citation needed

It was quiet when I finally made it to the path lab, and the tests I was getting meant the phlebotomist could guess I'd been overseas, and ask where I had been. China, I said, and explained that I had been working and living there, and then I waited for the question that is always asked, not only from strangers but from people who I feel should know better.

"Do they have free-thinkers, then?"

 I'm still working on my elevator pitch, but it goes like this:

 Of course they do. I have my issues with the system (I always say this, lest they disregard my opinion as biased or something, though I don't know what would be regarded as biased) but there are writers and artists and scientists and discoveries and awesome things happening every day.


People think that mainland Chinese are still living under the yoke of Mao's wooden farming equipment, wearing their Mao collars and starving, completely unfamiliar with Western media and consumed by their communism. Sure I have a list of issues with China that's longer than I care to actually write down, but there's social media and access to foreign websites and this phlebotomist so clearly thinks that the media we get in Australia tells us everything, that they're not keeping anything out or picking and choosing what stories are spun. There is reporting of a quality higher than Today Tonight in Beijing, I want to say (I rarely do).

The Chinese education system doesn't encourage a deep analysis of media (or referencing and verification, as I can elaborate on at length, with a lot of flailing and waving around of reports I've edited half a dozen times and ask me about the google citation one time), but many people I know work on the assumption that while they're not necessarily being told lies, there's a possibility they're not being told the entire truth. I have a friend who has never lived anywhere other than China, but his first holiday overseas he googled 'Tiananmen Incident' and read and watched everything he could find; and after all of that he went home again.

When I told the story about Kuai (his name is not Kuai, but let us call him that), the phlebotomist paused. "Oh, they can go on holiday?" she asked. Imagine me restraining from throwing my hands up in the air. Going on trips overseas is very encouraged. Domestic tourism is massive but international tourism is growing and growing and growing and if I wanted to change my career to tourism the first thing I would write on any cover letter would be that I speak Mandarin, that I lived in China, that I have connections in China's tourism industry.

Representations of mainland China in English-language media are all dire, post Cultural Revolution gritty stuff. Despite a wealth of Chinese fantasy, science fiction, romance, and comedy being written, the stuff that's translated from Chinese into English and held up as authentic Chinese experiences are those that look at the desolation of the Opening Up of China, or life during the Cultural Revolution. Sometimes there are stories about the materialism of modern China and how it's ruining China (and the world). And let us not forget for a moment that the critiques and summaries of life in China that are given weight are also the ones written by foreigners.

This article at NPR suggests that censorship in China is less about specific issues and more about collective action. Certainly it speaks to my experience - news about the Occupy Movement, for example, was easy to access up until the narrative started to project being about organising against one's own government.

I have a sort of recoil now, a distaste when Westerners ask why Chinese people don't get active about [insert issue here]. Well, I try to say, why don't we? Active in Australia is so specific, characterised as protests and rallies about things we can see, but what brought this up was the pollution in the air in Beijing, and how you just get used to it. She asked, why don't they get active, get something happening about the pollution? I explained that China is developing fast, and there's this idea that in order to catch up with Western, developed countries, China must be like those countries in terms of manufacturing and development, and that the preference, for the most part, was for keeping that manufacturing in-house (this blog post has been at least partially debunked but has some links about this stuff). At least China is taking responsibility for its pollution, I said. Where do you think ours goes, when we import all of our manufactured goods?

Mind blown.

I'm currently reading Gaysia, by Mr Benjamin Law, and I have plans for an extensive review when I'm finished but what stood out for me in the section on China was the concept of self-censorship, and the idea that some censorship was needed, self or otherwise, otherwise there'd be anarchy.

The level of censorship is frustrating and sucks and is all about the national government's obsession with stability, or at least it claims to be. There are ways around it, like hosting websites overseas, getting info from overseas, pointed self-censorship or my very favourite, memes using coded words. The meme in this style that you might of heard of outside of China is the grass-mud horse, both a way of expressing a vulgarity and a political comment. Commentary about China is so obsessed with free speech but often people don't really know what that means (particularly as Australians! This article on Anita Heiss' Black enough has some really gross comments exemplifying that - yes, free speech has been curtailed when we can't 'say anything that could be deemed offensive'! Yes, that's right, miscellaneous Australian).

I self-censor. I self-censor for different reasons. I self-censored before I considered moving to China. I avoided using certain T words while I was living in China. I self-censor now.

Living in China has changed me in ways I didn't expect. I don't know if I would have had all of these attitudes or thoughts before I lived there, but I certainly have them now. When you know a thing, when you have lived a thing, and it is a thing that works, then it is a thing that works. And it frustrated me before I went, and while I lived there, and definitely now, that people can't see the connections between the things they were supposed to complain about, because China, and the things in their own daily lives.

