by Linda Jaivin
I join Richard in his office. I tell him I want to be spanked during the interview.
‘You serious?’ he laughs. He's delighted. ‘I love spanking. It's one of my favourite hobbies,’ he says.
I lie across his lap.
‘Mind if I…?’ he says, lifting my skirt.
‘No, go ahead.’
‘Have you been a good reporter is the first question.’ WHACK!
‘No, I deserve a spanking. But tell me how you got into this.’
‘When I was a young boy…’ SLAP! ‘…you know, all the neighbourhood girls would get this…’ WHACK! ‘…from their parents, you see, and that rather excited me at the time. I always thought it was quite erotic and that sort of led me…’ SMACK ‘…into the world of bondage as I got older and got sexually active with members of the opposite sex.’
‘So that progressed into whipping and all the rest?’
‘Yeah, I mean, I'm into flagellation very much.’
When I ask if he does men as well, Richard says he doesn't mind whipping men ‘quite hard’ though, he admits, ‘I get more of a sadistic pleasure rather than a sexual pleasure out of that.’
‘Do you like…’ WHACK! ‘…getting it as much as giving it?’
‘I like giving it.’ SLAP! ‘I'm more a “top”, a dominant.’ It's only because Richard runs the club that he gets up for a whipping to start things off ‘if it's a bit quiet’. Otherwise, he'll never take the submissive role. Chuckling, he describes himself as a ‘strict individual all round’.
Richard was born and raised in Melbourne. Today's his birthday. He's twenty-four.
On Sunday nights, Richard runs another Hellfire Club in Melbourne. He says he gets about 800 people a week in Melbourne; the Sydney club has been open a shorter time so the clientele is less well established. He started the club after a trip overseas where he visited Germany's Club Berlin, the Vault in New York and Club Fuck in LA, which he says is probably ‘the most similar thing to Hellfire in the world’. Traditional S&M clubs are more private affairs, and don't have a dance floor. Some may be more hardcore as well, although, he observes, ‘we've had a lot of full-on stuff occur in the Hellfire Club.’
‘Where were all these people going before this opened?’
‘God knows. Lots of people who've been coming here have told me they haven't been going to any other clubs. So it's…’ SMACK! ‘…pulled a lot of people back into the club world, which is good…It has to remain financially worth my while…’ SLAP! ‘…but I do it because I believe that a club like this should exist really to promote the lifestyle and, hopefully, to destigmatise it.’ WHACK! ‘It's like a gay club celebrates gay sexuality. This place celebrates S&M sexuality. Not everyone who comes here might be…’ SLAP! ‘…into it, and some might just try something out, and that's the whole idea.’
‘Is Masters a stage name?’
‘Hahaha. You never know.’ WHACK!
‘Does your grandmother know you're doing this?’
‘She does, actually.’ SMACK!
‘What does she think?’
‘I think they're unsure what to think, you know?’ SLAP! ‘They see I'm doing reasonably well out of it, so I guess they can't complain. They probably think I'm a bit of a pervert, but that's all right.’ WHACK!
‘This is an unusual interview,’ I remark.
‘It is indeed,’ Richard agrees. SLAP! ‘You've been a naughty reporter and I'm sure Rolling Stone will be glad to hear you're getting spanked. And you'll go straight to bed after this, without any supper.’
‘I've never done this before,’ I confess.
He seems surprised. ‘So you were never spanked as a little girl?’ WHACK!
Yes, I was. Funny how I never made the connection, which seems so natural to Richard.
Every so often, Richard stops his slapping to caress my backside. Whenever this happens, the contrast is so pleasurable that I go totally off the air and forget what I want to ask him next. (This admission invariably causes Richard to exclaim ‘Naughty reporter!’ and to start the spanking again.) I'm beginning to realise that this is one of the keys to S&M, the surprising eroticism of a gentle touch after the infliction of pain.
‘It is quite erotic,’ he agrees, ‘and that's the name of the game.’
I thank him for his time. He wraps up the session with a series of slaps and the promise ‘If you don't behave, there'll be a repeat.’
