Jordan/Yuan-Wei: More Secretly American than Usual

Even though it probably wouldn't have done a lot of good or had much impact, considering that I've spent my life in New York, Massachusetts, and California before Hong Kong, I feel like it would have felt really good to cast votes again President That Fucking Guy in the last three elections.  And that's even before he did anything - as someone born and raised in Queens, hating That Fucking Guy is my goddamn birthright.

But he has done stuff, and I've been a woman with a Hong Kong passport for almost ten years now, and I'm dating a guy from here who is suddenly a whole heck of a lot less interested in seeing America than he was when Max and Jonah/Krystle invited me to their weddings last year.  I can't really blame him, at least up to the point where he says maybe I should just cancel what I've booked entirely, since it wasn't like this was family or anything, but just friends from years ago, and he's been sleeping on the couch for the past week.

Oh.  Yeah.  He didn't move back to his apartment after his lease lapsed, because being all up in each other's business all the time didn't drive us apart but instead confirmed that we do indeed like each other enough that neither he nor I is going to suddenly decide that we don't want the other around.  Not enough to make always being around each other and in the same bed after work something we're gonna want to stop, anyways.  I know that sounds like me avoiding saying I love him, which it's not - I do love him! - but that doesn't make me any less wary about sharing my space.

It's our space now, and in a lot of ways it's not that bad or different.  Dominic and I have a lot of the same tastes, even if he occasionally insists living in America has time my palate.  Over the past couple months, the food in the fridge is different, you see more stuff labeled in Chinese characters on the walls and shelves, some of my baseball stuff has given way to his martial arts stuff.  As I was telling Max during a zoom call the other day, it's starting to feel more like Jordan Lee's apartment than Jordan Chang's.

He laughed at that, saying I worry way too much about names and what they mean and if the Inn has fucked me up in some fundamental way, and he's probably right, but I point out that I'm zooming with him from a park rather than my living room because I couldn't talk about this sort of thing with Dominic around.  He says that's kind of going to be the new normal, though, because he didn't tell Pei Pei that he spent a year as someone else when he proposed and doesn't think it would be right to spring it on her at the wedding. 

That's when I understood the reason for arranging a call - he's just going to let his fiancée think Benny is his real fucking brother, and I'm just some girl who used to hang out with him and his folks because "Missy" was a theater kid who would come to New York to see shows while at school in Boston.  And while I get it - Pei Pei is a nice girl who has no connection to the Inn whatsoever (believe you me, folks checked!) - it made me feel like I was being pushed out of the family when I often feel like I work pretty goddamn hard to stay in touch.  I blew up at him a bit more than he deserved, though he sure fucking deserved some of it, probably because I was stressed out about visas and if I wanted to buy burner phones for the trip and just everything about how my home is rejecting me, again, in large part because That Fucking Guy is president again. 

I'm still coming, but there's a good chance my family and folks like Annette and Jonah won't get to meet my boyfriend, and I'll be making sure that there are folks ready to call lawyers to deal with ICE fuckery if I don't text every ten minutes after the plane lands for every airport.  It's crazy, considering I live in China (yeah, Hong Kong, but the SAR isn't nearly as S as it used to be), and makes me worry about whether I might just get cut off from people I care about long-term.  I know that's what happened with my grandparents, and what happens with a lot of Inn people, but I guess I've been in denial about it happening to me, and what sort of Hong Kong girl that will leave me. 

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Could Be Worse!

Hope I didn't get folks too worked up over the last post.  Anyway, Dominic had a rough night of it - compound fracture and what is apparently way more internal bleeding than you want from the femoral artery as a result.  I mean, you want none, obviously, but I feel like transfusions for "just" a broken leg is kind of alarming!

If it was alarming to me, it was absolutely panic-inducing to him, so I wound up in "reassuring girlfriend" mode the next day - no, I was not just attracted to you for your body, and it's not nearly broken enough for me to put me off, you'll heal up, and be back at risking your body/skillfully making it look like you've risked your body in a couple months - which, admittedly, is not natural to me.  I'm not a bitch, I don't think, but there's still a lot of New York asshole in me which is not exactly helpful when someone feels legitimately down or isn't used to busting your chops as meaning "see, it could be worse" rather than "it's worse than you think".  Trying to quickly think of solutions when he's down, that sort of thing.

And, like, trying to make sure he's not down for very long.  There are logistical considerations in fucking someone whose full leg is in a cast and not supposed to have any weight put on it, but we're figuring our way around them.  Purely for the purposes of making sure he knows he's no less a man in this situations, of course.

I kid, but that sort of temporary handicap is no joke, especially in a place like Hong Kong where folks often have tiny, cramped apartments and some of the elevators are like sixty years old and break down a lot.  Dominic's apartment, for example, is on the sixth floor of his building and he's often joked about the stairs being his workout.  His parents are in a high-rise whose elevator doesn't have any problems but which is just a bedroom, kitchen, living room, and bath, since they downsized after he moved out.  Which leaves me.  I don't know if I'm really rich right now - Chen-ai/Bingbing didn't exactly drain the family accounts but she sure as fuck convinced the nice lady living her life that she deserved a good chunk of it - but I've got a nice condo with a spare bedroom should we not decide to sleep in the same bed for whatever reason, and the building is relatively new and reliable.  There's the family house, but...  Well, I'm not sure what to do with it, to be honest, but that's a whole other thing.

But, yeah, Dominic is moving in, at least for the next couple of months, a lot sooner than I expected we'd be having this conversation.  We've gone over to his place and brought a lot of clothes over, and he insisted on being the one to buy a cheap bit of plastic storage to keep them in.  So far, we're not clashing too much, except over breakfast, when I am trying to get out of the habit of grabbing the closest thing Hong Kong has to a New York bagel and coffee en route to work because he'll make dim sum.  Along those lines, he and his parents are not really sure what to think about just how American the contents of my apartment are.  The place you see the most Chinese characters is one the Blu-ray shelf and the pantry, whereas my jottings on the refrigerator's notepad are all in English and so are most of the books and magazines lying around.

More than being generally Western - which isn't that big a deal; folks in this city have been using a lot of English and getting into Western things to look worldly and sophisticated for a long time, and the transition to sucking up to the Mainland instead is kind of happening slowly and reluctantly - it's my place.  Me, Jordan Chang, not Jordan Lee Yuan-Wei.  And I suspect that while that just looks eccentric to friends and lovers who pop in for a visit or stay the night, it's probably pretty fucking weird for Dominic when he's got time to settle in and look around.  Like, why does the Christmas card from a random-seeming family from New York have a place of prominence while the one from my mother (you know, Chen-ai, or the while lady posing as her) doesn't?  How would someone who went to college in Boston know this family from New York, getting all these texts at odd hours and there was a package with some Christmas presents, and do you know what it fucking costs to ship stuff internationally these days?

I'm not worried he's going to find out my secret and have some sort of gay-panic freakout; the Inn's curse kind of protects me from that, which becomes weirdly convenient once it's not the most fucking frustrating thing in the world.  But, ugh, I'm not looking forward to coming up with weird stories (which you kind of have to after the face I made when he guessed that I had dated my kid brother at some point) or pushing my original life even further into the background.  But I guess that's what you kind of have to do when your new one fills out like this.

