Xiao Guo’s arrival at Outside Island as a virgin was not unusual. Teens often sneak their first dates, first handholding, and first kisses while in high school, but they wait for their college years for their first intimate experiences. The major American movie trope of losing your virginity on prom night does not exist for most twenty-year-olds in China because almost everyone remains a virgin, and no one has a prom.
Generation gaps come into focus around issues of sex. According to the statistics, China’s post-80s generation generally had their first sexual encounter at twenty-two. China’s post-90s generation was more likely to lose their virginity at twenty. With sexual outlooks changing in China, I met more twenty-eight-year-old virgins than twenty-two-year-old ones. I know because, over the course of a friendship, they’ve told me. It was nothing to be embarrassed about.
The average age of first sexual encounter continues to decrease. People born after 1995 are, according to the statistics and to many parents’ horror, having their first sexual encounter when they’re seventeen, just one year older than Little Fish.
* * *
“Check this out,” Zizi, the guitar-playing hostel resident, told me. What sounded like Japanese emerged from his Xiaomi phone speaker with a whine. I knew it could be only one of two things: animé or porn.
Porn is illegal in China, although it proliferates. People, often Uighur women carrying bundled-up babies to deflect suspicion, according to the stories, used to sell porn on DVDs in alleyways and under bridges. Peculiarly, most of my Chinese friends describe how porn used to be largely the domain of China’s ethnic Muslims, alongside offers of dried fruit, lamb kebabs, and currency exchange. “Want discs?” the women would whisper to passersby. When foreign content was more tightly controlled, pornography was one of the handful of windows into the outside world.
Now China watches more online porn than any other country in the world, representing perhaps as much as a third of all Internet porn traffic.6 The industries surrounding sex are generally on the rise in China too. In 2015, thirty million Chinese bought sex toys online instead of walking into one of China’s twenty thousand sex shops. China makes 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, and sales of sex products are up 50 percent at the online retailer Taobao.7
Because making porn has always been illegal in China, Zizi and his friends had never really seen two Chinese people having sex unless they filmed themselves. Part of what had made Da Peng’s comedic soft-core sex scene in the car so unsettling was that he and the other character were speaking Mandarin while having sex on screen. If someone in China wanted to be able to identify with someone on screen, to see someone having sex who looked like them, they watched Japanese porn. Most young Chinese guys and some women grew up watching on a computer—and now on phone screens—as two (or three or four or four and a squid … Japanese porn runs the gamut) graphically get down to business.
The video on his phone Zizi meant to show the group was, in fact, porn. Everyone groaned, but Zizi persisted. “No, no, no. Check this out. It is not what you expect.”
The couple on screen was in what appeared to be in a fitting room. They were engaging in what appeared to be sex. Ye, the hostel owner, cast an accusing look at Zizi. It appeared to be exactly what everyone expected.
After a few seconds of blurry amateur production, the group watching the video froze.
In crystal clear Beijing-standard Mandarin, a background voice said on the video, “Dear customers, welcome to the Uniqlo store at Sanlitun. There are no fitting rooms on the first floor. Please proceed to the second and third floor if you need to try clothes on.”
In the living room of Outside Island, everyone watching the video on Zizi’s cell phone stared at each other for a few moments, processing what they’d just heard. “Call me ‘husband,’” the guy in the video mumbled, followed by a few obscured, furtive thrusts. “Say we’ll always be together.”
The group couldn’t contain their laughter.
“Oh. My. God.”
“No way.”
“This can’t be real!”
But it was. The “Uniqlo Incident,” as it came to be known all over China, lit up the Chinese web like a pinball machine. Everyone saw it. The sex itself was nothing special—a young couple getting it on in a Uniqlo changing room and filming it with a phone. For me, it immediately brought to mind Old Zhang and the description given in China in the Mosaic: “Gentleness, modesty, courteousness, restraint, and magnanimousness,” though perhaps it was light on the restraint.
