AFTERNESS

AFTERNESS

LITERATURE FROM

THE NEW TRANSNATIONAL ASIA

Editor-in-Chief

Rebekah Chan

Managing Editor

Gregg Schroeder

Senior Editor

Jenn Chan Lyman

Poetry Editor

Quenntis Ashby

Fiction Editor

Jenn Chan Lyman

Nonfiction Editor

Amanda Webster

For questions or comments about this anthology, please contact:

AfternessAnthology@gmail.com

For more information, please visit:

www.facebook.com/AfternessAnthology

www.facebook.com/SaveCityUMFA

www.SaveCityUMFA.tumblr.com

After-Party Press

© 2016 the individual authors and editors

All rights reserved. First published in Hong Kong, 2016

ISBN: 978-988-77482-9-8

Production: Chameleon Press, Ltd.

Cover: Sarah and Schooling Graphic Design

This anthology is supported by City University of Hong Kong for a one-time publication as a legacy project of the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing program at the Department of English. Launched in 2010, the program was closed in 2015. Copyright for the individual pieces published in this collection belongs to the individual authors.

Wake, butterfly –

it’s late, we’ve miles

to go together

– Basho

In Memory of

Hung Boon Wah Der

1947 – 2016

Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Editor’s Note

Introduction

POETRY

Re: work | NICHOLAS WONG

A Girl | ML

Night Owl | MAGS WEBSTER

My So-Called Soul | MAGS WEBSTER

God | SONALI RAJ

II Shadow Tales | AME COOMBS

Lag | ASH DEAN

Anagram | JOEY CHIN

You voyage my body– | MAGS WEBSTER

You, Me and Mory | DANIELLE VAN-DE-BROUCKE

A writer’s fantasia | JUDY KEUNG

Perhaps | ELIZABETH MARSHALL

Surfers & Flounders: The Golden Shovel | AME COOMBS

Pistachios | MIHO KINNAS

Poem for the Left Hand | QUENNTIS ASHBY

The Before & in the After | MAGS WEBSTER

Ονοματοποιία | JOEY CHIN

On Poetry | ML

Queen Among Leaves | JUDY KEUNG

Glooskap| ASH DEAN

The Other Night | MIHO KINNAS

Bear Weds Rabbit: An Ukiyo-e Fable | QUENNTIS ASHBY

FICTION

An Interview with My MFA Testamur, Nearly Four Years after It Was Issued | PETER PHILLIPS

No. 9 | DENIS WONG

The Protester | JORDAN DOTSON

Vigil | JENN CHAN LYMAN

A Special Gift | JOHN FRANCIS SMITH

Domestic Arrangements | ANDREA BRITTAN

Dayshift Done | JOY AL-SOFI

By Foot or By Feather | VIVIAN TANG

Breathing Under Water | SOPHIE KALKREUTH

The Sheep Years | CLINT ETTINGER

Heavy Lifting | PETER GOFF

The Hitting Curse | MABLE WOO

The Faeries of St. Monica | ALISTAIR YONG

In Water My Dreams | KAMANA SRIKANTH VENKATARAMAN

The Minimalist | MITCHELL D. STOCKS

The Sparrow, the Princess and the Emerald | ARTHUR CHAN

Shades of Resistance: Eight Flash Fiction Stories | VERENA TAY

Green Grass | SREEDHEVI IYER

To the Mountain | JENNIFER LEE

Blueprint | LAVANYA SHANBHOGUE-ARVIND

The Extinctionists | SHEREE CHUA

The Police Station | LUCY HUNGERFORD

Origins of a Name | TWIGS CHEN

Chapter One | NATALIE LORD

Seagull | CARMEN HO

If You Love Me Stay Sane | MICHELLE WONG

The Road to Hell | ROBERT POWERS

Fragments| SOPHIE MONATTE

NONFICTION

Prospectus | KEANE SHUM

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA (Polyamorous) | REBEKAH CHAN

My Un-Asian Manifesto | INGVILD SOLVANG

Bachelor Brothers | HAYLEY KATZEN

False Alarm | SAFFRON MARCHANT

Strawberry Shakes | AMANDA WEBSTER

#yourcamp #survivorsguilt | ADNAN MAHMUTOVIC

Next of Kin | SARAH VALLANCE

How to Be Alone | NICOLA SEBASTIAN

Requiem | GERSHOM TSE

Rocky Mountain Red-Eye | CLAIRE NOBLE

The Stranger | HUNG DER

Half My Hundred-Year Life | GREGG SCHROEDER

It | GENEVIEVE WONG

A Sinking Feeling | JACINTA READ

Freshly Created Things | SEBASTIAN BITTICKS

The Mark of a Wanderer | KARLA P. DELGADO

Fruit Ninja | FAN DAI

We Are All Good Friends! | COLUM MURPHY

Stitches | EMBER SWIFT

The Moon in a Dog’s Eye | SONIA FL LEUNG

A Basket of Three | ANNELI MATHESON

The Eternity of the MFA Cup of Tea | HUANG HAISU

Final Exercise | TATA MAPA

Postscript: The Death of a Program or the Beautiful Irregularity of Amateur Flight | KEVIN BROWN

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contributors

Faculty Notes

Acknowledgments

The editors would like to thank Hemans Wong for her support in attaining the hard-fought budget approval for this anthology and without whom this project would not have happened. We would like to thank Peter Gordon and Nicholas Gordon of Chameleon Press for their generosity and diligence throughout the publishing process. Thank you, as well, to proofreaders Sebastian Bitticks, Andrea Brittan, Hayley Katzen, Tata Mapa and Claire Noble for their precious time and sharp eyes.

We would like to extend our gratitude to Kingsley Bolton and Xu Xi for building the City University of Hong Kong MFA program in the first place, and to Rodney Jones and Rocio Davis for their efforts to sustain the program. Thank you to Winnie Cheng and Chris Leung for their ongoing support of the MFA students and faculty. Also, a special thank you goes to external examiner Shawn Wong and MFA faculty member Madeleine Thien for their dedication to #SaveCityUMFA, and to the student coalition who fought so valiantly on the behalf of us all.

Finally, a heartfelt thank you to Xu Xi for being ever-present, ever-stoic and ever-devoted to her students.

Foreword

Before the Fall: the Conversations

IT BEGAN with one specifically memorable conversation. This took place on the tiny island of St. Martin, the smallest inhabited island in the world divided between two nations, France and the Netherlands. Such a division has been the case since 1648, the year the Spanish were ousted when the French and Dutch were talking to each other. Alas, that conversation ended in 1672 when they went to war, and England moved in for a spell. It was not till 1734 that they agreed to converse again and settled on neutrality. A couple more centuries of English intervention followed – in the form of looting and full or partial occupation of the island by England – and it was not till the mid-twentieth century that things more or less took the shape of its present day governance, although only after many complicated political maneuvers. Today, the most commonly used language on the island is English, and every place accepts the U.S. dollar although the official currencies are the euro on the French side and the Caribbean guilder on the Dutch side, after the Netherlands Antilles was dissolved and its guilder ceased to exist.

But that conversation, the one with Kwame Dawes, the Ghanian-Jamaican poet and writer who now lives in Nebraska, that conversation was in English. It was in June 2005, the year of the third annual St. Martin book fair and literary festival. Imagine an international writing program, I said, a border-less MFA. One that focuses on writing and writers who live and think globally, who are transnational, multilingual, perhaps displaced but “at home” in more than one region, one nation, one city, town, village or hamlet. Or one language. Who want to write in English but need to write beyond the limits of Anglo-Americanism, colonialism, imperialism or the many deaths of the author. Kwame and I talked about the accidents of our births, our British colonial and post-colonial lives that gave us this language, a global English inflected by the accents, languages and dialects of our countries of origin. After all, I say jalan jalan to my mother when we go for walks, the Javanese that is her mother tongue, and prattle on in Cantonese as if it were my language, even though it’s really not. All this mediated by English, the common tongue of global souls, including those of us who write.

That was the beginning of what I think of as “the eternal conversation.”

It was a conversation continued in subsequent years with writers around the world. Sharmistha Mohanty in Norwich, England; Marilyn Chin in Jamaica; Justin Hill in Hong Kong; Luis Francia in New York; Madeleine Thien in Ubud, Indonesia; Jess Row in Baltimore, Maryland, but really, on board a train to Lowu, China; Ravi Shankhar in Delhi, India; Robin Hemley simply everywhere, because Robin and I have been talking for so long we’ve lost track of where we are when we’re actually conversing in person; Tina Chang, in my head initially, because she first spoke to me from a stage in the East Village, long before she had published a first collection or even had her MFA, when she was a talented, young poet on the reading circuit, the unforgettable one among the many forgettables; James Scudamore on Skype, because James lives in Paradise, most of the time.

Which was how the CityU MFA came to be, because it had been imagined by enough writers with an interest in Asia, and once established, it was easy to identify other writer-faculty. By the second year, the others who joined us included Sybil Baker, Evan Fallenberg, Suzanne Paola, Tabish Khair. The first three came via Vermont College of Fine Arts (themselves via Seoul, Tel Aviv, Bellingham and Arhus) where I taught on the MFA faculty for twelve years. Tabish was earlier than everyone, except perhaps Tina, because we originally met in Hong Kong in 2001, when he was a fellow of the first International Writers’ Workshop at Baptist University, down the hill from CityU. The workshop’s theme that year was post-colonial literature, and he was an Indian from Bihar, living in Denmark and writing in English and occasionally Danish as well, which is about as post-everything as it gets. We conversed overlooking the Hong Kong harbor, at the bar on the top of The Peninsula Hotel, a suitably colonial relic. With us was the poet Lasana Sekou, from the tiny island of St. Martin, a proponent of independence for his island state, a publisher of both Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean literature. Which is how I eventually ended up on St. Martin, in conversation with Kwame.

So that’s how this first, and to date only low-residency MFA program in Asia really began. It doesn’t end until the conversations cease.

My conversation with myself began a lot longer ago, during my own MFA in fiction at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sometime in 1982. It was a cross-genre moment, also a trans-lingual one. I wrote my one, and to date, only long piece in Chinese, an 偶記 to address the problem 我是不是中國人? Essaying on identity, and language, to ask and answer the question for myself – am I Chinese? – in a notebook called an “occasional journal.” I am only part Chinese, the other part being Indonesian, but this literary attempt had much less to do with race or ethnicity than it had to do with language and culture. It was actually less a literary attempt than homework for Mandarin language lessons, which I wrote weekly and turned in to my tutor, a graduate student from Beijing, for correction. It was a little like distance mentoring, a conversation begun and continued even after he was no longer my tutor.

When I was a child, my father, who is fluent and literate in Mandarin, used to travel frequently to Indonesia and Japan on business, and was sometimes away for months at a time in the mines in Indonesia. My mother would sit my sister and me down at the dining table and ask us to write letters to Daddy. I found this a difficult writing task, unlike the stories, essays and poems I scribbled on my own, unlike the weekly in-class essays for English and Chinese class in school – “generative writing” that found its way into the curriculum of this MFA. My letters in English were short. Mum rejected one and made me rewrite it. I was trying for the comic, but its effect was too morose (and presumably wicked) for a good daughter. That first draft is lost, like so many first drafts, but it half-survives in memory, my request for a “dead rose on a leaf” instead of yet another litany of gifts that good daughters, presumably, should ask their fathers to bring them. I had been reading Hans Christian Andersen, his tales about marsh kings and life in the bogs and the girl who trod on a loaf and ended up in an endless purgatory, to be attacked by all that flew, crept and crawled and was noisome. My allusive imaginings leaned dark. But my letters in Chinese, the few I attempted, were entirely circumspect. 親愛的父親 they began, because I was in primary school and had learned the correct, formal address for “father,” in contrast to the kindergarten “daddy” 爸爸. Unfortunately, I could not write much more than How are you? Right now I am quite fine. Yesterday (because I was proud that I knew the proper term 作天, not the colloquial, spoken-only Cantonese) in school, we learned some new vocabulary. This revelation was undoubtedly prompted by guilt, because I often did not do my Chinese vocabulary homework, and when moved to do any, would turn in a brand new notebook. Which is why I went through multiple notebooks and flunked out of Chinese by primary five. Meanwhile my aunt sang Dutch children’s songs to me, and I memorized and sang these, the way children mimic anything. These I still can sing, which was helpful when I was eighteen, because I dated a Dutch guy and could impress him with this remembered nonsense and was probably the only girl in our tiny, northern New York state college who knew any Dutch at all. Years later in Greece, on board a boat sailing to the island of Hydra from the port of Piraeus, I struck up a long conversation with a Dutch poet and asked him about his desire for translation into English. No one reads Dutch, was his response.

Which is why this MFA became one in English with Asian characteristics. It struck me that writers with similarly complicated cultural and linguistic backgrounds need to prod and poke the edges of their consciousness if they wish to locate the language(s) of passions, the language(s) of literary expression, the language(s) of their heart.

So here we are in our post-lapsarian state, in afterness. Which is really just another beginning. Another paradise.

Xu Xi 許素細

CityU MFA Program Leader in Perpetuity

Editor’s Note

I DESIRE TO WRITE because I think and feel. I’ve been told my entire life that I do too much of both. This is what I wrote in my CityU MFA application, and this is why I’ll always need to write.

How extraordinary it has been to meet others who also possess a surplus of thoughts and feelings inside. Some even contain entire novels within. But I quickly learned that writing is much more than cerebral catharsis or emotional bloodletting. It is the intentional reconstruction of life, whether directly captured into creative nonfiction, reimagined into fiction or carefully crafted into a poem. The purpose is to search for and replicate some form of truth found at one point in time. Maybe we lost it and want to find it again, maybe we forgot and want to remember. Maybe it was just so beautiful that we want to experience it again.

And how we searched; examining topics like Asian writerly perspectives, trauma narratives, transnational poetics and more. Where else would a Norwegian aid worker living in Jakarta, a tax lawyer from Chennai and an American schoolteacher living in Suzhou (who was once a boy in St. Louis reading Li Bai and Du Fu), all find their collective intellectual and literary homes? We call it Transnational Asia, or as alumnae Jenn Chan Lyman calls it, a sanctuary for “the hybrid and the hyphenated, the chameleons and the nomads.” This is English writing from Asia, for Asia and beyond. For the five years that CityU MFA accepted students, aspiring writers from all over Asia or with roots in Asia gathered in Hong Kong to search.

For me, writing is a constant psychoanalysis and interrogation of the self, probing the subconscious of my tendencies and obsessions: human connections, found moments and being in transit. It is an analysis of the dreams I have created while awake; the dreams I have created from within.

For two years, I met my classmates three times a year: in the summer, autumn and spring, giving each residency a distinct sentiment. School, and our longest residency, began in the summer, subjecting me to daily trials of commitment as I overcame the pinnacle of Hong Kong’s heat and humidity by walking up a hill. In autumn, my fortitude was tested in the cooling air as self-doubt slithered in along with the ghosts of All Hallows’ Eve, which always coincided with fall residency. But faith in myself was restored each spring when I saw my fellow classmates again. I had survived the winter after all – five months of writing alone – so there was nothing sweeter than to see their faces again during the season that flowers bloomed.

We were together at residencies reading, writing, learning and workshopping each other’s pieces. But when we weren’t gathered on campus, we were still united in writing our portfolios and attempting to produce work worthy of our newfound literary home. Although writing is a solitary endeavor, I knew that I was not alone in the obscurity of the creative process. Whether waiting at the same metaphorical bus stop for our muses, or sitting at the same figurative coffee shop in self-doubt purgatory, we were together in the search.

While workshopping, the icebergs of our personalities were inverted as often times writing revealed that how we reconstruct life is sometimes more telling than what we reconstruct. Some classmates had a proclivity toward lyrical, bold language; others were delicate, economical and sparse. Some wrote with straightforward candor, while others artfully hid themselves within plot, characters or humor. Still, they revealed themselves. We all did, through our clumsy attempts at greatness and all the bad writing habits we kept repeating. Often, we exposed our true natures to each other whether we knew it or not, and whether we wanted to or not.

Throughout the course, I grappled for my voice and identity, trying on different words, tones and personas to construct myself on paper. But really, I was just trying to construct myself as a writer – paper or not. I was just trying to hold the framework of who I was intact while weathering the critique and judgment on hours of my attention and imagination. For me, there is no separation between who I am and what I write. My writing is who I am, a tangible representation of my insides, born of my mind and my emotions.

And that’s all I ever wanted anyway; for someone to see my insides – the red raging through my body, the culture and soil that make up my flesh and meat. This is why I write. And while searching for my own voice, my own truth and my own intentions through the enigma of the writing process, sometimes I find myself. … But when I am truly fortunate, I find others who are also searching.

Although the hill and the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre still exist, CityU MFA is no more. So I strive to reconstruct some form of truth that I have found while studying creative writing at CityU through this anthology. I lost it once when the administration shut down our program, so I want to find it again. I’m afraid that I’ll forget, so I always want to remember. And I found that it was just so damn beautiful that I want to experience it again.

Thank you to Xu Xi for bringing your dream of a transnational Asian MFA to fruition and allowing me to discover my own dreams through yours. Your dream is a spirit and legacy that I will carry forth in everything I read and write.

To the others I’ve met along the way: I don’t know when I’ll see you again ... but when I do, I know that faith in myself will be restored. And when I do, surely, the flowers will be in bloom again.

Rebekah Chan

Editor-in-Chief

Introduction

RANDOLPH BOURNE, the writer and intellectual, regarded nationality as a connection between individuals and their culture, not a political home. People cling to the literature and culture of their native country, he observed, regardless of where they actually live.

Bourne was writing in reaction to the horrors of the First World War and had in mind displaced peoples, refugees among them, settling in new lands to find a better life and that an immigrant nation – like his own United States – offered to these newcomers shelter that would allow them to maintain their cultural identity from which the rest of the populace could learn. The resultant creation, Bourne wrote, would be what he dubbed a “Trans-National” society of individuals with newly-shared traditions; a society with strong ties to the range of countries from which these traditions sprang. A nation not of melting-pot nationals striving to assimilate, but a society where residents celebrate and share their differences and thereby are united, and stronger because of it.

The pieces in Afterness are all concerned, in one way or another, with transnationalism, that borderless existence for increasing numbers of modern migrants begotten not necessarily by war and turmoil, but by worldwide interconnectivity in trade, communications and travel. The products of globalization-containerization-transAtlantic/Pacific travel are individuals who belong everywhere and nowhere: connected yet unconnected, a part and apart. And in contrast to Bourne’s imagined cross-cultural nation-utopia, the new migrants ebb and flow between multiple hometowns around the globe.

It is a blessed curse to straddle the lapping, watery borders of nations and languages. Being at home in one or two cultures, no longer at all unusual, yet still not usual, brings with it opportunities and challenges for study, work, creative fulfillment and love. But can an individual be fully in and of more than one culture? If she or he or they live in two or three or more cultures does that mean not actually being fluent in any one of them? And who does the transnational share the secrets and burdens of this fluid life with if not everyone is transnational, or at least not in the same way?

It’s a life rich with discovery and not without the peril of becoming truly lost.

Keane Shum’s nonfiction piece “Prospectus” sums up the feeling of having the privilege of all opportunities wide open for the taking, of being able to do any- and everything, of the fragility of choice:

I’m scared of pushing my luck, that a rainy day will come and I won’t be able to afford an umbrella. You can’t have everything. You can’t be everywhere. Some things in life you just miss; you miss them because you never had them, or you miss them because you had them and lost them.

Choice for transnationals may be vast, but picking judiciously is not easy. “It’s very complicated,” Jacinta Read points out in her essay “A Sinking Feeling.” When international lines are drawn so lightly, if at all, it’s possible to lose the sense of who is on one’s team – and who is not – when the old and the new worlds collide: “How can we presume to place our cultural expectations on them,” Read writes. “Don’t ask me who our and them are to me, I’m not even sure.”

Read muses over the whos and whats that are responsible for her own predicament:

In less coherent moments I like to blame the invention of long-distance travel for most of my issues. If my Chinese grandparents hadn’t been educated in America they wouldn’t have met, and they wouldn’t have had their number three daughter, my mother, who wouldn’t have met my Welsh father, who wouldn’t have traveled via Kenya to come to Hong Kong to work, marry and have children. I wonder if maybe we all just should have stayed put where we were born.

But going backward is not an option and accepting the transnational facts of life means facing not always fitting in. Nicola Sebastian, in her nonfiction piece “How to Be Alone,” touches on the resultant solitude, and with this modern problem points to the solace that can be found in modern technology:

As you walk, think to yourself that it isn’t so bad, being alone, and that it was silly to have had those thoughts the other night about what if you had never existed. … Try not to think those thoughts every time something goes wrong, or you have not heard another voice except the one in your head for two days. Test your croaking voice in the stifling warmth of your room. Suddenly be struck with the idea that being alone is an endless list of to-dos where the one task you never have to do is to be alone. Delight in the cleverness of this little insight and share it with your online friends.

Those who make a home in their non-native culture may from time to time feel lost in what is paradoxically foreign to the foreigner. Jennifer Lee’s character Jane, a young mother, steels herself against this debilitating emotion as she joins her husband and in-laws through the oppressive crowds and frantic tangle of her adoptive city on the semiannual visit to family graves in “To the Mountain”:

This is Seoul. This is the beginning of the twenty-first century. This thought is enough, sometimes, to arm me against the forces of discomfort with a war cry and a bayonet; I picture them coming at me, the bodiless eyes, the invisible walls of soju-breath, and the swarms of overwhelming signage, buzzing like killer bees. One day, I vow, I will find that twisted gulfstream that exists in all crowded sidewalk traffic. I will learn to live in the spaces between cars and thin walls and alleyways. To find my own thoughts in the midst of the clang and squeal and babble of this city.

Feelings of solitary confinement or of being engulfed naturally tease out coping strategies, including the temptation to hide, safe in insularity, just as Denis Wong’s fictional characters Kung and Winnie do during the Hong Kong Occupy protests, in “No. 9”:

If we stay in this blue tent long enough,

it’ll be as if nothing is left outside,

our world will just be this tent,

and there won’t be any need to remember,

what we have to do or not do.

Poet Judy Keung highlights the dangers of locking oneself behind walls, however, real or imagined, and embraces the wilds of freedom, even if that freedom extends only as far as the writing mind allows. In “A writer’s fantasia,” she advises:

set your ideas free from your mental cage

let them flutter like butterflies on the page

don’t squeeze them into static shapes

don’t squash them with stifling rules

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

let your muses give birth to stunning poetry

let each character create their own destinies

Perhaps the fullness of life cannot be achieved by remaining separate from the world. It’s the disconnects, Nicholas Wong suggests in his poem “Re: work,” that bring humanity together:

in belief of the world as a sane project / in discomfort of hugging someone new / infants expected to renew or further / incoherence connects after all / in the clockwork of seeing the missing / in the holding of hands

In Afterness we proudly bring you the work of sixty-five graduates and soon-to-be graduates of the CityU MFA Creative Writing program, 2010 to 2016. These pieces, some previously published in journals and newspapers as disparate as Griffith Review, Hotel Amerika, Drunken Boat, The Jakarta Post and Sweet, and others published here for the first time, represent the wide range of talents and interests of the writers in the program, living in thirty-five cities as far-flung as Hong Kong, Perth, Mumbai, Stockholm, London, New York, Toronto, San Francisco, Manila and Shanghai. This anthology is a celebration of transnationalism.

Using mental cages – or blue tent walls – not as barriers but to mark safe zones, transnationals celebrate their exceptional place in time, despite the drawbacks and even dangers, just as Carmen Ho’s “Seagull” does:

We hoot our song of triumph. There is much to celebrate in being respected. … A group of tourists pauses to take their photo at the “Welcome” sign. Welcome to where? We wonder. There is no particular boundary that cuts the pier off from the rest of the world. No solid wall, no painted line. People can come in and exit in all directions. Where is the beginning? Where is the end? Perhaps the sign re-welcomes people to the world where they already belong. Perhaps it should read “Welcome Home.”

This is a big book of adventure across transnational nonboundaries, a journal brimming with thoughts and ideas that lift and sing and challenge. Some speak heartily from the perspective of one culture or another or many; each reflects the boundary-pushing, non-melting-pot life of its writer. Why not follow one of these voices that speaks to you – one, at the very least – and see where beyond frontiers the adventure leads?

We hope you enjoy this collection.

Gregg Schroeder

Managing Editor

POETRY

NICHOLAS WONG

Re: work

after Afterwork, an exhibition exploring issues of class, race, labor and migration in Hong Kong, its surrounding region and beyond

Xyza Cruz Bacani, Hong Kong in Mono (2012–14, photographs / digital prints on paper)

In between touched-up intimacies / in case the wish to be wetted by a kiss, wished by a girl’s lips, her feet slightly off the flip-flops / in arms clogged with gentleness / in control: limping, down / in a body still good compared to other countries / in the surround of abused space / in comparison, an eye snows / inanimate scaffoldings purr in pain / incorrect to assume the covered-up is indexical to progress / into a gloomy cloud over the skyline / in finding a jaw of memory that it thinks it should not have / in time of putting on a nightgown just found / in prettiness heavy with discard / in consent with the autographical isn’t renewable, so who are we / in is a man in reverse / in theory, we are all worn out like the most popular belt hole / inaudible web of kids / inclination repents having / in a warehouse of mannequins to be hoaxed / in this frame: a urinal or a dictator’s label / integrity protrudes from a Happy Meal / in belief of the world as a sane project / in discomfort of hugging someone new / infants expected to renew or further / incoherence connects after all / in the clockwork of seeing the missing / in the holding of hands / in the city would a life be a coatrack not without pleasing

ML

A Girl

You should come home before half past ten; no good girl

stays out so late. You should do your homework, but you should

learn how to knit as well; this is proper for a girl.

You should wash your clothes every day. Wear shoes

not slippers on the street; your father will scold you.

Clean vegetables three times with water before chopping;

Fry the eggs – with one spoonful of oil, then steam the meat.

It is appropriate for a girl to learn cooking.

Don’t leave it to your brother, that’s not his job

– Don’t retort, I’m having my meal.

Feed the cat with fried fish;

No need to clean the fish bowels.

He’s only a tomcat, not a man. When you get married,

you should bring up a tomcat; he’s stronger, and more useful.

Female cats just bring you naughty kittens.

But I like kittens. Nonetheless, tomcats are better; boys are better than girls.

You should give birth to at least one boy when you get married.

You should not marry a younger man; and, you must bear children.

– But, Mom, I’m only fifteen. You’ll be sixteen next March.

Anyway, your grandma married at seventeen.

MAGS WEBSTER

Night Owl

I surf cloud-break, wings

sweep stars, brush dust

off the moon. Small scare

far below, in grass, parting.

Tiny pink feet, flex

of backbone. I eat

with the lens of my eye,

hold ready for swoop

and clutch, wet of earth

and fur. Kids carp loud

tonight—one kill will not

suffice. Wife is out

on a girls’ night, won’t

be back till dawn.

Head of the family, me.

Feathers heavy, carry

the weight of the rain

MAGS WEBSTER

My So-Called Soul

a found poem*

she is addressing

the sea, of course—

the pinewood floor

through the trees

and of no matter

the whale-fish hear

like a curiosity shop

her own dark shape

facing mountainsides.

*From Scottish poet Kathleen Jamie’s award-winning

collection The Overhaul, Picador, 2012

SONALI RAJ

God

Do you know who owns the ocean?

Who makes the sun leave by dusk

And awaken at dawn

Do you know who gives rise to the big waves

Who is it that made tigers, then

Diminishes their number every day

You say it’s you who lives two hours in one

You who rides a lion

You have never lied

Do you know who makes the Northern Lights

Who makes the dolphins cry?

Is it you who blows the breeze into my room

Tell me, if it’s you who draws the current

What is it you do with your strength

AME COOMBS

II Shadow Tales

Tale 1: My sister Miranda d. 1951

Tell me a tale, O Shadow, tell me a tale,

What happened to my sister, O Shadow?

Take me back to the beach that day

When nine-year-old Miranda

Was at play,

Sea shells, cockles ’n sandcastles

Digging herself a fortress.

Who took her Shadow? Who took her?

No one kept her at bay,

Like a puff of smoke, gone one day, one day.

I need an answer, O Shadow, I need an answer.

Tale 2: My sister Jane d. 1955

I never said goodbye, never said goodbye.

At the door, twelve-year-old Jane called out to me.

Slumbering like the dead on the canvas bed,

A six-year-old, heavy with sleep,

I couldn’t open my eyes,

Just couldn’t open my eyes

To say goodbye.

This time round, the body found

Struck by rocks at Bride’s Pool.

I spied a white sock, one shoe off

One shoe on, the new pair for school.

ASH DEAN

Lag

Jiyoung looks over a bowl

of tiny dried fish seaweed

and rice While I eat my

cereal hoops We flew

against the spin through

the night shuttered inside

with an unquiet mind now

everything is off We vow

to keep breakfast in our

new time without sleeping

I feel somehow divided

from myself Somewhere

I am plowing a field

or baiting a hook morning

is brisk I wait for

water the zig zag line

at immigration replaced

by the smell of rusty pipes

Sitting here with my wife

I make another vow to find

myself I am behind I am

ahead The good world It

wobbles as it spins The sky

never waits but we are

bound to return we

are bound to the arc

of the earth never

completely at rest the

muscle in our chest

wherever we stand it

pushes and pushes

but never away while we

ride We always ride

JOEY CHIN

Anagram

M e i n e L i e g e

M e i n e L i e b e

e i n e L i e b e

d i e L i e b e

i L i e

i.e.

Translation by author from German:

M y c o u c h

M y l o v e

A l o v e

T h e l o v e

I l i e d

i.e.

MAGS WEBSTER

You voyage my body–

after Octavio Paz

—surf cirrostratus

past hidden eclipses

blood-din of moon

electric disturbance

swim east in search

of a mythical sun

a petalled corona

preparing for solstice

there is no star cluster

to show you the way

only my body

its currents and craving

you carry your fire

right into the flood

drown in the dark

ocean world of me

your comet tail

writhing with light—

DANIELLE VAN-DE-BROUCKE

You, Me and Mory

For Patricia Van-De-Broucke

and Shelagh Cooper

Mory was there the day we baked butterfly cakes.

Your back was turned,

knife poised to lop off tops.

A hand crept toward the counter

began to cram the spoon into a mouth greedy for beige buttermilk.

Mory made sure I saw

your raised, graying eyebrow

that would make me wait

before I would take

the icing for the cakes.

You and Mory gave them wings

that helped them fly off plates

leaving behind a wake of crumbs

and sweet smacking lips.

Mattress became trampoline.

Silken scarves of reds,

green polka dot,

blue peacock’s eye,

buttercup yellow

danced around our tuneless sounds.

You sat and smiled with Mory

so we were stars.

Audience; willing captives to

sugar-fueled girlish fun.

Mory’s silence

meant I heard only

your soft, deep, grown-up

laughter –

muted as the

yellow scarf

floated

toward

the

ground.

There was no time we shared

that Mory wasn’t there for me.

Yet between you two:

the occasional letter.

Birthday card, late,

postmarked, no date.

No matter if he wasn’t there.

A phone call –

if you would answer,

or crackle

and break.

Like Morse Code SOS at a frequency no one could hear.

If Mory had a heart, it would have done the same.

I do.

You looked so small

That day

without Mory.

He was stood behind me all the time,

both hands on my shoulders.

I wanted to leave, but he wouldn’t let me.

That

was the

last time

you

searched

for him,

your child’s eyes in mine.

I wanted it to be different.

I made Mory tell me how

Violet Evelyn danced on water.

Stippled lines melted across her palms,

glittering crystal against stained petals.

Until Mory heard a violin stroke in D, watched              her shorn

stem

pierce

the

membrane.

Moonlit ripples told him where she fell.

Circles grew larger, wake shallow.

Until they were gone.

Moonshine liquid

Unbroken.

You are me Mory.

JUDY KEUNG

A writer’s fantasia

set your ideas free from your mental cage

let them flutter like butterflies on the page

don’t squeeze them into static shapes

don’t squash them with stifling rules

let full-stops go semi-colons vanish

inverted commas get out of the way

let your vowels howl and shriek

let your consonants skip and run

let your letters twirl and twist

let your punctuation bungee-jump

let your muses give birth to stunning poetry

let each character create their own destinies

ELIZABETH MARSHALL

Perhaps

You walked in, my lady dear to the Ghillie Dhu

Shoulders reflecting amber lights, that night of the Ceilidh

I stood to attention, taking in all beauties, dress and tresses

I stood in awe of all, my delight, that night of the Ceilidh

Wine in goblets felt like you in your garment

My hands felt the notes, that night of the Ceilidh

Eyes they searched for words below and behind

They clicked glasses shards away, that night of the Ceilidh

I moved closer to shield your space

Took your arms in mine, that night of the Ceilidh

They came to your table and you invited them

Yet they left you, that night of the Ceilidh

You had given away the haggis, they rejected the pieced fudge

Then you walked out of sight, that night of the Ceilidh

My hands received the whimper, the muted banshee

I moved closer to catch the aged heart, that night of the Ceilidh

Running, fleeing out of the door

Ruining the night that could have been, that night of the Ceilidh

Perhaps if I caught you in my arms

And sang you the Auld Lang Syne, that night of the Ceilidh

AME COOMBS

Surfers & Flounders:

The Golden Shovel

after Gwendolyn Brooks

I firmly believe the world is divided into two kinds of people, we

who are treading water and looking for the ropes and the real

swimmers who navigate the tides of the sea, seeming real cool,

mermaids and mermen, splash and play, while mere mortals, we

learn to navigate this world with its clouds and nets, feeling left

out, floundering but not about to give up. We go back to school,

sit on a bar stool, in a bar area where no drinks are served. We

are attended by lead geniuses and group specialists who lurk

waiting to cheer and clap, waiting for those who enter late.

Mesmerized by all the tools, the docks, with primitive pencil, we

take notes on finders, logos, rocket launch pads that do not strike.

Lesson over in this new temple of worship, we go home straight,

tired but elated after learning the testament of Jobs, we

want to praise him who is prescient of our unknown needs. We sing

our way home. We cannot idolize him. To worship false gods is a sin.

Our learning to navigate in this new world renews us. Though we

feel we are not up to the job, though we wish to be young and thin,

we’d rather put our feet up, dull our senses and have a tonic and gin.

Yet to thrive in this new world, to engage it and learn the ropes, we

muster our remaining bytes of psychic energy. By choice, we jazz

up our lives, turn our withering January cold to fiery summer June.

In our golden years, finally we learn to swim and float. In truth we

do not know how, or where or when we are going to die.

So let us learn to navigate and flourish in this world soon.

MIHO KINNAS

Pistachios

Spring rain two

smashed frogs

pistachio green

Arguments in the heat;

scooping seawater

with a pistachio shell

Apple butternut salad

with pistachio (can be

replaced with almond)

Pistachios in my hands

sound like the last match

in a box

QUENNTIS ASHBY

Poem for the Left Hand

for Tomas and his music

First, the thumb, yours, tumbled, trembling as if trapped in a thimble,

poised over your notes, purposeful, direct, now

waiting for the heart beating in your wooden chest to stop its fluttery shiver,

knowing the approaching stroke will strike right at the voice,

down on the crossing, and in this, your box,

but not to silence it, only to deepen the lines.

The bar line raises itself: noble, able, unclenched, palpable;

like an old melody buried in the rhythm of rests.

MAGS WEBSTER

The Before & in the After

Dying wasps crawl into shoes, settle and curl.

—Lavinia Greenlaw

The year before you leave, dying wasps

crawl into shoes, settle & curl, the garden

puts on armor, becomes a fossil of itself,

birds sing through night, the throttle

of the magpie marbling the darkness,

& I lie face to face with the waning,

a circle of bones in a scraped edge of skin.

The year after you leave, the fret begins,

summer becomes swelter, winter too wet,

while autumn and spring, angled in between

act crazily & spin about each solstice.

I do not care. You are gone where I

cannot reach, but even in the friction

of my dreams, I still hear the shape

of your voice before your body collapsed,

before its swallow dive. Your lunate voice,

like the corpse of a wasp, curved in

on itself, like one I’ve just found

in the heel of my shoe, & I’m shaking

the shoe by the edge of its tongue, in case

it can tell me how to release you,

take back those moments, After &

Before, moments which settle &

curl, which won’t stop stinging.

JOEY CHIN

Ονοματοποιία

When a sound

( )

becomes thing

becomes word

becomes noun

becomes

name.

This poem makes reference to the word onomatopoeia: onoma (όνομα) means name in Greek.

ML

On Poetry

I

Poem

You are a beast

like a flat, formless scarf

that I can’t hold tight and conquer

when I wear you on my shoulder;

Instead, you fly away like a mini-dancer.

II

Poetry is a Leopard

I’m a hunter wrestling with you –

I’ll hunt you down.

Once I’ve tamed you,

I’ll strip your coat

to make you docile as a cat:

To be possessed

As a word.

JUDY KEUNG

Queen Among Leaves

On a granite wall you stretch,

scarlet brown, greenish red,

like a silent flame you spread,

waxy and soft, tender and strong.

apple green framed by rustic red.

You open your palms,

your veins translucent arteries,

You expose your neck,

daring yet vulnerable.

You creep, you crawl, you cling.

Queen among leaves,

defiant of icy scorn,

quiet conqueror,

proud to be you,

not eye-catching

until you show your true colors.

ASH DEAN

Glooskap

A legendary figure of the Wabanaki people, known as

a creator figure, Glooskap means literally “Man created from speech.”

In a way it is like

we are, all of us,

listening to a radio

frequency, or kissed

by the same particle

that travels with angels

of air or streamed

from node to node

teeming through

secret sacred capillaries

because if distance

and mass turn out

to be the same thing: warbled

together spun & stretched at once,

then we might be part of

the same song: If

I am thinking

of Sonia does it

reach Sonia

beyond the drowsy

morning

as the last river

dolphin travels toward

the delta, water sliding

off its back: or secret

notes hidden

under the bark of trees:

so it is true that

we might have

been created

by a single

utterance of just

one word one word

that could sound

like anything but we know

for sure what it

means it means love.

MIHO KINNAS

The Other Night

Exchanged poems in the style of The Tales of Ise

Woman:

You sent for me to wait in bed

No robes or reservations

I was a winter bird in fear of ice melting

Man:

Had you flown away I would have

chased you like the wind but I thought

I’d seen a budding blossom between the sheets of ice

QUENNTIS ASHBY

Bear Weds Rabbit: An Ukiyo-e Fable

On a day when

The bush warbler’s call is faint

A rabbit passing by … (Takao)

The rabbit stops,

Then he hops off to sniff worlds;

A fern uncurls fingers …

Bear’s wedding gift’s green bite;

For her rabbit’s appetite’s

For firm fern friends …

Feathered blessings warble

As, passing by, we hear

Forest echoes fade …

Rabbit grabs the starry sky;

Happy on hind legs,

Wishing for love’s bed …

On a day when animals talk

As people,

Bear proposes marriage …

Rabbit, say you do,

To wed the bear in you;

I do, I do. I do …

Her bear feet not bare;

In her paws lie two goldfish scale rings,

Hers and his …

Vows change veiled reasons for living;

Seasons flock

To witness their lifting ...

A dark moonlit bride

Dressed in clouds of mist;

Bear hugs her first dance at last …

On a day when the moon

Scars the wood of trees,

Woodblock carvings marked time …

Rings are worn.

Seeds are sown. Corn is grown.

Horns are blown. Bearded kids are born …

Epics cut in wood.

Silver images unread,

Rings of life bark closed …

Fabled to be true love

In the forests of the past,

A bear passed by …

A rabbit passing by …

On a day when

The bush warbler’s call is faint (Takao)

FICTION

PETER PHILLIPS

An Interview with My MFA Testamur, Nearly Four Years after It Was Issued

LET’S START with the JFK question. Where were you when you heard about the closure of the CityU MFA? What was your reaction?

Funnily enough, I was sitting on one of my owner’s bookshelves, hanging out with all the novels by MFA faculty that he bought during the program but never read. I’ve spent most of my days there since being issued and it’s not the worst place to find yourself. I mean sure, it’s hardly life in a gold frame, but it beats being crammed into the bottom of a desk drawer alongside the dried-up pens and grimy old coins of this world. Anyway, obviously the news came as a real shock at first. I can still remember the afternoon that my owner received the email announcing the decision. He was absolutely livid and so was I. We were so young as a program – it felt like the party was just getting started and now the fun police was knocking on the door. But as the reality’s set in, I must admit I kind of like the idea of being forever one of less than a hundred CityU MFAs. There are few things sadder than as you grow old, facing up to the fact that maybe you’re not that exceptional after all; as Mary Robison says in a short story that my owner seems to like a lot, being only a little special means you expect too much, most of the time, and like yourself too little. I think if I’d been a testamur from one of those fancy, long established American MFAs at a university that truly values creativity and culture, I’d feel like that. There’d be so many of me! But an MFA from City University of Hong Kong, an institution run by beige-colored bean counters and best known for its shonky collapsing green roofs? That’s pretty unique. I can only imagine that in time, as the very notion of a world-class MFA in Hong Kong recedes more and more into the past, we’ll develop an almost mythical aura and I’m happy with that. Dying young has its advantages.

You mention your owner’s anger at the program’s closure. How’s he holding up?

It’s odd, because for the year or so before CityU’s decision, we’d become somewhat estranged. I think he was at a point where he wasn’t seriously reading or writing much anymore, he was coming to terms with the prospect of becoming a father and the attendant sense of middle-class dread about whether he had the cash to finance that, and he’d begun to question whether spending those two backbreaking years creating me for no obvious material gain was worth it. I even heard him joke to friends he had over one night about how he’d really meant to enroll in an MBA, but had filled in the wrong letter on the application form, which I found extremely hurtful. He’d been so proud of me when he graduated, yet here he was dissing me like I was some kind of two-bit community college course. But when the news broke about the program closing, it stirred up all these nostalgic feelings in him and straightaway brought us closer. He came and got me out of my envelope and as he stroked the 60 lb. parchment paper of my lower body, I could feel the deep sense of longing he felt to be part of the MFA community again. I’ve read about how grief can bring people together, like this story I found on my bookshelf by Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s about a married couple who reconnect during power blackouts over the grief they carry for their dead son. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that intense for me and my owner, but it was definitely nice to know that I mattered to him once more. He let me sit next to his laptop as he drafted his protest letter to the university, and aside from my constant confusion over who or what a “provost” is, it was so affirming to see him write all these heartfelt words about the crazy, magical experiment that was the CityU MFA. He really cared again. And like me, I think he’s oddly proud now of how short-lived the program ended up being, because it emphasizes just how unlikely the whole enterprise was in the first place, and how fortunate those five cohorts who got to experience it truly are.

What did you make of the #SaveCityUMFA campaign?

I loved all the letters, they were great. Of course I already knew a lot of the famous authors who expressed support from their novels on my bookshelf, but to hear them vouch so passionately for the program that I was conceived in was extremely moving. As our world becomes more and more ephemeral, I think it’s really important that we all have a sense of our origins and heritage, so discovering just how much love and hard work had gone into the creation of the MFA was very emotional. I must admit though, I wasn’t entirely convinced by all those selfie photos. Everyone just looked so grim. Not that the closure of our MFA wasn’t grim business, but there was such utter sadness in those faces that I sometimes wondered if we weren’t protesting the torture of child asylum seekers or something similarly grave. I know my owner struggled with the format and gave up after a few half-hearted attempts at taking a selfie with me. He’s one of these people who feels incredibly self-conscious having his photo taken and so never adopts a serious expression. I think that’s one of the (many) reasons he struggles to imagine himself as a “real” writer, he’s worried about the author photo. I’ve seen plenty of book jackets come and go from my shelf in my time and I can see his point. The authors typically look like they’re either struggling to remember their Latin conjugations from school (think Julian Barnes) or have just walked in on one of their parents masturbating (Martin Amis). No one’s ever smiling, that’s for sure. I’m not saying the #SaveCityUMFA selfies should have been all vaudeville or anything, just that for me, it was the proliferation of beautiful words by our students, faculty and supporters that really hit home, not the photos. I think that those words ultimately formed the perfect illustration of not only the awesome writing powers within the MFA, but just how much the program meant to everyone involved.

It’s been nearly four years since you were issued and you’ve lived in Hong Kong the whole time. What do you make of the city?

In so many ways, Hong Kong seems like such a weird place for an MFA. Granted, I haven’t seen that much of the city, but the few times my owner has taken me out – to be photocopied at his workplace, for instance – I’ve peered out the little plastic window in my envelope and hardly observed a culture in love with reading. It seems that Hong Kong’s just too mercantile and drunk on capitalism to be bothered with literature, hence my ongoing amazement that an MFA like ours ever got started here. I know this plays on the mind of my owner, who’s very good at making excuses to justify his lack of creative output. He often naïvely thinks that if only he lived in Brooklyn or Berlin or some other hub of creativity beginning with B, he’d be writing a new novel a month while simultaneously becoming a maestro of the harpsichord. I do realize that my experiences of Hong Kong are extremely limited, and having read the early novels of Timothy Mo, who basically has a shelf to himself in my owner’s flat, I can appreciate how rich a source of inspiration Hong Kong can be for writers who are willing to embrace its paradoxes. The city’s language and identity issues alone cry out for exploration. Just look at me – I have two languages printed on me, yet my owner only speaks one. I’m a born and bred Hong Konger, yet I’m also supposed to represent the best of “Asian writing” – in English. I’m not sure I can define what “Asia” or “Asian” mean let alone “Asian writing.” There are so many like me in Hong Kong, hovering restlessly in the space between cultures, and I just wish my owner would start examining these kinds of questions more in his writing. He’s been here eight years now, has a daughter born here, and from what I gather, has no thoughts of leaving any time soon. And yet on the rare occasions he does sit down to write, he too easily defaults to his stock characters of white, middle-class men wrestling with insecurities and anxieties almost identical to his own. Unlike me, my owner gets to go out and experience Hong Kong every day, and he should realize what a privilege that is. If he could commit to rendering the vibrancy and complexity of this city and its people more enthusiastically in his work, he might give up the misguided notion that being a writer in New York or Europe is better than here and start living more happily in the now.

You mention your owner’s lack of creative output since the MFA. Do you think he’ll write seriously again?

It’s hard to know, but having lived with him for nearly four years, I can categorically say that he should. I’m one of the few who sees him in his most private moments, and I can assure you, the guy’s got some serious issues that would make for cracking fictions. I’m not saying that writing should always be an act of catharsis, but I definitely think that there are emotions bottled inside my owner that simply must find their way onto the page. And to misquote Hamlet, which interview subjects trying to sound clever invariably do, such emotions can’t be left to fust in him unused. Yet too often my owner hides behind gimmicky tropes and narrative devices like appropriated forms and non-human narrators. That’s fine if you want to spend the rest of your life submitting to McSweeney’s, but I know he has bigger writing ambitions than that, and it frustrates the hell out of me how slack he is most of the time. I’ve heard him talking about this legacy anthology for the MFA that’s coming out, and how he’s set himself the goal of writing something completely new. We’ll see how he goes with that. I think what it comes down to is this. As one of the MFA faculty says in an essay I read on my owner’s laptop, if you want to be a writer, you have to want to write more than anything else in the world, and keep on doing it, whatever the cost. It’s so true, but the problem with my owner is that on any given day, he wants to do lots of things more than anything in the world. He wants to drink beer with his mates at the pub. He wants to binge-watch entire TV series over a weekend. He wants to be a good father to his daughter. Doing an MFA teaches you exactly what it takes physically and emotionally to write a lot of words, some of which will be good, most of which will be bad. And it gives you a mere glimpse of the enormous personal costs that come with a life wholly devoted to writing. Is it any surprise that a lot of graduates reach a point where they ask, is it all worth it? Who’s going to read my words anyway? Am I better off channeling that kind of effort into something that might actually make money? I think my owner knows that these kinds of self-doubts are all part of being a writer, but they still slow him down. Maybe having a kid will be good for him – by having virtually no time to write now, he might actually use whatever free minutes he has more productively. I live in hope, because obviously the more he writes, the more worthwhile I start to look.

Before you were issued, you spent some time in a filing cabinet at CityU with all the other testamurs from the first cohort. What sense of the MFA’s early days did you gain from talking to those certificates?

I’ve heard my owner refer to program founder Xu Xi as Professor Chaos, apparently a nickname she uses in email communications. And from what I know, I think that word sums up perfectly the early life of the MFA – chaotic, but in a magnificent way. You had some very serious writers in that first cohort, but you also had your fair share of writing hobbyists like my owner. They’d discovered the MFA largely by accident and signed up without really knowing what was involved, and here they were suddenly in classes with some of the world’s best creative writing teachers and Pulitzer Prize winning authors, with zero clue what they wanted to say in their writing. That added such a raw element to those first residencies, and people spoke and wrote from the proverbial hip. Or maybe it was just the alcohol, as most of the stories I heard in the filing cabinet seemed to involve epic late-night drinking sessions and the hangovers that follow them. Most of the chaos seemed to center on a mysterious underworld figure called Dan Ryan, who I gather runs some kind of speakeasy in the bowels of Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong. The trouble nearly always started at his joint, and I imagine the bar there is still stained with the tears that often flowed. You always hear that the writing world is full of bitter feuds and acrimony, but that just wasn’t the case with this MFA community. Instead, there seemed to be a profoundly deep bond between everyone from the outset – the group laughed together, cried together and downed way too many Jagermeister shots together. There was an esprit de corps in this MFA that few, if any, programs in the world can claim, and that’s a pretty cool achievement in itself.

It sure is. Do you have any final words for the officials who shut down the program?

Look, I accept that there is no shortage of people in the world who enjoy the act of screwing others. And if you’re that kind of person, there are countless professions you can enter where a willingness to screw other people is the number one prerequisite. Go into litigation, or politics, or management consulting … knock yourself out. But if that’s really your thing, my question is why go into education? Here we had this beautiful program that was a lighthouse for creativity in Asia, bringing together outstanding people from all over the world in a spirit of new art and intercultural understanding, then after barely five years, a small band of bureaucrats comes along armed with spreadsheets and business jargon and cans it. Who knows, maybe they’re really nice people outside of work, but to me, that’s just a stupid way to run a university. In time, I’m sure this MFA will reinvent itself elsewhere in Asia, it’s too strong of an idea not to. But that’ll mean CityU ends up being the big loser, and unfortunately I was silly enough on the day I was printed to go and get the university’s logo tattooed on my forehead. I can live with that, I’m hardly the first testamur to do something reckless in my youth. But that tattoo will always remind me how the same university that created me was also the one that broke my heart.

Well said. It’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you.

Likewise. So long as I can keep out of the recycling bin, I look forward to doing it again soon.

DENIS WONG

No. 9

September 12

THE NO. 9 MINIBUS is full today, mostly kids from the preschool and their Filipina domestic helpers. The traffic down Kennedy Road is slow, a bit unusual for the mid afternoon. From my lap, Elliot is counting the Muppet-like characters of an Avenue Q ad. 1-2-3-4-5-6, purple-orange-green-yellow-pink-blue. I try to remember if there’s a real avenue Q in Brooklyn, but I’m pretty sure there isn’t.

The bus jolts, and for a moment Elliot is simultaneously forward and backward. I catch his head before it hits mine. Helpers squeal as their bags come loose, and collections of oranges and kiwis tumble under our seats. “Jesus,” I say, and Elliot says, “Daddy, don’t say that. It’s not nice.”

“Sorry, El.”

Out the window a large crowd has gathered on both sides of the road near the American Consulate. “We should’ve just walked,” I say. I wonder what the United States has done. The bus continues to stutter ahead by inches; it’s slow enough that I can measure the angle of the sunlight as it begins to cover our legs. Then up to our chests. “I’m hot,” says Elliot. He squirms, and leans back so that he is hanging half off the seat. We should’ve just walked.

The driver of the minibus is skinny and brown, with unexpected permed hair. Cigarette smoke from his break lingers in the fibers of our chairs and he shouts, “Fuck, it’s a party. That’s right all of you, get out your cameras.”

Outside, reporters form a semicircle around four police officers and a man. A terrorist? The guy looks more like a stressed-out accountant: glasses, sweat-plastered hair, oversized, plaid short-sleeved shirt. The cop talking, pleading to him is holding a large, clear riot shield, and for a second I think there’s a bomb, but then I remember I’m in Hong Kong, and not New York, or other places in the world where bombs exist. The accountant is holding something, a knife, pointed at his own heart. He’s placed it in the correct space, a bit off-center to the left. Maybe he studied anatomy. Maybe he checked Wikipedia. Whenever the police get closer, he steps back and jerks the knife closer to his chest. His arms are frail; wrist bones protrude.

Elliot looks out and I ask him, “How many monsters are there on the poster?”

“Six.”

“Can you count again to make sure?”

“No, Daddy, I’m sure.” He says this very clearly so that I understand. He looks straight into my eyes.

“Then what letters do you see? Can you tell me the letters?”

“Just stab yourself already,” the driver is saying over us. “Or at least stab yourself at home. Why cause everyone so much trouble? Need an audience.”

The accountant outside is getting more desperate. As the officer talks through the transparency of his shield, other cops are creeping up around the man. They move together in a clumsy dance. A semicolon. It’s sad. Just terribly sad. Which is worse, a successful or botched suicide attempt? I’ve never been able to figure it out.

“Just die already,” the driver says.

I’m glad today that Elliot can’t understand Cantonese. “A-V-E-N,” he says.

Kung and Winnie

Will you sleep with me if I go to the protests?

Democracy now.

Look, we care about things together.

They can’t kill us all.

I know we have a lot of homework.

Keep calm.

Everything is happening now.

Love Hong Kong.

I’m tired of everything being the same.

Stay strong.

I love you.

Do you hear the voices?

Love me, screw Hong Kong but love me, okay?

October 7

It’s the first day that schools have been open since the protests began and the No. 9 minibus is fifty minutes late at Exchange Place. Elliot didn’t want to go to school, but a lollipop bribe has gotten him this far. We’ve been here for so long that we can’t even smell the exhaust anymore. He jumps down from the railing that he’s been climbing on. “Why do I have to go to school? Why, Daddy?”

“It’s the principle,” I say, “that our lives continue. That life goes on no matter what’s happening.”

Elliot thinks about this for a few seconds with his three-year-old brain. He sighs. “Can I have another lollipop?” I’ll say no and he’ll be disappointed, but I’ll still say no.

Kung and Winnie

Hong Kong is just an accident. We’re just an accident. This hunger, and toilets, and washing up. Love. I’m writing a paper about this. I can’t let go. My mum and dad want to visit. Our mobiles are dead.

November 25

“Fuck,” the driver mutters. “Traffic.” We’ve stopped moving entirely. Tops of tents peek out in the distance, as if a fair has come to town. The driver shifts back and forth in his seat. His eyes wince every now and then. “Damn protests, damn China, damn students, damn traffic.”

The other passengers ignore him, or maybe only I can hear him, since we’re sitting in the seats directly behind him. He tilts his head up slightly. “What do you think about all this?” He studies me from the rearview mirror.

“I don’t know,” I tell him, because I don’t want to talk, because Elliot’s on me, because I’m tired, because it’s difficult to explain I’m American and from Hong Kong, too. But he won’t let it go.

“Come on, which side are you on?”

“What sides? I don’t know about the sides.” And finally he leaves me alone.

Elliot makes funny, babbling noises. His version of Cantonese.

Kung and Winnie

If we stay in this blue tent long enough,

it’ll be as if nothing is left outside,

our world will just be this tent,

and there won’t be any need to remember,

what we have to do or not do.

The future, suffrage, democracy, Hong Kong,

none of these words are real.

December 1

We’ve been on the minibus for more than an hour now. By now, the kids will already be in circle time. Another twenty minutes and Elliot will have missed out on snacks. The driver is silent. The entire bus is silent, aside from the slumped sounds of bodies and sleeping children. We’ve only gotten around the corner of Statue Square, where barricades, umbrellas and fallen leaves block the road. The Mandarin Oriental stands observing. I consider asking the driver to let us off, even though it’s technically illegal. By now, I’ve had to admit that maybe life doesn’t continue on in quite the same way, not when there’s a boy to feed and distorted air all around.

“Excuse me, driver.”

But he doesn’t reply.

“Hey, driver!” I say louder. He’s not even turning around.

“Daddy, why are you yelling?”

“I’m not –” and the minibus changes gear and lurches forward though it can’t, because we’re still in traffic. Instead it turns to the left. Another gear change. I sit/fall on my seat and hold Elliot to me. “Shit,” I say. “Daddy ...” but I can’t apologize because we’re already reaching the barricades. I grip Elliot’s knees and he says, “Ow.” What can the minibus do going twenty-five miles per hour? I remember driver’s ed. Most collisions are low-speed collisions. The crash test dummies always hit the windshield; joints bend in oblique angles. There aren’t any seatbelts around, so I wrap myself around Elliot, so that he is curled under me, his head against my breastbone. He senses the tension under my calm, and says, “Daddy, what’s going on?” It’s nothing. Tents come closer into view. Police in the area wave their arms, and as the bus shakes I think, yes, we can see you, too. People scatter, onto sidewalks, grass, each other. There’s a sound coming from Elliot that sounds like a feral keen. Or it might be the driver screaming, a joyous scream like he has conquered a hidden fear, like this is the moment he’s been waiting for during all those years driving the No. 9 bus up Kennedy Road, Bowen Road, Borrett Road.

The children are still sleeping, but a few nannies have woken because of the noise. They stare in confusion. Frowns form on their faces, more annoyance than anything, and while I think about juxtaposition, we hit the barriers and it’s the sound of a hundred soda cans being stepped on. My back hitting the protective cushion in front, my knees falling underneath the seats and the feeling of Elliot. “Elliot, Elliot, hey, Elliot are you alright? Hey, Elliot are you alright? Are you alright?” I’m shaking him although I know that shaking is not a good idea. His eyes open.

“Daddy, you’re squeezing me too hard,” he says.

“That was just like a rollercoaster, wasn’t it?” I sound manic, I know.

“Well, it wasn’t as fast or as fun.” He looks as if he wants to cry, because the nannies and children around us are crying, but he doesn’t cry. “Daddy, what’s going on?”

I try to say something but I can’t, or I say, “It’s fine it’s fine.”

The Occupy protesters watch from afar while reporters and police rush toward the minibus. Is the driver okay? I check but he isn’t here. All the windows are intact, but then I notice the opened door. And there he is. The driver is running, no, sprinting, through the barricades, toward the protesters. He heads straight for a blue tent. For some reason I watch his hands as he runs. They’re open and careless; for a second he reminds me of Elliot running. The police follow close behind, but when the driver ducks into the blue tent and closes the flap behind him, the cops stop and wait outside. They circle the tent in formation: front, back, both sides.

I can make out the outlines of three people inside the tent, two shadows huddled together and another diving toward them. The shapes become one and I stop looking because I can feel Elliot kneeling on my thighs and his neck and his arms.

We’ll outwait them all. We’ll persevere. Everything we need is here.

JORDAN DOTSON

The Protester

IN SPRING he felt raindrops pinging his scalp and swore no typhoon could move him. The next week he realized the sun still shone. It was just an A/C he discovered, rusty and dripping and splotching his sign and he swore again three times as loud. Who has money for repairs in this town, he said aloud to the one-eyed flower salesman.

That summer he broke his toe, then kicked the curb with his good foot until he was certain that neither would crumble. Fall was a great season. He fell in love that fall, with a strawberry-shaped mole on the chin of a girl who worked in 7-Eleven. She disappeared by winter, of course, when he was arrested twice, but at least they gave back his sign.

It was an early Monday when his father died and he decided to take the week off. The local policemen all shook their heads at the empty space in the sidewalk, but he’d show up again, they knew. And so he did, at 6 a.m., when dawnlight fingered the sootiest seams in the city. Show up, he did. Just the same as always. Just like he’d never left, as summer rained rust water right into his mouth. It was tangy and fresh and a good year to be angry, he decided.

Then came the autumn when they didn’t get the vote, or maybe the second, or third. But one thing for sure, that was the week when he ate half of nothing at all. The students left bowls steam-hissing on the curb, and he just watched and listened. Then passersby kicked them over. When he signed himself out of the hospital, he saw his own face on T-shirts and flyers and flung fresh noodles at the crowd. How quickly you forget, he told them.

May came and he checked his watch, wondering how it could be so cold. His breath fell and shattered on the ground and his teeth clattered off-rhythm, but when he caught his reflection in a camera store window he felt such marvelous pride. Truly, truly, a fantastic beard. That day he chanted twice as long and loud. When the Observatory declared the weather a record January low, he tucked his beard in the nape of his coat and blamed it on rental prices.

Spring Festival always made him cry. Then, during Spring Festival, he realized he’d forgotten how to cry. It took him till summer to remember.

Flowers were growing in the median when he found himself young again. His arms were strong and his feet nimble, and he yanked the spring blossoms up carefully. He wanted to preserve the roots, to make himself a tongue-red crown. If he couldn’t have freedom, he could at least be a king.

He knew it was a Saturday when the schoolboy stole his sign. Eucalyptus husks scuttled past his feet, scritch-scratching on the concrete as he found the playground empty. He slid down the slide three times, but none of them worked. He remembered how he loved to sleep in on Saturdays.

At 5:14 one Tuesday morning, he coughed up blood, as was his right. And when I was young I saw him. He sat beneath our window. And he was the story we told whenever we needed to be scared. Because we told stories then. We had to. They were all we had. Stories and dreams and visions.

JENN CHAN LYMAN

Vigil

ON THE TWENTY-EIGHTH DAY of Po Lin’s vigil, her mother opened her eyes and said, “Don’t pour that cheap stuff on your father’s grave. Bring him his favorite.”

“Maa?” Po Lin rose from her chair and blood rushed to her half-awake limbs.

“Your brother will forget. Your sister-in-law would have him drinking cooking wine if she had her way. It’s up to you, Aa Lin, to do good by your father.” Her mother’s left eye was unfocused beneath the sagging lid, but her right eye was sharp. “You look tired.”

“Maa, how are you feeling?”

“Why so tired? If I’d known that husband of yours was going to work you like a dog, I’d never have let you marry him. Chewing pork rinds all day while you work the meat off all ten fingertips. Aa Keung should watch it, what with his high cholesterol. Men don’t listen. Your father never did.”

Po Lin hesitated. It was so good to hear Maa’s voice. This was the most coherent she’d been for weeks, though she’d forgotten that Aa Keung was dead. He had a heart attack years ago, leaving Po Lin in Dong Guan tending to the embroidery shop that kept their son in college.

The stroke had hijacked Maa’s entire left side and rendered her in and out of consciousness for the past month. After two weeks at the hospital, Po Lin’s brother, Fung, and his wife, Ling, had brought her home to East Kowloon, ostensibly for Maa’s comfort, but Po Lin figured the climbing hospital bills had more to do with it. Since then, Po Lin commuted to Dong Guan twice a week to make sure the head seamstress Xiao Dong had all the orders progressing well at the shop, but returned to the cot at the foot of her mother’s bed every night.

The late afternoon light from the small window behind Po Lin cast an orange glow over her mother, masking her gray pallor. Maa’s palm was cool in her own. She squeezed Po Lin’s hand and said in a soft rasp, “How long has Aa Keung been gone?”

“Six years.”

“Huh.” Maa closed her eyes and her face transformed into a stranger’s. The left side drooped, as if a seam had come loose and was left un-mended. Po Lin fought the urge to pin it up, to stitch it back into place.

“Are you hungry, Maa?” she asked, trying to rouse her.

“No.” Eyes still closed, Maa added, “Wake me up for the news.”

“Okay, Maa.” Po Lin swallowed the bitterness in her mouth.

Maa loved to watch the evening news, every night, for as long as Po Lin could remember. But what would Maa think of the news today? A few days after her stroke, the city had become unrecognizable, erupting in response to the latest election reforms. For weeks, the images on television seemed out of a movie: protesters swarming like ants, students sleeping in the streets, tear gas streaming into the crowds. It wouldn’t do any good for Maa to watch the news now.

Po Lin folded back into the chair that was wedged between the bed, the wall and the tall cabinet at her elbow. Maa’s breathing became regular again. Po Lin closed her eyes, taking in the familiar scent of dried plums and sandalwood.

The front door clicked, startling her.

In the outer room, her brother Fung was sliding the security gate closed behind him.

“Maa woke up.”

“She did?”

“Not for long. But she was talking.”

“What did she say?” Fung said, slumping into the couch.

“Something about Aa Baa’s favorite wine. She was speaking clearly though. She wanted to watch the news.”

“Mm. Be prepared, Aa Lin. Could be any day now.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Your sister-in-law wants us to be prepared.”

“Maybe we should call the doctor, see if Maa should go back.”

“I’ll call tomorrow.” Fung switched on the television. The camera was panning across a sidewalk strewn with broken umbrellas and yellow helmets.

“She’s eating so little. Maybe an IV would help. I can call tomorrow.”

“I said I’d call. Start dinner, your sister-in-law will be home soon. Aa Wing coming tonight?”

“No, he’s staying at the dorm.”

“Mm. Make sure he stays off the streets.” On the television, students were studying in a well-lit tent surrounded by hand-painted protest signs. “Look at them. So naïve.”

Po Lin looked at the faces of the young protesters; some radiant, some haggard. They looked desperate, maybe, but not naïve. Maa would probably agree with Fung though. He said the protests were pointless. The students were wasting their parents’ hard-earned money. There was no use fighting. The city should face reality instead. Po Lin thought there was something quite noble about the protests, but Fung was probably right. There should never have been any illusion that the city would remain the same. They were part of the motherland now, another stop on the Guangshen railway like grim and dusty Dong Guan. Po Lin went into the kitchen and turned on the faucet, drowning out the low rumble of the news.

The next morning, Po Lin was on the subway heading to Hung Hom Station when Wing called.

“Maa, I don’t want you to worry, okay?”

A pit began to form in her chest.

“I’m at Admiralty. I’ve been here on and off for a while now.”

The pit widened, threatening to swallow her, the train car and her fellow passengers whole.

“It’s safe here. I’m with my class. Mostly studying. It’s not violent like Mong Kok.”

Wing kept talking but all Po Lin could think about was the image of a police baton caving in her son’s head.

“Maa? Are you there?”

“Yes, I’m here.” She swallowed the cotton in her throat and continued, “Were you there when the police –”

“No, Maa, don’t worry, okay?”

There were a million things she wanted to say, but all she could manage was, “Do you have a helmet?”

“I’ll get one.”

“Quickly.”

“Okay, Maa. It’s fine. Really. It’s important, what’s happening here.” The hopefulness in his voice brought tears to her eyes.

“Be safe.”

“How’s Po Po?”

“About the same, but not eating as much.”

“Can’t you bring her to the doctor again?”

“Your uncle says it’s pointless.”