And I guess I can; Jonah is getting married next year and seems to be making her peace with it.  I just wan't figuring on doing it the week I'm exchanging a lot of Christmas greetings with my American friends and family, is all.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Too much time to think right now

I mentioned a few months ago that I was trying not to jinx something, but I guess I may as well.  His name is Dominic Wong Tak-Lok and I think I may love him.

We met on a dating app, as you do, but it actually started to take off when we crossed paths at work.  He's a guy who would be about to break big if Hong Kong's film industry was what it once was, a pretty darn good screen fighter in one of the big stunt teams who has the charisma to jump to speaking roles; he's had a couple things - mostly stuff that goes straight to the likes of iQIY - where he's a sort of featured heavy, the guy that gives the star a run for his money on the way to the big showdown with the villain and lodges himself in your memory because that guy was sort of cool.  Anyway, he was in a fantasy action thing and I came on-set to set up mo-cap when needed and show the director monster designs to make sure that there was actually room for a bulky ten-foot-tall beastie on screen.  So I was putting some dots on him, he said funny meeting you here and poured on the flirting; I wasn't seeing anyone exclusively and he was my type, so I went with it.

Not that "my type" is particularly specific:  He's tall, well-muscled but just short of the super-sculpted way that Benny says isn't achievable without risking dehydration, and gets a nice five-o'clock shadow.  Some of his family emigrated back in the 1990s, so he's spent a fair amount of time in Vancouver, which means his English is pretty good and he doesn't think I'm weird for preferring baseball to soccer, and he respects that I'm good at my job so he doesn't try to mansplain movies to me.  He's got an impressive, responsive dick.

I wasn't expecting much more than some good sex and some good times.  I've been a woman for ten years, even if I figured to become a man again during the first, and though I've had boyfriends, I really only got hurt by something ending once, and that involved a bunch of weird Chen-ai Inn Conspiracy Shit.  I kind of figured that's how it was going to be, just because of who I am.  I figure that the Inn alters the parts of your brains that control gender identity and sexual orientation but don't mess with anything that speaks to your experiences or skills (I've read so much fucking neuroscience of gender for dummies shit since becoming Yuan-Wei) and just kind of figured that who I am was kind of set by the first twenty-five years of my life, where I was overweight, angry, overlooked by girls and pissed off about it.  I kind of go into relationships expecting the collapse.  And sometimes I wonder if how I behave as the girl in a relationship is really me, or me trying to be what I wanted girls to be as a guy, or how I think girls act, or how I think girls should act.

(If a therapist went to the Inn they could make so much fucking money from zoom sessions with folks who can't tell a regular shrink why they're fucked up)

It's been really good.  We both tend to work long hours, but Hong Kong is a good city for when you're looking to have a date at 3am, and when he's not working, he's a good cook and not weird about how I make more money than him so I sometimes pay for dinner.  We go to movies and elbow each other to point out stuff that we think is kind of funny or weird from a behind-the-scenes perspective.  His family is pretty cool about me being a couple years older and doesn't talk about my eggs running out or anything.  He has yet to fail to bring me to orgasm, and all that martial-arts training seems to translate well to how I kind of like being picked up and kind of manhandled without crossing a line.  Like, he knows his own strength and that I like to feel some power without actually getting hurt.

And, right now, sitting in this hospital, I wish the stunt coordinator on his current job had been similarly committed to people not getting fucking hurt.

it's so fucking ridiculous, because I was there to make sure something like this didn't happen, helping with green-screen work so that we could put a fake cement wall in behind him so that if he didn't manage to leap onto the car's hood in time, we wouldn't be crushed between them.  We do a lot of that stuff - folks don't realize how much CGI is letting folks do practical stunts safely - but some jackass figured they could store equipment behind the green screen, and Dominic's leg got pinned.  It's a pretty gnarly fracture - they brought him into the OR rather than just setting it with a cast - and they won't let me into his room, even though I'm the one that called his parents and told them where to come.

So, yeah, maybe I'm in love.  Can't imagine I'd be this freaked out otherwise.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Mothers & Matrimonies

Hey all, been a minute.  Just dropping in to congratulate Jonah/Krystle on her engagement and state for the record that while I would feel like a complete asshole to ask her to choose a date that's either the weekend before or the one after my brother Max's wedding next summer so that I could just take a couple weeks of vacation and minimize the brutal jet lag next June, I am absolutely not above just casually mentioning this circumstance in a slice-of-life blog entry about how I've evidently reached the point in my life where everybody I know is getting married and it's kind of a pain in the ass.

I am, of course, pretty happy for everybody in my life who is tying the knot, especially them, although I'm not likely to join them any time soon; I had a long string of bad dates before meeting the guy I'm seeing now.  The funny thing is that my mother is starting to get antsy, quoting some statistics about women over 30 getting married or having children, and I tell her that wither you consider me a man over thirty or a woman under, but you can't mix them up willy-nilly like that.  She says it's perfectly reasonable - I've lived that long and I certainly seem to identify as a woman - but she's had two kids and is about to attend her second wedding, anything from me is a bonus.

Meanwhile, both of the Chen-Ais got married this summer, and I was a bridesmaid at both.

For original Chen-Ai/current Bingbing, it's to some guy whose family owns a bunch of factories in Guangzhou, who doesn't seem particularly evil himself, but the rest of his family and friends...  Ugh.  This was my first trip into the Mainland, which I gather isn't necessarily that big a deal for a lot of Hong Kongers, but I've been kind of skittish about it.  I'm not politically outspoken, but folks know I've spent a lot of time in the United States and that I tend to take that perspective.  Plus, I'm a Chinese-American guy who has taken over the life of a Chinese woman and while we've all experienced how the Inn's magic keeps people from believing in it, maybe there's someone in the Chinese government who sees me or the "Lee Yuan-Wei" identity as an asset.  Or just a criminal.

It doesn't seem to have bothered Bingbing, though, who after draining her old bank accounts as much as she could without the lawyers starting to lean on her sought out a new potential rich husband, and this guy is probably a good target because he may technically be what they used to call a "princeling" - wealthy family, educated abroad, not involved with the business's day-to-day - he seems to be an earnest socialist and humble.  Enough that, after I'd wound up dragged along on a few outings with them, I asked if she has Inn-related plans for him, and she stook her tongue out saying "yuk, no interest in having one of those things on my body, and his is big that I don't know what I'd do with it."  I gave her a look and she said she liked being Bingbing and wasn't looking to change.  Much more fun, she says, to be the pretty wife who is good at social things than actually running the business

I think she remembered my skepticism, though, because I fucking swear she had the dressmaker make my bridesmaid dress tighter, shorter, and doing more to push my tits up into a plunging neckline than when we tried them on, so I spent the whole wedding and reception looking like I was some tacky Kong Girl trolling for a rich Mainland husband of my own from among the much-less likable folks on hand.  Just gross even when they weren't grabbing my ass.

(It's been a while, but, no, I haven't become a shrinking violet or anything; I just enjoy guys pawing me a whole lot more after we've established we like and trust each other than before, and part of that is them not being asshats because I'm not one to hide what yoga and dance do for me!)

I admit, I did agree to a date with the least-objectionable one, but I'm glad the night ended on a silly-seeming pop-cultural argument as opposed to actually getting near a second date.  And that wasn't all bad; the guy I'm seeing now had actually been in the restaurant and mentioned it when a dating app matched us up, saying that I was right and he was impressed at my willingness to call something a red flag.  So not a total disaster.

