Asia Literary Review No. 27, Spring 2015 Sampler

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Is this the Year of the Sheep, Goat or Ram? Is its character gentle, wily or cantankerous? In this issue of the Asia Literary Review you’ll hear a range of voices – some mild, others outspoken, but all original and authentic.

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No. 27, Spring 2015

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No. 27, Spring 2015

Publisher Greater Talent Limited /Asia Literary Publishing Director and Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Director: Business and Finance Phillip Kim Senior Editors Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Poetry Editor Kavita A. Jindal Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Production Alan Sargent Proofs Shirley Lee Main Cover Image © 2015 Boaz Rottem Back Cover Image © 2015 Boaz Rottem 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 Editorial@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Sales@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Poems from Over the Moon by Imtiaz Dharker printed with kind permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd. Images in ‘Masks’ printed courtesy of Boaz Rottem Images in ‘Challenging Convention’ printed courtesy of Namgay Zam Images in ‘Land of Light’ printed courtesy of Frank Light

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-12155-4-3 Individual contents © 2015 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2015 Greater Talent Limited

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Contents From the Editors

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Fiction from After the Turn of Dark

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Shin Kyung-sook, translated by Shirley Lee

And Now There Came Both Mist and Snow

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Clara Chow

Beijing Hospital

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Jeremy Tiang

Comfort Woman Eleanor

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James Tam

Run

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Phillip Y. Kim

The First Noble Truth

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Nathan Lauer

Childhood

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Mona Dash

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Poetry Lamp Lighting At Swallow Rock

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Chen Dongdong, translated by Michael Martin Day

Ghazals on the Grundig, Pingling in Pollokshields Bombil, Bumla, Bummalo Drummer First words Mumbai? Kissmiss?

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Imtiaz Dharker

Chinese, Not Han

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Reid Mitchell

Event • Writing

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Yu Jian, translated by Simon Patton and Tao Naikan

Distant Sea on a Summer’s Day

114

Li Yawei, translated by Denis Mair

M. F. Husain’s Goddesses

123

Usha Kishore

Peng Chau

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Zheng Danyi, translated by Luo Hui

Forgetting Jiaocheng, 1970 Notes from South Xinjiang The Sun and Rain of West Lake

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Song Lin, translated by Li Dong

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Non-Fiction The West Sea Battle

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Jang Jin-sung, translated and introduced by Shirley Lee

Seeing the Monet

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Suzanne Kamata

Land of Light

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Frank Light

Challenging Convention – The Kung Fu Nuns

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Namgay Zam

The Sinking City

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Bill Tarrant

Which God is Ours?

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Angela Smith Kirkman

Photography Masks

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Boaz Rottem, text by Elizabeth Solomon

Contributors

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From the Editors From the E ditors

hether Sheep, Goat or Ram, it is that year. Because the yang (㕞) in the Chinese zodiac could refer to any of these animals, precisely which of them is being represented is a topic of debate in the English-speaking world. In any event, those who follow the Chinese calendar consider a defining characteristic of the year to be mild manners – sheepishness, so to speak. It’s been widely reported that mothers across China chose to deliver their babies in the last days of the Year of the Horse, with all its auspicious associations, rather than risk giving birth to a meek and vulnerable lamb. Such planning might be as much a result of prudent pragmatism as wild superstition. After all, even the most rational in other cultures avoid walking under ladders or undertaking risky enterprises on Friday the thirteenth. Meanwhile, Hong Kong’s embattled Chief Executive C. Y. Leung greeted the New Year with a plea to citizens that they should be like ‘mild and gentle’ sheep, and ‘pull together in an accommodating manner to work for Hong Kong’s future.’ This message didn’t go down well with those who spent the latter half of the Year of the Horse refusing to be reined in to docile obedience.

Elsewhere in the region and around the world, much of the last year has seen clashes between stridently independent voices and those who prefer the sound of bleating sheep. Many in Thailand and Burma have bridled against regimes that deny them a voice, a denial that remains widespread. Keyword blocking on Weibo (the popular messaging service) and other censorship pressures in China have intensified. North Korea took exception to the portrayal of the assassination of its leader in The Interview and lashed out by hacking into Sony Pictures’ email servers. In the United States, people suffering prejudice protested that they ‘can’t breathe’. And, of course, there was the Charlie Hebdo tragedy in France.

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From the Editors

Writers have a special duty to seek truth as they examine the human condition: to record experiences faithfully and fancifully as fact and metaphor, to question underlying beliefs, and to speculate about the consequences of real and imagined events. Their voices help make sense of the world as it is. Though not necessarily intended to be so, the written word can become political when truths are proscribed by terror, religion or government. Atrocities committed around the world to stifle freedom of speech are all too horrifyingly real. Thus, the special duty of shedding light and seeking answers requires a great deal of courage, not least in the difficult act of speaking out for peace in the face of fear.

This issue of the Asia Literary Review is an eclectic collection of writing that reflects the striving of people to make their voices heard.

The most extreme example is in The West Sea Battle, Jang Jin-sung’s account of his debriefing of North Korean sailors after a skirmish with the South Korean navy. In a country where nobody dares to speak the truth to anyone, his task was to persuade the sailors to risk saying what they had genuinely thought and experienced, rather than what they believed was expected of them.

James Tam tells a harrowing tale of sexual slavery in World War II, the larger truths of which are denied by many even today. In Nathan Lauer’s novel extract, he dares to offer a disturbingly contrarian view of Tibet and the aura of the Dalai Lama, a perspective focused on subjugation rather than liberation. Namgay Zam introduces us to nuns in Nepal and Bhutan who have exuberantly cast aside the constraints of tradition by mastering kung fu.

Mona Dash and Phillip Kim take us to more intimate family settings, where people fail to acknowledge their histories and fictions, to themselves and each other. Jeremy Tiang’s protagonist in Beijing Hospital has a macabre change of heart in a story that reveals an uneasy marriage between commerce and justice, and where the central characters are forced to live with the consequences of their complicity.

Other contributors allow us to consider seemingly familiar topics from a fresh perspective. Boaz Rottem’s photographs invite us to see what lies behind Asia’s exotic façades. Bill Tarrant warns of what may be Jakarta’s fate as he watches the city sink into the wetlands from which it

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From the Editors

had risen. Meanwhile, Shin Kyung-sook’s protagonist loses his sense of self in a capricious and inscrutable world, and Clara Chow’s vision of Singapore is of a city encased in ice and snow, victim to catastrophic climate change.

From Britain, the poet Imtiaz Dharker celebrates the joyous muddle of her identity as a Pakistani Glaswegian – but in Drummer, an elegy to Lee Rigby, she has no doubt about where she stands. ‘Hack at you,’ she says to him, ‘and the city bleeds.’ In her poem we hear the drum that ‘speaks the difficult name, the name of peace.’ We at the Asia Literary Review believe in the vital importance of beating that same drum in the pursuit of original ideas and authentic voices.

We don’t wish to debate whether this is the Year of the Sheep, Goat or Ram. We simply acknowledge the virtues of the animal – gentleness, consideration, persistence, thrift. We also note that the pictogram for yang (and the animal depicted on our cover) has horns. We therefore draw energy from the notion that, whether mild sheep, wily goat or cantankerous ram, each of us has the means to take a stand.

Martin Alexander

Phillip Kim

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Imt iaz Dhar ker Poetry

Ghazals on the Grundig, Pingling in Pollokshields The moon of the fourteenth day or the first light of the sun, I swear to God, you are beyond compare.

The moon. . . .

Out of its massive grey body, Grundig TK20 is singing reel to reel, unspooling love songs in Hindustani, a voice that is sometimes female, sometimes male. Lahore arrives via Germany on Sunday mornings in Pollokshields.

What does it mean?

Time, Ammi translates, and sighs, Time has played such a joke on us You are no longer you. I am no longer I.

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We learn Hindustani from Grundig, singing along with the tragic song.

Ammi says we must speak English, Say it like this, excuse me, thank you, but when I say the words they come out Glaswegian. To her it all sounds the same.

She finds new ways to speak the new tongue, delighted by the birds on television, waddling to the sea, Pingling! Pingling! and the chorus girls who come out highkicking when the sequined curtain goes up, Nappy! Nappywali!

Sometimes she lapses, negotiates meals in Urdu, swears by accident in Punjabi, Ullu di patthi! But if I am the daughter of an owl who is the owl?

