by Yu-Han Chao
He unlocked the briefcase and took out a leather-covered book, one like the typical salon-quality photo album. It featured women in schoolgirl outfits or white dresses, with innocent, wide-eyed facial expressions; whip-wielding women in rubber suits with blood-red temptress lips; women with bleached hair in bikinis; punk rock chicks on motorcycles. The text beneath the pictures was too small for me to read quickly, but I noticed numbers in bold: height, weight, and the bust-waist-hip measurements of each of the women. My mind raced as I pictured borrowing Tan’s catalogue and quoting parts of it for my master’s thesis. It might even be published as a book. Of course it would be published as a book. Sex sells, after all. Maybe I should interview the women and get some fascinating, in-depth case studies.
“I think you would be great as a sexy librarian,” Tan said, interrupting my thoughts. “And you are very educated. You will be able to carry on a good conversation, which high-level businessmen and government officials love.”
“Government officials?” I asked.
“Sure, we have all types of clients. Many rich and influential men, and they are rather selective. I only sign the best girls, classy women like the two of you. And, of course, utmost secrecy among all parties is imperative. We don’t PR and tell here.”
“So what would I have to do?” I asked, already plotting to avoid legal issues by drafting disclaimers, getting releases signed, and using pseudonyms in my thesis.
“Spend some time with the men. You can pick and choose which clients and appointments you want to take, and spend some quality time with them at an exclusive location.”
The exclusive locations turned out to be seedy motels on the outskirts of Taipei. Between gray walls and faded wallpaper, I learned to say the things each client wanted to hear, act out the parts they expected of me while wearing the outfits that made their dicks hard. I became one of Tan’s best PR girls because I took such great notes. Back home on my laptop, I had an Excel file that listed information about each client. The whole time I had my thesis on my mind. Nobody had done research like mine before in Taiwan—it was groundbreaking fieldwork—no sociologist in the past had made such sacrifices for her work, personally xia hai, waded into the murky sex-worker ocean, as it were. I could become a famous author and be invited to appear on TV shows, maybe even have my own call-in talk show. That would be in addition to traveling all over Taiwan on speaking engagements and university lectures with my bestselling book, of course.
In short, the work sucked me in. Every other day, I spent a few hours of my free time in a motel with one man or another. They gave me gifts: spa memberships, designer bags, jewelry, and of course, cash. I documented everything in my Excel file, meticulously recording each non-monetary gift and its market value.
Up until the day the police barged into the motel room and arrested me for one account of solicitation and a second of adultery, adultery still being illegal according to Taiwanese law, on a certain level, I really believed I was only doing serious sociological research.
“It’s called immersion,” I said to the police officer, a young man with a crew cut and pockmarked cheeks.
“I don’t care what you call it, doll. It’s illegal.”
“I am a graduate student in sociology. It’s a sociological term, to immerse yourself in the environment of the people or careers you are studying. I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s research for my thesis.”
He made me stick my hands out in front of me and handcuffed my wrists.
What happened was one girl was caught by the wife of one client, and the police got involved. That PR girl made a deal with the police and gave up Tan’s information, which led to a search warrant and arrest. Naturally, the police got all the phone numbers, the detailed menu of girls in Tan’s book, and all the evidence they needed to catch most, if not all, of us.
“A total of nineteen girls were caught,” Helen whispered.
“No men?”
“Who cares about the Johns?”
“What about Tan?”
“He was booked for possession of all sorts of illegal drugs, I heard. Amphetamines, ketamine, cocaine, and ecstasy. He’ll be in jail for much longer than all of us put together, or maybe they’ll just put him in a chair and buzzzzzz.”
I shuddered.
Some women would be bailed out by their (very angry, probably ready-for-divorce) husbands, and some by friends or siblings, but who would bail me out? I couldn’t ask my colleagues. I would be fired from my teaching assistantship, dismissed by my university, which despite accepting students of all religions, identified itself as a conservative Catholic institution. A PR girl for a TA wouldn’t do.
