Hong Kong 1959, February 5th, Thursday, Lesson One

Chinese Lessons, 5th floor, followed by a phone number, read a plumply calligraphed sign alongside the doorway of a ten-story building on Lockhart Road, five or six blocks from the waterfront seaman’s bars in Wan Chai, about a mile and a half walk away from Golden Court. It caught his eye when he was taking the long way back to Frank’s apartment from Suzie Two’s place in the early dawn on the last Saturday in January. Later that morning he called the five-digit phone number and arranged to meet the teacher at three. The doorman seemed to have been informed about his visit and let him into the building without a word. He walked up the stairs to the fifth floor and was greeted at the landing by an attractive Chinese woman, apparently unmarried, a propitious sign to the sexually addicted youth.

She offered him low tea at a small round table covered in a spotless white linen tablecloth, with a folded napkin aside each plate, a small white teapot, a small crystal bowl of sugar cubes, and a triple layer stand of cakes and cookies on white, bone china. As comforting and lovely as the tea setting was, the thin white curtains wafting in the breeze across the table from him, gently revealing glimpses of Causeway Bay in the distance, evoked the view that he must stay here, in this gossamer embrace of subdued femininity, for weeks, if not forever. She had uttered no more than a few words of polite formality before he knew without a doubt that he would do whatever it took to study Chinese under this woman.

So it was that Miss June Wong would become his first formal Chinese language teacher and a harbinger of things to come, i.e., intellectual stimulation combined with erotic curiosity and lust. Initially, they scheduled one lesson a week at her apartment. It turned out she was thirty-two, exactly twice his age and he got the feeling that someone else may have been living there, but he or she was never present when he took his two-hour lesson.

On their first lesson, three days later on Thursday the fifth, releasing his inner cad, emboldened by a mental disturbance due to frequent contact with bargirls and whores, unbalanced by any social contact with virgins and wives, he tried to unfasten her mian’ao1. She moved his hand aside but didn’t get angry. Instead, she got up and fixed low tea again— it was the 1959 British colony of Hong Kong after all, and 4 PM was tea time— simpler than at their first meeting, but even more pleasant because of the concomitant visions of intimacies to come that danced in his testosterone addled adolescent head.

She then opened their text and, glancing at the short vocabulary list, began to tell him about the second syllable in the word hongse for “red.” “Se,”2 she said, “can mean color, form, or sex.” With this sleight of hand, Teacher Wong expediently converted, at least temporarily, the object of his prurient interest from her breasts to the point of her soft and silky smooth writing brush with which she gracefully guided the black ink onto the coarse but pliant paper, replicating a new instance of the graphic form of the word se and thereby guaranteeing that he would never miss a lesson with Teacher Wong.

Hong Kong 1959, February 6th, Friday, Lesson Two

In a change in the schedule that they had agreed on at the end of the first lesson, the second lesson occurred the next day instead of Thursday the following week—something to do with the impact of Chinese New Year on her schedule. Because of the weather or not, at the next lesson, he noticed that Teacher Wong had allowed the top two buttons of her mian’ao to remain unfastened, and that the blouse beneath it, too, was open at the neck. The glimpse of a tiny patch of soft, vulnerable skin at the top of her breastbone confirmed for him, from his head to his toes, on the emotional level at least, that this was the beginning of a wonderful trip, much longer than this one.

“In your last lesson, Master White, we discussed the word se. I wonder if you would prefer to continue in that direction or not? Or, would you rather return to the lesson in the book?”

He felt the saliva build in his mouth until he had to turn his head and gulp. “Continue,” he said, nodding his head. “Please continue in that direction.”

“Have you practiced writing the word?” “Yes, I have.” “Please show me.” She dribbled a little water onto the inkstone, then picked up a stick of ink and ground it slowly in a circular motion against the wet surface. The liquid ink flowed gently down into the shallow well at the end of the stone. Setting the ink-stick aside, she picked up the writing brush and stroked and rolled the lower third of the hair of the brush in and out of the well, until she was satisfied that the brush had absorbed the proper amount of ink. Then she handed him the brush and called his attention to the coarse blank newsprint that she had laid out on the table.

“I didn’t practice with a brush,” he said. “Just a pencil.” She seemed to halt for second, straighten her back, and in a stricter voice than before said, “That is no good, Master White. You must use a brush.” But seeing the momentary look of concern on his face, her slight frown fell into a soft smile and in the same sweet tone as before she said, “I’ll guide you.” She came around behind him and, leaning over his right shoulder, the touch of her breasts barely perceptible under the lightly padded mian’ao, aligned his fingers correctly around the bamboo stem of the brush. She adjusted the angle and commanded him to write. “Write one se in each of the large squares I have folded into the paper.” He could feel her breath lightly on his neck as he attempted unsuccessfully to write the character.

“I will guide you,” she said. She laid her hand over his and directed it in a smooth, waltz-like motion, producing the correct form of the character in one square after another. When she lifted her hand from his, he was able to continue this motion, and managed to make a few recognizable copies of the character se, for color, form, and sex.

“Now put more ink on the brush and continue,” she said. “Not too much or too little, not too wet or too dry. You will be able to feel it.” She returned to her seat across the table from him. “You must be deliberate, very deliberate. Especially at the end of each stroke. There are different ways to end your stroke. You may pause, producing slight bulge, or make short hook, or medium hook, or long hook, or maybe tail, straight down. I will show you, one by one. Now, here is your first full line of Chinese. I have picked it carefully because it has multiple meanings and yet it is easy to write. Start with the first and second character, the character ri, for ‘sun’ or ‘day.’ The first two characters and the last one in the line are the same. When you are able to write ri, you are able to write three of the five words in this sentence. Because of my excellent choice,” she smiled. “Please observe.”

