by O Thiam Chin
They went out on a Saturday with no plans for what they wanted to do or see; they simply walked around the shopping mall for an hour and sat down for a round of bubble tea when they were tired. Yifan was not afraid of bumping into Hai Feng as she knew he was busy with his badminton training for the next three weeks, preparing for an upcoming regional tournament. As far as she was aware, Hai Feng had not caught on to what she was doing. Nobody in their mutual social circles knew they were a couple yet, since they did not give each other undue attention in school. It was an unspoken mutual agreement between them; for Yifan, it meant that she could still test her feelings for Hai Feng, to find out what she really wanted.
So, after that first outing, Yifan went out on several other occasions with Peng Soon—to the movies, to the games arcade, to the bookshop. Watching their third movie together, Yifan sneaked her hand into Peng Soon’s, and he held it in his lap. While Hai Feng’s grip was firm and clammy, Peng Soon’s was soft and loose.
In this and other ways, Yifan started making comparisons between them. One was intense and passionate, the other was cool and obliging. One loved the outdoors and long walks in nature, the other preferred air-conditioned environs and an unhurried pace; both had strong, good appetites, for food, for new discoveries, for experimentation. One kissed lightly on the lips, brushing his skin gently against her, the other searched the interior of her mouth with his tongue, leaving her lips sore and tender at times. She felt differently for each of them, varying only by degree and magnitude and situation, and even then, her feelings were fluid, changing from one day to another. At any given point in time, she would prefer one over the other, but in the next moment, she would change her mind. When Yifan was with one, she had to make a conscious effort not to think about the other, though sometimes she would mix up something one said with the other. Small innocuous stuff that she was thankfully quick in masking or diverting away from, quelling any unnecessary suspicion.
The busy secret life she lived, dating two boys at the same time, was not one she would have chosen for herself. But in the thick of it, she did not want to think too much about what it meant or where it was going—whether it was right or wrong or something else altogether. Yifan only knew she liked the two boys, and to give one or the other up was something she was not ready to do, not just yet. She liked the fact that she was someone who could be loved in very specific and very different ways by two different persons, and all that she had to do was to present herself in a different light to each of them, to remake herself to fit what they thought she was. Wasn’t that what everyone else was doing—to reinvent themselves for the sake of love, to change themselves for the better? And what was wrong with that?
One of the ways Yifan gave of herself was through her body. At 15, her body had long shed the bony, formless shape of a child, and taken on the defining form and proportions of a woman—full breasts, a trim waist, generous hips. She was well aware of the impressions her body made on the imaginations of Hai Feng and Peng Soon, and the demands they required of her. She was not squeamish or ignorant of her own body’s needs, and because of that, she was willing to give in in order to meet these needs.
When Hai Feng first touched her breasts, she did not resist, and when Peng Soon did it later on, she merely closed her eyes and leant forward submissively. With the urgency and clumsiness of first-timers, they fumbled through the unthinking, uneasy stages of lust for some sort of release, and Yifan was quick to discover her role in mastering what the boys had no control over—their lack of restraint, their bodily need for climax. When they were in the spell of their own lust, they reverted to larger, needier, more cumbersome versions of themselves, ones which hungered for everything in sight, seizing whatever they could lay their hands on. It was something that seemed almost childlike to Yifan, like boys with their toys and their bloated declarations of strength and abilities.
Still, Yifan was not unaware of what she also needed. To get them attuned to her demands, she sometimes withheld her enthusiasm or feigned a lack of interest. The boys would usually catch on to her moods, and because they were not callous or heedless, they were always eager to redeem themselves, and bring Yifan around. They did everything they could to please her, and Yifan was more than willing to play her role, to indulge them.
