MAN UP

There is no man on this planet I adore more than my younger brother Beavis. He is my hero. He is funny, smart and twisted to such a perfectly balanced equilibrium that there must be a higher power involved with his creation. I understand Angelina Jolie’s fraternal worship (that runs so strongly that the casual observer interprets it as incestual) and it never struck me as gross because I understand, fundamentally, how you can adore someone so strongly, so completely and yet not feel a moment’s lust for them. Even my own mother says, “I know better than to get you started on [Beavis]. You just worship him.” He is most certainly my favorite person ever.

My father’s mother fell and broke her hip at the end of February and we were made aware of her hospitalization the day before my Beavis’s birthday (March 3rd being his birthday). Being that Beavis lives in Los Angeles and my grandmother lives in San Francisco, he felt prudent to go to the hospital and visit her. After all, she is in her mid nineties and this sort of injury is a lot to recover from at any age. The morning of his 26th birthday, he woke up early and called our stepmother (or at least I think she’s my stepmother; the last few times I saw my father, he was wearing a wedding band but there was never any mention of whether or not they were ever formally betrothed).

Frankly, I find her detestable and the idea that he was able to stomach a conversation with a woman who makes up stories about his flagrant racism to drive a wedge between he and my father, already declares Beavis infinitely more patient and benevolent than I. So, he spoke with the stepbitch to get my father’s new cellphone number and was forced to listen to yet another barrage of lies about how she keeps trying to convince my father to get back in touch with us. (Perhaps not coincidentally, my mother has recently revealed to lawyers the fact that she uncovered evidence that a woman who looks remarkably like the stepbitch has been using my mother’s identity to access joint accounts with my father.)

Beavis was subjected to an extensive “I’ve been trying to get your father to embrace you guys” lecture in order to get my father’s new cellphone number. Not surprisingly (for Beavis) that did not deter him entirely from the task at hand; seeing grandma in San Francisco. He then called our father.

My father, being my father, wept and wallowed in a good hour’s worth of “Woe is me because I’m a terrible father.” My father indulged in a mea culpa for close to an hour and failed to notice two things: 1. Beavis was merely calling for directions and 2. Not once in almost an hour of blathering about what a terrible father he is did our father once ask anything even remotely resembling, “How are you?”. The whole time Beavis neither engaged in a fight (which I would have done) nor falsly condoned my father’s self-indulgence. Beavis is a pillar of stoic masculinity and well-articulated honor in spite of the example our father sets.

Once again our father missed the whole piece about how our ailing grandmother is not about him.

“All I wanted was directions and as he crying all I can think is, ‘Man up. This isn’t about you.’” And in his succinct commentary, Beavis managed to encapsulate the entirety of my issues with our father; our father needs to “man up.” Frankly, for all my verbosity, I would never be capable of such a crystalline and pure description of the issue at hand. Consequently, I’m going to steal my brother’s usage of “man up.”

I need to man up.

Z has been making himself present in my world and so I finally decided to reach out to him. He is aggressive about meeting me more than half way and I adore his company. When I am with him, I am want for nothing and he has no qualms about fighting hell or high water to be with me.

Friday (3/23), I finally called Z.

“Do you want to speak English?” I asked as he uses, “Speak English” in lieu of “your [my] company.” (I have been assured by all my Chinese girlfriends that the custom is to not be too outright as to scare off a woman and he’s using “speak English” not literally but metaphorically.)

“Yes,” he said so quickly I barely finished my sentence.

“Ji dian?” [“What time?”] I asked.

“19 o’clock.” Z answered with the Chinese typical military time of 7.

“Okay.”

“I will meet you at the East gate.” Z arranged to meet me at my gate despite the fact that it’s now light out at 7 at night and his gym is literally across the street from my front gate.

“Okay. Bye-bye”

“Bye-bye”

As we hung up, I looked at my watch and realized it was 5 minutes to 7.

“Shit!” I muttered as I threw off my gym clothes (I had just gotten back) and tried to find something clean to put on.

Five minutes later, Z was escorting me to the gym and he was very happy.

As we ascended to the dance studio space, I was greeted with the large group of kids learning Tae Kwon Do. It was such a lovely surprise to see the studio filled with students and there was barely a space to sit down. Z got me a seat and then some water and I watched the adorable, fearless 4 year olds learn how to fight.

Once the kids were finished with their classes, Z and I had dinner and rehashed a bit of what when wrong in our relationship. We had a really good clarification session and Z suddenly discovered he was in the mood to celebrate.

The next thing I knew he was calling his friends up and we were in a cab going to a club. In the cab was the other primary school gym teacher and it was really cool to see him out of his usual stern-teacher mode. I was shown that he’s a really fun 20-something with a great sense of humor and a very laid back nature. Frankly, I wanted to pat him on his lovely little head and then set him up with one of my girls.

