Originally written: Fall 2011 Contains some footnotes for vocabulary and grammar that foreign students might have difficulty with.
Have you ever had a joke where the setup is just too good for a punchline[1]? The setting is too out-there, the characters are too quirky, the entire situation is just too pregnant with humor for anything you say to really top it. Here’s one—three white guys walk into a condom shop in China: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. It sounds like the setup for a really bad joke, but it’s not. Because it actually happened.[2]
My friends and I were walking along one night in Kaifeng, a little podunk town in the middle of nowhere China, going out for some late-night snacks: myself, my good friend Adam, and my good friend Richard. On our way to the night market, a cornucopia of cheap foods and amazing tastes (though not always so amazing smells), we happened to see a particular kind of sign that only comes out at night. Set inconspicuously in the middle of the side walk, in big red block-characters set against a background of white, it said 避孕药, which literally translates to “Avoiding pregnancy medicine”. Seeing this (being the most literate of us three in Chinese characters), I pointed it out to my two friends, and we all snickered in our male-centric[3] way at the frankness of the awkward translation. Walking past the sign, I turned around for no reason I can now recall, and saw the back of the sign said 安全套, literally “protective coverings”. Taking about two seconds to recognize the Chinese word for “condoms”, I couldn’t resist but point this translation out to my friends as well. We all got a good giggle out of it, then Adam said all of a sudden, “Hey, Richard, didn’t your wife say you needed to get some of those?” A pause. Then Richard, in his tall, awkward, gangly sort of way, replied, “Yeah.”
So, three white guys walk into a condom shop: a short fat guy, a tall skinny guy, and a guy in the middle doing the talking. They want to buy one box of condoms. This actually happened.
The funny thing is, it didn’t have to happen on that particular street, on that particular night, or in that particular city in China. You can find little hole-in-the-wall[4] condom shops all over the place, all sporting equally awkward signs when translated literally. One of my favorites is 成人店 , which really just means “Adult Store”, a common enough term in America, but when translated literally becomes “Becoming a man store”, which has so many more implications. There are also the signs advertising “Objects for his or her self-pleasure”, where we would use the euphemistic “Toys”; “Products for Husband and Wife”, which we just snicker at; and “Night-Fire Shop”, for which I cannot think of a more appropriate translation.
But it’s not just the sex stores that give off this image of a strangely promiscuous China; hotel rooms have raised my suspicions as well. I remember travelling to Anyang, an even smaller city in the same province as Kaifeng, where the six of us travelling together stayed three to a room: three girls in one room, and three boys in the other. In each of these rooms, there were three separate beds, as we had expected. Also in the rooms was the standard package of a water bottle, soda, and snacks, with a little price card on the side saying how much each product cost if used or taken. Less expected was the additional package, which we dubbed the “pleasure package”, containing condoms, male- and female-flavored lubricant, and a razor. This one had no price card. I don’t know what kinky[5] things they thought were going to be going on in a room with three separate beds, but they were ready for it.
Here’s the punchline—I still have no idea whom all these products are supposed to be marketed for. Obviously there’s a supply of sex-products in China, so basic economic logic says there must be a demand. But where is it coming from? My first assumption as an outsider and an American was that it was coming from the young, unmarried crowd in Kaifeng, and especially suspect (as always) were the college students. My suspicion was grounded both in experience with American colleges as well as observations such as the hotel down the street from campus that rented rooms by the hour and the predominance of sex shops in the area around the university. (I recognize now that my last observation may have been biased—I spent my time around campus, and thus it was around campus that I saw sex shops. The hotel in Anyang with the “pleasure packages”, for example, was nowhere near the university where I stayed.)
However, there was a problem with this assumption that quickly became apparent. While the market right outside of campus was primed for casual sex, the attitudes within campus were emphatically not. Now of course it is impossible to know the minds and attitudes of every student on campus; we as teachers are witness only to a very small handful that pass through our classes, and even then the topic of sex is not usually openly discussed. However, if our few observations could be taken as representative of campus culture, this would seem to be a university of romantic virgins. That is to say, a great deal of emphasis and credulity is placed on the idea of an exclusive, life-long relationship with a “one true love”, at the expense (perhaps) of any notions of casual dating and short-term romantic or sexual relationships.
Obviously I have to qualify those last conclusions quite a bit. If our observations of a few students’ attitudes could be taken as representative of the entire campus, this might be true. It is possible that we have just happened to talk with a handful of romantics whose views do not reflect those of the campus at large. It is equally possible that, even if this romantic idea of “one true love” is more popular here than on college campuses in America, it would not necessarily preclude casual romantic or sexual relationships. Perhaps the two ideas are far enough removed that they don’t interrupt one another, that it does not seem strange to both wait for one’s true love and in the meantime partake in relationships that have more immediate gratification. Or perhaps every relationship is assumed to be one’s true and lasting love, and so it is unproblematic to have sex with a girlfriend/boyfriend.
Regardless of these complications, there remains a discrepancy between the material environment that seems to support casual sex[6] and the social environment that does not[7]. This discrepancy does not exist in China alone – America certainly exhibits a similar condition. But somehow it is more striking in China, at least to a foreigner and an outsider; perhaps it is a symptom of learning Chinese, that once you recognize the characters for “adult store” you start seeing them everywhere. For three white guys walking into a condom shop in China, it was a cultural as well as personal experience.
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Notes
[1] The last line of a joke, the one that makes everyone laugh.
[2] This is an incomplete sentence. However, it is used here for emphasis (see pages 8-10 in Vol. 1)
[3] Concerning males—all three of us were guys.
[4] Small and without advertisements
[5] Strange and sexual; sexually deviant
[6] This includes the sex shops and availability of condoms and contraceptives.
[7] This includes the romantic ideas described above, as well as the report from some students of a lack of any sex education.
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