All Who Live on Islands

Rose Lu

• Publisher: Victoria University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781776562893
• eBook ISBN: 9781776562688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

All Who Live on Islands introduces a bold new voice in New Zealand literature. In these intimate and entertaining essays, Rose Lu takes us through personal history—a shopping trip with her Shanghai-born grandparents, her career in the Wellington tech industry, an epic hike through the Himalayas—to explore friendship, the weight of stories told and not told about diverse cultures, and the reverberations of our parents' and grandparents' choices. Frank and compassionate, Rose Lu's stories illuminate the cultural and linguistic questions that migrants face, as well as what it is to be a young person living in 21st-century Aotearoa New Zealand.

YELLOW FEVER

1

“Are you sure?” whispered Callum.

“Yes,” I replied. It was late, past midnight. We’d been fooling around for some time, our clothes kicked to the bottom of the bed. Watery light filtered through the curtains. His face was grainy in black and white. Not enough light for his freckles to be shown, not enough light for his expression to be read.

“Okay.”

He reached for the packet of flavoured Durex condoms by the single pillow. He drew one out and tore it open carefully. I waited as he slid it down his penis.

He shuffled on top of me and I spread my legs. Under the covers he fumbled with our genitals, trying to find the entrance of my vagina. I reached down to guide the rubbery tip to the right place. He lowered his body down, stacking his hips on mine. My thighs rolled slightly outward and upward from the weight. I didn’t expect him to feel so heavy.

He ground up against me with a stilted rhythm. I took that to mean he was in, even though I couldn’t feel anything. But what was a dick inside me even supposed to feel like? I thought about asking him if he was in, but that would be rude. Besides, I was glad that it didn’t hurt, and that he hadn’t come instantly. He shuffled again, leaning to one side. It didn’t make the motion any smoother, and my leg was getting crushed by the side of his hip.

Next, he tried propping himself up on his hands. His weight was lifted off my chest, and his pubic bone pressed against mine. That seemed to work better. He tried thrusting from one angle, and then another. Occasionally I felt an internal tug or friction from his experiments. Was it pleasurable? I guess it felt better than nothing.

We persisted with our silent thrusting for at least ten more minutes. I couldn’t tell if he was enjoying it or not. He wasn’t making any sounds. Did that indicate a lack of pleasure or a fear of being heard? My hips and legs started to feel sore. Was he close to coming? He would’ve told me if he had, right?

Callum stopped. He rolled off me carefully. We rearranged our bodies and he threw an arm across my torso.

I nestled closer to him. “Did you come?” I asked quietly.

“No,” he responded.

What did that mean? Had I done something wrong? “Okay,” I said, aware that the pause was held for too long.

He rested his head against mine. “I think I’m just not used to the sensation.”

“Okay,” I said again. He moved his head away.

I tried to gauge whether I felt different in any way. After all, Callum and I weren’t virgins anymore. Did I feel differently about him now? Did I feel more adult? Was sex what I expected? I wasn’t exactly picturing fireworks, but I thought there would be a more pronounced difference from the times when he’d fingered me. Actually, I probably got more out of the fingering. His penis was like a big awkward finger, incapable of performing delicate motor tasks.

The metal bedsprings wheezed as Callum shifted his weight on the single bunk. Was he trying to get to sleep? Was he thinking about what we just did? I think he was surprised when I suggested that we have sex. We had been together for six months and I’d known friends who’d only waited three. There was no discussion or planning beforehand, but he had condoms on him when he showed up. It wasn’t like he wasn’t thinking about it too.

A wet smacking sound broke my thoughts. I peered over Callum in the direction of the noise, the bunk diagonally opposite ours. On the bottom bunk a large lump bobbed rhythmically under a single blanket. The top bunk was empty. It looked like Diana and Sam were hooking up. I mean, what else was there to do?

Callum looked at me. I could just make out his grin. I wondered if Sally and Wiremu were still asleep. No movement from their bunk. They were on the top of the last bunk set in the six-person room. Wiremu was a mess; he’d sculled his bottle of spirits within an hour of arriving at the holiday park and Sally had to take him to bed. By the time the rest of us came back to the bunkroom they were asleep, or were doing a good job of pretending to be.

Callum and I settled back down. I tried to concentrate on getting to sleep rather than the movement of greasy bodies on a plastic mattress. “Where’s the condom?” I asked suddenly. He lifted up the covers to look. A waft of latex and sweat hit my face. His hands found our underwear, knotted and warm. He shrugged. “I don’t know.” I pulled on my shirt and knickers, and turned to face the wall.

I thought of Sally’s birthday party last month. At some point we’d noticed that half the girls she’d invited were missing. Sally opened the lounge door to find them in the hallway, giggling in a tight circle on the floor. We couldn’t join in, they said, shooing us away. It was a private discussion. We wouldn’t understand; we hadn’t had sex yet.

In the morning we woke to find multiple coloured condoms littered around the bunk room.

