Asia Literary Review No. 28, Summer 2015

SUMMER 2015

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No. 28, Summer 2015

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No. 28, Summer 2015

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Managing Editor Phillip Kim Senior Editors Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Poetry Editor Kavita A. Jindal Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Alan Sargent Main Cover Image © 2015 Andrew Chan andrewchanart.com Back Cover Image © 2015 QAGOMA. ‘Nomads 2014’ (detail) by Baatarzorig Batjaral, courtesy of Queensland Art Gallery|Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Grant.

This issue is published in collaboration with Griffith Review griffithreview.com Special thanks to Julianne Schultz, Jane Camens, Susan Hornbeck and John Tague The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2/F 3 Sha Po New Village, Lamma Island, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Subscriptions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Sales@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-12155-5-0 ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2015 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2015 Greater Talent Limited

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Contents Editorial

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Fiction Man of the People

17

Maggie Tiojakin

Father, Son

42

Anjum Hasan

Black Origami Birds

65

Siobhan Harvey

Stress Management

101

Glenn L. Diaz

A Little Life

133

Sheng Keyi, translated by Shelly Bryant

Supernova

172

Omar Musa

A Cottage for Sale

189

Ploy Pirapokin

Non-fiction Half a Butterfly

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Ellen van Neerven

The Asian Invasion

50

Jessie Cole

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Kashmir’s Bitter War

93

Majid Maqbool

Ripples from Hong Kong

158

Keane Shum

Poetry The Umbrella Men

26

Joshua Ip

The Hanged Man Sings Kathmandu

47

Manan Karki

Roll Call

91

Jang Jin-sung, translated by Shirley Lee

Pollen Fever

131

ko ko thett

Vacuum

152

Nicholas Wong

Essay Beating Dickheads

29

Miguel Syjuco

Made in Cool Japan

56

Sally McLaren

Chinese Thinking in the Age of the Internet

80

Murong Xuecun

All For the People, Without the People

115

André Dao

Let Bygones Be Bygones

180

Prodita Sabarini

Contributors

204

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Editorial Edit orial

Asians and Australians: when one group is asked about the other, the immediate response often abounds with stereotypes.

To Asians, Australia has been viewed as a Californicated England – a vastness of middle-class Anglo Saxons enjoying an outdoors life of surfboards, ripe wines and Commonwealth sports. Aussies are what Brits become when clouds and wind are permanently shooed away by a hot, dry sun, and starched collars are discarded for untucked linen shirts.

Australia is a land blessed with both abundant mineral reserves and a vibrant democracy – a rare combination in a world where nations are too often endowed with one but not both assets.

To Australians, Asians have been their antithesis. The Asian world is one of chaotic growth – other-skinned people scurrying up and away from histories long mired in poverty, conflict and repression. Their energy seems relentless, sometimes threatening. Asia is life spice – a piquancy for an otherwise stable or bland existence, flavouring that enlivens local communities with diversity, energises economies, and stirs up the native cuisine. ‘’Roo tails cooked in coals’ have given way to ‘’roo curry’, according to aboriginal Yugambeh writer Ellen van Neerven.

However, as with all constructive dialogue, continuing engagement reveals a far more complex and subtle picture. Firstly, Australia and Asia are anything but homogeneous: each contains large populations of people whose identities – race, religion, values, politics – differ widely, often violently. To many of them, labels such as ‘Australian’ or ‘Asian’ are too broad to be meaningful. Furthermore, few things are more dynamic or vexing than human interaction. As observer, as analyst, as scribe, any of us at best simply tries to keep up with what’s going on. Inevitably,

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Editorial

labels – inadequate though they might be – can at least provide a useful frame for further questioning.

In mid-2014, Australia’s Griffith Review set out to create a virtual community of Australian and Asian literary talent by inviting writers born after 1970 to reflect on contemporary Asia and the tumultuous change that the region has undergone during their lifetimes. The collection was jointly edited by Griffith Review’s Julianne Shultz and Asia Pacific Writers & Translators’ Jane Camens, and produced in collaboration with the Asia Literary Review. This issue of the ALR is a selection of articles that appear in Griffith Review’s New Asia Now, being published in parallel.

What themes have emerged from the resulting dialogue? Naturally, many of the Asian authors have chosen certain well-established topics when addressing audiences from Western countries such as Australia. As expected, there is politics, where comparisons between Asian and Australian systems highlight current or past inadequacies – and hilarities – in countries such as Indonesia (Maggie Tiojakin), the Philippines (Miguel Syjuco), Vietnam (Andre Dao) and Malaysia (Omar Musa).

Asian contributors have also felt compelled to open up on human rights shortcomings, whether in Kashmir (Majid Maqbool), China (Murong Xuecun), North Korea (Jang Jin-sung) or Hong Kong (Joshua Ip). The Australian writing has a different resonance, some using Asian motifs such as manga (Sally McLaren) and origami (Siobhan Harvey) to tell their stories, while others explore the prickly and seemingly intractable issue of racial tension (Jessie Cole) that exists in some Australian communities.

Many of the pieces represent a reaching out by disparate types of people who have shared a common experience (Asia). They acknowledge that many differences in perspective exist, but so too does an irrepressible desire to bridge the gaps. Their writings are a nudge for action or a plea for better understanding.

More tellingly, though, many of the works that simply explore an author’s own world reveal an essential universality amongst all of us.

Stories detailing family conflict – an unwanted pregnancy in China, father-son alienation in India – speak to anyone confronting the complications of everyday life. The tragedy of death or dementia, whether it occurs in Japan or Thailand, flattens any person whose loved one has

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Editorial

been so victimised. A Nepalese poem that eerily foreshadowed the recent earthquakes reminds us all of our frailty in the face of nature’s stirrings.

Yet, in our lighter moments, as we contemplate how information technology has transformed our lives, we also can’t help but wonder about call centres in the Philippines or India and what human melodramas might be playing out amongst their legions of cheerily-voiced agents.

Most powerful is the metaphor of Gondwana, the southern half of the Pangaea supercontinent that separated some 200 million years ago to become the continental landmasses familiar to us today. As Gondwana itself fractured, some of it drifted north to collide with Laurasia (the northern half of Pangaea) to form India and the Himalayas, while other parts settled in the Southern hemisphere to form Australia, New Zealand and Antarctica. As explained by author Ellen van Neerven in her essay ‘Half a Butterfly’, the geology, flora and fauna between the various parts of Gondwana share much in common, though they are now oceans apart. That many similar species of fauna, including dogs and butterflies, exist in India, Papua New Guinea and Australia owes much to the migration of humans that have continued throughout history. In short, we have been and always will be wanderers, as well as wonderers. Our individual perspectives and fortunes seem forever destined to follow courses that intertwine, then merge. Advancing technologies, widening human liberties and increasing dialogue only accelerate that process. Collectively, though oceans and hemispheres may divide us, our commonality is a seismic force more impactful than the shifting of tectonic plates beneath our feet.

Phillip Kim Martin Alexander

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Asia House, a centre of expertise on Asia in London, is an established and exciting part of London’s cultural scene. Presenting over 100 events a year, including the Asia House Bagri Foundation Literature Festival and the Asia House Film Festival, we offer an outstanding selection of opportunities to explore, absorb and enjoy the arts of Asia.

Some of the world’s leading authors, artists and performers have joined us at our Marylebone headquarters. These include Michael Palin, Jung Chang, Elif Shafak, William Dalrymple, Amitav Ghosh, On Kawara and Lancelot Ribeiro. We also work with the world’s leading institutions, such as the British Museum and the National Ballet of China.

Join us to celebrate the best and most interesting art and conversations coming out of Asia today.

Asia House 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP 020 7307 5454 www.asiahouse.org

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asiahouseuk Facebook @asiahouseuk

7 August 2015

Half a Butterfly Half avan Ellen B utterfly Neer ven

Ellen van Neerven

T

he first few days I stayed in Dona Paula, I had a really hard time finding the beaches I’d heard about. My companions and I would walk down the dusty streets, but the roads seemed to curve away from the water at the last minute. We walked for hours in the heat until we reached the end. It wasn’t a beach. There was a jetty, a juice store and plenty of people, but it seemed to be a site used for commercial fishing, unsightly and uninspiring. We stood at the water’s edge and looked back the way we came; there were two beautiful-looking beaches in the direction of our accommodation. But they remained elusive, slipping out of sight on our return.

I was in India as part of LITERARY COMMONS!, a cultural exchange programme between Aboriginal Australian writers and Dalit writers. My companions were Jared Thomas, Nicole Watson and Mridula Nath Chakraborty. We were guests at the Goa Arts and Literary Festival. There were creative types from all over staying at the International Centre and the place was buzzing.

I’ve noticed Australians like to hang out with the Canadians, and that’s what seemed to be happening again when Jared and I met Ulrike Rodrigues, the Vancouver writer of a blog Girl Gone Goa: Travel, sex, magic and cycling in an Indian state.

It was Ulrike who took us to the beach, via a resort. That beach had been under our noses. All we had to do was go through big white gates and walk down a driveway. Guards greeted us as we entered the building

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and we went through a security screen. Outside there was the beach, a swimming pool and a bar. I was eager to walk along the beach, and peered into the ocean, noticing prominent structures of coloured rock.

‘Laterite,’ said Ulrike. ‘Rich in iron ore. That’s why they’re mining so much around here.’

Ulrike often blogged about the love-hate relationship the villagers of Goa have with mining. ‘It provides jobs, but it takes away arable land.

Mining also requires a great deal of fresh water – water that is taken away from villagers’ wells and crops.’

I was taken by the colour of the rock, a deep red. For the first time since I’d arrived in the country, I felt a deep sense of home; laterite is widespread in Australia. Laterite was first named here in Southern India in 1807 by Francis Buchanan-Hamilton from the Latin word ‘later’ meaning ‘brick’.

We sat under the palm trees and watched the sunset with drinks in hand. Ulrike’s paternal grandparents were from here, but her father never spoke of it much, and then he passed away. Growing up in Canada, she denied her Indian heritage. The need for secrecy came from observing schoolyard hatred of South Asians and she grew self-conscious of her tanned skin and dark features. Just a few years ago, Ulrike – who is in her fifties – made contact with a relative who invited her to visit. She felt an instant connection to Goa and travelled the state on her bicycle. The white stripe in her hair had locals comparing her to Indira Gandhi. A self-proclaimed ‘free spirit’, she was not looking forward to going back to a ‘normal life’ in Canada. We looked across the ocean at the lowering sun, thinking of home.

Australia and India once cuddled close on the super-continent of Gondwana. India drifted so far north it collided with Asia, and we eventually broke it off with Antarctica. Once side by side, what do we retain of each other, in geography and flora and fauna? This was something that perhaps interested me more than comparisons of our peoples and cultures. There are similarities between the Indian and Australian rainforests that suggest this common ancestry. A survey conducted by Dr Leonard J. Webb at the University of Queensland found that Australian

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Ellen van Neerven

and Indian rainforests share forty-seven species but only forty-one with Papua New Guinea, which was attached to Australia until relatively recently. Australia and New Guinea were a single land mass thirty-five thousand years ago.

In 2011 a discovery was made off the coast of Perth by the University of Sydney’s School of Geosciences. Two landmasses the size of Tasmania were found deep below the ocean’s surface. It wasn’t straightforward, collecting rocks from the abyss more than 1.5 kilometres underwater, though the rocks retrieved unveiled a startling fact. The islands had flat tops, indicating they were once at sea level before gradually being submerged, and tests showed the rock hadn’t always been underwater. The location of these sunken islands is important; in the Cretaceous when dinosaurs walked the Earth (more than 130 million years ago), India was adjacent to Western Australia. The make-up of the rocks suggests how the islands might have fitted into the break-up of Gondwana. When India began to break away from Australia, the newly-discovered islands formed part of the last link between the two continents. Eventually these islands, referred to as ‘micro-continents’ by the geologists, were separated from both landmasses and stranded in the Indian Ocean.

The next morning I was up early, standing outside our accommodation, slightly cold in my T-shirt and loose pants. It was Mridula, our dear ‘chaperone’, the organiser of the trip, who suggested the birdwatching tour. None of my companions had woken to join me. On the drive from Goa airport Mridula had asked, ‘What do you want to see?’ While Nicole and Jared talked about shopping for their relatives and surfing, I said ‘birds’.

‘Should we wait for anyone else?’ Rajiv D’Silva from the Goa Bird Conservation Network asked. I was with a group of bird enthusiasts from different parts of India; we shared two sets of binoculars between the eight of us. We walked first on the main road and Rajiv pointed out kingfishers and drongos on the telephone poles and the eagles circling above. ‘It’s usually the same pair,’ he said. I was impressed by how many birds we saw before we reached the side street, which promised to lead to

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some good old bush. In this lusher area, we saw a tiny purple sunbird.

The bird, otherwise black-looking, glinted like metal in the light.

A birder in the group said he had seen someone coming down the road, possibly trying to catch up with us. We voted to check, and the birder walked quickly towards the stranger. The rest of us stood impatiently in a circle while Rajiv told stories of birdwatching fortune.

A short young Indian woman appeared, dressed all in black, wearing a nose ring. ‘Sorry!’ This was Suneeta. She fell in step beside me. A few minutes into the trail I paused at the sound of a familiar bird, much as I stopped on the beach to look at the rock. Suneeta had also stopped.

Rajiv gave us a knowing smile, ‘You have the myna in Australia?’

‘Yes. The noisy miner.’ This was how I got to know Suneeta as Australian – born in Sydney, but staying with family in Goa. She was a good friend of Mridula, also Sydney-based, and that afternoon we went to the town to have lunch and to do some shoe shopping.

I was affronted by what I saw there, not yet used to the rules and sights of Indian cities, but Suneeta knew her way around. ‘I don’t see her like this in Sydney,’ Mridula whispered to me while Suneeta asked directions for lunch. ‘She’s shy. But in India, it’s funny, because she wasn’t born here, she’s in her element. She’s full of energy.’

Mridula’s observation of Suneeta looking natural in her ancestral environment stayed with me as we made our way to the restaurant. A dog was in front of us, lean and muscular, with powerful limbs and a prominent spine. There were almost more dogs than people on the streets of Goa. Humans and dogs walked past each other mostly with no exchange. I felt they were spirit dogs, and regardless of their colour (some are white, some grey, some yellow, some brown, some black), we agreed they were like dingoes. I couldn’t stop looking at them and feeling they were more aware than any of us.

Marie Munkara, another Australian writer participating in the exchange, told me of her time in Bangalore where a dog embraced her like a friend. His paws on her arms. He knows you, the locals said. He knows you. And when she had to leave, the dog stared at her until she was out of sight.

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To Mridula they are ‘pi dogs’, the name of the indigenous class of primitive dogs of India, but she concedes those in urban areas are usually a mixture of modern breeds. They roam their territories cautiously, the fear of an ambush by tigers or leopards evident in the way they extend their limbs and position their heads.

Recent research suggests Indian migrants might have brought these wild dogs with them into Australia. Genetic history indicates that contact with Indians occurred four thousand years ago, which coincides with the arrival of the dingo. Much is unknown about the arrival and impact of the dingo. First Nations’ groups became fond of these dogs, and perhaps they acclimatised at the expense of the once mainland-spread thylacine.

Some researchers believe the dingo hunted and killed the female thylacines, which were much smaller than the male, while others suggest it was competition for food that favoured the more versatile hunter.

However, these incidents are not usually a simple case of one animal wiping out another, or dingo v. thylacine. Perhaps the answer is more complex. Aboriginal people formed a special bond, dingoes became pets, pups plucked from their dens. There are some old stories that report dingoes were hunting companions, but the idea that dingoes perform the same duties as a retriever or another breed of domesticated hunting dog does not fit. Dingoes are too wild, motivated and distracted by their own needs, and their noisy excitement would jeopardise the hunt. Either way, when Marie sent me photographs of paintings of the thylacine in Arnhem Land, I was struck by how much we have lost in what, for Aboriginal people, is a short time.

We went back to the hotel and prepared for the seminal evening of the festival at the Governor’s house. When I met the others in the lobby, freshly showered and dressed, Mridula had a huge smile, but was definite in tone. ‘You can’t wear jeans.’

I went hastily back to my room and pulled on a pair of colourful feminine trousers, blushing more at the way she had said it. I was still getting used to what I saw as a very direct style of communication.

From a distance I was easily mistaken for Indian and was told I could ‘get away with it in the North, where the women are lighter-skinned’.

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And Jared was decoded as a ‘Mark Waugh lookalike; a Waugh brother’, hinting also at the tendency for conversations between us and the locals to begin with cricket. Given a chance to explain our background, Jared would eagerly repeat the story about his aunty marrying an Indian man: ‘We used to cook ’roo tails in the coals, now we have ’roo curry,’ explaining the Aboriginal–Indian connections in his family. Indian people were thirsty for knowledge about our culture and easily grasped narratives of colonisation.

The Australian Indians, Mridula and Suneeta, were able to look at us from sometimes surprising angles. As we waited for the bus to take us to the Governor’s house, Mridula jested that Murri time is ‘about the same, maybe better’ than Indian Stretch Time (‘dinner at seven’ means ‘starting at ten’).

The house of Governor Raj Bhavan was at the end of a slender cape overhanging the Arabian Sea. Before the poetry readings started, while the others were admiring the historic Portuguese architecture, I was looking at the butterflies.

I had surely never seen any of these butterflies before, and they moved quickly in the vines and trees planted alongside the garden edge with the ocean below. I was hoping to see a southern birdwing, the largest butterfly in India and one of the thirty-six species of birdwings (the largest in the world) native to the Indian subcontinent, mainland and archipelagic South-East Asia and Australasia. We have four birdwing species, but there’s one in particular that’s important to me. The Richmond birdwing once existed in terrific numbers across Queensland and New South Wales but is now endangered. Stories from my own people, the Yugambeh and the Bundjalung – meaning place of butterfly – tell that before settlement the sky over the Pacific Ocean was black with them. And there are reports the streets of Brisbane were once crawling with birdwing butterflies. Now, they are seen only in two areas, the Gold Coast hinterland and on the Sunshine Coast, from Nambour to Eudlo. My friend has planted the Richmond birdwing vine on her Eudlo property and sees small numbers.

I saw the southern birdwings there at the Governor’s house. They were much larger than the Richmond, with yellow and white marking.

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Males and females floated unhurried above the gardens. I moved out of the way of guests and knelt to see the butterflies below the railing. It was a warm winter’s night, though it felt like summer. I felt the cloud of mosquitoes and the scent of mussaenda; and above me was the cadenced circling of kites.

I wondered why Goa’s birdwings had fared better than mine. SouthEast Queensland is as much a biodiversity hotspot as Goa, still a paradise to the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians who live there now.

Though our continents once lay cheek by jowl, the animals in Australia have evolved very differently to those in India. India has retained some of its great beasts – the elephant and the tiger – but our megafauna disappeared around fifteen thousand years ago.

Evidence is sparse about whether Australian First Nations killed off large populations of giant marsupials and flightless birds. Many believe, as I do, that these animals became extinct gradually, through a combination of climate, firestick farming and hunting. I believe that Aboriginal spiritual beliefs and methods of hunting, like those of the ancient Indian people, would have prevented such a mass kill-off.

Thylacine rock paintings in Arnhem Land show the marsupial once lived much further north than Tassie and, indeed, rock paintings and Aboriginal stories serve as great markers for the megafauna history of this country. The importance of such discoveries is less understood in India, where the significance of early rock art is not yet celebrated.

The Hindu Times reported that Australian rock art experts are encouraging India to take up more of a role in the scientific dating of Indian rock art, to investigate the people of Lower Palaeolithic times who used art as a means of communication and expression. ‘Indian art is at least two hundred thousand years old, which is an educated guess and it could be much more,’ said Robert Bednarik, part of the Early Indian Petroglyphs Project, a joint venture by Australian and Indian rock research institutes. The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit some of these early traces of human life; paintings depict religious rites and burials, as well as huge figures of animals such as bison, rhinoceros, tigers and elephants in green or dark red paint. Bednarik feels it’s time for India to move away from its Anglocentric, colonial model of archaeology to develop its own approach.

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A genetic study of Aboriginal people from the Northern Territory and sub continental Indians shows there was a significant gene flow from India to Australia approximately four thousand years ago, and it’s most likely, from the genetic diversity, that there were several waves of migration. The first influx of Indian genes coincides with the appearance of stone tools, changes in plant processing and the arrival of the dingo.

Aboriginal people share up to 11 per cent of DNA with modern Indian people, though the study is not representative of Australia because testing didn’t occur outside the Northern Territory. The Indian immigrants arrived in boats, lugged tools and dogs, integrated into communities and stayed here to become what we know today as Aboriginal Australian.

I saw the dog of my past curled up on the stairs of a drug store. It was reddish-brown and had a long stiff tail. The dog was busy. I can’t say how, but that was the impression I got. The dog wouldn’t look out of place in the Great Victoria Desert, in the sand dunes of Fraser Island, where a dingo fence controls movements and minimises human and dingo interaction. I wanted to feel this dog’s beating skull with the palm of my hand. I had traveller’s bewilderment; I was asking myself – no, demanding – why I was here.

But what I meant was that I didn’t know how we had ended up like this, pi dogs and dingoes, southern and Richmond butterflies; and we all must wonder more when we think of those two now sunken islands that, once, were between us.

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Man of the People Man of tTiojakin Maggie he People

Maggie Tiojakin

‘I

s he here, yet?’ he asked, craning his neck to the left and right.

‘Who?’ ‘The guy, what’s his name?’

‘The guy? You don’t remember the name of our next president?’

‘He’s not our president, yet. The election’s not until next week,’ the man said, chewing on a strip of strawberry gum.

They were standing on a bench under an angsana tree outside the public garden where the Candidate was supposed to deliver his speech in the next hour, addressing the nation on live television.

Karno, the taller of the two men, was forty. He had come to see the Candidate in person after reading in the papers about his unique campaign style – for example, how he didn’t want to have a security detail following him everywhere, and how he preferred to eat local delicacies at cheap food stalls instead of enjoying an international selection of meals at fancy restaurants. And since Karno’s old mini-van was still in the workshop, he had asked his young friend, Putro, to take him to the centre of town on his motorbike. He promised to pay for the gas, plus a little something on the side.

The public garden was closed to the general public, which meant only campaign volunteers, sponsors and supporters were allowed inside the complex. Everyone else would stay outside, along the periphery of the gated garden.

On the other side of the gate, volunteers in yellow shirts and red bandanas distributed water bottles and lunch boxes to sponsors and supporters who had come from all over the country to shake hands and 17

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have their photos taken with the Candidate. News reporters and photographers were there, too, with laminated press badges around their necks. A stagehand untangled cords from one side of the podium to the other, checking microphones and alerting whoever was in charge of the sound system that no sound was coming out of the speakers. The sun was high and the air muggy. It was toward the end of the dry season. You couldn’t sit or stand in the open without perspiring. It was that kind of day.

Karno took out his phone and aimed the camera through an opening between the gate’s metal posts, focusing on the crowd inside the garden complex.

‘Why are you taking a picture of people’s backs?’ said Putro.

‘I’m trying to capture the energy,’ said Karno, sliding his phone back into his pocket and then, like a child, pressing his face against the opening. ‘You don’t know shit about photography.’

‘And you do?’ said Putro.

‘I know stuff.’

‘Yeah, like what?

‘I’m not telling you.’

Putro scoffed. ‘Of course you’re not.’

‘I wish we could go inside.’

‘You want to?’

Karno peeled himself away from the metal posts, stretched his arms and looked down at his clothes. ‘I’m not dressed for this kind of event.’

‘Who cares how you dress? Just walk in like everybody else.’ Putro pointed towards the entrance of the garden where a steady stream of people was pouring in. More and more were arriving by the busload.

‘Pretend to be a volunteer or whatever.’

‘Naw,’ said Karno. ‘I’d best just hang out here.’

‘You sure? You don’t want to see him up close, shake his hand or something?’

Karno gave a nervous laugh. ‘Naw, naw, man. I wouldn’t know what to say.’

‘You don’t have to say anything.’

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‘Naw, I’m all right. This here is good. We can see everything that’s going on from here – without all the pushing and shoving. Here is good.’

‘If you say so.’

They spotted some of the country’s biggest celebrities and personalities going through the entrance. There was their favourite punk band, that used to write songs about getting high and trashing around, but now wrote the kind of music that talked about finding God and beating the devil in the bottle. There was that famous movie director and his producer, and the crew and cast of his latest film. There was the beautiful conservationist who was always on television harping on about all the things governments weren’t doing enough of to save the earth.

‘Hey, listen.’

‘Hey, what,’ said Putro without averting his eyes from the girl.

‘Did somebody give you something?’

‘When?’

‘Whenever,’ said Karno. ‘Did you receive something at home?’

Putro raised his eyebrows, curious. He was only twenty-three, but the way he was built you’d think he was almost the same age as Karno. The long hours he spent on the road driving people around on his motorbike from morning to midnight had taken a toll on his body. There used to be meat on him when he was at school, but that wasn’t there today. A walking skeleton, some would call him.

‘What kind of something?’ he said.

‘I don’t know.’ Karno shrugged. ‘Anything.’

Putro spat his gum on the ground. ‘Did you?’

‘Maybe. Nothing, really. Just a bag of rice, a prayer kit and some money.’

‘And some money?’

‘Fifty thousand.’

‘Not bad.’

‘Good for a couple of packs of cigarettes.’

‘Yeah, it sure is. You smoke?’ Putro asked.

‘Huh. Sometimes. When I’m bored. The problem is it came from the other guy.’

‘Ah.’ Putro grinned.

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Karno seemed perplexed. ‘My wife told me to give it back, because she knows how I feel about that guy. But my kids need to eat and I could use a new prayer kit.’

‘And cigarettes, too.’

‘Exactly.’

Putro understood his friend’s troubles, though he didn’t care much about the state of the nation’s politics. He was only seven years old when the New Order regime fell so he had little memory of what life was like before that time. When he heard stories of what it was like back then, about people taking to the streets and getting beaten to death, it amused him. Why would anyone do such a thing at that particular time and even think it would end well? When he read personal accounts of people who were silenced by the regime, who were made outcasts for years and years and years, he didn’t feel anything. Not sympathy. Not anger. Nothing.

‘I wouldn’t worry about it,’ he said casually.

‘You don’t think they will force me to vote for the other guy?’

‘They might,’ said Putro.

‘I don’t want to vote for him.’

‘Then don’t.’

‘Who are you voting for?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

‘Vote for this guy right here,’ said Karno, cocking his head in the direction of a large campaign poster taped to a wall next to the public garden.

The Candidate’s face blocked almost the entire space. ‘He’s a man of the people.’

‘What does that even mean?’

‘He’s one of us.’

‘So he’s poor?’

‘You think we’re poor?’

‘Well, you know. Ish.’ ‘We’re middle class.’

‘We are?’

‘We’re not poor. We’re struggling. There’s a difference.’

Putro grabbed hold of the gate’s metal post to steady himself as his shoulders shook with laughter. ‘You’re killing me here.’

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‘Naw, wait. You don’t understand. Let me ask you. Do you really, honestly, in your heart of hearts, think we’re poor?’ Karno was looking very serious.

Karno did not like the word poor, or being associated with it. In his mind it meant having no way of living a decent life or providing for his children. He was not rich, that was true. Everything he earned went to the family’s dinner table, the kids’ clothes, rent and his wife’s few necessities. He had known poverty once, when he was growing up. His father spent his mornings collecting garbage and evenings sniffing paint thinners in their cramped plywood shack in the middle of a slum on the outskirts of town. Karno was just nine years old when his father’s body was found floating in the city’s murky river – and for the next sixteen years he’d pulled himself out of poverty by working every menial job available to him. He had never been to school and had taught himself how to write by reading and re-reading Kho Ping Hoo’s martial art stories. He had worked for the same taxi company for close to twenty years, and now things were looking up. There was always warm food waiting on the table when he got home and a clean bed to sleep in. This, he said, was not what poverty looked like.

‘Poverty is when you’re falling slowly underwater toward the bottom of the sea,’ he went on. ‘There’s little you can do because you’re half paralysed at that point.’

‘Listen to you getting all riled up about what it means to be poor!’ said Putro.

‘Boy, a brother’s trying to teach you a lesson here.’

‘I say you go in there now and wait for the man. When you shake his hand, look him hard in the eyes. And I mean really hard. If he wins the election, maybe you’ll get a chance to work for him. Even better, maybe he’ll give you a job ministering or something.’

‘Why not?’ said Karno. ‘This guy, I’ll have you know, didn’t come from money. He was dirt poor. Now look at him. He got his name on the ticket. He’s defying all expectations. And he’s only getting stronger in the race.’

‘What was it you said about hitting the bottom of the ocean?’

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‘I’m saying we’re not falling underwater,’ said Karno. ‘I’m saying we’re in the middle of the ocean with a cheap life jacket – and we’re swimming toward the shore.’

‘That’s supposed to mean we’re part of the middle class?’

‘Sure.’

‘What does the upper class look like?’

The two of them pressed their faces close to the metal posts once more and looked at the swollen crowd. People were now chanting the Candidate’s name. Black cables snaked up and across the grass toward the stage where the microphone stands were now set up, barricading the podium. The noise had become so loud that the traffic around the garden seemed to be on mute.

‘Them folks are upper class, I suppose,’ said Putro.

‘You can tell by their skin,’ replied Karno. ‘Smooth as porcelain. Shit, they practically shine.’

The two men, covered in dust and smelling of exhaust fumes, shared another laugh.

A while later, several shiny black cars turned off the road and glided past them in slow procession towards the garden. The windows of the vehicles were tinted so it was near impossible to recognise the people inside.

‘What about these guys?’ said Putro.

‘These guys, I tell you,’ said Karno. ‘They’re not from this world.

They’re the ones who have been robbing us blind.’

‘Yeah? How did you guess that?’

‘Nobody gets that rich without stealing from the little people.’

‘Are we the little people?’

‘What do you think?’

Putro shrugged. ‘You said we aren’t poor, so I assume we’re not the little people.’

‘The way it works, see, there’s the little guys and the big guys.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘We’re definitely not the big guys.’

‘Right.’

‘So what are we?’

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‘The little guys?’

Karno gave a solemn nod. ‘Damn right.’

From somewhere nearby, someone called out, ‘Wait, there he is! He’s getting out of the car!’

A mob of people ran toward the gate, sticking to the posts like fruit flies, pulling out their phones and taking random snapshots. Karno and Putro were no exception. They had their arms wrapped around the metal posts.

There was a jubilant uproar as the Candidate emerged from one of the cars. He didn’t have a single security guard with him. He wore a check shirt and a pair of jeans, as if he were going to the movies or something. His shoes, Putro noticed, did not bounce back the light from the sun. And he was about as skinny as anything he had ever seen.

Karno had a smile on his face that stretched from one ear to the other.

He was elated. ‘Look at him.’

Putro turned to his friend. ‘What is it about him that you like so much?’

‘He gets us.’

‘I don’t know, man,’ said Putro, lighting a cigarette and stepping off the bench, his back to the garden now. ‘What if it was all just for show?’

Karno gazed down at his friend. As the words hit him, his face turned a darker shade of red. ‘I wish you’d take that back. I really do,’ he said.

‘What did I say?’

‘He is a good man.’

‘I didn’t say he wasn’t.’

‘Take it back.’

‘Are you being serious?’

‘I heard your guy is a murderer,’ said Karno. He said it with such conviction that if the conversation were to be had between two strangers, it would have been hard not to buy into it, even just a little. ‘He kills people for sport.’

‘My guy?’

‘He used to beat his wife, too.’

‘Wait a minute.’

‘He should stand trial and answer for all the terrible things he’s done.’

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‘My guy?’

‘He’s going to burn this country to the ground,’ said Karno. ‘And he’s not going to spare you, or anybody else.’

‘How is he suddenly my guy?’ said Putro.

‘If this guy here’s not your guy, then the other guy is. There are only two candidates in the race this time around.’

‘All right. Suppose I am voting for the other guy,’ said Putro. ‘What then?’

Karno couldn’t stand the other guy, or people who supported the other guy’s campaign. Worse than that, he refused to tolerate people who wouldn’t stand for, and do, the right thing. He said this to Putro, then added curtly, ‘It’s up to you who you’re going to vote for. But if it were me, I would rethink my options. I would do what is right.’

‘So it’s this guy – your guy – or nothing?’

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Karno. ‘He’s not my guy, he’s everybody’s guy.’

Putro shook his head and dropped the rest of his cigarette to the ground. ‘I’m going to get something to drink, you want anything?’

‘He’s about to give his speech,’ said Karno. ‘Stay a little bit more.’

‘I’m thirsty.’

‘Fine.’ Karno shoved one hand inside his shirt pocket and took out a small bill. ‘Here, buy yourself some food while you’re at it.’

‘You don’t want anything?’

Putro stepped off the sidewalk and went across the street toward a footbridge, under which street vendors crouched by their food carts, their gaze fixed intently on the busy road. Putro ordered a cup of instant noodles and a bottle of iced water from a guy on a bicycle, and fish cakes from another guy who introduced himself as Aquaman.

‘Aquaman?’

‘Nice, ya? It’s from a comic book my son reads. It sounds like someone important.’

‘Well, he’s a superhero.’

Aquaman smiled, baring toothless gums. ‘I like the sound of that.’

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Putro sat on a wooden stool near the fish-cake cart and ate his lunch.

He could hear the applause and knew the Candidate must have taken centre stage. From where he sat, Putro could see Karno’s back. There was another man on the bench standing next to him. Karno had his arm around the other man’s shoulders and every once in a while they bounced off the bench in great excitement. Putro could not hear all the things the Candidate said, but he could tell by the reaction that he was saying everything everyone wanted to hear.

When he finished, Putro paid for his lunch and told both of the vendors to keep the change. He lit another cigarette and offered one to Aquaman. He lowered himself into a crouching position next to Aquaman and smoked his cigarette facing the traffic, away from the garden.

‘Have you decided who you’re going to vote for next week?’ asked Putro.

‘Yes,’ said Aquaman.

‘This guy?’ Putro cocked his head in the direction of the garden.

‘Yes.’ Aquaman nodded.

‘Why him and not the other guy?’

He thought for a minute. Then, Aquaman said, ‘I think maybe because he’s funny.’

Putro did not ask his companion to explain. That was as good a reason as any. It was the best thing he had heard throughout the campaign. And if he did feel like going to the polls next week – he might use that as his guide.

Across the street, the Candidate’s voice was drowned out by a wave of cheers; and from where Putro squatted he could feel the ground shake a little. Or maybe he imagined it.

He’s funny.

That was good enough for him.

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Joshua Ip Poetry

The Umbrella Men the umbrella men are blooming in the season of rain. they grow in the shade like magic mushrooms, unlooked-for and uncultured. they blossom like gunshot wounds across the circulation of a city. the umbrella men sprout tents, a commotion of cauliflowers in a well-tended garden. they neatly unpack their picnic baskets. in the night-cold they ignite their hotpots. in the dreary morning they unfold their ping-pong tables. in the heat of mid afternoon they sunbathe on concrete islands. the umbrella men are helping each other with their homework. they are reciting rote essays in a foreign tongue. after this is over they will skew college quotas all over the west with variants on one remarkable admissions essay painted in neon over one city street.

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the umbrella men have the resilience of smartphones the smartest of whom last barely a day, but their charging cables are hydra in this many-headed metropolis they are always plugged into, they pulsate with their openings and closings and the thrill of their vanes, for the occupation of an umbrella man is shelter and shellacking both. the umbrella men are blowing blank speech bubbles in the wind. they are singing anthems from dead rockers and live lyricists amidst the silence of the lamborghinis. they are falling off the world stage head first and the sea is wide, the sky is empty. the umbrella men are sheltering their guards and jailers in the penumbra of their smiles. they hide their fear of a harsher gaze. after all they are only reflectors and diffusers, lampshades to direct and shape their own smouldering where elsewhere the umbrella men are being burnt in effigy by a billion people each one a personal solar eclipse, a blot on a national brilliance. the umbrella men are linking arms; they raise their shield formation like Spartans, Athenians; they have lived in the shade for too long to know the sun always rises. the umbrella men are falling like parachutes, like dandelion seeds; they are turning in place like bamboo dragonflies; each revolution a rising, the spinning of palms together –

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the umbrella men are blown inside out and borne away on the monsoon rain. they gust and gasp as the wind crumples them; they are higher than they planned for; they are flying through turbulence; they are hanging from the gibbets of their stretchers and runners; so fragrant and fleeting the harbouring of hope. they swing from their own rope in the sky which is peace which is also a door. in the haze of this city we can pretend not to see them fall.

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Beating Dickheads B eating Syjuco Miguel Dickheads

Miguel Syjuco

I

know exactly how you feel. I see you at the brekkie table, reading a newspaper. You – a decent citizen, a reasonably informed voter, patriotic in your own quiet way. I know exactly, because I’m the same.

Whether it was Julia Gillard and Labor who got your goat, or Tony Abbott and the Liberals who make you spew, the urge is universal: you sit at breakfast and poke your finger once, twice, thrice into the newsprint or touch screen. You turn, tongue-tied, head shaking, managing only to say to your spouse: What a dickhead!

This is natural. Healthy. A reasonable defence mechanism. We all feel disenfranchised, from time to time. From election to election, it’s like our vote is ultimately useless. Like our choices are always only the lesser of a few evils. Because what else can we do?

Every nation has its unfair share of dickheads, douchebags, dingleberries and degenerates. But my country, the Philippines, bests most in democratic tomfoolery. My entire life, a panoply of perfidious politicians has reigned, inheriting or bequeathing unchallengeable dynasties. Congress, Senate, governorships, mayoralties and even the presidency are but a game of musical chairs (which function, yes, like thrones).

The roots of this are deep. They predate our republic. The Filipino archipelago, a colony of Spain for more than three centuries, watched its revolution and independence stolen by its ally, the United States. The Americans saw in our islands a strategic and economic opportunity and waged a bloody war in which massacres and waterboarding were used for conquest while education and democracy were wielded to win hearts and

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minds. Into positions of power were placed members of the local elite – neither the best nor the brightest, but usually the most co-operative. If this sounds familiar, you are not off. As was once said by Mark Twain (who, incidentally, protested against US imperialism in the Philippines): ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme’. The recent nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan echoes the Philippines, just as the same surnames recur in Filipino politics throughout the last century. Some things never change.

Yet presidents and their pundits will always declare that things are improving. On the face of it, they’re not lying. The Philippines is no longer the sick man of Asia. Our middle class is expanding. Our workers are prized all over the world. The country is politically stable compared to our neighbours. The administration of our current president, Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III, has cracked down on corruption, most notably on a scandalous pork-barrel scam implicating a dozen powerful senators and more than a score of congressmen. And, best of all, the Philippine economy is booming.

But the same families maintain a stranglehold on power while the gap between rich and poor widens. Monopolies, nepotism, tax evasion, protectionism, erratic regulation (too little where it’s needed, too much where it’s not) and personal relationships between business and policy makers continue to bloat the wealth of the political and non-political elite alike.

A recent study by economist Cielito Habito said that the forty richest Filipinos account for three-quarters of the country’s GDP growth – the highest proportion in Asia. As the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported, this contrasts with Thailand, whose swankiest forty are behind a third of GDP growth. Malaysia’s fattest forty account for just 5.6 per cent, while Japan’s drive a mere 2.8 per cent. Meanwhile, the top two Filipinos on Forbes magazine’s rich list account for around $18.8 billion – 6 per cent of my country’s wealth. This was contrasted with the bottom quarter of Filipinos, who live on hardly a dollar a day. That’s twenty-five million people, more than the population of Australia, living on less than a buck.

This ratio, the Inquirer reported, ‘was little changed from a decade earlier’.

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But what’s more insidious than the ongoing saga of unequal growth and governmental thievery is how the Filipino elite has systematically engineered legislation and the mechanisms of government to protect its control. Some examples: the heft of the Philippine Catholic bishops scuppered for twelve years any real reproductive health initiatives. A Freedom of Information Act has languished in the legislature. Defamation is criminalised and carries stiff prison sentences. Offending religious feelings is punishable by jail. And a popular anti-dynasty bill stands no chance of even making it through the lower house of Congress.

