{"id":138324,"date":"2019-07-29T09:00:07","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T13:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=138324"},"modified":"2019-08-01T12:50:20","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T16:50:20","slug":"not-gonna-get-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/29\/not-gonna-get-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Gonna Get Us"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Original illustration \u00a9 Jia Sung<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t eat pigs,\u201d she said. \u201cSo I can kiss you, if we meet again.\u201d That was how she said it, in Mandarin. Pigs<\/em>, not pork<\/em>. The line went dead. I was out of calling-card credits again.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d met a year earlier, in 2002, at the Shanghai Municipal Physical Sports School. She was fourteen, I was fifteen. She played soccer, I played softball. She was a Uighur Muslim who\u2019d never heard of metropolitan Singapore, I was a Straits Chinese atheist who didn\u2019t know pastoral Xinjiang existed.<\/p>\n

A soccer coach, trawling rural northwestern China for athletic girls from underprivileged backgrounds, lied to their parents: If your daughter trains hard, she might be selected for the 2008 Beijing Olympics! In truth, the girls were only ever intended as a minority Xinjiang team for his majority Han Chinese girls to spar against in Shanghai. My Singaporean all-girls softball team was visiting their facility for a training trip. We were from a tiny Southeast Asian city-state that desalinated its seawater and had the highest number of millionaires per capita.<\/p>\n

Mandarin was the only common tongue we had between us, but unlike for the Han Chinese, it was the first language for neither of us. We spoke slangy Singlish; the Uighurs spoke Turkic Uighur. When the Uighur girls began singing a traditional folk song to a clapped beat, it was clearly a cultural performance rather than a social invitation, but I took my chances. I\u2019d never once used Mandarin this way as I walked up to the girl with the palest, longest, thinnest fingers I\u2019d ever seen and said, \u201cWant to dance?\u201d<\/p>\n

She laughed shyly, pushing me toward their captain.<\/p>\n

Nuoerguli, the captain, was seventeen. She played goalie. Her short hair was curly on top, like Justin Timberlake\u2019s. Their coach gave them mandatory crew cuts when they arrived, for hygiene, and confiscated their passports, for safekeeping. The girl watched me dance with her captain, hiding her smile in the upturned neck of her zippered windbreaker.<\/p>\n

I asked Nuoerguli about her.<\/p>\n

Her jersey number was 12. She played forward. Her name was Maidina. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

That night, Jia, our pitcher, advised: Don\u2019t start.<\/p>\n

\u201cStart what?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

Jia had a girlfriend back home whom we called Jams.<\/p>\n

Jia, one of our fiercest players on the field, would trail her girlfriend dutifully with a bonbons bag as Jams strode through pick-and-mix candy stores, wordlessly indicating which sweets she wanted by flipping the tops of the plastic boxes open before sailing out like a queen, leaving Jia to gather up and pay for her assorted selection. Jams said she\u2019d marry Jia as soon as she bought her a pink diamond ring. When the time came, Jia said, they\u2019d migrate.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere must be somewhere,\u201d Jia said.<\/p>\n

The next day, I wrote Maidina a letter. In the evening, a Xinjiang junior passed me an enormous rose. Its petals were spritzed in cologne. There was an accompanying note in blocky Mandarin characters. \u201cMaidina is too young for you,\u201d Nuoerguli had written. Pretty amazing: a seventeen-year-old girl appealing to the anti-pedophiliac in a fifteen-year-old girl in regard to a fourteen-year-old girl.<\/p>\n

Our Singaporean teacher-in-charge, with whom I was rooming, found out. Such \u201cbehavior\u201d was \u201cunnatural.\u201d I was barred from training, locked in the room for a day \u201cfor your own good.\u201d I peed on her toothbrush. (Sorry-not-sorry you had to find out this way, Miss Ann.) We left 126 Water-Electricity Street on a Sunday. I spent the day before wondering what would happen if I refused to board the plane. But at that age, my life was not mine, nor was Maidina\u2019s hers.<\/p>\n

