The Pat Wong Diaries

Chun's bold move opened our eyes to a sad reality: we, the daughters of the Cultural Revolution, were absurdly ignorant about sex. It is important to remember that this was not always the case with the generations that came before us. To illustrate this, I share with you two stories.

The first one was the story that Li liked to tell us – and we always laughed a lot whenever she told us, some of us so hard that we farted, which made us laugh even harder and louder – about what used to take place in the back room of the restaurant her family owned in Changsha back in the early 1930s.

It was a large room where old females in their sixties and seventies and even eighties spent all day sitting on low stools and squatting, peeling and cleaning vegetables for the kitchen and farting comfortably as they engaged in long, meandering conversations. These females had near them a pile of cucumbers of all sizes and each one of them had one such cucumber comfortably inserted and resting inside their old vaginas, with only the tip of the cucumber peering out. A bucket of water also nearby, within reach, and once in a while the females would take out their cucumber (this invariably resulted in the sound of vaginal flatulence), plunge it into the bucket, wash it, and then insert it back, always exclaiming with satisfying and even laughing as they did this.

Nearby, sitting on a chair was a large man who was fully dressed except for trousers and underpants. He invariably smoked a large cigar, a cup of Jasmine tea by his side and read a newspaper. The man, whose penis was visible, always had an erection, and his balls were shaven clean. He was called The Cocker and his job was to ensure that the females were able to do their job without interference from “the visitors” (about who more shortly).

The backdoor to this room opened to a back alley and often the door was slightly ajar to let in some air when the room became too stuffy. (And since cabbage was a staple in the diet of the old females, the smell in the room was heavy with the odor of the anus.)

Li told us about how the room had also served as a place where males of all ages (“the visitors”) could come in from the back alley, hand over 10 Yuan to the Cocker, pull their pants down and start masturbating in front of the elderly females. They all wore a serious expression on their face and repeated the phrase, “I am lustful, but I extend my deep respect!” all along slapping their cocks, as if to keep them in check, and fondling and jerkily stretching their balls. This phrase that they repeated was a requirement and those who did not repeat it or repeated it softly were sternly chastised with an acid sneer by the Cocker (this immediately resulted in the delinquent masturbators to begin chanting or to chant louder).

The masturbating males, according to the story, used their own saliva so that in addition to the slippery sound of their hands slapping and manipulating their penises, there was also the sound of them spitting in the palm of their hands. And taking their cue from the females, who farted on a regular basis, they also all farted, feeling comfortable and relaxed in their actions.

The females, who went about their business as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening would once in a while languidly pull out their respective saggy, low hanging breasts, one breast at a time, and start bouncing them left and right as they peeled their vegetables, occasionally settling on a male in their sight and fixing their stare at the male and his cock, all of them together falling silent. After a few seconds of such tense silence, they would then start making loud comments, speaking to one another in raspy but strong old voices, talking about the man in front of them loud enough for him to hear everything. They used extremely foul language while talking about his demeanor, how his penis was thick or thin, long or short, how his balls were round or dangling, shaved or unshaved, always giving an honest and accurate description of what they were seeing without ever addressing him directly. Then, at one point, one of the females would get up and start clucking loudly like a chicken, flapping her arms and raising her skirt above her ass, her old breasts stretching and droopy and her old ass exposed fully, bent and facing the masturbator.

Then, she would stop, part her legs, look down at her pussy, her arms pushing against her ass, and start tightening the muscles of her stomach. A few seconds later, the cucumber would slip out and tumble on the floor, at times shattering, followed by a white, glistening ping pong ball. The ball would bounce on the floor for a few seconds, and then a second ball would come out shortly afterwards. The males invariably groaned and grunted, some of them barking, others yelping, following the ping pong balls with their eyes, many of them trotting to keep the balls within sight, and would begin to masturbate even more intensely at the sight and sound of the bouncing ping pong balls. (Some of them would even stop masturbating and would start slapping their buttocks and sneezing uncontrollably.)

The old females knew what they were doing; they knew what buttons to push. And within a few minutes, the males would begin to ejaculate, some of them cursing with lust, and ejaculate loudly, depositing their thick liquid on the old newspaper sheets that had been stretched under their feet, some leaving small drops of semen, others a sizable puddle. (The Cocker, whenever someone was ejaculating, would pull his newspaper down, stare at the ejcaulator’s penis as it ejected its liquid, shaking his head, as if in disapproval, and then, grunting, he would go back to reading his paper and puffing his cigar.)

Then there was the story that Li told us about a friend of her Great Aunt who had become famous in her village as the healer of marital strife. Her therapy was simple: the unhappy or frustrated husbands would visit her and spend the night with her, and would engage her in continuous, vigorous coitus with the strict requirement to ejaculate at least three times during the night. The therapy was prescribed by a committee of village elders commissioned to ensure martial stability in the village.

In certain situations, when the tension between a husband and his wife seemed to be linked to no specific, identifiable cause, and when such tension lingered stubbornly and led to chronic clashes, the elders would prescribe a night with Mrs. Zhin. The wives were fully apprised of the recommendations, which they always accepted without second thought. And remarkably, that simple prescription almost always brought harmony to the troubled households. She started her healing practice when she was in her mid thirties and retired when she was in her early seventies. She raised a healthy family of two boys and one girl and maintained a happy marriage throughout. She practiced her craft openly and no one bothered her. In fact, she was held in high honor and was always spoken of in reverential terms. When she passed away, shortly before the advent of the Cultural Revolution, hundreds of people, females and males, attended her funeral to pay their last respects.

I loved these stories. They comforted me and made me feel proud to be Chinese, instead of ashamed and confused.