A Two-City Tour by “China’s Three Billboards,” Against a “Disease That Doesn’t Exist”

“Fight absurdity with facts.”

Wu Laobai (a pseudonym), 28, drove three trucks through downtown Shanghai, then did the same thing in Nanjing, and has just left Jinan. The hashtag he opened on Weibo, “#TheCorrectedLover,” has racked up more than 11 million views so far.

Unlike ordinary trucks, these three drive pressed close together at the same speed, their sides plastered with three slogans: treating a “disease that doesn’t exist”; the Chinese Diagnostic Criteria for Mental Disorders still lists “sexual orientation disorder”; 19 years on, why?

This is the performance-art project Wu Laobai launched to protest institutions that offer gay “conversion therapy.” He calls it “Lover.” Netizens gave it another name: “China’s Three Billboards,” meaning it copies the film Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and uses billboard advertising as protest.

“When there’s no other way to say certain things, three billboards can be one way to do it,” Wu Laobai said. He is from Shandong, majored in photography as an undergraduate, and after graduating took a job at an arts institution while making his own work on the side.

As a heterosexual man, Wu Laobai had not been familiar with LGBT issues. “I’d done a photo book before, and one of the people who bought my work was a police officer named Lin He. After we added each other on WeChat, I saw that a lot of what he said didn’t sound like the police officer I’d imagined. I asked whether he wanted to work on a project together, and only after we started did I find out he was gay. For me, that was the starting point.”

Not long after Wu Laobai began paying attention to LGBT issues, on April 13, 2018, Sina Weibo announced that, following the Cybersecurity Law and other regulations, it was launching a three-month campaign to clear out comics, games, and short videos that broke the rules. The main targets included content that was pornographic, glorified blood and violence, or dealt with homosexuality. The announcement set off a wave of posts under the hashtags “#IAmGay” and “#IAmAFriendOfGayPeople.”

The controversy caught Wu Laobai’s attention. He started reaching out to LGBT organizations in Guangzhou and got to know Peng Yanhui of LGBT Rights Advocacy China, who had sued a conversion-therapy institution and won. Peng Yanhui gave Wu Laobai a list of the conversion-therapy institutions operating in China — and Wu Laobai decided to make that his subject.

The other person behind “Lover” is Wu Laobai’s friend Zheng Hongbin, the project’s curator. His exhibition series, “Nine Press Conferences,” includes “Lover.” Since the whole plan launched last May, only four of the nine have been finished.

Zheng Hongbin is from Liaoning. A few years ago he worked with Wu Laobai at the Xi’an Art Museum; the two later moved on to jobs in Shenzhen, where they once gathered residents of a Shenzhen urban village into the “Xisancun Band,” which performed at the Shenzhen Biennale. “Nine Press Conferences” is Zheng Hongbin’s project bringing together nine artists, each making their own piece. It is not a physical “press conference” or an exhibition, but nine separate artworks probing social problems.

On November 29, 2018, Wu Laobai launched a crowdfunding campaign on a WeChat official account. The post laid out the first planned route for the trucks: leaving Shanghai, passing through Nanjing, Jinan, Tianjin, Shijiazhuang, Zhumadian, and Hefei, then returning to Shanghai. Every donation would be converted into distance at 20 yuan per kilometer of truck travel — the more people gave, the farther the trucks could go.

The campaign made little noise. After a month of fundraising, by December 31, 2018, it had taken in just 9,666.66 yuan from 117 donors. That meant the planned route could not be covered in one go, so Wu Laobai decided to run the project in stages and recruit more people along the way. The first stage would cover two cities, Shanghai to Nanjing.

On January 6, when Wu Laobai and Zheng Hongbin flew from Shenzhen to Shanghai, they were far from “ready.” The trucks weren’t confirmed. They hadn’t settled which three lines to put on them. The departure time and the route kept changing. Wu Laobai didn’t even know whether rented trucks could cross provincial lines, or what the local rules were for trucks on the road.

Take those three lines, which later got so much exposure — at first Wu Laobai was still torn over whether to soften the demands. He wanted to be forceful, but worried that demands too direct and too confrontational would invite trouble. Then again, he also felt that if the project were shut down by “force majeure,” that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

“Limited time, limited things,” Wu Laobai said. That line more or less summed up everyone’s state of mind over the days that followed.

