Lying flat in the West — Sang Ye’s interview with a hooker in search of a golden heart

“The Way does not prevail. I shall take a raft and put out to sea” 道不行，乘桴浮于海. Although Confucius was not actually forced to take to the high seas, his collected sayings The Analects, from which this line is taken, reflect his peripatetic anxiety in an age of disorder. He traveled throughout the Warring States in search of a sage ruler who would take his advice and restore “The Way,” or good governance.

As what felt like forever lockdowns under China’s “dynamic COVID-zero” regime in 2020–2021, people of means searched for an escape from what felt like creeping stagnation and a slow degradation of “The Way” that led to China’s remarkable economic success. Rùnxué 润学, or “runology” in English, became modern-day slang for “putting out to sea,” that is running away and emigrating overseas. Today, Confucius is hailed on the Chinese internet as “the founding father of runology” 润学祖师爷.

Long before Confucius, fleeing social repression and political uncertainty was a commonplace feature of Chinese life. In The Art of Survival, a compendium written in Taiwan in the 1960s by Lǐ Aó 李敖, a famously obstreperous and persecuted writer, “taking a raft and putting out to sea” comes in second place after “finding refuge in the mountains,” the solution chosen by Bó Yí 伯夷 and Shū Qí 叔齐, China’s first dissidents. According to legend, the brothers chose to hide in the mountains and starve to death rather than submit to tyranny.

The term “runology” only describes the latest wave of self-imposed exile in modern Chinese history. Apart from the repeated surge of migrants leaving the southern provinces of the Qing empire during its nineteenth-century decline, enterprising individuals and groups left in waves from the end of the century. There were those who traveled never to return, while others went to Japan and Western nations to pursue their studies in the hope of contributing to the Republic that was founded in the wake of dynastic collapse. Then there was the war generation who were displaced by the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and another wave of exiles resulting from the Civil War in the 1940s. Although some returned to China following the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, many more flooded into the British colony of Hong Kong. Even more would “run” during the famine years of the Great Leap Forward and some even made it out to Burma and Hong Kong amidst the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.

When I first worked in Hong Kong in the late 1970s, some of my coworkers, friends and acquaintances had “fled the harsh rule of the Qin” 避秦苛政 during the Mao era, or were the progeny of exiles. The expression was a reference to “Record of the Peach Blossom Spring” 桃花源记, a famous fourth-century essay by Táo Yuānmíng 陶渊明 that told of a traveler who happened upon a hidden rural idyll far from the harsh politics of the day. The earlier refugees in Hong Kong were, when I lived there, now joined by a new influx of mainlanders who, despite the promise of the post-Mao relaxation, were unwilling to give the Party another chance.

Years later, when I was finishing my doctoral studies back in Australia, I met many young Chinese who were taking advantage of what was called the ELICOS program — short for English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students — a money-earning government policy initiated in 1986 that encouraged Chinese students to take English preparatory courses for tertiary education. By the late 1980s, mostly funded by family members, thousands of P.R.C. students were in the program. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, the government granted protection visas to about 20,000 Chinese students. By the early 1990s, over 40,000 students and their families had been granted residence. The number soon swelled to 100,000, the largest wave of Chinese migration to Australia since the gold rush of the 1850s.

***

On the eve of those developments, in 1987 the Australia-China Council and the Literature Board of the Australia Council, two government bodies, had asked me to suggest the name of a Chinese writer who might accept a literary fellowship and be willing to travel around the country. I suggested that they invite Sāng Yè 桑晔, an oral historian who had come to fame with the publication of Chinese Lives: An Oral History of Contemporary China, a translated selection from the one hundred interviews with everyday Chinese that he had done with Zhāng Xīnxīn 张辛欣. Those interviews, published in the leading literary journals of the day, were hailed as the first “literary sensation” of the post-Mao era. They offered the first, relatively unvarnished account of life under the economic reforms.

As the editors of the English edition of Sang and Zhang’s book wrote:

“Chinese Lives is the product of a chain of influences between China and the West stretching back a quarter of a century to 1962, when the Swedish anthropologist Jan Myrdal and his wife Gun Kessle spent a month in a Shaanxi village, interviewing over fifty of its people about their lives. The resulting Report from a Chinese Village inspired Studs Terkel to embark on the first of his books of oral history, Division Street: America. His later books, Working and American Dreams: Lost and Found, attracted much interest in Chinese translation, and gave two young writers the idea of a similar collection to record the feelings of Chinese people about their lives in the 1980s.”

