Lin King
WU MAYLING NEVER knew the pains of dieting. She had always been thin and pale. When she was a child, this had caused her nurse much anxiety, especially when other women would pinch Mayling’s spare cheeks and shake their heads in disapproval. As a teenager, her scrawny figure led her mother to accuse the nurse of undernourishing Mayling. How will she ever find a husband, she cried, with those bony hips?
The nurse was dismissed, and her paychecks used to hire a new cook, a man with a formidable waistline and a head like a monk’s. He was ordered to make pig feet stew once a week and chicken broth twice a week. But despite his best efforts, Mayling’s body remained lean. The nutrition had to go somewhere, however, and instead of cushioning her bones it seeped inside them, making her taller than her mother and, in time, even than the cook.
In the fall of 1969, Mayling left her home in the south to attend the Teachers College in Taipei. Her mother had ordered the maid to sew cotton padding into the linings of her dresses to soften Mayling’s harsh edges. By the time of her graduation, however, Mayling was wearing new, unpadded dresses that she had purchased with her allowance. A few of the dresses were even sleeveless, and these she hid in the bottoms of her suitcases, safe from parental discovery. Still, the line had to be drawn somewhere, and despite her diploma-boosted confidence and head full of Carly Simon lyrics, Mayling did not own any denim.
She taught for just three years, at a private junior high school just outside Taipei. These were quiet years. She spent half of her weekends taking the bus to the city for movies and Western tea, and the other half in her small, spotless teachers’ dormitory room, humming to records she’d bought herself with her more-than-adequate salary. She began learning to apply makeup by studying glossy magazines. On the longer holidays, she went home to lists of potential suitors, each one carefully evaluated and ranked by her mother: family friends, friends of family friends, optometrists, patent lawyers, accountants, chemical engineering PhDs.
Mayling met these young men at supervised lunches, always in the company of the suitor’s mother and perhaps a couple of aunts. Some of the men were good-looking but mostly mute, never saying a word without direct prodding. Then there was the opposite breed: loud, garrulous, prone to excessive eye contact, desperate to dazzle. These candidates sometimes later telephoned her or wrote her letters at school, to which she responded briefly, out of obligation, never revealing much. Most of the men were quickly discouraged; those most impressed with themselves hung on for a little longer.
The third year of Mayling’s life as a teacher, the year of her twenty-fourth birthday, her mother demanded that she choose a husband by the end of the Chinese New Year break. You’ll have five months to get to know each other before getting married when the spring semester ends, she said. This being as fair an offer as any twenty-four-year-old only daughter had reason to expect, Mayling nodded her consent.
Three weeks later, she made her choice. His name was Wu Shutian, a twenty-seven-year-old dentist in a steady, third-generation family practice. His main draw for Mayling, on paper, had been the location of his office, on the west side of Taipei, where fashionable theaters and shops lined the streets like paintings on display. During her college days, Mayling had frequented this colorful gallery borne of Taiwan’s commercial boom, marveling at its glossy, motley charms. However dull her married life, she told herself, at least it would be lived in a place that was anything but dull.
In person, Shutian was decidedly a catch. He was tall, towering over his mother at a respectable 179 centimeters, with broad shoulders to match. He had a healthy complexion, thick eyebrows, and small eyes, which without his wire-rimmed glasses—as Mayling discovered later—gave him a somewhat comical look. When he had bowed his first greeting, Mayling’s mother had tightened her grip on Mayling’s forearm, signaling excited approval.
After a luncheon of small talk, the mothers had proposed that the young people take a walk in the nearby garden. They were old women, they’d said; they would stay indoors and have some more tea.
Mayling and Shutian trudged off stiffly together. When they reached the garden, safely out of their mothers’ sight, Shutian’s wide shoulders relaxed a little, and he stuck his hands in his pockets. Mayling said nothing. Shutian began to whistle.
Rainy days and Mondays always get me down, Mayling sang softly as he reached the end of the verse, her tongue slightly uneasy with the weight of the foreign words.
You know the Carpenters? he asked.
Yes, I’ve been buying their records since college, she said, looking at her kitten-heeled feet, which hurt.
Me too. I bought their newest one just last week, he said.
That evening, Mayling’s mother announced to Mayling’s father that she had at last found a husband for their daughter.
Mayling and Shutian were married in July, with a costly banquet and many blessings. They were not unhappy at their wedding. In fact, each was genuinely satisfied with their choice of the other. Their eyes were not offended by the faces they had vowed to look at for the rest of their lives; their hearts were fond of the same music, popular songs imported from England and America with which they would fill their home—songs their future children would soon tire of but nevertheless feel obliged to play at their parents’ funerals.