On Sunday morning, before the plane left, a pint-sized Xinjiang player named Mukadasi conveyed a message: Meet behind the cafeteria. Bring a camera. When I got there, I saw her and Maidina scaling the padlocked gate to get in.<\/p>\n

Mukadasi said, \u201cFive minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maidina and I stood apart, awkward and too inexperienced for words, between a rubbish dump and a cafeteria. Mukadasi hissed, \u201cWhat are you waiting for!\u201d She took my camera and arranged us under a tree. Maidina stood stiff, arms by her sides. I went as close as I dared. She smelled like baby powder, and I wanted to hold her hand.<\/p>\n

The flash went off.<\/p>\n

\u201cWash the negatives in Singapore,\u201d Mukadasi said. \u201cIf you send back this picture to Maidina, that means you\u2019re together<\/em>. Got it?\u201d<\/p>\n

I said nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cGotta go,\u201d Mukadasi said, pulling Maidina away.<\/p>\n

When the picture was developed, our shoulders were touching. Maidina looked like an Ottoman prince, unsmiling, flung out of time. My hands were jammed into my pockets, and I had a sheepish half-smile on my face. Most unforgivably, my eyes were closed. Cursing myself, I sent it to Shanghai.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Back in Singapore, tipsy on e33 (4 percent alcohol) at our Christmas softball chalet, Jia and I scaled a breakwater at three in the morning. I shouted to the sea that I wanted to move to China and be with Maidina.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about all those ACS boys?\u201d Jia said, suspicious.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about them?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

\u201cOkay,\u201d she shrugged. \u201cSo\u2014what\u2019ll you do in China?\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019d done my research. Xinjiang had a wonderful climate for grapes, dates, melons.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll have a raisin farm,\u201d I said.<\/p>\n

On the last day of 2002, we went to Mad Monks, a lesbian club flanking the Singapore River. It doesn\u2019t exist anymore. The bouncer was a butch in her thirties. I was stunned: There are old lesbians in Singapore?<\/em> Patently underaged, we were told to run out the back in the event of a police raid. Inside, there were adult butches in binders dirty dancing with adult ah lian<\/em>s in halter tops. Online anglophone definitions of this Hokkien slang word suggest a \u201cskimpily dressed girl gangster with tattoos,\u201d an \u201cunsophisticated hillbilly seen in unsavory places,\u201d a \u201cdistasteful (Singaporean Chinese) female who speaks bad English, is lowly educated, crude, loud, foulmouthed,\u201d but this does nothing to capture the demotic reverence encoded in the term, which is not half as pejorative as it sounds: the ah lian<\/em> is always hot, sassy, and ready to hold her own in a fight. Wow, I smirked to myself, watching them dance. It was so not a phase. At midnight, I wanted to call Maidina, but I knew I wouldn\u2019t be able to. Her curfew was nine o\u2019clock. Happy New Year to me. My love had no future, nor any end in sight. My friends were having a ball on the dance floor. Standing in line for the bathroom, I started to cry. A tall girl in a long-sleeved shirt approached me. She asked for my number.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi,\u201d I said. \u201cI\u2019m crying.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d she said. \u201cBut you quite pretty when you cry leh.\u201d<\/p>\n

I gave her my number. Then I went into the toilet and threw up.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

School reopened for 2003. That summer, t.A.T.u. released \u201cNot Gonna Get Us<\/a>\u201d and \u201cAll The Things She Said.<\/a>\u201d Trapped behind a fence in their MTV, Julia and Lena kiss in school uniform in the rain, under the Muscovite public\u2019s disapproving stares<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jia and I went to HMV and bought their CD, 200 km\/h in the Wrong Lane.<\/em><\/p>\n

We sang their you-and-me-against-the-world Eurodance hooks like a call and response: Not gonna get \/ not gonna get us! \/ They don\u2019t understand \/ they don\u2019t understand us!<\/em><\/p>\n