(Terkel also influenced Dài Qíng 戴晴, an aspiring writer working in the cultural bureaucracy who accompanied him during his 1981 trip around China. Until she was arrested and banned in 1989, Dai would be China’s most influential “unofficial historian” and her investigations were an early, if now unacknowledged, influence on the works of “counterhistory” produced in the P.R.C. from the 1990s.)

Since Sang Ye had recently returned to Beijing from a long trip around China, I thought that he might be up to the challenge of the Australian outback. He was, and Sang Ye recorded his adventures in The Finish Line: A Long March by Bicycle through China and Australia, published in 1994. He also continued his work as an oral historian and, starting in 1988, a “year of the dragon” 龙年, he interviewed over one hundred people who had come to Australia. The majority had availed themselves of the ELICOS program, but their true motives varied: to study, of course, to make their fortune, to join family, or to settle as business migrants. The Year the Dragon Came, a translated selection of those interviews edited by Linda Jaivin was published by University of Queensland Press in 1996.

The book was an unsettling read for multicultural Australia and it appeared just as a politician-led wave of xenophobia swelled in a country that had, superficially at least, seemed to have moved on from its “White Australia” past. Sang Ye’s interview subjects were disarmingly frank in their assessment of a county that they now chose to call their home. One review of the book noted that the dramatis personae included “intellectuals, dissidents, and escapees from the horrors of Tiananmen, visiting professors teaching Chinese for a pittance, scholars of Australian Studies, former government cadres, uneducated factory workers out to make money, corrupt entrepreneurs looking to ‘screw some foreign devils,’ individuals persecuted for their religion in China, and others who falsely claimed religious persecution in order to emigrate, spivs and prostitutes. The more considered voices of some non-mainland Chinese — a Taiwanese woman studying social work and a Hong Kong woman whose family came out as ‘business migrants’ round out the picture.”

That review went on to say that “…this is a profoundly disturbing book for Australians to read. Sang Ye’s words in the preface give an inkling of what is to come: “China is a country with a strong xenophobic, isolationist tradition; a place where deeply racist sentiments are not uncommon.”. Even so, the Australian reader will be unprepared and probably shocked and offended by the contempt displayed by virtually every Chinese person interviewed here for Australian people and the Australian way of life.”

“I don’t have any ‘Australian dream.’ This place isn’t good enough for my dreams,” says one of Sang Ye’s interlocutors. As a preferred destination, Australia comes in only third after America and Japan. “In the eyes of the Chinese,” another tells him, “you’re a second or third-rate country…To put it more bluntly, Australia’s become a refuge for drifters, a dumping ground for the world’s garbage.” One of the thousands of “students” who had dropped out of English classes to work declares that Australia should offer permanent residency. “Look at it this way,” she says, “so many talented and educated individuals left their homes to come here. We could have gone elsewhere but we didn’t. We chose Australia and Australians should be happy to have us.”

The tenor of many of the interviews in The Year the Dragon Came was similar to my observation about Sang Ye’s conversation with a software pirate at Zhongguancun, China’s future Silicon Valley, in Beijing in 1995. In the translator’s introduction to that interview, published in Wired, I wrote:

From his mouth pours the brash, in-your-face voice of contemporary China. It’s the voice of a nation proud of its 5,000-year-old culture, but acutely aware that this culture has been humiliated by more than a century of technological backwardness, political decay, and imperialist aggression. The message is unambiguous and unapologetic: We’re here. We’re mean. Get used to it.

***

The following interview originally appeared under the title “Are you Satisfied?” in the June 1991 issue of Independent Monthly, a short-lived current affairs journal published in Melbourne. In 1996, it featured as the first chapter of Sang Ye’s The Year the Dragon Came, which we titled “Are You Ready?”, the first line of the “Song of the Communist Children’s Corps” 共产主义儿童团团歌, which Sang Ye’s interviewee sings.

The Chinese prostitute that Sang Ye interviews here is unapologetically frank. Instead of the pronouns “she” and “he,” she refers to women as “stinking cunts” (臭屄 chòubī) and men as “pricks” or “dickheads” (屌/  屌男人 ​​diǎo/ diǎo nánrén).

She also observes that Chinese students and the other mainlanders from the People’s Republic that she had encountered while plying her trade on the Gold Coast in Queensland, were not interested in a Chinese sex worker. That’s because, she tells us, they think “that to screw foreign cunt is a kind of patriotism,” (肏外国屄也算爱国麼 cào wàiguóbī yě suàn àiguó me), translated here as “to screw a foreign woman is to win glory for China.”

