My Queer Chinese Comrades, in My Mother Tongue

Tongzhi (同志), the all-encompassing term for queer people in China, literally means comrade. After 1949, as China’s idyllic vision of a classless Communist society spread, it became a friendly term you could use to address anyone, a gender-neutral form of brother or sister. A gay Hong Kong activist in the ’90s liked the gender-neutrality and collectivist nature of the term, rebranding its meaning for an LGBTQ film festival in Hong Kong.

*

The summer I spend in China I take on the role of translator. There are ten of us, five English-speaking foreigners and five students at Nanjing University, and I am the only one with any semblance of fluency in both languages. They are fooled by my non-American accent and my Asian-looking face, however—a lifetime of speaking Chinese to only my parents has left me with a vocabulary that barely extends beyond I am hungry and what time is it and where is the bathroom, but the fact that I am a humorless toddler in this tongue somehow escapes them.

*

The harmony of a term like tongzhi reappropriated for queer identity brings to mind Walt Whitman, great gay grandfather of American poetry, who spoke lovingly of comrades:

“I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies;

I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks;

By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.”

*

One of the students from Nanjing is six years older than me, getting her PhD in anthropology. We share adjacent beds in our seven-person dorm room and spend the nights sitting face-to-face and cross-legged, asking each other peculiar questions. Do Americans really put milk in their soup, she asks me, skeptical. And are there a lot of gay people? Yes, and I guess so, I say, though probably not more than there are here.

*

Today tongzhi is seldom used in a political context, if ever: The Beijing LGBT center is called Beijing Comrade Center; 同志村, or comrade village, translates to gayborhood; a quick Baidu search for 同志 returns a number of highly pornographic images and sites, including a film called Eating Out with two naked white men almost kissing on its cover, like a gay Nicholas Sparks. So yeah, everyone knows what comrade really means—everyone except the president of China, apparently. Every few years in China there’s a parade to celebrate the might of the growing military, where president Xi Jinping rides in an open car, waving and yelling, Tongzhimen! Tongzhimen! at the soldiers, stony-faced. Comrade-men, comrade-men. CCTV, the predominant television network in China, streams it nationwide, dutifully and without comment. Somewhere in Beijing, every few years, an entire gay bar cracks up.

*

As a sham translator, I have a shameful moment in a meeting with the school officials. The principal delivers a long spiel about the school’s standards of education, how they hope we can boost the students’ English scores, how much it means that we have come all this way to help their community, and I am so overwhelmed by this monologue I lose track of what he’s saying. Everyone turns to me, waiting. I say in English, meekly, we hope you do well. Yifeng, the one who studies business in France and whose knowledge of language far outshines mine, bursts out laughing. After this, I develop an obsession with having the right words.

*

Gangkou, our township, has a fluid, unpretentious beauty. A river where the elderly wash their grandchildren ebbs through the town, dragonflies flitting about, a constant wet quiet pulsating in the air. We sleep on wooden cots covered with bamboo mats and wash our clothes by hand. Nights dense with lightning and suggestion. Wake to pouring rain. It smells of sweat. A familiar heartbeat, nearby—unzipping a mosquito net, pen whispering into a journal—it feels furtive, bare, enormous.

*

One night, gripped with premature nostalgia for our time here, the ten of us decide to play Never Have I Ever. Everyone piles onto three cots in the girls’ room, hair wet. The anthropologist starts us off: Never have I ever had sex!

*

Gangkou itself means harbor. To harbor, to shelter. To adopt, to inhabit, to need. To need. Here everyone speaks to me in my mother tongue, assumes that I am one of them, and though I struggle with it daily I dare to think—maybe—I could be one of their own. On a regular basis I forget the words for routine, memory, custom, the speech of formality, the terms of endearment, but I think, with time, there could be a place for me here.

