Chapter 3

“A Girl Named Dou Dou”

There was a beautiful girl in a few of Lijian’s classes. A girl named Dou Dou. She was unlike any girl Lijian had ever seen. Not that Lijian knew much about girls. Truthfully, Lijian never had a girlfriend and had never even touched a girl.

Back in his village, boys outnumbered girls by three to one, and most of the young women left town early to work in bigger cities like Nanchang, so even seeing an attractive twentysomething lady was rare. That, of course, changed when he arrived in Shanghai. And at his school, he was smitten by the numerous young beauties he’d see on a daily basis.

Especially that Dou Dou. She was beautiful as a movie star, with her porcelain body, white jade skin. Her opal eyes big as an anime cartoon. Her jet-black waves of hair trailing down to her shoulders. The heavens smiling on her flawless form as she’d wear the clingiest skirts, qipaos...

Mesmerized, he’d glance over at her, in the classroom ... How he loved the girl’s painted face, her makeup. Her heavy flicks of mascara, various shades of eye shadow. Her candy-red, pouty lips. Her pink-pink cheeks reminding him of candy. And oh, oh how he loved the sweetness of her scent, how she was perpetually perfumed ... He’d imagine her whole form, her whole body somehow made of sugar...

Mao Yeye have mercy! The girl was incandescent, poetry in motion, a work of art!

Lijian pictured Dou Dou as a descendant of Diaochan, one of the “Four Beauties” of ancient China. And like those ancient beauties, he averred that Dou Dou had a face so stunningly gorgeous it could sink fish, eclipse the moon, entice birds to fall from the sky, and put even the prettiest flowers to shame.

Lijian secretly developed a heart-pounding crush on the girl, imagining the two marrying. Dou Dou, on his arm, in a brilliant red and gold marital qipao. The two having children, several children, several chubby little bundles of sunshine. Lijian proudly doting on her, but not uxoriously. Lijian and Dou Dou, high-ranking members in the CCP, living in Zhongnanhai, living the Chinese Dream!

But he was never able to muster the courage to approach her. Worse yet, he felt his stomach sink when he started seeing her clicking on her dagger high heels, her hips swaying as she’d saunter up to Wilson, the dufus foreign teacher, after every class. The girl all smiles, giggling, tilting her head, and chattering away in her perfect English. The girl speaking with nearly pure pronunciation, sounding almost like an actress in a Harry Potter movie.

It drove Lijian mad, sent sizzling gusts of anger down his spine. Lijian seeing that girl, talking to that disgusting dog fart of a man. Even if she was only making nice to ensure her grade would be high, still, it roiled him.

Eventually his crush on her evaporated, when he spotted the foreign teacher and Dou Dou, strolling through campus together, smiling and chatting. Standing outside the library, Lijian’s skin crawled, then his face twisted in disgust, and he froze in his tracks, glaring down at the two like someone would stare at dogshit on their shoe. He then figured she must be a prostitute and lost all respect for her.

Simultaneously, he grew to hate the foreigner, even more, when he noticed the foreigner must be around 180 CM, far taller than him, at 168 CM. Lijian pictured himself as his grandfather, in the War Against America in Korea, Lijian blasting a mortar at the horny white baboon and the whore, then chuckling as the two exploded in a firework show of bloody body parts and black smoke.

It wasn’t as if there weren’t other girls in his class. So what if she were the prettiest. She was a whore, he thought, a traitor to her country! Lijian started imagining her, arm in arm, with that hairy white baboon, the two stepping into a dingy, dark and smokey hotel room. Dou Dou on her back, legs spread, her trading sex for grades. Certainly grades, or maybe a poorly written recommendation letter, would be all the baboon had to offer. Certainly, by the looks of him, he couldn’t pay, financially, for her “services.”

Lijian hacked and spit on the ground, silently cursed the wretched pair! The both of them worth no more than a glob of spit!