"Are you sexually active?" She asked.
This is really straightforward. I thought to myself. When I was in Beijing, the MD there asked me "are you married?" to get the same information.
Her next question was even more unexpected. "Is your partner male or female?"
This is not a difficult question, but I've never been asked about this before. In China, we take it for granted that guys' partners are "wives", and women's are husbands. No one considers this improper. Gay couples don't correct mistakes like this either because it may trigger an endless debate over value judgement.
I remember about two weeks after my arrival in Princeton, I had a coffee with a friend from the same program after a long group discussion at night. We hardly knew each other at that time, so we asked about working experiences, research interests, family members, and then personal lives.
"Wow, so you are married!" He looked really surprised, "it must be tough to be so far away from your husband."
"I know! It is difficult. Thank god it's only two years." I forced a smile.
Then there was short silence. I felt like I should ask about him in return. "So, how about you? Do you have a girlfriend?"
He paused for a while, "no, I don't."
"Being single is cool, you have full control of your life."
"Actually," he said with a shy smile on his face, "I have a boyfriend."
The next five minutes were filled with my apologies. I suddenly realized that I had just committed a mistake which could be very offensive to some people. Later I noticed that my new classmates always asked about my "partner", instead of more specific terms like husband or boyfriend when we first talked about personal lives.
It is the details like this revealing how minorities are dramatically underrepresented in a unanimous society. Heterosexual chauvinism excludes gay groups from expressing their pride, nor using more inclusive language to describe their lives. Not only on sexual orientation, unanimous societies have uniform standards for almost every field. Students are supposed to study hard, get high grade in exams and go to good universities; workers have to work hard and follow the instructions from the above. Young people should get married before turning 30 with an apartment and a stable job, with a baby born in 3 years. If you are off the track, you are in trouble. Well, not only you, your parents will be suffering from social pressures as well.
Sometimes people can "correct" themselves to meet the standards, sometimes not. For the latter, it is painful to live under disguise. If you very unfortunately are one of the minorities in this society, the best way to protect yourself is to hide your uniqueness and act as majority. A documentary recorded the lives of "Tongqi" (gay's wife) in China. It's reckoned that about 1.6 million women are married to gay without knowing the true sexual orientation of their spouses, and their husbands choose to marry women only out of pressure from family and society. Families like this always end in tragedy as wives doubt their attractiveness while husbands cannot stay with their true love.
Everyone is born unique. But some people take it for granted that everyone else in the world should be the same as him/her otherwise there must be something "wrong". And even worse, they may want to correct the "wrongness". Conformité, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!
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