“Maomao, don’t be such a Màoshīguǐ.” My mother said. Màoshīguǐ is Mandarin for “Daredevil”, a reckless person who enjoys doing dangerous things. Admittedly, this etymology fits me like a glove. When I was six, she cried over my bruises after I slid down the stairs in a zipped-up laundry basket, while I only craved another tumble. By the time I was eleven, she was screaming at me to get down from the unstable baseball fences I scaled, watching in horror as the Herculean structure swayed in the wind while I climbed higher and higher, my fingers raw from the dirty metal. When I was sixteen, I blindly jumped off of a bridge into a sea of complete and utter darkness, without knowing whether or not a sharp rock would spearhead my exposed skin. I returned home soaking wet, but unharmed. I always knew that one day, my luck would run out. Nevertheless, my faith in the universe never faltered, and my invincibility complex grew with every unhinged adventure.

I grew up on high school dramas and pink bubblegum chick flicks, where the most beautiful of women were always wearing stilettos and short skirts. I have always had trouble deciphering the differences between fiction and reality. To me, there was no reason why they had to be separate. So I became my idols, imitating the way they dressed, talked and acted. I combined their wildest plot lines into a single weekend and rolled my skirts so short they were hanging off of my waist. Just like my impulsive tendencies made me feel alive, dressing like my favourite characters made me feel invincible. If I looked the part, I could do anything they could do – stunt double or not. But my mother disagreed.

“Maomao, you look like … like a prostitute.” she choked out as she eyed me up and down with disdain.

My body and what I put on it became the single source of our arguments for years to come. I interpreted her incessant nagging as her trying to control me, or her playing right into our patriarchal society. My sister, on the other hand, taught me everything I knew about the world, drilling into my little head that my body was mine, and mine only.

“Never allow anyone to tell you what to do with what belongs to you.” she would say to me as I laid between her bedsheets, dizzy from a night out.

Admittedly, I took it a little far. Last Friday, I missed my train home and was forced to retreat to the underground subways. In my blind confidence, I didn’t care that it was nearly 1 A.M. I didn’t care that I was alone. I didn’t care that something bad might happen to me.
As I scurried up the steps, I was careful to keep my thighs pressed together in consideration of whoever was walking behind me. The stairs were damp from the last rainfall and catching the violet light of the fluorescent signs that surrounded the near-empty station. My rhythmic ascent was interrupted by a brick wall of a man standing in my way. As I looked up, he mumbled something almost incoherent.

“Can I walk you home?” He leaned in close to me, his breath smelling of cheap cigarettes and Heineken.
“What?” I replied quietly, confused by his question.

I have always liked strangers. As a child, I waved to them from my car seat and wandered away from my parents in theme parks to find someone new, someone interesting. I have fallen in love with unfamiliar faces I will never know. I have made some of my best friends in party bathrooms or train stations. But this man wasn’t a friend. Not at all. Not even close. This man was Danger. The whispers of fear in my head grew to a crescendo until I could only hear one ear-splitting scream over my blasting music.

Run.

I betrayed my every polite, feminine instinct as I pushed past his makeshift barricade to sprint up the stairs. I didn’t dare to look back. I cursed every decision I had ever made as my heels hit the wet pavement. Click. Click. Click. I had heard stories about the countless women raped and murdered late at night, seen the news and photos of bodies left in ditches and the mourning families, and my mortality was suddenly overwhelmingly apparent to me. Click. Click. My vision blurred as I raced through the dark. I could feel every seam of my clothing on my raw skin all at once. My short skirt, my skimpy corset, my uncomfortable shoes. I was the perfect victim. Everything my sister had ever taught me, every stupidly idealistic feminist ideology, seemed so cruelly childish in the face of this overwhelming fear. Even if my harm could never be anyone’s fault but the attacker’s, if something happened to me, I would never stop blaming myself. Click.

