by Ouyang Yu
‘Woman of Easy Virtue’,1 done in 1903 by Pablo Picasso, is good, graphically simple and evocative: a standing man and a squatting woman, the man fully clothed except where his dick pokes out and the woman starkly naked, taking half of the dick in her mouth. It was the same then and it is the same now. Sam said: But I can’t ejaculate in a woman’s mouth however hard and long she works on it. I recall him saying he dumped it all on the spoon of a xiaojie’s curved tongue after he had used his hand for the purpose. Even in the porn DVDs
I have watched, the men have to resort to their hands to achieve the final purpose of puking, anatomically, that is, or erotically. The thought came to me that this book might be considered for publication if not recommended outright. In today’s China, things are much more confronting, much more insidious, and much more physically permissive than a decade or so back as it is good for the economy; they could be food for artistic thought as artists need inspirations, or else it would all stagnate at an animalistic level. Still, I am not sure because B may object on the basis of market and censorship.
Talking about the C word, there are so many things not allowed into print. Nothing gay or lesbian. No graphic sex. No The Satanic Verses. No Mao: The Unknown Story, books forbidden to be translated, let alone published. Nothing offensive to ethnic tastes. Nothing against the positive image of Chinese people and China. Absolutely nothing about official corruption. As a colleague once said: Castrate your mind before you enter into this business.
Strangely, lines from a gay poem come to mind, written by someone pen-named Grave Grass,
Old Ruan refused (the call girl)
But continued his tongue job and his mouth job –
Like a burning fish that swam across every inch of my skin
Sucking my balls off like a vacuum cleaner2
Such stuff can only exist on the Internet, like grass on a grave, as his name suggests, for bad-taste mourners.
The girl who allowed me to take photographs is now in my hand. Bearing a number 62, she is wearing a black bra, with a white fluff in the front, a head full of black hair, tied up in a white flowery lace. Her eyes, single-lidded, are black, too. Although she did not allow me to enter my tongue in her mouth, she did, aesthetically, allow my second tongue into her second mouth, in and out, many times, and, as I put it, the Buddhist way that is in and the Taoist way that is out.
23/6
Daffodil is the girl I love best. As things are, the more you love a person, the less likely that person is to be with you for long. One has to live with her disappearance one winter, never to appear again, and an expectation that she will somehow turn up somewhere. Of all the sexual episodes I have had with her, one stays in memory for always, lasting longer than the rest. One evening, in her rented apartment, I was eating dinner at the table, sitting across from her, when she bent down as if to pick up something that had dropped on the floor. I was mystified as to what she wanted to do. Soon, it dawned on me that she wanted to perform an oral on my phallus, from under the table! There I was, biting on a succulent chicken drumstick above while she was sucking on my cock underneath, fresh from the open fly. I came right in her mouth as my own mouth also came, swamped with a surging flood of phlegm. When she crept from under the table, she started kissing me with her semen-filled mouth, returning the rest to me after swallowing some. For the first time, I tasted my own semen on her mouth, an experience like no other.
Once, on another occasion, when I arrived at her apartment, she let me in and closed the door behind us. I was pleasantly surprised to see her wearing only a pink dress with nothing underneath, standing in a pair of super-high-heeled shoes, her face made up in a most sexy way. I was immediately aroused and made love to her then and there.
How I want to do it like that again in the physical absence that is a mental presence!
Ours is such a highly sexualized society that if a man is left alone with himself for longer than half an hour he feels unwanted and starts dreaming of having a mouth taking his cock inside it. That’s how I feel about things in general. Only the other day, B, in going through hundreds of applications sent for a sub-editor’s job, joked that qualifications mattered much less than looks. After all, it is the looks that would make him and other males in this publishing house tick whereas an ugly woman with a PhD would only dampen the general spirit, worse if she had a temper because of her superior qualifications; no one would stand a taunting female walking brains on a daily basis.
How right Maugham was when he said, ‘The three duties of woman. The first is to be pretty, the second is to be well-dressed, and the third is never to contradict.’ The two first duties are perfectly observed here and elsewhere in my country but the last one, poor Maugham, is constantly opposed, I’m afraid.