It was too good a line not to use and, in June 1995, I published an academic paper on China’s new nationalism under the title To Screw Foreigners is Patriotic 肏老外是爱国的. It struck a chord and was picked up in China where it was immediately attributed to Wáng Shuò 王朔, a celebrated wit and the Beijing master of “scamp literature.” Wang, a friend who combined a strong commercial instinct with a finely honed irony, told me that, since the line encapsulated the anti-foreign sentiment of such best-sellers as China Can Say No! 中国可以说不, he was more than happy to take a bow for it.

***

Like Chinese friends of my vintage, since the 1970s I have witnessed four waves of “runology.” They have been part of the heartbreaking political and economic biorhythms of post-Mao China. Today, faced with what New Yorker writer and author Evan Osnos calls “China’s Age of Malaise,” “runology” is once more in vogue. The resulting feelings of “tedium” and “ennui” encapsulated in the title of the series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium, published in China Heritage since early 2022, are germane to the sense of déja-vu that characterizes the Xi era. Clumsy political practices, tireless cultural policing, hard-to-explain policy backflips, stentorian sloganising, hubristic xenophobia and snarky nationalism are all too familiar from the past. Equally exhausting for those involved is the fact that when “everything old is new again,” it also seems that the modest progress of the past will inevitably have to be pursued again, albeit with considerable difficulty, at some point in the future.

I am grateful to Linda Jaivin for permission to reprint the following chapter from The Year the Dragon Came, a long-forgotten and disturbing gem of a book and to Callum Smith for typing out Sang Ye’s interview.

—Geremie R. Barmé

***

“In the last months of his life, Mao Zedong pointed to Australia on a world map and said, ‘I wouldn’t want to go to Australia; just looking at it on the map makes me feel lonely.’ He wouldn’t be lonely here now.”

— from Sang Ye’s introduction to The Year the Dragon Came

***

“Are You Ready?”

Sang Ye

Translated by Geremie Barmé and Linda Jaivin

(from Sang Ye, The Year the Dragon Came, edited by Linda Jaivin, Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1996, pp. 1-17.)

I found her through a Chinese-language advertisement posted in a supermarket in Brisbane’s Chinatown. There are dozens of such ads every day in Australia’s Chinese language press: “escorts”, “tour guides,”, “masseuses”, that sort of thing. You can even specify whether you want a Mandarin or Cantonese speaker.

We met in the lobby of an upmarket hotel. She was wearing a lavender dress, nothing flashy or even particularly sexy. It wasn’t the sort of outfit you imagine prostitutes wearing. Her “manager,” a Chinese fellow with a cordless telephone, disappeared as soon as I showed up. We went into the hotel coffee shop. I had said I just wanted to talk to her, and when I explained I hoped to interview her for my book, she agreed immediately.

***

I can tell you we were meant to meet. It’s in our karma. My life story is a book. You name it. La Dame aux Camélias, Du Shiniang, Butterfly Dream — I mean Madam Butterfly. Bugger the dreams. I went to university in China. Can you beat that? A university-educated whore. Maybe I could call my autobiography Out of Asia and Reaching for the World.

I don’t care what happens, I’m not going back, and no one in Australia can do anything to make me. Just try me: you can boil me in oil, cook me in soy sauce, pop me in a steamer, whatever you’ve got a taste for. Call me a slut if you like. Doesn’t bother me. “You’re a goddamn whore!” Yeah, and what of it!

“The East Wind blows, the war drums roll, in today’s world, no one’s scared of anyone else.” Chairman Mao taught us Chinese not even to fear death. So why should I be scared of losing face? Just write it all down and to hell with it.

You can only speak like this to Chinese, you know. The Australians are dogs. Can’t expect them to understand. Our “Taiwan compatriots” aren’t much better, in fact, they’re complete fuckwits. The only thing they know about is pussy — yellow pussy.

I went to university in the town where I grew up. But if you want the whole story the hour you’ve paid for isn’t going to be nearly enough. That was in Nanchang; I was born and bred in Jiangxi Province. I usually just say I’m from Shanghai or Peking. All these dimwits here know is that China has a Peking, a Shanghai and a Canton. Try explaining to them where Nanchang is! Sometimes I say I’m from Singapore. They’ll believe anything. I even say I’m twenty-three and they believe that too. Chinese look younger than Australians. They can’t tell. Usually no one asks my age. It’s so fucking hilarious: It’s like here they are, they’ve paid for my pussy and they still don’t want to “violate my human rights” by asking my age. So that’s what democracy and freedom are all about!

The Taiwanese are different. The first thing they ask is your age. Chinese are such clods.

