Shanghai Girl

by Vivian Yang

  It’s Sunday morning at ten. Ed has forced himself out of bed at 8:30 to go to the firm. He has to finish co-drafting a due diligence report this weekend. I am spread out on the heated wooden panels of Ed’s Finish sauna, contemplating retaliation. As if our confrontation yesterday morning wasn’t enough, Ed staged an “Osaka Night” late yesterday. And that was the last straw.

  Ed began acting weird after dinner. He locked himself up in the bathroom while I did the dishes, and stayed there for quite a while. When he finally re-surfaced, he looked haggard and worn. “We shall have some fun tonight, I tell you. R-right here in this apartment,” he announced.

  “What kind of fun?”

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  To my great surprise, Ed put on one of his many cotton kimono bathrobes he calls a yukata that he occasionally wears in lieu of pajamas. This one was in a black and white pattern with kanji Chinese characters. He went to the bathroom again and returned with a can of hair spray and a pair of nostril scissors.

  “I’m directing a show and you’re my actress. Here are my props and costume. You slide this tape into the VCR.”

  I looked at the videocassette, which read “Ono Offers Osaka.” “What kind of a show? Kabuki?”

  “Osaka Night. Ever heard of role-playing? Tonight is Da Ban Zhi Ye,” he explained in Chinese. “‘Big Curvaceous Field’ in kanji, right?” He asked me with an air of a serious language student.

  Unsuspecting, I confirmed the meaning of those Chinese characters. “You’re right. Da is big and Ban is ‘crooked or uneven fields.’ So Osaka literally means ‘Big Curvaceous Field.’ But what is it that you are driving at?“

  The FBI warning preventing illegal duplication of the tape appeared on the TV screen.

  “I’m driving at you,” he said with a vulgar laugh.

  The screen showed a Japanese woman stripping before a white man. “This is disgusting. You want me to be your personal porn star?”

  “If that’s what you want to call it. I call it ‘pleasure enhancement aid.’ Either way, you’ll enjoy it, believe me. It’s make-believe and it’s fun, my dear Imoto-san,” -- my little sister.

  “You’ve got to stop this tape!”

  “Okay. As long as you’re happy.” He turned off the TV with the remote, leaving the VCR still running. Then he peeled off my clothes and draped his yukata robe on me like a cape.

  “Put your hair up in a bun like a Japanese woman and I’ll spray it in place.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just do it!” he ordered, pulling my hair up and spraying it.

  Without my arms in them, Ed tied the baggy kimono sleeves together in a knot across my chest, effectively trapping my arms and hands. Then he pushed me down to the floor and went down on me. “You’re going to love this, Imoto,“ he pants as I began to screech, aroused and embarrassed at the same time. But he stopped short and started to trim my pubic hairs with the nostril scissors. “What are you doing?” I recoiled.

  “Making an Ono out of you!”

  I tried to wriggle away from him, but the point of the scissors cut me. I scream at the sharp pain. Ed rushed to my wound and sucked, encouraged by my screams. With his bloody face, he next dashed to the refrigerator and returned with a bottle of Sapporo beer. Ed took a gulp from the beer, thrust his middle finger into the bottleneck and shook it. The next second saw my loins turned into a fire hydrant shooting frosty, foamy contents.

  Shrieking, “Stop! I’m freezing!” I cringed into a ball and tried to escape. But Ed didn’t stop. He pried my legs open and thrust the bottle into my crotch like a handgun.

  “Ouch!”

  Tears wet my hair, now loose and messy. “Untie me, you maniac! Untie me!”

  With a laughter, he loosened the kimono sleeves, saying, “It’s not over yet, Imoto, … “

  I interrupted him with a slap on his face.

  Irate, Ed made a choking motion with his teeth clenched and yelled, “What’s the problem with you? I went all out to please you!”

  “To please me like this? You treat me like a prostitute!”

  “A prostitute? Ha. Big deal! In life, we’re all whores. Busting my balls working for Sachs & Klein is one way of doing it. Peddling stocks on the trading floor is another. Can’t stand feeling like a prostitute? Don’t come to America!”

