Over the course of a week, whole bridges would rise up from the rubble and scaffolding would envelope skyscrapers like a parasitic mold. Like many second-tier Chinese cities, signs of seismic change were inescapable in 2010. The result is a ten million-person concrete sprawl on the Yangtze River where traffic-choked roads run between the districts like sutures across a wound.
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Less than a century ago, Wuhan was three cities, Hanyang, Hankou and Wuchang, which the government decided to artificially merge into a metropolitan area larger and less cohesive than Shanghai. Wuhan is many things-the capital of Hubei province, the site of a violent uprising against the Cultural Revolution, a transportation hub where bullet trains snake through a white station resembling a space hanger-but it has never been a place that many are proud to call home. You had lived in Wuhan all 22 years of your life, a fact you confessed with a twinge of shame. You asked me why on Earth I had come to Wuhan instead of somewhere cool, like Beijing, or beautiful, like Chengdu, where the pace of life is gentler and alleyways still harbor tree-shaded teahouses. You kept coming back to this place, hoping that maybe you would run into her by chance. So you bought bootleg DVDs of The L Word and watched every episode, then watched them again. And then one day she wasn’t there and she wouldn’t answer your calls. You told your parents you were too busy to have a boyfriend, but of course, you would get married-to do otherwise would have been unthinkable. You used to lie to your friends about where you were going and meet her in bathroom stalls and darkened corners. You called her your ex-girlfriend, although I wonder if she would reciprocate the term. And there you were sitting on the stool next to me, drinking straw-yellow SNOW beer and crying at the only gay bar in town.Īn older girl had broken your heart, you told me between sobs.
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You were pretty, with a smart bob and unblemished skin a fashionable shade of pale. You worked as a translator and spoke in deliberate, precisely enunciated English. She liked the feel of the word, its strangeness and the staccato clack as it rattled off her tongue. Once, a student named Cherry asked if she could be Flamenco. Unlike birth names, these alien monikers could be sloughed off as easily as a snake might shed old skin. They wanted to be Rihanna, Beyonce, Rainbow, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jackson. In a country where one in five citizens has the family name Li, Wang, or Zhang, a foreign name offers a chance to stand out-the more exotic, the better.ĭuring the aimless year I spent working as an underqualified English professor at Wuhan University of Technology, the people I met did not want to be Jane or John. Adopting a Western name is a common practice in China, ostensibly out of courtesy to waiguoren like me, though its appeal runs deeper than pragmatism. You told me your name was Pamela, although of course that wasn’t what you were called at birth. Everyone here had a secret, as did you, as did I. A middle-aged drag queen with a voluminous wig twirling around a pole. A butch lesbian in a sequined white pantsuit. A ring of younger women around the perimeter who had come to gawk.
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In the dull red glow, I could see skittish businessmen in rumpled suits.
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The floor was sticky with sweet tea and black market knock off whiskey. The city’s lone gay bar was spectacularly seedy, even by Wuhan standards.