Diary of a Naked Official

by Ouyang Yu

  G: But they are worth a lot and they don’t even pay the maintenance cost.

  I: What’s that?

  G: We in the lowest group have to pay the cost of monthly medical checkups, of garments like this – if I wear this home my dad will break my leg – and a lot of other little things, such as condoms, this tearable pair of stockings and this fake penis.

  I: Do you have a boyfriend?

  G: No. Why?

  I: You don’t want to keep one?

  G: No. If he works, he is supposed to keep me. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep him but that’s too hard. No, I don’t have one and at the moment I share accommodation with a few other girls.

  I: Did you say you wouldn’t be here long and you’d go back in a few months?

  G: That’s right.

  I: What if I come back and see you again?

  G: I don’t know. There are always other girls for the taking.

  I: Wouldn’t you wish to have someone rich keep you as a – a lover?

  G: It’s not like in the old days any more, when the rich would come here to pick up their 2nd tits or 3rd and baoyang, keep, them. Nowadays, the rich seem too happy with their marriages to want to break them; instead, they’ll come here for momentary relief, pay up and go home.

  I: Which means you don’t want me to want you.

  G: (silence)

  I: What if your client is not happy with you?

  G: They’ll complain and we’ll get a hefty fine.

  I: Hefty? How much do you have to pay?

  G: 3000 yuan.

  I: Is that right? I’ll lodge a complaint against you for not providing me good enough services then.

  G: Ha, ha, ha. That’s funny.

  I: I won’t. That much I can promise; I was just joking.

  G: I know.

  I: You have brothers and sisters at home?

  G: One sister.

  I: And parents?

  G: Both at home, doing nothing, nothing to do, my dad is hospitalized.

  I: What condition?

  G: Bowel problems.

  I: You send money back to support them?

  G: That’s right. The hospital and my sister’s tuition fees. A lot of money to go their way.

  I: But you could make hundreds of thousands of yuan in a short time.

  G: Not me but the girls in the 1200-yuan group. You didn’t hear how much they made at Tianshang Renjian, Heaven on Earth? For one night, you’d have to pay a girl 10,000!

  I: It’s shut down, I heard.

  G: I know.

  I: Would there be anyone willing to pay that high price?

  G: Why not? There were so many men so rich; they’d be willing to pay anything and everything just to bonk the high girls.

  I: High girls? You mean high-class girls?

  G: Yeh, whatever.

  I: But if you go back, you won’t make money. What are you planning to do then?

  G: I’m going to xiangqin, meeting a potential partner.

  I: Someone rich and older than you?

  G: No. It’s not going to work because we won’t have much in common. I’d rather go for someone about my own age. Just easier.

  The conversation went on and off, between lovemaking sessions and her multiple services, involving blowing, sucking, back-licking, tearing a stocking at the crotch, masturbating with a dildo by my hand while moving up and down on my dick. When I asked which was better, doing it with a dildo or a dick, she said: Of course the latter, because it was more meng, powerful.

  Meng, powerful, was the word she kept using a few times when I got on top of her right in the middle of the bed, the way I fucked my dead woman many years ago, until I came when she uttered a small cry of pleasure and both of us opened our eyes to see a tiny plastic bag loaded with my useless semen come out of her cunt. Her mouth, skyward, I now recall, was a gaping hole of ugly darkness as I tried to separate her clinging legs and pushed harder, into another woman, my dear dead one. As I became delirious with ejaculation, I thought J Ro had come alive under me, wriggling and twisting this way and that, pushing herself against me as if she were a male and I, a female, till we became seamless, life and death coupled, commingled and connived.

  It was not till, at the time of finishing it, when she removed her high-heels, that I noticed the bulgy bit of her big toe on her left foot, something called hallux valgus that only a 40-year-old and above is seen to have, rare on a 19-year-old. Asked what the matter was, she said: Nothing. I grew up like that, with that.