Meanwhile, top senators recently admitted that it’s not so much religion that keeps the Philippines the world’s last country where divorce is illegal, it’s that many male politicians (with their mistresses and additional families) do not wish to risk paying alimony to unhappy former wives.

Such is the evidence that the separation of powers remains a quaint myth. Party lines aren’t drawn from ideology but from personality and political expediency. Checks and balances just aren’t sympatico with bank cheques and account balances. The system is geared accordingly. The president alone has the power to appoint hundreds of prominent officials, including judges, chiefs of departments and bureaus, heads of task forces and the mid- to top-level brass of the armed forces. The ability of the president’s anointed ones to appoint others extends our commander-in-chief ’s influence into many thousands of key positions.

Why would anyone in power seek to change what clearly works for them? That is why our dynasties put the 1980s soap opera to shame: clans control cities, districts, entire regions. They seem to be familial fiefdoms because they are.

To this asks the regular Filipino – a decent citizen, a reasonably informed voter, patriotic in her or his quiet way – what can we do? What is left to be done but poke our fingers into the newspaper and shake our heads and curse the terrible kleptocrats who won’t bugger off?

Take, for instance, Imelda Marcos: she of the famous shoes, the former first lady to the late strongman responsible for thousands of extrajudicial killings, billions plundered from government coffers and the country’s economic demise during their twenty-one-year conjugal

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dictatorship. After opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr was assassinated, the Marcoses were ousted in the famous People Power Revolution of 1986, fleeing in distress and disgrace. Yet Imelda returned after a few years, was elected a governor and is now on her third term as a congresswoman. This, despite billions of pesos stolen, with much still missing, and a graft conviction demanding ten years in jail, which she managed somehow to dodge. Imelda’s daughter was also in Congress and is now governor of her father’s home province. Imelda’s son, Bongbong, took his turn as governor and congressman and is currently a top senator with promising presidential aspirations for next year’s election – despite recent revelations that he lied about receiving degrees from Oxford and Wharton.

What can we do?

Take, for instance, Juan Ponce Enrile: the long-time Marcos henchman who turned on his boss in 1986. Hailed as a hero for ushering in the presidency of the widowed Corazon Aquino, he was sacked as her defence minister a year later for his alleged hand in a coup to overthrow her. The ninety-year-old current senator has also been a congressman and Senate president. He was recently among the many powerful politicians linked to the pork-barrel scandal. And his son, Jack, now a congressman, was alleged to have shot another teen between the eyes at a party in 1975, as well as killing his sister’s boyfriend in 1981. (More on rumours later.)

What is left to be done?

Take, for instance, Joseph Estrada: the former actor turned president who was ousted in 2001, not halfway through his term. He was sentenced to life in prison for plundering the country of hundreds of millions of pesos during the two-and-a-half years of his rule. While he was in jail, his wife won a seat in the Senate. Estrada was soon pardoned by his opportunistic successor, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, and is now mayor of the country’s capital, Manila. His long-time mistress, Guia Gomez, is mayor of the adjacent city of San Juan, an Estrada bailiwick.

It doesn’t stop there.

Estrada’s offspring are in the family business. Of his three children with his wife, and nine bastards from six mistresses, two are now powerful

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politicians. J. V. Ejercito, who preceded his mother as San Juan mayor, is now a senator. J. V.’s half-brother, Senator Jinggoy Estrada, who preceded him as San Juan mayor, was recently arrested for corruption – for the second time in thirteen years. It’s alleged that Jinggoy also took part in the pork-barrel scam, which skimmed billions earmarked for postdisaster reconstruction.

What can the common citizen do about such leaders?

And let’s not forget Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo – Estrada’s successor to the presidency and herself daughter to a former president. In 2011, she was arrested at the international departure terminal and charged with electoral sabotage. She posted bail, claiming health issues, but was re-arrested for plunder and confined to a hospital, from where she won a seat in Congress in 2013. Her two sons are also congressmen, as is her brother-in-law. Her husband’s forbears include a governor and a senator during the American colonial era. Arroyo, who is pictured on the two-hundred-peso bill, is the current chief scout of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines.

How can we shake such dynastic nogoodniks?

For there’s also Romeo Jalosjos: a congressman in 1997 when he received two life sentences for raping an eleven-year-old girl. On the grounds of the country’s main maximum-security prison, Jalosjos reportedly drove around in his luxury SUV and played tennis daily on the court he had built. From jail, he won re-election to Congress in 1998, then again in 2001. President Arroyo pardoned him in 2009. Now the chair of the Tennis Academy of the Philippines, Jalosjos wants to re-enter politics.

What can you do but shake your head and curse?

For there’s also Teodoro Bacani, one of the many influential bishops in a country that is more than 80 per cent Catholic. An outspoken moraliser against reproductive rights, Bacani resigned his bishopric in 2003 after his young secretary said he grabbed her from behind and fondled her privates. Bacani has since been named bishop emeritus and continues to rail against telenovelas, selfies and the legalisation of divorce.

Shake your head and curse.

For there’s also Socrates Villegas, elected president of the country’s most powerful unelected leadership – the Catholic bishops’ conference,

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who see themselves as the nation’s moral stewards. They’ve had a performance artist arrested for criticising them, censored a McDonald’s commercial showing a young girl and boy flirting over French fries, protested against a Lady Gaga concert as ‘devil worship’, closed down an art exhibit that used Christian imagery, and threatened to excommunicate or pull from power politicians and academics who supported reproductive healthcare. Despite our impoverished population of a hundred million people (in a land area only a little larger than the state of Victoria), Villegas insists that ‘contraception is corruption’ that will lead to ‘greater crimes against women’.

Shake your head and curse.

For our present president, Benigno ‘Noynoy’ Aquino III, has done nothing to break this cycle. The faces of his parents now adorn the fivehundred-peso bill, yet he was considered, by a relevant majority, merely the better candidate among the worst. With less than a year now left in his presidency, his competence has been questionable and his churlishness towards accountability unforgivable. He’s been conspicuously fickle during times of national crisis and mourning, and his mishandling of a recent raid on a terrorist hide-out, which saw forty-four elite police commandos massacred, has triggered calls for his ousting. Even his administration’s much-celebrated anti-corruption campaign has targeted only opposition politicians.

So is there hope at next year’s presidential election?

Amidst the carnival of dozens of candidates, only a few will be seen as presidentiable, as we Filipinos dub them. These are: Bongbong Marcos, with his campaign war chest from his parents’ plundered wealth; Rodrigo Duterte, the popular tough-talking mayor who vows to shoot rice smugglers, drug dealers and corrupt officials without the hassles of a trial (he’s also allegedly linked to vigilante groups murdering ne’er-dowells and petty criminals); Mar Roxas, an Aquino administration official, son of a senator, grandson of a president, but lacking the popularity for the pageantry that is the Philippine presidential race.

Which leaves the most likely: Vice-President Jejomar Binay.

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Binay, the former mayor of Makati, the Philippines’ financial capital, has ruled the wealthy city with his family for twenty-nine years. His younger daughter is now a congresswoman, while his eldest girl won a Senate seat with no political experience beyond being his personal assistant. Binay’s wife, as mayor, faced accusations of corruption. Their son, Junjun, the current Makati mayor, was recently suspended pending an investigation into his alleged receipt of kickbacks; in reply, Junjun barricaded himself in his office, using as a human shield hundreds of his supporters lured to City Hall by free food, giveaways, movie screenings and zumba sessions.

The Binays, however, say there’s no proof of their corruption, though last year they fielded allegations that they own, beyond accountable means, a palatial country estate with air-conditioned piggery and hedge maze inspired by London’s Kew Gardens.

To these choices, what can Filipinos do or say?

Not much, actually. A nation ruled by Goliaths will always make illegal the slings of possible Davids. While those in office are flush with parliamentary privilege and immunity, the citizenry’s ability to dissent and demand accountability is constantly whittled away. As in many countries ruled by tenuous legitimacy, constitutionally protected freedom of speech is a danger to the status quo. This is why those who would speak on our behalf – the journalists of the fourth estate – face both violence and the law itself.

Last year, Rubylita Garcia, a hard-hitting newspaper and radio journo, was shot in her home. As she died, she told her children that the town police superintendent was behind it. The previous year Joas Dignos, known for reporting widely on corruption, was assassinated on the street by gunmen. Since 1992 seventy-seven journalists have been killed in the line of duty, making my country one of the most dangerous in the world for those who would report the truth.

Such lawlessness, however, is no match for the law when protecting lawmakers. Defamation remains a crime and carries a penalty of up to six years in jail. Yet its definition is open to interpretation: according to the Philippine penal code, it is ‘a public and malicious imputation of a crime, or of a vice or defect, real or imaginary, or any act, omission, condition, status or circumstance tending to cause dishonour, discredit

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or contempt of a natural or juridical person, or to blacken the memory of one who is dead’. In other words, we must beware of insulting the powerful, or of making even justified allegations.

Such is what leads to good reporters answering lawsuits purposely filed in far-flung jurisdictions, meant to intimidate them into silence through legal fees and absence from employment. This harassment is in addition to the real possibility of imprisonment. Newsman Alex Adonis discovered that the hard way, when his reporting of a politician’s alleged extramarital affair saw him sentenced in 2007 to four years.

In keeping with modern times, a new cyber-crime law has also been introduced, thanks to Senator Tito Sotto, a former comedian whose repeated plagiarism in his senate speeches earned him ridicule for his arrogant impunity and coddling by his colleagues. Netizens took to blogs, comment boards and social media to pillory him in jokes, memes, satirical articles and hashtags (such as #sottocopy). It was soon revealed that Sotto had introduced into the cyber-crime law a clause that doubles the current penalty for defamation. Because of Sotto, even comments made on Facebook can now land you in jail for twelve years, despite the Philippine Constitution, which states: ‘No law shall be passed abridging the freedom of speech, of expression, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and petition the government for redress of grievances.’

The ‘redress of grievances’: our forebears knew that freedom of speech is what guarantees our ability to fight for exactly that: the redress of wrongs and the equality of rights. By slowly forgetting this, our leaders are able to prioritise some rights over others to suit their agenda. In the Philippines, as in other conservative Asian countries (from Malaysia to India, Singapore to Saudi Arabia), this often involves dissent silenced through accusations of sedition, oppressed religious freedom, blasphemy or contravention of moral propriety. In Saudi Arabia, for example, blogger Raif Badawi was sentenced to ten years imprisonment and one thousand lashes for posting criticism of the clerical elite. In Singapore, seventeen-year-old student Amos Yee was arrested for YouTube comments deemed insulting to Christianity and the country’s founding

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prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew. In India, outrage from Hindu groups led to the pulping of American Indologist Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus (Penguin, 2009). In Malaysia, a bookseller faced two years in prison for selling a translation of Allah, Liberty and Love (Simon & Schuster, 2011), a book by Muslim reformist Irshad Manji.

And in the Philippines, Muslims marched against depiction of their prophet, issuing the statement that ‘the Charlie Hebdo killing is a moral lesson to the world’. Meanwhile, activist Carlos Celdran was sentenced to fourteen months in jail for ‘offending religious feelings’, for holding up, during an ecumenical meeting, a sign criticising the Catholic clergy and later shouting: ‘You bishops, stop involving yourself in politics!’

Celdran’s landmark case, involving a rarely used law from 1930, has opened a Pandora’s box. In January of this year, three non-Catholic Christians were also arrested for offending religious feelings when they preached, on the street, against idolatry; they were released when the devout Catholic cop who filed the case decided to forgive them. Similarly, four evangelical Christians were charged with offending religious feelings when they called out comments about Catholics during the visit of Pope Francis; the accused also held up signs saying such things as: ‘Only Jesus Christ can save you from sin and hell’.

This ongoing debate over freedom of speech and religious rights is alarming. After the eight murders at the French satirical newspaper, many intelligent and sincere writers and commenters, in the Philippines and abroad, are now questioning whether expression should indeed be limited by respect and responsibility to religion – forgetting that it is freedom of speech that ensures our freedom to worship, to co-exist in a world of differing values, to prove and disprove ideas, to engage in representative democracy and to require responsibility from the leaders we elect. Forgetting that when we cede power to religious feelings we will inevitably privilege, at some point, one faith over others. Forgetting that when we conflate insults with threats, and hate speech with hate crimes, we punish thoughts and words rather than actions; this undermines our right to a government strong enough to protect equally both our freedoms and our safety. (As Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, reminds

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us: ‘There is a huge difference between an insult and a threat, and . . . it isn’t actually that hard to tell one from the other.’)

In other words, to ask that free speech be conditional or transactional means it is no longer free; instead, it is doled out upon approval by whoever holds power. This is dangerous. State-sanctioned dissent can no longer be true dissent; it robs citizens of our individual social agency and excludes us from the democratic right to engage with the workings of society. Our views cannot even fail in the marketplace of ideas. When this happens, our society can no longer be called a democracy. It becomes an oligarchy. Which, presumably, is the point.

Why would the Goliaths let it be any other way?

Yet Filipinos will never submit. As human beings we’re hardwired not to. Simple profanity challenges what is empowered as sacred. That’s why we sit at the brekkie table poking the newspaper and uttering invectives.

Calling Tito Sotto a dickhead is not only a constitutionally protected opinion, it is palliative and healthy. Everyone is encouraged to do so.

Laughter, after all, is the best medicine, especially for a country that is ailing. Especially when the legitimacy of those in charge is so flimsy they neither listen to nor condone criticism. Rumour, humour, storytelling and name-calling become weapons of self-defence that function by knitting together the weak, binding them jointly.

This collective impulse to mock out of frustration is seen every day among drinkers at beer gardens, in editorial cartoons, in the comments beneath Facebook posts. A semblance of power is retained by the powerless in refusing to accept the official narrative of the powerful. As with conspiracy theories, satire – on such Filipino websites as So, What’s News?

– plays a vital role in political discourse. When Senator Jinggoy Estrada responded to one of their stories with an official statement – that he had not, in fact, tried to smuggle wads of cash into the US via his pectoral implants – this was both a triumph for Philippine satire and a spotlight on the legislator’s alleged corruption.

Similarly, in such clanky democracies, rumour serves as an important coping mechanism. There are many examples of such narratives, which I do not in any way present as fact, but as hearsay illustrative of the

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country’s political frustration: Joseph Estrada is said to have gorged on twenty-four-hour buffets in the presidential palace, quaffing cases of Chateau Petrus while brokering deals over poker games he was allowed to win. Stories have been spun about Ninoy Aquino, Jr’s taste for Taiwanese prostitutes, procured by a pimp named Pembong, which may link to rumours that the opposition leader was assassinated by his brother-in-law. It was also bruited about that his wife Corazon, as president, hid under her bed during an attempted coup. And message boards are rife with comments that their son, President Noynoy, is autistic or retarded. Meanwhile, rumours surrounding Tito Sotto allege he used his influence as senator to exonerate his brother and friends from the gang rape of an underage starlet who eventually committed suicide. And that as an anti-drug crusader, Sotto was allegedly linked to a drug kingpin whose pay-offs he used to write an anti-drug book. Even as fiction, these tall tales function as criticism of what’s factually dysfunctional in our society.

The most brutal gossip, however, is usually directed, perhaps with due cause, at those who seem the most untouchable. After all, the Marcoses, during their brutish two-decade rule, manufactured their own gossip to their advantage: the dictator’s war medals; the unsuccessful ambush on his henchman Enrile, which prompted martial law; or Marcos’s karate chop that unhanded an assassin’s foot-long dagger and saved Pope Paul IV during his 1970 visit. Even the ill-gotten Marcos billions have been explained as General Yamashita’s lost treasure, which the retreating Japanese commander supposedly hid in the mountains at the end of World War II. Information, the cliché goes, is power – which is why, soon after declaring dictatorship, Marcos made rumour mongering punishable by law.

That proved futile, of course, and only reinforces the thesis that mockery is a powerful political tool for the powerless. To the comical fictions of the Marcoses, Filipinos replied with their own specious tittle-tattle: Imelda is said, before meeting Marcos, to have screwed Mayor Arsenio Lacson in his car outside Manila city hall to reverse her loss in a beauty pageant; the Marcoses’ eldest daughter is said to be the fruit of that protracted affair. Bongbong, the only Marcos son, is said to have died

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Beating Dickheads

and been replaced with a cousin who underwent plastic surgery, to maintain a male heir for the dictator. The youngest Marcos sibling, Aimee, who is adopted, is said to be the child of Bongbong’s incest with a first cousin. Another Marcos daughter is whispered to have had her breast milk flown every day from the US, where she was partying, to her newborn she had left in Manila. And Imelda was said to have ordered the Beatles roughed up at the Manila airport for not agreeing to play a private gig for her children. She is also famously reputed to have had dozens of injured workers buried alive in concrete after their scaffolding fell during the rushed construction of her prized national film centre.

None of these can be corroborated, but they’re oft repeated with purpose.

This is because rumour can sometimes drive the truth into the light.

When the country was abuzz that President Arroyo had been hospitalised for leaky breast implants, her staff said it was swine flu, calling the rumours ‘absurd’ and saying that she was not some ‘sexy actress’. The perky allegations finally forced Arroyo to admit to having augmentation in the 1980s, but that the silicone was not, in fact, now leaking. And the gossip about President Estrada’s excesses in the palace? It combined with revelations regarding his corruption and drove the people into the streets to successfully oust him from the presidency.

Yes, sometimes the effects of tale-telling can be as silly as fake tits, but sometimes it can be as significant as real democratic change. That is why, as a fiction writer, I’m constantly thinking about how my work can have the most impact – especially when one considers how few novels have ever driven actual social centrifugal force beyond the insularity of literature. Given my comparatively small upper- and middle-class readership in a country of tens of millions of poor and under-educated, writing can seem quixotic. An older Filipino writer once told me: ‘If you want to keep something secret in the Philippines, publish it in a book – because nobody will read it’. A joke like that stings because, to a certain extent, it’s true. Politicians don’t care much about what artists say or create, because it doesn’t hit them where it hurts: at the ballot box.

What, then, is to be done? I’m convinced that the role of artists involves the long game – honesty, memory, legacy, posterity. But, in countries

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where inequality stifles democracy, there is inherent and immediate value in challenging those rules that omnipotent rule-breakers make against our freedom of expression. In doing so, we question the legitimacy of such mandates. In doing so, we highlight the hypocrisy of those proven worthy, as the penal code says, of ‘dishonour, discredit or contempt’ – the dynastic scofflaws whose own legacies they themselves will have blackened, of which we must dutifully remind the world. In doing so, I believe, we can be revolutionary.

I think often of José Rizal, one of the many great Philippine heroes of the late nineteenth century. At the time, his homeland was under the influence of Western imperialists. The Catholic Church held sway over society. Wealth was held by a small percentile. Equality did not exist.

The laws benefitted the powerful. (History, as we now know, would prove to rhyme.) Young Rizal, then living in Spain, worked with his compatriots to press for reform that was not forthcoming. As some of his comrades considered revolution, Rizal returned home to pursue peaceful change. He wrote two novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, both funny in their honest satire and brave in mocking the ruling friars and elite. For this, Rizal was charged with sedition, rebellion and conspiracy.

He was executed in Manila by firing squad, though his words and example helped spur the Philippine Revolution that ousted Spain and established Asia’s first constitutional republic. Few novels have ever had such an effect.

Few ever will. But that doesn’t mean we can’t try.

What then is the role of the writer? In a country like mine – where the powerful insist most on their honour and respectability – perhaps it begins, but does not end, with simple, unabashed, constitutionally protected dissent.

Perhaps it begins with doing as we all do – poking a finger into the news of the day and declaring in public what most say in private: Imelda is a dickhead. Enrile is a dickhead. Estrada is a dickhead. Jinggoy is a dickhead. Arroyo is a dickhead. Jalosjos is a dickhead. Bacani is a dickhead. Villegas is a dickhead. Aquino is a dickhead. Binay is a dickhead.

Duterte is a dickhead. Roxas is a dickhead. Sotto is a dickhead. (The list goes on.)

And in that way, we begin to beat them.

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Father, Son Fat her, Son Anjum Has an

Anjum Hasan

L

ooking at the mammoth spot-lit ads for chubby babies and running shoes, he feels very far from home. When he imagines talking to his son, the voice isn’t right. Too stern. Or too soft.

They haven’t spoken for three years – after their fight in a room hung with photos of the family younger and rosier. The boy had said, You have no nerves, and flung the full plate of his dinner against a wall. The father had said, You mean I don’t have the nerve, you idiot. But then anger sparked in his brain too and he said, Get out of here. His wife wiped her nose and laid out more food as if some bird had flown off with her child’s dinner. She had ruined him with adoration. They’d been arguing about money – son for, father against, mother inconsolable. And here he is now, where the billboards are aglow with wealth.

He peers out into the night through the large bus window, trying to read the road signs. The address, which had seemed self-evident to him when he’d noted it down from his son’s email, now feels quite irrelevant.

He knows the name of the place but it is a signal he’s looking for. A large gang, all young men and women with laptops in backpacks and none of his nervousness, get off at the following stop and he does likewise. He senses he is near – and besides, there are rickshaws. The night outside the air-conditioned bus is warm, scented with eucalyptus trees and the fumes from a biryani restaurant. The driver of the first passing rickshaw he asks looks nonplussed for a moment, and then agrees to take him to Gundu Circle.

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The poet feels a moment of relief. He hasn’t written poems for a while but now contemplates one. He’s seeing his son after three years and is not sure he wants to. The invitation to a reading in Bangalore, the sudden light in his wife’s eyes, and the ensuing pleading. Meet him? I should send him a bill of accounts – that he would appreciate, said the poet. You don’t understand, answered his wife. Who speaks to him on the phone every week?

Who can hear the great big hollow in his voice?

So a reunion was engineered and the boy sent an email saying: I am alone in a villa, come and stay with me for as long as you like. The poet replied as tersely. Coming to read my poems. Can meet you for dinner.

And then he signed – love, Baba.

Less than a minute later he regretted that word. It burned in him like the memory of the curry dripping off the dining room wall. He consoled himself with Shakespeare. What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief. He examined his son’s note again. I am alone, it said. Come.

The rickshaw judders under him as he thinks with dissatisfaction of his day. The poetry was mediocre all round. Delivering his own lines he sensed their lightness and wished he’d put on a finer shirt or had Tagore’s beard. This is literature, he thought. Poetry’s never grander than the life of the poet. He’d felt dazed, as if some treasured thing had turned on close inspection to dust and air. On the podium, a lady weighed down with silk declared: No one remembers the date of my birth and that is a good thing. Animals, trees, the earth and the sky don’t have a date of birth.

Literature is bodies and voices, thought the poet. A tall man towers over the rest and a sweet-faced woman’s words go a longer way. Over lunch the poets discussed their liver problems and children’s careers. He brought up the subject of his unpublished manuscript so he could get advice from the superior ones. They were sympathetic but no one said, I’ll help.

So he focused on his lunch and ate more than necessary.

He is still uncomfortably full and soon there will be dinner over which he will have little to say to his son. Something like a line of poetry tugs at his tired mind, the idea that he has no word for his wordlessness.

They keep driving – a hospital or two looking oddly radiant, like monuments to pain – finally reaching some kind of circle at which the traffic is ranged on every side, straining at its leash. As soon as he alights he is

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helpless again, the lefts and rights he has painfully transcribed from his son’s directions meaningless to him in this brightly lit, howling island of the night.

The poet stares at a glass-walled gym on the second floor of a corner building, people inside running strenuously towards nowhere, and wonders if it is a possible landmark, the talisman that will bring them together finally. Where does he turn from here? He can hear his son, berating him for not possessing a mobile phone, a savings plan or a streak of modern ambition. He appeals to a passer-by who, without breaking his stride, points into the distance and says, Fifteen kilometres.

That side.

Impossible, says the poet, pressing his fingers to the bridge of his nose.

This is the place, I am here. He waits, imagining his hotel room. And then the phone on the nightstand and his wife on the other side, not asking a thing, waiting for him to yield. He singles out two elderly men who seem to be taking a leisurely evening walk in some halcyon dimension, unconcerned about the present one filled with car horns and commerce.

One remains silent while the other says, Good evening, and scrutinises the poet’s crushed scrap of paper, looking up and down the street in thought. Then he says with great consideration, You’re in the wrong Gundu Circle, sir. There are two.

Wonderful, says the poet wearily, trying and failing to remember where he has gone wrong. The best thing to do, says the kind man, is to get onto the ring road and take a bus. But I just took a bus, the poet wants to say.

He thanks his saviour, pressing his hand. The walking companion remains quietly supportive.

The conductor on the bus tells him it will take forty minutes and suddenly the poet is relieved again and loses himself in the journey. They go into striped blue underpasses and wide open overpasses. Outside is his son’s world – high-rises that enfold hundreds of homes, huge banks of litup office windows, names of international companies in blazing letters crowding the sky. There is no word for the wordlessness within us, he thinks. And there is no love that is not a measure of defeat.

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The conductor nods at him, and he steps out onto a street that feels so uncannily similar to the one he was in an hour ago, he is almost shouting for the bus, afraid to be abandoned there. Of course it’s not the same place, he admonishes himself. Carver Street, says a blue and white signboard. And take this lake, I haven’t seen it before. There is something otherworldly about the lake. It is completely overrun with weeds and at its centre is a tiny island on which stands a lone tree, lit up by the artificial glare of the city. He walks with purpose, seeking as before some kind of a sign, and comes to a bus stop where a girl stands waiting. She seems to anticipate his questions and tells him he has got off the bus a couple of stops before he should have. It’s too far to walk, he needs a rickshaw, she says, and then returns to her silent vigil.

So he is near and there’s even an interested rickshaw at hand. He gets in and shuts his eyes. It is late and the boy has perhaps given up on him and gone to sleep. Thinking of the email again, he is enraged. Why did he feel the need to mention his villa? Of course he hasn’t changed. There is nothing to him except this gross attachment to things. The hefty rickshaw driver has been driving without awaiting instructions. The poet taps his shoulder and repeats, Gundu Circle. He nods and continues speeding.

Enough, says the poet suddenly. He is certain they have overshot their mark. His man goes on. Stop, stop. What? yells the driver. It strikes the poet that he could be an unsavoury type, and this an evil city. Not reached, says the driver in English, but, just as the poet is contemplating either jumping out or wringing the man’s neck, the vehicle hits a red light and screeches to a halt. He pulls out his wallet angrily and there is some argument over the right fare and the question of who is to blame for this unnecessarily long journey.

It is only when he has worked his way through the traffic and on to the pavement that he knows his right trouser pocket is empty. As soon as he completes this thought, the light turns green and the monster rickshaw shoots off. He had, for a moment, dumped the wallet on the seat while counting his change. The address is in it as is all his money.

Wonderful, says the poet out loud. He puts his hands into his wide pockets and begins walking in the opposite direction. He walks without

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tiring, happy that this is a city without end. At the end of a broken street is a small bar; a man stands smoking outside. Decent place? asks the poet, gesturing at the door. No, says the man. Lousy. They both laugh. I’m new here, says the poet. First time in Bangalore. You like it? asks the man.

Lousy, says the poet and they laugh again. The man extends a hand. He is a property consultant. The poet says he is a poet. Ah, says the man. Then I must buy you a drink.

They go in and sit down with the other men talking in the gloomy bar suffused with the aroma of fried fish. The waiter brings them their whiskies and sodas. He slowly drops ice-cubes into their glasses. I was a poet too once, says the property consultant. Lousy poems I used to write.

They clink their glasses together. The poet’s new friend asks, And you?

Lousy poems, says the poet, smiling.

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Manan Karki

Manan Karki Poetry

The Hanged Man Sings Kathmandu I ‘A nation cursed by the Sati.’

A popular Nepali saying.

Neither with a bang, nor with a whimper, But with the cries, the shrieks, the curses As of a woman by fire being ravaged Will you go down, Kathmandu, City of ruins and shadows, Where the dead lurk in the eyes of the living And thicken with cries their tongues.

II Kathmandu – through a cold drizzle grey, The colour of loss, Of blindness in the eyes of old women Greedy for succour and for lies, Of froth on the floods of foaming rivers Grown turbid with hate.

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Poetry

As in a dream I see you now Smug in your corruption as vermin in their filth Sprawled like a carcass upon whose skin Abominations suppurate.

Your mud and your gold are one, Are one and the same now, Kathmandu, And the yellow stain upon your widows’ brows And the crimson upon your brides’ And the fires that consume the flesh of your dead And those in which your living go down Like drowning men – arms flailing, fists Clutching air, desperate eyes distended in The impotence of rage.

But once those very eyes had sought the heights Where now in a frenzy of grief the sky Lurches downwards To impale itself upon your golden pinnacles; From there a god had once descended, And captive among them had lived, Who long had sung your graces . . .

But who will sing you again, mother?

Your lays have all grown tuneless now, And that proud breast that once had suckled gods Is now no more than a pair of shrivelled dugs From which none again shall draw sustenance, None, save this – this aborted foetus Crowned with a wreath of nettles, Lying still, grinning, Hideous in your leprous arms.

III Down at the bottom of a dry gulch An old sow gorges on her feast of farrow,

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And sated lies upon her throne of mulch Belching with grunts a reek of flesh and marrow.

Proud empress still, even though her empire be No more than a rubble of tares and stones, And every porcine heir to this debris Nothing but a pile of shit and bones.

IV A bitch upon my canker feeds, a dog upon my bone, A curse of whelps upon my knees howl and moan; All the dry summer long the men stabbed with a daggered hope, And amidst caresses the women noosed me with a rope; And hung me out, oh so high, my shame for all to see, Now a dead rat my leprous pride eyes enviously; Father to a bastard son, mother to a whore, I’ve played my parts, and now I’m done, the devil’s at the door.

V Over a city choked with soot and ashes The sky in a frenzy of funeral fires seethes.

Seethes.

Seethes and burns.

This is the hour when In my memory Everything burns.

Note: This poem was written well before the earthquakes that have devastated Nepal and its capital, Kathmandu.

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The Asian Invasion The Asian Jessie Cole I nvasion

Jessie Cole

T

he first ride-on mower my parents bought was always breaking down. This seems an incidental fact, but really it isn’t. We lived on sixteen acres in subtropical northern New South Wales and the grass grew like wildfire. There was a man who would come out to repair it. He was a regular feature of my childhood. Reliable, efficient, relatively cheap. There is something alluring about people who come into your home and solve otherwise insurmountable problems, and it’s interesting the way fix-it men can come to seem wise. Into my teens, I’d watch my parents’ thankful faces as they waved this man off, peaceful in the knowledge that the mower would work again tomorrow.

One day, after he had fixed our mower for the umpteenth time, my mother and I stood chatting to him in the driveway, a moment of small talk. I don’t know why, but I mentioned that my boyfriend was of Italian descent.

‘The I-talians, well, they’re all right,’ he said. ‘But those Asians, you’ve got to watch them.’

I was utterly shocked. This statement, so out of the blue. I glanced across at my mother, but she was staring avidly at her feet.

‘What do you mean?’ I stuttered.

‘They’re shifty. You can’t trust ’em.’

Now it might sound improbable in small-town rural Australia that I could get to the age of seventeen and never have experienced such a blatantly racist statement, but that’s the first I remember. I stared at this familiar man, trying to fit his words into the picture I’d built of him.

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‘We don’t feel that way,’ my mother said quietly, finally looking up.

The man seemed unperturbed. ‘In the cities and that, they’re taking over.’ There was a faint gleam in his eyes. ‘Can’t go anywhere without seeing them.’ He climbed into his truck and lifted his arm in a casual wave.

The same as he’d always done but irrevocably different. The week after that my parents bought a new mower and the fix-it man vanished from view.

The valley where I grew up, and where I still live, is a predominately white place, but something unusual happened around the time of my birth. Three separate Japanese families moved into town and then each proceeded to have a bunch of kids. In my small primary school of sixty children there were about ten kids of Japanese parentage, all around my age. It was an anomaly – a Japanese community in 1970s rural Australia – but in the jumble of that time and place they fitted right in.

The 1970s was a chaotic decade in the history of my town. Previously it had been quite homogenous, old farming families going about their business, but with the rise of the hippie counterculture there was an influx of new settlers, young folk from the cities trying out whole new ways of being. They were on the hunt for a place far removed from the rat race, or – as my father once explained – away from the perceived evils of materialism and conformity. I used to imagine that there must have been quite a struggle when all these outlandish characters, with their long scruffy hair and bell-bottoms, turned up in town to build their hippie shacks, but nowadays – when I ask around – I find a relatively benign response to their arrival. It’s easy to forget that Nimbin, a place that became the hippie heartland of Australia, was voted the deadest town in Oz by an early 1970s television show. Clearly there was some ideological reshuffling required when all these young folk came flooding in, but I get the feeling that mostly the locals saw this rush of outsiders as revitalising – fresh blood, so to speak.

And into this topsy-turvy world came the three Japanese families.

Drawn to northern New South Wales for the same basic reasons as my parents, they wished to escape the society they’d been born into, to live a

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different life from their forbearers. Adventurous, they were ready for a new start. Of the three families, there were two who were particularly close with my parents. Shigeru and Yumiko, with their four children, and Yoshi and Tokie, with their three boys. Shige is a builder and Yoshi an artisan carpenter, and in the late 1970s both were involved, in different ways, in the building of my parents’ home.

Shige and Yumiko were first to arrive. They had travelled through India and South-East Asia, the classic hippie trail. Flying into Western Australia, they’d lived in Coolgardie for five months before they’d hitchhiked across the Nullarbor Plain, Yumiko pregnant with their first child. I once asked Shige why they’d settled in my valley, and he laughed and said, ‘We run out of money. Stuck!’ But later he elaborated: ‘When we move here, lot of other people move here too. Everybody new around the same time. Also, we lucky, lots of people traveller, so they understand.’

Yoshi and Tokie had planned just to visit the area, but by the time they arrived Tokie was pregnant with their second child, so they stayed for a while, and in time it’s where they settled. Yoshi told me, ‘In Japan everybody same mind . . . here people so friendly and very openminded.’ Shige added, ‘Australian people complain about having no culture, customs . . . traditions . . . because it’s young country. For me, in Japan, too many traditions. So when I came to Australia I feel so free.’

Things like cultural capital can be hard to quantify, but the presence of these Japanese families brought something special to my town. Shige and Yoshi were both, in different ways, extremely skilled craftsmen, and many of the older houses in town have a uniquely Japanese flavour.

Slanted, shingled roofs, hand-carved wooden features, handmade bamboo fences, the occasional wood-heated bathhouse. Way before the ubiquitous sushi train, we hippie kids were sampling the delights of homemade Japanese cuisine. Sushi rolls and handmade tofu. And on top of all that was the philosophical exchange. Elements of traditional Japanese culture involve a focus on being in harmony with the seasons and a reverence for nature. Keystone hippie ideals. The Japanese families in my hometown led the way when it came to going back to basics, living for years off the grid without electricity.

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As kids in my hometown, we’d run together in packs – climbing trees, swinging wildly from the Tarzan vines, splashing our way through the creeks. Going out bush with baskets of fruit from the trees, we’d hang about playing elaborate games – laughing, bickering and making up again. Mostly we stayed outside, but at the end of the day we’d venture into one another’s houses.

When you’re a kid, everyone else’s family is like a foreign country, peculiar and unique. You have to learn the house rules, figure out the language. I distinctly recall being entranced by the exoticism of the plush pink wall-to-wall carpet in a friend’s suburban bedroom at about the age of eight. Suburban aesthetics that horrified my parents – from which they had so determinedly escaped – were alluring to me in their unfamiliarity.

It is often confounding, how different we all can be, but I don’t remember feeling the Japanese families were more foreign than anyone else’s. I do remember enjoying the company of the Japanese mothers, who were gentle and softly spoken. Sometimes those mums would come into our primary school to teach us origami. They made us onigiri, which we thought were a massive treat.

I’ve been wondering lately about my own obliviousness to race as a child. I used to believe it was an outcome of having been brought up in a particularly open-minded community; that difference was somehow made invisible by the lack of attention afforded it. It has struck me recently that maybe my blindness was a luxury of my ‘normality’, my whiteness. Isn’t the very definition of privilege that the one who has it doesn’t see it? But then again, our town was full of wild characters. In this spectrum of eccentricity it was hard to get much of a sense of what was normal. Mine was a mixed-up world, multi-layered and complex.

The rules, at times, seemed difficult to discern. As a child, the basic tenets I intuited were: be open (explore!), be kind (where possible) and – last but not least – don’t judge. (Each to their own. Whatever gets you through the night.) Certainly, when it came to the Japanese families, I detected not a hint of ‘us’ and ‘them’.

I am endlessly fascinated by this hippie experiment, that a proportion of the population committed to trying out relatively untested ways of living even existed in the 1970s. That they could flow towards my valley

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like a meandering creek, arrive in an unruly mess and go about erecting this strange boundary-less place seems somewhat fantastical in hindsight.

Of course, they have always been easy targets for parody and derision.

Long-haired stoners, talking their ideological bullshit. But there is something about this idealism, this verve – when it was still fresh and new – that fills me with a kind of yearning. Though I’ve experienced first hand the ill effects of the hedonism of this era, there’s a part of me that longs to experience some version of the idealistic fervour. To be able to truly believe. By the time I’d come into any kind of political consciousness, idealism was dead. Cynicism was ever-present, anything less was just plain foolish.

In my final year of high school one of my teachers announced to the class, ‘You know, the rest of Australia isn’t anything like here. You think this is the mainstream, but it isn’t.’ We treated that statement with the derision we always reserved for old men in bad ties who tried to tell us how the world worked. A year later I was living in Brisbane, Pauline Hanson had been elected to the federal seat of Oxley and the political landscape had erupted into a space where fear of the ‘Asian invasion’ loomed large.

‘I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians,’ Hanson said in her maiden speech to parliament. ‘They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate.’

It was hard to make sense of this in the context of where I’d come from. I couldn’t stop thinking of the Japanese families in my hometown, of what they’d brought to my community, of what we’d all shared. I couldn’t shake the bewildering sense that I had entered adulthood and stepped into an unfathomable world, an alien landscape where bigotry was righteously defended as a valuable addition to society instead of a scourge. My nation felt like a foreign land.

Nowadays, fear of the Asian invasion has lessened and the denigration of Muslims has taken centre stage. It’s a sad pattern, that each new wave of migration brings a counter surge of racism. I think of how ostracised the Italians and Greeks once were in our national culture – wogs, dagos – and how Australian they now feel. I watch the Socceroos win the Asian

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Jessie Cole

Cup with my sport-mad fifteen-year-old and the names on the shirts make me smile: Luongo, Langerak, McKay, Behich, Spiranovic, Brillante, Troisi, Bresciano and Jason Davidson, whose grandmother is Japanese. I want to say to my son, This is the best of us, this mishmash of names, this team.

We are a nation of immigrants. Colourful, diverse, textured. Apart from the First Peoples, none of us has ancestry on this soil that goes back more than a paltry two hundred and twenty-seven years. Looking back through our nation’s history of shifting prejudice – from the early stigmatisation of Irish settlers to present day anti-Muslim sentiment – I suspect that in a few decades the tide will have turned. Muslims will be seen as fully integrated citizens, a part of the fabric of this patchworkquilt nation. Someone small-minded somewhere will be saying, ‘Well, those Muslims, they’re all right,’ with a world-weary sigh, ‘but those [insert new immigrants of choice], you can’t trust ’em.’

How I wish we could just skip that part, take a look around us and see how much we’ve gained.

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Sally McLaren

I

hand my passport and boarding pass to the officer at Brisbane International Airport and she notices I’m heading to Japan.

‘What do you do there?’ she asks.

‘Work at a university,’ I say.

‘Teaching English?’

‘No, Japanese popular culture.’

‘Oh! My son loves manga and is studying Japanese,’ she chirps. I’ve had this conversation hundreds of times. But the look on my face must be puzzling her.

‘What a fascinating culture,’ she continues, angling for an affirmative response. ‘I’d love to visit.’

‘Yes, it’s. . . .’ but I can’t finish the sentence and head off to my flight.

There’s so much I want to say and it matters too much to fake an exuberant spin on it.

