Sugar in My Bowl (19 page)

In my later years in college, I started to write essays, and a few were published in campus periodicals. I had written one about the sexual assault of a woman on campus. In the essay, I briefly mentioned that I had learned about the attack after returning from the aforementioned grad student boyfriend’s apartment where I had spent the night. An older friend, a Korean-American divinity student, pulled me aside after he’d read it.

“You shouldn’t write about the fact that you had spent the night at your boyfriend’s.”

“Why?”

“Because a nice Korean man won’t marry you if you aren’t a virgin.”

“So I should lie?” My mother had never addressed virginity, yet I could not imagine lying if she asked me a direct question.

My friend looked away. “You just shouldn’t tell anyone. Okay?”

He was very concerned, and although I was upset with him for a lot of reasons—insensitivity to the sexual assault of the woman; religious hypocrisy; antiquated sexism and paternalism, to name a few—I also knew he was telling me the reality for some nice Korean men and their families. That’s how it was. I was contaminated, because I had lost my chastity—the most precious thing for women in most Asian countries, including the place of my birth. And what made it worse was that my boyfriend then was white. In Asian countries, there were so-called good girls and bad girls, and in 1990 New Haven, those standards applied to me nonetheless.

Throughout the twentieth century to the twenty-first, Asian governments and families in China, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, India, and Nepal, among others, allowed the sale of their girls for sex. Those girls who brought income to their families and nations were nevertheless permanent outcasts. My divinity school friend was trying to protect me from being called a bad woman. But I did not think of them this way. My friend thought that if I concealed my sexual history—comically brief by
Cosmo
girl standards—I might have a go at a nice Korean groom who might have me. The history of Asian prostitution and the modern advent of interracial romance had become curiously intertwined with one word:
whore
.

My husband was right. I hadn’t written about sex, because I didn’t want to get into it. I grew up not talking about sex, and I didn’t want to begin doing it in my fiction. It wasn’t just fear, it was also some perverse pride. In my writing, I’d wanted to be seen only as a serious and creative mind—an objective brain floating without a race, history, or a body. A well-furrowed brain in a mason jar of formaldehyde. I hadn’t written about sex, because I was trying not to be identified with sex only.

But not writing about sex wasn’t changing anything either. When I had worn my glasses, cut my hair short, donned shapeless turtleneck sweaters with loose jeans and New Balance sneakers, someone had called me an Oriental hooker anyway.

Now, I was trying to write a novel about identity (this became my first published novel). I had numerous questions about different professions in addition to race, class, and naturally, sex. There was a lot I didn’t know. For another novel manuscript, I had been reading some wonderful ethnographies by cultural anthropologists, and I thought that I would model my research interviews with people who would populate my next book as if I were an anthropologist. My hero became Zora Neale Hurston—a gifted anthropologist and a remarkable novelist.

I conducted over forty interviews with men and women who shared profiles with my invented characters, spanning over a hundred hours. I would take a guy who worked in Wall Street to a fancy lunch, and ask him questions from my typed script. Where did you go to elementary school? What’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen? Those questions were softballs, but even for the tough ones, my subjects wanted to keep talking. I might ask a married woman, “Do you like your husband?” and she would confess that she wanted to leave him.

I was the wannabe storyteller, but they were my Scheherazade. Their narratives riveted me, and I felt protective of them like an older sister who wouldn’t judge. I was an unknown fiction writer with a file of rejections and a couple of published short stories in literary quarterlies you couldn’t find at bookstores. But they did not mind. I listened carefully, and I promised to be confidential. The joke was that regardless of their ethnicity, they might end up being Korean in my novel anyway. The big surprise of what I learned on the field: Everyone wanted to talk about sex.

The old, dead novelists had been on the money after all. Sex and how we make love matters to everyone. My subjects wept about one-night stands, affairs gone wrong, women who left, and men who left. Those who abandoned were often as bereft. You shed your clothes; you reached for the other; you wanted to be loved, to forget, to hurt yourself, to worship, to feel something again, to control another person; and though the act passed momentarily, for good or for bad, the event was not forgettable. Sex haunted every single person—I learned this, too, from my interviews.