Grundig’s barrel body is rumbling to release the voice, pitched impossibly high, juggling the world from spool to spool.

Time has played this joke on us, says Grundig, You are no longer you, I am no longer I.

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Beijing Hospital B eijing Hospit Jeremy Tiang al

Jeremy Tiang

W

hen Doctor’s words confound Sophia’s patchy Mandarin, she says, Pardon, but he just grows unhelpfully louder. Finally she begs, Wait, wait, and dials a number. As the phone rings, she imagines the aunt’s ungainly progress through the apartment’s camphor-scented air, catching her knee on the rosewood armchair, swearing in pungent bursts.

A click and muffled thud as the aunt pulls at the cord and demands, breathlessly, Yes? I don’t know what Doctor wants. Can you ask him? Sophia has learnt that the aunt regards hellos and how-are-yous as wasted words. She hands the phone to Doctor and Sophia leans her head against the smeary window as they have a quacking conversation. From four storeys up, the view is bleak, gunmetal grey. Yet whenever she mentions the pollution to a local, the reply is always, You should have seen it before the Olympics; it was a luxury to see blue sky.

A finger jabs her impatiently: Doctor, thrusting the phone back. The aunt says, He wanted to know about – a jumble of sounds. I don’t— Sophia begins, and the aunt sighs. Artificial heart, she says in English.

Machine.

We didn’t want that, protests Sophia. Gu Ma, can you tell him— she calls the woman Gu Ma, Aunt, even though she is her father’s cousin, not sister, from the branch of the family that stayed in China instead of coming to Singapore half a century ago.

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Sophia passes the phone back to Doctor and they squawk away again.

Both have Beijing accents, their voices arch and slurred. Her head aches.

The noise is amplified by the narrow corridor, which smells not of antiseptic but of concrete and radiator dust. The doctor slots the phone into her hand as if she were a wall socket and marches away. She lifts it to her ear, but the aunt has already hung up.

She retrieves her bags of supplies from reception and continues to Nicholas’s ward. At visiting hours, families leave their doors open so the building feels like a many-storeyed village, children shuffling in corners and wives noisily recounting the latest gossip. She had wanted Nicholas to go private but the aunt vetoed that – the care wouldn’t be as good.

Korean surgeons, she sniffed. Japanese nurses.

They have at least insisted on a private ward. It is important that Nicholas has restful surroundings before his operation; he can always earn the money to pay for this after recovery. She turns a corner and the grinding of the lift fades. The doors are farther apart here. They are the only foreigners in this section, though if she does not speak she can pass for a local.

Nicholas is watching television when she comes in, although he doesn’t understand a word of Chinese. He claims to follow the sense, but she thinks he just wants a voice in the room. She has left him a small stack of index cards on which the aunt has scrawled ‘Bring water’ or ‘Turn down heating’.

A chaste kiss as always; then she begins to pull containers from her bags. Over Sophia’s protests, the aunt insisted on doing the cooking.

Your food is the reason he’s sick, she’d said, and there was enough truth in that to silence Sophia. She still remembers the consultant talking about malignant hypertension, blaming diet as well as stress. Her guilty recollection of all those steaks fried in butter, all that French patisserie.

The hospital does not provide food. This had surprised Sophia, but then she wouldn’t have trusted anything they served. She pushes the folding table across Nicholas’s bed, and places the plastic containers within easy reach. He will not eat all of this; the variety is to stimulate his appetite.

Double-boiled soup – just a little; they are supposed to be restricting

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fluid intake – stewed pork, steamed fish, fluffy white rice. He brings a shaky spoonful to his mouth.

Sophia goes to the market every morning with the aunt, paying pennies for an array of meats, and fish lifted live from a basin and splayed open in front of them, making sure everything is fresh and untainted. She has heard terrible stories about processed foods. One is playing out on the news at the moment: a milk powder scandal, babies dying from formula adulterated with melamine. She shudders, imagining sniffing at a bottle – Something’s off. A bit too chalky? No, I’m sure it’s fine. . . .

When Nicholas has had enough, the food goes back into the bags it arrived in, boxes slotting neatly together, cutlery wrapped in a paper towel. She pours him tea from a thermos and blows coolingly before touching it to his lips. In the first days, she felt the need to keep up a stream of chatter, filling the dead air. Now she sees her presence is enough. She can sit with him and time will pass of its own accord. She reads him an article from The Economist – something about Elizabeth Warren, which he snorts at, a glimpse of his old self.

The nurses come as usual, day shift handing over to night. Both are young, alike enough to be sisters. They smile and jabber rapidly over his chart. Sophia is sure they linger in the doorway longer than necessary, still taken with the novelty of a white man on their floor. Finally, she thanks them pointedly and they go.

They did more tests today, says Nicholas, shrugging as if to forestall her next question. Who knows what for? They took some blood, labelled it, and packed the vials neatly into a plastic box that whizzed off on a trolley.

So much of him, circulating in unknown parts of the hospital.

Sophia nods, and then remembers. Doctor said something about a mechanical heart. I got Gu Ma to say you’d never wanted one – This was an option they’d been offered in Singapore, when it became clear Nicholas did not meet the criteria for the transplant waiting list. It seemed plausible at first. What is the heart except a pump? What does it do that a machine cannot? But this would only ever be a temporary measure, and he didn’t want to live a patchwork life, buying one year at a time, never knowing how much longer—

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They already have this information, he says. They keep asking me the same questions. I hope there isn’t— Gu Ma says nothing will go wrong. You’re a textbook case. The aunt works with livers, but knows someone in the heart work-unit and managed to get Nicholas admitted that way. As long as we’re able to pay, they’ll do a good job for you.

They slip into another silence. She straightens his bedspread, which is too short for him; his feet stick out. She notices his toenails need cutting, but has not brought clippers. When the sunlight has gone she puts on the light, which shows up stained linoleum, grimy salmon-pink walls.

She has never actually seen a cockroach in the building, but suspects they lurk out of sight.

When Nicholas collapsed, her first thought was this must be one of his opaque practical jokes, embarrassing her in the middle of IKEA. She stood helpless, cross, until people came running. A store assistant started CPR. Understanding only came when the ambulance arrived. She sat in the back, thinking, This doesn’t happen to people like us.

How long ago was that? Months? Weeks? So hard to pin time down in the eternal summer of Singapore. She sometimes passes on news of the outside world – a new Goldman Sachs outrage, some faraway natural disaster – which he contrives to seem interested in, but really, the world has shrunk to the two of them: just these walls, just the stubborn passages inside his heart which will not function as they should.

We’re so lucky Gu Ma brought us here, she says ritualistically, unsure whether she is trying to arouse gratitude in herself, or merely to appear grateful so the universe will not take even this chance away from them.

Yes, says Nicholas. Very lucky. They could never, on their own, have negotiated their way into this hospital, not without the aunt to speak to certain people, to scribble her way through swathes of paperwork with the élan of someone who’s lived her life in a low-tech bureaucracy.

They play a word-hunt game on her iPad and Nicholas cheats flagrantly, which she pretends not to notice. It is a relief when Nurse comes to tell her to please leave, come again tomorrow. Sophia kisses her husband’s dry lips and joins the families clustering in the hallways, laughing and shouting at children to stop running. Her insides are heavy, as if the grey

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sky outside has taken up residence in her. She is somehow unable to fit into the rhythm of the people around her, and they keep bumping into her.

Her phone rings as she reaches the car park. She knows it will be the aunt, and breathes in-out rapidly three times before pressing ‘answer’. Gu Ma? Finished? Can’t pick you up today. Meeting.

The aunt has a lot of meetings. Sophia has not been able to decipher what these might be – something to do with the Party? She does not want to know.

That’s fine, she says. I’ll take a taxi. She remembers to use the proper Mandarin word, ‘gongche’, not the Singaporean ‘deshi’ – a bastardisation of the English.

Don’t tell the driver where you’re from.

I’ll just say I’m from the South. The aunt insists Beijing taxi drivers, being rogues, will overcharge her mercilessly if they find out she is foreign.

Don’t know what time I’ll be back. Eat without me.

Yes. Sophia hesitates, but the words bubble up. Gu Ma, will he be all right?

The aunt sniffs. Don’t worry for nothing. Old Cheng will do a good job.

He’s done so many hearts over the years – for him, it’s just like putting a new battery in your alarm clock. Old Cheng is the former colleague. Sophia isn’t sure how they are connected. Campmates in the time of reeducation?

Something like that.