At the end of the second lesson, they changed the schedule again. She agreed to give him lessons four times a week, Monday through Thursday, starting right after the Chinese New Year holiday which ran for sixteen days. The next day would be New Year’s Eve and sixteen days later would be Tuesday. “But,” she said, “we will have your third lesson on the day before, on Monday, February 23. I will sacrifice the last day of the New Year Holiday for you, Master White. Are you not pleased?”

“I am,” he said, then quickly swallowed his saliva again. “But ... studying throughout the holiday would be better, Teacher Wong.” With you, he added in his mind.

She smiled and said, “You are right. I expect that, Master White. Use a brush, not a pencil or pen. You will learn how to write with a pen later. Practice every day as long as you can. When we meet again on the twenty-third, I expect you to know how to hold a brush and apply ink. We cannot continue if you do not learn how to use a brush. And to be able to write that five-character line from a Chan master,3 and the word se nicely. Do you understand?”

“I do,” he said.

He did not waste the chance to practice using the brush. Nor to wonder how it was that Teacher Wong spoke English so well and to imagine various underlying scenarios. Nor to remove the mian’ao and the blouse and bra beneath, from her upper body, in his mind. Nor to recall the barely perceptible, muffled, touch of her left breast on his back.

He enlisted Ely’s help in getting two brushes, an inkstone, a medium size stick of ink and permission to appropriate the daily newspaper to write on. He practiced several times every day throughout the long holiday season. His conversation classes were already on hold until after New Year. New Method English College, too, had recessed for the holidays. His uneasiness when first writing the character se under Ely’s eyes quickly dispersed when she prefixed the character hong to it, to make the ordinary disyllabic word for the color ‘red’. The idea that his teacher would introduce a word for ‘sex’ was so incongruent that it didn’t occur to Ely. She added the words for white and for black, thinking they were starting by learning the colors.

He went to Suzie Two’s place once. But she was not there and a brief visit to the Arizona confirmed that she was taking a break and would not be back until after the New Year.

He was obsessed by thoughts of Teacher Wong and impatiently awaited his lesson on Monday, the 23rd. The mian’ao was carefully removed, and what lay within gradually exposed, in both fantasies and dreams. He wrote to his parents and asked if they could increase the amount they were paying to Frank to $16 a week to pay for Chinese lessons, a doubling of his allowance. Also, he would see if he could launch a second English conversation class, continuing to keep secret from them that it, like the current class, would be strictly for bargirls and whores. In the meantime, he would dip into the money he was supposed to use on his trip home, three months away, to pay the additional tuition that four days a week entailed, to Teacher Wong.

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It had been five months since he had walked down the gang plank of the M.V. Hai Min and stepped onto the dock in Kaohsiung port and Ely had taken him by train to his uncle’s house in Taipei. And about three months since he’d paid to relinquish his virginity to Sue in a whorehouse near Yanping North Road. He had carved out for himself a modus operandi that Ely, and probably Uncle Frank— it was hard to tell because although he came home more often than in Taipei, Frank was still absent most of the time— had begun to dismiss as merely indicative of the natural born degenerate he was and probably always would be. And when he was home, Frank seemed uninterested in playing the role of a surrogate father, preferring to tell stories about mainland China during the war, still only ten years past, or help him understand a new Chinese phrase he was practicing. He would refrain from going out at night when Frank was there, but otherwise his nocturnal comings and goings continued, and for the most part Ely and the maids turned a blind eye to them.

In contrast to Taipei, the maids in Hong Kong offered little to arouse his prurient interest. The three of them slept on mats in one room, the old prunes flanking the young wet nurse. It was a modern, well-lit apartment, quite unlike the Japanese style house in Taipei where the younger amah was his age, her sister only three years older, where shadows and nooks, the semi-exposed bathing area, a tatami covered floor that could instantaneously become a bed, a sliding shoji screen suddenly a door and easy access to a dilapidated garden with trees and bushes and three gates to the outside world inflamed curiosity and stoked excitement. He loved the old Japanese house and he was suspicious of the apartment precisely because it was new and lacked gravitas and a soul.

However, his life was not entirely laissez-faire. Part of the deal with his parents was school. It was expected that he would not have to repeat his junior year of high school when he got back. It was assumed sufficient credits could be transferred to allow him to rejoin his old class and graduate normally at the end of his senior year in 1960. Unfortunately, however, thanks to the bargain he’d made to trade class time with for time with prostitutes and snooker-playing pimps, he would be deficient in American History, Social Studies, and Advanced Algebra. His mother, the English teacher, made a deal whereby he could take three correspondence courses over the summer and if he passed with a ‘B’ or better, the school authorities would let him back into his old class in the fall. And the best part was that he could substitute French for the Social Studies requirement. These correspondence courses plus Mr. Bean’s course in Chinese History at Taipei American School would, in terms of learning, prove to be the most productive of his entire high school experience. The year that he rarely went to school was the year that, academically, he learned the most. The lack of both an in-person teacher and the distraction of other students simply made it easier to concentrate. What would prove to be problematic was not what he didn’t learn while away from home, but what he did.

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Initially, in Hong Kong, he was supposed to go to King George V in Ho Man Tin on the Kowloon side, and Ely took him there for a visit. He did not like the place from the start and fought against it. He’d have to wear a jacket and tie to school, and brown and only brown shoes, and there were a bunch of other rules. It was not his kind of place. Nevertheless, he would have gone there if it weren’t for the commute, which was too long, including crossing Kowloon Bay by ferry twice a day. With his strong opposition, and the saving grace of the long commute, King George V was abandoned in favor of New Method English College, three stories high, less than a mile from Golden Court, [[[NMC, est. 1951, short name: xinfa shuyuan 新法書院]]] ]]] a little English school for South Asian foreigners downtown on the Hong Kong side. It was a short tram ride from where he lived. English was a second or third language for most of the kids so he was placed in sixth form English, but his weak American public school math background relegated him to third form maths. Only in physics was he given a level commensurate with his junior status in high school at home.