“What do you think?”

She hesitated.

“There’s hope until the last moment, Maa. Don’t worry about Kaufu and Kaumou. You have to fight for what you –.” She held her breath until he came back again. “Sorry, Maa, I’ve got to go, I’ll call later.”

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing. We’re moving to the study area now, I’ll message you tonight when I get back to the dorm.”

She exhaled. At least he wasn’t sleeping in the streets.

Across from her were a group of students, each wearing a yellow ribbon. Wing must have one, too, she thought. The subway heaved to a stop and the doors opened, letting in a stream of passengers before whirring into motion again. Two middle-aged men standing in the center began talking loudly. She caught only fragments: “... ruining Hong Kong with naïve notions … bellies full of education but not an ounce of responsibility … parents can’t show their faces anymore …” Finally, the shorter man turned to the students and said, “You are an embarrassment to your families, flushing your futures into the salty sea.” Po Lin glimpsed the blue ribbon pinned to his chest. An anti-protest protester. One student stood up. He was taller than both of the men, but skinny like a reed. Like Wing. Po Lin flinched, thinking they would come to blows, but then the boy began to sing “Happy Birthday.” The short man yelled for him to shut up, but he kept singing. The tall man pushed the boy and then the other students rose, singing in unison. The men stood red-faced as the train slowed for the next stop. When the doors opened, the tall man shoved the boy once more before leaving with his comrade.

Po Lin texted Wing: “When you find a helmet, let Maa know.”

Throughout her trip to Dong Guan and back, Po Lin could not shake the image of Wing getting his skull bashed. He texted her last night about having a helmet but she didn’t feel any better. The smell of burning brought her back to the present. She turned the choy sum in the wok but it was too late. She arranged the un-scorched leaves onto a platter and brought it to the dining table. Ling came home just as she was ladling out the soup.

“How did it go,” Fung said from the couch.

“Awful. Tung Lo Wan is a mess. Roads all closed. Idiots standing around like there’s nothing better to do. Don’t know if Daai Go’s store is going to survive. It went from being in the best location to the worst and the landlord isn’t about to go easy on the rent.”

As all three of them sat down at the table Ling continued, “If the students keep this up all those neighborhood stores are going to die.”

“Occupy, occupy … as useful as a fart,” Fung replied. “The mainland doesn’t care. These students fighting for their so-called future won’t have any at all after the police mark their IDs.”

Po Lin felt the heat rising in her face and stood up, gathering her chopsticks and half-finished bowl of rice.

“Eating so little?” Ling’s voice followed her to the kitchen.

“Not very hungry,” she said as she edged into the narrow space. She ran the faucet on full but could still hear her brother talking.

“… and who knows what else the government will do once their numbers are on file? They’ll have to emigrate to Canada or Australia to find a job.”

Po Lin scoured the burnt leaves encrusted on the wok, keeping her elbows in to avoid smacking into the tiled walls. What would Fung say if he knew Wing was in Admiralty? Sure, she was afraid of the consequences, too, but the way Wing sounded on the phone, the exhilaration, the optimism – she’d never had that kind of fire. If Fung found out, though, Wing would just be another naïve kid and Po Lin a neglectful mother.

Fung called out, “Lucky that Wing’s the timid sort. I used to worry about him not having any guts but better gutless than jailed.”

She threw down the pad and shut off the faucet. It took only the few steps from the sink to the doorway to make up her mind. She announced, “I’d like to bring Maa back to the hospital.”

Fung and Ling looked at her in silence.

“I know you think it’s pointless – but we can’t let her wither away.”

“Who says we’re letting her wither away?” Fung said. “She hates being at the hospital. She’s much more comfortable here.”

“She’s eating less and less.”

“That’s what happens. She’s eighty-four and she’s had a stroke.”

“At least the hospital can give her some nutrients, maybe an IV. And she’s eighty-three.”

Fung drank his soup slowly. Ling began cleaning her teeth with a toothpick.

Still standing at the doorway, Po Lin said, “I’m bringing her in tomorrow.”

Fung set his bowl down and said, “Fine, just don’t blame me when she gets sick from all the germs, or when she can’t sleep because of all the people coughing at night.”

Po Lin’s heart pounded as she cleared the dishes from the table. Fung’s remarks worried her. She must text Wing to come tomorrow. She would feel better with him by her side.

The canteen at Haven of Hope Hospital had paltry food options, so Po Lin hiked downhill to the nearest shopping center for lunch. It had been over a week since Maa was admitted. When she and Wing first brought Maa in, the doctors and nurses seemed hopeful, but as the days passed, they grew more aloof. Maa had remained unresponsive, waking intermittently but with eyes glazed over. That morning, the doctor reminded Po Lin that brief periods of lucidity did not suggest that the patient was capable of recovery. False hope, he added, would do no one any good.

The Café de Coral was full of the usual lunchtime traffic. Po Lin sat down to wait for her takeout. Beside her, a teenage girl was watching a video of the protests on her phone. Protesters with umbrellas open at assorted angles faced a jagged line of policemen. There was a great shout and batons began flying down. Her eyes filled with tears as she watched the heads of strangers being pummeled on the tiny screen. She thought of Wing. “When was this?” she asked the girl. “Last month,” the girl responded. Last month, not last night. Tears flowed down her face. The video jumped to a man sitting in the street with empty palms facing skyward. A miniature rocket hits him in the chest, enveloping him in gas. The girl said, “Not much hope for Hong Kong.” Po Lin had no response. The service bell on the counter rang insistently as a server hollered her number.

Twenty minutes later, her shirt was drenched in tears and sweat as she reached the hospital entrance. She could not stop from weeping, for her mother, for her son, for the city. Her brother was right. What was the point of fighting? Her mother would end up buried beside her father within days or weeks. Her son would end up with his head beaten in and his future ruined, or at the very least, his hopefulness crushed out of him within weeks or months. And within five or ten or fifteen years, the city she called home would end up disassembled and patchworked back into the motherland’s tapestry, as if its own spirit and personality had never existed. And where would she be? In Dong Guan sewing dragons and phoenixes for bride after bride after mainland bride. She wept for all these inevitabilities, but most of all, she wept at the prospect of never hearing her mother’s voice again.

A nurse was standing beside her mother’s bed when she returned.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” the nurse said, smiling. “Your mother’s been telling me stories.”

Po Lin hurried to the bed and the nurse left the two of them alone. Maa’s right eye looked directly at her.

“Aa Lin, do you see the size of this room? It’s the biggest room I’ve ever slept in. Look at this window!”

Po Lin laughed and took her mother’s hand. She had decided on a private room, which she could only afford for another week before dipping into Wing’s tuition money. It was a suite with a large picture window, a private bathroom and a couch that doubled as a bed, though Po Lin preferred the chair at her mother’s bedside.

“How are you feeling, Maa?”

“Maa’s tired. You look tired, too.”

“I’m okay. Do you want some water?”

“Not yet.” Maa closed her eyes. When she did not stir, Po Lin shook her shoulder gently.

“Maa? Don’t sleep, Maa.”

Her mother’s paper-thin eyelids fluttered open. “What time is it?”

“Almost 1:00 p.m.,” she said, her voice catching in her throat.

Maa pointed her right index finger at the television hanging on the wall and said, “Midday news.”

Po Lin switched on the television. Coverage of the protests began almost immediately, but the scenes were mild: protesters milling around at the sites; a student lying on the street with a book tented on his face. When the coverage ended, Maa said something in a soft voice.

“What, Maa?” Po Lin asked, lowering the television volume.

“Those people. Reminds me of when I was young. Actually, I was not even that young. You and Fung were with me, too.”

“What are you talking about, Maa?”

“The five cents incident. You must have been four or five. We went to one of the demonstrations, a student demonstration. Before the violence, of course.”

“Five cents incident?”

“The Star Ferry raised rates by five cents. It was a big deal. The British were fat and the Hong Kong people were hungry. It was pointless, of course. Rates increased anyway …”

“Maa?”

Maa’s right eye refocused and she asked, “What are they demonstrating for?”

“Universal suffrage.” Po Lin could not resist the urge to tell her everything. “Wing is there, too, at the protests, and I can’t do anything about it.” Her voice faltered. “I’m so sorry, Maa.”

“Why are you sorry, silly girl?”

“I didn’t want to tell you about Wing. I shouldn’t have shown you the news either. You should be resting, not worrying.”

“Aa Lin, Wing’s a big boy now. It’s good to fight sometimes.”

“Aa Go says it’s all pointless.”

“Maybe Fung’s right, but you never know. Sometimes you fight, sometimes you let things go.”

“How do you know the difference?”

“You won’t until you try.”

“I’m not ready, Maa.”

“You don’t have to be.”

They were silent for a few moments. Then Po Lin whispered, her voice trembling, “Are you ready, Maa?”

“Aa Lin, Maa has been ready for a long time now.” She added, “Maybe a little water.”

After a few shallow sips, Maa closed her eyes and said, “Wake me for the evening news.” She cleared her throat twice and then was still.

Po Lin set the cup down and laid her head on the bed, cradling her face in her mother’s warm palm. Alternating shadows across the faded hospital sheets mirrored the movement of unseen clouds above. Beyond the glass all she could see was a tree-covered mountainside. At first, there seemed to be nothing hidden in the thick foliage, but after her eyes adjusted, she could make out a narrow path leading upward to a small, obscure structure. A shelter, a shrine, or just a concrete block – there was no way to know from a distance. She closed her eyes and listened to her mother’s respiration, counting each breath until finally succumbing to sleep.

JOHN FRANCIS SMITH

A Special Gift

IT WAS LIKE one of those film moments when you want to check behind you before saying, “Me? You’re talking to me?”

I was retreating home from the office on a midweek, midlife birthday that I was trying to ignore. Thankfully, no one else had mentioned it and I was looking to get back home, have a long shower and phone in a pizza. Separation can make you want to slam the door on the world, and that’s the way I was feeling as I crossed the cobbled forecourt of City Hall. I walk past every day and there’s always a scattering of tourists posing for photographs. I occasionally get asked to take the shot, but I was in no mood for photographing tourists this evening. Keep moving, I was thinking. Don’t look up and don’t hesitate. And that’s what I was doing until she leaned forward, fixed me with those laser blue eyes and said, “Can I ask you something?”

How do you resist that? One half of me was saying, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to catch a bus,” while the other was countering, “Of course. I’ve got all the time you need.”

Can I ask you something? I think it was the politeness and the gentleness of her tone, or was it the conspiratorial way she leaned forward? It doesn’t matter, unless I want to torture myself for the rest of my life thinking about her, which I don’t.

Can I ask you something? Yes; I’m ready for anything.

“What would you like to know?”

“I’ve only got a few hours before I have to catch the boat back to the mainland. Can you tell me what to see?”

“What to see?” I echoed, buying time while I absorbed the question and searched my brain for an answer.

“Well, the museums will be closed and …”

“I’m not really into museums.”

It was the smile. It was that, “This is fun, isn’t it?” smile. But why me, of all the people who must have been walking in Central? Well, why not? I didn’t look like a gargoyle, and my shirt was ironed. Perhaps this was my lucky day.

“Let me think. Have you been on a tram?”

“No, I’ve just been walking around the shopping centers.” She held up a carrier bag.

“Okay, let me show you where to catch one.”

I walked with her through flash floods of people rushing toward ferries and buses. When we got to the stop I told her what to do but she just stood smiling, as if waiting for something more.

“Shall I come with you?” I said, and the next minute we were on the top deck with the breeze blowing in and the crowds below.

“This is great,” she said.

“This is my birthday,” I said.

“No!”

As we sat looking out at the shops and market stalls I wondered if I should have said that. Perhaps it would make her feel uncomfortable. But it didn’t make any difference at all. She brushed back her wavy hair and watched in wonder, as though the scene from that tram was the most marvelous thing she had ever witnessed. She was leaning forward again and every so often she’d turn to me and smile, then return her gaze to the open window and say nothing. I’d been along that street a thousand times but had never seen it the way she was seeing it now. Perhaps the first time had been like that, but never since. Now I felt as though I was seeing it through her eyes of clear turquoise, and the world was a miraculous place.

“This is great,” she said. “I’m lucky I bumped into you.”

I felt like repeating the words back to her. This could turn out to be the best birthday of my life.

“What’s next?” she said when we got off. This time I was ready.

“We’ll take a taxi up to the Peak. From there you’ll be able to see the whole city in lights.”

“Great,” she said, and smiled into the distance.

As the red Toyota wound up the narrow road, the thought crossed my mind that I was being taken for more than a taxi ride. I knew nothing about this young woman except that she was in her mid-twenties, had been sent over the border by her boss to collect clothing samples for his factory in the mainland, and was enjoying her one evening in Hong Kong at my expense. But so what. She’d rescued me from a birthday in front of the TV with a double cheese and salami, trying to forget that my estranged wife had moved in with a guy who was taller, richer and more handsome than me. What did I have to lose?

“I never imagined there’d be so many trees,” she said, and the way she looked at them was as though she was trying to commit each one to memory. I thought then that it was because she only had that one evening to see the city, but now I wonder if she had some idea that her time was short and she wanted to absorb everything around her in the belief that she could take it with her. But that’s preposterous.

“I don’t even know your name.” I’d distracted her from the trees, and she turned and fixed on me for a moment.

“Cathy,” she said. Then, “What’s yours?” with that smile, as though we were playing some guessing game that was the most fun anyone could have. She just had this ability to make me feel like I was the most important person in her whole world.

“Tony,” I said, and she gave one long assenting nod of her head, as if that was the best possible answer I could have given her. Then she returned her gaze to the passing scene, glancing back at me for a moment, as if to seek approval. Or was it something else?

For me it was becoming tantalizing by now. I couldn’t tell what was really on her mind. I began to wonder why a pretty young woman would ask a complete stranger what to do in an unfamiliar city, then jump into a taxi with him and drive up a densely wooded hillside as darkness began to settle. And what were my motives for doing this? Was I content to be a tour guide for the evening or was I desperate to find out if I was still remotely attractive to women?

I couldn’t wait for the next part. As we got out of the taxi I said, “This is the best bit.”

“Really?”

“Yes. The anticipation.” She nodded, as though I had reminded her of some enduring truth. “Wait. We’ll go in here first and let it get completely dark.”

I guided her into a shopping center and we wandered among the crowd. I’d forgotten that sensation of being in shops with someone at the start of a relationship, when you’re insecure about how long you should spend looking at something before the other person gets bored. I was aching to put an arm around her, but I didn’t. Now I know that it wouldn’t have mattered, but I wished I’d done it.

I said, “I want to buy you something.” She seemed surprised and her mouth opened a little. It’s funny that I can remember all these details now; things that I didn’t think I’d even noticed at the time. Perhaps I’m just making them up. Memory can be creative about filling in the blanks. “As a souvenir of your visit,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said, with extra emphasis on the “thank.” It was stated so sincerely that I can still hear her saying it.

I bought her a blue pendant on a thin silver chain. It was glass and flashed as it caught the light. I wanted to put it around her neck but the assistant got there first. Cathy must have known how I felt when I bought it for her. I hope she did.

Finally, we were ready for the highlight of the evening. We walked out toward the vista point and the whole city opened up before us like a great open jewel box. At the edge of the vista point she reached down to grasp the fence rail, then leaned forward as if to embrace the whole fabulous spectacle. Or be absorbed by it. Perhaps this was the most significant moment of her life. As she looked out over the electric lights I stood transfixed, adoring her. She was perfect.

I had to persuade her to leave that spot. When I mentioned eating I noticed her grip tighten on the rail. We sat at a table for two but she didn’t eat anything.

“Sorry, I don’t feel hungry,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s my fault for insisting.” I felt foolish then, like someone who has just learned something that has been obvious to everyone for a long time.

She smiled. “I’ve been so lucky to meet you.” An expression of great uncertainty, almost pain, passed across her face. For a moment she seemed disoriented. “Can we go back out and see the view?” she said.

We walked farther along this time and found a quiet place among the trees. She reached up and felt the pendant. “Thank you,” she said, then turned, once more to take in the fabulous scene.

“Cathy,” I said, but it was too late. By then I could see right through her to the trees beyond. She remained a moment longer, becoming more and more transparent until her body stretched, then burst into a thousand tiny stars. They floated around me like little worlds, until one by one they were gone.

For a long time I couldn’t move. When I did, it was to pick up the pendant from the damp earth. I looked at it in the palm of my hand and saw Cathy’s eyes again. They say eyes are windows to the soul but that’s nonsense, isn’t it? Hers were the purest eyes, but she didn’t even have a soul.

I turned and stared out over the city. For a while it had seemed like a wondrous place of endless possibilities. Now it had turned its back on me again.

My mobile droned. Absently I pulled it from my pocket.

“Happy birthday!” said the female voice.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Did she find you?”

“Yeah, she found me.”

“So? Did you like your special gift?”

“Yeah, she was great.”

“Well, we couldn’t think what to get you, and I know things haven’t been great recently. So we all put in for her. Aren’t they amazing? Jim’s workmates got one for his boss. He loved it. Did she look real?”

“Yeah, completely.”

“But you guessed, right?”

“Of course. I can still tell the difference between real people and ...”

“Well listen, I know you didn’t want to make a fuss about it this year, but let’s do something at the weekend.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll call you.”

“Right.”

“Bye. Have a good one.”

I turned and walked hurriedly through the tourist groups. A voice shouted, “Photo! Photo!” but I kept going, away from the people and away from the lights, out along a narrow path to the shelter of a banyan tree, where I bowed my head and wept.

ANDREA BRITTAN

Domestic Arrangements

MARIELLE REACHED OVER to tuck the quilt around Brandon’s shoulders. His murmuring from the lower bunk had woken her from a leaden sleep. She sat upright, leaned against the bunk beds and listened. She hadn’t meant to fall so deeply, not now, not this weekend.

But everything was fine. The apartment was silent, except for the lion-shaped wall clock Mrs. Lawson had brought the boys from one of her business trips. Its hanging tail marked out the seconds with a regular swish.

There was nothing to worry about.

Her bed was a rolled out mattress at the side of the bunks – Louis on the top, Brandon on the bottom. The twins had just recovered from scarlet fever; now Marielle insisted she slept in their room, one ear tuned to the rhythm of their breathing. Recently, she’d started listening for other sounds, too.

Marielle lay down and turned her pillow over, resting her head on the cool cotton, but sleep was elusive. Tomorrow was Sunday – her day off – and Mr. Lawson was in charge of Louis and Brandon; his wife was not due back from Beijing until late afternoon. Before Marielle set off for church, she’d ask him to take them to the cinema. The latest animation film was showing – the boys talked of nothing else. Then, by the time they were back, their mother would be home.

Her friends thought she was lucky to have such a good employer, but really, it was just that Marielle and Mrs. Lawson understood each other, even though she’d only recently come to work for the Lawson family. Marielle knew that Mrs. Lawson didn’t like the children to have too much bread or rice or pasta and no sweet drinks at all. She knew that the two sets of navy blue bedding and the matching navy towels were for the master bedroom only; the cream linens were for the guest room. Marielle understood the use of bleach was forbidden.

In return, Mrs. Lawson trusted and respected her and paid her well. Marielle now earned a thousand dollars above the minimum monthly wage after she had dived, fully clothed, into the pool to rescue a pale and gasping Louis from the deep end. She often overheard Mrs. Lawson tell her friends of Marielle’s dedication. There were no binoculars kept on the windowsill, ready to spy on her when she took the twins down to the playground.

Yet these days, she was forever on her guard as her position with the Lawson family was becoming harder every month. Her life had become like a game the twins played where they tried not to step on the cracks in the pavement, except the cracks in her pathway weren’t so much gaps as yawning crevasses.

Brandon murmured again. Marielle sat up at his side, watching his face for any sign of anguish or discomfort. His eyes flickered open for a second then closed slowly.

“It’s all right, baby,” she said, stroking his hair across his forehead.

“Can I have some water, please?” he croaked, through the haze of sleep.

Marielle pushed herself up from the mattress and pulled an old shapeless dressing gown of Mrs. Lawson’s over her pajamas, wrapping it tightly around her. Taking care not to wake Louis, she tiptoed out into the hallway. A full moon shone in through the sitting room window. No clouds drifted across its face; it was as clear and bright as an unblinking eye. Its glow filled the apartment and cast a rippling pathway across the parquet floor to the master bedroom. She paused, listening, but heard only the whistling rumble of Mr. Lawson’s snore.

Brandon had kicked off his quilt when she returned with his water. She knelt beside him, his eyes fluttering open as he levered himself up from sleep.

“Here you are, baby,” she said, cradling his shoulders then settling him again once he’d finished. And while he sank back into sleep once more, she crooned a lullaby she remembered from her own childhood.

Her head was nodding again when a noise from the hallway jerked her awake. The moon was still up: a bar of light filled the gap under the door. A shadow – a pair of legs – moved across it. Alert and tense now, she crouched closer to Brandon’s bunk. She pulled the dressing gown tighter, shrinking down into its folds, and watched as the doorknob turned. Surely he wouldn’t come for her now, not here in the boys’ room?

With only a moment’s regret she snaked an arm under Brandon’s quilt and pinched the soft flesh of his thigh. He let out a cry – half shriek, half sob – and opened his eyes in bewilderment.

Mr. Lawson stood in the doorway. He was naked, his silhouetted outline revealing a jutting erection.

“I’m sorry we’ve woken you, Sir,” she said. “Brandon’s restless tonight. I’ve already fetched him some water. I think he has a fever.” She knelt over him and placed a hand on his forehead. “Shhh … shhh,” she soothed.

Mr. Lawson hesitated, then left without a word.

Once Brandon had settled again, she hugged her knees into her chest and closed her eyes. Thoughts of her employer’s husband filled her head. The excuses he made to come to her room when he thought she’d be just out of the shower or changing to go out. The way he squeezed past her in the hallway, a hand brushing against her breasts. Then last month, when Mrs. Lawson was in New York on business, he’d pinned her against the kitchen cupboard, his breath sharp with whiskey, and forced a hand inside her jeans.

By the time Louis and Brandon were climbing down from their beds in search of their father and breakfast, Marielle had come to a decision.

Usually, she met Lilibeth and Reyna on Sunday mornings. They went to the nine o’clock mass and afterward, they’d spend the day in Hong Kong Park or find a spot under one of the fly-overs in Central to sit and play cards, and share news from home.

But once mass was over, she made an excuse not to join her friends. Instead she headed toward Central, down Lan Kwai Fong, where the air still smelled of last night’s beer, to the market stalls of Li Yuen Street. She picked out a red thong, fingered the lacy fabric. Was she being foolish, wasting money when the outcome was so unsure?

To be certain, she turned and headed up to the steeply sloping steps of Pottinger Street where she bought a long blond wig from a costume stall. But both purchases cost more than she’d anticipated, leaving her with less money than usual to send to the Philippines. She went home to wait, and prayed her plan would work.

It seemed as though God had answered her prayers as Mr. Lawson and the boys were still out when she got back to the apartment. She thanked Him again that Mrs. Lawson had chosen a sharp, masculine navy blue for the master bedroom, rather than the cream fussiness of the guest room. In fact, everything moved with a smoothness that seemed preordained – Mrs. Lawson’s arrival from the airport, her fury at her discovery, her outburst when her husband returned home with the twins.

“You’ve been at it again, haven’t you? The minute I’m out of the door, you’re at it again,” she screamed, hustling the twins into their bedroom. Her face was sour and drawn. Before the kitchen door closed her off from the dispute, Marielle glimpsed Mr. Lawson’s bewilderment and the twins’ looks of stunned confusion.

It broke her heart that her boys should be so upset, but how else could she ensure her own survival? Things would have only become worse with Mr. Lawson.

Angry fragments could be heard through the door.

“… only a tart wears red lacy knickers … a blond this time … I’d have thought even you would have remembered to check the bed for stray hairs …”

Marielle opened the kitchen door just enough to see out into the hallway and waited for it all to be over. Eventually she heard the squeak of suitcase wheels.

“Let me speak to Louis and Brandon,” said Mr. Lawson. His voice was tight, defeated.

“No way. I told you last time this happened. They’re upset enough as it is.”

The suitcase wheels continued out into the lobby. Then the front door closed.

Marielle crept into the boys’ room. Brandon sat sobbing on her mattress. She sank down next to him, pulled him to her.

“There, there,” she whispered. “Everything will be all right.”

Louis climbed down from his bunk dragging his bedding with him. He lay down at her side, head in her lap, teeth clamped around the corner of his duvet.

“There, there.” She gentled them with her soft voice and stroked the brown curls of their matching heads.

How long they sat there she didn’t know, but eventually the gulping sobs stopped and the stiffness dissolved from their rounded limbs. As the twins relaxed into sleep, she felt her own tension slowly subside. He was gone and she was still here with her boys.

Everything would be all right.

JOY AL-SOFI

Dayshift Done

… He [Wing] comes toward this end of the boat, and sits down on the last row of deeply stained varnished wooden benches. He puts his left foot up on the next row in front of him and rests his left elbow on his kneecap. His colleague, [Kit,] also in the Star Ferry sailor suit, indigo with white highlights along the edge of the broad collar and a big star on the left chest, comes over with slouched shoulders, dragging his shoes as if they are a pair of slippers and as if he is a panda walking upright, and says in a hoarse voice, “Passengers are not supposed to put their feet up.” “Either here or I’ll stick my foot up yours,” is the response.

– Gershom Tse

THE TWO MEN’S EYES lock then Kit lurches away toward the railing clenching and unclenching his fists. And Wing’s foot stays where it was. He stares at Kit’s back, willing it to burst into flames. That bastard!

Wing pastes a grin on his face, turns his head away from Kit and looks toward the starboard railings as if enjoying the view. Pain shoots up his leg and he uses both hands to rub it, working down his leg, across the top of his foot to his toes. He raises his fingers, sniffs and spits through the rails.

Gates clang open and Kit scrambles to the bow. A momentary relief before the scattering of mostly mainland tourists stumble aboard; couples compete to be first to the best-viewing seats. He knows they’ll be confused and sit facing backward. Too stupid to know the seat backs slide back and forth for a front view no matter which way the ferry is heading. Their shrs and ers rise and fall about his ears like a buffeting wind. He shudders, but without the mainlanders, there’d be nobody.

Wing’s shift is done. When they reach the opposite side, the tourists will push and shove their way off and he’ll follow behind. Another bunch will barge on and the ferry will embark but without him. Tomorrow, he’s on duty again. Tonight he’ll stand in the queue, fight his way onto the bus and hope he finds a seat. Some days, it’s like his leg is dead and he can’t feel anything. Days like today, when Kit’s around, the pain is a boa constrictor moving up his leg, squeezing the life out of it.

Kit may be big but Wing is wiry and strong. He could take Kit down in a heartbeat, anytime. When his foot is back right, Kit better watch out. He tries anything, he’ll get what’s coming. Just wait. He has repeated this all the years since the day it happened. For a moment, echoes of this phrase fill his head, mocking him.

His eyes linger on the dock where the line is still looped around the cleat. He knows its heft and curves and the many tricks it can play. Another line, just like that one, had tripped him up long ago. The rope, yeah, and Kit.

Kit had been big, a lumbering hulk of a boy, even back then. He’d started working on the ferry a few years after Wing. Always trouble; always a show-off. Kit thought he was a big shot, trying to get to the top, push past Wing. But Wing had understood early on that because Kit was a few years older he thought he should be boss. Wing’s seniority was in his way.

That’s why Kit flashed that mirror at Wing, trying to blind him so he’d stumble over the rope and fall in the water, maybe get crushed against the wharf. Instead, all that happened was his banged up foot and it hadn’t stopped him up to now. Kit hated that Wing was still around. Sorry Kit-jai, Wing’s not ready to leave the ferry, not just yet.

An idea flickers at the back of his mind: if he retired, he’d never have to see Kit again. He shakes his head. Never mind, it gets shoved down like always. Outlast that son-of-a-bitch, then leave.

Wing and his wife have talked about him retiring but what would they do without his job? And what would he do with all that extra time and Ah Ling still working? He finds no answer in the bobbing skyline fast approaching. Ah Ling has her job, one she likes. There’s not much pay but together with his, they manage. So not yet.

Almost every trip these days, scenes of what used to be flood his mind as the green and white craft maneuvers out into the crowded waters for the now less-than-eight-minute ride across the shrinking remnants of Victoria Harbour. It was vast once. He’d started working when he was twelve, alongside his father or nearly so. Every morning, they got up before dawn and he would try his best to match his father’s stride down the hill to the busy streets and Queen’s Pier. His eyes slide across the gap where the old pier once stood. There are days he doesn’t recognize the city at all and the harbor looks like a stinking open sewer.

Plenty of times he’d had to run to catch up with his father, then restart his stride-matching game. Once in a while, they stopped at a dai pai dong filled with working men on their way to jobs. He’d eat the wide, slippery cheung fan with the salty sauce. Sitting with the men surrounding him, Wing felt connected to a long and never-ending line of men whose work was changing the world. No time for such ideas on the job.

He’d worked dockside, lifting and hauling thick coiled ropes, holding back long queues of people, keeping them from getting tangled up or falling in, especially the ones who’d had too much alcohol. It was hard work in the sapping humidity and heat with only a few seconds snatched, after one ferry left and the next arrived, to squat under the high-hanging, fast-humming fans that whirled overhead like wobbly, woozy spiders. And if he looked too long, they made him dizzy drunk, too.

The day came when they got a new rope, all pale and tightly curled. That was the first time they told him to lift it all by himself and he could barely move it; he could get only a tiny portion up, even when he pulled with all his strength. The other men laughed. Embarrassed, the line dropped from his hands. He watched that rope become part of the crew, saw it fly from his father’s hands and he loved the rope until the day he caught his foot in it. And even after that, he didn’t hate it. Every replacement rope was a continuation with the same trickster spirit as that first one; a rope is tough, dangerous and unstoppable, just like him.

When he and Ah Ling married, they made plans for all the things they would do. Nothing they thought then was anything like how it turned out. They imagined their sons working with him on the ferry, just like he worked with his father. Thousands of people depended on them every day, stood in queues that stretched for as far as could be seen. And even though the ferry company wasn’t the best pay, it was steady and would always be there. Who could have believed otherwise when ferries ran until after midnight, every ten minutes or so, to all parts of Hong Kong, to Kowloon and beyond to the outer islands?

He had worked on the docks till he turned fifteen and gotten promoted to assistant linesman. Then it was his turn to be on the boat and throw the rope back to the dock. A new boy stood where he’d just been, learning the job he’d once had. A few years later, the company bought grappling hooks to manhandle the ropes. As for a new boy? The youngest was probably fifty and to Wing it seemed like they hadn’t had a new hire in twenty years.

He and Ah Ling never did have any sons. They put their two daughters through college, medical degrees. Both girls married and moved to America. They say he and Ah Ling ought to come over there and live with them but he doesn’t have the energy to pull up his roots, not now, so near the end of his life.

Behind him the rapidly changing, skyrocketing shoreline of Tsim Sha Tsui recedes. Ahead, there is the new pier that looks like a child’s toy, some sort of joke. With the harbor shrinking over the years, the number of trips and the shorter turn-arounds are wearing him down faster than he expected. There was no longer a chance to catch his breath.

In a few minutes he will get off, head for the bus stop and home. It was a good thing, his work, but this ferry business is almost finished. Give it another two, three years, tops.

His body shouts, telling him he won’t last even that long. He’s never wanted to make the move to America to live like children dependent on their own children. His foot tells him today he might not make it as far as the bus. Doubts cloud his mind. He’s no longer sure if he can stay working the boats. But he has to stay. Kit would win. He’s got a few minutes to pull it together or ...

What if this time he can’t make it off the ferry? Kit would kick him off or worse, carry him like a sack of rubbish, laughing. Someone would snap a photo. He’d slug Kit before he’d let that happen. Then what? He’d have to crawl. None of the images made any sense to him: his future … the next two minutes. Nothing.

Almost all his life, he’s been working here and for a long time it’s been just a place to earn a paycheck. Looking around, everything feels different. He can’t remember going two days in a row without seeing the shifting horizon and the never-still water. It’s like he’s in some kind of dream that keeps flipping back and forth like those pictures that first look one way and if you look longer it changes into something else. One minute, there are huge numbers of people and cars all crowding onto triple-decker ferries. The next, he’s standing in a nearly empty vessel and it seems like it’s a dream instead. How could it all have just vanished? All the people no longer being carried by the sea. For them, in those few moments, there was no time, they were free. He was the one who gave them that, and now – all of it is gone and the people don’t even know what they have lost.

He stands and the pain almost drops him to the deck. He stumbles back to the seat. A minute, he just needs a minute. Overhead, black kites glide in circles, wheeling effortlessly over the open water. One swoops and plucks a dead fish from the water then carries it off. No hesitation. That’s how you do a job. Once he was free, moving like that. He knows it now; his time is done. Call Ling. She’ll come down to help him, let her know it’s time, even if they have to sell their tiny flat.

His eyes search the closing horizon as he rubs his leg with long, slow strokes that quicken; then he’s pounding his foot trying to get the blood going, trying to bring it back to life, wondering which way is America.

VIVIAN TANG

By Foot or By Feather: Excerpt from the Novel

IN THE MIDST of a dream where he stood on an impossibly high cliff with no leaf in sight, where swirling angry purple clouds covered all creation, and where he crouched, overcome by vertigo and the fear of falling to his death, Teru sat up and wondered if he was fit to fly that night. The office had been busy as usual, but he felt drained. Could this be the flu? He had been in Hong Kong for three years and hadn’t so much as sneezed. No ... he was simply over-tired. He must be.

He resettled in the sofa trying to sleep until he heard the knocking. More knocking coming from the balcony that turned out to be Cria knocking at the glass door. She slid it open, stepped off a battered leaf the size of a plate and came into the flat. The leaf had been plucked from an alocasia, and by the looks of it, she had borrowed it from his plants earlier that day. Teru ran a hand through his short gray-black hair.

“What’s wrong, old man? You’re usually up at this time.” Cria flung herself onto the couch opposite him. “Don’t tell me – the Hang Seng Stock Index plummeted. You’ll have to recoup by charging more from your clients.”

Teru ignored her. “I distinctly heard someone say they would be back in half an hour as opposed to half past eleven.”

“No watch, sorry. Anyway, I’m going free-falling – are you down with that?”

He shook his head.

“Why not? It’s dark out, plus there are dragonflies and plastic bags wafting around at ground level – if we fly high up, we’ll be covered.”

“I feel tired.”

“You took a nap! Come on, you’re not that old.”

He nodded at the leaf on the balcony. “Pick up after yourself.”

“Fine.” She flounced over and hurled it over the railing. It flopped and tumbled down twenty-nine stories.

“Cria.”

“What? It’ll blow away or biodegrade or whatever.”

“Try to be more careful. I’d expect more from a glider on the flight committee.”

“I know, I know.” She waved a hand. “So, free-falling tonight? Will you come? If not, we’ll wing it without you.”

“We?”

A second figure landed on the balcony and slowly walked into the apartment. “Seam’s been checking out Hong Kong,” Cria said. “This is Teru, my brother and the finder of Hong Kong.”

Seam strolled into the flat, bowed awkwardly and greeted Teru. “Sir Finder. Nice to meet you.”

Cria laughed. “Just call him ‘Teru.’ Want a drink?”

“No, thanks.”

Cria strode into the kitchen. Seam stood in the corner of the living room folding and unfolding two leaves from a Cuban Bast. They looked like they would make for choppy flying. He didn’t look like a glider – there were no obvious scars on his hands or face. He wore black, matte clothes and his scuffed sneakers were also made of dark, non-reflective material. Cria had done a good job of informing him of the local dress code for flying at night.

“Please take a seat, Seam. Tell me where you’re from.”

Seam sat on the edge of the large sofa with his knees together and his hands rolled up on his knees. “The Red Forest.”

“When did you arrive in Hong Kong?”

“A few days ago.”

“How do you find it so far?”

“Good, sir, thank you. I’m still getting used to flying at night here. It’s much brighter than the forest. It’s a little disorienting, but Cria’s been a great guide.” Seam darted a glance toward the kitchen and looked at Teru again, who nodded.

From the kitchen came the sound of glass clinking as the refrigerator door opened and closed. Cria walked into the living room sipping ginger ale. She sat beside Seam on the sofa.

Seam folded his leaves and held them in both hands as he glanced around the room. It was sparsely decorated: an L-shaped sofa and a high-backed, padded chair separated by a coffee table lined by a stone-blue carpet. The rest of the room was an expanse of wall covered in a cool gray suede-like material. No pictures. The ceramic pots in the balcony outnumbered the pieces of living room furniture by far. The larger ones contained large, leafy alocasia. A row of fleshy jade plants with leaves the size of hands and cacti with long soft prickles stood in rows around the larger pots for decoration.

“So, uh, Teru, what kind of flats do you use?”

“Mostly alocasia and lotus. I would have more alocasia on show but I’m afraid someone has been borrowing the finer specimens.” Cria pulled a face. Most of the oval, dark green leaves in the ceramic pots that huddled together on the balcony were a handspan wide. Among them jutted stems that ended in ragged tears or one or two larger leaves.

“Lotus, wow. What’s the mileage on those?” Seam asked.

“Well –”

“See for yourself.” Cria strode to the balcony. She tore off one of the darkest leaves the size of an open magazine and threw it to Seam. As he scrambled to catch it, his own yellowing leaves dropped onto the living room floor. Cria took a second leaf and set it on the ground. “Make like a tree, people.” Cria stepped onto it and immediately rose up over the balcony and shot off toward Victoria Harbour, blending into the dark night.

Seam gave Teru a puzzled look.

“She means it is time to leave.” He grinned. “See you at the Egg.”

“Thank you for having me over, Teru.” Seam stepped on the lotus leaf and levitated out of the balcony.

Teru picked up the phone.

“Esmé. Would you get me the caller in the Red Forest? I’ve got a new arrival here. His name is Seam.”

Seam found the leaf to be very sensitive to movement. Standing straight, he brought it to a smooth stop and hovered gently. Leaning slightly forward made it drift with him. When he crouched suddenly, it plummeted. More responsive and powerful than the leaves he was used to flying, the leaves soon carried him across Victoria Harbour to the Kowloon Peninsula. He swooped down and flew above the dark mass of water, the black waves nothing but slosh, sloshing beneath him for hundreds of meters until they eventually picked up the glints of the lights in Tsim Sha Tsui. He spotted Cria waving to him and followed her to the Egg and Curve.

The Science Museum and Cultural Centre were unusual buildings, immediately distinct. One was covered with square white plates that curved around the museum, making it spherical like the squat end of a gigantic egg; the Cultural Centre was a beige rectangle with its roof scooped out, giving it a curve that joined to points, like an “M” with a smooth valley.

“So, Teru’s a finder, huh? What’s it like – have you ever seen him in action?”

“Yeah, but he can’t say anything.”

“He ever find you anything?”

“Confidential.” Cria enunciated the syllables and hip-checked him out of her way. She made for the Cultural Centre and started to climb into the air above it.

“Come on!”

“Nosy!”

Seam spotted Teru on the Egg and sat beside him. They watched Cria warm up, preparing to break her record for fourteen loop-the-loops. Gliders. They saw her pick up speed and altitude until she was hidden in the clouds. Seconds later, she was bombing toward the steepest point of the Curve and streaming along the Curve to the second point which made her whoop and sent her wheeling back into the sky.

“Has she always been so carefree?”

“From the day she hatched.”

Cria was getting ready for another attempt. Teru and Seam watched her glide on the roof of the Cultural Centre, shooting into the colorful sky and spinning loop after loop. It was the kind of thing that snowboarders, skateboarders and surfers dreamed of, the kind of thing that pilots could achieve in their anti-gravity advantage, flying in tiny circle after circle in the air. She carved the tiles of the pink building and whirled into the air, making fourteen, fifteen, sixteen loops! She clasped her hands above her shoulders and shook them in victory as she floated from the sky onto the dome of the Egg. She swept her leaf in a curtsey. “Props to my supporters. I couldn’t have done it without them.” She drew out a bottle of water and sipped.

“Good run,” Seam said.

Teru clapped. He stood up. “I will be leaving soon, Cria.”

“The night is still young, sir.”

“You stay. I have an early start tomorrow.”

“Aw, really? Then let’s see you to the Harbour.”

From the Egg, the three made a smooth ascent up and over the water.

Cria was weaving up and down in the air. “I can’t believe it, sixteen loops! I’d like to see if the others –”

Teru dropped.

“Teru!” Cria screamed, coming to a halt in the air.

Seam shot down to the surface of the water. “Cria! Grab the leaves!” He dove into the choppy waters.

SOPHIE KALKREUTH

Breathing Under Water

WHEN HE MENTIONS his wife and children, he does so offhandedly, as if this is already known to her. Sarah listens politely and tries not to avert her eyes. The words circle around her. She lets them hang in the air, waves of sound that have not yet reached her ears, suspended yet encroaching. When they fall they will tear a hole through her.

Under the table her knees are pointing toward his. There is a sliver of space between them, a gap just large enough to slip through, but she feels powerless to move, afraid to disturb the momentum, the pulse that is pushing them forward. Everything is close but also far away. The low-lit walls of the restaurant, the clanging of glasses behind the bar. She feels like she is inside of her body and outside of it, hovering, watching.

As he speaks she recalls the particular angles of his movements, his voice, how when he smiles his face lights up with lines crinkling at the corners, the way he shreds his napkin while he talks, then gestures wildly, scattering the small white shavings over the table.

It’s been months since they first met at the bar in Hong Kong where Alex sat sketching the room onto hotel stationery. The lines he drew were layered and scraggly as if creating and unraveling its subjects at the same time. At first glance she thought things looked misshapen. But it was a careful disorder, the tilted row of liquor bottles, the beer taps, the people sitting on stools. She saw her own shoulder and a wave of her hair. Her heart beat faster. Before they spoke his hands had already traced the curve of her neck, the arch of her back.

She’s not sure what feels greater now, the time or distance that has extended between them, the soft space into which she has crawled, cocooned by their words. When they parted Alex slipped a torn piece of paper into her coat pocket: I already miss what could have been. She discovered the note days later, soft and creased around the edges. The words coursed through her like sparks along a wire. She folded it and placed it back in her pocket.

The notes continued into the winter, emails and letters, her heart racing each time his name appeared in her mailbox. She spent hours choosing her words and studied his in microscopic detail, consuming each one slowly until the letters swarmed inside of her.

There is a seagull circling outside my window today, he looks about as restless and lonely as I feel, but at least he has the wind as his companion …

The wind is such a force here, too. I wish you could see the way it has sculpted the prairie snow into smooth-edged drifts. They look like giant waves but are hard-crusted and strong enough to carry me.

I walked by our restaurant today and I was remembering how you burned your fingers playing with the candle wax. You were glowing so brightly, Sarah. And to imagine you now, floating across frozen drifts ...

Isn’t it strange the way certain moments are preserved in memory and others fade completely? I forgot about the candle wax, but remember distinctly the picture you sketched.

The bearded man behind the bar … I couldn’t quite get his profile right. Memory is mysterious. But when I’m with you I feel I’m able to remember every moment exactly.

He never mentioned family in his letters, and neither had she. Now sitting across the table his eyes are on her. She feels them linger even when she looks away, feels her self condense under his gaze. It’s as though he can see through her, the heat of anger flaring in her stomach, the desire drawing her body in; she feels as transparent as the glass in his hand.

She thinks about her first time diving into a shipwreck, the final family vacation in which she and her father learned to breathe underwater. Below it was silent and dark and felt safe compared to the sweltering sun and the unease that awaited them on the surface. She remembers sliding slowly through the barnacled rails of old cabin doors, seaweed swirling around like the mane of a giant ocean beast, the way slender fingers of sunlight found their way into the deepest crevices, fine filaments of silver wavering over the landscape of underwater ruins, the fins of fish twisting along the coral floor. There is a whole other life under the sea’s surface, a world that moves parallel to ours.

Long after their shells have been eaten away by salt and sediment, rusted remains lie lodged in the seabed. Sarah can still see her father’s brown leather briefcase leaning against the table by the door. It looks both familiar and foreign strewn among the toys and shoes, woolen hats and mitts. She has an overwhelming desire to open the brass buckles, the leather flap. She has seen him handle the case with careful precision, the partitions inside dividing papers and envelopes, his passport. With a quick flicking of fingers, he rolls up his tie and tucks his razor into the small, outer pocket.

When he returns he pulls out gifts from overseas: miniature African masks, silk scarves from China, shells from a Spanish beach. His eyes sparkle. Sarah and her sister sit on the floor and examine strange currencies – large blue bills from Tanzania, heavy coins from Hong Kong, relics from a colorful world beyond theirs. The leather becomes soft and worn over time and one morning it sags like a dead weight in her mother’s hands. She sits unmoving with the case on her lap. Her eyes are swollen. There is an empty wine bottle on the table, and a passport with two tickets. The corkscrew glints in the sun. Sarah’s father stands silently at the window. Then his taxi arrives.

Sarah puts her glass to her lips. She watches Alex’s mouth move around his words. Each story they share unravels into the coil of another, like this isn’t the first time their lives have touched, like their stories have already intersected and they have simply arrived at this moment, the natural sum of an endless number of moments. But now she sits outside, too, hovering, watching, and she wonders what stories he tells himself, about the sum of his choices. She wonders why she failed to notice his wedding band.

Alex scrolls through his phone looking for photos to show her. The screen casts a pale light onto his face. His teeth and the whites of his eyes gleam; the rest of the room recedes. She grips the side of the table. Keeps her hands on the hard surface as if to say, this moment is solid, this one won’t dissolve, but she knows this is untrue.

She leans in closer and glimpses snapshots of his daughters playing with butterfly nets and sandcastles on the beach. The sea is sparkling gray and the gangly childhood limbs are flung wide, always moving beyond the frame. She watches his life slide under his thumb. The pictures are real, she thinks; they will sink to the bottom. They will last. The screen turns off but he continues to hold the phone in his hand. She holds the images inside of her, swallows them and holds them in her gut. Small shards of evidence, a reminder of what should be resisted.

Later he pushes her hair away from her eyes, traces the arcs of her eyebrows with his thumbs, kisses her mouth, her collarbone. Each place his fingers touch the small, swallowed cells spring to the surface. Sarah feels them like magnets pulling and repelling, burning holes in her skin. She knows he can’t touch her without touching them, too. Each point of contact leaves a print, like a smudge on glass. The walls between worlds grow thinner.

Somewhere a woman sits at a table and waits. Sandcastles are flattened under the force of moving feet. She concentrates on the feel of his hair between her fingers. It is soft and thinning at the back. She coils it around her fingers and holds it in her fist. She knows he will slip from her hands at the first light of morning.

When Sarah leaves the hotel she finds the streets awash in hazy sunlight. She feels the heat on her face, bright slabs of sky float between the buildings. She walks back along the creek, emptying her pockets into the wind.

CLINT ETTINGER

The Sheep Years

I

MEI FELT FUNNY in her abdomen and she knew what was happening. It felt like a melon had died on its vine and months later, on a spot of earth deep in the trees off the path behind her parent’s house, she squatted low and pushed. It was the eighth month in the Year of the Sheep and the leaves had started to fall from the poplars and elms surrounding the village.

She hadn’t allowed anyone near her since that night in the melon patch under a waning moon, her body pinned to the ground, compost and dead leaves under her fingernails, feet tangled in the tendrils.

No one knew but her; not the boy, nor her parents. Her cheeks had gotten fuller but she said it was winter weight; she hid herself in loose garments, hadn’t allowed anyone to see her unclothed.

She was calm throughout, focused instead on her surroundings in the woods. The sky was a hazy sheet metal and the sun struggled to glow. When she was younger, perhaps three or four, her father had called her mother a worthless dog, berating her for producing a girl and nothing else. He called her mother one name after the next, words she didn’t yet know and others she would never forget.

You’re a barren wasteland, her father said. What use is a hen that doesn’t lay eggs?

Crushed by the weight of his bitter anger, her mother sat meekly and absorbed it.

Mei couldn’t vividly recall a time before that incident, so as she squatted low to the ground and pushed, she was not surprised by how little pain she felt. What she did feel was an intense concentration on her feet planted firmly in the ground. She pushed and pushed. A head broke through and a body followed after, a miniature pinkish version of herself slipping to the ground with a wet thud.

She had known it would be like this: at first not believing or wanting, but then gradually the acceptance and realization that it was true, the yearning was real. But there was something wrong from the third month and although there had been movement throughout, the last few days brought silence and stillness.

Around her she heard the trilling of insects, the sporadic shouts of farmers yelling in the distant melon patch. But there were no cries here: not when the tiny body first touched the choked soil; not as Mei placed her into the freshly dug hole; not when she scooped in handfuls of dirt and patted the earth flat.

II

Nostalgia stirs in Mei’s belly as she returns home one last time for a funeral. The primary school has fallen to shambles, and the local market has been razed. Behind stone walls, heaps of trash pile. Though this is not the village she remembers, her parents’ home remains the same, yet seemingly smaller and less significant.

Decades of smoking and drinking and bitterness finally killed her father, who died cooped up in that house. Now he must be buried. The day is brisk and threatens rain, and she likes to think that if it did, it might just wash away all the filth.

It has been nearly twelve years since she fled from here to the city, from a land where teenaged children of peasants roamed the expanse of melon patches on the outskirts of the village, free from their parents, from responsibility; boys who jeered and whistled, and one, who one night, took things too far. But that boy was the son of a village cadre, and she was just the quiet daughter of a poor farmer, and there was nothing that could be done. So she made sure to leave her mark in some other way.

Mei walks the path behind her family’s house, searching for the spot of earth that has clouded her memories ever since. She follows a wider road to the beginning of where the woods once stood, but which now marks the entrance to a new factory complex. Her mother had told her of the many village boys who stuck around to work at this factory. She speaks of rumblings in the village of chemical leaks, of the handful of workers dying from lung cancer; of local children born recently with missing appendages, babies born with misshapen heads and pink bulbous growths emerging from the small of their backs.

Mei stands outside the chain link fence watching the men file out for lunch when suddenly she spots him.

Surely it must be him.

Their gazes cross. The years have done little to dull that cold glint in his eyes. His face is darker, more weathered. His right cheek has a crescent-shaped scar, the one she branded him with one night twelve years ago. Recognition flickers in his eyes and he turns away.

In that brief second she realizes that those eyes are not the same dark blades that haunted her nightmares, but rather those of a beaten, stray dog. So much for the cadre’s golden child.

Mei returns to her mother’s house, back through the patches where melons hang fat and broken on the vines. At home her mother still grieves, but mostly out of respect for tradition.

The day after the funeral she finds her mother in the kitchen, her eyes fixed to a spot on the wall. She asks her to come to the city, saying there is nothing left for her here. Mei tells her not to be worried or nervous, that she has a good job at a famous hotel and it is not as dangerous as she’s heard; that there are many older women from villages all over the province living there. She tells her mother there is plenty of opportunity to be somebody else, to be who she wants to be. She says, it’s never too late to start again, no matter how far gone you think you are.

III

On the bus ride from the village, Mei looks at her mother and feels a warmth in her belly. She believes that the warmth is just the future’s fire burning hot.

She tries to picture what will happen when her mother sees the vibrant city for the first time, with its wide streets that stretch forever and skyscrapers towering up from the ground.

She imagines what her mother will say when she enters Mei’s apartment to find she is living comfortably, and with a man: a smart man, with no apparent vices, who cares and provides for her. A man married once before, but who lost his wife shortly after childbirth. A man with a daughter whom he treats like a gift, not an embarrassment. The three of them living together in harmony. A family.

Her mother will ask why it’s been kept a secret, will wonder if she will try to have a child herself. And at first Mei will tell her mother that they are trying but eventually she will come clean, telling her the doctors have said she cannot bear a child. She will confide many things to her mother but she will never speak of that day twelve years ago. That moment is buried deep in the ground.

Mei envisions weeks of old wounds made fresh, months of confusion and acclimation and years of triumph and tears. She also senses tragedies, for there will come a time in the future when everything she holds dear will disappear. She foresees a future Year of the Sheep, perhaps the next one, when she will have to bury her mother, and she knows that she will not return her body to the soil of that village. Another way will be found.

These visions appear to her with perfect clarity.

Outside, the sky is painted cobalt blue and the clouds break to let the sun shine through. The bus clips along the highway as Mei and her mother stare out the window at the passing farmland. Her mother turns to offer a timid smile, then reaches into her bag to pull out a container of diced melon. She extends it toward Mei, who reaches in with her fingers, taking out the largest pink chunk of fruit and biting it in half, the juice dripping down her chin onto the floor.

The taste is sweeter than she remembers.

PETER GOFF

Heavy Lifting

SHE HAD TO PEE, and she hated to pee. It was not the peeing so much; it was the squatting. The cartilage in her knees had long worn away so her caps now ground when she bent, her ankles cracked and her right hip sounded like it was threatening to pop. It was bad enough normally, but here, squatting on a train shuddering across the northern plains of China, the pain was seeping deeper. Sucking in the reek of piss and cheap disinfectant, she struggled to keep her balance.

The ignominy of it all was this was once her finest stance. Not many could say that in honesty, but she could. She thought back to her proudest moments, with her bum brushing the ground, chalk dust on her palms, eyes burning the middle distance. The mute audience focused on her hands fondling the bar. Clean lift, hold and … jerk. Clean and jerk. Always smooth. Above her, quivering slightly, her own bodyweight or more. Cheering crowds while she stood ruddy-cheeked but steady and blew out bursts of air. She would snap backward. Weights would thump to the ground. She’d take a brisk bow and stride off the stage. All-China Champion, yet again. “Bastards! They built me to do that and now I can’t even stand up from a pee. People need to know what they’ve done to me. To all of us.”

Limping back to her seat, Wang Li looked far older than her thirty-eight years. Her squat frame was stooped and edged forward mechanically. She had more facial hair than her husband. Some joked her Adam’s apple was bigger, too. It wasn’t, in fact; it was a little smaller. She snorted when she realized she still referred to him as her husband even though he basically used the home as not much more than a postal address and laundry service these days. Anyway, good riddance to him. She had her daughter Peipei and that was enough for her. Thankfully, Peipei had inherited her father’s figure, at least. We could finally thank him for something. Peipei wasn’t “four-foot-square,” as her mother had been nicknamed. At eighteen, Peipei was now about to go to university. And it looked like, somewhat amazingly, she was going to get that place in Peking University. Chemistry – a scientist that would be – who could have imagined? And in the top college in the country! She had worked hard for that. Gutsy kid. That was certainly plucked from her mother’s tree. A scientist! She wouldn’t live long enough to see her daughter graduate, that was for sure, but the thought of it was a warmth within. Some protection from the chill she constantly felt since she fell ill.

She wedged herself back into the middle seat and her companions on either side wriggled and grumbled – Chinese train seats were not designed with former champion weightlifters in mind.

The recorded automaton voice on the PA system screeched out the “welcome on board” message once more while phones and tablets throughout the carriage hissed and boomed the shrill sounds of video games and action movies. Her friend handed her another vacuum-packed sachet of duck feet, which she took with grunting approval. Ripping it open, she sucked on the gelatinous skin and tendons marinated in rice vinegar and chili oil, then tossed the stripped claws into an overflowing plastic bag on the floor. Outside, the rape fields flashed glimpses of vibrant yellow against the gray, dilapidated buildings and the dusty, hard ground.

Just then two men appeared at their seats. Some of the passengers fumbled for their tickets but that was not what they wanted to inspect. “There you are, ladies. We knew you were here somewhere. We’re in the next carriage up, not far away,” one of them said.

“Comrade Zhang, just leave us alone,” Wang Li snarled. “You can’t stop us. We’re going to Beijing. Stop harassing us. Peck that beaky nose of yours into someone else’s shit.”

“You know, Mrs. Wang, it’s only your safety we are concerned about. We are only doing our jobs,” Zhang said with a nasally drone.

“It’s your own pockets you are worried about and that’s it. Happy to turn spy and snitch on your own to curry a bit of favor with those who have some power and money.” Wang Li got a chorus of nods from the four women around her. The four she had mustered up from her province were finally aboard and ready for the voyage to the capital. It had taken some convincing. There would be consequences, they were all sure of that. Just what they would be and how bad was still unclear. Wang Li had gone to their homes several times and urged them now was the time to act. She told them of her own illness and the deteriorating condition of others. Her passion was contagious and finally she had started to get them to sign up, one by one. Apart from the four from her province, there were currently three former athletes from Liaoning, and hopefully two more from Jilin planning to meet them in Beijing. They had all been products of the state sports gulag system, earmarked as young children, picked like cattle out of an auction pen. Picked for their height, or strength, or speed, or balance, or agility. In other cases, it was simply a family connection – a favor of sorts – that saw them brought into the system. Regardless of favors, ultimately the kids needed to show some signs of having aptitude. The training was tortuous for all of them, but for the ones with average natural ability it was unbearable and quickly destroyed them. The system was built on a theory, a theory based on numbers and percentages. If you take a child with aptitude, the thinking went, and you brainwash that child and focus its entire existence over many years into excelling in one sporting discipline, they should ultimately perform well, assuming its body or mind did not crack under the strain on the way. But performing well was not what Olympic champions were made of. They must truly excel and that was the numbers game. In every discipline the system cultivated hundreds and thousands of children in sporting hothouses. They brought them up with one sport or discipline as their core existence. A handful of these children, with a degree of luck and with the benefit of some science, could become the best in the world. And as for the rest? They were the 99 percent base of the pyramid that was essential to allow the other 1 percent to work their way to the pinnacle.

Wang Li was five years old when one day three officials came to her school and walked around the playground. They chatted with her as she swung from bar to bar on the rusting climbing frame, where she was always to be found. Prompted by her teacher, she impressed the visitors with her display of chin-ups and pull-ups. A few days later, her mother told her she’d be going to a new school, a fancy sports one in the provincial capital. In this college they would train her to become an Olympic champion, to bring honor and glory to her family, to the village and to the Chinese people. Though strong in build and stoic in appearance, Wang Li was petrified in the new surroundings. The first thing she heard at five o’clock every morning in the dormitory was a trainer screaming at them to get up, and the screaming and the shouting seemed to continue all day, every day. The fear never went away. Always terrified. She was terrified of not being able to keep up, of getting injured and not being able to train, of not being selected on the team, of not being the best, the very best. She panicked about letting down her teammates, her trainers, her parents, the officials, the country. They were all there. There to be let down. Terrified.

One day, when she was six years old, a ten-year-old boy Ran Fei came over to her in the gym and sat down to watch her train. He was the best in their group and had already won some junior championships. She hated Ran Fei. He would taunt her in the canteen and had knocked over her tray of food a few times. “You’re as ugly as a pig’s ass,” he liked to roar. From the corner of her eye he saw him touching her backpack before skipping off across the gym floor. He could hardly have taken anything; there was nothing of value in there, just some powder, a hardened bar of soap, a worn towel that was once white and two steamed pork and cabbage dumplings to snack on. She peered cautiously into the bag and flung it to the ground. She screamed a low-pitched shriek of horror as the gym erupted in hysterics. On the ground, maggots writhed and wriggled out of the sack; the dumplings seemed to have come alive. She walked out of the gym and kept her head up high as the hoots and sniggers shoved her to the door. It was nearly three weeks later when she chose to strike back. Ran Fei was leaving his tray on the trolley at the back of the canteen. There were no teachers in sight. She walked up to him. He was mocking her, she could tell by the tone, but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. She was fixated on his windpipe. She lurched at him and grabbed his throat with one paunchy hand and squeezed with her unforgiving grip. He dropped to his knees and made a peculiar wheezing sound. There were noises all around her but to Wang Li it sounded like she was under water. She marveled at the colors of his face. First red, then gray, now bluish. She came to an hour or more later. She found out later a chef had belted her skull with a hot wok in a last-ditch attempt to prize her off her prey. She dropped like a stone and Ran Fei survived. He disappeared after that, though. There was trouble, big trouble, for Wang Li, but nobody in the school said she had a face like a pig’s ass after that day.

“There are ways and means of dealing with the leaders. Approach them gently and they’ll be kind. Attacking them is not good. Please, I beg you again,” Zhang said, “before we get to Beijing and it’s too late, let me discuss this with them and negotiate. Quietly and delicately is the Chinese way. It’s far more effective.”

“We’ve been quiet and delicate all our lives, and look where that got us,” one stout woman said. “Quiet maybe, but us wrestlers and weightlifters were not always the most delicate,” another said with a gurgled laugh.

“You know we’ve tried many ways to discuss this with the various levels, but at every point they just stonewall us,” Wang Li said, “and look at us. Young former athletes who are crumbling wrecks – women with beards and bumps on their throats where women shouldn’t have bumps. One weightlifter in Jilin even has a tiny penis, they say. No surprise, the amount of magic mix they pumped into and tested out on us over the years. And the cancers left and right. Mine’s thyroid, with her it’s the pancreas, for another it’s everywhere. Coincidence? Hmmpf!

“We’re taking this to the very top if I have to drag these people with me. I have nothing to lose now. Three doctors told me so. We want a full inquiry into what went on and what they fed to us. We want compensation. And we want it to stop so the younger ones don’t go through the same.”

“You were professional athletes,” Zhang hissed. “You were given free training and food and board. The state sponsored everything for you, turned you into world-class performers and gave you the opportunity to be stars. Do you think there’s glory without sacrifice? You weren’t complaining, Wang Li, when you were national champion. You liked that a lot, it seemed. Is it their fault you let the country down on the world stage? Twice. Are they to blame for that? They weren’t lifting the bars.”

“It’s what they did to try to get us there, what they turned our bodies into, that’s what we want to understand and have out in the open,” said a woman beside Wang Li. “And to let them and others see how high their scrapheap is. The leftovers. The discarded. So many of us. Wang Li was national champion at least. That counts for something. She got a bonus and a bit of a pension. She can get work in training centers, maybe, with that medal behind her, or she could if she weren’t sick. But she’s in the top few percent. The rest of us who gave our childhoods to this experiment and who didn’t get to the top are left with nothing. No education to speak of, no qualifications. Just left with sick and confused bodies. We’re going with Wang Li. She has convinced us. As a former national champion, people will listen to her a lot more than us. It is time to take this to the petition office, to take a stand, to let the central government know our situation. We all know that locally you officials are thugs, just in it for yourselves, but in Beijing they are different. They understand justice.”

The public announcement system told them Shenyang was the next stop. Wang Li hadn’t been in Shenyang for years. It was one of her glory towns. She had been crowned on national TV here. She had even got an endorsement deal from a sportswear company out of that competition, which along with the bonus for being national champion helped her rent a small apartment. Those deals were rare in those days. Mind you, the sports federation got to keep more than 95 percent of the money, “paying back a return on their investment.” She needed to pee again.

As she opened the toilet door to step out, Zhang was waiting with his sidekick. “I’ve just had a call, Mrs. Wang. A very pleasant call. I think congratulations are in order. I’ve just spoken to our town mayor who has been talking to the management of Peking University, he has friends there, and the mayor has managed to convince them to take your daughter in as a science undergraduate. The most famous university in all of China. That’s quite an honor, Mrs. Wang. You should be very proud.”

Wang Li twitched. “What’s this got to do with you or the mayor? She’ll get in on her own merit. She doesn’t need you interfering.”

“Oh, you know China, Mrs. Wang. Things like this need merit but China works on connections, too, so a personal recommendation from a distinguished source helps open doors, or close them. There are a lot of students out there with good grades. The right word can make or break an opportunity like this. But the mayor told me to tell you that this is a proud moment for the town. And we want proud moments for the town, of course. You, however, leading a group of protesters to Beijing to harass the government is not a proud moment for the town. It’s one that just brings shame to us. The government wants a harmonious society. You know, the mayor, too, loses face with this. So he told me to tell you very clearly. You must get off the train in Shenyang and take the next one back to our town. And you must drop this nonsense immediately. If you do not, the mayor will ensure your daughter does not get into Peking University, or even into a third-rate makeup and massage college for that matter. Your choice. Your daughter’s life. You decide.”

The train started to slow. Wang Li stared at Zhang. She could smell cigarette smoke and garlic oil from his breath. He was a scrawny man and relatively small, but he stood a head higher than her. When she looked straight ahead she stared at his throat. She could see an artery slightly twitch. It seemed to twist slightly and was wide in the middle and tapered to the top. Her thoughts flickered to Ran Fei – she subconsciously steeled herself and felt her muscles go tight – and then the rolling camera in her mind panned to her daughter Peipei, the toothy, trusting, innocent Peipei. Wang Li felt the intensity ooze out of her like the organs of a cat squelched by a car.

On the platform at Shenyang station she couldn’t bear to look up as the train pulled out. She couldn’t look up even if she had wanted to, there wasn’t enough energy left in her body to lift her heavy head. She heard a shout, more a wail than a shout, from one of the women out of the little window. But she couldn’t make out what she said. It couldn’t have been important. Not in the overall scheme of things. With her backpack hanging low, she shuffled toward the rusting iron steps.

MABLE WOO

The Hitting Curse

THE FIRST THING I did after deciding to ruin Alex’s life was make a list. There were lots of things to do and they had to be done in a specific way. Grandma showed me how to do it. It would backfire if it was not done properly. I found the perfect location to do it: a dank, abandoned lot in the graffiti-laden alley around the corner from the tenement building that I’d grown up in.

I collected all the materials I would need, storing them in the sandalwood chest Grandma had left me after she died. Most of the necessary things could be found in the cupboard my frugal, packrat parents stored odds and ends in. Other things I had to make myself. Patiently, I waited for everything to fall into position.

I awoke early one brisk morning in March and knew it was time. I donned dark clothing and sturdy shoes, and brought my sandalwood chest to the abandoned lot. There were no signs of life, just broken glass and waste. Perfect. In the far corner of the lot, under a rusted tin awning, I set up my work area. I laid out a bamboo mat, lit incense and candles, poured cups of strong white rice wine and unwrapped a packet of greasy salted pork. I carefully placed delicate, painstakingly-cut tissue paper figures on the mat, weighing them down with a sharp knife so they wouldn’t flit away in the morning breeze.

I kneeled, pouring wine and offering incense to the higher beings who would grant me the power to destroy.

With the incense smoke swirling around me, enveloping me in its mystical scent, I sat on the little red plastic stool and pulled out a wispy piece of cream-colored paper. The paper was decorated with swirling black characters, their beauty masking the ugliness they would bring. Pulling a black Sharpie from my pocket, I wrote on the paper, adding Alex’s name and birth date on it. I didn’t want to rip the paper with angry slashes. My pen strokes were light and deft, as light as my heart would soon feel. The black ink soaked in and spread, as if my hatred was soaking into the paper.

