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contributed some money to the bar, and in the end they were all shaking hands.
    You could call this “happiness”: knowing for certain that that dead-of-night bar, in the darkness before dawn, is now very distant. Still, it’s something I look back on.
    5.
    We started kissing, and we kissed until it became a kind of agony.
    I’d never drunk so much alcohol before, and my head ached hotly. I’d never looked at a man’s naked body until now, and I felt I couldn’t distinguish between his skin and mine, couldn’t tell for sure where my skin ended and his began, and we were enveloped in the softness of our own silence, and my desire lay hidden inside his body.
    He traced a moist fingertip over my lips, saying, These are yours. When you’re happy, it turns me on.
    When he kissed my sex with his lips, I cried out. I had found the sense of total safety I had always craved.
    He was slowly changing into another person, a sleepwalker, his hands getting heavier and heavier, his penis growing larger and larger inside me, and he let out a moan, this pitiful man. I finally heard that sound.
    I said, Do you have to do that?
    I hurt all over, but his cries had an eerie sweetness that made me reel, and I couldn’t tell whether I was moaning with joy or with pain, and this made me feel ashamed. His sweat dripped onto my face, my breasts. I felt like a pathetic little girl. I looked up at him, loving the feeling of his sweat rolling across my body.
    Finally he moved me on top of him, tonguing my breasts and breathing hard and warm against me. Suddenly I saw that his eyes were wet. He said, Remember me, remember me like you remember yourself.
    My body broke with joy. I thought that this was probably a climax. Catching the scent of the substance flowing from inside my body, I saw into my own future, saw that I would become a woman with many stories to tell. But every story would have its price.
    6.
    Lying in bed in 1992 , I thought back on that night three years earlier, thought back on all of the passion and pain and hunger and terror connected with it. I was still confused. Three years had passed, and I was still asking myself, What is love, anyway? The only thing I knew was that it was impossible for me not to see this man. We needed each other. There were secrets that only we shared.
    And what was a climax? Qi told me that she had passed out once when she was coming, and this left me feeling more confused than ever. I loved the turbulent mood Saining and I shared when he was screwing me—this moment was more real to me than anything. I loved it when Saining screwed me like a total stranger while his lips spoke the sweetest words—it was only when he was fucking me as if he didn’t know me that he would say things that really touched me. That was his style.
    I know, language hurt me. Language hurt me, and there was nothing I could do about it!
    One night, Saining repeated something he’d said to me early in our relationship, Remember me, remember me like you remember yourself! I didn’t know if he was saying this to me again on this particular night because he’d just had a really good orgasm, or because I’d found out that he was cheating on me again.
    God only knows how many illicit sexual encounters took place on any given evening at the nightclub where I sang. A lot of girls came from the countryside or from other cities to make a living here. Qi was just one among many transient “cocktail hostesses.” She wore a perpetually quizzical expression; her face even looked like a question mark. I found out that her name was Qi, that we were from the same city, that she’d gone to university, and that she had no father. On another occasion, we were having drinks together, and after talking about Freud’s
Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,
we became friends. But one day she called me up out of the blue and asked me to come over to her place. She said she wanted to break up with her boyfriend and that she needed to have