by Yu-Han Chao
Working at my parents’ store is how I met Natasha. She has golden hair and the kind of face you see in a Western magazine, all angles and sharp lines. I could never pronounce her name, so she let me call her Na Na. It’s a good name because there are Chinese words for it, there there, so soothing and soft, and because I gave the name to her. Soon she went by “Na Na” all the time, she said, because it’s easier for people to say. I’m a little mad that she used the name that I gave her with other people—that takes the specialness away a bit.
Na Na used to come to the store two or three times a week. She bought the same thing every time: one pack of green Wrigley’s gum with seven pieces in it. She’d take the gum from the rack and place a ten-NT coin on the counter, and I’d give her three one-NT coins for change. She must have a whole jar of one-NT coins, I used to think to myself, since she never gave me smaller change, always ten-NT. Once I showed her a value pack of Wrigley’s gum, because she bought so much every week it would save her money to just buy a larger pack, but she smiled and pushed the value pack away; she only wanted seven pieces at a time. She pointed at the weekly calendar on the counter and flipped pages. Each time she flipped a page, she made a shrugging motion. Then she let all the pages fall back into place and pointed at the current week, making a thumbs-up motion. I thought about that for weeks, for months. I decided it was a good philosophy. Instead of being greedy and hoarding a lot of gum, possibly risking losing it or letting it go stale, you can get it seven pieces at a time, just like life. You consider everything one week at a time like the weather report and never worry beyond that because there’s no point. You might die next week, and somebody else will eat your extra gum.
I would never say that to my son, of course. I don’t say much to my son. He’s only one, and he can’t walk yet. I figure he’s too young for the depressing realities of life. He’s confused enough as it is. Na Na speaks Russian to him, my parents and I speak Taiwanese or Chinese to him, and he never responds. He has no words. He has some sort of speech delay, my parents say. I asked them if I had speech delay when I was little and they said absolutely not, I started speaking earlier than most kids. Something must have happened along the way. The teasing didn’t help. You see, I hardly spoke to anyone at school, but once, just once, I farted out loud during siesta time. Since then my name has been Fart. My classmates said I farted more than I spoke because I farted instead of talking. I hope nobody makes fun of my son in the future, call him names like bai chi, white idiot. His name is Bai, white, because that’s my favorite color, and also Na Na’s favorite color—at least I think it is.
I ran into one of my old junior high classmates the other day. She couldn’t believe that I was married and had a son. You, Fart, married? A son? It was mean of her to still call me Fart after all those years. If I see her walking down the street next time, I will close the door and pretend the store is closed. I don’t want my son to hear her call me Fart. I am a father, and a father should keep his dignity in front of his son. To your son, you are always someone big, someone important, not a fart or a joke. If you set a bad example and lose face before your children, the children will grow up with low self-esteem and become the running dogs of gangsters or accept beatings from their spouses. I learned that much from TV.
Na Na worked in a bar. She was one of those Russian white girls who came to Taipei to dance in bars for money. She wasn't really a prostitute. Though I think she had probably slept with a customer or two that she liked, but she was too quick-tempered to “service” just any man. A sex worker? Forget it. She would never go down on her knees and put her mouth around a stranger’s dick—she was too proud. She didn’t even do it for me. She did like to dance for them, though. I didn’t understand why a man would need a woman to perform a dance for him, but I didn’t mind too much. She was tall, like a goddess made of white chocolate, and she liked to show off her body because it was such an overwhelming sight, so gorgeous and creamy, like a marble statue. There was a crease here or there and her breasts sagged a little bit, but she carried herself very nicely. She was almost as tall as me, and I’m pretty tall for Taiwanese, 182 centimeters. Bai will be tall when he grows up, I’m sure. Unless he gets bullied too much at school and becomes depressed and covered in acne, and turns to drugs, alcohol and smoking, all of which will stunt his growth. Otherwise, he will be tall, light-skinned and handsome. White and Asian are a good mix, and he’s a nice-looking kid: long lashes, big eyes, and everything. He looks like a Russian child with dark hair, al though I’m not really sure what a Russian child looks like. I can only imagine a very short and chubby Na Na.
I lost my virginity to Na Na on our first date; at least, I like to call it our first date. She took me by the hand and led me to her one-bedroom apartment down the alley from my store. She kicked the front door shut, unzipped my pants, stared at my privates, jerked me off, and laughed because I came so quickly. Her apartment was small, essentially a bedroom with a corner paneled out for a bathroom. Later, I noticed there was no stove. All she had to cook with was a hot water kettle to make instant noodles. After jerking me off, she wiped my softening dick off with a rough towel covered with dark stains. She removed the rest of my clothes. She examined every part of me, touching my chest over and over again. I’ve heard that white women like Asian men because our bodies are smooth; maybe that was what she was thinking. As her hands moved down toward my privates, my dick grew hard again.
And just like that, she sat on me, and took me all the way into her amazing, slippery body. It felt so good and warm and wet inside. It was the most wonderful thing in the world. I couldn’t stop after that; it was like drugs. She screamed things in Russian. I had no idea what she was saying, but I could tell she liked it. We had sex all night. Na Na didn’t go to work the next day, and I didn’t go home. When our stomachs were both growling, I went out and bought some yang chun noodles from a food stand nearby. We wolfed down the noodles in hot soup, and fell asleep in each other’s arms. Soon I woke up with an erection and drove it into her, and we became animals again.
A few months later, when Na Na pointed at her stomach, slightly fuller than it used to be, and made cooing baby noises for me, I understood she was having a baby. She also pointed at me. I unwrapped a piece of gum, rolled it into the shape of a ring, and put it on her long, bony ring finger. She smiled. That was how we were married. We were never officially married because there was something wrong with Na Na’s papers—that was as much as I understood, after one of her Russian friends tried to translate for me in her bad Chinese. It was okay. I loved her, she loved me, and we were going to have a little baby. I began referring to her as my wife in front of everybody. My parents liked the idea of me being married and having a kid. They were living in the countryside by then, having moved into my grandmother’s house after her death.
Na Na stopped going to work after her stomach became too obvious. Her breasts were more magnificent than ever, like helium balloons fully inflated. She stayed in her apartment and slept all day or sat with me in the store, reading Russian novels and chewing a lot of Wrigley gum. She still only wanted the seven pack gum, even if she could finish two packs in a day. It was a good thing she agreed not to smoke during her pregnancy.
Bai was a gigantic, healthy baby. Na Na screamed like I had never made her scream when Bai came out of her. When I leaned close to her during labor she slapped me, yelling something in Russian. I took her hand and squeezed it, but she looked away. I offered her gum, which she grabbed and tossed straight across the room. The obstetrician chuckled at me.
“It’s the hormones and the pain. The bad mood will pass.”
I stared at Bai. He was plump and adorable. When I put my face close to his, one of his hands reached out and hit me with curled fingers.
“Good reflex,” the doctor said.
He was wrong, however, about Na Na’s bad mood. It did not pass. He instructed us not to have sex for six weeks after the baby, so I stayed away from her, but that made her even ang
rier. She grabbed my dick, forcing it hard and drawing me close to her all the time, but I had to say no and push her away. Sometimes she got mad and left the apartment. She couldn’t go back to work yet because her tummy still looked pregnant, so I don’t know where she went when she ran out like that. When six weeks finally passed, and I wanted to sleep with her, she just slapped me and ignored me and pitched the TV remote control at my head.
Some days she only chewed gum and didn’t eat. She also smoked a lot of cigarettes. She lost the baby weight quickly and went back to work. Na Na wasn’t always around to breastfeed Bai so he got used to formula, which he sucked down eagerly and grew plump on. My parents came and helped me take care of Bai. He was a very easy baby. He didn’t throw tantrums and could sleep through anything. Just change his diaper, give him a bottle, burp him, and put him in the crib. This was all stuff I could do between counting out change for customers at the store.
One night, Na Na came home very drunk. Her floral dress was unbuttoned at the top so her breasts were mostly exposed. She threw things at me, and when I tried to stop her because she was waking Bai, she hit me. Having taken taekwondo for self defense in all of my middle school years, I blocked all the blows, which made her even angrier. We fought and struggled until she was tired, and then her mood changed. She reached for my pants and unzipped them. At first I thought she was going to hurt me down there, but instead she started stroking my dick and sucking it. I unbuttoned her dress and fucked her hard, the way she liked it. We fell asleep together, exhausted.
The next night, Na Na didn’t come home. I waited all day the next day. When I closed the store, she still wasn’t home. She had left for work like usual the previous night, taking only her purse with her. The closet was still full of her clothes. I went to the bar she worked at and asked her friends and boss about her, but they said that she didn’t come to work and they hadn’t seen her or heard her say anything about leaving.
A month later, I got a small envelope in the mail with a foreign postmark on it. I tore open the flap and shook the contents out of the envelope. It was a small package of Wrigley gum. It had seven pieces in it. I understood her meaning completely. Na Na really was living life seven pieces at a time, and my seven pieces with her were up. I looked at Bai, who toddled over and grabbed the bright green gum packet from me. He held it up to his nose and smelled it.
“Mama?” he asked, one of his first words. I didn’t know he remembered Na Na and the gum she was always chewing. Maybe he remembered the gum on her breath, or her ripping open the bright green packaging.
“Yes, from Mama. For you, Bai.”
Crisp Skin Thick Soup
THE ONLY THING I have from home is a jade necklace that my mother gave me. I come from a small Vietnamese village, My Lai, where we had a small rice field on which we relied for a living. The river gave us water and a modest harvest. Two harvest seasons ago, Mother died giving birth to a baby brother, a silent infant who never lived to see the sun rise. Father took to the bottle, stopped working the fields, and our growing debt was like a balloon filling with air, ready to burst. Every store I went to, I had to owe money or give them something in return. Some of our neighbors tried to help me plant the rice sprouts I’d gotten on credit, but Father, drunk on cheap rice wine, waved a rusty sickle at them, threatening to kill anyone who meddled in our business.
When young men in our village asked for my hand in marriage, he scared them all away. “Anyone who touches my daughter will die.”
I was only sixteen and wanted more. I ran away.
