One marvelous feature of this chapter is the way the straightforward, rough-and-ready Honest Quan manages by devious, convoluted means to work his way inside the "iron door," thus reenacting the romantic exploit of Sima Xiangru. [71] And a second marvelous thing is the way Master Iron Door, who has worried over every possible contingency and taken every conceivable precaution, falls right into Honest Quan's trap like a latter-day Zhuo Wangsun. The thought and imagination that have gone into The Carnal Prayer Mat also deserve to be called convoluted in the ultimate degree!

Poem:

Let us explain that the story of how Honest Quan sold himself lies in the future. Well before he entered the household, Mistress Jade Scent had fallen prey to a secret melancholy, which our brush has been too busy to describe but which we shall now address. Just at the height of her sexual enjoyment, her husband had been driven away by her monster of a father, a development that left her feeling like a drunkard who has just sworn off wine or a gourmet who has just given up meat. She couldn't even get through the next few days, let alone survive for years as a grass widow. Deprived of real pleasures, she was reduced to placing the erotic album in front of herself and trying to quench her thirst by looking at plums and satisfy her hunger by drawing a cake. To her dismay, however, she found that looking at plums increases rather than quenches one's thirst and that drawing a cake sharpens rather than satisfies one's hunger. The longer she looked at the album, the worse she felt, until at length she put it aside and brought out a few idle books instead, in the hope of relieving her distress and boredom.

Gentle reader, what kind of books ought she to have read, do you suppose, in order to relieve her distress and boredom? In my humble opinion, no play or novel would have been of any use whatever. Only the books her father taught her to read as a girl, such as The Lives of Virtuous Women and The Girls' Classic of Filial Piety, would have met her need. If only she had been willing to take them out and read them, they would have relieved her distress and boredom and also quenched her thirst and satisfied her hunger. She might then have been able to endure a real widowhood, to say nothing of the grass variety.

But Jade Scent took a different course and gave undue credence to the "Four Virtues for Girls" and the "Three Obediences for Women," which stipulate: "Before marriage obey your father, after marriage your husband." Accordingly she ignored her father's books and began to read her husband's, tipping out his entire stock of obscenity, such as The Foolish Woman's Story, The Unofficial History of the Embroidered Couch, and The Life of the Lord of Perfect Satisfaction, and going through them carefully and methodically. She noticed that these books invariably praised penises as either extremely large or exceptionally long, using expressions such as "a head the size of a snail," "a body like a skinned rabbit," and "strong enough to support a peck of grain without bending." She noticed also that men's thrusts were numbered in the thousands and tens of thousands rather than in the dozens and hundreds.

I simply don't believe there is any man as strong as that between Heaven and Earth, or anyone with so impressive an instrument either, she reflected. My husband's is less than two inches long and two fingers thick, and he cannot last more than a couple of hundred strokes before discharging. He has never reached a thousand! He told me himself that he was without equal among men, so surely there cannot be anyone dozens of times stronger than he is! As the old saying goes, "Better to have no books at all than to believe everything you read." These absurdities must have been concocted by the authors! Such marvels don't exist!

But her skepticism did not survive for long. "That's not true, either," she reflected. "It's a big world we live in, with vast numbers of men, among whom there must be all kinds of exceptional cases. How do I know that what the books say isn't true after all? If a woman were able to marry a man like that, her bedroom pleasure would be beyond description! She'd be loath to change places with the immortals in Heaven! But that's too much to hope for!" Thus, having gone from skepticism to faith, she reverted to skepticism.

Day after day she would get up and, neglecting her needlework, match herself against these idle books, trying to bring her sexual excitement to a fever pitch so that when her husband returned, they could relieve it together. But when time passed and no word came from him, she could not help feeling a certain resentment. I've noticed that there's not a single woman in any of these books who does not have several lovers, she thought. Evidently it is not at all unusual to take a lover. I must have misbehaved myself in my last existence to get such a beast for a husband. Only a month or two after our wedding, and he goes off and stays away for years! I very much doubt that anyone as highly sexed as he is will have held out this long without straying. And if he has strayed, it would hardly be wrong for me to have a backdoor affair of my own. The only pity is that we women are so strictly regulated that we never even see a man.

Then, having arrived at this stage in her thinking, she transferred her resentment from her husband to her father and looked forward eagerly to the latter's early demise so that she could bring a man into the house.

Thus when she first set eyes on Honest Quan, she was like a ravenous eagle spotting a chicken or a hungry cat coming upon a mouse-rough or smooth, good-looking or ugly, she wanted nothing better than to gobble him up. While he was still working his land, she could do nothing about her desires; firstly, because she had observed that he was a terribly prudish soul who would not even look at her as he passed by and would certainly not jump at an invitation; and secondly, because he came in the daytime and left at night, and even if he did accept, they would have had neither the time nor the place for sex. But when she heard he was selling himself as a bondservant, her heart leaped and she resolved that on his very first night in the house he would not escape her.

As it happened, however, the one who was waiting anxiously to fulfill her desires (suixin) did not fulfill them, while someone else who was not expecting to satisfy hers (ruyi) did so. Jade Scent watched with a pang of jealousy as the bridal couple took their vows and entered the bedroom together. Waiting until her father was asleep, she then stole out of her room to eavesdrop on their lovemaking. Honest Quan's penis was by no means insignificant, and Ruyi, although in her twenties, was still a virgin because her highly principled master had never molested her. How could a space scarcely big enough to hold a finger endure a laundry beater stuffed inside it? Naturally she screamed and wailed fit to shake the heavens, until the eavesdropper herself began to feel pain on her behalf.