“Lao He, you really surprised us,” the leader of the group said. I had met YuanGe (Yuan is his name, Ge referring to him being an older brother) before, but the other two guys were new—Lin, a lawyer for a pharma company and his partner MiaoGe, a microbiologist for a Japanese firm. I arrived slightly pressing out against my clothes, the last few months in the US, even while attempting to stay on a strict diet, were not too kind. Made worse was the long journey to get here: a fourteen-hour flight from San Francisco, a brief night in Beijing to pack some sundries, before I was back on a plane by 7:30 the next morning.

We proceeded to drive west from Chengdu airport. We passed Ya’an then went north along the Dadu River deep into the Garzé Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture.

Though the others spoke some English, YuanGe didn’t, and thus we switched to Mandarin with flashes of Sichuanhua amongst the Lin and YuanGe. As the group tripped over pronouncing Keith, my partner, our fifth companion, told them to call me Lao He, the nickname I had created for this blog.

In all truth, I was never known as Lao He throughout my time in China. Those who didn’t speak English usually called me by my full Chinese name, 何凯 He Kai, or occasionally, if they were jesting, I might be He Zong (Boss He).

The sound of Lao He at first ricocheted off my ears as if they were talking about someone else. As the trip went on, I slowly adapted until I came to fill into the name that at one point was nothing more than a last minute choice for Substack.

An unplanned trip

I left for the US just after New Year’s, moving into an apartment vacated by a friend and from a perky landlord that let me move in sight unseen.

My partner stayed behind. In part as a balance as I got my feet wet in my new job (whose circumstances were far from perfect, itself worthy of a post maybe in some far off future), but also because the long drang of the green card process meant that he couldn’t immigrate just yet.

The story of our separation is neither new to this site or the two of us, but when I left, I promised we would see each other before five months passed. It was a moving target. As March passed and work seemed to stabilize to the point that my bet seemed to have paid off, I requested a week off to return to China.

I should pause to note that I am a planner. If I come across as comfortable with chaos, I am far from it. I just have a high tolerance for pain. My partner for both reasons of nature and his work is not. As I tried to confirm coming over China’s May Holiday, he suggested he might be out of the country, or he might need to do the roving workday. Maybe we should visit Japan? Oh no, it would be stormed with tourists. And what about his upcoming interview for his visa, perhaps it was best that we stayed in China. There were many things unknown so close to the date.It was risky, but without any certainty I felt I should force the issue. And so, three weeks ago I pulled the trigger and bought a ticket for Beijing.

We spent the subsequent weeks figuring things out. No, he didn’t need to go on a business trip (ironically, he would leave the same day as me). Whom amongst our friends did I want to see? I shared a list. What about a trip to Jiangxi with friends? What days? I asked. I don’t want to do anything too wild, I said. Just spend time together, I insisted.

As plans for Jiangxi began to come together, he felt I didn’t seem thrilled to go to the home of China, the pottery. I had never been to Chengdu, I countered. And all these years I said I would want to go. Maybe we go for a few days when you’re free, I suggested.

Within a few hours, he returned with an offer to go hiking with a group of guys that I barely knew, but we would need to leave the night I arrived, missing the friends I had hoped to see. I pushed back, wishing in some ways I could plan the whole thing myself instead of through mysterious friends I didn’t know.

In our arguments, there is a point when I know that I will not only lose that even trying to win is so painful that I rather not bother. I retracted. And suddenly he compromised, adjusting the plan that we could have one night in Beijing, a dinner with friends, but otherwise we would go on a trip to Sichuan.

When I asked how much of Chengdu would we get to see? He gave me the look. I recoiled. I would just need to tolerate the unknown.

The only thing I knew is that we would do some hiking and that I should bring both my passports, US and Mexican, just in case. When I asked why bring the Mexican one, he said just in case they don’t like Americans.

A gay road trip to Tibetan Sichuan

My partner will say that he didn’t know what we were going to do up until we arrived at the airport in Chengdu. If that is the case that made two of us.

I arrived and met our three travelers. We packed our things into the back of an off-road SUV at which point we learned our destination—Dang Ling, a village deep in Danba County of Westwrn Sichuan, or 川西 as it is known in Chinese.