From the outside, Japan seems so exotic, so ordered and so fun. That’s how people I meet outside Japan seem to see it. What I see, on the inside, is that the delights of Japan, which are attracting ever-increasing numbers of foreign tourists, are now tarnished by disaster and denial. Japan, four years after the triple disasters of 11 March 2011 (‘3.11’), is sliding backwards into a nationalistic cocoon and preparing to switch the nuclear power stations back on. It’s irradiated to an unknown degree, increasingly chauvinistic and, slowly but surely, re-militarising.

As the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, there are some uncomfortable and disturbing echoes from the past –

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media censorship, talk of military conscription and serious economic problems. The disabled reactors of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant are still spewing radiation and leaking contaminated water. Accidents, mishaps and cover-ups continue to plague the clean-up operation. But Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told the International Olympics Committee in 2013, before Japan won its bid for the 2020 Olympics, that there was no need for concern about the Fukushima situation because it was ‘under control’.

There are still more than 240,000 people displaced by the triple disasters of 2011 and around 90,000 people are still in temporary housing.

Meanwhile, a ¥169 billion Olympic stadium is being built in central Tokyo.

Japanese pop culture delights and dazzles both domestic and international audiences with its technical artistry, imaginative storylines and aesthetic pleasures. At the heart of this multi-billion yen industry are manga (comics or graphic novels) and anime (animation). Manga and anime are a ubiquitous part of modern daily life in Japan.

It’s difficult to compare manga to Western comics because the medium has its own visual language – essentially black-and-white frames that are read from right to left, but which include visual cues such as extreme close-ups of characters or details. The plethora of manga genres and subgenres is overwhelming – there are manga aimed at children, teenagers and adults. They are also categorised according to gender. However, these divisions are fluid and there is crossover between ages and genders. The subject matter is diverse, everything from science fiction and romance to magical fantasy and history. There are manga for religion, cooking, sport and travel, and even pachinko (a kind of pinball gambling). But there are also some very problematic manga – pornographic and sexually violent stories, often depicting young girls. This unsavoury aspect of manga puts an unfortunate dent in what is otherwise a sophisticated fusion of art and media.

Manga and anime have a close relationship. A vast amount of anime originates from manga and nearly every aspect of Japanese pop culture is rooted in a manga or anime story. Together they inspire film, video

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games, pop music and ‘character goods’ – such as figurines and hand towels. Contemporary Japanese media and advertising is saturated with aidoru (idols, or manufactured celebrities) and the culture of kawaii (cute) – most of which emanate from manga and anime, either in style or substance. These cross-media platforms in Japan are cleverly intertwined and marketed, and a crucial part of the globalisation of Japanese pop culture.

I work on the intercultural frontlines of Japanese popular culture at a local university, teaching a course to dozens of foreign students who have spent their childhoods idealising and dreaming about Japan through its pop culture. This generation have been immersed in the products of Japanese visual culture from an early age – Sailor Moon, Pokemon, Neon Genesis Evangelion and Hayao Miyazaki anime films, to name just a few.

Eventually, these students ride the transnational flow of Japanese pop culture to a Japanese university and are now in situ to indulge further.

Expectations are high, and the Japanese pop culture tastes of these students are intense and immediate. The Japanese students in my class seem both bewildered and delighted by the obscure interests and passion shown by the international students. They try not to stare too much at the Canadian student who arrives in full Lolita-style cosplay every week, looking like a Victorian doll, and they seem both impressed and disturbed by the articulate self-proclaimed otaku (nerds) from the US, Germany and Singapore who have intricate knowledge of particular anime or manga subgenres.

Japanese universities are now struggling to compete for the everdecreasing numbers of local students (Japan has one of the lowest birth rates among industrially developed nations) and the steady influx of international pop culture devotees is helping to keep universities afloat.

But it’s not just financial. The presence of international students also validates the success of the government’s ‘soft power’ strategy – ‘Cool Japan’.

‘Cool Japan’ is the label given to the products of Japan’s popular-culture industries. The concept emerged in the early 2000s, after Japan had already started to lose its economic might. The economic downturn had

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an unexpected side effect – many artists and designers, the original creators of ‘cool’ stories and styles that have fuelled pop culture trends for the past two decades, thrived in this challenging environment and produced inspiring and inventive work.

Thanks to an article in Foreign Policy by journalist Douglas McGray trumpeting Japan’s ‘Gross National Cool’ (by way of Harvard Professor Joseph Nye’s ‘soft power’ ideology), the global success of Japanese popular culture, including fashion, art and design, was identified as a national resource. Cool Japan caught the attention of the government and since 2002 has been the focus of several policy initiatives. Billions of yen have now been spent promoting Japanese companies both at home and abroad, at the same time as the dysfunction of successive governments (eight prime ministers in the last ten years) has destabilised many aspects of Japanese life. The government is intent on branding the nation as ‘cool’, and pop culture is part of the propaganda.

But, as many journalists and scholars point out, once something ‘cool’ has been identified and co-opted by the government, it loses any kind of ‘cool’ credibility. A perhaps even bigger faux pas is that calling yourself ‘cool’ defies the conventions of Japanese ‘modesty’. There’s also a dark side to this political misappropriation of Japanese popular culture. Some scholars note that Cool Japan initiatives have been used as a way to foster pro-Japanese sentiment – and erase history – in the many Asian countries that were the victims of Japanese imperialism in the twentieth century.

In 2006, before his first term as prime minister, Shinzo Abe wrote a book called Utsukushii kuni e (‘Towards a beautiful country’), which outlined his motivations and vision for Japan. He argued that Japan should become a more assertive nation that values its traditions and culture, and is respected by the world. The book was a bestseller, with more than 1.3 million copies sold. Abe then became prime minister for a year before resigning due to several political failures and health issues – namely irritable bowel syndrome. In 2012, he returned to power with improved IBS medication and a renewed vigour for making Japan a ‘beautiful country’.

After calling a snap election in late 2014, which had the lowest voter turnout on record, Abe’s victory gave him the political mandate to

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reinterpret parts of Japan’s war-renouncing constitution in order for the Jieitai – the Japanese Self Defence Forces – to transform into a more active military force internationally. As the foundations of Japanese democracy are being shaken to the core, tensions with China and South Korea over sovereignty in disputed territorial waters, together with historical revisionism in Japanese history textbooks concerning war atrocities, have heightened to a worrying degree over the last two years.

During Abe’s time in office, Japanese high-school students who are about to graduate on to employment or further education have been receiving unsolicited postcards in the mail from the JSDF. The message is: ‘We see you will soon graduate from high school. Why not consider a career in the Jieitai?’

Outraged friends whose children have received these postcards say they are worried that compulsory military service, which exists in neighbouring South Korea and Taiwan, will become a reality in Japan if Abe’s government successfully changes the constitution and the education system, and successfully stifles media freedom through the State Secrets Bill.

The last time Japanese youth received mail from the military was during World War II when akagami (red letters) were sent by the Imperial Army to conscript young men.

However, erasing history and making the military ‘cool’ are both off to a successful start. The JSDF have utilised pop culture aesthetics to attract the attention of Japanese youth. In 2013, I saw recruitment posters featuring an androgynous looking manga character in military fatigues and helmet on the platforms of the Kyoto city subway line with the slogan written in English letters ‘JJJ – jieitai joyful job’, and in Japanese Yatte minai? (Won’t you give it a try?) That year, JSDF recruitment was reported to have increased by a fifth.

The phenomenally successful all-girl idol group AKB48 has been coopted into recruiting for the JSDF. In 2014, twenty-year-old member Haruka Shimazaki was appointed as a JSDF brand ambassador and appeared in an advertisement where she spoke directly to the camera amid images of JSDF men and women active on land, air and sea. With a background soundtrack of innocuous upbeat music, her main message was: Koko de shika dekinai shigoto ga arimasu (‘This is work that can only

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be done here’). On the screen in English she points to the phrase ‘You and Peace’, while a pink heart-shaped petal spins around her.

Complementing the insidious nature of these campaigns which link ‘joyful’ and ‘peace’ to a cute, more female-friendly image of the military is the anime series Garuzu ando Pantsa (‘Girls und Panzer’). First broadcast in 2012, it’s the story of a competition between high schools for girls where tank warfare (sensha-do – ‘the way of the tank’) is a sport. The characters are typical bishojo (beautiful young girls) in school uniforms with very short skirts. Their mouths are permanently open and they appear in child-like poses. No one is maimed or dies in the Garuzu ando Pantsa battles – the main action revolves around driving stunts – it’s all just cute, harmless fun. According to media reports, the animators were granted access to the JSDF’s tank school in order to get the details of the tanks right. So far, Garuzu ando Pantsa has spawned five manga series, a light novel and a video game. A full-length animated film is due to be released later this year.

Fukushima translates literally as ‘lucky island’. But there’s not much good fortune to be found in the irradiated and abandoned areas of Fukushima Prefecture and the other disaster-affected parts of northern Japan, known as Tohoku.

As much as Japanese and international media emphasise ‘recovery’, and well-meaning foreign volunteers publish fundraising cookbooks with titles such as Smiles for Tohoku, there’s no getting away from the fact that Japan’s encounters with nuclear technology since 1945 have had tragic consequences for Japanese people. The former mayor of Futaba, the now abandoned town that hosted part of the Daiichi nuclear reactor, says in the documentary Nuclear Nation by Japanese filmmaker Atsushi Funahashi, ‘People in Tokyo prospered while we were swimming in radiation’.

By now, all of Japan is to some extent ‘swimming in radiation’.

Through the movement of transport in and out of the contaminated zones and the burning of the irradiated tsunami debris at select spots all over the country, everyone has been exposed and will suffer together.

There is debate over safe and acceptable levels of exposure, but it’s not

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something you hear a lot about through the media or in daily conversation. Mention it too much and you will be accused of ‘hating Japan’, or shunned by friends and colleagues. It’s not easily discussed even within the university. After a showing of Nuclear Nation to my film studies class, there was shock and disbelief as well as anger. Both local and international students seemed unaware of some of the basic facts and consequences of the 3.11 disasters and were disturbed by the personal stories of the nuclear refugees shown in the documentary. For comparative purposes I showed another documentary on the disaster by a foreign filmmaker, The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, which had a more upbeat take on trauma and recovery. At the end of my course, the feedback I got from one Japanese student was: ‘You showed us too many disaster documentaries.’

After more than three years of safety checks, the Sendai nuclear power plant on the southern island of Kyushu is scheduled to come back online during 2015. Two more nuclear power plants in Fukui Prefecture, close to Kyoto, are also being prepped for a restart this year, pending a court case. The anti-nuclear movement struggles along, barely getting its voice into the mainstream media. After gaining momentum throughout 2011 and 2012, with hundreds of thousands protesting in Tokyo, the movement has fizzled out. Dedicated activists continue on, almost in isolation from mainstream Japanese society. Although the majority of Japanese people are reported to be against nuclear power, in person many will shrug and say it’s a necessary evil. Whatever happened to Japanese technical innovation and the business philosophy of kaizen (continuous improvement)?

There’s another Japan that doesn’t agree with the nuclear restart, the regressive economic and social policies, and the direction in which the country is heading. This Japan is mostly populated by artists, activists and some of the most brilliant, interesting and creative people in the country. But at the moment it feels like not only is this Japan increasingly depressed, it’s barely visible. The government wants to project an image of the country as safe, hospitable and, of course, ‘cool’.

In 2014, the bestselling and much-loved manga series Oishinbo (the title loosely means ‘foodie’), about the epicurean adventures of a food

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writer, tried to start a conversation about the radiation effects of the Fukushima accident. A chapter in the series entitled ‘The Truth About Fukushima’ included a storyline where a group of journalists experienced nosebleeds after visiting the Daiichi nuclear power plant. There were also scenes questioning the health and safety of people living with radiation in Fukushima. The government and media furore was so great that the manga’s publisher stopped publication and put Oishinbo on an apparently ‘scheduled’ hiatus.

Japan’s foreign tourism has increased beyond 2011 pre-disaster levels, thanks to a weaker yen. In 2014, Japan had a record 13.41 million foreign visitors. The government has announced a target of twenty million tourists a year by the 2020 Olympics. Apart from the initial aftermath of 3.11, the nuclear accident has not deterred visitors, or even caused many to question the levels of radiation or the situation of people in Tohoku.

Information, just like Prime Minister Abe’s assurance on the situation in Fukushima, is ‘under control’. In December 2014, the Diet passed the State Secrets Bill without clearly defining what a ‘state secret’ is. The bill essentially deters whistle blowers, investigative journalists, lawyers, artists, academics and anyone wanting to speak truth to power against the state.

It’s especially useful for preventing long-term scrutiny of the Fukushima situation and any other aspect of the government’s determination to proceed with nuclear power. Not only does the State Secrets Bill strengthen Abe’s political power, it also cynically exploits cultural values in Japan.

According to a 2012 report of an independent investigation committee for the Diet on the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the disaster was ‘man-made’ and caused by the ‘ingrained conventions of Japanese culture’. Kiyoshi Kurokawa, a medical doctor and the committee chairman, explicitly identified these conventions as ‘our reflexive obedience; our reluctance to question authority; our devotion to “sticking with the programme”; our groupism; and our insularity’.

The more than 600-page report, based on 900 hours of hearings and more than 1,000 interviews, was published in Japanese and English.

However, it is only the English version that emphasises the culpability of

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Japanese culture in the disaster. Readers of the Japanese report have been deprived of a crucial and increasingly urgent discussion.

In the cracks of Cool Japan, things can go spectacularly wrong. In what sounds like a cruel April Fools’ Day joke, in 2012 an entrepreneur in Kashiwa, Chiba (just outside Tokyo), tried to put together an all-girl idol group called the Hot*Spots. The name was a direct reference to the high levels of radiation in the area, which received some of the fallout from the Fukushima disaster. The group’s mission, according to an online announcement for auditions, was ‘to improve the way people think about radioactive hotspots through song and dance’. The first song they planned to release was entitled ‘1 Millisievert Fever’. Outraged locals forced local government officials to shut the project down.

Nothing will sell radiation. Not even ‘Cool Japan’.

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Siobhan Harvey

I

n the darkness, she counts them off like sheep. Black sheep.

And another . . .

And another . . .

And another . . .

Blinded by the night, disorientated by half-sleep and the heaviness inside, Grace can’t tell if each jolt is her heart, the baby or the earth.

Sometimes loud and angry as a scar, their pain frightens her. Sometimes weak as a whisper, their voices sing her to sleep. Even so, it is always worse at night. When darkness presses in upon the emptiness.

When the city, still and noiseless as a frightened animal, magnifies her unsettlement. As if, at its most terrible, land-mind-body-heart collide.

Eventually, when another quake rolls through, she climbs out of bed and stumbles into the murk, feeling her way to the door and down the corridor.

In the lounge, the curtain open at the window, a sliver of moonlight slices through the room as if guided by a mean hand. Grace sits at the table, picks up some paper and begins to fold.

It is raining when she lands. She’s witnessed April downpours that race in towards Christchurch from the Pacific, and September thunderstorms that drench the Canterbury Plains. But this rain – a constant flow of water, as though God (if He exists) has absentmindedly left a tap running – is as curious as her new concrete landscape. So once she’s checked in to

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her gaijin house and settled her things, she ventures (umbrella in hand) into both.

The parts of the torrential city that disclose themselves to her are like elaborate, layered ornaments. At first glance, they are networks of roads heaving with automotive and human traffic, but when Grace ventures deeper they reveal side streets where shrines huddle side by side with small shops whose shelves teem with Buddhist icons.

The jumble of the city is clearer to behold once the deluge stops.

Dazzling with neon signage, black, reflective glass and wide, silver architecture, its difference to her hometown, its bustling energy, absorbs her.

Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, she feels part of something – something vast, energetic, electric and inescapable. She walks for hours – through the arcades and craft shops of Asakusa, past the grey-faced office blocks and Dior, Chanel and Gucci boutiques in Ginza – until, finally, Tokyo’s inner workings take her to black, iron gates.

Here, the vast green lawns, loops of pathway and square-fronted museums of Ueno-Koen surround her. At random, she selects a pathway to follow, a line of huge, ancient sakuras taking her to miniature rockand-water gardens reminiscent of those in Christchurch’s Botanic Gardens. A weathered statue of Samurai Takamori points her towards lakes containing signal-red rowing boats and nesting black cormorants.

Beneath Aesop Bridge, she glimpses a tented city of business-suited itinerants.

And there, suddenly, is Ken. Dressed in full uniform. Skin pale as a spectre. An illusory presence, inserting himself indiscriminately into her memory. His hand reaches out for her.

The earth shudders once more.

The strange jolt of Ken’s presence among the lost and dispossessed. A rejection of the truth, that’s what his appearance in Grace’s memory was.

Unreal. Out of place. For she hadn’t met him until much later. All these tremors since the loss of her husband have shifted her sense of what is real and what is not.

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Abruptly, her senses are alive. Her eyes see a shadow cast by the Japanese maple cross the window. Her ears are abuzz with birdcall, an odd medley composed by blackbirds, tuis and starlings light in the air.

Only now does Grace realise she is lying on the sofa, that on the table nearby nests of colourful paper cranes are watching her. She traces herself back to the previous evening. It dawns on her that, while taking up her origami, her mind reliving her first day in Tokyo, she must have fallen into a dream.

The chill morning air walks her to the kitchen. There she prepares a pot of green tea. While the kettle boils, she stands at the window, where her hand instinctively reaches out for a black paper bird resting on the ledge. Apart from the colour and the fact that it was made by Ken, the delicate bird is identical to those she’s preparing now for their son. She holds it up to daylight, studies the intricacy of its folds, its wings, neck and beak. As her little finger strokes the papery mandible, her gaze drifts outside to the star jasmine her husband planted when they first came to Christchurch and which, until a month ago, he tended with the infinite care a parent offers their child.

Suddenly Grace is crying again.

An hour later, the last of the tea cold in its cup, Grace settles down to more folding. A ripple of fingers, feather-faint against the front door, disturbs. In the silence that follows, Grace holds her breath and waits.

Coming in to land, a plane roars overhead. She focuses on this – the noise, the image of an object propelled by mechanical flight – rather than on the stranger standing on her doorstep waiting to be let in.

The clock on the wall tells her it is Flight NZ94 from Narita.

Grace visualises a cockpit, an empty seat where Ken should be, the preparations for descent.

Only when Grace is certain the visitor has departed does she rise from her seat, her stomach now so swollen that movements like this are becoming increasingly difficult, her bulge making movement an act of negotiation with her body. She treads softly down the hallway, and then peers through the front door’s bevelled glass. Wedged into the frame, an envelope. The script upon it is stubby, as if clawed on to the page. Miss

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Grace Bird. Like the handwriting, the use of her maiden name confuses her. She finds headed notepaper inside.

Miss Bird I recently visited your father. He is very ill.

Please call me urgently to discuss his situation.

Mrs Rona Matata Christchurch Public Health Nurse

Grace sighs. After her mother’s funeral, she stood on New Brighton Pier, looked out at the Pacific Ocean and knew there must be more to her life than teaching English at college and looking after her father.

Wings, invisible, unfurled at her back and she flew to countries she’d never seen. Her first stop was the place she wanted to visit most, Japan.

A few weeks later she told her father, his wheelchair parked in a grey corner of the room, she was going away to teach in Tokyo. The newspaper he was reading ruffled.

‘Who will look after me?’ he asked.

As she listed the agencies that could support him, she felt twinges of selfishness. But then her father added, ‘Grace, of all the places to choose, why there? You know how I feel about them Japs.’

Back in the dining room, Grace places her half-finished origami bird to one side, rests Rona Matata’s letter on the table and reads it once more. For a month, she’s closed her door to neighbours, her midwife, Ken’s workmates and Victim Support. Grace knows Rona Matata can’t be so easily dismissed. So she settles the envelope close to the telephone and tells herself that she’ll call as soon as she’s ready to deal with her father again.

Later, as the house grows dark, Grace sits in the rocking chair in the baby’s bedroom. In spite of the continuing tremors, the day hasn’t been without success. Strung together, dozens of rainbow-coloured cranes sit peacefully on the dining table. She surveys the bedroom’s blue walls, expectant cot and empty change table, then at the wooden mobile that waits, patiently, to play its song. Even the slightest thing, small as her memory of Ken decorating this room, seems impossible to bear at a

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moment like this. She closes her eyes, turns her mind away from the plans once conceived in this room and lets the memory of first meeting Ken wash over her like sleep.

It is the beginning of her second term in Tokyo. In the distance, the white peaks of Mount Takao remind her of the snow-dusted Kaikouras.

In the city the air is crisper than Colombo Street in July, snowflakes falling alike on Armani- and Chanel-suited businesspeople, kimonowearing women and the cosplay tribe. At night the lights – neon signs of the metropolis, constellations of office-lights in a dark, cloudless sky – flicker as brightly as pinpricks of illumination in a southern twilight.

Hanging out with a group of teachers from New Zealand, Grace has discovered a shop that sells Vegemite, Ojays, Pineapple Lumps, Cloudy Bay sav blanc and all the things that remind her of home.

Like Grace, Ken is an outsider. Not that she realises it when he appears in her advanced class. Tall, bone-thin, with feather-white skin and a ruffle of jet-coloured hair, he carries himself with an ease that refuses to set him apart from the Japanese men around him. He is different, though. Grace is confronted by it when he explains in soft, unbroken English that he’s a trainee pilot in need of a language qualification. The bank employees, Nikkei stockbrokers and housewives planning overseas holidays who are Ken’s classmates treat him differently thereafter. In group work, they abandon him. Each time he looks at his teacher when he speaks, they furrow their brows and whisper their disapproval. Then, when it’s their turn, they rise and lower their heads slightly as if addressing the floor.

Ken has already gained his certificate by the time he and Grace meet again, accidently, in a ramen-ya in Ueno close to Christmas. She’s there with a Kiwi friend, Becky, to sample what the proprietor of their gaijin house claims is the best yakisoba and plum wine in the district. Ken is there with a fellow trainee pilot, Ryosuke. The couples sit at tables some distance apart. Only when the teachers are leaving does Grace knock Ken’s chair. Her apology, expressed in rudimentary Japanese, quickly evaporates. She and Ken fall into conversation about the excellent food and then the coincidence of their living nearby.

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That first meeting outside the classroom lasts into late evening. Ken and Ryosuke take Grace and Becky to the Kei Plaza Hotel’s Aurora Lounge, where they drink Manhattans and look at the synthetic city far below. They chat about life in Tokyo, teaching, flying and New Zealand.

Ken tells the best stories. Grace listens attentively as he recounts the tale of how, aged ten, he moved to Auckland where his father took up work at a medical practice in the city.

‘It didn’t work out,’ he says and laughs lightly. ‘Mum was homesick all the time. So eventually we returned to Sendai. Living overseas changed me, though. As soon as I came back to Japan, I begged my parents to let me have flying lessons. Even though I was only twelve, my parents knew I was serious. So Dad took me out to the aero club where I had my first lesson with an old friend of my father’s, Kenzo-san. I was lucky. Kenzosan was a retired flight captain and a very generous teacher. When the first lesson began and Kenzo-san lifted the plane gently off the ground, it felt incredible. As if, in the sky, I’d found a place where I belonged.’

The way Grace’s memories overlap is draining. One recollection folds into another, just as, each time the earth crumples these days, one quake signals the next. So destabilising, like the way current events merge with the past in her mind. She feels she’s been robbed of every certainty.

The landscape of her mind morphs into the pagodas of Senso-ji Temple. It’s New Year’s Day, the oshogatsu festivities. Grace and Ken stand outside the Thunder Gate, a crowd about them, the smoke of collective breath fusing with burning incense. Ken strokes Grace’s face, places lips gently upon her. A moment’s tenderness, so brazen, so un-Japanese. Afterwards, the crowds – some wearing kimonos, some holding ancient Buddhist icons – surge through Thunder Gate and start their march into the temple. Ken seizes her hand and leads her into the temple grounds. Nakamise-dori’s bright arrangement of stalls selling woodblock prints, sweets, Godzilla toys and T-shirts flashes past. The next thing Grace knows she’s standing in the Great Hall before the golden statue of Kannon, Goddess of Mercy.

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When she wakes, Grace opens windows in the kitchen, lets unseasonably hot air flood into her home. Light, too: how it drenches bench-tops cluttered with dirtied crockery, cutlery and cups. For the first time in a month, Grace fills the sink with fresh, hot water and a squeeze of detergent.

Into this, she places dirty plates and starts to clean.

More planes overhead. They pass at regular intervals like large, elegant birds folded into being from immense sheets of metal-grey paper. Her mind strings them together and hangs them in the sky, migrants awaiting safe harbour.

For a moment she thinks she sees Ken standing in his garden, the star jasmine in flower again. He has stopped gardening, the sight of an airplane captivating him. A wave as he welcomes his colleagues home.

This causes Grace to remember the day when she and Ken traipsed from one open house to another until they landed up here. She thinks of how her husband, in typically methodical fashion, set out his reasons for wanting to buy the house, as if they formed one of those checklists he used each time he sat in a cockpit and readied a plane for flight.

‘It’s close to work. It’s modern and well built. Brick and tile. It’s a good price. And in a safe area.’

Given what has happened, Grace wonders if she had accepted Ken’s desire to live in this part of Christchurch too lightly.

There’s a knock at the door. Grace opens it to find a tall, thin, beaknosed woman dressed in grey.

‘Miss Bird.’ That name again, Grace thinks wearily. ‘Rona Matata.’

Grace makes a fresh pot of green tea. Then she and Rona sit in the dining room, overlooking the stone path Ken laid, the neglected magnolia and abandoned bamboo.

Rona looks around her. ‘I see you make paper ornaments. Aren’t they sweet?’

Grace smiles weakly.

‘Now, Miss Bird, where to begin? As a public health nurse responsible for the elderly, I deal with cases where the relevant agencies and the council have tried to care for someone but, for various reasons, this support breaks down and other solutions need to be found; which brings us to

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your father. Miss Bird, are you aware that your father’s nearly blind, his kidneys are failing and he’s suffering from peripheral arterial disease?’

‘He gets help, doesn’t he? Public nurses and home help?’

‘It’s not enough, I’m afraid. Especially since the earthquake. Like a lot of residents in the east of the city, your father’s home was hit hard. The chimney collapsed. There was so much liquefaction; mud and water swamped the property. At present, he has no heating and the whole house reeks of damp. We’ve tried to find him alternative accommodation but he refuses to leave. Things can’t carry on as they are.’

Grace nods.

Rona Matata continues, ‘Especially given your father’s . . . temperament.’

‘Temperament? What do you mean?’

Rona leafs through her notes. ‘Abusive comments towards some of his home support ladies. . . . We feel it would be best if alternative arrangements were made for your father. He requires specialist help. Some family support too.’

‘I’m not sure. . . .’

‘Yes, when I spoke to your father I sensed there’s some bad blood between you. At first, he refused to tell me your name or where you live.

He took a lot of persuading.’

‘He would.’

‘Perhaps he could be convinced to see the benefits of a move towards supported accommodation? If you agree, I could raise the issue with your father again and take him to see a few facilities. But I’ll need your help to prove to him it’s in his best interests.’

‘I don’t think I can do that.’

Grace sees Rona survey her stomach momentarily before asking, ‘Could your partner talk to him?’

‘No.’ ‘I see. . . .’ Rona scribbles on the papers in front of her.

‘No, you don’t. My father doesn’t . . . didn’t approve of my husband.’

Rona nods sympathetically. ‘I see. . . .’ she says again.

‘No Mrs Matata, you don’t,’ Grace replies, shaking her head. She feels pressure welling up inside. Tears begin to come. More softly, she adds, ‘I’m sorry but I can’t do this. I . . . I thought I was strong enough, but I

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was wrong, I see that now.’ She negotiates her body out of the chair and stands up. ‘Another time, perhaps.’

Rona sighs as she packs away her things. ‘I’m sorry too. I didn’t mean to upset you. The situation with your father is tricky. I’d hoped that we might be able to sort it out today.’

Deaf to Rona’s remarks, Grace leaves the room. In the hallway, she opens the front door then waits for her guest to leave. But Rona stops before reaching the door. Her interest is drawn towards a photo on the wall.

‘His face looks familiar,’ Rona says. ‘He was in the newspapers recently, wasn’t he? The man who was. . . .’

Grace continues to weep, ‘Ken, my husband.’

‘Oh,’ Rona’s voice cracks, ‘I’m sorry. Your father didn’t say anything about this.’

It’s not tears anymore, but a howl.

Another kind of quaking comes on.

Rona Matata is right. Ken was in the newspapers.

In the days after his death, when Grace’s days twisted together, a policewoman visited and requested a picture of Ken. Grace remembers fumbling through a drawer in Ken’s lacquered bureau until she found a photograph, a replica of the framed image hanging in the hallway. She recalls little else about that moment apart from how cold the skin of the film felt in her fingers and how serene Ken appeared, captured in a moment of happiness.

Sometime later, the policewoman telephoned to say that various newspapers planned to publish Ken’s picture on their front pages. The thought of it, Ken as a ghost living on in other people’s lives, caused Grace’s heart to swell and break with equal measure. However, when she went over what the policewoman said, she began to believe that the call wasn’t an act of heartbreak but of warning, preparing Grace for the sight of Ken in unexpected places like newspapers and the television news. So she heeded the advice. She cancelled the newspaper delivery, turned the television off, locked the front door and began to make origami cranes.

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Now Rona has left, Ken has become a bird, the visit resurrecting him in avian form and turning Grace’s recollections into shapes slender as quills.

She sits at the dining room table making more origami cranes. The trouble is, post-Rona, the papery flock Grace constructs seems like pale imitations of the group of small black waders Ken gave her as gifts when they lived in Tokyo.

Soon Ken will be awarded his wings.

These are the weeks during which he sits numerous examinations in a flight simulator. And these are evenings when Grace listens to her lover discuss his assessments, her mind picturing him as a character trapped in a fantasy, a boy aboard a magical bird (something Japanese – the green pheasant or red-crowned crane). Each time a drama unfolds, Ken an avian jockey navigating a creature through surreal, black space and a series of equally illusory dangers.

These are also nights during which Grace awakes in darkness, her brain turning over again these chimerical impressions of Ken as she worries whether this is what it means to be married to a pilot – one’s life and sleep shadowed by recurrent jeopardy.

The morning of the final appraisal, Ken and Grace agree to meet later in Ueno-Koen. Grace floats through classes at the language school – speaking to her students about tenses (the pluperfect, the future), clauses, irregular verbs, silent letters and allophones – while her mind drifts somewhere else: with Ken and his dreams of taking to the air.

Her last class dismissed, she finds him waiting on a picnic blanket in the park. They kiss, then he hands her a glass of wine, something distinctly New Zealand. He takes her free hand and lays a black crane in it. The origami bird sits in the summer light sparkling with the single diamond ring it bears on its back.

Of course Grace says, ‘Yes.’ Once they’re married, their home becomes a nesting site for paper birds. Whenever Ken leaves for LAX, Chek Lap Kok or Heathrow, he leaves another crane on Grace’s pillow, in the fridge or next to her

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toothbrush. Always, his cranes are black and inscribed – the faintest peck of metallic ink pen upon paper – with the word aishiteru.

When Grace and Ken move to Christchurch, the birds migrate too.

Grace hangs them in the master bedroom. The window ajar, they rustle furtive as a secret even when Ken leaves to do some light baby-shopping on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, never to return.

Half an hour later, there is such a shuddering, Grace becomes something paper-light and folding.

The next thing she knows her body is a rumple upon the floor.

For the first time since Ken’s funeral, Grace leaves their home. She walks through the blood grass. She brushes past the star jasmine and Japanese maple. She climbs into Ken’s car, cold as it is from weeks of inactivity, and turns the engine over. She’s surprised by how easily it starts.

As she drives towards the east of Christchurch, to Aranui, glimmers of the time she spent growing up return – the playhouse at the bottom of the garden her father built from stray wood; the lessons he gave her from his wheelchair in how to ride a bike; his plotting of the constellations on dark nights – Crux, Centaurus, Vela. . . . Then there’s a void. Grace hasn’t spoken to her Dad in such a long time that his absence has turned him, in her mind, to a thin, ashen point of light. To which, she reminds herself, she’s returning now.

Ken is the reason for this.

‘Family is too important to let differences of opinion come between you,’ he told her time and again. ‘Your Dad belongs to a different generation.

It’s not prejudice. He’s just set in his ways.’

Grace wishes she possessed such tolerance. As she weaves through the maze of Aranui’s backstreets, she’s full of hesitancy and despair. This isn’t the landscape she once called home. Abandoned houses rest beside sections reduced to a crumble of brick and tile. Where homes have collapsed, she sees garages have been transformed into makeshift living quarters. There are Portaloos on every corner. The once concrete roads have become mud tracks, undulating and pot-holed. Only occasionally does a familiar house, still standing, greet her.

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When Grace arrives at her father’s place, she spies the mud and silt, remnants of liquefaction, settled at the entrance, the chimney a griefstricken pile of rubble. A stone-heavy certainty that she’s doing the wrong thing sits inside her.

The last time Grace travelled to see her father, her doubts were heavy too. Back then, she and Ken left an autumnal Tokyo, crossed the Pacific and made for where its waters wash up at the bottom of the world. High in the sky, she thought of the letters she’d sent her father preparing him for Ken’s arrival. Her correspondence included details about how she and Ken met, their ninth-floor apartment close to Ueno-Koen, Ken’s busy flight schedules and their visits to his parents’ Sendai home. The closer she got to Christchurch, the more she knew that her offerings weren’t going to be enough to change her father’s mind.

She was right.

When Grace introduced Ken, her father nodded, then turned back to the jigsaw he was working on. Throughout dinner that night, while the sweethearts talked about their lives in Japan, Grace’s father stared out of the window. Each day of their visit, Grace and Ken toured the city – the Port Hills, Lyttelton, the Gondola. They invited Grace’s father to accompany them, but he preferred to stay at home and spray his weeds and aphids.

On the last afternoon of the holiday, Grace sent Ken down to the pier to watch the fishermen and marvel at the ocean, and then called her father insensitive. He took a sudden interest in a framed photo of his wife. Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t care. If he was a Maori or a Pacific Islander, I’d tolerate him. But that Jap! Never! I fought against his kind.

They’re the reason I lost my leg.’

‘That’s the past, Dad,’ Grace sighed. ‘Anyway, you fought in Vietnam.

That has nothing to do with Ken.’ ‘They’re all the same. If you want to shack up with one of them then that’s your lookout. Just don’t expect me to welcome him into our family.’

With that, her father negotiated his wheelchair on to the deck and down the ramp into the garden where he appeared to admire his blooms.

When Ken and Grace left the next morning, her father remained in bed, his eyes closed. Six months later, she sent him an invitation to the

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wedding in Sendai. Later still, once she and Ken had moved to Christchurch, she notified him of her new address. The silence that greeted both overtures kept alive her memory of him feigning sleep.

At the back door of her father’s home, Grace knocks then lets herself in.

The house is chilly, the warmth her mother once generated – strategically placed heaters, the oven cooking something or other – missing.

In his wheelchair, Grace’s father sits in the corner of the lounge close to the television, the curtains pulled across the windows, buttressing the room against midday light. The television flickers greyly with an old war movie. From experience, Grace knows that the war being fought on the screen is a blur to her father. It’s not the images that matter to him, but the words, voices and the company they offer. As if to validate this, he mumblingly repeats the hero’s speech.

Suddenly alert to a presence in the room, he squints. ‘Ruby, is that you?’

‘No. It’s me.’ Cold words for a cold house.

There’s a pause, then her father says, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here? Where’s Ruby? Bloody chinks!’ He turns back to his movie.

‘Dad, Ruby’s not coming.’ Grace approaches her father and sits near him. She’s so close she can see his sallow skin and the crease of his clothes across his body. Silently, she watches the end of the movie.

As the credits roll, her father asks, ‘You still here?’

‘I’m not going anywhere, Dad. You need help.’

‘Who says?’

‘Rona Matata. And I agree.’

‘I’m fine. I don’t need that Rona or you. I’d have all the help I need if only that damn nursing agency sent someone.’

‘But they’re not going to, Dad. Not anymore.’

‘And I suppose you’ll be cleaning and feeding me from now on, will you?’

‘No, Dad. I’m having a baby, your grandchild. He’s due soon.’

Her father huffs. ‘So where’s Len, Ben or whatever he’s called?’

‘Ken, Dad. Short for Kenji.’

‘Well, where is he?’

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‘Dad, Ken’s not here anymore.’

‘Hah, told you he was no good! Bet all he wanted you for was a passport.’

‘Dad!’ ‘Well, it’s true. Thieving little blighters, the lot of them. They come here. Steal our jobs. Steal our kids.’

How delicate and fragile love is. So fragile, it can be taken from us at any moment, leaving only the memory of what was and what might have been.

This is what Grace concludes as the kindly policewoman holds Ken’s photo and says, ‘Your husband passed away on the pavement just outside the entrance to Riccarton Mall. Close to Baby City. When the quake hit, pieces of masonry from old shop frontages toppled on to the pavement.

Unfortunately, one of them fell right where your husband stood.’

‘Did he suffer?’ Love aside, this was all Grace could think about.

‘It was quick. He wouldn’t have felt anything at all.’

Once Grace has described Ken’s passing, she looks at her father and sees a tired, old man whose tired, old eyes look back at her.

Delicate as paper, he whispers, ‘I’m sorry.’

It’s too late. Of course it is. Grace knows this, just as she has learned to accept Ken won’t be coming back. But she still pushes her father’s wheelchair to the window. And there, she looks out with him at the roses that, even though encircled by silt, continue to grow.

At home, she realises there is a weakness possessed by those who remain tethered to one position. Place, geographical or ideological, is unstable, subject to fault line, rupture and quake. Sitting in the shade of the Japanese maple, the warm afternoon air lazing around her, Grace arrives at this realisation: how weak are those who tie themselves to one fixed location, be the terrain physical or principle. And how strong are those, conversely, who occupy the sky. Like Ken. He was at home in Japan, New Zealand, the heavens, everywhere. . . . Such power, such freedom, such belonging as he will pass on to their son.

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Inside, the phone rings. She lets the call go to answerphone. Rona Matata’s voice crackles out of the machine.

‘Grace, I called on your father today. He told me you visited him. He’s asked me to take him to see some care homes.’

Grace senses her time has come. She climbs to her feet, returns to the house, cool with shade. In the lounge she collects the thousand bright cranes she’s made during the past few weeks. For a moment, as she lifts them, they soar, light as newborns, around the room. But soon they’re gathered in and hanging high upon the walls of the baby’s blue room.

She stands for a moment admiring her work, thinking of Ken. Another shake rolls through.

And another. . . .

Just for a moment, Grace feels nothing – absolutely nothing – but their son’s kick.

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Chinese Thinking in the Age of the Internet Chinese Thinking Murong Xuecun in t he Age of the Internet

Murong Xuecun translated by Griffith Review

C

hina’s president Xi Jinping and I have a common understanding: we believe that the Internet has become the Chinese Communist Party’s greatest enemy and, if left to take its natural course, the Internet will change China. Based on this understanding, Xi Jinping and his government have decided to purge the Internet.

Over the past two years, the government has cancelled numerous microblog accounts, shut down untold numbers of websites, arrested countless people and built higher than ever the great firewall of China – whose primary function is to shut out overseas websites and deny access to unfettered information.

Xi Jinping is right to be nervous. According to Chinese media reports, in November 2014 the online population of China reached 630 million, of which over 500 million are registered users of Sina Weibo, China’s equivalent to a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter. This enormous user base and the astronomical amount of data it generates has overwhelmed the old censorship system. The CCP has not yet set up netizen branches, and it cannot possibly delete all ‘harmful’ information.

Tens of millions of users are sharing information and expressing opinions on bulletin board systems, microblogs and via WeChat groups.

It is here that people are interacting, debating and even exchanging abuse. And it is in the midst of this cacophony that change is gradually taking place. People are beginning to think for themselves – to think about their country, about the society they live in and about their own

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circumstances. New words and new ideas are emerging every day. I can’t say that this has completely changed people’s mindset in China, but compared with the pre-Internet age, people are far more clear-headed. A difficult but profound awakening will soon arrive.

