Confessions of an S&M Virgin

by Linda Jaivin

  Wang does not exactly come with standard-issue qualifications for a writer in the People's Republic of China. It's a sign of the post-Mao times that he was eventually elected to membership of both the Beijing and national writers' associations.

  Given his background, it's not surprising that Wang Shuo's fictional world is populated with a mob of charismatic crooks, artful dodgers, fast-talkers, wise-crackers, wannabes, poseurs, schemers, dreamers, the over-sexed and the under-employed. He regards them all with an eye that is at once merciless and sympathetic as he shepherds them through the roller-coaster twists and turns of his endlessly inventive plots.

  The popularity of Wang Shuo's work had driven the authorities to the verge of distraction. It was once memorably described by an exasperated official as ‘literature by the riffraff, about the riffraff and for the riffraff’. An outraged cadre from a municipal institute for labour reform accused one of Wang's novellas, Hot and Cold, Measure for Measure of being a ‘primer for sexual criminals’. The story follows the misadventures of an ex-con who seduces a university student for a lark.

  Fulminating that it described ‘in dulcet tones the delights of a licentious, treacherous, and boorish criminal world’, the cadre wrote, ‘It's as if the author is standing on a grassy knoll in the middle of a swamp, appealing affectionately to his young readers to gather round and hear his tale. But I despair for these young readers; I fear they will sink into the mire and be unable to extricate themselves.’

  That's the power of even the most appalling of Wang Shuo's anti-heroes: it's almost impossible not to identify with them. This is because Wang Shuo seems able to project himself into everyone's shoes, whether they're the high heels of a Beijing tart or the worn cloth slippers of an old man. The most absurd, pathetic or just plain awful characters are given an empathetic hearing, and this lends a psychologically complex edge to even his most wicked satire. ‘Sympathy must be just a part of my nature,’ says Wang Shuo, claiming he's never really thought about the question. He giggles. ‘I guess I'm just a good sort of guy.’

  A ‘good guy’ is not, however, what people expect Wang to be. He is forever being approached by fans who speak to him in the street-wise patois of his novels, gangster-to-gangster as it were. ‘It's awful,’ Wang insists. ‘It's a big misunderstanding.’ Of all his characters, Wang Shuo is probably most like the narrator in his semi-autobiographical, Wild Beasts, who hangs out with the bad boys, talks tough and sometimes acts that way too but who is basically a sweet little wimp at heart, less grizzly than teddy.

  He is, however, a teddy with claws and, when he strikes out, it's the poseurs and the pretenders who have to duck. His novel An Attitude is probably the sharpest send-up of China's contemporary literary and intellectual scene ever written. It opens over a game of mahjong:

  ‘Tell me,’ I asked Anjia, ‘if someone's got a full stomach and nothing to do, what's the best way for him to kill time?’

  ‘Sleep.’

  ‘But once he's slept, what then? You know, if he's slept to the point where he just can't sleep any more?’

  ‘Does he have any other talents? For instance, can he run the country? Fluff cotton? Pickle pigs' heads? That sort of thing?’

  ‘Nup. Nothing at all. He's a complete klutz and couldn't tell a grain of rice from a stalk of wheat.’

  ‘But does he have a burning desire to be something?’

  ‘Does he ever.’

  ‘How many Chinese characters does he know?’

  ‘I suppose, if you count the ones he mispronounces or gets wrong, about three to five thousand.’

  ‘That's it: he should become a writer.’ Anjia looked at me calmly. ‘Particularly since there's nothing else he can do and he's not happy just to remain part of the common masses.’

  ‘I suppose that's the best choice,’ I said approvingly. ‘It looks like there really is no other option.’

  ‘Do it then.’

