by Ouyang Yu
When I asked if the girls also sized up their clients, she said yes. She said that she was glad that I chose her because she didn’t like the man sitting beside me. She was repulsed by anyone wearing a western suit and tie but liked me because I wore casual.
5/7
I changed my mind as soon as the girl revealed that they’d charge 400 yuan for ml [making love - editor’s note], so I said to her that I only wanted a pao [beating cannon or dapao, making love – editor’s note], to which she agreed, with much reluctance. It turned out that she was skinny. When I asked why, she said she had been on drugs. I asked what she took, she said bing [ice - editor’s note] I fell silent as she took my member in her mouth and began working on it. Meanwhile, I stuck my right index finger inside hers and could feel it watering there. She kept saying: I’m feeling itchy. I’m feeling itchy. It wasn’t until I met Sam when I found out that by ‘itchy’ it meant that she was itchy for a fuck. Still, at the time, I had no intention of letting her do it to me; I just wanted her to take it all out on her own. Instead, when it came out, it smeared her hand, which she quickly wiped clean.
Afterwards, she told me this scary story of how a girl she knew had recently died when having a mandarin bath, a bath involving the pair like two mating mandarin ducks, with an official, a deputy bureau chief, with a good reputation as a caring husband and loving father. He got acquainted with a woman from a lowly background and invited her home when his wife went to work. They made love as soon as they arrived and, after a lunch that he prepared – he being a good cook – they went to have that bath in a tiny area of about two square metres, with the door and windows closed. They would never come out alive again. It was his wife who, on coming home, made the shocking discovery: the man and the woman were dead, naked together.
Poor man, I thought with a shudder, but it was the girl’s comment on the man’s hypocrisy more than anything else that made me pause and think. Unless he suffers from chronic impotence or is totally devoid of any desire for the fair sex, a man in his forties or early fifties these days is a mass of sexual desires that he must find an outlet for no matter what. The most saintly would resort to self-comforting by watching or reading porn, then having sex with their wives with the porn images in their heads. The more out-going – yes, the going-out ones – would simply abide by the current law, as unwritten as effective, that a man is allowed to do whatever he likes to do as long as he does it outside the family and in a way that is not found objectionable by the women he comes into contact with, and, of course, as long as he can afford it.
It is odd how something else comes to mind when one writes about this. Years ago, while I was studying at the university, Lao, a classmate, openly flirted with a girl classmate of ours, their sleeping together becoming public knowledge except to his wife, who, when coming for a reunion, drew a remark from another classmate that he might run out of bullets on their first night together. I still remember the jealousy on the part of the guy who made the remark. After all, it was none of his business. In a permissive society, moral values are of little importance or relevance and the only thing that counts is jealousy, a healthy dosage of which can, perversely, act as a moral force capable of toppling anyone powerful.
6/7
Ours is no doubt a sex-soaked or saturated society in which one remains restless till one is fulfilled, or, to put it more bluntly, till one is emptied, emptying being fulfilling, the same thing. There is no desire to read any books unless they are sex related. And if love does not lead to sex, it is love wasted. All one wishes, when one is not occupied, is for his member to be wrapped up in a mouth or a second mouth, repeating the act of ejaculation, or dumping, again and again.
Poet X emailed me a suite of poems by a poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina and wondered if there was any likelihood of getting them published if he translated them. Although I was sure that B would scorn the idea of publishing someone from such a small country I delved into one of the poems and was immediately taken by the thought an introducer (Aleksandar Hemon) writes, that goes: ‘Every war is fought against the body. The body is what soldiers give to the army and their leader, the enemy body is what they aim to destroy. The cost of “freedom” (currently the cheapest word in the English language) is paid in bodies.’ I would have readily published the poet for that invaluable insight but for B who I knew would not touch poetry unless it was either by Nobelprize winners or poets from the USA and the UK. He once said: Mark my words: Nothing would sell well in China except books from the USA and the UK and a few other equally powerful countries, such as France and Germany.