I positioned the paper on top of the wooden box. How many times had I seen Grandma do this? Now it was my turn. I slipped off one of my heavy shoes. Grasping it firmly, I began to pound the creamy paper with the sole of the shoe, chanting words of hate and destruction. “Hit the vile person. Hit their head so they cannot breathe. Hit their damned feet so they cannot run away from the agony. Hit their arms so they cannot resist. Hit the goddamned vile person.” Again and again, I chanted these words, picturing Alex’s face. Was I not good enough? Were my lower-class, Taishan peasant ways that repelling?

“Hit their bloody hands so they can’t grab back all that will be taken from them. Hit their mind so that they will go insane. Hit their heart and make it impure, repulsing all that they hold dear.”

Always so kind, doing the right thing. And not even the decency to feel superior about it. Bitch. Bitch. Bitch. I pounded the paper in time to my thoughts.

To increase the potency of the curse, I turned to the power of the White Tiger. I ran the pad of my left index finger over the knife and let my blood drip into a little dish. After pressing a tissue to the finger to stem the bleeding, I cut off a piece of the greasy pork and dipped it into the dish of still-warm blood. I chanted to the White Tiger. I wrapped the blood-soaked pork in the cream-colored paper bearing Alex’s name, and placed the bundle into the mouth of the cute paper tiger.

I had to feed the White Tiger so it would only hurt the one whose name was on the paper. To make sure it would not hurt anyone else, I rubbed the paper tiger’s mouth with some pork grease to seal it shut. I bowed my head to the cartoon paper tiger, its mouth smeared with blood and grease. I prayed to it. Then I ripped off its head and burned it.

I poured wine on the decapitated tiger’s burning body, extolling its virtue and valor. I gathered the ashes, mixed them in a cup of the strong white wine and downed the mixture in one gulp. It burned. I felt White Tiger’s power inside me.

Now it was time for the gentler, more introspective, less icky phase of the Hitting Curse. I waved wispy yellow paper, decorated with swirls of calligraphy, in sharp angles, tracing the shape of the characters of heaven, earth, great and people, in the smoke. I praised the Great People, those who were good and just, and asked them to bless me, to help me, to give me strength. Please help me ruin the life of Alex Wong. I want her to feel the heartbreak that I feel, that I have felt since the moment she told me she didn’t love me anymore. She will be abandoned, rejected and utterly alone. I want her ruined, stripped of everything good in her.

I offered wine and incense to the Great People.

For extra reinforcement, I burned paper treasures to my ancestors and to vengeful deities and spirits. I burned gold taels, loyal servants, sports cars, flat-screen LCDs, iPhones, iPads, designer clothes, top-shelf liquor. I burned a virtual Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue to them. I burned rich foods and incense, so that they would be well-fed and content. I poured more wine, dousing the ashes of the paper treasures and completing my worship.

It was now time for the forecast, to see if my heartfelt prayers would be answered and if the curse would take. I pulled out Grandma’s walnut, crescent-shaped shells and tossed them in the air. Time stood still as they made their descent to the bamboo mat. Both pieces landed open sides up. Success! The spirits, the White Tiger, the ancestors – they were all on my side. They would help me ruin her.

I felt the power come over me. A flow of energy spread through my body. This was the Qi of Destruction. The Qi of Justice.

The world was but a tiny bug that I could squash with my mind. I was as powerful as the deities. My ancestors, too. I could tame the White Tiger, make it my bitch. I’d have it do tricks, jump through hoops, like in a Las Vegas magic show. Only I’d keep the tiger in line. It wasn’t taking a chunk out of me.

Everything slowed to a crawl. Every speck of incense ash danced a three-act ballet as it fell through the air to the ground below. This suited me fine. Dance for me, I commanded them. And they did, because they had to. I was just that badass, like Darth Vader without the respirator, filled with the power of vengeful, otherworldly beings.

A cloud passed before the sun, turning the sky a soft, grayish blue. How pretty. More clouds, more gray, more pretty, I commanded. The clouds obeyed. They pirouetted like melty marshmallows, graceful and delicious.

Marshmallows. I only liked them in s’mores. I first tasted s’mores with Alex when we were ten. She showed me how to make them in her parents’ fireplace, promising me this was a campfire must. She had set up the living room to look like a campsite, with tall potted plants, a tent and sleeping bags. She’d even brought her giant stuffed teddy bear, George, from her room, placing it behind a potted plant, because I was convinced bears lurked behind trees at campsites, waiting to pounce on innocent campers. She’d done all that for me, because I had never gone camping. Mom wouldn’t let me go on school camping trips because she was convinced they were school-sanctioned sex parties and I would come home pregnant and my life would be ruined forever. Those s’mores were sweeter than anything I’d ever tasted, the best s’mores ever, because she made them just for me.

We’d promised to be BFFs, best friends forever. Not just scribbled in pink in yearbooks, but whispered to each other as we lay under her canopy bed. She was my first kiss, my first love, my only love – who didn’t love me anymore. Alex and her roommate from law school, Josephine, were planning a summer wedding.

My heart ached and stomach spasmed. In hunger, I guess. After all, I had skipped breakfast. The only things I had ingested were the tiger ashes and burnt, blood-soaked pork. Breakfast of champions. I should use my powers to summon a pizza delivery guy to bring me a meat lover’s pie.

Maybe after a nap. I was so very tired. It had been a very early morning and I had exerted so much energy in the ceremony. It was so cool and soothing here. My throat was still scratchy from the tiger ashes. I needed a drink. All I had was the bottle of clear rice wine. Works for me. I uncorked it and drank deeply, clearing my throat of tiger and pork remnants. The wine was strong, much stronger than before. The qi makes everything stronger. I tipped my head back and kept drinking.

I couldn’t wait to see the results of my curse. I had hit the vile person, whipped her ass to a bloody pulp with a Doc Marten boot. The cursed one will get what she deserves. Then I’ll be free. I’ll soar to the heavens and ride rainbows, maybe even meet a unicorn. I’ll flip my boss the bird and start an organic bee farm or something. I’ll tell the world I like girls and annihilate anyone who has a problem with that. But first, I’ll just rest my eyes for a bit.

ALISTAIR YONG

The Faeries of St. Monica

THERE WAS A DARK SHADOW emerging from the curtains that draped the open windows. I saw it reaching out toward the body next to me and tried to scream with all my might but no sound came out of my mouth. Next thing I knew, Jonah was holding me down, his hands on my chest. His frame smaller compared to mine but much more solidly built, he held my larger frame down as I thrashed and screamed in my nightmare, preventing me from falling off the bed. “You had another bad dream,” said Jonah.

The wind was howling loudly and blowing the curtains haphazardly into our room in a condo in Klang Valley. The chill from the cold night air blowing in while lightning flashed across the night sky and the muffled rumbling thunder signaled that a downpour was imminent. He got up to close the window and then turned the nightlight on. He sat by the side of the bed and told me a story, that when he was a boy in a Chinese village in Kuala Lumpur there used to be a big tree outside his wooden house with vines hanging down from it. He remembered one night the wind howled such as it was howling now and he couldn’t sleep. His mother came into his room to pacify him and told him that the Heavenly Guards from Jade Emperor’s Palace were coming down to do battle with the spirits that dwelt in the tree. The next morning, he found the large tree uprooted. He ended by saying that large trees usually had spirits who would come to live within them, especially old trees, and rarely are they without a “resident spirit.”

With that story and with regard to trees, I could not help but be reminded of my own very early encounters with resident spirits in trees in my childhood days back in the sleepy town of Sandakan in my home state of Sabah. My primary school was named St. Monica’s Primary School and the wooden buildings of this school were built encircling a huge stone Anglican Church built in 1925 and named after St. Michael the Archangel. The area had many old rain trees surrounding it, making the atmosphere of the wooden school very damp and dark. Even the classroom that I was in had moss growing in some corners.

There was a boy named Joseph who was my classmate and always cried when he was teased or bullied by the others. His mother sold flowers and lottery tickets in the town market. My family knew them and either my mother or father would help by buying one or two lottery tickets, while Grandma would buy flowers from his mother. Everyone knew everyone in Sandakan. Joseph would talk of ghosts and spirits that supposedly haunted the school grounds; I would listen to him and asked him questions to which he would gladly elaborate with vivid descriptions and hand gestures. I never quite believed him until one day he told me, “I can show you some spirits in the trees.”

During school recess he brought me to the bell tower next to the church and next to it was a valley with a few rain trees but there was one which stood massively in the middle with its gnarled roots spreading out like an octopus. “There,” he pointed. “There they live and they only venture out when the sun is totally down. It is that old tree with vines that hang down like an old hag’s hair.” It looked big enough for two boys to disappear into its trunk. “We have to wait until after school before we can listen to them or talk to them,” he explained. “Have you seen them?” I asked Joseph, to which I received no answer.

Then Joseph and I went to the edge of the landing where the bell tower stood beside the church. There a gentle downward slope turned into a steep gradient toward the massive rain trees, which held the ground around the hill together with their strong root system. In this part of the school grounds it was silent, far away from the din of the school and its wretched, shrieking bell. Already the students were thinning out as parents were coming to pick them up.

“We have to go down to the tree,” and before I could say anything Joseph was already making his way down the slope. I followed and my feet sank ankle deep into dead leaves. He touched the tree and scratched on its surface. At that point when you are a kid in primary school there is a mixture of naïveté and curiosity that keeps fear at bay. I heard the bark creaking and then the cracking of dead leaves, the evening sunlight was dancing as a gentle breeze blew, the swaying tree leaves filtering the evening sunlight. “You brought a friend?” A voice permeated the surroundings. It didn’t sound like a single voice but many at once and trailed off into the sounds of the trees. My curiosity, bolder than my fear, prompted me to ask, “Hello, do you have a name?”

“We have many names but we’re the spirits of the trees,” it echoed in cadence with the cicadas’ music.

“How many are you? Can I see you?”

“There are many of us, and no, but you can feel us here can you? Stand closer to the tree. The hour is not yet right for us to reveal ourselves in your day. For when night falls on your day, our day begins, and when your day begins, our night falls upon us.”

I could hear a car honking for children from afar and I thought it could possibly be my mother. So I ran up the slope again as my mum was waiting for me at the school entrance. There she was and not too happy about me wandering off.

Over the next few days I didn’t pay attention to Joseph until he came to me again, “Do you want to visit the spirits of the trees again?” If he didn’t ask me, I would have totally forgotten as we were distracted with the preparation for the school’s Sports Day. On our second visit, the trees rustled again as if they felt excited at our return. “Tell us your dreams,” the voices whispered as the trees rustled. We obliged them, me with tales about my toys and my dreams of flying. Joseph told about his robot toys while the tree stayed still and listened. This time, Mum was really worried and asked where I went, so I pointed to the church bell tower and she scolded me again for making her wait for almost an hour. I told her about my encounter with living things near those trees but my mother reminded me sternly not to make up stories. The nights that followed were filled with both dreams and nightmares as if something was fuelling it, so that there would be more to tell when we met our “friends” in the trees. I remembered sharing with Joseph about the dreams but he told me he had more nightmares than dreams.

On our third visit, we told of our dreams again and our friends. Then all of a sudden there was a change in the voice and the tree seemed like it grew a little bigger, thus preventing the evening light from penetrating its core trunk. “Do you have nightmares?” The voices shivered, though they seemed excited. We both nodded.

“Tell us your nightmares,” and then we heard the chattering of teeth and the leaves were being blown around the tree while the vines were swinging gently as if the movement of the air was generated from somewhere within the tree. “Do you not like to listen to our dreams anymore?” I boldly asked. And the tree seemed to sway and enlarge itself, as if it wanted to cover the rest of the dimming light of the evening sun. “No, no, we like to hear your dreams but some of us prefer listening to your nightmares.” The voices said in a sort of rush.

I waited and heard another reply, “If you tell us more, you will gain our trust and we will reveal ourselves to you.”

So Joseph and I told them of our nightmares, of monsters, of falling down into dark pits, of losing mothers or fathers, of being left alone in shopping centers. The tree and vines seemed to be leaning toward the spot where Joseph and I usually sat, but by now there was a rough trail leading to a cleared spot free of dry leaves. The following day during school recess, while kids played police and thieves, Joseph asked me if I had had more nightmares. I said some but not many. He revealed to me he had been having them every night and was devoid of new dreams. He was afraid to go to the tree now, though he asked innocently, “It’s okay to go since we can then see our friends eventually?” I nodded naïvely.

A few days passed before we visited the tree again after school. This time I felt cold and it was a cloudy day. We talked to the voices and they told of how wonderful it was when the forest was much quieter and they told us that if we came into their realm, we could probably fly like them. Then as Joseph was telling his nightmare of falling and losing his mother the voices sounded anxious. “Why don’t you stay with us so that we can feast on both your nightmares and dreams?” Curiosity still got the better of the both of us. It was almost twilight, the leaves rustled and there was a sound like the grinding of teeth. I looked at Joseph and was just deciding to leave when the voices invited us to come. “Climb the tree, climb the tree and enter our realm.”

Without hesitation, we climbed the tree and saw something like an entrance where two large branches intertwined and met at the top to form an arch-like door. As we passed through the opening, there was something different. The clouds were no more and everything was much brighter still; it wasn’t the light of the sun but something else. We saw things in our peripheral vision, fleeting and very shyly hiding from our sight. They disappeared under the leaves when I directed my gaze at them. After a while, I suddenly heard the rustling of the leaves and the voices calling out to us.

“Dreams, we want your dreams but some of us want your nightmares. No we must let them go. We must or the Heavenly Guards will come for us. But it is a while since we feasted!” Now the voices seemed to be discordantly murmuring between themselves and sounded very anxious before trailing off. Despite all our efforts of wanting to explore and see our “friends,” our bodies felt heavy and we lay down by the side of the tree we just climbed to let sleep take over.

I do not recall what happened during or after our experience but we were found much later in the night by the school guard with worried teachers and parents, in a cave hidden by shrubs down the valley, not too far away from the massive rain tree where our “friends” resided. We were accused of making up stories when Joseph and I told our tale. We were reprimanded and no students from either the primary or the secondary school were permitted to go beyond the boundaries of the bell tower that led into the valley of rain trees. A few days later the tree was uprooted in a storm and nearly damaged the church’s bell tower. Shortly after, I moved with my family to another town and entered a new school with new friends, but Joseph stayed in touch and we wrote letters to each other before losing contact and also forgetting the tale for a while. Until now. You will not find those rain trees or the wooden school there anymore, but you will find the church and its bell tower still standing today.

It began pouring at about three in the morning and Jonah made me a mug of warm milk. After finishing my milk and switching off the lights, we held each other for a moment before turning to our respective sides of the bed and dozing off in the witching hour of a Saturday morning. He is my rock and much like how he held me down during my nightmare, he keeps me grounded in life to prevent me from being swept away by my lofty ideals and passions like a stray kite in a storm. It is never ever easy to have a writer as a partner.

“No more nightmares ya,” Jonah reminds me again in the dark.

KAMANA SRIKANTH VENKATARAMAN

In Water My Dreams

WE FLOAT, and swim, we boat and punt on the storm waters aglow in the weak sunlight. A freak happening, an accident of the El Niño year, warm and cold currents met and mingled, a dance of opposites that birthed the rains, gleaming rivers of it. If there is a line that separates land from warm turquoise, it blurs, and we fall into our shadows or perhaps our shadows swallow us, the outlines of boat and people, wavy lines of form. We are liquid, one with the water, in the water, and on the water, and I believe I only know that it is winter because my sister was born in early January and with the year coming to an end, it will soon be her first birthday.

My mother used to say that my sister had not yet decided if she belonged here in this place, or if she wanted to be once more within my mother, safe in her water sac. She said that’s why my sister resembled a wide-eyed baby fish, with small nostrils and small ears and a soft head that had so little hair. At first I thought she was very ugly, her squashed face with its gummy mouth and the starfish fingers that couldn’t hold anything, but then within her eyes lay a spell that called me with the soundless voices of the water people who live below us, in grottos of coral, hiding behind curtains of iridescent shell and seaweed. When her hair grew out in little fluffy patches my mother announced that she had joined our family, that soon my sister’s legs and arms would begin to look like ours, and she would even grow teeth. I am suspicious. It really does not seem likely that this strange squid of a thing can look anything like the three of us, though I am told that even I started out like that.

The live mirror beneath our boat refuses to stay still – for some days now I only know of the presence of my limbs and face by touch, not sight – it rolls into little waves and bumps our boat, admonishing me, assuring me. You know who you are, say the waters, as do your mother, your father and your sister; what are you looking for?

I count my toes and count my sister’s toes which are much smaller, flipper-like and delicate. I can tell she will be a strong swimmer like her people, I have seen them, they come to the surface sometimes with faces of pale rose, the older ones bulky and graceful and the younger ones quicksilver and excitable. I am sure I have seen my sister wave at them. They don’t see me, though, or my parents, who tell me to hush and watch my sister and entertain her. I am dutiful, I entertain her, I hold her and we watch our city.

Silver spires pierce the air, tall arches that seem shorter now with the water levels rising, cars and autos dance by, lopsided, rusting a little but with smiles, the half open windows winking in the sun. I see a cyclist atop one of the cars, he has found himself a boat, an old Fiat, the one my father liked to call the steel bucket, its roof dented into a comfortable hammock. He sits sunning himself as he passes us, and I would like to join him. Sometimes we see billboards, revenants of another age, with bangles on a dangling arm, a neck dragged down by gold and emerald, or a waist – bare to the navel flashing a belt of silver and aquamarine – hanging from a steel skeleton. She must have been a beautiful woman once, I tell my sister, though I cannot be sure without seeing the woman’s face. I am encouraged when my sister claps her hands.

My parents spend a lot of time holding hands, far more than they used to, my mother presses up against my father’s side and they speak in whispers. My mother reaches beneath the blouse of her sari, a secret movement, and pulls out her purse. It is leather, a dull purple with a faint red border. She carefully smooths it open and they peer inside, their heads together, a completed circuit, a close circle of comfort and some other emotion that I cannot identify. The five-hundred-rupee bill looks insubstantial in my father’s large hand. Milk, my mother says, and smiles thinly, it is what the baby needs and what we can manage. I wish that they would ask me what I want.

A coconut seller appears close by, his cart afloat. He is still, lying atop the fresh green fruit pile, his arms wide open, hugging them, his head a black, curly circle. The coconuts look heavy and I can taste the liquid, a little thick, sweet and filling, and then the white flesh, slippery and cool. I imagine the feel of it in my stomach and I envy the man as he stays unmoving, pressed close to his treasure. The water is lapping at the edges of the cart, demanding, creeping upward. He will have to share his hoard with the water people, whether he wants to or not, but he doesn’t stir. I point him out to my parents. My father looks very sad and immediately picks me up and sets me looking in the opposite direction. I tell him that if we call out loudly enough, the coconut man may be willing to sell some of his fruits to us before the water takes it all. My father is not listening, he rarely does now, in the days since we left our home.

Home. It’s under water now. They came slowly, sneaking into the skies above us, these big clouds, intense, brimming, darkening. It was the day I had an assignment for my art class, to draw my favorite person. I decided to draw my sister, though she didn’t look quite human yet. In my drawing I gave her fins, long, frilled and translucent, and a tail, extending away from her down to where her feet should be. The tail was the color of her pajamas, there were teddy bears on it, pink and green, and she carved lazy circles in a fish tank before coming up to spout water through her mouth. That was the image in my mind, but on paper it was all squiggly. When my mother came and looked over my shoulder I covered the picture with my hand. My mother tried to pull my hand away but I would not show it to her.

My sister had just started to lose her tadpole look and my mother was happier. Even the doctor had stopped coming to see us in his rumpled shirt and stethoscope garland. My sister was asleep, and on the television, our fat chief minister waved to a large crowd, the road in front of the vehicle buried in flowers, a happy electorate, fed on gifts of gas cylinders, mixies and my father muttered “country liquor.” The chief minister looked like she would burst out of her odd purple coat. The TV died, sputtered out like a weak flame and then the lights followed. It was an odd sort of darkness. Nobody said anything for a moment. I was startled; there was no sound of warning, just the sudden absence of everything. I heard my sister yawn widely and then my mother giggled. My father asked if everyone was all right and went outside to check the electricity box. I realized what was odd about the darkness. It was total. There was no light for miles around us, impenetrable. If there were stars, they were hiding that night.

Then those silent clouds exploded above us, and the drumming rain deafened. I felt it through every part of my body. I knew it would never stop and it didn’t. I hugged my sister and we sat in the dark until my mother found a candle, so bright, a fallen star, a dazzling pinprick of light. I didn’t hear the match, the quick rush to fire; it just appeared, disorienting and welcome. We watched it burn down to a stub, the wax trickle down the sides, time itself was melting but in here we were stationary. We counted the days by the candles and by the emptying of the kitchen cupboards, and the spoiled food in the refrigerator that found its way into the garbage under the sink. I worried that the only one who could ever leave this house would be my sister, I could feel her spirit long for the world outside, her form so still beside me. My mother’s soup prepared on the gas from a packet did nothing to warm her. When I put my head to her chest, her breath was quick but complete, soft cycles, the barely perceptible beat of butterfly wings that I could hear even through the sound of the rain; she had not grown a tail as yet.

Something cold plopped onto my head, and trickled down the side of my face. I reached up and my hand came away wet. I brought my hand to my nose and it smelled of damp and cement. I told my mother the house was leaking. “Three days,” my father murmured. Time without electricity, a weak sun that filtered in through the window, a murmur of a journey that we were not a part of. The radio gave us instructions in its static voice; my father said he hadn’t used the thing since the days of my grandfather. The sound was barely audible over the rain but the government said that we were to stay in our houses. The water had entered the house, seeping upward through the floor, downward from the ceiling. Our furniture was disappearing by inches as if by magic. The water was erasing everything. My sister occasionally became energetic and tried to dive off her high chair. It was not the time, I told her sternly, she still belonged with us. I can’t say that she heard me, those thin membranes inside her ears may have been tuned in to the calls of her people waiting outside.

Men in rafts came to rescue us. Inflated rubber, army colors, strong arms and wet bodies. I wanted to join the army. The brown faces that peered at us and smiled were brighter than the candles that we had lit earlier; they carried the warmth and assurance of the sun itself. My sister was given a feeding bottle with milk and she cried as she gulped it down, coughed and puked and made more noise than she had in almost five days. My mother hid her face against my father’s shoulder, and we watched as the house slid out of view. I did not think I would miss it at all. The rain had not stopped. The army men told us that it was 430 millimeters of rain in a day, more rain than the city had had in a hundred years. My grandfather used to say that rains like this happened when the gods wanted to piss on us humans. That was sure a lot of piss.

We were taken to a long queue at a bus terminus where the buses, submerged, only their green roofs still above water, formed a sort of awkward walkway for people to reach the government help depot. Here we were given our own raft with a map and told to row out of the city, past the railway tracks to the border of the next state where food and shelter awaited us. A man hopped along the queues, carrying a long wooden pole, a sort of food tree from which packets hung tied to it with strings. He plucked off the packets and distributed them, and quickly, like a whisper, pocketed the small green bills that people held out. He looked satisfied and furtive, and then I saw another man, he was the twin of this one, they mirrored each other’s movements and soon the food trees were close to bare. No, said my mother, we will not buy those. She pointed to one of the packets trailing in the water, see there, that’s disease waiting to happen.

How could rain cause our homes to float? To drown? I felt a little silly asking the question for the water from above was filling our raft, weighing us down.

Soon we had a routine, I would bail out the water and my father would row, while my mother held my sister under her rain jacket, solemnly watching for some indication of where we were going. The map in her hand was soon a rag, a sodden mass, but my father said he knew the general direction and beneath his breath he hummed a little. I could only tell because of the way he breathed as he pulled the oar free of the water and then pushed it back in. An extra beat to the movement, I expected to see him smile even, a rueful curl to his lips, the one that appeared when my mother said that she had cooked his favorite dish and he poked at the slightly burnt vegetables and said thank you.

It stopped raining a little later but we heard from another raft that some of the reservoirs were full to bursting and so the government would release the waters. They must have been right. The waters around us swelled again, a massive expanding, an ocean and we were swept out from the path we were on to the outskirts, swept away under railway bridges, and under a highway broken in the middle, a gaping entrance to the drowned world below. That’s the first time I saw the water people and the first time I saw my sister wave at them. The city belonged to them, though I doubted they would find anything useful: tangled telephone wires, beds, mattresses spilling their contents as offerings to the water gods, televisions, refrigerators, clothes trailing out of wooden or steel wardrobes like the unexpected generosity of a miserly old man. The water people did not need these things. I heard them speak of fireworm, sea cucumber and the insides of mollusks as they pressed their lips to our raft from below. Maybe I shared some of my sister’s powers, for how else could I hear them?

The coconut man is away behind us now and we buy the milk from a food tree. My mother is not worried about disease anymore, now she eyes my sister and then she looks at me, her eyes round, larger than when we left the house, or is her face smaller? Like my stomach, which always stuck out a little and now it’s back, back and inside. The milk tastes strange but I am distracted by a man on a log of wood, lying on it, his hand making gentle designs in the water as he passes by. He seems to be talking to the water people and he doesn’t see us, doesn’t respond when my father calls out to him.

My father does not prevent me from climbing out of the raft and paddling alongside. He allows me to look around for the water people. He asks me to be careful though as I chase the patterns of the sun around and around the raft and am distracted from my hunger. My sister rests against my mother’s chest in deep sleep, she has been sleeping for some time now and when I call her, my mother puts a finger to her lips. My father’s rowing has become very slow. We move but more because the water people are pushing us along. Then we are in the center of the city, I can tell, I have seen pictures of the red brick building before, the towers on four sides. The raft comes up to the steps, bumps against them gently and I climb out of the water. There are suddenly thousands of people. They get out of their rafts and as one we step forward.

I think my sister gurgles a few words, and my mother’s soft breath is on my neck, my hand in my father’s. We walk along chambers flooded with water, sometimes a book floats by. Soon I am not able to see ahead; it has darkened. It is long since I have seen myself, since I saw my parents and my sister, though I still feel my father’s hand. I can hear from the water people that in this place we leave behind our faces, we only carry ourselves and then in the depths, in the quiet, in the dark, there is sleep and forgetfulness. I think we will join the water people, and my sister will be back where she belongs, in this place without names and where voices are heard in the mind.

MITCHELL D. STOCKS

The Minimalist

IT STARTED with the index finger Buster Hern snapped off while cracking his knuckles. It should have hurt, but he hadn’t felt a thing. Not those ghost itches the Iraqi War amputees are always talking about or even just an ordinary sense of loss. He kept the finger in his pocket like a talisman and showed it to his middle school classmates to measure their squeamishness. High in most cases. Like Gertrude Wellenbach who fainted dead away or Allen Lundborg who twitched his nose and said the finger looked like a poodle turd and smelled like lutefisk.

It was just one finger, and it wasn’t even on his writing hand, God having cursed him with left-handedness and too little coordination to do anything productive with it. He didn’t really miss the finger and viewed it for what it was – a welcome conversation starter, something no one could top with a cute story about their toddler Cody’s latest novel or how they waved to Morley Safer in the lobby of the Sheraton Fort Worth.

The gap Buster had created was like a missing tooth, smooth and briefly magnetic, tempting an impressionable tongue until it decides the whole thing is just a bore and finds something else to do like collect bacteria or sprout canker sores or both. And so it was with the thumb of his left hand that soon tired of rubbing the fingerless joint as if polishing an elk ivory.

Indeed! A more dramatic commitment to minimalism was required, a course of action so bold and consequential no one could ever again doubt Buster’s resolve to be somebody. This time he broke off the middle finger on the same hand. His mother warned him about “too much of a good thing” or maybe it was “beggars can’t be choosers,” anyway what do mothers know, always spoiling the fun.

He buried his middle finger in the backyard to see if his dog Lester would find it. Might as well use it to serve some higher scientific purpose. He dug a hole in the rose bed two feet deep which wasn’t easy what with his missing digits and all. But he persevered all the same, and before his shirt was completely torn from his back, he had buried his finger, tamped the earth flat and even spread some leaves and twigs over the spot like he’d seen Daniel Boone do on TV to hide his tracks from an Iroquois hunting party.

He turned Lester loose who promptly found a shady spot under the maple tree and scraped his butt on a patch of quack grass before taking a two-hour nap. He decided to conduct a little experiment. Each day he reburied his finger six inches closer to the surface. On the fourth day he just laid it on top of the ground among the leaves and the twigs. On the fifth day, he threw it at Lester and hit him square in the ribs, a perfect strike thrown with his left hand. He wished he’d paid a little more attention during that season of Little League he had tolerated a few years back. “Maybe I could have been a star,” he thought. “For the A’s or the Rockies … Nah. Probably not.”

That’s when things escalated. Why not a whole arm? Who needs two anyway? He broke off his right arm at the shoulder and, with the addition of a steel sleeve cut from one of his mother’s dining room chairs to keep the elbow from bending (much more challenging now that he had just the one arm) fashioned himself a dandy cane. “Be careful what you wish for,” was all his mother would say. Or maybe it was, “Haste makes waste” or something like that. Ah, who cares what that old windbag said anyway?

Was it his imagination or was that when the local news media began to show interest? National stardom was later assured by the interview with Morley Safer. Morley was kind and saved the tough question for last. “Why are you doing this, son?” A good question. A fair question. “Because it’s not there,” he replied. And that’s exactly how they played it, straight up just like you’d expect them to. When mother saw him on 60 Minutes, she just shook her head and said, “All’s fair in love and war” and/or “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder” and, for once, he could not agree with her more.

And then it hit him over breakfast like Who’s on First? Performance art. The stage beckoned. He’d call his show, “The Minimalist.” His mother scraped egg yolk from his face with her thumbnail and said, “Look before you leap,” hesitated, and then added, “All the world’s a stage.” He had never loved her more.

The screenplay took a while to write. It wasn’t easy typing with just the one hand. Then there was finding a producer, a director, a gaffer, a best boy (after a long session on the internet figuring out what they’re supposed to be best at), a couple of key grips, a few financiers and a proper venue. His decision to donate his remaining appendages to The Limb Bank proved to be the clincher. Everyone loves a philanthropist. And why not? There was certainly much more to this than self-promotion. He even auctioned his cane after the last performance and gave the proceeds to The Prosthesis Society.

Mother attended the gala premier in a beehive and a floral house coat that shaped the season’s fashion trend. She was quoted on ET as warning all that “He who hesitates is lost” and “A stitch in time saves nine.” Mother. Such a card.

Buster now knew that genius is never fully appreciated unless the artist’s sacrifice is visible in his work. During the curtain call of his final performance, he felt profoundly satisfied by what he had accomplished, listening from his specially made sling to the audience admiring his life’s work, only the insensitive few shouting for an encore.

ARTHUR CHAN

The Sparrow, the Princess and the Emerald

1

HE HAD BEEN suffering from delirium the whole day. Great pain was burning everywhere; some parts of his skin had become featherless, directly exposed to sweat and wind and the afternoon sun right above his head. The encounter with the eagle was close, the very last clear memory he could summon; something was preventing him from remembering clearly, as if his mind were drenched in a thick blob of foam, in which scattered images were bubbling, growing and bursting endlessly. However, he felt an unnamed urge to travel on: the agitation of someone waiting for him kept stirring that thick foam of confusion. The injured wings were failing him again. He needed a rest.

2

Every day the princess would spend most of the day appreciating her own body, with the ritual beginning before she awakened. Sometimes during her half-dreams, she would see a girl silhouette glowing in rainbows slowly emerging from the sea, who, when the shining had subsided, was revealed to be herself.

As this usual contentment oozed from the dream onto her face, she became more awake. A sense of hunger propelled her from the silver-embroidered bed. She examined her snowy feet with admiration before carefully sliding them into her icy, gold slippers, shivering slightly. Once out of bed, she spread her limbs wide with clicking stretches that always sounded musical, to her delight; she could feel every inch of her flawless body growing every day. She walked onto the balcony, its walls and pillars trained with her favorite roses and lilies, and gazed across her garden onto the sparkling sea, feeling the moist breezes that caressed her face with the smell of spring vegetation. A sense of loneliness billowed from the sea and invaded her. She then went back to her bedchamber and started her ritualistic, daylong gaze at her own reflection in the mirror.

3

A blast of wind rustled the big shady leaves of the fig tree on which he was perched and rinsed his muddled mind like fresh water. He started to feel as if he had been squeezed into a tight outfit.

Fly away my little prince. They say the king has decided to kill you. Forgive me but this is all I can think of to help. It’s always better to stay alive in faint hope than lie dead, rotten in dust. As a sparrow you will forget about your past gradually every day. The spell can only be lifted if you can bathe yourself in tears of love for you. Fly away and stay alive, my little prince.

The voice of his old nanny echoed through his head as he started to remember the night – was it only last night? – she visited him in prison, saying she had begged the king to let her see him for one last time. Then those green and luminous eyes of the woman he loved also came back to him, beaming through the foam of bubbling dreams. Everything was clear again. Where is my Emerald? She was still in prison, whipped day and night. Tears of love. He must save her from the unimaginable tortures.

4

The princess’s stomach was now groaning for a substantial meal. Every day she ate and spent most of her time alone in her chambers. She had never stepped outside of her castle.

Great beauty comes with great solitude, the king often said. Not even he should exploit the privilege of visiting a princess of such beauty. One visit per season at most, Gretel, otherwise it would be unjust to your divine beauty. She had no one to play with and no one to talk to, because she did not need that. Her servants never spoke to her more than was needed. She spent her days looking into a mirror and admiring her body parts for hours, trying to console herself with her great beauty, the pride of the land. And eating.

When Gretel was gorging on juicy meat and washing it down with chilled red wine, she heard some faint noise from the balcony. She licked her greasy lips and wiped the excess meat juices and wine with her laced sleeve, walking to the balcony in her gold slippers.

A small lump of brown was shaking slightly near the flowered railing. Then what seemed to be a head raised and gave a little squeak. It seemed to be a sparrow lying in pain. She took a few slow steps forward, squatted down and examined it more closely.

When their gazes met, she felt something uncanny about the sparrow’s eyes, as though they were telling a story of immense melancholy. The bird kept writhing on the ground squeaking. As Gretel was watching this, a strange fervor knocked through her chest as if a door were being opened and a hidden part of her saw the light of the day for the first time. She carefully scooped the injured sparrow up and brought it to her bed.

The next day Gretel ordered her servants to find a blacksmith to forge a huge cage. Coated in silver with the bars carved with patterns of brightly painted flowers of various kinds, it was shaped exactly like Gretel’s own castle. She pointed at the three big locks at the door and said to the sparrow, who she had tied to a corner of her bed, “There’s nothing to fear now. You have your own little castle and no one can harm you anymore.” The bird looked at her, sitting very still, yet quivering a little.

Since then, the princess spent every day with the little sparrow, talking to it through the cage whenever she felt lonely, which constituted most of her waking moments. For the first time in her life, she felt a sense of companionship.

5

It must have been days, or even weeks, since he was incarcerated by the she-giant, who he had learnt was the princess of the kingdom neighboring his own. Her deformed face and deep echoing voice colluded to escalate his lingering confusion. It was impossible to think in her presence, the deluded she-giant suffocating his mind with endless mumbling about everything from her self-imagined beauty to her loneliness. Yet in her sleep she would often say softly. “I miss you, Mother. Where have you gone? Why don’t you come and play with me? You don’t love Gretel anymore?” These dreamy utterances only ended in sobbing and they somehow evoked a familiar sorrow in him.

No, he could not forget again. Nothing could make him forget her sparkling eyes of emerald.

They were caught in the act that night; he was kissing all over her young, translucent skin, when the dirty, old rapist rushed in. “How dare you mess with my woman, the king’s woman!” the rapist bawled, “and you, disgraceful slut!”

No, she was not the dirty old man’s plaything, she was meant to be his wife, the future queen. To him she was never a mere servant to a prince. It was love at first sight and he knew they were destined lovers transcending prejudice and heredity. “She is mine! You disgusting, old man!”

Naomi had been incapacitated into a frozen silence, staring fixedly at the rapist, shaking. He wrapped her with his left arm, looking into her tearful green eyes.

“If it wasn’t for the love for my dead brother, I would kill you immediately,” the rapist shouted. “As for you, slut, I will have you whipped day and night without letting you die.”

Now he could still see the tears flowing from her sparkling green eyes. Tears of love. He gathered all his strength and pounded against the cold and hard bars of the cage, which went thump thump thump but did not move an inch. But the pain did not stop him; failing one side he kept on trying another until he found himself panting and shaking in a corner.

He knew by the next morning he would have half-forgotten about everything again, until he summoned all his will to seize fragments of the bubbling past once more.

6

She had never felt kinship to anyone, not even to her parents. Sometimes she suspected her existence was purely symbolic. It was like living alone in a haunted house with ghosts from a different dimension whom she could feel but never connect to. Their existence, too, was metaphorical. But there was now, in the dark, a small candle, with the mere light of which she felt less lonely.

With her conscientious care, Hansel – that was the name she had given him – had recovered with his feathers glowing. Hansel repaid her love and care by listening to her with great patience, sometimes chirping excitedly in response. She had been telling him everything, even about her mother.

It’s a curse, it’s a curse, she remembered her mother saying to her with her pale, sorrowful face. What was the curse? But when the little princess was old enough to ask, the queen had already passed away. And the king would never give her an answer; he would look at her with a gaze similar to the queen’s.

“Why was Mother always so sad? Why do you think Father wouldn’t answer my question? What was the curse? What do you think, Hansel?” Gretel asked with a bitter smile, “You’ve been to the world outside, Hansel. What is it like? I really hope to travel and look at all the colors and listen to all the voices. I hope we can go traveling together one day, Hansel.”

7

Time had lost meaning in the cage. How long had passed? How many days, months and years? The she-giant felt less threatening now; even suffering could lose its color when it became an everyday inevitability. He had even developed a faint sympathy toward her. A poor soul, growing up without the love from a mother, friends and father – he had seen the way her father looked at her; ashamed and frightened, as if he were looking at his own sin. He understood what it was like without the love of parents; he was raised by a nanny. But his hatred for her did not lessen. She had incarcerated him while Naomi was dying slowly without help. Remember, he had to remember.

“Will you ever abandon me?” Naomi asked in his embrace, her breaths warming his chest, “You’re a prince and I’m only your servant.”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m just a boy who has helplessly fallen in love with a girl,” he said, “I’ll never leave you, never.”

“Promise?”

“I promise.” Then they kissed and made love again.

But sitting in the cage now, he understood more than ever that any bliss in life, especially one that bore such a suspicious resemblance to fantasy, could only be transient. One day when they made love, she started crying hysterically. “The king raped me.” He grabbed his sword and swore to slay him.

“You will only die if you go. He is old without a son. I will wait for you to become king and marry me.”

But he would never be king anymore. He was just a fragile bird imprisoned in a cage, tortured by a she-giant and trapped in a perpetual cycle of forgetting and remembering. The mere act of summoning the past back to him and clinging to it had already worn him out. He would be content enough if he could die without those precious memories slipping from him. Sorry, Naomi, it’s all my fault. But I’ve never forgotten our promise. I will hold you again in heaven.

8

Since the first day Hansel refused to eat, Gretel had not been able to sleep. She tore her hair and bit her lips until they bled; she blamed herself for not being able to do anything. Soon she stopped eating, too, just spending all day looking at the motionless bird. By then the mirror had long been completely abandoned.

It was the fourth day that Hansel had refused to eat or drink. He lay in the corner shuddering just like the day when Gretel found him on the balcony. Gretel opened the three big locks and scooped Hansel gently out of the cage.

“No, Hansel, no,” she kept whispering, the bird lying in her cupped hands. Tears trickled down her cheeks, bathing the bird drop by drop. It was the first time she cried after her mother’s death. Then she felt Hansel growing bigger and heavier every moment, his shape changing constantly. Eventually lying in her embrace was a handsome young man in splendid clothes, gasping weakly. Gretel gawked at him with great surprise.

“At last …” the young man said between his weak breaths.

“Are you Hansel?”

“I’m Prince George, not your pet …” he said, coughing. “Give me some water ... and food ...”

“Yes, yes!” Gretel rushed to the dining table and brought back for him a jug of water and some bread. Hansel – or Prince George – sat on the floor next to her and ate without speaking. Gretel did not want to disturb him. She just looked at him, her heart throbbing. He was so handsome and made her blush.

Finally Hansel looked at her and said, “I’ll explain everything to you. But I’m too weak now. Can I get some sleep first? We’ll talk tomorrow.”

“Sure, you get some rest first, dear Hansel. Oh, no, Prince George.” She gently propped him up and helped him to walk to her bed. “You sleep in my bed tonight. I will just use the chair,” she said softly and grinned, showing him her big white teeth.

With hardly any sleep for the last few days and the emotional swing just now, Gretel fell asleep almost the moment she touched the chair. But when she awakened from pleasant dreams the next morning, Hansel was gone. Her blood coursed and she let out a scream.

He was nowhere to be found. Had it been a dream? But the cage was open and empty. Then she saw a small note on the long dining table.

Thank you for all the years of imprisonment. Let me repay you by telling you the truth. The curse your dead mother was mourning was you. You are not beautiful. You are an ugly, giant monster whose life has been nothing but a lie. That’s why you’ve been locked up in a castle and never allowed out. If you don’t believe me, ask your father. Farewell.

9

It was two hard days of traveling through the woods. He tasted the sweet air of home and hope when stepping again on the soil of his own kingdom. He sold his expensive clothes and disguised himself as a peasant. Without much difficulty he got a lowly job at the castle’s stable, where people gossiped. It only took a week to find out Naomi was still alive and had become the queen.

“It was eight years ago already! Everybody thought his majesty wouldn’t have a son after so many years of trying and his nephew the prince would succeed him. But one day the prince died from fever and the king had a son with the new queen! I’ve heard that she was a servant girl before, but don’t tell a soul that you heard that from me,” one of the grooms told him.

He waited patiently for two months until the following summer when the king went for a hunting trip. On a starless night he snuck into her bedchamber when the guards were changing shifts.

“Naomi, I’m back,” he whispered into her ear, nearly fainting upon seeing her again.

She opened her eyes slowly and then cried out, “Who are you?” almost screaming.

“It’s me, George.”

“George?!” she gasped, propping herself upright. “I thought you were dead.”

“I promised never to leave you, remember? What happened to you, my Emerald? Did that monster force you to marry him? But don’t worry, come with me now –”

“Leave me alone. It was a long time ago, you and me. Everything has changed,” she said, turning her face away.

“What are you talking about? How could I leave you in this hell?”

“You have no idea how much I’ve suffered,” she shouted, facing him again. “The tortures! For so long all I wanted was to die. Then one day, I thought, no, I don’t deserve dying like this. So when the king came to see me whipped, I begged for his mercy, saying you’d forced me to succumb to your lust, and cursed you furiously. I even promised to give him a son in a year or he could kill me. I was only trying my luck, but life gave me a chance. I did give him a son. Where were you when I was suffering? Now you’ve come back from nowhere and you tell me you want to save me when I’m queen?” Her green eyes bit his heart with venom.

“I’ll take the throne back and compensate every pain that you’ve suffered, I promise!” he said and gripped her forearms. “We promised we’d never leave each other. Do you remember?”

“What’s the use of remembering a rotten past?” Her voice had become rough and shrill. “You will never become king now, but my son will! I’ve suffered enough because of you. Don’t you dare stand in my way!”

George looked at her blankly, his hands still clutching her forearms.

“Is there a problem, your majesty?” a man bellowed outside. Footsteps approached the bedchamber. “Help!” Naomi shouted. The door broke open. Three guards rushed in and seized him.

“This man was trying to hurt me. Probably an assassin,” she said calmly. “Kill him.”

The long sword ran through his heart in one swift motion. George dropped to the ground without any resistance, still gazing with tears into those cold, indifferent eyes of emerald. Tears of love, tears of love ... For a moment, Gretel the she-giant flitted across his darkening mind.

VERENA TAY

Shades of Resistance:

Eight Flash Fiction Stories

Smashed

TOO MANY LIKE HIM. Too young. Too much testosterone.

Too unemployed. Too much time on his hands. Too much nothing.

Too many dreams unreached. Too demoralized. Too angry.

Too little to eat. Too much to drink. Too much to smoke. Too much coke.

Too much heat in the blood. Too much steam building up. Too tight for thought.

Too pumped up. Too edgy. Too jarred by the bump in the street.

Too cool to let it down. Too fired to back off. Too much man.

Too many shoves. Too many punches. Too many blows.

Too little ducks. Too little dodging. Too little rolls.

Too charged. Too relentless. Still too much steam to release.

Fist to cheek. Tooth to nails. Foot to head.

Too blind to see blood shooting. Too deaf to hear cracks and screams.

Too senseless to stop whacking the downed and the fading.

Finally, too tired.

Too dizzy.

Too breathless to go on.

Too hazy to think. Getting too old, too unfit, need to work out. Not too bad, not a scratch. Hey, they were too easy.

Too surprised only two lie on the street. Too blasé about death. Too numbed to feel responsible (better them than me).

Too proud of his handiwork: broken bones protruding, red and raw, marrow trickling out.

Too hungry, too thirsty, too wild now to care. He flicks his switchblade and tears.

Venus de Milo

MINUM MILO anda jadi sehat dan kuat, mulls Mabel to herself as she regards the drink offered by the nurse. Regain my strength, for what? She turns her head away from both caregiver and Milo, her eyes falling to the stumps of her upper arms left after the double amputation necessary to save her life from that strange bacterial infection. Those bugs took away my hands. Why didn’t they kill me, too? How can I paint or sculpt anymore?

Sinking back against the pillows of her hospital bed, Mabel stares at the water stains on the ceiling. A curvy mark reminds her of the Venus de Milo. Its armless form mocks her. She closes her eyes in despair. Still she sees the figure. Desperately, she tries to erase the image from her head. Then she hears its voice, “If you’re a true artist, you’ll find a way.”

Inspiration, and hope, finally dawn. Opening her eyes, she summons the nurse and sucks a mouthful of Milo up from the cup through a straw. Instead of swallowing, Mabel spews the brown liquid all over the bedclothes in a deliberate shower. The nurse dashes away in horror from this madness to find fresh bedding. For the first time in weeks, Mabel smiles. Not quite Jackson Pollock yet, but not bad for a maiden attempt.

Desired

HE LIKED THIS ONE, naked and tied face up to the bed, so available. Her temper was spicy – instead of cringing away, she stared at him in defiance as he grew closer. Yet her skin was cucumber cool to touch, and her small breasts, two firm globules of boiled egg. He smelled her hair – ahhh, fragrant as coconut ... He plunged his hand between her thighs and then brought his fingers to his mouth to suck – ahhh, delicious like fish ...

After he had his fill of her, he asked, “What’s your name?”

She was silent, her head turned away from him.

He slapped her across the face and demanded, “What’s your name?”

She whimpered, “Nusi.”

That’s how he started calling her Nasi Lemak, and he would order her each Thursday night he visited.

Kept against her will, she had to serve him every time. Because of him, she became the most desired choice in the whorehouse menu.

Many months and clients later, she had the rare luxury of a free moment. In her dim cubicle, she held a hand mirror to check her appearance. The freshness of her youth was gone. Only dead fish eyes stared back at her.

She could not let this decay continue.

She smashed the mirror against the walls of her prison. Then, a glass shard was the last thing that touched the cool of her flesh and the fading spice of her blood.

Vegemites Unite

WE, THE CITIZENS of this tomato plant, pledge ourselves as one united people who will suck the life out of our host regardless of rain, predators or insecticidal soap and oil, to build a webbed society based under leaves and stems so as to achieve happiness, posterity and progress for our kind.

“Damned communists,” spat Lee upon seeing the latest infestation of mites beneath a leaf. These microscopic creatures will not stop a healthy crop of cherry tomatoes. Several sprays of dishwashing liquid diluted in water every two or three days should scare them away.

We, the citizens of this tomato plant, have just as much right to milk the plant for our subsistence as any other creature. We will not accept any threat against our way of life and therefore protest that the drowning of some of our brethren was uncalled for and that this forced eviction from our homeland is perverse. Therefore we invoke the natural law of karma and call upon our cousins to help us apply this form of universal justice.

“Damn bloodsuckers,” cried Lee as he slapped at that buzzing mosquito and then scratched his butt where the bedbug had bitten. Although tiny red ants repeatedly found floating in his water glass alarmed him, what finally drove Lee screaming, “Damn terrorists,” from his house was the army of cockroaches escaping and running free from his septic tank.

Private Time

SUSAN-AH, can you find my glasses? I don’t know where I put them.

Susan-ah, did Ah Ee call?

Susan-ah, why is the TV blinking like that?

Susan-ah, open this bottle for me please.

Susan-ah, how to make the CD play?

Susan-ah, where are you going? Kopi-tiam? Coffee shop! What for? You know how much they charge for kopi-o there? Four, five times more than kopi-tiam! For the price of one cup, you can buy a whole bottle of instant coffee from NTUC. Aiyah, don’t need to go and waste money. We have at home. You want to drink? Then make me some, too!

It was another hour before Susan could extricate herself from the confines of home. What an accomplishment to stand in front of the barista and order the largest possible black coffee ... Damn the expense! It was worth every cent to drink real, high quality stuff and rent a table and chair in clean, air-conditioned comfort for two hours of privacy. She sat down in the quietest corner, stirred a packet of sugar into her steaming mug, and sipped her upscale kopi-o slowly. To enjoy the latest copy of Psychologies undisturbed, this was the life.

John’s Bread

JOHN CAME FROM A RICH FAMILY. How rich? During his youth, for family bonding they would dine at least twice a week at the best restaurants where the price tag per meal for two sets of grandparents, his parents, three siblings and himself easily exceeded fifteen hundred dollars.

At first the filial son, he followed the flow without question. Then when he turned fourteen, something inside him changed.

Maybe the weekly chapel sermons of the top mission school he attended finally began to hit home. Perhaps he became uncomfortable with the hordes of servers fawning on his parents and grandparents for ang pows during each Chinese New Year meal at their favorite Chinese restaurants. Maybe he grew guilty about the tons of Buddha Jump Over the Wall and other environmentally unfriendly delicacies that he ate or threw away when he was too full. Perhaps he felt the time and money spent consuming these massive feasts could be better spent on something else.

Many years of contemplation, study, disagreements with his family and testing by the church passed before he could take his vows of poverty, celibacy and service. Nowadays every morning, Father John earnestly gives thanks for the simple breakfast before him and happily feasts on two slices of margarine-covered toast and two boiled eggs. Thus fortified, he goes about his day doing the Lord’s work.

The Artisan

EVERY MORNING. Come to work. Make the marinade. Slice the meat. Marinate the meat. Crush the peanuts. Make the rempah. Cook the sauce. Steam the ketupat. Chop the cucumber. Chop the onions. Skewer the meat. Start the charcoal fire. Open the stall. Customer orders. Grill the order. Lay out order. Serve the order. Collect the money. Customer finishes. Clear the table. Wait for next customer. Repeat until all one thousand satay sticks are gone. Clean up. Go home. Sleep. Next morning, the same.

This is my life. I like my life. Busy and simple.

You like my satay. Thank you. You think more people must eat my satay. Thank you. You think I must get more customers, earn more money. Thank you. You award me best satay. Thank you. You take photo of me, my stall, the red ribbon. Thank you. You put everything on your website. Thank you.

Then more people visit my stall. More people buy my satay. I sell out faster. Good. I can finish work earlier, go home and get more sleep.

Then more people order my satay and more people want me to make more and open more hours.

No. I sell good satay because I make only one thousand sticks every day. Why must I change because more people now want my satay? If they want, they must queue.

Tomorrow, everything will be the same. Come to work. Make the marinade …

Bibliophile

SO NEW, SO ENTICING ... On the shelf, the book lies – sleek, lean lines, unblemished cover, virgin pages, the text promising fulfillment for mind and soul. How can she not succumb to such charms?

Behind her, her husband asks, “Is it really necessary?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you my mother?”

“Sometimes,” he grins.

In exasperation, she elbow-jabs his chest. How to make this man she loves understand her ever-present hunger? As a child, she loved reading. Yet books were then a luxury at home since Dad was always sick and the family had to make do on Mum’s earnings as a cleaner. Weekly visits to the public library barely satisfied her appetite. While she spent hours absorbing grimy dog-eared paperbacks and pen-marked nonfiction, she always dreamed she would one day hold pristine texts within her hands for her eyes only.

“Really, Honey,” he continues, “so what if nowadays you can damn well afford to buy any new book that you want? Must you get everything that grabs your attention?”

Her shoulders slump over. He is right. There are too many books in their condo stacked high everywhere, a veritable buffet of all new, mostly unread titles – a far cry from the famine of her youth. Instead of purchasing yet another book, perhaps she should buy time to read since leisure is a premium now that she is a busy lawyer.

She resists. He smiles. Then on reaching home, she regrets.

SREEDHEVI IYER

Green Grass: Excerpt from the Short Story

WHEN MOHAN’S WIFE arrived in Thirumugam we could hardly believe it. Her skin was white, so white that we could not see where her hair started. Once we looked closely, we saw that her hair was golden, like our paddy on the eve of harvest day. The two of them climbed down from the Ambassador car in front of Ammani Mami’s house, where they were to stay for a few weeks. We were slightly disappointed. Little Nandu had run around the village for days yelling that Mohan and his white wife from Australia were coming, that Mohan was now very rich, that they had a cell phone each and drove shiny foreign cars. His news resounded in our cluster of mud huts. When we waited outside Ammani Mami’s big landowning brick house, though, all we saw was an Ambassador car pull up, with her nephew inside. The Ambassador was something we saw everyday – even our school headmaster sometimes used it to get to town.

Mohan’s wife was introduced to us as Ray-chil. It was her first time in India. We saw them go into Ammani Mami’s house. Ammani Mami was Mohan’s father’s third cousin, and single-handedly brought up Mohan after his parents died. We were very happy to see that Mohan remembered his relations here in Thirumugam, and that his wife Ray-chil was honorable enough to pay her respects to her husband’s relations.

We heard a lot about Ray-chil in the next few days, and quite a bit about Mohan as well. It was all Nandu’s doing. Nandu visited Ammani Mami’s house a few times a week. Her son Velan taught Nandu 8th Standard Math. But when Mohan and Ray-chil came, Nandu found excuses to visit them everyday. We saw Ray-chil and Mohan around Thirumugam a lot, and when we didn’t, Nandu would tell us all that we needed to know.

Mohan and Ray-chil had met and fallen in love in Australia while studying. Her divorced parents were not invited to the wedding. Having them together in the same room would remind Ray-chil of her childhood, smelling of citronella, scratching her body acne, wearing peasant blouses and standing pointlessly next to her mother at rallies. Nandu said he wasn’t sure what all this meant, only that these were reasons for Ray-chil insisting on coming to Thirumugam for her honeymoon. Mohan did not have the option of saying no.

Ray-chil loved Thirumugam and we loved her right back. She came to our riverbanks in the mornings, where we washed our clothes and ourselves. She smiled at our stares, and in television English once said, “It’s just so hot,” to nobody in particular. “But I’m going to get some clothes stitched.” Nandu repeated her words to us in Tamil, but we already understood her apologetic tone, about her jeans and bare arms. Mohan was with her, and when some of the men waved from the river and called out his name, he at first pretended he hadn’t heard. They kept calling out to him, till Ray-chil turned toward him and said something too soft for us to hear. Mohan then turned around, and smiled and nodded at the men.

“Mohan is a foreigner now, he has no time for us,” Chellamma said later that evening, as we walked back from the fields. “Yes, did you see, he hardly had any gifts for anyone,” we responded. “Only his wife.”

The next day we saw Ray-chil walking the streets, smiling at the small group of boys that had formed around her. The group eventually became so large Ray-chil and Mohan could no longer move. Mohan tried to shoo them away, but Ray-chil knelt down at their eye level and spoke to them. She took their pictures and learnt some words. She seemed to already know some Tamil, and practiced it on the boys, who would laugh, congratulate her and teach her more words. Ray-chil was very clever, Pandi said. She knew how to make herself pleasing to Mohan’s family. We guessed they must have married without his family’s consent – but Mohan’s family should have thought of these things before sending him to Chennai, and then Australia, to study. “Those that go so far away lose a little bit of what they initially knew,” said seventy-year-old Tenkasi. He would know, he’s lost four sons to the big city. “They have to make space for new things, new ideas, new languages, new ways of thinking, and to fit it all in, some of the old things have to be pushed aside.”

But Ray-chil seemed to know that, and seemed to be making up for it. One day she came to Manickam’s sundry shop in the middle of the village, and asked him for a box of matches in Tamil unmixed with English. Manickam did not understand her accent at first, but when the words unfurled in his brain he was very impressed, and grinning, gave her the matches for free. Not long after, Nandu reported that she had been taking pictures of cows and had turned up one morning at the milkman’s house, asking if he would be so kind as to teach her how to milk one of his cows. That news spread very quickly and some of us did not know what to make of it. We heard she had been alone – Mohan wasn’t with her. But she had genuinely just wanted to learn how to milk a cow. Besides, she was white – she would not have the same ideas of honor.

Still, Velan said he spoke to Mohan about it. And Velan was very diplomatic – he did not make it seem like a complaint. Had he told Ray-chil yet about Velan’s grass, we asked? “No, he was scared. He watches Ray-chil very carefully. Ray-chil and Mohan have never been up on the roof of Ammani Mami’s house.” We laughed.

Nandu’s stories kept us entertained, but we were also a little concerned about Mohan. He was no longer the Mohan we remembered, the Mohan who would run to the river in nothing but red shorts and dust and splash in with a leap and a scream. He first arrived so stiff, so uncomfortable, as if he were the foreigner, not his new wife. He walked with her wearing odd pants that had too many pockets and stopped at his knees, and shirts in thick material with collars. He looked like a Bombay film star, but still faded next to his smiling wife, from whose skin and hair the sunshine for our fields seemed to emanate. He almost always spoke English, even when Ray-chil tried to speak in Tamil.

But after Ray-chil’s milkman episode, Mohan seemed to relax. Pandi thinks it happened after they all went to the cinema in the neighboring town, Nandu in tow. They were showing an old movie, a Sivaji Ganesan mythology where the great actor played Lord Shiva. Apparently Mohan had burst out laughing at a small joke and later explained it to Ray-chil. He had heard that joke before, he said, when he was in primary school. It was about punning on the word “hot.” Dust from fruits collected on the ground had to be blown away, like blowing on hot food. Mohan laughed and laughed at this, and Ray-chil laughed a little with him, pretending to understand.

After that, we all agreed, Mohan seemed better. He would wear his old veshti, his white lower garments, speak in Tamil, and once Nandu spotted him using a neem twig to brush his teeth in the morning.

We don’t think Mohan told Ray-chil about going to the milkman’s house. Maybe he felt it was beyond his wife’s comprehension. But Ray-chil had become more like us as time wore on. She was now on laughing terms with Ammani Mami, and had started to learn her recipes – something we received dubiously from Nandu, as Ammani Mami was very particular about them. But Nandu insisted he saw it with his own eyes. He’d gone to Ammani Mami’s house since Ray-chil had called him. He had rushed from his homework like a shot. We didn’t blame him – many of us, young and old, found excuses to go see Ray-chil, to touch her skin, feel her hair, hear her speak Tamil with such pink, pink lips. But Ray-chil was not there. She was out with Ammani Mami, who wanted to show her where she got ingredients for her avial.

“What did you do then?” we asked Nandu, a little jealous of Ray-chil for accessing Ammani Mami’s secrets, and wanting to distract ourselves.

“Well, Mohan was there, and he gave me a gift,” he said.

“Mohan gave you a gift? What was it?”

“A crystal pyramid.”

“A what?”

“A crystal pyramid. He showed me how to use it. If you hold it at a certain angle to a light, the elements of light break into its individual components – the colors of the rainbow. Mohan said I could use it in school later.”

“You can see the rainbow in the pyramid?”

“No, you see it through the pyramid. The crystal is the prism. You see the bare elements through it. All the colors are there, but my favorite is green, because it is strong, and it reminds me of our fields.”

But we had lost interest. Ray-chil was not in this story.

We all knew Velan was nervous having Ray-chil and Mohan around in the house. But we realized that over time, Velan slowly changed his mind. He was as curious as us, at first, at Ray-chil’s eagerness. Velan would answer her questions with his eyes on the floor, as if shielding them. He would laugh if she made a joke or made a mistake in her Tamil, but then carry a guilty look about him. Gradually, though, Velan looked evenly into Ray-chil’s eyes, and Nandu once reported that Velan himself cracked a joke about the village well, and swelled when Ray-chil laughed. We understood completely. Not only did she look like the Americans on the television we’d crowd around in the schoolteacher’s house, but she also ate our food and spoke our language – something that we never saw on that bright box.

We felt Velan must have changed his mind the day Ray-chil and Mohan visited the Kali Amman temple on the outskirts of Thirumugam. She was our village guardian, this Kali Amman. She made sure the rains came and that we harvested enough each year. When Velan saw Ray-chil there, with her eyes closed and palms pressed together, he must have finally felt she was trustworthy.

She was dumbstruck, said Velan to us the next day. Overwhelmed. Velan had finally taken Ray-chil and Mohan up to the roof after they returned from the temple. “I show you view,” he had said, as an excuse. But Ray-chil had seen it right away. They emerged from the side stairwell on the second floor of Ammani Mami’s house onto the open-air cement rooftop. It was a large open space, perfect for summer nights when the house was simply too stifling. We knew the floor now had black stains, and the sides were crumbling, and the ground was littered with little seeds and flowers from the trees overhead. But in a corner, to the right of the house, Velan had set up something, something that showed foresight.

Ray-chil gasped when she saw it. Although she should have been struck by the grays, blues and reds of the thatched and cemented rooftops around her, what drew her eyes was a patch of the clearest, brightest green in front of her. It was in such contrast to the rest of the musty environment, it almost seemed to glow. Ray-chil went closer.

“Why, you son of a bitch, you waited this long to tell us?” Mohan said to Velan, who glowed. “Emergency supplier,” he said in English, drawing out each vowel, savoring the mouthful. His secret patches of grass came from the hands of gardeners and watchmen in landowner houses, and went to hotels and stadiums in towns and cities at a fraction of the market price. They were all the rage, he said. Everyone in the district came to him, just by word of mouth. “And also,” he said, “it is re-cycling. Take one from old, give one to new. Take old grass, give new grass. No waste.”

The patch was rectangular and the size of three cricket pitches. It started from the rooftop door and led to the far wall, from where one could look over the whole village and marvel at our squalor all in one go, not piecemeal over days. Mohan edged away from the patch, turning slightly so that he stood at an angle from it, neither facing it nor turning away. He said it hurt his eyes and looked the other way into the mountains. Ray-chil seemed very drawn to it, however. She stood and stared at the secret stash, admiring the painstakingly nourished patch of first grade carpet grass. She even bent down to feel the blades with her fingers, caressing its velvety smoothness, running both her hands through them, feeling their over-cared-for voluptuousness. She stayed that way until Mohan interrupted her. She then regained her bearings and attempted a small smile at her husband, a smile he did not return. Both of them told Velan he could trust them, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Later, they found this was something they agreed on, that Velan was a genius.

All of us spoke about nothing but Ray-chil. She was in our thoughts when we started the day in the fields, and still there when we returned home. Manickam boasted as a complaint that he had run out of Fair and Lovely creams. He had ordered more, and when they arrived, sold them at a higher price, and still ran out. Ray-chil began to recognize some of us, especially the little girls, and remember our names. She clicked photographs of us. She had them printed in the next town and gave them to us one day. We didn’t know what to make of it – most of the young ones who visited took photos of us to keep for themselves, to look at us when they were far away. In the photos, we stood on the dirt tracks doing nothing but smiling, hands hanging uselessly at our sides. It made us look lazy and jobless, like we were louts. Still, there was something captivating about holding a photograph in our hands. Some of us placed the photos in our houses, next to the painted calendar of the gods. That way we understood the photos, the way they were cocooned in time while we aged looking at them. It gave us the idea to take a picture of Ray-chil, so we could put her in our houses, too, forever. It made us excited, to be able to show others the beautiful white lady who came one day.

Ray-chil understood what we meant quickly enough, and with a big laugh that made her whole face go as red as Aruni’s tomatoes, she agreed. She gave the camera to Mohan and stood under a tree, facing the sun. We started to pose with her – first Ramnath, then Gopi, and then Prasad. Some of us who were passing by realized what was happening and began to line up. Nandu did his part by spreading the word even further and bigger crowds began to form. Ray-chil was very nice about it all. She smiled, laughed, spoke a little bit in our language to encourage the shy ones among us. Mohan kept taking photos. Women wanted to take part, then entire groups of children on their way back from school. Time passed; the day grew long. Ray-chil never stopped, never said no. In fact, we noticed a glow on her face, a strange kind of breathlessness that came over her as we lavished our attention, as we let her know we wanted a piece of her to be with us forever. She seemed to know it, to drink in our yearning with her eyes while aware of a yearning of her own. Our crowds, our easy spotlight on her gleaming skin seemed to feed her.

We think Mohan noticed, too. After some time he slowed down, taking the photos in a more lackadaisical manner, as if his heart was not in it. Many times he suggested they stop for the day, but Ray-chil goaded him on, saying he should not disappoint his fellow villagers. She ignored Mohan’s retort that he cared more for her health than the villagers’ disappointment. “Oh, but they like looking at me,” Ray-chil said, and we agreed with her. After a while Mohan no longer met Ray-chil’s eyes, and when dusk came, Mohan shut off the camera, picked up his bags and started toward Velan’s house, leaving Ray-chil with Balu the blacksmith.

Nandu managed to eat breakfast at Velan’s house the next day, showing up unannounced with a hungry grin that Ammani Mami recognized. He said things were different. Ray-chil sat down on the floor with Velan and Mohan, trying to cross her legs the way they did, but unable to stay that way for long. Mohan showed her how to use her hands to smash up the idlis, to dip it into the chutney before bringing it to her mouth. Velan told Mohan he thought Ray-chil did do it well – perhaps she lacked some grace, but there is no use being fussy over the little details with someone who hasn’t been brought up in our ways. He wasn’t about to tell her that in small places like this the men ate first, and that women were to wait till after – things are changing; we must change with them.

But after Mohan finished and left to wash his hands, with bits of idli and sambhar running down his palm, Ray-chil barely picked at her breakfast.

JENNIFER LEE

To the Mountain: Excerpts from the Novel

Jane (Summer 2003)

“LOVE IS A HABIT,” Dong-Jin says. Or would say, if he put things that way. It’s what he means when he wakes up early on the Sunday before Chusok and wakes Jae with a series of gulpam, knuckles rubbing that sweet wall of toddler hair that always stands in surrender. It’s what he means when he strokes my cheek, then reaches under the cover for my swollen belly, saying, “Good morning, my wife, good morning, baby, we’re going to the graves today! Aren’t the graves a great thing?”

