Diary of a Naked Official

by Ouyang Yu

  A bit more on Montaigne. He is a man of self-indulgences to the degree of verbosity, which I dislike. He repeats himself regarding his honesty, his poor memory, and his need to be outspoken, too. I told B that we should not put too much focus on the market but we need to build an aesthetic sense of appreciation. He didn’t know what I was talking about. Instead, he said, a publishing house should be run like a mint, producing books the way money is made, millions of copies worth tens of millions of dollars, as the market is the order of the day and dictates what to publish and what not to. That’s right, I agreed but said to myself under my breath that it was all nonsense. I would rather be managing director of a book publishing house than that of a banknote printer! He had the sense to see that I wasn’t agreeing although I pretended I did. He must have hated my guts, staring at me like I was a total stranger who had just trodden on his big toe without offering an apology. I could see that he also pretended that he didn’t know what I was thinking. But, shortly after, his decision showed: I was to be responsible for looking after self-funded poetry and books of values deemed quite unpublishable unless I made convincing enough recommendations. ‘This is a very important job,’ he said, with a knowing smile.

  I consulted Old Sheng and found enough info about book numbers and how to use them. Despite the complexity of it, I’ve worked out that a book number, worth nothing in the international market, could be worth from 10k to 60k, for a mere book, all depending on an editor’s whims.

  Interesting, I thought to myself.

  Then I thought of M. As long as she is there, hope is there, too. She’s my woman, at my beck and call, even though I have to pay and have to wear the thing.

  She came into my room and said she missed me. Without any preamble, we undressed and coupled. Unlike most of the girls in the business, she allowed me to mouth and tongue her, which was a bit scary. When I kissed other girls they turned their faces away, avoiding the kiss as if it were poisonous. I felt disappointed at the same time when I acquiesced in the act as it was a sensible one. With her, there was no problem, her mouth agape, swallowing mine up, my tongue pulled as it was being sucked into her depths, to breaking point.

  Pretty soon, I made the entry, encountering no resistance from her as she did not stop to ask me to put it on as the likes of her would have instinctively done, reaching for their tiny bags of aids and tools. I was all the way in, as deeply as I could, her eyes closed as were mine, each probably seeing different pictures. I saw the goner, my eternal lover, as imperfect as lovable, and as unholy as lovely. I wonder why I have chosen to settle for loss, for the loss. When she was with me, clinging to me, loving me without giving me a break, I detested her, I found her sweet words nauseating and I even wished for someone else as I was deeply engaging in the act of lovemaking, hatemaking too in a way because I hated the goner, the misser, the person gone missing that I loved so much.

  Afterwards, I lit a cigarette for her and for myself and, reclining against the bedstead, heard her story of how she had split up with her boyfriend.

  It’s the GPS, yes, the GPS on my mobile phone that helped me track him down to a nearby hotel. He was with a bought woman in a hotel room, a hotel that I was familiar with. I hailed a taxi and directly headed for it. I stormed into his room, catching them red-handed in bed, right in the act!

  I looked at her face through the rising smoke that screened my face, wondering about the amazing power of modern gadgets. I looked around but did not see her mobile phone. I sighed with relief: She hasn’t recorded a video of our lovemaking on it. I wouldn’t want to see our photos on Weibo, no.

  ‘What?’ she said, hearing my sigh.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ said I. Then I related a story I had heard, of how four men were eating and drinking while four women were underneath the table mouthing them, one of them having difficulty because she had a piece of vegetable caught in her teeth preventing her doing a smooth blow job.

  She laughed as she said, ‘Did she manage to extract it?’

  9/6

  The guy was cleared of his crime or almost. Right from the beginning, I, along with nearly all my friends, believed that it was a set-up. Who would want to fuck an ugly face? Not even for free. Not even getting paid to unless you were a duck, a male prostitute.