On the way we stopped at a rest area that was plastered with memorabilia for G318, the famed Chinese expressway that cuts through the mountains and has made its rounds around US social media circles. We ate noodles and spicy Chicken bits as they probed into my background, relaxing as they realized that I wouldn’t slow down the conversations.

We went further north to Danba Town, an impressive hamlet in the middle of the mountains with a public square with aunties dancing and fresh fruit stalls. I reckon this is the smallest town I had ever been to in China and thus the size and feel reminded me greatly of my dad’s town in coastal Veracruz. It was there that I began to feel the Tibetan influences in the region. The typical signs that would be in Hanzi and English were now in Hanzi and Tibetan script. Women walked down the street in traditional garb. Kids walked around and stared at me. YuanGe insisted that I wasn’t the only foreigner in town, but it felt that way. Stronger than in any other place I had ever been to in China, before or during the pandemic.

These towns are the historic border between the Tibetan and Han peoples, where skirmishes were fought and remained across epochs even as the peoples were separate and together. To come to Danba—and its larger cousin Kangding—is to imagine the end of the world at one point.

We continued further north into the mountains. I finally gave way to my exhaustion and passed out until the smell of a sulfur hot spring woke me up. We had a half hour more. YuanGe rang up one of the hotels to inquire if there were any rooms for the next few nights. I wondered what if they didn’t? He said it wasn’t likely, we left on the Sunday before the holiday for a reason, we should be fine.

As we arrived at the hotel some 3200m above sea level, we slowed down our movements to not consume too much oxygen.

A lady responded surprised that someone came at that hour. She called the owner who would be back soon. He collected an ID per room, as it was all he said he needed, but then when he saw me, he asked that we send him a copy of my passport and visa page, the American worked fine. I later learned that YuanGe had spent over a day calling government officials and hotels to assure that there would be no trouble for a foreign guest. A level of care for someone he barely knew that filled me with emotion.

Over 12 hours after we arrived in Chengdu, we finally got to our room. I lightly washed my body to avoid shocking my body with a full shower. And then I fell into the bed, brutally cold and starved of oxygen. I slept through the night.

A Walk in the Woods

In high school, I read Bill Bryson’s exploits of walking the Adirondack Trail. It was an unromantic look at hiking life that made me first fantasize about the idea of being a hiker. But over the years living in cities, my closest version to hiking was a few hours jaunt in the mountains of Beijing or otherwise a journey on foot through urban centers. It is not that I had never walked for hours. Just that it was never anything quite as rigorous as what I would now encounter.

As we began to set off for the trail our first morning, I realized that my hiking boots were broken, unused for years since. By luck, I brought a pair of sneakers as a change of shoes for evenings but now they become my only coverage for the next few days as we scaled the landscape of Western Sichuan.

Our first hike was rated as advanced up to Hulu Lake, a mountain set high in the snow peaks of one of the central and minor ranges in the region whose peaks would only top out at 5500m.

As we started out, two shepherd dogs from a restaurant nearby met up with us and eagerly became our companions. We called the white one Xiao Bai and the black and tan one Xiao Huang.

We scaled the path that alternated from a dirt line in the grass to a gravel path that could accommodate motorbikes. We didn’t see anyone for hours.

At about 3900m, we happened upon a field with yaks, cows, horses, and two small farmhouses. We met a family with a daughter whose Mandarin was poor as she showed us their outhouse, and we bought more supplements for the journey. We thought we were halfway done but we realized only later we had far more to go.

As my heartbeat passed 150 beats per minute, I slowed down, worried that I might succumb to altitude sickness or worse. I drank water to hydrate and to give my body stores for oxygen. I walked slowly, concentrating on my breath in order to not over exert myself.

In the moments between, we chitchatted. Never anything too serious. Occasionally about the flowers on the trees or if someone saw a view worth a photo. It was almost as if we existed in the same space that first day climbing. I didn’t even learn Miao’s names until the second. My partner didn’t know either, guessing it wrong himself.

As we arrived at the top of the trek at over 4200m, we gasped with excitement. The mountains were still capped with snow and the lake was still mostly iced over. But we wouldn’t have had it any other way. It was ours.

