by Yu-Han Chao
This continued all winter and spring. In the summer, Cynthia went south to stay with her paternal grandparents.
When classes began again in March, Cynthia’s stalker was gone. She still never felt entirely safe, and wished she had friends at school. She was just one of the faceless many wearing the same uniforms and hairstyle at Han Lin Vocational School. Nobody knew her, and ultimately, nobody would notice when she was killed by her ex-boyfriend’s parents, her insane ex, or a middle-aged stranger with crazy eyes and a sharp knife in the basement.
The morning after receiving the awful note, after a broken night’s sleep, Cynthia finally trudged downstairs in her slippers and pajamas to look at the writing on the basement wall.
Cynthia you heartless Bitch I am going to Cut Slice your heart OUT just like you did mine You Just Wait
Cynthia put one palm against the horrible wall to support herself. The message was scrawled in either red paint or blood in his crazed handwriting. He was back. She wished they had never met. She would be the next headline in the Taiwan news, she could see it: “Vocational School Student Brutally Mutilated by Spurned Boyfriend.” The old woman on the seventh floor would open the newspaper, read about her and say, “Why, that’s just awful,” as she sipped the cup of tea her granddaughter Yune brought to her. Cynthia’s grandparents would sob and blame their son for not bringing her up right, for letting her live alone in dangerous Taipei when her thoughtless mother had already abandoned her as a baby. They would lament the fate of their nineteen-year-old granddaughter, too young and innocent to meet such a horrible end.
Cynthia walked stiffly back up to her apartment. She combed her hair, washed her face, put on a bright red dress she wore to a wedding last year, and eased her feet into a pair of red ballet flats. She turned on all the lights in her apartment and switched the radio to ICRT.
Instead of going down to the first floor, she took the elevator to the twelfth floor. She climbed up a staircase which led to the roof of the building. A jungle of gas and satellite equipment lined the flat, cement roof. A large water tower hummed in its metal net. She stepped over some ailing plants in cracked pots and made her way between rows of clothes drying on bamboo poles fixed in place with stacked bricks. Cynthia gazed down at the rest of Taipei through a layer of moist morning smog. The sun malingered behind clouds.
She approached the waist-high ledge, leaned on it with trembling hands, and closed her eyes for several seconds.
She put one red shoe on the ledge, then with a boost, the other. She didn’t take the time to rebalance herself as she stood, and she simply fell, fell, and landed on the first floor, in an unswept alley beside No.3 Sing Yi Street.
A neighbor’s dog barked, hearing the dull thump of the body.
My Ex-Boyfriend the Spy
IN THE BASEMENT of a popular Taipei gym, two young women wrapped in nothing but plush white towels sat side by side on the wooden bench in a sauna room. Their eyes were half closed as they leaned back in the small space saturated with hot steam.
“It’s so hot I can’t breathe,” Angela said.
“You’ll get used to it. Relax.”
An older woman left, leaving Angela and May alone in the room. May moved to the bench where the older woman had been lying, removed her towel, spread it lengthwise on the bench, and lay down on it. She crossed her legs in Angela’s direction. Angela gazed idly at her friend’s naked body, slender with rounded breasts, the lower body slightly thick.
“How long has it been since a guy saw you naked?” Angela asked, observing the curved outline of May’s breasts.
May laughed. “It’s been a while. It’s not exactly convenient to have a boyfriend when you’re living at home. I’m almost thirty, but my gramps still watches me like a hawk. How about your parents?”
“Mine don’t really care. They’re too busy running the supermarket. They don’t bother me even if I come home late,” Angela said.
“Have you dated anyone since you broke up with Dennis?” “No. But hey, at least I didn’t forget his name this time.” “You loose woman, sleeping with men whose names you don’t know!”
Angela’s face reddened, but at least she could blame it on the steam. “Hey, watch it. That was my first boyfriend.”
“The older guy? Where the hell do you find these old men, anyway?”
