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sublingua | |||||
| The heart with a mind of its own.(Be present.) | The mind with a heart of its own.(It's past.) | The dream that is your waking life.(Go there now.) | |||
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Yellow Fever
Yellow Fever I'm standing in line at the crafts store, waiting to pay for my hole punch, blank cards, and other assorted collage materials. Ahead of me is a Japanese woman and her American husband. They have a half-breed toddler, the cutest little girl I've seen in months and months in the basket. She is dressed all in pink, pink hat, pink jacket, pink pants, pink shoes, pink barrettes in her hair. She has little pink lips. Her parents ignore her. The woman, who is about two feet shorter than her husband, is chattering away in simple Japanese to her husband, who chatters back in even simpler Japanese. I smile at the little girl, who does not smile back. I'm thinking of Mitch. My friends call it China Doll Syndrome, I had said to him. He had just finished telling me about his attraction to Asian women, the Japanese wife, the Filipino girlfriend, the Thai prostitutes. Women as a type, I thought. Women as objects. Women as things. He had expressed some disgust over men who went for women with large breasts. Fetishists, he called them. Oh yeah? I thought. Try looking in a mirror some time. "I've always called it "Yellow Fever," he had replied. I'm not Asian, obviously. This is a problem. This is one of those things that I won't be able to ever move past. This is Max's settling for me for eighteen years, when his preference was for men. This is Mitch's settling for me for several weeks, when his preference was clearly for Asian women. This is me being settled for. I am Jack's useless appendix.
More lies:
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