gaochang ruins

I blew my cover. Or rather, I learned I didn't have a cover to blow. Today I solicited the services of a minibus driver to take me from tourist site to tourist site around Turpan. Also on the minibus were five women from Chongqing and their silent male friend. The most outgoing of the group invited me to join them - an unnecessary invitation, since we were all joined together for the day anyway, but I appreciated the gesture and returned it by being especially pushy with my extra raisins and sweet crackers. She also kept turning around in the minibus to ask, "小伙子 (a.k.a. "Hey, champ!"), don't you like traveling with us? Isn't it fun?"

We went to check out a karez museum, Flaming Mountain, the Gaochang ruins, and a minaret on the edge of town. Karez are the underground irrigation channels that the people of this hot dry dusty region created millennia ago to turn this Martian wasteland landscape into the grape-producing capital of the known world. Very cool they did this with primitive tools (ox-drawn winches, wicker baskets) to haul dirt out of the ground to create a channel sheltered from the evaporative punishment of the desert sun. Flaming Mountain is the site of many Xi You Ji stories, and I identified very strongly with the monkey king as a child and was very interested in seeing it in the flesh.

I am wearing the outfit I've been wearing the last few days - chinos, hiking boots, button down shirt, leather belt, and a dour expression - I fear that smiling gives me away instantly as either a gay or a girl. By gay I don't mean homosexual but someone who can't play man. Again I've been trying to take up space and touch things like they belong to me and talk with my mouth full and do all the things that suggest I feel entitled to exist in the world however I please. This to me is also a masculine trait.

After I had some snapped some photos of myself atop a camel, I returned to the minibus and struck up a conversation with the woman directly in front of me. We were chatting about something inane, and she said something that gave me pause. Something about "像你中性的人," which means "somebody androgynous like you."  性别 is gender; 中性 literally means "middle gender." I started because I didn't quite understand what she was saying - whether she was saying was an androgynous man or an androgynous woman. And then I realized it didn't matter, and I poured forth in one long breath all of my secrets: "Here's my secret, I'm actually a woman, I'm dressed this way because it's easier to travel alone as a man, I'm wearing a chest binder, I thought I could fool everyone, it's exhausting to keep up this performance, could you tell I'm a girl and I'm actually 31?" She laughed and said she could tell there was something not quite normal, that she and her friends had wondered about my gender, and that her 19 year-old daughter was a tomboy so she was already on alert.

And thus your neurotic genderbender learned that she is perceived not as a 31 year old woman, not as an 18 or 12 year old boy, but as Pat, asexual, genderless, curious, weird. Perhaps this explains all the people who double take, then stand near me and look at me from their peripheral vision and imagine I can't see. I was expecting people to be more direct about their curiosity, since generally in other countries no one seems to have a problem asking "ARE YOU A MAN OR A WOMAN???" so I took silence in China to mean that I passed successfully as the former. Ooop.

And thus also I remembered that I am not the first person to do this, and there is no need to treat other countries like precious foolish children who must be shielded from the truth of my female masculinity. The woman from Chongqing has a tomboy daughter. There is language in China to describe what I'm doing. This is the country that gave the world Mulan, folks. Once upon a time I knew this and did not need to act like a weird, rude, dour nose-picker in order to convince myself that I fit in. Perhaps I will shrug off the cursed binder (so goddamn hot, and it feels like it's dislocating my shoulder every time I encase my broad sausage body in it) and start going to women's rooms again - but nahhh, why start now?

Gaochang ruins were a sight to behold, mostly because nobody else felt that way and I had a few square miles of hot dust and dead people's architecture to myself. Well, myself and one of the women from Chongqing, a 40-something electrical worker named Yan Ming, with whom I walked and chatted and flirted. I don't know if Yan Ming knew the secret that her other friend from Chongqing knew, and maybe it didn't matter. I for one was very pleased with myself for having the language skills to flirt with older women. ("You don't look a day over 40!" and "What a beautiful scarf that you just bought for only 10 RMB" etc.)  There were two signs in the entire site, and two of them offered this spartan guidance: "Big Temple -->"  A few kilometers from the entrance we came across the first living soul - the bleached donkey (presumably) bone we found does not count - an ancient Uighur man playing a beautiful stringed instrument with a long curving neck and a drumhead body made of a stretched snakeskin. I paid him 10 RMB to sit next to him, wear his sweaty crocheted cylindrical hat, and strum that thing for a while. It sounded like it had a resonator cone but it was as light and unmechanical as a hollow snake.

We returned to the car and I sat behind the original woman from Chongqing and stuffed sweet crackers and raisins into my face as we drove the hot barren stretch back to Turpan. She wanted to know how much it cost to send her 19 year-old tomboy daughter to study abroad in America, and I ended up drawing up an imaginary budget for someone living in a city, living in a "rural area" (since that's the only demographic place designation I know besides "city"), and someone living in "a place that is in between a city and a rural area" (again the circumlocution because the speaker is an unprepared incompetent who knows 30% of the vocabulary she should know for someone as educated as her). We chatted about grapes, tourist sites, the risk to Han Chinese people in Kashgar (the next destination for this Han Chinese unprepared incompetent!). It was very nice not to have to pretend to be anything but myself to this woman. When I left them, I caught her and said with a wink, "You can tell your friends my secret after I leave." And now I have a bus to Urumqi to catch.