Peeved (updated)

So it's morning and the subway is late, and I'm stressed out because I don't like it when errors eat in to the margin like that, however unplanned.

Ok who am I kidding. I don't leave margins.

Anyway, so the train is late and by the time an R arrives, it's so packed that half the people on the platform sort of give up and wait for the next one. I am about to give up too but see a tiny place to squeeze into at the last minute, and slide in right before the door closes.

Two stops into the crowded ride, the guy behind me mutters, "Don't lean on me."

I hadn't been leaning on him, though certainly I could have bumped or nudged into him with the sway of the subway. Leaning is what the man in the full velvet suit on my left was doing to the left side of my body. I was not leaning.

Years ago, on the shuttle from Grand Central to Times Square, two young girls had said the same thing to me, when I had somehow touched their arms. Two young girls, up to my shoulder in height, but I sprang back abashed as if their arms had been made of hot irons, and tears might have, MIGHT have sprang into my eyes and I might have stared at the subway ads for ESL classes as they became blurry through those POSSIBLE tears.

Anyway, that was years ago.

This time, last week, I turned and took a look at the guy. He was made of that sort of pale hardy fatness that, though it bestows him with curves, is undeniably masculin, like a rotund marble sculpture. He wore a large t-shirt the colour of dog poo in the spring time and I bet, I just bet, that he watched Tomb Raider (both) in the theatres and doesn't bring the plate to the kitchen at his mom's house after she brings him a plate of his favourite pie. And I bet he's been hurt a lot, too, and pretends not to feel it.

So I said to this broken but hardly unusual man: "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? I DIDN'T LEAN ON YOU, YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE."

Instantly I met the eye of a girl who looked up at me, and I was too ashamed to stop or to reflect, so I continued...

(To Be Updated tomorrow...)

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...to yell swear words at the guy who dared to accuse me of leaning. I held steady the gaze of the girl my age who was looking at me with interest, then I turned my head and surveyed the rest of the car, daring anyone, anyone at all to look me in the eyes.

"You leaned on me, I felt it," the guy said with a weird little smile, like a disaffected chortle, really.

"No I didn't you fucking asshole!"

"Yes, you did."

"@#*&#$&"

"Yes, you did."

"@*#&@$"

"Yes, you did, I felt it."

"No you didn't!"

"Don't tell me what I felt," he stipulated quite reasonably.

The thing about it is, I'm not very good at this sort of stuff. I know what I would have said now, because I have been thinking about it for a few days now. But in the heat of the moment, I was all feeling, no thinking.

"Look!" I shouted, pointing at the sliver of space between us as I backed away as much as I could without melding into the velvet suited man on my left.

"So?" the guy jeered.

"So how could I be leaning on you? Look at that!" I gestulated wildly at the space again.

"So what! I felt you leaning. I know what I felt," he countered.

To which I, brilliantly, responded, "No you don't, you @#$^@*#$."

We paused a little as the door opened and some people tumbled out and twice that number squeezed themselves in.

When the door closed, we resumed arguing seamlessly.

He was still adamant that I had leaned on him, repeating, "I know what I felt."

"WHHHHHYYYY would I lean on you?!" I shouted into the ceiling wildly.

He shrugged, "I don't know, but you did."

"No I didn't! It's a... a question of intent," I stammered. Then I immediately quieted down, horrified at the nonsense that had come out of my mouth. I was afraid that "intent", being half legalese, would result in the guy saying, "oh great, a fucking lawyer." And what would've been even worse is that it didn't even make sense to me how that assertion fit into the argument, and so I was afraid that everyone would snicker to themselves and think, "a fucking lawyer and her arguments are zany."

Later, I decided that I had meant to say that because I acknowledged bumping into him, which is unintentional. But he had accused me of leaning, which I consider to be an intentional activity, and therefore he had accused me of purposely touching him, and of course I did not do such a thing. Uh, something like that.

Anyway, at the time, I was horrified and to "fix it", I let loose a long string of expletives.

"Whatever, you leaned on me," the guy whispered triumphantly when I had finished cursing.

