Asia Literary Review No. 29, Autumn 2015 Sampler

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No. 29, Autumn 2015

Publisher Greater Talent Limited Editor in Chief Martin Alexander Managing Editor Phillip Kim Senior Editors Kavita A. Jindal, Justin Hill, Michael Vatikiotis, Zheng Danyi Consulting Editor Peter Koenig Special Acknowledgement Ilyas Khan, co-founder of the Asia Literary Review Production Alan Sargent Front cover image ‘Fallen Angel’ © Mariko Nagai Back cover image ‘PLA march on the Shanghai Bund, 1950’ The Asia Literary Review is published by Greater Talent Limited 2504 Universal Trade Centre, 3 Arbuthnot Road, Central, Hong Kong asialiteraryreview.com Subscriptions and advertising: Admin@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Editor@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Submissions@AsiaLiteraryReview.Com Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro Printed by Charlesworth Press ISBN: 978-988-14782-0-7 (print) ISBN: 978-988-14782-1-4 (eBook) ISSN: 1999-8511 Individual contents © 2015 the contributors/Greater Talent Limited This compilation © 2015 Greater Talent Limited Poems by Jee Leong Koh from Steep Tea printed with kind permission of Carcanet Press Ltd, Manchester ‘Back Again’ by Stephanie Chan is published in collaboration with Griffith Review, Brisbane Images in ‘Nagasaki’ printed courtesy of Mariko Nagai Extract from Private Life of a Nation © Eungjun Lee 2009, all rights reserved. Originally published in Korea by Minumsa Publishing Co Ltd, Seoul ‘Mao to Mohawks’ is extracted from Little Emperors and Material Girls and printed with kind permission of I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London Extract from When Ali Met Honour printed with kind permission of Dahlia Publishing, Leicester

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Contents Editorial

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Fiction Slanted Girl

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Zen Ren

from The Private Life of a Nation

37

Eungjun Lee, translation commissioned by LTI Korea

Prologue from Aruna and Her Palate

106

Laksmi Pamuntjak

from When Ali Met Honour

115

Ruth Ahmed

You Say

141

Juhee Shin, translated by Miseli Jeon

The Backroom Angels Boogaloo

162

Maria Carmen A. Sarmiento

Tiger Under Pipal Tree

181

RK Biswas

Non-fiction Rooftops of Shanghai

53

Paul French

From Mao to Mohawks

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Jemimah Steinfeld

Small Bird Song

85

Sally Breen

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Rice

92

Chitralekha Basu

Poetry Nagasaki

27

Mariko Nagai

Anatomy of a Fig

52

Saleem Peeradina

4th

82

Quan Barry

Cơm Com

103

The Curious Case of the Custard Apple

113

Kelly Morse Saleem Peerdina

Eve’s Fault

132

Jee Leong Koh

Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps

134

Jee Leong Koh

A Whole History

136

Jee Leong Koh

Talking to Koon Meng Who Called Himself Christopher 138 Jee Leong Koh

Civic Patience

158

Brian Ng

Back Again

178

Stephanie Chan

Contributors

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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

Editorial Edit orial

Edit orial

Think of an object tossed through the air. The narrative is simple – it will rise, reach an apex and then arc down towards a destination. As common as this event might be, the infinite range of possible outcomes nevertheless makes it mesmerising. Will the object land somewhere safe, as in a sure pair of hands, or somewhere instantly forgotten – a bin or a ditch? Is it a ball spinning towards a boundary or hoop for a winning score? Or is it a projectile packed with hate, such as a glass bottle trailing a flaming tail?

Each is a mystery unravelling. We often hold our breath as we watch.

That’s also how life is, whether on a small or large scale. Some of our lives are launched into the air with clear purpose, others haphazardly. For some, the flight path doesn’t end far from where it started; it’s a matter of up, pause, and then back down to a familiar spot. For others, it’s a shot at the moon. But in all cases we are gripped by the uncertainty of how and where we will land, and whether we will be finally received with cheers, indifference or disdain.

The pieces in this issue of the ALR sample some of the shapes that can be drawn from our individual trajectories. Some are inspiring, others redemptive, still others heartbreakingly frustrating. But all articulate that shared sense of suspense.

2015 marks the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though it has been seven decades since such weapons were used against other human beings, nuclear arsenals remain in vast stockpiles around the world, many poised and ready for use. Their existence is a constant reminder of the pain and suffering of those horrific days in 1945. Our cover image, ‘Fallen Angel’, from Mariko Nagai’s photo

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Editorial

essay on the destruction of Nagasaki that is still evident today, poignantly illuminates how little movement we have made from the place of that original sin. Nations on both sides of the conflict frequently toss into the air the issues of war crimes, but then let them bounce around aimlessly rather than guide them towards a state of rest.

Eungjun Lee’s story depicts the opposite sort of peril that can arise from haphazard action. In Private Life of a Nation, he imagines North and South Korea suddenly reunited, without adequate preparation or oversight. The result is a nightmarish and dystopian society structured around rival gangs and political factions. Lives ricochet like shrapnel, with days and nights endured only through violence, drugs, and the satisfying of base desires.

Paul French’s essay projects us more literally – across the rooftops of old Shanghai. With his usual romantic sense of nostalgia, he assumes the guise of flâneur and sends us soaring through the decades of the mid-twentieth century when the city was a place out of time and circumstance, besieged first by decadence and then with the violence of foreign occupation and the Cultural Revolution. In so doing, he laments how little remains of the rooftop venues that once provided so much of Shanghai’s distinctive buzz.

Jemimah Steinfeld’s ‘Mao to Mohawks’ brings us back to twenty-first century China, where she depicts the irrepressibly rolling stone that is Beijing’s fringe youth culture. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll have replaced the Party with the party. The Establishment is dismissed with a shrug, or worse, ignored.

Other pieces in this issue deal with life’s movements on a more personal scale. In introducing her new novel, Laksmi Pamuntjak hurls at us a single sentence – about food, no less! – that stretches to 2,700 words without running short of energy. In Zen Ren’s ‘Slanted Girl’, a young emigrant from China struggles to establish an identity in the unfamiliar US by attempting to unravel half-truths told by her mother, and by clinging to the comfort of a nest of Russian matryoshka dolls given to her by an unlikely guardian.

Juhee Shin’s ‘You Say’ depicts a paranoid mother who fails to make the transition from one side of her life to the other, paralysed in performing work at her office as she obsessively watches CCTV feeds of her new-born baby and nanny, sensing danger everywhere other than in her own emotional blindness. Lastly, in Ruth Ahmed’s novel – written by two authors

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Poetry

Saleem Peeradina

Saleem Peeradina

Anatomy of a Fig The fruit with the longest history on earth, the fig Is also believed to be the first farmed fruit.

In Eden, the fig leaf failed its mission – the fruit hung Immodestly from the tree, tender as a testicle. Its skin Shade goes from yellow and brown to resplendent purple.

In the market, the figs sit on their ample rumps Neatly arrayed in a basket. Pick one by its nubby stem And gently sink your teeth into its glistening wet, lush red Yellow-dotted interior. No seed or nut to bar your way – Just a mouthful of oozing, melting flesh to sweeten your life.

Even so, like most other fruit, the fig survives in an altered state In a new incarnation. Drying in the sun, the fig Folds into itself, curling its stem down To its flat belly, hoarding its honey for a second act.

