Fly Away, Mona

I knew her first as Hsu Hai Meng. It was my second year in college, history department, and she was my classmate. I came from the capital city, she from a rural town down south. I only learned of her English nickname as Mona later from her American boyfriend. It was an unusual nickname, not like Suzie or Stephanie. Anyway, I quite liked the sound of it.

I thought Mona was most striking. She was not someone you could easily forget, her long dark eyes in the distinctive Chinese slant, gazing into your soul, not cold, not warm, but intensely, mysteriously. I had never seen eyes like that, so urgent, so deep, like she had a lifetime of stories to tell, yet holding them back just in time. She was a tender twenty-years old, elegantly tall by Chinese standards. She looked different, she walked differently, she stood out among all my Chinese girlfriends from the capital city, stooped by heavy books and stress of years of striving and working and doing the school thing. She was slender and casual - she could easily throw on anything, which she did frequently, and still looked so statuesquely stylish: like a pair of jeans, a plain oxford shirt, and sandals for the summer heat. Her effortless charm never ceased to amaze me, her secret fan. A whiff of her magic dust was more intoxicating than all the artificial fragrances put together. My other girlfriends were all too busy trying on the Bobbie-doll looks at the time, but Mona couldn't care (or didn't have the means for it). No matter, to me, she was in a class of her own, no one's slave and no one's fool. I was crazy about her, but I couldn't tell anyone, including her. I watched her in a distance, admiring, always hoping.

I didn't know her well. I wanted to, but she kept a distance. I had many many friends from high school going on to the same college. We'd known each other well, studying, playing and gossiping together all these years. Mona somehow was able to quietly and quickly take over my mind. I could think of no one but her: how I wanted to pry the secrets behind those enigmatic eyes, to protect her from hurt, to understand her, to earn her loyalty. And when I wasn't able to get any closer to her, I felt frustrated, rejected, jealous, and worse, wanting to be with her even more.

It was a visceral feeling, innocent, chaste, girl-to-girl. It was also the 70s. It could have easily turned into something else in today's hyper-sensitive world, two girls in one scene. But we lived in a subconsciously uptight society with rigid rules. Girls were born to marry boys and raise their children, despite their own education and higher intelligence. Choices were few for even the college girls, and life was supposed to be simple and orderly.

Mona lived with her older sister, a retiring Cathay Pacific airline stewardess, in Taipei. I heard that her sister, much older than she, practically raised her alone, since her parents passed away when she was little. When the older sister was flying, Mona would spend weeks on end by herself in the apartment, something ordinary Chinese girls would not do then. But, everything about her was special: the inside knowledge of the air hostess profession (a glamorous profession for young Asian college women who were pretty, tall to do for a few years, earn a lot of money, a ticket to see the world, or to seduce a rich husband and retire in her mid-30’s in prosperity. Not a bad life for a society with so few options for college-educated women, a little play mixed in with a little work), the passion for art history (an odd subject to study in a practical world), the elusive quality of her sexuality, and her perfect aloneness.

The two sisters had moved around a lot in Taipei. In my junior year, they moved to an apartment complex two blocks from me. I heard that her older sister just retired from Cathay Pacific, and this was the place she bought for her and her future husband - not the international rich dude she met on the plane, but the local boy she grew up with in southern Taiwan. When I visited Mona in her new place, her older sister was in the back room practicing typing, preparing for a career change to secretarial work.  I was hoping to get closer to Mona, now that she lived in my neighborhood. But she never allowed that to happen, still a big wall between us. I wondered if she was seeing somebody else, perhaps a ghost boy from the south, from her past, when no one else was around.

In my senior year, I was dating an American graduate student studying Taiwan in my college. Society gradually opened up after the Vietnam War. First waves of the American visitors were the vacationing G.I.'s, but they were mainly interested in the Taiwanese prostitutes in the capital city. Then came the American students and scholars, and they ventured further into local communities, universities and Taiwan countryside.  It was an exciting time to be modern women, partying with different people from all over the world, experimenting with each other’s cultures. We were avant-guarde, doing things forbidden to us by our ancestors. We were carefree and loose, lost children of the lost empire.

I was pretty much over Mona by then. I even introduced her to a friend of my boyfriend, another expat American boy. To my surprise, she agreed to go out with him. I felt a tinge of regret. What could I do? I could only secretly follow up on their affair. This was what I heard: She drove him crazy, emotionally and physically, then she dumped him a year later. She was a major hangover for him, much like the way she had put a spell on me.

Three months after graduation from college, I landed my first job as stenographer for a German chemical firm in Taipei. Mona was one of a handful Taiwanese girls from thousands of contestants chosen to become the next generation of Cathay Pacific air stewardesses. Her passion for art history must wait, I supposed. Before she departed for her new destination in Hong Kong, I went to bid her farewell. She had plastic surgery done on her eye lids, which were no longer slanted in a mysterious Oriental closed way; her eyes now a double-folded emptiness staring out to the open.


She was a perfect girl from my dream, the high goddess I had wished to pray and inhabit, whom I wonder till now how she is, in her beautiful, tortured, slanted China eyes.