by Yu-Han Chao
Sonnie did not grow up with many boys, anyway. He was always in music school, which meant that in a class of twenty-six boys and girls, there were usually two to four boys, one of whom was Sonnie, and the rest of his classmates were piano-playing, perfumed, spoiled, rich girls. They were pretty, proper, talented, and usually nice, but they were not for him.
Now, as a bachelor of thirty-two, Sonnie liked his self-sufficient life in Taipei. His parents had him in their old age, so he had very few memories of them except their somber, quiet presence at the dinner table and their handing him red envelopes during Chinese New Year. He loved them, vaguely and mostly out of politeness. When they died of cancer when he was eight, he cried only in his sleep. Perhaps he was too young to understand death then. His older brother, a man of few words, and sister, a very traditional woman, were the ones who brought him up. But like estranged parents, each of them had long since moved to different parts of Taiwan. His brother lived in Yi Lan because of his job with the government-owned telecom company, and his sister went even further south to Kaohsiung after marrying a schoolteacher there.
This left Sonnie with their old family house, a modest three-bedroom, one-story house which belonged to one of the historic neighborhoods in Taipei close to the old train station. Most of the traditional houses with large gardens and little sheds nearby had been torn up and rebuilt into skyscrapers, but not Sonnie’s neighborhood. The owners here were all too stubborn or old-fashioned to sell their property and move. Sonnie liked his neighborhood; here he felt safe. It was like holding on to some part of his childhood, before he knew that he was different, before he had to worry about boys, or men, or what people thought of him. This was where he had practiced his violin one and a half hours a day, seven days a week, for twenty-five years, and this was where his violin students came for private lessons before big recitals, important exams, and to fill the hours of the day during winter and summer vacation.
Sonnie taught violin at two music schools, making slightly less than a typical elementary school teacher. The private lessons he gave to students outside of school and other private students, however, more than made up for his modest taxable income. He always had thousand-NT dollar bills lying around in clean, white envelopes with “Teacher Mu” written on them. These he spent on nice suits for evenings at the concert hall. His drawers contained imported Calvin Klein underwear and silk-blend socks, handcrafted leather belts and silk neckties. He lived comfortably but not extravagantly, taking pleasure in little things like fine garments and nice, solitary meals at a good restaurant.
He was the quintessential Taiwanese bachelor, the established thirty-something young man with a house and car and job whom every mother wanted her daughter to marry. Many people were interested in arranging for him to go on blind dates with their daughters or sisters or friends, but he always declined by saying he did not feel ready for such a commitment yet. In truth, he would not be able to commit to a woman until his next lifetime. In Asia, unfortunately, one did not turn around and ask the parents trying to offer one their daughter whether they had a nice son for one to date. It simply wasn’t done. The word “gay” did not really exist unless you were making fun of someone, calling them bo li, glass, a name Sonnie never understood. Why were gay people referred to as “glass”? Because they were invisible, and one looked right past them? It was certainly how Sonnie felt. He was under the impression that even if he ran down the street, screaming at the top of his lungs, “I like men, not women!” the old lady next door would continue to push her eligible grand-niece on him and tell him that he was just “going through a phase.”
One evening, Sonnie stumbled into the gay chat room on a Taiwanese website, Yam.com, and found himself typing in English to a man called Brian.
“Where are you from?” Sonnie typed.
“Great Britain,” Brian answered.
Sonnie’s heart skipped a little; he had never had a conversation with a white man before. He had seen them at fancy concerts with their Taiwanese wives, in posh outdoor bars drinking beer. He never thought that he could get a gay white man to talk to him. But Westerners were supposed to be more liberated and open-minded, and maybe this was exactly what he needed.
“You live in Taipei?” Sonnie asked.
“Yes, I work here.”
“You like it here? Taipei?”
“Not really.”
