Asia Literary Review No. 29, Autumn 2015

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No. 29, Autumn 2015

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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

69

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

Kelly Morse

The Curious Case of the Custard Apple

113

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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Editorial

in alternating voices – Ali and Honour struggle to find cross-cultural love.

They are drawn together by chemistry but their differences and misunderstandings obstruct a clear trajectory.

We all accept that uncertainty and upheaval are simply facts of life. Our minds therefore try to make sense of all that surrounds us. We then codify what we can with words, pictures and numbers, using paper and pen or computers. All the while, we propel our bodies into motion – forwards, sometimes backwards, up, down, side to side. We refuse to remain still. We have no choice; otherwise we die. With eyes open or shut, we go out to become what we must, letting spent air sweep past us. We are in flight, hoping for a safe landing.

Phillip Kim Martin Alexander

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Slanted Girl Slant ed Girl Zen Ren

Zen Ren

M

a always told me that if I ever felt myself vanishing, I should find somebody right away and recite in my head everything that was true about them until I came back to my senses.

Up until I was ten years old, I had a tendency to forget myself. Even now, I couldn’t tell you why it would happen. The first time, I was standing in the supermarket aisle looking at bags of chips with Ma, complaining that she never picked my favourite flavour. Meanwhile, she was trying to drown me out by calculating each brand’s ounce-per-price-per-calorie efficiency aloud. Suddenly I felt a tingle trickle around my scalp, like someone was gently unspooling the hair out of my head and letting my brain unravel, a pink balloon.

Ma’s voice, counting numbers, came at me from far away in a thick, droning hum. I did not know what that was. I did not have any sense that I was a real person. Chip bags, and then cereal boxes, and then the checkout lines and the swirl of cool AC and warm summer air all flowed past me as I wandered outside into the parking lot, uncomprehending. Presently a stranger’s hand clapped upon my shoulder and turned me around. The confused grocery boy asked me who I was. He rushed me back inside to Ma, who cried and hugged me and then smacked the backs of my legs. All the cashiers she had asked to page me over the intercom pronounced my name so badly that after that, she started calling me Christine – my American school name – to prevent future trouble.

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Zen Ren

She didn’t realise then that I would continue doing this for four years. It finally stopped when I was ten and encountered someone who was neither friend nor stranger, but rather something nameless in-between.

I don’t like to think about that day but sometimes I have to, because I’ve kept Russell’s matryoshka doll. I’ve packed it with me across two states and three schools, a small bulge in my luggage, a tumour on my possessions.

When I see it the memory struggles to awaken – it’s malnourished from my neglect and has become an ugly thing to behold. But still, I keep the doll.

At first it was because Ma insisted. As a reminder of how badly things went when I was nine. Or perhaps, as a trophy to commemorate my last vanishing.

‘You have to remember,’ she told me, ‘you can’t just trust anybody. You don’t know what strangers will do.’ Of course, she’s right. All we have is our family to go back to. People are too unreliable with kindness and honesty.

The doll sits on my bookshelf, a relic of Russell, a talisman from Ma’s heart to mine.

But the memories the doll conjures are so fractured. When I attempt to examine them properly, it’s like I’m trying to see what glass is made of. I get the curious sensation that I’m squeezing myself into another person’s life, breathing her air: there’s no space for the two of us. And when I plummet back into the real world, it almost feels as if I’ve been floating up above again, except this time I’ve come back to the wrong place.

After the first time I forgot myself, Ma started reading self-diagnosis books to solve my sickness. It started with one book, then another, and then stacks of them sprouting from the ground in our study, a forest guarding my mother’s chair. The books yellow and green and covered in smiling, reassuring white faces. No Chinese ones. My mother had enough context clues: I had never acted like this until we moved to America. Something about American air was making me sick, and no Chinese doctor could sniff that out.

One book said I should listen to a constant source of noise, like a clicker, so I’d have something to focus on. She put my piano metronome in my backpack but the teacher at school thought he was hearing a bomb. The principal sent everyone home that day while trying not to scare us with his

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Slanted Girl

suspicions. Instead he said things like ‘possible incident of future complications’ and ‘preventable sources of misconduct’. We all assumed that someone with lice was rubbing themselves on other people, as Charlie Hector had done last year before he was suspended.

Another book suggested that Ma make me stand at the mirror while reciting facts about myself. She watched me carefully as I said things like: I am Christine. I live in Dallas. I am Chinese. None of that meant anything to me then. Or I would say something like: I like eating macaroni and watching Spongebob.

‘What’s a spongebob?’ Ma demanded when I confessed this. ‘And I don’t cook macaroni.’

She was right, yet again. I had a secret thrill in saying that because I had never actually done it. Really, my favourite food was mapo dofu, but nobody at school named that as their favourite thing so I didn’t know if it was allowed. What I did know was that a lot of my classmates liked macaroni and Spongebob so I was ready – prepared – to like them too.

Ma finally realised that the recitation trick might work if I said things about other people. How could she rely on me to remember myself if I’d just forgotten myself? Her concept of using others was simple. When I tried to remember another person, their familiarity would pierce my fog and draw through the fragile thread of my own being.

The next time I forgot myself, I had just enough dim awareness to wander into the deli aisle, where the man who worked the counter usually let me sample fancy hams. I watched him slide rump roast into the machine, the slicing sound so smooth I could feel the rhythm in my teeth: one two three, would you like a taste?

George is tall and brown like Ba, I told myself. He likes seeing Ma and Ba because they can speak really fast Chinese with each other about huijia and feijipiao. If he worked at the college like Ma and Ba he might be their friend. He has a daughter who does her homework in the back and sometimes I see her stealing pieces of ham.

And as I recited, the memories of George shook off their sleepy covers and assembled themselves loosely inside me, a delicate nest in which the rest of my consciousness quickly flew back to roost.

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Zen Ren

The truth that I couldn’t admit to Ma was that sometimes I enjoyed the feeling of slipping away, even for a little while. The sensation of floating, ghostlike, above all the heaviness of my body, was always delightful enough that I wondered why Ma wanted me to come back. All I knew was that on occasion, I would experience a few pleasant minutes of aimlessness, and then Ma would very calmly take me home and then very quickly disappear inside her forest of smiling white faces for a while, looking for a permanent cure. She couldn’t rely on the kindness of strangers to guide me back forever.

Of course, the permanent cure was out there already, lurking close by, although we didn’t know that then. It wasn’t something that Ma would ever find in her books (although she still researched them for explanations as to why my sickness had stopped), but rather who I found, when I was all alone.

When I forgot myself for the last time, I was in the dishware section playing with the plates, trying to create a place setting that I’d learned about in home ec. As I gazed into a cup I felt it swallow me up whole, and suddenly I was a cloud floating above my improvised tea party, empty and pleasant.

I wandered, somehow, into the meat aisle, and that’s where I saw him.

Russell. Wearing a baseball cap, curls popping out from under the rim. His thick finger prodding a discount steak to see how it bled. Even through the fog that obscured my mind, I knew to stop in my tracks.

Russell occupied the peculiar space of both familiarity and foreignness that I hadn’t properly figured out yet. He was Ma’s friend, and we’d both come over for dinner before. I wasn’t smart – or experienced, or aware, or anything – enough to recognise how much of a danger, or a possible incident of future complications approaching him could be. What made Russell unusual in my eyes was that I knew he was more than just Ma’s friend.

You see, these were the facts I recited to myself when I saw him that day: Russell is only a clerk at the college, but the name on his placard isn’t his real name, just like Ma and Ba’s placards.

On the first Sunday of each month he takes me and Ma but not Ba to the park and he buys me ice cream because he thinks it’s funny when Ma scolds him for that. He also thinks it’s funny on the drive there when Ma scolds him for driving with his knees. He doesn’t take us to the park anymore.

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Slanted Girl

Russell travels a lot and usually to Russia and he shows me really cool things from there, like candies and knives and matryoshka dolls.

Russell can understand my stories about school when Ma and Ba can’t, because in China they didn’t have recess or four-square or field trips to the zoo but Russell grew up here so he gets it, even though he doesn’t have kids and lives alone.

The last time Ma mentioned Russell, it was a few months ago and she was crying. Ba was talking in an angry voice to a police officer, who kept asking Ba to repeat himself. The angrier he got the more English he forgot.

After a great deal of red-faced thinking his mouth managed to clobber out park and college and lying. Later that night when he thought I was asleep, he was angry at Ma too. That was when I heard him say Russell was more than just a friend.

This made what Ma told me the next morning even more confusing. She woke me up after Ba left for work and said, ‘We can’t see Russell anymore.’

I asked why.

‘Russell is a stranger now. He just is.’

But I didn’t get how a person you know can become a stranger, just because somebody said so.

As I stood there remembering these things, he turned and saw me in my little plaid dress. He gave me a surprised look and said, ‘Well look at you, missy!’ I remained where I was, trying to capture the wisps of my mind already coming back, so he lumbered over, discount steak in hand. He wore a big grin that reached all the way up to his eyes, which were shiny and pale as glass. I thought about the time he ran across the park to pick up someone’s Chihuahua and he had turned and given me that same smile.

Then I realised; he’s not my stranger, just Ma’s.

When he bent down to hug me tightly, the buttons on his military jacket stamped their little eagles on my cheeks. The rest of my mind was already flooding back, filling me up, making me warm and whole. He smelled just like his office but also something different. The warm cinnamon of his home.

The thing I told myself, about myself: I am smiling.

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Zen Ren

We walked round the store twice but didn’t find Ma anywhere. ‘No problem,’ Russell said. ‘If you come back to my place, you can wait there until your mother’s ready and can pick you up.’

‘My name’s Christine now,’ I said. ‘So we can use the intercom.’

‘This will be fun,’ he said. ‘You’ll get to watch all the TV you want.’

‘Spongebob?’

‘If it’s on.’

He bought the steak for himself and a tub of Vanilla Blue Bell for me.

In the car, Russell had a moment of trouble with the key getting stuck.

‘Help me out here, missy,’ he said. ‘Shake the wheel.’ He twisted the key forcefully – surely something would break – and the car rumbled awake underneath my bare legs.

The day was hot and seared itself into my skin. I thought about the Blue Bell, dripping its cream all the way home. It would take forever to get to his house, I thought. Maybe Ma will notice too soon, and I won’t get to watch Spongebob. As we went deeper past the city, the buildings shed themselves to a few sparse trees, and cars tapered off one-by-one until I stopped seeing anyone outside.

That was the weird thing about America, Ba told me once. People don’t walk outside – you can drive for hours and be the only person around. There were lots of weird things about America that Ba scorned. Tips at restaurants.

The need to be honest about how their day was going. The billboard advertisements for beer that had women showing too much skin and not drinking any beer. Americans are so needy and easy like that, Ba liked to say, all in Mandarin.

Actually, I could never say much about Ba when trying to recite facts, because he only spoke in Mandarin and mine was never good enough. The facts I knew about Ba assembled into a bare skeleton, no flesh. I knew that he and Ma came to America to work at a college. For good luck on the day he sent his job application, Ba took a picture of a three-month-old me lying next to his textbook about quantum mechanics and Ma’s thesis about planetary movement. Ma told me that everybody in their town thought I was going to grow up to be Newton. Sadly, science was the only subject I got a C in at school. Later that night I could hear Ba saying to Ma, maybe if we had stayed home in China she’d be doing better. Maybe this is not the

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Slanted Girl

place for her. But I could hear the yearning straining through his voice and knew he was not just thinking about me. Ma, despite all her worries about my sickness, insisted that I should stay here. ‘America is practice,’ she implored. ‘You just keep trying, and it will work.’

Ba didn’t like to try, though I thought that he should. Because I knew what it was like, to be stuck in the wrong world too.

‘How is school?’ asked Russell. ‘What are you, fourth grade now?’

‘Almost fifth,’ I said, trying not to sound too boastful. He laughed and rubbed the top of my head with his huge hand. I didn’t like it when people did that – and they were always doing that, the teachers at my school marvelling at how dark my hair was – so I flinched away. But then I felt bad: he was just trying to be nice. To show him it was OK between us, I began to tell him about Charlie Hector last year and how he’d rubbed his head on every person he sat next to in class and how the teachers didn’t know how to react before they realised that he was trying to give everyone lice. He couldn’t explain why he did it. He was a really weird kid. A weird American.

But as I was about to begin, I realised that if I told the story about Charlie Hector, I’d end up talking about the metronome in my backpack getting people sent home too, and then I’d have to explain that I had the metronome because I kept forgetting myself. So instead, I lied and said that Charlie Hector had just run around spitting gum in people’s hair and it was awful and I hated him.

‘Boys can be stupid like that,’ said Russell. ‘You’ll understand, you’re just starting to get to that age. Sometimes boys won’t make sense, but that’s because they like you.’

‘I didn’t get gum in my hair,’ I said, feeling petulant despite the fact that I’d just made it all up.

‘Good,’ said Russell. ‘Did you know that if you swallow gum, it stays inside of you forever? Sticks to your stomach. If you eat enough you’ll burst like a little balloon.’ And then he reached over and pinched my belly hard, so it tickled and hurt at the same time. I laughed so hard that when I tried to remember this much later, my throat would clench as if I had been screaming instead.

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Zen Ren

‘What are you going to do this summer? Any plans with your mom and dad? Fun vacations?’

I explained that Ma had a summer curriculum already designed for my betterment: lots of piano, lots of cleaning the house with her, a math summer camp that sounded horrible and, of course, plenty of reading after I finished my current book report for Ma. ‘What book?’

‘Joy Luck Club.’

Joy Luck Club was Ma’s new obsession. Before, it had been the Bible and I had to recite from memory a new psalm every Sunday. Ma didn’t even know how to spell psalm. She made me do this because she didn’t want my tongue to be stuck in Chinese ways, like hers was: thickened with ai’s and ao’s and too much XO sauce. She sent me to Sunday school each week so I’d shed these transgressions from my own mouth. But when she discovered Amy Tan, she made me stop reading the Bible and focus on Joy Luck Club instead, because it was about families like us.

‘I’ve been thinking about picking that up,’ said Russell. ‘The four ladies and their moms, right?’ He hesitated for a moment, did the little hiccup with his breath that people do when they’re about to say something but change their mind. He seemed to wrestle with the words he’d caught in his throat before he released them to me. ‘Does your mom read it with you?

Y’all have any favourite parts?’

I liked that he knew to ask that, but I didn’t know how to explain my answer. My favourite details in her book were the ones repeated in no other book, only in my own life: the wet click of mahjong tiles, the sharp smell of mapo dofu permeating the air, the sound of chopsticks scraping against the bowl faster and faster until they got every last bit of rice. ‘I like the parts about food,’ I said, in my clumsy version of the truth.

He laughed. His laugh grew bigger the longer it went and ricocheted off the tight walls of the car and into me, where I expressed the tickle as a small, nervous giggle. ‘When you’re back in my house,’ said Russell, ‘you can have all the ice cream you want, missy.’ Russell was always very generous, very giving like that – it was Ma’s favourite thing about him, in contrast with my father’s restraint.

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Slanted Girl

I smiled at him, wondering if the characters in Amy Tan’s books ever ate ice cream with chopsticks, and if they would still clatter against the bowl, but the image didn’t seem real in my head. There were other parts in the book that seemed unreal too. When the mother and daughter fought, the mother would yell strings of italicised Chinese at the daughter, and then immediately repeat it all in English. The slanted words broke the steady stream of the narrative, like rocks straining against flowing water. I could quickly skim through pages and identify the terms that didn’t belong. Ni wei shenme and xingku. But good daughters should already know their Chinese. They shouldn’t need translations. The repetitions back and forth, English and Chinese, always startled me out of Amy’s world and reminded me her stories were untrue.

Ma never bothered to translate her panic or disappointment or love. I would have to collect the bits and pieces of her anger that she would leave lying around the house: the way the rice cooker jammed from being brought down too hard, the pile of sunflower seeds by the table as Three Kingdoms played on TV. Her anger in English was too diluted, permanently interrupted, and broken by the need to parse it out a word at a time.

Ma could never stand to listen to herself speak outside the house. The Chinese snaked itself around her tongue as she read the psalms and made her pronounce Jesus like Ji Su. In the end, she decided the best practice for her would be to find an American friend. And that’s why she made a batch of hamburger-flavoured dumplings one day, walked over to the American clerk, and introduced herself to Russell.

I only ever went to Russell’s house twice. Most of the time we spent together before he became a stranger had been in the park, where he’d lead me to pet the dogs that Ma was too afraid to approach. He lived in a duplex in the south of Dallas, a place where crooked storefront signs had faded into a uniform greenish pink and weeds sprouted from the cracks of sidewalks.

I never realised weeds could do that, and as Ma and I went to his door for the first time I plucked a dandelion and blew it, like I’d seen my classmates do during recess. I didn’t know that in their heads they were also making wishes.

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Zen Ren

I can’t remember what Russell’s house looks like. I can vaguely extrapolate that maybe he had some couches with an old floral print, and numerous bookshelves with glass fronts filled not with books, but with gilded plates or knives or porcelain figurines – something collectible that I couldn’t fathom. In the corner, a TV that was small enough to seem disappointing to me. By the kitchen the wet clink of what couldn’t have been mahjong tiles, but probably Ma setting his plates so we could eat his American cooking. It must have smelled like paper inside, because I get the same expansive, isolated feeling I have in libraries whenever I think of Russell’s house.

The matryoshka doll sat on one of his bookshelves. It had almond eyes that were painted at a slight diagonal, and black hair and a small red fan with tiny golden scribbles on it. I stared at it all through dinner, as Ma giggled and smacked Russell on the arm, talking about work. From the moment I saw it I knew I wanted it, and Russell must have noticed how enthralled I was, because he opened the case and showed it to me.

‘When you open it,’ he explained to me then, ‘there’s another one inside – see? Now try opening that one. Open that one too – yup, keeps on going.

This one was made starting with the littlest one, and then the next littlest one, and so on until the outside doll. You know, they make very big versions too. I bet you there’s probably a hundred dolls inside each other packed in those. In English they call it a nesting doll, but the real name is matryoshka doll.’

I held the small cold body to my ear as if it were a seashell, wondering if it held the ocean, but all I heard was the hollow rattle of the other dolls inside.

Back at the house, Russell settled me on the couch and offered me a blanket.

I refused, because accepting it seemed to acknowledge we were going to be there a while. That was fine with him, so he turned on the TV and set it to Spongebob before heading to the kitchen to fix us some ice cream. ‘Do whatever you like,’ said Russell. ‘Make yourself at home.’

Spongebob was a bit disappointing, and after trying to understand the jokes I finally flipped the channel to Syfy, where Fact or Fiction was playing.

Usually the stories were too frightening for me to watch alone at home, but

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I’d do it anyway. I was always trapped by the inertia of my own curiosity and fear that an unfinished story would be more frightening than the whole horrific ordeal. Russell watched obliquely from the kitchen, so I was confident that if a ghost showed up in our window or a gorilla fell from the ceiling I’d be pretty safe.

‘You like scary movies?’

‘I guess,’ I said. A new fact about me, something I could say instead of Spongebob.

‘You know what’s spooky,’ said Russell, ‘is something that happened to me when I was a kid.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I tried to sound interested while keeping a frightened eye on the TV set.

‘You know I’m not from here? I’m from another country. It’s close to your mother’s country, actually. Right next to it, like we’re neighbours. I moved here when I was ten, a little older than you are now. The kids here didn’t like me very much.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said again, now trying to sound sad.

‘Very much yeah,’ said Russell. ‘Anyway, I’d get away from the world and the other kids and everyone by going out to the woods behind my house.

Lots of trees. Nothing like you’d see in Dallas today. Anyhow, I would just go out there and skip some stones and just look at the sky but one time I was out there I heard a little scratching sound, against a tree, like someone was asking me a question but didn’t know how to speak.’

‘Like a ghost?’

‘Sure. That’s what I thought too. I was so scared I fell out of the tree I was in and hurt my leg. There was nobody around – it was already dark. I didn’t mention – we lived right next to a state prison, too, and it wasn’t unheard of to have people escape now and then. I thought, that’s definitely a prisoner out there. I was going to die. I’ve never been so scared in my life.’

My mind was racing, accelerated by what I was watching. The ice cream curdled in my stomach. A murderer, I thought. A bear. Except Russell was sitting beside me unmutilated and clearly alive. ‘What was it?’

‘Well, I looked behind me and realised it wasn’t a person, it was actually just this tiny little stray dog. And he was just as scared as I was, whimpering behind his own tree. I reached out my hand, and after a minute or two, he

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came and licked it. Then he started walking away from me, looking back like he wanted me to follow. So I did. Limped all the way. And he knew exactly where I lived, and took me straight home. I looked for him for a long time after, but I never saw him again.’ He looked straight at me, gauging my reaction.

‘Very spooky,’ I agreed. There was a silence, and I struggled with what to say next. ‘I don’t know how to climb trees.’

‘It’s not worth the trouble.’

We continued watching the TV for a few minutes before Russell got up and went to the kitchen to finish chores. One story was a bit too gory for me. I was fine with seeing blood but I hated to see where it came from. As the murderer raised his knife I turned away in fear, and that’s when I saw it, more startling than the murderer’s crazed face: the matryoshka doll, smiling at me from inside one of the cases. I wandered over, slid the case open, and picked it up.

‘You can keep it if you’d like,’ said Russell, distantly. He was washing dishes, an act so private and home-like that I couldn’t look at him.

‘No, that’s OK.’ I was embarrassed. I had shown my desire too plainly on my face. Russell was being too kind.

‘Don’t worry about it. All the pieces are there in that one too. I’ve got plenty more.’

Somehow, this was disappointing. The doll was the only one of its kind in all his collectibles cases; I had thought it was special somehow. But my simple child’s greed was sufficient for me to bury that disappointment. I tucked it into my chest, to reinforce the fact that it was now mine, before settling back in front of the television. But I couldn’t find a comfortable position on the couch again, and it was this simple struggle that finally returned me, all the way, back to my own senses.

Ever since we had arrived at the house, I’d had an increasing sensation that something was off. Something was supposed to happen. It felt like I had taken a deep breath and forgotten how to exhale. I looked at Russell to see if he was feeling the same thing, but he looked perfectly fine, standing still in the kitchen with a towel in his hand, not doing anything at all. That’s when it struck me what the missing thing was. I waited a half-episode to be polite. The host was revealing that the jigsaw puzzle story was untrue. I

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turned towards Russell, who smiled and raised his eyebrows expectantly at me.

‘I was just wondering, when are you going to call my mom?’

His face broke. He looked apologetic. He threw his hands up to demonstrate it. The towel, white and damp, flopped over his arm. ‘Oh, I’m sorry missy. I can’t call your mom. I just remembered, I don’t have her number anymore.’ He laughed, to explain that it was all a funny coincidence.

I was relieved. ‘That’s OK. I know my dad’s number. I can call him.’

Though I didn’t want to, because he’d be so angry I was gone for this long.

It was OK though – I was confident I could explain to Ma and Ba that because I met him again Russell wasn’t a stranger anymore.

But when I said this, Russell’s face became all flat where he’d just been laughing. He hollowed out his expression so suddenly that the feeling drained out of me too. ‘Well, I hardly think your dad is gonna want to take the time off work to drive all the way here, right? What about your mom?’ he asked, a little too hopefully.

‘What about my mom?’ I asked, confused.

