To be quite honest with you, our marriage falling apart during the year that my husband's work kept us in Chengdu wasn't really a surprise. If I had put any real thought into it, I would have been able to realize that our relationship wasn't remotely strong enough to survive the stresses of coping with a completely foreign culture, spending very little time together, and having virtually none of our habitual outlets for blowing off steam available to us.
What was a surprise was where I ended up finding comfort during the worst of it. But that's getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.
My name is Victoria. My husband's name was David. We had been married for five years. We'd met when David was getting his masters in international business law, and I was a -- well, I guess you could say I was a party girl. My family had plenty of money, and I was a legacy enrollment theoretically getting my bachelor's in business management, but what I really spent most of my time doing was shots at a number of different college bars. I had a rocking body, I knew how to flaunt it, and college boys and townies alike loved buying me drinks and trying to get into my pants. Quite a few of them pulled it off over the years, since I liked to have a good time. David didn't try to, which was the first thing that made me curious about him.
After a few conversations with him I knew he was exactly the kind of guy my parents would want me to marry -- he was obviously going to be making a lot of money very soon -- and he was pretty cute. When he did eventually get into my pants he wasn't brilliant, but he got the job done. He was on track to finish his degree before I finished mine, and I figured being his trophy wife would be less of a hassle than completing the necessary credits, so I made up my mind to fall in love with him, and shortly afterward he fell in love with me.
We got married in the summer after his graduation and spent five glorious years in a loft apartment in Northern Virginia, where his first job landed us. Close to the bustle of DC, with absurd amounts of money coming in after the wedding and with David's star on the rise, I had the best time of my life making a really stylish home we could be proud of, putting on my flirt-with-the-men, gossip-with-the-women act at all kinds of social gatherings, and doing the weekly rounds of Pilates, yoga, couture shopping, and Botox in order to keep my reputation as the most attractive wife in the firm.
Then David got assigned to Chengdu, and he was thrilled, since it meant he was already trusted enough to be the face of the firm in one of the most important international markets. I was excited too: I had seen a lot of amazing East Asian tourist destinations on Instagram, and the thought of weekend trips to the high-end shopping meccas at Hong Kong, Macau, or Singapore almost made me physically aroused. David really enjoyed our session the night he gave me the news.
But the prosaic reality, after the exciting glow of the first two weeks in a new place faded, was hard to deal with. It turned out that Chengdu was deep in the western interior of China, too far away from the big coastal hubs to make weekend trips worth the travel time, and worse yet, David imposed a budget on me for the first time ever. He hadn't told me before the move, but he was actually taking a significant pay cut in order to build up a reputation as a savvy international operator.
"It'll be fine, because the cost of living is so much cheaper here," he said, "and when we get back to the States I'll be able to negotiate a much higher salary than I would have if we stayed. But you know you were spending a little recklessly in NoVa. And we can't afford to do that here."
I saw even less of him than I had back home; he was taking grueling crash courses in Mandarin in the evenings, after spending long days at the office getting familiar with the workflow and logistics. He asked me, once, if I wanted to join him in learning the language, but I said something cutting and bratty and he never brought it up again. Our sex life vanished almost overnight.
The only real consolation was that the house the firm was renting for us was lovely and palatial, with ultramodern labor-saving devices everywhere, despite an old-fashioned exterior that matched the surrounding historic Sichuan architecture. It even came with a live-in maid, a tall, slender, quiet girl who introduced herself as Yiman. Her English was very good, although clearly learned in a Chinese classroom rather than from talking to Americans. She wore a gray uniform with sturdy shoes, and kept her long black hair wrapped up in a hairnet whenever she was working.
But with Yiman to clean up after us, do the grocery shopping, and prepare meals, I felt as though I had very little to do. Not that I had ever aspired to be David's live-in maid and do all that work myself -- that was what cleaning services and Postmates had been for, back home -- but without my old rounds of yoga, exercise, aestheticians, and shopping to keep me occupied, I was feeling bored and restless.
And horny. David had never been spectacular in bed, although he always finished the job -- but since moving to the other side of the world, he seemed to have no time or desire for sex, and if there was one thing I refused to be it was a nagging wife; so he didn't offer and I didn't ask and eventually, three months into our year-long lease, Yiman walked in on me frustratedly masturbating on the bed with my phone in one hand, trying to find anything accessible via the Great Firewall that could get me off.
Of course she turned around and withdrew immediately, waited for an appropriate amount of time for me to compose myself, and then knocked meekly.
"It's okay, come in," I sighed, and lay staring at the ceiling as she came in. My phone was face down on the bed, my hand was out of my panties. She looked at me carefully, but since I refused to meet her gaze, she just started to do her usual picking up of our discarded clothes. Eventually, realizing that she would want to make the bed and that disrupting her routine would be impolite of me, I rolled out and went to go shower.
I had never been a big user of pornography back home, always figuring (correctly) that I could get laid in real life just as easily. Steamy scenes in regular movies and books had been about all I had ever masturbated to, so I had no idea where to go online that wouldn't be blocked as a matter of course by the Chinese government. The burning need in my loins only ached more as I showered, and I tried to finger myself as the water ran over me, but I could hear Yiman moving in the other room, and the fire ebbed, leaving only the ache as I sobbed frustratedly into the pouring water.
I was afraid for a moment that Yiman would tell David about seeing me masturbating -- there was a stupid, uneducated assumption in the back of my head that every foreign culture would see the wife as the man's property -- but I ended the night wishing she had. Maybe then he would have realized that I needed some sexual attention. But instead he only went immediately to sleep, and I tried again and failed again to get myself off with my hand.
It was five months before we had our first explosive argument, in which I screamed at David that I should never have come to China, since I was clearly useless to him. He responded that I could at least have tried to be pleasant, and that would have been of some use, but no, I was barely there at all. I lost it at that -- I was the one who was barely there?! -- and threw something porcelain and decorative at him that shattered against the wall. He turned around and walked out of the house immediately. A curt text informed me that he would be sleeping at the office this week. I crumpled into a ball on the floor and wept.
Yiman's hand on my shoulder was the first thing that shook me out of my misery. I pulled myself together with a jerk, cutting off a sob and sitting up with an abruptness that must have looked hilarious. But Yiman's face was nothing but concern, her large brown eyes looking into my watery blue ones, and her delicate, sparse eyebrows puckered anxiously.
"You need my help?" she said.
I shook my head and tried to stand up. My knees gave out immediately. She caught me, and with my hands in hers I looked up at her again with an apologetic grimace that would have been a smile if I could have managed it in the moment, and nodded ruefully. I did need her help.
She carefully led me, half-staggering and half-supported, to a couch in the sitting room, and had me lie down. She brought me first water, with a dissolvable tablet that she said would relieve pressure, and then tea. There was, of course, a lot of sinus pressure after my crying jag, and I took the water, the tablet, and the tea without asking any further questions. I was soon feeling much calmer, and looked up at Yiman, who had returned from sweeping up the debris of the porcelain decoration I had broken, and was kneeling at the side of the couch watching me.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm so ashamed of myself."
She nodded seriously.