"Whatever, don't flatter yourself," I sneered, then turned my nose up at him literally to drive home the point, which was difficult to do since he taller than me. The rock and sway of the subway car lulled us back into silence, in which I stewed vehemently and then came upon a sudden fear that the guy worked at my firm. I imagined us walking side by side into our office building, then standing in a crowded elevator, and repeating the whole thing over again. I immediately felt sheepish and cast furtive glances into my memory to see if his face registered with any of those I'd seen at work.

Luckily, he got off two stops before me. I breathed a sigh of relief, but still stood quite haughtily, feeling kind of silly but not conceding fully to my idiocy.

A stylishly dressed young man who had been reading a daily tabloid moved to stand beside me in the still crowded subway car. He nodded at me and smiled.

"That guy..." he began.

"He's a fucking asshole!" I knee-jerked.

The stylish young man grinned, "he liked you."

"Wha?" I stuttered a bit before I mumbled something about him still being a fucking asshole, regardless.

The young man nodded knowingly.

Years ago, perhaps, this would have been charming to me. Or would have tickled my chewy girlish center. But these days, pre-coffee, post-graduation, mid-reas, mid-job, I am immune from the tickle.

I looked up at the young man without seeing him and demanded him to tell me the time.

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Epilogue

--
"You're mean!" my friend recently accused me in an email after having read the first part of this story.

Yeah, maybe. But on today's subway to work I definitely met someone much, much meaner. I was walking up a flight of stairs behind a woman in black leather, who looked fairly young from behind. Except she was painfully, painfully slow. I wrung my hands a bit dramatically behind her, then moved over to the stairway on the other side of the handrail and passed her.

When I was at the top of the stairs, I heard a man bleat, "You need to go to the gym."

"I have a broken leg," the black leather woman informed him, somewhat pathetically.

The man huffed and puffed past her. He was fat like humpty dumpty and wearing a little nylon backpack.

I waited for him to apologize or at the very least, look a little taken aback.

But instead he said, as he turned towards seventh ave., "Yeah well you should still go to the gym. Work out your other leg."

With my jaw-dropped, I turned back to the black leather woman, waiting for her deadly zinger, which of course should have been, "You're the one that should go to the gym, fat ass, it's not my fault you can't pass me on the stairs because you're too FAT-a-tat-tat!"

But she just looked back into my eyes with that same pathetic hang-dog look. I turned away quickly and ran towards 7th ave and followed the mean subway rider for half a block before I lost him in the midtown commuter shuffle.

Another Installation of Pictures on My Desktop

Concept show for Nicole, AKA Virtue, at Happy Ending. After several long hectic weeks of being, you know, a lawyer, in the middle (possibly beginning, *gulp*) of a Big Litigious Flurry, it is such a relief to become a "sweetheart", clothed and rushed around to make-up and hair and jewelery, nervous and tittering with a group of other sweethearts, barely 21, standing on your toes to swipe a peak at the fotogs. If I did not have this in my life I would be seriously unbalanced.



This is a dog laughing. I don't know where I got it from. I have mixed feelings about it.



This was taken at the Queens Blvd Motel. Remember the indie movie Vince makes in Entourage called Queen's Blvd, and it's all gritty? Yeah well. It sure is, it surrrre is. On my way to the location, my metrocard fell out of my jeans pocket and onto the snowy sidewalk, unnoticed. Then hours later on my way back to the subway, I found it. That probably made me feel more successful than it should have.



I remember doing a google image search for this and evidently I thought it important enough to save on my desktop. That is a lot of cash. When I was a kid I used to keep my coins in their separate denominations in an egg carton, and everyone once in a while I'd dump them all out on the floor and grab them by the handful and let them fall through my fingers, inspired by Scrooge McDuck in that show about those three duck brothers... what was it called?

Duck Tales!

I was never a regular watcher of the following cartoons: Duck Tales; Tail Spin; the one about the two chipmunks (NOT the one about the three chipmunks.. I watched that religiously well into middle school); Teddy Ruxspin (sp?); the one about those cats who wear jackets with a slice of pizza on their backs.

In addition to Alvin and the Chipmunks, I also watched these shows regularly: Jem; My Pet Monster; Inspector Gadget (though I hated Uncle Gadget); Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And sort of: Captain Planet and the Planeteers; Batman, The New Series, X-men, Pound Puppies, Carebears.

