Young China

by Zak Dychtwald

  On screen Da Peng groaned, tensed up, and … to the scream of his girlfriend, vomited all over the backseat of the car. “Sorry, I get carsick,” he stammered. The joke earned only scattered chuckles.

  Xiao Guo and Mei were on their first romantic getaway as a couple. They were from Xi’an, an ancient capital of China at the eastern end of the old Silk Road. They dutifully asked if I’d been there and seen the Terracotta Army. The other hostelers decided that Xiao Guo and Mei, both of whom are tall and slight, had 夫妻相, fū fù xiàng, an auspicious husband-and-wife quality in the way they looked together. They fit in easily with the young crowd and best with one another.

  Without much preamble, when Mei had gone to their room to organize her things, Xiao Guo told me this was the first time he and Mei would share a room. By then I’d gotten used to people confiding in me about sex. I was the first and only foreigner to stay at Outside Island, and often the first foreigner anyone had ever spoken with outside of a classroom. Because I was a Westerner, they assumed I’d been around the block. Sex was not a taboo so much as an unknown, something that they’d been told was bad for them when they were kids, only to learn later in life that all the adults had been doing it the whole time. Sex on TV and in movies was becoming more commonplace. Though sex was seldom depicted as explicitly as Da Peng’s romp in the Mini Cooper, sex was implied, suggested, and a regular part of dialogue in screenplays and TV shows, to say nothing of the endless amounts of sexual conversation and content on the Internet. The proliferation of sex in Chinese media seemed natural. Sex sells, and the world wants to sell to China.

  I asked if this was also his first time sharing a room with any girlfriend. “Mei is also my first-ever girlfriend,” he said.

  The couple had talked about it, Xiao Guo told me. That night they would try sex.

  * * *

  China is in the midst of a sexual revolution. Lest your mind wander to orgies and wild sex romps, the sexologist Li Yinhe marvelously clarified what is happening: “China is in the midst of an extremely quiet sexual revolution.”

  Li Yinhe was talking about sex in China at a time when an extramarital sexual relationship still was punishable by death. She is the Chinese Dr. Ruth, and one of the most groundbreaking popular academics alive in China today. My friends did not think I was cool until I posted a picture with the famous sexologist. “Dude … do you know who that is?!”

  “Most Chinese are still not promiscuous,” Li Yinhe told me, as she sipped chrysanthemum tea in a Beijing teahouse. “They still emphasize monogamy. But people now are getting comfortable with the idea of sex for sex’s sake.”

  China’s quiet sexual revolution is not about sleeping with everyone; it is about sleeping with someone and doing it now instead of later. In 1989, the year of Tiananmen Square, only 15 percent of Chinese engaged in premarital sex. By 2009 that figure had jumped to 70 percent. Several professors and the real experts, those young people who put together large singles dating events, assured me that the number was closer to 85 percent in cities. This radical shift has indeed occurred under the radar. The mild Li Yinhe said with a nonchalant shrug, “It’s true. The majority of people in China are now having sex for fun.”

  Outside Island Hostel had three private rooms and three rooms with six bunk beds each. Along with a small handful of others, I was a long-term resident, spending six months with a nightly rotating cast of characters. I was the first and last foreigner to stay there, as it eventually shut down. Ye, the boss, normally let me sleep in one of the single rooms, but if three couples arrived, I had to sleep in a balsawood bunk. So my night’s sleep became linked to these handholding, mild-mannered couples, and I became particularly sensitive to their comings and goings.

  The hostel was on the top floor of a thirty-four-floor apartment building in a fourteen-building complex that took up a whole city block. About five thousand people lived within that single square block. The hostel, one of thousands of youth hostels scattered across the country, was an outpost for college students and recent graduates.

  It also became a getaway for couples. Chinese college dorms sleep three to six people per room. Recent college grads often lived with their parents or shared cramped apartments. Space is a luxury in China, and traveling gives young people time to breathe. Traveling also often gave young couples their first opportunity to be alone behind closed doors.

