Diary of a Naked Official (17 page)

3/9

Drizzling for part of the day, spent in a meaningless but extraordinary meeting in which contracts for new titles, books to be introduced from overseas, and all the ordinaries were discussed. She was there making a PowerPoint presentation. She was so composed, with a big smile on her face, as if nothing had happened but
didn't we fuck only a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days before that and a few weeks before that? And, yet, there was not a single trace of love left on that face. As she clicked from one slide to another, title to title, I thought I saw her put all the photographs of our lovemaking on the screen, many sizes larger, for all the publishing house to see, including the typesetters and the doorman: my mouthing her crotch, with her legs spread wide open like two featherless wings; her tongue sticking into my mouth like a mini-moveable feast; my hand removing a high-heel halfway from her foot; and my big instrument, that is, my non-Party member, erect and dark red, held in her hand before she put it inside her, craving for it.

I watched and watched, enjoying it while scared to death and at the same time wondering why no one bothered stopping her. It was not till my name was called that I realized I was seeing something in my daydream, in my abyss mind and in my hell heart. My name was called because B, the publisher, wanted to know my opinion about a number of books recommended. I gave a halfhearted response, basically accepting all. And that was that.

4/9

What I forgot to mention last night was the unanimous voting against the publication in translation of
Philosophy in the Boudoir
by Marquis de Sade as everyone who had read the translated excerpts found them shocking beyond their endurance, things like Eugénie's declaration that goes, ‘Oh! How well I understand evil now! How deeply my heart now desires it!', followed by Madame de Saint-Ange's exhortation that the ‘foulest, the filthiest, the most forbidden things are always the most exciting … They always unleash the most delicious orgasms.' As for the translated excerpts regarding the practice of such harmless crimes as sodomy and incest, they were found to be absolutely unacceptable, rejected outright. I was left astounded by their universal condemnation of what could be called a masterpiece, at least in my own view, particularly when I knew that B was himself into these sorts of sordid secret pleasures as he once revealed to me and as Sam and a lot of other men had, too, in a similar fashion. That night, at Spring Comes, he got quite tipsy and told me that he was tired of all the bought girls; instead, he would like to fuck as many married women as possible, without the obstruction of a condom. When it comes to facing the public with a book, the shit-forming and shit-producing humanity becomes horrified as if it
was their own shit that was about to hang out to dry. It is the night in our hearts that one is afraid of exposing, a beautifully dangerous night, so fascinating that one simply wants to daydream into it, never to come out again.

5/9

T is someone I do not know but who keeps sending emails with attachments which so far have not corrupted my computer but that is not the reason why I have allowed them to come in. The reason I have allowed them is that he sends stuff that is quite amazing. In the past, I heard about this and read, amazingly, only one story about it, published, unsurprisingly, overseas by a writer of Chinese origin. I have forgotten his name now but the story somehow sticks in my memory, that of a man who, in the absence of his wife, enjoys having sex with an artificial doll.

What T sent me today is an attachment containing many photographs of a new product, called ‘Super Dollfie', made in Japan, with a description that these dolls are detachable, refittable, make-upable and resizable, the only word missing is fuckable and refuckable. At
these photos, these dolls, my mind took a leap far ahead of time to a future, a problem-free one, in which sex is not only purchasable but hassle-free, trouble-free and problem-free, as it does not involve any human interaction or any financial bickerings, bitchings or chest-beatings, one in which a bachelor – bachelorhood or spinsterhood is the ultimate preferred mode of living – lives with a variety of dolls, all sizes, all colours, all kinds of make-up, as many as the human imagination can create, in his private house, including ones that are as moveable and intelligent as a robot, a flesh-and-blood robot, and including, of course, the ones into arguments and fighting if the bachelor happens to be a moody one, the age downgradable to year 1. Or am I committing a crime by simply thinking the thought? That would be called an Able Age, an age in which everything can be suffixed with an ‘able', as shown above. If I live long enough to see that happen, I shall buy myself a doll or a number of dolls able to satisfy all my wildest fantasies without having to bear a shred of responsibility, social or legal or familial. The downside of this is that the future dump may be filled with trashed dolls.

