Li Yu - The Carnal Prayer Mat

"That way I'd have someone to turn to the rest of my life! I'll bring the contract over tomorrow. But there's one point I'd like to make. My sexual desires are very modest, and it's not important to me whether I have a wife or not. Why not go slow for the time being? There'll be plenty of time to give me a wife after I've put in a few years' service and my strength has begun to fail. At present all I want to do is serve you with all my heart, not have some woman sapping all the energy I shall need for the household chores and the farmwork. As for this so-called bond price, there's even less need to talk about it. Since I'm selling myself and don't have any parents or brothers left, there's no one for me to give the money to. Once I'm part of your household, so long as I have my food and clothing, I shall be perfectly all right. What would I need money for? But if the contract doesn't mention a sum, I suppose I can't be said to have sold myself. You can put down whatever you wish, but in fact you won't need to spend any money on me at all."

The Master's face broke into a broad smile. "Ah, it does my heart good to hear you say that! Anyone can see that you're a faithful servant. But you can decline only one of my offers, not both. If you don't collect your price, perhaps the money can remain in my keeping until such time as you need to have clothes made. But it simply won't do not to take a wife. People who sell themselves as bondservants have always done so to obtain wives and enjoy a little married pleasure. So why don't you want to? If you won't take either your bond price or a wife, you'd seem completely independent, and even though you addressed me as master, I'd feel very awkward calling you my servant and very uneasy about giving you orders. If you're going to insist on that, I'm afraid I cannot take you on."

"I know what's at the back of your mind, sir," said Quan. "You're afraid I'm not dependable, and you think that one day I'll want to leave. You wish to give me a wife to prevent me from being disloyal. Well, I'm not such a scoundrel, I assure you, but since you're so concerned, I shall accept your offer."

After this clarification Quan did not wait until the next day, but drew up a contract and submitted it to the Master that evening. The Master didn't wait either, but gave him a maid in marriage the same evening. He tore down the hut and told Quan to move into his house. Previously he had called him Lai Suixin, but now he called him simply Suixin. By an odd coincidence the maid given him in marriage was named Ruyi ( satisfy desire ). It is evident from this coincidence that vengeance is now more likely than ever, for to the name Suixin has been added the portent of Ruyi.

CRITIQUE

One marvelous feature of this chapter is the way the straightforward, rough-and-ready Honest Quan manages by devious, convoluted means to work his way inside the "iron door," thus reenacting the romantic exploit of Sima Xiangru. [71]And a second marvelous thing is the way Master Iron Door, who has worried over every possible contingency and taken every conceivable precaution, falls right into Honest Quan's trap like a latter-day Zhuo Wangsun. The thought and imagination that have gone into The Carnal Prayer Mat also deserve to be called convoluted in the ultimate degree!

Poem:

Let us explain that the story of how Honest Quan sold himself lies in the future. Well before he entered the household, Mistress Jade Scent had fallen prey to a secret melancholy, which our brush has been too busy to describe but which we shall now address. Just at the height of her sexual enjoyment, her husband had been driven away by her monster of a father, a development that left her feeling like a drunkard who has just sworn off wine or a gourmet who has just given up meat. She couldn't even get through the next few days, let alone survive for years as a grass widow. Deprived of real pleasures, she was reduced to placing the erotic album in front of herself and trying to quench her thirst by looking at plums and satisfy her hunger by drawing a cake. To her dismay, however, she found that looking at plums increases rather than quenches one's thirst and that drawing a cake sharpens rather than satisfies one's hunger. The longer she looked at the album, the worse she felt, until at length she put it aside and brought out a few idle books instead, in the hope of relieving her distress and boredom.

Gentle reader, what kind of books ought she to have read, do you suppose, in order to relieve her distress and boredom? In my humble opinion, no play or novel would have been of any use whatever. Only the books her father taught her to read as a girl, such as The Lives of Virtuous Women and The Girls' Classic of Filial Piety , would have met her need. If only she had been willing to take them out and read them, they would have relieved her distress and boredom and also quenched her thirst and satisfied her hunger. She might then have been able to endure a real widowhood, to say nothing of the grass variety.

But Jade Scent took a different course and gave undue credence to the "Four Virtues for Girls" and the "Three Obediences for Women," which stipulate: "Before marriage obey your father, after marriage your husband." Accordingly she ignored her father's books and began to read her husband's, tipping out his entire stock of obscenity, such as The Foolish Woman's Story, The Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch , and The Life of the Lord of Perfect Satisfaction , and going through them carefully and methodically. She noticed that these books invariably praised penises as either extremely large or exceptionally long, using expressions such as "a head the size of a snail," "a body like a skinned rabbit," and "strong enough to support a peck of grain without bending." She noticed also that men's thrusts were numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands rather than in the dozens and hundreds.

I simply don't believe there is any man as strong as that between Heaven and Earth, or anyone with so impressive an instrument either, she reflected. My husband's is less than two inches long and two fingers thick, and he cannot last more than a couple of hundred strokes before discharging. He has never reached a thousand! He told me himself that he was without equal among men, so surely there cannot be anyone dozens of times stronger than he is! As the old saying goes, "Better to have no books at all than to believe everything you read." These absurdities must have been concocted by the authors! Such marvels don't exist!

But her skepticism did not survive for long. "That's not true, either," she reflected. "It's a big world we live in, with vast numbers of men, among whom there must be all kinds of exceptional cases. How do I know that what the books say isn't true after all? If a woman were able to marry a man like that, her bedroom pleasure would be beyond description! She'd be loath to change places with the immortals in Heaven! But that's too much to hope for!" Thus, having gone from skepticism to faith, she reverted to skepticism.

Day after day she would get up and, neglecting her needlework, match herself against these idle books, trying to bring her sexual excitement to a fever pitch so that when her husband returned, they could relieve it together. But when time passed and no word came from him, she could not help feeling a certain resentment. I've noticed that there's not a single woman in any of these books who does not have several lovers, she thought. Evidently it is not at all unusual to take a lover. I must have misbehaved myself in my last existence to get such a beast for a husband. Only a month or two after our wedding, and he goes off and stays away for years! I very much doubt that anyone as highly sexed as he is will have held out this long without straying. And if he has strayed, it would hardly be wrong for me to have a backdoor affair of my own. The only pity is that we women are so strictly regulated that we never even see a man.