Author Bio

L. ACADIA

RAMBUTAN

I relate to the rambutan, red hair frizzing unappetizingly in the humid Taipei heat. I added the adjective ‘red’ a few days after writing that sentence, having forgotten until then that I have red hair, that I am a foreigner. It isn’t that I don’t see myself regularly, I just try not to process what is reflected in mirrors or tinted windows. What I see seems more likely to be an advertisement for glasses or insurance, not a person. Better to ignore the mechanics of the mirror displaying a shockingly foreign-looking face, with animalistically freckled skin, obscenely pink lips, and eyes so green they look like those vanity contact lenses with artificial streaks of unnatural color. 
      A redheaded friend had commented on how easily ‘we gingers’ burn in the subtropical sun: wouldn’t it be rad to be impervious to star fire? We’re playing a game of choosing worlds, where he’s been offered fire-resistance and the ability to talk to animals, at the price of always wearing underwear four sizes too small. The ensuing debate over whether we can say that fire rather than UV rays cause sunburns sent me back to my first and only surfing lesson. We arrived at 外澳 Wai’ao beach at 9AM, slathered in the reef-safe zinc sunscreen I order  practically by the gallon from California, with full-sleeved rash guards and long board shorts. After drills on the sand, teaching technique and humility, we spent a magical two hours in the waves feeling the point of when to pop up and looking for fish while waiting for the right swells. I must’ve been saying that this was the sport for me and I couldn’t wait to go out again after lunch when I felt a sting while slipping on my flip-flop, but ignored it in post-surf exhilaration. We had walked half way back to the house where we were staying, on the other side of 頭城 Toucheng, when I crumpled in nausea and whole-body ache. My partner shrieked at the sight of my feet, burned purple. I can picture her waving down a car, a last sharp image before the blur of days in bed with sunstroke migraine, with the scent-track of aloe vera freshly cracked off the large succulent in the garden below, which I could’ve seen out the window if I could make it out of bed. 
      After the world-building game, my partner whispered that she hadn’t known the friend’s hair was red, as though it were knowledge unattainable from visual input. His hair has the same auburn hue as mine, sparking a déjà vu replaying of our recurrent argument over my hair, though with a new coclusion: no one here will presume I have a redhead’s temper or libido, because they don’t know I’m a ginger. Writing this, I doubted my cultural stereotype memory. Googling yielded sites for redheads that affirmed we are cleverly argumentative and sexy, while pages for the non-ginger public warned of violence and aggression. Those for scientists indicated that we do have higher adrenaline levels leading to a low fight threshold. I worry it’s the wrong stereotype my neighbors imagine when they see me. A Taiwanese colleague, attempting to excuse his peers, and assuming I was cis, explained that most women in the porn here are white, conditioning men’s associations with white femininity.
      I may as well be a rambutan in Carrefour, standing in the fruit aisle, being assessed by the 阿公 Agong (grandpa), his mask hanging down below his nose. He’s evaluating my color but also shape; I see how his eyes wander without the subtlety he reserved for the teenager who just moved to the dairy section. He waited for her to turn her back before gawking at her legs that from my vantage appeared unremarkable in pajama pants hanging loose over thick rubber sandals. From his perspective, am I monstrously shaped? Gearing up for summer, I shopped for one-piece swimsuits yesterday, giving up in humiliation when the sizing chart suggested size XXL for my 58 kg 168cm body. I’m writing this from the bathroom, where I came to check my swimsuit drying in the shower. It’s bad enough to have to wear a swimsuit that advertises my assigned gender from a distance, even though most swimmers in speedos and board shorts have larger breasts than I do. The tag has faded in the five years since I bought it in the US, at the same weight and height (127 pounds and 5’6” there), but I can still make out the XXS. Yet the Agong is still staring at my humungous body almost too bloated for bathing suits. Does he presume I comprehend the language of stares as poorly as the language he speaks? One of the first Mandarin phrases I learned, living in Shanghai, picked up quickly for its unfortunate utility in China, was 你看怎麼看?看你媽的頭! (What’re you looking at? Look at your mom’s head!) I’ve yet to use it in Taiwan, too apologetic of my oddness. And I don’t want to discourage children: when they stare, I wave and tell myself I’m expanding their schema of what a human looks like. 
      This is what a 30-something white human looks like. I may look dry and wispy on the outside relative to your longan-like smoothness, but believe it or not, I was wrinklier before being submerged in Taiwan’s humid weather. I can see the lines around my eyes and mouth filling out in this moisture. I even celebrated the island’s anti-aging climate until the afternoon a man who was trying to sell us his apartment asked whether I was my partner’s mother. She is four years older than I, and 漢 Han (the ethnic majority in China). He was neither old nor blind (nor a good salesman), and it was certainly light enough to see on that sunny day.
      After a dozen painful mistakes, I added sunglasses to my checklist of items never to leave the house without: sunscreen, mask, keys, cash, MRT card, book, rain jacket, sunglasses. Apartments are so dark—small, bar-covered, film-tinted, awning-protected, north-facing windows trick me into thinking it’s always dusk—I never expect the overcast daylight as bright as LA sun ricocheting off millions of car windows and acres of asphalt. One clear winter afternoon in 臺中 Taichung, a Polish exchange student and I bonded over our alien physiology, pale eyes seeing Taiwanese screens and skies as too glaring, at odds with our cultural aesthetic desiring vitamin D and wind swiping our skin. (Can I use the wonderfully onomatopoetic 刷 shuā to describe that action, I wonder.) I speculated while searching for apartments that the architecture exacerbated the suicide rate, blocking out the serotonin-boosting sun.
      The Mandarin word for rambutan, 紅毛丹, references the fruit’s red hair, while in the fruit’s native land of Malaysia the provenance of that red hair is a bit more specific. A Malaysian woman told me they call rambutan a name meaning ‘Dutch heads.’ I’m also a Western imperialist, come to exploit an opportunity, come to indoctrinate Taiwan’s youth in European ideology like syllogism and critical theory. More sinisterly, I’m corrupting the toddlers, stretching their schema to include the odd physiology I see reflected in the Carrefour windows, and it’s not an ad for sunscreen.