Lucky Dip

When the revolution comes, they will blame the foreigners first.

At the end of every course I teach, I tell the students my email is available on the university website, so that they can ask me for help with their compositions, job applications and the like. Mostly I do this because I am aware my earning power is much greater than theirs, and I get paid 200 rmb an hour for more or less talking in my native tongues. Most of them do not earn that much in a day; and even the Chinese staff doing the same job as I do, with English perfectly good enough for the task, earn less (whereas they ought of course earn more, since they are fluent in both English and Chinese, whereas I am only fluent in English). So making myself available for any student who is inclined to ask makes me feel a bit less guilty about the matter. Foreigners do get an easy deal here; and that is why if revolution ever does come (unlikely as it is with China’s placid, passive population, too supine to ever ask questions) we foreigners will get the first blame for what, truly, are the ills and evils of the government and the Chinese people’s own ignorance.

But the other reason is that it is a convenient way to hit on the female students that catch my eye without doing it too crudely; the whispered word as they leave, ‘Keep in touch.’

The drawback to this situation is that after each class, a host of students will add me to their accounts, meaning that I general I cannot pick out the women I am most keen to talk to. Is the new person who wants to chat to me a man or a woman? If a woman (and it is frequently impossible to tell by name alone, especially when written in pinyin), is it one of the ones I am interested in?

Of course I cannot straight come out with it, ask Are you a guy or girl?’; and in general each conversation begins with the student saying, ‘Hi, I am your student. Do you remember me?’ – which is no help at all. But it is usually easy to find out the gender without even asking loaded questions; the fact is women in China are eloquent, talkative, opinionated, loquacious and each an individual; the guys are mostly monosyllabic, misinformed and identical. (Which is why 90% of the students who add me are women anyhow.)

The dilemma grows even greater if we begin chatting a few weeks after the classes are over, for by that time I generally have no memory at all of the woman or the class, so easily are they replaced in my interest by subsequent students.

The long and the short of it is, from time to time I make a coffee or dinner appointment with a woman whose face and form I cannot remember.

This is the lucky dip, and in general it is something I rather enjoy… heading for the rendezvous, wondering what she will be like, what age, what looks, what availability.

As a child I would go to an annual fair near my home. There was a lucky dip stall there, a large tub filled with bran in which was hidden a selection of gifts, some better, some worse. The image of my hand burrowing into the bran, and the feeling of anticipation that went with it; these are on my mind each time I make such a date.

Sweetie was one such dip, and a dip that came up lucky.

I’d been helping her online with a fairly complex paperwork problem, and (more by luck that judgment) had managed to solve it for her with some aplomb; coffee was natural after this. Heading to meet her, I still had no clear idea of who she was. But to my pleasure I found she was a woman from a class I’d taught a few weeks before.

True, I would likely never have thought about this woman again had I not met her now, but in that class she was the one I wanted.

Sometimes there is more than one woman I incline to in a class, but only rarely nil; for even if it is not such a good batch there are still gradations, ranks. And so there’s always one woman I’ll choose in each class.

And, online at least, Sweetie had a sexy personality, which seemed promising. So we had our coffee, and I asked the questions I needed to ask, married, boyfriend, and so on (whether the woman has a husband or boyfriend or not does not matter; what matters is how she talks of him. If it is with love, then I know I have no hope; if it is with brief coolness (as most generally it is) then I know I have a chance). In this case, the prognosis was good. So we had our coffee, we talked and we flirted, but no more than that; sex may be easy here but it is not quite that easy.

But I knew I had done a good job, for, talking to Sweetie online a little later that night, I saw she had added a line of text by her sign-in name:

`He said I am cute and funny, and many guys will run after me. But I see a fat boring girl in the picture. The picture is honest.’

I had indeed told her she was cute and funny as we drank our coffee, and now I repeated it. She half-believed me.

I guess – no, I am sure – an objective viewer of this would see me as rather predatory, manipulative. Maybe it is so. But I liked her in class, I liked her when I met her in person; she was cute, appealing. And, sure, it is not much more that friendship and fuck for me; but as far as that goes, it is genuine.

A week or so later I hit her up for dinner, meeting near Henan Zhong Lu. Now, Shanghai’s best restaurant for a seduction, Laris, is in that part of town. It always works a charm, and I have had great success with the women I have taken there. However, I knew I had already charmed Sweetie – I did not need to do any more. And frankly I like to reserve this place for women who intrigue me a little more than Sweetie did – my interest in her was purely physical, purely fuck.