My position is slightly at risk here as the PhD degree I’ve earned in Chinese language and literature may not stand me in good stead, placing me as it does at the centre of attention and jealousy in comparison with all the rest of them whose highest level of qualifications is a mere MA and one editor has no qualifications whatsoever, a mere primary school leaver, managing to get up the ladder by an accumulation of publications in literary magazines, large and small, in the country.
The girl’s mother, a 40ish woman, came to see me about the possibility of securing a job for her daughter. She came by herself. When I pulled up a chair for her, I noticed she was wearing a low-cut dress that revealed much of her breast, the dress black, with enticing lace. And she had put on such a profuse dosage of perfume that I was concerned I might have difficulty expelling it afterwards and my office might become the talk of the publishing house should they happen to also come in and smell it. Her shoes were decidedly unsightly as they were like two pieces of slices cut from a fat cake, although I must say her skin was fairer than most of my female colleagues. She carried two bags of presents as she came in and I waved them off. But she insisted, so I told her to leave them in a corner. She said that Sam had introduced her and that her daughter, near graduation, was keen on the position of a sub-editor. I told her the usual things about the stringent selection process and the requirement for a professional resume. When I finished and she rose to go, we shook hands and it was in that moment that I felt her hand linger a tad longer in my grasp, reluctant, it seemed, to let go. I looked at her and caught this glitter in her black eyes. Remembering something, I picked up a card and gave it to her but she said: I’ve got it already.
24/6
After disappearing for weeks, M has reappeared, with a short message to my phone, saying that she missed me. I saved her number, putting it under Meta, and deleted the message.
I hesitated late this afternoon when N called, the 40ish woman who was dressed up like a 20-year-old girl. Women of her age seem to be quite into doing that these days. The other day, when I took a walk outside on the street, I noticed a quite charming girl walking in high heels and a back-revealing dress. I looked and looked and then, as if my gazing had the effect of turning her head back, she turned her head back and met my eyes. In that instant, I realized with regret that those eyes were embedded in a face decades older than I had thought, revealing an anxiety deep within about their passing youth and lingering potency.
She rang that she had booked a private room for two, at somewhere I have not heard of, something called Humble Abode. It looked humble on the outside, next to a construction site that anyone would overlook when going past, but it was handsomely laid out inside, with elegant calligraphy and paintings. As soon as I was led into the private room, two lines written in a flowing style caught my eye, in the scroll hanging down the wall: ‘I wish the moment would last/in which we share this moonlight apart, over a thousand miles’. It was the word ‘wish’ in this poem of Su Shi’s that momentarily arrested my attention. Right, I thought to myself as I realized that I, in giving attention to Su Shi’s poem, had neglected the woman walking up to me and extending her hand. I was slightly taken aback as she seemed to be the woman-girl I had seen on the street, in
the same back-exposing dress and heels high enough to tip her bodily balance. She did something that changed the power relationship - if there was such thing - when she pulled me into her arms, ever so reluctantly on my part, and held me in a Western-style embrace that, as a rule, I find embarrassing. The evening could be summarized in one word: let. I let her order more than we both could consume and I let her take me to Metropark Hotel and give herself to me in her entirety, all in my total unpreparedness.
I must say the whole thing was a total flop, so humiliating and embarrassing. Wherever I attacked her, condom-less, from before or behind, from above or below, I just couldn’t come, not even when she decided to use her mouth, then her hands. That seriously led to my contemplation on the idea of beauty. A man’s phallus, the origin of his life force, erects its head at the sight of beauty but hangs its head when seeing something unsightly. It seems as natural as the sky is above the earth and the night follows the day. Unless the mind were trained to love the ugly, the dick will follow where beauty is alive despite the realities often to the contrary, as the popular saying goes, haohan wu haoqi, chouhan qu huazhi (a good man is matched with no good wife whereas an ugly man is married with a bloom along the bough), perhaps a balance set by an invisible force.
