After my kid sister began middle school she suddenly developed an interest in issues such as whether or not there was any true equality between the sexes. Each time she wrote a letter to me in the military, she couldn’t help offering a profound analysis of the wording and phrasing of my last letter. On top of that, she would spare no effort in digging up any hidden ideological problem that she could find (actually, “problem” is a rather gracious term; “error” or “evil” is a bit more like it). From then on, I would often look back upon every aspect of my little sister’s early childhood with a feeling of nostalgia. I missed her expressions, tone of voice, attitude, features, and even the way she used to dress.
A long, long time before that, just after she had begun nursery school, she loved to wear a certain kind of checkered cloth skirt. She liked yellow and white, red and white, pink and white, blue and white… in short, as long as there were two alternating colors and the checks were no larger than a fingernail, she would wear it. Mom also liked to wear checks, and the two of them together looked like a couple of perfume bottles from the same factory—one big, one little, but other than the size difference, all the other specifications were identical. The big one would usually be carrying the little one or holding her hand as they strolled under the covered sidewalk to every place imaginable: the supermarket, the park, or the recreation center. Even on rainy days, the balcony behind our apartment could always serve as a most ideal extension of their stage. Mom liked to hear people say, “Look at how adorable that mother and daughter are!” Even if they didn’t say it out loud, you could see the admiration in their eyes; to Mom, this was all music to her ears. “So cute!” That is what Dad would usually say. Who could have guessed that at the time he was already screwing that woman painter with the black silk fishnet stockings?
“So cute!” Dad said. “You really look just like Renoir’s painting The Swing. So cute.” As he pronounced the first syllable of Renoir’s name, it sounded like there was phlegm stuck in his throat. Later I learned that that was French and the technical name for the place where that special sound comes from is the uvula. Afterward, while in graduate school, my precise pronunciation of this sound would leave a deep impression upon a language instructor—I never bothered to explain to her how my father taught me to make uvular sounds as a child.
My kid sister going with Mom to the small park to play on the swings was truly a regular activity. Every afternoon after Mom got off work she would pick up my sister at nursery school; first they would go to the supermarket and then to the park. Looking out over the school wall from my third-floor classroom, I could regularly catch sight of them. Often that wouldn’t be until dusk—I would still be at school studying abacus calculation, mental arithmetic, and composition.
For one of my homework essays, I wrote about my little sister. In my composition I characterized her as stunningly beautiful and extremely obedient, just like a little princess. Aside from my description of my sister barely even coming close to reality, I also fabricated a few aspects of the plot (that was simply to fulfill the teacher’s requirement that the composition be “no less than three pages”). I wrote that my sister had once fallen off the swing set and ended up with a cerebral concussion. Thanks to the devoted care of my father, mother, and me, she was slowly able to regain her health. God only knows if I ever really took good care of my sister. However, at the same time, the extreme joy I felt when in the position of caring for my sister was second not even to my mother’s delight in dressing my sister exactly like her.
What was the implication of having to look after my sister? Naturally, it meant that I had already grown up. At first I must have hated it. Growing up and going to the third grade meant that I had to move to a new classroom—and that meant that I had to climb three flights of stairs and endure the periodic noise of those whiz kids practicing in the second-floor music room. Growing up and starting fifth grade implied that I would have to stay after school to take part in voluntary night cram school—while in class I had to bear watching those little bastards from the lower grades playing and laughing in the schoolyard. Growing up and going into middle school was a definite nightmare—at the time, I never believed that I would live long enough to see that day. Most distressing of all was the fact that even though I had grown up only a bit more than my little sister, everyone in the family would never fail to remind me: “You’re her big brother. You have to start acting like a big brother.”
What does it mean to act like a big brother? My answer was quite simple: to recognize that fact that I could no longer act like a child and blame others for what I did. It was almost precisely at the moment I was accepting this reality that I became conscious of my sexual orientation. It was my sex that determined that I must take care of my kid sister. Sometimes, in order to assert this, I would specially seek out some things to do in order to protect my sister.
For example, fighting. (It is okay if you want to take the term “fighting” in the broad sense.) When my sister was a sophomore in high school she once used her class time to write me a letter. At the time I was taking part in a divisional-level defensive military exercise. She wrote, “I’m not sure if by the time you receive this you and the blue army will have already finished fighting with the red?”
Actually, I laughed when I read that letter, but hidden in my laugh was a sadness. When we got back to the barracks, it was pouring outside. Inside there were over one hundred men who for seven days and seven nights had had not a single opportunity to wash away the stench of mud, grime, and sweat from their bodies. In order to make out my little sister’s handwriting, which was practically dancing off the page, I needed to constantly wipe away the steam from my eyeglass lenses. It was at that moment I truly had the desire to go back in time; how I genuinely cherished the days of remote antiquity when my kid sister would still offer her heartfelt appreciation when I fought for her.
