Diary of a Naked Official (15 page)

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

Exhaust pipes 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.

18/8

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.