#caomoli

and its pretty good too!

this was so revolutionary! danmei feminizes its bottoms while simultaneously looks down upon feminine gays, so a book that seemed to unabashedly have it's protagonist lean into his femininity broke the mould in the best way possible. plus, the act of putting on powder — as opposed to a makeup product like say, a concealer, which could be passed as simply covering up scars — was even more groundbreaking to me. that wasn't fengtian just hiding scars, that was him actively embracing makeup to me, fucking groundbreaking

so what the hell happened! i have two theories as to why such a thing happened. exhibit A, the readers weren't into it, they didn't like it, so the author acted like this wasn't important enough to be mentioned later on. barely respectable, but moreso a compulsion than anything. hey, everyone gotta earn their bread, wtv

exhibit B concerns me. what if this wasn't a mistake, but a deliberate choice? what I mean is: maybe the author themselves never wanted fengtian to stick to being "feminine" and "deviant", especially in the long run, to begin with.

case in point, fengtian's hair. at the beginning of the book, his hair was some bright colour (red and bleached blonde, I think?) and quite long — upto his neck. then it was his original blank and red at the roots, but still long. at this point in his and siqi's relationship, they were close friends of sort. by the time they'd gotten together, fengtian not only have scraped off colouring his hair altogether, but also cut it quite short.

this sends a clear message: the more he gets into a relationship, with a man "like zheng siqi", the more "normal" he becomes. which, other than being a horrible and dangerous message to send, is so boring? I was so excited to see fengtian experiment all kinds of colours and especially zao'er (and siqi) interact with it, but such a scene never came.

as a side note, the first chapter also made it sound like fengtian slept around quite a lot back in the village (i distinctly remember something being said that he let "many men fuck his ass") and it seems unlikely to me that a singular event would be extrapolated to him fucking many men???? where's the logic in that anyway?

i kept thinking about how the author has reiterated, over and over again, both in the synopsis and the novel itself, that zheng siqi and qiao fengtian and people on diametric ends of society and that it really is an "insane" idea for them to be together

which i never really got??? until in ch 31, du dong offhandedly mentions that he and qiao fengtian were, back in the day, part of the shamate subculture. the translator very kindly has linked this incredible article about it, which i will quote parts of, repeatedly, below:

Shamate had once been the country’s largest working-class subculture. Its lack of “refinement” stemmed not from some moral defect, but the fact that its adherents were poor farmers’ kids, middle-school dropouts with absent parents who flocked to cities in search of better jobs, and who were shocked by the brutal labor conditions and urban snobbery.

even if qiao fengtian no longer dresses up as a shamate in the present day, he entirely fits the definition and background of this subculture. even his "choice" of career aligns directly with the article:

In Luo Fuxing, the “godfather of Shamate” and the person who coined the term, these publications and content creators found a willing spokesman. Like his peers, Luo quit the group in the early 2010s, becoming a barber in suburban Dongguan (...)

i put "choice" in quotation marks for a variety of reasons. one one hand, it is imperative to assume that a lot of shamates were not only majorly factory workers (acc. to the article) but would have taken the path of luo fuxing and become hairdressers, like qiao fengtian.

however, the choice of careers for queer people has, historically, never been a "choice" in a true sense; this brings me to my other reason. queer people across the globe, especially where the culture has continued to remain like that in this book, choose professions where the likelihood of their being accepted is higher. this is especially true in all kinds of service industry jobs. when i was reading the book in fact, the only reason i could attribute to the author's relentless division between these two was because qiao fengtian has a "gay" job (funnily, one could argue being a literature professor is a pretty damn gay job too)

canonically, qiao fengtian had inherent interest in working as a hairdresser and a makeup artist as a teen; the reason he seems to have taken it up as a career was because of this interest + he needed to find a job in the city

a certain part of the article was a little amusing to me:

I’ve got a bad impression of UCCA—when we visited, this employee in a yellow suit said, “What kind of people are [shamates]? How’d they get inside?” All I could think was, you better fucking not let me catch you in Guangdong, or I’ll make you pay. So I ended up just looking around for a second, then leaving. I don’t think art about factory workers is interesting, because I was a factory worker. Isn’t watching a film about my own life idiotic?

doesn't this sound exactly like qiao fengtian? the tone, the choice of words; this does make me wonder if qiao fengtian is supposed to be an amalgamation of the shamate subculture from the author's side. even if fengtian isnt a direct embodiment, im sure the subculture must've inspired them very strongly

all of this is to say, the "difference" between zheng siqi and qiao fengtian is not just of upbringing, background, or sexuality; it is a direct manifestation of the inherent class divide between them. they cannot not be together because they're "different"; they cannot be together because while zheng siqi represents the crème de la crème of society - respected, dignified, scholarly; qiao fengtian represents the marginalized - the migrant workers looked down upon, not just by society, but by people like zheng siqi.

to me, their differences then transcend simply their sexualities or backgrounds. it is a direct critique of how society treats people who migrate to cities in search of job opportunities; how they're culturally and socially "othered" until there is no longer a connection between these groups other than employer and employee. the article describes this articulately:

By the early 2010s, considerable backlash had mounted. Mainstream media seized on Shamate as a symptom of China’s lack of “suzhi,” or refinement, and malicious users infiltrated and sabotaged Shamate spaces. Factory bosses’ tolerance for their hair and clothing dwindled. I can only attribute this venomous reaction to a combination of middle-class contempt for the rural poor—“uppity” farmers intruding into “our” cities — and an overactive, online id (anonymous Internet users launched the most vicious attacks) taking out the anger of political emasculation on a group too weak to retaliate.

as a tangent, society's disdain towards migrant workers and their subsequent retaliation-turned-subculture is a pattern not just in china; i am reminded of chapri subculture in india. originally a castiest slur, the word is carelessly thrown around, especially on the internet, to the same subset of people as in the shamate subculture:

We know that Chapri is a caste-based slur, but we are not surprised that it talks about class as well. To be a Chapri means that you usually belong to a lower socio-economic class and have an outdated sense of fashion, and the internet has run with this definition. Online you would find memes that play on this stereotype, like the ‘Chapri Starter Pack.’ Skinny bleached jeans, distressed and narrow on the ankles, bleached blond hair, fake branded clothing, a neon green KTM, and excessive use of social media filters.

the above paragraph is directly quoted from this incredible article discussing the societal reaction to chapris. as an anecdote, before tiktok was permanently banned in india in 2020, it was an app looked down upon heavily by the urban elite due to its popularity among the 'chapri' demographic, used to share mostly humourous videos and lip-sync content in the form of short videos. this mirrors how Qzone (as mentioned in the article) was used as a means of self-expression on the internet by shamates.

finally, to hit the nail on its head, i want to conclude qiao fengtian's many social struggles with this: