I HEARD S*X SELLS (ii)

If I remember correctly, around the same time, I started watching Taiwanese dramas with 杨丞琳、王心凌、张韶涵 etc. Back then, there were no streaming platforms that played these. I’d have to either go to 合丰电脑城 to buy the pirated DVDs, or use these pirated sites to watch them. I would find the drama on pirated websites that had questionable ads, aka pornography, onlyfans-like call girls etc.  Sometimes I clicked on the ads, and it turned out I was curious about what I saw. I’m not sure if because all the male-facing porn were and still are all about fulfilling male fantasies, while disregarding the female needs, I didn’t know they were geared toward dudes, and it confused the shit out of me. I don’t know where to find “straight-female” porn, but it doesn't matter anymore.  I never needed “straight-female” porn again anyway. It was around third or fourth grade. No one gave me sex education ever. It’s not just sex: love, life, work, death; my parents didn’t talk about any of those.  It was all about the grades, who’s talking to who, have I done assignments yet, which middle school I want to go to, and when to get ready for middle school entrance exams (yes, I had to take those. There were “The Famous Four” (四大名校) that everyone wanted to go to, they were: The First, Yali, The Second, and Hunan Normal University High School. Each had their own entrance exam) . 

Schooling was no joke. My parents only let me have four joyful years of schooling, even though no outside playing was allowed. The furthest I could go until 4th grade was the small park in between the buildings in the same complex. I didn’t trust my parents, and they didn’t trust me. I hate my mom and dad, I didn’t get along with my classmates, I’d always be causing trouble at school, though I didn’t think I did anything wrong. 

I didn’t want to have any sort of conversation with my parents. I wanted to minimize the time I spent with them. I always felt suffocated and extremely triggered when I was around them. I’d never go to them with anything. They were the last people on earth I wanted to talk to about anything. For a long time, I thought the western concept of talking to your parents about your problems was such a naive idea, until much later that I realized, many kids of my age had that with their parents, it wasn’t a pipe dream, just a norm. 

I didn’t know how to start a conversation about anything to anyone. I didn’t talk to anyone outside of 岚 until I was maybe in 4th grade. Whenever I was around kids of my age, I’d freeze. I thought nothing interesting would come out of my mouth, I also had nothing I wanted to share. I didn’t enjoy any “games” other kids of my age liked to play, whether it’d be girls pretending to cook or boys competing to race. I didn’t want to cook nor did I care about winning a race. I came across as nonchalant, which I didn’t find out many years later. 

I didn’t know how to start a conversation about anything with anyone, letting alone the subjects of sex, or love. Love seemed a bit far from my life at the time, I don’t remember that word ever coming up at school among kids. But sex came up quite often. I was a late bloomer, emotionally, not sexually. I didn’t understand love, but sex was right in front of my eyes. 

I used to walk home with this other boy who lived upstairs in my building. My dad always wanted to make sure I walked home with someone from school, and he wanted to make sure it was some kid whose parents he knew. We became pretty good friends, but we also started getting made fun of after we started second grade. It really wasn’t anybody’s business who I walked home with, but when some kids saw me, they’d joke about how we’d been doing things people didn’t want to know about. I wasn’t sure what they were insinuating. But they made me pretty fucking uncomfortable. 

To stop them from talking, I stopped walking home with him, and I didn’t really explain why I didn’t want to walk home with him anymore, even to this day.  I wonder how he’s doing now. I stopped saying hi to him after a while. I hope he knows that it had nothing to do with him. It was just typical of me. Avoidant. 

Kids of my age were very curious about me. I didn’t think there was anything special about me, I still don’t think there is. I didn’t like being the topic of gossip, I started avoiding being around boys as much as possible. I wasn’t too big of a deal, I liked girls more anyway. I don’t know how it was for anyone else, but in elementary school, we were divided into five classes in my grade, each class had 60+ kids, but no more than 70. We each had our own classroom, our own classmaster, and each class had a student leader, and a vice.  Teachers would come to our classroom for each period, except P.E., and Music. P.E. because, how do you do it in a classroom? Music because that’s the only room with space for a piano.  

We’d get our seats rearranged in our regular classroom, so every kid gets to sit in the front. Rotating seats was more fair to everyone than never changing seats. It was also because everyone was going taller at different speeds, it was difficult for teachers to organize. However, we never did that for the music class. So I had the same people sitting on both sides for the entire six years. I sat next to this boy who would always put his head on my left arm, while I held the music book with both hands, and sat only on the ⅓ of the chair, like the music teacher instructed us to.  He’d always be in all kinds of relaxing positions in class and never paying attention to nothing, except me. He said he had “多动症“ (ADHD), i didn’t know what he meant, but I just wish he could stop exposing me. I hadn’t given up on pretending to be a good student, I still wanted to try. As if I could be a student, my mom would be nicer to me, more patient with me, listen to me, pay attention to me. She wouldn’t. She didn’t. 

Sometimes the music class boy didn't just put his head around my arm, but also made jokes about sex. I still remember some of them, he wanted to know if I knew what he meant. I did, but I didn’t know what’s the big deal about it. A dick in a vagina, so? I don’t have to take you up on it. Perhaps my attitude intimidated him, he never made another move. It’s weird to think about how early kids could mature sexually, but it’s not too weird when you think about how early people used to start having kids. Yet the sex education piece was completely missing in almost everyone’s childhood of my age, except a few among the ones I’ve talked to. It was a shame to talk about sex, or period, or losing your virginity, or exploring sexually. Even a few days ago, my dad said it’s shocking to see me talk about “having sex” “making love”. To that, I’d say, you ain’t seen nothing yet. 

The music class boy became the second time I was passively engaged in a situation where I had to make sense of “having sex”, like what is it, and what it means when it’s a boy. I didn’t think too much about it, I was young. I didn’t have to think too much about it, my body already rejected it. I didn’t want to confuse anyone. I didn’t want to give any wrong ideas.  He continued to put his head around my arms, and I pretended that I was playfully bouncing his head on my arm like a basketball, to get him to eventually give up on putting his head over my shoulder. He’d eventually give up, and I’d eventually be like, ah, he finally gave up. I’m not evil, but I was not straight-forward about it either. I liked being around him, but I did not want to be with him. I’m not sure how to convey the difference. Also, I was too young. I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t know what I’m doing.