I'm going, I am gone, and won't be back to trouble the timbers anymore. You can get lost by looking back. A's a tropic plant - good for nothing but flowers... I'm not with anyone... I'm walking downstairs from the art gallery. That astutely humble painter knows how to sell paintings with refined manners alone.

To the boomshelter is born - a holy-wad... Yes, they knew how to choose them for their graces... I'm only thinking quietly - isn't that allowed? Nope. I was thinking - that big aura thing scares me: I don't want to be the magnet of a motion picture, a stereo voice - severed from the machines playing me back. Do it live, in person, always - if you can. That's the only way...

I want a woman in my arms so I can know her before she starts to act - before she starts to pretend she's being seen as she wants to be seen... A woman is more near to me than an actress... Ah, but movies are so much easier to get inside than paintings... You need to contemplate a painting. A painting begs too much and makes us think hard through the mystery of what we're looking at - and most of us don't know where to begin. That woman made of subtly colored oils - she can't tell you who she is...

You must forget me. I'm too simple. You will remember her instead. I want you to squeeze some more lemon monsieur. My drink is dry and I need her. Women want to do it, even when they pretend to be hardcore feminists, even when they're too repressed: they just need a guy with size or character enough to fulfill their particular fantasy of easy-taking... All women want men to love them. If you really begin to understand that first, you begin making love to a woman as soon as you begin to speak... All women wait for you to find the key to her need. First start by thinking: she likes to imagine that you can see who she is; or try the other extreme: she knows that you can't possibly understand her. A woman will not admit anything about what she thinks of you... Subtle entry or aggressive lust doesn't matter. Loving to fuck has nothing to do with the character of her preferences for men. How she sees you depends in large measure upon whatever she imagines you want, or what she desires for herself in her ideal man. Does she know you at all? Does it matter? That preliminary game is only a mood she expects you to see through - to get from imagination into the pants of action.

She's walking across the courtyard of the Yak Hotel, looking holes into the pavement. Crossing her path, I'm almost asleep, quite unimpeded by superstition or desire. She's there - like a mistake. The weird thing is that she's happened to me before. I feel the subtle psychic wave as I tread the tarmac before her subconscious. It feels as if she's coming for me alone. I've run into women, coming into and out of doors, and they looked as if they wanted to see me. That connection is real, like a pure desire of nature. Her name doesn't matter...

I want to be evocative. She wears a velvety dress, orientally long, as clingy as a flower pod - appealing to man's wish to entrap the feminine form. That's the history of Chinese female wardrobe: it plays with a woman's curves, especially the broad back swooping into her waist like water into a gorge. The hips open a winsome flowers. Caught in her tight ankle length sheath, the woman walks constricted steps, moving between her legs, one butt cheek slipping over the other. Maybe god will forgive her for being very capable of orgasm, a child of pure pleasure, and for loving herself more than he... She always wonders where I am... Look - here's another lovely Chinese girl from Chengdu - I don't know her name and met her in a disco a few years back...

I'm over here - see me, darling? Not yet. She's lugging a huge suitcase - but does not expect me to make the intercept. I can't help it. I'm too timid, harassed and skeptical to open my eyes anymore... I can never get what I want! She's still pointing questions at the earth, using her toes and nose. I can see she likes my complex, man's mind. She looks into my eyes...

We talk. Her room is only one flight up. I take her heavy bag upstairs. She wants me to. As soon as we enter her room in the old wing of the Yak Hotel, I have to think about what she looks like. She dissatisfies her hair, frazzling her perm with a hair dryer. But she does have a supple, athletic physique.

I'm sitting in her grandpa's armchair. She watches me as we answer each other's questions. I see the compact size of her body. She's Ms. Y, independent business lady. Her way to make money is to sell candy, flour and sugar in shops from Sichuan to Tibet. She's a real live sugar mama, with a perfect swimmer's bod... She goes swimming every day! Immediately, I sense she's looking for a replacement hubby and already thinks of me. She doesn't know that I won't like the idea of going to live in Chengdu, her home.

