I spend a lot of time in the nude. It isn't by choice. In fact, I'd say that the amount of time I spend naked fairly equals the number of times I get spanked in a week.
My family, especially my two stepmothers, thinks I'm innately and incorrigibly bad. But for a progressive, middle child like me in a conservative Asian family of thirteen children, it has not been easy to stay out of trouble.
Earlier in the week, I had been purposefully punished for being disrespectful to a venerable elder: I had refused once again to kowtow to my Religious Instructions (RI) tutor and dared to refute him. Freedom of speech was not encouraged, I had learned always too late, and counterproductive to the training of a young man in Zen Buddhism.
My father had been duly informed and wasted no time in teaching me obeisance. I was forced to remove my clothes completely and in accordance with the practice in my family, receive my punishment in the presence of witnesses. The witness was, to my chagrin but his gratification, the tutor whom I had wronged.
With the help of his two oldest offspring, Father positioned me atop a tall wooden stool so that my head was held down lower than my waist and my naked rear end raised high in the air. As soon as my second brother had my wrists firmly pinned down, I was declared ready for my punishment. Father mercilessly brutalized my buttocks with seventeen lashes of the rattan cane that I had come to both dread and relish, a paradox I find as confounding as the layers of ambiguity that shrouded Father's wrath.
I didn't know how long I was left on the floor of the exercise yard crying till my throat was parched but I felt hands dragging me back into the house and pushing me under the shower to clean up. Being wealthy, my family was only one of three in the village to have installed a warm shower in the house, a western luxury whose necessity I was lately aggrandizing as an old comforter.
Had I my own way, I would have happily stayed sequestered under the shower but all too soon a servant came for me with distinct instructions to return immediately to the main court.
I had not been offered any covering for my naked form and felt utterly embarrassed as I made my entry before my family: my father, the family Patriarch and his two oldest wives who seemed to regard the unfolding plot as inconvenient as my inconsequential birth seventeen years ago; my nine older siblings and three younger ones (eleven of these were really only half siblings) who sat scattered about the vast court but kept a deferential distance from Father; and of course, the raison d'etre for my being in this predicament, my RI tutor, who took ringside seat to enjoy an unobstructed view of the show about to be staged.
I scanned the room and found my mother, sweet-faced but sad-eyed, watching me passively from behind an ersatz bonsai tree. That she was Father's favorite accorded me no special treatment or unconditional pardon, whatever size the infraction.
Father beckoned me over with a wave of the hand and I approached him tentatively, feeling increasingly mortified at having my nakedness put on display for the whole family for the first time. As I finally stood before Father I looked down to find (to some humor) that despite my shame, my penis was sticking up at ninety degrees in its full six and a half inch propensity. I hastened to place my hands over it but Father, always implacable when disciplining me, barked at me to place my hands at my sides. I quickly obeyed and before I could dwell further on my throbbing bit of urgency, Father had unceremoniously spun me around to face my audience. I was then ordered to apologize to everyone present for having disrupted the peace and orderliness of the evening with my bad behavior. I mumbled a halfhearted apology while I felt Father inspecting his recent handiwork still evident on my twinkling bottom.
Father must have sensed the lack of conviction in my apology and without warning swung me back around, got up from his chair and in a swift move, had me upended face-down against his chair. While his hand pressed my neck down he kicked my knees straight and apart and ordered me to remain that way so then my buttocks were once again pointed towards the ceiling. I heard him summon my two oldest brothers over to me. Second Brother took Father's place at holding down my head while First Brother stood on my right gripping me around my waist. At Father's word, he began to pry open my cheeks, exposing my private parts for everyone in the court. I wilted in shame as I thought of my tutor and youngest brother and sisters being privy to the most intimate parts of my body. In fact, nothing was hidden; everything - my now limp penis, my testicles, bits of my pubes, even my holiest of holes - must now be totally exposed.
