by Ouyang Yu
25/8
Cioran is right when he says: ‘Life not only has no meaning; it can never have one.’ The only meaning, I think and, as Cioran suggests, may be an attempt to die in the fulfilment of one’s sexual desires, in the final moment when one is so coupled with another, the way gears are mutually engaged in the gearbox or a piston is inside a cylinder, or when pork and fish are cooked together in a soup till they become inseparable, that they merge into one another like a cloud into another cloud or a drop of rain soaking into the soil, or, simply put, dying in one another’s death. That, when I think of it, is not sufficient, far from sufficient. I dream of turning us both into suicide bombers, blowing us up right in the middle of mutual orgasms, like two life-sized firecrackers, that burst into most brilliant blizzards of sparks and sparkling thorns, whatever that is. Actually, early this morning I had a dream in which we make love on her return from the Mingfu and agree to go to the top of the building. There, in the bright warmth of the spring sun we shed our clothes and become physically engaged to an inseparable degree because we tie ourselves together with a couple of leather belts around the waists. While I move faster and faster inside her, we manage to inch towards the edge of the building as we drink from each other’s eyes, brimful with love. It is not till we reach a simultaneous orgasm that we let go, taking the spiritual as well as physical plunge that thrills us when both of our brains are splashed like watermelons and our hearts torn apart with the highest sensation of pain-pleasure. I woke up with a deep regret at heart, a mounting wish that I’d disappear that way in defiance of the whole world.
26/8
C’s story of 13-year-old girls with good-looking twats reminded me of a past stained with menstrual blood, semen and phlegm and of a visit with friends to a roadside brothel in T. That afternoon, David, my friend, did at least five women. One of them, a fat woman with a tiger face, proclaimed that David did it the hard way, pumping and pounding, all the way in and out, till she could no longer hold it. She sounded as if she was in pain but one could unmistakably see that she had never enjoyed it as much as then. She accompanied her words with gestures showing how the man did the pelvic thrusts, not minding all watching. Wool, David’s friend, was an old bachelor, who did at least two, one of them twice. Each time he came out of the room, he would say: I am really tired but it’s good; it’s so good. Half way through the afternoon, a girl showed up in our room where we gathered, sitting or standing around, smoking and drinking, while sharing our experiences. The girl was shoved around for each of us to pick and choose while she pretended to resist, uttering small grotesque cries that showed her discomfort, the men freely groping her up and down as if she were a piece of meat. I did not join in the fun but bitterly nursed my own wound: two women were thrust upon me and pounced on me as soon as we went into our room, without even drawing the curtains close, through which I could see the courtyard outside, with sticks of broken furniture, before they noticed I was fully flat. Instead of trying to arouse me, they left me there, with my clothes, shed like tatters. It was not till much later that I realized what had happened: as soon as a man shedded his clothes, with their help, it was his own responsibility to do the fucking and if he couldn’t achieve an erection, he was considered to have done it and the girls had to be paid. Because there were too many girls, they preferred to be doing it two to one, the two of them getting paid together. If one could afford to do ten at a time, the ten would be overjoyed with the tenfold charged. I shook my head at this but, when asked by David, I did not say anything; instead, I just commented that the girls were too ugly for my liking.
Indeed, none of the girls in the house were pretty. They were decked out in vulgar garments and rough-hewn heels. Everything was too much: too much make-up, too much flesh, and too much pressure for you to turn on the tap and shoot. I did not shed a single drop of semen that day.
