by Sheila Heti
Meng Sheng was among my partners. My feminine clothing, speech, manners, and hair tossing were plainly intended to attract a man, and he was perceptive enough to notice my transformation. Yet he didn’t ask questions, and instead he adopted a chivalrous attitude toward me. Every few days he’d see me, and I’d be waiting for him, as if we were dating. In my heart I was hoping I’d find a guy to fall for soon, yet Meng Sheng treated it like a big joke, like we both knew it was a charade. Only much later, when I recalled the look in his eyes and the words he said, did I realize that no matter what his real motive was, he had tried to love me.
“Hey, if you don’t meet the right guy, you can always call me up,” Meng Sheng said. He dragged me to campus on my birthday, saying that in honor of the occasion, he’d take me out for a celebratory round of drinks.
“Meng Sheng, do you think I’m changing in order to find a man?” It was the first and only time in four years that I’d spent my birthday with someone. In fact, when Meng Sheng suggested it, I felt grateful.
“I don’t buy any of it. You people are ridiculous, wasting your energy trying to improve yourselves. What good does it do? You all think I don’t try hard enough, and that’s why I’m such a failure. But what do you know? In order to save my own life, I had to muster a hundred times the strength that any of you have. Hell, I can’t even exert myself anymore! Do you know how psychology defines ‘helplessness’? I like you the way you are right now, being like, Who cares? and seeing how bad it gets. The best is when things get so bad that I actually feel something. That’s when I reach self-understanding,” Meng Sheng said, laughing. He’d written me a song as a birthday present.
“Seriously, though, don’t die before me. If you did, I’d be even more bored than I already am. You have to go on living for me.” He solemnly placed his hand on my shoulder, his emotions genuine, and we bonded in a profound moment of mutual understanding. Then, he added, “Really, you should let me make love to you just once. It’ll be your birthday present.”
“Okay!” I merrily agreed. In that instant, we abandoned all inhibitions and sentimentality, yet it was anything but an act of debauchery. He wanted to give me a gift that was hard to come by, pure and simple—and what I got was the experience of absolute trust.
A campus patrol car passed. We lay naked, hidden in a patch of tall grass, and the entire time I felt wild and free, not self-conscious in the least. Suddenly Meng Sheng let out a howl.
“You have to stop hurting yourself! You’re not okay at all!” He practically exploded. For the first time, I realized that he was in pain, that my tragedy had become his own.
With that revelation, a hole was blown through the earth’s crust. That reckless lunatic felt sorry for me, and I truly loved him. Numb to my own feelings, I never saw it coming. Faraway sounds drifted toward us. The charade was over. It was no use.
* * *
Xiao Fan was the most desperate woman I’d ever seen. Despair was in her past and in her present. Everything about her screamed despair. Because of her despair, I loved her. Because of her despair, I was shaken. Because of her despair, I was overwhelmed, and because of her despair, I left her. Her despair was her beauty.
I secretly looked forward to seeing her during my weekly shift. By day, she worked at the offices of the Youth Corps. By night, she and her fiancé and a few friends ran a bar. Every Saturday at six p.m., we’d work together. The two of us made a good team. By the time her shift began, she’d be overworked already. She often arrived looking thin and pale. Naturally concerned, I’d stare at her out of the corner of my eye. She smiled at me. It was a tired smile.
She’d ask me why I was sitting next to her, and I’d say because you’re smart. She’d also ask me why her. I’d say because you’re so beautiful. She said maybe you don’t know that I have nothing to offer you. I said doesn’t matter, other women don’t want me. She said you can’t handle me. I said let’s cross that bridge when we get there.
She sat on my bike, waiting for her fiancé to pick her up. I insisted on giving her a lift home. She didn’t think I’d be able to move with her on the back. I got on the bike, and we went for a ride. She was so light. We ran a red light and made a sudden turn. And with that, she became a little kid screaming in delight. She said she’d never ridden so fast before. We rode up a giant bridge, taking the steep lane for motorized vehicles. All around us, cars were zooming past. We were on the only bicycle. I was drenched with sweat. It was a dangerous and slow journey, and she was behind me, shouting go, go, go . . .