  ‘All right, I will.’ I stood up and went over to the mirror hanging on the closet door. I gave my reflection a pitying glance. ‘Just look at you,’ I said. ‘Look what's become of you.’1

  The narrator's mates all decide to become writers as well, so they divvy up the genres. One declares he'll write patriotic literature; another, who spent two months in the countryside in 1968 being re-educated by peasants, will take on rural-based fiction; a third gets to be a modernist and write about sex. The fourth will become a literary critic and write about the others, so they resolve that the winnings from that night's mahjong game will go to purchase foreign theoretical tracts for her to plagiarise. They become a literary clique, and eventually launch their own magazine. The first issue of the journal is called ‘Extremely Deep’ and all the stories they write for it bear the same title. The second issue is called ‘We Are Really Deep Not Pseudo-Deep’.

  This sort of satire cuts close to the bone in a place where for both the mainstream establishment and ‘underground’ cultural crowd, Art is always capital A and Deep is Meaningful.

  One of Wang's most successful works is the novel I Am Your Dad, which describes the relations between a divorced father and his teenage son. The father, a bookstore assistant who fancies himself a writer and intellectual, is forever trying to work out an ideal mode for interacting with his son. He bounces madly on the trampoline of possibilities, one minute a strict authoritarian not averse to a little beltwork, the next a democrat determined to be best mates with his son, who is now supposed to call him by his name and not ‘Dad’, and the next an absent figure who neglects all parental duties. The son puts up with his father's shifts of mood and attitude with a completely understandable teenage cocktail of taciturnity, sympathy, condescension, love, contempt and despair. The novel, which was published in June 1991, is as much a political allegory as it is a psychological study.

  Other stories are set in an editorial department of a literary magazine (‘Who's the Cretin Here?’ and ‘Just a Few Changes…’), one (‘No Hand Clapping’) centres on a woman flautist, and he has produced a body of detective fiction with a middle-aged public security officer as its hero.

  While most of Wang's fiction is contemporary, he has also set some stories in the Cultrev milieu of his youth. The actor and director Jiang Wen turned the most famous of these novels, Wild Beasts, into an award-winning film, In the Heat of the Sun.

  Whatever the topic, style or genre, Wang's writing is characterised by a dazzling virtuosity of language that defies translation. His playful and evocative prose, deft wit and ability to capture the special rhythms of Beijing speech have been likened to that of the late great humourist Lao She. His fans would contend Wang has already surpassed the old master in brilliance.

  ‘I believe,’ Wang wrote in a brief essay published in early 1989, ‘that literature ought to have two functions: artistic and popular. I'm always trying to find a middle ground between the two… But, if I had to choose, I'd take the latter over the former any day.’ Asked what his goal in life is, Wang chuckles, but replies without hesitation: ‘Yangming tianxia’, to have his name known to all under heaven.

  Since I wrote the above profile, Wang Shuo has put his considerable literary talents on the back burner to turn his hand to business. He has written a number of television scripts and screenplays, but they are not the gems that his earlier works were.

  Recently, I was asked to translate the synopsis of a film script based on one of Wang's most extraordinary works, No Man's Land. I was repelled by the plot summary—the work had been thoroughly bastardised. All the truly subversive, weird stuff in the original novel was gone, and the story had been reduced to lowest-common-denominator fare. I was outraged—it struck me as someone's cynical exploitation of Wang Shuo's name. Then they told me that the adaptation had been done by Wang himself.

  1 trans, by Linda Jaivin.

  Gay Abandoned

  ‘Attitudes towards homosexuality are changing very rapidly in China,’ the gay rights activist assured me. Even the police, he said, were becoming more enl
ightened. Then his eyes darted nervously around the Beijing hotel lobby where we were sitting. ‘I wonder if we're under surveillance,’ he whispered. ‘I don't think it's very safe here.’

  For our second meeting, I picked him up in a cab. We drove around for a while, got off on a busy street and darted into a half-empty, privately run restaurant with a quiet corner in which we could sit, unobserved, talking over a bottle of Beijing Beer and a plate of boiled peanuts. Even then, when he spoke of his plans to establish an underground national gay network, he switched to English.

