by Ouyang Yu
I watched and watched, enjoying it while scared to death and at the same time wondering why no one bothered stopping her. It was not till my name was called that I realized I was seeing something in my daydream, in my abyss mind and in my hell heart. My name was called because B, the publisher, wanted to know my opinion about a number of books recommended. I gave a halfhearted response, basically accepting all. And that was that.
4/9
What I forgot to mention last night was the unanimous voting against the publication in translation of Philosophy in the Boudoir by Marquis de Sade as everyone who had read the translated excerpts found them shocking beyond their endurance, things like Eugénie’s declaration that goes, ‘Oh! How well I understand evil now! How deeply my heart now desires it!’, followed by Madame de Saint-Ange’s exhortation that the ‘foulest, the filthiest, the most forbidden things are always the most exciting … They always unleash the most delicious orgasms.’ As for the translated excerpts regarding the practice of such harmless crimes as sodomy and incest, they were found to be absolutely unacceptable, rejected outright. I was left astounded by their universal condemnation of what could be called a masterpiece, at least in my own view, particularly when I knew that B was himself into these sorts of sordid secret pleasures as he once revealed to me and as Sam and a lot of other men had, too, in a similar fashion. That night, at Spring Comes, he got quite tipsy and told me that he was tired of all the bought girls; instead, he would like to fuck as many married women as possible, without the obstruction of a condom. When it comes to facing the public with a book, the shit-forming and shit-producing humanity becomes horrified as if it was their own shit that was about to hang out to dry. It is the night in our hearts that one is afraid of exposing, a beautifully dangerous night, so fascinating that one simply wants to daydream into it, never to come out again.
5/9
T is someone I do not know but who keeps sending emails with attachments which so far have not corrupted my computer but that is not the reason why I have allowed them to come in. The reason I have allowed them is that he sends stuff that is quite amazing. In the past, I heard about this and read, amazingly, only one story about it, published, unsurprisingly, overseas by a writer of Chinese origin. I have forgotten his name now but the story somehow sticks in my memory, that of a man who, in the absence of his wife, enjoys having sex with an artificial doll.
What T sent me today is an attachment containing many photographs of a new product, called ‘Super Dollfie’, made in Japan, with a description that these dolls are detachable, refittable, make-upable and resizable, the only word missing is fuckable and refuckable. At these photos, these dolls, my mind took a leap far ahead of time to a future, a problem-free one, in which sex is not only purchasable but hassle-free, trouble-free and problem-free, as it does not involve any human interaction or any financial bickerings, bitchings or chest-beatings, one in which a bachelor – bachelorhood or spinsterhood is the ultimate preferred mode of living – lives with a variety of dolls, all sizes, all colours, all kinds of make-up, as many as the human imagination can create, in his private house, including ones that are as moveable and intelligent as a robot, a flesh-and-blood robot, and including, of course, the ones into arguments and fighting if the bachelor happens to be a moody one, the age downgradable to year 1. Or am I committing a crime by simply thinking the thought? That would be called an Able Age, an age in which everything can be suffixed with an ‘able’, as shown above. If I live long enough to see that happen, I shall buy myself a doll or a number of dolls able to satisfy all my wildest fantasies without having to bear a shred of responsibility, social or legal or familial. The downside of this is that the future dump may be filled with trashed dolls.
One glance into his ‘Lifelike customized sex dolls from Japan’ assures me that the human world will not have long to last. In two to three hundred years, no one will have to marry anyone but men and women will live totally alone, surrounded with dolls, male, female, old, young, gay and lesbian, of all sizes, colours, weights and ages, that cater for all tastes. The greatest industry in the world will be the doll-making industry in which lifelike dolls are made that can talk in chosen languages and make life tolerable by pandering to all desires. Life that involves love and sex will be problem free: no arguments about kids or money or kids and money, no visits to family courts to settle property issues, no need to ask a woman to consent to sex, no need to wait for her period to stop, no fear of any extramarital affairs, just sex, sex, and no end of sex. Imagine sleeping nightly among a group of dolls by any names, ranging from Candace to Polly to Rebekka. I can afford them, at least three if not more. I’ll get a Japanese doll, an African doll and a Moroccan doll, one that resembles that of Berlusconi’s. I shall never have to keep any demanding ones who keep asking for more, both silver (semen) and gold (money). This is better than death by blasting. In fact, one can write in one’s will that one should be buried with one’s multiple concubine-dolls. Or if not buried then cremated together. There will be an ultimate fulfilment of seven sentiments and eight desires. To the detriment of mankind, I hear you say but who gives a fuck?
6/9
The cold has set in, an intellectual chill, a sexual cold, that hit me hard, reminding me of Xianfeng Emperor and Tongzhi Emperor, his son, who succeeded to him at the age of five, both having had enough sexual indulgences and depravities to cost their own lives. Xianfeng, in the prime of his life, had four women, commonly referred to as ‘Four Springs’, respectively, Peony Spring, a courtesan, Chinese Flowering Crabapple Spring, an actress, Apricot Flower Spring, a maid, and Mandana Spring, a beautiful widow, but lost all of them when the English and French armies entered Peking and set fire to the Garden of Perfection and Light. By then, his health was in ruins, as hinted in a poem of the day that goes, ‘A beautiful girl of 16 has a body of such softness/it resembles a sword that kills a foolish man/reducing him to dry bone marrows/without his head seen rolling.’