I'm happy for the newest model Chen-Ai, though.  As much as she's made some solid progress in that identity, Cantonese is a tough language to learn at her age.  Six months ago, she met a nice man her apparent age that works at one of the large UK-based banks, they hit it off, and when he was reassigned back home, he proposed.  And while immigrating to a new country by marrying someone from there is not nearly as straightforward as people assume - I've reap up on this "just in case" - Hong Kong to the UK is apparently one of the easier cases; the new quasi-stepfather says that making it easier for Hong Kongers who held UK passports before the handover easier to immigrate was one of the few good/competent things Boris Johnson did.

This was a much smaller ceremony, as a lot of Chen-Ai's friends have sort of fallen away as she disappeared and returned as someone else who had a hard time communicating with her.  It's good, I guess; she's going to be starting a new life on the other side of the world and being able to make a clean break is probably pretty handy, but she gave me this big hug like I was her actual daughter and thanked me for how much I'd helped her to be able to get by so that she could meet someone like him.

I'm not sure what to do with that, really.  I know that I was often a real asshole before going to the Inn and especially while I was Deirdre, and I don't really recall a point when I decided to stop being an asshole.  Anne likes to point to me deciding Benny could keep my old life as that moment, and, maybe, but sometimes I feel like I was more intimidated than generous there, or what it means that I had to be made attractive or female for me to treat others well.  I like myself more than I did, and it's not just knowing that there are folks out there who want to fuck me.  If the thing I've got going now doesn't work out, I know I'll be okay.

But Chen-Ai didn't have anyone from her old life when she got married as Bingbing; her real daughter and the real Bingbing are men in Montreal and I gather she didn't really have any regrets about their not being there.  I don't know if the original Yuan-wei will come when and if I get married, but she came to graduation and we get along okay.  We'll find a way to explain why my folks are there.

Is there a point to this?  Probably not.  It's just been crazy hot and busy and I've had my weekends eaten by weddings lately and I needed to blow off some steam.

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: City Without Baseball

It's a silly thing to worry about, given everything else, but Spring Training has started, and even though the Mets look like they're going to be a force this year, I kind of wonder if I'm going to be able to follow them from here in Hong Kong.  I can - the internet is a thing, obviously, and I can easily afford MLB's streaming package, but trying to watch postseason games in the morning last fall felt profoundly wrong even if work didn't get in the way.  It would be nice to develop a rooting interest here, even if the quality of play wasn't great, but...  Well, there's a movie I found in one of the video stores in the Ladies' Market a few weeks ago called City Without Baseball, and while it's not really about baseball and how there should be more, the name isn't wrong.  There's no damn baseball here and, like, should I start following some Taiwanese/Japanese/Korean team at random?  Would that make me the same as the fucking hipsters from back when I was my original self who started "supporting" an English Premier League "side" out of nowhere and then started acting snotty when I called it "soccer" instead of "football"?

...

Okay, so this isn't really about baseball and rooting interests, but, like, that's the most obvious and harmless way that being Yuan-Wei in something approximating what the original Yuan-Wei's life might have become is messing with me these days.  The only time I actually speak English is at work or when talking with "Mom", and even she wants me to help her practice Cantonese these days.  I'm glad to, because...

You know what?  I should have led with this.  The person who was living the live of the lady now going by "Wang Chen-Ai" died a month ago.  It took us two weeks to find out because, I mean, why would you tell some random middle-aged woman in China that your grandma passed away, and neither of them really did social media.  It's not immediately some sort of tragedy in terms of someone's life being cut short because they aged fifty years overnight - I gather it was someone about the same age - so maybe something like that is going to happen down the chain, but it was a shock.  Fake Chen-Ai figured she'd had at least ten more years in her once she got back to being herself, but, well, sometimes a decline comes fast.

I don't really know what she's thinking, but she's seemed really shaky at times, so I've tried to spend more time with her.  She's been taking Cantonese lessons and appreciates when I help her practice, and about a week ago she said we should probably try to do more together, stuff that looks like mother/daughter but is just two people trying to get to know each other and the city we're supposed to call home on the one hand, and maybe trying to carve out some sort of corner where we can kind of be ourselves, and she says she and her father used to watch the Giants a lot back when they had just come out west, so I thought maybe that would be something.

Selfishly, I'm not happy but with this turn of events but kind of like the idea of not having to start over with a new fake mother every year or so.  I tell her that a lot of us have gone through something big like this, but she's kind of getting a lot of culture shock that she'd been able to stave off by leaving a lot of things to Chen-Ai/Bingbing and staying in, and I'm not sure of the best way to help.  There aren't fucking books on this!

(And, once again, I want to know how things got to the point where I'm the mentor/voice of reason!)

-Jordo

Jordan/Yuan-Wei: Finally Being Called "Home"

I'll get to the title I just entered, but first - do you ever think of how weird "Western Names" for Chinese people are?  Like, if I asked you what your favorite Chan Yuan-Lung movie was, you'd think you'd never heard of the guy, and that's kind of fucking crazy - you would think that after decades of having success on both sides of the Pacific, folks would at least absorb the name by which Jackie Chan is known in Hong Kong as a fun piece of trivia, or maybe try to use it more if they're good progressive folks, but nah - they (heck, I admit it, we) just keep using the name he chose because white people couldn't handle a Chinese name and he wanted to do business with them.  Even though people use the names of Japanese and Korean actors all the time, this weird and sort of racist tradition continues.

Although, heck, I'm named "Jordan" because my parents wanted to make things easy on me and Max at school and later on, and I went to using that after graduating college as Yuan-Wei because I'd rather go by that than "Missy".  Sometimes, growing up, I kind of wished I had a Chinese name; today I'm kind of grateful because it gives me a way to more easily reclaim a bit of who I am than other folks who have been to the Inn get.  Being Jordan Lee lets me more easily separate myself from Lee Yuan-Wei, even if it also means I'm also not Jordan Chang.

But it's apparently time to accept being Lee Yuan-Wei more.  The person who has been Wang Chen-Ai for the past couple of years is kind of stuck in Hong Kong despite not really knowing any Cantonese or Mandarin - just disappearing in the United States for a few months gets a flag put on your passport, apparently.  It's not as bad as it sounds - you can get by there just speaking English, and whatever magic the Inn has which keeps people from believing it exists must make her claim that some sort of stroke erased her first language but not her second sound less ridiculous.  She's hired "Bingbing" - the original Chen-Ai - as an "assistant" despite my warnings, but I can't exactly argue with someone on the other side of the world and a different culture from what is home that she shouldn't lean on the person who knows it best.

The family's lawyers feel a little differently, though, and have contacted me, saying that I really shouldn't leave my mother in this situation.  Romain and René - the original Yuan-Wei and Bingbing - either don't have super-strong opinions or just sort of freeze trying to figure out what their interest should be at this point and I don't blame them.  Meanwhile, my employer is finally getting around to opening a department in Hong Kong; they'd planned to do it a couple years ago, but then there was a fucking pandemic.  Now, though, they really want a piece of the visual effects market in China, and to a lesser extent Korea, Japan, and India, and here I am, with a pretty good record, speaking the language, and technically only living in Southern California because they sponsor my visa.  As it turns out, the timing of this works out pretty good for "Lee Yuan-Wei" - because they couldn't open two years ago, I've got more experience, so if I transfer to the new location, I'll get a promotion to lead animator, probably a couple years ahead of when I would if I stayed in L.A.  It's a good opportunity, but I'd like it more if it felt like "spend a couple years overseas, come home with a promotion" rather than maybe the end of my life as an American.

