MALA Vol 1 Issue 1 June 2010

Transcription

Original works by:
Kirsten A. Allen
Eric Blankenburg
Jessie Brett
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
Catherine Chen
William Ellis
Blue Germein
Katrina Hamlin
Sophia Kidd
Lancer Kind
Leslie Mills
Isaac Myers
Scott Ness
Jo Parish
Catherine Platt
Bill Stranberg
Allen Sutterfield
Julia Wang
Jessica Wilzcak
Ader Wu
Aaron Zhang
Featuring:
Ingrid Booz Morejohn
Amit Chaudhuri
Scott Ezell
Paul French
Colum McCann
Christopher G. Moore
Alberto Ruy Sanchez
Adam Williams
MaLa would not be possible without the generous
assistance of our patrons:
Media Patrons:
MaLa
The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal
Volume 1 Issue 1
June 2010
www.mala-literary-journal.com
MaLa
The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal
Volume 1 Issue 1
June 2010
Editor-in-Chief: Peter Goff
Editorial Board: Kirsten A. Allen, William Ellis, Catherine Platt, Aaron Zhang
Logo Design: Jessie Brett
Design Team: Kirsten A. Allen, Jessie Brett
For submission details visit: www.mala-literary-journal.com
For sponsorship details contact: [email protected]
To subscribe contact: [email protected]
To subscribe for updates: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-988-19091-9-0
Published by China Economic Review Publishing (HK) Limited
1804, 18/F New Victory House, 93-103 Wing Lok Street, Sheung Wan, HK
Individual works and images © 2010 the Authors
The compilation © 2010 China Economic Review Publishing (HK) Limited
Printed in Chengdu, China by StarLink Printing.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof
in any form whatsoever without permission in writing from the publisher. Opinions
published in MaLa - The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal are not necessarily those
of the Publisher, Editors, or Designers.
4
MaLa
From the Editor
It was an impish concoction, and things were bound to get fervid once hydroxyalpha-sanshool and capsaicin hooked up.
Sanshool, to her friends, is the bio-active component that makes up about 3% of a
Sichuan pepper, or huājiāo, the outer pod of a tiny innocent-looking fruit endemic
to west China. Yet she is the one guilty of delivering the pepper’s numbing, pinsand-needles sensation that stuns the uninitiated diner and enjoys baffling the
nervous system. It’s like putting your tongue on a nine-volt battery, according to
one scientific researcher, and Sichuan cooks have been having fun lobbing this
culinary missile into dishes for centuries.
Then capsaicin enters the cauldron in the 15th century, as traders introduced Asia
to the red chili pepper – capsicum annum – one of the Americas first cultivated crops,
domesticated in places like Ecuador more than 6,000 years ago. Capsaicin – he’s
chili’s active component and its defence mechanism against troublesome herbivores
and fungi – is the endorphin-releasing demon that delivers a chili junkie’s fix.
Their relationship was consummated and the offspring was málà – literally numbing
and spicy – the potentially stupefying sensation that defines much of Sichuan
cuisine. For centuries it has become a ritual for locals and visitors alike to throw
themselves, sweating and sniffling, at the merciless altar of málà.
In honour of the fiery alliance, this publication has been dubbed MaLa – The
Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal.
The title is a bow to the creativity, passion and originality that is málà. It is a nod to
its challenging stance and taunting approach to the bland and the banal. And it’s a
doffing of the cap to its East and West collusion.
MaLa, the publication, is driven by the members of the Chengdu Bookworm
Writing Group and exists to promote new writers and new English-language writing
in China and beyond. The aim is to regularly publish poetry, short fiction, literary
non-fiction and work in translation – supported by graphic art and photography –
that is alive, stimulates, explores.
In the hotpot that is Volume 1, Issue 1 we bring you 30 contributions from China
and ten other countries around the globe. Aside from the writing group pieces we
present work from several critically acclaimed, award-winning authors who have
given talks in The Bookworm or who have strong connections with our venues in
Chengdu, Beijing or Suzhou.
We’ve piled in plenty of sanshool and capsaicin. We hope you like it.
Peter Goff
Editor-in-Chief
Contents
Bill Stranberg
The Cymothoa Exigua
Nobody Here but us Fish
The Trouble with Heart Attacks
3
4
5
Colum McCann
Moonshot
6
Katrina Hamlin
Snow
A Child Walks Along a Beach at Night A Journey in China
11
12
15
Aaron Zhang
Hot Spring
Dufu’s Cottage
18
19
Jessica Wilczak
Post-quake
Something to Say
Charlie Darwin
21
22
24
Adam Williams
Travel Writing
25
Scott Ness
Name Game
Beast Talk
Missing Home
32
34
36
Sophia Kidd
the night before
images
love copper mary
40
41
42
Alberto Ruy Sanchez
The Goats in the Trees
43
Jessie Brett
Bad Egg and the Hospital
Moshing 46
49
Catherine Platt
Exile
Eclipse
Notes from Barthes’s Camera Lucida, chapter 5 52
53
54
Scott Ezell
Yushu
55
William Ellis
Heritage
Sonia, Grief and Leaving
Exemption and Loss: A Letter
66
67
69
Allen Sutterfield
Tinkerman
Construction Site in Chengdu
75
76
Paul French
A Night on “The Line”
77
Jo Parish
Gladys
83
Ader Wu
Sorrow
Spring Breeze
84
85
Lancer Kind
Get the Girl?
87
A Family Connection
93
Isaac Myers
Oyster Moves Like a Bat-Fly Ostrich Chain Plank
Timeshare Minds
95
96
Blue Germein
Necessity 99
Julia Wang
Jackal
In Heaven
Mother and Daughter
100
102
104
Kirsten A. Allen
The Knitting Needle Affair Shadow Dancer
Visible Stain
Amit Chaudhuri
Double Trouble
107
110
112
114
Catherine Chen
To See or Not to See
118
Eric Blankenburg
Stanton Blues
122
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
Mangoes
Nursery Rite
Death of MaLa 131
135
136
Contributors’ Biographies
138
Submission Guidelines
145
Images by
Kirsten A. Allen
Isaac Goldings
Leslie Mills
Catherine Platt
Bill Stranberg
MaLa – The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal
Bill Stranberg
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The Cymothoa Exigua
Bill Stranberg
is a small parasite
with two large front claws
it uses to get a grip on the under-side of your tongue.
There, it digs its head into the flesh
and feeds on the fresh blood.
Slowly, it grows larger, larger
until it is drinking so much blood
that your tongue atrophies and dies.
Then, the Cymothoa Exigua
attaches itself to what’s left of the muscle and
replaces your tongue altogether.
With it you swish your wine and lick your lips.
With it you give me my morning kiss.
With it, you sing our children to sleep.
As you turn to leave their bed and
turn out the light,
you will wonder, who exactly
is saying:
“I love you”?
3
Nobody Here But Us Fish
Bill Stranberg
We sit here silently waiting
for cinder blocks to fall from the blue skies and rain down upon us.
Shattering on impact, bricks scatter and bounce.
We sit still, our eyes safety pinned to our noses and tongues.
All senses tied, we sit and wait silently.
Tied to our chairs, eyes fixed to the screen,
we miss the blue shirted muscle man as he enters the room
he steps to the bar and orders a drink.
A drink and we smell and taste him.
His cologne and his lust mix into the smoke and stale beer.
He moves about us like a panther dropped in water.
His sheen and roar,
his roar and his sheen
slipped from his tree up with monkeys and flowers.
Stripped of his prowess and powers,
his legs kick, feet flexed, claws outstretched,
casting out hands and hoping for ground to stand on,
but there’s nobody here but us fish.
4
The Trouble with Heart Attacks
Bill Stranberg
The trouble with heart attacks is their complete lack of poetry.
Given their name, an innocent person might imagine a heart clad in iron and steel
laying siege against the ribs holding it like prison bars, or perhaps, a cowardly
heart hidden behind a wall riddled with holes from Cupid’s poison arrows.
But heart attacks aren’t such things.
When stripped of its symbolism, the heart is left to its utility.
The attack is a cold product of sloth, time and lard.
~
Gone are the sexy and subtle hearts carved on trees.
Gone are the hearts tattooed around the word “Mother” on the forearms of the
tough.
Gone are the hearts of lovers.
Gone are the hearts of every color, save that of the greasy and grey.
The heart, both pump and piston, is left to beat away the seconds like the last
drummer of lost causes.
~
One day the elephant will come
and your drummer will drop his sticks at your daughters wedding;
at Friday’s fish fry.
Maybe it will find you in bed, and, interrupting your last cigarette, it will sit on
your chest and flip out the lights with its trunk.
5
Moonshot
Colum McCann
The aim of good writing is to put the handcuffs on history. Briefly, to arrest time.
Stop movement. Clamp down memory. Put a headlock on life, if even just for
a moment or two. And then – when life is still, caught, held – the handcuffs are
swallowed, and the words are put together in an attempt to recreate life out of
stillness, to make the silence breathe, to give an edge to the violence, or the beauty,
so that years later, when a stranger comes along, he or she can step back into
another time and have it come fiercely alive. This is the privilege of fiction. We
become alive in a body, a time, a feeling, a culture that is not our own. We step
into a new space. We adventure in the skintrade. We make new words: we become
Mailers.
Mailer was the ultimate skintrader. He wanted to be Norman, or Norman Kingsley
at a stretch, but really, truly, honestly, he wanted to be everyone else. Gilmore.
Marilyn. Miller. Ali. Eisenhower. Armstrong. Hemingway. Kennedy. He wanted to
step from his body into a symphony of imagined bodies. Cummings. McLeod.
Esposito. Rojack. Montague. Menenhetet. He took them on, warts and all, and
then he slipped out of their skins and away. He was making layers of himself.
At the heart of it was a selfishness to live as many lives as possible, coupled with
the deepest possible empathy for others. He kept slipping into new times, and
geographies, losing himself there. The only things worth doing were the things that
might break his heart. Oswald. Picasso. Hitler. Even Jesus.
The natural extension of the list is, in fact, that Norman K. Mailer, the little boy
from the sandy streets of Long Branch, New Jersey, wanted to be the man on the
moon. So – in the late 60’s and early 70’s – that’s what he attempted to become: the
man who wrote his own moonshot into existence.
When it came time to write the book, Mailer was at the top of his game. In his
40’s, he was already the most celebrated and possibly feared author in America.
There had been five National Book Award nominations in a row, in four different
categories. He could command huge advances. His literary output was prodigous,
promiscuous even. But controversy came behind him like a draught of wind: he
6
7
got in bar brawls, his family life was a spinning top, the Daily News had their feelers
out for little snippets of ruin. He had run for Mayor of New York City and came
in fourth out of a field of five. He’d lost a good deal of money in financing three
experimental films. The begrudgers were beginning to talk about him being all
washed up.
Mailer knew that fame was not a cheap whore he could call up from the street
corner. There was work to be done. Books don’t just write themselves. Ideas didn’t
just fall at his feet. But then the call came in from LIFE magazine. Not only was
the money good, but it was the story of the century. The outer edges of mankind’s
possibility. The hottest Cold War battle ever. It would be the largest non-fiction
piece the magazine had ever published – only Hemingway had ever been given as
much space for the novella Old Man and the Sea. The only problem for Mailer was
that he wasn’t invited to journey upstairs in the rocketship: more than anything
else he would have loved to be onboard Apollo 11, inside the goddamn thing,
weightless, soaring. Over a drink he might have told you wryly that he was too
short, too fat, too Jewish, to go that far, but if you stuck your hand through his
ribcage and wrung his heart for the truth, he would have insisted on the necessity
of a writer being there, at the pulse of the moment, the throb of the wound.
The fact that the powers-that-be didn’t send a writer, that they didn’t even think
about it, was metaphor enough: American letters was losing its oxygen fast. But if
he wasn’t able to go to the moon physically, well, shit, he would go to the moon
anyway. After all, what was the moon but a word? And who better than Mailer to
examine the intricate helix between wounds and words?
So Mailer swallowed a little pride, checked his bank balance, and surrendered
himself to history. He drove down NASA Highway 1 to hang out with the bulleteyed boys at the Manned Spacecraft Center. He shouldered his way in amongst
the scientists, the bureaucrats and the astronauts themselves. He went looking for
the story. Used his own Harvard background in engineering to understand the
mathematical dynamics. Ghosted his way into the heads of the computer geeks.
Laid a hand on the bedspreads of the NASA wives. Listened to the evasions of
the corporate clowns. Probed the little dusty corners for the details that nobody
else would find. Yawned at the press conferences. Kept searching. Watched as men
broke the skin of the sky, landed, splashed in the sea, and beamed for America.
His search sent him back home to Provincetown where he stood at the edge of the
ocean and talked to the violated moon. And then he sat down to write his book,
his own self-proclaimed “philosophical launch” where he hid behind the mask of a
character called “Aquarius,” and then discovered what he was looking for all along:
Norman Mailer at his most honest.
8
One of the central questions – one that seems almost quaint now in the 21st
century – was whether the venture was noble or insane. “It was as if we had begun
to turn the pocket of the universe inside out,” he writes. To him, the moonshot
was conceivably the first voyage of the first cancer of the world, or else it was the
pinnacle of civilisation’s progress. In his philosophical wheelhouse, the choice was
between celestial and satanic. This “braincase on the tip of a firecracker” was taking
Mailer to the outer borders of his own skin. So he went out to know as much as he
could, and – as all intelligent people do – began to hold a welter of contradictory
ideas in the palms of his hands.
In the end – the deep space end – he does what very few prose writers can
accomplish in that he allows us to step into one of the great moments of history
and properly understand it from head to toe, from the big to the small, from inside
out. Turn the pages of this book – with the photographs assembled together for
the first time – and you can get a good idea of the expedition and its vast scope.
This is the world as Mailer was seeing it. Now delve into his prose and you will get
the sense that he was correct, goddamnit! He painted the pictures for us and now
we’re seeing them. Even from quarter of a million miles away, Mailer somehow got
it right. He used the techniques of fiction in order to illuminate a historical reality
that was at turns good and bad and ugly.
The real beauty to be found in Mailer’s text is not just in the way that he wants to
get in and vandalise your mind, and it’s not just in the way that he slings his words
so tempestuously together, or the way his prose lights up the photographs, and it’s
not just in the way he understands the science of space, or the weight of history,
or the breadth of mythology, and it’s not just in the tiny detail where he finds God
and the Devil both in a press conference, and it’s not just his own ruminations on
mortality, or the way he gives life to something as bland as a Florida motel room,
or the graffiti he draws on Werner von Braun’s dreams – it’s also the way Mailer
himself emerges from the book. There’s energy in the prose. There’s ego. There’s
jealousy. There’s a searing loneliness. But at its most elemental core, Mailer comes
home and confesses, and it’s possibly one of the more profound and ignored
confessions of recent literary times.
In the end, minutiae is what makes history. At home in Provincetown, while trying
to make sense of the moonshot, his friends bury a car in the ground – they do it as
a lark, and because there doesn’t seem all that much else to do, but Mailer knows
exactly what it means: it’s inward and it’s aimless. He is as honest as can be: we’re
doomed unless, in some way, we once again ask for the very best from ourselves.
Mailer discovers that, like Ginsberg, he has seen the best minds of his generation
9
destroyed. His overwhelming feeling is that his generation – his very people, his
lifeblood – have thrown their beauty away. They have allowed corporate America
to outflank them. While they have been stuffing their bongs and shucking their
bras, the businessmen got the imaginative jump on them. They were inventing the
predominant American spirit that would govern for the next forty years. History
has, in so many ways, corroborated his endbook confession. Out of that time came
the baby boomers, then the ineffectual dreams of the Clinton era, and then –
perhaps the culmination of it all – the brutal indifference of the Bush government.
Mailer saw it coming, even back in the early 70’s. He looked at the moon and found
the dark side. (If only he had stayed around long enough to see Barack Obama
getting sworn in, he might have reinterpreted things yet again).
Mailer’s genius in this book is that he always wanted to be an everyman, but his
further genius is that he could find the ordinary man in the everyman. And the
book was a plea for literature to stand up and be counted. It’s as if he was saying: if
those square bastards can go to the moon, well we can too, so watch us fly, watch
us.
I myself was only four years old when they shot the moon, so I have no recollection
of it whatsoever. In Ireland, where I was born, we associated the moon with John
F. Kennedy. That’s whose face we saw up there. But the idea that men had breached
space didn’t startle me all that much. It was just another country in the sky by the
time I had a chance to think about it.
Nowadays there is more computing power in my fridge than there is in the machines
that managed to take the astronauts up in Apollo 11. I write this essay on a computer
that the NASA scientists would have swooned for. The software they used back
then would be considered neanderthal in an X-box machine today. Yet they did it.
They succeeded. What was accomplished was heroic beyond explanation. But there
have been very few good books to give flesh and flair to that heroism.
We can be thankful, therefore, that one of our great writers was there. He caught
the moonshot in flight. He caught himself in flight too. In fact he’s still flying.
Occasionally he stops to suck wind, Norman, but he’s up there still, yes. Catch him
at the rim of the world, still looking for another frontier, yes, mailering.
This article was written recently as the foreword for Norman Mailer’s “Moonfire” book (Taschen
Books).
10
Snow
Katrina Hamlin
Fourteen years ago was the first snow. It was thin, crusty, quickly dirty. We scraped
it up together with the bitter mud; a stunted off-white snowman. He lived for a
couple of hours before the winter sun came.
The English snow was not what they promised. Once the drifts covered the cat
flap; but we didn’t get snowed in. Never missed school, or lived off tinned stuff
for a week.
~
Last year we sat in the kitchen. I drank black tea from the mug with a broken
handle. Flora watched green leaves settle in a china cup. We faced the door and
looked out into the frozen weeds. The big tree still didn’t have leaves.
I put the CD on; wished we hadn’t scratched the vinyl. She said she thought Abbey
Road sounds like winter sun.
~
The winter I met Flora we drank cheap wine. We danced over the floorboards and
the carpet (where the insects lived).
Then we strode out to Cowley. There was sleet in the air. She was wearing the red
velvet coat (fifteen quid) and rolling a cigarette. She lit up, walked faster and took
me by the wrist.
“We’re already nineteen. There’s not much time left.”
We walked faster.
11
A Child Walks Along a Beach at Night
Katrina Hamlin
A child walks along a beach at night. She hears a sound behind her. She stops and
turns. A weak light streams towards her, too far away to reach her face. The beam
moves nearer.
The child stands straight and stares. The light’s edge finds her pearly skin, tight
mouth and quiet eyes.
A man in uniform meets her gaze. He is a security guard from the hotel up the
shore. He carries a pair of shoes in his left hand and the plastic torch in his right
hand. The uniform is grey and does not fit. It reminds him of old hand-me-downs.
He is squinting through wire-framed glasses.
He hesitates, “Are you lost? It’s late.”
At first she doesn’t reply, and they listen to the water shushing on the sand.
“No.”
Her voice is firm. When he followed her, he’d guessed the silhouette and short
steps were those of a five year old. When he hears her voice, he is no longer sure.
He was going to ask her why she was there – alone? How he could help? He was
going to be the evening’s hero, bringing the lost little girl home to anxious parents.
But she doesn’t want that. She is waiting for him to leave.
“Go.”
“But, why…?”
“Go.”
He blinks. Her eyes don’t move from his face. He can see anger rising behind them,
12
and finds he is afraid.
“Go.”
His throat tightens. He grips the torch harder and turns away. He wants to stride,
but the sand is deep, his movements are awkward, and he feels her gaze on his back.
Fifty yards down the beach, he knows that she has looked away. He is almost at
the gates of the hotel with their cheap orange lights. He switches off the torch and
feels safe in the last stretch of dark.
Already he is forgetting why he obeyed the girl’s command. Curiosity and wonder
become stronger than fear. He turns back.
Now he moves slowly along the top of the beach, under the pines, over dead wood
and pricking needles. He finds her silhouette. She is looking out to sea, her feet in
the water.
Then from the foam another figure rises. There are deep, low sounds and the girl
moves into the waves. The figure reaches out to embrace her.
Now he is moving forward, trying to run on the sand. The two turn to look at him.
He comes to the wet mud near the water’s edge and stops, ashamed, and afraid
again. His eyes have adjusted and he sees the girl clearly once more. Her eyes return
to meet his and this time there is contempt as well as anger. Her companion moves
back, frightened. The girl hisses at him.
They sink down; black water closes over their heads. New waves wash away the
ripples.
Eyes wide, he waits and watches the shallows. They are gone, they won’t come
back.
He moves away, slowly, and sits down at the tide line. He will not leave until dawn
disturbs the dark, and light prevents him from believing.
13
14
A Journey in China
Katrina Hamlin
I sit on the folding chair in the walkway. I forgot to bring a flask, so I make tea in a
plastic bottle which shrinks to half its size as I add boiling water. The sides are so
thin it’s hard to hold it without burning my hands. I take little sips as often as I can
through the steaming mouth.
Land and sky rush past the window. Every few hours the world outside is grander.
Gentle hills and paddy fields have flowed up into rocky terraces and darker greens.
I look at the book in my lap without seeing the words. Electric butterflies are
fluttering in my stomach. As long as I stay on the train, I’m held in a suspension of
all my expectations.
