Knocking one out in the Middle Kingdom… and the aftermath
By ChouChou

Oh, hello there Reader (you’ll have to imagine that I’m sat behind a large oak desk and that I’m turning towards you as I put down my trusty pipe), I’m glad you came. You see, I’ve been asked by my dear fellow Sinocidal members to say a few words about my days as a writer in China. In the next few paragraphs I’m going to dazzle you with secret irony, disseminate essential information, let you in on a bit of the secrecy behind those draped media curtains, and even use two or three of Sinocidal’s Five Hardy Jokes. In short, you’re going to have a ruddy good time. Or are you? Or ARE you? OR ARE YOU? No, not really, no.

And if this all sounds a bit self-indulgent: you’re right. However, I’m contractually obliged to be dead by the end of this Article, so indulge me.

A few years ago I used to work for Hangzhou’s premier English language toilet paper: In Touch Zhejiang. IT, as nobody affectionately referred to it, was a wonderful and worthy read; full of fascinating articles that didn’t scratch one’s arse too much as you wiped shit all over them. However, during the period that I worked for In Touch, the Magazine committed many gross and unforgivable crimes and, quite frankly, resembled the NEFARIOUS HANDIWORK OF HE WHO WALKS BACKWARDS. “Why do you say that then?” asks Reader Stuart N Hardy of Yuhuan District, Taizhou. Well Stuart, it’s simple. That magazine was responsible for more than its fair share of errors and wrongs.

Now, I’m not talking about little errors which any of us could commit unintentionally – the slaughter of millions of Chinese during a Great Leap Forward, say – I’m talking about major crimes up there on the same level as Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. Grammatical errors, appalling examples of Chinglish in leading articles, any article containing sentences beginning with “In Chinese peoples’ eyes…” or “With a history of five thousand years…” And far too many pages devoted to luring naïve businessmen into investing x amount of dollars into y Special Economic Zone of z county. But hey! That’s all part of the fun when you work for a Sinister Evil Mega-National Organisation! As any fule kno.

To quell my unease over the rotten rubbish I had written during my sentence on my magazine, I decided to make sure that my last ever article was going to see me leaving the magazine with a bang. Here, for your viewing pleasure, is that article:

Knocking one out in the Middle Kingdom

I enjoy my job about as much as a paedophile loves the onset of puberty, so to spice things up I sometimes turn my phone off and disappear for a few days. Many of these days are solely spent leisuring in the gentlemanly fashion: partaking of the pleasures of one’s own company. Normally I reserve these 24 hand shandy drinking marathons for the weekend; Palm Sundays were created by God for his hardworking creation to enjoy a day of wrist, but uncontrollable needs brought the vinegar strokes on this Wednesday.

I went to nearby Penglai to visit a friend, and her being A) Chinese, and B) A girl, the evening meant back in the hotel room by 8.30 rather than haggling for Chivas with some spiky haired tosspot of a barman. 8.30? Good grief, what is a man supposed to do stuck in a remote hotel room at 8.30? Back home, Heartbeat would only just be starting. I could have rang the hotel’s “masseur” service, but quite frankly I’m much cheaper and I’ve probably given more handjobs than most of the girls employed at the Haidu Hotel (handjobs to myself I mean, of course).

It was then I found myself in a position (ha! position!) that I haven’t been forced into since the dark days of my first arrival in China. I had no whacking material. Back home, by various means, I have managed to gather quite a considerable amount of pornographic DVDs and magazines, from Golden Showers to Double Vaginal Double Anals. Hell, the only reason I bought a computer was so that I could go online and see “Dutch girls with big boobs must be punished”. Yet suddenly, here I was gland in hand in the middle of Communist China without a single Jazz Mag or internet connection to help me out. I tried to close my eyes and do a thinky wank of my girlfriend, but thinky wanks are never as good as looky wanks, are they? My only option was CCTV: at best there might be some kind of variety performance with ethnic minority girls in khaki miniskirts, but unfortunately no. All I could find were flabby men in crinkled white shirts talking about One Country Two Systems. Normally that would do the trick, but not tonight. Finally, I found the only image of a young woman within 37 stations: the newsreader on CCTV9. Trying my best to filter out the sound of her horrible robotic English I proceeded to tug away at my old man; but it was no use. The complete and utter bollocks coming out of her mouth, and her serious buttoned-up business shirt, were turning me more off than on. It was then I took the only available option. I pressed the mute button and held up my elbow just below her face so that the crack in my arm made it look like she had some cleavage. After three minutes of this shameless act of self abuse, I had shot millions of never-to-be-born babies onto the Andrex Runway already prepared on my lower belly, and was ready for a good night’s sleep.

Without a doubt, that was probably the worst, the most miserable wank I have ever done in my life. Although some other things which I wanked over during my first few days in China come pretty close:
An illustration of a lady on a shampoo bottle.
Trying to catch the 0.000000001 millisecond on a Chinese Oil of Ulay advert when the woman looks naked.
A CCTV documentary about the Zhuang minority women of Guangxi Province.
My own drawing of a naked woman.
Standing in front of the mirror naked with a pair of breasts drawn on my chest in black marker pen.

So readers, if there are any of you, what is the crappest thing YOU’VE ever masturbated over in China? The best answer will receive a roll of toilet paper and a signed photograph of the late Hattie Jacques.

Was the article well received? Did the fun-loving expat masses of Hangzhou write in and thank me for daring to write something other than vile propaganda in their English magazine? Can The Fonz jump the shark? The answer to the first two questions was a definite NO. Three hotels withdrew their advertising from the magazine immediately, the editor was given a final warning, and the In Touch mailbox received letters for the first time ever demanding that the “sociopath” who had written the offending article should never be allowed to write again (little did they know I was already 500 miles from Hangzhou and had no intention of ever working for the Chinese media ever again). Sure enough, the next issue saw a return to translated articles about strawberry picking in Yuyao and messages from the mayor of Quzhou welcoming foreign businessmen to invest in his city.

In my opinion, anything was better than the insipid and uncomfortable propaganda that In Touch repeatedly published, and I did try to make a valid and subtle point in my infamous article that something is deeply wrong in a country where it is easier to sleep with a prostitute than it is to masturbate. Perhaps I was wrong, I really don’t know. That’s why I want to hear the opinions of all Sinocidally minded folk out there, and hopefully hear them say that I was right.

Was it a harmless and flippant article that just wanted to give a government mouthpiece a kick up the arse, or was it (as one American woman wrote in and said) “a vile piece of filth written by somebody who clearly has mental problems”?

What do you think?

(And in a further twist of fate, The Fonz’s jet skis break at the critical moment, and his limp body is torn apart by sharks. Oh, the irony of it all.)