Shame and Loathing in Sichuan

Letting the erotic save me from saving face

I’ve been daydreaming about chasing a girl in Chengdu, Sichuan. When I flew to my hometown in April, I had just two expectations: see my sick 90-year-old grandpa and treat my pre-cervical cancer. And honestly, I prioritized the novel treatment over tepid bonds with my relatives. For me, family is a river reflecting shame. The shame ran so deep that I almost canceled the trip—cancer care be damned. But fear of death made me channel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, so I bought the ticket and took the ride.¹ In contrast to Thompson’s drug-addled escape from a dying American dream, I meant for my ride to be repressed and resigned. I was a body on autopilot, searching for a cure that would, in the most literal sense, save my life. Instead, I found feeling, a soul stirring. A pulse thawed from permafrost. Real, life-saving, erotic energy.

Shame as a cold river

面子 / miànzi - “Face is the guiding principle of the Chinese spirit, just like the long braids of the late Qing Dynasty. Once you grab the braid, the whole body will follow you” - Lu Xun, legendary modern Chinese writer

I last stood in Sichuan nine years ago, staring at the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system, meditating on shame. Over two thousand years ago, engineers forked the wild Min river with a levee instead of a dam. One branch swallows the floods, the other feeds over 2,000 square miles of fertile fields to this day. Water is to life as saving face is to Chinese culture. An alien concept to Westerners, face refers to social status cultivated through virtue and achievement, not just for yourself, but for your family and friends.² Face is a collective reservoir, easily drained. A child’s good job refills the cistern; a moral lapse cracks the embankment for everyone.³ When the reservoir bursts, its runoff surges into my river. Lose face, be flooded with shame. As the tide rose inside me, I texted a friend “Being Chinese kinda sucks,” then boarded my flight. I was never good at treading water.

This trip forced me upriver, to the roaring headwater where my shame was born: money. Its absence ripped me away from bonding with family; I saw my relatives just three times in thirty years. Its absence powered abuse at home, leaving bruises in its backwash. Its absence stranded us to low, muddy banks while our wealthier Chinese-American acquaintances enjoyed deeper waters. As an adult, I still ferry my destitute, divorced mom across the shallows, pretending we’re cruising on the American dream. Some say even the poorest can save face through virtue alone, but I’ve only ever seen it be pay-to-play. In China, my mom and I played rich enough; it’s easy to do with exchange rates. We rigged rafts out of lies: my abusive father is “a wonderful husband” and “we visit him in Silicon Valley” and “we still live in that big house.” Among her rich retiree friends and family drawing 10,000+ RMB per month,⁴ my minimum-wage mom still managed to stay buoyant. She is quintessentially Chinese in a way that I’m not. For her, keeping up appearances is social glue, not deceit. Layer by layer, she collects the silt of status, securing her shoreline. I drift beside her, half-drowned.

Class pretense may have worked, but moral, sexual shame lapped at my heels. I arrived with HPV, no ring, no man—a sheng nu, a leftover woman. My aunt whispered “It’s okay you’re still single,” which proved it wasn’t. I kept up the saccharine smiles until I was blocked from treatment.⁵ What a wasted trip. I threw a fit, scaring my uncle, then hid in my bathroom where the math decor on shower walls mocked me. They reminded me of my ex, who loved tracing equations onto fogged panes. He was haunting me in China, a spectre from a past where I had face, a “high-value man,” a mask for bisexuality. Before him, short-lived situationships with women spared me from reenacting Saving Face (2004). In the movie, Chinese lesbian Wil tries coming out: “Ma. I love you. And I'm gay.” Her mom responds: “How can you say those two things at once?...I am not a bad mother. My daughter is not gay.” My mom would add: “You still like men? Then choose a man!” Flawless logic. My family doesn’t think “the bisexuals are gonna kill me,”⁶ but they do see gayness as a stain that shame should scrub off. Used as a temporary tool, shame can nudge people back in social line.⁷ Too bad homosexuality is permanent.

