Diary of a Naked Official (5 page)

However passionate and deep one's love is, it tends to peter out like a brisk fire that burns with passion and heat, only to burn itself out at the end of the day. Peter - what a name in association with the phrase ‘peter out' -had an affair with Third, the third daughter in her family,
a pretty girl who did frames for his paintings, but had to marry a Singaporean woman when he went to Sydney. Third fought tooth and claw to stop him from marrying and going. According to Sam, Third threatened suicide but didn't; instead, she left scratch marks all over Peter's back, traces of love when gone, turned sour and resentful.

Love seems to have two faces, one loving, the other hating. Sue is a typical example. Like the name ‘Peter', this name is portentous. I would run miles away from any woman by that name because who knows if she is not going to Sue you one day? In fact, when a girl I loved reported that her name was Sue, I said: It's not a name you should have. I'd much prefer you call yourself ‘Su' or ‘Soo'. In fact, Soo with two holes in it is infinitely preferable to Su with a ‘u'. She seemed to like it and said: I'll think about it.

Sue, according to the news I had read, took her husband to court for raping her. I couldn't believe such absurdities, an absolute mockery of marriage as a sacred institution. In the future, a man probably will have to agree to a fee with his wife before she allows him to make love to her. Then why bother marrying? It saves a lot of trouble and it makes more sense to pay a fee to make love with anyone one chooses. By the look of things to come, marriage is going to be more like a scary institution than a sacred one.

I met Soo in Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, a place that provides a combination of services, ranging from manicuring to sauna to cannon beating, or bonking. I managed to steal a card bearing all the services in quite amazing names: Roaming, Water Mill, Mandarin Duck Bath, Poisonous Dragon, Swings, Red Ropes, Burning Fire on the Ice Mountain, Oral Communications, Push Oil, Wave Push, Salt Milk Bath, Double Flying, Anus Licking, Back Knocking, Ice Fire, Beating the Airplane, Ants Climbing the Tree, Mouth Job, Explosive Mouth, Foot Licking, Flying in the Air, Barrel Bath, Four Seas, and Sucking the Skin.

As I looked over it, I asked Soo what each meant and she couldn't come up with an answer as she was sucking the skin on my back, lifting it to its limit and, with a ‘baa', releasing it. I wasn't particularly impressed with that until she, with a ‘you'll know it when it comes to that', put a plastic bag on each of my naked feet and began gently biting them, first the right foot, then the left. The sensation it caused was wonderfully pleasant; I could feel the heat of her tongue as it wandered from toe to toe and from heel to heel. Poison Dragon, as she later revealed, did no more than put the tip of her tongue inside my anus, licking it as deep as she could go. After an initial round, I told her to stop as that made me itch.

After my ejaculation, Soo lay in my arms, like a true
lover, and told me of her visit to Dubai and how she would love to catch the attention of an Arab prince. She wouldn't mind their system of polygamy as it was one of equality, as far as she knew, in which each wife was well looked after. ‘Much better than one man lording it over you,' she concluded.

21/6

Read a news item online today about a man in his early 50s who died in bed after making love with a
xiaojie
. When they found him, the girl had gone and the man lay half naked, with clothes on but no pants. The cause of death was reportedly a sudden heart attack. Lately, there have been quite a number of deaths in bed like that, one involving the principal of a school and the other, a quite well-known actor. Despite the ancient wisdom that says to die among the flowers is to die a lascivious hero, I baulk at going further along the line, perhaps not till we go to Australia at the end of the month.

22/6

The book that B has brought back from Frankfurt, along with a large bundle of other titles, is
Erotica Universalis
by Gilles Neret. He said, with a winning wink: It's for you. Without a word, I took the hint. Whatever books he deemed unpublishable he would happily pass on to me, after sampling through them. But why did he buy it in the first place? Of course, it wouldn't cost him anything; it's all reimbursed. Perhaps it's because I showed an irresistible tendency towards the wanton and dissolute? But I am sure he must have enjoyed the pictures even if he can't read the language.

