Jianfeng grew up in Dalian. He attended Dongbei University of Finance and Economics which was just on the outskirts of town. Jianfeng was born before the one child per family restriction was placed upon Chinese families. The result was his family had three children, of which he was the youngest. At twenty-three, he had recently graduated from the highly-regarded university majoring in accounting. He was excited to be entering the world of business. He wanted to apply his knowledge of money to the import/export world.
In English, Jianfeng translates as "harsh mountain." How appropriate a name for the hard and almost marble-like personality the young man possessed. And like his choice of profession, full of numbers and cold reality and his character, which prevented emotions from affecting his daily life, his body had sharp lines and taunt muscles. He was like a gray wolf, lone, predatory and unyielding but somehow elegant and magnificent. The square of his jaw reminded his acquaintances, because he had no true friends, of a Korean's, his eyes clear and bright were more round than anyone he came in contact with, so much so, that many people believed that he might have European blood flowing within him. He was tall, unusually tall for a Chinese male. At slightly over six feet, his height added more confusion as to his national identity; his skin offset his jet black hair and he had deep red, almost crimson lips.
With a wry and ironic smile Jianfeng would, every morning, stand in front of his bedroom mirror and stare at the picture it produced. It was a portrait of a lonely but extremely beautiful youth. More accurately he was the personification of Narcissus. He knew the objection - that no one could take the form of N--. But no one made an attempt to deny his likeness to N--. Why, indeed, was he so fixated on his own image? Except, that if there, in the corner of his mind, in the recess of his mind - he felt the need for that description. Simple, obvious, commonplace, he rebelled against these words - they were things he held a universal distaste, he wondered, his being might be reduced one day. But he could not be ordinary so he knew the only way to phrase it was to be like Narcissus. An observer could clearly see that beyond his golden eyes were unspeakable grief and wisdom that people generations older than he sometimes never acquire. His eyes' expression, however, were not so much molded or inherited but produced by an internal anguish the depths of which no one could fully comprehend.
At this fragile moment he thought of all the world's hatreds, its jealousies, its enmities, its passions and obsessions and wondered where true, undisturbed life could be had. And what about love? What is love? Jianfeng thought, "I can physically love someone, to make love, but what of the other kind, the intangible one? Is it possible for perfection, to know love? Isn't it after all a fact that Narcissus had no emotional love?" But these questions he never really seriously entertained, for he had never experienced being with a woman. In fact, he planned never to behold the wonders of the female sex. "All that women are good for is children," he thought, "but contact with the masculine, dominating sex is instantaneous creation. Woman's nature is the highest point of baseness, of depravity. What a waste it is for men to be attracted to such vile creatures." What was the reason, Jianfeng wondered, thinking of his past, some deep, some obscured, some speechless feeling that he had toward women. Like all his feelings felt for himself, it made him angry. These thoughts were so inadequate, what could women hope ever to give to him and what women felt was out of proportion to anything he truly felt toward them. And women would come to realize and to suffer, he supposed, with deep feelings and so he was ready to say that he never wanted a woman!
Women never did anything of value. They did nothing but talk, talk; eat, eat; shop, shop. They talked nonsense, ate nonsensical things and shopped frivolously. That is why it was woman's fault. Women made culture impossible with all their fake niceties and impeccable manners. Then he thought women can't create; can't paint; can't write. It was helpful to think of women in such terms for he knew that men were superior. Then he thought, women were all the same, the ambiguity of their thinking made them unable to create; it was a state of mind that Jianfeng was never able to understand - these women could never keep one thing in their mind - nothing was ever clear or fixed. It was only under painful effort and great abasement of himself that he could stand their presence at all.
Jianfeng was completely lacking in any feeling of sexual desire for the opposite sex. This was well proved by the fact that he never had the slightest wish to see a woman's naked body. For all that, Jianfeng would begin to seriously imagine falling in love with a girl, and a spiteful fatigue would begin to clog his mind; and then he would find delight in regarding himself as a man ruled by reason and would satisfy his vainglorious desire to appear stoic by likening his frigid emotions to those of a man who has grown weary from surfeit of women. Such mental gyrations had become automatic with Jianfeng, as though he was one of those candy machines that go to work and send candy sliding out the moment a coin is inserted. Jianfeng had an aversion to outward expressions of feeling - to displays of kindness and love. He could love and hate equally and valued those that could be loved or hated. It was his mask; it was his attempt to deny ownership of his own feelings, a man who could not say, this is what I like - this is what I am. Through the unbearable pain of being able to remain chaste without effort Jianfeng learned how to hate women as well as morality.
The extinction of beauty. No, not physical beauty. Idealistic, emotional beauty. The death of Jianfeng's beauty suggested a natural process. A spiritual cause. Yet, irregular somehow. It was his distorted notion of the essence of being Chinese. The cause of which was produced by his internal battle between tradition and Western modernity. Jianfeng knew he enjoyed sex with men, but did that make him gay? Westerners thought so. Jianfeng was not so certain. To be sure, he knew that Americans and Europeans had a sense of homosexual love, of companionship. Jianfeng did not understand that concept. He held firmly to the belief that any part of one's true self, be it what it may, which revealed itself accidentally was a fraud. He hated the naked truth and therefore made himself into a sculpture made of raw flesh. Jianfeng possessed all the beauty in the world; he dwelled in the sunshine of human existence. The beauty Jianfeng thought he had found in others was entirely of his own self-delusion. "I entirely own beauty," Jianfeng thought. "There is no more beauty anywhere to be found. I am perfection." Thus Jianfeng didn't need a name. Indeed, beauty with a name doesn't count at all. Illusions of beauty that are named like Jianfeng or Wang Chen or Wu Zeen, he thought, don't work. Jianfeng believed that he did not need a name to carry out his human function. He believed he was a type. He was part of the stage. His name was 'Young Man.' There are no actors, Jianfeng supposed, that could bear this title. All of them depend on a personality, a character or even a name. They are Wang Young Man; Chris Young Man; Ethan Young Man. Jianfeng, however, was the universal name: 'Young Man.' He believed he was the physical representation of all the beautiful young men that appear in all the myths; histories; stories; of all societies; in all places. And so Love was not his option. He was aesthetic beauty.