In the 1955 war propaganda movie Dong Cunrui, Wang Ping is critically wounded. He rests on a precipitous mountain path, struggles to retrieve a small bundle from his waist pocket and says to Dong Cunrui, ‘I’m not going to make it. Here are my Party dues for May. Please make sure you give it to the Party for me.’ This scene gave birth to a vile tradition: from then on, every CCP member who dies in a movie asks his comrades to pay his CCP dues on his behalf. At the last moment of their lives they are not thinking about their parents or wives or their brothers and sisters – concern for the CCP is the only thing on their minds.

Evidence that this ever happened is meagre, but this meme has become an emblem of the CCP. For the sixty years that the CCP has ruled China, the Chinese have not sufficiently been treated as people, but rather as objects – a member of a unit, a part of a collective, a brick of the revolution to be moved about as needed, a screw in a machine. They must always be ready to sacrifice their possessions or even their lives for the collective. When their services are needed, Chinese people are praised as the ‘discerning masses’ who are ‘industrious, valiant and kind-hearted’; otherwise they are plebeians unqualified to enjoy democratic rights. When necessary, they can even be disparaged as ‘a small group with ulterior motives’ who are capable of splitting the nation asunder, fomenting social unrest and devastating livelihoods.

In the age of the Internet, people’s outlooks have gradually changed.

At first it was not obvious – a few new terms cropped up, just fragments of ideas – but gradually it all converged into a new trend.

More and more people began to think of themselves as people, not mere material to be used. They began questioning: If I have not given my permission, how can you represent me? Why does the collective’s interests outweigh mine? Why does patriotism have to be more important than me? If I can’t protect my own house, why do we have to protect an

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uninhabited outcrop in a distant sea? If the nation can’t protect my freedom and safety, and, conversely, if my lack of freedom and safety is caused by my country, why do I still need to love it?

Protracted debates like these have inculcated new concepts, like ‘human rights take precedence over sovereign rights’, and ‘if citizens have no dignity, then the nation has no dignity’. At the same time, people are beginning to question such established and overbearing concepts as ‘the great masses of the people’. Questions arise about who ‘the people’ are, and who is qualified to represent them.

In recent years, self-appellations like ‘loser’, ‘shitizen’, ‘ant tribe’ and ‘grass mud horse’ have gained unprecedented popularity. When millions of people start referring to themselves with such deprecation, there is an undercurrent of meaning: ‘Sorry, please don’t call me a “people” because you already represent the people’. From now on, these Internet voices are saying, ‘I no longer want the honour of being a “people” – I’d much rather be a loser or a shitizen, simply a vulgar individual who is not represented by you.’

This is hardly a profound awareness, but don’t forget, this is China.In sixty years of totalitarian rule, we have rarely had opportunities to even appear to be real people – individuals with dignity, freedom and rights – let alone live as real people. Day in and day out, the newspapers, television and radio constantly promote patriotism, nationalism and altruism, rarely if ever mentioning the wellbeing of individual members of society.

Today, China Central Television (CCTV) still sings the praise of revolutionary heroes who, disregarding the safety of their own families, rushed to rescue the assets of the commune, while at the same time branding ‘individualism’ and ‘extreme individualism’ as selfish and evil, and anyone so branded is regarded as a reactionary and a public enemy.

In the Internet age, huge numbers of people have already seen the rivers of blood and mountains of skeletons produced by evils like the anti-rightist movement, the great famine, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen incident, under the twin banners of ‘the nation’ and ‘the Chinese people’. At the same time, rapid development of communications

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has made it easy to learn about the lives of people in America and Europe, as well as places like Hong Kong and Taiwan, populated with Chinese compatriots.

It all raises the question: why do other people, even other people of Chinese origin, live so differently? And why does the ruling party, which claims to serve the people, repeatedly push its people into the abyss? If capitalism is so selfish and corrupt, why do its people seem so happy?

After several years of thinking about and discussing these issues, I believe that many people choose to be patriotic, certainly, but they love themselves and love their own families even more than they love the nation. Some people over-compensate, adopting the selfish philosophy of Yang Zhu: ‘Even if I could benefit the realm by pulling out one solitary hair, I still won’t do it.’ I know such people will never become exemplars in any country at any time, but in China it counts as an earthshaking transformation when people begin to awaken from the dream of patriotism and nationalism, shouting, for the first time in their history, ‘I don’t love my country, I only love myself.’

This awakening is demolishing artificial gods. Over the past sixty years, the Chinese government has repeatedly manufactured idols such as Lei Feng, who is said to have performed a lifetime of good deeds and never did anything bad.

From Lei Feng and Liu Hulan, to Jiao Yulu and Ren Changxia, generations of Chinese have been living in the shadow of these models.

But in the age of the Internet, such propaganda is losing traction. ‘Why do we have to learn from Lei Feng? What good will it do me? He died at the age of twenty and never even had a girlfriend.’ That’s what a young resident of Guangzhou said during the Lei Feng Emulation Month two years ago. Models for emulation like Lei Feng are being subjected to ridicule. More and more, individuals in China are questioning the absurdity of official propaganda. A passage in Lei Feng’s Diary mentions that he collected three hundred catties (over one hundred and fifty kilogrammes) of dung in one day. Some busybodies then calculated the total weight of the dung, his pace and the amount of time each pile of dung required, and came up with startling results: if Lei Feng were telling the truth, he

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would have had to pick up a pile of dung every eight paces. ‘You weren’t collecting dung, Comrade Lei Feng,’ they say. ‘You were obviously living in a cesspit!’

Likewise, more and more people are rejecting the ideal of ‘A great life!

A glorious death!’ built up around Liu Hulan. She was just a little girl, barely ten years old, when she took up guard duty. At twelve she was part of an assassination plot and at thirteen she took part in actual warfare. At fourteen she participated in another assassination and at the tender age of fifteen she was executed. It’s a cruel tale, yet it has always been part of the Chinese primary education curriculum. A year ago, a parent pleaded on Weibo: ‘Liu Hulan, please stay away from my child!’ Such posts receive tidal waves of support.

Great Nation Rising, Great Nation Culture and Great Nation Foreign Affairs are terms have that frequently popped up on official media in recent years. The words ‘Great Nation’ might rouse the pride of some people, but, in an age of awakening, new questions demand answers: if there are no great citizens, how can we speak of a great nation? If my rights are not respected, what does it matter to me how great the nation is? On Weibo, when the war hawks proclaim that ‘China and Japan must fight a war’, they are mocked with questions like, ‘Is a Beijing residence certificate mandatory for the battlefield?’ ‘Will there be a lottery for the battlefield?’ ‘Will the leaders lead the way?’

It has been a rare thing in the past, but now people are becoming concerned about their own lives and property, and have become wary about nationhood and war. It’s an infinitesimal change, but the impact is far-reaching. I believe that when more and more Chinese people become individuals with dignity, they will demand that the nation respects their dignity. Otherwise their clamour will be deafening.

On 15 August 1969, Jin Xunhua, who had just turned twenty, jumped into a raging river in an attempt to rescue two logs. Unfortunately, he drowned. Even more unfortunately, he became a national hero. His name appeared in newspapers and on radio broadcasts. Commemorative stamps were issued. Every Chinese was instructed to learn from him and his spirit of ‘risking his life for two logs’.

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Six decades of totalitarian rule have accustomed the residents of China to a lack of freedom. There are strict class differences that force peasants, urbanites and officials to stay within boundaries. Women of reproductive age are often forcibly sterilised. Religious freedom is subsumed under the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Movement umbrella. Freedom of movement is also restricted; leaving one’s registered abode turns people into second-class citizens, if not criminal suspects.

I believe the awakening of the individual will be followed by the awareness of rights. Regarding the household registration system, individuals ask, ‘This is my country, so why do I need the government to approve a temporary residence permit? I want to be a permanent resident wherever I choose to live.’ On the family planning system, couples ask, ‘If the people are the masters of the nation, why don’t we have the freedom to have children?’ And on re-education through labour, many workers and activists are asking ever more earth-shaking questions.

Under enormous pressure, our government announced the abolition of re-education through labour a year ago. But it was no cause for celebration. The government found a new way to lock up citizens on a whim: for instance, the crime of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’. In May last year, several of my friends were arrested for holding a private gathering at home and charged with this crime. One of those arrested was the lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who made huge contributions towards the abolition of re-education through labour.

Economic rights are another thing. The core sectors of China’s economy are, more or less, controlled by members of the ruling class (or the wellconnected). A joke circulated on Weibo over a year ago. Someone at a dinner party was asked what was keeping him busy. He answered, ‘Just some small business transactions. I paid off Li Peng’s family, did a business deal with Zhou Yongkang’s family, and tomorrow I’m off to sign a contract with Jiang Zemin’s family.’ The person who asked the question was astounded. ‘You call that small business?’ The man laughed, ‘It really is small business: I paid my electricity bill, went to the petrol station for a fill-up, and bought a new SIM card for my telephone.’

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This is not just idle chatter. View it instead as dissatisfaction with China’s current situation. Apart from the state of Chinese soccer and complaints about the Chinese Red Cross Society, most criticism on Weibo is reserved for PetroChina and Sinopec, two petrochemical conglomerates. Web searches on these two companies return millions of pages, a significant number of which contain expressions of dissatisfaction and anger. The criticism is not merely because these companies have become the private property of powerful officials; it’s more about the usurious role they play within China’s economic life.

The anger directed at PetroChina and Sinopec is not unique. All monopolistic enterprises are being denounced: power generation, telecommunications and, now, even taxation If you visit Beijing, I strongly urge you to go to the National Petition Centre or Beijing South Railway station. There you will see innumerable miserable petitioners, sleeping rough and eating the cheapest possible food, though they have not given up on their dream of receiving justice.

Most of them are there because their homes were forcibly demolished and they did not receive satisfactory compensation. They then set out on the arduous path of being a petitioner. On their frequent journeys to Beijing, they are often driven out of the capital, beaten and even incarcerated. Over the past few years, many people have self-immolated outside their former houses.

Finally, there is the issue of freedom of belief. According to statistics from the Pew Research Center, a Washington-based think tank, there are fifty-eight million Protestants and nine million Catholics in China. The majority belong to underground churches, and the government has not for one moment relaxed its attacks on and oppression of them. It has demolished churches, broken up gatherings and arrested believers. Like their brethren overseas, Chinese believers have been among the bravest and staunchest opposition to the government.

A journalist once asked me about the most lasting impression of my student days. I replied that it was the lack of freedom to think. In Communist China, when it comes to history and society, there are only

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standard answers: history is determined by productive forces and productive relationships; consciousness is determined by the material circumstances; peasant uprisings are always good; landlords and capitalists are always bad; idealism and metaphysics are always bad.

The year I took the university entrance examination, the last question in the history section required students to analyse Chinese history after 1840. We were asked to discuss the reforms of 1898, the self-strengthening movement, the Republican revolution of 1911 and the Republican era; and then come to the conclusion that only the Chinese Communist Party can save China. But recently, almost all the standard answers have come into question. Some people debate historical issues while others research modern society, and most of the officially sanctioned phraseology is coming under suspicion. All of this can be viewed as a cultural awakening.

In China, there are many writers and scholars like me who refuse to employ terminology such as ‘since liberation’ or ‘since the founding of the nation’ – we simply use ‘1949’ to demarcate the year the Communist Party established its regime. We do not use ‘New China’ to denote The People’s Republic of China; we change it to ‘Communist China’. Unless we are being sarcastic, we never refer to Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou; we simply use the names Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. We don’t use the single word ‘Party’ to stand for the Chinese Communist Party, and definitely do not place the party ahead of the nation, as in the common phrase, ‘Party and State leaders’. We just use the Chinese equivalent of CCP. Sometimes this desire for linguistic cleanliness can become compulsive. I obstinately refuse to use the Chinese characters for ‘the people’, which sixty years of official propaganda have distorted and cheapened. I prefer to say ‘citizen’ or ‘the populace’ instead.

The bureaucratic nomenclature has become the laughing stock of the Internet in China. In 1978, the evening news on the state television broadcaster, CCTV, was the most important source of news and had the highest ratings of all programmes. Thirty-six years later, people make fun of the speaking voices of the newsreaders as well as their clothing and hairstyles. A succinct summary of the evening news circulates widely: ‘In the first ten minutes, the leaders are very busy; in the next ten minutes,

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the Chinese people are very fortunate; in the last ten minutes, the people of the rest of world live in misery.’ In February 2014, CCTV used hidden cameras to expose the dark side of the sex industry in a southern Chinese city. After the report was broadcast, netizens mocked it in unison, with tens of thousands siding with the prostitutes. One widely circulated comment is particularly noteworthy: ‘CCTV has sold its soul, yet it looks down on people who sell their bodies.’ Even CCTV had to admit that this roasting stemmed from mistrust.

When people are able to shake off the spiritual and ideological influence of the old propaganda apparatus, they can begin to be creative. On the Internet, exciting changes in vocabulary and writing styles are bursting forth daily, with people creating many humorous and peculiar terms to mock and criticise the communist regime, such as Yellow Soviet, West North Korea, The Bastard Dynasty and the Post-Qing dynasty.

Growing contacts with the West and increasing exchanges have led to large numbers of people becoming more familiar with English. New English words with Chinese characteristics are popping up: Chinese citizens become shitizens; Chinese democracy begat democrazy; secretaries with Chinese characteristics (especially the female secretaries of high officials) are sexcretaries. Political jokes are also spreading. Here’s one I encountered recently: Xi Jinping went into the Qingfeng Dumpling Shop and asked what the fillings were. The waitress answered, ‘This one is cabbage and pork; this one is pork and cabbage; this one is pork with added cabbage. Which do you want?’ Xi thought about it for a moment and said, ‘They’re all the same, there’s no choice.’ The waitress responded, ‘Aren’t you forgetting, that’s how we chose you?’

After Xi Jinping came to power, the media spared no effort in singing the praises of Xi’s brilliance, his drive, his language habits. Many regions established Xi Jinping Speech Research Centres and officials all over the country began to study his speeches. Military bases began to display photographs of and inscriptions by Xi Jinping. His books became best sellers. His image appears on television. Songwriters sing of his loves and exploits. But more and more people are sick of deification campaigns. In the past two years the words ‘If problems are not eliminated, harmful

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habits will be formed’ have become a popular saying. The first of the eight characters happens to be the same as Mao Zedong’s surname and the last is Xi Jinping’s surname. Xi Jinping has acquired many nicknames in the two years since coming to office: his visit to the dumpling shop has made the name Dumpling Xi very popular, as well as the Emperor of the Qingfeng Dumpling Shop and Ignored by Dogs (the name of another famous dumpling brand). His espousal of the Chinese Dream has landed him the nickname Dream Emperor Xi. If Xi Jinping is clearheaded, he will understand that although he may be able to seal people’s mouths, he can never stop them sniggering.

Over the course of Communist China’s sixty-year history, the Chinese people experienced two rare awakenings. One instance was in the 1980s, when the power of the authorities was relaxed a little and their arbitrary interference in ordinary people’s private lives became less intrusive. For just over a decade, ideas, culture and art flourished – unprecedented in the history of Communist China. In the age of the Internet, the depth and breadth of topics and the number of people participating in discussions have far exceeded anything that occurred in the 1980s.

The Chinese government feels it is under enormous pressure and in 2012 began to comprehensively suppress the Internet. Superficially, these measures have achieved their intended results; the Internet in China is beginning to go into decline and discussions are becoming less animated, with fewer people having the courage to speak openly. To use the government’s description, ‘the cyberspace has become clear and bright’.

However, the violent stoppering of mouths cannot achieve its aims for long. This is how a friend of mine describes the situation: ‘People’s mouths are not needed merely for eating food, they’re also very much needed for speaking. Under threat I will temporarily shut up, but I definitely won’t shut up forever.’

Despite the many chains and fetters inhibiting Internet space in China, the Internet has not entirely lost its vitality and creativity. The lampooning of CCTV that I described earlier occurred in February 2014, after wave upon wave of crackdowns had already commenced.

I cannot say that Chinese citizens are sufficiently brave and wise, but I have indeed seen more and more of them experience a difficult awakening.

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I cannot be sure that this will change China in the short term, but I believe those who awaken will no longer be willing slaves of a totalitarian regime. The wall will be built higher, but I have faith that no matter how high it rises, it cannot hold back the yearning for freedom. Another friend put it well: ‘The great wall will not collapse under the weight of tears, it will be laughed down. When the laughter is loud enough, it will tumble.’ In 1989, as young students awakened from their slumber, determined to remain silent no longer, they gathered in Tiananmen Square, shouting for democracy and freedom. Ultimately, they were driven out, killed or arrested. But in the age of the Internet, the exchange of opinions has awakened even more among the populace. I believe our netizens will do something to rescue their country and their homes. This was expressed in an anonymous poem I read on the web: You must really hate the cold Because you slept right through the winter You must dislike the heat too Because you slept right through the summer One year passes, and then another You sleep in hiding from this world But today, I want to walk through fields of blossoming flowers and say to you: The flowers have blossomed Please wake up while the flowers are blossoming.

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Jang Jin-sung

Jang Jin-sung Poetry

translated by Shirley Lee

Roll Call Trains came to a halt.

Factory chimneys stopped breathing.

Schools and hospitals boarded up their doors.

But from his desk each morning, the old teacher still called the roll.

His chapped lips spoke each student’s name.

Whenever he was met with silence – as if he had been punched right through – he shouted, Study comes before hunger!

The teacher was absent today.

Above the desk where once stood character, learning, wisdom now hung only the portrait of a dead man.

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The register lay open, each name waiting for the call.

With no one there to utter them their whimpers spoke their loss.

They had no right to absence – conscience forbade even tardiness: he’d lived his life a sacrifice for the future of the homeland.

And so each weeping student stood; each raised his arm to shout: Teacher, I am here!

Teacher, I am here!

Note: This poem is set at the time of the famine in North Korea, where it is treasonous to show greater respect to anyone other than the Supreme Leader.

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Kashmir’s Bitter War Kas hmir’s Majid Maqbool Bit ter War

Majid Maqbool

K

ashmir’s story is, for me, a personal history of unresolved pain and grief. Once called a paradise on earth, Kashmir is my wounded homeland, a much-contested geography torn between India and Pakistan.

Growing up in Kashmir during the 1990s meant living in a state of war, staring at the prospect of death that could arrive anytime. We, the children of conflict, were deprived of many freedoms enjoyed by children elsewhere as battles between militants, the Indian army, Border Security Forces and counter-insurgents erupted around us. Our world was filled with the sound of gunshots, the roar of military convoys, the sight of frightening crackdowns, dead bodies, tortured youth, disappearances and grieving mothers.

A few memories of these years stand out for their vividness and left a lasting imprint. Other memories compete and merge – flashes of the stark imagery of brutality return to me at odd times during the day, fill my dreams at night and when I am alone sometimes these memories completely invade my thoughts. There’s no escaping my childhood years.

Kashmir’s past still weighs heavily, threatening to overcome the present, lived in a state of perpetual unrest.

One of the images from my childhood that keeps returning is the sight of the dead body of a rebel, his blood-soaked shirt perforated with bullet holes. He was dragged on to the street after being shot dead in an encounter in the nearby open maize and rice fields close to my childhood home. The dead body lay on the roadside and I could see it by peering out from behind the curtains of the second-floor window of

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our home. The anxious troops kept guard over their prized kill. A few press photographers arrived on bikes. They clicked pictures of the dead rebel with his rifle placed horizontally on his chest, surrounded by BSF troops who posed for the photos, which would appear in the local newspapers next day. After the photographers left, the body was driven away in a police truck to be kept in the nearby police station until his family claimed him, if they dared admit their relationship to the dead rebel.

Some of my memories of the summer of 1993 are of our small northern Kashmir hamlet on the banks of a tributary of the river Jhelum. On either side of the river, conical-roofed houses, apple orchards and vast rice and maize fields stretched into the distance. The orchards glowed, pregnant with ripening fruit, while rice and maize crops flourished. At the end of that summer, as leaves fell from the trees, the villagers reaped a rich harvest to store for the long, harsh winter ahead. Different varieties of apples were picked, carefully packed in wooden boxes, loaded in trucks and then sold in far-away markets.

Then the war arrived. Military forces moved closer and closer to the fields and homes of our villages. Army convoys became a regular sight travelling the dusty, unsealed roads. Troops riding atop army trucks waved batons and guns threateningly at us, whistling as they drove through the villages. The military ruled the streets and followed their own rules. There were consequences for civilian vehicles breaking into the long line of military trucks, or speeding past them. The offending vehicle usually ended up pushed onto the side of the road, its windshield smashed and the driver beaten with gun butts and batons. Military bunkers and checkpoints proliferated.

When the Indian government sent armed forces to Kashmir to fight rebel forces, we were told it was for our own good. Yet our lives, our former freedoms, were steadily curtailed.

Everyone had to return home by 6 pm, before the troops started night patrols. Breaking the curfew meant arrest, on-the-spot beatings, or both.

The darkness was frightening.

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The army began ordering all the village men and boys to assemble on the open fields, sometimes summoning them in the harsh winter months at sunrise. We waited for our turn for interrogations about suspected militant activities nearby. Troops searched our houses for weapons. They confined women and children to a single room, entered the bedrooms and searched beneath the beds, inside water tanks, locked trunks, briefcases and cupboards. They found nothing of consequence, but left household items and personal belongings tossed haphazardly all over the floors.

Military searchlights continually beamed from the army’s bunkers at night, searching for any suspicious activity in the fields. These sudden flashes of light scared kids like me, signalling that something was wrong.

We had to switch off all the bulbs, draw the curtains and try to sleep. We were too scared to peep out the window lest the searchlights expose us to their suspicion.

My family and our friends were afraid to venture outdoors even in daylight, and they returned home from the fields well before the sun went down. At night, we sometimes spotted a roshandan (a sudden rocket flare) piercing the night sky. It exploded in a burst of bright light in the darkness, illuminating everything on the ground below. The army used these intense flares to expose a rebel on the run or hiding on the ground.

It was as if the troops summoned the daylight to stun the dark.

In the ensuing years, many friends, relatives and loved ones were tortured, killed or disappeared. The cumulative atmosphere of fear inevitably sprouted seeds of rebellion, particularly among young people, who began wanting to resist the forces occupying their lives.

One older cousin – I’ll call him Altaf – became a militant rebel after finishing school. He chose to become a Mujahid, as he later came to be known, instead of pursuing the engineering degree his father wanted him to do; or medicine, to fulfil his mother’s longing to see him wearing a doctor’s white coat.

I had just turned twelve years old when the surprising news of Altaf ’s taking up arms was broken to our family. We kids were not supposed to know this, but eventually we all learned about it. Altaf ’s decision was

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discussed in hushed whispers by the older boys in the family. He’d made an independent choice, we were later told, and he hadn’t discussed it with any of his family.

Altaf was tall and charming, a young man who excelled in sports and other outdoor activities more than at his studies. Now he acquired the status of a modern-day rebel, heroically taking on the military might of the Indian state. For the state, however, he was a ‘terrorist’ who had to be captured and either imprisoned or killed.

In the weeks before he vanished, Altaf was away from his home regularly, telling his parents he was practising for an important cricket tournament to be held in the district. They believed him; Altaf ’s parents knew that cricket was his passion. He would even skip school, much to their displeasure, to play all the scheduled matches at his local club. I remember following him to the ground and watching him play from a distance. He was engrossed in the game, both on and off the field. He was always in the thick of the action – running around, battling, throwing the ball, fielding, as if his life derived meaning from the game.

He was the youngest player, a fast bowler, famous for his toe-crushers and long run-ups. He was also a gifted batsman, but when he went out to bat, he didn’t stay at the crease for long, getting out after hitting a few quick fours and sixes. But when he bowled, his spell was fast and furious.

He had the reputation for clean bowling some of the top batsmen of opposing teams by smashing their wickets to smithereens. Altaf would erupt with joy when the wickets flew in the air. The crowd loved it.

Cricket cannot have been at the front of his mind when he finally left home on the pretext of playing in the big tournament. Instead, he must have been playing secretly with an idea that was far bigger than the game he loved. The idea of an independent Kashmir, without the suffocating presence of Indian army troops and their bunkers and checkpoints and crackdowns and army camps, had gripped his imagination.

At the age of twenty, Altaf was transformed into a larger-than-life figure for those of us who knew him. With the power of his gun, he represented a promise to change the fate of his people.

His family became accustomed to living in a state of perpetual anxiety. His mother mentally prepared herself to hear bad news about

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him at any time. She consoled herself with faith in Allah and her belief that someone who struggles against injustice and fights tyranny acquires a higher status in the hereafter. Altaf would attain immortality after death, members of our extended family assured her. She still prayed endlessly for Altaf ’s safety.

Sometimes her eyes brimmed when the family assembled on the dastarkhwan (floor cloth) to eat dinner. Even in Altaf ’s absence, his family kept his room neat and clean, all his cricket gear and uniform in order.

His room became sacred. No one entered while he was away. His father didn’t talk about his son in front of his mother, though he wondered aloud to others whether Altaf would end up in some dark dungeon, or simply disappear. But, like Altaf ’s mother, his father prayed for his son’s return. The only way to live through and survive those dark days was to hope and pray for better days.

Altaf ’s decision to join the rebels inspired both admiration and fear among his friends. Sometimes, only fear. A few who used to hang out with him no longer wanted to be seen in his company. He was discussed and prayed for in his absence. In this way, Altaf remained present long after he’d gone.

I would sometimes see him, uncharacteristically showing up in the inner alleys of his neighbourhood. He’d flash a smile of secret recognition, as if he didn’t want me to see him, as if everything was fine, including him. Then he would hide his AK-47 rifle, knowing I would ask to hold the gun. Before I became too inquisitive about his activities and his gun, Altaf would ask me about school and studies and everyone at home. Then he’d ask me to convey his salaam to all the relatives and then quickly disappear. He didn’t like being questioned. He had a stock answer: ‘I’m fine . . . everything will be fine, Insha’Allah. Pray for me.’

Altaf ’s physique, his imposing height and the AK-47 inspired awe in boys like me, all of us trying to make sense of what was happening. He let his hair grow until his dark tresses fell over his ears and covered his long face. He grew a beard and his image began to evoke mystique and bravado, a mix of youthful revolutionary energy that promised much resistance in the face of the overwhelming military power.

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Altaf ’s presence, in his absence, instilled fear in the hearts of the military and police forces who looked for him through a chain of local informers bribed to keep track of his movements in the village. Altaf gave the military the slip several times when they were close to nabbing him. They feared that he and his associates were planning a major attack.

Informers hovered around his home, appearing to be friendly and otherwise engaged in normal conversations, but always keeping watch on Altaf ’s friends, family and relatives. We thought he would never be caught and never surrender; that he would fight heroically till the end.

We prayed to God to forbid an encounter, for we knew he’d die a martyr’s death.

But one morning in the autumn of 1993, his life changed forever. Altaf was arrested with associates from another village – the result of a successful tip-off from a local informer, followed by swift action by troops who swooped on him and his colleagues within minutes. For some strange reason, none of the rebels were carrying guns. The troops pointed their guns at the captured rebels, fingers on their triggers, but they didn’t fire.

Blindfolded, the young men were taken to an abandoned house owned by a Kashmiri Pandit family who had left when the armed struggle erupted. There, the army began systematically torturing the young men.

They tied the rebels’ legs and hands to large wooden logs, beat them with batons and demanded the whereabouts of associates, their weapons and hideouts in the village. For as long as my cousin and his rebel colleagues remained silent, the blows rained down on their knees and elbows, wherever it hurt the most. Their torturers also kept the captives naked, humiliating them and applying red chilli powder and jolts of electric shocks to their bodies, including their genitals.

The men were subjected to frightening immersions in hot water barrels bubbling with chilli powder. Depending on the mood of the torturers, frustrated from failing to elicit information, they’d pull the captives’ nails out and apply salt to their bloodied fingers. After the captives regained their senses, another round of torture followed, always more painful than the last. Sleep was hard at night, with fresh wounds inflicted during the day.

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After weeks in such torture centres, young men emerged deranged.

Many were unable to walk easily or speak normally. Others did not survive. Some were just thrown onto the streets from military vehicles to be picked up by locals who took them back to their homes. Half dead, the young men were unable to speak or hear anything for many days. It would take some of them years to recover.

Altaf was released from torture and our relatives gathered at his home to welcome him. His parents could hardly believe that he’d survived. Their eyes were moist and they kept hugging him. Although he’d been tortured, they were happy to see him alive. He was a shadow of his former self, weak and unable to stand without support. He just stood, staring about as if the torture had even deprived him of emotions.

For about a week after he returned, he was unable to talk in clear and coherent sentences. At times he would mumble and make hand gestures to ask for things. Even slight movements of his lips pained him. We later learned his injuries extended to the inside of his upper and lower lips.

He couldn’t smile. He didn’t want to smile.

In his earliest days after returning, when friends and relatives enquired about his recovery, he didn’t talk much and often reacted as if there were no one there. I would sit close, not asking any questions, though I had many. I wanted him to rest and recover fast. He didn’t want to speak about the torture, he told his parents when the guests left. The memory of the ordeal was as painful as his injuries. His torturers had extinguished cigarettes on his body, including his genitals. Emptying his bladder was an agonising exercise that sometimes took an hour. His body hurt terribly when he tried walking, and when he sat down, it hurt him even more.

For weeks he could wear nothing but a loose pheran (winter cloak). The wounds needed several different ointments and frequent changes of bandages. There were nights when he couldn’t sleep. He would sometimes shout at his family, and at himself when alone in his room. But he was surprisingly calm on other days.

Altaf ’s energy and vitality, passion and promise were snuffed out in the days of his torture. Post torture, he was not the same confident young man, brimming with energy, so sure of a successful revolution.

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Now, he said, he felt discarded with his tortured, broken body; his mind struggling with the memories of the harrowing brutality he’d been through. Now he doubted his ability to fight against the Indian military forces occupying the village. He hated being identified as a ‘released militant’.

Kashmir’s long, brutal submission under occupation completely consumed Altaf ’s youth. Multiple wounds on his body had also unsettled his mind. All his injuries continued to fester in his mind, even when his body eventually healed.

Today, decades later, Altaf is still fighting to be at peace with his memories. He lives in a state of permanent unrest, his torturous past forced into his present. His mind remains occupied with unrealised dreams of a better future.

Altaf ’s youthful dreams have become nightmares. There is no end in sight for Kashmir’s bitter war.

This piece is published in Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now as ‘An unending, torturous war in Kashmir’.

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Stress Management Str ess Management Glenn L. Diaz

Glenn L. Diaz

U

nknown to the bosses, all of us on the call desk could tell when they were listening in. Common signals included a split-second, sporadic choppiness or a Darth Vader-like echo, even for agents like Karen, who was known for hiking her already high-pitched voice whenever she spoke to a male heterosexual caller.

‘It’s a strategy,’ she had told us during a cigarette break. ‘Sounding girly and helpless. Letting them think they have the power. Men like that. They let their guard down and shit. Then I sell them something they don’t need.’

We were graduates of marketing and sociology, biology and liberal arts, communications and philosophy. This wanton parade of impracticality. A lot of us were philosophy graduates.

But the feedback could get too loud sometimes, and distracting.

‘What was that?’ our bat-eared caller would bark, catching the echo. We were mandated by federal law to admit, at the slightest insinuation, that the call was indeed being recorded. When we did, the customer would sometimes go ballistic, say something like, ‘I knew they were listening in on my calls!’ or lapse into rehearsed nostalgia: ‘It’s never been the same after September 11.’ Sigh.

The official rebuttal script was, ‘This call is being monitored or recorded but only for quality assurance purposes.’ Our callers, bless them, would eventually shrug off this caveat as Standard Operating Procedure.

In our skyscraper, half a world away from Lower Manhattan, we would coolly step into a well-worn elevator, march into our stations and,

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with a bit of a psychosomatic yawn, put on our headsets, then wait for the beep that would open the floodgates.

Beep.

‘Thank you for calling US-Tel Consumer Services. My name is—’ ‘Hello?’ the American on the line would say, already outraged.

That night, Brock, the bearish operations manager from Austin, walked over to our spine – ‘Hello, guys!’ – and told us to gather around.

Eric, our supervisor, was absent, he said, so he’d taken the liberty of deciding to evaluate our team for call flow compliance. Nothing special, you know, just a routine procedure.

Our ally at Quality Assurance hadn’t alerted us about any impromptu monitoring, or was that nonstop frenetic waving supposed to be the signal? In the first four hours of the shift, we had been doing that thing you did when the cat is away. Karen had been caught Googling ‘edible+undies+Manila’ in the middle of a call. Philip, who sat next to her, was arguing with a bunch of tweens in an online forum for American Idol fans. Alvin, who was new and sat next to Philip, was browsing through half-naked torsos on a gay hook-up site. And down the line Macky was playing a spirited game of chess with someone from Lahore. Brock shook his head, his mouth like a deformed rhombus – the way Filipino mothers showed reproach.

‘Good job, guys,’ quipped Mitch, overachieving occupant of the highly sought-after window cubicle. Mitch routinely followed the call flow to a T (the condescension optional). She would arrive at the office forty-five minutes before shift and get to work right away, unlike the rest of us. For Halloween, she would decorate her station with fake cobwebs and Styrofoam tombstones, and dress up like the White Lady of Balate Drive.

The rest of us would call in sick then party somewhere else. Mitch cosied up to the Americans (or British, Canadians, Aussies) in the al fresco courtyard-cum-smoking area called the Lung Centre. The rest of us used the stairs to get to the thirty-second floor, if only to avoid sharing an elevator with the white guys.

Anyway, Brock said, because of our infractions, they were installing Surf Control in all the computers. That, and we would all need to attend a Stress Management Workshop after shift.

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‘But we’re not stressed –’ Philip said.

‘Well it’s either that or suspension, so—’ Brock said.

‘– are we?’ Philip looked at us, mortified.

Brock looked at him. ‘If there are no other questions—’ ‘How long will it take?’ Karen asked.

‘Who will run it?’ Macky asked, taking a peek at the tiny chessboard on his monitor.

‘Is it safe to say,’ Alvin whispered to the few within earshot, ‘that we’re stressing over a Stress Management Workshop?’

‘I heard that,’ Brock pointed out.

‘Brock,’ Mitch cooed, ‘do I have to be there, or is it just the offenders?’

We glared at her, then looked at each other.

‘Yes, Mitch,’ Brock said, clearing his throat, returning to formality.

‘Okay? If there are no more questions. . . .’ He drummed his index fingers on the grey plastic spine that separated the cubicles. The staccato that punctuated his sentence was also our signal to disperse.

We didn’t know how we got here. We were excitedly tossing our rolledup diplomas into the air one moment, and the next we were arranged in modular stations, sipping stale vending-machine coffee and answering billing inquiries from Americans. Certainly, few of us imagined it would be as dull and unchallenging as this, although we did like the arctic temperature and the money. The money, especially. Some of us liked the graveyard schedule, too – stepping into the shower just as the chicken adobo for dinner had started to settle in our stomachs, leaving the house as the parade of primetime telenovelas began, and encountering the exhausted homebound jeepneys and buses.

After Brock’s huddle, we went to get something to eat at a condemned high-rise in front of GT Tower a block away. The space used to be dark and closed off by rusty, vineswathed GI sheets, before a group of enterprising individuals cleared the debris on the first floor and set up tables and chairs. Voila! Instant food market. It was a hit. The army of call centre employees along Ayala Avenue flocked to the stalls that sold everything from chargrilled quarter pounders to mutton and paneer masala – an unwitting hat tip to our competitors in the subcontinent.

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‘Anyone see Jasmine’s performance last night?’ Philip asked, tearing a chapatti with one hand and scooping a hefty chunk of rubbery mutton.

‘Is she the Hawaiian with the stupid . . . thing?’ Karen asked, plucking an imaginary hibiscus petal from her right ear.

Philip’s mouth opened for a moment, then he shrugged. ‘Yep, that’s her.’

As vaguely racist company brochures and government puffery put it, we Filipinos were, unlike the Indians, ‘attuned to American culture’. So of course we followed American Idol. We’d all seen Jasmine’s god-awful performance. We looked at Philip to register the pointlessness of his question, and could he please leave us alone with our lunch, which, for a change, wasn’t from the Subway on the third or the McDonald’s across the street. Tonight it was Filipino fare – tapsilog for Alvin, sisig for Karen, and San Mig Light and Marlboros for Macky.

Philip took a furious drag at his cigarette, held his breath, coughed a little and then blew smoke that gingerly drifted to the open air. ‘Guys, guys,’ he said after a moment, pointing in the direction of a graffiticovered wall, dimly lit by far-off spotlights.

Mitch, the unflawed Madonna in our section, looked to be buying something from an undermanned dessert stall, her neon ID lace bright amid the marbled smoke from the nearby barbecue grills. She dropped what appeared to be a slice of cake in a carton and erupted in giggles, hand darting to cover her mouth. She picked up the carton, handed it to the vendor, and giggled some more. In her amusement, she tilted her head and saw us, at which point she lifted a hand for a jolly wave.

We waved back, in varying degrees of languor.

‘Let’s go?’ someone suggested. We pushed our chairs back and picked ourselves up.

‘She wasn’t in her element,’ Philip said, above the steady buzz of conversation at the Lung Centre, a veritable Pangaea where on-break agents amassed from all over the building. ‘Imagine having to do disco when you’re used to doing ballads and Whitney Houston. I mean, she probably has too much Pinoy blood in her. I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘Somebody shut him up,’ Karen said, puffing smoke to her right.

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We looked elsewhere.

‘Dibidi, dibidi?’ Macky said in his sheepish, mock Indian accent – a horrible imitation of one of the many Indians peddling pirated DVDs in the shopping plazas, or weaving through public markets astride beat-up Suzukis.

In one corner of the Lung Centre, we saw Himmat smoking, his back turned away from the multi-coloured glare of bank logos. Himmat managed the airline reservation account next to ours. His patch of ceiling was crowded with Boeing 747s and Airbus A320s dangling from strings like piñatas.

US-Tel had centres in Bangalore, New Delhi and Ahmedabad, wherever that was. It wasn’t uncommon for us to get a call from someone who sounded unmistakably Indian introducing herself as ‘Chloe’.

‘How are you doing today?’ Chloe would ask, then explain that the customer she had on the line had been routed to their site by mistake.

Without thinking, we would imagine someone in a colourful sari who resembled the gorgeous Sushmita Sen, only darker, less statuesque, so different from us and our mixed Chinese and Malay blood, our acidwashed Levis and fake Lacoste shirts, but who, like us, had read the same ring-bound Manual for US-Tel Customer Care Associates and memorised the same spiels.

‘I wonder what’s underneath the turban,’ Karen said dreamily.

‘I have a wild guess,’ Alvin said. ‘Hair.’

Himmat flung his cigarette butt into a nearby bin and made his way back towards the building. We took that as our cue to wrap up our own post-meal cigarettes and we followed him across the lobby to the elevator.

‘Fuck,’ Philip said, looking at his phone. ‘Dial Idol says she’s going home. I don’t understand. We always win these texting contests.’

Thirty-second – our floor – was already pressed and lit when a leather shoe stopped the elevator doors from closing.

‘You need a US phone line to vote,’ Karen said. ‘So our loyal armies of bored housewives and tambays can’t—’ ‘What needs a US phone line?’ Brock asked, wedging his torso into the mishmash of bodies. His question hung in the air as the car started its

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ascent. We wondered if the elevator’s sluggishness was only in our imagination.

When we got to our floor, Philip pulled us to one side.

‘Listen,’ Philip whispered. ‘I just remembered something.’ A long time ago, he said, he had discovered a way to log off from the system without being detected. After a call, instead of hitting Next, he pressed the switchhook of the physical phone and got a dial tone.

‘What are you suggesting?’ Alvin asked.

‘Well, there’s five of us and four more hours left in our shift. . . .’ Philip said.

We disengaged from the mutinous huddle and started walking back to our stations.

‘Hey,’ Philip called out, trying to keep up, ‘Don’t you want to see a Pinoy in the finals of American Idol?’

