Friends of mine in the States have already written telling me to delete my post about China’s gays. But I’d hope that readers can see it is intended as an observation and not a critique — it’s the way life is here, and I want those who know me to know what I’m seeing and experiencing. It’s certainly worse in some countries and better in others. And it is also improving here — there is no doubt about that, and things are moving in the right direction, if at a painfully slow pace. I have to praise the powers that be (and I mean this) for relaxing antique laws and attempting to bring China up to speed with the rest of the “modern world” in terms of its economic and social policies. At least the present generation of young people have more hope than those who preceded them, and a new mindset can’t take hold overnight. But there is no denying the heartbreaking loneliness that these people are experiencing, especially those who are becoming more liberalised, going to good schools for their high-level degrees and achieving successes the likes of which their parents could only have dared to dream. These young people know that they have everything except love and happiness, and that is a very sad realization indeed.

Coming to terms with being gay, no matter how liberal or conservative the society, is difficult and painful. The realization that you must live a life very different from that of your brothers and sisters, and that much of society sees you as somehow “wrong” or “bad” can never be easy to accept. Here, where there is such a small and undeveloped gay community to offer the support that is so essential when we are young — that’s the unique challenge of growing up gay over here. I think it is changing and will change even more dramatically in the future. But for these young people trying to come to grips with their sorrow today, that cannot be much consolation.

Memories of 911

I just spent about half an hour perusing a site dedicated to Father Mychal Judge, the NYFD chaplain killed by falling debris during the 911 horror. I haven’t felt so in touch with my emotions in a long time, despite some of the site’s more maudlin aspects. Don’t go there without some tissues in easy reach.

It brought on a flood of memories. I was sitting in a Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong having dinner when my closest friend from America called me on my mobile and told me he had just heard on the radio about the two planes hitting the World Trade Center and that experts were trying to determine the odds of two such “accidents” taking place within minutes of one another. It was just an accident, totally amazing, a fluke. It wasn’t until I got home half an hour later that I learned what had really happened, and I, like so many millions, stood there transfixed and in utter disbelief as the America we knew vanished before our eyes. I tried to call my parents but the lines were jammed all night. Not being in America, I think I had no way of knowing, of feeling just how anguished the country was. I remember talking with some English colleagues shortly afterward, and hearing them say how awful it was, but that maybe it would be a wake-up call to Americans about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. Somehow they saw that little sliver of a country as being responsible for bringing death into this world and all our woes, and being the source for all of the Middle East’s inhumanities. No, I don’t mean to get into a discussion of that now….it was just that in Hong Kong, I didn’t feel the pulse of what was going on in my country, television simply couldn’t do it.

Interrupted by a phone call, which I will definitely write about shortly.

And now I can get back onto my site and all the others. I have no idea why I couldn’t get onto any blogspot site for more than half an hour. It’s kind of eerie. If it gets blocked again today. it really will be Chinese water torture.

Is this what they mean by Chinese Water Torture?

Just when it seemed all was back to normal, it appears the ban on blogspot.com sites is back. I am careful to say it appears that way, because it may be too early to tell. All I know is that once again I can no longer log onto any blogspot site, my own included, of course.

I was reading my daily dose of The Gweilo Diaries’ latest, and clicked on his link to China Hand, a blogspot site. Oddly enough, the home page opened for about two seconds, then the dreaded Cannot Find Server message appeared. I tried several more times, same thing. It opened and I got a 2-second glimpse, then it closed. I tried to access my own site, same thing.

Is this a game of cat and mouse, where we get 48 hours of hope and then it’s dashed? I hope not, but right now I don’t know what else to think.

Peking Duck — my first time attempting to upload with BlogSpot+/BloggerPro. Seems to work.

Another interesting day here, not nearly as bad as yesterday’s banking calamity but certainly more surreal. We went to visit one of the major Chinese media (I’d rather not say which one). The media here are run by the state, and this was my first face-to-face encounter with The Media. The first thing you notice as you step into the large building are the two uniformed guards, each standing on his own little platform on the side of the main door. At first they look like a low-budget version of those famous guards in London, the ones in the brilliant red uniforms and the tall furry hats who never change their facial expression. Indeed, across from their Beijing counterparts stands a large sign in Chinese warning vistors, “Do not disturb the poise of the guards” (or so my colleague translated it). These guards also carry guns in prominent brown holsters strapped around their green coats.

We had an appointment with an executive, and at first it seemed all would go smoothly. My Chinese colleague went into a little office to get us our guest passes, handed them to me and my Western colleague and the poker-faced guards let us through. But moments later, as we waited for the exceptionally slow elevator, we heard a lady yelling that we had to come back. It turns out, since two of us weren’t Chinese we needed a different type of badge, one for waiguoren. Being from America, this is kind of surprising — and I know, I need to understand that they think differntly here than they do in America and things are different and all that. Fine. I enjoy different cultures. But to differentiate people strictly because their eyes are shaped differently or their skin color is different — that just doesn’t sit well with me. Yes, I am a foreigner and I respect that foreigners might need a special badge. But if so, they should ask all visitors for their passport or ID — anyone American who happens to have Asian parents or Asian features could walk right in. It’s only visitors who have different eyes and skin color who are stopped. Okay, okay I know I’ve got to be tolerant. I tried, I promise. But I was with a colleague, also a Westerner, who has lived here for 12 years and he was more upset than I was. (Just think about how this would go over in the US, stopping only people whose eyes are shaped like this or skin color is like that. And I know, this isn’t the US. And it is still discriminating based 100 percent on race.) I wasn’t really angry, just perplexed. And I certainly wasn’t shocked; nothing shocks me here anymore. We then had to wait about 10 minutes for our “special” card for people with white skin and round eyes, and we were personally escorted by someone from the badge office. There were all sorts of other interesting aspects of this meeting (it was the first time I ever saw one of those tinted-globe-covered video cameras, recording every gesture and syllable, in a conference room) that will go into my book.

