Encountering an unfamiliar culture, the outsider looks for difference. Nowhere is difference more easily apprehended than in the arenas of gender and sexuality. In any cross-cultural encounter, gender roles and sexuality supply a medium for clarifying and symbolizing the essential cultural differences that separate “us” from “them.” So sex – that most intimate of acts – is ironically one of the first things we think of when we imagine the remote Other. Imperial expansion aimed at economic or political conquest therefore also, and inevitably, negotiates gender relations (Stoler 1991). In the history of Western colonialism, the gender models at the civilizing center were binary and heteronormative. Encountering Chinese culture, Europeans asked: What makes women women, and what makes men men, in this place? The civilizing projects of China's own late imperial government, and of China's contemporary Communist state, posed the same questions on the borderlands and in China's heartland itself. The effect of civilizing projects, in general, has been to masculinize the dominant metropole and feminize the colonized Other, as in Wei Hui's Shanghai Baby, quoted above. But gender bending and confusion can also arise. Who is liberated, who is modern, who is moral, who is perverse? Cross-cultural encounters also pose these questions and demand answers.