Being a sister of the Shanghai sorority carried with it massive prestige and cache here in this cut-and-paste kaleidoscopic melting pot of vintage-meets-contemporary color and style.
For Shanghai was essentially a collage in living color and 5.1 surround-sound, the too-precise-to-be-random culmination of influences and experiences drawn ultimately from the great iconic western and Asian cultural symbols and dramatic fragments of their histories all painstakingly deconstructed piece-by-piece so that upon reassembly there emerged a rearrangement of the old into a brand new, original, essentially more radical concept in which lay a partial vision of the immediate future.
It was eternally stuck in the nearly-but-not-quite-finished stages, wherein the pieces all accommodated one another, but where there was always something essentially missing from the imagined final composition.
What was so special about the sorority was that it was one of those few finished aspects of the thing. It was in and of itself, completely self-supporting, one hundred percent self-energizing and self-perpetuating, as it didn’t matter what the state of affairs – be they domestic or international – as sure as you knew that the sun would rise in the East tomorrow morning, you knew that the sorority would be here to stay tomorrow, next year and the decade after that even, just as it had been for the past thirty-plus years. Like the universe itself, the sorority only got progressively more expansive in terms of its social dimensions; there were now millions of girls wishing themselves a part of it.
While all this had made sense to her in their previous two meetings, it had been a stretch too far of her private, somewhat introverted nature to just spill all her deepest, darkest secrets to a couple of girls she hardly knew at all, and so when Chanel said, finally, “Just tell us when you are ready then – and try to relax. We’ve done hundreds of these with other girls, just remember that,” in the past couple of interviews, Milana had felt something move inside her – a distant fear, a pang of warning. Thus, when the girls asked her, after she had indicated she was ready, whether she had ever kissed a boy, she had just said “no,” and left the extent of her experiences at that.
But it was so obvious that the girls opposite her wanted more. They wanted – and demanded – the absolute truth, no matter what. It would be this one factor, she figured – that is, whether she chose to give it to them or not – that would determine whether she ultimately became a sorority sister,
Milana did feel more comfortable with the two girls now she had met them twice before, too.
In a way, she began to feel that, despite the fact that they offered no information themselves in return, they were really trying to be her sisters. She felt as if it was her who was making it difficult on them. And there had been the way her father had looked at her last night, when she had announced that she was “having lunch” at the Zheng’s house (the exaggeration had been to impress him). He had looked truly proud of her, as if she was scaling an impossibly high social ladder and building a bridge into another world that he had only dared dream she ever could.
Milana knew that she was kinky as hell. She wasn’t especially experienced, but she certainly wasn’t this boring, uptight girl who never thought about sex at all. That was a deeply, cavernously erroneous illusion of herself, in fact, one which she had been presenting to Chanel and Jasmine in the previous question-and-answer sessions under false pretenses.
So this time, she avowed to let herself go, to let her deepest, darkest urges spill forth. At least if she did, and she didn’t make the cut, then it wouldn’t be for her lack of trying.
Ω
As the tears streamed down Lixue Lai Feng Lee’s little doll-face, her ghost-white facemask became streaked in long streams of quickly smudged tears that revealed her true honey–hue complexion underneath. Despite her distinctly domestic presentation right now, sitting on the floor like this in pink flannel pajamas in the middle of her large, rectangular marble en-suite bathroom, Lixue Lai was, just like her English namesake – beautiful snow – something of a frosty, natural beauty.
It was true that she possessed none of the exotic beauty that Chanel had suddenly exhibited in recent years, and certainly none of the compelling glamor of Sofia. But there was a real cuteness about her, thought Mason.
Lixue Lai’s was a traditional Chinese beauty: her miniature hands and short fingers and tiny feet with the little toes to match, the long, artfully-painted nails, the button nose, the puerile shoulders under which her perky breasts jutted forth with just the finest trace of cleavage.
