WHEN MY HUGELY pregnant balloon of a wife and I got on a plane to the United States, we had one goal: to have an American baby. The timing was impeccably planned to fit into the visit allowed by our costly three-month tourist visas. Our prize: Seng Seng, my nervous, large-headed son; the bruise marks that my wife, in labor, squeezed onto my wrist; and special front row seats on the airplane behind the galleys so we could use a bassinet attached to the wall. Blonde stewardesses cooed at our baby all the way from San Francisco to Taipei. And the final reward: when Seng Seng turns twenty-one, he will apply to his government to bring us all to America.
At least that’s the plan. My wife’s plan, mostly.
Here’s another new plan of hers: hiring help at home.
The new maid, Lin Lin, could be anywhere between nineteen and twenty-six—you can’t tell with the baby-faced ones. She’s pretty enough, I guess, with soft Southeast Asian features similar to many Taiwanese women, but with paler, porcelain-like skin. When she wears her hair in a ponytail, I almost mistake her for my wife sometimes, except for her slim figure in contrast with my wife’s generous, post-pregnant form.
I don’t think about either of them in a lustful way. At this point women are a tiring presence in my life: three of them, all under my roof. The scariest one of them all? My mother-in-law.
“Why don’t you let me buy you a new suit, you’re always dressed so shabbily. You’re a businessman. Appearances are important,” my mother-in-law says, not even looking at me but checking her professionally manicured nails.
“This suit was very expensive,” I say. It’s true.
“But it’s old! An expensive old suit is much worse than a cheap suit. It’s shabby to wear old clothes. At least put on one of those new shirts I got you.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“You think nothing is necessary. Just put one on, they weren’t expensive, two for a thousand NT, marked down at the department store sale.”
“I tried one on a few days ago, remember? It made me itch.” It’s an allergy I inherited from my mother’s side of the family. Synthetic fabric leads to my breaking out in hives every time.
“You’re just neurotic, imagining things. You’re not a real man. My daughter married a fake.”
In addition to having an unreasonable personality, my mother-in-law also has diabetes. No doubt her kidneys will worsen and require dialysis every three weeks, emptying our bank accounts while her bitterness eats up our souls.
One night, I was reading the evening paper in the living room, minding my own business, and in she walked wearing her favorite green nightgown. She gave me the full-frontal view of her sagging, scary body veiled in the color of moldy, spotted olives. I don’t even remember the question she asked me, so stunned and scarred was my mind. She had the longest nipples I had ever seen, long, droopy ones like a stack of one-NT coins with dark areoles at the base of each sag, so dark one could see their shadows through an entire layer of fabric.
Her daughter’s nipples aren’t especially small or short either. I’m glad she keeps her bra on most of the time. It’s too much, really, the sight of bare breasts, so real with swollen, uneven, goose-bumpy areolae, especially after the baby when the veins showed like tree branches and the orbs were engorged with fresh human milk, nipples inflated into balls. Luckily, my loving wife finds the fact that I like her underwear to be kinky. She imagines I have a brassiere fetish. She does not know what horror I feel every time she pops a breast out of her convenience bra, ripe melon from a sack, to feed Seng Seng.
My wife is attractive enough. Just not to me, not in that way anymore.
Something happened to my overgrown schoolgirl. Once she was adorable, the smile on her peach-like face or a glimpse of a smooth limb always stirring something I thought was happiness in my heart. Even the way she bit into a steamed bun I used to find moving.
Now, watching her eat just frightens me.
When we were dating, she only let me hold her and touch her through a bra and panties or one-piece swimming suit. The transition point was our wedding night: after the ceremony with its toasts and drinks and clothes-changing and bowing, she climbed on top of me and rather forcefully claimed me as her husband. Perhaps it was the stress of the wedding, the champagne, shock, or fear in response to her aggressiveness, but I could barely get it up for my bride.
Now, she won’t leave me alone. Sometimes she reaches for me in front of her mother; it’s indecent, all those ideas the Chinese version of Cosmopolitan must be putting in her head. She buys imported lace nighties from France and Italy, and a ridiculous assortment of candles and massage oils with dirty-sounding names. Half the time, I want to run away. The rest of the time, I just want to watch television or sleep.
I don’t want to be like one of those tormented men on TV who are always being nagged by insatiable wives. I’ve considered stocking up on the little blue pills that one can buy whispering, leaning over the counter, from most Taiwanese drugstores. Not that I’ve ever done it. I’m only thirty-one; I’d have to be at least thirty-five to stoop that low.