  Talking about the ducks, Sam told me last night how they thrived on the sugar mums – if there are such things as counterparts of sugar daddies – who were rich enough to pay for their services. One such duck was told to hold his thing steady and erect for three days for one rich lady’s satisfaction until he deflated, like a pricked balloon, dying then and there, in his early thirties.

  Sex, a keyword of our times, is like a poisoned liquid that seeps into the minds of everyone, including women, right down to teens. Are we hoping one day we’ll find a baby pregnant with a smaller baby even before it is born?

  I made love to her last night. It is so rare these days that the only way I can rely on to make it successful is to resort to my memory. The second I went in the woman gone missing came back, she came alive, she became her, she was underneath, screaming as she uttered loving words, the harder you hit her the louder she screamed, with increasing pleasure. At one stage I felt that I was like a wall flat against her wall when I went all the way in, the act of impinging producing an explosive sound only flesh coupled with flesh tearing into the flesh was capable of making. Afterwards, I fell dead inside her, then beside her, and soon went into sleep.

  I have not convinced B of the need to purchase the copyright of On the Heights of Despair. He is a man so full of optimism that Cioran’s dark sentiments pale beside his bubbly zest for a book-strapped world, each page a foil of gold. I, for one, feel the temptation of the abysmal instincts, destructively alluring, that often plunge me into helplessness after a shower of pleasure.

  10/6

  M told me she loved books, which isolated her from the rest of the crowd. The other isolating factor, she revealed, was that she was hui, a Muslim. I said: But you look no different from other Chinese girls. She said: Oh, yes, I do. My hair is slightly yellowish. My eyelashes are, too. I took a look at her but still could not detect any differences, perhaps because the room with the curtains drawn was not light enough. I let her go on with her story.

  She comes from a mining town in the North where the Huis and the Hans are living together but separately. Her father, a mining boss, his health wrecked from drinking and smoking heavily because of the need to entertain his clients, is now lying in bed, half paralysed. Her mother, doing nothing at home, and supported with the savings from her father’s mining business, has grown into a huge mass of flesh, her waist ‘this big’, she indicated with her hands in the shape of the Rubber Duck. She herself has graduated from a tailor’s school, a polytechnic, and, because of the difficulty in finding a job, not to say a decent one, has chosen this line of business to make money till further opportunities arise. If she stops doing it, as I suggested, there is no income.

  I offered her a cigarette, which she took and lit up. After only a few draws, she stopped and complained that she was suffering from a smoking-related ‘drunkenness’. I found her description intriguing.

  The place does not suit her, she said, because there are so few restaurants catering to the Hui minority. She does not eat pork or anything pork-related, finding it smelly and dirty. I remember the novel by Huo Da, a Hui woman writer, in which the Huis are represented as a beautiful, artistic and highly moral people as negatively contrasted with the Hans, who are cunning and deceptive. I told her so and she said she had not read the book, not expressing a desire to read it, either, although she said to me that her grandmother kept her house so clean no one else’s house could match it.

  She also revealed that she had had a hard time at school. The school rules and regulations meant that she did not have a holy place, not even a hiding place, to pray. She managed to find her own secret spot by her bed in the shared dormitory room, where she knelt and prayed in silence each and every night beh
ind a mosquito net after the lights were switched off.

  I would not have asked her back but for her revelation that she had studied art at school, perhaps because of my own inclination towards the more artistic, the talented people, although in my early days of flower-searching, I had encountered more uncouth, less educated and no less honest ones.

  At home, W claims I am not interested in her any more but I am. I need this marriage to last, to be sustainable, solidity better than liquidity. And the good thing is that I can manage to come each time we make love.