‘Woman of Easy Virtue',
¹
done in 1903 by Pablo Picasso, is good, graphically simple and evocative: a standing man and a squatting woman, the man fully clothed except where his dick pokes out and the woman starkly naked, taking half of the dick in her mouth. It was the same then and it is the same now. Sam said: But I can't ejaculate in a woman's mouth however hard and long she works on it. I recall him saying he dumped it all on the spoon of a
xiaojie
's curved tongue after he had used his hand for the purpose. Even in the porn DVDs

I have watched, the men have to resort to their hands to achieve the final purpose of puking, anatomically, that is, or erotically. The thought came to me that this book might be considered for publication if not recommended outright. In today's China, things are much more confronting, much more insidious, and much more physically permissive than a decade or so back as it is good for the economy; they could be food for artistic thought as artists need inspirations, or else it would all stagnate at an animalistic level. Still, I am not sure because B may object on the basis of market and censorship.

Talking about the C word, there are so many things not allowed into print. Nothing gay or lesbian. No graphic sex. No
The Satanic Verses
. No
Mao: The Unknown Story
, books forbidden to be translated, let alone published. Nothing offensive to ethnic tastes. Nothing against the positive image of Chinese people and China. Absolutely nothing about official corruption. As a colleague once said: Castrate your mind before you enter into this business.

Strangely, lines from a gay poem come to mind, written by someone pen-named Grave Grass,

Old Ruan refused (the call girl)

But continued his tongue job and his mouth job –

Like a burning fish that swam across every inch of my skin

Sucking my balls off like a vacuum cleaner
²

Such stuff can only exist on the Internet, like grass on a grave, as his name suggests, for bad-taste mourners.

The girl who allowed me to take photographs is now in my hand. Bearing a number 62, she is wearing a black bra, with a white fluff in the front, a head full of black hair, tied up in a white flowery lace. Her eyes, single-lidded, are black, too. Although she did not allow me to enter my tongue in her mouth, she did, aesthetically, allow my second tongue into her second mouth, in and out, many times, and, as I put it, the Buddhist way that is in and the Taoist way that is out.

23/6

Daffodil is the girl I love best. As things are, the more you love a person, the less likely that person is to be with you for long. One has to live with her disappearance one winter, never to appear again, and an expectation that she will somehow turn up somewhere. Of all the
sexual episodes I have had with her, one stays in memory for always, lasting longer than the rest. One evening, in her rented apartment, I was eating dinner at the table, sitting across from her, when she bent down as if to pick up something that had dropped on the floor. I was mystified as to what she wanted to do. Soon, it dawned on me that she wanted to perform an oral on my phallus, from under the table! There I was, biting on a succulent chicken drumstick above while she was sucking on my cock underneath, fresh from the open fly. I came right in her mouth as my own mouth also came, swamped with a surging flood of phlegm. When she crept from under the table, she started kissing me with her semen-filled mouth, returning the rest to me after swallowing some. For the first time, I tasted my own semen on her mouth, an experience like no other.

Once, on another occasion, when I arrived at her apartment, she let me in and closed the door behind us. I was pleasantly surprised to see her wearing only a pink dress with nothing underneath, standing in a pair of super-high-heeled shoes, her face made up in a most sexy way. I was immediately aroused and made love to her then and there.

How I want to do it like that again in the physical absence that is a mental presence!

Ours is such a highly sexualized society that if a man
is left alone with himself for longer than half an hour he feels unwanted and starts dreaming of having a mouth taking his cock inside it. That's how I feel about things in general. Only the other day, B, in going through hundreds of applications sent for a sub-editor's job, joked that qualifications mattered much less than looks. After all, it is the looks that would make him and other males in this publishing house tick whereas an ugly woman with a PhD would only dampen the general spirit, worse if she had a temper because of her superior qualifications; no one would stand a taunting female walking brains on a daily basis.

How right Maugham was when he said, ‘The three duties of woman. The first is to be pretty, the second is to be well-dressed, and the third is never to contradict.' The two first duties are perfectly observed here and elsewhere in my country but the last one, poor Maugham, is constantly opposed, I'm afraid.

