SHE THOUGHT IT was a matter of being a wonderful, loving girlfriend who could cook, looked pretty, and had a nice body. All she had to do, or be, were these things, and love him, and he would love her back, as simple as that. She was wrong.
She met him by chance in the lobby of a karaoke club. He spoke to her in perfect Chinese, which took her by surprise, because his eyes were sapphire and his hair dark auburn.
“Are you waiting for me?” he asked.
Jolie did not understand this as a pick-up line, only stared at him, confused.
“It was a joke,” he said. “Hi, my name is Mike.”
“I’m Jolie.”
Jolie wasn’t in the mood for chatting, especially since she had just broken up with her long-distance boyfriend after he admitted he had been with two different girls behind her back and still expected her to forgive him. She didn’t, and was feeling rather sore about men in general. This was why she wanted to go to karaoke with the girls—so they could bitch about men and sing sad love songs by Tsai Chin until they lost their voices. But politeness forced her to keep up a conversation with Mike until her friends arrived.
“You speak Chinese very well,” she said to him. “Everybody must say that to you.”
“Yeah, and guess what, I speak English very well, too. I just came here after graduating from college in America. I majored in Chinese.” He smiled, showing perfect teeth.
“You have no accent when you speak Chinese,” Jolie said.
“My nanny was from Taiwan,” Mike said. “My parents were never around, so after school I would hang out with her and speak Chinese. I was like her son. I always told myself I would come to Taiwan when I had a chance.”
“Where is your nanny now?”
“She got married to an American soldier when I was in sixth grade, and we kind of lost touch. At first, she wrote some letters and I wrote her back, but after a while there were no more letters, and I wasn’t sure of her address anymore.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if she got divorced and moved back to Taiwan. Maybe I’ll find her again here.”
“Why would you want her to be divorced?” Jolie thought Mike rather unkind to have such a fantasy.
“I’m just saying it’s a possibility.”
At that moment, Jolie realized that her two girlfriends, Yoyi and Angel, were spying on her and the red-headed foreigner through the glass lobby door. They giggled and looked guilty as they waved at Jolie. They walked in, wearing identical sly grins.
“Hi, Jolie, are we interrupting something?” Yoyi asked.
Jolie wanted to warn them not to say anything inappropriate or rude because this foreigner could understand Chinese perfectly, but she didn’t have a chance.
“Good to see you’ve found a better man, dear, he’s very cute,” Angel said.
“Did you get his number?” Yoyi asked.
“Oh, stop it, you two, let’s go,” Jolie said, blushing fiercely.
Mike did not say anything, just smiled good-naturedly at the three girls.
“Hi,” Yoyi said to Mike in English.
“Hi,” Mike replied in English.
Then, seeing that Jolie had already darted into the elevator and Angel was just behind her, Yoyi said a hasty “Bye!” to Mike and ran after her friends.
Eight months later, Jolie was living with Mike in his apartment next to National Taiwan Normal University. They were a picture of domestic bliss. She worked part-time in a flower shop and spent half her day shopping for groceries and making nice dinners. Mike taught English at a cram school near Danshui and took the MRT back and forth every day. Some nights, when traffic was bad or he got waylaid by eager female students with post-lecture questions, he would not get home until eight or eight-thirty at night. Jolie felt like a genuine housewife those nights, trying to keep her dinner from becoming soggy or dried-out or cold while she waited dutifully. She loved Mike more than ever, and she was certain that he would propose to her any day now.
Sure, they had exchanged their “I love yous,” or rather, Jolie was first to say, a few months into their dating, “I think I love you,” while Mike, a few weeks after that, said to her, “I’m falling in love with you.”
She never told her parents she was cohabitating with someone in Taipei City, which they considered the city of sin. But she hoped that after Mike proposed, she could legitimately introduce him to her parents as her fiancé, and everything would work out in the end, even if her parents scolded her a little for not telling them about him sooner.
A few days ago, however, Mike casually mentioned that he was taking the GRE so he could apply to graduate programs back in the United States. Jolie didn’t know how to respond, because he had never mentioned graduate school or going back to America before. She cheered herself up by telling herself that, wherever he went, he would take her with him—after a romantic proposal, of course.
After thinking obsessively about their future marriage day and night for weeks, an email from an old classmate finally broke her. Mia, the most unlikely of her old friends to become a bride, was engaged. Mia, the most cynical misan drist on Earth, in love. Jolie hated that she was not happy for her old friend, but she was reminded of a line both Angel and Yoyi were fond of delivering, with all the dramatic flair of a Korean drama heroine: “Every time one of my friends gets engaged, I die a little bit inside.”
Mia’s engagement was the last straw.
Mike was watching a bag of butter popcorn pop in the microwave when Jolie said, quite abruptly and intensely, “You never mentioned you were planning to go to graduate school.”
Mike appeared to be listening for the right interval between pops as a cue to turn off the microwave. He acted like he hadn't heard what she said.
“You know, Mike, I don’t mean this as an ultimatum or anything like that, but if you really leave for America, there’s no way for me to go there with you unless we’re engaged or married.”
Mike looked at Jolie as if a bat had just flown out of her mouth, but still, he said nothing.
