The Other Side of Paradise: A Memoir

by Chin, Staceyann

  His cronies nod their conviction.

  Red runs his hands down my right hip and thigh. “Yes, we going fuck her to bring her back to the right way of thinking. We fucking her to save her from herself and from hellfire.”

  The group nods again.

  I wish I could speak, but I am too afraid of how they would respond to anything I would say.

  “All right, forget all o’ that. What if somebody find out?” A slight pause interrupts the nodding.

  “What if the police find out? Her family might have money, you know.” He is better than I thought. They are still listening to him.

  “Who going tell them? You?” Red Shirt narrows his eyes in question.

  “No, man, but just like I walk in here, somebody else can walk in too.”

  Doubt settles over the congregation. And Orville forges ahead. “Anybody can just walk in, the cleaning man, the plumber—anybody. And oonu say she a sodomite? What if she have some kinda fuck-up disease? What if she have AIDS?”

  “The woman them get AIDS too?” Blue Shirt’s tone is unsure.

  No one is holding me now. And I am five feet from the door. Five small steps. Three medium ones. One carefully planned lunge and then the door.

  “Yes, man, the whole a them fuck each other in them batty and do all kinda nastiness—you never know, and some of them have disease that worse than AIDS.” Orville is on a roll.

  Four and a half tiny feet to the door. Four and a quarter. Four. No one is looking at me. All eyes are on Orville.

  “And, you know, it quicker fi a man get AIDS from a woman than the other way around. Who in here did know that?” He indicts their lack of knowledge.

  Three and a half feet. Skirt wrapped around my hips. Left hand holding the ends together. Three feet.

  My right hand is inches from the door.

  “And from what I hear, more woman have AIDS than man and some disease you can get just by touching one of them—”

  Red’s voice cuts into Orville’s. “Where the bloodclaat you think you going? Oonu hold her, nuh!”

  But everyone is afraid of touching me. And that split second is all I need to swing the door back and run. And run I do. Across the grass and toward the parking lot. Through the red cars, the blue cars, the white cars. Down the seductive curve of Ring Road. Across the Arts parking lot. Blue cars. Red cars. White cars. Green grass under my bare feet again. Through the Nat Sci parking lot. Over the wide expanse of grass again between Soc Sci and Mona, through the wire gate. Hot asphalt slapping the soles of my feet. Violet Avenue, Begonia Drive, Carnation Avenue. And then home.

  I Will Make a Way

  Once I am inside my apartment, I can barely move. My shoulders feel as if they are working hard not to close in on themselves. My heart refuses to stop racing and my eyes won’t close for more than a few minutes at a time. And my body begins to shake when I think about going outside. I am completely and utterly disgusted with myself.

  The events of the afternoon play over and over in my head. I want to go back there and scream at them, fight them, do anything but stand there paralyzed, unable to defend myself. I can’t believe that I just let them pull off my clothes and touch me without saying one word.

  For four days I remain in my house. I don’t want to go back on campus and bump into one of them in the corridors or in the cafeteria. The printed sarong is draped guiltily across my bed. I want to throw it away, but I wonder if I should keep it as evidence.

  “Evidence of what, Staceyann Chin? Nothing happened. There was no penile penetration. No rape. Nothing happened to you.” The face in the bathroom mirror does even not look like mine anymore. “Who are you, Staceyann Chin? Who are you but a coward and a farce? Why do you need fucking evidence? Who will you tell and whatever will you say? Nobody raped you! A couple of stupid homophobic college boys roughed you up a little. There is nothing to tell! You just have to stop being dramatic, and shower and get dressed and take your ass to class!”

  The bruise on my cheek has almost faded. But the warm stream of tears stings the cut that keeps reopening on my lip. I have to lie down again. I wipe my face with the sarong. It still smells like sweat and the walls of that bathroom. I wish I could just go straight to the police and report it. But I can never tell anyone how silent the brave Staceyann Chin was in that room.

