I’ve been fascinated with China since I was a teen, so all of the recent news about China’s earthquake and the upcoming Olympics captured my attention. I started studying Chinese in college, and liked it so much that after graduating, on the advice of my professor, I decided to teach English in Taiwan.

I didn’t have a teaching gig or even an apartment lined up. This was in pre-Internet 1992, so I couldn’t just Google “Taipei teaching” or send out e-mails. All I had was a one-way ticket to Taipei and a few hundred bucks. My family thought I was nuts.

Luckily, Taipei’s airport had a phone kiosk that listed accommodations for foreigners. I couldn’t afford a hotel, but found a hostel called “Amigo” that catered to young Westerners. Not surprisingly, it was located in Taipei’s red light district. But there were no window dancers here: the sex parlors were all disguised as barbershops/massage parlors, complete with striped electric barber poles. Behind their frosted glass doors were upscale lobbies where attractive ladies sat at reception desks. Since I was a new face, every one of the sleazy male barbershop managers would call out as I passed: “Haircut?” “Massage-y?” I never saw any barber chairs, and I was too chicken to go in. After a few weeks of this, they left me alone.

Upstairs from the hostel was a small private school that offered English classes. Several of my hostel mates taught there, and by my second week I was teaching my first class. Despite my lack of experience, I was a fresh face and the college-age students were eager to befriend me. One student, who went by the English name Tammy, was especially fond of me, and she started taking me around Taipei after class. Although I tried to get Tammy to practice English, she hated speaking it. This was great for my Chinese – after a few months I was able to hold simple conversations, mostly with Tammy, food servers and taxi drivers.

Tammy started calling me nightly. She didn’t have many friends and was clingy. Before I knew it, she was calling me her nan pengyou (boyfriend) and pointing at cute hwun-shweh (mixed race) babies. This alarmed me. I hadn’t dated since high school, and back then it was always with less-attractive girls. Tammy was no exception: she liked to eat and wasn’t slim. We frequented cafes and street markets, where I took a liking to sweet iced milk tea, chive pancakes, and even chou dofu (smelly tofu), a fermented, fried tofu served with spicy cabbage. Except for eating Tammy’s favorite food (chicken feet), I did all the things that a good boyfriend – and closeted gay guy – should do, like weekly clothes shopping. We even swapped music tapes, so I learned some smarmy Chinese love songs that proved useful during hellish karaoke sessions with my students.

Best of all, Tammy didn’t kiss. Like the three girls I dated in high school, she was too conservative to even make out, let alone have sex. So when my hostel mates talked about sex, I conveniently blamed Tammy for my lack of action.

On weekends, my hostel mates – guys and girls – would hit different dance clubs. One weekend when Tammy was busy, I joined them. The club we went to was unmarked and inside it was dark. There were some Chinese guys there but no women I could see. I didn’t think much of it, but after we left I remarked about the lack of women. “It’s a gay club!” my friends exclaimed, choking with laughter. Two of my 25 hostel mates happened to be gay and that weekend was their turn to choose a club. I was embarrassed and disappointed. Here I was, still in the closet and not even smart enough to know I was in a gay club!

After my six-month visa expired, I traveled to mainland China and Europe on the money I’d saved teaching, and returned to Taipei to teach English and study Chinese for three more years. After Tammy and I broke up, I had no more girlfriends. I started fantasizing about some of my Asian male classmates and students. I tried to find that unmarked gay club again, but my former hostel-mates had left, and the only “gay” place I’d heard of was a park where men cruised at night. One night I went there, heart racing, but quickly walked out. Taipei and the rest of China were too conservative back then, and so was I.

I eventually came out while in grad school in Hawaii (see www.gaylesbiantimes.com/?id=8169), and for several years I was a full-fledged, Asian-loving “rice queen.” Today my taste for “rice” has subsided, but whenever I think about my years in China, I still get a craving for some chou dofu.