Only another ten hours to go. I will be bored soon. The toilet will be dirty and
the smell will seep down the corridor. The tides of peanut husks and fag ends are
rising. I’ll watch the world until the light is gone. I cannot understand what I see
and the scenes roll on like a song I can only hear once.
~
It is early when we pull into the station. Steam from a dumpling stall blossoms into
the hard cold.
I jump from the door onto the platform. My right knee buckles under the weight
of my body and two bags, but I don’t fall.
Last year we left this city on the late train. Dachee Dhorjee chased us down the
platform waving a white handkerchief. We had a hat and we raised it into the rush
of air beyond the window like monochrome actors in an old film.
I walk through the entrance hall. Men throng around the ticket office. They are
dressed in crumpled suits and peaked hats. The crowd’s skin and clothes are very
dark, but their cheeks are red.
15
Tall figures in bright sweeping robes swing through the hall to the waiting room.
People stare at my face. They stop and lay their gaze on me without embarrassment.
No one knows me. I go through the doors into the square. The ragged grey
skyscape lies against the mountains.
In the foreground lines of metal trolleys offer glowing apples and oranges, thick
circles of bread, gaudy packets of noodles. Rubbish, fruit peel, scraps and torn
paper on the ground.
I wait for the others and search for fragments of last year.
I try not to confront memories. I don’t want to cover this scene with my fading
portraits. I look at the square and the people. I push to see them as they are.
A figure comes towards me through the gleam; Dachee Dhorjee. I go to greet him.
We wind through the city. Everything fills me with anticipation. The air is clearer
and cooler, the people look hardy.
We come to Dachee Dorjee’s home and step into the thick warmth. Lights are
turned on.
We are caught in a hundred exotic gazes. The walls are covered with painted
thangkas. The gilded eyes glare.
The paintings vie with one another to have the deepest and brightest colours. I
imagine that before we entered, they swarmed over the walls in a violent rainbow.
Each proud figure asserted its own beauty, pushing for space. Now they stand still
and stare.
As their glances and the weak lamplight hang over us, we make ready for tomorrow’s
journey. In the early morning, we will go to the mountains.
~
When we get up the night is still not over. We pull our things together in icy gloom.
The thangkas watch.
Finally we leave them. In the darkness I still feel their eyes.
16
A car waits for us. It’s old. There are tyres, gears and axles. But I don’t trust them;
it feels like the parts only hang together by chance. I notice there are holes on the
floor patched with crushed metal cans.
It moves. We jerk onto the road and I smile in disbelief.
~
Hours later we climb out. Bodies still rock to the car’s motion, and heads ache in
the sickly thin air.
The bags are thrown down in a different room. It is spartan but the white-washed
walls are edged in geometric patterns.
I leave my companions drinking hot butter tea and set out up the hill at the back
of the village.
The higher I climb, the better I can see and the more I feel the size of the valley;
and as it grows in my mind, so does the sky.
I know the shape of the distant outcrop. I know the warm orange of the bare earth.
I keep climbing.
17
Hot Spring
Aaron Zhang
Surrounding mountains are asleep
A winter morning
The foot of a green valley
White steam rises from the pool
I lower my body into hot spring water
Embraced by cozy warmth
Nothing to ponder
Tranquility
Small houses, green trees above clothed with light mist
Drunk with the scenery
I fall into a trance
a black and white Chinese painting
18
Dufu’s Cottage
Aaron Zhang
两个黄鹂鸣翠柳，
一行白鹭上青天。
窗含西岭千秋雪，
门泊东吴万里船。
- 杜甫
Amid the green willows, two yellow orioles are chirping,
A row of egrets surge high into the blue sky.
A thousand autumns of snow on the Western ridge loom in my window,
Boats outside my door sail East a thousand miles to Wu.
– Dufu, translated by Aaron Zhang
Dufu (712-770BC) lived in a cottage in Chengdu for almost four years. While in Chengdu, he
wrote many of his famous poems. This poem, which depicts the beautiful environment where he
lived, is in every primary school textbook in China, and everyone learns it by heart.
Whenever the sky seemed clear, I used to open my office window and lean outside,
in the hope that I could see the mountains in the distance. Only on a few occasions
had I been able to see the range of peaks that rose above one corner of Chengdu’s
western skyline. They extended miles and miles away like huge clouds. Each time,
the spectacular view reminded me of Dufu’s poem. I looked in wonder: these were
the mountains the poet had seen one thousand years before. The distant mountains
seemed to link me to him.
As a child, I lived very close to the place where the poet lived – in a park now called
the Dufu Cottage Museum. I was able to appreciate not only its environment, but
also the huge changes it underwent. I passed through the outside grounds of the
museum four times a day to get to my primary school, located just east of the
public museum. I was often amazed by what I saw: an enclosed area covered in
luxuriant green. A blanket of Nan trees was so tall that they gave me the impression
19
that there was a big mountain standing in front of me. Whenever I entered the
trees I searched deep inside them, trying to find the mysterious mountain. I found
no trace of it. As I grew older, I continued my regular strolls through the park. The
trees became sparser and the illusion seemed sadly to disappear before my eyes. I
grew to accept that it was simply the trees that once shaped the mountain in this
park.
It may be hard for people to believe today that the little stream surrounding the
museum was once a large river. Even as recently as the 1980’s, this river was still
abundant, almost overflowing with water. I caught fish there with friends. The river
was once a channel that linked Chengdu to the Yangtze River – so it flowed all the
way to Shanghai. I liked to imagine travelers of the Tang dynasty beginning their
journey to the east by boarding a junk anchored outside Dufu’s Cottage.
The boat would drift down the river, swiftly passing Qing Yang temple, then sail
along the eastern edge of the ancient walls of Chengdu. Old Chengdu’s grand grey
gate tower would soon appear, as a farewell to those aboard. Early-rising farmers
would labor in green rice fields on a crisp spring morning. The passengers would
watch them work, taking in the sweet flavor of the riverbank’s flowers. Willow
branches would bend down, lightly tapping the shoulders of the travelers.
20
Post-quake
Jessica Wilczak
It wasn’t there—
was it?
The space
between the bed and the wall
where you kept all your pictures,
flowers and animals you’d cut from last year’s calendars,
and those spare, modern living rooms
from real estate magazines.
The heavy wooden block
where she shucked the scales
from the fish we bought for New Year
while it was still thrashing.
(Who knew that a fish could be so bloody
and so vital?)
Or the hollow he dug
in the pressed grit of the yard
where two spun glass marbles knocked gently
then disappeared,
gone,
when, work-worn,
the old mountain lifted its roots
and
shook
us
off.
No—
Our house, its blue-gray tiles, its red door,
suddenly wasn’t.
Just the customary dog,
silent.
21
Something to Say
Jessica Wilczak
The incense and cigarette smoke were starting to make Li Po’s head hurt, but she
felt there was something she had to say to her old friend before she left. Ding’s
husband had passed on the day before yesterday, around dinnertime. He’d been
walking home from the market with a few vegetables for the evening meal when
he keeled over, just like that. Terrible thing, to die right there in public. Ding’s
neighbour saw it happen, she was out buying eggs. Didn’t recognize Old Hu at
first. Just noticed this tall skinny fellow kneel down on the sidewalk, then fold over
gently, as though he were praying or something. Walking back from the egg seller,
she saw the man was still there, face down on the ground, bottom up in the air, like
a sleeping baby. Imagine her surprise when she crouched down to find Old Hu.
When Ding’s daughter phoned, Li Po had rushed over to help with the preparations.
Not that there was much to do. The workers from the funeral company had already
set up a big tent in the courtyard of the gray work unit apartments where Ding and
Old Hu had spent their adult lives together. Tall stands of tissue flowers were piling
up around the tent, their blues and pinks lending the yard a festive air. Li Po spent
the whole night in the tent playing majiang with Ding and her daughter, and a couple
of neighbours who used to work at the old factory with Ding and Hu. Only eight
or nine people turned up that evening, so Li felt she had to stay. She didn’t go home
until lunchtime the next day and then returned after a fitful nap.
Li was relieved to see that things had picked up a bit on the second night – there
was a respectable crowd now. Ding’s daughter and niece were out walking her
around the yard while she emitted a low, broken wail. Inside the tent, the ground
was buried fist-deep in sunflower seeds, cigarette wrappers, and empty bottles. Old
Hu’s dingy white lapdog was under the majiang tables, yapping until he received a
kick from one of the players. Then he would dart to the next table and set up his
awful racket again. Two boys were in a corner ripping the pages of a magazine into
long shreds, tossing them up into the air, and watching the pieces flutter down to
the ground. Li found the whole scene a bit distracting; she couldn’t put together
what she needed to say to Ding.
22
Some advice about getting on as a widow? Routines are key. Get out of bed.
Brush your teeth. Go outside. The earlier the better. Li’s own husband had already
been gone for three years. But it wasn’t just the waking up. Something else. Don’t
become someone who waits. Was that it? It’s too lonely to wait. And don’t try to
make sense of the loneliness, because it doesn’t make sense, does it, to have to deal
with that kind of feeling at this stage in your life. But – there it was – staring at you
from every corner.
And the choice was there too, always had been, though she’d ignored it for most of
her life. Too busy maybe. The gas stove, the twelfth storey window, even rat poison,
though that seemed a bit messy. A lot of choices when it’s just you sitting in the
living room after dinner, watching the light leak away again. But even the loneliness
was a kind of companion. And it was a new thing, wasn’t it? Discovering that you
were someone who wasn’t willing to jump. Strange to think she had never known
that about herself before. After all these years, only now finding that out. But what
could she tell Ding? Don’t jump? No, that wasn’t it.
Li stood up, a bit dizzy, held on to the back of her chair. Ding was being escorted
back into the tent by her daughter and niece, red faced and coughing. No one
noticed her return, everyone seemed wrapped up in their separate scenes. Li
shuffled over to Ding, who resisted the seat that was being offered to her and
remained standing between the two younger women.
“Ding,” Li said. “The sun is coming up. I have to go home… ” She trailed off,
losing focus for a moment. “Ding,” she repeated, with new force, “The sun is
coming up. But it’s not the same sun as yesterday.” All three women were staring at
her now with puzzled, concerned looks. Li Po felt the pain in her head move to her
stomach. “Hah,” she barked, “Crazy old woman!” She fled out into the morning,
embarrassed and elated at the same time.
23
Charlie Darwin
Jessica Wilczak
On the Galapagos
The animals were so unafraid
He could kill the little finches with his hat.
At the tip of the Americas
He saw the bright, the painted people dancing
And barred them from his civil species.
Still, I can’t help admiring the man.
In the end, perhaps it is only this:
My desire
To sail away on the Beagle
As a mere boy—
A naturalist, theologian, gentleman companion—
For four years, nine months, and five days
To lose myself in an antipodean world
Its wonder and its classification
And to return with a gleam in my eye, a firm step
Now a fully-fledged man
With a complete understanding of how the world works
(Slowly, geologically, orderly,
Yet somehow unfolding a wild parade
Of endless forms most beautiful)
And what my place is in it.
24
Travel Writing
Adam Williams
(1) ISTANBUL: A LETTER TO LAURENCE
Have you been to Byzantium? Have you seen the Hagia Sophia?
In a recessed gallery, high, high above the pillars, you can stand in the very spot
where the Empress Theodora worshipped behind a veil and looked down haughtily
at the insect-sized congregation. You can forget the Turks and tourists and imagine
the Emperor Justinian kneeling in his finery at the feet of a bearded bishop, with
General Belisarius and the nobles fanning in a blaze of golden cloaks behind him.
Or you can close your eyes beneath the great dome and listen to the echoing
footsteps, imagining that later, sadder congregation waiting in silence for the dull
thud of cannon, or rasping trumpet blast, or any intensification of the battle
murmur drifting in with the smoke from the far away walls; and conjure again the
brisk clanging steps of the Emperor Constantine Dragases as he marched at the
head of his tired knights to the altar. His silver armour would have flashed with the
reflection of a thousand candles, and the ranks of white faces shrouded in black
mourning would have gazed up in wild-eyed desperate hope as he passed. But
the liturgy would have been hurried, the Emperor preoccupied. An hour before
midnight. An hour before the end of history.
I know nowhere else on earth more evocative, powerful, beautiful or tragic than
the Hagia Sophia. It is the most perfect of all creations ever built for God by
Man. St Peter’s and the Duomo are garish and fussy in comparison. Nothing on
earth matches the glory and simplicity of Sophia’s domes and arches. The Great
Conqueror Mehmet rode in on his horse and converted it to a Mosque but he gave
orders on pain of death that no man should defile or alter it in any way. For two
hundred years the Muslims worshipped in a temple of graven images, where from
every wall portraits of the angels and archangels, and ladies and knights and bishops
and saints looked down at them (until a bigoted Sultan of the Eighteenth century
25
ordered them to be plastered over) – but I am sure when they worshipped there,
these devout Mussulmans were oblivious of the portraits (as actually one hardly
notices the Arabic letters on the chancels today). They would have worshipped
their own God in the space around them. The lines of the building itself are its
own glory. The size and space and play of light are staggering. And everywhere is
gold, the blaze of gold…
The Hagia Sophia defines a house of worship. Even the Muslims copied it – better
than the Christians. The Mosque of Suleiman, the Blue Mosque, the Tomb of
Tamerlane – all these I have seen and they are glorious – and I have not yet been
to the Taj, or visited Isfahan, but I would bet that all of them, fine as they are, are
only reflections of the spirituality and beauty of the Sophia. I am sure that it is no
coincidence that the Church was named after a timeless abstract, Wisdom, rather
than merely a Saint.
Surely there was some old magic in Byzantium? Not just Yeats saw it. I am reading
the Narnia stories to my child now, and so much of it is Byzantium – whether in
the evil of Charn, or the doomed beauty of “The Last Battle”. I presume Lewis
knew Runciman well. (Have you read the early Moorcocks by the way, the books
about Elric and his adventures at the Court of the evil Magician King, Alexander
the Great – not the Alexander of history, but a weird evil magical Alexander in
a glittering but decadent ultimately doomed world; again, is there not a shade of
Byzantium here? Can you imagine what Dark Age Europe thought of that fabulous
city on the edge of their world?)
Do you know Runciman’s “The Sicilian Vespers”, or John Julius Norwich’s
two wonderful books “Normans In the South” and “A Kingdom In The Sun”,
now published as one paperback? The best things about them is that they read
themselves like Romances or adventure stories. (Do you remember T.H. White’s
device in “The Once And Future King,” when throughout the book Arthur and his
knights tell stories of those mythical kings, Edward I, and Richard the Lionheart,
and the Black Prince! And how our history really did read like romance!)
Oh, you must read Runciman’s “Fall of Constantinople!” It is like current affairs:
the hypocrisy and apathy of the Great Powers then no different from America’s
and Europe’s shenanigans in Iraq or Afghanistan today.
Better still go to Istanbul. Or Ravenna.
Perhaps we should all go to Ravenna!
26
(2) CROATIA: CONVERSATION ON A TRAIN
“Can travel writing include fiction?” asked Algy provocatively. “Were Jack London’s
or Conrad’s descriptions of the South Seas in short story or novel form any less
revealing than Robert Louis Stevenson’s journals? Any less Travel Writing because
they were fictional?”
“Jan Morris is a travel writer, or commonly called so,” replied Jurgen, thoughtfully
relighting his pipe, “but usually she describes the past and only incidentally appears
as a character commenting on what remains of the past. Is the “Pax Britannica
Trilogy” history, or travel writing?”
“I see what you mean,” said Algy. “Is a history inspired by the writer’s travel to, and
knowledge of, a place but in which the travel writer’s own experiences are NOT
described, in a book not even set in the writer’s own period, any less a piece of
Travel Writing than a voyager’s journal?”
“Do you have actually to travel at all?” continued Jurgen. “Was John Livingston
Lowes’ book “Road To Xanadu” – in which he examined the travel literature
which Coleridge had read and then went on a mental voyage of discovery of his
own, using this material to explore Coleridge’s mind and the process by which he
fused these images into the poetry of “Xanadu” and “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner......”
“In the process discovering the wellsprings of human creative powers,” murmured
Marie-Helene.
“Indeed so, my dear,” smiled Jurgen. “Is this any less a book of exploration and
travel because Lowes never left his desk in Chicago University?”
“Fifty years later another writer was inspired by Lowes’ book to travel to the places
which Lowes described, but had visited only in his imagination...” said Algy.
“But what a dull thing to do,” snapped Jurgen. “What repetition! For the armchair
travel reader Lowes’ book is the more exciting. Surely he, not his successor, was the
real Travel Writer? Can you not see it?”
The Orthodox priest in the corner of the railway carriage, who had not spoken
until now, coughed in a self–deprecating manner.
27
“Excuse me,” he said. “I could not help but overhear what you were saying about
John Livingstone Lowes. This touches, I believe, on Borges’ conundrum about
Don Quixote. You are no doubt familiar with the story, but for the benefit of the
conductor who is also taking a keen interest in this conversation permit me to
remind you of the salient points.
“A modern writer who had never read Don Quixote determined to study everything
he could about Cervantes’ life and times; then armed with this knowledge, he set
out to write Don Quixote himself. He spent many years at the task and the work he
produced was word for word as Cervantes himself wrote it. Which then was the
true work of art?”
“Surely that of Cervantes” said the conductor, pausing from a long examination
of Marie-Helene’s ticket. “Even if the other man’s work was exactly the same, it
could still not be the original creation. A Ming vase cloned in a computer is not a
Ming vase.”
“Well said,” said the priest. “Borges may have agreed with you.”
“Or does it matter?” asked Algy, irritated that he had been interrupted by a member
of the lower orders.
“My point exactly,” said Jurgen triumphantly. “Is not all writing fiction anyway?
“Ask yourself this question,” he continued. “Is not travel writing less about
description of place and experience than about the mental or imaginative
significance to the writer and reader, whether historical or otherwise? Is the reader
of Newby’s “Short Walk In The Hindu Kush” remotely interested in the Hindu
Kush? Or is he interested in Newby? If he is, it is only in the fictional persona
that Newby becomes in his writing. In other words, an invention. And is that not
fiction?”
With a flourish, he returned to his copy of Foreign Affairs and Algy disconsolately
fell back to looking out of the window at the passing mountains. None of them
noticed that a man in a black leather raincoat and pince nez was watching them
closely from the corridor...
28
(3) TIENTSIN: THE TRUE STORY OF KIESSLING’S
Scene, the Starlight Club, 1924: George, Catherine, Robbie and Willie have had
a rickshaw race and are now drinking champagne at a table in the Starlight Club
watching the Russian taxi dancers as they slide back and forth in the arms of
Chinese gangsters and warlords. They are merry because Catherine, pretending to
be a prostitute, has just, for a dare, danced with a Chinese general, and received a
substantial tip.
“Did you ever hear the truth about Kiessling and Bader?” asked George, lighting
a cigar.
“Go on, this’ll be another of your fatuous stories,” said Catherine.
“Certainly not,” said George. “It is a tragedy of our times. A stirring moral fable,
with lessons for us all…”
“Get on with it,” said Willie.
“Well, you know that Herr Kiessling, an Austrian, established his bakery around
the turn of the century, and shortly afterwards he was joined by Frau Kiessling, a
lady of ample proportions like himself. They were very happy. They sang together
as they baked their cakes.”
“They didn’t,” laughed Catherine. “You’re making it up.”
“No, I’m not. They sang together. It was sweet. It was divine. It was baker’s heaven
– until the Great War came to break up their happy idyll. Herr Kiessling felt the
call of patriotism, and returned to Austria to fight for Franz Josef, leaving Frau
Kiessling in charge. Came the awful day. A letter arrived at the cake shop. Corporal
Kiessling was missing in action on the Eastern Front, presumed dead. Frau
Kiessling was distraught. All the cakes had black bands round them for a week.
Her only comfort was the solicitude of Herr Bader, the violinist in the thé dansant
quartet and her missing husband’s best friend. Herr Bader was very understanding.
A year passed. Two. The war ended. In due course widow Kiessling and Herr Bader
were married. The cakeshop thrived.”
“Did they sing together?” asked Willie.
“No, Frau Bader sang as she baked and Herr Bader accompanied her on the violin.”
29
30
“How touching.”
“Wasn’t it? Anyway, came the night – this would be in late ’19 – it was a dark
and stormy night as it always is on these occasions, the Baders were woken by
a thunderous knocking on the door. They crept down in their night dresses and
through the window display they saw a black and shadowy figure peering menacingly
at the cakes…”
“Don’t tell me, Kiessling’s ghost,” giggled Robbie.
“No,” said George. “The man himself returned from the dead, a thinner version,
of course, because he had been a prisoner of war in Siberia, and had only recently
managed to escape, walking the distance from Lake Baikal. What to do? The three
of them sat silently at one of the tables. Black looks were exchanged. Frau Bader
noticed that Herr Kiessling was looking ominously at the cake knife on the counter.
You know these Austrians.”
“What happened?”
“Frau Bader did the only thing she could do in the circumstances. She brought
out the largest cake from the display and plopped it on the table. It was a big,
cream cake and they all set to. By morning, the cake was finished and everything
was resolved. Passers-by noticed a new sign above the door. Kiessling’s was no
longer Kiessling’s. It was now Kiessling und Bader. And the good frau? I believe
she shares Herr Kiessling’s bed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, Herr Bader
takes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays, and Herr Kiessling and Herr Bader have
privileges on alternate Sundays.”