“I ran into him a few times on campus and had asked his name twice but still forgot it. By the time he finally convinced me to go out with him, I could not for the life of me remember his name, and a few dates later, it was too embarrassing to ask him.”
“So how did you find out his name?”
“We were lying in bed in a motel room one afternoon, and I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I asked him what his friends called him, and he said Will. So I knew his name must be Will or William, and I could just call him Will.”
“Just how old was he?”
“I never asked him his age, but he must have been over forty.”
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
“That’s nasty.” May made a face.
“Well, I didn’t think too hard about it. He was really weird and secretive, though. He always invited me on remote hiking trails outside of Taipei, and I never knew his telephone number or address. He always called me. I never called him.”
“That sounds really shady,” May said.
“Well, when I told my next boyfriend, the Irish guy, about how secretive Will was, he was certain that Will was some kind of spy working for the American government.”
“Spy? That’s ridiculous. I’m sorry, but that sounds paranoid and crazy. Why on earth would America need spies in Taiwan? Taiwanese love Americans.”
“I thought it seemed odd, too.”
“You want to know what I think, Angela?”
“Enlighten me.”
“He was married,” May said with conviction.
“Married?”
“Yes, that’s the most logical and obvious explanation.”
“Hmm, he did used to check the motel rooms for hidden cameras, which I thought was funny. Who cares if perverted motel owners got our naked butts on film? He said he wanted to protect me because I was so young. And he always, always insisted on using a condom and didn’t allow me to even touch him without one already on.”
“So there you go; he was married, simple as that. No spy conspiracy theories, nothing psycho or paranoid,” May said.
Angela’s face grew dark, and she felt herself sweating profusely, not just because of the heat. She felt nauseous and lightheaded. Perhaps it had occurred to her that Will might have been married, but she’d subconsciously blocked the possibility out, even after all the years. This was the man who took her virginity, the first man she was ever serious about, and it turns out he was only having her on the side, that he was married the whole time? Angela felt something snapping inside her.
“When I asked him where he lived, he said he lived with a Taiwanese family. I thought it was a language exchange type of setup.” Angela clenched her teeth.
“Maybe that’s a euphemism for I live with my wife and kids,” May said. “Yep, the asshole was so married.”
“He’s such a piece of shit!” Angela burst out. “I gave him my first time, my first everything! And I can’t believe it took five years after we broke up for me to figure this out.”
“Calm down, it’s okay, it’s all in the past. I mean, what are you going to do?”
“I’d like to slap him hard and tell him off,” Angela said.
“How are you going to find him if you don’t have his address?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I can go hang out on the Taida campus and see if he’s still there trying to pick up young college girls.”
“Come on. Let’s go in the cold water pool to cool off,” May said, getting up from the bench and rewrapping her towel around her body. “You’re getting way too worked up.”
The two women exited the sauna. In the adjoining room, they plunged
into the coolness of the tile-lined cold water pool.
“Wow, my skin feels all prickly,” Angela said.
“It’s nice, isn’t it? Feel better now?”
The next day, Angela spent her lunch hour on the Taida campus at the cafeteria benches, where she had run into Will many times five years ago. May would’ve told her to give it up if she knew Angela was stupidly waiting here in hopes of running into her ex to tell him off for being married and stringing her along, but this was just one of those things. Angela needed this. That she had inadvertently dated a married man, and that he had told her how much he loved her and actually wept, a grown man weeping like a baby when she came back from studying abroad in Europe for a year and dumped him—all of this made her angry. The more she thought about it, the more she fumed.
Sure, she had had the satisfaction of dumping him when she came back with the much younger boyfriend she replaced him with, but that was nothing compared to her new knowledge that he had a family. He would never be able to make amends for this insult, this injury, this wrongdoing, done to her as well as his wife.