  The VCR clicked STOP after the tape had finished playing. Ed hit the EJECT button and threw “Ono Offers Osaka” across the room, hitting the frame of the Kitagawa Utamaro Ukiyo-e print above the bed. “The hell with you, bitch!” he cursed, as if cursing me.

  When he bent his head, I noticed that his nose was bleeding. “Shit! This shitty stuff is no good!” he yelled, and snatched the yukata to stop the blood. I wasn’t sure what “shitty stuff” he was referring to.

  At this moment, the heat in the sauna is beginning to make my head reel. I flip over and sit up, sensing dull pain in my underbelly. Charcoal rocks, red trapped in black. An image of fire fills my head.

  Get back at him!

  I recall a Chinese movie released in the 1970’s during my teens. “The Bright Red Star” had a boy-actor as the protagonist. Pan Dongzi, or the Winter Boy Pan, was my childhood hero. The lyrics and melody of the film’s theme song resound in my mind:

  The red, red star, shining bright,

  The red, red star, warming our hearts.

  ‘Tis the star of our workers and peasants,

  The brilliance of the Party’ll shine 10,000-generations!

  Pan Dongzi, whose only tangible connection to his Red Army-man father was the red star badge from his army cap, kept Dongzi’s faith in the Communist revolution. When life under landlord Hu Hanshan became unbearable, Pan Dongzi killed the stout, blue silk-clad master by pouring gasoline on his embroidered quilt, setting it on fire while he was asleep, then locking up his room from outside.

  I get out of the sauna and go into the bedroom. The smoke detector’s red light blinks at me from the high ceiling. The blanket over the sheets is made out of synthetics. The closest thing to gasoline in this place is the olive oil on the kitchen shelf.

  Silly. What am I thinking about?

  But the thought of the kitchen lingers. There’s always the meat cleaver, with which many a meal has been prepared for Ed. Men were occasionally known to have their livelihoods chopped off for not deserving to possess them. But this kind of highly skilled job is probably best left to a real butcher with a genuine hog.

  Strategy, strategy. The ultimate Chinese strategy is to go away. San Shi Liu Ji, Zou Wei Shang Ji - of the thirty-six stratagems, going away is the best. Edward Johnson Cook, III deserves no love from me if he doesn’t give me basic respect!

  I bought The Chinese New Yorker first thing Monday morning. A one square inch advertisement under Manhattan Rentals pops out to me.

  REFINED ROOMS FOR RENT

  Chinatown golden district bed spaces for rent. Perfect for single woman &/or female garment factory workers with no burden. One suitcase allowed. $250 a month. Utility not included.

  Going fast. Call now!

  I pick up the phone and call. An old woman answers in dialect-accented Mandarin, "Two space left. You want, come before seven today, bring money."

  "Oh. How much cash?"

  "One month rent."

  "So that's $500 altogether if I want the room?"

  She grunts, "Bed space, not room. Six in room."

  "What?" I think I misunderstood her clouded Mandarin.

  "Three double-decker."

  This sounds like the university-provided student dormitories in Shanghai where there are often three to four bunk beds to a room. No wonder the ad allows only one suitcase per person. I remember the place Lu Long rents in Brooklyn. For a space in Manhattan, I think I can put up with it. After all, this is the only rent range I can afford. I bite my lower lip and ask, "Does the room have windows?"

  "One window. You have burden?"

  "What?"

  Her tone dismisses me as stupid.
"Burden, you know! Kids! Men! Everybody worker. No visitor insider!”

  “Oh, I’m not married. No, no burdens. What do you mean everybody’s a worker?”

  She makes me feel more stupid. “Garment factory, you know! Women out morning, back night, just sleep. You want, come before seven!" And she hangs up.

  I start to pack.

  15 Edward Cook: Dig and You Shall Find

  Sha-fei Hong has changed my opinion of Chinese women. She has left me with a pill too bitter to swallow, too hard to digest.