Sweater sweater

Sept. 16, 2006, Mandate of Heaven Spring 2007 Show, backstage. Maria catches me with a super shiny face and a faux mole ("fole").

My First Boyfriend --Epilogue

Hey, so I finished that long, long , long story, My First Boyfriend. The whole story is there, including the new part. Also, here below is JUST the new part. Trust, the strained metaphors and themes that I tried to make in this story are much more apparent if you read the whole thing from the start. Choose your own misadventure.

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My First Boyfriend: Epilogue

Seven years later, the two of us flew back to Beijing with two male companions in tow: my dad and the good-sport and big-hearted Edward, my six-year-old brother. We were poor but homesick and buoyed by a recent move from Winnipeg to Toronto and my dad's first job (as a post-graduate reseacher at the University of Toronto), we decided: enough, let's go home this summer.

On the plane, we happily and without furtiveness nor shame collected all of the small plastic containers that came with our meal trays, whether disposable or not, and stuffed them into my mom's handbag, to serve as holders of buttons, paper clips, and stray screws. We clapped our hands and batted our eyes with shy pleasure at the luxuries of flight.

Walking from the plane into the non-air conditioned airport, the heat was so overwhelming that one suspected it of being, actually, a fire. From the tarmac, it rushed towards us, we swallowed and blinked it into our bodies.

"It's hot!" Eddy whimpered.

"Is the air conditioning broken?" I asked.

But our voices got lost in the heat, and the words wilted in mid-air, sighed not unromantically, and fell dead limply onto the ground.

"Mom, dad?"

They were in another world. My father had been away for nine years. Leaving a country like Canada for nine years is very different from leaving a country like China for nine years, especially if that nine years spanned from 1984 to 1993 and included, sure, a notorious massacre, but also a slow and measured reconnect with the rest of the world. And telephones and colour TVs and the bleaching and tidy perforation of toilet paper. Sky scrapers, bad pop music, taxicabs and forced early retirement from state owned companies.

As children always do, we quickly blended into the new environment. We had our own take on it, and were possibly a little bit snobbish and uppity about the sorry state of public bathrooms in our new summer home, but we began to speak with the rolling accent of native Beijingers and we did what all the local kids do in the summer: take summer classes. Thus Eddy took: swimming, drawing, Chinese chess, kung fu. I took swimming, drawing, kung fu, and god knows what else my mother fit into my schedule. Someone lent us a Chinese video game console and we played American baseball on it. We adopted the mid-day nap habit and got used to not having hot water on tap, as well as the prescence of our nemesis, Duyi, our grandparents' housekeeper and a horrible cook, if not person.

Throughout the summer, a steady stream of visitors came to see us, bringing years' worth of personal histories of acquaintances that needed to be uploaded into my parents' specifically my mom's, consciousness. We visited all the new babies, the old people in their dark dusty apartments and memories. No one had gotten used to the idea of disposable packaging yet, and everyone's apartments in 1993 were overstuffed with colourful empty cardboard boxes with pictures of blenders, tape recorders, and televisions on the cover. In 1986, plastic bags did not exist, we brought our own reusable bags to the vegetable market. In 1993, we had not reached the point, psychologically, of a disposable society, though we had invited disposables into our homes. And so, collectively, as a country, for several years in the mid nineties, our apartments went through a form of constipation. We kept our crap in like nobody's business.

These visits were not simple. People expected us and anyone else who was returning from abroad to come home bearing exotic gifts, based on the fair assumption that we had been visiting a land of ...well, a fantasy land, full of luxuries and easy rewards that were thrust upon us like greatness upon Malvolio. It was true, we had wall to wall carpeting and a wild orgy of Transformers to play with. We had alamgated a wealth of furniture, comic books, and sports equipment from garage sales and dumpster diving. And while the source of our riches was a secret, had they known, they would have only said, "wow, what an amazing place you live in, that people would throw such treasures into the garbage!" And who could argue with that? It was true, one country was more comfortable than the other, as simple as a porridge tasting. But one thing they did not know, and we were also too proud to explain, was the peculiar feeling, in a capitalist society, of socio economic class differences.

