The Pat Wong Diaries Ch. 17

It was a shame Kang was not present that afternoon. She would have been my ardent supporter and would have backed up every claim that I made about the centrality of sex and the necessity of remaining sensual and erotically sentient for a healthy, balanced life. Chun thought the opposite and pointed out that Kang's support would have robbed my project of its innocence and would have caused the girls to take pause and not humor me and patiently follow my lead.

Chun was probably right. The girls would have frowned at emulating Kang or taking advice from her when it came to sex. We had all resigned ourselves to the fact that Kang was one of a kind, that she was afflicted with a condition over which she had no control, and that, even though we loved her as a sister and cherished her friendship, she was not a role model and the lifestyle she chose was not suited for a normal woman, let alone a normal, respectable Chinese woman.

Harry always frowned and winced when he saw her and often commented to me in a whisper, "I can smell that foul vagina a mile away," or, "here comes the gash." The other Chinese men felt the same and whispered similar vulgar observations to their wives, unable to help themselves. (And yet, when she spoke to them, they stammered and mumbled, and smiled and tried to please her, often blushing and always averting her eyes.)

Kang was perhaps the smartest girl among us, having graduated from Tsinghua University near the top of her class. That alone was enough to win her a level of respect among the boys and the girls that no degree of misbehavior could have lowered. On top of that, she hailed from one of the most respected and privileged families in Beijing, her parents high party officials who fought in the trenches alongside Mao during the struggle against the Kuomintang. That's why we always called her by her last name rather the familiar Jia-li, her first name.

When she arrived in the US, Kang was very much like the rest of us girls: quiet, submissive, wide-eyed and focused on one and only one thing, her studies. But realizing that she was able to always land an A with minimal preparation, she began to explore life beyond the library and the lab. While we spent ten, sometimes even twelve hours a day sitting on chairs in the fourth floor of the library, always in panicked cram mode, the first ones to enter the library as soon as it opened, she waltzed in around ten o'clock and left for lunch by one, then dropped by later in the afternoon and usually left long before we did.

When Chun told Kang about the formation of the Daughters of Mao, Kang smiled and laughed.

"I am glad you are finally joining the human race," she said. "Welcome my dears," she said, hugging us.

We were surprised.

"I didn't want to tell you," she explained, "but now that you have stumbled upon the sauce of life, all I can say is that it's about time."

Indeed, Kang was far ahead of us, and as always we were more than a few steps behind.

She had been sleeping with boys for months, all of them non-Chinese, except for Gao, who had slept with her once and had decided that it was too dangerous to have sexual relations with a Kang and so begged her to let him off the hook. She had slept with class mates and most of the young men she worked with at the lab, and had even gone to bed with her adviser, a tall, lanky man with a pockmarked face, long nose, and a thick, droopy mustache. Able to afford it, she lived off campus in a large, sunny two bedroom apartment she shared with a friendly American girl, where she brought her boys and quietly had sex with them in her room.

She graduated a year ahead of us and went off to work in Wilmington, Delaware, where she landed a lucrative job as a financial analyst.

It was there that her sexual energy erupted in full force, and where she became the Kang that we now knew. It was there that she met her first husband and where she realized that she was not meant for just one man. That was where she came to terms with the basic hard reality that her sexual appetite was not a passing fad or a fancy of youth, but an undeniable part of her core essence and what made her who she was, and that she could deny it or ignore it only at her peril.

She conquered them one by one, starting with her colleagues. She lived close by, so after lunch, she would take a man to her apartment and have sex with him there. At first, she indulged herself only once or twice a week, but before long, having sex at lunch time was as essential and routine as eating lunch. And the men indulged her enthusiastically and eagerly awaited their turn to "take Jia-li out for lunch."

Three months into her job, Kang had built a roster of nine men that she rotated, taking great care to be fair and impartial in her assignments. Most of the men were colleagues who worked beside her, but before long, she had enrolled her supervisor, a tall, sturdy, thoughtful fifty-five year old man with a white thin mustache and a narrow nose, who seemed to have quickly grasped what was happening around him and was only glad that Kang had decided to add him to her stable of men.

Kang was sleeping around because she wanted to sleep around and enjoyed sex more than anything else in life. But it did not take her long to realize that her pussy was a powerful tool that she could leverage to her benefit. Why give it away, she realized at one point, when men were willing to reward her generously for letting them penetrate her?

It started with the lunches: she calculated that she was saving close to $500 a month just because the men were buying her lunches, and usually, they took her to a good restaurant and treated her to the most expensive plates and insisted on her having a fancy dessert. (She had started gaining weight as a result and consciously forced herself to choose a salad and skip desert at least twice a week.)

Then it was the rent on her expensive three bedroom apartment. So she took the landlord to bed, usually dedicating a couple of hours a month on Saturday for him, and had him take off 20% of her rent. (He offered to take off 50% if she guaranteed him a weekly session, but Kang politely declined his offer.) Then she added the HR manager to her roster, a young, newly married blond man, tall and open-faced, who spoke deliberately and listened carefully when he spoke to people. Kang liked him and felt a little jealous of his wife for having landed such a nice husband, and was glad when she was able to lure him to her bedroom and have him penetrate her so soon after his marriage. But he too was useful to Kang, helping her place her Chinese friends in jobs around the US and even in London.

Kang divorced one year after getting married -- the only one among my friends to get divorced. We were not surprised, but we were sad. How was she going to grow old without a husband and without children, we wondered. She remarried many years later, but it was to a man five years her junior and he was not Chinese. And in any case, it was not a "real" marriage, as far as we were concerned: she called it an "open marriage," where she and her husband could sleep with other partners, as long as they informed each other about whom they were sleeping with and took the necessary precautions to ensure that they did not contract any diseases.

I was glad when three years ago she moved close by. And I was glad when she agreed to join us once in a while on our Saturday gatherings in my basement. But I always felt a little bit sad for her, even though I was convinced that she had always been far happier than any of us had been and was living a far fuller life than we, respectable and reasonable and responsible as we were, could imagine living.