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From Mao to Mohawks: Yaogun – China’s ‘doomsday rock’ From Mao toJemimah Mohawks:Steinfeld Yaogun – China’s ‘doomsday r ock’

Jemimah Steinfeld

V

iktor and his friends are in thrall to Beijing’s new hedonism. They symbolise the possibilities open to Chinese youth who choose to experiment. Viktor is the lead singer in a Beijing-based band called Bedstars and is immersed in China’s underground rock scene. Describing themselves as ‘doomsday rock’, Bedstars’ influences range from the Rolling Stones through the Libertines. On top of music, Viktor is trying to bring about a sexual revolution in China through his own sex toy company.

Chinese youth are experimenting outside the bedroom as much as they are inside. As an increasingly hedonistic bunch, their slogan could well be carpe diem or, more accurately, carpe noctem. At night, the country’s cities hum to the noise of fancy bars and clubs, underground raves and private parties. People cite New York as the city that never sleeps, but in the twenty-first century such a label should really be awarded to Shanghai first, and Beijing second.

The strict moral codes that were created by Confucius and adapted by the communists are dissolving around China. Since the 1980s, waves of ‘spiritual pollution’ from outside China have washed over the nation’s youth, who have proved more than ready to embrace these influences.

Replacing communist jargon and imagery, China’s now-open doors have allowed in new role models, such as pop stars from Hong Kong, Taiwan and the US. Young people have stepped out of their Maoist straitjackets and started to enjoy more daring choices in their clothing and lifestyles.

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I am scheduled to meet Viktor on a warm Wednesday afternoon. He sends me to a guitar shop in a hip, central area of town. The shop is the smallest in a row of guitar stores – it is barely the size of an average bathroom – and is on a street dominated by dive bars and offbeat boutiques. Guitars cover the tiny wall area and a flag of the Sex Pistols’ album God Save the Queen peeks out from between them. Perched on a tiny plastic stool is John, a scrawny boy with hair dyed dark orange. I quickly deduce he is the band’s drummer. To a soundtrack of jazz, he uses one hand to balance a cigarette and the other to surf through a playlist on his computer. One of his colleagues, Ricky, soon appears.

‘Oh you’re English! You’re English! I have been to England!’ he enthuses.

It transpires that Ricky and John are former band-mates in a group called Rustic, which won the Global Battle of the Bands in 2009, a big accolade and one that took them to England. The young men are originally from rural northern China and describe themselves as farm boys. Like other ambitious young people, they moved to the capital to try and make it. This background of struggle features in many of their songs, such as one called ‘Rock ’n’ Roll for Money and Sex’. It is a song about their projected desires, which have arguably come true (though not quite in a Mick Jagger way).

Winning the competition in London was certainly a dream. From their humble beginnings they beat nineteen other countries in a showdown; it was their first time overseas, and they took home a gold trophy and a cash prize worth more than they could ever imagine. Li Fan, another band member, was twenty-one at the time of winning and Ricky was nineteen.

No Chinese band had ever done this before.

Ricky points to another poster, also hidden behind guitars on the wall.

It is of Rustic back in their glory days.

‘Do you recognise us?’ he asks.

I squint, my eyes flicking back and forward between the two. Ricky is tall and has a pretty face, in an androgynous way. He is wearing Converse shoes, a T-shirt, and despite the temperature being thirty degrees, a pink, purple and yellow jacket. His hair, which is reasonably short, has a subtle purple hue running through and one of his ears is pierced. The aesthetic is not flamboyant. In the poster, on the other hand, three heavily made-up Marilyn Manson types glare into the camera lens. Ricky has hair that makes

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him look like Edward Scissorhands. The picture bears no resemblance to the happy-go-lucky boys standing in front of me.

As I tell them this, the music changes to electro-rock and John gets up to switch places with Ricky. Ricky moves to the computer and puts on a song for me to listen to. It is Rustic.

‘We sang in English,’ he explains. ‘Bad English!’

‘It’s better to sing in English because it’s more cool. And rock is Western too, so it makes sense. It’s hard writing song lyrics because I’m not a native English speaker. So I have to translate when writing the lyrics,’ he tells me, saying how as a child he would write songs in Chinese, but now he never does.

‘No kids in China care about rock. They’re more into pop. I of course love it because it’s more free. There’s no pretending. Society is more about money now. I think that’s everywhere, though,’ he says, shrugging.

‘What do you think of the rock music culture now?’ I ask.

‘Aged twenty to thirty people in China don’t have a good music culture.

At school they teach you how to play music but not what music is. Music should play from the heart. It should be for yourself, not for an audience.

In China people like me can’t become really good musicians because there is no music education or innovation. We keep on copying from the West.

Maybe one day they [the West] will stop making music and we will catch up. We only started playing in the 1980s, whereas the West started what, the end of the 1940s? So the music scene in China is like the equivalent of the seventies and eighties in the West.’

Ricky pauses, then sighs. ‘Even though I’m turning twenty-five, I’m still poor about music. I wanna know so much more so I’m listening to more.

I wanna have my own style eventually.’

It is true that rock music in China is not as old as in the West. It has, however, taken on some unique tones, as Jonathan Campbell describes in his book Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock and Roll.

He writes: ‘International media reports on China’s contemporary urban culture – skateboarding, punk music, experimental theatre – abound, but rarely delve beneath the “hey-check-this-out-they’re-doing-stuff-we-did!” quickie. Yes, there was a journey from Mao to mohawks, but as much as

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the alliteration may work, there’s far more to the story than what’s on the surface.’

Campbell articulates over the course of his book the strange and wonderful quirks of Chinese rock music, which goes by the name of yaogun, a banner used to group many different people and musical styles.

Back in the guitar shop with Ricky, his self-deprecation spreads to the topic of his girlfriend. She works in contemporary art and has different tastes to his. Just as he starts to tell me about how they got together, Viktor shows up. At his side is a girl, waif thin, in teeny hot-pants that leave little to the imagination. Bulky black platforms, a red T-shirt and a dainty bag are thrown into the mix. It is an interesting combination: part athletic, part punk and part princess – Chinese girls having fun with fashion.

We decide to grab a drink on the rooftop of a café around the corner.

After walking through a labyrinth of lanes, we arrive at an industrial-chic restaurant. Despite holding a lit cigarette, Viktor walks straight in, ignores the waiter and marches up a narrow flight of stairs to a makeshift rooftop terrace, choosing a table in the corner.

‘I don’t think there’s such a thing called Chinese rock music,’ he tells me, after explaining that his band, Bedstars, is so named because it sounds ‘slutty’.

Viktor was born in Henan, in central China, and raised at a military base, as his dad was an officer. There were lots of other children at the base, which suited Viktor as he had always longed for an older sister to play with. Then, at the age of fifteen, he moved to Beijing, where he has now been for eleven years.

‘I’m a lousy singer and player. For rock music you don’t need skills but passion,’ says Viktor, whose band is known for its head-banging music and crowd surfing. Viktor’s passion comes from noise, lots of it, and beats, he tells me. Most of all, his passion comes from girls.

‘Are girls into rock stars like they are back home?’

‘Nah, the girls here are into pop shit. They don’t wanna date a rock star,’ he says, adding that girls rarely hit on him. ‘It’s because I’m ugly,’ he remarks.

To be honest, Viktor is not the most attractive man I have met. Looks are not working on his side and neither is the music culture of China, which

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as yet is free from a culture of professional groupies, though some girls are starting to desire people in rock.

‘What do you think about groupies?’ I turn to ask his girlfriend. She has been sitting with us the whole time playing on her phone and chainsmoking. At this question she rolls her eyes.