In all her dealings with Hai Feng and Peng Soon, Yifan was careful not to be seen with one or the other too prominently. Thus, miraculously, throughout the four months she was secretly seeing both of them, neither saw her in public with the other. While the town they lived in wasn’t exactly small, it had enough breadth and hidden spaces for them to slip into. For her dates with Hai Feng, she chose the movies, where they could hold hands discreetly; in any case, they were not given to showy displays of affection in public, since Hai Feng was the school badminton captain and needed to maintain his public image. With Peng Soon, they stuck to window-shopping at the malls (no hand-holding) and visits to the bookshops and art supplies stores before heading back to Peng Soon’s, where he had a room of his own. There, he would show her his latest drawings and they would lie on his bed, talking and sometimes kissing.
Unlike Hai Feng, who took every opportunity when they were alone to initiate the kissing and touching, Peng Soon rarely made the first move, which Yifan put it down to his natural shyness. With one, she was diffident and reserved, and with the other, she was assertive and self-possessed. She often wondered if her nature had always allowed these opposites, this discrepancy of traits, and if not, why had it come so naturally to her? Yifan reasoned that she was not deceitful, no, only truthful to her own self, to her real desires—only human.
She lost her virginity to Hai Feng on the cusp of her 16th birthday, beside the river, near the fruit plantation where her parents worked. He had taken her there on the pretext of watching the sunset— the view offered a dreamy vista of the green-topped hills in the distance—and surprised her with a small chocolate cake and a plush teddy bear. She thanked him with a hug and a kiss, which led into a round of frantic fondling, to which Yifan offered no resistance. She was happy, and felt somewhat ready for what was to come, the next stage of their courtship.
She lay back on the dry stubbly ground and closed her eyes and listened to Hai Feng’s soft grunts and the whispers of the nearby river. The pain came, as expected, but was not as bad as she had gathered from her classmates’ stories; it was sharp for a few seconds, before dulling into a persistent, low-grade numbness. She had anticipated the hit of a rush, a build-up of sensations leading to something consequential—wasn’t it supposed to lead to some feeling of pleasure? she thought—but all she felt was the clamminess and tightness in the lower half of her body, rigid and remote, cut off from the rest of her.
When Hai Feng was done—pulling out before he came copiously on her inner thigh—she quickly wiped herself off with a tissue, put on her panties and smoothed out her grass-stained skirt. Hai Feng immediately apologised, to which Yifan offered a consolatory smile and a pat on his back. They said nothing as they made their way back to Yifan’s place in the somber twilight. After he dropped her off at her doorstep, Yifan left the cake in the fridge without touching it, and put the teddy bear with the rest of the soft toys on the bed she shared with her sisters. The panties she had worn, spotted with blood and dried-up cum, she disposed of by digging a hole in the field next to the house and burying it.
Three days later, while she was at Peng Soon’s after school, she made love to him. They had to be quiet while they were at it, as Peng Soon’s mother was at home, her footsteps audible even behind closed door. The attempt this time round went much better than her first, and Yifan was able to find a sliver of pleasure in what Peng Soon gave. While Hai Feng had rushed through the act, self-conscious and anxious to get to the end, Peng Soon was deliberate in his movements, slow and tentative, as if he were assessing every step of the lovemaking. Yifan looked up into his face as he entered her and started thrusting, his exertion visible with the lines of veins snaking up the sides of h
is neck. He took his time, and when he came, his body shook with a force that sent tendrils of shivers up Yifan’s body. Before she left, he presented her with a birthday gift—of course, he had not forgotten. A watercolour of her face in close-up, rendered in light shades of yellow and pink, his initials scrawled in the right-hand corner. She kept it in a folder in the bottom drawer of her study table.
In the weeks after her 16th birthday, she had had sex with the two boys whenever she went out with them. It was what was on the boys’ minds, the first and last thing they wanted when they leant in to press their bodies close to her, when they held her hands or kissed her. She could feel their urgency, and recognise her own; in meeting their needs, she was able to fulfil some of hers—her yearning for intimacy, for one. She could feel her body expanding under their touch, unfurling into new forms, yielding up new founts of pleasure, and there was an unquenchable, inexplicable delight to all of this.