More than Xianfeng, his father, Tongzhi went the rounds visiting brothels outside the palace and even played with xianggu (Like-girls), or male prostitutes, till he caught the disease. The last straw came when, overwhelmed with sexual desire, he did it with an imperial eunuch, thus plunging him to death faster than he had wanted.
It may be worth pointing out, to no one but myself, that in those days it was a common practice for high officials to keep not only concubines but also what is called nanqie or male concubines. Yang Xiuqing, command in chief of the Taiping Rebellion, for example, had three nanqie, Huang Qifang, Fang Shunzhi and Niu Rongchun, that were all slaughtered when he was assassinated. It would seem that those were morally relaxed and lax days in which anything could happen and did happen as long as one had power or money or both.
Nothing has really changed. Perhaps the only thing that has is the way of writing in those days. Whenever intimate details are about to emerge the author will say, ‘my pen won’t be able to give a thorough description’, or, ‘what happens next, I, a fiction writer, won’t mention as I’ll put my pen aside.’
Which leaves much room for imagination, to do him justice. If I had read that earlier I might have employed the same techniques by eschewing all the unholy details. It is now a bit too late. Man is a wilful being who will not be content with mere lovemaking but must insist on recording it in a number of ways through writing, recording, aural or visual or both, and photographs, and, then again, he is such a fearful being that he won’t show any of those to anyone till death knocks on his door when his life will be exposed and his life or the life he has lived will be forever linked to the scandal. He is much better off if he just enjoys it like the short-lived emperors with no audio-visual or photographic evidence except the elusive beings, such as words, with which generations to come will employ for the benefit of their imagination.
7/9
[Entry I forgot to make]
8/9
This is a make-up entry for last night or, to be more exact, a non-entry for nothing h
appened overnight in C, a small mountainous town that the agent took me to, one that is full of hot springs. According to him, there are only one or two that are genuine, out of a dozen touted as the ‘hottest springs’ where the water is heated tap water. He took me to the genuine one that consists of more than a dozen open pools, the largest being an auditorium pool where you swim or stand near a stage on which professionals sing or dance. We moved from one pool to another till we came to one that I liked best because it had schools of tiny little fish swimming around and as soon as you put your feet down in the water they come to you and caress them, sucking on your soles, making you feel as if you were being loved or made love to in a way that only fish were capable of. I thought of something and was going to tell him when I changed my mind.
‘Do you see any likelihood of this MS getting out of the country and published?’ said I.
‘Sure,’ said Z, the first letter of the agent’s name. ‘It’s going to make a great impact overseas once published because …’ He stopped in mid-air and, putting his mouth to my ear, said in a low voice. ‘Use your connections in Hong Kong. Once you get this going, I’ll pay you kang mi xing.’ He used a dated expression that no one in the pool could understand but I did. It’s an old transliteration of the English word, commission.
It was not till then that I told him what I had thought of in return for his offer. It is something I recalled that had happened a long time ago with Tiberius, the second emperor of Rome. This guy had a peculiar habit of training children of noble families in a way that enabled them to swim underneath him as he swam by, nibbling and sucking his dick. He went so far as to have his dick smeared with milk and honey for newborn babies to suck on as if it were a nipple, a dick-nipple.
At this, Z laughed uncontrollably but, for some reason, I detected something insincere because it sounded so hollow.
After we exhausted all the pools, the coldest and the hottest, it was past midnight. We went to our separate bedrooms without a fuck.
*******
As I went to work this morning in the crowded bus, I thought of my planned death. It wouldn’t do to commit suicide by blasting myself into pieces among the crowd because they are too innocent to warrant that, although the idea of setting the bomb off in the wilderness or in the depth of a mountain or on board a small boat adrift in the Yangtze while no one is watching is enticing. When I disintegrate in that instant of explosion, along with this diary and the collection of my photographs taken with all the women I have ever fucked, there will be nothing remaining after me except my fragments that will be flushed and rushed away by the rainstorm that comes after. Life will end as honestly as it begins, no need for a fake funeral and forced tears. And the earth will absorb all the nutrition from my fragments in a fragmentary and fragmentarily celebratory way. I prefer this to the one I have thought of before: a funeral in which all my dozens of women appear in their best mourning clothes weeping over my past pleasures and what-needs-to-be-worked-out future.
This thing, this diary, is so unliterary that I have no pretensions about getting it published; I abhor the very idea of getting it published, having seen so many vain attempts at publication of things not even worth mentioning. The very fact that I write in English may stop many from reading it as many do not have the language unless it finds its way into a guilao. Incidentally, talking about the ‘literary’, I find much written in the early 1920s, about 100 years ago, way more readable than anything I’ve read so far, either at home or abroad. The writer is humble enough to drop any pretensions and yet the story he tells is riveting, particularly the one involving Empress Dowager Ci Xi’s affairs with her many eunuchs and actors, in which she is often seen lying in bed, not with Emperor Xianfeng whose imperial concubine she is, but with An Dehai, a eunuch, seen even by the five-year-old Zaichun, her son with Xianfeng, the future Emperor Tongzhi. Zaichun is so upset with his mother that he leaves in a huff. The difficulty, the sadness or the beauty of it is that this text will defy the best attempts at translation, guaranteeing its enjoyment solely to the people born in the language.
