While on the multilingual theme…

I went down to a Blairgowrie with some friends the other weekend. There we spent two nights drinking, chatting and relaxing. A friend Mick brought down of all things a Mandarin phrase book, with which he popped out bawdy come-ons and pillow-talk in Chinese. Now this got me thinking about a mandarin bi-lingual dictionary that I’d stolen some way back while I was at uni off a friend after some falling out. It was published in 1978, two years after Mao died and makes for some interesting reading. So I thought I would offer my own brief lesson in Chinese, communist and red-book waving.

fàngsōng: relax; slacken; loosen. We mustn’t slacken out efforts to remold our world outlook.

Despite not being able to drink (much) because of the medication I’m on and a minor spinal injury incurred while foolishly trying body surf at the Sorrento backbeach it was a good weekend.

liánjié: bind; tie; join. A common revolutionary goal has bound us closely together. The ties of friendship join the two peoples.

It was just the eight of us down having started at the Midsumma opening in Federation Square extending through Saturday into Sunday at Cam’s beach house. I suppose you could say it was a gay boy weekend away, free from the chains of heterosexual patriarchal oppression and the like and as you expect we approached it with shocking abandon playing party games such trivial pursuit and mastermind.

We’d been at the beach most of Saturday and back at camp, the evening began with the most expensive pizza and a game of “never ever”, a variation on the theme of “truth or dare,” which never wavered much from talk of sex despite Cam’s greatest efforts.

Oh and then there was the skinny-dipping.

qiáng zhì: force; compel; coerce. People cannot be compelled to accept one particular style of art or school of thought.

The weekend was part of Glen’s birthday celebrations and he’d been talking about swimming in the buff since Meredith, early December. Now I was not totally against the idea, some part of me wanted the experience. Maybe I wanted a bonding session which’d draw me closer to a group that I sorta feel a little on the outer and maybe there was also the rabid homosexual in me who was a little bit curious about my friend’s bits. Yes well and you see this is the problem. Glen tried to sell it as a liberating experience, that the intense sense of shame that I felt about my body would somehow be dissolved in the water, amongst the waves, naked and around a group of gay men, sizing me up, judging me…


luŏ: bare; naked; exposed; stark naked and undisguised.


I stood there without clothing, water lapping at my thighs, arms crossed. I didn’t feel particularly free. Why was no one talking to me? Was this all in my imagination? Their eyes averted? Were they trying to avoid seeing me all flabby, hairy and pale as frigid cadaver?

This is why I never felt nudism to be particularly revolutionary. Clothes are not what I need to shed, social expectations and the baggage I carry ain’t so easily hidden amongst the bracken by the shore.

Why couldn’t we do something really liberating like karaoke?

yĭncáng: hide; conceal; remain undercover. A bourgeois careerist hidden in the revolutionary ranks. A counterrevolutionary who has succeeded in staying hidden.