LIN TOOK THE MRT to and from work every Tuesday and Thursday between Liu Zanli and Da Zi stations, during the worst part of rush hour. Not only did she never have a seat, she was constantly pushed around, stabbed by the corners of studious students’ open textbooks, old women’s umbrellas, and old men’s canes. Lin clasped her pink handbag close to her in case any of the pushers and pokers were also pickpockets. Her handbag always had a small stack of thousand-NT bills in it because Lin 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 honoring her request of receiving it in the form of cash in an envelope.
Lin 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, and hems, and ordered cheap cotton fabric so students could make aprons for their semester-long projects. 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 draw in the sun, in whatever medium they chose—watercolor, gouache, charcoal, colored pencil, oil pastels. She watched them from under a tree, a food magazine in her lap. Lin 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 students’ overall grade point averages, the students would revolt and beat her up on her way from school to the MRT station.
Lin took long baths at night and had a membership to the twenty-four-hour movie rental store next to her building, which allowed her to check out unlimited films each month. Lin’s parents were remarkably old (mother forty-nine, father sixty-three) when they had her, an only child, and by now, long dead (breast cancer, lung cancer). When they were still alive and their minds were not yet silenced by cancer cells, they had encouraged Lin’s artistic career. Unfortunately, they died before her first opening in Taipei Professional Art Academy’s North Wing. It was an installation—lots of space, with tiny papier-mâché animals strung in white necklaces from the ceiling, and clay animals stacked together. Regardless of species, the clay animals were equal in size—the rats as large as the rhinos, the giraffes as tall as the Chinese sparrowhawk. The central concept of the piece, titled “Under, On Top Of,” had to do with proliferating cancer cells, food chains, and human impact on the environment.
Lin’s artistic career never went anywhere after she started teaching at the age of 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 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 consume 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 ears. That rabbit cost her thousands of NT in clay yet now sat 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 look close enough to confirm. A colony of smaller clay bunnies clustered quietly around the king-sized bunny like its subjects. At some point Lin gave up all other figures and concentrated on bunnies. It was some time after her parents’ death, about the time that her professors at National Taiwan University of Arts stopped encouraging her to send her slides out to galleries and grad schools and residencies. Lin did not mind. She got a stable teaching job and that was more than most of her poor, more talented classmates had.
Lin never bothered to date, either. She was neither ugly nor beautiful, just plain, and a little too tall for the preference of most Taiwanese men, generally short themselves. Some might consider Lin plump, progressively so over the years, at least by Taiwanese standards. She had long, straight hair, the hairstyle that required the least amount of maintenance other than shampooing twice a week. Lin 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 most human contact and potential suitors by not socializing at all and not talking to colleagues except when absolutely necessary.
Lin was forty-three and regretted nothing 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.
Lin 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. There was some swapping going on, and the tall, Caucasian actors lost Lin within the first half hour. Lin decided she would watch the film again tonight, before returning it. If she still couldn’t understand the relationships the second time she watched it, carefully reading the subtitles and trying her best to memorize the actors’ faces and relationships with one another, she would give up.
The train was especially crowded today. The door opened and closed at Taipei Train Station, the busiest transfer station where three MRT lines converged, and people flooded into Lin’s compartment so that the passengers were all pressing against and touching one another. People in the MRT car 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. Lin felt a push on her back that nearly made her bump her head into a pole, but she was too tired to turn around and glare at the offender. The doors closed, nearly catching a young woman’s curly tresses. The woman yelped and pulled her bleached and permed hair with fraying split ends to the front of her right shoulder, then spent two minutes inspecting it and smoothing it out, as if comforting a baby. Lin watched her for a while with a blank expression on her face. She never understood the vain young women with over-processed hair, expensively styled yet horrible haircuts, painful-looking high heels, and tight clothing. Didn’t their feet hurt? Didn’t they feel cold? Did they really think anyone cared? Lin certainly didn’t.
The MRT car pushed into motion, creating a whooshing noise that grew more high-pitched as the car accelerated. Lin closed her eyes. She felt some shifting and squeezing around and about her, which was common because some people couldn’t balance themselves well enough on a moving MRT car and felt the need 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, Lin became conscious of something pressing against her left ass cheek through her 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 her head to see what it was, and saw a short little man with a weasel’s face. The weasel’s fly was down and his dick was pressed against the fabric of her pants. It was the size of a small walnut—uncircumcised, wrinkled, and disgusting. Lin 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.” Lin could not move. She had violent fantasies about the little man with his tiny, wrinkled penis, scenes she had seen in movies applied directly to him: the man’s head lopped off by an axe, his body parts separated and ground-up by machines and made into fresh steamed dumplings, or multiple bullets hitting his body, bang bang bang bang bang, the blood saturating 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.
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.