Dog man, mutant man, and Korean Mike Tyson.
Sometimes the dog man is pretty unkempt and unattractive. I was mulling over my feelings for him, when I was thinking that maybe the reason I like him is that he kind of resembles the mutant man. I’ve always known I have these tendencies to make up nick-names for people, but really, maybe it sounds like I’m living in some sort of comic book. The cast of characters includes the dog man, the mutant man, and Korean Mike Tyson. In the past, there was also Fragrant Soldier.
What ties these people together is that I either have some sort of fear of them despite liking them a lot. I have mixed-up feelings for the dog man, I think the mutant man is — oh, I don’t want to say it, because it’s too embarrassing (but actually he’s a famous person, not someone I know in my real life) — and Korean Mike Tyson … I like him a lot but maybe had some weird feelings about him too. His thing is that he has/had (because I haven’t seen him for a long time), this total absence of self-doubt or critical feeling. I liked him, but it was like he was another world. Fragrant Soldier was a really pretty and feminine Korean girl I bumped into in my Chinese class at Shenzhen U., and I was intimidated by her femininity. I felt inadequate next to it.
As for the people’s names, the dog man owns the dog, the mutant man played a mutant in a film, Korean Mike Tyson is really macho and built like a fridge but has a high, quavery voice, and Fragrant Soldier’s Chinese name is “Xiang Jun,” which could, according to the tones, mean fragrant soldier (but probably doesn’t).
There was also Qing the King, the last guy I dated. I always wanted to call him by his real name, but I don’t know if I ever did. I never even asked him if I could. Actually, it felt strange calling him by his English name, because I always knew his real name was something else. Once I think I called him the wrong name in bed, which happened because I called him one thing in my mind and then had to make another thing come out of my mouth.
Maybe I make up these names for people because I want to pigeonhole them as one sort of character, so I don’t think of them as having the unpredictability of a real person. I think it has to do with wanting some sort of control over other people, over their actions, and my feelings about their actions.