One glance into his ‘Lifelike customized sex dolls from Japan' assures me that the human world will not have long to last. In two to three hundred years, no one will have to marry anyone but men and women will live totally alone,
surrounded with dolls, male, female, old, young, gay and lesbian, of all sizes, colours, weights and ages, that cater for all tastes. The greatest industry in the world will be the doll-making industry in which lifelike dolls are made that can talk in chosen languages and make life tolerable by pandering to all desires. Life that involves love and sex will be problem free: no arguments about kids or money or kids and money, no visits to family courts to settle property issues, no need to ask a woman to consent to sex, no need to wait for her period to stop, no fear of any extramarital affairs, just sex, sex, and no end of sex. Imagine sleeping nightly among a group of dolls by any names, ranging from Candace to Polly to Rebekka. I can afford them, at least three if not more. I'll get a Japanese doll, an African doll and a Moroccan doll, one that resembles that of Berlusconi's. I shall never have to keep any demanding ones who keep asking for more, both silver (semen) and gold (money). This is better than death by blasting. In fact, one can write in one's will that one should be buried with one's multiple concubine-dolls. Or if not buried then cremated together. There will be an ultimate fulfilment of seven sentiments and eight desires. To the detriment of mankind, I hear you say but who gives a fuck?

6/9

The cold has set in, an intellectual chill, a sexual cold, that hit me hard, reminding me of Xianfeng Emperor and Tongzhi Emperor, his son, who succeeded to him at the age of five, both having had enough sexual indulgences and depravities to cost their own lives. Xianfeng, in the prime of his life, had four women, commonly referred to as ‘Four Springs', respectively, Peony Spring, a courtesan, Chinese Flowering Crabapple Spring, an actress, Apricot Flower Spring, a maid, and Mandana Spring, a beautiful widow, but lost all of them when the English and French armies entered Peking and set fire to the Garden of Perfection and Light. By then, his health was in ruins, as hinted in a poem of the day that goes, ‘A beautiful girl of 16 has a body of such softness/it resembles a sword that kills a foolish man/reducing him to dry bone marrows/without his head seen rolling.'

More than Xianfeng, his father, Tongzhi went the rounds visiting brothels outside the palace and even played with
xianggu
(Like-girls), or male prostitutes, till he caught the disease. The last straw came when, overwhelmed with sexual desire, he did it with an imperial eunuch, thus plunging him to death faster than he had wanted.

It may be worth pointing out, to no one but myself, that in those days it was a common practice for high officials to
keep not only concubines but also what is called
nanqie
or male concubines. Yang Xiuqing, command in chief of the Taiping Rebellion, for example, had three
nanqie
, Huang Qifang, Fang Shunzhi and Niu Rongchun, that were all slaughtered when he was assassinated. It would seem that those were morally relaxed and lax days in which anything could happen and did happen as long as one had power or money or both.

Nothing has really changed. Perhaps the only thing that has is the way of writing in those days. Whenever intimate details are about to emerge the author will say, ‘my pen won't be able to give a thorough description', or, ‘what happens next, I, a fiction writer, won't mention as I'll put my pen aside.'

Which leaves much room for imagination, to do him justice. If I had read that earlier I might have employed the same techniques by eschewing all the unholy details. It is now a bit too late. Man is a wilful being who will not be content with mere lovemaking but must insist on recording it in a number of ways through writing, recording, aural or visual or both, and photographs, and, then again, he is such a fearful being that he won't show any of those to anyone till death knocks on his door when his life will be exposed and his life or the life he has lived will be forever linked to the scandal. He is much better off if he just enjoys it like the short-lived
emperors with no audio-visual or photographic evidence except the elusive beings, such as words, with which generations to come will employ for the benefit of their imagination.