‘I don’t judge. Everyone has their own life. But I would never act like that myself,’ she says matter-of-factly, an air of condescension around her words.

Viktor and his girlfriend are currently living at his parents’ place. It is a temporary arrangement while the girlfriend, unemployed, applies for jobs.

Being a music editor is the dream, she says. Viktor’s parents are OK with the living situation. Like other Chinese parents, their gripe is merely that their son is not yet married, and shows no intention of changing this situation.

The girlfriend’s parents, on the other hand, do not know that she is living with her boyfriend. In fact, they don’t even know she has a boyfriend. They live in the southern province of Hunan. China is depressing, she explains, Hunan particularly so. The province is suffocating as a result of the attitude of the people, who are less tolerant towards difference. Her parents want her to follow a conventional route: make money and get married. Beijing is a more tolerant city and allows her to veer off the beaten track, which is exactly why she has ended up here.

China’s capital is more liberal – that part is true. It is also accommodating of creativity. But only to a degree. Bands come and go and in Beijing, as in the rest of China, guanxi – connections – rule supreme. There is nothing easy about making it in China, even if there are plenty more opportunities.

The stories of struggle from Viktor, his girlfriend and his friends highlight this point. Before moving on to the topic of his sexual revolution, I want to hear a bit more about Viktor’s band. What does he sing about, I ask? Apparently, songs about the life he lives. One song in particular is about the sad and upset faces he sees daily on the subway.

‘The people, they close their eyes. They don’t look happy, even if they might be going back to a home with a wife and kid.’

This is another truth. Rush hour in Beijing is a nightmare, nowhere more so than on the subway, where most of the city’s twenty million-plus workers try to cram onto a system that does not have the capacity. Those with a

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From Mao to Mohawks: Yaogun – China’s ‘doomsday rock’

proclivity to commuter rage are best advised to avoid it. And of course he sings about love, about girls breaking his heart and him breaking theirs. As the conversation steers onto this topic, I look back and forth between Viktor and his girlfriend. She is growing increasingly uncomfortable.

‘I used to sing about drinking too, but now I’ve quit. I hurt people when I drink. I hurt my girlfriend. I kissed another girl right in front of her. Didn’t even remember!’ he says, chuckling to himself as the opposite reaction takes hold of his girlfriend’s face.

‘What do you think about this?’ I ask her.

She stubs out her cigarette and looks away.

What Viktor does not write or sing about is politics, which makes sense if you want your band to survive and avoid government harassment. It’s part of the Faustian bargain: the communist government will grant youth a degree of freedom in their personal lives so long as they don’t ask for too much.

‘I don’t know anything about politics. I don’t care about it. I used to love the idea of China having democracy. But then I think there is no solution.

The current government looks ugly. They’re all fat and they look like bad people.’

Bo Xilai is good-looking, I throw into the chat as a counterpoint.

‘There’s a joke in China about his name. It sounds like “bullshit lie”.

They’re not stupid, but they give the impression they’re stupid. They’re smart in a bad way,’ Viktor chips in, revealing that perhaps he does care about politics more than he would like to concede. Viktor’s is a common enough stance. The bulk of twenty-somethings in China occupy a middle ground between caring about politics and being completely uninvolved.

They can largely see through the indoctrination, they are alert to the key issues, yet they’re unwilling to challenge the status quo. In short, they like democracy as a concept, just not quite now. Now is for fun, for not asking for too much.

I bring up the topic of sex.

Viktor feels somewhat short-changed when it comes to the cliché of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. In China the first two are much less dominant and money is a constant problem. If Viktor continues along the rock music trajectory, he calculates, getting enough money to afford the Beijing rents

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is unlikely in the near future. The industry is still too underground and, without enough financial support, he will always struggle. Those who are able to stay in the game are often kids who are bankrolled by their parents.

He knows of people who haven’t even produced a single record and yet they have their own line of T-shirts and other paraphernalia as they try to copy what they perceive to be norms of the Western music industry.

It’s not all doom and gloom in China’s music industry. For every negative anecdote, there is a counter-example of a good band in China, and the entertainment industry is becoming more diversified. Contrary to the stories that circulate in the national media, and to arguments I have heard from other Chinese, Viktor actually thinks the youth of today are becoming less materialistic. Those born in the 1990s onwards are a different species from those born in the 1980s, immediately after the opening-up, he believes.

They have different wants, different music tastes and – interestingly – different bedroom habits.

Unwilling to put all his energy into just music, Viktor has found another avenue to channel his interests and ambitions: the sex-toy industry. Viktor is currently in the process of starting an online sex store, which will sell toys and kinky underwear. For him, a revolution is underway and the revolution comes in the form of a dildo.

Online is the perfect platform in China for something sexy, he tells me.

Chinese people are still very conservative. Walking into a store is embarrassing; online avoids that. So embarrassed are the Chinese about their sex lives that, according to his calculations, condoms will be the biggest sellers.

The condoms at the cashiers are decorative; people rarely want to buy them so publicly.

‘When you walk on the street everyone looks like a virgin, but they all have sex. I did a survey of porno sites and discovered many career people doing kinky, perverted things,’ he exclaims, leaning across the table and looking me straight in the eyes.

‘Shi hen ku’ – ‘It’s very cool’ his girlfriend chips in, ku being a loanword from its English counterpart.

It is hard to tell if Viktor’s idea really is that revolutionary. Beijing is littered with sex stores. Others cottoned on to the market potential a while back.

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As for the demand side, people must be frequenting these stores to keep them in business. Chinese people can’t all be as shy as Viktor assumes.

Later on, with this in mind, I venture into one myself. The shop assistant looks at me with utmost suspicion when I start asking a series of questions.

He’s frugal with information, only revealing that the shop has an even split of foreign and Chinese customers (I am the only customer in there at the time). The shop is not far from some major hotels, and also stocks fancy dress, which might explain the even split. My suspicions are that elsewhere in the city, the ratio of Chinese to foreigners would be higher.

A cursory glance elsewhere reveals that the sex-toy market in China is booming. While most people do not partake in one-night stands or have the number of partners that their youthful counterparts have in the West, they are becoming increasingly adventurous and this translates into a sex-toy industry in full swing. China is estimated to make 80 per cent of the world’s sex toys, with one million people employed in the industry. In the past these products have largely left the country. Now they’re staying put.

Adam and Eve was the first ever sex-toy store in China, opening in Beijing in 1993. Two decades later Beijing houses more than 2,000 sex stores.

Definitive figures for the size of China’s sex-toy market are difficult to come by, but some speculate. For example, a 2012 article in Chinese business magazine The Founder places it at $16 billion (£10.5 billion). The domestic market is on the up, with the Chinese version of men’s magazine GQ calculating the market’s annual growth at 63.9 per cent.

This says nothing of online, Viktor’s future office. If you go onto Taobao, China’s equivalent of eBay, you find thousands of stores willing to cater to the sexually curious or deviant. How does Viktor intend to differentiate himself? Apparently by reversing the trend: importing foreign toys.

‘China is the factory of the world and things made here are bad quality.

People want good quality. They will pay more,’ he says with conviction.

Viktor raises a good point. Quality control is a huge issue in modern China. The world should be worried. Exploding vibrators do not sound safe.

With this image in mind, I speak to Brian Sloan, an American who moved to China several years ago to export sex toys to the West. Does he have issues with quality control, I ask him? Not really, he responds quickly.

