D, 18, is the first woman I made love to who has not a single hair on her cunt, a straight line going down beneath her. After we finished making love, she, lying in my arms, told me her story.
I have kept a man at home. He is younger than me by one year. He does nothing all day. Just sleeps and waits for me till I get home. And that is what I expect him to do, too, because I can afford to keep him that way. I make money here and he waits on me there. He says he loves me but I don’t know what he does when I am not around. I don’t care if you know this because you are a total stranger and because I have not been in the mood for anything today.
We had an argument yesterday. That’s what. I got a bit of cold, so I asked him to buy me some medications in the shop. When he came back with the medications, I found they were not the right ones, so I sent him back to the shop to have them replaced but he refused. Why did you refuse, I said. Did you not see that I was quite ill? Then and there, he turned stubborn. I then said we’d go together but halfway he became nasty again. He threw the medications wrapped in a paper bag down to the ground and squatted there, refusing to move, like a spoiled child.
He’s like that. Men from his place are all like that. They are kept by their women, doing nothing all day but just smoking and drinking then sleeping. He said he was not afraid of me dumping him because he was young and handsome and it wouldn’t be hard for him to find another girl willing to keep him. He did work in a factory for a short while but he gave up, complaining that he was not fit for work, not even born for work.
While he was squatting there in public, everyone was watching. I was made to feel very embarrassed. This upset me so much I decided to go, leaving him there. Tomorrow, I’ll come early to work and won’t bother with him anymore.
As she talked, I found it hard to keep my eyes open, her young body having exhausted me. She wore an eye-hitting pair of Christian Louboutin shoes, with brightred soles, called Declic, which I thought was Derelict; I rather liked my mistaken shoe identity. As I entered her, I said: You are so dry. Her response came from below that it was because she was youthfully tight.
I can’t keep writing this because, for one thing, I’m getting an erection, and, for another, I feel as if someone is watching over my shoulder. I must find a way to keep this in a safe place.
Another detail: While she was licking me, one of her false lashes half fell. She attempted to put it back a few times, but in vain. I watched that half-fallen thing, looking like the broken piece of a black toothbrush, moving up and down as she nodded her head above me.
A line, ‘your eyes/close upon the gift of life/that without cease I give you’, emerged, as if from the depths of my loins, and mind, as I finish today’s entry.
5/6
Early this morning, someone touched my hand and I woke up. It was Y, Yummy, who put a finger over her mouth and said ‘shush’ as she saw terror in my eyes, because my wife was lying next to me on my left, sleeping without a sound.
Now the size of a Barbie, she crept in, nestling against my chest and whispering into my left ear, ‘I love you’, in a voice as beautiful as before, as when she had decided to break up with me. In my semi-confused mind I thought I was dreaming a dream but she was there, her tongue out in search of mine. I was reluctant, knowing that my mouth stank after a night’s accumulation of stagnancies but she insisted, like in the old days when we would touch tongue any time of the day or night, regardless. I gave it to her and she took it as if it were her own, in a way that hurt. I ‘ah’ed and she let go. My wife turned in her sleep, muttering something about my disturbing her.
When I woke up I realized with bitterness that it was a dream and that once gone she would never return. I would categorize her as my nth wife, gone but palpable.
In this morning’s meeting I wasn’t happy with B, head of our publishing house and the Party secretary, as he was making a suggestion about publishing quickies – books that made quick money but had no values. As I was new to this job I kept silent; I had to see what role he assigned me.
To do him justice, he does have values, ones that the Party wants him to adhere to, that is, the socialist core values putting the emphasis on yi ren wei ben, an expression that defies translation but could roughly turn into something like this: with human beings as the roots. To achieve that purpose, books published should contain no sex, little violence, and nothing that might hurt the harmonious relationship between the Han and other ethnic minorities. In a word, books are published to serve the people and to serve socialism by making people feel happy, not otherwise.
Something to remind myself: Have to remit the first lot of money to John towards the purchase of an incense shop and get ready for Wife’s visa.
6/6
Celibacy for a whole day, which is rare these days, but memory makes it worse, so I suppressed it, its assault.
W, short for Wife, was unhappy. She didn’t like me going out too frequently even though I said it was all work related. ‘I feel so lonely sometimes,’ she said. ‘You can go to Australia, then,’ I said. ‘I’m organizing everything for you and it’ll be pretty soon that you’ll live riding on the sheep’s back.’ ‘I’d rather live off a man’s back than a sheep’s back,’ she said, in her forthright manner. ‘And what about her, our daughter?’
‘She’ll definitely go with you,’ I said, remembering what has happened recently, involving the principal of a middle school molesting a number of teenage girls. ‘I wouldn’t want our girl to be eye-raped,’ I said, using a new word I’ve learnt from the Weibo.
I could see why she cheered up when she heard the word ‘Australia’, coupled with the fact about the molestation. She can’t stand China. Too many people. Too much chemical-infested food, with a sky that is never blue or never entirely blue, shrouded in a constant haze that refuses to lift. She daydreams of living overseas. Which she thinks is her destiny. With D, short for our daughter, she’ll enjoy it even more. University matriculation examination is hell that both of us want her to avoid, at any cost. Unlike some parents who stick to their gun or gunho (I’ll have to check if this is the right expression) by waiting and working hard till their kids pass the exam, when they then divorce, we’ll save the trouble and go elsewhere and live in a divorce-like situation of marriage. Where else but Australia, which lots of people have come back from and reported as the last jingtu in the world, jingtu, literally, clean earth, being Sukhavati, Pure Land or Paradise of the West?
I’ll organize payment for the purchase of a house for them in Melbourne or Sydney, perhaps Sydney because it’s been nominated the most liveable city, better than Melbourne as there is the Opera House where photographs of her would do her proud when sent home. Once they are there, all my money will be tucked away in an Australian bank, safe from official scrutiny here.
It’ll be good for me, too. I love to have the freedom of being totally alone, totally free, like an emperor, among my many and varied imperial, no, new-age, concubines. Some time ago, this vulgar man who came to my party in the Green Teahouse with Peter and Samuel proclaimed that he had slept with over 500 women! I tried to picture how that must have felt but I can’t stand the thought of coming into contact with the smell of so many mouths! The guy looked no older than someone in his mid-thirties. How did he manage that? I noticed that neither Peter nor Samuel said a thing. They kept sipping their tea, looking at the man expressionlessly. I couldn’t tell whether they were impressed or not. An absurd thought came to me: Maybe they’ve also done that many themselves?
7/6
The boys are heard talking on a construction site. One of them, the thin one with the long lashes like those of a girl, is telling them a story:
They are doing that, you know, when they find they cannot separate themselves. Whatever they do the man cannot pull his thing out and the girl cannot push him away either. Soon, the girl’s parents will come home. What to do? They cannot do anything till they are discovered. They are discovered eventually. So they are carried to the hospital where they have to be operated on. It soon transpires that to separate them one has to die, either the man or the woman.
I woke up from the dream and found it oddly familiar. It seems to have a significance beyond the simple dilemma. These days the women who come into contact with me are as naked and slippery as fish, and as easily separable. C, who I went to see earlier this evening with them, was one such girl. Afterwards, when we sat on the sofas in the semi-darkness of the hall, watching overhead TV and smoking, H said: I’ve given it to her three times! I rather doubted his prowess. Q smiled feebly, shaking his head, as if he did not believe his own doubts. I pretended I did not hear that. Because I had done someone else earlier, I wasn’t able to ejaculate with C and had to get her to help me out with her hands. Afterwards, I lay in her arms and heard her story or part of her story.
She told me that she had a boyfriend whom she suspected had affairs in her absence. ‘If he does that, I am not much concerned because I can also do it,’ she said. Then she told me that she had another boyfriend in her hometown, a nice fellow who was prepared to wait till she came home. ‘He is a nice one. It is beneath his contempt to make advances to other women; it’s not like him to do that. He’ll wait for me.’
This is a woman who, to excite my taste for the wild or perhaps just to perform one of her duties, tore her black fishnet stockings to pieces before she allowed me the entry. I had to excuse myself by saying that I was not used to the condom. She laughed and said: You don’t know how quickly these other men come. I said: How? She said: The other day I had a young man come in. The minute he saw me his thing stood up to attention and I had scarcely touched him when he ejaculated, pong pah, just like that! I found myself laughing out loud uncontrollably.
I must say she seemed to enjoy her work a lot but I am not one to comment on the morality or values of whatever she does or how she relates to other people. I am more concerned with B as he always must have his own way. I get the feeling that he’ll probably assign me something negligible to do. As Old Sheng, editor of self-published poetry books, is leaving, I might be asked to succeed him. Fingers crossed.
I’ll write about M – short for Metamorphosis – tomorrow as I now am really tired.
Done a few books, including Pale Fire by Nabokov. The poem is okay, but too designed. In fact, that’s what the whole book is. Can’t finish the rest of the notes and stuff. Too pretentious for my liking.
Montaigne is different. The translation is a flawed one but Montaigne comes off as someone full of wit, of a violent kind, sometimes, such as this story he tells of an old man who succeeds in wooing the heart of a beautiful young lady, only to give up on his dick when he realizes that it is incapable of an erection. Totally frustrated, he cuts it off and chucks it away. It is good that, as yet, I do not have that problem. On one occasion, I remember, I did it no less than ten times in a day with J Ro, coming each time. Quite a waste, of body fluids and physical energy, in retrospect. I wonder why I have bothered keeping track of the times.
A bit more on Montaigne. He is a man of self-indulgences to the degree of verbosity, which I dislike. He repeats himself regarding his honesty, his poor memory, and his need to be outspoken, too. I told B that we should not put too much focus on the market but we need to build an aesthetic sense of appreciation. He didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead, he said, a publishing house should be run like a mint, producing books the way money is made, millions of copies worth tens of millions of dollars, as the market is the order of the day and dictates what to publish and what not to. That’s right, I agreed but said to myself under my breath that it was all nonsense. I would rather be managing director of a book publishing house than that of a banknote printer! He had the sense to see that I wasn’t agreeing although I pretended I did. He must have hated my guts, staring at me like I was a total stranger who had just trodden on his big toe without offering an apology. I could see that he also pretended that he didn’t know what I was thinking. But, shortly after, his decision showed: I was to be responsible for looking after self-funded poetry and books of values deemed quite unpublishable unless I made convincing enough recommendations. ‘This is a very important job,’ he said, with a knowing smile.
I consulted Old Sheng and found enough info about book numbers and how to use them. Despite the complexity of it, I’ve worked out that a book number, worth nothing in the international market, could be worth from 10k to 60k, for a mere book, all depending on an editor’s whims.
Interesting, I thought to myself.
Then I thought of M. As long as she is there, hope is there, too. She’s my woman, at my beck and call, even though I have to pay and have to wear the thing.
She came into my room and said she missed me. Without any preamble, we undressed and coupled. Unlike most of the girls in the business, she allowed me to mouth and tongue her, which was a bit scary. When I kissed other girls they turned their faces away, avoiding the kiss as if it were poisonous. I felt disappointed at the same time when I acquiesced in the act as it was a sensible one. With her, there was no problem, her mouth agape, swallowing mine up, my tongue pulled as it was being sucked into her depths, to breaking point.
Pretty soon, I made the entry, encountering no resistance from her as she did not stop to ask me to put it on as the likes of her would have instinctively done, reaching for their tiny bags of aids and tools. I was all the way in, as deeply as I could, her eyes closed as were mine, each probably seeing different pictures. I saw the goner, my eternal lover, as imperfect as lovable, and as unholy as lovely. I wonder why I have chosen to settle for loss, for the loss. When she was with me, clinging to me, loving me without giving me a break, I detested her, I found her sweet words nauseating and I even wished for someone else as I was deeply engaging in the act of lovemaking, hatemaking too in a way because I hated the goner, the misser, the person gone missing that I loved so much.
Afterwards, I lit a cigarette for her and for myself and, reclining against the bedstead, heard her story of how she had split up with her boyfriend.
It’s the GPS, yes, the GPS on my mobile phone that helped me track him down to a nearby hotel. He was with a bought woman in a hotel room, a hotel that I was familiar with. I hailed a taxi and directly headed for it. I stormed into his room, catching them red-handed in bed, right in the act!
I looked at her face through the rising smoke that screened my face, wondering about the amazing power of modern gadgets. I looked around but did not see her mobile phone. I sighed with relief: She hasn’t recorded a video of our lovemaking on it. I wouldn’t want to see our photos on Weibo, no.
‘What?’ she said, hearing my sigh.
‘Oh, nothing,’ said I. Then I related a story I had heard, of how four men were eating and drinking while four women were underneath the table mouthing them, one of them having difficulty because she had a piece of vegetable caught in her teeth preventing her doing a smooth blow job.
She laughed as she said, ‘Did she manage to extract it?’
The guy was cleared of his crime or almost. Right from the beginning, I, along with nearly all my friends, believed that it was a set-up. Who would want to fuck an ugly face? Not even for free. Not even getting paid to unless you were a duck, a male prostitute.
Talking about the ducks, Sam told me last night how they thrived on the sugar mums – if there are such things as counterparts of sugar daddies – who were rich enough to pay for their services. One such duck was told to hold his thing steady and erect for three days for one rich lady’s satisfaction until he deflated, like a pricked balloon, dying then and there, in his early thirties.
Sex, a keyword of our times, is like a poisoned liquid that seeps into the minds of everyone, including women, right down to teens. Are we hoping one day we’ll find a baby pregnant with a smaller baby even before it is born?
I made love to her last night. It is so rare these days that the only way I can rely on to make it successful is to resort to my memory. The second I went in the woman gone missing came back, she came alive, she became her, she was underneath, screaming as she uttered loving words, the harder you hit her the louder she screamed, with increasing pleasure. At one stage I felt that I was like a wall flat against her wall when I went all the way in, the act of impinging producing an explosive sound only flesh coupled with flesh tearing into the flesh was capable of making. Afterwards, I fell dead inside her, then beside her, and soon went into sleep.
I have not convinced B of the need to purchase the copyright of On the Heights of Despair. He is a man so full of optimism that Cioran’s dark sentiments pale beside his bubbly zest for a book-strapped world, each page a foil of gold. I, for one, feel the temptation of the abysmal instincts, destructively alluring, that often plunge me into helplessness after a shower of pleasure.
10/6
M told me she loved books, which isolated her from the rest of the crowd. The other isolating factor, she revealed, was that she was hui, a Muslim. I said: But you look no different from other Chinese girls. She said: Oh, yes, I do. My hair is slightly yellowish. My eyelashes are, too. I took a look at her but still could not detect any differences, perhaps because the room with the curtains drawn was not light enough. I let her go on with her story.
She comes from a mining town in the North where the Huis and the Hans are living together but separately. Her father, a mining boss, his health wrecked from drinking and smoking heavily because of the need to entertain his clients, is now lying in bed, half paralysed. Her mother, doing nothing at home, and supported with the savings from her father’s mining business, has grown into a huge mass of flesh, her waist ‘this big’, she indicated with her hands in the shape of the Rubber Duck. She herself has graduated from a tailor’s school, a polytechnic, and, because of the difficulty in finding a job, not to say a decent one, has chosen this line of business to make money till further opportunities arise. If she stops doing it, as I suggested, there is no income.
I offered her a cigarette, which she took and lit up. After only a few draws, she stopped and complained that she was suffering from a smoking-related ‘drunkenness’. I found her description intriguing.
The place does not suit her, she said, because there are so few restaurants catering to the Hui minority. She does not eat pork or anything pork-related, finding it smelly and dirty. I remember the novel by Huo Da, a Hui woman writer, in which the Huis are represented as a beautiful, artistic and highly moral people as negatively contrasted with the Hans, who are cunning and deceptive. I told her so and she said she had not read the book, not expressing a desire to read it, either, although she said to me that her grandmother kept her house so clean no one else’s house could match it.
She also revealed that she had had a hard time at school. The school rules and regulations meant that she did not have a holy place, not even a hiding place, to pray. She managed to find her own secret spot by her bed in the shared dormitory room, where she knelt and prayed in silence each and every night behind a mosquito net after the lights were switched off.
I would not have asked her back but for her revelation that she had studied art at school, perhaps because of my own inclination towards the more artistic, the talented people, although in my early days of flower-searching, I had encountered more uncouth, less educated and no less honest ones.
At home, W claims I am not interested in her any more but I am. I need this marriage to last, to be sustainable, solidity better than liquidity. And the good thing is that I can manage to come each time we make love.
Wang Ming, a poet whose name I have never heard of, sent me a manuscript and insisted that I read it before I reject or accept it. After I flipped through it, my eye caught a poem that goes:
You I wanted
I wanted to love you
But I can’t
They do
I wanted to love you
But I can’t
I think of the seeds I sowed
What a waste of my youth
I wanted to love you
But I can’t
A bed is always meant for two
But one doesn’t know who’s the other you
I wanted to love you
But I can’t
I look down at my loins
They do
A bit anal, I thought, banal, that is, although it seems quite close to the core, a man’s concern. There’s no market for such things, though, I think. I thought of immediately rejecting it, thinking of B’s dismissal of such books in a remark he once made, half-jokingly: In our age, we do not need poets any more; if they want to kill themselves, they’d better do that thick and fast before they get killed, but I laid it aside for the moment as I wanted to wait till my thoughts settled down.
B, on the other hand, can be glibly enthusiastic, given a different setting, e.g. in a company meeting, attended by all and sundry, in which he would give his support for books, including poetry, written in praise of the Party and the socialist system. I could tell that he didn’t believe a word of it and I know for certain that such books, if written by officials occupying powerful positions, can sell well through official channels at the government’s expense.
11/6
The new girl, fresh from the university, was quite shy when she came to work today, her first day, but, in one glance, I could see that she looked nice, her features soft, tender and freshly pale. She wore light brown leather boots, flat soled, which I think could be heeled to make her taller. Since she graduated from the English department, I spoke to her in English and found that she was quite fluent although she was a tad slow.
Over lunch, Sam revealed to me that he had split up with his girlfriend. According to him, it was a good riddance to bad rubbish. The woman was a dead bore, who clung to him like a piece of chewed gum. It was beyond his comprehension why women nowadays are more aggressive than their male counterparts two decades ago, going for their liked men, not even loved men, the way men went for the enemy-occupied cities, never giving up till they captured them.
Thus far, I have not experienced what he had; I would have thought it exciting and exhilarating to be pursued and loved, adored like a baby doll. All the women I have loved and made love to seem as transient as a wisp of smoke issuing from my burning, but shortening cigarette. The minute you chuck the butt, the way you chuck the wrapped semen, they are gone. But for the occasional photographs, you can’t even remember their faces as they all blur into one of an enormous woman cloud.
AA has a goose-egg face, whose creamy-whiteness is sharply contrasted with her rosy fleshy lips. Her raven hair, reaching down to her nipples, parts like a curtain, to reveal her single-lidded eyes, big and black. She may have made-up but not in a heavy-handed way. After she gave me a salt bath, which she said would relax me and cure me of skin conditions, if any, she laid herself down in preparation for my entry. When I did, and increased my speed, she was beside herself as she kept saying: Oh, it’s so good! Fuck my tiny little cunt! I like it so much. Fuck harder, harder please! Oh, you are so steely and so hard!
Sam went with me that night but he chose an oil pusher and told me afterwards that he had shot into her mouth. He said that it had saved a lot of labour as usually it was the girl who got the most out of it, not the paying man. Why pay hard and work hard to please a woman when you can pay for her to work on you?
Huhm, you’ve got real sense, I said to Sam and thought to myself: Why do I seem to enjoy the physical labour more?
12/6
In his submitted book of poetry, the poet says, ‘Truth does not wear a condom whereas lies wear lipstick daily.’ I am still in two minds about recommending it to B despite the poet’s offer to self-fund the publication.
M has disappeared altogether even though I gave her my number. Curiously, she said she did not carry a mobile phone because she had left it at home. Sounds like a lie. But if she decides not to contact me does that not mean something? Perhaps I am too old for her? Or she finds my uttering endearments a bit too much, as if I were treating her like a true lover or someone else I was addressing in my mind, using her as an aid?
Love is lust. I love, therefore I become lustful. The process is more like this, a triple L: I like, I love, I lust; it is never quadruple L, because it never contains the word ‘last’ as it does not last.
The poet also openly expresses his ideal of polygamy, with one man married to multiple women. He can keep that a secret wish or rave about it among his friends but this will never be allowed into print, not in this day and age. If I do, B wouldn’t.
He should know that there is no need for that. An ordinary man of today is a citizen-emperor who can love and lust as many women as he can afford to, the way an emperor did without paying in the past. So, why worry supporting a large battalion of wives while you can come into contact with every total stranger, totally beautiful strangers, stranger-ness being synonymous with beauty, familiarity wearing one down and tiring one out, each and every night? There’s no escaping the fact that ours is an age charged with sex, in which the saying ‘strike while the iron is hot’ could be changed to ‘strike while the cock is hard and before you go hard’. Speaking of that, I recall what Sam said about the fall pill.
