Fatal Weakness—Yang Hengjun (4.1)

致命弱点 Fatal Weakness
扬恒均 Yang Hengjun

第三章 上帝的手术刀 Chapter 3 The Scalpel of God

Part 4.1

Back when I was in New York studying at Columbia, I used all Sundays and public holidays to go around nearly every street in the city. It's the best way to get to know a city, and of course you also get your money's worth. Since then, whether it was when I went back to Beijing or off to Guangzhou, I use the same approach to find my way around. At the beginning, it was a bit exhausting and boring, but as I followed road after road, I grew more deeply with the city without even being aware of it, and this process of change from the quantitative to the qualitative was pretty much complete by my third worn-out pair of running shoes. Though I've only lived a few years in each of New York, Beijing and Guangzhou these three cities, I feel I know them just as well as any of their locals.

On my second day in New York, I pulled out the address to Catherine's place that Director Zhou had given me. I took a good look at it, then closed my eyes, more or less bringing to mind the look of the road and that of the residents there. The road is just a little street across and behind the Brooklyn bridge just three blocks to the left, situated in a ghetto in an borough with one of the highest concentrations of black people. As I made my way over, I felt a bit spooked; the buildings on both sides of the road didn't go any higher than four floors, and it was almost hard to find any that didn't have any broken windows. Walking down the street you have to be a bit careful or something might trip you up. What something? Well, that something could be some trash, or it could also be some drunk dude lying in the street, maybe even a junkie or a corpse. Sometimes things trip you up and you can't even tell what on earth it was. Except for these unknown somethings, the thing that left the deepest impression was the smell of death there and the lack of lifeforce in its residents, with their eyes like those of dead fish. All of this just just gave me an intense feeling of being in a far-off foreign land. I've been to a lot of cities in China, even to their so-called poor or vagrant areas, and though they're just as filled with trash, with unknown 'somethings' of their own, namely dilapidated housing or even iron huts, despite the smells there, the people's eyes at least give one a sense that hope still exists.

A thirty-something year old white woman who lives alone in a small apartment on this street, and I can already imagine just what kind of person and what kind of life. Coming out from the hotel, I find a taxi, and when I tell him the name of the street, the forty-something Afghani drive just sits there, doesn't start the car. I know he doesn't want to go, but when I repeat the address in standard New York English, he reluctantly starts the engine. On the way, he grumbles in English you have to stretch your ears out just to understand: 'whenever I go to this place every time I am losing money, it is very common for people to not pay, and the worse is when you get robbed. Sometimes you're lucky you can back out safely, but the car cannot avoid the bottles which drop down and smash.' Hearing him tell me this is really too much, so I agree to let him stop the car two blocks away and get out, taking the risking of walking in myself.

Catherine lives on the second floor of a run-down little three-story apartment building. Climbing up a wooden stairwell which looks like it would collapse if given a little push, I find the door. Probably because I phoned beforehand, I've barely just knocked when someone opens the door: "are you Yang, from China?"

It's a chubby white woman. I smile and nod as I push past her. As she lets me in she mockingly says, "standing here in front of the mirror, seeing this face and body of mine, I sure don't feel like like smiling, so what are you smiling at?"

I keep smiling politely at her.

I size up everything in the room, it's actually not that messy, probably because there's no furniture anywhere. Catherine's just the kind of Caucasian woman I'd imagined she'd be, which luckily wasn't as a skin-and-bones junkie or a cheap whore caked in make-up so thick some drops off her face every time she smiles. She's the kind of fat woman that's built solid like a German beer mug, arms as thick as my legs. Her chin is like a scrunched-up napkin hanging off her neck, swaying back and forth as she moves.

"Yang, help yourself, my home is your home. I don't have any tea, will pop do?"

"Sure, thanks." I take out the present I brought for her from China, handing it to her: "just a little something I thought you might like." Catherine takes the wrapped box and keenly rips it open. It's a Suzhou style Chinese silk scarf I went out of my way to get. She anxiously wraps the scarf around her fat neck, and I breathe freely when I see she manages to tie the scarf's ends together.

