Shanghai Girl (35 page)

Never been told our city’s bygone glories. Never watched Shanghai Express. Never seen Marlene Dietrich. No Greta Garbo. No Joe DiMaggio. No Marilyn Monroe. No McDonald’s Happy Meal. No Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach soundtracks. Nowhere. Nothing. China the country sealed off as good old Cathay ought to be. All imperialists and revisionist poisons were banned: English, Finnish, French, Spanish, Swedish, Yiddish, even Esperanto -- everything. I, and my generation of young successors of the Chinese revolution, did not share the rest of the contemporary world’s collective retinas.

My heartbreak was different.

I was lucky to be in the junior swim team run by the School District Sports Authority. Like the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, China had a state-sponsored system to cultivate future Olympic medalists. Three times a week, after school, we received training at no cost to our parents. That made us special. Our goals in training were clear: to excel on the team so that we could get to the next level. Competition was fierce and the attrition rate high. Only the crème-de-la crème could join the district, municipal, provincial, and eventually, the National Team.

Most girls like me had not yet heard of menstruation. On the team, boys wore as uniforms navy blue trunks with a white string. Girls wore red suits with elastic bands sewn from inside such that they became virtual blobs of cloth bubbles. This design was intended to conceal the natural curves of the female body just in case the boys were distracted. We girls, having matured earlier, had a nickname for what was tucked inside a boy’s shorts:
xiao maqie
-- little sparrow.
Xiao maqie
would become
wugui dou
-- turtle’s head, when they reached young-adult size, complete with a thicker, extendable neck. But even we girls weren’t aware of this process yet.

My breasts, periodically sore and itchy, were protruding against the swimsuit bubbles. To conceal my nervousness, I pretended to keep my vision steady and straight. My peripheral vision told me that Coach Lai liked my focused attention. Thanks to the ingenious design of the female swimsuit, nobody could notice my awkward bosom.

I was always the first to be dropped into the water. Coach Lai would push me before going for the tallest boy half a head shorter than me. “One, two, three!” he would clap his oar- like hands, which were toughened by years of pushing water and pumping iron. “Jump! Now!” While coaches generally did not raise an eyebrow when they heard kids sneeze, Coach Lai would occasionally hand me a beach towel after training and say curtly, “Don’t catch cold!”

Despite my size, I wasn’t the fastest on our team. Coach Lai once patted me through the towel he had placed on me and said, “You don’t have to feel awkward for being big and tall. A good swimmer needs a well-rounded physique for buoyancy.” These words convinced me that I had a fighting chance. I was so moved I had an urge to tell him that my well-rounded physique was due to my partial Russian stock.

But of course I didn’t dare to do so. As much as I admired him, he was the all- powerful coach who held the key to my future. Coach Lai wore a crew cut all year round, so closely cropped that the contour of his skull in between the dark and spiky hairs was clearly visible. In a sport where the reduction of water resistance was critical, the completely shaved watermelon haircut was not uncommon among male athletes. It was atypical that Coach Lai had chosen to retain this style after leaving active competition.

The 1970’s witnessed the arrival of the form fitting, skin swimsuit showcased by the East German Women’s Olympic Team. Although deemed rather scandalous at the outset even by the Western media, the record speeds the body-hugging design had helped to generate silenced all critics. Naturally, nobody living in China could have heard about such decadent things. As far as our authorities were concerned, the East Germans were out and out bourgeoisie and ideological lackeys for the Soviet Revisionists, hence their practices totally dismissible.

Coach Lai’s skin suit was his torso itself. With his hollowed chins and gleaming teeth, he looked especially handsome when he smiled, something he rarely did. I regarded him as very focused. It was his routine to swim a 10, 000-meter medley after finishing training us, three times a week.

During the political instruction segment of our training, the coach would sometimes tell us stories. We heard that some of his old training buddies had gone on to the National Team, becoming the very few Chinese who had opportunities to travel abroad to compete. They were expected to bring honor and glory to our motherland, but few made it to the winner’s rostrum.

I turned thirteen on May 15
^th
, 1975. A child’s birthday was rarely marked and an adult’s, hardly remembered. Birthday party as a practice was condemned as bourgeois. The few determined to go against the tide would have been thwarted by the challenge baking a cake due to the rationing of flour, eggs, and sugar and the want of an oven. December 26
^th
was the only exception as Chairman Mao was born on that day in 1893. All of China was legislated to eat “noodles
of eternity
” to wish him “
ten-thousand
lifetimes of longevity with
out
limits”.

At the beginning of our training on my birthday, I noticed Coach Long’s eyebrows were knotted like two forceful Chinese calligraphy strokes. There was a tug in me when his eyes failed to sweep across me as they always did.

“
Today, we’ll streamline to make our team leaner and stronger. Same heat ordering, now!”

“
Streamline” was a code word for team member elimination. I feared for my fate.