Russell did not respond. I did not know that I had pried into something I shouldn’t have, and that my questions were casually scratching at a scab of his. Russell came over from the kitchen and sat down next to me. He was so heavy the cushion dipped over and I found myself leaning uncomfortably towards him. Then I felt his hand rest on the top of my back, and I turned to look at his face, his jaw already greying from his beard hair growing back, and his eyes hard and blank.

It may be that I’ve reconstructed this part of the memory incorrectly. It’s the same with his house – I can’t remember details of what it looked like but I remember how expansive and lonely it felt despite the cramped rooms.

It was as if he’d said, at this moment, ‘Your mom and I need to talk about things.’ Or perhaps, ‘I haven’t seen you or your mom in such a very long time. Sad, don’t you think?’ The line I think it might have been, though, was ‘It’s strange to look at you – you look so much like your mom.’

But all that sounds so ridiculous. It’s out of character for Russell. He always asked me little questions about my life, to which he’d nod or relate his own tale, but he never evaluated me, or told me these things about myself

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in all his adult wisdom. That’s what Ma and Ba were for: to tell me I was a certain way and encourage me to be more or less.

Whatever he said, I came out of it feeling mortified and bare. I remember blurting out: ‘My dad’s home, so could you drive me back if my mom doesn’t come?’

He didn’t respond for a while. ‘Your dad wouldn’t like it if he knew you were with me.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Do you know why?’ asked Russell.

It was hard to tell if Russell didn’t know either, or if he was testing me.

I didn’t want to be wrong. I crossed my arms and said, ‘Hmm,’ like I’d seen people do in movies when they were confused, and let Russell interpret what that meant.

‘You should know why,’ said Russell. He sat back on the couch, and I felt my entire body ripple over along with his shift in weight. ‘I’m sure he told you horrible things about me. But that’s not fair. You’re just a kid.’ It was at that moment that I felt, very strongly, that he’d said something dangerous, although I couldn’t understand what it might be. I could suddenly smell him acutely, his sour cigarette breath and the mildewy flatness of the cotton shirt he wore. He was sitting too close to me but I couldn’t move, couldn’t give myself away although I didn’t know what I had to give away.

‘My dad didn’t tell me anything,’ I said, trying to make my voice bigger.

‘Really now?’ he asked, loudly. But then he softened a little bit. It must have been my face. I must have looked like Ma: confused and not entirely understanding the conversation unfolding before her. I imagined he was frequently confronted with that face, learned to hold her concern in both hands, shore it up, protect her. Their friendship was more than just a friendship: it must have been the English lessons. My dad was probably angry that her English was now better than his, and was so angry he called the police. So I guessed that Ma had decided a long time ago that she had received sufficient education, and placed him back on the shelf where she’d first found him, letting him be a stranger again. That’s how people worked, once you were done, I thought.

He sat back away from me now, and I had space to breathe. I felt embarrassed for knowing his secret, and suddenly the grip of fear in my

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chest disappeared altogether. He seemed so pathetic, not knowing this about his place in our lives.

‘It’s OK,’ I said, wanting to comfort him. ‘I’m sure my mom misses the lessons.’

He looked confused, but didn’t ask what I was talking about. ‘Well, missy,’ he sighed, ‘I miss your mom. Somehow I was thinking she would come here to pick you up.’ His voice strained, just as Ba’s had when he was talking about China.

‘I’m glad I got to see you again,’ I continued. The whole thing felt very adult suddenly, me and Russell, his secret with Ma that he didn’t want to talk about, his secret that I had so cleverly discovered. I had never felt sorry for a grown-up before but now I did, for him. In that moment, imperceptibly, something shifted around in my internal mechanisms, locking me to my place. I would not wander off again. I saw that he was a man and should have known more about life than me but he still had no clue what he was doing or what he wanted, from of me or Ma or the world.

‘Look,’ he finally said, shaking his head, ‘taking you here was a bad idea.

I can’t call your mom or your dad from my home phone, but there’s something else we can do.’

A half hour later, a bewildered police officer showed up at Russell’s door, where he tried to explain that he’d just found me wandering alone in the supermarket and knew my parents but neither of us knew their numbers or address so could you please take her back? And on the car ride back, where I could describe my address using landmarks only, the police officer interrogated me: Did he hurt you? Did he offer you anything? Do you know why he can’t call your parents? Did he touch you? She drove up to my house, still asking me: What happened to you?

I explained that all he did was let me watch Spongebob, but it wasn’t very good.

When Ma answered the door and saw me, she burst into tears and hugged me very tightly, tighter than Russell had, as if she could squeeze the entire ordeal out of my body. The matryoshka doll pressed hard on my chest, where a bruise bloomed and then withered over the course of several weeks. For a long time afterwards Ma wouldn’t let me out of the house and I got to

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watch a lot of TV and even eat some ice cream, which was strange, because that’s what I had got into trouble for wanting to do.

I didn’t forget myself after that. I had peeked behind the curtain of my Ma’s relationship and saw what it was like to be grown up – to want so much, all the time, for something that was already gone. ‘It was my cure,’ Ma claimed proudly. She made me put the matryoshka doll on my desk.

‘Don’t go wandering again,’ she warned me. ‘You don’t know who you’ll find.’

Neither of us mentioned Russell. I brought him up once or twice right after coming home, but Ma’s response was always the same: ‘He’s a stranger now. There’s nothing to say about strangers.’ After a while, I thought I understood. I was still jealous, though, that she could pick and choose her own connections with people with such ease. Russell could never be a stranger to me anymore, no matter how hard I might try. He would always be the person responsible for curing my American sickness. So until I confronted Ma about Russell again years later, that was the reason I kept the doll everywhere I went.

When you’re a child it’s easy to be amazed by anything. In time you gain more experience at examining things to see how they work: you see the string attached to a magician’s finger, the individual smears on a speed painting done on the street. What took me a while to notice was that the head on the littlest doll had been poorly carved, so that the head and body were bent, like a peanut. On the littlest it wasn’t too obvious but the artist had to make the next one bent too and so on and so on, until the outermost doll was visibly slanting its head to the right, giving her an unusually inquisitive look.

With other matryoshka dolls I’ve opened, sometimes the next doll within would be facing left, or entirely backwards, because there was always enough space for each one to rattle around a little from time to time. But the slant on Russell’s matryoshka doll prevented any movement. You could open it and every doll, down to the last, would always face you, her head bent as if she were asking you why, or possibly, wei shenme.

As I grew older, I began to see the real reason Ma told me Russell was now a stranger. The English lessons, sure. But also Ba, who had never come to

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the park or to dinner with us. Ma’s scolding, Ma’s laughing, Ma’s crying.

The police officer, taking down notes to create a restraining order. Everything built a framework in my head upon which years of growing up and loving and heartache were laid down brick by brick, until I could finally see our own home, broken by my mother’s affair with him, this strange American. I grew content with this interpretation. If I had needed to, I could have looked at Ma and recited that fact about her.

In a way, I found my knowledge of her affair to be comforting. I knew she had married Ba mostly to be practical – there were no other eligible PhDs in that small Chinese city – so it was fascinating to have met someone that she possibly really loved. It told me more about her than anything she chose to tell me about her life with Ba. I wondered what she liked about Russell – his generosity? his patience? – and I treasured our intimate secret, that I had figured out the truth about him.

But when I mentioned Russell’s name many years after, when I was already in college, she only looked at me blankly and asked me who I could possibly be talking about.

‘Russell,’ I said. ‘You know, the guy you told me had become a stranger.’

‘Maybe you dreamed him up,’ she suggested. She sounded carefree, even bored by the topic. She could have been talking about anything. Spongebob and macaroni. ‘Maybe he was just someone you thought you saw when you were forgetting yourself. You did that a lot.’

‘But the matryoshka doll. The nesting doll.’ I was astounded at her. ‘Where did that come from then? Why did you want me to keep it?’

My mother gave me a little frowning look, and put her hands comfortingly over mine. ‘You found that on the ground right before the police officer found you. Remember? You had wandered into a neighbourhood near the grocery, all alone, and you were holding onto the mei cha sha ka doll so tightly. I wanted you to keep it, because you’d never gone so far before, and there’s no telling what kind of person you could have encountered. It was just to scare you a little into behaving, OK?’ She patted my hand and squeezed it gently, pressing her calluses against my palm. ‘You found it on the ground,’ she repeated, and then she said it again in Chinese, because I must have looked like I didn’t understand.

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Poetry

Mariko Nagai

Mar iko Nagai

Nagasaki ‘It is a very pleasant way to die’ —General Leslie Grove’s testimony before a US Senate Committee, November 1945

Before the Before and After the After : they were told many things during the war : they were told many things : that Japan was the chosen one : that Japan was a sacred nation protected by a divine wind : that this country would never lose : to wear clothing that covered their arms and legs, to cover their heads with an air-raid helmet and to wear gloves : to wear white clothing : to cover their eyes with four fingers and stick the thumbs into ears and to duck : never let the burn victims drink water (but they died anyway, with or without water) : that a few days before August 9, 1945, fliers fell from the sky – just like the bomb – with a message, Nagasaki is a good country, a nation of flowers, Nagasaki will be a nation of ashes on the 7th or the 8th : and afterwards, they were told that dogs overran the cities and attacked the dead and ate the living : afterwards, they were told that 95 per cent of the people who were irradiated on those two days would die : afterwards, only five days after the surrender, two cities were

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Shadow of the Bomb: A replica of the bomb hangs from the ceiling of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum.

covered in wisteria : that once your hair starts falling out in fistfuls, you will die : that every woman on those two days spontaneously started menstruating : that all women stopped menstruating : that the more you drank, the more you were likely to survive, and drink you did, even the alcohol that was made from recycled gasoline and pure alcohol : that you can’t live long if you stay in Hiroshima or Nagasaki : that plants grew better near ground zero : that people were finally freed from athlete’s foot in these cities : that the atomic bombs blew a hole and let in the light from a new possible world . . . a hope for new resource, it’s the dawn of the new world when humans can live like humans1 : that bodies went down the rivers toward the sea, just like

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A Doctor’s Coat: Displayed at the office of the Nagasaki University Histopathology Department, which holds one of the largest collections of tissue and organ specimens from hibakusha, including those returned from the US.

all creatures going back to the saline past, and the clams ate the dead and we ate the clams : that the cities were rebuilt upon tens of thousands of bodies, the cities built upon bones, the cities stacked precariously upon the dead : that all women who were from Nagasaki and Hiroshima had something wrong with them : that babies born in the cities were missing parts of their bodies or, even worse, parts of their past : never get in the Black Car from ABCC, even if the money is seductive : never go into a hospital, you can never come back alive : never marry people from Nagasaki and Hiroshima because they carry within the possibilities of devastation, even after decades : that they were all right, they were healthy, and it’s all in

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Irradiated Shadows on a Memorial: A shadow cast on the wall of a memorial monument at the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Peace Park.

their heads : that their After lives are difficult and painful because they survived, because they left their loved ones in fire, because they didn’t give that glass of water to the dying who begged for it, because they turned deaf to the pleas of their friends begging for mercy, for an easy way out or in, because they stepped on the bodies of the dying as they ran through the devastated terrain, because they are selfish, because they are still alive : that the bomb dropped on Nagasaki was God’s way of punishing, because it wasn’t enough that Jesus died long ago for their sins, but because they are human, they are sin : rumours thread into their stories : each retelling puts rumours closer to truth until truth and hearsay become one and the same :

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The Story of Hibakusha : there is only one story for hibakusha, the irradiated people : there is only one narrative and nothing else : their stories must be tragic : their lives must be bound to loneliness and pain and loss : they must carry the visible wounds for all to see : their faces must be disfigured beyond imagination, their flesh knotted bark that climbs up and down the body unwanted : they must be told, at least once in their lives, that they cannot marry the ones they want to marry because they carry the possibility of monstrosity within them : they must have been ostracised by others, whether in the bathhouse or at the dentist’s office, afraid they would bleed to death, or on streets or by the government : (Listen carefully, do you know how it feels to be walking down the street and men catcall, but as soon as they see my face, they run away screaming? Do you understand how it feels that no one wants to rape me?2) : they must have journalists and photographers stalking them during those two days, documenting their corporal tragedies : they must all experience strange deaths, unnamed and unnameable, deaths that are beyond understanding and the only way to explain them is by explaining them away with atomic bombs : they must be victims, they must be weak, they must be outsiders in the narrative of the postwar : (If we say how our legs ache, our backs ache, if we say we would never forgive the atomic bombs and look sad, would people be happy? But we are not freak shows, we are all managing somehow; I’m so sick of tear-jerking articles, I’m so sick of talking about peace this, peace that; do they think that by writing about sad things, we the hibakusha would be happy?3) : they are supposed to be blind : they are supposed to be deformed : they are supposed to sit by the windows of the Atomic Bomb Hospitals, papers folded into cranes to submit their pains and fears : they are supposed to be orphans or to have lost their families : they are supposed to be within the three-kilometre radius of the bomb that day in order to be considered hibakusha : they are supposed to have lost everything that day : but so many went on with their lives, with scars invisible, never telling their stories to anyone : they went on and they still go on, because there is no other way but to live, even if in guilt and shame: even if it is without words :

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Atomic Deaths of a Family: A tombstone in a Christian graveyard, listing the names, August 9 as the date of death, and atomic bomb blast as the cause of death.

What It Means to Be Irradiated : it means that you carry the fear inside you : it means that no one sees you as a person but as a hibakusha, your life defined by that day, even if you yourself have gotten over it : it means that someone else defines you : it means that you must have entered the city, whether Nagasaki or Hiroshima, within the first week after the atomic bomb : it means that you must have at least two people vouch for you, even if you lost everyone who knew you there on that day in that city : it means that you have to carry the green hibakusha card : it means that your words against those of anyone else have no meaning : you were there, you know, but there is no proof : it means to

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Atomic Church: Taken at the Epicentre Park next to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Peace Park. This vestige of a wall was part of Urakami Cathedral, half a kilometre from the epicentre.

live with the fear, the constant fear of getting sick : a little nosebleed, and you fear the inevitable : a common fever, and you wonder : it means that your life is dictated by how you should be : a victim, yes, always a victim, always pitied, and you know that once you are an object of pity, you are at their mercy : it means that you have to lie in your life, you don’t tell people where you were on that day, you tell others that your sickness is not related to the bomb : it means that you live your life not telling even your children that you were irradiated : it means that you fear going to the Atomic Bomb Hospital, the examinations are scary, if it’s because of the bomb, they’ll make you stay at the hospital for the rest of your life4 : it means that if you ever get

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Fallen Angel: This carving of an angel is one of many on display at Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral. Completely demolished by the blast, it was rebuilt in 1959.

sick, you refuse to go to the hospital because you are the healthiest person in the family, and if you stopped working, no one else can bring in the money so you keep pushing and pushing yourself : it means that if you are a Korean, you aren’t a hibakusha because in order to be a hibakusha you have to be Japanese : it means that if you were a burakumin you got double the stigma, first as the untouchable, then as the hibakusha, and neither was good : it means to live with guilt of having survived : it means that you must have walked away that day when others were begging for your help : it means that you wondered, every time you got pregnant, whether the new baby would come out healthy : it means that every time your child got sick, you blamed yourself for being there that day : it means that if you were disfigured

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from the burn, from the blast, you would stay inside the house, hoping to live out your life without being seen : it means that every year, when those days come around, photographers take your photo without permission, as if hibakusha lost the passport to humanity the moment they were irradiated : and you see the faces of these journalists and photographers, their eyes gleeful because the more scars you have on your face, the more tragic you look, so they can elevate you into an icon : it means to be told by politicians and doctors to be sterilised so that there won’t be bad genes in the future : it means to stand, naked, in front of American doctors, so that they can film your scars : it means that the rest of the time, no one cares about your life, no one cares about your illness, no one cares : it means that every time you walk down the street, people stare at your wounds then look away as if by staring they, too, would become disfigured like you : it means that when you go into a restaurant, no one wants to serve you because they think you are contagious : it means that even the world-famous photographer will never shake your hand, no matter how many hours he spent photographing the most intimate moments in your life : it means that no one understands why you feel aches and exhaustion for no reason, and others call you lazy and living off the welfare : it means that while the cities were rebuilt and renewed, old buildings were razed and streets were paved, you felt left out of the progress : it means that you live the rest of your life as if on borrowed time : it means that you lost your home, everything you cared for, and no one cares : it means that you walk on the street, and no one seems to remember what you went through, what people like you went through, that day, and so many days and years afterwards : it means to reject receiving the hibakusha card so that your children never have to go through what you did, so that their children never have to be stigmatised for being the grandchildren of the atomic bomb victim : it means that when you speak of your experience, some will say that you are selling your tragedy : it means that you keep telling the story of that day again and again so that your voice sounds mechanical and your story soulless : it means that every time those days come, people flock to the cities and you stay in your home, and they give speeches in the self-congratulatory way and you stay silent, all these years, and you will stay silent until the day you die :

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Notes: 1. Dr Takashi Nagai. Kawamura, Minato. Genpatsu to Genbaku Kaku no Sengo Seishinshi (Atomic Bombs and Nuclear Power Plants: The Psychological History of Atom in the Postwar Japan). Tokyo: Kawade Books, 2011 (115–119).

2. Fukushima, Kikujiro. Fukushima no Uso Utsuranakatta Sengo (Lies of Hiroshima: Postwar That Was Not Documented). Tokyo: Gendai Jinmonsha, 2003 (112).

3. Nakajo, Kazuo. Genbaku to Sabetsu (Atomic Bomb and Prejudice). Tokyo: Asahi Shimbunsha, 1986 (41).

4. Yamashiro, Tomoe, ed. Kono Sekai no Katasumi de (At the Corner of This World). Tokyo: Iwanami Shinsho, 1965 (2).

All photographs © Mariko Nagai 2013

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from The Private Life of a Nation from The Pr ivate Eungjun L ife ofLee a Nation

Eungjun Lee Translation commissioned by LTI Korea

A

gun fell to the marble floor. A dusty black shoe kicked it aside.

Clutching a hatchet and clearing his mind of all emotions, Lee Gang walked with heavy footsteps down a corridor lined with plain doors evenly set apart on each side. There is nothing more terrifying than a murderous, unhurried will.

Police Chief Ko stumbled and Detective Kim grasped his left shoulder with his right hand. Cursing Lee Gang, they both backed away. They weren’t bleeding, and it didn’t appear as though Lee Gang had yet attacked them with his hatchet. Because it was the middle of the day, the Eunjwa ‘room salon’ nightclub was eerily quiet and did not feel quite like this world. The sounds they were making were painfully audible in the underground complex.

The upper body of Detective Jeong, who had collapsed on the floor and had foam around his mouth, was visible between the legs of Lee Gang. The gun on the floor was the one Detective Jeong had reached for but missed when Lee Gang struck him.

A waiter came out of a room carrying a tray of empty beer bottles.

Detective Kim grabbed one of the bottles, smashed it against the wall and began to struggle with Lee Gang. Chief Ko pushed the waiter and sent him tumbling to the floor. The metal tray was tossed into the air, and fragments of dark glass flashed under the ivory lighting.

After knocking Detective Kim unconscious, Lee Gang turned around to face Chief Ko, but he was no longer there. Catching his breath, Lee Gang walked down the L-shaped corridor. When he turned the corner, there were

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from The Private Life of a Nation

only two doors left on each side. Lee Gang stood silently between them.

With his emotions held at bay, only his senses remained. That was how he always handled himself.

‘Chief Ko? Chee-f Ko – Detective Ko?’ Lee Gang turned the knob on his left. The door opened easily. Inside the room, General Youngster was slurping his vodka, with a half-burned cigar in his mouth and three half-naked hostesses leaning over him. The women, intoxicated by alcohol and drugs, deliriously greeted Lee Gang, addressing him as ‘Director’. General Youngster, a pretty fifteen-year-old youth, was dressed in a very expensive suit, his hair combed back with oil. Staring with penetrating eyes at Lee Gang, who was standing awkwardly with his hatchet, General Youngster looked like a portrait of wickedness.

‘Pitiful lad,’ said General Youngster, his voice like that of a hundred-yearold man. Lee Gang was curious as to why he did not feel any disdain for this monster but instead a peculiar empathy. At that moment, he stifled a wry chuckle as he recalled how fellow Daedongang gang member Jo Myeong-do had complained about Lee Gang’s excessive curiosity. Poor SOB? The same bullshit? Lee Gang made a point of closing the door unobtrusively, and backed out into the corridor.

He stood in front of the room where he was sure Chief Ko was hiding.

Confirming this, the doorknob wouldn’t turn. He looked up at the chandelier hanging from the particularly high ceiling. His pupils were aflame with the colourfully refracted light. From the depths of his heart came an indescribable stirring.

Behind the locked door, Chief Ko stood against the furthest wall and watched the door being chipped away with the hatchet. With trembling hands, he struggled to take the gun from his waist. Terror expands infinitely when its origin is not known; such was the fear that now swept over him.

The doorknob broke away and the door burst open. The hatchet flew across the room, grazed Chief Ko’s left ear, and struck the wall. Though still clutching the gun in one hand, Chief Ko lost control of his tensed arms.

They hung slackly by his sides.

Lee Gang hopped onto the table and nonchalantly walked up to Chief Ko. He then knelt on his left knee and looked straight at the chief ’s face.

He seized the gun from Chief Ko as though it belonged to him.

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Eungjun Lee

‘Our esteemed detectives like to shoot at whim. So I followed you to give you that chance. But we’re a little lazy here, aren’t we?’

Six months earlier, a discussion between Chief Ko, Detective Mun and the general secretary of the Daedongang gang, Han Gil-su, about the illegal drug trade, had become unexpectedly hostile. Mistakenly thinking that Han Gil-su was pulling out his gun, Detective Mun had instinctively shot him. The truth was that Han Gil-su was about to take some chewing gum from his coat pocket to calm his nerves. Just seven days after he had stopped smoking, Han Gil-su attained an eternal rest he had not wanted.

It was neither a comical nor a tragic episode; similar ruckuses happened all the time. In unified Korea, guns were to be had more easily than automobiles. In the autumn of 2014, the whole country had been turned topsy-turvy when an Anyang private high-school teacher with an old Soviet Tokarev shot a hole the size of a water pipe in the head of a vice-principal who had sexually harassed her for nearly three years. Therefore, one could only imagine what it would be like amongst the corrupt detectives and former North Korean People’s Army soldiers turned organised gang members. The police had become so paranoid that they would pull out their guns even at the sight of a toy pistol. This was what Jo Myeong-do had meant when he said that wimps like Detective Mun were more dangerous.

The recovery and management of the DPRK army’s weapons had been incomplete amidst the chaos of a unification that, although peaceful, had come about like a bolt from the blue. It was merely one of several thousand evil spirits that had been unleashed when Pandora’s box was opened on the Korean peninsula at 4 p.m. on May 9, 2011.

Oh Nam-cheol, the head of Daedongang, pacified the unrest of the members and covered up Han Gil-su’s death. It was certainly not that Oh didn’t value the life of his underling, or that he was such a compassionate man as to embrace Detective Mun and Chief Ko, who were worth less than bugs. He lived by the principle that one should never discard what is still useful. Now that Chief Ko and his cronies had escaped a terrifying revenge, they were even more slavishly subject to Oh Nam-cheol’s authority.

