Panda Cunt, Bear Gall

Let me cut to the chase and tell you why I’m here: it has come about that the only thing my boyfriend gets off on is if I put on a panda suit. He’s a researcher at the Wolong Reserve—this is strictly confidential, right?—and they’ve pioneered this method of raising the bears in which no human enters the field of vision of a panda unless they are in a panda suit.

It’s to aid in reintroducing the pandas into the wild, because every single panda they’ve reintroduced so far has either died pretty quickly or lumbered back to the reserve. Those pandas that grew up around humans before they designed this method don’t know how to fear humans or they’re too used to humans.

I must say, the program is pretty good. It takes someone with imagination to come up with something like that. Someone like my boyfriend. And you see, this is why I find it so hard to leave him: I know the person who makes me put on the panda suit before we have sex is also the person who’s crazy and brilliant enough to design the only programme in China’s conservation history to successfully reintroduce pandas bred in captivity back into the wild, and to convince his uptight superiors that it’s not going to make them laughingstocks, but pioneers. He does have this antagonistic charisma about him that helps him get his way.

The pandas China gave to Washington, D.C., refused to have sex, so my boyfriend was flown to D.C. to assist the American zoologists. No, I take that back—China doesn’t give out pandas like bonbons anymore, not even to countries we want to make nice with—the pandas were loaned to Washington. Panda rental: one million U.S. dollars per year, with the condition that any cub born in that period still belongs to China. My boyfriend would be there for two weeks, and since I’d never been to America, he bought me a ticket, and I stayed with him at the hotel they were putting him up in.

Mei Xiang and Tian Tian: those are their names. So the problem didn’t lie with both pandas—just the male one, Tian Tian. He simply didn’t know what to do, even when the female, Mei Xiang, prostrated herself in front of him, wet between her legs. Mei Xiang—she wanted it bad. I saw her masturbating, would you believe it. Digging her big furry paw in between her legs and moving it up and down, up and down. Before that she was marking her scent all around the enclosure, from the stones, to the ground, to the play area: a waxy, hormonal secretion from a gland hidden under her tail.

And my boyfriend brought his homemade Wolong panda porn for the pandas in America to watch. No, seriously, he gets paid to do stuff like that. They set up a nice little projector and a white screen in a cloistered area of the enclosure; it was so surreal. Before we left for D.C. he made me watch it with him, asked me if the sequencing was okay or if the video ought to do tighter jump cuts to the panda genitalia. I said No, ’cause the pandas—they have to learn socially, the big picture, you can’t have the parts zoomed in all out of context. And then he told me this thing about when he was in Tokyo for work once—Ling Ling, the old panda at Ueno Zoo, had kidney problems; we have a long history with Japan: Empress Wu Zetian gave the Japanese emperor a pair during the Tang dynasty, and that was the beginning of panda diplomacy as we know it—the Japanese zoologist had taken him and the other zoologists to a stripshow near Shinjuku, and they were seated in the front row and everyone in the front row was given a shot of whisky and a magnifying glass.

My boyfriend and I were both students in zoology...