I’m actually twenty-nine. I was born in 1961. Nearly thirty, means I’m getting old. I went to primary school and high school during the Cultural Revolution and took the university entrance exams after the fall of the Gang of Four. I didn’t pass so I was unemployed for a while. I found a boyfriend. We both took the exams again the following year. I flunked again, but he got into some lousy teachers’ college and the prick dropped me. That hurt like hell. I was such a pure little soul — what a dope.

I still couldn’t find work and spent the next year studying for the exams. I wanted to start my own business, but I couldn’t get a license, so I had no choice but to keep studying.

Third time lucky. I got into some lousy university in 1981. It was called United University; it had been formed by the amalgamation of a few other schools and colleges. The course was four years, but you still couldn’t get a proper university degree from it, just a graduate diploma. They didn’t have any dorms, so I had to go on living at home. Their school motto was: “Speed up the Education of Young Talent” and “The Whole Society Should be Concerned About Unemployed Youth”. But it was a rip-off joint. It was a “vocational college” all right, look at the vocation it trained me for! I studied modern Chinese history. Ask me anything about the Qing Reforms, Self-Strengthening Movement, whatever, I can still remember it all.

At university, I was quiet and studious. I got a new boyfriend and even joined the Party Youth League. Just think of it: a Youth League whore. I ought to be given a fucking public trial.

In 1984, we heard that the policy for university graduates had changed. You might be given work anywhere in the province [instead of being allowed to stay in the city]. Everything changed overnight, just like that. No wonder there’s a saying: “Plans can’t keep up with changes, changes aren’t as fast as the telephone, phones aren’t as fast as lies, but even lies aren’t as powerful as what Dèng Xiǎopíng 邓小平 tells us to do.” That’s China for you, but I thought it’d be pretty rough if they sent me off to work in the boondocks, like Mount Jinggang.

When we started university they said that the work assignments we’d get when we finished would all be in the city. Now, with this new policy, all you got for your university education was the chance to be a country bumpkin. It was ridiculous, although there were admittedly worse fates than being sent off to Mount Jinggang.

My parents were both accountants, bureaucratic lowlife. They had no clout, no connections, so I had no choice but to wait and be packed off to the sticks. Everyone was absolutely shitting themselves worrying about it. Some people appeared real nonchalant, but it was all an act. You know how the Chinese personnel system works: If they send you away to the countryside then you’re stuck there for life.

Some students just got a diploma for the studies they’d done and quit. They went off to try their luck. My new boyfriend, who also turned out to be a real prick, had an uncle who ran the branch office of a Jiangxi provincial company in Shenzhen. He was in charge of finances and personnel. My boyfriend decided to get a job there and asked me to join him.

My family didn’t approve, mostly because they wanted me to graduate from university before deciding what to do. But I was young and dumb. I didn’t think I’d get another chance like that so I quit school and went south.

As luck would have it, the job assignments everyone got who stayed at university were in the city. All that stuff about being “forced to return to Mount Jinggang” was bullshit. The people who stuck it out are now living contentedly in Nanchang. I really must have been wanking myself silly to have gone off to Shenzhen like that. But I was stuck on that prick of a boyfriend of mine. I wanted him. And I thought Shenzhen would be more open than other places, there’d be more opportunities to use your talents there. Plus, I was young and innocent; I wanted to see the world. It was just a dream.

Sure, the prick and I had to be very sly at home in Jiangxi. We were always worried about being found out. My family kept an eye on me as though I were a counter-revolutionary or something. But in Shenzhen we could live together and no one would care. We’d be free. That was a major reason for going. Marriage? Sure I thought about it, but we didn’t have anything. I was so innocent, I thought everything would work itself out.

What can I say about Shenzhen? For China it was really open and wealthy. But for a woman like me, someone without fame or connections — it was hopeless. If you did tricks, though, you could get yourself both power and money. Remember that line in the song “Flower Blossoms”: “I’lI sing if you want me to, everyone sing along?” It’s all about how good socialism is. Well my version is: “I’ll be a slut if you want me to, everyone just whore along?” Not bad, eh? My personal theme song since I was in kindergarten.

No, I wasn’t always like this. I was so fuckin’ pure. I worked my arse off as a secretary in that lousy company for 100 yuan a month. But I was really up myself. I felt great: most uni graduates only made 56 yuan, and here I was a dropout earning 100. Boy, did I think I was something special!

But within a few months I discovered I was being mightily screwed. Shenzhen was so expensive that I could only just manage to keep body and soul together on my 100 yuan.