  I carefully fold the sarong and place it in my bottom drawer. It was once my favorite. Now I cry every time I look at it. I examine the almost-invisible bruise again. I wish I lived in a big city, far, far away. That way I could go outside without the likelihood of my almost-rapists seeing me. Maybe I could move to Germany, find my sorry excuse for a mother. I would like to ask her what the hell she was thinking when she left two small children with a poor, deaf, illiterate woman. But I don’t even know where in Germany she lives. Maybe I should go to Canada, practice this irrelevant French. But Canada is really the dream of that little girl waiting for someone to come back and save her. I am a big girl now. I am not waiting for anyone to come back for me. I can go anywhere by myself. I should go to America. I should go to New York.

  “I am going to America!”

  I say it out loud. The woman in the mirror looks excited. “Yes, I am going to migrate to America!”

  In New York I wouldn’t have to sneak around and live like something is wrong with me. I could go on dates with women and hold hands and act like I am a normal person. I could forget my father’s denial of me, my mother leaving. America seems like the kind of place where people go when they want to leave everything behind. Sometimes it’s good to leave everything behind. So you can make room for new and better things. I yank the sarong out of my special drawer, cut the fringed rectangle to pieces, and toss them one by one into the garbage can.

  I strike a match and let it fall into the can. The fabric sizzles and the flames blaze higher and higher. Bending over the black smoke makes me cough and I get scared the apartment will catch fire. In my hurry to get water, I overturn the bin and the flames fizzle to nothing on the smooth tiles. I pour the water over the charred bits of sarong anyway. The blackened water looks like ink on the white tiles. I wipe the floor and wash out the garbage can. Only the faint smell of Lysol lingers in the air. If anyone walked in, they would never guess that moments before something important had been burnt to ash.

  I walk the long way to rehearsal at lightning speed across the campus. As I cross the Arts parking lot Brandt calls out to me, but do I not want any company, so I pretend not to hear. I play Melissa Etheridge for all she is worth. I keep my favorite song on repeat and belt the words out to the empty sky.

  I travel from agency to agency hunting for the least expensive ticket to New York. I sell my computer for enough money to buy the ticket with seven hundred U.S. dollars left over. Then I start selling my books. I am so focused on leaving that I barely attend classes. My professors want to know what is going on with me. But I say nothing to anyone.

  The only place I feel present is in rehearsals. I run my lines over and over, getting angrier as I stomp around on the stage. It feels good to scream Braithwaite’s poem out loud. It feels good to say the words fuck and raas and “Down, down, white man!”

  On the night of the performance I fill the theater with my voice. I think of Red’s hands in my panties and I whisper,

  Ever seen

  a man

  travel more

  seen more

  lands

  than this poor

  land-

  less, harbour-

  less spade?

  I think about how I let those hands touch me—how I did not say anything while they did what they wanted to me.

  To hell / with Af-/ rica / to hell / with Eu-/ rope too, / just call my blue / black bloody spade / a spade and kiss / my ass. O-/ kay? So / let’s begin.

  The audience applauds every time I speak. I want to stop my lines and start shouting that I am a lesbian. To tell them they are clapping their heterosexual hands in appreciation of a lesbian in performa
nce. I want to run out into the crowd and tell them what I am. But the scripted words keep forcing themselves out of me with an anger I do not recognize:

  But bes’ leh we get to rass / o’ this place; out o’ this / asshole, out o’ the stink o’ this / hell. To rass o’ this…

  At the end of the night the audience is on its feet. One girl corners me after the performance and tells me, “Boy, Staceyann, you were so electrifying when you were shouting at the audience. You looked so angry! It was wonderful! You looked so sexy and powerful up there!”

  I cough and nod my thanks.

  “You are quite welcome, Miss Chin.” Then she kisses me on the cheek and walks away.

