Diary of a Naked Official

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
www.transitlounge.com.au

Copyright © Ouyang Yu 2014

First Published 2014
Transit Lounge Publishing

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher.

Front cover image: Andrea Pun/Trevillion Images
Cover and book design: Peter Lo

Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

A cataloguing-in-publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia:
http://catalogue.nla.gov.au

ISBN: 978-1-921924-71-2

Let ideals be declared void: beliefs, trifles; art, a lie; and philosophy, a joke … Let the mediocre speak of the consequences of pleasure: are not those of suffering even greater? Only the mediocre want to die of old age. Suffer, then, drink pleasure to its last dregs, cry or laugh, scream in despair or with joy, sing about death or love, for nothing will endure! Morality can only make life a long series of missed opportunities!

–E. M. Cioran

He's the most renowned atheist, the most immoral Man … He practises the most thorough and complete corruption, and he is the wickedest and most nefarious person in existence!

–Marquis de Sade

At birth, and death, our bodies naked are.

–John Donne

I said to the men who liked me: Let's not talk about love; there is no love in this world.

–F03 (a woman who had had ten sex partners by 32) [p. 172]

The other day, when I travelled home on the tram from the city, I was reading a book that I had bought some years back. It was a history of Chinese in Indonesia, of all the books, and I was reading it in Melbourne, of all the places, too. I had picked up this book out of pity because I saw it lying there in my study, amidst a large number of other books that I had bought, waiting to be read. After all, I thought to myself, a book is a book. If it is not interesting enough I can read it fast and get onto the next one. In less than half an hour, when we arrived at Thornbury, I had covered 86 pages and had found only one reference that aroused my interest. It was the translation of the word ‘junk' in Chinese, as
zhongguo fanchuan
(Chinese sailing boat) that had left me puzzled until it turned out that, in its original version, the Chinese sailing boat was actually called
zong
. It dawned on me that the English word ‘junk' may have originated from this Chinese character as
zong
may have sounded like
jong
in Cantonese.

It was a fine day that day. After a steamy hot day of 34 degrees Celsius, Melbourne had seen an overnight rain that brought the temperature down to a cool, comfortable 24. I sat there reflecting upon this latest discovery and wondering how I could incorporate that into my work in progress, one that was a book on translation, when someone rose to go, who had been sitting opposite me and who, in my occasional glances, I had noticed to have a haggard, sickly face. I had wanted to move away from him because he sneezed a few times and blew loudly into his handkerchief. When I raised my head, with resentment at the likelihood of catching germs from him, I could see something shiny running down his nose. The guy quickly wiped that clean with the back of his hand when he noticed me watching him. So, it was a relief to see him disembark. I settled back to my book, intending to get through it quickly as a history full of irrelevancies was beginning to pall, when I spotted something on the opposite seat, something white, caught in the corner of the seat. I reached for it and took it in my hand. It was a USB. I looked around, searching in vain for the man who had blown so much stuff into his handkerchief. He must have pulled it out of his trouser pocket when he wiped his nose. Hopefully, I thought, I might find this guy when I got home and checked.

There was nothing in this USB when I inserted it
into my computer except a document, titled,
Diary of a Naked Official
, written in English in its entirety and signed in a name I had not seen anywhere. I Googled ‘Shi Ma' but in vain, too; it could be a pseudonym, given the nature of the book. Nor was there any contact detail that I could lay my hands on. It reads like a mere diary but in certain places it sounds like a novel. The blurring border between the two is as unclear and unclear-cut as that between the skyline and the earthline, known in Chinese as
dipingxian
, the word for horizon. I prefer to think of it as the former because the stuff written seems to have quite an authentic ring to it although imaginary things could also appear true, or truer than the realities.

No sooner did the thought come to me of putting the whole thing online at my blog than I had given it up, for the need to protect the person's identity was greater than the need to reveal it. The alternative was that I could present it as it is, either as a diary or a novel or both, for the readers to decide as to what they want it to be or believe it to be. I now present it as it is, with a bit of editing here and there, just to make it less offensive to the middle-class sensibilities in this country. Although I thought of adding comments wherever appropriate or necessary I have ended up not doing so for obvious reasons: it's not my writing and I should try to maintain its integrity by not tampering with it; after all, the author
might one day come back to claim it. However, before I show the manuscript in its entirety, I have to prepare my readers for the assault to their eye and their senses as well as their sense of moral values because the kind of thing written here is more than we want to see of a growing superpower such as China. I do warn the readers against any potential corruption.

The story tells of an official in his mid-40s, to be more exact a deputy director in a publishing house, who, prior to and after settling his wife and daughter in Australia, leads a life of debauchery and total abandon until he is put in detention for his alleged embezzlement and corruption, of which he keeps a detailed account by way of a diary. I present this in the hope that my readers will be discerning enough to fend themselves off any corrupting influences from a civilization known for its past capabilities of evil and present diversion into the weird and irrepressible, coupled with its resistance to moral and moralizing influences from the West. Because there's no indication of the years given, I would presume that the dates would fall somewhere in the years of the late 20th century or the early years of the 21st although I could be wrong.

Instead of giving the text chapter headings as I had thought of doing, I allow it to run on in a flow of dates in an attempt to retain the natural sequence without disrupting it.

4/6

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.