Everyone went for the Eurasian girls these days, such was the instant breath-catching beauty they seemingly possessed, but, despite being of Eurasian origins (he was a fifth European), it was the Han Chinese girls he liked best. He hated what the Americans and Europeans called voluptuous figures – for to him they were just fat masquerading as fashion: chests and butts so large you couldn’t even get your hands around them into a proper grope, meaty thighs that would make an anorexic horse envious, feet so large you could just imagine them quaking.
No – it was girls like his step sister that he though the models of physical perfection. Alright, they might not always be blessed with the whitest skin – but, if they had money then, like Lixue Lai, they could fix that with one of the many expensive melanin reduction creams on the market today. And after that, they were perfect to look at.
Mason had thought once or twice about making a move on Lixue Lai. After all, they weren’t related by blood: just by marriage. His father, Bao “Treasure” Feng Lee, a Eurasian like him, had married Lixue Lai’s mother Changying six years ago just after his biological mother had died from a life-long battle with Malaria, which she had contracted as a child in her home outside Beijing.
Despite his father’s illustrious-sounding name, theirs had been just a moderately successful family until around three years ago, when he had developed HaiSoc.com, an online portal that enabled everything from search to social networking to secure payment mechanisms. Unlike most of these rich kids with whom his sister now associated, Mason had worked damn hard to get where he was. Night after night, as a teenager he had locked himself away in his room and diligently, he had taught himself how to program software so well that by the time he wrote the source code for HaiSoc and travelled up to North China in the freezing winter, bunking on his deceased mother’s younger second cousin’s hard, stone floor for four months without heating during the night while he worked in the day alongside the Party officials on the demonstration of the product’s Beta application, on the very final presentation the hard-nosed politicos had stood in unison immediately when the demonstration was over and given him a thundering round of applause.
Being just twenty-one at the time, Mason was the exact answer to America’s young techno-savvy whizz-kid entrepreneurs that they were looking to counter their imperial superpower, America, with, and thus the site – originally intended as nothing more than a sort of hang-out for Shanghai teenagers – had, with official endorsement behind it, fast become a national event. His company – which now belonged to him, a bunch of Chinese venture capitalists, a Zhengky Bank employee who was permitted to partake in the recent pre-IPO stock offering, and not a few Communist Party officials – was pegged to become the all-in-one homegrown domestic Chinese answer to Google, Facebook, YouTube and Foursquare.
As the company’s founder, CEO and chief innovator, Mason was flying high. He’d been able to buy the whole family a house the likes of which was bigger than he’d ever imagined existed and more than two cars for each of them personally. Mason’s family, which all lived under the one, enormous roof, consisted of him, his father, his step-mother, his mother’s second cousin who had put him up in Beijing outskirts in the early days, and his step-sister Lixue Lai. In total, that came to ten supercars. In China, that cost more than four million dollars, but that was pocket change to him now. He was on top of the world, more powerful than any of his new friends, who, he knew, were in reality the furthest thing from friends he could ha
ve. Mason had never had friends. He didn’t care. He was living like an Emperor, and everyone was either courting him or just plain fucking scared of him.
The only thing Mason regretted about making so much money so soon was how his sister had become involved with this flaky high-society crowd as a result of the family’s sudden skyrocketing financial status. Sofia was OK, he thought, even if she had a bunch of crazy personal issues and a dangerously unhealthy drug habit. At least she had seemed genuine in a way that her cousin Chanel simply was not. The Zheng’s were scared shitless of him, Mason thought with a smirk. Old money was so fucking scared of his badass new money. They weren’t true party loyalists anyway; the Zhengs were simply loyal to the system that served their own self-interest. Not like he was; committed to the cause of China. He could have put his website out there and waited for the Mandarin-speaking world to come to it. There was nothing like it out there, so they would have eventually. That’s what his father had told him to do, after all. But no – Mason’s first concern had been whether his invention met with the approval of the Party. And his loyalty had paid off grandly, only reinforcing his faith in the great ideal of the People’s Republic –
“She’s kicking me out of the Sorority!” mumbled Lixue Lai under her tears.
