by Hu Shu-wen

On the last night of the last lunar year, as families everywhere swept out their houses in preparation for the New Year, someone found a steamer trunk by the side of the road. The trunk was big, and too heavy to move, as if it had been filled with mud. The person who found it opened it right there, and discovered a chunk of meat — a square-cut block of human flesh. The newspapers said it was a woman’s body in the box: the torso was whole, and had breasts. The dead woman had a thick, blocky build. She was at least 1.7 meters tall.

It was a dim, drizzly day, that New Year. The woman, there all alone in the boxy death notice in the newspapers, had no name, and nobody showed up to claim her body.

On the first day of the new lunar year, the day the notice hit the newspapers, I was hanging around with CJ. I’d actually been hanging around with CJ since before New Year’s Eve. I’d only known him for two weeks, so it wasn’t as if we were old friends — you couldn’t even say we were familiar with each other, really. Before the new year’s holiday, he and I had called in sick to our jobs, and called in ‘busy’ to our families for the New Year, saying we were stuck working overtime in Taipei. The two of us, almost perfect strangers, using every legal and illegal holiday at our disposal, as if we’d gambled away all the money we had and then borrowed a bit more money, to lie together day and night. I don’t know what you could call it except love.

Love wears you out, mind and body. Two strangers suddenly becoming close to one another, like two burning beds. I spread my nakedness wide open for CJ, exchanged every last inch of body heat. We couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop kissing — watching as we hovered perilously close to burning out and yet still burning with fever. We rushed to a cruelly white emergency room in brittle dawn light, staring out like lunatics through eyes that hadn’t seen sleep for three days, in search of sleeping pills, tranquilizers, anything. “Get the doctor to knock us out,” CJ said. “I’ll go crazy if I don’t get some sleep soon.”

Worn out, so worn out. Love really does wear you out. We went back home, hand in hand, swallowed our pills and lay down on the bed, closing each other’s eyes like a couple of idiots getting ready to die for love. I woke up at one in the morning, nineteen hours later, rolled out of bed and away from the warmth and scent of my lover, and walked (the floor cold against my feet) into the living room to watch TV and see if there was any news about “The Body in the Box.”

Nobody had come forward to claim the body yet, not even after the headlines. At New Year, there was no lonelier thought, no lonelier person. Everyone with a home to go to had gone home for the New Year, and the people who had no home to go to had gone to see friends, and the people who had no friends had gone to the bars to kill time, and even homeless people could stand around their pots and drink warm soup. Only she had nowhere to go back to, and not even a whole body to go back. No head, no face, no arms or legs, no clothes, no cover. In the hopes of getting an identification, the police had published her distinguishing characteristics. “The deceased had augmented her breasts,” they said, “and the body displayed signs of postsurgical inflammation.”

Just awful. Her killer took her clothing, and the police stripped her naked, and nobody bothered to think that she wasn’t just a corpse, she was a woman. They just left her naked, just as naked as if they’d read out her medical history.

Should I go and ID the body? Did I have the right? Would I even recognize her like that?

All I knew was that whenever I began to get too happy, I’d think of her. In those heady days, those days as full of sweetness as a ripe fruit, I thought about her — my old roommate, who I hadn’t been in touch with for years. Xiao Yi.

Xiao Yi and I didn’t live together for very long — about a month, and then four days.

The first day, he came to see if he could stay with me. “I only need to stay here one day,” he explained. “I only want to live for one more day.”

Xiao Yi was seventeen then, and I was nineteen. I’d just moved out of my parents’ house, and was living on my own for the first time. My roommates were two twenty one year-old college juniors who’d cleared out one of their rooms and rented it out to me. I paid the rent with one of my tutoring salaries, and paid for food with the other. Money was tight, and I was often in debt — in debt to Da Lan. Da Lan was a rich kid, but he wasn’t as stingy as your typical rich kid; he was always finding excuses to take me out for meals. I’d be there in the expensive Western restaurants he took me out to, tipping up the soup bowl so I could get the very last mouthful, and Da Lan would shake his head. “You won’t starve without it, you know.” I’d say I didn’t want it to go to waste, and Da Lan would say: “Waste is the entire point of the ‘bourgeoisie.’”

The reason I wanted my own room wasn’t so I could read or write by myself, it was so I wouldn’t be bothered when I was crying, so I wouldn’t have to pretend to be asleep on sleepless nights. I didn’t have a bed yet when Xiao Yi came to stay the night, so I spread out my sleeping bag and we both lay down with our problems on the hard floor.

“I don’t know why I came to you, or why I trust you. I just don’t know anyone else,” Xiao Yi said.