In English class he read poetry from a book called A Pageant of English Verse. The most memorable class was the day the turbaned Indian instructor spent the entire hour drawing and describing in loving detail the poppy flower, including its narcotic virtues, as well as the processes employed by evil men to extract them, in loose conjunction with Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. They read Sir Philip Sydney’s My True Love Hath my Heart, George Peele’s A Farewell to Arms, Robert Herrick’s The Argument of His Book, John Milton’s Il Penseroso, Andrew Marvell’s Bermudas (which was really just an excuse to secretly read the adjacent To His Coy Mistress), Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess (That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall / Looking as if she were alive) and, last and least favorite, Francis Thompson’s The Kingdom of God.

At New Method English College, he met a sixteen year old Filipino girl named Maria Montesana. She and her Pakistani girlfriend, Hafiza, would accompany him on little trips, not quite dates. One day they skipped a couple of classes—the school was not too strict about this, because they had to keep the students happy to maintain their precarious source of income—and walked up the hills to Tiger Balm Gardens. Amid exemplary scenes of torture in Buddhist hells, carved into the rocks, and shown in little statues in caves, he flirted with Maria. He kissed her for the first time near a scene of lust-crazed sexual transgressors being burned alive, over and over again, on a red hot bed of iron. Later, he tried to follow up this promising overture with an early evening visit to the apartment where Maria lived. But a couple of brothers, one older and one younger than he was, made it clear that he was not welcome at that time of day, or anytime. This would not be the last failure to make friends with a nice girl in East Asia.

Buoying sexual confidence coupled in an unholy alliance with incessant desire propelled him to constantly hunt the OS. Usually, he embraced his destiny as a teenage whoremonger and profligate without hesitation or deviance. “I shall concentrate on pussy to the exclusion of all,” he’d say. But something, from a previous life perhaps, kept gnawing at his brain—a moral qualm, a quest for truth?

Shortly, under Teacher Wong, he would start to learn how stupid he was, especially when it came to sex. Although counterintuitive, a cheap Taipei whorehouse was a poor environment in which to learn the lay of a woman’s genital landscape. Very little of what he had learned in the last four months of whoring was about sex. It was an adventure in discovering and investigating the cheaper part of the world of prostitution in a relatively large East Asian city in the late fifties at a time when he was young and good looking and extreme poverty was widespread. In fact, it would have been detrimental if it had continued for years and decades instead of for five months. That he stayed with a prostitute-centered approach to sex with the OS for only five months was entirely due to Teacher Wong, the luckiest thing that happened to him on his adventure—during that year away from home and, it could be argued, throughout his life.

His year in Taipei and Hong Kong were not only his first experience with sexual intercourse but also a country boy’s first experience with city life in any form. Back home, he lived fourteen miles from town on a thousand-acre ranch, considered tiny in those days by the cowboys in the rest of Montana. There were four people in his family then. If the population density were the same on the 6700 acres under Taipei City in 1958, there would have been less than thirty other people living in Taipei. Conversely, if the ranch had the same population density as Taipei, he would have been sharing it with twelve thousand people besides his dad, mom, and brother. With no preparation except a willingness to look and learn, suddenly, there he was, in Taipei, cheek to jowl with more than eight hundred thousand people who spoke languages he didn’t know, ate food he had never tasted, and did things he had never seen done. Although Frank and Ely made an effort to cooperate with his parents who tried to enforce it remotely by letter, he was, in a practical sense, free of parental control, many a teenager’s dream. The only limit on fornication for him was how much dough he had in his pocket. And both in Taipei and now in Hong Kong he was able to make money teaching his mother tongue and all the dos and don’ts and other corrections from his English teacher mother were perfect training for the job. But would he start to anticipate a reconciliation between the mental and physical, then at some distance, in the dimmest of relief, imagine a union of the spiritual and the sensual? Would he glimpse, in other words, the possibility of a prayer mat of flesh?

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He turned sixteen by the time he started cheating sailors in the seaman’s bars of Wan Chai and North Point, a new sort of lark, he thought, but in fact it was a low point of debasement that he would not quite descend to again. He would hang around until a sailor offered to buy him a drink. By prior arrangement, these were watered-down facsimiles and the bar kicked back some of the price. He was kind of like a bar girl, but he didn’t do sex. It worked pretty well—he ended up with about the same as Mellon’s super generous allowance in Taipei, a little less than a hundred bucks a month—until about five weeks into his game, a sailor grabbed his drink, swallowed a mouthful, and confirmed his suspicions. He looked him straight in the eye and told him under his breath he should beat him to a bloody pulp. But in a bigger voice, he said, “I see.” He stood up, turned, and walked out the door.

This gentlemanly display of mercy impressed him enough to make him stop his con. Instead, he organized an English conversation class for bar girls two afternoons a week and ended up making about the same money in less time and without the need to constantly drink booze, even his watered-down bar girl versions would make him drunk after a few hours, especially if he hadn’t eaten much. It was also the beginning of a perennial part time career selling his mouth and ears in conjunction with his native English language skills to the same girls that sold him their hands, feet, oral, sexual and anal orifices in concert with whatever skill they had at pleasing men.

He became a regular little mascot at the Arizona, especially after the question arose, Was he a cherry boy? They had pushed on his nose and pronounced him one, laughing and loud-mouthing but, judo like, he turned it to his advantage. “Yes, I’m cherry boy,” he whispered. Of course, they immediately switched positions. “You NO cherry boy!” Nevertheless, he held his ground, adamantly maintaining his virginal purity and not for one night alone but for many a fair night until one of the older women, named Suzie—no surprise in the heyday of the novel The World of Suzie Wong, set in Wan Chai, exactly where he taught and hung out—made a leap of faith and, in a self-induced state of suspended disbelief, took him under her wing. She saw to it that he had fried rice and noodles, sweet rolls, and sometimes milk tea. He usually had to buy his own drinks.

