Bing vs. Bianca, 1981-82

THIS is how I, Bing, looked, circa late 1981/early 1982. Sitting against the piano and wearing a pink eyelet blouse. Twelve years old. This photo was taken at the faculty home on the Silliman campus where our family lived until I was 13. 

This is what I drew, among others. It's a tiny watercolor painting, a detail of a 5" x 8" inch piece that I had designed to cover an ugly spiral-bound notebook. It's Hornet's Nest fan art -- except that the boys are depicted as girls: five girls to be specific. They recur in my stories and were initially named after people we knew, and came into being around the time I turned 8 and my sister 11. Then the names changed somewhat, as did their appearance and abilities.

My avatar, also called Bing, is the one in blue dressed as Arturo, the tree-climbing boy super-soldier of Hornet's Nest. By then, two years had passed since we had seen the movie and I had forgotten that Arturo was supposed to wear long sleeves. This Bing's hair looks just like mine in the picture, the same grown-out bangs, except that the part is on the wrong side. This was probably because there weren't many photos taken of me at this time, so I knew my face only from what I saw in the mirror. 

What did I, Bing, write at age 12? Hah. A scandal. Fan fiction. Here are the first two pages of a story, out of hundreds if not thousands of pages my sister and I produced throughout our childhood.

Fans of Hornet's Nest (1970) will recognize the names and the situation. For those who have not seen the movie... this story is Bianca's. She is the doctor who three boys lure to a cave to attend to the wounded paratrooper/demolition expert they have rescued from under the noses of the German troops. Here she finds 12 other boys, most in their mid teens, who have been hiding out for weeks or months after their entire village is massacred by Nazis. In the cave, confronted with the prospect of aiding one of the enemy, Bianca at first refuses. Violence results at the hands of 15 boys. Okay, let me put it squarely: they attempt to rape her, and are stopped by the demolition expert (Capt. Turner, played by Rock Hudson) who has just regained consciousness. 

The following morning, one of the boys expresses disgust at their behavior, and another insists they wouldn't have gone through with it. Despite this, I found the savagery of the near-rape sequence upsetting. But it was also intriguing. I had, after all, just turned 11.

Bianca comes to realize that she is a prisoner of the Italian boys and the American captain, but throughout the movie, through dialogue and her actions, she resists.

Bianca was played by Silva Koscina. I didn't know what her character name was at the time (we only saw the film once, in a theater, which was how people saw movies in 1980), so my sister and I gave her a different name. In this story I wrote (I can see myself, nose to the page, utterly focused on the task of translating the story in my mind into words), she goes unnamed. The first two pages, and a third, are scenes from the Hornet's Nest movie as I remembered it, and was my way of keeping loyal to the subject matter. And also of recollecting the film, two years later. There are two completely made-up features here here. First is the interaction with the boy called Paolo, who oddly I describe as being nine years old (more about this, and about him, to come). The second is the woman's attempt to undermine the group by pinching the child Mario so that he cries and attracts the attention of the German patrol -- that was definitely not in the movie! (The actual scene is here, beginning at the 2:55 mark). Resistance indeed.

The third liberty I've taken will be familiar to writers of fan fiction -- telling the story from the point of view of a neglected or objectified character. Now the woman doctor is no longer the dolled-up, bouffant-haired creature to be knocked around and assaulted into submission, but is the subject herself.  But I wasn't aware of that kind of academic language as I wrote. All I knew was that my sister and I disliked Bianca. 

To me Bianca was an object of fun, a parent-figure (or a sexual yet prudish auntie figure) to be pranked and dodged. So for that matter, was the war-weary Capt. Turner, who my sister and I decided, out of guilt over his deeds, had gone quietly and completely insane. But as my sister turned 15 and we continued to write about and draw this universe, blending other movies and even comic books into it, Bianca became something else to her -- a whore-figure to be humiliated, for whom redemption was impossible. 

The frustrated rape in the cave (and the strong suggestion that it would be a gang rape) had a profound impact on us as children. It didn't help that, in the milieu where I had grown up, gang rape was a very real possibility for adventurous girls. At least it was held over us as a threat.

My sister and I spent a lot of time discussing Bianca then, demonizing her for being a pacifist wet blanket (we were kids and we wanted war!) as well as being so sexually attractive. We never once considered that it was the actions of the boys (really just Aldo) that were savage. Or that it was war itself that is savage. The story I wrote runs for several pages as a summary of some events in Hornet's Nest as Bianca would have seen them, then heads into dark terrain. Because on page three she is raped by  Capt. Turner, exactly as it appears (or is strongly suggested) in the movie. And, on page four, she discovers that she prefers to be taken by force. For as my sister and I merged more worlds into the Hornet's Nest one, our fictional Bianca went on to sleep with some -- a lot -- of the main players in each of those worlds, an invention I faithfully chronicled in the story, though not in any sexually explicit fashion -- more in the voice of a romance novel heroine, amazed at the attributes of each of these men, and of her response to them. 

I can't wrap my head around the fact that, at 12, I was writing this stuff. My husband says, "Maybe you weren't really 12." He means that I was smart, I had read a lot, I was precocious. In retrospect, I was trying to reconcile the adult sexuality I'd seen a lot of in movies and read about in books with what was expected of us as young women. (No one enforced the R ratings in the cinemas, and awful soft-porn paperbacks made the rounds of high school classrooms). We were growing up in the kind of society (provincial Philippines, late 70s-early 80s) where it was still acceptable for people to say that good girls would never have sex before marriage unless they were forced. Therefore much of the rape fascination probably had to do with that. It was a kind of projection as well, and of revulsion  -- "I'll never grow up to be like her. Not if I can help it."

I was fascinated by Silva Koscina, the actress, though. I didn't hate her. There were lots of pictures of her in old magazines lying around the house, and her woman-warrior character Danitza (Danica) in The Battle of Neretva, seen a few months after Hornet's Nest, was one of my favorites too. She was brave and beautiful there, she dies valiantly, and she was no one's possession.   (To be continued)