by Ouyang Yu
‘If a contemporary novelist were to write Maugham’s story, he would have taken the man and the woman to bed in under ten pages. And yet, the club-footed Philip has no such luck or is not provided with such luck for a prolonged period of time prior to his going to Paris with Mildlydreadful.’
This manuscript, laid open in front of me, is from someone by the surname of Tu, whose attached CV shows him to be an academic in his thirties, a very well-read man, it seems. Because there is no market for this kind of thing, he came to me with the intention of self-funding the publication. Although I have not read Maugham, I followed Tu’s logic and could see where he was coming from. In this day and age, love means one thing: instant gratification. What is love if a man does not have an erection? What is love if he does not want to erect into something beautiful? What is love if he does not utter it, again and again, in the euphoria of lovemaking? According to Mr Tu’s interpretation, in those days when Maugham wrote the thing, ‘making love’, as an expression, did not even carry the connotation of having sex as it does today.
I must confess that it was similar to my own experience when young, living in a revolutionary period in which sex was unknown. I’ve written about that in a group of diaries that I must go back to in search of things I said. One memory is particularly vivid in which I used to have aching balls long after I had a rendezvous with W – in which we only cuddled and kissed, nothing dramatic – from a prolonged erection. It was not until much later that I realized that it was far better to resort to masturbation than bear the brunt of sore balls and the excruciating pain. And may I say that I tended to be promiscuous in the freedom that the act lent to me, in which I thought of the beautiful faces that I had seen on the street, culminating in the flooding with the most ravishing one? The saying, a bit on the vulgar side, ‘the pig fucks the buttocks the same way a man fucks the face’, is absolutely true. And, in a strangely weird way, that is the nature of truth too.
12/7
While another saying, quite popular these days, also vulgar, goes that people like us are ‘fucking busy by day and busy fucking by night’, it is only half true, for we may not be ‘fucking busy’ during the day or ‘busy fucking’ at night as sometimes these things become mixed. Over the last few days I have been kept so busy reading through the manuscripts, nearly all trash, I must confess, that I can’t afford the time to go out despite Sam’s invitations. A married man, he took me to a coffee house one night and showed me two women, in their mid or late thirties, that I dismissed in one glance as un-look-at-able. But Sam told me, not without pride, that one of them was his ‘small wife’, who would come regularly to do his chores. Sam said he had lost his virginity at around 20 when an older woman seduced him, thus opening his door to a wider spectrum of opportunities and possibilities or possibilities, ‘b’ in Chinese language sounding exactly the same as cunts. I listened to him recounting his loss of virginity with disbelief: there is always ‘an older woman’ somewhere to shift the blame to. The first knocker on my door, of love, of sex, was no older than 22, but she certainly gave me access to a wider world of possibilities, for, afterwards, the world was no longer a train of austere compartments, separated along the rigid lines of moral value, with the constant threat of expulsion and excommunication, that was headed in one direction: death in good name. The world literally opened itself up, not just a mere Shakespearean oyster but, more aptly, a Shakespearean oyster-like, many-splendoured cunt, a cunt-bed that one sleeps in and would like to stay in forever.
A line I read by Samuel Beckett appeals; it goes, ‘Up to the penis in I went to the seablood of a shattered maid.’4 I keep it here for the future when I get this published and will probably use it as a quote upfront.
Although my marriage has stayed the course, perhaps our daughter the mainstay, many of our friends’ haven’t. Honghong – I realize I have to use false names because when this diary is made public, I don’t want anyone to be hurt, least of all our friends – daughter of Wan, was married only six months before she declared that marriage did not suit her temperament and that she needed to grow maturer than marriage. Maturer than marriage? That is tantamount to saying no marriage. The girl who masturbated me the other day – gosh, I can’t even recall her name now – revealed to me that, apart from sex she provides to her clients on a nightly basis, she needs love from ‘boyfriends’, of whom she has quite a few. Sex is work or drudgery, a job that you do to pay the bills and keep alive, but love is an emotional necessity, an offering, a giving, not in the expectation of returns. The theory, coming from a girl’s mouth, seems to make a lot of sense, more sense than mine, and, yes, more mature than marriage, although I think her truth is as truthful as mine, neither cancelling out the other but each complementing each. For me, love, after the initial cuddling and cooing and kissing and aching, is no more than the act itself, with the necessary paraphernalia, accessories you buy the one you have made love to if you want to keep going back to her, although I find none metaphysically attractive enough to want to go back to; I prefer a combination of cunt and brains, not just cunt and kill or cunt and con.
