I WAS A CHINESE MISTRESS

Sometime between seducing Mao and exterminating millions of people, Jiang Qing stayed at Shanghai’s Xingguo Guesthouse. It was a natural fit. Madame Mao was the sort of woman who trekked to rural Yan’an, where the revolutionaries were camped out in caves, just to bag their leader—in short, a slut—and the Xingguo was a place of intrigue, drama, and sex.

By the time I stepped foot on the hotel grounds last year, the Xingguo had appended “Radisson” to its name, and it was a place of fat white people, drunk Chinese newlyweds, and acned bellhops in navy blue polyester. Smooth jazz renditions of Christmas carols drifted oppressively through the hotel bar. It was no longer the sort of place that inspired you to, say, fuck a young revolutionary. But somehow there was this middle-aged real estate tycoon sitting across from me, turning on the charm. “Shanghai has seven garden hotels,” crooned the tycoon, who called himself Thomasuh. “I will take you to all of them.” I was interviewing to be his son’s English tutor. I stared at the long hair sprouting from the mole on his cheek and fought the urge to yank it out.

“Don’t do that!” he shouted. He knows how much I want that hair, I thought. But suddenly his hand was on my forehead, pulling my skin toward my brow.  “Do what?” I asked.

“This,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. One of my stock facial gestures—one extremely useful when dealing with something like a three-inch hair that could so easily be plucked—is the raised-eyebrow what-the-fuck look. “You look like an old woman,” he said. I gave him the look again.

Our rapport thus established, every Saturday from then on Thomasuh came to pick me up in his black Audi. I lived in a Mao-era concrete building a few blocks from the Xingguo—the sort of place where migrant women sat outside on little stools, waiting for the opportunity to sift through my discarded condoms and tampons. Thomasuh always waited in the parked Audi, the car’s tinted windows insulating him from the activity. As we drove to his claim on the suburban housing landscape, a tall gray box he called “my single house,” he chatted easily about my pimples, his money, and my fat parents. The Very Best of Aaron Neville was on constant rotation in the Audi’s stereo. He paid me $50 in cash every Saturday, but every few weeks he called at 8:30AM on a Tuesday or Wednesday to ask if I needed money.

Then one day, on the way home, he steered off the highway to the outskirts of Shanghai. A thin, made-up young woman emerged from a building that looked like mine and climbed into the back seat. “My friend,” Thomasuh explained unnecessarily. The woman, who was my age, smiled obligingly. I smiled back, hoping this meant no more Mr. Neville.

But then a few weeks later there was another, virtually identical girl in the car, this time catching a ride back from Thomasuh’s house where she had been hanging out with his wife. Mid-ride, Thomasuh turned to look at me. “You remember the girl from last time,” he said. He had been speaking his peculiar breed of Chinglish, presumably to impress our guest, but now, eyeing her, he switched to Chinese. “She’s still doing well,” he said, “Still studying.” When we dropped the new girl off at her place—another cement low-rise—she turned to me and said, “Next time we’ll go shopping, OK?”

So we were all in this together: Girl #1, Girl #2, Thomasuh’s wife, and me. A modern assemblage of concubines. It apparently didn’t matter that I wasn’t putting out. I was reminded of my first week in New York, when I realized that the nice Israeli couple helping me acclimate actually wanted to get in my pants, except that then the problem was that I hadn’t seen the sex coming. Now the problem was that no one seemed to care about getting off.

Still rather fond of the craft, I started exchanging flirtatious text messages with a performance artist I met at a Warhol-themed warehouse party. He was an insignificant player on the Chinese art scene—he had never, say, cut off a finger. But he had named himself after a Dadaist work, and he once stood outside the Shanghai museum holding a sign that read “No Dogs or Foreigners.” His interest in me suggested either complexity or hypocrisy. I was intrigued.

After three weeks of SMS courtship, my new beau, whom we will call Nude Descending a Staircase, took me out to a Korean barbeque on the northern edge of the city. It was June, and we sat on either side of the steaming iron table, drinking beer to stave off our sweat. Afterward, we walked along the expressway, and he told me he was married.

“I know,” I said.

“How do you know?”

Thanks to Chinese Google, I knew that Nude’s wife had short hair, that his daughter was about seven, that they lived in another city. So I said, “I just know,” trying to infuse my words with worldly emphasis but messing up the tones.

“So, want to go to your place?” he responded.

Nude started to visit me every week or two. He always brought gifts—a necklace, a case of cigarettes, an order of stir-fried pig stomach. As my boyfriend-presents had heretofore consisted of old sweatpants and a nasty case of crabs, I was elated. But one day, after I spent several minutes fawning over a watermelon, he gave me a cryptic smile.  “Shanghainese women want money,” he said.

Now, I was brought up to believe sex is an end in itself—or, if it must be an exchange, then my return was the mornings at the kitchen table with Nude, drinking coffee while he downed shots of grain alcohol. We shared, if not love, then at least mutual appreciation. He made sticker art.

Then one day he announced that his family was going to join him in Shanghai. “So, no freedom anymore,” I said. He laughed. Later he told me about a place near the apartment he was preparing for his family, a villa with a garden, for half my current rent. He could help me arrange it, he said. “That way you can come over and play with my daughter,” he said. I gave him the what-the-fuck look.

I told a friend, a Shanghainese girl who was more knowledgeable about such matters, about the proposed set-up. “What does he mean by ‘arrange it’?” she asked. “He should pay your rent. And give you money to live on.” A stipend. Shit. I remembered the watermelon (US $1.50) and the pig stomach (US $2.00) and had a terrible revelation: I’m cheap.

Shortly after meeting Nude, I befriended a 22-year-old from northern China at the gym. She was ostensibly a university student, but while most students spend their waking hours studying, crammed six to a dorm room, Roxanne, as she called herself, shuttled between her off-campus apartment and clubs, shopping centers, and expensive restaurants. Apart from the useless English homework worksheets I completed for her, I never saw any sign that she actually attended classes.

Our friendship revolved around the fact that we were both big. Roxanne, who was 5’11”, showed me where to buy size-40 shoes. I, in turn, took her to bars where she might meet an acceptable German man, should one move to Shanghai. But she hardly needed help. One night, as we sat on the deck of an overpriced bar, drinking White Russians, she explained the string of bracelets on her arm. One was from a businessman in the Muslim province of China. Another was from a guy who owned a chain of karaoke bars in a city south of Shanghai. A third was from a Canadian-passport-holding Shanghainese man. She worked the rent-and-stipend thing with all of them. How? The odds were with her.

Here’s the breakdown: There are six men for every five women in China. The men who can afford it have two, three, four women, leaving the remaining men with the shitty ratio of around two to one. Unless, of course, men adopt the prison-and-boys-school model, women like Roxanne, who take four or five men, are integral to the perpetuation of a peaceful society. Supply and demand being what it is, they also call the shots. They don’t have to deliver all of the services they used to. Roxanne, for example, doesn’t do sex.

My own options have lately become clear to me: 1) Put out and get nothing or 2) Do nothing and get paid. Why settle for an artist when I can have an artist sugar daddy? They’re out there; probability says so. Forget Madame Mao, forget Whore of the East, forget Pearl of the Orient—no sex is the new sex. Shanghai is the land of boundless opportunity, a place free of herpes and pregnancy, free of soiled sheets and sore thighs, subsidized by the coffers of sad men. From here on out, we will have all of the trappings and none of the dirty substance—a huge show with millions of actors and constant cash flow, Shanghai’s most spectacular display of performance art yet. So long, boys. It was fun while it lasted.

MARA HVISTENDAHL

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