My position is slightly at risk here as the PhD degree I've earned in Chinese language and literature may not stand me in good stead, placing me as it does at the centre of attention and jealousy in comparison with all the rest of them whose highest level of qualifications is a mere MA and one editor has no qualifications whatsoever, a mere primary school leaver, managing to get up the ladder by an accumulation of publications in literary magazines, large and small, in the country.

The girl's mother, a 40ish woman, came to see me about the possibility of securing a job for her daughter. She came by herself. When I pulled up a chair for her, I noticed she was wearing a low-cut dress that revealed much of her breast, the dress black, with enticing lace. And she had put on such a profuse dosage of perfume that I was concerned I might have difficulty expelling it afterwards and my office might become the talk of the publishing house should they happen to also come in and smell it. Her shoes were decidedly unsightly as they were like two pieces of slices cut from a fat cake, although I must say her skin was fairer than most of my female colleagues. She carried two bags of presents as she came in and I waved them off. But she insisted, so I told her to leave them in a corner. She said that Sam had introduced her and that her daughter, near graduation, was keen on the position of a sub-editor. I told her the usual things about the stringent selection process and the requirement for a professional resume. When I finished and she rose to go, we shook hands and it was in that moment that I felt her hand linger a tad longer in my grasp, reluctant, it seemed, to let go. I looked at her and caught this glitter in her black eyes. Remembering something, I picked up a card and gave it to her but she said: I've got it already.

24/6

After disappearing for weeks, M has reappeared, with a short message to my phone, saying that she missed me. I saved her number, putting it under Meta, and deleted the message.

I hesitated late this afternoon when N called, the 40ish woman who was dressed up like a 20-year-old girl. Women of her age seem to be quite into doing that these days. The other day, when I took a walk outside on the street, I noticed a quite charming girl walking in high heels and a back-revealing dress. I looked and looked and then, as if my gazing had the effect of turning her head back, she turned her head back and met my eyes. In that instant, I realized with regret that those eyes were embedded in a face decades older than I had thought, revealing an anxiety deep within about their passing youth and lingering potency.

She rang that she had booked a private room for two, at somewhere I have not heard of, something called Humble Abode. It looked humble on the outside, next to a construction site that anyone would overlook when going past, but it was handsomely laid out inside, with elegant calligraphy and paintings. As soon as I was led into the private room, two lines written in a flowing style caught my eye, in the scroll hanging down the wall: ‘I wish the moment would last/in which we share this
moonlight apart, over a thousand miles'. It was the word ‘wish' in this poem of Su Shi's that momentarily arrested my attention. Right, I thought to myself as I realized that I, in giving attention to Su Shi's poem, had neglected the woman walking up to me and extending her hand. I was slightly taken aback as she seemed to be the woman-girl I had seen on the street, in the same back-exposing dress and heels high enough to tip her bodily balance. She did something that changed the power relationship - if there was such thing - when she pulled me into her arms, ever so reluctantly on my part, and held me in a Western-style embrace that, as a rule, I find embarrassing. The evening could be summarized in one word: let. I let her order more than we both could consume and I let her take me to Metropark Hotel and give herself to me in her entirety, all in my total unpreparedness.

I must say the whole thing was a total flop, so humiliating and embarrassing. Wherever I attacked her, condom-less, from before or behind, from above or below, I just couldn't come, not even when she decided to use her mouth, then her hands. That seriously led to my contemplation on the idea of beauty. A man's phallus, the origin of his life force, erects its head at the sight of beauty but hangs its head when seeing something unsightly. It seems as natural as the sky is above the earth and the night follows the day. Unless the mind
were trained to love the ugly, the dick will follow where beauty is alive despite the realities often to the contrary, as the popular saying goes,
haohan wu haoqi, chouhan qu huazhi
(a good man is matched with no good wife whereas an ugly man is married with a bloom along the bough), perhaps a balance set by an invisible force.