~ Stop and ask, "What's admired today?" People who are good for nothing but selling guns and ammo to any old bastard country.

You have to wait three hundred years before you dare to admire my work. I don't care. I'm already 38 and need something to lift me up... Maybe a joint, but haven't got one... These fucking morons on the radios and tv keep calling me an "in." Horrifying! What's an "in?" Insane? I am not that bad. I'm terrified and I really want to die - but only because they call me an "in." I don't know what an "in" is... So, I write a poem about it that you can't find in a book, snook! Got an English name? They won't call you insane! Work all day and all night for nothing. Less money than you are promised, and zero respect. But my mind is mine and I don't owe anybody a thing... What's this nonsense? A screwy memorial to all the Sarahs, Mei-meis and Kates. I want all of them...

...Her cellular jingles and she answers. This is business: she speaks briskly and nicely to the man - at first. Then she leans over the phone, like it's a root growing from her deepest need into her greatest fear. Apparently, the crook businessman at the other end, a Chinese, is lying and is running away with all the money that he owes her. Meanwhile, I sit here as she gets all riled, like a suckling pig to the needs of all the men she so wants to use... But she can't use them, poor thing!

She's the kind who looks for love without knowing it. The onus is now on me to oblige her. I am made too conscious of her expectation - so I decide not to... I don't want to have sex only to help a woman forget her sorrow. It might be fun once in a while, but not as the prime motive. I'd prefer doing her from the first. I dream of virgins, or sexy wives - because they know their husbands are cheating on them! Yeah - then they can remember my sex forever. Really, that's much more satisfying...

The man on the end of the line refuses to pay. She's in a humiliating position. She barks out a few angry demands but gets excuses. So she hangs up, now quietly disgusted. I watch, agape, feeling the full humiliation of my loserly and superfluous presence. Because - I can't help her! But this lady is so simply alone... Sometimes the loneliest woman is the biggest turn on. Other times, she makes you want to run fast and far away. On the outside I appear, as usual, the calmly collectible hobo-for-hire. Her simple mastery of fate laughs at my imaginary freedom. She doesn't need to care about anything, not with a bank account like that!

This is mainland China/Tibet! How could a successful businesswoman even happen here!? Questions and history wait in slow queues. Women wait for us to ask the right questions... "How did you become a business lady?"

"I was an English teacher until..." She divorced, retreated home and then started her business with ten years of savings from teaching. By work and luck, she managed to create a successful distributing firm. She sells flour, sugar and candy. She moves it from points east and south to Sichuan and resells. She has two houses and at least fifty people work for her. She claims that she's lucky. She's completely independent with an income that depends on how much she can sell. She reveals the double structure of independent and government economy prevailing in China.

The people who work as party cadres tend to have a fixed official income no matter their position up and down the ladder... Perhaps this growing discrepancy between independent endeavor and the fixed system of government economy may help to explain some of the social chaos and weird economic disarray in China today. The cadre has power but begins with small money in his pocket; so, he uses his power to funnel more money into his purse by means of favors. Meanwhile, the honest business lady Ms. Y doesn't need to play such tricks to earn her privileges. She only needs to discover a market. But if the communist cadre wants that house and a new car in his name, he must make many more friends than deals - and some enemies, too! The more corrupt cadres must also learn how to pick the pockets of the public coffers...