Lee Gang pressed the muzzle of the gun hard against Chief Ko’s right eye.

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‘Director Lee, don’t do this,’ the Chief pleaded, convinced that Lee Gang, whom he viewed as both inscrutable and obstinate (sometimes even regarding Oh Nam-cheol’s orders), might very easily pull the trigger.

‘How many men do you think I sent to hell while exporting revolution to Africa?’ Lee Gang said. ‘Now that we are unified, you find North Korean bitches appealing but not North Korean SOBs, is that it?’

‘Loo— look, your head. . . .’

‘Cut it out. I don’t care to know. What happened with Lim Byung-mo?’

‘Didn’t everyone think that Detective Mun killed him?’

‘Think? You don’t know?’

‘Please don’t accuse an innocent man. I’m only guilty of handing over the corpse.’

Lee Gang’s left hand secured Chief Ko’s right on the table. ‘You really don’t know?’

‘What are you doing?’

‘You didn’t screw around, did you?’

Lee Gang un-cocked the gun and then shoved it down behind Chief Ko’s belt buckle. The muzzle dug deep into his underwear. It felt cold against his penis.

‘Have you gone crazy?’

‘Please don’t move. The gun might go off.’

Lee Gang pulled the hatchet out of the wall.

‘Director Lee, Director Lee!’ The blade of the hatchet slammed into the table and stood quivering between Chief Ko’s middle and ring fingers. Chief Ko could not even bring himself to scream. His trousers became wet with piss.

‘How unbecoming for a respectable police officer in unified Korea!’ Lee Gang said.

A shrill and sharp voice rang out from behind. ‘You sons of bitches!’

Lee Gang turned around to see Hong Hae-suk, the hostess who managed Eunjwa, with her waiters. The waiters looked shaken but Hong Hae-suk seemed undaunted.

‘I can’t believe that you are human beings.’

Lee Gang knew very well that she most sincerely meant it.

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Seo Il-hwa had a hangover. The clock on the living room wall showed two in the afternoon. Dressed in her nightgown, she opened wide the balcony window of her high-rise apartment. All manner of urban noises mixed with rays of sunshine came pouring in on her. Narrowing her eyes, Seo Il-hwa looked down at the Han River. Seo Il-hwa was the most popular woman at Eunjwa but this was not the paradise that until five years ago she had secretly envisioned Seoul to be, based on her access to information inaccessible to the ordinary citizens of Pyongyang. Instead, it was a genuinely glamorous but savage and avaricious Seoul that consumed one’s youth. Among her regular customers there were none from North Korea, but there was one who was a Minister of Defence in the unified Korea. All these old men putting on airs were like children abandoned by their mothers. My God, Seo Il-hwa thought, and these are the men who are running the country. . . .

Her father had been the head representative in the Supreme People’s Assembly. Seo Il-hwa found herself thinking about elections in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. They could not really be called elections, but rather occasions for members to make their vows of allegiance to the great leader, Kim Jong Il. A single candidate from each region stood for office. Everyone had to show up at the polling booth. When you were given your ballot you had to bow before the Great Leader and his son, and then leave the ballot there to indicate your consent. If you wanted to dissent, you had to stamp the ballot, but no one was foolish enough to risk death by doing so. Seo Il-hwa had lived in such a world until she was twenty-four.

Compared to the upper-class men and the old fogies of the unified Korea who wanted their bleak and desolate hearts to be caressed and brightened with a smile, Seo Il-hwa came from a more refined class in North Korea.

She had discovered that people in South Korea were going berserk over the notion of heaven and hell after death, and this made her think that there couldn’t be any place in this world that was fair. The distance between heaven and earth seemed farther apart in North Korea, where people were told that there was nothing after death. She had only been able to acknowledge that her life in North Korea had indeed been like heaven.

Seo Il-hwa thought it absurd that the men of South Korea, with their expensive liquor parties and glorious prostitution, scorned the North Korean women – these men who were high-ranking dignitaries, businessmen and

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politicians; lawyers, doctors and professors; journalists and generals; artists who looked more like public servants; and the rich religious leaders who appeared as if they might easily live to be a hundred or more. Be they North or South Korean, all men were boring, sly and crude. It was only natural to her that one country ruled by such men had collapsed and the other was heading towards its downfall. In her opinion, the greatest common denominator between North and South Korea was the mercenary nature of those with high rank. The notions of fatherland and ethnicity were ludicrous to her, as amply proven by the evidence of unified Korea.

Seo Il-hwa coolly embraced her reality. Even if North Korea had not ceased to exist and she had continued to live a privileged life in Pyongyang, the gravity of her sins would have been different only in form but not in weight. It was not a question of adjustment but a special skill. Her remarkable background and class in North Korea was not something she had any say in and neither was it her body that attracted the most attention in unified Korea. She was responsible for her sins wherever she was and it was best not to burden herself with a sense of guilt. Since that was how she had been in North Korea, she had vowed to be the same now that she was in the South.

It was only after meeting Hong Hae-suk, the hostess of Eunjwa, that Seo Il-hwa had become a Seoul woman. Hong Hae-suk had been hired by gang chief Oh Nam-cheol. She was a thirty-seven-year-old South Korean woman who still looked as ravishing as an actress. She was believed to be highly educated and ran a fairly ambitious business; although there was no way of confirming it, one had to admit that at first glance she had the look of such a person. And Hong Hae-suk seemed to like Lee Gang.

Just as Hong Hae-suk had chosen the same path as the monster Oh Nam-cheol, Lee Gang was a subject of curiosity for Seo Il-hwa. She thought that she and Lee Gang were two of a kind. The lovely daughter of the highest ranking representative of the Labour Party in the former North Korea had become a prostitute; and the proud elite soldier of the North Korean People’s Army was now a gang member. But the obvious difference was that Lee Gang was anguished whereas Seo Il-hwa felt it was useless to be distressed; and Lee Gang’s feeling of pain for other people, which was difficult for her to understand, continued to annoy her.

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Not all the young women at Eunjwa were from North Korea. A fifth of them were South Koreans. Hong Hae-suk was the only other South Korean who worked in the building. It was uncertain as to what kind of sexual stimuli the women from North Korea set off but they were in greater demand than the South Korean women. Men from North Korea were not accepted as customers at Eunjwa. It ran exclusively on membership, and North Korean men who had both enough status and money to afford Eunjwa were rarer than aliens.

Hong Hae-suk screened young North Korean applicants like contestants in a beauty pageant, taught them the best of manners and style, intermingling a sense of purity with the sensuality of a femme fatale. Setting aside a high-class room salon like Eunjwa, one could find placards that read, NORTH KOREAN WOMEN ALWAYS AVAILABLE in many parts of the red-light districts of South Korea. It was common knowledge that an establishment without North Korean women could not hope to succeed in the liquor business.

Seo Il-hwa had been an art student. Abstract art was a kiss of death in North Korea. There, such a thing as abstract art did not exist. The one and only acceptable aesthetics was the Great Leader Kim Il Sung’s doctrine that all art should foster revolutionary values within the nationalist framework through socialist content.

Seo Il-hwa recalled her realist paintings that had been shown in the national and Songhwa Art Academy exhibitions on the Great Leader’s birthday. She remembered the excessively emotional commemorative dimension of her works. If she had not wanted to maintain her status in North Korea, she would not in her wildest dreams have chosen the meritorious path of being a public artist, thereby having to follow petty rules against mixing paint with other media, and having to stay faithful to the basic material and achieving harmony with the environment.

For Seo Il-hwa, South Korea was about realism, and the North, abstraction. That’s right. Abstraction was death. And that is why North Korea was dead. For her the many faces of capitalism, which were crude, cruel and crushed, truly represented the real world. It’s not that Seo Il-hwa was content with all this, but rather that she was acquiescent.

When Seo Il-hwa took in Lim Byung-mo as her pimp, everyone was taken aback – not just Hong Hae-suk but also all the women of Eunjwa

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and the members of Daedongang. Why had she picked him? It couldn’t possibly have been love. Was it then some kind of a penance close to a reckless act? Life is perhaps far simpler than one might guess. If it involved a man and a woman, then that’s especially how it was. But Lim Byung-mo was dead and Seo Il-hwa had suspicions about his death.

In the living room, Seo Il-hwa slipped out of her nightgown as if it were her skin. Standing naked, she abruptly turned around to look out of the large window. She was in Seoul, a city where the body was the vehicle of labour but also contained desires that could only be exchanged for even greater desire.

The bathtub was full of warm water. Seo Il-hwa got in.

The small letters visible under the streetlights were shaped like old furniture.

Yi Seon-u was crouching on an isolated pavement in the H region – where peddlers gathered – and was reading a paperback. Born in Seoul in 1970, he was forty-eight years old but for him it felt as though time had come to a standstill at thirty-eight when he lost his only brother. His mind still lingered in the 1990s, and he denigrated and disparaged himself as an immature thirty-eight year old. There are some people who endure their whole lives hanging on to a decisive period in their life. He disdained the twenty-first century.

Yi Seon-u’s heart and body ached both before and after the unification.

Just because one was an eccentric, it did not mean that life in the dumps was transformed into roses and bread. Like a worn clock, his senses had become dull, and only vain and futile emotions remained. Yi Seon-u had learned from his dead brother to think in a certain way, but he really should not have done so. That he could live haphazardly on the outside, but could not do so internally, was driving him crazy, though other people were amused by Yi Seon-u’s variety of schizophrenia. He was misunderstood but not despised. Perhaps they thought there was nothing to be gained in disdaining him.

Yi Seon-u thought of the poor man in a story he had heard. The man looked perfectly normal. No matter how serious he looked, people were delighted, thinking he was happy. No matter how sad or pained he was, people took his sincere remarks as terrific jokes and rolled on the floor with

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laughter. Finally the man became dispirited and killed himself. An extraordinary incident like this could also happen in real life. Of course, Yi Seon-u didn’t have the courage to commit suicide. His brother, before he died, should have taught him how to disconnect his thoughts.

All that was being torn down or built after the unification was taking place in North Korea, not that any of the work was actually being completed. There didn’t appear to be any visible change in Seoul. Instead, it felt like there was something scarred lurking everywhere, making it difficult to breathe – a very gothic atmosphere. The urban ethos had changed. Unified Korea was desperately struggling not to go bankrupt. What people feared most was the point when even this pitiful effort would come to a halt. What atrocities would take place then? Everyone agreed that the prelude to the tragedy had not even ended, and still they waited helplessly for things they really should not have been waiting for.

Security in the H region, where Yi Seon-u had a business running a stall, was not too bad, relatively speaking. It was one of the few neighbourhoods where ordinary people could walk around late at night. Although there were some North Koreans with stalls there, most were to be found in much more run-down areas. Meanwhile, over sixty such Harlems had popped up nationwide.

‘Oh! You startled me!’ Yi Seon-u stepped back, seeing Lee Gang standing before him. ‘Damn it, are you a phantom, or what? Can’t you even make a little noise to warn me?’ ‘. . .’

‘A rare visit?’ ‘. . .’

‘What’s that grin for? What’s funny?’ ‘. . .’

Lee Gang, who was a regular customer, cast a glance at the stall as though he were going to pick something to buy. But Yi Seon-u knew very well that there was nothing on his stall that Lee Gang would want.

‘Say, you still have insomnia?’ Yi Seon-u asked. ‘Based on my scientific assessment of you, your problem is that your life is too easy.’ ‘. . .’

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‘Reserved people are dull. ’Cause when you dig into them, there’s really nothing inside.’

Yi Seon-u had secretly sold a new hallucinogenic drug nicknamed ‘Red Eye’ to eccentric customers like Lee Gang. The drug, rather than the odd bits and pieces spread on the straw mat, was his main source of income.

Red Eye caused hallucinations but was considered a replacement for marijuana in that it helped one relax and fall asleep. The Ministry of Health had issued a frightening warning that it was dangerous, contrary to pseudoclinical results that found that it was neither very addictive nor particularly harmful. If it did scare anyone, then it was like Casanovas being turned away from Viagra for its side effects on the heart. According to one report that was impossible to verify, Red Eye had been invented by a young pharmaceutical genius who had come down on his own to Seoul from North Korea. He had formulated it in a Hyoja-dong attic overlooking the government’s Blue House. It came to be called ‘Red Eye’ for the red eye that symbolised the blood of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (now deleted from the list of countries’ names) – the ‘red eye’ of the revolution that would yet take place. In pill form, it was easy to transport and swallow.

Red Eye was red in name only; it was actually a rough grey in colour and was easily crushed when gripped. The young pharmacist might not have had the money to buy the edible colour dye at the final developmental stage of his research, but Yi Seon-u romantically deemed Red Eye all the more poetic because of it.

The police did not have the manpower to crack down on the pills. Even before the unification, the distribution of drugs had expanded sharply; and after, many different and more vicious drugs spread in no time. Among them, the most notorious was called White Bellflower, a combined drug.

It was mass-produced mainly in the mountainous regions of North Korea where they were free from administrative controls, and it spread across the world. In order to put a stop to it, the government had mobilised a special task force similar to those in Colombia.

Of the 999 mistakes made by the unified government, the most appalling had been its shoddy treatment of the 120,000 former members of the armed forces of North Korea, whose compulsory service had lasted anywhere from ten to thirteen years. After a hasty unilateral disbandment of the military,

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an enormous quantity of conventional weapons had disappeared like kitchenware, and 120,000 robust men had urgently needed to search for new jobs. A huge number of these men went to South Korea and became part of the urban destitute or joined organised gangs, thus putting their abundant military experience to good use. If only strong government authority could have been so easily importable, it should have been done at once.

‘You want me to get totally drunk again, don’t you?’ Yi Seon-u asked. ‘. . .’

Though Lee Gang rarely spoke, his flawless command of the Seoul dialect made Yi Seon-u mistake him for a South Korean. But he did not even know Lee Gang’s name, let alone his profession. To Yi Seon-u, he was just a reserved man who bought Red Eye to relieve his insomnia.

Before unification, Yi Seon-u had been a struggling actor. There were no odd jobs that he had not worked at, but at least he was on stage several times a year, and he defined his identity as a theatre actor. But after his older brother’s pointless death, Yi Seon-u gave up theatre without regret. In the midst of his despair, the unification that was considered to be everyone’s dream – and which did not interest him in the slightest – suddenly became a reality. In the past five years, a huge number of South Koreans found themselves compelled to do kinds of work that they had not once imagined, even in their darkest dreams. Yi Seon-u was one of them but he did not feel guilty. The world in which he lived did not allow guilt to occupy any space.

Even if there had been any room, Yi Seon-u believed that his older brother had taken it with him to the other world. When he walked in a crowd in the middle of the day, he wondered how many of these people might be drug addicts, and how many were hiding Red Eye in their pockets or bags; at such times, he felt desperately frightened and wished that he could leave the country as quickly as possible. His dead brother had been no Jesus but all the things he had predicted had come to pass one by one as the years went by.

When Yi Seon-u first saw Lee Gang, there were aspects of his character that did not feel unfamiliar. He couldn’t forget Lee Gang’s forlorn expression when the man had observed him in his drunkenness. Tonight, Yi Seon-u felt as though he understood Lee Gang a little more. Looking at

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him, Yi Seon-u said to himself – you and I are alike. You want to die. You wish you could die right now.

‘If you can’t fall asleep, you should find yourself a woman. That’s the best remedy. If you’re with a woman, it doesn’t matter whether you can sleep or not, right?’ ‘. . .’

‘Are you ignoring my excellent advice?’ ‘. . .’

Yi Seon-u suddenly diverted his attention from Lee Gang. ‘Yes, yes, take your time and look at everything.’

Lee Gang looked to his left, where a woman who had not been there until a moment ago stood looking down at the stall. Dressed in casual clothes, her long, straight hair was tied in a ponytail. As though she sensed his gaze, she turned to look at Lee Gang. Yi Seon-u broke their silence.

‘Young lady, are you originally from Goguryeo?’ ‘. . .’

‘Are you a Moranbong girl?’

‘Do I look it?’

‘Aren’t you?’

‘If I was, would I be looking at things like this?’

Yi Seon-u’s face brightened up.

‘What I meant was you are pretty like the Moranbong girls. Isn’t there a saying, South Korean man and North Korean woman make an ideal couple?

Look here, this is a Kim Il Sung badge.’

‘Oh? Really?’

‘Sure, it is.’

‘It’s not a fake?’

‘Fake? Ah, that hurts. Do I look like someone who would sell fakes?’

‘But isn’t it too much to sell a real one, though. . . .’

‘Pure-hearted souls like us shouldn’t haggle. Look at these pieces of wire fences and barricades, this warning sign for land mines, things like that. All the stuff you see on other stalls is fake. Evil-spirited people get them from any old construction site and give you a load of shit, saying they’re authentic.

It’s been five years since unification. Don’t think there’s even a pebble left in the DMZ. Whereas my things, they show the government stamp – look,

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here. These are official souvenirs of the unified Korea. With pure-hearted souls like us, I wouldn’t profane the sad history of a Korea that was divided for sixty-three years.’

‘Ahjushi,’ she scoffed. ‘You’re from South Korea, right? You can’t fool me.

Did you really buy this badge from a North Korean?’

‘Ahjushi? I don’t look like someone who should be called Ahjushi. Hey, don’t drive me crazy. Who’s the Ahjushi here? Me? I am a bachelor.’

Yi Seon-u pointed at Lee Gang. ‘You call someone like him Ahjushi. I should be called “older brother – hyung”. Didn’t you feel your mind clearing the minute our eyes met? You know what I mean, miss?’ ‘. . .’

‘So, you’re also a bit demure? Good, that’s good. Women should be like that. It’s more appealing that way. But let’s take a break here. The thing you’re holding there, it’s a genuine Kim Il Sung badge. If that’s a fake, then my kidney is a fake. I bought that badge from a North Korean special task force officer last week.’

Lee Gang’s eyes turned cold. He extended his hand. The woman nonchalantly passed the Kim Il Sung badge to him. As she did so, her fingers brushed against his. Lee Gang rubbed the badge in his palm. With an annoyed expression, Yi Seon-u snatched it from his hand.

‘What’re you doing with something you’re not even going to buy? Don’t you know rubbing an object is a kind of sexual harassment, mister?’

Yi Seon-u turned towards the woman again.

‘Even if the world is full of mistrust, if I were to cheat you with such a heart-breaking object like this, then I’d surely end up cleaning toilets in hell.

If you miss an important chance and lose a treasure then of course you’ll always wonder about it. Can’t you see some kind of a halo around me? I am only telling you this because I believe truth will get through to you. As for its collectible value, well, twenty years from now, it could end up in a museum. Think about it. How many people in North Korea do you think wore Kim Il Sung badges on their hearts?’

‘Its owner must’ve felt bad. . . .’

‘What could he do? He needed the money. When the Soviet Union went under, there were badges for sale in the marketplaces. The North Korean officers are now in a pitiful situation. Poverty is not a sin, but when your

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pride is gone, then it’s the end. . . . But who knows – maybe he sold it because he got fed up with Kim Il Sung.’

‘How much is it?’

They began to haggle over the price. Yi Seon-u started by demanding a very high amount.

Lee Gang felt forlorn. He also thought it strange that the woman should want to buy such a thing in a place like this at night. But then, after the unification, the North Korean wave was popular from time to time in South Korea. It drew criticism when even convenience stores sold popular paintings of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jung Il as souvenirs. It seemed to South Koreans that the residual fragments of a collapsed totalitarian nation were as amazing as a dinosaur footprint.

‘Expensive? In light of our young lady’s pure soul, this comes to me as a big shock. Would you actually sell an Order of Military Merit? In North Korea, this is equivalent to that. No, you can’t compare them. Because the Great Leader was like a god. So this is like a medal awarded by God. Think of what a great honour it would be if you were a churchgoer and God gave you a medal! What would an Order of Merit presented by Jesus to a minister be like? It worries me that Koreans have such little appreciation of history!

I might get thrashed for saying this, but as an intellectual, I want to point out that they shouldn’t have removed the statues of Kim Il Sung in North Korea. They could have been used as tourist attractions. The Egyptians didn’t blow up the Pyramids because the Pharaohs behaved like gods. It’s all because of those Protestants who threw a fit, saying that the country will go down the drain because of idolatry. But don’t tell anyone I said this – it’s just between us intellectuals.’

After unification, the anti-communism law had remained very much in force; in fact, it was even more strictly observed. ‘. . .’

‘This thing, here, eh, is Lenin’s tooth. That’s right. It’s like Lenin’s molar.

How old are you, Miss? Do you even know who Lenin was? Do you know about the Soviet Union? You know about the Earth? The place where we’re engaged in this sad conversation is called Earth. Earth, the blue planet in the galaxy.’

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Yi Seon-u, whose rambling was having no effect on the woman, was becoming anxious. He was annoyed that Lee Gang was just standing next to them, watching them in silence.

‘Hey Mister, what’s with you? Why are you just standing there? Go away!

I don’t want you here and I’m not going to sell you anything.’

Chuckling at Yi Seon-u’s outburst, Lee Gang crossed the road.

If his organisation found out that he, an officer, was doing a drug like Red Eye, Lee Gang was sure to suffer. Even though Oh Nam-cheol was the Big Boss, it was Lee Gang’s job to command Daedongang. The members’ confidence in him was absolute. For formality’s sake, Jo Myeong-do and Lee Gang were of the same rank, but there was no one, including Jo Myeong-do himself, who believed it, and there was only one person who wanted to believe it. Jo Myeong-do was solitary in scrutinising him.

That night, Lee Gang had not sought out Yi Seon-u to buy some Red Eye. He just wanted to see someone, anybody. Could the death of Lim Byung-mo have confounded and depressed him? It can’t have been pleasant for him to interrogate Chief Ko so savagely earlier on. At any rate, there was no one else that he felt at all comfortable with in unified Korea – only the peddler who did not even know his name or what he did. From the first time Lee Gang saw Yi Seon-u, there was something about him that simply felt familiar. He thought he could now understand a little of Yi Seon-u, who would rant and rave about the world, then slump on the table in the middle of it all, drunk. You, too, are alone. Like me, you too have died but are living.

Lee Gang turned around as soon as he reached the deserted pavement.

The woman was accepting a brown envelope from Yi Seon-u. Lee Gang did not know that, besides Lenin’s molar, there was a Red Eye inside.

Just then he heard two men talking nearby in hushed tones.

‘What’s she buying there? Cookies?’

‘Talk about getting around! Let’s get her now.’

The Private Life of a Nation copyright © Eungjun Lee 2009. All rights reserved. Originally published in Korea by Minumsa Publishing Co, Ltd, Seoul. The publication of this extract was made possible by the generous support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

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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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Rooftops of Shanghai Rooftops of Shang Paulhai French

Paul French The flâneur is . . . the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city.

—Walter Benjamin, 1935 Right smack dab in the middle of town I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof (up on the roof ) —The Drifters, 1962 (Up on the Roof, by Gerry Goffin and Carole King)

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F

or this particular flâneur, the desired direction is up. A long-held dream to rise above and gaze down, to attain . . . what? A perspective perhaps unobtainable at street level. To learn something new, fresh; to rediscover the city and, by viewing it from a different direction, to catch an enlightening new glimpse. Like catching an old lover’s profile from an unfamiliar angle, it might just be possible to become smitten all over again.

