Early Lessons in the Classical Language, Chapter 1
First time
Epigraph
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
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.
長衫 chángshān. ‘Cheongsam’ is based on the Cantonese pronunciation. A long dress with slits up the sides—the younger the woman the higher the slits, it seems. Also called qípáo 旗袍.
暖簾 Japanese, noren.
素 sù E.g, 素女, a female spirit, some say well versed in the divine yin-yang arts.