Diary of a Naked Official (9 page)

‘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.

12/7

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 possi
b
ilities, ‘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 possi
b
ilities, 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
b
usiness 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.