2
He wanted to experience everything, that's all. Everything that happened in a moment of time; how the flowers looked when the sun hit them; how the sheets smelled, the moment before he would fall asleep. All his feelings at all moments - the history of it. Everything all mixed up. But he failed; he failed. No matter how it was conceptualized, it ended up being so much less. Indeed, he had, for reasons he could never fully understand, these thoughts of his sex; an attitude which no one could fail to find obsessive, something of a drumbeat, something childlike. A man's whole life was had, experienced and lived through a single obsession, just one obsession and in the character of that obsession a whole life was born. It was light and dark.
In his hands a healthy, flourishing form of love exploded with a passionate loneliness and a severity of an epidemic raging through a squalid city. In the midst of this coldness came a moment of warmth, a sudden expression of feeling. In the midst of coldness, a heroically vicious feeling of regret made itself felt. What a masterfully deceptive mind he thought he had, "It can wrought such a paradoxically succinct thought which could combine love and hate at the same moment."
The process by which he hid his expressions was the opposite of how the whole of society hid theirs. Society hides in order to function; his secrets became obsessions and that was his disorder. His obsessions were not real yet they nibbled away at what was real. Would he and reality someday meet? At the place where he and reality came together his delusions of his desires already in existence ate away at reality and reality itself could create fictional forms dictated by his desire. He became the antagonist to reality. His desire, which was his form of representation, straddled reality and pricked it to a halt; it was his thoughts that stopped the root of reality's breath. Through the process of representational form, his thoughts crowned themselves the heir of reality. He would never find what he wanted. Everywhere he went he would meet his desire. In order for his obsession to come into reality, either his desire or his concept of what was real must perish. In this world delusion and reality live together side by side; but delusion must dare to break the laws of reality. Why? In order that it may exist alone.
He had always loved Asians. "If only their looks had a language of its own." Shamefully, he was overwhelmed with the confession that he knew that they were his destruction. Through his interactions he had learned of their reputation of deliberate heartlessness, a reputation, which only he could fully appreciate. It was a misinterpreted picture of an ideal: in his life the desirable qualifications of lust combined with the awful chains of tragedies caused by his love of Asians; an existence somehow merged that contained the conviction that he had always been unlucky. And if he had never loved an Asian, suppose better yet, he had come to live without them, what a happy life his would have been.
He had a masochistic view toward love and respect for Asians that without physically harming them could lash out against their subsistence and being. Why? Because no day went by that he did not dream of his rebellion against his obsession. Nevertheless, he strove, out of his Western sense of chivalry and justice to be kind to his objectified race.
These thoughts - these choosing, craving, pursuing, mournful, seeking, sighing, dreaming, loitering thoughts - these thoughts, obsessions, whose existence had changed to something ugly by an inescapable esthetic disease. His hope was his repose. In the dark alley of his mind; in the refuse of his obsessions he divested himself of every moral restraint. Not anxious to come into contact with the fangs of his thoughts, he striped his soul to nakedness. Yet, they could scarcely understand this tacit insult. He, unfortunately, was unable to control them, rousing and awakening all of them. And so he divested himself of all the glories of reality, dethroning himself of this world; he clung to his fluttering wings of delusion. These thoughts gave him something - he acknowledged that, but he could also acknowledge that they destroyed something. Could it not be thought that habits grew on him; eccentricities - weaknesses? It was amazing, he thought, "A man so part of the world, could stoop so low - perhaps that was not accurate - could depend so much on his own obsessions." The restlessness of his thoughts seemed like the boiling and brewing of the sea. It resembled one of the sea's own moods, one of the sea's moments of response, an intermittent storm of activity.
3
Separation, ideals, strife, division, different priorities, assumptions, tainted the being of their relationship. Jianfeng felt many things toward his mother, things about her excited and disturbed him for reasons he express. She did not flatter him, insinuating as she did the greatness of Western intellect, even in its decay, had more importance and impact than their native thinking. He could not follow the ugly Western jargon that rattled so glibly out of her mouth. They refused to talk; that was the reasoning behind the tension which had encircled them to the other extreme which, as if they had recovered from their expense of emotion were cool, amused and even somewhat malicious. They looked at each other without seeming to see each other. His eyes, were merely glazed with emotion, met hers for the slightest of moments, on the verge of common understanding, but then, raising his hand, to his face, averted the shame. Jianfeng wanted to beg her to withhold for a moment what he knew to be unstoppable, as if he forced upon her his own resentment of her, yet even in the moment of their unusual connection, was determined to let go of these emotions, of which he was ashamed, but in which he found piggish delight. Their inability to communicate made them uncomfortable. Together they had experienced a thing they had not been meant to know. They had encroached upon each other's privacy.
