Diary of a Naked Official (10 page)

In the steamy days of the early 1990s, dinner parties out with friends always ended up in a fuck or two. The next day, when I went to Z city, I was taken out by a writer friend, Francis, a false name of course, to a dancing club filled to overflowing with
xiaojie
and clients, the music loud to a deafening degree, enough to wake up the dead and the living. A Sichuan girl – girls from there are known to engage in this profession, however degrading it is – taught me how to play a game the name of which was lost on me because of the deafening noise. She said a number and covered the dice with a bowl-like thing. Then she cast the dice and asked me to guess the number. The place was so filled with people my attention was constantly carried away, by a scantily clad girl walking past me, by dancers dancing cheek by jowl, by the girl facing me with a broad smile as if in mockery of my stupidity, and by my own increasing erection. Soon enough, I found a Southern girl of diminutive size. Francis hailed a taxi and, together, we three headed for her place miles away. There, in a tiny one-bed room, I made love to her as her small dog kept barking from outside the barred door, staring at us through the bars until we finished. This girl was so thin that it was like I was fucking a braced bone structure.

In a way, as Beckett once said, ‘Woman is a starter',
⁵
the girls were usherettes of a new age beckoning with its many and varied sexual allurements and enticements to the extent that one travels with the knowledge that there will be no nights on which one will feel lonely any more. If
xiaojie
can be called wives or small wives, or, even more aptly, instant cunts, they are everywhere to be had across the length and breadth of the country. And, in this, there is the economy of redistribution of wealth on a national scale. As one
xiaojie
put it, she'll only spend a few years in it because she'll go home and settle down, erect a multi-storey building, open a store and find a man. In the past, only a decade ago, there would have been no chance whatsoever for her to make that
much
money and become a small capitalist. What the dick contributes to the cunt these days are factors that may not be lost on economists in the future although they tend to turn a blind eye to it now, the D-C economy, an economy in which wealth is evenly redistributed across the world along the sexual lines, with young, fresh country girls either working their cunts off in metropolitan cities for an annual turnover of at least 200,000 yuan or marrying men old enough to be their granddads or shagging with them for keep, or with younger women from the impoverished countries, such as Russia, or, recently, Vietnam, grabbing their potential sugar-daddies across the States or Europe, and, finally, from across the globe, the well-heeled and well-oiled part of it.

15/7

Sex, I'm afraid, is going to be reaching its climax till it drops, till no one takes any interest in it any longer, trashing it like love, as stated by the anonymous academic opting for the non-academic role of taking things head-on without mincing words in his manuscript: Love as we see in Maugham is obsolete. Can anyone imagine loving someone without making love to him or her? The withdrawal of love is the withdrawal of making love, a simple enough rule of thumb, and, in Maugham's case, a rule of toe, to judge anyone's love by.

After a surfeit of sex, I think I'll go into a lengthy period of monastic abstention from those ‘public toilets', or, more aptly, ‘pubic toilets', as Sam put it, certainly quite offensively but absolutely accurately, though not to be imparted to the ‘toilets' themselves.

I've made up my mind about the new girl. She is nice and everything but I'm not going to take the first step. To love is to lose, to be a loser, and to be loved is to be powerful and strong. If she declines it, I can purchase it elsewhere, in fact anywhere. She had this white dress on yesterday through which I could detect the traces of her bra. And the heels of her shoes were lovely, better than a lot I have seen so far, which goes to show that she has taste. At work, I managed to catch a few glances shot from her as she went past my office, its door ajar. I immediately returned my glances to the screen, reading the stuff by the academic, acting as if I had taken no notice of her; there was a slight warmth in my loins. Or, as Beckett puts it, ‘enough to unhinge your loins'.
⁶
How I would love to hold her face in my arms and kiss those thin lips! She is a fairy in contrast to her mother. When I thought of sending her an email, I realized that I did not have her address.

16/7

I've made the decision to reject the manuscript, titled,
Lovelorn and Lovelong in Love Lanes
, a title that could be better reduced to two words,
Love Lanes
, even though the poet offered to self-fund the entire publication. Call me a prig or prude, but the society must somehow maintain its decorum, not expose its scrotum. The poet, by the name of Meng, can publish it at his own cost for all I care. Still, there is a poem I think I'll include here for me to refer to from time to time after I send back his manuscript:

Unfortunately, Love

unfortunately, love

is not meant

to be successful

if it succeeds

it fails

and when it fails

it is beautiful

so meaningless and memorable

it becomes memory

Rejecting people does not make one feel good but it is an essential and necessary part of an editor's daily existence. It feels like getting rid of the snotty stuff out of one's nostrils. I do not suffer from this chronic sense of rejection as a literary rejector myself because I hardly write in order to submit. In a way, the submitters of works are asking for trouble themselves. No submission, no rejection, simple as that. In fact, many have opted for the Internet rubbish tip, with their own blogs showing their own stuff, a fad that reduces their own value and worth to only slightly better than zero.

I like the new girl – I'd call her Larkspur – for who she is and what she is, young, in her early twenties, with sparkling eyes and an open face that invites gaze, like a pool of clear water that lures one to kiss its surface, any part of it, except her ears which are broad and thin, possibly suggesting a thin life, if you are familiar with phrenology or armed with face-reading skills.

17/7

I didn't find her. She found me. This morning she came to my office and introduced herself. She asked if there was any work for her to do and she was full of praise for
me: how I was in charge of important work and what a lot of hard work I must have done in my PhD studies at P—U. It is good to hear a girl much younger than you praise you to your face but a thought came to me reminding me of Aesop's fable of the magpie and the fox. Perhaps I shouldn't have allowed that in but, well, I am not the one to be easily had just for nice words or nice features.