I started to beg Father not to spank me in front of the women and the young ones but my words came up in a pitiful wail as the first painful smack was served up to me in the middle of my backside, right on the epicenter of my anus. Five whacks immediately followed in rapid-fire succession and although Father's hands were not particularly large, they were heavy and strong as whack after painful whack landed on my quavering bottom in haphazard fashion. By the time he was finished, he had covered my entire bottom with his handprints. For obvious reasons he had especially concentrated on my hole and the fleshy parts where the cheeks joined the thighs.
I was crying too hard and had my eyes closed most of the time to see my own spanking, but during moments of brief reprieve, when Father rested his hands and I managed to steal a peek, I saw the fearful fascination with which the others were watching me and the wicked grin etched on the saliva-glazed lips of my vindictive tutor.
Father spanked me for a good ten minutes after which he sat back down, hauling me on his knees so that I sat straddling his legs as if on a saddle. This was a humiliating position to be in now that I was seventeen and 5' 8" tall, but I knew his decision to sit me on his laps was a deliberate one to compound my shame.
I was blubbering loud enough to disinter my ancestors so Father lightly slapped my face to make me stop. He always insisted I paid attention and looked him in the eye while he designed a fitting diatribe for my conduct. I tried to concentrate while I eyeballed him through my wildly unkempt bangs.
"You have such beautiful eyes, Han, but you insist on hiding them behind your hair," Father chided, with a modicum of acrimony in his voice. "Tomorrow you're getting a haircut."
I started to protest and wanted to cry again but Father put a halt to that with a stinging blow to the other side of my face. Then I felt my backside smart on his bony knees and began to realize the discomfort of having my penis crushed under me. Father intuited to the latter and not too gently dug his hand under my sweaty groin and disgorged my penis. He absentmindedly held it in his palm all the time he was lecturing me and I half cooed at this attention. I didn't hear much of his long and tiresome tirade for while staring into his heavily-lidded eyes - weighted down partly by age and partly gravity - I found myself cursing once more at the infernal gods for my misfortune of having inherited my mother's delicate but non-descript features instead of Father's elegantly handsome bones.
At length Father ceased talking before ennui descended on me, only to crudely stretch me out for a series of reinforcement spanking over his knee. In between whacks I was forced to promise to improve my behavior.
(SMACK)
"I promise to be obedient."
(SMACK)
"I promise... to be...obedient."
(SMACK)
"I...promise...to be...obedient."
(SOB)
(SMACK)
"I promise...I promise...I promise..." I was parroting off, trying as stoically as I could to surmount the torment to my bared bottom.
But the frail thread of my pain threshold finally snapped and unable anymore to distinguish that deliciously fine line that separated pain and ecstasy, I lost myself to my needs and started grinding my crotch against Father, pounding with the utmost shameless abandon until I exploded in come on his silk tunic and trousers.
When I realized what I had done, I broke down in tears. Father, whose harsh resolve had also collapsed by this time, let me bury my head and sob in his arms, but remained reticent while the family tried to make sense of what had just taken place.
Duty and decorum soon returned to Father and he ordered me back to my chamber. As I left escorted by my nurse, Father reminded me that I was denied sustenance, companionship and clothing for the next twenty-four hours so that I'd remember my promises.
That night I lay on my stomach beside my secret lover who had sneaked into my chamber and waited patiently for my punishment to be over. (I had always wondered: if Ky and I were ever caught, would the village council strip us naked, have us bound in chains and then thrown into the well with a brick tied to our penis, as was the law?)
"You're pleased with yourself, aren't you? You little bastard," Ky remarked with a knowing grin, his handsome jaw supported on a slender elbow.
"Your platitude is very touching," I retorted sarcastically.
As clever as he was foul-mouthed, Ky, a city boy about to embark on a college education in the United States, held the theory that I was deliberately being a reprobate because I coveted the attention. I dismissed his theory as simplistic, primal and trite.
But even as I allowed Ky to massage my sore buttocks, which would gradually melt me into tenderness and placidity, my mind was already hatching another idea that would allow me to feel once more my father's exquisite brand of wrath.
THE END