My childhood friend Han gave me a lift to Saigon on his new scooter and introduced me to his friend’s cousin, a big-deal business lady, Mrs. Rie, who worked in the city. She was the wife of a man who owned a special agency, a company that introduced Vietnamese girls to foreigners as brides. I had no money, couldn’t even pay the matchmaking fee, but Mrs. Rie persuaded her husband to let me owe it to them until I was successfully married to a foreign client.
She looked me up and down. “You’re not especially beautiful, legs too thick and hips too narrow, face all bones, but I think someone will like you.”
They showed pictures they had taken of me, dolled up with make-up and swathed in elegant clothing, to their clients, and in three weeks, they had sealed my marriage with a Taiwanese man.
“But I don’t speak Taiwanese.”
“Everybody speaks Chinese there, my dear. Plus he will not mind, I guarantee you.” Mrs. Rie smiled, nice to me all of a sudden now that I was bringing them business. “He’s looking for a wife, not a conversation partner. Just smile and look pretty and cook and clean.”
She was pleased that the Taiwanese man was willing to pay nearly half as much as an American would have for a Vietnamese bride. I never saw any of that money, of course. It all went to the agency and they even claimed I owed them many fees for the arrangement as well as rent for the time I slept in the cockroach-ridden warehouse they kept me in, so in the end I got little more than a coin purse of pocket money. My new husband met me at the Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. He was holding a sign with my name written in English: Lei Lee. My last name would be changed soon. My husband was Mr. Ting, and I was to become Lei Ting.
All the buildings in Taipei are so tall and shiny, the people so happy, that it is strange to me. Their faces are Chinese faces, not terribly different from us Vietnamese, maybe a little coarser, broader, yet their lives the exact opposite. Here, rice comes from burlap bags in supermarkets, not the fields. I don’t know where the fields are here.
My husband, a retired soldier, has a bearded chin that scrapes my skin when we kiss, hollow eyes I am afraid of meeting, and thinning, gray hair. We communicate with a few words of Chinese at first, mostly gesturing. I prefer nighttime, when no language is necessary. He gives me little medicine pills to swallow, draws an X with his fingers, and makes the shape of a woman’s round belly on me. He does not want me to become pregnant, and these pills will protect me.
We live on the eleventh floor of a residential building. Our apartment has just one bedroom and is smaller than our old hut in Vietnam, but I like it here because it is clean and has large windows to let the sun shine in, just like the outdoors back home, except with air conditioning.
The strange thing is that there is no source of fire in his apartment, no stove, nothing to cook with. His dinner comes from the night market: an oyster omelet from a food stand, along with rice, vegetables, and fish from a cafeteria. He shows me the way twice, and soon it is my job every night to buy his omelet and some cafeteria food for both of us.
From nine-to-three every weekday he sweeps and mops the floor in a public library nearby while I go to the morning market, take a walk in the neighborhood, clean the house, or watch Taiwanese television at home. We have Japanese cable channels, but I prefer local soap operas. I learn a lot of Chinese from them. I especially like the period shows where all the characters wear traditional Chinese clothing, flowing robes embellished with sashes, wide sleeves that flutter. I would have liked to wear those clothes. But, I still wear my plain blue gowns that begin at the jade necklace around my neck and end at my ankles, even in the hot Taiwanese summer. It is important for me to still feel like I am Vietnamese, because even if I married a Taiwanese man, it does not change me inside; I am still Lei Lee. I will not forget my ancestors, and it is important to honor them.
As I venture out more during the day, I make friends. Most of them are maids and nannies from Vietnam. If given a choice, one always picks their own. My companions tell me the latest gossip. One woman, Taiyun, has a neighbor who got a mail-order bride from Russia. Russia! She has skin the color of milk and porcelain. White women are idolized goddesses in Asia.
“How can you possibly buy a white woman?” I ask.
Taiyun smiles slyly and makes the motion of rustling money in her right hand.
“Lots and lots of money. And do you know what, that man’s family treats her as if she were a princess instead of a mail-order br
ide—no offense, Lei Lee.”
“What do you mean?”
“They are afraid that she will be bored, so they find little kids to be her English students, even though her English is so bad that I would laugh at it. But they don’t care, they think she is so wonderful to marry their son. Rich people, of course. They’re just nutty. And they can’t wait till she gives them little mixed, foreign-looking babies, beautiful and creamy-skinned.”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t want to teach English, I don’t envy her that,” I say.
“The point is, they try so hard to please her,” Taiyun says. “From what I can tell, your husband treats you like my employer treats me. Like a servant. Because they bought us— they know it and we know it.”
“Well, I don’t think of it that way. I want to please my husband because if he is happy then I will be happy because he will be good to me.”
“Right, right,” Taiyun scoffs. “You are perfect material for a mail-order bride. Exactly what he ordered.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say.”
“Let me ask you, if you go out to buy his dinner in the night market and come back, say, twenty minutes later than usual, will he be mad?”
“Maybe, if he is hungry. Once I walked a little slow, and—”
“Ah ha! That’s exactly what I mean. He treats you like a servant. A man will not scold his wife like a child for being late. He would only scold a servant.”