  Fear of the security forces is a constant for China's gay community. Chinese law doesn't outlaw homosexuality. But that doesn't stop the police from arresting gays for the criminal offence known in Chinese as liumang zui, or hooliganism. Liumang zui also covers street fighting, vandalism and heterosexual adventurism—gang bangs, sex in public places, prostitution. In general, however, heterosexual activity has to be very in-your-face to warrant arrest whereas homosexuality is in itself, in the eyes of some policemen anyway, enough to earn someone a stint in a labour re-education camp. And that's not camp as in Mardi Gras; that's camp as in concentration.

  The sad truth is, even today, even if they are not being hassled by the law, most Chinese gays and lesbians live their lives under a cloud of repression, misunderstanding, prejudice and condemnation. Critics openly accuse them of immorality; even many sympathisers tend to espouse the view that being gay or lesbian is a kind of illness. Homosexuality is China's true Forbidden City.

  According to the comprehensive, Chinese-language report Sexual Behaviour in Modern China, the largest survey of sexual practices ever conducted in the world, most Chinese believe that homosexuality is ‘deviant behaviour’. Even the majority of university students think like this. Only 11.9 per cent of the male uni students and 6.4 per cent of the women surveyed considered it normal. About one out of three said that they'd be ashamed were they to discover that one of their relatives had homosexual leanings. As for the peasants, who make up the vast majority of China's population, one out of three claimed not to know what the word meant.

  An article published last year in the Chinese Journal of Psychology and Hygiene began with the line ‘Homosexuality is a form of sexual deviance’. The authors of the article, psychiatric workers, noted that most of the gays and lesbians whom they had ‘treated’ had been pressured by family or friends to attend their clinic. They observed that the education levels, intelligence, learning abilities, work capabilities, accomplishments and social skills of these people were well above average. ‘Most,’ they concluded, ‘had no [other] abnormalities of character.’

  I looked up homosexuality, tongxinglian, in my edition of the Cihai—a kind of Chinese OED-cum-mini-encyclopedia. It said, ‘see xingyu daocuo’, a term literally translatable as ‘the mistaken transferral of sexual desire’. This expression was in turn defined as ‘a kind of abnormal behaviour, in which sexual satisfaction is usually achieved in a manner not in accordance with social custom, for instance, “homosexuality” (having sexual relationships with members of the same sex, and generally lacking interest in the opposite sex), fetishism and so on’.

  The approach of the Chinese popular press to topics related to homosexuality ranges from lurid curiosity to ignorant condemnation. An example of the first comes from a semi-academic journal published in Shanghai called Society. The writer of the article, ‘Some Notes on a Survey of Homosexuality’, had heard of a lesbian who is a beautiful and talented university graduate. He understands from a mutual acquaintance that she despises men and won't have anything to do with them. She rebuffs his request for an interview. Assuming that no doesn't always mean no, he gets dressed up, he tells us, ‘like a gentleman’, and knocks on her door. She closes it in his face.

  But our intrepid reporter refuses to give up in his quest to interview her. Why? Because, he tells us, she's gorgeous. When she finally agrees to meet him, she serves up a hostile lecture on how lesbians are not as ugly as he obviously expects, and that they care about their looks, emotional lives, education, and careers as much as any other woman. The reporter is blown away. He admits, ‘I really did find that hard to accept and to understand.’ Then he asks her to tell him all about her sex life. She refuses, much to his disappointment.

  The editor's preface to the article states that it was undertaken ‘in order to better understand the causes of homosexuality as well as how best to prevent it’.

  The following passage comes from a book published in 1988, Notes on Sexual Topics. The chapter titled ‘Incomprehensible Homosexuality’ concludes:

  Homosexual behaviour… is a form of sexual deviation. Because homosexuals are sexually promiscuous, it's exceptionally easy for them to come down with a range of illnesses, AIDS in particular. This is the punishment reserved by Nature for disobedient elements. People with a healthy psychology will not get mixed up with homosexuality.

