When I first met Mei she had just arrived from China and spoke better English I think than I did. She was twenty-one and very smart, but at the same time in many way she was as naive and unsophisticated as a twelve year old. She told me her name meant beautiful in Chinese and she certainly lived up to the billing. She said she also had 'unconventional' ideas about sex, very different from American values. She told me she thought it was idiotic, even humorous for a woman to have only one lover, or even one husband.
"I have six," she told me shortly after we met. "At least back in China. Here I expect to have many more," she said with a seductive smile, one that would start the heart of a dead man. When she told me about her sexual opinions my heart did a backflip and landed on its head. I wondered if I had the slightest chance with this princess from China.
"Six?" I said in amazement. "And you plan to have more here?" Casually, she nodded her head. "You plan to have a husband?" I asked.
"No, no," she said with a scowl. "Husbands are too confining," she replied with assertiveness. "I may have a boyfriend, handsome like you," she said. "But I will fuck many, many men here in America. That's what you say, right, fuck?" She said innocently. I told her it was but she had to be careful where she said it.
"Some places you don't say fuck?" she asked, challenging me to defend such craziness. "Where is that where you don't say fuck?" I told her it varied, that it wasn't that simple, but she wanted to know why you couldn't say fuck in some places. I told her it was a matter of courtesy, but she said, "But everybody fucks, right?"
I said that you needed to assume in most situations that it wasn't polite to say 'fuck'. She thought that was crazy, since everyone did it, and she then laughed at the silliness of it. "Everyone doesn't," I explained. "Adults might, but young people won't be doing it," I said. "Usually. You know that, right?" She thought it was strange to be so 'afraid' of a word. I told her I agreed, but that was the way it was.
"So silly," she said, mocking the fear of a word, shaking her head.
She then asked if I had a place. "Maybe I could live with you? We could have sex," she said casually, with a sly smile. I said she could stay with me but she didn't have to have sex with me to stay at my house. "That's okay," she said. "I like to. Sex is good? Don't you like sex?"
I told her I did and we could talk about it later. When she brought her two trunks and three suitcases she wanted to know where my room was. I said she could stay in the guest room and showed her where it was. She asked why I did not want to have her in my room and have sex with her.
It wasn't easy explaining why I didn't want to have sex with her. "It isn't that I don't want to, but we need to know each other better before we have sex."