27/8
Relationships snap so easily, it seems, at my age. The minute B criticized me for my ‘wild’ tendencies I blurted out, ‘But it’s none of your business.’ He, too, seems capable of turning his face anytime he wants. I am left far less impressed than I would have liked. The translation of the classic into English would definitely make a good catch in the Western world despite the description of Emperor Yang of Sui’s indulgence in seeking pleasure with a huge harem of 13-year-old girls. Fact is, Moon Guest, one of the girls, has actually denied him the pleasure, as shown in the translation below,
Moon Guest is a mere child, about 12 or 13. She would have liked to seduce the emperor if she had not been aware of the pain of it. Seeing that Emperor Yang of Sui was trying to have fun, she said, smiling, ‘It does not matter if you want to sleep here although I am afraid you may miss out on the fun elsewhere.’ The emperor smiled and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be better here?’ As he said so, he stopped drinking, stood up, took Moon Guest by the hand and went back to the bedroom. When the other imperial concubines noted that Emperor Yang was interested in Moon Guest, they had the mandarin duck quilt and the elephant pillows prepared. When he arrived in his bedroom, Emperor Yang took off his clothes and went to bed. As much as she would like to gratify the emperor, Moon Guest, in her early teens after all, became so shy when asked to remove her clothes that, leaning against the bedpost, she refused to budge. The emperor, highly charged with a mounting desire, urged her a few times but she kept delaying the act of disrobing.
If the emperor slowed down in his calling, Moon Guest would remain silent but if his calling became urgent, Moon Guest would say in a loud voice, ‘Pity me please, your Ten-thousand-years-to-live!’ If the emperor reached for her, she would burst into tears. Much as he would have liked to force it on her, Emperor Yang was reluctant. If he let her go to sleep, he would find it hard to suppress the rising fire within. Instead, he groped her all over and whispered sweet nothings in her ear. Terrified, Moon Guest said not a word, resisting as much as she could, till the emperor was made so uncomfortable that he turned from side to side, for half the night, when the desire overcame him. It was not till then that, no longer giving a damn about the girl as delicate as a piece of precious jade, he rose to force himself upon her. Trembling with fear, Moon Guest found it unbearably painful as she tried in vain to resist him. Despite his effort, the emperor could not fulfil his wish in the face of her strong opposition. After a while he was so tired that he fell into a sudden sleep.
I don’t know why B failed to see the point. I will not speak to him about it for as long as it is possible and as long as I can avoid it in our daily discourse.
28/8
Bad mood day today. After that phone call, I realized there was not a shred of love left with that woman, nor with me. Ours is an age made for splitting up. Or, to put it more bluntly, man and woman are born to be split up, not tied together, as the very act of making love demonstrates: in and out, in and out, in, then out, and out, not in anymore. I am sick of love, sick of making love, sick of making love to bodies that can be easily replaced with substitutes, e.g. inflatable dolls. After a certain age, when the girl realizes that the least sustainable thing in the world is love, she is turned into a grown-up woman, with a prostitute’s intuitive sense of what money could do and what she really wants in her life and for the rest of her life. At the centre of the word, romance, shines forth the best and worst values of capitalism.
29/8
I wrote a short letter that I emailed to her today, as follows:
Darling,
Perhaps we should divorce. I have done enough to deserve it although you do not need to know any details. I have had more than my fill of life’s pleasures and I now am weary of anything to do with humanity. I could go on, of course, but what’s the point? Now that you and our daughter are safely accommodated in Australia, with enough funds to last you years, I am not concerned or worried. If they take me in, I am a bare stick, a financial and political bare stick. As the saying goes, I do not have anything else but my own life, which they can have for the taking.
Please take goo
d care of our daughter and make sure she finds a Chinese-Australian man instead of anyone of a different ethnicity. From my experience, marriage between cultures looks promising but does not work out.
At the same time, I wrote a letter to my dead girl, which I could not possibly email but just keep in my own file, as follows:
Dear J,
I am sorry that I was so cowardly that I did not even go to your funeral because I was afraid of being recognized and associated with you in people’s minds. Once, I was romantic enough to entertain thoughts of a lasting union with you but after you were gone my heart grew so cold it felt like a piece of ice, worse, a piece of unmelting glacier. I trashed all our photos, including the ones in which we made love. Photographs are not as good evidence of love as that of scandal, particularly when one of the partners involved is dead or has parted ways. Parents do not want their children to see photographs of their copulation the same way they do not want to see them in their separation or their old age. I, for one, won’t live to the age when people are free to hang their lovemaking photographs like trophies on their bedroom walls, for all the world to see, and be praised for it.