First Stop: Shanghai (1/11–1/12)

Day one, January 11, 8:30 a.m.

A public parking lot in Songjiang District, Shanghai. Wu Laobai was late.

The three truck drivers he had booked were on time. While they waited, they sat in one of the cabs eating breakfast, one of them glancing now and then toward the lot entrance. Wu Laobai had found them through Lalamove. Xu Zheng (a pseudonym) owned a red truck; by coincidence, two of his friends had the same model of red truck.

“At first he [Wu Laobai] told me he needed three trucks to drive from Shanghai to Nanjing with slogans stuck on the sides. I told my friends, and they all said I’d run into a scammer,” Xu Zheng said.

They were supposed to have left four days earlier, on January 8. Back then Wu Laobai had a fairly optimistic plan: three trucks leave Shanghai, drive through Suzhou to Nanjing, finish in two days, and visit 12 conversion-therapy institutions along the way.

But Wu Laobai didn’t know Shanghai. He had no idea what problems came with moving three trucks between cities, or what he would run into at the therapy institutions. Even the drivers were only confirmed the night before.

Xu Zheng’s two friends didn’t want the job at first. One thought the slogans were a little “sensitive” — if anything “went wrong,” they could lose points on their licenses. Xu Zheng talked them around, saying that he had no problem with homosexuality, that a driver’s job is to drive, and that as long as nothing was illegal, there was nothing wrong with putting an idea out there in some form.

January 11, 9:00 a.m.

The advertising company hired to apply the lettering ran into trouble. First they told Wu Laobai they didn’t have enough material; then, once work started, the technician said that sticking letters onto an uneven truck body took a long time, and the rain that day had left the bodies slick, making it harder still.

Wu Laobai had planned to leave before ten, visit three gay-conversion-therapy institutions in the morning, spend the afternoon driving around downtown Shanghai and shooting photos at famous landmarks, then take the high-speed train to Nanjing that night and rent three more trucks. He kept expecting things to go this smoothly.

The lettering took three hours, more than three times as long as expected, and by the time it was past noon, the institutions they meant to visit had gone on lunch break, pushing the schedule back another hour.

While the lettering went on, Zheng Hongbin and several volunteers turned up to help. Their job that day was to follow the trucks and film from behind. Also along were Wu Laobai’s photographer friend Wang Yanpeng, two reporters, a documentary filmmaker, and a volunteer from Taiwan, Jiang Haohao (a pseudonym).

January 11, 2:00 p.m.

Before setting off, Wu Laobai asked the three drivers what order they would drive in.

Xu Zheng glanced at his silent companions and said, “I’ll take the lead truck, then,” and sorted out the order for the other two. He joked to one of them: “Your truck isn’t the one with the gay line, it’s got ‘19 years on, why?’ — so you can relax.”

The slogan on Xu Zheng’s truck read: “Treating a ‘disease that doesn’t exist.’”

Xu Zheng, 29, is from Jiangsu: tall and thin, pale, small-eyed, usually smiling, his whole face creasing when he laughs. He said he had been driving trucks for more than eight years and had bought the red one less than a year ago.

Songjiang to downtown Shanghai normally takes about an hour, but because the three trucks had to stay tightly bunched so none fell behind, the drive took considerably longer. As lead driver, Xu Zheng not only had to keep under 40 kilometers an hour, but also had to check at every curve and traffic light whether the two trucks behind were still with him.

Wu Laobai looked exhausted. He shot a bit of video on his phone in the cab, then started to doze. Before long he picked the phone up again, opened his notes app, and quietly read out the six questions he planned to put to each conversion-therapy institution. Back in Shenzhen he had already called these places and confirmed that they were indeed conducting conversion therapy on gay people, and had recorded the calls. But turning up without an appointment still made him deeply uneasy.

Whenever Wu Laobai gets nervous, he rubs his fingers together without noticing. The closer he got to a conversion-therapy institution, the more he rubbed.

January 11, 3:43 p.m.