She started eating lunch on the Taida campus daily. She bought lunch at the cafeteria, just like she did five years ago as an undergraduate, and ate it on the open benches beside the bike racks. It was like she was back in college again. The excellent food options had not changed much since she was there, and she enjoyed the variety—cold sesame noodles, steamed buns, sticky rice with chicken and tea eggs, delicious fried chicken patties, beef noodle soup, and savory pork meatball soup.
One whole year passed before Angela caught a glimpse of a tall, gray-haired man on a bicycle. She had reduced her visits from five days a week to one or two days a week, starting to believe she would never see him again.
The man locked his bike to the bicycle rack by the road, and when Angela saw his face, she froze. She dropped her steamed bun and stood.
He hadn’t seen her yet. She took large strides toward him. He had an envelope in his hand and was walking toward the post office. There were so many people coming and going in the plaza that he didn’t notice her. Without thinking, Angela cut in front of him and blocked his path. She watched as his pupils dilated with recognition and disbelief.
“Angela, it’s you! I thought I would never see you again! How are you?”
“I would be better if you had told me the truth about yourself,” she said.
She crossed her arms and tapped the right toe of her high-heeled shoes. When Will knew her, she wore sneakers, old jeans, and tank tops. Now she wore a nice blouse, fitted office pants, and expensive high heels with pointy toes as sharp as weapons. She wanted to dig them into his gut.
“What do you mean, the truth?”
“You know exactly what I mean. You’re married, aren’t you?”
“I’m not married now,” he said, dragging out each syllable the way liars do.
“But were you married then? When you fucked me and told me you loved me and cried when I was leaving and then cried when I dumped you? When I gave you my virginity? You were married, weren’t you, you piece of shit!”
“I . . . calm down, Angela, I didn’t mean to—”
“Answer my question!” she yelled, though all the Taida students nearby were staring, some gawping mid-chew, at the two of them.
She wasn’t a student here anymore, anyway. She did not care. Nobody she knew was here to gossip about her, and all she wanted was to make Will feel shame, as he had made her feel when she realized how naïve and stupid she had been to believe him and trust him.
“Yes, I was married,” Will said softly, “but I got divorced shortly after you and I broke up.”
“See if I care.”
“When I told you that I would have married you, I was sincere. I wanted to marry you. I really loved you,” he said quietly.
Angela tried not to let the old man’s words affect her. Marry her, indeed. Who wanted to marry him? She stared right in his face and was surprised to see what an old, graying, long-faced, and unattractive creature he was. She could not believe she had been naked in bed with this man, given him her affection, offered him her body. She really dodged a bullet, she thought to herself. When he opened his mouth he showed two rows of undoubtedly fake teeth so shiny and blindingly white they looked frightening against his receded, reddish-pink gums. Angela’s feelings toward Will shifted from anger to a kind of pity, which soon gave way to disgust.
“Get away from me. You don’t deserve to have anyone in your life, you dirty old liar. If I could take everything back, I would.”
The expression on Will’s face triggered in Angela the vivid image of her twisting a knife in his wound so it would never heal. But it was still not enough.
“You are a piece of shit, human scum, and I shouldn’t have wasted a single minute on you. I regret every second I spent with you, and I’m sure your ex-wife does, too.”
Will stood there, pruny mouth stretched into a flat line of dismay. Angela turned and started walking, her heels clicking loudly on the sidewalk. She walked toward the bus stop at the front gate of Taida. She imagined Will was following her, a mere arm’s reach away as she crossed the crowded campus, but she refused to look back. As she approached the bus stop, her bus, the number 60 Taipei bus, pulled up. She waved at the driver and quickened her steps, making it just in time. The door of the bus swung shut behind her with a whooshing noise. She dropped twelve NT into the coin chute and plopped down in the first seat behind the driver.