We kept walking.

‘Beer on me later?’

Back at our stations, prompted by the family photos that decorated our bays, some of us remembered the younger brother in college, the overdue life insurance premium, the number of days before Christmas (forty-three).

‘Log in now, guys,’ Brock called out from his temporary station near our spine. ‘Start logging in. . . .’

That was our cue to steel ourselves, not so much for the irate caller that dependably lurked in the queue – we could always handle that – but for the simple truth that anything short of the devil calling in to inquire about our long-distance rates was probably not enough to make us quit.

Speaking of the devil, we watched Mitch reposition her mic and massage her neck, talking in the same firm voice that neither shook nor cracked even when her caller shouted and called her names. Every now and then she nodded gravely, as if the person from across the Pacific could see her dogged earnestness.

Four hours later, at 8 am sharp – 5 pm in California – Brock walked over to the middle of the floor and, with a couple of claps, called out, ‘Last call, everyone! Last call!’ There was sporadic applause and some

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utterances of joy and relief. He then walked over to our spine. ‘As for you guys,’ he said, ‘please head over to Training Room B, thanks.’

‘If this were Survivor,’ Philip said as we made our way to the training room across the floor, ‘we could just vote Mitch off the island.’ His voice then hiked to a falsetto. ‘Do I have to be there, Brock?’

When Brock walked in a few minutes later, we were confused, then worried. If the company couldn’t afford a trainer, moving its business back to Naperville couldn’t be far behind, could it? We hated our jobs, sure, but a pull-out was not the way to go. Pull-outs were scary.

We straightened up in our hard plastic seats.

‘You’re doing the workshop, Brock?’ Mitch asked.

‘Uh huh,’ Brock said. He clicked on the mouse once, twice – but the first slide of his presentation remained frozen. His index finger tapped hard on the helpless mouse, and then he smashed it repeatedly against the desk.

‘So, stress,’ Brock began. ‘Sometimes we become so used to it—’ ‘Should we call IT?’ Philip asked.

‘Nope,’ Brock said. ‘I can handle this.’ He looked at his laptop and mumbled at it. The computer caught up moments later and moved to the next slide. ‘There you go,’ he said with a sigh. ‘We start off with. . . .’

Onscreen were the letters PERA. Money.

We chuckled. When were we less stressed than on the two days a month when, in the wee hours of the morning, raucous cheering erupted from some corner of the floor, bearing news that our above-minimumwage pay had been credited to our payroll accounts?

Brock went on. ‘P is for “Prepare”. For example, your attitude. . . .’

An hour or so later, when Brock had reached ‘A’ for ‘Adjust’, Alvin felt a tap on his shoulder. Mitch, who was sitting next to him, lowered her head and leaned closer. She showed him the supple underside of her arm, skin so pale the veins protruded like fossilised worms. ‘Can you?’ she whispered. ‘I’m not going to make it.’

The whites of Mitch’s eyes, Alvin saw, were red and watery.

‘Again?’ he asked. ‘You sure?’

She nodded.

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Alvin ran a hand down her arm, squeezing gently here and there, until he picked a spot somewhere in the middle and, with a nervous force, pinched an inch of skin.

Mitch closed her eyes. ‘Thank you.’ She smiled. ‘Now harder. And use your nails.’

By the time Brock finished the last of the slides, everyone in the room was yawning.

‘Any questions?’ he asked.

We shook our heads and made a show of checking the identical monochromatic wall clocks on the right side of the room. The clocks announced the time in four different time zones, none of them Manila’s, although Eastern Standard Time, twelve hours away, incidentally did.

Mitch raised her hand. ‘I’ve been under a lot of stress lately –’ Philip dropped his empty tumbler on the floor with a loud thud.

‘– and I’m starting to get used to it. Maybe that’s good?’

After a long pause, Brock ventured into something indecipherably long-winded. ‘My generation of Americans, we were raised in a home environment that really nurtured our hopes and dreams, you know? We baby boomers; we were a very promising generation. Very promising.

Our parents have been through the worst. The Great Depression. World War II. So for us, growing up, we had these role models to look up to.

People who showed us the triumph of the human spirit, who seized their destiny, forsaking material comfort.’

Our open mouths must have betrayed the debilitating headache that Brock’s speech had just hatched in our already heavy heads. Even Mitch, who we surmised could fake a smile through any brutal non sequitur, was speechless.

‘If there are no more questions. . . .’ Brock drummed his index fingers on his desk, and we were on our feet faster than one could say, ‘Pavlov’s dog.’

The following week – Jasmine safely through to the final three, thanks or no thanks to us – we were eating fries at McDonald’s for lunch when Mitch came prancing in. She looked around the store and, spotting us, headed to our table.

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‘Guys,’ she said. ‘Sorry, but can I borrow a hundred?’

‘You’re late,’ Karen said, not so much out of rudeness but disbelief.

‘I know,’ Mitch sighed. ‘Overslept. Is Brock in?’

We nodded.

‘Shit,’ she muttered.

Philip handed her a crisp hundred-peso bill. She scampered to the waiting cab outside, waved to us again, then crossed the street to our building, no doubt bulldozing her way through the crowded lobby.

‘That was weird,’ Philip said.

‘Yeah,’ Karen said. ‘You don’t even like her.’

‘No,’ Philip said, ‘I mean. . . .’

‘The driver didn’t have change?’ Alvin offered.

‘Otherwise, why would you take a cab if you don’t have any money?’

Macky asked.

For the rest of us, McDonald’s was a benevolent refuge, especially during pecha de peligro, the few days leading up to payday. Walking back to our building, we were distracted by a soft whirr from somewhere. We looked up and saw, framed by our skyscraper and the one across the street, the wing lights of a low-flying plane, a blink in the night sky.

Back at the floor, we spotted Himmat under the forest of unmoving jumbo jets by his bay, talking to people in suits, mostly white guys, including Brock.

Mitch sidled up to us. ‘Did you hear?’

‘What?’ we chorused.

‘Guard ran the handheld metal detector by his turban,’ Mitch said.

‘Fuck,’ Macky whispered, stifling a laugh.

Dibidi, dibidi.

‘Mitch,’ Philip turned to her, ‘everything okay with you?’

‘What do you mean?’ Mitch asked.

‘Is it something personal?’ Karen asked.

‘Not sure what you guys are talking about.’

Alvin ran a hand up and down her back.

‘You can’t let that ruin your focus,’ Philip said. ‘You’re the best performer in the team. Your output’s equivalent to, what, five, six agents combined?

That’s half the team. What will we do without you?’

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When we saw Brock leave the group, we quickly dispersed.

‘Start logging in now, guys,’ he called out, passing by our spine. ‘It’s 3.59. Log in now, people. We have a queue.’

Mitch, when we turned to look at her, was already in her station, already taking calls while tinkering with the assortment of bric-a-brac lined up around her computer – a framed Polaroid of a man in a hammock by the beach, a couple of Agent of the Year trophies, and an antique-looking desk clock from a long-ago trip to Paris. She was already talking in the modulated lilts that all of us, at one point, had secretly tried to eavesdrop on, mildly envious.

We took our seats and cleared our throats, took a sip of water. In the final few moments before logging in, the operations floor would always descend into absolute silence.

Beep.

‘Thank you for calling US-Tel Consumer Services. My name is. . . .’

Brock had started to walk back to his office when we saw someone approach him with a sheet of paper. He took a look and at once closed his eyes, as if in deep pain. He gave the guy, one of the more senior supervisors, a pat on the back of the head.

‘Guys,’ Brock said to the auditorium full of cold and sleepy agents, ‘do you think what we do here is some kind of a joke?’

‘Be specific,’ Karen whispered.

‘You think what we do here is funny?’ Brock asked.

‘Well. . . .’ Karen slurred.

A few days before, we had received a directive from Naperville telling us to remind switching customers that ‘only US-Tel phone lines stayed up in New York on the morning of September 11’. A rival carrier, using a new technology, had brought down their rates to rock-bottom, and since US-Tel couldn’t compete with their prices, its last resort was the ‘Appeal to Patriotism’. The response from our callers, on the few hesitant occasions when we used this suggested rebuttal, was cold-blooded amusement.

Sometimes they would laugh so hard that we had little choice but to join them, a camaraderie so touching and unexpected that a few of them did end up staying with US-Tel.

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Brock paced back and forth in front of the hastily called account-wide assembly. There were murmurs, errant yawns and, from a remote corner, someone’s ringtone – the Elton John song that Jasmine had sung weeks ago on Idol – turned heads.

Brock stood absolutely still. His right hand, we noticed, was balled into a fist. A few moments passed, and he checked his watch. He cleared his throat.

‘Now,’ Brock began, taking out a piece of paper, the same one handed to him earlier. He said he had just been informed that around a third of the calls from our phones last week were made to a 1800 number that a quick Google search revealed was the hotline to American Idol. ‘I’m not sure why we didn’t find out sooner. I had to hear it from Tim Miller.

Tim fucking Miller.’

Some of us thought, ‘Who?’ The rest of us looked at each other.

Brock smiled the frigid, hollow smile worn only by people in absolute torment. He then recited, in an overly formal tone, ‘the damage’. Abandoned calls, 291. Customer Satisfaction, 66 per cent. Billable hours, 42 per cent below target, meaning the company had lost nearly half its income for this account last week.

Did we derive, he asked, some sick pleasure from thinking that we were somehow able to outsmart the company, the company that for years had provided us with gainful employment denied to so many others? ‘What were you guys thinking? Really, I’m stumped over here.’

We expected Mitch to raise her hand, say something consoling in our defence, something apologetic and maudlin, with elements of nationalism and Catholic fervour thrown in. But when we looked at her, she seemed a little constipated and tense, although Alvin would claim, in a future assessment of the events of that day, that there was the tiniest hint of a smile in one corner of her pursed lips.

‘Unfortunately,’ Brock went on, ‘it’s logistically impossible to find out who made that very first call.’ And suspending all agents who partook in the ‘little operation’ would paralyse the Manila site. So he was going to wait until someone came clean, and, until then, lunch would be cut down from one hour to thirty minutes. ‘We’ve been too lax with you guys. We’re seeing that now.’

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‘You know what the worst part is?’ Brock asked after another long pause. ‘Jasmine’s not even Filipino. Not really.’

In the sluggish march to exit the conference hall, we saw Mitch make her way to Brock. They had a brief chat – Brock occasionally nodding – before they walked to his glass-encased office.

‘His hands were shaking, did you see it?’ Karen said at the Lung Centre, which always looked different, surprising in daylight, as if from being a mystical place it had suddenly become real. She took a long drag at her cigarette.

‘I got it,’ Philip said, blinking rapidly. ‘We don’t go to work tomorrow.

We show them that US-Tel needs us more than we need it.’

‘Right, right,’ Sharon said.

Karen nodded.

Macky nodded.

Alvin looked at us.

Mitch appeared from out of nowhere. ‘Hi, guys.’ Smiling, she handed Philip a hundred peso bill. ‘Thanks again. Don’t try to get my phone.’

She giggled.

‘Sure,’ Philip said, looking uncertain.

‘You know, to be honest?’ Mitch said. ‘I did vote for Jasmine once or twice last week. Maybe more. My fingers are super-fast, you guys know that.’

The last two hours of the shift, typically, are a dead time. Supervisors start to clear their desks. Quality Assurance people are done with their audits. The maintenance kuyas have started to empty the waste bins in their assigned rows. Agents, with few calls trickling in, chat with their neighbours over the dividers, their cursors hovering over the logout buttons on their onscreen phones. But when we came back, the operations floor was as alive, as noisy as it had been at midnight when call traffic is at its peak.

‘So I had this customer who wanted to disconnect his line,’ Mitch said, parking herself next to our stations.

‘We need to log in now, Mitch,’ Philip said.

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‘So I told him the usual things, right?’ she said. She went through the list of available rebuttals with practised ease – quality of service, value for money, the prestige of having a US-Tel line, even that stupid thing about September 11. When it started to seem hopeless, she offered to move the customer to a lower-priced plan. ‘He freaked out,’ she said. ‘He started cursing and calling me names, asked me how much I made in a year, then finally demanded to speak to an American.’

Mitch went on. ‘So I dialled Brock’s extension and put him on, but he didn’t know the customer was already on the line and he must have recognised my extension because when he picked up, he shouted, “What? What do you want now?” ’ ‘What? Why was he mad at you?’ Philip asked.

‘Anyway,’ Mitch said, ‘the customer, who turned out to be the owner of a chain of international fitness centres, went nuts. He was already mad when I turned him over, then to hear Brock go off like that. . . .’

‘Where am I calling?’ the customer had shouted.

‘US-Tel offices are based in Naperville, Mr Giuseppe,’ Brock lied.

‘Baloney!’ the customer said.

‘Hilarious!’ Mitch cried. ‘When the call was over, I told Brock I was quitting. He said something about a two weeks’ notice and a potential suit. I told him I had a draft of an email to Tim Miller about the many times his arm “accidentally” brushed against my breasts.’

Mitch’s desk, we noticed for the first time, had been cleared of all her trinkets. She smiled, gave Alvin’s arm a light squeeze before marching away.

Somehow we’d always find ourselves surprised by the first light, the glacial, unobserved shift of sky from black to leaden to deep blue, the sun nowhere but also everywhere on this side of the tilting ground. Soon, colours: on the skyscrapers, the horizon of sharp-cornered silhouettes, the solitary aircraft on its final tentative descent.

‘Guys,’ whispered Brock, suddenly behind us.

We turned to look at him.

‘Log in now. C’mon. You’re already seven minutes over-break.’ A couple of claps. Quick, playful drumbeats on a vacant desk.

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We put on our headsets and waited for the beep. When it came, our memorised spiels rushed out of us. On cue, we thanked our callers for calling us, introduced ourselves with made-up names and conveyed a most ardent desire to help them, in all the ways we could, and more. The call done, we awaited the next.

Beep.

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André Dao

‘W

hen you don’t like whoever is in charge, you can vote them out.

Right?’

It’s two in the morning and I’m standing in the middle of the street outside my hotel in downtown Ho Chi Minh City. The speaker is a young xe om driver – one of those ubiquitous motorbike taxis that dart in and out of the traffic like busy mosquitos – and though he’s only twenty-six, the same age as me, Cuong has a wife and two children. On the ride from the canal-side bar back to my hotel, Cuong tells me that this is his third job: during the day, he splits his time between working as a mechanic in a local garage and as a porter at a medium-sized hotel.

Eventually – as they all seem to here – our conversation turns to politics. Cuong gives me his interpretation of Australia’s political system: democracy, to him, means you can kick out the government when they do a bad job. He compares this to Vietnam, where there is no opposition party, no elections, no open criticism of the government. Instead of getting the boot, the government here is untouchable, regardless of its performance or the wellbeing of the people. The inevitable result of such immunity is corruption, at every level of power.

‘The police here are very bad,’ says Cuong, angrily. ‘They can stop you for no reason at all. And then they’ll just keep you there, on the side of the road, until you give them money.’

On the bigger political questions, Cuong is more fatalistic. Before my arrival in Vietnam, the international news had been all about the Chinese government’s unilateral move to place an oil rig off the disputed Paracel Islands (which the Vietnamese government claims lies within its 115

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exclusive economic zone) in the South China Sea (a further sore point for the Vietnamese government, who would rather it be known as the Eastern Sea). For a while, Lonely Planet’s travel guides were banned in Vietnam because they referred to that particular body of water by its Chinese designation. The incident stirred up the uglier side of Vietnamese nationalism, with mass demonstrations in 2014 culminating in pogroms that saw scores of Chinese-owned businesses – or at least, supposedly so, but often actually Taiwanese or Korean – burnt or destroyed. Up to twenty of the victims were killed. But when I ask Cuong about the sea dispute he simply shrugs his shoulders.

‘That’s a matter for the rich,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t concern the poor.’

After a pause he adds, ‘Unless there’s a war with China. Then it’s us who will be fighting.’

Conscription aside, Cuong’s primary concern is corruption, a topic he keeps circling back to. The fact that we vote for our leaders in Australia strikes him as particularly important. Who would vote again for a corrupt leader?

By this point I’m conscious that we’ve been standing in the middle of the road for half an hour, undisturbed by the occasional xe om that skirts easily around us. But Cuong presses me for an answer to his question.

‘That,’ he says, referring to the endemic corruption, ‘would never happen in Australia, would it?’

My mind turns to the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the New South Wales parliament, to the influence of mining lobbyists, and to the periodic scandals surrounding police drug squads. But it feels churlish to disagree, so I nod my head. That’s right – nothing like that ever happens in Australia. We’re a democracy, after all.

A few months after my late-night chat with Cuong, I woke up back home in Melbourne on a perfect spring morning to vote in the Victorian state elections. My nearest polling station was only a few hundred metres down the road, in a picturesque Anglican Church hall, and walking there it felt as if I were approaching a school fête. Loose bunches of people wandered in the same direction, chatting happily about the weather and their plans for the summer. Out on the footpath, at the

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perimeter of the church grounds, a small number of volunteers handed out how-to-vote cards for parties across the political spectrum: from Family First and the Australian Christians, through Liberal and Labor, to the Greens and the Animal Justice Party. Despite the range of political opinions, everyone is civil and any rivalry seems pretty friendly. As an old high school friend once said, to explain why he voted the way he did: ‘It’s like picking a footy team isn’t it? You just barrack for the team your parents go for.’

Before lining up to vote, I made a beeline for the sausage sizzle. In front of us, a father tried to explain the preferential voting system to his young son. It was the closest thing to a political conversation within earshot, unless you count the middle-aged men guffawing about the Sex Party. Most people stood in line quietly, browsing their phones or idly reading their little stack of how-to-vote cards before depositing them, with all the others, in the bin by the door.

Just before we got inside the hall, a portly man with a Santa Claus beard came out to apologise for the wait. ‘Thanks for your patience folks,’ he said. ‘We’ve got as many staff working as possible, but there’s been a bit of a rush in the last half hour.’ Most of us looked slightly bemused – we’d been waiting in line for no more than ten minutes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he assured us, ‘we’ll get you through as quickly as possible.’

He was good as his word, because I was soon standing at a cardboard booth with my ballot papers, having given my name and address to a kindly lady who ticked me off the roll in the manner of a schoolteacher.

Dao, André: present. At the booth, I took the time to vote below the line for the upper house, something only 5 per cent of Australians bother with. But as I hadn’t done much research beforehand, I made some onthe-spot decisions, folded up my ballot papers and handed in my vote.

And then, less than half an hour after I’d left the house, I was strolling out of the church grounds to enjoy – along with the rest of the state – my Saturday afternoon, safe in the knowledge that I’d just exercised my democratic rights.

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Some days, it felt like everyone I met in Vietnam wanted to talk about democracy. What struck me about these conversations was the sense of proximity that underpinned them. For every single person I spoke to about politics, it all came down to the same logic that Cuong had articulated: that a democratic Vietnam would lead to real material changes in their day-to-day lives.

In some ways, of course, they would be absolutely right. Before arriving in Vietnam for a three-month writing residency, I’d previously written about censorship there at an abstracted level, focusing on the conspicuous persecution of dissident bloggers who had received jail sentences of up to twelve years for criticising the government. Following the example of international NGOs, I concentrated on the hundreds of official media outlets, all owned by the government and controlled by the Ministry of Information and Communications, and the government’s ever increasing categories of sensitive (that is, unreportable) news: relations with China, land disputes, the medical conditions of top leaders.

It wasn’t until I was living in Hanoi that I began to understand the lack of free speech on an everyday level. My status as an inside outsider – a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese – played a part, as strangers or recent acquaintances spoke to me openly about their hopes for democracy and their loathing for rampant corruption. But as suddenly as these conversations began – in taxis, over locally brewed bia hoi and at a distant family wedding – they stopped again, with a jarring abruptness. Sometimes it was a third person butting in, to say jokingly – but nonetheless warningly, ‘What’s the good in saying that? You’ll just land yourself in trouble.’ But most of the time it was a kind of self-censorship, so crude that I could almost see the government’s hands on the levers of the speakers’ minds as they lapsed into an awkward silence, or backtracked, asking me not to ‘tell anyone about this’.

To answer Cuong’s question, my vote in Australia doesn’t kick anyone out of office. The significance of my vote comes only through a mathematical process of aggregation.

But voting’s true significance is not really the act itself, but the entitlement to vote. The importance of that entitlement is demonstrated by the

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campaigns to win it for the disenfranchised. The campaign leading up to the 1967 referendum, which granted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people the right to vote, stretched out over ten long years. That campaign was – it had to be – an incredibly broad and powerful social movement that crossed the usual divides of class, gender, race and ideology. But following the successful referendum, that movement splintered. In the nearly fifty years since that watershed, progress on Aboriginal rights in Australia has failed to live up to the promise of that campaign.

One way of understanding that failure is that liberal democratic processes – especially voting – inevitably drain social movements of their energy. It does so by effectively saying to the movement, ‘Hey look, you have the right to vote now – so if you have anything else to complain about, do so with your vote.’ Voting – and consequently parliamentary politics – becomes the only legitimate way to channel one’s political energies. Even outside the right to vote, we can see the same process of corralling political energy into ‘legitimate’ institutions.

Of course the orderly calm that characterises the experience of casting your vote in Australia is commendable. But that calm – verging upon apathy – also characterises the tenor of everyday political discussions in Australia. We’re cynical about politics without any of the urgency that I found in Vietnam. All politicians are lying bastards, sure, but the fact that we’re able to say so without getting particularly incensed – outside of staged performances of outrage, performed for our social media followers and others who already belong to our tribe – betrays our lack of real proximity to the political process.

That sense of growing distance is backed up by the numbers: according to statistics from the Australian Electoral Commission, a fifth of eligible voters didn’t cast their ballots in the 2010 federal election, and in 2013 a quarter of young people – a bloc of some 400,000 eighteen to twentyfour-year-olds – didn’t bother to register as voters.

Which is what leads me to the question: is the undeniable desire for change in Vietnam a desire for what we have in Australia? Is our democracy what Cuong really wants, and is it what he’ll be satisfied with?

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Before I can even begin to answer that question, I’ve already run into a definitional problem. Like a Year Ten debating student, my instinct is to reach for that old fall-back, the Oxford English Dictionary. And sure enough, there it is, democracy: ‘a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives’. But directly below there are further definitions: ‘control of an organisation or group by the majority of its members’; ‘the practice or principles of social equality’. So which is it, majority rule or social equality? Etymology is no help; the Greek demokratia comes from demos – the people – and kratia – power. We’ve all heard the chant: power to the people. But who are ‘the people’?

The definitional instability of this common term is such that the Australian Catholic University’s Research Node in the Sydney Democracy Network has been developing a database of different democratic theories. Their list – which continues to grow – is at 507.

They range from the familiar (liberal democracy, direct democracy) to the frankly bizarre (marine democracy is a standout), and their sheer number and diversity should give us pause for thought when we hear phrases like ‘democratic change’. We should always ask: Which democracy?

In the context of the spectacular success of the global human-rights hegemony, it’s worth rephrasing that question to ask: Which form of democracy does human rights prescribe (indeed, if it does so at all)? Or as Singaporean academic Li-ann Thio put it in a 2014 paper for the Beijing Forum on Human Rights: ‘Does human rights then require a one-sizefits-all or uniform approach to political and economic systems? Or are there a range of systems which could live up to the objectives of human rights?’

It’s an important question because of human rights’ claim to universality, a claim exemplified by international legal scholars like Louis Henkin, who wrote in The Age of Rights (Columbia University Press, 1990) that ‘[h]uman rights are universal: they belong to every human being in every human society. They do not differ with geography or history, culture or ideology, political or economic system, or stage of societal development.’ This claim to universalism saturates the primary

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documents of the international legal order. The United Nations Charter begins with the words, ‘We the peoples of the world’, reflecting Henkin’s claim that the notion of human rights is a global concept that doesn’t originate from any single culture. As Milton Friedman has put it, any and all of the differences of the past have been erased with the advent of the human rights regime.

But has difference really been erased? And if it has – is that something to celebrate?

During my three-month stint in Hanoi, I worked at a local governmentrun publishing house, The Goio Publishers. The Goio specialise in publishing non-fiction about Vietnam’s history, language and culture for a foreign audience. They also translate Vietnamese works into a number of foreign languages, including English, French, Russian and Spanish.

Working at a government-run publisher afforded me some telling insights into the consciousness of the current regime. Economic reports for the past two financial years were overwhelmingly market based, despite the official Marxist–Leninist line: chapters on non-performing loans, attracting foreign investment and the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement were followed up by token references to ‘Ho Chi Minh Thought’.

More telling than this fairly straightforward (and expected) propaganda of nostalgia was a small book called Dignity (2011) that I found on the shelves of The Goio’s public bookstore. Dignity purports to be an introduction to the philosophy and justification of human rights, and finding a book with chapter headings like ‘Democracy’, ‘Justice’ and ‘Universal human rights’ at the heart of the government’s information network felt, on the face of it, like a seismic change – another sign of the triumph of human rights.

But what had seemed like an earthquake was quickly reduced to a mere tremor by the publisher’s note in the preface: Due to the author’s meticulous research, this book has been published to serve as a reference guide to those who are interested in this topic. In this book, personal viewpoints are taken into account; however, not all

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of them support the orthodox viewpoints present in contemporary Vietnam.

We should note that, in addition to the universal permanent values of humankind, each nation or regime has its own particular features, which are conditioned by its geographical, cultural and social characteristics.

Therefore, each nation builds a system of values that corresponds to the conditions that characterise each stage of its historical development. As a result, a system of values is always based on universality and particularity. . . . In other words, there cannot be a development model or a system of values which is unique to or ideal for all human societies or communities.

Of course, I hadn’t expected such a book to be published without some safeguarding caveats, and so the ruse that here was simply a ‘reference guide’ presenting human rights as a Western curio for intellectual – but non-political – edification, was relatively predictable. But what are we to make of the assertion of cultural and historical relativism that follows? Hadn’t the Asian Values debate been put to bed by the turn of the millennium?

Sparked off at the beginning of the 1990s, the Asian Values debate was the first serious challenge to the universality of human rights in the postCold War era. Bilahari Kausikan, a Singaporean diplomat, neatly summed up the relativist position at the time in a 1993 Foreign Policy article, entitled ‘Asia’s Different Standard’: The Universal Declaration [of Human Rights] is not a tablet Moses brought down from the mountain. It was drafted by mortals.

The human origins of the Declaration, claimed Kausikan, meant that it inevitably reflected the values of the cultures that had the greatest hand in drafting it, and consequently failed to fully reflect the values of other cultures. As the Singaporean government put it in a 1991 white paper on shared values:

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A major difference between Asian and Western values is the balance each strikes between the individual and the community.

Asian societies, so the thinking goes, value communitarianism and harmony more than the individualistic West.

There was an element of historical relativism at play too. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and China, emboldened by burgeoning economic growth, had been the loudest voices proposing Asian Values. Kausikan argued that Asian countries tended to see ‘order and stability as preconditions of economic growth, and growth as the necessary foundation of any political order that claims to advance human dignity’. In other words, civil and political rights – the rights that underpin liberal democracy – might be well and good for advanced, industrialised countries in the West, but it was too much to expect poorer countries to implement democracy without achieving economic stability first.

The debate about Asian Values was significant, in part, because human rights had been explicitly linked to economic development after the fall of the USSR. Philosophers like Amartya Sen argued that development in its truest sense – the conditions under which society allows for the fullest use of human capabilities – requires freedom. The argument is best illustrated by the nexus between the recognition of women’s rights and economic growth – the full participation of women in society obviously goes hand in hand with women’s full participation in the economy. But the economic success of East and South-East Asian countries in the 1990s – countries that did little to protect civil and political rights – presented a strong counterargument. It was no longer possible to say that only liberal democracies that respected rights could thrive economically.

For that reason, the economic collapse of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in 1997 played a significant role in undermining the Asian Values position. It was further weakened by Indonesia’s subsequent turn towards democracy, and Malaysia’s flirtations with doing the same. Even China began to change its approach – more than a little cynically – by releasing a counter-report to the US State Department’s annual report, documenting human rights abuses in foreign countries. China’s report, which

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documents the United States’ rights abuses, is of course part of the usual geopolitical game – but it is also a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamental universality of human rights, above and beyond the question of their actual protection.

Ultimately, the argument that Asian culture differs from Western culture so greatly as to justify distinct rights and obligations failed because it was unmasked for what it truly was: an apology of power. If anything, authoritarian governments asserted that any mass movements of note in those countries appealed not to the supposedly native values of harmony and filial duty but to those ‘foreign’ rights that the West was supposedly forcing on the East. The lie of the Asian Values argument is exposed by people like Cuong, whose desire for justice and emancipation is expressed – to the chagrin of his government – in the language of democracy and human rights.

Yet here was that old argument again, in a book published in 2011, long after the debate had supposedly been settled. And just last year, in a paper for the Seventh Beijing Forum on Human Rights, Li-ann Thio pointed to the fact that Singapore was ranked ninth in the UNDP Human Development Report in 2014. Thio, who could be counted as one of Singapore’s most progressive academics – and certainly no opponent of human rights – nevertheless wrote that ‘[r]ather than a right to housing, the vast majority of Singaporeans enjoy housing’. This, she said, is to succeed not on paper, in the realm of law, but on the ‘more rigorous test of practical success’.

As Karl Marx wrote of the European middle classes who put their faith in parliamentary democracy: They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above.

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What had applied to the European middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries now applies to the non-West as a whole. It’s no coincidence that the first sentence of that quotation from Marx forms the epigraph of Edward Said’s seminal work on post colonialism, Orientalism (Vintage, 1978). In the book, Said borrows from Michel Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge to explain how colonialism was constructed.

He argues that the study of the Orient by the Occident (Orientalism) allows the West to turn knowledge of the Orient into the ability to categorise, manage and control. Consider the invention of ‘Indochina’, conceived of as literally the space – and more profitably, the trade route – between two great civilisations, India and China. Or the concept of South-East Asia – that collection of incredibly diverse nations, peoples, cultures and religions, which had never before been considered as a single mass – which was an invention of the Cold War, explicitly dreamt up as a buffer against encroaching socialism. As Benedict Anderson writes in The Spectre of Comparisons (Verso, 1998), ‘South-East Asia was more real, in the 1950s and 1960s, to people in American universities than to anyone else’.

Think tanks like the Hoover Institution in the US, whose motto is ‘Ideas defining a free society’, develop economic modelling to predict democratic transitions in non-democratic countries. Larry Diamond, a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, has predicted democratic transitions across Asia in the next generation, based on alleged corollaries between a certain level of GDP and historic democratic transitions in other countries. Unsurprisingly, the same sort of thinking saturates the UN, whose Universal Periodic Review process will commend a country like Cambodia for making the appropriate level of democratic elections for its economic strength. In a strange way, this is the point at which the Western democracy exporters and the authoritarian Asian Values leaders agree: a poor country can only be expected to afford a budget version of the West’s full smorgasbord of rights.

For the past two years – usually as the Australian Open is starting up or winding down – I receive a letter from at least one of my elected representatives. The letter is always the same: it wishes me a Happy Lunar

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New Year, in a variety of different languages. I recognise the Vietnamese, and what looks like Chinese and Korean. The English text varies but it’s only ever a variation on a theme: my elected member is committed to multiculturalism, and a series of values that seem plucked from the Asian Values debate – hard work, family, community. None of my housemates – who are all Anglo-Australians – ever get this annual letter. The only explanation for it is that at some point my name has been taken from the electoral roll, analysed and then entered into another database under a new category (presumably something like ‘East Asian’).

It’s a revealing – if trivial – example of the double bind of being counted and categorised; for it is both the source of my freedom and of my oppression. It is by virtue of being counted and categorised that I have the right to vote, and it is only through the data collection described above that governments and international bodies can deliver the services and safeguards that I consider essential to my rights.

It’s no accident that former president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, cribbed lines from both the American Declaration of Independence and the French Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen de 1789 for the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. It was in part a deft geopolitical manoeuvre to secure the support of the anti-colonial Americans and the political left in France, but it was also because by using the language of rights, he hoped that the new nation of Vietnam would be counted and categorised among the nations of the international legal order.

In 1955, at the Bandung Conference, the Afro-Asian world accepted the human rights paradigm largely because of its links to anti-colonialism, and five years later they had their reward when General Assembly Resolution 154 (XV) on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was passed, acknowledging the rights of all peoples to selfdetermination. In other words, recognition by the established system is the pay-off for submitting oneself to measurement.

And yet, being counted leaves us vulnerable to arbitrary categorisation. My family have only ever half-heartedly celebrated Tet – Vietnamese lunar New Year – but the arrival of that letter each year classifies me in a way that is beyond my control, and independent of my

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self-conception. On a more serious level, the categorisation of voter blocs (the Western Sydney vote or the Hispanic vote in the US for example) lumps together a diverse range of people based on a single, arbitrary identifier. The logic of the census – whose chief function after all is to correctly apportion electoral representation – reigns supreme. There are almost 200,000 Vietnamese people in Australia, according to the latest census.

But beyond that we know nothing about whether they are Vietnamese– Australian, an Australian of Vietnamese descent, or a Vietnamese person living in Australia temporarily.

In February this year, a two-day democracy workshop at the University of Social Sciences in Hanoi was the first ever officially sanctioned academic conference on the topic. The only previous conference of a similar nature was more generally about political science, according to Jean-Paul Gagnon, one of the Australian Catholic University academics working with the Sydney Democracy Network putting together a list of the different theories of democracy. This time, says Gagnon, on returning from Hanoi, the workshop explicitly tackled ‘the D-word’.

The focus was on endogenous forms of democracy in Vietnam, and in Asia more generally. The central question is whether or not research can reveal a form of democracy that imports nothing from Western philosophy – papers included the non-hierarchical decision making structures of a minority tribe from Vietnam’s mountainous central region (‘campfire democracy’) and the development of networked democracy in China.

According to Gagnon, the workshop was more open and frank than they’d expected (one Australian representative from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told them she had ‘no idea how this was allowed’). The presence of Professor Hoang Chi Bao, a member of the Party Central Committee’s Theory Council, was a marker of how seriously the Vietnamese government were taking this question. Even more encouragingly, the workshop participants included a large number of young locals, especially on the second day when word got around on social media that senior Party officials and foreign academics were talking openly

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about democracy – which, it was argued during the workshop, had always been a feature of Ho Chi Minh’s thinking, in the form of his theory of ‘the people’s mastery’.

Listening to Gagnon talk, I get a sense of democracy’s glorious openness, its endless possibilities and permutations. No one knows – no one has ever known – what true democracy is, runs Gagnon’s argument, so why can’t there be a specifically Asian form of democracy, developed in accordance with its specific history, geography and culture?

On the other hand, the academics who flew into Hanoi might be nothing more than stooges – there to give a new intellectual sheen to the old Asian Values masquerade. As frank as the discussions were, there were notable gaps in the conversation – no mentions of environmental politics for example, and little talk of women’s rights or the struggles of minority ethnic groups. Workshop participants were also acutely aware of the security agents in the room – one in plain sight, stern and uniformed, and another a plant, surreptitiously using his phone to video the more outspoken locals. Proceedings were punctuated by the university vice-rector’s reminders that this was a scientific conversation, and ultimately it was clear that the Party’s primary interest in these conversations was the extent to which the realisation of Ho Chi Minh’s ‘mastery of the people’ would lead to economic development.

The workshop is a perfect encapsulation of the bind that good-faith critics of human rights and liberal democracy find themselves in. There’s every chance that one’s criticisms of the West, of the UN and its mechanisms for counting and measuring, will serve as an apology for authoritarian power. But to fail to criticise our own forms of democracy would be to fall into the trap of myopia.

‘Alles für das Volk, aber nichts durch das Volk’ – translatable as ‘all for the people, but without the people’ – was a motto used to characterise the rule of Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II. Joseph saw himself as the great Enlightenment monarch, whose reforms reflected his extraordinary concern for ‘das Volk’. Yet those reforms were limited by an arbitrary horizon – the supremacy of the monarch – which necessarily meant that for all his reform he still ruled ‘without the people’. If we set liberal democracy

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as our horizon, then we risk being enlightened liberals just as Joseph was an enlightened absolutist – always failing to see how each reform falls short of our elevated ideals.

A few weeks after the democracy workshop, Hanoi’s officials were caught off guard by snap protests – mobilised by unprecedented social media outrage – over a decision to chop down 6,700 healthy, and iconic, Hanoian trees. In a country where street demonstrations of any kind are rare, it was remarkable to see protestors – who included scientists, prominent citizens and celebrities – climbing into trees and placing signs around their trunks that read ‘I’m a healthy tree, don’t chop me down’. One long-time Vietnam researcher noted that he hadn’t seen this proportion of young people at a public protest since the anti-war demonstrations in Saigon in 1964.

When asked about the protests, the people in the trees and on the streets didn’t just talk about their sentimental attachment to the trees that had been planted a hundred years ago during French colonial rule.

Instead, their concerns mirrored those of Cuong, the xe om driver: there were allegations of corruption, as the timber is valuable, and anger over the lack of public consultation. As ever, the officials were clueless, with one responding to the protestors by claiming that ‘all citizens were in favour of the project’.

But, in the end, people-power prevailed. The decision to cut down the trees was reversed, and scores of officials involved in the decision were suspended by the mayor, pending an internal investigation. Of course, the struggle for better accountability and transparency continues in Vietnam, as it does around the world. We’ve yet to find the better expression of democracy that would give full voice to the Cuongs of the world.

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ko ko thett

ko ko thett Poetry

Pollen Fever * Contrary to what they believed, I was never allergic to skin. Or sunrays.

I wasn’t a cadre. ** Arrested by three. Tortured by five. Fornication. For negligence. For negation. Wasn’t that a question about a syzygy? Or posture? He even pawned his pearls to pose with my wax figure. I sneezed profusely in their hands. *** First they spoke a language that embraced you like a failed state. Then they switched. Like a passage from winter to summer, the transition was ungovernable, and violent.

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Poetry

**** Damn you all! Indecent infixes, triple consonants and doted vowels!

Like Mi Aye, I’ve had it twice.

Once for being too yellow.

Once for being too white. ***** Even after they’d renamed pollen fever hay, I insisted watchful trees mustn’t bloom. Rain may settle dust, but leave us with wet pyres. For padauk, however, drizzle is never enough.

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A Little Life A LittleKeyi Sheng Life

Sheng Keyi translated by Shelly Bryant

I

t was after ten at night when they finally arrived – three men and a woman, faces shining and covered with sweat, their expressions displaying an alert restlessness. Everything about the short, pale, plump woman was blunt.

‘Our wait has finally produced some fruit. Have a seat.’ My youngest aunt, very polite, emphasised the word wait, as if to suggest our patience had reached its limits. She had specially rushed back from Beijing for this matter. Everyone had taken time off from work and suffered sleepless nights. We had all been up through the previous night. The clock ticked, making us anxious. My oldest aunt’s husband crushed out his cigarette, saying, ‘We can’t just sit waiting like this. We should “invite” the fellow over, then his parents will appear.’

‘Kidnap him? Isn’t that illegal?’ My father was afraid. He had so little courage it would fit in a nutshell.

‘Bring his girlfriend. She knows him, and also knows the way.’ My oldest aunt had dark circles under her eyes. ‘Who knows whether he’ll show up for work tomorrow.’

The boy’s girlfriend was my older sister. At the moment, she was the calmest of all of us, seven months pregnant and sitting like the Virgin Mary with her hands in her lap, saying nothing as she watched everyone worry about her life and her unborn child. Her face was untroubled and serene. She occasionally shifted in her seat, as if none of it had anything to do with her.

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My sister was eighteen, and studying in a very poor junior college. She had taken out a loan for her tuition, while my mother cooked and cleaned for other families and my father did manual labour, struggling to save enough money to repay the loan. The college was close to home, about three hours by train. My sister came home often at first, but then she got busy, and we hadn’t seen a shadow of her for four months. She didn’t even resurface for the summer holidays, saying she had gone with the boy to Changsha for an internship.

