happy wuhan-lockdown anniversary

A year ago I was thinking that I should reserve these photos I took from Jan to March 2020 in Wuhan for a proper channel to release them. But as lockdowns have become the most banal and universal experience of 2020 (with very few exceptions) and I, for one, forgot about the matter entirely until a super quiet anniversary that no one seems to care. So I am just going to exhibit them here.

Lockdown diet from Jan to March 2020, in chronological order
It began with an emergency shopping in the early morning of 23rd 2020. Ge Yulu called me at 3am and told me to buy whatever from convenience stores before food and other necessities run out. I went to 5 24hr-convenience stores and bought 24 cup noodles and some other stuff. Lockdown began in full force later that day but we were good in terms of food during the first two weeks because mum stocked up plenty of dumplings and cabbage (which was intended for the CNY anyway). I preferred pan-fried dumplings. I loved snacks but those were certainly out of question as supermarket deliveries prioritised essentials. Those cup noodles became the rationed snacks I only consumed when I had trouble falling asleep late at night – it of course did not resolve the issue but it worked somehow as the comfort food at a time I unfortunately run out of Valium. Plenty of noodle supply – just need to find inventive ways to cook them and mum was exceptionally good at that. I craved snacks so mum and I made chips from raw potatoes, sliced them, fried them in oil, seasoned them, dried them, and stored them in a candy jars. Spring rolls – yum too. Half way through the lockdown as the supermarkets began to restock things other than essentials. Alcohol returned, first taste of wine in a month was amazing – it was really shitty wine but who cared, then came the beer, and yes with peanuts. Hot dried noodle was necessary for breakfast, it was Wuhan after all. I ate most of my breakfast at random hours – 5am, 10am, 12pm, 2pm. And finally when I got out for the first time in 66 days, I went to my uncle’s place and we together drunk 6 bottles of Penfolds – very mediocre but damn I passed out for the first time in 66 days.
Nail growth
I did my nails right before the lockdown, for the special occasion of CNY. But of course I ended up staying inside for 66 days and watched my nails grew. Vanity was not in vain.
(always)Bored(anyway)
I created a Chinese character out of boredom: a small person inside a door inside walls.
First outing on 26 March 2020
I went outside, with the last remaining KN95 mask, a bottle of sanitiser spray, gloves, and a pair of goggles. A lot of blockades, bulldozers, randomly parked cars, empty streets, workers in hazmat suits, and old people chilling outside with their masks on their chin. I went to see the riverside, too. The day ended with an optimistic note of a building lighting up ‘Hello Wuhan’.
The empty city centre on 26 March 2020

For the record.

Yuepao, or, Impotence of Desire

This unfinished fieldnote was originally written in 2016 as a continuation of an earlier research interest of mine: how dating apps work in China but it was never published. And as my first fieldwork in 2014 (initial findings can be found in the essay “Stranger Stranger or Lonely Lonely?”) really just shows, dating apps are rarely about casual sex for most people – it’s many things, but mostly social, and not necessarily the enduring social. The casualness was not in sex but the ephemeral social connection. But then when I actually go into the issue of casual sex, dating app gradually phases out of the picture. The following text is not a sociological rumination but entirely expressionistic abstraction from the countless conversations I had with Chinese men and women on the topic of sex and love in 2016.

Chinese men are sexually impotent. These are by no means issues of premature ejaculations, dysfunctional erections, or abnormal penis size. It is rather the insecurity deeply embedded in the often contrived social and sexual performance of (in)confidence. Maybe even most Chinese men are sexually impotent – a weirdly exaggerating statement maybe. But there is certainly an element of ethnographic truth in my statement. Maybe it is due to a different social convention of love, maybe it’s just a universal misconception of it emerging in the past 30 years.  It is essentially “instrumentalised love”, and sex in pursuing a relationship or the act of having sex.