We took out ready-made meals our bags that could be warmed merely by adding water to the equivalent of a hand warmer. Within 15 minutes, our meals were ready.

There were three men there already, the only other humans we had seen since we left the farmhouse. They were building a stand that would sell snacks to tourists in a few months, but we had come too early. They told us that Xiao Bai was a well-known trekker named Abao, who often accompanied hikers up.

We posed for photos and ate heartily. Then we packed up all we had taken with us and brought it back down, erasing any memory we might have been there.

As we descended, the weather shifted violently. Wind forced us to put on all our layers. Small pellets of hail began to sprinkle all over us, turning our journey into a winter wonderland. The soft hail bounced off of us and my shoes, making me feel lucky. If it were rain, I might have become drenched in a way that would have made the journey home terrible.

We arrived almost 9 hours after we set off, bid goodbye to our companions, and passed out before our next day.

In struggle, there is camaraderie

When I worked at VIPKid, there was a tradition that we would climb a mountain. It was a team building activity, a competition, and a metaphor. What team would climb the highest mountain spoke about the team’s desire to tackle the hardest challenge. This was my first time working at a company within the Chinese tech industry and its rather idiosyncratic mix of old Chinese idioms, Musk worship, and militaristic metaphors. Hiking for me began to take on this metaphor, an experience far bigger than the act itself.

Our second journey took us on a slightly easier trek up another mountain valley, but this one began in the heart of a Tibetan village. There were men sitting outside the commissary chatting and waiting for lazy travelers that would take a motorcycle up to the top instead of the five kilometer walk up. We asked about the area and if there were a lot of tourists. Some, they said. This was the most difficult part about the trip. My only interactions with locals were in the awkward conversations pressing us to buy something as we respectfully declined. I never had a chance to truly understand the locals and how they understood themselves as Chinese, as minorities, as Sichuanese.

It was a failure of this trip, in a sense, but this was mostly a trip for five guys to experience nature together. That I could go to one of the few Tibetan regions accessible without complex travel arrangements for me as a foreigner, was more of a plus than the attraction.

Where I pulled up the rear on the first day, I pushed the pace on the second. More confident in how to control my own body but also finding my heart adjusting to the altitude.

The rest of the guys slowly opened up, asking me about my work in the US, why I left China. I learned about YuanGe’s company, Miao’s love of flowers, and Lin’s gentility. Lost in the mountains, we talked about YuanGe’s boyfriend of 14 years, who loathes the outdoors, as Miao and Lin stole kisses. It wasn’t perverse. It was an old love. Love of people who now have passed into middle age and thus can only joke about those older gay selves.

As we arrived at the top of the second lake, more impressive than the first but slightly more touristic, we were the first to summit that day. We went off trail up into pastures ruled by yaks and their droppings, going until we could see the first followers arriving on motorcycles. We spoke in interjections: How beautiful! How peaceful! How lucky!

As the passersthrough came and went, we returned to the trail bonded by the experiences of the last 24 hrs. Our words may have lacked in complexity, but we joked and goaded each other. We had discovered a connection with the landscape that felt so remote that you could only arrive here by one carriage roads deep into the mountains.

In college, my professor recounted a story that seems as true as it is apocryphal. It was of archaeologists climbing mountains north of Mexico City in the 1960s when the happened upon a completely restored Mesoamerican city in pristine condition. It was for them one of the most impressive finds of all time.

The place they found was Teotihuacan, which had already been maintained by many of the archaeologists in the group. It was not that they didn’t know of the site, it was that for a moment they felt they had discovered something for the first time. It was about perception after being starved for discovery for such time that they wanted it to be truer than it was.

There in the mountains without cell service and only faith that the trail must lead somewhere, we found our way back to the same Tibetan village we had set off from. It no longer felt as distant as we encountered it at first. We understood what had given them faith in the land, in its fertility despite its elevation, in the way it allowed their herds to scamper across the land in joy. We envied them. A thought as flawed as it was true.

A hot spring in the mountains

We traveled from Jieyi Lake southward along one of the first paved roads we had seen over the last few days but found ourselves completely alone besides the occasional herd of yak or roadside monkeys.