But within a few days she came home, luggage in tow. Her face was still thin, but her midsection was plump. She wore a dress with no waist and waddled like a penguin. Mother was shocked, like she’d been electrocuted. She knew all about how to clean a window and could confidently fry up tasty vegetables, but was completely useless when faced with my sister’s inflated belly. Mother could only resort to the timetested method – tears. Lots of tears. Her face was distorted by bitterness.

We soon found out that the boy who had accompanied my sister home in the middle of the night the previous winter, and who had been hiding away in the Internet café playing games, was responsible for her present condition.

Our house was only fifty square metres. My sister usually slept with Mother on one bed, and I slept with Father on another – the family’s sleeping arrangements separated along gender lines. Only after my sister went to college did I have my own space. If she had a baby at home, it would cry, and there would be nappies and bottles piled up on my desk.

It was no use considering how I could focus on my own studies and get into a good college if that were the case.

Father went quietly to the balcony to smoke. My mother could not stop crying. ‘Such a huge thing. . . . Why didn’t you tell us?’

‘He said we should have it, so we’re going to have it,’ my sister said.

‘An unwed girl having a baby at her parents’ home. How can your father and I show our faces in public?’

‘Their house is even smaller.’

‘You haven’t graduated. You’re not even the legal age to marry. And you’ve no means to raise a child.’ My sister did not say anything. She was not anxious. She could have a baby or not; it made no difference to her.

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The fellow’s home was in the mining area. His parents divorced when he was two, then his father later found a woman with whom he had lived ever since. When the boy was hiding out at the Internet café, my sister brought him home early one morning. That was the first time we met him, and the only time.

Father had a bad impression of him, saying he smoked, chewed betel nut, and seemed foppish – all signs of dishonesty. Father never had high expectations of us. We just needed to be like a tree or a flower: honest, and quietly doing our duty.

Mother liked the fellow, saying he was tall and handsome, clever, sweet-tongued, mature beyond his years and quite well mannered.

I thought of the dark mining area, where dust covered the vegetation and your hair and filled your nostrils. It was certainly not a good place.

Father thought the same way. Even though our home was a poor one, at least it had mountains and water and the air was clean. But my father had always listened to my mother and, though he didn’t like the boy or that place, he was powerless to object to the relationship.

My mother did not cry long. Afterward, it seemed she had feelings for the child in my sister’s belly, saying I would be an uncle soon and things like that. Perhaps because it had been cleansed by tears, my mother’s face brightened. Her maternal instinct quickly restored, she went to the supermarket and bought milk, ribs, fish and nutritional supplements for my sister, and asked if the foetus was moving. The next day, Mother took my sister to the hospital for another check-up. The ultrasound showed that the foetus was healthy and had a high nose. My mother was very happy.

She suddenly realised that this was actually a joyful occasion.

Since every wedding must follow procedures, Mother decided she should phone and speak to the fellow’s father. Nervous, she pressed all the wrong buttons. I finally had to dial the number.

Where we live, each city has its own dialect. Forcing herself to use Mandarin, Mother stammered. Her accent was strange, making it sound all wrong, even when seasoned with a degree of flattery.

The boy’s father seemed to be a real talker. Mother could only get the conversation started, then the rest was all ‘mm-hm . . .’. She pulled the phone away from her ear for a moment. The other voice was really loud.

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Mother uh-huhed for a while, then hung up. Her joy had faded. It seemed her spirit had taken a blow, and her expression was dazed and bitter.

‘Are they coming?’ Father asked.

‘He said he hit someone with his car two weeks ago. . . . In a few days, the official from the mine will come to investigate, so he has a lot of work to do in preparation. They don’t have time to come here, so they asked us to go there.’

‘That doesn’t make sense. Making excuses means they don’t want to take responsibility.’ Father wasn’t angry. He was just stating a fact. He was used to holding things in, and never spoke sharply.

Fortunately, Mother never expected Father to go to any trouble. She continued to try to contact the boy’s father, but the other side did not answer the phone.

Mother simmered for several days and, when she couldn’t hold it in any more, told her two sisters. That’s when things really started to boil.

My sister said the boy worked in an office. That night, when some of the family were getting ready to go to Changsha to look for him, she told us the truth – he worked in a bar.

My youngest aunt hadn’t slept for two nights, but drove there through her exhaustion. Mother was worried sick, and I kept her company while she waited. Sometime after four in the morning, they finally came home.

We were all at my oldest aunt’s house, since it was the most spacious, sleeping on the sofa, the floor and anywhere else we could find. I opened the door when they returned and saw the fellow, wearing a white shirt and black trousers, clean and cool. Without a word, he strode into the room and plopped onto a stool, like a child being confronted by his parents.

It had been several hours of hard work, and everyone was tired and hungry. My oldest aunt cooked for everyone. Her husband drained a glass of water, leaning his head back.

My sister’s face was expressionless, as if her only task was to co-operate.

She and the boy didn’t speak. They were like strangers.

My youngest aunt, dozing on the sofa, suddenly sat straight up. She said slowly, ‘That sort of boy working in a bar, they’re all like ducks waiting

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for customers to feed them. That’s not the sort of place someone about to be a father should go.’

Ignorant of the euphemistic use of duck common among adults here – and having never heard of a gigolo anyway – I felt that what my aunt said was not right. A duck was fluffy and quacked. It didn’t seem anything like that fellow, sitting there, cold as ice.

‘It’s not a place decent people go. Bright lights, liquor and noise. . . .

And you want to let her go there to work!’ my uncle said.

‘It’s just temporary,’ the boy said. ‘You see, I’m still in my work clothes. I didn’t even ask for time off. What is it you want from me anyway?’

My uncle slapped him on the head. ‘Damn! When a man does a thing, he has to take responsibility. You ditched her here, then disappeared.

What’s that about?’

‘I didn’t say I wouldn’t take responsibility,’ the boy said nervously.

‘She’s staying at home for a while so I can get settled in, then I’ll come back and get her.’

‘How old are you?’ my youngest aunt asked.

‘I’ll be twenty soon.’

‘And you want her to have this illegitimate child?’ she asked.

‘Wait till we’re of age, then we can register our marriage,’ he said.

‘Why do you keep hiding the truth?’

‘Aren’t I telling you now?’ the boy stretched his neck back and forth. ‘If I’d known it would be like this, we could’ve just gone somewhere and had the baby first, then told you. What could you have done about it then?’

My youngest aunt walked over to him. ‘Look up, please.’

He did so, looking disdainful.

‘Can you repeat what you just said?’ she asked.

‘If I’d known it was going to be like this, we could’ve just gone away and had the baby first, then told you about it. What could you have done?’

There was a loud pop when she struck his face. ‘That’ll make you remember. Being an adult requires showing at least a modicum of respect for other people, including your own parents.’

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He fidgeted in his seat and gritted his teeth, trying to control his temper.

‘You’re acting like a scoundrel. Give me your identity card,’ my uncle said.

‘I didn’t bring it,’ he retorted.

As my uncle prepared to frisk him, the fellow quickly produced some rubbish from his pocket, tossing it on the coffee table. ‘I told you I didn’t bring it! There’s nothing to discuss!’

My uncle slapped his head with some force. ‘What’s with this attitude?

Be honest!’

My oldest aunt had just put the food on the table. Hearing this phrase, she chuckled, calling my sister’s name. ‘Take a good look. You see what he is now?’

My sister was standing on the balcony, leaning on the railing and looking at the blue sky. Dawn had come and the birds were already singing their morning song from their perches in the trees. She turned and glanced into the house to indicate her compliance. But she still wore the same indifferent expression.

‘My father just sent me a message. He said he’ll come tomorrow to talk about wedding arrangements. . . .’ The fellow’s voice suddenly turned tearful. ‘Now that you’ve all gone overboard like this, what’s there to talk about? You’ve made such a mess of our love!’

The word love jabbed everyone. The whole house instantly fell silent.

My youngest aunt said, ‘All right. Let’s talk about love. Do you love her?’

‘Yes!’ he said fiercely.

‘You do? If you love someone, how could you let her tote around so much luggage when she’s seven months pregnant? In thirty-eight degree heat, no less, and sitting in the back of a bouncing vehicle for hours? If you love someone, why don’t you let her wear a beautiful wedding gown and take her back to your own home?’ My aunt fired this series of questions. ‘Why degrade her? Why let her be a poor, abandoned woman? Do you have any idea the sort of shame and anger we’ve had to bear?’

My aunt paced back and forth as she spoke. Her gestures and expression made her look like the instigator of a revolution.

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The boy curled his lip. ‘That’s how you see it. But I love her.’

‘You love her? You don’t even have basic respect for her. You haven’t paid your respects to her parents or relatives, and you haven’t introduced her to your parents. Your father has only just come to know about this situation himself. You don’t care about her at all!’

‘Anyway, whatever you say is right, and I’m wrong,’ he muttered as he started to light a cigarette.

My uncle interrupted, ‘Please don’t smoke in front of me.’

That fellow threw the lighter away, tossing it in a small arc.

My youngest aunt called my sister and asked her to come in. Then she said, ‘Tell me, what do you see in him?’

My sister looked at my aunt blankly.

‘What’s good about him? Name three things.’

My sister seemed lost in thought. Right up to the end of this ordeal, she offered no answer.

Aside from Mother, everyone thought the fellow was a lousy character, rotten to the core and from a bad family – clearly not marriage material.

Especially Father, a resoluteness suddenly rearing up in him.

‘Abort it. Abort it and start fresh.’ Father took my sister’s hand, removing the hangnails on her fingers, ‘I’ll take care of you. And you can rest as long as you want when it’s done.’

My sister’s hand was plump and had dimples on the back of it. Because of that, Mother had concluded early on that my sister was fated to be rich.

‘She’s so far along. Abortion will be harder on her body than giving birth. She’ll suffer physically.’ A note of bitterness entered Mother’s voice. ‘What if some worse complications arise?’

She was worried my sister would turn out like one of her friends, unable to have any more children after her abortion.

‘If that fellow was honest, reliable. . . . We can still make do. . . . But she’s so young. She doesn’t know anything about having a baby. Is there any thought more terrifying than to be stuck with a debauched, irresponsible husband and father?’

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My oldest aunt agreed, ‘There’s still a long way to go. The girl’s life has just begun. It’s not worth letting it get consumed like this.’

My sister’s eyes followed the voices, watching whichever mouth was speaking at that moment.

My youngest aunt sighed and said to my sister, ‘The worst of it is, I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re thinking. You’ve been back for a few days, and we’ve not heard you say a word. Do you feel we’re stifling you, or interfering with your life?’

My sister looked at Mother.

Mother said, ‘How could she think that? She knows we’re only looking out for her best interests.’

‘Don’t answer for her,’ said my aunt. ‘All these years, it’s always been you speaking on her behalf. That’s why she’s in this situation now, looking at her own life like an outsider! In the end, she’s going to have to face up to it!’

All eyes were focused on my sister now.

To my memory, no one had ever said my sister was pretty. She wasn’t tall, and neither was she fair. Her performance at school was average, and she never answered back at home. In all her life, my sister had never been the centre of attention like this, the object of everyone’s concern and the topic of discussion. She seemed to enjoy the moment, like a spectator quietly appreciating everyone’s performance and rating the way they played their roles.

Father, Mother, my oldest aunt, her husband and my youngest aunt eagerly waited for her to speak. My sister’s composure was admirable.

She glanced around, then finally stared at her toes, still as a statue.

My oldest aunt and her husband had had enough. They left the room.

My youngest aunt finally said, ‘If you want to suffer with him, to be partners in crime, to be cheapened, then say so. We’ll just leave you to live your own life.’

My sister lifted her face and stared straight ahead, eyes set. She still did not reply.

‘OK, I’ll take that as your consent.’ Then my aunt said to Mother, ‘I can’t be bothered. Tomorrow I’ll go back to Beijing. You wait and meet

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his relatives. The fellow’s a little rogue, and his old man’s a wily old bird.

You’ll be jumping into a fire pit.’

The cicadas called loudly, and the sun shone white-hot. The branches were still, and not even the wind generated by the fan was cool. Sweat dripped from every pore, covering our bodies with a sticky film.

My youngest aunt was asleep, and my uncle had gone to his work unit to attend to some business. Mother and my oldest aunt were in the kitchen cooking.

The boy was helping my sister hang the laundry out to dry. Mother signalled with pursed lips, wanting my aunt to look.

‘Whether you choose to have the baby or not is up to you,’ my aunt said, glancing at the couple. ‘A seven-month-old foetus is also a life. . . .

It’s just that bloody rascal,’ she said, pointing to the boy. ‘He’s not reliable at all.’

‘Wait till his father gets here. Let’s see what they intend to do.’ Mother cut some red and green chilli, preparing to fry spicy pork. ‘We’ll be polite for now, in case we become relatives.’

As soon as Mother started cooking, she perked up. Now she had everything under control. She could discern things, having a firm handle on what was what. And, maybe she still held out some hope for the boy’s father. Things had progressed this far, making it impossible for him to ignore the situation.

She tipped the sliced chilli into the wok and it sizzled. At the same moment, the doorbell rang. It was my uncle, carrying a case of beer. He seemed afraid that he had made things worse, so he threw himself into doing minor tasks.

‘When will your father be here?’ He put the beer in the refrigerator, then poured a cup of iced water and drank it.

‘He’s bought a ticket for the afternoon train,’ the boy said, much more at ease now that the atmosphere was amicable.

Before long, Father came home, red-faced and sweating. He carried a bag of fruit for the guests.

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The smell of frying chilli pork wafted over us all, making Mother cough. My aunt laughed, and suddenly the whole house had a holiday feel, as if we were celebrating.

My sister and the boy silently wiped the table and set out the dishes.

‘Smells good.’ my youngest aunt said, lazily coming out of the bedroom. She deliberately ignored the couple. ‘Aiyoh . . . spicy pork, braised fish, steamed egg, amaranth, eggplant and beans.’

‘Have some beer,’ my uncle offered. ‘Let’s all have a glass.’

‘She can’t drink,’ the boy said, taking my sister’s glass.

‘Of course,’ said my uncle. ‘Drinking isn’t allowed for pregnant women. She’s on the protected species list now.’

Everyone laughed. Mother was especially pleased. And so, our lunch started happily. The fellow was very attentive, making sure my sister had enough to eat, then pouring more beer for Father. He even stood up and toasted my parents, aunts and uncle, showing off the good manners Mother had always suspected he had.

After we’d been eating for a while, the boy put down his chopsticks and said, ‘I need to ask one favour of you. When my father arrives, please speak gently, so it will be a pleasant discussion. After all, we aren’t adversaries, and certainly not enemies.’

His remarks were not unreasonable, but it seemed a little like lecturing.

My uncle was not happy. ‘Whether people like or dislike what is said depends on the content, not the tone.’

My sister had lowered her head and was eating fish, sipping her soup and gnawing on a bone as if she had the most voracious appetite. All around the table, the only sound was her chewing.

At that moment, the boy’s cellphone rang. He stood and went to the balcony to answer. He spoke quietly in his own dialect.

Soon, he came back to the table. ‘My uncle is here,’ he said. ‘He’s at the supermarket in the housing estate. I’ll go get him.’

My uncle seemed to mind this very much. Catching hold of the boy, he said, ‘Sit down. I’ll get him.’

A few minutes later, a bespectacled man of small build came in with my uncle. Mother got up and set another place at the table for him.

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‘Sorry,’ said the man. ‘My brother was afraid you would be worried, so he asked me to come over first. It might be evening before they arrive.’

He stared sternly at his nephew for at least half a minute.

Then, he said, more loudly, ‘Damn you, don’t you know anything?

You’ve made a lot of trouble for everyone. When you were two, your mother dumped you on us and ran away. Your grandmother raised you single-handedly, penny pinching for your sake. She doted on you constantly, and now you’ve really let her down. You know, she’s so angry she nearly had a heart attack!’

This early arrival had come to spy out the situation, but he wasn’t a very good actor.

My uncle laughed. ‘Don’t scold him. It’s no use saying anything now.

Let’s finish eating. Every problem has a solution.’

The boy’s uncle lowered his head and ate. When he had drunk his tea and had his fill he announced that he would go back to his hometown to visit his mother in hospital. We knew it was an excuse just to get away.

By that afternoon, three men and a woman had come to the house – the boy’s father, a friend, the short uncle and his stepmother. The latter had a straight face, like a wicked character.

Mother stuttered over a few words of introduction, but was interrupted by the boy’s stepmother.

‘This is too sudden,’ she complained. ‘We were caught completely unawares. She knew about our family’s circumstances. I’m not working, and my husband only makes a couple of thousand a month. Our home’s no larger than your arsehole. What are we supposed to do? She’s been to my house a few times, and hardly had a thing to say. They just go about their own business. Even now, I don’t know her name. I only know her surname is Wei, so I call her the Wei girl.’ Her voice croaked.

They were not, as the boy had indicated, coming especially to discuss wedding plans. They were here to absolve themselves of responsibility.

Mother listened gravely. Her mouth moved, but she didn’t seem to know what to say.

My youngest aunt stood up, looked at the boy’s stepmother and, enunciating clearly, said, ‘Well, you and your lover have lived together for

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over a decade, so you should have a good understanding of what it’s like to be denied proper status. You have to know its importance to a woman. Our girl will not bear an illegitimate child. Do I need to remind you of your own illegitimate position in this family? You don’t have the right to speak here. If you’re the boy’s mother, I have to say you’re a pretty incompetent one. You don’t care about your son, and you don’t like “the Wei girl”. You don’t even know her name! One might say you have no real concern for your boy. You knew he wasn’t serious and yet you just left him to his shenanigans, creating trouble for everyone else.’

The boy’s stepmother had been ready to blow her top earlier, but she wilted in the face of my aunt’s attack. She sat and did not speak again.

She looked a little pathetic.

My aunt refilled the woman’s teacup and pushed a plate of fruit in front of her, as if to make amends. ‘Well. The parents of a girl are always more anxious than the parents of a boy,’ she said. ‘There are so many more problems to bear. Before we contacted you, our nights were sleepless. Please forgive me if I said too much.’

Everything was quiet except for the sound of the fan turning.

My sister sat in the centre, bracketed by a family on either side. That fellow sat across from her. He strained toward her with his eyes, but when my sister looked at him, it was as if she were looking at a stone. He could only grit his teeth and lower his head, his hands fidgeting.

Mother said that the couple had agreed to have the baby, and that my sister had promised to wait until the boy was old enough to marry. The boy dropped whispered hints, reminding my sister to keep her promise and to stand up and declare her position, but she was like a pagoda planted serenely on the ground, unaffected by the buffets of the wind.

The boy’s father looked very young and fashionable, as if he had not yet sown all his wild oats. He was a little coarse, and did not seem very educated. He put down the workbag he held clasped under his arm. His Adam’s apple slid up and down for a long time. When he finally spoke, his words were hardly different from his partner’s. He pointed at his son.

‘You little bastard,’ he scolded. ‘I’m always telling you to be careful and not let accidents happen. Now you’ve got someone pregnant again—’ ‘Again?’ my oldest aunt screamed. ‘Got someone pregnant again?’

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The boy’s father was stunned. ‘No, no. You misunderstood! I didn’t say “again,” I said, “and then”—’ ‘Oh, I understand! No wonder your wife didn’t bother to learn the name of the girl he brought home.’ My youngest aunt snorted loudly, then said to the boy, ‘I already suspected you were a player, I just didn’t know you were such a veteran. You’ve obviously been there before. You mentioned at one point you never imagined she was a virgin, didn’t you?’

The boy’s expression was extremely cocky throughout the conversation.

‘Auntie, you’re misunderstanding what I said. What I meant was that, in this sort of society, a girl as pure as her. . . .’

‘You little fucker. I should’ve never brought you into this world.’ His father moved as if to punch him, but the friend who had come with them stopped the older man.

‘You didn’t come here to discuss marriage at all,’ my oldest aunt said.

‘She knew our family’s situation,’ the boy’s father said. ‘Now the conditions have been laid out. Our son is still so young, and he doesn’t have a place to live.’

My youngest aunt said to the boy, ‘You really are a liar. Even your tears were false.’

Father stood to one side, muttering, ‘All right, forget it. Anyway, you don’t consent to the marriage and, to tell the truth, I’m not quite sure it’s a good idea either.’

Everything was silent, as if even time had stopped.

The friend who had come with the family suddenly smiled broadly and said to the boy, ‘You have to listen to your elders. You’ll soon become a father. You’ll mend your ways and not pick up any new bad habits.

Your grandmother is seventy years old and in poor health, yet she’s still cooking and cleaning for other families just to earn a little money each month, all because she doesn’t want to increase everyone’s burden. The key is to rely on yourself. You’ve got two hands and a sense of responsibility, so you should be able to feed your family, right?’

The boy took his cue. ‘I swear, I’ll work hard to make a living. Even if I have to haul sand bags or mix cement, I’ll do it. I’ll work a hundred

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times harder than anyone else.’ He looked at my sister, as if looking at a camera, and said, ‘Please believe me.’

My sister bowed her head and looked at the dimples on the back of her hand.

The boy burst into tears. ‘Why won’t you speak to me? Tell me, what does my love mean to you? I never imagined our love would be put on the table and discussed like this.’

At the word love, everyone felt a little uncomfortable. Watching someone say ‘I love you’ to another person really made our flesh crawl.

Even so, the scene was a little poignant.

My uncle, who had remained quiet through all this, now spoke up.

‘You little brat. Do you think getting a girl pregnant, sneaking around like that, is something romantic? You’re toying with girls.’

‘She consented. Something like this can’t be all my fault.’ The boy turned and wiped his tears.

My oldest aunt said, ‘If she has an abortion, there are two lives at stake. If something goes wrong, how can you repay that?’

The situation immediately took on a grim tone.

The boy’s uncle nudged him with his knee.

As if he’d had an epiphany, the boy knelt on the ground, facing the right-hand parenthesis. Weeping, he said, ‘Father, support our marriage.

I know I’m not a good son, but I’ll change.’ Then, still on his knees, he turned to the left parenthesis and said, ‘Uncles and aunties, I’m begging you, please give way a little. I promise I’ll be good to her.’

At this point, if both sides had nodded in agreement, it would have been time to sound the gong and cymbals to celebrate a happy ending.

But neither of the bracketing families was moved. They were indifferent, having seen through the fellow’s game. Father held my sister’s hand the whole time, looking for hangnails, inspecting the thread marks on her fingertips, and touching to see if there were calluses on her palm. Then he said, ‘I have two conditions. The first is that you must stay nearby, here in our city, so we can look after her. The second regards the purchase of a house. You can make a down payment, then take out a loan for the rest.’ Father was actually agreeing to let my sister marry the boy.

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‘Isn’t that backwards? As if he’s marrying into your family?’ the boy’s father objected. ‘I have several brothers, but my son is the only boy in our family. We can’t let him marry out of our family and into yours.’

‘Maybe they can stay in Changsha. There are plenty of job opportunities there. And it’s halfway between you and us. That’s convenient.’

‘We’ve really got no money. There’s no reason to even think of buying a house in Changsha.’

Impatiently, my youngest aunt checked the time. ‘From the outset, you’ve been trying to avoid responsibility. The young ones try to escape, and the old ones try to hide. If not for the fact that we’d gone to Changsha in the middle of the night to get him, you wouldn’t even be sitting here now! It’s two o’clock in the morning and we can’t take it anymore. Let’s be blunt – our girl’s already seven months pregnant. We have to get them married. Contribute ten thousand as a down payment so they can have a nuptial home. If they don’t get married, she’ll go for an abortion, and you’ll pay ten thousand in compensation. We’ll be the ones to bear the consequences after that, since you don’t care whether she lives or dies.’

‘There it is!’ The boy leapt up from his stool. ‘So, all along it’s only been about the money!’

My youngest aunt also stood up and, quick as lightning, slapped his face. This pop was even louder than the last time.

Mother’s eyes immediately turned red.

‘She hit me again!’ the fellow said, turning to look at his father.

The older man hesitated, then shouted, ‘Good! Beat him to death!’ At the same time he rushed at his son, limbs swinging.

The family’s friend was like a referee blowing his whistle for a timeout. They all gathered on the balcony to discuss the matter, trying to come up with a strategy to counter us. Our neighbours were not asleep yet. Lights were on in all the houses around us, and heads stuck out the windows, ears opened wide.

‘He’s so young, and he’s motherless. Poor thing. Don’t hit him again, OK?’ Mother was crying as she spoke.

My aunt did not say anything.

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Mother went on, ‘He’s only nineteen. His stepmother doesn’t love him and his father doesn’t care about him. His relationship with his father is terrible.’

My uncle laughed. ‘The fellow should win an Oscar. I can tell you what I think, but the final decision is up to you.’

My youngest aunt spread her hands. ‘I don’t have any idea what to do.’

Father just stroked my sister’s long hair, saying slowly, ‘I really don’t feel good about you going off with that fellow. But I can’t stop you. It’s entirely up to you.’

My sister, who had remained silent all night, put her hands on her belly. Father patted her head.

The other group came back into the living room and resumed their places. The boy’s father said, ‘As for the house, we bought a small place last year, but it hasn’t been renovated yet.’

‘I told you already, I don’t agree to let her live in your town.’ Father was very insistent on this point. ‘They can either stay here or in Changsha.’

My youngest aunt said to Mother, ‘Let me say one last time, I don’t think they can be trusted. But I won’t stop you from making your own decision.’

Mother looked tired. She glanced at my aunt, and then around at everyone else, as if her eyes could draw energy from each face. The boy’s father exchanged glances with the others.

‘Okay. We’ll meet all your expectations,’ he said at last. ‘Your place really is better than ours. We’ll scrape together ten thousand as down payment for the wedding and marry her into our house properly.’

Mother’s eyebrows immediately shot up, as if she were about to laugh.

Father looked like he’d just fallen into a well.

‘No, I don’t want to marry him.’ My sister’s voice came from nowhere.

My sister slowly pulled her hair back and tied it with the black rubber band she had around her wrist. Then she tucked her fringe behind her ears. ‘Tonight, I’ve figured out who really loves me.’

The fellow hit his knee with his fist. ‘Go on, say what you want to say.’

When she’d finished with her hair, my sister put her hands on her lap and, staring at the dimples on their backs, she said, ‘Before, I listened to

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him about everything, right or wrong. But now I understand. This isn’t romantic love, or anything special. It’s cheapening myself.’

The boy gritted his teeth, then tentatively asked, ‘Why have you changed? I’m asking you one last time, do you want to marry me or not?’

‘No,’ my sister said clearly.

The boy spread his hands. ‘I did my best,’ he said, addressing the people on his side.

It was a very odd statement.

His father seemed to have got what he wanted. He picked up his bag, stood and walked to the door.

My uncle stopped him. ‘Where are you going?’

‘Home!’

‘Just like that, you’re washing your hands of everything and leaving?’

‘I’m going back to raise the money,’ the boy’s father said, revealing his fox’s tail.

‘Sorry, but this has to be settled today.’ My uncle knew what it meant to withdraw from a commitment.

‘Even if I sit here, I can’t suddenly summon up ten thousand yuan,’ the other man said.

My uncle made a phone call, and within ten minutes the police arrived.

Everyone went to the police station, leaving only Mother to keep my sister company at home. Mother had spent yet another sleepless night, and now she began to clean the house, a darkly bitter expression on her face.

My sister went into the bathroom. The thick walls and door failed to block the sound of her weeping. It was like shattering glass.

My youngest aunt had said to her older sister, ‘A virgin who just can’t wait to be brought into womanhood gives herself a heavy dose of life experience all at once. It’s unbelievable!’ If she had heard my sister’s cries, she probably would have regretted how harshly she’d spoken.

After a while, my aunts returned home, leaving my father and uncle to wait at the police station. After consulting a mediator, the other party had agreed to pay fifty thousand yuan in compensation.

Then dawn came. The birds started singing their morning song.

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My sister was resting in the bedroom. Mother sat in the living room as if she were dozing. My youngest aunt, clearly not sleepy, spoke her mind. ‘On the surface, it seems like we’ve found some resolution to the matter, but it may affect her for the rest of her life.’

‘She’s always been a good girl.’ My oldest aunt’s words seemed a little forced.

Mother muttered, ‘Do we really have to go to the hospital? I don’t know if her body can take it.’

My youngest aunt said, ‘Whatever else, the boy is not to be depended on.’

‘Or maybe she should have it?’ Mother asked no one in particular.

As if wanting to hear more clearly, my oldest aunt turned off the fan.

It was as if the whole world had stopped turning. Even the birds fell silent.

The leaves started to shake slightly in the sultry breeze. A glow of morning light brightened the opposite wall.

The three women lay on the floor, eyes closed, trying to turn off their minds. Somehow, they managed to sleep until my father and uncle knocked on the door. By this time, the sun was already shining onto the balcony.

Father and my uncle, faces sweating and clothes sticking to their bodies, looked as if they’d been baking in the sun for a long time. When they came in, the air inside the house seemed to heat up by several degrees.

My oldest aunt turned on the fan. She poured water for them, asking, ‘Is the money in your account?’

My uncle said, ‘We got thirty thousand, after baking in the sun for hours.’

‘Thirty thousand? You let them get off so cheap?’ My aunt was surprised.

‘To tell the truth, we didn’t even get thirty thousand,’ my uncle said, looking at Father.

Father took out a stack of cash and put it on the coffee table. Two of his fingers were deformed. He had been injured a year earlier in an accident with a truck and, out of pity for the driver, had settled for what

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treatment he could afford himself, seeking no compensation from the other party.

With a crooked finger, he wiped a bit of sweat from his nose. ‘After turning it over in my mind, I took only ten thousand from them, for medical expenses. They have to at least pay for that. After all, any parent would be furious to see his son in this situation.’

My uncle sounded exhausted when he added, ‘Even if it were life or death, they wouldn’t be able to scrape together fifty thousand.’

Everyone looked at the stack of money. It returned our stare.

‘If my son did something like this, I wouldn’t have fifty thousand, or even thirty thousand, to scrape together,’ Father said. ‘They really did try.’

My uncle said that when Father returned the twenty thousand yuan, the boy’s father’s legs trembled and his eyes filled with tears.

The fan turned noisily.

Suddenly, my sister appeared. Her hands on her belly, she said, ‘These last couple of days he kept kicking. It was like he knew what was happening.’

Everyone looked at her as they’d stared at the stack of cash.

‘If . . . I decide to have the baby, will you support me?’

We were dumbfounded.

Mother was the first to nod.

My oldest aunt started crying. My youngest aunt laughed. My father held my sister’s hand. My uncle shouted for a round of drinks.

In a flash, the atmosphere in the room was radiant. My mother again said that I would be an uncle soon. And this time, I knew it would be so.

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Nicholas Wong Poetry

Vacuum In 2013, there were 319,325 migrant workers in Hong Kong. About half were Indonesian and nearly all were women.

Recruitment and placement agencies, in Indonesia and Hong Kong respectively, are routinely involved in the trafficking of migrant workers and their exploitation in conditions of forced labor. – Exploited for Profit, Failed by Governments (Executive Summary), Amnesty International, 2013

The moon blue, shy at first to know you now croons for your childhood spoon. Its edge and back once sliced, mashed a world into bites and paste fitful for your mouth that, over the years, has learned about survival, though later you know

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habits form territories, though questions, not meanings, remain.

You, no longer amused by the spoon’s plastic handle of faded giraffes, choose to sweat in Hong Kong streets, eat take-outs with chopsticks that do not split like win-win situations.

It takes a romantic to say extroverts need a large world to perch on love. You have a new self, new feet, with which you run to look for the cause – why a clock is losing its hand to get to time as time crushes continuity. Your old home’s ribs shaped in that hour of leaving like an hourglass.

You watched its waist, where skin flakes fell.

It was a sign of slowed pain. You have a new Ma’am, who visits the salon, returns every Saturday with the same soufflé hair-do that holds the sweet shape of her youth that has already leaped.

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You want to adjust time, but it adjusted others around you: a limp, an unhearing, here and there, enormous maternal skins wounding into a maze. Because everybody surrenders in the same way, you left your arms at the entrance.

A cobra imitates a collar and says constraint is fine so long as it is gentle.

An octave of pleading makes begging musical. How hard does forgiveness scratch? What if returning home means blanks to fill? Would you foil?

Humpback whales are mammal jukeboxes, each song twenty minutes long. How short are your regrets that you keep in a jar with the herbs?

Mermaid are scaled and wet with brine in the West, they sautÊ tales. But you cook fish, married the common type. Which of your lungs bursts when you surface from the deep to feed others’ sons, with fins that grow fingers calloused and lost?

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Nicholas Wong [mid-notes] 53 out of 54 interviewees were not properly informed about the recruitment fees they would have to pay 60 per cent believed a mop got into the habit of drying 41 out of 79 wondered why homes insisted on windows 34 out of 62 did not trust windows or temples painted in gold The same 34 had to wash clothes, clean the living quarters or take care of the children of the staff and/or the owner of the recruitment agency 57 out of 57 responded to the phenomenon that tires of school buses moaned like babies mistakenly fed with rice 35 out of 81 discovered there was language in SETTINGS, there was language in 27 per cent discussed whether it was possible to say different things in the same voice, same breath 26 out of 29 tended not to think it was odd for Hong Kongers to say Have you eaten yet instead of Hi 11 out of 40 were getting more pocket-conscious 79 per cent thought ‘She only likes Caucasians’ implied either a problem or symptom 4 out of 37 wished they would wake up as a four-year-old and crying in the morning was acceptable 6 out of 51 studied science before arrival and knew the tighter a hen’s vagina, the smaller the eggs she laid

The placenta, for example, understands parodies. A lump of tissues launching the script of much loneliness.

If the night is blood, the day wakes.

I wake to a language delayed, a slaughter of nouns to select colours. The true story is that flags are an assertion of the blowing winds, as if to mean each rising was enclaved by practice and reflection. My medical record is clean, no allergy, been bitten by dentures of dogs, your country’s teeth. What else can I declare to your loudness of fortunes?

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What else can I crush besides garlic, histories and hormones? My ovaries not more occult and my eggs not any mosaic than hers. Look, these cams are watching if your hands open things they should not, she said, not knowing he, the one who picked me, had already filmed me. He saw my fingers between my legs, a brown visual motif. Unearthed. Some sockets and I have two legs. When they choked the vacuum cleaner’s tube into my mouth, I was just a make-happy machine. I made them a happier machine.

Since I lied, they took out the truth detector all the time. Wash grandma before chemo. Don’t frown, I have seen you. Buy your own bowl. Table is for us, you eat by the stove. No Jesus behind this door, I have seen you. Don’t leave the tap running. Don’t run. I keep your passport.

No Skyping your sisters at night. No night is purely your night. Don’t switch your tone, don’t switch on the Wi-Fi yourself, I have seen you.

Don’t act like a man with your boots on Sundays, I have seen you. Don’t kiss your friends. They are friends.

We are family. There are things lips should not do.

A tub told by a bath that feeling is not in its design has its desire of holding to hold. The fabric of selendang clads you in with an anthem, loose, rhythmic, about home.

I consume gaps into resistance. I, yes, daughter of textures, thin as ventilation.

I am restricted to lists strictly odd, yet manicure helps. The edge of nails smoothed and round

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like the norm. I paint them red in splotched August, your month of Hungry Ghost. Why should I be scared if I dust, curse to your altar each day but survive?

I have flip-flops, clogged pores in your homework.

Match my image with A MAID, my madeness makes your home work. Your kids call me eight woman.

You say if I enough ginger I can talk back. Grandma steals chips, murmurs, mostly, fry squid if I report string. If I triple my strength, I dare they have teeth. Ten years ago, I left home to do the world. I see road carefully, face green green, walk walk stand stand, each day is gone.

I have seeds that grow into debts which are sewn into a fence. Behind it, I thin to contradict rust.

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Ripples from Hong Kong RipplesShum Keane from Hong Kong

Keane Shum Richard the Lionheart waits in a dungeon with his brothers for their father, Henry II, to come and kill them.

RICHARD: He’s here. He’ll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn’t going to see me beg.

GEOFFREY: Why, you chivalric fool–as if the way one fell down mattered.

RICHARD: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

– James Goldman, The Lion in Winter (1968)

T

he Ritz-Carlton, Hong Kong, occupies the top seventeen floors of the International Commerce Centre in West Kowloon. It is the tallest hotel in the world – the lobby is on the hundred and third floor. In 2011, a month after it opens, I go up late one night to the bar on the top floor, and look out at – and for the first time, over – the Hong Kong skyline. I see the city as I have never seen it before, the harbour curving like I didn’t know it did, like a river. At sea level, on the Star Ferry or along the waterfront, even from up on the Peak, the harbour is flat, neatly east–west, constant even in its diminishment, reclamation pushing the shorelines ever closer. It is Hong Kong’s Giving Tree, the root of our wealth; and yet we keep chipping away at it, bartering slivers for land, always more land. One day the harbour will disappear, the city will be unborn, its name redundant.

Save tonight, where from a hundred and eighteen floors up, the harbour looks anything but disappearing. It seems to have a life and course much longer and winding than I knew, less brief and less straight than the

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short drive it takes to traverse the length of Hong Kong Island. From up here, I can trace the texture of life along the skyscraper façades and deep within them – down the elevator banks, out of the alleyways and into the underground tunnels.

It is a Friday night but, across the water, the woman in the dry-cleaning and alterations shop in the barren arcade at the foot of the Mid-Levels escalator huddles over a sewing machine, mending a pair of jeans; the lights are all still on in the glass towers of Central, junior bankers in their cubicles hot-keying spreadsheets and missing out on the first round of shots in Lan Kwai; a green minibus shuttles east on Kennedy Road past young lovers silently observing the terrapins stacked over each other’s shells on the stones in the pond in Hong Kong Park; lanky teenage boys rocking Jordans throw up the last bricks before the floodlights go off at Southorn, across the street from the noodle shop window still steaming with beef brisket broth; at a Jockey Club outlet, the noodle shop’s Chinese chef wrapped in a curry-stained apron, a Pakistani labourer sheathed by his reflective, fluorescent yellow safety vest, and a Filipina domestic helper rehearsing a dance routine with her earphones plugged in all line up for twenty-dollar Mark Six snowball tickets; an interior designer locks up his studio and follows the ding of a tram to the karaoke hall in Causeway Bay, where his university friends are already on their second bottle of Chivas mixed with green tea, already given up on trying new songs, already just pounding out classic Jacky Cheung ballads with abandon; pimpled international school kids flirt and stand around under the Jumbotron at Times Square, indecisive, waiting for always-late friends; young women sit on stools outside a desserterie under a flyover in Tin Hau, pointing their phones at mounds of snowflake ice-cream; down a numbingly lit basement study hall in Fortress Hill, an elevenyear-old boy huddles in a cubbyhole struggling to fit his newest vocabulary words into the neat character squares of his exercise book; seven floors above, a Korean soap opera plays on TV while a gang of four grandmothers knock mahjong tiles on green felt and outside the window a taxi coasts along the Eastern Corridor; a middle-aged woman whose husband is on the mainland on business and whose son is in class at a boarding school west of London walks through an emptying mall, back

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to her Taikoo Shing apartment after the last showing of a new romantic comedy; fruit vendors at the market in Shau Kei Wan switch off their hanging red lamps; long silent guns and a never-used torpedo station keep watch across the Lei Yue Mun channel; and a thousand souls whisper up the cemeteries and crematorium along the Chai Wan hillside.

Lei Yue Mun is, by its name, the gate through which carp once flowed through the harbour; it is the narrowest span of the harbour, with 500 briny metres between, on one side, the last Brennan Torpedo station ever built and, on the other, a fishing village that is now a seafood market; it is where I learned how to shuck, with my teeth and tongue and scissors when needed, the salt and peppery, crackly shells of mantis shrimp, which in English are so named because their claws strike as fast as bullets and in retraction emit shockwaves that annihilate their prey, but which in Cantonese are called pissing shrimp because they squirt water when they are pulled out of the tank to be deep fried and showered with chilli and garlic; and it is my starting block, one clear October morning, from which I jump into the sea and begin front-crawling towards the island, where students carried umbrellas that day even though it was clear, and I swam on, even though the finish line seemed further and further away.

