Beijing Comrades

by Scott E. Myers

  I had no doubt that Lin Ping—an ordinary girl from an ordinary family—would make a suitable wife. Though born poor, she was the kind of woman who strove endlessly to reach greater and greater successes in life. I needed her. For my life and for my career.

  And what about Lan Yu? I asked myself. What would I do with him? Let things stay as they are? Retain him as my “kept” boy? Would he even go along with that?

  After hours of agonizing over these questions, another option crossed my mind: just call it quits and break up with him. But no matter how many times I imagined this scenario, I didn’t think I could do it.

  I’ve always believed there are no coincidences in life. Even if you don’t understand it at the time, everything happens for a reason. Thus I felt certain it was no coincidence that at the very moment I started to think about marriage, I met Dr. Shi. Dr. Shi was a psychiatrist, a professor at the university where Cai Ming taught, and he had devoted a good part of his career to the study of homosexuality. He was the first expert on the issue I had ever met. Talking with him was the first time I began to gain knowledge on the subject.

  After a lengthy four-hour discussion, Dr. Shi gave me his diagnosis. First, he assured me, I was a completely normal man who just happened to have slight homosexual tendencies. All I needed to do was break things off with Lan Yu and getting married would be no problem at all. The real problem, he said, originated with Lan Yu, who was a true homosexual and who, Dr. Shi suspected, suffered from severe paranoia. With therapy, he reasoned, Lan Yu would be cured of the disorder, thus allowing me to extricate myself from the relationship and move on with my life.

  I burst through the door when I got home that night, beside myself with excitement about sharing my big “scientific discovery” with Lan Yu. Armed with the doctor’s encouragement, I was determined to convince Lan Yu to take aggressive steps to enter into therapy and get cured. It would be a difficult discussion, but I had to do it. For him. For us.

  Neither Lan Yu nor I could cook, so we either ate out or ordered in almost every night. When I told him about the conversation with Dr. Shi, we were in the car coming back from dinner at Beijing’s finest Peking roast-duck restaurant. Lan Yu was in the driver’s seat talking animatedly about school stuff while trying to concentrate on the road ahead. With great zeal he described everything that was going on in his department: the various activities of the student affairs office, the teachers’ office, and the dean’s office; where his classmates would be assigned jobs after graduation, including how many would stay and work in Beijing; his recent job interview at the Institute of Design; etc. On and on I listened to him ramble, feeling impatient and increasingly annoyed. When he was finished, I told him that if they tried to make him leave Beijing after graduation, I would buy him a household registration card for Beijing so that he could stay in the capital. Then I quickly changed the subject before he could keep talking.

  “Listen, Lan Yu,” I began. “Have you ever thought about what we’re going to do in the future?”

  He turned his gaze from the asphalt and looked at me. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t you think it’s abnormal for two men to be together?”

  He returned his eyes to the road and fell silent.

  “Actually,” I continued, “it’s a psychological problem. You see, sometimes people develop a kind of—like, an illusion or misrecognition. People like you—I mean, like us—it’s a kind of . . . like a sexual perversion.” I did my best to parrot the words I had heard Dr. Shi say, but they failed to convey exactly what I meant.

  To my great surprise, Lan Yu was more than prepared to tackle the subject. “Well,” he began, “I’ve read a lot of literature about this, and they don’t think it’s an illness anymore, at least not outside China. It’s just—I mean, I can’t remember exactly what they call it—it’s just, some people like women and some people like men. They’re just two different choices. That’s all.”

  His words astonished me. Never would I have imagined he’d read any materials about such matters. “When did you read this stuff?” I asked.

  “I’ve been following this kind of research ever since you and I met. It’s all foreign literature.”

  “Oh, okay, foreign literature,” I retorted. “So what? They have pornography in foreign countries too, don’t they? They have sexual liberation in foreign countries, don’t they?”

  “It was a science journal, okay? It was legit.”

  “Well, whatever you might have read—listen, Lan Yu, this is a psychological disorder!” Though rapidly losing hope of convincing him, I wasn’t giving up yet.

