Painter

Don’t Give Me What I Want

Oct. 16, 2011. New York Times

A FEW days before I was dumped, I sat in the campus library. It was the eve of my first chemistry exam that semester. Under the dusty lights of the reading room, I was supposed to be studying. Instead, I stared at the cracked screen of my cellphone, waiting for a call.

Scattered across the table were my textbooks, laptop, pencils and two stacks of index cards. One stack had the names and definitions of the seemingly endless number of organic compounds I had to memorize. The other tackled more complicated material: my love life.

It had been almost two weeks since I’d seen the guy I was dating. Based on his lack of communication, I feared our next phone call would be our last. So I took pre-emptive action, composing on index cards a list of reasons why he and I should still hang out. One read, “I’m not looking for anything serious either, just fun” (a completely false statement). “My friends love me,” read another.

He did not call that night. I guess he didn’t want to break up with me on Valentine’s Day. Memories of better times galloped through my head: cuddling in bed, watching nature documentaries. I thought we had a connection, some bond.

When I got home I didn’t bother taking off my jacket. I just collapsed into bed and stared off, in that way. I had dated this guy for only a month. How pathetic. Why did I miss that hulking hockey-player-turned-vegetarian-paralegal so much?

Throughout the school year I am employed at a popular nature museum where I care for animals, primarily insects. To me it’s the best job ever. For a science student, it’s much better than folding clothes at a department store. I have also learned a lot, odd facts I tend to spout out during dinner conversations, like: “Butterflies can see with their genitals. They have photoreceptive cells on their sex organs.”

I actually have said those words on dates. That’s how a nerd copes with first-date anxiety.

I also collect information on animal courtship, and my knowledge is extensive enough to make David Attenborough blush.

Did you know that a female humpback whale lifts her genitals above the water while males fight for her affections? Male fruit flies give females a gentle pat on the behind to let them know they are interested (not much different from some guys I know). Panamanian golden tree frogs wave their tiny hands to communicate their desires. And albatrosses, which stay together their entire lives, keep it interesting by entertaining each other with goofy ritual dancing.

I think life would be good as a monogamous albatross, partly because I find human courtship senseless. In almost all species of animals I have studied, a remarkable gesture of interest is what wins a mate. In humans, it’s the opposite.

Constructing a brightly colored nest works wonders for the bowerbird. Clownfish will actually change their sex in the right setting. Bonobo chimpanzees display their physical interest in one another directly and ceaselessly, performing sex acts as greetings.

Perhaps humans have simply entered a new stage of evolution in which we have abandoned chocolates, door holding, flowers or any overt gesture of interest for a new and unnatural order of things.

“The smartest thing you can do is play hard to get,” said my best friend, Becca, during a brunch at which I was discussing my relationship troubles. “Don’t make yourself too available.” Becca must know what she’s talking about because she has been with a guy for more than a year, and they are talking marriage.

My friend David was also on the cusp of being in a serious relationship, but he prided himself in staying detached enough so he would not be forced to label it. “It ruins it when you have to call it something,” he said.

When I was with my guy, the last thing I did was play hard to get. Once I even badgered him with six texts in a row, and the fact that he did not respond only made me want him more. It left me wondering: Why can’t we get enough of people who don’t give us enough?

After brunch with Becca, I was ruffled by how little my guy was talking. I wasn’t quite at the point of writing “I love myself” index cards (What crazy person does that?), but I found myself reading a lot of dating material, articles like, “How to Know He’s Just Not That Into You” and “When He Doesn’t Text.” It did not matter that the articles were about straight relationships and I was gay. They assured me of nothing except that I wasn’t alone in how I felt.

When he finally called and said he wasn’t looking for anything serious, I was crushed. I passed through the stages of grief that follow a breakup: denial, anger and depression. But not acceptance. My pride stood in the way of that. Pride also is what filled my planner with the long list of guys I dated for two weeks after, most of whom I met on dating Web sites.

Dating sites are like virtual zoos, but for humans. You can learn about the various creatures by reading their panels and observe them without any real danger, but you should think carefully before squeezing through the bars to meet what is lurking on the other side. At least that is what I should have done.

Among my dates were a boring professor of Shakespeare who made dinner feel like office hours and a Texan who thought he could lasso me by subtracting 15 years from his age.

But then one morning I saw Nick waiting tables at the restaurant around the corner from my apartment. He hustled around the dining room serving a combination of eggs and attitude. His piercing blue eyes and messy dark hair made me bite the inside of my lip. He reminded me of Jonathan Rhys Meyers, but made in Little Italy. As it turned out, we shared mutual friends.