According to him, the Viagra is good but it has a few problems, one of which is that it stands you in good stead, literally, that is, in hard stead, maintaining the erection for long stretches of time, making one very uncomfortable, from his own experience. However, after his friend introduced him to a ‘fall pill’, a pill that could instantly knock the full erection flat, he no longer has had the problem.
I, for one, will not touch either the stand-up pill or the fall-down pill. For me, youth is the best pill.
13/6
But this one I had earlier this evening isn’t quite youthful although she is full of lust of a kind that I appreciate. Compared with Acacia whose breasts are hard to grab, hard not only in the sense of difficulty but also in the sense of solid, Banksia has breasts that sway, bob and fill and overfill your hands till you have to hold them with your arms and slip your face in between. When she opened up, I noticed a brown mole near the right lip of her vagina, the lip fanning out like a slice of a human ear. I do not recall having seen anything like that before, but to have these ear-like lips wrapping, and lapping, around your member - a joke someone told emerged that to join the Party is to become a member - is to experience the initial sensation of going inside a furcoated house. Everything on her has depths: her mouth, so large and warm, that buries my member, not a Party one, not even wanting to be one; her twat, so large that I could feel that my balls were wet when I ploughed in; and her eyes, so dark and deep that I felt dizzy when I looked into them. She had a number of tiny little moles lined up alongside her nose on the right side but their existence enhances rather than reduces her carnal allure. It’s a face, when made-up, that I would love to make love to again and again. She didn’t tell me her age nor did I ask but judging by the size of her pussy and the mellow timbre of her voice I suspect she’s around 30, at least 28. That’s fine. I wouldn’t mind someone slightly older than 25. Anyone around the 20-year mark is aphrodisiac enough. And I like the red leather bra she was wearing as well as the blue tattoo on the back of her left hand: a Chinese character, jia, family. When I ejaculated, my eyes wandered to where the character was and I was swept by a feeling of curiosity, mixed with guilt.
She told me her story: My boyfriend was a beast. He stopped loving me after I got pregnant. He wanted me to get an abortion but I refused. I wanted the baby. I particularly wanted a girl. In the few months that followed, he disappeared. We had met in a hotel. I was then working in the hotel as a headwaitress and, on the side, I made a bit of money with clients like him. I did because that is what everybody did in those days; at least girls of my age did as the money one made from one’s wages was so little. There was so much one wanted to buy: cosmetics, clothes and things that made one look cool, such as sunglasses, mobile phones and stuff. So we met and became friends. He gave me 60k and asked me to start running a shop. Then he was gone. To please him, I aborted the baby. It was so bloody and painful when they opened me up and pulled the mass of meat out. I vowed to never let a man enter me again. But pretty soon I used up all the money; I spent it all on things. They were so expensive, such as this Estee Lauder and Lancôme that you have to wear if you are a woman. They are poisonous, in a way, because after repeated use your skin seems worn out by simply wearing them. Look at me: am I a bit tired and weary looking? My skin is no longer as good and soft as before. But if I do not make myself pretty no one bothers looking at me on the street. I want people to look at me, to gaze at me, because I can feel proud of myself that way.
It was not till then that I saw there was a long thin scar on her right arm. I didn’t ask her why it was there although I was concerned that my seed might germinate in her, her body seemingly such a wealthy mine for growth. I gave her the money and told her to go, in a gentle but firm voice.
14/6
The Chinese saying, qiong ze du shan qi shen, fu ze jian ji tian xia, that when you are poor you improve your body by yourself and when you are rich you help relieve the world, is interesting in the contemporary context because of its added sexual connotation. Ji is understood to mean ‘to tide over’, ‘to cross’ and ‘to help’, but because of its water-related image it could also be interpreted thus: a man, or rather a member, in a powerful position, is able to relieve the female world by showering them with gold.
Got rid of Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a real boring book that I have stopped bothering about by p. 83. The only thing memorable is perhaps these two lines that go, ‘Lovemaking is not everything. Good looks/Are not that indispensable!’
Humph, makes sense, in a curious sort of way, my way.
Talking about that, something that was exchanged between us at lunch today comes back to haunt me. I said, Love is suspect. P said, But it doesn’t exist in the first place. S said, Yes, it does, but all it wants is money and never tires of wanting more.
No books about love are as honest as our conversation about love or lack of it.
15/6
Michel Houellebecq seems more contemporary than the rest in that he tends to be controversial. These two words sharing the head letter ‘C’ must co-exist. Everything else is designed and calculated for a catch, a C that conflicts with the other two Cs. Have made a recommendation to B despite my reservations about him, a man, not unlike me, very much into the beauty, or the ugly beauty, of things, or, to be more exact, of the faces.
Speaking of the faces, I must say I like the new girl’s teeth when they are revealed in a big smile, so neat, so white and so enticing. Words are trite. Have got to see them daily to make me feel that liking is probably better than loving and sexing although it dangerously tends to be the first step on the downward thrust into the abysmal and inevitable depths of sex that returns with a feeling of hollowness.
W was a little like that when we first met, God, how many years ago was that? I tremble at the thought of having an affair with such a fresh flower, picked only to wither, like all other flowers, bought to be gazed at and ravished. Not really worth it, and yet, the only way. Why waste the resources if they are available?
Sam’s story again. Nothing impossible, he began. Zhu, my billionaire friend, set his sights on this lovely girl working in a five-star hotel he happened to check in to one day. Once he deemed her the most beautiful girl and the freshest he had ever seen he would not budge from that position. What’s more, he wanted to make it with her but met with a flat rebuttal. What has a 20-year-old got to do with a half-century man? She’s not a common girl selling her organ for a fee, night after night. Zhu got his friend to approach her, with a case of cash: 5,000 bucks. The girl said no. Zhu got his friend to go back to her again, this time with 50,000! The girl wavered a bit but held her ground, with another resolute ‘no’ but not as resounding. Zhu laughed and said to his man: Go with more. I have yet to see a woman purer than money. When the sun of 500,000 was presented, the girl melted like ice before the sum (I think the sum should swap places with the sun but I’ll fix it later as this is not for any prying eye anyway), finally brought to her knees, her purity reduced to a palatable piece of meat.
That’s life as it is being lived now. And good for the girl, too, whose instrument will go rusty if not practised in time for the maximum profit, like a flower which will die on its own if not picked, purchased and pushed, not to say perfected.
M offered a sum in the hundreds of thousands USD for a crucial piece of info but I’ll have to give it careful thought. Besides, he promised to take me out tomorrow for a double fly, having a twosome. Got to be extra-careful as someone has revealed in his blog about a case of corruption involving a publisher in a northern city stealing millions of RMB by transferring the proceeds from the sales into his own account.
16/6
In this ka la ok bar, called something like Drifting, Driven, Dropped, that M took me to, we were led into a darkened cave of a song room, complete with the wall-screen, the electronic ka la ok selector, a glass tabletop of food and beer, and more girls than we could settle for, whose faces I could hardly distinguish one from another. In this postmodern cliché of a formidable collective foreplay, vision gave place to senses, predominately the olfactory, as one smelled the pungent body odours of the thinly clad girls, two of whom had sandwiched me before I knew it. Here, things became sharp-pointed: the sharp-pointedness of their tits, of their finger-nails, of my fingertips touching their tits, of their pointed shoes, of their heels, erect as thin and hard penises, and even of their gelled spiky hair. And, of course, of my own non-Party member, straight as a sword.
One girl had a self-styled name, Po Sen, and the other one, Kristy. Because of the loud music, I thought I heard Poison and Creepy. Thereafter, I just called them that and they giggled ceaselessly.
I started with a song, called, ‘A Man Has Three Flowers a Life’, with these words:
They say a man has three flowers a life
A narcissus and a rose
But I wish to be the most beautiful carnation
To give you warmth and to nurse your wound
Poison and Creepy, one in my right arm and the other in my left, swayed from side to side with the rhythm of the song, amazed how well I sang. I was feeling pleased with my own vulgarity, paying to be reduced to the same level as P and C. Thrilling, too, was their age: P was 18 and C, 19!
Later on, the two girls tortured me with pleasure until I fell into exhaustion. All I can remember now is before I shot into C I pulled out in time and was about to enter P when she stopped me to get me to replace the condom with a new one. I came inside P while letting C smear my face with her black lipstick until her lips were returned to their original normal colour.
The girls, as I understand it, were first-year university students. In Creepy’s absence – she went to the loo to perhaps re-make-up – Poison told me that she hardly went to classes these days; she could easily get a dozen of boy students infatuated with her to do her homework. She did not have to buy her breakfast as it was ready for her before she was even out of bed! As for her male teachers, she could easily victimize – that’s the word she used – them with her looks; they’d do anything for her. From that point of view, I should consider myself a lucky guy. But I thought of her with regret: a youth trashed for the mere money.
17/6
I paid a visit to my sick father. He’s suffering from prostate cancer. Doesn’t seem to have long to live. As soon as he saw me come into the ward, he said: Stop wrecking your health! You look like a ghost of your former self.
I recalled once asking him if he had had affairs in the past. He laughed but did not say anything. He did say that our grandfather had two concubines, the ones he called ‘aunties’, apart from my grandmother. That created in me an instant wish for a return to the old days but the wish died as instantly when, according to Father, a man must be responsible for all the wives he had, ensuring financial security for each and every one of them. That seemed a burden, I thought to myself. It is easier to love and leave, loving transiently and leaving permanently, in a way that makes every woman a new woman regardless of how many men they have previously gone through or the other way round, been gone through.
I am not sure about The Savage Detectives. I’ve managed to only get to p. 180, over a number of years. I won’t make the recommendation to B. There is some pretty savage sex in that book but in this society sex is what one practises but does not read about; one doesn’t need to read about it, having been surfeited.
Over dinner, I noticed that D – our daughter – had her fingernails painted black. It was startling to see the glaring allure symbolized therein. I taunted her with it, so she put down her chopsticks and refused to eat. It took W a long time to bring her around. Then it was her turn to taunt me with being unfair to D: Can’t you be considerate enough not to hurt a 16-year-old’s feelings?
Had a quickie with W before I rose to put this down, just to say how pleasureless it was to come back to her after all those nights. Still, I managed to come although she bitterly complained that I was so perfunctory and that whatever came out did not amount to much: a few drops, in her brutal expression. And then, too, she wondered if I was having affairs outside home. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a book, titled, Multiple Sex Partners. Ah, well, I thought to myself, and said, Do you?
The message was instantly put across and understood that in this day and age a couple should be content with their own separate sex lives as long as neither sees the other engaged in it with someone else, as exactly described in the book.
We didn’t argue, there being no need for it. Instead, I told her how an old friend of mine managed to have sex with many women while maintaining a solid companionship with his wife and that his wife, keen to keep the relationship going, didn’t particularly want to know.
She must have some sort of sexual problems then, she said.
I have no idea what the matter is, I said. But no one’s life is anyone else’s measurement nor should it be.
I find it hard to romanticize the women I met. Sex is one thing but money is quite another. Banksia, for example, never ceases to ask for more, in a way that synchronizes with mine, she for more money and I for more sex. But her reason, though honest, sounds awful: I need money. I am not a bank even though her name is Banksia. I suggest that she change the name to simply Sia, which she happily accepted as long as I paid her as much as she wants and more than she should get. Her cunt was the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen, resembling the freshest salmon meat when sliced open, the hair around it even and young, like a cluster of dewy grass in the morning sun. Although she never asks why I want so much sex, I can tell her if she does: I don’t know, I honestly don’t know. I just want it out, for some reason. It’s as natural as the sky that wants to rain after a period of drought or that sometimes just wants to keep raining, for no reason at all.
I was amused by the thought that came to me while I was sitting on the bowl this morning, of an old expression that goes, ‘one’s body is one’s revolutionary capital’, which can aptly be revised and updated as ‘one’s body is one’s sexual revolutionary capital’.
Had a dinner with the five women, all divorcees, all wanting to get their books published, and all introduced by Sam. They were so made-up that I was scared that their lipstick might smear their chopsticks that picked the duck or pork or chicken as they insisted that I eat them. I ignored their advances, finding them slightly unpleasant and less than stimulating, and concentrated on the drinks. By the end of the dinner, I forgot their names. All I can remember now is they squeezed me between themselves and caressed my hand like a baby while bursting into laughter. We didn’t touch lips or faces, these women in their mid-30s or early 40s were decent enough to refrain themselves from that. We sang songs and drank more beer. I let them take photographs of me with them, in a half-tipsy way, and heard them giggling without knowing why. It was not till much later when I got a number of photos from them that I understood. In one photo, they described me as a ‘Bonbon Baby’. In another, I am standing next to a woman with curly hair that looks like a poodle’s, with a caption below that goes: Con him, crush him and conquer him! I threw it down and shredded it, saying to myself: That is absolutely ridiculous.
Divorced, they seem full of zheng nengliang, or positive energy, or love, in this instance, more love, in fact, as the title of a poetry book, My Love Lies Elsewhere, suggests, written by the longest-faced woman with a lot of gums exposed when she grins. I don’t know if she is aware of the twist of meanings in that title but I saw fit not to reveal it to her. Judging from the photos that feature them, in which their faces shine with decorative oil, I congratulated myself that I had not touched them in the ka la ok bar or else my face would have been turned into an oily canvas itself.
I remember the girl in the past that is W now. As far as I know, she never applied any cosmetic stuff to her own person in those days and yet her lips were redder and her face was tenderer and creamier than an 18-year-old now. 20 years ago you could drink from a creek where I came from without getting poisoned but now every creek and every river is polluted, not only with chemicals and medicals but also with human wastes. I suspect that even the bottled mineral water is poisonous, not to say the air we are breathing in on a daily basis.
Speaking of that, I am once again reminded of the need, now urgent, to send W and D to Australia, a country where, I heard, the poor are fat and the rich are thin, and shops are not open on Sundays, much better than China where people go out and eat past midnight. Mere pigs.
Some short poems in that submission, almost axiomatic, are publishable, such as this: ‘One talks about sustainability in everything except that of love’. I record this knowing that love is the least sustainable with people, with women. Goldenrod - I told her it’s not a right name, not even a good name, but she insisted on it - my previous lover, left me when she got pregnant. I told her to abort it but she refused. I asked how much she wanted, she named a figure and I agreed. As long as the baby was gone, I wouldn’t mind. Instead, she kept the money and the baby but chose to disappear, without a trace. I have no idea where she is now. Not a single smn or call. When I fished out her letter, one in which she confessed her love for me, I started wondering. Is ‘I love you’ such a facile thing to say these days, to whoever one is caught in love or making love with in the thick of it? I must have been a fool to believe in the sincerity of it, to believe that one day we might be living together, in another new life.
However passionate and deep one’s love is, it tends to peter out like a brisk fire that burns with passion and heat, only to burn itself out at the end of the day. Peter - what a name in association with the phrase ‘peter out’ -had an affair with Third, the third daughter in her family, a pretty girl who did frames for his paintings, but had to marry a Singaporean woman when he went to Sydney. Third fought tooth and claw to stop him from marrying and going. According to Sam, Third threatened suicide but didn’t; instead, she left scratch marks all over Peter’s back, traces of love when gone, turned sour and resentful.
Love seems to have two faces, one loving, the other hating. Sue is a typical example. Like the name ‘Peter’, this name is portentous. I would run miles away from any woman by that name because who knows if she is not going to Sue you one day? In fact, when a girl I loved reported that her name was Sue, I said: It’s not a name you should have. I’d much prefer you call yourself ‘Su’ or ‘Soo’. In fact, Soo with two holes in it is infinitely preferable to Su with a ‘u’. She seemed to like it and said: I’ll think about it.
Sue, according to the news I had read, took her husband to court for raping her. I couldn’t believe such absurdities, an absolute mockery of marriage as a sacred institution. In the future, a man probably will have to agree to a fee with his wife before she allows him to make love to her. Then why bother marrying? It saves a lot of trouble and it makes more sense to pay a fee to make love with anyone one chooses. By the look of things to come, marriage is going to be more like a scary institution than a sacred one.
I met Soo in Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, a place that provides a combination of services, ranging from manicuring to sauna to cannon beating, or bonking. I managed to steal a card bearing all the services in quite amazing names: Roaming, Water Mill, Mandarin Duck Bath, Poisonous Dragon, Swings, Red Ropes, Burning Fire on the Ice Mountain, Oral Communications, Push Oil, Wave Push, Salt Milk Bath, Double Flying, Anus Licking, Back Knocking, Ice Fire, Beating the Airplane, Ants Climbing the Tree, Mouth Job, Explosive Mouth, Foot Licking, Flying in the Air, Barrel Bath, Four Seas, and Sucking the Skin.
As I looked over it, I asked Soo what each meant and she couldn’t come up with an answer as she was sucking the skin on my back, lifting it to its limit and, with a ‘baa’, releasing it. I wasn’t particularly impressed with that until she, with a ‘you’ll know it when it comes to that’, put a plastic bag on each of my naked feet and began gently biting them, first the right foot, then the left. The sensation it caused was wonderfully pleasant; I could feel the heat of her tongue as it wandered from toe to toe and from heel to heel. Poison Dragon, as she later revealed, did no more than put the tip of her tongue inside my anus, licking it as deep as she could go. After an initial round, I told her to stop as that made me itch.
After my ejaculation, Soo lay in my arms, like a true lover, and told me of her visit to Dubai and how she would love to catch the attention of an Arab prince. She wouldn’t mind their system of polygamy as it was one of equality, as far as she knew, in which each wife was well looked after. ‘Much better than one man lording it over you,’ she concluded.
21/6
Read a news item online today about a man in his early 50s who died in bed after making love with a xiaojie. When they found him, the girl had gone and the man lay half naked, with clothes on but no pants. The cause of death was reportedly a sudden heart attack. Lately, there have been quite a number of deaths in bed like that, one involving the principal of a school and the other, a quite well-known actor. Despite the ancient wisdom that says to die among the flowers is to die a lascivious hero, I baulk at going further along the line, perhaps not till we go to Australia at the end of the month.
The book that B has brought back from Frankfurt, along with a large bundle of other titles, is Erotica Universalis by Gilles Neret. He said, with a winning wink: It’s for you. Without a word, I took the hint. Whatever books he deemed unpublishable he would happily pass on to me, after sampling through them. But why did he buy it in the first place? Of course, it wouldn’t cost him anything; it’s all reimbursed. Perhaps it’s because I showed an irresistible tendency towards the wanton and dissolute? But I am sure he must have enjoyed the pictures even if he can’t read the language.
‘Woman of Easy Virtue’,1 done in 1903 by Pablo Picasso, is good, graphically simple and evocative: a standing man and a squatting woman, the man fully clothed except where his dick pokes out and the woman starkly naked, taking half of the dick in her mouth. It was the same then and it is the same now. Sam said: But I can’t ejaculate in a woman’s mouth however hard and long she works on it. I recall him saying he dumped it all on the spoon of a xiaojie’s curved tongue after he had used his hand for the purpose. Even in the porn DVDs
I have watched, the men have to resort to their hands to achieve the final purpose of puking, anatomically, that is, or erotically. The thought came to me that this book might be considered for publication if not recommended outright. In today’s China, things are much more confronting, much more insidious, and much more physically permissive than a decade or so back as it is good for the economy; they could be food for artistic thought as artists need inspirations, or else it would all stagnate at an animalistic level. Still, I am not sure because B may object on the basis of market and censorship.
Talking about the C word, there are so many things not allowed into print. Nothing gay or lesbian. No graphic sex. No The Satanic Verses. No Mao: The Unknown Story, books forbidden to be translated, let alone published. Nothing offensive to ethnic tastes. Nothing against the positive image of Chinese people and China. Absolutely nothing about official corruption. As a colleague once said: Castrate your mind before you enter into this business.
Strangely, lines from a gay poem come to mind, written by someone pen-named Grave Grass,
Old Ruan refused (the call girl)
But continued his tongue job and his mouth job –
Like a burning fish that swam across every inch of my skin
Sucking my balls off like a vacuum cleaner2
Such stuff can only exist on the Internet, like grass on a grave, as his name suggests, for bad-taste mourners.
The girl who allowed me to take photographs is now in my hand. Bearing a number 62, she is wearing a black bra, with a white fluff in the front, a head full of black hair, tied up in a white flowery lace. Her eyes, single-lidded, are black, too. Although she did not allow me to enter my tongue in her mouth, she did, aesthetically, allow my second tongue into her second mouth, in and out, many times, and, as I put it, the Buddhist way that is in and the Taoist way that is out.
23/6
Daffodil is the girl I love best. As things are, the more you love a person, the less likely that person is to be with you for long. One has to live with her disappearance one winter, never to appear again, and an expectation that she will somehow turn up somewhere. Of all the sexual episodes I have had with her, one stays in memory for always, lasting longer than the rest. One evening, in her rented apartment, I was eating dinner at the table, sitting across from her, when she bent down as if to pick up something that had dropped on the floor. I was mystified as to what she wanted to do. Soon, it dawned on me that she wanted to perform an oral on my phallus, from under the table! There I was, biting on a succulent chicken drumstick above while she was sucking on my cock underneath, fresh from the open fly. I came right in her mouth as my own mouth also came, swamped with a surging flood of phlegm. When she crept from under the table, she started kissing me with her semen-filled mouth, returning the rest to me after swallowing some. For the first time, I tasted my own semen on her mouth, an experience like no other.