On their wedding night, Mayling took a long bath while Shutian prepared tea in the kitchen. She could hear him pacing outside the door when she turned off the tap. After her bath, and a moment’s hesitation, she decided to put back on the brassiere she had worn all day under her wedding dress. She then slipped into a white crepe nightgown that her mother had ironed herself and that was so crisp it crackled. It had a touch of lace trimming on the hem and a thin white ribbon that Mayling now tied into a bow at her collarbone. In the half-fogged mirror, she reminded herself of a heroine from a Gothic novel: her dark hair coiled in a damp braid, her face washed of rouge and powder, her waifish bone structure prominent under her thin, white gown.
When the newlyweds crawled under the thick duvet they now shared, they each had a rather morbid vision of what must happen, though neither was sure exactly how.
Shutian began kissing Mayling on the mouth. Her lips felt very thick and clumsy. She tried opening her mouth as she had seen kissers do in countless Hollywood films, if only to stop the swelling sensation in her lips. The texture of Shutian’s tongue reminded Mayling of the grilled pig’s liver dish from their wedding banquet, and she wondered what hers might be reminding him of. Then, without warning, his tongue grazed the ridges of her front teeth, an act so alarming that she drew herself away from him sharply, moving back and back until her neck touched the headboard.
They did not try any more kissing that night, but through sheer biological instinct, Shutian managed to complete the act for them both. When it was over and he had fallen into a noisy slumber, Mayling wondered if it would hurt less in the future and whether she would ever experience the pleasure that Shutian had exhaled so heavily into her face.
With the red envelopes they had received from the wedding guests, they bought new clothes and furniture to fill the spacious apartment that Shutian’s father had bought for them. They lined their new shelves with alphabetized soft-rock albums, Shutian’s records to the left of the brand-new wood-framed Sony television, Mayling’s to the right.
In the mornings, Shutian would pick out a record to go with breakfast while Mayling laid out the unchanging spread: sweet buns from the bakery down the street, hot coffee, and fruits of the season—mangoes, watery peaches, prickly lychees. With the constant presence of music, the lack of conversation in their home was not so apparent.
Mayling never visited Shutian at the dental clinic, though it was only one block from the apartment. She preferred to do her housework slowly, in between languid hours of sifting through records, skimming translations of foreign novels, and putting on makeup just to go grocery shopping. This way, when Shutian told her about his day or about the latest goings-on in the field of dentistry, she could be genuinely interested, if only for the novelty of the information.
Ten months after the wedding, to everyone’s great delight, Mayling’s tenure as a new bride was cut short when she attained the status of an expectant mother. The joy of both families was greatly multiplied when she gave birth to twins: a boy, Yijie, and a girl, Yixin. This was called a dragon-phoenix birth, one of the rarest and most coveted of good fortunes. With this extraordinary blessing, Mayling fulfilled her duties as a wife and daughter by producing, in a single afternoon, children of both the desired number and genders.
And motherhood bestowed upon Mayling yet another blessing: unprecedented beauty. The body that her mother had failed to create through excessive feeding now bloomed into being. Even after her stomach had flattened, a shapely fleshiness remained. In the street, she would examine her reflection in shop windows: now, instead of emphasizing her hollows and sharp angles, her knee-length cotton dresses revealed gentle, womanly curves. Clasping the hands of Yijie and Yixin, Mayling walked the streets with her head held high.
When the twins turned thirteen, they were plunged into their studies in preparation for the high school entrance exams. They took off at sunrise and did not come home until dusk, at which point they would practice their instruments for an hour—Yijie on the violin, Yixin on the piano—until Shutian returned from the clinic. The family would have dinner together, followed by an hour of playtime for the twins. After this, a young tutor, a recent graduate of Mayling’s alma mater, would come to guide them through their homework and administer additional exercises until it was time for their baths.
Mayling found herself with an abundance of unstructured time, as she had in the first year of her marriage. Unused to this freedom, she had difficulty devising a routine that did not leave her taking several naps a day. Shutian proposed that she take up a hobby—what about guitar lessons? She liked the idea. Interest in music was one of the few things the two of them shared genuinely, not simply out of conjugal duty. She was thirty-eight, a perfectly reasonable age for learning a new trick or two. With the best possible education filling up her children’s timetables, Mayling threw herself into her own second career as a student with a Yamaha beginner’s model and a lengthy list of nostalgic ballads whose chords she hoped to master.