The first stop was “Shanghai Letian Psychology.” Wu Laobai stood at the door waiting for the crew to shoot photos and video, and for the trucks to turn around on the street. Before going in, he said: “I’m so nervous. It feels like the first day of school.”

“Shanghai Letian Psychology” is a counseling outfit tucked into an office tower’s elevator lobby. The space is small: besides the front desk, there is one counseling room on each side of the entrance. On the wall hangs a registration certificate for a private non-enterprise unit, along with a plaque: “Congratulations to Shanghai Letian Psychological Counseling Center on winning Yixinli’s Best Psychological Institution of the Year for 2015.”

Wu Laobai didn’t say why he had really come. He said he was a gay man who hoped to change.

After the receptionist heard him out, she showed him into one of the counseling rooms and fetched a counselor. Wu Laobai and the counselor talked for nearly twenty minutes. This was exactly what he had planned — to collect the counselor’s own words, to record her using terms like “conversion” and “treatment” for homosexuality.

Afterward, back in the truck, Wu Laobai said he hadn’t expected this center to be so matter-of-fact about it, even willing to take him on for counseling.

January 11, 5:00 p.m.

The second stop was the “Ruiling Psychological Counseling Center.” It was getting dark and the rain was getting heavier, so the billboards on the truck sides had lost nearly all their effect. Wu Laobai had the drivers park in a nearby lot rather than circle the streets looking for exposure.

“Ruiling Psychological Counseling Center” has a door like an ordinary apartment’s, with a large sign beside it listing the counselors’ credentials. Before going in, Wu Laobai asked Zheng Hongbin how to handle the questioning. Zheng Hongbin said, “Just make sure there’s some friction.”

A counselor opened the door and froze at the sight of the crowd.

Wu Laobai explained why they were there and said all the cameras on site were filming his documentary. The counselor went from confusion to anger in an instant. She scolded him for showing no proper respect, saying any unannounced filming was an offense, an invasion of privacy.

She immediately had staff block the exits and called the police, saying no one could leave until they arrived. The two sides faced off in front of the elevator, breaking repeatedly into shouting. The news photographer and the documentary filmmaker eventually offered on their own to delete all their footage. Wu Laobai and Zheng Hongbin, meanwhile, told everyone present that they would take responsibility for all of it.

The police came. The counselor again said her privacy had been violated. The officers had Wu Laobai and the others hand over their recording equipment, confirmed that every video and file on site had been erased, took down Wu Laobai’s personal details, and then let everyone go.

Xu Zheng said later that they had kept the trucks parked in the lot outside the whole time, and that it wasn’t long before a police car pulled up. He turned to the other two drivers at once: “If the cops have got their little notebooks out, they’re definitely here for Old Bai.”

January 11, 7:00 p.m.

Some of the group were furious, others still shaken, but Wu Laobai decided to make the third visit anyway. He took fewer people in with him to the third institution, “Soul Garden Counseling Center.”

A receptionist there, after hearing Wu Laobai out, said the counselor wasn’t free but that she could try to answer his questions herself. Her account resembled the first institution’s: you had to work out whether someone was truly or only apparently gay, and with a strong enough will you could be “converted.” Throughout, she answered Wu Laobai in a manner that looked a lot like therapy itself.

When Wu Laobai came out, the baffled look on his face was the same as when he had left the first place. He decided that was enough for one day.

The three trucks pulled over on Longhua Middle Road and let everyone off, with an agreement to meet at the same spot at eight the next morning, ready to circle downtown and find spots for photos.

Day two, January 12, morning

Wu Laobai and Zheng Hongbin decided to bring back a few recognizable Shanghai photos to use as publicity material. Unlike the rain the day before, there was a little sun that day. Wu Laobai said: “Today feels pretty relaxed. It’s like being a tourist in Shanghai.”

As for where exactly to go “sightseeing,” Wu Laobai had no plan. When he first got in the truck, the only two places he was sure about were the Oriental Pearl Tower and Disneyland — Disneyland because “it’s cute.”

Many of the stops were decided on the spot. Xu Zheng chipped in with ideas: as a truck driver who had spent years running around Shanghai, he knew better which places were easy to stop at or circle.