Back then she had her hair tied back in a checkered scarf and was wearing a long checkered skirt. She held my hand as we walked home—she had already begun kindergarten. During my elementary-school years the kindergarten was just beneath where those whiz kids would practice Bach’s half-step dance music. And just outside the kindergarten classroom, in the small playground, was where the spherical cage we called S.S. Earth was preserved. Just beside the S.S. Earth, near the slide, was where my little sister would usually be waiting for me to pick her up as I walked two blocks over from my middle school. During that short two-block journey I would often fantasize that there was someone who dared to bully my kid sister (for example, pushing her down the slide or forcing her into the S.S. Earth and then spinning her at high speed). That fantasy one day actually became a reality when I delivered a wicked blow to a little bastard fifth-grader who had stayed after to study his abacus calculation. The reason for my attack was that as he went down the slide he rammed into my sister’s butt.
Afterward, not only would my little sister raise strong inquiries about male fighting, the launching of wars, and other issues, but she would also completely forget that I had hit more than one guy for her and, in one battle, even chipped off half of one of my bicuspids.
Then again, possibly I’m mistaken. A chick named Little Chess should perhaps get the credit for that broken bicuspid. I think the place of battle was the movie theater at Ximending;* my opponents were a couple of ticket scalpers who had taken over the ticket window. I learned many lessons from the Battle of Ximending; first was the fact that I really didn’t deserve those two stripes in Tae Kwon Do. It was obvious that my strength was only sufficient to deal with opponents that didn’t hit back, such as pieces of wood or tile (or my class partners, who were restricted under set rules). The second thing I learned stemmed from Little Chess’s renunciation of my use of violence—which was because during the chaos of battle I knocked her in the back of the head with a circle kick. Besides this, I also had a deep realization of the taste of fear. Just before the fight broke out, my veins pulsated and my mind went blank; then, after the battle was over, I had too much time to recollect. As for my recollection of violence—I believe it will forever remain much more terrifying than violence itself. Several years later, as I drove past Ximending, I suddenly realized just how close that young me, full of energy and vitality, had come to biting the dust. I couldn’t help but begin to shudder all over. No wonder my sister stated in her letter: “War can only prove that men are animals capable of fear.”
My kid sister’s feminist period did not last too long (I am afraid it was even shorter than my martial-arts phase). That day, after the military exercise, while in the disgusting and chaotic barracks, I read yet another letter—it was an official document from the Ministry of Defense. The document stated that I had passed the military instructor examination and would be able to leave my division for a post as an instructor at an officer school. Before assuming my new post, I had a five-day vacation. I used the first three days to go down to Xitou** with this chick I had just met, and we screwed like crazy for a few days. On the fourth day, when I arrived back in Taipei, I heard the news from Grandma and Grandpa that my parents were getting divorced.
Sitting alone in the living room, I hung up the phone and imagined the scene of my mother and father busy with their separate chores. Night had already fallen and he was probably in the brightly lit newspaper office going through a stack of written or printed material. She was most likely at the nearby supermarket going through the fish, meat, and vegetables, trying to figure out which were fresh and which were even fresher. I imagined it very probable that their physical movements and expressions were almost identical. After thinking about them for a long time, I couldn’t come up with any more suitable term to describe them than “absurd.” Just then, my whistling kid sister swaggered in. She still had her backpack on. She didn’t turn on the light, but I suspect that, from the half-closed door and the silhouette of my army helmet, she had already discovered I had returned. She was so wrapped up in whistling her song that she didn’t even bother saying hello.
“They’re still splitting up?” I asked.
She grunted, “Uh,” and then continued to whistle.
“Absurd,” I muttered.
Only after my sister finished that song did she answer me. In the darkness, she responded with a single sentence: “It’s better for Mom.”
“Give me a break from your feminist theory!” I forcefully whipped off my helmet, but my scalp instantly felt a chill and I had no choice but to put it back on.
“From this week on, I’m not going to talk anymore about that feminism stuff.” She smiled and turned on the lamp, continuing, “It is a waste of time, it just makes me an anxious mess.”