From the outside, our middle-class home looks modest. My wife and her mother picked everything they wanted from various home décor catalogues and traditional furniture stores. I appreciate that nothing matches. In the living room, a sofa of crocodile skin and a floral-patterned love seat cluster around a modern, wavy-looking coffee table, the TV an enormous fifty-inch thing balanced on a small brass table with S-shaped legs. Ratty tapestries depicting mythological menageries hang side by side with framed Chinese watercolors on our light green and cream-colored walls. Curtains line every window and doorway: heavy cotton in the living room, lace in the bedrooms, translucent plastic— sticky from old grease—in the kitchen. The kitchen, unlike most Taiwanese ones, boasts a built-in oven and the two-door, ice-making refrigerator my wife said she always wanted. A row of appliances lines the marble counter: automatic can opener, four-slice toaster, ten-cup coffee maker, blender, food processor. Too bad all those wonderful chef’s aids haven’t produced as many satisfying meals as one might hope.
I’m proud to own a house in the best neighborhood in Shing Tien while most of Taipei squats in tiny apartments. But this house has its flaws. Soundproofing was an issue I never considered before. How could I? I didn’t know my bride was going to be a screamer. And when she makes too much noise, I lose my erection. The idea of her mother hearing us might just drive me into celibacy.
It’s a good thing that first the pregnancy, and now the baby, keeps my wife preoccupied. We must be doing something wrong, however, because my son is a fussy bundle of nerves. Any sound at all startles him horribly, and after a few such shocks he wails. A dog bark, a door slam, or a car siren going off in the neighborhood—anything can set him off.
“You’re me, Seng Seng. You’re nervous and feel threatened by the women around you. I agree. They’re scary,” I whisper to him.
He looks at me with large, watery eyes. He wants me to stop talking, I can tell. Shut up, useless dad. I shake my head, folding my fingers around one of his chubby feet, and sure enough, he bursts into tears.
Aside from his mother’s sizeable nipples, Lin Lin is the only remedy to Seng Seng’s tantrums. The maid loves it when Seng Seng goes off; it gives her an excuse to drop whatever housework she is doing and run to take care of the baby. She can hold him for hours, watching television, napping with him, singing him Vietnamese songs. For all I know those songs might be a bad influence on him, but what can I do—the child likes her. She likes to grab Seng Seng and swing him around, something that makes me nervous because I think his arms will be dislocated from the rest of his body at the armpits.
My wife’s jealousy flares when she sees that the child she carried for nine months in her womb prefers Lin Lin instead. She yells at Lin Lin for trivial things such as a dirty corner in the bathroom or an unscrubbed bathtub, though her anger never lasts long. After all, the maid makes it possible for her to take naps in the middle of the day. I tried to get a raise for Lin Lin for her extra work with the baby, but my wife, who manages household finances, refused.
“She does not deserve it. The baby is only an excuse for her to avoid housework. Besides, who changes his diapers? Who gives him baths and gets wet when he kicks or pees everywhere? Who feeds him and gets vomited all over when he’s sick? Me! And you want to give the maid more money?”
Even when Seng Seng is being difficult and we are exhausted, neither of us approaches my mother-in-law for help because she acts like we’re abusing her or treating her like help when we ask her to do the tiniest baby-favor for us. You would think that a grandmother wouldn’t mind taking her grandson out in his stroller after dinner, but she screws up her face when we ask.
“You think I’m old and useless and have nothing better to do than your chores? Young people these days, no sense of responsibility. Old Mrs. Jian’s children would never ask her to lift a finger to do housework for them. When are you going to begin to treat me right, huh?”
She wasn’t a good mother; how could she suddenly become a good grandmother? her daughter mutters under her breath.
This morning, I woke up to a disconcerting silence in the house. Something was wrong. I could feel it in my bones. We had slept too long, too well. Sitting up in bed, I spotted the empty crib at the foot of our bed. I shook my wife, who was curled up to my left, hogging the extra blanket that she had rolled into a big sausage-like thing sandwiched between her legs.
“Where is Seng Seng?”
“Huh?” She let go of the sausage and rubbed her eyes.
“Seng Seng isn’t in his bed.”
“Maybe Lin Lin took him.”
I didn’t like the idea of Lin Lin “taking” the baby. I shoved my feet into plastic house slippers, almost tripping on them, and pushed open the bedroom door. The living room was empty. Someone had left the TV on last night, mute, flickering. Dust flew uncannily in rays of sunlight peeking through unevenly drawn curtains.
I knocked on the maid’s door, then, met with no answer, banged.
“Open up, Lin Lin, is Seng Seng in there?”
I opened the door with more force than necessary, thinking it would be locked from the inside. Lin Lin’s room was messy and impersonal: the bed unmade, towels lying around, the trashcan overflowing, but there were no photos or underwear or anything that indicated even the gender of its resident.
I headed for my study, next to Lin Lin’s room, and reached into the secret panel in the top right drawer, which yielded some objects. There used to be a few thousand NT in the drawer since we were going to pay the cable company and gas people—that was gone. My IDs and bankbooks were there, but where was my wife’s ID? And Seng Seng’s American passport and birth certificate?
I felt sick as I remembered that we had no identification of any sort from Lin Lin because she wasn’t legally hired. All we knew was her name, which could have been fake. She might not even be Vietnamese. She could be Thai, Filipino, Malaysian, even Taiwanese—there was no way for us to know. How would we find her, and our son, the American?