Once, on another occasion, when I arrived at her apartment, she let me in and closed the door behind us. I was pleasantly surprised to see her wearing only a pink dress with nothing underneath, standing in a pair of super-high-heeled shoes, her face made up in a most sexy way. I was immediately aroused and made love to her then and there.
How I want to do it like that again in the physical absence that is a mental presence!
Ours is such a highly sexualized society that if a man is left alone with himself for longer than half an hour he feels unwanted and starts dreaming of having a mouth taking his cock inside it. That’s how I feel about things in general. Only the other day, B, in going through hundreds of applications sent for a sub-editor’s job, joked that qualifications mattered much less than looks. After all, it is the looks that would make him and other males in this publishing house tick whereas an ugly woman with a PhD would only dampen the general spirit, worse if she had a temper because of her superior qualifications; no one would stand a taunting female walking brains on a daily basis.
How right Maugham was when he said, ‘The three duties of woman. The first is to be pretty, the second is to be well-dressed, and the third is never to contradict.’ The two first duties are perfectly observed here and elsewhere in my country but the last one, poor Maugham, is constantly opposed, I’m afraid.
My position is slightly at risk here as the PhD degree I’ve earned in Chinese language and literature may not stand me in good stead, placing me as it does at the centre of attention and jealousy in comparison with all the rest of them whose highest level of qualifications is a mere MA and one editor has no qualifications whatsoever, a mere primary school leaver, managing to get up the ladder by an accumulation of publications in literary magazines, large and small, in the country.
The girl’s mother, a 40ish woman, came to see me about the possibility of securing a job for her daughter. She came by herself. When I pulled up a chair for her, I noticed she was wearing a low-cut dress that revealed much of her breast, the dress black, with enticing lace. And she had put on such a profuse dosage of perfume that I was concerned I might have difficulty expelling it afterwards and my office might become the talk of the publishing house should they happen to also come in and smell it. Her shoes were decidedly unsightly as they were like two pieces of slices cut from a fat cake, although I must say her skin was fairer than most of my female colleagues. She carried two bags of presents as she came in and I waved them off. But she insisted, so I told her to leave them in a corner. She said that Sam had introduced her and that her daughter, near graduation, was keen on the position of a sub-editor. I told her the usual things about the stringent selection process and the requirement for a professional resume. When I finished and she rose to go, we shook hands and it was in that moment that I felt her hand linger a tad longer in my grasp, reluctant, it seemed, to let go. I looked at her and caught this glitter in her black eyes. Remembering something, I picked up a card and gave it to her but she said: I’ve got it already.
After disappearing for weeks, M has reappeared, with a short message to my phone, saying that she missed me. I saved her number, putting it under Meta, and deleted the message.
I hesitated late this afternoon when N called, the 40ish woman who was dressed up like a 20-year-old girl. Women of her age seem to be quite into doing that these days. The other day, when I took a walk outside on the street, I noticed a quite charming girl walking in high heels and a back-revealing dress. I looked and looked and then, as if my gazing had the effect of turning her head back, she turned her head back and met my eyes. In that instant, I realized with regret that those eyes were embedded in a face decades older than I had thought, revealing an anxiety deep within about their passing youth and lingering potency.
She rang that she had booked a private room for two, at somewhere I have not heard of, something called Humble Abode. It looked humble on the outside, next to a construction site that anyone would overlook when going past, but it was handsomely laid out inside, with elegant calligraphy and paintings. As soon as I was led into the private room, two lines written in a flowing style caught my eye, in the scroll hanging down the wall: ‘I wish the moment would last/in which we share this moonlight apart, over a thousand miles’. It was the word ‘wish’ in this poem of Su Shi’s that momentarily arrested my attention. Right, I thought to myself as I realized that I, in giving attention to Su Shi’s poem, had neglected the woman walking up to me and extending her hand. I was slightly taken aback as she seemed to be the woman-girl I had seen on the street, in the same back-exposing dress and heels high enough to tip her bodily balance. She did something that changed the power relationship - if there was such thing - when she pulled me into her arms, ever so reluctantly on my part, and held me in a Western-style embrace that, as a rule, I find embarrassing. The evening could be summarized in one word: let. I let her order more than we both could consume and I let her take me to Metropark Hotel and give herself to me in her entirety, all in my total unpreparedness.
I must say the whole thing was a total flop, so humiliating and embarrassing. Wherever I attacked her, condom-less, from before or behind, from above or below, I just couldn’t come, not even when she decided to use her mouth, then her hands. That seriously led to my contemplation on the idea of beauty. A man’s phallus, the origin of his life force, erects its head at the sight of beauty but hangs its head when seeing something unsightly. It seems as natural as the sky is above the earth and the night follows the day. Unless the mind were trained to love the ugly, the dick will follow where beauty is alive despite the realities often to the contrary, as the popular saying goes, haohan wu haoqi, chouhan qu huazhi (a good man is matched with no good wife whereas an ugly man is married with a bloom along the bough), perhaps a balance set by an invisible force.
25/6
Nasturtium’s story goes as follows. Oh, I must say she isn’t that repulsive; she is just a bit too rich for me in the sense of cosmetics and decorative stuff. As someone put it, it’s like a piece of meat a few days too old that needs dressing up.
She said that she had divorced her husband a few years earlier, having found out about his affairs. Because she initiated the divorce proceedings, it had to be a naked process in what people refer to as luoli, naked divorce, in which she walked away from her marriage a naked woman, without her daughter, without her husband and without her properties, not even her share of them. That’s how determined she was: wanting absolutely nothing from her marriage. Instead, she set up her own company, selling children’s clothes, at the same time when she found a man, someone much younger than her. She wanted to keep him for her own pleasures.
I was fascinated by her story and was once again reminded of another friend’s life story: Married but living apart from her husband, Ang, the film director, 40, lives with her son and a male artist, 60, from Paris. People don’t worry about these things any more. They take their lives, or the law of their lives, into their own hands and their own minds.
Neverthelss, she has a secret agenda that she revealed to me: She wanted her daughter to get the job and needed my help through Sam, a middle-school classmate of hers. I was surprised at her daring and regretted losing control on account of her mighty killer heels and her overpowering perfume. But I suppose I can give her a bit of nudge here and there along the way when opportunities avail themselves.
26/6
While My Love Lies Elsewhere falls far short of my expectation, I admit it is a perfectly acceptable book for publication as long as its author can afford to subsidize it, not only to the publishing house but also to me; forgettable books like that touch no one but can blow up the sense of contentment, even superiority, on the part of their authors. They serve as social lipstick and mascara, to be used when making up and dumped when removing it.
These days, bribing has become so rampant that an Australian businessman Sam knows said to me over dinner the other day that he’d play the Chinese game any way we wanted. By that he meant that he’d be willing to bribe his way to successful business deals. Because Sam’s English wasn’t good enough, I had to assist. I noticed that the Australian man was quite stingy. At the end of the dinner, he gave me a yellow kangaroo badge for my effort. I chucked it into a bin afterwards. The poet of Love Lies knew better; she’d already put her dough in my bank. Good on her. Love lies but money doesn’t.
The Australian man was, after all, generous in his telling of lewd stories about scandalous stuff in Australia. One, in particular, caught my attention. According to him, the boss of a factory, one of his main suppliers, had slept with nearly all the pretty girls that worked there. ‘One was so pretty,’ Doug said. ‘I had an immediate hard-on when I went there for a visit.’ He went on so enthusiastically about this girl’s looks and the way she walked that I found it irresistible and laughed out loud. Sam took him to 1919 that night, an entertainment place with the ‘1919’ figure that meant: Want to Fuck Want to Fuck, if pronounced in Cantonese, like this: yao gao yao gao. But, in Mandarin, it could also mean medicinal wine that has curing effects.
I’ve said the same to B. But it is books that speak the honest truth to a hurting degree that are denied the chance of publication because the comfort zone is out-stepped and our core values are challenged. One day, when I can set up my own publishing house, I’ll publish things to my heart’s content. But I hug that close to my heart, without ever voicing it to anyone, let alone B. For the moment, I’ll let things be dictated by MM, money and market through B, Banker of Books. It’s interesting how girls are referred to as MM these days, too.
On the other hand, this new poetry manuscript, titled, Short when Shrunken, from a poet who calls himself Daq Sogu, has got something to say. One poem goes, ‘What’s the matter?/When I see a beautiful face/I see a banknote.’ Another goes, ‘One of the differences/between the brains and the dick/is that/the former ejaculates poems/and/the latter, seeds’. A third, with the title, ‘Question/Answer’, goes, ‘Question: what colour on a woman is the closest to that on a man?/The colour of her tongue is closest to that of a man’s dick/and her own lips without lipstick.’
The absurdity of my position is that much as I love the prurient honesty of such poems I can’t make the recommendation, not even when the poet is willing to pay. A publishing house, unlike a prostitute, can refuse to provide the service even when the clients want to pay although it is similar to a prostitute in that it offers products attractive enough to induce people to buy. Eventually, these poets will have to go underground by publishing their own stuff in bundles of bound pages without a book number, like masturbating in the dark, or just go naked online, like public exhibition to an invisible degree because no one will pay any attention. I’d have to lose my job to give them the satisfaction of coming out to wank in the open.
In the application, the girl has attached a photograph of herself, as they always do these days, but she is different in that she wears a military uniform over a white male-style shirt, with a red tie. Her hair is brownish, obviously dyed, in a way that doesn’t actually add to her natural beauty and, I’d say, that is rather detrimental to it. Her legs and her hands, for my money, seem of the tenderest kinds, slender and slim. As I looked at her, I found myself going hot and hard underneath, which I really shouldn’t have; it was only last night that her mother had it with me and now I was scared of the trajectory of my own thoughts and where they might lead.
Every day now I get smns from them. One from C says: I want to swallow you up! Another from W says: But I miss you so much. Still another from R says: Hubby, when are you coming back? I want you now. I immediately deleted them all. In this day and age such sweet nothings keep the levels of one’s libido high and, from time to time, they make me want to quit my job and my marriage to lead a life of total abandon, something resembling de Sade’s ‘libertine dementia’, travelling from city to city and woman to woman, seeing the landscape of faces as one gets physical with them, with no more attachment than a mobile phone, which, I must say, has become a man or woman’s external sexual organ. Sometimes, short messages that come in create wavelets of desire bordering on an instantaneous delirium. When I go to work, they tell me I look much younger than before, quite inexplicably.
In fact, this is what the girl said who I made love with a couple of years ago in Q city. She told me that I was so good that she really enjoyed it. That sounded as if I was the one who provided the service. According to her, I was even better than her boyfriend, like someone in his early twenties. I pretended to be surprised that she did this thing while keeping a boyfriend on the side but she assured me that her boyfriend knew nothing. She then told me that many men she had provided the services to could not achieve an erection. ‘They had a mind to,’ she said. ‘but they did not have the ability.’
27/6
As I went to the loo this morning my thoughts about Snapdragon returned, only long enough for me to decide I’d push her out along with all that had been brewing in my intestines. If there are women who snap like a love-taut woollen thread, taking French leave – Chinese leave a more apt word, as it is more abrupt, more determined, more ruthless and more deadly – why can’t I dump them like shit by cleansing them out of my system? It didn’t used to be like that but, now that women are equal to men in everything except that they have not swapped their sex organs with men, the contemporary weaker sex, men can react and resist, like a species fighting a losing battle, whose semen is as trashable as a tissue with snot wrapped in it. Snapdragon gone, I shall make sure she does not resurface in my memory and if she by any chance reappears therein I’ll expel her then and there by forcibly deleting her from my memory, again and again, until no trace is left.
Immediately following her departure is the reappearance of Meta, who said, in one message, ‘I want to hug you in my heart’. And in another, ‘when you come back you’ll see a totally new woman.’ But, for some reason, she would not disclose her whereabouts except that she is busy but will give me a surprise when we next meet.
In the discussion I had with B and others this morning, Love Lies – a joking shorthand for the full title of that manuscript – was accepted without objection, along with a few other trashably acceptable manuscripts, self-aggrandisements dressed up as autobiographies, biographies of dead political VIPs, guaranteed big sales through official channels, and a number of unreadable poetry books by 40ish women whose life is passé and whose literary AA – ambitions and aspirations – are matched only by the amount of cosmetics applied on a daily basis, to the detriment of their dermatological care. I did not mention a single word about the other much more interesting manuscripts that have come my way. One of the main advantages for a deputy head in charge of my area, that of publishing works subsidized with private funds, is I can enjoy all the good stuff, or should I say, better stuff, without spending a single cent. In the scheme of things, an excellent book, by the time it is edited and published, becomes a good book, and a good book, a so-so book. It is amazing how a so-so book can sell, such as the one penned by a guy who called himself Hung Heavens, but I have ceased to be amazed by the mediocrities as the world is made for them, books written by the mediocre for the mediocre, like common food, eaten only to be shat.
28/6
In that transparent booth they refer to as The Goldfish Tank, in which they dance seen without seeing, I chose Meta because of the shoes. This was a pair I had never seen: Its heels in the shape of inverted erect penises, with balls atop like two tiny cherries. After we finished making love, when I asked where she bought them, she told me that she had actually got a shoemaker friend to make them for her, modelled on her own special design, an idea of hers based on the men she had come into contact with over ‘one month’. They all use ‘one month’ if asked how long they have been doing this job.
As she talked, an idea suggested itself to me. Why not get her to put the penis-shaped heel in her mouth for me to take a photograph of? She was obliging enough to put one inside her mouth and the other inside her vagina. I took a number of shots from different angles until I could not hold it any longer for the explosive liquid within was turning into a suicide-bomber, ready to detonate himself. Perhaps because of an artistic synchronization or identification, she allowed me to enter her without the condom. I was so delighted that I cried out ‘I love you, Baby’ as I uploaded my jelly-like lotus-root powder, thinking of Snapdragon. It was not till that instant that all I ever wanted to fuck was the dragoness herself.
Long afterwards, we talked about nothing but art, how Jeff Koons made sculpture based on his love with his porn star wife, and Tracey Emin with her ‘My Bed’, surrounded with used condoms; names that had never been taught her when she attended the school but that were immediately found likeable for what they had done. With an artistic bent myself, I have secret wishes that I could one day collaborate with an artist on a number of ideas that have been brewing in my head for a long time.
29/6
Dinner at Yamagoya, with Nasturtium and Rehmannia, her daughter, again at her mother’s expense. Surprise, surprise. Reh looked little like herself in the photograph. Unsexy, perhaps because in the company of her mother, she was attractive with her languorous eyes and her long black hair that cascaded over her shoulders. She was wearing a pair of white sandals and a longish skirt, nearly reaching her ankles, whereas her mother was more aggressive in her attire: newly curled hair above and red heels below. I was a bit embarrassed. Much of the time I ate in silence, letting them do the talking. Nas did much in promoting Reh, as a good daughter at home and a good student at school. At such times, I could catch Reh’s glances, timid escapades, cast my way and, in that instant, we managed to convey something slightly amorous between us without her mother’s awareness. I decided that I liked the girl for her winning smiles and speaking silences.
At night, before turning in, I masturbated myself thinking of the girl. I haven’t done this for a long time but the girl’s fingers, so pale and tender, seemed to have the power of seducing me in spite of myself.
I did not promise anything but I said I’d throw in a good word or two when it got to the final stage.
30/6
W had an argument with me today. She didn’t agree to let our daughter read porn. I said: But it’s classical Chinese poetry, not porn. I then quoted her a prose poem that, in sum, goes as follows:
I have dreamt a dream that is funny, in which, I dream you are flirting with someone else. When I wake up, you are still in my arms. In my heart, I can’t afford to lose you, so I sleep hugging you tight, for fear that you may be over there in your dream while you are awake in my arms.3
She said: This is absolutely unacceptable for a 16-year-old!
I said: What did you take her for, a fool? Girls her age have more carnal knowledge than all these poems are put together.
‘How did you know?’ she said, questioning me with her searching eyes. I dismissed it with a ‘there are stories galore online’. Then I told her there were reports that girls aged between 8 and 12 fell in love.
‘But you don’t want to quicken the process with our daughter, do you?’ she said.
‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘girls without boyfriends will do anything under peer pressure. For example, a girl of 16 impatiently waited for someone to come along and take her virginity just because everyone else was doing it; her story is online for everyone to read. However, if you give them something more refined and yet elementally absorbing they’ll be able to cultivate a refined taste without losing sight of the more pleasurable that will in time come their way.’
‘There’s no way I’ll allow her to do that,’ she objected. As she said this, she set about to confiscate my problematic books, such as Sexual Life in England, that I was going to recommend to B for translation and publication, as well as Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade. When she – a sub-editor working in another publishing house – learnt that, she said: You are dreaming. A book like Sade’s will possibly be so expurgated that nothing much that remains will make sense, when published in Chinese.
I told her that I’ll go to Australia if they continue to say no to my recommendations or proposals. I wasn’t serious, knowing that, for someone like me, it will probably be not that easy to carve out an existence overseas. Many fail miserably, then disappear. One, the son of a friend’s, was recently seen working as a doorman in a hotel while his parents were still safe in the knowledge that he was working hard at the University of London. My home will be here but I can ship my family away to a safe haven in case something happens.
When it’s raining and there is nowhere to go, I stay home and watch porn. As a rule, I find white girls more exciting, with their hairless cunts and high heels, often next to their cunts. Their dancing doors, ajar, resemble freshly served tender beef or uncooked chicken in a striking way but they all seem to love men mouthing them, something I do not like to do because the women I have come into contact with are the ones paid to do the sucking, not me. When I get a chance to go to Australia, I’ll find them.
As I watched, I played with myself but I stopped on the point of coming for I thought of the photos I’ve taken of the women I made love with before. I went to close the door of my study and locked it from inside. Then I fetched an envelope of photographs, mainly Acacia, Banksia, No. 62, and Torenia, this last being my latest favourite. In the two hours we had together, she held me tight in her arms and let me go inside her without the condom until I came. I was delighted to hear that she would only let the man do it if she liked him well enough and there were not many men who deserved that. Once, when a man did something impertinent, she slapped him across the face and refused to serve him. She said: Even if I come from the lowest of the low, I deserve to be treated with respect. I liked her a lot for that and regretted that she had recently lost a bag of banknotes amounting to 5,000 yuan. When next time I go there I’ll ask for her specifically. She’s not even 20. She used to be a dancer and, to demonstrate that, she put her legs up above her head, in a yoga fashion. It’s a great pleasure to fuck a girl with such supple limbs, as you can bend her legs this way and that and as far back as you can go. The only drawback is that she wore unsightly cream slippers that did nothing to heighten the sense of pleasure.
When I finished, dumping the saturated tissues in the bin, a smell of the semen lingering in the air, I thought of the waste. A metaphor offered itself: semen, no longer functioning as a tool of propagation, has now become as much a form of wastage as one’s excrement or urine, ejaculated or shat or pissed, for the momentary pleasure of relief.
2/7
Love. I detest the word. It’s such a violent idea. Why does no one talk about the violence of love? In the early days of our love, she threatened, always minutes before I entered her: If you stop loving me, I’ll stop loving you. It’s like this woman I read about. She cheated her husband again and again on the excuse that she was going to another city in search of work whereas she was in fact meeting a man she had got acquainted with on the Internet, a man much younger than her. For that purpose, she got a false identity card, with a birth date ten years younger, and a woman, if well maintained, wouldn’t look her age in any case. Then, with carefully calculated make-up, she would make herself look even younger, in the inexperienced eyes of a man infatuated to the point of blindness. So she lived together with the man for a period of time till her own husband tracked her down.
What is love? That is love, a wrongly spelt word that should actually be lust. A woman’s cunt, like a man’s dick, has now the freedom of fucking, like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and a lot more freedoms except the freedom of loyalty, the freedom of staying with one organ only. Hang on: the freedom of loyalty? That is not freedom but prison. It’s like saying the freedom of prison. For this reason, I would turn a blind eye if W had an affair with another man. In fact, I once insinuated that she should, as there was so much freedom these days. If marriage is a house, it is no longer granite-solid but full of holes through which winds, evil or benign, pass, leaving a trail of irrevocable losses, the loss of love, or lust, its correct version, and of peace, a psychological peace that used to tie a man and a woman together like two figurines carved in a china teapot. Now, if you tie them together, it is like binding two bunches of dynamite ready to explode any moment.
