some hot noise

boy love among rotten girls

2009-06-01T08:07:00.000-07:00

"Spock or Kirk?" I asked the two Chinese 20-something gals after exiting a screening of the newest Hollywood blockbuster showing in town. It seemed like a no-brainer to these girls.

"Spock, of course," they replied.

I was in a button-pushing mood so it was time to bring up the queer world of slash fiction, that (American) subculture of female fan writing that got its start by reimagining the yin-yang pairing of one cool Vulcan and one hot-headed Human as a swishy, swoony gay romance. Then came Wolverine/Cyclops. Sam/Frodo. Harry/Ron.

To my surprise, this was hardly news to one of my two Chinese companions. Meh, she shrugged. Yeah, lots of people here knew all about Wolverine's irrepressible attraction to one laser-eyed, mutant boy scout from the Chinese fan fic sites out there. And of course, she told me, now that the new Star Trek film had premiered in China, there will be some creative photoshopping of Zachary Quinto (Spock) and Chris Pine (Kirk) into making googly eyes at each other on the internet. She didn't get Sam/Frodo, though. Frodo was pretty enough but Sam? Definitely not worthy of the Japanese-influenced, Chinese fantasy of "Boy Love" between "Bishies" (Japanese: Bishonen/Chinese:美少年/English: Beautiful [Male] Youth). And she had only one thing to say about Harry/Ron: eeeeeeeewwwwwww. Way too pre-pubescent for some BL (Boy Love) by Chinese standards.

Self-proclaimed "Rotten Girls" (腐女), i.e., the Chinese readers and writers of BL, differ somewhat from their American counterpart in the slash fiction world. While in the U.S., it's been largely college-educated older women (geeky "cougars," if you will..) swapping homoerotic fantasies of comic book superheroes, TV and film characters and even a few real-life heartthrobs, in China "Boy Love" has been strictly a school girl obsession with fans ranging from middle school through college. At least where I am in China, this phenomenon seemed to have exploded overnight less than a decade ago when teen girls everywhere began to quietly seek out and circulate illicit translations of classic Japanese BL among themselves (very much behind their parents' and teachers' backs). A sly pun on the term for "woman" (fùnǚ: 妇女), "Rotten Girls" (fǔnǚ: 腐女) seemed, thus far, to have been masters at flying under the radar. They appear to have no distinguishing fashion sense and could be your average hyperstudious, exam-oriented teen. They may be getting all hot and bothered over 'mo fantasies but they're doing so through the very introspective signs of the model guai (乖, well-behaved) child: by staying put at home and clocking in hours and hours of reading and computer "work" in the privacy of their own bedrooms.

A whole underground industry has since blossomed around the voyeuristic pleasure of teen girls for fey dudes boinking with Chinese writers joining the ranks of their Japanese predecessors in producing their own BL manga and original fiction. Some of this can be purchased from the shady corners of small, backstreet bookshops and news stands. Even more of it can be seen on the internet. And speaking of the aforementioned boinking, it seems like their Japanese counterparts, these Chinese tales of gay lust have also taken a turn in recent years from queer "Gone with the Wind" territory to more "Debbie [read: Dudley] Does Dallas" graphic. [Historical side note: this is nicely captured by the transformation of the old Japanese acronym for this type of fan fic, Yaoi, from "Yama nashi, ochi nashi, imi nashi" (No climax, no point, no meaning) to "Yamete, oshiri ga itai" (Stop, my butt hurts!).] I must admit: I didn't dive too deeply into the nitty gritty Barthesian turn of the BL texts available at the slew of makeshift book stalls I checked out. But the recovering ex-Rotten Girl I knew sure did blush the shade of Boy George's kisser when she described the "reality effect" of the new pile-on, more-is-more approach to bishie hook ups (bodices popping and whatnot no more than three pages into a story...).