There was also humor and humility.

I had read in a magazine that the number one sexual fantasy for men was sex with two women. Really? When I interviewed guys who were my character studies for Harvard Business School graduates, I blurted out:

“Hmm. If you were to have a three-way, and I’m not saying you did or didn’t, and really, you don’t have to answer this one. I mean, so imagine if you were to have a ménage à trois, then what do you think you’d be thinking about? Like, you know, what would be going through your mind?”

All five men gave me the same answer. They’d be worried about performance and the satisfaction of both women.

“Honest?”

“Yes.”

Until I read the magazine, I had never thought about three-way sex before. No one had ever asked me to join in, and it certainly wasn’t my cup of chai. But all five men had thought of it before. A lot. It was obvious from the alacrity of their answers. Ménage mattered to men. Okay, then. I decided to write about it.

Then came Google—the technological revolution of our time. When I typed “Asian women” in the search engine, I got more than fourteen million hits—most of them for dubious dating sites and pornography. I may see myself as a forty-two-year-old writer, mother, wife, and former lawyer, but fourteen million hits trumped my subjective reality. The world was seeing something else when they searched for Asian women. There was a genre of pornography dedicated to Asian women, so I watched a video. In the one I saw, a middle-aged Asian woman was having sex with two men with mullets. Was I aroused? I was not. I watched for ten minutes, because that was sufficient. The characters were unattractive (I didn’t re-alize how shallow I was), its office setting was absurd (workplace fantasies weren’t doing it for me), and of course, the writing was comically bad (lousy writing could never turn me on). However, this genre was evidently popular and widespread. Not every person saw an Asian woman and thought pornography or mail-order bride, but some always would. This changed me as a writer. Could an Asian woman love a non-Asian man who fetishized her? How did pornography affect lovemaking for everyone? What did the Asian porn star think about her work? What did I think about all this?

So I wrote a scene with much of what I had seen in that film. Would anyone think the main character was me? Would anyone think that I had slept with a guy who watched porn? At this point, I had spent eleven years writing seriously yet was unable to publish a novel, so I figured no one would read this fourth manuscript anyway. When relevant, I wrote about sex, even Asian pornography and date rape, because I wanted to be honest about what was significant inside and outside my world. For most of my adult life, I had been uncomfortable with my body—my racial and sexual envelope. This time, in my pages, I thought, maybe I can talk about how it is for me, and I wrote it down.

If I had been angry about the lack of self-determination of Asian women’s bodies and lives, I had been staging a feeble and arrogant protest by refusing to write about sex. Intercourse was a part of everyone’s life, and it was an important part. Like it or not, it was often the defining subject for Asian women around the globe. Virgin, whore, dowry, bride price, family honor—all of these things boiled down to: did you have sex or not? By avoiding the topic, I had meant to be apolitical, but being apolitical was being political, too. As a novelist, did I want to be just political? No. I wanted pleasure, escape, and beauty in my fiction, too. And, in my invented world, I wanted sex to be authentic, and I wanted women to have real sex—uncomfortable, wonderful, awkward, delicious, humbling, empowering, and satisfying. As for the real world, one day, I wanted all us girls to call the shots about our true sex lives.

After my book was published, I gave my mother a copy. She had been a music major in college with a passion for literature. It was my mother who had guided me to read Somerset Maugham and André Gide, as well as Margaret Mitchell. She was the first artist in my life.

When she finished the book, she phoned me to tell me she liked it.

I was so relieved that I didn’t know what else to say. Always the tough customer, her liking it was for me the equivalent to the letter grade of an A.

Then she got real quiet.

“Mom?”

“Min Jin, do you think people have that much strange sex like the people in your book?”

“I think people have more sex and stranger sex. Sex is a part of everyone’s life.”

I was thirty-nine years old then, and that was my first conversation about sex with my mother.

It was a start.

My First Time, Twice

Ariel Levy

W
hen I was fourteen years old, I decided it was time to lose my virginity. Precocity had always been my thing. As an only child, I spent most of my youth around adults, which made me sound sort of like one. By early adolescence I had become so accustomed to being told I was mature, it seemed obvious to me that this next benchmark had to be hit early in order to maintain my identity. I was curious about sex. But mostly, I had a reputation to uphold. (I was pretty much the only person interested in this reputation.)