On the way from Puxi to Pudong, Xu Zheng noticed they would pass the China Art Museum and suggested Wu Laobai take photos nearby.

There weren’t many tourists in front of the China Art Museum, and the three trucks quickly claimed a conspicuous spot. Zheng Hongbin uploaded the photos and video to Weibo, and the trucks began to draw discussion online.

But not every location went as smoothly.

At the Oriental Pearl Tower, the heavy traffic and the trucks’ inability to turn around at will meant that after Zheng Hongbin and the photographer Wang Yanpeng found a shooting position, the back-and-forth over where exactly to stand kept the trucks circling Lujiazui almost five times.

Wu Laobai made a joke of it: “This really is performance art. Circling three times usually means you have a clear purpose. Circling five times is art with a purpose you can’t identify.”

Wu Laobai kept watching to see whether passersby noticed the three trucks. The reality was that unless a truck was stopped at a red light or briefly parked at the curb, people genuinely had trouble reading the words on it.

In the cab, Wu Laobai was often overwhelmed, his screen switching constantly between sharing his live location, recording video, and playing Zheng Hongbin’s voice messages. Even the itinerary went astray: they had meant to go from Pudong to the Bund, but the camera car couldn’t keep up along the way, and once they reached the Bund they found trucks weren’t allowed in, so in the end they could only pull over near the Fosun Art Center.

Fortunately, the morning’s photos and video from the China Art Museum had started to work online. Hua Zile, who runs Voice of Tongzhi and already knew about the project, got in touch with Wu Laobai to ask whether they could start reposting the videos.

By now Hua Zile had taken over publicizing “Lover” as it happened. “I’m part of the team now,” he said. “I help them coordinate things online. We wanted a big spike at the start, some discussion in the middle, and for it to keep going all the way to the release of the documentary.”

For the rest of the route, on top of relaying positions constantly, Wu Laobai had a new job: watching Weibo — which big accounts had reposted, how many shares and views there were now.

January 12, afternoon

With nowhere else convenient to park and shoot, the group went to what the drivers called “the Big Chimney,” the Power Station of Art, Shanghai’s contemporary art museum. To find the shot, the trucks started circling again.

The Shanghai Biennale was on there, and Wu Laobai suddenly wanted to go in and see it. Zheng Hongbin said no. He reminded Wu Laobai that the online discussion was heating up, and that the priority now was to push out material Weibo could use and get netizens talking.

Besides the China Art Museum photos, the shots from the Oriental Pearl Tower and outside the Power Station of Art also went up online, all posted under the same hashtag, “#TheCorrectedLover.” The view count was climbing fast.

As the trucks worked their way through downtown Shanghai, Wu Laobai’s phone kept lighting up with messages from netizens asking about the route ahead, hoping to see it in person.

Only then did Wu Laobai realize that if he had posted the route earlier, he might have drawn a crowd. He also thought he should have installed a camera in the cab and kept a phone free for live location sharing. Xu Zheng, beside him, said what they really needed were walkie-talkies: for short-range communication, WeChat voice messages were badly inefficient.

Xu Zheng had warned Wu Laobai that taking the trucks into downtown Shanghai carried some risk. As they passed Jiangsu Road and Jing’an Temple, Wu Laobai said: “Part of me is actually hoping the decals get torn off. Then it would just be over, and that could be the end of the Shanghai leg.”

Soon after, Wu Laobai got a message from his older brother, who had seen photos of him and “China’s Three Billboards” online. Wu Laobai showed a rare flash of panic: he had thought he’d kept news of the project away from the relatives who don’t really know what he does. He said he didn’t want to worry his family, and also felt they would struggle to understand what he was trying to do.

Around five in the afternoon, calls from foreign media began. He answered nearly every interview request patiently. Messages piled up on WeChat and Weibo too, most of them crowdfunding notifications. Over the next twenty-four hours, they raised more than they had in the entire previous month.

The Shanghai leg wrapped up around seven that evening.

Second Stop: Nanjing (1/13–1/14)

Day one, January 13, 10:00 a.m.

Since the trucks they had rented couldn’t cross provincial lines, Wu Laobai and Zheng Hongbin decided to take the high-speed train to Nanjing.