I was also struck by how these girls seem to be fantasizing not only about pretty boys who dug each other but about decidedly Euro-looking pretty boys with glam duds and emo haircuts to boot. People say the original Japanese BL bubbled out of the potent '70s milieu of Ziggy Stardust/David Bowie and self-consciously traces its genealogy back to the late 19th century effete movement of aestheticism and its star pupil, Oscar Wilde (another name for Japanese and Chinese BL fans is danmei or 耽美, short for 耽美主义 or aestheticism). Somewhere along the way Todd Haynes' cinematic homage to the glam, polyamorous days of his youth, Velvet Goldmine, also snuck its way into the Rotten Girl blogosphere with its fictionalized Bowie, Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers: above in full androgynous, glam regalia), added to the pantheon of lust-worthy bishie idols.

I'm betting that there is a new real-life bishie about to break big on the Rotten Girl scene in Japan, China and wherever else "Boy Love" rules. I don't know if it's by way of self-conscious, manga fashioning or sheer cultural osmosis but you can't deny the uncanny BL fit of America's (and the global blogosphere's) most recent queer pop obsession:

Whole Lotta Boy Love: popular "Rotten Girl" manga and the bishie-worthy Glambert.

strait in/out of china: part 2 (finally...)

2009-05-24T01:28:00.000-07:00

In case you're wondering what the hell happened en route to Taiwan (and back), dear reader (and I mean that in the singular, since I know there is just one teeny tiny one of you still interested), well like many in my profession I sorta got sucked into the black hole of fieldwork and fieldnotes. You know, that thing we do where we act like harmless sponges soaking up the scene around us, roaming (or "Rome-ing"?) like Romans, "deeply" hanging out, etc. etc. while trying to quickly unload it all on the computer screen in one frantic, carpal tunnel-inducing sitting before the impressions evaporate from our brain cells, tragically never to be seen again like Patrick Swayze and his mullet fading before Demi Moore's eyes in that classic cinematic tale (oh yeah, early 90s pop culture reference coming your waaaaay), Ghost. Yes, it's true: I'm disposed to get all Unchained-Melody-weepy when some details elude me in my professional recaps of life in "the field."

OK, I hate to admit it but I was also furtively watching downloaded episodes of, um, American Idol Season 8, AKA "The Adam Lambert Show," when I should have been tapping away here to all my peeps. I know, I know, what can I say? I've always been a sucker for androgynous vamping (and lemme tell you, the Chinese have been too! More on THAT later in the *next* post, er, i.e., when/if I ever get to it...).

A mad world indeed (badabing).

So a good, ahem, month and a half later, let me try to return to the scene of my Cross-Strait adventure when I was but a fresh-faced, wee traveler about to embark on a connecting flight (via Hong Kong) out to Taipei and return on a direct flight back to Fuzhou. First of all, the shoes stayed on. Oh yeah, no Richard-the-shoebomber paranoia here at the security checkpoint in China (as in Germany, UK, and all the other non-Kiefer-Sutherland-24-obsessed nations in the world). Leaving the Mainland for Hong Kong used to hold a bit of political and social cache. In the past, I recall getting at least a smidgen of CSI-kind of love for my passport mug shot and my actual muckety mug from the ticket agents and customs inspectors I encountered on HK flights in Fuzhou. This last time it was all so ho-hum and quick. I barely got a look at either my documents or my ole self before they were coldly handling me my ticket and giving me that bitchy "NEXT!" kiss-off. If it used to have a cool, jetsetting master-of-the-universe feel to get the green light past the velvet rope to the HK gate, now it was more like catching the subway in NYC or more like getting your sorry tourist ass on the broken down, rickety ferry from Long Beach, CA to dinky Catalina Island. No longer ambiguous territorially like Taiwan (is it or isn't it part of China?), Hong Kong was now more like any other domestic destination. Not surprisingly this is how customs and immigration protocol played out on my way to my gate and my flight.

