Chris Cuomo, an ecofeminist academic who I crossed paths with during my lacklustre university career, once explained to me her concept of ‘playful world travelling’. It was about broadening your worldview by deliberately putting yourself in a place where you are not at the centre. In other words, purposefully existing on the margins to know how it feels.
Being gay, a woman, and working class, gives me a little taste of what it’s like when I’m forced to go outside of my comfort zone at home, but at the end of the day, I am still a white, English speaking, and fairly well educated. In order to really put myself into the periphery, I had to go somewhere where the powerful majority was not white or English speaking. Is there a better place for that than China?
China is still a place where Westerners are stared at – though there are a few around in the major centres (Beijing and Shanghai) where tight knit expat communities exist. Feeling slightly uncomfortable that shop assistants were laughing at me and speaking Mandarin to her other (local) customers, I decided to look for a community where I could feel more at home – the GBTLI community. The problem – how to find the lesbians!
I scanned the streets for girls who triggered my gaydar but got nothing – maybe being in a different hemisphere was screwing with my compass. The rules, if there were any, for spotting lesbians here were obviously different. And I thought (or hoped) maybe they were all underground and visual signals would mark you as a target for undesirable attention.
The only girls with short hair appeared to be working women, older ladies who were cleaners and the like – a purely practical choice, and I certainly didn’t see any women who looked like they were blurring the masculine/feminine boundaries in a deliberate way.
When in doubt, turn to the Internet. A quick search turned up two possible hangouts for lesbians in Beijing, so we checked them out on our last night.
The first was a café, dark and centrally located. Despite being Friday night it seemed quiet. I spotted a few girls who would have set off my gaydar in the street, but mainly the girls here holding hands were ultra-femme – it seemed this was the pretty girl place with ribbons and bows and cute dresses!
The next was a bar and it was an adventure to get to. My expat friend had written the address in rough Chinese characters in the hope that the taxi driver would understand it. He dropped us at a building out of town, which looked like an old castle. Its grey brick walls towered above us, and the place looked deserted from the street. She explained, ‘this is a bus station, but the bar is meant to be here.’
She asked for directions and in a combination of Mandarin and mime we were directed to knock on a big door. I thought, ‘So this is the underground.’
We walked around a little, and totally concealed from the street we found a wide open door with a number of women loitering who appeared to be security personnel. We had certainly arrived – there were women of all shapes and sizes. We were stared at, mostly as a freak show, though I did catch a provocative glance from a girl decked out in basketball gear.
The only person who would talk to me was a foreigner herself, a gorgeous Korean girl with a wide, warm smile. She said she loved China because there were so many people that it didn’t matter what she did or that she was a lesbian. The sheer population of China was overwhelming – 1.3 billion is hard to comprehend when Australia has a tad over 20 million.
When I told her I was from Australia her face lit up, and she said, ‘It’s very good for lesbians there, can they marry?’ I did not want to disappoint her, but I told her the truth – no, they cannot marry, but the general population is more or less accepting. Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped a little close to the table when I told her stories of young dykes shaving their heads as a symbol of their newly realised identity. As she left she was saying, ‘I want to go to Australia!’
Out of a meeting with another foreigner I began to understand something. The lesbian community really doesn’t have a global aspect to it, and maybe it should. It seems to me that we have a lot to learn from each other and I’m sure we could help each other in our struggles!
