China Dolls

Once, in a back street in Calcutta, a wheezing Bengali snatched my arm and said, "You want Chinese girl?" I had been hurrying to get a train ticket at Howrah. I had promised to meet someone after that. It was midday, and the humid heat of the Hooghly River penetrated the crowded city and made it stink. I had wanted to get everything done--my ticket, my shopping, my appointments--and then head out of there. The Bengali had caught me just as I had set off on what I expected to be a busy day, in which I had no time to spare.

And yet, without the slightest hesitation, I abandoned all my plans and followed this pimp deeper into the city in search of the Chinese girl. I imagined her reclining on a couch in a large bedroom of a rotting hotel. She would be young and pale, the color of a wood shaving and just as thin, and wrapped in flimsy silk, with the blue fumes of a joss stick perfuming her. I saw brilliant red Chinese characters on the wall, and perhaps a tapestry, and the Chinese girl smiling in the semidarkness as I entered. She would lift her hand from her breast and murmur and beckon to me with the two-inch crimson nail on her forefinger.

The stories in those parts were well established. These girls were ferocious in the street, but in bed, they were slaves. They began by giving you a soapy bath, and then they dried you and massaged you or else walked up and down your spine naked. They made love to you by taking the active part, treating you as some exotic being and producing rapturous sensations in every part of your body. When you were exhausted, they pillowed your head; and when you woke up, they brought tea and a cold towel and pleaded with you to return.

But this Indian I was following seemed a little baffled by these alleys and these crowds. He said he was lost. And then, after we had found the place, he slapped his forehead and said that the Chinese girl was out for the day, but what about this other one? She was Tibetan. She sulked in a narrow room on a burst-open mattress. She looked lumpy and unwashed. I made my excuses to the Indian and hurriedly left.

Anyone who wonders why I was tempted needs his head examined, and it was simply bad luck or Indian hyperbole that deflated my hopes. Every man's fantasies are uniquely and strangely his own, but if there is a common denominator, it has something to do with the exoticism of the East--the beds in the East are soft, and the women are smoother, nakeder, sweeter and more willing. It is perhaps a dream of naked pleasure inspired by the dusky and bare-titted imagery of countless South Seas specials of National Geographic. But more likely, it is the conventional wisdom that they do things differently in the Orient. Nothing is more tempting than the forbidden, and the Oriental woman seems like a mythical beast or a superior species of human designed to give pleasure.

All such fantasies are, I suppose, a confidence trick you play on yourself--the worst sort of self-delusion. But so what? In the realm of the senses, nothing is what it appears. It is no good saying that such women may be shrewish, materialistic and talkative--the aura, the whispers and associations are what matters. What the Chinese woman does perhaps better than any other woman is inspire a man--she sets his imagination on fire by representing his fantasies. And the great thing about fantasies is that they are triggered by suggestion and they happen in your head. Isn't most sex single-minded and private?

The West has many forms of feminine beauty: the cheerleader, the hourglass, the nurse, the nympho, the pneumatic mother figure, the surfer girl, the game-for-any-thing groupie, and more--each one a distinct physical type. It is easy to imagine what jobs they hold and how they dress. I knew a man who was wildly aroused by the expression bored housewife--he pictured a pretty woman at an upper window hungering to be stuffed. It is probably an effect of our multicultural upbringing, this non-Oriental notion that beauty comes in all shapes and sizes.

Beauty in the East is one particular woman. She is smooth and vaguely snakelike. Her hair is always black and straight, her fingernails long, her feet very small--foot fetishism has always been popular in China and it did not end when foot binding stopped. She is always slim, even thin. Her hooded eyes are always black, her eyebrows narrow and her lips slightly fuller than you would expect. She is nearly always small, but because she sets off her erotic feet with luxurious shoes, she may appear taller. Looking at a Chinese woman, you understand why the Chinese euphemism for a snake is "little dragon." There is something reptilian and not quite human in her beauty.