At 9:45 they were rushing for the ticket gate at Hongqiao Railway Station.

“We’d agreed we’d go back [to Shenzhen] this week,” Wu Laobai said. Both he and Zheng Hongbin have day jobs at an arts center in Shenzhen. Zheng Hongbin said drily, “Maybe we’ve already been fired.”

January 13, midday

The “#TheCorrectedLover” hashtag had passed 2 million views in a single day, faster than Wu Laobai expected. So they planned to release more material while it was hot.

Wu Laobai decided that in the first days in Nanjing they would stay near where the trucks were parked, by Maigaoqiao Station, the terminus of Metro Line 1, to cut travel time.

On the subway, Wu Laobai’s phone kept switching between Weibo and WeChat. He saw that under the “#TheCorrectedLover” posts, some netizens were questioning the motives behind the piece, or arguing that the team had misunderstood what “sexual orientation disorder” means. Wu Laobai looked resigned: “I’ll find time to answer them later.”

Then lunch. His phone kept buzzing; the crowdfunding total was approaching 10,000 yuan, from 136 donors.

January 13, 2:00 p.m.

The three trucks booked in Nanjing were white. Two of the drivers had to work into the evening, so only one could meet Wu Laobai that afternoon.

Wu Laobai’s group waited in a mall Starbucks, using the time to sort through material and watch the online reaction — which friend, which big account had shared it. Private messages came in from LGBT and feminist circles, some asking the team to take up the Lei Chuang sexual-harassment case and speak out about it in the same protest form.

As for the concrete to-do list — making the truck decals, contacting volunteers to confirm the route, contacting conversion-therapy institutions — nothing had moved.

The driver arrived. His truck had a side door on the right and a protruding handle that could spoil the decals. Wu Laobai wasn’t happy with the model, but time being what it was, all he could do was make the decal fit the truck. The driver didn’t really follow Wu Laobai’s billboard plan. The one thing he cared about was that they not tear off the Lalamove sticker already on the truck.

January 13, 3:00 p.m.

Wu Laobai still had nowhere to get the decals made. It was Sunday, so the sign shops around Maigaoqiao were closed, on break, or would have to send the job to a factory and couldn’t deliver in time.

One advertising company suggested printed vinyl banners: fast, cheap, and less work to hang on a truck body. Wu Laobai seemed to waver. Zheng Hongbin reminded him that these three Nanjing trucks were different from the Shanghai ones, so decals would probably mean remaking the print files. Even with banners, though, this company couldn’t solve the problem of keeping the surface flat.

At 4:10 p.m., Zheng Hongbin abruptly said, “Let’s go,” and walked out. Wu Laobai, at a loss, followed him.

On the street Zheng Hongbin said: “That boss was too hung up on details.” Wu Laobai answered: “He’s not the one who’s hung up.” Zheng Hongbin shot back: “So it’s me?” Wu Laobai: “You have to think about the time. We still haven’t settled a single thing about the schedule.”

After weighing the alternatives — an LED-display truck (too expensive, too short a run) and sign shops in other districts (each with its own problems) — the two argued again, and neither gave way.

Wu Laobai decided to go back to the first company and have the vinyl banners made; there was no time left to consider anything else. On the way back, Zheng Hongbin spotted an aluminum shop and went to ask whether they could build a frame to hold the banners flat. The owner said there was no chance of getting one done that day. By then Wu Laobai could barely hide his irritation.

The sign shop owner called to say he had already left and wouldn’t be back for another half hour.

Night was coming on fast, and the truck slogans still weren’t settled.

January 13, 6:30 p.m.

The owner returned and Wu Laobai hurried over. Sending the order out at this hour, the owner told him, meant waiting until nine at night just for a proof, and workers wouldn’t be free to install anything until after ten. In other words, the truck slogans wouldn’t be finished until the middle of the night.

While they waited, Wu Laobai and Zheng Hongbin finally dealt with where to sleep. They found a hotel nearby, contacted volunteers in Nanjing, and planned the next day’s route.

At eleven at night, two workers turned up at the trucks and began hanging the banners. The fog thickened and the temperature dropped. Close to 3 a.m., Wu Laobai gave out and went back to the hotel, leaving the two workers to finish mounting the banners.