At our first dinner I sighed with relief when he rattled off names of barbecue places he liked. We laughed over our mutual obsession with superhero films. And after watching me chew the meat off a chicken bone, he still gave me a kiss goodnight.

On another date he suggested a trip to a shooting range near the West Side Highway. I was excited but nervous, never having shot a firearm. He smiled and laughed and held my hand. His skin was always warm to the touch.

Working at the museum greenhouse recently, I saw a pair of birdwing butterflies engaged in a courtship dance. The male, with his shimmering green wings, flies up and under the female repeatedly until she submits. This male looked exhausted; he had spent so much time seeking her attention that his wings had become tattered and faded.

That evening a large group of children were in the museum for a special event. A few were excited seeing a large butterfly carrying a smaller one in flight. At first I thought it was the same mating behavior of the previous pair, but then I realized it was something tragically different.

The female was spiraling in the air with the corpse of the male butterfly attached. He had died during intercourse. He must have been so exhausted from impressing her that when she finally gave in, he gave out. Spending most of the day resisting him, the female did not have the strength to remove him, so she died also. The moment felt very metaphoric, probably because Nick had been so persistent in pursuing me.

AT first his behavior was endearing. He constantly gave me attention, lavishing me with compliments, calls and sometimes gifts. But one morning when I slid out of bed from next to him, things felt different. All his wooing suddenly repelled me.

I crawled back in and tried my best to pretend things were O.K. He showered and dressed. I clenched my teeth when it was time to kiss goodbye, then shut the door behind him, sighed and wondered if he had any idea.

Slouching into a nearby chair, I found myself questioning the nature of our relationship, how uneasy I became when Nick gave me everything I supposedly wanted. I began to think how ridiculous it is that our most useful allure is resistance and that our natural reaction is to push away someone who shows that he cares.

Would I hurt Nick the same way I had been hurt in the past? I was reminded of my friends and their need to stay detached. I thought about the guy who dropped me and wondered if he experienced the same thing I was experiencing now. I wasn’t used to being liked so easily.

Could it be that I was conditioned to think I had to work for someone’s affection and if I didn’t it meant something was wrong? All that effort did the birdwings little good. Then I thought of my friend the albatross, and I smiled for a moment.

It wasn’t long after that I realized I was now failing chemistry.

The Trophy Wife

By Deanna Fei, September 1, 2011, New York Times

ONE balmy evening in Shanghai, my boyfriend and I were strolling home from dinner when two boozy blond men called to us. Expecting a plea for directions, we stopped. The men leered at me and grinned at my boyfriend.

“Where’s the party?” they asked jovially. “You know, Chinese girls. Where can we get one of these?”

They meant me.

My boyfriend cursed at them and held me close as we crossed the street, but I dropped his hand. For the six months we’d been together, we had endured more than our share of stares, from curious to smug to hostile, from Chinese and Westerners and everyone in between. But nothing had been as flagrant as this. Suddenly, I felt as if those men had seen the truth, while what we knew of ourselves was a sham.

He was no longer the boyfriend whose home I shared, the journalist whose dedication and drive kept me inspired, the man who scratched my back through entire seasons of “The Sopranos.” In that moment, he was just a laowai, another foreigner in China taking home an Asian woman like a souvenir.

And I was no longer the girlfriend he loved, the native New Yorker like him, the Chinese-American who had moved to Shanghai on a Fulbright to research a novel, the woman who challenged him on a daily (he’d say hourly) basis. I was just another local naïf, maybe a gold digger, possibly a prostitute.

My boyfriend tried to reason with me. Those men were bumbling tourists. The truth of our relationship was in the life we shared. He said, “All we can do is be who we are.”

But that was part of the problem. He was a successful white man ensconced in cushy expatriate life. I was a young Asian female who had somehow ended up living off him.

We had met at a reading sponsored by the United States Consulate. He told me later he was struck by the question I asked the author as much as by my eyes. I liked his authoritative yet easygoing presence, the unassuming way he talked about his work, the respectful way he asked about mine.

I had a strange feeling of warmth and well-being sitting beside him. But I didn’t see him as a romantic prospect, not even when he asked for my number. My reasons were both superficial and not. He towered over me by more than a foot. He was at a different stage of life. He was a laowai in Shanghai.

Back home, I had grown up grimacing with my girlfriends at what seemed to be the rampant coupling of white men in pursuit of the exotic with Asian women seeking a socioeconomic boost. Partly for this reason, I had always tended to avoid dating white men. It wasn’t until I moved to Shanghai that this preference became a principle.

Everywhere I looked, “yellow fever” seemed amplified to a cartoonish extreme: paunchy white businessmen towing petite Chinese girls decades their junior; personal ads seeking “hot Asian women, no English required”; local call girls working the lobbies of hotels.