Knowing that there is no hope of getting this book, The Life of an Amorous Man by Ihara Saikaku, published in a mainland version, based on a Taiwanese version that exists in the traditional script, I chose to read it all by myself and for myself. If they prefer to engage in the amorous scene without wanting to find out why, they are mere animals; worse, they are taps and sewers and pipelines, if they are male, and receptacles if otherwise. In that book, there is so much joy to be had. There is a scene in which, to keep Shizhijie, An Iota of the World, cool, the servant sets flying a swarm of glow worms inside the mosquito net, together with a barrel of water on which float the lotus-flowers and a root of the balloon flower. I found that unspeakably beautiful. In today’s world, there is no beauty, no art any more. It’s all like cheap eats, putting in and pulling out, then a bombardment of trash. What the xiaojie is holding dangling from her hand is a tiny plastic bag of a man’s life, life force, life to the fore, in the form of dumped sperm, with no more use than say a pool of piss or a blob of nasal mucus, which she is only too glad to dispose of when she chucks it downstairs into the mountain of garbage swarming with millions of wriggling maggots, mosquitoes, flies, crap and whatnot.
3/7
John Donne made a mysterious remark that goes, ‘Flesh (itself’s death)’, that baffled me although I could sense the inevitability of a feeling that one has when one shoots. The shooting of a gun hurtles the bullet towards a person causing his or her death; the shooting of a dick, on the contrary, ends up causing its own death and, in consequence and sequence, leading to an arrest of everything associated with pleasure. It’s like reaching the top of a high peak before climbing down to the abyss of fatigue and even weariness, in which one wonders why one has bothered and if it is worth bothering again. Indeed, the downloading of sperm into the hard-drive of a vagina through the USB of a dick occasionally feels like pissing into the mud. And that, perhaps, is what Donne refers to as ‘death’ or the death that is the ‘flesh’?
I much prefer his apt remark that goes, ‘Love builds on beauty, soon as beauty, dies’. Take Banksia. Our recent meeting after a few years of absence has reached a new low. When she peeled herself, I noticed that her breasts sagged horribly, like half-empty bags. The flesh on her legs seemed looser. And whichever way you looked at her face, it just didn’t seem right. Despite her blonde hair, dyed unnaturally, her attraction was minimal. I could almost have told her to go home but for our old days. I let her fuck me three times and fell into sleep, with my back turned towards her, not wanting to touch her, not wanting to sleep holding her in my arms. When beauty fades from a woman, a man’s love for her also fades, at least in this part of the world that I live, regardless what other people think or do in other parts of the world, as that has little or nothing to do with me here in my city.
I heard that there are things like self-storage in Australia where one can store anything. I’ll have to think of organizing my photographs and things, perhaps even my diaries, to somehow ‘disappear’ in one of those places. It is so scary that I may lose these things to others.
4/7
When I checked my mobile phone this morning and she was not there, I experienced a sense of disappointment, mixed with a deeply-felt knowledge that such things would not last long; they were not even meant to last long. She’s probably busy receiving clients and making money. Why would she hang on to your love, which you are not even sure about yourself? Once we were all pure but after dicks meet cunts when the singular turns plural there is no going back. The acquisition of a new woman resembles that of a new mobile phone, useful for a period of time before it is abandoned or sold for a song on eBay. A woman is different in that she takes the initiative by living with you, then leaving you.
After the Chen case, I now have a serious fear of computer guys who have the technology to break into your computer and steal your files; worse, they may even be malicious enough to put stuff out there online for all and sundry to see.
For this reason, I have penned a note to the effect that anyone allowed to repair my computer may not take my personal stuff or upload it online, thus making it available for the general public on pain of – I paused at the word death – and wrote ‘serious consequences involving legal proceedings’.
Y, a friend, from another publishing house, has emailed me what he thinks about the translation of a book, titled, Sex Pots, citing reasons of the double costs of having to pay for the copyright and the translator even as he admitted that it was an excellent book with good reviews online. According to him, the publisher would much prefer to do books that were outside the copyright range. With that in mind, I shall not recommend it to B because it has come to my attention that he doesn’t trust newcomers with PhD degrees under their belts. I realized this when he made a remark about someone who had left recently: You can’t trust these people. With PhD degrees, they think they are superior, their tails tilted so high as to touch the skies. I half heard the remark as I went past his office and when I looked I could see that he, along with another colleague of ours, suddenly went silent.
To compensate for the loss, Sam and I went back to Feng Qiu Huang in Yellow Waters. It was better than last time but I faced a problem of embarrassment. Minutes after we sat down on the sofa, I heard the guy make the announcement. In came a group of girls in single file, all in alluring attire and black leather heels. As they came to a standstill, in the limelight, they turned to face us and deeply bowed. When they raised their heads, I had an instant realization that I, the client, was not the gazer but the gazee because there were more than a dozen eyes gazing at me, sizing me up and deciding whether they wanted me or not, or perhaps guessing who I’d go for. I was made so uneasy that I could not make up my mind until I heard: ‘This lady is from North East’. Then and there, I decided on her. The collective gaze instantly turned off and I was back to normal.
I made the decision for no other reason than freshness. I have had girls from the lianghu (Two Lakes), Happy Construction, River North, River South, River West, Cloud South, but, as yet, I have not had any from North East even though that is one of the major sources of xiaojie in the country. The girls there had such a bad reputation that a rhyming couplet goes: ganzou dongbei hu, huan wo hao zhangfu (Expel the North-East tigress and give my good husband back to me). With that in mind, we began our instant affair, instantly purchased, instantly enjoyed and instantly dropped.
She turned out to be quite amazing, doing everything energetically and thoroughly: sucking, licking, and even dancing nude in her heels. When I came, she removed the container – my condom – and sucked my member, my non-Party member, clean and dry. It was not till I entered into her from above, shouldering her legs, that I realized how small and short she was. With her heels off, her feet reached slightly above my ears. Then I pulled myself out and got her to put the heels on, to make her look taller.
Afterwards, she told me that she had never found such a big cock as mine. It didn’t sound like a deliberate compliment because it seemed true as compared with another girl the other day who, when asked, said: It’s just okay. Obviously, this girl was not an old hand, or, more appropriately, she’s not an old cunt the way the other girl was, meaning that she hadn’t experienced a big enough number of didi, younger brothers or pricks.
For this reason, I got her number and promised I’d come back.
As usual, we lay side by side chatting. Much of the time, I let her do the talking, throwing bits and pieces like ‘is that right?’ or ‘how did that happen?’ She told me that she constantly wagged school and, as a result, her dad beat her up with a stick the size of a rice bowl and nearly broke her leg. As she spoke, she pointed the scar out to me, a large one that ran across her left shin. To get back on her dad, she ran away from home to the neidi, or inland China, staying with her relatives or friends or acquaintances, whoever was willing to take her in for a day or two, drifting from place to place, until her family got so worried that they made enquiries at the police stations everywhere and posted Missing Persons Notices in the newspapers. She was happy to make them sad and distraught. She waited long enough for her dad to literally promise over the phone that he would never lay a finger on her ever again for the rest of his life before she agreed to go home. She had a heroine’s welcome when she arrived back in her village, her parents in tears, heading the village welcome procession.
When I asked if the girls also sized up their clients, she said yes. She said that she was glad that I chose her because she didn’t like the man sitting beside me. She was repulsed by anyone wearing a western suit and tie but liked me because I wore casual.
5/7
I changed my mind as soon as the girl revealed that they’d charge 400 yuan for ml [making love - editor’s note], so I said to her that I only wanted a pao [beating cannon or dapao, making love – editor’s note], to which she agreed, with much reluctance. It turned out that she was skinny. When I asked why, she said she had been on drugs. I asked what she took, she said bing [ice - editor’s note] I fell silent as she took my member in her mouth and began working on it. Meanwhile, I stuck my right index finger inside hers and could feel it watering there. She kept saying: I’m feeling itchy. I’m feeling itchy. It wasn’t until I met Sam when I found out that by ‘itchy’ it meant that she was itchy for a fuck. Still, at the time, I had no intention of letting her do it to me; I just wanted her to take it all out on her own. Instead, when it came out, it smeared her hand, which she quickly wiped clean.
Afterwards, she told me this scary story of how a girl she knew had recently died when having a mandarin bath, a bath involving the pair like two mating mandarin ducks, with an official, a deputy bureau chief, with a good reputation as a caring husband and loving father. He got acquainted with a woman from a lowly background and invited her home when his wife went to work. They made love as soon as they arrived and, after a lunch that he prepared – he being a good cook – they went to have that bath in a tiny area of about two square metres, with the door and windows closed. They would never come out alive again. It was his wife who, on coming home, made the shocking discovery: the man and the woman were dead, naked together.
Poor man, I thought with a shudder, but it was the girl’s comment on the man’s hypocrisy more than anything else that made me pause and think. Unless he suffers from chronic impotence or is totally devoid of any desire for the fair sex, a man in his forties or early fifties these days is a mass of sexual desires that he must find an outlet for no matter what. The most saintly would resort to self-comforting by watching or reading porn, then having sex with their wives with the porn images in their heads. The more out-going – yes, the going-out ones – would simply abide by the current law, as unwritten as effective, that a man is allowed to do whatever he likes to do as long as he does it outside the family and in a way that is not found objectionable by the women he comes into contact with, and, of course, as long as he can afford it.
It is odd how something else comes to mind when one writes about this. Years ago, while I was studying at the university, Lao, a classmate, openly flirted with a girl classmate of ours, their sleeping together becoming public knowledge except to his wife, who, when coming for a reunion, drew a remark from another classmate that he might run out of bullets on their first night together. I still remember the jealousy on the part of the guy who made the remark. After all, it was none of his business. In a permissive society, moral values are of little importance or relevance and the only thing that counts is jealousy, a healthy dosage of which can, perversely, act as a moral force capable of toppling anyone powerful.
6/7
Ours is no doubt a sex-soaked or saturated society in which one remains restless till one is fulfilled, or, to put it more bluntly, till one is emptied, emptying being fulfilling, the same thing. There is no desire to read any books unless they are sex related. And if love does not lead to sex, it is love wasted. All one wishes, when one is not occupied, is for his member to be wrapped up in a mouth or a second mouth, repeating the act of ejaculation, or dumping, again and again.
Poet X emailed me a suite of poems by a poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina and wondered if there was any likelihood of getting them published if he translated them. Although I was sure that B would scorn the idea of publishing someone from such a small country I delved into one of the poems and was immediately taken by the thought an introducer (Aleksandar Hemon) writes, that goes: ‘Every war is fought against the body. The body is what soldiers give to the army and their leader, the enemy body is what they aim to destroy. The cost of “freedom” (currently the cheapest word in the English language) is paid in bodies.’ I would have readily published the poet for that invaluable insight but for B who I knew would not touch poetry unless it was either by Nobelprize winners or poets from the USA and the UK. He once said: Mark my words: Nothing would sell well in China except books from the USA and the UK and a few other equally powerful countries, such as France and Germany.
I like the poet’s words because they remind me that the peace we live in is like a war, a warless war, in which bodies, loved, are fought against bodies through the weapon of love until they are exhausted and turn old, then cold. It’s not about love, a minor weapon of destruction that one can purchase; it’s all about bodies, bodies entering bodies like doors, bodies hitting bodies like balls, bodies hugging bodies like burdens, and bodies hating bodies like corpses.
Sam told me something that I already knew, a story widely spread online of how four fupo or sugar mummies, counterparts of sugar daddies, milked a young man of 28 years old till he died and lived again, after being revived with heavy dosages of Viagra, reaching the final moment of total ejaculation in death. The result is not hard to imagine: the four fupo were arrested on murder charges.
Whether the story is entirely true is anyone’s guess as there are versions disputing the authenticity but one thing that Sam said about the four rich women, in their late forties and early fifties, left to themselves without ever being touched by their men, has a ring of truth about it. These men and women must have loved each other when they were first united in marriage but years of bondage in the union serve only to widen the gap, mainly sexual, between them until neither holds any bodily attraction for the other and each goes in search of his or her own pleasures, findable in men or women of a much younger age.
This is terrible. When I do not have sex, my thoughts are preoccupied with it. I turn on the computer to look for porn pics online. Or I insert – what a word; it sounds almost like inserting a member – a CD to watch porn. Or I talk with friends about women, and sex we have had. It is temporarily at work that our thoughts are suspended from it, only to return to it with a stronger passion, like a fire rekindled. The world will definitely go to the sexy dogs; it actually has.
7/7
For some reason, I felt quite depressed today and shut myself up for most of the day without seeing anyone, on the excuse that I was not feeling well. Though I allowed my phone to remain switched on, I did not care to take any incoming calls. The jumping to death of this university vice chancellor came as a shock, making me restless. You could say that he took his life for a combination of reasons: his demotion from his high position, the removal of the official secretary, his lover, the betrayal by his mistress of many years who spilled the beans in a secret letter sent to the authorities, and perhaps many other reasons but if I were him I would never have taken the plunge. If I did, it would be for only one reason: having exhausted any pleasures deprivable from sex. I would then opt for the apogee of sexual enlightenment and extremity by flying off the top of a building face down towards my death, in the final moment in which I come face to face and dick to cunt with Mother Earth, instantly turning myself into an unrecognizable mass of flesh and blood, hot and steaming, achieving the highest intensity of orgasm. That is love, sex, life and death all rolled into one. Short of that, there is nothing worth trying. It is all the same if you keep fucking the same cunt year in and year out or if you keep fucking different cunts of different sizes, matched with different faces, until you are too old to fuck when you realize, in retrospect, that all you have ever managed to do is exactly the same as a golf ball that enters multiple holes or a basketball that drops through hundreds, if not thousands, of net holes.
If I get caught one day, I shall experience the impingement of my body upon the earth, with its ultimate arousal and thrill, in the coupling of life and death.
For the first time, it seems, I realized the proper function of this diary or journal. Now that there are no priests of any religions or religious denominations worth my trust and my confidence, the diary is the only confessional, in which the man listens to himself, his other self or selves, or reads it or them, the way Cioran succinctly puts it: ‘All men are fragments of himself’.
I shall fly with all my sins into the skies and let them shit like rain. Let the mediocrities of this world quote that.
After reading Cioran, I find I’m becoming him although B finds him too distressing for publication, not a shining example of optimism for the money-minded masses going to beat the Americans and become the Number One Nation in the world. He wants uplifting stuff, such as The Surrendered Wife, as he thinks the book might be an antidote for the ills of the contemporary society. But nothing American, in my opinion, is going to work. Good luck if he can make sales soar.
8/7
With poets, as a rule, you do three things, in sequence, to pass the night. First, they call you out to a dinner, surrounded by friends, all poets, known or unknown. Then, they move on to a KTV place where they hire a private room with more beer and they sing with escort girls. Afterwards, a few stalwart ones stay and move on to a huisuo or entertainment complex where you go for three Ss, sauna, shower and shoot, to put it crudely. This is exactly what I did last night.
X, who sent me the query regarding the Bosnian-Herzegovinian poet, has also sent a few manuscripts that I have knocked back but he persists, almost on a daily basis. When you have someone like that, all you do is delete him as soon as you see his email, without even reading a word. He is not the paying type but he keeps hoping that his stuff might somehow be published by us at our expense as he believes that his is so good that, once published, it will win prizes all over the country and, once translated, will win awards all over the world. I am sick of poets like that, blinded and bloated by their own sense of self-worth, blown out of all proportion, although as a person he is urbane and accommodating enough.
As soon as I arrived at the Starbucks, he arose from his seat and introduced me to a crowd of people already sitting there. Even though I am used to being called zongbian or editor-in-chief, which I am not as I am only a deputy editor-in-chief, I am never comfortable with the appellation because it is not true. But if they insisted, I simply allowed them the indulgence. He did the rounds pointing out their names and positions but I was convinced that we would remain strangers afterwards. The only other person I knew was DSG, short for Daq Sogu, a poet with fish-whiskers, who seemed delighted to see me and asked me to sit next to him. Soon, large plates bearing steaming dishes came, with bottles of beer, wine and baijiu, white liquor. They talked about poets and who had won what. While lending them half an ear, I chatted with DSG about his latest submission, what I thought of it and what could happen or not happen. He pretended that he did not care; instead, he began drinking in big gulps as if the beer was mere water. Then he said something that shocked us: If Li Bai were alive today, he would have committed suicide or, even more likely, he would have turned into a suicide bomber by involving a lot of innocent people in his own death, most likely publishers or editors who had rejected him. The conjecture threw us into confusion, not knowing why he had made the remark or on what basis he had done so. As he refused to be drawn out, I turned to talk with X, who filled me in with his good report: having a few poems accepted for publication in a major literary magazine, and counting. I let him talk but couldn’t help noticing that he tried very hard not to ask me a single question about his submissions. But my ears pricked up when I heard him whisper that he’d take me to a ‘nice place’ afterwards. In reply, I told him that I liked the remark about the war and the bodies although a poet from a small country would have great difficulty getting published, even in translation.
Called Emperor Yang of Sui, the place boasted of more than 100 xiaojie. Where the door opened, Periwinkle, a girl wearing purple, was gently pushed into my arms as soon as she turned up, by a hand from outside, with chuckling words, ‘tso yours’. Although I later called her Peri, I did not do anything in the beginning but sat there passively, letting her perform her duties according to a set of rules in her head, dutifully and methodically. At such moments, I was relaxed enough to wax historical. Whoever named the place must have been ignorant of the significance of the historical personage or deliberately meant it for the emperor was notorious for his corrupt prurience involving minors. My train of thoughts was interrupted when she said: Be careful now as I’m going to do something exciting. I said ‘what?’ She said ‘just look’ as she raised herself up, feet to the sky, all her weight on her hands, before she inched towards my dick, taking it in her mouth as she put her feet against the wall above my head.
I grew scared watching her head move up and down on my dick, which made its way right up to her throat. As the pleasure intensified, my fear deepened: What if her hands gave way and she collapsed on me, breaking my member? The more I dwelled on it the less I liked the idea, so much so that I called her to stop, saying, as my dick softened, ‘I’m a bit tired’. Perhaps because of the risky and risqué act, I was not able to come however hard she worked on me. In the end, I got her to milk my little life juice out with her hand and left it at that.
9/7
It seems I write only what happened yesterday, the diary no longer a daily account. We had an argument last night when I refused to ‘serve’ her. She lost her temper and accused me of not loving her any more. What has sex got to do with love, I said. Everything, she said. If I do not love someone, there is no water underneath. That’s interesting, I said: How can the girls do it without love? What did you mean? she said. Nothing, I said. Do you visit them? she said. Yes, I do, I said. No, you don’t, she refused to believe it. We kept going at it, seeing and sawing, until she said: But I like you to mouth me from below because it gives me such pleasure. I don’t even have an erection, I said. But we haven’t had it for two weeks, she said, how come? I am just tired, I said.
‘No,’ she screamed, all of a sudden, and began furiously masturbating herself, with one hand, and pulling my head towards her with another, in a very violent way; there are scratch marks on the back of my left ear. Eventually, I gave in, not to her temptation, but to her pressure: Her dad has agreed to finance our trip to Australia.
I have a suspicion that my liver does not function properly. I feel tired easily. When I fuck with these girls, I feel I am the fuckee and they are the fuckers, enjoying themselves to the hilt, at my expense. And, at home, I am a fuckee too, a domesticated one at that, my mouth turning into my exterior dick, my muncher. The end result is I’m growing physically and spiritually weary. I’m losing appetite as well. At the party the other day, the poets became tigers and wolves, devouring plate-loads of food and barrels of drink as if they had been starving all their lives whereas I sat there, unwilling to touch anything. I must go and see a doctor about this.
10/7
I take the girl by the hand. Her name is Bai Xue. She is wearing a white blouse and a white skirt with black stripes. She hardly talks but just listens, to the wavelets licking the rocks underneath our window. The sea is calm. The moon is small and high, its silvery light playing in the middle of the sea. We lay naked in bed, side by side, exhausted, the white tissues wrapping our love lying on the floor, weary and wasted. It’s a night that both of us want to last but it doesn’t.
It’s not a dream; it’s a daydream that visits me from time to time, and from place to place, in various poses and positions, but that always involves the girl we are soon to give an interview to. I can’t somehow get her out of my mind.
I now am resorting to going through the photographs of the women I have slept with before and masturbating myself while looking at several of them at the same time, glancing at them one by one, till I come over them, thus ruining them before I trash them. Then, I print my next lot. This is sheer madness, for the moment, at least.
11/7
‘No novel can last or stand the test of time. Take Mildred who can actually be called Mildreadful or Mildlydreadful.
‘Maugham’s novel, Of Human Bondage, over 600 pages, is so absorbing, with his portrait of Philip’s hopeless love for Mildred who regards him as a mere friend that can be easily exploited and ditches him by going for another man, Miller, that one would be perfectly content if the story stopped there. Instead, there is more and more, to a tedious degree, with Norah, then Griffiths, when the point is driven home, and through home, that A loves B but B does not love A and life goes on, and love goes on. If Maugham were a poet, he would have cut the crap by half; regretfully, he was a novelist and did not know how to restrict his passion and compassion; instead, he indulges in page after page of cheap love preachings between a number of characters with diminishing attraction. Who wants to follow what’s going on with Mildreadful after she’s got a baby with another man?