I’d only met Xiao Yi once before that. Now, on our second meeting, here he was lying next to me, wearing the high school uniform he’d run away from home and school in and looking up admiringly at the clothes I’d hung from the walls. I was living the freshman lifestyle — no desk, no money for a dresser, thumbtacks in the walls where I hung up clothes to dry — no place to receive a guest.

After Xiao Yi finished listing all the reasons he couldn’t go on, I lay quiet for a long time, unable to think of anything to reply with. I was just nineteen, and a dumb nineteen at that, and I’d never had any proper education. What education I’d gotten from school had been just enough to get me into college, and just enough to make me hate books and misunderstand what little I did know. I could hardly be blamed for not believing in “what Teacher said.” All I could do was say to Xiao Yi, “I don’t think I have any right, or any ability, to butt in on your problems.”

“Hang on,” I remember saying. As the sky outside grew lighter, I closed my tired eyes and said “Maybe you can hang on a little longer, hang on until the world catches up with you…” The dead didn’t have anything, I thought. All they had was endless time. If someone was looking to die, I thought, maybe they weren’t afraid of anything — or at least they weren’t afraid of waiting.

Years later, I noticed a passage in Catcher in the Rye: “I can very clearly see you dying nobly, one way or another, for some highly unworthy cause.” The speaker is a gay man in his thirties or forties who is married to a woman much older than he is. After he speaks, he writes out a message to the sixteen year-old protagonist of the story and tells him to keep it: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” It’s a line the gay teacher gets from a psychologist, so it could quite well be nonsense. But it moved me.

“Hey, I know what I wanted to say — ” It was half a month earlier, and I sat re-reading Catcher in the Rye in a cafe, across the table from CJ, who I’d just met. “If I could meet Xiao Yi again when he was seventeen, maybe I could tell him about Holden and Catcher in the Rye.”

“I would’ve forgotten if you hadn’t mentioned it,” CJ said, tapping his head. “The main character in Catcher in the Rye is Holden. I remember he was kind of old before his time.”

“With a red hunting cap.”

“He asked people where the ducks in Central Park went when the pond froze…”

“And pissed off every cabbie unlucky enough to pick him up.”

“The only thing he wanted to do was stand beside a cliff and protect the children who came running up.”

“The ones who went up to the edge,” I said.

“But I never remember that part that you remember,” CJ said.

“Which part?”

“Noble sacrifice, humble living, that part…”

After CJ said this, I realized that it was because of that seventeen year-old high school student, Xiao Yi, that young would-be suicide, because of the things he’d made me see, that I was able to read Catcher in the Rye, to treasure and remember those sentences.

The day after he came to stay at my place, Xiao Yi did not kill himself. He decided to hang on. He stayed with me for about a month, until his parents came and dragged him home.

The last time I saw Xiao Yi was in the hospital. His roommate had found him with his wrists sliced open. It was his fifth time running away from home.

Xiao Yi wasn’t just trying to get attention. His roommate Ah Bo said that day, she’d gone to the bar nearby where she worked — usually until her shift ended at three in the morning, but after dinner she’d begun to get chills, to vomit, and get diarrhea, and her boss had sent her home. When she got home, she ran to the bathroom, clutching her stomach, and immediately vomited up whatever she had left in her stomach at the sight of the blood everywhere, sobbing as she vomited up her guts, her heart, her soul’s impurities.

In the bathroom (”At the scene,” as Ah Bo put it), Xiao Yi’s blood ran like spilled paint towards a passing ant, pooling thickly in a red-black puddle, blocking up even the drain. The lipstick-red, pooling liquid looked like the last attempts of a desperate, frenzied painter who’d decided to use up every last ounce of his oils.

I rushed to the emergency room, where through a semi-translucent curtain I heard a doctor say, “I can’t find a pulse. The blood’s almost all gone.” — Had Xiao Yi “passed over?” Was he in that otherworldly passage now, moving towards the “other side?” –that unearthly, unknowable territory that we call death? I remember there was a small hole in that curtain, and that the top of it was dripping with blood.

But Xiao Yi came back to his life that would not end. He lay on the bed, holding closed eyelids that had never wanted to open again, and cried.

“Can you tell me why?” I asked.
Xiao Yi kept his eyes closed and said nothing.
After a long time, he spoke. “I couldn’t sleep. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for half a year now. I wanted to leave this. I wanted to become someone else.”
Xiao Yi’s wounds were uneven, not parallel to his wrists. He had looked for the blood vessels that ran down his wrists, felt for the pulse, and then cut them open.
A hospital social worker arrived, and then Xiao Yi’s parents. The doctor who came with them said Xiao Yi had been dressing as a woman for two years, and that he’d gone to a clinic behind his parents’ back to try to get sex-change surgery. “But in his current state of mind, I’m afraid it would be too radical a decision for him to be capable of making,” the doctor said. “It would be best to institutionalize him for a course of treatment.”