25/6
Nasturtium’s story goes as follows. Oh, I must say she isn’t that repulsive; she is just a bit too rich for me in the sense of cosmetics and decorative stuff. As someone put it, it’s like a piece of meat a few days too old that needs dressing up.
She said that she had divorced her husband a few years earlier, having found out about his affairs. Because she initiated the divorce proceedings, it had to be a naked process in what people refer to as luoli, naked divorce, in which she walked away from her marriage a naked woman, without her daughter, without her husband and without her properties, not even her share of them. That’s how determined she was: wanting absolutely nothing from her marriage. Instead, she set up her own company, selling children’s clothes, at the same time when she found a man, someone much younger than her. She wanted to keep him for her own pleasures.
I was fascinated by her story and was once again reminded of another friend’s life story: Married but living apart from her husband, Ang, the film director, 40, lives with her son and a male artist, 60, from Paris. People don’t worry about these things any more. They take their lives, or the law of their lives, into their own hands and their own minds.
Neverthelss, she has a secret agenda that she revealed to me: She wanted her daughter to get the job and needed my help through Sam, a middle-school classmate of hers. I was surprised at her daring and regretted losing control on account of her mighty killer heels and her overpowering perfume. But I suppose I can give her a bit of nudge here and there along the way when opportunities avail themselves.
26/6
While My Love Lies Elsewhere falls far short of my expectation, I admit it is a perfectly acceptable book for publication as long as its author can afford to subsidize it, not only to the publishing house but also to me; forgettable books like that touch no one but can blow up the sense of contentment, even superiority, on the part of their authors. They serve as social lipstick and mascara, to be used when making up and dumped when removing it.
These days, bribing has become so rampant that an Australian businessman Sam knows said to me over dinner the other day that he’d play the Chinese game any way we wanted. By that he meant that he’d be willing to bribe his way to successful business deals. Because Sam’s English wasn’t good enough, I had to assist. I noticed that the Australian man was quite stingy. At the end of the dinner, he gave me a yellow kangaroo badge for my effort. I chucked it into a bin afterwards. The poet of Love Lies knew better; she’d already put her dough in my bank. Good on her. Love lies but money doesn’t.
The Australian man was, after all, generous in his telling of lewd stories about scandalous stuff in Australia. One, in particular, caught my attention. According to him, the boss of a factory, one of his main suppliers, had slept with nearly all the pretty girls that worked there. ‘One was so pretty,’ Doug said. ‘I had an immediate hard-on when I went there for a visit.’ He went on so enthusiastically about this girl’s looks and the way she walked that I found it irresistible and laughed out loud. Sam took him to 1919 that night, an entertainment place with the ‘1919’ figure that meant: Want to Fuck Want to Fuck, if pronounced in Cantonese, like this: yao gao yao gao. But, in Mandarin, it could also mean medicinal wine that has curing effects.
I’ve said the same to B. But it is books that speak the honest truth to a hurting degree that are denied the chance of publication because the comfort zone is out-stepped and our core values are challenged. One day, when I can set up my own publishing house, I’ll publish things to my heart’s content. But I hug that close to my heart, without ever voicing it to anyone, let alone B. For the moment, I’ll let things be dictated by MM, money and market through B, Banker of Books. It’s interesting how girls are referred to as MM these days, too.
On the other hand, this new poetry manuscript, titled, Short when Shrunken, from a poet who calls himself Daq Sogu, has got something to say. One poem goes, ‘What’s the matter?/When I see a beautiful face/I see a banknote.’ Another goes, ‘One of the differences/between the brains and the dick/is that/the former ejaculates poems/and/the latter, seeds’. A third, with the title, ‘Question/Answer’, goes, ‘Question: what colour on a woman is the closest to that on a man?/The colour of her tongue is closest to that of a man’s dick/and her own lips without lipstick.’
The absurdity of my position is that much as I love the prurient honesty of such poems I can’t make the recommendation, not even when the poet is willing to pay. A publishing house, unlike a prostitute, can refuse to provide the service even when the clients want to pay although it is similar to a prostitute in that it offers products attractive enough to induce people to buy. Eventually, these poets will have to go underground by publishing their own stuff in bundles of bound pages without a book number, like masturbating in the dark, or just go naked online, like public exhibition to an invisible degree because no one will pay any attention. I’d have to lose my job to give them the satisfaction of coming out to wank in the open.