Day two, January 14, 9:00 a.m.

They were meant to leave at nine, but after a few hours of wind the banners were a mess. Wu Laobai called the worker who had hung them the night before and got no answer.

The three drivers asked Wu Laobai to buy some materials so they could rehang and tie the banners down themselves. The result was better than expected, but it pushed departure back another hour.

While they worked, the Nanjing volunteers arrived one by one, assigned to document the day on camera. One of them was a French photographer.

An old man cycled past the trucks, stopped for a closer look, and read out: “It’s ’19, why?” Wu Laobai laughed ruefully: “When I was planning this, I really didn’t expect so many people would read the 19 as 2019 instead of nineteen years.”

January 14, 10:30 a.m.

Before setting off, the drivers reminded Wu Laobai that the three trucks absolutely had to be out of the city center by 5 p.m., or they would hit the evening rush.

The lead driver was from Anhui. He seemed amazed by how the trucks looked with the banners up and took photos on his phone — though he had no idea what the slogans meant.

The convoy left an hour late. Wu Laobai again rode in the lead truck; along the way the driver kept taking voice calls from a friend about a job hauling oranges, so Wu Laobai had to keep reminding him to mind the formation.

January 14, 11:00 a.m.

The first stop was Renkang Hospital, a specialty hospital treating psychiatric patients.

Wu Laobai went in to register. A nurse told him the doctor was hypnotizing a patient and he would have to wait about thirty minutes.

Once again Wu Laobai “played” a gay man who had not come out to his family and privately hoped to be converted to heterosexuality.

The doctor who saw him, Dr. Ma, is the hospital’s specialist in “treating homosexuality.” His photograph hangs in the corridor alongside the other doctors’, with a bio that reads: nationally certified level-two psychological counselor, more than a decade in psychological counseling, with unique insight into hypnotherapy, specializing in the treatment of homosexuality, marriage and family problems, adolescent school aversion, internet addiction, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other psychological issues.

Asked about converting homosexuality, Dr. Ma told Wu Laobai confidently: “Renkang Hospital has rich experience resolving the problem of homosexuality, but there’s one precondition: you have to have a strong personal wish to change — that is, I myself want to change.”

Dr. Ma didn’t ask Wu Laobai much about his own experience. He said directly that homosexuality was a matter of ideas, so treatment would begin by changing cognition, then move on to professional techniques such as hypnosis, combined along the way with medication and “brain-balance therapy.”

Brain-balance therapy, so called, means stimulating the brain with a machine; on top of that they work at the cognitive level to instill acceptance of one’s biological sex.

Zheng Hongbin asked Dr. Ma how brain balance related to electroshock. The doctor pushed back quickly: “People who know what they’re doing don’t need electroshock.”

Dr. Ma stressed that the whole course took only 15 days, cost a little over 20,000 yuan, and needed about two hours a day, and that it could turn a gay man straight in that time. He also assured Wu Laobai there had already been several successful cases.

Wu Laobai seemed at a loss for a reply; afterward he said his heart had been pounding through the entire consultation.

The doctor suggested that if he wanted to know whether he could be treated, he could pay a little over 370 yuan on the spot for a test, with results in half an hour.

Wu Laobai agreed.

Meanwhile the three trucks were parked under the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, where the volunteers and drivers in the chase car went through the photos they had taken, which were quickly shared in the “Lover prep group” chat and on Weibo.

No one was allowed to sit in on the test. Wu Laobai went through it alone, and came out with an expression mixing confusion, alarm, and a trace of curiosity.

The results did come back quickly. Wu Laobai went in for a second consultation, and Dr. Ma read them for him: by the numbers his score was perhaps a bit high, and he showed some tendency toward obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Dr. Ma then said that if he wanted treatment, he could start that day. Wu Laobai seemed curious about brain-balance therapy and wanted to know exactly what it involved — he even thought it could be important footage for the documentary.

Just as he was considering sending the three trucks off on their own while he handled this separately, Zheng Hongbin reminded him what the treatment would cost in money and time, and suggested he eat lunch and calm down before deciding.