Thank you, says Sophia to the click of the aunt hanging up.

The sky is inky blue as she walks round the front of the building. The roadside trees are sharp silhouettes. She thinks of the Chinese word ‘qing’, which means something between black and green: the exact colour of a tree at dusk.

That was a good phone call. Talking to the aunt is an obstacle course, especially with her limited Mandarin. She counts a conversation successful if it passes without real awkwardness on either side. It doesn’t help that she barely knows the aunt – their families were only able to get back in touch after China opened its borders in the eighties. She has a childhood

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memory of a loud-voiced woman visiting once, her clothes plain and washed thin, smelling of unaired rooms. She is in her sixties now, a squat figure with formidable powers of persuasion.

It can’t have been easy being a female doctor, and perhaps this is why the aunt never married. Sophia knows she should show an interest, but can’t find the energy to ask questions, and there are always more pressing things: Nicholas’s food, Nicholas’s medicine. She remembers her father once saying something about high-powered friends, how she could have risen higher if not for political factions – but this is part of the wall of unknowing that now surrounds Sophia: China, the aunt’s past, Nicholas’s illness. Each overwhelming, too large to contemplate.

Outside the hospital, there’s a sculpture on a tall pedestal. High overhead, two bronze hands clasp, each the size of a man’s head, the lower hand clearly being pulled from danger. The upper hand is fringed with the edge of a sleeve, on which it is just possible to make out the emblem of a five-pointed star.

Her own hands clasped for warmth, Sophia walks to the pavement.

Even though winter is supposed to be on its way out, the air is chilly. She shivers as she checks that her bags are all there. A man is selling roast chestnuts nearby, his brazier exuding charred, smoky fumes. If only I could be saved, she thinks, stretching her arm out into the road to stop a taxi.

At two in the morning, the concrete walls begin to sweat. They must turn off the heating at night for the building to chill so rapidly. This is Nicholas’s worst time, when he gives up trying to force himself into sleep. Perhaps it is better this way, rather than sleeping through what could be his last hours of life.

He tries to divert his mind but now it slips into well-travelled lines. If he dies on the table; or if he lives, but is no better off than before; or if they magically remake him the way he was before, strong and whole, and he can go home! None of these possibilities feels real. There seems no reason he shouldn’t be here forever, in this dank bunker of a room, listening to the coughs seeping in from adjacent wards.

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Most of all, it seems inconceivable that a stranger’s organ will beat inside his chest. He has spent the day visualising the heart of each person around him, doctors, cleaners, even Sophia – stripping away the layers; skin and bone and fat, laying bare the dark red core. He imagines scalpels filching one swollen muscle, neatly replacing it with another.

It has been a year of strangeness. The blank disbelief on Sophia’s face as they stretchered him through IKEA. All the way to the hospital, she squeezed his hand – though she says it’s impossible he could remember this; he didn’t recover consciousness until later that afternoon. Now he keeps his recollections to himself.

His vocabulary has expanded over this year. He has learnt the precise medical terms for each of his symptoms – the heaviness keeping him awake is pulmonary oedema, his weak heart no longer able to pump the fluid from his lungs. He knows the difference between aortic and ventricular aneurysms. Some of this comes from doctors, but also hearsay, piles of medical journals and, most of all, the Internet. The last few days have been a release – no Wi-Fi at the hospital, preventing Sophia even from reading out good wishes on Facebook: the deadening parade of friends who feel they ought to say something.

He makes a list in his head of people who might miss him. He has no family to speak of. Sophia, of course – but for how long? And friends – but again, he can think of only a couple he would want in the room right now. Can he remember the names of all thirty-four MBA classmates, all twenty-seven people from his college choir? How many of them will remember him?

But this is morbid. He reaches for his bedside water bottle before remembering it has been taken away, the nurses placing their hands firmly across their mouths in a gesture of abstinence. He remembers an episode from his childhood: their family cat wasn’t supposed to eat anything the night before spaying, but jumped up on the breakfast table and snatched a scrap of food. They took it to the vet anyway, and it died under anaesthetic, choking to death on regurgitated ham.

If Sophia were here – and now he feels resentful that she is not. She would have stayed, but he sent her away. He couldn’t allow it. He’d be fine: he was a big boy. All the things he felt obliged to say. And so she’s

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spending another night on the aunt’s creaky sofa, probably little more comfortable than on a plastic hospital chair. He feels she might have offered one more time.

And once again his mind fills with Sophia. If she were here, if she were to attain one of her rare periods of calm – when she is still, her outline no longer flickering, her voice suddenly gentle. If she would just pull her fingers through his hair, just once, knead the precise spot on his neck that makes all the tension leave his body. Tears prickle at his eyes and he is horrified. To be sniffling like a schoolboy when he will see her tomorrow!

He imagines himself whole again. Perhaps a year, Doctor said – at least according to Sophia’s translation, which he mistrusts. He suspects her of eliding inconvenient statements, glossing over words she does not understand. At her school, she once told him, it was fashionable to speak Mandarin badly, to flaunt ultra-fluent English – and he has noticed her anxious, furrowed concentration when Doctor speaks.

Nicholas is still a young man with almost all his hair, but must privately acknowledge his outline is not as firm as it once was. He runs his hands over his belly, comfortably flat now he is lying down, and wonders if this degradation is the result of a year of no gym, no five-a-side – or the inevitable decline of a man in his middle thirties, the first supports giving way before the entire edifice collapses. When I am strong again, he promises, I will start jogging.

The wall clock is barely visible. He squints through the gloom, trying to distinguish the minute hand from shadow. Is it before or after three?

He doesn’t want to turn on the light and bring himself to full wakefulness. At least in the dark he can glide along the surface of consciousness.

Several times now he has felt a shift, as if he’d fallen into a stretch of light sleep, or at least had his mind empty momentarily.

This is his eighth night in Beijing, a city he has visited many times before, but never really seen. His memories are mostly of the insides of buildings – meeting rooms, cocktail bars. A world of work that once seemed barely tolerable, a laughable exercise in moneymaking until real success found him. Now he finds he cannot wait to get back: to knot his tie, step into polished shoes, allow the numbers to run through his brain, familiar as slipping into a warm bath.

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He has been out with Sophia only once here, on a day when the low winter sunlight seemed too enticing to ignore. They took a taxi to one of the large parks, full of humanity even on such a cold day. Huai Hai Gong Yuan, Sophia read doubtfully off the sign at the entrance. ‘Hai’ is ‘sea’.

Maybe that’s the lake? His skin was grey in full daylight: actually grey.

The afternoon was a disaster. Sophia’s brittle cheerfulness gave way and she snapped at him for making fun of a woman’s hair. She probably doesn’t speak English, he protested, but she was already marching stiffly ahead. He was in hospital slippers, which forced him to shuffle like an old man. Next time, he resolved, he would make an effort and put on lace-up shoes. Only Sophia never offered to take him out again.

The walls feel impenetrable. He has never felt so constrained. Both alone and with Sophia, he has always been able to board a plane to take him where he needed to be. The first sealed door wasn’t actually the illness; it was being told by the hospital in Singapore that he was considered a poor candidate for a transplant; it was learning from a harassed-sounding woman in a Newcastle call-centre that, having lived outside the UK for so long, he was no longer eligible for NHS treatment. The cost of a private operation made his eyes widen. Why hadn’t they saved more? Or bothered taking out insurance?

He remembers his watch and rummages for it in the drawer. It is designed for diving and lights up at the touch of a button. A minute after four. He must surely have slept a little, even if he wasn’t aware of it.

He can’t have been up all these hours, chasing thoughts in circles. Even now the lines in his head will not stay orderly; they bend and twist around each other. This is wrong. He isn’t supposed to be agitated. Even though he hasn’t smoked since university, he desperately wants a cigarette.

It is so still, the quietest hour of the night. He thinks he can hear his own heart: normal, no stutter, just a regular thud. What will they do with it? A bin full of medical waste somewhere, and— his imagination fails him. Presumably the risk of contamination rules out landfill, so the incinerator? All those scraps of bodies: fat melting, little hairs catching fire, igniting skin.

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He feels a knot inside him dissolve as if made of sugar, and he is calm.

The city letting out its breath, a pause before it draws the next. For the first time in weeks, there is no pain between his shoulder blades. This may be the resignation of a condemned man approaching the scaffold, but there is strength in it too. You can do nothing further to me, he thinks.

After the trapdoor opens, gravity takes over.