There was no fuckin’ way you could eat well: One good dish cost a few hundred alone; shoes were a few hundred FECs. Then there was that prick of mine. He enjoyed the good life, and his uncle was a company manager. Within a few months he was jumping into bed with other smelly cunts. At first, he was scared I’d find out so he avoided me, but then he came out in the open. I was hurt, I cried and made scenes. In the end, I moved out. Screw the fucker, I thought to myself. Anyway, those other tarts were better off than me: they dressed and ate well, had nice things and knew how to enjoy themselves. They were slick cunts all right. All the crying just made me uglier, I became like a harpy, so he had no choice but to let me go. The prick ended up being nabbed by the police for fraud.

They couldn’t kick me out of my job because I had a contract. But I couldn’t stay on, either. They were all arseholes — the uncle, his nephew, my boyfriend, and the rest of them.

All they wanted to do was to fuck me over. I quit and that was the end of it. Of course, I could have gone back home to Nanchang, but then what would I do? No way. I’d thrown my lot in with the scum and I was going to stick with it. Things in Shenzhen really were a little easier. There was a contract system there and you have mobility. There was nothing like that in Jiangxi. The only thing waiting for me back there was fucking unemployment.

I decided to obey Chairman Mao’s teaching to “be independent and self-sufficient in food and clothing”. I went in search of a new job. And they weren’t bad to me at my old job: they paid me my wages until I’d found myself a new spot: searching for a new mount while still in the saddle of your old nag. That’s the superiority of socialism for you!

I found a position in a company run by a bank. Back then everyone was starting up companies: the PLA, the police, even the fucking Customs Service were into the “Third Industry”. They paid me over 200 yuan a month plus fringe benefits, but I was still a secretary. Secretaries are just like flower vases: the only qualifications you need are good looks. My job was to go out to meals and night spots with the manager and his customers. I was no different from the sluts who jumped into bed with them.

But I got face out of it, and it was a real education. You learn to join in the banter, drink and smoke, pick up a little Cantonese and then you’re as good as the best of them. We’re a bloody social lubricant.

I went through four, five jobs in rapid succession. They were all the same. I’d eventually end up in bed, sometimes with the manager or boss, occasionally as a service for clients.

The minute you screwed your boss, things changed, and always for the worse. He’d pressure you to sleep with him, but the second you did he’d start treating you like shit. He’d make you do odd jobs like you were his wife or something. If you weren’t happy about it they’d think you were frigid, or fickle, or that you didn’t want to let them fuck you anymore. Then there’s the ones who’d get all serious. Makes me want to throw up. Such pricks. They should just put a noose around their necks and finish the job.

If they ask you to “entertain” a client and you do it, then they just think you’re a slut, and it’s “open day” seven days a week. If you refuse and the deal falls through, suddenly it’s all your fault. Mind games, psych-fucking-ology.

Where was I in all this? Nowhere. I was in it for the money. You had to put personal considerations aside and do as Chairman Mao instructed us: “Deal with things as they come along”, and, “Be determined and you won’t go cold”.

Hey, your time’s up.

I finally decided to “liberate myself”. Everything was a matter of PR no matter what company you ended up with. You were just making money for other people. If I had to sell myself, why not be my own boss? So in late ’86 I became a hooker. Called myself a “tour guide”. I showed them the sights all right and I can’t even remember how many times the cops carried out “purges”. They never got me, though. The new arrivals, the bumpkins, especially the streetwalkers, were the ones who got hit. They’re such clods, doing it right out in the open like that, all up front. Stupid sluts.

I had connections and some money, so I was tipped off before any crackdowns. I’d lay off work or go on a holiday. The streetwalkers couldn’t afford to take time off, “no workee no cashee.” All they had to their names was a cunt. I felt sorry for them. They didn’t even know how to express themselves in anything but their yokel accents — they were from the northeast, from Anhui too. Lots of them got VD. Sure, I feel even more sorry for them now that I’m in Australia. My relationship with them? Friends, I suppose. Yeah, we’d help each other out.

I’ve always been very clear about my aims: I want to make money, as much bloody money as I can. Don’t buy that bullshit that hookers try to put over about being “victims of circumstance” — if you’re that hard up you can always do manual labor. Sure I could survive without selling myself, but I want to live well, better than everyone else. If you’ve got a father with the right connections then you can make it, become an official or a speculator. But if the only thing you’ve got is a cunt, then that’s what you have to sell. You’ve got to “work hard and steam ahead”. Everyone’s the same: shameless. Me, a disgrace to the Chinese? What about you? I’m just making sure that you lose whatever face you’ve still got. Fuckin’ well serves you all right.