I had an awful day today. A classically bad day. At one point I was sure I was going to simply resign and go home. Home, as in America. And why was my day so bad? Because I had to go to the bank, because I need to get money wired to America to pay my mortgage there. Only the banks in Beijing don’t like people trading RMB, the currency of the PRC, for US dollars. It means less money will be spent here in China. They like to keep the money here, as RMB, and they are masterful at erecting every conceivable obstacle to letting you change RMB and spend it in another country. It’s very easy to take US money and put it into a bank in China. But oh, is it hard getting it out, at least as dollars.

The bottom line is that I simply could not do it. I failed. I thank God I recognized several weeks ago that this could become a huge headache for me, and my company has agreed to pay my salary directly into my not-in-China bank account starting February 1. I won’t go into how I finally got the money to wire to the US; let’s just say it wasn’t easy and I hope I never have to go through such an ordeal again.

It is at moments like this, when I was in the bank nearly in tears, that I really wonder what the fuck I am doing here. If I told you the bureaucratic hoops I had to jump through today (all to absolutely no avail) you simply wouldn’t believe me.

AMAZING — I JUST LOGGED ONTO MY BLOG, AND I CAN ACCESS IT AGAIN!

Let’s keep our fingers crossed. Tightly.

I got an email from a former colleague of mine whom I haven’t seen in five years. She mentioned the desperate state of affairs in once-almighty Silicon Valley, where we worked together in the mid-90s. Here is my response to her, which pretty well sums up my state of mind:

Dear —-,

Thanks so much for writing back; your email really touched me. I’m sorry about your mother, of course, and wonder how I will deal with such inevitabilities as my father approaches 80 and my mother 75. I guess I got some good practice when I lost my brother back in 1996, but I still haven’t gotten over that event, and I am far closer to my parents than I ever was to him.

I can especially relate to your husband’s plight. Our lives were about limitless opportunity and wealth, calls from frantic headhunters, obscenely bloated salaries and endless perquisites, overpriced dinners and lavish vacations. And we took it all for granted. Today my significant other gave me a frantic call — if I can’t wire some money soon, I could lose my house in Arizona. I can take care of it and I won’t lose the house, but it’s such a different world, and at times I really wonder whether I can survive. This overnight transformation from boundless success to agonizing limitations (if not downright poverty) can really make one wonder about his very life, its purpose, whether every decision made was a wrong one — and then there’s the accompanying sense of desperation and dread: this is my LIFE, and it appears wholly invalidated. This can make for a powerful mid-life crisis indeed, and I have thought of running away myself. We thought we had it all figured out, that we were invulnerable….

As for returning, my life is at the moment a huge question mark. I believe I will stick it out in Beijing for another 9 months or so and leave before winter sets in (and in Beijing, winter starts in mid-October). There are people I miss so much, and when I think of them I just want to run home, forever. I stay for one reason: I am in a good job with a good company, and this is the smartest move I can think of for my future. As you know too well, there aren’t alternatives growing on trees anymore. When I do go back, it will have to be to Phoenix, to my cats and to my house and my family. We won’t be too far apart, and maybe we can find a way to meet. (Who would have known that day when I met you at your home that it would be so many years before we saw one another again?)

Okay, enough sentimentalizing. Have a wonderful trip to Europe, and if the plane stops at Beijing to refuel please give me a call. Take care.

A thought-provoking article in Foreign Policy magazine on whether war with Iraq is necessary. I’ve never felt quite so conflicted about foreign policy before. I want us to go into Iraq and decimate Saddam & Co. But I am not convinced he poses a true threat to the US, now or in the future. Frankly, I’m more scared of the psychos in North Korea.

The article’s most compelling argument is that we can deter Saddam fairly easily if we wanted to:

“It [deterrence] only takes a leader who wants to stay alive and who wants to remain in power. Throughout his lengthy and brutal career, Saddam Hussein has repeatedly shown that these two goals are absolutely paramount. That is why deterrence and containment would work. If the United States is, or soon will be, at war with Iraq, Americans should understand that a compelling strategic rationale is absent. This war would be one the Bush administration chose to fight but did not have to fight. Even if such a war goes well and has positive long-range consequences, it will still have been unnecessary….”

I guess all these arguments are beside the point, since it’s fairly obvious we’ll be at war within three weeks. I do think the world will be a better place without him. Since we are going in, let’s just hope we know what we’re doing and know the way out.

I just find the whole thing a bit surreal. How did it all shift from Osama to Saddam? What happened?