Hong Van / Hammock
by K-Ming Chang
Hong Van
Lanny and I wanted to look like the commercial on KTSF, the one of the Hong Van woman swinging ripe in a white hammock. The woman’s strung between two coconut trees, surrounded by water that froths like a dog’s jaw. But look, Lanny said, the water’s so fake. I asked how she could tell. I’d never seen the sea before, so it looked real to me: vein-blue with a layer of mattress foam. Lanny said that the ocean in real life isn’t blue, it’s polluted. She’d seen the San Francisco bay before, the signs that said don’t swim. I didn’t know what polluted meant, so Lanny scooped grit from my mother’s potted loquat tree and honeyed my face in it. Like that, she said, laughing. I liked her laugh. I held it like a pebble in my palm. My mother always kept cans of Hong Van under the sink, and Lanny and I thought that drinking them all at once would sweeten our hips, glaze our faces: all we needed was a hibiscus flower plugged in our hair and a bikini as thin as flypaper. We’d bloat ourselves a pair of breasts and sip our skin white as the woman on-screen. Lanny taught me how to snort up the cubes of grass jelly and swallow them that way, like snot when you’re sick. She said if you eat things through the nasal cavity instead of the mouth, you don’t get any of the calories. I didn’t know what a calorie was, so Lanny explained it to me: if you input enough of them into your body, you’re pregnant. Lanny taught me all kinds of ways to not get pregnant, such as doing a headstand twice a day for ten seconds at a time, parting your hair to the left, and not having any knees. Lanny told me what she overheard from her aunts: that you could break open a baby like an egg yolk if you had the right fork. I didn’t understand what this meant, but Lanny said when I was older I’d know. She was only eleven months older than me, but she’d already broken her wrist twice, attended Catholic school in a skirt, and seen The DaVinci Code in theaters by sneaking in with her sister. So what was the movie about, I asked her, and she said she didn’t really know. But there was a man in it who whipped himself, she said, we should try it. I liked it better when we pretended to be the woman in the commercial, even though I had to tie all my clothing into a hammock for her to swing inside, and impersonate the trees too, and knock my two fists together to make the sound of coconuts. I didn’t mind carrying her, buoying her on my back while she lounged on the ocean. But Lanny said this would be more fun, this thing called punishment. She searched through the kitchen and found my mother’s cooking chopsticks and told me to kneel. Because I’d never seen the movie, I wasn’t really sure how to copy the scene, so I whacked myself a bit with the chopsticks until Lanny told me to stop. That’s terrible, she said, it looks like you’re killing mosquitos. She grabbed the chopsticks from me and said she’d do it. You have to look like you’re sorry, she said, but I didn’t know the shape of that, so I leaned forward until my back was a beetle’s. Lanny hummed some words as she beat my back with the chopsticks, a soundtrack to something else I’d never seen, and later when I lifted up my shirt, I counted the bruises screened onto my skin, places I couldn’t trace. I lay the cold cans of Hong Van on the floor and rolled my back against them, but they still took a month to fade. Later, when Lanny got a boyfriend, she didn’t come over anymore, and she said that TV was for poor people. We are poor, I wanted to say to her, but her boyfriend had a brand-new Mitsubishi. She told me he hit ninety on our street, and I thought she was saying he was ninety years old. No, you idiot, ninety miles an hour. That’s how fast I’ll be going when I get out of here, she said. I watched her from the window of my apartment, watched her on the sidewalk below, waiting for the boyfriend going ninety. I wanted to ask if she still remembered when we were beached together, suspended over the sea in a hammock made of my hands. But then I saw her leave, and she didn’t come back to our street for weeks at a time, and my mother said she was probably pregnant. Impossible, I said, remembering all the tips she used to tell me, forgetting that we lied all the time. I said I wanted to be like the woman in the commercial, the one with the flower and the coconut breasts, but what I really wanted to be was the sea behind her, lacerated by light, reaching out to yank the hammock loose from the trees and swallow the woman back to salt.
Hammock
They hire me to hang above the sea. They weave me a hammock with strands of my spit. They gild me in oil and say tilt your head, like the rain is typing its name on your face. There’s no rain in the scene they make for me. Water’s flat on every map. They hand me a can and a pink straw and say, stick it in, sip. A long time ago, I used to sing on TV. Not the kind of singing that’s on TV now. Folk songs, the ones no one sings anymore. Back then, there were languages we were banned from hearing. I knew a man who was arrested for talking to his dog in Taiwanese. Maybe not arrested, just fined a hundred dollars. He sold his spleen or his liver or some other soft part, some neighbor to the heart. Since the commercial’s in Mandarin, the director tells me to work on my accent. He says I’ve got to hammer it out, then hands me my hair. It’s a wig they sprayed with real seawater so that my bangs maintain volume. The set designers are hammering out a sheet of aluminum they’ll paint for the sunset, but they can’t decide which side of the sky to sketch the sun. On the left, they’re saying, or maybe the center, but that’s too cliché. In the mirror, I tap each word with my tongue, careful not to crack it into different consonants, but the director says they’ll just dub me. Dubbing is cheaper, he says, than trying to capture the sound live. I remember when sound was dead. When the military built a prison behind the river and they kept boys there. The boys used to sing old songs before they were executed, the ones in my dialect, and then they were dumped in the river with their wrists strung together. They always tied all the boys together so that they’d only have to shoot one: the rest would be dragged in and drowned. This type of death was called saving bullets. They sang as they sank, or maybe that’s just what I remember from a TV special about martial law. All Taiwanese songs are about fighting, my mother always told me, but I don’t remember blood in any of them. I only remember the one about the grandfather who goes out to a taro field and digs up the fattest of them. There were bones found in a field beside the river, dug up by some farmer, and I hear they’re in a museum now, that you can see them under light. Under this lighting, the director says I’m not so beautiful. Let’s dim it, he says, it’s supposed to be sunset. They’ve painted the sun with a special kind of paint that radiates when it’s cold. I pad my nipples with cotton and collect my ankles, warm them in my fists, lay back in the hammock while the director says move the water a bit, it looks dead. They turn on a machine that claims to be the sound of waves, but I don’t think any water speaks that way. When it stalls, the assistant kicks the machine until it hacks, clearing the foam from its throat. Just mouth the words, the director says, you don’t have to actually say them. We’re just going for the shape. Okay, I say, but when I open my mouth, I sing until the tin sunset shudders behind me, sing so loud that the director says it’s going to be a pain to cut my sound out, to clean up the footage, but I like that he’ll watch this later, that I’ve been captured somewhere, that the sound of me will surface, birth-blue, every time they screen the sea.
K-Ming Chang / 張欣明 is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel Bestiary (One World/Random House, 2020). Her short story collection, Resident Aliens, is forthcoming from One World. More of her work can be found at kmingchang.com.
