Hello Kitty Must Die Read online

  When I looked down, Mr. Happy had disappeared into the hallowed darkness. The flared base, the only part still visible, nestled up tight against me, ensuring easy extraction.

  Seeing my success, I bit my lips, trying to suppress a squeal of delight. I had conquered myself. I wanted to carve a notch on my own headboard. I had picked my own cherry. I had been deflowered by my own hand. I would forever own myself, my honor, my all. My virginity will always be mine.

  Penis envy my ass, you losers.

  I pushed against Mr. Happy’s base to keep him snug. After that ordeal, I wanted to make sure that my hymen was demolished good and proper and that it would stay that way. I didn’t want it closing back in like ear piercings if you removed the earring too early.

  “Twist and disinfect. Twice daily for six weeks.”

  This was less of a hassle.

  I grabbed a piece of square cotton gauze quickly and readied myself to soak up my family’s honor. I wanted to capture every drop like that man did in Memoirs of a Geisha. The collector with his glass vials of Asian virginity in his black bag. I would be my own collector. A collection of one.

  I swabbed myself and caught nothing but globs of Lidocaine gel. I had really overdone it with the anesthetic. But better overdone than underdone. Half a bottle good, a whole bottle better. Orwell got it backwards.

  A mulatto, an albino, a mosquito, my libido

  Cobain was a genius. I wondered what he would have written if he saw me like this, waiting eagerly with a pad of cotton gauze to collect the remnants of my hymen.

  I thought about auctioning off my bloody gauze on eBay. Reserve price of $19.95. I wondered how many bids I would get.

  My knees ached. I stood up, trying to keep Mr. Happy inside me while stretching my legs, back, and arms. Bad idea. Mr. Happy hit the hardwood floor of my bedroom with a dull thud and rolled under my bed, collecting lint, seed husks, and strands of black hair on his Lidocaine-glazed shaft.

  Pepito, my parakeet, woke up and began beating his wings against the bars of his cage, protesting the violent disturbance of his sleep. Parakeets need ten to fifteen hours of sleep a day or else they’ll croak. I felt bad.

  I feel stupid and contagious

  Leaving Mr. Happy to get acquainted with the dust bunnies under my bed, I jumped up and down, trying to shake every last drop of honor out of me. When the pad felt heavy and saturated with liquid, I removed it, glass vial ready and waiting.

  But the cotton pad glistened only with a slick, glossy whiteness. Whiteness, a shiny whiteness that belonged to the porcelain god, to the driven snow, to Great White paper, to virgins.

  “Some people are born without hymens,” Dr. Ng had said. “Some break them during gymnastics, horseback riding, roundhouse kicking, cheerleading.”

  I have never done a split or straddled a horse. I have never tornado kicked anything. I have never had to do a flying herkie while waving some pompoms.

  And yet, the whiteness confronted me. Bold, unflinching, unapologetic.

  No blood.

  No honor. My family had no honor.

  I had been born without honor. I had been protecting, preserving, and defending an honor that had never even existed.

  Hi, my name is Fiona Yu.

  People call me Fi.

  Here we are now, entertain us

  It’s so nice to meet you.

  Oh, by the way, I’m missing a hymen.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  IT’S CALLED HYMEN restoration, or hymenoplasty.

  No joke. In fact, it has gotten so popular in New York City that the price has gone from five thousand to eighteen hundred dollars in several clinics. Nose jobs are out. Hymen jobs are in.

  And they’re done by real surgeons, not perverted hacks in a dark back room without an autoclave.

  The Internet is flooded with ads from hymen restoration surgeons. “Dr. Sean Killroy. Surgeon highly experienced in hymen surgery. San Francisco.”

  “Highly experienced” sounded good to me.

  So I picked up the phone to make an appointment. I wanted the hymen that evolution had seen fit to deny me. I didn’t have to have one for a wedding night. I didn’t have to save myself from a village stoning. I just wanted some family honor that I could shred into bloody pieces and wear around my neck.