Sometimes it surprises me that I have to explain some of these things; sometimes, it doesn't surprise me at all.

personal positives: experiencing my mistakes

Maybe my answer will be different in two months' time, after I've moved home to Australia and settled back in to Melbourne. But right now, here in Beijing, far away from my home and my loved ones and loving (and hating) my life here and this city, the thing I do to make a difference is share.

Not share my opinions, though I'm perfectly capable of that. I share my experiences. I've made so many mistakes and I've done so many things right; I've tried so many new things and so many old things and some have been good and some have been bad and some have been anywhere in between. I've moved countries and cities and navigated new problems. 

I feel shame when I do something less than perfect, whether that thing be mix up jiao and mao (they are, in fact, the same thing), or misunderstand someone when they speak, or turn the wrong way down a street and have to come back again. What if someone notices? I feel horrible and terrible and wrong, which is almost certainly a marker of my anxiety. 

Whenever someone asks, I always try to say yes. This works for me and against me, at times. Sometimes I feel so guilty when it comes time to say no, because I do genuinely want to do as much as I can. Sometimes I think I want to share these experiences so badly because I wish someone else could help me from making any mistake ever. Sometimes I forget that part of learning and living and experiencing is making mistakes and mixing up mao and jiao and walking the wrong way down a street and learning to be okay with having those experiences yourself.

It pleases me to make a difference in this way, to help others avoid feeling this way and to maybe help others have awesome experiences the way I feel I have been able to. I feel like this is my personal positive, but maybe it isn't always a personal positive?

three names

I have had three legal names, and the name I am happiest with, as it turns out, is the one I gave myself. I know it shouldn’t surprise me, but it does, because coincidentally that name was also the one I already had.

The hardest thing about going through the process of changing my name is what a hassle it is, every time. There are questions that I don’t want to answer (questions like: why are you changing your name?). It costs a lot of money, especially the bit where I need to get a new passport issued, and I have to send off to N.S.W. to get my birth certificate reissued again. It’s inconvenient. The transition period especially is a pain, and due to being overseas I’m still in that period, where my chosen name is where I can put it but that other name is all over everything that my passport touches. One of the first things I’m doing when I get back to Australia is changing my passport, again.

But this is the most comfortable I’ve ever been in a name. I didn’t realise how uncomfortable I was with my own name until I changed it and changed it again, and suddenly it fit me. And every moment of annoyance that came before has been totally worth it, because it’s my name and even thinking about my name makes me feel good, even though it’s been my name my whole life and it didn’t fit until I shifted where it sat.

I use my legal name now a lot more than I ever used to. Before this name, I defaulted far more frequently to Steph or Stephie Penguin, and I'd never put my family name on things, not any of the ones that came before, not for privacy reasons, but because it didn't fit. I seriously considered making Penguin my legal name, but whilst that, too, is part of the name that makes my identity, I don't think I could sign it on a credit card with a straight face.

There are discussions that we have, about names, whether we want to or not. After picking this name, I've chosen not to have any of these discussions. But there is a propriety there, from strangers and from not-strangers, a request for information and explanation that I don't want to give, because I picked this name for my own reasons and unlike the previous name change, there were no expectations, there was no assumption that I would do it or not do it. And I don't want to explain it.

I made my Chinese name my family name, and picked myself a brand new middle name. It means I don't share my family name with people who are my family. It means I don’t have a Chinese name anymore, not officially (though my business cards say ‘绿叶’, I kind of borrowed it from my Apore and that’s good enough for me), and sometimes I get people who are like ‘Oh...I thought you’d be Chinese...,’ or ‘...but that’s an individual name, not a family name,’ but it’s exactly right for me. And everyone else can just deal.

queering beijing

When I was preparing to come to China, at training (provided by the Australian government) it was made clear that coming out as queer in China was probably not a thing that I should do.

At work I say 'my partner' and the singular 'they' in English; in Mandarin 她 (she) is pronounced the same as 他 (he), so I just don't correct people. Someone (a native English speaker) heard my slip up one time in English, saying 'she'; they took me aside later, and told me not to come out at work, because 'they' (my Chinese colleagues) just wouldn't understand, and maybe I should consider actively using 'he' in English. I feel crappy enough as it is hiding my queerness for the first time in a long time, there's no way I'm using the pronoun he to refer to my wonderful beautiful girlfriend.

Incidentally, the verb for coming out is the same: 出柜, or 'to go out of the closet'.

Despite these warnings I've received from Westerners living or who have lived in China, however, what I see doesn't necessarily match up with what I've been told. There's a local lesbian centre (the only reason I haven't visited it is because it's a bit of a distance from where I live), and a number of queer bars, and regular events with queer authors and movie makers, and I know these links are to expat sites but it's not only expats who are involved in these things. And then last week Anthony Wong came out, and it was all good!

I came out to my Chinese tutor (she's about the same age as me), and she didn't seem to care.