A bubble of noise just outside his door: creaking, rattling wheels and rough voices. He is routinely woken just before dawn by the cleaners, who will not enter his room till much later but announce their presence, distributing cleaning supplies at regular intervals along the corridor like peeing dogs marking their territory. They chatter constantly, louder than can possibly be necessary. Sophia may be hesitant when she speaks Mandarin, but at least her tone is pleasantly modulated, obviously educated.

He closes his eyes for a moment, and when he opens them again the corridor is silent and sunlight has appeared on the wall, the yellow of broken egg finger-streaked through Venetian blinds. Something unhooks inside him – excitement from a past life. Spring is on its way. He has lived in Singapore too long, absorbed too much of its constant tropical sun. Now he remembers the pleasure of seasons, the sudden lightness of a coat-free afternoon.

Nicholas feels his anger slip away. It isn’t fair that his parents are dead, that he is alone in this box of patchy walls, his own body betraying him.

But he lets this drift away, and soon it is beyond his field of vision.

Sophia’s moods, her maddening aunt, the head-drilling voices of the cleaning staff – one after another they float into darkness. He has always been the kind of man who builds up quiet rage over weeks. Not now. He inches a toe forward until it just touches the pool of sun, convinced he feels a gradual warmth blossom over his body.

By the time the nurse comes in – without knocking, as usual – he is able to watch her placidly. She seems unnerved by his attempt at a smile.

There are a few things she must do – take his temperature, check his chart – and she goes through them studiously, as if he is a puzzle requiring great attention to solve.

Perhaps it is the sleepless night, but the next hour passes in a fog. He is wheeled down a corridor and his chest is shaved. So many lights. They

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flare above his head, making squiggles across his retina. Each time he opens his eyes, his surroundings have shifted. Everyone is speaking, but probably not to him. Sophia flickers past, though later he can’t remember if his eyes were open or shut when he saw her. They inject various liquids into him. He feels oddly little pain, then none at all.

Soon you will be going home, says the aunt. Sophia jumps. She’s been staring out the car window. Maybe, she replies. Probably. It depends what Doctor says.

I’ve enjoyed having you here. The aunt is unusually abstracted today, not shouting at other drivers, even though they have been stuck in traffic for forty minutes and motorcycles keep veering close enough to threaten her wing mirror.

We’ll visit again. There is more that Sophia wants to add – how grateful she is, how sorry she doesn’t know the aunt better – but the right words fail to come. There must be polite formulae for these situations. I should have watched more TV, she thinks. How many soap opera scenes there must be of awkward car journeys, family members reaching tentatively towards each other – stock phrases used by lazy screenwriters.

Instead she says, Gu Ma— and then stops. She should not, but the question comes unbidden. Are you sure everything’s going to be okay?

The older woman shows no exasperation at being asked again, for the third time since breakfast. Of course, right as rain, she says, her intonation and phrasing consistent as a fairy tale. Why are you so worried?

You hear so many things— Don’t listen to things.

I read on the Internet about someone dying. He had cancer and they gave him a new liver, but he died later. It turned out the liver was HIV positive.

The aunt laughs. That might happen at a private clinic. At this hospital they choose good organs. When I was still on the work-unit, we had to match the tissue samples very carefully, to make sure everything was compatible before the executions went ahead. The patients who came through us always made full recoveries.

Sophia isn’t sure she has understood correctly. Executions?

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The condemned prisoners were tested several times, everyone on death row, until we found something suitable. So much work. We had to inject them with an anti-coagulant before they were shot.

I didn’t – I thought it was car accidents, or brain death – in most countries— Is it? Well, not in China. Who wants to meet their ancestors with half their insides missing?

A swoosh of relief, as the traffic starts to move again. The aunt nudges the car forward, jaggedly overtaking. Sophia wonders if she already knew this. Half-remembered magazine articles about forged signatures on consent forms, men and women appearing in court with jaws wired shut to prevent them speaking out. Why did she think this had nothing to do with her?

The aunt seems to guess what is bothering her. You shouldn’t feel guilty.

These are all people who’ve done bad things. This way at least they can pay something back to society.

But how— and again, her limited vocabulary trips her up. How can someone in that position really consent? Did our heart, the one now in my husband’s chest— But there are no words in any language to ask such a question. She tries not to think what a short wait they had for a match.

Don’t think about it, says the aunt. I knew a lot of comrades who were sent to work in the abattoirs during re-education. They stopped eating meat after that. It’s best not to think about it.

They are moving at speed now, the traffic suddenly smooth again.

Buildings streak past, concrete slabs studded with neon signs. Between bright pink beauty parlour hoardings and homely restaurant names, familiar images appear: Starbucks, the Gap, Taco Bell, English names replaced by Chinese characters but still instantly recognisable. I could go into a shopping centre and pretend I’m home, she thinks.

For the first time since coming here, she allows herself to imagine their Tanjong Pagar apartment. Perhaps in just a few days – stepping out of the lift, with their luggage. Opening the familiar door. Her mother’s domestic helper comes round twice a week, so there’d be no dust, just the faint lemon scent of floor polish. They’d walk slowly through the

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rooms as if to reclaim possession. Turn on the air-conditioning. And then?

She has not experienced this since school: an event so ominous it becomes impossible to see beyond, the quiet desolation of the day after your last exam. Relief, of course, but also a dull ache: absence, like a missing tooth.

The aunt is speaking again, something about messages to pass on to her mother, her cousins. This is a family visit, and now that the main complication is over, there are protocols to negotiate, souvenirs to be bought. Sophia nods at the right moments. She will do this, but already she knows this is all, these messages from the aunt are the last real contact they will have. The Chinese do not send cards at Christmas, so there is not even that. Will she call the aunt, if she and Nicholas find themselves back in Beijing at some point? Well, perhaps, depending on their schedule.

So awkward for Nicholas, who doesn’t speak a word of Mandarin.

They parallel park on a side street. A warden comes over and mechanically recites: Ten yuan for the first hour, five for each subsequent half hour.

The aunt cuts him off. I’ll give you twenty, just let me park here as long as I want. They haggle and settle on twenty-five, and he’ll keep an eye on the car for her.

It is not far to the hospital, but the walk there is littered with the usual hazards: uneven pavements that end abruptly, drivers who treat traffic lights as no more than suggestions. At one point they have to step out onto the road because the entire pavement is taken up by a donkeycart, from which an old couple are selling watermelons. Sophia follows closely behind the aunt, trusting in her to navigate the hostile terrain.

The safety wall before the hospital entrance is covered in earnest graffiti, made with marker pens rather than spray paint: some slogans that mean nothing to Sophia, and a great many phone numbers. She’d vaguely assumed these were prostitutes advertising. Now, she realises, most of them are preceded by the same single character: ‘shen’. Kidney.

Something gives way around the level of Sophia’s own kidneys, some kind of air lock that suddenly empties her body of air, the rush of it leaving her barely able to stand. For a moment she cannot draw breath, and she must put a hand on the sliding doors to steady herself. Not now. Deal

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with this later. Her chin snaps up, and she makes the effort to pull herself upright.

She becomes aware the aunt has said something. Pardon?

I’ll let you see him alone, says the aunt again. Don’t worry about me. I’ll go have a chat with Old Cheng.

Gu Ma – thank you. This seems inadequate, but the older woman nods firmly, reassuringly, and trots off into the depths of the hospital.

Sophia watches her aunt’s sturdy legs and broad back, mind filling with unexpected tenderness.

All the way up the stairs, Sophia studies everyone she passes, trying to work out who is grieving, who is hopeful, what each person must long for. Something like a song grows inside her, a lightness that breaks gradually, step after step. By the time she reaches Nicholas’s floor, she is humming. There is queasiness beneath this, the rumble of upset waiting to make itself known, but she is able to push it far down and skate over its surface. The nurses smile politely as they pass her in the corridor and she decides they are not so bad after all, these girls.

When she opens the door, Nicholas is in bed, the television on, a scene so familiar she feels for a second the jolting fear that nothing has changed. But no, she’s been watching him all week through the glass window, bandaged and blurry from anaesthetic. Now he is finally out of Intensive Care. Now she can approach.

He looks up when she comes in. They warned me that the anti-rejection meds might make me go a bit funny. If I seem odd, it’s temporary.

She cannot speak. Already he is like his old self, confident, his dark blue eyes no longer vulnerable. There will be months of therapy and years of pills, she knows, and nothing can be certain. Yet the air of fearfulness that cloaked them for months is dispelled. Light through grey clouds. She cannot possibly say anything to break the joy of this moment.