Sam picked up the purple one. “Sorry, guys, that was me,” he declared. I knew it was him, having heard the crinkling of foil and the smell of artificial grape late last night. Diana kept stripping the bunk beds. She either hadn’t heard or didn’t want to respond. Sally and Wiremu were awake, but still in bed whispering to each other. Sam shrugged and started rolling a cigarette.

Callum picked up our green condom from its hiding place under our bottom bunk. He tucked it discreetly into a chip packet. My cheeks grew hot as I watched him throw it in the bin. I was thankful that the flavour we’d drawn blindly in the night was not a pungent one.

Dumped by the door was Sam’s Steinlager box, full of our empties. We counted out one bottle of Smirnoff vodka, four Smirnoff Ice Blacks, four Gordons, three vodka mudshakes and eight Steinlagers. Callum and I took them all to the glass recycling bin. On our way back, we slowed and came to a standstill in the grey courtyard outside our bunkroom. It was our last few hours together, here in Taupō Holiday Park. He was driving back up to Auckland with Sam, and the rest of us were heading back down to Whanganui. School tomorrow.

Callum stood with his hands in his blue jeans, looking out towards nothing in particular. The tips of his brown hair were like hay, brittle from chlorine. He had always been a swimmer. We’d “dated” once before, in intermediate school, when I still lived in Auckland. I’d call him on the weekends and ask what he’d been up to; his answer was always swimming or gaming.

It wasn’t a real relationship back then, unlike now. Back then, if I called in the middle of his game of Counter Strike, he would put me on hold to his favourite Limp Bizkit song while he finished his campaign. He would never remember to pick the phone up again.

Conversation was subdued as our car left the holiday park. I was curious about how far everyone got last night, but waited for someone else to initiate the gossip. We were all waiting. Diana and I sat up front, leaving Sally and Wiremu to hold hands in the back seat. At least that much was obvious. Before this trip they hadn’t really hung out, but it looked like they were definitely a thing now.

Diana started things off. “Soooooo. Rose. You and Callum, huh?”

“Yeah, he seemed cool,” Wiremu volunteered. It was the first time my friends had met him. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret—we just didn’t live in the same city.

“What were you guys up to on the top bunk?”

I blushed. “We . . . had sex?”

Diana screamed, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.

“What? No way!” came from Sally in the back. I turned to look at her. Wiremu held his hand up for a high five. Excited chatter drowned out the low sweep of passing cars. After everyone calmed down, the questioning switched to Diana.

“Soooooo. Diana. You and Sam, huh?”

“Ugh. Yeah,” she said, rolling her eyes. “I gave him a blow job, but I didn’t really like him.”

Callum called me when he got home. “Sam said Diana gave him the worst blow job of his life last night,” he said, laughing.

We shared this laugh together, not knowing what would happen over the next few months. He would break up with me out of the blue. I would push him for details but as he tried to explain he’d sound as confused about it as I was. He would still come down for my school ball, flights already booked. The weekend would be messy. We couldn’t help hooking up again and I’d notice that the way he looked at me hadn’t changed. Then a new girl would start to leave long posts on his Bebo wall. She’d talk knowledgeably about FPSs and RPGs. I would spend too long staring at her pixelated icon, her pale face and dark eye makeup.

壹

The emperor glides through his court, a swathe of officials in his wake. His silk robes are a deep purple, almost black, with red embellishments on the collar and sleeves.

This silk is gathered from the mouths of silkworms. After their feast of mulberry leaves they dance in a figure-eight pattern, vomiting up gossamer thread.

The purple root of the gromwell plant is harvested for the dye. It’s difficult to work with; the dye refuses to take easily. To achieve the same hue as the pale veins of taro, the garment requires at least ten washes.

Hands pull the silk through the water over and over again. The emperor’s purple needs more work. It has to reach the intensity of dark violet, the shade of twilight falling on China, united as a nation for the first time.

2

Whanganui’s main drag is Victoria Avenue, aka the Ave. When I was a teenager, the primary pastime was driving down this street and heckling pedestrians, aka “doing an Ave-y”. Carloads would congregate spontaneously at the Gull Petrol Station at the top of the Ave. It was the only place open 24 hours in Whanganui. If it was early enough people would head inside to buy a pie or use the toilet; if not the guys would piss in corners, amber liquid mixing with beer from bottles that were invariably smashed. We would loiter until the night manager’s patience broke and he’d chase us off the premises with threats of calling the police.

It was after midnight and Baby and I were sitting under a fluorescent light on the corner of the Ave and Maria Place. I don’t remember how we got there, or why we weren’t with our friends. I don’t remember who kissed whom, but I remember being picked up later and ending up at the house of another boy in my year. At the time I thought it was exciting, kissing two boys in one night. My life finally had the level of excitement I saw in Skins.

The boys in my year weren’t known by their first names. Baby was the runt of his friend group, shorter and smaller than the rest of them. He was taller than me, but just barely. “Baby” was one of the more benign nicknames people had.