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‘Quality control is handled the same as with any other product. For large orders I would use a secondary inspection company to do their own QC. Normally the factory handles it by itself. The factories who make sex toys do not want to make dangerous products, because then they wouldn’t have repeat customers.’

Sloan explains that his clients have different quality-level requirements.

They can use extremely safe or relatively less safe materials.

‘But I don’t think anyone would make something totally unsafe to use.

The safeness of materials relate mostly to how easy they are to clean and what chemicals are in them.’ Condoms are a totally different industry he adds, one that Sloan is not involved in. Stories of ‘faulty’ condoms have made headlines regularly, and these stories are not limited to China’s borders. In April 2013 more than 110 million faulty Chinese-made condoms were seized in Ghana. The condoms had holes and burst easily. In another condom-related news story, police in China confiscated over two million condoms that were being palmed off as Durex, Contex and Jissbon, a popular brand whose name is meant to sound like James Bond. Importing real Durex isn’t such a bad idea in light of this.

Viktor thinks that at least those that he mocks so much – the rich kids with no idea – will go in for more exclusive sex products. He is light-hearted when it comes to China’s various scandals, brushing them off with humour.

He pokes fun at the fact that he will potentially die younger in Beijing (recent statistics say that those living in north China should expect to live for 5.5 years fewer than their southern counterparts because of air quality).

He jokes that living amidst low-level toxicity, as he calls it, makes him stronger.

‘Have you heard about the tour group of Chinese and Japanese people visiting India? The Japanese get ill but the Chinese are fine because they’re immune,’ he says, laughing.

His girlfriend, meanwhile, is less amused by it all. ‘It’s depressing . . . in every way,’ she says, stamping out the fifteenth cigarette she has smoked since I met them.

I finally want to know what the pair thinks their future will entail. Will they get married and appease their parents? The girlfriend is a romantic, wanting the till-death-do-us-part bit. Viktor is more a cold realist: ‘If you

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love each other it doesn’t matter if you get married. It’s just for economy.

My mum is so worried. She’s always saying, “Why can’t you be like other people? All I want is you to be normal!” I tell her my future is unwritten.’

I playfully joke that they are both almost twenty-six and the clock is ticking, especially for the girl. ‘Sheng nu tick-tock tick-tock!’

‘Fuck them who care about sheng nu!’ Viktor spits, growling at the waiter for the bill.

Done with coffee, we head back to the guitar shop. We walk past a new bar and Viktor pauses, peering through the window.

‘I thought you no longer drank because it makes you misbehave?’ I enquire.

‘Yeah, and because I’m on medication. Me, my mother and my girlfriend are all on anti-depressants. We are all depressed! My mother is depressed because she is so disappointed that her son is in a profession that earns no money, that I dropped out of school and that I am not interested in marriage. My girlfriend is depressed because I keep on cheating on her. And I’m depressed because my mum and girlfriend are depressed. My dad, though, he’s a happy man.’

Pharmaceutical drugs and cigarettes aside, one of the topics that Viktor and I have not discussed is recreational drugs. I suspect that, if we had, our conversation would have been lively.

Jonathan Campbell documents the rise of recreational drugs in Red Rock.

Drugs and rock go hand in hand in China as much as they do elsewhere.

With more relaxed borders, increased wealth and greater individual freedoms, drug taking is becoming a permanent fixture within certain pockets of Chinese society. In an anonymous survey I conducted as research for this book, sent out to fifty people ranging from eighteen to thirty, 16 per cent of the respondents said they either had done drugs or knew someone who had. Most – 96 per cent – said they didn’t think taking drugs was cool, though they were evenly divided over whether drug users should be punished or not. Marijuana was singled out as OK, particularly if used for medicinal purposes.

Such mixed reactions were also displayed back in August 2008, when news of the ‘Lost Heart’ blog hit the press. It was penned by an eighteen-year-old

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Jemimah Steinfeld

girl suffering from drug addiction and suicidal tendencies. When you click into the website, electronic music starts to play, the groaning and heavy breathing of a man imitating a woman then takes over and the following caption appears: ‘The room has been booked, the foil placed, the ice pipe prepared. The fire is burning, the ice is running, let’s start, shall we?’

The site is filled with images of gaunt girls and heavily tattooed men snorting drugs through straws. The reaction to the blog was mixed. Some expressed sympathy for the blogger and her friends, relating that they too knew drug users; others expressed horror that this was going on and even called for a search to find those who were fuelling her addiction. The girl spoke of Triad members, and people were keen to chase the online paper trail.

Several years later, illegal drugs are moving away from the margins of the blogosphere and closer to the centre of youthful socialising.

The increased popularity of drugs is certainly evident in Beijing. Getting drugs in the city is easy. You only need to head to Sanlitun, a central going-out area, and men peddling drugs will probably approach you. While these men rarely solicit Chinese rather than expats, sources tell me that scoring drugs is not difficult for locals either. If some of the parties I have been to are anything to go by, I can believe that.

Until recently heroin has been the drug of choice when it comes to Class A drugs, with marijuana being widespread in both ‘druggy’ and ‘non-druggy’ circles. Then, around 2010, synthetic drugs such as methamphetamine, ecstasy and ketamine, and other hard drugs such as cocaine, started to compete in popularity. The drugs are coming from North Korea, international transport hubs and home-grown labs. Young, wealthy urbanites as well as rural youth are the main users, with people under thirty-five making up more than 80 per cent of all addicts.

Meth, ‘ice’, is becoming particularly common, most notably within the gay community. A friend tells me: ‘They all ask on Jack’d [a gay social network] if you want to have fun and if you have any ice, at which point I usually block them or say goodbye.’

During my first time in a gay club in China, back in 2006 in Shanghai, the room was full of patrons snorting poppers. Experimentation has now migrated to meth. Crystal meth is commonly referred to as bing, meaning

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From Mao to Mohawks: Yaogun – China’s ‘doomsday rock’

ice, and ‘doing meth’ is called liu bing, or ‘ice skating’. Initially it was confined to the rural hinterland. It took off amongst populations not previously pegged as drug users, such as truck drivers, who smoked it to stay awake for days on long-distance journeys. Now it’s starting to penetrate urban areas as a party and sex drug. Its increased popularity is in part due to the ease with which it could be made and obtained in the country.

Ephedra sinica, the shrub that is used in meth production, is native to the country. The plant has been used for centuries in traditional Chinese medicine. Other ingredients and tools are also readily available. Crucially, China is a huge source of precursor chemicals such as ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, which are also used to create methamphetamine.

The government’s expectedly harsh line on drugs continues a long tradition. China has bitter memories of the opium wars, which took place in the middle of the nineteenth century, and holds those historical figures who fought against it in high esteem. Lin Zexu, a Qing dynasty official who initiated a war against British opium when most Chinese authorities tacitly allowed it, remains widely honoured and respected in China. Modern Chinese attitudes towards drugs, at least amongst the older generations, contain strains of Lin’s approach. The puritanical view is visible even in the contours of Chinese censorship. On social media, searches for marijuana and specific slang for other drugs such as ketamine are blocked, perhaps owing to the increased use of the Internet to facilitate drug deals. But, like its policy on sex education, more often than not the government embarks on half-measures. For example, regarding meth in particular, ID is required for people buying medicines containing ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, and caps are placed on how much consumers can purchase at any one time.

Enforcement is patchy, though, and plenty of pharmacies circumvent the rules.