  The girl has never spoken to me before. And I am confused by the kiss. Does that mean she likes me? That she is a lesbian? That I am to speak to her when I next see her?

  The next day I pick up my ticket to travel to New York on August 20. Now all I have to do is finish my thesis and fly far, far away.

  My head of department, Dr. Chang, asks me to house-sit for the two months before I leave. In the morning I head to the library. I walk with a book of poems and a novel in case I lose the urge to work. In the afternoon I sit on the grass. I do not feel so alone when I can see the sky.

  One evening I come home to find an invitation to a party. The square card, slipped under the door, is glossy and has a phone number where the invitee has to RSVP. The host, Sunflower, is throwing a party and I am invited. I am shocked to see that the card says Gays and lesbians only.

  I show Racquel the invitation “Can you believe this? A real live invitation?”

  “Of course! This is the first one you ever see?”

  “What you mean by the first one? You have seen one of these before?”

  “Yes. There are lots of us on campus. But you are so out that everybody is afraid to talk to you. There’s even a club.”

  “A club? A gay club? In Jamaica?”

  “Yes. It’s called Entourage. And it’s in New Kingston.”

  Entourage is really the living room of a man named Brian Williamson. One wall of the room has been converted to a bar of sorts. There are mirrors behind a shelf with various bottles of alcohol and a cleared space in the middle of the room for dancing. On the other side of the room a DJ spins while one dark slim boy in cut-off shorts wiggles provocatively on the lap of another. A muscular girl wearing a white T-shirt and a black tie winks at me. Everyone else stirs colored drinks and looks around nervously.

  The girl from the Passages audience, Marlene is her name, is also there. She kisses me on the lips and asks me if I got the invitation to the party in the hills. I tell her I can’t go because I don’t have a ride. She offers me a lift if I promise not to tell her father where she will be taking his car.

  The ride is long and the directions aren’t clear, but Marlene knows exactly where she is going. She tells me that the instructions are intentionally misleading to discourage straight people and their dangerous curiosity about who goes to these parties. Old Stony Hill Road is dark, and it is raining, but when we get there I am not disappointed. I never imagined that there were this many lesbians in Jamaica. There are scores of girls dressed in suits and slinky ball gowns, and jeans and shorts. The gay men are out too, dressed in drag—men sporting muscled glutes in batty-riders and lots of heavy, heavy security at the gate.

  I recognize a few people from school. Orville is there, but we both pretend that we do not see each other. Seranna is there in a beautiful white dress that makes me want to take it off her. When I try to say hello she turns her back, lights a cigarette, and leans in to the beautiful woman standing next to her. I tap her on the shoulder and Marlene elbows me and quickly pulls me away. Generally, she says, people don’t speak to each other unless they come in together. I explain to her that I already know Seranna, but she says it does not matter. Occasionally, she says, if there is a mutual crush, you can ask a common friend for her number later, but the rule is you leave people alone to have a good time at the parties. You just listen to the music and stand around and thank God that you are with people who are like you.

  I watch Seranna dance with her friends. I really want to just walk over to her and tell her about my decision to move to America, but every time I meet her gaze she seems to look right through me. I count at least ten people from the English Department and five from Philosophy, but no one even looks in my direction. I feel as if I am in a film. We all have the balls to come out to a big secret party, but we are all too scared to actually talk to each other.

  Two weeks later I get another invitation. The day after that Marlene shows up waving a note she says was sent by the pretty woman who was standing next to Seranna at the last party. Kimberly is a final-year medical student who identifies as bisexual. Her note is short and to the point.

  You looked really good in that little dress you wore at the last party. If you promise to wear something equally fetching, I will give you a ride in my pretty car to the next one.

