MFA/MFYou
Short Fiction
by
Yu-Han Chao
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M |
ei Su was born on the wrong side of the nightmarket - to be exact, she was born right in the filthy middle of it. When the first pains of labor knocked her ample fifty-year-old mother to the tile floor of their sunless living room, it wasn’t a doctor or nurse or the Taiwanese Buddhist Red Cross who helped her up; it was the wrinkled old woman from next door. Next Door was an ex-midwife, ex because the last mother-to-be she helped died on the spot.
Mr. Su wasn't around to drive his wife to the hospital; he was out of the country. Mrs. Su decided to make do with her neighbor and give birth at home. In fact, she didn’t have much of a choice - Mei Su was nearly two weeks early and already fighting, kicking her way out.
The red candles on the Su ancestral altar eerily lit the sweating mother and old woman’s faces to flickering oranges and yellows. The retarded sister-to-be, oldest daughter of Mrs. Su, ran to fetch hot water in basins and towels, spilling water all the way. Some concerned or nosy neighbors stood outside the open garage that served as the Su house’s foyer, craning their necks and murmuring disapproval.
Where are the Su sons? They're old enough to help.
What the hell do you raise children for if they don't give a helping hand at a crucial moment?
All that's left is that retard. Even a retarded daughter is better than a unfilial son.
A storekeeper who owned the little newspaper and candy stand next door offered to help the midwife, but Mrs. Su, sweating from pain and exhaustion, yelled that nobody but her husband was to come in. So no one did.
Meanwhile, while his wife labored in bringing Mei Su into the world, Mr. Su was on vacation in Mainland
The breeze is a bit chilly. Would you like my coat?
No, being beside you warms me up wonderfully. I like the breeze--it smells like all the flowers of spring.
She lay her head on his shoulder, sighing.
The first word Mei heard, if newborns can immediately hear, upon emerging from her mother’s belly, was an unmentionable phrase, followed by a string of other crass Taiwanese expletives. Mei Su came out plump and round, which caused her mother even greater pain and augmented the swearing audible throughout their little alley.
The old midwife smiled through her cracked teeth at the girl infant and dunked her into a basin of warm water, in which blood and mucus swirled like whipped clouds. The slippery child kicked furiously, protesting life, its obscenities, and wetness. Sis peered at the bundle of flesh being passed from midwife to mother and exclaimed, Mei ah! - forgetting to close her mouth afterwards and letting the drool flow.
So it came to pass that Mei’s retarded elder sister gave her the name of mei, beauty. The adjective couldn’t have been less appropriate (who said all newborns or any newborns were beautiful?) considering the baby’s flat, swollen red head with only the beginnings of eyebrows and hair plastered to her skull.
Mrs. Su, too tired to agree or disagree, didn’t protest. If the mother had been forced to name her child on the spot, she would likely have named her something quite unthinkable. Not too long ago, families still named unwelcome daughters Von Chi, feed for nothing, which was how they felt about girls, thinking of them as rice worms who would only grow up to belong to some other family, bringing with her the dowry her father sweated in the fields for, which the daughter hadn’t earned in any way.
The crowded, noisy, filthy Tung Hwa Market area provided vegetables, fish, and other sundry goods in the morning. Butchers of chickens, pigs, cows, and fish stood behind stacks of meat displayed on lotus leaves and ice, hawking their ware, convincing housewives that their products were the freshest, their prices the lowest.
We're practically giving them to you!
Vegetables and fruit of all sorts lay in baskets and boxes or in clusters on plastic sheets. There were pickled vegetables, dried fruit, and even jade merchants and clothing and underwear sellers, all giving away their ware at a quarter of what these products would sell for elsewhere. They could afford this because they paid no rent for their stands and stalls and plastic mats.
The morning market is smelly, filled with fish and seafood smells, escaped ice and fruit trampled under foot, with the odors of fried chicken, spring onion cakes, soy sauce-boiled pig parts, black eggs, and stinky tofu everywhere. In the evening, the nightmarket which replaces its stinky predecessor offers fried food, all sorts of noodles and soups featuring oysters, rice wine and intestines, pricier clothing and shoes than in the morning, and small stores with cute things for young girls.
Running in the Tung Hwa Market as soon as she learned to run, Mei Su picked up the slang her family and neighbors spoke, a mixture of Taiwanese idioms and crude phrases, cockney of the Mandarin tongue. The Sus were only a few of the dozens of market-dwellers-sellers-workers who relied on the dirty vending street for a living. Family histories were written in the haphazard alleys of the market, trodden onto red tiles with dragon patterns, stained with blood, fish smells, grease, paint. The Su family, though consistently growing in number, managed to make a living in this diurnal and nocturnal hawking of wares. The only time of day for sleep or street-sweepers in the market was between three and five in the afternoon, when the morning market had hiked up its smelly skirts and gone home, while the nightmarket hadn’t boiled its gallons of tap water for fresh noodles yet.