And Hong Kong to Taipei? It was the consummate Hong Kong transit experience, by which I mean, the trek to my connecting flight was like being trapped in a shopping mall that stretched on for infinity (which is really how it felt like walking around HK itself: where you couldn't get out of one dizzying shopping mall without finding yourself frustratingly sucked into another, the malls were like the little urban virus that could...). This was only punctuated by the Taiwanese passengers who were on the same original flight as me and who skipped merrily into the Hong Kong terminal with the joyful clarion call: "Let's go look at handbags and oh, the Ralph Lauren store! (insert: psychic squeeeeeeeee!!)." They definitely seemed more excited about the time they had between flights than in getting to their final destination. I made my now obligatory pit stop in HK to my preferred American franchise away from home, Starbucks, and stocked up on some fuel, "grande" style (coffee is too good of a word for this stuff). Then it was to Gate 21 where a good half of the same crowd from Fuzhou were gathered with their newly acquired Ralph Lauren shopping bags, etc.

"You're a Professor????" the immigration officer asked me when I handed him my customs declaration form at Taipei International Airport. I know, I know, I was thinking: I still get the three-hour undergrad book reserve treatment at the university library unless I emphasize key phrases like "this is for the class I'm, um, TEACHING." It didn't help, probably, that I'd opted for contacts rather than the usual nerd-glasses-means-I-can-maybe-just-MAYBE-be-a-Prof-oh-thank-you-very-much-asshole look. Okay, it was not like the immigration officer did not believe I was who I said I was. He did his usual spiel of what are you doing here, how long, etc. And yes, contrary to the subway turnstile experience at Fuzhou Airport, this dude was playing the international flight/passenger game. I may have left the Mainland as part of a domestic herd like so many beaten-down, shuttle riders on an RTD bus in Compton, but I was arriving in Taipei like Cheech and Chong crossing the Tijiuana-San Diego border (minus the ganja, but with proper documents). So it seems the connecting flight was part domestic, part international, if you follow the customs/immigration inspection scripts that were being played out between the checkpoint for departure at Fuzhou airport and the one for entry in Taipei.

On my way back, I had deliberately booked the cross-strait direct flight from Taipei to Fuzhou for comparative shits-and-giggles. After some mysterious, backroom tussling between the "non-governmental" cross-strait representatives for Taiwan and PRC, it had been decided that direct flights from the Mainland would be routed to Taipei's Domestic Songshan Airport smacked in the middle of the city rather than its official International Airport in the outskirts. So guess who won the political smackdown in that series of negotiations? As my own mother huffed, it ain't Taibao (Taiwanese Compatriot, as the mainlanders termed their cross-straits neighbors), it's Daibao ("Stupid" Compatriot). Adding perhaps insult to injury for the likes of mommy dearest, we were greeted as we pulled up to the domestic airport by the cuddly, smiling visages of China's newest "gift" to Taiwan: the panda bears, Tuantuan and Yuanyuan (whose names combined to make the word, "togetherness" or "reunion"). There they were two black and white smiling blobs gracing the main sign welcoming you to Taipei's domestic airport. Awww, you ask, how can any Taiwanese hate on such adorable, roly poly pandas? Well, that's probably how some people in Troy looked at that cute wooden horse given to them by those sneaky Greeks, so some self-proclaimed non-Daibao Taiwanese insist. There’s much more to say about these two pandas and the great, if politically awkward, April Fool's hoax concocted by the Taipei Times. But I'm just going to leave you to read all about that by yourself:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2009/04/01/2003439917

The terminal for the direct Xiamen Airlines flight had such the creepy, barren echo of the Catskills hotel in The Shining that I almost expected to hear the screeching calls of "Red Rum! Red Rum!" or see Jack Nicholson's Chinese doppelganger limping down the hallway with a bloody ax in tow (well, him or those scary bug-eyed twins!). But alas, at one far end of the otherwise empty terminal, there was a long line of passengers snaking around a u-shaped counter. On the left side of the counter, the sign read "Domestic." On the other, "International." Guess where this line was forming? Yes, it was all Cheech, all Chong, all the way to the ticket counter. Dammit, I thought, this is one long muthafrakin' line. Despite feeling like I got there waaaay early for the flight, a good 1.5 hours early, I knew I was in for a long wait. Maybe the problem was that I had calculated how early I had to be at the airport based on the wrong logic (domestic flight = 1 hour). By international flight standards, I was cutting it a little bit close (international = 2 hours). This was what happens when your flight is having an identity crisis or can't stop being coy about which way its door swings (sorry, minor Glambert brain fart!). By the looks of how the airline agents at the counter were scanning people's faces and paperwork like hungry hawks, yeah, this one was singing "I am International, hear me roar."