One can be a flâneur in a single place. Obtain a vantage point, stand motionless and allow everything and everyone else to move . . . people, traffic, clouds, time. A rooftop is such a place ‘right smack dab in the middle of town’. Aren’t people praised to the rooftops, lauded to them, while the vitally important and heartfelt is shouted from the rooftops? Surely the spaces up there are repositories of vital emotions? Do not rooftops offer freedom from the enclosing tyranny of the street, the grubby intimacy of the crowd (though it is an intimacy the flâneur, the gentleman stroller of the streets, is both drawn to and appalled by in equal measure), the possibility of flight (for who has not felt the exhilarating urge, just for a split second, to jump, indeed to swallow-dive fabulously off the ledge)? A flâneur may not be subject to the laws of traffic or the routine of everyday life but, as with us all, he is subject to the laws of gravity.

In winter, the snow lingers on the roofs of the older buildings of Shanghai as it does in vintage photographs of the city. Even today, in the few surviving shikumen and lilong that have not been winebar-ised, French-restaurantised or upwardly mobilised, the lack of central heating means no warmth escapes upwards to melt the rooftop snow. Consequently the fresh white powder remains on the eaves untouched and largely unnoticed, while below the city’s would-be Master Planners, who seek to micromanage the metropolis to within an inch of its soul, despatch their minions to shovel slush away as if it were toxic or could do anything but make a city more charming.

Snow in the city is nature’s way of saying slow down, take it easy, stay indoors for a day or two or, if you must go out, go with fresh eyes, just for a moment.

Afterwards, the madness of modern life can start again as the snow naturally melts and disappears.

The primary narrative of the city for most is the story of inside. Indoors.

To go ‘in’ is what a modern city like Shanghai has long offered – the bars, cafés, dance halls of the French Concession; the libraries, churches, hotels

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and apartment blocks of the International Settlement. To ‘go out’ in the city is invariably to go back in again as soon as possible – surely the antithesis of the flâneur’s code.

In the 1930s and ’40s Shanghai’s legion of nightclubs, cabarets and dance halls sought to outbid each other to attract people in. They advertised themselves proudly (having made a not-insignificant financial investment) as ‘air conditioned’. Sir Victor Sassoon’s purpose-built nightclub and restaurant, Ciro’s, was perhaps the ultimate urban experience of ‘in’.

No windows – so no chance to enjoy the foggy wintry weather, the suddenly reduced views, the haze of car headlights emerging from the gloom along the Bubbling Well Road, the people rushing along and suddenly upon you rather than seen approaching from afar. The muted sound of the ship’s foghorns from the Whangpoo River (as it was once spelled), so familiar and yet somehow distorted as the sound waves hit the dense foggy air. And in Shanghai it may be fog, or it may be smog. Perhaps back then too, as now, a ‘pea souper’, thanks to the factories and coal-burning and the new exhaust pipes of Packards, Cadillacs and Fords trundling up the Nanking Road past the great department stores along Mohawk Road from the borders of Frenchtown, disgorging their passengers through the doors of air-conditioned Ciro’s, complete with the sulphurous tang of dirty coal-fired pollution. All this exhaust once mixed with the smell of thousands of smoky chimney fires. The chimneys are now largely blocked off, their fireplaces ripped out and considered surplus to a modern lifestyle, banned by bureaucratic municipal order except for a few special cases or daring lifestyle miscreants holding out against electric heaters. When fires were allowed a thousand or more wisps of smoke, thin trails amidst the several dozen thick plumes from the stacks of the factories

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and filatures, lined the skyline like myriad puppet strings between the ‘thick slice of hell’ (so the missionaries said) that was Shanghai and the heavens above.

The true flâneur cannot linger at Ciro’s. Its view of the outside world is not much more than that from the bowels of an opium hulk moored on the Pootung wharf – the ‘air conditioning’ sign as ubiquitous then as Wi-Fi today, urging on a stepping out of reality into a climate-controlled or virtual world. What cares the flâneur for such temporal distractions? Better to take the elevator (Asia’s first) to the Sky Terrace of the Park Hotel on the Bubbling Well Road. Rooftop lovers can be happy here, as a young Shanghailander by the name of James Graham Ballard once was (and who as a boy flâneured the war-torn city on his bicycle), watching ‘. . . the army of prostitutes . . . in fur coats . . . “waiting for friends” as Vera (Ballard’s stern White Russian nanny told him), outside the Park Hotel . . . a vast brothel for American servicemen after the war.’ The Park Hotel ‘had been one of the tallest buildings in Shanghai. . . .’

And so it was, and is, when we arrive here in 1941 at the Park Hotel for the Tea Dance, the last of the season. What a view! West to the Bubbling Well, east to the river, north to the Soochow Creek, south to the racecourse (where the racehorses and stands once shared space with Howitzer detachments

Park Hotel

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and Royal Air Force planes standing ready to defend the Settlement in 1932, and again in 1937); and beyond that the low-rises of Frenchtown (not such a good area for rooftop lovers).

From this vantage point it’s clear that the Park Hotel is almost at the dead centre of the Settlement, its roof the conning tower of all Shanghailander life in every direction.

But even the rooftop (‘the first high building of [the] Far East’, as the Park’s advertising brochure had it) is not high enough to escape the stifling heat of a Shanghai August and its starchedcollar-melting humidity. Fear not, for the tea dances will resume in September, when a breeze or two can be whipped up from the Whangpoo, a mile or so east, and drift across the dancing couples. And dance they did, but only until – and never again following – the Japanese invasion of the International Settlement after Pearl Harbor.

We can only imagine what a contrast rooftop dancing would have been to the familiarity of the dancehall interior. The slight otherness of music played outdoors, perhaps with a complementary soundtrack of night-time city noises – a siren, a shouting pedestrian, a trolley clanging, its ungreased wheels screeching, a dog barking – noises just slightly off-stage, but not intrusive. How Baudelaire, ‘the first of the Moderns, the last of the Romantics’, would have loved the scene. Smoke only occasionally got in your eyes, and you could really dance in the light of the silvery moon. There were rooftop dance venues all along the Nanking and the Bubbling Well Roads, including on top of the major hotels and all the large department stores – Sun Sun, Wing On, Sincere, Yong’an and Dah Sun (reached via Shanghai’s first escalator). Wing On changed the Shanghai nightscape forever to something brazenly and identifiably modern with the city’s first commercial neon sign illuminating the evening twilight. Each store’s rooftop

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Wing On rooftop garden

had its own band; maybe jazz, maybe a light orchestra of Italian (or, more likely, White Russian) strings.

Leo Itkis, a White Russian piano prodigy, played on the roof of the Park Hotel and continued, even after the Japanese invasion, until he died in 1942 at the age of thirty-five. It’s possible that, on sultry summer nights when the street cacophony dulled and the wind was in the right direction, music from one rooftop could drift across to the next and so on and on.

Just as the Situationists dreamed of opening the rooftops of Paris to pedestrians – each separate roof connected by fire escape ladders and catwalks across the city – so we can imagine a stroll across the connected rooftops of old Shanghai. The grand rooftop on the Bund of the Cathay Hotel’s Tower Nightclub (a popular spot for rooftop weddings) led to the smaller rooftop bars where Bubbling Well Road met Yu Yuen Road, or where the tip of smart-set Shanghailander life slid down to where the notorious ‘Badlands’ began and the foreign underbelly cavorted mischievously till dawn. The soundtrack was one long drifting lilt, like a Chinese whisper snaking through the city.

On some hot summer nights when the temperature never dropped and humidity rendered sleep impossible anyway, they really did dance on rooftops till dawn. Then, as the sun came up, they descended to ground

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level and towards the taxi ranks; rickshaw pullers and pedicabs jostling for fares to finally take them home.

The wealthy loved their rooftop urban oases in the furnace of the Shanghai summer. A rooftop idyll was the Shanghai pastoral against the overwhelming ‘modern’, the neon, the brash. Sir Victor Sassoon’s Hamilton House was located at the power junction of Foochow and Kiangse Roads. Standing opposite the Central Police Station, the Shanghai Municipal Council offices and the Metropole Hotel on what was Shanghai’s most impressive ‘circus’ (à la Piccadilly rather than Barnum & Bailey), it was a sumptuous art-deco haven with penthouse apartments and a rooftop garden for those ordained to be able to afford to live there. Here, on the private sky terraces of the rich, the flâneur can, for a moment, give free rein to sensualist urges, appreciate the occasional breezes, allow the noises of the street below to wash over him in their muted form (which recalls Malraux’s assassin in La Condition Humaine, his classic novel of 1920s Shanghai, Chen Ta Erh, listening to the ebb and flow of Shanghai traffic: ‘the wave of uproar subsided: some traffic jam – there were still traffic jams out there in the world of men’). The best time to penetrate the sanctuary of these oases is the early, still hours of a summer morning that provide a pleasant, neckwarming humidity before the onset of another day of hustle and heat in the metropolis. Baudelaire once wrote of early mornings in the city: ‘Alone at last! Nothing is to be heard but the rattle of a few tardy and tired-out cabs.

There will be silence now, if not repose, for several hours at least.’

Old Shanghai’s rooftops were not just for the idle rich, but also for the entertainment-seeking masses. A yearning for the crowd takes the flâneur to the most packed rooftop in Shanghai – the Da Shijie, the Great World Amusement Palace. A great flâneur of old Shanghai, the film director Josef von Sternberg, came here repeatedly to film the beloved Shanghai of his mind.

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The neon-lit rooftop destination stands at the junction of Boulevard de Montigny and Avenue Eddy Seventh.

On the roof of the Great World, von Sternberg shows us another possible side of the flâneur – the boulevardier, more a participant than observer. Not some detached flâneur moving in slow motion against a double-quick-time backdrop, von Sternberg dives in headfirst.

On that roof von Sternberg saw ‘seesaws, Chinese checkers, mahjong, strings of firecrackers going off, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers’. For the boulevardier, the rooftop also meant the sexual liberation of Great World Amusement Centre ‘nailing’ a cheap whore in a dark corner against a backdrop of open sky (flâneurs have urges too, you know), looking down from the roof of the Great World onto the Frenchtown tenements of Rue Palikao, Rue Weikwei and Rue Imperiale. Here are the flop houses for the itinerant storytellers, comics, magicians, puppeteers, sword fighters and swallowers, tightrope walkers, animal acts, fortune tellers, qigong displays, fire eaters, monkey and freak shows that worked the Great World and made the whole district a nightly carnival. Peer down from the Great World’s rooftop through the windows of the rabbit warren of streets and tenements below, across to the Rue de Saigon, Rue des Peres and Rue Hué as far as the arcaded Rue du Consulat and the imposing structure of the Hotel des Colonies (where discretion and respectability reappear in this part of Frenchtown) with its own more sophisticated and less raucous rooftop.

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In this heightened and vulgar milieu the flâneur cannot help but be a Peeping Tom with more than a taste for voyeurism. Dress it up all you like, there’s a strong element of titillation in the pornography of the urban. In the windows along the spill of streets behind the Great World, the flâneur can spy a dog being trained to dance, a bearded lady combing her profitable growth, a juggler trying six balls instead of five, an Anhwei whore providing a happy ending for her out-of-town client whose night and hopes of love will end here. Teahouses, Yeji houses, gambling houses with fan tan and pai gow . . . all manner of fun is to be gazed down upon (or had) by our voyeuristic flâneur.

Now cross the Soochow Creek, head east and consider those stateless European Jewish refugees who flocked from Berlin or Vienna to Hongkew.

They liked nothing better than to go drinking and dancing on Roy’s Roof Garden above the Broadway Theatre on Wayside Road, in the heart of their newfound Oriental ghetto and hoped-for safety from persecution. Ascend through a down-at-heel pool hall to the roof (if the fire door is left open) and see that nothing remains but the rooftop itself – the rattan chairs and plain deal tables, the makeshift bar, the ice buckets, the red and green light bulbs strung around the wood planking that once made a small stage. The

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band and the dancing are all gone. Of course in the 1940s, when leaving the ‘Heim’ was problematic, Roy’s offered both music and dancing; a chance to socialise, fall in love, have a little Yiddish conversation, swap ghetto gossip, or enjoy a Friday evening shabbat shalom in the Far East. To climb the broad stairway to the roof of Roy’s was to escape the everyday food queues, fights for onward visas, and the petty squabbles and inevitable kvetching of Wayside Road. It was in itself, perhaps, a kind of freedom for those whose future was so uncertain.

It was amazing, given the hopelessness of the stateless refugee in the Hongkew Ghetto and the poverty of the provincial peasant rendered all the more transparent in glittering Shanghai, that there weren’t more jumpers – men and women who decided, once upon a rooftop, to end it all. Rooftop leapers were apparently rare then, just as distraught rush hour subway-line jumpers are uncommon in Shanghai today compared to their seeming frequency in London or New York. Chinese suicides are typically less dramatic – often poison for women and hanging for men – both quiet, solitary methods lacking the grand gesture of the leap. There was one exception – the roof of the Great World – which became a favoured spot for jumpers seeking to end it all as well as provide a watching crowd with entertainment. Von Sternberg once enquired of the manager why a protective rail was never installed. The reply was, ‘How can you stop a man from killing himself?’

Other tragedies also happened, of course. On ‘Black Saturday’ in August 1937, as the first bombs rained down on the Settlement, nearly two thousand were left dead and thousands more wounded, both Chinese and white. The Nanking Road was left a corridor of mismatched limbs with bloody sinew smeared on the shop windows, burnt-out Lincolns and screaming amahs looking for lost babies. The New York Times journalist Robbie Robertson was injured by shattering glass at a rooftop restaurant on the Nanking Road while other diners around him were left dead, their bodies pierced by jagged shards of glass. On that same murderous day, his colleague Anthony Billingham was caught in a too-rapidly descending and very crowded elevator at the Wing On Department Store when its cables gave out during the blast. Only Billingham and a twelve-year-old Chinese messenger boy survived the fall.

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Death has always rained down from rooftops, murder lurking in their shadows. Even today, strong winds bring down neon signage and construction workers’ detritus onto the heads of unlucky pedestrians. In 1927, when the streets of Shanghai literally ran red with left-wing blood, thugs and gangsters took to the rooftops to shoot down communists and trade unionists. In the First Shanghai War of 1932, the British established rooftop posts in Hongkew to observe the fighting and protect the Settlement from attack. Across the Soochow Creek, hundreds of Chinese army snipers, their number bolstered by the sharp-shooters of Du Yuesheng’s Green Gang, took to the rooftops to try and stop the Japanese attack on Chinese Shanghai.

On the night of 28 January, the Chapei warehouse of the Commercial Press and the nearby National Oriental Library were bombed and burnt by Japanese fighter planes. On the rooftops on the northern side of the Settlement, wisps of ashy paper landed and dissolved in the rooftop puddles – fragments of Tang dynasty scrolls, Qing dynasty calligraphy, 60,000 charred books – like so much ash from a taipan’s cigar. China’s heritage smouldered, courtesy of an Imperial Japanese Navy Nakajima A1N2 fighter plane. Across the rooftops of Shanghai that night, civilisation began to descend into barbarism.

The descent was complete by that infamous ‘Black Saturday’ – August 14, 1937 – the Second Shanghai War. Foreigners took to the rooftops to watch the dogfights between the Japanese and the Nationalists over the skyline of Chapei and Paoshan, Rooftop observation post, 1932 north of the creek. So much of the city burned, once again. A bomb fell in front of the Great World, killing or injuring 2,000 people thronging the complex. For Shanghailanders, who then still considered themselves immune to the firebombing of the Chinese portions of the city to the north, war became a spectator sport on

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the rooftops – after a long lunch, war aided digestion. Long time Shanghailander J. B. Powell reported for the China Weekly Review from a temporary camp on a Bund balcony, watching the dogfights dressed in a doublebreasted suit and equipped with a fine pair of binocs. Two years later a Japanese sniper on the roof of a water tower in the old town of Nantao saw Daily Telegraph correspondent Pembroke Stephens poke his head over a wall. The soldier took aim and shot him dead.

In 1949 the communist army entered Shanghai and took to the rooftops to capture the city. Stories of the peasant soldiers’ sudden vertigo when they reached the impossible heights of the fifth floor abounded at the city’s final petit-bourgeois dinner parties before the lights went out.

The Red Army peasants’ bemusement at the concept of elevators was mocked by sophisticated Shanghainese who, not taking the soldiers overly seriously with their country bumpkin ways, would soon be shocked to discover how brutal and philistine a regime was being ushered in.

Men in uniform with red stars on their peaked caps took to the rooftops and used them to watch for spies, allowing their paranoia free rein across their vista. They stood on the rooftop of the former Shanghai Municipal Council Building on Kiangse Road and lowered enormous portraits of their chairman over the entrance. Big Brother had arrived, and had no intention of leaving. For the general public, rooftops became out of bounds. They were closed, spy paranoia deeming them off-limits, and a massive dustsheet was thrown over the city. Despite the restrictions, a lucky few with access to rooftops watched the first optimistic Red Parades along the Bund in 1950 when a ‘New China’ seemed possible and the Chinese people had seemed

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PLA parade, 1950

truly to stand up. The possibility of the economic disaster, hunger, isolation and fratricide that would plague them in the coming years and force them to sit down again was far from their minds.

Flocks of swallows – a hundred, two hundred – used to swoop over the shikumen, guided by their internal radar. But with the destruction of so many of the shikumen and lilong, Shanghai’s swallows have also mostly disappeared – swallowed up by ‘development’ – flying off to who knows where. They were proletarian birds, urban birds, common-as-muck birds, not the soaring kestrels and kites that office workers in Hong Kong’s skyscrapers watch tumble on the winds outside their computer-networked, temperature-controlled work-modules. Sadly for Shanghai, its birds had always felt right for their chosen city home.

There are new rooftops now and the modern-day flâneur must work harder to gain a vantage point. These rooftops are now taller and glitzier, some taller than almost any other rooftop on earth. As Shanghai’s skyscrapers fight to outreach each other, Old Shanghai has been pummelled, so many of its rooftops closed and padlocked. Most new buildings have not sought to incorporate active rooftops into their design except as fee-charging 65

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tourist platforms. Rooftop experiences have become fewer and farther between as the tops of buildings are turned into nightclubs, restaurants, swanky pads for the newly-moneyed nouveau riche.

A few memories linger for this long-time Shanghai flâneur, who had the good fortune of living for several years in the penthouse of the former Gresham Apartments on Avenue Joffre. A 360-degree balcony provided opportunities for visiting friends to gaze down, G&Ts in hand, at the Music Conservatory. On a pleasantly warm night in the early 1990s, an invitation arrived to the opening of a new nightclub, the first to open on the Bund for fifty years. A stocky and stubbly Armenian man led a tall Russian woman with porcelain skin in a tango at what turned out to be a short-lived Latin dance club on a rooftop, in the days when the Bund was still dark all night.

On another evening, on the roof of a now long-since bulldozed Frenchtown bar overlooking the grounds of the former Morriss family estate and the Ruijin Hotel, sweat dripped off noses as friends sipped tepid beer that no ice could chill, and the city slipped into lethargy. Those who could, took army-style camp beds out onto the street or up onto the rooftops in search of a smidgeon of air. And then there was the memory of standing on the terrace of the bar at the Broadway Mansions (which until 1949 housed the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents’ Club), contemplating Soochow Creek, the Bund, and those days in 1937 when the Garden Bridge teemed with terrified Chinese seeking sanctuary from the marauding Japanese army in the International Settlement. The great American journalist Randall Gould most famously snapped that iconic picture from the roof of Broadway Mansions as the poor souls streamed across, symbolising the fall of Chinese Shanghai to Tokyo’s brutal militarism.

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Hongkew’s old rooftops are mostly gone now – the Hongkew Market was five storeys high and the largest grocery market in Asia but it was virtually destroyed in August 1937 as the Chinese retaliated against the Japanese attack on the northern portions of the city. Hongkew Market took a battering, surrounded as it was by Japanese clubs and institutions, yaki-tori stands and bars selling Asahi in the heart of what had become the city’s Little Tokyo.

Certain sounds are also remembered. From an apartment on the old Amherst Avenue in far western Shanghai are heard ships’ bells during a lie-in on Sunday mornings, just as a young J. G. Ballard must have done on the same street sixty years earlier. The clang of hammers on metal at a construction site can, just for a moment, be mistaken for church bells, a beautiful sound that once radiated across the city on Sunday mornings but that is now officially banned. The East is Red chimes from Little Ben in the dome of the Customs House, but few if any hear it now. Shanghai these days seemingly has as little time to stop and listen to the kitschy communist anthem as it does for the beauty of church bells.

To stand now on a roof and attempt to be an innocent flâneur is to be confined to a regulated space – a restaurant balcony, a penthouse office.

The outdoor, almost rooftop, portions of numbers 3 and 5 along the Bund are known to be popular places for the dramatically romantic to propose – to shout love from the rooftops. Yet sometimes a moment can be recaptured – on the top floor of the old Municipal Abattoir, perhaps, where it’s invariably this flâneur – and a couple of dozen Chinese males photographing their ever-willing amateur-model girlfriends – looking out across Hongkew, down the endless stretch of the forgotten roads of the far-flung portions of the old Settlement in what was Yangtszepoo and the Eastern District.

There was a time, all too brief, when the rooftops of Shanghai were important spaces; when they were homes to the rich and powerful Shanghailander as well as the poor peasant seeking a novel experience or two at the Great World. They were places of entertainment and escape for busy secretaries who wanted to dance the night away and refugees who wanted to shake off their cares for a few hours. They were places where people went to relax and contemplate – if not to dance, dine and party. Those spaces that remain are home now mainly to ghosts. As the relentless destruction

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and rebuilding of the city continues, these too will eventually go. The few flâneur-friendly rooftops are where Shanghai becomes truly visible and transparent; where it is possible to look down and spy upon the city; to see its streets and their interconnections; to peep into its inhabitants’ homes and offices. They are places where one can observe or distance oneself from life. They were that then, and remain so now.

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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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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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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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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

Quan Barry

Quan Barry

4th For some reason I was staying just up the street from the Trevi Fountain.

The location was amazing but at night the noise wasn’t.

It must have been a disco. No, more likely it was just a bar.

The whole thing struck me as deeply weird. 2 a.m. & just down the street the Trevi Fountain gushing like an oil derrick.

Maybe it was something about the Italian moon. Or the waiter who’d been rude to me earlier in the Piazza Navona because I dared to sit down at a table for two when obviously I was only a table for one.

I could hear every word. They got inside me & started rattling around. Born down in a dead man’s town / the first kick I took was when I hit the ground. / End up like a dog that’s been beat too much/ ’til you spend half your life just covering up.

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It wasn’t even close to what I remembered. I got out of bed & googled the lyrics. I was old enough to barely remember Springsteen telling Reagan to cease & desist.

A convention centre full of old white guys rocking out in Oxford shirts & red white & blue top hats.

Then I realised what day it was. Michael Jackson had just died the week before. I imagined whoever was down the street in some dive bar in the shadow of la Fontana di Trevi was probably standing around with fists pumping the air. A sea of arms like pistons.

There’s no other way to say this. Six years ago on a starry night in Italy, I heard it as if for the first time.

A song about hard living, about a young man shipped off to Vietnam so he can avoid jail. His best friend killed at Khe Sanh. Then no job when he gets home.

Nowhere to run / ain’t got nowhere to go.

In the shadow of the penitentiary the refinery’s gas fires like something out of Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’.