Several local governments are also coming up with creative ways to combat usage. Sponsoring online dialogue and information campaigns, especially those targeted at youth, is one such way. In the city of Tianjin next to Beijing, for example, various civic organisations have partnered with the city government to host a viral anti-drug campaign on Weibo, asking youth to repost anti-drug messages to three of their friends. Participants are entered in a raffle for the chance to win an iPad, iPods and other electronic

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goods. The campaigns are not just about curbing drug use; they are about curbing misinformation. Myths that certain drugs are not addictive, that they help with weight loss and improve sexual prowess are all circulating, adding to the appeal of drugs amongst China’s youth.

Even though drug-taking is not quite on the same scale as in the US and UK, everything needs to be put in perspective. The twentieth century in China saw an eradication of the country’s opium past. Only twenty-five years ago, narcotics and illicit drug use were practically unheard of. When they were mentioned, it would invite consternation. Herein lies an irony: the escalation of drug use amongst Chinese kids has been provoked by the country’s relatively drug-free past. While my parents, for example, might not have been experimenting with acid at Woodstock, they were still children of the 1960s and 1970s and all that entailed. Not so for the parents in China, who had zero exposure to drugs as they were growing up. The result is once again discord between children and parents, with the latter offering minimal empathy and guidance to the former.

Viktor, his girlfriend and I soon arrive at the guitar shop. A girl is outside, clad in school uniform and looking roughly the age of ten. She is screaming at her mum, saying she wants to watch TV. Her mother is screaming back at her saying she needs to do her homework. Viktor laughs, likening the situation to his own childhood, and I am reminded once again that for all the change in China, there is still continuity.

With that I unchain my bike, which is parked outside. Viktor starts gossiping with his band-mate and friends, who are both in the same spot where I had left them earlier. More cigarettes are lit and, to a background of screams and laughter, I cycle off into the night.

‘Mao to Mohawks’ is extracted from Little Emperors and Material Girls and printed with kind permission of I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London.

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Poetry

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh

A Whole History In the morning they were both found dead.

Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.

—Eavan Boland, ‘Quarantine’, Section IV of ‘Marriage’

The floor is cold with the coming winter.

I pull on white socks and sit down before the blackout window to think about our separation closing in.

We have a history longer than the two years that fitted like a shirt.

You learned a long time ago to enjoy ironing.

I always had someone ironing shirts for me.

But we go further back than birth, to furtive park encounters, coded glances, tapping on bathroom walls, ways of staying warm and white in winter.

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Yesterday a young friend said it’s wrong to expose children to a gay wedding. The chill hit me again.

Rage spread like blood over my clean shirt.

I cannot wash it off. You are no longer willing.

In the closet the shirt, part reminder of love, part reminder of rage, is held up by its shoulders on thin twisted wire.

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Tiger Under Pipal Tree Tiger Under Pipal RK BTree iswas

RK Biswas

T

he tiger lay sprawled upon a stone girdle that ran around the pipal tree’s trunk. He was a picture of elegance in his fashionably striped suit. His furry little member peeping out from between his thighs and the soft curve of his belly gave him just that little touch of helplessness, so attractive in all things male.

The pipal spread its shiny green leaves above him, a canopy of soothing noise thanks to all the birds, not least the jungle and common crows.

Together they sang and chattered incessantly amongst themselves. The sharp ‘yik, yik, yik’ of squirrels punctuated the restful atmosphere every now and then. A bus honked. Its tyres screeched. But these sounds were not close enough yet to be a bother. I began to feel good in spite of my unsuccessful work-related trip to a town that lay close to the pipal tree. I was tired and badly wanted to go back to New Delhi. But the sight of the tree – and, I must confess – the reclining tiger, made me feel like stopping, until at least the car or whatever transport my office had arranged returned to take me back. The lines of a poem I had learnt at school popped into my head, except that instead of the chestnut tree and the village smithy, it sang of other things. I sauntered into the shade as I fished into my handbag for a pen and something to write on before the poem vanished entirely from my mind. Soon I was mumbling and writing at a furious pace on the scrap of paper balanced precariously on my bag, supported by my other hand. A few minutes later, a curious sensation of being watched intently, even hungrily, made me look up. The tiger met my eye, held it, and then blinked like a tabby waiting for a belly rub. He stared at me again for what seemed

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to be an extraordinarily long pair of seconds before raising his chin and sniffing the air.

‘Are you in season?’

‘What?’ I said, too shocked at first by his impertinence to realise that tigers don’t talk, at least not in English. Had a man said those words I would have abused him roundly. Men, of course, use a different language, in terms of both tongue and body, and it’s hard to make them pay for the things they do. The tiger, however, had an innocent air about him, as if he were genuinely curious. He certainly was an interesting specimen.

He sniffed again, swaying his head like a sunflower in the breeze. ‘I say.

You are indeed.’ He rested his head on his paws. ‘Never mind. You’re not my type. So what’s the rest of the poem like?’

Of course, the only talking tiger I knew about was Hobbes, who converses only with Calvin, while the rest of us remain mere spectators and eavesdroppers. But today was turning out to be rather unusual. I am a scribe and I was determined to make the most of it. After all, who gets the chance to have a conversation with a real live tiger?

‘It’s there,’ I said pointing at my head, mock-gun fashion. ‘I haven’t finished composing it, but. . . .’

‘You made it up? All by yourself?’

‘Well,’ I said, feeling pleased. ‘There’s a poem called “The Village Blacksmith” by H. W. Longfellow. He’s a poet we had to read in school.

This poem was the one that most schools, the English-medium convent ones at least, used to teach. And I sort of took off from it and created something new. . . .’

‘Never heard of him,’ he said, interrupting me. He examined his long curving claws and drawled, ‘The one that folks – city folks, tourists etc. – usually recite when they come to the Sundarbans is “Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright”. Heard that one?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, of course. It’s by William Blake. We had to read him in school as well.’

‘I wonder why they like to hang around reciting that dumb poem every time they see either me or my friends. Most can’t even progress beyond the first two lines. There are usually a couple of chaps standing around with guns and sticks. There’s also strong wire fencing between us. The cowardly idiots.

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I could’ve grabbed their miserable, pompous necks, you know. Shaken the stuffing out of their woolly heads.’

‘So you’re from the Sundarbans?’

‘Yep. I am.’

‘You’ve travelled pretty far.’ This was the Grand Trunk Road, and we were a hundred miles or so away from New Delhi.

‘I was on my way to Delhi. Since that’s your capital, I was hoping my protest would be heard.’

A tiger on a protest mission? This was even better than a talking tiger.

Here I was, stranded in no man’s land, having missed the bus in more ways than one, and now not only was there was a light burning bright, but it was sensational light. I sat down near him, unzipped my bag, took out my laptop and prepared to take notes.

‘What are you protesting?’ I asked innocently, quivering with excitement within.

The tiger sniffed, looked at me with puzzled eyes, and sniffed once more.

‘Strange,’ he said, but more to himself. ‘Now it’s different.’

I cleared my throat. ‘Um, I’m a journalist, a reporter at a leading Delhi paper. I can help you. Even make you famous.’

‘Tigers are already famous,’ he said contemptuously. ‘For centuries and centuries. Been painted, photographed, written about, shot and stuffed. I don’t need fame. I need food. PROPER FOOD!’ My blood turned cold. All the residents of the pipal fell silent.

‘I’m hungry,’ he said, and launched into a tirade.

