Sex and Taipei City

by Yu-Han Chao

  I don’t say anything. Half of me sees Taiyun as being jealous of my legal status as a wife here, my freedom to stay in Taiwan as long as I like without having to work on a temporary contract or bribe officials for a visa. The other half of me understands Taiyun perfectly. Mr. Ting feels that I’m something he owns, someone he can order around. Indeed, I cannot even think of him in my mind as Hsia, which is his name—to me he’s always Mr. Ting. My friends are used to it and no longer laugh at me for calling my own husband by the title Mr., but I still feel embarrassed and confused about who he is to me. My companion? Lover? Master?

  I am still thinking of what Taiyun said today as I leave the house to get dinner.

  It’s a fifteen-minute walk to the omelet stand, where a long queue winds to the left, pushed back by the passing crowd. The owner notices me and nods. I come daily, and today he’s in a good mood. He gestures to the cook to give him the next omelet, catches it in a styrofoam container as the cook tosses it to him, and with a swift flick with his ladle, drizzles coral-colored, tangy sauce all over it. I hand him five ten-NT coins and he gives me the container in a little red-and-white striped plastic bag.

  “Just one, not two?” He winks first one, then his other eye. “Buy one get one free, only for you, number one customer.”

  He knows I am buying Mr. Ting’s omelet. He also knows I am a Vietnamese mail-order bride, and leers. I wave my hand no and walk away as politely as possible.

  I think oyster omelets are disgusting, and overpriced. I ask Mr. Ting why he will not get a stove, so I can cook all this food for less money than we are paying the vendor and cafeteria owner.

  “Can you make o ah jian just like the stand? Eh? What about the flavor of the special sauce?”

  “I could learn.”

  “Forget it. I don’t want the smell of cooking in my home,” he says. “It is a small space, and I won’t have it smelling of grease and oysters. Just go buy the food and stop questioning your husband.”

  I feel the heavy ring of keys in my pocket as I drag my feet in plastic sandals through the night market. Because of moments like this, that come back to me over and over again, when he ends the conversation with scolding me, the resentment wells up. But I vent it in small ways, little by little, so that I can still like him. Sometimes I spit in his coffee in the morning, or into the special sauce on the omelet.

  Recently, I stopped taking the little pills. Even if Mr. Ting doesn’t want a child, I want a son, a boy whom I could love, one who would grow up to be tall and strong and who would take care of me. I don’t believe that a man would really not want a child once it is here—doesn’t every man want a boy, a small version of himself? It will make him feel manly, to have produced another human being, especially in Mr. Ting’s case—he is forty-five years old already—what does he have to look forward to besides family? When I am pregnant, I’m sure Mr. Ting will change his mind and love the child. It’s only human nature.

  At the cafeteria, the lao ban nian, female owner of the store, smiles and nods when I come in. She works hard and is polite to all customers, adult or children, mail-order brides or not. As she hands me two paper containers for the food and a plastic bag for steamed rice, I open my mouth to speak, which surprises her because she has probably never heard me talk before. She must have thought I did not speak Chinese.

  “Can I have su pi nong tan?” Su pi nong tan, crisp skin thick soup, is a creamy Western-style soup cooked in a soup tureen with a layer of golden puffed pastry baked on top. It would be the ultimate luxury to taste; I could imagine the buttery flakes of pastry contrasting with the rich texture of the soup. I would eat it so eagerly my tongue and the roof of my mouth would burn, but it would be worth it. Several days ago, I watched an episode of a food channel show about gourmet restaurant dishes that featured the soup, and could not stop thinking about it since.

  “Why, sure, of course you can have some soup!” She smiles broadly. She is happy for more business, especially since su pi nong tan is not cheap, one hundred NT per bowl.

  “But it is too hot for you to carry home. You see, the soup bowl is baked in the oven.”

  I think about this. “It’s okay, I will eat it here.”

  The lao ban nian smiles and calls to her chef, a short, handsome man who looks half Taiwanese, half some kind of Caucasian. “One su pi soup!” Then she turns to me courteously. “Please have a seat and wait here.”

