More on the sauna trip and some contemplating. So apparently at saunas male guests can order a variety of intimate services. I’ll leave you to determine what this means…in fact, I don’t know the extent of options available and frankly, not something I really care to be well-versed in. (Oh, I asked Stephen about the guy at the massage a couple of weeks ago and he said actually it wasn't a male prostitute so much as it's just extremely common for people to hook up at saunas. No additional money exchanged, just sex, or whatever else one might want to drum up. I basically could have done whatever if I’d wanted to. What I took as a sign of relief from the guy that nothing had happened was more likely something along the lines of disappointment. Go figure. *shakes head*)

About the intimate services…Mom asked if that type of thing was ok with Chinese woman—knowing their men are doing that in saunas—and the answer is well no, but for many women, their opinion doesn’t really count in this sort of situation. Some women claim not to know, but realize there’s not a whole lot they can do about it. This is definitely the darker side of chinese life (and for fear of sounding too ethnocentric, let’s not forget that this sort of stuff does in fact go on in America too). The big difference is that here things are a little more visible. There’s a term in Chinese 重男轻女 (zhongnan qingnv) which literally translates to ‘heavy man, light women’. Essentially what it refers to is male dominant society wherein men’s desires and opinions bear heavy influence. Men tend to enjoy a greater degree of sexual freedom than women and concepts like women’s lib aren’t exactly all the rage, if you get my drift. Marriage is kind of a funny thing here too. China is still developing so for money, for status, for connections, people often get married. Rarer is marriage here for love. I know of two women off the top of my head who are in the fast track to marriage against their will, both for money and familial connection. It's unfortunate, but there are more important issues that practical marriage seems to have a very convenient way of solving. This is not to say that love doesn’t exist. Love DEFINITELY exists. China is a very loving country. It’s just that marriage and love aren’t exactly synonymous with one another.

But then again, you’ve heard me talk about the huge contrasts of this place…on the one hand there’s this night club/sauna culture where sex is a public commodity and while not regarded openly in discussion with people outside of this lifestyle, it’s not like these things are exactly secret either. Saunas are ubiquitous and although some actually are innocent and legit (go and have a bath—they serve a very practical purpose since many low-end Chinese housing options are not equipped with shower facilities) really sex is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. You needn’t look hard to find it, but you won’t generally hear people talking about it either, that’s for certain.
On the other hand, you still have a large portion of the population adhering to very conservative, traditional views on sexuality, which helps explain the unspoken silence (or perhaps ignorance) regarding these types of issues. Formal sexual education is for the most part non-existent (from what I’ve read, only a handful of middle schools have any sort of programming on the subject). Where condom use is becoming more widespread, abortions are a comparatively more abundant form of birth control and unfortunately, the necessity of instilling responsibility doesn’t always seem to come across. For instance, I know a 25-year old who has had three abortions. So from what I can roughly tell, what you’ve got are a lot of young people who have very little sexual understanding and a culture that discourages open candid discussion about sex. When these people start exploring their sexuality, it’s taboo to discuss openly so I guess it sort of lends itself to the creation of varying degrees of a sexual subculture.
To further complicate matters, the Chinese perception of sex in the West is a sad construct of scenes from Hollywood television, most notably Friends and Sex in the City. Many Chinese young people that I meet automatically assume that Americans are very “open-minded” about sex and I do my best to help fill in the blanks left by Sarah Jessica Parker and Jennifer Anniston, namely that while yes, many Americans believe in a healthy and diverse sex life, there are still many traditionally minded folks as well. Many Chinese are curious about Western culture but unfortunately, the sample they normally get (from media and from foreigners living here) isn’t necessarily representative of the whole.

An interesting side comparison is of the root of conservative values: in America, it generally stems from religious influence, whereas in China (where religion/spirituality are far less important) I guess it comes from an extremely developed sense of traditional culture (Confucian, Tao, etc.). I’m not exactly sure yet, I need to do some more investigating on this one.

It’s interesting to think about and really, I’m not doing justice here to all the little branches of thought that this discussion is creating so please realize that this is just rough thoughts and where it seems shallow or prejudiced, it’s really just me thinking faster than I can type. I try not to make broad subjective statements without at least attempting to justify or explain them clearly but it’s late and I’m tired. Your thoughts/comments/ideas on this subject are encouraged, I’m eager to discuss this with folks. You can email me too jessicalynnjohn at gmail dot com.

Wow long time no post. Much has happened in my life and in order for it to not take two weeks for you to read, I’ll do my best to limit to interesting details. Apologies in advance if I get verbose.

On New Year’s Eve the godfather called me: a friend of his who works for the local Liaoning television station was in charge of producing the New Year’s Eve variety show and he needed foreign faces to come help fill the audience. So a gaggle of us goons went and watched dancing, singing and comedians and it was all fun and games until they decided to get a couple of us onto the stage to perform some Beijing opera. You know, the really high pitched singing and deliberate dancing? Yeah, well yours truly definitely got up there and definitely sang unintelligible gook in front of a live studio and home audience. Thankfully this wasn’t national television and my Chinese friends who saw said it sounded good, just not sure what I sang. In any case, it was a funny experience and I’ve definitely got the bug to be on tv more haha. One of my students just contacted me about being featured in a special on the upcoming spring festival and I think godfather and I are going to produce a movie. We’ll see how it goes.

