He pushed the cynical words of the actress’s mother to the back of his mind, sat down on the ground and leafed through all the correspondence relating to Chi Hui. A strange passion welled up in his heart. He wanted to conduct a love affair with a woman all by himself. He wanted to suffer the agonies of love. He wanted to kiss someone, conquer them, adore them. He wanted a woman of flesh and bone. A thin layer of sweat moistened his face. He laughed with delight as he looked through the drafts of the letters he had sent Chi Hui. He realised he loved her, that perhaps he had always loved her. In these letters, he had written descriptions of her beautiful hair, teeth, dimples and breasts, and between each word and every line he had left traces of his love.
He rose to his feet and walked to his desk. An immense joy seemed to fill the room. The hitherto numb nerve endings in his groin and thighs suddenly came alive. His mind clouded, his chest ached with anticipation, his pulse quickened a beat. He imagined smiling coyly as Chi Hui shook her head at him. He scooped a pile of Chi Hui’s letters into his arms and jumped back onto the bed. He ran his tongue over his upper lip, stretched one leg in front of the other and chuckled contentedly.
Hearing a soft knock at the door, he quickly swallowed his laugh. Experience had taught him that the sound of laughter always attracted the police. He fastened his belt, and like a man who has been summoned for interrogation, opened the door with his head hung low. A figure, smelling both stale and sweet, darted inside, slammed the door and stood in front of him. Through his eyelashes, the street writer recognised the face of the actress’s mother. She twisted her large mouth into a smile, and gazed at him with eyes that were as deep and narrow as the eyes of a leopard.
‘It’s you …’ he whispered, terrified and confused.
‘My daughter committed suicide last night. She never listened to my advice.’ The old woman edged closer and wrapped her arms around him.
He had no time to put up a struggle. The old woman carried the frail, tubercular street writer to the bed, and pressed her wine-stained lips over his mouth. The next image that shot through his mind was not Chi Hui and her flowing locks, or the policeman who had harassed him on the street corner – it was the old woman’s dark eyes glinting in the lamplight. Then his mind went blank and all he could see was a white plastic bag floating in the still air. Suddenly, he felt his tiny body, like a puff of breath, plunge into a dark vat of grease. He tried to free himself from the old woman’s grip, but before he could summon the energy, the lights went out, everything went black, and he could no longer see a thing.
Let the Mirror Be the Judge or Naked
The professional writer sees the girl running naked down the street, her drooping nipples as sad and lonely as the eyes of a blind man. In his mind, he still confuses this girl with the entrepreneur’s mother, whose personality seems to have seeped into many of the characters of his unwritten novel.
The girl’s breasts were large, plump, heavy, soft and pendulous. Women see these fleshy protrusions as tools for flirtation and nurture; for men, they are the inspiration for a multitude of criminal thoughts. Erudite students refer to them as bosoms; artists portray them as pink-tipped peaches; peasants merely regard them as objects that droop to the stomach and are grabbed hold of when babies need a feed. In the villages, men get to see naked breasts all the time; for them a bare breast is as unremarkable as a bare arm. But as soon as these protrusions enter the towns, they become objects of immense value. Modern women mystify them, hiding them inside tight brassieres. Photographers are always careful when they aim their cameras at a woman’s chest, because they know that too much cleavage can lay them open to accusations of ‘Bourgeois Liberalism’, and consign them to a four-year stint in prison.
The more daring contemporary writers refer to them variously as ‘curvaceous pillows’, ‘tender dumplings’, ‘rose petals’, ‘ripe grapes’ and my longed-for refuge’. When describing the experience of touching a breast for the first time, they claim they ‘joined the immortals’, ‘fainted with delight’, ‘tottered on the precipice between life and death’. As a reaction against this sentimentality, avant-garde writers prefer to use words like ‘tits’, ‘knockers’ and ‘withered strawberries’.
With the advent of the Open Door Policy, a few facts about breasts have entered the public consciousness:
Large, round breasts signify a virtuous wife and able mother. Good marrying material.
Medium-sized, pert breasts with pale pink nipples signify the ideal mistress. (Breasts like these make artists drool with desire.)