“It’s just that. Getting a long-term visa is very hard, I know from my friend’s experience, and I’m not going to be a student at an American university or anything because I can’t pass the TOEFL for English proficiency. I can’t afford to come and go every three months on tourist visas because of the cost of airplane tickets, and—”
Jolie kept explaining until she sensed that Mike was no longer listening. His facial expression betrayed little, if any, emotion.
After a long silence, he said, “Okay. I get it. You don’t have to keep harping about it.”
Jolie felt hurt. She never considered herself someone who harped, and Mike’s words made her feel like a shrew or a nagging woman. She realized she wasn’t going to get a proposal out of Mike this way, at least not now. She didn’t regret talking to him about it, however, because that was how she felt. And that wasn’t even all of it.
When they were first dating, Mike took it upon himself to educate her about sexually transmitted diseases. Sex education in Taiwan wasn’t particularly specific or comprehensive about the sexually transmitted diseases and sexually transmitted infections out there, so Jolie listened, wide-eyed, at times covering her mouth with her hands, at times shaking her head in disbelief, the whole time shuddering, while Mike went through the terms and symptoms. These STD/STI lectures began when the two of them got more intimate physically—nothing serious, just some kissing and touching.
“I wanted to educate you about all this because I have HPV,” Mike said finally.
“That one is—”
“HPV is a virus that causes genital warts. It lives in your skin and doesn’t go away. Where I have it cannot be covered by a condom, so basically if you have sexual contact with me, you will get the virus, too. It’s mostly a cosmetic concern because of the warts, but it’s also been associated with cervical cancer in the long run,” he said, slowly and clearly.
Jolie’s mind raced. This was so explicit, so real. Mike had a real sexual disease! She didn’t know what to think, or do, how to respond.
“So that’s why I wanted to tell you, so that if you decided to become intimate with me, you can make an educated decision.”
He looked so sad that Jolie felt a sudden, motherly, Florence Nightingale type of love for him.
“Ever since I found out I had it over a year ago, I’ve felt awful. I didn’t think anybody would ever touch me again.” Mike’s voice was breaking.
Jolie didn’t say anything as she put her hand over his. Perhaps it was sympathy, but that night, when he held her in his arms on the sofa, she sat down in his lap and slowly removed her clothes. She tugged at his pants and undergarments as he looked at her with a grateful kind of disbelief. They slept together, and Mike was so loving, appreciative, and attentive that Jolie felt genuinely in love. She had made the right decision. He was the one, her soul mate, her future husband. When he asked her to move in with him, she eagerly gathered and boxed her belongings. Yoyi and Angel helped her move boxes into the taxi and her new home.
That was twelve months ago. They had been living together all this time, with Jolie expecting that Mike would one day be her husband because she had sacrificed so much for him. She thought about him all day, put much effort into cooking perfect little dinners of his favorite dishes, and even learned to make all sorts of cakes and desserts that he liked in a little mini oven she saved a month’s salary to buy. Worst of all, she now had this virus, this sexually transmitted HPV thing that would render her untouchable for Taiwanese men. She checked herself obsessively for warts or bumps, read the same articles on the internet about HPV/genital warts, or in Chinese, chai hua, vegetable flowers, and routinely scared herself into near hyperventilation by looking at photographs of the poster boys and girls of HPV: an uncircumcised penis spiked with a crown of genital wart lesions, a vagina that looked rotten and moldy and plain chewed-up. In some pictures, the affected bits were spotted with white mold-like substances in addition to huge areas covered with dirty-looking, flesh-colored, long bubbles in clusters and colonies pushing against one another. Some lesions stood out like the large, flat mushrooms on tree trunks in subtropical forests. In many cases, the parts looked like they were going to fall off.
This was why Jolie was so angry when Mike did nothing to reassure her that he was going to marry her. For the first time, it dawned on her that maybe he never had that intention; he just wanted to know that someone would “touch him” again, and she was his first victim. Who would want her now? Even if she had no warts, she had to tell every future partner about the HPV, because otherwise they would be a hundred times angrier if she slept with them and they grew warts. Maybe in America someone could get away with it, but there are too many virgins in Taiwan for her to get away with something like this. Not to mention she could not lie to someone like that—it would be immoral.
The days passed, and Jolie became more anxious and resentful, but she still waited and hoped. She inspired herself with the traditional Chinese ideal that, with time and effort, one could move someone into reciprocating one’s love, if one tried hard enough.
Mike got his GRE scores, applied, and heard back from the graduate school of his choice. He was leaving. Jolie hoped all the way to the airport, fantasizing about him presenting her with a ring just as he was about to go through Immigration and Customs. He gave her a long kiss and hug, then entered the doorway guarded by officers clad in intimidating blue-and-white uniforms. The officers eyed him icily, as if they knew. She watched him through the glass wall at Chiang Kai-shek International Airport. He waved as he got in line for Immigration, and waved again when he disappeared from sight. Jolie waved back, and as she did, she broke down. She had thrown two years of her life away for nothing, she had an STD, and surely nobody would ever touch her again. Two more years passed. Jolie and her friends were having lunch at a Western-style restaurant.
“It’s not your fault,” Yoyi said to Jolie. “But I definitely think you could have been meaner to him. At least not as nice as you were.”
Angel, who was bouncing a toddler on her knee, nodded.
“I treat my husband like shit, and he just comes back for more.”