Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 9

A Cursory Nod to School Again

It had been five months since he had walked down the gang plank of the M.V. Hai Min and stepped onto the dock in Kaohsiung port and Ely had taken him by train to his uncle’s house in Taipei. And about three months since he’d paid to relinquish his virginity to Sue in a whorehouse near Yanping North Road. He had carved out for himself a modus operandi that Ely, and probably Uncle Frank— it was hard to tell because although he came home more often than in Taipei, Frank was still absent most of the time— had begun to dismiss as merely indicative of the natural born degenerate he was and probably always would be. And when he was home, Frank seemed uninterested in playing the role of a surrogate father, preferring to tell stories about mainland China during the war, still only ten years past, or help him understand a new Chinese phrase he was practicing. He would refrain from going out at night when Frank was there, but otherwise his nocturnal comings and goings continued, and for the most part Ely and the maids turned a blind eye to them.

In contrast to Taipei, the maids in Hong Kong offered little to arouse his prurient interest. The three of them slept on mats in one room, the old prunes flanking the young wet nurse. It was a modern, well-lit apartment, quite unlike the Japanese style house in Taipei where the younger amah was his age, her sister only three years older, where shadows and nooks, the semi-exposed bathing area, a tatami covered floor that could instantaneously become a bed, a sliding shoji screen suddenly a door and easy access to a dilapidated garden with trees and bushes and three gates to the outside world inflamed curiosity and stoked excitement. He loved the old Japanese house and he was suspicious of the apartment precisely because it was new and lacked gravitas and a soul.

However, his life was not entirely laissez-faire. Part of the deal with his parents was school. It was expected that he would not have to repeat his junior year of high school when he got back. It was assumed sufficient credits could be transferred to allow him to rejoin his old class and graduate normally at the end of his senior year in 1960. Unfortunately, however, thanks to the bargain he’d made to trade class time with for time with prostitutes and snooker-playing pimps, he would be deficient in American History, Social Studies, and Advanced Algebra. His mother, the English teacher, made a deal whereby he could take three correspondence courses over the summer and if he passed with a ‘B’ or better, the school authorities would let him back into his old class in the fall. And the best part was that he could substitute French for the Social Studies requirement. These correspondence courses plus Mr. Bean’s course in Chinese History at Taipei American School would, in terms of learning, prove to be the most productive of his entire high school experience. The year that he rarely went to school was the year that, academically, he learned the most. The lack of both an in-person teacher and the distraction of other students simply made it easier to concentrate. What would prove to be problematic was not what he didn’t learn while away from home, but what he did.

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Initially, in Hong Kong, he was supposed to go to King George V in Ho Man Tin on the Kowloon side, and Ely took him there for a visit. He did not like the place from the start and fought against it. He’d have to wear a jacket and tie to school, and brown and only brown shoes, and there were a bunch of other rules. It was not his kind of place. Nevertheless, he would have gone there if it weren’t for the commute, which was too long, including crossing Kowloon Bay by ferry twice a day. With his strong opposition, and the saving grace of the long commute, King George V was abandoned in favor of New Method English College, three stories high, less than a mile from Golden Court, [[[NMC, est. 1951, short name: xinfa shuyuan 新法書院]]] ]]] a little English school for South Asian foreigners downtown on the Hong Kong side. It was a short tram ride from where he lived. English was a second or third language for most of the kids so he was placed in sixth form English, but his weak American public school math background relegated him to third form maths. Only in physics was he given a level commensurate with his junior status in high school at home.

In English class he read poetry from a book called A Pageant of English Verse. The most memorable class was the day the turbaned Indian instructor spent the entire hour drawing and describing in loving detail the poppy flower, including its narcotic virtues, as well as the processes employed by evil men to extract them, in loose conjunction with Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. They read Sir Philip Sydney’s My True Love Hath my Heart, George Peele’s A Farewell to Arms, Robert Herrick’s The Argument of His Book, John Milton’s Il Penseroso, Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas (which was really just an excuse to secretly read the adjacent To His Coy Mistress), Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess (That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall / Looking as if she were alive) and, last and least favorite, Francis Thompson’s The Kingdom of God.

At New Method English College, he met a sixteen year old Filipino girl named Maria Montesana. She and her Pakistani girlfriend, Hafiza, would accompany him on little trips, not quite dates. One day they skipped a couple of classes—the school was not too strict about this, because they had to keep the students happy to maintain their precarious source of income—and walked up the hills to Tiger Balm Gardens. Amid exemplary scenes of torture in Buddhist hells, carved into the rocks, and shown in little statues in caves, he flirted with Maria. He kissed her for the first time near a scene of lust-crazed sexual transgressors being burned alive, over and over again, on a red hot bed of iron. Later, he tried to follow up this promising overture with an early evening visit to the apartment where Maria lived. But a couple of brothers, one older and one younger than he was, made it clear that he was not welcome at that time of day, or anytime. This would not be the last failure to make friends with a nice girl in East Asia.

Buoying sexual confidence coupled in an unholy alliance with incessant desire propelled him to constantly hunt the OS. Usually, he embraced his destiny as a teenage whoremonger and profligate without hesitation or deviance. “I shall concentrate on pussy to the exclusion of all,” he’d say. But something, from a previous life perhaps, kept gnawing at his brain—a moral qualm, a quest for truth?

Shortly, under Teacher Wong, he would start to learn how stupid he was, especially when it came to sex. Although counterintuitive, a cheap Taipei whorehouse was a poor environment in which to learn the lay of a woman’s genital landscape. Very little of what he had learned in the last four months of whoring was about sex. It was an adventure in discovering and investigating the cheaper part of the world of prostitution in a relatively large East Asian city in the late fifties at a time when he was young and good looking and extreme poverty was widespread. In fact, it would have been detrimental if it had continued for years and decades instead of for five months. That he stayed with a prostitute-centered approach to sex with the OS for only five months was entirely due to Teacher Wong, the luckiest thing that happened to him on his adventure—during that year away from home and, it could be argued, throughout his life.

His year in Taipei and Hong Kong were not only his first experience with sexual intercourse but also a country boy’s first experience with city life in any form. Back home, he lived fourteen miles from town on a thousand-acre ranch, considered tiny in those days by the cowboys in the rest of Montana. There were four people in his family then. If the population density were the same on the 6700 acres under Taipei City in 1958, there would have been less than thirty other people living in Taipei. Conversely, if the ranch had the same population density as Taipei, he would have been sharing it with twelve thousand people besides his dad, mom, and brother. With no preparation except a willingness to look and learn, suddenly, there he was, in Taipei, cheek to jowl with more than eight hundred thousand people who spoke languages he didn’t know, ate food he had never tasted, and did things he had never seen done. Although Frank and Ely made an effort to cooperate with his parents who tried to enforce it remotely by letter, he was, in a practical sense, free of parental control, many a teenager’s dream. The only limit on fornication for him was how much dough he had in his pocket. And both in Taipei and now in Hong Kong he was able to make money teaching his mother tongue and all the dos and don’ts and other corrections from his English teacher mother were perfect training for the job. But would he start to anticipate a reconciliation between the mental and physical, then at some distance, in the dimmest of relief, imagine a union of the spiritual and the sensual? Would he glimpse, in other words, the possibility of a prayer mat of flesh?