Michelle Anderson

Digging for treasure

Here I am, age six or seven, finding a small thick disk of metal in the scrabbly earth of our yard in Seoul. It is bigger and chunkier than any coin I have seen, and heavier. I dig in the dirt with a stick. I find more dark slabby disks. I dig day after day, in secret, and the treasure accumulates. I put the coins in a secret place. The excitement of finding something ancient and precious forms a kind of vibrant pressure in my chest. The dirt where I find the disks is otherwise barren and dead-seeming. I feel the story of the treasure more than I invent it. I have a shadowy sense of long-ago human shapes, a hiding process. Hiding and finding: I am completing a circle with some past person. I play with the coins and in turn I too keep them hidden. 

At this time of great secrets, the library in our house is, I discover, full of them. There is a small cluster of books about birth and women’s bodies. I spend time studying one in particular: The Book of Natural Childbirth. Smallish and thin, hardbound with a paper jacket, it has finely rendered drawings of anatomical details. I study the drawings and their labels, and realise there is a hidden part of me for which there exists precise vocabulary. Soon after making this discovery and sharing it with my friends, I organise a procession of girls. All wearing tutus, we march through the streets of our quiet diplomatic enclave, chanting I have a vagina, I have a vagina, I have a vagina…. Triumphant, we feel doubly rich; not only do we each have the same secret body part, but we know its name.

Being a girl

Very early in every girl’s life, she begins to understand that she herself is a form of currency. She is sought after, desired, displayed like wealth, even traded. She learns she is endangered. She carries this fear. She learns she is dangerous. She carries this power. Whether she learns to wield it or not, to deny it or to embrace it, it is already too late to escape the understanding that she is object.

Selling stuff

I realise early that selling stuff is a great way to get money. I surmise also that part of the pitch is being a kid. People seem to like to buy stuff from kids. I gather discarded things from around the house and garage: pieces of two-by-four, plastic bowls, rubber bands. Sometimes I hammer pieces of wood together to make boat shapes and sell them. Sometimes I get cookies from the cupboard and sell those. I make a sign that says For Sale at Good Prices and set up a table in our driveway in the compound in Yangminshan, outside Taipei. People come along and they buy stuff. I see that my table makes them happy, and buying my stuff makes them happy. Also, I figure this is the smartest way to get rid of junk. But it also seems like magic, to be able to turn something worthless into coins, coins which in turn can be turned into something else, something wonderful. What surprises me is that everybody isn’t doing it. Not that I would want to buy other peoples’ old stuff. I just want the magic money.

Avoiding rich men

Money. Work. Survival. How will you get by? As a girl in our family of five children (three girls, two boys) it is mixed messages all the way. Primary is the difference between the girl message and the boy message, surprisingly old-school in a left-leaning family. Hearing the paternal refrain — be a good cook, learn to sew, and better know how to type so you have something to fall back on if your marriage to a rich husband doesn’t work out — means that I avoid rich men and fail typing. I like cooking and sewing but these pursuits pale next to doing chemistry experiments, riding horses, and sailing boats. The tacit boy message is simpler: make money and find a pretty wife who cooks. The maternal message is a saving grace. Only art matters. To be creative is the highest good. We each learn every art form and we each find those we love. We grow up with the idea that everybody writes stories, makes pictures, dances, acts and makes music, and none of these things are presented as transactional. But the dual parental messages are difficult to integrate. They are not equally weighted. What we see before us is a life where the woman might be an artist but she is one who serves the man. Her art is his elevation. Our father’s first wife, our mother, is a writer and a great cook. After decades of inspired meals and several books, she escapes. Our father’s second wife is an artist who rejects his demand that a bell be installed in her studio so he can alert her to his need for food. She is discarded. His third and final wife is our ex-nanny, and she is no artist. Ultimately, the artist part is clearly just pleasant window dressing. Sandwiches come first.

Bargaining in Mandarin

Beginning around the age of thirteen I spend a lot of time exploring the back streets of Taipei. They are full of enticingly dusty tiny shops crowded with antiques, street peddlers with their wares laid out on plastic sheets, female betelnut sellers with baskets of the red nuts rolled in leaves with slaked lime paste. I go to these streets to buy pirated records in neon yellow, green, and hot pink. I design my own shoes and take my drawings to a shoemaker, who measures my feet and makes me whatever shoes and boots I dream up. My favourite thing to do is to look for baskets full of silver jewelry and old jade in the antique stores, wending my way past celadon tea bowls, brass dragons and rotting silk robes. It is on one of these explorations that I purchase a wide silver aboriginal ring that I wear for many years, losing it twice and finding it once. It is lost for the final time, ten years after I buy it, in the remote Matobo Hills of Zimbabwe, among 7000-year-old rock paintings. I like to think that someday someone will find it and wear it and guess wonderingly at its story.