But I’m already thinking about breakfast, and the aftermath: the never-ending cycle of dirty dishes, cascades of order and disorder. I pull the covers over my head, inhaling the sweet and musty smell of our bodies, holding onto the sound of laughter as Dong-Jin and Jae wrestle, but it is no use; there is the acrid breath of mosquito-repelling incense; there is the pat-pat-pat of someone jump-roping upstairs, there is the distant clang of brass bells from the scrap metal collectors. My in-laws will be here in an hour. It doesn’t matter what kind of feminist I am, if the place is a mess they’ll judge me, not Dong-Jin, and the mood will only go downhill from there.

Even before we moved to Seoul, we returned to Korea at least once a year, and while here, we went to the graves. For ten years now I have been following Dong-Jin and his family to these rituals and I know what’s ahead. We’ll leave our apartment armed with coffee, full of immediate concerns (did you make him pee? did you bring the scythe?) and make our way through the tangled city streets, where new apartment complexes rise and highways sprout like weeds. As we leave the restless and hungry city, following the Han River out into green fields, then through the satellite city of Namyangju, then up to the mountain graveyard, Dong-Jin and his father’s thoughts will turn to memories of the past, and they will begin to fight.

This is Seoul. This is the beginning of the twenty-first century. This thought is enough, sometimes, to arm me against the forces of discomfort with a war cry and a bayonet; I picture them coming at me, the bodiless eyes, the invisible walls of soju-breath, and the swarms of overwhelming signage, buzzing like killer bees. One day, I vow, I will find that twisted gulfstream that exists in all crowded sidewalk traffic. I will learn to live in the spaces between cars and thin walls and alleyways. To find my own thoughts in the midst of the clang and squeal and babble of this city.

But for now, there is breakfast to be made, dishes to be done, a bag to be packed.

Halmoni slips off her shoes and enters the apartment. She doesn’t look to my face for permission before placing her hand on my stomach. She knows that I can fake a smile but I cannot conceal the resentment in my eyes. She looks down and I look away, out to the veranda, to the traffic on the street, the fluorescent red crosses on the skyline. Sundays in Seoul are like this, either spent in prayer, or in the mountains, dressed for an expedition to the Himalayas. After a few moments she moves her hand to another spot, like a doctor with a stethoscope. I feel her face turn to mine as she senses movement but I continue to look away. Some part of me needs to be free: if it’s not my skin, it’s my gaze. We write novels about love, full of the fireworks of romance or the howling agony of grief, but mostly we live like this, in small moments of capitulation. Fishing poo out of the bathtub. Breathing the dust of a vacuum cleaner bag while searching for a missing Lego piece. Allowing a woman who had no children of her own to feel like she shares this pregnancy, this baby, this life.

Dong-Jin doesn’t believe in grand gestures. There is no gift large enough to win affection, no abracadabra to conjure love when it’s been lost like a letter in the mail, somewhere over the ocean, or scattered in the winds, or caught in crossfire, or lost in translation. Love is a war of attrition, you have to amass your troops and send them into the hills, guerrilla style, looking for openings, weaknesses, applying constant pressure. They were still finding soldiers in the mountains, Dong-Jin tells me, years after the armistice was signed. They’d emerge emaciated, still fighting.

She withdraws her hand and we face each other, finally, smiling, relieved. “Himdir ji?” she asks, sympathetically. I clench my jaw. Outside, church bells ring, calling acolytes. She means the pregnancy: it’s hard, isn’t it? “Anyo.” No, it’s not. Not difficult. Some disappointment flits across her face, which she generally keeps calm and unwrinkled. I am supposed to say “yes,” but I cannot. All day long I listen to the neighborhood women talk about how himdiro everything is. Sigh, it’s so hot, himdiro. Sigh, raising kids, how himdiro! Oh, my legs hurt but I still have to cook and clean, himdiro jookesso! It galls me, all this whining over trivial things, as if there weren’t enough real hardship around to send someone smashing the windows. It grates me, like pebbles in my shoes, to offer complaint as a way of saying, “We’re the same.” She offers it to me as an olive branch, as her way of saying, “Thank you for letting me pet your belly,” but I take it as an insult, as criticism. The question thins my skin, and my “no” thins hers. A coolness spreads between us, and she straightens her blouse and moves into the kitchen, her posture that of a court lady on inspection.

Yu-Jin (December 1986)

It was from the outhouse that Yu-Jin got his first good look at his old home. Feeling peaceful and benevolent with a full stomach and empty bladder, he watched the warm fingers of the late winter sunrise re-awaken the land, and then the house became the center of a magical canvas of brick and wire and pipes and clanging and smoke. The hub of his childhood. Had he ever really looked at it before, ever considered its hidden rhythms, which no outsider could possibly sense, much less interpret?

As a child he had run as fast as he could from the stink and darkness of the outhouse, back into the protective arms of the hanok. So he ran, delighting in the grace and strength of his adult legs. Across the yard and up the stone steps, he slid the door to the sleeping chamber aside. But he had forgotten how to take those steps in the winter. He slipped, hitting his chin on the metal rail of the sliding wooden door with a crack.

“Yu-Jin-ah! What happened?”

Father rushed from the side of the hanok, hands still dark with soot from the yeontan, and knelt next to him, tilting Yu-Jin’s chin up to look at the gash. The gesture sent a quiver through Yu-Jin’s body. How long had it been since he was touched, treasured, taken care of? In Korea he had taken touch for granted: bumping and pushing in the street, going to the public baths with his friends, scrubbing one another’s backs, sleeping together on yo mats, holding hands. Those first few months in America he had tried to express his growing intimacy with his new friends by touching them and had been met with a horrified pulling back. He had quickly learned to respect that invisible barrier the Americans called “personal space.” Meanwhile he had endlessly fantasized about the moment of his return home: Father’s strong arms around him, his shirt wet from Father’s tears.

But Father had not embraced him. Father had held his arms out straight and placed them firmly on Yu-Jin’s shoulders, nodding gruffly. “Yu-Jin-ah. You’ve grown tall, but you’re too skinny. Did you take those vitamins I sent you?”

As Father gently wiped the blood away with his handkerchief, Yu-Jin resisted the urge to bury his head in his father’s chest and cry, the way he had as a child. Instead he pushed Father away and said, “Don’t you know that’s unsanitary? I’ll do it myself.”

LAVANYA SHANBHOGUE-ARVIND

Blueprint

HE LIVES in the heart of the material world, renounces nothing, denounces everybody and yet he is called Yogi. You wait for him in near-bridal finery, a meticulously draped red saree, its many folds coerced into perfection with a safety pin, your shiny hair braided in an elaborate fishtail pattern, your lips colored in bright fuchsia, your eyes smeared with kajal, henna for your hands and silver anklets for your feet, the ones with the little bells that jingle when you walk.

Your friend Savita tells you not to wait for him. It’s been a month since he showed up, she reminds you. Instead you tell her that you’re going to find him.

“No,” she says, “It’s not good for you.”

You dismiss her with a silent wave of your hand and continue to fuss over your appearance. You adjust your nose ring, your earring, the many rings on your fingers, your nails. You check if your teeth are white enough, if your breath is fresh, if the flowers in your hair are still in place, strategically pinned to your fishtail braid the way Nutan, the parlour-wali, fixed it. Savita grumbles. What does she know? She’s been in a bad mood since morning ever since the neighbor’s son called her Savita bhabhi for the whole street to hear. As a joke. There’s been much sniggering in the basti since then. The mechanic boys who zoom around on the bikes they’ve repaired are the worst. If you get too close they grope your breasts. And how far can you get away from them in the thoroughfare of the basti? They give her the creeps. And you, too, but you’ve got other things on your mind.

“I must go,” you tell her, “It’s time.”

You don’t tell Savita why you need to go, why it’s important to see Yogi. You can’t tell Savita before you tell him.

Savita speaks. He’s not even a nice person. He doesn’t have a regular job. He squanders away his father’s limited wealth. He spends his entire day with the mechanic boys, borrowing client bikes and going god-knows-where, smoking beedis and god-knows-what, laughing too loudly, drinking toddy at night and the other day he had to be brought to his chawl on a handcart. And then there’s that other girl, the light-eyed one. Didn’t you know? You do know. You know everything about him. And, there’s NO light-eyed girl.

You can’t explain why you’re with him. It’s a wordless feeling right in the center of your chest. You can’t name it. It’s like asking an illiterate person to read. You can only see the squiggles. You can’t say what it is. But it feels good.

Even as you begin to walk toward where you think he is Savita mouths platitudes.

If it has to be a secret, if you need to keep it in the dark, if nobody should know, blah, blah, blah, then is it right? And what has he ever bought you, the wealth-squandering bastard?

She rolls her eyes when you say that it isn’t about what he has bought you but what he has brought you. You tell her that darkness has a quiet, evil dignity that light can never achieve. It’s a place where you make secrets, keep them and bury them and that’s a good thing because everybody has secrets. When she rolls her eyes at you after your over-the-top mini-speech you tell her that you’re meeting him to bring it all into the light. She makes a sound of dismissal, a cluck of the tongue.

You’re walking right into the heart of the basti, past mounds of garbage and dog shit, past train tracks, past street hawkers selling channa and peanuts in tall paper cones, past half-naked toddlers playing with mud and old rubber tubes.

Savita is following you. She’s talking in a high-pitched voice. You’re not listening. She can’t shriek her way to appeal to your devious mind. A shriek has that comic, ignorable quality. And your mind has been made up. You’re looking for him. It has been a while since you saw him, since you ran your fingers on his cheek, grazing his stubble with the back of your hand, kissing his lips as his mustache pricks and tickles. Ever since he left you’ve been having vile nightmares of headless horsemen and dark wood-nymphs in black cornfields. And there’s that thing you need to tell him.

Somebody is calling your name. You turn around. It’s one of the mechanic boys, a short, lanky lad with a mop of rough curls. He’s Yogi’s friend. When he’s not looking at your breasts he treats you with something that resembles respect.

“Yogi’s there,” he says pointing to a large crowd. You look closely and you see it.

Where, you ask although you know where exactly because your heart begins to sink. Savita has been reduced to an extra, a prop in the background. You are the tragic heroine of this story. The Meena Kumari. It’s your birthright now to talk to Yogi and get your heart shattered and cry about it; you know that Savita will fuss over you with the usual I-told-you-so dialogue, and just to spite her you might tell her, enough, Savita bhabhi.

How could you forget what day it was? How could you forget that today is Lord Krishna’s birthday and that people would gather, thousands of them in festive-wear, cheering, singing and dancing, all to recreate the lord’s favorite childhood antics? How could you forget that Yogi nursed this secret ambition to get to the very top of the human pyramid to break a coveted earthen pot of yogurt strung at the very top in celebration of the lord’s many boyhood feats? How could you forget that Yogi wanted that kind of glory? The kind that has crowds chanting his name even as he’s doing something only for himself. He could have so easily been a politician.

You look at the pyramid, at Yogi’s many friends standing shoulder to shoulder in a circle, their knees slightly bent, their arms entwined and you watch as Yogi puts one foot after another on shoulders, forearms, even heads of the people forming the pyramid. You are an idiot to trust the sure-footedness of a drunkard. But, wait. You look again and you realize that he is good. Man, he is good. He’s steady. He knows what he’s doing. He’s hauling himself up, one foot after another, an expression of utmost focus plastered on his face. And then it strikes you. He was here all along, in the city, practicing for the climb. He had not gone to his village to “settle matters related to property.” The lying piece of goat shit.

Worst of all, how could Yogi forget his promise? He knew that your brother died this way, plummeting down from the top of the pyramid just as he was about to strike the pot, just as he had steadied himself on the shoulders of two of his comrades, and when he had raised a hand to strike the pot something happened, somebody from below moved, coughed and your brother was falling rapidly, toppling and tumbling, his feet pointing skyward and then the crash came and ended it all. Those screams, those terrible screams still haunt you.

And Yogi? After he saw you weep for months, after he saw you wither away little by little and diminish into a shadow of a previous self he’d told you that he’d never ever be the climber, the Govinda who must get to the very top of the human pyramid.

“He promised,” Savita tells you in a loud whisper.

“This year the height is only eighteen feet,” says Yogi’s friend and the voice seems to come from somewhere very far away although he’s standing right next to you.

Enough to die, you think.

You can’t take your eyes off him. In a minute there’s cheering. He’s completed the task. He’s broken the pot. He’ll receive a lakh of rupees. He comes down slowly, the sure-footed drunkard, his arms in the air celebrating his victory. Once he’s on solid ground he’s hauled up again on to the shoulders of his friends. There’s more cheering.

He sees you. He asks to be brought down. He walks to you. He smiles. You don’t smile back. He knows you are angry. You look at each other for a minute, him smiling even as you are still angry. He hasn’t noticed your saree or the henna or your hair in the elaborate fishtail pattern. You take his hand and place it on your stomach. His hand touches your bare skin. You nod. He doesn’t stop smiling. It’s not a smile for you. He’s smiling for himself, for his victory.

Somebody calls his name. He turns away from you. It’s the light-eyed girl. Yes, she exists. He tells you he’ll be back. You don’t know what to say.

Savita starts the I-told-you-so song. You don’t have the heart to insult her.

You think about him. He never gave you his heart, only its blueprint. You saw the empty spaces there and made grandiose plans for moving day. From here, he will love you like this. From there, he will love you like that.

But all those spaces, all of those were already filled much before by something else, other dark things. A blueprint is not certainty. Only certainty is certainty.

SHEREE CHUA

The Extinctionists: Excerpt from the Short Story

I SAW IT THEN, a colony of lizards with electric blue skin, so vibrant against the yellowed blades of grass strewn around the empty aquarium. Uncle Jonas had put his prized piranhas in the pond by the garden and spread a fishing net over the water as if it could stand between the viciousness of hungry predators. He told me that the piranhas wouldn’t attack unless they knew that they could overpower the other and assured me of our safety. Abuela didn’t have to know, they were there for a few days until his customer arrived. The lizards were jumpy in their glass environment; they would not eat any of the bugs that Uncle Jonas caught from the controlled wilderness of the suburbs. He caught sickly grasshoppers, ladybugs, earthworms and dragonflies, he even tossed in a caterpillar in its chrysalis for good measure, but the lizards would touch none of it. It soon became a terrarium with a vast insect colony and even the butterfly managed to emerge from the cocoon and fly away from the madness. One time when he dropped a beetle into the aquarium, I watched as the beetle drew its pinchers and charged to the nearest lizard challenging it to a fight. For the first time, I saw a spark of life in the creature as it moved in listless twitches. Uncle Jonas leapt in indignation and fished the beetle out with his bare hands, at once throwing it to the ground and crushing it under his Doc Martens.

I jumped off my stool, enraged by the violence.

“That was a poisonous one.” Abuela chuckled. “I thought Jonas knew.”

“You could have told me,” he muttered petulantly. “I could have been stung when I took it out and where would that lead me? To an early grave?”

“It only stings when it knows that it’s going to overpower the prey, hijo,” Abuela responded.

“Like the piranhas?” I asked.

“Yes, Byron, like the school of abominations that your uncle keeps. Did they die yet, Jonas?”

“Of course not, Mother. I put them in the pond.”

I could remember the distinct moment when Abuela twitched, exactly like the lizard and raced to the garden not bothering to remove her house slippers. Uncle Jonas was struck with a foreboding, a suspension of dread and conscious guilt. When the synapses of his brain made the connection, he dashed after Abuela like a schoolboy. The waters were lurching with underwater activity. Abuela yanked the fish net as if it were a veil that obscured the carnage before her. She jumped into the pond and took the net with her, the water churning above her knees. She cast the net and dragged it to the surface, piranhas and goldfish tangled in its knots. She threw the fish onto the lawn, uncaring.

Uncle Jonas came back breathlessly with a pool skimmer. He stood on the partition between land and water and blindly fished out his piranhas.

Abuela threw the net without respite, dead fish and shocked ones alike drawn from the green comfort of their environment into the harsh sunlight where their gills stuck together and they drowned on air. The garden was strewn with aquatic corpses, some mangled with their eyes chewed off, some even their fins, others perfectly fine but beached in a world where they cannot survive. I wanted to save some of the fish, but the dark scales of the piranhas scared me, their teeth, small as they were, gave me visions of being bitten if I came close. I imagined that the smell of my blood would awaken them and I would be devoured ferociously and the piranhas would, in their last hurrah, rip off flesh even if they were dying because it is a predator’s instinct. When the frenzy died down, Abuela rescued a few of the gasping fish, throwing them back to the waters.

“It’s still alive!” Uncle Jonas exclaimed.

Abuela walked over to the edge of the pond and grabbed the pool skimmer from my uncle’s hand. Uncle Jonas had forgotten about Señor Bruno, Abuelo’s prized arapaima. The old man rescued it from an exotic pet store where it was being masqueraded as an arowana. Nobody was fooled with its sharp head, not even when the shop owners tattooed it with a gold stamp and symbols for good luck. The Chinese loved arowanas because they were said to capture bad luck when they jumped to their death from the tank. The arapaima would not jump out of the tank to capture the plague even if the mistress of death hovered above it. Abuelo recognized the fish by its nature, to swim in the wild until the day its gills failed. It would not survive in any tank – it was destined to die because of its inherent ugliness. So he bought it and named the fish Señor Bruno. Abuelo put the fish in a large drum and constructed the pond himself, transporting water from the nearby creek. Strangely enough, Señor Bruno survived despite the crammed space and finally when he was free to roam the pond, he never stopped moving. He continued on years after Abuelo died, becoming a living memory of the man himself. A relic that was almost threatened by the carelessness of Uncle Jonas.

“I raised an idiot,” Abuela cursed.

“I swear, I forgot!” Uncle Jonas reasoned.

“Forgetting is a convenience of circumstance,” Abuela replied bitterly.

Uncle Jonas said nothing. I felt his guilt from across the green. We were both complicit in the unwitting murder plot of Señor Bruno. We forgot that he was still there. The audacity of his crime hung around him like a heavy coat in the summer, weighing down his shoulders and stooping his back. What was even more unforgivable was that he had forgotten and remembered again almost all too late. Abuela began sweeping the dead fish with her feet. I could see a goldfish with its dying gasps floating to the surface on its side, fins desperately flopping until it slowed and finally rose, belly up. My uncle, watching as the emotions rose, like the fish, to the surface – emotions for a dead man.

Abuela buried the goldfish but carried the piranhas to the kitchen where she lopped off heads and yanked guts and placed the corpses on a frame stretched out with silkscreen to dry in the summer air.

The silence between the three of us lasted until the next morning when Uncle Jonas’s client finally arrived. The woman inspected each lizard as if they were museum pieces and placed them in a carrier filled with cotton. She handed Uncle Jonas a card.

“The inauguration will be in eight days.”

Uncle Jonas nodded.

“We expect you to pay your dues yearly in alternating species, though if you manage to get an Ivory-Billed Woodpecker or a Javan Rhinoceros you will be granted a lifetime membership.”

“Will they go painlessly?”

“Our chefs are the best in the world, the deaths of these animals are not as relevant as their taste.”

Uncle Jonas hung his head.

“Banquets will be held on the twentieth of the month,” she continued. “Welcome to the club. Piscem vorat maior minorem.”

LUCY HUNGERFORD

The Police Station

THEY HAVE PUT her belongings into a clear plastic bag. “This is all there is,” chides the woman behind the desk. “No phone, no wallet, nothing.” She thrusts the bag toward me, as though I’m somehow to blame. I pick it up and examine the contents: one set of house keys, a bus pass, some safety pins, a tea bag, a few coins and in the corner of the bag, a small pendant, wrapped in a coil of leather cord. My mother never goes far without a tea bag. It is one of her pet austerities, limiting herself to one each day, drawing it out until the water no longer changes color. I bought her the pendant, a small piece of jade in the shape of a rabbit. I was so pleased with my eleven-year-old self for having given her something significant – she was born in 1951, the year of the Rabbit – but it turned out to be yet another example of my getting things wrong, as you’re not supposed to get a Rabbit a rabbit. I’m surprised that it’s here amongst her things, that she still has it, though it is hardly recognizable now. It seems she’s found a use for it after all, using the rabbit not as the good luck charm I had intended but as a giant worry bead, thumbing the finer carvings away over the intervening years, so that what remains now is just a smooth, grayish-green lump of stone. At least it’s no longer a rabbit after all.

“It’s all hers,” I tell the woman eventually, handing the bag back across the desk.

“Fine.” She tosses it blithely it into a plastic tray behind her. “You can collect it when she comes out. It won’t be long now.”

I hover by her desk for a moment, eyeing the large revolving doors and beyond them the street, thronging with lunch-hour activity. I can see people passing by, carrying food and umbrellas, talking on phones or to each another, enjoying the fresh rain-washed air. Whereas here, in the damp hush of the police station lobby, the serried ranks of blue plastic chairs are now nearly all occupied. The old man in the far corner is still here. He has finally stopped being sick and sits doubled over, with a bucket still between his knees. There are a few recent arrivals, currently perched on the edge of their seats filling in forms, but the rest of us are waiting for someone to be discharged. We pass the time by napping or chatting to one another or just staring blankly at the notices offering community support and encouraging us to surrender our knives in the drop box provided. I recognize in these people the same harried, life-interrupted quality, having, like me, started the day elsewhere, doing other things. Every so often, someone will be led out by the duty officer and for a hopeful moment we will all look up, then watch as someone else’s muted reunion is played out. One of us will rise stiffly; we will offer a nod or a comforting hand on the shoulder and say almost nothing as belongings are collected and forms are filled in, saving it all for beyond the walls of the police station. Not long now, I think to myself. I’ll be next.

They thanked me when I first arrived. “Great of you to come so quickly,” said the duty officer. “Your mother stated you as next of kin. We considered it better for someone to come and take her home, given what has happened.”

I am generally awkward in conversation with strangers. The pressure to say something tends to make me go red and silent. I suppose in this case, worry for my mother made me bold.

“Is she okay? Is she hurt?”

“They didn’t tell you?” He looked surprised.

“They just said,” I began, feeling a sudden lurch of apprehension, “that she’s been involved in a minor incident …”

“Yes, that’s right,” he confirmed with a cheerful smile.

“But …”

He gave me an expectant look.

“But what happened?” I blurted finally, concern for my mother winning over my embarrassment. “Was she mugged? Where was she, when –”

“I can’t give you the details, I’m afraid,” he said, halting me with an upheld hand.

“But she’s okay?”

“She’s fine, Miss Quan. Absolutely fine.” And then, seeing my concern, he added: “She’s even been seen by the nurse.”

“Oh, that’s good,” I said, relieved. “Can I see her?”

“Not yet. But soon. I’m sure it won’t be long.”

“And you’re sure –”

“Everything will be fine,” he insisted, with a hint of irritation, ushering me to a seat.

That was four hours ago. I sat down to wait, presuming – I don’t know why – a mugging of some description. Perhaps someone had snatched her bag. I ate a bar of chocolate and tried to shake off a mounting guilt that this was in some way my fault. My mother had been complaining a lot recently, about getting older and frailer – more of a target for opportunists. I thought back over our last few meetings, reminded of the low-level, niggling fretfulness on her part, which I’d dealt with just as she would have done, in a mild “stop-your-fussing” kind of way. She’d ask me three times whether I’d double-locked the door, convinced that someone in the building was out to get her. One time, her shoes had gone missing from the hallway. “Why would anyone want to take your shoes?” I asked her. She told me it wasn’t just her shoes. It was her mail, too. I’d tried to reason with her, to point out the obvious. “How can you know that, Ma? Maybe no one sent anything. Perhaps some days you just don’t get mail.” I hadn’t meant it unkindly. I’d just wanted her to stop worrying all the time.

After that, our conversations – whatever the topic – seemed inevitably to veer off-course into dark imaginings of young boys in hoodies on bikes, or people dressing up as gas men. She produced a crumpled leaflet entitled “Take Control! Self-Defense for Beginners” in large red lettering. I should not have laughed. It seemed ridiculous. I just couldn’t picture her doing karate. She’s a seamstress; the heaviest exercise she does nowadays is moving the presser-foot. “Please stop, Ma,” I kept saying. “This is silly talk.” She’d nod and say: “Okay, yes,” without much conviction.

But now the brisk woman is calling me back to the desk. This is hopeful. I sense the end is finally in sight.

“So, Miss Quan,” she says, beckoning me with her pink-nailed finger, “you’re probably wondering about the delay …”

“Is everything okay?”

“Well,” she says, sliding her large frame conspiratorially across the desk and reducing her voice to a whisper. “It’s because we’ve been trying to find your mother an interpreter.”

“A what?”

“It’s someone,” she begins, raising a heavily penciled eyebrow, “someone who can translate –”

“No, I know what an interpreter is,” I tell her, feeling flustered. “I just want to know why she needs one.”

“Your mum, being Chinese and all –” she pauses, as though waiting for me to confirm the fact. “Well, we just don’t have anyone available right now.”

“But there must be some mistake,” I tell her. “My mother has lived here for twenty years. She speaks very good English.”

“Doesn’t seem like it. She’s not said a word all morning.”

“But she can.”

“Well, she isn’t.”

“Look,” I say, gripped by a sudden sense of frustration. “If she’s not speaking it’s because she’s scared. Not because she can’t. She doesn’t need an interpreter. She probably needs some breakfast or a cup of tea or … me, even –” I take a breath to keep my words from flying out in bursts “– to sit with her or just reassure her because let me tell you something: she’s probably freaking out right now. She’s never set foot in a police station in her life and all this,” I jerk my head backward to the waiting area and the queue I can feel forming behind me, “it’s a lot, you know, if you’re not used to it.”

I can picture her sitting there in silence. It’s true, my mother is not a woman of many words. Chinese is language of pictures, she likes to say, tapping her temples for emphasis: for the eye, not ear. She says it a lot, perhaps to explain her history of long silences, or to encourage a belated fluency in my Mandarin – it’s always hard to know with her. Her mother tongue is an obscure Sichuanese dialect and highly divergent in almost every respect from the standardized Mandarin they teach in schools. I have few memories of her ever speaking it but when she does, it is an eruption. She is like an effervescent tablet, all those careful, neat features of her dissolving into swirls of sudden expressiveness, filling the air with strange buzzes and lilts and sonant hums: a rare glimpse of another person from another life.

For this reason, English has always been her language of choice. “Not many people from Sichuan in Soho twenty years ago,” she explains, if anyone asks her, so “more better,” she always says, for her to speak in English. It is a nuts-and-bolts way of speaking, a brisk and bombastic execution which is spoken like a true first generation immigrant, but it is English, nonetheless. My mother can make herself perfectly understood when she wants.

The woman is saying my name again.

“I can see you really care about your mother, Miss Quan,” she repeats, smiling patiently. “And we have tried everything. We’ve told her that you can sit in with her. Your mother knows that you’ve been here all day waiting –”

And then she stops and does something funny with her mouth, opening and shutting it a few times, like an out-of-water fish. “I don’t know how to say this –.” There is more lip movement and another smile. “She says she doesn’t want your help. She’s very insistent: she wants you to go home.”

I feel the sudden heat in my cheeks and the needling stares of the people in the queue behind me, all leaning in, enjoying my awkwardness. Half of me wants to suggest that this is all a mix-up, that she’s got the wrong woman but the other half knows that this kind of bald asperity has my mother written all over it. I ought to feel relieved: at least she’s okay, back to her old, hard-boiled self. Certainly, no sign of the fragile parent I’ve been worrying about in recent weeks. And yet there’s also a stab of anger, at having given up a whole day waiting for her and something else, too: a simmering resentment, probably fed by this long-standing habit she has of always using rejection as a weapon.

“Well,” I say, taking a steadying breath. “She’s managing English perfectly well when she wants to.”

I’m torn between going and staying. It’s a typical dilemma: whether to do as she says, and leave her here – in which case, I’ll likely never hear the end of it: how-could-you-to-your-own-mother. Or, I could do the right thing and stay, which I know is just a Pyrrhic victory and offers further doses of rejection as its reward.

“If I go,” I ask her. “Who’s going to take her home?”

There is no one else. It’s just me and her. And I can’t think of anyone else whom she would allow to see her like this, sitting alone in a London police station, with her things in a plastic bag. None of her friends, certainly – she has too much face for that. My mother comes from a family called Quan or 拳, which, as she never tires of telling me, is the symbol for “fist.” The one thing she can’t tolerate – above everything else – is weakness. If she finds a soft spot in someone, she has an instinctive urge to squeeze it hard until it’s gone. She can’t help herself. I decide that what’s really behind this “I’m fine, leave me alone” talk is her pride. She doesn’t want pity – and least of all mine – because her whole identity is built on strength and self-reliance. These are the attributes which have underpinned her success and which, for the full twenty-eight years of my life, she has consistently found wanting in me.

“She doesn’t seem to want anyone to take her home.”

“I wish you’d told me all of this earlier.”

“Well, what your mother does want – another thing we’re trying to arrange – is her own lawyer.”

For a moment I think I’ve misheard her. “Why?” And then, it occurs to me: she is exercising some sort of revenge strategy. “She wants to press charges?”

The woman bites her lip. “Best would be, Ms. Quan, if you make your way to Interview Room number 5. DC Berwick is waiting for you there. He will explain everything.” She swings a straightened arm out so suddenly that instinctively, I duck. “Just straight down that corridor, there,” she says, her palm strangely flat and outstretched, as though she’s checking for rain or something.

I move warily past her hand, toward the corridor.

“Thanks,” I say, without really meaning it.

“It’ll all be all fine, I’m sure,” she says, without really meaning it either.

TWIGS CHEN

Origins of a Name: Excerpt from the Novel, “Venga Venga Venga”

THE ONLY HERITAGE I share with China is my name. My parents gave me one reeking of stature and importance, laden with more geographical and cultural worth than they could ever hope to provide, incomparably memorable in the holy sanctum of names and not at all distinctive from its derived namesake. A mountain. That’s what it is. A world famous mountain range in China, or to be exact, Anhui in Eastern China. The Yellow Mountain of China, known to the Chinese as Huang Shan. Even today their decision from thirty-five years back baffles me. Why name me after a landscape which doesn’t exist in Singapore? Here, anything natural that rises beyond one hundred meters and is surrounded by a circumference of greenery is parceled as a nature reserve. The most famous is a mound of land in the central region no more than 160 meters high. Not to besmirch Singapore’s tallest natural landmark, which does resemble a proper hill when you are gazing at it from ground level, miles away. It helps that a transmission tower is perched on the hilltop, too.

Dad: “Writing Poetry at Bukit Timah Hill just doesn’t have the same ring to it as Writing Poetry on a Mountain.”

Mom: “A legendary mountain.”

Dad: “It’s a very inspiring name for a boy. Majestic, flowing, all conquering, inimitable. Dashing as mountains go, powerful as the rivers beneath your feet flow. What grows on you are pine trees and the elegance of the occasional willow.”

Mom: “One day you’ll be a creator of great poetry and literature. If not, a true connoisseur of the literary arts. If not, a mountaineer living in the footsteps of Sir Edmund Hillary. If not, a botanist at the Botanical Gardens.”

Based on the poetic ideals they believed a person of my name should embody, I was sent to calligraphy school at the age of five; picked up watercolor painting and poster-color painting at the ages of five-and-a-half and five-and-three-quarters, respectively; recited poems from Tang poetry and Song verses when I wasn’t involved in abacus and swimming lessons; worked on my hanyu pinyin when I was six and failed it constantly between the ages of seven and eleven; endured classes outside of school to perfect my Chinese and made it to an A during the final examinations. There was no time to waste. Whenever I fell down, my parents made me observe the five-second rule to get up on my feet, otherwise the bacteria on the ground would attack me and then I would cease to exist.

I wound up in a top secondary school where my name was the toast of the population and the entire Huang family during New Year and Christmas. My red packets were always fatter and gifts larger and more delicately wrapped than anyone else’s. Even the ribbons and gift cards were grander and the wrapping paper glossier. My cousins, most of whom were around my age, caught hold of that and singled me out for a good picking on during family gatherings. I had no sibling to hide behind as I was a mountain. Everyone had some sort of agenda against me and they couldn’t wait to unleash it on me so they could fulfil this item on the list and move on to the next. For six years, I was an item on the list.

In school, not a day passed without someone yelling it from across the building – “Yoo-hoo! I’m climbing the great Yellow Mountain of China!” or “Here comes the Chinaman!” – their voices sometimes reaching across the length of the quadrangle. I tuned them out. Primary school was nothing, secondary school was a breeze, and in perfectly natural progression, I did Chinese literature for my O-Levels. Emerging as the top scorer in my class didn’t come fair nor easy; I relied on my memory and pulled all-nighters to cram every detail, useless or not, into my head. You can never be too sure. When the results were released, everyone congratulated me, even neighbors whom I had never met before and teachers who bore an opposite opinion of me. The school had sixteen hundred students and I was singled out for having a good name and a bunch of As.

“Like wearing roller skates,” said Poon. “Roller skates, bro.”

Now, onto roller skates, I feel obliged, as I did a few times when I took part in storytelling competitions as a kid, to quote a passage from Trevor J. Trabant’s sophomore piece published in the local papers in November 1965, simply titled “Chinatown”:

Mr. Sim was a gifted runner. At the age of two he ran his first marathon, and he went on to win every competition that requires peddling on two legs. He won every competition that there is to win. Running was all he did and bless his parents’ souls and outrageous lack of wealth and understanding of English, was all he could do. Mr. Sim ran fast like the wind and with the grace of a hunted cheetah, because his intuition told him the only way out of the rat race is to run faster than everyone else.

Out of the kindness of his heart, Mr. Sim, who had squirreled away his competition winnings to open a shop on the periphery of Chinatown, created roller skates for men and women alike to catch a breather from the mad dash in life he expected to see when buildings around him began to fall and rise. He sold the skates for close to nothing, and immediately gained a wide following.

Mr. Sim’s father – a clay sculptor who changed his first name so that no one would associate him with his goody-two-shoes son – went out of his way to pour ice cubes on the pedestrian path outside his son’s shop, so the men and women and sometimes children on roller skates exiting the shop were instantly punished for having the cheek to speed ahead of where they should be in life.

When I turned eighteen and was clutching my A-Levels result slip with both perforated sides peeled off and the bolded letter grades on the concealed flap rubberstamping the finality of my fate, that was the only story I could think of and continue to think about for months. There were many other things I should have been thinking about, but this story stuck like wet mud to the sole of my shoe. I should have been thinking about what went wrong in my revision, and perhaps the one thing I should have started with was excelling in stuff I could barely understand. Weird and bizarre don’t quite cut it – that feeling stirs up an eerie sensation which never went away when I realized I had no way to go but up, and higher and higher I pushed myself up the metal rungs. Sure, you make your luck and I made mine, and mine ran out in junior college in a time where down became the new up.

According to my parents, the deities at a nearby Taoist temple, which we visited every year to ask for blessings, had failed them. When I asked them to be rational, they turned their blame on me. “You need faith,” they chided. Those were their exact words when I was sixteen, when they encouraged my enrolment in a Catholic-based junior college where I never once took part in the morning prayer sessions. Instead, in that space of five minutes they took to progress from “Lord” to “Amen,” I found myself relishing a purposeful stroll halfway around the running track, long after the pledge was taken, the anthem sung, the flag raised. Red against white, crescent moon and five stars rising. The flag often hung limp atop a tall rusty white pole. It looked weary, as though weighed down by the perpetual density in the air. I bet the flag was at least thirty years old. As I gazed up at the flag, my mouth moved along but I had no idea what I was singing about. Something along the lines of progress and brotherhood, I think. For better or worse, we were to sing in Malay. Everyone knew the lyrics as soon as the melody struck, but once the music wore off, the meaning disappeared as well. What’s more, some classmates, lethargic with morning breath, had really horrible singing and reciting skills, which brought out an insipid desire in me to crawl along the canal on the outskirts of the school compound and flee for dear life.

So, the thing is, I crashed. Plain as day. I saw it coming and seeing it arrive did not bother me as much as having a chocolate fudge cake slammed into my face at a birthday party when I was eight. I know. Lick off the goodies and get on with it. I cannot say the same of the onlookers who caught wind of my grades. Given their mortified expressions, you would think it was them who screwed up.

I first saw it coming when I could not shake off the image of me pruning shrubs into fancy cannons at the Botanical Gardens. When I saw a gardener in the park, his weatherworn face became mine, and mine, his. The saga tree outside the window of my room seemed to grow taller and faster than ever and one day its branches would creep in through the window, its claw-like twigs weaving silently past the curtains at the stroke of midnight, and when I woke up, the twigs would have entwined themselves with my room, huge broad leaves blocking out all light. I started to hate trees and everything they stood for. I was certain my hand shook during the exams and almost demanded a re-assessment, not because of doubt in the result tabulations, but because of the unfamiliarity of the handwriting on the papers submitted – words that could only be written by the rough, calloused hand of a garden worker.

I went on to do economics in a private university. No reason why except the subject being the hottest thing around and having absolutely nothing to do with trees or people with bad morning breath. The university itself was not as bad as everyone made it out to be and neither was it as good as the marketing advertised it to be. If anything, it produced an advanced race of exam crammers like Poon and I, although Poon chose to do things differently from others. For example, he read Trabant on the eve of economics exams and Karl Marx for leisure. Everything else was considered redundant. I got through by memorizing whatever I could and reading Trabant in sporadic spurts. I could not care less about fiscal versus monetary economics, or the aggregate demand of a nation, although I can safely say that for a period after I graduated from school, I’d admired Krugman and his depression economics theories and found Freakonomics properly despairing. Then I got a job when the economy was still bubbling at its peak. Guess I got lucky – my grades weren’t even that good but a plethora of job openings meant I could field out forty job applications and receive eight call ups for an interview despite being stranded in mental catharsis since my last paper on Industrial Economics.

It wasn’t that tough. Everything in this meritocracy hinges on the power of your memory and the quality of the answers provided at the correct time. Once you figure out the beat, up you go. They said it, I believed it. I memorized mine like pearls of wisdom. Once the exams were over I threw everything away.

Later – only much later – did it occur to me that without complete understanding of something even as basic and natural as a memory, that memory becomes nothing but an empty shell, where every last bit of mollusk has either died or slipped away. No amount of repetition can resuscitate it. I can recite every one of Li Bai’s and Du Fu’s poems right down to the last word. I can provide you with a running commentary on their history and how they came to produce these poems. Churn out rhythmic and symbolic verses in five-word long stanzas? No problem. Snap a photo of your spouse getting down low with a faceless person at a multi-story car park somewhere and blow it up into a poster color painting reminiscent of de Chirico? Why not. Not even completing a reasonably realistic charcoal portrait of a tabby cat in three hours fazes me. Give me some time. Time does the trick. Close your eyes and listen to the ebb and the flow while I let some computer software do the work. There, poetry in the post-postmodern world.

In the end, if anything, I’m far from poetic.

Gemma seemed to share my sentiment in the poetics of a name.

“The lack of poetry in your life is incredible,” were her exact words, spoken to me time and again, as if afraid of banishing it from memory. The frequent beginnings of a conversation, or at the very least, what I can recall that was exchanged between us. In reply I would recite some classical Chinese poem, or when the mood kicked in, a couple of verses of T.S. Eliot or Yeats or even lines from Trabant’s prose, which she loved and I’d memorized by heart, of course.

“I’m not talking about that,” she said.

“You said poetry, didn’t you?”

“Your perception of what I said is so literal.”

“Do you mean it figuratively then?”

“Never mind.” She would turn away at this point. “I’m hungry. Let’s walk faster, shall we?”

This is about as long as the conversation gets.

NATALIE LORD

Chapter One: Excerpt from the Novel, “Lines in the Sand”

HIS NAME WAS CAIO FERREIRA. It was an unusual name, perfect both in rhythm and sound. It could have been the name of a famous actor. But it wasn’t. Of the few facts Analiese Jacob knew of Caio Ferreira, this was one.

When Analiese arrived at the gallery she wondered how Caio would greet her. She was facing the painting where they were to meet nine minutes ahead of schedule. She blamed the Swiss in her for making her overly efficient, as if she had an in-built clock that ran ahead of time. She looked up from her watch to survey the people in the room. Caio could also have arrived early, and she was impatient to see him. After discounting each visitor, she decided to check the other rooms and, under the guise of inspecting the works of art, went in search of him.

She wandered through the rooms trying to distract her mind. She applied her attention to the paintings, the changing hues of the wooden floor, the sunlight adding its own artistic perspective; but what she was really looking at were the people around her, searching their faces for his. When she finished her reconnaissance she returned to the painting before which they were to meet, sitting on the bench nearest it, in reverence as much as in appreciation.

Analiese took a moment to adjust her posture. She sat upright before the painting, crossing her legs so that her calves cushioned each other at a forty-five degree angle to her body, admiring the peacock motif on her shoes. She’d once read that was how a lady should sit and wanted to appear as ladylike as possible. Not least because she hoped looking like a lady might somehow compensate for not having behaved like one.

Analiese believed in first impressions and wanted to make the right one this time around. The entrance was to her right, and she positioned herself so she could see everyone entering. Then she tilted her head to look at the artwork, arranging her hair so it fell partially over one shoulder with the remainder flowing in waves against her back. She placed one hand on her thigh, the other on her handbag, and waited, statuesque in her stillness.

Her eyes refused to comply, incited by nervousness to glance at her watch, the second hand racing against her heartbeat. She anticipated his arrival at any moment. The gallery wasn’t an easy place to get to and Analiese knew she should have chosen a place that was in consideration of his not knowing London, but she hadn’t been able to. Not since finding his image in the gallery years earlier. Not after spending hours of lost days, hidden years, watching him, sitting with him, sharing their secret. Analiese needed to experience the real and the imagined in one place. She needed to show him his image and explain that in some way they hadn’t parted at all.

She changed the position of her legs, folding right over left. Then, looking for something to occupy her, she took a silver atomizer from her bag and pressed twice. The delicate floral and citrus notes of Penhaligon’s Blenheim Bouquet brought her an air of calm. It was lavender picked on a summer’s day in Provence, grated lemon rind waiting to decorate a cake. A fleeting distraction. She leaned forward, arranging the folds of her navy silk dress as she stole a quick glance around the room to make sure he hadn’t arrived and was mistakenly waiting by another painting. She knew this to be unlikely as there was only one painting of this name, but felt a need to verify his absence.

She imagined him rushing in, shirt untucked, sleeves rolled up, hair mopping his face. This was how he’d appeared in the last photo she’d seen of him. “Sorry, sorry,” he would say as they brushed cheeks in courteous and mandatory greeting. She would move along the bench to allow him space to sit down. After that she could not be sure how to proceed. Would she be bold enough to launch into her speech, apologize, feign some sort of explanation, justify an entirely unjustifiable act? Her thoughts were winding in ever tightening circles, and with a forced breath she ordered her focus to change. Instead of contorting every consideration, she began twirling her hair around her index finger and tugging at it.

Analiese was practiced in hiding turmoil. It was the twinge at the end of the hair twirl, pulling her scalp to the threshold of pain, that told of her anxiety, the depth of a tooth biting against her lip that spoke of frustration, the methodical stretch and curl of her toes within her heels that betrayed her fear. But none passing her by would know this.

More than an hour had passed and she was growing irritated, even though she had no claim on impatience given the circumstances. A sudden movement caught her eye. It was him. She saw the side of his head first as he surveyed the room, his shoulder-length hair tousled just like in the photo in her bag. I’m here, Analiese wanted to shout, turn around. But, prevented by the sensation of a blow to the stomach, she was unable to utter a sound. Instead she stood up to face him. He turned as she did so. They stood face to face on opposite sides of the room. She’d met him in distant memory and imagination before, his reality existing only on photographic paper. She raised a hand in greeting and forced a smile. She knew it looked entirely unnatural and hated herself for not being relaxed. But no one in this position would be. When she smiled naturally she’d been told she could light up a room. How she wanted that to happen now.

He caught her gaze, passed a hand through his hair and looked behind him, as if he didn’t realize she was waving at him. He must recognize me, Analiese thought. She’d emailed him a photo. She was even wearing the same navy dress. It was him, wasn’t it, she questioned. She clutched her bag wanting to check the image she was carrying and wishing she didn’t need to. She remained standing as a blond girl came into view, rushing over and reaching her arms around his neck. Analiese watched as he slid an arm around the girl’s waist. She sat down on the bench, hiding her embarrassment by looking at the floor as they passed her.

She’d always thought she would know him by instinct alone, and was disappointed to realize she was wrong. The hair, the eyes, they were so similar to those of the young man in the photo. The age, too, would have been about the same. A silly mistake, she told herself, acknowledging and blaming her nerves in equal measure. There’s still time. There could be an infinite number of reasons for his lateness. There were always delays on the buses and trains. He might have overslept. Probably he’d been out the night before, exploring London and his alarm hadn’t gone off, or he hadn’t set it.

Analiese was prepared to wait for him as long as she needed to. She’d never known if this moment would come. She’d dreamt of it year after year, replaying a multitude of scenarios in her head. She’d been with him in nightmares, waking in shock, in fear. She’d woken smiling after a night with him, only to discover he wasn’t there. She would wait because she needed resolution. She needed to talk about what had happened. She needed to know how he felt, what he wanted, consider their future. When he arrived they would sit together and talk long into the evening. They would walk from the gallery to the village, where they would have an early dinner at the new Italian place opposite the flower shop, or drinks at the pub. After that, she knew what she wanted to happen, yet dared not anticipate it.

As time continued to stretch, Analiese fell into a pattern: casting her eyes to her watch, the entrance hall, the painting. She watched as the dulled tones of dusk crept into the room through the skylight diffusing the vibrancy of the painting, and marveled at how the young man in the center of the work still refused to retreat into the shadows, instead using the sunset tones to convey an intimacy Analiese hadn’t witnessed before.

Piero di Cosimo, you have indeed created a captivating character even if the title Portrait of a Young Man fails to indicate so, she thought, examining the protagonist from different angles. After spending so long with him in one sitting, Analiese felt closer than ever to the depiction of this man standing proud against a pure blue background.

She’d found the painting years earlier when she’d come to the gallery in search of solace, looking for a place where she could sit with her shame, rather than hide it. She’d never been sure of exactly what it was in the painting that reminded her of the young man she was now waiting for, but each time she’d sat before the portrait, she’d found him there.

It was the oldest painting in the gallery and when it was originally bought had been attributed to Leonardo da Vinci then later to Bolraffio and finally to Piero. The portrait was painted on wood using tempera and the iridescence of color in the work was captivating. Analiese smiled back as he looked at her, this five-hundred-year-old young man, his skin translucent and radiant, dark hair falling to his broad shoulders, eyes warm, mood pensive. She admired his handsomeness, more enticing for the lack of perfection, his uneven lips and pert nose.

Analiese wondered about the young man she was waiting for. Bringing a finger to her face and running it up and down her nose, she remembered his nose and decided it was like that of the young man in the portrait, a smidgen too broad and too long. Not that she was in a position to judge, her own nose being long for her face, ruler straight and with a blob at the end. She held her forefinger against the point of her nose, forcing her eyes to engage with the painting rather than drifting back to the doorway.

The rhythm of footsteps behind her caused her to jump and she sat upright with a start, having long forgotten about her initial attempts to perfect her posture in anticipation of his arrival. Her nerves like beads in a shaker, she turned to face the sound, unsure of whether she was going to say something about his tardiness or launch into a hug.

“Closing for the day now. If you could make your way to the exit, please.” There was no warmth to the words, a mechanical phrase uttered by the security guard day in, day out. Analiese frowned, nodding in acquiescence. She bowed her head before the painting as she stood, accepting without admitting that the only young man she was going to meet that day had been hanging before her for the best part of the afternoon. She sighed a long drawn out breath, trying to disperse the suffocating sadness.

As she left the gallery, her posture, with its curved shoulders, bent head and downward eyes, spoke of defeat. Her mood was a fading gray against the terracotta bricks of the gallery, its verdant lawns and rainbow flowerbeds. The dainty pastel petals of new roses brightened Analiese’s path as she left the gallery, their scent infusing the cooling night air.

Had she not been distracted by her sorrow, she might have noticed them swaying in the breeze, waiting to be praised for their beautiful spectacle. Were she not lost in a fog of remorse, she might have seen a young man, not dissimilar to the one in the painting, standing across the street, watching her.

CARMEN HO

Seagull

OCTOBER 25, 2016, another ordinary autumn day in Vancouver, Canada. We are at Steveston Fisherman’s Wharf. We are a seagull perched on the side of a docked fishing boat. The boat is crowded with blue tubs filled with seawater, and an old fisherwoman in a straw hat stands among the tubs, selling salmon, prawns and sea bass to passersby. The boat rocks gently on the small waves. A little girl sitting on her father’s shoulders and her mother stop in front of us, looking and pointing at today’s fresh catch.

“Look at the big fish, Mama!” says the girl.

“Oh wow, honey, it’s big isn’t it?” the mother responds. She looks at the fisherwoman and smiles.

“This fellow’s a fighter,” says the fisherwoman. “Fifteen pounds! The fellow nearly got away. Look at him, still lively! I’ll give you a good deal if you want him.”

The girl squeals with glee as the fish splashes water over its plastic container. The fish glances up at her with much less glee. It is not happy with its situation. It wants to swim free in the vast ocean. The man and woman smile and stand a while longer to be polite, as if considering the fisherwoman’s offer. They then thank her and head back toward the promenade by the dock.

The promenade is buzzing with life on this sunny weekend. Despite the cold October weather, the wooden planks of the promenade and the dock are warmed by the brilliant sun hanging high in the clear sky. We leave the fishing boat and fly over the promenade for a sweeping view of the people. Restaurants selling fish and chips, all-day breakfast, pizza, seafood and burgers line the promenade. Two young women in their twenties leave the fish-and-chips restaurant, laughing at a joke we missed. They approach an ice cream stand and buy two vanilla cones. The ice cream glimmers under the heat, already melting onto their fingers as they lick the trails of white as quickly as possible, laughing merrily. Across from them, by the railing that separates the promenade from the water, two men are arguing. A man in a long black coat and red scarf leans in close to the other man, who is wearing a blue cap with a matching blue jacket and is leaning with his back against the metal railing.

“I told you not to take it off! I told you!” says the man in the long coat. He seems to be trying hard not to lose his temper.

“I took it off to wash my hands. I didn’t want it to get wet,” says the man with the blue cap.

“Did you check thoroughly? Are you sure? What about your pockets?”

“I checked everywhere.”

“Do you remember who else was in the washroom?”

“Two other guys I think.”

“What did they look like? Would you recognize them? Did you see which direction they went?”

“John, how would I even find them?”

“Listen, I’m trying to help! That’s our engagement ring.”

“I know that!” The man with the blue cap turns around and peers down at the water.

After a moment, the other man puts his arm around him. “It’s okay, love. We’ll get another one.”

The other man starts to heave heavily, his shoulders shaking.

“You don’t have to cry! Let’s go back and have another look. Maybe the restaurant has cameras outside the washroom.”

Preoccupied in his own storm of emotions, the man with the blue cap doesn’t seem to have heard him. “I can’t believe I’m so stupid! Who loses their engagement ring?”

Tired of flying, one of us lands on the railing next to the two men. We are so familiar with people now; we no longer fear them. A girl, maybe seven or eight years old, comes up to us. She is holding a bread roll. We dive to the ground, eager. She keeps a cautious distance, trying not to scare us off.

“Hey! Hey!” she calls to the two men. They turn to look at her. “Do you want to feed the seagull?”

Without waiting for a response, she tears off a small piece of bread and hands it to the man with the blue cap. She then tears off a few more pieces and throws them toward us. Crumbs scatter on the ground, immediately attracting more of us, another flock of seagulls. We plunge for the nearest crumbs.

“Come on!” she shouts impatiently to the two men.

The man in the long coat grins. He takes some of the bread from his fiancé and throws a whole chunk onto the ground. We dive toward it with several other seagulls.

“That’s too big!” says the young girl, cross.

“No, it isn’t! Look! They seem happy,” says the man in the long coat.

A large seagull suddenly dives down from above, grabs the whole chunk of bread with its feet, and glides off high into the air.

We turn eagerly to the man for more. The man with the blue cap throws some to us. He seems to be in a better mood now.

It takes a few more minutes for the girl and the men to toss the remaining bread onto the ground, and only a few seconds for all of that to disappear.

Still hungry, we wave our goodbye and take off into the air toward the sea. We circle the water slowly, keeping the dock in sight. Although we are familiar with the sea, it is unwise for a seagull to stray so far from land that it disappears entirely. The water provides for us, but the waves are untrustworthy. Even calm waters are devious. Exhaust ourselves in flight and the waves may suddenly reach up to swallow us whole if we fly too low. The skies and winds have a royal temper; they can grow angry without warning.

We watch, alert. The water today seems unusually frothy, as if someone spilled oil and waste into it. Still, we can see the slightest glimmer of fish scales in the sunlight. We dive for it. Just before our beak hits the water, we angle our body upward so that our feet go in instead. Our talons close in on the cool body of a small fish. It wriggles violently. We lift it out of the water and into the air. As we fly toward a rock that protrudes from the water to devour the fish, we catch glimpses of other fish, some leaping from the waves and some glimmering just beneath the ever-moving surface. The sea is abundant with life.

We place our catch carefully on the rock and stand over it, our talons gripping the rough surface of the rock on both sides of the fish. The fish flops, struggling to breathe. We make our kill swiftly, tearing the head off in one swift movement, ending its pain. The moment is over. The fish passes through death, moving onward to its next life, to be born again, perhaps as something else. It leaves behind its body, an offering that nourishes us. We pick at the soft flesh beneath the scales. Above, the sun burns, its rays warming our feathers and the fish that is now half gone. We watch as another, bigger bird dives low toward the water but misses its catch. It sees us. It comes toward us. It is an eagle. We stand possessively over the remains of our fish. As the eagle approaches, it slows down, observing. Perhaps our protective stance and hostility fend it off, or perhaps it thinks of a better way to get its meal, for it decides to leave us alone, and flies away.

We hoot our song of triumph. There is much to celebrate in being respected. But we are no longer hungry now. Having eaten our fill, we leave the remains of the fish behind and head back to the fisherman’s wharf. Now in the late afternoon, the promenade is brimming with people. A group of tourists pauses to take their photo at the “Welcome” sign. Welcome to where? We wonder. There is no particular boundary that cuts the pier off from the rest of the world. No solid wall, no painted line. People can come in and exit in all directions. Where is the beginning? Where is the end? Perhaps the sign re-welcomes people to the world where they already belong. Perhaps it should read “Welcome Home.”

A girl is dancing to music in the middle of the promenade. She leaps and twirls in front of a violinist who looks too absorbed in his music to notice. A small crowd has gathered around them, smiling and applauding in encouragement at the end of each song. The girl bows, pretending to be on the stage of a grand performance, and immediately begins dancing again when the music picks up. We hover close by, observing. The girl is the same girl who gave us bread. But something seems different about her. We can’t quite pinpoint what it is. We fly around her, examining her from all three hundred and sixty degrees. Is it her clothes? But she is wearing the same plaid dress, cream-colored jacket and faux leather ankle boots. Is it her hair? But it is still tied up in a high ponytail, the shiny black elastic band contrasting slightly with her frizzy black hair. No, we can’t find any part of her that is physically different. She is the same person, with the same bright eyes and laughing lips. Her hands are the same hands that sprinkled bread generously into the air; now they are spread out widely, palms, fingers and all, like wings, and now they are lifted high up over her head, and now lowering to her side again like a tulip blooming in the springtime.

Yes, she is the same, but she is also not. Perhaps it is the time between us first seeing her and now; she has grown and changed imperceptibly. Who knows how her thoughts have tangled and untangled, finding their places and rearranging again, shuffling to make room for new, expanding thoughts during the minutes we didn’t pay attention to her? Who knows how her mind is growing and transforming now, changing at every millisecond, altering her personality, her soul, or whatever word we wish to label it? How fascinating she is! How rich her inner world is! The moment we begin to understand her, she has already become someone else, a different person, a newer version of her who responds in unique ways to her external and internal worlds. She is unpredictable, indefinable; we cannot grasp her, not the core of her, not the absolute of what makes her who she is, because she is ever-morning, like water. She is larger than what she appears to be. She is beyond the little body leaping into the air now; she contains a whole universe we cannot see.

So she is the same, but she is also not. But it is more than this. It seems more than this. As an instinctive observer, we know deep down that there is a change that surrounds her, envelops her, which is not the natural change of her beautiful mind. Some kind of energy, some strange, disturbing atmosphere follows her now that was not there before. Yes, it is external; it is not coming from her – very strange indeed. What could it be?

We see it now. The slightest flicker of gloom. The silhouette of danger. The smell of impending misfortune.

We squawk. We screech a loud, high-pitched cry. The girl and the people pay no attention to us, for we are just a common seagull. In their minds, we are a silly white bird that only eats and never thinks, for what knowledge might a seagull have? We cannot walk up to her and tell her to be careful. We cannot do anything, because even if we get her attention, how would we communicate with her? She is not as patient and observant as us; she is human. She would not stop to try to understand us as an equal. Perhaps she would only offer us another bread roll.

And so we stay close by to observe, as we always do.

The violinist finishes his repertoire. The audience hoots, whistles and applauds. A cascade of coins and dollar bills falls into the open violin case. The girl bows once more and hops away, merging with the crowd. Only now do we notice that she seems to be alone. Where is her family? Her friends? It is odd for a child, a young girl of her age, to be out alone. Perhaps she lives nearby in Steveston Fisherman’s Village and often frequents this pier? We should have noticed her before if that were the case, since we are here every day, but we have never seen her before. We know this with certainty; her spirited nature is too striking to forget. Where could she have come from?

She weaves purposefully through the crowd, as some children do even when they have nowhere to go. Her stride is confident and her eyes are curious, darting this way and that as if trying to take in every action and detail around her. Women and men smile at her when she glances at them. A crying baby stops crying and looks at her inquisitively as she passes by. She stops to bend down to pet a French bulldog, her hand stroking its short hair ever so gently while it pants under the sun.

“What’s your name?” she asks.

“She’s Sandwich,” says a man in his mid-thirties. He is the dog’s friend.

“Sandwich? Well, hello, Sandwich!”

The girl decides to go. She gets up, nods at the man, and continues onward, turning back once to wave goodbye to Sandwich.

We follow her closely, hovering behind her, making sure that we don’t lose her in the crowd. But the strangest, most bewildering thing happens. There in broad daylight, right in front of our eyes, the girl disappears. As if she is sucked into an invisible vacuum, she vanishes suddenly and completely. The people don’t seem to have noticed and continue on with their preoccupations. Perhaps nobody paid attention to the girl at the moment of her disappearance? Perhaps she never existed? For it really seems as if she never did. But this can’t be the case, because she was talking to the man with the French bulldog just a moment ago, and she gave us her bread.

Maybe it’s a trick of our vision. With the way the sun’s rays are bouncing off railings and windows and clashing with the kaleidoscopic colors of people’s clothing, it is possible that our usually impeccable vision failed us for a split second, a second long enough to let the girl escape us. We circle the area carefully, searching for a girl in a plaid dress with a high ponytail. We see several who look like her, but upon close inspection we find, with great disappointment, that they are not. Could a person as alive and solid as those milling about and chatting below us right now really just vanish? Where could she have disappeared to? Was there some sort of invisible portal?

Time seems to be slowing down. The crowd has thinned and the people are walking slower now, enjoying the remaining sunlight. The sun is a red globe, sinking lower toward the horizon while streaks of majestic orange and purple underline the sky as if emphasizing its splendor. We sweep low to hear the chatter; bits of gossip and suggestions for dinner float in the air we breathe, mixing with the smells of the sea. By the dock, the fisherwoman is still in her boat, the plastic tubs now empty except for some remaining prawns. The big fish we saw earlier today is no longer there. She turns off the oxygen pumps and lifts the tubs of prawns onto the dock, checking that the boat is tied securely before she leaves with the tubs. Perhaps she will sell the prawns at a low price to the seafood restaurants by the promenade.

Outside the fish-and-chips restaurant, the couple looking for their engagement ring is talking to a policewoman. Nearby, the family we first saw is making their way to a red minivan. The little girl is holding several shopping bags – souvenirs? – which she refuses to let her parents help her with. She insists on carrying the treasures herself. Perhaps they are going home, or to their lodging if they are travelers. We settle on the railing, wondering where they might go now. The water below us stretches out into a vast, smooth surface that mirrors the darkening sky. Who knows what mysteries and treasures lie beneath? Strange creatures of every sort, large menacing fish that will terrify even the most experienced fishermen, skulls of humans long drowned and the precious items they brought with them to their forever sleep – items that once had the value that the humans ascribed them, but now are just objects, things, equal to the pebbles and rocks on the seabed. The possibilities are endless, beyond our imagination. But what we do know with certainty is that the sea is our life source. It breathes and teems with life that sustains us all. Like standing outside the gates to paradise, its beauty can never be guessed just by looking at the surface.

Where is the dancing girl who disappeared? Is she still in this world? We do not know. She could be in a different universe now.

We look up and see the moon and sun courting each other. Here comes the end of another ordinary, exceptional day on Earth, and soon the beginning of another.

MICHELLE WONG

If You Love Me Stay Sane

TASHA HADN’T STOLEN a thing or seen a person for three months. In fact, she hadn’t slept for six months. Nor had she had a square meal, unless you count the block of cheese she had for breakfast, along with the remains of the chocolate cake, which she had discovered, frozen to a brick in the fridge. She hadn’t seen her mother for a year, nor did she want to. The only thing she did all day was take showers, long hot showers that lasted for hours, and, in between them, lie in her bed with her eyes and legs wide open, staring bleakly at the perfectly-painted walls that surrounded her, just one shade from being hospital white.

In real-estate agent speak the walls were “pale cream, with rosy overtones.” Translated into Tasha-speak, it was sickly white, milk gone suspiciously sour, specked with blood. It made her cough, it made her heave dryly into the toilet bowl. When the walls weren’t watching, that is.

The walls had ears. And eyes. And genitalia. These were folded deep within the flatness of their surfaces, so that under normal circumstances, they did not show. But Tasha knew they were there. She had seen the cracks, she had met their gaze, undergone their surveillance. The eyes had followed her across her room, watching her as she stripped down to her underwear, surveyed her disapprovingly as she buried herself underneath pillow and blanket, in clothes she had pulled on day after day, until their smell overcame her. And the ears, sometimes she was sure they could listen in on the contents of her head, and, that, somehow, people on the other side of the wall could know exactly what she was thinking. She had only seen them once – the man was small and morose, the woman posh and intimidating, with frozen brown hair and upswept eyebrows, but she couldn’t help but suspect that from that one encounter they could deduce the fact that she was going crazy. Maybe it was the fact that her eyes were unblinking, or that her sweater was punctured with holes the size of dimes, or that her voice was pitched above her natural range, but she had tried her best to avoid them ever since, dashing out only when she heard their front door key turning in the lock. I’m just Tasha, she had thought, living alone with my block of cheese and my chocolate cake, and my hot water shower. You’re my neighbor, and hence dangerous. Sometimes, when sanity broke through, she wondered what they did besides spy on her – was she a cellist? For she could sometimes hear the creak of a cello’s bow. Sometimes she could also hear the yapping of a small dog, and cries in the night which she wasn’t sure were due to nightmare or orgasm. This only proved that the walls were thin as well as malevolent, a fact that gave her nightmares and cold sweats. And as for herself, she kept everything muted – cotton slippers on carpeted floors, plastic kitchenware instead of crockery, so that they would have no way of telling what she was up to. Her body she kept folded at an angle on the bed, arms tucked underneath her hips, ankles pinned to the wall, the bare minimum space she could occupy in her shoebox of a flat.

The genitalia were the most disturbing of all. They lunged at her whenever she was off guard, meaty, sweaty flowers that pulled her closer, threatening to consume her whole in their muscular embrace. It was like living with a flasher; one was never quite sure when he was going to drop his pants, or lift up her skirts, then out would come everything, rank and uncensored. And because the walls were expressionless, without a leer or a smile, it was impossible to tell when they would strike. Inevitably, it was always too late when she could tell what was coming. Once, she had emerged from the shower when they burst out of the wall. There had been a flight of birds fluttering past; she had tried her hardest to focus on their bright silken bodies, but couldn’t quite stop the frantic thumping of her heartbeat. It was only after several deep breaths that she saw the great shadows, with the ugliness in their center, disappear back into the wallpaper. After that there were no signs they had ever been there, not a break, not a crack, not even a hint of discontinuity in the floral pattern.

She ran her fingers across them now, feeling, worryingly, no lump or stain, but the steady beating of an artery. There was movement in there, she knew, a sudden convulsion or a kick in the gut, that came suddenly and without warning. Her friend Susie had said, in one of their last frantic conversations (she was in New York, and had begun to suspect that something had gone very wrong in Tasha’s life), that it was probably just a mouse scurrying through the hollowed-out walls. You know what these old buildings are like, she had said, trying to laugh it away. A brick falling through the architecture, a mother mouse rushing to its baby as walls crumbled. Susie had said all this in a helium-filled Mickey Mouse voice, which gave her no choice but to laugh. “What if the mother mouse gets trapped in the walls?” she had asked. Susie hadn’t answered. They don’t talk about deaths in cartoons, least of all starving to death between the walls of someone’s bedroom, while its human inhabitants cooked, cleaned, fucked. That was the realm of literature, and of religion, and Susie was determined to steer Tasha’s mind away from those.

Back when she – Tasha, twenty-two and with the future rolled out before her like a red carpet – was happy, she had stolen something as often as once a week. A purse from the High Street Accessorize, a packet of chicken thighs from the supermarket, a towel from Bed and Bath when the manager was chatting away to a gaggle of old ladies. It was her way of rewarding herself. It was a sign that life was in balance, that risk was possible and worth taking. But now the urge had fallen away from her. Her hands rarely strayed across the items on display at stores. In fact, she couldn’t bear the sight of the bright and sparkly products themselves, preferring to stare ahead, or away – at the concrete, or at the sky. That was, when she was out at the stores, which was rarely. Mostly she was in the flat, thankful that at least there was a pane of glass between her and everything else and that she had no need to see anyone except the men who passed daily through the flat, fixing the plumbing, delivering pizzas, shoving letters through the mailbox. They never said more than two words, and they always left quickly, as if somehow afraid that the longer they stay, the greater the possibility they would discover a corpse in the corner cupboard, or something equally gruesome. She shared their horror – but hers was directed at the rumpled, blood-stained bed, the unwashed dishes in the kitchen and the gnawing of the mouse in the walls.