  “I’ll get the food first,” I say and walk toward the steaming trays of green, brown, and yellow dishes shiny with grease.

  I pay her in advance, handing over two crumpled bills.

  “Are you sure it is okay if you make Mr. Ting wait?” She looks at me with concern. Why is a stranger worried about me being scolded by my own husband? Is it so obvious?

  I nod. I want the soup.

  Besides, it’s too late to back out. I’ve paid for the soup and am all ready to eat it.

  The chef seems to be taking his time. The lao ban nian turns to me at the table and apologizes every few minutes. “Sometimes the oven is slow to heat up,” she explains. I smile and say that it is no problem.

  The handsome chef finally comes out with my beautiful soup, the rounded pastry top domed like a breast, golden and perfect, a few black sesame seeds sprinkled over the top. He holds it with oven mittens and an extra rag. The lao ban nian rushes to put a coaster down before me as he sets the bowl down.

  “Enjoy,” she says. “And be careful, it’s very hot!”

  I look at my su pi nong tan. I can hardly bear to break the beautiful, crisp skin at the top, but I do. My husband is waiting for food at home, and probably grumbling already. I make a small hole in the pastry skin, which breaks immediately and some buttery pieces crumble into the soup. Steam rises from the hole in the puff pastry, and I smell the fragrance of creamy mushrooms and chicken. I make a larger hole with my spoon and reach into the soup, picking up a small piece of pastry, moistened with creamy soup, that had fallen in. I blow on it to cool it down, then put it in my mouth. Delicious. I savor every bit of my soup, blowing on each spoonful but still burning my mouth. I’m sweating though it is winter and unseasonably cold; the soup warms and satisfies me. It may sound ridiculous, but this is one of the best moments of my life. I feel free, like I am defying the universe by sitting here, enjoying su pi nong tan as my husband waits hungrily at home for his dinner.

  I want to linger in the store longer, enjoying my su pi nong tan, but there is no more. Not one scrap of mushroom remains at the bottom of the bowl. I smile at the owner on my way out.

  During my walk home, some men look at me. They see my red cheeks and red lips from the soup; they must think I am in love. I turn my gaze to the ground and walk as quickly as possible. After all that waiting, the omelet must be only lukewarm.

  When I open the door, Mr. Ting is standing right behind it.

  “Where were you?” he asks.

  “In the night market,” I reply.

  “Why were you so late?”

  “I just . . . walked more slowly.”

  “You are forty minutes late and you say you walked more slowly? What kind of lie is that, what were you up to?” He raises his voice.

  “Nothing.” I walk past him to put the food on the counter.

  “Don’t evade my questions like that.”

  He feels more and more free to scold me in Chinese since he knows I understand it well enough now. He seems angrier than is appropriate for my being late, though, even if he is hungry and worried.

  “I’m sorry. Here, let’s eat now.” I use my most soothing voice.

  “After you explain this.” He holds something out in front of me. It is a blue-and-white foil and plastic container with twenty-one little pills in it. He found the contraceptive pills I did not take in my underwear drawer.

  “I . . . I forgot all about them,” I stammer, sensing his anger.

  “Forgot? You lying woman, how dare you lie to me twice in so short a time, did you forget I bought you from your
country, gave you a good life and home here, you ungrateful wench! How dare you disobey and deceive me?”

  I move back toward the door as he advances. I suddenly remember that he used to be a soldier and that my mother had warned me to stay away from soldiers. So many of them were damaged, she said, and they were not balanced people, often prone to violence.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” I say over and over again.

  “Sorry is not enough. Where have you been? Have you been sleeping with someone else? The cafeteria cook, that mixed bastard? Do you want his child, is that why you are not taking the pills?”

  “No, no!”

  I reach for the door, but he slams it shut. He is strong, and much bigger than me. He uses his left arm to twist me around, yanks me closer by my jade necklace, and lands a punch in my abdomen with his right fist. The pain is sudden and fierce. I feel a snap and the little jade beads fall to the floor, scattering in different directions. I scramble around on the floor, trying to gather them up, but they roll away from my trembling fingers. He grabs my upper arm, pulls me up and punches my stomach again.