Declining Shutian’s offer to hire a home tutor, Mayling signed up for private lessons at a music studio four blocks from their street. The boulevards of West Taipei had grown ever more kaleidoscopic in the thirteen years she had been busy raising her children, and she inhaled everything with the eagerness of a freshly weaned cub.
He asked her to call him Liang. This was what everyone at the studio called him. She was not sure if this was his given name or just part of it, or only perhaps a nickname. He told her his last name once, on the very first day of class, but she had not particularly cared to know it at the time and never found the opportunity to ask him again.
Liang was in his mid-twenties. In truth he could have been younger or older, but in Mayling’s mind he was twenty-six. Everything about his face was petite and angular. He had narrow eyes, a small nose, thin lips, and a notably pointy chin. Even his ears were bony, a fact she noticed only because of his earrings—five silver hoops through the thin cartilage of his left ear. On any other man his face would have looked rather mouse-like, but these diminutive features were somehow balanced by his hair: thick, wavy curls—permed, she thought, though she never asked about this either—that he brushed to the right side of his head, emphasizing the piercings on the left. His unfussy wardrobe consisted of gray, white, and black T-shirts and faded jeans. He wore his keys on a long chain around his neck.
Mayling paid painstaking attention to Liang’s appearance because it was the only thing she could take from him without anyone noticing. He was neither a great teacher nor a bad one. They began with C, E minor, G, D, A, A minor. She had great difficulty with F. He demonstrated on his own guitar, brushing her fingertips to make slight adjustments. A little more curved, he would say. Press harder, but don’t squeeze, press. Twice a week she paid him five hundred Taiwanese dollars to soak in his scent of tobacco and laundry powder and, curiously, a hint of vanilla ice cream. His face was sunburned, even though it was the tail end of autumn. How? she wondered. She looked, and wondered more. The shape of his throat. The curve of his nose. The freckles on the backs of his hands. Did he sleep with another body at night?
She wondered.
At home, Mayling watched the man to whom she had given her life. Shutian, meanwhile, continued living his routine without ever noticing her gaze: reading newspapers at dinner, picking his ears and then sniffing the sullied finger, changing the television channel without asking, wriggling his strangely long gray toes while guffawing at political talk shows, requesting endless beers and endless massages. The beers distended his soft stomach and the backs of his arms and the skin under his chin. The massages forced Mayling to dig her fingers into these growing mounds of pillowy flesh. She felt them appear and expand in all the expected (and some unexpected) places on his body. On one of his birthdays, he received a bottle of cologne from his mother. He began dousing himself every morning, leaving pungent traces in the sheets, in the furniture, in the children’s hair—even in the food on the table. Why did he never buy new records anymore?
In the studio, Mayling learned bits and pieces about Liang: he owned a black dog with a single white paw (he showed her a Polaroid), he had attended the University of the Arts but received very poor marks (he confessed with a laugh when she pointed out his memorabilia keychain), he loved guavas (he almost always ate one before class), he hated Coca-Cola. But that’s a secret between you and me, he told her. He was full of little surprises like that, hinting at confidentiality when she did not expect it, with an offhand grin. Every few lessons he would give her a compliment—something small, maybe about her new haircut or improvements in her strumming, and, twice, about her “glow.” These she gulped down hungrily and later etched into her mind’s schoolgirl diary, reenacting them whenever she had a moment to spare.
Sometimes, when puzzling over a chord or lowering her head to hide her blushing, Mayling would feel the tingling sensation of his gaze gliding over the buttons on her chest, the waistband of her skirt, her bare shins, the recesses of her ankles. Most of the time, when she looked up again, he would be focusing dutifully on her fingers. But sometimes she would catch his eyes flickering away. This happened so rarely, though, and so fleetingly, that Mayling questioned her own senses. But just in case, she began rubbing scented lotion on her wrists and hands—the only parts of her body that he sometimes touched. And whenever he did touch her . . . did his fingers tremble, or did he inhale more deeply, or . . . ?
Shutian never asked her about her lessons. If she offered to perform for the family, he would listen with a toothy smile and hum along. But, on the whole, he treated her learning guitar as if it were an incidental attainment, something that simply happened when she picked up the instrument.