Still, they had been careful; Yifan had insisted that the boys wear condoms, shortly after she had sex with them for the first time. But there had been several instances, in the heat and haste of the moment, where there had been lapses of judgement, a reckless abandonment of reason and precaution. It would be okay, they agreed, nothing bad would happen.
Yifan carried on her relationships with Hai Feng and Peng Soon for as long as she could, until one day, when she woke up feeling a terrible sickness in her guts and had to throw up in the toilet. The first time it happened, she did not think much of it, but when the frequency of the nausea and vomiting did not subside, she became alarmed.
Sensing something desperately amiss, Yifan bought a pregnancy test kit after school, and it confirmed all her doubts, made them concrete. She was surprised at how fast her luck had run out, at how promptly she had been dealt with a fate that she had no way to overcome.
Still, she refused to be shaken by the fact, though her mind threatened to spill over with a torrent of fears. She thought about the ways of handling the situation, and decided not to tell Hai Feng and Peng Soon about the pregnancy. What could they do if they knew? Their involvement would only complicate things, she reasoned. And so she kept everything to herself, even as her body bent itself to the changes taking place inside her.
In school, Yifan strove to remain her usual self, albeit now with greater self-awareness and even greater self-control, constantly aware that her body would betray her if she did not monitor herself with tight vigilance. So far no-one knew about her involvement with either of the boys; yes, some in her class knew she was close to Peng Soon, but assumed they were nothing more than just friends. And she had not let on about her relationship with Hai Feng, since theirs was a closeted courtship. Even if her schoolmates knew, they could not have guessed how far they had gone. She kept herself sufficiently occupied with her studies and school assignments; yet, whenever she was alone, the doubts and anxiety would surface, leaving her breathless with helplessness. Eat your sorrow, she reminded herself.
As the weeks passed, Yifan lost her sense of self-mastery, succumbing more than usual to swinging moods of despondency and malaise. She avoided Hai Feng and Peng Soon. While they were worried and puzzled about her erratic behaviours, they could do absolutely nothing. She needed to put distance between herself and the boys, so as to get her thoughts in order, to think about her next steps.
At nights when she could not sleep, Yifan would flee into the humming forest and make her way to the river, her mind fired up by a sudden, irrational impulse. In the darkness around her, she sometimes imagined herself as a small nocturnal beast, feeling danger in the surroundings through its awakened senses, its thumping heartbeats pulsing through the edge of the skin. She saw herself through the eyes of this creature, a sad, pathetic sight. By the time she broke out of the cover of the forest, Yifan was no longer sure who or what she was—a creature prowling in the dark, or a figment of imagination conjured up by the forest. If only, if it’s possible, she pleaded, please, let me be someone else, something else. She kept her gaze on the opposite bank of the river as her cries were swallowed by the fury of the passing currents, absolved and silenced. Wearied by her outburst, Yifan dropped to the ground and fell right into sleep, her body tucked in like a question mark.
One morning, sneaking back home after a night of dreamless sleep beside the river, Yifan came upon her mother standing by the back kitchen door. As she walked sheepishly towards her mother, averting her eyes, Yifan hoped to come up with an excuse—she was taking an early morning walk; she couldn’t sleep—but something in her mother’s forbidding posture cut her short. Yifan put her arms around her loose-fitting shirt, her stomach churning in sick, nauseous waves; she breathed in deeply to hold back the surge at the back of her throat. Her mother gripped her arm, as she walked past her.
What’s going on? What have you done? she said, holding her arm firmly.
Yifan swiftly pulled away from her, but before she could take another step, she threw up at her mother’s feet. The latter let out a cry and a sigh, putting her hand on Yifan’s damp back, stroking it gently. Yifan, flinching from the touch, slipped away and scurried back to the bedroom, where her older sisters were slowly stirring awake. She did not get up that morning for school; she waited for the whole house to be quiet before she finally fell asleep.
