When I was 25 I left LA, dropped all the career momentum I had built up in the film industry and joined the Peace Corps. I had imagined of going to some sandy African coastal village and living beneath palm fronds for two years while digging latrines or building wells. Something romantic that would leave me with a perfect tan and well-developed forearms. Instead, I was sent to Western China. I spent a summer training in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province (which you might recognize in its more familiar western distortion as Szechuan). A lot of great things happened that summer. I had sex in public for the first time. I ate deep fried rabbit heads. I learned how to speak some Chinese. I taught a few eager college freshmen bits and pieces of English. And I also fell in love with a lesbian. Note to reader: if you fall in love with a lesbian your life will be beset on all sides with wondrous pain, heartache, and candy-colored daydreams.

After the summer was over, my newly sworn-in class of fellow volunteers was split up and sent out to work in sites all across Western China. I was sent into the southern-most part of Sichuan to a town called Panzhihua, a mining town that had grown exponentially since the 60's thanks to Mao's paranoid initiative to move all of China's main industries inland away from the coastal metropolises that were vulnerable to foreign invasion. One of the biggest steel companies in China set up shop over a speck on the map and, in a few decades, the city housed almost a million people and had an immaculate Kentucky Fried Chicken downtown. Peace Corps is a lovely establishment, but full of contradictions.

But back to lesbians. After a few months of being separated, working in cities 700 km apart, exchanging long circuitous emails and spending hours on meandering phone calls, I was reunited with C during a national holiday when we agreed to meet for a scamper around the tourist towns at the foot of the Tibetan plateau. We started at a place called Emei Shan, some famous mountain with a Buddhist monastery and which was renowned for having unfriendly monkeys on its summit. Then we bumbled around a small cowboy town called Kanding, which has a famous song written about it which none of you have heard but I can still sing by heart. We ended up back in Chengdu for a couple of days before having to part ways again. We had been drunk lots, and fooled around here and there. By the end of our week together I knew that there would never be anything between us romantically.

We were traveling with another volunteer for a good bit of the week, another woman, and one that irritated me immensely. She used NPR and the Utne Reader like a checklist for her personality. She was also exotic and attractive, and C was more interested in her by the end of our week together than she was in me. I spent our last night in Chengdu alone, while the two of them courted each other in a string of red light bars, walking by myself through the city. Chengdu is a giant cement maze, filled with more than fourteen million people (in 2002), and I walked through its rank corridors lined with incomprehensible symbology on either side, lit up in garish neon signs, wondering how I had gotten into the mess of being hopelessly in love with someone who wouldn't love me back.

That night, somewhere around 4AM, all three of us managed to come back to our shared hotel room at the same time. C and our travel companion drunk and giddy from trading teenage kisses in the night air of a foreign country, me brooding and exhausted, angry at both of them, wanting to be gone again.

The next day, I left on a night train back to Panzhihua. It would take fourteen hours, and would get me back by 7 the next morning, two hours before my first class of the week. I was out of money and bought a ticket in the hard seat section, the cheapest fare available. You don't buy actual seats when you travel hard seat in China, you buy entry into a car that is continually filled with more people at each and every stop. There is no maximum capacity. People sit on the floors, stand in the aisles, mash into the connector compartments between cars, and sometime after midnight the cars transform into human cattle transports.

As we pulled out of the station I felt hopeless and abandoned. There was no consolation in the rank night ahead, nor in the prospect of having to lead my students through the overwhelming labyrinth of verb conjugation the next morning. I didn't have any music to listen to, nor any books to read. I had nothing but a bag full of clothes, a lingering hangover, and a torn train ticket in my pocket. I pulled out a ratty notebook I still had tucked away in one of the compartments of my backpack and started writing a poem about my mother, wondering what it would be like to watch her age and die in slow motion before my eyes. I wondered how to say you love someone when you don't have any words left to use, when all you have left is the leaving. I wrote for an hour, and cried during most of it; surrounded by Chinese travelers, who stared but didn't speak because we didn't have any words in common just then. I kept writing while they stared.

Note to reader: if at all possible fall in love with a lesbian at least once in your life. 

 

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