A man told a female friend of his that he could last “exactly” (he said the word “exact” during the interview) 17 minutes. But to arrive at such an exact number, you would need to start the stopwatch before you penetrate and press again when you ejaculate. That is not even conceivable for me – how do you enjoy sex without suspending all other matters at hand? I thought sex requires uttermost concentration? The point is, why would you do such a thing? And then quote the number to his female friend (not the girl he had sex with while counting), a second girl for her opinion on his performance? It seems that the basic underlying assumption about modern love and sex (sex is built on love and sex is therefore a climax of an emotional intensity) has already been dismissed cynically. I am not building a moral high ground here but I am not sure if “objectifying the act of sex” should be considered as an empowered stance to the point that the phrase ‘making love’ is no longer making sense. The problem is not how many sexual partners you have at the same time, or how casual sex has become; it is rather how love is completely out of picture. Some are frustrated because they are incapable of loving, which is not a “sexual” frustration. Like how Chinese phrase “yuepao” goes: “date for a cannon/shot” (a euphemism for sex). Love is forbidden, avoided and even when encountered, suppressed.

Another woman who regularly dates guys from the internet for casual sex is actually a very “obedient” daughter in “real life” (her own words). Real Life refers to how she presents herself to her colleagues and parents. She goes home before midnight every single night but dates 2 or 3 different guys every week. To maintain her image for her parents as well as those who are not in the know, she never stays overnight at hotels so she only pays at an hourly rate and goes home on time afterwards. She works at a bank so whenever she has a date she leaves work early to go to a hotel but tells her parents that she will be working overtime, which is totally normal for bank employees. She then falls in love with a boy much younger than her after several dates, not in the monogamous and exclusive sense but in the sense she thinks of him more often than other guys. She proceeds to date more random guys to distract her from the preoccupation with the young boy. In other words, love interest and the fact that she often thinks of him and talks about him in front of her only colleague in-the-know makes her feel insecure and this insecurity or fear for love leads to more casual sex.

The male impotence is not simply insecurities about sexual performance but the assumption of how to attract girls (i.e. the process of forging an emotional relationship, before “getting laid”) is often based on the model of (cross checked and verified therefore repeatable) techniques. Of course, this happens in all cultures- rituals to prepare for sex. To send flowers, send repetitive mundane messages to express care, wait outside her workplace and walk her home, deliver food to her place, appear without prior notice; all of them can be romantic but also borderline harassment depending on the perspective. It seems to me it is either bombardments of performances of “care” or quite the opposite of it: indifference and even embarrassment after the act of sex. Yuepao has become so “professional”- sex is merely sex, you supposed to cut off immediately after the act of sex. Sexual desire is now a need to be fulfilled in the act of sex and that fulfilment is the conclusion whereas in the last generation (who grew up in the danwei system) sex is an FINAL affirmation of an established relationship. I am merely suggesting an inversion: sex is now often treated the conclusion rather than the start of a new love relationship.

Some women are therefore tired of the “contradictory desires” (as an informant puts it) for sex and longing to be loved. Yuepao is a temporary contract, under which a sexual performance is promised but love interests are not encouraged and at times even actively avoided. On the other hand, women are bored of yuepao, the instrumentalising of “care” and even heterosexual men in general. They want company but the company of the opposite sex usually results in sex. Some even experimented with homosexuality, not necessarily for sex but the emotional need. I am not sure if feminism has become common knowledge but certainly independence, economic independence from men is what most women strive for. The family, especially in the traditional sense, has already collapsed since the moment of getting married. There is indeed a backdoor sexual revolution in the sense that some people are having way more sex and in all sorts of fashions. But more people are frustrated about relationship and sex – even more men and women have given up the thoughts/hopes of having sex with another person and building an intimate relationship altogether.

A Prelude to Shitfuturism (2010-2020)

Wangba persists, in the countryside.

Before leaving his county, Jin Lin used to work at an unnamed factory in Shenzhen, assembling motherboards during day shifts. The pay was meagre, but he could survive by staying at the cheap dorm and eating subpar set dinners at the canteen. The factory, and its adjacent complex of massive living quarters-or urban villages in the local colloquial term-are located at the peripheral of the migrant city. He mostly resisted temptation of visiting the city centre on Sundays and buying anything substantial, not even a non-shanzhai smartphone. While other workmates bought branded smartphones, browsed unaffordable goods in shopping centres, allured by prostitutes at massage parlors, his sole entertainment was baoye at a familiar wangba. Baoye means paying for the whole night, usually for 10yuan instead of paying an hourly rate, to stay at the wangba from midnight until early morning. While wallowing in permeating smoke and the scent of cheap cigarettes, he enjoyed browsing Tieba and pixelated images of Shamate girls in exaggerated hairstyles, taking selfies in front of the webcam, uploading them to QQzone, and talking to others in his Shamate clan on QQ. He wrote in QQzone blog with the Martian language input at 3am,