One day Jia said we couldn\u2019t listen to t.A.T.u. anymore.<\/p>\n

She\u2019d found out online that they were two wannabes who hated each other, paired up by a male producer who wrote their lyrics. What else to sing along to? At fifteen years old, in that hemisphere, without a personal computer, I was not savvy enough for Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, or even Tegan and Sara (millennial mind-blow: it was t.A.T.u.\u2019s cover of \u201cHow Soon Is Now\u201d<\/a> that led me to the Smiths<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Shanghai, Maidina was fast blossoming from wallflower to rake. In one breath she said the fact that we couldn\u2019t really know anything about each other was the best way for two people to remain together forever.<\/p>\n

In the next breath she told me not to call again.<\/p>\n

She asked me to say our password (I love you<\/em> in Uighur: Menn shxxni yakshi korimen<\/em>, or at least that was how I spelled it in my diary phonetically), then passed the phone to the latest chick writing her crush letters, telling us to introduce ourselves. She told me her grandmother was \u201ca Soviet.\u201d She said the Han Chinese athletes tried to get them repatriated by complaining the Uighurs were dirty, noisy, and heretic (they were not heretic; they were Muslim). But she didn\u2019t care, because on the field, they whupped those Han Chinese asses. I asked if she considered me Han Chinese. I was descended from them on my father\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

\u201cNah,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat am I to you,\u201d I said, crossing my fingers for something romantic.<\/p>\n

\u201cA farang<\/em>,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She\u2019d taught me that Uighur word before: \u201cmad person; foreigner; other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Finally, of course, we had to betray.<\/p>\n

Maidina put it this way: \u201cBabe, I\u2019m seeing someone whose body is in the same country as mine.\u201d I don\u2019t want to come across like a masochistic linguaphile, but this sounds even more brutal and fantastic in Uighur-accented Mandarin. To this day, I have never met anyone who speaks the way she does, and I don\u2019t know where she learned to talk like that, part Clark Gable part Chinese epic verse part neighborhood fuccboi. Back then, I was winded. Her girl was a Han Chinese tennis player whose name translated to Red Dream Mountain.<\/p>\n

So I too went with a real girl, instead of the fly-by-night dream.<\/p>\n

Right then it hardly mattered to me who: either you were Maidina, or you were not Maidina. I let myself be wooed by a bespectacled basketballer. Her jersey number was also 12, and she played forward, too (though the sport was different, this was of some comfort to me). She knew all about Maidina and regarded her aura stoically from a respectful distance. We held hands in public. If you find present-day Singapore oppressive, you\u2019d have perished back then. Schoolboys heckled us on public transport. If we were in uniform, members of the public called our school to complain. Once, a balding middle-aged man pushed paper into my face as we were walking down Orchard Road, at the traffic light intersection between the Heeren and Cineleisure.<\/p>\n

It was a pamphlet of two screaming bodies licked by flames.<\/p>\n

When I opened it up it read: It Is Never Too Late to Seek Salvation<\/em>.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Ten years later, I\u2019d still be a heathen en route to hell: living with my filmmaker girlfriend in Brooklyn, writing a novel that, among other things, circumambulated an affair between Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong.<\/p>\n

Maidina and I reconnected over WeChat. I visited her in Xinjiang in 2014. She\u2019d put on a little weight around the hips. She ran a late-night provision shop of her own in \u00dcr\u00fcmqi, slept behind the counter on a mattress. Her girlfriend was an incredibly beautiful part-time kindergarten teacher whose eyelashes looked perpetually wet.<\/p>\n

If Shadiyah passed ten men on the street, Maidina told me with pride, nine turned back to look. Even though I no longer hankered after Maidina, I could not help but feel a pinch of envy for the way she made this compliment to her girlfriend sound charmingly anachronistic, like a folkloric idiom of yore.<\/p>\n