“What utter rubbish,” laughed Catherine.
“It’s God’s truth,” beamed George, “Could I have made that up?”
And then they had all laughed uproariously and called for more champagne.
They had apportioned the general’s tip to the delighted Russian prostitutes, who
accompanied them in their drinking until the club closed.
31
Name Game
Scott Ness
I started with hope
of improving on Pope
I dreamt of the gift
of out-mocking Dean Swift
of grasping a voice
reminiscent of Joyce
I wondered, beguiled,
if I might be a Wilde
But I fear I’m too fake
just a wannabe Blake
I can’t make a stab
at narration like Crabbe
or perform verbal feats
not unworthy of Keats
I’m too small to try on
the robes of Lord Byron
I know letters’ scorn
but cannot be Hawthorne
I doubt I’m the peer
of William Shakespeare
The sea makes me ill
So I am not Melville
32
It could be much fun
being well as John Donne
But what of the worst:
am I worse than Wordsworth?
At best I’ll have heart
for a cat and Chris Smart
I don’t like the math
of expiring like Plath
Not a candle to Poe
Well, at least now I know
If I let it hang loose
just little bit Seuss.
33
Beast Talk
Scott Ness
Run.
They follow.
You hurt.
They come.
Hit. Bite. Scream. Howl.
They leave.
I am.
Look.
One farms.
One herds.
They pray.
One strikes.
Earth drinks.
I am.
People fear.
You care.
34
They cry.
You heed.
They look.
They See.
She births.
He Bleeds.
I died?
They believe.
We lied.
They forget.
Books burn.
They hail.
Men obey.
Brothers burn.
You wait.
I am.
They tremble.
Wars rage.
Pride soars.
Mushrooms cloud.
They heard.
I wake.
35
Missing Home
Scott Ness
She tugged at her father’s coat. Evelyn was a nine year old girl with long chocolate
hair left to dangle aimlessly. She wore a pair of jeans and a simple white top. Her
father, Issac, whom she was alternately walking beside or dangling off of was
dressed much more formally. A sleek leather jacket on his wispy frame matched
to a simple polo and tan slacks. His curly beard jutting off his jaw managed to
precede his nose, but only by the tilt of his head. He kept his hair short, a gentle
carpet upon his crown. Next to him was his wife, a plump woman and step-mother
to Evelyn who had a gift for patiently ignoring other people. Somewhere behind
them was the son who was still far too unused to his increasingly lumbering frame.
They didn’t look like a family: the scrawny father, the spherical wife, the lumbering
brother, and the bored little girl. She tugged again.
They hadn’t always been this way. Briefly, in the months following the divorce, there
had been a family in this picture. The plump round woman had been genuinely
caring and involved with her new lover’s children, the lumbering brother had been
patient and attentive, the wispy daughter had been dutiful. Then Issac was engaged.
The novelty and the newness wore off for everyone. The step-mother-to-be
retreated into her own passions, intent on leaving Issac to parent his own children
while Issac turned his attention to his new love and away from the reminders of his
past one. Some time after all of them slipped back into their natural states. Evelyn
was wishing they were...
Home, was there ever so false a word? She tugged again. They finished their silent
tour of the antique shop and walked out. She went to tug again but this time
suddenly felt herself at the very center of her father’s attention. She didn’t hear his
words. Curled brows furrowing inward and sending lines rocketing up his forehead.
Nostrils flaring, his beard bobbing up and down with his growl. When he stopped
she took the chance and spoke.
“You need candy?” Her father asked, his growl winding down. “You mean you
want candy, no one needs candy.” Even though he said that, without waiting to see
if she was even listening he turned around and looked for a candy store. With their
36
new direction firmly in mind, they walked away from Issac’s world. Away from the
dust and finery, away from valuing everything in numbers and years. Issac’s was
numbers, names, dates, ceremony... Evelyn’s world was inside the candy store.
The store was bright. Yellows popped from the walls, cherry red flowing across the
oaken beams, emerald greens fountaining around the wooden barrels. The colors
drew Evelyn in. The spirals on the wall where orange and pink dove into each other
and then splashed outwards into tubs of gummy bears made her forget the dusty
shelves from before. This place drew all her melancholy from her like leeches draw
blood from a wound. Issac tapped his foot. Licorice glistened in a beechwood tub,
and rainbow lollipops hung along the yellow. In that moment, in that place, Evelyn
was content. Her needs had been met. The colors continued to burn around her,
dancing and blazing as they spun together making her feel rather light-headed.
Issac tapped his foot again. He looked around at the gaudy decorations and poorly
used floorspace. He sneered briefly at the piles and leaned away. He checked the
prices of things as he went, low prices but still too high, all things considered. A
few calories, a small dose of endorphines, and more likely than not, a few unsightly
pounds. He wanted to go. He tapped his foot again and looked at his watch. His
daughter was flitting from one barrel to the next without a care while he was waiting
on her. He tapped his foot again. “Pick something Evelyn, we’re leaving,” he said
as his impatience won out.
She was caught. On one side were the gummies, on the other were the chocolates,
between were the giant plastic tubed Pixie Sticks. The purple shadows which had
bled out of her in the radiance of the yellow walls began creeping back in through
her soles. The giddy daze she had been in faded away back into reality. Then came
the car ride.
Three hours in a car, she starting in on her Pixie Stick. Issac put on his favorite
music and drove quietly. She twirled a finger in her hair, and ate some more. The
wife chatted with the father intermittently and sat there knitting. She felt the candy
scratch her tongue. She tried to talk to her brother. Her brother’s lips tried to
curl back. She started playing with her candy and got the tube caught under her
chair. She pulled. She pulled harder. She thought about asking for help, but decided
against it and pulled one more time only this time there was no resistance. It hit
hard. She wailed.
“What is it?” Issac shouted, at once agitated and anxious. He turned back to look
to see his daughter wailing with her face covered and his son sitting there wide eyed.
“I can’t see.” She cried.
37
“What happened?” he asked again.
“I hit my eye.” She cried more. “I can’t see,” she said, still not opening her eyes.
“Do you need to go to the doctor?” He asked, pulling the car over to the side of
the road.
“I was pulling and it... and it... and I poked myself in the eye.” She wailed. “With
a Pixie Stick.”
The brother and the wife snorted for a moment, barely keeping their composure.
“Wait.” The father said, frustration winning over anxiety. “Are you tellling me
you’re too stupid to eat candy?”
The wife broke into snorting laughter. Though she apologized, she still didn’t stop.
The brother looked between his wailing sister, fuming father, and laughing step
mother trying to figure out what reaction would keep him out of trouble.
Evelyn threw the Pixie Stick on the ground and muttered, “Stupid candy.” Then,
still covering her eye, she curled up and cried.
38
Bill Stranberg
39
the night before
Sophia Kidd
the way
a jealous
woman
sits
in a chair
next to
the man
she’s made
feel so
bad
40
images
Sophia Kidd
infinite brown
leather jacket
flame on his head
gainst
autumnal spring
dads, hands in pockets
landfills behind
or a stump of a tree
bagged and tied
at its tip
sons
all over the
place
walking quickly
over sans
41
love copper mary
Sophia Kidd
too bad
you lef ’
yur song
on my pillow
an’ i drank
it fur
breffas’
an’ love
lo
love is a torn
sleeve
on my bedpost
from when ya
wanned ta run
so bad
you gotchur
momma
kitchen memories
leakin’ out yur socks
and i laughed
at table
later
to drink an
emerald
glass of
absynthe
42
The Goats in the Trees
Alberto Ruy Sanchez
I was in my early 20s when my wife left me for Europe. I quickly got a scholarship
and followed her. One time from there we visited Morocco and we went to lie
on a beach. My wife was wearing a bikini. At first we were all alone but then a
bus arrived with about twenty women on board, and they were wearing veils,
kaftans and jilbabs. My wife, being a strong feminist, said “poor women, poor
Arabic women”, and so on. They went past us about ten metres and then began to
undress, completely… completely.
That happened thirty years ago, and it would not happen today, but in a few minutes
those women were completely naked right beside me. And all my woman’s feminist
speech made no sense at all because they were freer than us. And of course I was
astonished, marveled, frightened, excited. And what were they doing with all of my
excitement? They were laughing at me and establishing a complicity with my wife.
So what we understood is that we don’t understand anything; that you need to learn
again everything.
And another similar thing happened soon after when we went into the desert.
There were some dunes but for so long only rocks, and no vegetation. And then
you see these bushes, trees that are less than two metres high. We saw some of
them far away in the distance. One was full of spots, black spots. With all of my
knowledge of the Mexican countryside I said to my wife, with a lot of authority,
“You see that tree? It is full of vultures, there is probably a dead cow around.” And
in that trip I learned another thing – that she is always right, even if she is a little
bit wrong.
She said to me, “You’re extremely blind, those are not vultures, they’re not even
birds. And there are no cows here? Maybe a camel or donkey, but there are no
cows.”
As we got closer I saw she was right. They were not birds because they had four
legs. “Say, what’s that – dogs?” But no. When we got closer we saw the trees were
43
44
full of goats! Goats over the trees, with a shepherd taking care of them. And the
shepherd instead of looking down was looking up. And I was extremely excited
because it was real. We were on a bus and I said to a Moroccan who was next to
me, “Look! Look! That is amazing.”
And he said, “What?”
And I said, “There!”
“Oh yes!” he said, “Those trees are fabulous, they only grow in Morocco.”
And of course they are fabulous trees, it’s true. They grow where nothing else
grows because they have a root that goes down thirty meters. Even if the bush
is no more than two metres, the roots go deep down so that they can find water.
But I said, “No, I’m not talking about the trees, I’m talking about the goats.”
And he said, “What’s the problem with the goats?” He looked at me like he was
looking at a crazy man.
And I said, “The goats are over the trees.”
But he said to me, “Goats are always over the trees.”
So I realised that what for me was absolutely astonishing, for him was a thing of
everyday life that didn’t even deserve to be noticed.
So in that moment I decided that another thing in my literature should be to notice
the goats over the trees in everyday life. And if I wanted to recover my wife I
needed to pay attention to the goats over her.
I began to develop an aesthetic of wonder.
Excerpted from an interview with Berenice Hernandez Garcia at The 2010 Chengdu Bookworm
International Literary Festival.
45
Bad Egg and the Hospital
Jessie Brett
One night Blaze rang me up late to say he was coming over. “Sure”, I said, and
soon he whirled into my place and into my bed, drunk and excited. Lying on his
stomach, chin held alert, he told me that earlier that night he had the opportunity
to go home with two other women, one of them being Big Tits, the other some girl
from Israel, “Fucking Muslim haters”, he said, “as if I would go home with her.”
He rolled onto his back.
“But I did not. I came to you. Are you happy about that?”
I was not happy, it was late and I was tired. Things blew up when I called him
manipulative and he called me jealous. And I was jealous, even though I found
Big Tits unattractive. Likely it was the competition that got me; I make a point of
never losing.
Mid-argument his phone rang; it was one of the Italian boys calling from the
hospital. Bad Egg, who had been at the same party as Blaze had drunk too much,
as he often did. He’d slipped on the pavement, hit his head and possibly had a
concussion, so we got up, got dressed and caught a taxi.
When we arrived, a small group of Italians were sitting in the open foyer, among
them Big Tits. Bad Egg was lying on a raised stretcher-bed next to a pillar near
the front desk. Nobody was attending to him and he was covered in vomit, which
soaked into his fine, long blonde hair. Usually his hair towered in a hairspray-hard
Mohican, but tonight it lay in a wet lumpy mess. We went to his side and tried to
catch his attention as his eyes rolled back into his head. Big Tits stood up from
her blue plastic chair and came to stand beside Blaze. Antonio, handsome, with an
Elvis-style quiff, came over to explain.
Bad Egg had drunk countless bottles of free wine and had fallen face-first on to
the pavement. A blue and purple egg rose from his forehead. Everyone feared he
may have split his skull, so the Italians piled him into a taxi. During the ride Bad
Egg had vomited a stinking red stream all over the back seat, the driver was furious
46
and Antonio had to pay him off. While Blaze paid Antonio back the money, Bad
Egg moaned that he didn’t want to be left alone and grabbed me around the neck,
pulling me into his vomit-stained face, he spoke to me in French, things I couldn’t
understand, his glazed blue eyes searching mine.
As he held me Blaze grinned at Big Tits, a smile that showed the dimples in his
cheeks. He tickled her ribs. She smiled back, looking up at him through dark
eyelashes. She thought he was secretly showing her attention but Blaze knew I
could see what he was doing – he was performing for me. I tried to ignore it,
and unlocked Bad Egg’s arms and walked to the front desk to berate the nurse
for leaving him unattended. Antonio told me it had been like this since they had
arrived; another useless, drunk foreigner, they didn’t care if he fell unconscious
and died.
Finally we organised an MRI scan. Bad Egg didn’t agree to having scans or the
like because he believes that “MRI’s and X-rays are somehow connected to a
government conspiracy to control people,” Blaze told me. We had to hold Bad
Egg’s hands and convince him he may die otherwise, while he protested in a feeble
voice. In the end we decided he was probably drunk enough not to remember the
next day anyway. We wheeled him to the room ourselves because the nurses refused
to help.
We pounded on the flimsy aluminum roller door which protected the main door,
taking turns in groups of three, knocking until our hands hurt. Finally the noise
brought the doctor grudgingly to the door, which he unlocked but did not pull up.
He walked off to turn on the equipment while slinging a doctor’s jacket on over his
pajamas. After the process we wheeled Bad Egg out of the room and into the hall
where he sprayed an aubergine jet of vomit over his safety pin-covered Gouride
band t-shirt and the brown tiled floor. The doctor looked at the mess blankly,
looked at us and headed back to his little bedroom, closing the door behind him.
We all stared not knowing what to do; the vomit was slowly spreading over the
hallway floor and dripping down the wall in chunky purple streaks like drunken
slugs. I knocked on the doctor’s door and asked him to get me some paper towel.
Sighing, he got out of bed, carefully putting on his dressing gown, left arm, then
the right. He stood up, put on his slippers, wiggling in each foot until his toes hit
the ends, and then shuffled to a locked door which led to a small office. In the
office he looked around then stood in front of a tall filing cabinet and fiddled with
his keys. Finally he clicked open the bottom drawer from which he pulled out two
pieces of cheap, gossamer-fine paper towel and handed them to me.
I looked at him and pointed to the bobbing sea of vomit, which by now was
47
separating into what was clearly hunks of stir-fried lotus root with pickled
vegetables and rice floating in a thick liquid. I said, “Please give me the whole box,”
with which we wiped the floor and Bad Egg’s face.
Blaze, Bad Egg and I rode in a taxi back to their house. Exhausted our heads lolled
against the dirty headrests. Back home, Blaze and I fought some more about Big
Tits. Then we fucked, and then Blaze slept, his heavy limbs draped over me, and
I looked at the plants outside the window, watching them grow and replaying my
orgasm in my head.
We were still worried about Bad Egg so we left him water by his bed and took turns
during the night to check that he was still breathing.
“Well, at least it was not as bad as the time I had to take Shit and Ling Ling to the
hospital because they had taken some bad acid,” Blaze said as he drifted off to
sleep. “I tried to get a taxi while Ling Ling cried and kept asking for his father, who
is dead. Then when I thought I had called over a taxi it turned out to be the police.
That was some fucking shit, that night.”
48
Moshing
Jessie Brett
Sweat rolled down her face and back, soaking her singlet. Her quiff, without
hairspray, toppled with her thrashing. A smash to the ribs knocked the breath from
her lungs, pushing her into a body tumbling the other way. Someone kicked her in
the knee. It felt amazing.
Our dreams, and hurt, they embrace the wind and are blown away, Lao Mao growled, his
eyes closed, neck tensed, back arched. The road, our future, follows the heart to the other
side… Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!
The band wore army-green polyester jackets with red armbands bearing their name.
Their jackets had darkened to a deep, forest-green with sweat. The music was so
loud you could hear nothing else. The girl in front of her moved her head up and
down rhythmically with an intense look of concentration on her face. The boy next
to her grinned manically, wide-eyed, jumping up and down. Heavy smoke melded
with the tangy taste of sweat on her top lip.
She wiped the sweat dripping into her eyes with the back of her hand. It didn’t
remove it, only smeared it around. She grabbed the soggy shoulders of the people
in front of her and lost herself in the smashing bodies. She let her thoughts go like
she hadn’t in months, she let them join her body; it was like being in a violent sea
storm, smashed upon the rocks, buffeted up and slammed down again. She wanted
to be lost.
She felt his presence in the crowd and caught a glimpse of his hair, it was different
now. He had changed out of the clothes he had performed in earlier that night.
Later, outside, he told her he had bought the pants he was wearing with her in
mind. He knew she would be there. She knew that the leopard print stockings
and tiger emblasoned leotard he had performed in were for her too. He had sung
looking at her – she knew it even before he told her, he had sung for her. His eyes
had sought her out in the crowd, through the steamy heat of the lights, and found
her, to sing to her and try to fuck her up.
49
Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! Determination paves the way to a new direction, the tendons in Lao
Mao’s neck taut under tattoos and sweat, he sang in a low roar, Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s
go! And our dreams will be given new intention.
She thought she would feel something, seeing him again, but she had felt nothing.
A gaping nothing; a deep cavern empty of feeling. But she knew the thoughts
would come later. And they would come and come, over and over. After all this
time she would still think about it too much.
Fuck it… and fuck him, she thought. Right now, she would mosh. And right now,
being lost was what kept her going.
50
Leslie Mills
51
Exile
Du Mu, Translation by Catherine Platt
遣怀杜牧
落魄江湖戴酒行，
楚腰纤细掌中轻。
十年一觉扬州梦，
赢得青楼薄辛名。
Exile
Disconsolate I travel
Rivers and lakes, laden with wine.
Slender-waisted women of Chu, so fine
They danced in the palm of my hand.
Ten years in Yangzhou are as one –
A dream from which I wake,
And take with me from its pleasure halls
Only my own inconstant heart.
52
Eclipse
Catherine Platt
Each day of blistering light seared the plateau’s
Summer hues onto a deeper lens –
Reflecting lined and layered coral flags
Whipping their faded prayers to the azure sky,
White bones on the turquoise hills, ochre light
Burnishing each stone, each startling flower.
But the day the sun disappeared
Was claimed by cloud,
Lying low and heavy as light drained
Softly from the world.
Aged hands shuffled tender beads, mantras
Against the unknown, the hallowed loss of light.
A monochromatic hush held us in thrall,
The birds were quiet, the shadowed hills lay still.
Only an owl was prompted to call, once,
A baffled query to intruding night.
53
Notes from Barthes’s Camera Lucida, chapter 5
Catherine Platt
Knowing myself observed,
I make another body,
Become an image, pose.
My faint smile drifts.
“Myself ” is never in my image,
Except, perhaps, through eyes of love.
A History of Looking,
The photograph the advent
Of myself as other.
A strange action, I do not stop
Imitating myself.
Inauthentic, imposter,
I am subject becoming object
In a micro-version of death:
I am truly becoming a specter.
Yet, I love the trigger of the lens,
These mechanical sounds
To which my desire clings.
The noise of time is not sad,
The first cameras were clocks for seeing.
In me someone very old still hears
In the abrupt click
The living sound of wood.
54
Yushu
Scott Ezell
After days traveling through the empty, exuberant yawp of earth and sky that unfurls
across the Tibetan Plateau, Yushu seemed like a busy clot of commerce sifted with
schist and dust. In the morning the sun elbowed its way over surrounding mountain
ridges as I stepped out into the dirt street busy with nomads and wandering chickens
and yak-pulled carts. The road curved down an incline to the center of town. A
spangle of market commerce bloomed where a 3-story warren of concrete shop
fronts stood in a square profusion of color and chaos.
The cold perforated my skin as if preparing to rip me in two. A man in yellow
shades fell into stride next to me and took my hand, we walked down the street like
teenage sweethearts. He beamed at me beneath wool rags wrapped around his head,
and swept his free hand in an arc towards the gravel-colored mountains, mountains
of a senselessly dull gray but which captured a sky so whangingly blue that I turned
around and around in dizzy circles. The man spoke to me in Tibetan, his words
like some incantation of the elemental reality that embraced us, the mountains, the
sky, our blood and bones, our thin skin of visceral enclosure. Tashi delek, he said,
and reached up to lightly box both my ears in playful benediction, then turned and
stopped at a cart that sold carrots, potatoes, and radish greens.
Horses clopped down the streets, creating a pre-industrial sense of human
commerce. Tarps were stretched along the edges of the market, slanted and rippled,
ribboned with stripes, strung up with crisscrosses of rope. What did rural Asia do
before plastic tarps? They are so fundamental to these human landscapes, without
them I can only imagine the butcher’s cuts of meat laid out on the bare earth, and
the outdoor stalls roofed by nothing but sky.
I heard someone hoot and call out, looked over and saw the kid from the truck I’d
hitched a ride in from Sershul, over the border in Sichuan. He sat drinking tea in a
plastic chair, and waved me over to join him. Black waves of hair rose and subsided
across his head. He’d been silent the entire day’s journey from Sershul, but now his
glacial reticence was gone, he smiled affably and invited me to share his tea.
