First Night, 2025

Yuan Changming 

Copyright ©2026

On October 11, I got up at 4:00 am to catch my connection to Jingzhou. By the time I

arrived at my mother’s residence, Cao was already waiting outside the apartment

complex, ready to pick me up for a two-hour drive to Songzi.

This was the third time we went together to the county town to attend our zhiqing

gathering, which was held annually to honor our halcyon days at Mayuehe Youth Station

as well as our close comradeship since the end of the covid-19 pandemic. The event had a

special significance for me and Hua, as it afforded us the only opportunity to openly join

each other and marked the outset of our third short annual secret getaway.

As a rule, the party dispersed at dusk. After Cao dropped me off near my cousin’s

apartment where I had claimed to spend the night, I took a long walk to Shangyite Hotel,

where Hua was to lead me into her room.

“Aren’t you afraid people will see you having a different man this time?” I asked.

“Nah, no more receptionists in the hall now.”

Scarcely had we entered her room and changed our shoes when I dragged her to

the washroom for a joint shower.

“Finally, our performance’s over,” I said, referring to the way we had to act

normal like old comrades during the yearly gathering.

“You must be feeling tired after such a long day!” Hua said softly as I caressed

her gorgeous body.

“But the very touch of your physical being has re-energized me, like a dead

cellphone regaining its full function the moment it’s connected to a power bank!”

“You’re sweet-talking me again,” Hua said coquettishly. “But don’t be too hard on

yourself tonight, though.”

“It’s a great shame that I can never be hard enough in you, no matter how much I

long to!”

Getting my pun in no time as she often did, she extended it further by saying,

“Don’t worry, I like the way you’re so softened,” meaning she was fond of my

tenderness.

As always happened, I experienced a premature ejaculation during our first round

of lovemaking, due to my habitual nervousness and lack of practice over the past year.

“You’re really hurting me this way, Mingming!” she complained under me in a

murmuring voice.

“How come?” I wondered aloud. “I’m doing it the same way as before.”

After some hesitation, she seemed to have overcome her embarrassment and went

on to say, “Besides, you’re always a bit too fast.”

She had mentioned this a couple of times before, but without taking the matter

seriously, I just explained it away by telling her that I had to do it fast enough to maintain

the necessary hardness, something quite difficult for me to achieve. While most other

Chinese men of my age might well have lost their libdo completely, I was proud of my

sexual endurance. Before sleeping with Hua for the first time in 2023, I had already

become impotent, constantly failing to get into my wife’s body. It was only after

I became partners with her that I regained my power, just as Cao had suggested. Indeed,

as I had made it clear in my published personal essay “Muse in the Flesh,” I’d always

been proud of my libido remaining as strong as my literary creativity. But how come my

wife had never complained about me hurting her before she became sexually inactive?

“I’m taking the classic posture, and doing it in a perfectly normal rhythm,” I said

in self-justification. “I saw all men doing it exactly the same way.”

“Where, when?”

“I told you before. It was in adult videos that I was invited to watch by a Hong

Kong roommate in 1988. That’s when I first went to Canada, as a government-sponsored

visiting scholar at McGill University.”

“Then, yours is probably the fast or the occidental way,” Hua observed. “But it’s

not really so enjoyable to me.”

“Is there a Chinese or oriental way then?” my curiosity aroused. “I never know of

such a distinction.” As a matter of fact, during our entire married life, my way never hurt

my wife, and neither of us felt anything abnormal.

Nevertheless, I suddenly became aware of this difference at this juncture: each

time we made love, my wife just lied down there as I kept throwing in and pulling out

myself rhythmically until we, mostly I, reached orgasm. During the whole process, I felt

like doing a one-man’s show, while she stayed still all the time. By contrast, Hua would

thrust her hips upward actively and rhythmically to match my movement in a wavy and

harmonious fashion.

“So, I was today year’s old to know a man can fuck a woman slowly in a mutually

interacting way,” I exclaimed. “Where did you learn this way? It’s so much more

delightful. No wonder only you could give me such a soul-melting experience.”

“Isn’t it a most natural thing for a woman to do? Didn’t Yiming do the same with

you in the summer 2007?” Hua teased me.

“Come to think of it now, I did recall her doing it in a similar slow way, but I paid

no attention to the incongruity.”

“Didn’t you enjoy it all the same back then?”

“Not really! We never really had enough time to click, so I only slept with her

to find some closure—it was like making up for lost time after missing out when she was

my first love."

“Who am I to you then?’

Instead of answering her right away, I pulled her toward me and made love to her

for the third time that night. As I got off her sweating body in the wee hours of the

morning, I told her how one’s never too old to learn, even about sex after half a century

married life. In so doing, I got a strange feeling about how we’d downgraded ourselves

from surreal soulmates to beastly bodymates.

About the author:

Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. With 18 published collections and 15 Pushcart nominations, Yuan has appeared in BestNewPoemsOnline, Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2,207 other literary publications worldwide. A former poetry juror for Canada's National Magazine Awards, Yuan began to write prose in 2022 and has released a cnf collection (Return to Roots), a novel trilogy (Towards) and two poetry collections (Bamakoola; Museum of Limerence) in 2026. 

This short story is inspired by Helena Qi Hong