One night after closing time she told him to wait for her at the end of the block and took him to her squalid rabbit hutch apartment where she let him sleep with her and, before noon, she gave him access to her pleasure dome below. True, technically, he wasn’t a virgin, but she taught him several important things about intercourse, mostly about entry and exit speed; in short, be slow on the entry and fast on the withdrawal or was it the other way around? He was nice to her, brought her a bottle of Hennessy five-star cognac one day, and felt toward her a genuine form of puppy love.

One night, around two-thirty in the morning, he felt the urge and unable to sleep, secretly escaped from Frank’s apartment without waking the maids and walked the ten blocks to Suzie’s place. Light leaked out from under her door and he could hear movement on the other side. She was not especially surprised to see him when she let him in, but whispered she had a guest. If he could slip into the closet-like space in the makeshift entryway, hide behind the curtain, and be quiet, she'd be done with her client soon and he could stay.

The guy blabbered something drunken and Suzie yelled, “No worry, no problem,” and went back to him in the bed. She was saying things to him, in a low growl disguised as a moan, and he didn’t particularly like what he could hear of it. Things like “Sooo good, Jerry.” “You sooo big, Jerry.” “You strong. You strong, Jerry.” Before her words had their intended effect, he peeked through the curtain and was dumbfounded by the prick he saw. In all dimensions he had him in spades. In fact, it was the biggest prick he’d ever seen, the better to remind him how puny he was compared to other men of the West. Within ten minutes Jerry had done his duty and was getting his clothes on and mumbling something in British English about what a swizz it was for forty dollars, Hong Kong.

Of course, he’d have to be British because the Americans had to be back on the ship at midnight, poor saps. But not Brits and not me, no curfew for us. No, Sir. When the American sailors cleared out of the bar before midnight, he would always feel smug and superior. Grown men like them having to go home to Mama while real men, him included, could stay out as long as we frickin’ A wanted.

Suzie squatted over a spittoon and pissed a good one, wiped her snatch with a bit of toilet paper, and dropped it in the pot. She then dumped some hot water from a thermos on a skimpy towel and did a more thorough job of wiping up, since the head was down the hall, and there was no running water in the room. With a mean scent of fresh urine directing his attention to his chosen destination, he took off his clothes and lay on the bed, his erection wholly enabled, although doglike in comparison to recently departed Jerry ‘the horse’. Nevertheless, there was something to be said for ending up with the girl.

He looked toward Suzie who had fallen asleep on her side facing him. An embroidered white cotton shift bunched up around her waist, her businesslike manner, her tough exterior, gone slack. She must be exhausted, he thought, and for the first time he wondered, truly wondered, what was really there, across the OS divide.

He lost his impulse to wake her and turned away. As he began to fall asleep an insight arrived. There’s a yin-side, he thought, to it all. Not a joke or a whipping boy, not an amusing clown, not even an opponent across the ring or a victim tightly bound. Other images floated through his mind. He let them sail through, none quite fit the bill. A whore? A Wan Chai bargirl! Nope, said the game master, I’m afraid, you’re wrong … A cunt, he murmured, that’s gotta be it, he thought. Noooh, the game master crooned, getting warmer perhaps, but why the pejorative? We’re just talking facts here, son, and soon he was asleep, Suzie by his side. As dawn steadily cleansed the bed through a single grimy pane, he dreamed he was in Montana again on the high mountain side of the ranch, in the company of wolves, a Chinese girl among them, the atmosphere wary but friendly, and the voice of his mother arrived with the light — in a situation like this, it said, you have to be polite. Time to study now, she cooed. Time to study now.

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On the last day of November, 1958, Frank flew to Hong Kong to accept a full-time position on the staff of the Time-Life International regional office. About three weeks later, he followed along with Ely and their baby son, leaving Taipei on Christmas day 1958. They lived on the top floor in an apartment building called Golden Court, on Electric Road in North Point. This was the first time in his life that he didn’t live in a house. And it was the first time he had lived so close to other people. Unlike the ranch, where the closest family was a mile away on one side, and dozens of miles away on two sides and maybe forty miles away on the fourth side and unlike even Taipei, where there was a garden and a wall and a road and an alley between Frank and Ely’s house and their closest neighbors, in Golden Court, neighbors were a mere foot away through a none-too-solid interior wall on one side and perhaps two feet away below through a far from sound-proof floor. There was nobody above them and nobody to the east or south because their apartment occupied the southeast corner of the top floor. But to the west and below there was only a foot or two of distance between their lives and those of their neighbors. At first he was alarmed at this situation but within a week or so he had grown used to it. He did not congratulate himself on this, because at his age he did not or could not look back much. Only in old age, when his joints ossified, when nine times out of ten something billed as progress meant annoyance, when he dismissed the latest gadget with a snort of contempt, when the tendency to stay put gradually replaced the desire to move, as he was dying in other words, did he realize how amazingly adaptable he used to be. But when he was that flexible boy, he did not think of adaptability as perhaps his top talent. There was little or no thought involved. He had to accept it and he did, immediately, with at most one second thought. Then.

At the beginning of February, a few days before Chinese New Year, late in the evening, nearly out of cash, he sauntered along a Wan Chai waterfront alley where the cheapest streetwalkers, most old and some sick, shone a flashlight into their own faces to show what the buyer might expect for the equivalent of fifty cents. They were literally dying for money, and a very small fistful at that. As he looked into the sad eyes of a broken-down woman, he said, “Okay,” as much out of empathy and a sense of adventure as sexual desire, and she led him up four or five floors to the roof where they crawled into her stall.

A few minutes later when, alarmed by the noise, he rose up off the woman, she urgently pulled him back down and shook her head No, No, No, meaning Do not get involved. Stay out of it. He fancied himself a go-for-broke kind of fighter, with a determination that did not stop, necessary compensation for his small size in fights with the big boys back home, but a drunken sailor in his prime would have probably turned this young punk and his old lady of pleasure into minced meat. No, no, no, do not get involved. Let it be.

