Li Ang: The Lost Garden

After sleeping away more days than I could count, I began to feel a hint of dizziness and nausea. It could have been a result of too much sleep, but it could also have been a terrifying sign that a life really was growing inside me. I didn’t bother to find out. I was constantly reminded, though in a dizzying, delayed fashion, that keeping the life inside meant that I’d naturally have an unbroken connection with Lin. He was not irresponsible; put differently, he would consider taking care of a child a simple enough task that he could not possibly refuse.

So what I needed was to wait, to wait for the child to be born. In fact I didn’t even have to wait that long. It would only take a while before the growth of the baby became visible and he’d come forward to claim responsibility. A set amount of child support was without question; he might even lend his last name to the child.

In my hazy state, in which everything seemed to progress with dull slowness, I was actually thinking that I finally understood why women desire or believe that a child can keep a relationship together. Maybe that is the last assurance we women can have. But even when I was most addled and confused, I could sense hidden somewhere in a secret corner a different, clearheaded self declaring unequivocally in a determined voice that:

This is absolutely not what I have in mind.

A week passed before Zhu Yinghong picked up the phone; through the operator and a personal assistant, she reached a clearly apprehensive Teddy Chang and told him succinctly that she wanted to see him.

They met at their usual place around noon, a small coffee shop in an alley, which was not a trendy place for fashionable Taipei residents. Devoid of taste and special character, it was more a community haunt selling simple set meals and sandwiches. She had spotted the place when Teddy took her to a nearby hotel in the past, and had been in the habit of arriving early and sitting down for a cup of coffee. The shop hence became a midway station on her way to a tryst with Teddy, a node between her office and the hotel, like a turning point, where she switched from one need to another.

Teddy was slightly late when he saw her smoking in a corner. She looked visibly thinner and her deep-set eyes seemed gloomier, darker and more shadowy, as if her unease could send her fleeing at any moment. He asked her how she was doing and why she wanted to see him. Her eyes turned misty, but he wasn’t sure whether that was caused by the smoke from the infrequent cigarette in her hands or from tears.

He suggested that they go to the hotel, as if to stop her from shedding tears in public. She got to her feet without giving it much thought, following him out the way she had in the past.

They walked into the alley and entered the motel, unlike before, when they had arrived separately and registered under false names. While getting the key and waiting for the elevator, she saw couples leaving after their trysts, but made no effort to avoid them.

Teddy began taking off her clothes the moment they got into the room, and she did not try to stop him; nor did she respond. He touched her with a triumphant air, obviously playing with her body. Not worried that someone might be watching or filming them in secret, he turned on all the lights, examining her naked body with a mocking look.

Then he thrust himself into her, unconcerned whether she was ready, and began to move. Within a minute or two he finished and withdrew.

“I told you you’d come back to me one day.”

He got up and looked down at her with a smug sneer.

“A woman like you is insatiable; you open your legs wide and let a man, any man, mount you. See, didn’t you come back to ask me to fuck you?” He spoke so forcefully that the corners of his mouth curled. “But who do you take me for? Your sex tool? No way! Let’s get this straight. I’ve been the one screwing you, not you screwing me.”

He dressed at lightning speed, as if afraid she’d talk back, though he continued to mock her cruelly.

“Didn’t I just screw you?”

He picked up his jacket and walked to the door, where he turned and said:

“Let me tell you this, don’t call me again. Go find someone else if you need to be fucked. I won’t be back.”

A reflexive reaction to the extreme humiliation made her sit up, but before she could get to her feet, she felt a sticky substance oozing down the insides of her thighs, followed by a nauseating odor.

Yinghong thought about how the semen must have squirted deep into her uterus, where it soiled Lin Xigeng’s baby. She thought she ought to be tearing up, but no tears came when she raised her hand to dry her eyes.

She stood up, sending the sticky secretion flowing down her legs to her feet; warm at first, it quickly turned cold and clammy like snot. It felt like the first time she realized that a man could leave such a large quantity of semen in her.

While she was trying to find something to wipe herself off, she happened to look up and saw a naked woman before her in a ridiculous posture, standing with her legs wide apart. Her heart raced before she realized that it was a mirror.

A hotel that prided itself on its Mediterranean flair had a large oval bed that took up half of the room and faced a mirrored wall. The other three walls were plastered in paper featuring huge red-and-yellow flowers that seemed to engulf the room in fiery passion. With all the lights on, a white glare was reflected in the mirror, which contrasted with her disheveled black hair and displayed her naked body in an eerie, embarrassing posture. In the mirror, the ridiculously large oval bed behind her, with its full pretension to romantic exoticism, appeared to fill up the room, as if serving as a constant reminder that a carnal encounter had just taken place there.

She turned the water on full and scrubbed herself repeatedly, but she knew she would never wash off the soiled feeling of violation; she was even more keenly aware that, for the rest of her life, she would have to live with the unclean feeling that the baby inside her was contaminated by another man’s semen.

She left the bathroom and quickly got dressed. When she reached the ground-floor reception desk, she was, to her surprise, stopped by the staff; it turned out that Teddy hadn’t even paid for the room.

After hailing a taxi at the alley entrance, she settled in before calmly giving the name of an ob-gyn on Zhongshan North Road. The young driver glanced at her in the rearview mirror, but she just turned her head to look out the window.

It was already dark outside on a cold, drizzly winter evening. Yet it was only when the driver reached the street and began to search for the sign of a clinic lit up by fluorescent lights that she was startled awake by the sight of neon signs dazzling the streets in the misty evening.

The doctor was a man in his fifties who had studied in Japan. Yinghong had recently accompanied a female friend for a procedure that had gone smoothly. She asked for a general anesthesia, to which the doctor agreed with an understanding nod.

When she woke up to find herself in the recovery room, she placed a call to Lin’s office. A familiar male voice answered with a hint of fatigue after a long day’s work. She told him in a measured voice, with little elaboration:

“There’s no need for you to worry that I will hang on to you. I want to tell you that I just aborted our child.”

He raced over. What greeted him was an ashen-faced Yinghong devoid of makeup. She was noticeably thinner but peaceful, with a relaxed, even indifferent composure, as if everything that had supported her in the past was gone. She was no longer the daughter of the Zhu clan, nor was she his most competent assistant. She was, simply put, a woman; she had even lost her intimidating beauty.