Her mother, when she could remember to love her daughter, was inclined to be vague, and wary of details. But she did call once, out of the blue. Tasha found herself admitting, guiltily, that she was going crazy. A pause. Then came the demand, like a decree, or a plea to a dying lover: “If you love me, stay sane.” She closed her eyes and hung up on the last word. The shower greeted her, water filled her mouth. It stopped all thought. In the shower cubicle, she was no longer Tasha, reformed thief, lapsed student, fresh graduate, madwoman. All of those labels fell away with the water, slipping away from her body and down into the drains. She was no one. That she was sometimes, intermittently and fondly, known as Tasha, seemed merely a small but grotesque accident. Her own true self was anonymous, and as long as the water ran she could remain unidentified, hidden, camouflaged, protected. But out on the street, in the small, claustrophobic town full of pretty shops and pretty scenery, she could not avoid or outrun people she knew. Something about her was instantly recognizable, even to casual friends, even under disguise, and that something warned others like a red flag discreetly waved, subtle but alarming. Men stopped her on the street, old flames whose names she barely remembered, inviting her up to their flats. She could only flee in horror. If she stayed to chat she might find herself following their footsteps, and before she knew it, they would be on top of her, on some unmade bed while the ghosts of their absent wives waited quietly in the kitchen, knives in their laps. Sometimes acquaintances threw her quizzical glances as she hurried past, slumped under an outsized hat. Before they could venture a “Hi, Tasha” she was already on the opposite side of the street, hiding behind lorries and postboxes. For she could not bear to hear her name spoken, by someone once close to her. It was like a chainsaw through her heart. As long as she remained unnamed, there didn’t need to be any explanation for her absence. She was another skinny girl rushing past the street with too much makeup on, on her way to somewhere, her whole life in front of her, like a pale ribbon winding onto somewhere safe, and padded, and warm, a destination that would make the most epic of voyages – and the worst kind of heartbreak – worthwhile.

“Hi, Tasha.”
The dreaded words came one day, on Aisle 7 of the supermarket. She looked up before a familiar body jostled her, dashing her Weetabix to the ground. She had no choice but to bend over and sweep the pale little flakes into a corner. The task was futile and absurd. She felt like Sisyphus with his stone. That was when familiar boots kicked the grains aside, familiar arms swept her away from Aisle 7, and she was manhandled into a bright and fragrant café. All the menus were painted a dazzling gold and macaroons glistened under spotlights: pink, violet, cream. She recognized it as something she would have found beautiful in her previous life. Now the colors merely wearied her, their expensiveness a sort of muffled threat. It was Josh. He looked well and smelled expensive, and she wanted to run. Meet the certified lunatic, she thought, holding out her hands for a hug. With supreme effort she forced her lips into a crooked smile. “I could save you,” Josh had said once, at the height of their affair, when he was twenty-five and she was a mere nineteen. He had stood tall and stern at the foot of her bed, surveying her dewy body, when he said those words. At that time, she thought he meant her soul, because Josh was pious and religious, but later on she had not been so sure. Perhaps he meant her body as well – perhaps he had recognized that her soul was beyond saving, that underneath the bright package of her flesh was a rottenness she took pains to conceal. But her body still craved a hero to sweep it off its feet. And he could be that hero. He said it now, again, taking her hands in his. This time she grimaced, because the story, it would appear, was written plainly on her face. The knitted eyebrows, sunken cheekbones, hollowed eyes and trembling fingers all held clues to the central mystery, the mystery of why she had dropped off the face of the Earth. He did not even need to guess very wildly to alight upon the conclusion: “breakdown.” Well, Tasha thought, giving in to the gravity of the moment, let him try and save me then. Let’s see what he can come up with. “Why don’t you come up to my flat?” he said now, gravely, his face holding both kindness and lust.

In that instant she understood – with a sinking of her heart – that there would be no saving. There wouldn’t even be an attempted Christian conversion. There would only be attempted sex, plenty of it. And there would be another absent girlfriend she would have to deal with, whose shadow would crouch at the foot of the bed, waiting for the minute she stepped on the bathroom floor to trip her over, so that her head would break open against the porcelain of the sink. It was a story that could only end in bloodshed. Josh’s voice seemed distant now, as did the décor of the café. Her Weetabix lay under her feet like a sleeping spaniel. She thought of the brick of chocolate cake in her fridge, the stack of dishes in her sink and Mickey Mouse trapped inside the wall. She longed for the shower, and the feeling of water beating down on her skin. She looked up at the perfectly arranged rows of cakes and pastries, glazed and sugared, under glass, and swallowed hard. “Tasha?” Josh’s voice sounded concerned now, but she could not speak. The tears came, like sleet, like rain. He was no different from the pizza delivery men, the plumbers, her mother, Susie. He was only one man out of a thousand, a stranger she once had sex with and forgot about until her hour of need.

“If you love me –” she began hesitantly. Josh’s hands came down on hers greedily, his face flushed with the prospect of heroism, or was it just the strain of holding back an erection? “Stay sane,” he said. “Stay sane, Tasha.”

She bowed her head under the command. Somewhere, elsewhere, a starved mouse morphed into a beautiful mouse-maiden and broke out of the walls, swinging its iron-gray tail and pushing its hips forward, tearing its way through the eyes, the ears, the genitalia. Heerreee’s Minnie! Susie shouted, somewhere far, far away, her voice booming through Tasha’s head like public announcements at a mall. Welcome, welcome to the world, she finally replied, wearily, flinging her arms wide open.

ROBERT POWERS

The Road to Hell

TODAY I BURY MY DAD. He’s not dead, but he will be. It’ll be daybreak soon and I’m looking at him sleeping in his hospice bed. Later today my sis wants me to meet with this new preacher at the last church he went to, a Methodist one. She wants me to tell him about our father for the eulogy. She expects everyone at the funeral.

I’m sitting here, looking at him, and all I can think of is the time he took me to see Virginia, nickname Ginny, his mom, early one winter night, late 2008, thirty years ago. He took me to another hospice outside D.C. on the Maryland side, torn down not long after she passed. On our way down a pale hallway he coached me on what to say. By then she was in her mid-nineties (I think) and I hadn’t seen her in years; my dad must’ve been in his mid-sixties; I was in my mid-twenties, a week away from leaving to teach English in Istanbul, where I would live for nearly ten years after meeting my first fiancée. It wasn’t long until I received, out of the blue, a typo-ridden email from my dad in all caps that included the lines: GRANDMA DIED LAST MONTH. DO NOT COME HOME FOR FUNERAL.

Her room was a dark little cube with a big picture window that opened up onto nothing. She had been propped upright and looked like a gremlin. A dim, exposed fluorescent bar on the wall shaded everything the wrong color. Alabaster cellophane skin. Baby garter snake veins. Dark teeth. He sat me in a chair beside her. She wanted to hug me, so I leaned in close and listened to her talk like small bits of gravel crunching in a light rain. The curls in her hair were like ash. Her spine traced the golden ratio. Her posture was embryonic. I could feel her lame embrace weakening like wet tissue paper. He had told me to lie to every single question she asked: Do you love me, Willy? Where is your sister Winnie? Where are you going? Are you going to see me again? For years afterward he warned me about what her death did to him.

I haven’t slept or been to work in days. I can’t breathe.

I step out of his dank and bleached room, take a walk down the hallway, fish in my coat for headphones and go outside. The world is beginning to set fire to itself.

When I was eighteen, nineteen … I was seein’ this gal. Her name was Phyllis. The boys in the neighborhood, were … boys. Boys are boys. And I remember she got a nickname. Her nickname was Pincushion.

(On the recording, my dad’s already-raspy voice flows like syrup. I hear myself: “Uh oh.”)

I’m just tellin’ a story here, William.

(“We’re listening,” says my sister Winter, a few years before our mom’s sudden passing and her blaming me for his not going to the funeral.)

So, I started dating Pincushion. And the next thing you know, Pincushion calls me and says: “I think I need to talk to you about something.”

So I go see Pincushion. And she was a nice girl, but … y’know how young boys are, always chasin’ the skirts. So she gets me in there, and her dad’s at work – he worked at night somewhere, in the printing business. Her mother was gone; it’s just me and her in the house. I’m sittin’ in the den and she says: “I’m pregnant.”

And I go: “… okaaayyy …”

And I was like eighteen, nineteen. I was an adult. She was like sixteen, seventeen.

“… okaaayyy …” I go, and I’m at the University of Maryland my first year, I’m a freshman, and my whole future’s goin’ in front of me, and I go: “What about … what do we … what about … what-what …” You know, I’m like stumbling over myself.

But she says: “But I don’t know that it’s yours.”

So, I said: “… okaaayyy … Um, what do you know?”

She says: “Well, I’ve been seein’ this guy and this guy and this guy …” Hence the nickname Pincushion. So –

Look at him! He thinks this is politically incorrect! This is back in the ’60s!

(I’m flustered: “It’s alright, I’m just –”)

What’s ole Pincushion doin’ now? Ha ha ha!

(I say: “Did she know people called her a pincushion?”)

I don’t know and I don’t care, I just remember the nickname.

So I said: “Phyllis, what do you want me to do now?”

“It’s not what I want you to do, it’s what you wanna do.”

I said: “Well, I got a test tomorrow in Biology 101.” Ha!

So I stopped seein’ her.

Next thing I know, she marries this older guy. To me, he was ancient, he was thirty. To us guys who were eighteen, that’s: “Thirty-year-old guy? The guy’s practically dead!”

You know how you are when you’re young?

So I find out a little bit about him. He was probably tickled pink to be datin’ a seventeen-year-old girl, right? So I even remember his name at one point. I can’t recall it now.

Long story short: she had this baby.

We made the first recording with him on a New Year’s Eve, my thirty-second birthday – a few weeks before my dad would turn seventy-two, six months before my sis would turn thirty-one. The day before we wrote down a list of questions and made plans to meet him at 10:30 a.m. the next morning in the parking lot outside our mom’s apartment where we were staying for the holidays. We were bound to uncover something. I agreed to type up the transcript and share it with her.

With a mild hangover and less than four hours of sleep in me, I cracked the kitchen blinds at 10 a.m. and saw him leaning against his old, emerald green SUV, which he had parked in the wrong spot again, the one he was always told he’d be towed from if he left it there too long. He had his denim on, his work jeans, his boots. I hadn’t seen him in the flesh for years. Before long I was out there next to him wiping sleep from my eyes then crouching down to lace my new, black leather shoes, my sis inside struggling to get up off the living room couch where she had fallen asleep with Netflix cycling through seasons. He was more than happy to cross his arms and study me: “Now look at you.”

I finally find it – .m4a file extension; 1 hour, 20 minutes, 37 seconds; timestamp 31/12/2014 – and begin to listen.

Four or five, six years go by. I’m in law school. On my way out the door, takin’ my law boards, opening my own practice. I was a probation officer during that journey and went to law school at night.

So I open up my law office. I get a phone call. It’s Pincushion. She says –

I mean: it’s Phyllis. She calls me up, she says: “Can you come over …?”

… wooohhh …

I said: “What about that guy you married?”

“Oh, we’re separated …”

“… what am I comin’ over about?”

“Um, I’d just rather talk to you in person.”

So I get to her – the same house! She’s in her same house. Her dad’s at work ’cause his – he works at night, her mom’s not there. Usually people were there. I’m alone in the house with her and I’m thinkin’: this is a setup, or something.

She starts talkin’, she goes upstairs and brings this little girl down. She’s got the girl by the hand, and she’s walkin’ her down. The girl’s like six or seven or eight or something. And she says: “This is Mister Walden Wakeman! He’s a lawyer now!” She’s talkin’ baby-ish. “Wally, this is Lisa.”

And I go: “Hi, Lisa! How are you?”

And uh … one thing led to another.

But all I remember is – she said this, when Lisa was over playing, doin’ something, she said: “I want you to look at her very carefully, and tell me what you see.”

I said: “Phyllis, I see a little girl with bangs, brownish hair, playing with toys, and she looks very happy.”

And Phyllis goes: “Look how smart she is.”

And I’m goin’: “… what?”

I had enough common sense to see where this was goin’.

I go: “… yeah! She looks real smart.”

Phyllis goes: “… I wonder where she got that from.”

I said: “What about the guy you married?”

That’s all I remember, substantively, of that conversation.

“Look how smart she is. She’s really smart. She’s way ahead of the kids in her … pre-school” or kindergarten or whatever.

So I leave. I figure: “Whew …”

I can barely listen to the recording of the ride over, heading for a budget IHOP-style diner he liked but even then couldn’t remember the name of. “Okay, folks,” he says in his best Dad voice, pulling into the small strip mall’s parking lot. “We’re here for breakfast. Comin’ in for a landing.” A sedan leaving the lot lazes into his right of way. He stops. “Go ahead, my friend,” he says and waves the car on. “All right. Lots of movement of people in here. Gotta be careful …” We get lost in the parking lot. “Let’s see here, didn’t we just pass the restaurant? We did. Where is it? It’s back there. Lemme find it …

“Okay.” He cuts the engine.

After plate-sized pancakes, golden-yellow scrambled eggs, plain crispy toast, finger-sized sausages, cranberry juice, bottomless coffee and water with shaved slush-ice, he makes a limp fist with his left hand and extends his middle finger in a crook toward the table. It shakes, lamely, up and down. There’s no arguing the body’s decline and he gets to show it to us. “The doctors can tell if you have Parkinson’s just by your gait,” he says, smirking.

After he tells us the story, he asks me to pay the bill, hands me wads of dollars from his front pocket, and off I go to the register as my sis excuses herself to the restroom. The recording app on my phone continues and catches him talking to himself. The restaurant is loud and full. Plates and silverware constantly clinking. A few babies crying. Servers converse and spurts of laughter or loud dialogue come from nearby tables. His every pause lasts seconds. He occasionally grunts or sighs: “… what time is it? I don’t know what fuckin’ time it is.

“Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. That’s the name of the game.

“What time is it? 12:44? Holy shit. I gotta go.

“I gotta go. I gotta go. I gotta go.

“Gonna take them back … Gotta go get her …

“12:45? Jeezus Christ.

“How’m I gonna get outta here?

“Goddamn. Okay …

“Damn … Damn … Damn …

“I’m gonna go pick her up off the metro … take the safety roads back.”

The woman he was seeing at the time was a sweetheart. I’m still mad he didn’t tell me about her funeral.

I want to find the story, so I skip and skip and finally find it after a flurry of random tapping up and down the queue, landing right on the moment where my sis asks the one question we didn’t expect an answer to. “You have other children?” she asks and we both laugh.

His tone becomes immediate, serious: “When I was eighteen, nineteen … I was seein’ this gal. Her name was Phyllis. The boys in the neighborhood, were … boys. Boys are boys. And I remember she got a nickname. Her nickname was Pincushion.”

So goin’ down the road, four or five or six years go by. There’s another phone call, my secretary says: “There’s a Phyllis Livesay on the phone. She said you would remember her by her last name: Livesay.”

I pick up the phone: chtk! “Hey! Pincushion – I mean: Hey! Phyllis, how’re you doin’?” Ha ha ha! I go: “Hey, Phyllis! What’s happenin’?”

She said: “I need to see you about a legal problem.”

“Y-y-yeah …? … whose?”

“Well, mine and Lisa’s.”

So she comes in. She doesn’t bring Lisa.

I close the door, which is most of the time left open if it was just a mundane case.

“What can I do for ya?”

And she goes: “I want to file adoption papers for Lisa.”

“… you’re the natural mother. What do you mean?”

“Well, me and my current husband …”

“Oh, your current husband?”

“I’ve remarried, and my husband wants to adopt Lisa. And I want you to do the adoption.”

And I went: “… okaaayyy … You’ve thought this out and everything.”

“Yes I have. Very carefully. There would be nothing more appropriate than for you to do the adoption.”

So I did the adoption.

When he finished telling us the Pincushion story, we were flabbergasted. We were shocked, in disbelief. It also seemed obvious there was more to the story than he was letting on. “The road to hell, kids …” he says on the recording, “is paved with good intentions. Just be careful what you go lookin’ for. I always tell you two, the only thing we have left at the end of life is family. Blood.” I remember him pointing to a dark, lime green vein on the inside of his wrist, his psoriasis like desiccated moss. “It might not be pretty, but it’s always in there.”

Breakfast ended and everyone went back to their lives. I was less than a year from my engagement being broken. It would be another ten years before I met my second fiancée, who would leave me less than a year after the miscarriage of the child we had already named. My sis would turn forty before becoming engaged, though that, too, wouldn’t last.

Back at our mom’s apartment, Winter wanted to go looking for Phyllis and Lisa. She did the math: they would be around seventy and fifty-five, respectively. “If we’re lucky, Winnie,” I said, “we might get to meet Pincushion Junior at Dad’s funeral. Whenever that might be.”

It was the first time I had seen her angry all day. “That’s not funny,” she said. “You need to know that’s not funny.”

So, everything goes on down the line. Now Lisa would’ve been, what, a teenager in the the ’70s. So years and years and years go by …

“Walden, there’s a woman on the phone named Phyllis Livesay. You’ll remember her by …”

She kept saying Phyllis Livesay when she’d had a couple different – more names. I picked up the phone: chtk! “Heyyy, Phyllis, how’s the … tricks. How’s life?”

“I just wanna let you know, um: Lisa’s gettin’ ready to go to college.”

I said: “Ah! That’s wonderful! How’s everything with the new husband?”

She says: “Well, I’m not with him anymore.”

I said: “Okay … what college?”

She said: “Brown University.”

(I chip in: “Wow …”)

I said: “Oh! That has a pretty good name.”

She said: “Yeah, she got an academic scholarship …”

I said: “That’s wonderful!”

She said: “Remember how I told you how smart she was …?” She said: “But she really asks an awful lot of questions … and I really don’t know what to tell her about certain things …” Then she said: “Have you ever wondered why I had you do the adoption?”

“… you like me?”

Ha ha ha ha!

Anyway: end of story.

But you asked: do I have any other kids? I never found out for sure.

(I ask: “But did you do, like, a DNA test, or something?”)

She had me do the adoption. I thought years later: what more of an appropriate punishment for somebody … let the lawyer who either is or probably is … let him do the adoption of his own child.

So what happens is, as you get older: when I got to be in my forties … fifties … sixties … I used to think: “God … what if that kid is mine?” But I already have a sweet, wonderful, smart –

(I’m dumbfounded. I turn to my sis: “Lisa.”)

– great daughter. I don’t want another daughter.

So I started calling your sis My Favorite Daughter.

Ha ha ha ha!

(Sis: “Oh my god!”)

Now that’s a mystery that’s been solved!

(Sis: “You would always call me that, and I’d always say: ‘But Dad, I’m your only daughter!’”)

That’s what you would say: “But I’m your only daughter!” And I would never respond with that stor-eee!

That’s because to this day: I don’t know.

“Excuse me, sir?” An orderly shakes me on the shoulder. I pull the buds out of my ears. “Your father seems to be awake now.”

“Oh, that’s good.”

“And your sister called. You want me to see if I can find another chair for the room?”

“No, no. Thank you, though.”

My drive back to my new home – Ginny’s old house – will be quick. Though no one has lived there for decades, it’s still packed to the brim with old clothes, disused furniture, hermetically sealed jars and packages of processed foods, and boxes of photos and papers. The furnace and pipes have been broken for decades. I’m sure my sis will see the light and move back, too. There are so many other recordings for the two of us to go through.

Before I go, I look in on him. He’s not awake but he’s changed positions: rolled toward the open window and a new dawn boiling the sky. A recovering alcoholic for longer than I’ve been alive, he’s probably in a dream walking up a beachfront at dusk, the weather cool and tickling his skin, all the rum-soaked tiki bars switching on strings of dancing lights twinkling like little Technicolor stars, distant, blocky hotel chains lighting up like blood-orange transistors, the waves lapping in the moonlight like smiles.

Someone’s waiting for him at the bar, a woman he recognizes. He approaches and their faces beam brightly for one another, their eyes crazywild. They clink glasses. They drink. They’re happy. Their time in the sun has occurred.

And so: Good night. Good night. And good night.

SOPHIE MONATTE

Fragments

Inspired by Édouard Levé’s Autoportrait.

I AWAKE WAITING for dusk to fall.

Sometimes I have to think about breathing. I blame it on infant apnea.

As a kid, I spent hours going through the La Redoute catalogue, choosing my sofa, comparing deck chairs, picking sets of lingerie, deciding on a hairstyle and a smile, building up my grown-up life like a Lego landscape.

I never run the washing machine maintenance cycle.

My grandmother hoarded earwigs in a stainless steel couscoussière. Thinking about her reminds me of her kitchen, right when dusk reaches that shade just before people realize it is time to switch on the lights. I remember the hum of the fridge, the loose faucet handle, the coal-burning stove that blackened the walls. When I watched her body during the wake, her skin like a dry riverbed, I could have sworn she was breathing. She wore her violet housedress.

A funny observation might not be funny anymore by the time I say it out loud.

Exclamation points terrify me.

I will never air quote.

Hugging makes me uncomfortable. I like handshakes.

Is it possible that people who close their eyes when they speak cannot help it? I wish they could.

I prefer memories that have not yet happened, images of things I might do.

I feel sad for those who forget their dreams as soon as they wake up.

At times I feel vague all day.

I don’t remember getting dressed, or when I last showered. I pause to check what shoes I’m wearing.

I worry I might upset people if I tell them their shirt tag is sticking out. I check mine.

I don’t comb my hair.

I used to tell people I was Venetian blond.

I feel the most vulnerable when I get a haircut.

I would like to be a truck driver. A wood carver.

Thinking about my lisp makes it worse.

Who is the elevator-voice lady?

Revolving doors are the scariest thing.

I do not step inside a movie theater room first.

My grandmother – the other one – wants me to have her engagement ring when she passes. Every summer when I see her, she tries to hand it to me. “Next year,” I say. It’s not what I mean to say. Her phone number is the only one I never forget. I pretend I don’t remember my mother’s.

I don’t know how to say, “I love you.” I get tattoos, scarring my body with memories of people I love. Getting inked never hurts.

My friend told me I was an iceberg. I’m a chocolate fondant, I said. She said I was the opposite. We couldn’t think of anything.

I’ve never read Proust.

“In near relatives the faintest gastric gurgle has the same ‘voice,’” Nabokov wrote. How terrifying to find out he was right.

My mother and I share the same hairy mole on our right arm. I plan to have it removed.

My father doesn’t mind silences.

My native village is split between two communes. My aunt is famous for living right on the edge. In 1982, the population was seventy-five. In 2011, it was seventy-eight.

My parents are back together. The first time he left, she gave our Labrador paracetamol. When I visit my hometown, I’m longing to be away and stay forever. I’m sucked into trying to impress my father and dismiss my mother. It used to be the other way around.

My sister has gaps between her teeth. She was a knock-kneed child. She wore metal leg braces to sleep. One time she sprayed bedbug spray at me. Everything she says carries the echo of our mother. She makes it seem as though I do things only to disappoint her.

Not becoming the person I am is my most reasonable fear.

Smoking gives me something to look forward to.

Most things I cannot do without lighting a cigarette first.

When an attractive woman steps in the room, I feel myself sit up.

I am surprised when someone flirts with me. I was feeling invisible without knowing it.

Coming is never as good as the anticipation of coming. It might be true for everything in life.

I’m at ease watching strangers have sex. I’d rather have sex with strangers, as long as I’m not wearing my glasses.

Whenever I tried to lose my virginity, I couldn’t help thinking about my mother.

I would like to be a man to find out what it feels like to get a blowjob.

At times I meet people and I like the idea of them. I say the things I believe they would say. I assume their points of view, fall into their persona. Losing myself is second nature.

An indefinite personality is an identity in itself.

When I’m nervous, words come untamed and fast. They are never what I mean. Insecurity can take the form of stupidity.

I dread the breath of people working in an office or talking on the phone all day.

We never thought he would really jump.

People have a tendency to disappoint me.

I never wonder about afterlife. I think about the moment right before death, not the when, but the how. How will I get there?

I might be a closet Buddhist.

Thanatophobia is the fear of death.

I remember being the best version of myself at fifteen, and then at twenty-five. I’m turning thirty-five.

Numbers have a color.

I’m allergic to aspirin.

How could I have known the spider was pregnant? I smacked her with the spatula in my hand, and then watched thirty or so baby spiders burst out of her and race across the kitchen floor. I killed them all.

Pregnancy smells like clotted cream.

I dubbed the stretch marks between my navel and pubic hair Hells Angels.

Women tend to cut their hair short after giving birth to their first child.

I can see why some people shake their newborns.

Motherhood has a lot to do with lonely idle moments and restless boredom.

My son has an imaginary pet owl living on the tip of his index finger. He rides a rhinoceros. Everything is nothing, he tells me.

I find it difficult to get the right tone with children and old people.

My mood is like a light switch.

Sometimes I sneak into my kids’ bedroom, they have a nightlight.

I don’t like to talk about Santa Claus.

I enjoy rain more than most people. I’d rather get wet than carry an umbrella.

Cold air makes me want to pee.

I like when the air smells like snails after rain. I pick them up from pedestrian paths and move them where they won’t get crushed. I worry I might screw up their life plan.

I don’t pick up slugs.

If I’m not careful, my right foot bends out when I walk.

My mouth is always dry.

I suck my thumb.

I get mouth ulcers.

I often get the urge to lick the roof of my mouth with the tip of my tongue but then it gets itchy.

I don’t like symmetry.

Whenever I examine my face, I find it is never the same.

I often remind people of someone they know from somewhere.

Love is too intense a feeling to be permanent.

I’m too selfish to love, too selfish not to be loved.

I’m too self-centered to be lonely.

I feel the loneliest among the people I know the best.

I am stronger on my own.

The heart of a shrimp is located in its head.

The penis of a snail is located in its head.

How do prison inmates cut their toenails?

I always believed I would end up in jail or in an asylum. Neither sound that bad, but so far the opportunity has not presented itself.

I don’t mind throwing up.

Cola Chupa Chups are my favorite.

Bread gives me hiccups.

My baker remembers not to give me the receipt when she hands me back the change, knowing I will toss it aside anyway.

I don’t know the price of things.

I have eaten cockroaches but can’t remember the taste.

Things that make me dizzy: pulling off split ends, touching my belly button, putting in eye drops.

I enjoy feeling a twitch pulsing under my eyelid.

I seldom notice eye colors.

When I was a kid, there was this girl at school, sickish body, a rusty pin clamping down woolish chestnut hair and this left eye that would never follow her gaze. She was plucking flowers with garden shears. The blade sliced right through her green eye, now charcoal and lifeless, two creamy spots where the pupil should have been; the pupil, popped like a party balloon. During recess she often lost her lens and the teacher made us search the schoolyard. Kids found the lens and buried it deeper into the ground. Her right eye showed fear, like a small animal waiting to be tortured. We called her Kitty. Kids can be cruel.

I skip polar bears in zoos, they seem to be waiting for the permission to die.

Old clothes smell like nostalgia.

I never fantasized about wearing a wedding dress.

I got married for visa reasons.

I think of everything.

Even years later, I replay conversations in my head, thinking about all the witty lines I could have said.

Why do people insist on being late?

It takes me hours to compose a tweet or a Facebook update.

I google myself.

I have a talent for mentally withdrawing.

I think differently in French.

It’s more difficult to insult someone in your native language.

There’s something soothing about observing people speaking in a language I do not understand. The links and leaks in their relationship stand out.

I find questions more interesting than answers; answers are seldom of your own creation.

I would rather leave conversations unfinished.

I forget what is true.

NONFICTION

KEANE SHUM

Prospectus

I BOUGHT THE TICKET. Flew all night, drove all day. From Hong Kong to New York to Orlando, where I picked up a rental, parked it on a sandy stretch of the south Atlantic shore and fell asleep in the back seat with the windows open and the lukewarm Florida breeze drifting through (no room at the inn). Jetlagged, I woke up without an alarm just as the sun rose over the Cape and the familiar figure in the distance, the size of my thumb. As morning grew, so did the crowd around me, thousands, cars lined up along the coast as far as you could see. A family of four stepped out of the minivan next to me and began to unload their picnic wares; the father offered me a beer. I unfurled a towel, stepped up and onto the hood of my rental, and took a swig. Daydreamed I was halfway to Tranquility and then, T-minus nothing at 11:26 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, I heard the rumble, felt the tremor before the truth, the storm before the storm, like plates shifting, grinding. The ground shook, the people shouted, and I watched, as Atlantis rocketed into a powder blue sky. The last one of its kind.

Space Transportation System flight 135, the way I dream it.

I went to Space Camp in the eighth grade. This is probably the best time to go: at thirteen, you’re just starting to be able to understand how cool some of the science is, how real it is, how there are these invisible forces that propel us forward, and how explosive are the chemical reactions that power our progress. At the same time, at thirteen, at least when I was thirteen, you’re not yet beset by either peer or parental pressure to get your head out of the clouds. You get to be the launch controller during a shuttle mission simulation, you get to try on the spacesuit and bounce around on the one-sixth gravity chair, and you think, I could do this one day. I could go to space.

The names help. Discovery. Endeavour. Atlantis. Heavy with gravitas, built to inspire. They would be corny if they weren’t imprinted on the wing of a spacecraft that launches itself two hundred miles into the sky, can make a three-point turn while in orbit and dock with an international space station or parallel park near a super space telescope so its astronauts can do a spacewalk and pull out some tools and fix the telescope. In outer space. And then this two-hundred-thousand-pound machine makes its way back to Earth, burning through the atmosphere, landing like any other airplane on a runway. How is this for real? Spacewalk. Space telescope. Space station. Spacecraft. Even just the idea that there are wings on the thing and we are talking about flying.

I could’ve gone, could’ve been on that flight to New York tonight. I have the money, even the time. But I can’t. It’s a step too indulgent, a stretch, like if I did this I would be messing with my karma. I’m scared of pushing my luck, that a rainy day will come and I won’t be able to afford an umbrella. You can’t have everything. You can’t be everywhere. Some things in life you just miss; you miss them because you never had them, or you miss them because you had them and lost them. I’m lucky enough, so lucky, that I don’t miss much. If I’m thirteen and I want to go to Space Camp, I go. If I want to go to the Olympics, or the Obama Inauguration, I go. If I want to be a lawyer, or a writer, I go. But you don’t get everything. Some things in life just suck; some things you just miss. I wish I was going to watch the last space shuttle launch tomorrow. I wish I could see the crowds, feel the earth shake like no other way there is. I wish I could feel my dreams rising with the shuttle, the closest realest thing we have to seeing ourselves go to infinity and beyond. I wish. We are promised as children that we can go wherever our dreams will take us, and no wonder some of us dream to be astronauts, so we can go as far as we can go, dream as far as we can dream.

I will never have the space shuttle. Even if I left right now, I wouldn’t make it in time. I will never have in my eyes its smoky trajectory burning through the sky, or the rocket fumes in my nose, or the thundering in my ears, the trembling at my feet. I will never have the space shuttle. I will only ever be able to dream it.

There was a lunar eclipse not long ago, visible from Hong Kong, and I separated from my friends after dinner in Causeway Bay so I could go to a clearing in Victoria Park and see it. I looked up at it, at the Sea of Tranquility and the Ocean of Storms, dyed for this one moment in mango red, and I thought about dreams, and the chasing of them. Knowing I may never go to the moon, or to space, but also that I have other dreams that need chasing, that can be chased, must be chased. As I turned thirty, it dawned on me, like the moon emerging from our shadow, that this is a completely conscious choice you make in life. To be a dreamchaser, or to not.

I remember one business trip, flying back to Hong Kong from Singapore after a drafting session. I was watching the route map on the airplane TV screen, and it marked cities or notable places along the flight path. I kept looking at this map on the screen, at cities like Yangon, and Bangkok, trying to make out the border between Myanmar and Thailand and imagining myself there, tucked somewhere within the different shades of green that represent the hills and the jungle. I thought about working in a refugee camp there, or a border town, helping people, and writing, and those couple hours thinking about the possibilities were the most excited I had felt in a long time. It was a familiar kind of anxious butterfly in the stomach feeling, like what I often had at work, only the opposite, buoyant instead of constricting.

This is about my BlackBerry, butcher of dreams, enabler.

You can get by like this. You can figure out all the tricks. If you capitalize the RE: or FW: in the subject line, it looks like you’re e-mailing from your desktop. If you set the timer function on Outlook, you can make it seem like you sent something out way past midnight. If you leave a spare set of keys and an empty wallet at your desk, and a book on your keyboard so the screen never sleeps, it’s like you never left. You can learn all this, and more, on a blog called corporatemonkeylawyer. You can get by like this.

You can get by the one-hundred-hour weeks and the three-hundred-hour months like this, you can get by them like this so you can enjoy the slow weeks, the I’ll-watch-the-matinee-during-lunch weeks, or the I’ll-go-to-Kowloon-for-coffee-and-not-come-back weeks. You can get by like this, because of this, this BlackBerry, this flashing red light from hell, this ringtone that makes me shudder. You can do almost all your work from a BlackBerry, almost anywhere, almost all the time.

You can hardly feel more smug than when you’re sitting on the beach, or in a cinema, or in the airport lounge of a city you have no business being in, knowing you are getting paid cashmoney for pretending you’re at work.

You can do this, you can do it for weeks and months and years, for more and more cashmoney, you can ride out the bad weeks with the good weeks, you can sleep in every morning the market crashes, you can get your haircut in the middle of the day, you can dial-in to the call while riding a bike along the causeway across a lake, or from the bathroom of a club and pray like fuck the mute button works.

You can do all this as long as you have your BlackBerry, as long as you are on call, on point, all the time. You can do it for weeks and months and years.

You can do it for years and years, until you’re really good at it, really seem like you’re willing and able to work almost anywhere, almost anytime, until you’re promoted, and partner, and fifty, until you’re sipping Champagne on your yacht and nothing, nothing like you ever thought you’d ever become.

You can do this because the people aren’t that bad, the job isn’t that bad, the hours aren’t always that bad; because that day each month that you trick them into depositing a boatload of cashmoney into your bank account is good, because it’s not like watching a pot boil, it’s actually pretty fast, the way the months go by, the way you wish on Monday for Friday to come sooner and it does, suddenly the week is over, and the month, and you’re getting paid again, you feel good again, it’s your birthday again, you’re still here, again.

I gotta be honest, I’m the kid who rocked all the pop quizzes, who aced the SATs. I’m that kid. I’m the kid teachers told they expected big things from, the save-the-world kid, the I’m-gonna-chase-my-dreams kid.

Look, I love my BlackBerry. I love her like the girl I can’t let go of because she keeps saving my ass, the one who wakes me up in the middle of the night for fakeurgent reasons but who I keep in my pocket anyway, because she’s not always like that, it’s not always that bad. She’s the one I never miss when I don’t take her with me but who keeps screwing me when she’s around, who feels good when I get away with it, but I keep getting away with it. I get further and further away with it.

People would kill for my job. I know that. It’s not that bad; if you learn to love your BlackBerry, it’s not that bad. I try not to take it for granted. I understand, sometimes you just gotta be a realist. But not me, not now.

Now is what separates who I wanted to be from who I’m gonna become, now is how I can tell my kids with a straight face not to settle, now is when I want the weeks to start going by slower.

When I left for work last Friday, I unplugged my BlackBerry from my wall, turned it off, then turned it in. I quit. Fuck my job; I’m going dreamchasing.

REBEKAH CHAN

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA (Polyamorous)

Soundtrack: Björk – It’s Oh So Quiet

- I cut my hair short.

- I had a breakdown in the middle of my first summer residency when my mentor, Ira Sukrungruang, asked me how I was doing.

- I wrote about this breakdown in a piece called, “In Search of Jose,” inspired by Jose Garcia Villa.

- I learned of Jose Garcia Villa from a piece Luis Francia read two springs ago called, “Villanelles.”

- Ira read about my breakdown recollections, “In Search of Jose” as my first distance mentor.

- I traveled to Luang Prabang, Laos and fell in love with a gay woman from South Dakota. She was the co-host of an American television show I had never heard of.

- I watched two episodes of an American television show called Finding Bigfoot.

- I contemplated moving to Seattle to pursue a same-sex relationship with the co-host of Finding Bigfoot.

- I did not move to Seattle because I was married. And straight.

- My doctor now refers to me as bisexual

- My doctor now refers to me as polyamorous

- I learned from another gay woman that my classmate Ember Swift was a queer icon in the 90s.

- I listened to Ember’s queer anthem called, “I Boinked the Bride.”

- I asked Ember if anyone sang that song at her own heterosexual wedding.

- I learned that you should never go to a lesbian party with Ember unless you don’t mind being the ugly friend.

- I told Ember a sad story once, and she held my hand as I cried in the student cafeteria.

- Ira got a divorce.

- Ira sold his house.

- Nicola broke up with her boyfriend.

- Nicola’s beloved grandmother, Mama Cez, passed away.

- My friend’s father, John Gardner, passed away in Texas.

- My own father got diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

- My own grandmother fell and could not walk anymore.

- My grandmother moved to a nursing home.

- I lost my pregnancy at 5 and a half months.

- I wrote about this loss in a generative exercise for a workshop with Tina Chang.

- I got published in a literary journal for the first time.

- I cut my hair even shorter

- Nelson Mandela died

- A super typhoon hit the Philippines

- The polar vortex made my visit home to Toronto damn cold

- Flight MH370 went missing

- A South Korean ferry sank

- Riots in Ukraine

- ISIS

- Ebola

- Nepal was devastated by an earthquake

- The Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong

- CityU MFA gets shut down in Hong Kong

- I survived a workshop with Sharmistha Mohanty. And loved it.

- Ira fell in love again.

- Ira moved into a new house with his new love.

- Nicola got into Sarah Lawrence and moved to New York.

- Tata got engaged.

- Tata got married.

- Xu Xi became an aunt.

- My grandmother willed herself to walk again.

- My grandmother started teaching tai chi in her nursing home.

- I traveled to Tibet and Nepal with the woman from South Dakota.

- I fell out of love with the woman from South Dakota.

- I became incredible friends with the woman I used to be in love with.

- I saw Mount Everest and went to the highest monastery in the world with my incredible friend from South Dakota.

- American police killed Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice and Michael Brown.

- I met Denis Wong and Anna May.

- Together we formed the Writing Youth of Hong Kong.

- The Writing Youth of Hong Kong took a photo with Chang Rae Lee last summer residency.

- Last summer I stared into Denis’s eyes for two minutes for Tina Chang’s workshop.

- Denis and I wrote a piece about each other after staring into each other’s eyes.

- I wrote a piece about Denis being my family.

- Denis wrote a piece about me sleeping with everyone … but not letting anyone come inside.

- Ferguson Riots

- Last summer Anna May and I sat beside each other during the student readings.

- I asked Anna May if she would tell me “good job” after I read, and told Anna May that I would do the same for her.

- Anna May read a piece about San Jose. When she returned to her seat I told her that she did a good job.

- I read a piece about falling in love with a woman in Laos.

- When I returned to my seat, Anna May told me that I did a good job.

- I became amazing friends with Anna May.

- I have laughed and cried all over Hong Kong with Anna May.

- Nicola got into Columbia and will move to Columbia from Sarah Lawrence.

- I started to shave the right side of my head.

- I fell in love with an Oscar Peterson song called, “Hymn to Freedom.”

- I started playing piano again after falling in love with an Oscar Peterson song.

- I met Joey Chin and Ash Dean.

- Together they form my secret poet alliance.

- Once when I was sad and existential, I emailed Joey Chin and Ash Dean.

- Joey Chin and Ash Dean replied separately to my email – both with poems.

Ash’s email read:

I just wrote this in the last few minutes sitting here drinking coffee, having to pee but not wanting to walk home. I think it comes from a similar feeling

sending love

ash

Satellite

cold city

where in

the rant

of a

homeless

man

i once found

myself

completely at ease,

and certain

of my place.

In my most listless

days, every song

an allegory,

circular rivers,

a familiar childhood

cul de sac

cars

climb

pitched driveways

night after night

on the outside

nothing much

happens in the center

where gravel gathers:

rusted hardware;

a washer, a tiny bolt.

We live our lives

in the orbit:

homing,

because

we find,

in the nearness

we remain

attached

mostly

to the search.

- I may have cried pitifully after reading Ash Dean’s email.

- Mags Webster moved back to Australia

- Sarah Vallance moved back to Australia

- Sebastian Bitticks moved back to America

- Sophie Monatte moved to Cambodia

- I stared at Cezanne’s paintings in a workshop with Madeleine Thien.

- I listened and wrote to Glenn Gould and 80s hip hop in a workshop with Madeleine Thien.

- Madeleine Thien read a letter she wrote to someone with the initial S.

- I will never forget the letter to S or Madeleine Thien’s workshop.

- I decided to grow out my hair

- I saw Herbie Hancock, Esperanza Spalding and Roy Ayers in Hong Kong.

- I saw Gregory Porter in Tokyo.

- The Charleston shooting

- In Hong Kong, June 2015 was the hottest June recorded since 1885.

- In the United States, the Supreme Court declared gay marriage legal in all fifty states.

- Venus and Jupiter appeared to be a third of a degree apart, looking like a double star from Earth.

- It won’t be until the year 2023 when that happens again.

- NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft came within 7,000 miles of Pluto.

- For the first time ever, we have the most clear images of the dwarf planet, Pluto.

- BB King died

- Ben E. King died

- Ornette Coleman died

- I emailed Joey Chin and wrote: a part of it feels so romantic that it’s ending ... it’s like the only place CityU MFA will exist is within US ... i know so cheesy, but there’s something incredibly romantic about everything fading ... it makes me just miss and love everyone that much more ...

- Joey Chin replied to my email in all caps and wrote: YOU ARE A REALLY ROMANTIC PERSON.

- I may have cried once when pondering my identity as a writer outside the CityU MFA.

- I may have flung myself onto the bed in tears after reading Ash Dean’s humble, heartfelt letter pleading with the authorities to reinstate the CityU MFA.

- My husband may have said: you have got to get a hold of yourself.

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA?

- My psychologist now refers to me as bisexual

- My psychologist now refers to me as polyamorous

- Denis Wong wrote a piece about me sleeping with everyone

- Joey Chin calls me A REALLY ROMANTIC PERSON

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA?

- I fell in love:

Ranae Holland, Ira Sukrungruang, Madeleine Thien, Ember Swift, Nicola Sebastian, Anna May, Denis Wong, Ash Dean, Joey Chin.

- And then I cried.

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA:

- I fell in love:

Ben E. King – That’s When It Hurts, Ray Charles – Let the Good Times Roll, Ornette Coleman – Lonely Woman, John Coltrane – A Love Supreme, 12-year-old jazz prodigy, Joey Alexander.

- And then I cried.

- I fell in love:

George Saunders – Escape from Spiderhead, William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying, Brenda Shaughnessy – Our Andromeda, Louise Fitzhugh – Harriet the Spy, Jeff Schmidt – Otis & Jake, Adrienne Rich – Diving into the Wreck, Pablo Neruda – Tonight I Can Write the Saddest Lines …

- And then I cried.

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA:

- I fell in love.

- And then I cried.

- I fell in love.

- And then, someone died.

- I fell in love.

- And then I cried.

- I fell in love.

INGVILD SOLVANG

My Un-Asian Manifesto

1

I shall not write about Asia as if I never lived my life here.

2

I never gave birth to my baby daughter, although I squatted next to chanting midwives.

3

I never ate kupat tahu and cumi-cumi, although the dog meat in Timor was marinated in arak.

4

The naked male stripper never passed out, although someone secretly mixed ecstasy into my drinks to keep me dancing.

5

I was never taken away on the back of a police truck for singing karaoke with a man after midnight, although I sat at the police station until azan sounded from the minarets at dawn.

6

I never cheated on my lover, although she carved my eyes out of portraits.

7

I never slept on flattened cardboard with a newspaper blanket, although I drank topi miring with street youth until Roni was stabbed at sunrise.

8

I never learned to hear an earthquake before feeling it, although the fish in my backyard catapulted from the pond.

9

I never had a friend drop to her knees in prayer beside me in a dark forest: “Allahu Akbar, let me go home,” although Indra lost her tooth under feet thumping to Allahu Akbars of terror.

10

I never spent days in shelter from a rain of religiously branded bullets and bombs, although an armored vehicle brought me out of the burning city.

11

I never stood at the edge of a mass grave, although a Malaysian doctor asked to take my picture with the decomposing man in blue underwear as backdrop.

13

I never shared kretek cigarettes with Soni, who a few years before punched Chinese girls in the face, or coffee with Heru who beheaded the Madurese in 2001, although a colleague, a young girl then, today feels the guilt they gave her when they made her eat the enemy.

14

I never watched a woman pretend to read a formal letter upside down, although she was too embarrassed to ask her village leader to issue a birth certificate for her son.

15

I never looked at a father’s damaged photos of a two-year-old girl, although she wore a white dress when mountainous waves ripped her from his arms.

16

I didn’t spend sixteen years in Asia, although it made me profoundly human.

17

Asia is not mine to write about; without Asia I wouldn’t be.

So I whisper my stories to the wind; I know the rice fields know me.

And let it be heard, I understand less and less of anywhere.

Let it be heard that I cannot be the father who didn’t lose faith when God took his child. Let it be heard, some people never know their date of birth. Let it be known, the girls abused by Soni are finding their own voices. Let it be known that there are new beginnings, and that the lover I betrayed called me a perek when I deserved it.

18

I never planted my daughter’s placenta under a mango tree.

19

None of this affects me, nor does it influence my writing.

HAYLEY KATZEN

Bachelor Brothers

Morning tea

MORNING TEA AT THE FLETCHERS. Four bachelor brothers who live on the neighboring farm. When the ding-dong clock on the walnut sideboard chimes 9:30 a.m., you take your seat at the round table and sip the best cup of tea you’ve ever tasted. The plastic cloth is patterned with purple pansies. Its centerpiece is an aluminum teapot and a tray of tomato and barbecue sauces, salt and pepper, Vegemite, golden syrup and toothpicks.

Frank, the family cook, sets down a plate of hot date scones. The brothers slather them with margarine and chew tremulously. They talk in stop-start phrases, their voices heehawing over each other. From their teasing tone you assume they’re bullying or blaming.

You don’t understand a word they’re saying.

Pigs

Growing up during war-time, way out the back of Green Pidgin, the brothers chopped wood, carried water, dug lantana and milked cows. They didn’t go to school. They didn’t learn to read and write. They learned which seeds were poisonous and that pigeons were “goo eang,” but not crows. They learned how to wring a chicken’s neck. At dawn one morning they spied their father going outside. They were sure he fed the pigs a human fetus. Twelve children. Until the nuns took the three girls.

Fletcherese

A code spoken by a family. “Lash” is latch, “Tussex” is Sussex, “showed” is closed, “boozed” is bruised, “awigh” is all right, “icey” is pricey. You record words in search of a pattern. But just when you decide Rs and Ls are spoken as Ws, you hear them articulate the R in “rats” correctly. Some words are left hanging, only half said, like “sho dow” which is shut down. Some words elide; others are skipped altogether. The key is context.

Three meat and veg

Frank is seven. Standing on a wooden stool at his mother’s side, he learns to bake and stew and roast. Unlike his brothers, he doesn’t learn to use a gun or a chainsaw.

He gets work cooking – for harvesting contractors, for weed sprayers, for workers at the asbestos mine. When he buys the farm with his brothers, he sets out breakfast (cereal and toast, no eggs), morning tea (Sao biscuits with sliced tomato), lunch (cold rissoles with onion, tomato and white bread) and tea (three meat and veg). In summer he bottles apples that he gets cheap by the box. In winter he pickles chokos from his own vine.

Invited for “tea,” you find Frank hovering over the grimy Formica kitchen table with its jam tin of hot fat and ice cream container of vegetable scraps. His conical red face peaks in a Tintin tuft of rice-white hair. Wiry hairs sprout from his blotchy skin. He stabs a bone-handled fork into a roast chicken the size of a turkey. “Tea” is wilted beans, dried out roast potatoes and chicken, and pork and beef drenched in salty gravy; for “sweets” there’s rhubarb crumble that sticks to your palate.

Milk

Frank milks three Jersey cows at five o’clock every morning. He funnels the warm milk into old port flagons and stacks them in the fridge that sits on the verandah between a bucket of sour milk and empty beer cartons. A flagon costs two dollars and you return the bottles washed clean. Frank keeps a tally in his head of who owes him for milk and who doesn’t wash out the bottles.

One of the local women refuses to go on her own to get milk from the Fletchers. She’s scared, she says. She can’t understand a word they say.

Laying hens

Frank keeps laying hens. Sussex, Silkies, Leghorns, Bantams. Numerous roosters crow at dawn. If the wind is blowing in the right direction, you hear them from across paddocks a thirty-minute walk away.

After lunch he lets the chickens out into the paddock. A dozen eggs cost two dollars – the dried chook poo, dirt and feathers are free. Frank keeps a tally of who owes him money and how often you come back for a new carton. From his red plastic chair on the verandah, he tells you which carton to take, from which side, and then sends you out to the back bedroom with the five single beds and the bookshelf loaded with recycled egg cartons.

Meaties

Frank raises “meaty” birds for eating. He keeps them warm under lights through the night. Big-footed birds that he doesn’t let out into the paddock. Come time to kill, he lights the old copper in the lean-to near the chook pens and sets up a table under the spotty gum tree. He grabs a fluttering bird by its legs, and places its head between two nails on the chopping block. An empty feed bag hangs just below the target to catch the bloody head. Just once, to show you, he places the headless chook on the ground and it does run around before he rescues it and puts it into a bag that jiggles like a dying flame. He dunks the bird in boiling water and you gag at the stench of wet feathers. As you pluck the body grows cold. The chicken’s skin is pale and goose-bumped in the thin morning light. Frank slices it with a carving knife and scoops out intestines, heart, lung and liver.

He shakes his head as he tells you “I wo le Misserfixi hell no more. ’Em ings ’er boozed.”

Translation: “I won’t let Mr Fix-it help me anymore. He bruised their wings.”

T-bones

One by one his brothers die. First Norman is found dead in bed at dawn. So Frank defrosts T-bones for three. Then Bruce collapses against the fridge on New Year’s Day. Frank defrosts T-bones for two. Then Jack has a stroke, and three weeks later he, too, dies. Frank defrosts one T-bone.

Fruitcake

Some days you eat lunch with Frank; some days you have a beer with him on the verandah and he waves to cars that hoot as they pass. Mondays he cooks “dog tucka” for your three working dogs – kangaroo meat with pasta tubes and carrots in Gravox. Friday nights he barbecues steak at the community hall. Christmastime he makes fruitcakes and ices them white with pink trim.

One evening you’re about to take a tub of dog tucka from the verandah fridge, when he instructs you to follow him. You think he wants you to do his telephone banking or write a check or read a letter. In his narrow bedroom with its single bed and chest of drawers, he hands you an envelope. Red in the face and smiling, he stands over you watching.

Inside is a wad of certificates from the recent Bonalbo Show. First prize for mustard pickles. Second prize for fruitcake. Third prize for bottled apricots.

Beef cattle

With bowed legs and wrinkled knees, Frank pushes the calves up the race toward the crush. You catch and drench and inoculate and castrate. By mid morning Frank’s face is placenta red. You ask if he needs a rest. You wonder if it’s sunburn or high blood pressure. When the job’s done, you go back down to the house. He kicks off his gumboots and pulls on black slippers. His legs are skinny and spotty with patches without pigment.

In the bathroom you wash your hands with a nub of soap that teeters on a ledge of decayed wood. The lino beside the shower is blue floral. There is a smudge worn to white where the brothers have balanced their bodies to scrub a raised foot.

You slump in a padded dining chair and say it’s been a long day. You’re tired. He calls you “city girl” and shoves a bottle of beer at you. When the clock chimes 5:00 p.m. he turns on the television. It’s a quiz for primary school students. He swings his slippered feet back and forth against the bald carpet and calls out the answers. Sometimes he shouts “siwy bugga” at the contestants.

During the ads, he lifts the leg of his shorts to show you translucent white skin and a grape-purple bruise. You look away from his pale nakedness. He says something you can’t decipher. You sharpen your focus and when he speaks again, you realize he’s blaming you because he got kicked in the cattle yards last week.

Common language

One time you understood Frank perfectly. Early morning, his frightened telephone call: “Alfie’s died.” Another brother, one who lived in town. Now of twelve siblings, only four are alive.

When you drive up to the house, Frank’s sitting on his red plastic chair, his white hair shining in the winter morning sun. You tell him you’re sorry and put your arms around him. He clings to you. You rub his back. When you pull away, he takes off his glasses and wipes his wet gray eyes. You sit together at the table drinking tea from the aluminum pot and listen to the 9:30 a.m. chime of the ding-dong clock.

SAFFRON MARCHANT

False Alarm

Midtown Manhattan, September 12, 2001

31

I’M GOING to die now, aren’t I?

I’m going to die right here, amongst strangers.

“There are reports of a bomb.” The disembodied voice again, calling out from the walls, from behind the corporate artwork of prairie landscapes, flowers, past Presidents. “Leave if you wish to do so.”

A woman with square, burgundy fingernails pushes the elevator button repeatedly. Her hand is shaking. I swallow hard. There’s a group of us, men in collared shirts and chinos, women in skirts and heels, corporate wear, each of us staring at the elevator doors. My high heels sink into the carpet of the elevator lobby as I bite a lump out of my thumbnail. Getoutgetoutgetout.

What if today is not the aftermath; what if yesterday was just the start? More collapsing skyscrapers. More rogue planes in the sky. More smoke, confusion and death. All that I have to cover my head if this tower comes down is a fake Gucci purse that I bought off the sidewalk in Times Square. I thought it was a good fake, convincing, but it has a stuck zipper, nylon seams and the inside has a sharp plastic smell. I take another chunk out of my thumb.

A man, with deep blue sweat hoops under his arms, says, “No way. After what happened yesterday. Where are the stairs?”

He pushes open a door beneath a green EXIT sign. The pale golden carpet of the hallway gives way to gray concrete. In the emergency stairwell, people already herd downstairs, un-smiling, heads down. The ceiling is low and angled steeply. The walls are close together. The lights flicker on-off, on-off, on-off like an eye twitch. My Brazilian colleague’s long, tawny ponytail swishes. She’s about to leap into the throng. I reach down and grab her hand. Luisa turns to me, mouth open, eyes narrow. She gives my hand a small yank, I hold firm.

30

If a fire breaks out in your skyscraper, stay put, don’t leave. These tall buildings are designed to contain fire within their floors. Sit at your desk and wait for the Fire Department. You may smell smoke; you might even feel warm. That’s just the fire playing with you, whispering through the air conditioning ducts, sneaking along the electric cables, bubbling up the water pipes.

Skyscrapers fall down, although this we didn’t know until yesterday.

Fact: in the emergency stairwell of a skyscraper, the thud of hurried footsteps on concrete is a stadium’s roar.

29

Nobody is going up the stairs.

We roll around the corner. Black numbers on a white wall.

28

“It’s-okay-it’s-okay-it’s-okay-it’s-okay.” I can’t stop saying it, like a prayer or a mantra or a wish. “It’s okay.” I say it to myself and I say it to Luisa. She’s faster than me; she wants to let me go, keeps giving little tugs. I don’t know Luisa. We’ve never had a coffee together, or shared a bottle of wine after work. Until yesterday, we had only spoken once.

27

We skitter past the obese, the old, the relaxed. My upper thighs spasm. I’m wearing somebody else’s legs. I’ve not yet learned to walk. Each step down is a jolt. My hips pinch. There’s a pull across my groin. Sweat streams through the crack of my buttocks, down my legs, out of my armpits and into my plastic handbag.

26

“There’s a report of a bomb in the building.” The deep male voice hesitates. “Leave if you wish to do so.” Why are they not being cryptic? Back home in London, it’s an “unidentified package,” an “abandoned gym bag,” a “security alert.”

Yesterday, as the evacuees descended the stairs in the Twin Towers and the firemen ascended, survivors spoke of calm, of camaraderie.

“Keep going, buddy.”

“Not too far to go now, ma’am.”

But they didn’t know then that the Fire Department can’t always get to that room in the sky where you are. Our pace slows, we hit an obstruction. Someone below is carrying a suitcase, hugged to his chest like a baby. “Put the case down, man, you’re holding us up.”

At every floor more people file into the stairs, unsmiling. “Just put the fucking bag down.”

If I could, I’d kick off my shoes but they have an ankle strap, a complicated clasp. I’m slower than I should be.

I might die because of a buckled shoe?

25

Someone just kicked me in the back. I drop the hand. Luisa hurtles away, takes the stairs two at a time. I slow down and turn. A briefcase swings at me. I duck, smell leather. A man. He is very fat, with a sheen of sweat on his face as though he’s dipped his head into butter. “You’re inhuman, running. Leaving the rest of us to burn,” he growls and swings his briefcase at me again. “I’m going to find out who you are,” he says. “I’m going to find out where you work.”

24

Yesterday, I walked to the office in a Walkman vacuum and only noticed when I got to Broadway that Manhattan was quiet. I pulled the speakers from my ears and heard the distant wails of sirens – so very New York – but no car horns. Rising into the vacant air was the static hum of car radios turned up high. People on the sidewalk stood still. A woman, her arms and legs bare, shielded her eyes and looked downtown. The sky was a pottery blue.

23

Yesterday, I was so late for work that I rode an empty elevator up to my floor. People were gathered in the secretarial bay, grouped around a computer. A collective sigh. “My God, the Pentagon!” My secretary looked at me as I passed. “You’re used to attacks like this, Miss Street, coming from London.” From the Photocopy Room outside my office: “The South Tower’s down!”

22

Yesterday. The state of Before, of not yet knowing. A spasm in time.

I fired up my computer. Row upon row of emails entitled, “Are you okay?” My friends. If they all raised their hands to say, “Yes, we know her,” could I race home, across the Atlantic on their upturned palms?

21

Luisa kicked open my office door, her face was red and wet with tears. “I saw people jumping! I saw them jump!”

I shook my head.

Nothing made any sense.

20

Yesterday. I called my parents, imagining the phone ringing in their house in England. My brother answered.

“I’m okay.” I rushed the words out, so that there would be no misinterpretation, no tiny second of doubt.

“What d’you mean you’re okay?” said James.

“Haven’t you heard? Where’s Mum?”

“She’s asleep. She’s got a migraine again.”

“Can you wake her?”

“You want me to wake Mum up?”

“Manhattan’s been attacked and I want her to know that I’m okay.”

“What d’you mean attacked? You don’t want to go worrying her now, you know how she worries.”

“Please, just go and get her.”

The familiar sound of my mother rubbing the receiver free of germs. Then her sleepy voice. “Hello?”

“I’m okay.”

“That’s good, darling. I’ve been in bed for two days. Bloody migraine.”

“Mum, there’s been an attack here but I’m miles away … Mum?”

“Your brother’s shouting something. What is it, James? He’s watching the telly. Turn it down, I’m talking to your sister, Trans-Atlantically. Jesus Christ! Sas? I’ve got to go, there’s something happening on the news.”

19

Someone on the stairs above us is singing the R.E.M. song, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It.”

18

Christ, my heel has snapped! A woman behind me groans. I can’t lose my space here, I can’t be shunted into the slow lane. I grab the iron banister and pull and lurch my way downstairs until I hit a steady rhythm.

Why am I here? Why am I even in Manhattan?

I remember now: “I’m going to meet a Rockefeller.”

Who do I think I am? Carrie bloody Bradshaw?

17

It’s all over isn’t it? We’ve shifted into war and we’re all poorly equipped and dangerously clothed and why should I be killed for a career choice? What a fucking useless thing to die for.

16

I wish R.E.M. man would fucking shut up.

15

You might feel fine, mate, but I feel like giving you a punch in the chops.

Cunt.

14

“Cunt?”

13

My last word on earth: cunt.

“Cunt” isn’t me. I am not “cunt.”

12

What if I am “cunt?” Is that why I’m so useless at yoga, I’ve got no real Zen?

11

I’ve been kicked. I’ve been abandoned. There’s no humanity on these stairs.

“It’s the end of the world as we know it!”

Fuck-off-fuck-off-fuck-off –

10

“Excuse me?”

I turn my head and look at the woman. The stairs are clogged now, the fast lane has slowed so I match her step-for-step. Her chest is heaving, sweat drips from her nose. I realize she’s been praying out loud and that I’ve been listening to her – “Hail Mary full of grace, blessed be thy name” – and, based on her stare, she’s been listening to me. I didn’t know I was speaking out loud.

I haven’t been to confession for years; I only go to church for weddings. Is prayer going to help me, her, us? How long have we been walking side-by-side, uttering our unlikely penance: Three fucks and a Hail Mary?

“Oh sacred heart of Jesus, I place my trust in thee,” I say, holding her stare. She smiles and the clot of people in the fast lane suddenly releases and I bounce down the stairs and away from her.

9

Yesterday. The afternoon of September the 11th in London. I imagine my father at his cushion shop in the East End, cutting swathes of velvet, methodically slicing through the layers, forming squares. His chief machinist hovered in the doorway. “One of the world’s tallest buildings just collapsed.” She picked up an armful of green velvet.

My father uncoiled another roll of cloth across his table. “How did it fall down?”

“A plane flew into it.”

Dad bent over the cutting machine, aligning it with the length of the table. Pat came back for more squares. “Another building has just fallen down,” she said.

“Where are these buildings?”

“New York. The financial district.” Pat put her hand to her mouth. “Do you think that’s where Saffron works?”

My father left his shop without unplugging his cutting machine or saying goodbye. He wanted to get home before my mother found out, before she could start to worry; he wanted to be the worried one, the fraught one. When Mum phoned the shop to tell him I had just called Pat said that he had already left. “Those poor people, Pat, trapped. We must pray for them.”

Dad kept stopping on the roadside because he couldn’t see through his tears to drive. The news on the radio got bleaker: nuclear device in Lower Manhattan, the fire visible from space, the impossibility of survivors. When he got home Mum was in the road waiting for him, holding a bottle of rum. “She’s okay. She’s okay,” she told him as he opened the car door. “Have a drink, Jimmy.”

8

Tim, I think of Tim.

We are very new. We go on dates, sit in little walled gardens festooned with fairy lights. We conduct our early courtship downtown, in the shops and restaurants of the Village, walk hand in hand in the shadow of the Twin Towers.

Walked.

7

Last night, in my small Midtown apartment, Tim and I watched CNN, the alarmist red text circuiting the bottom of the screen and looping around my chest. Pearl Harbor. Mayor Giuliani. Empty Hospitals. We learned that a sniffer dog had sat down on a floor of the Empire State Building. “It means he senses a bomb,” the blond co-anchor said and she nodded her head but her hair didn’t move.

“How far away is the Empire State from here?” I said.

“It’s a dog, sitting, sweetheart, it’s not a bomb.”

I went into the kitchen, picked up first the bottle and then the opener. I drew out the cork as my stomach curdled and my breath shortened.

“False alarm. No bomb,” Tim called.

I took the bottle and sat back down. Tim shook his head when I offered him a glass. I filled mine. We changed channels and watched cars whizzing around a racetrack before we saw street children in Cairo celebrate the wreck of the Twin Towers. I drank the whole bottle of dark red wine. When there was a dreg left, I stood and showed Tim that I could hip thrust better than Madonna. I “Vogued” for him. I showed him how my dad dances. Tim eyed me carefully through his steel-rimmed spectacles. My teeth were stained and my mouth coated raspberry.

6

I’m not getting any younger.

Should Tim and I have a baby?

5

What do I want children for? The mess, the body fluids, the neon plastic.

The tiny red truck abandoned in the hallway.

All that softening of the body and the heart.

4

A man steps into the stairwell, pressing a linen handkerchief to his forehead. “My wife says all the Midtown buildings are being evacuated.”

This announcement triggers a new lane, a third lane, right down the middle. People begin to jump down the stairs, kangaroos in business suits, taking the landings at a hip-popping slide.

I can’t go as fast as them; I know my limitations. I can’t jump all the way to the ground floor, not in these shoes.

3

I have written down a name in my diary: “Binladin.” He is an enemy of mine. He wants me dead. I’ve never had an enemy before, just people that I don’t especially like and who don’t especially like me.

2

I think of England in the War, living life under attack. Coastal children strafed by fighter pilots, as they walked home from school. Gas masks and doodlebugs and aboveground air-raid shelters, made of battered tin. I don’t know how Londoners coped in the Blitz. I know they were brave, stoic, community-spirited, bedding down in the Tube stations, as the city exploded above them. But if I’d been there, I think I’d have been the one with my head under the blanket, crying into my ration book, as everybody else sings, “Roll Out the Barrel” and “God Save the King.”

1

My hair lifts in the wind from the street and there is late summer’s heat, tanning lotion and mosquito spray and limbs prickly from the sun.

The future is at the bottom of the stairs on the Avenue of the Americas, between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth. I push the man on the step in front of me, I bear down as he slows, forcing him to stay on his journey. I turn my shoulders, look back into the stairwell. “Keep going!” says a woman a few steps above me.

Mezzanine

The milky daylight spools first around my ankles and then rises up my body, higher and higher.

Each step down gouges flesh and my feet slip in my shoe, from blood or sweat, I don’t know, but I’ve got to keep moving. When I get to St. Patrick’s Cathedral, I’ll say my prayers. I’ll light a candle for the dead and another for the living. I’ll take off my shoes and I’ll let myself cry.

Ground

The steel door is wedged open with a fire extinguisher. The light changes, a puddle of gold on the cement floor. The sunlight is a hand reaching in from the sidewalk, it pulls me free.

Manhattan. Sheer cliffs of chrome, steel, glass, fountains in the courtyards of the skyscrapers. A city of shadows and sudden rectangular sunbursts or a squeak of sky. It looks just as it should, except for the people lined up beneath the buildings; faces part bluster, part blind fear. Thousands of us.

This is not New York City. This is not America. Something has broken. The fighter jets roaring above Central Park, the sealed tunnels and blockaded bridges.

The pyre at the bottom of the island, the slash in the downtown sky.

AMANDA WEBSTER

Strawberry Shakes

AFTER ANOTHER tiresome day, as you’re driving back to your townhouse, you remember the strawberries. Beside you, in the car, your son thrums spidery fingers against thighs that are little more than skin-draped femurs. You steel yourself for the familiar cautions that will follow the news that you need to make a stop: don’t buy bad food, don’t go near other food, don’t let the strawberries touch other food.

You park outside the Milton supermarket. Your son stays in the car, his rigid body spotlit by a streetlight. You make your way, shivering, through the shadows. Inside the store, you shield your eyes from the fluorescent glare as you wander through a psychedelic display of acid yellow lemons, boldly-colored oranges, plump mandarins and boxes and boxes of apples – Pink Lady, Red Delicious, Sundowner and Fuji.

You will remember how from an early age your son ate two apples – each neatly peeled and cut into eight precise pieces by you – before bed. But that was before fat became the bogeyman. Tonight, you will wash a handful of strawberries for your son, you will peel and cut a kiwifruit, and you will peel and cut just one apple in the same way you always did. You will deliver the plate to his room. Not knowing any better, you will leave him with limp advice – you must eat it all – to supervise his meal, if a plate of fruit can be thus defined.