In the cab, Z returned to being very comfortable touching me and it just felt natural. There was no hesitation and there was no weirdness. It is so rare that a man can touch me without me having to over-think it. When Z touches me, it just feels like the way things are supposed to be and in the back of the cab, with his hand on my knee, it suddenly occurred to me how unbelievably stable the good times between us are. There is nothing off kilter and nothing askew. And, I started wondering if things could really be this easy or if I was fooling myself in thinking such an on-paper-doomed-relationship could be easy.

“Where is the problem?” I started to wonder.

We finally got to the club and Z and the other gym teacher made it to our table first. At our table was another teacher from school and her friend. Seeing the way the friend lit up at seeing Z, it was clear she knew him and had designs on him. Then she saw me and the way her face fell, I didn’t need to know Chinese to know that the things she started saying to the female teacher as she gesticulated towards me and glancing at Z.

The friend had one final, frustrated outburst. The female teacher said, “Sorry” to her friend and shrugged. The friend then decided to do what girls in that situation tend to do; she got very, very drunk very, very quickly.

At first, she used her drunken state as an excuse to be dependent on Z. Z wasn’t having it and maintained some seriously clear boundaries. Considering his behavior with her, he knew exactly what was going on but wasn’t remotely interested.

To be honest, the friend is such a beautiful, petite, well-coifed little club girl that I was not even remotely threatened. She is confident in her desirability the way mid-20’s beautiful women tend to be. She doesn’t look LIKE an anime hero; she looks like she’s been lifted straight from an anime book without any translation to real life. The bottom line is that she’s the antithesis of me.

I am confident in my sexuality and I don’t really care all that much about whether or not large groups of men find me attractive. In fact, instead of feeding off being adored by large groups of men, I am unnerved by it. I have hard and fast lines about what I need and I am what I am. Unlike the friend, I am not good at maintaining facades to the detriment of my own well-being.
In other words, someone interested in doing business with her would, most likely not be interested in doing business with me. I’ve always found it strange to be threatened by entities wholly separate from one’s self as a set of needs that far from what I provide reveal something that was certainly never going to need me. She is wholly separate from me. Z was free to choose and he very clearly chose me.

Instead of paying her any mind, he tried to show me lots of club games the Chinese play like a dancing/drinking version of rock/paper/scissor. I am terrible at statistical games and so I kept fucking it up. I’m such a loser unable to learn anything statistical but, whatever, we were having a good time.

As Z and I were busy talking, being silly and playing, the friend was getting more and more drunk and within the first hour of being there, she had her first serious trip to the restroom to rescue her liver.

When she returned and at the suggestion of the female teacher, we started playing various games involving passing things from mouth to mouth aka ‘Suck and Blow.’ Before we played, I made sure the friend had another drink of alcohol to kill any of the germs and ate some pineapple to clean her mouth.

Essentially, we started with slices of fruit and the friend place herself between Z and the other boy gym teacher leaving me on the other side of Z and flanked by the female teacher. The friend took the piece of watermelon from the other gym teacher and proceeded to eat most of it, leaving only a small slice sticking out from her lips, forcing Z to kiss her or drink. Z got the fruit and then passed to me. I passed it to the other female teacher and she passed it back to the other gym teacher. It should be noted that it became the responsibility of the other three people not passing the fruit to shove the heads of the two passing the fruit together. It also became a point of serious fascination for everyone else in the club to watch the Western girl kiss the Chinese girl. Even the military guards placed around the club to deter fights found reasons to stop by and watch.

Soon it was clear that the friend was taking every opportunity to kiss Z but as a girl raised in bars and on Western snogging, I was not threatened by her actions. Drunken bar activity is drunken bar activity and kissing seems to be par for the course. Z, however, was becoming uncomfortable with her drunken antics and ended up switching places with the other female teacher. In other words, Z actively chose kissing a man over kissing another woman. I must say, I’ve never had a man go gay FOR me.

Upon being flagrantly rejected, the friend proceeded to down a few more and then do everything she could to make out with the fellow gym teacher. The fellow gym teacher was clear on what was going on and so he actually took to holding her face so that she couldn’t stick her tongue down his throat. Frankly, it was painful to see the scene she was making.

We closed out the club with our antics and the friend really started give to the fellow gym teacher the full court press… between trips to the vomitorium. The fellow gym teacher was very well behaved and he took care of her while maintaining some levels of propriety.

While we were walking from the club to the late night restaurant for some nourishment before bed, the friend turned from the fellow gym teacher and started yelling at Z. It was clear what she was telling him despite the fact that I don’t understand Chinese. I never thought I’d hear how much someone would rue the day he failed to pick her being yelled at full volume in the middle of a deserted street in the middle of Mainland China at 3:30 in the morning. Then she turned to me to warn me that nothing but bad things would come of the two of us before she stumbled off, laughing into the hesitant arms of the fellow gym teacher. And, out of respect, I feel not an ounce of pity towards the girl. Frankly, who hasn’t been in her place (at least in their head if not literally drunk and yelling in the middle of the street) and the last thing you want is pity. All I could think was, “Yeah, it sucks to be there but you’ll get through and be just fine... just like the rest of us.”

Immediately, the female teacher turned the yelling into a joke and Z tried to explain her yelling as, “Drunk words.”