‘If a contemporary novelist were to write Maugham’s story, he would have taken the man and the woman to bed in under ten pages. And yet, the club-footed Philip has no such luck or is not provided with such luck for a prolonged period of time prior to his going to Paris with Mildlydreadful.’
This manuscript, laid open in front of me, is from someone by the surname of Tu, whose attached CV shows him to be an academic in his thirties, a very well-read man, it seems. Because there is no market for this kind of thing, he came to me with the intention of self-funding the publication. Although I have not read Maugham, I followed Tu’s logic and could see where he was coming from. In this day and age, love means one thing: instant gratification. What is love if a man does not have an erection? What is love if he does not want to erect into something beautiful? What is love if he does not utter it, again and again, in the euphoria of lovemaking? According to Mr Tu’s interpretation, in those days when Maugham wrote the thing, ‘making love’, as an expression, did not even carry the connotation of having sex as it does today.
I must confess that it was similar to my own experience when young, living in a revolutionary period in which sex was unknown. I’ve written about that in a group of diaries that I must go back to in search of things I said. One memory is particularly vivid in which I used to have aching balls long after I had a rendezvous with W – in which we only cuddled and kissed, nothing dramatic – from a prolonged erection. It was not until much later that I realized that it was far better to resort to masturbation than bear the brunt of sore balls and the excruciating pain. And may I say that I tended to be promiscuous in the freedom that the act lent to me, in which I thought of the beautiful faces that I had seen on the street, culminating in the flooding with the most ravishing one? The saying, a bit on the vulgar side, ‘the pig fucks the buttocks the same way a man fucks the face’, is absolutely true. And, in a strangely weird way, that is the nature of truth too.
While another saying, quite popular these days, also vulgar, goes that people like us are ‘fucking busy by day and busy fucking by night’, it is only half true, for we may not be ‘fucking busy’ during the day or ‘busy fucking’ at night as sometimes these things become mixed. Over the last few days I have been kept so busy reading through the manuscripts, nearly all trash, I must confess, that I can’t afford the time to go out despite Sam’s invitations. A married man, he took me to a coffee house one night and showed me two women, in their mid or late thirties, that I dismissed in one glance as un-look-at-able. But Sam told me, not without pride, that one of them was his ‘small wife’, who would come regularly to do his chores. Sam said he had lost his virginity at around 20 when an older woman seduced him, thus opening his door to a wider spectrum of opportunities and possibilities or possibilities, ‘b’ in Chinese language sounding exactly the same as cunts. I listened to him recounting his loss of virginity with disbelief: there is always ‘an older woman’ somewhere to shift the blame to. The first knocker on my door, of love, of sex, was no older than 22, but she certainly gave me access to a wider world of possibilities, for, afterwards, the world was no longer a train of austere compartments, separated along the rigid lines of moral value, with the constant threat of expulsion and excommunication, that was headed in one direction: death in good name. The world literally opened itself up, not just a mere Shakespearean oyster but, more aptly, a Shakespearean oyster-like, many-splendoured cunt, a cunt-bed that one sleeps in and would like to stay in forever.
A line I read by Samuel Beckett appeals; it goes, ‘Up to the penis in I went to the seablood of a shattered maid.’4 I keep it here for the future when I get this published and will probably use it as a quote upfront.
Although my marriage has stayed the course, perhaps our daughter the mainstay, many of our friends’ haven’t. Honghong – I realize I have to use false names because when this diary is made public, I don’t want anyone to be hurt, least of all our friends – daughter of Wan, was married only six months before she declared that marriage did not suit her temperament and that she needed to grow maturer than marriage. Maturer than marriage? That is tantamount to saying no marriage. The girl who masturbated me the other day – gosh, I can’t even recall her name now – revealed to me that, apart from sex she provides to her clients on a nightly basis, she needs love from ‘boyfriends’, of whom she has quite a few. Sex is work or drudgery, a job that you do to pay the bills and keep alive, but love is an emotional necessity, an offering, a giving, not in the expectation of returns. The theory, coming from a girl’s mouth, seems to make a lot of sense, more sense than mine, and, yes, more mature than marriage, although I think her truth is as truthful as mine, neither cancelling out the other but each complementing each. For me, love, after the initial cuddling and cooing and kissing and aching, is no more than the act itself, with the necessary paraphernalia, accessories you buy the one you have made love to if you want to keep going back to her, although I find none metaphysically attractive enough to want to go back to; I prefer a combination of cunt and brains, not just cunt and kill or cunt and con.
13/7
‘Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq, is a confronting book if only because of its bitter tone, uncompromising in its unflattering portrait of women, particularly aggressively career-minded younger women, and in its poisoned attitude of disgust towards things in general. But it leaves one wondering about the sex hunger its main characters experience, such as Raphael Tisserand, in France maybe but not in a Chinese situation where a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, however ugly he may be, would not be starved for sex at all, particularly when he is working in a company and earning a decent income. Surely, one suggests, he could buy sex wherever he goes in China now that it is so available, and, surely, one further suggests, he, along with other sex-starved ugly French men, could go to China for sex tourism. It is a book which, in that regard, leaves one unsatisfied.’
Having read another entry – yes, I call them entries because this guy, an academic, writes in a very unacademic way, perhaps, as he suggests in his Introduction, ‘Tired of the academic hard currency for which academics in this country and elsewhere strive, by producing rock-hard theses or papers so impenetrable that few understand and bother reading, not even themselves after they have won the credits in their philistine climb up the jealous ladder to the top of the academic world, really another business world where money speaks the academic language and makes them churn out dung-coloured and dung-heavy articles or uncool keynote speeches,’ this writer sets about putting down his most immediate impressions after reading a certain writer regardless of the writer’s established reputation or position, following his heart as the sole measurement – I went about my own business and met 100, the number displayed on her breast.
In a short explanation, she told me that this was because all the good numbers had been snatched away by other girls but, after we finished making love, she revealed that she had actually liked this number as it meant baifa baizhong, a Chinese expression that literally means a hundred shots, a hundred bullseyes, or, figuratively, every shot hits the target. It also means, in another Chinese expression, baihua qifang: a hundred flowers bloom. And, still in another Chinese expression, baichuan guihai, that means hundreds of rivers return to the sea. Curiously, the expression associated with bai, hundred, that came to me was baikong qianchuang, hundreds of holes and thousands of scabs although I didn’t mention it as it was such an unlucky thing to say.
She’s quite a beauty in her own right, her face creamy, unpowdered, and her lips red, unlipsticked, ancient and classic in a way that she lacked the contemporary girl’s pretensions. According to her, she was of an ethnic minority, namely, tujia zu or Earth Family Nationality. The village where she came from was deep in the mountains and, in ancient times, it was one in which beauties were born and would be selected for the emperors down the dynasties. She told me that she had once picked up an egg by the roadside of her village and had her hen hatch it, only to have a snake come out of the egg, and, prior to her coming to the city to do this job, she had kept it in a cage. Not long after that, she had an accident in which she went gathering firewood but fell down the side of the mountain till she hit a tree when a huge snake curled itself around her with its tail and scooped her up. She also told me that mine was so big and fitted her so well.
Thus talking, I felt the urge again and, fittingly and excitingly, she seemed willing enough to cooperate. So we had it a second time, within the hour, and I came inside her, without the condom. As soon as I finished she got out of bed, walking away as she muttered to herself: I must get washed immediately; I don’t want to get pregnant again.
I kissed her goodbye on her lips unsmeared with the modern technology of sham designed to cheat, allure and catch, and left the premises feeling content at heart.
14/7
‘How’s your wife?’
That remark, from the wife of a novelist, now dead and unknown somewhere in Eastern Australia, came as a shock and a condemnation. In the moments that followed, Si, the woman I was secretly in like with if not in love, stared at me as if she didn’t recognize me, as if I had been play acting. I liked the shape of her slim figure; I liked the way she moved; and I liked the way she talked. The only thing I didn’t like about her was her capacity for food: God, how much she ate! She was generous enough to treat us to dinners from time to time and she would bring sweet bread and biscuits to me when she came to see me in my cramped dormitory. I thought of her pale face and imagined how lovely it would be to kiss her lips. But after that remark made by the boring married woman, it was not going to be. It was a remark typical of the time when man-woman relationships were beginning to show signs of breakdown and those hopeless people who dared not rise to the challenge were quick to point them out in others to feel good about themselves. But for the remark, we would probably have made it in no time; instead, when she came back with more lovely food, I showed her the proof: photos of my family. It was a devilish thing that I did but to this day I do not know why. I could have simply told her: Si, I love you. Even though I am married we can still be together; I didn’t have the courage.
Not only did the priggish woman make that remark but a xiaojie also did it, years ago. She was one of the first to open my eyes, my crotch and my wallet. As I entered her, her feet pointed towards the ceiling, held up by my shoulders, she said: Where’s your wife? To which I said: I don’t know, as I moved faster and faster till I shot the lot.
In the steamy days of the early 1990s, dinner parties out with friends always ended up in a fuck or two. The next day, when I went to Z city, I was taken out by a writer friend, Francis, a false name of course, to a dancing club filled to overflowing with xiaojie and clients, the music loud to a deafening degree, enough to wake up the dead and the living. A Sichuan girl – girls from there are known to engage in this profession, however degrading it is – taught me how to play a game the name of which was lost on me because of the deafening noise. She said a number and covered the dice with a bowl-like thing. Then she cast the dice and asked me to guess the number. The place was so filled with people my attention was constantly carried away, by a scantily clad girl walking past me, by dancers dancing cheek by jowl, by the girl facing me with a broad smile as if in mockery of my stupidity, and by my own increasing erection. Soon enough, I found a Southern girl of diminutive size. Francis hailed a taxi and, together, we three headed for her place miles away. There, in a tiny one-bed room, I made love to her as her small dog kept barking from outside the barred door, staring at us through the bars until we finished. This girl was so thin that it was like I was fucking a braced bone structure.
In a way, as Beckett once said, ‘Woman is a starter’,5 the girls were usherettes of a new age beckoning with its many and varied sexual allurements and enticements to the extent that one travels with the knowledge that there will be no nights on which one will feel lonely any more. If xiaojie can be called wives or small wives, or, even more aptly, instant cunts, they are everywhere to be had across the length and breadth of the country. And, in this, there is the economy of redistribution of wealth on a national scale. As one xiaojie put it, she’ll only spend a few years in it because she’ll go home and settle down, erect a multi-storey building, open a store and find a man. In the past, only a decade ago, there would have been no chance whatsoever for her to make that much money and become a small capitalist. What the dick contributes to the cunt these days are factors that may not be lost on economists in the future although they tend to turn a blind eye to it now, the D-C economy, an economy in which wealth is evenly redistributed across the world along the sexual lines, with young, fresh country girls either working their cunts off in metropolitan cities for an annual turnover of at least 200,000 yuan or marrying men old enough to be their granddads or shagging with them for keep, or with younger women from the impoverished countries, such as Russia, or, recently, Vietnam, grabbing their potential sugar-daddies across the States or Europe, and, finally, from across the globe, the well-heeled and well-oiled part of it.
Sex, I’m afraid, is going to be reaching its climax till it drops, till no one takes any interest in it any longer, trashing it like love, as stated by the anonymous academic opting for the non-academic role of taking things head-on without mincing words in his manuscript: Love as we see in Maugham is obsolete. Can anyone imagine loving someone without making love to him or her? The withdrawal of love is the withdrawal of making love, a simple enough rule of thumb, and, in Maugham’s case, a rule of toe, to judge anyone’s love by.
After a surfeit of sex, I think I’ll go into a lengthy period of monastic abstention from those ‘public toilets’, or, more aptly, ‘pubic toilets’, as Sam put it, certainly quite offensively but absolutely accurately, though not to be imparted to the ‘toilets’ themselves.
I’ve made up my mind about the new girl. She is nice and everything but I’m not going to take the first step. To love is to lose, to be a loser, and to be loved is to be powerful and strong. If she declines it, I can purchase it elsewhere, in fact anywhere. She had this white dress on yesterday through which I could detect the traces of her bra. And the heels of her shoes were lovely, better than a lot I have seen so far, which goes to show that she has taste. At work, I managed to catch a few glances shot from her as she went past my office, its door ajar. I immediately returned my glances to the screen, reading the stuff by the academic, acting as if I had taken no notice of her; there was a slight warmth in my loins. Or, as Beckett puts it, ‘enough to unhinge your loins’.6 How I would love to hold her face in my arms and kiss those thin lips! She is a fairy in contrast to her mother. When I thought of sending her an email, I realized that I did not have her address.
I’ve made the decision to reject the manuscript, titled, Lovelorn and Lovelong in Love Lanes, a title that could be better reduced to two words, Love Lanes, even though the poet offered to self-fund the entire publication. Call me a prig or prude, but the society must somehow maintain its decorum, not expose its scrotum. The poet, by the name of Meng, can publish it at his own cost for all I care. Still, there is a poem I think I’ll include here for me to refer to from time to time after I send back his manuscript:
Unfortunately, Love
unfortunately, love
is not meant
to be successful
if it succeeds
it fails
and when it fails
it is beautiful
so meaningless and memorable
it becomes memory
Rejecting people does not make one feel good but it is an essential and necessary part of an editor’s daily existence. It feels like getting rid of the snotty stuff out of one’s nostrils. I do not suffer from this chronic sense of rejection as a literary rejector myself because I hardly write in order to submit. In a way, the submitters of works are asking for trouble themselves. No submission, no rejection, simple as that. In fact, many have opted for the Internet rubbish tip, with their own blogs showing their own stuff, a fad that reduces their own value and worth to only slightly better than zero.
I like the new girl – I’d call her Larkspur – for who she is and what she is, young, in her early twenties, with sparkling eyes and an open face that invites gaze, like a pool of clear water that lures one to kiss its surface, any part of it, except her ears which are broad and thin, possibly suggesting a thin life, if you are familiar with phrenology or armed with face-reading skills.
17/7
I didn’t find her. She found me. This morning she came to my office and introduced herself. She asked if there was any work for her to do and she was full of praise for me: how I was in charge of important work and what a lot of hard work I must have done in my PhD studies at P—U. It is good to hear a girl much younger than you praise you to your face but a thought came to me reminding me of Aesop’s fable of the magpie and the fox. Perhaps I shouldn’t have allowed that in but, well, I am not the one to be easily had just for nice words or nice features.
I gave her a few manuscripts to go through, mainly translations in Chinese of imported political biographies from the US or the UK, paying particular attention to sensitive areas such as human rights. I cautioned her by telling her what happened when Hillary Clinton’s Living History was published in Chinese translation and how it was expurgated in more than a dozen places, particularly where Wu Hongda or Hongda Harry Wu was concerned.7
It was not till she left that I realized that I had noticed two things about her, the smell exuding from her that was so similar to that of her mother’s and a tiny black mole on the lower part of the white in her left eye, which only showed when she looked further left but disappeared as soon as she looked you in the eye.
I find it hard to take in a woman all at once. It’s always one or two things you notice and remember afterwards. With other girls that you buy and leave, it is their stories that stay longer, years after one had sex.
A couple of years ago, I met this girl with big hair, hair that seemed to be piling up on her head, threatening to fall when she was over you, letting you enter her. She revealed that she was a hairdresser and took meticulous care of her hair, putting it in the latest style, a bit like RuPaul, except that it was intensely dark. I had an instant hard-on at the sight of the gelled hair that felt like hardened spaghetti to the touch. And because you didn’t want to ruin it you stroked across it in an ever gentle grope as if over a knotty wired cage and you smelt the chemical of it that seemed to be aiming at an arousal in itself, with its mousse effects.
She let me enter into her from all positions except the hair. In fact, it was her hair that I wanted to enter and ejaculate into but she said: Definitely no, and wondered why. I told her. A couple of decades ago, even before she was born, when I was a teenager, I had seen a woman walking on the street wearing such a sexy hairstyle, with an opening in the middle at the top, that I had a wet dream in which I uploaded – there was no such expression in those days – all my rice gruel or rice-gruel-like semen. I was to miss the hair for days after.
She was surprised that there was such a thing in those austere days of revolution but I told her that it wasn’t really that austere as fashion moved between two extremes of banning and loosening. I told her what I had seen with my own eyes: young men who wore tight-fitting trousers stopped in the street by workers who cut their trousers open from below with scissors, in an effort to carry out the revolutionary action, and young women wearing trousers so tight that they delineated their buttocks in a way that looked as if they wore nothing underneath.
While listening to me telling my story, she also shared hers with me. At 24, she told me, she did not have a boyfriend but she would go home at 3 a.m. every day, telling her mother that she was working the night shift in a factory. She would then sleep away till lunchtime when she rose and washed herself. What she enjoyed most was watching TV and going shopping, sampling the latest styles of clothing and footwear but hardly ever buying anything till there was a sale.
She said she would occasionally spot a client of hers out on the street but she always managed to get out of the way, in time to escape his attention. Once, when she went shopping in a department store, she saw an army man, in fact a platoon leader, who had visited her once or twice. She quickly hid herself from view, behind a granite column.
Unlike the other girls who dipped in the profession for the money and would quickly get out of it in time to build their own business, she said she would like to be a soldier herself as it would give her opportunities to go places and see the world. ‘A woman in military uniform looks cool,’ said she. Hollowroot, I think that’s her name, gave me her number and asked me to come back again as she would always ‘wait for you’.
A line from a poem in a submitted manuscript that I had rejected came to me and I read it to her,
Wo lande qu cao zhege zhuangbi de shijie
(I’m too lazy to fuck this fucking pretentious world)8
She immediately dismissed it as ‘trash’, saying that poetry was meant to be beautiful, not vulgar.
Then I read her another, which she said was, ‘quite interesting’. It goes as follows:
Deep and Far
Sometimes you think you have gone far
When in fact you have only just arrived at the edge of the bed
Sometimes you think your love is deep
When in fact the depth is only the size of your yang tool
Oh, I forgot something. At one stage in our lovemaking, I used an English word, ‘great’, when she stopped in the middle of it, her brows knitting. ‘What happened?’ I said. ‘I dislike you talking like that,’ said she. ‘Like what?’ said I. ‘Nothing,’ said she, lowering her eyes, afraid of further contradicting me, then added, ‘I hate to hear my own people talking like a foreigner.’ My guard put down, my dick also down, I said, jokingly, ‘What if a white guy comes here and wants to pay for your service.’ In a hard voice, she said, ‘I’d refuse to serve him however much he pays. In fact, I have rejected a few. I never like their smell and their looks.’
I also read another poem from a submitted collection, called, simply, ‘Shoots’. In a couplet, the poem goes, ‘In a loveless age/the only thing that matters is sex’. She said, ‘I don’t agree.’ Asked why, she replied, ‘If you don’t love, you don’t give him the tongue; tongue to anything else but tongue.’
I am dog tired after Australia. While there, I had absolutely no time to make a diary entry although there were a number of other entries sex-wise. While W and D were out visiting places such as Phillip Island and the Great Ocean Road, Wen, an old friend, took me out in search of ‘cultural experience’, as he put it. With the help of Fiona, a migration agent running her own company, called Peach Garden Beyond the World, shortened to PGBW, W and I have decided to pay the first 10% of the deposit for the purchase of a piece of land in Point Cook and start up a business in the town centre, where a house will be built in six months. According to Fiona, by then it will be time for me to ‘transfer’ my wife and daughter to the new abode for a peaceful life, with me to follow and join them whenever I want to. However, when I learnt about Subclass 163, a category of migrants allowed into Australia to set up their own businesses,9 I told her that I wanted to get them out asap, to first run a milk bar while waiting for the house to be completed. By then, I shall be joining them.
Australia is a big enough country with a small enough population. I never go anywhere without feeling that millions of people can be somehow settled there to make the country a populous and strong one. For the moment, however, I just want to shift my own W and D there, with my money safely deposited, away from the clutching hands of the authorities.
One thing I must record here briefly as it’s left an indelible impression upon me. Ya, an old friend, now an interpreter and migration agent, took me to see a court case in the local magistrates’ court. In the couple of hours we spent there, I witnessed a magnificent example of the future for the whole world: about fifty couples had their divorce applications considered and their divorce dissolved, each case lasting no more than ten minutes, perhaps shorter. I can tell from what I heard that none of the marriages, between people from all over the world, lasted more than a few years, the longest being nine years. The words that got repeated by the judge, a fierce-looking woman of Caucasian origin, were Decree Nisi. I put myself in her position and imagined that I repeated those words day in and day out, dealing with divorces that were so easy to obtain, just twelve months of separation. But the thought was unbearable. And I found myself thinking to myself: In the future, the second a man makes physical inroads into a woman it could be considered their moment of marriage and once he backs out they are declared decree nisi. Goodbye, the white Australian decree nisi woman. When I shared this with a friend on my return to China, he immediately posted it on Weibo, saying, If you want to divorce, go to Australia.
