Gay Assimilation, Chinese Style
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             Born in 2000 into a working-class family in Hong Kong, Yojo lives with his decorator father and cashier mother on a public housing estate. He is their only son. Six feet tall with “a large, quite chubby body” he calls himself “fatfat.” The youngest of the research participants, Yojo was studying for a diploma in hotel management when Kong met him in 2018. His description of his parents confirms the stereotype of the Tiger Mom: “They are monster parents. [When I was a teenager,] after school, I had to learn various things requested by my parents: Latin dancing, table tennis, swimming, badminton, volleyball, Chinese painting, calligraphy, drawing, magic, mathematical Olympiad, and piano … but piano [was]the only thing I really wanted to learn. … They had already planned a life for me … a life I didn’t want. … They expected me to be competent, obedient, to study [hard], to know good people, etcetera.”

            But being parents, they discovered gay porn on his computer, along with messages from other boys with whom Yojo had begun having sex at fourteen, which led to a showdown that shocks the Western reader who associates Asian culture with filial piety: “They then asked me if I were gay. I said, ‘If you think I am, then I am.’ And then we got into a fight. She [his mother]hit me, and I hit her back.” After days of not speaking, his parents “reluctantly accepted that I won’t have children and continue the family bloodline and worry that I might get hiv/aids.” But his parents still want him to “be normal” and get married, even if they have accepted that it will never happen. The end result? “They rarely discuss it these days.”

            Hiro, on the other hand, got this reaction when he came out to his parents in Taipei: “Oh, so you won’t get married and have children,” his father said, “so you don’t need to worship all these ancestral plaques, and you can destroy them.” What happened next, Hiro reports: “He then cried in front of me. That was the first time and the only time I saw my dad cry. But he does not oppose or deny (me).”

            Thus Taiwan and China are changing, even in that most universal and classic of gay experiences: coming out to your parents. It sounds suspiciously Western—i.e., narcissistic—when Kong says that “generally speaking, parents’ expectations of their children have shifted from ‘be normal’ to ‘be happy’ while children’s expectations of themselves in relation to their parents have shifted from ‘please one’s parents’ to ‘be yourself.’ Those expectations have changed in conjunction with growing acceptance of LGBT people, changes in parenting culture and a shift toward individualism among the younger Chinese generations.” Even so, Kong dismisses the idea that the gay liberation movement is exclusively Western.

            But even now, a young gay male is expected to get a stable job and an apartment, to marry and have children. (This, in a country with 1.4 billion people, eleven million new college graduates this year, and a troubled economy.) So, people like Yojo and Hiro must not only come out to their parents but also decide whether to marry, and if they do, whether to marry a lesbian or a straight woman who doesn’t know they’re gay. (The plight of the Chinese woman married to a man she doesn’t know is gay has actually inspired a national TV show.) Meanwhile they dream of a monogamous partnership with another man, a fantasy that critics call “cruel optimism”: wasting your life believing in the possibility of something that’s not likely to happen. (None of the interview subjects quoted by Kong was able to maintain a closed marriage.)

     At the same time, there are the familiar snobberies that make gay life so competitive: the prestige of gym bodies, successful careers, good looks (there seems to be a marked disgust with being fat), masculinity, and even, it must be noted, whiteness. The description Tony gives of his life in Taipei, for instance, seems all too familiar to the gay reader: “The tongzhi circle is full of discrimination. … The fatties look down on the skinny. The skinny look down on the muscled. The muscled look down on the fatties. … For me, if a skinny guy wanted to approach me, I would ask him to leave. … I am part of it, too!” Tony aspires to belong to the beautiful, stylish set called the wanghong. “I have been observing them silently. Those well-dressed and elegant wanghong … are my future goal, and they are my idols. Even though when I meet some of them, I think they are idiots!”