January 14, noon

Wu Laobai left Renkang Hospital keyed up.

January 14, afternoon

Over lunch, Zheng Hongbin and Wu Laobai roughly settled what came next: shoot at Nanjing landmarks, and visit one more conversion-therapy institution, the “Nanjing Urban Psychological Counseling Center.”

Wu Laobai gradually cooled down. He decided not to split off from the trucks, and to stick with the plan of taking photos at well-known spots around downtown Nanjing and posting them online.

The donations the Shanghai leg had generated seemed to be cooling by their second day in Nanjing. Wu Laobai needed more material to draw attention again.

They decided to go first to Xuanwu Gate and the Confucius Temple.

Unfortunately the three drivers never quite matched speeds, so the footage from the chase car came out poorly: either the trucks were too far apart, or the third one fell well behind. Every stop took much longer than planned.

The drivers also disagreed about how to hold the same speed. On the way to the Confucius Temple, the trucks got separated during a turnaround. Wu Laobai had to talk all three back together.

The evening rush was coming on, and his appointment at the next conversion-therapy institution was for four o’clock, but by the time the trucks headed that way it was nearly 4:30. When they arrived, Wu Laobai said goodbye to the three drivers.

The institution occupies an ordinary apartment in a residential compound, with no visible sign; you have to ring the doorbell to get in.

In a dimly lit office sat an older counselor, Mr. Zhu, and a young woman on staff.

When Wu Laobai explained why he had come, Mr. Zhu replied that he would first have to pay for a consultation, 1,000 yuan an hour, and that without going through the consultation stage he couldn’t disclose anything more.

But Wu Laobai only wanted to confirm whether they could convert gay people or treat them. Mr. Zhu kept repeating that a consultation had to come first.

“A thousand yuan right off the bat — I can’t accept that,” Wu Laobai said.

“He’s an old professor, a chief physician. A thousand yuan isn’t high at all. If your motivation is strong enough, treatment has a chance of changing you,” the woman said.

The two sides stayed stuck on the money. Mr. Zhu stopped arguing and asked only: “Are you doing this or not?”

The woman told Wu Laobai that the next day’s consultation slots were full too, and that by being late he had wasted half an hour of Mr. Zhu’s time.

Under the circumstances, Wu Laobai left less than ten minutes after walking in, and the Nanjing leg was over. Zheng Hongbin said they had already bought tickets on the eleven o’clock flight back to Shenzhen that night.

The trucks went out again on January 27 in Jinan, Wu Laobai’s hometown — he wanted to fold the “action” into his trip home for the Spring Festival.

After two cities’ experience, Wu Laobai said the third stop, Jinan, went considerably more smoothly than the first two. They even brought in a drone to film.

But not long after Nanjing ended, Xu Zheng, the Shanghai driver, told Wu Laobai that the police had come to his company over something to do with the truck decals. When I asked him later how things were going, his tone had changed from before the trip. He said he didn’t want to talk about it: “All right, I don’t really feel like discussing this anymore. I think we should leave it here.”

As the three trucks passed through more cities, “#TheCorrectedLover” kept drawing attention, and Hua Zile’s Voice of Tongzhi went on releasing short videos from Shanghai, Nanjing, and Jinan.

Watching how the view counts grew, though, the hashtag never regained the explosive pace of the first days in Shanghai. Some voices also began to question Wu Laobai’s motives, or to challenge the details and the concepts behind conversion therapy.

“The reason they came to Voice of Tongzhi to work with us is that our core direction is public education too. Facing the talk and the comments we’re seeing now, we want more people to understand what homosexuality actually is, and why it can’t be treated. Wu Laobai is straight, and going into this piece his understanding was in fact quite limited — I believe he has learned a great deal in this period. A lot of medical institutions still treat people on the premise of ‘sexual orientation disorder.’ There are many tragedies like this, and people don’t see them,” Hua Zile said.

Besides keeping the trucks going, Wu Laobai is also collecting material for the final documentary. Online, they have been calling for people from across the country who have been through sexual-orientation “conversion therapy” to come forward and share their experiences.

“Fight absurdity with facts.” That is the line they wrote in the online call for participants.

Cover image from QDaily.