  Wang Ming, a poet whose name I have never heard of, sent me a manuscript and insisted that I read it before I reject or accept it. After I flipped through it, my eye caught a poem that goes:

  You I wanted

  I wanted to love you

  But I can’t

  I touch my loins

  They do

  I wanted to love you

  But I can’t

  I think of the seeds I sowed

  What a waste of my youth

  I wanted to love you

  But I can’t

  A bed is always meant for two

  But one doesn’t know who’s the other you

  I wanted to love you

  But I can’t

  I look down at my loins

  They do

  A bit anal, I thought, banal, that is, although it seems quite close to the core, a man’s concern. There’s no market for such things, though, I think. I thought of immediately rejecting it, thinking of B’s dismissal of such books in a remark he once made, half-jokingly: In our age, we do not need poets any more; if they want to kill themselves, they’d better do that thick and fast before they get killed, but I laid it aside for the moment as I wanted to wait till my thoughts settled down.

  B, on the other hand, can be glibly enthusiastic, given a different setting, e.g. in a company meeting, attended by all and sundry, in which he would give his support for books, including poetry, written in praise of the Party and the socialist system. I could tell that he didn’t believe a word of it and I know for certain that such books, if written by officials occupying powerful positions, can sell well through official channels at the government’s expense.

  11/6

  The new girl, fresh from the university, was quite shy when she came to work today, her first day, but, in one glance, I could see that she looked nice, her features soft, tender and freshly pale. She wore light brown leather boots, flat soled, which I think could be heeled to make her taller. Since she graduated from the English department, I spoke to her in English and found that she was quite fluent although she was a tad slow.

  Over lunch, Sam revealed to me that he had split up with his girlfriend. According to him, it was a good riddance to bad rubbish. The woman was a dead bore, who clung to him like a piece of chewed gum. It was beyond his comprehension why women nowadays are more aggressive than their male counterparts two decades ago, going for their liked men, not even loved men, the way men went for the enemy-occupied cities, never giving up till they captured them.

  Thus far, I have not experienced what he had; I would have thought it exciting and exhilarating to be pursued and loved, adored like a baby doll. All the women I have loved and made love to seem as transient as a wisp of smoke issuing from my burning, but shortening cigarette. The minute you chuck the butt, the way you chuck the wrapped semen, they are gone. But for the occasional photographs, you can’t even remember their faces as they all blur into one of an enormous woman cloud.

  AA has a goose-egg face, whose creamy-whiteness is sharply contrasted with her rosy fleshy lips. Her raven hair, reaching down to her nipples, parts like a curtain, to reveal her single-lidded eyes, big and black. She may have made-up but not in a heavy-handed way. After she gave me a salt bath, which she said would relax me and cure me of skin conditions, if any, she laid herself down in preparation for my entry. When I did, and increased my speed, she was beside herself as she kept saying: Oh, it’s so good! Fuck my tiny little cunt! I like it so much. Fuck harder, harder please! Oh, you are so steely and so hard!

  Sam went with me that night but he chose an oil pusher and told me afterwards that he had shot into her mouth. He said that it had saved a lot of labour as usually it was the girl who got the most out of it, not the paying man. Why pay hard and work hard to please a woman when you can pay for her to work on you?

  Huhm, you’ve got real sense, I said to Sam and thought to myself: Why do I seem to enjoy the physical labour more?

  12/6

  In his submitted book of poetry, the poet says, ‘Truth does not wear a condom whereas lies wear lipstick daily.’ I am still in two minds about recommending it to B despite the poet’s offer to self-fund the publication.

  M has disappeared altogether even though I gave her my number. Curiously, she said she did not carry a mobile phone because she had left it at home. Sounds like a lie. But if she decides not to contact me does that not mean something? Perhaps I am too old for her? Or she finds my uttering endearments a bit too much, as if I were treating her like a true lover or someone else I was addressing in my mind, using her as an aid?

  Love is lust. I love, therefore I become lustful. The process is more like this, a triple L: I like, I love, I lust; it is never quadruple L, because it never contains the word ‘last’ as it does not last.

  The poet also openly expresses his ideal of polygamy, with one man married to multiple women. He can keep that a secret wish or rave about it among his friends but this will never be allowed into print, not in this day and age. If I do, B wouldn’t.