Mei Yu stood at barely five feet. She had plump cheeks and was bespectacled, with large, unseemly out-of-date glasses that covered her round portly face. She was beginning to loose her hair, which for a woman at almost sixty was not uncommon in China. She wore a wig everyday to hide this embarrassing fact. So now Jianfeng always saw, when he thought of his mother, that wig that sat on top of her head. And with an easily unwanted moment of concentration, he focused his mind, not upon her portly round face or her surprisingly delicate hands, but upon the ugly fake wig, one of those synthetic, coarse wigs, whose virtue and usefulness seemed to have vanished, as Mei Yu's humanity. If Jianfeng's days were reduced to thinking nothing but of this wig, with all of its representational flaws, he could not be judged like an ordinary person. Suddenly, without warning, a movement of a hand or a particular circumstance could release the whole of his accumulated impressions and passions of his mother and out flowed all he felt about her. That was only one sensation. Then rose up, as if smoke from a chimney, the essence of her being. That was yet another sensation. He felt transfixed by the intensity of his perception. It was her severity; her strangeness. "I hate you," he thought, "in every part of my body; you are the worst mother; you are neither mother nor wife, you live for only yourself."
How does one judge people? How does one conclude that like or dislike is appropriate? Transfixed by his mother's wig, impressions poured in upon him of his mother and to follow his thoughts was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be understood. It was his own voice saying resoundingly repetitive things. These thoughts came together like a swarm of bees, each individual, but all controlled by some invisible force, where still there, as a target for the bees and a symbol of his hate for his mother, hung her wig. Until his thoughts which had come together quicker and quicker, violently and chaotically exploded; he felt released; he heard his mother's voice: "I found you a job."
Mei Yu had found it, she was proud of her accomplishment. Although, she didn't agree with what had transpired, she wanted to please her only son, Jianfeng. She had spent the following weeks after his graduation asking her friends, acquaintances, and family members about available positions for her son in a small, upstart foreign trade company. And her friends had come through. They heard through their connections with local officials that a young white man was trying to sell fish internationally and that he needed educated young professionals to help.
She had always wanted a boy. And she felt extremely overjoyed that she had been given the chance to raise a son. Mei Yu knew that Jianfeng had his faults. She tried to look past them though. She wanted to be a good mother and understood that sometimes life dealt different shades of mediocrity. Mei Yu's mediocrity was her inability to recognize the pain of her son. She did not care about her son's feelings, about what he wanted or about what he needed emotionally. There was something comical about her obstinate determination to superficially supporting the youth in his endeavors. Both mother and son knew that this was merely pretense a sign to the world of Mei Yu's false deference to the plight of Jianfeng.
She wanted to see the office herself. She wanted to know the young American who would be making her son money and so she felt more and more strongly, outside of her normal venues, that she saw things clearly. The office, she looked thoroughly, was very shabby. The office was nothing special as belonging to any newly founded company in China. The small space was sheltered from the outside light; it was dark, with wood paneling that further enclosed the space. There was no beauty and she sat, waiting; foreboding to see the American, as a fact without hostility, that he would be as ugly as his office. And when he walked in with Jianfeng in tow (what a strange sight that was - as a master and his slave or an owner and his puppy) that he was not ugly astonished her.
And then her eyes fell over his form, on the trunk of his body, she lingered upon that form - her eyes stumbling over his idyllic image. He was slender and well proportioned - with an admirable picture. Inevitably, her eyes withdrew from him - but she could not let go completely; she was entranced and a sense of vastness and nothingness filled her being. The feeling within her made Mei Yu feel as if she were tied down and unable to move from the intensity of her feelings for him. They could reduce her soul; life-force; mind to nothingness forever. He was large and calm in her presence; monumental and contemplative. And yet she saw hunger and desire (desire for what she thought) in his eyes and she knew that at any moment he might catch-up with his desire; might cross paths; might meet one day. Had they been agreeable in expression, his eyes would have also been irresistible. Unfortunately for Mei Yu, the only sentiment they expressed see-sawed between sadness and desire, both depressing and unnatural to be found there; she was drawn to those eyes, for she believed that desire to be for her. He said nothing, and it seemed to her that this was his chain. But he could play contented; he could play dignified - by standing upright, he possessed great size and depth, and with his golden haze he could deflect her attention away from his sad eyes to the more noble parts of his body.
Mei Yu and he had different desires and yet they were united together in their restless craving fulfillment of it. For as time passed he became her desire; he became her obsession. He was her trophy or Poseidon's banquet or the bunch that hangs over the shoulder of Bacchus or her Adonis - as if she were the Goddess of Love and not Aphrodite. That was the way of her desire but she did not know the way of his.
An alternate existence of being sprung up in her, loving and frightening, they were two emotions which could be found within her - one frighteningly intense, for what could be more passionate than her love for him - what more powerful, more forceful, more expansive and yet fermenting in her heart the seeds of destruction - the seeds of her obsession - the germination of its growth. In order for her obsession to survive she must have all his love and all his attention. Absorbed with him she exalted and worshipped his presence. She opened her soul to take in his warmth, to protect it, to bask in it. Then an intangible force came over her, the emotion and tremor of love. How unworthy she felt of his love. He was glowing, burning, young and powerful - she meek, old and solitary. How would she ever capture his attention?
