Sex Tour of Shaangxi Province
It’s 5am. I just got back to my hostel and immediately ate Tibetan style yogurt and sugared hawthorne stuffed with walnuts (a hella choice combo) then smoked two cigarettes in a row, one outside while scrolling 美团外卖 for McDonalds which I didn’t order (I keep trying to get myself to try it in China but at this point I think permanently can’t stomach the idea of McDonald’s), the second while chatting with the front desk person. Then I talked to a Chinese hostel guest so drunk he kept telling me he didn’t understand Chinese.
Today I ate the rice and lamb of my childhood for the first time in years. I laid in a Muslim man’s bed and listened as he lamented his fear of god. I told him in Chinese, the only common language we shared, that I was Jewish, then told him my mother told me never to tell anyone I was Jewish. He didn’t care. He regretted the sex. Then had it again.
Last night I went out with a de-facto friend. I’m traveling through Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces, finally stepping foot above the Qin-Huai line into the North. I’m staying in hostels for dirt cheap ($3 a night is common) and everywhere I go Chinese collectivist culture urges people to 抱团 and do things together. Everything is 一起， 一起，一起. People are more than happy to do something with an absolute stranger rather than going alone.
We went out to see the 兵马俑 terracotta warriors famous in Xi’an and when we got back we hit up the Muslim quarter for dinner. She was awesome, the best kind of travel buddy. She was totally down for having experiences, trying new dishes, ordering a few extra things knowing we won’t finish it, getting the sodas on the side in glass bottles everyone is drinking, getting the Terracotta warrior novelty fudgesicles that are way too expensive because we’re here, everyone’s eating them, why the hell not. Hell yes to that joie de vivre.
We saw his stand in the Muslim quarter, selling lamb meat pockets in a tandoori oven, barbecued lamb shanks, and, in a metal pot over a fire, plov. Pilaf. Plof. Plov. Pilau. Polu. Pilav. Palaw. 手抓饭。 抓饭。 The names are endless. Perfectly cooked rice with stewed tomatoes, raisins, lamb, and sometimes nuts. *Chef’s kiss*. My mother, a notoriously not so hot cook, used to make a decent version. I got viscerally excited, but looked at my friend’s face and saw zero response. I ended up getting a lamb pocket instead because it was small, but the cumin spiced lamb inside was the same flavor as I’ve had at every other stall and the flour wrapper was nothing seriously special. I ate half of it.
The next day, today, I came back for lunch, swearing I’d finally get some of his plov. I found him and chatted him up, this time noticing his smile and his attractive features. We discovered the word for the dish in his language, Polu, is similar to the Russian plov/plof. Instant connection. He smiled and invited me to come back later and he’d treat me to dinner. I said yes. I grabbed a person off the street to take a photo of us. I took the plov with me and ate it on the street, cracking open the plastic container and eating it with chopsticks for the first time in my life. Even though it was pretty cold at this point, I still viscerally moaned on the street with every bite. This man was cooking my childhood. I felt remiss to admit this but to me, this was better than anything I had eaten in China in the last year and some.
I thought about how Chinese people are always telling me Chinese food is the best food in the world, making sure they always have access to it no matter where they go. If there’s a small town anywhere in the world, there will likely be a Chinese restaurant. I’ve even heard that fancy expensive skii resort type trips in Europe for all Chinese customers must provide Chinese cuisine to their guests. They are in Europe to ski, not to eat European food. The guide who took us up my first mountaineering trip last week was much the same. He had been to India, same as me. When I asked him if he liked Indian food, he said he bought ingredients and cooked Chinese food for himself the whole time he was there.
After lunch I made my way back to the hostel to change my wet socks (raise your hands feet sweat people, I know I can’t be the only one) and dry out my shoes with my shoe dryers while I tried to do some homework for my teaching program, then once evening came I wound my way through the narrow alleyways of the Muslim quarter back to 阿布’s stand. He was still in full swing, selling a lamb pocket a minute. I told him to text me when he got free and left him to it.
I wandered down the street into a shop. This has become my favorite activity lately while traveling. Wander into a mostly empty shop, wait for the salesperson to figure out how to talk to me, then strike up a conversation in Chinese. Invariably come the questions (where are you from, how long have you been in China, what do you do, etc) and compliments (wow your Chinese is so good, you’ve only studied over a year, etc), which I soak up because who doesn’t love a good little ego stroke, but also it’s very encouraging and I love the language exposure. I feel like speaking Chinese is only going to a good party trick for so long. After I’ve been here a certain amount of time it will go from 哇你的中文这么那么好 to 那怪不得 and I am just not ready for that yet.