Angela looked out the window at the familiar Taipei scenery: couples on bicycles, mothers with strollers, elementary school students wearing school uniforms and banana-yellow hats. A sense of satisfaction and vindication flowed through her. At last, she had the closure she wanted. She only wished she had remembered to slap him while she was at it. Fishing her cell phone out of her purse, she dialed May’s number. She hadn’t spoken to May since her friend began a demanding new job answering telephones for a home shopping network. Even when May wasn’t busy, she no longer enjoyed talking on the phone—“occupational hazard,” she jokingly explained.
“Hey, May, you won’t believe who I just ran into,” she said when May picked up.
Simple as That
SHE THOUGHT IT was a matter of being a wonderful, loving girlfriend who could cook, looked pretty, and had a nice body. All she had to do, or be, were these things, and love him, and he would love her back, as simple as that. She was wrong.
She met him by chance in the lobby of a karaoke club. He spoke to her in perfect Chinese, which took her by surprise, because his eyes were sapphire and his hair dark auburn.
“Are you waiting for me?” he asked.
Jolie did not understand this as a pick-up line, only stared at him, confused.
“It was a joke,” he said. “Hi, my name is Mike.”
“I’m Jolie.”
Jolie wasn’t in the mood for chatting, especially since she had just broken up with her long-distance boyfriend after he admitted he had been with two different girls behind her back and still expected her to forgive him. She didn’t, and was feeling rather sore about men in general. This was why she wanted to go to karaoke with the girls—so they could bitch about men and sing sad love songs by Tsai Chin until they lost their voices. But politeness forced her to keep up a conversation with Mike until her friends arrived.
“You speak Chinese very well,” she said to him. “Everybody must say that to you.”
“Yeah, and guess what, I speak English very well, too. I just came here after graduating from college in America. I majored in Chinese.” He smiled, showing perfect teeth.
“You have no accent when you speak Chinese,” Jolie said.
“My nanny was from Taiwan,” Mike said. “My parents were never around, so after school I would hang out with her and speak Chinese. I was like her son. I always told myself I would come to Taiwan when I had a chance.”
“Where is your nanny now?”
“She got married to an American soldier whe
n I was in sixth grade, and we kind of lost touch. At first, she wrote some letters and I wrote her back, but after a while there were no more letters, and I wasn’t sure of her address anymore.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if she got divorced and moved back to Taiwan. Maybe I’ll find her again here.”
“Why would you want her to be divorced?” Jolie thought Mike rather unkind to have such a fantasy.
“I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
At that moment, Jolie realized that her two girlfriends, Yoyi and Angel, were spying on her and the red-headed foreigner through the glass lobby door. They giggled and looked guilty as they waved at Jolie. They walked in, wearing identical sly grins.
“Hi, Jolie, are we interrupting something?” Yoyi asked.
Jolie wanted to warn them not to say anything inappropriate or rude because this foreigner could understand Chinese perfectly, but she didn’t have a chance.
“Good to see you’ve found a better man, dear, he’s very cute,” Angel said.
“Did you get his number?” Yoyi asked.
“Oh, stop it, you two, let’s go,” Jolie said, blushing fiercely.
Mike did not say anything, just smiled good-naturedly at the three girls.
“Hi,” Yoyi said to Mike in English.
“Hi,” Mike replied in English.
Then, seeing that Jolie had already darted into the elevator and Angel was just behind her, Yoyi said a hasty “Bye!” to Mike and ran after her friends.
Eight months later, Jolie was living with Mike in his apartment next to National Taiwan Normal University. They were a picture of domestic bliss. She worked part-time in a flower shop and spent half her day shopping for groceries and making nice dinners. Mike taught English at a cram school near Danshui and took the MRT back and forth every day. Some nights, when traffic was bad or he got waylaid by eager female students with post-lecture questions, he would not get home until eight or eight-thirty at night. Jolie felt like a genuine housewife those nights, trying to keep her dinner from becoming soggy or dried-out or cold while she waited dutifully. She loved Mike more than ever, and she was certain that he would propose to her any day now.