What would be the point? What can they do now, either of them?

Gu Ma’s here, she says. She’ll come and say hello in a bit. Maybe – when you feel up to it – we should take her out for a meal.

Of course. His voice is smooth with politeness. She’s done so much for us.

I’ll ask her to pick a restaurant. She must know somewhere nice. So easy to slip into practicalities.

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A strange new animal has taken up residence inside Sophia, and she will have to learn to reach an accommodation with it. It only rears its head if looked at directly, but otherwise remains dormant, only noticeable from its cold weight against her gut. The whole of this grey city seems bound up in that weight. She suddenly wants, more than anything, to feel Nicholas’s warmth along the length of her body.

How are you? she says, in a way that requires no answer, and abandons her chair to snuggle next to him. The bed is too narrow to accommodate them both, but just for a moment she wants to remember the familiar way they fit together, her chin against his shoulder. This is better. She runs her fingertips over the valley of his collarbone, convincing herself he is real. The thickest bandages have come off and now there is only a swathe of gauze down the middle of his chest. She is careful not to go anywhere near that, and the tender scar it hides.

They stay like that, watching television. Nicholas must be feeling better: the remote is in his hand and he is scrolling freely through the channels.

She translates, but before she is halfway through a sentence he has flipped again. They see scraps of game shows, overcooked period dramas, what appears to be a travelogue centred entirely on food.

He hovers for some time on a strange chat show, set outdoors. A man on a hard chair, in handcuffs, his head shaved. What is this? says Nicholas.

It takes Sophia a few seconds to work it out. They’re interviewing death row prisoners before execution. Asking what they’ve done, why they did it.

Nicholas laughs, a warm sound she hasn’t heard for too long. Brilliant. I’m surprised Geraldo hasn’t thought of it.

The interviewer is a youngish woman, very fashionable – feathery, cropped hair and a loose silky top. Do you repent? she asks. Are you even sorry?

The man looks down, unable to meet her eye. Of course I’m sorry.

What would you say to the parents, if they were here? All those families?

And now Sophia recognises him. He has been on the front page of every newspaper, along with his colleagues – the men and women in charge of the company that cut their milk powder with melamine, national villains, baby-murderers. No wonder the interviewer looks at him with such contempt.

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Poor bastard, says Nicholas. Why would anyone agree to this? I suppose he’ll be languishing in his cell now. At least he got his fifteen minutes.

Sophia does not tell him the program is a repeat, that the man is already dead, executed by a bullet through the right side of his chest. Always the right side, the aunt said, so as not to damage— Those innocent children! hectors the interviewer. The only hopes of their families – no siblings, because of our unique national circumstances. Such cruelty. A single tear glistens in the corner of an eye. She dabs it away, examines her fingertip.

We didn’t intend this, says the man quietly. We just wanted to cut costs to avoid bankruptcy. No one was meant to— His voice wisps away along with his face. Nicholas has pressed the button, and they are now on a cooking program. Strange, strange country, he says. I can’t wait to get home.

And they are silent again, watching the presenter demonstrate the preparation of Chongqing hotpot. Not that they will ever try this; within easy reach of the Tanjong Pagar flat there are three restaurants that serve excellent Chongqing hotpot. Still, it is fun to watch. Sophia continues to rest her head against the side of Nicholas’s chest, carefully avoiding the scar, enjoying the rise and fall, and that ferocious thumping, as if something inside is struggling to get out.

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The Sinking City The B ill Sinking Tarrant City

Bill Tarrant

L

uar Batang is one of the oldest communities in Jakarta. It dates back to the seventeenth century when a settlement grew around a post levying tolls on fishing boats sailing up the Ciliwung River and into the city’s canal system. The Ciliwung, the largest of the thirteen rivers that flow through Jakarta, doesn’t make it down to Luar Batang anymore.

The river starts its journey on the slopes of a volcano south of the Indonesian capital and flows through the heart of one of the world’s most densely populated cities. But it no longer spills into Jakarta Bay because, for the final mile or so of its course, the river would have to defy gravity and flow upward to discharge its waters into the sea.

Jakarta is sinking. This city of almost thirty million people squats on a swampy plain that has sunk four metres over the past three decades. It has essentially turned into a bowl that deepens discernibly with each passing year and poses a threat to the city’s future existence.

Today the residents of Luar Batang live well below sea level. Yasmin, a resident in her mid-twenties, led me up a three-metre ladder to the top of the village wall, against which the muddy brown waters of the Java Sea gently lap on a pleasant day. Next to the fishing village is the 800year-old Sunda Kelapa harbour, where a rank of sharp-prowed wooden pinisi sailing ships stands majestically at anchor, still the mainstay of inter-island trade in the Indonesian archipelago.

This spot is ground sub-zero for the sinking city. It’s not only Luar Batang that is sinking, but also the channels of the Ciliwung and other rivers, along with the entire sprawl of Jakarta’s north coast – fishing

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ports, boatyards, markets, warehouses, fish farms, crowded slums and exclusive gated communities. And the forty-year-old seawall that is supposed to keep the Java Sea from inundating the Indonesian capital?

That’s sinking, too.

Unlike many of the neighbouring slums slowly subsiding along the coast, Luar Batang is a clean and relatively prosperous place, thanks to its famous mosque, established in the eighteenth century by an Arab trader, and its historical status as one of the city’s first settlements. Its future, though, is highly uncertain. Like many people who live in proximity to constant danger, Yasmin, who helps run a family food stall, shrugs off the possibility of catastrophic floods: ‘I’m not scared, because I’m used to it. The only time I worry is during the rainy season, because the drainage system doesn’t work,’ she says, looking sceptically at one of the water pumps stashed in every alleyway of the kampong, testament to the everworsening floods. She expects one day she and her neighbours in Luar Batang will have to move.

Jakarta is in danger of drowning from floods and rising seas, paradoxically because water is disappearing from the ground underneath.

Extraction of groundwater causes layers of rock and sediment to pancake slowly on top of each other. Most Jakarta residents and businesses suck water up through wells drilled into shallow underground aquifers, according to city data. Fook Chuan Eng, senior water and sanitation specialist with the World Bank, who oversees a US$189 million floodmitigation project for the city, compares Jakarta’s basin to a chunk of Swiss cheese. ‘Groundwater extraction is unparalleled for a city of this size,’ he said. ‘People are digging deeper and deeper, and the ground is collapsing.’

There’s that, and the sheer weight of Jakarta’s urban sprawl crushing the porous ground underneath, Fook tells me, waving from his twelfthstorey office at the thickening forest of glass and steel high-rise towers outside that has replaced Jakarta’s traditional cityscape of red-tile-roofed bungalows and double storey shop houses. Jakarta as a whole is sinking at a rate of three inches a year, far outpacing the one-third of an inch annual rise in mean sea level in the area. The northern coast, however, is sinking at double the rate of the rest of the city – by an average of six

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inches a year and, in some places, as much as ten to eleven, according to a ten-year study by a team of geodynamics experts from the Institute of Technology Bandung. Today, forty per cent of Jakarta is below sea level.

Other Asia megacities are also dealing with severe subsidence: Manila is sinking at a rate of approximately three and a half inches a year. Ho Chi Minh City is subsiding three inches a year and Bangkok by approximately an inch. This has been happening even as populations around the world have tended to concentrate along low-lying coastal land. In 2010, an estimated 724 million people around the world lived in what researchers consider low-elevation coastal zones – coastal areas ten metres or less above sea level.

For this sizable mass of humanity courting danger at the waters’ edge means worsening impacts from storms and floods. The frequency of these events is rising as well. Recorded floods and severe storms in Southeast Asia have increased sixfold, from fewer than twenty between 1960 and 1969 to nearly 120 between 2000 and 2008, according to an Asian Development Bank study.

Little can be done to halt the slow increase in sea levels. Nor has Jakarta had much success in stemming the arrival of migrants from the provinces who squat illegally along the coast. It is possible, though, to stop subsidence. Jakarta has regulations limiting the amount of water that can be extracted daily from licensed wells. A public-awareness campaign on television urges viewers to ‘save groundwater for the sake of our nation’.

But enforcement is weak, and illegal wells are rife in the city. The city has a moratorium on new mall construction, mainly to ease notorious traffic congestion, but has otherwise done little over the years to temper the building spree that weighs heavily on the ground below.