But when the journalist called, that warm feeling washed over me again. I agreed to meet him. Drinks stretched into dinner, then into a weekend, at the end of which I remembered to tell him that my time in China was nearly done. My grant was expiring. I missed my family and friends. I was tired of Shanghai.

He was about to embark on a 10-day reporting trip down the Mekong River through southwestern China and into Thailand, Laos and Cambodia. After that, he was heading to Sudan, then Europe. By the time he returned, I’d be gone.

He asked me to join him on the Mekong. I reminded him we hardly knew each other. This was more than a fling, he said.

When I mentioned I couldn’t afford the trip, he offered to cover everything. I had never been dependent on a man, and I didn’t like the prospect. He didn’t want my dependence or even gratitude. All he asked was the chance to prove that our connection couldn’t be dismissed.

So I found myself floating down the Mekong beside him, interviewing farmers on the riverbanks, writing on boat decks, swimming in pools lighted by the grand wings of former French colonial mansions. Halfway through, he began persuading me to live with him. By the end, I could no longer laugh off the notion.

He was wildly romantic yet matter-of-fact about our situation. He received a salary for pursuing his passion; I didn’t. If I returned to New York, I might abandon my novel to pay rent; he could prevent that. We both knew I would never choose a man for money. By the same token, how could I walk away from him for my lack of it?

I wrestled with what people would think; how any man could support a woman he had just met and expect an egalitarian relationship; whether I could compromise my independence without losing myself.

A few months before, a fortune teller at a temple in Hong Kong had warned me that my self-reliance might propel me, career-wise, to a glorious treetop on a mountain peak, but leave me sitting there alone. In fact, this trait had undone every previous relationship.

Back in Shanghai, I gathered my belongings from the mice-infested studio where, for more than a year, I had fallen asleep to the screeching of stray cats and woken to the songs of rickshaw vendors. I moved into the journalist’s 3,000-square-foot perch in the V.I.P. tower of a hotel compound where President Nixon and his delegation once stayed.

I learned to smile less uneasily at the doormen who rushed to greet us; to focus on my computer as the housekeeper worked around me; to leave my wallet in a drawer whenever we ate out.

When we traveled — throughout China and to Vietnam, India, Turkey, Italy, Hungary — I often carried nothing. He had the currency, itinerary and keys, so why not my passport? None of this affected the way we debated books, edited each other’s work, excavated our pasts and built a relationship in which we each felt we had finally met our match.

He never expressed reservations about our arrangement. In fact, he’d begun talking of marriage. And though marriage seemed a remote possibility to me, I began to understand his vision: a future where not only our finances, but every twist of fate would be shared. In truth, my financial dependence was breaking down my cynicism about romance. I could no longer tell myself, as I had with every previous boyfriend, that I didn’t need him.

“You’re a keeper,” he liked to say. “I had to grab you and keep you.” This became our joke, until we encountered those blond men. After that, in my own eyes, I wasn’t just a keeper: I was a possession, a woman being kept.

Other realities I hadn’t quite faced: my mother’s pointed remarks about how women had nothing without financial autonomy; a mutter from my father that I’d become a laowai’s mistress; the incredulity of friends who knew I paid the bills by working as a teacher, a salesclerk, a waitress, so I could devote my spare time to writing. Now here I was trying to finish a novel about a family of fiercely independent women touring their ancestral home of China, while I lived like a trophy wife.

I started to persuade myself that this was temporary. I joked to friends that my boyfriend was my latest fellowship. I told him there’d be no more talk of marriage. He was hurt but figured I’d come around. Over the next months, the relationship continued as before, even as I told myself that, any moment, I would resume my real identity.

ONE evening, we sped toward yet another hotel in a taxi, having flown into the otherworldly beauty of Guilin. I was fighting a cold and weary of travel as we hurtled past lush banyan trees and jutting karst formations. I thought he was focused on the scenery when, out of the falling darkness, he said my name, first and last, so quietly he might’ve been talking to himself. He said he would love me forever. I started to make a lighthearted rejoinder.

He said: “I love generations before you and generations after. I love your children. I hope to be their father.” As his words suffused me, I realized that all the time I had tried to convince myself our present would soon be the past, it was unspooling into our future. I had fretted over the connotations of being kept, yet forgotten the basic meaning. He wanted to keep me, and I wanted to keep him. This was for keeps.

In the six years since that evening, we have moved back to New York, weathered ups and downs in each of our incomes, bought a home, married and are now expecting our first child: traditional steps in the human pursuit of permanence, if not in traditional order. Still, when I think about what will remain, I remember those words he uttered in a cab as the treetops and karst hills blurred into twilight.