Strange Bedfellows
Strange Bedfellows is a farcical tale of sibling devotion, sexual exploitation, and rampant corruption among government officials, all played out more or less in bed.
The strange bedfellows include:
A country girl: she borrows money from a hometown loan shark to find another wife for her brother, whose first wife ran off with another man. When this second wife runs away with the money, the girl goes on a hunt for her to retrieve it, only to end up falling prey herself to a high-class madam who teaches her to be a fake virgin prostitute.
A governor of a certain province: he faces arrest and possible execution for taking bribes, until a fortuneteller presents him with a mysterious solution—sleep with a virgin. It works and he gets to keep his job.
A chief of a certain city’s environmental protection bureau: a bridge constructed under his watch collapses, killing over two dozen people. After netizens’ online investigations reveal he has often been photographed wearing an array of expensive watches, he is arrested and confesses to having slept with a virgin prostitute.
When the authorities eventually locate the country-girl-turned-(fake)-virgin prostitute, she ends up being the key to exposing a number of corrupt officials, which earns her praises all over the internet.
Written in the tradition of Swiftian satire, Strange Bedfellows makes social commentary through exaggerated events and caricatures. It experiments with narrative structure and, unlike conventional satirical works with clear-cut objectives, leaves the readers pondering the intended moral lesson.
