Yu-Han Chao
Daughter
Luy took the MRT to and from work every Tuesday and Thursday between Liu Zanli and Da Zi Station. Unluckily, she had to take it around 5:30, during the worst part of rush hour. Not only did she never had a seat to sit in, she was constantly being pushed around and stabbed by the corners of studious students' open textbooks, old women's umbrellas and old men's canes. Luy clasped her pink handbag close to her in case any of the pushers and pokers were also pickpockets. Her pink handbag always had a small stack of thousand NT bills in it because Luy didn't believe in credit cards. She didn't even have a bank account until Da Zi Middle School hired her and insisted that her salary had to be wired to a Post Office Savings Account rather than her request of receiving it in the form of cash in an envelope.
Luy taught Home Economics and Art at Da Zi Middle School. Strictly speaking, she was a sculptor, but the school wanted her to teach drawing and sewing. So she showed students how to do double stitches, single stitches, hemming, and ordered cheap cotton for students to make aprons with for their semester-long project. She told her art students to bring 2B pencils, soft erasers, and gave them sketching paper on which to sketch each other in pairs. On nice days, she sent them out to sketch in the sun, in whatever medium they chose – watercolor, gouache, charcoal, colored pencil, oil pastels.
She herself would sit quietly under a tree with a food magazine. Luy rarely commented on student projects, and everybody received an A at the end of the semester. What kind of Home Economics or Art teacher would give a student anything but an A in a competitive Taipei middle school? If a teacher of such unimportant subjects brought down student averages, the students would revolt and beat her up on her way from the school to the MRT station. Luckily, Luy was a kind if uninvolved teacher and the students didn't mind her or bother her at all.
Luy took long baths at night and had a yearly membership to the 24-hour movie rental store next to her building which allowed her to check out unlimited films per month. Life was pleasantly uneventful. Luy's parents were old (mother 50, father 63) when they had her, an only child, and by now, long dead (breast cancer, lung cancer.) When they were still alive and their minds had not yet been silenced by cancer cells, they encouraged Luy's artistic career. Unfortunately, they died before Luy had her first opening in Taipei Professional Art Academy's north wing gallery as a sophomore. It was an installation – lots of space, with tiny paper mache animals strung in white necklaces from the ceiling and clay animals stacked together. Regardless of species, all the animals were equally tiny – the rats as large as the rhinos, the giraffes as tall as the Chinese Sparrow Hawk. The central concept of the piece, titled "Under, On Top Of," had to do with proliferating cancer cells, the food chain, and wildlife.
Luy's artistic career, however, never really went anywhere after she started teaching at twenty-three. She played with clay, still, but since there was nowhere to unload her "art" and her apartment and studio were getting too full, she decided it was probably a good idea to cut down on the sculpting. She took up cooking creatively, collecting challenging recipes from gourmet magazines, and arranging food with expert color-coordination and composition on the plate. She often felt it a shame that she had to eat her culinary masterpieces, which sometimes seemed more beautiful than her best sculpture of all – a large bunny rabbit as tall as her, with lifelike fur and perpetually alert, thin ears. That rabbit cost her thousands of NT in clay and was now gathering dust in a corner of her studio, by the north window. She thought she saw a crack in the large bunny the other day, but couldn't bear to walk close to it to confirm. A colony of smaller clay bunnies clustered quietly around the king-sized bunny, like its subjects. At some point Luy gave up all other figures and concentrated on bunnies. It was some time after her parents' death, about the time that her professors at Taipei Professional Art Academy stopped encouraging her to send her slides out to galleries and grad schools and residencies. Luy couldn't care less. She got a stable teaching job right out of the Academy and that was more than most of her poor, talented classmates had now.
Luy never bothered to date, either. She wasn't ugly or especially beautiful, just plain, plus a little too tall for the preference of most Taiwanese men, generally not tall themselves. Luy was also plump, and progressively so over the years, at least by Taiwanese standards. She had straight, long hair, the hairstyle that required the least amount of maintenance other than shampooing twice a week. Luy demonstrated in the past twenty or so years of her life that it was possible for a marriageable, healthy woman living in Taipei City to avoid all human contact and potential suitors or husbands by not socializing at all and not talking to other teachers, except when necessary, at school.
Luy had always been an independent child, and now lived the life of a single, independent woman. She was forty-three and did not regret anything in her life. She did not want to change her days, her routines – long baths, irregular but fancy homemade meals, unlimited rental movies, and the occasional satisfaction one got from sculpting a furry, clay bunny.
Luy was thinking about a movie she saw last night as she stood in the crowded MRT, hugging her purse. She hadn't understood the movie, mostly because she was confused which man was which woman's husband and which woman was which man's girlfriend. Apparently there was some swapping going on, but the tall, Caucasian actors and blonde and brunette actresses lost Luy within the first half hour. Luy decided she would watch the film again tonight, before returning it. If she still couldn't understand the film the second time she watched it, carefully reading the subtitles and trying her best to memorize the actors' faces and relations with one another, she would give up.