  If I had made the discovery earlier, I thought, I might have gone limp.

  15/8

  It looks as if we were going to exhaust it, the desire for sex, the sexual desire, till our organs are wrung out of their last drop of sperm, till we, perhaps, no longer want to have anything to do with it anymore, secularized unto tedium, completely desexed, unable to ‘recover from the delirium the next morning’, as she put it, like the little one in the novel who opts for having his root removed at one stroke, for the mere purpose of being allowed entry into the emperor’s palace filled with imperial concubines without running the risk of being caught copulating with them, with a knife so sharp a hair is cut in two if you blow it against its blade, as described in the novel featuring Emperor Yang of Sui.

  With my wife and daughter far away in Sydney, I now have more time with my friends. Whenever we are together, our conversation, as if by gravity, naturally slides to the topic of love and sex. After that session with the girl with the hallux valgus, as L drove me back, he revealed to me that love was now only obtainable from qingren, a mistress, someone married who craves extra-marital affairs. According to him, this kind of love is the best possible as the wife, cocooned in the prison of a marriage, becomes callous, serving love like a meal with no spice, and the xiaojie, working-girl, providing the service or services like a cleaner who sweeps desires off your innards for a fee, the way a fish is disembowelled. Only someone who once had a fling with you and still hankers after you will come back to you from time to time, not for money, not for any material gain, but purely for love, a love that leads to wonderful sex. He remembered with fondness how he made love to a woman he loved when she was set all atremble with passion.

  Likewise, I told him my own story, of how this girl who came to apply for the job commanded my attention by making all sorts of advances, taking me out to dinner, offering me flowers first thing in the morning and giving me presents, things that a man would have done in the past when he chased a woman. Eventually, one night, after she closed the door behind her in my hotel room, she threw herself into my arms despite my attempts to push her off. I was so overpowered with her perfume and body odour faintly emitting underneath that I lost my head and went to bed with her, knowing at heart that it wasn’t the right thing to do.

  I did not tell him that I also had a fling with the mother although I was secretly pleased with the fact that both of them seemed to love me enough to give in to my desires, or to their own. Who can distinguish them these days when the line is so blurred? Sometimes, it is hard to tell whether they did it for love or for some other motive as one is never sure what really is on their mind.

  16/8

  In this morning’s meeting in which we – B and I – discussed a number of manuscripts, I rejected a translation in English of a Ming Dynasty novel on the grounds that certain descriptions were particularly horrid to foreign readers who might find it disturbing to read them. Take the baby-eating episode in which members of a family, to avoid a road going right through their ancestral grave, steal babies from the villages around, cook them and offer them as delicious food to the viceroy in charge of the roadwork. It makes gruesome reading; a short passage would do:

  They went away and, in no time, came back with two babies, aged about three or four, fat and tender. The three hard-hearted brothers killed the babies alive, chucked away their heads and limbs, with their flesh finely removed from their bones, and cut their good flesh into dices, with ingredients of five different flavours thr
own in. They were stewed overnight till they were thoroughly cooked before the brothers rode to Ma Shumou’s camp with them in a box.

  B remained unconvinced, believing that a West steeped in violence and sex would probably welcome such novelties and rejecting my claim that Westerners are human beings themselves, more so because of their religious restrictions. After all, he said, a text rediscovered from more than a thousand years ago wouldn’t hurt. If it didn’t hurt the Chinese readers, it would not hurt the Western readers, either.

  Meanwhile, the girl was present. I must confess to myself that she was acting like a total stranger to me even though we had made love only a few days ago. I looked at her and she looked at me but there was no intimacy of the kind that had been exchanged before our lovemaking sessions began. She listened and occasionally took down a few notes. Any outsider would have thought that she was more friendly with B than I, nodding her head in agreement to everything B said, it seemed, which annoyed me quite a lot. What is so attractive about the balding head of B and his cigarette-stained menya, gate-teeth or front teeth? On the other hand, I did not want others to know what had happened between us. So, I, seething with resentment, looked unconcerned, hardly ever glancing her way. And by doing that I could see she was reduced to the desired unwantedness.