7/9

[Entry I forgot to make]

8/9

This is a make-up entry for last night or, to be more exact, a non-entry for nothing happened overnight in C, a small mountainous town that the agent took me to, one that is full of hot springs. According to him, there are only one or two that are genuine, out of a dozen touted as the ‘hottest springs' where the water is heated tap water. He took me to the genuine one that consists of more than a dozen open pools, the largest being an auditorium pool where you swim or stand near a stage on which professionals sing or dance. We moved from one pool to another till we came to one that I liked
best because it had schools of tiny little fish swimming around and as soon as you put your feet down in the water they come to you and caress them, sucking on your soles, making you feel as if you were being loved or made love to in a way that only fish were capable of. I thought of something and was going to tell him when I changed my mind.

‘Do you see any likelihood of this MS getting out of the country and published?' said I.

‘Sure,' said Z, the first letter of the agent's name. ‘It's going to make a great impact overseas once published because …' He stopped in mid-air and, putting his mouth to my ear, said in a low voice. ‘Use your connections in Hong Kong. Once you get this going, I'll pay you
kang mi xing
.' He used a dated expression that no one in the pool could understand but I did. It's an old transliteration of the English word, commission.

It was not till then that I told him what I had thought of in return for his offer. It is something I recalled that had happened a long time ago with Tiberius, the second emperor of Rome. This guy had a peculiar habit of training children of noble families in a way that enabled them to swim underneath him as he swam by, nibbling and sucking his dick. He went so far as to have his dick smeared with milk and honey for newborn babies to suck on as if it were a nipple, a dick-nipple.

At this, Z laughed uncontrollably but, for some reason, I detected something insincere because it sounded so hollow.

After we exhausted all the pools, the coldest and the hottest, it was past midnight. We went to our separate bedrooms without a fuck.

*******

As I went to work this morning in the crowded bus, I thought of my planned death. It wouldn't do to commit suicide by blasting myself into pieces among the crowd because they are too innocent to warrant that, although the idea of setting the bomb off in the wilderness or in the depth of a mountain or on board a small boat adrift in the Yangtze while no one is watching is enticing. When I disintegrate in that instant of explosion, along with this diary and the collection of my photographs taken with all the women I have ever fucked, there will be nothing remaining after me except my fragments that will be flushed and rushed away by the rainstorm that comes after. Life will end as honestly as it begins, no need for a fake funeral and forced tears. And the earth will absorb all the nutrition from my fragments in a fragmentary and fragmentarily celebratory way. I prefer this to the one I have thought of before: a funeral in which all my dozens of women appear in their best mourning clothes
weeping over my past pleasures and what-needs-to-be-worked-out future.

This thing, this diary, is so unliterary that I have no pretensions about getting it published; I abhor the very idea of getting it published, having seen so many vain attempts at publication of things not even worth mentioning. The very fact that I write in English may stop many from reading it as many do not have the language unless it finds its way into a
guilao
. Incidentally, talking about the ‘literary', I find much written in the early 1920s, about 100 years ago, way more readable than anything I've read so far, either at home or abroad. The writer is humble enough to drop any pretensions and yet the story he tells is riveting, particularly the one involving Empress Dowager Ci Xi's affairs with her many eunuchs and actors, in which she is often seen lying in bed, not with Emperor Xianfeng whose imperial concubine she is, but with An Dehai, a eunuch, seen even by the five-year-old Zaichun, her son with Xianfeng, the future Emperor Tongzhi. Zaichun is so upset with his mother that he leaves in a huff. The difficulty, the sadness or the beauty of it is that this text will defy the best attempts at translation, guaranteeing its enjoyment solely to the people born in the language.

9/9

One comment on an online documentary featuring the Chinese underworld of brothels goes, now from memory: It's nothing out of the ordinary because it happens everywhere, all for the same reason: different feel, different squeal.

10/9