Diary of a Naked Official (4 page)

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.

14/6

The Chinese saying,
qiong ze du shan qi shen, fu ze jian ji tian xia
, that when you are poor you improve your body by yourself and when you are rich you help relieve the world, is interesting in the contemporary context because of its added sexual connotation.
Ji
is understood to mean ‘to tide over', ‘to cross' and ‘to help', but because of its water-related image it could also be interpreted thus: a man, or rather a member, in a powerful position, is able to relieve the female world by showering them with gold.

Got rid of Nabokov's
Pale Fire
, a real boring book that I have stopped bothering about by p. 83. The only thing memorable is perhaps these two lines that go, ‘Lovemaking is not everything. Good looks/Are not
that
indispensable!'

Humph, makes sense, in a curious sort of way, my way.

Talking about that, something that was exchanged between us at lunch today comes back to haunt me. I said, Love is suspect. P said, But it doesn't exist in the
first place. S said, Yes, it does, but all it wants is money and never tires of wanting more.

No books about love are as honest as our conversation about love or lack of it.

15/6

Michel Houellebecq seems more contemporary than the rest in that he tends to be controversial. These two words sharing the head letter ‘C' must co-exist. Everything else is designed and calculated for a catch, a C that conflicts with the other two Cs. Have made a recommendation to B despite my reservations about him, a man, not unlike me, very much into the beauty, or the ugly beauty, of things, or, to be more exact, of the faces.

Speaking of the faces, I must say I like the new girl's teeth when they are revealed in a big smile, so neat, so white and so enticing. Words are trite. Have got to see them daily to make me feel that liking is probably better than loving and sexing although it dangerously tends to be the first step on the downward thrust into the abysmal and inevitable depths of sex that returns with a feeling of hollowness.

W was a little like that when we first met, God, how many years ago was that? I tremble at the thought of
having an affair with such a fresh flower, picked only to wither, like all other flowers, bought to be gazed at and ravished. Not really worth it, and yet, the only way. Why waste the resources if they are available?

Sam's story again. Nothing impossible, he began. Zhu, my billionaire friend, set his sights on this lovely girl working in a five-star hotel he happened to check in to one day. Once he deemed her the most beautiful girl and the freshest he had ever seen he would not budge from that position. What's more, he wanted to make it with her but met with a flat rebuttal. What has a 20-year-old got to do with a half-century man? She's not a common girl selling her organ for a fee, night after night. Zhu got his friend to approach her, with a case of cash: 5,000 bucks. The girl said no. Zhu got his friend to go back to her again, this time with 50,000! The girl wavered a bit but held her ground, with another resolute ‘no' but not as resounding. Zhu laughed and said to his man: Go with more. I have yet to see a woman purer than money. When the sun of 500,000 was presented, the girl melted like ice before the sum (I think the sum should swap places with the sun but I'll fix it later as this is not for any prying eye anyway), finally brought to her knees, her purity reduced to a palatable piece of meat.

That's life as it is being lived now. And good for the girl, too, whose instrument will go rusty if not practised
in time for the maximum profit, like a flower which will die on its own if not picked, purchased and pushed, not to say perfected.

M offered a sum in the hundreds of thousands USD for a crucial piece of info but I'll have to give it careful thought. Besides, he promised to take me out tomorrow for a double fly, having a twosome. Got to be extra-careful as someone has revealed in his blog about a case of corruption involving a publisher in a northern city stealing millions of RMB by transferring the proceeds from the sales into his own account.

16/6

In this ka la ok bar, called something like Drifting, Driven, Dropped, that M took me to, we were led into a darkened cave of a song room, complete with the wall-screen, the electronic ka la ok selector, a glass tabletop of food and beer, and more girls than we could settle for, whose faces I could hardly distinguish one from another. In this postmodern cliché of a formidable collective foreplay, vision gave place to senses, predominately the olfactory, as one smelled the pungent body odours of the thinly clad girls, two of whom had sandwiched me
before I knew it. Here, things became sharp-pointed: the sharp-pointedness of their tits, of their finger-nails, of my fingertips touching their tits, of their pointed shoes, of their heels, erect as thin and hard penises, and even of their gelled spiky hair. And, of course, of my own non-Party member, straight as a sword.