In October 1967, just as rehearsals began for The Lion in Winter at the Haymarket Theatre in London, months of guerrilla rioting in Hong Kong was reaching its apogee. Except for the Japanese invasion during the Second World War, the summer and autumn of 1967 remains the most violent period in Hong Kong since a failed villager rebellion in 1899. Leftist sympathisers of the Cultural Revolution enveloping the mainland had tried to pineapple-bomb the city into anarchy, fomenting a period of social unrest to which the 2014 democracy protests were often compared, sometimes less than innocuously, never ironically.

Rioting Hongkongers in 1967 were not only justified, the People’s Daily proclaimed at the time, they were obliged to ‘fully mobilise youths and students’ and ‘begin a movement to hate and despise British imperialism and to take all possible measures politically, economically and culturally to launch a counter-attack’. Like last year’s protests, the

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insurrection of 1967 waned with the onset of winter, its dwindling corps of agitators resorting to increasingly desperate tactics. A Chinese idiom reprised during the 2014 protests – also less than innocuously – reminds us to wait until after autumn to settle scores.

On the morning of 9 December 1967, Police Constable 3810, Lee Koon Sang, was walking his beat through Chi Tong village in Kam Tin, the same part of the New Territories where my once warlord greatgrandfather settled in 1925 after being driven out of Guangxi on Sun Yat-sen’s orders. Constable Lee and his partner had just stopped to chat with the proprietress of the village wine shop when they were set upon by two leftist workers who had been eating noodles at a food stall a few metres away.

‘Don’t move,’ one of the attackers said, according to witnesses. He brandished a firearm and then attempted to seize the constables’ revolvers.

A gunshot went off. The attackers fled, and Constable Lee’s partner pursued them on foot, firing at and wounding one of the attackers. Constable Lee himself staggered back to the Kam Tin police post, his stomach punctured by an assailant’s bullet. When his partner returned to the police post, Constable Lee’s ‘revolver was missing from his holster’, the partner testified, ‘and the lanyard which would have been attached to the revolver was broken’.

Within half an hour, Constable Lee was dead, the last of eleven police officers killed in action that year, Hong Kong’s deadliest on record. He was twenty-one.

The first time the Chinese words for Hong Kong ever appear as a place name is on a Ming dynasty map of the South China Sea more than four hundred years old. The characters, though, seem to denote not the frog-shaped island that we now call Hong Kong, but rather a small island just underneath the frog’s gullet, known today as Ap Lei Chau, or ‘duck tongue island’.

I lived on Ap Lei Chau on and off for eight years, in one of the hundreds of apartment blocks on the island that make it by some measure the most densely populated island on Earth; nearly 90,000

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people live in an area less than half the size of Uluru, a quarter the size of Sydney’s central business district.

Every day at high school, I caught – or, just as often, missed – my school bus that took me across the bridge that connects Ap Lei Chau to Aberdeen, in and around a succession of bays and along the always surprisingly beautiful southern coast of Hong Kong Island. In the early mornings I usually slept on the bus, because I had been up late on the phone or online, and in the early evenings I usually slept on the bus because I had just sweated out four hours of badminton and basketball practice. I missed a lifetime of perfect sunsets and sunrises.

What I never knew, each night I crossed the bridge back to Ap Lei Chau, was how this little island had given my city its name. At least as long ago as the Ming dynasty map, the harbour between Ap Lei Chau and Aberdeen was the port from which local agar wood was exported throughout China and beyond. The resin in agar wood secretes a pleasant, soothing perfume used for incense, which is why the area came to be known as ‘fragrant harbour’.

How came to represent the larger island abutting Ap Lei Chau is uncertain. When the British first arrived, one story goes, a group of British soldiers were led by a Hakka woman down the passage that now runs from Repulse Bay Road to Pok Fu Lam Road. At the halfway point near Aberdeen, the soldiers asked the woman what the name of the place was. Stretching her arm out into the distance towards Ap Lei Chau, she replied, ‘Hong Kong’ – the name of the local area at the time, as it would have sounded in a thick Hakka accent, like the one my greatgrandmother had. The unwitting soldiers thought she was referring to the whole larger island they were standing on, oblivious that the Cantonese pronunciation sounds much more like ‘Heung Gong’.

For these and so many reasons, Hong Kong is something of a misnomer, never possible to define in just the right way. There have been and continue to be awkward attempts. City-state. Crown colony. Special administrative region. One country, two systems. Maybe that is how it is with all cities, all places; maybe anything that really matters defies definition.

But there was one summer, when I walked along the Amalfi Coast and around the amphitheatre of Pompeii and looked up at the ceiling of

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the Sistine Chapel, and stood before the north face of Mount Everest and inhaled the smoke rising from the funeral pyres of Pashupatinath, and climbed up the stairs of the Potala Palace and sat and lay for eightyfour hours on trains passing what seemed like every farm, factory, mountain and river in China. The station names became increasingly familiar – Lanzhou, Xi’an, Chongqing, Guangzhou – and after I crossed the Shenzhen River, which a great writer once said separated the realms of the living and the dead, I rode the rails as far into town as they would take me and then, finally, a double-decker bus across the bridge to Ap Lei Chau, where I disembarked at a plaza surrounded on three sides by apartment towers and on one side by the ocean. The sun was setting over Lamma Island and the South China Sea, the exact location where Hong Kong first came into being four centuries before. And I didn’t know how to compare this place to all the others I had seen, or how to describe the feeling I felt, except to say that it was unlike anywhere else I knew.

This is how most (English) histories of Hong Kong begin: in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British people begin to really like tea and other fancy things from China. To square the massive trade imbalance this caused, Great Britain gets China hooked on opium. Then in June 1839, the Qing dynasty official Lin Zexu dumps all the opium in Canton into the sea. The British are enraged and declare war. The British win the war. The British demand war reparations, and on 29 August 1842, aboard Her Majesty’s Ship Cornwallis, representatives of Queen Victoria and the Daoguang Emperor conclude a Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Commerce, Indemnity, etc., between Great Britain and China. It is more commonly known as the Treaty of Nanking, and Nanking is always spelled like that, with a ‘k’. In Article III of the Treaty, China cedes to Great Britain ‘the Island of Hong-Kong, to be possessed in perpetuity by Her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors’, and that is how Hong Kong – barren rock, sleepy fishing village, etc. – becomes a Crown colony, economic miracle, global financial hub.

That history will endure, and it is not inaccurate. It is just not mine.

It is not my father’s, not my friends’, not the history of any number of Hongkongers who may not have come before the British, but always

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knew they would be staying long after. Our history of Hong Kong does not begin with tea and opium and the Cornwallis, nor did it end with the last governor and the Prince of Wales shipping away in the rain on Her Majesty’s Yacht Britannia a quarter after midnight on 1 July 1997.

No, we sail a longer course; our vessels of history carry us somewhere else altogether.

At the height of the 2014 protests, Joe Yeung Yat-lung, one of the frontline protestors with face mask and goggles always dangling around their necks, turned twenty-one. He was a third-year history student at Shue Yan University and had just been outed as an auxiliary member of the Hong Kong Police Force. After denying accusations that he was a government infiltrator, Yeung officially quit the force in November, then made the news again on 1 December, days before the protests ended.

Early that morning, in the movement’s final major confrontation, protestors had made one last attempt to regain ground and blockade the Central Government Offices.

They failed. The police discharged water hoses for the first time. Forty people were sent to hospital, eleven police officers were injured. Dozens of protesters were arrested, including Yeung, who later showed the media the scuffed-up left side of his face while wearing vintage US Army fatigues with the name patch stencilled WISEMAN. The bruises, he said, were gifts from his former colleagues, one of whom recognised him.

‘The Auxiliary Officer, right?’ he recalled one plainclothes officer saying, while pushing him to the ground. ‘Being an officer is real cool.’

The Song dynasty was steward of the greatest technological advancements man had ever known. But all the art and literature, the scientific breakthroughs, even gunpowder, could not hold at bay marauding Mongol invaders from the north, and in a string of military defeats and naive alliances, the Song dynasty kept retreating, always south. It held court from a new southern capital in Hangzhou for a century and a half, but by 1275, Kublai Khan’s armies had already pushed Song forces well past the Yangzi River, taken Hangzhou, and captured the four-year-old Gong Emperor. What remained of the Song court fled to Fuzhou with Gong’s

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brother, Zhao Shi, as its new sovereign. When Fuzhou fell too, Zhao Shi carried the dwindling hopes of Chinese control of China even further south along the coast to what is today Kowloon and Lantau Island.

While on the seas, he fell overboard, became ill and never recovered.

When he died, his seven-year-old younger brother, Zhao Bing, was crowned emperor of China near the Lantau beach town of Mui Wo, which is where my uncle taught me how to ride a bicycle one afternoon when I was seven.

Less than a year after the coronation, in 1279, the Mongol navy assembled for one final siege of the Song remnants at the mouth of a river a hundred kilometres west of Lantau Island. Zhao Bing was ensconced in a row of a thousand warships, chained together to prevent defections. It was everything that remained of the Song dynasty.

On 19 March, the Chinese general for the Mongol navy, Zhang Hongfan, ordered celebratory music to be played while Mongol soldiers piled into ships under large stretches of fabric, where they were hidden from the view of Song forces momentarily disarmed by the music.

Zhang directed the Mongol ships slowly closer to the Song fleet. When they were within striking distance, the drums of battle were beaten, the fabric was thrown aside, and the Mongol soldiers launched into a total, terminal assault. Zhao Bing and his coterie of guardians watched as the enemy neared, cutting down everyone in their path.

There was nowhere else to retreat to, nowhere further south to flee. As their fate became clear, the boy emperor’s prime minister, Liu Xiufu, asked that they be spared the shame of capture. He picked Zhao Bing up into his arms, and in the final moment of a dynasty, jumped into the sea.

The end of the Song dynasty’s history is the beginning of Hong Kong’s.

In the boy emperors’ flight through Kowloon and Lantau Island, one guardian in particular, Yang Liangjie, has been singled out through time as their most loyal protector. His death in Hong Kong in 1279 is remembered as the greatest of sacrifices in service of the emperor and the Chinese nation. As a reward, he was made a king in death, and temples around Hong Kong consecrated in his name are known as Hau Wong temples, or temples to the Marquis King.

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Half of the Hau Wong temples that remain standing today were built around the eighteenth century in Yuen Long, the district of the New Territories that also includes Kam Tin, where my great-grandfather built our family village after he, too, had nowhere further south to flee.

Several Hau Wong temples were built by one of Hong Kong’s original families, the Tangs, and the virtues that Yang Liangjie embodied – unwavering loyalty and unwillingness to relent even in the face of certain defeat – seem encoded in their genome.

The Tang family traces its lineage to Deng Fuxie, a Song dynasty official posted to Yangchun in Guangdong, not far west of the estuary into which the Song Empire dissolved. After leaving the imperial civil service, Deng settled in Kam Tin and, in retirement, founded Hong Kong’s first school, Li Ying College.

Deng Fuxie’s descendants built several of Hong Kong’s oldest remaining structures, including an ancestral hall, now around 700 years old, and the Tsui Sing Lau pagoda, built in 1486 by the seventh generation of Tangs. The name summons the gathering of the stars, from a time when this presumably still happened in the skies above Hong Kong. But the most enduring, still breathing Tang family edifice is in Kam Tin, a halfhour walk from our family village that my father might have once taken through narrow, curving lanes that evoke the labyrinthine backstreets of suburban Japan.

Emerging from these lanes, a couple of hundred metres north of where Constable Lee was walking his beat on 9 December 1967, is an out-of-place, out-of-time, walled compound surrounded by the footprint of a moat. When I arrived there one recent afternoon, the setting winter sun cascaded down the charcoal brick face of the southern wall, at an angle across a basketball court with no baskets, just four young children and one of their parents playing badminton over make-believe nets. A Porsche Cayenne was parked directly opposite the centre of the wall.

This is Kat Hing Wai, a 500-year-old village that is not a declared monument in Hong Kong because the 400 people who still live within the 300-year-old walls have not given their consent. A sign tells visitors that they enter at their own risk – of what, it is unclear – through an

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archway that could once be sealed with two swinging iron gates. The gates are still there, rusting away, but that was not always the case.

In April 1899, ten months after Great Britain secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories that the British negotiator called ‘as good as forever’, the Tang family led a coalition of local families in armed resistance against the British occupation of their land. They were not the pictures of heroes, not motivated only by pride or patriotism. More likely, they were protecting the rural oligarchy they had presided over for centuries. But unless you count the failed defence of Hong Kong against the Japanese invasion in 1941, this is the only time the people of Hong Kong have ever taken up arms against the powers that have through history treated Hong Kong’s sovereignty – and the livelihoods of its people – as an asset to be leveraged.

Over six days that April, several thousand men fought sporadic battles against a much smaller but outlandishly better-armed British contingent, moving west from Tai Po through the hills above Lam Tseun, the same hills that rise behind my family village. I used to amble onto the roof above my father’s childhood room and look at those hills, and wonder how they built the rolling power lines that now traverse the valley. I never had any idea that a war had been fought there.

The British suffered just two minor casualties, or three, if you count the man who found himself on the horns of a water buffalo. When the British came upon a walled village whose iron gates they could not breach, as they did in Kat Hing Wai, they simply blew the gates in, salvaging them as booty to be presented to Henry Blake, the governor. In 1925, the year my great-grandfather built our family village a few kilometres away, the gates were unearthed at Blake’s family home in Ireland and the then governor, Reginald Stubbs, in a gesture of reconciliation, returned them to Kat Hing Wai where they remain today, rusting away.

By 19 April 1899, each of the insurgent villages had surrendered. They had lost, according to some estimates, 500 men and a handful of women.

A mass grave was dug for dozens of the Tang men from Kam Tin, just down the road from where my great-grandfather put down roots twenty-six years later. It is a tomb of the unknown like the Cenotaph, a memorial

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for the two world wars that stands at attention between the Hong Kong Club and Statue Square in Central, but only the Tang grave commemorates different – opposite, even – battles, and victims. That tomb in Kam Tin is now marked by one wide gravestone with outstretched wings, inscribed in the centre with the characters . The word means ‘burial’. The word is the same as in – a cocktail of justice, righteousness and loyalty that is the driving source of admiration and conflict in the Young and Dangerous Hong Kong gangster flicks, the anthems of adolescence of every teenage boy in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Both sides wished they had done things differently in the war. The British forces wondered if they had been too heavy-handed, particularly in punishing those who had instigated the insurrection. The Chinese seemed to wish they had never fought at all, knowing they had been foolish to think they had a chance against British artillery.

But for whatever reason, perhaps something to do with – that blend of justice, righteousness and loyalty – there seems virtue in that foolishness, honour in that naiveté. It is why we write books and make movies about Thermopylae, and Eureka, and why Hong Kong – modern epicentre of creative destruction – is still dotted with centuries-old temples dedicated to a Song dynasty bodyguard who gave his life protecting an emperor with no empire.

When I was twenty-one, in 2004, my final assignment for International Studies 200, International Law and Human Rights, at Yale University, was a pretend memo to Colin Powell, then the US secretary of state, on how to support democratic reform in Hong Kong. I was optimistic. The previous summer, half a million Hongkongers had, with their feet on the street, convinced the government to withdraw a proposed anti-subversion law and, for the first time in my life, I had been paid to write. That summer, the South China Morning Post published my 852-word rebuttal of an article written by Leung Chun-ying – then a cabinet member, now chief executive – in which, even then, he weaselled behind every reason not to implement universal suffrage. Leung replied to me, in a letter to the editor, and then again, after I wrote back to him. I was excited, and my father especially so, but it was odd, almost embarrassing, that a member

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of Hong Kong’s cabinet should feel the need publicly to lob back idealistic volleys thrown by a college junior halfway around the world. He was like an insecure blogger before there were even blogs, not just reading but responding to all the comments, as if he knew he was going to be the beneficiary of this less-than democracy, as if he were already eager to defend a legitimacy he had yet to, and still has not, earned.

Since he became chief executive, Leung has been the principal target of Hongkongers’ unrivalled creative proclivity for the profane. The namecalling alone has bordered on violence. But the most damning moniker, the one that will resonate through to Leung’s obituary, contained no vulgar innuendo, no foul words, no words at all. Just three digits: 689, the number of votes he received to become the leader of seven million people. That number, eerily matching the date the Tiananmen Square protests were crushed, was plastered throughout last year’s protest sites, painted on banners strung from bridges, scrawled on wooden boards there was no way to avoid stepping on, magic-markered on homemade signs that did otherwise stoop to the vulgar and foul. As in, ‘I don’t need sex, because I get fucked by 689 every day.’

I am prepared to concede that the Umbrella Movement set us back, that whatever concessions Beijing was prepared to offer were quickly retracted once this became less a local governance matter and more a showdown between foul-mouthed, pimply-faced students and the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe we were never going to win that battle, not any more than the Song dynasty could have survived the Mongol armada or Tang family villagers could have held off Her Majesty’s Armed Forces.

But try being twenty-one and damned either way. Condemned. The principled stand risks losing everything. The practical – cut your losses, secure your gains – risks complicity in your own, and your children’s, demise. It is an impossible choice, the kind no twenty-one-year-old should be forced to make, least of all by their parents. If that was the dominant narrative of the Umbrella Movement – the stern parent and the rebellious child – whose best interests were being served?

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I am still waiting for one more letter from Leung Chun-ying, the one telling me how not freely electing my leaders makes ours a better city.

Because we are not the prodigal sons, who spurned home and returned begging forgiveness. We were the spurned ones, who for decades carried the burden of the unkempt house we were booted from, giving shelter to refugees, capital to markets, cures to diseases. On this rock we built a home when we had none, and if the fall is all that remains, we are going to make it matter.

When you jump into the harbour, it is neither straight nor curving, certainly not diminishing. For decades, the annual cross-harbour swim had been suspended because the water was close to noxious. If you ever swung in a 747 over kids flying their kites from the roofs of the Kowloon Walled City and touched down harbour-side at the old Kai Tak Airport, you would agree: your first impressions of Hong Kong would have been concocted from the mildly rancid smell wafting through the fuselage ventilation.

My problem was not the smell or toxicity. My problem was that swimming across the harbour is not like how a ton of feathers weighs the same as a ton of bricks. One thousand five hundred metres of Victoria Harbour is a lot longer than 1,500 metres of the swimming pool on the seventh floor of my apartment building. I had never swum in an openwater race; actually, not in any race since a few laps in the pool at the Hong Kong Sports Institute in Sha Tin, when I was ten years old and the weak link in an IronKids Triathalon team that placed and would have won if not for me.

I had assumed, despite dutifully studying the race information pamphlet, that the finish line would be self-evident; it would be on the other side of the harbour. When the starting gun went off, though, and I found myself actually in Lei Yue Mun, bobbing in the waters through which carp once flowed, the finish line was nowhere to be seen. I could see the other side of the harbour, but my fellow swimmers were not swimming there. Instead, they were all paddling, thousands of them, in another direction, southward toward the Island, the end of which was unseen.

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Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes in, I considered giving up. I defogged my goggles and eyed the lifeguards holstered in their orange emergency kayaks and I thought, no big deal, life goes on, nothing changes if I don’t make it. And then I looked back in the direction everyone else was swimming, to that elusive goal, and I swam on, because nothing changes if I don’t make it.

Notes An imaginative, eclectic take on the origin of Hong Kong’s name and many other stories of Hong Kong can be found in Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City.

Trans. Anders Hansson and Bonnie S. McDougall. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Dr Patrick H. Hase has written the only English book about what he calls the Six-Day War of 1899. I have relied heavily on his work. Hase, Patrick H. The Six-Day War of 1899: Hong Kong in the Age of Imperialism. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008.

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Omar Musa

T

he telescope sat slightly apart from the clutter of the room – aloof, cool, shaded by a closed curtain. Azlan Muhammad ran a chubby hand down the length of its metallic form as he whistled a loud and tuneful melody. He paused to thumb the plastic toy rocket super-glued to it before covering it carefully with a cloth. He belched, scratched an arse cheek, then traced a circuitous route through the stacks of books on the concrete floor, nimble for a man of his size. He had important things to do, after all.

Coffee first, though. He made it strong, sweetened by condensed milk, making sure not a drop spilled down the side of the cup. He hated that. ‘Coffee first, and the rest’ll fall into place’ – he could hear his old boss’s thick Aussie accent, even now. Azlan turned on the radio. A serious voice was commenting on the imminent election. The lead-up had been full of skulduggery and intrigue, and there was a sense of excitement that after more than fifty years in power, the government looked to be in its death throes and the opposition was gaining traction. Today was election day.

Azlan cared little about the messiness of his house, but the surface of his body was sacrosanct. He showered and brushed his teeth fastidiously.

Drops of water shone on his hair and big belly before rolling down to the concrete floor. He had once prided himself on a full, Samson-like head of black waves, but he’d taken to cropping it short as it receded slowly to the back of his head. He swore the receding had started around the time his daughter, Rozana, was born, and he’d tried his best to cover

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it up by combing his remaining hair forward. But there comes a time, he had told Rozana, where you just have to give in. She was only eight, but the way she had thrown back her head and laughed with such gusto had already seemed so mature and defiant.

Azlan looked at the clothes he’d laid out for himself on the single bed: a traditional Malay outfit – the baju Melayu. He struggled into the matching dark red, long-sleeved shirt and trousers, doing up the imitation diamond studs at the chest. The long-sleeved baju strained at the belly, but how proud and striking it looked. He admired himself in his mirror. He’d hardly ever been able to wear his national dress during his life in Australia, other than that awful work function where he had been cajoled to wear it to show ‘diversity’, of course. He tied the kain songket carefully around his waist like a short sarong, its pattern of gold threads shimmering and bending in the light. Last of all came the jet-black songkok, tipped jauntily on his head.

Election day, yes, but food first. Even on an important mission, like today’s, Azlan could never stop thinking of it. After spritzing on some cologne Rozana had sent him from Australia, he hurried, puffing slightly, outside into the humidity and headed straight for the restaurant next to his family home. He ordered three plates of kueh teow goreng and sat watching the clientele. All Malays. Was it true, as he had read somewhere, that 90 per cent of Malaysians had never dined with someone of another race? Multiculturalism – bah! Malaysia had moved on, his family kept telling him, it had become advanced, but they told him this while sitting in front of that damned television, awash in wave after wave of advertisements and dirty politics, the young ones staring into their mobile phones, letting the bullshit and religious rhetoric wash over them without listening. And they never read books! He seethed at the moral policing and juvenile displays of public piety but, nevertheless, he still went to Friday prayers where he recited Arabic he didn’t understand and knew only by rote, thinking of the stars and constellations in the privacy of his own head. He’d never considered himself a political man but today was his chance to make a difference. By voting.

His plates of noodles arrived, steaming, and he picked up a marblesized lime to squeeze juice on to them.

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‘Hey, Azlan!’

He looked up, surprised. Two men were grinning at him from the street, leaning on their mopeds as they watched the restaurant TV and smoked. Imran and Amir – he recognised them from high school. They had hardly changed since then. How classless they looked in their grubby football jerseys and flip-flops, particularly compared to his magnificent baju Melayu.

‘Hey Azlan,’ called out Imran, ‘Did you see anything last night?’

‘I saw something,’ he called back good-naturedly, ‘but who knows whether it was anything important.’

‘Remember, Azlan, anything is possible with a good attitude!’ yelled Amir. The two men laughed again, before flicking the ash from their cigarettes simultaneously and turning back to the Liverpool game playing on the flickering screen.

They had been making fun of him, he knew that. The ‘anything’ they were referring to was something he’d let slip in a conversation they had once all had over tandoori chicken. As Azlan had crunched the chicken down with red onions and spear-sliced pieces of cucumber, he’d mentioned that with his prized telescope, he hoped one day to take a photograph of paranormal phenomena – a spaceship, maybe, something unnatural against the stars, something not seen before, anything. The two of them had caught each other’s eye and roared with laughter. They thought he was pretentious; he knew they thought he felt himself above his station because of all his years working as an engineer in Australia, so they had relished finding something to mock him with. And of course that gossip had inflated and distorted his words, so the story got out around town that Azlan was using his telescope to look for aliens. He looked down and realised he’d devoured two of the plates of kueh teow and was about to tip more chilli sauce onto the third. With a sigh he squeezed the last bit of lime juice on to them and forked them up, smacking his lips. When he stood to pay, he inspected the front of his red shirt carefully for spots. Still immaculate, he noted proudly, reaching for some money.

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The bus was relatively empty. He was only going a few stops, and when he was young and fit he would have walked, but now he thought it would be unnecessarily tiring and, in any case, he didn’t want to get his trousers dirty. He sat next to the window and watched the drifts of dust boiling up then dissipating to reveal houses speeding past. While the rest of Malaysia developed at a rate of knots, this place was still sleepy, still resembled his childhood memories. This was his village, his kampung, arranged along the banks of a broad brown river that led to the sea. It was in this river that Azlan had first found the plastic toy rocket. At the age of six, he had been swimming in the waters of the river when he saw something bobbing in the murk. ‘Don’t swim too far out,’ his mother called. ‘There are crocodiles out there.’ He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t want to get in trouble, so he held on to a supporting pole with one arm while he tried to figure how to get the toy. For her part, his mother, squatting on a wooden platform some distance away, observed silently and spat betel nut as he held on to the supporting pole with his legs, fashioned the end of a length of rattan into a loop and managed to guide the toy towards him. She looked up and squinted down the river at Japanese fishing ships, which sat flat on the horizon against an oily orange sky.

Dripping and laughing, Azlan climbed up on to the platform and showed his mother the toy rocket, this gift of the water. She dried it on her sarong and handed it back, grinning. He asked her whether a Malaysian had ever flown a rocket into space. She screwed up her nose, thought hard and then replied that she didn’t think so. Despite the fact that most of the paint had chipped off, he looked at the rocket with wonder. It was the first toy he had ever owned. That night, there was a clear sky and he could see a magnificent shawl of stars through a chink in the wall as he ran his delicate fingers and thumbs over the cheap plastic edges and curves of his new toy. One day, he vowed that night, he would become the first Malaysian astronaut.

No-one told him until high school, of course, that only a few countries in the world have space programmes, that the chances of winning a place in one was as unlikely as winning the lottery, and that growing up in a kampung in Malaysia made it about as possible as actually learning to fly.

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For a while, he imagined growing up in Russia or the US, but it didn’t feel right – Russia seemed cold, and America was full of cowboys. He remained interested in science and had a knack for it, consistently gaining top marks in his class. Over the years, as life went on, he tried to keep up with advancements in international space travel, and calls for more equity between rich and poor countries in this field. But by the time the Malaysian government announced a plan to send a Malaysian into space for the first time, Azlan Muhammad had already lived twenty years in Australia. He had a beautiful, rebellious daughter and a hairline so far back that if he were asked to salute he would have to do so from the top of his head.

The palm oil plantation passed by now, a hypnotic pattern of green on green. The salary for an engineer was good in Australia, and he was proud of how far he had come from the days in the kampung. Yet his mind always remained in the stars. At the age of forty, he saved up and invested in a telescope and camera gear that would allow him to take detailed photos of the stars. He loved fiddling with his gear, experimenting, setting long exposures, identifying comets, seeing stars turned into white-hot lines and satellites into points when printed out. He would pin his photos all over the house and his office. The really good ones, he got blown up and framed. Even Rozana, who generally thought everything he did was uncool as could be, had to admit how impressive they were.

The school where he would cast his ballot was coming up and the bus shuddered to a halt. Azlan tried to squeeze down the aisle as delicately as he could, but he kept bumping into people’s shoulders as he passed, to their great annoyance. He stood on the roadside in his baju Melayu, sweating already, somehow still unused to the humidity. The school had been freshly painted white, with rich green lawns and a fruit tree out the front. It was the school he had attended as a child.

When his wife Janet had passed away and Rozana was off at art school, the idea of moving back to Malaysia had begun to obsess him.

The family house was there, just as it had been for years since his parents died, the garden overgrown and no-one was living in it besides a family

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of monkeys that neighbours kept shooing out. Azlan thought perhaps he could contribute something to a country suffering from brain drain.

Also, he had always harboured the unsettling feeling that he had never truly fit in in Australia. It was not the type of dislocation some of his Middle Eastern friends from the mosque felt, or Rozana, who railed against the ‘system’ with a fury that took him aback, but a kind of benign discomfort. So to Malaysia it was.

Azlan stood in the line to cast his ballot, thinking about the opposition. Change was better than staying the same; anything had to be, but the opposition seemed a gallimaufry of different elements and he did not trust the ageing leader, so slick, so wily. But fifty years! He remembered how proud he had been of his nation in the early years, how optimistic they had all been. As time had gone on, he’d observed from a distance, and it had gradually seemed more and more disillusioning.

A young man in front of him was fidgeting and sighing loudly, as if voting were a chore. And dressed so casually! Azlan shook his head in disapproval and ran a hand over his scalp. He was casting a vote for the first time in over twenty years since becoming an Australian resident. Resident, not citizen. He loved Australia, and his daughter was most definitely Australian, but he was Malaysian. Especially today.

He was near the front of the line now. He stood straighter and readied himself for the voting procedure. First, he would have to present his identification card, and they would check his name against the electoral roll.

Then they would get his thumbprint and strike a line through his name using a ruler. Then he would wait until his name was announced and move on to another group of officials who would give him the voting slip. Then, then, finally, he could go into a booth behind a curtain, draw a cross next to the name of the candidate he wanted to vote for, then fold up the slip and put it in the ballot box. Vote.

When he finally got to the front of the line, he whipped out his identification card immediately. The official sitting at a desk in front of him was skinny, moustachioed and middle-aged, in good shape. He was an official and looked, well, officious. There was a younger official standing behind him. The older man stared at Azlan’s belly and baju Melayu before taking the identification card and looking down at the electoral

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roll. As the man flicked through the pages, Azlan noticed how carefully pressed his shirt was, but how cheap the material looked. The younger man had a pair of imitation designer sunglasses tucked in his belt, and thumbed the fake Gucci logo absent-mindedly. His own thumb, its whorls shaped like the spirals of a distant galaxy, would soon be covered in ink.

‘Excuse me, pak,’ said the officious-looking official. Azlan looked up sharply.

‘Yes?’ ‘There was no need to come a second time!’ The man smiled haughtily and the younger official smiled too.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, you have already voted.’

Azlan’s mouth became dry. ‘No, I haven’t. I’m here to vote now.’

The man sighed. ‘Just look at this. Your name has been crossed off.

You have already voted.’ He turned the page so that Azlan could see.

There was finality in his voice and he was looking beyond Azlan in the line. Azlan stooped to look. Yes, he could see his name there, and it had been struck out. But he had not voted.

He stood open-mouthed. No words would come. If Rozana were here, she would stamp her feet, shake her dyed-blue hair and cause a ruckus at such a blatant injustice. But he could not. He did not have that same rebellious instinct. He looked back at the line and felt suddenly selfconscious in his baju Melayu. No one else was wearing one. He looked down at his un-inked thumb and at his identification card, which was grubby around the edges. A younger, skinnier man with a full head of hair stared back at him.

‘I went to this school,’ he blurted suddenly. ‘Then I became an engineer in Australia.’

The two officials looked at each other and smiled again. Azlan stared, unable to move his feet. Soon the officials got back to business and gestured impatiently for the next in line to step forward.

The bus ride back was cramped, but he managed to find a seat all to himself. He opened his wallet and slid his identification card back inside,

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then took out the folded newspaper clipping and looked at it for a long time. A young, handsome Malay man smiled out at him, dressed in an astronaut’s uniform with a helmet under his arm. This was the first Malaysian astronaut, Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor. Azlan felt foolish for carrying it around, and knew there had been controversy about whether the man even qualified as a true astronaut or a ‘spaceflight participant’, but he’d always kept it nevertheless. Beneath the photo was part of the speech the minister had given at the launch of the space programme: ‘It is not merely a project to send a Malaysian into space. After fifty years of independence, we need a new shift and a new advantage to be more successful as a nation.’

Not long to go now, to home and a comforting meal. He absently smoothed the songket fabric that reached halfway down his thigh, the intricate designs in gold thread, woven through the dark blue cotton weft. Once upon a time, everyone knew, the great weavers had heated real gold to liquid, coated the thread and woven the fabric for kings. The symmetrical patterns had to do with nature, but after so many years Azlan had forgotten what centre of weaving they had come from. To him, they looked like the stars, like comets and asteroids, soundlessly exploding in distant space, far beyond the dominion of him or any man.

Like supernovae, with brightness enough to outshine an entire galaxy momentarily, emitting more radiance than a sun or an ordinary star does over its whole lifetime, but long spent by the time their light reaches us.

He closed his eyes. Tonight was going to be cool and clear, perfect for stargazing. He would point his telescope out of his window and the stars would be glowing without interference, close enough to press his face to.

There would be a blur on the side of his vision, a pulse, a strange dot of a colour neither he nor anyone would have seen before. He would not be able to name it, or class it, or tell another soul about it, because it could be anything.

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Let Bygones Be Bygones Let Bygones Prodit a Sabarini Be Bygones

Prodita Sabarini

‘L

et bygones be bygones!’ Mum and Dad said to me, speaking over each other. Their faces shared a determination to have the last say on the matter. The afternoon light was fading and our teas were turning cold. My parents and I had been shouting at each other for the past hour, debating whether or not Indonesia should apologise to the victims of the 1965 communist purge.

Like some Indonesians who lived through the massacre of nearly one million people that brought Suharto to power, my parents are averse to the idea of a national apology and reconciliation for the crimes of 1965.

‘Who would apologise? All the people responsible have died.’

‘The state,’ I said.

‘It’s in the past,’ Mum snapped.

I tried yet again to put my argument. ‘The army did it. The army is a state institution. Therefore, the state should apologise on behalf of the army. It doesn’t matter whether generations have passed. That a state institution carried out the killing is what matters.’

The conversation ended with Mum and Dad saying the president should spend his time tackling poverty and natural disasters. I insisted that someday the state would apologise; maybe not now, but definitely later. We agreed to disagree but I knew this would not be the end of our discussions.

My parents’ position did not surprise me. I was more in awe that this heated dialogue was actually taking place.

‘Let bygones be bygones’ has been the national mantra to address the cry for justice from survivors and victims’ families since Suharto fell 180

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from power in 1998. The mantra has been used by the Indonesian government, the military and religious groups such as Indonesia’s largest Islamic organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama. The army extinguished communism in Indonesia with the help of civilian militias like NU’s youth wing, Banser.

NU clerics and their congregations acted as death squads in East Java, at the time Indonesia’s communist stronghold, killings tens of thousands of people.

A few years ago, a very limited space opened up for talk about the killings of 1965. After Suharto’s fall, attempts were made to break the silence. Survivors got together to collect testimonies, documentary filmmakers started to record the violence and stigma that families of victims face, and researchers released various analyses of the massacre. But these documents reached only limited circles and their impact was slight.

In 2012, the National Human Rights Commission (Komisi Nasional Hak Asasi Manusia, known as Komnas HAM) released the results of a four-year investigation into the atrocities of 1965 and declared that the army had carried out gross crimes against humanity. But since 2012, the attorney general has continued to reject Komnas HAM’s recommendation for a criminal inquiry.

Nevertheless, the documentary film The Act of Killing, and its sequel The Look of Silence, have opened up a larger space to talk about what occurred. Those born after 1965 are now discovering that modern Indonesia is built on horrendous violence. We are asking questions of our elders, and the answers reveal not only that we were lied to by the state, but that we have also been deprived of our families’ histories.

It is fifty years since Indonesia’s anti-communist purge. In 1965, with three million members, Indonesia had the largest number of communist party members in the world outside the USSR and China. But in a matter of six months, the army, operating with the help of civilian militias, extinguished communism and nearly wiped out the entire Indonesian political left.

The slaughter started in retaliation for the killing of six army generals by left-wing junior army officers. Suharto, the only one among the army top brass who was not targeted in the putsch, blamed the communists

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for the murders and, as Saskia Wieringa explains in her book Sexual Politics in Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), used a campaign of sexual terror against Gerwani, the communist women’s organisation, to paint a savage and brutal image of communism.

Shortly after the assassination of the generals, army newspapers, the only ones allowed to run at the time, libelled Gerwani members. The reports made the public believe a fiction that communist women danced naked while the generals were being tortured. The army also reported that they committed sexual acts with the generals, castrated them and gouged out their eyes. Further into the propaganda against the Gerwani, they were reported to be prostitutes for Partai Komunis Indonesia leaders.

The lies were effective. The retaliatory killings did not begin until three weeks after the assassination of the generals, and only after the army had established an image of the PKI as godless, promiscuous and violent. Civilian death squads such as NU’s Banser saw the killing of communists as a religious duty.

Party and union members, teachers, journalists, writers, artists and farmers were tortured and slaughtered in a bloodletting comparable to the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia. These mass killings have been universally condemned, while in Indonesia the perpetrators have never been found guilty.

Suharto had been in power for sixteen years when Mum gave birth to me. I was sixteen when student protests brought him down in 1998. The babies born that year are now sixteen. Their history books tell the same stories as my history books, painting Suharto as the saviour of the nation.

Most Indonesians born after 1965 grow up without knowing the dark history of their country. Throughout his rule, Suharto spooked the public by raising the spectre of atheist communists lurking within Indonesian society, ready for a takeover. Every year until his fall, students were made to watch the slasher-style propaganda movie Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, a three-and-a-half-hour movie about how the communists tortured and killed the six generals on 30 September 1965. The movie dehumanised the PKI and desensitised us to any whispers we heard about the killings.

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I became aware of the moral wrong of the communist purge only after watching The Act of Killing in 2012. The film follows Anwar Congo, an ageing but jovial death-squad leader in Medan. Inspired by the cowboy image of John Wayne, he created a narrative for himself as the hero killing the evil communists through theatrical re-enactments of how he murdered his victims. At the beginning of the film, the filmmakers, American Joshua Oppenheimer and an Indonesian ‘anonymous’ co-director (we will call him Anon), place the film against its historical background of the massacre of more than one million.

After watching the film for the first time, it was hard for me to speak.

I was taken back to 2008, when I visited Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh and shivered while walking the paths surrounding the pits in the killing fields, unaware that my own country had a similar story.

Walking in Jakarta now feels sinister and nightmarish. Instead of memorials for the victims of the purge, we have monuments and museums that reinforce the narrative of Suharto as the national saviour.

In the 1970s, when human rights activist Soe Tjen Marching was young, she liked to lie down by her dad’s side. She would notice that his chest was covered with rounded scars that looked like craters on his skin. She asked him what they were. He would close his eyes, shush her and tell her to sleep.

One day as she lay by her dad, she joked about whether these were ant holes. He became furious. ‘Never ask again!’ he shouted.

Marching tells this story in the memoir she is writing about her relationship with her father. She knew he had been imprisoned for being a communist supporter and hated him for this, having been taught at school to fear and hate the PKI. She couldn’t understand his sudden outbursts of anger.

Marching is now one of the most vocal advocates for victims and survivors of 1965. Only one-and-a-half metres tall, she is small but a force to be reckoned with. Her journey to understanding the events of 1965 and her father’s personal history took decades. She used to wonder why her father would never vote during elections in the Suharto era; why he

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demanded that the TV be turned off whenever Suharto was on the screen.

After seeing The Act of Killing she started to ask her mother questions.

She was shocked to find that her father had been one of the committee members of the PKI branch in Surabaya. Nobody in her family knew this except her mother. Marching and her siblings had known only that he was jailed for his involvement in the leftist organisation.

‘He had just been inaugurated but the official letters from Jakarta hadn’t arrived in Surabaya when the systematic attack against the PKI started,’ Marching said. Her parents burnt all papers associating him with the PKI so, when the troops searched their house, they found nothing. But he was eventually named.

The image of her father’s sudden flares of anger at the sight of Suharto on TV and his rage at the sound of the presidential court’s chanteuse, Titiek Puspa, reminds me of a quote by Indonesia’s most celebrated writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. ‘I’m enraged alone,’ he told Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira, who published their interview with Pramoedya in 2006. The writer, who spent fourteen years in the Buru island gulag, describes in that short sentence his fury towards the state and the alienation he felt from Indonesia’s people, especially the young, who were not aware of Indonesia’s dark history.