When in doubt, do nothing. This attitude, attested to in many forms, would begin to seep into his heart and influence the rest of his life. Funny thing, the old woman herself was one of the most enjoyable of his life. She was juicy and there was a deep and immediate rapport, as if they’d known each other well. Maybe the contrast between his soon-to-be-sullied baby bod and hers, aching with rheumatism and God knows what else, entered into it. She was insistent and he complied. He was the stranger here. He did not try to stop the abuse that rattled the tin walls and roared forth insults in the next stall. He kept on fucking.

A few days later, he walked out to explore the spit into Causeway Bay, to get close to the ocean, to feel the sea again after his first and long-anticipated encounter with it on the ocean voyage to Taiwan on the M.V. Hai Min five months earlier. A small bundle in a blanket lay on the rocks ten yards or so from the water’s edge. He drew closer and saw the face of a tiny infant at the same time that he guessed what it was. It sent a cold chill down his spine. He didn't know what to do. The baby was dead. He stared at it for a long time, then walked away, back toward the beach. He met a policeman on a bicycle and tried to tell him there was a dead baby over there, pointing to the spit, using English and hand gestures and a few of his newly learned words of Mandarin. The man merely said, Yes, Yes, and continued on his route. It was unclear whether he understood. There was something sad and symbolic about this encounter. He probably picked it up from his dad’s True Magazine: The Magazine for Men, but the phrase “Life is cheap in Asia” kept circulating in his brain as he walked back to North Point and Frank’s apartment. To him it was another Humphrey Bogart tough-guy line, a hard truth about the real world that separated the men from the boys.

Whichever way he chose to classify it, the encounter with the dead baby symbolized the end of his childhood and seemed more important than dispensing with his virginity in the Taipei whorehouse or hearing a drunk Yank beat a prostitute in the tin-walled rooftop stall next to him. The stakes of the game were rising.

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Loss of virginity happily bought and paid for, his experience with prostitutes expanded over the coming months, and he felt increasingly confident in the face of the opposite sex which had the effect of solidifying his ignorance of them. He came to enjoy calling them “the OS”, a seemingly objective term that held them at arms length and partly because it was not immediately recognized did not grate upon other’s ears like the usual set of pejorative words spit out with a few drops of derision. But, as is often the case with neologisms, just below its thin skin it carried a small prick of hatred and, in his case, misogynistic ire. He probably got the idea of using those initials by hearing of the “OSS,” the agency that Frank worked for in China during the war. So when someone would ask What do you mean, OS? He could answer with the accurate but only mildly emotive ‘opposite sex’, a term he would not normally like to use because the word ‘sex’, like ‘love’, embarrassed him, evocative as they were of his own obsession and secret hope, disruptive intruders into his fragile and therefore tightly held image of himself as a man. Nevertheless, the wider experience, having paid sex where love was forbidden, emboldened him to began to make sorties into the realm of non-whores, but without success.

He had already pulled one shenanigan. He lay down alongside the maids when he came back late one night, well into his cups. He had snuggled up to the nineteen year-old and tried to tickle her, only to be pushed away with soft screams and giggles and moans of annoyance while her sixteen-year-old sister beat him with a pillow. As usual, Frank was not home on this occasion, and soon his wife, Ely, got up and, thoroughly disgusted with his behavior, while threatening to send him back to the States, shooed him back to the room where he slept, at the other end of the house, as far as possible from where the maids slept.

The next day he approached the older one from behind in daylight while she had her hands in the laundry sink, only to receive stinging lye soap water in his face. He caught the younger one napping and tickled her breast with a feather-duster and watched mesmerized as she stirred awake and, joy of joys, put her hand on her breast. He won a buck bet with Mellon that he could kiss the younger one on the face. He succeeded by grabbing a sock and walking up to her, faking anger, and pointing to an imaginary hole, as if to blame her for putting it there. As she bent to examine it closely, he caught her a loud smack with his lips on her cheek. She turned red and looked as if she were about to explode. Mellon discounted the story as unrealistic and never paid.

The coup de grâce was his successful spy mission to see one of the amahs fully naked. Anticipating their evening showers, he had unscrewed the key to the lock which secured the two halves of a sliding window that opened into the bathing area from a narrow exterior veranda. This left a small keyhole and, by setting two boxes of soap on the sill to the left and right of it, he blocked the view through the lower halves of the windows, and, crouching down as he sneaked along the veranda, invisible to those inside the bathing room, he was able to raise his head and peer, unnoticed, into the room. He was rewarded by the Devil himself. The older sister, solid body glistening, was soaping herself, and when her hand moved to wash between her legs it was all he could do to keep from collapsing with excitement.

Hearing her younger sister approach the adjacent room, he had to retreat. Exhilaration was too tame a word to express his state of mind. Fortunately for all concerned, a few weeks later they moved to Hong Kong before things regressed further with the maids in Taipei, flying on Christmas day for the cheap tickets. In Hong Kong, two of the three new maids were, to him at least, old prunes devoid of sexual appeal and they kept a very close eye on the third, a teenage nursemaid. Ely had already warned them about him.

Nevertheless, these childish antics served to inflame his desire for non-whores and he added voyeurism to his burgeoning garden of vices. Specifically, he learned that the prostitutes he had been privy to were dully resigned, even sullen, or straightforward, all business, no nonsense, blatant, available, and, like meat and potatoes, fueled his voracious bodily appetite. But nice girls—as indirect, impractical, ignorant, silly, covert, off-limits as they may be—titillated his fancy for fantasy and true love, that hidden object never to be named, even to himself, except in derision of course. The entire assembly of fertile women began to appear before him, from whores to virgins and back again, sensuous, offering unlimited opportunities, beckoning him to come to them, one after the other. And he heeded as best he could the clarion call: I shall follow my prick, he thought, albeit small. In this way, he took a deviant but well-trodden path, a path directly into the deeper parts of the jungle that is the world of desire, sexual desire, perhaps desire in its steamiest setting. Many years later, in spite of his many fascinating adventures exploring the jungle, he would wish he had not taken that path because it robbed his energy for other, more important things.

