A view from the Bund in Shanghai. (Unsplash)

A while back, when I was still living in Beijing, I was waiting on some takeout from Lily’s American Diner in Shuangjing. Sitting at an outside table, smoking a cigarette, I started eavesdropping on a conversation between two Americans at the table next to me. One was telling a tawdry story about his latest conquest.

“Check this out. I was out with this Chinese girl drinking, right, and we went back to her apartment. She cracks the door, looks in, and she, like, comes right back out. Her mother was in there sleeping, so we couldn’t do it at her place.”

“So what’d ya do?”

“Well, I’m thinking on my feet, you know, so I take her to a public bathroom downstairs and we do it there, but she starts crying after!”

“What!?!?”

“I know right. So she’s all like ‘It’s my first time and I didn’t think it would be in place like this.’”

They both started cracking up.

I felt like getting up and calling “bullshit,” but I didn’t want to make a scene.

No Chinese girl — or any girl for that matter — would willingly ever have sex in a public bathroom in Beijing. Every single one of them smells like piss and ammonia. On top of that, there are no doors on either the stalls or the entrances.

Who would do something like and be proud of it? Then again, it was also hard to imagine anyone would make up something like that, either.

The ‘immoral foreigner’

Several years before I arrived in China, a blogger who posted under the name Chinabounder, had scandalized the country with similarly salacious stories of his sexual exploits in a blog called Sex in Shanghai. It has all of the misogyny of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but none of the artistry. A sample: “But though I was tired of her, pussy is pussy, and so I kept her on a little longer for fuck fun.”

Though he devotes a lot of the blog to Penthouse Forum-style descriptions of sexual acts, most of it is spent recounting his text message exchanges with the various girls he’s wooing. His cheesy lines belie the reputation he’s trying to cultivate for himself as a smooth-talking Lothario.

The next morning I messaged her:- Last night I dreamed of you… all night long, my Clarissa… … To this, Clarissa replied `ur killing me, u know?’ … But still I tried to play it a little, replying ‘Killing? O, if only I could change that double `l’ to double `s’…’

Like the American outside the diner, Chinabounder also reveled in his own depravity:

And so while she freshened up I lay on the bed, reaching down to pick a pair of panties from the floor, feeling their slick silk texture under my fingers, pressing them to my nose to inhale her scent, and once again running through in my mind what was about to happen.

But unlike the tall tale of the romp with a virgin in the public privy, Chinabounder’s blog read as authentic. His stories, written anonymously, came across as a more or less honest account of his sexual adventures.

And they struck a nerve with the Chinese public, in particular a Shanghai professor named Zhang Jiehai, who started a campaign to out the blogger and eject him from the country. In fall 2006, a wanted poster appeared across the Chinese Internet with the text “The immoral foreigner plays around with Chinese women. How can we let him commit such wanton perverse acts in China?”

Zhang later published a book titled I Am Angry: The True Story Behind the Immoral Foreigner Incident.

Chinabounder’s identity was eventually revealed. A British graduate of Cambridge, David Marriott was a perfect target for Chinese nationalism. Here was a colonizer from the very country that flooded China with opium and set fire to the Old Summer Palace— a pillager claiming Chinese women as trophies, like so many Zodiac statues and Pekinese dogs.

Although it was written over a decade ago, it’s worth revisiting Sex and Shanghai because it provides a window into a mindset that remains prevalent in China today— a Western mode of thinking about the East that is eternal, firmly rooted in more than a century of colonialism.

‘No more than a machine’

In Marriott’s narratives, there are echoes of the 19th-century French writer Gustave Flaubert’s lurid travel logs of the time he spent in “the Orient” as a young man. Flaubert’s sexual encounter with an Egyptian prostitute named Kuchuk-Hanem at the age of 27 was the inspiration for his most famous fictional character Emma Bovary.

Second shot with Kuchuk-Hanem — as I kissed her shoulder I could feel her necklace against my teeth — her cunt milking me was just like rolls of velvet — I felt ferocious.

He wrote to his lover, the poet Louise Colet, to assuage her jealousy about the time he spent abroad: “[T]he oriental woman is no more than a machine: She makes no distinction between one man and another.”

Flaubert and other writers of the era, such as Gerard de Nerval, feature prominently in Arab scholar Edward Said’s seminal work on post-colonial theory Orientalism, the central theme of which is the definition of the Western colonial “Self” in opposition with the Eastern colonized “Other.”

Said argues that representation and study of the East is a tool of Western hegemony. It’s no coincidence that the golden age of Western “exploration” and ethnography was also the high water mark of colonialism. It was a time when adventurers, like Richard “Dirty Dick” Burton traveled East and “went native,” documenting in lurid detail the sex lives of subject peoples.

In Orientalism, Said writes that to “have knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for ‘us’ to deny autonomy to ‘it’—the Oriental country—since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.”

