by Yu-Han Chao
The next minute seemed to last longer than all the years Lin spent teaching at Da Zi Middle School. She had never felt so humiliated, violated, and dirty. Had she kept to herself, protected herself from human contact and men and all of that, only to be insulted by a horrible little man with a wrinkled walnut for a penis?
The car pulled into the next station, Si To, not her station. Lin rushed out. The weasel followed her out. They held on to each other’s presence with their eyes amidst the people pushing to enter the MRT car and the passengers struggling to get out. When the crowd cleared between them and only Lin and the weasel were left, Lin exploded into tears and profanity, words she had only learned from movies, words she never used or ever thought of using until now. She hit the man with her pink handbag, cursing and screaming and crying. She no longer cared if she was making a scene. She continued to hit him while he ducked and covered his head with his hands, trying to shield himself from the much taller and larger woman’s blows. The pair moved across the lobby of Si To station in this manner. Finally, when they were close to the exit, the little man ran out the door, and Lin sat down on the dirty plastic bench beside the entrance with a thump. She sobbed heartily into her hands. At least she did not touch him, not even once, though she would have to throw out the sullied handbag when she got home.
Nobody would understand and nobody cared. Why hadn’t she made some friends? Who would she tell, who would she talk to? If she had married at some point, perhaps her husband would have picked her up in a modest yet serviceable car today after school, and the weasel would not have put his dick up against her butt cheek and she wouldn’t have had to chase him all the way out of the station, hitting him like a crazy bag lady, which no doubt everybody in Si To Station thought she was.
As Lin convulsed and choked on her sobs, she felt someone tapping her on the back. A police officer? She turned and was surprised to see a little old woman’s wrinkled, sunken face.
“I saw what happened,” the old woman said slowly. She had no teeth and her mouth puckered in each time she uttered a consonant.
“I saw what happened, and I am so glad that you went after him. You are a brave girl,” the old woman said.
An old man came toward Lin and the old woman.
“My wife and I saw everything,” the old man said, gesturing toward the old woman to indicate that she was his companion.
“You did the right thing. I wanted to hit him, too. You are brave. Don’t cry,” the old man said.
The old couple nodded earnestly at Lin.
Some middle-aged women were looking at them, and the old woman held up her raisined hands and addressed them. “This is a brave girl. A dirty man insulted her and she fought back.”
The middle-aged women nodded sympathetically all around. The expressions on their faces said, Good for you.
Lin’s tears dried slowly on her burning cheeks, and through her tears she nodded at the elderly couple to express her gratitude. The old woman put her wrinkled hand on top of Lin’s.
“Don’t cry, daughter,” she said.
Lin swallowed a lump in her throat. These old people could have been her parents. In this moment, they were. Lin was grateful, and for the first time in many years, she felt her heart opening.
My Strange Grandpa
IGUESS I wasn’t all that surprised when my mother told me that Grandpa’s caretaker, the Indonesian maid, had run away. As horrified as we were that a girl willing to leave her country for the purpose of making money was not willing to take care of Grandpa in exchange for good wages and room and board, we also felt vindicated. It seemed to excuse us for all our complaints about Grandpa.
My grandpa has been living with us for as long as I can remember, since Grandma died. I heard that when I was little and he wasn’t as senile, things weren’t so bad, but honestly, for as long as I can recall, Grandpa has been something of a skeleton in the closet for my family.
He’s like any other eighty-something-year-old grandfather, except he’s exceptionally demanding, even for a Taiwanese elder, and worst of all, he watches the Japanese porn channel at a high volume all day in his room. When I was in elementary school, I asked my mother if I could bring some friends home, but she always suggested that we go to McDonald’s or the park instead; she even went as far as giving me three hundred NT just to make sure we would entertain ourselves outside the house.
“It’s not good to disturb your grandfather,” she said in a troubled tone.
“I don’t think Grandpa minds,” I said, thinking she was mean, but pocketing the money anyway.
Now, of course, the reason we couldn’t have my little girlfriends over was because my mother didn’t want my classmates to hear the weird noises coming out of Grandpa’s room. I didn’t know what they were at the time, and was actually more or less used to them. I’d accidentally seen him watching it a few times, just Japanese people being dramatic about taking baths together—they were often not dressed, so that’s how I understood it.
When I was in third grade, Grandpa tried to explain to me where babies came from. He brought me to his room, where he had the Japanese channel playing, and told me about the different parts on a boy and a girl and how they fit together when the boy is excited. My mother interrupted, knocking on the sliding Japanese doors.
“Lille, are you in there? Father, have you seen Lille?”