  Knowing what B was like, I suppressed my desire to tell him about a manuscript submitted by a poet who called himself laji or rubbish, together with English translations. I had laughed when I reached the end of the poem but I decided to return the MS without letting B know as I was sure he would say no; worse, he would have a low estimate of me because I was so naïve as to introduce rubbish poets. The poem translated, in my opinion, is way over the top but is strong enough to be copied and pasted here:

  Poisoned

  Cigarette-filters poisoned

  Kisses poisoned

  Fish-mouth poisoned

  Cunt poisoned

  Phlegm poisoned

  Semen poisoned

  Oil poisoned

  Eggs poisoned

  Balls poisoned

  Exhaust pipes poisoned

  Vegetables poisoned

  Sugarcanes poisoned

  Looks poisoned

  People poisoned

  Famous people poisoned

  Earth poisoned

  Detox poisoned

  Botox poisoned

  Lipstick poisoned

  Mascara poisoned

  Eyeshadow poisoned

  Nail varnish poisoned

  Cunt poisoned

  Heart poisoned

  Human flesh poisoned

  Human heads poisoned

  Long-living-ten-thousand-years poisoned

  Party poisoned

  Words poisoned

  Hair poisoned

  Values poisoned

  Water poisoned

  Poetry poisoned

  Sky poisoned

  Cunt poisoned

  There are worse ones than I can quote here. And I also wonder if ‘poisonous’ works better than ‘poisoned’. But to read this kind of poetry is to understand contemporary China from a unique perspective although publishers like B would never allow that into print, let alone into foreign print, assuming it would give the world an unlovely picture of China. I, too, doubt if foreign print would take it seriously, not knowing its multiple layers of cultural and linguistic references and easily shocked by the images of a woman’s corpse being tampered with by a poet, in one of the poems. A publisher with vision would break free from the yoke of contemporary restrictions into things original and far-flung, reminding me of Bourdieu when he talks about ‘thinkers’ who ‘leave in a state of unthought … the presuppositions of their thought’.

  17/8

  Perhaps I was too tired or something but at night, near midnight, I was about to retire to bed when a thought struck me: I do not want to continue my life like this anymore. I am absolutely bored with a multitudinous accumulation of bodies. The more I experience them the more it feels like visiting the loo, like a love butcher hacking through a forest of flesh. At the end of the story when Emperor Yang of Sui has 3000 girls aged between 12 and 13 collected for his sole pleasure, he meets with a monk who says to him: all these beauties are but ‘heaps of white bones’ and you will come to an early end if you are in love with the ‘pit of fire’.

  Am I like L and C who, at one stage in their lives, were fired up by the imagination of flying places to meet their digitally arranged women all over the country only to conclude that life remained unchanged and all the difference it made is a new high-heeled shoe that, once worn, now smells of the foot that wore it?

  There is nothing much more to write in this diary as I’ve received a notice from the authorities that I now am under shuanggui, double regulations, that is, I have to clear my name by telling the whole story about my corruption at the fixed place within the fixed period of time. What is comforting is that my wife and my daughter are now safely accommodated in Australia, beyond the reach of the Chinese law, beyond the pussies’ pale, that is, with all our money tucked away in an Australian bank. I want to die but I am afraid of death. If I die, my wife will be a husband-less woman, my daughter a fatherless girl and my father a sonless man, but there is nothing to fear. After all, I am as naked as the room I occupy, anything worth much already gone or sold. As for the pretty women I’ve made love to, I wish those ‘white bones’ well and hope they’ll never touch me again.