Jianfeng watched their unspoken connection. He wrenched his face up; scowled and frowned. Jianfeng's face grew crimson and he became flushed with a sense of embarrassment; an embarrassment that hung about them. "What on earth is this about?" Jianfeng thought. "What are they thinking?" It was unthinkable, it was detestable. Now, at this moment, his mother's presence meant absolutely nothing to him; her existence meant nothing; her sitting there with that wig he despised and that strange look meant nothing - nothing. He only wished to be alone now; he felt uncomfortable; he felt the treachery of her actions. Here is the consequence of staying in the dark, she has shut her eyes to the world; from sheer ignorance she believed that he liked her; that he desired her. Jianfeng felt pity yet his mother's actions bordered on repulsive. How could Jianfeng take into account the feelings of his mother, when he did not love her? He must think of all women, including his mother, as if they were rocks. He never acknowledged that a woman had a soul; a spirit. How could he feel sorry for a stained couch or a dirty dish? Jianfeng knew that through his beauty that unhappiness could never come to him. His beauty had no time to assume responsibility for each and unforeseen effect of its powers. Narcissus had no time to think of happiness, so how could Jianfeng? Jianfeng did not care about the happiness of his mother or of the foreigner's. He knew that she liked him more than her own son. "What does one live for," he asked himself. "Is life so desirable?" His mother was foolish and vain. A mother no one could ever ask for. "Are all mothers like this?" A contented son never asked these questions, he thought, so he let it be known to himself that he did not want this mother.
4 He was part of a new generation, a generation influenced by new ideas and new principles. He was part of a generation that was enthusiastic for the enthusiasm over seriousness. They praised affectation - an age that praised thoughts and education. He could, or at least he tried to, talk of these days with pride and affection, as if he were truly part of it. A feeling of regret left his heart and went coursing like the waters in a flood plain. He felt desire to announce to the world who he was - like he was an exploding star. For no one knew or he supposed would ever know the obsession he carried within himself. He felt humiliated by the failure of his life. He was full of memories of the secret life he hid from others, full of the joy and loneliness his obsession produced.
He hated his thoughts. They were evidence of the obsession that possessed him. These obsessions could make him do whatever they wanted. That's the power it had over him. Be they ugly or handsome thoughts, they all had the same thing in common this master-slave absurdity he called desire. A sort of transaction went on between his thoughts; his desire was on one side and reality was on the other. Yet, he could never be intoxicated by his own thoughts, at any random time, so much as when he saw what he desired. How ordinary were his thoughts. It's obsession you find everywhere. It's an obsession aware that it is at any one time most prone to confuse itself with sincerity. The strange thing, however, was that at these moments of doubtfulness of this uncontrollable passion, it was with perfect consonance that his actions and circumstances dictated the revival of his thirst.
There was no hope for him. Night after night he would fall asleep with the hope that he would forget about his past experiences with Asians. Every night as he would lie down he would think about freedom. It had always been a strange concept for him. But now, here in China, it sounded to him like the name of some malicious or sinful existence. It filled him with fear. He longed to desire it. In the dark of his mind he saw two paths: one to the maliciousness of freedom and the other to the glory of his obsessions. As he fell asleep, the choices would still follow him. They murmured their desires for him to choose one of them; their beckoning; their calling. He felt pleasantness and viciousness at the same time.
Only new manifestations of his obsession fueled him. He was a prisoner to the repetition of his first love; his first sexual act. It was thunder and lightening at the same time. Since then he searched for that storm. Yet it seemed no one ever looked as sad as he did. Bitter and desponded in the blackness of his obsession he longed to live in the sunlight of reality and to escape the depths of his mind. He asked himself, "Is it nothing but looks, I desire?" What was there behind it - their beauty and sophistication? Or was there nothing? Nothing but an incompressible beauty which he loved behind and could do nothing to stop? For although he thought at some intimate moment when stories of passion, of failed love came to him how he too knew or felt or been through it himself, he never said. He was always silent. His singleness of mind grasped what others could never understand. "They are no more aware of their beauty then a child." If he merely thought of them as children who threw off their beautiful forms as if their beauty bored them and all that he could say of their beauty. They wanted nothing else but to be like him. That was the paradox of his obsessions. All the being and the doing, living, experiencing, communicating, verbalizing - he shrunk to a sense of oneness - a place of solitude. Yet, beneath this calm was a darkness, all spreading, unfathomably big and lost in his obsessions was the only way he thought he could know himself. This darkness could go anywhere, for not even he knew where it led. He could not stop it.
5
When Jianfeng looked upon him it was once filled with envy and desire, for his handsome body and strong demeanor. He now saw him with the darkly piercing eye of jealousy. He understood that he was inherently better than him, not just in physical beauty, but in his maturity and emotional outlooks. Jianfeng's restless craving look was his desperate urge to seek out equal beauty. Something disgusting hung about Jianfeng's personality, like a stain in a shirt that refuses to come out; that nameless, unpleasant mixture of want and morality; those absurdly beautiful lips and perfect physique; that ever so carefully planned charm: all were signs of Jianfeng's artificiality. All the fragmentary impressions that had been used to describe Jianfeng he could form into a certain pattern, a definite thread from which a certain set of behaviors could be used at the right moments. It was another thing too - his not being able to tell the truth. This other thing, this untruth; his reality, which suddenly made itself known, emerged from the back of his thoughts and commanded his attention. He was half unwilling, half acquiescent. Why always hide and be carried off by his own deception? At the very moment when it was painful to be reminded of the failings of human relationships, that the most perfect human was flawed. Hating him, combined with his instinct for untruthfulness drove Jianfeng to keep his emotions, with marble silence of an immovable statue, but like a real statute, he was trapped in the form that it possessed.