  Looking back, it’s hard to believe the number of young couples like Xiao Guo and Mei from all over the country who came and went while I was living at Outside Island. They’d arrive from nearby Mianyang and Deyang, college towns with tens of thousands of students each. Others would come from Beijing or farther north. Some came all the way from Taiwan.

  After being around so many Chinese couples, I started to notice real differences in the way they and young Western couples hold space. Chinese couples exude softer, calmer, more secure attitudes than typical Western couples. Couples like Xiao Guo and Mei, for example, were often touchy, usually in one or another phase of physical contact. When he returned to the couch after fishing for something in their room, Xiao Guo would instinctively reach for Mei’s lower back or waist, not to pull her closer but to confirm his presence. She would lean toward him ever so slightly, and they’d be together. It was almost like two gears gliding past each other until—click—they’d lock in place.

  Their physical relationship reminded me more of the cues between a husband and wife than young lovers, a different type of subdued passion, an air of mutual reliance. In college each lived in a single-sex dorm with three roommates. At the hostel couples would often leave the group before everyone else, go back to their room, and we wouldn’t see them until the next morning. Then there they’d be, leaning in close on the red couch, poring over their phones as they plotted their route for the day.

  Xiao Guo told me he and Mei had met in college. They both studied engineering. He was a year older, and a friend within their major had introduced them. He got her WeChat account and the two had begun texting, timidly at first, then all the time. They met once to study together. When they had studied for a long time, they realized they were both hungry, so they went for a meal together. Then they started studying together every day. Two months later, here they were at Outside Island, and Xiao Guo couldn’t stop beaming.

  Before dinner that night, I asked Mei about the first time she met Xiao Guo. “It was cute how nervous he was with me that first time we went to study. We studied for five hours before he suggested we go get some food. You could hear my stomach growling from across the room, and he still didn’t pick up the cues,” she said, smiling as she recalled their first sort-of date.

  “Were you nervous at all?” I asked.

  “Not as nervous as Xiao Guo,” she said. “I’ve been in a relationship before.” The two students from Shanghai raised their eyebrows.

  Virginity used to be a prerequisite for marriage in China. Authors like Yu Hua write about static sexual ideals in a rapidly changing China. In his novel Brothers, for instance, a dozen judges of a beauty contest expect the women to parade in bikinis and insist that they sleep with the judges if they want to win the cash prize. The person who makes a killing at the beauty contest is the man selling fake hymens. All the women buy several of them as they get in bed with all the judges. And yet the judges espouse their search for someone with true, traditional virtue.

  For women, virginity was equated with virtue. Traditional Confucian society regarded women more as reproductive accoutrements than sexual beings. “Orgasm equality” was far outside Confucius’s Spring and Summer Annals. One of the simplest and most commonly referenced distillations of traditional thoughts on sleeping around comes from the most famous Confucian during the Qing Dynasty, Wang Yongbin (1792–1869). In Fireside Chats he wrote, “Of a thousand virtues, filial piety is foremost. Of a thousand vices, licentiousness is the most grave.”1 As a feminist podcast host who calls herself Debbie describes the Confucian outlook, “It was like ancient slut-shaming. All women we
re expected to be virgins, or they were unmarriageable.” Dating was out of the question.

  Modern China, especially under Mao, was not much better. While young Americans danced naked and made love in the mud at the Woodstock festival in 1969, China often treated sex outside wedlock as a crime against the Chinese Communist Party. Casual dating did not exist five decades ago in China. As Richard Burger, author of Behind the Red Door, explained in an interview, “[Chairman Mao] considered any discussion of sex outside the home to be a form of Western spiritual pollution and he insisted on total faithfulness and monogamy.”2