Anyway, I mostly worked the big hotels in Shenzhen: Hong Kong businessmen, rich entrepreneurs and company managers. Cadres on official business never have enough money to spend: can’t get a receipt for a fuck, and they won’t spend a cent unless they can claim it on expenses. They usually go for streetwalkers: they’re cheap and some even give receipts — old taxi dockets, or they write it up as “services rendered” in their hotel bills. God I hate cadres — such pricks!

Sometimes a company would hire me to entertain a client from the north. The company would foot the bill. I mostly hit Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Zhuhai. Never got to Hainan.

Sometimes I’d be paid by a Hong Kong businessman to take a spin around the country, keep him company, like a temporary wife. Some of them have wives in Hong Kong and keep a woman in Shenzhen. They set them up with an apartment and everything. Costs them a few thousand Hong Kong dollars a month. That’s what the girls who work the streets dream of. No bloody way I’d do it — the money’s lousy, and it’s a bore. Some girls keep boyfriends on the side and take other business. There are fights; people get killed. It’s a dead end.

I’ve worked it all out: money’s the answer. Money — tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars — a real spunk has been known to marry a bed-ridden cripple for it. And they’re made out to be a fucking example of socialist spiritual civilisation!

Marrying a foreign devil to get out of China is another way of doing it. Lots of people fantasize about it, particularly those undereducated Guangdong smell-holes and Harbin horses from the northeast. Pack of shit-heads! They’re just asking to be screwed. Once they’ve been fucked they expect to get married. They must be kidding.

Others get out by marrying Hong Kong businessmen. But what type of businessman do you think’s going to come to China to marry a whore? Bloody fishermen, that’s what!

I know where I’m at: money. Once I’ve got enough I’ll see. At the time my goal was to buy a passport and get out of China.

I made a fair bundle. I was only earning 100 yuan a month when I first “joined the revolution”, but once I got into heavy-duty “spiritual pollution” I was making several times that a day. I made enough to pay for my student fees and living allowances to get to Australia and still have money to spare. I also did an “inspection tour” of our great motherland from north to south. I visited the Great Hall of the People and went up onto Tiananmen Gate. All you need is money. I can have whatever high level cadres have. Like the saying goes: People might laugh at the poor but they don’t laugh at prostitutes. The cadres exploit the masses. Well, I’m just exploiting myself. Who’s got the right to laugh at me?

I’ve really enjoyed talking to you. It’s fate. It’s not all that often you meet someone you can really talk to. God, there are a lot of stupid fucks out there, men and women. They don’t know how to talk at all.

Do you remember that song? Now, what the fuck was it called? Anyway, it goes, “I’ve polished my .38 and I have a bullet in the barrel”. Japanese War song. “I knock one out, take another prisoner… and have captured a few American guns.”

Hey, it’s not anti-Japanese, it’s about the war with the KMT. They’re talking about American guns. Well, that’s how the cadres got where they are today. And that’s just what I’ve done: “I knocked one out, taken another prisoner…and captured a few American dollars.” What’s wrong with that? It’s all bullshit! I’m not anti-Nip. You can have as much as you want. And who’s to stop me giving it?

You know, I was once a singer in a Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. I wanted to be an actress. What a joke. In those days, I was scared to death of being criticized for being “improper”. That’s my problem now: indulging in improper sexual relations. Who gives a fuck? People change. The Party even managed to transform the last Emperor of China.

I never felt cheated by what happened to me in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, or how I was treated by the Communist Party. Shenzhen was an open city and I wanted to go there. I was asking for everything I got. I was just scared of ending up on Mount Jinggang, I can’t blame the bloody Party for anything.

Australia’s a richer place than China, more open too. It’s easier to sell your fanny here. No one’s forcing me to do it. That’s just bullshit. I take full responsibility for whatever I’ve done, right or wrong. I don’t blame anyone else. In the past, Chinese women sold themselves to pay off their fucking debts. It’s not the same today, don’t believe it for a minute…

[Other Chinese prostitutes in Australia] will tell you that’s why they’re in the game. Stinking whores. They say there’s no democracy in China and no [government-arranged] job assignments in Australia so they have no choice. What a load of shit. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the fucking kitchen. Find a normal job. Immigration will grab you, but what are you hiding from? Only a fuckwit would be fooled by those stories.

My residence permit was in my hometown, Nanchang, so I had to go back to apply for a passport. If you’re willing to pay, there’s no problem. That prick of a boyfriend had told people what I’d been doing for a living in Shenzhen. And to think my family had made a big point of telling me “to be a good girl” while I was away. I was a fucking good girl.