A February 2007 storm was a tipping point, stirring the government to act with more urgency. A strong monsoon storm coinciding with a high tide overwhelmed ramshackle coastal defences, pushing a wall of dark and filthy water from Jakarta Bay into the capital. It was the first time a storm surge from the sea had flooded the city. Nearly half of Jakarta was covered by as much as four metres of muddy water. At least seventysix people were killed, and 590,000 were left homeless. The cost of damages reached US$544 million. As Jakarta cleaned up, then-President

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Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono formed a task force to come up with a strategy to deal with more frequent flooding. One option discussed was to move the overcrowded capital to higher elevations southeast of the city or to another island altogether. Another thought was simply to abandon the old city district of north Jakarta.

Both ideas were dismissed. Jakarta is the economic hub of Indonesia, contributing twenty per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Allowing the sea to claim forty per cent of the capital city, home to nearly half of Jakarta’s population, was unthinkable, said Robert Sianipar, a top official from the Coordinating Ministry of Economic Affairs, which convened the task force. ‘If we abandon north Jakarta, that would cost US$220 billion in assets – not to count the number of people and productivity that would have to be replaced.’ The task force decided to focus on bolstering coastal defences and refurbishing the crumbling flood canal system. It was the former colonial power, the Netherlands, that offered technical assistance. Perhaps no other country in the world has learned how to live so effectively below sea level; the Dutch also built the canal system for the old colonial city of Batavia, before the city was renamed Jakarta after independence.

As a first step, the height of the existing twenty-mile seawall was raised in 2008. But as the existing wall slips under the waves, it’s obvious that this measure offers little protection against another big storm surge, or even a moderately high spring tide. At high tide in some places, the old seawall can barely be seen poking above the water’s surface, both because the sea is rising and because the wall itself is sinking into soft alluvial sediments. The World Bank warned in a 2012 report that catastrophic floods would soon become routine in Jakarta, ‘resulting in severe socioeconomic damage’.

The task force was still trying to decide on an overall strategy when the World Bank’s prediction came true in January 2013: parts of the city were submerged under two metres of water after a heavy monsoon storm. Days later, President Yudhoyono ordered the task force to take a bolder approach.

A year later, the task force came up with the ‘National Capital Integrated Coastal Development Master Plan’, which was soon dubbed the

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‘Giant Sea Wall’ or the ‘Great Garuda’, for its resemblance from the air to the bird-god of Hindu mythology that is Indonesia’s national symbol.

The Great Sea Wall was launched in October 2014 – two weeks before incoming president and popular former Jakarta governor Joko Widodo was sworn in. The centrepiece of the plan will be an outer seawall built on reclaimed land several miles out in Jakarta Bay. A new ‘Waterfront City’, with office towers, hotels and luxury housing, will be built atop Garuda complex, covering up to 10,000 acres – that’s nearly half the size of Manhattan. Selling real estate on the wall is expected to be the main financing vehicle for the wall itself, which would be completed by 2022.

Meeting that deadline ‘will be one of the most challenging hydraulic civil works that has been carried out worldwide’, the Master Plan says. The first phase of the project is a $2 billion, twenty-mile inner seawall now being built in front of the village of Muara Baru. The inner seawall is aimed at buying time, holding off another inundation until the Great Garuda is built, providing long-term protection.

The Great Garuda won’t, however, restore the natural flow of some of the sinking city’s thirteen rivers and various canals into Jakarta Bay. Some of these channels drain into floodwater retention lakes, magnets for new migrants from outlying provinces who squat illegally around their perimeters. Huge pumping stations then lift the highly polluted water from these lakes the last few hundred yards into Jakarta Bay. More and bigger such lakes will soon be needed to pump out water from the other rivers and canals that will no longer be able to discharge into the Bay in the coming years. ‘You’re talking about pumping lakes up to a hundred square kilometres,’ said Victor Coenen, a geologist by training, who was part of the Dutch water management team. ‘Where do you find room for that in a densely populated city?’

The Great Garuda would solve that problem by creating a single gigantic storage lake in Jakarta Bay, enclosed by the inner and outer seawalls and fed by giant pumping stations onshore. Planners even envision that this reservoir will one day become a sustainable source of drinking water for the city. That seems like a stunning ambition. Jakarta would first have to build massive wastewater treatment and water purification plants. Until that happens, the new pumping stations would spew an un-

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ending stream of toxic swill and rubbish from some of the world’s most polluted rivers and canals into the reservoir of the Great Garuda.

This scenario fuels criticism of the project. Sceptics are afraid that it would turn into a giant septic tank behind the Giant Sea Wall. Jakarta Governor Basuki ‘Ahok’ Tjahaja Purnama, who took over from Widodo, has become one of the biggest critics. ‘I honestly have doubts about (the Giant Sea Wall),’ he told an audience of hydrologists last October.

‘Flushing the mud will be very problematic.’

It’s hardly a new problem for Indonesia’s capital. Colonial Batavia was styled ‘the Queen of the East’ for its distinctive colonial architecture and tree-lined canals. Even then, closer inspection of the coast revealed ‘a dismal succession of stinking mud-banks, filthy bogs and stagnant pools [that] announces to more senses than one the poisonous nature of this dreadful climate,’ British writer John Joseph Stockdale observed in his 1811 book, Island of Java.

Then as now, ‘stagnant canals’ functioned as open sewers and exhaled ‘an intolerable stench’. In the wet season, ‘those reservoirs of corrupted water overflow their banks in the lower part of town, and fill the lower storeys of the houses where they leave behind an inconceivable quantity of slime and earth’.

Today, the city has just one small wastewater treatment plant that serves the central business district. Almost everyone uses septic tanks or dumps waste into neighbourhood sewers that flow into the canal system. The slime has accumulated over the centuries in the canals, and their embankments have risen in a failing effort to contain the floodwaters. The canals that flow to the sea or into the coastal retention ponds have lost up to seventy-five per cent of their capacity.

The city is near the end of a three-year project to deepen the canals and increase the height of their walls. But the homes along their banks often lie below the level of the canals now, leaving no escape in the event of a flood.

A city with an extensive canal system and a tropical monsoon climate should not suffer a water shortage. Yet only about a quarter of Jakarta’s population is connected to the city’s piped water system. Half the population draws water from wells, and the other quarter buy fresh

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water from vendors. Some city residents who could have access to piped water prefer to use groundwater because connection fees – amounting to a month’s minimum wage – and additional charges on the bill make it much more expensive than sinking a backyard well.

Piped water is also unpopular because it is often filthy when it comes out of the tap. There’s a good reason for that: half of Jakarta’s water supply comes from the basin of the Citarum River, the largest in West Java, which the Asia Development Bank has dubbed ‘the world’s dirtiest river’.

The Citarum is so clogged with industrial and agricultural effluents and waste from the teeming settlements along its banks that in places during the dry season it almost seems like you could walk the river. Well-water is hardly better. Seventy per cent of the wells in the city are contaminated

by E. coli bacteria from leaking septic tanks, according to a study conducted by the city government. The water crisis has been a boon to the increasing ranks of water vendors who drag long carts filled with five-gallon jerry cans of water around the kampongs. One jerry can costs about four US cents.

Jakarta has recently tried another tack in its struggle with water: evicting settlers to create green areas along the coast. Tens of thousands of squatters occupy large swathes of the Muara Baru village, behind the seawall and around a nearby retention pond – a catchment for flood waters and also the end point for some of the rivers and channels that are backing up in the soggy, sinking bowl that Jakarta has become. They scavenge debris from the channels, collect green mussels or shrimp from the dirty water, or pick up work in the boatyards.

Yet Muara Baru, home to more than 100,000 people, is now at least six feet below sea level, and residents like Rahmawati, a mother of two small children, gaze upward from their front stoops to view the sea.

‘When there’s a high tide, the ships float almost at the same height as the seawall – we can see the ships from here,’ said Rahmawati who, like many Indonesians, goes by one name. Flooding from overflowing rivers and canals in the area is an annual event that forces Rahmawati and the rest of the kampong to evacuate to public buildings nearby. High-water marks from the last big flood, in 2013, are still visible on the walls of the kampong.

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Every year the floods come, people evacuate to public buildings and the village sinks some more. Even so, says Sukiman, a father of three, ‘It’s not that bad: we can live here.’

Reuters published a different version of this story in December 2014.

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Song Lin Poetry

translated by Li Dong

Forgetting 1.