There's nothing new about giving and receiving money and privileges in China. Study the old society of two hundred years past: simply read the novel, "The Scholars," by Wu Ching-Tzu, then you will see how the academic proficiency test, along with connections to money and influence, allowed some few individuals to purchase their positions of power. They earned the right to sell them to others later in life. The man destined to become a provincial prefect, he would need to be born with some extra cash and the right friends. Quite simply, his father or uncle was likely to have held the job before him. We still see this rigid progression of familial destiny upheld in the strict hierarchy of Oriental society, especially in Taiwan and China. Although the communist revolution dispossessed the old order in mainland China, it created a new variation on the old hierarchy. The communist revolution in China, like the revolution in Russia nearly a century ago, was born from pure frustration; its impetus arose among an educated class of individuals who believed that things had to change if the country was to develop into a modern power with a liberated citizenry... These intellectuals inflamed the peasants to rise up - and they really did! It's like a miracle when you think back on it. I admire the Chinese for their courage and their ability to tear down an old order and then slap together a completely new one... Many people explain that the democratic movement inspired by Sun Yat Sen, and the subsequent communist revolt were inevitable... Patriarchy and feudalism, corruption and starvation, and perhaps most of all, brutal authoritarian resistance to all progressive change inevitably gave birth to determined revolutionaries. Unfortunately, all too many of the new Communists tended to retain the same national characteristics of those they had to defeat... Historians have said that the Communist revolution in China saw a very simple change take place: as the indolent city-born intellectuals and the careless rich men who supported the last dynasty were swept aside, they were replaced with ill-educated country boys and impractical theorists who in their turn were locked up in the city. None of the revolutionaries knew anything about developing China properly. Then again, nobody else inside or out of China knew, either... For several decades before the revolution, China was a disorderly, poverty-bound mess.

But while that's all past now, we still observe an old order of behavior in Taiwan and China today. Legalism and technocracy have come to Asia, but I might add, democracy is a new idea. Most educated people in Taiwan today rely on a sort of "import ideology," an ineffectual rhetoric that ignores and fails to take into account the deeply engrained socio-psychological characteristics of the Oriental-Pacific body politic which inhibit the progress of equality, fraternity and democracy.

(Of course, democracy doesn't really exist anywhere in the world today except, at best, a nominal "reality" denoting a non-existent, and rather dreamy social ideal. The West is responsible for over-rating democracy to the point of blind stupidity, perhaps for the sake of securing the election of a narrow caste of rich people to high public office. Democracy has seen less development in Asia than almost anywhere else, except perhaps in Africa. Meanwhile - American, Japanese, Chinese, British, French and German corps go on dumping their cheap dangerous drugs, their toxic chemicals, their military weaponry, and their fake ideology - whatever. What do you know? These heroic, democratic Western leaders aren't called terrorists by economic journals anymore than by the Nue Jork Thymes, nor even ignorant punks on the street deprived of all chance for getting a good education, much less a first job.... The world stays horribly unbalanced.)

Oh I know - there are plenty of good old boys who will want to impose a sentimental analysis upon the remnants of their genetic heritage - the grandiose post-feudal-patriarchy - that cozy club made of a legal education, a corporate stewardship, that ol' money-talks-cracy. Everyone pretends it's "democracy." Overlook the negative and accentuate the positive - so you can cling to power and find some excuse for the lack of any progressive social change. Ignore the weak rights of workers, and the huge concentrations of wealth among very few individuals. A downright Oriental rightist would exclaim, heartily, that the fewer super-rich power barons that there are in the business world, the better, since the inherent stability of authoritarian (wealthy) patriarchy depends directly upon how concentrated its forces can be hoarded among a few powerful friends. These power cliques inevitably "stabilize" (paralyze?) the society; stale intransigence becomes the highest virtue, at least according to fusty old Confucius. Maybe not if you are a woman: but that point of view doesn't touch the old men who are quite content to run the Asian world... (Yes, and my analysis is unfair, too. There's a creeping tendency towards more transparency and free play among Asia's would-be democrats, but an awful lot of sticky old cronyism isn't going away next week.)

Never before has the Western way of thinking and doing business exerted so much influence over the "development" of China; however, the substructure and the underlying fabric of power and the concentration of money - they tend to follow the old patterns: a few are very wealthy. But most people are obliged to work silently for very poor wages to enrich the wealthy. Taiwan has seen the rise of a much more robust middle-class than mainland China, but that's because nearly the whole island has evolved into an organized, urban society. But the whole of mainland China cannot develop in the same way.

In China, as in all societies around the globe, there are deeply engraved patterns of ethno-genetic and acculturated behavior. The social character of a people is perhaps nowhere so pronounced and deeply engrained as among the Han Chinese of China. While it is truly fascinating to examine the wide variety of minority groups who coexist in peace together all over China, only the Hans, with the exception of a few isolated pockets of Mongolians, have drifted into the remotest corners of China: Sichuan, Yunnan, and finally, Tibet.

