The Wall Dancers

Chapter 1: Coming Out

Qinhuangdao, Hebei, 1995

When Ma Baoli felt that he could no longer contain his secret, he would go to the beach. He’d walk out of the squat police bureau building, where he worked as an officer, across the train tracks that cut through downtown Qinhuangdao, straight down the sandy path to the sea. The police bureau was his home, but the sea was his refuge. Standing alone on the stretch of golden sand, watching the tides come and go in silence, he’d calm down. His secret was safe with the sea.

Ma grew up in Qinhuangdao in the eighties, when the city was just a quiet port town where container ships picked up coal and timber, a passing point between Beijing and China’s northern hinterlands. As a child, he was raised in a working-­class household with modest means but was happy; his father was a factory worker at the local distillery, and his mother took care of him as a housewife. The three of them shared a courtyard home with two other families and had everything they needed. If it became cold in the winter, they lit the stove under their large wooden kang; if they got bored, they passed the time chatting with their neighbors in the courtyard.

The Mas were proud of their son, who enrolled in the all-­boys Qinhuangdao police academy when he was sixteen and was training to become a great officer one day. As a student, Ma was hardworking and diligent, quickly commanding the respect of his peers. He kept his hair short and neatly trimmed, spoke with a voice that was gentle but authoritative, and smiled with his brows slightly furrowed. He aced his classes—­not only math and physics but specialized police courses like constitutional law and criminal investigations. Outside of class, he managed the school paper and ran the campus radio station, playing cassette tapes of the latest pop hits. He loved the academy, its rules and routines, and the students’ easy camaraderie. Every morning before sunrise, they gathered by the courtyard and jogged to the beach to complete their daily sprints and wrestling exercises by the sea. Every evening, they slept together in dorms, eight to a room, huddled together for warmth in winter. The world was simple. His ideals were clear: Learn how to be a good cop, enforce the law, keep the city in order.

When he turned seventeen, a secret began to take root and bloom inside him, quietly and unannounced. While his classmates boasted about girls they wanted to date, he nursed crushes on boys. He became infatuated with his best friend—­a playful, mischievous student from the Hebei countryside. The two spent all their time together—­during their morning exercises, at meals, after class—­and, sometimes at night, shared the same bed. “We’ll issue you two a marriage certificate after we graduate,” their classmates joked. During the holidays, they exchanged long letters. Few households had their own phone then, so if Ma was desperate, he used the convenience store phone booth and called the number of his friend’s neighborhood committee, the only phone in his village. That feeling of anticipation—­receiver pressed to his ear, lightheaded with pleasure, waiting to hear his friend’s voice—­was delicious and disorienting, like tasting ice cream for the first time.

“What’s going on between us? What do you think our relationship is?” Ma blurted out anxiously during one of their conversations.

“Do you think we’re homosexual?” his friend responded.

“No, we’re not,” Ma said. “Of course not.”

The first time Ma encountered the word “homosexual,” or tong­xing­lian, was in one of his school textbooks, entitled Criminal Psychology. The book dedicated an entire page to “sexual deviancy” and explained how men who desired other men were more likely to commit crimes. At the time, homosexuality was still prosecuted as “hooliganism,” a vague descriptor that encompassed crimes like “humiliating women” and “stirring up a crowd to create brawls.” As a small-­town boy, Ma did not know this, but in larger cities, police routinely raided cruising spots; in Beijing, one man—­dubbed “Lady Paris” for his dalliances with a Parisian chef at the French embassy—­was arrested at a popular spot on the east side of Tiananmen Square and sent to a labor camp for two years.

Homosexuality was then also officially classified as a mental disorder. Across the country, clinics offered pills, injections, and electroshock treatments as forms of “conversion therapy.” Desperate parents sent their gay sons and daughters to psychiatric institutions in hopes that their “illness” might be cured. Doctors told their gay patients that if they did not change, they would get sick and bring shame to their families. Deep-­seated Confucian values—­an unshakable emphasis on having a respectable marriage, giving birth to sons, and honoring one’s elders—­meant that the family was one of the most intense places of discrimination. To not bear offspring, a popular proverb declared, was the greatest act of disrespect toward one’s ancestors.