Mayling would watch him lying in the folds of the bed they shared. His face, like Liang’s, had thin, small features; but these were so different from Liang’s, his body ever so different from Liang’s body, from both Liang’s true body and the body in Mayling’s mind, the one that cooed as she pushed her hips deep into his, one of his hands gripping her thigh, the other holding her under her armpit, his thumb pressing into her breast. This was the image that came to her on certain afternoons while Shutian and the twins passed more productive hours elsewhere, when she ducked under the covers and pressed herself against her palm again and again until she and Liang converged in a mutual grunt of climax.
Once, about a year into their lessons, Liang asked her what her plans were for the night.
Television, probably, she said, making sure not to smile too eagerly, with an expression that tried hard not to say, Unless you have something else in mind.
He was playing at a show, he said. A small venue, something of a cross between a bar and a black box theater, and she would have free entrance and food and drinks as his—was he consciously trying not to hesitate?—guest.
And Mayling pictured it: the grime on the postered walls and the dimly lit faces exhaling boozy cigarette smoke, appraising her. What on earth would she wear? She would be seen as Liang’s guest. To be known, by anybody, as Liang’s somebody. She looked up at him; beneath his casual demeanor she discerned childlike anxiety. He was nervous. He had probably rehearsed this casualness. She resisted the urge to bury her face in the curve of his neck. Maybe in that dingy basement, maybe in that moment when he was sweating from an impassioned performance under the dim spotlight, he would find the strength to brush her thigh with a calloused, feverish hand.
Laughter sounded outside the classroom. Images from the evening before crashed into her thoughts: Yixin, tearful from bickering with her brother; Shutian’s slumbering face, with its comically round nostrils expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting.
That sounds like a lot of fun, she said, and thank you for inviting me. But I need to be up early before the kids leave for school.
That night, Mayling turned to face the snoring Shutian. She thought: I could have left you. I could leave you. I could leave.
Then, one spring day, two and a half years after they first met, Liang said goodbye. He had signed on with a small record company to replace the guitarist in an up-and-coming band. It was nothing fancy, but he had liked the demos they’d sent him, and it would be good experience. She had been a top-notch student, he said. First class. He hoped she would pick up his album when it came out. He hoped she would keep playing the guitar.
Mayling stopped playing the guitar. She offered no explanation to her family.
Yixin and Yijie were both accepted to the top high school in Taipei. Each would go on to National Taiwan University, Yixin to study English and French and Yijie to study economics.
Having not one but two children at the best school in the country could be considered enough good fortune for two lifetimes. But the twins went even further. Yixin flew off to Cambridge to garner more literary degrees; Yijie got a high-profile banking job in Hong Kong. By the time Shutian retired at sixty-six, family businesses had edged toward extinction. The management of the clinic was taken over by a trusted employee.
Shutian’s retirement was to be expected given his age, but came as a rude shock to Mayling nevertheless. She had grown fond of her solitude, taking hours to prepare simple lunches for herself, watching daytime TV dramas with rambling plots, strolling through the neighborhood streets and marveling at the young people who filled them. Her children had been kind enough to induct her into the world of modern technology: she learned to browse news sites and blogs, email long-lost schoolmates, and, most notably, watch videos. Before the internet, she had been able to follow Liang’s band—now decades old and with a respectable following—only remotely, haunting the CD store in search of increasingly rare album releases. Now she was able to see him. She could actually watch him online, drawing her face close to the pixels where his fingers touched the strings; she could pause the video as the camera swept past him on its way to the lead singer. She would touch the screen with icy fingertips and feel them turn hot as her whole body warmed at the image of him.
And now, to have Shutian at home, sharing her days? What would he say about her aimless routine? He had not asked about the details of her day-to-day life since the twins were born. Would they now have to relinquish their mutual genteel obliviousness of each other? She could not bring him beers and give him massages all day long. What would they do to fill up their hours? What could they add—after almost four decades—to fill up their marriage?
They were each too old to adjust to new habits in the other, Mayling decided. She would not, could not see Shutian as anything beyond the tired face whose whims, uninspired jokes, and gurgling bodily functions strained her patience from dinnertime to bedtime. He was a scheduled disturbance in her quiet existence. What if he decided to pick up some unbecoming hobby, like . . . waltzing?
Before her fears had time to be realized, however, an X-ray of Shutian’s left lung revealed a shadow. The earliness of the diagnosis meant that surgery and recovery were both possible. But the worry, the bewildering medical vocabulary, the long-distance phone calls to Yijie and Yixin, and the trips to the hospital now filled up Mayling’s days.