  Kind of like women who find out they can’t have babies. The doctor tells them their plumbing’s no good and all of sudden that’s the only thing they want. A crying, screeching baby. All because they can’t have one. We want what we don’t have, can’t have. We decide that we must have it. That we can’t live without it.

  That was me.

  “Two weeks?” I shouted into the phone.

  “That’s the earliest appointment I have for Dr. Killroy,” replied the throaty voice.

  There must be an epidemic destroying hymens in San Francisco. A surge of aft-regretted premarital sex. Either that or there was another serial rapist running around. I wouldn’t know. I never watched the news; it just depressed me. There was always a rapist, pedophile, or psycho killer doing God’s work.

  “Okay, I’ll take it.”

  “Wonderful, I’ll put you in for the last appointment of the day. Four-thirty.”

  “Great. I won’t need to take the entire day off work. Oh, how much is this going to cost?”

  “Depends on what you want done.”

  “My hymen is missing. I want one put in.”

  “Oh, you were born without one?” she asked, her voice full of pity like I had just told her I was born horribly disfigured.

  “Apparently so.”

  “Well, honey, that’s not hymen restoration. There’s nothing to restore. You’ll need a hymen re-creation. That costs more.”

  “So how much is it?”

  “That runs about twenty-five hundred dollars, more for complicated cases.”

  I had no idea whether I was a complicated case, but I took the appointment. Twenty-five hundred dollars is what it costs to get a shiny new hymen in San Francisco. Twenty-five hundred dollars and you are as pure as a newborn babe. Twenty-five hundred dollars for family honor. For the same price, you could get yourself the latest Chanel handbag. Guess it depends on what your priorities are.

  I wanted a hymen more than a Chanel handbag, even though one would go nicely with all my pin-striped suits.

  I AM A CORPORATE lawyer.

  I went to law school because I didn’t want to be a pediatrician or a gynecologist like all the other Chinese girls in my class. I didn’t want to examine women’s nether regions or catch newborns as they shot out of the birth canal. I didn’t want to wipe dripping snot or deal with screaming babies.

  Instead, I chose to deal with screaming senior partners.

  I chose to stock up on industrial size Chapstick for all the ass-kissing I had to do when I wasn’t billing hours. Many, many thousands of billable hours. The bane of the law profession. The yoke of all attorneys-at-law in the private sector.

  On the first day of law school, the dean welcomed us with a motivational welcome speech. “When you leave here with your law degree, you will have a tremendous amount of power and privilege.”

  The dean must have had a different definition of power than my senior partner, Jack.

  Jack of Toller Benning LLP, Land of Lost Persons. Fat, bald, foul-mouthed Jack. Six foot one. Fifty-eight years young. Strawberry nose of a drinker. Face of a bulldog. The biggest rainmaker in the corporate group.

  As a young associate in the corporate and securities group at a five-hundred-plus lawyer law firm, I had the privilege of keeping my water under Jack’s desk. All the associates did. We had the power to be his yes-men, his sycophants, his lackeys. In return, he gave us the honor of doing all his scutwork at the impressive billable rate of two hundred and seventy-five dollars an hour and the joy of working over eighty hours a week in thick, expensive suits and nylons.

  Dean Perry, I want my money back.

  “Power is when the other guy has to sit th
ere with a shit-eating grin while you ejaculate right into his face,” said Jack, pulling at his suspenders.

  Nice man, Jack was.

  Power is when you can just buy yourself a hymen for twenty-five hundred dollars without having to worry if you can still afford to eat dinner that week.

  To pay for the new hymen, I had to glue myself in front of my computer screen in my office with the view of the city from the twenty-second floor behind me. I had to imprison myself in a tower of steel and glass.

  But I kept little things to remind me that there was more to life than Jack, memoranda of understanding, and purchase and sale agreements.

  Ted Bundy grinned at me from my computer desktop—that handsome, toothy, wolfish grin in black and white. A true psychopath. Charming, glib, and merciless.

  “Who is that cutie? Is that your boyfriend?” asked my pretty secretary, eyeing my desktop picture with interest.

  “Oh no, out of my league.”

