chinese women and their devices was the strongest, with 45 percent willing to give up sex for a month to keep their smartphones. Only 39 percent of respondents in the US would do the same, compared with 38 percent in the UK and 28 percent in Brazil.

Among the reports other conclusions, it found that 71% of Chinese respondents said that they use social media to keep up with news compared to a global 46% percent.

An un-ironic 44% used social media to find love.

For comparison, a Samsung study from 2009 found “nearly a third of Denver–area residents would sooner give up sex for a year that go without a cell phone for the same amount of time.” Ditto for Boston.

Smartphones? Better than sex! (Shanghai Daily) (Image via)