Somewhere in the haze, I stopped. With my back pressed up against the cool brick wall, I caught my breath and forced down the bile in my throat. Little did I know, he had followed me for blocks. As I opened my eyes again, there he was: so close to me I could feel every heavy breath on the tip of my nose, beads of sweat dripping down his forehead. He had me cornered.

“Can I walk you home?” he asked again, breathless.

My mind does this funny thing when it goes into a panic, where I can suddenly see the back of my own head. I floated outside of my body, my feet just brushing the floor as if I was already dead. I could see it all now. My ignorant, impulsive decisions were catching up to me. All of the worry I caused my poor mother, all of the bones that should have snapped when they only bent, culminated in this moment. I deserve this.

My body shuddered as his rough hand brushed my bare waist, rejecting his touch. In every movie I have ever watched, the woman always recounts a rush of adrenaline going through the veins, forcing her to pull out some deeply buried martial arts to fight off her attacker. As a kid, I had prepared for this moment. I had imagined every deadly situation I would so-gracefully pull myself out of, but now all I could do was freeze. There was no shift in my head, no charge of electricity through my blood – I had to make a choice. I wasn’t about to leave my mother up waiting for me all night. I wasn’t about to go down without a fight. In my desperation, I reached into the tote bag hanging off of my shoulder as if I had a .44 revolver stashed in the woven purse.
“No.” I said quietly.
My fingers wrapped around a cylindrical object in my bag as I mustered up my most threatening scowl. As I pulled out a damp umbrella, his face turned from slight annoyance to amusement, to condescension. The way he looked at me made me want to beat the smug look off of his face. I winded my arm back once and hit him clear in the chest with the blunt tip of the blue umbrella. He stumbled backwards, surprised. I flung open the umbrella in his direction, resembling a soldier with a shield in battle.
“I’m going home now. Alone.”
He must have decided right then that I wasn’t worth the trouble, or worth another blow to the chest. He sighed in exasperation like a mother annoyed at her child’s temper tantrum – but he turned and slouched away. I kept my umbrella in its shielded position until he was no longer in my sight.

When I was ready, I pushed out of my corner of the station and wiped any remaining moisture from my eyes with my thumbs, taking care not to smudge my mascara. I didn’t tell my mother what had happened to me that night. I didn’t think it was a big deal. After all, I was fine. I had escaped unscathed, as usual, and there was no point in making her worry even more.
For days, I didn’t think anything of it. When I told my friends, I laughed. I brushed off the horrified looks and chalked it up to another good story to tell, but my survivor’s guilt had other plans. Why not me? Why, even in all of my carelessness, my flirtations with death, do I always get so lucky?

My heart aches for the women who have fallen victim. The women who have taken every precaution, with keys between their knuckles and sweatshirts thrown over their shoulders. The women who have had their wrists pinned in cold stairwells, thighs pulled apart and dirt injected into their fragile bodies. And if I could, I would take away their pain and give it to someone who deserves it. Someone who can take it. Someone who was asking for it. Someone like me.

A friend asked me, “what really happened to you?” as if I had been downplaying my story. The question seemed unreal to me. It only occurred to me then that I had been lying to myself. I have been lying this whole time. My invincibility has always been a sick façade. My body may have escaped death, but the filth that crawls through my skin every time I remember his touch has plagued my mind. My hands, my throat, my sore feet, remain tainted red from the memory. I have had to fight to convince myself that what happened to me that night – whatever could have happened to me that night – had nothing to do with my clothing, my smile, or my sexuality. The shards of my shattered invincibility have always taken form in the worry etched across my poor mother’s face, or the fear I ignored time and time again in my soul. I was just too good of a liar to notice.

My mother has been my guardian angel all along. She moved the weight of the rocks around so the water would always break my dive, screwed the nails on the fence just tight enough to hold steady under my weight, and demanded that I take that godforsaken umbrella with me – just in case it rained. If I cannot value my own life enough to stop my daredevil tendencies, I hope for the sake of my mother, the thing I love most in the world,
I will at least try to stop being such a Màoshīguǐ.

photography: “Kiss Of Death” by Bruna Kazinoti, 1998