  “So you’re actually saying you think we have a mental illness?” He forced out a fake and deeply unhappy laugh.

  “Not we! You! At least I still like sex with women. What about you?”

  “I’ve never done it before. You know that.” His voice was defensive.

  “Have you ever even liked a girl? You don’t even like magazines like Playboy!”

  Silence. This was my cue to continue, to cut deeper.

  “What I’m trying to say, Lan Yu, is that you basically see yourself as a girl.”

  “I do not!” he retorted angrily, hands trembling against the steering wheel.

  “Be careful, you’re driving! Listen, if you don’t see yourself as a girl, then why do you like men?”

  He didn’t have a ready answer to that, but a few minutes later he spoke again. “Handong, I don’t . . . what I mean is . . . it’s you that I like.”

  By the time we got home we weren’t speaking to each other. Unwilling to let the subject drop and die, though, I told Lan Yu about Dr. Shi, adding that I wanted him to go into therapy right away to get cured.

  “No!” he said resolutely. “I’m not going!”

  “But Lan Yu—you have to get married one day! It’s important for you!”

  “I’m not getting married!”

  “Not getting married!” I scoffed. “Listen, Lan Yu, you’re twenty now. What happens when you’re thirty, forty? How are you going to establish yourself in a society like this one?” The more I spoke, the more I sounded like a nagging parent, or perhaps like I thought I was Dr. Shi himself.

  “Besides,” I continued, “don’t you want children? Men have a responsibility to continue the family line! You’ll have to face this pressure one day!”

  “What pressure, Handong? Nobody in my family cares about the family line and I don’t care, either! What pressure do I have?” He buried his head in his hands.

  I had forgotten that Lan Yu’s family situation was different from my own. He didn’t have the same obligation to marry and have kids as I did. I needed to work a different angle if I was going to convince him.

  “Didn’t your mom say—” The words were barely out when Lan Yu glared at me with contempt. This, I knew, was the dagger in his Achilles’s heel. “Didn’t she say she wanted you to be an honorable man with an invincible spirit? You have to try, Lan Yu!”

  For the first time since the conversation began, he had nothing to say. This, I knew, was an admission of defeat. It meant he agreed with me. And yet, just as we were about to go to sleep he returned to the subject.

  “Do you want to break up with me, Handong?”

  “My god, Lan Yu!” I said. “Why do you take my good intentions and turn them against me?” I pulled him into my arms and held him close. “Can’t you see I’m trying to help? If you think I want to break up with you, it’s all in your imagination.”

  Lan Yu was in a bad mood in the weeks that followed, but finally agreed to make an appointment with Dr. Shi. He never vocalized it, but I knew he hated me for pushing him into therapy. He began coming home late every night and even slept periodically at his university dorm. On returning home from his first visit to Dr. Shi’s office, he entered the house and proceeded straight upstairs without so much as a greeting.

  “Hey!” I stopped him. “How did it go? What did you guys do?”

  Lan Yu halted halfway
up the stairs and looked at me over the banister. “We talked, okay? He showed me pictures. Tried to make me think about stuff.”

  “What else?”

  “If you’re that interested, why don’t you go see him yourself!” he said angrily before storming up the stairs.

  Life with Lan Yu was difficult during that period. If I wanted sex, he went along with it, but his lack of interest was plain, and most nights he just jerked me off before rolling over and going to sleep. Often, I would wake up in the middle of the night to the restless sound of night talk. I could never make out what he said, though, just inaudible mumbling punctuated by loud, sorrowful moaning.

  “Lan Yu, wake up!” I would say, nudging his shoulder. Each time he awoke he would sit up in bed, trying to calm himself before going back to sleep.

  Things were even worse in the daytime. Tired and sluggish because of poor sleep, he was also rapidly losing weight because he had lost his appetite.

  When I asked him what it felt like to be in treatment, his reply was always the same: “Nothing.” He had become empty, hollow.