I like the poet’s words because they remind me that the peace we live in is like a war, a warless war, in which bodies, loved, are fought against bodies through the weapon of love until they are exhausted and turn old, then cold. It’s not about love, a minor weapon of destruction that one can purchase; it’s all about bodies, bodies entering bodies like doors, bodies hitting bodies like balls, bodies hugging bodies like burdens, and bodies hating bodies like corpses.
Sam told me something that I already knew, a story widely spread online of how four fupo or sugar mummies, counterparts of sugar daddies, milked a young man of 28 years old till he died and lived again, after being revived with heavy dosages of Viagra, reaching the final moment of total ejaculation in death. The result is not hard to imagine: the four fupo were arrested on murder charges.
Whether the story is entirely true is anyone’s guess as there are versions disputing the authenticity but one thing that Sam said about the four rich women, in their late forties and early fifties, left to themselves without ever being touched by their men, has a ring of truth about it. These men and women must have loved each other when they were first united in marriage but years of bondage in the union serve only to widen the gap, mainly sexual, between them until neither holds any bodily attraction for the other and each goes in search of his or her own pleasures, findable in men or women of a much younger age.
This is terrible. When I do not have sex, my thoughts are preoccupied with it. I turn on the computer to look for porn pics online. Or I insert – what a word; it sounds almost like inserting a member – a CD to watch porn. Or I talk with friends about women, and sex we have had. It is temporarily at work that our thoughts are suspended from it, only to return to it with a stronger passion, like a fire rekindled. The world will definitely go to the sexy dogs; it actually has.
7/7
For some reason, I felt quite depressed today and shut myself up for most of the day without seeing anyone, on the excuse that I was not feeling well. Though I allowed my phone to remain switched on, I did not care to take any incoming calls. The jumping to death of this university vice chancellor came as a shock, making me restless. You could say that he took his life for a combination of reasons: his demotion from his high position, the removal of the official secretary, his lover, the betrayal by his mistress of many years who spilled the beans in a secret letter sent to the authorities, and perhaps many other reasons but if I were him I would never have taken the plunge. If I did, it would be for only one reason: having exhausted any pleasures deprivable from sex. I would then opt for the apogee of sexual enlightenment and extremity by flying off the top of a building face down towards my death, in the final moment in which I come face to face and dick to cunt with Mother Earth, instantly turning myself into an unrecognizable mass of flesh and blood, hot and steaming, achieving the highest intensity of orgasm. That is love, sex, life and death all rolled into one. Short of that, there is nothing worth trying. It is all the same if you keep fucking the same cunt year in and year out or if you keep fucking different cunts of different sizes, matched with different faces, until you are too old to fuck when you realize, in retrospect, that all you have ever managed to do is exactly the same as a golf ball that enters multiple holes or a basketball that drops through hundreds, if not thousands, of net holes.
If I get caught one day, I shall experience the impingement of my body upon the earth, wi
th its ultimate arousal and thrill, in the coupling of life and death.
For the first time, it seems, I realized the proper function of this diary or journal. Now that there are no priests of any religions or religious denominations worth my trust and my confidence, the diary is the only confessional, in which the man listens to himself, his other self or selves, or reads it or them, the way Cioran succinctly puts it: ‘All men are fragments of himself’.
I shall fly with all my sins into the skies and let them shit like rain. Let the mediocrities of this world quote that.
After reading Cioran, I find I’m becoming him although B finds him too distressing for publication, not a shining example of optimism for the money-minded masses going to beat the Americans and become the Number One Nation in the world. He wants uplifting stuff, such as The Surrendered Wife, as he thinks the book might be an antidote for the ills of the contemporary society. But nothing American, in my opinion, is going to work. Good luck if he can make sales soar.
8/7
With poets, as a rule, you do three things, in sequence, to pass the night. First, they call you out to a dinner, surrounded by friends, all poets, known or unknown. Then, they move on to a KTV place where they hire a private room with more beer and they sing with escort girls. Afterwards, a few stalwart ones stay and move on to a huisuo or entertainment complex where you go for three Ss, sauna, shower and shoot, to put it crudely. This is exactly what I did last night.
