Here at the exit of Mingzhu, a small train station close to Macao, after travelling ten thousand kilometers respectively from Vancouver and Melbourne, in this firefly-like moment right after five o’clock on October 12, with exactly half a century behind their long-stretched shadows and, above all, despite the enormous pressure of traditional social norms, imposed or internalized, they are now finally ready to join each other in body as in spirit.
1) It’s true that Ming has fallen in love with Hua several times in his life – each time significantly more after a certain period of separation – as much for her good looks as for her sunny character, but alas, he’s never even taken a close look at her since he first saw her at a high school meeting in 1973, let alone had any bodily contact of any kind.
So, the first thing he did when he met her face to face was hold her hand tightly and shake it for almost a whole minute, like a real long lost friend, as expected in public or by any acquaintance who might chance to see them in Zhuhai.
He remembered that she had once requested him half-heartedly to do nothing more than just touch her hand for the first three days after their reunion, for both her mind and body would need time to become prepared for further physical contact with “an other man” beside her husband, but no sooner did they get into the taxi than he began to fondle her surreptitiously from behind the passenger seat. Probably because she didn’t want to make a scene within the car, or because she actually enjoyed his caressing as much as he did, she gave him a free hand literally; in the meantime, she struck up a friendly conversation with the driver as if to cover Ming’s intimate gestures by distracting the third wheel’s attention. On their way to her home in Fuhua Square, one of the oldest and richest neighborhoods in the city, he was naturally more impressed by the fleshiness, softness and warmth of her shoulder, arm and side than by the hot weather, or the clean streets.
2) Once inside her spacious and well-designed condo suite, Ming locked the door behind him and stole a big kiss on her back neck..
“You are really bad!”
“How?”
“As bad as a naughty and impatient monkey!”
“I’ll take it as a compliment, since my family name sounds like one, anyway!”
To deflate her initial sense about his ‘badness,’ he told her how he had counted the time minute by minute and the distance kilometer by kilometer as his train was moving towards Zhuhai. Then he gave her a special gift, a poetry collection titled Limerence, which included thirty love poems he’d written for her before the COVID pandemic reached its peak. Though most of them were published individually later across the English-speaking world, he’d never mentioned the book to her..
“You know I’m an English illiterate. Will you translate it into Chinese for me?”
“Nay, not for now, unless into body language.”
“You mean…?”
“You got it.”
In return, Hua gave him a brand new tuner, exactly like the one she’d given him but soon asked him to return while they were still working as zhiqings (educated youths) in Mayuhe, a laboring camp during the last years of “Cultural Revolution.”
“Your previous tuner did set the tune of my love for women, if not that for my life, but now I can no longer play erhu with it, for lack of practice for the past four decades.”
“Well, more important for the time being is to fill our stomachs with food. Shall we go out for a slap-up meal?”
“A simple one in a nearby restaurant will do. You’ll be my richest dinner.”
“Shh! Bite your tongue, especially when we’re out, OK?”.
To avoid being seen by her next door neighbors, they left her home separately, pretending not to know each other. When they met again on the street, Hua led him into Yueyang Tower, where they had several typical Hunan dishes, all very hot and mouthwatering.
Seeing him sweating a lot in the lingering heat of late summer, Hua suggested going back to her condo suite for a shower instead of hanging out around the neighborhood. Upon their return, he insisted on her washing herself first. Without any hesitation, she got her things ready, stepped inside her personal washroom and closed the door behind her. He meant to follow her for a joint shower, but finding the door locked from inside, he gave up. Considering that she had never had an intimate relationship with any other man beside her husband, he knew he should allow her some time to warm up and learn to accept him with no reservation.
3) As if afraid that her husband might fly back from Australia to catch them red-handedly, Ming went out of his way to safe-lock the main door before entering her air-conditioned master bedroom. Seeing her sitting expectantly at the bed edge in a dark silk blouse, he was ambushed by an overwhelming wave of mixed emotions. First and foremost, he was amazed by the way she had carried her years so exceptionally well: while her facial features looked even more attractive to him than when he saw her in the flesh four years ago, her sixty-five-year-old body remained as shapely as that of a thirty-five-year young woman. .
As he approached her, he felt an increasingly strong note of high-spiritedness in the atmosphere. For both of them, he knew this was the first time to come so close to someone of the opposite sex other than their spouses, and that in her own bedroom, an extremely private space which even her husband would now have to knock at the door before he came into. At the same time, Ming became more anxious than ever before. On the one hand, he was worried that though she’d assured him of her love many times, her body might refuse him unconsciously, thus betraying her natural and innermost feelings for him. Indeed, any spontaneous resistance or the slightest pushing-away on her part would disappoint and disturb him in a profound way. On the other, he was more than nervous, like an unprepared student taking a major examination. As an inevitable and irreversible result of the aging process, he was simply uncertain if he had already lost his sexual power completely. Though he did bring Viagra with him, he strongly hoped that he would not have to use it. Even if he took a whole pill, who knows it might not necessarily work for him..
Between anxiety and excitement, he reached out for her hand and proposed to perform a little ritual first.
“What do we do?” said Hua, sounding no less nervous and excited than he was.
“Let’s bow to each other, like a young couple do during a traditional Chinese wedding ceremony!”
Giggling, she stood up and joined him in a mutual bow as he declared them to be “husband and wife” under the Sky as their witness.