Paper money

Antique stores evoke a feeling of history being jumbled, of time non-linear and space without frontiers. Each object has a past, a trajectory which has brought it to the present moment. Its future is uncertain. Will someone trade money for it? Will it begin a new contemporary chapter? Will the rare celadon-glazed tea bowls enjoy an exalted phase as objects of adoration, clucked over by an Asian art scholar from the Bronx who affects imperial silk robes, a long wispy beard, and whose fingernails are so long and curved that they impede all practical functions? For him, the cups serve to extend his dominion further into the past/future and across the globe, transmuting his identity so that his Odessa roots expand into something altogether transcendent. Women surround him in such an intoxicating way that he forgets which parts of his story are true, which are false. The sheets of paper money he hands over to the dealer are counted once, twice, several times, by two separate pairs of hands, then pocketed. Are these bills special? Do they tell a story? We think of clean money and dirty money, even blood money, but money itself is blessed with anonymity. The exchange of money, however, is all about story. Bills, like pages in a book.

Sexy money

My friend Agathe in Tokyo is tall and stately, with milky-white skin. Her beautiful face is badly scarred from a car accident. She is a very successful escort with only two or three regular clients. She tells me that the best advice she was given when she was just starting out was to wear the perfume 1000 by Jean Patou, because it communicates a message of both eroticism and money, like wearing a sumptuous fur coat. And in a meta-layer of messaging, because the most elegantly sensual escorts in Japan wear 1000, when a man who frequents this rarefied milieu catches a whiff of the scent his memories of such women converge and he is transported and disarmed. How refined and enchanting a way to seduce while transmitting a fee structure.

Needing a coat

I am in Paris for my first year of university. I live in a one-room studio on the Île St. Louis, with a window that looks out on the Seine. Despite my chic and romantic surroundings, I have almost no money. My mother has battled my father to try to get him to send more, to no avail. He claims he is broke, which is a story we have all believed for decades. Years later, I come across a letter my mother had saved, written by me to my parents in late November of that year. In it I write, “I am really sorry to have to tell you that I may need to buy a coat after all, and possibly a pair of tights. I know it is a hardship for you, but it is getting extremely cold here and its very windy. I found a coat in a street market that costs $20. It’s the cheapest I can find. I’m so sorry to add to your burdens. Very very very sorry.” I am finally able to buy the cheap unlined navy blue coat, and all year I carefully count my coins. I save them on the marble mantelpiece, allowing myself to buy tiny loaves of ficelle bread only once or twice a week. I pay 40 centimes to bathe in the public bath around the corner. And when a man invites me out for a meal, I am unable to say no.

The Kenya for Freedom Boys

Picture this: I’m swimming in the glinting warm green of the Indian Ocean near Malindi with a bearded friend. We’ve left our clothing on the empty beach. My bag is there too, with passport and money along with my beach reading, a paperback copy of King Lear. When we return, everything is gone. How can it be? There is nothing here, nobody. We have come by motorbike, and my friend, who finds his underwear discarded on the sand, tells me to get in the sea and stay there while he rides off to the luxury hotels to beg towels. “Thieves don’t swim,” he assures me. He returns with plush orange towels emblazoned with a hotel name, and we ride towel-wrapped through Malindi town traffic, first to see a man he knows who gives us clothes, and then to the police station to report the crime. “Those were the Kenya for Freedom Boys,” says the policeman we speak with. “No point in trying to find your things. We know who they are but they are uncatchable. Your money and passport are being used to fund revolution.” We don’t mention we had been swimming naked. Might my dress and sandals also play a revolutionary role? It’s a thought I find intriguing, especially when I remember they got the book too, in which clothing is used as a political tool. Aptly, a tale of reckoning, the rise and fall of power and wealth, as regular as the East African tides.

Angry money

My father’s hands-off approach to helping his children displays a few glaring exceptions. At the age of 21, when I let my parents know that I have a year-long well-paid contract to illustrate a book in Kenya, he sends me money, saying nothing about the job. It’s punishment. I don’t cash his check.

My father’s secret

He has rushed from Seoul to Tokyo with my sister, and I’ve been summoned from the north of Japan to come help. The mission they’ve been on is to set up a marriage between him and our ex-nanny. In the meantime my sister has been nurse-maiding him and she’s had it up to here.

He’s having panic attacks, she says. He starts crying and he can’t breathe.

I book them into the Hilltop, a hotel that pumps oxygen and negative ions into the rooms. Yukio Mishima used to stay there. When I arrive I send my sister out to explore the city. My dad is in bed. He’s trembling and moaning, swathed in quilts.

What’s wrong? I ask quietly, taking his hand.

Everything is a mess, he sobs. His eyes have panic in them. All my wives have been beautiful, and she’s not. She was beautiful before but now she’s old.

Everybody gets old, I say. I’m thinking we have to make this happen or my sister will be in the nurse role forever.

And the embassy wants to know everything about my bank accounts and investments, or the Koreans won’t let her out.

So this is the bigger problem.

Where are the forms? Shall I help you fill them out?

He points. I take the forms from the desk. He’s started to complete them but all the financial details are blank.

So I say, okay, do you want to marry her?

Yes.

Then you have no choice, Dad. You need to give them this info. I’ll fill the forms out for you. All you have to do is give me the facts.

So this is when the truth comes out. Money, money, money all around the world. Secret money. Seven figures here, seven figures there. All the years he said he was too broke to help with college, too broke to help with health emergencies, too broke too broke too broke. I don’t express my dawning horror at the revelation. When we finish I tell him that it’s done, that he will be able to marry her. That’s that. We are all relieved. My sister is free. He might have a chance to be happy. But now I know him for who he is and what he has. And he knows I know. And he begins a campaign against me which never ends. The things he did for money. The things we lost for money.