Trip

By Mindy Hung

Charles P. Salt, pedophile, would like to settle down with a sweet girl. But North American laws are unsympathetic to a man of his tastes.

So he's off to South East Asia, where he falls for a young prostitute. But his bliss is dampened by the constant fear of discovery.

TRIP is a mordant comedy about sex tourism in South East Asia.

A Lolita for the global economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Outpost19
• Release date: May 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937402303

Book preview

TRIP

Mindy Hung

Copyright 2012

by Mindy Hung

All rights reserved.

Published by

Outpost19 | San Francisco

outpost19.com

Hung, Mindy, 1974—

Trip, a novel / Mindy Hung.

ISBN 9781937402310 (ebook)

ISBN 9781937402310 (print)

For their encouragement and advice,

I am forever grateful to Martin Roper, 

Victoria Anderson, Marjorie Schulman, 

Deborah Berry, Kristin Olson,

and Brandon Paul Cohen.

And to my parents,

thanks for all the crazy stories.

Part 1

1.1

O LAX, demesne of frustrated desire and expectation. Daily, half a million await the arrival of love, departure from heartache, accidents of fate and baggage. They watch and wait. They sit and wait. They play video games and wait, and wait, and wait. If anticipation is indeed better than the goal, then bliss is American built.

I was stopped over in the airport terminal, standing in the madness of the mid nineteen-nineties. Around me, hair shone slicker than an oil spill, a watch glittered on every wrist, festive scarves bloomed over shoulders, necks, and breasts. Filled with prosperous people, the beautiful and the annoyed, it was like an enormous office party where the drinks have been watered down. I moved through the crowd, humming Sukiyaki under my breath.

The realization hit me: I, Charles P. Salt, bureaucrat, was alone, free. I had no debts, no diseases, my limbs were intact, my neuroses entertaining and my soul ready for love. No more gazing longingly into the glowing windows of family homes, watching as Biff and Betsy tucked in little Tammy. No more yearning outside hermetically sealed North American bungalows, where fathers, mothers, and children soaked in love and lamplight, like peaches in the golden juice of their lives. I was going to South East Asia. I didn’t need them. I didn’t need anyone.

I had decided to change my life. Until now, I lived in a condominium. I wore glasses and my hair was brown, brown, brown. I was tired of the little chases and flirtations, the daily grind of driving all over the city to rent tapes from perverts and slackers, staring at a tiny screen to read tiny print, excusing myself to jerk off after watching America’s Funniest Home videos, tired, tired. You know how it is. Dreaming of domestic bliss, I would go to parks and observe little children and the vigilant mothers, who regarded them with eagle eyes, lips parted ready to bray out for danger. I waited and watched, hovering under trees, tying my shoelaces over and over again. My uncle Nate used to say, There’s no harm in looking if you don’t touch. But then, my uncle had lost both arms in a plowing accident, so this much was easy for him.

One afternoon, I looked at the sky and decided that perhaps existence was getting too hard here. A five-year-old had upended me, sending me sprawling on the bike path. I’ve heard that South East Asia is heaven, I said, gazing at the lovely, wary mother who helped untangle me from my bicycle. 

I can’t go, she said, misunderstanding me completely. I’m happily married.

Of course, I said.

I offered her my hand and forgave her as she pulled me up. Even though she and all of her ilk had driven me to solitude, my enemies were so beautiful. There could be no rancor between us.

But you hate traveling, Rhona, my girlfriend, screeched when I informed her of my impending departure. When I wanted to go to the mountains, you said—you insisted—that the motels along the way were just fronts for human butchering operations—

A tad dramatic.

— and our fillings would be melted down into charm bracelets for flat-chested, middle-aged socialites who wear Mary Janes and barrettes.

I was wrong.

Charles P. Salt, when I wanted to go to Vegas, you told me we’d end up in a bathtub full of ice with our spleens removed and sold to a man named Wan He, who would hawk them as aphrodisiacs on the streets of Beijing. You didn’t want to go to Niagara Falls in summertime—

One false step and I’d fall in.