  Kimberly makes me laugh. And she has the most beautiful legs. And she quotes verses and verses of poetry while she kisses my feet. She spends most nights in my apartment. We stay up till dawn, talking about everything from politics to babies to religion to sex. But one day I bump into her at the library and she passes me, barely nodding hello. That night when she knocks I do not answer the door. She begs and begs, but I tell her I refuse to speak to her unless she promises that that will never happen again. She tells me I am being unfair, that I want her to risk her life for my crazy politics. I tell her I would rather die honest than live the deceitful life she has planned for herself. I turn up the television and close the windows. I don’t even know when she leaves.

  Days later she shows up with flowers and a poem written on rice paper. She admits that I am right and promises to introduce me to her friends. After a while I realize that even when she admits that she knows me, I am still only her literature-major friend. By the first week of August we are back to sneaking into her apartment by day and out of mine late at night. I know I cannot live my life like this. I refuse to grow old kissing the woman I love under the cover of night and pretending I don’t know her the next day.

  I finish my thesis on the sixteenth. My bags are packed by the morning of the seventeenth. When the last bag is zippered, I lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. The list of people I have to see is short. Racquel, Grandma—I wonder how Delano is doing all the way in Germany. I still have no number for him. It hurts my chest to think I may never see him again.

  Racquel and I plan to have our last lunch together on the eighteenth—the day before I leave. I get there half an hour before we are to meet so I can journal. I write two lines before she arrives.

  August 18, 1997

  I leave Jamaica tomorrow. Lots of emotions.

  I can’t believe I am really doing this!

  She is quiet as she hugs me. And when I pull away there are tears in her eyes. I beg her not to cry. “Please, please, please. I’m not sure if I can handle that, Racquel.”

  “I’m sorry, Stace. But you must expect that I am going to miss you.”

  “I know that. I know that. It’s funny, though, a few days ago I was so happy to be leaving. Today I am wishing I had another month to be here—I don’t even know what I would do with another month, I just wish I wasn’t leaving tomorrow.”

  “What is funny is that I wish it were me going.”

  “You could still come with me…”

  “No—that journey is yours. You are the wild, crazy one that everybody expects to go and conquer new horizons and all that jazz. Go on and do your thing. I am staying right here. Come hell or high water.”

  I had hoped she would want to leave too. But I know she has two more years of school, and I know she would not just up and leave her family. Maybe later she will change her mind. Still, I can’t imagine my life without Racquel close by. Who will I call to complain to or argue with—or just sit with?

  “Racquel, for most of my life you
have been such a good friend. And even though I’m not crying, I will miss you—very, very much. Everything is so complicated, and I don’t know if I really feel sad about leaving, but I know I will never find a better friend than you. Please be careful here. And I hope you and your girl stay together for a very long time.” My heart is a rock inside my chest as I whisper good-bye to my oldest friend.

  She holds me and mutters that I could still change my mind. There must be another way around this. I wrap my arms around her and squeeze. It isn’t fair. In my heart of hearts I don’t want to leave either, but I don’t see a way I can stay. Plus the wheels have been set to turning and I am already on my way.

  When I go to see Grandma, the lump in my throat almost makes me call the travel agent to cancel my ticket. When I tell her I am leaving for America, she wipes her eyes with her handkerchief and nods. Her hands are gentle on my shoulder as she begs me to be careful. “America is a very big place, and you was never very big. But me will be here praying for you. Every day that God send I am going to put you safety before the Lord—God bless the day that you was born…” She buries her face into her hands and sobs.

  I put my arms around her and hold her until she stops shaking. I remember how easily I left her crying at that tiny bus stop in Bethel Town. I wish I could tell her how sorry I am about that, how wrong I was to think we would have been better off without her. I want to be nine again so I can hug her, say how grateful I am that she looked after Delano and me for all those years. I want to explain to her that I am not my mother, that I will come back. But I am twenty-four years old and I know better than to make promises I’m not sure I can keep. So I just rub her face and tell her that as soon as I get a job I will send her some money. She makes me promise that if she dies I will come home for the funeral. I promise, though I am not certain I will ever see Jamaica again. I need to be far away from the things that have happened to me here.