In honor of Valentine’s Day, here’s the most appropriate thing I’ve got: a little essay I wrote last year about losing my libido in China. XX

PLAYED OUT: Confessions of a neutered white male in China

I have always prided myself on being a sexual person. Not promiscuous, but, within the proper confines, freaky. Since moving to China about a year ago, I have felt my sexuality shrink to the point where I could now potentially lose it in the shower. How could this sad state of affairs come to pass? I’m out on the town. I keep fit. I’ve managed my drug intake in a manner that allows me to get an erection when and wherever I damn well choose, thank you. So, what happened to me?

Distant Lover

The most obvious explanation is that I’m in a long distance relationship. When separated from love, a loss of sex drive can be most welcome. But that can’t explain everything. I’m no saint, and like so many in my demographic (underdeveloped, arty white boys) I have found the “Asian persuasion” highly compelling. My girlfriend is Chinese - a fact which motivates and provides the Kafkaesque emotional backdrop to my story - but still, I’m not like that. I didn’t come here to pull.

I met my girlfriend in Holland about five years ago. We fell deep in love. After a couple of years living together, she decided to move to Beijing to open her own office. Around the same time my friend Charlie invited me to Guangzhou to start a magazine. It almost seemed fated. So even though I knew we’d be thousands of km apart, I moved to Guangzhou thinking it would bring me closer to my girl. And that’s where the trouble begins.

Guangzhou is a strange place. Historically, it has always been China’s most globally connected city, but when I first arrived here, my overwhelming feeling was of disconnect - from the west and its anxieties, from family, from familiarity. It was liberating; I didn’t want to resist it. The city’s feeling of restlessness and possibility, mixed with constant ear, nose, and throat assaults from its “floating population” of sulfur dioxide and smoke dust, consumed all my attention. Arriving from the airport via Guangzhou’s elevated infrastructure, past its candy-coated high rises, through its heavy gray atmosphere and aroma of spilled fuel and sulphur, I felt like the city was closing in on me, like the ocean closes over a diver.

So, what does one do when he finds himself in such an environment - with so much to take in and so little to attach to or be held accountable by? To find out, Charlie and I launched an exploratory mission through Guangzhou’s small, demented expat scene. The journey brought me through several replica English pubs, a couple pink-tinted massage parlors, and uncountable uncomfortable club nights. In the end, I emerged a neutered being. Perhaps something like China’s legendary eunuchs, a should-be beneficiary of a phenomenon I hate.

The Paddy Field

The Paddy Field is one of a handful of western pubs in Guangzhou. Like the others, it leads a double life. During the evening it is home to homesick diplomatic workers and their mates, who take the edge off a hard day by politely chatting and filling themselves with the starchy, gut generating tastes of the British Isles. The music is wholesome and unobtrusive - Christy Moore, Frank Sinatra, etc. But at night the scene changes. The tables are cleared away and the pub transforms into the set of an S&M orgy of whining and drunken flirtation between commonwealth expats, English students and prostitutes, all set to a soundtrack of Anglo-American dance standards. Amongst so many inflated, faux prosperous players and promiscuous language groupies, it’s maybe perfect that the song I’ve heard most in these late night sessions is Fatboy Slim’s “Rockefeller skank.”

The party hard foreigners in places like the Patty Field generally fall into four categories. Most are either “opportunists” (traders and business people) or “do-gooders” (cultural workers and NGOers). These groups would seem opposed to each other, but I’ve never noticed anything in their nighttime behavior to distinguish one from the other. There’s also a good number of “do-nothings,” people with unclear ambitions and daytime activities who I often suspect are fugitives, running from the law, family, old age, etc. Finally, there are the “international payers” a.k.a. sex tourists.