Her capacity for happiness was limited, and yet she seemed happy. She always seemed happy. Her happiness was natural, infectious. Having been endowed with an intuitive understanding of others, she knew how to give and take. She was the epitome of graciousness. The art of courtesy, as she so ably demonstrated it, was a musical instrument in the hands of a virtuoso.
As I carried her on my bike, her weight became my own, and for a time, she was a part of me. During my grueling ascent of the bridge, a cool breeze encircled us. The surrounding riverbed was visible beneath the limpid waters, and the twilight sky was a gentle pink. To our left was the sun, tiny and round, its rays forming striations of color.
Xiao Fan and I inhaled deeply. All was peaceful. I let up on the pedals, slowing down as much as I could. I wished the bridge would never end. With her close behind me, I could tell that her breathing was irregular: She’d gotten overexcited. I had seen this day coming, when we would drop the façade and find ourselves at a loss for words. In a calm and matter-of-fact tone, she asked whether I’d still see her if she quit her job. She was older and worldly-wise, sober and heavyhearted.
I could see into the depths of her soul. I knew her type. Insight was my natural gift. Just go on managing your bar. I’ll come see you. Doesn’t matter what time you get off, I said. A flock of white pigeons flew overhead, and in that instant, having been shown a glimpse of absolute freedom, I found courage. I wanted to fall madly in love. I already knew I would take the love in me that no one else wanted and give it all to this woman. All my memories of Xiao Fan and I together were to be captured in this single bleak picture.
She knew I was secretly in love with her. She knew my demons. She knew I was trying to figure out the inner workings of her soul. She knew that I understood her, that she could trust me. She even knew that I would vanish; I could hear it in those words on the bridge. I could tell that she was not one who was easily moved, but that I had moved her. She hid too much. She begrudged my absence before things even began. Her feelings for me were complicated.
During the lowest point following my split with Shui Ling, I disappeared for a month. Didn’t report for duty. Didn’t get in touch with anyone. I was at home, incapacitated. Out of the blue, I got a phone call. It was Xiao Fan’s soft, courteous voice on the line. I heard her say, “I don’t know why I’m calling you, and I really don’t know if there’s any point in me calling you, but I just wanted to make sure you were still alive.” (At this point, I was certain that she was crying, and that she was stifling the sound.) “So it’s just for my benefit, okay? You haven’t shown up for work all month. I sense that something’s going on with you, but I know very well that I have no business telling you what to do. You always have to have your way. You’re always looking after me, and whatever it is I need, you’re there to offer it. But you never tell me what’s going on inside of you. Something bad happens, and you hide at home, alone, wallowing in misery. So tell me, what can I actually do to help you? Or should I wait for you to feel better on your own and show up for a shift with a smile again? You make me feel so helpless.” Her voice betrayed a nasal congestion from crying, and she seemed to be struggling to maintain her composure as she spoke.
On the most intense night of all, I finally went to the bar to find her. I was already drunk, but she didn’t ask questions. She just sat with me and kept me company, telling me all kinds of anecdotes about what had happened while I was away and what was going on in her life. I laug
hed as I listened. I laughed so hard that my entire body shook violently. Tears of laughter streamed down my face the whole time. With firmness as well as understanding, she looked me straight in the eye. I stared back as she rattled on. Through my tears, I was laughing hysterically, and I thought about how I had always longed to be loved like this . . .
The alcohol kicked in. I vomited everything up in the bathroom. I told her not to worry, that I didn’t want her to see this disgusting side of me. After I threw up, I came back and hid in a corner of the room. I lost control and burned myself. I thought she wouldn’t notice, but when I looked over, she was standing at the bar, watching me as she poured a drink. There were tears welling in her eyes.
* * *
Six months later, I moved into Xiao Fan’s apartment. She took me in like a stray dog. The months that I lived with her were, in all my four years, probably the only time I was truly happy. They were like a dying man’s final glimpses of the world.
