I have been dating this boy named Xu since the middle of June and we have been seeing each other a few times a week. He is from Liaoning, which is the coastal province of China which shares a border with North Korea. He is doing a logistics program through Penn State’s industrial engineering department but he is in Seattle for the summer on vacation.
Xu, Lane, and Davin near Paradise
It has been fun to meet someone with an open schedule. We have been kayaking; went to the downtown artwalk; toured lots of neighborhoods, went to Golden Gardens, Discovery Park, and the Arboretum; he went to the Olympic Forest after riding with me to Port Townsend to a wedding I attended; we went to Paradise from the east side of Mount Rainier when my cousin and I went to tour the Hanford nuclear site; we saw Jet City Improv; went to the zoo; saw fireworks from a cool apartment party on July 4; we went to Gay Pride; got sun on Madison Beach and the nude beach; and we have talked a lot about his experience of going to grad school in America after having lived in China for his entire life and a lot about what it means to be gay in America. I like him a lot and I will miss him when he leaves but we have a solid base for friendship at this point so I feel like my time with him has been very well spent. We are going for karaoke this week for tourism, then he is going to Alaska for a camping trip then he goes back to school.
It has been very enlightening to me to see what kind of people China can produce. I do not have many Chinese friends but if there are other people in China getting an education like him then China is doing great. Xu is clever at explaining mathematics and applying equations to real-life situations and that impresses me a lot. His relationship with his family reminds me of the relationships that exist in India in the importance that he puts on maintaining them and giving respect to ideas based on their origin.
I am sure I am going to stay in touch with him. I am not sure when I am going to see him again after he leaves, but it has felt really good to date a guy who has been so exploratory about the nature of romance. I am the first America he has dated, and he is the first Chinese I have dated, and a lot of the little conceptions each one of us have about relationships have been a wonder to us both.