One girl had a self-styled name, Po Sen, and the other one, Kristy. Because of the loud music, I thought I heard Poison and Creepy. Thereafter, I just called them that and they giggled ceaselessly.

I started with a song, called, ‘A Man Has Three Flowers a Life', with these words:

They say a man has three flowers a life

A narcissus and a rose

But I wish to be the most beautiful carnation

To give you warmth and to nurse your wound

Poison and Creepy, one in my right arm and the other in my left, swayed from side to side with the rhythm of the song, amazed how well I sang. I was feeling pleased with my own vulgarity, paying to be reduced to the same level as P and C. Thrilling, too, was their age: P was 18 and C, 19!

Later on, the two girls tortured me with pleasure until I fell into exhaustion. All I can remember now is
before I shot into C I pulled out in time and was about to enter P when she stopped me to get me to replace the condom with a new one. I came inside P while letting C smear my face with her black lipstick until her lips were returned to their original normal colour.

The girls, as I understand it, were first-year university students. In Creepy's absence – she went to the loo to perhaps re-make-up – Poison told me that she hardly went to classes these days; she could easily get a dozen of boy students infatuated with her to do her homework. She did not have to buy her breakfast as it was ready for her before she was even out of bed! As for her male teachers, she could easily victimize – that's the word she used – them with her looks; they'd do anything for her. From that point of view, I should consider myself a lucky guy. But I thought of her with regret: a youth trashed for the mere money.

17/6

I paid a visit to my sick father. He's suffering from prostate cancer. Doesn't seem to have long to live. As soon as he saw me come into the ward, he said: Stop wrecking your health! You look like a ghost of your former self.

I recalled once asking him if he had had affairs in the past. He laughed but did not say anything. He did say that our grandfather had two concubines, the ones he called ‘aunties', apart from my grandmother. That created in me an instant wish for a return to the old days but the wish died as instantly when, according to Father, a man must be responsible for all the wives he had, ensuring financial security for each and every one of them. That seemed a burden, I thought to myself. It is easier to love and leave, loving transiently and leaving permanently, in a way that makes every woman a new woman regardless of how many men they have previously gone through or the other way round, been gone through.

I am not sure about
The Savage Detectives
. I've managed to only get to p. 180, over a number of years. I won't make the recommendation to B. There is some pretty savage sex in that book but in this society sex is what one practises but does not read about; one doesn't need to read about it, having been surfeited.

Over dinner, I noticed that D – our daughter – had her fingernails painted black. It was startling to see the glaring allure symbolized therein. I taunted her with it, so she put down her chopsticks and refused to eat. It took W a long time to bring her around. Then it was her turn to taunt me with being unfair to D: Can't you be considerate enough not to hurt a 16-year-old's feelings?

Had a quickie with W before I rose to put this down, just to say how pleasureless it was to come back to her after all those nights. Still, I managed to come although she bitterly complained that I was so perfunctory and that whatever came out did not amount to much: a few drops, in her brutal expression. And then, too, she wondered if I was having affairs outside home. I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, a book, titled,
Multiple Sex Partners
. Ah, well, I thought to myself, and said, Do you?

The message was instantly put across and understood that in this day and age a couple should be content with their own separate sex lives as long as neither sees the other engaged in it with someone else, as exactly described in the book.

We didn't argue, there being no need for it. Instead, I told her how an old friend of mine managed to have sex with many women while maintaining a solid companionship with his wife and that his wife, keen to keep the relationship going, didn't particularly want to know.

She must have some sort of sexual problems then, she said.

I have no idea what the matter is, I said. But no one's life is anyone else's measurement nor should it be.