I don't think my employer would fire me for not going, but I have joked about it being a shame I'm not in a relationship so that I could believably become a citizen through marriage.

As you can see, there's a huge part of me that hates all this and resents that it's going to push me into upending my whole life again, and I kind of want to do what i did when I woke up as Deirdre and just put my foot down and say fuck it, I'm going to keep living my life no matter what.  But I was talking to my folks, and they kind of pointed out that the Inn has been good to me.  Not that I should be grateful for the way it messed up my life, but I've got friends, I'm physically younger, healthier, and more attractive, if in a different way.  This life comes with resources and I've been able to redirect it into something that probably suits me better than both my original path and the one it was on.  I've got friends in Annette, Jonah, Ernesto, and a few others like I haven't had before.  If that means helping to look after some 75-year-old white woman who finds herself trapped in a Chinese life she doesn't understand, I guess it's not a bad price.

I'd just like to feel like I've got a little more control over it before something else sends it in a different direction!

-Jordo

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-Wei: Boyfriends

I don't have any records of how long I ever lasted with any chick in my original life, but I think Jacky Lau may be the longest relationship I've ever had.  Benjamin suggests that this should have an asterisk, since roughly half of that time has had us in different hemispheres, but I kind of call bullshit on that.  After all, if we were living in the same city, he wouldn't have the chance to forget just what kind of body he could be waking up next to.  Temptation increases with distance, right?

It makes the reunion more exciting, too.  I wouldn't exactly say it was sexual torture being away from him for the fall semester, but it did feel damn good to put on a push-up bra, fuck-me heels, and a tight dress to go down the arcade, where Jacky had just talked about hanging out, though I don't think he minded heads turning to his girlfriend and him at all.  I'm admittedly not at my best gaming in that outfit - even now, when I get in front of a fighting game, I kind of want to take a wide stance and use my size to establish dominance, for instance - but it pepped him up and made it very clear what the real highlight of the night was going to be.

I introduced him to my "mother" Chen-ai the day before Christmas, and I don't know whether she was more being playful or trying to do something to break us up when she asked if Ernesto knew about Jacky.  Yes, I said, my classmates know I've got a boyfriend back home.  It got a bit weird when she kept pressing the point, especially since she seemed to suspect I had slept with him; did she just assume that's how it went on a set?  Jacky didn't rise to the bait, not even when she mentioned that Inspector Yee had visited a few weeks ago, although she assured both of us that she made sure to mention my carelessness, so that it would be clear that what happened to Father was at worst an accident.

I blew up at her after Jacky left, something that felt like it was a long time coming, wanting to know just why the fuck she would say that to her daughter's boyfriend.  She tutted about how I was so rude these days, that America must be a bad influence on me.  I was tempted to give her the "you have no idea" line, but instead hit back with something about how, maybe, me being over there made her realize just how alone she was always going to be before storming off to my room, trying to calculate the time difference to Montreal to figure out whether I should call René or email.

I wound up emailing to be on the safe side, then heading back into the city.  I tried to phone Jacky on the way but it went straight to voice mail - he can get more tunnel-vision-y than me when gaming - so decide, fuck it, I'll just go dancing myself.

Benjamin thinks I should feel sort of bad about hitting a club solo now that I've got a boyfriend, but for me it's kind of a practical thing more than disloyalty.  I may just be there to dance and drink and show off, but lots of guys don't necessarily see buying me a drink as fair payment for getting to look at me in that dress as opposed to a down payment on getting it off, and even being with a string bean like Jacky or another girl will cut that shit down.  You've also gotta watch your drink like a hawk, because stuff that didn't seem like a big deal when it was my fraternity brothers doing it is not flying with me these days.

Despite all that, I still like getting sexy and flirting; the knowledge that I could fuck any of these guys if I felt like it rather than maybe settling for someone's less-hot friend if I'm lucky is almost as intoxicating as the booze, and sometimes you just want to bounce around to music even if you're by yourself, just as a release.  I probably didn't have that much to get out - who gives a shit what some woman I've seen like four times in the year and a half I've known her thinks just because she gave birth to the original Yuan-wei? - but it felt good, right up until I saw Bingbing inhaling some guy's face and figured, fuck it, might as well force the issue after months of trying to be tactful electronically.

So I downed my drink, put a smile on my face, and was like "Chen Bingbing?  It's been forever!  And who is this kind of decent-looking guy?  I don't recall hearing about you and my brother breaking up!"

Bingbing looked annoyed, but close to match my bitchiness.  "Wow, what a weird thing for an only child to ask, Yuan-wei!  Keep up with these delusions and people will think you're nuts!"

I held my phone up.  "Well, if Max doesn't exist, then I guess this text message and the YouTube link inside it will just get bounced right back to me!"

It was a bluff, but Bingbing didn't seem to know that.  "Fine, let's go have a smoke."  She started walking to the door, telling her dance partner not to wait, even if he really is better than kind of decent-looking.  After a quick stop at the coast check to get her purse, we stood out on the sidewalk.  She quickly lit up, took a long drag, and blew the smoke in my face.  Bitch move, but I coughed a bit anyway.  "So," she said, "what do you know?"

"The real Bingbing says you're Giorgia Wong, and if that's the case, Google says you're 44 years old, come from Chinatown, two time loser, divorced three times, no kids.  Facebook suddenly takes a nosedive and switches entirely to English in 2014.  The person using it now says you've basically abandoned your old life.  Good match for you and your sister pulling the ultimate dick move and convincing René and Romain that going back to the Inn will kill them.  Whose idea was that, you or Carlotta?"

She didn't actually answer, just pointed out that I said "the real Bingbing" when I was just talking about her, but when the changes involved both of us, the people in Montreal were suddenly "René et Romain".  I started to explain, but she cut me off.  "I'm just saying, you did the same thing when you got that hot little bod that I did - you saw a chance for a fresh start way ahead of where you were at Yuan-wei's age and fucking took it.  Sure, Carlotta told you it was okay, but so what?  You chose to be yourself instead of Deirdre when you first went to the Inn, you made a choice, and we choose to have good lives rather than the ones we had which sucked.  And if we have to lie a little to do it without hearing them fucking whine about it for the rest of our lives, so be it!"

"And Max?"

"Well, at first that was just me being pissed off - Carlotta was going to transfer to NYU at the same time I did so we could be classmates, but she goes and freaks out over Yuan-wei's father, and living in Hong Kong, and, like, how kids in their twenties do all that social media shit and abandons me, and then I meet the brother of the guy who took her place?  Watching you fall all over yourself to hang out with us but having your skin crawl every time Max looked at your tits was just funny! Although, let me tell you, if you ever come around on not being related any more, and want to get close, I wouldn't blame you - he's really sweet and his dick--"

She went on about that subject.

"-- so tell him.  I'll just say I was lonely and sorry and call you a bitch for stabbing me in the back like that.  He'll feel great that I chose him over a lifelong friend and he'll fucking hate you.  Trust me on this, I've known how to get men to do shit longer than you've been alive."  With that, she flicked her cigarette butt into the gutter and smiled.  "God, it felt good to let that all out!  I just never get a chance to do that now that Carlotta is spending all her time being a good 'Sandy' since you outed her.  We've got to hang out more - call me when you figure out your New Year's plans!"

Yeah, like hell.