The splattering yet quiet upheavals now over, Coach Long pronounced the death sentences for some.
I could feel my heart filling with joy when I realized I had been spared.

“
The verdict was reached collectively by
all
coach
es
. Today’s results support our decision.” So the list was pre-determined. The heat competition was just a formality.

Coach Long frowned when a girl began to sob. “Tears won’t get you back on the team. Even though you don’t have the talent for competitive swimming you can still achieve by focusing on your academic studies. Keep in mind Chairman Mao’s teachings: ‘Study well, and make progress every day.’ There are many ways one can succeed in life.”

The common phrase describing athletes as “possessing well-developed limbs but a simplistic mind” reinforced the perception that one could be a good student or star athlete but not both. I was always interested in Chinese composition although little was available for us to read to improve our writing. I dreaded being regarded as overly intellectual. My physical appearance was enough of a problem. I had been jotting down my thoughts in private and hid my notebooks under my mattress. Bold lines like “I admire him to death but don’t know why,” in which I confessed my nascent feelings towards Coach Long, would definitely brand me a
la san
if discovered and be classified as “bourgeois poisonous weeds”.

Of course there were entries about the street sweeper who had vanished from the Pushkin graveyard area. During the past three years since I last saw him I had often imagined bumping into him again, with him unmasked and handsome. I had even written down what I’d say to him if I saw him again:
Please allow me to thank you for giving me the confidence to overcome difficulties in life.
I still remembered clearly the fainting but visible creases on his khakis and the high quality but unpolished leather shoes he wore. I could always see his encouraging eyes. The appeal the street sweeper had on me was persistent, and my secret diaries attested to my largely make-believe attraction to him.

Well, that day, I was already drafting my birthday diary entry in my head while the “streamlining” was taking place. It should definitely be recorded, I decided. After the session, as I dragged my feet to the changing room, Coach Long strode over in my direction. I stopped to wait. Next, he snapped a towel at me as though to startle me. I was shocked at his open flirtation. Red to the root of my long bare neck, I thanked Buddha
Guan Yin
that none of the other girls saw this. Coach Long draped the beach towel over me and whispered, “Wait for me outside where I parked my bicycle.”

My heart jolted as my cheeks burned. A giddy feeling hit me. “Mo Mo, you have become a
la san
and Coach Long is your man,” I told myself.

When I walked out, he was standing like a bronze statue next to his bicycle.

“
Hop on!”

As soon as I side-saddled onto the metal rack on the back wheel, it began to roll. “Hold on to my waist!” he commanded without turning his head.

Steadying myself with my arms around him, I could feel my heart beat as if I had just competed in a swimming race. Then, without warning, he sped up and took his hands off the handlebars as the bicycle swished along. “Look, no hands!” he called out, revealing an adventurous side of him I had not previously seen.

I held tightly onto him, my cheek pressed against his broad back. “Where are we going?”

“
You’ll find out soon enough. I’ve got something for your birthday.”

“
How … ? and what is it?” I’d never received anything for my birthday.

“
The team’s personal dossiers were reviewed for the streamlining so I know,” he returned his head to tell me. “Now don’t make me look back again.”

He
pedaled on. I clutched onto him, anticipation building inside of me.

Half an hour later, we arrived at an old building in Hongkou District. Coach Long parked his vehicle against the front wall and chained both wheels. Bicycles being the sole means of transportation aside from public buses, they were a highly prized commodity whose purchase required coupons, a long waiting list, and months
’
worth of salary. More so than towels, they were the most desired targets for th
i
e
ve
s. The exterior of the house had many exposed bricks and moss had grown in the cracks.

“
Who else lives here?”

“
Other unmarried male co
lle
a
gues
.”

So
this was the Sports Authority staff residence. “You share?” I asked nervously, never having been to this part of town that was the de facto Japanese concession during the WWII.

“
The facilities, yes, but I’ve got my own space with a coffin.”

“
A coff…?”

Before I could finish, Coach Long entered the front door and pulled me in. I bumped into a wooden shelf filled with mud stained rubber rain boots, umbrellas with bent spines, and nylon string-knitted net bags with used brown wrapping papers.

“
Watch out!”

I looked down and saw a mousetrap with a darkened piece of fried dough on its hook. Hairy stuff once extended from a rat’s rear end graced the baseboard. I let out a cry.

“
Don’t scream,” he said curtly, offering a hand, which I took.

“
Why is the shelf right by the door?”

“
Can’t move it, it’s fixed to the wall -- Japanese style. The Eastern foreigners store their shoes here before entering the house.”

Coach Long’s dim room was even smaller than Wang Hong’s home, about the size of two shower stalls. The first thing I noticed was another fixed wooden shelf heaped with piles of gym clothes. A pillow without its case and a soiled comforter lay inside as well.

“
So this is the …?”

“
Yeah. The Japanese used to tuck away their comforters during the day and sleep on the
tatami
at night. We all jokingly call it the coffin, and I use it as a bed.”