So instead of trying to explain these depressing concepts, we and all other returning Chinese prepared suitcases full of small tokens of our new luxurious life, which we gave to our visitors, pushed into their reluctant, shy, desireful hands. Take it take it, it's nothing, don't make us bring it back to Canada!, we'd say, chiding them gently until they stop refusing us and left with a tall bottle of Pert Plus 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner, happily smoothing their flyaway hair down in anticipation.

The stoic Chinese archetype was firmly in place when we had left: don't complain, be generous, were some basic tenets. But people had changed when we were gone, and it felt that they had changed on us. A sort of betrayal like discovering that your child had turned into a teenager when you were out at work.

"I can never come back here," my dad muttered to himself. "I would be eaten alive by these new saavy business types."

And this was true. Our Chinese values had been preserved in Winnipeg for over half a dozen years while China lost its innocence. Even though the purpose of my dad leaving, in the government's eyes, was to pick up knowledge from abroad to apply back at home, even though they thought of my dad as an empty pod, sent out to fish for useful data, to bring back, what actually happened was that they had launched into the sky, via China Air, three Chinese from 1986, and now we'd returned, like time-travelers.

One night the phone rang for me.

"Hello?" I said skeptically.

"Hi, Ying Ying?" a deep smooth voice asked back.

It was First Boyfriend.

While I had left China somewhat precocious (I had a brief affair with an older boy in Shanghai as well, where we stayed for a few days before flying to Canada), I had morphed from the pre-whore six year old into the court jester who hung out with the popular alpha girls who were all at least a foot taller than me, wore dark red lipstick, and, it was rumoured, "had almost done It" on multiple occasions with older, badder boys from other schools. I read a lot of coming of age books and was also extremely proficient, intuitive even, at finding the raunchy sections in Alex's older sister's V.C. Andrews books, which he would steal from her bedroom and sneak into class so that we all huddled in a tight circle between classes, like a ring of hormones, eagerly waitng while I flipped through the book, scanning methodically for key words, until I'd present them with a passage that drew similies between legs and sissors and Mike Naggy would whoop and girls with painted fingernails would squeal in a mixture of delight and disgust. That was me at 13. Harmless and considering Christianity for all the wrong reasons (instant friends, a sense of immediate belonging, unquestioned acceptance). A sharp eye to help the life quest of assimilation, a sharp tongue to scold my family with when we veered to far from that goal. Happy, not particularly ambitious beyond fitting in, and rather simple minded. My phone calls to boys consisted of: hanging up, or asking yes/no questions on behalf of girls with vested interests. I was in love with Luke Perry, though if Jason Priestly insisted, I would probably be able to find him charming as well.

So, sprawled across my grandma's bed, reunited with a forgotten ex, I was reminded of the girl that I had been, the one that snuck up stairs and insisted on partial nudity. And then I became, a little bit, like her, teasing flirtatious, bold and of course, all with a requisite glimmer of dismissiveness, the assessory of every alpha female. I told him all about my classes at the Children's Center, about my summer in Beijing, having to go back in September to, casually, Canada. For a few minutes, I became the girl that I would have been had I not left. I ended the phone call when I got bored with it, refusing an invitation to meet-up since I had class all day, and also because deep down I was probably not ready to meet him and be an alpha female, face-to-sucking-face.

The next day I walked out of art class with a rolled-up painting, probably done in bird's eye view to avoid dealing with angles and proportions.

Sitting outside on a bench was a tall tanned boy. He had the easy, androgenous manner of a man who never had to vie for the attention or approval of women, so much so that he never had to prove his masculinity, and was therefore at ease with his androgeny.

"Ying?" First Boyfriend smiled.

"Huh?"

"Ying? I'm First Boyfriend. You said you take classes here on the phone yesterday."

I looked at his face and saw nothing but what I later learned from Mike Jones, who would be my boyfriend on my second visit back to China five years later, was called a 'pube mustache.' That is, a small sparsely and soft haired concoction arranged earnestly above his upper lip. As if god had been proofreading his creations and paused at First Boyfriend's nose, not knowing whether to keep it or change it, and had in His deliberation, squiggled a faint absentminded but thoughtful line below it. For some reason, it grossed me out.