18/6

I find it hard to romanticize the women I met. Sex is one thing but money is quite another. Banksia, for example, never ceases to ask for more, in a way that synchronizes with mine, she for more money and I for more sex. But her reason, though honest, sounds awful: I need money. I am not a bank even though her name is Banksia. I suggest that she change the name to simply Sia, which she happily accepted as long as I paid her as much as she wants and more than she should get. Her cunt was the prettiest thing I've ever seen, resembling the freshest salmon meat when sliced open, the hair around it even and young, like a cluster of dewy grass in the morning sun. Although she never asks why I want so much sex, I can tell her if she does: I don't know, I honestly don't know. I just want it out, for some reason. It's as natural as the sky that wants to rain after a period of drought or that sometimes just wants to keep raining, for no reason at all.

I was amused by the thought that came to me while I was sitting on the bowl this morning, of an old expression that goes, ‘one's body is one's revolutionary capital', which can aptly be revised and updated as ‘one's body is one's sexual revolutionary capital'.

19/6

Had a dinner with the five women, all divorcees, all wanting to get their books published, and all introduced by Sam. They were so made-up that I was scared that their lipstick might smear their chopsticks that picked the duck or pork or chicken as they insisted that I eat them. I ignored their advances, finding them slightly unpleasant and less than stimulating, and concentrated on the drinks. By the end of the dinner, I forgot their names. All I can remember now is they squeezed me between themselves and caressed my hand like a baby while bursting into laughter. We didn't touch lips or faces, these women in their mid-30s or early 40s were decent enough to refrain themselves from that. We sang songs and drank more beer. I let them take photographs of me with them, in a half-tipsy way, and heard them giggling without knowing why. It was not till much later when I got a number of photos from them that I understood. In one photo, they described me as a ‘Bonbon Baby'. In another, I am standing next to a woman with curly hair that looks like a poodle's, with a caption below that goes: Con him, crush him and conquer him! I threw it down and shredded it, saying to myself: That is absolutely ridiculous.

Divorced, they seem full of
zheng nengliang
, or positive energy, or love, in this instance, more love, in
fact, as the title of a poetry book,
My Love Lies Elsewhere
, suggests, written by the longest-faced woman with a lot of gums exposed when she grins. I don't know if she is aware of the twist of meanings in that title but I saw fit not to reveal it to her. Judging from the photos that feature them, in which their faces shine with decorative oil, I congratulated myself that I had not touched them in the ka la ok bar or else my face would have been turned into an oily canvas itself.

I remember the girl in the past that is W now. As far as I know, she never applied any cosmetic stuff to her own person in those days and yet her lips were redder and her face was tenderer and creamier than an 18-year-old now. 20 years ago you could drink from a creek where I came from without getting poisoned but now every creek and every river is polluted, not only with chemicals and medicals but also with human wastes. I suspect that even the bottled mineral water is poisonous, not to say the air we are breathing in on a daily basis.

Speaking of that, I am once again reminded of the need, now urgent, to send W and D to Australia, a country where, I heard, the poor are fat and the rich are thin, and shops are not open on Sundays, much better than China where people go out and eat past midnight. Mere pigs.

20/6

Some short poems in that submission, almost axiomatic, are publishable, such as this: ‘One talks about sustainability in everything except that of love'. I record this knowing that love is the least sustainable with people, with women. Goldenrod - I told her it's not a right name, not even a good name, but she insisted on it - my previous lover, left me when she got pregnant. I told her to abort it but she refused. I asked how much she wanted, she named a figure and I agreed. As long as the baby was gone, I wouldn't mind. Instead, she kept the money and the baby but chose to disappear, without a trace. I have no idea where she is now. Not a single smn or call. When I fished out her letter, one in which she confessed her love for me, I started wondering. Is ‘I love you' such a facile thing to say these days, to whoever one is caught in love or making love with in the thick of it? I must have been a fool to believe in the sincerity of it, to believe that one day we might be living together, in another new life.