Unintelligible chimes

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I never know where to set my stories—I’m always debating between New York and Taipei—but one thing I’ve decided on lately is to be confident in writing Chinese and Chinese American characters. I don’t know how to explain it on paper, however, because for me it’s more a feeling than any cultural signifier.

I’m Chinese.

Sometimes that means very little to me. Sometimes I wonder what exactly I’m trying to hide when it’s written right there all over my face.

*

G shows me a padded blue Chinese jacket she’s taken out of her closet.

“No,” I say right away.

She says, “Interesting. You don’t wear Asian styles, just like I won’t wear overtly Italian styles. Otherwise, I’d look like a mobster moll.”

I nod, but I’m agitated, growing impatient. She is cleaning out her closets and wants me to inherit some of her favorite items. There are clothes everywhere, many of them I would not wear. At one point she holds a dress up to my frame and says, “That’s sexy.” It is not, and I tell her gently that I’m “not feeling it.” Besides, I add, I am not interested in sexy, just comfortable and stylish. She looks back at me in surprise and confusion. We both are so similar—but she wants to be noticed everywhere, and despite her protests at being viewed as a mere sex object, she enjoys, understands, and desires the admiring male gaze.

From the bowels of her closet, she mumbles, “Dolce and Gabbana,” sighing over a dress that she thinks looks cartoonish on her these days.

*

The blue Chinese jacket had been foisted on her by her Chinese boyfriend. He fattens her up whenever he’s in town, and introduces her around as his wife; he is an emperor to her, and she does her best to defy him but is not altogether successful.

That she even showed me the jacket unnerves me. “I’m self-conscious enough as it is,” I tell her. “I don’t need more dirty old men thinking I’m some China doll.”

*

Years ago at a company party, J’s colleague drunkenly high-fived him: “I hear you have an Asian girlfriend. You’re living every guy’s dream!”

There was something else about a schoolgirl’s uniform, but I’ve blanked out the exact wording.

J, who is usually quick to cut down an idiotic remark, was speechless for once.

It’s like when this Indian American girl from dance class whispered to me during dinner last December: “I’m not racist, but Jews are greedy motherfuckers.” I could only blink back at her, as did our other companion. Finally, this third party and I continued our conversation about Holocaust-themed novels; she was urging me to read Thomas Bernhard, and I was urging her to read David Albahari. Later that night, I asked J why the girl from dance class would say such a thing. “And how the hell does one respond to something like that?” I demanded.

“You say: ‘Color me wrong, but that sounds pretty racist to me!’”

*

The IT arsehead who hit on me last October had said: “I once had a Chinese roommate. She cooked for me all the time. Will you cook for me?”

“Not if you want to live,” I answered.

Many men confide something similar to me: I once had a Chinese roommate, or I once had a Chinese girlfriend.

I smile politely but don’t encourage that line of the conversation. What am I supposed to say? “Good for you”? There is a way to deal with this kind of thing humorously and intelligently, but my nerves are often so frayed that I just want to kick the guy’s ass.

*

I laugh loudly in delight, and once, a beautiful Italian man said to me, “I love the chime in a Chinese laugh.”

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Filed under NYC, conversations, daily, pet peeves, puzzles, what a weirdo

Tags: random gobbledygook, Sunday musings