55
He said something in Tibetan to the matron of the stall and she set down a
disposable plastic cup for me. He poured me butter tea from his pot, and she went
back to work hacking at a yak carcass with a hatchet. She chopped with the hatchet,
then sawed at the connective tissue and skin with a long knife to sever pieces from
each other. The matron herself was undeniably yak-like, enormous across the belly
and shoulders, with a large head of looped braids, a slow, deliberate shuffling walk
and a vague air of fatality. She piled the meat and bones on a plastic sheet, flecks of
gristle and blood spattering the area around her.
I wondered how anyone could eat with such bloody mayhem strewn at his feet. The
kid gleamed and smiled like something broken open from a shell, freed from some
veil or inhibition that had clung to him the day before. He was urbane and suave
now, with his legs crossed loosely at the ankles, his fingers laced easily around his
cup of tea.
—Where you going, he asked me, so far from America.
—From here, northwest across Qinghai, and up to Kekexili, I said. To the Tibetan
antelope reserve.
—Whoo, cold, cold, that’s more than 5,000 meters, he said.
—Yes, I know. Where you going?
—Lhasa.
—What for?
He shrugged and smiled. —To study. Maybe. Or to work. I have an older sister
there.
He looked to be gliding towards a destiny he was at peace with, whether he knew
what it was or not. The matron brought him a bowl of noodles, piled and steaming
with yak ligaments and ragged muscle grain. He immediately began slurping at it.
Grease and juice spattered from his mouth and chopsticks and spottled the table,
he spit out pieces of bone, he looked like he would jump into the bowl and eat his
way out if he could.
—Do you want a bowl? I’ll buy it for you! He said.
—Yes, I said, but you can’t pay, it’s all on me.
56
Whatever mind-generated revulsion I’d felt for the gruesome carcass at our feet, my
stomach and tongue were completely seduced by the smell of the food. I wanted to
bite into the rich caloric grain of animal energy, drink down the hot spicy broth, I
felt only intestinal desire for the dead body as food. There’s no point denying that
every meal is someone else’s body, just as my body is someone else’s meal.
He laughed through the slurp and suck of his noodles, and called out to the matron.
—I ordered you a bowl, he said, and told her to only take my money!
My food came and we both ate noisily, in a syncopated rhythm with the dull fleshsound of the matron’s hatchet striking the body of the former yak. At one point
she looked up, visibly winded, and said something to me as she caught her breath,
shaking her head with a loose smile, sweat slicking hair strands to her face.
—She says to ask do you have a machine for this in America, the lad translated into
Mandarin.
I paused with the spicy yak grease smeared around my lips like a clown’s smile
and thought of all the freeways, factories, feed lots of America, the freezer trucks,
the flash-frozen fish, the assembly lines of meat production, the slaughterhouse
electrocutions, the egg hutches 10,000 chickens strong, the plastic-wrapped
supermarket lunchmeat, the food in cans, the food in frozen boxes, the food in
sealed pouches, the fast food burgers with their circle and square geometries slopped
with lard and sauce, the phallic anonymity of hotdogs, the deboned turkeys, the
circumcised cuts of pork, the six-paks of chicken breasts, the low-cal TV dinners,
the pre-washed salad mixes, the drive-up windows, microwaves and electric egg
beaters and bread-making machines, boxed juice variety paks, white bread with
added vitamins and minerals, cake mix, jello, frozen peas, instant curry, shake-on
cheese, ridge-cut chips, french fries, hydrogenated oil, dextrose and xanthan gum,
red dye #4 with its cancer in the bladders of dogs, corn syrup, hormone-injected
beef, shrink-wrapped salami, garlic salt, dehydrated onions, lite beer.
—Yes, I said, we have a machine.
~
A large lama stood before me. He was fat, almost obese. It’s always a mystery
in this type of environment, where 99% of the populace is lean as scrap metal,
to come upon the anomaly of excess. Perhaps it’s glandular. Anyway, there is no
stigma against overweight in Tibet, if anything fat is considered good luck. Famine
57
insurance, perhaps. The lama wore thick-framed glasses but with only one lens.
—You must be looking for something, he said to me.
—How do you know that? I asked.
—You are standing in the market empty-handed with your mouth hanging open. It
doesn’t take an oracle to read you.
—I guess you’re right.
—What do you need?
—I need insulation, I said.
—Warmth.
—Yes, I’m traveling north into the cold.
—Right into the belly of winter, he nodded in understanding.
—Look around, everyone’s wearing these sheepskin robes, but they’re not for sale
in the market. All I can find to buy are thin polyester sweaters.
—You have to order one custom. I’ll take you to the shop. Follow me.
He turned and pushed his bulk through the narrow aisles of the market. —What happened to your glasses? I asked
—Nothing, he said, with no further explication. He had a detached, deliberate way
of speaking, as if words were not subject to his volition but rose like bubbles from
inside him, contingent on laws of physics and chemistry rather than personality or
psychiatry or temporal exigencies.
We stepped through a doorway to a narrow shop filled with bolts of cloth and
shelves of sheepskins and half-stitched vests and coats. A woman sat working a
pedal-powered sewing machine amid a coterie of lamas and women friends who
reclined and chatted as if at an informal soirée. One young lama was sprawled out
asleep on a wolf skin.
58
—She asked if you are Russian, my rotund guide said after he talked to the
seamstress in Tibetan.
—No, I said. I bought this Russian army hat earlier today, but I was born in America.
—She has two cousins in America, the lama said, in Salt Lake City.
—Does she speak Chinese?
—Yes, the lama said. But the seamstress shook her head.
—Can I order one of these traditional overcoats from you? I asked.
She shook her head again as she worked and everyone began talking in Tibetan,
collectively deliberating my request. The conversation subsided and the lama told
me, —She says no.
—Why not?
—She says she doesn’t make them.
I looked around at the clothes in progress, and at some completed garments of
exactly the kind I hoped to buy.
—Didn’t you make these? I asked.
—She says someone else made them.
The seamstress looked up at me with benevolent pity, as if it broke her heart to
refuse, but she had no choice. Her dignity was so inviolable there was nothing for
me to say.
—What can I do? I asked the lama.
He shrugged. —She says she can’t help you, he said, as the sewing machine
continued to roll with a sound like chewing knots.
—Well, thanks anyway, I said, I guess I’ll keep looking in the market.
I walked around the market wondering what had compelled me so many thousands
of miles, what possessed me with such a strong desire to strip down to nothing, to
59
the point that I didn’t own a warm coat in Tibet? Of course it was because I wanted
to absorb the road, to wear the road on my back, and to carry as little as possible so
that my pockets, heart, and skin would be open to receive whatever I encountered.
But standing there in the Yushu market, unable to beg, buy, or barter for what I
needed, this whole journey felt like an infatuation, a love affair that was fine as long
as I limited my vision and experience to the terms of the façade, but when a larger
reality leaked in suddenly the whole delusion tumbled down.
~
I walked up the stairs to the second floor of the market catacomb and stepped
into an old Wild West saloon-style restaurant, with a tv screen and karaoke instead
of pianola. The place was noisy and laughter-filled as a school bus. I stood in
the doorway a moment as the door-curtain fell closed behind me, but a table of
adolescent lamas called me to join them and squeezed improbably close together
on their bench to make room for me.
The boss was a 40ish Tibetan man in a red sweater with a dignified left turn to his
nose. I ordered “noodle pieces,” mian kuai, while he personally poured my tea and
brought me a bowl of salt. He pantomimed that I might pinch salt into my tea if I
liked. I told him I didn’t need any extra salt at the moment, and he jumped back in
astonishment or terror that I had spoken Chinese.
My dinner came, thick pieces of noodle squares fried with lamb meat and tomatoes
and mustard greens, I asked for chili peppers and the boss sent one of his daughters
over with a small bowl of them, then told her to bring me a second one in case that
was not enough. Another daughter filled up my teacup every time it was diminished
by even the tiniest sip.
Across the room a man my age stared dreamily at me. He wore a soiled gray serape
and had tangled locks hanging down from his cowboy hat. He smiled almost
beatifically when I looked his direction, like we shared some divine secret that
made us permanently free, a smile of no abashment, just open wonder of the kind
as when a Tibetan man takes my hand on the street and walks several steps with
me in fraternal companionship, then simply says tashi delek and goes on his way—
The boss’s wife had a bronze medallion 3 inches across with a large turquoise
nugget mounted in it, she wore it in her hair like a tiny hat, off to one side, tilted at a
rakish angle. Three pretty daughters worked in the place, serving food and clearing
tables. The youngest one was about 8, she came by and said something saucy to
the monks in reprimand for something they asked for, then stalked away, righteous
60
and proud with pouted lips, climbed the back of her mother’s chair and kissed her
mother’s neck 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 times.
The girls could have been princesses all, they were tall and slim with bright open
faces and shining eyes, except that they will work here every day of their lives until
they are married and pregnant by 18, I guess – still I loved their sense of style,
jewelry in their hair, shine of brocade along the seams of their robes, and they
smiled radiantly with inner dignity, they were flowers blooming forth from the loam
of their culture and their home—
The young lamas got up and left in an abrupt spill of their voices and limbs out the
door, they left a spew of chopsticks, half-chewed bones, and vegetable scraps on
the table and floor. The boss sat down next to me, massaging his jaw and watching
the TV as his daughters cleaned up the empty table—
I stood up and paid and left, through the door curtain and down the stairs to the
street. Someone shouted to me, I looked up and the three girls lined up waving
goodbye to me, leaning halfway out the window. I turned down the street, two
kids sang out tashi delek to me and I reached out and lightly boxed their ears, they
grabbed my hands and we walked down the street a hundred yards together, then
they bowed and said goodbye, which was also tashi delek.
~
I looked all the next day for some alternative warmth to wear north into the
descending winter. There was nothing. I returned to the seamstress shop in the
late afternoon.
—Look, I said in my reviled Chinese, are you sure you can’t help me? I could really
use an overcoat. I don’t need it to be the full traditional style, I don’t need the
special fold-over cut, the brocade along the trim, the button holding it together
like a singlet.
—Why do you need a Tibetan tunic so badly?
—I’m going to Kekexili.
—Oh, way up high. Why are you going so far?
—For the wilderness, especially the Tibetan antelopes. And also to see what’s
61
62
happening with the railroad they’re building there.
—It’s cold there.
—Yes, I know! I need warmth. I need to SURVIVE. I’m not trying to buy
decoration! I need something from this place to sustain me.
She looked around and conferred with her friends.
—Just a plain coat, like a chuba, maybe with a belt to cinch it tight? With sheepskin
on the inside and wool outside?
—Yes!
—And you don’t need all the ornamentation like we have on ours?
—No!
—You’ll have to buy the skins yourself.
—Yes! No problem! Where do I buy them?
—Here in the market, they’re easy to find. What about the sleeves?
—What do you mean?
—You’ve seen them, here in Kham the sleeves on the chubas hang all the way to
the ground.
—Yes I know, it’s the style.
—It’s more than that, it’s for the step dancing! The sleeves swirl around like dragon
tails in the dances. Of course it also keeps your hands warm, you keep your arms
tucked up inside each other – but you don’t need sleeves that long, do you?
—Just make them hang down a bit past the tips of my fingers, for warmth, that’ll
be good enough. Anyway I don’t know how to step dance.
—Oh you can learn, maybe you’ll find a local girl to teach you. Are you shy?
—No, I just didn’t expect you to say that.
63
—Come on then, I’ll measure you and get started. When are you leaving?
—It’s getting colder by the day. I have to get over the Kunlun Mountains before
winter arrives for real.
—You’ll need four lamb skins. That should be enough. You can get three sheep
skins or four lamb skins, but the lambskin is warmer.
—How long will it take?
—I can make you a chuba in 3 days.
Outside dusk had fallen, and lay like a grainy, underexposed negative across the
square, where men packed their goods into boxes, loading up their 2-wheeled carts
and taking the yokes over their own shoulders to pull. They covered the goods with
tarps, children swept up debris with long-strawed brooms, and they pulled the carts
away to park in a shed somewhere, to pass the night and then to wheel it all out and
spread it in the daylight again.
~
The seamstress and her minions clucked and cooed and offered commentary (in
Mandarin, for my benefit) when I tried on my new lambskin chuba. The exterior was
sturdy woven wool of deep blue, with a slight purplish tint, the inside was snowy
plush lamb’s wool, and she had sewn a fold of turquoise-blue silk in the seams
between the hide and fabric. —It’s wonderful, I said, feeling like an insulation-protectorate of Tibetan culture
and animal husbandry.
—It will keep you warm.
—You can go roll in the snow now.
—Now all you have to do is learn to dance!
—I’ll try to find a girl to teach me!
—You look almost like a real Tibetan!
64
—When will you come visit us again?
—Soon, soon, I will come back soon.
—When are you leaving?
—My bus is early tomorrow morning.
—To where?
—Qumalai.
—What’s there in Qumalai?
—Nothing, you know there’s nothing—
—Yes but why’s he going there?
—I’m going to cross from there to Budongquan, at the edge of the Kekexili
wilderness.
—Ah yes, there is a jeep track across the wasteland there—
—It will not be easy to travel.
—No, there are no buses, nothing.
—I will try to find a way.
As I walked back through town now everyone on the street gave me a thumbs-up
and whistled as I passed by. The old Tibetan men stopped with joyous faces and
said tashi delek! as they extended their arms to me, opening their hands palm-up as
if presenting a bolt of cloth. I returned the gesture and bowed.
Back in my room I started packing, on the eve of another journey, another road
through unknown lands. After walking these market streets for days, tunic, pants,
hat gloves, belt, I had everything and nothing, everything lay ahead, nothing
remained but the night to pass, nothing to do but sleep and dream, wake once again
to fall into the open emptiness of the road in my lambskin chuba, sleeves hanging
down beyond my fingers, a grasp of swirled motion, nothing to do but dance like
a ghost as if no flesh or bones constrained me.
65
Heritage
William Ellis
My grandmother never believed the clear, Midwestern sky.
She bought me dark clothes as if we had never escaped
our coal-stained mountains.
She wiped my lips as if I had her black cough.
I wore sun glasses, my skin was tan,
I rode my bicycle in the new tracts
and watched the empty frames
rise up in the cornfield.
As the houses sprouted I played the strangeness away –
memory empty, body edgy:
I hoped the new children I met would never see
how my grandmother clucked about the prodigal child
and pitched her chair in the lawn to guard
against his getting free.
One night I woke up sweating,
hearing muffled coughs
and the echoes of hammers on rocks.
I grabbed the sides of my bed
and felt it slide
down a long shaft towards a black spot
that was darker than night in my room.
My grandmother muttered to herself until she died.
We watched her whenever she left the yard.
In the rough grass at the edge
she paced back and forth, lost
with her husband
lost deep in the Appalachians’ side.
She squinted at our thin clouds,
waiting for the sky to cave in.
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Sonia, Grief and Leaving
William Ellis
When Sonia left, she gave the usual reasons:
his wife, his children, the furtiveness of their meetings,
her need to strike out on her own –
But when he asked her, his smile a mask,
to stay, just one last time,
she wiped her eyes with her sleeve
and rose and gave him her hand.
The day was mist and light rain.
They walked from the café through the little park.
Her hair was beaded with transparent pearls
At the glass-paneled doors
that gave to the room.
Inside, white curtains pulsed with muted light;
their bodies rose and fell in the glow.
Her face, rinsed with rain, was bathed in a halo
when arching back, arms outstretched, she cried out.
~
He thinks of her now, late at night.
He has not slept well these last few days.
Another love – the first in years –
has shattered without warning.
~
He knows the young woman was not to blame
as she pushed back his hands:
shaking her head, she whispered
“You have no right to grieve”.
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No right to grieve. It is true. His three children sleep upstairs;
his wife of twenty years, still lovely, sleeps
at his side.
She murmurs: he smoothes back the thick black hair
flecked with gray that he cannot see,
and brushes her brow with his lips,
then rises and makes his way in the dark.
In the kitchen, he fumbles through every drawer,
one after another, until he finds
not what he wanted, but what will do:
a package of birthday candles.
He holds one candle in his hand: how small,
how frail.
He lights the candle between his fingers
for men who have no right to grieve,
and offers a prayer to Sancta Sonia,
the angel of leaving.
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Exemption and Loss: A Letter
William Ellis
(Ann Arbor, 1970, André, Flor)
Cher André
Yes, Flor looks as she did at the window.
We
glanced up from the porch of that Queen Anne ruin
sprung clapboards, skewed turrets, a riot
of colors (the fashionable drag of those years)
the bottles of wine tucked under our arms,
not really believing our glamorous season
was streaming away down curved streets
with the soft crash of leaves.
She was watching for us, and we, unseen,
took that as her parting gift:
until the last moment, she was still ours;
our rivalry fading in loss,
we looked up in silence until she
looked down and there was her smile
for me: hesitant, crooked,
as if one lip were afraid to follow the other;
the heavy black bangs
you used to comb back through your fingers
fell over her eyes
the last time.
~
I read her poetry, you, her palm,
and took her to football games, tossing aside
all your homework for our brutes coutumes
69
(as you called them), while I studied classics
and lent you my varsity sweater
that reached to her thighs
as she padded about
dark Sunday mornings
when coffee was all the heat in the room.
And then to her work on the footstool,
smooth knees pressed together, hunched over her script.
Head nodding, and eyes screwed up tight,
she rocked like a bobbin
adrift on white water
until her voice calmed,
lost the trace of its stammer,
then loudened, and her dark eyes cleared:
her arms swept out, and she stood before us
as you had first seen her, on center stage,
so striking, you’d reached back one hundred years
and sent a bouquet with your card.
I met her off-stage, asleep on my shoulder
before we had said a word
one summer day on a greyhound bus
heading towards a small city
whose odd name hinted
at what it was: a green Cloud cuckoo land
in a flat state
who woke abashed at the perfect stranger
as awkward as she; I had not budged
despite a numb side, and now watched her blush:
her skin had a lustre
(sun polished almond) that did not redden
but darkened into a deeper radiance
that left me so shaken I blushed as well
as if I had seen her naked –
as indeed I had
when I had been gazing on her sleeping face.
Where was she from? She spoke of the island
where she had been born and I thought of a wine
quaffed in eighteenth century novels
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and of her home now, so far away,
and of Gil Vicente, the man who had changed her life,
and my heart stopped:
I gasped for joy
when she spoke of his death
four hundred years past, and took out a book
from a wicker bag, Fragua de Amor,
and with that slant smile, pressed it into my hands,
a talisman of the new world where that bus was sailing
as it floated through the green cloud of leaves
that shaded the homely chateaux of our kingdom:
the aging frame houses huddled together
along the worn streets of a college town.
First love for which I did not imagine
a rift between vision and the damp body
I tried to dissolve
into my own,
until the one morning I came unannounced
and found you wrapped up in a sheet
and her in the bathrobe that I had left.
I stood there frozen, until you murmured,
“Come, come” (that accent,
the shock of red hair, the aquiline nose,
those oversize, confident teeth) “drop those fists”.
When I stepped closer
she caught at our arms
and the untied robe opened:
each reached out to gather her in,
and she gathered us both from that day:
an ex-redneck from Kalamazoo,
and a sixty eighter shipped out of France
by a family with a very long name;
above them the moon, in wisps of dark cloud:
it rose and set in a gentle arc,
marking the rise and fall of their youth,
mine the light and yours the dark
“my friend,” you said, “you take life too hard.
Just think of that marvelous body:
so soft to the touch, so taut? underneath.”
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I see your pursed lips even now,
and the wink she gave us, flexing her arms,
and the scowl she put on at your claim to be lucky
to know her before she spread out like her mother
the mother we met only once,
and shaped, as you said, “like a mango”
(a fruit I had not yet seen),
and the father, squared off as if a big hammer
had bludgeoned him into shape.
One damp late spring, two tense April fools:
you in a blazer and I in a synthetic suit
much admired by both parents
in one of Detroit’s last white ghettoes:
drab streets where tenements shuddered
away from the wind, where tarpaper siding
wrapped bruised working lives
in a rococo parlor, the ceiling a stuccoed cave,
and the Virgin’s face, on a velvet trimmed wall,
that stared us all down
and did not even blink
when Flor called us her guardian angels –
her mother: “she loves you as brothers” (you see!,
there is a poetry of the poor).
And in the lost look of those earnest people
who offered us soft drinks, potato chips, pretzels
“whatever you want” we saw in their faces
her future, and ours: she was destined
to leave those she loved.
“Think of Rilke” you said to me later
“(the one Allemand who could write good French)
`We need, in love, to practice just this:
letting each other go. For holding on
comes easily: we do not need to learn it.’”
We let go. What did we learn?
~
My wife sends her love; the children are well;
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my students are worse every year.
I hope your family’s interests bring you here:
it has been a long time.
A long time… and yes, thanks so much for the clipping;
I’ll put it with the rest. The snapshot is clear:
there she is which husband in tow?
looking beyond the cameras
almost as at that window.
Of course, the bangs are gone, but the crooked smile is still there.
They both were there the last moment,
before she went down to the cab,
when you christened her, brandishing one of my novels,
“The Tragic Muse”
Ah, André ...