YuanGe asked as we drove where we wanted to stay before we settled on a place he knew about from the previous summer, a hot spring hotel. As he often travels to Western Sichuan, he comes across various places well off the beaten path.

We called the place, they told us the hotel wasn’t opening until the next day, but we went anyhow, asking them to show us the property which included a main building and 8 cottages, each with its own hot spring pool. We negotiated a special rate and a mushroom hot pot meal. We took the room for the night.

There has always been a casualness in China that I have both loved and never understood. I have gone to a hotel and made a booking along the way, but this was far more casual way of checking in than even I had ever experienced.

As we finished our food, my partner and I watched a documentary about Nordic Winters. And then, for the first time in a long time, I fell asleep from utter exhaustion.

The next morning, birds woke us up at about 7am in the morning. China’s single time zone means that different parts of the country experience morning differently. From the 5:30 sunrise in Beijing that helped me get to the airport earlier in the trip to the later hour here in the mountains, the hour on the clock means less than the movement of the Earth. The other guys had gone into the hot spring the night before while I rested. I decided to go in that morning as a dramatic landscape formed in the background with fog clinging to the mountainsides. It reminded my partner and I of Vals, the hot spring hotel in the valleys of southern Switzerland that in so many ways captures our relationship entirely: peace in nature.

Am I alive? Is this real?

At breakfast that lasted for a few hours as they cooked special meal for us and we played dice—reminding me I am a bad better—YuanGe confided that he too is a mountain man. Beaches are fine, but mountains are about what grows on the ground and how we scale to see it all. It reminded me that I had yet to fully throw myself into the outdoor gay circles in San Francisco who hike on weekends. I wondered why. I always feel weird inviting myself into a group that I only know by extension. I remain an I-人 as Chinese would say, quite obsessive about Meyers-Briggs and the differentiation between I and E people. 

I wonder if this will push me to try harder? Maybe find a group online and just figure it out? But I suppose that’s why I married my partner. Despite the ease with which I could be annoyed, I enjoy the hard labor he performs to make friends for both of us.

I also most find myself at home with Chinese despite my linguistic challenges—and people from the mainland more so than those born elsewhere. We hold a common understanding and a way of looking at the world, one I have adopted more than anywhere else. Though in work, I might find myself quite flexible with many cultures and people. When alone and given a choice with whom do I want to share a drink or a walk, I gravitate in one direction.

The Four Ladies

Siguniang Mountain literally means Four Ladies, referring to four peaks that are visible as you descend into Chengdu, the easternmost mountains before the Sichuan basin and its flat plateaus and fertile valleys.

Gays in Sichuan are known for referring to each other as sisters—姐妹. It crosses all members of the community, creating a sense of togetherness that is immediately intelligible. Lin lives in Shanghai but comes home to Chengdu whenever he can to be with his sisters. Indeed, most of the friend group that I would meet later are all Chengdu emigres, living in other cities but pulled together by their common heritage.

It is unsurprising then that as we approached Siguniang, we immediately began to call ourselves the Five Ladies, 五姑娘. There is an old feel to this language transformation, reminding me of my college years in New York where we were all a little bit mincer. I don’t know if American gays use these words anymore. It feels ancient to me and yet homely.

We arrived on May 1st, the first day of the holiday. As we headed East from Danba toward Chengdu, a trail of cars went the other way, vacationers that would fight to see what we had been able to have for ourselves. Our side of the road was empty, but a stalled procession of cars led by 川A and 川G, the license plates for those from Chengdu, led the way. We began to count the numerous travelers in the caravan and what provinces or municipalities were represented. Chongqing was in very high representation, a six-hour journey only to be stuck in a single file line. But we found even further away places like Zhejiang, Hebei and even Heilongjiang Province, many days drive away. We counted 22 different plates. Out of 31 provinces or municipalities, MiaoGe said. 32, I responded cheekily, having learned to never forget Taiwan. The group wasn’t much for politics.