  One Monday morning, I went to Dr. Shi’s office to inquire about Lan Yu’s progress. Reclining in his black leather swivel chair, the psychiatrist asked me if he could be frank. I told him he could, and with great calmness and patience he gave me his assessment. Not only, he said, was Lan Yu perverted in his psychosexual orientation, but he also suffered from paranoia and severe depression. Most alarming of all, he added, was that the patient was not cooperating with therapy.

  “The outcome of the first stage of therapy has been less than ideal. My recommendation moving forward is that we try hormonal injections. This will help him blah blah blah,” Dr. Shi went on glibly.

  “Hormonal injections?” I exclaimed when he finally finished what he had to say. The words came out as a shout. “No, we can’t do that.” I couldn’t accept the idea of injecting hormones into someone who was basically healthy, at least physically.

  “Well,” the doctor said, crossing his legs authoritatively, “there are other options. For example, we could have him look at images of nude men—perhaps even a picture of you—while applying a . . . um . . . a sort of stimulus. The idea, of course, would be to create a conditioned reflex of pain that would be associated with the image.”

  “What kind of stimulus?” I asked.

  “Well, we would start with a mild electroshock therapy.”

  “No!” I said resolutely. “Absolutely not!”

  I’ll never know if it was Dr. Shi’s convictions about the dangers posed to society by homosexuality, or simply because he felt guilty about the exorbitant fees he charged me, but he continued to give me other suggestions. One by one, I dismissed them all.

  In the days that followed, I puzzled endlessly over Dr. Shi’s explanations of Lan Yu’s condition. I recalled what the doctor had asked me the first time we met: “Are you in love with him or are you just looking for a little fun?” My reply was full of hems and haws, but I ultimately told him I was only looking for a little fun.

  “Then there’s nothing to worry about!” he said cheerfully. “You’re obviously not a homosexual. You just don’t have a serious outlook on life.”

  On the surface of things, Dr. Shi’s words made sense. But then I kept thinking. By his logic, anytime I messed around with a girl without falling in love, it would just be me “not having a serious outlook on life.” It would only be if I fell in love with a girl that one could say I was truly heterosexual. But I had never been in love with a woman. So what did this make me?

  I also thought about what the doctor said about Lan Yu: that he saw himself as a girl. Without doubt, in some ways Lan Yu’s longing for me was like a woman’s love. He had always been very sensitive, delicate, loving. But he was also a person with deep self-respect, who always stood on his own two feet, who was strong and tenacious and brave. Those are qualities both men and women can have.

  After spending most of the day at the office thinking about Dr. Shi and the therapy, I decided to give Lan Yu a call. I asked him to come to my office so we could go play pool when I got off work. More importantly, I wanted to talk to him about something, though I didn’t mention it on the phone. At first he said he was busy and couldn’t leave the house. Then he said he felt sick and wanted to go to bed early. When these excuses didn’t work, he agreed to come see me.

  “Where are we going?” he asked as he walked into my office and plunked down on the couch.

  “Where do you want to go?” I asked.

  “Wherever.” His voice was languid and he eyed me suspiciously from the couch.

  “Are you going to see Dr. Shi tomorrow?”

  “Day after tomorrow.”

  “Well, don’t go, okay?” I said, mindlessly moving some paperwork around on my desk.

  “Why not?”

  “Just because. Don’t go anymore from now on, either. It’s putting you through too much.”

  A great big smile stretched across Lan Yu’s face. He jumped up from the couch and pounced on me, hugging and kissing me with every ounce of energy he had.

  “Are you out of your mind?” I said with a laugh as I pushed him off of me. “I’m at work!”

  My absurd attempt at curing Lan Yu of his homosexuality died right there in my office. Before long, his original spirit was restored and I finally saw that smile—sweet, radiant, beautiful—that I had come to know and love. He also started eating again. Having weathered this storm, his attachment to me felt even deeper than before. And yet, this was exactly what worried me.

  Seventeen

  One weekend, business called and I had to head south for a trip. First Hong Kong, then Hainan Island. Lin Ping insisted on seeing me off at the airport.