Or perhaps you leave him because it’s 8 p.m. and you’ve been up since 4 a.m. when he came into your bedroom and demanded the first protein shake of the day and you thought you’d finished with 4 a.m. feeds for him eleven years ago and you want a glass or two of chardonnay (who are you kidding; you want three or four) and the thought of watching him dissect his apple as if it’s a dead rat in a laboratory makes you want to throw up or scream or bang your head against the wall just as he does when the voice in his head grows too loud.

He will eat the strawberries and the kiwifruit – they’re small and low in calories – and he will take a bite or two of the apple. This is the first food he will have eaten all day. The rest of his nutrition will have come from the five protein shakes. When you return to his room, you will find picked-off pieces of apple assembled into a small shrine on his plate.

You would like to buy some of the boxed apples, polished and shiny, lined up like flush-faced cherubs. But you can’t buy apples and strawberries at the same time. That’s the rule. One day you will have to break down this prohibition, but there are so many battlefronts, and you are a solitary foot soldier.

So you walk past the apples and the oranges, the lemons and the mandarins, the pears and the plums, the potatoes, tomatoes, aubergines, rhubarb, carrots, and cabbage, by which time you are reeling with the smell of all this forbidden food. You reach the end of the aisle without finding strawberries. You won’t find them in the next three shops either because they’re out of season.

In the fifth store you try – a Chinese delicatessen on Milton Road – you find one punnet in the refrigerator on the back wall. The strawberries are tiny and discolored and you see a faint fuzz of mold on several, but they will have to do. Anorexia pays no heed to seasons. And you need strawberries not only for the fruit plate but also for the protein shakes that you must prepare tonight for tomorrow’s 4 a.m. start.

When your son is in bed, you will wash and chop the remaining strawberries and toss them into the blender. You will add three scoops of protein powder and one liter of no-fat Sanitarium soy milk – the one in the red carton. Always and exhaustingly the one in the red carton. The noise of the blender will drill into your head.

For years after your son recovers, you will hate strawberries. You will see them in the supermarket, and your stomach will turn. They will smell, to you, sickeningly sweet, and they will remind you of chardonnay-soaked nights. If anyone were to tell you that one day you would eat strawberries sautéed with orange juice and maple sugar with pancakes before you watched your smiling son graduate from high school, you would give a small, bitter laugh.

ADNAN MAHMUTOVIC

#yourcamp #survivorsguilt

YOUR CAMP DID NOT have barbed wire around it, like your uncle’s. Like my father’s camp. Nor damp walls. Nor buckets of shit and piss, emptied on the mornings when the Serbian soldiers were sober. Nor was it full of thirsty men with bad breath and teeth like those of Dickens’s bad guys. Nor did it have a rough patch under window bars against which the prisoners scratched off the tattoos of Tito’s name and the symbol of the Yugoslav National Army, which was now killing everyone. They were blue, the tattoos. Blue ink that pales with time. Ink that makes your skin reek of nostalgia. My skin. I know that your camp was airtight and skinny. And it followed you wherever you went. The camp. Yes. It was the stalking kind. It’d come with you to Sweden like just another silly tourist you can’t turn away from because you got something to gain. You don’t know exactly what, but you trust there is gain. Your camp. It’d follow you on your first trip back to your ruined house. It would sightsee the motherland from the car but never get out and touch that hot ground. Your camp was made of all the failed men. Of all the hurt women. You wish it had high fences and barbed wire. Then you’d know for sure you were a victim. Now there are those who can tell you, you ain’t seen shit. You escaped too early. They can do it in any language and with any accent but Bosnian. They can do it sounding like George W. Bush or Helmut Kohl or Boutros Boutros Ghali or John bloody Major, or why not Gaddafi himself. You’re still too stupid to get the meaning of those words. It doesn’t hurt if you’re too stupid to get it, right? It doesn’t count if it hurts in retrospect. If your mind is like a phantom limb that only imagines there’s pain, does it count? If there is no brain to register the ghostly pains, no nerves firing at will? You wondered, I mean WE wondered, how come we can still, with our phantom brains and our phantom hearts, enjoy the old music, the kind we used to find boring and lame and clichéd. Remember, in 1992, a year before your escape, my escape, our family’s double escape from Banja Luka – where, by the way, there was no resistance, just nice and clean old-fashioned ethnic cleansing – all the way down in Sarajevo, in the midst of ruins, pop musicians sang songs and made simple videos. It was music that sounded nostalgic, but not always for the past. It was music nostalgic for the future. ’Tis weird, when, as the Bard put it, “fair is foul, and foul is fair,” and the past kicks you from the future and the future pinches you from behind. Nostalgia should come after the fact. It’s supposed to thunder in those moments of loneliness in the crowds of America or Scandinavia, Malaysia or Australia, even in Pakistan (and God knows why anyone wanted to be a refugee there. You chose well, haven’t you, you lucky bastard). Dear God, how those war songs were nostalgic, not for the times destroyed by the raging war, but for the things that may happen further down the road. This singer I’m talking about, you know him, tall and skinny with that ridiculous ’80s haircut and All-Star sneakers and 501 Levi’s (cheap Chinese copy), imagines a future situation in which his lost friend, lost because he or she escaped the war and is now safe in Paris or Belgrade (seriously, Belgrade??? WTF), lost because the singer is left behind and the only thing he can do is make his friend miserable for no other reason than that he or she ran away in time and survived, because he or she abandoned and betrayed Sarajevo, betrayed Bosnia and stopped giving a shit about the soul of the country. This dialogue, this meeting, this emotion produced by the song lies in the future. The singer is singing on the off chance that the song will escape the country like his friend did and strike the heart of this mysterious friend who is now walking the amazing streets of big European cities, “Po Parizu, Beogradu druže jedini, volio bih i ja sada s tobom šetati. Po Parizu, Beogradu druže jedini, volio bih i ja sada s tobom šetati. … Ovo nije tvoja borba drugi ratuju. Ipak druže ti si tamo a ja sam još tu. Ipak druže ti si tamo a ja sam još tu (My only friend, I’d love to walk through Paris and Belgrade with you. … This is not your fight, others are at war. But anyway my friend, you’re there and I’m still here).” Notice the repetitions. Let me stress it again: notice the repetitions of the lines that are not even the chorus. Everything needs to be said twice, or sent out twice over the radio waves, everything needs to escape twice, just in case. The double escape. The big cities. Yeah, right. Most refugees you and I know ended up in villages and small towns, and not everyone sits in Central Park or is gazing at the skyline of Chicago or the towers of Kuala Lumpur. But the song is effective. You and I feel guilty though we’re not that friend he sings to. We’re not Sarajaveska Raja, but we hear him sing “Dok gradovi Bosnom gore daleko ste bili, kad je teško Sarajevo ostavili (While the cities of Bosnia are burning, you were far and away. You left Sarajevo in the toughest of times).” Notice the past tense. Again: notice the past tense. As if the song was written ten years later, not in the moment of sadness and despair. And for despair, obviously, the pop singer needs this lost friend. Despair cannot exist in solitude. It’s like the French des pairs, a couple. And notice the semi-happy tone, the sad-cheerful melody, the poppiness. He obliges us, you and me, a couple of survivors, and he wants us to respond, at least for the duration of the song. So go ahead, feel that guilt, and feel that nostalgia, but not the real one, not the authentic one, the obligatory one. Do it. With me. Try. It’s not hard. It’s a damn pop song. It’s a given you’ll feel something as you walk around your big city, our big city, carrying your camp everywhere. Our camp. And the fading blue tattoos.

SARAH VALLANCE

Next of Kin

LIFE SOMETIMES has a way of chewing you up and spitting you out. After eleven years abroad in Hong Kong and Singapore, I had made the curious decision to move back to Australia. I left my home in a seething metropolis for a new home in a sleepy seaside village, and my world shrank to the size of a postage stamp.

Pearl Beach is a pristine strip of coast nestled beside thick bushland, an hour and a half’s drive north of Sydney. There is nothing here but a café, a general store, an upmarket restaurant with limited opening hours, and a community hall offering seniors’ yoga, seniors’ stretching and seniors’ Pilates, depending on the day. The neighboring beach towns offer little in the way of attractions, but each has a shop selling motorized scooters. Then there are the funeral parlors, each with slight variations on the same shopfront display: a vase of white flowers standing on a wooden coffin, set behind a wispy white curtain. I did not come here to die, but in the short time I have been here, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it.

I moved home at the age of fifty-one, with a broken heart and a withering bank balance. It had been three years since my girlfriend had broken up with me, and our relationship had settled into one of friendship. I had hung around too long, hoping she would change her mind and take me back. Then one day I asked her. “No chance!” she said, shaking her head with unnecessary vigor. The next day I took my three dogs and two cats to the vet for their rabies tests, and started to organize my move home. I planned to live in the beach house I had bought online twelve years earlier. It was the only place I knew I could live rent-free.

The house was in dire need of renovation. I had arranged for a new kitchen and bathroom to be installed before I left Hong Kong, but four weeks after the supposed finish date, I was still waiting on lights, a bath, a sink, an oven and a dishwasher. The floors had been sanded and polished but the house needed painting. I moved into the cabin at the rear of my garden, empty but for a bed, and spent a lot of time wondering why I seem to make the most important decisions in my life with the least amount of forethought.

In the absence of a better idea, I decided to wake each morning at six and paint the inside of my house. It would be another four weeks before my dogs and cats arrived from Hong Kong, and at least another six weeks before my furniture would be delivered. I had nothing else to do. Every morning at eight o’clock, when the café opened, I wandered across the road and ordered muesli and two café lattes, dressed in the same pair of paint splattered jeans, and the same soiled T-shirt. At lunchtime, I bought ice cream and chocolate. Each evening I visited an Indian restaurant in a nearby suburb and ordered takeaway. I ate vegetable curry from a plastic box with a plastic fork, propped up on my bed inside the cabin, under the glare of a long strip of fluorescent lighting.

It had been decades since the house was painted. The walls soaked up four coats of paint, and the woodwork was scabby and required a process of scaling, sanding, patching, more sanding, a coat of primer and three coats of oil paint. The task seemed endless. Then one day, after almost finishing the living room ceiling, I decided to put my mental health first and stop. Could I live in a house that was almost painted? Of course I could. Painting taught me two important things: First, I am lazy by nature, and in spite of a fondness for grandiose plans, not a great “finisher.” I knew this already. And, second, to save time and effort in the future, one should always make use of drop sheets when painting a room with freshly polished floorboards.

Four weeks alone in the cabin reminded me that I am scared of the dark. The streetlights in Pearl Beach have been set out stingily, and from my bed inside the cabin it was black outside. One of the things people like most about the neighborhood is that the houses here do not have fences. I used to like the idea too until I spent a month in that cabin and realized a child could have opened the flimsy lock on the sliding door with a toothpick. A fence might have slowed him down. From the hardware store I bought a small wrench and a large torch I kept beside my bed.

I had been gone a long time, and I was unaccustomed to the sounds of the bush – the squabbling of possums, their strangulated hissing, the lashing of branches against my roof, the silent procession of funnel web spiders to my front door, to find a crack in the masonry through which they could squeeze and hop over toward my bed. Each night I heard something that sounded like a small child walking across the roof of my cabin. Eventually, I summoned the courage to go outside with my torch. The culprit was a bush turkey, a large, charcoal-colored bird, with a yellow chest, and a head that resembles an old man’s penis, sauntering up and down, searching for food, or somewhere to rest, or maybe he was just trying to fuck with me.

No one had come to the airport to meet me when I landed in Sydney. I had told my mother and brother my arrival date, but I hadn’t expected to see them. We had barely spoken in the eleven years I was gone. Our family had always felt to me like a broken plate, with my father and me on one side, and my mother and brother on the other. In the years following my father’s death, the wedge between us had developed into a chasm. They grew even closer, and I had let them be. Walking out into the arrivals hall, into the jaws of a city that was no longer my home made me feel like doing an about turn, marching back inside the airport, and buying a ticket for the next flight out.

I caught a taxi to a serviced apartment in Zetland, a dingy suburb on the outskirts of the airport, and checked myself in for the night. Dinner was a squashed piece of almond cake I had kept from the plane and a bottle of water bought from a vending machine in the hallway outside my room. It was a strange homecoming. The next morning, I picked up a car and drove to my new home.

I had visited Pearl Beach three times in my life before deciding, days after being dumped by my first long-term girlfriend, to buy a house here. In twelve years, the value of the house had dropped sharply.

“I’d be lucky to get my money back, wouldn’t I?” I asked the real estate agent when I went to collect the keys.

“It’s been a bit flat here,” he nodded.

I did not recognize my house. I had only been inside it once, but I had no recollection of the layout of the place, or its size. I thought the garden was bigger, the house smaller. It was a ridiculous size for one person. It had too many bedrooms. Too much space. I had spent a long time getting rid of things so I could live in Hong Kong where space is at a premium. Now I needed clutter to fill the void.

I visited the local pharmacy to buy an oral contraceptive. Not because I have been entertaining prospects of sex here – although I should point out that one gentleman in his late seventies asked me if I would like to go for a bushwalk with him (he winked at the suggestion and squeezed my forearm), and another older gentlemen I met in the vegetables section at Woolworths invited me home to help him make tomato sauce (he also winked) – but because I have reached an age where without a dose of hormones each day to keep me balanced, my moods swing with a ferocity that frightens me.

“You need a prescription for that.” The pharmacist looked at me like I had fallen from another planet.

“Not in Hong Kong, you don’t,” I said and he shot me a look that said, “Tell someone who gives a shit.”

I went next door where I had seen a sign saying “Surgery.” I registered at the counter, and the receptionist, who looked to be in her sixties, snapped at me and told me I needed to make an appointment. I was happy to wait, I said, all I needed was a prescription.

“It doesn’t matter what you need,” she hissed. “You still have to see a doctor.”

She looked up at me glowering and asked me how I liked to be addressed. Ms.? Mrs.?

“Doctor, thank you,” I said.

I can’t recall the last time I used the doctor honorific or even the last time I told anyone I had a PhD. But now, I wanted this woman, with her big blond hair and crumpled face, to call me Doctor. As soon as the word left my mouth, I realized my pettiness.

“I’m terribly sorry.” Her tone changed instantly.

And I wanted to lean across the counter and shout, “You should be, you rude bitch,” because I had run out of my hormone pills and it had been five days since I had taken one and I was at risk of doing something rash.

“And Doctor,” she said, smiling, “can I ask for your next of kin?”

I looked at her and my mouth fell open. The fact was I had no next of kin, or at least none with whom I had any kind of relationship. I had a brother to whom I never spoke, and a mother I had seen four times in twelve years. I had no kin at all except a cousin who lived a twelve-hour drive away on the Sunshine Coast. We had seen each other once in the past twenty years. Every person I knew had a next of kin but me. I had three dogs, two cats and an ex-girlfriend I still loved who lived in Hong Kong. My closest friends were scattered around the world in Hong Kong, Singapore, Phnom Penh, Mexico City and Amsterdam.

“I’m sorry,” I ended up saying. “Can I get back to you? I don’t have my phone with me and I can’t remember anyone’s number.”

“Of course, Doctor.”

In the twelve years I had been away from Sydney, I had been a sloppy friend and kept in touch with only two people. One was weathering serious marital problems and was living with his wife and their two boys in a cramped apartment while their house was being renovated. He was setting up a business and had no free time at all. The other now spent his days caring for his two grandkids. Our lives had taken radically different turns.

At least I had the internet. I could Skype with friends as often as I wanted. Or so I thought. I was unaware that internet coverage outside the big cities in Australia is extremely poor. About the same as Romania, apparently. After seven visits to the local Telstra store, begging for any kind of help they could offer me, I was told the best thing I could do would be to wait two years. “You should be fine by then,” a young man with a name badge that read “Chris,” above the words “It’s how we connect,” told me.

I canceled my online subscription to The New York Times. And without the papers and magazines I used to read online, without Facebook, which I had always hated until I ended up alone and isolated and decided it wasn’t so bad after all, and without a means to communicate with my friends, my loneliness grew worse. I went ten days without having a single conversation with a human. I spoke only to friends on the phone. And I, who had always had a low need for social contact, started to panic.

My three dogs and two cats arrived from Hong Kong in two batches, a fortnight apart. Finally I had company. For three dogs who had never known the sensation of grass underfoot, much less visited a beach, their new home was paradise. On their first visit to the beach, they stepped gingerly through the sand, sniffing it, looking at one another with surprise. Moments later, they were racing up and down the shoreline, dodging the waves, chasing after each other in huge loops. I had never seen them so happy. And for the next month, their joy became my joy. Until one evening I assembled them around me on the sofa and took up a pen and a piece of paper.

“I need to show you something,” I said. I drew a graph with a large cross, and pointed to the line that ascended sharply. “That’s your happiness here,” I said, as they shuffled around me yawning, trying to get comfortable. “And that,” I said pointing to the line which descended sharply, “is mine.”

The next morning, one of my dogs tried to savage an elderly man riding past us on his bicycle. I apologized and explained that the dogs were skittish after their trip from Hong Kong and ten days in quarantine. Two nights later I found myself sitting opposite the same man in a restaurant that served “Burgers, Italian, Chinese, Thai, and Fish and Chips.” He seemed lonely and I am terrible at declining invitations from the elderly. At eighty-two, he was thirty years my senior. Keen to manage his expectations, I had told him I was “gay.” He nodded, and I had given him an awkward shrug. Over dinner – some of the worst food I can remember eating – it dawned on me that he had either misheard me, or had no idea what “gay” meant.

At lunchtime the next day, I walked the dogs to the empty beach, sat on the sand and watched the waves crash along the shoreline and retreat into the sea. How could I not be happy here? That evening the boyfriend of one of my oldest friends messaged me from London. “You’re living the dream!” he wrote. “Most people would kill to be doing what you’re doing.”

“Most people,” I said aloud.

I decided to list all the things I loved about being home. I loved bright blue skies. Most days in Hong Kong, one looks up and sees a thick brown cloud. I loved fresh fruit and vegetables that had not spent months inside a deep freeze, or been coated in some pernicious pesticide that had long been banned in the developed world. I loved fresh seafood that had been caught in pristine waters, and buying milk that had an expiry date of one week instead of six months, and water I could drink from a tap. I loved living near a beach where I could put my head under the water and not have to worry about cerebral meningitis. At Big Wave Bay Beach in Hong Kong, a sign tells you whether the water quality is extremely poor, very poor or poor. And yet people still swim, amid the plastic bags and drink cans, and the odd clump of human poo.

Twelve weeks have passed since I moved to Pearl Beach. It is winter now, and dark outside at five thirty in the morning when my youngest dog, Scout, starts digging me out of bed for our first walk of the day. I throw on some clothes and trudge along behind her toward the beach, my other two dogs looking up at me wearily, wondering as I do, why we couldn’t have spent another two hours in bed. We walk one length of the beach in darkness, guided by the stars, but as we turn around to walk home, the sun starts to peak through the clouds. The sky is smeared with crimson and orange. I stop and stare at the horizon, and I am reminded of why I dreamed of living here. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. Paradise.

But it is hard to come home when you’ve been gone so long.

Back at the house, I feed the dogs, feed the cats, make some toast and an espresso, and wander through the living room, inspecting the paint-speckled floorboards, marveling at my stupidity for forgetting to use drop sheets. A baby kookaburra perches on the railing of my balcony, a safe distance from the spot where Luca, my cat, lies asleep in the sun. I reach for my phone to take a photo, but by the time I am close enough, the bird disappears onto the roof of a neighbor’s house. I make a second coffee, ease myself into the sliver of space my dogs have left me on the sofa, turn to Scout and ask, “Well, what on earth are we going to do now?”

NICOLA SEBASTIAN

How to Be Alone

REMEMBER TO EAT. Always order two meals when eating out at restaurants. One to eat now and one for later. You will always be hungry later. Finally understand the wisdom behind every Filipino mother’s insistence on doggie bags. Light a scented candle, so that the smell of your room will wrap you in something generically pleasant, like Fresh Linens Drying in the Sunlight or Warm Earth After the Rains or Smell of Salt on an Evening Breeze.

Buy a lamp from Ikea so that you can settle yourself into its warm circle of light at night – see, even the shadows it casts about the room are your friends. Also from Ikea, buy a duvet and let it smother your breath and entangle your limbs in lieu of a clumsy, unconscious lover. The cover of your duvet should be printed with flowers and plants, to remind you that somewhere out there in this inconceivably vast world, it is spring, and certain flowers are in bloom.

Do most of your shopping online, because bringing all your purchases home is difficult with only one pair of hands and it is even harder while changing trains twice and having to remember which exit to walk out of. Anyway, shipping is free and they do returns and there are always new things that need to be bought. Click Save Later for some things, and pass a day and a night thinking about whether you should get a coat that skims your thighs or reaches down to your knees.

Do not read on the bus unless you want to get off at the wrong stop two miles from your destination and have to walk for forty minutes through neighborhoods that feel unsavory because you are alone with two big bags and the sky is getting darker. Do not look up when the South Asian or is it Middle Eastern woman stands in the center of the train, a baby perfunctorily balanced against her left hip. Do not look her in the eyes when she tells the train, I lo-ost my jo-ob I ha-ave two ki-ids. It shouldn’t be too hard; she isn’t looking into your eyes either. You are well-trained: you have seen worse back home in Manila, children breathing in rubber cement from plastic bags to stave off hunger and selling garlands of sampaguita at midnight. Do not buy the scented candle that smells of magnolias, because it reminds you of their dirty faces pressed against your tinted window, bare feet splashing through the flooded highway, their flowers (your guilt) swinging from the rearview mirror.

Listen to your flatmate jiggle her key in the front door late at night, flush the toilet and cough from smoking pot all day. Leave your door open in case she wants to come in and chat, even if she never does. Play music, especially when you first wake up and get home and also when doing the dishes, because it fills the room with a mood that isn’t your own and you never before understood how comforting it is to hear another human voice. It also passes the time – just remember that one album is the sound of an hour going by. But don’t sing too loudly; your flatmate’s room is right next to yours.

Go online and send messages to friends, preferably ones who are also online and alone. Talk about how good it is to be alone, how much you are learning from this experience, how much you in fact enjoy this time for yourself. Type too many has into your hahas and lol when you have nothing more to say, but not literally out loud. Appreciate the merit of a well-selected emoji. Ask your online friends whether you should get the coat that skims your thighs or reaches down to your knees. Even when they vote the latter, buy the former anyway, because it is a color you’ve always wanted.

Make tea and heat a croissant for yourself. Enjoy how the busy movements you make in the kitchen make you feel like you know what to do in there, even if it is just to boil water and pull out the croissant from the oven without burning your fingers. Add sugar and then milk. Watch the milk swirl into milky ways in your cup of Lipton English breakfast tea, which you’ve always loved and reminds you of Hong Kong, which was once your home, which reminds you of England, which was never your home.

Think about the label that says Lipton: 300 years of experience and wonder about Sri Lanka and India and if three innocent numbers can be nostalgic and oppressive at the same time. By now the milky ways are gone, the tea a tepid murky brown and you remember how the boy you once loved remembered how much you loved these milky ways, and always made sure you were there whenever milk was poured into a teacup.

Take down a book from the shelf and feel special about reading some words whilst eating your croissant and sipping your tea – also about the word whilst. But then it takes two hands to tear apart the croissant, one hand to smear the butter and jam onto the croissant, which smells like butter and makes you think of your mother who has opened a restaurant you’ve never eaten at, and another hand to hold down the pages, and the tea gets cold and the croissant gets hard because you are trying to read. So you stop reading.

Write down words on bits of paper and stick them to the wall – they will be your mantras. Look at them about as much as you do the cracks in the white wall, the plastic adhesive hooks left by the room’s former tenant, their locations out of context with the room’s new furniture. Promise to get Post-its the next time you go to the grocery. Look at the crack in the wall again. Download new music, music without words this time, because you really need to write something, anything, and anyway these voices are singing so loudly you can’t hear yourself think.

Sit at your desk and watch the cursor blink on the blank page and find yourself getting annoyed by the music without words, the glare from your Ikea lamp, the little bits of paper stuck to your wall. Get the feeling that your annoyance, these things, is all arbitrary – stop typing to listen to footsteps through the ceiling. A dog is scratching at the floor above you. Try to make out the words that are being shouted upstairs, and then stop because it is making you unhappy. Download entire seasons of TV shows and movies you’ve always wanted to watch and feel excitement lurch in your belly – these little things will bring you inordinate delight. Watch one episode but do not finish the rest of the season because you are too busy worrying over your deadlines or chatting with your online friends about how worried you are over your deadlines.

Remember to eat. Especially when you are hungry. Because if you forget to eat or just can’t be bothered right now you will become weak and it will be even harder to be bothered later. Learn how to make carbonara, which is a simple dish that is difficult to perfect. Notice how it comes out different every time, because you have to get the steps, the timing, exactly right. Tell yourself that, next time, when you get it exactly right, you will share some with your flatmate. Give her some of your mozzarella sticks wrapped in salami. Eat your meals at the dining table in case your flatmate will join you after she’s done microwaving her meatballs and boiling her pasta. Watch her take her bowl of pasta and meatballs into her room and think that maybe the next time she will join you.

Decide that you will smoke pot with her next time: you will get dizzy because her pot is stronger than you’re used to, and imagine that you can see the electric pulses coming from your Wi-Fi router. They will look like ripples on a pond. Put lots of sorrys and I didn’t mean tos in your messages to your flatmate when she sends you a text asking you to stop talking so late at night, and again when you forget to remove your hair from the drain after your shower. You never see her hair in the drain, maybe because it is blond, unlike yours, which is black. Beat yourself up again and again thinking about how you should have kept better track of the time, or removed your black hair from the drain or mailed your rent check on time. If you beat yourself up enough, you will learn to do better next time, and when you are alone there is always a next time, and it is usually right now.

Answer the phone when your dad calls to check in on you. Be sure to smile – let him remind you that you are loved after all. Feel the silence return when you hang up, punctuated now and then by the sounds of shouting from upstairs. Spend most of your time thinking about your groceries, about exchanging or returning things you bought, about your next meal, about the friends and family you have left behind. Spend some of the time thinking about how maybe your dreams of living alone were better as dreams. Think less about your dreams of success and fulfillment as an artist, because you are busy doing the dishes and anyway you have an assignment to finish but it doesn’t seem like your teacher ever reads your assignments.

Walk everywhere, because you do not have a car, and take pleasure in how strong your legs are becoming. As you walk to the grocery, from class, to the train station, back home, notice how the world around you seems to be very private, as if the trembling trees and standing-still houses are only there for you, curving around you and disappearing as you walk up the hill and around the corner. Maybe it is good that you are the only person whose thoughts you can hear, that the only misty breath is your own, for now. Your new boots scrape and click against the wet pavement like in the movies – think of your brother who has always loved this sound in the movies. Notice how the sound is dampened now and then by brown and trampled leaves. Collect the leaves before they turn brown and trampled, when they have just fallen and are red, orange, green and yellow like a messy palette of watercolors; use them as bookmarks until the colors fade and the leaves crumble like old paper.

As you walk, think to yourself that it isn’t so bad, being alone, and that it was silly to have had those thoughts the other night about what if you had never existed, what if you died in your sleep and they only found your body when it started to smell. Try not to think those thoughts every time something goes wrong, or you have not heard another voice except the one in your head for two days. Test your croaking voice in the stifling warmth of your room. Suddenly be struck with the idea that being alone is an endless list of to-dos where the one task you never have to do is to be alone. Delight in the cleverness of this little insight and share it with your online friends.

Feel your phone vibrate again and again with their supportive replies and try to imagine their voices coming at you from inconceivably far away, from one day ahead or a few hours behind, from across an ocean or a different continent, from the wrong hemisphere; picture how their words have turned into invisible electric pulses that travel across the big empty atmosphere, sometimes getting lost in space. Think about how words, their lols and emojis and selfies, are really just ones and zeroes. About how you are here but not there, but sometimes you are there and not here.

Think of your grandmother in her hospital bed, surrounded by strangers changing her diaper, alone and lost and floating in her old, bloated body. Hello? she called out, pushed up on her side by gloved hands, facing the wall that looked more gray than pastel. I’m here, you said, from the visitor’s armchair next to the dwindling supply of flowers and novena cards and butter cookies that she could no longer eat. Remember how she called out again and again, Hello? And how each time you said, I’m here. Remember then, how she had said, Thank you. Say it in your mind, say it out loud, say it to the crack in the white wall, to the dust bunnies you can see beneath your bed from where you lie on your new Ikea rug. Thank you. She had said. Thank you.

GERSHOM TSE

Requiem

School Pressure Prompts Primary Student to Jump Off Building

Oriental Daily, November 15, 2011

“I WANT TO DIE. I want to kill myself. I want to be in prison. I want death.” Leaving behind these four “wants,” a ten-year-old boy, dressed in full school uniform, jumped out the bathroom window of his fifth-floor flat in Siu Sai Wan yesterday morning. The primary five student had locked himself in the bathroom after being scolded by his mother earlier.

The mother, having knocked on the bathroom door after her son had spent a suspiciously long time inside, managed to pry open the door, to discover a wide-open window and that it was already too late. The boy’s body was recovered on the podium.

The police found in the boy’s schoolbag a diary filled with death-related, suicidal notes. The case is now being treated as a suicide; no foul play is suspected.

Interview with the Composer, Friday, March 5, 2021

Host of radio show: Welcome back to the second half of tonight’s Nocturne program. You just heard Schubert’s Du bist die Ruh, performed in 1965 by the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and accompanied by Gerald Moore. This was picked by our guest tonight, C, local composer with more than twenty works to his credit. Welcome to our show, C.

C: Thanks for having me.

H: Tell us about your connection with Du bist die Ruh, or Schubert.

C: I used to hear my father sing Du bist die Ruh when I was young; I’ve always loved it.

H: He’s a serious singer?

C: Very serious. He reveres singing. I’ve never really understood why he cares about it so much; in fact, every now and then it annoys me a bit.

H: It “annoys” you?

C: Yes … it’s not so much what he sings but what the reverence turns him into that annoys me. He is very critical of everyone who sings. I used to really think my dad knew the art of singing so much better than everyone else. Then I grew up and realized I had become judgmental like him. One day it struck me: it’s very irritating to be around someone so negative, and so I started to distance myself from that person, from being that person, eventually from my dad, because he was still doing it. It drives me mad; he’s so insufferable, and I can’t just enjoy the music, or art, or anything for what it is. I want to overlook small imperfections and just immerse myself in the beauty of things. There has to be something beautiful, somewhere in everything, if you care to look for it. But my senses are too tuned to flaws.

H: Your father seems to have affected you a lot, for better or for worse.

C: I remember when I learned César Franck’s Violin Sonata, my violin teacher gave me an Itzhak Perlman CD, you know, just to help me learn it better. I was young and I’d practice playing along with the recording, just to get used to playing with accompaniment. I remember my father barging into my room and shouting if he ever found me doing that again he’d throw my violin out the window. He thought I was being a copycat and that’s not music. The ironic thing is, years later, I heard on the radio an interview with Pinchas Zukerman. He was asked whether youngsters should play along to recordings of the masters and mimic, and he said, “Why not? There’s nothing wrong with wanting to learn to play like the masters.” At that moment I wished my dad was there and I could just say to his face, “Zukerman thinks you’re wrong!” In any event, there’s very little that my dad and I agree with musically.

H: What’s another example of something you disagree on?

C: My dad used to transpose almost everything up a couple keys just because he thought tenors should sing as high as possible, and I always hated that.

H: Is key very important to you?

C: Absolutely, as a composer. I first paid attention to it when I heard Barber’s Adagio for Strings in B-flat minor, and Bach’s Concerto for Four Pianos, the one after Vivaldi’s Four Violin Concerto. Anyway, Bach transposed Vivaldi’s concerto to A minor from B minor. I remember – this was when I was around eighteen or twenty years old – listening to the two back and forth just marveling at their difference in “temperature” even though they’re only a semitone apart. B-flat minor is sad, but soft, like velvet. A minor is brittle and cold, like touching marble. Now you could always argue that they have very different rhythm and texture and character, one slow and cautious, the other very crisp, and that the differences affect their temperatures a lot, but my point is, had Barber written his Adagio in A minor, and Bach his in B-flat minor, they’d be very different music with very different effects.

H: You must hate working with singers then – they are known to be particular about singing registers and they like messing around with keys.

C: Absolutely. I don’t like people transposing my music. A key isn’t just a thing of convenience. It’s a careful, deliberate choice of what’s musically best, and musicians should respect that.

H: Any positive influence from your father?

C: If nothing else, some of the songs my dad used to sing did inspire me and more importantly give me an understanding of the importance of voice when I compose. One of my songs, “Cold in the Wind,” drew a lot of inspiration from Du bist die Ruh in terms of how to portray stillness with notes. There’s this other Italian song Intorno all’idol mio by Cesti – I think in the seventeenth century – that I absolutely adore. I must’ve been around nine, ten when I first heard it. It’s very serene.

H: How do you know where and when a piece should end? How do you decide you’re happy with it? That it’s ready to show to people?

C: I suppose you just know … if it feels right. That’s probably not a very good answer.

H: No, that’s fine. Not everything has to have answers … You’ve been described as a dark, “melancholic” composer. Is that accurate?

C: I think the standard answer to any labeling or typecasting these days is to deny it, but, I guess there is a dark pattern in my music. I don’t know if I seek out dark materials – maybe subconsciously I do – but I do find them more emotionally accessible to me. I don’t mind other people’s happy endings so long as they’ve earned them. I have little patience for people who are just happy all the time. Those people can’t take anything seriously, and won’t ever accomplish anything real.

H: Why do you suppose you are more tuned to darker materials?

C: I’m not sure, but having looked for flaws for many years makes life very tough and sad. Anyway, I feel more emotionally connected to minors I guess. But one thing I do like to do is to begin in minor, then transition into major.It’s like candlelight in a dark room. Minors make majors pretty. It’s like a well-deserved small triumph after a long struggle. It makes it that much sweeter.

H: Do you have a process?

C: You mean a process of composing, like a certain routine? Nothing specific. I’m not one of those disciplined writers or composers who can “create” for three hours in the morning before they do anything else. I am more chaotic. I write whenever there’s inspiration, or out of necessity, or when there’s a deadline.

H: How is your life as a composer, and why do you compose?

C: I compose to leave a good legacy. Everybody should think about their legacy, and how they will be remembered. I think people will act very differently if they think about their legacy every day. The world would be a lot nicer if they do. As for how’s my life as a composer, all I can say is I’m on an isolating, alienating pursuit of something that probably doesn’t exist. This is something I have to be careful of, because I just might drive myself insane going down that route. Every now and then someone needs to check up on me and make sure I don’t go too far, or I may just walk into the open sea and never come back. There’ve been composers who’ve gone crazy. In fact, I’ve always thought all serious composers are a bit crazy.

H: You mean a composer isn’t serious if he or she isn’t a bit crazy?

C: In a manner of speaking, yes. Composers push boundaries and create things that not everyone is ready for. Otherwise they’re just repeating what’s been done already. That’s not creativity, even though music is associated with creativity no matter what. I tend to think the only creative people in music are the composers and improvisers. Everyone else is confined in a tight space trying to become “best” in filling the space. But no matter how well you fill it, you are still less than that space. It can be suffocating.

H: How does the composer fit into that picture?

C: A composer defines that space? I’m not sure. On the surface you are collaborating with musicians, but truthfully you are having deep intellectual conversations with yourself. Others can’t help you compose a piece or tell you what the next bar should be, or how the music should end. If you do start to compose, it is your own conscious decision. It’s private. And when you have wrestled with your work long enough and decide to put it out there, you suddenly realize you’ve become very protective of it and of yourself. You worry about how you’re received or judged. It’s both physically and mentally alienating, and makes me a bad conversationalist. I think that’s why Beethoven began conversing with notebooks. It’s easy to think he did that because of his deafness, but being a composer myself, I’ve experienced becoming bad at social interactions. I have days when I don’t say more than two sentences. I just compose and revise from afternoon till evening, having only internal conversations, so I avoid direct conversations because there isn’t the luxury of rehearsing what you say. I love to think about what I say, and how to respond as opposed to react to others. I like to write long emails. I think Beethoven was the same. He was too used to expressing his thoughts with pen and paper instead of with tongue and lips.

H: Will you pick something to play us out?

C: Sure. This is an early song, called simply “Happiness.” It was my response to a ten-year-old boy who committed suicide in 2011. That piece of news really affected me. You can almost say that was what got me into composing. Anyway, I just wondered why and how the boy could be allowed to feel so sad and helpless to a point he’d take his own life. Meanwhile I came across a poem called “Huanle” (literally, “happiness”), written by this twentieth-century poet He Qifang, and I immediately knew I needed to set it to music and dedicate it to the boy. The poem asks what happiness really is, and questions why it is so elusive.

Obituary, April 25, 2025

Local composer, C, has been found dead, a day after he went missing. His body was pulled from a deserted rocky beach in a remote corner of the Sai Kung East Country Park. C was clothed in running gear.

C was last seen parking his car in Pak Tam Chung and entering the country park, jogging toward High Island Reservoir on April 23. He had been known to frequent the park, so those who saw him – two guards at the park’s gate and the owner of the small food stall next to the visitors’ center – did not suspect anything out of the ordinary. The police were notified when C failed to return to the parking lot to retrieve his car after dark. A search for him was carried out for much of yesterday, with both the Civil Aid Service and Government Flying Service joining in. C’s body was discovered near 7 p.m. Foul play has been ruled out.

Besides being a composer, C was a writer, editor and teacher at a local university. He had lived in Sai Kung for ten years, and stages 1 and 2 of the MacLehose Trail were a favorite running route. He was best remembered for composing “An Intoxicating Dream.”

CLAIRE NOBLE

Rocky Mountain Red-Eye

TECHNICALLY MY PASSENGERS were not hitchhikers since I met them at the airport and not along an interstate. They probably told me their names, but remembering their names was not my priority. Staying alive was my priority. The two strangers joined my daughter Brigitte and me for the drive from Denver International Airport to the Vail Valley. I had made the drive before during daylight, favorable weather and with people I actually knew. However, I had never braved it during the limited visibility and hazardous road conditions of a winter storm. As if a snowstorm was not enough peril, I was operating on almost no sleep after traveling for more than twenty hours from Hong Kong. The not-quite-hitchhikers did practically nothing to aid in the journey, but I could not have done it without them. Their presence in my car and their untroubled attitude, real or not, gave me the confidence I needed to keep going when I wanted to pull over at the first Marriott I saw. If they could be composed, then I could resist the urge to give in to panic.

Our travel day began ominously. After we boarded the United 747 and stowed our belongings, Brigitte began examining the headphones left on her seat. As the slow conga line of passengers shuffled past our row, a family with a daughter that looked about Brigitte’s age, five, came to a stop next to our seats.

“This is my baby.” The girl held up her baby doll for Brigitte to admire.

“This is my gun.” Brigitte held up the plug-in end of her headphones.

The girl’s eyes widened in alarm and she gripped her doll tightly to her chest. When the line started moving again the little girl and I heaved sighs of relief. Thankfully Brigitte made no more statements that might prompt the intervention of an air marshal.

Air travel across the Pacific was a long slog. Hong Kong to San Francisco was typically twelve hours of recycled air and economy seat torment. Customs and Immigration at the San Francisco airport were usually efficient, but the system started to break down with the security reentry. U.S. airports were not designed for the stringent security of a post-9/11 world. In San Francisco the security areas were small with slow moving, serpentine lines and tactical police milling about armed with weapons that looked as if they could vaporize a city block. Still, once we arrived at this point, we started to breathe easier, as we were more than halfway home.

Once we touched down in Denver it was just one more connection and then we could claim our bags, hop in our car parked at the Vail-Eagle airport and walk through our front door thirty minutes later. Running into a friend at Denver’s airport reinforced the feeling that we were on home turf. That feeling came to an abrupt halt when we arrived at the gate for our short flight to Vail. Instead of a gate agent, a pilot addressed the assembled crowd of passengers. Not a good sign.

“Sorry, folks. Due to a severe winter storm, our flight to the Vail-Eagle Airport has been canceled. Please see a customer service agent to reschedule your flights.” A chorus of groans, shaking heads and resigned shoulder shrugs acknowledged the announcement.

Brigitte and I joined the crowd of weather refugees trudging off to the closest customer service counter. A long line greeted our arrival. The only movement seemed to be people shifting their weight from their right to their left legs. Two guys at the front of the line turned around and one of them addressed the crowd.

“We’re heading to Vail. Anyone interested in sharing a rental car?”

“We’re in.” My hand shot up like a kindergartener’s.

The two guys collected the bags while Brigitte and I set off for the rental car facility to rent whatever seemed as if it might make it over Vail Pass in a blizzard. We returned with a Ford Explorer. I drove. One guy sat in the passenger seat and the other sat in back with Brigitte. Brigitte immediately fell asleep. We set out for the mountains, not sure what to expect. It was a black and white world. The meager daylight was quickly extinguished with winter’s early nightfall as blankets of white enveloped the vehicle. I stayed in low gear most of the way and the speedometer never registered more than forty miles per hour. My passengers were two guys from Ohio. I do not recall anything else about them despite the fact that we chatted the entire drive. A drive that normally took two hours that night stretched to nearly four. They were likely used to the snowy weather. Having lived in Shanghai and Hong Kong for the better part of a decade, I was not. I was also not used to driving on the right, but I did not tell them that. I just kept motoring.

The distance from Denver to Vail was more than a hundred miles and involved navigating two major mountain passes, the Eisenhower Pass at more than 11,000 feet above sea level and Vail Pass at 10,662 feet. Transiting both passes was I-70, a four-lane, divided highway. A few small towns dot the route from Denver to Vail, but most of the land in between is national forest. After sunset, headlights struggle against the pervasive darkness of the wilderness in the best of conditions. The thick, relentless flurries falling that night reduced visibility to no more than a car length. Emerging from the Eisenhower tunnel I stared into the yawning blackness. As I began the two-thousand-foot descent toward the towns of Dillon and Frisco I experienced the sensation that I was driving off the edge of the world. My fingernails dug deeper into the foam steering wheel and I pressed my left foot harder to the car floor. I screwed up the courage to remain calm and continued driving.

As we crested Vail Pass I sensed movement in the back seat of the car. Brigitte was waking up. Under normal conditions Brigitte woke up grumpy. Therefore, her reaction when she awoke and saw an unfamiliar face staring back at her was not unreasonable; she started to scream. Backseat guy eagerly agreed to take over driving, but we needed to get to the right-hand side of the highway. As I attempted to maneuver the car to the right shoulder another vehicle shot past me on the right. I jerked the wheel back left and I felt a tightening sensation at the base of my neck and a nauseous roll of my stomach. Somehow we did not collide nor did we spin out when my foot reflexively pressed on the brake.

Fortunately, the Vail exit was only a few more miles. As we emerged into the cozy valley beneath the Gore Range the snow stopped and the large, almost winter solstice moon shone brightly through breaks in the clouds. Brigitte calmed down and we soon arrived at our passengers’ condo. The Ohio dudes and I chuckled a little about the harrowing drive, wished one another a happy holiday, and said our goodbyes.

As I drove away I realized that if my husband were there, I would have expected him to drive. I would not have thought myself capable of navigating that route in a winter storm.

As an air force cadet in college, I attended Recondo Training at Ft. Riley Army Base in Kansas. When the other cadets and I arrived at the rappelling tower and sat down in the bleachers I thought, how nice, a rappelling demonstration. I was handed a helmet and gloves and I realized it was no demonstration. I also thought, no way. Once I mastered how to rappel however, they could not get me off the tower. How many things have I convinced myself I could not do before I even tried? The thought was sobering – yet another in a long line of forgotten life lessons.

I was a former military officer. However, somewhere in the intervening years I forgot I was a competent and resourceful person. I relinquished running my life. Mr. Chang, my driver, did all the driving. My housekeeper Xiao Yin ran our household. Xiao Yin would not even let me carry the groceries into the house as though my muscles were atrophied along with my existence. I let my husband do the challenging things such as managing the finances and ordering the wine. I accepted my role as the secondary partner in our marriage, forgetting how much I accomplished on my own. I did all the paperwork and coordination to adopt our daughter Brigitte. I was our son Kendall’s advocate and researcher once he was diagnosed with autism. I became a de facto single parent for three years so Mark could keep his job in Shanghai and Kendall could get the best care possible in Hong Kong. I was my own worst critic, not counting my sister. I’d never made the cheerleading squad in high school, but it was not too late to start cheering for myself. No one else was lining up.

HUNG DER

The Stranger

This piece is part of a larger memoir, “Paper Son,” about my grandfather, Tom Der.

THE OLD MAN and I rarely talked. When there weren’t any customers, he’d sit on an upended wooden Coca-Cola crate. The top was worn smooth and shiny from years of use. A narrow wall, about the width of a body, separated the kitchen from the lunch counter. The Old Man would sit on the crate and lean back against the wall to nap or just to rest and smoke. I sat on a 7 Up crate beside the till with my back to the window, facing the kitchen. When I looked down the long lunch counter, I could see a bit of his shoulder and his left leg. The wall and length of the counter separated us, but the real distance was fifty-eight years and very different journeys to end up together in the village of Buffalo Narrows.

We ran the Buffalo Narrows Café, the only place to eat in town and upstairs we had rooms to rent out. Café and hotel combos like ours also run by Chinese men were not uncommon. They were scattered across the Canadian prairies like dandelion fluff. He worked in the kitchen and I served. We used to have a waitress, but now that I was almost a teenager, the Old Man thought I could handle things out front and he’d save some money.

Money was always a problem. He was sending money to support Grandmother, my parents and my nine siblings his whole life. He left China when he was nineteen years old in 1912. Grandmother was pregnant with Father who was born six months after the Old Man left. He hadn’t seen them since. For a number of reasons, the Old Man didn’t go back to China: the Japanese invasion, the Second World War and then the Communist Revolution in 1949. Then, there was the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” which didn’t allow the Chinese to immigrate to Canada from 1923 until 1947. In 1948, a Canadian citizen like the Old Man could only bring his wife or children under sixteen, but not grandchildren. In 1955, the Old Man got around this by paying for “papers” from a Mr. Lee, a Canadian citizen who in 1947, after the repeal of the “Chinese Exclusion Act,” claimed that he had gone back to China, married and fathered a son, named, Hung Poo Lee. I assumed the identity of the Mr. Lee’s son and at the age of seven, I became a “Paper Son.”

The Old Man was always warning me not to break my cover or else I’d get deported. Fortunately, we lived in northern Saskatchewan. Buffalo Narrows was in the middle of nowhere, the right armpit if Saskatchewan was a body. The road ended there. Actually the road ended on the south side of the Narrows and a cabled ferry would bring cars and trucks across to town. There was only one way in and out. In the freeze-up in late October, the ferry stopped running until the April spring thaw. However, cars and trucks could cross the lake safely on the ice roads by late November after the ice was four to five inches thick. We were not completely cut off from the outside world.

A couple days after Christmas, the Stranger arrived with the cold wind. He wore a big parka with a hood lined with wolf fur. He was probably in his thirties, slightly built with thick short hair combed straight back. When he spoke he flashed even, white teeth. That alone made him a contrast to most of the locals. Surprisingly, he spoke English without an accent. He was the first Asian man I’d seen in town. What was he doing this far north? He must have known that he could rent a room before he came. Not many strangers came to Buffalo Narrows. Why would you? There were no jobs; no future. We didn’t have radio or television reception or any plumbing and, worst of all, no liquor store – just the Buffalo Narrows Café. Could this stranger be with the RCMP or immigration?

“Hi,” said the Stranger. “I need a room for a few days.”

“No problem,” replied the Old Man. “Room is four dollars a night and you pay now please. I open eight o’clock morning and close nine o’clock night. You eat here? Lunch and supper, extra.”

“Yes, I will. Hope you’re open for New Year’s Day, too. I was worrying I wouldn’t have a place to eat.”

“No problem, open every day. No close,” said the Old Man, proudly.

“My name is David Nakamura,” said the man handing over the money.

A Jap, I thought! I’d never met one before. All I knew of the Japanese people were from Mother’s stories of soldiers during the war. Mother said they were all cruel and fearsome; they even killed babies. I had assumed that all Japanese must be the same. However, Mr. Nakamura was polite and not fearsome at all, but still, what was he doing up here? I had glimpses of the outside world only through Life magazine. I’d read them whenever a trucker from the south left one behind. I knew about the Cold War. I learned about Eisenhower and Khrushchev, and that John F. Kennedy had just been elected President of the United States.

“Take Mr. Nakamura up to room three,” said the Old Man.

I picked up Mr. Nakamura’s suitcase and led him through the kitchen, past the backdoor to the porch.

“The toilet is here,” I said. “It’s better than going to the outhouse at thirty below. The washbasin is here beside the door. Clean towels are below. It’s the only sink for everybody to wash. The cold water is in the big drum in the kitchen and there’s hot water in the large kettle sitting on the stove.”

We went up a flight of plywood stairs. A naked light bulb, which was permanently on, lit the hallway. We had four small rooms to rent. The Old Man thought it best if I slept in the hallway. That way, he could rent out all the rooms when needed. I led Mr. Nakamura past my cot to room three at the end of the hall. It was the nicest room.

“You sleep here,” he guessed.

“Yeah, it’s cozy.”

He looked at the plywood ceiling, walls and floor and nodded in agreement. “Cozy … like a box.”

For the next few days, Mr. Nakamura would have breakfast at nine o’clock. The Old Man packed him a lunch of a chicken sandwich, a piece of raisin pie and a Thermos of green tea. He’d get back in the afternoon. It was a mystery what he did, but neither the Old Man nor I asked. He was the only person eating dinner. In the evenings, teenagers came to listen to the jukebox, smoke and drink pop. The music was heavy on country featuring Hank Snow and Kitty Wells, but Elvis Presley and Fats Domino, too. However, the wailing of “Your Cheating Heart” played for years and was the theme song for the girls. After dinner, Mr. Nakamura washed up as best as he could with our basic amenities before going upstairs to read and write. I wasn’t even aware that I hadn’t taken a shower or bath in three years.

After we closed each day, the Old Man would take a Thermos of hot tea and retire to his room next to the stairs. He smoked a pack of Export Plain and would cough throughout the night. In winter, he’d have to get up twice a night to feed four or five birch logs into the furnace in the basement so the fire wouldn’t go out. In the winter when business was slow, we’d close early at eight. After I finished sweeping the floors and cleaned up, I’d go upstairs to my cot and find Mr. Nakamura reading. He left the door open and would talk with me.

“What grade are you in?”

“Six.”

He nodded, “And what do you like at school?”

“Pretty much all subjects: science, geography and arithmetic. I even like reading but we have few books at school. We do have the 1923 edition of the Book of Knowledge. I read the topics that interest me, but of course, there’s no modern stuff.”

“Here, why don’t you take a couple of my books on the latest stuff on science? You might find them interesting.”

I took two books; one was on rockets and how man was going to the moon in the near future. Another was on electro-magnetic waves, radar and radio waves. The one about radio waves caught my interest. Back in October, I swiped some money from the till and ordered a “crystal radio” from the back of a comic book. When it arrived, the Old Man was livid and cuffed me across the face.

“You no steal money to buy stupid stuff!”

He wasn’t cheap, but thought toys were a waste of money. I also remembered the time I had my eyes examined at school by the government van that came north. They told me I needed glasses. I went back to the café at lunch to tell the Old Man. He was frying a couple of hamburgers on the stovetop and a western omelet in a frying pan. He turned and glared at me, angry.

“No way you get glasses. Look at me; I’m almost seventy years old. I no wear glasses. How you be cook? Grease and steam fog up glasses and you no see. No way you get glasses.”

I guess he was right. Glasses would cost money and I didn’t want to be called four-eyes anyways. That night, in the room that faced north, I followed the instructions and wound the copper wire around the crystal. Then, I clipped the alligator-clip to the metal bed frame and put on the earphones and waited. There were some hissing and static noises, but nothing resembling radio waves. I dragged the bed closer to the window and tried again. There was louder hissing and then like magic, the interference cleared. I heard a beautiful voice singing a refrain.

The signal was clear one moment and gone the next. The hissing came back. Shortly after, a faint signal came back like it was far away and I heard through the hiss, the announcer said, “This is WKGB from Chicago. That was Paul Anka singing “I Miss You So.” I knew from geography that Chicago was far away. How did that crystal and copper capture the radio waves with no power? How did it snatch voices from thin air? It’d be like trying to form words with smoke using my hands. There were no books at school that could explain the questions in my mind. However, Mr. Nakamura could.

He explained about electromagnetic waves and sunspots and their relationship to the northern lights that we see in the night sky. He tied in radio waves and radar signals. My brain was spinning, but I couldn’t absorb most of the science of electro-magnetic waves.

“Don’t worry,” said Mr. Nakamura. “I spent years at university to become an electrical engineer learning this stuff. Maybe someday you could, too.”

On New Year’s Eve, the Old Man cooked a special meal for us, Chinese food. He had ordered some Chinese groceries from Saskatoon. The last truck that delivered produce from the south came two days before Christmas. The bok choy was now a little wilted, but Chinese vegetables just the same. It was a simple meal of steamed chicken with dried shiitake mushrooms and Chinese sausage over a bed of boiled bok choy, braised pork ribs with taro and steamed rice. The Old Man ate sitting on his Coca-Cola crate as usual. Mr. Nakamura and I sat at the lunch counter. He seemed appreciative of the Old Man’s effort to cook a Chinese dinner to welcome the New Year. He took a picture out of his wallet and showed me his wife and young daughter. His eyes misted over. He must miss them.

“They are pretty,” I said.

He surprised me and gave me a little red envelope with a new dollar bill in it. Blushing, I thanked him. He made me think of my parents and my brothers and sisters in Hong Kong. The last couple of years, my memory of them had been fading like an old newspaper left in the sun too long.

I saw another side to the Old Man. He held no grudges against the Japanese and didn’t charge Mr. Nakamura for the dinner. On the eve of the new year that John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States, the three Asians – a stranger, a boy and an old man – ate together in the Buffalo Narrows Café, a cafe located in the middle of nowhere in northern Saskatchewan. Each lost in their own lonely thoughts.

The next morning in the bitter cold, Mr. Nakamura left town. Through the frosted windows I watched his car pull away. I waved, knowing he couldn’t see me. I stood there watching the exhaust spiraling slowly up and disappearing into the sky. I never did ask what brought him to Buffalo Narrows. I wondered if Mr. Nakamura would ever come back.

GREGG SCHROEDER

Half My Hundred-Year Life

Is life worth living? It all depends on the liver.

– William James

“YOU’RE VERY LUCKY,” the technician said to me as she slid the scanner over my abdomen. I was splayed horizontally on a pint-sized examination bed, halfway through my all-over, inside-and-out exam at Bumrungrad.

“Really?” I strained to see the monitor. What bullet had I dodged? And was it lodged on the screen somewhere? I twisted my neck and turned my head. The image looked like early television. If only she’d adjust the tuner, I might see Jackie Gleason. Or the sex of my baby? Perhaps I was very lucky to be a pregnant man. “I’m glad to hear it.”

Lying with my arms stretched above my head wasn’t unpleasant, though the warm belly goo had turned cold. The hand scanner left a snail trail across the flesh covering my entrails. I was in a vulnerable posture certainly, but felt ridiculous enough not to let smudges on a screen bother me. And this was just a routine checkup. I didn’t expect anything to be wrong. Nothing ever had been. The technician asked me to shift to my left side, facing the wall.

“Yes,” she said, eyes on the screen. “Very lucky.” The image ebbed and flowed as the magic wand rubbed back and forth. “We’re normally very busy. You haven’t had to wait at all.”

Ah.

The morning had started with filling in forms, paying the fee, getting measured. It was little more than a whim a month prior, to sign up for the full health check, but I’m fifty-two and haven’t had one in a long time. The last job that required one, two years ago, covered only the basics. To confirm I was alive, I suppose, and would likely live through the four semesters of my contract, to not cause a lawsuit by infecting students. But when I’d asked the college HR office for a copy of my results, I was told the information was classified.

“But they’re my results,” I stammered. “I want to know how I am.”

“You’re healthy enough,” was the response.

Today’s exam package didn’t include the camera-up-the-butt – which every fifty-year-old in the over-developed world comes to anticipate with a specific range of emotions – but it covered just about everything else so seemed a good place to start as I set out on my next fifty years. I figured I should begin taking better care of myself if I might live to see one hundred.

“Turn to your right.”

Bumrungrad International Hospital in Bangkok is among the best of those promoting themselves for medical tourism in Asia, ranked among the top ten in the world by Medical Travel Quality Alliance. With more than 1.2 million patients annually from across the globe, Thailand is by far the most frequent choice of health tourists. The range of care runs from cosmetic surgery and dentistry to transplants; from sports medicine to cancer, fertility and weight-loss treatments. Not only is care considered top rate, services are provided at relatively low cost. Compared to home, Americans can save 20 to 40 percent having procedures done in Brazil or Singapore, according to Patients Beyond Borders, a provider of medical travel information. India offers up a whopping 90 percent savings and my in-the-neighborhood choice of Thailand can be as much as 75 percent cheaper.

I was going to Thailand anyway – my partner, Lucas, had business in Bangkok – so we flew together from Hong Kong and I thought checking under the hood would be something constructive to do instead of lazing by the pool while he was in meetings. When the nurse was about to stick a needle in my arm (part of the preliminaries) to draw four vials of blood I did rethink my choice, but that was little more than an instant of regret. Other than the pinprick that I always dread, the process had been fine up to the sonogram. At five feet eleven inches, I weighed in at 166 pounds. My waist has grown to thirty-four-and-a-half inches, though I can still get my hips into thirty-two-inch jeans, and the doctor’s rummaging around my nether regions had produced only good reports.

“No testicular irregularities … no enlarged prostate.”

To be honest, I figured it was my liver that was going to give everyone pause. How much did I drink? It was always a puzzle. The more I drank the less I kept accurate count. And is a five-ounce glass at home – one unit of alcohol – the same as a Hong Kong happy hour pour on a Friday night? Americans are given the green light for up to two drinks per day for men, one for women. But in the U.K., the Department of Health lets men push the boat out at three to four units per day and two to three for women, though their units are a bit smaller. The French ministry allows around three drinks for men and women; in Spain they get about seven. Who’s “right” versus who’s happy? The Japanese are allotted the same quota as Americans – one to two drinks per day – but Japan tops the life expectancy competition, with the United States coming in far below – beat out by Spain (number twelve), France (seventeen) and the United Kingdom (twenty-eight) with a score of thirty-six.

My personal score is about three drinks per night at home; I’ve counted six out on a bender more than once (after that I may have lost count), and those footloose nights were always followed by a morning of mourning. How did I used to go to work the next day when I had a corporate job, where I had to sit at my desk and make responsible pronouncements to staff below and managers on high? A swing by McDonald’s for grease, sugar and caffeine helped. And I’d been younger. More recently, teaching college students, the dread of feeling hungover during a long day of lectures and tutorials kept me in check. But now, heading back to the unstructured schedule of the freelance writer means a more relaxed approach to the morning-after-the-night-before. I can still drink like my younger self but can’t recover like that slimmer person that – until recently – I thought I still was. The fuzzy head, wasted day and thirty-four-inch belly (okay, thirty-four-and-a-half) have convinced me there is something to the idea of not drinking every night. A bit of exercise might help, too.

So, for the past several months I embarked on an uncharacteristic four days of fitness activities per week (gym, running) and in the last month before the checkup I struggled through two teetotal nights out of seven. Actually, with exercise having become a routine, knocking off on some of the wine wasn’t too difficult. My body was happy for the extra rest. And while I honestly want this to become a rest-of-life routine, I am well aware that a little bit of exemplary behavior isn’t going to erase thirty years of passive aggressive self-neglect.

I felt myself a liar when I answered the doctor, telling him I drank fifteen to twenty glasses per week and exercised four times per week (for how many of the 2,700 weeks in my life?). It wasn’t whether I was a picture of virtue or not. It was whether I could nail down a recognizable version of the truth.

“What do you drink?”

“Wine. Red wine.” (I felt the color made it better.)

“Only wine?”

“Yes.” (No. But mostly.)

Electrodes on my chest, lying down. Electrodes on my chest, standing up. Walking on a treadmill: check. Running on a treadmill: check. Blood pressure? Once I calmed down and she tested me a second time the worried look left her face: normal. Cholesterol: normal. Blood sugar: slightly high. (Reduce sweets, carbs, alcohol; exercise more.) All fine, more or less.

“Fifty-two?” said the EKG technician earlier in the morning, pulling off my suction cups. “Surely only forty-two.” I had come to accept such statements as compliments. Ten years ago I’d have been horrified to think I looked forty-two.

Back on the sonogram bed, the technician stopped massaging my gall bladder or spleen or whatever it was she was trying to bring in on her radarscope.

“I’ll be right back.”

She was gone for a few moments, and I remained belly up, arms crooked over my head. Like a dying cockroach. I didn’t feel so lucky, all of a sudden. Running off for reinforcements could not have been a good sign.

“This is the doctor.”

The doctor. Okay, so I’m not so lucky. Somehow I doubted she’d been brought in to see an irreproachable collection of innards. You stop to gawk at a car accident. Not at traffic moving smoothly.

The doc lubed me up and scanned the highs and lows all over again.

“You have a few spots on your liver.”

My liver. Of course, my liver.

“It’s probably nothing. Hemangiomas. Bundles of blood vessels. But it’s hard to be sure.”

She’s sure.

“We’ll put this in your report and you can discuss it with your doctor. In the meantime, it’s nothing to worry about, but worth looking into with an MRI. He can discuss that with you.”

So, the technician wiped me down and I re-retied my scrubs and pulled down the hood. Hotel slippers back on and off to the next test. I felt fine. No pain in my liver. Where exactly is my liver?

Hundreds of things can go wrong with the liver. Aside from the blessings and curses of family history, parasites can get in there in the form of flatworms (usually through dirty water or contaminated raw vegetables); viruses can cause inflammation, as can toxins associated with alcohol. Drinking seemed to cast the biggest shadow in all this, from my perspective, and the risks are many: fatty liver disease and cirrhosis, which involves the formation of fibrous tissue replacing dead liver cells – cells that have died because of drinking too much, among other things – and that leads to liver failure. Cancer in the liver most typically arises when spread from other cancers that have gone out of control in the kidneys, lungs, prostate or – in the case of my mother almost thirty years ago – breast. There are other threats to the liver, but you get the general idea. My brother’s oral cancer didn’t wait long enough to spread to his liver before it got him. Both my mother and brother died at about my age.

This was all bubbling through my mind as I changed into my civilian clothes and, among other patients, waited in the hotel-like lounge with a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat for the doctor to go over my results with me.

“Everything looks good. It’s just the liver.”

Just the liver.

“You have three small echogenic foci, within the right lobe,” he continued and I looked blank. “Nothing to worry about, but consult your doctor in Hong Kong. You should probably have an MRI.”

I told him the one thing I had been concerned about was my colon.

“You can check that in Hong Kong. Or we could schedule a colonoscopy now.”

I declined. We only had a few more days in Bangkok and suddenly I was missing the hotel pool. I thanked the doctor and took my report, headed down the lift and out into the steamy afternoon.

I ended up doing my MRI in Hong Kong. Closer to home, with a doctor who knows me, whom I could talk to in person or on the phone easily; the price difference – an important factor to the self-employed – wasn’t that great. The experience going into the noisy scanning tube was traumatic only for the needle to inject the contrast medium. Otherwise, it was a fairly Zen experience. A few days later I got a clean bill of health: not three, but two small, benign nodules in the right lobe. The rest of my upper abdomen – the area explored – looks fine. No other lesion or mass. The liver is not enlarged. Nothing abnormal and the liver is smooth. The Thai technician turned out to be right after all. I am lucky.

GENEVIEVE WONG

It

GIRLS BLUSH WHEN they get their period for the first time. They trade tales of how and when it happened in hushed, bashful-yet-proud tones when this first bleeding takes place, and shun those who have not yet crossed the messy line from girl to woman. “It” lurked then, back with my first period, and if I had known, I would not have welcomed the step over that line so eagerly. Would have said I would rather retard the process and remain a girl forever, a female Peter Pan.

How does “It” feel? This strange disease that takes what is a natural process and distorts it to something close to madness. Some researchers have even said that hysteria, that condition which has caused women to be locked up in madhouses and asylums for centuries, was in fact “It.” I understand that. A dear old lady prayed for me once in church. It’s not time for healing, she said eventually, presumably after listening to God for a while. As she hugged me, her words came from afar, as if she were speaking into a small microphone at the far corner of the room. She held my cold, shivering hands and told me about having joy in sorrow, about how people thought she was crazy when she was so joyful after her husband died. People think I’m crazy, too, I wanted to tell her. I think I am crazy. I have stopped thinking and praying because I fear it would drive me crazy. But I just cried.

“It” has a name, and when it is absent, I can look people in the eye and say it. En. Do. Me. Tri. O. Sis. There’s a steady, unwavering beat to the six syllables, a gentle blend of consonants and vowels. But when the searing pain hits and robs me of my speech, covers me in cold sweat and overpowers my synapses, I can only say one shaky word: Stop. Scream it, rather, though no sound emerges. Sound requires energy, and “It” leaves me with none. Friends stare at me as I try to describe the stabbing pain. Imagine a bad migraine. In the absence of a more calibrated way to describe pain, I use a common pain to describe an uncommon one. “It” is also accompanied by migraines, so the memories of both kinds of pain are always quite fresh in my mind. Then imagine the pain of the migraine on a three-inch wide belt just above your hip bone. No, not evenly spread out. Imagine it traveling around the band on a random course. It appears and stays. Then disappears. Then reappears in another spot, usually finding its home at the front and back of the right hip, shooting nerve-like arrows down the right thigh, like muscle cramps. Now imagine this happening for about fourteen days and nights every month.

When I am not hunched over, trying to distract myself with deep breathing exercises – a new technique I picked up from Google – I can then explain what “It” is in unfeeling scientific terms, buffering the wrenching, twisting agony with research findings and statistics. It becomes the Other. It becomes who I am not and who I want to fight. It becomes who I do not want to define myself by, an alternate reality I ignore. Or try to forget, until it reminds me of its presence. Whenever anyone brings up painkillers, I tell them how I tried various brands for close to two years. Pills that came prefaced with hope, but left the darkness intact. An electric heating pad, put on maximum, is my only source of comfort, its sixty-five degree heat distracting the body from the pain.