But, for him, pursuing non-whores was easier said than done. If the whore situation around his home in Montana had been next to dead for fifty years, eventually the opening up of the modern nice girl ‘market’ compensated pretty well for the loss, whereas the exact opposite presented itself to the adventurous Montana boy in Taipei. In those years, the sex industry was vibrant, offering a wealth of variety, conveniently located, and inexpensive, at least to a fistful of US dollars. The availability of nice girls for sex on the other hand was tightly controlled, functioned only through certain channels, usually complicated by the institution of marriage, subject to a ton of restrictions and conditions and, and in any event, it was unquestionably off-limits to someone like him. The high stone or brick walls with sharp glass shards or inverted broken bottles plus rolled razor wire on top enclosed the better residences of such creatures amply symbolizing the message: Stay out, do not touch these women as well as providing some deterrent to the casual thief. Unfortunately, it would take him a few years to learn the simple lesson, often enjoined by even the most naive traveler, When in Rome do as the Romans do, Boy! And it would take him many years to learn the lesson of how unreliable and eventually unsatisfying sexual objects can be.

Instead, he wanted to find the whores of the east in his back yard, in the whorehouses of Wallace, Idaho when those places themselves were on life support, and he wanted to find beautiful, graceful, versatile virgins ready to go with him on a date in Taipei, when he lacked all the necessary qualifications for it.

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Quick was his progress in spoken Chinese during those formative months in Taipei, but not in sex, alas. Quite to the contrary, sex turned out to be a dance the intellectual boy did not learn. Instead of gaining a precocious mastery of it, he added a large failure to his burden of physical inferiority which he attempted to patch over by deepening his acquaintance with the external forms of the floating world. For it was really only to the outer aspects, not sex itself, that he had been privileged to gain premature access. A typical session ran:

No observation. No exploration. No touches. No play. No kisses. No words. No patience. He hopped on. No breaks. A self-propelled jack hammer, driven by a robot. Fear of stopping. Fear of softening. Fear of missing a deadline. Fear. A binary target, out or in, off or on. No awareness of the concrete reality of the other. No awareness of the specific physical parts of the other. Mere ideas swirling around. On the physical plane, there was nothing good about it. It was probably the worst introduction to sex possible, aside from outright violence.

At that point he had no way to know how bad it was. For all he knew, this was it. There was no motive for the whores to teach him anything about sex itself, although a word or two of advice was occasionally offered, often so unobtrusively that he missed it entirely. With few exceptions, the faster he got off, the better it was, for business and their mental health. For them, only harm could come from being drawn into something more intimate and communicative with a passing john. A key component of the Mama-san’s job was to keep her charges from falling for one of the clients, in other words, to keep the sex for the girls as pro forma as possible, doing the minimum to satisfy the men. For a sexual tyro such as him, all they had to do was lay there, pretending to be moved and sometimes barely moving. A few took it to a higher level, creating a complex web of illusions of love, and were rewarded in riches, very occasionally marriage, or a knife across the throat. Any attempt on his side to go beyond formal consideration toward the girls was invariably met with deflection. They could pretend to be a girlfriend, to an older, mature man perhaps, one who enjoyed the charade, but not to a boy who mocked true love with a sneer and craved nothing more. If they did, it could prove dangerous. A boy their age may have been a welcomed physical relief, but the risk of a sticky emotional involvement rose exponentially with a decrease in his emotional age. It was telling that after the third or fourth time, he noticed that Sue was frequently unavailable and an older woman would take her place. The Mama-san didn’t want no stinkin’ love affair to interfere with the biz.

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Mr. Bean was frequently unshaven, and met the letter of the law at TAS by wearing a white shirt and tie, but the shirt was as dirty as the sin he looked like he just managed to extricate himself from, and the tie was scrunched to the left, twisted and filthy. He seemed to be perpetually hungover, and his scruffy shoes would appear with a token smear of polish, but only on one, not the other. If Jack Kerouac had been a China scholar, he would look like a handsome version of the Mr. Bean he saw in 1958. Unlike almost everyone else at Taipei American School, Mr. Bean was not associated with the US military. In short, he impressed the holy hell out of him. He had an instant man-crush on Mr. Bean, and pronounced him “cool.” This admiration spilled over to his subject matter, Chinese culture. In retrospect he suspected that the dishevelment that marked his appearance in the classroom was due to studying Chinese literature all night and not to drinking and whoring, like he imagined. And decades later he found his scholarly writings to be precise, well-written, and modest. He would have found it insufferably cool if he had run into Mr. Bean in a whorehouse on Yanping North Road, say, or at the Circle Restaurants1 after midnight enjoying a wee-hour snack with a working girl’s hand on each leg. He never did, but he always kept an eye out.

Nevertheless, at least once a week, he would turn right instead of left at the intersection near Frank’s house on Linch’i Street, and peddle away from school and American adult authority toward cigarettes, booze, prostitutes, snooker, and immersion into the raw linguistic cacophony of the whorehouses near Yanping North Road. It was a great feeling riding along, the wind in his hair, knowing he was headed to a good place instead of a bad one. Yes, Sir. Whores for a buck, whores for two dollars, five-dollar all-night specials, bottles of gaoliang liquor for a quarter, ten-cent smokes, pedicab to a whorehouse for thirty cents...down payments only, but how would he know?

Once he’d paid to lose his virginity, he discovered that he lived in a cornucopia of opportunities to indulge his desire for more. He learned that he could order a woman directly through one of the pedicab drivers who stationed themselves at the intersection near Frank’s house and at a lower rate than the mid-level whorehouses near Yanping North Road. But since he had no place to take her, he would have to pay at least 30NT for a hotel room which made it about the same as the whorehouse. He tried to introduce Mellon, the only American friend he had made so far in Taipei, to this vast realm of the senses, but Mellon didn’t want to go. He couldn’t understand why. He, too, was horny as sin. His monthly allowance was twice his. Maybe he was scared. Or maybe he had qualms. He decided he was scared and saw it as a sign of weakness.