“Zhe do. Ren ren renshi ‘drunk words.’ Mei yi sa.” [“I know. Everyone knows ‘drunk words.’ They don’t mean anything.”] I explained.

We then went on to be silly and play-stalk the fellow gym teacher and the friend as we continued our long walk to get some food. It was a lot of fun to be so silly and it occurred to me how little 20-something shenanigans exist in my life. Not that I have any desire to flood my life with such insanity but it is nice to leave my 35+ group of friends and cut loose a little every once and a while.

As we ascended stairs to the late-night restaurant for dim sum, the heavy weight of anxiety started to settle over me. Being such an incongruous emotion, I found myself a little more sober than my blood alcohol would imply. Regardless, Z was taking every opportunity to care for me and make sure I didn’t hurt myself going up the marble stairs while the friend drunkenly ran up the stairs to make her fifth or sixth trip to the restroom to boot.

Z held my elbow as we made our way to the table as my exhaustion was making me appear more drunk than I was. As we got to the table, he put me in the window seat on the left side of the table so that I could have a nice view and so that I wouldn't be bumping anyone with my left-handed chopsticks.

Being that it was 4 am, sleepiness was beginning to take over and, frankly, I have less control over “sleepy” than “drunk.” As I slouched over the table, watching everyone speak Chinese, Z placed his arm on the back of my chair and gently rested his fingertips on my shoulder. The two teachers and Z spoke about a variety of things, including the friend during the times that she would disappear to the bathroom. For my part, I could just listen and try to understand.

Every once and a while, Z and his friends would stop talking and try to explain the more complicated bits in English. It was very nice and as I thought, “I very much like this and wouldn’t mind this being the sum of the quiet social moments in my life” the anxiety that had settled in around me started to seep into my bones and grow.

Every time Z touched me, the comfort and ease I felt reflexively seemed to amplify the anxiety that was steadily growing.

When we left, the fellow gym teacher and Z and I all piled into a cab and in order to not pass out from the exhaustion, I opened a window for some air.

“You okay?” Z asked concerned from the front seat as the fellow gym teacher next to me reached out to touch my shoulder.

Sleepily, I nodded. “Yes, I’m just tired.”

The echoing silence following my statement made it clear they had no idea what “tired” meant.

“Very sleepy.” I clarified as I know they know what “very” and “sleep” means and for the Mandarin mindset, it seems to be the easiest leap to make from my behavior to the fact that I was exhausted and not so drunk I was about to vomit.

They both thought “sleepy” was a cute word and repeated it, laughing.

Z made sure that the taxi dropped us off by my front gate and the boys saw me to the compound, making sure the military guards knew I was there before leaving me. The next thing I knew, I was in bed about to pass out.

The next morning, I was reflecting upon the night we spent and I was definitely freaked out. I didn’t quite understand why I was so unsettled by loving Z and the fact that he clearly loves me. We’ve had what is tantamount to our first fight (he fights like I do; simply going away until he’s sorted things out) and now I’m completely freaked out. The love I have for him, while not as shiny as it was at the very beginning is definitely stronger than it had been. Consequently, I was having a very hard time sorting out why my flight reflex was screaming, “NO! RUN!”

I spent the day in a very weird space and ended the day the way I ended my days as a little girl. When I was little, bedtime was always the time I would always confess to my mom whatever it was that was bugging me. The thought of going to bed without having talked to her left me feeling hollow and alone. So, I called her.

I blathered on and on at her about what was going on and most importantly about this newfound resistance I was chaffing against. She said something about “chasing a mistress” and then I realized that was it.

I’m not going to start off chasing a mistress with Z. I’ve always chased a mistress before. My own father couldn’t love me unconditionally and so I’ve recreated that with every man I’ve ever been with. I don’t understand what it looks like to be loved by a man without competition and so I’ve only ever loved men with one foot out the door. I date men too old for me because I’m supposed to be the reckless, irresponsible one. It’s expected of me to fuck up those relationships. I fall in love with men my own age who are in torn between me and another woman. I’ve never loved anyone without some ready-made excuse as to why it would fail.

Z isn’t interested in anyone but me and to be totally honest the other men all fall into the category of having a ready-made excuse for failure. Yeah, we’re from different cultures but we overlap in so many ways and we’re both fairly amenable to tolerating cultural differences that I’m not scared by the difference. I’m terrified of the notion that I’ve got no one to blame if this relationship goes belly up but us. I know that love isn’t always enough but I’m terrified to have that proven to me in the flesh.

I explained all of this to the Jude and she said the only thing she could, “I wish I knew what to tell you but I don’t. You’re right. It is a big responsibility to love and it is scary.” In that moment I realized that though my father never loved me unconditionally my mother does. She’s wise, kind and she adores me. We’ve got a pretty damned good friendship and so maybe there’s hope for me.

“No, this is where you tell me to man up. I need to man up. I have a great guy, he loves me and my problem is that he’s not interested in other women. Man up.”

To that, the Jude just laughed knowing I had plagiarized Beavis’s phrase of the moment.