In America, I never really listened because I didn’t have to.

The culture had established the narrative.

Rah rah rah & fireworks & apple pie & TV commercials for F-150s hauling payloads of solid gold up goddamn Mount Rushmore.

But ‘Born in the USA’ in Italy? I had to sit up & listen.

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[Like that time I ordered cheese curds in Los Angeles.

On a personal level I was forced to rethink the whole essence of what constitutes a cheese curd.]

I’ve been to Khe Sanh. It’s where we dropped enough bombs to blow up Hiroshima five times over. Now the place is overrun with coffee bushes, small green beans as far as the eye can see.

It’s actually quite peaceful. Even as the guide tells you what happened there, a part of you doesn’t believe it but a bigger part of you does.

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Small Bird Song Small Bir d Song Sally B reen

Sally Breen

Y

ou and your brother watched Oliver Stone’s Platoon a total of twentyeight times before you were eleven. Parents were better then. They seemed to have lives that went on without you. You also watched The Amityville Horror, Children of the Corn. Jason and Nightmare on Elm Street.

All of them in a row. No one cared. At first your family didn’t own a VHS – you had to hire one from the video shop when the video shop was still split into Beta and VHS sections and still had videos in it and then eventually like everyone else (perhaps a little later than everyone else) you did own a player.

Movies. On demand. As long as you could still ride your bike to go and get them. The guy in the video shop didn’t care about ratings. Porn was pretty much the only thing he wouldn’t rent out to you. You lived in some nowhere on the outskirts of a forgotten town where days were bright and people were tough and sometimes mean. This was not gold star territory. You only won when you won.

You and your bother liked horror stories and soldiers. Soldiers had whole wars thrown at them and they still got up. You liked Platoon best. But you also obsessively watched Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. It was all about the soldiers. Their jokes and who they were. The banter. The helicopters swooping and the pilots radioing in. ‘Roger your last, Bravo Six. Can’t run it any closer. We’re hot to trot and packin’ snake and nape, but we’re bingo fuel.’ And it all sounded good. Like they had a plan. Like deep down they all might have loved each other. You didn’t know then what you know now. That Oliver Stone was a full-blown patriot. With a ‘that hole ain’t gonna dig itself ’ chip on his shoulder. And Stanley Kubrick wasn’t and

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Full Metal Jacket was intense. The drill sergeant movie that only made you love the soldiers more. The weak ones. The funny ones. The quiet ones.

The uniforms. When Private Pyle shot himself in the head in the latrine and his brain splattered all over the tiles you pressed rewind and watched it over and over again just to see if you could stand it. Sad things happened.

Because they were happening to someone else. Scenes from Platoon still live inside your head. A young Johnny Depp walking across a bombed-out rice field with a young gook girl in his arms. Sergeant Alias, the good guy, falling to his knees in the final scene, arms raised in supplication as the strings lift and the footage drifts into slow motion, the Viet Cong shooting him a million times in the back before he falls in a series of staggered motions.

You cried when you were supposed to. And Sargent Barnes – the bad guy, flying away in the helicopter watching his softer rival die. You don’t think about these images the way you did when you were eleven. Now you know there’s another side. In the eighties the other side didn’t get a whole lot of screen time.

You are thirty-two. You are working for a magazine. They are, like everyone else, doing an Asia Issue. The war in Vietnam is over. The war is happening somewhere else, in a way no one understands and you’re surprised that everyone is implying but hardly anyone is actually writing about how the West still can’t see the future. You edit. You ask for The Sorrow of War at the library. The copy has to be shipped in. Since the last century only four people have read it.

The writer is Bao Ninh. The first person to tell you a story from the other side. The Sorrow of War is a love story with a war in it. There are no Americans speaking. Only the shadows of retreating aircraft. Hot blazes.

And the ghosted footsteps of a lost girlfriend on the stairs. A book about how love is annihilated and ended. You cry about more than just the words when he says, ‘The sorrow of war inside a soldier’s heart was in a strange way similar to the sorrow of love. It was a kind of nostalgia, like the immense sadness of a world at dusk. It was a sadness, a missing, a pain which could send one soaring back into the past.’

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You are middle aged. You are living in Hanoi. You think you’re close to understanding something about this country but when you close the cover on The Quiet American you feel a little bit sick. You know it’s beautiful but it’s also wrong and you wish more people knew about The Sorrow of War, about how the history, even just the one you bring with you, might have been so different. Reading Greene feels somehow false on the shores of Truc Bach Lake where John McCain was shot down and imprisoned. On the Internet you read about a memorial but you cannot find it. You keep seeing the movie endlessly in your head because it’s playing out in the streets and the bars in the city. Cheap versions of the novel, the legacy. Crusty white alcoholic men with fading Vietnamese brides. Young expat suits with Vietnamese girls. Faces like porcelain. No love lost and very few of them happy. There is no other side. Just an enigmatic, unknowable Phuong stoking the old man’s opium pipe and more confused paternity. Such indecent, enduring hierarchies. Bao Ninh would have said that ‘war was a world without real men’ but you got raised on Charlie Sheen instead. Flying over a foreign land in a helicopter ruminating on his two emblematic fathers, Alias and Barnes, the soft and the hard, fighting for possession of his soul.

You think you know something about history. Standing in the grounds of the military museum in Hanoi you realise you do not. You watch children from the provinces in their shiny red jackets sprawling all over the wreckage of numerous wars, all over the struggles for independence. This is no solemn war memorial – the bombed out B-52s, tanks and Huey choppers are not roped off, they’re strewn around the grounds of the museum like toys for the children to play with because these children have not been taught or asked to bow their heads, to respect these machines in long minutes of silence – there is no need. They didn’t lose. After a thousand years of Chinese governance, the Vietnamese fought everyone who tried to own them. The Songs, Mongol Yuans, Mings, Manchus, the Dutch, the Japanese, the French and the Americans. And they fought themselves. These kids posing for photos, arms wrapped around their mates and the half charred, bombed out metal, faces full of bright smiles, proud and victorious, jostling next to the faded insignias of their enemies and colonisers – the tricolour French

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roundel, the star-spangled banner – do not look sorry. The few Australian and American Vietnam vets you see slinking around, do, for everything; cartoonish in their heavy leather jackets and vests, booze-bellies stretched, dazed and confused like they’ve wandered out of a production company studio lot. Which they kind of did. Later the guards tell you the pavilion dedicated to what the Vietnamese call the American War is up the back.

Just a series of rooms that wouldn’t house the dead.

First Indochina War. The French. The children in the bright red jackets are excited to stand near you and admire your blond hair and clothes and have their photo taken by their only friend with a camera phone. You pose, towering above them, one arm on each set of slight shoulders, pleased and self-conscious, standing awkwardly by the glass cases full of strange helmets and hand-written declarations you can’t make out and old weapons. Later you think about your image being transferred endlessly among strangers.

Second Indochina War. The Americans. The faces of the children fade when you see the old Vietnamese men sitting in neat rows watching scratchy footage of the Christmas bombing of Hanoi, a time when Curtis LeMay, a general in the United States Air Force, had declared that America would bomb the Vietnamese back into the Stone Age. You can hear the commentary before you enter the room, the harsh tones of an urgent local accent intercut with American announcements. You’d been walking past the displays cut into walls which showed how the Vietnamese fighters had dug tunnels under ground, whole worlds of creeping activity in the mud; and replicas of the crude hand-made weapons designed to trick and maim and kill, laid out proudly like prizes. When you do enter the room the wrong way you are blocking the projection of images for a second, the old men not moving but following your movements with their eyes. They do not smile. They tolerate your mistake and you move aside. You should stay.

Listen. Watch the film. Pay your respects. You should watch the footage of the bombs falling over Hanoi like the fading tails of dying fireworks. But you move slowly towards the open door and the sunlight unable to shake the sensation that these old soldiers and civilians, eyes trained on the screen, seem to be waiting for you to leave. On the landing you think about Ninh.

And a place he called the Jungle of Screaming Souls. A place where the

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bamboo blistered like meat and the birds cried like human beings and never flew.

You sit in the white noise of the Hanoi Old Quarter thinking about animals, how people had said to you that Vietnam was a land without birds or dogs or animals, that all the animals had been eaten. And when a Stanford University professor said so in an article in the Washington Post the wave of words erupting between the two countries smelt like old hurts. He claimed the Vietnamese were naturally aggressive. They ate dog – they were not colonised by India like their neighbours. They lacked gentleness. And you couldn’t help wondering. Was there something in it? Could a people be judged and understood by what they ate? By who had claimed them? Could you skin and slice up a dog and still be a nice guy? And why didn’t the professor think further about how such tastes were acquired? What if your people had been starving for centuries? What if hunger was drawn into your DNA? The legacy of a tiny people. Men with fine fingers and legs like adolescent girls. When your history is an empty belly of time how can you be rational? When so many nations have tried to take a bite out of you, you eat what you can and what is to hand. How else to explain a craving for insects? The strangeness of a supermarket in the twenty-first century where insects are piled up high in scratchy mounds. Hundreds of dark olives with wings and legs. The blood on the floor at the market. The sound of machetes on hard wood where two men swing over and over again, endlessly, one cut for the head, two cuts for the legs, a huge mound of toads piled high, still wriggling, still alive and trying to escape.

You have seen wild birds in Hanoi, small sparrows darting about in the trees outside your windows, tails twitching, flitting from branch to branch as if too frightened to stop, to be still. There are never any birds in the trees bigger than your palm. In a restaurant you were served a plate of small birds, their bodies collapsed and melted by the heat of the oil they had been fried in and you had been horrified thinking of the birds in the tree caught in nets. And there are dog restaurants and dogs in the streets and on leashes in the courtyards and in the doorways of homes, badly trained puppies with huge feet and too-friendly snouts who follow you as you walk and fully grown beasts coming at you in edgy packs. Their owners, either never

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around or not too keen to call them back. On the corner you have seen two golden-haired puppies in a cage on the sidewalk. Yelping and yelping all day. Sometimes one of the men by the pho stand wanders over and smashes his hands on the metal to quiet them. Most of the time he does nothing.

Every time you pass, you resist the urge to let them out. You start walking another way. This is how the world changes, dogs moving from plates to leashes, from meals to friends, in a country caught in a new war of aspiration, in the shiny SUVs taking up too much room on the roads and the cut-glass crystal bottles of expensive European whiskey piled high in shop doorways on holidays, their syrupy sheen full of promise.

You can’t get into the bunker underneath the Sofitel Metropole Hotel unless you are a paying guest. This is not a problem. You drop a few hundreds in the restaurant and the bar and say enough intelligent things to be elevated from ‘holidaying Westerner who orders club sandwiches’ to ‘expat with means’ so you get in. The French-speaking maître d’hôtel loves you. Two days later you arrive at the appointed time and suffer like a new arrival through a tour of the memorabilia in the foyer that you’ve already seen.

There’s something about the small group of genteel tourists in the tour that gets to you. How they take so many photos of the blown-up photos of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt when they were here that you have to turn away. You gaze patiently at the silver spoons which are the spoils of some long gone triumphant dynasty and listen to a young American girl ask her boyfriend out loud: ‘So like, how did the war, like, actually start?’ And there are all these words on the wall. Quotes from Graham Greene. Joan Baez.

Americans. So much sympathy but still no other side. Except for the guide.

Except for the Vietnamese man who’s been underpaid to lead you through the underground, the hole under the hotel where people fled. He ushers the group outside past the pool and the famous bar with the overhead fans drifting just so and when you go under with your helmet on you watch the sure-footed rich wishing they’d never really thought about the rank and file.

And you don’t feel much and the corridors are creepy, the idea that this is what we do to hide from each other and a puffed up woman has an asthma attack because there’s not enough air and she’s had oysters earlier she says which doesn’t make any sense. And when you press a button on a wall you

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can hear the track Joan Baez composed when the bombs were falling outside on the people who cleaned her room for her but you have to listen with headphones on because this is more respectful. Far be it from anyone to milk a bunker. Later you walk up into the outside thinking, well, some people made careers out of this. And later, because you don’t leave like Graham Greene, the guide tells you the bunker was only for guests. That on the 18th of December 1972 when the US launched the biggest aerial offensive since the Second World War, a campaign they called Operation Linebacker II, the management sent all the famous people downstairs and the Vietnamese staff outside to fend for themselves. Two thousand homes were lost in a single night. Thousands died. LeMay didn’t believe in innocent civilians. ‘You are fighting a people, you are not fighting an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.’ The underground had become a special thing. Where Joan Baez played her guitar. And everyone who hated war thought it so profound.

Sometimes in the street you can feel the low heat directed towards you. You are noticed. With your blond hair and your white skin. But you are nothing.

Eyes settle and then pass over your frame like wind. You know the doorman writes down your movements. That there might be spies in the street. Old ladies who most Westerners think have a penchant for sitting on sidewalks are paid to be watchers. In Vietnam people don’t smile unless they know you. And then they smile all the time. The men and women who work in your building who you address as friends squeeze your middle when they greet you and exclaim strings of phrases you can’t understand. The woman who cleans your room pinches you on the arse and gives you a wry look every time. And so you exaggerate. You play the fool. You talk too loud. A strange waft of guilt trailing behind you because you don’t know anything about their lives and you can’t speak the language and you’re just like Greene and Baez and everyone else mooching around here on borrowed time. You’re still on the other side.

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Chitralekha Basu

Chitralekha Basu . . . and R said, ‘Are you still a dim sum virgin after six months in Hong Kong? If Cantonese cooking has anything to recommend it by, it’s the dim sum and desserts. . . .’

I reminded him I was from a part of India that has traditionally been partial to rice over dough. Bengalis are notorious for their addiction to all things derived from the transparent oblong grains of nourishment, including rice-brewed liquor. There is a reference to amaani (fermented rice water) in Kaliprasanna Sinha’s satire on the social mores of Calcutta, published in a series of chapbooks in 1861–62. Amaani is described in Sinha’s sketches as the subaltern’s DIY drink. However, the neophyte Anglophile in midnineteenth-century Calcutta – a city still in the making where metropolitan aspirations often come up against a deeply-entrenched provincial core – seems to like it too. He is probably both lured to and repelled by the crudely-distilled brew, drawn especially to its potentially-lethal nature. And although he literally swears by his vial of brandy, the college-going gent who reads John Stuart Mill as part of the East India Company–approved curriculum is a liberal at heart, willing to ignore class barriers and sip from the peasant’s pot of fermented rice water when no one is looking.

A Bengali eats rice for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and still thinks it’s a theme worth writing poems about. He consumes rice in its myriad forms – puffed, flaky, coated with jaggery. He uses rice powder solution to draw mystical patterns on the floor that emerge only gradually, a squiggle at a time, like cryptic clues leading to a hidden treasure.

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Rice is the source of some of the most visually imaginative idioms in the Bengali language. For instance a big eater is expected to polish off steamed rice heaped as a hillock that even the ‘cat couldn’t jump over’.

Besides, as I told R, although commonly thought of as high-calorie, rice is in fact the healthier staple food option compared to anything made with refined flour dough, including the skin used to wrap dim sum, which would be that much more difficult to burn off!

In any event, the prospect of piling on the kilos has seldom come between a Bengali and his love of the pearly grains of carbs. The actress Sumitra Mukherjee is known to have offered a heart-warming piece of logic to defend her preferred staple. She was shooting a film with director and actress Aparna Sen. At lunchtime, Sen, who was obviously minding her figure, would only have a fish fry whereas Mukherjee tucked without a shade of guilt into a full-course rice meal. ‘What’s the point working so hard to earn my plate of rice if I don’t get to eat it?’ Mukherjee told Sen. Bengalis dig their plate of rice and will likely never be short of reasons why. They call themselves ‘bheto’ or the rice-loving Bengali – differentiating themselves from the brawny North Indians brought up on a diet of charcoal-toasted rotis made from wheat or maize. Although ‘bheto’ sounds similar to another Bengali word meaning ‘scared’ or ‘cowardly’ and carries the connotations of being laid-back, sluggish, and cellulite-prone, Bengalis throughout history have fearlessly and spectacularly defended their plate of rice and the plot used to grow it.

A Bengali’s response to rice is hardly ever impassive. Tebhaga farmers swore in 1946 that they would not yield more than a third of the rice they grew to their landlords, even at the cost of their own blood. They pretty much kept their word.

Want more proof? Try serving to a Bengali a plate of steamed rice in which each grain isn’t completely separable from the others. When boiling rice in a pot – only a philistine will use a rice-cooker with a thermostat – one must be ever-vigilant. To ensure each grain has been cooked to the right degree and evenly, down to the kernel, one must remove the lid and tip out the starch at a precise second. Each grain is to be succulent and yet dry, polished and gleaming, with steam rising from it in curlicues. Identifying that moment is completely intuitive; there are no guidebooks on this.

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Well, actually, there are. One of the very first milestone works on Bengali cuisine written by Pragyasundari Devi in 1900 lists at least a dozen recipes for cooking rice, differing according to the consistency one is trying to achieve. But these formulae work only to an extent. Each cup of grain comes with a distinct character, depending on the soil, the season of harvest, whether the rice has been processed manually or machine-polished, whether the red-hued coat of bran has been left on or only the husked core is cooked.

A pair of expert hands can make a plate of steamed rice look like jasmine blossoms collected early on an October morning, still dewy from lying on a bed of grass all night. Only a seasoned cook with a connoisseur’s nose for detail would know how long to boil a given variety, and when to remove the lid or put it back on.

Cooking rice is like composing poetry: either you get there or you don’t.

My earliest memories of rice include watching it being smuggled.

The task would be performed by incredibly skinny women scrambling down the steps of still-moving trains pulling into a station. These unlikely rice peddlers changed platforms at extraordinary speed, even hunched down like riverboats piled high with cargo, lugging sacks that looked at least twice their weight. They never used the footbridge, preferring to kick and pull the bulging gunny bags, taut at the seams, across the gravel trackbeds. Most of them, skilled sprinters whose talent probably deserved better exposure elsewhere, were too agile for the railway police. Perhaps they had already negotiated a deal with the guards, and the cat-and-mouse game played on a daily basis was simply pretence or meant as a diversion for the passengers.

This was in pre-reforms India, when rice supplied through the public distribution system was insufficient and usually full of stones. Calcutta had an insatiable appetite for the fresh, manually-husked, fine-quality rice that these women brought every day from the districts to the city at great personal risk.

The Bengali writer Joy Goswami wrote a poem on the phenomenon.

Goswami used to live in the riverside town of Ranaghat, seventy-four kilometres north of Calcutta. A somewhat romantic, frail, listlessly-wandering young man – a high-school dropout with lots of time on his hands – he was drawn to the river and the rail tracks that cut across it. The rice-delivery

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women perpetually on the run made for a hauntingly powerful image. The phosphorescent vermilion marks on their sweat-stained foreheads and hair partings would shine like miniature beacons under the blazing sun – the red marks linking them to the invisible men in their lives, who were likely away in the city, employed as factory hands or rickshaw-pullers, or, in the worst-case-though-not-uncommon-scenario, sitting at home, drunk and wasted, living off the wife’s income.

It was the late seventies and the trend of women stepping out to work was still relatively new to India. Although women from peasant families had traditionally been a part of the rice farming process – from sowing the seedlings in submerged fields to separating the grain from the chaff by working the husking pedal – nobody quite remembered when they became so adept at running between the tracks and giving as good as they got to the home guards on those rare occasions when they did get cornered.

Agriculture in Bengal, from sowing seeds to the transport and marketing of the finished product, had turned into a nearly all-woman operation in just three decades since India’s Independence.

Goswami gave a fairy-tale spin to the story of the rice carriers. He chose the lullaby form. In his imagination, the women who competed with the railway police every day in a race where one could never be sure who won also had a maternal, nurturing side to them. . . . Pat the child to sleep, Aunt, Where’s your box and bundle?

Home guards in the rail bazaar Keep getting us in trouble Months pass, years go by And so the weather turns Cradling rice bags in their arms The aunts are on the run —from Mashi Pishi (The Aunts) by Joy Goswami, 1993 Now let’s cut to 2007. The Marxist government in Bengal is set to launch a massive industrialisation drive. For three decades the ruling Left had abetted what turned out to be a managed decline of industry in the state –

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labour unrest, lockouts, enterprises declared sick, trades unionism of the most insidious kind. For a long time, the government had resisted the entry of computers on the grounds that they would make human employees redundant. Then along came a chief minister who watched the films of Fernando Solanas and translated writings by Vladimir Mayakovsky into Bengali. He wanted to do things differently, and ‘do it now’.

Trying to put Bengal on the fast track to development was a noble idea, poetic even. The profile of the rice-growing peasant had not changed much in sixty years of free India, at least not visibly. As Sunil Gangopadhyay (easily Bengal’s most-celebrated writer at that point and certainly its most prolific) wrote, farmers’ sons continued to wear the same torn shirts their fathers and grandfathers had worn, and got tapeworms lodged in their guts from not wearing shoes. The only way that could change, it seemed, was by making the farm boy trade in the torn shirt on his back for a factory hand’s overalls.

The trade-off did not happen as smoothly as was promised at the outset.

Not all farmers were ready to sell their plots and switch careers. Besides, only a minuscule fraction of the fifteen thousand people expected to be affected by the large-scale displacement of farmers could be inducted into a training program with no assurance of being absorbed in the small-car manufacturing unit that would be built on the site of what used to be their home and source of livelihood. Since the land reform movement in 1978, all farmers who cultivated other people’s land technically had a claim to it as well as the landlord. The same Left government that had introduced a series of laws to protect sharecroppers against eviction from the land they farmed was now bent on claiming it back to set up car sheds.

I recall a particular farmer from Singur. As the resistance against imminent displacement gathered momentum, he scooped out a handful of topsoil from his plot for closer inspection by visiting members of a Calcutta-based rights group. Rice was harvested three times a year and several vegetables grown along the river embankments – all very fine yields, he said. The earth was so rich in alluvium that the crops grew as if on hormones.

Soon, he and his fellow farmers were dislodged from their land by armed forces and hired goons sent by the government. Protesting young men were assassinated and thrown in ditches. A girl of eighteen known for speaking

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her mind was ambushed when she stepped out of her home for her early morning ablutions in a neighbouring field. She was gang-raped and set on fire. Horrific tales of children being maimed and butchered lost their shock value. Several women whose profile matched that of the ‘aunts’ who pat the children to sleep in Goswami’s poem lay in derelict hospital beds, mauled irreparably, ingesting a saline drip through a needle stuck in their arms until they couldn’t take any more.

‘Whom shall we pray to for rice and for care?’ asks Allen Ginsberg in the poem ‘September on Jessore Road’ – his ode to the ten million refugees who crossed over from a war-torn Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) to India in 1971. Anyone would have recoiled at the horror of watching scarred women and starved children with distended bellies hop and hobble their way across runnels of shit to get near the packs of rice dropped by a helicopter. For Ginsberg, the sight triggered righteous rage at his own country, too preoccupied with ‘bombing North Laos’ and ‘Napalming Vietnam’ to send aid to the famished millions camped out in temporary shelters.

But sometimes, these sites of hygienic disaster and numbing, soul-killing sordidness could double as a stage for extraordinary displays of compassion.