“Victory in China is only the first step on our Long March. The journey forward is even longer, our enterprise more magnificent and arduous.”

I arrived in Australia in late 1988. I went to English classes for six months. I’d done English at university and middle school, so they put me into the third level. I worked as a waitress and found an Australian boyfriend, but I soon split up with him. I never liked the prick, I was only interested in the fact that he was an Australian citizen.

Because of June 4 [1989 — the Beijing Massacre] they first gave us an extra year, then an extra four on our visas. Residence for four years, no fucking worries at all. I went back to my old profession. No one made me, I wanted the money. Make hay while the sun shines, life is but a dream, a hundred years passes in an instant, etc. etc. I can make money and, boy, I can spend it too. My goal is to live a lot fucking better and happier than other people. I’m a shameless slut and I know it. Other Chinese students want face. You think washing dishes in a restaurant from morning to night gives face? Such hicks. They probably couldn’t sell themselves if they tried.

I read the classifieds. There’s lots of work for prostitutes: “masseuse”, “actress for adult movies”, “nurse — no experience necessary”. Everyone knows what they’re really after.

Do you know what it’s called, what I do? Yes, I’m an “escort”. I fucking escort them straight into a hotel room. Better than streetwalking or stripping. Lots of the older cunts have been forced to do that stuff. Old and wrinkled, dope fiends; some don’t even speak a word of English. But hey, they got themselves into it … Serves ‘em right …What were they doing with their lives when they were young, especially the ones who don’t know any English? They don’t know how to talk, but they can do it all right, they’re after hard currency. But you really don’t make much as a stripper.

I never touch drugs. I don’t smoke anything and I don’t shoot up. Once you get into that, it’s all over. It eats up all your profits, too. That Australian prick I went out with was always trying to get me to smoke grass with him. He spent all his dole money on the stuff. I’d have to be a real shit-for-brains if I’d stayed with that loser.

I know what I’m after. Money. I keep saying, once I’ve made enough — but fuck it, you never make enough. A million wouldn’t be enough. But, one thing is true: once I’ve got some savings I’m through. I’ll spend the rest of my life in peace and quiet.

Go back? No fucking way I’d go back to China. The four-year visa is as good as permanent residence. If you don’t believe me, just wait and see. I’lI move to another city. Perth seems okay. I don’t know anyone there, so I could start from scratch.

Chairman Mao said the Chinese people have stood up. Well, I can’t stand up, but I’m better off than those jerks back in China, and a lot happier than the language students slaving away in restaurants or market gardens.

I think I need about $100,000. That’ll get me a house, a car. It’s not an impossible target, especially if you keep off drugs. Streetwalkers make enough in a few years to build a house. I’m selling my body, better off than those people who sell pork.

My income varies from day to day, $100 to $500, it depends. If you think $100 a day is good, you’re too fucking easy to please, I’ll tell you that.

The tricks are about the same as in China. A little more multicultural, I suppose. It’s money up front and I won’t do scumbags. Blow jobs are unavoidable. No real hassle. But “going through the back door” is too much for me; it’s not like I don’t have a vagina. If you want a tight squeeze, find yourself a guy. Some of the tricks need you to hit them or they can’t get it up. I’m not into that kind of stuff, I’ve never hit anyone in my life. That’s about as kinky as it gets.

There are guys who are scared of AIDS, won’t do it without a condom. No one worries about that in China. There, they like to do it without a condom, it’s called “fighting the real war”. And boy are they filthy. If I did contract AIDS in Australia, China wouldn’t take me back anyway, so I’d just live out the rest of my days here. Sick or not, I never want to go back. Filipinas [come here to work as prostitutes], make a bundle and go home; their society can tolerate them, take them in. In China, no one’s tolerated, let alone people like me.

It’s very different here from China. Take hotels, for example. In China you need well-placed friends or you’re screwed. The hotel management does room checks and they ban guests from entertaining women in their rooms after ten at night. They work hand in glove with the police. If you’ve got friends who work in the hotels, however, they’ll help you cheat the pigs. They’ll even slip you info about the guests. Of course, you have to give them a cut of the action.

In Australia, hotels are just that. It’s your business who you bring in. No one interferes with you, they wouldn’t think of it, but no one helps you either. They wouldn’t want to get their hands dirty, that’s probably how they’d see things. It’s so different from China here, the worldview is so totally different. Do you know what I mean? The key to understanding the difference between these two societies lies in this sort of thing.