Pramoedya’s words resonate with the desolation that thousands of survivors of 1965 felt. Suharto not only massacred the entire Indonesian left, his propaganda ensured survivors were emotionally isolated – by the annual television screening of Pengkhianatan G30S/PKI, in monuments and museums built to influence Indonesians’ memory of PKI as a traitorous monster, and in the history books of students. In many instances, emotional bonds between survivors and their families are completely severed.

It’s not uncommon for Indonesian families to suppress family histories related to 1965. Writer Putu Oka Sukanta told me that his nephew also grew up hating and fearing him. Sukanta was imprisoned for ten years for being a member of a writer’s association deemed close to the PKI. Sukanta makes documentaries about 1965 survivors. In one of his films about female prisoners in Plantungan prison camp in Kendal, Central Java, he interviewed a woman who had lost contact with all her children

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after being imprisoned. They were adopted by family members and grew up hating her.

I decided to ask my close friends about their family histories. My friend Dorita Setiawan, a PhD student at Columbia University, said her mother’s distant uncle was shot dead in 1965. Dorita’s extended family took in his wife and nine children and attempted to erase the background to the death of the family’s patriarch.

‘They didn’t have any other way but to conform,’ Dorita told me. She said her family hid the story about how her relative died, but she had heard whispers in the village. After watching The Act of Killing and other documentaries such as Robert Lemelson’s Forty Years of Silence, she became curious. ‘But they don’t really want to talk about it,’ she said.

Another close friend, journalist Ika Krismantari, found out recently that her late grandfather had been imprisoned for eleven years. On a road trip from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, Ika decided to kill time by asking her parents if the 1965 pogrom affected their family. ‘I’m so shocked that I never knew about this,’ she said later.

My own family was not immune. Despite my parent’s stance on reconciliation, my dad’s uncle, Subandi, was imprisoned during the pogrom.

Subandi was an army soldier who read about Marxism and communism.

When the 1965 putsch occurred, the army detained him at the military command in my father’s hometown Salatiga, and later threw him in jail.

‘I used to ride my bike and take food for him,’ my dad recalled.

The premiere of The Act of Killing was secretly held in 2012 in Jakarta at Salihara Cultural Centre. In November 2014, the premiere of The Look of Silence drew nearly two thousand people to the open screening at Graha Bhakti Budaya theatre at the Taman Ismail Marzuki Cultural Centre.

Organised by Indonesia’s National Human Rights Commission and the Jakarta Arts Council, the screening proved so popular the film had to be shown twice. The president did not comment.

While The Act of Killing focused on the story of one of the killers in 1965, The Look of Silence followed a travelling optometrist, Adi Rukun, whose brother was brutally murdered. In the film, Adi visits his brother’s killers. Calmly, he confronts them with uncomfortable questions about

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why they killed an innocent man. At the end of the screening, Adi came on stage to a long, standing ovation.

The Act of Killing paved the way for this remarkable event to take place, Anon told me.

The Act of Killing was not shown in theatres in Indonesia. But it has been screened thousands of times. The film’s producers send out free DVDs to anyone in Indonesia who wants to arrange screenings. They have sent more than 1800 DVDs to independent screening organisers in thirty-three provinces across the country. Since the premiere of The Look of Silence in November last year, more than 1200 DVDs of this film have been distributed. ‘As of February, there have been 266 open screenings,’ the Indonesian director said. ‘The great thing is more than 80 per cent of the organisers are young people. More than half are students from across disciplines,’ he said.

In The Look of Silence, while the perpetrators show no remorse, a daughter of one of the perpetrators of the violence apologised to Adi on her father’s behalf. Adi accepted her apology with an embrace.

‘We tried to show in The Look of Silence that intergenerational reconciliation is a more realistic aim than waiting for the old perpetrators to apologise,’ the director said. ‘We’ve waited so long and it hasn’t happened yet. But if the children can be moved, reconciliation can work.’

Human rights commissioner Nur Kholis, who is now forty-four, is used to hearing the phrase ‘let bygones be bygones’. He heard it many times in 2008 when he started to lead the investigation into the crimes of 1965.

He hears it still, after the launch of the Komnas HAM report recommending a criminal inquiry into gross human rights violations in 1965.

Nur Kholis said leaders of the Islamic mass organisation Nahdlatul Ulama, whose youth group Banser was involved in the killings in Java, rejected the report and expressed their anger when they met with him.

People point to his relative youth – and the fact that he was not there to witness the situation – in questioning his capability to investigate that period. ‘They would say, “How old are you to dare lead a team that would bring a big impact to Indonesia?” ’

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‘I just listen to them,’ he said. ‘I understand their anger. In this country we have to be able to deal with anger. The survivors are twice as angry.’

Not all of NU rejects reconciliation. The late president Abdurrahman Wahid, who was a long-time leader of NU, apologised in 2000 on behalf of the organisation for its involvement in the massacre. Since the fall of Suharto, NU member Imam Aziz has spearheaded a civil-society initiative for reconciliation between NU and the survivors of the 1965 massacre through an organisation that he founded called Syarikat.

The generation born after the atrocities and those who witnessed them have only just begun to see the truth – and we want to remember.

Unburdened by fear of ideological wars, we see the massacre in simple terms – a slaughter of helpless civilians. Most who manage to learn about the massacre side with the survivors.

The anonymous Indonesian co-director said that his own father condemns the massacre, but thinks if it hadn’t happened communism would have taken over the country. My mum thinks the same way. The Film Censorship Body, a remnant of the Suharto era, seems to think the same way too as it banned public screenings of The Look of Silence in East Java.

But there is no turning back the curiosity of the post-1965 generation.

In cities like Yogyakarta, Malang and Jember, where anti-communist groups cancelled open screenings, requests increase for DVDs to be screened underground. Banning screenings only increases curiosity.

‘Every time there’s a news report about cancellation in an area, we receive more requests for DVDs in that city for screenings,’ the director said. High school students ask to watch the film in class with their teachers. Some teachers show The Look of Silence and then get students to write essays reflecting on the country’s past.

I sat with twenty-nine-year-old university lecturer Windu Jusuf and his friend Berto Tukan, also twenty-nine and a lecturer. The two are now editors of the leftist website Indoprogress that features writings about Marxism, but they were both afraid of the communists when they were children. As part of Suharto’s propaganda against communism, school kids in Jakarta and surrounding cities were often taken on field trips to

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the Museum of PKI’s Betrayal, built near the memorial site for the assassinated generals in Lubang Buaya, East Jakarta, where their bodies were found in an abandoned well. Suharto filled the museum with dioramas detailing PKI’s treachery towards the nation in different eras. Windu visited the museum at the age of ten and recalls thinking ‘the communist were such dogs’. Berto, who was raised a devout Catholic in a small town in Flores, viewed communists as sinners.

At the dawn of Suharto’s fall, Windu’s father showed him newsletters from clandestine mailing lists that revealed forbidden information about 1965. His world was shaken. ‘I became really scared,’ Windu said. ‘I started to ask myself, Who am I really? I ask myself, Who am I as an Indonesian? Have I been fed lies all this time?’

Windu became silent for a while. Then he said to Berto: ‘I think we should make a funny meme at the Museum of PKI’s Betrayal.’ Berto laughed and agreed. ‘We should make people laugh at the obvious lies,’ he said.

In the memorial complex at Lubang Buaya, a couple of hundred metres away from the shack that houses a life-size torture-scene diorama, is the Sacred Pancasila Monument, commemorating the murder of seven Indonesian army officers in 1965. Statues of the generals stand in front of a massive mythical Garuda. Below are stone reliefs depicting communist women dancing naked while men (communists) throw the slain generals into a well. Elsewhere on the monument Suharto is seen bringing back order from chaos, symbolised by women cradling their babies with their heads bowed.

I looked at Windu posing with a director’s clapboard in front of the torture shack, looked at the monument and then my surroundings.

Police cadets leisurely strolled through the grounds, couples held hands as they looked into the deadly well, children peered into the torture shack. Amid the surreal landscape of the monuments, the attempts of Windu and his friend to mock the distortions of history seem the only sane response.

In that mockery, I see change happening: when people reject the lies they’ve been fed and start to laugh at the absurdity of how the country deals with history, it marks a true turning point for the nation.

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A Cottage for Sale A CotPir Ploy tage apokin for Sale

Ploy Pirapokin

A

ccording to my father, this is how to sing like Frank Sinatra: keep your body straight, taut like a rope. ‘The deep vibrato will come from your stomach,’ my father always told me. Next, sip in little breaths from the sides of your lips. Tip your neck back and send out those long notes from the back of your larynx. Frank never sings in beat. ‘Tatim, it’s not cool to follow the beat,’ my father would say. He didn’t need instructions or a tuning fork. He could close his eyes and feel for the melody.

I’d lie beside my father, head tilted to one side, listening to him inhale as he sang, a lovely sotto voce confirmation that two hearts were in solemn agreement.

Every afternoon that year, we would lie at the end of his bed, bellies down, the remote control pointed at the CD player in front of us, harmonising Frank Sinatra’s classics: ‘New York, New York’, ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, and my father’s personal favourite, ‘A Cottage for Sale’.

These little town blues: a hopeful legato confirmation that you can do anything. I often imagine this song as the soundtrack to the first time I walked into our new home in Bangkok – a house so large and empty I could cartwheel from one end to the other fifteen times without my feet grazing any of the walls. My father said the lyrics reminded him of when he and my mother, newlyweds, made a brand new start of it. ‘There was never enough space,’ my mother said about our old home, where they had settled after having me. When they argued, she would hide her tears and turn her back to him, cornered. But within seconds he’d wrap his arms around her from behind and say, ‘I’m sorry’.

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‘Fly Me to the Moon’: composed of cheeky, passaggio prods that scale up and down pitches, like every step down the busy Witthayu Road right outside our new house. After we moved in, I followed my mother like her shadow as she navigated through narrow alleyways with beggars rattling a few coins in their bowls, up larger streets busy with vendors calling for customers, their voices like gongs ringing at temples. My father, horizontal on the couch, waited at home.

‘A Cottage for Sale’ was a song that unwound from a spool. I remember its terrible darkness and my father wanting it to be the only song played at his funeral. He played it after every disagreement with my mother, who rolled her eyes the moment it came to The key’s in the mailbox the same as before, but no one is waiting for me anymore. ‘For him? I’d be waiting all day,’ she mumbled to no one in particular, ‘and everyone would go hungry.’

I loved that he lived in his striped pyjamas, unlike other fathers who came home at seven in grey suits and ties. He’d greet me at his door with a huge smile. My father rarely left his room and my mother went to work in his stead. He had done his time at the office, and my mother, well, he said, ‘That woman can never sit still.’ When I came home from school, Frank’s voice only became louder, a beautiful garden has withered away, and my mother could not help but exclaim, ‘Really!’ as though Frank’s voice turned her hair white. My father sang this song from a place deeper than dreams.

Every afternoon before dinner, we performed this ritual: my father, thin as a noodle, tiny stubble growing over his chin and cheeks, bare feet flat against the pillows, would order me to bring out the CDs. He always started with a story about how he and my mother met – he had spotted her in the garden, just outside her door, bending over to pick up the bag of oranges she’d dropped. This is how I came to know so much about their relationship. My father would then place the CD in the player and start singing. I joined in when I could. Later, I’d think of his voice when reading of Titans walking on earth.

Surrounded by the gloss of the hardwood floor, the sharp angles of the dresser, the marble side table, he looked right where he belonged. That’s where I wanted to keep him – happy. I believed our time together urged

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the walls of home to solidify. I never noticed my father growing weary. I assumed he aged at a reasonable pace, as fathers do when their little girls grow taller.

After our singing, we’d join my mother at the dining table. We’d eat, chopsticks dancing across our plates, every bite full of steamed fish or pork knuckles braised in thick brown gravy, or stir-fried choy sum in oyster sauce and rice – all of my father’s favourites – until we were satisfied.

My mother always asked him how his day had gone, and he’d happily tell her about how quiet his life now seemed. No tour buses to furnish with petite water bottles, no tour guides to train and no trips to the airport.

Then he would rise, whistling, put on his slippers and walk back to his room, every motion so clean and sure that I was convinced all was well in our world.

Sitting cross-legged on the bed, his faded pyjama bottoms rising above his ankles, he told me about Frank Sinatra’s life: the booze, the broads and brawls, the hat worn at a rakish angle, the jacket slung over one shoulder, the late nights in small saloons and even later nights in Vegas.

He assumed a swaggering persona in real life yet revealed in his songs such an aching tenderness and vulnerability, a real man with a broken heart.

‘A real gentleman,’ my father said. ‘A complex and complicated gentleman. I hope you will one day find one.’

Whenever I thought about gentlemen, I thought about Davey, a boy I loved to watch in my new school. When I sat next to him in Spanish class, he would ask me for an eraser and I would pass it back without looking. But I would keep my hand holding items a little longer, just so his warm hand would graze mine. And maybe I would catch his eyes, round and blue, and his smile, wide and friendly. Nothing like my husband now, who spends hours behind a computer screen, speaks Cantonese to my mother and has hair as dark as the night.

My father smirked when I told him about Davey. It was the first and only smile since we had left Hong Kong.

He said, ‘That’s not your complicated gentleman.’

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We looked out into Bangkok’s red-curry sky. The city, built entirely out of traffic, one hesitant beep, then another and another until they reached full volume, was nothing like our quiet Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong we had lived on top of a hill in Ho Man Tin, just a short walk from the open-air market where fish peddlers and butchers manned their stalls. In the mornings, I had walked down steep hills bordered with ferns that folded when I ran my fingers down their spines. I would wait for the school bus at the bottom of the hill, where the wind poured from the city through the trees. The leaves fluttered, and although I could not see up that high, I could hear them move, like the sound of burning paper, little delicate sheets toasted by the flames.

When I got home, I would sit with my parents in the living room where we’d listen to the neighbour’s son practising his piano above us, his foot tapping the pedals rhythmically. He would play slowly as we watched the news on TV. We talked over the sounds about our days, like a family of ghosts that had nowhere to roam.

My husband and I moved back into this Hong Kong house shortly after my father passed away. I’ve only spoken once to him about my parents’ brief time in Bangkok. We are very good at talking too – rotating between English, Cantonese and Thai. Speaking three languages, we should occupy more space than my parents ever did, but half of the house will always be dark without my father. When he died, I thought I would regain a part of him by moving back here again. I thought of the wind. The length of our voices over the muffled grinding of piano pedals. The length of our laughter.

In Bangkok, rows upon rows of cars stood still on bumpy roads and tiny one-way alleys. Fumes sputtered from exhaust pipes, the deadly smoke joining the sky. Office ladies crossed streets while texting, heads bowed, shoulders rounded, fingers swiping their iPhones. Street kids carried homemade jasmine garlands and rapped on car windows hoping to sell them for a couple of baht. Hawkers, old ladies, washed their utensils and pots and pans in buckets straddled between their legs, foam and bubbles dribbling down their ashy calves. In our empty new apartment

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above, I’d watch my father, worlds away, in his even emptier room, swaying to Frank Sinatra.

For the longest time, I blamed my grandmother for my father’s unhappiness. A regal, unsmiling, ballooned-from-child-bearing widow: my mother’s mother. That year, in Bangkok, we lived next door to her and she would wait for me by her doorway on Sundays with bamboo leaves tucked under her armpits.

‘She makes the best dumplings in our neighbourhood,’ my father told me. ‘My father wanted me to marry your mother just so we could have some every year.’

My mother’s mother filled her rice dumplings with two salted egg yolks and plump, dried shrimp. Sundays with her were enough for us all, daughters, sons, grandchildren, cousins, son and daughters-in-law. Every blood relative tolerated her in the kitchen so we could celebrate brunch together.

One Sunday, the maids, my grandmother, my mother and I were on dumpling duty. We sat bunkered in the kitchen, forming an assembly line of leaves, filling and rice. My grandmother was trying to teach me how to make dumplings quickly, scolding me when my lotus leaf came undone. Meanwhile, mayhem reigned in the unsupervised living room.

From my uncles and boy cousins, the sound of beer bottles tapping. In the dining room, my aunts shrieked over the latest gossip, flipping magazine pages furiously. My girl cousins played catch with the Chihuahua, squealing as the pup growled at them. Sundays at my grandmother’s were chaotic compared to all my afternoons with my father.

‘How can he live in that house after all that’s happened?’ my grandmother asked my mother. She suggested I sleep in her guestroom instead, so that I wouldn’t be cooped up in my father’s bedroom all day.

My mother looked nothing like my grandmother, except that she had the same brown hair and huge unblinking eyes. She slouched like a deflated balloon, diminutive; unlike her mother, she was a complete nonentity. She was like a spectre floating around our new house, occasionally asking our maid to wipe down the tables. Before we moved, she had wielded a quiet sort of power in her own right that could sometimes be

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felt during dinners with my father. She had rested her hand on his thigh when he threw plates on the ground, yelling at our maid for over-salting the food. She had nudged him with her foot when he made me recite the ten-times table – over and over again – until our dinner turned cold and I almost wet myself. She never had to say a word. All of the sudden, my father would be recognisable – there’d be a twinkle in his eye, a smile wide across his face. I have never been able to crack their language of love, even to this day.

‘How long are you here for business this time?’ my grandmother continued questioning my mother.

My mother mumbled, ‘A couple of weeks,’ and flattened a wet lotus leaf on the table, wiping the water off the stem. Her answer was deemed unsatisfactory by my grandmother, whose face said it all: scrunched nose, squinted eyes and a frown.

As far as I knew, nothing had been going on at home. Occasionally my mother would storm out of her bedroom, ordering me to go hang out next door with my grandmother. ‘He’s not feeling well today,’ she would tell me, her voice stern and unwavering. I recognised the tone, one that would not allow for questions. My grandmother would then come to get me, never once speaking about my father’s health when I stayed with her.

‘Why did you come back?’ my grandmother asked.

She continued to badger my mother for weeks. During the first week we were there, my mother avoided the questions by unpacking. By the second week, my mother made up an excuse about how she wanted more space for me to run around, even though in Hong Kong they had taken me to the park at weekends. By the fifth week, my grandmother made it clear that she had booked weekend excursions with all of my cousins and me for the next few months since it was obvious we weren’t going anywhere.

‘Your husband was always weak,’ my grandmother said, rolling the leaf into a cone. ‘He had the same thick glasses when he was courting you. I told you you’d be taking care of him for the rest of your life.’

I patted the rice into the cone and passed it to my mother. She shook her head, annoyed.

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‘He gets more blind every year,’ my grandmother continued. ‘He lets you take care of him when he should be taking care of you.’

I remember wishing my grandmother would stop her incessant probing and leave us alone. I see now that she was trying her best to force my mother to rethink my father’s imperfections, angular with feeling.

‘Want to go to the mall soon, Tatim?’ my mother asked, her knees brushing mine a little longer as she inched closer to me. She shooed me out to call for more help in the kitchen.

Among our new house’s ghosts was the soul of my grandfather, my father’s father. One evening he had passed away broken-hearted, swimming in his sheets, cursing his last lonely years. My grandmother, his wife, my father’s mother, had leapt off the fourteenth floor balcony two years before that.

She had been sick in the head, or so I was told. She always dreamt that her final breakdown would be when my father retired and came back to care for her. What really happened was that my grandfather found her foetal on the bed, bawling with a noose made out of beach towels around her neck. All the little neurons had come together in her head, like a thousand devils with Tourette’s, pushing her into the grave.

She took to her bed for months. Couldn’t string together sentences.

Wouldn’t go to the hospital. Wasn’t sent any flowers.

One day, she peered over the aloe vera plants, the roses and the lavender, and thought, to hell with it. My grandfather never quite recovered. I think I slept in their room afterwards, but nobody ever confirmed that. The hospital-white painted walls had chipped, the oxygen tank was gone, the railings in the shower had been taken down, but glue and pale lines remained between the tiles.

He wasn’t a very demanding ghost. My father said Ah Gong would come and stand by him when he ate breakfast sometimes. In the early morning light, my father would stir his coffee and you’d know Ah Gong was there because the steam would start billowing to the right.

‘He blows smoke to get my attention,’ my father said. ‘Ghosts can’t touch things. They need to use their breath.’

‘What is he trying to tell you?’ I asked.

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My father touched my forehead. ‘He wants to remind me that he’s here.’

The morning after we moved into the new house, my maid woke up screaming and sprinted into the living room.

‘A tall old man with grey eyes told me to wake up,’ she panted.

My parents and I laughed kindly.

‘He looked just like. . . .’ she looked at the sepia-toned picture of Ah Gong on the mantle by the prayer room, the only decoration in the house, above the pot of incense sticks.

‘He was waking up your lazy ass,’ my father teased.

‘Don’t make me give you a higher dose of that medicine,’ she said, and looked at him with crazy eyes. My father, my mother and I giggled.

There was nothing to be afraid of. With a swift turn she went back into the kitchen.

My father never got over his father’s death. Initially he just sat and stared at the TV, relieved that his father had gone to a better place and out of our world of pain. Once I spied my mother holding the back of my father’s head between her breasts, asking him to say something – anything, as she kneeled behind him watching the flickering screen in silence.

‘He regretted not spending enough time with him,’ my mother told me. She sat at her dresser, setting her hair into rollers. ‘Ah Gong comes to let your father know he was never angry.’

‘Ah Gong’s not real,’ I said, ‘Because ghosts are not real.’

My mother stopped midway through one roller. ‘Sometimes you want those voices in your head to be real,’ she sighed. ‘Sometimes, when you hear them all the time, they become real.’

‘Ah Gong loved your father,’ she continued. ‘But it wasn’t like your grandfather to tell him that. To tell your father that there was nothing he could have done and that he still loves him.’

I sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor and looked up at her.

‘You should say it more,’ my mother said. ‘Tell him you love him before you don’t get the chance to say it anymore.’ Only she wasn’t talking to me.

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One day, I came home at four o’clock as usual. I mentioned a girl in my class whose mother designed dresses for the royal family, with the queen herself making personal orders. Every society doyenne owned a frock from her, grabbing the newest dresses off the racks as soon as they arrived at the department store. I could barely squeeze one of my arms through those little holes.

‘Hi-so’s,’ I said, ‘stands for high society people.’

‘What’s that?’ my father sniffed. He took off his glasses, pinched his nose and put them back on.

‘Thailand’s richest,’ I said. ‘They’re the elites, and all the kids in that school are elite.’

He pressed play on the remote. Start spreading the news, accompanied by clarinets, flowed from the speakers.

‘My friend Davey’s parents own that big steel import business,’ I said, ‘that huge factory on Sukhumvit Road with private Gurkha security guards that carry their own swords.’

‘They must be ashamed of you then, daughter of a retired travel agent!’ my father said.

‘I told them about how you did tours for Michael Jackson, Pablo Escobar, prime ministers of Italy, Stevie Wonder—’ ‘And no one dared to entertain the thought of how we did a tour for Stevie Wonder?’

If I can make it there, I’ll make it, anywhere.

‘Well, I’m sorry we’re not hi-so’s then, we’re so-so,’ my father said.

He laughed, his shoulders shaking. ‘So-so.’

I smiled at his play on words. ‘So-so,’ I mimicked. ‘I’m not a hi-so or a low-so, I’m so-so.’

‘So, so very beautiful.’ My father kissed me on the forehead.

In my father’s room the ceiling was high and the air was light with the sounds of swinging beats, all those songs jostling for air space. They suffered the brunt of his frustrations, his sadness and his paralysis. They were his vice. His weakness. His joy.

What is it about Frank’s voice that made him calm? What made my father’s carefree nature so overpowering that he was able to slink into his

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room in the middle of a working day to belt out tunes with Frank? Each song was a lesson. Each one offered redemption to the prisoner that was my father. He had hardly finished the last note of one song before the next began playing; and all he was left with was an insatiable need for yet another.

The day things went sour was when my grandmother’s driver drove my father, mother and me to the main department store. Mourn was a silent man with dark, tamarind-paste skin. The only thing he said to me there and back was, ‘Anything you want, little miss. I’ll carry it.’ He dropped us off in front of shiny-waxed floors, floor-to-ceiling glass storefronts glittering with chandeliers and bags and clothes on display.

‘Call me when you’re ready to leave, sirs!’

With purse in one hand and a list in the other, my mother went straight for the suitcases. I followed her with my father, looking for ones with hard shells, ones large enough and bright enough to recognise at the arrivals belt when we landed.

‘We need three,’ my mother said. ‘One for each of us and an extra for the shopping.’

Swarms of people made it impossible for us to see what was what, although I could tell which brand was unpopular by the empty spaces in front of those sections.

‘Something light, but sturdy,’ my mother said.

‘But we will be dragging them on the streets in New York,’ I said.

‘Don’t we want something that’s fashionable like all the ones New Yorkers will carry?’

‘I’m sad I can’t go with you two,’ my father said, ruffling my hair.

My mother reminded him that he’d promised to look after the business for a while. This little getaway was a girl’s trip.

‘Tatim, you can get all the Nike shoes you want!’ she said to me.

‘Let’s get this one,’ my father stopped at a set of orange suitcases.

My mother looked at him sheepishly.

‘To hell with it,’ he said, ‘Let’s get all of them.’

‘Dad, we only need three,’ I said.

I watched as he ran back and forth from the set of orange suitcases, dragging back some blue ones, knocking over mannequins and display

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cases full of bags. A crowd began to form around us while my father carried on like a lunatic, shouting for the saleslady to please get the leather polish, all sixteen bottles of it, and extra waterproof covers too!

‘You can have all the Nikes in New York,’ he told me, rolling ten suitcases to the checkout stand as the saleslady tried to hide them behind the counter, ‘but you’ll need to put them in something to bring them back.’

He sounded shrill, like a seagull squawking before plunging down for a kill.

I wish that everything I remember about this were imagined. I can see myself, watching my father, my real father, for the first time, outside.

The twelve-year-old girl I was, with straight black bangs, in leather Mary Janes, standing in front of my mother with her bulbous eyes, a mouth tightly pursed and hands frozen beside her. I want to take her by the hand and lead her into the crowd where she could be faceless beside them, wiping off her features so my father would not see that we recognised him. That we knew about him. That we judged him.

My mother begged him to slow down, to please stop causing a scene.

The spectators were now staring at the tug-of-war between my father, piling suitcases into a plastic mountain, and the saleslady, carefully taking them off one by one and standing them on their wheels. My mother balanced herself by holding my shoulders, her fingers digging into my skin, and I believed that if she let go, she would drop straight to the floor.

‘Your mother thinks we’re in a sticky spot right now,’ my father ran blurring by, pulling enormous duffle bags to the pile. ‘Sweetie,’ he said to her, ‘I just haven’t found the right time to spoil you both!’

My mother turned pink with embarrassment, hot tears like a flurry of hail streamed down her cheeks. She never said it, but I knew she wanted to tell him she was sorry. She had never meant to humiliate him, to make him grow older than he already was.

He almost knocked us both over by dragging the suitcases to the checkout counter and running back to line the rest up so he could pay. I was relieved when he slid his credit card over and thanked the saleslady, watching the onlookers leave. Mourn came and pushed two shopping carts and thirty bags away.

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Six months later my mother told me about love. How she fell into an ocean of it. Grew gills, fins and a tail. She was just a young girl when she met a merman, my father. She gave up two legs. She gave up oxygen. She gave up her family. Swam far into the warm embrace of the water, its hold silencing the doubts that surrounded her.

‘We are not just lovers,’ she told me. ‘We are also best friends.’

She had tried to swim back to land, to her mother, her sisters and her brother while bringing back my father the merman, in a tiny mason jar.

She had modelled our new home after a fish tank, and plunked my father in the middle of it, hoping the water would hold him still and silence the doubts in his head. She went to work. Made sure we only served him food that he liked. Cancelled all my after-school activities so I saw him more. My father never stopped saying he loved her. He said it before he tucked me into bed as she watched from the doorway. She told me this as though all you had to do to prove your love was to say it. You had to say what you mean and if you said it again and again, you might actually make your actions mean something.

When they talked about whatever they wanted to tell me, they were together. I saw my parents, on the sofa in matching striped pyjamas, watching TV late into the night. When I told my mother to leave me alone, swatting her away like an irksome fly, my father would get angry.

‘Don’t talk to your mother like that,’ he would say. My mother would flinch. My father’s mood swung like a pendulum, going up and down like the melody of a Frank Sinatra swing song.

When my father was angry, she blamed herself.

Once my mother asked me if I remembered anything from that night.

‘What night?’ I asked, though I knew. How could I forget?

The evening had begun with my parents arguing over my father’s behaviour at the store.

‘You forgot to take them, that’s all,’ she said. I had said goodnight earlier and pretended to walk towards my room. Instead, I kept my ears on the wall next to their door.

‘I thought I could handle it,’ he answered. I tried to become one with the wall, fusing with the wallpaper.

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‘If you don’t like it,’ she said, ‘we can try other ones. I’ll go with you this time.’

My father decided not to press on. I imagined him crawling onto the bed, pulling the covers over himself. He did the same thing to me to signal that our time was up. Switches clicked, and the reflection of the light under the doorway turned dark. I crept back to my room and dived under my sheets. I watched the covers go up and down, breathing slower so that they stayed still, as though I had always been there.

‘Do you hate me?’ my mother asked me after our visit to the mall.

‘Why would I?’ I said. ‘We left because we had to. We would’ve died if we stayed.’

‘We wouldn’t have died.’

‘Are you getting divorced from Dad?’ My mother looked at me, eyes narrow and crinkly. ‘Where did you learn that word “divorce”?’ she asked.

‘Davey’s parents got divorced and he lives in two homes,’ I said, not sure whether or not that meant he was lucky. ‘Can I live in the Hong Kong house then?’

‘My baby,’ my mother clutched my hand and guided me to her bedside. ‘I love your father. Only people who hate each other get divorced.’

She had kept her thoughts dammed inside of her for too long. They leapt from her eyelashes, jumping sideways, and for a moment I almost cried too.

That night, I returned to my room and pretended I was asleep. Once I was under the sheets, ‘A Cottage for Sale’ came on. Seconds later, my father’s voice, smooth and tender, swept through the house. I sang along with him, the end of our story is there on the door, my own girlish voice, an octave higher than his, joining Frank’s to keep him company.

Outside my father’s room, I crouched against the wall. When I stepped forward and looked, I saw my mother running to my father on the bed. He was lying on top of the covers, out of his pyjamas, as if thrown down and dragged there. His knees folded into his chest, the crown of his head burrowing down. His back was hunched over and I could see his spine, little bumps on his skin.

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She was crying, pawing at my father. He seemed loose, deranged, as if everything in the known world was ending right there. I remember crying out, ‘Goodnight Dad, I love you.’ He did not turn around to face me. ‘Dad, I love you,’ I said.

The song blended into a low hum in my ears that grew louder and louder and blotted out my father’s cries. I could not make out a word he said, if he said anything to me. There were loud guttural sounds, but I don’t remember if they came from him or me.

My mother came flying out the door, seizing me by the armpits.

Everything became wet: her body, my face, her hands. She soothed me with words I could not understand because all I could hear was Frank Sinatra’s laugh, his handsome, streamlined voice. The CD had finished and continued emitting a whirring noise, or so I believed. This scene in my mind bursts into a million white pieces every time I try to recall it.

The next day, my mother took me to my grandmother’s. I waited at the dining table and watched my maid painfully serve me breakfast. Her hands trembled as she poured milk over my cereal, the cornflakes rising slowly to the top.

Nobody said a word to me, not even my father. I went knocking at his door. I even warned him that if he slept all day Ah Gong would come find him. His back was turned towards me the whole time, but I caught myself staring at him through the reflection on the TV. I saw him through his bedroom door that kept him on the other side of me.

I often tell my husband that when we have a daughter, if we ever have a daughter, I want her to know everything about us. If we are arguing, I want him to look down and remind himself that we made this beautiful child and that this child will not care who’s right or who’s wrong, who’s sick today, or who’s fine. All she will care about is that her mother and father are there.

We didn’t end up going to New York. In fact, that year, we never left my father alone in the house. As always, four o’clock came around and I would get off of the school bus and go into the house, knocking on his bedroom door. I would go in his room and tell him about my day, ask him for blessings on my tests and kiss him on the cheek.

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‘He only has to hear your voice,’ my mother would say.

My father, still thin and unshaven, stubble growing over his chin and cheeks, couldn’t see me, but my mother assured me his mind was perfect.

‘He remembers your name.’

Frank Sinatra was gone. She would ruffle my hair and ask me how my day had been.

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Contributors Contributor s

SHELLEY BRYANT (translator of Sheng Keyi) is the author of six volumes of poetry and a pair of travel guides for the cities of Suzhou and Shanghai.

She has translated works from Chinese for Penguin, Epigram, Giramondo and Rinchen Books, and the National Library Board in Singapore. Her poetry has appeared in journals, magazines and on websites around the world.

JESSIE COLE grew up in northern New South Wales and lived a bush childhood of creek swimming and barefoot free-range adventuring. Her debut novel, Darkness on the Edge of Town (HarperCollins, 2012), was shortlisted for the 2013 ALS Gold Medal, and her non-fiction work has appeared in many Australian publications. Her latest novel is Deeper Water (HarperCollins, 2014).

ANDRÉ DAO is a writer of fiction and non-fiction based in Melbourne. He was the 2014 AsiaLink Arts Resident in Hanoi, and is currently working on a novel based on the lives of his grandparents, who survived more than half a century of war and persecution in Vietnam.

GLENN L. DIAZ has an MA in creative writing from the University of the Philippines. He is the 2013 recipient of the M Literary Residency in Bangalore, India. He lives in Manila.

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Contributors SIOBHAN HARVEY is an author and lecturer in creative writing at the Centre for Creative Writing, Auckland University of Technology. Her most recent books are the 2013 Kathleen Grattan Award winner, Cloudboy (Otago University Press, 2014) and, as co-editor, Essential New Zealand Poems (Penguin Random House NZ, 2014). Recently, her work has been published in Evergreen Review, Meanjin, Landfall, Pilgrimage, Segue and Stand, among others.

ANJUM HASAN is a poet, magazine books editor and author of a collection of short fiction, Difficult Pleasures (Penguin, 2012). She has published two novels, Neti, Neti (Roli, 2009), and Lunatic in My Head (Penguin-Zubaan, 2007), as well as the book of poems Street on the Hill (Sahitya Akademi, 2006).

JOSHUA IP is the Singapore Literature Prize-winning author of making love with scrabble tiles (Math Paper Press, 2013), and sonnets from the singlish (Math Paper Press, 2012). He has co-edited two poetry anthologies: A Luxury We Cannot Afford (Math Paper Press, 2014) and SingPoWriMo (Math Paper Press, 2014). He is working on his first graphic novel, Ten Stories Below. His website is at www.joshuaip.com.

JANG JIN-SUNG worked as a senior writer for the Korean Workers’ Party and earned special recognition from the North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il for his poetry. In 2004, he defected to South Korea. He has published widely in South Korea and represented North Korea at the Cultural Olympiad in London in 2012. His memoir Dear Leader (Simon & Schuster) was published in 2014.

MANAN KARKI was born in Kathmandu in 1976 and lives there working as a freelance editor and translator. He has a degree in English literature and a diploma in linguistics. His novel, The Memory of Leaves, was released in Ireland in 2009 and Nepal in 2011.

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Contributors SHIRLEY LEE studied classics and Persian at Oxford University and is currently writing a PhD on North Korea at Leiden University. Lee read at Poetry Parnassus in the London 2012 Olympics, and at the HK and OrientOccident International literary festivals. Her articles, poetry and translations have been published in Wasafiri, Words Without Borders and elsewhere. She is the translator of Dear Leader by Jang Jin-sung (Random House 2014).

MAJID MAQBOOL is a journalist and editor based in Kashmir. His writing has appeared internationally in Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America, NYT India Ink, Warscapes magazine and several Indian and Pakistani publications.

In 2013, Majid received a United Nations Population Fund-supported award for his ‘investigative reporting on the status of women in the conflict region of Jammu and Kashmir’.

SALLY McLAREN lives in an old kimono factory in Kyoto and teaches media studies at Kwansei Gakuin University. Her research focuses on gender, media and power in the Asia–Pacific region. As a journalist she has been writing about Asia for international media since 1997.

OMAR MUSA is a Malaysian–Australian rapper and poet from Queanbeyan, Australia. He is the former winner of the Australian Poetry Slam and the Indian Ocean Poetry Slam. He has published two books with Penguin Australia, Parang (2014), a book of poetry, and his debut novel Here Come the Dogs (2014), which was long-listed for the 2015 Miles Franklin Award.

PLOY PIRAPOKIN was born in Thailand and raised in Hong Kong. Her work has been published in The Queen of Statue Square: New Short Fiction from Hong Kong (Critical, Cultural & Communications Press, 2014) and the journals Hyphen and Transfer Magazine.

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Contributors PRODITA SABARINI is a Jakarta-based journalist and an editor for The Conversation. She was selected as the 2013–14 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow, offered through the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), which included internships at the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

SHENG KEYI is a contemporary Chinese novelist currently living in Beijing.

Her works include Northern Girls (Penguin, 2012), Ode to Virtue, Death Fugue (Giramondo, 2014), Barbaric Growth and several short story collections. She has won, among others, the Chinese People’s Literature Prize, the Yu Dafu Prize for Fiction, the Chinese Literature Media Award and the Top 20 Novelists of the Future Prize. Northern Girls was long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize.

KEANE SHUM is a lawyer who received his MFA in Creative Writing from the City University of Hong Kong. He is a frequent contributor to the South China Morning Post, and has also written for the Atlantic, the Sydney Morning Herald, and the Age.

MIGUEL SYJUCO is from the Philippines and the author of the novel Ilustrado (Vintage Australia, 2010) which won the Man Asian Literary Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. He writes about topics unsuitable for the polite dinner table: politics, religion, sex and human folly.

His forthcoming second novel, I Was the President’s Mistress!!, trains its crosshairs on the powerful and corrupt in his home country.

KO KO THETT is a poet by choice and a Burmese by chance. In between, he is a poetry translator, editor and anthologist of contemporary Burmese poetry. His first anthology, Bones will Crow: 15 Contemporary Burmese Poets, was published by the Northern Illinois University Press in 2013. He lives and works in Belgium and writes in both Burmese and English. His collection the burden of being burmese is forthcoming from Zephyr in the autumn of 2015.

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Contributors MAGGIE TIOJAKIN is an Indonesian author, translator, scriptwriter and journalist. She is the author of several books, including Winter Dreams (Gramedia Pustaka Utama, 2011). She is also the founder of Fiksi Lotus, an online journal of translated short stories. She lives in Jakarta and is currently working on her second novel, Grace.

ELLEN VAN NEERVEN is a young Yugambeh woman from South-East Queensland. She is the author of the award-winning Heat and Light (UQP, 2014) and has published short stories and poetry in McSweeney’s, Meanjin, The Lifted Brow and others. She received a Queensland Writers Fellowship in 2015 to work on a new project, ‘Days of Extinction’, a fictional exploration of Aboriginal relationships with megafauna.

NICHOLAS WONG is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), and an assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat. He holds an MFA from City University of Hong Kong.

MURONG XUECUN is the nom de plume of Hao Qun, one of China’s first internet-based writers. Born in 1974, he studied law at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. A prominent social critic, he became a contributing opinion writer for the International New York Times in 2013.

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Australian and Asian lives are colliding and colluding as never before.

This issue of the Asia Literary Review presents a conversation among writers of these seemingly distinct continents, creating a cultural bridge that renders the space between them diminished, even illusory.

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Chinese internet ‘shitizens’ – an essay by Murong Xuecun Manan Karki’s poetry foreshadows devastation in Nepal Miguel Syjuco on the tragicomedy of Philippine politics Father/Son dysfunction – fiction from Anjum Hasan Siobhan Harvey’s story of loss following the earthquake in Japan Sally McLaren on Japanese pop culture Ellen van Neerven on the shared fauna of Asia and Australia

‘For decades, Asia’s modern literature, even to us in Asia, was a dark continent. If all this is now changed or changing, ALR has had a lot to do with it.’ Arvind Krishna Mehrotra asialiteraryreview.com

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