The train was especially crowded today, but Luy hardly noticed. The door opened and closed at the busiest transfer station where three MRT lines met, Taipei Train Station, and yet more people entered Luy's compartment so that the passengers were all pressing against and touching one another. People in the MRT car, like other normal commuters, did not enjoy this forced physical contact with strangers, but precisely because the other passengers were strangers, it was okay to pretend not to notice the touching of arms and elbows and occasionally, hips. Luy felt a push from her back that nearly made her bump her head into the pole she was holding onto, but was too tired to turn around and glare at the rude pusher. The doors closed, nearly catching a young woman's curly tresses in it. The woman yelped and pulled her precious, bleached and permed hair with fraying split ends to the front of her right shoulder, then spent two minutes smoothing it out, as if comforting a baby. Luy watched her for a while with a blank expression on her face then looked away. She never understood the vain young women with overprocessed hair, expensively-styled yet horrible haircuts, painful-looking high heels and tight clothing. Didn't their feet hurt? Did they ever feel cold? Did they really think anyone cared? Luy certainly didn't.
The MRT car pushed into motion, a whoosh noise becoming more high-pitched as the car accelerated. Luy closed her eyes. She felt some shifting and squeezing around about her, which was common because some people couldn't even balance themselves well enough on a moving MRT car that they had to lean on other people in order not to fall. At any rate, the space was so tight that passengers' bodies kept other passengers' bodies pinned in an upright position, so that no one would ever fall all the way to the floor. There was simply no space.
Suddenly, Luy became conscious of something pressing against her left ass cheek through her brown linen pants. She shifted a little to avoid being touched by whatever it was, but the bag, or briefcase, or cane or umbrella, followed her behind persistently. She turned around to see what it was, and saw a short little man with a weasel's face. The weasel's fly was open and his dick was pressing against her ass cheek. It was the size of a small walnut, uncircumcised and wrinkled and disgusting. Luy wanted to scream but didn't want everybody else in the car to think she was crazy. They couldn't see what was going on, and as far as they were concerned, she was the crazy one. She wanted to pull the red M-shaped lever that would stop the MRT train, but she didn't want to be in the six o'clock news – "Hysterical Middle School Art Teacher Waylays Rush Hour MRT Traffic.” For some reason, Luy could not move. She had violent fantasies about the little man with the little wrinkled penis, scenes she had seen in movies applied directly to him – the man's head lopped off by an axe, his body cut and ground by machines and made into fresh steamed dumplings, several bullets going through his body, blood seeping through his green T-shirt and beat-up jeans. She wanted to hit him, but at the same time she didn't want to touch him. He was dirty and ugly and short and perverted. He was a filthy weasel.
The next minute seemed to last longer than all the years Luy had spent teaching at Da Zi Middle School since she graduated. She had never felt so humiliated and 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. Luy rushed out. The weasel followed her out. They held on to each other's presence with their eyes amidst the crowd pushing to enter the MRT car and the crowd struggling to get out. When the crowd cleared between them and only Luy and the weasel were left, Luy 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 powerful blows. The pair moved across the right waiting section of Si To station in this manner, the woman hitting, the man shielding himself and ducking. Finally, when they were close to the exit, the little man ran out the door, and Luy sat down on the dirty plastic bench beside the entrance, sobbing heartily into her hands. At least she did not touch him, not even once. Only, she would have to throw out the sullied handbag.
Luy sobbed noisily. She knew that nobody would understand and that nobody really cared anyway. 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 walnut-sized dick up against her butt cheek and violated her and she wouldn't have 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 Luy convulsed and choked on her sobs, she realized that someone was tapping her on the back. A policeman? Policewoman? She turned and was surprised to see a little old woman's wrinkled, sunken face. The woman must be at least eighty years old.
"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 to Luy.
An equally aged old man came towards Luy and the old woman.
"My wife and I saw everything," the old man said, gesturing towards 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 Luy. Some middle-aged women were looking at the three of them – Luy, the old man, the old woman.
"This is a brave girl; a dirty man insulted her and she fought back," the old woman announced to the onlookers, gesturing with her raisined hands.
The middle-aged women nodded sympathetically, and the expressions on their faces said, "Good for you."
Luy's tears dried slowly on her burning cheeks, and through her tears she nodded her head towards the elderly couple to express her gratitude for their sympathy and companionship at this moment. The old woman put her wrinkled hand on top of Luy's.
"Don't cry, daughter," the old woman said.
Luy swallowed a lump in her throat. These old people could have been her parents. They must know that – they were being her parents for her right now. Luy was grateful; she felt her heart opening, for the first time in many years.
Yu-Han (Eugenia) Chao was born and grew up in Taipei, Taiwan. She received her MFA from Penn State and currently lives in California. Her poetry book, We Grow Old, was published by the Backwaters Press, and her short story collection, Passport Baby, is forthcoming with RockWay Press. Visit her writing and artwork at www.yuhanchao.com