In the application, the girl has attached a photograph of herself, as they always do these days, but she is different in that she wears a military uniform over a white male-style shirt, with a red tie. Her hair is brownish, obviously dyed, in a way that doesn’t actually add to her natural beauty and, I’d say, that is rather detrimental to it. Her legs and her hands, for my money, seem of the tenderest kinds, slender and slim. As I looked at her, I found myself going hot and hard underneath, which I really shouldn’t have; it was only last night that her mother had it with me and now I was scared of the trajectory of my own thoughts and where they might lead.
Every day now I get smns from them. One from C says: I want to swallow you up! Another from W says: But I miss you so much. Still another from R says: Hubby, when are you coming back? I want you now. I immediately deleted them all. In this day and age such sweet nothings keep the levels of one’s libido high and, from time to time, they make me want to quit my job and my marriage to lead a life of total abandon, something resembling de Sade’s ‘libertine dementia’, travelling from city to city and woman to woman, seeing the landscape of faces as one gets physical with them, with no more attachment than a mobile phone, which, I must say, has become a man or woman’s external sexual organ. Sometimes, short messages that come in create wavelets of desire bordering on an instantaneous delirium. When I go to work, they tell me I look much younger than before, quite inexplicably.
In fact, this is what the girl said who I made love with a couple of years ago in Q city. She told me that I was so good that she really enjoyed it. That sounded as if I was the one who provided the service. According to her, I was even better than her boyfriend, like someone in his early twenties. I pretended to be surprised that she did this thing while
keeping a boyfriend on the side but she assured me that her boyfriend knew nothing. She then told me that many men she had provided the services to could not achieve an erection. ‘They had a mind to,’ she said. ‘but they did not have the ability.’
27/6
As I went to the loo this morning my thoughts about Snapdragon returned, only long enough for me to decide I’d push her out along with all that had been brewing in my intestines. If there are women who snap like a love-taut woollen thread, taking French leave – Chinese leave a more apt word, as it is more abrupt, more determined, more ruthless and more deadly – why can’t I dump them like shit by cleansing them out of my system? It didn’t used to be like that but, now that women are equal to men in everything except that they have not swapped their sex organs with men, the contemporary weaker sex, men can react and resist, like a species fighting a losing battle, whose semen is as trashable as a tissue with snot wrapped in it. Snapdragon gone, I shall make sure she does not resurface in my memory and if she by any chance reappears therein I’ll expel her then and there by forcibly deleting her from my memory, again and again, until no trace is left.
Immediately following her departure is the reappearance of Meta, who said, in one message, ‘I want to hug you in my heart’. And in another, ‘when you come back you’ll see a totally new woman.’ But, for some reason, she would not disclose her whereabouts except that she is busy but will give me a surprise when we next meet.
In the discussion I had with B and others this morning, Love Lies – a joking shorthand for the full title of that manuscript – was accepted without objection, along with a few other trashably acceptable manuscripts, self-aggrandisements dressed up as autobiographies, biographies of dead political VIPs, guaranteed big sales through official channels, and a number of unreadable poetry books by 40ish women whose life is passé and whose literary AA – ambitions and aspirations – are matched only by the amount of cosmetics applied on a daily basis, to the detriment of their dermatological care. I did not mention a single word about the other much more interesting manuscripts that have come my way. One of the main advantages for a deputy head in charge of my area, that of publishing works subsidized with private funds, is I can enjoy all the good stuff, or should I say, better stuff, without spending a single cent. In the scheme of things, an excellent book, by the time it is edited and published, becomes a good book, and a good book, a so-so book. It is amazing how a so-so book can sell, such as the one penned by a guy who called himself Hung Heavens, but I have ceased to be amazed by the mediocrities as the world is made for them, books written by the mediocre for the mediocre, like common food, eaten only to be shat.