"Uh yeah, yeah I do," I licked my lips nervously and squinted at something in the distance.

"Well, what are you doing now?"

Certainly not up no stairs, I thought.

"I have to go home, for lunch," I stipulated, relieved that such solid reasons existed. Though they were never an obstacle for us when we were six.

"Where are YOU going?" I asked suggestively.

"Oh I'm going to my Grandma's."

He then revealed that our destinations were not very far from each other at all, and that we would hence walk towards the same bus stop and indeed take the same bus.

We stuffed ourselves into a crowded bus. Chinese buses are not always crowded, but when they are it is a marvel to see how much we want to get to our destinations and how little we care about our personal space. We believe that another person can surely fit into any space with the same happy tenacity that competitive eaters believe that another hotdog can fit into their stomaches.

Up to this point in this long winded story of First Boyfriend, I have been portrayed as a rather reasonable person. Some of my actions may have been childish, but they were always understandable.

Alas, on that crowded bus reunited with First Boyfriend, both of us squished between soft-fleshed men and sun burnt old ladies, barely within each other's peripheral vision, I, gripping tightly my roll of art, went a little mad.

First, I deliberately missed my stop. I did not want First Boyfriend to find out where I lived. My heartbeat increased expoentially as our full bus rumbled farther and farther away from my home and towards, I suppose, First Boyfriend's grandma's home.

At some point, the door opened, and I unpredictably (to myself) wiggled out the backdoor. I looked back and saw First Boyfriend slowly react to my leave and then, twisting his open mouth a little, try to wiggle out after me.

That was my last image of him.

I ran blindly and with a low posture aligning the top of my head with a line of shrubs for no perceivable benefit.

An apartment complex beckoned me into its dark cavernous self and I scrambled inside like a boy or a good soldier. A flight of dark, wide, cement steps greeted me. Outside in the apartment courtyard I could hear First Boyfriend calling my name. I ran up the stairs.

Up and up I went until I got into the attic where strangers stored broken wicker and exta sets of everything. I worked myself into the middle of the attic in a low crouch and listened for footsteps.

"Ying Ying!" and then he tried my nickname, "Bei Bei!"

I looked about wildly. He wasn't giving up as easy as I thought he would. Didn't he know that I had changed, that we could not play the old romance anymore, that my focus and challenge was assimilation, not rebellion? That I had spent the last seven years lying about my parents to the world, rather than lying to my parents about the world? That I did not have the luxury of fitting in so how could I take the next step to stand out? (This, incidentally, is why I think some second generation kids are so boring. Because they got stuck at this step and then sort of got comfortable here.)

I formulated a plan of action. I took off my shirt and put it back on inside out. Then I rolled up my long shorts to make cuffs. I took off my socks. And lastly I took the elastic on my rolled up painting and used it to put my hair up in a pony tail. I took off my hat.

When I had finished doing everything I could think of to disguise myself as a totally different person, I realized that I needed to pee.

Really bad.

The apartment at the top of the stairs had its door open, and I could hear the sound of vegetables being stir fryed, chairs being pushed back and forth around a table, the desparate last round of a video game before its player would be forced to stop to eat lunch.

I tiptoed into the familiar setting, quickly located the bathroom, and slipped in without notice. I peed, washed my hands, dried them instinctively on the damp towel hanging beside the sink, and slipped back out, feeling a slight sadness as if leaving my own home for the last time. I had spent seven years trying, with spotty success, to fit into a rubric on the other side of the world, yet here, where I was born, I could slide seamlessly in and of a complete stranger's home in less than seven minutes.

It was not something that I was old enough to articulate, so I ran out of that building, back into the midday sun, sprinting home with tunnel vision, washing myself of my past.

Strangers are Strange

Strange men have been approaching me with increased regularity in the last couple of weeks. I think this is because instead of a mature and sophisticated autumn, New York is experiencing a rainy Spring for the second time this year. And as everyone knows, rain -> moist soil -> fertile conditions -> strange men approaching women with ill-conceived strategies. For example:

1. I was walking to Union Square from Kung Fu class, around Broadway and West 3rd.

A man comes up from behind me and starts talking as if I didn't have my ipod on. I remove one ear bud.

