Cross-dressing in China, a teacher’s tale

I realised I had the makings of a decent book the instant I stepped out of my hotel room and looked down the corridor towards the lift. Standing there, waiting to go down, was my Chinese teacher, but something about him was different. The teacher was standing there in a full set of women’s clothes. He was wearing make-up, high heels and a padded bra.

We all have moments in our lives when we come face to face with the unexpected. This was one of those times, and as we stepped out of our hotel into the glare of the street, I felt momentarily dazed. The teacher seemed to be enjoying himself. While I walked uncomfortably by his side, he kept stopping to admire himself in shop windows or to ask the way to the best restaurant.

I had known the teacher for about five years before he revealed himself to be a cross-dresser, in 2012. He taught me Chinese twice a week at a coffee shop in Beijing; I was working as a correspondent for the BBC and wanted to improve my language skills. Over the years we became friends. He was talkative and funny, and I looked forward to our lessons.

He never mentioned his love of women’s clothes but, looking back, it would be untrue to say that there were no signs.

The teacher would sometimes appear at our lessons with glowing lips. I dismissed the idea that it was lipstick, choosing instead to believe he wore colourful lip balm. Similarly, I ignored the tight T-shirts with spangly writing emblazoned on the front, and the jewellery that occasionally sparkled on his fingers or around his neck. I did not properly consider his facelift, or why a man of 60 would even want one.

Thinking about it now, I am reminded of Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, who once tried to explain the lack of evidence linking the government in Iraq to weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld said there were “known knowns” – things we know we know – and “known unknowns”, which is essentially information that we know we do not know. There are also, according to Rumsfeld, “unknown unknowns”, things we do not know we do not know.

I could not help linking these linguistic gymnastics to my relationship with the teacher. I realised that his cross-dressing fell into Rumsfeld’s “known unknown” category. It was perhaps too much to have expected me to guess the teacher’s secret, but I should have known he had one.