They have guard rails, she screamed, flinging her Lean Cuisine at my head. You just don’t want to die with me.

She was a perceptive, insightful woman. That’s why I stayed with her. But she was, as I said, a perceptive, insightful woman. Why she stayed with me continued to mystify.

When I got up, prepared to leave, Rhona reappeared, wearing a pink bathrobe. Her face was washed and her bangs had been brushed out of her eyes. Would you like to visit for a while? she asked, standing in the doorway. It was a last ditch attempt to keep me here, and I had to admit that my heart, if nothing else, went out to her. I don’t think so, I said, getting up from the sofa. As I stretched, bits of pasta fell from out of the creases in my sweater. Traffic is going to be a bitch, I added.

Rhona was right in one respect, at least—I hate travel. But a grand adventure was never my plan.

Every story is a journey, my high school English teacher once told us, quoting some unspecified person, which is a fine way of saying nothing about nothing, because if you think hard enough, every story is also like: drinking a bottle of tequila at a table in the middle of the night; playing poker; or, vacuuming an area rug. In fact, it’s not so hard to imagine the journey-story or story-journey being a number of other things that contain enough repetition and sudden bursts of activity. English teachers are overrated, so are tequila and poker. And voyages across bridges leading to nowhere most definitely are overrated if they can be so many things and nothing in themselves. Only the discontented need to move constantly. They need the diversions that others provide, like bank robbers, stealing pieces of a life more interesting.

Unhappy people love travel and travel makes them unhappy. They long for it, they talk about it, they save their little pennies so they can go off and buy backpacks and water bottles and money belts, and little bottles of shampoo and rail tickets and rain slickers and ugly, ugly little hats that can be washed and wrung out in the sewers of Calcutta without losing their shape, as if that were a wonderful thing.

Old people, they travel because they have nothing to else to do. They migrate to Miami, or drive around in RVs with the blessing of their children, the modern equivalent of being pushed off of an ice floe. I loathe travel, and I despise people who profess to be passionate about it, especially the ones who shuttle around from one underdeveloped country to another, stomping on rare spongy plants, which they proceed to photograph and classify. I hate the way they rub coconut-scented sunscreen on the tips of their noses and twitter on about meeting really interesting German girls. Travelers meet travelers. They talk exclusively to people with the same damn hobby. They might as well go to Star Trek conventions.

It is not a virtue to watch life from behind a camera, to move past vendors in a blur, to laugh at local custom, to drink, smoke hash, live your life at a remove simply because you can remove yourself. Motion is not depth, action, or feeling. It is what it is, and as long as you are in motion, the eating, the washing, the dying, they will mean nothing.

I do not want to be a spectator to a parade of foreign lives. I want to live mine calmly, and with ease, make it my own.

1.2

I was in the air hovering in an airplane somewhere in the Pacific when Don, the passenger seated next to me, asked for a Valium, then a moist towelette, then an aspirin. And after he’d had enough from me, he proceeded to tell me his troubles. 

Don was the latest victim of North American economic depression. He could no longer afford Prozac. He was flying to Port Tinker despite a long distrust of Asian countries. It was a last ditch attempt to gain the U.S. rights to Mr. Organizer, a wallet/alarm clock/ledger/pager/file folder, For the man who has everything, Don recited, but can’t find it.

We were flying over the lovely island port. It was my first stop on this jaunt. From the air, the isle rose, grey-green and spiky. Back in early 1997, it was so beautiful, so clean, so full of dollars, known for rosy projections, tight lifestyle laws, and favorable regulatory environments. People wanted to go there. People wanted to breed there. On the plane from Japan, fully forty businessmen sat rifling through their files, or flipping through their business cards. They all had shiny, white fingernails.