ㄞ隻⒋突繎詴些ńàń鐹っ突繎詴些涳虗っ突繎詴些мΙss尒っㄞ

[I am suddenly a bit sad, suddenly a bit hollow, suddenly a bit miss you.]

He was intrigued by melancholy as it seemed fashionable to melancholic. He heard of the “suicide waves” but he was relatively fortunate as his family did not rely on his remittances and he was not in debt. In other words, he was not alienated in the sense that he was rarely bored nor overworked. Simple rituals like baoye kept him withdrawn and away from the whirlpools of urban seductions and mental repercussions of capitalist exploitation.

Five years later Jin Lin found himself back at the county, his birthplace but erringly unfamiliar. He largely evaded the daunting urban growth by staying at the contact zone of the “connecting region between the city and countryside” but he had to confront this very nausea back home. His county town is now upgraded to a city, a fifth-tier city that is. While his cousins boasted their ventures in Shanghai and the older generation of ex-migrant workers complained about re-adapting to a quasi-rural life in the county (the improperly urbanised now) during family dinners, Jin Lin was unbearably bored, perhaps for the first time as he remembered. He never felt nostalgic towards the ordinary urban attractions—high rises, malls and luxuries were irrelevant to him. He is admittedly still attracted to wangba, which are no longer the centre of internet, for which it is the smartphone. Most of the members in his Shamate clans have left the cities and started families and worked in “proper” professions, not manufacturing nor hospitality but real estate. The greatest migration in human history seems to be imploding as migrants flow back. Jin Lin was indifferent as he knew he had zero chance in getting a wife.

The county is littered with heiwangba or “black (illegal) internet bars”, equipped with outdated and dusty hardware, occupied by underage teens playing online games, loitering while skipping school, flirting (both online and offline), smoking, and doing nothing. Just not long ago, a grandma rushed into the wangba with a machete looking for her grandson who had been missing for several days. At another wangba across the county, a primary school kid stabbed another schoolmate because he was told he sucked at League of Legends. Not to mention an unemployed twenty something guy died at another wangba the moment he stood up after sitting in the sofa for 36 hours reading a rather long but banal fantasy novel about a hopeless young guy just like him finding a new life (a fulfilling one at that) after time-travelling to Ming Dynasty. The owner of the wangba vanished after that incident and another owner reopened it under another name. Now the ceiling is leaking water from the rain, Jin Lin is rather annoyed but the guy sitting opposite is undisturbed and continues his killing spree in League of Legends while holding an umbrella with his neck and shoulder.

Jin Lin’s case is a weird mimicry based on a tunnel vision of urbanity and oblivious creation of a New aesthetics, which sometimes appears at the frontline of Chinese contemporary fashion/art/music, but sanitized of course. The excess of incivility and aesthetics of vulgarity engenders a specific production of the rural wangba space—the juxtaposition between an exoticized rustic life (for its supposed simpleness and uncultivated naivety) and the unrelenting and sometimes inexplicably weird adolescent boredom haunting rural life (which is hidden under the surface and much pathologized when exposed).

Diaries of Abstinence

This is the first post of a series of (un)translations of confessions, diaries, anecdotes I collected over the years from an anonymous discussion board. They are not correctly translated in entirety without omission but rather re-stylised, rewritten, fictionalised into this form (or lack of form) of colloquial internet writing. The original posts no longer exist so I cannot claim any integrity of the translator but my own experiments with these intimate tales of prohibition, guilt, and transgression.

“People born in A island think having girlfriend is illness”
(correction) “People live in A island think being in a relationship is a kind of illness”

Rhythm and Masturbation (R>M); Reinvented Classic Positions; ASS♂Drum (Wrong Position, Oops).