I can’t now think of the love we made without shuddering all over. We were such animals and we were talking about love as if it were the most beautiful thing in the world! It is not; it’s so ugly, so unbearably disgusting. Think of how I put my penis in your hole, then take it out for you to suck clean before I put it back there again while sucking on your tongue that has just tasted my cunty dick. It’s all so boring.
I’ll join you soon. That is for sure. Perhaps we could enjoy it as much as we want in hell, which I believe is a much less restricted place than heaven. Who wants to go to heaven while hell is available and for all the worst kind of things one couldn’t enjoy on earth?
30/8
Bad news is good in that it reminds one of the danger that has been lying dormant for so long that it has to be somehow addressed. The Yanzhaomen Gate Incident involving Chen is a case in point. I can no longer ignore the warnings on the wall, or are they the writings on the wall? I couldn’t give a fuck. Language has to be bent by the writer who uses it. Otherwise, a human being is not a being but a word.
I found the photos and went through them one by one. This one shows her in bed, lying on a wide spread of snow-white bed sheets, her legs wide open, her feet extended sky-wise, ending in a pair of black high-heeled sandals I had bought for her in Paris, their heels so thin and so high that they would pierce through the heart should they find their way there but usually they end up in my hands, becoming a fitting weapon to propel and empower my pelvic pussy-pushing thrusts. Her face, far away from her heels, watches me behind my camera and appears to be in fear or fearful anticipation because she knows that I’ll throw the camera and make a resolute entry. I tore it, right down the middle of her good-looking cunt, as I gathered a huge erection. When I pulled my thing out, a poet’s words came to mind: My hand, married to my cock, is riding it far/into the future. It smelt as I put my nose between my right thumb and forefinger. I did not wash it for days. That brought back a sliver of memory in which I shafted my unwashed dick into the young girl’s mouth till it got rinsed clean there, one of the most exciting moments in my life, for some reason. Another photo shows her walking away from me in her silk cheongsam, her arse so alluringly tight I wanted an entry. It was on this photo that I dumped my load on her back before I also tore it into pieces, stained with my hot semen. After my aimless shoot, I became reckless in my endeavour to destroy all the remaining photos, be they beautiful, pretty, attractive or downright sexy. I did not want any of those to fire up anyone else’s fantasy or to be smeared with their unwanted load of trash however steamy or burning. Least of all did I want them to be released online and used against me. One needs to live naked offline and be virtually anonymous online, the Internet being a hell of knowledge, as destructive as constructive, like a river into which people chuck all rubbish, garbage and excrement but that, in a fury, could wash away village after village and city after city.
31/8
Love, or love as made or made love, I must say, has an accompanying penetratedness. I am not sure if I make myself understood. And I don’t need to be understood. That’s not the purpose of this diary. Since I am not writing for anyone else and now that I have decided to die with my diary – what a word, it sounds like diery – I am free from inhibitions that ordinary human beings have to live with and secretly wish to do away with. This penetration or penetratedness is like what one experiences when one sees himself in the mirror in a hair salon where he sees himself in still another mirror ad infinitum. Sexually speaking, this happens when one enters into a woman: he feels as if he were entering into a darkened room, in which he is met with two other women, both in their early 20s and both making advances to him in their full nakedness. As he moves faster and faster inside the woman underneath him, he cuddles one of the women he meets in the hall and takes her tongue in his mouth while hearing the woman underneath him uttering melting cries of ‘I love you, Baby’. He lets the other woman put one of her heels inside his mouth and another into his anus, slowly and super slowly, till he feels like exploding, from his mouth and from the head of his penis, his tongue taken by he knows not what or whom and his root gone he knows not where, the sexual territory of multiplicities turning into a wholly new world. And, that is one of the experiences that I often have, with W, with J, with Snagpdragon, and with all the other flowers, now gone, or trashed, their names forgotten, like paper tissues wrapped up with saliva and semen, without a trace; not even a hotel cleaner would notice the difference between when love was initiated and when it was made. When the plastic bag was tied up at the mouth, it made no difference what was contained in there. This penetratedness or interconnectedness, in sex and of sex, is the drive that perhaps lies behind or below all human endeavours, suppressed and buried as it is or has been, afraid to make its ugly beautiful voice heard.