“Must be so nice to have an U.S. passport,” the agent manning the security checkpoint told me after he recovered from his Macauley-Culkin-worthy double take (American document? Daibao face? Beep! Beep! Beep! Does Not Compute! Does Not C-O-M-P-U-T-E!!). I took it that the airport security folks like him have not seen many U.S. passports on these direct cross-strait flights since they launched them last July. “You can go anywhere with this, eh?” he continued. “No problems, right?” I thought this last one was a trick question and he was going to punk me with “well, sorry, MoFo, you’re going to the interrogation room tonight! MOOHOOHAHA!!!!” Instead, he just waved me forward after I did the nervous laughing shuffle and blurted out all Rainman-like, “heh heh heh heh yeah yeah yeah not bad not bad not bad” (yes, it’s a double shout out to Dustin Hoffman and Home Alone, if you’re keeping track at home, homeys!).

You see, there was something mind-blowing about trekking across the Straits with one single passport. Taiwanese and Chinese traveling this route were not so privileged and had to lug around multiple documents for multiple checkpoints: a national passport for their own national gatekeepers, an alternative ID for their Cross-Strait neighbor to skirt that very “national” question, an exit-entry permit (don’t call it a visa, puleeease, we’re still in Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask, mutual non-state non-recognition mode here!). Enter the non-passport “resident” booklet issued by both the PRC and ROC. It might not carry the national insignia but as they say, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, well...OK: maybe it’s really a platypus. Born to confound the international/domestic divide?

Non-Passport for Mainlanders (Left); ditto for Taiwanese (Right).

privy redux

2009-04-07T06:28:00.000-07:00

Having submitted ourselves to the sundry charms of the Japanese toilet on our first day in Taipei, it only seemed appropriate that M and I book-ended our short trip with a visit to the Taiwanese mecca of corpophagous fantasies.

Originally, both M and I had assumed that something as quirky as a toilet themed restaurant (its catchphrase: Go To Toilet!! Deliver Ur Shit) had to be a one-off. As it turned out, Modern Toilet was a successful franchise with branches all over Taiwan, the McDonald's for those comfy in the Freudian second phase, where in lieu of the Golden Arches you get its signature, gleaming bowl of simulacra crap. A place for reclaiming the shit-eating grin.

Somehow we both got it into our heads that this was going to be the pinnacle of sophisticated, naughty kitsch, a place overflowing with the Taiwanese version of early John Waters characters reveling in their own carnal excesses (a la Divine, that fecal-loving behemoth of a tranny...). A Rabeliasian rabble of the highest order. We were giddy all week just thinking about it while winding our way through Kaohsiung and Pingtung, Sun Moon Lake and Taichung. Ah, what strange gratification it was going be to cap off our last night with a swirly scoop of the restaurant's iconic chocolate ice cream delivered in a ceramic squat style toilet bowl. Maybe we'd even sample its shaved ice offerings of "bloody poop" (shaved ice with strawberry sauce) or "green dysentery" (with mung beans). Heehee, haha, we kept snickering and fantasizing to ourselves all week.

Perhaps we should have known that our visit to Modern Toilet would not live up to our hopes/hype when our Kaohsiung hosts, who turned out to be frequent diners at the branch in town, soberly described its attractions to us in terms of its reasonable prices, convenience and cleanliness. This was no ringing, John Waters kind of endorsement. More like lukewarm, Ron Howard fare or dare I say it (for you movie buffs), like a Brett-stinking-Ratner review of the positives of mass consumption.