My warnings came from older expats, being given directly to me, a young decadent Westerner working a cushy office job in an international organisation, and I wonder if there's a reason for that. I recognise things would be different if I worked in a different kind of situation, or if I wasn't from Australia, and didn't have this assumed right to privacy (or not privacy), as I see it, that we have in Australia (another post for another time, the difference between privacy in China and privacy in Australia).

I haven't quite been brave enough to come out at work yet, and I mean, I'm not going to take out an announcement or anything but last week a colleague asked me if I had a boyfriend back home and I said no, which is technically true, and left it at that.

queer australian teevee

I’m not watching much Australian television at the moment, because I’m in China and sadly ABC iview isn’t available outside of Australia, but I have been making an effort to watch two shows: Outland and The Newtown Girls. Coincidentally, these are both humourous shows about Australian Queers.

Outland is a six-part series that just finished on ABC1. It's a comedy about a gay science fiction club in Melbourne. I’ve been watching it via iTunes (AUD2.99 an episode; AUD16 for the lot).

The Newtown Girls is a ten-part webseries, a dramedy about the dating lols that accompany "returning to the scene." I didn't realise dressing up as Xena counted as a part of returning to the scene but it's all good. I’ve been watching it on the website (no cost).

Both of these shows are not only Australian and set in queer communities, but my favourite characters on both are queer ladies of colour. This makes me so happy.

Rae is an Indigenous sci-fi fan in a wheel chair. She wears awesome clothes and is a little insecure about her body but she’s not afraid of calling bullshit when it hits her. She’s played by Christine Anu, who is a super awesome TSI with a twitter.

Alex is a young Asian woman living it up in Newtown. She’s addicted to coffee (looks like an espresso) and she’s cheerful and forthright and she wears awesome clothes. She’s played by Renee Lim, who is an Asian actress from Perth who is a doctor in her spare time.

How could I not love them? I love them.

It took me a long time to become comfortable with being a queer Australian woman of an Asian background, and sometimes it’s still something I have to fight with other people about (more on that later), but it is my identity and I love it. And I’m so happy that there are two queer Australian women of a not-white ethnicity on my television (well, on my laptop), who speak like me and are portrayed by actresses I already liked and also one of whom is a science fiction fan like meeeee.

queer chinese things!

Zooming in on LGBT issues, about a program in Beijing designed to train lesbian, trans, bi and gay people in creating documentaries about their queer lives.

An article kind of about fear, homophobia and expectations in Chinese culture: Wives of gay men: not an easy job in China.

About 80 per cent of homosexuals in China get married to avoid social pressure. Their wives, who number about 24 million, are not having it easy, but they have started organising themselves.

A talk in London: Activist and film maker talks on gay life in modern China

Gay activist and film maker Xiaogang Wei will be giving a talk in London on how queer activism is changing the face of modern China.

[books] the secret history of the mongol queens, jack weatherford

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens is an attempt to fill in some of the gaps that can be found in Mongolian history. It’s a comprehensive look at the role of Mongolian Queens in the ruling and establishment of Mongolia and how they advanced its borders over the centuries, starting from the early years of Genghis Khan through seven hundred years of history. It’s a compelling illustration, looking at not only Mongolian history but also touching on the role of historians in erasing those histories of which they don’t approve (here, ladies in ruling and making decisions and being awesome).

I really enjoyed learning about Genghis Khan’s wives and daughters, and the critical role they played in the division and governing of the Mongol Empire. The book gave a lot of insight into Mongolian history centred around Genghis Khan, and not knowing a lot about Mongol history it was a nice introduction for me. And I like lady-centric history!

It’s a shame then that in all the reviews I read of The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, not a one mentioned that the writer was patronising and condescending. Ordinarily when I make these claims I like to have page numbers, but I was reading on my iphone so alas page numbers are not to be. However the author did make a number of sweeping unsubstantiated claims such as the lack of a son was ‘one of the cruelest blows of her life’ (I didn’t note which queen this was in reference to), and the entire epilogue was just about how shocked and surprised he was that Mongolian people knew something about their history that he didn’t, and how he constantly dismissed tales of Mongolian Queens (and Manduhai) as folk tales. Definitely an epilogue that makes me respect him as an historian and researcher. He comments that there were a number of contradictions in the Secret History whilst rarely specifying what they were. The Secret History, incidentally, is an historical Mongolian document, and maybe it was just my epub version but at no point did the author mention what the Secret History was, so there were lots of confusing references to things in the Secret History.

The book also veers from history, and things actually verifiable, to actual made-up storytelling, or at the very least, poetic license, with little distinction between what is what. And rather than this elaboration making what could be a dry historical document interesting and compelling, it just makes it longer and boring.

I’m glad this book exists, I just wish it was written by someone else.

five out of ten penguins