-I would like to clarify I don’t like this girl, I swear I don’t, but she looks like a bit like someone I was secretly in love with, or she simply fits into some traits I like, I really really don’t have any lewd thoughts about her. But damn I cannot control myself when I see her, my face turns red and my palm sweats and I act unnatural. I just want to be normal.

–cut
–it
-forever
–cured

-yo please fap and calm the fuck down

Entry#1 5-20-2014 I FINALLY CAME WHILE WATCHING CCTV NEWS
Entry#2 5-22-2014 I practiced magic five times yesterday! I felt terrible!
Entry#3 5-24-2014 I practiced magic three times yesterday, I can feel the pulsing pain! But Lotus books are irresistible.
Entry#4 5-26-2014 I practiced again last night, I woke up in the middle of night from a nightmare.
Entry#5 5-27-2014 I failed to practice last night. Sigh~~
Entry #6 6-1-2014 Scattered rains turning Windy.
I fapped today. I planned to quit it after getting a job. I felt terrible every time after I fapped, I despised myself, I need to work tomorrow.
I have accumulated so many dirty socks, I planned to buy new shoes and clothes today, I just got paid salary, but I failed to wake up because of the night shift, then I thought buying clothes is useless anyway, I only stay in the dorm and the factory, new clothes can only be stored in wardrobe. I fell asleep as I thought about these. Another idle and unfulfilling day, I will work hard tomorrow.
Entry #1 11-10-2014 Everyday I tell myself fapping twice a week is healthy. But I feel the impulse to watch porn at some point of the day every single day, then I just fapped, then I felt remorseful, I told myself abstinence, my little brother needs to rest as well.
Entry #2 11-10-2014 10pm, I should go to bed. I just saw a good doujin so I could not resist. Anyway, a fap is a fap. I really should not do it again tomorrow. Gonna shower and sleep.
Entry #3 11-11-2014 I could not sleep last night, so I tried to hypnotize myself by reading boring online fiction, fuck it, those kinds of stallion(alpha) males (genre). Fuck it, a fap is a fap. I need to stop today.
Entry #4 11-11-2014 I was supposed to write a diary of abstinence but anons kept posting names of these doujins in diaries…After I finished lunch, I read two doujins, one is Kusatsu Terunyo’s Pet Life. A black foreign student banging his classmate’s mum, that BBC was irresistible, fuck so slutty, I fapped again. I became this fapping fat loser under the bad influence of anons.
Entry#4 11-11-2014 I just saw a screenshot of my diary on Weibo. I feel like I is on television. I wanted to repost but no courage. If my diary of abstinence got recognised out by any acquaintance, they will laugh at me.

Endure it, resist the temptation.

Entry #5 11-12-2014 I did not practice magic today. It was a good day.
Entry #6 11-13-2014 I don’t even know how many times I did it. The materials were totally random from some nude models online and another doujin. Am I too high in androgen, my sexual desires are insatiable, my beard grows really fast, body hair as well.
Entry #7 11-16 I did some exercises today. Some pull-ups, the row machine.

I went to see Interstellar…I bought two tickets with such confidence and invited a girl I like.
.
.
.
.
But really, it felt really good to have a seat to put my bag while watching the movie.

-I am almost crying [at this sad tale]
-You can pull up the armrest in the middle and occupy both seats. No one will blame a fat ass like you.

-Anons, I want to experience being pissed on by a traveller/woman.
-Police uncle, this is the unidentifiable object
-no worries, you will feel the same if I piss on you.
-bullshit, traveller’s piss is in milk color.
-I wish to service her after her piss.
-truly perverted
-disgusting pervert, pervert, there is no dignity in you.
-so simple, just ask your mum to piss on your face.
-you only want to be a toilet
-how can you claim you love her if you cannot even drink her piss.
-piss is poisonous.

Entry #1 11-16-2014 First day of abstinence. Daka (punch the card), I deleted everything.
Entry #2 11-16-2014 I probably gonna regret it tonight.
Entry #3 11-17-2014 Second day is a success. I did not some indoor exercise.
Entry #4 11-18-2014 Third day is a success. I started jogging. I want to quit fapping and lose weight.
Entry #5 11-18-2014 Actually, once or twice a week is ok. Must live a positive life, do more exercise, don’t always browse this anon board.
Entry #6 11-19-2014 I am trying to catch up with exercise, but I have decided no more lewd fantasies before finding a girlfriend. Fourth day is a success, muscle training today, sleep la.
Entry #7 Fifth day is a success. I watched interstellar again. Still good.

