Kindle Edition
Roadmaps for the Sexually Challenged
Category:
Relationships
Publisher: Roadmap Girl Publications
Type: Fiction
Pages: 332
Copyright: Feb 23, 2015
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
"Roadmaps for the Sexually Challenged: All's Not Fair in Love or War" is set in the mid-90s with the O.J. trial in the background and plenty of L.A. vibe. It follows the hot romance of a divorcing woman in her late 30s with a 40-year old Japanese American man who bears the scars suffered by his family during World War II.
1994. Los Angeles. Carrie Walker has just left her husband of 10 years--a Russian immigrant filmmaker with whom she used to make documentaries. Hot to make a new life with a new man, she lands in Topanga Canyon in a coed Bohemian household where her three roommates are also looking for love. Enter Shane, a 40-year old Japanese American actor who ignites a thunderclap attraction that will lead this 30-year old Jewish woman through a sexual odyssey of joy, pain and ultimately self-discovery.
Shane still bears the scars of his family's "internment" during World War II, and Carrie still bears the scars from her marriage. Beyond the romance, there is a very real connection between them, but can it withstand the deeper and more hidden realities of why this may not be the "perfect" man for her and vice versa?
Cheering from the sidelines, her girlfriends toss out advice like "The mind cannot process sex" (this from her stripper friend) and "Don't go unconscious for Love" (this from a woman who did).
This is an often humorous portrait of a passionate woman struggling to make a new chapter in her life with a new man, while learning that interracial dating may be challenging, but its lessons will change her life forever.
Excerpt
Note: Carrie and Shane have only been seeing each other a few weeks, but he's asked her to take care of his place while he goes to France with his family and a hundred other Japanese Americans on a pilgrimage to the spot where his uncle lost his life fighting for his country during World War II while his family was held behind the barbed wire of a Japanese American "Internment Camp." They are both sick from overdoing the sexual side of their relationship, and it's the day before his trip.
Excerpt:
I'm sitting on the loveseat, blowing my nose and watching him heft a chocolate-colored dust buster.
"Japanese are very clean," he says.
"Why are you doing this? It's after midnight and you're leaving."
"I don't want to leave you with a dirty apartment."
I follow him from room to room, content to let illness excuse my inactivity. He sweeps, vacuums, scrubs ("If you buy a mop, I'll reimburse you..."). It's been an hour since I drove here in a snit about his thoughtless behavior and we've been pleasantly chatting.
Taking a break, he holds out a jar of paper wrapped Asian candies.
"Oh, I love salted plums!"
"Most people don't know what these are," he pops one in his mouth, leans against the sink, chewing up the flesh and tossing the seed out the open door, into the garden.
Time.
"You know," I plunge in, "when you stayed at the theater, I was really scared my car might break down again and these neighborhoods are dangerous at night. I wish you’d have come with me."
He tosses the pit out the door, "I'm sorry, I guess I wasn't thinking." Then he turns to the sink where he squirts dish detergent.
And that's the end of it. My feathers are back where they belong, neat and smooth.
"Oh, my brother might drop by to spend the night from time to time," he says over his shoulder. "He's having trouble with his wife, she's sick in the head and sometimes he might need to get away."
Brother? This is news.
"Is there anything I need to know about him?"
"He's a serial killer. No, he's okay. A real live wire. He married this Korean girl."
"Is everybody in your family married to Asians?"
"My brother's the only one who didn't marry Japanese."
I tell him about a girlfriend of mine whose father is Japanese and mother, Chinese.
"The first time she brought her Caucasian boyfriend home, her father was talking to him downstairs while her mother was upstairs yelling at her, 'Tell me you're not sleeping with him!'"
He wipes the moisture from the walls around the sink over and over, suddenly serious. "White guy with an Asian woman?"
"She married him. They're both screenwriters."
Scrub. Scrub. "All these Caucasian guys, they want Asian women right now. Asian women are hip."
"Why?"
"They think they're 'exotic'. And once they've developed a taste for Asian women..."
Is that how he feels? Why is he telling me? How does he think it makes me feel?
Now he's scrubbing the tiny crevices around the stove knobs. "Y'know what really pisses me off? You always see white guys with Asian women and you almost never see Asian men with Asian women."
"Oh, come on, I've seen lots of Asian couples."
"Where?"
"Chinatown."
He snorts, "Fresh off the boat, sure. I'm talkin' Asian American women who grew up in this country with all its media hype of what a sexy guy should look like. The WASPS have made the "WASP look" a turn-on. Men with Asian features are out."
"What?" I've never even thought about it before. "Listen, Shane, every Caucasian woman that I've told that I'm seeing an Asian American man has says, 'Wow! How'd you do that? I'm getting horny just thinking about it.'"
"Really? Well, those are your friends. Believe me, they're the exceptions. Trust me. I live with this. Don't get me wrong," squeezing the suds out of the sponge, "I'm not the KKK or anything..."
"It sure sounds like it." It's late, I'm sick, and trying to ignore the implications, but I want to leave.
Now he's ranting: "It's not enough they take our jobs, our dignity, our stories. They take our women and when they marry, have kids...all this crap about how beautiful Eurasian kids are..."
Maybe if I get outside, it will give me the courage to do what I know I must to save myself. I walk out the door and land in a patio chair where I sit just outside his kitchen, nursing my cup of Chinese medicine, which has grown ice cold.
He talks to me through the door, as if I haven't budged:
"In Hawaii, a white guy can get killed for being with a Hawaiian woman. That makes white guys think twice."
Anxious to leave the topic, but unable to, I offer, "Now that I think about it, there is a lot of anti-Asian male media hype. About a month ago, before we got together, a woman at work told me that she'd heard on a radio show that Japanese men don't do any foreplay. But after being with you..."
He laughs, "Were you saying, 'Oh, it's not twoo, it's not twoo!'" (a twist on Madeline Kahn's famous line in "Blazing Saddles" when she realizes that black men are well hung).
Our laughter has eased the tension. I go back inside and sit at the kitchen table, thinking of our connection: "People are just people. They get attracted for lots of reasons—not just because one's white and one's Asian."
He throws back his head with a derisive laugh, "Yeah, right!"
Finally putting the sponge aside, he wipes his hands on a dishtowel, which he carefully hangs to dry on the edge of the sink. Then he sits next to me, opening a map.
I draw in breath to draw in courage.
"Shane. I have to ask you. Do you see me as some white chick that...?"
Without missing a beat, he answers simply, "I don't think of you as white. You do Tai Chi, drink Chinese herbs, do Japanese healing, know how to use chopsticks...and anyway, you're Jewish so you're ethnic, not white."
What?
Is this B.S.? If it is, what great B.S.! Well, I can't leave now. Was it Eva who stated that Shane and I “must have been non-white in a past life?”
Something dawns on me and the words just come:
"The media—our TV and movies—they give us our legends. That's how we pass on who we are, where we come from, where we're going. So if you remove an entire people and their culture from those stories, you remove their chances to have a history, to have their own legends, until there's nothing left to pass on, no positive cultural images. And eventually, it will wipe them out because they've been made invisible."
He looks at me steadily. I'm on a roll:
"So if they don't exist in the media, then they don't exist. Even their own women won't want them."
"That's it!" he cries. "I want whatever you're on."
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