Diary of a Naked Official

by Ouyang Yu

  28/6

  In that transparent booth they refer to as The Goldfish Tank, in which they dance seen without seeing, I chose Meta because of the shoes. This was a pair I had never seen: Its heels in the shape of inverted erect penises, with balls atop like two tiny cherries. After we finished making love, when I asked where she bought them, she told me that she had actually got a shoemaker friend to make them for her, modelled on her own special design, an idea of hers based on the men she had come into contact with over ‘one month’. They all use ‘one month’ if asked how long they have been doing this job.

  As she talked, an idea suggested itself to me. Why not get her to put the penis-shaped heel in her mouth for me to take a photograph of? She was obliging enough to put one inside her mouth and the other inside her vagina. I took a number of shots from different angles until I could not hold it any longer for the explosive liquid within was turning into a suicide-bomber, ready to detonate himself. Perhaps because of an artistic synchronization or identification, she allowed me to enter her without the condom. I was so delighted that I cried out ‘I love you, Baby’ as I uploaded my jelly-like lotus-root powder, thinking of Snapdragon. It was not till that instant that all I ever wanted to fuck was the dragoness herself.

  Long afterwards, we talked about nothing but art, how Jeff Koons made sculpture based on his love with his porn star wife, and Tracey Emin with her ‘My Bed’, surrounded with used condoms; names that had never been taught her when she attended the school but that were immediately found likeable for what they had done. With an artistic bent myself, I have secret wishes that I could one day collaborate with an artist on a number of ideas that have been brewing in my head for a long time.

  29/6

  Dinner at Yamagoya, with Nasturtium and Rehmannia, her daughter, again at her mother’s expense. Surprise, surprise. Reh looked little like herself in the photograph. Unsexy, perhaps because in the company of her mother, she was attractive with her languorous eyes and her long black hair that cascaded over her shoulders. She was wearing a pair of white sandals and a longish skirt, nearly reaching her ankles, whereas her mother was more aggressive in her attire: newly curled hair above and red heels below. I was a bit embarrassed. Much of the time I ate in silence, letting them do the talking. Nas did much in promoting Reh, as a good daughter at home and a good student at school. At such times, I could catch Reh’s glances, timid escapades, cast my way and, in that instant, we managed to convey something slightly amorous between us without her mother’s awareness. I decided that I liked the girl for her winning smiles and speaking silences.

  At night, before turning in, I masturbated myself thinking of the girl. I haven’t done this for a long time but the girl’s fingers, so pale and tender, seemed to have the power of seducing me in spite of myself.

  I did not promise anything but I said I’d throw in a good word or two when it got to the final stage.

  30/6

  W had an argument with me today. She didn’t agree to let our daughter read porn. I said: But it’s classical Chinese poetry, not porn. I then quoted her a prose poem that, in sum, goes as follows:

  I have dreamt a dream that is funny, in which, I dream you are flirting with someone else. When I wake up, you are still in my arms. In my heart, I can’t afford to lose you, so I sleep hugging you tight, for fear that you may be over there in your dream while you are awake in my arms.3

  She said: This is absolutely unacceptable for a 16-year-old!

  I said: What did you take her for, a fool? Girls her age have more carnal knowledge than all these poems are put together.

  ‘How did you know?’ she said, questioning me with her searching eyes. I dismissed it with a ‘there are stories galore online’. Then I told her there were reports that girls aged between 8 and 12 fell in love.

  ‘But you don’t want to quicken the process with our daughter, do you?’ she said.

  ‘Thing is,’ I said, ‘girls without boyfriends will do anything under peer pressure. For example, a girl of 16 impatiently waited for someone to come along and take her virginity just because everyone else was doing it; her story is online for everyone to read. However, if you give them something more refined and yet elementally absorbing they’ll be able to cultivate a refined taste without losing sight of the more pleasurable that will in time come their way.’

  ‘There’s no way I’ll allow her to do that,’ she objected. As she said this, she set about to confiscate my problematic books, such as Sexual Life in England, that I was going to recommend to B for translation and publication, as well as Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade. When she – a sub-editor working in another publishing house – learnt that, she said: You are dreaming. A book like Sade’s will possibly be so expurgated that nothing much that remains will make sense, when published in Chinese.

  I told her that I’ll go to Australia if they continue to say no to my recommendations or proposals. I wasn’t serious, knowing that, for someone like me, it will probably be not that easy to carve out an existence overseas. Many fail miserably, then disappear. One, the son of a friend’s, was recently seen working as a doorman in a hotel while his parents were still safe in the knowledge that he was working hard at the University of London. My home will be here but I can ship my family away to a safe haven in case something happens.

  1/7

  When it’s raining and there is nowhere to go, I stay home and watch porn. As a rule, I find white girls more exciting, with their hairless cunts and high heels, often next to their cunts. Their dancing doors, ajar, resemble freshly served tender beef or uncooked chicken in a striking way but they all seem to love men mouthing them, something I do not like to do because the women I have come into contact with are the ones paid to do the sucking, not me. When I get a chance to go to Australia, I’ll find them.

