Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

It seems I’m going to have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of my own fate.

The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fact that I was pure carrion inside.

though when it came down to it, I spent more time getting to know my way around the supermarket next door than I did getting comfortable in my own skin.

It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

i HAVE to be the hottest person in the grocery store "a woman must continually watch herself"

Even now I’m still in awe of her innate power to command such devotion—not only her charms but how it felt to be deprived of them.

There’s nothing that won’t change, do you understand? I said in my heart.

Life ahead was soon supplanted by a miserable prison sentence. It was as if I never really had a youth.

"she is forced to evolve her own life pattern, often living much of her life alone, learning usually much earlier than her "straight" sisters about the essential aloneness of life and about the reality of illusions" - the woman-identified woman

Nonetheless, I was determined at all costs to become a person who would love without boundaries. And so I locked myself and that eye together in a dark closet.

On Mondays, she would appear like the answer to a dying man’s prayers—roses in hand, draped in white muslin, barefoot and floating, come to grant me a reprieve.

Roses every week and she didn’t even know it, and it was amid roses that it seemed I might live after all. I reached for those roses, and for a new life, only to discover a glass wall.

She accepted me, which amounted to negating my negation of myself. Those sincere eyes, like a mirror, hurt me. But she accepted me.

She thought she understood. And she accepted me. Years later, I realized that had been the whole point.

How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.

I am a woman who loves women. The tears I cry, they spring from a river and drain across my face like yolk.

A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence.

All that you know is that you’ve been crucified for something, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life feeling like no one and nothing will help you, that you’re in it alone.

Literally how it feels realizing you're a lesbian at fifteen

I don’t want to become myself.

how it feels when "becoming yourself" means admitting you're a lesbian

The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and instead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide.

You turned me into my own key, and when you did, my fears seized me in a flood of tears that soon abated. I stopped hating myself and discovered the corporeal me.

ring of keys moment

Didn’t understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds.

She spoke timidly, not because she wasn’t supposed to have such feelings but because she was telling me about them. Because femininity meant having to hide one’s true feelings.

“Nauseating is nauseating. Try to be the most honest child you possibly can,” says Mauvais Sang. “Who says you can’t get away with a naked-lady necktie?” says Betty Blue.

Lazi is the Loose-Tongued boy, the crocodile. She is honest about the pain of love from the beginning, aware of the illicit nature of lesbian relationships. She tries to be honest with herself and Shui Ling yet holds back just how much the relationship pains her (carrying tears for her lover to death) Shui Ling is Betty Blue. She is devoted to their relationship because she thinks they can get away with it. Maybe she is "deceptively" positive or naive about their relationship, which may make the final end much more sudden and nauseating. Her unashamed love may end up killing both of them, like the man in the movie.

Did you know these things? If you don’t want me to seek refuge in you, sorry my skin’s not thick enough to handle it. What’s wrong with that?

I said, Can we start over? She turned around. The ocean wept. I knew it was mutual love.

All that is neither masculine nor feminine becomes sexless and is cast into the freezing-cold waters outside the line of demarcation, into an even wider demarcated zone. Man’s greatest suffering is born of mistreatment by his fellow man.

Her hair brushed against my face, and her scent filled my lungs. I pulled her head in close, wrapping my arms around her neck. My lips were pressed up against her eyelid. She was so tender.

I never did anything to attract it, nor did I choose to be this way. I had no hand whatsoever in shaping the self that was crawling with fear.

When I held her body for the first time, it was as if I’d severed the very tendon of my fear, and it hurt so bad that I gnashed my teeth.

To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.

Thus this demographic had opportunities to supplement their archaeological research.

Speaking perhaps about the hatred of lesbians that is paired with the fetishization of them in the media. The workers don't want anything to do with the protection of crocodiles, they only want to look at them posed in magazines.

Didn’t utter a word about her feelings, even though I would have given my life to kiss those downcast eyes and lick away those tears.

All I know is that I was forced into a corner, and so I violated myself in order to ward off the threat of being violated.

I BROKE MY OWN HEART CAUSE YOU WERE TOO POLITE TO DO IT.

From now on, for the rest of my life, I have to change my ways and pay the price for the crimes I committed as an eighteen-year-old.

As you can see, at my best I’m a freak with wit and substance,”

my nickname in highschool

“Right, the verbal talent of a smart-ass and the charm of a brown-noser, along with a severe case of nearsightedness!”

“Ever since I started to wise up, my family’s been perpetually disappointed in me. Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn’t, I’d have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal.

I’ll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don’t, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence.

“So if we put our names together, we have Laduzi—diarrhea?” asked Zhi Rou sardonically.

LMAO

Since the actual volume of domestic data on crocodiles has grown and the nation has devised new measures to either protect or eradicate crocodiles, this category of highly sensitive classified information must not fall into the hands of foreign states.

maybe referring to how discussion of lesbians and queerness is censored or stigmatized in news and media. Using the excuse of "protecting image" or "protecting the public"

Now that it thought about it, things ought to be different since it had been thrust into the national spotlight and made a public figure.

Because love goes hand in hand with hatred, and because there’s hatred, you’re going to fight, and when you fight, you see that there’s love.

Why keep pretending to be a good person when it’s obviously that painful for you to show compassion?

It’s like all this bacteria was already there, but because it was microscopic, you let it build up and form dust under the rug. The college lifestyle is about becoming independent, with no one else around to force you to do anything. So there’s this muck that hasn’t been dealt with, and because all your arrangements are loose now, you have no one to hold on to, which means you get sucked into the vacuum cleaner and tossed around in it. Your automatic response is to grab hold of something and pull yourself out.

When the crocodile got home from work, it removed the sweat-soaked human suit clinging to its body and settled in for the night. Usually, it hid in the bedroom (“hid” because it feared the people on the living-room TV might burst in at any moment and discover its forbidden feelings for so many people).

As dolphins hear the call of their shared language and must turn back toward their origins, the three of us found ourselves attuned to a common frequency. It was an experience too profound for words.

How it feels finding the gay group in a room

What is the human race, anyway, but a multitude of outlets for desires?

Desires teach us lessons, and we have to go forth into the new worlds that we construct for ourselves.” Chu Kuang’s voice trembled. “When you can’t, that’s when you die.”

You’ve retraced the roots of self-knowledge, experienced the primal frustrations, and transgressed the perceived boundaries. And you’ve managed to come back alive.”

How it feels to kiss girl

It was an illicit love—a thing so dangerous it refused to be contained, yet made of nothing but sweetness.

Every day, he’d stare at the green light. If it went out, that meant hope was gone. It was his only point of reference.