For a while she really made me an anxious mess. Not long before, during that military outing, my brothers in arms would occasionally sing that song, “I’ve got two pistols, their sizes are different, use the long one for the commies, use the short one for the girlies.” Each time I heard that tune I would feel an uncomfortable quiver all the way down to my bones as if the lyrics were a kind of blasphemy. But less than a year later—just when Dad had forsaken Mom—my sister suddenly became graceful and merry, as if feminism was an outfit that had already gone out of style. Before I had a chance to ponder the implications of this change, she had jumped into my arms. She wrapped her arms around my neck, and reflected in each of her sparkling eyes was the distorted image of my face. “So, tell me about that chick you’ve been seeing,” she said.
It had already been quite some time since she had used the term “chick.” I thought that she had already been completely awakened to the fact that “concealed within this term were the evils and faults of the male ideology.” And so I softly pulled her hands away and explained to her what I thought. What happened to all of those evils and faults?
“What’s the point?” Her retort was the same pet phrase that she had become fluent with when just two and a half years old. Then she abruptly jumped up as if she had suddenly thought of something and went back to whistling that same tune from before. As she whistled, her four limbs twisted up and down in a kind of dance that looked like an automated crank trying fruitlessly to produce oil. She looked like a puppet dangling from strings. Finally she assumed a pose that looked like a cross between a stiff corpse and the Hunchback of Notre Dame and said, “Moreover, I like to say whatever is on my mind.”
I should have taken that as a cause for celebration, so how come I didn’t? My sister took a detour through the devil’s gate of feminism, the ideology that is like thorns scraping on the back of every man, and was then brought back to life. A pedantic nitpicker no more, she became cute and witty again and I had my normal sister back. Who could ask for anything better? However, instead of rejoicing, I had the same feeling as I did when I drove back to the scene of that fight at Ximending. I felt myself on the brink of being crushed—I suddenly became scared. A thought instinctively flashed through my brain: my sister was growing ever farther away from me. For me this was even more terrifying than my parents’ ruined marriage.
It was during that time that my father formally moved out to live with that woman artist. I guess that after ten-odd years of secretly sleeping together their relationship was probably already exhausted and tasteless as well. However, the event that truly took me by surprise did not occur until after I had left the military. Trying to make me laugh, my sister, lying on the filthy sheet in the foul gynecological ward, hit me with a “tragically realistic and hilariously ridiculous” news flash: “That father of ours is having an art exhibition!”
This news indeed was enough to make you laugh your guts out. Dad also sent an invitation to my sister—that was the first time in her life she had been addressed as “Miss.” She was but eighteen at the time, yet already had three months’ experience as a single pregnant woman. Just over a year before she was called “Miss,” she still believed that this extremely traditional title was quite suspicious. But her attitude changed, just like so many other events, beliefs, actions, people, dreams, and feelings in her life that stayed for a while and then disappeared. Before she had the ability to grab hold of something, she already didn’t want it. “What’s the point?” she would say.
That evening, wearing my army helmet, I discussed feminism and our parents’ divorce with my kid sister. We had dinner with Mom—we ate a fresh fast-food hot pot that Mom had brought home from the grocery. After supper I went for a walk with my sister. Just like so long ago, I held her hand as we walked past the small park and cut through the schoolyard, which looked no larger than the palms of our hands. We kept going until we got to the old run-down juancun, which still hadn’t been torn down. That was the place where our grandparents had screamed and fought for several decades—neither of us wanted to go there. On the way, I asked her if she remembered wearing a scarf and dress of the same color and style as Mom’s. She shook her head. I asked if she remembered playing on the swings in the small park. She shook her head again. I asked her if she remembered waiting by the slide for me to take her home when she was in kindergarten. Again, she shook her head. At first I thought that she would be ashamed for not remembering those events—who knows, it is possible that subconsciously, I just wanted to force her to feel shame for so easily forgetting. For one short second she dropped her head and stared at the ground, and her head bobbed like a rattle; I thought she was so ashamed that she was going to cry. But in the end she quickly straightened her neck, exposing a beaming smile. “Grandma’s really something,” she said. “Do you know that she bought a Mah-jongg Mate cartridge for her Nintendo and stays up playing until after midnight? She won’t stop until all four of the women inside have stripped butt naked!”
Grandma really did have quite a way with that electronic mah-jongg, and that day she displayed her prowess to her heart’s content. Later she even cooked us some noodles. No one mentioned Dad. Grandpa shouted out a few names in his sleep; from what I could tell, they were all people who had absolutely no connection to our family. After I finished my noodles, I rested my elbows on the edge of the balcony, which had been declared off-limits to me when I was eight years old, and for a long, long time not a single thing passed through my mind. It was only then that I realized that my kid sister’s forgetfulness was a kind of boundary; she was a part of a different breed of humanity. I’m afraid that I will never understand much more about her than that—even though she herself shared with me all kinds of forgotten secrets.