  As I watched, I played with myself but I stopped on the point of coming for I thought of the photos I’ve taken of the women I made love with before. I went to close the door of my study and locked it from inside. Then I fetched an envelope of photographs, mainly Acacia, Banksia, No. 62, and Torenia, this last being my latest favourite. In the two hours we had together, she held me tight in her arms and let me go inside her without the condom until I came. I was delighted to hear that she would only let the man do it if she liked him well enough and there were not many men who deserved that. Once, when a man did something impertinent, she slapped him across the face and refused to serve him. She said: Even if I come from the lowest of the low, I deserve to be treated with respect. I liked her a lot for that and regretted that she had recently lost a bag of banknotes amounting to 5,000 yuan. When next time I go there I’ll ask for her specifically. She’s not even 20. She used to be a dancer and, to demonstrate that, she put her legs up above her head, in a yoga fashion. It’s a great pleasure to fuck a girl with such supple limbs, as you can bend her legs this way and that and as far back as you can go. The only drawback is that she wore unsightly cream slippers that did nothing to heighten the sense of pleasure.

  When I finished, dumping the saturated tissues in the bin, a smell of the semen lingering in the air, I thought of the waste. A metaphor offered itself: semen, no longer functioning as a tool of propagation, has now become as much a form of wastage as one’s excrement or urine, ejaculated or shat or pissed, for the momentary pleasure of relief.

  2/7

  Love. I detest the word. It’s such a violent idea. Why does no one talk about the violence of love? In the early days of our love, she threatened, always minutes before I entered her: If you stop loving me, I’ll stop loving you. It’s like this woman I read about. She cheated her husband again and again on the excuse that she was going to another city in search of work whereas she was in fact meeting a man she had got acquainted with on the Internet, a man much younger than her. For that purpose, she got a false identity card, with a birth date ten years younger, and a woman, if well maintained, wouldn’t look her age in any case. Then, with carefully calculated make-up,
she would make herself look even younger, in the inexperienced eyes of a man infatuated to the point of blindness. So she lived together with the man for a period of time till her own husband tracked her down.

  What is love? That is love, a wrongly spelt word that should actually be lust. A woman’s cunt, like a man’s dick, has now the freedom of fucking, like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, freedom of expression and a lot more freedoms except the freedom of loyalty, the freedom of staying with one organ only. Hang on: the freedom of loyalty? That is not freedom but prison. It’s like saying the freedom of prison. For this reason, I would turn a blind eye if W had an affair with another man. In fact, I once insinuated that she should, as there was so much freedom these days. If marriage is a house, it is no longer granite-solid but full of holes through which winds, evil or benign, pass, leaving a trail of irrevocable losses, the loss of love, or lust, its correct version, and of peace, a psychological peace that used to tie a man and a woman together like two figurines carved in a china teapot. Now, if you tie them together, it is like binding two bunches of dynamite ready to explode any moment.

  Knowing that there is no hope of getting this book, The Life of an Amorous Man by Ihara Saikaku, published in a mainland version, based on a Taiwanese version that exists in the traditional script, I chose to read it all by myself and for myself. If they prefer to engage in the amorous scene without wanting to find out why, they are mere animals; worse, they are taps and sewers and pipelines, if they are male, and receptacles if otherwise. In that book, there is so much joy to be had. There is a scene in which, to keep Shizhijie, An Iota of the World, cool, the servant sets flying a swarm of glow worms inside the mosquito net, together with a barrel of water on which float the lotus-flowers and a root of the balloon flower. I found that unspeakably beautiful. In today’s world, there is no beauty, no art any more. It’s all like cheap eats, putting in and pulling out, then a bombardment of trash. What the xiaojie is holding dangling from her hand is a tiny plastic bag of a man’s life, life force, life to the fore, in the form of dumped sperm, with no more use than say a pool of piss or a blob of nasal mucus, which she is only too glad to dispose of when she chucks it downstairs into the mountain of garbage swarming with millions of wriggling maggots, mosquitoes, flies, crap and whatnot.

  3/7

  John Donne made a mysterious remark that goes, ‘Flesh (itself’s death)’, that baffled me although I could sense the inevitability of a feeling that one has when one shoots. The shooting of a gun hurtles the bullet towards a person causing his or her death; the shooting of a dick, on the contrary, ends up causing its own death and, in consequence and sequence, leading to an arrest of everything associated with pleasure. It’s like reaching the top of a high peak before climbing down to the abyss of fatigue and even weariness, in which one wonders why one has bothered and if it is worth bothering again. Indeed, the downloading of sperm into the hard-drive of a vagina through the USB of a dick occasionally feels like pissing into the mud. And that, perhaps, is what Donne refers to as ‘death’ or the death that is the ‘flesh’?

  I much prefer his apt remark that goes, ‘Love builds on beauty, soon as beauty, dies’. Take Banksia. Our recent meeting after a few years of absence has reached a new low. When she peeled herself, I noticed that her breasts sagged horribly, like half-empty bags. The flesh on her legs seemed looser. And whichever way you looked at her face, it just didn’t seem right. Despite her blonde hair, dyed unnaturally, her attraction was minimal. I could almost have told her to go home but for our old days. I let her fuck me three times and fell into sleep, with my back turned towards her, not wanting to touch her, not wanting to sleep holding her in my arms. When beauty fades from a woman, a man’s love for her also fades, at least in this part of the world that I live, regardless what other people think or do in other parts of the world, as that has little or nothing to do with me here in my city.