*

On China’s equivalent of Reddit, on the subforum for queer women, I find a post that says, in Chinese slang: Lonely in Shenzhen . . . any dominant femmes nearby? Half the responses provide simply a phone number; the other half offer their Myers-Briggs types and astrological signs, advising the original poster to consider compatibility. O! I think, delighted. My kin!

*

In one of my post-coming out conversations with my dad, he asked, sincerely, if I had ever considered that a long-term relationship with a woman might not be sustainable. Why not, I said. Well, there are certain things women just can’t do that you might . . . need, he said. I thought he was going to say like sticking a prick in ya so you can have babies! but instead, he said, with surprising astuteness, that it’s harder for women to make as much money as men do. (And, he added, to do things like change a tire, move furniture, carry a child on your shoulders. To which I responded, weakly, I’m . . . strong!) But I know this mentality stems not from a belief that women are inherently inferior to men, but from the deep-seated cultural instruction that the structure of marriage, of all relationships, of the power dynamics baked into the language itself, must follow a pattern, an order, a hierarchy.

*

The word for father, here. The word for nephew, the word for sister-in-law, the word for your mother’s third-oldest brother. The words for lover, a pair of lovebirds, a husband’s husband, a wife’s wife. The words you’ve forgotten, in a language you can only recall in blurry shapes, where everything has a structure, and a place, and a name.

*

Despite the rigor of hierarchical relationships in China, the history of egalitarian institutions for same-sex love dates back centuries. One model, qi xiongdi, was a form of ritualized intimacy between men that basically amounted to marriage. Under this custom of “adoptive brotherhood,” two men would sacrifice a carp, a rooster, and a duck, smear each other’s mouths with the blood of their animal sacrifices, and swear eternal loyalty to each other before moving in together as partners.

*

Women had their own customs, too: Arrangements of group lesbian cohabitation existed in nineteenth century Canton. Called zishu nu, literally self-combing women, groups of women would live together as sworn sisters, ceremoniously vowing not to marry. An anthology of historiographical essays from the Qing period describes a group of prostitutes who take the name “Mirror-Polishing Gang”—mirror-polishing means scissoring—who live together and have a lot of sex.

*

The anthropologist is twenty-five and has never been in a relationship. She tells me she dated a guy she had no interest in for two months in high school, and that his English name was Wilfred. She makes fun of the name Wilfred. I ask her once if she thinks she’s ever felt intimate with a woman, and she says, women have more tender souls, aren’t all female relationships like that, in a way?

*

It would be fallacious to claim that these groups of sister-wives, cohabiting lesbians, whatever you want to call them, were common in premodern China. Society did not tolerate such relationships, especially under Confucian constraints of the male-female hierarchy, and women who loved women generally had few options. A number of accounts from nineteenth-century China indicate stories of women who chose religious asceticism or suicide over the confines of heterosexual marriage.

*

In the winter, I go back to Shanghai with my family. I take the train down to Nanjing by myself, where the anthropologist meets me at the station. We walk twelve miles that day, weaving all over the city, and try to summon the closeness that was once possible between a body like hers, a body like mine. Later, she shows me her prep books for the GRE and TOEFL, the English-language exam she needs to take to apply to graduate programs in the US. She asks if I can help her with some of the vocabulary, but I can’t even recognize most of the words she’s trying to memorize—words like pellucid, sere, gaucherie. I tell her this is stupid, that no one ever uses these words in actual colloquial English, but mostly I am ashamed of lacking so many words in both of the languages I am supposed to know.

*

In 1976, sex educator Shere Hite compiled a study of female sexuality based on survey responses from women. One research subject wrote that “sex with a woman includes: touching, kissing, smiling, looking serious, embracing, talking, digital intercourse, caressing, looking, cunnilingus, undressing, remembering later, making sounds, sometimes gently biting, sometimes crying, and breathing and sighing together.”

*

Her dorm room is freezing, and that night we fall asleep on her twin bed under the weight of four blankets, my nose to her shoulder, our socked feet barely spooning.

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