  She laughed. “I’d wrap him around my little finger.”

  “Oh, he’d probably eat you right up.”

  Little finger included.

  No wonder we Americans are so in love with our serial killers, the epitome of freedom and power. As a nation of fast cars, fast food, and perfect teeth, we are obsessed with the ones who possess complete freedom from fear, remorse, and conscience. America enjoys the prestige of having the longest list of these creatures and has spawned some of the finest specimens in the world.

  China has a pathetically short list.

  The Collectionist, the Angel of Death, the Alligator Man, the Vampire of Sacramento, the Freeway Killer, Son of Sam, the Hillside Stranglers, the Shoe-Fetish Slayer, the Killer Clown, the Werewolf of Wisteria, the Lipstick Killer, the Campus Killer, the Giggling Granny.

  And then there was Gein, who won the Best Dressed award.

  A slideshow of them saved my screen when I left my computer unattended.

  A gallery of the sick and twisted. A spark of something outside the corporate world, outside of Jack.

  These folks are not to be confused with psychotics, people who hear voices, who mistake themselves for Jesus, who eat their own shit, who wear aluminum foil hats to keep out alien brain waves, who get injected in the ass with Haloperidol at the end of the day while strapped onto a gurney.

  No, these folks have jobs. They shower, brush their teeth, have wives and children, attend Sunday services, participate in Boy Scouts, coach Little League, bring pot roast to the neighborhood picnic, bake you apple pie, volunteer to watch your little ones so you can go out on the town with the missus for a night.

  Then they’ll hog-tie you, rape you, sodomize you, burn you with their cigarette butts, bite off little chunks of your flesh, strangle you, inject bleach into your veins, carve you up like a fat Thanksgiving turkey, splatter you on the walls, ceilings, floors, before gouging out your eyes for a trophy and adding a piece of you to their nipple belt.

  Or turn you into vegetable-face soup. A la Albert Fish. Five points for an ear. Ten points for a nose. And double points for a lower lip.

  And for all their hard work, the state rewards these folks with the needle, gas chamber, electric chair, sparing them from the indignities of old age. No sitting in a pool of their own piss. Lucky bastards.

  Bundy was right. All you have to do is comb your hair and wear a suit and you can be one crazy motherfucker. And get away with it.

  The FBI profiles are almost always the same: White men. Age twenty-five to forty. Female serial killers account for only eight percent of all American serial killers. And they are white too.

  White people get to have all the fun.

  For once, I’d like to hear “The unsub is most likely female. Asian. Age twenty-five to forty.”

  Unlikely. Just look at Hello Kitty.

  I hate Hello Kitty.

  I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty. She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head, tell anyone to go and fuck his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid, blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.

  Poor Hello Kitty. Having to go around itchy, unlicked, un-scratched. Tortured by her own filth.

  Like my mother.

  After nearly thirty years of marriage to my father, she still asks him for money to buy Payless shoes. And groceries, discount clothing, Maybelline makeup.

  That’s another reason I became a lawyer instead of a housewife. An American lawyer. I wanted to be able to pay for my Jimmy Choos myself with Visa, Mastercard, American Express. I never leave home without it. Thank you, Carl Malden.

  So I could tell anyone who tried to put a damn bow behind my ear to go to hell. But it didn’t work out that way. The six-figure salary, the J.D., the Eileen Fisher-Armani-Calvin Klein wardrobe didn’t liberate me from the confines of tradition, culture, and family.

  Because it’s family. My family. And you don’t turn your back on love and family. A J.D. doesn’t change that. It’s just a part of people culture.

  So I became an American lawyer with Jack’s shoe prints on my back any given day. An American lawyer who is expected to help out at her parents’ Laundromat on the weekends after an eighty-hour week. An American lawyer who still lives at home.

  MANY OF MY CHINESE FRIENDS’ parents either worked at or owned a Laundromat or two somewhere in the city. Their offspring unanimously bitched and moaned about having to pitch in.

  Not me.