  “You have to be careful in Hong Kong,” she exhorted as we said goodbye at the boarding gate. “Anytime you go outside or drive or do anything, just be really careful!”

  “I’ll be fine,” I assured her with a squeeze of the hand. “I go to Hong Kong all the time!”

  “I know,” she said with an air of resignation. She pulled her hand away from mine and reached into the pocket of her jeans to produce a delicate box made of heavy, decorated paper. “This is jade,” she said solemnly. “My grandma gave it to me—my mom’s mom. She told me an eminent monk had touched it and that it can ward off evil. Here, take it.” Lin Ping placed the box in the palm of my hand.

  I opened the box. Inside sat a rectangular, emerald-green stone with a splash of red in the center. It looked like a baby heart gently throbbing in a sea of green. On the back was engraved a single character: Lin.

  “Thank you,” I said, looking into Lin Ping’s misty eyes then giving her a big hug. I had no idea whether the piece of jade could chase away evil, but I couldn’t deny that I was moved by the gesture.

  In Hong Kong I went to a jeweler in Chungking Mansions and had Lin Ping’s gift put on a gold chain. On a whim, I also had it appraised: the mild-mannered Cantonese jeweler pulled out a magnifying loupe and after just a few moments told me in heavily accented Mandarin that the jade was of the highest quality. A rush of guilt came over me. I hadn’t given a single thing of real value to Lin Ping, and here she was gifting me an exquisite gemstone. Stepping into a bar in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong District, I recalled what Liu Zheng had said about her: she was the kind of woman no man could resist.

  Ten days later, I called Lan Yu to tell him I would be returning to Beijing in a week. The truth was, I was coming back from Hainan that very day. Arriving at the airport, I descended the plane to the tarmac. Looking up at the terminal building in front of me, I saw Lin Ping’s hazy figure hovering in the window above. She waved and smiled. I opened my shirt collar and held up the jade pendant for her to see.

  Inside the building I greeted her with a big hug. She wore a tight white T-shirt with a scandalously low neckline and a pair of jean shorts. All tits and legs. She looked great.

  “Let me take you to dinner!” I said once we were settled in the car. “
I know a great place.”

  “Don’t you ever go anywhere other than restaurants?” she asked in baffled amazement. It was true that at this point in our relationship, nearly all our time together had been spent in hotels and restaurants. We decided to go to Ephemeros.

  Lan Yu and I had long since moved our belongings out of Ephemeros and into Tivoli. Apart from furniture and a couple of kitchen appliances, the old apartment was basically empty. When Lin Ping and I got there, we were only inside for a few moments before I started to feel uneasy. It was strange for me to be with her in that space.

  “All right, you’ve seen it. Let’s go eat!” I said playfully, grabbing her by the hand and pulling her back outside toward the car.

  “Hey, not so fast,” she protested. “Why don’t we just pick up a few things and cook here? We’ll have a nicer meal that way—tastier, too!” When I reluctantly agreed, she gave me a shopping list, and I went downstairs to the little vegetable market on the east side of the residential compound. When I came back, she whipped up two dishes and a soup in thirty minutes flat.

  She couldn’t help but laugh when she saw my uncouth table manners. “How’s my cooking?” she asked.

  “Nectar for the gods!” I sputtered, chomping on a plate of stir-fried prawns. Her cooking was, in fact, very good—much better than anything one would find at a restaurant.

  “Did your mom cook much at home?” she asked.

  “The maid did most of the cooking when I was growing up,” I replied. “Ma only made a couple of special dishes. Her Beijing-style shredded pork was fantastic. And her stir-fried cucumbers—oh my god, so good!”

  “Really?” Lin Ping cooed across the table. “If she has time, I hope the dear old lady will teach me to make stir-fried cucumbers just like she does.”

  I knew that if I were to take Lin Ping home, the “dear old lady” would leap with joy. Lin Ping was a paragon of womanly virtue. As a son, this would be the greatest happiness I could give my mother.