After they sent him to the mental hospital, Xiao Yi never said a word. To visit him you had to pass through a heavy iron gate, write down your name, phone number, relationship to the patient, and search through the things you carried with you and leave any lighters, Swiss Army knives, and belts at the desk. You could bring in a laptop, but not a power cord; you could bring in a mobile phone, but no charger. Anything that could be tied around the neck was forbidden.

To prevent patients from escaping or jumping out of windows, the hospital was built like a jail. None of the windows opened. They didn’t care about how you lived; they cared about how you didn’t die.

I met a young girl in the hospital and asked her how old she was. “Year of the Pig,” she said, and worked it out on her fingers: fourteen.
“Fourteen, or twenty-six?” I asked her.
Fourteen, she said. She’d been here for four months already with delusions, and she couldn’t stand light. She rested her head on my chest and asked me to pull up the curtain by the bed to seal off the darkness from the light. I bought her a pastry, which she liked, so I bought her another one, which she smiled shyly as she ate, saying, “I have gastritis. It gives me diarrhea…” Oh dear, I said. “If you’ve already spoiled your stomach, I guess there’s nothing for it but to have a popsicle.” Her teeth hadn’t come all the way in yet — malnourishment, it seemed — and one of her eyes was swollen with a fresh bruise. You’d have a hard time finding any tenderness in the way her mother treated her. One night the girl woke up with a nightmare and asked her mother – who was spending the night in the hospital – to lie down with her. Her mother hit her in the face, raising a fresh bruise.

And yet her mother was the only person in this world who loved her. The nurse on duty told me the girl’s mother worked two shifts at a karaoke parlor and spent all the rest of her time with the girl, sleeping on the reclining chair in her room. “You say it’s like jail here? Well, you’re right — but have you ever thought that outside is even more dangerous?” the nurse asked me, eyeing me. “You know what’ll happen to the girl if she goes home? You know what happened to her at school?”

“So what happened to her?” CJ asked. “How come you and Xiao Yi stopped talking?”
“Probably because he didn’t talk to me again.”
“He didn’t talk to anybody, right?”
“It was my fault, I guess. I wasn’t able to make him talk to me. He pushed everyone away, and he pushed me away too.”
It was because I believed too much in the weight of language that I couldn’t get along with a Xiao Yi who wouldn’t speak to me. Without language, I didn’t know how to be with him — I wasn’t even sure who he was any longer. We weren’t lovers, after all, so we couldn’t rebuild an intimacy outside of language. And as if in a fit of pique, I blamed him for abandoning himself, and abandoning me — abandoning us — and I went to visit him less and less frequently, until one day I visited the hospital only to be told by one of the nurses that he’d checked out, and that his parents had sent him out of the country.

After college, I folded up my youthful days like an old sweater that you keep in a drawer and never wear anymore, but can’t bear to throw away. I found a job; I changed jobs; I made friends; I changed colleagues; I adapted to grown-up life.

Adapting is a process of continual loss. We secrete mucus as we adapt to the temperature. We shed menstrual blood (and how Xiao Yi dreamed of this, evidence at last of womanhood) as we adapt to the ebb and flow of our bodies. Our noses bleed in the cold, dry air of an unfamiliar place as we adapt to the difference in humidity. When we are sick our noses run with mucus and we cough up blood-flecked gobs of phlegm. Our eyes well with tears as we adapt to the dust in the air, and with more tears as we adapt to the people around us and the ways they work. No more of the sweat we shed playing around in our student days, or the sweat of our parents’ brows as they worked to make a living. I sweated hardly at all in my air-conditioned office, though I secreted plenty of saliva as I talked and talked and talked. Again and again I had premonitions (because again and again I worried about it) that Xiao Yi would end up as a corpse. As if this was the only way I could ever see him again.

And now I stand in this “Stone House,” looking at pictures of Xiao Yi and trembling with emotion.

Da Lan called me up to tell me about it. He had a two-day break on a business trip to Xi’an and he saw the old building in a magazine. He drove down there, to Lantian, to the little town called Yushan. “It’s got another name,” he told me on the phone. “It’s called ‘Father’s House.’ It was the aloofness of it that attracted me — the way it stands there all alone on top of a hill, like a person nobody understands.” He paused for a moment, then: “Like my father.” Da Lan’s father had gone bankrupt. He’d had to mortgage his four houses to the bank, and had rented out one of them to open a Buddhist training center.