I find John and Russell. Russell has finally decided to stop being a slacker. He peels off his singlet and John helps me tie him up on the X-rack. I get a lash from the MC. John stands to the side, instructing. ‘More wrist,’ he says.
The security guard, Daniel, sidles up to Russell and comments, ‘She looks like she's really enjoying this.’
Russell asks for a finale of ‘ten hard ones’. Afterwards, Daniel approaches the three of us to proffer a small paper cup containing a dark liquid. Did we want to try something really special? Uh, maybe, maybe not.
‘What is it?’ I ask.
‘Tabasco sauce,’ replies Daniel. ‘You put it on your nipples.’
John solemnly lifts his cloak and offers me his. I dip a gloved finger into the tabasco and paint. It's like a tea party. Once we've all been served, Daniel launches into an enthusiastic exposition on even more esoteric uses for wintergreen and peppermint oil. The thing to do, according to Daniel, is to put red food colouring in the wintergreen and green in the peppermint. Then, he says, you paint the man's dick like a barber's pole. Not only is this extremely interesting for the man, Daniel assures us, but when you have sex, the woman feels it, like, ‘hot, cold, hot, cold’. Russell and I go off and grit our teeth for a while over the effects of the tabasco.
I leave around 4 a.m., though the action is still going strong. In my wallet is a little plastic card with a drawing of a woman tied up by another woman who's pinching her breasts. They look happy. The card says, ‘The Hellfire Club, membership number 1398.’
My Friend the Axe Murderer
I give you each a knife
—ye who have murdered me—
like the flower's hidden thorn
because I have loved
the fragrant time
the short man the small man the squads of troops parading
the dwarf's heart
because I work on the riverbank
the white poplars rustle all the way to the end
carve more decorative patterns, carve more decorative patterns
wait until
that murderer
love
brings colourful death 1
THERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH
There is a photograph. There are six people in the photograph. It was taken in 1985, in a hotel room in Beijing. Gu Cheng is the only person in the photo who isn't smiling or touching anyone else. Is that the sign of a psychopath? At the time, he seemed in his moodiness only like a poet.
He stands in the back, leaning in from the left. Perched on the edge of the bed, just in front, is the woman poet Shu Ting. I sit between Shu Ting and Yang Lian, another poet and my friend, the reason I am there. Hsu I-chi, the Chinese—American businessman and photographer who was staying at the hotel, kneels behind Yang Lian, hands on the poet's shoulders.
She was there too, of course. In the photo, Xie Ye's smile is the broadest of all. She sprawls comfortably behind Shu Ting on the bed, her face beaming out between Shu Ting's and mine, one hand on the other woman's shoulder. Looking at her, I feel a chill. I find it hard to imagine that face frozen in pain and terror. Who can imagine such a thing?
I don't remember who took the photo.
What I do remember is this: the first thing Gu Cheng ever said to me was, ‘Do you sometimes feel like the clouds and the trees have voices? Do they speak to you?’ I had met him for the first time that evening, over dinner. He suddenly turned to me, his eyes boring into mine with a peculiar, unblinking intensity, and asked me this question. He went on to describe his own conversations with nature. He struck me as sligh
tly mad and utterly charming.
He told me how he'd met Xie Ye on a train, and wooed her with poetry. He had gone to Shanghai, where she lived, to propose marriage. Her parents opposed it, believing him quite insane, and even delivered him to a mental hospital. He persisted in his courtship, however, and four years later, in 1983, they were wed. She heard him telling me their story and smiled at me over her chopsticks. I hung on his every word. Gu Cheng, although only twenty-nine, was already a legend in the Chinese literary world.
After dinner, we went to Hsu's hotel room to watch a videotape of 1984, which Hsu had brought from America. I did a running translation from English to Chinese. Someone took the photograph.
I only saw Gu Cheng and Xie Ye a few more times after that in Beijing. Not long afterwards, they were invited to travel abroad. It wasn't easy for them to get their passports. The Chinese Communist Party had never been comfortable with Gu Cheng's poetry. It was too ambiguous, too weird. The party liked the kind of clear, politically positive poems written by people like, well, Gu Cheng's father, Gu Gong, a revolutionary poet.
