Shanghai Girl

by Vivian Yang

  During the political instruction segment of our training, the coach would sometimes tell us stories. We heard that some of his old training buddies had gone on to the National Team, becoming the very few Chinese who had opportunities to travel abroad to compete. They were expected to bring honor and glory to our motherland, but few made it to the winner’s rostrum.

  I turned thirteen on May 15th, 1975. A child’s birthday was rarely marked and an adult’s, hardly remembered. Birthday party as a practice was condemned as bourgeois. The few determined to go against the tide would have been thwarted by the challenge baking a cake due to the rationing of flour, eggs, and sugar and the want of an oven. December 26th was the only exception as Chairman Mao was born on that day in 1893. All of China was legislated to eat “noodles of eternity” to wish him “ten-thousand lifetimes of longevity without limits”.

  At the beginning of our training on my birthday, I noticed Coach Long’s eyebrows were knotted like two forceful Chinese calligraphy strokes. There was a tug in me when his eyes failed to sweep across me as they always did.

  “Today, we’ll streamline to make our team leaner and stronger. Same heat ordering, now!”

  “Streamline” was a code word for team member elimination. I feared for my fate.

  The splattering yet quiet upheavals now over, Coach Long pronounced the death sentences for some. I could feel my heart filling with joy when I realized I had been spared.

  “The verdict was reached collectively by all coaches. Today’s results support our decision.” So the list was pre-determined. The heat competition was just a formality.

  Coach Long frowned when a girl began to sob. “Tears won’t get you back on the team. Even though you don’t have the talent for competitive swimming you can still achieve by focusing on your academic studies. Keep in mind Chairman Mao’s teachings: ‘Study well, and make progress every day.’ There are many ways one can succeed in life.”

  The common phrase describing athletes as “possessing well-developed limbs but a simplistic mind” reinforced the perception that one could be a good student or star athlete but not both. I was always interested in Chinese composition although little was available for us to read to improve our writing. I dreaded being regarded as overly intellectual. My physical appearance was enough of a problem. I had been jotting down my thoughts in private and hid my notebooks under my mattress. Bold lines like “I admire him to death but don’t know why,” in which I confessed my nascent feelings towards Coach Long, would definitely brand me a la san if discovered and be classified as “bourgeois poisonous weeds”.

  Of course there were entries about the street sweeper who had vanished from the Pushkin graveyard area. During the past three years since I last saw him I had often imagined bumping into him again, with him unmasked and handsome. I had even written down what I’d say to him if I saw him again: Please allow me to thank you for giving me the confidence to overcome difficulties in life. I still remembered clearly the fainting but visible creases on his khakis and the high quality but unpolished leather shoes he wore. I could always see his encouraging eyes. The appeal the street sweeper had on me was persistent, and my secret diaries attested to my largely make-believe attraction to him.

  Well, that day, I was already drafting my birthday diary entry in my head while the “streamlining” was taking place. It should definitely be recorded, I decided. After the session, as I dragged my feet to the changing room, Coach Long strode over in my direction. I stopped to wait. Next, he snapped a towel at me as though to startle me. I was shocked at his open flirtation. Red to the root of my long bare neck, I thanked Buddha Guan Yin that none of the other girls saw this. Coach Long draped the beach towel over me and whispered, “Wait for me outside where I parked my bicycle.”

  My heart jolted as my cheeks burned. A giddy feeling hit me. “Mo Mo, you have become a la san and Coach Long is your man,” I told myself.

  When I walked out, he was standing like a bronze statue next to his bicycle.

  “Hop on!”

  As soon as I side-saddled onto the metal rack on the back wheel, it began to roll. “Hold on to my waist!” he commanded without turning his head.

  Steadying myself with my arms around him, I could feel my heart beat as if I had just competed in a swimming race. Then, without warning, he sped up and took his hands off the handlebars as the bicycle swished along. “Look, no hands!” he called out, revealing an adventurous side of him I had not previously seen.

