Guai Girl By Anyu Ching

I often find myself thinking about the first time. The sound and spring of it. How the unconscious, bite-sized action of an even smaller child would go on to spur a lifetime of torment and disdain. Had I learned how to talk yet? Otherwise, walk unassisted? Or was I still a gathering of cells nestled deep inside my mother’s womb, never moving except to hiccup or reply, a stoic presence that her ringless hand hovers over? The unknowing recipient of a nascent curse: guai.

In Chinese vocabulary, to be guai is to be good. Obedient. It is most commonly used as praise for an uncrying baby aboard an airplane, or the swift downing of medicine by an adolescent offspring. In my family, I am the guai one. The eldest daughter of eight cousins, and the first to leave home. From my childhood in Asia until my eventual reckoning in New York, I wore that title like a holy wreath.

“Ni hen guai,” my grandmother would murmur over my shoulder, rubbing her palms against the sides of my arms as I wordlessly assumed my stance over the kitchen sink after a Lunar New Year dinner. You’re so guai. The effect of that word on my pride—and, consequently, my sense of self—was so incredible it made me dizzy. Being called guai kept me so remarkably satiated and warm that it would be years until another frame of that memory unearthed itself: the besmirchment of my brand-new red cardigan in the cloudy dishwater. The gentle, rhythmic bleeding of my scarlet sleeves into a chasmic, violent maroon.

It was when I moved away from Asia when being guai took on a different, more palpable, meaning. For the first time in my life, I was the foreigner. The exotic international student with a voice that did not match her face except for when she is tired, or tipsy, or home. And I should have known it from their eyes, if not their hands. Those tentative touches on your face and the flabby part of your thigh, as if one wrong touch could displace an entire evening of colonial fantasy.

When I first started sleeping with white men, I had written this apprehension off as run-of-the-mill performance anxiety. An over-reliance on powder cocaine and dimly lit hotel bars. I thought my race wasn’t a factor in the equation. Or if it was, that my youth would render it void. This was back when I thought sleeping with older men would help me get over my fear of climate change, or at least inspire a body of avant-garde novellas. What can I say? I was nineteen and treated the world like a dollar store. So when Eric shows up at my apartment after work with an old camcorder and a slutty Sailor Moon costume he had gotten on clearance at the Spirit Halloween on Sixth Avenue, I tell him to grab a beer from the fridge while I change.

The transformation occurred seemingly overnight: the title that I once bore proudly as a crown I now lug, relentlessly, up and down the streets of lower Manhattan like a vestigial limb rendered useless except in its ability to summon the past. A guai girl is not greedy. She desires nothing that is not given to her. Guai girl always does as she’s told and never takes up too much space. Guai girl is respectful to a fault, lowering her head—and dignity—for those whose validation she craves. I convinced myself that I was the most guai when I sunk down to my knees. Even as I entered my twenties and drifted further and further away from the Indian Ocean, I believed being guai was an obligation, an affliction, that I could never be rid of.

There’s still a part of me that wishes Eric had shown up at my door with a gun or with a Polaroid picture of me on all fours and I didn’t have a choice. It would’ve been simpler, or at least exponentially more palatable. Instead, I let him tie polyester ribbons into my hair and call me his little geisha sex toy. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t actually Japanese. And when he left, he took the costume with him.

I saw Eric again nearly a year later, standing outside of the Chelsea Williams Sonoma. His eyes were shielded by a pair of gaudy sunglasses, but I could recognize that anime thigh tattoo anywhere. I had half a mind to cross the street and say hello when I saw that he wasn’t alone. A slender blonde woman strolled out of the home goods store with a bottle of margarita mix and a young daughter. She looked to be about four years old. I watched as she leaned in to give Eric a kiss on the lips—something I was never allowed to do—and felt my entire body set on fire.

I must have said something loud enough for my voice to carry across Seventh Avenue because all of a sudden, the woman was looking at me. She had piercing blue eyes and a tall nose bridge and I wanted to kill her. But more startlingly, I wanted to be her. I wanted to slice the skin off her bones and devour her whole. I wanted to have my own vacation house on Lake Tahoe and find my name on a gas station keychain, accompanied by an unlicensed image of Marilyn Monroe, beauty mark askew. Didn’t I deserve at least that?

I watch Eric and his little family as they walk down the block and disappear around the corner. On my subway ride home, I searched for his real name on Facebook. Her profile shows up almost immediately, tagged to a Polaroid photograph of the two of them holding hands on a beach in Indonesia. I checked the date at the bottom of the post. Eric had shared that throwback photo the same week he asked if he could put his dick up my asshole.

My finger hovers over the Add Friend button and I start drafting potential messages in my head to send to her:

Hi. How are you?

Hi. You don’t know me but your husband does.

Hi! Sorry to bother you but I think you should know this.

Hi! You should ask your husband what he was doing last November.

Hi! You should ask your husband who he was doing last November.

But then the F train pulls into the 2nd Avenue station and I switch off my phone. Sometimes to be guai is to be so small that you can be swallowed whole.

Anyu Ching is a Singaporean writer and journalist based between Southeast Asia and the United States. Her work can be found at anyuching.com.