“The house doesn’t have a regular door,” Da Lan said. “The door is in three parts that can fold up like a screen. It’s made out of bamboo and rattan wicker — handmade, really lovely — and surprisingly tall. NBA players could walk through it without hitting their heads. You can imagine what the light is like here — how bright it gets when the gate is open. But when it decides to close itself, it gets so dark….” But it was a warm place, Da Lan said. The floor inside was all rattan, and even the walls and the stairs you could feel the warmth of it.

There was a photography exhibit here the day Da Lan moved into ‘Father Cottage,’ and I rushed here because of these pictures here before me, where there is a portrait of Xiao Yi. He had become a woman by then.

So you were here. So. So you were here. I think of Catcher in the Rye, of that sixteen year-old runaway walking through the cold streets of New York at Christmastime, worried that at the next intersection, around the next corner, he will disappear. He prays to his dead brother for help: don’t let me disappear. Please, please, don’t let me disappear. I don’t know how Holden’s brother died — disease? An accident? A suicide? All I know is that at the end of the book, Holden is there in the sanitarium telling his story. But after that? Where does Holden go after that? And Blanche — where does Blanche go? There she is at the end of A Streetcar Named Desire, made up and dressed up for a party, when the doctor fools her into the sanitarium. Does she get out of there? When does the treatment end? How does it end?

When the pond in Central Park freezes over, where do the ducks go? When the world is so cold and hard that people can’t go on there any longer, where do they go? The missing, the jobless, the voiceless, the unaccomplished (even if not entirely unknown), the un-phoned and un-written, the unvisited, the uncertain-if-living-or-dead and yet unmourned and unburied.

But Xiao Yi is still here, smiling from a photograph, happy in her new skin, her new hair, lightly pushing up her new breasts.

I can’t take it anymore, and I begin to cry, not caring about the people walking back and forth through the room. A woman I’ve never seen before comes up next to me quietly and says, “This is a good place for crying — nice and soft.” I smile at her and retreat to a bedroom off to one side of the gallery. There is an old-fashioned wooden trunk in there; the copper lock on its lid has been stripped off. I reach out to open it, curious to see what’s inside, but I am unable to open or move the lid. I don’t dare force it open, for fear that I’d damage it – and that it might hurt me – and I turn around to see a bed. With the last of my strength I lie down and continue crying. Let my tears say what they want to me.

Under Xiao Yi’s portrait there is a self-description:
I’m an MTF, or male-to-female transsexual. Two years ago, I began sobbing suddenly in a subway car. I hadn’t had surgery then, and was only halfway through my transition. The middle-aged man sitting beside me slowly lowered his head and said to me: “You know what you’re doing.” And then he continued, in his rough Hokkien: “Don’t be afraid. Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t let them deny you.” My parents had told me that I was selfish, that this time I was going too far in seeking what I wanted. And yet it was this stranger, this blue-collar Taike ojisan[ Taike: Taiwanese slang referring to a low-class or uneducated individual.Ojisan: A Japanese word meaning “middle-aged man,” now part of Taiwanese slang.], who understood that for me, changing my sex wasn’t selfishness or stubbornness. It was a matter of life and death.

I fix my eyes on the portrait and scrutinize the street scene behind Xiao Yi, discovering that the picture was taken in Taipei. She’d always been here, living in the same city as me. I take out my phone and call Da Lan.
“What’d you think? Pretty hot, right?” Da Lan said. “Xiao Yi finally completed her Metamorphosis.”
“I thought she looked dignified. Like a good girl.”
“She could’ve taught you a thing or two about make-up, anyway.”
“It looks like she was in Taipei…”
“Yeah. I noticed that too.”
“What about you?” I asked. “How’s your father doing?”
“Not too bad. An old man died in the alley over from me the day before yesterday; my father’s saying the mass.”
“Sounds like your father’s in the middle of a Metamorphosis of his own.”
“Who knows. As long as he’s happy…”
There were a few seconds of silence, and then Da Lan asked me: “What about that woman?”
“What woman?”
“The woman in the trunk. The one who got chopped into pieces…”
“Oh…I don’t know if they ever solved it. The police said the trunk was completely new — never used before. They checked the product number and found out that RT-Mart is the only place in Taiwan that sells that model of trunk. They checked sales records for about that time and found out that a couple nights before New Year, someone went into a small outlet in Taichung that was about to close for the night and bought one of the trunks. The store got it on video tape, and they got a picture of the suspect’s face…”

As I spoke, rain began to fall outside, the stone wall around the “Stone House” changing its color, drip by drop, in the setting sun, as if at any moment it might start pulsing.