I turned to my neighbor Don, who slouched, sloppily suited. He sprawled in his seat, pulled both his hands through his hair, and let his empty coffee cup roll into the aisle. His voice, American and raspy, dragged out of his throat like a dead animal. Look at me, Don said, my mother was so proper, she wouldn’t even lick envelopes in public because she didn’t want anyone to see her tongue. Now I’m begging strangers for pharmaceuticals on foreign airlines.

Don hated Asia, the whole continent. Only desperation had prompted his return. The last time he was here, he was forced to transport a friend and colleague back in a fragrant, ebony jar. The event had left him wary of everything, especially the food, emphatically the food. He could not so much as crack open a fortune cookie now. 

Don’s reason for hating Asia stemmed from the unfortunate demise of Fred, his business partner. Fred was a father of two, a gentle soul. High of forehead and shallow of chin, in life, he looked as benign as a tumor. Don showed me pictures of better days: Fred wringing his hands while his girls attempted to pet a tiny monkey; Fred in a corner of a room, wearing a silly party hat. He was pushing a plate of birthday cake away. Chocolate allergy, Don explained. Fred’s face shone, patient and resigned.

According to the Japanese medical examiner, Fred suffered from anemia, eczema, six broken ribs, a punctured lung, bruising along his breastbone, and a broken nose. A long, nasty interior burn stretched from his mouth down the whole length of his esophagus. But what had really killed him, however, was the enormous heart attack Fred had sustained shortly after freaking out.

An aside: has it ever struck you that all of the aspects emblematic of North American life need to be undertaken with rubber gloves? Lawn care, dishwashing, copulation, fiber-evidence gathering. I have heard that the millionaire Donald Trump refuses to shake hands with anyone now because he is afraid of contamination. Perhaps he should consider donning a thin layer of latex so that his meaty hands can remain insulated from the swarming germs of sycophants. He will seem cool and smooth to the touch. 

Don continued with his story. Here Fred was in Japan, faced with shabu-shabu, a plate of dripping raw beef and fish and chicken, and fish balls (whatever those were) piled high in front of him. To his left sat enormous fronds of napa cabbage, to his right, a puff of brown mushrooms. 

Until now, he had admired Japan, the silent glide of the subway, the sprightly little packages of pencils and erasers that he bought for his children, the efficient umbrella locks arranged outside the stores. He even liked the food he had eaten, compact little packages of confections, boxes within boxes wrapped in light paper, the cake itself just a frame, a spongy layer hiding the real prize, one lick of strawberry jam, a shiny gem. Don, on the other hand, couldn’t stand it. He had to tear through five packages of potato chips to satisfy his salt craving, and 12,500 yen later, he was still dabbing at the insides of tiny bags and sucking his fingers in order to make the taste last. So Don groused about Asia, the whole continent, and Fred just tittered.

Shabu-shabu, however, was a different story. Their host, Mr. Morimoto (The king of the miniature organizer market in Japan, Don said, spreading his hands wide, the king.) explained that they should each grasp a piece of meat with their chopsticks—the very chopsticks they’d be eating with, and swish them in the communal pot. Then they should take the beef out, drop it in the raw egg mixture in their bowls, and then eat it, all with the same wooden cutlery.

Everything that Fred ever feared about Japanese cuisine seemed worse than he imagined. He knew about the enormous slabs of raw tuna, quivering obscenely on pieces of barbarian wood. He understood that plain rice could come cunningly vinegared, a small edge of sweetness tonguing his unsuspecting palate. He had even heard of the seaweed, binding together ingredients in dark, rubbery silence. Fred was prepared for sushi. He knew that he could gather up the courage and moral indignation to politely refuse this horror; it was like the way he approached swingers, or Abstract Expressionism. But Morimoto offered no uncooked seafood. Instead, Fred was faced with this enormous dripping pile of red, raw flesh that he was supposed to cook himself. He was not even supplied with a pair of stainless steel tongs and a pathogen obliterating fire, but instead was told to use a pair of germ-sucking wooden chopsticks, to swirl and twirl the meat in a whirlpool of soup and drop it into a bowl teeming with raw egg, soy sauce, E. coli, rotavirus, Staphylococcus enteritis, and/or Salmonella. There was nothing he could do except lick his dry lips and blink one frightened eye at a time. When Morimoto plucked a fish ball from the pot and waved it at Fred with a friendly look of offer, making guttural eat-eat noises, Fred hurriedly picked up the nearest piece of meat, threw it in the pot, and downed it in one swift motion, avoiding the egg cesspool altogether.