Mrs. Su used to sell clothes in bundles on a plastic sheet by
The Tung Hwa Market was unmistakable gangster territory. Before opening a store, one must obtain costly permission from local bullies, otherwise one rain-and-thunder-ing evening, dark tattooed men would come and smash up one’s brand new non-gangster-approved store. Sometimes they couldn’t wait and came in broad daylight. Such gangster warnings are so common in the world of small businesses they are rarely investigated, at most reported on 24-hour news channels as the newest gossip. Zoom in to the weeping shop owner who sniffles into the camera, I didn’t deserve this, while the old people (including my four grandparents) watching television for the seventh hour that day at home sigh with the cheap, half-hearted compassion of a loyal Taiwan News fan.
Taiwan News has to be the most depressing and scary news channel in the world: the sobbing, cursing the heavens and earth and government, screaming, fighting, public protests, invasions of privacy, crimes of passion, child molestations, dismembered bodies...you can see all of these first hand on your television screen, with detailed confessions, zero censorship, the ugliness bare for all to see. It's like one of those talk shows where obese people beat each other up and curse one another for sleeping with their girlfriend or brother or mother or spouse, but much worse error.
Life isn’t any easier for store-less merchants, who are of less concern to gangsters and seldom make it into the news. The row of non-renter hawkers like Mrs. Su with merchandise sprawled in the streets have to pack up and hide, fast, whenever the Taipei Police make a show of sauntering down the main nightmarket streets, swinging their thin police bats, walking noisily, jingling the multiple chains and keys on their midriffs. Each of these fine men represent the quintessential essence of the Taiwanese police force: incompetent, lazy, nearly illiterate, and simply don’t care.
These men don't care if your father got murdered, if your house was robbed, if a crook took a hundred and twenty thousand dollars out of your bank account by fraudulent means. They slowly, very slowly, frequently making mistakes, illiterately type up your record as you answer their questions. This file they will shelf and never look at again. However, they will happily receive bribes if you harbor an illegal gambling machine or three in the back room of your restaurant for teenage delinquents and bored middle aged men to patronize. They also hide behind trees, buildings, and thick posts to catch you speeding, passing a yellow light, or not wearing a helmet while riding your scooter:
Ah-ha! 500 NT, please!
These officers occasionally confiscate wares and demand fines from venders who do not run away fast enough, or who don't show sufficient respect towards the police uniform, but generally, there is an unspoken agreement between both parties that the policeman will walk slowly, very slowly, and the illegal merchants will scram as fast as they can, hauling bags, pushing trolleys, running for cover. The police inspect one side of the street at once, so the vendors on the left side of the street can continue to display their ware while those on the right side scram with their bundles for cover, and vice versa. There are arrangements between vendors and their neighboring stores for the former to hide in a back room or basement of the latter's shop for a small fee. Shop and plastic mat owners alike must make a living; after all, one day, if a store owner loses his venue, he might end up brandishing a mat and filling it with little trinkets to sell in the streets too.
Once many summers ago Mrs. Su didn't manage to pack up her clothing (special sale for 190 NT apiece) because she was putting together change for a customer who preferred to carry big bills. The policeman, who came as a shock to the vendor, was ready to bring all her clothing in a colorful bundle back to his vehicle, and in addition, to charge a five thousand dollar fine, much more than she'd made all week. Five-year-old Mei Su happened to be there, and precociously, with large round eyes filling up with tears, pleaded her mother's case.
- Please Mr. Policeman, don't take my Ma's clothes, please don’t Mr. Policeman, Ma she works so hard every day...
The officer softened and let the mother and daughter go with a verbal warning, patting his bat noisily pah! against his palm, asserting his power to condemn and condone, as he wished.
Mei Su would tell me these stories when we walked home from school together. Sometimes I passed my house and walked her home to her house in the market. We could hear children calling to her as soon as we stepped into the entrance of their cluttered and strange-smelling garage.
- Auntie Ah Mei! Auntie Ah Mei!
I was always shocked that Mei Su was a real aunt already; we being merely fourteen. She looked suddenly grownup as a little boy tugged at her uniform skirt, nagging her to take him out to play, and she brushed him away, yelling go sit down and be quiet, or you're not going anywhere or having any supper. This loud and commanding voice which she never used at school she obviously inherited from her stout, hearty mother, who was now yelling at the top of her voice at the kids, who raced about the house and made one another cry, each bullying each. However, Mrs. Su was a warm, down-to-earth woman who liked me a great deal because I was quiet, polite, an A student, and from a bookish, college educated family. She imagined that I was a terribly good influence on her daughter.
Pointing at the nagging boy, Ah Ti, Mei Su told me how he had gotten into trouble last month. On the fifteenth of the lunar month, the Su family, like many other hybrid Buddhist-Taoist-ancestor-worshipping families, laid out a table of offerings to the gods. A ripe pig head steamed to a delicious sticky consistency in light soy sauce sat in the middle of the altar, surrounded by fruit and incense. Ah Ti came along, idle and hungry for a taste, and bit a bite out of the poor pig's right ear. The dent in the ear ruined the costly pig pate, making it unworthy of offering to the gods and ancestors, and Ah Ti was beaten brutally by Mei Su's oldest brother. When the rest of the family enjoyed the spoils of the delicious offerings the next day, Ah Ti wasn't given any food at all.