I chatted to a family run store with no customers in the store for a while. As soon as a customer appeared I made myself scarce then reappeared to chat some more. We all added wechat contacts and I agreed to teach the shopkeeper’s kids English if I ever move to Xi’an. They gave me a dried persimmon to taste which, despite never having a dried one, also reminded me of home and childhood, eating soaking ripe persimmons from the box and finding the juicy gelatinous bits in the middle, like a secret toy in a box of cereal.
The text came in from 阿布 and I said goodbye to my shop friends and walked back down the street. He gave me the rest of his plov for free and started wrapping up shop. I looked at the time. It was a little after 10pm. I was still relatively warm, though my feet were a bit wet and cold again from the aforementioned sweaty feet syndrome. I stood and waited across the lane, people watching, catching the odd stare and “hello”, making bits and dabs of conversation. Always the curiosity, especially for young children and anyone wanting a chance to try their hand at speaking English. It continues to boggle my mind that people move here without even trying to learn Chinese. I don’t know what that would be like, living forever in that concave mirror of the self, forever folded inward, I can’t even imagine it.
I watched him move about his cart, cleaning and tidying, step by step, practiced, methodical. Three years of making rice and grilling lamb, hooking up propane tanks, answering every passerby’s 怎么卖？ with a 5快一个。I was getting cold. I checked the time, 11:30pm. I checked it again. Midnight. It was after 12:30 by the time he had his electric scooter pulled out front and the oily seat wiped off and ready to ride. 吃啥？he asked me, 看你, I replied, whatever you want, hoping he’d take me to a local Muslim minority restaurant far away from the same set of touristy snack streets I’ve been cruising all week.
I started doubting myself. It’s getting late. What am I doing here? The subway is closed, I’m far from my hostel, I’m freezing cold, the sweat from my feet has now cooled and left my feet frozen in my wet socks and shoes. I paced, I people watched, I asked myself again and again if I should bail. I felt awkward leaving, waiting until the eleventh hour then not following through. It’s just dinner, I have a nice crush on him going, wouldn’t it be nice to bask in that for a few hours? I don’t need to be up early tomorrow, it’s ok, I can afford this unplanned adventure.
The street was closing down for the night, shop doors pulled shut, carts being driven home for the night. A candied-fruit cart stopped in front of us. 拿一个, he said to the 老板, grabbing a skewer of hawthornes stuffed with walnuts, candied in golden sugar. He didn’t need to pay, a nod and unspoken previous and future favors was enough. He handed the skewer to me. I took it, feeling half as though I was suddenly on a date, breaking it in half and putting it in my bag with the free box of plov he had given me earlier.
Finally we set off, me riding on the back of his scooter, shivering in the cold. It was past midnight. We stopped at one restaurant that was closing for the night, then made our way to the next. At the next one he motioned me to stand in front of their heater. I whispered to myself, inaudibly almost, that I needed to go to the bathroom. He immediately told me where it was and pointed for me to go. I noticed his attentiveness towards me. It felt nice. The bathroom was a squatter and had tissues and soap, both of which are very hit and miss in public toilets in China. When I came out he had two bottles of soda opened on the table with straws in each and was waiting for me. It was a small gesture, but it didn’t go unnoticed.
The food came out wrapped up to go, the restaurant was closing down and they made him this as a favor, levied against the weight of their relationship, looking at me but not saying anything. As we rode away we passed a few guys smoking and drinking on the street, out for a little fun on a Friday night. They called to him and made some comments in their dialect, obviously about his passenger. I laughed and gave them a smile. As we passed he said “everyone here knows me, I’ve been here for three years”. “And you’ve got a girl on the back of your bike”, I said, laughing, thinking about the gossip he’s going to get tomorrow, thinking about universal human needs, needs of the body, needs of the mind, needs of the spirit.
He stopped the bike. 你怎么了？I asked. “I want to get noodles to go with this dish, I like to eat noodles, but everywhere here is closed, and you’re very cold. I’m thinking about taking this back to my place”. 嗯, I said, the universal Chinese word for agreement and confirmation. I figured we were going here eventually, I had already slipped some condoms into my bag earlier this afternoon just in case.
“I’ll drive slower” he said, carefully steering his scooter down the dark empty streets to a dusty alley and parking it behind a set of stairs. I got off. Nothing looked clean or familiar. I entered a liminal space in my mind, a space I’ve embodied time and time again since childhood. I used to sit in this space, holding two friends’ opinions and perspectives on a situation in my mind, totally without a solid place to hang my own understanding. The world was constantly shifting and I felt myself momentarily stunned and dazed in a haze, a type of empathy that overrides the sense of self, erases it.
We climbed the stairs, narrow, dark, and dusty. Nothing could have prepared me for the scene inside his apartment. He had lived alone for over a decade doing nothing but running his lamb and plov stand and it showed. The floor was covered in dirt and track marks, he obviously had not taken off his shoes other than to get in bed. There were large cardboard boxes stacked up everywhere, steel workbenches and cutting boards, a fatty piece of meat left out. The entire apartment was as cold as the outdoors other than the bedroom where one space heater was working overtime.
