From Jenny to Mei

I hope you enjoy this chapter but you might wish to start from chapter 1.

Please remember to vote, comment and send me some feedback.

Thanks 'John' & 'Jim' for the editing!

*****

Philip had a script running on his computer that identified a change in pixels from her camera and beeped if the image altered. So when Mei Chun entered her bedroom, he was alerted by his computer. He got a drink, opened a window to watch her and opened her TextEdit program.

"Good evening, Mei. Have fun with Markéta?"

She was so happy to see the writing appear. Being without him felt like she was missing an organ, something big and important, like half a lung or a liver.

"Yeah, I'm afraid you'll have to get accustomed to living in the poor house."

"How are the clothes?"

"Beautiful, expensive, very high-quality."

"Good, just like you."

"I am turning out to be very expensive, not sure about the quality."

"You're worth it. I'm counting the dividends already."

"I don't feel worth it. Anyway, you could have my dividends for free."

"That's sweet, but I have to earn my rewards just like you do."

"Why don't you just go out and get a ready-made girl? One who is prettier and perfect? One who isn't a slut?"

"What fun would that be? And I like fucking up your life. Anyway, perfection is a cruel illusion. It's always promise and never delivery. Much better to be a sculptor with good stone than shopping around and buying a fake. And you are worth it, Mei Chun - you are worth everything I have. I see what you can't see. You must trust me on this."

"Do you forgive me? I still feel like such a horrible backstabbing slut."

"I forgive you. And I don't want you to feel horrible. In fact, I want to talk to you about that."

"Do I have more punishment to endure? Being in this lonely apartment without you is bad enough. I've never loved anyone before, Philip. I cried myself to sleep last night."

"I know."

"How could you know?"

"I'll tell you later, but first, let's talk about Karla and last night."

"Sure." Then she backspaced and wrote, "Sure, sir."

":)" he typed, then, "I want you to do it again."

"What?!?!"

"No questions. Just listen. You will go in tomorrow evening as though nothing happened. As though you didn't tell me. And you will either let her seduce you again or you will initiate it. Do you understand?"

"Sure," she said out loud and typed, "So let me get this straight. You want me to go back to the gym, do another workout, go in for a massage and let Karla lick my pussy and make me come?"

"Yes, exactly, you are to get her hooked on you. Desperate for you and I give you permission to come."

He laughed as he saw her head turn like a dog watching a kitten roll on the floor inside a paper bag, astounded and intrigued.

"I'm confused, but I won't ask any questions."

"Good. Until further notice you will get a massage with Karla every time you visit the gym and you will make love with her, make her come and orgasm yourself."

She couldn't believe what she was reading. Not only did she get away with a very mild punishment, although being away from him was terrible. She had just gotten a shopping spree the Hilton sisters would envy and now he was telling her to betray him again.

"Are you sure, no questions?"

"Don't even ask if you can ask."

"Can I say how astounded I am, master?"

"Ok, you're astounded. It's on the record. Remember, honey, don't call me that unless there is something of mine inside you."

"Oh dang. But you're across the bay!"

"Do you still have my remote controlled toy?"

"Yeah, somewhere."

"That's mine, you know."

"Oh yeah, right. Just a sec!"

He saw her get up, leave the room, turn one way out the door of her bedroom, stop and turn the other way toward the bathroom.

She found it on top of the toilet and came rushing back in. She sat in the chair, leaned back, pressed it against her lips and the bit of moisture that was growing inside her helped to ease it in. He wondered if she would act differently if she knew he could see her and figured she'd just play it up a bit. This was much better.

"Master, master, master your inside of me now," she typed. Her girlish enthusiasm made him grin.

"It's you're, not your.'"

"Whatever!"

"Good, I give you permission to come this evening. Now remember: be a good girl to everyone you meet, and especially to Karla. And not a word that I've given you my permission."

"Right. When do I get to see you again?"

"Be patient!" was all he wrote and the now dreaded blue flash appeared and he was gone.

Her heart sunk like iron in a bathtub.

'What the hell's going on? Maybe he has a fetish.' Watching women have sex, or just the idea, turned him on? Maybe he was letting her get all this out before they settled in together. Then she had an insight. 'Maybe this isn't about sex at all.'