Inside at the Ximending Taipei branch of the restaurant, M and I seemed to be the only ones making a carnivalesque spectacle out of our faux fecal matter. There we were playing with our food and hamming it up for our digital camera while next to us, a family of three was quietly and neatly finishing up their dinner. The mother gently nudged her plump bespectacled child to eat another bite of their family-sized dessert while the husband checked the text messages on his cell phone at the table. Forget that they were playing out this scene while sitting on closed toilet bowls instead of dining chairs and scooping tawny brown mush out of another giant toilet bowl on the table. It might as well have been any other family meal. Behind us, two twenty-something women were blankly taking sips of juice from miniature ceramic urinals while engrossed in hushed conversation with each other. The staff, with their generic polite shouts of welcome and brisk distribution of menus and orders, seemed equally immune to the unique charms of their surroundings. From the looks of all these people around us, we might as well have been in a TGI Fridays, Denny's or other generic chain restaurant. It all seemed so ho-hum to everyone but us. We were the freaks in our own freak show while everyone was just trying to have a decent, inexpensive meal. The very mundane nature of it all made it (and us) seemed even weirder.

Oh, and about the food: we ordered two small orders of ice cream (more like soft serve)---one chocolate, one chocolate and vanilla swirl. Flavor-wise both ice creams were on the watery and bland side, though the chocolate one did not disappoint visually. We didn't finish either toilet bowl of goop but we did manage to make a muck of the chocolate one to the point of grossing ourselves out before hightailing it back to our hotel. So without further adieu, for your scopic pleasure (especially you secret corpophages)...

privy desires

2009-03-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

Most people who have been around Taiwanese of a certain age (and certain class status) should be familiar with their pervasive colonial nostalgia and desire for all things Japanese; a yearning traced to a supposedly gentler and kinder occupation the Taiwanese endured under the Japanese (from 1895 until the end of WWII) before Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT arrived to impose martial law and to summarily expunge anyone with a whiff of Marxist sympathies following the Communist takeover of China in 1949. Sure, the Japanese treated the Taiwanese as second-class citizens and did their share of cracking down on "trouble makers" among their colonized subjects. But hey, at least the Japanese also genuinely advanced Taiwan's "development," so people today claimed. The Japanese built crucial infrastructure. They modernized the economy. They introduced all sorts of new technology. Chiang and his gang? Just take a look at the memorial marking the favorite pavilion of the Generalissimo and his cosmopolitan Wellesley-educated wife, Madame Chiang née Song Meiling at Taiwan's famed Sun Moon Lake. If you squint, you might be able to make out the former KMT leader's name underneath all the black blotches and furious scratch marks which more than one visitor scrawled across every mention of "Chiang" in his otherwise pristine dedication. How do people feel about "outsiders" from China today? No one will admit it but just ask them to expound on their experiences with all people and things "Made in China." It ain't pretty. No sireebob.

Japanese things, in contrast, especially Japanese technology, have remained potent fetishes of sorts. Even after Japan's decade-long economic free fall after the 1997 Asian crash, the words "Made in Japan," persists as a durable chant of commodity magic for any product, high or low, among the Taiwanese. Case in point: take this much-touted toilet at a very new boutique hotel in Taipei where I crashed when I first arrived last week in Taiwan.

It's a true point of pride on the hotel's website (not to mention one of the reasons for its high ratings among the largely Overseas Taiwanese cum Chinese/American netizens on Trip Advisor!). I can't deny being seduced myself by all the hotel PR and online ravings about the distinctive Japanese ingenuities of this toilet. Squatters may have their social charms and health claims (if you don't know, don't ask). Bidets their Euro-Francophile fans. The Japanese toilet? Let's just say it's a bit like the Stepford Wife of the lot. High-tech. Sleek. Seductively familiar yet NOT. It automatically opens and closes its lid when you walk by as if doing a half-bow or kow-tow. The seat is temperature controlled. It seems warm and inviting at first. It beckons. You sit. Whaddyaknow, it's pretty ergonomic too. Then there are those many buttons. Bouncing cute or kawaii like much of Japanese illustrations and characters. So Pikachu, you just want a stuffed toy version of those curly w's.