Over spicy hot pot, they told me I should\u2019ve visited during Hami melon season. They told me CCP cadres were trying to replace the Uighur language with \u201cnational\u201d Mandarin, and that during the 2009 demonstration-turned-riot, they saw Uighur men thrown down manholes. I didn\u2019t know what to say to this, and Shadiyah gave Maidina a look as if to say it would be best to say nothing at all. They changed the subject. They told me they were getting married next year, before they got too old.<\/p>\n

\u201cWow,\u201d I said, impressed. \u201cA civil partnership?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOh no,\u201d they laughed. They were marrying men.<\/p>\n

What men?<\/p>\n

\u201cWhomever my parents choose,\u201d Shadiyah said.<\/p>\n

I looked at Maidina.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat,\u201d she said, offended. \u201cYou think I can\u2019t get a man the moment I grow my hair out?\u201d<\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t realized until then that, while my resources and education would open up into choices for me, Maidina\u2019s life could only tighten around her as she grew up. I could feel the blood drain from my face when she went on to say: Surely you don\u2019t intend to go on this way for good? People will talk, and what about disgracing your parents?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Before I left \u00dcr\u00fcmqi, Maidina asked in jest whether I still ate pork.<\/p>\n

Pork<\/em>, she said this time, not pigs<\/em>. \u201cYes,\u201d I said, somehow disappointed.<\/p>\n

Kissing me chastely on the cheek in the middle of a busy street, she told me in this life, between us, it was too early and it was too late. \u201cDon\u2019t let me catch sight of you in another life,\u201d she said, \u201cbecause that\u2019ll be the end of you, I\u2019ll never let you go. Do you understand me at all?\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole time I was in \u00dcr\u00fcmqi, Maidina refused to let me pay for anything.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I visit you in America,\u201d she said with a rueful smile, like we both knew it\u2019d never happen. \u201cThen you can pay for everything. Deal?\u201d<\/p>\n

The last thing she bought me was a chalice full of pomegranate juice at a roadside bazaar, freshly squeezed by a crinkly-eyed Uighur granny in a headscarf. You stood at the stall till you finished your drink and returned the chalice, which would be reused. Across from us, I saw a sheep being slaughtered, knife held close to its throat. It happened so quickly I didn\u2019t even know what I was looking at till I saw fresh blood, the color of my pomegranate juice, pooling on the ground. There was a second sheep tethered close by, and I asked Maidina if she thought it knew what was coming. \u201cI think it might have an inkling,\u201d she whispered into my ear, taking my hand and guiding me away so I wouldn\u2019t go on looking.<\/p>\n

Back when I quit pork for her, nominally halal for lips two thousand miles away, I would have given anything to hold her hand. Suddenly I was fifteen again, wet-eared and wild-hearted, running around a softball field.<\/p>\n

Jia and I were sing-shouting \u201cNot Gonna Get Us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more we shouted, the faster we ran. I had the feeling that we were running for nothing less than our lives. Jia grabbed my wrists. We spun till we tumbled onto warm grass.<\/p>\n

The sky was definitely falling down. I was so dizzy. Should I catch my breath, or scream at the top of my lungs? I couldn\u2019t see how we\u2019d ever figure anything out. But the sun was so bright, and I didn\u2019t have enough breath left to be afraid. There was no way they were going to get us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Amanda Lee Koe was the youngest winner of the Singapore Literature Prize. Her debut novel, <\/em>Delayed Rays of a Star<\/a>,<\/a> named a most anticipated book of the summer by <\/em>ELLE, <\/em>USA Today, the <\/em>Los Angeles Times, LitHub, Thrillist and others, was published this month by Nan A. Talese\/Doubleday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

t.A.T.u., sports, and Singapore lesbian clubs: Amanda Lee Koe on her star-crossed first love affair<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1809,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-138324","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nNot Gonna Get Us by Amanda Lee Koe<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 29, 2019 \u2013 t.A.T.u., sports, and Singapore lesbian clubs: Amanda Lee Koe on her star-crossed first love affair\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/07\/29\/not-gonna-get-us\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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