by Vivian Yang
“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 playful tone. “Let’s see whose teeth are whiter, yours or mine.”
I displayed an exaggerated grin. He loomed closer, his sweet breath 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 ...
Afterwards, 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 me 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.
6 Love and the Troika Teens
I, the pianist’s daughter, was now concerned about having to face the music at home. Initially, telling Mother about Coach Long felt like mission in
surmountable especially in the context of my swim team elimination. Then I remembered that Mother had me when she was only eighteen and that her mother gave birth to her as a teenager as well. They apparently experienced “sex” as teenage girls, too, so there were the three of us.
Realizing this, I became less anxious. Besides, Mother hardly ever asked me about my life now that she assumed I was fine in the swim program. She never seemed to be interested in me much anyway. So if she did not ask, I would not tell, I decided.
Fueled by the exhilaration of first love, I was dying to know about my maternal grandmother Nga Bu’s romance with my Russian grandfather. If I were lucky, Mother might even tell me who my father was. Our Russian meal generally put Mother in a better mood. I offered to wash her hair that Sunday afternoon and planned to bring up the subject of her parents.
I pondered all this as I combed my tangled hair with my fingers. The chlorine in the swimming pool was the culprit. As you might have guessed by now, the strictly rationed soap was not available in the shower stalls where we trained. I usually washed my own hair but Mother said she would wash mine this time in exchange for my offer.
Shampoo, or “fragrant waves” in transliterated pidgin, was not rationed but unaffordable. We used instead a solid black chunk of camellia exact. With boiling water I dissolved it an enamel washbasin that was resting on a wooden frame. I then added cold water to make the solution to the exact lukewarm degree Mother desired.
My hair was straight and almost all black except for occasional streaks of brunette. The plastic comb designated for me had embossed on it the words “Serve the People”, a ubiquitous quote from Chairman Mao. I used to examine my brunette strands that were caught on it and flash the comb under the sun. Mother had a real brush that she must have had for years for it was molting and its wooden shaft crumbling. All the hairs on it were wavy and smoky brown.
When it was my turn to be washed, I bent my head to face a liquid mirror and asked in a muffled voice, “Mother, can you tell me how your parents first met?”
Her nails dug into my scalp. I clenched onto the washbasin to endure the pain much like someone with a stomach flu gripping onto the toilet bowl rim. The turbid water was getting into my mouth as I waited for her answer.
“After I finish with you, now don’t move.”
Her ivory-like fingers tapped my crown as though it were a drum. Presently she began humming “Red Is the East”, her hands separating my hair into sections to let the camellia solution soak through. During one of her numerous delirious outbursts, she said that her parents had endowed her with those fingers to play Chopin, but now they only touched keys on the accordion. I knew that it was fortunate for her that she was allowed to play any instrument at all, as all things Western were considered “spiritual opium” to our revolutionary will power. Mother’s survival instincts were attributable to her orphaned childhood. Just as Old Wang once said, she was the smartest in knowing how to adapt to the ever-changing political climates. While some of her colleagues had held on to their “commitment to art”, Mother had volunteered to give up piano and take up the professionally despised accordion, the Red Guards’ instrument of choice popularized, ironically, by the Soviet revisionists.
As the lead accordionist to the School’s “Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team”, Mother played tunes like “Red Is the East” and “Sailing in the Sea Depends on the Helmsman”. The Red Sun in the East and the Helmsman both referred to Chairman Mao on whose leadership our nation of 800 million depended.
Red is the East,
Rises the Sun,
China has brought forth a Mao Tse-tung.
For the people’s happiness He works,
Hu-er-hei-yo –
He is our great savior!
The Communist Party is like the Sun,
Illuminates every corner where it shines.
Wherever exists the Communist Party,
Hu-er-hei-yo –
People there’ll be liberated!
And:
Dahai hangxing kao duoshuo,
Wanwu shengzhang kao taiyang …
Sailing in the seas depends on the Helmsman,
life and growth depend on the Sun.
Rain and dewdrops nourish the crops,
making revolution depends on Mao Zedong Thought.
Fish can't leave the water, nor do melons the vine.
The revolutionary masses can't do without the Communist Party.
Mao Zedong Thought is the sun that shines forever.
Mother broke off in the middle of the song as abruptly as she began. I kept my eyes and mouth shut, listening to the sound of water dripping into the basin. I could sense that she had again entered a different world, a place where time had stopped like the hands of an unwound clock.
The washing over, I combed my hair with “Serve the People” as Mother began, “I never knew my parents so what I’m telling you may not be all factual. The orphanage record only had one photo of your grandfather but not your Nga Bu. Most Chinese women who had died in the 1940’s couldn’t have had a picture taken of them, you know.”