Ma was terrified of being found out. As far as he understood, the textbooks were right, and his feelings were deviant and perverted. The secret grew like a tumor in his chest, threatening to overtake the order of his life. After graduation, he would go to the hospital to fix himself, he thought. For now, he would keep his secret to himself and the sea.

• • •

One night in 1998, Ma stopped by a new internet café that had opened next to the police bureau. He had graduated two years before and started working as a police officer, first in the investigations department, then writing speeches, strategy documents, and public announcements for the police chief.

The first internet cafés had recently arrived in Qinhuangdao, and everyone was flocking to these cramped, computer-­filled establishments to get a taste of the online realm. In 1995, after China’s first private internet service provider, China Infohighway Communications, gave ordinary users access to the web, China was swept up by an internet fever. Computer companies sold hardware from street stalls and department stores; roadside billboards advertised Acer and Microsoft. Internet start-­ups proliferated, launching China’s first search engine, instant-­messaging platform, and popular email service, 163.net. The number of internet users doubled every six months. People waited in line to visit China’s first internet café, Sparkice, in Beijing’s Haidian district, paying 20 yuan per hour—­to spend a whole day would cost nearly the average monthly income at the time—­to surf the web. As these cafés sprouted across the country, news reports insisted that the traditional greeting of “Have you eaten?” was being replaced with “Have you logged on?” Ma wanted to see what all the hype was about.

The café was a small, dim room, sandwiched into an alleyway, lit by two rows of desktops with buzzing screens. Ma picked a computer and searched tongxinglian—­homosexual. First, he scrolled through what he expected to find—­a messy jumble of advertisements promoting electroshock therapy clinics and conversion medication. Then he stumbled upon a discussion forum entitled “Chinese Men’s and Boy’s Paradise,” which featured a link to an online novel called Beijing Story. The novel was penned by an author who went by the pseudonym Beijing Comrade. Ma clicked on the link.

The story’s protagonist, Lan Yu, a poor architecture student, moves from China’s far-­flung west to Beijing in 1988. Enter Han Dong, spoiled princeling and rakish businessman, who squanders his money on houses and lovers. They meet for the first time and have sex. Han Dong tries to pay Lan Yu off with 3,000 yuan, Lan Yu rejects his money, and their first encounter evolves into a tumultuous romance.

Ma devoured the passages, heart racing. He’d never read anything like this before—­so cruel and tragic and yet so brazenly sensual, another man’s body described with the language of appetite and desire. The novel reached its emotional climax at a moment of tragedy and reckoning; after Lan Yu narrowly survives the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, he finally accepts his love for Han Dong: “Having just escaped death, we began to feel each other. We tried to confirm with our bodies that we were still alive. I caressed his skin with my face: it was warm; it was alive; he was still in my life.”

By the time Ma finished reading, the sun had risen. Hunched in front of the computer, he broke down in tears, crying so intensely that a young woman in the seat next to him checked in on him.

“All good, brother?” she asked. “What are you reading that’s such a downer? Can I read it, too?”

He shook his head, switched off his screen, and hurried out of the café, face shiny with tears. It was a revelation, a catharsis, knowing that there were people who shared his secret, who felt the way he did. “It felt like I’d opened up a new world,” he would later say, “a world where such a beautiful love between two men could exist.”

The internet café became Ma’s new refuge. Online, he stumbled upon a world where he belonged. He joined gay chat rooms, befriending other gay men seeking kinship and connection. He found gay film and television shows, such as Dosokai, a Japanese series about a gay man trapped in a marriage to a woman, and East Palace, West Palace, a Chinese film about a gay man arrested in a popular cruising spot in Beijing. Eventually, Ma bought his own computer and a clunky dial-­up modem to access the internet. During his lunch breaks, he would lock the door of his office and watch every gay film he could get his hands on, sobbing over his takeout noodles. The Chinese films almost always ended in tragedy—­gay men being disowned by their families, detained by authorities, dying in car crashes—­but he still saw hope in their love. He was no longer alone.