Notes:
“Cloud cuckoo land”: the fantastic city of the birds in Aristophanes’ The Birds. Here it is Ann
Arbor.
“The island where she had been born”: Madeira – home of the “wine quaffed in 18th century
novels”
“Gil Vicente”: Portugal’s greatest Renaissance dramatist. Fragua de Amor (The Flame of Love)
is one of his plays.
“sixty-eighter”: “Soixante-huitard”: someone involved in the riots in Paris in 1968.
“We need in love to practice just this….” From “Requiem” by Rainier Maria Rilke. Translated
by Stephen Mitchell.
“The Tragic Muse” – the title of a novel by Henry James, about an actress and the men she
draws round her.
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74
Tinker Man
Allen Sutterfield
Did a tinker make the stars
from some old piece of tin?
And put them out on spars
of sky to let us in
on a secret?
Did he hammer through a hateful night
in his shack behind the dark?
And was it love taught him to write
in metal signs on cold stark
empty spaces?
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Construction Site in Chengdu
Allen Sutterfield
Sparks fly from the welding torches,
A saw whines through thick wood:
Someone drops a long metal pole,
Ringing loudly on the concrete floor.
A definite music all this cutting and building!
Even now men are not far from nature,
Men are noisy birds building huge nests.
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A Night on “The Line”
Paul French
In 1906 an American woman called Gracie Gale took over a bordello at No. 52 Kiangse Road
in Shanghai. She stayed in the game for over 20 years. Her bordello became the most famous
to ever grace Shanghai and Kiangse Road, and a street of many bordellos became known as
“The Line”. Emma Goldman, the American radical and Anarchist noted in 1910, “…in
Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Yokohama, the Augean stables of American vice are located. There
American prostitutes have made themselves so conspicuous that in the Orient ‘American girl’ is
now synonymous with prostitute.”
The International Settlement of Shanghai – 1906 – No. 52 Kiangse Road
The first men arrived after dark. It would get busier later as some had dined
formally with business associates or at home with their wives and families, while
others had been drinking and then decided to move on somewhere more louche.
Many of the regulars went straight there. They came by horse and carriage or
rickshaw, a few walked, as late April in Shanghai was temperate enough after
the bone chilling winter and before the insufferable and seemingly never-ending
humidity of summer. As they approached the door to the building they could hear
the sounds of the city – Shanghai never quite slept – the legion of barges on the
nearby Soochow Creek, the larger ships moored on the Whangpoo River a few
blocks away, the street life of Shanghai’s waterfront, the all-night food carts, the
night soil collectors whose daily horde would be fertilising the fields of Pootung
across the river by dawn the next day. They were white men and they were all men
of some standing.
Kiangse Road was a warren of alleyways and dark lanes that ran from the foulsmelling Soochow Creek across more than half a dozen blocks until it met the
broad, and equally foul-smelling Yangjing Creek that marked the border between
the International Settlement and the French Concession – Frenchtown. Kiangse
Road was fairly narrow at the end of the street close to the Soochow Creek. Despite
the vile aromas, the street often smelt strangely sweet, you felt you could almost
taste sugar on the night air. Here the bordellos clustered. Further up the road were
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warehouses filled with opium – the source of the sweet smell, for large amounts of
burnt opium do indeed smell like sugar. The two great sins of Shanghai – sex and
drugs – huddled together on Kiangse Road.
The men headed for a fairly large and forbidding grey stone building, No. 52 –
known to all in Shanghai whether they were invited to enter or not; whether they
decided to patronise it or not, as Gracie Gale’s sumptuously appointed bordello, the
most expensive on the street, and home of her ‘American Girls’. Outside the house
was unostentatious, little more than some curtained windows and a regular door.
There was only a small, neat brass plaque of the sort favoured by lawyers or highpriced private doctors to advertise No. 52. Certainly no blazing red light, nothing to
indicate that this might not be the private residence of a wealthy Shanghai merchant
or banker, perhaps a discreet gentleman’s club. The plasterwork outside was past
its best and the red louver shutters over the windows were perpetually closed and
heavy curtains tightly drawn to prevent snoopers. The outward dinginess was
deliberate – Gracie did not seek clients nor solicit undue attention. Her place was
invitation only; for those in the know. Throughout the night men came and went,
carriages occasionally pulled up outside. The door opened and closed letting out
a little light and revealing a liveried and polite Chinese doorman, who on closer
inspection looked a little larger and perhaps tougher than most.
Unostentatious on the outside but quite the reverse on the inside, No. 52 was pure
theatre. Clients entered a drawing room where in winter their hats and gloves were
removed and silent Chinese maids took their coats. Sweet fragrant perfumed scents
filled the room. There were fresh flowers: sprays of orange and cherry blossom
in season, lilies and orchids displayed in tasteful Chinois vases. Discreet Chinese
servants ushered the men into another room with plush sofas, chaise longues and
lacquered furniture – more flowers, more Chinois, more perfumed scents. After
making themselves comfortable silver salvers containing glasses of champagne
were offered around, and then Grace Gale – known as Gracie to everyone – would
make her grand entrance.
And grand it invariably was. Waist pulled in, bust pushed out, long hennaed hair
piled up on her head. Gracie was always sumptuously dressed in her trademark
cream-coloured sheer, chiffon peignoir, lace trim perhaps and gold slippers; ever the
height of fashion. To arrive at Gracie’s and be welcomed by Gracie – statuesque
and “dolled up to the nines”, laughing her deep sultry laugh by way of greeting –
was a Shanghailander male rite of passage.
She’d already run through that night’s menu prepared by her Russian-trained
chef, Fan Lu, and then a servant would enter with another tray of her favourite
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Napoleon brandy to get the evening started. Gracie always drank the first toast
– her drinking abilities and alcohol consumption were legendary. In the adjacent
ballroom servants would continue to hover, proffering trays of drinks, keeping a
keen tab of who took what for later reckoning. Then the American Girls would
appear, half a dozen or so at a time, parading around the ballroom under rosy red
lights – fetching smiles but hard eyes, alluring to the men who were now often
feeling mellow and slightly drunk from their night out, and by now usually totally
under the spell of the illusion Gracie had sought to create from the moment they
crossed her threshold. The Girls whirled their long skirts to enticingly reveal calf
and thigh muscles, their silk stockings making their legs sheen in the glowing light,
they lifted their skirts to reveal their shapely legs (this was still the time when an
ankle was risqué on the street) but no higher – after all Gracie’s was not a common
or garden cat house. They wore the latest designs, daring and expertly tailored,
chosen by Gracie herself on her regular trips to San Francisco for fashions and
Girls – long, black, tight-fitting satin dresses with high-heeled shoes or high, calfhugging lace-up boots.
But what do we know about any of Gracie’s American Girls specifically? We can
only wonder at what parts of Big Annie were actually “big”? What Singapore
Kate had done to earn her geographically specific sobriquet or what inspired
“Lotus” from San Francisco to infamously dance the can-can on a table top with
a champagne bottle hugged between her ample breasts – an event that became the
talk of Shanghai for years.
And what of Gloria, rumoured to be a university graduate from Boston who had
been a social worker and adviser to prostitutes hospitalised with venereal disease?
Gloria claimed she had befriended a girl from New England, who told her she
had caught syphilis in Shanghai, while working at Gracie’s no less. Thrown out, as
Gracie assumed anyone contracting syphilis in her clean resort was “freelancing”
outside on their own time, she’d taken ship to England and then back to Boston.
If the tale Gracie later told is to be believed, Gloria, looking for adventure in her
life, decided to resign as a social worker, take ship to Shanghai and knocked on
Gracie’s door introducing herself, professing that she was a virgin and applying
for employment. Always with a good nose for an extra profit, so the story went,
Gracie auctioned Gloria’s virginity (which may or may not have been real – like
most good madams Gracie undoubtedly knew the tricks of re-virginising girls).
The winner paid $1,000 (US$20,000 in today’s money) and spent three days alone
with Gloria, who had been working as one of Gracie’s most popular and highest
earning American Girls ever since.
Some of the men chose Girls either known previously to them (the Girls all had
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80
their regulars) or new encounters. The chosen ones would join their companions in
conversation, after a few drinks moving onto their laps, some fondling, caressing,
lighting their cigars. The conversation by now had degenerated to flirtatious talk
designed to ensure the man stuck with them, seeking praise for their looks and
dresses, heaping praise on their new friend and client. Then perhaps a whispered
decision to move from the ballroom to the Girls’ private rooms.
Singapore Kate was remembered as having a sharp business brain and a zest for life
while being “a lithe beauty.” Lotus was popular apparently but remained a mystery.
Thought to be a direct import from San Francisco, a girl Gracie had found on
the Barbary Coast, taken a shine to and brought to Shanghai. She was reputedly a
redheaded nymphomaniac who was at her best usually around 4 a.m. dancing on
tables and showing off her pink-nailed toes. Still others remain largely anonymous
– a Girl called Agnes worked for Gracie for many years and was remembered by
many clients as being tall and dark with deep hazel eyes and an extremely sensuous
nature. She was believed to have made a fortune working at No. 52 with a retinue
of wealthy regular clients before retiring.
Eventually the talking slowed and the men turned their minds to other activities.
One by one nods, squeezed hands and other subtle gestures were made and the
women stood and led their clients up the stairs for some privacy in the lavishly
decorated but discreet bedrooms above.
The rooms were said to be finely appointed, as had been the great bordellos of
nineteenth century Chicago and San Francisco, themed with fountains, dragons,
Chinoiserie, Japanois, objets d’art, oriental rugs and of course large beds and plenty
of mirrors. For what was a bordello without mirrors and plenty of them? The
rooms at No. 52 were a testament to interior design and the finest fittings and
furnishings imaginable imported from Europe and America – invariably straight
from San Francisco. Four poster beds with elaborate hangings, marble washstands
and decorated local china and Satsuma-ware pots from Japan for clients to piss in.
Open fires to deflect the winter chill for the soon unclothed client and girl, large
and plush sofas to recline on before, after and probably during as well. Chairs and
bidets were provided, hanging drapes, soft lighting courtesy of gas jets and a little
more sound-proofing than perhaps the ordinary bedroom required. The boudoirs
were comfortable, warm in the winter, fanned in the summer, inviting and ideally
suited for creating the right sort of mood while they also had discreet bell pulls to
summon service at any time it might be required. Bath tubs were installed in some
of the rooms with soft-slippered Chinese maids to fill the tubs with water so that
clients could relax in a warm bath and have their back scrubbed and their genitals
washed (and surreptitiously and discreetly examined for signs of syphilis) before
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things eventually got started.
Gracie stayed up late preparing the ‘chits’, or handwritten bills, that would discreetly
be delivered to her clients at their workplaces, away from any prying wifely eyes,
later. For foreigners in Shanghai, nothing (excepting rickshaw or sampan rides)
was ever paid for with cash, not donations to the church on Sunday or girls and
Champagne at Gracie’s the evening before, but rather with chits to be collected
later. She saw the last clients leave and then retired herself for a well-earned rest.
As the sun came up The Line closed down.
Gracie Gale and her American Girls remained firmly in business for another twenty years, despite
repeated attempts by the authorities to close her down. Eventually the era of the high-priced, highclass bordello in Shanghai passed after the First World War and the influx of White Russian
refugees to the city forced down prices. Gracie Gale wanted no part of the new world of low
class prostitution and committed suicide aboard a liner bringing her back to Shanghai from San
Francisco in 1927. No. 52 and The Line persisted in a reduced form until the Second World War
but its heyday was past and Gracie Gale and her American Girls gone – though some remained,
either rich from the glory days or married to respectable men. Occasionally former American Girls
were spotted in the most respectable restaurants and cafes of Shanghai and old timers in hushed
whispers would point them out as having come from “down The Line”.
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Gladys
Jo Parish
1925, born third of nine,
Hand-me-downs, nothing ever mine,
Terraced house, three to a bed,
Cold damp rising, feet like lead,
The cold is harsh, mum bold as brass,
England’s winters of the working class,
“I’m expecting again,” mum resignedly said,
All dad’s to do is hang ‘is belt on the bed,
Feeding in shifts, never saw mum eat,
Dad comes home, my heart skips a beat,
Baths – oldest first, youngest gets cold,
Laughter round the fire, singing songs of old,
Chat over the fence, neighbours next door,
Happy then, simple times, pre-war,
Kick balls in the street, jumpers for posts,
Victorian houses, replete with ghosts,
Women and babes on doorsteps, gossip rife,
But him next door, I’d trust with my life,
Dad – give us a song, a laugh, a joke,
“ ‘Ere Gladys,” he’d say, “there’s nowt wrong wi’ good folk.”
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Sorrow
Ader Wu
The weather is warmer now
but your winter has just arrived
He walked away from you
Put your skirt and straw hat on
follow me to the countryside
escape the city bustle
We will run in the fields, breathe the breeze
Hand in hand, with a pink butterfly kite
write all your unhappiness on its wings
string in hand we are conductors
Higher, higher
You’ll shout, face alive
A pink spot in the sky
I’ll snip the string
Your face asks why
Your sadness flies with the wind, there is nothing left to hurt you
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Spring Breeze
Ader Wu
Spring breeze,
woke up the frog, made the osier green and peach blossom red.
The breeze stoked her memory:
black tie, Starbucks, independent, Jazz, five Singapore dollars, cigarettes, freckles,
vodka, morning jogs, business suit, balcony, on the bridge, Kong Ming lantern,
Bulgari Rose, motorcycle, tea house, white high heels, jacket, “Good Bye”…
Who was he?
It was no matter.
She started a new journey
Spring breezed across the temple, the river bank and the bridge.
The breeze stoked her memory:
courtyard homes, poetry, bridge, essays, Qing Cheng Mountain, under the trees,
Wang Jiang Bamboo Forest, by the river, fireworks, Greek skirt, library, ambition,
Burberry Summer…
Who was he?
It was no matter.
She started a new journey
She couldn’t remember when she wept
Spring breeze,
she had grown up.
85
Catherine Platt
86
Get the Girl?
Lancer Kind
The car engine gave up and Dusty steered it to the shoulder. According to the
map, he was in big trouble. His detour had taken them forty miles from the nearest
mechanic, and all he could see outside was a forest, a lonely dirt road, and Montana.
Amber woke and stared at the steam leaking from under the hood as if hoping she
still dreamed.
“Where the hell is the highway?” she said.
“That’s Sawtooth Mountain over there,” Dusty said.
“Yeah? It’s the mountain’s fault you left the highway?”
She looked at her cell phone, then shoved it in Dusty’s face. The display was too
close to read but the way her hand shook said it all.
Amber said, “I bet there isn’t even any AM. Now what are we supposed to do?
Wave down a fucking deer for a ride?”
Dusty got out and lifted the hood. “Crap!” he said and dropped the hood. His
burnt fingers tasted of dirt and bug grime.
Amber got out of the car. “I can’t believe this is happening.” She turned around,
and then did it again, as if hoping to discover the forest was a flat movie backdrop.
“I knew this would happen. Your car is such a piece.”
Dusty shook his head. They had this fight two-hundred miles ago, when the
alternator was being fixed halfway through Washington. He opened the trunk and
got out his fishing rod.
Amber pushed herself between between him and the trunk so she could complain
to his face. “You are always trying to be Mr. Environmental and Mr. Thrifty. You
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didn’t save a cent. The fuel for my SUV would have been less than your alternator.
What are you doing?”
He pushed past her and tried to get his tackle box from beneath her suitcase of
shoes. “I’m going to catch us some dinner.”
“Oh great! Mom and Dad, we had fish and tubers for Thanksgiving.”
He gave up on the tackle and started down the road. They had passed a river when
the engine started sputtering.
Amber said, “What am I supposed to do?”
She stood by the car, shading her face from the sun. The diamond ring, which she’d
been hinting was too small, glinted. She had left the receipt at his bedside where
he kept his wallet and keys, and on their calendar was a circle around the day when
the 30 day money-back guarantee expired. Yesterday, she had penned in a diamond
on top of the circle.
Before walking down the road, Dusty said, “Gather wood for a fire.”
“Dust-tin,” she said.
He kept walking because only his mother called him that. Amber shut up and he
didn’t look back. After a bend in the road, he began to relax because the Ponderosa
pines blocked her from view and the forest enveloped him. Squirrels chattered, the
sound of running water, and the tick-tick-ticking of a flying grasshopper made him
feel welcome.
As he left the road and followed the river, he thought of how Amber had been nice
when they’d met at the University of Washington. She had on a low-cut tank top
and a smile he couldn’t resist when she asked for help moving her entertainment
center from her SUV to her dorm room. The elevator was broken as usual and she
was on the sixth floor. She had just returned from a long vacation, and maybe that’s
how she fooled him. The nastiness was out of her system.
A grasshopper sunned itself on a boulder and Dusty trapped it beneath his cupped
hand. The hopper’s antenna and wings tickled his palm, and he remembered
how his cat loved chasing insects. He really missed that cat. Amber was always
complaining about Spanky’s hair getting on the sofa. One night he came home and
Spanky wasn’t in the apartment. Amber said that the door was open only a second,
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and Spanky had ‘run out like his life depended on it.’
That choice of words had always seemed suspicious.
Dusty brought his face close to the trapped grasshopper and pitched his voice low
like a prayer, “You don’t know this yet, but you’re going to help me out.”
He grasped it, and then stabbed a fishhook through its body. The hopper’s legs
were kicking as he swung the rod, and cast the line into the river. He twisted his
index finger into the line to feel for light nibbles from trout.
The river talked over the rocks, and the fishing line shimmered in the sun. Amber
was missing all this. She owned six pairs of unused hiking boots, collectively worth
more than his broke-down Honda.
They were happy before the wedding. She’d planned and organized everything: her
family and friends on what to wear, who would sit with whom; she and her mother
argued with the caterers over the color of the seat cushions, and the pattern on
the white-on-white napkins. It was great being around her energy. But since the
honeymoon, all the vigor that had gone into the event had turned against him. He
was to blame for everything: the apartment smelled, the traffic was bad, and she
sometimes insinuated that he’d made it rain after her SUV was washed.
Now they were going to be tardy for their first Thanksgiving with her family, and
OK, he wasn’t excited to rush right there. It was his fault again.
Dustin inhaled, filling his lungs with the fresh air, and then slowly exhaled. He felt
better. Maybe there were forces at work. Perhaps life had brought them here to be
stranded together. Their marriage was at a tipping point, a stone at the edge of a
cliff, teetering, ready to crash at the slightest of gusts.
He closed his eyes sensing only the air around him, the smell of tree bark, and
the feel of the river pulling on his fishing line, and he meditated on what plan fate
had in store for him: he would catch some food, a forest ranger would find them,
he’d stay with the car and she’d get a ride to her parents. It would be a screw-up of
catastrophic proportions. He’d take full responsibility and she’d divorce him.
There was a tug on the fishing line, a release, and there it was again. Dustin tried to
see into the water; he tried to look at the trout that teased the drowning grasshopper
with its fins.
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Dusty whispered, “Come on you bastard. We can’t survive on goldfish crackers
alone.” Amber loved them; they made him sick.
There was another pull, but still not a strike.
Amber’s voice disturbed the forest. “Dusty! Is that you? Dustin!”
Oh for fuck’s sake. He stayed focused, trying to extend his senses down the fishing
line and into the water.
“Dustin! You’re scaring me.” She sounded closer.
The fish struck, the rod bowed, he pulled and reeled in the line.
“Oh god-dammit Dustin!”
He lifted it out: a rainbow trout swung on the end of the line. It hung over the
water, wiggling. Its iridescent spots gleamed.
Amber screamed, and started yelling. A branch snapped right behind him and he
jumped, almost dropping the rod.
He hauled the fish to the shore. It fell off the hook and flopped in the grass.
He turned and yelled, “What’s your problem!”
There was Amber, her blonde hair hanging over her face. And what was that? A
hairy giant held Amber in the crux of its elbow as if she were a loaf of bread. But
when Dustin met Amber’s eyes, she looked angry at him instead of frightened. She
smacked the creature with a branch she must have broken from a tree. Her ring
glinted on her hand.
Amber, his wife. She needed his help.
“Dustin!!”
He stood frozen, the rod in his hand, the fish flopping on the bank. He tried to
conceive how this could be part of the plan: the forest created this monster to carry
her away; eventually a forest ranger would show up and help him radio for a tow;
and that would be that. He’d go back to Seattle, to a quiet apartment, and make a
small fortune selling her shoes on EBay.
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But there would be questions; her parents would call; the police would show up;
he’d have to make rent on his own.
“Amber!” He dropped the rod and ran after her. He had to help. He wouldn’t be
able to live with himself. What was happening was unconscionable. The creature
was a Big Foot, an anthropological treasure. It had no idea what it was getting into.
Dusty gave chase because there was only one ethical decision. He had to save the
beast.
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Leslie Mills
92
A Family Connection
It is night and I guard the bodies. The dead men in this room are foreigners. No
one knows their name or country. They died when we stormed the mosque on
Wednesday. My friends teased me about wandering ghosts. Some believe that if you
die violently in a holy place that your spirit cannot rest. This is a village superstition.
But they are afraid. I volunteered for guard duty to show them there is nothing to
fear.
