Diary of a Naked Official (13 page)

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 Sister
¹¹

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 year
¹²

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?