He motioned me in, pulling a card table over and setting up the food, grabbing a kettle of water to boil and some paper cups. It was by far the most unkempt living situation I had ever witnessed. After a momentary shock, a microsecond of internal resistance, I entered my liminal space and accepted it unreservedly. It’s the same coping mechanism that has allowed me to travel in remote areas of the world (China, India, Turkey, and Greece all have had living setups I would never have imagined). I knew immediately that I could lie naked in this bed. I also knew I could not stay the night.
My liminal space still has its boundaries. I am, even in a space where my edges are blurred away, still me. An evening is not a lifetime. A kiss is not a contract (credit to Flight of the Conchords for this brilliant line). We sat on his bed in our coats and ate. I took out my shoe liners and put them on top of his space heater to dry them out, sticking my feet in the slats between the heater to warm and dry my wet socks.
The food, though cold, was delicious. Chicken and crisp raw peppers, tofu and wood ear mushrooms, fresh and beautiful, so unlike much of the street food I’d been eating lately. Authentic 回族 Huizu (Chinese Muslim minority) food. I savored every bite.
We ate and chatted. He told me how hard he works, how he gets five or less hours of sleep a night, how much money he earns when business is good (a lot more than me), how little he earns when it’s bad (how often he’s gone hungry), how long he’s been alone, how he has no friends at all. He showed me his hands, swollen, blackened and crackled from working with hot fire and cold water every day oustide in the cold. He told me how a 汉族 Hanzu (Han Chinese, the majority of Chinese people are Han) girl he was dating wanted to marry him. He rejected her and she moved to Thailand. Now he regrets it, he wants to find her, all these years later, but the Chinese government won’t let Huizu (people of his minority) leave the country. He told me how he’s been treated unfairly by others, by life. How it’s not his fault, not his choice, how he’s been victimized. I found it hard to sympathize but I listened, giving him my attention, telling him stories from my life in return.
The conversation turned to world affairs. He brought up all the topics Chinese people love to talk about, the war in Ukraine, Trump, Biden, always American politics. There’s no escaping it. I fly halfway across the world only to talk American politics.
We talk about Covid zero, about the Uyghur fire. He pulls out his phone and shows me his Douyin (Chinese TikTok) account. He had posted a photo of the family who died. Muslims, like him. He said he cried for days when it happened, didn’t sleep. The police came to his door and questioned him for hours, asking where he had found the photo, who had posted it, where he had gotten it. “They don’t care about the people who died, they only care about finding who posted the picture.”
We kept talking, the food sitting untouched on the card table by the bed. I found out we are the same age, though he looks ten years older than me. I told him about why I came to China, how I wanted to challenge myself and grow in ways I couldn’t predict. “You’re brave”, he said. “Yes”, I said, “but so are you. We are the same, only I’ve been lucky, I’ve had more opportunities than you. My family brought me to America when I was small, now I speak English and have an American passport. I went to college. I can do what I want with my life. Many people can’t.”
It had been months since I had been with someone. My body had been drawing my attention towards this fact for the last few weeks. People were looking good, and now here I was, finally poised to fulfill my biological needs, conditions, evidently, be damned. I was ready.
He wasn’t picking up on it. Time to make a move. I held out my hand and asked if he could read palms. He said no, but took my hand anyway. Progress. “Your hands are so cold”, he said. More progress. “Warm them up”, I said.
And so it began. I asked him how long it had been. “Years”, he said. I asked him if he wanted to. “Yes”, he said. I asked, as best I could, if he had any STDs. I knew it was probably useless, but I had to at least try. He said he didn’t. We hugged, first awkwardly in our heavy layers, then, as you would expect, without them.
I can’t say he was a good lover. I’ve had very few good lovers in China, though so far I’ve only been with Chinese men, and now 阿布。 Cultural differences in the bedroom are vast. Men seem conditioned go from kissing to vaginal penetration, seemingly without foreplay. Manual and oral play are almost non-existent. Men don’t seem to expect it, and though they willingly receive it, there’s no effort to return the favor. In fact, often they outright refuse to.
With 阿布 I tried my hand at explaining the situation, laying out the merits of reciprocity. He said he’d never touched a woman with his hands. I offered to teach him. He agreed. I offered to have him look, explaining it would be best for his understanding. He refused. I had made this offer to a man once before, back in the US, and he had also refused.
Why do men hate pussy? Why do women accept a man who hates her body but wants to use it for his pleasure? I sighed, and agreed to a compromise. I’ll teach you by feel, no looking required. I guided his hands and talked him through it, explaining with my words and using my finger and tongue on his nose to show him what I liked and also explaining what some other women might like, trying to instill in him at the outset that not all women are the same and he has to tune in to his partner’s pleasure.