“Do you think one of our clients would bail us out?” I asked Helen.
Helen threw her head back, laughing like a crazy person. “You think those men would touch us with a ten-foot pole right now? They will deny everything and anything! Those men don’t want to be associated with prostitutes! It would ruin their careers, businesses, marriages . . . are you nuts?”
Helen had never called herself or me a prostitute before.
I really don’t want to call my parents. I can just see it— Chinese New Year, everybody in the family whispering about my scandalous lifestyle, how my parents failed to bring me up right, how I used to be such a good girl but see how I am ruined now, how nobody will ever marry me, a tainted, worn-out shoe . . .
Cat Spring Roll
TINA NEVER LIKED cats. Her mother always said they were yin, dark, connected to spirits and the underworld, possibly evil. Tina hadn’t known that Bo had a cat. If she had, she would never have agreed to go on a date with him in the first place, would not have passively gone to dinners, lunches, movies with him for two months, and consented, mostly out of wanting to end the boredom of his courtship, to become engaged and married soon afterward.
Tina had been to Bo’s house a few times and liked what she saw: a garage large enough for two cars at the entrance, a large living room, a narrow hallway opening on the left to a cozy master bedroom, on the right a beige-tiled kitchen and bath, ending in a sun-facing back room for laundry. The modest furniture, Taiwanese and traditional, combined just the right amount of red wood, leather, and glass. Marbled white tile covered the floors, and the walls were painted the white-yellow color of rice.
They were already engaged by the time she saw the cat, unfortunately. When the cat emerged, Bo picked up the animal and rubbed his face in its fur, startling Tina with this uncharacteristic display of intimacy. The ratty tabby looked at her, opened its jaw in a silent meow, leaped out of her fiancé’s arms and trotted into the bedroom, tail fluffed up and erect. Tina noticed that the bedroom had no door. In fact, except for the bathroom, all the rooms were door-less. How strange. Maybe it was a feng shui thing, to get rid of fighting doors or something. Maybe Bo had them taken out, or the house came like that.
They married in a hurry because men were not supposed to marry in their twenty-ninth year; it’s very bad luck according to Chinese fortunetelling. All the arrangements felt rushed—Tina hardly got to enjoy being a bride. The ceremony itself was simple, merely involving the signing of documents in the presence of two witnesses. The wedding banquet followed. The banquet, usually a high point of Chinese weddings, seemed no grander an occasion than a large family meal at a restaurant, in this case.
“You are marrying into a good family,” Mrs. Yeh, Tina’s new mother-in-law, said. “You will see that our wealth lies in the fact that we do not show it off in lavish wedding ceremonies and fancy banquets. We know better than that. One thing I can assure you is that you will never starve.”
Tina never assumed that she would starve, single or married. She did wonder, however, about the honeymoon she felt she had been tricked out of. Bo had promised Tina a trip to Hawaii as soon as the busy season at the television station was done, but she wasn’t holding her breath.
Tina did not know if she loved Bo, but he seemed a suitable match for her. Stability was a good thing; plus she ha
d long since tired of meeting the awkward men her parents set her up with.
Bo and Tina did not consummate their marriage on their wedding night. Bo, a deadline looming over his head, went back to his office to edit clips. Tina spent most of the evening taking off her makeup and getting situated in her new home. She unpacked, organized and reorganized closets and drawers, and finally dozed off on the living room sofa as one late-night variety show blended into the next.
When Bo came home, his bride was already in bed. She pretended to be asleep, and he didn’t try to wake her.
At three in the morning, the tabby came into the bedroom, howling. The ugly cat noises woke Tina with a start. She opened her eyes to see the fat ochre-and-black cat land on her husband’s chest. The cat crouched on Bo’s chest in a way that made Tina think it was going to attack her, and she nearly fell out of bed trying to dodge its claws when it pounced on a spot right next to Tina. The cat dug its claws into the blanket—foggy yellow eyes strange in the moonlight shining through a high window. The cat hissed at Tina and let out a loud meow which turned into a howl. Bo woke.