Mason squinted; his small pupils were drowned in his pitch-black irises, giving his surging anger a demonic artifice.
“What are you talking about, younger sister?”
“She – YuZheng Jiang has been replaced and it’s now Zheng Minzhen who’s in charge,” said Lixue Lai, using Sofia and Chanel’s Chinese names.
“How?”
“I don’t know. Oh, older brother, I am so sorry. I have ruined everything you’ve built. I’ve torn down our whole family’s mianzi. We look so pathetic because of me. All because of my stupid ambitions to be a high-society girl like the rest of them like those Zhengs. You warned me about them, older brother Gan,” continued his sister through her sobs, referring to him with his Mandarin name. It meant bold – most international people however referred to him simply as Mason. He really liked it when his step sister called him Gan, though. Feng Lee Gan. Bold sharp blade. That was how he liked best to think of himself, how he wanted his younger sister to see him. He went over to her and she fell into his arms and sobbed harder. “I didn’t listen to you, older brother Gan, but I should have. Now because of me they have taken all our mianzi, just as you said they would one day!”
“Darling little sister, stop. There, there. They have not taken a shred of mianzi from our family,” Mason comforted her, although he knew that was patently false. To expel the First Lady of the sorority was akin to suggesting that she had no decency in the whole of society; further still, it suggested that she had no business with the Communist Party more generally. “Why don’t you tell me what happened? Where did this start?”
Mason had heard that Sofia was in trouble, but he had no idea that she had resigned her position at the sorority. The sorority, which was one of the pearls of the Communist Party – at least for the Party’s women. Ungrateful mongrel white devil slut, he cursed to himself in his own, internal silence.
“Number one sister Jiang abdicated all of a sudden – she said nothing to me, nothing to anybody first about it. But yesterday, all her sisters, including me, received the news: she had left to Dubai, because she had been given a promotion at her American advertising company, Theo Farrell.”
“What?” said Mason. “You’re sure of this?” That seemed mighty strange. No one with Sofia’s reputation would leave right now; she was at the height of her success. Mason had even been pressured by some Party officials to make her the face for the latest HaiSoc.com ad campaign, such was her allure. She was a marketing girl and the face of the marketing material – she was both backstage and front of house when it came to branding in China. That was far bigger than any job offers in this day and age – surely?
“I’m totally sure. I couldn’t understand it either, older brother Gan. But it’s just been announced officially – it’s even on the HaiSoc main news board!”
Mason went into his stepsister’s room and picked up her iPad. He punched a number of commands quickly into the touch screen and pulled up the announcement. Uploaded only five minutes ago by one of the HaiSoc crew working out of one of the company’s ten floors in the massive multi-story village office complex that was the company’s base, was a headline confirming what his sister had just told him:
SOFIA YUZHENG LINCOLN DOESN’T EVEN WAVE “GOODBYE!”
THE SHANGHAI MEGA-STAR HEADS TO DUBAI IN MEGA-PROMOTION AS THEO FARRELL’S REGIONAL PRESIDENT OF EUROPE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA (EMEA). CEO RICK YORKIN SAYS THE HIRE IS “UNPRECEDENTED”; MARKET WATCHERS SAY THE ‘IT’ GIRL IS BEING PRIMED TO TAKE THE AMERICAN AD AGENCY’S NUMBER ONE SPOT AS YOUNGEST CEO IN JUST YEARS; NEW DAME OF SHANGHAI SORORITY STILL YET TO BE NAMED
Ω
“OK,” said Milana, coughing a little humphhh! into a small, pumped fist, which she rose to touch her glossy pink lips. “This is the difficult part for me. You know that, right?”
“We do,” said Chanel sympathetically. “But the sorority has a very open policy on sexuality, and perhaps if you can’t for whatever reason embrace that, it’s best that you don’t consider trying for a place?”