The sundial heads that receded in secret.

Whose metre drew out their false curves?

The altar of your eyes was sunken facing an immense building of tomorrow when a comet hit muxidi.* If I were you, you could be him: a mantissa her last glance crossed the bellowing of the deer.

2.

The red homonym of snow, spewing flowers, blooming painlessly a flower triggered the opening non-flower of death which was real. It climbed onto your name under shrubs in spasm – prop-like toes were painted in the black salt of fireflies and were carried away like this very much like the scenes of the recent earthquake.

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3.

Lightning-fast flames from the machine guns kissed every tender face. The morning taps washed over and over night’s ashes.

The scabs would turn into stalagmites, in the heart a missing person came by, a person missing for too long, his thin arms looking like Don Quixote’s.

Countdown time was up. Please read, read like the second hand of the clock in the rattling of tracks, what has been mired in confrontation for a thousand years.

* An important access point into central Beijing from the west suburbs. On June 4, 1989 the greatest number of casualties occurred here.

Jiaocheng, 1970 The strait in anguish. Severe typhoons repeatedly made landfall.

The loudspeaker replaced the moon, preaching to the sky the philosophy of war.

The longan trees, like the blind, stood on the low hillocks, nothing to look forward to. The crabs blew bubbles, still living in their prehistoric recklessness.

Cabins of the Fuzhou boat people leaned against dark shoals.

I was eleven, my face a country moth, dirty-blond hair, matted. On a golden shell-case that I found I played the national anthem and the Red Youngsters song.

I remember people streaming to watch executions in the suburb like a flood, the crowd stamped on each other, wild with joy as if running for life, more frantic than during air-defence exercises.

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I remember those summer nights, endless street wanderings.

Someone accused me (of course to my parents) of sneaking into the People’s Theatre over the wall to see a model opera – without buying a ticket! Adults splashed water to cool down summer heat; children were learning how to ‘ride a plane’ in the alleyways.

I had no evidence, but I knew among my parents’ comrades, there must have been an informer.

He wore sneakers, like a robust athletics teacher.

He stared at me, came closer. His fingernail flicked: faster than a grasshopper he flicked the melancholy pimple on my forehead.

Notes from South Xinjiang 1. The reckless god reads the braille of the desert.

2. One night in Kupa, I received a telegram from Mars: there were traces of water.

3. Dead rivers looked like twisted mummies in the gallery of the sky.

4. Language, dust of dust, flies on the long, long road.

5. An oar stands before the boat-shaped coffin. Sailors of the desert sea, tell me, what kind of sail do you dream of?

6. Business caravans head east, and west. The sun bakes eyebrows, beards and crusty pancakes.

7. Go. Once you lie down, you run the risk of being air-dried.

8. From one invisible border to another, I count those disappeared countries.

9. A silkworm once dreamed of Rome; or rather, Rome once dreamed of a silkworm.

10. Breeze in the dense forest, homonym of silk and porcelain.

11. The Han princess Liu Xijun – Sappho of Wusun country – was married to the vast and endless homesickness.

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12. Under the statue of Kumarajiva, I thought: Perhaps his intelligible translation saved Buddhism.

13. On their pilgrimage to Chang’an, the three Buddhist masters walked in the opposite direction to the three wise men.

14. If Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty knew that the Ferghana horse was a horse with a disease, would the history of Ferghana be re-written?

15. The donors depicted on the murals have thin eyebrows.

16. Stupa – navigation system of the desert.

17. What a pity! Gan Ying saw the sea but did not know which one he saw.

18. Petals of the mandala – one five-baht coin after another.

19. The auricle of the crescent rises on the ruins where Xuanzang preached.

20. In the dark labyrinth of the karez, flowing water looks for bright vineyards.

21. Migration – from Sanskrit to Charian, Uighur to Chinese; over battlefields and millennia of forgetting, Maitrisimit flies into my vision like a phoenix.

22. Another Uighur muqam: alas the musailaisi wine, the ice-cold beauty, come quickly and rub out my burning desire for you!

23. In Kashgar, Shen Wei said to me: There are people wherever poplars grow.

The Sun and Rain of West Lake The Buddhist relics in the stupa shine at night. During the day they read the saying: The ferryman is opening a gate of water!

The once-forbidden inner lake now leaks spring light with the gift of a brief afternoon play of sun and rain.

From the rippling middle blows the homesick song of silkworms and moths – the sun spits threads in the clouds and weaves nets on the water.

I fish the red carp in your eyes – come ashore to hold fast this dazzling word.

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Poetry

The lake poets sit and drink up rainbows in the glass.

When wind smokes wave after wave of visitors to sleep, Su Xiaoxiao comes out of the grave and sings: where the clouds break, ecstasy after the rain, sigh for the late sun.

Twilight grinds West Lake into the most dazzling word lilacs whisper in your tresses; whispering, the stream of fish in your eyes swims into my arms.

I take out a letter, I rise to the solitary summit to watch you – like Zhu Yingtai, the willows by the bank put back on their maiden clothes and in a wedding dress of blue smoke, drift to night.

Your lotus heart grows on the water, you reincarnate as a woman and take me through every pavilion and every secret quarter.

Su Xiaoxiao was a legendary courtesan who lived during the Southern and Northern Dynasties and was buried by the West Lake.

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Contributors Contributor s

CHEN DONGDONG, a Shanghai native, was born in 1961 and graduated from the Shanghai Normal University. He began writing poetry in 1981 and his work is known for a highly textured quality of blending the classical tradition of lyricism with contemporary sensibilities. With a family background of music and theatre, the musicality in Chen Dongdong’s poetry is widely recognised by critics. His recent publications include Flowing Water (1998), Book of Summer • Unbanned Title (2011), and The Guide Map (2013).

CLARA CHOW is a Singaporean writer and journalist. Her short stories have appeared in CHA: An Asian Literary Review, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore (QLRS), Junoesq Literary Journal and Blunderbuss Magazine. She also contributes to The Straits Times and the South China Morning Post.

MONA DASH is of Indian origin and lives in London. She writes short stories and poetry and her work has been published internationally and anthologised widely. She has recently gained an MA in Creative Writing (with distinction) from the London Metropolitan University. Dawn-drops is her first collection of poetry (Writer’s Workshop, India). Her first book of fiction is represented by Red Ink literary agency. Her website is www.monadash.net.

MICHAEL MARTIN DAY is currently employed as an Associate Professor of literature and history at National University in San Diego, CA. A translator of Chinese poetry and fiction since 1984, he is a contributor to the Leiden-based poetry division of the Digital Archive for Chinese Studies (DACHS) website, where some of his poetry translations and related materials may be found.

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Contributors IMTIAZ DHARKER is a poet, artist and documentary filmmaker. Awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, her collections include Postcards from god, I speak for the devil and The terrorist at my table (published by Penguin India and Bloodaxe UK), Leaving Fingerprints and Over the Moon (Bloodaxe UK). She has been Poet in Residence at Cambridge University Library and has recently completed a series of poems based on the Archives of St Paul’s Cathedral.

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 (Random House, Simon & Schuster), was published in 2014.

SUZANNE KAMATA’s most recent novel, Screaming Divas, was published in 2014. She is currently working on a mother-daughter travel memoir, for which she received a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She teaches at the University of Tokushima in Japan and is an MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia. For more, see www.suzannekamata.com.

PHILLIP Y. KIM is a Korean American banker turned writer who lives in London. His debut novel, Nothing Gained (Penguin 2013), is a financial thriller that drew on his twenty-five years of experience as an investment banker in Asia. He is currently working on his second novel and short stories.

Phillip is the Business and Finance Director of the Asia Literary Review.

ANGELA SMITH KIRKMAN recently returned to Santa Fe in New Mexico from a two-year journey around the world with her husband and three young children. During the adventure, her family hiked the Inca Trail, rode camelback through the Sahara, caught swine flu in Istanbul and taught at a tribal school in Rajasthan. Stories from The Big Field Trip have been published in International Living Magazine and Eventus Magazine. Kirkman blogs at www.thebigfieldtrip.com.

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Contributors USHA KISHORE is an Indian-born British poet and translator, now resident on the Isle of Man. Her poetry is internationally published and anthologised

by Macmillan, Oxford University Press (UK) and Harper Collins India.

Kishore’s debut collection, On Manannan’s Isle, was published in 2014 with an Arts Council award and a Culture Vannin award. A second collection of poetry and a book of translations from the Sanskrit are forthcoming.

NATHAN LAUER is the author of the unpublished novel Bardo. He is an American writer living in Hong Kong. A selection of Lauer’s electronic music can be heard on SoundCloud at UnaUthOriZedReProductions. He is currently working on his second novel.

SHIRLEY LEE studied classics and Persian at Oxford and is currently writing a PhD on North Korea at Leiden University. Her articles, poetry and translations have been published in journals and anthologies including Wasafiri and Words Without Borders. Lee is the founding editor of New Focus International and edited and translated Jang Jin-sung’s Dear Leader (Random House, 2014).

LI DONG was born and raised in China. The Olive B. O’Connor Poet-inResidence from 2013–2014 at Colgate University, he has held residencies at Yaddo, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony and elsewhere. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Poor Claudia, Cincinnati Review, Kenyon Review and manuskripte (Austria, in German translation). Li is also Editor-at-Large (China) for the international translation journal Asymptote.

LI YAWEI was born in Chongqing in 1963. He is one of China’s most influential underground poets from the 1980s and is considered an important representative of Chinese poetry’s ‘New Generation’. He was Poet of the Year at the Chinese Literature Media Festival in 2006 and has won a number of poetry prizes, including the first Lu Xun Cultural Award in 2013.

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Contributors FRANK LIGHT adapted ‘Land of Light’ from an unpublished memoir, Adjust to Dust: On the Backroads of Southern Afghanistan. Other adaptations from that memoir have been accepted for publication in literary journals and anthologies, including War, Literature and the Arts, Make Literary Magazine and the Tahoma Literary Review. He worked at the US Department of State from 1978–2006. Now retired, his experience in Asia also includes time spent in Vietnam, Iran, and Laos.

LUO HUI has pursued literary studies in China, the United States and Canada. Currently a lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington, he writes miscellaneous prose and plays music in a local band. His translations of contemporary Chinese poetry have appeared in journals and anthologies in many parts of the world.

DENIS MAIR holds an MA in Chinese from Ohio State University and has taught at the University of Pennsylvania. His translations of modern Chinese poetry include works by Jidi Majia (Oklahoma University Press), Mai Cheng (Shearsman Books), Meng Lang (Waves Culture Media) and Luo Ying (Visor Press). Denis Mair’s own book of poetry, Man Cut in Wood, was published by Valley Contemporary Poets in Los Angeles.

REID MITCHELL is from New Orleans and since Hurricane Katrina in 2005 has spent much of his time in Hong Kong and China. A historian and novelist, he has taught at universities in Wuxi, Quanzhou and Beijing. He now teaches at the Center for Creative Writing at Sun Yat Sen University in Guangzhou. Mitchell’s poetry has been published in The Pedestal Magazine, Mascara Literary Review, Poetry Macao, Softblow, the Asia Literary Review and elsewhere.

TAO NAIKAN is interested in poetry and poetics and translates Chinese poetry. He is the translator with Simon Patton of Starve the Poets! (Bloodaxe, 2008), and with Tony Prince of Eight Contemporary Poets (Wild Peony, 2006), and the author of ‘Subjectivity and Innovation in Contemporary Chinese Poetry, II’ (JOSA, 44, 2012).

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Contributors SIMON PATTON translates Chinese literature. He lives with his partner, two cats and Sealyham the Terrier near Chinaman Creek in Central Victoria, Australia. An essay on Yu Jian appears in the current issue of the Australian Poetry Journal, and a short set of poems entitled ‘King Hong Kong’ will be published in APJ later this year.

BOAZ ROTTEM was born in the United States and raised there and in the Middle East. He travelled widely as an irrigation consultant and developed an interest in photography. Rottem is now a full-time photographer and focuses his career on documenting the lives of people in Asia and Africa. His work has been published in Lonely Planet guides, Asian Geographic and elsewhere.

Rottem’s photos can be seen at www.boazimages.com.

SHIN KYUNG-SOOK made her literary debut in 1985 with the novella Winter’s Fable after graduating from the Seoul Institute of the Arts. She is perhaps best known in the Western world for her award-winning novel, Please Look After Mother, published in nineteen countries. Shin is one of South Korea’s most critically acclaimed and widely read writers.

ELIZABETH SOLOMON is a writer, human rights activist and international educator, currently based in Hong Kong. Her first short story was published this year in the Hong Kong Gothic anthology (Hong Kong Writers Circle, 2014). Raised between Bombay and Jerusalem, she is fluent in three cultures and five languages. She is currently working on her first novel.

SONG LIN, born in Xiamen, holds a literature degree from East China Normal University. He has published five collections of poetry (two of which were translated into French and published in France), two books of prose, and has co-edited a contemporary poetry anthology. He is the poetry editor of the journal Jintiang. Among his honours are Rotterdam and Romanian International Poetry Fellowships and the Shanghai Literature Prize.

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Contributors JAMES TAM is the author of award winning novel Man’s Last Song. His essays and short stories, all written bilingually in English and Chinese, can be found in his blog: guo-du.blogspot.com. The Chinese version of ‘Comfort Woman Eleanor’ was published by Hong Kong Writers.

BILL TARRANT has been a correspondent and editor in Asia for more than thirty years for Reuters. He was a correspondent in Indonesia and India, bureau chief in Malaysia and Korea, and currently is Asia Enterprise Editor for Reuters. He has written a book, Reporting Indonesia, about how the media tried to evade the press censorship of the Suharto era. Bill was part of the team that started The Jakarta Post newspaper in 1983.

JEREMY TIANG’s writing has appeared in Esquire, the Guardian, Meanjin, Ambit, Litro, the Istanbul Review, QLRS and Best New Singaporean Short Stories. He has also translated six books from Chinese. His plays have been performed in London, Hong Kong and Singapore. Jeremy won the Golden Point Award in 2009, and has represented Singapore at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Programme.

YU JIAN is one of China’s major contemporary poets. He has published several collections of poetry and a five-volume collection of poetry and essays.

His poems have been awarded prizes in China and abroad, and widely translated. Flash Cards (Zephyr Press, 2010) – selected poems from his collection Biantiao shi (Poem notes) – was published with an introduction by Simon Patton.

NAMGAY ZAM is a well-known Bhutanese journalist, a passionate feminist, and an LGBTQ ally. She also raises funds for an NGO called the Bhutan Youth Development Fund, and is Technical Advisor to the Bhutan Film Trust Fund.

ZHENG DANYI is one of China’s finest contemporary poets. He has won awards in the US and China, and his poems are widely anthologised and translated. Zheng has published seven poetry collections and two novellas, including the highly acclaimed bilingual collection, Wings of Summer. He is also a painter, and the Asia Literary Review’s China editor.

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Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing The Sun Yat-sen University Center for English-language Creative Writing is the first and currently the only one of its kind in China for teaching and promoting creative writing in English as a second/foreign language. It combines the teaching of English with creative writing techniques to enable students to write about China from an insider’s perspective.

Under the Sun Yat-sen University Creative Writing Education Program, the Center organizes readings by international writers and a book club to promote the reading and writing of world literature. From October 2015, it will start the Sun Yat-sen University International Writers’ Residency, which moves from the campuses of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and Zhuhai to Jiangmen in Guangdong Province and Yangshuo in Guangxi Autonomous Region, and gives between ten and fifteen writers the time and space to write as well as providing them with the opportunity to get to know Chinese people and culture. Contact: daifan@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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Is this the Year of the Sheep, Goat or Ram? Is its character gentle, wily or cantankerous? In this issue of the Asia Literary Review you’ll hear a range of voices – some mild, others outspoken, but all original and authentic.

Asia Literary Review | Essential Reading Featuring: Poetry from Queen’s Medal winner Imtiaz Dharker Fiction from Shin Kyung-sook – After the Turn of Dark Jang Jin-sung in North Korea after The West Sea Battle Bill Tarrant exposes a threat to Jakarta – The Sinking City Namgay Zam and the kung fu nuns – Challenging Convention Jeremy Tiang on a macabre change of heart – Beijing Hospital Frank Light in a remote province of Afghanistan – Land of Light

‘Without the Asia Literary Review it would be impossible, unless you had a really a deep interest in a certain country, to read many of these authors.

It has opened up a channel. It’s like the Panama Canal.’

Miguel Syjuco, Man Asian Literary Prize winner. asialiteraryreview.com

ISBN 9789881215543

9 789881 215543

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