We got together late in our seventh-form year, just before school finished for good. It had been a few months, but the breakup with Callum still felt fresh. I knew from the start that the relationship with Baby wasn’t going anywhere. Nor did I want it to. But I had to do something to alleviate my boredom. I wondered if my parents would have reconsidered moving from Auckland if they knew the gallons of RTDs and drunk boys’ saliva I swallowed to pass the time.

Dating Baby confirmed exactly what I was trying to avoid about dating in Whanganui. Everyone at school was curious about our relationship, about how far we got, about whether Baby had been immunised for yellow fever. So little happened in our small town that our cross-popularity-level relationship was big news. Girls with Roxy backpacks sneered at me and my SpongeBob SquarePants backpack. I wasn’t a social pariah, but being in extension maths meant I was exempt from coolness.

Two weeks after the acknowledgement that we were officially dating, Baby came by my house after a night out. It was more early morning than late night; the black sky was bleaching into shades of navy blue as I opened my bedroom window to let him in. As we made out, my mind played back the expectations and projections of everyone at school. I assumed that he assumed that I’d had sex before. It was common knowledge at school that I’d had an out-of-town boyfriend. Sex had felt like something to get over with so that the speculation at school would end and the gossip would move on to something else.

“Do you have condoms on you?” I asked Baby.

“Yeah, in the car.” He paused. “Should I go get them?”

“Yeah, if you want.”

He pulled on his blue jeans and black Metallica T-shirt and headed back out the window.

There were unspoken rules about how long it was appropriate to wait before having sex. It depended on so many things: how long you’d been dating, whether you’d had sex before, your relative ages. Back in fourth form, word got out that Lydia had had sex with her older boyfriend, and she didn’t come to school for an entire week. I had PE with her friends and in the changing room they talked loudly about how she was a slut.

But by now most people in my year had already had sex, or at least claimed that they had. One of my friends had only waited a few weeks with her new boyfriend. Her justification was that they had both had sex before, and it’s not something you can really go back on. So was this okay? Baby and I had been together for only two weeks, but I’d had sex before. Did it matter that Callum and I only had sex once before he broke up with me?

The window frame creaked. Baby climbed back in, holding a twelve-pack of condoms still in their plastic wrapping. I was fairly certain it was his first time, but I didn’t want to embarrass him by bringing that up now. We got naked. I pumped his dick half-heartedly to make sure he was hard enough; his fingers rubbed against me to get me wet enough.

Baby handed me a condom and I pretended to know what I was doing. I pinched the tip, like I’d seen in health class. Thankfully it rolled out the right way. I got on top of him. Like the last time, I didn’t really feel anything. Baby made a groaning noise, squeezing his eyes shut. It had been less than a minute. I got off him. He scrunched the condom into a wad of toilet paper. He looked around, holding the wad in his hand.

“Where’s the bin?”

“Just put it in your pocket.” I didn’t want to risk my parents finding it in the bin.

We lay back down in my single bed, sleeping close due to the lack of space rather than the presence of feelings. I thought about having sex with Callum. Funny how the gap between how I felt about them hadn’t changed the quality of the sex.

*

The last week of school made everyone sentimental. Signatures were collected in scrapbooks and on our white uniform shirts. In our last ever physics class, Baby walked in and sat as usual in the row behind me. Scrawls covered his shirt. Several of them read “sideways vagina”. An attempt to draw a sideways vagina had been made; it looked like a raisin. I had never heard this term before but I knew it had to be about me. Buckbeak also noticed. He started laughing and drawing the class’s attention to the drawing. I pointed out that it made no anatomical sense. Everyone was too busy laughing to consider its logical inconsistencies.

The popular girls organised an informal prizegiving, with awards such as “Most Likely to Become Prime Minister” and “Most Likely to Become a Millionaire”. They had come up with the nominations for each category and circulated a voting form the week before. During our final lunchtime, all the seventh-formers gathered outside the gym for the ceremony. Awards went to the popular girls and their friends, and the reaction from the crowd walked the line between respect and heckling. I sat with my friends, dreading the award that I knew was ahead.

The nominations were read. “Daniel and Jessica, Diana and Wiremu . . .” I winced as I heard my name. Baby’s friends cheered.

Baby and I were announced the recipients of “Cutest Couple” award. I didn’t want to get up, but the crowd was insistent. We stood up the front like docile cattle and were presented with blue ribbons. “Kiss!” yelled someone from the crowd. Everyone laughed, and to my horror a chant started up. “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”

Baby looked at me. I hadn’t seen him wear that expression before. It was an expression for the crowd. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 穷人店、富人店
• Hustle
• 剁骨刀 | Cleaver
• How Is Your Health?
• All Who Live on Islands
• Alphabet Game
• Five–Five
• Yellow Fever
• The Tiger Cub
• A Note on Languages
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgements