Recently, I went to mainland China on a business trip, and I was lucky enough to meet Mr. Lin Zhen, a master of eroticism whom we have always admired. The following is a small interview that I did, hoping that those who like Lin Zhen’s works will have a better understanding of him.
PANG: Mr. Lim, I admire you so much…
Lin: Mr. Peng, there’s no need to repeat Star Chow’s lines, let’s get to the point.
Readers of Pang:Yuan Yuan, and fellow fans of your novels, are very interested in knowing how you’re doing. How’s the lawsuit going?
Lin: Thank you for your concern. I’m on “medical parole” and my lawyer won’t let me talk much about my lawsuit. However, what seemed like a big deal two years ago is now nothing at all. On the Internet, there are people who use all kinds of software to collect e-mail addresses and sell them to SPAM companies every day. If you want to arrest them, you should arrest SPAM companies, which are also in China now.
Peng: But Big Reference is not just any SPAM company, right?
Lin: Who in China reads Big Reference now? In 95-96, Chinese newsgroups ACT blossomed to a climax, but with the domestic major introductory Web site discussion forums and chat rooms flourished, ACT has died, when so keen to discuss the Internet people should now be married and raise children.
Peng: That’s right, many of those pro-democracy activists abroad have already received economic benefits through political appeals, and the next step is to go back to the mainland to do business. I’ll tell you a joke: we all know that both the pro-democracy movement and the Falun Gong people, if they go to the Garden Corner in San Francisco’s Chinatown for activities, they will be beaten up by a group of 60- or 70-year-old men. It is said that these old men were volunteers back then. They said: “Grandma, I was defending our country and fighting with the American devils for what? It is not for you rabbit grandchildren can live a good life? Now your grandpa is trying to save the country, why are you making such a fuss?”
Lin: (Laughs) The national newspapers should report such things.
Peng: Mr. Lin, you know very much about the website of Zhang Min and paper flowers, as well as your works posted on Yuan Yuan. I think one of the questions that people want to ask is: do you continue to write hetero erotica?
Lin: Basically, I’m in a state of semi-blocked writing because I’m not in a good mood, and I don’t have a place to publish what I’ve written. However, from time to time, I still write one or two sketches to entertain myself, but they are not complete stories, purely for the sake of shooting very boring things!
Pang: Your graffiti is also a treasure for those who like such things! (Pang’s note: I’ve been kissing ass to the point of shamelessness, just to get a little something.)
Lin: Ha ha ha!
Peng: We all agree that Girls’ Club is your masterpiece. What do you think? How did you write this novel?
Lin: Actually, I don’t think this is my masterpiece, I think it’s a bit too long. I was inspired to write it because I went to a slaughterhouse to help repair their slaughter line, and when I saw a pig hanging in the air that had been cut in two, I thought, “How exciting it would be if they were beautiful girls! However, since I don’t like human-eating stories, I didn’t develop it into a human-eating story. After reading the book you showed me, “A Visit to Club X”, I realized that my creative impulses are similar to that author’s. I’d like to write a story about a pig that’s been disemboweled.
Peng: Zheng Yunxiang’s work is very similar to yours, and I know he has published this kind of novel in many magazines.
Do you recognize him? Has a similar novel been published in a magazine?
LIN: In the early 1980s, there were various salons, and Zheng Yunxiang, a graduate student from Hong Kong, organized an existentialist salon dedicated to discussing sex and death, and of course we also discussed the military. Because the things we discussed were rather extreme, there were only Zheng and me, as well as Huang Xiaowen and Chen Wubiao. We were very fond of reading handwritten novels at that time, and we also learned how to write them, but later on we increasingly realized that shooting girls was our common interest, and the result was the reason why Zheng’s novels you see now are very, very similar to my novels. It seems that there was a Zheng novel that used characters from my novel, I forget which one, and I don’t know if you guys have that one.
Peng: Jung is now a professor of astrophysics, while you later became a 46-pass technician, how did that happen?
Lin: Because I fell in love with my girlfriend and got inside the bushes to kiss, the campus police team found out and both of us were expelled. She lost her college degree and I lost my master’s degree and had to work as a general technician.
■ Peng: do not want to comment on this paragraph, let Yuan Yuan’s readers comment on it. How much China has changed in less than twenty years! It’s no longer news that female college students are picking up girls after class, but if they knew that you were expelled for kissing, they would think it was a mirage. Your novel is very realistic and detailed in its portrayal of female psychology, is it because of your girlfriend?
Lin: Yes, but she doesn’t know that I like such things or that I’m writing such things. But one good thing about her is that she answers any question I ask, unlike some girls who lose interest and don’t answer when they hear a topic they don’t like.
What questions did you ask?
Lin: For example, if you were shot in the breast, how would you react? What if you were shot in the pussy? What if you knew where the bullet could hit you? How would your friend Wong Siu Hong (or Yau Yan Kwan or…) react? Why? At this point, although she was annoyed with me at first, blaming me for asking such dirty questions, she answered me very carefully because we were already very close.