One such incident was mentioned a few times by Sunil Gangopadhyay (‘Sunil poet’ in Ginsberg’s poem) in his writings – in his memoir as well as in the mammoth two-part novel Purba Paschim (East West, 1989). In one passage, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi visited a refugee camp. She seemed the very antithesis of the tough, ruthless, cold-blooded and powerhungry autocrat that she was commonly taken to be. Gangopadhyay described her picking a grain of rice ladled out for inspection from a still-bubbling giant pot, squeezing it between her fingertips and declaring that it wasn’t quite done yet. The gesture was somewhat out of character for a Prime Minister often referred to as the only man in her cabinet. By stepping up close to the untamed flames of a crude oven dug into the ground and getting her hands dirty, Gandhi revealed a side of herself that was maternal but not necessarily soft. Soon afterwards, she would make a brief speech about India not being large enough to offer permanent asylum to every person who arrived at her door. The squeezed grain of half-cooked

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rice between her fingertips was a token gesture that revealed that she cared for her guests, even if she were unable to extend the hospitality indefinitely.

In Bengali folktales it is not uncommon to find villagers welcoming a rank stranger into their homes, offering him a plate of rice and a pillow on which to rest his head for the night. Perhaps it is still possible to find such instances of hospitality in hidden pockets of rural Bengal – on the edge of a tranquil settlement perhaps, shaded by the giant leaves of saal and seesham trees.

I was the privileged recipient of such unconditional kindness a few years back, in a Santal village roughly eight kilometres from Santiniketan. The lady of the house was a widow with a young son who was training to be an artist. A blacksmith’s workshop in a shed next to their mud house was covered in a layer of dry, yellow leaves. It had been used only sparingly since her husband had died. It was a mystery how she managed to rustle up a meal for five hungry people who had plodded across miles of parched, harvested fields on a freezing January afternoon to reach her door. The rice she served us was of a thick, coarse variety, made even heavier by letting the starch settle on and soak into the grains. The slippery gruel was served with a side dish of potatoes steamed with unidentifiable greens that were so bland that they would have been difficult to swallow were it not all washed down with tears of gratitude.

Rice is so intrinsically linked to the notion of ‘caring’ that these two things might even be mutually transferable. The Chinese say, ‘Chifan la ma?’ and Koreans ‘Bab mugguh suh?’ – literally, ‘Did you eat rice today?’ – and mean, ‘How are you doing?’, but to ask in Bengal if one has had rice for lunch could be a code connoting something entirely different. It might even be a bit of a joke, as a traditional Bengali lunch featuring rice with several side dishes and a dessert on an ordinary day sounds too middle-class, if not downright bourgeois. Indeed, even if one were to go the whole hog (so to speak) – i.e. begin with deep-fried strips of bitter gourd served with rice and ghee and end with payesh (fine-quality rice boiled in milk and sugar or molasses, with cardamom, raisins, saffron, cashew nuts, pistachios or almonds added for flavour and special garnish), not forgetting the fish head cooked in a thick soup of husked moong lentils and tender goat meat stewed in ginger broth in between, to name just two items on the menu – it would

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seem somewhat awkward to talk about it in public except as a deference to tradition.

Speaking of code, the following is a translation of one of the first poems written in the earliest form of Bengali: My house is on a knoll, neighbours I have not People stop here every day, no rice in the pot The family swells like a river, like milk in full flow Squeezed out the udders, it could never ever go Back where it came from. The cow is sterile, but the bull delivers The calf is milked every three hours The jackal fights the lion each day Few will ever get what the poet has to say. . . .

—from Charyageeti by Dhendhonpaad, 1000–1200 CE The continuous cross-reference to milk in this enigmatic piece is noteworthy. Milk mentioned in the same breath as rice suggests nourishing care of the most basic kind. If rice is the staple that provides the energy and keeps one’s blood flowing, when combined with milk it is undoubtedly one of the world’s most soothing comfort foods that one might consume without worrying about piling on too many calories. There’s perhaps a sense of poetic justice in that this common and traditional meal-ender served at a Bengali lunch does not figure on a restaurant menu and isn’t available to buy off-the-shelf. Its place is in the realm of poetry. In Bharatchandra’s eighteenth-century narrative poem, Annadamangal (1752–53), when the goddess of prosperity asks the boatman Ishwar to seek a boon from her, his only wish is that his children ‘may have their daily milk and rice’.

The lady who cooked for my family when I was a child would sometimes tell me a story to help the food go down, for I had a tendency, when no one was looking, to spit out the morsels she so scrupulously placed in my mouth.

Part of her job was to follow me around with a plate of small balls of rice, rolled with boiled lentils, vegetables or fish curry as the binder.

Yamuna Mashi’s story was set somewhere in the north of Calcutta, in those neighbourhoods tightly woven with labyrinthine alleys between

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houses stacked up against one another. The story of a Naxalite boy who was just about to sit down to lunch when the police knocked on the door had all the ingredients of a thriller, told with precise graphic details. The young revolutionary, reaching out for his first fistful of rice, sprang up at the sound of approaching footsteps on the other side of the door, jumped over the boundary wall and ran through the bewildering network of alleys until he was cornered, shot dead in the ‘police encounter’ or caught and taken into custody.

The story came with a moral lesson.

‘That should teach you not to play with rice,’ Yamuna Mashi would say.

‘You got any idea how many people don’t get to eat any?’

Revolutionaries didn’t, at any rate.

Much later, a first-person account of time spent in prison by former Naxalite Raghab Bandyopadhyay provided a different kind of insight in the matter: Food consisted of gruel, burnt rotis, starch passed off as lentil soup, a thick, black curry. It wasn’t unusual to be served a piece of fish or meat, once or twice a week. Some of the convicts would add oil and spices and cook the lentils and curry all over again. Sometimes I too got a taste of their cooking. Who could have imagined that the food cooked at the main jail kitchen – the Bada Chauki, as it was called – could be so drastically transformed? What surprised me even more was the prisoners’ urge to protect their taste in food. They were determined to not let their palate’s sensitivity lapse into indifference. . . . Inmates were forbidden to carry matchboxes or lighters, or light a fire – a ban they regularly flouted. Not only did the guards posted outside the ward gates know about it but, in fact, they had eaten food cooked by prisoners a number of times. Cooking was a tale in itself – a longdrawn process. Cigarette sparks were dropped on cinders of burnt rags to make a fire. . . . The finished product was a wonderful aim to work towards – an achievement at the end of the day. The art of cooking would bring a sense of purpose or a meaning, howsoever small, to the dull prison days.

—Journal Shottor (The Seventies Journal) by Raghab Bandyopadhyay

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While the ways we re-imagine and re-do the food we consume add meaning to our lives and our experiences, the dishes we taste, watch, smell and think of, in turn, also work their magic on us, spring a surprise, throw us off-kilter, put us in touch with a side we never knew we had.

I wasn’t feeling particularly hungry or adventurous that evening but R insisted I should eat something. He knew I had skipped dinner to see him off and that I had come straight from work at the end of a very long day in the middle of a busy week.

He ordered a tang yuan item for us – a typical Cantonese sweet dish. In a few minutes he would catch an express train to the airport. This was the last food we would be sharing for a while.

The dessert arrived in a square cup. A glutinous ball of sticky red rice was suspended in an intensely grey-black sesame syrup, floating like a darkly luminous planet in an endless sky. The syrup evoked images of wet earth, trampled and kneaded to a perfectly uneven consistency. It was exactly the colour the barren plot on my way to school used to turn during the monsoon season. Nobody cared much for that un-cultivated, un-built-on patch surrounded by apartment buildings on a regular day, but come rain, the neighbourhood boys would bring out a football and have what was quite literally a field day, rolling in and lathering themselves all over with the squelchy, mousse-y viscous liquid.

In China, in the late 1950s, roughly 36 million people starved to death.

My friend Liu Jun once wrote a piece about her grandmother eating the soil from the wasted rice fields, bringing home chunks of dry earth embedded with shrivelled roots to share with the family. The plants had wilted and died after all the sparrows in the sky were shot down and the maggots, now breeding unchecked, ate up the grains, down to the kernel.

Now China – its steadily-growing middle class, at any rate – was eating plenty and eating well. Sharing a cup of mud with a friend had become a sweet, intimate experience, romantic even. There it was – a cup of kindness between us, if you like – to sample, reflect on and be thankful for.

As R and I scooped spoonfuls of black gold that slid down my gullet like drops of mercury, I told him there was a saying in Bengali, about ‘swallowing the husking pedal on request’ if that’s what it took to humour someone you

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particularly cared for. It is about a husking tool that women in Bengal’s villages still use. As one of them pedals away, a colleague feeds and shuffles the grain in a split-second before the pestle crashes down on the un-husked grain. A moment too late and the person raking up the grains could have her fingers squashed to jelly. Timing is everything.

Like romance, revolution or the first spell of rain arriving with the onset of monsoon, rice too is an experience worth waiting for until the time is right.

Extracts quoted in the text are translated from the Bengali by the author.

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Kelly Morse

Kelly Morse

Cơm Com First word I flip to and already I think this little yellow dictionary has deficiencies – only five words listed for rice: (plant) cây lúa; (uncooked) gao; (husked) lúa xay roi; boiled ~ com; fried ~ com rang Deficiencies like mine as I stand back touching whiteboard and reply ‘rice’, ‘rice’, ‘rice’ No listing for (home) com; wife ~ com My students think they’ve made a mistake, these students who say ‘English is too much more beautiful than Vietnamese.’

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– lost also the common joke, ‘a man needs (rice) com every day, but sometimes he wants (to eat without rice) an vã, sip a little pho on the side.’

Each classroom comes equipped with ceiling mounted projectors, central air, degreed Caucasian teachers No (rice seedling) lúa chiêm; (green as a seedling reed) màu lá ma; (planted in the fifth winter month) lúa mùa; summer paddy ~ thóc chiêm; The average Vietnamese person paces a field for a thousand dollars a year, less than one course in this old capital – (unit for counting seedlings) danh; to buy rice ~ dong; see also: national currency After class Huong directs my fingers, sifts some green flakes into my palm.

Her new mother-in-law observes silently No (young green rice) thuoc com, threshed and pounded until the (rice husk) trau winnows to the floor, pestles grinding

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unpeels a finger banana and dips it into the rice, delicately nibbles. She says something sharp, her face against the new (rice seed) hat until it flattens, bruises green and sticky. This is the best rice, rare, eaten raw after a long dinner to honour guests still in profile and coastal Huong blushes, says to me, ‘I don’t know this way of eating rice in Hanoi.’

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Prologue from Aruna and Her Palate Prologue fromLaksmi Ar una Pamuntjak and Her P alate

Laksmi Pamuntjak

H

er name is Aruna, her age thirty-five and, since I’m not the most reliable of storytellers, you may want to rely on your own judgment as to her provenance, for from the name you may think her of Indian descent, though her wayang-puppet face suggests she may be Javanese, perhaps Sundanese, or even Balinese for all you know, and being any of those things doesn’t mean you can’t still have some Indian blood in you, and even though she isn’t fat like Meh, world-class lover of doughnuts, or Cho, champion sucker for rice, she is plainly someone who is, like most women I know, torn between keeping a reasonably feminine figure and indulging her healthy appetite; and when I say healthy I mean this in the most objective, life-improving way, not in that nasty, double-entendre way you tend to reserve for people you secretly don’t like, which makes her, all things considered, plump – yes, that’s the word, that’s what people call women who are neither thin nor overweight but nonetheless of a somewhat pleasant shape – and even if you are tempted to use the same word to describe, say, Koh Abun’s famed roast duck, served in the bowels of Jakarta’s Chinatown, or certain dried fruits after they are stewed, don’t say it in the same breath; what I can tell you for certain is that she possesses an unusually observant eye; she takes note of everything, or if not everything then most things, and this makes her reticence a tad more acceptable in the notoriously catty social circles of Jakarta because, like it or not, there are not that many people in this world who are knowledgeable yet make no attempt to show it off, and even though you may discern something miserly, if not a little cruel, about her, a quality often acquired by those who have been forced to

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become an adult before their time, people are quietly attracted to her, or rather, to her persona, or even more, to that rare person to whom the act of talking requires much pause and consideration, which sounds like a contradiction but in fact isn’t, because time does what it does, asking you to pay for its services, and often at exorbitant rates you have no time for; and that’s not all, time is also snobby and inconsiderate, and it can upset or turn fickle the very thing it touches, causing commodities such as soybeans, chillies and garlic to vanish overnight from the market – just as the citizens of this big and broken city had witnessed at least twice that year – producing an often instant and crushing effect, such as rendering eating suddenly less pleasurable, our tongue curiously sallow, our vocabulary even more curiously drained (no longer do you hear exclamations of ‘Yummy!’, ‘Divine!’ or that ubiquitous phrase, ‘Mak nyus’); in fact we become so shorn and no different from, say, an empty shotgun, or a bird that cannot sing; but such is time, dear reader, it is adept, above all, at playing favourites; it avails, more often than not, the wealthy or, in other words, those who don’t have much use for time because they rarely have to work (because they’re already rich) and thus have plenty of time on their hands in order to invent other uses for their time, which on average costs triple the amount people with no time on their hands are usually willing to pay, and I suspect this is why she, Aruna, who has little facility for any kind of flourish, but to whom such notions as courtesy and compliance are still important, has long decided that she will only spend what little time she has on things that make her happy, and to be fair, at her age such a desire is not as mystifying as it sounds, especially since those who don’t talk much are often perceived as unhappy, and being perceived as unhappy, especially at her age, is increasingly not a very nice place to be, if not downright insulting, bordering on unfair, because what is being implied is a weakness of will, a vulnerable soul, a – God forbid – lack of personality, whereas she is in fact completely the opposite, or so she thinks, because how could she not possess a winning personality if the only thing that makes her truly happy is food, the one thing we know is never the same thing to you and me – honey to you, poison to me, cum to you, death to me – but the one thing that to her, Aruna, is the molasses that binds all of life’s morsels, defines all knowledge, a universe formed long ago, before music, before poetry, before images, that deepest and earliest

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connection with the world before all turns cruddy and senseless, and one which morning, noon and night fills her head, fills and cushions, as if she were blessed with the ideal lover and the ideal husband at once, inamorato and father substitute, two things that she incidentally doesn’t have (because she has no time, is that not so, for things that make her unhappy?), bears her away from work, from family, from other duties, probes the insides of her brain instead for a sliver of an image, a burst of flavour, a speck of colour, take the fine white strings of carbs that form a bowlful of duck vermicelli soup in the food stalls of Muara Karang, say, or a set of questions, best unanswered, regarding the sorts of emotions that may have gone, unwittingly or otherwise, into the unsurpassed texture of Bu Amah’s nasi uduk – is it jealousy, guilt, self-sacrifice or unrequited love? – and relentlessly plans culinary tours from one city to the next, starting with a plate of rujak juhi and ending with a slice of roti kaya, or starting with a nutty salad of ketoprak and ending with a steaming platter of lindung cah fumak, such that when other people are busy discussing stock market averages, zombie firms and ghostly banks, the fluctuations of the property market, new evidence in the latest mega-corruption scandal, the mysterious death of the wife of the Tanah Abang mobster boss, the pros and cons of decentralisation, climate change, paedophilia in schools, the rivalry between hospitals, public road and work place safety, who’s better, Messi or Ronaldo, Barca or Real Madrid, she is busy thinking, in almost embarrassing detail, about the affinity the zucchini shares with salt and olive oil, or the aubergine’s undying love for garlic and chilli paste, or accumulating seemingly useless fact-nuggets about food which, if tossed occasionally, and ever so casually, into the innately problematic mix that is the dinner table, can make the tosser seem more interesting than she really is (‘Roasting teaches you most of what you need to know about the meat you’re dealing with.’; ‘Meat must rest after roasting to preserve its juiciness. How long? It depends on the meat.’; ‘Venison – ah.

It’s the one meat you should neither overcook nor over-rest. Or else you will drain it off its juices. The meat will be tough and dry, the taste bland.

Its fibres cannot absorb and hold liquids that long.’), and it is such tiny tantalising thoughts that can fill her with a sudden sense of purpose and send her off on a supermarket spree, buying three types of granola and three types of salsa because she can’t be bothered to choose between them, or

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cooking the same pasta recipe over and over again until she arrives at breadcrumbs of the best consistency to sprinkle upon the pasta; thoughts that, if we are honest with ourselves, make us happy because they are not just about us, they are, rather, about everything else that lies outside us, for isn’t that precisely the point, talking or thinking about food is never just about food, it is often the best way to write about everything else as it seems to codify and conceal all manner of needs – absolution, recognition, love, revenge, fear of abandonment, fear of rejection, sex, lack of sex, same sex, lots of sex, no sex – and so in the end we can always say: ah, but doesn’t the city look different, with the aroma of this wicked garlicky broth swimming in my head, or, I don’t fucking care if this city, with its eternal stench and cheap shimmer, its homeless poor and its filthy rich, is cursed to hell, I’d still rather live here than anywhere else, I’ll die if I don’t have access to proper sambal for more than three days, and it is at such a moment of reckoning that the city does cease, as if by magic, to look like the city you’ve learned to hate yet cannot leave, because to leave it is to remove a chunk of yourself, a chunk that, like a tree, is only known to the soil that gives it life, a city that nonetheless sanctifies all corruption and deems impure those who are honest about their lack of religiosity, a city that chokes on its own smoke and carbon dioxide for a living, a city that wrecks all that you’ve learned in your sleep with its nosiness and insomnia and puts you on trial every day for crimes imagined and foretold, for hopes firmed and frayed, a city that for all its sins knows how to keep secrets, including yours, so much so that she too, Aruna, as staunch a realist in specific matters such as love and marriage (or, more aptly, the impossibility of the two) as she is a peaceable student of the dream world, allows herself to put her faith in different lights, secret alchemies, folk story and heresy, imagining herself on the back of a giant dragon, riding joyously into the mist while the un-dead and the ghosts of her past cheer her on, the holy and the damned, touching all the loved things she can finally touch and know, seeking first-hand, as is her wont, the taste of two whites, one from cauliflower the other from squid – the crowning glory, she was told, of a certain restaurant in the heart of London, and how the two can magically blend and produce what a certain English critic calls, not unbeautifully, a ‘new purity’; or what possesses, for that matter, the French, so scrupulously seasoned in the art of pleasure, to be

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waving their tinned anchovy at us and calling it umami while hundreds of small streets in Tokyo in which the secrets of the fifth sense have resided, modestly and unobtrusively, for centuries, or how a piece of fried egg in a modern tapas bar in New York comes to cost four times its more modest version in a market in Barcelona and ten times the version the average person whips up to feed herself, whose quieter fame may come, in Aruna’s rather special case, from the use of real butter, fresh and creamy and not your average Blue Band margarine, thanks very much, and from her patient insistence on not letting the middle part crack and the edges burn, because such is the principle of egg-making – consistency is key, there has to be a standard, and even though we can play around with food, substituting peppercorn with nutmeg, tamarind with belimbing wuluh, peanuts with cashew nuts, we know ginger is ginger, turmeric is turmeric, lemongrass is lemongrass, each a republic of its own, just as we know that each egg dish that comes out of a person’s hands, poached, boiled, fried or scrambled, will never be the same, just as every performance is final, it can never be repeated, and in the end it is this, the damning finality of it all, that more or less defines us as a person – what kind of people are we, Puritan or liberal, dogmatic or flexible? Which do we like better, Kudus-style soto or Lamonganstyle soto, the Padang food at the restaurant chain Sari Ratu or Sari Bundo?

– thus steering some of us, like Aruna, onto the enlightening path of Food, because isn’t it quite simple, really: Food demands neither observance nor allegiance, is neither vicious nor jealous; it possesses no clear theology, it doesn’t ask you to perform animal sacrifice, wear a headscarf, offer incense and recite sacred texts, it doesn’t denounce lovers of other menus and call them profane, it celebrates all the senses rather than tough-mindedness, it borrows and absorbs from here and there, it accepts the transient and the dissonant, eludes singular definition, and occasionally serves up a slice of heaven on a plate, and so this is how her love comes about, her love of Food and everything that has to do with it, the kitchens that produce it, the recipe scribes that immortalise it, the chefs that create it, the restaurateurs that institutionalise it, the table attendants that serve it, the food lovers that savour it, the critics that assess it, the food writers that celebrate it, and she, Aruna, increasingly finds that she can only live among those people, people who can catch the gingery scent of wedang from afar, who can pick up the

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seventh aroma in a glass of red wine, who can tell from the texture of coconut cream whether it comes from an old or a young coconut, who go ape over the different varieties of wild honey, who know how to choose an apple and what grape varietal is best paired with sticky rice, mango and coconut cream, who see a poster of Macedonia and think not of poverty and a long drought, but instead, a bowlful of salad filled to the brim with cucumber and tomatoes as plump as cherubs, who hear the word ‘Venice’ and imagine not water lapping at their legs and knees, but instead the bustle of the Rialto Market, with its small boats piled high with seafood and vegetables, punctuated by opalescent flashes of fish and molluscs of every kind, who know that they are happy when their tongues caress pandan and palm sugar, when their noses take in the sticky, sultry scent of gulai curry, when their throats and cheeks shiver at the enfolding warmth of milky carp soup, people who live to eat and in so doing chance on finding optimism, hope, magic, a succulent recipe, an unforgettable restaurant, a delicious fuck, sweet-smelling nights that open up worlds of half-dream, people like Bono, a.k.a. Johannes Bonafide Natalegawa, a talented young chef who has done time at some impressive kitchens in America, and precisely because he’s young and talented and has done time at some impressive kitchens in America, he’s also the most infuriating guy in the world, and Nadezhda, yes, that’s her name, not the baby version of Nadia, or Nadya, or Nadja, but Nadezhda, and that’s how you should say it, fully, roundly, broadly, as if you are coddling a liquor-soaked, Alpine-bred apricot in your mouth, Na-DEZH-da, contributor to a lifestyle magazine, super-beautiful, impossibly chic and a writer of countless articles on restaurants around the world, and because of that thinks herself the most cultured, the most extraordinary of all creatures; creatures, in other words, who make her, Aruna, happy, who loosen her tongue, light up her hearth, breathe life into her words, and with whom she can sit down at a table and eat anything, anywhere, anytime, in the way you can only do with friends and not a partner, because friends know not to hope too much and know how to love without tying you to a life sentence, and know how to return her, Aruna, into her own aloneness, an aloneness that returns her, ultimately, to Food, and that, dear reader, that existence is to her the summit of man’s value, and, because every story, in the end, craves a subject and a lead, it is in such a spirit that this story is

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told, with Food as subject and her in the leading role, and with everything emanating from a small office in a corner of Jakarta, in which a great many things are decided and in due course change her life.

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Poetry

Saleem Peerdina

Saleem Peerdina

The Curious Case of the Custard Apple If ever a fruit was misnamed, this one had the misfortune of getting Virtually defaced. The British had a hand in rewriting the Anglicised Versions of not only fruits and vegetables, but also of larger entities Like cities, rivers, mountains, and streets. Not to mention The changing of personal names which saved them the bother Of training their tongues around those slippery syllables.

The fruit’s native name is Sitaphal, or Sita’s favoured fruit, For which there is a male counterpart in Ramphal, or fruit Beloved by Rama, which, even if it makes no linguistic point, confers On it mythological status. Bound in a green-brown jacket Resembling bubble wrap, Sitaphal has the hard look of a grenade, Only rounder. When ripe, it has to be handled with care Or the fruit will easily smash. If the skin is shading into black The fruit is close to hitting its expiry date. When ready to eat

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The fruit opens in half in your hand so holding it like a saucer, You can dip your lips into it for morsels of sweet, milky, flesh, While deftly spitting out the shiny black seeds.