The first—and only impressive—expression of my precociousness was when I insisted on learning to read in nursery school. I loved talking and words, and once I could write them down I was a step closer to becoming myself. The upside of being a verbal kid is that adults often think you are bright, but children have another name for such a person: nerd. As I was going through puberty (early), I saw the necessity of shifting my focus from doing things that would impress my parents and teachers, to engaging in behavior that would strike my peers as cool. I started saying
like
constantly. I smoked pot when I was twelve. I dropped acid when I was thirteen. Losing my virginity was the next logical step.

It’s not that these things were necessarily fun. Well, the pot, actually, was great—unless you are reading this and
you
are twelve, in which case it was awful. But the acid was a classic bad trip, during which I thought I heard the breathing of dead people. With sex, as with drugs, my interest in the entity itself was far less potent a motivator than my fervent desire to transform myself from tiny dork into Janis Joplin. It felt like my job. I needed to do things that would make people gasp. Nobody would gasp if they heard a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old had lost her virginity. The clock was ticking.

I had a beautiful boyfriend when I was fourteen, with whom I was thoroughly infatuated. Josh had dark blue eyes and long, curly brown hair, which was (prematurely!) streaked with silver. He hung out on the steps in front of our high school with other boys who smoked cigarettes and, occasionally, joints in the bushes. Both of our sets of parents were slowly but surely separating, and both Josh and I were paradoxically desperate to assert our independence from them by mimicking the very expressions of rebellion they had taught us. We listened to Neil Young and Bob Dylan. We wore tie-dyes. We read
On the Road
and
The Prophet
. When Josh and I started going out I felt that I had been delivered from my isolation, my uncoolness, and my family. It did not occur to me that I got the ideas for my outfits from photographs of my mother taken at a time when she looked happy to be with my father.

Josh and I were unstoppable in our pursuit of 1960s-inflected accessories and experiences, but we were timid about sex. On the occasions when we found ourselves alone in bedrooms or on couches, our bravado dissipated and we became children again, unsure of what was expected of us. We did not have a lot of lust to guide us. We found each other attractive, but we were so young neither of us had ever experienced clear erotic desire. The thing I badly wanted wasn’t sex, but to be rid of my virginity, the last vestige of a childhood spent trusting and respecting adults, seeking their approval. Josh, I knew, was as confused about what this entailed as I was. I never brought it up. It was all we could do to get past second base.

After Josh broke my heart, my great regret was not that I had lost my virginity to him, but that I hadn’t. If I was going to be lovelorn, at least I would have liked the consolation of being able to brag that I’d had sex. So, when I was fifteen, I started going to bars with a pack of girls who went to Catholic school in Manhattan and knew how to get fake IDs. We would go to crummy dives in the East Village to drink beer, listen to awful bands, and flirt with grown men.

Once, I gave my number—or, I should say, my mother’s number—to a bassist with black hair who was twenty-seven. I can’t remember if he took me to dinner or to hear music, but I’m sure I had to be home by eleven, and that our conversation was stilted and humorless. I saw him only once. I was impressed by his advanced age and how shocking it would be if I told people he was my boyfriend, but even I knew that this was not enough grist for a relationship.

I met another guy who was funny and went to film school at NYU. He was twenty-two and had a tiny apartment on Great Jones Alley, and I thought he might make a suitable boyfriend, or at least a suitable deflowerer. He was older, he’d done it before, and, I had been told, all men were dying to have sex at all times, so it would be easy enough to get him on board with my project. It was harder than I thought. He was eager to make out and grope, but to my surprise and disgust, he seemed very uneasy about engaging in actual intercourse once I admitted—in the most blasé terms—that it would be my first time. It is possible this young man had located the term “statutory rape” somewhere in the back of his head. Or, perhaps his father or mother had warned him that girls get attached to their first lover—you break it you bought it, or some such. But his reluctance was no match for my romantic poetry: I told him that he didn’t have to worry about me falling in love with him, and that if he wouldn’t sleep with me I’d find someone else who would.