I know there are one billion people in China and that about half of them are women. It is obvious that I am generalizing. But with a culture that is so old and well established, so integrated and so like-minded, it is possible to make certain generalizations with confidence. If you asked a Chinese man what physical traits he valued in a Chinese woman, he would describe them by repeating the classical attributes--black hair, small breasts and feet, dark eyes, slim, submissive. There are no Valkyries or cheerleaders in Chinese society, and even Hong Kong and Singapore and Macao, which have been exposed to Western influences for well over 100 years, have not evolved a different ideal. And yet the mere fact that this Chinese woman is predictable does not make her less desirable.

The Chinese woman is never a mother figure, and although she is sometimes thought of as a slave or a courtesan, such roles do not do her justice. She is altogether subtler, even innocent-seeming. The Chinese man usually draws his sexual stereotypes from classical literature, mythology and the imagery that is inscribed on old bridal beds, all about penetrating the lotus and discovering the jade. But this classical creature--the dragon lady with claws and a cunt like a flower blossom--is different from the Chinese woman a Westerner sees.

For one thing, she is seldom a woman. Even a middle-aged Chinese woman looks girlish, so what she represents is youth and vitality. She is obedient, she is lovely, she is small and perfectly formed. I suspect that for most men she is a daughter figure, an incest fantasy, and that she illustrates in the desire she arouses the breaking of our oldest taboo. She is the opposite of the big, raunchy bimbo of frat-house fantasies, yanking her great flopping boobs out of her blouse and saying, "Wanna play telephone?" She never raises her voice. That alone is erotic.

The Chinese woman symbolizes silence. That is her daughterly and submissive quality. The only sound that you associate with her is a whisper of invitation. Her youth is also a kind of agelessness--as a matter of fact, most Chinese women have exquisite skin, like yellow velvet, and thick tassellike hair. Her sensuality and obedience allow us to imagine ourselves as domineering and protective at the same time. But this is also part of the fantasy, because this woman is in total control, even though it does not seem so. That is why it is like sex with mirrors: The eroticism is calculated, but it is never obvious.

Perhaps with all this ancient wisdom of the arts of lovemaking and the studious working out of the physical ideal there may be a loss of spontaneity. The sexual ritual might make some Chinese women cynical. Certainly, in all senses, they are the mistresses of manipulation. But these are the dramas of the sexual life. It is never simple, and the Chinese woman knows how to give it tension. And it is frequently more than just fantasy--sex is magic; sex is also power. How could a woman who has this effect on a man not realize it? The Chinese woman, I think, knows that she is in possession of a tremendous secret. Her confidence and self-possession are also part of her sensuality. She knows why she is attractive; she may even emphasize her Chineseness by making herself thinner, paler, blacker-haired, silkier, more slant-eyed; make-up is important to the Chinese, and the natural look is for tractor drivers. The very look of a Chinese woman is an aphrodisiac.

That look is described in the greatest Chinese pornographic novel, the classic Golden Lotus (Chin P'ing Mei). This book has been banned in China since the Ming dynasty (1368--1644). Golden Lotus is a woman who becomes the mistress of a horny young man called Hsi-mên. This is his first glimpse of her: "Her hair was as black as a raven's plumage; her eyebrows mobile as the kingfisher and as curved as the new moon. Her almond eyes were clear and cool, and her cherry lips most inviting.... Her face had the delicate roundness of a silver bowl.

"As for her body, it was as light as a flower, and her fingers as slender as the tender shoots of a young onion. Her waist was as narrow as the willow, and her white belly yielding and plump. Her feet were small and tapering; her breasts soft and luscious.

"One other thing there was, black-fringed, grasping, dainty and fresh, but the name of that I may not tell.... It had all the fragrance and tenderness of fresh-made pastry, the softness and appearance of a new-made pie."

That is the Chinese ideal, the ultimate edible woman.