After that, I decided I really needed to get the hell out of Dodge for a while, even if I had booked a flight and hotel so that René and Romain could visit HK for the first time since they went to the Inn.  I guess I was kind of lucky that they apparently were a little nervous about that themselves, because when I suggested that the for of us (me, them, Jacky) head to Australia instead, they liked the idea.  Jacky thought it was kind of weird, since I don't get much time at "home", what with going to school in America, but how to explain how little it was feeling like home that week?

I booked René and Romain a round trip that would basically fit in between their flights from Montreal, so we met at the airport, but didn't have a lot of time to talk; owing to the last-minute nature of the reservations, we wound up scattered throughout the first-class cabin, and then a crowded bus for our ride from the airport and hotel in Melbourne, then...  Well, by then it was evening and Jacky and I opted to take advantage of not having mothers or roommates nearby.

One side effect of going to Melbourne instead of staying in Hong Kong was that there was a lot less time for chatting with René and Romain about how to handle actually knowing about each other; if we'd stayed in HK, there would have been times when Jacky was just of doing his own thing or at home, but making it a couples' vacation meant he was always around.  Normally, pretty nice, but it meant I didn't really have a moment alone with either of the other Inn people until the third day, when we're sitting on a beach and Jacky & René run off to fetch us some ice cream.  Romain and I are both in swimsuits, but I don't really feel like that's rude or anything until he says I'm looking good.

"Well, I did inherit some good genes."

"You don't have to say that."

"It's true!  I watched the guy living my life drop a hundred pounds, and by the time I was done being Deirdre, I'd gotten kind of soft.  It's different this time.  Maybe I'm still enough of a guy that I like the sight of a naked hottie in the mirror every morning, but that can't be all of it."

"Mm."  Way he looked at me was different, and not just because he's gay.  He was studying me the way I do Benny and wondering.

"Look, if you really want--"

"Of course I want that!  I mourned that body when Carlotta said there was no going back, and ever since meeting you, I wake up every morning trying to figure out how to arrange it, and if it were just me...  Have you ever been in love with your best friend?"

"I've, uh, had a crush."

"Me and René is crazy - we were kind of disgusted that the Inn made us into a gay couple, but we had no-one else, and, like, now I can't be without him, and I've spent the last few months coming up with ways we could go back, but even if you don't back out, only I can, and then, what, we hope he lucks into becoming a straight guy where the fact that his English isn't nearly as good as his French, Mandarin, or Cantonese isn't a problem?"

"You guys could probably make something work--"

"We're making this work, but I know what I could have had, and been, and I kind of hate that you and René get along, because what if he actually kind of likes girls a little?  What if that's why he was so supportive those months I was doing the drag thing...  Then I think of my Dad and how the police are still poking around even though the case is closed, and I think about getting my life back and going to jail..."

He stopped there, and we looked at each other, both kind of thinking that we weren't getting what we wanted it off this conversation.  Like, we were going to sit down, talk, and he was either going to say "oh, I'm too in love with René and settled into this life to ever think about getting the life I was born with back, enjoy fucking Jacky and spending my money with a clear conscience!" or him making an argument that has me saying "ah, well, easy come, easy go".  No, instead the situation is still complicated and we both know it.

At least Romain's face seemed to legitimately light up when René got back, and is weirdly cute to watch two guys whose bodies are in their mid-twenties goofing around with their ice cream like they were actually what I look like.  Jacky started getting a bit uncomfortable when it became kissing, to the point of asking me whether all that time in America got me used to that, and I kind of wanted to say, dude, I grew up in New York, but, obviously, I can't.  It at least got him feeling kind of competitive, though, and while we didn't quite wind up making out on the beach, he did pick me up and toss me in the water.  It involved a little huffing and puffing and promising to work out a bit more,  even if I wouldn't see the results until Spring Break.

Anyway, the rest of vacation was cool - there's lots of signs in Chinese around Melbourne, so Jacky and René could keep up with Romain and I without a whole lot of trouble, we all did little girly squeals meeting koala and kangaroos and penguins (okay, maybe not Jacky), and we got to celebrate the New Year before anyone else, practically.  There's a ton of good food and streetcars and museums and stuff, too.  I highly recommend the trip.  Heck, I won't lie; I might start thinking about it long-term after graduation, depending what my Hong Kong and American situations are.

It was a bummer that it ended; knowing I'd only talk to Jacky, René, and Romain online during the spring semester sucked, although I've been kept busy enough for that not to be a huge problem.

-Jordo/Yuan-wei/"Missy"

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei: Hong Kong girl

It's been a while since I wrote here, to a certain extent because I worry about the Great Firewall of China, but seeing other people mention me makes me feel like I should check in.  Part of it is that I really want to do something in fucking English - as much as my Cantonese now kicks ass and my Mandarin is just disappointing (it's a damn difficult language to pick up, but a girl with Yuan-wei's background is expected to be fluent), a couple of months in Hong Kong had me sometimes losing touch with the American half of my Chinese-American upbringing.  There are plenty of Hollywood movies to see, but I'm always seeing them with friends, and any salve they may be top my homesickness ends add soon as the credits roll and we're talking about them as outsiders.  Not completely, as even young HK folks feel a connection with the West as well as China, but whenever I start talking about New York or Boston as places I'm familiar with, I get a few odd looks.

I should probably start off by mentioning that the spring semester was kind of bumpy, academically, but productively so. I was in another play, not quite so tiny a part, but small enough with what my advisor told me was an "undistinguished" performance. It was no fun, not nearly as much as the short we made earlier, and it really crystallized for me that, while my first school-year as Yuan-Wei has shown me that I do enjoy creating stuff, I hate and fucking suck at pretending to be someone I'm not.

It's not exactly a ground-shaking discovery, but it does sort of run counter to my feelings at the start of all this, that since us folks who've been to the Inn are pretending to be someone else all the time, acting should be a snap. But that initial assumption was way the fuck off. We're all at our best when we just be ourselves, and the trick is knowing that what we define as "ourselves" has changed. We're not just minds riding in our bodies; the meat matters, and it affects how the "mind" makes its decisions. I was miserable as Deirdre in part because I had a hard time accepting that I was a petite heterosexual white girl with this sort of metabolism and that kind of physical endurance. Knowing that Yuan-wei's form isn't something I'm in but what I am hasn't made periods suck less, but does give me the right outlook toward them.

Being onstage is just doubling up on that. I'm not this character, and I'm not the person who wanted to play characters so much that she decided to make a life out of it.  I'm glad she did, because it gave me a chance to discover that making movies is fun and rewarding even if it is a lot of hard work. It stimulates both sides of my brain in ways just writing code didn't. So, while I'm still going to be studying film and television, it's going to be in the area of direction, production, and visual effects rather than being in front of the camera.

Or on stage. Fuck the stage.

My advisor probably hasn't heard somebody planning to stay in this program say ''fuck the stage" very often, but given that my core grades are pretty good and I'm doing well in the classes that will transfer to my new major (and I'm not on any sort of scholarship), the fact that he spent most of his pre-academic career there couldn't exert enough influence to kick my perfect ass out, especially when I pointed out that the short I made with Ernesto and his friends got into a big damn film festival.

The news that I was changing focus got some interesting reactions when I got back "home" to Hong Kong. I'd kind of worried about breaking it to "Grandmother" Yu-ling, since she had been the inspiration for the original Yuan-wei to pursue a career in acting, but it turned out not to be a big deal. She had, after all, retired without a lot of regrets when she married, and though she admitted that she had been looking forward to following my career, she could still do that, though she worried that she couldn't name a lot of female A-list directors, whether in Hong Kong, China, or Hollywood.