9/9
One comment on an online documentary featuring the Chinese underworld of brothels goes, now from memory: It’s nothing out of the ordinary because it happens everywhere, all for the same reason: different feel, different squeal.
10/9
The story goes something like this. The man is a playboy who has inherited a large sum of money from his dead parents which could have lasted him years if he had not squandered it on beautiful women, good food, gambling and all sorts of expensive things like horses and carriages, until he became penniless. He goes around seeking help from his relatives but no one cares to give him a hand with his bad reputation behind his back. Just as he sits on a street corner going hungry with no prospect of a meal anytime soon, an old man appears and asks what is going on. He tells the old man his story. The old man says: How much do you need? He says: 100 bucks. The old man challenges him by saying: How much more? He says, emboldened by the question: Maybe 1000. The old man says: How much more? He increases it to 10,000 but the old man keeps challenging him until he ups the ante by raising it to one million while promising he will never squander it again.
As soon as he allays his hunger and has a good night’s sleep, the man forgets his misery. With the newly acquired fortune, he retraces his steps to the old track again, this time even more extravagantly by keeping a house of 20-odd concubines and having a large team of servants at his service until, in about two years, he comes to the end of the road with nothing in his pockets. The old man reappears and keeps challenging him until he walks off with two million dollars.
Again, this amount of money is soon gone. When they – the old man and the squanderer – meet for a third time, the squanderer is so ashamed that he refuses to look the old man in the eye. In the end, he takes a larger amount and goes away, never wasting his money again. Instead, he devotes himself to charity by helping the poor and the needy. Before he leaves, the old man asks him to visit him in the mountains one day.
So he does, visiting the old man in a temple where the old man turns out to be a monk, sitting at the altar, surrounded by nine fairies. To become a deity, the monk advises, he should keep silent, never uttering a single sound under any circumstances. As soon as he finishes speaking, the monk disappears. In his place is a huge vat filled with water.
Soon after, a group of soldiers turns up, led by a general who demands to know his name but he refuses to utter a word. Angered beyond his endurance, the general leaves with his soldiers. Next comes a swarm of snakes, tigers, poisonous dragons and lions that attack the man but he remains unafraid, not saying a word. Before long these also quit the scene.
A storm comes shortly after with such power and passion that it feels as if the mountain housing the temple is going to be split in half but the man remains absolutely unperturbed, without uttering a sound. When the storm dies down, the general reappears with his army and demands again to know the man’s name. Seeing that nothing could move the man to words, the general decides to torture the man’s wife by having her hauled to inches within the man’s reach and beaten up, but the man says not a word, not even when the general orders that they cut off her flesh piece by piece and not even when his wife entreats him to save her by saying something. Eventually, the general gives up and orders that the man be knifed to death.
After Du, the man’s name, goes to hell, he remains silent, to the great chagrin of the demons who turn him into a woman and send her back to the earth. Even as a woman, Du says nothing and so is called a mute. She grows up to be a great muted beauty, with whom many fall in love but one scholar has the fortune of taking her as his wife, excusing himself by saying that he prefers to have a good woman who says nothing over a long-tongued woman who scolds.
Not long after, they have a baby boy, intelligent beyond belief. The scholar shows Du their baby and tries many ways to get her to say something but she remains quiet until one day when, his patience wor
n threadbare, the scholar gets so enraged that he holds the baby upside down by grabbing hold of his feet and dashes his head against a rock. On impact, instantly, the baby’s head is smashed into pieces and the blood is spilled many feet far. It is not until then that Du, whose heart is filled with love, utters a sound of ‘yee’, opens her eyes and finds himself back in the temple, with the old man/monk by his side. It’s now near dawn.
The monk tells him that he has ultimately failed in his attempt to become a deity because he has not kept his promise not to utter a sound. Even though he has beaten all his other sentiments, such as fear, fury and disgust, he has not been able to overcome his love. He is thus sent back to the ugly, worldly and dusty human world, never to rise above it again.
I was devastated to hear this story on a street corner this morning, told by a blind street storyteller. When I asked if he could give me a date he said: Oh, this happened a long time ago, probably more than 1000 years ago.
11/9
Nothing more to say except that I have burnt all the photographs, deleted more from my computer and trashed the lot in the bin. If they dig the ashes they won’t recognize anything. It’s my 9.11, for sure, but if they turn up as they say they will, in the shuanggui notice they have issued me, telling me to pack up and go to live in a special place to wait for ‘further notice’, I shall be prepared, as naked as ever, my bank accounts remaining zero and all the flesh ever associated with me gone, including the text messages in my mobile phone. Hang on. I must also delete all the phone numbers, including my wife’s in Australia. When they ask, I shall have a naked memory as well, in which nothing is retained, as naked as 9.11.
