My first real introduction to sex was in Graduate school at Virginia Tech. I was working on my Master's in Mathematics and lived in the Hillcrest graduate student dorm, an old and bulky four-story building with creaky stairs and small rooms. My room was on the fourth floor, at the end of the hall. I shared the floor with three other women, a large, friendly black woman from Kenya and two other Chinese women from Beijing. The Kenyan woman, Mala, was studying urban planning while both Chinese girls majored in microbiology. Mala must have been in her mid to late thirties, while we, the Chinese girls, were in our late twenties.
From what she had told us and could gather from her friends, the Kenyan woman was a widower who had a teenage boy back home. She spoke with a loud, strong voice and had a frank face with a small, round nose. Her waist was larger than our three waists put together, and her breasts were enormous, but surprisingly firm and erect. By all indications, she never slept. Her door was always open, even when she was undressing or studying. Since all the tenants on our floor were female, she often walked around with absolutely nothing on but black socks, absentmindedly fingering her vaginal area and squeezing one of her breasts, a frank smile on her face. She was so at ease with us that she often farted without thinking twice, sometimes so loudly that the noise did not sound like that of a fart but something akin to a horse's snort.
I remember I was shocked the first time I saw Mala walking about naked. Her enormous dark breasts were so heavy that she walked around slightly stooping, which emphasized her jutting large ass. I distinctly remember being astonished at her pure black nipples, which were as long as my index finger and wider than a quarter.
Mala often invited us to her room to chat and treated us like her little sisters. But it was always uncomfortable for us to be there, especially when she was naked. I remember how Li laughed out loud the first time she saw Mala's white bra: she couldn't even tell what it was until Mala told her.
"I hope you girls don't mind my walking around like this," she asked, pointing to her belly button. "I love having nothing on; it is the natural way to be." Then she laughed a pleasant, friendly laugh and tried to make us feel comfortable by telling us stories about her life back home.
We took all this strange behavior from Mala as an education in the ways of the real world. And Mala quickly grasped how naive we were and how little we really knew about the world outside of China. So, when she decided to start masturbating openly in front of us, she explained it to us in cultural terms. "Back in Kenya," she said, "women masturbate very frequently and openly." When we told her that in China, no one ever discussed masturbation, she pretended to be astonished.
"But it is natural," she declared with her clear voice. "It helps you regulate your period and is the easiest way to maintain your hormonal balance."
And so, a week after she moved in, Mala started masturbating openly and frequently, and we got used to it. On the weekends it seemed she would finger herself for hours at a time, watching TV and munching on vinegar flavored potato chips. I still remember distinctly the sight of large Mala on her small bed, her heavy breasts leaning sideways, her African hair disheveled and sweaty, her large legs parted all the way and resting comfortably on the bed, with a wide patch of kinky pubic hair that went almost all the way up to her navel, while her small right hand swiftly rubbed her pussy again and again, once in a while slapping it with a loud crisp smack. And then, every half an hour or so, we would hear a series of deep heaves and grunts coming out of her: the sound of Mala having an orgasm.
The only time when Mala's door was closed was when a man was in her room. And she had many, many men visit her room.
At such times, not long after the door was closed, we would hear strange noises coming from within the room.
At first, innocent as we were, we didn't understand the nature of those noises. The first night we heard them, Li, the oldest among us, was concerned and knocked on Mala's door to ask if everything was fine. Upon knocking, the grunting and muffled screaming stopped, but no one answered. Li knocked again, but no response. We then retreated to my room to chat, and as soon as we closed the door, the noises commenced again. At which point Chun started giggling and said in Chinese, "they are marrying each other."
Hearing Mala with her men in their room, night after night, laughing, giggling, whispering, moaning, and deep in the night outright screaming in her native language without any care, at first annoyed us because it kept us up and affected our studying. (Little good did the superintendent's threats do to evict her if she didn't quiet down.) But after a few weeks, we started to secretly feel jealous, not fully understanding why we envied her.