Chen-ai, my inherited mother, was a little bit more pointed about that. Acting, she pointed out, may not be the most respectable career, but they needed to hire women for roughly half the jobs, and maybe I didn't quite realize that this wasn't the case most of the time. That did sting a bit; as much as I had noticed it was kind of a sausage party, I've got what I figure is an understandable tendency to think of myself as one of the guys in that sort of group.  Once most of the guys who are going to hit on me get shot down and we start doing what we got together to accomplish, I tend not to think about being the only girl there, though I should probably start.

Bingbing was probably the most surprised, saying it's a pretty long-haul decision to drop something you've been talking about since childhood.  I actually had a little trouble figuring out the right way to put it; I may not be that much older than the real Yuan-wei in reality, but I kind of wondered if a twenty-year-old kid would have the wisdom to recognize that things can stop being fun when you have to be really good at them, so maybe you should pivot to something similar which you find satisfying. I tried saying that while really saying "I'm a rich kid who has never had to push through something I didn't enjoy so I quit", but who knows what sort of performance I gave to the person who maybe knew the original Yuan-wei best. Acting. Ugh.

I tried not to be too curious about her and Max, especially when we went out partying and she had zero problem flirting with guys who aren't really my brother. She said they had a lot of fun, but New York was a long ways away and as much as he wanted to be a real Chinese boy, he didn't subscribe to any of the local social networks so what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him.  Besides, she says, it's not like he's going to be her forever guy; she doesn't see herself staying in America after school and while Max would probably love being an expat in Hong Kong, who knows if that will be an option? And even if he does, she figures on trying her luck in Beijing, and Max probably wouldn't be down with that.

Fair enough, I guess, although I kind of hate the idea that this girl I really enjoy hanging out with is basically waiting for the right time to break my kids brother's heart, even if he always was a pain in the ass.  And, since I do figure to find some way to stay in America after my student visa express, I wonder what that means for me and Jacky.

Yeah, I somehow managed to pick up a boyfriend, or at least something with the potential to be more than "guy I've fucked more than once".  His name is Jacky Lau, and, yes, I've told him that is a stupid Engorged name because no English-speaking man has gone by "Jackie" in at least fifty years, but, whatever.  Gotta folks were big Jackie Chan fans and I can't exactly talk, since I'm ten years, max, from being too old to go by "Missy".

We actually met in Tokyo, because I can afford weekend trips to Tokyo, which is amazing.  I've never traveled that much except for family trips, but I was having a day of being pissed off at people saying that there were things a pretty young woman shouldn't do alone, and having a gold card makes me all the more likely to go "oh yeah? fucking watch me!"

And, okay, going to a really crowded city where I don't speak the language but can read the signage well enough unless it breaks out the kana isn't the world's greatest idea, especially some of the places I wanted to visit.  But I had fun, and ended Friday night in a huge arcade, where I felt more like myself than I had in weeks or months - standing at a fighting game, mashing buttons, trash-talking, I felt like Jordan Chang, doing things that just don't fit into Lee Yuan-wei's life very often. For good reason, at times, because when she soundly defeats someone and yells "suck it, bitch!", she's not six feet tall and bulky enough that she doesn't get messed with.

Apparently, "bitch" was all the a English the guys around me knew, and they knew even less Cantonese, so the screaming would have probably gone to a physical place I couldn't handle if Jacky hadn't rub in and broke it up and coaxed apologies out of each of us.  We called it a night, he bought me an ice cream, and then we hung out together the next day.  He'd never seen baseball, and is never seen baseball like they do it in Japan, so we did that after shopping in Akihabara and checking out a few other tourist things (the game's the same, but the festivities are amazing!).  I didn't realize I was asking for it when I mentioned that at least the stadium didn't do the "kiss cam" thing they do in Shea, but apparently I was.

We were on the same plane back on Sunday, and he was kind of surprised to see me boarding with the first class passengers, since I hadn't fit his "I'll take one of everything" stereotype of trust-fund girls when shopping.  I was kind of surprised when he met a gorgeous girl at the gate (I got through Customs a lot faster than he did, probably because I didn't buy a bunch of manga with sexy teenage heroines), because he is kind of nerdy and I thought he should be pretty psyched about getting my attention, quite honestly.  So I walked off and was surprised when he texted me the next day about not being able to find me and introduce me to his sister.

It's been three weeks since then, and while we haven't been inseparable since then - he does have to work for a living between semesters, the poor bastard - we have hung out a lot.   It's been a lot of weird feeling each other out at times, because I'm kind of a weird girl as a result of the two paths that got me here.  He doesn't see how I fit in with girls like Bingbing other than hotness and social class, and while he's not bad-looking at all, their boyfriends intimidate him a bit.

Still, we have fun, and I'm going to miss him when I had back to Boston via a somewhat scenic route.  But I do wonder about the long-term thing.  Even though this summer has given me the chance to get to know the original Yuan-wei's friends for more than the novelty of seeing pictures on screens in the flesh, and I've been able develop routines and even a bit of a rapport with Chen-ai (I get the impression she was closer to her dad than her mother), I do still feel more Chinese-American than Chinese, still, and while I certainly don't need anyone to tell me how much can change in two years, I feel a little dishonest forming new attachments here, no matter how good they feel.

-Jordan/Yuan-wei

Jordan/"Missy" Yuan-wei: Play-acting Part II : There

It's amazing how quickly the memory of long school breaks goes. It hasn't been that long since my first college graduation, but looking at the school calendar and seeing three whole weeks between the end of fall term and the start of spring term kind of blew my mind. I mean, sure, it's not all that time without any responsibilities for a lot of folks at school - they've got jobs and the like - but it still seems like an absurdly long amount of unscheduled time.

Of course, it wasn't completely mine. Even if I wasn't a little prepared for a change of scenery after that play and finals, it was probably past time to really get to know "my" family and friends. The only ones who really made an impression on me back in August and September were my mother Chen-ai and grandmother Yu-ling, with everything else kind of a jet-lagged blur.

This time would be different, sort of like meeting people that one has become friends with online in person for the first time. It was literally that in a lot of cases for me, or very close to it, considering how many words I might have exchanged with people at the birthday party. I've been keeping up with most of Yuan-wei's old friends on-line and spent a lot of time digging deep into their online histories in my last week at Boston University before break - it was actually kind of a good way to take a break from studying for a certain subject but not totally putting my brain into another gear - and felt pretty good about it.

And with reason! Without "must get to party right fucking now!" going on, and just being generally more relaxed in this less-unfamiliar skin, I was able to panic less and just deal with situations at my own speed. It was still weird shifting into Cantonese-mode - binge-watching John Woo movies on the flights only helped so much - but I wasn't a complete deer in the headlights. I'm doing better with Mandarin, too - weekly classes and new movies from Beijing playing in Boston have helped.

I could sort of feel how it had grown easier as certain parts of the trip repeated - get off the plane, not strain so much listening to announcements, smile and maybe even flirt a little going through immigration, recognize the driver and engage in more authentic small talk on the way "home". There's something really assuring about the second time through; "they're gonna catch me" is still in the back of your head, but you can tell that voice to shut up, because the Inn doesn't work that way.