“Hello, Baby.” His left hand reached behind the cat’s ugly little head, scratching gently.
The cat’s howl turned to a persistent whine. It spun around and sprawled lengthwise across Bo’s chest so that the claws of its hind leg scraped Tina’s elbow. She sat up on her side of the bed, terribly bothered. Bo and the furball’s eyes were closed, but the cat’s throat jangled every few seconds, answered by a humming sound from the sleeping man. The two of them obviously always slept like this, humming and purring, a combination of sounds more irritating than anything Tina had ever heard, at least at this time of night.
The man-and-cat noises irked her so much she moved to the couch like an evicted spouse, post-quarrel. This was a bad beginning to their married life, and she knew it.
Three weeks later, both Mr. and Mrs. Yeh had deep, green-and-brown tired marks under their eyes. Bo’s were from few hours of sleep and the stress of work, Tina’s from being awakened by the cat every night. From any other person’s point of view, being woken up by a cat at three in the morning wasn’t a big deal, but Tina was so incensed by the disturbance that she instantly turned into an insomniac. She would spend three to five in the morning watching television or reading a romance novel in the living room under a fluorescent light, which would make her still more awake and irritated. Finally, she would pass out on the couch, and her husband, up at seven and leaving the house at around seven twenty, would peck her on the cheek on his way out. The cat, eager to please, always followed him to the glass doors and saw him off with round eyes.
“Bye, Baby.” He said this with great tenderness before opening the electronic garage door and going to his car.
Tina suspected his beloved Baby was the cat, not her. Through sleepy eyes, she watched the metal garage door curl up like a sleeping bag to the ceiling, then lower itself slowly after her husband’s green Honda backed away. A small, black remote controlled the door. Tina had one, too, and sometimes she played with it. It struck her as odd that there were barely any doors in the apartment, but in order to leave one had to open this incredibly heavy garage door which even Superman couldn’t lift unless he had the remote control. The grooved metal curled up and down, clink clink whoo whoo, like a strange creature’s metamorphosis being recorded and fast forwarded on the Nature Channel.
Tina worked off and on taking cases from an East Asian translation agency in Taipei. During the day, she sat in front of her laptop with her multiple Japanese-Chinese dictionaries, alternating between typing, watching TV, snacking, and dozing off. She wanted to punish the cat for ruining her sleep every night and hogging her husband, but the animal hid from her in the daytime, only to emerge, purring or howling noisily, when he came home.
Upon entering the living room, Bo sat down on the sofa and took the cat instead of Tina into his lap and arms. Peeved, Tina clanked woks and pans and chopsticks against bowls, making as much noise as possible in the kitchen, but Bo never seemed to notice.
Every night the cat came in. Tina developed an irrational hatred for the animal, yet she was afraid of it because it was so yin, its impure yellow eyes glinting in the dark, and because it had sharp claws. She had seen the streaks—long, red marks on her husband, which he said the cat just made inadvertently. Tina could imagine what it would look like if the tabby really wanted to kill someone; she pictured her own stomach sliced open by a few cat slashes, the bowels pouring out like bloody noodle soup. Her fear only fed her hatred, and sometimes, when she was startled out of sleep by a sudden “MEEOOOW!” she temporarily forgot she was a civilized human being and hissed at the cat.
Her husband only ran his hand along the cat’s spine with a sleepy smile on his face and hummed. The cat purred, and the louder it purred, the more it seemed to be saying to Tina, “He’s mine, he’s mine. He likes me, not you.”
Sunday morning, Tina awoke with a craving for freshly steamed crab with sweet orange eggs beneath the shell. She could still hear Bo’s snoring when she got dressed to go to the morning market.
“Damn, where’s the remote?” Tina muttered out loud.
She searched the garage and living room, leaving the glass door wide open though she knew she wasn’t supposed to, since there was no screen door and mosquitoes were always getting in. Finally, she found the device wedged between two sofa cushions. She must have accidentally pushed it in there last night in her sleep. Locking the glass door with her left hand, she pressed the remote with her right. The metal door curled up in slow motion. Impatient, she ducked under the metal spring roll as soon as there was enough space for her to do so. Tina left the garage door half curled up so she didn’t have to wait for it again when she returned with a cart full of groceries.