He says of Flaubert’s relationship with the Egyptian dancer that “he was foreign, comparatively wealthy, male, and these were historical facts of domination that allowed him not only to possess Kuchuk-Hanem physically but to speak for her and tell his readers in what ways she was ‘typically Oriental.”

The East is reduced to a supporting character in the Hero’s Journey of the West. Sexpat memoirs aren’t even telling stories about China from a personal point of view. China is merely a setting, a site for a personal awakening, and its people are two-dimensional props that are cycled on and off the stage.

In 2015, another self-published expat memoir crudely titled Shanghai Cocktales came out that made Chinabounder’s blog look like high literature by comparison.

From a review:

Every woman [the author Tom] Olden meets is immediately judged on her appearance. The idea persists among some foreigners — dare I say, especially in Shanghai? — that China is populated by porcelain dolls just waiting to jump into bed with them. Most of the time, it’s just run-of-the-mill Asian sexpot sophomoric dross, which isn’t worth quoting, although I kid you not that the first Chinese girl he runs into tells him he’s handsome and gives him an “exotic giggle.” Often it’s nastier, such as a bargirl who is “probably in her early thirties and had certainly been a pretty girl at some point in life, but now she looked pale and pinched, her slanted eyes rimmed by darkened circles.”

Said’s commentary on Flaubert applies just as well to China’s sex diarists. He writes: “Woven through all of Flaubert’s Oriental experiences, exciting or disappointing, is an almost uniform association between the Orient and sex.” Said adds that a persistent motif in Western writing is the equation of the East with “not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies.”

Another feature of Orientalist writing is the arrogant presumption that the West knows the East better than it knows itself. Of this, Marriott also provides a good example.

In one entry, he admits to knowing precious little about China despite having lived there for five years. He wrote that he would feign expertise by tossing out one of the few bits of trivia he knew about Chinese history—that names like Jianguo (“Build the nation”) signify a person was born during the Cultural Revolution.

Most of his knowledge about China was apparently gleaned from shallow conversations with 19-year-old students he was trying to bed, including his impression that Chinese men were “on the whole, dull and passionless.”

That didn’t really stop him from offering his own armchair diagnosis of the country’s problem’s in a 500-page tome titled Fault Lines in the Face of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never be Great.

Marriott’s bio for the book claims his time in China “brought him into contact with a wide cross-section of Chinese people,” a statement contradicted by his own blog that admits 98 percent of his 500 or so phone contacts were women. The book currently ranks No. 4.5 millionth on Amazon’s bestseller list and retails for $27.

At the same time, it must be noted the nationalistic response from Chinese men is no less sexist and patriarchal, as it still implies the country’s women are objects—resources being plundered by foreign invaders. While preparing for my trip, I went to a used bookstore and perused a worn-out copy of the Lonely Planet guide from 1996. It warned of plainclothes police officers lurking in the discos to prevent foreigners from dancing with Chinese women.

By the time I got there, this function had been privatized. One time I was talking to a girl at a bar in Nanluoguxiang—not even hitting on her per se, just asking benign questions about her job from a respectful distance—and this Chinese guy obnoxiously wedged himself in between us. He didn’t even know her but still felt it his duty to defend her from the guilao.

‘A bang and a buck’

Infantilizing Chinese women as hapless victims of wily foreigners objectifies them and robs them of their agency just as much as treating them like walking sex toys. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Western guys dating Chinese girls or casual sex in general, but on a certainly level, the outrage Chinabounder provoked was somewhat justified.

It’s one thing to date more than one woman simultaneously (provided that you’re transparent about it); it’s another to exploit power imbalances—age, wealth, status—and cultural differences to use women, Chinese or otherwise, and toss them aside like garbage when you get bored.

Marriott routinely lavished attention on young former students and dangled the prospect that he might become their boyfriend one day (or at the very least never bothered to disabuse them of that notion).

In one entry titled “Seducing Simone #3,” he talks about a woman’s response after he stopped texting her so frequently. “Now I was sure of her, there was no need to woo.”

Here are a few of the desperate text messages she sent him. (He doesn’t state most of his own replies.)

I’m really waiting for your sms all day. I know u r busy but I still feel unhappy. Ha ha.

I know ~ I’m happy now~ I want to be your girlfriend now~ ha ha ha ha only making a joke but I really like you.

If any girl told you she wanna be your gf would you agree with her?

I love you, I wanna be your gf.

:-) You say you dreamed of me, tell me something about that

To this last one, he adds a note in parenthesis: “I’d told her I dreamed of her. I had not. But telling a woman this is an effective gauge of where she sees the relationship going. It is a shallow and obvious thing to say, and would not work on a Western woman, but of such flimflam is my box of tricks made.”

For Western sexpats, their relationship with Chinese women—and China in general—is colonial, which is to say extractive. They’re in the country to get what they can and leave. In the words of Chinabounder: “a bang and a buck.”