Shanghai Nights

Shanghai Nights
A Vignette
By Maryanne Peters

In 2015, it seemed to me that China was the place of the future. It was growing at a huge rate, and was set to overtake the United States as the strongest economy in the world – it was just a matter of time. For that very reason I studied the Chinese language alongside my business degree. I figured that while so many others in my class were smarter than me, I would have an edge when it came to dealing with China. 2015 was the year I went to Shanghai to work on my speaking and reading skills, and to scope out opportunities.

China had a new President at that time. His name was Xi Jinping. Xi is a very common name in China, but the way his name is written in a Chinese character is very similar to diao, which means sly, cunning or tricky. I was told he was all of these.

But he had a program based on anti-corruption, which is good for business, and relaxing rules on private property ownership, which was good for investment. Things looked promising for China under this new relatively youthful, leader.

Image by Maria Callisti, used with her permission

After only a week in Shanghai, having seen sights, I was ready for work and I was offered a job working for a large fast-growing pharmaceutical company. At that time pharma in China was growing at 3-4 times the rate of the economy as a whole – the fastest of any industry. President Xi regarded it as important, and he was unconcerned that Chinese pharma ignored US patents and fabricated test results. The FDA and other sections of the US government were becoming increasingly hostile, and I was supposed to be some kind of American buffer. It was interesting work, and they paid me at foreign rates, but I could live cheaply in Shanghai and save money for my future.

My role was consider important enough to have me report directly to the owner and manager of this very large business, and man called Liu Mingxin. I was one of the few allowed to call him Lao Liu, or old Liu, a more informal address than Liu xiansheng, or Mr. Liu. He seemed to be fascinated by me, somehow, and I couldn’t understand why. He was always staring at my light colored hair, which I guess I wore longer than Chinese men do.

At that time, China had a reputation for producing low value-added bulk pharmaceuticals and copies of popular drugs without licence. There was virtually no research and development and no investment in innovation. All the money went into new machinery to make more drugs, and expand into more copies of drugs already in production overseas. Lao Liu had no concern about the illegality of anything, provided that it was not against the law in China – he was aware of the consequences of that. I suppose that it was only a matter of time before the company started producing methamphetamine for export.

Like I said, I liked my job, so maybe I closed my eyes to a lot of what we were doing. Somehow it seemed as if I thought that asking not to told certain things not only gave me the ability to deny knowledge of it, but rather the belief that it was not happening.

Lao Liu confronted me about it. He said that I was living in a fantasy.

“The world was not what you want it to be – the world is what I want it to be,” he said. “At least here in China that is the case. If I want you to be my servant, or even my wife, here in China, then I can make it so, and there is nothing that you can do about it.”

I just laughed. I could see that he was serious, but I just laughed in his face. I have seen this in China many times. A man with power will let it go to his head and believe that he has the power of life and death over his minions. Even though President Xi had enacted a series of policies designed to increase equality, he was just the same. The old tradition of emperor and peasant still runs deep in tradition.

From that moment Lao Liu decided that I was to become his wife. It sounds crazy because I need to confirm that when I arrived in China in 2015 I was a man – a naïve young man, but a man.

But among the bulk drugs that Lao Liu’s company produced, was a whole host of endocrinal drugs – androgen blockers and estrogens, and drugs to weaken the resistance of body and mind.

To add to that, Covid19 came around and China was locked down completely. I was trapped.

It is not that I didn’t fight back – I did. But this is not a story of my relentless battle for freedom from an evil megalomaniac. No, in fact it is a very different story. This thing is that he loves me, and he always did. I have now come to the view that he saw something in me even when I did not. I never even knew that it was there until my breasts grew and my hair as well, and there was only the three of us in his mansion – him and me and his aged aunt who instructed me in all things feminine.

Those times are over now. I am free to leave, if I like. But I choose not to. I choose to stay in Shanghai with the man I have grown to love.

The End