In the afternoon, in the midst of a feverish recurring dream—she was always running in her dreams lately, heading somewhere or nowhere, she could never tell—she was woken up by a firm, insistent touch. Her mother, holding a bowl, telling her to sit up. Drink this, she said.
While Yifan was drinking the acrid concoction, her mother lifted her T-shirt and put her hand on Yifan’s stomach. She glared at Yifan. What were you thinking, you stupid girl? her mother said, her voice low and strained. Why did you go and ruin your life? You stupid, foolish girl.
Yifan pushed her mother’s hand aside and slipped back under the blanket, the bitterness on her mouth working its way into her guts. There was no way to hide it now, she thought, she had to find her own way out of this.
That night, knowing full well that her mother would press her for the only thing she wanted to know—whose was it?—Yifan told her the full story, one she had started fabricating since the knowledge of her pregnancy. She did not want to involve Hai Feng and Peng Soon in this, especially since there was no way she could tell which of them was the father. So she came up with a story she hoped would invite the least suspicion. A man, a stranger, had appeared out of nowhere while she walking home along the forest path one afternoon, and dragged her to a secluded spot behind a thick brush and raped her. It happened three months or so ago, and she did not dare to tell anymore, Yifan said, her voice quavering in the telling.
When her mother placed her hand on hers, Yifan broke into tears. I didn’t know what to do, she said mournfully.
We need to report this, her mother said.
No, no, Yifan insisted, I can’t, let’s not. Her mother shook her head, her eyes heavy with sorrow. And please don’t tell Papa, he’ll kill me.
Having told this story to her mother and swearing her to secrecy, Yifan did not feel any better. She knew she could have told her mother the truth, but the truth wasn’t something that had felt right or appropriate at the moment. It was enough that she alone knew what she had done—frankly, did it matter to anyone else?—and that she would be able to live with it somehow. She would have to manage the consequences, no matter the cost. She only needed to get through it one step at a time.
Two days later, on a Thursday, her mother told her to skip school; she was taking her to see someone. Yifan, sensing her mother’s silent disapprobation, did not ask any questions, and did as she was told.
They took a bus from the city centre to a town an hour away. They did not speak on the ride there; Yifan stared out of the window the whole time, the landscape flitting by in an endless, sandy blur. When the bus hit a pothole, she felt the tiniest of movements in her stomach. Had she really felt it? Or had she just imagined it? Even now, sh
e refused to acknowledge that whatever was inside her was something alive or real. She absolutely refused to give it a definite form in her mind, or even call it a baby: such an ugly, ill formed word. Gripping her hands in her lap, Yifan did not dare to go any further with the thought.
They alighted along a row of old shophouses, and her mother, in a brief moment of uncertainty, looked up and down the quiet street, checking the signs. Then she started walking down one of the back alleys, and Yifan followed close behind. They turned into an entryway beside a bakery and climbed up a narrow staircase.
Her mother knocked on one of the doors along the corridor, and the long, pale face of a matronly woman popped into view. They were quickly ushered in, the woman’s head and her mother’s bent solemnly in a whispered conversation. The old woman took a few glances at Yifan, her expression impassive, unreadable. While they talked, Yifan sat on a wooden stool and stared at her fingers. She knew what was coming and told herself not to panic, and not to give in to her fears. She drilled her mother’s words into herself, an incantation: eat your sorrow. It had to be done, and it would be over soon. It was for her own good.
Her mother returned to her side and sat with her for a long, quiet moment, not looking at her. The old woman came out of a side room wearing an off-white coat, and called out to Yifan. She rose and entered the dim dusty room and lay on a thin bed with cool, soft sheets and waited for instructions. When she felt the cold probe entering her, spreading the folds between her legs, Yifan closed her eyes and let her mind slip into a daydream.