An officer said that other terrorists might return. In the community these men are
martyrs. What kind of God sends men to a strange land to kill? In many ways, it
is better they are dead. Storming the mosque was our only option. Hours will pass
until dawn. Until then I will guard the door and windows and the bodies, which lay
side-by-side on the concrete floor. They are wrapped in white shrouds. They look
small in the dim light. There is an electric fan. Already there is the smell of death.
A soldier knows that smell, it clings to the inside of the nose, and whatever comes
into your lungs filters through death. This is the worst part. The smell.
There is a chair and a small desk but I choose to stand. A soldier must be ready at
all times. You can never let down your guard like the men in the armory who slept
as the terrorist surprised them. The terrorists separated the Muslim and Buddhist
soldiers and killed the Buddhists. The killers could have been these men. Such
men have killed soldiers, teachers, and civil servants. They would’ve killed us in
the mosque if we hadn’t killed them first. But we do not know their names or
nationality. For a moment, I shut my eyes, and imagine myself going to their land
and killing their people. But no image comes. I only see darkness.
I listen to the radio for a news report identifying the men. Intelligence people are
running in and out of meeting rooms, whispering. Are they getting closer to the
truth about these men? The bosses are silent.
There are seven bodies. One for each day of the week. My superior says no one
will claim the bodies. I say nothing but I think the families do not know their sons,
fathers, and uncles lay in this place. They died far from home. I imagine that my
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family would come for me. If they knew I were in such a room. My mother would
ask, “Why did he die among strangers?” Would their mothers ask that question?
After the killing, we made merit at a temple, asking for forgiveness. If I had died
in their country, would these men have prayed to their God to forgive them? My
officer says that isn’t their tradition. Can we be so different? I don’t believe their
families know their sons are in this place. I want them to know. I would want my
family to know. I close my eyes and imagine the faces of their women and children.
No image comes. Just darkness. None of us has had much sleep. The first light of
dawn is in the window. Tomorrow I will volunteer again. A decision must be made
– bury the terrorists or return the bodies to their home. Tomorrow we may find
where these men belong. I believe this. They do not belong here, not under our soil
but in a place near their family.
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Oyster Moves Like a Bat-Fly Ostrich Chain Plank
Isaac Myers
I caught the missionary in mid-flight, and he laid his plans bare. I caught them. I
went underground, and Walt Disney followed. A turtle in a wooden box. A boxer in
a wooden crate. A man with a childish face. I left the orphanage, and followed the
signs. There wasn’t a missionary to scoff at. I followed. He led me underground.
That’s where the cartoonists go. I led the charge. We went on tour. Fifteen buildings
with neo-gothic exteriors, and Japanese adults posing as children. We ran through
the courtyard, and put on bandanas. I cried, and they ricocheted. We charged up
the hill, and they followed. I timed it all out. The angles were perfect. We arrived in
unison. The genies were waiting. I was leading. They waited. I shrank back. They
understood. I waited. The prisoners left the home. They melted down. Some of
them were burned black and crispy on the faces. I shrank down. I didn’t tell them to
do anything. They waited. I saw the horror on the ground. Some of them yelled. A
man came running. He was scared. He whispered. There were new faces. We were
prisoners. We waited.
One day they took role call. I jumped onto the roof. They followed. I couldn’t jump
any more. I waited. They got me. I jumped down. She left the scene. I didn’t know
why. Father volunteered for the team. I didn’t know why. He knew it was suicide.
He wanted to save me. He didn’t want to be compared to a dog. He felt bad for the
dog. The horror waited on the floor. I couldn’t leave the scene, so I waited. They
came and found me. I jumped. They followed. I caught a ledge. I floated down.
They waited. I cried. They are going to kill me.
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Timeshare Minds
Isaac Myers
Dunno what I smelled in the road but the gods had me following quickly. A last
minute stretch toward empathy left me exhausted. I didn’t know who to face. But
I had myself. I could always tell my face in the mirror. It was me. The last thing
that I expected was to not be I. But me? I started to think that my frontal lobe was
an imposter, that my temporal one had been hijacked to participate unwillingly in
a terrorist attack on my future. They should’ve heightened security, but they had a
tight budget. Even the meal plan was beginning to dry up. Peanut butter, tuna, hot
dogs. It lacked something. Whereas the ambitious tumult of otherness, the insect
males posturing as chimp females – they managed to get my attention, and hold it.
And then they struck.
The last temptation of Brahms the bladder. The mindset was entire, the holdover
went well, and we profited from their timeshare estimates. The files were
understood, they were kept, and all over the world people danced and cried. The
last one to see it was me. But then I was working under the table. I was understood.
I was kept. When I came out they cried. They were still crying. I thought it was for
me. I lent a hand.
I didn’t expect you to finish. I just hoped. I hoped it wouldn’t be too short, and I
thought it might take a while, but altogether nothing happened, did it? I lessened
the pull, and I fell short of the projected target. I strengthened, and I fell short of
the protected margin. I wept, and the police came and you left me alone. To my
projects. And my yellow field equipment. Gears, modern pieces of nostalgia. The
last thing I expected was a field guide. I thought I was set towards the Rhine. I
thought I had won. But you showed me the difference between Elmo leather and
the Gendarmerie. My mistake.
The cads with their sportjackets. A mannerism, that’s all. I got excited. But I
couldn’t be one. Hijacked, the Left Bank showed a missing towel. The towel was
me. I started after, and then you faltered. Failure to contain the key elements toward
surprising--most, if not all, the rounds were checked. Guess I got lucky. Weapon
loaded, I strode into the scene. Cabaret.
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Then Dance Floor struck me. As I staggered to the window, hands kept, upright,
a talisman hidden from my view slipped down round my neck, and then the host
knew what was coming. Dance Floor left me alone. She hadn’t a feeling left to
capture in me, and so I became a guest. When she walked out, everything turned
to rubble. We stood in silence, realizing our unkempt futures were wasted. When I
walked out, my terrorists got friendlier. They left the scene. Dance Floor came to
the rescue, resuscitating the embers and bones of my childhood. I denied having
spoken. Then, I realized, I came from goat. I didn’t like her, but we embraced. My
friends blew up the Meany Tower. They left skid marks outside the museum. The
lounging chair didn’t bother me. It was the AC.
If you’d only been with me. Dance Floor was the host that time, and I played
carriage. They goaded me into retirement. I left, feeling resentment, and altogether
a different sort of alloy found only in sandwiches came into the forefront. That’s
when I knew I was to retire. When sheep’s milk became a legacy. With Dance
Floor bereft, I came back on the scene. It was spectacular. And my friends left
building plans in a wheelchair. A paleontologist found me and goaded me back to
science. I retired. But loam wasn’t there. It was in a wheelchair. We fought, and I
found my strengths. We left the scene in a tussle. The men dragged it out of me,
but Dance Floor couldn’t save. She wasn’t a mesmerizing host. She allowed for
occasional lectures in stovetop science, and we found heart in the neighborhood
side of fencing. Vehicle repair is another thing I came to tell you about. The left
bank had me destroyed. She didn’t laugh. We found plugs in the doorway, and we
tied them together. Blue meets Miles. West meets husband.
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Kirsten A. Allen
98
Necessity
Blue Germain
age-weathered man
with right-angled
neck
you fossick
in the dark, cold
rubbish bin
for leftover food
and your cracked, blackened
fingers
scrape
my eyes
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Jackal
(For J – February 2007)
Julia Wang
My body, moonlight silvered,
turns into a jackal’s shape
for you, under the moonlight.
Here is a drink, a painless draught
to toast for your giving;
closing my eyes, for my heart is about to open
to heaven where your laughter is hidden;
running from hunters’ shooting
from thousand times’ trapping,
sharp teeth glistening on the crying.
Should we meet again,
please allow me to borrow a person’s skin
to feign myself as I used to be.
A kiss is a wild wish to be buried;
if you are not afraid
of a jackal’s lures,
please hold back your crystal tears;
let me howl, smell, and trace your faraway steps;
eyes I remember, yours,
a soul to lead my way
like a pair of flowers blossoms.
In the sky,
The clouds are like
the silk you wear.
With courage I grow,
I know to find you
is my last goal.
To die in the grassland,
is to return to mother’s lap,
my eyes open to view
your swaying body’s shape
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comes near, then goes,
and all my loneliness, like dust,
like me, forever disappears.
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In Heaven
Julia Wang
I died in a car accident, and was lifted by a cloud to heaven.
God stood before me
gleaming like sunshine.
The palace in heaven,
flanked by arhats,
red smiling faces, like ripe dates.
A group of people was circling an older man.
A saint, I thought.
A group of women with some children
scattered to the corners
talking and laughing.
At the center of the palace:
people seated at a round table.
I looked at God, confused.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“To tell the newcomers about heaven.” said God.
He motioned to the people near the table,
“You will join them.”
“But I don’t even know what heaven is.”
“You will learn before you start.”
But I was reluctant.
I died an untimely death:
My life was not closed; it seemed warm as a hearth.
God smiled a sincere smile.
“What did you leave behind on earth?” God asked.
“I have loved ones like my true North.”
“You can wait for them in heaven.” God said.
“I left a mission incomplete.”
“You will complete it by telling people about heaven here.” God said.
But I doubted.
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“Don’t doubt. No mission is ever completed until it is finished in heaven.”
God finally said.
My hope to return was futile. I cried.
My days and nights in heaven went on.
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Mother and Daughter
Julia Wang
The fluorescent light hummed above her head. Ann sat straight, dead still, her eyes
gazing ahead, but seeing nothing, the callus forming in her heart as her mother’s
words ran like wind that chilled a stream, leaving fragments of ice.
“How many times do I need to say that you’re not allowed to see that boy again?”
Her mother paused, looking down at her daughter, whose face was half-shadowed
under the fluorescent light. “He will ruin your life. He is a troublemaker. What do
you like about him? One neighbor told me that she saw him sneak into another
neighbor’s house, and another one saw his mugshot at the police station when she
picked up her stolen bike a few days ago. There has been some gossip around our
neighborhood that you and he are dating! I have to stop you before it’s too late.”
“Please, please don’t!” Ann cried out silently to herself. Her heart swelled in her
body like a drowned lily. “Gossip is gossip. These things can’t be true.” She silently
repeated the words, her heart thudding as if it wanted to break free from the
thickened callus. The fluorescent light was still humming.
“You think you’ve grown up enough that you can make your own decisions? Forget
him, Ann! You’re just 16 years old. You will regret what you do in the future. I
don’t understand. What do you like about him?” Now her mother stood up and
started to collect the bowls and plates from the table.
She had been quick, Ann thought, with her widow’s efficiency, which had steadied
her through all these years to raise a family of three alone. Ann dipped her eyes
to a level where she could still see her mother’s movements. She had now gone to
the sink.
“At the last children-and-parents conference at your school, your teacher told me
that you had escaped classes twice the week before. Goddamn it, twice Anne, in
one week! I wondered where you went then, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve got the
answer right now and it’s a bad one. You think I don’t know? I know everything.”
Ann started swallowing, small gulps that eased her parched throat. SHE had
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investigated me, she thought. SHE had done something ignominious behind my
back. That’s why my teacher had shot me that look of concern; that’s why Ms.
Thomas, the bible-thumping bitch living next door, had looked at me one night
as if I’d come back from hell, her piggy eyes searching for anything that could
feed her love of gossiping. Ann gritted her teeth, her heart throbbing under the
pressure of the invading callus that coiled around it. The fluorescent light hissed
as if burning for too long.
“From this moment on, you stay at home after 6 o’clock. No getting away, no
homecoming party, and let me know how you get along with your courses. I will
keep in constant contact with your teacher. Do I make myself clear?”
Ann couldn’t look up at her mother. Pouting her lips, she kept silent. She wouldn’t
tell him what her mother had said. She knew he would blow up and get more
trouble. That would give her mother more reasons to separate them. But that rule,
“home after 6”, was a mountain in their way. But she knew she couldn’t change
it. Her mother was a strong woman; once a rule had been set, no one could break
it. She shuddered. The callus began to choke her heart. She felt suffocated. The
fluorescent light fizzed above her head, becoming steam escaping from the cover
of a pot.
“Are you listening to me? Did you hear me?” Her mother looked at her daughter
from the sink. “Don’t make me say it a second time. I’ve had no time to repeat
things since your father…” Suddenly she trailed off, then drew a deep breath to
calm herself down. “Since your father died. The whole family has been on my
shoulders, my one-person shoulders. Do you know how hard this has been?” Her
voice cracked, but quickly she tightened her jaw. “Still. I’ve made it. I’ve made it
to raise you, to raise all of you. And now I deserve something back – back from
you. Obey me, and everything’s straightened out. Now what? Say something!” She
threw a plate that she had been rinsing in the sink. A clatter rang through the house,
but not the words that she had been waiting for.
She walked toward her daughter, and stopped inches away.
“I’m talking to you, Ann! What’s going on your mind?”
Ann didn’t move. She cast a steady look at the floor before she raised her head. Her
mother stood under the fluorescent light, now sizzling like skin in flames.
“Can’t I just get a bit of respect? Say something!”
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That was enough. It had gone on too long. Suddenly Ann smiled. She had found a
way out. Why not do something to make her go crazy?
“Yes, mother,” she said. “I’ve heard you, and you want to know what’s going on
my mind?”
“Yes! What is it?”
“You know what I like about him?” Ann asked with a smile. “I like his cock best.”
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The Knitting Needle Affair
Kirsten A. Allen
An unassuming and forgetable woman of thirty odd years, with average pay, at an
average retail store, Shi Lin had done nothing worth noting prior to one particular
day during Spring Festival. On that day, she spent an uncomplaining stint in front
of the annual TV programs surrounded by the entire family, apart from her
husband, who had been out since lunch drinking with friends. Shi Lin knitted,
smiled her watery smile and gazed at her aunties and uncles, cousins and nephews
with a bland contentedness.
Until her mother leaned across the table, “Did you remember to bring the present
for Auntie Wang?”
Shi Lin frowned. She had forgotten the present. She thought for a moment and
decided that she had left it on the kitchen table where she had set it the night
before. She shook her head, “I’m sorry Ma but I forgot it.”
“Well, you’d better go and get it before she gets here. Take your bike and be quick
about it.”
Shi Lin didn’t really mind, it was her responsibility and she had neglected it. So, she
put her needles back in her purse with her yarn, and went out to get her bike. She
put her purse in the basket and clambered gracelessly astride the squeaking black
bike, then pedaled slowly through the aging, gray housing complex and out on to
the road. She frowned as she cycled past that strange American restaurant with
the picture of the owl out front, and proceeded to cycle the wrong way down the
sidewalk until she reached the west gate of Sichuan University. To save time, Shi
Lin made the decision that would make her vaguely interesting to her friends and
relatives for at least one day. She crossed the road and cut through the relative quiet
of the campus, winding her way towards the north gate.
Passing through the north gate she was immediately swallowed by a throng of
fellow cyclists who were also inadvertantly rushing towards Shi Lin’s moment of
infamy. As she pedaled along with the other cyclists she gazed out into traffic, and
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paused. She saw her husband. Her husband, in her car, her lime green QQ, with his
arm around a woman, and a moon-faced woman at that. She blinked.
Having never felt much about anything one way or another, the sensation taking
hold of her bowels was entirely new. Shi Lin blinked again, and in so doing she
snapped. If her worn tires could have squealed they would have done so, as she
whipped her bike through a break in the blue barriers that seperated the cars from
the bikes and out into traffic in front of the tiny green car.
It is possible now to imagine her husband’s astonishment as he slammed on the
brake to avoid hitting his wild-haired, wide-eyed, nashing-toothed wife, while
throwing his right arm across the chest of his wide-eyed, fair-skinned lover to keep
her from damaging her looks.
All this happened in Shi Lin’s third blink, just before she launched herself at
the passenger side window. At the window she reached in and grabbed the little
moon-faced bitch by her hair. She saw the woman’s dress, one Shi Lin thought her
husband had bought for her, and uttered a scream as she hauled the dress and its
contents half way out the window.
The ensuing fight blocked a three lane thoroughfare for twenty minutes. Anyone
passing by stopped to watch as Shi Lin tried to remove every hair from the head
of her husband’s lover. Shi Lin’s husband added to the spectacle by ineffectually
flapping his arms about and shouting at Shi Lin to stop hurting the love of his life.
With every mention of his mistress he only succeeded in driving Shi Lin to remove
more hair.
When Shi Lin finally paused for breath, her husband made a grab for her, which
caught her by surprise and gave the woman in the car a chance to right herself,
roll up the window and lock the doors. In retaliation Shi Lin threw her bike at her
husband and seethed while Little Moon Face, as she now thought of her, fixed
her hair in the car mirror. Shi Lin noted with a degree of satisfaction that she had
ripped out enough hair to create a bald spot. Shi Lin’s husband must have seen the
hint of glee on her face because he began to beg Little Moon Face to either start
the car and go, or flee the scene. Astoundingly Little Moon Face got out of the car
and thereby sealed Shi Lin’s fate.
As Little Moon Face ran for a neighboring street, Shi Lin’s husband made a dash
for the car, jumped in, and fled, while Shi Lin wrestled herself onto her bike and
followed Little Moon Face. Half-way down the street Little Moon Face realized
that the road she had chosen was a dead end.
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Shi Lin came back to herself in a rush, realizing she was staring into the eyes
of a dead man on the street while the cold metal of handcuffs bit deep into her
wrists, drawing blood. She had the nagging feeling that her fist had connected with
the police officer’s face, or had that been the other woman’s flailing fist she saw
connect? She wasn’t sure. What Shi Lin was sure of was that somehow the man on
the ground had been the victim of her knitting needle, and not her husband’s lover
who was being dragged into a nearby cop car.
Shi Lin took a moment to hope as she was also tucked into a car, maybe they would
find Little Moon Face’s finger prints on the needle rather than hers. Yes, hadn’t
Little Moon Face managed to rip the needle from her hands? There should be two
sets of marks on those needles, not one. And maybe, at the jail she would actually
find out the woman’s name.
Regardless of who actually murdered the man lying there, knitting needle sticking
from his neck, blue yarn waving in a breeze, Shi Lin’s husband was dog’s meat. She
would make sure of that.
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Shadow Dancer
Kirsten A. Allen
The lights go out
The dark creeps in
Moving across the floor,
Running up the walls,
Licking at the ceiling
The dark creeps in as the sun abandons the sky
One by one the stars wink in
Framing the bedroom window
Bringing the shadows
The shadows that come out in the night
The shadows that play in the dark
The shadows that dance in the star light
Every night that the light is right
The shadows come out and ask me to play
My bed is my throne upon which I sit
And when the time is right – I conduct
Tree if you please, tap us a beat
Friend owl, a horn
Little cricket, the strings
And pixies the rest
Bewitched, the thin man dances with a floating woman
Their feet never touching the floor
Enchanted, the cat kicks up his heels
A little mouse sets sail to the moon
And the lady who lives there sends him home
The tin soldier and his ballerina lead the final dance
The band bows good night
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The cat is curled in sleep
The stars dim their farewell
As the sun embraces the sky
My throne becomes a bed
It is far past time that I lay down my head
The rooster’s call is now my lullaby
Good night my dancing friends
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Visible Stain
Kirsten A. Allen
White, crisp, straight edged,
the envelope sits on the table
The yellowing pine table with nicks and dents
a wide-edged coffee-brown ring,
a stain
the place where the mug always sits
The envelope
harshly reflective in the noon light pooling on the table
blinding from across the room
In the morning it was soft, fuzzy,
fibers loosely defined
as I looked at it from the edge, at eye level
The drift and curve of lines,
in ink,
black ink that has bled and spidered its way
forming letters,
forming words,
my name
But I know the contents
it tells me as it sits there
next to the stain
where the mug always sat
I stare at the searing white of paper in sun,
from my seat on the floor
rough tile
a cupboard handle settling between my shoulder blades
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I watch the shadow under the lip of the envelope shift with the sun
I open it though there is no need
Shadows settle
white to gray, gray to black
wrinkled and torn, the envelope drifts to the floor
113
Double Trouble
Amit Chaudhuri
About midway through Henry James’s novella, ‘The Private Life’, the narrator
has an unsettling experience. The story itself seems to be located in familiar
Jamesian terrain, and begins by describing the sort of ‘international situation’ in
which characters in many of his tales find themselves. Here, a group of English
aristocrats and luvvies are gathered, probably at the turn of the nineteenth century
or one of the early decades of the twentieth, near a ‘great bristling, primeval glacier’
in Switzerland, in a ‘balconied inn’, for what seems like a vacation. Among them
is Clarence Vawdrey (Clare Vawdrey to his friends), a famous writer, ‘the greatest
(in the opinion of many) of our literary glories’. The narrator’s description of
Vawdrey’s dinner-table manner will be read with recognition by those who, among
us, have studied famous writers at close quarters: ‘I never found him anything but
loud and cheerful and copious, and I never heard him utter a paradox or express
a shade or play with an idea… His opinions were sound and second-rate, and of
his perceptions it was too mystifying to think. I envied him his magnificent health.’