What causes “It?” Like one delivering a speech, I drone on about how, during a normal period, the body sheds the endometrium, the lining of the uterus. Here, I sometimes see a twitch in my friends’ eyes, especially if they are male. These are not words used in daily conversation, although for some reason, nobody blinks when women talk about their labor process in detail over lunch. Perhaps that results in new life, whereas this just brings more darkness and pain. Yet sometimes I casually mention “It” to friends, to undergird my life with a sense of steel. “It” is a badge. Of what, I don’t know. Self-pity, probably. Suffering with no aim. A touch of trauma to a bourgeois urban existence. One of the many doctors I saw said it was in my mind. I suppose she was right. I have made it a part of my mind because I enjoy having it there. I have medals in the war against the self. Medals in a losing war.

However, in endometriosis, some of this tissue is retained and implanted in other internal areas. Unlike normal endometrium, these implants have no way of exiting the body. Here, I sometimes might insert a wry comment about how they, like me, are doomed to wander around forever, lost, uncertain and alone, with nary an exit door in sight. The internal and external are one. Each month, about two weeks before my period, these implants bleed, and because there is no exit, the blood builds up and causes inflammation, which leads to pain. I never used to know these things; I decided one day after maybe twelve years – it’s about sixteen years of pain, by now – that I should at least know what was going on. Thank God for Wikipedia and Google. Though I’m not sure what knowing does. I am less clear about adhesions – the formation of internal scar tissue that fuses internal organs together – so I do not talk about that. It’s frightening to imagine your organs getting stuck together like plastic left in the sun for too long, creating a trap that blood – the same blood that could have created a baby – will never be able to escape from. I also omit statistics on the links between “It” and infertility, certain types of cancers, notably some types of ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and brain cancer. Saying these might make it more real, though they are always with me.

The Eastern view is more hopeful. Traditional Chinese Medicine concurs that there is a stagnation of blood, but it believes that certain herbs can provide it with an escape route. For qi, the body’s internal energy, to flow, one also has to avoid anything that will cool the body down. Absolutely no cold water or tea, the Chinese sinseh tells me. Online, websites on Chinese medicine tell me to avoid showing too much emotion, and ironically, to avoid fear. The sinseh’s clinic is a large dusty room bordered by wooden drawers decorated with curvy Chinese script. Hopeful, barren couples sit in plastic chairs. This is the same crowd that I sit with in gynecological clinics: anxious husbands needing to know every detail, holding the hands of their thirty- or forty-something-year-old wives. Wedding bands fresh on their hands. They shoot me curious glances and gossip in hushed tones. An abortion, probably. Once, I overhear. Girls these days, all so wild. I wish that were true, I wanted to retort. Like you, I wish my body could hold a baby.

The sinseh is the man at the end of the tunnel holding a small match. He sits in his open office, on a plastic stool, at a worn wooden table. Stacks of index cards and school exercise books flank him: his registration system. A small stuffed cushion, covered with a kitschy cartoon fabric and sweat-soaked from decades of wrists, is his only instrument. As I wait for my turn in between the couples, I eavesdrop on the bedroom tips he gives. He seems to double-up as a sex therapist as well, replete with detailed diagrams and instructions that he scribbles on scrap paper. The idea of a bright-eyed elderly man in a singlet dispensing Kama Sutra-esque advice engages the voyeuristic side of me, and makes my wait worth the while. Even though I struggle to understand how this man, who occasionally blows his nose in a volley of mucus behind him, holds the answer that I crave, I choose to believe him. This is sheer desperation, probably. A roomful of people and a four-hour wait to see someone does that to you. His wife piles an assortment of leaves and twigs on a square piece of bright pink paper and showers it with scoops of two kinds of black powder. She gets all these from different drawers around the room. Hen hei, she whispers to me, grimacing. Very black. I gather that this means it is very bitter, but wonder if she knows something about the darkness herself. At home, I down the opaque reduction in five gulps. “It” had taught me how to swallow bitterness and to be accustomed to the darkness, so the concoction was never too black or too bitter for me.

“It” was chased away by the leaves and twigs occasionally, but ricocheted with relentless pain at other times. The sinseh shrugged again when I asked him the reason for this inconsistency, or this vengeful nature. Who knows, he said. Only the body knows itself. That seemed like a strange thing for a physician to say, especially since my body was trying to abuse me, but I continued buying the pink paper packets of leaves and twigs, to feel more Chinese, if nothing else. Not for me your long chemical names and plastic capsules, your scans and devices, your experimental trials and patented drugs: my Asian body needs to be treated by nature’s secrets, gathered by wizened old men for centuries from the hills, valleys and grasslands of China. As the whole house is thick with the pungent-sweet-earthy smell, the darkness dissipates.

What Wikipedia and Traditional Chinese Medicine do not cover however, is the reaction of the body, mind and soul. When “It” comes, the body retches, and my frame recoils with a graceless spasm. I become a puppet held ransom by “It,” all self-assuredness stripped away, a writhing shell over which I have no power. An action-reaction sequence, a law of motion beyond my control. That’s why I’m thankful “It” usually makes an appearance behind closed doors, away from human company. But sometimes, it chooses not to. And that is when things get really awkward, when the wall between private and public is torn down, when base reactions take priority over politeness or socially-correct behavior.

“It” came last year in a naked, public form. It seized me in the day, tortured me in the night. On a whim, I was attending a church ladies’ conference. My roommate saw me suddenly double over on multiple occasions, midway through conversations, through sermons. She saw my face crumple, saw me try to vomit, saw me running to the toilet. Nausea. Frequent urination and diarrhea. Bloating. She couldn’t imagine how anyone could go through “It.” I smiled at that; sympathy is worth something, though I felt ashamed for bringing her into my darkness. You must go up for healing, she said. No, I said. It will go when it is time. I sounded so philosophical when I said it so firmly. Of course she knew I was terrified and stubborn; fear and willpower make a potent, paralyzing cocktail. I had gone up for such healing sessions before, and I always ended up in more acute despair and betrayal. And darkness.

I told one boy about “It” once. We can have dogs, he said, shrugging. But he looked irritated and turned away when “It” came. Passion brings “It” out, too, unfortunately. It is a killjoy on so many levels. What man would tolerate that? I leaned into the warmth of his arms, while “It” engulfed me. But I didn’t think I could stand that look for the rest of my life. So we parted. And he got married. I saw his wedding photos, and his son’s photos, on Facebook. I’m sure he’s a wonderful father. And I was left alone with “It.”

I think about “It” when I meet anyone new. As if it was a child from a previous relationship that I need to softly raise at an appropriate juncture. It rarely comes up though. I never let things get so far anymore. Better to hide with “It.” To be a recluse. To keep it silent, hidden. To shush it. To lull it to sleep. To keep it unsaid. This is my private selfish horror, unshared, guarded and locked away in a private chamber of myself.

Sometimes, in the darkness, I find the mental space to pray. “It” indulges me, and pushes the mind to the spiritual. Then the tether to a childhood faith comes through. Take “It” away, I pray, gasping, grabbing grace, seeking mercy. I make bargains, promises, threats. I wonder what deeds or thoughts I might have committed or omitted. I wonder what the grand plan is and whether this is my cross to bear, and for how long, and for what purpose. Is this the thorn in the flesh? Had I brought this upon myself? Or was it a generation curse? A lack of forgiveness, I’ve been told. Bitterness. (Perhaps I have swallowed it too much?) I wonder if this affliction was a way of telling me that I was somehow excluded from a series of life events that normally happen to other people. Is this a way of controlling the population? Of letting me feel more empathy for a sinful, fallen world? Of pushing me to my limits and leaving me hanging there, grasping, gasping? Awakened at night in a spasm of hard pain, I clutch at the bedsheets and bury my head under the pillow. “I’m sorry,” I whisper through clenched teeth, “I’m sorry.”

Sorry to … what? Sorry to my body, on one level, that “It” comes to interrupt sleep and ravage the mental faculties. Sorry to my existence, that “It” comes and robs moments of life. Sorry for Science and Faith, that their combined power has shriveled in the presence of “It.” But I must not say that. It shows my bitterness and lack of forgiveness. It means I have no faith. That I have not persevered in trials. It means I have given up, that I have not run the race, not fought the good fight. I say sorry to God, but He is silent. In the darkness, the shades of black present themselves, melding, veering, blending into each other. I take comfort in the lack of light sometimes, feeding the cynicism, fanning the pessimism. Much easier to remain in the negative, to look at a bleakness without the hope of salvation or redemption. There is a certain reassurance that the enveloping darkness will always be there, like a cloak, to hide, if not to protect, to be over-powering and overwhelming in its gaping emptiness.

But fighting is tiring. Much easier to let “It” come, to surrender to it and not risk the deep disappointment that comes with being vulnerable before finding that there is nothing that can remove its appearance. Much easier to expect the darkness and to survive in it, confidently groping in the dark like a blind man, instead of a sighted man who panics when plunged into darkness and starts searching desperately for the light switch.

JACINTA READ

A Sinking Feeling

“THE MALDIVES ARE SINKING!”

I was about seven years old when I received this piece of news. My father knew I would chew on it for some time. My young imagination conjured visions of island natives wading in knee-high waters. In my mind’s eye the swirl rose steadily until they had to hold their coconut-shell breakfast bowls above their heads to stop saltwater splashing onto their Cap’n Crunch. Eventually a wise island elder would say to the others, “Okay guys, time to go, we can’t live here anymore,” and then they would all swim off to a more suitable habitat.

Flash-forward thirty years and I have just identified a possible reason that the notion of the sinking Maldives struck me so vividly: growing up in Hong Kong, I, too, was living on an island whose permanence was questionable. We weren’t in danger of physical submersion, but as citizens poised to witness the end of Britain’s reign over our territory, there was shared certainty that change was afoot.

Perhaps this is why Hong Kong has been described, quite accurately, as New York on Crack. It is a city stuck on fast-forward. A New York minute is a Hong Kong second. It is the rush of drink orders during a bar’s last minutes of happy hour. It is an excellently executed flash mob, a delightful moment that takes people by surprise. It is a location joke that you had to have been there for. On some level everyone in Hong Kong has known that change is coming and that is why we’d better live it up, play it up, work it up while we still have a chance.

The thing about the Maldives – God bless them – is that, other than a child’s imagined advantage of being able to swim (instead of walk) to school, there really is no silver lining to their situation. Once the inevitable happens to the Maldives, they are, well, sunk.

This is where Hong Kong has proven very interesting; as a small city we have taken more than our fair share of hits in recent years: the 1997 Handover, SARS, swine flu, Article 23 and China’s national education are some of the big ones. But like one of those inflatable punch bags with a weighted bottom, Hong Kong has always sprung back, and usually with more vigor than could reasonably be expected of a little city taking such a full-frontal pummeling. After SARS, our comeback involved elevator buttons disinfected hourly and hand sanitizing stations all over the place. My in-laws made a killing in the property market to boot.

But some people can’t handle it. The transient nature of Hong Kong means that at any given moment there is a pocket of people poised and waiting for an event that will serve as the final push toward their departure. Each of the above-listed headline-grabbers would have given some of these guys enough reason to throw up their hands, book the movers and ship out. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit tight – either due to stubborn devotion to the city, lack of awareness or plain lack of options – and we watch until the dust clears just enough for us to continue on our frenzied ways. Our city has always recovered.

I was born in Hong Kong and have, until recently, assumed that I would live there forever. I was passionate about my home, to an unhealthy degree. I judged people as they left Hong Kong, calling them lightweights and concluding they never really loved the city as much as they had once claimed. I eyed-up newcomers, trying to ascertain the purity of their motivations for moving to my city. Users, fair-weather friends of Hong Kong, I presumed.

About two years ago my young son went through a season of illness that coincided with my own self-inflicted and culturally approved period of being permanently over-committed. The too-many commitments and sick child collided and threw me into a state-of-stress/burnout/general-condition-of-I-can-no-longer-function. Something needed to give, and it goes almost without saying, that something was not going to be Hong Kong’s pace of life. We chose to take a sabbatical and move to England for a year. We planned to be away from Hong Kong for twelve months, but for various reasons we stayed on. This was not something I would ever have imagined us doing.

I didn’t see the Umbrella Revolution coming. But, boy oh boy, once it happened I couldn’t peel myself away from my computer, watching powerlessly from afar. One tab for Apple Daily’s live stream, one tab for Facebook, one for Twitter, one for the South China Morning Post and one for BBC World news.

It is hard to express the disbelief experienced when watching your city, your streets turn into front page global news. To frantically search the faces in the crowds on the slightly delayed and distorted live feed, looking for your big brother because he’s just SMS’d to say he was heading over to the protest site and not to worry. Not to worry?!

Every cell in my body wrung with flashbacks from newspaper front pages reporting on the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Each cell sick with fear because several loved ones were taking a stand and I could lose the lot of them. Then came the pangs of remorse over the fact that I was not standing with them, and finally a heavy realization that my being there would not change a thing – my city, my tiny beloved city had chosen to engage in a standoff with an unrelenting bully. A Pomeranian picking a fight with a pit bull.

China is not famous for being reasonable. I cannot see how this is all going to work out – not in Hong Kong’s favor anyway. The tension between Hong Kong (my birthplace) and China (my grandparents’ birthplace) is something that I’ve always underestimated. My porpor made dumplings and thick noodles like it was going out of fashion (it was). She wanted the whole family to be well educated and cultured, to speak both the Queen’s English and proper Beijing Mandarin. I didn’t know she was the exception rather than the rule. Having family roots in the capital, I always associated myself with the mainland and felt sad when Hong Kongers dismissed mainlanders as uncultured or worse. Why can’t they embrace their motherland? I wondered, naïvely.

After educating myself on some of China’s dark history I came to accept that I had been wrong to assume the Chinese government was interested in goodness, nor in the general pursuit of the betterment of society – local or global.

Thank goodness for “One Country, Two Systems,” I thought, again naïvely. It’s a good thing Hong Kong has that fifty-year margin to figure out how to make all this work. And thank goodness we’ve got Britain there, keeping an eye on things. They promised to help out if we needed it.

Fortunately, it didn’t seem we did. After the Handover very little changed in Hong Kong – nothing overtly noticeable, really. The police force’s uniform changed, and the RSPCA changed its name to the SPCA (it was no longer Royal). Nothing major.

But then property prices rose, and luxury malls starting popping up. These malls are filled with designer label shops and hardly anything normal people can, or should, buy on a day-to-day basis. I’m no fan of the Golden Arches, but there was something sad about the day you realized McDonald’s was no longer welcome in Pacific Place.

The new malls sit beneath massive luxury apartment buildings with garish crystals hanging in their lifts and a dozen security personnel to verify your right to exist. The flats are inhumanely boxy but they are kitted out with top-of-the-line whathaveyous. Like shit rolled in glitter. And if this is the state at the high-end, what hope is there for anyone else? The average Hong Konger can’t afford to own a parking space, let alone a home.

Disneyland came to Hong Kong. The sharply increasing numbers of mainland tourists became noticeable. Friends from the West complained about how they pushed in on lines and unashamedly photographed blond children without permission. This broke my heart again. It’s very complicated. How can we presume to place our cultural expectations on them? Don’t ask me who our and them are to me, I’m not even sure.

My city and I are similar; we have parents of two different cultures. A third culture has emerged as the result of a lifetime of trying to reconcile the first two. There are literal Eurasians like myself; I am the most common kind, a product of a British father and a Chinese mother. But there is also a city-full of metaphorical Eurasians who are born to a Chinese daddy, and have inherited his surname and looks, but who live at odds with the Western heart inherited from their British mother.

In less coherent moments I like to blame the invention of long-distance travel for most of my issues. If my Chinese grandparents hadn’t been educated in America they wouldn’t have met, and they wouldn’t have had their number three daughter, my mother, who wouldn’t have met my Welsh father, who wouldn’t have traveled via Kenya to come to Hong Kong to work, marry and have children. I wonder if maybe we all just should have stayed put where we were born. There are several logical fallacies at play here, I know, but stay with me if you will.

Or, perhaps the invention of long-distance travel was not so much to blame as the penchant of world superpowers to dominate substantial chunks of the planet. Yes. Let’s blame colonization.

In the opening chapter of his autobiography Going Solo, Roald Dahl makes mention of meeting some of the “endangered species” that were the British colonists. The British Empire was winding down and with it came the “extinction” of several of the by-products of colonization. I had never thought of it this way. As a by-product of a specific moment in history we, the Hong Kongers who spanned that time, truly are an endangered species. We will die out, and take with us all that was the place we inhabited during that era. Annoyingly, the exact same principle could easily be applied to anyone existing anywhere in any span of history, but I still argue that there is something poignant, potent even, about the combination of factors that collided to make Hong Kong what it was. If you were there you will agree.

It is hard to express to non-Hong Kongers just how exceptional a place Hong Kong was, and to some people still is, and to others still, hopefully one day will be again. There is nothing the rest of the world would consider conventional about the place. It is a small but beautifully formed land of possibility where you could find anything you want, as well as several other things that hadn’t even crossed your mind. It’s no melting pot: it’s a flaming wok of people and ideas. It’s a couple of paint pots accidentally knocked onto an old canvas to create a priceless and irreplaceable work of pure art.

Around the time I had my first baby in a local hospital there was a big issue about pregnant mainlanders trying to get over the border to have their babies in Hong Kong. Many benefits for them were to be had by doing this, to the degree that some ladies were hobbling through immigration, poker-faced, amniotic fluids trickling down their legs. Hong Kong was up in arms about the scarcity of hospital beds. At the time I thought it rather ungenerous of us, but today I am able to see things differently.

Hong Kong is a heated game of musical chairs. Players have clued in to the fact that unless they fight hard, play dirty even, there is a very real chance that they will be caught out when the music stops. They feign nonchalance to cover frenzied dismay, noticing that with each round, more than one chair is being removed, and yet at the same time new players are joining the game.

Scarcity is a real problem in Hong Kong. In my opinion it’s the main one. I’ve begun to see Hong Kong as a prophetic vision of what the rest of the world has in store for it. With over-population, diminishing resources and an abundance of corruption it is not unreasonable to expect what is happening to Hong Kong to happen everywhere else eventually. There aren’t enough chairs to go around at the rate humankind is demanding them.

Inch by inch small changes can lead to a total overhaul of anything. A humorous old sermon illustration I’ve heard many times in my church-going career says that rather than getting permission from the committee to move the organ from one side of the church to the other, it’s more efficient to move it slowly and gradually, an inch a week until you get it to where you want it. I suspect China knows this.

I don’t know if China’s goal is actually to overhaul Hong Kong and rid it of all that it ever was. Maybe it wants to erase all memory of the British years; maybe it wants to remind stubborn Hong Kongers who their daddy really is; or perhaps it innocently wants its own citizens to experience the uniqueness that is Hong Kong, forgetting said uniqueness will dilute due to scarcity.

Most likely it all just boils down to money. Hong Kong is a cash cow, it always has been, and whoever gains power over it will enjoy its benefits. Hong Kong has been used and abused by more than one power in its history, and the fact that things always seem to be playing up shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who cares about the city.

The two bits of bad news that I think the Umbrella Revolution have brought to light are, first, Hong Kong’s problems are worse than many of us were willing to recognize, and second, the international support we have is substantially less than what we would have hoped.

The good news is there are a lot of Hong Kongers who are unreasonably passionate about their city. They are intelligent, orderly and proactive enough to fight for it with grace and dignity. In light of the good news, who could possibly know where things will go from here?

The Umbrella Revolution protests caused quite an inconvenience – both to the government and general functioning of the city, as planned. They also stirred the minds and emotions of anyone who considers herself a Hong Kong Belonger.

Wherever in the world we find ourselves, we have been forced to remember, and grapple with the thing that we have all known, on some level, all along – that the existence of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong we knew and loved, is not a given. It is a forever shifting landscape. I grieve now, because only now have I admitted that I think the change has happened. It is done. I can’t pinpoint where the line was crossed, but I have to concede, the organ is now over halfway to the other side of the church.

In absolutely no way do I think that this is the end for Hong Kong. More likely it’s the beginning of yet another glorious comeback – another new incarnation, and for future generations I pray that it is. But my city, the Hong Kong that I, part of the aforementioned endangered species, knew and now mourn, is gone.

Maybe this is just a normal part of getting older – nostalgic feelings for the place of your youth – the time before you took up your share of the burden that is the world’s problems. None of us can go back to there, whether it’s a former colony under threat or a small hometown somewhere in the countryside. We can’t go back because it’s not a place; it’s a time.

There are two different issues at work here: first, the need to let go of the past, and second, the garnering of strength to join those who are fighting to ensure an acceptable home for future generations. I have nothing but admiration and the desire to support those in the second category, and at this time of writing I am reasonably satisfied that I have taken a decent step toward dealing with the first.

The home of my upbringing was a fantastically beautiful blip in history; a village sat blissfully unaware in the foothills of an active volcano; or maybe even a tropical island paradise surrendering to the inevitable.

SEBASTIAN BITTICKS

Freshly Created Things

TRY USING the word “knowledge” by itself in a sentence. Most often we moderate it, “a certain knowledge of accounting” or “some knowledge of the city at night.” Undiluted, however, the word rings with an unexpected authority. “Knowledge is power,” we say, with power being the weaker of the two. “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” making a lot of knowledge a cataclysm. Even in a humble phrase, “done without my knowledge,” the word carries in it the whole of a person’s autonomy and free will. To know “in the Biblical sense” is used today mostly tongue-in-cheek, like the “horizontal polka,” but I detect even here a remnant of what it really means to know. You have only to cut the word “knowledge” loose from its set phrases and a centuries-old specter returns to fill the room. Say it and your lips tighten all of their own accord, as if stricken by an Old Testament taboo.

I teach at a university in Hong Kong and all my students are second-language users. They have to pry their meaning from the jaws of the language. I don’t mind the fact that every sentence is wobbly as a barstool. My department makes me grade them on their grammar when I mark their essays, but if it were up to me I’d dock a full grade for every sentence that was gibberish – irrespective of the correctness of the grammar – and give everything else a pass. After all, civilization was built on the back of the creatively a-grammatical. Imagine lecturing Marco Polo on comma splices. So, within the limits afforded me, I try not to get hung up on the small stuff.

And yet the way my students use the word “knowledge” ruffles me someplace deep. This is how I first parsed the aura of mystery that surrounds the word. For instance:

“I am very grateful for the knowledges received in your class.”

“Sometimes our mainland comrades do not have the knowledge for polite queueing.”

“Sadly, I am insufficient of knowledge to do the film director.”

Each time I hear it misused in this way, the word resounds inside my cranium like a Manchurian gong. No other ESL slip fazes me, really. Not even “do the film director” when what was surely meant was “be a film director.” It’s only when they misuse the word “knowledge” that I get a shiver up my neck, the sort of shiver people used to say meant someone was walking across your grave. In their innocence, my students transgressed a ley line never consciously acknowledged.

I know they were only looking for a reason to use this word they’ve studied and learned, this spelling bee pitfall. The silent K! It was a dirty trick, but they’d mastered it. Who wouldn’t want to get some mileage out of that? It certainly seems like the kind of word you would use all the time, a fundamental word like “water” or “sky.” But the best I can tell them is: “We really don’t use this word. Really … ever. Knowledge, as opposed to learning or understanding, exists someplace deeper than words.” In my afternoon class on autobiography, “Reading Lives, Writing Selves,” a student nods as if she understands. But really, how could she? What kind of people have words they never use?

And in truth, I agree with my students. I don’t think a language can have words that are both fundamental and never really used. But maybe they each have just one word, a word that cannot be used without summoning the chill wind that accompanies plagues and giant-slayers. As far as I understand it, pinning down that one word was the work of entire generations of philosophers and poets. There was the sublime of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, for one, and after that Ezra Pound’s Vortex. Garcia Lorca posited his own in a lecture to Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes on the duende, the “dark sounds [that] are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art.”

I’m fond of Lorca’s duende idea more than the others I’ve come across. “Reject the angel [of inspiration],” Lorca writes, “and give the Muse a kick.” Rob yourself of skill and be exposed, he instructs via a parable of an Andalusian flamenco singer. “The true struggle is with the duende.”

I have struggled for years to write, and it has only been recently, by abandoning ideas of style, and by throwing away the New York school of sparse realism, that I feel I’ve made any progress at all. I have found in the place of craft and the snap-spark of cleverness a deeper, quieter struggle. But I would not call this a struggle with duende. The struggle I face as a writer is to know.

This essay is about knowledge, and a postcard. The knowledge, as is its way, is balanced on the rim that divides understanding from the chaos of all that we cannot fully comprehend. The postcard arrived unexpectedly a year ago and has been tacked to the cork board above my desk ever since. It comes from an art exhibition dated October 7th, 1988, at the Michael H. Lord Gallery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. On its face is a sculpture titled No Model to Roll By. The sculptor is John Balsley, a man I’ve known all my life.

John Balsley was known as Big John. We called him this both because of his size, 6’4” with wide shoulders and a broad, healthy stomach, and because his son was John Junior, or Little John. Big John had been my mother’s friend since they taught together in the fine arts program at UW Milwaukee in the late 1970s. She brought me to the Balsley’s shortly after my birth so John Junior and I could be crib mates, and their houses from then on figured centrally in the foggy Eden of my childhood. Their second home in Brown Deer Village even had a couple of gardens, each bustling with high walls of thorny, tropical-looking vegetation. Their feathery tips dipped down over Little John and me as we ran circles out and through their one-acre yard. So Big and Little John and their homes were for me foundational, fixed points of reference. It was here that I began to understand what is meant by a struggle with knowledge.

Inside the Balsley house was another sort of garden: Big John and his wife, Diane, were accomplished collectors of American folk art, as it was then called. Most of it was Christian, of the fire-and-brimstone variety. A postbox had been turned into a diorama, its open door the mouth of Hell and its interior an inferno of whittled wooden devils and the tortured damned cut from soda cans. Another: a hand-fashioned wooden figurine of a nude woman, features stiff as a doll’s as she grasps the neck of a snake, the both of them frozen trance-like as it emerges from between her legs.

I think even as a child I knew what to make of the Balsley’s surrealist ark. The pink faces leering out from the downstairs bathroom, the men in Sunday suits with teeth like white Chiclets, were unsettling but recognizable. They weren’t unlike illustrations in storybooks. They had a message, a clear and direct one, and once you understood that about them, you didn’t need to understand the actual message to know how you were meant to be around them. Whatever lay behind their dogma – whatever dark or ecstatic knowledge had compelled the artists as they worked – could be safely passed over and ignored. Big John’s sculptures, on the other hand, were truly frightening.

I remember coming across one in the basement of their house. It was sitting in the dark, on a low table or steamer trunk. Light filtered down from a ground-floor window, the earth a dark penumbra at the bottom of the frame. The sculpture was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Something about it said: don’t touch me.

It wasn’t my artists’ child training that held me back. It looked as though it could sting. Objects – balls, splinters of wood, toy men – were suspended in the mass of wire as though caught in a web. The entire assemblage had a cool, unearthly sheen (lacquer, I suppose now). Drips had frozen over the surfaces, but still seemed capable of oozing and sticking to your fingertips. Caught in one corner of the assemblage was a life-sized squirrel. It must have been taxidermied. It was suspended, legs cocked and grimacing, as if mid-sprint. Its fur had been dusted with a coat of metallic spray paint.

I know what you’re thinking. A sneering dead squirrel is just scary, Sebastian. There’s the fear right there. But you’d be surprised. I remember being most frightened by the feeling the work gave me. It promised, in a language I didn’t speak, to suck me in. That was the fear: that I could lose the ground below me, could be consumed. Lost.

Gradually, as I saw more pieces in the series, they lost their power to frighten me. By the time I was in high school and Little John and I were using the vast bushes and hidden hedges of the Balsley garden to hide our pipes and rolling papers, Big John’s sculptures just baffled me. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would make them. They didn’t even look made; they looked like they generated themselves, like they had swept themselves off of the shop floor. Worse, they seemed meant to remind us of what we’d rather forget, or maybe more aptly, what we’d rather never know at all. They threatened exposure.

And then a year ago the postcard came. My Mom had found it in a drawer and thought I’d enjoy seeing it. Her handwriting was on the back. I couldn’t just throw it away. What else could I do but tack it to the board at my desk, along with daily reminders and checks to be cashed?

Which is when I began to watch it. I thought I was looking at it, but in fact each day when I looked up from my notebook to search my mind for a word or my memory for an image, I was watching the postcard. I was watching what it did. Slowly, I began to form a sense of something at work in the sculpture. And slowly, slowly, I came to love what I saw. Not with the frantic love that we have for things novel, the way we love a new song on the radio by mindlessly chewing it until, two weeks later, it’s lost all flavor. I began to love No Model to Roll By with a deep, personal affection.

What had frightened me then, and what draws me in now? And what of my years of apathy? I’m struck by having run through the complete gradient of experience on this single piece of art (or the series, rather). I can tell you that at each instance, the struggle was with knowledge. It was a certain knowledge that I feared then, as a child, and later denigrated as an adolescent. It’s a knowledge I have made peace with now as an adult, and from that peace a quiet affection has bloomed.

I am forced here to say “knowledge” because no other word is sufficient. “Understanding” implies interpretation, and “experience” a definite set of events. Only the word “knowledge” contains both of these and many others in its roiling, storm-cloud scale. Only “knowledge” evokes both the cloud and the illuminating flash of its lightning.

Big John’s own struggle with knowledge, I am certain, passed through its own phases, perhaps very similar to mine. I expect it began with fear. I am certain that he underwent such a process because Big John approached his work personally, as personally as I approached it as a viewer. He swept his life and memory up in it – swept up the shop floor of his mind into the funnel of his art-making. No doubt Lorca would say it “surged up, from the feet,” that it “shatters styles,” but I suppose that is just one process among many. At its core, all I’m talking about here is watching, and by watching, beginning to know.

I hadn’t realized it then, but by watching that postcard I was beginning to see a fundamental difference in two things that are commonly thought to be more-or-less the same. It was another transgression of my university students that provided the final insight. For a semester it was my job to get them through a standard essay writing class, the sort of grim, by-the-numbers instruction in rhetoric that is so badly needed by incoming students, and because the need is so dire, becomes a trial for everyone involved. All semester they struggled. I struggled to reach them. I kept asking them to think deeply, to go inward and come to an understanding of what they really believed and felt. I kept pushing them to just be real. Instead, I continually received papers overrun with clichés and appeals to conventional wisdom. I was stymied. Why couldn’t I get these students to actually look at what they believed and why? To look into the face of their own understanding? I say “look,” but of course I mean “watch.”

Joshua, a leader in his class and a true intellect, summarized the problem for me when during class one day we talked over his choice of topic for the final prompt. He was writing on gender inequality in Hong Kong. He had a few striking statistics, but was struggling to phrase a single, coherent argument. It was as if a paper were just a configuration of datapoints, an assemblage without an author. I began to smell a rat.

“What do you really think about all this?” I asked on one of my circuits through the class.

“What do you think about it?” He paused and cocked his head, upturning his eyes the way a child does when looking for approval before breaking a rule.

“What I think doesn’t matter. You can’t make other people’s ideas your own,” I said as if to settle the question.

“I could, though, if I wanted.” He was smiling, his hands open as in offering. Or perhaps he was showing his palms, already stained with calf’s blood. Here, in its blasphemous alternative, was the heart of it, but Joshua looked up at me still with that sly look, knowing only that he was testing his luck with this particular instructor. He was hoping I’d tell him what I wanted to hear, an idea he could then dutifully repeat.

“Why would you even want to …?” but I couldn’t finish my sentence. Be so gutless, I was thinking.

He dropped his hands, seeing he’d failed to win a co-conspirator. Finally, the boy leveled with me.

“It’s just easier that way,” he said quietly.

I can say that I had a class of twenty-four other students, all of whom were waiting to talk to me about their papers, and that’s why I cut it short by laughing and warning him not to try me. But honestly, his response made me uncomfortable. I sensed immediately that on one level, he was right. For most of us, most of the time, it’s easier and safer to stay within the confines of received wisdom.

What I mean here is that Joshua was really running from the struggle that the artist runs toward. Like almost all of my students, he was hoping to sneak past the fire of knowledge unsinged. He wanted to find that safe self, the self made up of the pretty-faced pleasantries and politics that get us safely through a crowded room. He was searching for the proper mask, for the “other” he could grasp hold of, use for his purpose, and then forget forever. He wanted to stay as he was, unchanged. Which in the end is exactly what he tried to do. I gave him a B+.

Joshua was a very intelligent young man, but his essays never rose to the level of mastery. Unwilling to step into the margin of what he does not yet understand, to “reject the sweet geometry of our understanding” as Lorca put it, he could only recycle the rules and norms that had been handed down to him since the day of his birth. He could not bring forth anything new.

Creation demands change. Even in drafting a simple essay, we’re really talking about procreation. As with the joining of egg and sperm, or Eve’s eating of that fateful apple, true knowledge can never be undone. It comes like Lorca’s wind, “announcing the endless baptism of freshly created things.” As for “knowledge,” it seems to me that if it’s a god, then it’s an old deity. It’s the kind that needs us to furnish a house for it, to set a table, build a warm fire. Knowledge, like the Chinese kitchen god, needs space in which it can live. We give a piece of ourselves away to it, and in return, we are changed.

I’m not going to tell you what it is I see in Big John’s sculpture. It’s not profound unless you apprehend it for yourself, and even then it didn’t emerge for me like a face of an optical illusion or tremble me with a voice like thunder. All I’ll say is that when you live with something, you come to quietly love it. You begin to truly see it. And then, you know.

KARLA P. DELGADO

The Mark of a Wanderer

WHEN I WAS ABOUT TWELVE, seated cross-legged on the wooden floor of our home at 40 Kisad Road in Baguio, I noticed a spot on the sole of my right foot. Thinking it must have been dirt, I tried to scratch it off with my fingernail. But there it persisted, dead center on the most padded part of my foot: a mole. It was wide and flat and somewhat opaque, like a brown ink spot.

“That means you are a callejera,” laughed my mother, Mercedes. “You like to be out and about. You like to wander.”

The mark of a wanderer. I liked the idea, and in the decades that have passed, I have grown to love my mole. Wanderlust is in my DNA. My grandmother Antonia was fond of taking the bus to Baguio when she longed to escape Manila for the mountains. She would take a paper bag as her maleta. She eschewed fancy clothes and name brands. Knowing Lola, she had multiple changes of underwear inside that paper bag.

“You must always wash your cosa,” she would tell her granddaughters, teaching us by example to have high standards of feminine hygiene.

Being a wife and a mother myself now, I can understand why Lola needed to get away. We leave our domestic routines behind. We shake off the duties, worries and burdens. We turn inward, take deep breaths, sleep in and wake when we are actually fully rested. We reconnect with ourselves, our spirits, and come back to our families recharged, ready to face the responsibilities all over again but this time with joy because we missed our husbands and children and feel blessed to have them.

My own mother is a free spirit. In her youth, she would ride up the two hundred and fifty kilometers from Manila to Baguio with her father and her brothers – all on their motorcycles. When she separated from my father at the age of twenty-three, she traveled to Europe while my brother and I lived with my paternal grandparents. She would come back from her travels with funky pasalubong like purple leather shoes that my grandparents dyed black. “So you can use them in school,” they said. Though my six-year-old self knew it was because of the unusual shape of the shoes and their eggplant hue.

We moved house many times. We lived on: Antares, Victoria, United Nations, Menlo, Kisad, Brookside, Lourdes, Leveriza, San Antonio and Magdalena streets. Each house has the memory of scent attached to it: Victoria the ylang ylang that perfumed the garden, as well as the chlorine from the pool we played and swam in daily with our grandparents; Menlo the dog kennels; and Kisad the pines and roses sunbathing in the garden.

I went to Montessori, St. Theresa’s, Assumption, International School Manila, Brent Baguio, SPED Center Baguio, University of Baguio Science High School, Stoke Brunswick, Woldingham, School Year Abroad Spain, Smith, Harvard. Each institution has an image attached to it: Montessori the wooden toys we used to hammer in the sunlight; SPED the bunot we used to polish our classroom floor; Woldingham the miles of dew-blanketed countryside between the school and the train station, and Smith the wooden boathouse by the lake.

In college and the early years of my working life, I lived on: Wilder, Peabody, Kirkland, Fifty-eighth, Arbuthnot, Robinson.

At twenty-two, when I had been living in Hong Kong three and a half years, I realized that was the longest period I had lived anywhere my entire life. Unknowingly, I had planted myself in one place because I had really needed to. On our vacation leaves, my boyfriend and I explored Southeast Asia, staying in hotels ranging from one dollar to fifty dollars a night in Ubud, Sanur, Koh Samui and Koh Phangan.

The wanderlust strikes in cycles but never really leaves. At thirty-seven, I did the math and was stunned to realize I had moved five times in six years. From the home I shared with my first husband, to my mother’s home, to Paris for a change of scene, back to my mother’s home to write a book and to my new partner’s home. Each move has a particular emotion or activity attached to it: second chances in Paris, nesting in the suburbs of Manila.

I have happily passed on this physical trait that must lie somewhere on the curl of the X chromosome. When she was about ten or was it twelve, I noticed Kai had a mole on the sole of her right foot. The first time she traveled without family, on a school trip to Chiang Mai to study Southeast Asian history and culture in the fifth grade, we were affected more than she.

Last night we sat on the foot of her bed and checked her feet. There was the original mole on her right foot, a little more faded than before, and a new, clearly demarcated one on the sole of her left. Curious mother-daughter markings: I, too, have a mole on the sole of each foot, the first more faded than the second. I noticed the second one when I was maybe in my twenties. Kai is only seventeen. No wonder that when she traveled alone to Sydney this summer to work in a horse farm, she was thrilled to be leaving home for a continent she had not yet explored. As she did with Chiang Mai and the Great Wall of China, she got to Australia before me.

This week our family travels to Cebu to get away from the soupy smog that hangs over our home city. Our flight is not until Friday but on Monday, Uma gathered her bathing suits, sundresses, snorkel, mask and beach booties, and stuffed them into her maleta with a toy cat, dog, book and journal. “I want to pack my swim board, too, Mom.” I love the wanderlust and sense of adventure that runs through our veins.

Last I checked, I did not notice any markings on my little one’s bony white feet with high arches. But she is only eight.

Manila, 2013

FAN DAI

Fruit Ninja

I STOOD BY the aisle seat on the plane from Guangzhou to Melbourne, waiting to say hello to the fellow passenger on the window seat. She was going wild on her iPad playing Fruit Ninja.

“Oh, hi!” She managed to seize the split second when the fruits slowed down on the screen, her face tilted up just enough to indicate a greeting, her eyes intensely focused on the screen.

“Sorry about this,” she added, as her index finger went all over the pad.

“No worries.” It felt good to see someone else so drawn to Fruit Ninja. I had felt very sneaky playing it in public places, including the library.

“Haha, I just can’t stop.” She struggled to keep the conversation going as she nervously slid her finger across the fruits rushing onto the screen.

I used to have very strong opinions about games: they are a waste of time. I feel sorry for their addicts. Don’t they have better things to do?

I didn’t witness how addictive games could be until I visited my son Dai in January 2010. He had a roommate called Qin, who did nothing but play games for a semester. Dai managed to talk Qin into his senses, the latter having just sold his fancy desktop that gave him access to very advanced games. They were three weeks into the semester at the University of Pittsburgh, and had work to do in the evenings.

“Okay. 10:00. I’ll play for a few more minutes,” Qin announced one evening.

He was playing Fruit Ninja on the mobile. His body moved on the couch as his finger, sometimes two fingers, went all over the screen with a force that could easily destroy the phone. His lips twisted left, right, and then pressed hard onto each other ... His legs raised up high in one second, came down in another as his body bent toward the phone.

“You said his mom doesn’t know any of this?” I whispered and shared an amused look with Dai.

“No, she thinks he’s studying hard.”

“This is so worrying. Can’t you stop him?”

“I’ve done that a million times. This is nothing compared to last semester. He’ll get down to work eventually,” Dai said reassuringly, as if I were Qin’s mom.

It wasn’t until half a year later when Dai came home for the summer break that I had a closer look at the game. Dai’s legs went up and down in response to the rhythm of the game. The fruits popped onto the phone’s screen, only to be sliced into messy juice by his unforgiving finger.

I like fruits of all kinds, and the game has a good collection of them: bananas, peaches, kiwi, watermelons, passion fruit, mangoes, strawberries. The music, coupled with an encouraging comment when one does well, excited me.

“You want to give it a go?”

“Oh, well, why not?” I heard myself say.

It was an interesting sensation, especially when my finger went through a fruit that triggered a ten-point reward. Something seemed to physically click and you knew you scored well. Then I accidentally sliced through three fruits.

“Like a ninja!” said a man’s voice. I was given thirty extra points!

But my overall score was low, 157; Dai’s was 385. He said he could score over one thousand if he took it a bit more seriously.

That hurt. I couldn’t be so much worse than him. I played again, this time a lot more mindful of the bombs that dashed into the screen randomly with the fruits, of how one explosion at the fingertip would take one of the three lives that came with each new round, and the game would be over if I lost all three.

I scored 135. That was intolerable! I spent the rest of the evening playing. The highest score went up to 280, not anywhere close to Dai’s score on a casual play. By bedtime, I was playing with the lights off. I kept thinking I could do better in the next round. Sometimes I did, and the highest went up to 322. I couldn’t see how I could get it any higher. I couldn’t see it going up to one thousand and beyond.

I was challenged. I was defeated. So I kept playing. Until 7 a.m.

Dai was amazed, or more accurately, shocked, not only because I played all night, but because of my score. He played one more game, in a very light-hearted manner, and scored 539!

“At least you still have the energy and passion to sit up all night. I can’t do it anymore!” My husband Jigang took it much more positively.

Good point. It made me feel young.

When I complained that the beginning of the game went too slow, Dai said it had a one-minute version, too. That would give me a timeline and discipline. Then I discovered what addiction felt like. I would play for one minute, then another minute, thinking one minute wasn’t much. But I just couldn’t stop. I was embarrassed by myself. Isn’t this something I used to despise?

I excused myself thinking that it keeps the mind alert and trains body-mind coordination. Practice makes perfect. I did improve. My best score was 1,431 a minute, way ahead of the three colleagues I persuaded into the game. As I became a more advanced player, I was given rewards through I don’t know how many channels: sometimes a dragon fruit flew in promising fifty points, sometimes all fruits froze on the screen allowing me to slash them one more time, doubling or even tripling the regular points awarded. One day, the screen reported the all-time high score of 2,388 a minute!

Then I found myself becoming nervous if I knew I stood a chance of breaking the record, which invariably led to a bomb explosion and ruined the prospect. I couldn’t believe that I cared so much about a new record, when it was just a game and I wasn’t playing against anyone. Am I more vain than I know? Am I simply the perfectionist that I have always been?

In the meantime, I resorted to all kinds of excuses for my inability to stop playing. The best one had to do with mental health, which justified the need to leave the last round of the game with a higher score than that in the previous round. That worked well, as it would take at least a few more rounds before that happened. When that excuse became not applicable, I would check the last digit of score. If it ended with four, I would play again, as the Cantonese four sounded like the word “death.” I wasn’t superstitious, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t use one minute just to avoid an omen.

Another excuse would be that if I played more rounds, the fruits would come up in clusters more frequently, creating more opportunities for the extra thirty-point reward, hence the possibility of a new record. And the weekend seemed to bring more fruits, and so on and so forth.

Over time, I learned that the star fruit that makes an occasional appearance gives extra points; that one can buy strawberries with star fruit points, and strawberries, entering with a white halo, carry five points each. One can also buy peaches with the star fruit points for a tiny bit of extra time.

I also discovered how extra points can be earned so one keeps feeling inspired. If one slices at least three fruits in one go and goes fast and forceful enough, one can gain from three to thirty extra points. But I never figured out how one wins another ten extra points, which come in blue. Yet I didn’t really have to know as long as I won them.

I also convinced myself that I benefited at another level as I learned how the Fruit Ninja business operated. It designs different versions for players of different needs and levels. I was guided to an online version once, and enjoyed the competition against an unknown player, though I remained a fan of the one-minute version – I like the fact that the designer gives me the chance to quit every other minute.

Lately, I had the profound pleasure of finding in Fruit Ninja a resemblance of life. Sometimes it goes so well that you score over one thousand points, but in the next round, it can drop to three hundred something, even if you don’t drop any fruits. The way the fruits come is so random that you can only do what you can under the circumstance. It reinforces what we know about life, that though you work hard at something, it doesn’t guarantee the desired goal.

Such realization helped me come to terms with low and high scores. All of a sudden, I could really take it as a game. One in which I can let go of myself and play for fun, one in which I could choose to leave any time because I already know all the possibilities. Above all, it is wonderful to see games as life – and still take them as games.

Besides, how many things are there in our life that turn out to be manageable addictions? Right there is the usefulness of Fruit Ninja.

COLUM MURPHY

We Are All Good Friends!

MY PLAN TO VOLUNTEER for a week in Shaoxi started out as a whim. One day in November, as I entered the university building in southern China where I was taking a course in Chinese, I noticed a small flier pinned to an otherwise empty notice board. Printed in black and white and written in Chinese and English, the ink was too dark to discern the faces in the photographs. “Let’s join Work Camp!! Invite foreign students who wanna join work camp.” It outlined the week’s activities: “physical work (plowing, cleaning some road, wood chopping); house work (making photo albums for the villagers, the villagers’ home visiting, collecting information about villagers; and parties (camp fire, making dumplings, etc.).” “If you are interested in this activity, please contact Hua Hua (Flower Flower) by 25 Nevember (this Friday!!!).”

I called him the next day.

A week at a Chinese leper colony with a score of Chinese university students would do wonders for my terrible Mandarin, I thought. I had wanted to use part of the year – which was a sort of sabbatical from the stressing world of journalism – to engage in some form of volunteering. Besides, I thought, it might even be fun. The other volunteers – they preferred to describe themselves as “campers” – were of a similar age or even younger. At forty-one, I was twice as old.

Shaoxi isn’t a real village. It’s not on most maps. There are no shops, no bars or schools. There’s a clinic and a small community hall. There are no babies, or toddlers, children, teenagers, or young newlyweds. There are two sets of communal toilets and two sets of communal showers. Shaoxi is home to just thirty people. The youngest is forty-eight years old. The oldest resident is ninety-four. The average age is seventy years. The residents share one thing in common. They have all suffered from leprosy, or Hansen’s disease.

I had never met a leper before. In fact, I had never really wanted to. Or, I should say, the idea never really entered my head. The only time I had ever really heard the word “leper” was back in primary school in Ireland, when one of our teachers gave us a lecture on Father Damien of Molokai. The Belgian priest-now-saint, who worked with lepers in Hawaii more than a century ago, eventually contracted and succumbed to the disease. These days, we’re not supposed to use the term “leper” or “leper colony.” Instead, we’re encouraged to refer to the illness as Hansen’s disease and leper colonies as “recovery villages.”

I was not the first foreign writer to visit a leper colony in southern China. More than a century ago, intrepid American journalist Nellie Bly visited one when she made her much publicized race around the world in seventy-two days. She was not impressed:

The lepers were simply ghastly in their misery. There are men, women and children of all ages and conditions. The few filthy rags with which they endeavored to hide their nakedness presented no shape of any garment or any color, so dirty and ragged were they … Many were featureless, some were blind, some had lost fingers, others a foot, some a leg, but all were equally dirty, disgusting and miserable.

I wondered how the lives of Chinese lepers might have changed since Bly’s visit and whether my reaction would be as harsh as hers.

My self-imposed sabbatical from journalism was triggered after years of being a journalist in Hong Kong for a political magazine called the Far Eastern Economic Review. I had covered a coup in Thailand, corruption in Bangladesh, witnessed body parts strewn on a Karachi street, the results of a suicide bomber’s handiwork. My disillusionment with the profession was also borne from the long hours, the constant demands from editors for more copy while each month more colleagues quit or were fired. They were never replaced, which meant more work for the suckers who remained. Twenty years of living abroad also had begun to take a toll. My globetrotting, which once had inspired me, had become a kind of addiction that I couldn’t shake, no matter how hard I wanted to try. A decade in Japan, three years in Madrid, a stint in Thailand, more studies in New York, and then reporting in Hong Kong. By now this lifestyle had lost much of its appeal.

So I headed to China to get away from it all and learn some Chinese. I also went to figure out whether my then relationship with a young ethnic Indian Singaporean man had a future. (It didn’t.)

In contrast to Bly’s days, the people currently living in Shaoxi have been cured and they are no longer infectious. Yet most still bear the scars of the disease. Others have even more severe disabilities, including deformed arms or legs. Some have prosthetic limbs. Two are completely blind. Many suffer from other ailments such as headaches, stomach ulcers and bronchitis. Most take medication regularly. The social stigma too much of a burden, many have been abandoned by their families. Today, an estimated twenty thousand Chinese live in more than six hundred recovery villages similar to Shaoxi, scattered mainly in the south of the country where the humid climate was most conducive for its spread.

The village was set up for lepers in 1957 when original residents were convinced to relocate to make way for them. At one point, the patients numbered in the hundreds. But over the years the population dropped as the older ones died off. Now, rows of cottages lie idle, their decaying doors hanging from hinges, and dark caverns lurk behind punctured window panes. Current residents live in rows of terraced white cottages with faded yellow doors and window frames, and roofs made from amber tiles. The cottages are really nothing more than small rooms. They have no toilet or cooking facilities. Typical decor includes two single beds with straw mats for mattresses, small stools made from wood rendered wobbly by humidity and overuse, and compact dressing tables that double as dining tables. Most villagers live alone, apart from a handful of married couples.

Villagers prepare and cook food on small fires they build outside their front doors. For those unable to look after themselves, light meals are prepared in a bigger communal kitchen by more able-bodied villagers and delivered twice a day in the early morning and at four o’clock in the afternoon. In the surrounding fields, villagers grow peanuts for sale at nearby markets, and cabbage and other garden vegetables for their own consumption. The few dogs that live in Shaoxi scamper sulkily around, sniffing for treats. There are cats, too, on permanent watch for mice, of which there are many. Then there are the squirrels that work over any discarded rubbish or food scraps.

The day we arrived, we were all decked out in canary yellow parkas, the backs emblazoned with the group’s motto: “We are all good friends!” It didn’t feel like we’re pals.

It was hard to believe we were in southern China. Locals sometimes called Shaoxi “little Guilin” after the world famous scenic spot in neighboring Guangxi province, but tourists didn’t visit here. It was silent, apart from the occasional boom from one of the two quarries located nearby. Birds chirped, reeds rustled and the air was fresh and crisp. In the near distance, sharp, steep hills covered by camphor trees rose and fell rapidly like a naturally formed roller coaster. Little Horse, one of the volunteers, cupped his hands to his mouth and whooped: “Ni hao!” His voice rebounded off the hills, and then faded.

During our stay in the village we organized events to entertain the villagers. Monday, a fireworks display, Wednesday, games and other activities in the community hall, and on Thursday, our penultimate day, a farewell concert, for which we were all instructed to prepare some performance. I had been advised ahead of the trip that I should do something from “my” country. The prospect filled me with terror. But that was quickly replaced with fresh dread. After a very short discussion of how we would interact with the villagers during our time in Shaoxi, a volunteer named Ping announced it was time to begin the session called “ice breaking.” This turned out to be a euphemism for adolescent games. Whoever lost was “punished” – typically a truth or dare that invariably had some sexual component. I escaped major grilling. It was the first night and no one was willing to push the limits of intimacy by asking me awkward questions like: “Why don’t you have a wife?”

Before lights out, Hua Hua took me aside for a chat. Despite his playful nickname, he rarely smiled and seldom took part in the volunteers’ childish antics, such as when they randomly shout out the group’s catchphrase, “We’re all good friends!” A law student, Hua Hua looked more likely to be buried in books in a library than out in the fields helping lepers harvest peanuts. He told me, nicely as it happens, to avoid asking villagers too much about their lives. “It is too painful for them to remember,” he said.

After breakfast that first morning of congee and wok-fried cabbage, we were split into groups of three or four for house calling. This would be the main activity of the week, where we visited the villagers in their homes. My discussion with Hua Hua aside, we were only given vague instructions to “chat” with the villagers. We were not given any guidelines about how to behave and what to say, or given any indication of what our goals were, except to provide an ear to the old folk, keep them company and bring a bit of cheer into their lives.

Two periods a day were devoted to calling in on the villagers to chat with them. I was happy for the chance to interact with them, although communication was a problem. First, my Mandarin was not great. Second, neither was most of the villagers’. Most of the old folks spoke Cantonese. Another sizable minority only spoke Hakka. One afternoon I was perched on my tiny stool sitting between three old Hakka women. They graciously smiled at me when I stopped by and asked me a few courtesy questions such as: “Where are you from?” “Are you a teacher?” “Why are you so fat?”

Still, with some help from my fellow volunteers, I slowly began to get a feel for the lives of at least some of the villagers. At sixty-two, Mr. Li was one of the more active inhabitants of Shaoxi. When I stopped by to visit him one morning, he was sitting against the wall, watching a small red television tuned to yet another re-run of a Lunar New Year concert on state-run channel CCTV. He offered me a stool and I squatted on the ground between him and the television. He kept his room tidy. Behind him, three large flasks – one pink, one red, one orange – were lined up neatly on a sideboard. Overhead, pieces of cured ham hung by hooks in a row from a line he had pitched across the room. On the bed, more New Year gifts: washing powder, breakfast cereals and Korean candies. “Have an orange!” he bellowed. “I’m fine. Thank you,” I replied. “Have an orange! They’re sweet!” he insisted. “I just ate breakfast,” I explained. “Have an orange!” he repeated. I gave in. “Xie xie,” I offered.

Over the next few days I bumped into Mr. Li many times. I saw him washing his vegetables under the ice-cold water tap outside his house. Decades ago his left foot had been amputated. His prosthesis was hidden by his trousers and green sneakers. I spotted him nimbly shuffling to or from the toilets. Every time he saw me he shouted out an energetic “Ni hao!” With his woolen pixie cap, protruding ears and mischievous smile, it was no wonder Mr. Li was one of the favorites among the campers. To them he was ke’ai – or cute. I wondered if Mr. Li had cracked the system. Had he discovered over the years that it’s better to laugh and smile with the volunteers? To make the “V” sign, to tip his head ever so slightly to camera? To join in unison with the youngsters as they shouted: “We are all good friends!”?

Mrs. Weng was a different matter. She did not engage with the volunteers much. This could have been because she simply could not – she was more than seventy years old and visibly frail – or it could have been, as I suspected, because she could not be bothered wasting whatever little energy she had on overly spirited university students. Despite, or because of, her aloofness, I was drawn to her. It might have had something to do with the uncanny resemblance she bore to my own mother.

Mrs. Weng’s legs were so weak she could barely walk around her tiny room. One day, I watched her make three attempts to stand up from her chair. She got up, leaned on the dressing table, her legs wobbling underneath her. After an initial burst, her confidence deserted her and she made a panicked attempt to sit back down on the chair. She heaved out a deep sigh as if she regretted ever trying to stand up by herself. Yet a couple of minutes later, she tried again. I watched her closely to make sure she wouldn’t fall. But I had no training in taking care of the elderly. I didn’t want to help because who would help her when we all went back to the city after that week? Still, it was painful to watch. It would only be a matter of time before she fell and hurt herself again. She had taken a tumble just last year.

So she sat on her chair in front of a small charcoal heater, occasionally reaching forward to poke the coals. It was bitterly cold and she was wearing a purple woolen hat. Her hair was as white as is her skin. She was not one for talking. She stared into the coals. She struck me as graceful. She might even have come from a wealthy family. I didn’t know. All I knew was that she didn’t have any close relatives anymore. She’d been there for more than three decades. I imagined what she must have been like when she was younger. Occasionally, she looked at me, confused. I was sure she had no idea who I was. My mundane questions in my halting Chinese didn’t help much. Still, it was better than awkward silence.

I tried not to think of my mother, but I could not help it. She was in her seventies, too, when she’d died from cancer. Toward the end, she had fallen a few times and had become senile, saying things she didn’t mean. Like the time she called me a bad son for insisting on hiring a Polish girl to help her out around the house. The cancer took my mother relatively quickly. I never got around to telling her about the real me.

If my mother had lived longer, would she have spent her days like Mrs. Weng, each day the same, just staring blankly into the distance, poking coals on a fire? Perhaps. My mother was fortunate – her sons and daughters visited her. Mrs. Weng didn’t even have that. All she had were irregular visits from volunteers like me, who sat on small stools, silently watching her and “keeping her company.” I’m not sure she even wanted our visits.

I never really figured out how the villagers looked upon us volunteers. They appeared welcoming. When our group organized events, the same old faithfuls turned up and participated. Mrs. Weng didn’t make it. But did they enjoy it? Did we bring them joy? The volunteers seemed to believe the villagers wanted nothing more than to spend an afternoon in the cramped community hall watching two young Chinese girls dance and lip-sync to racy K-pop tunes with English lyrics.

“Nobody, nobody, but you. I want nobody, nobody, but you,” they sang.

The villagers obliged by clapping along, like they had done for previous volunteer groups and would do for other groups yet to come.

EMBER SWIFT

Stitches: Excerpt from a Memoir

MY MOTHER-IN-LAW, Wang Wei, has a key to our apartment. She moved to Beijing when I was very pregnant with Echo, our daughter, but she didn’t move in with us like most Chinese mothers-in-law do. Instead, she rented an apartment in the same compound, just a building over, because living with us would be bu fangbian 不方便 (inconvenient), she said. The unspoken reason is our cultural differences, but I didn’t care about the why; I just exhaled, gratefully.

That didn’t stop her from freely entering our apartment first thing in the morning and not leaving until after dinner every day. You see, in Chinese culture, a child’s home must be fully accessible to the parents. But, for twelve hours a day? There were no boundaries.

She entered our bedroom anytime she wanted, a space I think of as private. Picture me in there, in the first few months of awkward motherhood, discreetly breastfeeding my daughter while propped up on the bed. My mother-in-law regularly barged in to hover over her suckling grandchild and critique how I was holding her. I once bit my tongue so hard it bled.

On one of those early days, I came back to the room from showering only to find my bed fully made, my recently stepped-out-of clothes retrieved from the floor and neatly folded on top of the bed and a puttering mother-in-law still in the room. Even when I clung to my towel, humiliated that she had just folded my dirty underwear, it still took her a good three minutes to get the message that I wasn’t going to get dressed in front of her.

It took a lot of getting used to – this culture, these presumptions. When she had finally retreated to her apartment at night, I barked several times about this absence of privacy to my husband, her kindness to help us with domestic chores notwithstanding. Eventually, he spoke to her. Somehow that produced an unspoken code: if the door is closed or the interior curtains on the outer rooms are drawn, she doesn’t come in. Not anymore.

You see, our apartment has windowed doors and walls on the inner walls of each of our outer rooms, which are the only rooms that get the sunlight. Without those interior windows, our central living areas would never get any natural light.

She’s the one who stitched the curtains.

Wang Wei is sitting at our table sipping green tea. She has chosen a small teapot from Guo Jian’s teapot collection – a brown earthenware one with a cute pouting lip for a spout. It sits before her on the bamboo tea tray wet from having been heated with boiling water. The little teapot is overflowing with the second pouring over its leaves, the first having been to both wash the leaves and wash the cups and pot out. Even its outside was doused in boiling water.

“The dust has to come off of the teapot first!” she said, clicking her tongue toward the triangular glass shelf that lacks regular dusting.

My daughter is playing on the floor with some blocks and my swollen midriff and I are sitting down next to her. I’m repeating the color names to her in English, trying desperately to infuse her environment with this household’s minority language.

Dinner has just ended. It is just the three of us, like most nights, because Guo Jian is out. If he shares a meal with me once a week, it’s an occasion. I’ve already whisked the dishes away and washed them, swatting off my mother-in-law’s protest. I now know, after several experiences of her backlash critique, that these are her polite protestations; my act of washing up is evidence that I dong shi 懂事 (know what’s right and wrong). She made the meal, of course, the culinary queen, so I should clean up. Besides, she rules the kitchen whenever she’s at our house. I have tried but failed to maintain dominion over my cook space.

The fact that it’s technically my kitchen is moot. She may not live here, but she has deemed anything not Chinese strange and foreign. She’s particularly prejudiced against cinnamon. Once she fished out and discarded all the paper labels in my glass canisters filled with dried goods from Canada calling them “garbage.”

“Those were labels!” I said, horrified. “They tell me what’s in the jars!”

“There were no words on them!” she squawked, defensively.

“Yes there are,” I said, fishing them out of the garbage. “Look, right here! English words!”

She hadn’t registered these as language. To her, with no Chinese characters, there was simply no language present, just visual design.

She didn’t apologize for that, either. Apologies are not her style. She is a matriarch, after all, and she would lose too much face in admitting errors. As a result, I spent the next six months unsure as to whether I was making gluten-free, rye or wheat flour bread, and having to stick my finger into the white powdered canisters to know if I was scooping up baking soda, sugar or salt. I had to laugh. But I haven’t always.

While her food is delicious, her organizational habits in a kitchen are infuriating. She puts unwashed pots on the floor; she rarely refrigerates leftovers; once I found a bowl of something I was partway through making balanced on the mouth of the garbage can in order to make more room on the countertop. She keeps vegetables in their plastic bags until they’re sweating with condensation. She stubbornly refuses to use my veggie or fruit baskets, purchased from Ikea and in plain view. Instead, I discover rotting vegetables on the floor beside the hot water heater in winter, or a bag of greens buried within my pots inside the cupboard. The soy sauces and cooking oil also seem to live on the floor when she’s around, leaving rings from their dripping sides on the tiles that then stick to my sock feet.

“Wear tuoxie!” she says when I complain.

She is constantly solving floor issues with the idea of slipper-wearing, a deflection of the point – another thing she’s extremely good at. But she came here to help us, so my complaints must be delicate. Knowing her has been an enormous lesson in patience. Sometimes I’ve failed miserably.

She is not in a good mood today. We fought last night. It was a fight about my work schedule and why she feels overworked as the “helper,” but it wasn’t about that for me; it was about the absentee third party here – so absent that he has become the third party. She swats at my mentioning of him as though he is an errant fly invading the conversation. To her, I have obligations to this household and to the kids; but he’s a man.

The sexism makes my skin crawl.

I have planned a dinner with my friend at the end of this week.

“You don’t have to stay late, Ma. Just leave after dinner,” I tell her.

“He doesn’t know how to take care of children,” she says, clicking her tongue.

“He needs a chance to learn,” I snap back.

“I think you should go out with your friends in the daytime. What if she wakes up and wants her mother? What then? A good mother is available to her children. I never went out at night. If I had, my parents would have lectured me up and down.”

The ball of violence that bubbles up in my body in the face of such double standards is like a churning, backed-up, overflowing toilet. Toxic. I stop speaking. Wisely. My mother-in-law sighs a huge sigh. She is hopelessly dramatic. She stands up from her tea tray and walks into the kitchen where I hear her moving things around in a noisy expression of disapproval.

I sigh in mimicry. I know she can hear me. I don’t disguise that it’s in reaction to her sigh – I even placed it in the same pitch in my throat for emphasis – and I continue playing with my daughter. Just before leaving, Wang Wei turns and says:

“Don’t forget to make sure she’s warm. Get up a few times and check that she hasn’t kicked off her blankets. It’s a mother’s job to prevent her child from freezing in the night.”

Then she is gone, pointedly making it impossible for me to respond by pulling the door shut as punctuation. I have been getting these kinds of condescending tidbits of advice for twenty-one months now, so I’m long past having my competence insulted by them, but they’re still annoying; in any case, the relief to see her finally gone is my primary emotion.

I notice she left me the teapot and tea service to tidy up, which is quite out of character. I pessimistically register that she has likely done this on purpose, in protest. The spout of the teapot is no longer cute. Having a disappointing daughter-in-law unwilling to simply nod and accept the traditional Chinese ways is, well, very unfortunate for her.

But we are stuck with each other. Tied in matrimony. Knotted together. No one ever marries a person; I married a family.

I leave the tea service where it is. In protest.

Since my daughter’s arrival, my visits back to Canada always include a mass purchase of kids’ clothes in solid colors. I also enjoy dungarees with buckles, plain black patent leather shoes, leotards, snow suits, etc. – you just can’t find those kinds of kids’ clothes in China. Chinese children’s fashion looks like it was all donated by the circus.

When I return to Beijing, I pull out new acquisitions from my swollen suitcase, its insides spilling into our living room, and I listen as my mother-in-law deems the garments as “not warm enough” or “uncomfortable” or made from materials “not good for the skin.” As the older generation, it is her job to be in charge of all things. My desire to dress my own child is quite obviously out of line. I clearly must be stopped.

When I do it anyway and she protests, I play a familiar card in reverse:

“It’s cultural,” I say. “In my culture, because I’m the mother, I make the decisions.”

She pretends she hasn’t heard me.

They say that fashion speaks volumes. Maybe our egos are just stitched into the seams of everything we wear or stuff our children’s limbs into, stubbornly. My daughter’s wardrobe is deafening. It’s like a screaming cultural debate.

In China, the word “fashion” has come into the lexicon and retained its English pronunciation, which itself is a rare occurrence. Few English words have been absorbed into Chinese, so the fashion industry should be patting its own well-dressed back for this.

What’s funny is that it has been reconstructed as an adjective rather than a noun. People will say, “na hen 那很 fashion: That’s really fashion,” about a fashionable outfit.

When I first met Guo Jian, he regularly pulled out new outfits – the guy has twice the volume of clothes that I do – and asked me if I liked his new fashion shirt or jeans or boots. Before we went out, I watched him working the runways between our apartment’s mirrors assessing his color schemes and ensemble choices. He has more matching bags than I can count. His shoes fill four storage containers. His T-shirts alone, if piled one on top of the other on the floor, would easily reach up to my chest.

“Fashionable,” I’d say, gently trying to correct the use of the word, but he was too busy getting ready and I was too amused to push grammar.

Eventually I started to wonder if the word “fashionable” really existed in English. It sounded strange in my mouth, like my own linguistic invention. Everyone kept using “fashion” as an adjective, even on television, and one day I accidentally did the same while speaking Chinese to a friend of Guo Jian’s. It tumbled out and its incorrect use had no impact whatsoever on the conversation. Because, in fact, I had used it correctly by Chinese standards. It wasn’t wrong here.

“Incorrect” is culturally subjective. Rules differ; standards aren’t universal. One thing from one culture can be absorbed and then redefined by another. While at first it’s an exchange (like the word “fashion” as it traveled into this language), once the borders have been crossed, the ownership rights shift, too. The new owner gets to make the decisions.

It’s a bit like giving someone the gift of a tablecloth and then returning later to discover that they’ve cut up the fabric and used it to line their drawers. There’s nothing to say. It was their gift, their right to determine its use. But a small part of you can’t help but feel injured.

Then again, language mutates. It changes, even within the same culture. So when this happens across cultures, who am I to get all “cut up” about it?