In 1987, the couple finally obtained their travel documents and left on a tour of Europe.
While passing through Hong Kong they met John Minford, then professor of Chinese at the University of Auckland. They asked him if he could invite them to New Zealand. They'd tried to go to Canada, where Xie Ye reportedly had relatives, but she was very pregnant, and the Canadians were strict about that sort of thing, so they hadn't been able to get a visa. John, who has a strong interest in poetry and is a brilliant translator, pulled the right strings and they ended up in Auckland in 1988.
She had her baby, and they named him Mu'er, ‘ear of wood’. John and his wife Rachel rushed her to hospital at 2 a.m., when Gu Cheng, in a panic, called their number instead of the doctor's. The Minfords gave Mu'er his English name of Samuel.
It was the second half of 1989 before I ran into Gu Cheng again. Geremie Barmé and I were in Auckland to discuss a book project with John. All I really remember about Gu Cheng from that visit is what an odd sight he presented, a slight figure in a grey Mao suit with a tubular hat like a section of pants leg perched on his head. I'm not sure when it was that he started making and wearing these peculiar hats, but there doesn't seem to be a photograph of him taken since that time in which he isn't wearing one. Even in a picture of him and Xie Ye eating a casual meal at someone's home he sports one of these head extensions. You almost expected to see a wisp of smoke emerge from the rim; they seemed like smokestacks for his overheated brain.
Gu Cheng talked about his chickens, I remember that as well. He and Xie Ye had borrowed money to purchase an old seaside cottage on an island called Waiheke, about a forty-five-minute hovercraft ride from Auckland. They thought they would make some money by raising chickens and selling eggs, but when the neighbours complained about the racket the birds made every morning they had to get rid of them. The poet and his chickens. It seemed very funny at the time.
Years passed. Gu Cheng published more poetry, as well as a collection of children's fables. His poetry was becoming weirder and weirder. Translators began to confess themselves defeated by it. John Minford describes his later poems as being ‘like scraps of dreams and childhood memories and nursery jingles. Whatever you say about anything else, what he did with the language was brilliant. He was a genius.’ He was wildly prolific, though he was just as inclined to carve a poem into a piece of wood as he was to get it published. He existed in a private world. He lived the dream of the hermit poet, a contemporary Han Shan.
In 1992, Gu Cheng was invited to Germany by a literary foundation which offered him a fellowship so that he could concentrate on his writing. He and Xie Ye left Mu'er with a Maori woman who had a daughter his age and was very fond of him. In Germany, he and Xie Ye worked on a novel together.
I didn't see them again. But his name would pop up from time to time in conversation with other Chinese poets or mutual acquaintances. Occasionally, I'd come across an article on or interview with him in the overseas Chinese press.
On 11 October 1993, I happened to be in Beijing. I went down to my hotel coffee shop for breakfast, picking up a copy of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post from the newspaper rack on my way to the table. It was dated 10 October. I was scanning the China news when a headline caught my eye. I can't recall exactly how it was worded, but it had something to do with a poet, an axe and a murder. As I'm the sort of person who never skips any story about a pet in a microwave oven or an unusual human death, I naturally turned immediately to this story.
The waitress came round to ask if I wanted more coffee, but stopped in mid-sentence when she saw the tears streaming down my cheeks.
THESE ARE THE FACTS
These are the facts: Gu Cheng was born in 1956 in Beijing. When he was ten, the Cultural Revolution erupted. He arrived at school one day to find that the windows had all been smashed by Red Guards. At thirteen, he went with his family to a village in Shandong province where his parents were to be ‘re-educated’ by peasants. At fourteen, in his words, ‘I walked out of the mud-walled, straw-thatched village, herding pigs in the wilderness. Great flocks of wild geese broke formation—and my life trembled a bit.’ He began to write poetry. In 1974 he returned to Beijing and joined a carpentry workshop. In the late seventies, he published some of his poems in the underground literary journal Today. He met Xie Ye and courted her with all his might.