~
Neither knew of the passions each held for the other. Yet they were vastly different desires. They were an orchestra playing different tunes. Both knew the melody and harmony but somehow the maestro could not coordinate their effort toward unity. Something was not right; there was a separation of movements. He was lustful of the strong Sino man and this affected his clarity. At moments he could sense Jianfeng's true character and look beyond beautiful eyes and deep into his soul. His foolishness was not from the fact that he desired sex with Jianfeng but rather his tendency to turn lust into obsession.
~
After a particularly long day he decided that he needed to relax. He had, only recently, discovered Dalian. Vertigo, a smallish bar that stood within the heart of Dalian's downtown was owned and operated by a friendly homosexual man. China, as opposed to Western nations, had no explicitly gay clubs. Although this was Communist China, Yan, the bar's owner made an effort provide the clientele with a gay atmosphere. It was a place that attracted younger gays. Here younger gay Asian men found the older mature men they sought along with its impressive wine list and the friendly staff at Vertigo attracted those older gentlemen. The club attracted many foreigners. To be sure, the majority of the foreigners were older Japanese men on business trips looking for quick sex with cute and lithe young Chinese men. The young American was no different. He could be counted as one of those foreign exotics that sometimes frequented the bar. This was the place that his primal urges could be played out. He was a young viral man in a land full of easy opportunity. And with a body such as his, he never had a problem finding a boy to conquer. It gave him great joy to know that he was wanted.
~
Jianfeng enjoyed working at the office. He enjoyed the work, not his boss. There was something. Something about him that made Jianfeng distracted. Jianfeng always liked the opposite of him. The other. He wanted something exotic. Yet, he could not understand why Westerners always talked of passion and a variety of colors. "Why has the West won?" "Why must we accept this notion of life?" This perplexed Jianfeng. He often talked with his schoolmates about Western influence. "They have infiltrated our behavior," he would say in disgust. Emotionless, cold reality. Westerners didn't understand that. "They have no idea what it meant to be part of a community. To be without feeling. To sacrifice." Maybe he was a masochist because secretly he desired them. He desired their lifestyle. Their openness. Perhaps it was merely physical. One night, after analyzing these thoughts, after all they were not emotions, he decided he needed a night out. Usually Jianfeng would return to his mother's house. But tonight he wanted to relax in a new setting, in a place he had never been before. He had heard of a small bar named Vertigo. This was one of only two bars in Dalian that catered to foreign men. Jianfeng hoped that he would be able to find an exotic at Vertigo. Sex was the only thing on Jianfeng's mind as he entered.
The men of the bar saw the handsome Chinese man sit down. Most were compelled by the sight of this beauty to turn to their companions and utter their wonderfully hungry and erotic whispers to each other. For this was not a man they saw as a philosophical beauty but rather as a catalyst for their lust. On this night aesthetic beauty lost. Practiced in their ways of observation, the usual men of the bar noticed all the fine features of Jianfeng. Even Yan who usually stayed out of the fray, was mesmerized by Jianfeng's presence. All his physical qualities were noticed and appraised: his gently sloping chest, the slightly tapering, well developed trunk; his muscular legs. When one took these and added them to his other features: his stoic shoulders, his perfect eyebrows set above his melancholy eyes, the supple lips, his sharp-lined face and his innate ability to harmonize the sections of what one saw and could not see into a masterpiece. His perfect neck gave way to a perfect body and thus Jianfeng could be thought of as using his scattered fragments and turning them into a beautiful artistic restoration.
When Jianfeng looked at those pitifully desperate men who wanted him when he did not want them, he could not help viewing them with the same eyes he turned on his pathetic mother. The impulses of compassion and sympathy condoned a willingness of acceptance, with a tinge of disdain for their urges, and in this mood of acceptance an easy carefree flirtation followed. Thanks to his extraordinary pride, Narcissus loves a bad mirror. Narcissus knew a bad mirror saves one from jealousy, if nothing else. When the usual men of the bar saw Jianfeng, a gleam of anticipation and impatience came into their eyes. Who would be the one to share a bed with him, they all thought? There is a code of behavior, Jianfeng knew, that at homosexual bars it benefits the men to expose the intestines, the bowels of their collective desires; of their need to assert themselves; as if indeed it was their duty. So Jianfeng bore about himself, he could not help knowing it, the torch of his beauty; he carried it erect into any room he entered. He could never shy away from the monotony of bearing it. His beauty was apparent. He was admired. He was loved. Men, letting go the multiplicity of things had all themselves, basked in his fake aura of simplicity. Was this aura wisdom? Was it the deceptiveness of beauty, so that all of one's perceptions, half way to truth, were tangled together in a mesh of thought?
~
The glass would have been nothing extraordinary, as belonging to any bar at any one moment in time, with squat features and of a quality that was not surprisingly common. Such a glass, as placed on the counter-top of the bar is regularly seen at all bars. But this glass formed a singular contrast to all other glasses, at all other times. He stared at the glass intently. It was smudged, darkened and dirtied with the fingerprints of Chinese men. Hands that had been used for industry as well as passion; hands that he longed to touch and be touched by. "This glass looks amiss," he thought. "What should be a handsome glass is turned morose by neglect." The glass; the bar; the young sexy Chinese men; their attitude; the gay environment - all these mixed together in his mind and he created his own private vocabulary - his own world. And though his subjects could be considered as being stark and uncompromising, with their aesthetic beauty and expressionless faces, he knew, underneath it all, they frowned at the slightest image, or perception of, human frailty. He knew this to be true. It was always true. His thoughts were incapable of any untruth. To pursue their truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings (especially of his), to be so brutally selfish, was so horrible an outrage of human decency, he often felt dazed and blinded by his attraction.