It’s difficult to overestimate the influence of this last group on Chinese nightlife. They are everywhere. One time I sat next to a couple of them at Elephant & Castle, an Anglo equivalent of the Paddy Field that caters to the same crowd. They were surrounded by whores, who they treated, well, like whores. They were apparently importer-exporters. (”Chemicals and canned food - not together! Ha ha!”) The leader of the two, a kind of Aussie manifestation of the Karamozov father, had one hand in a girl’s lap and the other cupped around the back of her friend’s neck. His mouth released a stream of drunken boasts interrupted occasionally by ridicule: “Hey, Jake,” he called out to his friend getting drinks at the bar, “she says she wants to be an actress!!”

But the part-time pervert-professionals aren’t what’s miserable about Guangzhou’s expat social scene. It’s the guys that have decided to extend the holiday indefinitely who dominate, and drug new arrivals with a disorienting one-two of sexual conquest and social discrimination stories. For the white nerds now streaming into China, both topics hold an irresistible exotic appeal. It sways them. You can see the change from one week to next: their conversation becomes gruffer, more puffed-up and dismissive. They like to talk about how stupid the Chinese are and how much they resent their simplistic views on foreigners. Especially in large groups, they’re prone to woman bashing. Their suddenly upgraded attractiveness rating gives them access to a sexual predator persona that they’ve quietly admired since adolescence, a 2D vision of a cold hearted gigolo, apparently grafted from Bond movies and rap lyrics.

A case in point is Simon, a mainstay on the scene, a middle aged American father of two, who was once a professor of political science at LSE. I met him at the Paddy Field on my second or third week in Guangzhou. A friend called him over to our table. He was panting from dancing, and his face still looked at little wild. My friend gave a brief rundown of Simon’s bio, and let it be known that I was new in town. Without any further prompting, the professor commenced to lay out “the deal” in a winding monologue that covered a considerable amount of China’s recent history and, I think, nearly all of his personal sexual history. To help illustrate his points, he dragged over a drunk, slutty-looking girl with whom he’d been dancing. With her nodding off on his lap, he waxed philosophical about the possibilities for a western man in China. “Lu Xun, China’s most important modern writer,” he announced at one point, “once claimed that the Chinese have two ways of looking at foreigners. ‘We either look up to them as gods or down on them as animals.’” He paused for effect and added, “And I think there’s a lot to be said for both identities,” then made a weird biting motion on the girl’s right cheek.

He carried on like that for while, always speaking as if the girl wasn’t there. She was essential to the conversation, of course. She was the trophy he used to substantiate his claims, but her value depended on her silence. For her part, the girl seemed accustomed, and nodded along while her date showed off.

Eventually more people joined us at the table. They hadn’t been in the city long either, and Simon became more animated in front of a larger audience. His talk wasn’t really educational or even self-aggrandizing. It was promotional. He was like a cult leader, recruiting the next generation of converts to validate his life choices. With the moronic soundtrack banging on in the background and several pints in my stomach, a darkness came over me, as if the world were displaying a faint but irresistible tendency to distort itself into the grotesque. I watched Simon’s tongue appear from behind his thin, bloodless lips, the tongue of a great orator, which I was now forced to consider a sexual tool.

Join the club

Junior members of Simon’s pale man cult are found in Guangzhou’s discos. They are noticeable immediately. Full of cocky gracelessness, drunk on an exaggerated sense of sexual potency and many beers, probably high on ketamine, they dominate the proceedings. Though he is one of its most hapless inhabitants, the expat man invariably positions himself at the dance floor’s center. His motions are cartoonish – wild and theatrical – to ensure that the world knows he isn’t “serious”. When not doubled over in spectacular laughter, he confidently surveys the room for an appreciative audience. To split up his happiness he has to be simultaneously himself and someone else - hero and witness. He sings and hears himself singing, dances and sees himself dancing. Everyone else is background.