My romantic life is about nuts as ever, now with potentially damning commitment issues. One of my grad students and I were getting along really well and one thing led to another. This guy was cool, he understood that I don’t like to talk a lot and he really seemed to get me, despite the cultural differences. The relationship was mellow and laidback, but passionate and mysterious. It was exciting to be at the start of something and to have it develop slowly and deliberately. And besides, I’m on break until March, why not make some time for a little romance. So when he asked me to be his girlfriend, I said yes.
Things changed when I left for a 5-day trip up North (more on the trip later). While I was away, I received at least 6-8 text messages a day from him telling me how much he loved me, cared for me, missed me and how he realized that I was his “miss right”. Here I was really liking how slow things were for a change and then he goes and puts on the jet engines. It led me to the realization that I really like my single life and that I just don’t want the commitment of a boyfriend at this point. I fear being tied down. Why can’t there just be casual dating? Why is it always all or nothing?
I broke the news to the guy when I came back from the trip and he was expectedly hurt and disappointed, primarily owing to the fact that my feelings had changed so quickly. The whole situation lasted little more than a week. I’m a fickle, flighty roller coaster these days, and sadly, a heartbreaker. I know I did the right thing because at this point, I’m not the girlfriend type…too many unknown variables in my future. It’s not fair to try and pull someone through that with me and yet again, it’s the whole guilt of not being able to love someone as much as they love me I think adds to my resistance. I’m just too independent. I don’t swoon. While I know I made the right decision for now, I can’t help but be left with the feeling that I walked away from something really good, like this is a great guy, I just met him at the wrong time in my life. Fate is a funny thing and I doubt it’s done with me.

So about this trip I took. Hans (my Minnesotan friend) and I took an excursion to 哈尔滨Haerbin. Haerbin is a moderately sized city about 500km (6 hour train ride – which was a blast, btw) north of Shenyang, not far from the Russian border. Haerbin is quite a bit colder than Shenyang, so much so that when I walked out of the station after returning home, I immediately felt that I was wearing too much clothing (which never happens here haha). Despite the cold, Haerbin is famous for its annual ice sculpture festival, which was pretty much fantastic. In addition, we toured the Russian part of town (which oddly felt a lot more like Europe than China), an original Russian orthodox church, a Japanese army germ warfare base from WWII, a very large tower and (the best part of the trip) a Manchurian Tiger breeding facility and park. (Pictures will come later, right now the internet connection has been terrible due to damaged communications lines as a result of the Taiwan quake so uploading anything is pretty much a very painful shot between the toes. Sorry, you visual folks will have to make do with google images for the time being.)
So many tigers! All the tourists load onto these mini-buses and get driven through various parts of the facility in order to ogle and snap photos of countless beautiful (yet very wild and willing to eat you if you happen to step outside of the vehicle) cats. Folks even have the option of buying live animals to be fed to the kitties. Chickens are cheapest and run at 40 yuan (about $5) a piece on up to ducks, pigs, sheep and even cows (about $200). Hans and I agreed that we should have bought a pig. The whole thing felt a LOT like Jurassic Park: with the live bait, the reinforced steel frame jeeps running around all over the place and the electric fences, I was just waiting for the heavy rain and car trouble. *gulp*
In addition to Manchurian tigers, they had African lions, white tigers, leopards…even some Ligers!! (You know, the magical mythical beasts from Napoleon Dynamite?) It was the best 50 yuan I’ve ever spent.

I’m definitely in vacation mode now…I’m having a hard time keeping track of what day it is. I’ve been swimming regularly and have become somewhat of a novelty at the pool I go to. One fellow asked me to critique his crawl stroke the other day, which was kind of cool but I realized giving swimming lessons in a foreign language is really hard! Yesterday I was standing in the shallow end stretching after my workout and I heard snippets of a conversation going on behind me…22 years old, 1.8m tall, teacher at Liaoda…I turned around to find a gaggle of women from their late 40’s to early 60’s standing near the wall looking at me and “trading notes” on what each of them knew about me in the various short conversations I’ve had with them over the past few weeks. They waved and smiled and I just shook my head and laughed. Sometimes being a celebrity can be fun.

I’ve consciously made an effort to limit my alcohol intake recently and it seems to be helping my disposition. It’s hard when so much of the culture here revolves around drinking and peer pressure is insane (often there’s not much choice BUT to drink when out with colleagues…sometimes “no” doesn’t work. ☹) But it’s working for the most part. My interests are also changing as a result, I’m kind of readopting the whole “my body is a temple” mentality that I had during the height of crew season so I’m feeling better and I’m meeting people with similar perspectives on personal health.

Last night was Jill’s going away party and we went for karaoke. I helped plan it but didn’t sing much. Afterwards, a couple of us wanted to go to sauna to get super soft smooth skin but we needed the godfather to go with us. Unfortunately he had to work so we went to the night club and hung out for awhile until he was able to leave. I’ve decided that saunas do not cater to women in the same way they cater to men and so I was left a little disappointed. This time however my massage was better and since it was late (like 4am) after the massage, they just let you sleep and go home in the morning whenever you want. It was refreshing, but probably not something I’ll pay for on my own in the future.

That’s about all for now. Thanks for reading (or skipping to the bottom and leaving a comment hint hint)