  He should know that there is no need for that. An ordinary man of today is a citizen-emperor who can love and lust as many women as he can afford to, the way an emperor did without paying in the past. So, why worry supporting a large battalion of wives while you can come into contact with every total stranger, totally beautiful strangers, stranger-ness being synonymous with beauty, familiarity wearing one down and tiring one out, each and every night? There’s no escaping the fact that ours is an age charged with sex, in which the saying ‘strike while the iron is hot’ could be changed to ‘strike while the cock is hard and before you go hard’. Speaking of that, I recall what Sam said about the fall pill.

  According to him, the Viagra is good but it has a few problems, one of which is that it stands you in good stead, literally, that is, in hard stead, maintaining the erection for long stretches of time, making one very uncomfortable, from his own experience. However, after his friend introduced him to a ‘fall pill’, a pill that could instantly knock the full erection flat, he no longer has had the problem.

  I, for one, will not touch either the stand-up pill or the fall-down pill. For me, youth is the best pill.

  13/6

  But this one I had earlier this evening isn’t quite youthful although she is full of lust of a kind that I appreciate. Compared with Acacia whose breasts are hard to grab, hard not only in the sense of difficulty but also in the sense of solid, Banksia has breasts that sway, bob and fill and overfill your hands till you have to hold them with your arms and slip your face in between. When she opened up, I noticed a brown mole near the right lip of her vagina, the lip fanning out like a slice of a human ear. I do not recall having seen anything like that before, but to have these ear-like lips wrapping, and lapping, around your member - a joke someone told emerged that to join the Party is to become a member - is to experience the initial sensation of going inside a furcoated house. Everything on her has depths: her mouth, so large and warm, that buries my member, not a Party one, not even wanting to be one; her twat, so large that I could feel that my balls were wet when I ploughed in; and her eyes, so dark and deep that I felt dizzy when I looked into them. She had a number of tiny little moles lined up alongside her nose on the right side but their existence enhances rather than reduces her carnal allure. It’s a face, when made-up, that I would love to make love to again and again. She didn’t tell me her age nor did I ask but judging by the size of her puss
y and the mellow timbre of her voice I suspect she’s around 30, at least 28. That’s fine. I wouldn’t mind someone slightly older than 25. Anyone around the 20-year mark is aphrodisiac enough. And I like the red leather bra she was wearing as well as the blue tattoo on the back of her left hand: a Chinese character, jia, family. When I ejaculated, my eyes wandered to where the character was and I was swept by a feeling of curiosity, mixed with guilt.

  She told me her story: My boyfriend was a beast. He stopped loving me after I got pregnant. He wanted me to get an abortion but I refused. I wanted the baby. I particularly wanted a girl. In the few months that followed, he disappeared. We had met in a hotel. I was then working in the hotel as a headwaitress and, on the side, I made a bit of money with clients like him. I did because that is what everybody did in those days; at least girls of my age did as the money one made from one’s wages was so little. There was so much one wanted to buy: cosmetics, clothes and things that made one look cool, such as sunglasses, mobile phones and stuff. So we met and became friends. He gave me 60k and asked me to start running a shop. Then he was gone. To please him, I aborted the baby. It was so bloody and painful when they opened me up and pulled the mass of meat out. I vowed to never let a man enter me again. But pretty soon I used up all the money; I spent it all on things. They were so expensive, such as this Estee Lauder and Lancôme that you have to wear if you are a woman. They are poisonous, in a way, because after repeated use your skin seems worn out by simply wearing them. Look at me: am I a bit tired and weary looking? My skin is no longer as good and soft as before. But if I do not make myself pretty no one bothers looking at me on the street. I want people to look at me, to gaze at me, because I can feel proud of myself that way.

  It was not till then that I saw there was a long thin scar on her right arm. I didn’t ask her why it was there although I was concerned that my seed might germinate in her, her body seemingly such a wealthy mine for growth. I gave her the money and told her to go, in a gentle but firm voice.