The fancy parts of the city looked fucking amazing as I rode by; though there are a fair number of foreigners and Christians there, Christmas blends into winter solstice celebrations and nobody gets too worked up about religious authenticity or whether things are too commercial, so decorations can be ridiculous and ostentatious and nobody cares. "My" family home had a monster-sized tree, and it was decorated with the careful balance and symmetry that says someone was hired to do it, but, hey, it's not like I need to be worried about some lost family tradition.

Chen-ai seemed a bit warmer this time around, although it's still kind of a weird relationship, maybe. Only having a brother, I don't know what sort of things mothers and daughters do together, but she seemed more curious about my life in America than anything, asking if I'd met any nice boys, being kind of teasingly naughty about how attractive they were. Maybe I should have been grossed out, but I wasn't, at least no more than when when I thought about how much I enjoyed being on the receiving end these days.

Not that I really get attracted to guys yet - I met one of the original Yuan-wei's high school boyfriends, and I liked the guy for hanging out with, but his twin sister was the one where my brain said ''that's attractive", though not with the "I want to fuck her" kick to it. which is good, because Bingbing is one of the best friends I inherited, and I'm guessing she wouldn't be down for that.

I wound up spending a lot of time with Chen Bingbing, both because she thinks we've been besties since the age of six and because she is transferring to an American college for this semester and wanted to practice her English. It's really good - she and Yuan-wei, along with the other friends I spent time hanging out with, went to English-language schools, although their good English isn't my good English.

We partied a lot - Bingbing seemed kind of horrified to hear that most places in America have a minimum drinking age of 21, so we kind of made up for that in advance. I highly recommend a weekend in Macau at one of the big hotel/casino luxury suites if you're ever young, Chinese, and of means.

That would have been a great New Year's Eve, but I felt a bit weird about partying big that night. We'd had a ceremony to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the death of Lee Siu-wong, Chen-ai's husband, who I guess would be my biological father now, the previous night, and it would have been weird to go nuts the next day.

That memorial was a bit strange, one of the times I really tried to act outside of school stuff. I mostly try to just be myself in day-to-day life, because even if I'm not much like the original Yuan-wei in certain respects, folks are going to have to get used to the new me because I'm not going to spend the rest of my life pretending to like things I don't or shit like that. This, though, was really specific and unavoidable, and as much as I don't really miss "Daddy", I don't think I'm quite such a jackass to disrupt things by acting that way.

So I tried to do what they teach in class, reaching into myself for something that brings out the same kind of feelings. I don't know whether I'd say it was hard or easy, because I spend enough time trying not to think about how I'm not likely to see my own Dad again except by some sort of co-incidence where he won't fucking know who I am that it takes a bit of effort to let that out, even without considering how much it's going to hurt. I guess I did all right - I was crying as I lit the joss-sticks and bowed toward Siu-Wong's picture - but it did make me question the idea of making a living doing this, even if the movie-star part looks awesome.

And then... well, fuck, it's why I took a break from writing this for a bit.

It was a few days later. I had stayed the night at one of Yuan-wei's high- school boy-friends' when I got a call asking me to come down to the police station. I had no idea what to expect - had Chen-ai been pulled over or had I inherited parking tickets of some kind? - until they took me to see a detective named Yee who made a little small-talk and then showed me a video.

It was taken on a phone - I've apparently been taking enough film & television classes that the vertical aspect ratio was the first thing that bothered me - and it showed the original Yuan-wei (or me, as far as the cops were concerned) going into some sort of sweet shop and telling the other person (the voice was distorted enough that I couldn't tell if it was male or female) all about the sort of candies and stuff they had in America that this store imported. At first, it was just weird - I kind of felt like a guy again, watching some girl who would never actually talk to me be knowingly cute in a YouTube video, and I kept having to remind myself that I shouldn't feel angry or turned on because I could do all that now.

Until she got to the Fluff.

Marshmallow Fluff is a pretty solidly northeastern thing. I think. It's what it sounds like, a gooey marshmallow paste that you can spread on bread. The Yuan-Wei in the video was talking about how one of her local classmates had dragged her to Somerville's ''Fluff Festival" in the fall, and the most popular use of the stuff was the "Fluffernutter", a dead simple sandwich of Fluff and peanut butter on white bread. She was saying that it's the most bland-but-too-sweet and thus the most American thing you can imagine - "but so good!"

Then the off-screen voice said that was too bad, because it meant I couldn't have one in the house because of my dad, and "I" joked that at least he would die happy. Then the Yuan-wei on the screen bought a jar of the stuff and some Reese's Cups which she said she would have to finish before she got home, and it was the end of the video.

I didn't really need Inspector Yee to do the "obviously, you knew that your father had a severe peanut allergy" exposition straight out of a fucking episode of Law & Order to see what was coming. And let me tell you, I didn't need to draw on any other sort of scary experience to be terrified.

"Inspector Yee, I would never-" I actually found myself stumbling for the right Cantonese words for what I would never do, but he seemed to be able to infer it.

"Not even by accident, just forgetting something was in your purse?"

I yelled "no!", but then something started rolling around in my brain. What if this was the wrong answer, and Yee was asking the question just so that I'd trip up?  Cops do that, right? What if anything I said contradicted anything else they had learned, or even what Yuan-wei had said during any original investigation of Siu-wong's death?

So I went on the offensive. "Who sent you this?"

"Don't you remember?"

I was able to think quick. "No! I hung out with a lot of folks after coming back from my first semester abroad last year, and probably showed weird American things to most of them!"

I guess you could say I successfully sold the performance, because Inspector Yee did back off a bit. I pressed a little, saying that the only reason that somebody would send them this is because they wanted to hurt me, and I deserve to know who is trying to stab me in the back.

The law doesn't exactly look at it this way, of course, and even though the family I've become a part of is pretty well-off, it doesn't appear that we're quite so connected that the cops' first thought when things look suspicious is to try to sweep it under the rug.

Or maybe it is and I just haven't learned how to pick up signals that a public official is fishing for a bribe like I can recognize a guy being interested in me.  There's a fucking one-percenter problem.

It put a bit of a pall over the rest of the trip, as you might imagine, as my brain went into overdrive looking for any sign that the people I hung out with didn't really like "me". I felt a little relief when I saw Bingbing hold her phone horizontally when taking a video a few days later, but worried about Chin when she didn't. It's a really stupid thing to try to parse, but there you go.

I'm not even really sure I should be writing about this now.  I denied having anything to do with Siu-wong's death, but I can't help but wonder - what if that's not the case?  What if the original Yuan-wei made a mistake and that's why she's so willing to live out a life that is such a step down from all this?  I may just be speculating about this, but if Inspector Yee or someone else at the HKPD stumbles over me saying that, it reads like some sort of confession from a girl who has had some sort of fucking breakdown.

Still...  The video.  I went to The Changeling a few days ago and mentioned this to Ashlyn, and she told me about her own stalker/"influencer", the one they called Pygmalion.  She says it's been a few years since she felt she could chalk up anything happening in her life to that, but that he isn't the only one out there who likes fucking with us.  So this is just a question - does it sound like anybody any of you know, or do I just have some sort of enemy on the other side of the world?

- Jordo / Yuan-wei

Jordan/Missy: Happy Birthday, Yuan-wei

Posting from mid-air again. As much as the real Yuan-wei says she's in love and wants to stay Ronan's wife Sandra forever, I strongly suspect that she'll be trying to get me to return her life to her the first time she has to fly coach, especially if it's something like going from Boston to Hong Kong and back again. Between the wi-fi and the comfy seats that turn into beds and the food that doesn't suck, First Class is way better than romance.