  The day she left me had started the way any other working day for me did: frustrating meetings over the due diligence report, endless shuffling of documents that left my hands with more paper cuts in a day than all the cuts I had suffered shaving in my life. In a quasi-hungover state from the coke I took over the weekend, I found it hard to focus. The black letters turned into sperms swimming around before my eyes like the talking sperms in Woody Allen’s movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex. After putting in a good ten and a half hours at the firm, I realized I was late submitting my billing hours form and ended up filling out the damned form in the cab ride home. As I dragged my feet into the apartment, all I wanted was a hot meal and Sha-fei. Perhaps a sniff or two in the john in between. Instead, I found a "Dear Ed" note lying on the dining table.

  The Osaka Night proved to be my undoing. Blame it on the white powder. And who knows? As foxy and alert as this chick was, she could have smelled something and decided it wasn’t for her. After all, Sha-fei Hong was no Irene Lou. This woman had things going for her. Not that I was stingy about sharing the coke with her. I figured I’d go slow before driving her away prematurely, as I ended up doing anyway. But the stuff is expensive. I’m slaving away for a $52,000 pre-tax salary. I’d think twice about letting her vacuum it all up before I reap any benefits.

  I’ve tried to forget her. Being obsessed with an FOB (“Fresh Off the Boat”) Chinese woman is uncharacteristic of me, so I scheduled a shrink session just for that. At the conclusion of our forty-five minutes, Dr. Avi Weinblatt gives me a $200 piece of advice: "By your own admission, Mr. Cook, it's easier for you to find 101 Chinese women in New York City than 101 Dalmatians. If that's the case, go out and find someone else and get the girl out of your system."

  The firm’s medical plan does not cover visits to shrinks. As far as I’m concerned, the two hundred bucks is down the drain. Weinblatt told me what I already knew. In fact, with the exception of Irene Lou, who even to this day could trigger in me both guilt and regret, the thing that worked for me in the past was to find a substitute, “an emotional transition figure” in Weinblatt’s lingo.

  I had noticed Naomi Fujimoto ever since I joined the firm a couple of months ago. She’s a small-framed, stocky-legged second year associate with single eyelids, really not all that attractive. But boy, was that bitch cocky! Naomi Fujimoto reacted to my advance so furiously I was lucky she didn’t go to the managing partner to report me. I ended up jerking off in front of my TV screen with "The Oriental Lickspress" running, until I was exhausted. And I’ve tried more coke, wishfully thinking that it would translate into less stress. Of course, I know better. I’ve been there before and I’m there again – a total fuckup, only this time in an expensive suit.

  Taking a rare lunch break to pick up a salad at Park Joon Stockbroker Deli the other day, I was stopped by a man and a woman holding a banner saying “Adopt A Friend.” They were also passing out registration forms for caretakers with hearts of gold to take in homeless cats and dogs. Having just been deserted by a friend of a different kind, I decided my heart could use a coat of gold. I asked whether they by any chance had a Pekinese, “Preferably female.”

  “The Pekinese are among the most loved pets. They typically do not end up homeless,” the woman told me with a straight face like I was born yesterday. “If fluffy, cuddliness is what you’re after, we might have something for you. Just a sec.” She leafed through a photo album and cried, “Here! See how cute he is?”

  He had brown hair, tangled up the way dried up cranberry sauce left on the carpet was the day after grandma’s Thanksgiving dinner. A dark mucus surrounding his eyes made him look old and pathetic. “A mutt,” I muttered under my breath.

  Seeing the hesitation on my face, the woman said, “A pet can be a truly wonderful and loving companion, you know.”

  Somehow, this suddenly sounded like Dr. Weinblatt’s voice. What the heck. For “an emotional transition figure,” this will do. “I’ll take him,” I said in a snap.

  The woman’s smile couldn’t have been sweeter. “Thank you so much, Sir!” she declared, promptly pressing an “Adopt A Friend” sticker on my lapel.

  “No! No!” But it was too late.

  The balled sticker landed in a trash can on Wall Street. Nobody at Sachs & Klein would appreciate the humor of such a badge of honor.

  I named the four-legged mongrel Moratorium, deciding that with him in, Sha-fei’s out. No more Chinese, Japanese, dirty nieces for a while, please. This will be the period of moratorium.

