Showing posts with label Massoud Hayoun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Massoud Hayoun. Show all posts

Jul 30, 2014

Coming out and of age in China (1) (reblogged)

Cool, folks, cool, the first part of a wonderful story by Massoud Hayoun, an Arab-American who went to China at the age of 19 to learn Mandarin. The piece---originally published by Gawker---is here reblogged with the permission of the author. It will easily count as one of the best examples of gay writing this year...


He would have been my first, I suppose---a Korean student at some other school in Beijing's Wudaokou university district.

I'd met him on a website. You're the first and only person I've ever admitted that to, handsome reader. I suppose I want to feel closer to you.

I was 19, Arab-American, studying Mandarin and poli sci at a Chinese university. I was exceptionally awkward, and still under the impression that no one knew I was gay. They all knew and indulged me my illusions of illusiveness.

(Just an illustration)

He was in his mid-20s. School was hard for him, he said, in our brief chat on a website for gay men in Asia.

I'd heard of a class of Korean students like him---unsuccessful and blowing their family's money away learning Mandarin, while China busily worked itself into the world's second-largest economy. Their parents wouldn't let them come home until they obtained a certificate of completion, and the Chinese universities appeared keen to keep accepting international student tuition fees, even if they were from the same students, year-in, year-out.

He was foreign---not just in the sense that we were of two different nationalities, living in China. He was a bad student, a rich kid, a magnificently athletic loser with a Rocky-like neanderthal chin and tall nose, the kind of man who is called, in Chinese, a baijiazi, a son who spoils his family's wealth. Fresh, preppy. He wore clothes my Chinese friends paid twice as much for at the bazaars: Korean fashion. His man-bag was made of real leather. He was a petit bourgeois; every lock of hair had been calculated and every pore tightened, perhaps surgically, because he had the time, money and inclination. He turned me on.

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