That is all there is to it. Except that the fruit also ranks high As a frozen treat: as a flavour, sitaphal ice cream, available only In season, vies with mango, pistachio and saffron. No doubt, The British palate was tickled when the fruit struck its custardy chords.

So we’ll consider this misnomer a tribute to the Sitaphal.

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from When Ali Met Honour from When AliRuth Met Ahm Honour ed

Ruth Ahmed Honour

W

e never made it to separate beds on that first night. I thought I’d understood the message of his drifting into my room with me, sitting tentatively on the edge of my bed, chatting and wriggling his feet out of his shoes. I had waited for a lull in the conversation, a convenient moment where I tipped my head towards his in laughter. And then, following convention and experience, I had moved forward to kiss him.

I hoped that the fact that my eyes were half-closed removed a little of the humiliation of his rebuttal. The tops of my cheeks burned crimson with clumsiness; embarrassment at putting myself, and him, into such an awkward situation. He was so gentle; it wasn’t a put-down – he just moved his face away from mine and immediately cast his gaze down to the floor and, when he spoke, his words were fast, tripping over themselves.

‘How long have you lived in this flat? Do you get on with your housemates? Are you keeping it on for next year?’ He picked at invisible strands of cotton on my striped duvet cover.

I tried to talk the last few seconds out of history.

‘We have a great laugh here, we really do. But everyone’s going their own ways in the next few weeks. It’ll be time for another group of students to go through it the same way we did.’ I patted my pillow, intending to illustrate my fondness for the house and its contents – none of which belonged to us – but Al seemed to see it as an instruction to swing his legs round and lean back against the headboard. He was fully clothed, his legs

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out straight in front of him, and he nervously wriggled his toes inside his black socks.

I filled the awkwardness with more words. ‘It was good for me to live here, with such beer monsters. They helped me get over leaving home – I missed my twin sister so much at the beginning of uni, I cried every night.’

‘Wow, my sister and I just have a fight every time we’re in a room together.’

I couldn’t imagine him fighting with anyone; he was so quiet, his body language almost apologetic.

‘Why didn’t you go to uni together, you and your sister?’ he asked.

‘Wouldn’t that have been easier?’

‘It was my mum’s idea, and she was right, I think – looking back on it.

She just wanted us to be individuals for once.’ It had taken a lot of persuasion on my mother’s part but, coupled with the fact that we couldn’t decide on a college that suited us both, Connie and I had eased our way apart three years ago.

‘I’ll be right back,’ I smiled and grabbed my pyjamas from under my pillow. ‘Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

‘That would be great, thank you.’ He smiled and we both made an effort to forget the aborted kiss and the tension its ghost left in the room.

I shrugged myself into my pyjama trousers in the kitchen. With anyone else, I’d have just jumped under the covers in my pants and T-shirt, but I felt a little responsible for him, for not making him feel awkward again. It made me grin to myself. My pyjamas were decorated with images of Tintin.

I thought Al might be relieved when he saw how harmless I looked; maybe he would be satisfied that no one wearing the Thompson Twins and Captain Haddock up and down their legs could have been that set on seduction.

I took the tea back into my room.

‘Sorry, I didn’t ask, do you take sugar?’ So polite, so distant.

He shook his head.

I sipped at my drink too soon, burning my lips in an effort to distract myself. Al sat propped against the headboard; his T-shirt – a matte bottlegreen – had slipped slightly up from his jeans revealing a line of smooth brown skin and tufts of black hair across his belly. I longed to lay my hand on his warm skin but I didn’t dare. There were new rules in this room and I had no idea what they were.

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I looked down at my pyjamas again, focussed on the motif of the little white dog skittering around my knees and tried not to think about Al or how much I wanted him to kiss me.

Slowly we got more comfortable with the proximity, our questions and answers little beacons of hope across the summer air.

‘Is English your first language?’

‘Nope.’ He sounded sleepy now, his voice smoother. ‘My mum doesn’t speak English so I just spoke Punjabi with her until I started school.’

‘That’s amazing. So will you spend all summer just talking in Punjarbi?’

‘Pun-jabi,’ he said, ‘there’s no r in it. Non-Asians always say Punjharbi but it’s just Pun-jabi.’

‘Cool,’ I said. ‘I feel a bit special now – like I’m in the know. So do you?

Do you talk in Pun-jhabi at home?’

‘No, there’s more English speakers in our house than not. So the majority rule. As soon as my sister arrived and I started school, English kind of came into our house. And my dad speaks English properly. So we speak in English and our mum answers in Punjabi; that’s how she likes it.’

He rolled on to his side; we were eye-to-eye. I didn’t dare attempt another move on him. I was terrified that he’d just go home.

‘What about the shops and stuff? Or going to the doctor’s? Does she speak English then?’

‘Don’t get me started. My sister goes with her to the doctor’s as a translator, unless she can get in to see the Pakistani doctor of course. And, God this makes me cringe, all our local shops are Pakistani. My dad or my sister go with her to Manchester city centre and do all her talking for her.’ He rubbed his face with his hands. ‘It sounds so awful when I talk about it, but at home, in Manchester, it’s just normal. It’s how people live. It’s who my family are.

And every other family around us.’

‘God, you don’t have to tell me about families.’ Here was a subject I could support him on. ‘My family are bonkers, nuts. They embarrass me every which way.’

I dared edge my hand into the narrow no man’s land between us on the bed. It cut through the shadow of the window frame thrown onto the bed by the streetlamp outside. I splayed my fingers out on the striped cover, my thumb on red and my little finger half on green, half on blue.

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His turn. ‘Is it just you and your sister? In your family?’

‘Just us. They wanted more kids but it didn’t happen.’

‘I can’t imagine how that must be. A family of four. It must be so peaceful.’

‘My dad doesn’t really do peaceful. He’s a bit of a character. You’ll have to come down to Kent and meet him.’

I stopped short. Maybe that was too much, too soon. Was that the phrase it would take to make Al run, to make him vanish into the night, leaving just the dent in the pillow where his head had been, and a faint trace of his aftershave?

‘That sounds cool. I like getting out of the city. Are they near the sea?’

I was so relieved. ‘Just a few miles. It’s crazy quiet there; a couple of pubs and a newsagent, that’s it.’

‘You’re making me very jealous.’ His arm fell forward; our fingers were millimetres apart. I swear I could feel the static between them. ‘My summer will be spent, sweltering, in my parents’ house, my brothers and sisters getting on my nerves, and nothing to save me but wandering around the streets and going to the gym or the. . . .’

He stopped mid-sentence. I looked at him, my eyes questioning.

‘I was going to say mosque, but it seems a bit silly. A bit wrong somehow.’

‘Guilty wrong?’ I asked.

He shook his head, rolled on to his back. I copied him and we stared at the spidery cracks in the damp-stained plaster.

‘Not guilty wrong. Just another-world wrong.’ His fingers snaked across the sheet and wrapped themselves round mine. I squeezed his hand gratefully.

We peeled layers of fact and history away from one another, keeping them inside us as an intimacy. Each similarity was a magical note, each difference a thread of intrigue and interest.

‘You haven’t got a spare toothbrush, have you?’ he asked as the dawn began to filter into our world. We were half-delirious with tiredness but I couldn’t close my eyes in case I broke the spell and he disappeared.

‘I haven’t, but I’ve got these.’ I reached into my bedside table drawer and pulled out a packet of Extra Strong Mints. ‘You could just rub one over your teeth. Better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.’

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‘Maybe not,’ he said, rolling the packet round in his hand, squinting at the tiny writing on the label. ‘Ah, thought so. I can’t eat these. But thanks for the offer.’

‘Why? What’s wrong with them?’ I asked.

‘Gelatine. It’s made from hooves. And it won’t be halal.’

‘Hooves? I’m freshening my mouth with something made of hooves?’

He nodded, grinning. ‘Where’s your bin?’

I pointed to the corner of the room and he tossed the packet into the wicker basket, a perfect shot.

I was so in awe of Al. I couldn’t take my eyes off him for the three weeks we had left at college, as if he was something I’d conjured up and he could vanish just as quickly. There was something about him that I hadn’t seen before in anyone else. I had been more intimate with other boys, other men, and yet I felt I knew Al far more deeply, that there were layers and layers of him to unfold and uncover. He carried himself confidently; he knew his limitations. The strict sentiments of his life, the very tenets that stopped him from even kissing me, were the same things that made him so unique, so perfect.

I longed for more, for an invitation into something further, into the parts of him that were still secret to me. In only twenty-one days he became my best friend, but I had serious doubts whether he would ever become my lover.

I sent tentative emails to my twin sister, Connie, hoping against hope that she would have backed out of the trip we’d planned for years, and that I could somehow spend my summer with Al. I wished with every fibre of my being that something would go wrong in the organisation of the summer in France Connie and I had looked forward to so much and for so long.

There hadn’t – the plans had come together perfectly.

I left for France, the thought of being without Al a physical pain.

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from When Ali Met Honour

Ali Almost every Bollywood film I’d watched involved love at first sight. The hero would see the heroine’s sari pallu flutter in the wind, clock her coquettish look, and then a song would start expressing how they made each other feel, how they were terrified of the emotions that they stirred in each other, how the world was alive for the first time. . . .

I didn’t dare to make that connection between Honour and myself.

And my heart, traitorous thing that it was, flashed an image: Al Hussain, successful professional, working-class boy done good and all grown up at a work dinner, his beautiful, red-headed, vivacious wife in his arms, dancing some slow ballroom number, envied by every man (and woman) in that room. . . .

But my mind woke up and obliterated it with another image: a self-confident, infatuated seventeen-year-old, declaring my love to a woman called Mehreen, who I’d thought felt the same. Only to be rejected.

Every morning for three weeks, whether in my narrow bed or at her flat, Honour and I had woken up together, digging deeper, mining our pasts, more isolated from the rest of the world, more reliant on one another. I preferred staying at mine, even though it was far less comfortable. Somehow, I told myself, it wasn’t intentional that we were sleeping side-by-side, that our skin occasionally touched, when the only option was a single bed. At her house, it was all my fault when I chose to share the double bed with her, the open doors of the other empty bedrooms a reminder of my decision.

We talked about everything, except how we really felt about each other.

And if I ever got close to being brave enough to talk about it, I’d remember the pain on her face when I’d turned down her kiss that first night. Every part of me had wanted it to happen, every part except the shamed boy inside me, the one who had kissed Mehreen before she walked away. I couldn’t take it happening again. I couldn’t kiss Honour until I was sure she wouldn’t walk away.

We were in a nightclub watching other people our age – people who barely knew each other – snog and dance; gyrate with strangers as if it was the easiest thing in the world. I wanted to pull Honour hard against me; I

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wanted to be able to shout above the music that it wasn’t her; it wasn’t that I didn’t want her.

When I turned around with our drinks, she smiled at me. It was genuine and without guile, for me only. I unsteadily carried our drinks back, trying not to spill her alcohol on my hand.

I shuffled into the booth next to her to make more small talk, to try and keep her attention a little longer. ‘Have you got any pictures of your twin?’

I said. ‘I’m curious.’

She dug in her purse for a photo-booth-style pic of two red-haired girls pulling faces. Only one had Honour’s smile.

She was shocked, unable even to pretend I was wrong when I pointed her out.

‘I’d know you anywhere,’ I said making eye contact as I clinked my glass against hers.

We danced until we were breathless, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. It was an opportunity to touch her, to be with her, letting the pounding music take the place of the pounding fear for a few minutes. She was a good dancer, made it easy for me to follow her. Over her shoulder, I watched other men look her up and down and I curled my hands protectively round her delicate fingers.

‘Time to go?’ I asked her. ‘Hungry?’

She turned and nodded, her eyes a little glassy from the alcohol.

We climbed the stairs up from the subterranean club and collapsed out onto Charing Cross Road. Leaning against the railings, I offered her my bottled water.

‘Al, have you seriously never had a girlfriend?’ she said between gulps.

‘No. . . .’ I felt the heat of embarrassment creep into my face, despite being outside.

‘But someone must have asked you out?’ She leaned close to my face and my heart raced. ‘You are actually fucking gorgeous.’

‘Honour Edwards,’ I laughed, ‘you’re unbelievably drunk.’

‘I’m not, Al, not that drunk.’ She struggled to her feet, wobbling slightly.

‘There was someone, briefly, at college. I thought I was – I had feelings for her, but it didn’t work out.’

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‘Why not?’

‘We were young – seventeen – she wanted different things. She didn’t feel the same way.’

Honour was silent, her fingers lacing through mine, holding on.

‘Her loss,’ she said. ‘What was her name?’

‘Doesn’t matter. She doesn’t matter.’

‘I’m curious. Was she English?’

‘No, her name was Mehreen.’

‘She broke your heart?’

I nodded, but Honour didn’t see.

Instead I turned the conversation away from the danger of intimacy and failure.

‘What about you?’ I asked. ‘How many boyfriends?’ The question was like a knife in my side. God only knew what the answer would feel like.

Fate protected me from finding out. The hot oily air of a kebab shop wafted across the street – the combination of the heat, the smell and the alcohol leaving Honour hunched over a black and gold litter bin. I held her beautiful hair away from her face and rubbed her back while she threw up; and afterwards, I half-carried her back to the bus stop. On the night bus she cuddled into me on the musty-smelling seat, her tiny hiccoughing sobs of humiliation making me love her more every second.

I helped her clean her teeth and tucked her into her bed, stroking her face and waiting till she was asleep. I leant over her, her perfect face pale and streaked with mascara. Gently I stole a kiss from her passive mouth.

The three weeks ended and I headed home to Manchester.

I thought maybe ‘us’ had ended before we’d had time to crack the surface, like something that doesn’t grow, that never was. She said she’d keep in touch. It gave me hope.

Write to me.

Those were her last words. I felt empty as my train pulled into Piccadilly, as though I had forgotten how to breathe without her there to show me.

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I tried to shake off my infatuation for Honour as the domestic reality back in Manchester hit me. Dad had a summer of DIY planned. Re-paint and refurbish; make the house look new. First job was to do the lounge.

The paint was thick, magnolia, spattering my old jeans and shirt, bobbling on my arm hair. The roller was causing a pain in my shoulder and a local Asian radio station played at low volume behind us. The furniture had been put in another room, the carpet covered in the sheets that we used when there was a gathering, religious or cultural.

‘I’m thinking of preparing Zain and Aaliyah for the grammar school exams,’ said Dad. He was on his knees doing the skirting boards, wearing a white shalwar kameez, now with the bland yellow blotched all over it. My dad was in his late forties, his hair grey-streaked but still black, a short beard covering his face. I didn’t think he had aged, but when I looked more closely, his eyes had circles around them that hadn’t been there when I had left home.

‘That’s a good idea. My tutor helped me, so maybe you can use him,’ I said.

Dad spoke in accented but good English. ‘For Zain, yes. I will find a lady tutor for Aaliyah.’

We carried on painting, the only sounds the radio and the roller.

‘You were right. I should have done the skirting boards and ceiling first,’ Dad said. ‘The gloss is going to mark the walls.’

‘It’s OK, we can do the walls again,’ I said.

‘I haven’t painted in a long time. What happened to flowery wallpaper?

That was easy to paste on.’

‘I’ll finish the ceiling,’ I said.

I exchanged rollers, picking up the white emulsion-covered one, and steadied myself on the dodgy wooden stepladder.

‘I was speaking to your cousin Abdul. He said you can do accountancy,’ my father said. He had his back to me still, painting the skirting boards. I guessed it was uncomfortable-discussion time.

‘Why would I want to?’ I said.

‘He says there are very few economic jobs here. But if you do accountancy, do the exams, you can practise back in Manchester.’

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The radio started its news in Urdu. Dad listened, tutting over Pakistani politics.

‘That nation was created with the blood and sweat of your grandfather, and this is what they’ve done to it,’ he said.

My mother came in to see if we wanted tea. She was dressed in a maroon shalwar kameez, her head uncovered, a dupatta, in case of guests, draped around her neck. She looked too young to have a son as old as me.

‘Be careful on that ladder,’ she said, speaking Punjabi.

‘I’m fine, Mum,’ I said, answering her in English. ‘And, yes, tea would be great.’

‘Do you want English tea or normal tea?’ she said.

‘Normal is fine,’ I said.

Normal meant boiled with teabags and milk on the stove. English meant the tea would have cold milk added after the teabags were boiled. I wondered how Honour might have coped with that. Would it taste foreign to her?

Get a grip, Ali, she’s not here, innit, she’s in France. It’s all over.

It just wasn’t so easy to shake her now she had been so close to me.

‘So what do you think?’ Dad said. ‘About the accountancy? Especially if I’m sending your brother and sister to a grammar school.’

‘Dad, I’ll help out with their fees; don’t worry about that. But I haven’t changed my mind. I’m doing my MA and then, inshallah, I’ll join an Islamic bank.’

My mother brought us tea and we sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor to drink it. She had brought a plate of jalebis too.

‘There is always the law,’ he said, putting a jalebi dipped in hot tea into his mouth.

‘Maybe for Jamal?’

Jamal was my middle brother, a teenager with gangster identity issues.

‘Jamal will be lucky to get even one A Level. Even the tutor said maybe education is not for him. I think I’ll send him to a polytechnic, and then we can see what he does.’

‘They’re all universities now, Dad. He must have an interest in something.’

‘Huh,’ was Dad’s response.

‘Let’s not give up on him just yet,’ I said. ‘People change.’

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Honour seemed so distant, and I felt more trapped than ever in the gilded ghettos of suburban Manchester.

I sat at my mother’s kitchen table for family dinner; we all ate together every evening. I couldn’t quell thoughts of Honour though, wondering how she would fit in, imagining scenes of conflict and comedy. Honour cooking her first curry and my mother taste-testing it, adding salt or even worse, extra chilli, just to spite her. I hated hot food. Or my mother daring my dad to say he liked what Honour had made.

‘You feel well, Ali? You have a very faraway look on your face, beta,’ my dad said. ‘Like you have left your heart behind.’

He fixed me with eyes as liquid black as mine and for a moment I felt exposed, like he could see right through me. That irrational childhood thought that he could read my mind, maybe.

‘What nonsense. His heart is here with his mother and his family. Tell him, Ali,’ my mother said.

‘Begum, this generation of boys and girls, you know how they are.’ My dad never said my mother’s name; she was always Begum, the generic term for ‘wife’.

‘Nothing’s changed. We know best. Don’t put ideas into his head when there are none. Ali is a good boy. He knows what will please us.’

At least Dad had tried to find out if there was ‘someone’. Mum just believed in the power of her chapattis: I wouldn’t stray.

Too late Mum, your Ali went and got corrupted.

At least I had hope that Dad would support me . . . except that was redundant. I had to keep reminding myself: Honour was in France and it probably didn’t matter. I’d end up confined to a life half-lived. Get over it.

Eric Cantona and Imran Khan posters looked down on me as I sat in my single bed, pen poised, ready to write something to Honour.

I wanted to write to her every day. Secretly I did, and then threw away bits and pieces. They always seemed to be so raw, on the sleeve, poetic nonsense, declarations of love. Honour had never said she was in love with me, or acknowledged what I felt.

We parted as friends. No – worse than that – as pen pals.

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Every letter of hers I would open with trepidation, wondering if some guy called Jean-Claude or Anton had whisked her off with his French-ness, his natural lover’s ability and his accent. Bastard. I grew up in a world where brown women had a moral code and white women didn’t.

Luckily that letter never came.

Instead, along came Billo. The girl from Pakistan.

‘Look, my son. She is so beautiful. She has fair skin and green eyes and brown hair.’

‘She’s English?’ I asked cheekily, holding the cheap photo print with trepidation.

Which unfortunate victim had they found for me to marry in what backwater, unbeknownst that my heart was not for trading? Honour would quote Shakespeare to make a point: for me, it was always Rumi.

‘La hawla wala kuwwat . . . May God protect us from such misfortune . . . you think I have lost my senses that I would marry you to a white girl?’

My mum used the word gori as an insult and yet when she talked about Billo she said, ‘Look how gori she is.’

Oh, Mum, the irony.

‘Well, you seem pretty obsessed with green eyes and skin colour,’ I mumbled.

‘She is so gorgeous.’ Mum went on ignoring me. ‘Think how beautiful your children, my grandchildren, will be? They will have cats’ eyes, just like Billo.’

Honour has fair skin and green eyes too, and just think how beautiful your grandchildren will be if they’re mixed race, I thought.

I didn’t say that to my mum, obviously.

‘She is the youngest daughter,’ Mum went on with the sales pitch, ‘the same caste and a Sunni. She is fresh out of school, only sixteen and is studying. . . .’

‘She’s sixteen? Mum, are you crazy?’

‘What? I was fourteen when I married your father, and it’s right the girl should be a few years younger than the boy. . . .’ She patted her shalwar kameez on her lap with a gesture of righteousness.

‘Sixteen? Mum, she’s a child. She’s way too young.’

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‘Well, we can wait then for two years and she will be eighteen, and it will all be well. Her family are OK with that option.’

‘What do you mean? You’ve already got to that stage? Mum?’ Instinctively I moved further down the sofa, away from her.

‘Well, I knew you would fall in love with her. Look – her hair is red-brown, and your sisters said that you like that Sally from the TV.’ ‘Sally?’

‘The one in your poster.’

‘You mean Scully? So what? Does the entire family know about this?’ I was fuming.

‘Marriages are between families. We know what’s best.’

‘Are you all going to get into bed at night with us then?’

‘Don’t be so shameless,’ she said.

‘It’s between a man and a woman,’ I said.

‘That lasts maybe a year. Then you become part of the family. That’s what matters.’

‘What about Dad? What does he have to say about this?’

‘He will do whatever I tell him,’ she said thrusting the picture into my hands again. ‘Look at her.’

I couldn’t let this go on. There was a young girl in Pakistan somewhere thinking she was about to get onto a plane and start a new life in Manchester.

That was not going to happen.

I refused to go along with it, and the battle lines were drawn.

Mum wrapped her dupatta tightly round her face and looked mournful – teary-eyed on cue whenever I came into the room. Dad kept chuckling to himself at her behaviour. All my siblings kept telling me how old I was and how I needed to get married and that Billo was beautiful. It was like a pressure cooker of familial duty and expectation, added to which were haranguing images of the love of my life being chatted up by strange French men.

I thought my refusal would be enough to end the Billo saga, but what did my opinion on it matter? I was just the groom. There were much bigger machinations behind the scenes; politics and family dramas on a global scale.

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Turned out Billo had an older brother, Bilal. And Bilal was going to marry my younger sister, Farzana. It was choose one, get one free. People said they could tell Farzana was my sister, even though she didn’t look like a boy and I definitely didn’t look like a girl. It was in our features, in the tone of our skin, different to the colour and look our other siblings had. I joked she was made from my leftover DNA; she said the crap came out first.

Naturally she hated me, but still I didn’t want to see her shipped off.

‘No way, Dad. Farzana’s only twenty. She is not marrying someone from back home.’ I valiantly came to my sister’s defence, appealing to my father’s liberal nature. He had never struck me as being that sort of man. The sort that got his kids married back home. I always thought he would let us have a choice, that he interpreted his religion properly.