  I held tightly onto him, my cheek pressed against his broad back. “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. I’ve got something for your birthday.”

  “How … ? and what is it?” I’d never received anything for my birthday.

  “The team’s personal dossiers were reviewed for the streamlining so I know,” he returned his head to tell me. “Now don’t make me look back again.”

  He pedaled on. I clutched onto him, anticipation building inside of me.

  Half an hour later, we arrived at an old building in Hongkou District. Coach Long parked his vehicle against the front wall and chained both wheels. Bicycles being the sole means of transportation aside from public buses, they were a highly prized commodity whose purchase required coupons, a long waiting list, and months’ worth of salary. More so than towels, they were the most desired targets for thieves. The exterior of the house had many exposed bricks and moss had grown in the cracks.

  “Who else lives here?”

  “Other unmarried male colleagues.”

  So this was the Sports Authority staff residence. “You share?” I asked nervously, never having been to this part of town that was the de facto Japanese concession during the WWII.

  “The facilities, yes, but I’ve got my own space with a coffin.”

  “A coff…?”

  Before I could finish, Coach Long entered the front door and pulled me in. I bumped into a wooden shelf filled with mud stained rubber rain boots, umbrellas with bent spines, and nylon string-knitted net bags with used brown wrapping papers.

  “Watch out!”

  I looked down and saw a mousetrap with a darkened piece of fried dough on its hook. Hairy stuff once extended from a rat’s rear end graced the baseboard. I let out a cry.

  “Don’t scream,” he said curtly, offering a hand, which I took.

  “Why is the shelf right by the door?”

  “Can’t move it, it’s fixed to the wall -- Japanese style. The Eastern foreigners store their shoes here before entering the house.”

  Coach Long’s dim room was even smaller than Wang Hong’s home, about the size of two shower stalls. The first thing I noticed was another fixed wooden shelf heaped with piles of gym clothes. A pillow without its case and a soiled comforter lay inside as well.

  “So this is the …?”

  “Yeah. The Japanese used to tuck away their comforters during the day and sleep on the tatami at night. We all jokingly call it the coffin, and I use it as a bed.”

  I gaped at the tiny straw-matted floor space and nodded absent-mindedly. A faded blue plastic sheet served as the curtain to a wood-framed window, which wouldn’t fully close. A mound of envelope-sized papers sat in a corner. A wooden stool and a child-size bamboo chair constituted all the furniture.

  Coach Long switched on the 15-watt bulb hanging down from the ceiling by pulling the attached rope. I was astounded to see that the rope was connected to a replica of the plastic lasso used in our training.

  “Why do you use this here?”

  “Oh, I took it from the pool because it’s easy to be grabbed from the coffin in darkness. Now don’t just stand there like a candle. Sit.”

  I fidgeted on the bamboo chair and wrung my hands.

  Coach Long came squatting before me, one knee on the tatami. “I’ve got something very important to tell you, but first promise me you won’t cry.”

  “I promise,” I said, my hands clasped tighter.

  “Good. Now, I didn’t announce th
is in front of everybody, but today was your last training session as well …”

  “I knew it! I knew it!” I shouted, tears misting my eyes.

  Coach Long put his hands on my shoulders and said, “You promised not to cry, Mo Mo.”

  Biting my lip hard, I struggled to hold back tears. “Sorry, Coach,” I murmured, sniffing.

  “Good. I told you I had something to show you, didn’t I?”

  He fumbled around in his trousers pockets. I caught a glimpse of something green. He tucked it down under one of his thumbs, stretched out all eight other fingers, palms down.

  “If you guess correctly which thumb I’ve got it under, I’ll show it to you.”

  I stared at his hands, transfixed. Here was a pair belonging to a man in his prime: big, firm, blue veins popping, and very much in use. The nails were so closely clipped that their white tip sections were nonexistent. In yet another effort at water resistance reduction, swimmers often wore their fingernails short. No dirt could accumulate under those nails buried inside the flesh.

  “Right one.”