  A book published several years ago by the Communist Party's ‘intellectual’ newspaper Guangming Daily on sexually transmitted diseases in China contains just about the most vile example of homophobic writing I've seen in print from China—and there's no lack of competition in this field. The book's title translates as Men and Women Be Warned! Reflections on the Spread of STDs in China. Its authors define homosexuality as ‘an expression of deranged sexual desire’, and claim homosexuals cannot enjoy the ‘most elevated pleasures of lovemaking’. They quote as ‘humour’ a line from some unnamed French magazine that ‘in the contest for Most Outstanding Homosexual, there's no need to take up arms, for the best judge is AIDS’.

  The authors warn that ‘the abnormal, poisonous sprouts of homosexuality are quietly flourishing on this great land of China’. They tell a story of two young women factory workers. Xiuxiu and Fangfang were always the closest of friends. Following unhappy heterosexual love affairs, they decided to live as ‘husband and wife’, and are now most content. The authors ask, ‘Should we express hatred towards them? Or sympathy?’ They conclude dramatically, ‘The demons are alive and living right beside you! This is not just alarmist talk!’

  The notion that homosexuality is new to China is, of course, patently absurd. The universality of human nature aside, Chinese historical and literary texts, from the dynastic histories to the classic romantic novel Story of the Stone, are replete with tales of homoerotic love and lust.

  Sources on the history of homosexuality in China include Bret Hinsch's Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China, as well as Van Gulik's classic treatise Sexual Life in Ancient China. The first contemporary Chinese book on the subject of homosexuality, Tarnende shijie, or Their World, by sociologist Li Yinhe and her husband Wang Xiaobo, came out in 1992. While Their World concentrates on gay life in contemporary China, its treatment of homosexuality in ancient times accords with the views presented in Hinsch and Van Gulik.

  It seems fair to say that throughout much of Chinese history homosexuality was a widely accepted fact of life. Men were openly praised and lusted after for their beauty by other men, and famous homoerotic love affairs were celebrated no less than heterosexual ones.

  The classical Chinese expression for male homoerotic love is: ‘fentao duanxiu’, literally ‘to share the peach and cut the sleeve’. It refers to two ancient incidents involving emperors and their male lovers. In the first, the lover took a bite from a peach and, finding it sweet, shoved the remainder into the emperor's mouth. This shocked the court, but mainly because it was such a breach of decorum.

  In the second, a Han Dynasty (206 BC–22 AD) emperor was taking a nap with his beloved when he was summoned to the court on urgent business. Rather than wake his lover, who lay across the wide sleeve of his ornamental gown, the emperor drew his sword and slashed the sleeve. According to Hinsch's book, this set off a brief vogue in the court for one-sleeved gowns.

  Lesbianism, meanwhile, was largely taken for granted. Wives and concubines endured being cloistered together in women's quarters for long periods wit
hout male company. For a woman to take a male lover would have brought down the wrath of the clan; lesbianism was considered a harmless release for sexual tension. According to Van Gulik, ‘when it gave rise to self-sacrifice or other beautiful acts of love and devotion’ it was openly praised. Lesbianism has also sometimes provided a means by which women could escape the strict patriarchal regimes around which society was structured. The women silk-spinners of Guangdong province's Shunde district traditionally entered into marriage pacts with one another.

  Van Gulik's survey of Chinese literary sources led him to conclude that overall they reflect a ‘neutral attitude’ towards homosexuality. The imperial court tended to get a bit uptight when they thought an emperor's male lover was wielding too much influence over public policy and no one approved of liaisons at any social level where one partner was obviously using the other for material or criminal ends. Indecorousness could be another cause for disapproval in staid neo-Confucian society; when the Song Dynasty (960–1279) decided to crack down on male prostitutes, it was apparently because there were simply too many of them on the streets.

  Nor was homosexual love allowed to interfere with the primary filial responsibility of continuing the family line. Their World shows that even today many gay men take this duty so seriously that they believe they owe it to their parents to marry and have a child. Of course, the desire for social camouflage may also push gays and lesbians into marriage, and therefore de facto bisexuality.