The conversation was slow, but Brian sent Sonnie a picture of himself and asked if he would like to go out and have a drink of tea or coffee sometime. Fumbling to find the computer keys to type his answer, Sonnie felt his body humming with nervous excitement as he made his first blind date: a date with a white man, a British person, someone with an elegant accent, light skin, and from the looks of the photograph, a fit, muscular body. Sonnie felt like his life was about to change, like he was finally breaking free of some kind of shell.
They were supposed to meet on the first floor of the plaza beside the old train station at seven in the evening. Sonnie left home early to have a tasty meal of crab bisque in a toasted sourdough bread bowl on the top floor of a nearby department store. Afterward, he stood reading a novel in a bookstore beside the restaurant, as he’d had the habit of reading entire books in bookstores since he was a child.
Sonnie did not know if he had read his watch wrong earlier or simply lost himself in the book by a Nobel Prize–winning Chinese author (it wasn’t interesting at all, in fact), but all of a sudden he saw that the hands of the large clock in the bookstore were pointing at eight and five. He was almost an hour late!
Taking the elevator and wishing it moved more quickly down the twenty-one stories, he half ran toward the plaza, thinking that he had missed Brian, who would have assumed that he had been stood up and left. Who makes a date with someone in an online chat room, anyway? As his eyes scanned the plaza full of commuting office workers, and schoolgirls and schoolboys going to cram schools or shopping, Sonnie spotted a Caucasian man of medium build wearing ripped jeans and a dingy wife beater. Sonnie himself wore casual khaki trousers, a carefully pressed shirt and a handcrafted, Indian-style leather belt. As Sonnie approached, the two men looked at each other and shared what seemed like a moment of recognition.
“You are Brian?” Sonnie ventured.
A nod. “You Sonnie from the chat room?” Brian pronounced his name sunny, which sounded odd, but Sonnie nodded. For all he knew, he had been pronouncing his own English name wrong this whole time.
It was a good thing Sonnie didn’t really sweat; he was overheated from running and very embarrassed for being almost an hour late. If one were half an hour late for an exam the teacher wouldn’t even let one in—Sonnie felt grateful that this gruff-looking yet in some ways beautiful foreigner had stood there waiting for him for a full fifty-three minutes (assuming the man had arrived on time).
“I’m so sorry I am late, I made a mistake,” Sonnie said, then realized that he was not making a good first impression, what with his accent, nervousness, and lack of confidence.
He collected himself and nodded in the direction of some stores. “What you want to do? Drink alcohol?”
Then Sonnie thought that this was probably the wrong thing to say, too—to assume that all British people wanted to drink.
“I don’t like the drinks they serve here,” Brian replied. “And they’re totally overpriced, even though they’ve only got bottled stuff here. I’ll tell you what, let’s go to an MTV, I know one nearby.” He pronounced bottled bah-old, which threw Sonnie for a second, but he nodded and followed Brian’s lead.
Sonnie had never been to an MTV in his life. To him, those were dirty places where strange things took place. Usually lovers went there, rented a room and a movie and watched it there in comfortable privacy (not complete privacy, though—likely for legal reasons, there was a small glass window about the size of a fist in the door). Teenage delinquents went there, and drug addicts, too, when they could afford it.
Sonnie patted his pants as if subconsciously brushin
g them clean as he and Brian walked into a dark neighborhood, where blood-like betel nut juice stained the asphalt and the streets themselves smelled. They passed stray dogs, garbage stacked beside the road, tobacco shops, places that sold lottery tickets, and an amputated man crawling along the sidewalk, pushing a tray with him, begging for money. Sonnie considered putting some change in the handicapped beggar’s tray, then remembered stories about how some beggars pretend to be helpless, but if you get too close to them, their accomplices, a group of muggers, will jump you. He quickened his step to catch up with Brian.
The MTV was a tiny business hidden on the sixth floor of a sleazy-looking cement building with tinted windows. Brian knew his way around. Soon the two men were at the service counter in the MTV, being invited to pick a film to watch.
Before the catalogue had been presented to them, Sonnie clumsily dug out his wallet.
“Please, let me pay. I am so sorry I was late. I feel bad. Do you mind?”