Since shame needs witnesses,⁸ it arrives hot; a public scalding. But once it seeps in, you become your own witness, your own warden. The heat leaks away. When the reservoir broke, class failure rushed out first, sinking the little pride I had. Lesser streams of shame—sexual or otherwise—poured into the river and sank me lower. In time, my river went glacial. Shame froze me over the years, damming up all other emotions, submerging them under its slow-sinking, twisting nausea, folding me inwards, away from the prying, judging gaze of others and towards the harshest, most unforgiving gaze of all: my own. I recoiled from being Chinese. It burned like flesh on dry ice. These old waters had turned my idea of China into something broken, into a wasteland of lack and lies. So I self-exiled from my heritage. It didn’t help much though. No matter how far I roamed, the ice still found me, carving fresh channels into the next brittle foothold I tried to claim. But I didn’t need to out-swim or bottle it up. I needed Dujiangyan at the source, a levee to divert the creeping shame before it could swallow all life downstream.

The erotic as Dujiangyan

Saving Face (2004), Wil and Vivian’s first date. Part of my movie personal canon.

The last time I saw her thirteen years ago, we were just friends, kids in Xi’an complaining about the worst food of our lives, unaware that our paths would cross in a different way. She’s the daughter of my mom’s rich best friend. Even back then, she seemed gay. I clocked Kristen Stewart in 2012,⁹ so my gaydar is pretty good. And according to my mom’s best friend, her daughter isn’t dating because “men are trash”, which sounds like a lesbian thing to say. But she could be saving face with her mom. Or maybe she’s out to her mom, and her mom is saving face with my mom. We left it as subtext while forming plans around Yulin.¹⁰ My nerves swelled at the thought of seeing her again.

The first time I saw her on this trip, I was probably already a goner. She surfaced from the metro like some suave C-pop boy band member, self-possessed in a way I could only dream of being. Perhaps wealth always walks like that. I admired her masculine silhouette, a studied boyish beauty. She looked like someone who sketches poetic notes in the margins of books. My nerves settled the longer we talked. Our moms drifted away while she bought me a matcha, her voice the same sweet tone I remembered. I followed the delicate gestures of her hands, her tired eyes. I joked she was a victim of 996 work culture,¹¹ and she laughed, a lilting, earnest sound. She asked about my hobbies and I confessed to writing, something I never disclose. She lit up; she reads a lot. We discussed The Three Body Problem—she graciously asked if I’d read it in Chinese, then praised my Mandarin anyway without patronizing me, unlike my uncle. Over dinner, we laughed at the torrent of Luigi Mangione posts on Red Note.¹² “He really is too handsome,” she sighed. Shit, maybe she’s straight? My worry vanished when she suggested dinner, just us. We swapped WeChat profiles to set a plan.

She’d chosen an English name: Mars. Her Chinese name was stars. Fitting.

*

The second time I saw her on this trip, my stomach lurched. She wore the same weary coolness on her face. When she turned her head and the gray metro lights skimmed across her short hair like sunlight on water, I was really, truly gone. A dam cracked open inside me—not polite interest, not admiration, but hunger. It tore through me. I pictured sliding my fingers through her hair. I wanted to press my lips to her shuttered, exhausted eyes. I imagined tracing a thumb along the uneven edges of her crooked bottom teeth. I dreamed of pinning her against the wall of some Chengdu nightclub, sealing her mouth with mine, feeling her laughs and shudders breaking over me until morning light.

A smidge of guilt seeped in, a familiar feeling from old waters, whispering that I was betraying my ex. A fresh new tide rose against it, a surge of wonder at feeling this way again about someone new. It happens only every few years, so I’d forgotten the rush, the aliveness, the spring flower bursting through frost after a long winter. I recalled that my ex dreamed of exploring Mars someday. I never wanted to leave the sanctity of Earth for the quiet horror of space. But suddenly I was interested in life on Mars alright.

Whatever electric current I felt stayed unmoored; I never confirmed she was even gay. My mom cuntblocked me, tagging along since I’d be kidnapped taking the metro alone. All I managed for our “date” was a clumsy attempt to pay for Mars’ food, which I failed at by scanning the menu instead of the payment app. It’s what happens when you try to impress your crush in front of your mom. But there were small benefits to my mom’s presence. She snapped photos of us. And while the two of them chatted, I listened dreamily, letting Mars’ voice wash over me. She kept referring to me as jie—big sister—and I nearly asked her to stop, lest I develop an unfortunate psychosexual complex. But I kept quiet and drank her presence in.

“What a shame that she looks like a boy,” my mom said when we returned home.

Well, isn’t everything a fucking shame?