  Premarital sex was not only criminalized but also heavily moralized. For Sexuality and Love of Chinese Women, published in 1996, Li Yinhe interviewed many women about how they experienced sex and sexuality during and after the Cultural Revolution. At the time the book was considered taboo. One woman told her, “We got our marriage license in September in 1976. Our wedding was in October. It was only after both were completed that I dared to have any contact [with my husband].” A middle-aged single woman explained, “Before I was thirty-seven years old, I was always very traditional. I thought before marriage, you couldn’t have any of this type of activity. I was afraid if I wasn’t a virgin when I get married, no man would ever treasure me.”3

  Today those expectations for women in cities are all but nonexistent. Research suggests that women—smart women, to be exact—are actually ruling the dating world. National statistics published in 2015 show that female doctoral students have more relationships than any other group the researchers interviewed, averaging nearly seven romances per woman.4 (However, the researchers did not specify the nature of these romances.)

  In the past I had met guys who billed themselves as traditional and said they were seeking a woman who was “pure” (they actually used that word). I asked Xiao Guo if he ever gave any consideration to Mei’s former boyfriend. Xiao Guo just shrugged. “Why would I care? It is the twenty-first century. I think she’s beautiful. She’s smart and she’s interesting. We like the same music and we share similar ideas about our futures. I feel like I can rely on her. What more could I ask for?”

  * * *

  Bringing about a sexual revolution requires both a will and a way, and, oddly enough, it was the Chinese government that unwittingly provided the tools for China’s sexual awakening. The one-child policy and the introduction of widespread access to birth control effectively cleaved sex from reproduction. The government made contraception readily available to every Chinese citizen. The one-child policy made it possible, for the first time in Chinese history, for Chinese couples to have sex without worrying about pregnancy. China had the kindling for revolution, but, after years of telling citizens that sex for fun was a criminal act, it lacked the spark.

  China wasn’t always so stodgy, according to my friend’s father, Old Zhang. I met Old Zhang when I visited his home as a guest of his son, Little Zhang. The elder Zhang enjoyed sweater vests and watching the NBA. One day, while Little Zhang slept off lunch, Old Zhang and I sat on the couch watching TV together. The house did not have heating. The temperature outside was below freezing. Old Zhang and I sat with our feet under a table whose central pillar doubled as a space heater. We began to watch a documentary entitled China Within the Mosaic.

  “We have discovered stone sex toys here in China dating back as far as thirty-five hundred years ago,” the elderly TV host began. Old Zhang sat straight up on the couch. A blocky stone penis glided across the screen. Old Zhang began fumbling for the remote lodged between couch cushions. The host continued, then began to compare histories of sexuality in all cultures. Remote finally in hand, Old Zhang hesitated, chewing on his lower lip as if weighing his options. His curiosity, it seemed, had been piqued. “You foreigners are pretty open about these things. It is the twenty-first century, right?” he asked me. We settled in.

  Ancient Rome, the host explained, had an extremely indulgent sexual culture. The Japanese were rougher, wilder, probably in reaction to their stiflingly formal public lives. Old Zhang nodded. Ancient India mythologized sex, coupling intercourse with religion.

  “And here in China, our ancestors’ sexual culture emphasized gentleness, modesty, courteousness, restraint, and magnanimousness,” the host asserted. Old Zhang nodded again, approvingly.

  Old Zhang went on to lecture me about sex and Confucius, the most intellectual birds-and-bees conversation I’ve ever had. “Gentleness, modesty, courteousness, restraint, and magnanimousness” are ideal qualities expressed not just for sex but for life in the Spring and Autumn Annals, the court chronicles of the Zhou Dynasty (722–481 BC). Zigong, a disciple of Confucius, used the phrase to describe the way his teacher would respond to everyone he met. During sexual intercourse Chinese are meant to embody those qualities that Confucius displayed during his life, Old Zhang and China in the Mosaic seemed to be saying.

  Chinese have never had a dominant religion, much less one that espouses the concept of original sin. Rather than being dictated by religion, attitudes about sexuality changed from dynasty to dynasty.