Seems he’d been on a diet of bread and milk and the odd rat or two for months. The price of mutton having gone up, chickens being banned on account of the bird flu, the spotted deer too fast among the mangroves for his injured paw; and with humans becoming more and more of a health risk as far as foods went, he didn’t have much choice. He showed me the paw. There was a blister between two of its toes. It looked like there was something wedged between them, too. I gingerly extracted a small pinecone. He looked offended that it was only a pine-cone.

‘Pine-cones are sharp, and can be painful,’ I said. ‘I had a German Shepherd once that used to get cones from the Casuarinas in our driveway into his paws. He would limp until one of us got it out. These are smaller

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than pine, but as bad. Once he even cut his paw and we had to get a vet to look at it.’

He licked his injury. ‘Thanks. It’s a bit better already. But do you think a vet will look at it anyway?’

‘Well,’ I said, looking around. ‘I don’t think there are many around here.

But there’ll be one at the Delhi zoo for sure. I mean, one that’s qualified to treat tigers. He’ll give you an injection to start with.’

He studied his paw as he digested the information. ‘It’ll heal. All it needs is nourishment. And I could use a decent meal. Right now!’

His tummy growled, alarming me and the other fauna around us.

‘How about cows?’ I offered. ‘They’re not as fast as deer. And tasty, too though I prefer veal. More tender.’

‘Cow?’ He was shocked. ‘You eat cow? You are an interesting woman.’

He sniffed, and looked a little disappointed before warming up to what, I realised soon enough, was his pet subject. ‘I’m a member of an endangered species. No, I am endangered. But I’m not sure I’m up to risking a Hindu mob for the sake of cow. Don’t know how you managed to evade them.’

He looked at me with suspicion. ‘What’s the deal, lady? First, you come into season. Then it’s suddenly gone. And now, you’re tempting me with cow?’

‘Deal? What deal?’ I said, annoyed at his constant reference to my being in season. ‘If you’re so scared of the Hindu-Fundoo fanatics, why don’t you eat buffaloes? They’re not holy.’

The tiger looked at me in disgust. ‘And how does a starving tiger get buffalo in the Sundarbans, pray?’ He growled along with his tummy. ‘You city people are all the same. All you know are some poems that you mugged up at school. And the art of snapping in and out of season. You’ve no idea about the country. You know nothing! When did buffaloes get into the Sundarbans? Eh? I ought to eat you up for your ignorance, skinny as you are.’

I was alarmed. The situation was getting sticky. ‘I’ve got some ham sandwiches. If you want,’ I suggested.

‘What are they?’ asked the tiger, at once curious and suspicious.

‘It – it’s a kind of processed meat. Pig’s meat.’

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‘Pig? Hmm? Pig, did you say? Aah! You’re a Christian, then? Christians eat both pig and cow, right?’ he said, pleased with his knowledge.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘They do. But I’m not a Christian.’

The tiger was stereotyping me. He was typecasting me. I hate it when anyone does that! I felt rebellion boiling in my veins once more. Why can’t we just live and let live without bunging people into cubbyholes?

‘I’m Hindu. Or rather my parents are. I don’t care one way or the other, as long as I get to eat and live the way I please,’ I said, throwing caution to the winds and regretting it almost immediately. I didn’t know anything about the tiger’s philosophy, ideology or political leanings. If he had been a tigress I could have hazarded a guess. But one has to be careful these days.

It doesn’t take much to stir up controversy – though it can be good for one’s career, mind you, provided you manage to get out alive in the first place.

The tiger looked quizzical. His tail twitched. A langur monkey let out a sharp cry of alarm from another tree.

‘I didn’t know Hindus ate beef,’ he said at last.

‘They do. I mean they used to. Centuries ago, as a matter of fact. But we mustn’t talk about the past. A historian – D. N. Jha to be precise – got into trouble for digging too deeply into Hindu eating habits.’

‘Doesn’t make any sense,’ said the tiger. ‘Humans are funny creatures.’

‘I agree,’ I said and sighed. The sandwich had begun to wilt in my hand.

‘You want?’

He put out his good paw and took the sandwich. ‘Rather salty, but nice,’ he said, chewing slowly. ‘In days of yore we ate baby boar. Very juicy.’ He sighed.

He looked so forlorn, lying there thinking of baby boar. ‘Would you like a smoke?’ I said.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said, offering his lips to me.

I lit a cigarette and put it between them. The tiger puffed, and then took it elegantly in his claws and contemplated it. We shared the cigarette in silence for a while. The feeling was quite beautiful, sitting beneath the pipal, life humming above and around us, just the two of us. And the bus was still far away.

‘Where’s the rest of the poem?’ said the tiger suddenly.

A squirrel stopped in mid-yik.

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‘Poem?’ I said blankly.

He prodded me with his paw. It was heavy and warm. ‘The one you wrote. The one about me.’

‘Oh, that one!’ I said, dipping into my bag. I took out the paper. It was a flyer advertising home-delivered burgers on one side and plain white on the other. My poem was on what had been the blank side. ‘Shall I?’ I said, and cleared my throat.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Be my guest.’

The tiger blew smoke rings delicately into my face as I read.

Tiger Under Pipal Tree Beneath the spreading pipal tree Panthera Tigris Tigris lies.

The Bengal tiger: a mighty cat is he With lethal claws and sinewy thighs.

His neck is strong, his carriage proud Sharp as thorns his tawny eyes.

His fur is yellow, black and thick His face would shame the sphinx.

His ears are pricked for the faintest sound None can fathom what he thinks.

He stalks and kills four-legged and two: Their nemesis, their royal jinx.

Morning, noon, at dusk or night Birds and beasts all hear him roar – Dread his silent, padded step, And the terror lying in store For the unwary, old or slow Upon the forest floor.

Humans trespass through his land Or shimmy up his trees

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For flowers, fruits, and leafy herbs And the precious toil of bees False faces worn behind their heads To mask their fear and unease.

He saunters to the forest’s edge He sniffs the fragrant grass.

He hears the bellow of buffaloes The bells of cows that pass The bleat of goats and lambs and ewes And smiles his tiger smile at last.

These sounds are music to his ears Manna from the heavens.

He crouches flat upon the ground With narrowed eyes – and listens . . .

To the timid beat of the moving feast, For the one at sixes and sevens.

Silent and intent upon his hunt Swiftly through the woods he goes.

A blur of yellow among twigs and leaves With knives at the ends of his toes.

He pounces on that unguarded neck, His teeth unclasp, and – Snap! They close.

Thanks! All thanks to thee, O Goddess Fierce queen of forest, stream and dell.

Let man heap flowers at your feet Chant hymns and ring their bells I am the one you ride with pride Mother, in your holy heart I dwell.

Let them bring out sticks and guns Their angry, warlike tom-tom drums

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Their frantic howls and whooping cries.

Their poaching thieves, their city spies.

Furless, clawless, toothless, meek, Honour and glory in my fall they seek – Those fools will never understand Nature’s will nor Nature’s hand!

‘Well?’ I said, after a long pause.

The tiger replied with a soft snore. The cigarette had fallen and lay burning itself out on the ground below. I reached over and opened his left eye with my index finger and thumb. He stretched his forearm to encircle and draw me close. He yawned hugely.

‘Long poem,’ he said, finally opening both eyes. ‘I lost you after the sphinx. Was the original as boring?’

I felt hurt. I don’t write poems every day. In fact I don’t write poems at all. They just don’t pay. Now I had written one and it was about him. I looked at my poem again. Maybe if I typed it out it would look better.

Maybe the mistakes, if there were any, would become clearer. But I didn’t want to. I had followed a classic poem’s rhythmic structure. That was a smart move. I didn’t know anyone who had rewritten an old poem and made it fresh, made something entirely new.

‘You know,’ said the tiger, interrupting my reverie, ‘I don’t particularly care for human meat. It’s quite tasteless. There just isn’t enough muscle for me to chew on, and there’s too much fat. To make matters worse, all this boom-shoom, shining-whining business has severely cut down our habitat.

Can you imagine us chasing humans for food in these concrete jungles?

We’d starve. Almost everybody has a car these days. And of foreign make, too!’ The tiger brought his face close to mine. His breath smelled of cigarettes and ham and a hint of what must have been dead rat. ‘Got another light, baby?’ I flinched. The cheek of it!

A brown kite passing overhead silently dropped the carrion that it had been trying to tear apart in mid air. The tiger looked at the fallen morsel wistfully. He shrugged. ‘Sometimes I feel like a hyena,’ he said and looked moodily around, spitting out a stray bit of tobacco.

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I nodded in sympathy, and handed him another one that I’d already lit.

‘Have you discussed these problems amongst yourselves?’ I said. ‘You have a union, I suppose.’

The tiger looked at his claws. ‘Oh, we are united all right, but forming a union? That’s so sheepish! Herd mentality, if you ask me. No way. We big cats like our designated spaces, our individuality. We walk alone.’

‘I agree. But sometimes you need to get together; that’s what coalition governments do, you know. Have you ever been to New Delhi?’

He looked at me irritably. ‘No I haven’t. I just told you that I’m on my way there.’

‘Yes, yes, yes, ‘I said hastily. ‘Yes, so you did. By the way, did you know that you’re one of our national symbols?’

He snorted. ‘Is that why we are being persecuted?’

‘You’re not being persecuted!’

‘Oh yeah? We aren’t?’ snarled the tiger, making me flinch again. ‘Look at us. No, look at me, sitting here with a belly that’s only a quarter full – milk and bread, a couple of mangy rats and, OK, one ham sandwich. And I’m talking politics with a pen pusher? If I had any self respect I’d gobble you up right here and now!’

He was so angry that he got up and roared. I took the blast of his dead-rat-ham-sandwich-cigarette breath. The crows and other birds fled the pipal. The bus, which was quite close now and weighed down by passengers on its left side, came careening round the corner and juddered to a halt.

There was silence for a few seconds, and then the cry rang out.

‘Sher! Sher! Sher!’

‘What’s that noise?’ the tiger said irritably.

‘The result of your roar. They’re shouting your name now.’

He looked smug. Then a fist-sized rock hit him squarely on the nose.

‘What’s this?’ he yelped, holding a paw up to his bloodied face.

I turned around to look, and my blood grew cold for the second time.

Two dozen men, and some women too, were charging at us. They had stout sticks and one of them had what looked like a home-made gun. They were pointing at me and making signs at me to flee. Some had started to beat a rhythmic tattoo against the bus’s tin sides. Several rhesus macaque monkeys took this as an invitation to jump on top of the bus and go hoop-hoop-hoop.

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Altogether, they were creating enough hoopla to summon Yamdoot, the lord of death himself. He didn’t appear, of course, but the thought gave me an idea.

‘Quick,’ I said. ‘If you want to save your skin, allow me to jump on your back and pretend to be the goddess.’

‘Which goddess?’ he said, swishing his tail.

‘Durga,’ I said in my haste, and immediately realised my mistake. Durga rode a lion, not a tiger. ‘I know it’s not Kali,’ I said, more to myself than him. ‘She stands on her hubby’s chest. But why are we discussing goddesses?

You want to be saved or not?’

‘Of course I do,’ he snapped. ‘How do I know there’s a tiger-riding goddess in your neck of the woods? What if they kill me, or both of us?’

‘You of all folks should know,’ I snapped back. ‘Isn’t there one such goddess for every village in and around your Sundarbans?’

‘That’s Bon Bibi. Nobody knows her here. If you’re so smart, go figure out a goddess these chumps are familiar with.’

It took me a few seconds, but I managed to remember her name. ‘It’s Jagadhatri,’ I said, as the name fell from head to lip like manna. ‘Jagadhatri Ma. She rides a tiger, I’m sure. Quick now!’

He stepped down and I leapt up onto the concrete girdle, slung a leg over his back, and clutched his neck for dear life. The crowd drew ominously closer.

‘Don’t cling to me,’ he said. ‘Behave like a goddess. Fling your arms around. Shout. Chant. Do something.’

I slung my bag across my shoulders, making sure my laptop was safe inside, and tied my scarf around my head like a bandanna. The crowd had stopped advancing. The people were crying out to me now. They looked shocked, terrified and incredulous. Clearly, they had never seen a woman on a tiger before. Just then, and unbidden, Edward Lear’s famous limerick danced into my mind like a wayward macaque. This one, I decided, I would definitely not recite. No way. But the lines were already having their effect on me, and all I could think of next in response to the tiger’s nagging was the ‘Hail Mary.’

‘Hail Mary,’ I squeaked. ‘Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. . . .’

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‘What’s this?’ cried the tiger. He had already set off at a trot down the road. ‘What’s with you now?’

‘It’s a prayer. Keeps the Devil away,’ I said, between gulps of air. ‘We had to say it in our school. Compulsory. Catholic school you know. So, it’s sort of gone into me. . . .’

‘Stop being an idiot,’ he said, turning to glare at me. ‘My nose is bleeding.

Can’t you see? Your Hail Mary won’t keep those devils away. Chant or sing something else. Anything that sounds heathen. How else will you sound like a true goddess?’

He had a point. My recitation sounded tame, fit for church or chapel or school assembly hall, not the highway with dozens of people after us with sticks and a gun. They hadn’t yet fired it, I noted with relief. Maybe because of me. But if we wanted to make good our escape, I realised, I would have to stop them in their tracks and inspire them . . . to take pictures! I had to behave like Jagadhatri!

Lady Luck winked at me. I spied a young pipal, probably an offshoot of the older tree, growing a few yards away. I reached for one of its branches that lay low and twisted it out of its sappy socket. My leafy lance firmly grasped in my hand, I flailed my arms about, yelling out the poem I had composed. Sure enough, after a few paces, I heard the comforting click of cell phones, and then the chorus began: ‘Devi Ma! Devi Ma ki Jai! Sherowali Devi! Sherowali Devi Ma ki Jai!’ Some even prostrated themselves as they chanted, their voices ringing out clear along the tranquil road, streaking forward like shiny silver bullets beneath the moon – which of course hadn’t yet risen, though the atmosphere was such that it warranted a moonlit dusk or night, a time for unnatural endings.

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Contributors Contribut ors Contribut ors

RUTH AHMED is the pseudonym for the writing team of Anstey Spraggan and Dimmi Khan, who met on the Creative Writing Masters programme at Manchester Metropolitan University.

CHITRALEKHA BASU is a writer of fiction, a translator, and a singer of Tagore songs. Her book, Sketches by Hootum the Owl: a Satirist’s View of Colonial Calcutta – is a re-imagining of the first work of modern Bengali prose, written in 1861–62

by Kaliprasanna Sinha. She is interested in the comparative histories of Calcutta, her hometown, and Hong Kong, where she now lives.