"Yang, do you think I'm fat?" Without even waiting for my response, she laughs: "you don't need to answer that, I don't want to hear you say 'no, not at all, you look great,' because you'll just be laughing inside. I'm fat and I know it." She has a little trouble bending down to pull a yellowing photo album out from under the coffee table. "Yang, these are all photos of what I used to look like, take a look if you want."

I open the album and flip through a few pages, noticing the same slim, blonde young woman in each photo. I know this is the old Catherine, but I still try and hide the awkwardness of seeing these, because I don't know what I ought to say.

"Yang, that's what I used to look like. Back then, I'd put a picture of myself in every week, but I stopped after 9-11. These last three years I haven't let anyone take my picture. You think I was pretty, don't you?"

Catherine's questions are in the past tense, so I just politely answer in the present: "you look good."

"Yeah, I looked really good back then; even though I didn't have much money, I pinched and saved enough to rent a place in the trendy area downtown. I still had hopes then. Looking like I do in those photos was one of those hopes; the other was him. Now, I have neither; everything makes sense to me now, not that it does me any good." Catherine lets out a deep, futile sigh. She stops, looks scrutinizingly at me for a minute, then asks: "Yang, tell me, back in your country, how do you look?"

At first, I can't tell what she's asking me; I'm confused, don't know how to answer. Catherine rephrases, and then I understand. It's an interesting question, so I tell her the truth, that a look like mine is extremely common in China, that at 5'7" I'm the average height for a Chinese man, that my eyes aren't so big, and they don't have double eyelids, that statistics show roughly two-thirds of Chinese men my age don't have double eyelids. My face shape is also quite common, there must be five or six hundred million people in China with this face, the kind you'll never read about in Chinese literature: not friendly, but not wicked either. Then there's my body. There was a time when I used to work out like a madman, but I grew up only able to eat meat once or twice a month and now you can't tell for looking that I'd ever been to to a gym in my life.

Hearing this, Catherine chuckles and says, candidly, "well, if you really want to stand out from others, you're just gonna have put in twice the effort." Then she adds, "I don't know what it's like over there in China, but from what I've seen on TV, whether it's your Communist or government officials, they all look pretty tall, on average at least more than 5'9", and every one of them seems to have two eyelids. Ha ha."

"But then again," Catherine sounds a bit serious, "here in America we really judge people by the way they look. Just go down to any high-class spot and you can see what I mean. There was some statistic a while back, it said all the top executives of the five hundred biggest corporations in the world all rate at above-average appearance. Especially for women. If a woman wants to get ahead, the first and most important thing she needs isn't talent, but looks. You know, the money we spend on make-up and facelifts each year here in America by far exceeds the amount we spend on education. They say God created people as equal, and the American constitution states that all people are born equal, but it's all bullshit. That what's-his-face of mine, he didn't buy into any of that, he said his job was to complete the unfinished causes of God and the American Constitution."

I yawn and stretch, then sit up; Catherine has finally reached the crux of the matter. Though I only gave her a simple reason for my visit over the phone earlier, since our meeting began this nearly two hundred pound heavy woman has known straight through what the real subject is, that being the guy she mentioned: Mike, both her former employer and lover.

"Yang, can you tell why it is you want to know more about him and I?" The way Catherine suddenly changes the subject, I guess she's worried about divulging her clients' information.

"Like I told you on the phone, I lost my job recently, my girlfriend just died, and then I was arrested by the Chinese police and locked up in prison for a few weeks. All of sudden I felt quite lost, things seemed meaningless. Over the last while, I've found that only old memories give me the strength to pull myself back together. You know, Guo Qingqing and I went to college together. I don't know if you could say she was my first true love, but I've always been in love with her, though I don't know if she loved me back. After working for a few years following graduation, the two of us happened to come to New York at the same time to do our Masters, but for a variety of reasons we just weren't able to stay together. A while after that, I suddenly decided to look her up, though at the time I still wasn't sure what I was going to do when I found her. I would have at least asked one question, though: whether or not she ever did love me during those years."