  Tears stream down my face as I struggle to breathe. I feel my consciousness leaving me but I hold on tight to the few beads in my hands. The pain is like a screw in my body, screwing tighter and tighter. The last thing I think of is that if I wasn’t a mail-order bride this would not be happening to me. If I was Taiwanese, like him, he could not feel so much more superior, or if I were a Russian mail-order bride, then I would be tall, strong, and beat him right back. With the last strength I have, I lunge toward him with the beads closed in my fists and try to punch him in the abdomen, as he had done me, but it takes him only a slap to land me on the floor again. The last beads escape from me and I curl up into a C shape, groaning. I can feel warmth and wetness down there, the blood coming from inside. He lunges and lands on me, but I kick him in a vital place, and it is his turn to land on the floor.

  I open the door and run out, into the street. I do not know where I can go, but I know I must run, and keep running.

  Daughter

  LIN TOOK THE MRT to and from work every Tuesday and Thursday between Liu Zanli and Da Zi stations, during the worst part of rush hour. Not only did she never have a seat, she was constantly pushed around, stabbed by the corners of studious students’ open textbooks, old women’s umbrellas, and old men’s canes. Lin clasped her pink handbag close to her in case any of the pushers and pokers were also pickpockets. Her handbag always had a small stack of thousand-NT bills in it because Lin didn’t believe in credit cards. She didn’t even have a bank account until Da Zi Middle School hired her and insisted that her salary had to be wired to a post office savings account rather than honoring her request of receiving it in the form of cash in an envelope.

  Lin taught home economics and art at Da Zi Middle School. Strictly speaking, she was a sculptor, but the school wanted her to teach drawing and sewing. So, she showed students how to do double stitches, single stitches, and hems, and ordered cheap cotton fabric so students could make aprons for their semester-long projects. She told her art students to bring 2B pencils, soft erasers, and gave them sketching paper on which to sketch each other in pairs. On nice days, she sent them out to draw in the sun, in whatever medium they chose—watercolor, gouache, charcoal, colored pencil, oil pastels. She watched them from under a tree, a food magazine in her lap. Lin rarely commented on student projects, and everybody received an A at the end of the semester. What kind of home economics or art teacher would give a student anything but an A in a competitive Taipei middle school? If a teacher of such unimportant subjects brought down students’ overall grade point averages, the students would revolt and beat her up on her way from school to the MRT station.

  Lin took long baths at night and had a membership to the twenty-four-hour movie rental store next to her building, which allowed her to check out unlimited films each month. Lin’s parents were remarkably old (mother forty-nine, father sixty-three) when they had her, an only child, and by now, long dead (breast cancer, lung cancer). When they were still alive and their minds were not yet silenced by cancer cells, they had encouraged Lin’s artistic career. Unfortunately, they died before her first opening in Taipei Professional Art Academy’s North Wing. It was an installation—lots of space, with tiny papier-mâché animals strung in white necklaces from the ceiling, and clay animals stacked together. Regardless of species, the clay animals were equal in size—the rats as large as the rhinos, the giraffes as tall as the Chinese sparrowhawk. The central concept of the piece, titled “Under, On Top Of,” had to do with proliferating cancer cells, food chains, and human impact on the environment.

  Lin’s artistic career never went anywhere after she started teaching at the age of twenty-three. She played with clay, still, but since there was nowhere to unload her art and her apartment and studio were getting too full—she cut down on the sculpting. She took up cooking creatively, collecting challenging recipes from gourmet magazines, and arranging food with expert color-coordination and composition on the plate. She often felt it a shame that she had to consume her culinary masterpieces, which sometimes seemed more beautiful than her best sculpture of all—a large bunny rabbit as tall as her, with lifelike fur and perpetually-alert ears. That rabbit cost her thousands of NT in clay yet now sat gathering dust in a corner of her studio, by the north window. She thought she saw a crack in the large bunny the other day, but couldn’t bear to look close enough to confirm. A colony of smaller clay bunnies clustered quietly around the king-sized bunny like its subjects. At some point Lin gave up all other figures and concentrated on bunnies. It was some time after her parents’ death, about the time that her professors at National Taiwan University of Arts stopped encouraging her to send her slides out to galleries and grad schools and residencies. Lin did not mind. She got a stable teaching job and that was more than most of her poor, more talented classmates had.

