Work Text:
You make my heart 乱七八糟
She tugged at the collar of her qípáo, her neck flushed and prone. She was lovely the way sharp things are lovely: she made your own thoughts draw blood. Outside, you and her were sitting cross-legged on a lawn too green to be real, or maybe too real to be green, you couldn’t tell. The sky above was a breath of red and it was all the light you needed. Sharp things were their own light, their own built-in warnings. Right now you were surrounded by warnings: a bird somewhere punishing the summer air with its shriek, the allergy welts welding your legs to the maybe-real lawn, the way her bangs are slanting across her forehead, hair-sprayed into a blade. And all you wanted to do was reach out and part them and reveal the center of her forehead, just above where her eyes met, the perfect stage for a kiss. Because you’d want it to be a performance. Daisy loved to perform. But you were never going to be her audience. Above, the clouds thin and glow, scripting gold against the sky.
“Hóngbāo,” Daisy says, laughing with her tongue out. Red envelopes. And she’s right, the sky is burning like an omen, and she's wetting her tongue in its glow. The sky may look like money, but Daisy’s the one who sounds like it. Her voice, it sounds like money. She sounds like money. And right now, I imagine what we look like. Money girls under a moneyed sky, gold and red and breathing as hard as I am. I could do it now. Kiss her on her money mouth, feel her lips as they warm against mine, as they hitch on mine and our fingers drift together and apart, the way I imagine Chang’E and her lover always did. I forgot her lover’s name. What mattered most to me was that Chang’E was always beautiful and that she never died. That even when she had to erase herself from the sky every morning, the moon scrubbing itself off the memory of the day, she was born again every night something higher, something wholer.
I don’t believe in 一见钟情
My mother always said that people wear their past lives. That they shift beneath our skin like bones, as much our present as our blood. As if our lives, across time, are not separate but merely phases of a single moment. A single moment: when you walked by my locker wearing a t-shirt with some K-drama star printed on it, Lee Min-ho or maybe Kim Woo-bin, cocked hair and the hardened clay features of a Shanghai jazz singer, circa 1920. Basically, the crushed-leaf scent of your hair makes my thoughts skip time. I guess I could have started a conversation, something about how I’ve seen Boys over Flowers three times, how Kim Woo-bin looks in a pinstripe suit: tallish.
But the concept of 一见钟情? I don’t believe in it. I don’t believe in it the way I don’t believe my stepfather will ever play a game of golf with me, even though he promises, even though he ran over my golf bag with his bloated teal Honda SUV, an accident that he apologized for by buying me 35-dollar Oolong tea bags, which I hate, not because he’s a white guy buying 35-dollar Oolong tea bags, but because I hate Oolong. It’s bitter. It reminds of tasting the bottom of a pool. I don’t believe in 一见钟情 the way I don’t believe I’d ever be able to love Lee Min-ho the way you love Lee Min-ho, that sweet-sickness in your stomach, the bellyache of loving someone so hard their face on a screen makes the heat in your cheeks rise like a fever. I don’t believe in it the way you don’t believe you could be anything but a fool, a beautiful little fool.
Today in class you raised your hand at the same time a boy did - a white boy - and the teacher called on you first, the boy’s eyes glinting. But it wasn’t your name, it was the name of some other girl with a chink face and long black hair, and I’ve always found the word chink to be funny. It means weakness, as in a chink in the armor. Your eyes when you smile: no pupils, no whites, just darkness. We pretend this doesn’t bother us, that our eyes become indiscernible, all shadow and hood. Not quite there. That’s how I’d describe you, the first moment I saw you: not quite there. I know you think we’re nothing to be read. But Daisy, I knew you before I saw you. But Daisy, I saw you.
This is when I’m supposed to tell you一路平安
At least you didn’t meet him at a military base, the way our mothers met our fathers. Our mothers never told us they made gruel out of American cigarette ash, made stew out of boot heels. They didn’t have to. We read about it in the history books later: Korea and Vietnam and Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines. Button-up boys and their glistening medals, American planes overhead, the bombs that our mothers mistook for a father’s fists. In Taiwan, American planes flew every day over Taipei and landed every night in Yilan, and years later our mothers took jobs in America, took calls from men who asked them where their accents were from, as if it were possible to unpin language from its body.
I flew over there, he said, and by over he means literally. The price of being Japan’s model colony: one bomb, then another, then another. The price of being on the wrong side of the Pacific War: everything our mothers left behind. Our mothers, left behind. They left before everyone realized: that the Americans weren't there to save them, they were there to take them. It wasn't liberation, it was transaction: comfort women, still chained and naked, mouths smothered in ash, bought and sold from one man to another. Comfort women: is there no greater irony?
Daisy, our mothers playing mahjong in the next room are just bodies unpinned from their language. Ghosting themselves deeper into the night.
Daisy, when we learned about World War II, when did you realize that the enemy was you? That all those beautiful boys were marching to claim you? Our mothers’ brothers were enslaved into the Japanese army, beautiful boys marching to be claimed, already claimed. Their enemy’s enemy was still their enemy. Our mothers slicked their brothers’ hair back, watched their brothers go. They said I love you, they said I miss you. But this is what they really wanted to say: I want to kill you before they can get to you.
What am I trying to say, Daisy? You love a guǐzi, a white man. I guess what I’m trying to say, Daisy, is that no one can agree on the translation of guǐzi. It means devil or ghost. Devil or ghost. Daisy, is he a devil or a ghost, the killer or the killed, the soldier or his wife? Daisy:
Is he one of us, or is he the one who made us?