On the whole, the Chinese have a very difficult character. With each new wave of ideas and techniques imported from the outside, you will find an equally old way of entrenching it under a system of authoritarian, patriarchal control. Even as things change and industry develops under the influence of Western progress, more often than not, things have developed after the manner of faulted mimicry than from inspired and original adaptation. Sometimes we see an attempt to unite a Western and an Eastern way of working: the electronic sector flourishing on Taiwan is a prime example... But as a rule I would say that most Westerners are usually blinded from understanding these inimical people. The Westerner cannot understand why everyone is kept on a short leash, nor why everyone is so pushy, autocratic and pointlessly mean. Rights and equality are meaningless concepts in such a cramped place.

The best thing I can say, in an effort to capture the "character" of the Chinese people, is that their individual personalities are strongly shaped by their immediate social milieu. Simultaneously, there is a pronounced psychological streak towards violent and chaotic behavior in the Chinese social organism. This need to rebel and fight, results directly from their authoritarian history. China has for a very long time been a "fear-driven" society: discipline and authority are rigorously imposed from outside: the warlord and emperor have always exercised complete control over everyone... There is "no escape" from this Chinese psychic disposition, as one or the other authority must vie to assert indisputable power over neighboring social forces.

Chinese people, and most Asian peoples, have been horribly repressed from self-expression. All Oriental peoples occasionally need to rebel against the permanent structural defects of their society, call it the "over-control" of centralized authority, familial-paternal-maternal - the external absolute overlord - all of whom have debilitated individual personality, the development of imagination and inhibited all attempts at social liberty. (For example, in the eyes of many Western females, Chinese women appear very simplistic and narrow in the scope of their social credulity, and the women appear to lack broad ideas and personal aspirations. But at the same time, that Western envy tends to ignore the subtle feline grace, spiritual purity and gentleness of the Oriental woman - traits which most Western women very much lack...) With every surge of collective or personal frustration, the history of China shows us that chaos ensues in the form of rebellion, revolution or a warlord attack. It is reasonable to suggest that the evolution of Chinese law and Confucian thought was also inspired by fear of the inevitable, and represents a congenital social reaction to the "over-control" of arbitrary central authority. Small warlords and chaotic rebellions have repeatedly crushed the society into lawlessness. Rules are imaginary and power has so often held nominal forms as frustrated centers clashed to assert their being and right to thrive. It seems that the only way to thrive in China has been to be the one and only central authority... Strange paradox: that only single, very powerful emperors could give the appearance of unity to all the many Chinas... Unfortunately, revolts and civil wars led to flip-flops, and the conquest always established a new order that behaved much as the former one, mercilessly repressing everyone. The harsh style of centralized control exercised by present-day Chinese communist authorities is nothing new, and clearly reflects the great fear of the chaos innate within the Chinese soul. Monarchist, theocratic, republican or communistic Chinese rulers have always behaved in the same silently diffuse, yet chillingly over-bearing manner. The result is a vicious circle of central authority in opposition with frustrated, murdered and otherwise cruelly silenced individuals. Not surprisingly, the people of China have long suffered from a great fear and hatred of authority; simultaneously, they have often given blind admiration and selfless devotion to their strongest leaders...

The main problem with China's authoritarian social character is its stagnancy and negativity: people in such a society are not really able to blossom - they are afraid and pressured by inequality to slave for almost nothing. So they go crazy or become criminals. Independent thought is not encouraged. Those with too much power become selfish, cruel and savage in the possession of their privileges. There is no chance at all for equanimity to emerge, but the imbalance between privilege and injustice grows as individuals take on the same old roles of mean control and subservient impotence... It's no wonder at all that so many eastern peoples have taken to Buddhism with a passion! To resign and give up the individual will is actually the same thing as expressing indifference to repression and authority: the result appears to be perfect freedom for the individual - exactly where none seemed possible before!

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copyright © 2001
by David Antoniuk