She reviewed a bit. The things he had done for her: the gym membership, the clothes and pearls, but most of all, the love he found inside her which kept her on a mad carousel of emotions as disorienting as a gallon of cheap wine. In a week she'd been through it all: humiliation, self-loathing, physical pain and mental anguish. She'd cried six years worth of tears, reassessed her life and found that it sucked. She'd fallen in love so quickly, so profoundly that it flattened the breath out of her. She reached new heights of sexual ecstasy with a man, felt the attraction for a woman - no, two women - and thoroughly enjoyed the novel sensations of lesbian sex. She finally discovered that love was more than it promised.

For a few moments, as the vibrator mindlessly stroked her g-spot, she meditated on her man, her master. She didn't fantasize about sex, but thought instead of what he meant to her and how he made her feel. It was all those things guys had been trying to tell her all along. From that first guy, Billy somebody, and the teacher she seduced and, well, frankly, blackmailed. All the guys in and after college, they had all been trying to tell her, but she didn't have ears to hear. It was what she'd wanted her father to tell her: how thinking of her made him live in joy. How life without her was unthinkable. But he never said those things. He just left, without a kiss or so much as a wave of his hand. That's when she realized where the source of her handicap lay.

It was like an unexpected midnight knock at the door and was so obvious as to be cliché. It made her feel so stupid not to have figured it out before, but her mind must have long ago created some mental block to protect her. It shunted his memory in a locker where lost and dead things go, only infrequently and indistinctly recalled.

She turned off the vibrator and removed it, remarking how wet she'd gotten thinking of Philip this way. She put it next to the keyboard and crawled into bed wishing she had her comforting leather collar to keep her warm and not the cold pearls.

She returned to thoughts of her father. As much as she had tried in the past to hate him, she could not. She just didn't have enough information. Her mother never spoke of him and photos were scarce. There was one, folded and faded, of them both at a park somewhere in San Francisco. She was on a swing and he was behind her, smoking a cigarette, looking off camera. She was looking at her mother, who held the camera, and smiling wide, full of joy. It was probably the last photo of them together.

'Where was he? Where had he been when she was young?' She thought back and felt his missing presence at the critical moments in her life. She couldn't think of any in particular then realized that they were all critical moments. Each argument with her mother, each night at the dinner table, each bath before bed, there was only one voice, one cheek to kiss. One set of arms to enfold her and tell her there were no monsters living in the park.

'How,' she wondered, 'how does a man leave his child? How does his own life become so important to him that he knowingly destroys the life of his daughter and wife?'

She reached for her phone and called her mother.

"Mama?"

"Jenny, honey. How are you?"

"I'm ok, mama. Are you well?" It had been a couple of weeks since their last conversation.

"I'm ok. You sound upset."

"There's been a lot going on. Listen mama, why did daddy leave us?"

"Oh Jenny, darling. We've been through this before."

"Mama, call me Mei Chun please. I want to go back to my real name and let's speak in Chinese, ok?"

Her mother replied in Chinese, "Ok, but I want to know what's gotten into you!"

"Ok, we'll have dinner soon and talk about it, but please tell me. Now that I'm a woman you can tell me the truth. Tell me like a woman, not like your little girl."

She heard something in her daughter that had never been present before. Something indeed had happened to her. Perhaps something tragic that caused her to step over the line from girl to woman. "Ok, Mei honey. It feels so strange to call you that again, but I always loved your name. I miss you."

"I miss you too, mama."

"What can I say? Your father was a big man in town, the son of an important official in Zeng Jia Wan, the county seat for Shayang county. Anyway, you don't want to get a lesson on central China, but for a small town, one of the tens of thousands of small towns in China, he was a big man. When he started to woo me, I was young. I thought he loved me and I thought I loved him. We were married in a big ceremony and there were so many people. Then we went to Shanghai for our honeymoon and stayed in a nice hotel. It was like a dream and you were conceived there, I'm sure. And we had all the love a new couple has. We were really happy and spoke about moving there and living the life of rich town folks, but honeymoons have to end. We had to return and our dreams came to nothing as dreams do. I've told you this before, honey."

