by Vann Chow
I felt my face and my ears reddening when I was trying to pay the fourty thousand worth of clothing at the counter with my credit card. I knew it would go through, but I still felt like a thief. Never in my life have I spent such a large sum of money in one go in such a short time, on frivolous, aesthetic items. The money I was spending did not feel real. It was as if I have simply taken it from someone else and played it off as my own (which was kind of true for any kind of borrowed money, especially one with 17% interest). My heart pounded as the cashier checked my signature on the bill against the one on the card.
The pretty girl at the cashier did not pay any extra attention to me that I was expecting when my card did go through for my large purchase. I supposed women who worked in stores like that were used to seeing big purchases. I made a point to never date a shopkeeper from a reasonably flourishing business.
The next day I went to the office with my new outfit. Nobody paid me any attention.
I told my friend about it and he said that it was useless to be fashionable in a software company. There were very few women to begin with and they were likely all taken. I should expose myself to environment more conducive to me finding a girlfriend, such as a bar or a party.
Partying and dancing have never been my thing, but drinking I could do with reasonable familiarity and skills. I decided to begin there.
Chapter 4: The Correct Way To Showing Off
On Friday evening, my friend asked me to wait for him at the bar of the Hilton Tower's Snake Lounge on the 60 th floor. In my new outfit, I was instructed to order a whiskey on rocks next to any group of boring looking males I could find. After about five minutes, I could locate such a group. I stood next to them and waited in line to order my drinks.
During my wait, I should turn around to look at the audience in the club and pose inconspicuously with the bar top supporting my back to show off the details of my expensive suits in various carelessly-waiting-for-a-delayed-friend stance. Two times and not more, should I be looking into my latest imitation Rolex watch that my friend had lent me for the evening and sighed.
A group of girls walked by. The trick I was doing did not get me any attention. So I activated the next level of attraction tactics. I dialed a fake number on my phone and spoke loudly to nobody at the end of the line about a piece of code that I had to write for a client whose name I was supposed to fill in with whatever the top performing A stock company of the day was, and pushed through the middle of the group of girls to deliberately spill drinks on them. The splash range was suppose to be as wide as possible to capture as many of them as I could. And it seemed like I succeeded with a score of three.
At that point I was supposed to hang up my fictitious phone call, apologize and flirtatiously invite them for a drink for their inconvenience. One of the girl however slipped and fell flat on her face. Her friends scrambled to lift her up and they wasted no time to give me a grudged I-never-want-to-see-you-here-again look and brought her to a lounge chair to examine her injury. At that moment I was so flustered and embarrassed I had forgotten to remain in my role. I sprinted out of the bar and down the elevator with still the whiskey glass in my hand. When my friend saw me at the lobby he frowned and reprimand me for not taking advantage of the situation further after my ice-breaking event with the group of girls.
What else could I have done but to bolt? I asked him. He said I could go forward and show my gallantry by participating in some saving-the-girl-who-slipped activities. It was easier said than done, when you obviously sensed that you were not welcomed.
My friend said that we needed to fix my social inaptitude, because a rich look alone was probably not going to get me anywhere.
I proposed to get me started off in a lower-level environment. Not the 60 th floor of the Hilton Tower but somewhere near the ground, so I could practice my way up. I expressed that I just wanted a girlfriend, not a rich girlfriend who would make me feel uncomfortable and would look down on me. This remark made my friend laughed, for he thought I was stupid for not realizing that a lot of women in fancy places like that were on the lookout for men themselves, ever more so than more down-to-earth places, like the library or neighborhood hotpot spots.
He had a point. It would make sense to be in places where there was a high concentration of women looking for a long-term male companion actively. Was there somewhere else where there would be lots of women hunting for husbands?
Unceremoniously, my friend pulled out his cellphone and pulled up a chatting app. The same one that my ex-girlfriend had shown me her long list of male suitors. I almost dropped the whiskey glass on the marble floor but luckily the bellboy spotted me and cupped it before it did with a smile. I gave him a small tip and returned my mind on the damnable app my friend was showing me.
No way. I told him.
No f-ing way. I would rather live alone forever than meeting someone online.
nothing else show up
Chapter 5: Hierarchy of Needs
I would live on dignity if I could. Apparently no one ever survived with just their egos alone.
Food, shelter, clothes, safety, sanitation, education, health care. I had all of the basic needs of a human fulfilled. There was a newer model published recently that even more accurately depict what a human being needed in the 21 st century, which included battery power, wifi and smart gadgets. All these I had, because of my employment, satisfied to a T. Kelvin ridiculed me for being so complacent with my life. There should be, according to him, entertainment, physical and emotional fulfillment and self-actualization. I did not really get what self-actualization meant and neither did my friend I suspect. He probably rattled them off from the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs he found on the internet so I decided there was no need to discuss with him the topic.
I did agree with the pyramids of Maslow. The man seemed to be the authority in the topic because if you google basic human needs, nothing else shows up. Five thousand years of Chinese musing and we did not produce any popular theory on the topic? I could hardly believe it.