  “You’re right!” he chuckled, un-clutching to reveal a rectangular packet of five thin sticks with white paper sleeves, two of them empty. “See? These are the only three left -- American kouxiang tang that a former teammate of mine brought back from abroad!”

  Ah, genuine American “mouth fragrance candy”! What an extremely precious commodity!

  “This … for my birthday?”

  “You bet! Would you like to share one with me?”

  I bounced up on my tiptoes. “Of course! Thank you!”

  He took out a slice and let me hold one end of it. My hand shaking slightly, I stared at the wrapper bearing the letters “WRIGLEY’S SPEARMINT CHEWING GUM”. The word “SPEARMINT” was italicized and distinctively printed across a forest green arrow pointing towards a little tree with three branches.

  So on that day, my thirteenth birthday, I had the privilege for the first time of touching something made in the U.S. This was the time before Wrigley’s “Double Mint, Double Pleasure” came into being, before the green-on-white wrapper was changed to mint green, before I knew that three quarters of the population of Singapore were ethnic Chinese and that chewing gum would be banned there. This was before I had a clue as to what life was like outside of China, before I could picture white people walking down the street chewing gum or drinking a whole can of Coke.

  “Happy birthday to you, and let’s haafoo haafoo this,” he said, using pidgin.

  He gave the stick a little tug and I let go of my end of it. I watched intently as his flesh-tipped index finger edged the foil-covered stick out of the wrapper and opened the saw-toothed silver paper. He broke the human flesh-colored piece into two halves, handed me one and put the other in his mouth. He then folded the foil along its creases and slid it back into the wrapper, inching along in the direction of the arrow, deliberately, precisely, one millimeter at a time until it was all the way, and snugly, in.

  Seeing that I still had my half in hand, he said, “Let me feed it to you.”

  “This is delicious. Thank you!”

  He chewed and chewed and studied me. I sensed the rhythm of his breathing in and out and visualized that pair of arms spearheading in water, his body defying its resistance. I broke the awkwardness and said, “Now I know why your teeth are so white. It’s the American kouxiang tang.”

  He shook his head. “Nothing to do with it. This is the only packet I was given. My teeth are white because I don’t smoke like most of the others do.”

  “And what made you not pick it up, then?”

  “Revolutionary self-discipline. I don’t believe an athlete should smoke. One has to exercise self control if he wants to accomplish something big in the long run.”

  Just as I savored the deep meanings of his words, he stooped down and switched to a playfully tone. “Let’s see whose teeth are whiter, yours or mine.”

  I displayed an exaggerated grin. He loomed closer, his sweet breaths blowing on me. The pair of hands he used to slide the gum stick in and out of the wrapper was now burning on my cheeks. “Nong zen piaoliang ah!” – You are gorgeous!

  I nearly bit his lip in instinctive resistance. But the next second saw us intertwined like a dragon and a phoenix, engaged in an effort to knead the two halves of the gum back into one. He cupped my breasts as if grasping on to a kickboard, admiring them uncontrollably.

  “Mo Mo you are beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!”

  He was breathing the way he normally did immediately after a few thousand meters of non-stop swimming. Then he lifted me onto the ‘coffin’, bellowing “Ngo yao nong!” – I want you!

  Kneeling on a lump of clothes, he peeled off my pants and parted my legs. His hands felt familiar, for this was not the first time they were on my thighs. Showing me the angles of a precisely executed breaststroke with a frog-like kick during “on-land simulation” had required Coach Long to thus direct me by the poolside, with my stomach on a bench. But this time he separated me at the crotch, his hand massaged my peach fuzz, and chanted “Relax, relax … it’s alright.” Then, without warning, he thrust his index and middle fingers inside of me and started to churn.

  As I cried out in a confused excitement, he pulled them out and dropped off his pants. His appendage, forever covered by his swim trunks, was now a fully extended “turtle’s head”. Spitting the piece of gum into his hand and flattening it with his palms, Coach Long capped it on his turtle’s head, lubricated me with his saliva, and inched into me the way he had just pushed the piece of foil paper into its wrapper. I shut my eyes, sensing his manhood reaching every cell of me. This must be the fun sensation of “sex” that Wang Hong told me about ...