“I’m in here, Mom,” I called back. “Grandpa’s teaching me about sex.”
I said this, not quite understanding everything, though I had at least been able to learn the word “sex.” My mother rushed in, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me with her all the way to the kitchen.
“Forget what your grandpa said. He’s really old, and sometimes old people say strange things,” she said, stuffing an orange into my hands.
I ate the orange and soon forgot about it, although whenever I passed Grandpa’s room and heard the wailing or moaning noises, I wondered if it had something to do with sex. In fifth grade, I finally learned in health class how sex worked and understood exactly what Grandpa was watching hour after hour day to day. I asked my mom why nobody never at least requested that Grandpa lower the volume on the television, or just quit watching it.
“It’s too embarrassing,” she said. “Your father won’t have anything to do with it. Nobody wants to mention to him that we know what he’s watching. And we don’t know how he will respond. He may think we are making him lose face.”
“But he’s your father,” I said.
“You can complain to him if you want,” she said, flailing her arms.
I didn’t.
Grandpa got worse—not in terms of health, since he was always in fantastic health, but his behavior. He watched porn more and more often, sometimes in the middle of the night, and took to calling my mother or me into his room to massage his back every hour of the day.
Of course we love him and want to take care of him, but sometimes it just gets to be too much. I started taking part-time jobs in senior high just to stay away from home longer, and the last year of senior high, while I was spending all my waking hours preparing for the difficult Joint College Entrance Exam, I took the bus to a cram school directly after class, then went to the library to study until closing time at 10:30 p.m. In some ways, I should credit my grandpa for helping me get into the best teachers’ college possible, Shida. I tried so hard to stay away from home that I had to spend my free time studying until I was a Chinese, geography, history, math, earth science, English, and Taiwanese Constitution whiz.
The summer I took the Joint College Entrance Exam and found out that I was accepted to attend Shida, we finally found Grandpa a caretaker, an Indonesian girl. We told people we had gotten a caretaker because I was going away to college and my mom would need someone else to help take care of Grandpa.
The hiring agency said the girl they were sending us was smart and capable, although only eighteen years old, with a junior high school education. In the few weeks of her training in Taiwan, they
told us, she had already learned some basic conversational Chinese and sufficient nursing skills that would allow her to take care of an elderly person. Grandpa had a wheelchair that he used sometimes, but he didn’t need diaper changes or special assistance, so when we applied with the agency, we were at the bottom of the list according to medical needs. Luckily, my mother sped up the process by accepting a caretaker with the minimum level of qualifications. Just as well; the hardest things she had to do were deal with pornographic sound effects and being woken up at random times at night to massage Grandpa. For that matter, she’d probably be ordered to massage him nonstop during the day, too.
Things started out alright. The Indonesian girl, Gem, had big, round eyes, a round face, and cute smile. She had the regulation haircut that a lot of Indonesian agencies forced their workers to get: a short, cropped boy’s haircut. She was kind of pretty, and that made Grandpa happy, at least for the first few hours. Then he remembered that everybody was supposed to be at his service.
“Listen to me,” he announced, “all of you have to obey my orders, especially you, Gem. You have to learn to massage me properly.”
My mother wanted to confirm that Gem knew the word massage, so she walked over to Grandpa, and started rubbing his shoulders in slow motion and saying the words ma sa ji, horse kill chicken, Chinese for “massage.”
Gem nodded and repeated, “Horse kill chicken” and moved toward Grandpa. Grandpa looked back at her and pointed at his shoulders, indicating for her to begin immediately. Then we taught Gem how to help Grandpa in and out of his wheelchair. My mother still bought the groceries from the grocery store, but sometimes Gem accompanied her in the kitchen while she cooked—that is, until she got called away by Grandpa.
Over the next few weeks, I witnessed in Gem’s young face all the psychological stages of a new employee, from initial excitement to disillusionment. The first few hours with us, Gem was eager to please, polite, bowing and nodding and smiling at everyone. By the first week, she had seen the porn, experienced the round-the-clock massage requests, and seemed slightly disappointed by the circumstances of her work. After week two, she had no expression on her face, and I thought I saw her clenching her teeth while massaging Grandpa.
My mom and I didn’t really talk to her that much, first of all because her Chinese was still poor, and also because, in a way, we were worried she would complain to us. The whole reason we hired someone to take care of Grandpa was because we didn’t want to deal with him and his needs. With Gem taking care of him, we were free to leave the house and not feel guilty, to be in the house and not be on massage duty 24/7. We gave Gem a nice bedroom with a single mattress, chest of drawers, desk, mirror, and chairs, and on top of that paid her extremely well, the higher end of her hiring agency’s specified range of salaries, despite her limited qualifications.