A poem, by the trash poet, that just emerged in one of my emails, says, as follows:
I won’t eat a single grain of rice from her
Nor shall I give her a drop of semen
Well, a high note that my night tonight can positively end on.
1/9
Sam, who has not been in touch for a long time now, sensing probably that I am infectiously dangerous, said something that impressed, which I woke up with first thing this morning. According to him, the Chinese expression qiqing liuyu, which literally translates into seven loves and six desires, does have a solid basis. The qiqing means love of gold, of wood, of water, of fire and of earth, as well as that of man and woman, whereas liuyu refers to a man with desires on six most sensitive parts of his body, his mouth mouthing a cunt, his left middle finger in one, his right middle finger in another, his dick in a fourth, his left big toe in a fifth and his right big toe in a sixth, the last one. I laughed and joked: Actually, this age-old expression could be turned into a new one as qiqing qiyu, with a dick inserted into the man’s anus at the same time.
Even when I am close to being suspended permanently from my work, I keep receiving submissions, from poetry to fiction to translations in English of fiction. One caught my eye, a book that I have so far not read or even heard of, titled, in English translation, A Life of Spring, its Chinese title more mundane and eccentric, tongzhi piaoyuan or Tongzhi’s Whorehouses, Tongzhi being Tongzhi Emperor (1856-1875) in the Qing Dynasty, who died of syphilis as a result of frequenting brothels and visiting male prostitutes outside the Imperial Palace although the orthodox version of it had him die of Sky Flower or smallpox. I’ll have to go through the translation manuscript to assess its qualities till I go to jail.
2/9
Someone knocked on the door. I went to open it. It was she. That was a surprise but not pleasant.
Looking at her in tall heels with mascara eyes, I said: ‘Who told you to come?’
She said, ‘I love you.’
I said, ‘I don’t even like you.’
She said, ‘But you must let me love you.’
I said, ‘No. It’s over. Love is crap.’
She said, ‘No, it’s not. It’s the most beautiful thing in the world.’
I said, ‘Then you can love love as much as you want to but I have nothing to do with love or you.’
She said, reaching a finger to me, beckoning, ‘Please, please.’
I said, ‘Go away, this minute. If you don’t, I’ll go.’
She stood there, frozen like a cover girl in her heels, her mascara, her wasteful make-up and her overabundance of love unwanted, as the door closed behind me.
I was out in the corridor.
When I came back, she had gone, a lingering aroma of her perfume, mixed with something foul. She had not done what Mildred does in Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Instead, there was a beautifully pushed pile of excrement, hers, on the bathroom floor, into which as I gazed I saw a piece of paper with these words written on it: That’s my love for you.
3/9
Drizzling for part of the day, spent in a meaningless but extraordinary meeting in which contracts for new titles, books to be introduced from overseas, and all the ordinaries were discussed. She was there making a PowerPoint presentation. She was so composed, with a big smile on her face, as if nothing had happened but didn’t we fuck only a couple of weeks ago and a couple of days before that and a few weeks before that? And, yet, there was not a single trace of love left on that face. As she clicked from one slide to another, title to title, I thought I saw her put all the photographs of our lovemaking on the screen, many sizes larger, for all the publishing house to see, including the typesetters and the doorman: my mouthing her crotch, with her legs spread wide open like two featherless wings; her tongue sticking into my mouth like a mini-moveable feast; my hand removing a high-heel halfway from her foot; and my big instrument, that is, my non-Party member, erect and dark red, held in her hand before she put it inside her, craving for it.