"Not to a woman. You told me when I was too young to understand the truth."

"Well... then things started to get worse, almost right away. He began to resent that his freedom was gone, that he couldn't be the cock in the farmyard. As the son of an important man, he was used to chatting up girls and I wasn't his first, so having to stay at home and care for me when I was pregnant was difficult for him. He tried," she sighed into the phone, "I think he tried, but some nights he made some excuse and came home drunk and I could smell the women on him. He didn't really have a job, just ran errands for his father, but his father's influence was declining because of age and probably politics. I think the wedding was the last opportunity he had to gather the respect he once had - like it was his retirement party or something. Well then, he had to find work, your father, and he didn't do well in school and that's when we moved to Wuhan, so he could find work.

"You had just been born and he was disappointed. I know you understand enough about China that a boy child is much more valued than a girl child. I am sorry about that, Mei, but it's just the truth, even though I never felt that way. Anyway, he was disappointed that you weren't his son and in China then, and I think now still, having more than one child was just not possible. Except for those who were rich or well connected, it was just not done.

"He got a job in a factory as a manager with his father's help but he hated working. We did ok for a few years. We struggled and we were poor, but I thought he had changed and was coming around to his responsibilities. But then he found some friends and they lured him out at nights and he came home later and later. I found out that he'd been keeping a woman, or at least paying something for her, and I lost control. I hit him and he hit me back and when you came crying out of the bedroom in pajamas he just left. He didn't return for days and I didn't know what to do. I was working then too. I had some basic English in college and they made me a teacher but it didn't pay much. I couldn't lose him because I wouldn't be able to make ends meet and give you what you needed.

"So I started thinking and began to suggest that we visit America and maybe try to emigrate. He had some relatives who lived over here and I began to press him to contact them. I tried to paint a picture of a new life for us. That he would be free to have his son in America. Eventually, he did contact them and they encouraged him. His father was still alive and he arranged everything through some close friends. So when you were nine we moved to San Francisco."

That sounded to Mei like the end of the story, but she pressed her mother for more.

"Well it didn't help. At first America was new for him, exciting. We'd seen Shanghai and San Francisco seemed even more of a dream. People were so wealthy, everyone had a car and he fell in love with it but soon our problems returned. He couldn't keep a job because he hated working. He fell into gambling with his cousins and the women returned. One day he said he was going back to China and asked if I wanted to come. I said no, that life for you would be better here, and that was it. He left and I haven't heard from him since."

"But mama, what about me? How could he leave me like that?" It was the little girl again and her mother didn't know what to say.

"My Mei Chun, I don't know, honey. He didn't leave you, baby; he left me. I got so tired of him, so sick of his excuses and his lies and laziness; I just made his life worse. It was a thousand things, honey, not you. It was the looks I would give him when he came home and the cold shoulder when he wanted love. He just didn't deserve to be honored like the big man he thought he was. He tried to get everything without earning it. Trust me, Mei Chun, you had very little to do with it."

That sounded right. She had very little to do with her father, she was insignificant, the child that wasn't his boy. Her citizenship was the result of his desire to replace her with a son, to fix the mistake of her birth.

'What a bastard', she thought, with more amazement than hatred. "I see."

"I know it hurts you, mèimei."

"Yeah. It does. I've tried to bury it but I think that's caused me some problems that I'm starting to deal with. I'm in love mama, for the first time ever."

"Oh, Mei!" She was happy for her.

"Yeah, but I'm still not convinced that I'm good enough and maybe it's because I wasn't good enough for daddy."

It hurt to hear this but her mother figured it was time for her to work it out.

"Honey, everyone has problems in life and in themselves. We all have enough things we've done wrong and we don't need to take responsibility for things other people have done to us. I used to think that first year or so after he left that I should have been more supporting or loving. Then I realized that his problems were his and not my fault. Maybe, with some luck, things would have been different, but your father was arrogant and thought life should be easy for him. Sometimes men are just sick inside and you can't heal them."

"But mama, I feel sick inside and Philip is healing me."