~
This was what was on his mind as Jianfeng entered.
~
At this moment both men finally, truly saw each other. For one man, his private thoughts turned philosophical, for the other they turned malicious.
~
He thought, "What is perfection? Is there such a thing?" He knew that perfection was a subjective matter. "Yes, there could be a perfect circle and something could be perfectly tuned. But could there be such a thing as human perfection?" He had always highly doubted it. At this moment, this awakening time he knew that he had seen it. His goal now was to be with perfection.
~
Jianfeng rankled long in silence after seeing him. He understood now more than ever his own repugnance for his beauty. He stared intently at him, as if a prey wounded by an arrow. Around Jianfeng's lips a mock-sardonic, bewildered, unhappy smile of chagrin momentarily drifted. Whereas other people are embarrassed about their joy, at this moment the repugnance was embarrassing. But Jianfeng had to come face to face with that repugnance. Still, within the preceptorial kindness with which he pressed this delicious repugnance upon him, Jianfeng hid his desire. Something had to come to an end. At the same time, something had to begin. Perhaps Jianfeng would be cured of his repugnance. Perhaps it would merely be strengthened. "At any rate, I'll do as I please." Jianfeng thought confidently. "I must deceive him cleverly. Where deception is clumsy there is no true affection."
Soon an awkward silence arose that replaced the astonishment of their meeting.
~
There was no eloquent dialogue.
Nothing was said at all.
Each knew what the other wanted.
Without saying anything at all both men got up from the bar. Both knew exactly what would happen that night and as Jianfeng followed him to his apartment, a sense of solace washed over him as he knew what he must do to prevent greater beauty from having happiness.
6
Jianfeng was reluctantly passive. He did not know how this affected Jianfeng. He was masculine and assumed that his Asian conquests would pacify his need and quiver with excitement at the anticipation of his penetrating force. That night he learned what it meant to Jianfeng.
~
Jianfeng's demeanor suggested a man in charge, not so much assertive but rather as having an air of confidence. He behaved as if he took charge in all aspects of life, including the bedroom. Jianfeng put this front up until the very last moment, when he assumed a submissive position.
~
He was surprised by this action, not the fact that Jianfeng might be submissive but rather by the apparent psychological denial of his true self. That Jianfeng flaunted his masculinity in public and was effeminate in the bedroom made him somewhat bewildered.
He saw the scar on the lower right-hand side of Jianfeng's torso. It was three inches in length and on a diagonal cut. He was intrigued by this manifestation of imperfection. He broke out into a giddy smile during what should have been one of their most intimate moments.
~
Jianfeng saw him look at the scar. Jianfeng now knew that he saw his imperfection. He became bitterly aware of his inferior status to his Western Adonis image. He could not compete with him and thus he was determined to bring him down, not physically, but spiritually, to his level.
~
The scar represented a degradation of the physical to the mental. If there was a physical imperfection on this specimen of Chinese perfection it must mean that there was a mental imperfection. He saw this scar as the physical embodiment of Jianfeng's imperfection being his perfection. He was happy with this apparent paradox.
~
Passion was missing from this pairing. It should have been the perfect coupling. A representation of the best from two different cultures. Yet, it was Jianfeng's reluctance to kiss him that almost spoiled the moment. "I can't kiss you right now. It's too personal. A gate to my inner soul that I cannot, dare not show you yet,"
Jianfeng said through clenched teeth and fake piety.
It seemed now as if, touching together that two perfect beings had parted the curtain of desire and stepped through. His penis was erect; Jianfeng's body open to receive it; the motion of their connectedness was rocking with a single distinct purposefulness that was palatable. Even though Jianfeng twitched with desire for his cord and drew open his inner portal for him - it was impossible that their passion should ever come together from their two separate perfect forms into a perfect coupling but rather the scene highlighted the little littered pieces of their beings. For perfection demands or requires a glimpse only. No image with a sense of lust and passion came to them - it did not reflect the state of their soul.
~
His being dwindled in Jianfeng's presence. It seemed useless to ask Jianfeng what and why they were together, whose main purpose was to seduce him - rather than seek an answer. With a lack of understanding each of his penetrating thrusts caused his obsession to grow more intense.
~
With each received thrust Jianfeng's resolve grew stronger.
~
Both were unhealthy desires and both meant destruction of happiness. And each had less awareness of the other's true feelings. Yes, Jianfeng could read his lust on his face and was happy that he could cause such emotion within him but he knew not of what depths he had gone. And he knew nothing of Jianfeng's conscious, but not malicious, effort to destroy his beauty for the ultimate purpose of self-gratification and the preservation of Chinese perfection.
~
He turned and saw Jianfeng. He was his perfection. He wanted to speak to him but he thought, no; he would not bother the picture of his ideal. Jianfeng was aloof to him now - in his beauty. He would let him be, though it hurt him that Jianfeng could look so distant at this tender moment. This was one of these moments when an intents feeling panged him, without thinking about it, to speak to Jianfeng and force him, he did not care how, his desire was so great, to give to him what he wanted: love.