Instead, we took videos of the long lines that crossed over a bridge that YuanGe’s company had built. Will it fall like the one in Guangzhou? Someone asked. Definitely not, YuanGe insisted. You could see his pride. But you believed him. Rare is it to meet someone of such character and warmth.

Siguniang Town sits high in the mountains, nearly at 3900m, and we looked around for dinner when we realized we hadn’t eaten Tibetan food yet. We found a restaurant with typical dishes including Tibetan hot pot and many kinds of dairy. The restaurant doubled as a live house, with Tibetan dances mixed with the kind of Chinese techno that you hear in smaller cities or, for me, recognize from Kuaishou videos. Young kids drank with abandoned and smoked plumes into the air as they seemed not to mind the altitude and its tricky ways.

A communal dance began outside of the bar with a ceremony that I didn’t quite follow or understand but left us to feed on yak meat and spicy peppers until we were full.

We still hadn’t found a hotel for the night, but we researched on our phones and found our place at a hotel that seemed might have space. We negotiated the price with the front desk attendant who appeared no more than 22. She told us that a hotel chain had just taken over ownership of the property, a decrepit looking building with the smell of propane in the lobby. We haggled, they responded, we settled. It all gave an ominous feeling that made me wonder if I should let my parents know.

We went to the room and slept.

At 7:00, YuanGe came to our room to say that it snowed the previous night. He urged us to go out to see the mountain before others might come. I had slept poorly that night, jet lag waking me up at 3am even with a sleeping pill, I declined. My great regret of the trip.

After they returned and we ate breakfast, we continued our journey toward Chengdu but not before we found a place to take a picture in front of the Four Ladies, the five of us—sisters now.

A last hike

After a day rest for our tired bodies, we reckoned we should do a mini hike on our last day. We found a spot along our path back to the city that was only a few kilometers and no more than a 120m elevation gain at a lower altitude, an easy one for us by now.

The road along the way to the hike was obscured by a thick fog that sat in after the previous night’s snow fall. We crawled down the mountain with our blinkers on as we saw accidents a plenty and more police than I have ever seen at every intersection and stop directing travelers for safety. We stopped for lunch at a roadside stand where we watched as a butcher cut up a fresh cow before our eyes and the guys all decided to buy meat.

Once we arrived at our chosen location, we discovered that the construction of the new tourist railway—which would make it easier for travelers to make the journey to Siguniang as early as next year in a glassed-ceiling train carriages—made it impossible for us to take the route. We continued down the mountain looking online for a new trail we might take. Lin found one that sounded interesting. We pulled up only to realize that it was inside a Giant Panda Reserve, looping around the main attraction. It was the closest I would get to a panda on this trip—the typical attraction that tourists would take when they come to Chengdu.

The climb up the mountain surrounding the reserve began with great worry. The same snowstorm was rain at the lower altitude, turning the trail to mud.

As we went up, I learned new vocabulary about weather, horticulture, animals, and topography than I had ever had a chance to learn before. But the word that stuck out was 泥, mud.

With my running shoes sliding down as we climbed up, MiaoGe let me borrow his walking stick he bought in Japan that made the ascent bearable.

We had been delayed by our own follies and that now threatened our ability to depart for Chengdu for our already scheduled dinner to meet the rest of the crew. We had expected the circuit to take us two hours but as we climbed ever higher in the muddy ground, we felt lucky if we could have finished it in three.

At the top of an 800m ascent is a pasture for cows nicknamed Panda Pasture, for its location. Families who had taken longer time to trek up were resting there, sitting inside a cloud that left most of the scenery barely visible.

The walk down appeared easier, an old wooden staircase that went most of the way, but the wet wood and sticky leaves made it a treacherous descent as we moved from coniferous trees to a bamboo forest near the end.

We rushed as best we could, arriving at a small farmhouse before we had to cross a creek on a broken bridge as the large water deluge made the crossing that much trickier.

We decided to go off trail to a nearby small country road where we jogged the last kilometer in a half before we all nearly collapsed from exhaustion.

Our journey in 川西 had ended, and now a long trafficky journey to Chengdu began. 

Chengdu nights

We arrived in Chengdu after our dinner was supposed to have started. We quickly changed in a parking garage into whatever other clothes that appeared cleaned and went to meet the others for hot pot.