I didn’t bother to try to get him to go down on me, if he didn’t want to see pussy I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to want to taste it. Shame, I thought to myself, thinking of all the pleasure and connection we were missing out on, and he would be missing out on for the rest of his life.
We fucked, and with every climax came the religious regret. God was looking down on him. He had done wrong. He shouldn’t have done this. “Do you want to stop?” I asked. No answer. “Do you want to keep going?” “Yes”. Empathy and impatience battled within me. I freed myself from this specific brand of mental imprisonment at 12 years old, and here I am looking at a 34 year old grown man still kicking at the prison gates. Ultimately, his religious guilt is not my burden.
I made what I could out of the situation for myself. I did the things I like to do, fulfilled the needs I longed to fulfill. I whispered dirty talk in Chinese in his ear, wondering if he had ever had or would ever have this kind of sexual experience again.
Afterwards I could see him falling asleep. I shook him gently. The gentle tug of war began. “You said you’d give me a ride back, I’m ready to go”. “Sleep here, the bed is big enough”. No chance, friend. I started pulling my clothes on. It was 3am. I tossed him his underwear, peeled a banana that was laying on the table and handed him a piece. He ate it and pulled on his clothes.
I wanted to say something, to say that momentary connections are also beautiful and meaningful, to say that I was honored to share this experience with him, that there’s appreciation in my heart for him. I struggled to find the words. Instead I said, “when I leave I won’t look for you again”. “I’ll come to Shenzhen and look for you”, he said. It wasn’t my first time hearing this line. 阿辉, our tour guide in Yunnan this summer, said the same thing. I said nothing. It was time to go.
We rode the empty streets in the middle of the night, just the golden lights of the ancient buildings of Xi’an interspersed with the modern infrastructure and buildings, laced together like a patch quilt of old and new. I thought about how the city might have looked when the clock tower was just built, when the silk road trade was bustling, when spices weren’t poured from plastic bags into tight-woven baskets to make them look old-fashioned but were just in baskets already, or leather sacks, or paper cones.
By the time we got to the hostel it was 4am. I hopped off the back of the bike, my plof and candied hawthorne ready for breakfast later today. I hugged him. “I hope things get better and better for you”. “I hope so too”, he said. “Bye bye”. “Bye bye”.
The bao’an was sleeping on the couch in the lobby by the elevator, snoring loudly. I didn’t bother signing the log sheet, I just pushed the button and went up. The hostel night staff was smoking by the stairs. I put my food in the fridge and tried to say hello to a hostel guest sitting in the lobby, looking very drunk. “How come you’re not asleep yet?” I asked. “I don’t understand, I don’t understand”, he said. “You’re not sleeping yet”, I said. “I don’t understand you”, he said.
I chatted up the night staff instead, not feeling tired yet, wanting to relax for a minute. I pulled out the pack of cigarettes my Sichuan tour guide had given me when I visited his house for Chinese New Year’s Eve. I don’t smoke, but once in a blue moon, in social settings, I’ll have one. For someone who doesn’t drink alcohol and is living in a zero-weed policy country, two or three cigarettes a year is a small indulgence. I took two cigarettes out and gave him one. “Smoke another?” I asked. “Sure”, he said. We stood in the stairwell and chatted, ashing our cigarettes into the garbage can. I didn’t tell him what I’d been up to, just said I had been out having fun in the Muslim quarter. Close enough.
There’s a conception some Chinese men have that foreign women are easy. I’ve certainly had more and less promiscuous chapters of my life. I used to think much more in black and white terms about dating, relationships, and sex. Now I quite like to think that I have space in my life for connections of all types of length, depth, intimacy, and meaning. I’m fostering my relationship with myself first are foremost, with no desperation or rush towards finding someone to be with me. I can, at long last, be with myself.
But, as it turns out, I can only go so long without building up a need for sexual connection. I am a sexual person. I always have been, from an early age. I won’t argue casual sex is as meaningful as sex in the context of love. It’s not. It’s different. But it has its own meaning, its own value. Perhaps I am easy, but it’s not like I’ll just have sex with anyone. Though, I will admit, the safety officer on my flight back to Shenzhen looked very cute from the mask up.
We have a tradition in the hash (I’ve mentioned hashing before, look up hash house harriers for information if you are curious). If you haven’t attended a hash in two weeks or more, we make you come into circle and answer for your crimes. “What’s your excuse?” we ask you. If you were traveling, we say you were on a sex tour. So if you went to Shanghai, everyone yells “sex tour of Shanghai!”, then we give you a drink and sing you a song.
I woke up in my hostel bed to the sounds of other people’s cell phone alarms going off two hours after I went to sleep, feeling rough. I stumbled to the lobby and while my plov was heating up in the microwave, I thought, they’re going to say I went on a sex tour, and goddamn it, they’re going to be right.
The plov, by the way, was delicous.