            But hovering over these young men, this book argues, is the political situation, the difference in governments. In mainland China the policy toward homosexuality is called “the Three No’s”: “no encouraging, no discouraging, and no promoting.” But the pink economy is still subject to police raids, and Xi Jinping has denounced the presence of “sissy boys” in the entertainment world. For mainland Chinese tongzhi, gay life means the Internet: the tedious task of cruising for hours online with nothing to show for it. And even these sites can be shut down by the government.

            In Hong Kong, there is a considerable pink economy but no place to live on one’s own; though Hong Kong tongzhi are prosperous and sophisticated enough to travel abroad, they generally have to live, like Yojo, with their parents because of the high cost of real estate. In Taiwan, there is a sense of foreboding, if not doom, regarding the economic possibilities of their island, and China’s stated intention to do to Taipei what it has done to Hong Kong. Here is Daniel, a successful young Hongkonger who has studied in the UK: “Hong Kong is dying, on the verge of death.”

            Sexuality and the Rise of China is written in the language of sociology, but beneath the jargon one senses a startling thing: that while young gay people may dislike their government, they are not really in conflict with their parents or identity as Chinese. They can’t be. When one is finished reading Kong’s survey one is struck by a great irony. Chinese culture is not going to change to make room for homosexuality; it is going to absorb homosexuality in what Kong calls “homonationalism,” a term that means, so far as I can tell, being gay but also a good, patriotic citizen. The LGBT person has not only to care for his parents in old age—especially on the mainland, where the government has chosen not to create anything like Medicare or Social Security—but to work hard, to be successful and masculine. In other words, he must be totally conventional, which leads one to ask: Then in what sense is one “queer,” in the new or old sense of the word? The modern version of homosexuality in Hong Kong, mainland China, and Taiwan all seem to be the antithesis of rebellious, different, alienated.

      Even the legalization of gay marriage in Taiwan is not seen as a concession to difference. It is seen, both here and in Petrus Liu’s book, as mainly political—something that sets Taiwan apart from China as being more liberal, modern, forward-looking, international. The legalization of gay marriage is simply one more tool in the Taiwanese government’s struggle to maintain what Hong Kong has lost: its independence from Beijing—just another form of pinkwashing. On the mainland, homosexuality bothers the Communist Party only because the Party fears any social group that might initiate collective action against the government à la Tiananmen Square—the nightmare that Xi Jinping shares with Vladimir Putin, that one day a mob with pitchforks will storm the castle.

            What hangs over Sexuality and the Rise of China is the threat of the Chinese Communist Party. It’s the mainland, and Xi Jinping, that engenders fear. Perhaps that’s why Daniel, in Hong Kong, is the subject whose interview is the most haunting. It’s Daniel—who says that when he was studying in the UK, he spent a lot of time explaining to people the difference between Hongkongers and Chinese—who provides the most memorable of all the quotes:

When I was young, I found China very backward. It was very dirty, smelly, and full of cockroaches. … You could smell it when you crossed the border. … It was a scary place … things would be stolen, you didn’t know whether what you ate was safe or not, restaurants were dirty, and what pissed me off is that people didn’t care about all these [things]. … But my parents come from China. … I wouldn’t say I hate mainlanders. I hate the government and its brainwashing, as a lot of people are being brainwashed. … The major difference between Hong Kong and China is the system. Hong Kong has the rule of law. China does not. … But the most important thing that Hongkongers have is integrity. We know what to do and what should be done and what shouldn’t. China does not [have that], maybe because they experienced the Cultural Revolution. … People with integrity either died or were exiled. … The rest are those who have no integrity, [who]just want to gain advantages, [or are]indifferent or ignorant. So they do things just for their own self-interest and do not care about civil society or the common good.

            As I write, the news is full of stories about the possibility of an economic collapse in China. Young Chinese are having a difficult time finding work. And these college graduates, eleven million of them, are so discouraged, they’re no longer thinking about getting married or trying to succeed; they are instead doing something they call “lying flat”: making the very minimum of effort to get by. Will gay liberation have any effect on these problems? Or will these problems make gay liberation irrelevant? One watches China, reads books like this, if only out of curiosity; how are they going to manage this society, what will gay liberation become in a country as authoritarian as China?