One night at Babyface, Guangzhou’s biggest club, I sat with a group of European designers in a conversation on the superiority of the Euro vis a vis Chinese man. The prevailing view was that Chinese men are inadequate lovers. What they may possess in physical dexterity is more than counterbalanced by smallness and poor hygiene. Their women are, therefor, to be pitied and, whenever possible, violently fucked. It may come as a surprise to the European ladies out there, but apparently we white guys have huge dicks. Massive. Combine that with our modern, feminized outlooks and large disposable income, and it’s a no-brainer really.

I’ve heard this storyline again and again among expat friends. It’s a fantasy turned self-evident fact. Every man uses it as his own. Two friends say it to each other, each one repeating half of it. Others listen and believe greedily. It only abates during encounters with Guangzhou’s sizable African community. Then things change.

Blackness is the specter that haunts the dream of white supremacy in China; it’s the pin that pricks the hot air balloon. To supplement his standing, Euro demeans African - portrays them as only drug dealers (dealing to who?) or pimps. It’s a tailor-made straightjacket, imported from American pop culture. Ironically, when free of their presence, many of the white guys I know adopt mannerisms from black men - vocabulary from Snoop, the macho grace of Thierry Henry, the hard man schtick of 50 Cent.

When I need a break from the miseries of the Paddy Field circuit, I know I can go to MVP, a grimy strip-club/bar populated mostly by lonely Nigerian traders. None of my European sex god mates will accompany me there. They say it’s because there’s never enough girls there, but I have a different theory. I think they avoid it because it reminds them of another, more common reality, which Guangzhou has allowed them to escape. It reminds them of the mediocrity of their previous lives, and what awaits them when they return home. Worse, it reminds them that, for all its pleasures, making the transition from nerd to player has wounded them irreparably. It has verified their worst anxieties - that size matters, that success matters, that the less a woman knows about you the better. Once you’ve breathed in the vapors, have been intoxicated by them, it’s hard to go back. It’s a Faustian agreement: accept confirmation of your darkest fear, in exchange for a taste of the sunny side of it.

In places like the Paddy Field you can see plenty of men who entered Asia’s amusement park of self-affirmation and found it impossible to leave. You see them sitting alone, their pouched hound eyes fixed on low definition flat screen TVs playing cricket or football matches from home. Often the pub feels like a mausoleum, storing failing bodies that had once been strong, transformed by time and self-indulgence into mounds of limp pink flesh. Occasionally, they get a bit of their old swagger back, and you can see them plying young girls with fluent, localized Chinese, getting back rubs and copping feels. I get the feeling that these couplings are therapeutic - a holiday from everything by which you’re defeated in life, at least until the moment of consummation when the true nature of your disfunction (erectile) is no longer concealable.

It was after too many nights observing these castaways, listening to them console and advise each other - “And when she comes she holds you like you’re her boyfriend!” - that I decided to corner and chill my sexuality. I could claim many PC reasons - the asymmetry of the relationships, the benefactor’s assumption of ownership and its myriad colonial implications, a retro interest in fidelity, self-preservation in a land of wildly conflicting HIV statistics, etc. But the truth is that I can see my future in these sad pubs and clubs, and that’s enough to cool out the most fervent Bacchic party man. I know how easy it is to come over as a nobody, find yourself instantly upgraded to somebody status, and start believing the hype. And I know where that lands you. So, like a carny in tornado country, I’ve decided to pack it in.

Not completely, of course. There’s only so much one can do. I’m no prude or player hater, and I know the importance, the beauty of that magical moment on a dance floor when you can abandon all pretenses and social grace to pursue lust in a pure form. I could never forget that, and, on occasion, I still suffer bouts of manic sensual resurgence. In a club or crowded restaurant, I might suddenly find myself overcome by visions of Amazonian princesses and strong, stout milkmaids. When reunited with my girlfriend, I’m prone to wanton acts of lechery and carnal aggression. During these times, I almost feel grateful that my passionless day-to-day life has left me with such large surpluses to draw on. Her reaction to all this would probably be best described as “kind of freaked out.” She thinks I’d be happier in Beijing. “There’s a lot more westerners here.”

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