Big Yao’s friend, Little Ma, then arrived and slipped her broad and stocky frame into the booth next to Big Yao and across from me. She brought sunflower seeds for us, and we chatted as we cracked the salty shells between our teeth. We spit the shells out on the table between us, while ingesting the nutty center. I welcomed something to do with my restless hands.
Little Ma smiled from across the table. She was wearing a baggy black t-shirt and long board shorts, one earring in her left ear, hair shaved close on the sides, and the top gelled and combed back.
“It’s not often that we get foreigners in here,” Little Ma commented. “You’re so fortunate that gay marriage is legal in your country! Did you hear about Taiwan? They just legalized gay marriage last week [May 24, 2017], which gives me hope. I think I will probably be dead before I witness anything like that in my lifetime, but it’s promising,” Little Ma pondered.[1]
Same-sex sexual activity was illegal in mainland China until 1997 and classified as a mental disorder until 2001.[2] For many of the LGBTQ+ people I met in China, they believed that legalizing gay marriage is still a long time in the future for mainland China. (Hong Kong and Taiwan, which now have legal gay marriage, are under separate legal jurisdictions than mainland China.)
“So, are you out to your parents?” Big Yao asked me. I lied and said I was. The truth was that I was still scared to come out to my conservative and religious parents back home.
“Americans sure are more open and accepting than Chinese people are!” Little Ma said while both nodded.
My heart sank with shame in my lie.
America’s inheritance of Puritan values and a recent rise of the conservative and religious right meant that in some ways the US was far behind China when it came to social acceptance of LGBTQ+ populations. China’s atheist culture made it slightly easier in some ways, but its filial piety combined with the One Child Policy meant that many younger Chinese people had a lot of pressure from their parents to get married and have a kid to carry on the ancestral line.
But those, too, are generalizations. The reality is that gay culture is complex in both countries, and many still face discrimination and oppression in both institutional and cultural ways, while some experience freedom in other ways.
Still, I felt like a coward, hiding in the closet when I felt that they were so much braver than I to come out in a more hostile environment.
“So. Can you own a gun in America?” Little Ma asked, breaking my daydream.
I explained gun ownership in the US—how people see them as symbols of freedom and some people feel safer with them than without them. I told them about the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando. Big Yao and Little Ma looked at each other with their mouths open, and then turned back to me with their mouths tightened into frowns.
“That is so scary!”
“In America, freedom comes first. In China, safety comes first,” I said.
“What good is freedom if you’re dead?” Little Ma asked.
I laughed and shook my head, at a loss for words.
In the US, we have institutional protections on many freedoms, such as gay marriage and gun ownership. China has few homicides by gun compared to the US and has an almost universal health care system. In America, freedom can be impinged by fear of losing healthcare or gun violence. On the other hand, the Chinese government impinges on freedom in other ways, such as freedom of speech.
In the end, what does freedom really mean? As my time in China continued, the concept of freedom became more subjective than I had realized. For some, having a xinghun marriage was a mode of freedom. For others, legalizing gay marriage was a symbol of freedom. For me, finally coming out to my parents was a decision about liberation as well. For all of us queers around the world, freedom and oppression come in many forms from the family to society.
How do we understand the human condition and human stories without reducing them down to generalizations and stereotypes? We can understand that behind every country, culture, and government, are individual humans with their own stories of love and loss, of freedom and suffering, of liberation and safety.
I ended up coming out to my family later that summer of 2017.
[1] Chappell, Bill. “Taiwan's High Court Rules Same-Sex Marriage Is Legal, In A First For Asia.”
NPR, 24 May 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/24/529841027/taiwans-high-court-rules-same-sex-marriage-is-legal-in-a-first-for-asia. Accessed 8 May 2020.
[2] Rofel, Lisa. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Duke
University, 2007.
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