The beef burned Fred’s tongue with its hot juices, merrily searing the entire inner length of his body from throat to stomach. He grabbed his throat and fainted. At 7:38 pm, Fred was dead, although the efforts of his partner and the businessmen in Shabu-Happy Pasture to keep him alive proved unrelenting. One by one, the American, the German, and the Japanese men attempted to give him the Heimlich maneuver, each convinced that the person preceding him was not capable of giving Fred a good sock in the stomach.

To their ardent embraces, Fred proved unresponsive (his coyness was something to which they were accustomed) but nevertheless, they persisted even though the heart in him had died. With the assiduous attention of lovers, they thumped on his chest and called his name. All the while, Fred grew limper and limper. It was not until all the businessmen in the restaurant had tried that it occurred to them to call a doctor.

Don told me that afterward he could do nothing. Mr. Morimoto bustled around, taking care of flights and papers, talking to the police. Don downed beer after beer, his eyes wide and dry. In this cruel world, he had been so flummoxed he had even forgotten to exercise that last, most American of rights, to file suit for emotional distress.

1.3

By the time we landed in the island city of Port Tinker, Don was too drugged up to care about anything. I left him behind somewhere in customs, where an officer had begun to paw through his belongings. Don looked serene as the agent scooped handful after handful of crumpled gum wrappers out from his carry-on. It looked like the white-gloved official was performing a low-rent magic trick. The wrappers said, Dentyne gum, Dentyne gum in faint green letters and cascaded to the floor like popping corn. Meanwhile, my old college friend Franz Wunderlich was waiting for me outside the baggage claim at Chong Xing International Airport. Chong Xing is also known as the Aerohub, although why anyone would want to call it that is beyond me—makes it sound like a tire for a four-wheel drive vehicle.

Wunderlich hadn’t changed. His body went straight up and down on all sides, and his hair, stiff and severe, was still mostly black. He spotted me right away. Charles P. Salt, he said, in his accented English, you are late.

By about twenty years! I cried. Hello, hello! Long time no see.

I held out my arms for a hug. Wunderlich looked at me askance. He took a step back and reached for my luggage.

Lichee has been circling the airport for thirty-seven minutes, he said, trundling me past other travelers.

I hope she’s not too dizzy.

A pained looked crossed Wunderlich’s face. He increased his pace.

Franz Wunderlich was one of the few people with whom I kept up a sort of sporadic correspondence. I loved most of all receiving the stamps, postmarks on the fantastically thin paper of tropical countries, the way the fibres whispered when torn by eager fingers. Wunderlich had lived in Port Tinker for the last twenty years, running a legitimately acquired books and manuscripts business, and avoiding taxes on two continents. I feel at home with the insomniacs, expatriates, and psychopaths, he wrote once. I kept the envelopes and threw away his letters. Most of them were full of abuse and dirty pictures.

When he was younger, Wunderlich had wide brown eyes, with such dilated pupils that passing women fell into those deep dark pools and convinced themselves that they were in love. He was, however, as gay as an Easter bonnet. He lived with his wife Lichee in an apartment building near the eastern section of the island-city-authoritarian-economically-enlightened state of Port Tinker. Judging by the pictures, the isle seemed to have been planted in the ocean brand new; it was set out like a circuit board, gridded and green, blinking with mysterious signals. I had always planned to come see him. I pictured