13/7
‘Whatever, by Michel Houellebecq, is a confronting book if only because of its bitter tone, uncompromising in its unflattering portrait of women, particularly aggressively career-minded younger women, and in its poisoned attitude of disgust towards things in general. But it leaves one wondering about the sex hunger its main characters experience, such as Raphael Tisserand, in France maybe but not in a Chinese situation where a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, however ugly he may be, would not be starved for sex at all, particularly when he is working in a company and earning a decent income. Surely, one suggests, he could buy sex wherever he goes in China now that it is so available, and, surely, one further suggests, he, along with other sex-starved ugly French men, could go to China for sex tourism. It is a book which, in that regard, leaves one unsatisfied.’
Having read another entry – yes, I call them entries because this guy, an academic, writes in a very unacademic way, perhaps, as he suggests in his Introduction, ‘Tired of the academic hard currency for which academics in this country and elsewhere strive, by producing rock-hard theses or papers so impenetrable that few understand and bother reading, not even themselves after they have won the credits in their philistine climb up the jealous ladder to the top of the academic world, really another business world where money speaks the academic language and makes them churn out dung-coloured and dung-heavy articles or uncool keynote speeches,’ this writer sets about putting down his most immediate impressions after reading a certain writer regardless of the writer’s established reputation or position, following his heart as the sole measurement – I went about my own business and met 100, the number displayed on her breast.
In a short explanation, she told me that this was because all the good numbers had been snatched away by other girls but, after we finished making love, she revealed that she had actually liked this number as it meant baifa baizhong, a Chinese expression that literally means a hundred shots, a hundred bullseyes, or, figuratively, every shot hits the target. It also means, in another Chinese expression, baihua qifang: a hundred flowers bloom. And, still in another Chinese expression, baichuan guihai, that means hundreds of rivers return to the sea. Curiously, the expression associated with bai, hundred, that came to me was baikong qianchuang, hundreds of holes and thousands of scabs although I didn’t mention it as it was such an unlucky thing to say.
She’s quite a beauty in her own right, her face creamy, unpowdered, and her lips red, unlipsticked, ancient and classic in a way that she lacked the contemporary girl’s pretensions. According to her, she was of an ethnic minority, namely, tujia zu or Earth Family Nationality. The village where she came from was deep in the mountains and, in ancient times, it was one in which beauties were born and would be selected for the emperors down the dynasties. She told me that she had once picked up an egg by the roadside of her village and had her hen hatch i
t, only to have a snake come out of the egg, and, prior to her coming to the city to do this job, she had kept it in a cage. Not long after that, she had an accident in which she went gathering firewood but fell down the side of the mountain till she hit a tree when a huge snake curled itself around her with its tail and scooped her up. She also told me that mine was so big and fitted her so well.
Thus talking, I felt the urge again and, fittingly and excitingly, she seemed willing enough to cooperate. So we had it a second time, within the hour, and I came inside her, without the condom. As soon as I finished she got out of bed, walking away as she muttered to herself: I must get washed immediately; I don’t want to get pregnant again.
I kissed her goodbye on her lips unsmeared with the modern technology of sham designed to cheat, allure and catch, and left the premises feeling content at heart.
14/7
‘How’s your wife?’
That remark, from the wife of a novelist, now dead and unknown somewhere in Eastern Australia, came as a shock and a condemnation. In the moments that followed, Si, the woman I was secretly in like with if not in love, stared at me as if she didn’t recognize me, as if I had been play acting. I liked the shape of her slim figure; I liked the way she moved; and I liked the way she talked. The only thing I didn’t like about her was her capacity for food: God, how much she ate! She was generous enough to treat us to dinners from time to time and she would bring sweet bread and biscuits to me when she came to see me in my cramped dormitory. I thought of her pale face and imagined how lovely it would be to kiss her lips. But after that remark made by the boring married woman, it was not going to be. It was a remark typical of the time when man-woman relationships were beginning to show signs of breakdown and those hopeless people who dared not rise to the challenge were quick to point them out in others to feel good about themselves. But for the remark, we would probably have made it in no time; instead, when she came back with more lovely food, I showed her the proof: photos of my family. It was a devilish thing that I did but to this day I do not know why. I could have simply told her: Si, I love you. Even though I am married we can still be together; I didn’t have the courage.
Not only did the priggish woman make that remark but a xiaojie also did it, years ago. She was one of the first to open my eyes, my crotch and my wallet. As I entered her, her feet pointed towards the ceiling, held up by my shoulders, she said: Where’s your wife? To which I said: I don’t know, as I moved faster and faster till I shot the lot.
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.