The video went viral almost instantly and thus ensued the whack-a-mole experience that is censorship on the Chinese web, especially now that WeChat is built around private conversations compared to WeiBo’s public blogging platform. The government takes something down; a copy pops up somewhere else. The government deletes the copy, and another one boings to the surface. Smack, boing, smack, boing—until one party or the other runs out of energy. Plus, now that social media is primarily mobile, Chinese netizens know to just save it to their phone.
The Uniqlo sex tape and the Internet commotion that followed felt like a collective sigh of relief and sparked a fairly open national conversation about sex. That the video clearly featured two Chinese people made it relatable. That it seemed consensual, good-natured, and a touch adventurous made it easy to talk about. Sex scandals in China too often consist of little more than leaked pictures of government officials posing with prostitutes. This was just two people having a consensual romp, what Chinese netizens call a 野战, yězhàn, an “operation in the field.” It gave people a reason to talk about sex, and the nation’s twentysomethings ran with it.
Sex education in China is notoriously nonexistent, and families don’t discuss sex. “Chinese culture is particularly ill-suited to talk about sex in public, let alone to children,” Li Yinhe told me. For the post-90s generation, most sex-education classes were held once or twice in high school. They were essentially a course in basic anatomy. Then, at the end of the lesson, the boys would be asked to leave and the girls would be told about periods and pregnancy. Most would have already gone through puberty. A few women had told me they knew people who had had abortions. What I found most shocking was that at least half the people I talked to over the years never had any sex education in school. Not one class. And parents avoided the subject. Even the sexologist Li Yinhe said that she had not yet had a conversation about safe sex with her son, and he was then sixteen.
Chinese sex on screen had crossed the line, the Communist Party decided. The Uniqlo sexcapaders were found, arrested, fined, and released. The Da Peng Mini Cooper episode eventually was censored by being stripped from all its host sites.
* * *
Mei sat with her hand on Xiao Guo’s knee. The two scanned through Baidu’s NuoMi app, which translates to Sticky Rice, for local deals at good Sichuanese restaurants. The app works like Groupon and lists hundreds of signature dishes at discounted prices that restaurants offer to attract customers. You can pay online within the app, walk in, have your phone scanned, and eat, all without breaking out your wallet. Mei was scouting for tomorrow night’s meal, as tonight we’d all be cooking a big communal dinner.
The two women from Shanghai and a few guys from Fujian were busy in the kitchen. Others were milling about, playing cards or watching movies. Someone had put on How I Met Your Mother, the sometimes banned, sometimes not, American TV show that had become a major hit in China, often supplanting the old favorite Friends, as English-language background noise for studying.
Zizi was busy working his phone to secure a date. A week earlier, he had met a young woman on Tantan, a Chinese dating app akin to Tinder. They’d been talking around the clock, and he had invited her over for the dinner that night. She had agreed. “One more for dinner,” Zizi called into the kitchen.
One of the women from Shanghai poked her head out of the kitchen and yelled, “Dating not for the sake of marriage is hooliganism!” She got a few laughs. Zizi went into his room to put on a button-dow
n shirt.
Tantan and other Chinese dating apps had met some resistance from the government. Conversations that included words the Party deemed inappropriate would elicit a warning popup on your screen that said such content is not allowed. Phrases like “one-night stand,” “hookup buddy,” and even the euphemism for erotic massage, which translates literally as “big precious sword,” all produce warning messages. Even onomatopoeia for sex, 啪啪啪, pa pa pa, runs afoul of the app’s basic filter.