  The Coach’s same fingers retrieved the piece of the gum which by now was coated with a paste the texture of egg whites with streaks of blood swirling around it. As I stared at him in a daze, he propped me up next to him and put his arm around me like a coach often would after a race.

  “I’ve fantasized about you without a swim suit for who knows how long, Mo Mo. How can you be so perfectly developed without even starting your period yet?”

  “Period?” I repeated, turning scarlet to the tips of my ears.

  He gave my cheek a quick pinch and said teasingly, “Don’t be shy, my beautiful Mo Mo. I know yours hasn’t started as I don’t have your Menstruation Record Card. I was just extra careful.” He glanced at our piece of gum, now discarded on the tatami.

  My head began to reel. “What record card?”

  “No girls on your batch have had their onset yet, so you don’t know about it. It’s a card system to track and monitor our female athletes’ monthly cycles so that their potential can be maximized. I’ll show you one.”

  From the pile of papers on the floor he pulled out a card with pre-printed grids. Crosses were marked on various spots indicating the duration and blood flow quantity as well as physical reactions and training schedule.

  I looked away and covered my face. “Oh, it’s terrible of me to do this with you …,” I began, almost sobbing. “You’re my coach, and in my heart you’re like a hero to me – honest. But now we’ve done this together, you’ll think of me as nothing but a la san.”

  Coach Long pulled me into his bosom. In an unprecedented soft voice, he said, “Don’t be silly, Mo Mo. You’re the woman of my dreams and no la san can ever come close to that. Do you understand?”

  I jerked my head up and down nodding. Meeting his gaze, I gathered all my courage and said, “Yes, I do, but I’m not a woman yet ... maybe I developed faster because I’m not a hundred percent Chinese?”

  He displayed the most charming smile I had ever seen. “Which is why I went out of my way to get you on my team.”

  “You did? … and you’ve been good to me only because of this?”

  “No … of course not … ”

  But I was not going to let him finish. My beating fists were fast landing on his chest. He stood stationary, letting m
e hit him like a punching bag.

  When I finally stopped, Coach Long put his hands on my shoulders and said, “Now that you’ve done beating me up, you won’t think of me as your custodian anymore, and I’m no longer your coach. You’ll always be my beautiful idol, and I hope you will always regard me as your hero.”

  One arm encircling me by the waist, he lifted my chin with his free hand and kissed me gently on the lips. His facial muscles twitching, Coach Long held me up by my buttocks and carried me to a bare wall, pulling the noose switch off as we passed.

  “What do you say to some serious celebration of your birthday?” he whispered in my ear.

  With my arms wrapped around his neck and legs around his waist, he pinned me onto that Japanese construction which did not wobble as much as pulsate.

  There, we celebrated and celebrated, with him wishing me many happy returns of the day.

  I would now periodically go to the pool and wait for Coach Long to finish working. Then we would go utilize the coffin at his place, where he kept meticulous records on my cycles. As he had predicted, I had my menstrual onset shortly after turning 12. Everything will be all right with you from now on, the Coach had reassured me in his sonorous voice, placing his firm hands on either side of my shoulders Trust me! This went on for months.

  So imagine my surprise when one afternoon, after the bus ride to the pool, I found him not at work. In his place was a wall-eyed, muscular young woman who shouted, Hey! Training is in session. Don’t stand around here! Having always stood by the poolside a few feet from where Coach Long would be, I didn’t know where else to wait, and worse, what had happened to the Coach. My heart missing a beat, I dragged my feet into the women’s changing room.

  “Ah, Coach Long’s former trainee girl’s here for his Xi Tang! Come over to my supplies locker. I still have a few packets to give out on his behalf.”

  Xi Tang, or Happiness Sweets, were customarily handed out by newly-weds to friends and colleagues to celebrate their union.