It's not my first trip to Hong Kong; my family took a summer vacation there when I was fourteen, seeing some of my parents' older relatives, cousins, and family friends, and also trying to get me and Max a chance to experience it before it was completely digested by the People's Republic.  That's part of the reason that I know Cantonese a lot better than some of my Chinese-American neighbors; in addition to wanting to be able to talk with my Grandmother, I always thought about coming back, although this is not the way I imagined that.

(It made an even bigger impression any little brother, who really latched onto a Chinese identity around that time, and one that's really HK-specific. He has extremely strong opinions on how people from Beijing are buying the city up and pricing its longtime residents out, along with student protests and other points of contention like that.)

It's not easy for a New Yorker to feel overwhelmed, but the airport did so, at least a bit. I speak Cantonese, but as a second language, and it would take a minute for some of the announcements to register in my head. Some got repeated in English, and there was plenty of signage with English on it, but this was my first test of being Yuan-Wei and belonging in this place, and I hated feeling like a tourist. There were a few moments when I would hear an announcement repeat or someone speak and think my languages skills were even more shit than I'd feared, until I realized that there was a lot more Mandarin being spoken than the time I came here as a kid.

(I should probably look into classes for that. I can order food in Mandarin, and know some other words, but the original Yuan-Wei was trilingual, because anyone her social class with her ambitions needs to knew the language of the Mainland, and it would be weird if I didn't.)

I tried to summon confidence while going through Customs, and I think I did okay. I kind of wish I'd been a little more outgoing as Deirdre, just so I had practice at being the smiling, cheerful, pretty girl that guys just wave through, but I settled for answering questions quickly enough that I didn't come across as a terrorist trying to maintain a cover identity. I'm not a terrorist, after all.

I'd gotten a message that ''the driver" would be waiting for me - yeah, I've been gifted a life where the family has a staff; what the fuck is up with that? - and since I only had my carry-on (the same suitcase Yuan-wei left back in Maine), I got to the pickup area pretty quickly but felt like I spaced for five minutes trying to remember the symbols for my name.  I kept looking for "money" rather than "peace".  I may not be anxious to be called "Missy" (is it weird to change your Western name? I mean, Jordan's kind of androgynous), but I would have spotted that.

The car was nice and not too fancy, and the driver was a good chance to practice my Cantonese and get some hint of what was coming up.  He was either glad I had come home for a few days, or very polite, saying he understood how hard it must have been to come back since "my" father's death in the winter.  I didn't recall the original Yuan-wei saying they had been particularly close, but she gave me the information so I could pass as opposed to spilling her guts to me.

I let him take my bag when we got to the house, because that thing was pretty damn big and I had no idea where Yuan-wei's room was.  Of course, I didn't figure on being stopped by "mother", Chen-ai, on the way in.

We hugged, and I said I was sorry for not coming earlier, but it was easier to stay in America for a number of reasons. She shrugged it off, although she made a crack about being surprised I wasn't insisting on speaking English after being there so long.  Then she looked at my outfit - a t-shirt and some ripped jeans - and said it was a good thing that there was a dress laid out in my room.

There was at that, although it was kind of sexier than I'd expect a mother to choose for her daughter to wear to her twentieth birthday party. But looking at some of the photos scattered around the room, if looked like Yuan-wei and her mother were no strangers to fancy occasions - there was my new face with Chow Yun-fat, Josie Ho, and Jackie Chan, and while Yuan-Wei was generally not dressed as sexily as her still-got-it mother, she wasn't wearing bows in her hair or shapeless bags, either.

I looked the door before stripping down, and spent a little time looking at my naked self in the mirror. As much as I was pretty sure that I was going to be into guys as Yuan-wei - even if I never acted on it, that's what set the purely biological alarms in my body, and there was no reason to expect that had changed - I still had a lot of connections in my head between seeing a hot girl and getting turned on, though, and shit, the girl in the mirror is fucking hot. This was the first time I'd seen all of the new me; I'd sort of changed clothes hit by bit at the Inn and in airport restrooms. It kind of hit me, looking at my body and the photos, that Yuan-Wei's movie-star dreams might actually be realistic.

It meant dressing the part, though, so I went for the dress. Picking it up, I could feel that there was boob support built in, so I didn't need a bra. Weird how that made me nervous, after resisting them so much as Deirdre, but these C-cups didn't leave a whole lot of room for doubt. The dress did help, although I don't know that I'd want to wear things like that for more than special occasions.

That doesn't take into account zipping the damn thing up, either! I managed, but I did briefly wonder if the Lee family was wealthy enough to have chambermaids who could come in and zip me up. Heck, maybe asking would be in character for Lee Yuan-Wei, but there was only so far that Jordan Chang from Queens was willing to go.

I looked good in the mirror, but I also knew that the girl in that dress wouldn't be seen in public without makeup. It made me wish Annette/Benjamin was there in my place, even if there were no way he'd get through the airport. Or at least there to help, but then folks would think he was my boyfriend, and we apparently aren't doing that.

Fortunately, there are demonstration videos for this sort of thing on YouTube, and Hong Kong isn't completely behind the Great Firewall of China yet. It went slowly, and I'll have to learn to do it myself eventually, but then all that was the shoes.

Fuck high heels.

They were the only thing in Yuan-Wei's closet that went with the dress (in that they were both red), so I crammed my feet into them and started pacing the length of the room. Pro tip: Don't pay too much attention to your ass swaying the first time you walk in three-plus inch heels or you'll fall on it.  Ex-guys should probably pay some attention because literally putting one foot in front of the other is not natural for us and you look like a total goon otherwise, but it's a tough balance to find in the half hour before you're told guests are arriving and realize, oh fuck, I've got to go down stairs in these fucking things.

Since I'm typing this, I didn't break my neck, and I wound up mostly enjoying the party.  I was never a party person before, but they are a lot more fun when people are constantly coming up to you, telling you that you look amazing, saying they're so jealous of you getting to go to college abroad, with the guys trying to figure out if you're single and the girls asking about the clothes.

After a while, I could tell which ones were probably Yuan-wei's closer friends, because they had specific questions about "Benny", classes, and other stuff, because they'd kept in touch via messaging and Weibo and the like.  I said things had gotten complicated with Benny because of his ex, which was kind of true, and that I was still in the film and theater program at BU, which was true enough from the schedule of classes in my new bu.edu mailbox.  A lot of them wanted to hear me speak English, and were amazed at my accent.  No way to tell them I was cheating there, or any way to ask how my Cantonese sounded.  I mean, it's got to sound weird, and it makes me wonder if this family is so rich/powerful that nobody's going to say so for fear of upsetting us.

I'm glad it was a big party, even if some of the folks there were clearly seeing this as an opportunity to suck up to Chen-ai.  I got to meet a lot of people who were a part of my new life in some capacity, but didn't have to get too in-depth with any of them.

And the cake...  My god, that was the best chocolate cake I have ever had in my life.  I am going to hate not having that sort of thing more often, but having seen this body naked, I don't want to fuck it up.

Anyway, it went pretty late into the night and I didn't feel like leaving, which is kind of a first for me.  It feels really weird to say this early on, but I think being Yuan-wei is going to be fun.  I don't really want to say I've traded up, and I know that the whole Trading Post Inn deal is intrinsically horrifying, but the perks are pretty damn great.

-Jordan/Missy/Yuan-wei