The morning market cheered Tina up. She loved the fresh fruit, live seafood still smelling of the ocean, moist vegetables picked just hours ago from the hills. The liveliness of a bustling market always appealed to her more than the sterile supermarkets with fluorescent lights and refrigerated, sagging fruit. In the morning market, farmers hawked their selection of fresh ingredients, cut samples for customers to taste (“See how sweet, this watermelon!”), butchers slammed cleavers down on wooden cutting boards, and old people shook their heads, haggling over a few NT even as they accepted pink-white plastic bags filled with their selections from vendors.
Tina would make a fantastic meal today. She hadn’t given up on her marriage yet, and a delicious meal might be just the thing to fix her relationship with her husband. In her cart sat snow apples, crab wrapped in newspaper, vegetables, half of a large salmon knotted in a plastic bag, seasoned pig ears, and stringy tofu. Tina walked home with her heart and cart brimming.
It was already bright out, so Tina wanted to open the garage door all the way to allow some sun into the apartment, something she usually did during the daytime. She fumbled in her pockets for the black remote and pressed the green button that said “up”. The door dutifully curled upwards, but as it clink-clanked upwards, Tina heard the horrible howling and squeal of a cat—her husband’s cat. There was the sound of claws scratching against metal and all the time howls, horrible intestine-twisting howls, the kind of noise one imagined permeated the deepest levels of Buddhist hell.
Hands quivering, Tina stopped the garage door and pressed the “down” button. As the door uncurled itself, a bloody, furry mass landed with a soft plop inside the garage, a few feet from Tina. Her husband’s Baby, his precious daughter, the ugly yellow-eyed tabby was writhing in blood, fur, and exposed flesh on the ground. All its legs seemed to be broken, chewed up then spewed out by the carnivorous garage door. Tina left her groceries in front of her home and rushed down the street in horror. She felt the accusing, unclean yellow eyes of the cat following her all the way.
Rainy Night Stand-Up
IT WAS THE first time Lena was going to have unprotected sex in her life. No condoms cluttered her or her husband’s backpacks, and she w
as officially off birth control. After all, they were not getting any younger, and Jon had been pestering her about having a baby ever since they got married.
Three hours ago, they got off the Jing Shan 611 bus and walked down a small path in the drizzling rain. Their destination? A big sign that read “Golden Springs,” which Lena thought sounded vaguely like a euphemism for something dirty, though she wasn’t sure what. The place was scenic enough: each unit was a little wooden hut with an enclosed yard containing a large hot tub lined with tile and surrounded with wooden planks. If it were not for the chill of the steady rain, this would be the ideal romantic celebration of their one-year anniversary. Soon after their arrival, the rain started coming down harder, violently bouncing off the surface of the hot spring water. Swirls of steam rose from the pool, which smelled faintly of sulfur and hardboiled eggs.
“It’s too bad it’s raining so hard.” Lena peeled off her wet jeans in a decidedly unsexy manner, yanking her wet feet out of the last bit of pant leg, and shivered herself into a terrycloth bathrobe. She had prepared lingerie, but it was too cold for that, and as far as she was concerned, too cold for sex.
“We can get in the hot spring later. Maybe the rain will die down,” Jon said, although he seemed visibly disappointed that Lena was hiding her body in a gigantic garment made out of towel material instead of something lacy or see-through. After all, he was the one who had bought her the lingerie, so he knew exactly what he hoped, if not expected, to see on her.
He changed into his pajamas and got in bed beside Lena, who had already ducked under the covers and rested her head sideways on a pillow. Jon turned on the television and flicked through a series of channels: the Taiwanese eight o’clock news, Star Movies, an infomercial, finally settling on stand-up comedy on HBO.
A burst of laughter from Jon woke Lena up. Through a sleepy haze, she heard the comedian’s words.
