What we are pursuing is beauty, nothing but beauty. It's not true beauty if we didn't create it. Creating beauty with beauty is not true beauty either; real beauty is achieved by transforming the ugly into the beautiful. This has two levels of significance. Let me explain. First, there's no beauty in sticking a donkey dick inside a donkey pussy and putting them on a plate, because they are dark as pitch, incredibly filthy, and they stink like hell. No one would eat them, that's for sure. But the head chef in Yichi Tavern soaks them in fresh water three times, bathes them in bloody water three times, and boils them three times in soda water. Then he strips the penis of its sinewy parts and plucks the pubic hair before frying them both in oil, simmering them in an earthen pot, and steaming them in a pressure cooker, after which he carves different patterns with his refined skills, adds rare seasoning, decorates the dish with bright-colored cabbage hearts, and voila, the male donkey organ is transformed into a black dragon and the female organ into a black phoenix. A dragon and a phoenix kissing and copulating, coiling around an array of reds and purples, filling the air with fragrance and looking so alive, a treat for the mind and the eye. Isn't that transforming the ugly into the beautiful? Second, donkey dick and donkey pussy are vulgar terms that assail one's sense of propriety and cause the imagination of the weak-willed to run wild. Now we change the former's name into dragon and the latter into phoenix, for the dragon and the phoenix are solemn totems of the Chinese race, lofty, sacred, and beautiful symbols that signify meanings too numerous to mention. Can't you see that this too is transforming the ugly into the beautiful?
(from The Republic of Wine by Mo Yan, Penguin Books, 2001)
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