In all fairness to the censors, the purpose of their work was not only to curb casual arousal. The filter was partly designed to interfere with sex workers’ new favorite tools for meeting johns. A quick sign-on to Tantan, or especially Momo, another Chinese dating app, made clear that some people were using it for the business of giving others pleasure. Prostitution was illegal but policed only lightly. Kaiser Kuo, cohost of the Sinica podcast, once remarked that the government at one time kept prostitution legal in part to facilitate the transfer of wealth from the rich to the poor in China, and to help close the wealth gap. While discussing prostitution in China, a Party official told me, “Sexual dissatisfaction is a large cause of trouble. If people are working so hard and not having some form of leisure, some form of pleasure, they will be upset.” He then pointed out that almost all recent shootings in the United States had been perpetrated by lonely young men. Within twenty years China is expected to have thirty million more men than women of marriageable age.8 As Richard Burger points out on his appearance on the Sinica podcast, “They [government officials] believe that a sexually satisfied population is a more productive population, less likely to complain.”9
Outside Island and the sixty or so other hostels I stayed at all over the country—I stayed at Chinese-oriented hostels when I traveled in Asia outside China—brought into relief one major difference between Chinese and Western travelers: few random hookups occur in Chinese hostels. In Western hostels sex is pervasive. While traveling throughout Southeast Asia and Europe, I’ve seen many Western hostelers with their hearts set on a travel romance. It has been my bad luck to have been present while these hookups occurred loudly in the next room or, during one really bad night in Thailand, in the bunk bed above me. China is simply not that casual, at least not yet.
Less machismo surrounds sexual culture in China than in the West. Rarely have I met the Chinese equivalent of the fraternity brother who maintains a list of the women he’s bedded. Instead, guys more often talk about sex with a certain amount of respectful awe—mixed with a persistent curiosity and a bit of innocence.
The exception, my friends remind me, seems to be Chinese study-abroad students. Mao’s concerns about Western spiritual pollution seemed to play out in the sexual sphere: young people returning to China from an American college frequently seem to have had a crash course in fraternity parties and casual sex. This, of course, is anecdotal, but it is a persistent theme.
As China modernizes, people often ask me whether that means China is becoming Westernized and, if so, to what degree. Most of what young Chinese men know about American sexual mores they learned from two types of movies, Hollywood films and porn. However little English a young Chinese person spoke, they could almost always say, “Put your hands up!” and “Oh, baby, ya, baby, come on, baby.”
Westerners also have a bad reputation for a sort of sexual colonialism—they visit China and other places in Asia just to have sex. As a guest on a Chinese-language podcast, I once was asked by the college-age female host, “Is it true what they say, that foreigners leave their own country with no girlfriend and come to China and get two?”
* * *
After our big communal meal, we all went up to the roof with guitars and beers to watch the sunset. Xiao Guo sat with his arm around Mei and both sipped on Tsingtao, smiling widely and singing along as Zizi played the guitar. His Tantan date, a twenty-year-old from the nearby art school, fit in easily with the group. The light receded behind Chengdu’s skyscrapers. Filtered through the fog, smog, and haze, the gray buildings were awash in a pastel yellow, then orange, red, and finally a fuzzy nighttime blue.
Xiao Guo and Mei retired early. The few guys broke into toothy grins, sharing looks and nodding their approval. Zizi picked up a guitar and began strumming Miserable Faith’s most famous love song, an acoustic ode to the singer’s wife. Zizi’s date looked on with fawning eyes. The four other young women were now red in the face, either from the beers or the now overt sexuality, and soon slipped downstairs to their bunks. That night all the guys stayed up late smoking cigarettes and talking longingly about girlfriends they’d had or hoped to have one day.
Zizi’s Tantan date spent the night. I ended up sleeping on one of the balsa-wood bunk beds.
Xiao Guo reported the next morning that his night with Mei had been a success, although his inexperience had made him nervous. That was all. He seemed remarkably calm for a twenty-two-year-old who had just had sex for the first time. He did not communicate his experience as a conquest. He didn’t brag. He did say that he hoped things would work out with Mei and that they would return so we could all have a reunion at Outside Island the next year.
I asked if they would get married.
“One step at a time,” he replied.