I was haunted by despair, pain, confusion, and loneliness, which threatened to drag me out of a world filled with the promise of the future and engulf me at any moment. For the time being, I was wide awake and living each day to the fullest, marking the dawn of a new era in which I was truly living the good life. This newfound ardor was all Xiao Fan’s doing, and like a moth to a flame, I reveled in it, allowing the desires that had once been dammed to run recklessly wild. I loved her ferociously. And in my total abandon, I relinquished all self-respect. I stooped to a new low.
Xiao Fan was the only woman I ever made love to. Of all my memories, my memory of her is the single most beautiful. It should be evident by now that I can’t conceivably depict this woman. In writing this much, I’ve already condemned myself to failure and done her an injustice. It amounts to nothing more than a sham, and I’ve gritted my teeth trying all the while. There’s a raw passion that still lives in my blood, still courses through my veins. The mere thought of her fills me with enough desire to send me into a mad frenzy. Yet this memory is also the saddest and most painful of all, for I never really knew this woman’s heart, and I never would.
CATHERINE POND
■
This Rain
FROM Sixth Finch
You like sex with other women
because it makes you feel safe,
she said. Nothing makes me
feel safe, I explained. She is married
but when her daughter wins
the fishing contest in Allatoona,
she offers me the prize trout.
Later, loosening the flesh
from the spine, I do not feel
relieved, or thankful. She who knows
me best believed I might be
nourished by this small, dead thing.
ALEX TIZON
■
My Family’s Slave
FROM The Atlantic
THE ASHES FILLED a black plastic box about the size of a toaster. It weighed three and a half pounds. I put it in a canvas tote bag and packed it in my suitcase this past July for the transpacific flight to Manila. From there I would travel by car to a rural village. When I arrived, I would hand over all that was left of the woman who had spent 56 years as a slave in my family’s household.
Her name was Eudocia Tomas Pulido. We called her Lola. She was 4 foot 11, with mocha-brown skin and almond eyes that I can still see looking into mine—my first memory. She was eighteen years old when my grandfather gave her to my mother as a gift, and when my family moved to the United States, we brought her with us. No other word but slave encompassed the life she lived. Her days began before everyone else woke and ended after we went to bed. She prepared three meals a day, cleaned the house, waited on my parents, and took care of my four siblings and me. My parents never paid her, and they scolded her constantly. She wasn’t kept in leg irons, but she might as well have been. So many nights, on my way to the bathroom, I’d spot her sleeping in a corner, slumped against a mound of laundry, her fingers clutching a garment she was in the middle of folding.
To our American neighbors, we were model immigrants, a poster family. They told us so. My father had a law degree, my mother was on her way to becoming a doctor, and my siblings and I got good grades and always said “please” and “thank you.” We never talked about Lola. Our secret went to the core of who we were and, at least for us kids, who we wanted to be.
After my mother died of leukemia, in 1999, Lola came to live with me in a small town north of Seattle. I had a family, a career, a house in the suburbs—the American dream. And then I had a slave.
At baggage claim in Manila, I unzipped my suitcase to make sure Lola’s ashes were still there. Outside, I inhaled the familiar smell: a thick blend of exhaust and waste, of ocean and sweet fruit and sweat.
Early the next morning I found a driver, an affable middle-aged man who went by the nickname “Doods,” and we hit the road in his truck, weaving through traffic. The scene always stunned me. The sheer number of cars and motorcycles and jeepneys. The people weaving between them and moving on the sidewalks in great brown rivers. The street vendors in bare feet trotting alongside cars, hawking cigarettes and cough drops and sacks of boiled peanuts. The child beggars pressing their faces against the windows.
Doods and I were headed to the place where Lola’s story began, up north in the central plains: Tarlac province. Rice country. The home of a cigar-chomping army lieutenant named Tomas Asuncion, my grandfather. The family stories paint Lieutenant Tom as a formidable man given to eccentricity and dark moods, who had lots of land but little money and kept mistresses in separate houses on his property. His wife died giving birth to their only child, my mother. She was raised by a series of utusans, or “people who take commands.”