  I enjoyed my hours at the Laundromat. The Laundromat allowed me to be personally responsible for the destruction of at least three Chinese marriages from behind the counter.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Fung. Your clothes aren’t ready yet. We are having a bit of trouble getting this cherry lipstick stain out of your husband’s shirt.”

  Mrs. Fung, standing there bare-faced, sporting the au natural look. Mrs. Fung, who didn’t own a tube of cherry lipstick.

  “Just give me his shirts,” she said, grim-faced.

  Okay.

  “Oh, Mrs. Wong, this fell out of the blazer pocket. Here you go.”

  It was a note with the message “Have a great day at work, honey” scrawled in large, loopy handwriting with a bright red lipstick kiss on it.

  “Thank you, Fiona. You are such a good girl.”

  “Oh no, I only pretend to be.”

  I do try.

  “Your husband brought these in yesterday. Just to let you know, Mrs. Lim, we don’t like to handle lingerie. Too delicate,” I said, holding up a silk La Perla teddy I had pulled from another customer’s pile.

  Mrs. Lim stared at the black negligee I was dangling in front of her. Her mouth pressed into a thin line. Her expression became wooden.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  You’re welcome.

  It was high time Hello Kitty got a mouth.

  I didn’t do this to every couple. Only to the ones I thought were on the brink of divorce already.

  But I helped change that for the Lims, the Wongs, and the Fungs.

  Chinese parents screamed, yelled, and threatened divorce only to return to their normal daily routines of cooking and cleaning and picking the kids up from school. Decade after decade, they clung to each other, fighting, bickering, and eating dinner together.

  Empty threats made good, solid marriages.

  Maybe saving your hymen for your husband to lay to waste on your wedding night helped too.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t have that precious gift to give.

  Twenty-five hundred dollars and the skills of Dr. Sean Killroy, “highly skilled in hymen surgery,” would give me the ability to keep that man. Decade after decade.

  Two weeks.

  One hundred seventy hours billed.

  Thousands of pieces of clothes freshly laundered.

  One lovers’ quarrel caused by a carefully-placed empty condom wrapper in a trouser pocket.

  And I found m
yself teasing Dr. Sean Killroy’s porcupine puffer fish from the dry side of the tank in his waiting room.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  DR. SEAN KILLROY RAN a very lucrative business restoring women’s hymens.

  His porcupine puffer fish, with its glittering blue-green doe eyes, spiked body, human-like incisors, and its eerie smile all wiggling up to my tapping finger, told me so. So did his spotted moray eel that had slipped half its body through a plastic tube at the bottom of the tank. And his large yellow tang.

  Any fish that looks like it’s smiling at you will cost a lot to acquire and to keep. Those little teeth won’t munch on flakes or pellets. They nibble on oysters, clams, shrimp, and sea urchins. Sea urchins. You need to rotate that diet every day or else it’ll just go on a hunger strike. The puffer is a very picky fish. It requires its own sushi chef.

  And it has a huge appetite.

  So huge that you can only keep it with other big, colorful, expensive tropical fish to ensure that they won’t end up as its lunch.

  Dr. Killroy needed to repair a lot of hymens to keep his puffer happy.

  Chinatown doctors keep twenty-gallon tanks with ten five-for-a-dollar feeder goldfishes that swim back and forth in front of a cardboard backdrop. Those fishes are lucky if they get a filter. Otherwise, they just swim in their own muck.

  Chinatown doctors don’t repair or recreate hymens.

  “Fiona Yu? The doctor will see you now.”

  The nurse gave me the once-over, pausing ever so slightly on my crotch. I could hear the cash register ring in her mind. Another twenty-five hundred dollars for the doctor. The little puffer would continue to enjoy its daily seafood buffet.

  “Take your clothes off and put this on. Panties too. The doctor will be right with you,” she said, handing me a blue dressing gown. “Opens at the back.”

  Duh.

  I was there to get a new hymen. Of course, I would have to take my underwear off.

  Panties. I hate that word. It sounds dirty. It makes me think of perverts, molesters, rapists, horny college boys.

  “So, Ms. Yu, what can I do for you? I’m Dr. Sean...”