What I especially like is that she analyzes the reactions of her female classmates or girlfriends of different personalities, because she is smart enough to know that I like to listen to her talk about those things, and this helps me understand the psychological state of many young girls. For example, she would tell me that if Huang Xiaohong had been hit in the pubic area, she would have cried but would not have shouted, because she was very shy and usually adopted an avoidance approach to sexual matters. But Qiu Yanjun would have cursed because she already knew it was very humiliating. As for Feng Zhimin, if she had been hit in the breasts, she would have screamed and cursed because her breasts were so full and firm that she wouldn’t have died so quickly, and she was a lively and bright person… and so on… All of this helped me to build up the material for my novels.
Peng: I envy you for having such a good encyclopedia of girls! Has your relationship continued?
Lin: Yes. If my lawsuit is over, we’re going to get married.
Pang: That’s great, bless you both. If only I had such a good girlfriend… Paper flower, will you be my girlfriend? (This sentence was added for publication in Won Won – Pang’s note.) Lin: You’re so young and talented, you’ll have tons of beautiful girls chasing after you…
Pang: Don’t, don’t say my company’s name out, I don’t have to mix, if our general manager in China knows I’m a fan of SNUFF, I’m dead, she’s a strong woman.
Lin: But a lot of people like to write about conquering strong women, including shootings.
Pang: I don’t like it, I just like to read your work, which specializes in the pleasure of young girls in the throes of love. The next question I’d like to ask is: under what circumstances do you find yourself enjoying these kinds of stories?
Lin: Basically, my own life experience: I’ve participated in martial arts battles, I’ve been to the countryside, I’ve been a soldier, I’ve shot people. The character of Su Bing is a bit of a reflection of my real life.
Pang: Wow! Don’t tell me you actually participated in the shooting of the Sixth Witch!
Lin: Ha ha ha! No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Pang: Can you briefly tell us how your life experiences led you to a love of fae erotica?
Lin: martial arts when I was very small, just developed it, because I was Ye Ye sports school shooting team, shooting is very accurate, so they made an exception for me to participate in the real gun martial arts, and fight with a stick or something I do not participate in the relationship because of small size, will only be dragged into the people.
Once the other side attacked us, holding up the red flag and Chairman Mao’s quotations, not afraid of death at all, and as a result, we killed a lot of people. I somehow felt that it was very exciting to hit the girls inside the charging team, so I specialized in targeting women, in fact, there were very few women at that time, and it was very difficult to knock down one or two of them.
Pang: Wow, that’s exciting! Where did you hit them?
Lin: see where you think! You do not know, at that time the girls in the dress is no different from the men, are wearing uniforms, wearing military hats, the difference is that many people wear two pigtails, the older girls in the belt tied around the waist, will see the chest bulge, I hit there.
Pang: How did they react after they were shot?
Lin: too far away, but their mouths are moving, must have screamed; hands have covered the wound. Unlike the men who were shot, they fell very slowly, as if they were afraid of pain, and they didn’t die right away, their legs were stirring.
PANG: It was wonderful… Did you check the bodies after the battle?
Rin: I didn’t take part in cleaning up the battlefield. If it was now, I’d be checking out the bodies of the girls I killed. Hahahaha!
Peng: Did you ever shoot a woman when you were a soldier?
Lin: Of course. At that time, the whole country had stopped fighting, but in Guangxi, because of Wei Guoqing, there was still fighting and killing every day. One faction killed another faction and so on, and the army also helped to kill people indiscriminately. The army also helped to kill people indiscriminately. After killing people, they were tied up in rows and thrown into the Xijiang River, down the river, and at that time, people downstream of the Xijiang River could often see a large number of Guangxi corpses flowing down the river.
I’ve been to a few shootings of armed prisoners of the opposing Red Guards, and they were all firing squad style frontal shots to the chest, as if they still shoot people in the chest today. Those Red Guards were very young, no more than 20 years old. Usually, there weren’t many women. But one time we shot ten people, and three of them were women. But you couldn’t tell what they looked like. Prisoners don’t look good. Besides, their throats were anesthetized so they couldn’t shout “Long live Chairman Mao!” If she shouts, no one can kill her. That’s why you don’t hear any screams when you shoot people.
I intentionally shot one of them in the bulging right breast and was excited to see the blood splatter from there. After the shooting, we usually stood there and chatted for a while, waiting for the coroner to check to see if they were dead or not, and then re-shooting if they weren’t, or sometimes we dared to get a little closer to see. I noticed that the women didn’t fall on their backs, and many of them convulsed for a long time after they fell, and they were still spasming and kicking even after the men were dead hard, which was very sexy. Also, the women break very loudly.
That time, I saw the crotch of the girl I shot in the right breast was wet, and the coroner said it was urine. He also said that women are usually incontinent after being shot, and some of them get their periods coming (I didn’t know what menstruation meant at that time).