  18/8

  Before I actually pack up and go to the place to jiaodai, present the case, I can still afford the time to go through some of the stuff received that has caught my attention. In an underground poetry journal, a poet lays his body and thought bare with these couplets, or, in my own coinage, coupling lets:

  In this age in which everyone pursues gold, everything is as fast as ejaculation

  And as empty afterwards

  Or this:

  Everyone is a prison guard

  At heart

  Or this:

  U lie or u tell the truth

  When u tell the truth, you scare people

  Well said. But, the thing is, I’m not taking these anyway. That said, I now am reminded of what I did not write about when I first went to Sydney with my family. At night, after they settled down in the hotel room, watching TV, I slipped out to meet Yan, a stout Cantonese guy who took me to a place in Kings Cross. There, my eye was met with the maximum impact from an overhead corner TV, playing a video in which a man is putting his penis inside a woman’s anus from behind while another man is about to enter her from the front with his penis, as thick as a hammer, at the same time a deafening song was on, its rhythms quite in keeping with the thrusting movements. Meanwhile, a black girl was dancing on the stage, gradually stripping herself bare, till she was open-crotch but because of the low and scattered lighting one could hardly see much there in her hole. To aid one’s vision, night vision, she lit up a stick with a cigarette lighter, which sent off little sparkling stars. I remained unmoved, watching her dance with the sparkling specks flying about her until they were gone. What happened next caught me unawares. When the girl announced that she was going to make love with one of the people she chose from her audience, I began to dread the prospect of my own potential fall but Yan said not to worry and that it could be fun. When the girl came down the stage, in her super-high heels, and walked through the narrow aisle, blowing kisses to the people as she went past, I grew tense and white and was about to stand up and make for the toilet when she stopped by my side and grabbed hold of me, gently but firmly at my crotch, and said: Your turn, mate! I kept saying no, no, no, but to no avail, as she dragged me upstage amidst raucous laughter. It was at that moment, under the dim light, that I thought of giving it a try, with abandon, and let myself go, completely and irrevocably. I had never felt so free, in that short space of time, and so internationally liberated. Here in Sydney, tens of thousands of miles away from China and scores of minutes away from my wife and my daughter, a ravishing black woman was
going to ravish me, all for nothing, right in the eyes of the public, even though it consisted of no more than ten. I let her undo my fly with her black hand, its palm grey, and watched her pick my bird out of its depth. However hard I tried, it would not raise its head, it was as if it had died a premature death. In no time, before I even had time to collect my thoughts, I was kicked off the stage by her with her heels as I hastily redid the fly and went back to my seat, holding my head low between my legs, as it were, like a teenage boy who had just been bitterly chastised for doing something terribly wrong.

  Why did I write about that? Well, I’ll just write about it for their benefit so they know what I was like, just an ordinary human being faced with the impotence produced by the sudden flowering of freedom à la Australia.

  It’s midnight now. Snatches of a conversation came back that I had in Sydney with a friend, who shocked me by saying that Canberra was the sex capital of Australia and that I should go and enjoy myself there. At the time, I was so tired and also ashamed of the fiasco I didn’t give much of a thought to it but now, when I think of all the potential I have when I go back again, my dick, now an integral part of my brain, raises its head in that direction in the hope of one day sweeping down there, catching W unawares as she won’t have a clue, thinking what a great idea it would be to visit the nation’s capital.

  24/8

  I have not written anything for days on end nor have I made love for as long. I am about fed up with everything, cunts and all, but I’ll try to achieve a thought that is taking shape in my mind. I have composed an email letter, to be sent off to D, my daughter; it may convince her of the need not to fall in love, particularly not with a white boy. Such people are capable of the greatest evil, spreading AIDS and dumping you at every opportunity. I can’t afford to have her ruined in Australia. According to Montaigne, marriage based on facial features and sexual desires most easily fails or goes awry. She has to understand this or else she is giving herself up to white birds of prey. Meanwhile, I’ll also write a letter to W, my wife, to get her to keep a close eye on D.