  But to my own disbelief, I continue to miss Sha-fei. I even make a copy of her parting note and carry it around in my Mark Cross billfold. And how can I forget the circumstances under which the copy was made. It was at the closing of the Freshwater Utility Corporation’s billion-dollar buy out deal last Friday – my first closing since joining Sachs & Klein. It was 10:20 p.m. and I had been in and out of the conference room since 9:30 that morning. I didn’t realize how late it was until I looked outside the window and saw the Brooklyn Bridge and its Gothic gateways, all lit up. The view from the 32nd floor was awesome. It’s a horrible shame to have to waste a night like this in a suffocating den filled with legal pedants, screaming clients, and withered plants. As I was. Tabor Wilcox, the leading partner on the deal was rubbing his eyes and yawning, his glasses landing lenses-side down on the long, cluttered table. A corner of the curly fax before him was brown, stained by a can of spilled Diet Pepsi. I walked towards the rectangular end table to get what must have been my 20th cup of coffee of the day and nearly tripped over the phone line that was dragged to the conference table. The guy on the phone gave me a dirty look before returning to bang on the HP-12c calculator in front of him. The Chinese food I had the paralegals order had only fatty chicken wings and fertilizer-like fried rice left by the time I had a chance to take a bite. Half-eaten burgers and donuts lay mixed with cigarette butts and ashes and Perrier water bottle caps. The paralegals were frantically forging corporate signatures on the closing docket, the third time in a day they had done so due to the eleventh-hour changes.

  At half past ten, I finally had to excuse myself from the conference room to release my caffeine-satiated bladder. As I stared down at my engorged appendage, I wished I could then and there be in a stall with Sha-fei. Irene and I did our share of peeing, powdering, and pawing in restroom stalls in places like the Tunnel, the Limelight, and the Palladium. I was never given a chance to go this far with Sha-fei …

  It was after the bathroom trip that I sneaked into the floor’s xeroxing cubicle and clumsily punched in my 4-digit attorney code and the “Firm Matters” client code. I smoothed out the piece of paper from a yellow legal pad and copied Sha-fei’s parting words. I would never let a paralegal handle this job for me.

  And now, as I slouch in the day bed sucking a cigarette at the same rhythm Moratorium is chewing his Bow Wow Chow, I again have the urge to read Sha-fei’s words.

  "Dear Ed,

  When you return later this evening, you will find me gone. Gone to search for my new life, the life I came to America in search of.

  As fate would have it, you are the first American I have ever come into contact with. And for providing me information on graduate schools in the U.S., and later, a roof over my head in my most distressing circumstances, I’m grateful.

  There is, however, something about our relationship you failed to understand. And it is this: in order for our relationship, and our potential partners
hip you have proposed, to flourish, we have to be equals.

  I entered this relationship in the spirit of love. I have given my body and soul to the pursuit of our shared happiness and a sense of individual achievement. You, on the other hand, seem to have given up daily delivered-food in exchange for the custom-made.

  And, no. I happen not to fit the profile of your desired immigrant-client. To lick your boots so that I have my boobs licked - as you once so bluntly put it - is unacceptable to me.

  Best luck in your endeavors.

  Yours,

  Sha-fei Hong"

  A gracefully penned parting shot, I have to admit. Considering that its author had lived all her life in the Western-culture-starved China up until a couple of months prior to its drafting, it was truly impressive. A lawyer should know good English from legalese. He only wishes he too, writes with a dab of elegance. So, with that, this FOB Shanghai woman has dumped me, leaving me shattered. This woman who has the rare combination of a brain and a body. Not since Irene Lou told me her father hated my being around her had I been hurt so much. I want to talk to Sha-fei. I need to see her. And the only way to track her down is to call Gordon Lou. I’m convinced that Gordon Lou, himself, has lured her away from me. The thought of him makes me fume. This stick-in-the-mud diehard who can't stand the sight of a Chinese woman with a white man, a man who probably desires Sha-fei’s young flesh as much as I do! But hell, I’ll call him and ask for Sha-fei. Every Chinese woman on earth is not his daughter!

  “Evening Pearls. Please hold.”