Mei Su gestured towards their ancestral altar, fixed high on a living room wall with red lights casting pink on the black and white pictures of their shriveled and aged, now dead family members. She told me that whenever she did badly in an exam at school, her parents made her kneel there and repent to her ancestors for making them lose face. Sometimes her father made a show of beating her when he saw her grades, but he was getting old and was tired of disciplining children.
We retreated to Mei Su's room to be free from the three or four children racing wildly around the hallway and living room. Here, she told me another family story that she had never told anyone outside her family.
Mei Su's big sister, Gu Gu, retarded from birth, was the mother of the oldest little girl in the family and the younger boy, Ah Ti. She had an unbearable secret.
Mei Su's oldest big brother, now in his thirties, had been forcing intercourse on Gu Gu since she was in sixth grade. Some nights, especially if there were people shouting in the streets or lightning and thunder, young Mei Su would creep to her parents' bedroom to sleep between her mother and father. Then, the elder brother would soundlessly, stealthily push his way into the girls' bedroom where Gu Gu gurgled and murmured in her sleep. Eyes half open with lust, he climbed onto his uncomprehending sister, muffled her mouth, and satisfied himself in dark dementia. Time after time, he spilled his desire and slipped away innocently, without guilt, leaving his sister squirming in a sticky puddle, often in pain, wondering what it was that was happening to her.
This thing, between brother and sister, went on for months, years. Mr. and Mrs. Su didn’t find out until Gu Mei's stomach swelled up. When the unmistakable signs of pregnancy showed on the poor sister, the same elder brother who had violated her now accused her of sleeping around with neighborhood boys. This seemed the only explanation, and much preferable to the possibility of incest, as far as the parents were concerned.
These two children of Gu Gu's were the only two who survived her many pregnancies, which often ended in miscarriages. Her parents did not hold her responsible for her actions; after all, she was retarded. They even tried to put her on the pill, but she spat them out secretly and got knocked up again. And again.
At some point, she did begin to sleep with neighborhood boys, and even married one or two of them. I found it difficult to imagine Gu Gu in traditional red garb in a Chinese wedding ceremony - the blank that was supposed to be the young groom was too hard to fill in. What did he look like? What was the expression on his face? Was he smart, stupid, desperate, ugly, deluded, in love?
At any rate, Gu Gu was currently single again and living in her parents' house, in a room of her own. There's a special bolt and lock on her door, and she alone holds the keys to it.
When you looked at her, Gu Gu's congenital condition was written all over her face. She was genuinely kind, rather intelligent if not entirely intelligible, but her slanted jaw and constant jerks of the neck and shoulders to her left side and the incomprehensible strings of guttural noises that she made all spelled dementia. I was unfortunately never entirely comfortable around her, partly because I couldn't understand what she said and partly because I wasn't sure how much she understood.
After Mei Su told me about what had transpired between her brother and Gu Gu in the past, I felt horrible around her two children too, eyeing them with a pitying kind of disbelief as we walked back into the living room. All I could think of was the illegal overlapping of family genes, the poor muffled girl under the sheets, under her elder brother's body.
Looking at the old-fashioned clock on the wall beside the Su ancestral altar, I realized I had stayed out too long after school and became anxious to leave Mei Su's house. As Sis walked about crookedly, starting a loud conversation with her mother, I said goodbye as politely as I could to everyone without seeming like I was fleeing. Stuffing my stockinged feet into my shoes, I shuffled through the garage as fast as I could. Just as I stepped into the street, however, I heard Mrs. Su's booming voice calling hey, wey, wait a minute, hey!
For some reason, I broke into a run.
I ran and ran and ran, away from the dark, dirty nightmarket neighborhood, from the mom with a natural loudspeaker built into her body, and the house full of my friend's redundant child-nieces, who I imagined were drooling profusely in my wake.
There was something frightening about the whole experience that made me want to escape, and as I fled my heart pounded as hard and as quickly as my feet on the asphalt. On the way home I almost slipped and fell in a dark alley littered with garbage and debris, and a mad old man with a violent look on his face lifted his cane to hit me as I passed, missing.
The next day Mei Su asked my why I ran away when her mother called me. I shrugged; I didn't know.
- Mom said that the louder she called you the faster you ran. She thinks you're very strange. She said she only remembered as you were leaving that you had never tasted any of her delicious homemade sticky rice dumplings. She wanted to give you some to bring home.
I felt like a fool. She had meant well and all I did was run. I hoped that I hadn’t offended Mrs. Su. I was also struck with a sudden craving for homemade dumplings (which nobody in my family knew how to make), and a vague sort of shame.
Yu-Han (Eugenia) Chao was born and grew up in