  I heard that there are things like self-storage in Australia where one can store anything. I’ll have to think of organizing my photographs and things, perhaps even my diaries, to somehow ‘disappear’ in one of those places. It is so scary that I may lose these things to others.

  4/7

  When I checked my mobile phone this morning and she was not there, I experienced a sense of disappointment, mixed with a deeply-felt knowledge that such things would not last long; they were not even meant to last long. She’s probably busy receiving clients and making money. Why would she hang on to your love, which you are not even sure about yourself? Once we were all pure but after dicks meet cunts when the singular turns plural there is no going back. The acquisition of a new woman resembles that of a new mobile phone, useful for a period of time before it is abandoned or sold for a song on eBay. A woman is different in that she takes the initiative by living with you, then leaving you.

  After the Chen case, I now have a serious fear of computer guys who have the technology to break into your computer and steal your files; worse, they may even be malicious enough to put stuff out there online for all and sundry to see.

  For this reason, I have penned a note to the effect that anyone allowed to repair my computer may not take my personal stuff or upload it online, thus making it available for the general public on pain of – I paused at the word death – and wrote ‘serious consequences involving legal proceedings’.

  Y, a friend, from another publishing house, has emailed me what he thinks about the translation of a book, titled, Sex Pots, citing reasons of the double costs of having to pay for the copyright and the translator even as he admitted that it was an excellent book with good reviews online. According to him, the publisher would much prefer to do books that were outside the copyright range. With that in mind, I shall not recommend it to B because it has come to my attention that he doesn’t trust newcomers with PhD degrees under their belts. I realized this when he made a remark about someone who had left recently: You can’t trust these people. With PhD degrees, they think they are superior, their tails tilted so high as to touch the skies. I half heard the remark as I went past his office and when I looked I could see that he, along with another colleague of ours, suddenly went silent.

  To compensate for the loss, Sam and I went back to Feng Qiu Huang in Yellow Waters. It was better than last time but I faced a problem of embarrassment. Minutes after we sat down on the sofa, I heard the guy make the announcement. In came a group of girls in single file, all in alluring attire and black leather heels. As they came to a standstill, in the limelight, they turned to face us and deeply bowed. When they raised their heads, I had an instant realization that I, the client, was not the gazer but the gazee because there were more than a dozen eyes gazing at me, sizing me up and deciding whether they wanted me or not, or perhaps guessing who I’d go for. I was made so uneasy that I could not make up my mind until I heard: ‘This lady is from North East’. Then and there, I decided on her. The collective gaze instantly turned off and I was back to normal.

  I made the decision for no other reason than freshness. I have had girls from the lianghu (Two Lakes), Happy Construction, River North, River South, River West, Cloud South, but, as yet, I have not had any from North East even though that is one of the major sources of xiaojie in the country. The girls there had such a bad reputation that a rhyming couplet goes: ganzou dongbei hu, huan wo hao zhangfu (Expel the North-East tigress and give my good husband back to me). With that in mind, we began our instant affair, instantly purchased, instantly enjoyed and instantly dropped.

  She turned out to be quite amazing, doing everything energetically and thoroughly: sucking, licking, and even dancing nude in her heels. When I came, she removed the container – my condom – and sucked my member, my non-Party member, clean and dry. It was not till I entered into her from above, shouldering her legs, that I realized how small and short she was. With her heels off, her feet reached slightly above my ears. Then I pulled myself out and got her to put the heels on, to make her loo
k taller.

  Afterwards, she told me that she had never found such a big cock as mine. It didn’t sound like a deliberate compliment because it seemed true as compared with another girl the other day who, when asked, said: It’s just okay. Obviously, this girl was not an old hand, or, more appropriately, she’s not an old cunt the way the other girl was, meaning that she hadn’t experienced a big enough number of didi, younger brothers or pricks.

  For this reason, I got her number and promised I’d come back.

  As usual, we lay side by side chatting. Much of the time, I let her do the talking, throwing bits and pieces like ‘is that right?’ or ‘how did that happen?’ She told me that she constantly wagged school and, as a result, her dad beat her up with a stick the size of a rice bowl and nearly broke her leg. As she spoke, she pointed the scar out to me, a large one that ran across her left shin. To get back on her dad, she ran away from home to the neidi, or inland China, staying with her relatives or friends or acquaintances, whoever was willing to take her in for a day or two, drifting from place to place, until her family got so worried that they made enquiries at the police stations everywhere and posted Missing Persons Notices in the newspapers. She was happy to make them sad and distraught. She waited long enough for her dad to literally promise over the phone that he would never lay a finger on her ever again for the rest of his life before she agreed to go home. She had a heroine’s welcome when she arrived back in her village, her parents in tears, heading the village welcome procession.