6
A Leftover Woman
How Marriage Expectations and Government Priorities Bind
A month before Chinese New Year, I returned home to my apartment in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province, to find that my roommate, Wendy, still had not moved out—although I had asked her to do so before I left for Chengdu. She lived in the smaller bedroom of our first-floor apartment in a 1990s-style cement complex; Wendy’s room had once belonged to my landlord’s daughter, who went by the English name of Smile. Smile and her father, Uncle Peng, as he had me call him, had gotten into a fight with Wendy while I was gone. Uncle Peng would not say what the disagreement was about. Smile later told me her parents were not comfortable with the idea that an unmarried man and an unmarried woman were sharing an apartment. They thought Wendy was trying to take advantage of me, “a foreigner who didn’t know better.” They wanted her gone. But Wendy—who worked as an English tutor for those preparing for the gāokǎo—appeared even more firmly dug in than she had been before I left. In my absence, her belongings had crept steadily beyond the confines of her room, edging toward my door across the narrow hall. Calligraphy ink filled one of our two rice bowls, notebooks lay scattered on the square dining room table, and a wet pile of jackets sat on one of our three dining room stools. The apartment was, without exaggeration, freezing cold. Residences in cities south of the Yangtze River usually do not have central heating. The temperatures in Suzhou do dip below freezing, but rain rarely turned to snow because of the high humidity. Wendy kept the windows open, and the tile walls of an already dank room had become clammy to the touch.
Although I was disappointed that Wendy hadn’t honored our agreement to part ways as roommates, I can’t say I was surprised. With Chinese New Year approaching, my roommate had bigger problems than my trifling request to vacate the premises: Wendy had to see her parents.
She was thirty-one and unmarried, which put her in one of the most heavily criticized and often lamented social classes in China: she was a 剩女, or shèng nǚ, “leftover woman.”
For Wendy, going home meant facing the firing squad of questions she’d been subjected to during every Spring Festival for the last seven years: “Do you have any children?” No. “Are you married?” No. “Ah, how old are you?” There followed the disappointed silence reserved for one who has reneged on a tacit cultural agreement sealed at birth.
Wendy’s name was, of course, not Wendy. She had chosen the name herself. Wendy was born to a family in rural Jiangsu, China, in 1983, seven years after the Cultural Revolution and four years after China’s reform and opening-up policies switched on the gas burners under China’s economy. Wendy’s parents had been grappling with their second language, standard Mandarin. They had never called their daughter W
endy. Still, she introduced herself as Wendy to almost everyone in Suzhou, Chinese and foreign alike.
China’s rapid modernization since the mid-1980s has left the Chinese people in simultaneous possession of the old world and the new, the third world and the first, tea-drinking traditionalism and tech-wielding modernism. The country’s palpable achievements are easy to track: the four-hour commute to Shanghai from Suzhou when she was younger is now twenty-one minutes on the high-speed railway; young people are fluent in Mandarin, the national language, whereas older generations struggle with Mandarin as a second language and so continue to be far more regional in their mind-set. At the same time remnants of old China persist in the attitudes, postures, and traditions of the nation: a woman should be married by age twenty-seven.
Wendy grew up in a rapidly modernizing country and therefore is a product of the twenty-first century—she speaks conversational English and decent French, Hugh Grant is her ideal man, and she lived with an American friend who happened to be male, an indecent arrangement by most parents’ standards. She also held on to some traditional anachronisms—she refused modern medicine, wouldn’t use indoor space heaters during winter (the warm air dries out the throat and the skin), and went on and on about how, were she to have a baby, she wouldn’t shower for at least a month because her body would be too weak and she’d get sick, probably die, and leave her baby defenseless.*
These examples are simple: this is old and that is new. But distinguishing which was which often was more difficult.
Such was the case when Wendy first described herself as a leftover woman. Was this modern slang or ancient idiom? Wendy repeated the word in Chinese, 剩女, shèng nǚ, and wrote it down for me in one of the notebooks she carried at all times. Nǚ means “woman” and is a radical taught on the first day of an introductory course in Chinese character writing. Shèng was tougher. I’d seen it before next to 菜, cài, the word for a dish of food, and together they literally mean the food leftover after a meal. But shèng could easily mean more than one thing, so I was stuck.
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