Huang He and Xin Yi

Author’s Note: The names are fictitious; the people are not. The telling is very personal but it may resonate among those in May-December affairs.

In 2001, I traveled from China’s capital city while a group of 10 late teenagers from an eastern city transited through Japan. On the flight to Saipan, I sat with two and learned of their travel plans. One of them was eager to practice her English.

I sensed something remiss when I was told the group headed for the CNMI on a one-year student visa. The Commonwealth did not yet issue such visas. They came to finesse their English skills and take the NCLEX a year later. I was inclined not to refute unverified information, so I gave one of the students my name and phone number in case they needed assistance later.

My intuition was on target. The phone call came two months after. The students discovered that reality did not match expectations. They were at the mercy of a sponsor willing to assist their English but on terms that was more servitude than scholarly pursuit. Unhappy with the arrangement, they sought assistance to get the balance of their money back and enroll at NMC’s nursing program. 

Huang He was one of those girls. The only child of an urban Chinese family, she was determined to fulfill filial gratitude. Her gaokao examination (the standard test that determines academic future beyond high school in China) was just “so-so,” so she was shunted to vocational training, in this case nursing. At the time, nursing was viewed only as slightly higher than being a maid in a 4-star hotel.

A warmhearted pastor recruited her group of China-trained nurses to Saipan, and though the sponsoring institution meant well, they promoted what they intended to do more than what they currently offered. I transferred three of them to NMC and temporarily housed two at a Methodist Resource Center.

All three finished the RN program, doing well in the NCLEX. Distraught when she was told to stop after the 75th of the 150-question computer test, Huang He found out later that she already excelled in the first half and did not need to proceed further! She passed with flying colors! We married in 2003; divorced four years later.

Here in northeast China where I recently concluded teaching Oral English, one of my recent students was Xin Yi. She hails from Beijing, older than her classmates in a third-tier college where people who only did “so-so” in gaokao are enrolled. China in the last 10 years recorded an increase from 25 percent to 62 percent of HS grads attending college; academic learning was extended to students like Xin Yi and new institutions built to accommodate them.

Behaving more adult than classmates who came straight to college from high school while she detoured through the job market, Xin Yi showed maturity beyond her age. Her family took a trip to the U.S. while the semester was in session and she asked permission to be absent. I asked her to give a 5-minute report upon her return.

Her report was notable on two counts: a) she found herself and her mother as the only people using a parasol on Waikiki Beach, radically exposing her culture’s usage of widely marketed skin whitening cosmetics, and b) she saw many Hawaiians of Japanese descent who did not elicit the feelings of disdain she experienced when thinking of Japan in Manchuria (universally regarded as deserving the labial spit peeyou). The ones she met were pleasant. The lessons she learned on the commercial virtue of white skin and her bias against the Japanese were heard loudly, delivering pedagogy more effective than what I could have offered.

Huang He and I on Saipan allowed mutual concupiscence to use the language of love with estrogen and testosterone intensity waning after four years of marriage. The cultural divide between an American of Philippine descent and a Zhongguoren conditioned to seek financial success for the parents, in a wide generational gap of 37 years, was too much to overcome. Friends later accused me of seducing the tender blossom. Though I exhibited sa-sa-ib-bek ti puso, (Iloko for “heartthrob pain”, expressed subtly and intensely) at the end, the parting concluded amicably, and the concupiscence was with genuine care and affection.

It is the memory of the time Huang He and I shared in As Lito, triggered by a budding relationship between Xin Yi and I that occasioned this reflection. Of late, Xin Yi and I shared one too many coffee breaks, sat through too long in the dark at the movies with no shortage of kinesthesia, but my double jowl is unmistakably lao ye rendering any lust remaining in my bones for someone her age as best left behind on Saipan’s shores. Besides, I am probably incapable of alluring her anyway, even if I tried. I took the imaginative play in the dark for what it was.

I brought Xin Yi to the train station on her trip home to Beijing at the end of the school term. When we said “goodbye,” we knew it was best not to see each other again. Just as well! My sa-sa-ib-bek ti puso will probably be more intense this time were I to mistake concupiscence for love again.