They chose one that was less spicy, a 70/30 water to spicy oil mixture instead of the usual 50/50. They hoped not to disturb their new friend.

But as I slurped down cow intestines and duck blood, the usual surprise kicked in that a foreigner could indeed handle the spice. It has always been an awkward performance for me. It is not that I don’t recognize how stereotypes work, but it always makes me wonder if life were easier if I just fulfilled them instead of feeling so determined to overcome them. Because to be frank at that point all I really wanted was a salad.

Dinner was interrupted by the clanging of red wine glasses as the Five Ladies reminisced about the trip to our new companions, one of whom I’d known from when I lived in Beijing. All in the table were quite accomplished, leaders in their field or organization. Many flew in just for the occasion, a dinner initiated by my visit was an excuse for many others to be sure they were in town for the holiday. A leading music professor was teased for liking “western cuisine”, a preference he picked up after living abroad. The sisters ganged up on the eldest member, another lawyer whose clip-on earring changed locations each time he came back from the restroom.

The revelry was contagious as each person began to share their appreciation for those in the group, and especially for me, their newest initiant. 

“You are truly genuine!” YuanGe exclaimed, a subtle compliment that others chimed in was exceedingly high praise coming from him. A reflection of a space where words are few, but meaning is plenty.

We wrapped up the last of four magnums and headed off to a night club to continue our evening. YuanGe’s partner excitedly engaged me in English, the first person to do so over the course of the trip. We talked about his upcoming visit to the U.S. and made plans to meet in San Francisco when he and YuanGe would come visit.

The club was a low ceilinged space on the third floor of a small office building, but whose cavernous interiors included a pumping dance floor and equally electric bar area. There were even private karaoke rooms on offer. We went to the bar where we had a table with bottles of ready-made cocktails that we downed as Latin beats helped me feel as if I were at home.

It was almost as if I forgot that not so long before, we had hiked a mountain in deep mud and even earlier had woken up to capture pictures of the Four Ladies.

My partner slowly began to fade and others, faring far worse, decided we should call it a night, but not before we had Chengdu’s famous late-night snacks. We went to a small noodle shop renowned for squid pasta. We passed around dishes of various options, the 抄手 chaoshou being the most delicious, and oscillated between sheer splendor and regret.

We exited out onto the street as rain began to sprinkle down. MiaoGe found a tree to hold onto as he released the days intake. YuanGe called a designated driver to come to help carry us back to our hotel, where he dropped us off with our things and our fresh cuts of meat from earlier.

My partner and I gossiped about the night and our new friends as we handwashed our muddy shoes. The trip was a success.

To be gay in a place like this

The final day was spent shopping, eating, singing Karaoke, and playing drinking games. That the parlor had Spanish songs was a delight to me and the crowd. I guess I didn’t realize even for myself how much singing in Spanish feels more natural.

In a rush, we said goodbye as we headed to the airport and off back to Beijing for one more night before my partner and I would fly off again in separate directions.

I wrote thanks to the group as my plane departed, saying in a phrase that my partner helped craft that I had left part of my heart in Western Sichuan. I had.

I have always been a sentimentalist. I don’t love easily, but once I do, it is absolute. I recall how quiet I was when I first arrived. How timid. How awkward.

That they were able to encourage me to come out of my shell, let alone in Chinese, was a feat. It was something particular about this group of Chengdu sisters that gave me a sense of appreciation for myself as much as it did for what it continues to mean to be gay in modern China.

Well before I came to Chengdu, I knew its reputation. It was a refuge of relatively open gay love, where men hold hands on the street or rent rooms together and no one seems to care. It isn’t as if there aren’t still challenges. Most of the folks around the table weren’t out to their colleagues let alone their parents. But there was an open mindedness here that you could feel in sharp contrast to the double life one typically lives in the capital.

I had always wanted to visit Chengdu but something about its reputation also worried me. What if I liked it so much that I would want to stay? An odd worry to have but one that seemed prescient as I tearfully said my goodbyes. But it was also the occasion and the people that matter most.

My journey was made special precisely because of the people that accompanied me on this trip. It made it memorable.