Unfortunately, good pay and a room of her own weren’t enough.
When I returned to my dorm after biology class this afternoon, I saw a missed call from my mother on my cell phone.
“Lille, you won’t believe this,” she said in a low voice when I called her back.
I couldn’t tell what was going on. Perhaps a relative that she disliked had a knocked-up daughter, something unfortunate yet juicy at the same time. “What’s up, Ma?”
“I think Gem ran away.”
“What?”
“I thought I heard someone leave the house kind of late last night, but I didn’t check to see. I never saw Gem this morning, and her room is still empty. I just called her agency. The woman I spoke to apologized and said they would send us someone else as soon as they can.”
“Send us someone else? What does that mean?”
“She didn’t say much, just that Gem told them she wanted a three-day vacation to meet her boyfriend and the agency said no, and then she said she wanted a reassignment and they said no again. I’m not quite sure I understood all of it, it sounded kind of complicated, but anyways, the conclusion is Gem’s going back to Indonesia.”
“I don’t understand why she asked her agency. She could have asked you and Dad to let her leave for three days if that’s what she wanted.”
“That’s why I’m confused. Maybe the woman at the agency made up the boyfriend story to make us feel better about her wanting to leave our home.”
“So we can’t get her back?”
“No, I asked that, too, and they were very firm about that. They basically told me we would never see Gem again.”
“That’s very odd. Makes it sound like we were abusing her,” I said.
“So, anyways, I put Grandpa on the waitlist for another caretaker. He’s throwing a fit right now, hollering for his cute little Indonesian masseuse.”
Mom lowered her voice even more. “You know, it’s strange to think that your grandpa, the way he is now, was my father, the man I looked up to as a kid. He was very strict and proper. You would think he and your grandma had never had sex. They never touched each other, and he didn’t touch us,” she said.
“So how is it now he watches porn with the volume all the way up and asks people to massage him all day?”
“I think maybe when you’re very old, your body and mind make you pay for all the things you denied them before. All the instincts and needs you neglected, they come back to haunt you so you can never be satisfied, and you begin acting out.”
“Mom, you’re being very morbid and strange. All this pressure with the caretaker and Grandpa must be getting to you. Do you want me to come back this week? I can skip my Friday classes and stay for the weekend.”
“It’s okay. I just wanted to talk, and ask you something. Do you think I’m going to end up like your grandpa?”
“Mom, you’re fine! Grandpa is just old and dotty. And I think, on a certain level, he simply doesn’t care anymore. Old people are so respected. They can do whatever they want and order everybody around. So, some of them do.”
“I hope that’s all it is,” my mom said, and I could hear in the background my grandpa calling first for the Indonesian girl, then for my mom to massage him.
“I have to go. I’ll see you this weekend.” She hung up.
I sat down on my bunk bed with my biology textbook in my lap. I thought about my poor, frazzled mom, my dad who turns a deaf ear to everything going on about him, and the mystery of the runaway Indonesian girl. I wonder what my dead grandmother, whom I’ve never met, would have thought of all this, and of my strange grandpa.
Discussion Questions
1. In “The Strange Objects Museum,” how does Sheri change as the story develops? What leads to these changes?
2. In “Yuan Zu Socializing,” why does the protagonist call her actions a form of revenge?
3. Discuss Brian’s rejection of Sonnie in “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”
4. What might wearing a bra symbolize to Lily in “And Then There Were None”?
5. Is the narrator in “Betel Nut Beauty” reliable? Why do you think she withholds information from the reader for most of the story?
6. How do Chinese beliefs around a “red suicide” inform your interpretation of how “Writing on the Basement Wall” ends?
7. In “Simple as That,” how do gender and culture inform Jolie and Mike’s relationship?
8. Consider the conflicting roles of the narrator in “Immersion”: graduate student versus “PR girl.” How are they compatible or incompatible?
9. In “Passport Baby,” why do you think Lin Lin stole the baby? Was this foreshadowed in the story?
10. If you were Serena in “Mine,” would you accept Jenna Lee’s offer? Why or why not?
Biographical Note
Born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, Yu-Han (Eugenia) Chao received her BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures from National Taiwan University and her MFA in fiction from Penn State University. The Backwaters Press published her poetry book, We Grow Old: Fifty-Three Love Poems, and Another New Calligraphy, Dancing Girl Press, and BOAAT Press published her chapb
ooks. Her website is www.yuhanchao.com, and she maintains a blog about nursing and writing at yuhanchao.blogspot.com. She currently lives in California, where she works as a registered nurse and educator.