The tricks are mostly tourists. Lots of Japanese. They’re really rich. A fuck in Australia is only half the price of what they pay at home. Fifty-percent “waribiki” [割引, i.e., discount]. There’s lots of Taiwanese too and of course, no lack of Australians. I get some mainland Chinese, but the pricks all claim to be Taiwanese. One look at these clods, though, and you know they’re not. Taiwanese my arse. Here they are paying for a screw and they still lie — all those years of education by the Party weren’t wasted on them, eh?

There are no English language schools in this district, so you don’t see many Chinese students around. Most Chinese students have jobs. They might gamble now and then, but they don’t have enough money for a fuck, and if they do, they want white arse. Turns ’em on. They say “to screw a foreign woman is to win glory for China”. Besides, if they want yellow arse, they form mutual-aid societies.

It’s been great talking to you. I don’t usually slag off like this. I pretend to be a real sweet bitch. Look, it’s nearly three goddam hours since we started this interview. But, hey, I’ll only charge you for two. I won’t give a freebie just ’cause I like talking to you since I’d lose out, but I don’t want to rip you off either. It’s not easy for anyone to make a buck these days.

It’s all a matter of money. If you’ve got nothing but money, at least you have something. You spend your youth making it, who’s got a choice? When you’ve lost your looks at least you’ve got something to show for it. I tried to have a real life, but every fucking prick cheated me. But I’ve got the classic looks of a tart: willowy eyebrows, sleepy eyes, nubile waist, large mouth, sexy cunt.

Heaven knows how I made it through these last thirty years, and who knows what the next thirty will bring. “A Chinese cunt in Western clothing”, that’s me. Try explaining that to an Aussie.

You know, I don’t just want to buy a house and a car and live a normal life. Dammit, after I’ve got all that for myself, what I want is a good husband, too. Someone to rely on, someone who I can relax with. I’ve got to have one decent man in my life! If there’s not a single one in the socialist motherland, you can’t tell me that there are none in the capitalist world either. Fuck it, let’s talk about something else.

Sometimes, I get really depressed. Whenever I have my period, I get into a terrible mood. Once, this Chinese guy living in Japan took me to a karaoke club. The prick made me drink a lot of whisky. I wasn’t a regular at that club, so they didn’t know me, and the bartender gave me the real thing. Normally, if they know you, they give you tea and you can fake it. Anyway, the prick said I had to sing a song. So I did. I thought I’d give him something different. The club didn’t have the music, so I sang it without any accompaniment:

Are you ready?
We’re always ready!
We’re the Communist Young Pioneers!
Masters of the future,
The future will belong to us
Dadada dida, Dadada dida

[These are the opening lines of the official “Song of the Communist Children’s Corps” 共产主义儿童团团歌: “准备好了么？时刻准备着，我们都是共产儿童团，将来的主人，必定是我们。嘀嘀嗒嘀嗒嘀嘀嗒嘀嗒。”]

Fucking bloody hell! None of them had a clue.

Rewind the tape and let me hear what I sound like…It’s like I’m crying. I’m getting old.

I really could sing once. Sang my way from primary school to high school. Performed in our district and then at municipal events. Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Team. Now, I’m on a one-way ride to the grave. “Doh-ray-me-fa-so-lah-tee, once more from the top…Don’t go. Stay with me a while more. You tell me. I’ve gone to college and I’m not bad-looking…I’ll sing whatever you want. Finally, I make it here, and I’m still only worth half of what a Japanese cunt gets.

The Hundred Days Reform [of 1898], Renewal, the Self-Strengthening Movement, the 1911 Revolution…who’s had it easier, who’s had it harder?…You tell me…When I finally make enough money…but I know that everything — where I live, the lot — will all be because of my cunt…

No, it’s okay. I’ll be alright if I just sit here for a while. I really think life is interesting, it’s just that I’m so tired. I really want some peace and quiet, to live with a reliable man. Is that asking for too much? It’s all been my choice. But I was fooling myself from the very start. Australia gave me a chance to start all over…

Is that really what you think? Thank you. Really, thanks.

Well, was it a good interview for you? Are you satisfied?

Fate will decide whether we meet again. “When you have to part then you do, don’t say tomorrow or goodbye.”

“Come, come — finish.” That’s what I tell them.

You can always wash yourself clean.

Thank you, really, I mean it.

Look at me, laughing again. I’m such a slut!

***

I had found her through an advertisement. Two years later, I called the same number, but the person who answered politely told me, “Sorry, you must be mistaken. We’ve never had a woman here of that description. Never mind. We can introduce you to a new friend. Would you like that?”