RK BISWAS is the author of a novel, Culling Mynahs and Crows (Lifi Publications, New Delhi) and a short story collection, Breasts and Other Afflictions of Women (Authorspress, New Delhi); a third book is forthcoming. Her poetry and short fiction have been published worldwide. She blogs occasionally at rumjhumkbiswas.wordpress.com.

QUAN BARRY is the author of four poetry books – most recently Loose Strife – and the novel She Weeps Each Time You’re Born. She is the recipient of two NEA Fellowships in both poetry and fiction. Currently she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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Contributors SALLY BREEN is the author of The Casuals (2011) and Atomic City (2013), nominated for the Queensland Literary Awards People’s Choice Book of the Year in 2014. Sally is senior lecturer in writing and publishing at Griffith University.

Her work has appeared widely in Australia including Best Australian Stories, Review of Australian Fiction, Griffith Review and Overland.

STEPHANIE CHAN is from Singapore and has lived in rural Ohio and London. She has won national poetry slams in Singapore (2010) and the UK (2012), and has represented these countries in regional and international poetry slams around the world. Her writing has been published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Body Boundaries: The EtiquetteSG Anthology and the SingPoWriMo 2014 anthology.

PAUL FRENCH is a long-time Shanghai resident and the author of the New York Times bestseller Midnight in Peking (Penguin), the true-crime story of the murder of a young English woman in 1937. Midnight in Peking was awarded an ‘Edgar’ by the Mystery Writers of America, and a ‘Dagger’ by the UK Crime Writers’ Association. It is currently being developed as a series for TV.

MISELI JEON graduated from Hanguk University of Foreign Studies and received her MLS, MA and PhD at the University of British Columbia. She was awarded a Korea Foundation Scholarship in 2000 and the SSHRC grant in 2004.

Her publications include ‘Weaver Woman’ (Waxen Wings: The Acta Koreana Anthology), translated from Oh Jung-hee’s ‘Chingnyeo’ (1970), and numerous translations in the Bi-Lingual Edition Modern Korean Literature Series and Storytelling Asia. She is working on the K-Fiction series (Asia Publishers, Seoul).

DIMMI KHAN is a graduate of the London School of Economics and has Masters degrees in Islamic Studies, Information Systems and Creative Writing.

He is currently studying for an MLitt in Terrorism Studies. He also has a lifelong passion for archaeology, human evolution, ancient history and Bollywood. A published short story writer, Dimmi is also part of The Whole Kahani writer’s group.

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Contributors JEE LEONG KOH is a Singapore poet and essayist living in New York City.

He is the author of four books of poems, including Steep Tea (Carcanet Press, July 2015), and a book of poetic essays, The Pillow Book, which was shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize. His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Russian. The co-chair of the first Singapore Literature Festival in New York, Jee curates the arts website singaporepoetry.com and the Second Saturdays Reading Series.

EUNGJUN LEE is a Korean writer, born in 1970 in Seoul, Korea. His novels include All About My Romance, Heaven Concealed Beneath an Elm Tree and Private Life of a Nation. He wrote and directed a short film, Lemon Tree, which was screened at the New York Asian American International Film Festival and Paris International Short Film Festival in 2008. His most recent short story collection, Whispering into the Night: Night Cello, was published in 2014.

KELLY MORSE’s work appears or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, The Journal, Brevity, and elsewhere; Heavy Light is forthcoming from Two of Cups Press. Kelly holds an MFA from Boston University, is a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow and is a Vermont Studio Center grant recipient. Her translations of censored Vietnamese poet Ly Doi appear in Asymptote, and recently won Lunch Ticket’s Gabo Prize.

BRIAN NG WING KUI is a student at the University of Chicago, where he co-directed a symposium on the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement with Regina Ip, Alan Leong, and various American academics. He has been mentored by Rosanna Warren, Susan Wheeler, and Leila Wilson, and has seen his creative work published in Epithet, Sliced Bread, and the South China Morning Post.

MARIKO NAGAI is an award-winning writer based in Tokyo, Japan. She is the author of Histories of Bodies: Poems, Georgic: Stories, and Dust of Eden. She has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Yaddo, Djerassi, and UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists as well as being twice a recipient of the Pushcart Prize. She is an Associate Professor at Temple University Japan Campus in Tokyo.

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Contributors LAKSMI PAMUNTJAK is a bestselling Indonesian writer whose first novel, Amba, was translated into English as The Question of Red, and into Dutch and German in 2015. Alle Farben Rot reached number one on the Weltempfänger list of best foreign works translated into German. Her second novel is Aruna dan Lidahnya. Pamuntjak was selected as the Indonesian representative for Poetry Parnassus at the 2012 London Olympics.

SALEEM PEERADINA is the author of four books of poetry, of which Slow Dance (2010) is the most recent. He has also published a prose memoir, The Ocean in My Yard (Penguin, 2005), and a long-running anthology of Contemporary Indian Poetry in English (Macmillan, 1972). A new book of poetry is forthcoming in 2016. He is Professor Emeritus of English at Siena Heights University, Michigan, USA.

ZEN REN writes from Austin in the USA and is a Plan II/English graduate from the University of Texas. She is interested in exploring issues of immigration, gender, and sexuality, especially as they relate to science fiction and experimental formatting. She is currently working on a book in wiki format. Follow her on Twitter at @superradian.

MARIA CARMEN A. SARMIENTO is a fictionist and essayist who has won numerous Philippine awards including a second prize in the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards (2015). She moderates the Writers Against Impunity web page for the Philippine Center of PEN International, and represents PEN on the Philippines’ National Commission for Culture and the Arts. She had a Rockefeller Writing Residency in 2014 to work on her novel Siete Pecados.

ANSTEY SPRAGGAN teaches creative writing in the community and for Canterbury Christ Church University. Now that their five children have left home she lives near the seaside in Kent with her husband. Ruth Ahmed is the pseudonym of Anstey’s writing partnership with Dimmi Khan.

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Contributors JEMIMAH STEINFELD holds an MA in Chinese from SOAS at the University of London. She has worked in Shanghai and Beijing, writing on a wide range of topics, with gender and sexuality being a particular focus. Steinfeld’s work has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Guardian, The Telegraph and CNN. She currently works at Asia House and runs their literature programme.

JUHEE SHIN graduated from Dan’guk University, majoring in Korean literature. Her debut was in 2012 with ‘Lunch Time Love Affair’, the winner of the New Writers Award in the Korean Writer’s World Annual Literary Competition.

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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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Life is a trajectory. But do we simply toss ourselves in the air or shoot for the moon and hope for the best? This issue of the Asia Literary Review illustrates the various shapes that lives can take as they arc towards uncertain outcomes.

Featuring: Eungjun Lee’s despairing, nightmarish world arises from a hastily unified Korea Paul French, as flâneur, floats across the rooftops of vintage Shanghai Laksmi Pamuntjak serves a 2,700-word sentence on food. Hungry for more?

An essay/poem pairing on Vietnam’s ‘American’ War – Sally Breen and Amy Quan Barry Mariko Nagai on the horrors of radiation in Nagasaki ‘Doomsday’ rock and sex toys rule in Beijing – Jemimah Steinfeld In reverence of rice – Chitralekha Basu and Kelly Morse Zen Ren’s ‘Slanted Girl’ seeks identity through Spongebob and matryoshka dolls ‘The ALR fills an important gap. We’ve grown used to reading about Asia. But through a kaleidoscope of stories, essays, poems, polemics and photographs, finally we can hear Asians talking about themselves.’ – David Pilling, Asia Editor, Financial Times asialiteraryreview.com

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