X, who sent me the query regarding the Bosnian-Herzegovinian poet, has also sent a few manuscripts that I have knocked back but he persists, almost on a daily basis. When you have someone like that, all you do is delete him as soon as you see his email, without even reading a word. He is not the paying type but he keeps hoping that his stuff might somehow be published by us at our expense as he believes that his is so good that, once published, it will win prizes all over the country and, once translated, will win awards all over the world. I am sick of poets like that, blinded and bloated by their own sense of self-worth, blown out of all proportion, although as a person he is urbane and accommodating enough.
As soon as I arrived at the Starbucks, he arose from his seat and introduced me to a crowd of people already sitting there. Even though I am used to being called zongbian or editor-in-chief, which I am not as I am only a deputy editor-in-chief, I am never comfortable with the appellation because it is not true. But if they insisted, I simply allowed them the indulgence. He did the rounds pointing out their names and positions but I was convinced that we would remain strangers afterwards. The only other person I knew was DSG, short for Daq Sogu, a poet with fish-whiskers, who seemed delighted to see me and asked me to sit next to him. Soon, large plates bearing steaming dishes came, with bottles of beer, wine and baijiu, white liquor. They talked about poets and who had won what. While lending them half an ear, I chatted with DSG about his latest submission, what I thought of it and what could happen or not happen. He pretended that he did not care; instead, he began drinking in big gulps as if the beer was mere water. Then he said something that shocked us: If Li Bai were alive today, he would have committed suicide or, even more likely, he would have turned into a suicide bomber by involving a lot of innocent people in his own death, most likely publishers or editors who had rejected him. The conjecture threw us into confusion, not knowing why he had made the remark or on what basis he had done so. As he refused to be drawn out, I turned to talk with X, who filled me in with his good report: having a few poems accepted for publication in a major literary magazine, and counting. I let him talk but couldn’t help noticing that he tried very hard not to ask me a single question about his submissions. But my ears pricked up when I heard him whisper that he’d take me to a ‘nice place’ afterwards. In reply, I told him that I liked the remark about the war and the bodies although a poet from a small country would have great difficulty getting published, even in translation.
Called Emperor Yang of Sui, the place boasted of more than 100 xiaojie. Where the door opened, Periwinkle, a girl wearing purple, was gently pushed into my arms as soon as she turned up, by a hand from outside, with chuckling words, ‘tso yours’. Although I later called her Peri, I did not do anything in the beginning but sat there passively, letting her perform her duties according to a set of rules in her head, dutifully and methodically. At such moments, I was relaxed enough to wax historical. Whoever named the place must have been ignorant of the significance of the historical personage or deliberately meant it for the emperor was notorious for his corrupt prurience involving minors. My train of thoughts was interrupted when she said: Be careful now as I’m going to do something exciting. I said ‘what?’ She said ‘just look’ as she raised herself up, feet to the sky, all her weight on her hands, before she inched towards my dick, taking it in her mouth as she put her feet against the wall above my head.
I grew scared watching her head move up and down on my dick, which made its way right up to her throat. As the pleasure intensified, my fear deepened: What if her hands gave way and she collapsed on me, breaking my member? The more I dwelled on it the less I liked the idea, so much so that I called her to stop, saying, as my dick softened, ‘I’m a bit tired’. Perhaps because of the risky and risqué act, I was not able to come however hard she worked on me. In the end, I got her to milk my little life juice out with her hand and left it at that.
9/7
It seems I write only what happened yesterday, the diary no longer a daily account. We had an argument last night when I refused to ‘serve’ her. She lost her temper and accused me of not loving her any more. What has sex got to do with love, I said. Everything, she said. If I do not love someone, there is no water underneath. That’s interesting, I said: How can the girls do it without love? What did you mean? she said. Nothing, I said. Do you visit them? she said. Yes, I do, I said. No, you don’t, she refused to believe it. We kept going at it, seeing and sawing, until she said: But I like you to mouth me from below because it gives me such pleasure. I don’t even have an erection, I said. But we haven’t had it for two weeks, she said, how come? I am just tired, I said.
‘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. Th
is 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?