Other writings about life in China

My latest update on living in Xi'an for Somnambulist is up now. I cover, loneliness, dogs, Dunkin Donuts, and Ferguson.

“Obviously it doesn’t help that I don’t speak the language here. Every day I walk through dozens of conversations I don’t understand. On campus, on the bus, on the subway, in the streets, at restaurants, at stores, nothing here really happens to me. Everything happens around me. Often I am the thing that is happening, people stare at me as I move through the crowds, point at me, take my picture. Occasionally people come up and talk to me, they always ask me where I am visiting from. It can not be conceived that I might be a semi-permanent feature of this city.”

I am also starting a series of blogs for PQ Monthly about using Grindr and Scruff to make friends in China, you can read the first one here.

“There are things you just can’t plan for if you move to another country. For example, the university I teach at is an hour outside the city center and surrounded by industrial parks, so I don’t meet a lot of new people very often. Also, the other two American teachers here both left in the first week of the semester (one for health reasons and the other for mysterious reasons), leaving me the only American on campus. I had expected my time in China to be lonely, but not this lonely.”

It's not going to be very sexy, but gay millennials always have to write about hook up apps, so I'm just being part of the zeitgeist.

Keep checking PQ for more as the story unfolds.

Ugh.