I gave her a few manuscripts to go through, mainly translations in Chinese of imported political biographies from the US or the UK, paying particular attention to sensitive areas such as human rights. I cautioned her by telling her what happened when Hillary Clinton's
Living History
was published in Chinese translation and how it was expurgated in more than a dozen places, particularly where Wu Hongda or Hongda Harry Wu was concerned.
⁷

It was not till she left that I realized that I had noticed two things about her, the smell exuding from her that was so similar to that of her mother's and a tiny black mole on the lower part of the white in her left eye, which only showed when she looked further left but disappeared as soon as she looked you in the eye.

I find it hard to take in a woman all at once. It's always one or two things you notice and remember afterwards. With other girls that you buy and leave, it is their stories that stay longer, years after one had sex.

A couple of years ago, I met this girl with big hair, hair that seemed to be piling up on her head, threatening to fall when she was over you, letting you enter her. She revealed that she was a hairdresser and took meticulous care of her hair, putting it in the latest style, a bit like RuPaul, except that it was intensely dark. I had an instant hard-on at the sight of the gelled hair that felt like hardened spaghetti to the touch. And because you didn't want to ruin it you stroked across it in an ever gentle grope as if over a knotty wired cage and you smelt the chemical of it that seemed to be aiming at an arousal in itself, with its mousse effects.

She let me enter into her from all positions except the hair. In fact, it was her hair that I wanted to enter and ejaculate into but she said: Definitely no, and wondered why. I told her. A couple of decades ago, even before she was born, when I was a teenager, I had seen a woman walking on the street wearing such a sexy hairstyle, with an opening in the middle at the top, that I had a wet dream in which I uploaded – there was no such expression in those days – all my rice gruel or rice-gruel-like semen. I was to miss the hair for days after.

She was surprised that there was such a thing in those austere days of revolution but I told her that it wasn't really
that
austere as fashion moved between two extremes of banning and loosening. I told her what I had seen with my own eyes: young men who wore tight-fitting trousers stopped in the street by workers who cut their trousers open from below with scissors, in an effort to carry out the revolutionary action, and young women wearing trousers so tight that they delineated their buttocks in a way that looked as if they wore nothing underneath.

While listening to me telling my story, she also shared hers with me. At 24, she told me, she did not have a boyfriend but she would go home at 3 a.m. every day, telling her mother that she was working the night shift in a factory. She would then sleep away till lunchtime when she rose and washed herself. What she enjoyed most was watching TV and going shopping, sampling the latest styles of clothing and footwear but hardly ever buying anything till there was a sale.

She said she would occasionally spot a client of hers out on the street but she always managed to get out of the way, in time to escape his attention. Once, when she went shopping in a department store, she saw an army man, in fact a platoon leader, who had visited her once or twice. She quickly hid herself from view, behind a granite column.

Unlike the other girls who dipped in the profession for the money and would quickly get out of it in time to build their own business, she said she would like to be a soldier herself as it would give her opportunities to go places and see the world. ‘A woman in military uniform looks cool,' said she. Hollowroot, I think that's her name, gave me her number and asked me to come back again as she would always ‘wait for you'.

A line from a poem in a submitted manuscript that I had rejected came to me and I read it to her,

Wo lande qu cao zhege zhuangbi de shijie

(I'm too lazy to fuck this fucking pretentious world)
⁸

She immediately dismissed it as ‘trash', saying that poetry was meant to be beautiful, not vulgar.

Then I read her another, which she said was, ‘quite interesting'. It goes as follows:

Deep and Far

Sometimes you think you have gone far

When in fact you have only just arrived at the edge of the bed

Sometimes you think your love is deep

When in fact the depth is only the size of your
yang
tool

Oh, I forgot something. At one stage in our lovemaking, I used an English word, ‘great', when she stopped in the middle of it, her brows knitting. ‘What happened?' I said. ‘I dislike you talking like that,' said she. ‘Like what?' said I. ‘Nothing,' said she, lowering her eyes, afraid of further contradicting me, then added, ‘I hate to hear my own people talking like a foreigner.' My guard put down, my dick also down, I said, jokingly, ‘What if a white guy comes here and wants to pay for your service.' In a hard voice, she said, ‘I'd refuse to serve him however much he pays. In fact, I have rejected a few. I never like their smell and their looks.'

I also read another poem from a submitted collection, called, simply, ‘Shoots'. In a couplet, the poem goes, ‘In a loveless age/the only thing that matters is sex'. She said, ‘I don't agree.' Asked why, she replied, ‘If you don't love, you don't give him the tongue; tongue to anything else but tongue.'

3/8

I am dog tired after Australia. While there, I had absolutely no time to make a diary entry although there were a number of other entries sex-wise. While W and D were out visiting places such as Phillip Island and the Great Ocean Road, Wen, an old friend, took me out in search of ‘cultural experience', as he put it. With the help of Fiona, a migration agent running her own company, called Peach Garden Beyond the World, shortened to PGBW, W and I have decided to pay the first 10% of the deposit for the purchase of a piece of land in Point Cook and start up a business in the town centre, where a house will be built in six months. According to Fiona, by then it will be time for me to ‘transfer' my wife and daughter to the new abode for a peaceful life, with me to follow and join them whenever I want to. However, when I learnt about Subclass 163, a category of migrants allowed into Australia to set up their own businesses,
⁹
I told her that I wanted to get them out asap, to first run a milk bar while waiting for the house to be completed. By then, I shall be joining them.

Australia is a big enough country with a small enough population. I never go anywhere without feeling that millions of people can be somehow settled there to make the country a populous and strong one. For the moment, however, I just want to shift my own W and D there, with my money safely deposited, away from the clutching hands of the authorities.