“No,” said Milana, her voice flat and atonal as a result of her nervousness. “I think you’re right. I think it’s time I opened up to you. I mean I, I want to open up to you.”
“That’s great,” said Jasmine. “We’ll be pretty hard on the pace of this however, since we’ve got a dinner in forty-five minutes to get to. You think you can get everything you want to say in within the next half an hour?”
Milana nodded, and as soon as she did so, Chanel opened fire.
“When did you first kiss a boy?”
“I haven’t yet –”
“Do you really expect us to believe that?” Chanel glared at her across the table accusingly. “You’re 18 years old, and you’ve never even kissed a guy before?”
“I’ve kissed someone – a girl. Just not a boy yet, that’s all,” said Milana.
Chanel and Jasmine looked at each other both guardedly and a little bemused.
“How about the first time you ever masturbated?” asked Jasmine.
“I was twelve – or thirteen. I can’t –"
“It’s important that you remember.”
“It’s OK, I understand,” said Milana, with a sigh. She thought back, counting down her years of adolescence at boarding school, passing along the way a holographic series of images and experiences and feelings from the past in reverse order. “I was twelve. ’Cause I was a year and a half ahead on my studies so I was actually in eighth grade back then.”
“Did you cum?” asked Jasmine.
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You mean –”
“As in, what way? Using your fingers, or by rubbing on a pillow – that sort of stuff? Just tell us about it – as much detail as you can think of.”
“Well, it was some point in the afternoon; I’d just gotten back from school and I was sitting on my bed. At first I was touching my clit for about half an hour just reading stuff online and talking to this friend of mine from class on instant messenger about it, since she was reading the story at the same time as me. I’d done this before, but never for as long, as far as I can recall. Usually I just stopped, I dunno, after like five minutes. But for some reason this time I just kept going on. It occurred to me that my friend might be doing the same thing so I asked her if she was. She told me that yeah, she was, but that she liked to do it best by putting a remote control under her pillow and then kind of humping down on that, so that’s what I did.”
“Did you enjoy that?” This was Chanel again. She seemed to be genuinely enjoying this exercise. For Milana it wasn’t so bad – in fact, once she got into it, she found it was kind of erotic, almost; opening up in this way.
“Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t beli
eve how great it felt. Then I thought of my friend from class doing that same thing and suddenly I felt this surge of – well, you know. I came.”
“This other girl, what was her name?” Jasmine now.
“Sophie.”
“What were you reading about when you came?”
Strangely enough, this Milana remembered clearly. A smile crept back over her face with the memory of it.
“It was a story about a brother and a sister. The guy was about my age then, and his sister was probably about my age now. It was a true story, or at least, it was written as one. His sister was writing it. She described how she had found him playing around with his cock in the study in their house when their friends were out, and then how she’s started to rub his cock. Finally, she’d given him a blowjob and whacked him off extra hard and he’d cum all over her mouth, her face, her tits – everything. I was really turned on by sibling stories back then. To be completely honest with you, I – I still am.”
“Have you ever done anything with your own brothers or sisters?
“Actually, can I ask first – who are your brothers and sisters first of all?” said Chanel. “Just to get it on the record.”
“I have younger sister called Lora and a brother in the middle whose name is Chase,” answered Milana, compliantly.
“Now back to Jasmine’s question: have you ever done anything with them at all? Even talked to them about this sort of stuff before?”
“With Lora’s friend, Leiticia, I’ve talked about it, but not necessarily sexually. More matter-of-factly. It was when we’d just arrived here in Shanghai, actually, about 9 months ago. I just kinda told her that she could make herself feel really good by sitting on a pillow or at the edge of her bed or her table, or by rubbing over her panties with the head of an electric toothbrush. She was kind of flushed, but she asked me some questions about it. I don’t think she had cum yet because after a couple days she came up to my room and told me thanks.” Milana laughed.
The Millennial Reincarnations: A Novel Page 9