Memoir reveals romantic side of Chinese maverick

Sexologist, feminist, advocate for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, Li Yinhe has been no stranger to public controversy throughout her career.

But her recently published autobiography reveals the private and little seen side of China's most prominent social commentator and maverick academic.

Her book reveals another Li Yinhe: a straight-A student, a romantic and a prolific researcher.

The 63-year-old was China's first-ever post-doctoral researcher in the arts and first sociologist to study sexology. She has been frequently listed as one of China's most influential people.

However, these honors are omitted from her memoir, where she revels in writing about her three great loves: one unrequited; her late husband, the novelist Wang Xiaobo; and her current transgender partner and taxi driver Daxia.

Much of Li's marriage to Wang Xiaobo is already known, but she reveals new details of their relationship. When they met in 1977, she was an undergraduate student who saw Wang as a "male Cinderella" because he was a middle-school drop-out scratching out a living as a worker.

It was Wang's literary talent and ardent pursuit that moved her. They married in 1980.

In 1982, Wang finished his undergraduate program while Li went to the U.S. to pursue her master's degree and doctorate at the University of Pittsburgh. Two years later, Wang followed to further his study at the same university. They lived solely on Li's scholarship.

After graduation, they returned home and found positions at Peking University: Li as a post-doctoral researcher and Wang as an instructor.

Wang's books, including The Golden Age, The Silver Age, and The Silent Majority, were acclaimed and he was hailed as China's Franz Kafka.

In 1997, he died of a heart attack. Three months later, a friend of Li's took her to a "queer party" to help her overcome her grief. "I knew hardly anybody there," Li wrote in her autobiography, "but Daxia came to talk to me and we exchanged phone numbers. I was thinking of a survey on homosexuality, but he had a crush on me."

As a transgender, Daxia was born female, but identified as a male. A forthright taxi driver who dislikes reading or writing, he began to write love poems for Li.

"Wang Xiaobo and Daxia have nothing in common," Li smiled, "except for their passionate love for me that is so irresistible."

"I can't bear anything that is boring," she says. "I love contentious things, and that's why I study sexology."

Among her main academic interests, including sexual norms in contemporary China, homosexuality, and diverse sexual behaviors, she was most devoted to her research in sadomasochism.

In the first half of 1997, as a visiting scholar at Cambridge University, she holed up in the library to read about sadomasochism.

Li believes "sadomasochism contains true elegance because this tendency only derives from a sound environment."

Her book Subculture of Sadomasochism was very popular within this group. "A dozen people from a sadomasochism club came to my home on a hot summer day because they liked this book," she wrote. "I think their lifestyle is quite perverse, but very beautiful. They resist marriage and reproduction; they just enjoy their youth and life."

Since retiring, she no longer does research, though she is still active in expressing her opinions, through her blog, microblog or interviews.

"It's time to enjoy life," she says. She has begun to "write in a graffiti style" and will no longer write serious and formal essays.

"The rest of my life will be preoccupied by writing, in a free style, or graffiti style, as Michel de Montaigne did," she wrote in the last chapter of the book.

In the foreword she says, "Since life is so short, we must follow our instinct and live it to the full." Endit