~
At this moment Jianfeng knew what love was. At this moment he knew he could never love. His goal was to make him believe that he was desperately in love. He now understood that this was the thing he desired the most. Love. That was the key to his destruction. "It was love," he thought, "distilled and filtered love; a love that never attempts to know its object; but like the phrases of poets or the notes of a composer, was meant to be known by all and add to humanity." Such passion - for what other name could one call it? That people should love like this was disturbing and foreign.
~
He knew that this life was cursed to eternal unhappiness. It was what he thought of as the "gay plague." Perhaps Jianfeng would be his cure. Perhaps he was merely the physical embodiment of this fact. As the depressingly eerie melody of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata began it signaled his submission to Jianfeng's will.
He watched Jianfeng's quiet innocence that surrounded his face, as they woke up in the morning. In an instant this changed when Jianfeng's laughter broke the pleasant silence. "Don't love me. Love is just an emotion and emotions are too vague to be real. Besides, you don't love me. You have nothing more than sexual desire for me and that is merely an animal instinct.
~
The boldness of his speech stunned him as if it was a clean incision and bright blood flowed like ink from a thick pen. He felt the drumming of his broken heart. His audience did not care for his soul or the hopes of this bloodied mortal, for Jianfeng was no mere mortal. He was Chinese perfection. He now understood that Jianfeng was a heartless man in a heartless world. But he did not care; he dared not, for he now possessed the spirit, the embodiment of his obsession.
He had perhaps been wrong; Jianfeng was no diaphanous angel with wings of down, reddened checks or golden halo. It seemed as if Jianfeng could become his cross, all dead unfeeling iron and coarse splintered wood with old brown blood on a path with no end. Dante's journey seemed intolerably easy compared to the challenge it seemed to be to love Jianfeng.
He would only make himself ridiculous in the eyes of Jianfeng. He would fail with him just as he had failed with all the other Asians. He had taken up the wrong obsession. His whole obsession was a mistake from first to last; it was a failure - he was a failure. But, he thought, he could never give it up.
The momentary glances Jianfeng threw him, at the office that day, dismantled him. This disaffection was caused by his internal turmoil. His choices now were to throw himself to the cold, deliberate passion of Jianfeng or try to resist. And though he knew it felt good he was concerned of the consequences for his personal as well as professional life. He did not want to ruin his chances. He knew from what Jianfeng had said the night before and this morning that there was something unusual about his Chinese lover. What he should do, his next course of action, still remained a mystery to him.
It was his obsession that fueled his demise. Obsession was the center of his thoughts. For it wasn't merely Jianfeng's perfectly alabaster skin, his shapely nose that sat so squarely in the middle of his face, his slender legs and the general perfect physique Jianfeng possessed that were going to destroy him, it was the obsession of the Asian. This fetish that could resist all attempts to abolish it. It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished to control it or not; to come out; standing alone - isolated like a desolate seabird. It was his power, not so much a gift, to take an individual and obsess about him. Though Jianfeng was an individual representation, he lost none of the intensity of his obsession and so to stand on the ledge of his mind, he understood what Jianfeng was there for.
He could watch Jianfeng all day, as if he were Donetello's David and he had been standing there for four hundred years. He thought Jianfeng's body was perfect. Smooth; soft, yet vibrant; hard as marble or bronze. It was bronze. His hands were delicate yet strong like the string of a bow. They could kill or give pleasure. His legs were like Roman columns or two rays of light; two roads leading to one point, the center of Jianfeng. He was the sweetest fruit of life and death.
He looked at Jianfeng's eyebrows. They were cold and clear. His eyebrows exhibited a youthful will; there was a harmony between his brown and his eyes; as if his eyes showed his fate and his eyebrows his will. What lies between the two was the struggle for who Jianfeng was. It is a fight fought by every beautiful youth. How many times had he wanted to see this kind of beauty? How many times had he wanted to make this kind of beauty his own? Of all the boys he had had Jianfeng was the most beautiful.
~
Jianfeng knew his weaknesses. It was the small things that he could use to bring down him. The flirtatious glances, the subtle gestures he could use as his bait to reel in him.
~
He truly wanted forgiveness. Forgiveness not of his actions. But of his being. He was not ashamed of who he was but rather of his shallowness, of what he had become. It was forgiveness he wanted, to be assured of his Western uniqueness; to be warmed and soothed in the knowledge of his distinctness. This was not enough, however. He must have forgiveness. He must be assured that he too was part of Western modernity. As he walked the streets of Dalian it was as if a flock; a herd; a gaggle; a pack of Chinese would follow him. For perhaps, it was not merely their curiosity of his foreignness but their ability to perceive his sinfulness. For what is sin merely but the perception of something dirty? And could it not be said that his soul was dirty? It was the Chinese likeness of this filth, rather than their disgust of it, that drove their understanding of who he was. His ability to turn everything into something sexual was a talent that made him popular in Dalian's gay world. For that was the word they used on him: popular. And yet popular was far from how he perceived himself to be.
He was nearing the climax of his obsession. He liked Asians but what about them held an attraction for him and he doubted whether it had any attraction for anyone else. He waited, impatiently and recklessly for the resentment of this obsession to die down in his heart. To follow his thoughts, the seeds of his growing disillusionment was to know the pain and sorrow he would feel after he had broken his addiction.
It was his turn now to see how Chinese Jianfeng was. And if he would be popular with him. He now understood that this popularity was not a good thing. But rather it was destruction. For that was what he and the Chinese shared: a destructive power. To bring a soul down to nothingness. Would Jianfeng be a typical Chinese or was he different? He hoped for the latter.