Midway through the novella, as I said earlier, the story turns from a study of
displacement into something like one of those supernatural tales that James was
adept at writing, and the narrator has that unsettling experience which suggests to
him why one who is a fine writer (in the opinion of many) should be such a dull
and garrulous raconteur. After a long evening repast, the narrator, who appears to
be unreliable in more senses than one, notices that Vawdrey is occupied with a wellknown actress on the terrace; he takes this as an opportunity to go up to Vawdrey’s
room in order to search for a play that Vawdrey claims he has been writing but,
given his incessant socialising, would actually have little time to write. Rummaging
among Vawdrey’s things in the dimly-lit room, the narrator is shocked to discover
that the silhouette he thought was a rug draped on a chair is a human figure, and
shocked to discover the human figure is Vawdrey. He mumbles something and
rushes out. Who, then, was the man downstairs with the well-known actress? The
narrator suddenly realises that the answer to this question is also the answer to the
problem posed by the discrepancy, in quality, between Vawdrey’s writings and his
pronouncements; that Vawdrey has a not-very-intelligent double who performs the
public role of the writer, while he sits in private and writes.
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James, tactfully, only glosses over, after all, what is common knowledge among
the writing fraternity, but is little publicised outside it; that novelists and creative
writers often employ doubles to perform their obligations and duties in the public
domain. Not only do these doubles shake hands, answer questions, and sign copies
of books, but are even, while the novelist is engaged in the struggle of creative
work, assigned the responsibility of writing reviews, articles, and treatises, all the
texts that might contain the writer’s ‘philosophy of life’ or his ‘point of view’.
Thus, a commentator such as Ashis Nandy, to mention only one critic, finds
himself frankly bewildered and flummoxed when confronted with the dismaying
qualitative gap between H.G. Wells’s science fiction, of whose unconventionality
and quirkiness he is an admirer, and Wells’s ‘prim, predictable’ pronouncements on
science in his more ‘serious’ non-fiction, such as his Outline of History. It’s almost
as if, Nandy seems to suggest, the considered pronouncements on science had
been made by another man.
Poor Nandy, in the same essay (which happens to be on Satyajit Ray), proceeds to
record other disillusionments; he confesses to having been almost almost as much
at a loss as the narrator in James’s story must have been, when he discovered that
another icon, Conan Doyle, creator of the ‘dispassionate, rational’ Holmes, was,
in his spare time, a ‘practising spiritualist and theosophist’. Nandy then goes on
to speak of the enigma of Rushdie, like Vawdrey ‘the greatest (in the opinion of
many) of our literary glories’. Nandy is a great admirer of Midnight’s Children;
but, lighting upon Rushdie’s more ‘formal social and political comments,’ finds
them ‘cliché-ridden…not even good radical chic’, and ‘a direct negation of [the]
sensitivities’ of the novelist he so admires. Is it time, then, to solve this enigma
and reveal that there are two men at work here, as James had once hinted at
playfully, under the single signifier ‘writer’, or, in this case, ‘Rushdie’? In Rushdie’s
case, indeed, the life of the double has taken on a tragic resonance. No one has
chronicled, least of all Rushdie, what it means to this double to go on shaking
hands, to lecture at literary events, and be interviewed with the endlessly extending
shadow of a fatwa hanging over him; Rushdie tells us little of the double, and the
double insists on speaking only about Rushdie. The situation reminds us of how
much we see of the writer’s double in our everyday life, in the flesh, on television,
in newspapers, but of how little we know about the person whom we seem to be
acquainted with so intimately; not even his name.
You will ask, how, then, is the writer’s double produced? Is he, or she, arrived
at by some technological process of which we are not all aware? Or is he too a
fiction created by the author in which we’ve come to believe? A clue might be
provided by the texts and works of art that writers themselves have composed,
texts that have proliferated, tellingly, with doubles through the centuries, from the
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Leslie Mills
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Epic of Gilgamesh, written on clay tablets in Babylon in the third millennium BC,
to Terminator 2. The epic tells us of Gilgamesh, created with a perfect body by the
gods, a god-like creature who is, however, not entirely invulnerable: ‘Two thirds they
made him god and one third man.’ (In our age, the latter-day superhuman, Arnold
Schwarznegger, is similarly physically perfect, but has suffered from a condition
called aortic stenosis.) When Gilgamesh becomes too proud, the gods, to subdue
him, decide to create his double: a superman called Enkidu. The description, in
the epic, of the creation of Enkidu, might provide us with some information as
to how doubles come into being: ‘So the goddess conceived an image in her mind,
and it was of the stuff of Anu of the firmament. She dipped her hands in water
and pinched off clay, she let it fall in the wilderness, and noble Enkidu was created’
(N.K. Sandars’ translation). One might imagine that it was much the same way
that Dolly the sheep came to find herself upon this extraordinary planet. Like
Dolly, ‘Enkidu ate grass in the hills with the gazelle and lurked with wild beasts at
the water-holes’. (I have always thought that, if the epic of Gilgamesh were ever
filmed, with its shows of strength and battles of equals, Schwarznegger should be
recruited for the double role.)
Doubles, however, come cheap these days. Although I am not a well-known writer,
I too have one, who performs an increasingly alarming number of public functions;
unlike me, he is constantly travelling cities and continents. I have spied him in local
bookshops once or twice; seen him, from a distance, autograph copies of my book
and hesitate, once, before signing, as if he’d momentarily forgotten who, or where,
he was; I’ve then experienced a passing pang of compassion. The other day he
was apparently at a bookshop, meeting people, being photographed, and parrying
questions; while I was at home, in a gloomy corner, trying to write this article.
Originally published in the Telegraph - Calcutta.
117
Catherine Chen
见与不见
仓央嘉措
你见，或者不见我
我就在那里
不悲不喜
你念，或者不念我
情就在那里
不来不去
你爱，或者不爱我
爱就在那里
不增不减
你跟，或者不跟我
我的手就在你手里
不舍不弃
来我的怀里
或者
让我住进你的心里
默然相爱
寂静欢喜
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by the 6th Dalai Lama Tsangyang
Gyatso
Whether you see me, or not,
I am just there,
Neither sad nor pleased.
Whether you miss me, or not,
Affection is just there,
Neither coming nor leaving.
Whether you love me, or not,
Love is just there,
Neither increased nor decreased.
Whether you follow me, or not,
My hand is just in yours,
Neither let go nor desert.
Come into my arms,
or,
Let me live in your heart.
Love without a word,
Joy in silence.
The following short story is based on the legends surrounding and poems by the 6th Dalai Lama
Tsangyang Gyatso.
The main hall of the White Palace is dark now. It is after midnight. The monks have
long since gone back to their dormitories after a day’s chanting. The incense sticks
are burnt out, with only faint streams of sandalwood fragrance lingering. The hall
is quiet; no one is around except a figure in the dark sneaking through the east side
door out to a long corridor.
At the end of the corridor a gate leads to the courtyard outside. As it cranks open,
the moonlight shines on the one who comes out. He is a young man around twenty,
dressed as a common Tibetan village boy, head covered by a terai so we cannot see
it’s been shaved underneath. He carefully unties the gate of the hedge surrounding
the courtyard. As he makes his way out, a dog suddenly bursts out barking. Startled,
he quickens his steps down the hill, leaving a string of footprints behind in the
snow.
Farther away down the hill, he can feel his pounding heart quieting down. Only
now, does he start to sense the chilly breeze stroking him. After a day’s snow,
the sky has cleared up. The moon rises high above the mountain peaks in the
east, bright and shining, like the face of a pretty young maiden. Yes, the face of
Dawa Droma, the girl with the clearest eyes. He remembers the first time he saw
those dazzling eyes. He was sitting high on the altar, receiving the worship of
the pilgrims prostrating themselves and chanting the oldest mantra “Om Mani
Padme Hum.” As the crowd rose up to make room for the next group of pilgrims,
something sparkling among them caught his attention. Those were the eyes of
this unforgettable young maiden, purer and clearer than the lake on the holy snow
mountain. The second they exchanged glimpse seemed to have frozen into eternity.
Freezing with it, only he knows, was his own soul and body.
But now, the thought of Droma brings a warm current through his heart. In this
ice-cold night, he is heading towards Makye Ame’s little tavern down in Lhasa city
below. Ame sells the best “chang” (wine made from highland barley), and also
provides a meeting place for secret young lovers. The young monk is a frequent
customer of the place. When night falls, he often dresses himself in layfolk’s
clothes and sneaks out of the temple to live his secret life of a reveler. It was here
that he met Droma again, and learned the girl with the enticing glance also has
the warmest and softest body, as fragrant as the tsamba freshly made by his Ama.
Sometimes sitting silently with Droma, he could feel a great sense of peace and
joy. This often confuses him profoundly: could there be greater happiness even in
the state of Nirvana, or maybe they are essentially the same? After all, what is the
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ultimate measurement of time? One second can be eternity; while eternity can be
overthrown by a sudden change of mind. “Yes, it all depends on your own mind,”
he remembers his old master’s teaching. “The most important thing is to find peace
within your own heart, so that when everything around changes, nothing is really
changed.”
Walking on the snow, he is completely lost in his thoughts. He forgot how long he
has been walking and how much longer to go. Down there, the silhouette of the
town gradually takes clear shape. In Makye Ame’s tavern, Droma is waiting.
120
Catherine Platt
121
The Stanton Blues
Eric Blankenburg
Mark heard the phone in his sleep, had dreamt it. Maybe? No, still ringing. Even
before he opened his eyes he knew. He knew this call was bad, just like his stillborn
dream, but he did not know how. He just knew: a call this late was never good, at
least not in his family.
He sat up. The phone stopped. Downstairs the answering machine: “click,”
nothing. His youngest son, Brady, lay in a crumpled ball beside Greta, his wife,
both dreaming heavily. Night after night this past week Brady had coughed his
way into the middle of their bed; with the cough came a high fever, 102 degrees.
The fever and nightmares stopped around 12:30 a.m. and Brady got a few fitful
hours of sweaty sleep. A bad cold that’s all, the doctor told them, nothing a little
penicillin couldn’t knock out. Still, Mark noticed the way Brady shook with fever,
like a weekday drunk sobering up for Sunday mass and it scared him, like a bad
dream.
The phone rang again. He rubbed his eyes. 2:47. The green numbers twisted and
glowed in the freezing shadows. Brady and Greta slept on. Wednesday morning,
he wanted sleep. Two hours of sleep, three hours until he had to get up for work.
Three days until the weekend. They’d planned to leave the kids with Greta’s mom,
and head north to go skiing and get away. It’d be good for them, Greta had said,
but Brady had this rattling cough and the phone kept ringing.
He slipped out of bed and out of the warmth. A January cold seized his legs as he
stumbled across the room. Outside a hazy streetlight shot a rusty, bourbon-brown
through the blinds, the light dancing across the beige carpet like wanton Chinese
characters. A teakettle whine, urgent and piercing, whistled from the winter wind
playing across the heat vents, a stale, dry air clutched the room. His nose itched.
The phone kept ringing.
Reaching Greta’s desk along the opposite wall, he stumbled over the stool in front
of it; sharp pain shot up his little toe as he sucked back electric twinges. He braced
himself on the cluttered desk. A pile of graded papers from Greta’s high school
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students buried the phone. He couldn’t find it, heard it close, but couldn’t see it. He
shoveled a mound to the floor. The phone stopped.
Downstairs, the answering machine turned on. His voice on the tape, hollow
and distant, didn’t sound like him: too whiny and nasally. But, it sounded like a
familiar stranger, a distant cousin perhaps. Did he always sound like that or just on
recordings? He didn’t like the weak voice.
His voice stopped. He waited. “Click,” again nothing. One of the essays, with a
glaring red F across its front, slid off the pile and hit the floor. Next to the paper,
the chewed up desk’s leg, the wooden foot filled with tiny puppy teeth impressions
like icy rain on dimpled snow. The phone rang again, and he almost fell back over
the stool. He finally found it, but hesitated – a wrong number, please.
He answered.
“God dammit. Where have you been? I’ve tried you three times. Can’t you answer
the first time like a normal person.” It was Drew, his older brother.
“It’s 3 a.m. for God sakes Drew, this better be important.”
“God dammit Mark, don’t tell me what time it is. I know what time it is.” Drew
was somewhere loud, a strip club probably. Stage music blared and bumped, then
abruptly ended, the muffled DJ’s voice unclear in the background, too high laughter
from eager working girls echoing through the receiver. Drew was drunk too, so his
words were crippled with the lazy end drop-off inherent with a night of Seagrams
7 and 7, his favorite drink. He started cursing into the phone, but Mark couldn’t
understand him, held the phone away from his ear, and walked out into the hallway.
“Slow down, damn it. I can’t understand you,” Mark hissed. Drew took a heavy
breath and tried again.
“Dad’s in some serious trouble again, and I’m not dealing with it this time.”
Mark didn’t answer, he couldn’t, and then Drew started yelling again. None of it
made sense – like a bad dream – but it wasn’t. Mark knew this: a dream stops when
you want it to.
He’d known for years this call would come, and now on a forlorn winter night,
crystal temperatures below killing, it was here. He’d thought of the call before,
thought of it with cool heroic detachment, like a firefighter running into a burning
building while everyone else runs out. Now he felt nothing. No desire to save.
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Drew yelled and slurred through all the details, half-lost through the eager music
and hungry laughter. But Mark didn’t listen, he couldn’t. Drew, like their father, was
a drunk, except Drew was still in the early stages and clung to the belief that he was
in control. Their father, however, had long since relinquished control to what he
always called The Old Laughing Lady (the lyrics from a Neil Young song he’d listen
to at the start of a binge). That song always dribbled out of his father’s workroom
in the basement as he sat in his cheap reclining chair, letting his Winston’s smoke
down to the nub, a tumbler of scotch dangling in his hand.
“Okay. I understand,” Mark kept repeating to satisfy Drew every time he paused
for a breath.
Mark shivered; yawned and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He hated January, the
way it shook his muscles, the dragging sleep that never seemed finished, the dark
sunless sky for days, the barren land empty and dirty.
“Goddammit, are you getting any of this. I said I’m not dealing with it this time,”
Drew yelled, piercing his vacant mind.
“Okay, okay, I understand. I’ll take care of it,” Mark sputtered. And with that, he
heard the receiver click and the long hum of the dial tone.
In the hallway Mark listened to the clean, even note that played from the phone. He
listened to the smooth dial tone until it started beeping before he hung up. Then
the silence, as forceful as packed snow, settled upon his chest: no feeling in his legs,
his head clogged with the magnitude of his last words.
He leaned against the wall, and briefly saw the closed hallway of his childhood
home: his shriveled father at the bottom steps near the door, crouched in a fetal
ball, his sobs echoing off the walls, his mother rubbing Dad’s elongated back,
whispering, “Take it easy now, take it easy,” and his father choking between fitful
gasps “If, if, I-I drink again. I-I’m going to kill myself.”
But he never killed himself, at least not quickly anyway. And, this wasn’t the first
time this’d happened. When Drew and Mark were younger their mother couldn’t
stand the sight of him when he was drinking. So he always hid it from them – in
the dark spaces between tool boxes, behind the washer, underneath dirty paint rags
– and on weekends when the old man was out fishing, or during the rare times he
held a job as a night janitor at the linen factory, they went on a treasure hunt for
the hidden booze. Each time they’d gather the booty in the kitchen and watch their
mother pour it all down the kitchen sink.
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After a few years, the old man lost too much liquor from this little hide-and-seek
game so he started disappearing for a week or two on one of his binges. He would
never tell anyone he was leaving or if he’d be back. The first few times their mother
told them to search the bars until they found him and brought him home. Maybe
she thought she could disgrace him off his barstool, Mark didn’t know, because
they never found the old man anyway.
But every time he’d stumble back – broke, crystal-eyed and smelling like stale booze
and crusty piss. And she’d always take him back; always thought this time she could
save him. It took years for them to realize, his mother the last hold out, that you
can’t save someone who won’t save themselves.
Downstairs in the kitchen, pale phosphorescent light bounced off the walls like
lines etched in relief. Mark made a pot of coffee. In the wailing silence, Greta
slipped up behind him, wrapped her arms around his stomach and dangled her
head along the crook of his shoulder. The sweet scent of her shampoo drifted up.
He turned around and hugged her closer.
“Who was on the phone honey?” she whispered into his chest. Brown curls, like
dark tangles of wild brush tickled his nose. Her firm body sturdy against his weight;
he leaned on her before stepping away.
“It was Drew.”
Greta stepped back into the corner nightlight, a faded sea blue robe wrapped
around her, fuzzy dog-haired slippers on her feet, swollen eye rings. She fingered
her strings of hair, tugging them along her ears, behind her neck, curling them
upwards into a lazy ponytail. She pulled the band tight around them, snapped it in
place, but a loose ribbon slipped from the bunch and rested behind her ear. She
shivered and hugged her robe closer.
“Why’s he calling this late. Is he drunk again?”
“You know Drew, always a party somewhere,” Mark shrugged, “but he was calling
about my Dad.”
“Oh-no, is he drinking again too?” Her pursed lips, tight around the mouth, hung
on the last word.
“Worse, he was in a pretty bad car accident. Rear-ended a woman and her daughter
downtown about three o’clock this afternoon.”
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Kirsten A. Allen
126
“Oh my God, how bad was it?”
“Well the little girl’s fine but the mother’s banged up pretty badly. Got her in ICU
down at St. Mary’s. She’s stable now and will most likely be fine. But…”
“Was he drunk?” Greta asked. She hugged him closer, rubbed his back.
“Drunk, honey, his blood alcohol was point 28! Most people can’t even stand at
that level, let alone get behind the wheel. That fucking bastard, I can’t believe he
did this. And all this talk about how this time it was real.”
“Is your father alright?”
“Of course, not a scratch on him. They’ve got him locked up in the drunk tank, I
guess.”
Mark stopped to fix a cup of coffee. The paint chipped away from the corner
cabinet, revealing old shades: hidden paint from years and styles long ago. A clean
beige covering a rose pink, burying a lemon meringue yellow, and a dirty white
layered on top of the lacquered maple door. He pulled out the chipped mug,
plastered with his picture, a Father’s Day gift from Kyle their older son. The brown
tiles on the floor, sticky near the refrigerator, and wrinkling like wet tissue paper
around the dishwasher, the dishwasher door stippled with crusty remnants of old
food. Nothing had changed. His father had done this, like so many times before,
and nothing had changed, except Mark’s last words to his brother “I’ll take care of
it.”
“Drew says I can either bail him out or leave him to rot. He’s not dealing with it this
time.” A gleaming image of his father slipped in front of him, lying silent on the
cold cement cell floor, toilet paper roll for a pillow. He shut it off. Poured out the
hot black coffee, watching the steaming vapors spiral and swirl through the dry air.
“So when are you going to get him?” she asked.
“I don’t know Greta, maybe jail is just the thing he needs to straighten him out. Get
it through his head he can’t keep pulling this shit.”
“How can you even say that? He’s your father. So he’s made a few mistakes, like we
all have. You should thank God he’s alive, and you can go get him out.”
“I know. It’s just that it’s always been like this. Even when we were kids.”
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“Well if it was you I’d hope one of our sons would come bail you out. And you of
all people should know what if feels like to be in jail.” Greta’s father had passed
away when she was a little girl so she never grew up with a father, terrible or not.
During college, her mother re-married a drunk, and now they only heard from her
through Christmas cards.
He stopped at the refrigerator for cream. Sunny pictures of trips on the door:
Disneyland, Brady’s toothless smile whiter than Snow White’s dress, the boys
sunburned and proud above Florida sandcastles, their honeymoon on a lazy
hammock in Costa Rica, the burning sun endless across the ocean. Next to them,
Brady’s drawing of their green house in fissured lines and purple windows, smiling
brown circles hanging out of them. His mother had always told him, like it or not,
that he was the only father he’d ever have.
He opened the door and the smell of dinner’s meatloaf seeped out, like dried
blood. He dug through the leftovers.
“Goddammit where the hell’s the cream.”
“Calm down Mark, it’s right there on the door. Right in front of your face.
“Oh – son of a bitch,” he cried and yanked his hand out of the refrigerator. He
violently shook his hand back and forth.
“What’s the matter now, what happened?”
“I just cut myself on the knife sticking out of the meatloaf pan.”
“What? How in the world… Hang on, calm down, I’ll go get the band-aids. Just
wait right there.”
After Greta left, he noticed the stack of day old newspapers and crumpled soda
cans waiting by the garbage to go to the recycling bin. A flowery border still circled
the kitchen at waist level, and kept the room from slipping away, like a belt on a
starving man. The maple chairs and table, lacquered a mahogany brown, were too
large for the room. Strings of dried farmer’s market sage, hung above the stove,
scented the room like a lost summer day. He watched the bubble of blood weep
out of his finger.
Greta came back in with a box of brightly colored Flintstone’s band-aids.
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“Sorry these are all we have left.” She took his hand and ran it under water from
the sink. She patted it dry with a towel and wrapped a fluorescent green band-aid
around his finger. He hoped she would drop the conversation and just let it go.
“Look, sweetie, no one’s going to force you to go down there. But I just don’t want
you to do something I know you’ll regret later.”
“Greta he needs help, but he won’t ever take it. So maybe he’ll get it there.”
“You know what kind of help they give down there. For God’s sake Mark that’s
the last place he’s going to get help. And how many times did you get put away for
the same stupid crap when you were younger? How many times did your mother
have to come bail you out or get awoken in the middle of the night with the police
at her door.”