As soon as I came back, I went to Ten Thousand Wind Emotions, a joint where Hollowroot works the nights. I thought to ring her but found that she had switched her mobile phone off. Bad, she’s seeing someone else. Then I rang the front counter and was told she would expect me in one hour. I excused myself by telling W that I had to meet an author tonight to discuss the possible publication of a book, and went out to hail a taxi. When I arrived, I decided to take a shower and have my feet manicured. The young man who handed me a towel and a key with a number plate had a knowing smile on his face but he was discreet enough not to ask any questions except a ‘Haven’t seen you for quite some time’. I could hear the unasked question: Where have you been? But I simply said: Busy, without so much as a glance at him.
After I showered, I went to the toilet to piss but the tap was so stubborn. If you pressed it, it wouldn’t go, so I pressed hard when the water burst out in a spurt, mixed with my piss, spraying my legs with it. Cursing under my breath, I had to shower again.
As it was still early before H finished, I went to one of the sofas in a darkened hall and sat down. I could see a number of sofas occupied but could not make out their faces, the lights so dimmed as to leave everything in dark profiles. Hope they couldn’t make out my face, either, I thought to myself, and felt safe. At that moment, a man in white emerged from the semi-darkness, saying, ‘Would you like me to do your feet?’ I recognized that he was the old master from the North. ‘Yes, please,’ I said as I reclined further in the large sofa, my feet extended and raised a little for him to slide in a cushion between them and the stool underneath. He was originally from the North, a place of thousands of miles of ice and snow in winter, with no reputation for foot manicure. He said he had learnt the trade from a master in Yangzhou and had been practising it for over twenty years. After that, I let the man do my feet, roaming from one toe to another, with very nimble and gentle fingers that trimmed my toenails as no one had done before. By the end of the process I had almost fallen into a sleep, all my fears gone that he might cause pain by cutting the nail too deep or even chip a piece of skin or flesh off my toes, when he said ‘It’s done.’ It was not till then that he made a remark that intrigued me; he said: Your toe shows you are non-Han.
Then he revealed that the simplest and most effective way of telling a Han from a non-Han is to see if his little toe is split in the middle. If it is, he is Han and if it is not he is a non-Han. When finally H turned up, after her other client, I told her that and asked her to remove her high-heeled shoes for me to have a look at the toes but she refused, saying that her feet were not very good-looking. I did not insist because I wanted to get on top of her and make love to her straight away. I spread her open to as far as my arms could go and entered her as my tongue also entered her mouth but it refused my tongue as she received me below, her head turned away from me. It was not till that moment that I realized, perhaps for the hundredth time, that if there is any fine difference between love and sex it lies between the first mouth and the second mouth. A woman in love with you will want both, for as much depth and heat as possible, but a woman in sex with you will only open one, the one below, to perform the function of a fee-charging pump until you run dry. Mouth, when coupled with mouth, is life-giving, and love-giving, just as if one is administering artificial respiration, whereas cunt coupled with dick, with the minuscule separation of a condom, is nothing more than the insertion of a card into an ATM till the money is taken, with the inconvenience of having to wipe the dick clean and trash the smelly semen, no longer a life force to reckon with but an instantly trashable substance, and source of suppressed anxiety and ennui.
4/8
B rejected my recommendations for a number of award-winning Australian books that I had brought back for possible translation and publication although he was quite diplomatic, saying that publishing history in China had proven that there was really nothing much in it, with each title selling for a maximum of 5000 copies, even with subsidies, unless, he stressed the word ‘unless’, I could succeed in getting the funding. In one go, Australian books were reduced to the category of self-publishing. I wouldn’t be bothered, as our attempts at filling the forbiddingly difficult and complex application forms in the past showed that it would be a waste of time. One would rather go for American books, or, as B put it: Even South Korean books are easier to handle; they sell well and you get subsidies from them without going through all those fucking forms. They come to you and offer you the dollar as long as you are interested in publishing them in translation.
Afterwards, I checked porn. I now do that even in my office. After I rearranged my desk in such a way that I faced the door with my back towards the window, I can safely check stuff without being always on the alert, always ready to minimize the page by going to the sign ‘x’ at the top right-hand corner. It was a bit weird but I got a hard-on when I got into this site and saw a beautifully made-up woman with an erect penis, sucked in the blooming two-petal flower of a man’s mouth. I was so fascinated by the penis-woman’s eyes in deep blue shadows and her – or should I call her him – that I started stroking my own penis. Then, when I pulled my hand out, I could smell something meaty on the O of my fingers. This proliferation and pluralization of sex certainly says something about today’s world. I was made uncomfortable by the thought that he or she might have difficulty pushing his or her shit the next day if he or she allows her own anus to be a passageway for another man’s entry or entries, something our scatologists may do well to manage in future.
That reminded me of my own entry via anus with J Ro, my Japan Rose, who, with her period coming, wouldn’t allow me to enter via the front door although she said: You can try it if you like, meaning the back door. It was in that tiny bedroom-kitchen-and-toilet-in-one apartment, as tiny as her cunt, that we made it, where I just couldn’t make the entry because it was so tight. I put a bit of phlegm on my member and eased the entry. At first she cried in pain. Then, as I attacked her with more vehemence, she cried in pleasure, mixed with pain, saying it was so good. With no more than ten powerful thrusts, I arrived at my small death, chucking all there was inside my scrotum into her back door. It was such a delirium of experience but I have never tried this on any other women because I loved no other woman to that degree.
I don’t think of J Ro often these days after her tragic death in a car accident, a car that I had bought for her because of her insistence on it, unable to resist the temptation. To remember once making love with a woman prior to her death is akin to that of making love to death, or almost.
5/8
Having dinner with B and his girlfriend – I was only guessing it was his girlfriend and, in fact, everybody said it was – I realized how little there was of any sign that suggested that they had had a fling. They sat there, chatting and laughing. One can’t imagine how B could have been drawn to such a gross specimen: Fat, unsightly, even uncanny. Perhaps her attraction comes from her being the CEO of a retail company but I couldn’t give a damn. It’s rather the balance of things that has brought them together: One handsome male face matched with a less than pretty female face. I kept wishing that Reh was by my side and, while these two were engaged in little jokes and intimate anecdotes, I found my mobile and started sending an smn to her: How u going?
I received an almost instant response, with ‘Good and u?’
Thus started our lunchtime flirting till B’s voice near my ear said: Boy, you can really be busy!
That’s right, I thought to myself: B B-sy, and heard myself saying: No, no, not really, as I waited for my erection to subside.
Looks are not Reh’s only strength, she is also a happy person. Wherever she is there is delightful laughter, one that is not forced but natural. I think B is right in saying that there is no point recruiting a tough woman who looks grim, smiles little and works like a cow. ‘You’ve got to have someone who fills the place with laughter, delight and great looks so that work is a pleasure rather than a pain,’ said he. I couldn’t agree more. Reh was a direct result of that recruitment policy, not without my backing.
This book is scary to read, that I bought at Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong and managed to smuggle in. The stories are nothing short of what the Marquis de Sade wants to teach and preach about ‘irreligion, impiety, inhumanity, libertinage’, but they are more and different, in that the sin-saturated are the Party members who, in losing their second heads – their cocks or pricks or penises or members – in the engagement with cunts, end up losing their heads and, eventually, missing their heads, getting beheaded with a shot in the back on the public execution ground. One guy, by the name of Li, was a Party secretary of a city in Guangxi province, who had many and varied affairs with women of lowly background. This girl of 18 asked him for 200,000 yuan to fund her small retail business in garments and disappeared with the 100,000 that he had managed to give her, prompting him to make a remark that goes: But she hasn’t let me fuck her a sufficient number of times to deserve that amount. Shortly after, he got to know another 18-year-old in a hotel and soon made her his nth mistress, installing her in a secret mansion, in the hope that she might bear him a son because his own wife had only given him a daughter. When the baby was born, he was so disappointed that he said: It’s another one of those without a handle! The guy was executed a few years after that.
I just had to laugh at such absurdities but, at the same time, I was alarmed. Surely, he was executed for embezzlement-related charges, as he had stolen a total amount of 16 million yuan, but everything is interrelated. Power leads to opportunities for making money and money leads to women who generate a need for more money that he has to make by abusing his power. The stupidity of this guy lies in the fact that he, of a lowly background himself, had no vision. The vast Chinese diaspora overseas may have never entered his mind, being too besotted with his crowds of women. Very shortly, I’ll have my wife go to Australia with our daughter and, by then, I shall become solitary again, a happy bachelor, having the time of my life. Besides, why would I want a baby boy born to me that adds to my burden of earthly concerns? I don’t need a womb to perpetuate my name; I only need a vagina to prolong my pleasures but it has to be varied enough to survive the boredom.
Meanwhile, I have to say no to another manuscript that I got whilst in Australia. The guy was a poet I have never heard of but he wrote a book of poetry in Chinese, full of long sequences. As soon as I read them, I decided to reject them. They may have relevance, reminding us of the bad old days but it is not possible to allow them to see the light of day in this part of the world. One of these, titled, A List of Famous Suicides in Contemporary China, gives details of where, when and how people committed suicide, mostly well-known artists and writers who killed themselves during the Cultural Revolution, compressing tragedy after tragedy into a few pages charged with a turbulence of feelings if you can bear to read it through; it’s like reading a gravestone carved with the names of the dead. Another long poem, titled, The File on the Corrupt Officials in China, is a list of all the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) members in high positions who were executed as a result of the various crimes they had committed over the years, with their CCP membership highlighted in red. Even though I am not a Member, I know well such poems will never be allowed into print as long as the Party is in power. I am not prepared to do the stupid thing by following some Western ideologies or slogans. I have my own life to live. At best, the West is an inevitable place, a political and economic haven, to escape to from China and, at worst, it is an excuse for whatever that can’t be done over here.
Before I sent off my rejection letter, I went through the second poem again and found the following:
Du Jiansheng, a Chinese Communist Party Member
together with his mistress, directed the biggest case of
financial fraud and
embezzlement in Guizhou since the founding of the Republic
Du Jiansheng, a Chinese Communist Party Member
consecutively kept over ten mistresses
and to please them
he played ducks and drakes with his money
parting with diamond rings as soon as he bought them
for tens of thousands of dollars
not long ago
to enjoy the first night of a virgin
he wrote a cheque to the amount of 1 million yuan
and the funds he had appropriated amounted to 188
million Hong Kong
dollars …
Well, to put this in the news is one thing but to write it into poetry is quite another. Is poetry a good means of exposing corruption or keeping the memory alive? No, I guess, as poetry anywhere in the world has become the least powerful of artistic expressions, fit only for an ever diminishing number of semi-idiots. And, in Beckett’s words, it is ‘the pastime of licensed apes’.10 I welcome the self-publishers only because I can sell the book numbers for higher than they should be sold. [I’ll remind myself to delete this.] At least I haven’t seen any Western poetry in translation do that, their poetry a vehicle of unrealities they call spiritualities; the only theme that keeps poets preoccupied seems death itself while they turn a blind eye to the physical darkness around them, thinking it’s beneath their dignity to take notice. Poets are living deaths themselves but they are such a nuisance that they keep coming back to me. I hope one day I can write a permanent note of rejection with these words: Poets, die your own death as you are a dead bore and nothing you ever do will achieve anything.
I am beset by one question these days: Are we still capable of love when sex has opened the sluice gates of desires and has made love so purchasable and saleable? But what is love and love is what? After J Ro’s death, whose funeral I did not attend for fear of being recognized or identified but that I had funded as an anonymous donor, it dawned on me that love is perhaps only possible in absence. When the person you think you do not love is gone you start missing her, as all the acts of love you engaged in with her appear to be more thrilling than ever, in memory. It is absurdity in the extreme but it seems true and it is true as far as I am concerned. Once, you got her opened up sitting on the edge of the washbasin in the tiny room, entering her like an army into an unprotected city and experiencing an intense hot sensation of explosion when you came. On another occasion, you splashed her face with semen that was like white face cream and got her to suck you clean. All these would have sounded meaningless to a man without memory or imagination.
She, I now recall, would tell me story after story of how ancient emperors made love to their imperial concubines. One detail emerges in which this emperor, whose name escapes me, has a wall of flesh formed around him of half-naked women against the winter cold, and puts his hands down between any woman’s breasts and his feet between any woman’s legs for warmth. She also told me a contemporary story of a country yokel from a poor mountain village who could not afford to marry a decent girl. Instead, he chose a German-made inflatable doll and married her in private after he gave her a Chinese name, Mu Guiying. I chuckled at this because Mu was an ancient folk heroine.
As far as I can remember, I’ve only ever told her one story, of how Caligula, an ancient Roman general, sodomized the dead body of Drusilla and hoped to revive her by masturbating into her ashes after her body was cremated. The story seemed to have a curious effect of horror and allurement. She was so overcome with the imagined scene that, perversely, her private parts were flooded and my virility, too, was so powerfully enhanced by the aphrodisiacs of the tale that I entered her from all holes, not many, just three, till I eventually came on her eyes, adding to the number. As my writing hits here, my thing goes up again, thinking of her death and how this could not have happened on her grave.
8/8
The thought of the dead woman stops me from visiting the living, leading to my abstention from sex again although another story keeps being told in her own voice, dead but alive.
A man and a woman are happily married but this other man next door has her in his sights because of her beauty. One day he goes south on business, together with this married man, also a businessman. When they are on their way back with their purchased rolls of cloth, they reach a river and have to hire a boat. In midstream, this other man pushes the married man into the river. When he tries to get on board, he stops him by poking him with a long bamboo pole until he sinks. This other man then collects the body and buries it before he makes the return journey.
Reaching home, he tells the woman of her husband’s death, how he tries to save him in a storm while crossing a river but in vain, how he buries him in such and such a place at his own expense. To show his sincerity, this other man pays for the stock the husband had bought. He pays regular visits to the woman and her family for six months without making any advances until he decides it is time to propose to the woman.
The woman, saddened by her husband’s sudden and mysterious death, refuses the man at first but is gradually won over by him as he is kind towards her without being aggressive. Eventually, she gives in, agreeing to marry him.
They live a happy married life and in due course have two children. Soon, twenty springs have come and gone. One day, there is a big rain, so big their backyard turns into a pond. Many frogs jump up from the water to the steps. On seeing that, this other man picks up a bamboo pole and begins pushing the frogs back into the water one by one when the act itself reminds him of the tragic incident that happened twenty years ago. Comfortable in the security of their matrimonial home and his wealth, he thinks it’s time to tell her the story. So he does.
Something extraordinary happens. As soon as she learns about what has happened, the woman begins screaming at the top of her voice, ‘Murder! Murder!’, as she tears out the door, and keeps screaming as she runs all the way to the local court. In no time, the tragic death of her husband is no more secret to the whole town. When the local magistrate asks what she wants to do, she expresses that her only wish is that the man, her husband and the father of her two sons, must die no matter what, on account of what he did that day twenty years ago when he killed her former husband.
‘That is the story,’ she said. That is exactly her story, of a story from the Song Dynasty. It is almost as if her life was interconnected with the spirits without the hindrance of space and time. All stories are hers such as this one involving Xuan Hua, a wonderfully beautiful imperial concubine, loved by Emperor Wendi of Sui. It so happens that Yangdi, Wendi’s son, falls in love with her at first sight but his amorous advances enrage Wendi, so much so that he soon dies. With the help of Yang Su, a minister, Yangdi succeeds in becoming the next emperor. The object of his desire is still Xuan Hua, who he sets out to conquer but finds it extremely hard because she would rather die than let Wendi’s son sully her. Yangdi, a strong and stubborn character, must have his own way and soon does, achieving sexual union with Xuan Hua, his father’s concubine.
As always is the case, happiness does not last long. One day, Xuan Hua falls ill and tells Yangdi that she has had a dream the previous night, in which Wendi comes alive and demands to know why she has had sex with Yangdi, his son. When she does not come up with an answer, Wendi smashes her head with something hard. She drops out of her bed to the ground and wakes up. Afterwards, she falls ill and becomes weaker day by day until she dies.
J Ro said something then that I cannot forget: There is no wall separating life and death. If you pass into death, it does not mean you cannot come back to life. By the simple act of dreaming, one becomes alive and elusive, despite the passage of centuries.
I remember I heard that with a shudder, as if that remark had sent chills down my spine. Although I never record my dreams I do daydream sometimes. In one, I see my own funeral being held in which all the women I have made love to appear, in mourning and in tears. In that moment, they seem united.
9/8
Another day of abstention, perhaps because of the other story she told me.
There was once an old monk living in the depth of the mountains. One day, a monkey he had kept for twenty years got rid of the chains that bound him and ran away. The old monk sighed and said: The guy will die of his obscene heart, all the years wasted in practising the art of asceticism.
Meanwhile, there was a rich merchant by the name of Fu who kept a crowd of pretty concubines, all for his own pleasure. One day, a young man, who called himself Bai, turned up in his premises and asked to be put up for the night. On seeing that Bai was a handsome young man, Fu agreed and, after nightfall, when he stole into his room he saw that the bed was bare of anything, so he offered to have bedrolls brought in. Fu then asked if Bai would like to accept him as his lover; Bai did, on the condition that Fu would keep him as one of his ‘special’ concubines.
Subsequently, Bai mixed with the other concubines and made love to them all, thus becoming a great concern to Fu who found it hard to get rid of him. He sought consultation from a friend who rejected his idea of cutting off Bai’s penis, the root of evil. Instead, he suggested that Snow Dog, a local prostitute well-known for her beauty, should be brought in because she had a way of melting the root.
When Snow Dog was introduced, Bai was overjoyed. He had sex with her day and night. A few days into it, however, he found it hard to sustain the level of energy necessary to maintain the speed and intensity of sexual pleasure, so he went away for a rest. He came back again but it was obvious he had less and less to offer until he could not even come out with anything anymore. It was at that moment that Snow Dog took hold of his penis and broke it with an audible sound. Horrified with excruciating pain, Bai ran away. Snow Dog laughed to see the bloody thing in her hand that was only five inches long.
The next day, a dead monkey with rotten loins was found on a rubbish tip, much to the delight of the old monk, who was pleased with the happy result as it corresponded to his prediction.
I was struck wordless long after she finished the story. She kept saying: Why, are you afraid? It’s only a story, not an element of truth in it. You don’t have to believe it. But, that night, however much she warmed up to me, I remained cold and ardour-less, the thought prominent in my mind being: Will she turn into a Snow Dog?
10/8
Feeling quite down, I went online in search of something funny. Pretty soon, I was amused no end when I found these new folk rhymes. I selected a few that I really like. This one is a new insight into the differences between the rich and the poor:
One keeps a pig when poor
But he keeps a dog when rich
One grows rice when poor
But he grows grass when rich
One wants a wife when poor
But he wants a mistress when rich
One’s wife is his secretary when poor
But his secretary acts as his wife when rich
Another one goes about ‘Four Clears’ and ‘Four Unclears’:
One is not clear what the meetings are about
but he is clear where he should sit
One is not clear who has bribed him
but he is clear who hasn’t
One is not clear who has done a good job
but he is clear who has promoted whom
One is not clear whom he has slept with
but he is clear what he does when he sleeps with them
This following one is an acerbic send-up of some ‘leaders’, calling them ‘Three Five Leaders’:
They are not tired playing mahjong for three or five days
They do not get drunk drinking Maotai for three or five bottles
They dance without going to bed for three or five nights
They have not learnt to do the right thing for three or five years
Part of another one adds to the acerbity of the above:
Party cadres these days are so weird they learn to behave badly in their fifties or sixties
They sing ‘Love that Arrives Late’ and they hug the next generation when dancing
One line of still another rhyme concludes this on a brief, accurate note:
All they ever want is a bed to work on
Some real names are mentioned, too:
Not smoking, not drinking, living to 63 (Lin Biao)
Not smoking, only drinking, living to 73 (Zhou Enlai)
Not drinking, only smoking, living to 83 (Mao Zedong)
Smoking as well as drinking, living to 93 (Deng Xiaoping)
Eating, drinking, whoring around and gambling, living to 103 (Zhang Xueliang)
Gosh, I thought to myself: Perhaps I should pick up smoking and drinking, in order to prolong my own life.
The best of all the rhymes that ridicule the corrupt bureaucrats is one that nearly defies translation but I’ll try:
An Official’s Diary
Getting up in the early morning: beating fist (practicing shadow boxing)
Having a meeting in the morning: beating sleep (taking an early nap)
Eating lunch at noon: beating belch (belching)
Working in the afternoon: beating yawn (yawning)
Overtime in the evening: beating card (playing card games)
Entertainment at night: beating cannon (fucking)
Returning home at midnight: beating fight (fighting)
And, finally, there’s something about love, as a butt of ridicule:
When in love with a woman, a man writes poetry
When in love with a man, a woman starts dreaming
A woman tends to think of a man day and night
A man, to think of a woman by day and of another by night
A woman is good at acting like a spoilt child
A man, at telling lies
A woman is happy with the thought: He really loves me
A man: She is worth my love
A woman considers it happy to kiss a man
A man considers it a pleasure to kiss a woman
When cornered, a woman will marry a man
When a man is cornered, a woman will divorce him
As a mistress, a woman will cause a man’s heart to ache
As a wife, a woman will cause his head to ache
And, in one of the rhymes, I see something missing, which I’ll add later on:
A Perfect Life
Living in an English-style house and wearing a Swiss watch
Getting American payments and marrying a Korean woman
Fucking a Russian woman and driving a German-made car
Drinking French wine and using a Filipino nanny
And, finally, working as China’s ‘public servant’
And the lines I want to add to that are:
Sending one’s wife and children to Australia
And living a naked life back home
Well, I think that’s enough for my day devoid of sex. I’ll stop here as I have a splitting headache myself.