“Sure,” Brian said, hands in pockets, indifferent. “What do you want to watch, bruv?”
“You can pick.”
“Okay.” Brian flipped through pages until he landed one finger on a page. “Let’s watch this one, Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. It will be an educational experience for you, since it's about Great Britain, my motherland.”
Without catching a word of the movie’s long title, Sonnie nodded eagerly and gave the clerk a five hundred-NT bill and two one-hundred-NT bills. A middle-aged woman with deep, tired marks and bags under her eyes led the two men to a large room. She opened the door and turned on the lights so they could have a look inside.
“Okay?” she asked, referring to the room.
“Fine,” Brian said.
“Yes, yes, good,” Sonnie said, speaking in English.
The woman cast a strange look at him, as if judging him for being with a man or for being with a foreigner, possibly both, but walked away too quickly for Sonnie to tell.
Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels turned out long, violent, strange, and mostly incomprehensible for Sonnie. He found himself unable to settle down comfortably in the room alone with this foreign man and foreign film despite an abundance of pillows and sofa space. Half the room was sofa. It stretched out long and wide, like a bed with armrests on the sides. Brian, who laughed out loud in an almost sinister way, especially when someone got shot, periodically turned to Sonnie and asked if he “got” what happened.
“You know what it meant when the big guy said crystal?”
“Uh . . . crystal clear?”
Sonnie had read as much as he could in English, listened to the English-language ICRT radio station, and kept current with his vocabulary by reading Studio Classroom magazine, but this was a difficult question for him.
“Right. Good job.” Brian looked pleased and turned his closely shaven head back to the large screen. He was leaning alternatively on his right and left elbows, flopping belly down on the sofa.
“Make yourself more comfortable. Are you comfortable like that?” he asked Sonnie, who was visibly stiff and tensed up whenever characters cursed or fired a gun.
Sonnie nodded, though just that moment he started at a loud gunshot.
“You can move closer to me if you like,” Brian said.
“It’s okay, I am fine here.” Sonnie’s heart brimmed with hope, but he was too shy to accept. Maybe if Brian had insisted, or asked a second time, he would reconsider, but he didn’t.
Sonnie longed to stretch his cramped legs. He imagined the handsome foreigner putting his arm around his shoulders—was that what was supposed to happen? He had so little experience, and the porn he occasionally furtively looked at on the internet was low quality and fuzzy. It didn’t show much gray area between two people meeting for the first time and the same two people going at it vigorously moments later. Plus, the situations were foreign and outlandish, involving pizza deliveries or flight school, or even the great outdoors, complete with waterfalls, boulders, and forests.
Sonnie made a mental note to himself to watch more British movies in the future so he could understand the accent better, especially if he and Brian went to an MTV in the future and watched something like this again. Understanding the film would help him feel more at ease.
“This is the kind of life I grew up with,” Brian said at the end of the movie.
Sonnie blinked, thinking of the smoking guns and mobsters.
Brian continued. “We had to struggle, just my mum and me; we were very poor. Most Taiwanese I meet don’t understand.”
Sonnie, who wanted very much to understand, nodded as sympathetically as possible, but Brian simply sighed and got up.
Sonnie walked Brian to a bus stop where he could catch a bus to his apartment near National Taiwan Normal University, where a lot of foreigners and exchange students lived because of the Chinese classes offered by the university. Along the way, Brian only attempted conversation once, asking Sonnie about what he did for a living. Sonnie, struggling with his English, tried his best to talk about music school and spoiled rich kids, things he was familiar with. Brian did not respond enthusiastically, only making a few “I see” type remarks or clarifying English words that Sonnie had butchered beyond recognition.
The next evening, Sonnie was already in “Gay Chat” when Brian logged on. In fact, he had been waiting all day to talk to Brian again. He couldn’t get him out of his mind.
“Hello!” Sonnie typed.
“Hi.”
“Nice to talk to you again,” Sonnie typed.
“I think we can’t be friends.”
“I think so, too,” Sonnie replied immediately. He had accidentally read Brian’s “can’t” as “can.”
