Samantha Leese interview about my forthcoming book. People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet

Images and Excerpt From my forthcoming book People’s Pornography: Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet.(Forthcoming with Intellect Books, 2011)

The Grass-Mud Horse is supposedly a species of the alpaca. The name is derived from cào nǐ mā(肏你妈), whose near-equivalent word translates as “fuck your mother”. The greatest enemy of the grass-mud horse is the “river crab” (河蟹, héxiè) whose name resembles 和谐 héxié meaning “harmony”, referring to government censors who wish to create a “harmonious society.”(和諧社會, hexie shehui) (Lam 2009) .The grass-mud horse spurred people’s imagination as evidenced in the thousands of image-collages and mockumentaries that have appeared online. The fad spread like a benign virus and was later popularized as a stuffed animal, an activist icon-turned commodity. The popular theme song of the grass-mud horse was banned by The State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television in March 2009 together with the official blocking of the entire meme itself.

The mythic figure survived and was later creatively conjoined with “Greendam Girl” (綠壩娘, lvba niang) a the satirical cartoon character who protects state interests.  She preaches a compulsive rhetoric of “harmonizing the family” ,acting like a bossy government official who enjoys saddling people with moral directives. The surreal and humorous qualities of these figures tapped into a populist stream, or indeed pop culture itself, and helped to spur a viral movement of protest.

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Three fairy sages transformed themselves into pitiful old men and begged for something to eat from a fox, a monkey and a rabbit.

The fox and the monkey both had food to give to the old men, but the rabbit, empty-handed, offered his own flesh instead, jumping into a blazing fire to cook himself.

The sages were so touched by the rabbit’s sacrifice that they let him live in the Moon Palace where he became the “Jade Rabbit.”

I am finally moving out of this old city hood into the central new territories, a special kind of mountainous suburbia close to my new university, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. I highly recommend life in Tai Hang but the human electricity that runs through ieventually catches up with you–the frantic mobs, the noises all around, the mammoth constructions left, above, underneath you and to the right. Tai Hang faces the destruction of old Hong Kong and hyper inflation of all real estate. It takes place right before your celestial eyes. If one could just be like the Roman emperor Nero who even observed his city go up in flames and kept singing along  “burn baby burn….burn burn baby burn.”

Here my latest video a about a visit a doll museum in Kyoto, the home of SuperDollfie dolls owned and managed by the Japanese company Volks. The video is based on an actual special visit. It is called Visit to My Half-Blood Sisters and narrated by my own doll Zaphy, who belongs to the enemy brand Pullip  (made in Korea).

Van Sinterklaas en Zwarte Piet from the Low Lands. Make sure to be bad so I can come and get you in the new year! Yummie!

(Thanks to Carrie Yang for this finding cute sex poetry, for translating it into English, and for annotating it below. Happy christmas everyone and don’t forget to be bad. )

月出煙盡琴簫冷

The moon rose, the smoke dissipated, the flute became cold

階前侯人唯杯影

I waited before the steps for the one with a glass and its shadows

且執木樨眠

Slept with the Osmanthus fragrance in hand

千紅棲碧淵

Thousands of redness rested on green abyss

欲提羅襪去

I was going to leave with my silk socks

聞語還凝佇

But I hesitated upon his voice so I stopped

夢里喚真真

It reminded me how we called out in dreams

掩門辭舊塵

I shut the door and bid farewell to the old dust…

Explanations:

The Poem is written in Pu Sa Man (菩薩蠻）

首句，月出而清，清則不亂，煙盡而寒，無情始

The first sentence, when the moon rise, the whole world cleared up, there was no longer noices and chaos; when the smoke dissipate, it becomes cold…It signified ruthlessness and cruelty.

The flute is widely used to refer to the dick. And the action of “playing(blowing) the flute” is the synonym of “blow job.”

A glass before the steps…You can imagine wither it’s drug or wine.

Redness refers to blood of the woman. The green abyss is from Tao Te Ching…It refers to the virginal.

We have compiled and translated some interesting tweets by China’s famous sex blogger Liumangyan (Sister Swallow) You can follow her (in Chinese) on http://twitter.com/liumangyan or visit her website  http://www.hongchen2006.com.

A more thorough analysis of her exquisite dialogues and rants will follow in my book.  She is a hyper-active blogger who is brave, full of jouissance and to the point. She is often neck to neck with well-known artist Ai Wei Wei, who will also be featured in my book.

***Defending and advocating for sex workers. 

@JinyanSONG 性工作者比小三夺正室的可能，情人蹿位的野心，都要小得多。因为性工作者面对许多男性，并不愿意界入他人的家庭。我并不反对一夫一妻制的家庭模式但性在婚姻生活中，不应该是影响家庭稳定的主要因素。當然性工作者也不构成威胁。June 30

@ JinyanSong sex workers are much less likely to intervene in a family than a second wife or a secret lover, because sex workers have to deal with a lot of males and they do not want to be part of these families. I am not against monogamy but sex should not be the major reason that affects the stability of a family. So of course sex workers cannot be a threat.

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(many thanks to Carrie for compiling and translating all these beautiful and poetic expressions)

胸部/乳房BREAST

波 ball (vulgar)

双峰（twin mountain）

咪咪 （mi mi）

奶子 (milk)

豪乳 (grand milk)

巨乳 (huge milk)

玉兔 (jade rabbit)

雪峰 (snowy mountain)

酥胸 (soft breast)

肉丘 (flesh hill)

肉峰 (flesh mountain)

NIPPLE 乳头

红豆 (red bean)

红头 (red head) (more…)

Yesterday night the rain cleared and the fired dragon danced around  in the streets of old Tai Hang for many hours. People seemed very happy to carry the dragon (made of thousands of burning incense sticks) despite the unstable weather conditions earlier on. If you read about the history of the dragon below, you will understand why it was important for the dragon to chase away the squally typhoon air. This is a kind of powerful trance ritual that is hard to find in this glitzy city & hopefully will stay despite the  the real estate overhaul.

“Back in the days when land reclamation had not pushed the shoreline so far away, Tai Hang was a small fishing village with just a few hundred inhabitants. In 1880, a few days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, it was lashed by a powerful storm – some versions of this legendary story say a typhoon – that devastated the waterfront hamlet. Around the same time, a large serpent entered the village and was killed by some of the residents. Shortly afterwards, plague and cholera broke out in Tai Hang, leading to the deaths of over 10 individuals. One night, a village elder was visited in a dream by the Buddha – though, appropriately for an area home to a beautiful Lin Fa Kung (Palace of the Golden Flower) temple dedicated to her, some versions state the message came via Kwun Yum, the Goddess of Mercy – and learnt that the serpent beaten to death in Tai Hang had been none other than the son of the consequently wrathful Dragon King. As that aquatic monarch was afraid of fire, Tai Hang’s residents were instructed to make a fire dragon and dance through the streets with it. Which they promptly did and successfully rid themselves of both Dragon King and the diseases. And they have continued the ceremony with much gusto every year since – bar for the troubled times when Hong Kong was under Japanese occupation, and during the 1967 disturbances.”"

Back in the days when land reclamation had not pushed the shoreline so far away, Tai Hang was a small fishing village with just a few hundred inhabitants. In 1880, a few days before the Mid-Autumn Festival, it was lashed by a powerful storm – some versions of this legendary story say a typhoon – that devastated the waterfront hamlet. Around the same time, a large serpent entered the village and was killed by some of the residents. Shortly afterwards, plague and cholera broke out in Tai Hang, leading to the deaths of over 10 individuals.

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