11/8
The poetry conference left me utterly exhausted. What is worse, there is the news that a poet has killed himself. It feels almost as if I was the one partly responsible for the killing. His name is Xiao Zhao and it sounds like a name I once rejected although I am not entirely sure, having rejected so many in my life that I can’t remember; it could be a Xiao Chao or Xiao Tao or Xiao Shao. When I found the poem again – one that had shocked me on first reading it – I still could not say I liked it but I’ll include it here for my own record:
My Best Dream This Life is to Fuck My Own Blood Sister11
Di Li said: Please fuck my mother
and my best dream this life, though, is to
fuck my own blood sister
my blood sister is 14 years of age this year12
legally speaking, it’s not against the law
although it is a bit too much
ethically
still, I am quite scared
forget it then. Let others go and fuck her
however
I might as well fuck her now if she’ll be fucked anyway
I admit that my decision to reject and return poetry manuscripts with stuff like that was essentially out of a deep-rooted fear of the human capacity for evil. Or is it really evil? When I was a teenager, I fell in love with a photograph, the photograph of my cousin. In that photograph, she’s about 20. I looked at her and thought I liked her. Pretty soon, I formed the habit of looking at her daily. I did not know what love was but I found a satisfying pleasure in meeting her gaze in the photo, her eyes deep and dark, intensely foreign. Her face, goose-egg shaped, seemed to have a sacred aura surrounding it. I was about 14 and it never occurred to me that this budding love for a stranger, also a relative, was morally wrong. If I loved a woman in secret, there was no one stopping me doing that. She held me spellbound for my wasted teens, in which I would have done it if I had learnt how to masturbate. Instead, I had wet dreams, often leaving me embarrassed and curious.
This girl had a thin face with three pigtails, two thin ones on the sides and a fat one at the back, like a bird. The price she quoted was ridiculous: between 1488 and 1988. Who’d fuck an organ for that money? I’d use my hand to do the job for free. I asked her to go. She stood there, showing no intention of leaving. Instead, she said: You offer a price. I said: You can go now. She said: Just give us a price and we’ll think about it. In the meantime, my mind was made up: Let’s say 800. She said: Can do, as she went to the phone and pressed a number. I heard her speak into the phone in a low voice: 800.
The deal was closed.
While she went to the shower, I went to the computer to close off the nude photos I had been looking at, in preparation for the coming assault by this bird. Days of exhaustion had left me frigid, not wanting to fuck in spite of an urge to. Man is a strange, conflicted animal. A hotel room large enough for only a queen-sized bed and a few sofas feels like a wild plain with no boundary, where all a man’s instincts come out for the kill, for better or worse.
When she came back, I was lying down in the bed, for her to strip me. I could see that she had large breasts and a surfboard body. She said: Oh, you’ve got a Toshiba. I said: Do you know how to use one? She said: No. I said: How old are you? She said: 24. I said: Oh. She said: Do I look like an 80 year old? I did not make a response, waiting for her to take action.
It was not till she reached for my pants that I realized I was wearing the pants that were once a present from J Ro, my dead woman. I let her strip me down to my underpants when she made a remark: Oh, yours is so tight. I looked down and saw my dick and scrotum shrunken to their minimum, a natural result of my J Ro related thought and the new thought of the suicide poet although I had hoped to do this bird with a nice remembrance of my other sexual experiences.
What followed was more than I had expected. The bird sat there, playing with my thing with her cold hand till it turned colder, refusing to raise its ugly head, when I said: Come on, you need to provide me with proper services. She said: You get what you pay for. I said: But it doesn’t work. She said: It’s not something I can help. I said: I’ll call your manager. She said: It’s up to you but you still have to pay; I’m not showing my body for nothing. A series of thoughts flashed across my mind, one after another, in swift succession: the manager was called, the girl complained, the demand was made for the quoted price, the fucking not done and the face lost. Beneath these thoughts ran a dangerous undercurrent that pointed media-wise.
‘Why is this?’ I said.
‘Well, I come here for the money,’ the girl blurted out. ‘and do the work according to how much I get paid.’
‘How much more do you want?’ I said.
‘If you add another 600, I’ll do the blowing,’ she said.
‘But I haven’t got that much money,’ I said.
‘You can swipe the card,’ she said.
As soon as the new deal was struck, the girl rose and went to the loo. Presently, she came back with a glass of warm water and began wrapping my death-saturated root with a condom. I relaxed, trying to expel the unpleasant thoughts of money while watching her working earnestly on my thing, my fingers once again reaching for the valleys of her sucked-in cheeks. If I were a sculptor, I’d make a statue involving a woman giving a man fellatio with the man’s fingers pressed into the hollows, his eyes closed against the heavens.
I soon felt the need for penetration. The girl, as she opened up underneath, began a monologue consisting of a string of obscenities: I am a fucking slut. I want your fucking root. I want to blow you away. Fuck me right back. And I thought: Fuck you and your ancestors right back to eight thousand generations ago. No sooner had I hit upon the idea than my stuff swelled up and extruded. She removed the bag heavy with my life and went to the loo. Almost immediately afterwards I asked her to leave, never wanting to see her again.
12/8
Back in the city, I caught up with L and C. After dinner, we went to a place called 911, an entertainment complex, where we played pool and sat down, each on a sofa with our feet soaked in a wooden barrel filled to half its height with herbal medicine infused water, letting women massage our feet while chatting about love.
L said: The problem with marriage is that a man does not get any respect at home. You arrive home after a long day’s work and say to your wife: Can you get me a cup of tea? She says: Why should I get you a cup of tea? Do you think I’ve got nothing to do at home myself? Do you think I am not busy enough doing your dirty laundry, preparing your meal, keeping your house clean until I am tired to death? A woman is not a tool; she is a human being. Why don’t you just go and get the tea yourself? After that, you just thought to yourself: Why did I bother getting married? A Little Three appeals to a married man precisely because she can give the man whatever that is denied by his wife: loving words, warm feelings, and, best of all, constant love with sex, which a wife won’t grant after the birth of a baby. You are right that, in marriage, a man lies, and dies, side by side with a woman like two dead rivers in parallel whose bodies run out of sparks for kindling.
C said: I’m sure you are right in that but, you know what, once a Little Three takes over, it’s the same all over again, one wife replacing another, one body replacing another, or, in your own words, one dead river replacing another, the only difference being the age. If women born in the 1950s refuse to marry until they are 50 or over, as a result of The Female Eunuch which advocates non-marriage for women, those born in subsequent decades, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, don’t have any qualms about chasing after fame and fortune. You have a quintessential example in W; we all know who she is. If women these days have no sense of responsibility towards their men, their men will equally lack in a reciprocal sense of responsibilities. Girls now marry for money and if they find they have made a mistake by marrying the wrong man they will exit and enter into another relationship until they find the right one, the one with everything: a BMW, a million-yuan house, just about anything you can think of. My brother-in-law is a case in point. After his divorce, he found a woman younger than him by 20 years, at a time when he was at the height of his financial power, owning a chain of shops. He ate, he drank, he whored around and he gambled. In no time, he squandered all his fortune. Like the firecrackers that send forth brilliant lights in the sky, only to fall in a heap of ashes, he quickly accomplished the process of riches to rags as if it was his pre-determined destiny. The woman, of course, left him. When Shakespeare said: Frailty, thy name is woman, he was wrong. The motto should be updated with a contemporary twist: Love and Leave, thy name is woman, an animal that loves for a purpose and leaves, for a purpose, too.
I said nothing; I just listened, while checking the photographs I had taken in my mobile phone as we went on our way to the restaurant for dinner; two girls, aged about 22, both wearing high-heels, one black and the other golden. The girl with her hair dyed fiery brown was wearing a singlet and short black pants with shiny metal buttons on the sides and the other girl, her hair dyed blonde, was wearing a white skirt that wrapped her buttocks up like a loose bag, the straps of her bra blue and visible. There’s no doubt that they were xiaojie but, looking at them, I had an erection. They looked so fuckable.
C continued: No one belongs to anyone and should not. If I return home and there is no woman, it does not feel worse than if I return to a home where my woman is kept and waiting and kept waiting; it might be even worse because you do not know who she is with in my absence. The body is such a free thing today that it comes into contact with multiple bodies before it moves on. No one bears the least responsibility for anyone anymore.
L continued: Once, when I was divorced and did not have a woman, I could not sleep at night, so I went to consult with a doctor who could not work out what my problems were. Did I eat too much? No. Did I work myself too hard? No. Had I too much on my mind that kept me awake? No. Or perhaps there was maladjustment of internal fluids? No. I told him: You know it’s quite simple. I don’t have a woman sleeping by my side. The doctor laughed and said: Why, but I should have thought of it myself! When I had a woman sleeping with me, I made love to her and went to sleep immediately after because I was tired. I would sleep like a log and even if I woke up again, I could make love and fall back into sleep again. Sleep was never a problem.
I said: You might as well start thinking of getting an inflatable doll.
L said: No way. Just think of how much cleaning you have to do afterwards.
I said: But you could get disposables.
L said: Well, then, people will soon get the idea you are an obsessed sex monster if you chuck the disposables with your ejaculates.
C said: Did you hear this joke about Empress Ci Xi who, after the death of the Emperor, had sleepless nights until she found her imperial doctor? After hearing her complaints, the doctor said: It’s an imbalance of yin and yang. What’s the solution, the Empress wondered. ‘Find two big men’ was the prescription the doctor gave. The next morning, when two men were carried out, someone said: What’s that? A court official said: That’s the ashes of the men.
The imbalance of yin and yang, I thought how apt a description that was. All my life when I walk alone or sleep alone it is the yin that the yang in me is hankering after regardless who the carrier is.
13/8
The girl was 16, going on 17 short of one day, so I said: Happy birthday to you! She said thanks. I noticed that there was a butterfly on the back of her right shoulder and started fingering it as I said: A butterfly, when she said: That’s right. Nothing more was exchanged between us. Instead, I let her do me by taking me through all the steps, such as Qingyimianmian, Tianqingmiyi, and Shengjianchui, the rest of them now a mess in my mind that I won’t bother sorting out. It was not till the ginger blow that she said her first words: Would you mind the ginger?
I said: No, but why?
She said: It’s hot.
I said: Go ahead, while my thought went: What the hell! Might as well.
She put a slice of ginger in a glass of water which she took a mouthful of before she took my member in her mouth. How she managed to suck me without leaking a drop was a miracle to me but I couldn’t be bothered; I couldn’t even start asking her questions because her mouth was full of water and me. The heat generated by the ginger worked wonders as it produced an enormous erection, sinewy with a deep brown-red. When she finished, I said: Can we make love now? She said: Are you sure because I haven’t finished yet?
I let her carry on, putting a few blocks of ice in the same glass and wrapping me up again in her mouth, now icy. After that my member cooled down, becoming numb. I watched how she moved her head up and down, mechanically, tongue-tied, as I played with the dyed and gelled hair on the back of her head until she finished the icy action and proceeded to wrap my right foot in a plastic bath cap that she had rung to ask for. It was not till she accentuated my big toe by separating it from the rest of my foot that I realized what she was doing: She’s going to sit on it to let me toe-fuck her! Sure enough, that was exactly what she did. Even as I am writing this my big toe still carries that feeling of cunt but I must confess that there was no pleasure; it was but another link in the chain of actions that she was professionally required to perform on me.
When it was my turn to fuck her I went half-mast. Wearing a condom made my member wooden, numb; not even the thought of my fucking a 16-year-old was sufficient to work wonders. I got her to remove the condom and suck me till I stood to attention but, as soon as she capped me with a fresh condom, I went limp again and could not find the entry point despite her multiple attempts to straighten it up. I thought: Bloody hell, and said: Just do it by hand, as I eased myself back to bed, my head inching back over the pillow.
As my body tensed and twisted under her performing hand, my mind was electrified with the images of two women, one much younger than the other, both standing naked and making up in front of their separate mirrors. I watched how the younger woman putting lipstick to her lips and how the older woman decorating her eyes with fake long eyelashes. I imagined putting my right finger into the older woman’s hole as my left finger slipped into the younger woman’s without resistance before they turned back and crept over me, letting my member enter into the younger woman, condomless, while my tongue shot inside the older woman’s cunt. There, I was thrilled to notice that she had put lipstick around her yin lips or vulval lips. In that double coupling position with the imaginary mother and her daughter, I reached an orgasm never experienced before, with the aid of the third hand, that of the 16-year-old.
As it turned out, the girl was an ethnic Mongolian but I had nothing more to say to her as we had nothing in common except sex, which took no time to finish.
After we paid, C and I went back to his car. On our way back to the city he told me that he was less and less interested in a good-looking face. Instead, he was more interested in a good-looking cunt. A revelation, I thought, that could be communicated only between men. He went on to say that a decade or so ago he had done girls as young as 13, obviously one year below what the law allowed, which was why it was dangerous as one could receive heavy imprisonment if one got caught but that is exactly where the excitement lay, according to him. Admittedly, the girl had no knowledge of what sexual intercourse was about and lay there for the man to manipulate her whichever way he preferred but it soon turned out that she had the most perfect anatomical organ one had ever laid one’s eyes on. ‘Most good-looking,’ in his words.
Seeing that I fell into silence, C sought to enliven the atmosphere by relating a huangduanzi, an obscene tale, of a mother, with her son, visiting her husband working in a city far away from her village. At night, when the two were hot at it, their son was woken up and wondered aloud what they were doing. To cover her embarrassment, the mother said: Oh, Dad is adding oil, refuelling. The little boy, surprised, said: You are consuming so much oil! Didn’t the village head add oil to you only a few nights ago?
I had a feeling that he’s probably exaggerating his prowess, like Sam used to, things like he chucked it three or four times in one visit. That sort of thing. If he really did what he said he had done, he wouldn’t be here today with me; he’d be in jail. However, one thing he said does make a lot of sense. According to him, ours is the unprecedented Great Proletarian Sexual Revolution, as compared with the Mao-initiated Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution when no one fucked anyone else and when fucking was for the sole purpose of procreation till the nation was bursting with an explosive population living in growing poverty. Now, in this GPSR, where everyone fucks everyone else who fucks everyone else ad infinitum, no one feels happy if he or she goes for days without the act although we remain labourers, not the Great Northern Wildness type, like Gulag, but the new-age Dongguan type where you constantly engage in the act of kissing, necking, coupling, shooting and cleaning up the post-love mess, your bodies bent into each other in a tireless sequence of non-procreative gestures that keep plunging you into a pleasurizing hell of your own making till you are done. If in the past you brandished a hoe and hoed the field, you now brandish a dick-hoe and dick-hoe the field of female bodies where nothing grows except instant sensations of pleasure. That makes all the difference.
The night ended with a pastiche he did on a poem by Li Bai, titled, ‘Thoughts on a Still Night’, which I know to be:
Bright moonlight in my bed
like frost on the floor
I raise my head to look at the moon
and, lowering my head, I miss my home
that he’s violated as:
Two pairs of shoes on the floor
A pair, of dog man and dog woman
Lay naked in bed
14/8
On my way back, L dropped me off at a hotel, called Swans Flying South, where I had my best sex in weeks. The conversation with the girl went something like this, as I now recall:
G: Would you like to do it first?
I: (a pause) Yes.
G: You want to clean up in a shower or a bathtub?
I: Umh, bathtub.
G: (as she turns on the tap) Is this temperature okay?
I: (holding out a hand to test it as the water comes spurting out) That’s fine.
I: Where are you from?
G: Gucheng.
I: Oh, I see.
I: Didn’t finish junior middle school?
G: No.
G: Just a month.
I: Not straight from Shayan then?
G: No. From Huzhou.
I: A pretty place, no?
G: Not really, not as pretty as one reads or hears about it. The water is no good. The temperature okay now?
I: Okay. So you worked in a factory there?
G: Yes.
I: Did they pay you well?
G: No.
I: How much?
G: Well, a couple of thousand kuai a month.
I: So you came here.
G: Right.
I: Like the job?
G: No.
I: Did they train you?
G: I didn’t like it at first, particularly this chui, blowing.
I: But you chuied well just now.
G: Took me a long time to get used to it.
I: Why did you offer shuangfei, double-flying as soon as you came in?
G: It’s my sister you know.
I: Do you mean you were trying to help her so that she could also come in for a share in this?
I: I see. How much would that be?
G: Our group is worth 600 each, the next group, 800, and the highest group, 1200.
I: But I thought the 1200 group of girls the ugliest and the 600 the best-looking.
G: But they are worth a lot and they don’t even pay the maintenance cost.
I: What’s that?
G: We in the lowest group have to pay the cost of monthly medical checkups, of garments like this – if I wear this home my dad will break my leg – and a lot of other little things, such as condoms, this tearable pair of stockings and this fake penis.
I: Do you have a boyfriend?
G: No. Why?
I: You don’t want to keep one?
G: No. If he works, he is supposed to keep me. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep him but that’s too hard. No, I don’t have one and at the moment I share accommodation with a few other girls.
I: Did you say you wouldn’t be here long and you’d go back in a few months?
G: That’s right.
I: What if I come back and see you again?
G: I don’t know. There are always other girls for the taking.
I: Wouldn’t you wish to have someone rich keep you as a – a lover?
G: It’s not like in the old days any more, when the rich would come here to pick up their 2nd tits or 3rd and baoyang, keep, them. Nowadays, the rich seem too happy with their marriages to want to break them; instead, they’ll come here for momentary relief, pay up and go home.
I: Which means you don’t want me to want you.
G: (silence)
I: What if your client is not happy with you?
G: They’ll complain and we’ll get a hefty fine.
I: Hefty? How much do you have to pay?
G: 3000 yuan.
I: Is that right? I’ll lodge a complaint against you for not providing me good enough services then.
G: Ha, ha, ha. That’s funny.
I: I won’t. That much I can promise; I was just joking.
G: I know.
I: You have brothers and sisters at home?
G: One sister.
I: And parents?
G: Both at home, doing nothing, nothing to do, my dad is hospitalized.
I: What condition?
G: Bowel problems.
I: You send money back to support them?
G: That’s right. The hospital and my sister’s tuition fees. A lot of money to go their way.
I: But you could make hundreds of thousands of yuan in a short time.
G: Not me but the girls in the 1200-yuan group. You didn’t hear how much they made at Tianshang Renjian, Heaven on Earth? For one night, you’d have to pay a girl 10,000!
I: It’s shut down, I heard.
G: I know.
I: Would there be anyone willing to pay that high price?
G: Why not? There were so many men so rich; they’d be willing to pay anything and everything just to bonk the high girls.
I: High girls? You mean high-class girls?
G: Yeh, whatever.
I: But if you go back, you won’t make money. What are you planning to do then?
G: I’m going to xiangqin, meeting a potential partner.
I: Someone rich and older than you?
G: No. It’s not going to work because we won’t have much in common. I’d rather go for someone about my own age. Just easier.
The conversation went on and off, between lovemaking sessions and her multiple services, involving blowing, sucking, back-licking, tearing a stocking at the crotch, masturbating with a dildo by my hand while moving up and down on my dick. When I asked which was better, doing it with a dildo or a dick, she said: Of course the latter, because it was more meng, powerful.
Meng, powerful, was the word she kept using a few times when I got on top of her right in the middle of the bed, the way I fucked my dead woman many years ago, until I came when she uttered a small cry of pleasure and both of us opened our eyes to see a tiny plastic bag loaded with my useless semen come out of her cunt. Her mouth, skyward, I now recall, was a gaping hole of ugly darkness as I tried to separate her clinging legs and pushed harder, into another woman, my dear dead one. As I became delirious with ejaculation, I thought J Ro had come alive under me, wriggling and twisting this way and that, pushing herself against me as if she were a male and I, a female, till we became seamless, life and death coupled, commingled and connived.
It was not till, at the time of finishing it, when she removed her high-heels, that I noticed the bulgy bit of her big toe on her left foot, something called hallux valgus that only a 40-year-old and above is seen to have, rare on a 19-year-old. Asked what the matter was, she said: Nothing. I grew up like that, with that.
If I had made the discovery earlier, I thought, I might have gone limp.