What was so bad about whores? Having no sisters made it hard to understand the equation from the other side and, not knowing who or what they really were, he imagined they were whoever or whatever he wanted. He didn’t think it was simply the general complex of misogyny, unending fascination, and idolatry of the OS in the American ’50s that gave rise to his whoremongering because all his buddies were steeped in that, and yet a fair number, maybe a third, sneered at men who went to prostitutes as much as they denigrated the women themselves, considering the men weak and the women scum. Then they went on to ruin their marriages with affairs that your run-of the-mill whoremonger like he would soon become and many millions in China, Japan, and Korea deemed unnecessary and messy. Like his friends back home in the States, Mellon didn’t read what he read. He figured if he had read Miller, Genet, the Marquis de Sade, Baudelaire, Simone de Beauvoir, Frank Harris, Kerouac, etc., he, too, would have realized that real men paid hard cash to sate this desire for pleasure and relief. But maybe it wasn’t his under exposure to avant-garde and erotic literature that predetermined Mellon’s apparent lack of interest in dipping his wick in Chinese oil.

Just as his own predisposition had always been to refrain from taking what is not given, and nothing he read of the lives of thieves changed that even a bit, Mellon was probably unalterably predisposed to refrain from sexual misconduct and he could have read those writers unmoved. More likely, they would not have held his interest. But he didn’t think like that. Caught in his own perspective, he saw Mellon and others like him as chickenshits, lacking balls. He looked down on them and their cowardice and relegated them to the realm of insignificance, richly deserving denigration and scorn. That he was setting myself up for a fall did not occur to him.

He began to pay to take Sue out of the whorehouse on ‘dates’. They charged him an ‘all night’ fee, about $8. In his tightly constricted social sphere, and under strict marshal law (it could be tightened or loosened depending on the concrete situation) there was only one place in Taipei that he knew of to take her dancing, the Friends of China Club.

This indiscretion was the one time he was chastised by Frank. Members of the club had been complaining—member’s wives, especially, didn’t like it. The more jaded of the correspondents, low-level diplomats, and occasional military brass looked on with amusement, even a wink. Here she was, an inexpensive lady of pleasure—well, what could a poor boy afford, really, on thirty-five dollars a month allowance—dressed in a gaudy skirt and a drab home knit sweater, broken down high-heeled shoes, which she couldn’t operate properly, whirling around in their face, trying to dance the jitterbug, slow waltz, cha-cha-cha, rumba, samba, late-night tango, and even one of the new, but tamed, rock-n-roll songs with an American kid, in their club!

It was the liquor. A couple of gin and tonics and he was lit and flying. He took Sue to the club three or four times before Frank called him aside one evening and explained the seriousness of the whole thing. Some of the wives didn’t see the humor in this display, wondered what this aberrant child was doing here anyway, and these people had way more power and status than a poor news stringer like himself. He’d just have to confine his garish displays to other premises, pretty much anywhere else, in fact, other than the Friends of China Club. Frank said he could still go there to bowl, though, by himself or with Mellon. But Frank offered no alternate venue for taking his new friend dancing because there wasn’t any.

Except, and it was a long stretch, Lucky Bar. It’s much smaller, more intimate atmosphere pushed him cheek to jowl with his fellow compatriots, and the sound of English in one version or another could be heard pretty much anytime, and the bargirls were expensive and sparse and likely intelligence assets to boot. But the one time he ventured inside with Sue, they asked him in some of the best English to be found in the city of Taipei at that time, to leave.

He re-centered his operations on the snooker halls near the whorehouse district around Yanping North Road. This provided a viable alternative to the Taipei American School where, according to his visa, school enrollment, and promises made to parents, he was supposed to be. It was an area where the rudiments of a life of debauchery could be swiftly mastered. And it was a minute’s walk from a short time with Sue, if he had the dough.

For him, Taipei in 1958 was a good place to play hooky and get nooky. Flunking several classes in his junior year of high school was a small price to pay for an education in a sport like snooker, a trivial sacrifice for the uplifting ambiance of the whorehouse district itself, with its dirt-cheap rates, and his new friend, rotgut plum brandy. And there was no competition because there was no other foreign boy on the face of the planet in 1958 that could sample at will, if he had the money, these specific delights on a regular basis. The people there misjudged his age as easy he misjudged theirs. Lots of the local 23-year-old males had as smooth a baby face as he did.

If this was not enough, the whorehouse district was a good place to practice Chinese, although the accent of the pimps and petty con artists at the snooker tables, whenever they made an effort for his sake to speak standard Mandarin, was strong and low class. He discovered that he could mispronounce Mandarin by what seemed to him a wide margin in the direction of Fat Pang’s Shanghai accent, or Skinny Shi’s Sichuan accent, or Lazy Worm Wu’s Shandong accent or Bill Zhang’s Shanxi accent or the Taiwanese accent of any number of the clientele and still be understood, but if his pronunciation veered off in the direction of western American English, even the slightest amount, people didn’t have a clue what he was trying to say. However, a few years later, at the Far East Language and Literature Department of the University of Washington, his brief experience in this polyglot world made it easier to grok a difficult class in the phonology of ancient Chinese. You never know what’ll be useful.

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Yes, sir, my natural, simple relation to women was destroyed forever. From then on I did not and could not have a pure relation to women. I became what’s known as a fornicator. A fornicator may abstain, struggle; but he will never have a simple, clear, pure, brotherly relation to women.

Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, Translated by R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky

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Taipei, 1958

October, 1958, in Taipei. It was already dark when he left judo class. There were no street lights. He went to a nearby corner where the pedicabs gathered. He was supposed to take a pedicab back to Uncle Frank’s house but instead of repeating the address that he had memorized in Mandarin, he used his hands to outline the curves of a female torso in the air.