But then from the hotel bedroom, I hear my partner try his luck with all those buttons for the first time. Initially all I hear is some hysterical giggling--a sound of shock and icky delight I recognized too well from my earlier test drive of this Japanese wonder. A primordial carnal yelp of Freudian proportions. But soon this fades into a drawn out beat of silence. Just as suddenly I hear a panicked call from the privy: "Whaohaaaaah, hey, HEY! How do you make it stop? Make it stop! Staaaaaaaahp!"

Don't worry. No one was physically harmed in the tale recounted above (though I cannot vouch for psychic and/or social injuries, especially after publishing this post...apologies in advance, m). What the toilet actually did, I leave you to puzzle over for yourself via the buttons pictured above just as my partner and I did as non-Japanese readers (though knowing Chinese certainly helps). Let's just say it's my way of extending the magic of the fetish, "Made in Japan," while tapping away on my computer in Nippon-happy Taiwan.

Next time: privy redux (or Taiwanese consumerism at its most, um, how can I put it...to borrow from my buddy Alex, it's seriously un heimlich).

strait in/out of china: part 1

2009-03-04T22:57:00.000-08:00

I'm trying to figure out what it's like to be one of these smiling men (sans the adoring reporters and red carpet treatment). Who are they, you ask. Well, well...they are the first passengers on the first direct flight from Fuzhou to Taiwan in fifty years. They're the Neil Armstrongs of a new Post-Mao venture into a former no-man's land (er, no-man's space, really) hereon known as the 海峡两岸 or "Cross-Strait." Until recently, this was simply "the Strait," no criss-crossing about it from Taiwan to China (or vice versa) given the ongoing disputes about what kind of place is Taiwan (China's renegade province or its own nation-state?). The dispute is not really settled yet, just awkwardly deferred in favor of what the folks negotiating have noted as more "technical" matters like, um, wait for it..."advancing tourism and trade"!

"Cross-Strait" is not unlike cross-dressing, so to speak. Cross it at your own risk. At this early juncture ("opened" since late last December), it's not meant for the shy and unimaginative (ready cash, connections & passport are nice too). Like cross-dressing, "Cross-Strait" is also a kind of repetition with a difference, miming the gestures of territorial space while neither really here nor there, neither 国际 (international) nor 国内 (domestic). How do I know? Well, I've been asking around for a ticket on one of these flights. Needless to say, it's all such a new thing here that no one---from travel agents to tour operators to local "cultural exchange" officials---understand exactly how and who can get on one of these planes. Especially someone like me who is neither here nor there, neither "Taiwanese" per se nor "Chinese" per se. These days people here say you can order up a plane tix on the web, no problem. So I surfed around and what do you know, the only options on all web templates for flight selection are either 国际 (international) or 国内 (domestic). Try to select Fuzhou to Taipei on the "domestic" flight page and the result is a "sorry, your data do no compute" message. Try again with the "international" page: ditto. Seems those webfolks know a pandora's box when they see one and have judiciously decided to leave "Cross-Strait" alone for now rather than work it into their nicely functioning web templates for flight selection. Wise, very wise. Me on the other hand? I'm gunning to traverse this newfangled (air)space. They say you have a choice of Taiwanese or Chinese specialties on board. They say they've assigned their "best" staff to these planes. They say "everyone" is welcome to board...er, well, YES, if you have a Taiwanese "compatriot" certificate (no Taiwanese passports, please; it's like a fake ID to the PRC) or if you are a Mainlander, yes, you are welcome too but only if you travel in pre-authorized tour groups of 10+folks and you are all accounted for at each leg of departure and arrival. Oh, then there's some throwaway line about how "other foreign nationals" can board too. The specifics on that last one? Still stuck in that no-man's land. So that leaves me somewhere in between, too.

Stay tuned for Part II when I attempt to do my actual crossing of the Strait.