  Both Taoism and Buddhism, specifically Vajrayana, better known as Tantric Buddhism, had found homes in China more than a thousand years ago. Taoism, which is both a religion and a philosophy, emphasizes the nurturing of the body and regards sex as an indispensable means through which to achieve maximum health and longevity. Men are seen as full of the yang essence, representing light and heat. Women have the yin essence, representing coolness and dark. Sex, in Taoism, is known as a “merging of energies,” a way to pursue the sacred balance of the opposites in life.

  Confucianism repositioned sex as a pragmatic practice for creating a family. Burger writes, “Confucius believed that sex, like eating, was a necessary human function, the main purpose of which was to produce children.”5 Sex is not linked with shame. It requires a man and a woman because that is the only combination that results in a child. It requires monogamy because a traditional family unit, the core of a Confucian society, is necessary to raise a child.

  * * *

  At Outside Island, every morning the building’s elevators would be packed with elementary, middle, and high school students in their uniforms on their way to school. One student in particular, a sixteen-year-old sophomore at a local high school, always took the time to practice a few lines of English if she ran into me on the elevator. She had introduced herself as Little Fish, the literal translation of her Chinese name.

  “Hello!” she’d say. “The weather is very sunny today!” she’d say. Or, “Have you eaten yet?”

  One day I shared an elevator with Little Fish and her mother. They were fighting.

  “Your teacher told us you have a boyfriend! Who said you can have a boyfriend? Do you want to ruin your chances at college? Dating not for the sake of marriage is hooliganism!” her mother said, then ended the discussion with, “No boyfriends till you test!” Little Fish stood with her head down while the elevator moved. Behind Little Fish was an advertisement for a local plastic surgery practice. It featured a woman in lingerie, her enhanced chest spilling out over the bra. BIGGER … IT’S JUST NOT THE SAME, the ad declared. Little Fish’s mom looked past her daughter, as if seeing the ad for the first time, looked at me, shook her head, and then, arriving at their floor, stormed off. Little Fish plodded sullenly in her wake.

  In declaring “dating not for the sake of marriage is hooliganism,” Little Fish’s mother undoubtedly thought she was quoting Mao—it’s one of the most repeated aphorisms the chairman never said. It’s a trope of growing up, a line that almost everyone’s teachers, parents, grandparents, or aunts and uncles have used to bring a teen up short at some point; because it expresses sentiments with which Mao would have agreed, it is often misattributed to him—and it is so common that it is now a universal punch line for young people. Dating, unless it is expressly for testing marriage potential, is moral hooliganism.

  The next morning when I saw Little Fish in the elevator, I said hello. She only nodded and k
ept her eyes on the floor. “Have you eaten yet?” I asked. She nodded again. It was another week before she asked me about the weather.

  A high school relationship, or dating, is often known by another name in China: gāokǎo killer. It is said to destroy a young student’s ability to focus on nothing but preparing to take the college entrance exam. Parents and relatives often try to forbid relationships completely, with teachers sometimes getting in on the act.

  They’re fighting a losing battle. Recent statistics from Peking University claim that average young Chinese born after 1995 have their first romance at age twelve. Little Fish was already late to the dating game.

  Attitudes about sex are just one of many aspects of Chinese culture that has undergone significant change in recent decades. From the thirty-fourth floor of Outside Island, we could track the progress of a hulking metallic apartment complex that would house ten thousand people being erected a block away. The contractors had broken ground only three months earlier. Now the building’s concrete skeleton was complete, and cranes were working around the clock. Between the construction site and Outside Island was a plot of farmland, curving rows of gray cabbage and a few shacks with tarps over the roofs. That is just how China is. Some things change fast, other things change slowly, and all share the same space. Little Fish’s mother believed young people shouldn’t date; Little Fish believed that romance was normal. Little Fish’s mother had not grown up looking at breast enhancement ads in her apartment complex because these apartment complexes had not existed.