Later that evening, Yang's parents brought in reinforcements consisting of his uncles and aunts to talk Yang out of homosexuality.
His father insisted that he get married, saying "I would rather you divorce than never marry." His parents, who lived in the countryside, where people tend to be more conservative, could not stand gossip from other villagers.
The frustrated young man left home the next day. "When I returned half a year later, my parents were not mad at me any longer, and my father, who seldom cooked, made me my favorite seafood. Thinking of all the miseries I created for them and their unconditional love to me, I softened," he recalls.
Yang finally got married later that year, but divorced after just three months.
Four years on, in 2005, Yang stepped into a second marriage that he says he could never have imagined after the first. This time, an outgoing woman, blind to Yang's real sexuality, was attracted to him and started pursuing him right in the period in which he broke up with his boyfriend of eight years.
"I was deeply hurt by the break-up and no longer had faith in homosexual love. At that moment, I just wanted to get married and lead a normal life," Yang explains.
However, his parents fiercely rejected the decision as they were clear about his sexuality and refused to arrange a ceremony for them. So the couple got married on their own and departed for a honeymoon.
Things did not work out as he wished. "I really thought I could distance myself from homosexual circles but I couldn't," Yang says. During their 15-day trip, the couple had an awkward sexual incident that saddened the bride, and Yang remembers seeing her "crying in pajamas in the hallway." But the bride did not have the faintest idea of what lay at the root of their problems.
In the following eight years so far, the couple have only made love five times, all in an unsuccessful attempt to conceive a child. "I felt deeply guilty and didn't know how to face her," Yang says.
To relieve his guilt, he treated his wife the best way he could and has taken good care of her family as well. "When her mother was hospitalized after a brain hemorrhage, I left my work behind and attended her bedside for months." Yang's parents also treated his wife like their own daughter to "make up for their son's mistake."
But his feelings of guilt cannot be totally laid down. Though an unsatisfying sexual life is not necessarily lethal to a marriage in China, where women are often deemed not virtuous for speaking explicitly about or showing interest in sex, being childless is another matter. This gradually poisoned the couple's relationship, with them fighting about it occasionally.
During these incidents, even his virtuous wife could not help complaining, "I demand nothing of you but to let me feel I am a woman."
"I cannot even satisfy such a simple wish in her," Yang says, tears welling up in his eyes.
As time went by, he gave up on making their marriage work and cheated on his wife with another man. The resulting menage a trois has tragically worked as Yang and his wife now only reunite at weekends because the husband has to attend the restaurant day and night.
Exhibition marks 10th anniversary of Leslie Cheung's death
Feedback
RSS