Gu Cheng, Yang Lian, Shu Ting and other poets became the heroes of a generation of university students. Their poems were mainly circulated samizdat style as few officially run publications would touch them. Party ideologues reviled their work collectively as menglong shi—‘obscurist’ or ‘misty’ poetry—in campaigns like the one launched against ‘spiritual pollution’ in 1983. What the authorities couldn't stand was the fact that not only didn't their poetry serve either revolution or reform, but half the time you couldn't even work out what it was about.
Who'd have thought, you've got to think.
That's why you need imagination
To make poetry starve,
To turn it into a dog with a pointed nose, to sniff,
To turn magnified trouser legs
Into savoury tripe.2
Gu Cheng and Xie Ye travelled abroad, had a child, and found on Waiheke what Gu hoped would be their own Land of Peach Blossoms, the fantasy haven of the ancient Chinese poets. The cottage's electrical wiring was dodgy, and there was only a ‘longdrop’, an outdoor toilet. The roof leaked. But there was a telephone and running water. Gu Cheng adored it. Xie Ye, with the baby to think of, was slightly less entranced. Gu Cheng's dream was to live off the land, however, and Xie Ye had committed herself to his dreams.
John Minford remembers one incident from the early days when the couple was living Gu Cheng's dream of a rural idyll. Gu Cheng was building a wood-burning oven. He tried to connect some piping with clay, but it wouldn't bind properly. Then he remembered that in the Shandong village where he spent his youth, the peasants strengthened clay by adding women's hair. Cutting off a lock of Xie Ye's hair, he mixed it into the clay and made their stove.
Then came the fellowship in Germany. They left their rural paradise for another European sojourn and co-authored the novel Ying'er. Xie Ye penned another novel herself, called One Thousand Days on the Island. She confided to the sculptor Wang Keping, when they visited him in Paris, that she was confident ‘it will create even more of a sensation than Gu Cheng's poetry’.
In March 1993, they spent a week in Beijing, staying with his parents. His father Gu Gong remembered how during that time they ‘were getting along very well’, though they did have one argument. ‘Gu Cheng,’ wrote his father, ‘was determined to return to Beijing; Xie Ye, on the other hand, wanted to settle in Germany.’ Yet in letters and essays written then, Gu Cheng continued to paint an ideal picture of their life on Waiheke.
They spent some time travelling, in Europe and America, and then flew back to New Zealand on 24 Septe
mber, Gu Cheng's thirty-seventh birthday. They had a row. Xie Ye left home; Gu Cheng chased after her and persuaded her to return.
Soon afterwards, he wrote a letter to his parents. It mentioned nothing of their quarrel. It was full of good news—their novel, Ying'er, was to be broadcast in German and translated into English; he was confident they'd be making some good money from it. Their son Mu'er was as adorable as ever and twice as lively, and Gu Cheng looked forward to the day when he could take the boy to China to see his grandparents. The peach tree he and Xie Ye had planted just before leaving New Zealand was in bloom.
‘I'm not by nature a very happy person,’ Gu Cheng said in his letter, ‘but I now feel completely at peace.’ He enclosed a sketch of Mu'er with his little Maori girlfriend.
The letter arrived in Beijing on 7 October.
Gu Cheng wrote another letter, around the same time, to a friend. In it, he listed his, Xie Ye's and Mu'er's birthdays, Mu'er's blood type and other personal details. His friend found this peculiar. It gave him an ominous feeling.
On 8 October, Gu Cheng and Xie Ye had another fierce argument and Xie Ye left home again. Gu Cheng chased after her once more. At some point, on one of the island's lonely paths, he picked up an axe. She must have been running from him because, when he drove it into her skull, he struck from behind. When she fell, he continued to attack her prone figure. She did not die immediately. She was still convulsing in pain, blood streaming from her wounds, when he left her to walk towards their cottage. There, he hanged himself from a tree.
LOVE
‘I've always thought them very happy, extremely happy, in the ten years they were married,’ Gu Gong later told a reporter. ‘Xie Ye would say, the two of us are one person, and Gu Cheng would say, the two of us are one person.’ Acquaintances like the sculptor Wang Keping, with whom the pair stayed in Paris earlier in the year, also confessed complete bewilderment at the news—they'd seemed such a perfect couple.