“Hey that was a long time ago. And I changed. And I didn’t almost kill a poor
woman and her little girl.”
“Yes, but you could have, all that drunk driving you and the Jacksons did when you
were younger.”
“I know but I changed honey. I left that life behind years ago and I want to keep
it there.”
“Yes, sweetie I know, but that’s why you’re the one that has to help him. Drew can’t,
hell he’ll probably take him out for Bloody Mary’s after making bail.”
“Greta, how am I supposed to help that man? He’s not going to change, he’s always
been like this.”
“You know, maybe he won’t ever change, and doesn’t need help. Maybe what he
really needs is just someone trying to help him. And this is his last cry. Look Mark,
your father’s 68, you might not get another chance.”
The kitchen seemed like it was falling away from him: the oversized maple table
and chairs now tiny and remote, the belt of flower trim losing its hold, letting go,
the picture-riddled fridge now distant and strange. He held the sink and stared out
into the frozen winter night. Thick hoarfrost grew out of the window’s corners like
silken spider webs. He heard the same tinny whine as the wind slapped against the
glass. Snaking snowdrifts had started forming across the backyard. The strawberry
bush’s skeleton the only thing sticking above the endless white. And there, hanging
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above it all, the image of his sunken father, shaggy beard and slippery brown hair.
He hugged his coffee mug and shivered. He hated winter.
“Alright. You’re right. I’ll go get him,” he said and left the room to get dressed.
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Mangoes
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
I knocked on the door, and asked for Bob.
“Bob’s out, won’t be back ‘til teatime,” said his missus, standing next to an empty
kitchen rubbish tin, and looking me in the eye,
“Why?”
“He told me to meet him here, we’ve found a bit of work.”
This seemed to perk her up, and Bob’s boy sitting at the kitchen table stopped
scowling at me. Don’t reckon Bob would be bringing him along but.
“Doing what?” she asked.
“Got some truck needs unloading tonight”, I said, “I’ll come back later then.” I
returned down the stairs. I heard her tell the boy to go find his Dad. Doubt he’d
needed asking.
Unloading trucks, what a laugh, man I’d really made a mess of things this time.
Knackered from walking around with Bob looking for work, I headed for the
town’s park and a seat. I wasn’t sure about the job tonight, seemed an odd time
to be unloading trucks, and the bloke who hooked us up with it didn’t seem legit,
too interested in sussing out who we were. But no way was I turning it down. I’d
been stuck in this town long enough. Not that there was anything wrong with it,
just missed me own digs and mates. And a swim in the sea. The river isn’t the same,
too much dirt in it.
And I needed to get back to Carol. Man she was going to be pissed at me. She’d
told me I was daft moving up here to work for a dodgy outfit like Morgans. Now
her advice of sticking with the boredom and crap pay of Blueberries looked right.
Even her knowing I’d done it for us, to help get us a bit ahead, isn’t going to count
for much when I turn up poorer than when I left. Skinnier too. Don’t suppose the
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old crowd will take us back either. Back to living on her skimpy wage again. What
was I thinking? Poor girl, she’ll have to take me on trust again. At least I’m tidy.
It’s lucky I’m not in jail. Seems a bit of a change when the bosses not the flunkies
go down. Can’t say I feel too sorry for any of them. Maybe Jim, he was fun to work
with, but even he knew what was going on, and didn’t tell us. It hadn’t been easy
to get the coppers to believe I had no idea what was going on. Suppose getting
paid to drive back and forth across the border should’ve had me wondering a bit
more. But the money was good, the boxes not too heavy, and me and Bob got on
ok. Since it all went pear-shaped we’d even talked about getting a proper license,
looking for long haul gigs, but it cost money for the courses, probably have to wear
a dicky uniform too.
Tonight’s work is just loading a truck, can’t see any harm there. The crew that
was supposed to do it had an accident or something. The bloke said we get three
hundred for the night. It’ll be enough to see me heading back south quick smart.
Quite like it up here but – quieter than down in Sydney – Australia like in the old
black and white TV shows. Looking forward to getting back to Carol though, seem
to make less bad decisions when she’s around. I found a bench that was clean
enough and lay down for a bit of a kip.
“You ready mate?” I sat up to see Bob heading my way, looking perky about having
something to do. Should be skinnier than he is, not that he’s fat, just the amount
of talking and waving his arms about he does, you’d think he’d wear thin. Guess
having a kid and regular meals keeps it on. His poor missus must be tired of him
always backing the wrong horse too. I remembered the empty kitchen rubbish tin;
you gotta buy stuff to make rubbish. Maybe she was just tidy.
“Hey Bob, you reckon this crowd’s dinky-di? I don’t want to end up in the poo
again.”
“Na mate, it’s just a bit of labouring, one night, plenty of dough, and then you can
shoot back home.”
“What’s the stuff we’re loading?” I asked.
“He didn’t say, said it wasn’t heavy though.” We looked at each other. “Anyway let’s
go, it’s nearly time.” He turned around and started walking away.
We hiked over to the edge of town to a warehouse we’d been given directions to,
just as a semitrailer pulled up, the driver manoeuvring to back the truck up to the
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loading dock. Someone must have dropped off some trestle tables, they were lying
next to the door with heaps of cardboard that turned out to be our first job, we had
to fold them to make low boxes, like for fruit. A couple of grinning backpackers
turned up too, seems the four of us had found a bit of work.
Then the doors were opened at the back of the truck and the sweet smell of
mangoes rolled out, filling the empty space and smearing a smile on the four us
standing there. The truck was full of sacks of them, I mean really full, stacked on
top of each other. Seemed an odd way to have packed them, guess they weren’t
too ripe and soft yet. There was a bunch of pruning gear too and a metal box, like
what people put cameras or other expensive gear in. The guy who opened the door
wasn’t smiling, he took the box, put it to one side.
So that was our next job, unloading them, carefully, not putting the sacks on top
of each other, but stacking them in rows over by the tables and boxes. By the time
we’d emptied the truck half the floor space was gone.
There wasn’t much talking, the size of the job, and having to finish it that night,
all the fruit unpacked and placed in the boxes we’d made up then returned to the
truck. Me, Bob and the two backpackers, a table each and a slowly receding line of
sacks behind us. The two other blokes helped a bit with the empty sacks, getting
them out of the way, but spent more time outside talking on their phones and sort
of hanging by the gate.
We finished before dawn, the truck was chocker with trays of mangoes, the sacks
had been stuffed in and the pruning gear and that metal case must have gone in
sometime too. With the doors closed and the tables folded up and stacked against
the wall you wouldn’t have known what had gone on, except for the smell of
mangoes, and I guess that would go too. The two running the show had been pretty
finicky about tidying the place up, no ruined fruit lying around, didn’t even want us
to take any. Said they were worth their weight in gold down in Sydney, first of the
new season’s crop, needed to be rushed off pronto. One of the blokes suggested
we kept it to ourselves what we’d been doing, something about not letting the
competition know about it, hinted it was in our interest to keep mum. Looking at
Bob, I guessed he was thinking the same as me - get paid and get out.
Five minutes after we’d put the last box in we were walking out the gate, three
hundred in our pockets, and the grins back on. Heard the truck leaving a minute
later. We split off from the other two, and headed back toward Bob’s. They were
yakking in some other language anyway.
133
A week or so later, safely back in Sydney with Carol, though still looking for work,
I picked up a newspaper left by some other poor sod at the employment agency
and read a story that flattened me. Seems a crew of thieves way up north had got
onto some mango farm and stripped a whole orchard bare. It said they must have
used night vision goggles, and done it in a night. No one heard or saw anything.
Apparently the value of the fruit nicked was huge, hundreds of thousands of
dollars, and other farms now had guards patrolling them. Worth its weight in gold
the story said. Time to take the missus’s advice and go back to Blueberries and see
if I can get my old job back.
134
Nursery Rite
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
Mum’s golden years arrived,
with body sound;
but a dismantling mind,
that can’t be put back together again.
She reads with the lights off.
Even switched on,
the words still escape;
her story slowly erasing.
Before, clock wise,
now tick doesn’t follow tock.
A once bright, full mind
now hey diddle diddle.
Arrows don’t point for her,
tangles don’t untangle.
Mum’s going, one way,
downhill.
135
Death of MaLa
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
Mala, a wasted death, her body poisoned by pride and envy. Fingers have been
pointed, but no one’s copped it yet. That doesn’t mean there aren’t suspects. The
whispers round the table hinted at locals in the thrall of glamorous blow-throughs.
I’d even heard suicide mentioned, like she didn’t dig being pulled in all directions,
and just fell apart at the seams. I had my own idea, and the mysterious Captain Pete
figured large. Who was this bloke anyway, I’d never trusted his goody-two-shoes
carry on. He’s a government stooge if ever there was, which one’s the question.
So Mala’s gone, what a mess. Reckon those nasty fuckers on the tribunal might have
had something to do with it too. Come to think of it she didn’t stand a chance,
her friends, the ones that had been with her since she arrived on the scene, too
frightened to speak out. I’d see them whispering in the corners, then worming up
to those fuckers. They know what happened but they’re scared, they gotta live in
this town. Wonder if they’ll help the next young innocent that comes along. Don’t
reckon.
Only that poof Guy tried to stand up and point the finger, and look what happened
to him. He should have been the one to take care of Mala. I mean the guys a fuck’n
legend even if he does suck cock. Wouldn’t have needed anyone else’s input either.
Could’ve shared with Mala his take on reality, shown her a way forward. Reckon
she’d still be here, ready to shine when she finally opened up. People would have
paid good money to hear what she had to say. But not anymore. Those fools, those
amateurs. What were they thinking? Poor Mala.
136
Kirsten A. Allen
137
Contributors’ Biographies
Kirsten A. Allen
Kirsten has dabbled in photography and writing since she received her first camera
at age five. She moved to Chengdu in 2003 on a whim and has worked on a variety
of publications, including founding the British Chamber of Commerce South
West China’s magazine. She has had work published in the China Economic Review,
and assisted Small Anchor Press in New York with their first bilingual series of
publications. Her first solo photographic exhibition was held at Cafe Panam(e) in
2006.
Eric Blankenburg
Eric has written short stories, essays, non-fiction and travel related articles since
2000. His work has appeared in Outside Missoula, Outside Bozeman, GoNomad.
com, Suite101.com, Ehow.com, Hello Chengdu and in other regional publications and
newspapers. Currently he is finishing his first novel, which follows three generations
of a family torn apart by drug and alcohol addiction. The first chapter of this work,
“The Stanton Blues”, is printed here. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Creative
Writing from the University of Montana.
Guy Bojesen-Trepka
An aging unsuccessful lothario who hopes writing can lead to a sitdown job in his
twilight years.
Ingrid is a Swedish-American photographer and writer living in Chengdu. She first
came to China as a backpacker in 1985 and frequently visited Chengdu, staying
at the infamous underground bomb shelter Black Coffee Hostel for five yuan a
night. One thing led to another and over the next 25 years she has traveled to
every province in China and written and photographed three books on China and
Chinese culture.
Jessie Brett
Australian painter, writer and tattoo artist living in China since 2006.
138
Amit Chaudhuri
Amit’s latest novel (his fifth) The Immortals was a New Yorker Book of the Year,
and Critics’ Choice, Best Books of 2009, in the Boston Globe and the Irish Times.
He is also an internationally acclaimed essayist, and a musician, having performed
worldwide as a singer in the Hindustani classical tradition. Among the prizes he
has won are the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Society of Authors’ Encore
Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Indian Government’s Sahitya
Akademi award. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of
East Anglia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was one of the
judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2009.
Catherine Chen Xintong
Catherine was born and raised in Chengdu, China, and is currently a Ph.D student
of Literature & Cultural Studies in Sichuan University. She has written short articles
and poems in both English and Chinese.
William Ellis
William received his Ph.D in Literature from Boston College, then taught humanities
at Vanier College in Montreal, Canada. In 2004, he was hired as the Senior Foreign
Expert of the English department at Sichuan University. There, he offers courses
in Western Intellectual History, Art History, European Literature, and Canadian
Studies. He was awarded the Sichuan Province Teaching Excellence Award in
2008. He is the author of The Theory of the American Romance, an Ideology in American
Intellectual History, nominated in 1989 for the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.
Scott Ezell
Scott has worked, traveled and studied a dozen years in Asia, including three years
in an aboriginal community on the Pacific coast of Taiwan, where he wrote the
essay collection A Far Corner. His book-length poem Petroglyph Americana explores
landscapes and communities of the American West, and his poem-painting series
Ocean Hieroglyphics will be published in 2011. “Yushu” is a chapter from The End of
China, a cultural travelogue about remote landscapes and communities of western
China, based on travels in 2004.
Paul French
Paul is a writer and analyst based in Shanghai. His previous books include North
Korea - the Paranoid Peninsula, Carl Crow: A Tough Old China Hand, and most recently
Through the Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to Mao. He is
currently working on a book detailing the horrific and unsolved murder of a young
English woman in Peking in 1937 to be published by Penguin in 2011 as A Peking
Murder.
139
Katrina Hamlin
Katrina came to Chengdu in 2008 to teach English and study Chinese at Sichuan
Normal University. She now lives in Shanghai where she hopes to find another
community of writers. Katrina likes short stories and bare prose, and sometimes
writes essays for the thinksix China blog.
Blue Germein
Hailing from the west coast of Ireland, Blue is a poet and musician currently living
in Shanghai.
Sophia Kidd
Sophia is a freelance writer and sinologist. In high school, she wrote poems in Latin
class, while everyone else declined verbs. She also read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in
in-school suspension, and decided Hitler’s thinking was two-dimensional, at best.
The skinheads in the back of the room thought she was cool for reading that book.
Lancer Kind
Lancer is an American science fiction author who lives on an island off Xiamen,
and makes frequent trips to Chengdu. He’s a 2003 graduate of the Clarion Writers’
Workshop and a 2006 graduate of the Odyssey Writers’ Workshop. He’s an active
member of the science fiction community and has spoken and participated at many
conventions. In 2010 his short story “KanjiKiss” will be printed in Chinese in
Science Fiction World magazine, and “Casino New Orleans” will be released in an
anthology of global warming aftermath tales. He is currently working on his new
novel, Agile Noir.
Colum McCann
Dublin-born Colum is the author of two collections of short stories and five novels,
including Dancer and Zoli, all of which were international best-sellers. His newest
novel, Let the Great World Spin, won the National Book Award in 2009. His fiction
has been published in 30 languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic
Monthly, GQ, Paris Review, Bomb and other places. Colum currently teaches at Hunter
College in New York, in the Creative Writing program, with fellow novelists Peter
Carey and Nathan Englander.
Leslie Mills
Leslie moved to Chengdu from Australia in 2000. He is a Kiwi-Aussie artist and
photographer who has held several exhibitions in both Australia and China.
Christopher is a Canadian writer of twenty novels and one collection of short
140
stories. He is best known for his trilogy A Killing Smile (1991), A Bewitching Smile
(1992) and A Haunting Smile (1993), a behind-the-smiles study of his adopted
country, Thailand, and for his Vincent Calvino Private Eye series set in Bangkok.
His novels have been translated into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew,
Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Turkish, Norwegian and Thai.
Isaac Myers
Isaac (M) was born in Seattle (W), Washington (A). He is passionate about recycling,
colors, and burritos. He likes to read Vonnegut, Barthelme, Borges, Dawkins, and
Camus, watch things organized by Lynch and Cronenberg, and listen to the Velvet
Underground and Asymmetric Warfare. He has been studying Chinese in Chengdu
for six months.
Scott Ness
Scott comes from the beaches of sunny San Diego. He has a B.A. in English
Literature and Writing from California State University of San Marcos and has been
teaching ESL in China for almost three years. He has had a one-act play performed
at Miracosta Community College in Oceanside, California. After graduating he
spent a year in Luoyang and then came to Chengdu. His Chinese name is 熊熊猫.
Jo Parish
Jo is from Yorkshire, England. After university in London, and some travel, she
taught in UK primary schools for 12 years. She has always harboured a vague
ambition to be a writer but never found the time to do anything about it, being a
full-time teacher, partner, netball player and mother. Jo moved with her family to
Chengdu in early 2009.
Catherine Platt
Catherine arrived in Beijing as a language student in 1985 and her life and work
has intersected with China ever since. She has degrees in East Asian Studies and
Anthropology of Development. Based in Chengdu with her family since 2004, she
writes and freelances with non-governmental organisations.
Alberto Ruy Sanchez
Alberto is a fiction and non-fiction writer, poet and essayist from Mexico City.
Since 1988 he has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Artes de México, which has won
more than 100 national and international editorial awards. With over 90 issues and
600 writers, the journal has given a voice to diverse points of view on Mexican
themes and identity. He has published widely in scholarly journals and is the author
of several books of literary criticism, including Una introducción a Octavio Paz. His
best-known work of fiction Los nombres del aire was translated as Mogador in 2006.
141
Bill Stranberg
Bill is very much like a Chicago-style hot dog except that, instead of celery salt, he’s
been dusted in Sichuanese numbing pepper. Oh, he plays tennis too.
Allen Sutterfield
Allen is a poet, visual artist, and teacher of writing. Originally from the USA he
has lived in Canada since 1967. Allen has published poems and stories in many
magazines, is the author of a children’s book Stone Soup, and has had more than 40
exhibitions of his collages, drawings and photographs. Allen is at present living in
Toronto, Ontario, hard at work completing his 30-year epic The City of Words.
Julia Wang
Julia has an English BA. She worked as a teacher before becoming a freelance
writer and translator.
Jessica Wilczak
SWF, of a certain age. Recovering Canadian and Chengdu resident since November
2009. Currently wading through a Ph.D in human geography. She enjoys candid,
exploratory discussions of anything but her thesis topic. If your idea of foreplay
includes reading aloud from Das Kapital, naked, please get in touch. She can
recommend a therapist.
Adam Williams
Adam is the author of three acclaimed historical novels set in China – The Palace
of Heavenly Pleasure, The Emperor’s Bones and The Dragon’s Tail. A businessman and
banker in Beijing for over twenty years, he is the fourth generation of his family to
be living and working in China. Adam’s fourth novel, a quest for love in war-torn
Andalucia, The Book of the Alchemist was published in late 2009.
Ader Wu
Ader was born in Chengdu, of the post-1980 generation in China. She is an
Aquarius, a daydreamer, who loves food, books, music, painting, luxury hotels and
travelling. The idea of ‘stay hungry, stay foolish’ drives her to explore the world
and humanity.
Aaron Zhang
Aaron has lived his whole life in Chengdu apart from a few years in Hangzhou and
Hong Kong. He used to live next to Dufu’s Cottage and likes it as much as he hates
Chengdu’s grey skies.
142
Isaac Goldings
143
Kirsten A. Allen
144
Mala Submission Guidelines
Written Work
If you wish to submit work to MaLa, please submit a maximum of three pieces:
poetry, short fiction or works of literary non-fiction. Submissions should not
exceed 3,500 words, and are preferred by email. Submit both in the body text and
as a Word attachment to [email protected]
Graphic Art and Photography
Graphic art and photographic submissions should also be sent to [email protected]. Please note that as MaLa is a black-and-white publication
submissions should be of high contrast.
Copyright
Any submission carries the understanding that the author agrees to grant MaLa
single-edition non-exclusive print and electronic world rights. Beyond this, authors
retain all rights and title to their works published in MaLa , but we do ask that you
indicate that your work was first published in MaLa in any subsequent publication.
With respect to your contribution, you represent that you can legally grant the
rights set out in the terms given above, and that it does not violate any third party’s
copyrights, trademarks, patents, or other intellectual property rights.
All submissions that are accepted for publication are edited at the editorial board’s
discretion in collaboration with the author. There is no payment offered for
successful submissions. Authors of accepted work receive three copies of the issue
their contribution appears in.
The MaLa editorial board commits to nominating contributors’ work for awards
and recognition. Details will be published at www.mala-literary-journal.com.
Please note that we may not be able to respond individually to unsuccessful
applicants, and we are not in a position to offer you feedback on your work or
enter into any correspondence about rejected work.
Deadline for submissions for the next edition: October 1, 2010
145
www.chinabookworm.com
MaLa – The Chengdu Bookworm Literary Journal is a
collection of poetry, short fiction, literary non-fiction and work
in translation, supported by graphic art and photography. In the
hotpot that is Volume 1, Issue 1 we bring you 30 contributions
from China and ten other countries around the globe.
Featured in this issue are:
Colum McCann, author of five novels including Let the Great World
Spin which won the National Book Award in 2009.
Amit Chaudhuri, whose latest novel The Immortals was a New
Yorker Book of the Year. He was one of the judges of the Man
Booker International Prize 2009.
Christopher G. Moore, a writer of twenty novels who is best known
for his behind-the-smiles trilogy of his adopted country, Thailand.
Adam Williams, the author of a critically acclaimed China historical
fiction trilogy and The Book of the Alchemist, a quest for love in
war-torn Andalucia, published in 2009.
Paul French, a prolific writer who has produced numerous nonfiction books on China and Asia, most recently Through the
Looking Glass: China’s Foreign Journalists from Opium Wars to
Mao.
www.mala-literary-journal.com

MALA Vol 1 Issue 1 June 2010

Transcription

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