• • •

Drive twenty minutes from Ma’s seaside refuge down the length of the Qinhuangdao coast, and you will arrive at Beidaihe Beach. Everything about this place, a popular summer vacation spot for local and foreign visitors alike, feels incongruous: A dumpling shack serves lunch next to an Austrian bakery; buildings feature kitschy Tudor gables and Habsburg-­style domes; rental bikes pedal past black Audis with tinted windows. The New York Times once described Beidaihe as “a Chinese combination of Jersey Shore and Martha’s Vineyard, with a pinch of red fervor.” On the public beaches, shirtless tourists eat garlic prawns off paper plates; in the private enclaves of luxury villas, tucked among the evergreens, the Communist Party elite gather each summer to decide on the future of the nation.

Nicknamed the “Summer Capital,” Beidaihe has long been the retreat for the Party’s top echelons. In 1958, it was at Beidaihe that Mao, an avid swimmer who spent his spare time in black trunks wading in the sea, dictated the blueprint for the Great Leap Forward, a social experiment that instead led to the deaths of tens of millions of people by famine. After Mao died, in 1976, leaving China impoverished and rudderless, Beidaihe became the forum to discuss conflicting views on the nation’s path ahead.

Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, in 1978, China introduced the Reform and Opening policy: loosening the planned economy from state control and opening China’s doors to the world. While Party members agreed on the country’s urgent need to modernize, they disagreed on how far and how fast. Opening the door to foreign technology, such as Boeing aircraft and IBM computers, enabled the country to catch up with the West but also let in other forms of unwelcome Western influences—­“spiritual pollution,” as the Party liked to call it, which included everything from pornography to detective thrillers. Without a clear road map to reform, Deng followed an improvisational philosophy he often referred to as “crossing the river by feeling the stones.”

But after the brutal Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, thousands of protesters who took to the square demanding democratic reform were shot to death, arrested, or driven underground. Reforms came to a sudden, tragic halt. Reeling from the crisis, the Party faced a dilemma: Meet the growing demands of the Chinese people, emboldened by reform and desiring more freedom, or appease the unyielding grip of Party hard-­liners, who believed that tightened control was crucial to preserving order. The Party’s sense of crisis was compounded by the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1991. They had to do whatever was necessary to avoid repeating the missteps of what they believed to be Mikhail Gorbachev’s failed and chaotic perestroika.

Deng’s solution was to play it both ways: Hold tight to the reins of political authority but accelerate market reforms. In 1992, he traveled south by train, starting in Wuhan and stopping by Shenzhen and Shanghai, in a monthlong journey that would be immortalized as the “Southern Tour.” He visited technology companies and stock exchanges, encouraging local officials to push for growth and attract foreign investment and calling upon ordinary Chinese people to engage in private business. He championed the “East Asian Tigers”—­the booming economies of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan—­as models of prosperous governance. The government, Deng said, “must not act like women with bound feet” but, rather, “should dare to experiment and break a new path.” His message was clear: The Party would stay firmly in control, but China’s doors would remain open.

By the time Ma Baoli was nursing schoolboy crushes at the police academy two years later, market reforms were in full gear—­overnight, it seemed to many, like a nation of communes and Mao jackets transformed into a land of Gucci-­wearing, Pepsi-­drinking businessmen.

As the economy liberalized, so did attitudes toward everything else—­not only education and business and enterprise but also sex and love. Economic revolution fertilized a sexual renaissance; the nation’s libido, bottled up for decades, burst loose. Prostitution skyrocketed, trashy romances flooded bookstore shelves, and porn—­once seen as a symbol of a depraved capitalist way of life—­proliferated. The percentage of Chinese people having premarital sex soared from 15 percent in 1989 to 70 percent more than a decade later, according to the surveys of Li Yinhe, a prominent Chinese sociologist. A call-­in sex education radio show called Midnight Whispers taught young people the secrets to lust and love; a wildly popular soap opera called Yearnings told a melodramatic tale of loves found and lost, devoid of Mao-­era political dogma. In 1993, China’s first legal sex shop, Adam & Eve Health-­Care Center, opened in Beijing.

Free from the bonds of Maoist prudishness, young people began to embrace desires they’d never before imagined: extramarital affairs, premarital sex, passionate love over familial obligation, and, of course, queer desire. If they couldn’t choose their leaders, the people realized, at least they could choose their lovers.