  Lin never bothered to date, either. She was neither ugly nor beautiful, just plain, and a little too tall for the preference of most Taiwanese men, generally short themselves. Some might consider Lin plump, progressively so over the years, at least by Taiwanese standards. She had long, straight hair, the hairstyle that required the least amount of maintenance other than shampooing twice a week. Lin demonstrated in the past twenty or so years of her life that it was possible for a marriageable, healthy woman living in Taipei City to avoid most human contact and potential suitors by not socializing at all and not talking to colleagues except when absolutely necessary.

  Lin was forty-three and regretted nothing in her life. She did not want to change her days, her routines—long baths, irregular but fancy homemade meals, unlimited rental movies, and the occasional satisfaction one got from sculpting a furry clay bunny.

  Lin was thinking about a movie she saw last night as she stood in the crowded MRT, hugging her purse. She hadn’t understood the movie, mostly because she was confused which man was which woman’s husband and which woman was which man’s girlfriend. There was some swapping going on, and the tall, Caucasian actors lost Lin within the first half hour. Lin decided she would watch the film again tonight, before returning it. If she still couldn’t understand the relationships the second time she watched it, carefully reading the subtitles and trying her best to memorize the actors’ faces and relationships with one another, she would give up.

  The train was especially crowded today. The door opened and closed at Taipei Train Station, the busiest transfer station where three MRT lines converged, and people flooded into Lin’s compartment so that the passengers were all pressing against and touching one another. People in the MRT car did not enjoy this forced physical contact with strangers, but precisely because the other passengers were strangers, it was okay to pretend not to notice the touching of arms and elbows and occasionally, hips. Lin felt a push on her back that nearly made her bump her head into a pole, but she was too tired to turn around and glare at the offender. The doors closed, nearly catching a young w
oman’s curly tresses. The woman yelped and pulled her bleached and permed hair with fraying split ends to the front of her right shoulder, then spent two minutes inspecting it and smoothing it out, as if comforting a baby. Lin watched her for a while with a blank expression on her face. She never understood the vain young women with over-processed hair, expensively styled yet horrible haircuts, painful-looking high heels, and tight clothing. Didn’t their feet hurt? Didn’t they feel cold? Did they really think anyone cared? Lin certainly didn’t.

  The MRT car pushed into motion, creating a whooshing noise that grew more high-pitched as the car accelerated. Lin closed her eyes. She felt some shifting and squeezing around and about her, which was common because some people couldn’t balance themselves well enough on a moving MRT car and felt the need to lean on other people in order not to fall. At any rate, the space was so tight that passengers’ bodies kept other passengers’ bodies pinned in an upright position, so that no one would ever fall all the way to the floor. There was simply no space.

  Suddenly, Lin became conscious of something pressing against her left ass cheek through her linen pants. She shifted a little to avoid being touched by whatever it was, but the bag, or briefcase, or cane, or umbrella, followed her behind persistently. She turned her head to see what it was, and saw a short little man with a weasel’s face. The weasel’s fly was down and his dick was pressed against the fabric of her pants. It was the size of a small walnut—uncircumcised, wrinkled, and disgusting. Lin wanted to scream but didn’t want everybody else in the car to think she was crazy. They couldn’t see what was going on, and as far as they were concerned, she was the crazy one. She wanted to pull the red M-shaped lever that would stop the MRT train, but she didn’t want to be in the six o’clock news—“Hysterical Middle School Art Teacher Waylays Rush-Hour MRT Traffic.” Lin could not move. She had violent fantasies about the little man with his tiny, wrinkled penis, scenes she had seen in movies applied directly to him: the man’s head lopped off by an axe, his body parts separated and ground-up by machines and made into fresh steamed dumplings, or multiple bullets hitting his body, bang bang bang bang bang, the blood saturating his green T-shirt and beat-up jeans. She wanted to hit him, but at the same time she didn’t want to touch him.