-Working is so boring
-Schooling is so boring
-your two lines of diaries have summarised ten years of my life.
-Life is so boring.

>be me
>went out for a dinner this evening.
>saw a cutie hot chick having a coffee and a hotdog
>went to ask her cell number
>she slapped me

TRUE STORY

-I thought I was on 4chan.
-Shut up and stop shit posting.
-gay gun

I have discovered the eternal return of this anon board:

  • having a KFC bucket alone.
  • Shit
  • Fap

We also have mimicry (crossdressing)

Eavesdropping: Blind Masseurs on the Question of Technology

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(Picture is from an article entitled “Haptic Dreams of the Blind Masseurs“)

Blind Massage Parlour is an interesting place. It is probably one of few places in China where blindness can be blatantly and especially socially visible. Often all Chinese pedestrians’ lane have tracks for the visually impaired but they don’t seem to be regularly maintained or even properly built. In general, disability is purged from the main streets and of course result in poor chances in the job market. Blind Massage Parlour is, stereotypically, where (predominantly male) blind people work as masseurs. The urban myth is that blind people, since they cannot see, have enhanced haptic senses and strong hands. All that comes from training rather than natural talents of course but myth still persists to make blind people remain in their place.

I have a chronic neck problem but I cannot afford regularly doing massage in Australia. Blind massage parlour is very appealing to me because it is cheap and it does help with my neck pain. The following is a abridged conversation between three masseurs while they were massaging me and my two friends.

 

Masseur A: What phone are you using?

Masseur B: Just a Xiaomi. Why?

Masseur A: Xiaomi is pretty good these days. Xiaomi Mi Mix even has the full glass bezel-free display, super high resolution and good screen estate. It’s great to watch videos on it. [more detailed discussion on the features of the Xiaomi phone omitted] and most importantly, it is a good bargain given its specs.

Masseur B: What about Huawei?

Masseur A: Huawei phone P2 has amazing camera. Huawei is doing great. The best Chinese brand now. We have a lot of good brands, Vivo, Oppo, and Cuizi etc. [more detailed discussion on the features of each brands omitted]

Masseur B: What about Samsung? Don’t they always have like better specs.

Masseur A: Well it just phased out in China after the incidents of explosion. I think Huawei would not have a chance against Samsung if they didn’t have that disaster. Well, I guess they also did produce good phones. And no, these days almost all smartphones come with similar processors, the only difference is probably the camera and RAM.

Masseur B: What about iPhones? I think iPhone’s quality is shit. I bought my wife a secondhand iPhone recently. It broke down after a few weeks. So I had to go fix it somewhere. Don’t iPhone have like the best cameras?

Masseur A: Did you buy secondhand, without a proper warranty? Of course they are going to scam you. iPhones are usually of good quality but they run of good ideas now. After Jobs died, they failed to innovate and lead the market.

Masseur B: Alright. I will look into it.

[…]

Masseur C: Did you hear in the news? US now prohibits their companies from selling their chips to us. What about our phones? They don’t care about the Chinese market no more?

Masseur A: of course, eventually they won’t touch the consumer products. Who does not want to make our cash?

[…]

My friend finally could not suppress his urge to question their discussion on smartphones since we were told by the reception that “they are almost blind” and the whole discussion never touches on how any of these brands provides technical assistance to people with disabilities, and asked,

“why are you guys (awkwardly pauses) talking about these again?”

Masseur A: (after a hardly noticeable groan) Why are we talking about these things (specification of phones)? I just spent a lot of time reading and hearing about these information. It’s true that I can hardly see anything. The screen size does not really matter a whole lot to me. Yeah, why am I talking about these? It does not really matter.

I looked into my masseur in the eye after he finished. I felt immensely guilty, not just for doubting his blindness but more importantly how I have been oblivious to their views on technology.