UGH

I am destined to die alone, a bitter, barren spinster. It is official. No man remotely appealing will ever find me attractive again. I will never again have sex. No man would ever feel more than pity for me. Every insecurity I have ever had about my unattractiveness is true. I am destined to die lusted after by only middle aged, married men looking for a trophy fuck as I am merely the default piece of “exotic” to be usurped the moment an actually attractive woman appears. The sexuality and attractiveness of “me” ceases to be, if ever it was.

I spent the day (Saturday10/14) with my lovely 18 year old “precocious” college friend. Now, I had no designs on him sexually despite the fact that I truly enjoyed being around him and the intelligent dialogue he provides. The bottom line is, an older woman and a younger man couple is simply unacceptable in Chinese culture. Period. Fine. There are over a billion people in this country; I was sure I’d find someone to flirt with. And, I also recognize that my sexuality is not something I am comfortable tossing out there for show, leaving me looking more like Betty Page meets the naughty librarian than anything else. In other words, I am not something your average 18 year old is looking for much less calibrated to notice. Fine. There is middle ground between sexual appeal and sexual repulsion. In fact, I am most comfortable in the land of neutrality. All this aside, I certainly never thought I’d feel like a teenager’s grandmother’s senior in my twenties.

We talked about dating and sex and it was clear that my role was as a mother figure, which is fine. I would much rather boys looking to experiment with sex have the appropriate medical advice than they muck about and get people pregnant or sick. I grew up in a medical household where such advice was readily available, never tinted with shame or revulsion and I know what my friends who didn’t have such an environment had to suffer (the very first of which was “gonorrhea” and the most permanent of which has already hit puberty).

He truly has no interest in me and as he was asking me about whether or not most “American Teenage Girls” look like me (I am told consistently; “fat” and “big” and “tall”; to say nothing of his “surprise” when he saw how little I ate for lunch and “yet, you are so...” [insert gesture to my body]). I told him I am uniquely tall and he was relieved. The worst part was he tried to hide his relief from me. So, my freakdom is not only to staggering, it is also to be pitied. He then told me, in the abstract, how Chinese men do not like to date women larger than them because we can beat them in fights. He then talked with me about how much I look like a teacher. He feels that being a teacher is the appropriate profession for me because, really, I look just like another English teacher in his college. “Really, just like her. It is amazing. She is from America too. She is two years older than my grandmother.”

So, to sum up; I live in a world where I am such a trophy wife in spite of all my physical flaws (that everyone consistently informs me of; hell, I have dinner with a friend once a week and every week she tells me how much “more beautiful” I am each week as I “get slim, slim”; I truly would not have a single Chinese relationship if I had to cut out all the people who tell me I’m “fat” daily) that I have been priced out of the “flirtation” pool. I am white, Western with the “perfect American voice,” well-traveled, well-educated and multilingual with functioning Chinese; the ultimate status symbol here in upwardly mobile China. (The weakling in me is tempted to take the path of least resistance by forfeiting my sense of self and submitting to the pre-feminist notions of “perfect white girl” by returning to being a blonde with an eating disorder, declare myself a virgin and get lasik because “boys don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.”) The only men able to approach me in any way had either be intent on marriage or clear that they will never actually have me. The rest of the men 28-40 cannot look at me, much less speak to me for the embarrassment of interacting with said trophy. Nevertheless, none of them could truly want me as they would a woman because I am the physical equivalent of a male.

In other words, marriage with me would be the best political move possible but they would have to stomach being married to me for said political move. Somehow I’ve entered a period piece where the unseen powerful heiress is known as much for her great wealth and political power as for her unfortunate aesthetic shortcomings. In college, as an art history major, you learn very quickly that all wealthy women were considered “beautiful” because of what their power bought them, not because they were attractive. I always pitied those women for being deceived like that. I never, ever occurred to me that I’d be one.

And, at 28, I look like my 18 year old friend’s grandmother’s senior.
All I could hear was the cocking of the shotgun I wished I had to put in my mouth.