Yet the Chinese powers of destruction were different from his. There was nothingness in the Chinese. A black hole that could suck morality and being into its likeness. For being Chinese was being nothing. But his destructive ability was different. His was half an acquiescence to it and half a forgery of his true self. For this disguise was the cause of his, perhaps unintended, maliciousness.
He had come to realize that China's spiritual essence is that of a fourteen year old girl. There is a childish sexual game of control and domination. Only, however, in a state of ignorance; their pride diminishes any sense of purity or innocence. And this is why there is a subservient reality to the Chinese. This was his tragedy because his obsession could never be satisfied by its own lust for Chinese men. They will always be subservient and thus no sense of fulfillment can occur. The more he had them, the more he despised them. The more subservient they became in trying to appease his obsession, the more he wanted to abuse them.
He knew himself, in knowing his culture, without lying, for he was right, the Chinese were lacking substance. It was strange and incompressible that a culture with such a rich history could not cling onto its art; music; literature; he felt they were missing that. He wanted to teach the Chinese of Plato; Socrates; Da Vinci. There rose, from the depths of his mind, the insincerity of his obsession - roused him and annoyed him. "For, why, like a people that offer nothing of value," he thought. "Why can't they cherish their past, as the West does its?" He seized upon the fact that there is no logic; no reason; no order and no justice in China, but only suffering; death and the poor. There was nothing too base or too low for the Chinese to commit. No, happiness could not last for that was the treachery of his obsession that hung over his head as fog hangs over a lake early in the morning.
The advanced guards of Chinese curiosity, as if they were a troop of monkeys inspecting a new site, nibbled, inspected and fueled their desire to know who he was. In the little shops or on the streets the adults wholly resisted his attempts to introduce them to his Western culture. Yet the children, with their bare legs that were furred, bruised and dirtied perhaps began to change their sense of what being Chinese was. They began to change their shape and understanding of humanity and at once became filled and animated with joy. "Will you leave us? Will you go?" They asked, scarcely disturbed the excitement, the air of joviality as if the questions they asked scarcely required an answer: he would remain. Things that were said by the children, an ignorance of the foreign world was a sweet innocence but coming from the uninformed laboring adults was robbed of meaning, was like a voice without reason, consistently itself, beaten down but bounding up again to repeat their stupidity - lurched, crawled, stumbled toward a meaningful existence. What power could prevent the infertility, the insensibility, the illogicalness of the Chinese? The Chinese sense of being was something that was not entirely conscious, something that teetered, that lurched - something that did not excite them to live or work with dignity or solemnity.
"What did it mean then? What could it mean?" He asked himself, wondering whether, since he obsessed over Asians, was it better for him to stay in China or to leave. What did it mean to stay here? - a thought that floated in and out of his mind that could not reconcile his feelings but could only make his own reality cover the blankness of his mind. For really, what did he feel after having his Asian perfection and not being satisfied. Nothing, nothing - nothing that he could express. Alone among the Chinese lumpenproletariat he felt cut off from other people - from humanity. The Chinese, the city, the young gay boys all seemed like strangers to him now. He had no attachment to China, he felt, no relations with it; the state of anything happening was something he feared. It was almost as if the link that bound normal things together had been severed and he floated up here and there, off, in every direction. How aimless his life here was, how chaotic, how unreal it was.
"What is the meaning of life?" That was the all - a simple question. The revelation would never come. Instead, "Life is a tragedy," he thought. But this could not be true; life could not be a tragedy. There were little daily miracles, illuminations that came in the dark and so he thought that perhaps life was owning the day. Perhaps there were answers to be found. And though he was a young man himself he felt that he was not a blank slate, but he was full of impressions about the world. He believed that he was surrounded with unbounded darkness, always alone, always destitute of hope. He could see everywhere the river that was the current of life. It created its own path, its own destruction; as if his own madness wasn't enough this current sprang from his jealousies, his passions, his obsessions and desires. It shot forth a variety of sprays; it was unstoppable and nothing could check it. All of this pain and hurt, moving with tremendous force could wipe out mountains of love and joy, towards a definite sea of despair and sadness.
But why repeat these thoughts over and over again? Why always try to bring some feeling up that he did not have? There was a kind of blasphemy in it. His feelings were all dry; withered and spent. In this strife, chaotic, ruinous China he detested his obsessions. Surely, he could imitate, from recollection, the rhapsody of normalcy - the rapture of sympathy of the joy he would find in the revival that could be had if he could just be normal. All he wished was that this flood of regret, this thirst for sympathy, this deluge that could make him surrender himself to his desires, should be diverted or channeled.
He once had a lofty, beautiful dream, but destroyed it; he had had a bright promising future but he ruined it. For a short time he had created for himself a new ideal but then he let his head be numbed by his environment; his primal desires. He now lived his life totally for the gratification of his obsession, letting it do whatever it wanted to do to him. His path through life was strewn with sad memories and were he to brood and simmer in them always he could not find the heart to go on with his work among normal society. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ridiculous and ludicrous figure who idealized his own sinful lusts, a man who had caught a glimpse of his own unworthiness in the mirror. A terror seized him that at this time he had wished he could have triumphed over his obsession, but then some impalpable and vindictive force came against him, gathering forces so that he stepped close to the abyss, yet instead of turning to some other path, he walked straight ahead towards that abyss and when the day of falling into it came, there was nothing that he could do to prevent it.