I haven't finished talking, but Catherine's eyes have already started to well up with tears, and she mumbles to herself: "did you ever love me? Did you ever love me?" Her voice is actually pleasing to the ears; if only she didn't look like a human version of Dumbo, I could easily imagined it was one of those loving, passionate heroines from Chinese martial arts novels speaking, with their sighs that seem to promise unconditional love. I see there's no need for me to say more. Sure enough, Catherine gets up to go to the bathroom and when she sits back down, spends two hours telling me the following story.

Yang, I might not be all that pretty, but I'm not ugly either. Look at the photos, not how I look today, and you'll see what I mean. Most importantly, I'm not stupid. Do you know which kind of men are the most handsome and succesful? I'll tell you, they're the ones in the courtrooms and hospitals, all the hunky young lawyers and medical interns. You wanna find yourself a lawyer, you can try taking someone to court, but it wouldn't be that much fun. Doctors, though, they're different; you can just say you're not feeling well and you're in. That's how I met Mike, in Queen's Hospital. Oh, how stylish and handsome he was. And professional. He was so set on medical research, spending all his time with seniors and patients, he was almost thirty and still a bachelor. The first time I went to see him I was stuck on him, and from then on I couldn't help but pretend to be constantly sick, just so I could see him again. You know he's a surgeon, and faking diseases that need surgeons' treatment isn't so easy. Things got pretty twisted for me back then.

With me taking the initiative, Mike and I quickly got it on. It was only later that I saw we weren't actually all that suited for each other. He wasn't just hunky and handsome with one of the highest-paying professions there is, he was as respected as one can get in America. And me? Of average looks, no steady job, I was pretty bummed for a while. When Mike found out why, he couldn't stop laughing. He never paid any attention to my looks, he told me, but that even if he did, he still wouldn't mind. He can say what he likes, but while I knew that marrying a man like this would only one day end up with me regretful and hurting, one the other hand, not marrying him, starting right there and then, would mean regret and hurt, day in and day out. So we got married. After that, we still often talked about people's looks, and from looks to jobs, success and destiny. In the end we agreed, that in this world looks are still the most important; the better you look, the easier it is to get ahead, and with the right looks, you're pretty much set for life. You could even, I said, find yourself a good husband or wife. Aye, if only I'd known then how deeply all this talk would affect Mike. He went from deep consideration of all this, to action. One day, he held me as we sat on the sofa and said:

"Honey, I'm thinking about quitting, and opening up a plastic surgery clinic."

So shocked I almost jumped up, because you know how respectable being a doctor is, and that the public sees plastic surgery as some sort of heresy. Mike's explained, saying the main reasons society doesn't accept plastic surgery lie with outdated concepts and religious retraints. In the East, the common view is that skin and hair are given to us by our parents and can't be changed, while in the West, things used to be bound by the philosophy of God's creation of man; you were the way God made you. Later, the West started pushing for freedom and democracy, coming up with the Declaration of Independence and all people being created equal. Nothing wrong with that. But, no matter how righteous Eastern sages, God, or the Declaration of Independence all appear to be, they still overlook an injustice that even a blind man can see: the adults who after just three months see their baby is going to be attractive and smile to themselves; the charming little boys and girls who get favored by their teachers; all the successful women in this world most of whom get by on their breasts and not their brains. Mike said his plan to open a plastic surgery clinic came from wanting to complete the unfinished business of God and the American Constitution.

Mike said his research into body structure and dermatology had gone so deep that he didn't just know how to use a scalpel to completely change a person's appearance, but also that with the development of modern medicine, full-body cosmetic surgery would have almost no side effects. He gave an example: remember when you were a kid all the places on your body that got hurt, cut or even broken? And what side effects do you see now?

I was totally persuaded by Mike; we made our minds up and we went to it. Cosmetic surgery clinics aren't medical care facilities, so I just had to take a crash course in nursing, and then I was a clinic nurse. Mike had been putting money away for a few years already, so we chose to open the clinic on the sixty-ninth floor of the North tower of the World Trade Center. As far as we knew, there were a few clinics inside the twin towers, but this was the only one doing cosmetic surgery.