Maybe I’m sensitive because that’s what happened to me, too – me and my Western standards. But who’s holding the scissors? The culture? Guo Jian? His mother?

Me?

Last year, Wang Wei stitched a pair of denim overalls that were too long for my daughter because Echo loved their “pretty flowers” embroidered on the bib and the fasteners she could manipulate. The message in this stitching was this: even though they’d been blacklisted as “uncomfortable,” she was going to permit Echo to wear them because a granddaughter’s desires trump a daughter-in-law’s. I dressed her in them often, with a satisfied grin.

I pulled them out again this winter and held them up to show my MIL while she was cooking, asking her if it would be all right if I took down the stitched cuffs. That was my first mistake.

“She can’t wear those this year! They’re too small!”

She scuttled this response into the space between us, hastily, turning away from me the moment her words were pitched from her mouth. She completely evaded the question. That’s because I had directly addressed the stitching in the first place. I exposed her silent compromise – a loss of face for her. I left the kitchen, a familiar barb of frustration scratching sharply from inside my right temple. There must be a seam ripper in this house somewhere.

I keep bringing up his absenteeism in the realm of childcare. The presence of his mother “to replace him” is not acceptable to me, I tell him. He and his mother may share a birthday and too many traits, but that doesn’t make them interchangeable. He’s still the father. He’s still the one who should be present. These are my Western values – standards I can’t allow my current Eastern environment to silence, like a mouth sewn shut.

It’s Saturday. He’s spontaneously decided to devote the whole day to the family. I give him a double take. Wordlessly. I’m sitting at the kitchen table messing with Echo’s overalls, trying to get the cuffs unstitched with a pair of scissors. Guo Jian comes over and calmly removes the scissors from my hands. And the jeans.

“What are you doing?” I am irritable at being interrupted.

“I’ll do it. The scissors are too close to Echo. I can do it.”

His sudden need to control the safety sphere around his child reminds me of his mother, laced with suspicion about my competence. Whatever, I think, but don’t protest, grateful for one less task. Hands idle, I watch him, curiously.

“Besides, Echo thinks these are her most fashion jeans, right?” He winks at me as he deftly removes the remaining stitches from the left pant leg. He has undone the cuff in half the time it took me to do the right side.

We decide to go to the aquarium. Echo happily puts on her overalls with the “pretty flowers” so that she can go see the “big fish.” The sun is bright and I throw open all the apartment’s curtains and flood the house with natural light. Guo Jian dances with his daughter in the sunbeams. She is all drama and poses which makes us both start to laugh. The giggling escalates until we’re doubled over in stitches, Echo squealing and crawling all over us in a bath of glee.

Maybe he’s changing.

When my daughter is sleeping, Wang Wei often sits on a low stool in front of her Chinese soap operas sewing or knitting. She’s a wizard at both. The wool or thread spirals around the needles in a helix of creation and I am mesmerized.

Stitching is really just a means of attachment. Several pieces of fabric, arranged together, and then we cover ourselves up with these attachments. We call them clothing. We see each garment as a new whole. Itself.

Likewise, fabric neatly stitched to hang along a rod before glass does not change the fact that the window or door is still an entranceway, curtain drawn or not. I have grown so attached to this idea of separateness that I believe I am alone when I shut myself in – a singular, attachment-free being in my own space.

But, people assembled together by blood or marriage, as incompatible and ill-matched as they might seem, are nevertheless invisibly tied by a series of complicated stitches. Especially after children arrive. If you take family and break it apart – willingly or forcibly – it will leave an indisputable scar, just like stitches do to flesh.

But which scars are deeper: the ones from the stitching or those from the ripping? This is my current question. Behind it rings this one: Am I brave enough to find out?

SONIA FL LEUNG

The Moon in a Dog’s Eye

ON A LATE September school night in the small hours, I gaze at the moonlight that slides gracefully through the rusty iron gate of our hut. The moon’s gentle light transforms the entrance and the steps beyond it, giving them a magical glow. The tranquility allures me. The peaceful world out there beneath the moon’s gleam generates an urge in me to join her.

The rest of my family is sound asleep. Creeping down from my upper bunk quietly, I unlock the gate and walk away. My slippers are stardust, carrying me away from our home. Weaving through the narrow paths of our slum, my body hurries toward a nearby construction site at Tate’s Cairn Tunnel in Diamond Hill. I need space, a quiet place where I can hear my breath.

Light from distant streetlamps and high-rises casts a nebulous luminescence over the deserted construction site. Rubble, cranes, debris and equipment lie all around in the cavernous gloom. Piles of sand and ragged holes lie here and there. A few hard hats lie around and some long, worn-out, black rubber boots have been left near the silent machines and graying dumpsters. Cigarette butts litter the bulldozed earth.

Some distance away, a car roars by and interrupts the silence. And then another car follows. The air is crisp and clear. During the day, the ravenous construction site stirs up the dust, harassing it nonstop. The site is sated now and allows the dust to float back down to the ground. The weak pulse of the dust quivers under my feet. It wails. Gently, I wiggle my toes in the cool earth, mingling with the dirt and kicking at it until little motes of dust blossom up around my ankles. Hues of gray, blue and black streak the sky. Wind passes through the site in gusts. A safety vest dangling from a hook swings in the breeze. The wind slices right through my flesh to the bone leaving an empty chill in its wake.

I peer into a dark hole, where I see that table-tennis coach. He has floundered down there since April, unable to claw out of the pit. No one can harm me now.

Skipping over the holes, I climb into the cabin of the crane, go down a slope, kick at some empty cans and wander around the site. Then I notice that I am humming my favorite nursery rhyme: “Lan lan de tian kong yin he li.” Or “Over the blue sky there are silvery streams, the Milky Way.” Worries dissolve into the song. The shamefulness of being a damaged “dailukmui,” or a filthy mainland girl, in Hong Kong loosens its grip on my throat. For now, the earth, the sky and the wind merge with the silent void of Diamond Hill. I breathe. Tender is the wind’s caress, a feathery touch upon the bare skin of my arm.

Then I walk and jog away from the ravaged earth until my legs are sore and my adrenaline has subsided. At the exit of the catchment channel, there is some grass to sit upon and regain my composure. Bushes shield me. Drawing up my knees and wrapping my arms around them, I lean back on the wall.

When I was twelve years old, my family emigrated from a village in Fujian, China, to Hong Kong. I was in primary six back then and had not had one English lesson yet. Thus I was downgraded to primary four to catch up on my English. This left me feeling like a complete outsider, an utterly-out-of-place teenager. But that was when a youth center coach discovered me. “You’re such a talented player, Fongling.” He leaned forward, put his bony hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes and said, “I can get you into the official HK Junior Table Tennis Team.”

For a whole year he trained me hard and gained my total trust. Then one night, those same hands of his turned gaunt and groping as they tore my body and shattered my dreams.

But now the moonlight mends my body and soul. Her grace cleanses me. I pull my knees closer to my breasts, embrace them, embrace the fragile new me. The sound of my breath shrouds me, soothes me. Resting my head on my kneecaps, I feel my eyelids are about to shut when something stops them.

A black dog stands right in front of me. Its bones poke out of its flanks. From ten feet away it stares at me with big, bright eyes. They seem to bulge out of its skull. And when those eyes focus upon me, they turn livid.

“Do you know what I do to little girls?” say those dog eyes.

I slowly uncurl, shifting myself into a different position with my hands flat upon the ground, sitting erect, glaring back at it.

The black dog turns its head sideways and I see the moon in its left eye.

Neither of us flinches.

The moon’s cool, sharp light beams through my mind advising me to hold my ground, steady my gaze. She emboldens me.

Yes, I can protect myself and reclaim the sovereignty of my body. No, this dog does not belong on the ground. It belongs in the pit with the coach.

I raise my head, pull back my shoulders, straighten my spine and intensify my glowering at the black dog. The sudden extension of my upper body and escalation of my spirit astound it. It cocks its head to the right and slides backward a bit, still glaring at me. But its muzzle lowers and the light of its eyes dims. It slinks away, craning its neck to look at me as it retreats in the direction of the pit.

I keep my posture for a few more minutes. When the dog’s tail is entirely out of my sight, I collapse upon the grass. Cool dew seeps through my skin. My sweat-drenched body shivers.

ANNELI MATHESON

A Basket of Three

Fortune, Stalk Me

LIKE MOST DENIZENS of Hong Kong, you’re not a girl who can live on skylines alone. To live in Hong Kong is to taste something in the air, a flavor that inhabits the alleys, streets and corridors of Central.

It’s the desire for more – not just enough, or what is adequate, but the most to be had. This is a city famous for its rapid acquisition of wealth and influence, as if Fortune herself shot it from a slingshot out of its fishing village genesis and into the forefront of history. Lady Fortune is beckoned still.

Light your prayer stick, your incense; seek out the geomancer’s advice on the best arrangement for your furniture – her fee is well worth the prosperity that will surely follow.

The stakes are high here and they move at the speed of light. In Happy Valley, horses race, bets are made; try to pick the winner, the one who looks strong and fast, as a champion should. Inhabit this moment when anything is possible, when your life could change because you just happened to lasso your wagon to Luck, that wily sprite now taking the form of a twelve-hundred-pound animal galloping down a brightly lit track in the valley of happiness. In five seconds it will all be over; there will be winners and losers and the hecklers cackling at both. In three seconds your life could change.

Or not.

And isn’t that just like life?

Those high stakes could be the stake through your heart.

Emily Dickinson Comes to Hong Kong and We Go to Tim Ho Wan Because She Heard the BBQ Pork Buns Are Delicious

“‘CONSIDER THE PORK BUN’ is the only commandment I keep,” she says, black chopsticks whisking the golden orb from its bamboo basket. She takes a bite and chews thoughtfully. As a baker she seems to be parsing the heart of the dough, examining its fluffy texture and unexpectedly sweet crust. We’re here for the works: pork buns, tonic medlar and petal cake, shrimp dumplings and, at Emily’s insistence, chicken feet in black bean sauce. Between the two of us we easily polish off three baskets of buns, never mind how many per basket, reveling in this snack that has put the tiny fifteen-seat Mongkok eatery on the international map.

Tim Ho Wan describes itself as “the hole-in-wall eatery in Hong Kong that defied all odds to gain an entry in the Michelin Guide” and it remains the world’s cheapest starred restaurant. The baked pork bun is one of four signature dim sum dishes grandly titled the Four Heavenly Kings. The other three include pan-fried carrot cake, steamed egg cake and vermicelli roll with pig’s liver. The latter has just appeared on our table, with surprisingly little ceremony given its royal status, as harried waiters do all they can to rush us through our meal. A crowd of impatient eaters waits outside Tim Ho Wan’s door, but we ignore their salivating stares and take our time.

“Careful, this one will slide right off the plate and into your lap,” I say, attempting to serve my friend with as much grace as two slippery sticks and slick food will allow. The large white noodle has been steamed and stuffed with the tender porcine organ meat. It’s so soft you could slurp it down.

“Hmmm, distinctly invertebrate in texture,” Emily says with a grin.

“Dim sum roughly translated from Cantonese means ‘little heart or token.’ And tim ho wan means something like ‘to add good luck,’” I say around a mouthful of savory shrimp dumpling.

“So we are eating lucky little hearts for lunch. A bit vampiric, perhaps, but also poetic, if you’ll indulge the phrase.” Emily pauses, and lifts a perfect cube of red tonic medlar and petal cake.

Cake, however, is a misleading term. This dessert is jello-y and its red gelatinous skin glistens in the fluorescent light. Like confetti frozen mid-toss, orange goji berries and green petals are suspended and visible inside. Popping the lightly sweet and medicinal cake into her mouth, she savors it slowly and thoughtfully. Suddenly she scribbles a deluge of words onto the back of our pink receipt.

“What’s the Cantonese word for hope?” she asks, tapping her pen quickly on the side of our cooling teapot.

“Urrrr … no idea. Unfortunately you heard all of my Cantonese when I told the waiter thank you. And I probably bungled the tones badly. They’re treacherous, those tones.”

“Well, we can find out later when we meet up with the others,” Emily replies, pouring out the last of the tea, speckled with green jasmine, into our small white cups.

I stack the empty bamboo steamers and they are almost instantly spirited away by a waiter. The poet pockets the pink slip and I wonder if she will share the words with me later. We stand to leave. Emily pauses, taking in the frantic and fragrant atmosphere of the restaurant.

“I really should get out more,” she says.

In Which Our Heroine Moves to Vancouver and Encounters Her First Dinner Dilemma at Kwong Chow Congee & Noodle House

THE TABLE IS LARGE AND ROUND, wobbling slightly as we gather ’round and scoot our chairs across the tile floor. This communal culinary sphere feels as large as a Ferris wheel to me. Teapots, hot and white, slowly circumnavigate with the lazy Susan as we, my new friends and I, fill our cups and chatter. Dave, born in Hong Kong but a longtime resident of Canada, pours jasmine tea into my cup and it tastes tart, green-boiled; it smells like a brewed garden. The din of Cantonese in this packed restaurant swallows our English whole and plays a duet with the clatter of a thousand plates and bowls being passed, scraped and stacked.

Soon sliced beef with black bean sauce piled on steamed rice; sautéed squid with ginger and green onion; and whole deep fried prawns (a house specialty) march toward me on platters as white and wide as the noblest steed. But two black chopsticks rest silently by my right hand; two black utensils that I really don’t know how to use well stand between me and this feast. They dare me to grasp them, like Excalibur taunting the unworthy and ignorant before Arthur arrived and reached forth an intuitive hand.

“We can get you a fork if you need one,” James calls from across the Ferris wheel.

He grins and is joking, as comfortable and familiar with this food as I am intimidated. This is my dinner dilemma: this Kwong Chow meal is a test. Use a fork and I will be the pitied pariah, the girl from the sticks who couldn’t adapt. Use the chopsticks and I am magical. I will be accepted by my new friends and prove my cultural dexterity.

The deep-fried prawns approach: eyes protruding from crunchy faces above toothpick legs and shellacked pink bodies. I weave the chopsticks between my fingers with an unstudied air, conjuring up movie scenes in my mind where the characters deftly solve crimes or discuss their investment portfolios while elegantly consuming rice and noodles.

Like Arthur, I reach forth and clutch, squeeze, yank my food into submission. Hah! I smile triumphantly at the two prawns in my possession and chase them around the circumference of my bowl, feeling friendly toward my new city and new friends. I give James a confident self-congratulatory smirk.

Suddenly, feeling a pair of eyes on my hands I realize Dave from Hong Kong is trying not to stare. Encouraged that I’m about to be complimented for my technique, I wonder if Dave, James, Lori, Grace, Vikram, Sasha and I will share many future meals together.

Leaning toward me Dave whispers, “Uhhmmm, I don’t know how to say this exactly but …,” he pauses.

“Yes?” I say.

“Your chopsticks are upside down.”

HUANG HAISU

The Eternity of the MFA Cup of Tea

MY USUAL DRINK IS TEA. Not the kind spouting from a metal dispenser into a cup of ice cubes, or that powdered sort in tiny packets dunked in hot water. The tea I drink is brewed with whole tea leaves in a pot of warm water. Its temperature depends on what kind of tea it is. Some tea, like the white tea or pu’er, needs a higher temperature, while some like the green tea, lower. Green tea with its delicate nature can be easily ruined in water that is too hot. You see, when a tea leaf is removed from its mother tree, its life ends until it is brewed, when it springs back to life.

Five years ago, I could not have written the above tea paragraph. I was not equipped with skills to create syntax and semantics that are simple yet penetrating, nor did I possess a writer’s quality of thinking – honest, forthcoming, detailed and brave. All I had were English journals carefully tucked in my closet and a secret passion to emerge as a meaningful writer.

In my application letter to the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing at City University of Hong Kong, I wrote to Xu Xi, the MFA program leader and later my mentor and thesis director, what writing in English had meant to me:

English Means Freedom from Family Expectations, Privacy, Freedom of Choice, Teaching, Communicating with Expatriates, Insight into China, Fulfilling My Destiny. (March 31, 2011)

When I was accepted into the program, I was as hopeful as a dried tea leaf. I was to be infused in a wellspring of writers, coming back to life; a writer’s life that I had only realized at the age of twenty-nine was mine.

Residing inside the MFA teapot, like tea leaves in a world of water molecules, I was nurtured for two years. I was attracted to the volatile but fascinating island of Hong Kong by one theme – Asia. I, the lucky tea leaf, was soon absorbed into the brewing ritual. I gradually unfolded my arms and legs, stretching my digits and toes. I danced in the water, expressing choreography designed by each of my mentors and workshop leaders.

They were, in sequence of the brewing procedure: Justin Hill, Sharmistha Mohanty, Madeleine Thien, Evan Fallenberg, Jess Row, Sybil Baker, Tabish Khair, Xu Xi and Philip Graham.

My MFA workshops kicked off in the summer of 2011, with distinguished English novelist Justin Hill, who remembered the characters in my story and asked about them when we met again after the workshop. The workshop concluded in the fall of 2012 with American writer Philip Graham, who empowered my stories through the practice of writing dreams.

For distance mentoring, I studied under Canadian short story writer and novelist Madeleine (“Maddie”) Thien. Her tremendously inspiring, constructive, kind and caring comments have resided in my psyche ever since. I say “tremendously” because I know how much like shotgun spray my very first MFA portfolio was. Through my years of also being a writing teacher, I have felt the frustration of reading such scattered work. But Maddie shared only constructive and positive feedback from which I knew where I did well and where I needed to improve. In my first experience of working closely with an award-winning writer and teacher, I learned how to write better, and how to read and comment with humility.

I remember my joy when I learned I was going to work with Maddie again for my final MFA assignment, the creative thesis. I wanted to complete my MFA with a re-edit of my first portfolio, a coming-of-age novella in contemporary China, an aspiration that I boldly dreamed upon entering the MFA. At this point I had learned so much about writing and found that the portfolio needed more time than I could give to reach my standard for a graduation thesis. Instead, after consulting Maddie, I created a series of short stories “detailing platonic and sexual relationships between women, between women and men, across cultures and between people and institutions.” (Maddie, 2013) The doubts I carried about my new graduation project were dispelled by Maddie’s step-by-step coaching. In her final evaluation, Maddie wrote, “I find her work both playful and serious, original, and a joy to read. She writes with a great deal of integrity.”

Whenever I am in doubt about my writing, I savor my mentors’ words over a pot of tea. A real tea drinker knows how valuable tea wares are. Among all the tea brewing tools, the most important and cherished ones are the teapots. Because of their importance, their creators are the most respected. Those who have made their names out in the world are only a few. One of them is Xu Xi, the MFA teapot founder. She is the first and the last person with whom I spoke for my MFA study. She made things easy, except when she was mentoring.

Xu Xi tells you exactly what you need to hear. You may not like it at the moment because truth hurts. I shared this thought with a friend from the program who was fishing for input about potential mentors. I added, “Enjoy Xu Xi’s Chinese massage style of mentoring: it feels tough during the process, but the body feels much lighter afterward.” My friend knew what I was saying, because like me, she, too, was addicted to deep tissue treatment.

In the longstanding culture of tea brewing, I believe the most devastating event is the smashing of a teapot, something a fraudulent tea drinker would do. When City University of Hong Kong terminated the MFA program in 2015, I felt as though someone had smashed a favorite teapot of mine. I was shocked, angered, mystified, frightened at the unpredictability of what was going to happen next. Why an individual or an entity would want to create such feelings in others, I did not understand. What I do know is that the resulting intellectual earthquake in that university on the troubled island of Hong Kong touched to the core the souls of MFAers from all corners of the globe, and fortified their commitment to the theme of Asian writing.

I think back to the fall of 2013, when I received the university’s invitation to walk upon the red carpet of the graduation ceremony. I was all set to don my graduation gown, accept my degree handed to me by school officials, toss the mortarboard into the air and pose for photos. But I stayed away and at the time, I didn’t know why.

And now as I sit writing at my table, an epiphany springs forth from the aroma of freshly brewed Iron Buddha: a machine – cold, metallic and uncaring – may easily smash a work-of-art teapot into pieces, but it can never stop pottery artists from creating more and even better pots.

TATA MAPA

Final Exercise

MY GODSON turned eight years old a few weeks ago, and though I have not seen him in months, I would like to send him a present. I would like to get him something that is fun and engaging. But nothing electronic, nor anything too extravagant. On his past two birthdays I sent him books. This year I thought of getting him a jigsaw puzzle.

I am not a puzzle aficionado. But I have always delighted in both the challenge and thrill that comes with correctly matching pieces together, one by one. The careful study of the image on the box, the methodical search through a pile of cardboard pieces, the repeated experimentation. The way each piece fits into the next until eventually, a complete image is formed.

The most difficult puzzle I ever worked on was of Monet’s Water Lilies. The impressionistic brush strokes melded into a haze of muted hues and it was almost impossible to distinguish one piece from the next. It took my sisters and me three weeks to finish that puzzle. Our mother thought of framing it and hanging it in our hallway.

The process of puzzle building can often be painstaking and frustrating. But it can ultimately be very soothing, rewarding and even exciting once things begin to take shape. It is also a process that reminds me very much of the way I write.

To me, writing has always been about searching for the right words, and carefully piecing them together. It has meant connecting the events, and gathering all the details, then finding the right hook and tone to effectively tell a cohesive story. There has always been a goal to work toward, and a certainty in my direction.

It has been an absolute struggle for me to break away from this way of thinking. To make that leap from puzzle builder to artist before a blank canvas.

When I first started my MFA in Creative Writing almost two years ago, several of my cohorts commented on my background as a published writer of magazine articles. They felt it would serve as an advantage when it came to churning out the number of pages required for each submission. But I’d always sensed that the skills I’d honed in my professional life would eventually betray me, morphing from a handy asset into my biggest obstacle.

After nearly two years in my program, I still hesitate to call myself a writer. I say that I am a features writer, a magazine writer, a writer of press releases – maybe even a journalist, or a student of creative writing. There is always this need in me to tack on a qualifier to indicate how far away I am from where I would hope to be one day. For each time I sit before a blank page, I feel so keenly the fact that there is still so much to learn – and even more to unlearn.

In my work for magazines, I rely heavily on a Writer’s Brief. Without this document that lists the topic, tone, target market, word count and purpose, I refuse to start on an article. To me, it represents a binding contract between writer and editor, where all expectations are clearly drawn out. From these expectations, I create my framework, and begin.

This method has always given me a sense of purpose. And I have always risen to the challenge of being as creative as possible, within a given structure. It has also always helped me know which of my writer’s hats to put on.

For articles in Cosmopolitan magazine, I take on the tone of the fun, fearless female. For teen titles, I am a girl’s best friend. With travel pieces, I am the observant adventurer. There is always a persona to play up, and a task at hand. In this way, writing has given me the opportunity to be helpful, informative, creative and even insightful. But it has also allowed me to skim the surface, fit the pieces together and coat things over with a touch of gloss. There is no real need to push harder, or go deeper. This type of writing is made for easy digestion, and is tailored for a reader with a short attention span.

But I cannot blame my issues in my creative writing – my trouble with pushing harder, and going deeper – solely on my work. For it was I who chose to embrace my profession and its parameters so fully, and I did so because it perfectly suits so much of who I am.

The other year, I read an interview with Haruki Murakami. In it, I discovered that much of his time is spent in solitude. If he is working on a novel, he rises at 4 a.m. and writes for six hours. In the afternoons, he goes on a ten-kilometer run, or for a swim. Sometimes, he even does both. I can’t help but wonder if his forced isolation is reflected in the loneliness and the desolate sense of silence that pervades his writing. I am in awe of the fact that these empty spaces, in both his life and his art, are ones that he never feels the need to fill.

In contrast, I find that I cannot bear to suffer through an awkward silence. I tend to be overly chatty, and love regaling my audiences with entertaining stories. In the past, I have valiantly tried to smooth over many a faux pas and taboo topic with a light and humorous touch. My friends have dubbed me “the Ambassadress of Goodwill” because of my tendency to connect with anyone feeling unwelcome or left out at a gathering. I am an Agony Aunt, and a problem fixer. It is not only puzzle pieces or words that I need to fit perfectly in place. Not only magazine articles that I need to paint a glossy sheen on.

I’d always suspected that my tendency to keep everything organized and contained would get in the way of my creative writing. But it is only now that I recognize how my need to make everything feel comfortable and correct has also served to be equally harmful to my writing, if not more so. It is reflected in my tendency to pull back, instead of plunge. In my need to make light of every darkness by quickly moving on to something better.

During my first summer residency, I was encouraged to play with form. I did so dutifully and systematically, but also, perhaps, rather superficially. I shortened sentences and paragraphs. I plugged in dialogue to break up big blocks of text. With the help of my laptop’s return key, I tried to make the words on the page jump, dance and breathe. This added a new dynamism to my writing. But it still was not enough.

The narrative has always been my wheelhouse. So much so that I’ve returned to it, time and time again. I would write to propel a story forward, making it a point to fill in the nuances, honestly portray my characters and include vivid descriptions. Often, this was more than enough for my audiences. As such, I was unaware that I had trapped myself in yet another comfort zone.

What I was writing about now was far more profound than anything I had ever written about in magazines. I tackled sensitive topics such as a modern woman’s role in a traditional society, abortion and abuse – but I’d used the same formula. I was still building a puzzle of a painting, rather than creating the painting itself. It took a stripping away of the narrative to help me break through.

In one of my workshops, I was tasked to write about an experience without telling a story. I was to write stand-alone insights, and distinct impressions, in place of a linear narrative. Before this, I had never realized how much I had relied on narrative structure. With it, I could conveniently look no further than a few steps ahead. Without it, I couldn’t move forward. I had nowhere else to go but deeper.

I finally realized that form is not just the shape that words fall into on the page. That form begins with the shape our ideas take in our heads, and it is the heights, depths and breadths we allow them to reach that create the composition. If my wish was to shape my writing differently, I had to first allow myself to think differently.

This was the answer I’d been seeking. But acting on it has proved to be far more difficult than I’d expected. Without my go-to structure and usual progression, I was painfully lost. Gone was the soothing flow of spinning out a story. There was only the breakdown of all that was familiar, and the cloying company of the unknown. I could not predict what I should do or say next. And when I fell back into my old habits, they no longer felt right.

I had no idea of what I was doing, and I was in a constant state of panic. I had never doubted my abilities more. And I had never hated writing so much. I am unsure of how to face the dis-ease of writing with uncertainty. I am afraid of relinquishing control.

I’d like to say that my writing has improved, but I would never be so bold as to presume this. I only know that what I write, and how I write, has changed. They say first write what you do know, then write what you don’t know. It’s a common enough saying. But this is the first time I understand what it means.

Kevin Brown

Postscript: The Death of a Program

or the Beautiful Irregularity of Amateur Flight

SOMETHING IS BEING KILLED. A safari hunter in Hong Kong has put the nib of death into a beast as big as a community. The prey is enormous – it can fill an entire building or distribute itself into so many selves holed up in cafés around the world. The collective beast is a body of bodies, a graduate program in creative writing. Its scales are pages of poetry, prose and nonfiction. It is a global beast, but it was killed by a hunter in a small room in a concrete and glass building.

Now the taxidermist will create a many-headed sort of trophy for the wall of some university office, and the rest of the thing will rot. It wasn’t personal. There was only strategy and no joy in the hunt. It was a business decision.

Will the absence of the program leave a chasm or a chiasma? If the channel is broken, the dark crack will consume the scales of the beast, the bodies, the minds. If it is a chiasma, the beast will thrive in spite of the blow it has received – information will be sent and received along parallel networks as the community expands and reifies itself.

Nonetheless, I am saddened by this loss, and my graduation feels more like a funeral. As I have yet to submit my creative thesis, and as my advisor has recommended that I write a final chapter to sew things together (notably the connection between East and West my work alludes to and a return to drones and calligraphy as avatars of the self), I will write my own student eulogy as the fittingly appropriate final chapter of final work for a program in its final days.

Thank you, CityU. During my time with your mentors, I learned how hard it is to write. That my tendencies in fiction run toward the absurd. That I am fast and not slow. That criticism and poetry are my gifts. That I am still in love with Taiwan. That I have come to peace on the other side of the Pacific. And that Hong Kong is a weigh station for people like me to integrate our divided selves.

What’s in it for you? It’s hard to say to a university what it means to graduate a writer. Writing is, as Basho said, that narrow road to the interior. When it is done as well as he did it, it is both personal and universal. It is an abstract investment on the part of the university – it is like the negative space in a painting. Artists and thinkers have always lived in the negative space of culture. They seek a kind of further disembodiment so as to see themselves and their place in the context of life that often lacks self-awareness because of the swiftness and alertness demanded by more commercially-oriented pursuits. And so, you are making an investment in diagnostic equipment, in a collective perspective, in the hoped-for wisdom of a body of writers who filter experience like so many prisms, and etch, collectively, a hologram of who we are. You are paying for a self-portrait, and not necessarily a flattering one.

You can stop the beast. You can stop the painting. That is fine. But think about what you will lose. The East and the West found a place to work together with a fullness of energy and a force of intellect that is the aesthetic equivalent to non-violence, or the moral equivalent to war, as William James said. Art is the space that can swallow anger, misunderstanding and fear. Your investment in an MFA program is an investment in peace. Peace, by its very nature, cannot be monetized. And yet, the feeling one has while building peace – the feeling I had as a student in your program – transcends any desire for traditional forms of payment.

You are losing a center for peace.

I am tiring of writing my own eulogy, and I have yet to tie up a few loose ends my mentor asked me about. My creative thesis was about drones and calligraphy. The drone, I now see, is a kind of avatar for my own ability to see my work – a kind of me I see hovering, a kind of Narcissus subject to the capriciousness of wind and battery life and pilot error. To make a technical correction, I was flying an unmanned aerial vehicle, which means that there is no satellite system giving guidance to my flight. I was flying alone the whole time. But I wasn’t writing alone. My mentors were my guidance system. We didn’t always agree, but that’s what makes for the beautiful irregularity of amateur flight.

I’ve become better at flying and writing and living as a result of the program. I’m taking with me an enormous data set of thoughts, which have the right ingredients for a theory of art and an explanation of self. I built this because I was part of a program. And I will keep building it.

My calligraphy is a more physical medium. Like Mishima, who decided his body was too soft, I, too, felt the need for a more active type of writing. Calligraphy had been placed on hold during much of my time writing for the MFA program. But I have returned with force and purpose. It feels good to use my body again. To write with strong-boned ink, with heart-thick lines. My calligraphy is post-alphabetic, asemic, the bridge between East and West that my mentor was looking for.

The MFA is a Theseus-like community of writers, which I envision floating indefinitely through time, and which I envision constantly turning over in terms of composition, of membership – temporary and yet permanent at the same time. These fragile forms of beauty are rare and should be preserved. An MFA, as a shelter and preserve for creativity, has more hope of unifying us than the engineer’s steel or the financier’s multinational. An investment in art is an investment in what is common to us all. It is really an investment in oneself. Its loss is not exterior to the committee that decides it is no longer viable. It is for us all that the bell tolls.

Copyright Acknowledgments

The editors are grateful for permission from each author to include the following previously copyrighted material:

“Fruit Ninja” by Fan Dai. First published in a slightly different form as “Game On” in The Jakarta Post, June 11, 2016.

“The Protester” by Jordan Dotson. First published in Drunken Boat 21, April 2015.

“The Sheep Years” by Clint Ettinger. First published in MaLa Literary Journal, Issue 4, March 2016.

“Green Grass” by Sreedhevi Iyer. First published in a different form in Drunken Boat 14, 2011.

“Bachelor Brothers” by Hayley Katzen. First published in Fourth Genre Volume 17, Issue 2, 2015, pp. 143–47.

“A writer’s fantasia” by Judy Keung. First published in Writers’ Kaleidoscope, St. Stephen’s Girls College, Hong Kong.

“Queen Among Leaves” by Judy Keung. First published in Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz, Chameleon Press, 2014.

“The Other Night” and “Pistachios” from Today, Fish Only by Miho Kinnas, Math Paper Press, 2015.

“The Moon in a Dog’s Eye” by Sonia FL Leung. First published in MaLa Literary Journal, Issue 4, March 2016.

“Vigil” by Jenn Chan Lyman. Unabridged version first published in the short fiction collection Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now, 2015.

“False Alarm” by Saffron Marchant. First published in Sweet Issue 7.3, May 2015. “False Alarm” is included in the 2015 Nonfiction Winners, Best of the Net Anthology (Sundress).

“Emily Dickinson Comes to Hong Kong and We Go to Tim Ho Wan Because She Heard the BBQ Pork Buns Are Delicious” by Anneli Matheson. First published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, October 2015.

“Fortune, Stalk Me” by Anneli Matheson. First published in 5x5 Literary Magazine, February 2015.

“In Which Our Heroine Moves to Vancouver and Encounters Her First Dinner Dilemma at Kwong Chow Congee & Noodle House” by Anneli Matheson. First published in Lowestoft Chronicle, June 2015.

“Fragments” by Sophie Monatte. “Fragments” received an Honorable Mention for the Hotel Amerika’s Transgenre Writing Contest. First published in Hotel Amerika Volume 14, Winter 2016.

“Half My Hundred-Year Life” by Gregg Schroeder. First published in Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, Fall 2015.

“Blueprint” by Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind. First published in BLink, the year-end fiction edition of The Hindu BusinessLine, January 22, 2016.

“A Special Gift” by John Francis Smith. Winner of the South China Morning Post and RTHK Top Story Award for 2011. First published in the Sunday Morning Post, January 29, 2012.

“The Minimalist” by Mitchell D. Stocks. A version of “The Minimalist” first appeared in Waterhouse Review, December 2012.

“Strawberry Shakes” by Amanda Webster. First published in a slightly different form in Alimentum Issue 11, Winter 2011, under the byline Amanda Skelton.

“The Before & in the After” by Mags Webster. First published in Westerly, Vol. 57, 2, 2012.

“You voyage my body—” by Mags Webster. First published in Desde Hong Kong: Poets in Conversation with Octavio Paz, Chameleon Press, 2014.

“No. 9” by Denis Wong. First published in Drunken Boat 21, April 2015.

“It” by Genevieve Wong. “It” was named 2014 “Best of Prose” winner for Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine. First published in Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, Fall 2014.

Contributors

Joy Al-Sofi | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

Joy writes stories, poetry and essays and is a now-and-then blogger at

hksounds.wordpress.com.

Quenntis Ashby | 2011 Poetry

Yuanlin, Taiwan

Quenntis is a multifaceted poet. He dances with words every day.

Sebastian Bitticks | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Chicago, United States

Sebastian worked as a teacher and journalist in Hong Kong and Taipei starting in 2005. He returned to the United States in late 2014.

Andrea Brittan | 2010 Fiction

Derbyshire, England

Andrea is currently seeking representation for her first novel, “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” A second novel and a short story collection are in progress.

Kevin Brown | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Irvine, Calif., United States

Kevin’s fascination with Asia began in Tokyo and continued in Taipei. His love for writing and Asian culture found a natural home at the CityU MFA program.

Arthur Chan | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

Arthur is a writer of fiction from Hong Kong. He loves art and science.

Rebekah Chan | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

Rebekah is from Toronto, Canada. She writes personal and lyric essays and the occasional zuihitsu. Her writing can be found in The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review.

Twigs Chen | 2011 Fiction

Singapore

Twigs enjoys throwing peculiar combinations of tropes and genres against the wall to see what sticks. She is currently working on her first novel.

Joey Chin | 2013 Poetry

Singapore

Joey is a writer and artist from Singapore. Her works have appeared in Drunken Boat, Hayden’s Ferry Review, QLRS and Anthropology and Humanism.

Sheree Chua | 2010 Fiction

Manila, Philippines

Sheree writes fiction.

Ame Coombs | 2013 Poetry

Hong Kong

Originally from Hong Kong, Ame is a former English language and literature teacher. She enjoys the poetic experience.

Fan Dai | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Guangzhou, China

Fan writes short stories and essays. She is now working on a collection of family stories and a biography.

Ash Dean | 2013 Poetry

Suzhou, China

Ash is the author of the chapbook Cardiography. He is currently working on a full-length manuscript based on Cardiography, and a novella entitled “Moon Jar.”

Karla P. Delgado | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Really? A farmer? Loving life in the hills of Silang. Karla is growing her own food. Teaching sustainability and green living. Happy.

Jordan Dotson | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Jordan is a hopeful novelist from Virginia, United States. His work has appeared in Drunken Boat and MaLa Literary Journal.

Clint Ettinger | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Clint is an English lecturer and member of the final cohort. One of these days he will finish that novel he’s been working on.

Peter Goff | 2014 Fiction

Dublin, Ireland

A former journalist, Peter now runs the Bookworm bookshops/cafés in China and its annual literary festival.

Carmen Ho | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

In the future, Carmen will be the author of several novels and short story collections. Now, however, she is a struggling, unknown writer.

Huang Haisu | 2011 Fiction

Dalian, China

Originally from Heilongjiang province, Haisu travels between fiction and creative nonfiction and writes what moves her.

Hung Der | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Toronto, Canada

A dentist in Toronto for forty years, Hung won a nonfiction competition for “Paper Son” in the White Wall Review in 2013.

Lucy Hungerford | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

Lucy writes plays and short fiction and is currently struggling with her first novel.

Sreedhevi Iyer | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Sree has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She guest-edited Drunken Boat’s special Hong Kong folio in 2015 and the March 2016 issue of Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Sophie Kalkreuth | 2011 Fiction

New York, United States

Sophie is a freelance journalist and writes about architecture and urbanism, travel and culture. She is also working on a collection of short stories.

Hayley Katzen | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Ewingar, Australia

Originally from South Africa, Hayley has lived on an Australian cattle farm for the past decade. Her essays have been published in American and Australian journals.

Judy Keung | 2012 Creative Nonfiction & Poetry

Hong Kong

Judy’s collection Footprints and Other Poems was published in 2005. She has also been published in Prairie Schooner, Becoming Poets | the Asian Experience and Desde Hong Kong.

Miho Kinnas | 2012 Poetry

Hilton Head Island, S.C., United States

Miho writes poems; she has also ventured out with a review of The Incarnations by Susan Barker (The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society China, September 2016).

Jennifer Lee | 2013 Fiction

Palo Alto, Calif., United States

Jennifer has (temporarily?) abandoned her novel (excerpts here) for a short story collection.

Sonia FL Leung | 2014 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

Sonia is a wanna-be writer disguised as a corporate executive. She’s working on her memoir, which will be her first book. She writes essays, too.

Natalie Lord | 2010 Fiction

London, England

Natalie is a journalist-turned-writer. She began her career reporting for The Financial Times and has recently completed her debut novel, “Lines in the Sand.”

Jenn Chan Lyman | 2010 Fiction

Shanghai, China

Jenn has roots in Hong Kong and California. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has appeared in Griffith Review, Salamander and The Queen of Statue Square.

Adnan Mahmutovic | 2011 Fiction

Stockholm, Sweden

A Bosnian-Swedish novelist and short story writer, Adnan leads an MA in Transnational Writing at Stockholm University, the first of its kind.

Tata Mapa | 2014 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Tata is a magazine writer, stylist and editor. In her less glossy work, she touches on the issues of the modern and global Filipino.

Saffron Marchant | 2014 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

A serial expatriate and recovering lawyer, Saffron is working on a book-length memoir, extracts of which have been anthologized.

Elizabeth Marshall | 2011 Poetry

Petaling Jaya, Malaysia

Elizabeth is a Malaysian who loves the ghazal form. Sexing Kofhee is her debut collection of poems.

Anneli Matheson | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Boston, United States

Anneli teaches teen creative writing classes at Grub Street, co-edited a poetry anthology / cookbook for Black Lawrence Press and reads nonfiction submissions for various publications.

ML | 2014 Poetry

Hong Kong

ML is a Hong Kong native and poet. She completed her MFA in 2016.

Sophie Monatte | 2012 Fiction

Esher, England

Though she’s also lived in the United States and Asia for the past twelve years, Sophie seems unable to write about anything but her hometown in France.

Colum Murphy | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Shanghai, China

Colum is a writer and editor with Shanghai-based news website

www.sixthtone.com.

Claire Noble | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Edwards, Colo., United States

Claire writes opinion columns for the Vail Daily. Channeling partisan opinions into her writing preserves friendships and family harmony.

Peter Phillips | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Born in Sydney, Peter moved to Hong Kong in 2008. He is father to an MFA of middling short stories and a daughter called Nora.

Robert Powers | 2012 Fiction

Lafayette, Ind., United States

Robert is, and will be was. At present, he lives 233 km from Buddha, Indiana, and 328 km from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Sonali Raj | 2011 Poetry

Delhi, India

Sonali has a poetry blog at strangetype.blogspot.com. She is writing a book of poems and a memoir. Afternoons she works at an animal hospital.

Jacinta Read | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Oxford, England

Jacinta has written for entrepreneurs, children and a church. She is currently working on a PhD about memoir and theological aesthetics.

Gregg Schroeder | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Gregg writes and edits. He is coordinator of the Tongzhi Literary Group and is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat.

Nicola Sebastian | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Born in Hong Kong, from the Philippines and currently residing in New York, it’s no wonder Nicola spends much of her time, writing or otherwise, wondering where she is.

Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind | 2010 Fiction

Mumbai, India

Lavanya’s debut novel, The Heavens We Chase, will be published by Roli Books in 2016. She is currently working on her second novel.

Keane Shum | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Bangkok, Thailand

Keane is a lawyer from Hong Kong.

John Francis Smith | 2010 Fiction

Republic of Lamma, Hong Kong

John is (still) an aspiring writer but spends most of his spare time in a local café sipping coffee and staring into the distance.

Ingvild Solvang | 2013 Fiction

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Ingvild is a Norwegian aid worker and social anthropologist who has called Indonesia and Asia home for the past sixteen years.

Mitchell D. Stocks | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Mitchell’s stories have appeared in The New Guard Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, Waterhouse Review and the Adirondack Review.

Ember Swift | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Beijing, China

Ember, Canadian musician and writer, is currently shopping her memoir. She writes for several publications and performs regularly with her band. More at www.emberswift.com.

Vivian Tang | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

When not teaching, Vivian is writing a novel, “By Foot or By Feather,” developing online fiction at http://vivian-stories.wix.com/read-on and making notebooks for Feldiejournals at Etsy.

Verena Tay | 2012 Fiction

Singapore

A published writer, editor, storyteller and theater practitioner, Verena

(www.verenatay.com) is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University (2016–19).

Gershom Tse | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

A stranger wherever he goes, a wayfarer and an observer, Gershom seeks to portray the human condition, and straddles the realm between fiction and reality.

Sarah Vallance | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Sarah has won a Pushcart Prize, and had a special mention in Pushcart Prize XL, 2016, and Best American Essays, 2015. Sarah lives with three dogs and a cat.

Danielle Van-De-Broucke | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Danielle writes short stories and essays and is looking to publish her debut novel this year.

Kamana Srikanth Venkataraman | 2014 Fiction

Chennai, India

Kamana writes short stories and hopes to complete her first novel soon.

Amanda Webster | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Amanda mourns the MFA program’s closure. Her first book was The Boy Who Loved Apples. A Tear in the Soul is forthcoming in 2016.

Mags Webster | 2012 Poetry

Hong Kong

Mags’s book The Weather of Tongues won Australia’s Anne Elder Award for debut collection of poetry. More at magswebster.com.

Denis Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Denis was born in New York City. His stories have appeared in Gemini Magazine, Hyphen Magazine, Drunken Boat and The Margins.

Genevieve Wong | 2014 Fiction

Singapore

A lover of words, dreams, explorations and nice people, Genevieve’s decision to do an MFA was the best she had ever made. To the tribe!

Michelle Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Michelle is a conformist in most things but in writing she tries her hardest to be fearless. The smell of old books turns her on.

Nicholas Wong | 2010 Poetry

Hong Kong

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press), Lambda Literary Award, 2016.

Mable Woo | 2010 Fiction

San Francisco, United States

Mable writes (mostly short stories) to appease the voices only she can hear.

Alistair Yong | 2011 Fiction

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

An introvert who reads and writes fiction, Alistair regularly does battle with characters from his collection of short stories.

Fiction‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Esher, England‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Though she’s also lived in the United States and Asia for the past twelve years, Sophie seems unable to write about anything but her hometown in France.

Claire Noble | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Edwards, Colo., United States

Claire writes opinion columns for the Vail Daily. Channeling partisan opinions into her writing preserves friendships and family harmony.

Peter Phillips | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Born in Sydney, Peter moved to Hong Kong in 2008. He is father to an MFA of middling short stories and a daughter called Nora.

Robert Powers | 2012 Fiction

Lafayette, Ind., United States

Robert is, and will be was. At present, he lives 233 km from Buddha, Indiana, and 328 km from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Sonali Raj | 2011 Poetry

Delhi, India

Sonali has a poetry blog at strangetype.blogspot.com. She is writing a book of poems and a memoir. Afternoons she works at an animal hospital.

Jacinta Read | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Oxford, England

Jacinta has written for entrepreneurs, children and a church. She is currently working on a PhD about memoir and theological aesthetics.

Blair Reeve | 2012 Fiction

Hong Kong

Blair published a poetic narrative / picture book, Hogart The Hedeghog Turns Nink, in 2015. Greta von Gerbil And Her Really Large Lexicon is coming soon.

Gregg Schroeder | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Gregg writes, edits and is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat. He is coordinator of the Tongzhi Literary Group.

Nicola Sebastian | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Born in Hong Kong, from the Philippines and currently residing in New York, it’s no wonder Nicola spends much of her time, writing or otherwise, wondering where she is.

Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind | 2010 Fiction

Mumbai, India

Lavanya’s debut novel, The Heavens We Chase, will be published by Roli Books in 2016. She is currently working on her second novel.

Keane Shum | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Bangkok, Thailand

Keane is a lawyer from Hong Kong.

John Francis Smith | 2010 Fiction

Republic of Lamma, Hong Kong

John is (still) an aspiring writer but spends most of his spare time in a local café sipping coffee and staring into the distance.

Ingvild Solvang | 2013 Fiction

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Ingvild is a Norwegian aid worker and social anthropologist who has called Indonesia and Asia home for the past sixteen years.

Mitchell D. Stocks | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Mitchell’s stories have appeared in The New Guard Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, Waterhouse Review and the Adirondack Review.

Ember Swift | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Beijing, China

Ember, Canadian musician and writer, is currently shopping her memoir. She writes for several publications and performs regularly with her band. More at www.emberswift.com.

Vivian Tang | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

When not teaching, Vivian is writing a novel, “By Foot or By Feather,” developing online fiction at http | //vivian-stories.wix.com/read-on and making notebooks for Feldiejournals at Etsy.

Verena Tay | 2012 Fiction

Singapore

A published writer, editor, storyteller and theater practitioner, Verena (www.verenatay.com) is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University (2016–19).

Gershom Tse | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

A stranger wherever he goes, a wayfarer and an observer, Gershom seeks to portray the human condition, and straddles the realm between fiction and reality.

Sarah Vallance | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Sarah has won a Pushcart Prize, and had a special mention in Pushcart Prize XL 2016 and Best American Essays 2015. Sarah lives with three dogs and a cat.

Danielle Van-De-Broucke | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Danielle writes short stories and essays and is looking to publish her debut novel this year.

Kamana Srikanth Venkataraman | 2014 Fiction

Chennai, India

Kamana writes short stories and hopes to complete her first novel soon.

Amanda Webster | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Amanda mourns the MFA program’s closure. Her first book was The Boy Who Loved Apples. A Tear in the Soul is forthcoming in 2016.

Mags Webster | 2012 Poetry

Hong Kong

Mags’s book The Weather of Tongues won Australia’s Anne Elder Award for debut collection of poetry. More at magswebster.com.

Denis Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Denis was born in New York City. His stories have appeared in Gemini Magazine, Hyphen Magazine, Drunken Boat and The Margins.

Genevieve Wong | 2014 Fiction

Singapore

A lover of words, dreams, explorations and nice people, Genevieve’s decision to do an MFA was the best she had ever made. To the tribe!

Michelle Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Michelle is a conformist in most things but in writing she tries her hardest to be fearless. The smell of old books turns her on.

Nicholas Wong | 2010 Poetry

Hong Kong

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press).

Mable Woo | 2010 Fiction

San Francisco, United States

Mable writes (mostly short stories) to appease the voices only she can hear.

Alistair Yong | 2011 Fiction

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

An introvert who reads and writes fiction, Alistair regularly does battle with characters from his collection of short stories.

S‪Fiction‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Esher, England‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Though she’s also lived in the United States and Asia for the past twelve years, Sophie seems unable to write about anything but her hometown in France.

‪Fiction‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Esher, England‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Though she’s also lived in the United States and Asia for the past twelve years, Sophie seems unable to write about anything but her hometown in France.

Claire Noble | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Edwards, Colo., United States

Claire writes opinion columns for the Vail Daily. Channeling partisan opinions into her writing preserves friendships and family harmony.

Peter Phillips | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Born in Sydney, Peter moved to Hong Kong in 2008. He is father to an MFA of middling short stories and a daughter called Nora.

Robert Powers | 2012 Fiction

Lafayette, Ind., United States

Robert is, and will be was. At present, he lives 233 km from Buddha, Indiana, and 328 km from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Sonali Raj | 2011 Poetry

Delhi, India

Sonali has a poetry blog at strangetype.blogspot.com. She is writing a book of poems and a memoir. Afternoons she works at an animal hospital.

Jacinta Read | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Oxford, England

Jacinta has written for entrepreneurs, children and a church. She is currently working on a PhD about memoir and theological aesthetics.

Blair Reeve | 2012 Fiction

Hong Kong

Blair published a poetic narrative / picture book, Hogart The Hedeghog Turns Nink, in 2015. Greta von Gerbil And Her Really Large Lexicon is coming soon.

Gregg Schroeder | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Gregg writes, edits and is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat. He is coordinator of the Tongzhi Literary Group.

Nicola Sebastian | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Born in Hong Kong, from the Philippines and currently residing in New York, it’s no wonder Nicola spends much of her time, writing or otherwise, wondering where she is.

Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind | 2010 Fiction

Mumbai, India

Lavanya’s debut novel, The Heavens We Chase, will be published by Roli Books in 2016. She is currently working on her second novel.

Keane Shum | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Bangkok, Thailand

Keane is a lawyer from Hong Kong.

John Francis Smith | 2010 Fiction

Republic of Lamma, Hong Kong

John is (still) an aspiring writer but spends most of his spare time in a local café sipping coffee and staring into the distance.

Ingvild Solvang | 2013 Fiction

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Ingvild is a Norwegian aid worker and social anthropologist who has called Indonesia and Asia home for the past sixteen years.

Mitchell D. Stocks | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Mitchell’s stories have appeared in The New Guard Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, Waterhouse Review and the Adirondack Review.

Ember Swift | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Beijing, China

Ember, Canadian musician and writer, is currently shopping her memoir. She writes for several publications and performs regularly with her band. More at www.emberswift.com.

Vivian Tang | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

When not teaching, Vivian is writing a novel, “By Foot or By Feather,” developing online fiction at http | //vivian-stories.wix.com/read-on and making notebooks for Feldiejournals at Etsy.

Verena Tay | 2012 Fiction

Singapore

A published writer, editor, storyteller and theater practitioner, Verena (www.verenatay.com) is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University (2016–19).

Gershom Tse | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

A stranger wherever he goes, a wayfarer and an observer, Gershom seeks to portray the human condition, and straddles the realm between fiction and reality.

Sarah Vallance | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Sarah has won a Pushcart Prize, and had a special mention in Pushcart Prize XL 2016 and Best American Essays 2015. Sarah lives with three dogs and a cat.

Danielle Van-De-Broucke | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Danielle writes short stories and essays and is looking to publish her debut novel this year.

Kamana Srikanth Venkataraman | 2014 Fiction

Chennai, India

Kamana writes short stories and hopes to complete her first novel soon.

Amanda Webster | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Amanda mourns the MFA program’s closure. Her first book was The Boy Who Loved Apples. A Tear in the Soul is forthcoming in 2016.

Mags Webster | 2012 Poetry

Hong Kong & Perth, Australia

Mags’s book The Weather of Tongues won Australia’s Anne Elder Award for debut collection of poetry. More at magswebster.com.

Denis Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Denis was born in New York City. His stories have appeared in Gemini Magazine, Hyphen Magazine, Drunken Boat and The Margins.

Genevieve Wong | 2014 Fiction

Singapore

A lover of words, dreams, explorations and nice people, Genevieve’s decision to do an MFA was the best she had ever made. To the tribe!

Michelle Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Michelle is a conformist in most things but in writing she tries her hardest to be fearless. The smell of old books turns her on.

Nicholas Wong | 2010 Poetry

Hong Kong

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press).

Mable Woo | 2010 Fiction

San Francisco, United States

Mable writes (mostly short stories) to appease the voices only she can hear.

Alistair Yong | 2011 Fiction

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

An introvert who reads and writes fiction, Alistair regularly does battle with characters from his collection of short stories.

‪Fiction‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Esher, England‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

Though she’s also lived in the United States and Asia for the past twelve years, Sophie seems unable to write about anything but her hometown in France.

Claire Noble | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Edwards, Colo., United States

Claire writes opinion columns for the Vail Daily. Channeling partisan opinions into her writing preserves friendships and family harmony.

Peter Phillips | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Born in Sydney, Peter moved to Hong Kong in 2008. He is father to an MFA of middling short stories and a daughter called Nora.

Robert Powers | 2012 Fiction

Lafayette, Ind., United States

Robert is, and will be was. At present, he lives 233 km from Buddha, Indiana, and 328 km from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Sonali Raj | 2011 Poetry

Delhi, India

Sonali has a poetry blog at strangetype.blogspot.com. She is writing a book of poems and a memoir. Afternoons she works at an animal hospital.

Jacinta Read | 2010 Creative Nonfiction

Oxford, England

Jacinta has written for entrepreneurs, children and a church. She is currently working on a PhD about memoir and theological aesthetics.

Blair Reeve | 2012 Fiction

Hong Kong

Blair published a poetic narrative / picture book, Hogart The Hedeghog Turns Nink, in 2015. Greta von Gerbil And Her Really Large Lexicon is coming soon.

Gregg Schroeder | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Gregg writes, edits and is on the editorial board of Drunken Boat. He is coordinator of the Tongzhi Literary Group.

Nicola Sebastian | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Manila, Philippines

Born in Hong Kong, from the Philippines and currently residing in New York, it’s no wonder Nicola spends much of her time, writing or otherwise, wondering where she is.

Lavanya Shanbhogue-Arvind | 2010 Fiction

Mumbai, India

Lavanya’s debut novel, The Heavens We Chase, will be published by Roli Books in 2016. She is currently working on her second novel.

Keane Shum | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Bangkok, Thailand

Keane is a lawyer from Hong Kong.

John Francis Smith | 2010 Fiction

Republic of Lamma, Hong Kong

John is (still) an aspiring writer but spends most of his spare time in a local café sipping coffee and staring into the distance.

Ingvild Solvang | 2013 Fiction

Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Ingvild is a Norwegian aid worker and social anthropologist who has called Indonesia and Asia home for the past sixteen years.

Mitchell D. Stocks | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Mitchell’s stories have appeared in The New Guard Literary Review, Prick of the Spindle, Waterhouse Review and the Adirondack Review.

Ember Swift | 2013 Creative Nonfiction

Beijing, China

Ember, Canadian musician and writer, is currently shopping her memoir. She writes for several publications and performs regularly with her band. More at www.emberswift.com.

Vivian Tang | 2011 Fiction

Hong Kong

When not teaching, Vivian is writing a novel, “By Foot or By Feather,” developing online fiction at http | //vivian-stories.wix.com/read-on and making notebooks for Feldiejournals at Etsy.

Verena Tay | 2012 Fiction

Singapore

A published writer, editor, storyteller and theater practitioner, Verena (www.verenatay.com) is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at Swansea University (2016–19).

Gershom Tse | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Hong Kong

A stranger wherever he goes, a wayfarer and an observer, Gershom seeks to portray the human condition, and straddles the realm between fiction and reality.

Sarah Vallance | 2011 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Sarah has won a Pushcart Prize, and had a special mention in Pushcart Prize XL 2016 and Best American Essays 2015. Sarah lives with three dogs and a cat.

Danielle Van-De-Broucke | 2014 Fiction

Hong Kong

Danielle writes short stories and essays and is looking to publish her debut novel this year.

Kamana Srikanth Venkataraman | 2014 Fiction

Chennai, India

Kamana writes short stories and hopes to complete her first novel soon.

Amanda Webster | 2012 Creative Nonfiction

Sydney, Australia

Amanda mourns the MFA program’s closure. Her first book was The Boy Who Loved Apples. A Tear in the Soul is forthcoming in 2016.

Mags Webster | 2012 Poetry

Hong Kong & Perth, Australia

Mags’s book The Weather of Tongues won Australia’s Anne Elder Award for debut collection of poetry. More at magswebster.com.

Denis Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Denis was born in New York City. His stories have appeared in Gemini Magazine, Hyphen Magazine, Drunken Boat and The Margins.

Genevieve Wong | 2014 Fiction

Singapore

A lover of words, dreams, explorations and nice people, Genevieve’s decision to do an MFA was the best she had ever made. To the tribe!

Michelle Wong | 2010 Fiction

Hong Kong

Michelle is a conformist in most things but in writing she tries her hardest to be fearless. The smell of old books turns her on.

Nicholas Wong | 2010 Poetry

Hong Kong

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press).

Mable Woo | 2010 Fiction

San Francisco, United States

Mable writes (mostly short stories) to appease the voices only she can hear.

Alistair Yong | 2011 Fiction

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

An introvert who reads and writes fiction, Alistair regularly does battle with characters from his collection of short stories.

Faculty Notes

The MFA program at CityU was more than a place; it was a state of mind. With students and faculty bringing different languages, experiences, cultures and perspectives, the program offered me the chance to inhabit a literary world as it should and could be, but often is not. I’ll always carry with me the lasting friendships, food, dancing, hidden stars above rooftop terraces, drinks mysteriously materializing, laughter, students’ stories transporting me to different lands, readings that left me without air, work that has transformed me. I’m grateful that the heart and soul of CityU carries on through the writing and vision of its alumni who will continue to make their mark on the world.

Sybil Baker

When Xu Xi proposed the idea of the first-ever low residency MFA in Asia, I was on board immediately. Nothing prepared me for the beauty of the community which developed over the span of the program’s life. We gathered not only to discuss writing, craft and technique but inspiration, soul and heart. Each of us kept one another going through emails and online discussions though it was our face-to-face meetings that gathered some of the world’s greatest spirits together for both learning and celebration. The foundation has been established for future collaborations, programs and literary friendships that will last a lifetime. I can only feel honored to have been involved in CityU’s MFA program and to have met our future writers whose stars shine so brightly.

Tina Chang

Teaching at CityU gave me a window on the Asian imagination, and on the imagination of Asia by the acutely observant, articulate and even refreshingly irreverent visitor. We had something truly unique and special going on at CityU, and its impact will be most strongly felt in the books we’ll be reading in the years to come from our graduates and teaching staff all over – works enabled by their authors’ exposure to a vibrant intellectual cosmopolis in one of the world’s most dynamic and challenging environments. In the end, that global cosmopolitanism will be the CityU MFA program’s most visible and valuable trademark.

Jose Dalisay

CityU MFA: The Tally

What I Miss

What I Do Not Miss

Royal Park Hotel, including elevator announcements in English, Mandarin and Cantonese

The Food …

… except the break-time snack selection at Pacific Coffee

MTR and my Octopus Card

Our nights on the town

… but not the mornings after

Workshop

Student portfolios (the creativity, the earnest grappling)

Student readings, faculty readings: great energy, great original material

Talking about writing (in rooftop bars, cafés, public transport, basically everywhere)

And most of all: You, the students and faculty. Hard to find a finer, funner, more talented group of people, as evidenced by this anthology. So when’s the reunion?

Evan Fallenberg

Owed to MFA, W.S. (and a Nod to Star Wars)

When shall the Jedi meet again?

At the Royal Park in Kowloon

In thunder, lightning or monsoon?

Will it be at Ryan’s

When the hurly-burly’s done?

We shall hoist as usual

More than a few at Festival

And write what we know:

To the bureaucrats at CityU,

For whom foul is fair, and fair, foul:

Boo!

To grandmaster Xu Xi and the fellowship of MFA:

Hurray!

To my weird sisters and brothers,

High-wire artists and fire-walkers,

Comrades-in-pen, we’ll always soar

Higher than Victoria Peak, delight in

Irking the empire with our sabers of light,

Our ungovernable treasure, beyond

The measure of balance sheets – and

For all to keep: Our words.

Luis H. Francia

I was fortunate enough to be one of the inaugural faculty of the MFA in Creative Writing at City University – there was never anything like it before and I can only hope that something like it will spring up again in Asia. What I loved about the program was its diversity, which seemed natural and unforced. There was no sense of tokenism either in the selection of students or faculty. It was truly diverse and brought together a uniquely talented and inspiring collection of voices and backgrounds that forged an inseparable bond despite the bureaucratic decisions that ultimately terminated this wonderful program.

Robin Hemley

In 2009 Xu Xi met me in a Starbucks in Tsim Sha Tsui to tell me about this new idea she was working on with CityU.

The next day I met with Rodney Jones and Kingsley Bolton and then I was on the team.

My five and a half years at CityU coincided with the life of the program. The MFA vibe was all that a writers or a literary festival should be.

It was a Popeye tin of spinach – bursting at the seams with energy, ideas, creativity and a shared sense of literary adventure; it was a week’s vacation from RealLife™; it was a place to think and listen and feel the walls of your world dissolve and grow – and it was all you could do to find the new boundaries.

The MFA was home. I miss it.

Justin Hill

I have fond memories of my two visits to teach at Hong Kong, and the students I supervised long distance. I remember the seminars and discussions, in and out of class, the readings, outings, dinners ... and over it all Xu Xi and her excellent team hovering like guardian angels. It was a lively program, which brought out the best in students and teachers, and it is a pity that it was closed down.

Tabish Khair

We exchange more than the power of the word. What passes between us all are ways of being, ways of looking. Varied cultures pushing back the idea of one single center. Writing both a consequence and a seed of vision. I watch each one who comes to learn, transforming in thought and word, going far, with what they already had inside them. Our meetings simply enable this movement. As I watch this I am myself moved, that is, I, too, do not remain as I was. I use the present tense because our communion here is far beyond borders and bureaucracy and their finitude. It is boundless and will remain so, across oceans, skies and continents.

Sharmistha Mohanty

What did I love about City University? I’d have to begin with the fiercely talented, smart, brave students. Those moments of realizing all we who sat in one of those rooms in the Creative Media Centre came from wildly different places, countries, cultures, even languages of origin, and all had arrived here, together, in pursuit of art. The faculty, also bringing such different perspectives, but like the students always open to sharing and trying new things. It felt like a rare serendipity, for a writing program to be so diverse and truly international and yet so warm and welcoming, and prolific of great words.

Suzanne Paola

The CityU MFA was a joyful thing. It rightfully took delight in itself. I never saw anyone lose their elation at being permitted to write what they needed to write, at the chance to spend time with kindred spirits working out how best to write it.

Joy in literature. Joy that we had found each other. Joy in the place we found ourselves and the places we’d brought with us. Joy at the way those worlds collided and colluded.

The spirit of this MFA was irrepressible, and it will live on.

James Scudamore

When I imagine the epoch of City University of Hong Kong’s MFA program, I see the faces of all the amazing, multilingual students and my fellow faculty first. Then I see the embodied education: those readings turning into performance art spaces, else all of us congregating at Festival Walk or on a rooftop to talk about crafting a voice, the harbor laid out before us, a banquet, like our words in the air of a shared room, stories and poems that range around the world, a digging deeper into our idea of ourselves and our home. Later yet, I remember the food and drink we share, the joy we incarnate together. Finally, a word springs to mind: family.

Ravi Shankar

I tell my students to avoid sentimentality when writing. I tell them that a reader will get and understand emotion if they’ve set it up right. But I can’t help but think there are places for the sentimental. Places like those long summer days in a city that doesn’t stop, where heat sizzles the skin and the rain is a little bit like holy water. Places that are completely foreign but still possess all of the sensations of home, all the warmth of comfort, like an embrace. Places with people so devoted to the betterment of the world through the written word, people with large hearts, large voices, exchanging ideas, striving always to be better. Being part of the CityU MFA family has been an honor I will never forget.

Ira Sukrungruang

I loved working with you all, and learned so much. All our voices met, and were changed by the meeting. This is a beautiful thing, and now something else, in your language, work and lives will come into being. Italo Calvino writes, “The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary.” Make art. Don’t forget.

Madeleine Thien

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Editor’s Note

Introduction

POETRY

Re: work

A Girl

Night Owl

My So-Called Soul

God

II Shadow Tales

Lag

Anagram

You voyage my body–

You, Me and Mory

A writer’s fantasia

Perhaps

Surfers & Flounders: The Golden Shovel

Pistachios

Poem for the Left Hand

The Before & in the After

Ονοματοποιία

On Poetry

Queen Among Leaves

Glooskap

The Other Night

Bear Weds Rabbit: An Ukiyo-e Fable

FICTION

An Interview with My MFA Testamur, Nearly Four Years after It Was Issued

No. 9

The Protester

Vigil

A Special Gift

Domestic Arrangements

Dayshift Done

By Foot or By Feather: Excerpt from the Novel

Breathing Under Water

The Sheep Years

Heavy Lifting

The Hitting Curse

The Faeries of St. Monica

In Water My Dreams

The Minimalist

The Sparrow, the Princess and the Emerald

Shades of Resistance: Eight Flash Fiction Stories

Green Grass: Excerpt from the Short Story

To the Mountain: Excerpts from the Novel

Blueprint

The Extinctionists: Excerpt from the Short Story

The Police Station

Origins of a Name: Excerpt from the Novel, “Venga Venga Venga”

Chapter One: Excerpt from the Novel, “Lines in the Sand”

Seagull

If You Love Me Stay Sane

The Road to Hell

Fragments

NONFICTION

Prospectus

Things That Have Happened Since Starting the CityU MFA (Polyamorous)

My Un-Asian Manifesto

Bachelor Brothers

False Alarm

Strawberry Shakes

#yourcamp #survivorsguilt

Next of Kin

How to Be Alone

Requiem

Rocky Mountain Red-Eye

The Stranger

Half My Hundred-Year Life

It

A Sinking Feeling

Freshly Created Things

The Mark of a Wanderer

Fruit Ninja

We Are All Good Friends!

Stitches: Excerpt from a Memoir

The Moon in a Dog’s Eye

A Basket of Three

The Eternity of the MFA Cup of Tea

Final Exercise

Postscript: The Death of a Program or the Beautiful Irregularity of Amateur Flight

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contributors

Faculty Notes