Like most teenage boys, at the age when “sex” hits hardest, I opened the door to “sex.” The trigger was a little ad I saw on the street, telling the story of a dick pill. It went like this: a “mistress” gets abandoned, then runs into a homeless guy on the street. He’s asleep, but still standing tall, so to speak. So the “mistress,” thirsty as hell, sits right down on him in broad daylight, and the wording that follows—I can’t decide if it’s absurd or inspired. Stuff like “jade stalk slides into jade gate,” “flower branch trembling,淫水 overflowing”—anyway, the ad ends by telling you this homeless guy is so godlike because he took their brand of dick pills. Even as an ad it’s total nonsense and makes no sense. For one, how does a homeless guy afford a box of fake dick pills at 98 RMB? And no woman on the street is gonna get bored and sit on a beggar. Do you people not own vibrators? Later, my more absurd education on “sex” came from a series of jokes called Professor Huang Xialiu. I found them in a pile of old newspapers—no idea which street rag printed them. A lot of the jokes were ridiculous, but sometimes they carried real satire of the era, including some absurdity from the Cultural Revolution. You can still find some traces of “Huang Xialiu” online, though supposedly anyone who’s seen this stuff is already 50.