Read Online The Border of Paradise: A Novel by Esmé Weijun Wang - Free Book Online Page A

cutting looks and bitch-mouthed retorts, plus a sharp sort of attractiveness, makes a girl like me as intimidating as any tattooed thug. Part of this was nature, but the other part was a consequence of the cutthroatswho raised me. I also had an uncanny ability to see past pouting lips and clotted-on makeup, deep into whether a girl could be transformed into a bar girl and, more important, a moneymaker. I had no formula for making such a decision; it simply came to me. Another girl in my position, had she a lesser eye, might have chosen a potential bar girl with predictably appealing characteristics. But on occasion I would select a rather flat-chested girl, with the secret knowledge that her flirtatious tentacles touched not only myself, but also anyone whose favor she wished to curry, and many of my mother’s best, and most eccentric, girls came to her from my cultivated choosing. By my eighteenth birthday I was seeing up to three or four girls a day for evaluation. Some, having heard that the Golden Lotus was a more hospitable refuge than their own sorry homes, had come to meet me at the market (always in the morning, before the heat descended, and when I was at my least ill-tempered). Others I’d found while prowling the streets, searching for girls running errands for their families. I’d ask them, “You want a better life?” as they hurtled past with their baskets and bags. Leery, yet grateful for the interruption, some would slow their pace. The pretty ones knew what I was after. No one would call Fatty pretty, which is why I had given her the job that I did.

    With David I was the girl who, when we returned to the White Hotel, chopped apples and oranges with a cheap knife on the hotel desk, and who said, “Fuck!” (my first English obscenity, taught to me by a sailor with an ear like) when juice got into a cut on her finger. And David said, “You don’t have to do that,” as I arranged them on a brand-new platter, and I said, “It is polite for your mother.” Because at the bar I was the slut who learned “Whiskey in the Jar” for the hilarity of the sailors, but I was also the girl who knew what it meant to have piety, with a mother who heaped too much pork and so many pomelos on the ancestors’ altar.
    I brought that fruit platter to the Nowaks’ brown stone house. I wore a lemon-yellow sundress with an embroidered bodice and kept stopping my fingers in midstroke as I felt the thick stitching, correcting my motions so that it wouldn’t look like I wascaressing myself sexually, with the platter resting in my lap and my new purse the color of fresh milk beside me. The air, which walloped us as we got out of the taxi, reminded me of home with a slap of damp heat. David put his wallet back in his pocket and moved to the trunk to take our suitcase from the driver; David, who was taller than any other man I knew and gangly, and made a swallow’s nest of his hair by yanking it when he was nervous. I reached up and smoothed it down because I loved him. David said firmly, “So let’s go ahead and do this.”
    It was all a dream; I was sleepwalking through everything. We were going to tell his mother that we were married. We were even going to, depending on the level of our bravado, tell her that I was pregnant, though the child in my belly was barely a month old and not yet stirring, and only known to us because of my otherwise precise menstrual regularity and symptoms of soreness and sickness. We were visiting her during our honeymoon early in July. We did not know what we were going to do after that. But Taiwan already felt very far away, as if it were itself a dream, and there was nothing around us to remind me of its fragments. The wisps of memory were already fading and being replaced by this also dreamlike reality. David banged the knocker twice.
    A woman came to the door. I knew that she was Mrs. Francine Nowak right away. She had his blond, nearly white hair pulled back with no fringe, and the same