Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 4

The problem of sex

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.