"Yes?"

"Hi, excuse me. I was riding by on a bus and I saw you and just had to talk to you," he said boastfully. He was so conscious of his daring whimsy that this consciousness made him proud and, I would argue, de-sincerefied whatever sincerety lay in his initial impulse to get off the bus and approach me.

"Aha," I nodded unreactively.

He told me his name, I told him mine, and we shook on it.

"So where are you from?" he asked.

I hate this inevitable question. I never know how to answer it. Like, where I live in the city? Where I lived before moving to the city? Where I spent the longest period of my life? Where I was born? My ethnicity? Plus, who cares?

Of course, it's easy to deduce that he meant my ethnicity. Because that would not be the second fact that he would request from a white girl he just meets. I decide to cut to the chase instead of tracing back my zip codes just to "teach him a lesson."

"Um, I'm from China."

I don't know why, but all of these guys that approach me on the street for conversation think that I'm a fob (Fresh Off the Boat). I think it emboldens them to believe that I am fascinated with foreign facial structures and unsure of my visa status after my F1 student visa runs out. And that if I were to tell them off, I wouldn't be able to do it bitingly in English, and instead would offer a string of delightful condemnations in an exotic foreign language that, even if overheard, would not be understood by most passersby.

"Oh! Hm... where in China?"

I also hate this question in the strange-man-on-the-street context. More often than not, the man is a China-phile, and will start speaking Chinese to me in a winky wink way.

Bored with this litany, I assault him with a barrage of questions. He works at the UN. He used to live in the city but now lives in Jersey. He knows my Kung Fu Shifu. (And in one of a series of unwise 'moves', criticizes him.)

Then he stops dead in his tracks with his body turned towards me, reaches one hand out to touch my arm and says in what he believes is a magenta-toned masculine chiding way, "But enough about me. What about YOU???? I want to know All About You!"

So seriously, I mean honestly, please please tell me, right here, right now, do I look THAT insecure? Do I? Am I doing something with the pleat of my pants, the angle of my arms, the size of my contact lens, that just screams, "Please, please look at me and recognize me a little bit, because I feel like a little little crumb of a ghost in the gigantic cookie of society. I have three beautiful sisters that do not give me a fighting chance to be appreciated in any way and when I go to a party my subway car is actually a pumpkin and there is soot on my heart."

Because that's how this and too many other strange men treat me. What makes them decide on this "angle"?

Anyway, I don't even remember what happened next. He asked me boring questions, I worked in the fact that I have a boyfriend, who I was meeting, like, right now, at Union Square.

He was undeterred.

"Can I have your number?" he asks.

"Um..."

Eyeing the sweet proximity of Whole Foods, my alleged meeting place for my alleged date... I decide that the fastest way to get rid of him is to humour him.

Pause. Wait I know I sound mean. But look, I'm not this rude to all strangers. My mom told my older cousin a valuable thing once, that I overheard when I was a kid and remember often: Neice, you are a good person. Quality. So when someone sees that in you, well, whoever they are, whatever sort of loser they are, they did at least one good thing, they recognized that you are special. So even if you are not interested, there is no reason to be cruel. No one can be all bad if they think you're good.

But this guy was boring and totally offended me when he talked trash about my Kung Fu teacher.

"You can give me your number," I decide.

He gives me his number, I put it in my phone, press to Save.

Before I even flip close the phone, he starts to annoy me yet again.

"So, so give me a reason to come here," he moves his eyes around to show that "here" means Union Square.

"I used to come here all the time, but now that I've moved [back in with mother, I add in my head], I don't come here as much. So give me a reason to come here."

What?! This guy needs to take a class on whatever the hell he's doing to me. Because he thinks that presenting himself to me as a challenge will work me up into an eager ...haha, beaver. It's like parents telling their kids who hate brushing teeth, "I bet you can't do it for a whooole minute!" And the little suckers brush for 2 and yell downstairs to you through foamed mouths that you are wrong and that they did it for 3.

I smile and nod excitedly, simply because I could feel that the end of our interactions was nigh. He looked very satisfied with himself.

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I will chronicle the rest of the incidents eventually. Sorry for the lag in posts. Will explain shortly.