“We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I thought the wave had long broken for me. That the high-water mark had come and gone, before I was even born. That shame was all I’d inherited. But this time, something surged and I was drowning in delirium, a most welcome little death. After my failed outing, my mom and I met Mars’ mom for hot pot. Maybe she could read the I-wanna-fuck-your-daughter vibe from my face, because she shot me a knowing look and twice scolded my mom for crashing our night out: “They had young adult things to discuss in private!” From that single wink of hope, I let fantasy bloom. Over the next month, I replayed each syllable in riveting, drooling detail. I pored over our photos religiously. I downloaded Pleco and binged YouTube videos titled What It’s Like to Be Gay in China (For Intermediate Chinese Learners). I endured podcasts about the boring tariffs just to pick up business-grade Mandarin. I dreamed about a life together in my hometown, our two streams intertwining. Small devotions to a god-star of a girl.

And then I crashed back to earth, sober yet enlightened. Limerence has such a thin atmosphere. Even if she felt the same way, we are different planets. Different worlds. Different classes. Different languages, orbiting at different speeds. Mars was never a real destination. She’s a projection, an escape hatch. And I’m no astronaut, just a tourist in a rented rocket. Reality has a heavier gravity, and I relish its pull as I descend into a landscape redrawn, a sky rearranged. This was never a mission about getting the girl. This is about eroticism. A return of want, desire as vivid spring rain, droplets dancing on the surface of a melting river. Now I can feel constellations falling from skies above. So I don’t message her. I don’t need to. I fall—for her, through her—into a wordless and warm river, nothing like the icebound shame that once suffused me. The erotic is not “sensation without feeling,”¹³ but feeling so true it refuses to be reasoned with, charted, or proofed. I am Walt Whitman leaving the astronomer’s lecture hall, standing alone in the mystical moist night-air. No longer calculating, but looking up at the night sky. Looking at Mars, my modern myth. My star, my perfect silence.¹⁴

I left China with a strange cure: the return of want itself. And that’s my Dujiangyan, the erotic charge of life humming in my blood, diverting the river of shame. I only know now in the glow of this new warmth what liveliness I’d been missing. Unreasoning desire cracked the ice and outpoured a great wellspring. Strange that I cannot fathom it now, being dammed up again by that old shame. I have trouble recalling the feeling of smallness, of exposure, of running away from myself, so lush is this new flowing feeling, this spring in my step. No amount of books or talk therapy or late-night journaling could have unlocked this in me. I needed to remember that I’m allowed to want, not merely be some servile creature at an altar I never believed in. And now it’s back, the simple, stupid, gorgeous pleasure of wanting itself. Now I’m aware of new fertile fields sprouting new sounds: I like being Chinese. I like myself. I want to be me. I want to become.

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Dolores Lucero

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The drawn Saving Face image is from china-mike.com

1. “Buy the ticket, take the ride” is the actual quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

2. Face and morality in Confucian Society by Kwang-Kuo Hwang, pages 267-8 and 281. Hwang also discusses a difference between lian/moral virtue and face/social status, but this varies by region and is too nuanced for this essay. I’ve also personally felt it to be one and the same.

3. Face and morality in Confucian Society by Kwang-Kuo Hwang, page 281. “As indicated in Fig. 10.2, the first two incidents that make retirees most feel they “have face” are when their children are morally upright (0.719) and successful in their careers (0.647).”

4. Affords a great lifestyle, way better than someone drawing $10,000 USD a month.

5. The new technology I sought was being gatekept at two elite hospitals used by President Xi Jinping. An American pleb like me had no chance. I’m grateful to my relatives who guided me through the Chinese medical system, even though it was fruitless in the end.

6. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas quote from Dr. Gonzo. There’s probably a Hunter S. Thompson quote for everything.

7. The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed, Chapter 5: Shame Before Others, page 107. Pages 101-103 explain how shame is also part of the reconciliation process for historical, national wrongs.

8. The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed, Chapter 5: Shame Before Others, pages 103, 105

9. I mean come on, just look at this photoshoot

10. Hipster district in Chengdu

11. Working 9 am – 9 pm, 6 days a week = 72 hour work weeks. Common in tech and internet companies in China. Unfortunately spills over into other Chinese sectors

12. Xiaohongshu/Little Red Book, Chinese social media similar to Instagram

13. Uses of the Erotic, a seminal essay by Audre Lorde, a renowned Black lesbian feminist icon

14. When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman, who wrote much controversial homoerotic poetry. The final line of this poem is “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” which was adapted to “My star, my perfect silence” in Breaking Bad. My identity crisis was never as bad as Walter White’s, thankfully. Love that show.