4) To his great joy and comfort, Hua seemed to be enjoying every moment as he carried her with his arms into her bed, unclothed her and tried to enter her with all the manhood left to him. Sensing that she was too shy or too nervous to upgrade their relationship so instantly from a platonic one into a fleshly one, he turned off both the bed lamp and chandelier, hoping she would find it easier and more natural to have sex with him in total darkness. After all, theirs was an underground relationship that “could never be brought to light,” as the Chinese idiom goes. But despite her being considerate, cooperative and capable of producing more than plenty of moisture to welcome him in, he had a premature ejaculation before achieving erection, probably because he was too anxious, too constricted and suppressed and limp from pharmaceuticals, or simply too rusty long after he stopped interacting intimately with his wife since he experienced his first failure on March 29, 2021. While he felt particularly sheepish about the way he wetted her little garden as well as the bed sheets, Hua remained as courageous as helpful, saying that at their age, they should not expect too much of themselves in the first place..
“I want to take Viagra.”.
“No, please don’t use any medication.”
“No need to worry about my heart condition. My heart specialist in Canada has assured me that I have no serious heart disease, except a congenital HCM.”.
“It’s not that, but wouldn’t it be better if we just let it happen?”.
“Okie dokie, I prefer it to be natural too!”.
“Rest up first, while we can talk…”
Easing down to a more comfortable position on the bed, Hua began by asking him to elaborate his intimate relationships with women since they left each other in late 1970s. As he’d promised beforehand during their daily video-chats across the Pacific, he first told her how he had lost his virginity to a classmate from Shanghai Jiaotong University; then he confessed that he had loved three women most deeply in his entire life, including his first date and his wife..
“Who’s the third?”.
“No other than you yourself!”.
As both his first date and his wife could be construed as close versions of Hua though to a varying degree, he reiterated that she was the female prototype that had the strongest physical attraction to him: tall, slim, fair-skinned, with good-looking features as well as a cheerful and understanding character..
To satisfy his curiosity, Hua gave a quite detailed account of how several men had tried to pursue her since marriage, but she never gave any of them a chance, though one of them was “really rich and handsome,” another a highly likable lifelong admirer of hers like Ming himself..
“How come you’ve eventually fallen into my hands? Because of my literary achievements, or my romantic experiences?”.
“Figure it out yourself!”.
“Just want to have some hint from you…”.
“I have no idea. Perhaps precisely because of your ‘badness.’”
5) That’s really a hard nut to crack. He was never sure what she exactly meant by ‘badness,’ nor could he see any logic connection between his badness and her eventual fall.
Anyway, to live up to his alleged badness, he climbed on her again and tried for a solid penetration in the wee hours of the morning. Fortunately, this time his hardness and her wetness had the perfect timing. As he kept pushing in and pulling out, she skillfully used her strength to escort him in a rhythmical manner until he burst into a cry in a fit of ecstasy for the first time in his life..
“Where did you learn to do this? You made me a happy Taoist Immortal today!”.
“Isn’t it only too natural a thing for a women to do? Doesn’t your wife do the same?”.
“Nah. She just lies there all the time. Unlike you, she never interacts, much less actively and harmoniously.”.
It was not until now that Ming came to realize that he’d never experienced the true joy of sexual love before. Because his wife had too much reserve, or because she was born a frigid women as he’s always suspected, she has never given him such a highly elated sexual experience, though he could sometimes perceive her orgasms during ejaculation. Without Hua, he would never have known of the extreme ecstasy of sexual love after forty years of marriage, so to speak..
“Are you saying I’m a bit too lascivious?”
“Oh, no! I just want to say it’s you, and only you, who’ve given me a truly soul-melting experience in sexual love!”
6) As it happened, this was nothing less than a sexual feat for Ming. Ever since his libido began to wane about three years before, he’d never had any chance to enjoy sexual love even if he yearned for it from time to time, while every attempt was made only as a routine check-up on his sexual functionality, which had a crucial significance to him because somehow he tended to equate it with his poetic creativity.
By contrast, Hua seemed to be a living demon as portrayed in Journey to the West. Aged at 65, she was still as fully functional or perfectly active as a young woman in a sexual sense, though her periods ceased when she was forty-nine, much like his wife. In this sense, she was a true wonder woman, a woman out of a hundred, if not of a thousand. As for himself, this accomplishment might have been more a result of effort than that of luck. For the past few years, he’d done a lot of physical exercise, including Kegels and the traditional Daoist anus-liftings. To make sure of a natural intercourse, he had also taken traditional herbal supplements regularly, drinking such as Goji tea and other traditional multiple-element tonic beverages. And before coming to Zhuhai, he’d also been eating turtle soup with fresh chives every morning for nearly two consecutive weeks. Now all hard work seemed to have paid off.
7) For young couples, natural penetration is no more than a walk in the park, but for Hua, and especially for Ming, it is a matter of life and death. While he could have died of a heart attack in the process, it has not only allowed them to experience the greatest joy of sexual love as man and woman, but also marked the most significant moment in their relationship, which they know is “immoral” to others but life-sustaining to themselves. Without such in-depth connectivity, their souls would never have become so complete as soulmates, nor would they die with their eyes fully closed in content.
Yes, they’ve made it. If sexual love is really a beast, Ming and Hua have managed to grab its tail as it’s plodding away from them steadily and surely.
Yuan Changming edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 2 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2019 other literary outlets worldwide. A poetry judge for Canada’s 2021 National Magazine Awards, Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022. This story was inspired by Qi Hong (祁红).
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