Most of the time I was quite entertained. I entertained myself with watching American TV series, playing games on Playstation with my friend, going to concerts, listening to pirated version of music online for free, playing pranks on others...the list went on. I was not in want of entertainment.
When it comes to physical fulfillment, I played soccer every Monday, Tuesday and Saturday, while I coached a team of eleven-year-olds soccer on Sunday I would watch my friends play on the same field in our neighborhood. There was not want of physical exertion. However, I felt energized every single time whether I was playing or when I was watching.
In terms of emotional life, I had wonderful parents, good group of friends from soccer, bosses that do not give me a hard time and reasonably obedient underlings at work that did not dare to challenge me as of yet. Emotionally I had a rather sophisticated fabric of interactions with people from diverse backgrounds, genders and ages interweaving through my life giving it color.
Counting up to here, I could see myself being fairly well off compared to a lot of people who would have trouble counting their blessings up the pyramid to this level. While I still did not know what self-actualization that sat on the top level of the pyramid meant, I could believe that if I knew I would be able to say something positive about it as well in my life.
My good friend, as good friend would do, torn that impression to shreds one day by showing up to our midday chat every Friday afternoon at the neighborhood coffee place with his new, insanely hot girlfriend. She wore a tight light blue dress that accentuated her figure so much no pair of eyes wanders anywhere else but her body between the coffee drinkers.
With his right arm, my friend hugged his goddess of a girlfriend on the waist tugging accidentally her skirt an inch higher than it should, exposing her white pearly thigh as they sat down on the couch opposite to mine.
Immediately I felt that something was missing from my life.
A woman.
; A hot woman.
Chapter 6: Hot
As much as I loved my ex-girlfriend, I would not call her hot.
Hot women do not make good wives, that was common knowledge, but hot women definitely make good girlfriends. They burnt your insides with just small movements of their bodice and if you were to be in close quarters of them, you would find yourself drowning in sweats and sound of your own heartbeats.
Never in my life had I felt that towards my own girlfriend for she had made it very clear we were to behave properly until we would be married. For whatever reasons I found that acceptable, given that a woman was like a flower which should be cherished and handled delicately. There were no thoughts of transgression of the physical boundaries between us nor was there real motivation until we get married, because we were supposed to. I did not mind the wait.
Now however being confronted by this visual display of hotness brought on to me unprepared and unjustly by my most trusted friend, I felt an onset of jealousy. Of having missed out. Of being betrayed. I wanted to avenge him for my humiliation. A hot girlfriend would serve him right.
So I made up my mind to use the chatting app and only meet the hottest women I could find in my vicinity. Turned out they were easier to find than I thought. Their photos brandishing their beautiful face and occasionally their decollettes and further on their profile pages, open to public browsing by anyone within 100 mile radius. Their adopted Western names conjured up imagery of angels descending from heavens.
Gingerly I sent out my first chat to a stranger, which received no reply after two days. After that, having understood the high chance of being ignored even on the internet, I became more emboldened and I started sending out more and more messages to these beautiful strangers.
And that was when things started to look up for me.
There were online interactions which were way beyond what I had ever made with my ex-girlfriend. I felt like I have discovered the secret of the world. No man would ever be left emotionally and physically destitute again with such an app which granted one direct access to thousands and thousands of beautiful women.
After spending the 2 nd hour of chat with someone whose handle I forgot, since there were so many, but had a beautiful face, I agreed to meet her.
The girl whose name and face were both Angelique .
Angelique quickly seduced me to bed. We ended up naked in a love hotel off the main road a hundred meters from the cafe we met. Her bosoms were as huge as they appeared on the photographs she posted online. I squeezed them over and over again, and started to lick them as if I was a dog licking a tasty bit of bone, forgetting any kind of decency.
Just when I was about to come, having a beautiful woman riding on top of me for over a minute, with her clothes on --- it was really difficult to control myself in face of an actual woman and not the ones that I saw behind a computer screen --- the door to our hotel room got busted open. Two men rushed in and started to yell at me. Angelique quickly got up, unfazed and wrapped herself with the blanket which was half covering my legs. I was now completely exposed to the eyes of those intruding strangers.
They wanted money from me, for the damaged that I had done to one of the man's honey.
Apparently Angelique was one of the man's girlfriend. This man though was completely focused on extorting money out of me. He did not stop snapping photographs of me with his cell phone until some hotel staff came over to look at what was happening. They scurried away as quickly as they could as soon as they saw the obscenity and smelt the dangers of imminent violence.
I cried out weakly to them for help to no avail and could do nothing but to cover my private part and face with each of my hand to defend against the assault of the man's camera.
Just when I thought I would never get out of this alive, the other man found my wallet and two thousand yuan in it. I had taken two thousand yuan out to pay my part of my cousin's wedding gift. The man grabbed the money and stuff it in his pocket. He beckoned the others to leave. I felt my wallet smashed against my rib cage as they slammed the door shut and disappeared, leaving me behind in a messed up hotel room and an emptied wallet to commiserate my first time with a real woman.