Then one time I secretly risked getting caught by shooting a girl in the pussy, which ended up missing and hitting her in the lower abdomen. Luckily it wasn’t noticed, it was pretty messed up at that point.
Peng: That’s wonderful, that’s wonderful! Are there any novels or movies that have influenced your work?
LAMB: Of course I did. The best is “Walter Defends Sarajevo”, where the watchmaker’s daughter is machine-gunned across the chest and falls in slow motion, and then when her father goes to identify the body, he shows the bullet holes in her body in close-up, and it’s so impulsive that I’ve seen the movie many times.
There is a novel about the Guangzhou Uprising in which a female soldier named Yuxi, with a squad of female soldiers, defended a barricade near the Sky Pier, and all of them were killed in action. The Kuomintang army stripped them naked, put them on display on the ground, and stuck bamboo sticks into their pussies. I once went to the museum inside the Martyrs’ Mausoleum in Guangzhou and found that this was true. I wonder if the museum is still there?
I was also inspired by the Sparky series of English novels. However, these movies did not have much influence on my creative work. What had a great impact on my creative work were some scenes that had nothing to do with similar movies, for example, when I watched the group exercise of the Fifth National Games, there were several thousand female high school students wearing blue skirts and dancing hula hoops, which made me very, very happy to see that they were being machine-gunned. So there’s a similar plot in one of my novels.
Peng: I’ve been to Guangzhou, but I’ve never noticed if there’s any martyrs’ cemetery there, but Ms. Zhang Min may know. I would like to ask one more question: Which class are you from?
Lin: 77th.
■ Peng: wow, can be our master granddaddy well! The paper flower asked me to ask a question: she found that your novel inside the girl wear clothes with different times change, is it your girl wear what clothes in the bullet most sexy with the trend of the times change?
Lin: Paper Flowers is very attentive. She’s right, in my early days I particularly liked girls who wore soft shirts, because these clothes can reveal the bra very clearly, and shooting the bra area is very exciting.
Then came the teenage tankini, a name I coined, and now a lot of people who write similar novels in my style also write about teenage tankinis, but they may not know what they are. I mean something like a sports bra, a half tank top with no sleeves and a belly showing, with thick suspenders.
Later on, it became popular for teenage girls to wear little halter tops, which are the sexiest and most exciting clothes at the moment. Teenage girls who were shot in little halter tops, to be thin halter tops, and then denim shorts, were simply beautiful.
As for lower body clothing, for a while I liked track shorts like volleyball players, looked thriving and fit, and also didn’t die as fast, so I could enjoy a little more of the fast aesthetic. Also liked the depiction of shooting various short skirts and suit shorts.
Later, denim shorts came along and became sexier than any shorts. I’m not too fond of describing shooting girls in swimsuits, especially the three-pointed ones; too revealing clothing rather loses the beauty of a teenage girl in the most appropriate teenage clothes. There was a time when I liked to write about killing before raping, then I gave up.
Peng: Do you have any contact with Zheng Yunxiang? Do you know if he still writes?
Rin: He’s kind of a celebrity now, so presumably he’s really diving?
Pang: Are you officially closed now? Because we haven’t read your novel for a long time.
Lin: I’m not going to stop writing, I’ll write again when I’m inspired. Here, take a look at my latest sketch, and if it’s good, post it on Yuan Yuan. And I’ll send you a letter.
Peng: Thank you, thank you! Do you have any plans to create your own website?
Lin: I’m not allowed to touch computers or surf the Internet. I probably won’t be able to create a Web site until after the lawsuit is over.
Pang: That’s too bad! About the language in your work: do you write in Cantonese?
Lin: Right. Although I have lived in Shanghai for a long time, I never knew what the verbal language and curses of the female middle school students in Shanghai were like. However, for Cantonese I was very familiar with it, and there were some cries after being shot that could be said to be very real.
Pang: The last question was asked by a reader of Zhang Min’s website: Do you believe that a bullet in the clitoris of a teenage girl will produce a fast and beautiful orgasm?
Lin: Absolutely. Not only is this the conclusion of the famous “Lublin Concentration Camp Moore Experiment Report”, but also, when I have sex with my girlfriend, when I am about to reach the climax, she would like me to press her clitoris hard, the stronger the force, the more comfortable, which can be indirectly proved.
Peng: Thank you, Mr. Lin, senior Lin. I have benefited a lot, and I believe that Yuan Yuan’s friends have also benefited a lot. I don’t dare to disturb Mr. Lin for such a long time, so let’s stop here! I will be the host for the evening, but please Mr. Lin, please enjoy your face!
Lin: You’re welcome, you’re welcome! Please go back and greet the moderators and readers of Yuanyuan for the holidays, and the two ladies who enjoyed my novel for me (though I still don’t believe they’re really ladies)!