15/8
It looks as if we were going to exhaust it, the desire for sex, the sexual desire, till our organs are wrung out of their last drop of sperm, till we, perhaps, no longer want to have anything to do with it anymore, secularized unto tedium, completely desexed, unable to ‘recover from the delirium the next morning’, as she put it, like the little one in the novel who opts for having his root removed at one stroke, for the mere purpose of being allowed entry into the emperor’s palace filled with imperial concubines without running the risk of being caught copulating with them, with a knife so sharp a hair is cut in two if you blow it against its blade, as described in the novel featuring Emperor Yang of Sui.
With my wife and daughter far away in Sydney, I now have more time with my friends. Whenever we are together, our conversation, as if by gravity, naturally slides to the topic of love and sex. After that session with the girl with the hallux valgus, as L drove me back, he revealed to me that love was now only obtainable from qingren, a mistress, someone married who craves extra-marital affairs. According to him, this kind of love is the best possible as the wife, cocooned in the prison of a marriage, becomes callous, serving love like a meal with no spice, and the xiaojie, working-girl, providing the service or services like a cleaner who sweeps desires off your innards for a fee, the way a fish is disembowelled. Only someone who once had a fling with you and still hankers after you will come back to you from time to time, not for money, not for any material gain, but purely for love, a love that leads to wonderful sex. He remembered with fondness how he made love to a woman he loved when she was set all atremble with passion.
Likewise, I told him my own story, of how this girl who came to apply for the job commanded my attention by making all sorts of advances, taking me out to dinner, offering me flowers first thing in the morning and giving me presents, things that a man would have done in the past when he chased a woman. Eventually, one night, after she closed the door behind her in my hotel room, she threw herself into my arms despite my attempts to push her off. I was so overpowered with her perfume and body odour faintly emitting underneath that I lost my head and went to bed with her, knowing at heart that it wasn’t the right thing to do.
I did not tell him that I also had a fling with the mother although I was secretly pleased with the fact that both of them seemed to love me enough to give in to my desires, or to their own. Who can distinguish them these days when the line is so blurred? Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether they did it for love or for some other motive as one is never sure what really is on their mind.
16/8
In this morning’s meeting in which we – B and I – discussed a number of manuscripts, I rejected a translation in English of a Ming Dynasty novel on the grounds that certain descriptions were particularly horrid to foreign readers who might find it disturbing to read them. Take the baby-eating episode in which members of a family, to avoid a road going right through their ancestral grave, steal babies from the villages around, cook them and offer them as delicious food to the viceroy in charge of the roadwork. It makes gruesome reading; a short passage would do:
They went away and, in no time, came back with two babies, aged about three or four, fat and tender. The three hard-hearted brothers killed the babies alive, chucked away their heads and limbs, with their flesh finely removed from their bones, and cut their good flesh into dices, with ingredients of five different flavours thrown in. They were stewed overnight till they were thoroughly cooked before the brothers rode to Ma Shumou’s camp with them in a box.
B remained unconvinced, believing that a West steeped in violence and sex would probably welcome such novelties and rejecting my claim that Westerners are human beings themselves, more so because of their religious restrictions. After all, he said, a text rediscovered from more than a thousand years ago wouldn’t hurt. If it didn’t hurt the Chinese readers, it would not hurt the Western readers, either.
Meanwhile, the girl was present. I must confess to myself that she was acting like a total stranger to me even though we had made love only a few days ago. I looked at her and she looked at me but there was no intimacy of the kind that had been exchanged before our lovemaking sessions began. She listened and occasionally took down a few notes. Any outsider would have thought that she was more friendly with B than I, nodding her head in agreement to everything B said, it seemed, which annoyed me quite a lot. What is so attractive about the balding head of B and his cigarette-stained menya, gate-teeth or front teeth? On the other hand, I did not want others to know what had happened between us. So, I, seething with resentment, looked unconcerned, hardly ever glancing her way. And by doing that I could see she was reduced to the desired unwantedness.
Knowing what B was like, I suppressed my desire to tell him about a manuscript submitted by a poet who called himself laji or rubbish, together with English translations. I had laughed when I reached the end of the poem but I decided to return the MS without letting B know as I was sure he would say no; worse, he would have a low estimate of me because I was so naïve as to introduce rubbish poets. The poem translated, in my opinion, is way over the top but is strong enough to be copied and pasted here:
Poisoned
Cigarette-filters poisoned
Kisses poisoned
Fish-mouth poisoned
Cunt poisoned
Phlegm poisoned
Semen poisoned
Oil poisoned
Eggs poisoned
Balls poisoned
Vegetables poisoned
Sugarcanes poisoned
Looks poisoned
People poisoned
Famous people poisoned
Earth poisoned
Detox poisoned
Botox poisoned
Lipstick poisoned
Mascara poisoned
Eyeshadow poisoned
Nail varnish poisoned
Cunt poisoned
Heart poisoned
Human flesh poisoned
Human heads poisoned
Long-living-ten-thousand-years poisoned
Party poisoned
Words poisoned
Hair poisoned
Values poisoned
Water poisoned
Poetry poisoned
Sky poisoned
Cunt poisoned
There are worse ones than I can quote here. And I also wonder if ‘poisonous’ works better than ‘poisoned’. But to read this kind of poetry is to understand contemporary China from a unique perspective although publishers like B would never allow that into print, let alone into foreign print, assuming it would give the world an unlovely picture of China. I, too, doubt if foreign print would take it seriously, not knowing its multiple layers of cultural and linguistic references and easily shocked by the images of a woman’s corpse being tampered with by a poet, in one of the poems. A publisher with vision would break free from the yoke of contemporary restrictions into things original and far-flung, reminding me of Bourdieu when he talks about ‘thinkers’ who ‘leave in a state of unthought … the presuppositions of their thought’.
17/8
Perhaps I was too tired or something but at night, near midnight, I was about to retire to bed when a thought struck me: I do not want to continue my life like this anymore. I am absolutely bored with a multitudinous accumulation of bodies. The more I experience them the more it feels like visiting the loo, like a love butcher hacking through a forest of flesh. At the end of the story when Emperor Yang of Sui has 3000 girls aged between 12 and 13 collected for his sole pleasure, he meets with a monk who says to him: all these beauties are but ‘heaps of white bones’ and you will come to an early end if you are in love with the ‘pit of fire’.
Am I like L and C who, at one stage in their lives, were fired up by the imagination of flying places to meet their digitally arranged women all over the country only to conclude that life remained unchanged and all the difference it made is a new high-heeled shoe that, once worn, now smells of the foot that wore it?
There is nothing much more to write in this diary as I’ve received a notice from the authorities that I now am under shuanggui, double regulations, that is, I have to clear my name by telling the whole story about my corruption at the fixed place within the fixed period of time. What is comforting is that my wife and my daughter are now safely accommodated in Australia, beyond the reach of the Chinese law, beyond the pussies’ pale, that is, with all our money tucked away in an Australian bank. I want to die but I am afraid of death. If I die, my wife will be a husband-less woman, my daughter a fatherless girl and my father a sonless man, but there is nothing to fear. After all, I am as naked as the room I occupy, anything worth much already gone or sold. As for the pretty women I’ve made love to, I wish those ‘white bones’ well and hope they’ll never touch me again.
Before I actually pack up and go to the place to jiaodai, present the case, I can still afford the time to go through some of the stuff received that has caught my attention. In an underground poetry journal, a poet lays his body and thought bare with these couplets, or, in my own coinage, coupling lets:
In this age in which everyone pursues gold, everything is as fast as ejaculation
And as empty afterwards
Or this:
Everyone is a prison guard
At heart
Or this:
U lie or u tell the truth
When u tell the truth, you scare people
Well said. But, the thing is, I’m not taking these anyway. That said, I now am reminded of what I did not write about when I first went to Sydney with my family. At night, after they settled down in the hotel room, watching TV, I slipped out to meet Yan, a stout Cantonese guy who took me to a place in Kings Cross. There, my eye was met with the maximum impact from an overhead corner TV, playing a video in which a man is putting his penis inside a woman’s anus from behind while another man is about to enter her from the front with his penis, as thick as a hammer, at the same time a deafening song was on, its rhythms quite in keeping with the thrusting movements. Meanwhile, a black girl was dancing on the stage, gradually stripping herself bare, till she was open-crotch but because of the low and scattered lighting one could hardly see much there in her hole. To aid one’s vision, night vision, she lit up a stick with a cigarette lighter, which sent off little sparkling stars. I remained unmoved, watching her dance with the sparkling specks flying about her until they were gone. What happened next caught me unawares. When the girl announced that she was going to make love with one of the people she chose from her audience, I began to dread the prospect of my own potential fall but Yan said not to worry and that it could be fun. When the girl came down the stage, in her super-high heels, and walked through the narrow aisle, blowing kisses to the people as she went past, I grew tense and white and was about to stand up and make for the toilet when she stopped by my side and grabbed hold of me, gently but firmly at my crotch, and said: Your turn, mate! I kept saying no, no, no, but to no avail, as she dragged me upstage amidst raucous laughter. It was at that moment, under the dim light, that I thought of giving it a try, with abandon, and let myself go, completely and irrevocably. I had never felt so free, in that short space of time, and so internationally liberated. Here in Sydney, tens of thousands of miles away from China and scores of minutes away from my wife and my daughter, a ravishing black woman was going to ravish me, all for nothing, right in the eyes of the public, even though it consisted of no more than ten. I let her undo my fly with her black hand, its palm grey, and watched her pick my bird out of its depth. However hard I tried, it would not raise its head, it was as if it had died a premature death. In no time, before I even had time to collect my thoughts, I was kicked off the stage by her with her heels as I hastily redid the fly and went back to my seat, holding my head low between my legs, as it were, like a teenage boy who had just been bitterly chastised for doing something terribly wrong.
Why did I write about that? Well, I’ll just write about it for their benefit so they know what I was like, just an ordinary human being faced with the impotence produced by the sudden flowering of freedom à la Australia.
It’s midnight now. Snatches of a conversation came back that I had in Sydney with a friend, who shocked me by saying that Canberra was the sex capital of Australia and that I should go and enjoy myself there. At the time, I was so tired and also ashamed of the fiasco I didn’t give much of a thought to it but now, when I think of all the potential I have when I go back again, my dick, now an integral part of my brain, raises its head in that direction in the hope of one day sweeping down there, catching W unawares as she won’t have a clue, thinking what a great idea it would be to visit the nation’s capital.
24/8
I have not written anything for days on end nor have I made love for as long. I am about fed up with everything, cunts and all, but I’ll try to achieve a thought that is taking shape in my mind. I have composed an email letter, to be sent off to D, my daughter; it may convince her of the need not to fall in love, particularly not with a white boy. Such people are capable of the greatest evil, spreading AIDS and dumping you at every opportunity. I can’t afford to have her ruined in Australia. According to Montaigne, marriage based on facial features and sexual desires most easily fails or goes awry. She has to understand this or else she is giving herself up to white birds of prey. Meanwhile, I’ll also write a letter to W, my wife, to get her to keep a close eye on D.
25/8
Cioran is right when he says: ‘Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.’ The only meaning, I think and, as Cioran suggests, may be an attempt to die in the fulfilment of one’s sexual desires, in the final moment when one is so coupled with another, the way gears are mutually engaged in the gearbox or a piston is inside a cylinder, or when pork and fish are cooked together in a soup till they become inseparable, that they merge into one another like a cloud into another cloud or a drop of rain soaking into the soil, or, simply put, dying in one another’s death. That, when I think of it, is not sufficient, far from sufficient. I dream of turning us both into suicide bombers, blowing us up right in the middle of mutual orgasms, like two life-sized firecrackers, that burst into most brilliant blizzards of sparks and sparkling thorns, whatever that is. Actually, early this morning I had a dream in which we make love on her return from the Mingfu and agree to go to the top of the building. There, in the bright warmth of the spring sun we shed our clothes and become physically engaged to an inseparable degree because we tie ourselves together with a couple of leather belts around the waists. While I move faster and faster inside her, we manage to inch towards the edge of the building as we drink from each other’s eyes, brimful with love. It is not till we reach a simultaneous orgasm that we let go, taking the spiritual as well as physical plunge that thrills us when both of our brains are splashed like watermelons and our hearts torn apart with the highest sensation of pain-pleasure. I woke up with a deep regret at heart, a mounting wish that I’d disappear that way in defiance of the whole world.
26/8
C’s story of 13-year-old girls with good-looking twats reminded me of a past stained with menstrual blood, semen and phlegm and of a visit with friends to a roadside brothel in T. That afternoon, David, my friend, did at least five women. One of them, a fat woman with a tiger face, proclaimed that David did it the hard way, pumping and pounding, all the way in and out, till she could no longer hold it. She sounded as if she was in pain but one could unmistakably see that she had never enjoyed it as much as then. She accompanied her words with gestures showing how the man did the pelvic thrusts, not minding all watching. Wool, David’s friend, was an old bachelor, who did at least two, one of them twice. Each time he came out of the room, he would say: I am really tired but it’s good; it’s so good. Half way through the afternoon, a girl showed up in our room where we gathered, sitting or standing around, smoking and drinking, while sharing our experiences. The girl was shoved around for each of us to pick and choose while she pretended to resist, uttering small grotesque cries that showed her discomfort, the men freely groping her up and down as if she were a piece of meat. I did not join in the fun but bitterly nursed my own wound: two women were thrust upon me and pounced on me as soon as we went into our room, without even drawing the curtains close, through which I could see the courtyard outside, with sticks of broken furniture, before they noticed I was fully flat. Instead of trying to arouse me, they left me there, with my clothes, shed like tatters. It was not till much later that I realized what had happened: as soon as a man shedded his clothes, with their help, it was his own responsibility to do the fucking and if he couldn’t achieve an erection, he was considered to have done it and the girls had to be paid. Because there were too many girls, they preferred to be doing it two to one, the two of them getting paid together. If one could afford to do ten at a time, the ten would be overjoyed with the tenfold charged. I shook my head at this but, when asked by David, I did not say anything; instead, I just commented that the girls were too ugly for my liking.
Indeed, none of the girls in the house were pretty. They were decked out in vulgar garments and rough-hewn heels. Everything was too much: too much make-up, too much flesh, and too much pressure for you to turn on the tap and shoot. I did not shed a single drop of semen that day.
27/8
Relationships snap so easily, it seems, at my age. The minute B criticized me for my ‘wild’ tendencies I blurted out, ‘But it’s none of your business.’ He, too, seems capable of turning his face anytime he wants. I am left far less impressed than I would have liked. The translation of the classic into English would definitely make a good catch in the Western world despite the description of Emperor Yang of Sui’s indulgence in seeking pleasure with a huge harem of 13-year-old girls. Fact is, Moon Guest, one of the girls, has actually denied him the pleasure, as shown in the translation below,
Moon Guest is a mere child, about 12 or 13. She would have liked to seduce the emperor if she had not been aware of the pain of it. Seeing that Emperor Yang of Sui was trying to have fun, she said, smiling, ‘It does not matter if you want to sleep here although I am afraid you may miss out on the fun elsewhere.’ The emperor smiled and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better here?’ As he said so, he stopped drinking, stood up, took Moon Guest by the hand and went back to the bedroom. When the other imperial concubines noted that Emperor Yang was interested in Moon Guest, they had the mandarin duck quilt and the elephant pillows prepared. When he arrived in his bedroom, Emperor Yang took off his clothes and went to bed. As much as she would like to gratify the emperor, Moon Guest, in her early teens after all, became so shy when asked to remove her clothes that, leaning against the bedpost, she refused to budge. The emperor, highly charged with a mounting desire, urged her a few times but she kept delaying the act of disrobing.
If the emperor slowed down in his calling, Moon Guest would remain silent but if his calling became urgent, Moon Guest would say in a loud voice, ‘Pity me please, your Ten-thousand-years-to-live!’ If the emperor reached for her, she would burst into tears. Much as he would have liked to force it on her, Emperor Yang was reluctant. If he let her go to sleep, he would find it hard to suppress the rising fire within. Instead, he groped her all over and whispered sweet nothings in her ear. Terrified, Moon Guest said not a word, resisting as much as she could, till the emperor was made so uncomfortable that he turned from side to side, for half the night, when the desire overcame him. It was not till then that, no longer giving a damn about the girl as delicate as a piece of precious jade, he rose to force himself upon her. Trembling with fear, Moon Guest found it unbearably painful as she tried in vain to resist him. Despite his effort, the emperor could not fulfil his wish in the face of her strong opposition. After a while he was so tired that he fell into a sudden sleep.
I don’t know why B failed to see the point. I will not speak to him about it for as long as it is possible and as long as I can avoid it in our daily discourse.
Bad mood day today. After that phone call, I realized there was not a shred of love left with that woman, nor with me. Ours is an age made for splitting up. Or, to put it more bluntly, man and woman are born to be split up, not tied together, as the very act of making love demonstrates: in and out, in and out, in, then out, and out, not in anymore. I am sick of love, sick of making love, sick of making love to bodies that can be easily replaced with substitutes, e.g. inflatable dolls. After a certain age, when the girl realizes that the least sustainable thing in the world is love, she is turned into a grown-up woman, with a prostitute’s intuitive sense of what money could do and what she really wants in her life and for the rest of her life. At the centre of the word, romance, shines forth the best and worst values of capitalism.
29/8
I wrote a short letter that I emailed to her today, as follows:
Perhaps we should divorce. I have done enough to deserve it although you do not need to know any details. I have had more than my fill of life’s pleasures and I now am weary of anything to do with humanity. I could go on, of course, but what’s the point? Now that you and our daughter are safely accommodated in Australia, with enough funds to last you years, I am not concerned or worried. If they take me in, I am a bare stick, a financial and political bare stick. As the saying goes, I do not have anything else but my own life, which they can have for the taking.
Please take good care of our daughter and make sure she finds a Chinese-Australian man instead of anyone of a different ethnicity. From my experience, marriage between cultures looks promising but does not work out.
At the same time, I wrote a letter to my dead girl, which I could not possibly email but just keep in my own file, as follows:
Dear J,
I am sorry that I was so cowardly that I did not even go to your funeral because I was afraid of being recognized and associated with you in people’s minds. Once, I was romantic enough to entertain thoughts of a lasting union with you but after you were gone my heart grew so cold it felt like a piece of ice, worse, a piece of unmelting glacier. I trashed all our photos, including the ones in which we made love. Photographs are not as good evidence of love as that of scandal, particularly when one of the partners involved is dead or has parted ways. Parents do not want their children to see photographs of their copulation the same way they do not want to see them in their separation or their old age. I, for one, won’t live to the age when people are free to hang their lovemaking photographs like trophies on their bedroom walls, for all the world to see, and be praised for it.
I can’t now think of the love we made without shuddering all over. We were such animals and we were talking about love as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world! It is not; it’s so ugly, so unbearably disgusting. Think of how I put my penis in your hole, then take it out for you to suck clean before I put it back there again while sucking on your tongue that has just tasted my cunty dick. It’s all so boring.
I’ll join you soon. That is for sure. Perhaps we could enjoy it as much as we want in hell, which I believe is a much less restricted place than heaven. Who wants to go to heaven while hell is available and for all the worst kind of things one couldn’t enjoy on earth?
30/8
Bad news is good in that it reminds one of the danger that has been lying dormant for so long that it has to be somehow addressed. The Yanzhaomen Gate Incident involving Chen is a case in point. I can no longer ignore the warnings on the wall, or are they the writings on the wall? I couldn’t give a fuck. Language has to be bent by the writer who uses it. Otherwise, a human being is not a being but a word.
I found the photos and went through them one by one. This one shows her in bed, lying on a wide spread of snow-white bed sheets, her legs wide open, her feet extended sky-wise, ending in a pair of black high-heeled sandals I had bought for her in Paris, their heels so thin and so high that they would pierce through the heart should they find their way there but usually they end up in my hands, becoming a fitting weapon to propel and empower my pelvic pussy-pushing thrusts. Her face, far away from her heels, watches me behind my camera and appears to be in fear or fearful anticipation because she knows that I’ll throw the camera and make a resolute entry. I tore it, right down the middle of her good-looking cunt, as I gathered a huge erection. When I pulled my thing out, a poet’s words came to mind: My hand, married to my cock, is riding it far/into the future. It smelt as I put my nose between my right thumb and forefinger. I did not wash it for days. That brought back a sliver of memory in which I shafted my unwashed dick into the young girl’s mouth till it got rinsed clean there, one of the most exciting moments in my life, for some reason. Another photo shows her walking away from me in her silk cheongsam, her arse so alluringly tight I wanted an entry. It was on this photo that I dumped my load on her back before I also tore it into pieces, stained with my hot semen. After my aimless shoot, I became reckless in my endeavour to destroy all the remaining photos, be they beautiful, pretty, attractive or downright sexy. I did not want any of those to fire up anyone else’s fantasy or to be smeared with their unwanted load of trash however steamy or burning. Least of all did I want them to be released online and used against me. One needs to live naked offline and be virtually anonymous online, the Internet being a hell of knowledge, as destructive as constructive, like a river into which people chuck all rubbish, garbage and excrement but that, in a fury, could wash away village after village and city after city.