Slavery has a long history on the islands. Before the Spanish came, islanders enslaved other islanders, usually war captives, criminals, or debtors. Slaves came in different varieties, from warriors who could earn their freedom through valor to household servants who were regarded as property and could be bought and sold or traded. High-status slaves could own low-status slaves, and the low could own the lowliest. Some chose to enter servitude simply to survive: In exchange for their labor, they might be given food, shelter, and protection.
When the Spanish arrived, in the 1500s, they enslaved islanders and later brought African and Indian slaves. The Spanish Crown eventually began phasing out slavery at home and in its colonies, but parts of the Philippines were so far-flung that authorities couldn’t keep a close eye. Traditions persisted under different guises, even after the U.S. took control of the islands in 1898. Today even the poor can have utusans or katulongs (“helpers”) or kasambahays (“domestics”), as long as there are people even poorer. The pool is deep.
Lieutenant Tom had as many as three families of utusans living on his property. In the spring of 1943, with the islands under Japanese occupation, he brought home a girl from a village down the road. She was a cousin from a marginal side of the family, rice farmers. The lieutenant was shrewd—he saw that this girl was penniless, unschooled, and likely to be malleable. Her parents wanted her to marry a pig farmer twice her age, and she was desperately unhappy but had nowhere to go. Tom approached her with an offer: She could have food and shelter if she would commit to taking care of his daughter, who had just turned twelve.
Lola agreed, not grasping that the deal was for life.
“She is my gift to you,” Lieutenant Tom told my mother.
“I don’t want her,” my mother said, knowing she had no choice.
Lieutenant Tom went off to fight the Japanese, leaving Mom behind with Lola in his creaky house in the provinces. Lola fed, groomed, and dressed my mother. When they walked to the market, Lola held an umbrella to shield her from the sun. At night, when Lola’s other tasks were done—feeding the dogs, sweeping the floors, folding the laundry that she had washed by hand in the Camiling River—she sat at the edge of my mother’s bed and fanned her to sleep.
One day during the war Lieu
tenant Tom came home and caught my mother in a lie—something to do with a boy she wasn’t supposed to talk to. Tom, furious, ordered her to “stand at the table.” Mom cowered with Lola in a corner. Then, in a quivering voice, she told her father that Lola would take her punishment. Lola looked at Mom pleadingly, then without a word walked to the dining table and held on to the edge. Tom raised the belt and delivered 12 lashes, punctuating each one with a word. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. You. Do. Not. Lie. To. Me. Lola made no sound.
My mother, in recounting this story late in her life, delighted in the outrageousness of it, her tone seeming to say, Can you believe I did that? When I brought it up with Lola, she asked to hear Mom’s version. She listened intently, eyes lowered, and afterward she looked at me with sadness and said simply, “Yes. It was like that.”
Seven years later, in 1950, Mom married my father and moved to Manila, bringing Lola along. Lieutenant Tom had long been haunted by demons, and in 1951 he silenced them with a .32 caliber slug to his temple. Mom almost never talked about it. She had his temperament—moody, imperial, secretly fragile—and she took his lessons to heart, among them the proper way to be a provincial matrona: You must embrace your role as the giver of commands. You must keep those beneath you in their place at all times, for their own good and the good of the household. They might cry and complain, but their souls will thank you. They will love you for helping them be what God intended.
My brother Arthur was born in 1951. I came next, followed by three more siblings in rapid succession. My parents expected Lola to be as devoted to us kids as she was to them. While she looked after us, my parents went to school and earned advanced degrees, joining the ranks of so many others with fancy diplomas but no jobs. Then the big break: Dad was offered a job in Foreign Affairs as a commercial analyst. The salary would be meager, but the position was in America—a place he and Mom had grown up dreaming of, where everything they hoped for could come true.