“Can I see it?”
Mother patted her hands dry and went to unlock her room, closing the door behind her. I could hear boxes being shuffled inside as I twirled my hair, waiting for the privilege of seeing my Russian ancestor’s visage for the first time.
She returned with a 2” x 1.5” snapshot, product of an amateur’s lens judging from the overexposure mark left by the magnesium flash power. Once black and white, it was now yellow on the edges. I leaned over and stared: a young Caucasian man in a V-neck sweater was leaning against one of the Grecian pillars, hands on an accordion that read HOHNER.
“Hohner is a German brand for musical instruments, excellent sound quality. The photo was obviously taken on the Bund, the most valuable stretch of embanked riverfront in Shanghai. This edifice with a fin-de-siècle European look used to be the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and now …”
“The seat of the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee,” I finished it for her. “Was he a clerk at the Bank?”
“One would wish but no. Kirill Molotov,” Mother uttered her father’s name deliberately, “was a native of St. Petersburg and a musically-talented Russian barber by profession. His father had died in the conflict between the White Armies and the Bolshevik revolutionaries following the fall of Tsar Nicholas II.”
“Which side was he on?”
“I have no way of knowing, but I’ve always insisted that he’d been a revolutionary soldier under Comrade Lenin, and therefore a martyr of the Soviet Union. Your grandfather was still a teenager when he fled with an uncle, trekking across Central Asia as stowaways on the Trans-Siberian trains. They arrived first in the Northeastern Chinese city of Harbin before getting south on freight trains to Shanghai.”
This mixture of facts and fiction must have repeatedly gone around in Mother’s head for she told them so engagingly as though she was reciting from a verse novel. The initial oddity of her referring to him as Kirill -- rather than Father as we Chinese always are required to show “filial respect” -- soon became unnoticeable. I was sucked into the whirlpool of her narrative.
“Like many of their compatriots, they reached ‘St. Petersburg of the Orient’, destitute.”
Mother said “St. Petersburg” in a whisper for she knew well that I belonged to the generation that knew no St. Petersburg but Leningrad, no John Lennon but Vladimir Lenin, and no Marx Brothers but Karl Marx.
Uncle and Nephew settled down in the émigrés community around Avenue Joffre in the French Concession, an area dubbed “Neva Street” after the river back home. Signs here were in Cyrillic and English, with occasional French added for flair. There were the Baranovsky Department Store and the Sonola Music House. The First Russian Bakery was in heated competition with the Café & Bakery I. P. Tkachenko. The pharmacies Foch and Sine, Siberian Fur Store, Koneff Shirts Maker, Femina Silks, and Europa Shoes. By the time the tombstone maker Tomashvsky Arc
hitectural & Monumental Granite set up shop here, it was clear that the river in the old country was one of no return.
Never again Neva.
Kirill apprenticed at the Figaro Coiffure while the uncle stuffed fatty meats at the Vienna Sausage Works. Our folks had worked, Mother reassured me. Unlike some who hung around on street corners trying to catch lice for one another, Kirill had risen above the local stereotypes.
On one sultry summer night in 1944, about a year before Mother was born, my maternal grandparents had a fateful encounter under the ceiling fans of the Sonola Music House’s accordion section. He, in an open collar white calico shirt, was fingering the keys. She, clad in a midnight blue three-quarter sleeves uniform cheongsam with a St. Emanuel Grammar School badge, watched him doing octaves. He had spoken first, in her patois, laboriously learned from the streets. Dimples showing and eyes gleaming with surprise, her pale face turned pink. Characteristically Chinese, she apologized in her first utterance that she knew not his tongue.
“You mean Nga Bu went to the same primary school as I do?” I asked incredulously.
Mother nodded. “Same physical location but St. Emanuel and your Young Revolutionary School belong to two opposite realms.”
A clerk rang a bell. The shop was closing. The teens strolled into to the breezy evening heat, his arm coming to encircle the narrowest part of her. Shanghai’s French Concession born and bred, my mother’s mother was unabashed.
My heart began to race from hearing Mother’s narration. Nga Bu must have experienced a similar sensation. He was three years older than her, Mother believed, with muscles three times firmer than hers. My own coach was eight years my senior, and oh, that much stronger than me!
Bound for the Bund, Kirill and Nga Bu walked and talked, thoughts boundless.
En route they approached the double-spanned Garden Bridge where Nga Bu stopped to brace herself for the body search by the occupying Japanese. As a Chinese she was expected to bow to the sentinels or risk being beaten up for “demonstrating disrespect for the Heavenly Emperor Hirohito”. Many had died at the sentries’ bayonet points for “attempting to smuggle rice” to the other side of the bridge or for simply being Chinese.