Yijie and Yixin, visiting with spouses in tow, decided that the work was too much for Mayling alone—what if she fell ill as well? A home care nurse was hired, a brusque woman in her fifties with a baked complexion and a gaudy collection of short-sleeved button-down shirts. Her name was Nini, a name Mayling found too dainty for a woman with such big, rough hands, such a big, rough grin.
The twins had worried that Shutian would find Nini’s presence an insult to his masculine pride—but no, he soon took to her. He had, as Mayling knew, a natural disposition to being nursed. Nini was there to assure his every comfort, be it fetching the remote control, preparing snacks, or singing at his request: coarse folk songs from the South, Japanese-style enkas in the Taiwanese dialect, Teresa Teng ballads with all the wrong lyrics. A favorite pastime of Shutian’s was to watch television on the sofa with Nini seated on a low stool beside him, massaging his feet with her left hand and snacking on cashews with her right. This seemed to Mayling a highly unsanitary habit, but as it kept both of them quiet and out of her way, she never objected.
Once a day, as his only exercise, Nini took Shutian for a walk in the nearby park. Mayling would take that time to read, or take a long bath, or stretch out under the covers. Sometimes she tried to recreate the image of Liang, pulling up his concert videos on her smartphone, but the sheets smelled too thickly of Shutian’s illness. The rippling pleasure never came.
Neither of the twins was able to make it home for her sixty-fifth birthday, so she settled for phone calls filled with the squabbling and bickering of her grandchildren. Nini had insisted on buying a cake, but she chose Mayling’s least favorite kind, with artificial-tasting fruit slices and three layers of heavy, cloying whipped cream. Nini also insisted on singing, and she made Shutian sing as well. Mayling was coaxed into making wishes and blowing out candles. After these painful festivities, Shutian and Nini went on their daily walk. Mayling, wearied to the marrow of her bones, took the opportunity to slip into bed with her favorite of Liang’s music videos. She settled into the familiar position. She was about to click play when she felt a lump of cloth at her foot.
Removing her earphones, she tugged out the foreign object from under the covers. It was a ball of black pantyhose, rolled and tangled in a way that could only mean they had been removed in a hurry.
Mayling had not worn black pantyhose since before she had given birth.
She pressed play on the video. The familiar frames flashed by, Liang’s face among them: a second here, a second there. When it ended, Mayling got up, wound the earbuds around the phone, and made the bed.
Shutian, whose last bottle of cologne had long sat empty on their bathroom sink, who reeked of camphor and that special scent of those whose skin was undersunned; Shutian, who had not changed the style of his glasses since 1986; Shutian, who had stopped bothering to remove her top during intercourse when they reached middle age, who would keep his eyes closed as she lay with her nightgown bunched up at her waist and the bedsprings creaked at an unvarying rhythm. Who had stopped doing even that almost ten years ago. How could such a man be harboring extramarital hosiery in his sickbed?
Mayling grabbed her purse from the dressing table and stuffed the pantyhose inside. She walked at a perfectly unremarkable pace out the door, down the two flights of stairs, and out of the building. Once outside, she turned a few corners before coming to an old-fashioned, run-down coffee shop. Inside, the tables were a reddish wood that clashed awfully with the cedar chairs. The menu was written in an unsophisticated font on plain printer paper with a clip-art Victorian border. The coarse, garish cutlery reminded Mayling of Nini, of Nini’s coarse, garish body, a body that must have pumped itself against her husband’s God knows how many times.
She ordered a rose tea, but when it came she did not drink it. When the shrill, peppy pop songs proved too much, Mayling paid for her tea and left.
She considered taking a taxi and going to a friend’s, or maybe to the airport and on to Hong Kong, on to England, making a pit stop at, say, Turkey, Sweden, somewhere completely alien.
In the end, she decided to go with the bus. Any bus. One that would take her away from this corner of the city that had consumed her entire life. Not so far that she would no longer recognize her surroundings; only far enough that she no longer had to recognize herself.
On her way to the bus stop, she came across two mailboxes: red for express, green for regular.
Mayling stopped. Behind her, a group of boys passed by, talking about girls in quacking pubescent voices.
She took the pantyhose from her purse and unrolled the legs. She folded the hose neatly into a square and slipped them into the slot of the green box. Clasping her bag close, she smoothed the front of her dress and continued on to the bus stop.
Lin King grew up in Taipei and currently does most of her writing on the New York City subway. A global citizen, she writes about global citizens. She works for the artist Cai Guo-Qiang and is a graduate of Princeton University. See lin-king.net.