I could not tell whether the hotel staffs were in on the scams. They must have, assuming that they had stayed in pretty much the same type of premises throughout their careers, seen enough dramas playing out in their workplaces to know what to do. Turned out they did not call the police nor did they attempt to acknowledge the atrocity that just happened to me. The bill still needed to be paid, and it included a hefty surcharge for replacing broken furniture.
Chapter 7: Scammers
There were not many things I kept to myself, but being scammed to my last piece of clothing was something that I would never share with anyone, not even my best friend.
Ever since that experience with Angelique, I grew ever more suspicious of the internet thing. What I experience was a classical scam. Millions of times I had seen it on television dramas and movies. More than anger, I felt shame. Being an engineer, I did not make good observations and sufficiently analyze the situation before surrendering my trust to a complete stranger. There was of course the silver lining that I did make my first sexual encounter with a real attractive woman, regardless of the reason why she would accept the abuse by her alleged lover to make money off of gullible men with her body and share the profit with them. (I certainly hope she gets the bigger share.)
Admittedly this was somewhat like a transaction, though as I had no prior knowledge of what was to come, I found that the two thousand yuan well worth it. Even when I closed my eyes for the next few evenings, I could still see Angelique angelical faces and her plumb seductive body as her imaginary presence straddled over me on the soft bed of the hotel room.
It might sound strange to you, but my grown suspicion did not stop me from making more connections with beautiful women on the chatting app, nor did I become weary of face-to-face rendezvous. I more than tripled the amount of time I spent on this whole activity every day since the unfortunate event perhaps, because I was curious. And now that I had been scammed once, I felt like it could not happen to me again. And if it did, since the first time wasn't so bad, as money usually could solve most problems in China, I just need to make sure I was alert and explored the most while controlling the damage to the minimum.
So that was how my contact list grew. It had been stabled for as long as I remembered since I got a smartphone. Occasionally I would make new entry for practical contact numbers like the numbers for my girlfriend's favorite hotpot restaurant, the hair salon which I was mandated by her to visit every two and a half months, the computer repair shop whose owner promised to contact me whenever he had some new imported PC games I could make a copy of for a fraction of the selling prices and so on. Recently I have been adding numbers of beautiful women with eye-sucking (a popular Chinese term on the internet) quality to my contact list which made me feel like I was finally growing up to be the man I was supposed to be. This was how an adult male should live, with at least a handful of beautiful women waiting at home for my booty call. The last part is of course imaginary. I did not think any of them actually wait for my call as anxiously as I wanted them to be. Still I got the numbers and as long as I got the means, I could get to an end.
Let me introduce you then to my repertoire of ladies. ---- There was Kiki, who was a twenty one year old studying in the Science Institute to be a chemist. She had one year to graduation but her hobby was to meet men online and scam them into buying expensive goods for her so she could show off in front of her classmates. Her tactics were fairly simple. All she needed to do was to suggest possible advancement in the relationship when certain desire for expensive objects of hers was fulfilled.
Janice was a lovely girl, and she was a bit absent-minded. She forgot her wallet every single time she went out. Regardless of what it was, she would suggest to split the bill or even shoulder it herself, and then found herself without any money. Men were
supposed to be the breadwinner, yes, still in the 21 st century China, so whether they were simply an acquaintance, a friend or a boyfriend, as men they were bounded by traditions to feel ashamed that their female friend even suggested the notion of paying, and to save face, they would seize the opportunity presented to them when Janice was in need of help to show that they can take good care of her. Willingly they would open your wallet for her.
Occasionally, the beauty of a woman can mask her treachery side. Lucy loved fixing up machines. She knew how cars work and with a group of friends she joined racing rallies every week. All suitors need to do to win her favors was to win a rally, which was of course fixed because the car they were assigned were always under-performing because of some mechanic's tricks. They would end up losing regardless of how hard they tried and were generally humiliated so much they forget about the bet money they were losing to their opponents which could be well in the thousands.
Then there was Mariam who looked like the singer Miriam Yeung but since she did not graduate from middle school, she could not spell her namesake properly. Her specialty was, coincidentally, singing. She loved to take men to karaoke. In these dark little private rooms filled with booming noises from the karaoke box of the room and the neighboring ones, she would get real up close to the men who were already engrossed in her good voice and genuine performance, and slip her naughty fingers into their pockets to fish out their wallets.
And let us not forget little Nancy. She had taken one too many men to her parents' house for dowry discussion. Of course before such a discussion could be made, there had to be a marriage proposal. Eliciting marriage proposal is Nancy's specialty. Being the heir of a prospering business (at least that is the story she always tell) and a woman of above average looks, it takes no more than three months for marriage proposals to come on average. She usually ran a couple of scams in parallel so she had a fish belly (a term to describe her naive targets) coming in less than every three months. Despite that this scam required considerable effort, having to feign the role of a girlfriend so perfectly she could be considered by men to be their future wives, the return of investment for her scheme was much higher than all the other ones I had mentioned.