"That's wonderful, Jenny."

"Mom, please." She said it sweetly, without reproach.

"I'm sorry, Mei Chun. Give me some time, honey. Anyway, bring your man over soon and I'll cook him dinner."

"He's a great cook."

"Is he a foreigner?"

"He's white, if that's what you mean."

"Good! Bring him over and I'll teach him to make some Húběi dishes. But learn from your mother's mistake. You must know your man's character before you marry him."

"Yes mama. I love you so much, mama," she said, and let the tears loose. They spent another twenty minutes on the phone, probably a record, and they both cried and felt closer than they had in years.

##########

Oddly enough, work was now the most relaxing part of Mei Chun's life. It was stable, secure and now that she wasn't such an insufferable bitch, she found there were things to enjoy about it. After all, she was part of an organization that gave health to people who couldn't afford it. Someplace for a mother too poor to feed herself and her child to get him treated for pink eye or worse. Mei wondered if her mother had ever taken her here or a place like it when she just arrived with no job and no insurance. It shook her a bit to think back a week and remember that she thought of these people as trash.

Her own mind had put words in Philip's mouth in the fantasy turned nightmare last Thursday night. He said that she was the trash here, and it was true. What an uncaring bitch she, or rather Jenny, had been! 'Goodbye to you,' Mei thought. 'I won't miss you.'

Mei was resplendent in her new outfit: accordion knee-length skirt and lilac-colored silk blouse adorned with a gold bangle she already owned and the pearl choker. Markéta would be proud and Mei texted her a photo before she left home. It was sort of a test to see how she would respond to personal messages from her. The return text, received on the BART as she approached her station, was encouraging and forthright. "You look fabulous! Good enough to eat :)" and a photo of her own showing her breasts in a bra as she leant forward."

"Sexy," she responded.

"Going to a private party at the president's retreat in Cannes with the new Miss X. But you would be the star here, Mei Chun."

"As long as I shine in your eyes, Markéta."

"You do. Text me frequently, přítelkyně. It's making me excited. Got to go, but first, send me a close up photo of that necklace please."

"Now?"

"Yes please, I want to show it to someone. I'll be thinking of you at the party! Hello to your master!"

She took off the choker and borrowed Carol's black coat for contrast, put it under the only non-florescent light in the office, on Dr. K's desk and snapped several photos, one with her keys next to it to show size. She sat in his chair and sent the photos as Dr. K came in. "Hiya, doc," she said cheerfully.

"Got your degree, do you, Mei?"

She put her feet on his desk. "Yep, taking over! You can have the rest of the day off."

He threw himself into the chair before the desk in an exaggerated display of fatigue. "Good. About time I was put out to pasture."

"What's up, doc? Under the weather?" She had noticed he'd seemed blue lately. She asked more seriously, when she saw his response was just a shrug and a pained look in his eyes, "What's the matter?"

"It's my boy, Mei Chun. They think he might have cancer."

"Oh no... Oh, I am so sorry. How old is he?"

"He's forty-one. Three kids."

"Oh no."

"They aren't sure, going to run more tests, but it has me scared. I don't want to be alive when my kids go. It would shatter me. Losing my wife was bad enough, but losing my son would kill me."

She didn't know how to respond, what he would like hearing, so she remained silent. Everyone spoke of how his wife's death hit him hard. How he'd taken week after week of sick leave to care for her, completely indifferent to returning. The director had to visit him several times and convince him that he was needed and that getting back to work would be the best way to recover. He grudgingly returned, but had only now, two years later, began to return to his former cheerful, happy self.

Mei wanted to do something for him but was at a loss, 'What can I do?' she figured. She'd think about it. "Are you a religious man, Dr. K?"

"Yes, I was. Until my wife died."

"I was born a Buddhist and they have a good philosophy when it comes to loss, I think."

"Yeah... that's nice, Mei Chun, but I'm a bit old to be looking for a new religion." His demeanor changed, but his eyes didn't, "Anyway, you scat... I need to get to work." He shooed her away and she left, trying to giggle at his attempt to swat her with a folder.

"I'll be thinking about your son and hoping the tests are negative."