“I said we cannot be friends.” Brian typed, sensing that Sonnie had misunderstood.
Sonnie stopped for several seconds. It was like someone had dipped him into a bathtub of ice.
“Why?” he finally tapped onto his keyboard weakly.
“When you first saw me yesterday, your face fell. I could see it. I get the same response every time. When I go to an interview for a job teaching English, at a kindergarten, even—and I’m great with children—the same thing happens, and they don’t hire me. They see that I am not wearing a nice shirt and tie and suit pants. They judge people by the cover, and that’s wrong. A bit of hair on the chin, a pair of old jeans, and you’re out. You judged me, too. When we met, you saw that I was not clean cut, and your face fell.”
Sonnie was stunned. He read the terrible words slowly as they appeared on his computer screen. He had not been disappointed about Brian’s appearance at all—he was too upset and embarrassed about being late. But Brian’s words left him with a rotten feeling inside. He felt misunderstood, and somehow, dirty. He wanted to explain, in perfect British English, that he had not grown up particularly rich, that he was not who Brian thought he was, that he did not judge him for how he dressed or whether he had money, that he only wanted a chance to get to know him, that he was attracted to him. Sonnie wanted to tell Brian how much courage it took him to finally meet him in person, how hard it was to be gay in Taiwan, that he had thought about him practically every minute since their date at the MTV, how he longed for him to touch him, about how hopeful he had felt, how much he longed for a relationship, for a boyfriend.
“I did not think that way yesterday—” Sonnie began, but no words came. He could think of a hundred eloquent explanations in Chinese, but not in English.
“It’s okay,” Brian continued. “You and I come from very different backgrounds. I don’t expect you to understand. I’m just saying that we can’t be friends.”
Defeated and hurt, Sonnie could only type, “Okay.”
“Take care.” The last words from Brian.
“Bye,” Sonnie typed, after a long pause. He felt ashamed— an awful, festering shame, which, if manifested in his body, would show as beehive-like infections in all his soft tissue, his liver and heart all sponge-like, eaten away and shredded into
three-dimensional, pink-and-blood-red lace filled with nothing but holes.
He shouldn’t have entered the chat room, shouldn’t have gone on a blind date with a stranger and foreigner; if he had done none of those things he would not have been hurt. Turning off his desktop computer, he leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. He felt weak, like he had been eviscerated, scraped, and emptied out from the inside.
A Bach theme was coming to him, a melancholy one in G minor that always pained him with its stretched, split chords. He picked up his violin and played. He pulled the bow across the strings as if wiping away the memory of the past few hours, or rather, his entire lifetime. He would play and play beautifully until he felt better, or until a student came, a rich little spoiled kid with an expensive violin in a heavy, velvet-lined case, who had hardly any worries at all, at least for now.
And Then There Were None
LILY GU STARED into the vast blue nothingness beyond a little rectangular window with rounded edges. She rubbed a napkin against the grease mark left on the win-dowpane by her nose and thought moodily about her ex-girlfriend.
The flight from Victoria to Taipei took nearly twenty-four hours: two continental breakfasts, three three-course lunches, and a long layover in Japan. The whirring of the engines shifted as the descent began. Flight attendants rushed about locking up food carriers, making sure overhead bins were closed, and collecting empty champagne glasses. Lily pressed two buttons, one to lower the foot rest and straighten her chair, another to change the massage setting of her seat. She could afford flying business because her father’s clinic in Taipei did well. He had also paid for her violin and voice lessons at the Victoria Conservatory of Music in Canada for the past five years.
Over ten years ago, local gangsters came to call at Mr. Gu’s brand new clinic. Unless he paid them a monthly protection fee, they said, they would kidnap his daughter for ransom money. After an initial advance, Mr. Gu made other arrangements as soon as possible. He sent his wife and daughter to Canada. With the help of some relatives in Canada, he bought them an old, drafty house in Victoria. He visited them in Victoria or they visited him in Taipei twice a year.