He was startled by the ease with which the pedicab driver understood. He had been wrestling with the problem for days. How to confess this growing need? How to say it? Who to ask? Who could he trust with his secret desire, who would punish him for it, who cared about his tender age? What would the world on the other side of the Chinese wall throw back at him?

 He was ignorant. Everything he knew about Chinese, about Taiwan, about East Asia, he’d learned during the past six weeks—from the twenty-one day sea voyage on the tramp freighter M.V. Hai Min across the Pacific from Tacoma with port calls at Nagoya, Kobe, Osaka, — from the Kaohsiung to Taipei train trip, chaperoned by an amah and Ely, Frank’s young Chinese wife, — from three weeks in their modest house on Lin Ch’i Street, spying on the younger maid, and from the rude intrusion of his first days of attendance at Taipei American School.

His hands were still mid air, modeling a pair of hips, when the pedicab driver gestured vigorously for him to climb in. Immediately, the smooth whir of the drive chain blended with the sound of his heart, picking up speed. And the smoke from the driver’s cigarette wafted back with the breeze into his pink, young lungs. This might be it! First taste of the real thing. In Taipei. Tonight.

The pedicab driver headed to an ally off Yanping North Road. Open-fronted whorehouses lined both sides of the narrow street. Repurposed Christmas tree lights in yellow, orange, red, blue, green, and white lit up the open door frames. Standing beside the pedicab, he affected cool disinterest as he glanced at the fully exposed roomful of young women and girls, five to ten at each place, who got up from benches and stools and hurried to welcome him in Taiwanese, Mandarin, and, now and then, a few words of heavily accented English. He stood still, lighting a cigarette, trying to be cool. It was hard to control the excitement and fear that raced through his heart. Two of the girls came up to him, asking for a cigarette. They tugged at the sides of his loose-fitting shirt.

Suddenly, he remembered he hadn’t paid the pedicab driver. He offered 6NT, but for some reason the driver just laughed and with a broad smile waved his hands indicating he didn’t want the money. He insisted, but the driver refused. Later he figured it out—he’d be paid by the whorehouse—but this interaction was a good excuse to delay the inevitable a little. That it was inevitable, he knew. It was his choice. It was something he’d dreamed of.

He allowed himself to be guided into the front room. Six of the girls gathered in a semicircle in front of him, all smiling. An older Mama-san tried to say something in English, and the pedicab driver and a few other men crowded close by on the street, watching, talking loudly, and laughing. He guessed it was a young foreign boy in an off-limits place that caused the interest. He didn’t know what to do. He smoked, scared. He tried to sit down on a bench near the front, but No. The Mama-san didn’t want that. Seeing how scared he was, she tried to shoo away the gathering crowd, afraid he would bolt.

Finally, he calmed down enough to respond. He was supposed to choose one of the girls, obviously, not just sit. In spite of his nervousness, he pretended to evaluate each girl thoroughly, looking her up and down, taking deep drags on his cigarette, apparently engaged in some obscure calculus of selection. But he knew from the start who he would choose. She wore a black cheongsam1 with a peony pattern embroidered in red and gold. She wasn’t the youngest, probably four or five years older than he was. But eye contact, a crippled smile, poise, understated makeup made her stand out as the most beautiful of the six and although he was not aware of it then, and even though one was east Asian and one northern European, in retrospect, she reminded him of his mother back in Montana.

The Mama-san took his hand and they followed the girl down the short hall toward the back. She pushed aside the noren split curtain2 and entered one of the stalls. Before letting him in, the Mama-san indicated she wanted to be paid. It was 60NT, or about a buck and a half US at the black market exchange rate at the time.

He was still stalling, nursing a Double Luck cigarette. Logically, he knew he had to take his pants off, but emotionally, he didn’t know what to do. He’d worked it out roughly on the ranch with dolls made of pond clay when he was ten, and gleaned a few technical details from other sources since then, but face-to-face with a live woman, he froze. The girl gently removed the cigarette from his lips and threw it into the chamber pot, where it sizzled for a second and died. With astounding speed, three seconds tops, she unbuttoned the front flap and slipped out of her cheongsam, bra, and panties. With no sisters to turn to, for the first time since pubic hair began to grow, he faced a naked woman close and straight on.

Her visual presence was overpowering—long black hair, bare shoulders, nipples, navel, the wispy black hair below, riding high on the elevated mons veneris. Barely used to the overwhelming scents of the streets, the intimate aroma of this girl, embedded in a stinking whorehouse, thickened with incense, nearly made him topple over in a bewildering swoon. Sitting on the low narrow bed she undid his belt, unzipped his pants, and pulled them to his knees. He kicked them off and she hung them on a nail in the flimsy partition that separated one stall from the next.

He unbuttoned his shirt and started to take it off, but before he could finish she had unrolled a condom onto his member and pulled him down on top of her and guided it between her legs to its long-dreamed-of destination and began showing him directly with her pelvis what he should do. He worried he was taking too long, although it was only a few minutes, that he wouldn’t be able to reach a climax, that his inexperience and body were suddenly on display to a stranger. This mind/body schism would haunt him for the next five months when, deep into his course of study with Teacher Wong in Hong Kong, he would see it for what it was and begin to transcend it.

Naturally, this mental nonsense interfered with the quality of the sensual pleasure. But she kept pumping and giving herself to him, and his first time in a woman, or in a condom in a woman, came to its natural end. So that’s it, he thought, impressed but not blown away, wishing he knew where he could take a piss, worried he’d miss, if he aimed for the chamber pot on the floor. Nevertheless, the pump had been primed and his addiction to sex had begun.

“Your name?” he said in Mandarin, one of the few phrases he’d memorized. And he got her name. Sue, a homophone for a Chinese name, meaning ‘natural’, ‘unprocessed’, ‘plain’, ‘raw’, like ‘raw silk’, ‘virginal’.3 So Sue was her fake name, and Su was her Chinese name and they were pronounced the same.