But as it happened, Sweetie had her own suggestion, a Guangdong place hard by, which suited me fine. It was ok, though too brightly lit as are most purely Chinese restaurants (I mean those not catering to an international clientele) and with patchy, generic service. For the first ten or twenty minutes of our date she played her Nintendo, or maybe Gameboy; whatever it was, she was keen to take it to a point where she could save the game.

The meal done, we pondered what next – but there was not really much ‘we’ to it, for she was waiting for me to make a decision. The decision I wanted to make was, let’s fuck. But of course I could not deliver it so crude as that. It had to seem as much her decision as mine; so I offered that we could go for a beer. But Sweetie thought maybe it was a little early to go to a bar, so I suggested she might like to ‘see’ my place.

She agreed: and so back we went by tube, which she preferred to a cab (I think because she wanted to seem somewhat modest, and a cab would have been rather more intimate). But even so, we kissed a little on the tube, though mostly modestly -- unlike a little later in my bedroom, where kissed with more passion.

But even then she wanted to keep it under control, so after some passionate kisses she broke away and said ‘Let’s have coffee!’ While it was brewing she stood on the balcony, and I went to her there, kissing her some more, my hands roving her body, pressing her pussy through her trousers.

The coffee never got drunk, cooling by the side of the bed as our passion rose. It was my normal routine, kisses starting on the mouth then moving to all over face, to neck, ears, to her still-clothed body, to belly, to top eased up and off over her head, and roll over, unhook her bra, and kiss breasts, nipples – her breasts a little spread, but pleasing – and she takes my top off, and I kiss her pussy through her trousers, trousers off, her just in panties and me too; and then her naked, and me following and, (as many other women have said), the ‘It’s much bigger than … other guys..’ There, the slight pause because she did not want to say ‘the other guys I’ve fucked.’ This of course this might be what women say to all men – how would I know? – but it is surely not mere flattery. The average Chinese cock ain’t up to much, as shown by no other evidence than the condoms sold in China are simply too small.

Getting inside her was – again as with other women – not so easy. It hurt her, though, unlike Gloria, or Jiping, she did not let that stop her, she bore it and, with plenty of lube, the pain subsided after a while. And as she got used to it, she got more into it, me coming from behind, from spoon position. At first, she would not go on top but anon she did; later she told me her reluctance was due to doing this with a past lover – it had hurt him she said, so she thought maybe she was doing it wrong. Some wimpy Chinese guy in her past, I guess. Rolling her over later, I quested for a bit of anal, nudging my cock against her there – and as she did not demur, I pushed on, getting in maybe an inch. Then it began to hurt, so I desisted. But she was willing, so with more lube, more preparation, it might be achieved – and frankly that would be almost half the reason for me seeing her again.

The other half of my reason for seeing her again goes back to earlier conversations we have had, in the various mediums; I think it was on msn first that she mentioned she was having dinner with her wife. ‘Wife?’ I’d queried. She’d explained that she had a number of very close women friends, so close she called them her wives. There was a sexual tone to this, and when we talked in the coffee shop that time I referred to it again. Her response was equivocal enough to make me wonder more.

Making love to two women at once, and having the two women make love to each other, is of course the ultimate fantasy of many men. It is not something I have done yet, but it is naturally something I am most keen to experience.

Now Chinese women in public life are the boring, tame creatures Chinese men want them to be. But between the sheets, they come alive; clutched by passion, you can reach the raw woman, with all society’s bullshit shucked off. And so asking a woman about a sex act is best done in the middle of a sex act. Thus I let a quizzical expression play across my face and, sure enough, she asked What are you thinking?’

With a show of hesitant reluctance, I said, ‘I am wondering what you would do if another woman came in and kissed you.’ I’d tried something similar on Lucy (to whom I believe I said ‘I am imagining you with another woman..’) and she’d shown some expression of interest; and so too now Sweetie pondered it, said, `Maybe.. one of my friends might like to do that…but I’d have to think about it – I wouldn’t want to risk her friendship if she said no.’

So that’s pretty much what it comes down to – my sole reason for seeing her again would be anal or lesbian. Thus masculinity!