‘She can speak for herself,’ Farzana said.

I ignored her.

‘Girls are different to boys,’ said my dad. ‘They grow up faster and it’s also difficult to find someone decent here. It’s my duty to get my daughters married, and with you also married into her in-laws they will treat her well.’

‘I don’t need my big brother to ensure my in-laws treat me well,’ Farzana said.

‘Dad, this is nearly the twenty-first century; this is England. I can’t believe you’re saying this. And I thought I had a choice? You’re taking it as a given that I’ll marry Billo?’

‘Ali, you are a man now. You have four younger siblings to think of. You need to accept your responsibilities. Until you are married your brothers can’t be. Your cousin, Abdul, told me to wait until after your master’s, then speak to you about marriage. But your mother can’t keep anything quiet.’

Abdul, sanctimonious leader of the cousins, always getting a say in my life. He was the oldest son of the oldest son, born to even more pressure and duty than me.

‘What about Farzana? What about her degree?’ I reasoned.

‘Do you even know what I’m studying?’ she said, narrowing her eyes at me.

‘She can carry on after marriage. I’m not sending her over there; I’m bringing her husband here,’ Dad said.

‘This is insane. And she’s okay with this, is she?’

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I looked at Farzana but couldn’t read her expression. Maybe she was embarrassed to fight with our father?

‘She’s staying here at home for university, and her head hasn’t been turned

by London. And Billo’s grandparents came over with yours in the Partition.

This will just cement that bond. It was your grandfather’s dying wish our families be bonded.’

‘I only stayed because the money went on this house, your tutor, your studies; and Dad couldn’t afford to send me away to uni. I would have paid back my own student loans, you know.’ Farzana pointed her long fingernail at me, accusingly. ‘And my head would have been my own whether I was here or in London, Dad,’ she said, one face for me, another – more pious – for my father.

‘Well, I’m not going to marry Billo,’ I said.

I was adamant and thought myself the hero. The biggest shock came from Farzana after my father had left us alone.

‘Why are you messing up my marriage, you freak?’

‘You want to marry some bloke you’ve never met? Are you crazy? I’m doing this for you.’

‘Oh please. Ali Hussain only does things for Ali Hussain. Or Al is it?

You’re so up yourself, totally selfish.’

I just stared at her. She was wearing an ankle-length denim skirt and maroon polo neck, her thick black hair falling over her shoulders. Nothing about her said Pakistan except her skin and fiery black eyes. I didn’t understand women, that was clear.

‘Fine. You go ahead and marry a freshie, but I won’t.’

‘They won’t marry me without you. Just do it; you’ve got to fucking marry someone!’

‘Do me a favour, Faz, and learn how to form an opinion.’

‘Pretentious fuckhead,’ she said.

Next up was my brother, Jamal.

Like some bad stereotype, he had taken to chillin’ with the boys in pool halls, learned to drive and become a man. All in the three years I hadn’t lived at home.

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‘Look, bro, you need to just chill ’n’ get wiv da program, innit. You is the eldest, so you do the right ting, you marry the virgin gyal from back home, innit. Means me and Zain can marry gyals from here, innit. We can mess about. You got born first, you got spoilt and you is the one who our parents love the most. Now it’s payback time. You marry da gyal from Pakiland and she looks after dem in der old age, innit.’

‘You’re an idiot,’ I said.

Who made this deal? This trade off where the first-born son has to conform just so everyone else could take the piss? Well, I wasn’t putting up with that.

So I sat sullen at dinnertimes, and it didn’t matter. My mother sat on her prayer mat all night; whispered conversations with the local women on what remedies worked to stop the black magic that was clouding my head.

Dad had the final word: ‘Unless you are married by the time you finish your master’s, I will propose your rishta to Billo. Men have needs, and I won’t have you fulfilling those outside of marriage. The longer I leave it, the more temptation there will be.’

‘Dad, that’s really unfair. I’m not an animal. . . .’

And so I ran. Took to a treadmill and spent as much time as I could in the gym just to get away from it all.

Inside, the thought was forming. I had a year to convince Honour to marry me: when my master’s was over, so were my chances of freedom. My desperation gave me courage.

To my relief, Honour wrote to me, and I found myself on a train to Kent.

This had to be significant. I imagined how Honour would be when I saw her again. Hoping she would say something that would reflect the affection I had for her.

I had to cling to those ever harder-to-remember moments Honour and I had shared in the last three weeks of uni. I had to read meaning into them, hope I wasn’t delusional; that she had begun to love me a little at least.

A summer apart had meant those reminiscences were torture. I couldn’t believe how easily I had planned a whole life around Honour, and had made it the life I wanted. Despairing of resenting a wife and kids that wasn’t her, weren’t hers. Until she had invited me down.

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TO MEET HER PARENTS. That had to mean something, right? Yeah, OK, me and Honour hadn’t seen each other in months but this was proof she was taking this seriously; she was in fact taking it to the next level?

I didn’t know the rules, so was guessing.

Ruth Ahmed is the pseudonym of Anstey Spraggan and Dimmi Khan.

This extract is from When Ali Met Honour (Dahlia Publishing, 2015).

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Poetry

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh

Eve’s Fault Eve, whose fault was only too much love —Aemilia Lanyer, ‘Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum: Eve’s Apology’

God won her when he whipped out from his planetary sleeve a bouquet of light. They watched the parade of animals pass.

He told her the joke about the Archaeopteryx, and she noted the feathers and the lethal claws, a poem, the first of its kind.

On a beach raised from the ocean with a shout, he entered her and she realised, in rolling waves, that love joins and separates.

The snake was a quieter fellow. He came in the fall evenings through the long grass, his steps barely parting the blades.

Each time he showed her a different path. As they wandered, they talked about the beauty of the light striking the birch, the odd behaviour of the ants, the fairest way to split an apple.

When Adam appeared, the serpent gave her up to happiness.

For happy was she when she met Adam under the tree of life, still is, and Adam is still Adam, inarticulate, a terrible speller, his body precariously balanced on his feet, his mind made up

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that she is the first woman and he the first man. He needed her and so scratched down and believed the story of the rib.

She needed Adam’s need, so different from God’s and the snake’s, and that was when she discovered herself outside the garden.

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Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh

Ashtrays as Big as Hubcaps In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.

A woman knelt there, washing something in the white bowl.

—Mary Oliver, ‘Singapore’

That woman scrubbing the big ashtrays with a blue rag, she was my mother. Her hands were not moving like a river.

Her dark hair was not like the wing of a bird, it was wispy.

When she smiled at you, she was not feeling embarrassed.

The toilet bowl was a handy place to wash the big ashtrays but she guessed the work argued with your wobbly stomach.

You flew home and put her in a poem called ‘Singapore’.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life, you wrote, I want her to rise up from the slop and fly down to the river.

She becomes, for you and your American fans, a picture of the light that can shine out of a life, meaning, a saint, and the picture is completed, roundly, with trees and birds.

She bused home and said nothing, for you were forgotten in her rush to stick the laundry out of the windows to dry.

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She remembered you later, the night as humid as always.

She had nice stockings on, or else she could have knelt in my place. She must have troubles of her own, we all do, she said, with the resentful condescension of the poor.

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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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Poetry

Jee Leong Koh

Jee Leong Koh

Talking to Koon Meng Who Called Himself Christopher I sing one stanza to my lute and a Tartar horn.

—Cai Yan, ‘18 Verses Sung to a Tartar Reed Whistle’, translated from Chinese by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung

Having been thrashed by the Express boys in soccer, we retreated to the canteen.

You sitting with a foot up on the bench challenged them, ‘Basketball tomorrow, we sure won’t lose. All-Star China versus England.’

Ben smiled and said, ‘Whenever,’ to me, ‘Thanks, Sir, for playing. A good game,’ and left for class.

Jin Sheng, who christened himself Nicholas, yawned loudly, ‘School so xian, so boring, ah-h-h.’

In the still air, you spoke your thoughts aloud, ‘You know what, T’cher, I miss the Express class

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by four points only,’ holding up four fingers.

‘In prim’ry school, I very good boy one.

I every day go home and study hard, practise my math, believe or not.’

Jin snorted.

You cast a sidelong glance at me before continuing, ‘But I did not make it, so I turn bad. Sometimes got caught, ganna caned.

We run round in class, never sit down one.’

No one could stop you. When they sent you out, ‘We feel dem proud, laugh and walk out like nothing.

If I do very well and get five As and behave, can I still go Express now?’

‘No.’ I explained, ‘They take different subjects.’

‘I miss by four points only, now can’t change.

English last time no good.’

‘T’cher, he like Shirlene’, Jin sniggered. ‘You know her? From Three Express.’

‘I taught her in Sec. One. She did quite well and moved from Normal to Express. She’s nice.’

‘See, people very smart one. You no hope.’

‘Who say no hope? Maybe we meet in Poly.’

Remembering my teacher’s pledge, I said, ‘That’s right. Do well in your Four N exam, go study what you like at ITE, do very well there and you can then go

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to Polytechnic. It just takes a little longer,’ anticipating your objection.

You said nothing. You lay down on the bench, sighed very loudly and stared at the ceiling.

‘School very xian,’ you said at last.

The bell.

‘What period now?’

‘Shit. Civics,’ Jin Sheng said.

‘That arsehole Mr Mah. I have no book, sure ganna scolding one. Whole period. Fuck.’

You peeked at me and quoted with a smirk, ‘We use vulgarities a lot because we have a limited vocabulary, right, T’cher?’

Before I could reach for an answer, you stood up, stretched and sauntered back to class.

The canteen grew quiet enough to hear you in my head, without the need to translate into imperfectly received pro-NOUNsee-A-shen curses at your gain and loss.

My Caliban, I thought, hurrying to Lit class, Galatea or . . .

Your voice challenged, ‘What, T’cher?’ and I answered, ‘Christopher.’

From Steep Tea (Carcanet 2015)

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You Say You Say

Juhee Shin

Juhee Shin translated by Miseli Jeon

S

lowly, the baby’s body swells up. It has nothing on, not even a diaper.

Its bare skin turns blue-purple. It is an enigmatic colour, fragile yet resilient, sad yet awful. Its tiny buttocks pale as the Mongolian spots disappear. Then dark death-spots spread in their place. Its small body, fleshless as it is, begins to reek of decomposition. Darkness fills the hollow eye sockets; and its heart, liver, and gall bladder vanish in turn. With all the usable organs gone, the body, now nothing but an empty shell, makes a hissing noise as it deflates. People whisper like the hum of the wind: an infant was found dead beside a garbage can outside a lone house; the body was hollow like the cast-off shells of cicadas often seen scattered by the roadside at the end of summer; and, for some reason, the skin looked transparent. A stir ran through the streets like stench.

Now, there is a woman before your eyes. Dressed in a decent navy-blue suit, the woman is tallish and has clean-cut features. Her short hair tucked up neatly behind her ears, her lips tightly closed as if she is absorbed in something, her eyebrows that seem to have suffered absolutely no indecision – these features may give you an impression that she can be a bit cold and sharp-tempered. She is walking. She seems to be in no rush, and yet her pace smacks of uneasiness. Beneath the feet of the woman who is walking on the transparent glass path, the rooftops of the other buildings are seen.

The path looks as if it were afloat in the air all by itself, as if it belonged to a future world. Her stiletto heels make a clear pattering sound as they hit the glass floor. Although walking fast enough already, she hastens her pace

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further. The woman, who appears to be out of humour, walks into the office.

The inside of the office, which is packed with cubicles partitioned up with ivory-coloured panels, looks like a chess-board. From the windows of the office, one commands an unobstructed view of the windows of the other buildings around it. While you are observing the tranquil atmosphere of the office with its refined furniture arrangement and people moving around in it, the woman as always enters her own cubicle, marked by her calling card fixed to the panel. Only then do you realise that at last you can watch whatever you want to, as long as you want to.

On her desk, there is a laptop, left open, and a monitor connected to a CPU box. The monitor shows the flowchart of a computer program designed by her; and the laptop screen is split into four sections, displaying different scenes captured by CCTV cameras. The laptop is recording the inside of her apartment: that is, the baby’s room, living room, kitchen and master bedroom, respectively. Each scene on the bluish screen flickers on in its own rectangular frame. The typical structure of the thirty-pyeong-size apartment, uncharacteristic furniture arrangement, and the clutter and trifles of a household raising a baby are all so plainly exposed on the screen. The woman straightens herself in her chair and fixes her eyes on the laptop screen. And she stares at it for a long while. Of course, nothing out of the ordinary happens. There is no ominous movement or stranger visiting her house. In the flickering CCTV scenes, only the hired nanny is busily moving around the house, as she had always done before the CCTV cameras were installed. Dressing, feeding, changing, bathing, and putting the baby to sleep, the nanny is seen in one section of the screen one moment and in another the next. As the woman is oblivious to your watching her, the nanny is also unaware of the woman’s spying eyes. You sense obsessiveness of some sort in her eyes. She seems determined to spy out everything, anything there is to. Because of the fuzzy images of the silent scenes, she squints her eyes further. It has already been a month since she began watching the nanny, even though she had no particular reason for doing so. She had no complaints about the way the nanny cared for her baby, nor was she anxious about leaving her baby in someone else’s care. And nothing could be further from the truth than the excuse that she was not fully recovered from the postpartum condition, or that she was under stress at the office and not able

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to cope with the amount of work, or of the pressure from her division manager who kept suggesting her voluntary resignation. Nevertheless, the woman, practically a bundle of nerves, continues staring at the uneventful scenes on the monitor. It’s so strange. You wonder, is it indeed because of the rumour that’s been going around? And you want to find out whether she, too, has heard the rumour. By now, many must have already heard of it several times. The story of the incredible circumstances and unconfirmed evidence thereof has spread like a forest fire, uncontrollably generating one scenario after another. Knowing that she has developed a search engine herself and has a hobby of collecting information in her fields of interest, you are certain that she has heard of it. But then, you realise that what you have heard of may not be exactly the same as what she has.

There is a working couple. It so happens that the couple gets married rather late in their lives and barely manage to have a baby. The couple wants to raise their hard-earned baby in the best environment possible. As is true of most expectations in life, it is just their wishful thinking. They don’t have a wonderful family background to rely on, like a rich grandfather. That’s why both of them have to work. They exhaust all of their personal connections to find a good nanny for their baby. They also search the Internet, ask around in their neighbourhood, and visit the Job-Link centres in the government offices. Nevertheless, nothing works, as if they are all conspiring against the couple. In the meantime, the parents hire and fire many nannies: the one who is not good at putting the baby to sleep; the one who hates to sterilise the milk bottles; the one who is foul-tongued; and the one who is light-fingered. As time passes, they compromise the qualifications they have set for their nanny-to-be, one by one. They feel worn out, overwhelmed by disappointment and anger as well as sadness and hopelessness, when they finally hear of a promising candidate. There is a nanny who has successfully raised someone’s baby from infancy through kindergarten. According to a close friend of the couple’s, the nanny has an affable appearance and a high level of education, a quality helpful to the baby’s emotional development. The couple don’t hesitate to hire the nanny even after they learn that she is Korean-Chinese. It seems that they no longer remember that it is against what used to be the foremost condition required of their nanny. Now, the couple even gets impatient for the nanny. They

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think it’s only natural that this nanny should be paid more than all the other ones they have ever hired. Interviewing the nanny and receiving her resumé, the couple feel that there definitely is something special about her. And they never regret their decision through their baby’s developmental stages of babbling, rolling over, and finally uttering ‘mamma’ and ‘dada.’ Then one day, all their illusions are shattered.

It is on one of those cloudy days, when people tend to feel out of sorts and hate to go to work or school, that the live-in nanny disappears with their baby. On that day, the couple feels an ill omen after one of them wakes up from a bad dream. They don’t feel like going to work, but leave home anyway, telling themselves to be careful about everything throughout the day. Unfortunately, however, they fail to notice the suspicious behaviour of the nanny who seems to be unusually unsettled and in a flurry. They also miss the warning signs of their baby’s cry early in the morning and the nanny’s old suitcase all packed and readied. Returning home after work, they find the nanny and their baby gone without a trace. Only then do they realise that they in fact know nothing about the nanny. All the certificates submitted by the nanny, neatly folded and placed in an envelope, turn out to be fakes. Some scenes from the past, as if they were photo evidence, belatedly cross the minds of the parents who are crying, screaming, and collapsing: a strange man who visited the nanny every now and then, the nanny owning an unusually small number of clothes, her other belongings the purposes of which were unknown, the uncalled-for, excessive kindness, the unnatural attachment to the baby, and so forth. ‘This can’t be happening!

This can’t be true! Can never be true!’ is what the couple tell themselves,while helplessly witnessing the investigation conducted by the incompetent police and the lazy Interpol that is going nowhere. Nevertheless, the climax of the rumour has yet to be reached. The whereabouts of the baby that remains in the dark for some time eventually comes to light as tragic news: its stone-cold body is found near an isolated dock in China. Now, the rumour gets worse by the minute: the baby’s body has been hollowed out; its eyes, liver, heart, and even the last drop of blood have been removed; its organs have been sold all over China to rich people who use them as tonic medicine; and so on. The rumour keeps uncontrollably and irretrievably snowballing and propagating.

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As you get goose bumps on your arms, so does the woman. She is still looking into the CCTV scenes with suspicious eyes – eyes that have become incapable of trusting anything. The blue light of the monitor flickers.

Shortly, a subtle movement is captured by the CCTV camera lens. It is the nanny in the living room. The nanny she has hired has all the physical features you can think of as typical of Korean-Chinese women, that is, narrow forehead, single eyelid, prominent cheekbones, thin lips, small physique, and yet limbs that seem strong. The nanny, who may well be thinner that she looks on the screen, has a well-formed face with the look of a woman of tenacity and stubbornness; but on the other hand, there is something about her face that conjures up some unusual life-story in the viewer’s mind. She presently comes out of the baby room. Held in her arms is the baby who has just woken up. The baby appears to be crying, judging by the way it moves its limbs regularly. The left and right, or up and down movements of the baby, for some reason, are not in the usual rhythm and sequence the mother is familiar with. In the meantime, the nanny’s mouth keeps moving as if she is saying something. Her lips as they pronounce words in a foreign language purse up and relax repeatedly, making unfamiliar shapes. She may be singing a lullaby known only to her, or simply murmuring to herself. A thought flashes across your mind: is she speaking to someone? At times, she nods as if she is in conversation. She also points at something, jutting her chin upwards. Further, she even pulls a wry face as if she is sulking. Nonetheless, her conversation partner is nowhere to be seen in any of the CCTV scenes. The nanny’s movements remain brisk for a long while, but eventually slow down. The nanny wipes the sweat from her forehead. The woman’s eyes, which have been fixed on the nanny on the screen, also begin to relax. Then the mother realises the otherwise motionless nanny is still moving her lips. Is she still singing the lullaby to the baby who has already stopped crying? As the woman brings the nanny’s lips into a close-up, a serious look returns to her face.

‘601 So’gyong Apartment, 657 Gae’po-dong’ is the first fact you have found out through observation. The second fact is that the woman had multiple CCTV cameras installed here and there at her place a month ago while the nanny was out. That the nanny is devoted and hardworking is yet another fact that you already know. As the woman herself seems to admit,

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the nanny has no problem preparing the baby food according to the menu the woman has worked out: rice porridge made with organic vegetables, Korean beef or fresh fish; fruit sweetened, steamed, and preserved in properly sterilised bottles; and so forth. The nanny brings out the baby food along with the barley tea that has been cooled to the right temperature, and feeds the baby skilfully and deftly. The nanny never stops working even while the baby is asleep, often washing the bedding, cleaning the bathtub, and sterilising the washing machine, none of which has the woman ever asked her to do. You even feel sorry for the nanny who is diligent to a fault.

You also know what is inside the suitcase that the nanny brought with her.

One woollen sweater, a pair of worn-out jeans, the sweat pants she always wears, one shirt discoloured from being hot-water washed many times, a pair of slippers and a pair of sneakers tightly wrapped in a plastic bag, a small pocketbook, a copy of the Bible, and a black formal dress and a coat she wore over it when she first came to the woman’s place. Putting all these facts together, you can hazard a conjecture regarding the nanny’s character: diligent, responsible, unselfish and frugal, perhaps always suffering a loss because of her character. The facts you have so far discovered make you feel it unnecessary to find out more about the nanny – although you can easily do so by manipulating the camera lenses as if they were your own eyes – for example, the authenticity of the copies of documents and certificates of work history submitted to the woman by the nanny.

Now, you can talk about the woman, too. She works in the field of computer program development. In the office on the forty-ninth floor with a great view, she spends her workdays performing simple, monotonous tasks, as if she were herself a well-designed computer program. Due to the nature of her work, she hardly has a chance to talk to anyone or attend meetings. About twice a month, she joins a meeting to report the progress of her work; but most of the time, she just stays inside her box-like cubicle staring at the monitor. The other people working in the same office are not different from her. At times, some of them are seen having lunch together in groups, but not very often. The woman is not interested in mingling with the others; instead, she spends her spare time collecting information in the fields of her interest. The area of her interest changes occasionally, according to the front-page headlines of the newspaper or to the nature of

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the new program she is designing at the moment. Usually, she obtains information using the search engine she has developed herself. You have seen, a few times, her face brighten up whenever she finds quality information that others have failed to get. That is why you feel convinced that she has certainly already learned of the rumour. It was around the time the rumour of the Chinese nanny was spreading that she had the CCTV cameras installed in her place. By then, ‘the horror story of the Chinese nanny’ had already remained on the list of popular search terms for over a month at various portal sites. Related search results were such bloodcurdling headings as ‘illicit organ trade’, ‘human-flesh capsules’, ‘human body smugglers’, and so forth. The woman rummages through more than 3,000 speculative articles and hypotheses every day. Her anxiety must have grown proportional to the ever-swelling rumour of the horror story. However, this is not what you really want to relate regarding the character of the woman. Rather, you would like to point up the fact that the woman has never betrayed any emotion whatsoever in front of the nanny, though all the while the level of her anxiety has been increasing. She starts her day by opening the CCTV screen; and yet, ‘Thank you’ has so far been the expression most often used by the woman to the nanny. You are amazed by her ability to hide so intense an emotion so perfectly. What a cold-hearted, perhaps even horrifying person she is! You are convinced that your judgment of her character is not at all in the wrong.

There are some documents placed side by side on the desk in front of the monitor: the nanny’s college diploma embossed with a golden logo, a certificate of health issued by a medical institution stating the results of her medical examination, and an official copy of her hukou with her address and family relations in China printed on it. They are the documents the nanny had handed to the woman at the time of interview. Korean translations are attached to the original documents printed entirely in Chinese.

Name: Hyon-suk Rhee. Born in Liaoning Province, China in 1961.

Married in 1982 a man who worked at an electronic equipmentmanufacturing factory and had a daughter with him. Obtained a divorce by mutual agreement in 1997 (Reason for divorce: the husband’s gambling habit had led the family to an economic breakdown).

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Moved to Korea with her daughter in 2001. While working as a live-in housekeeper, she had a chance to work as a nanny for the first time.

She has since helped raise five babies in total. Personality: sincere, and neat and tidy.

The woman’s eyes looking down at the document look tired. She gently passes her fingers over the letters on the paper. Her fingers slide smoothly across the clear facts stated there. She seems somewhat relieved. Now, she turns her eyes to the nanny shown on the screen, who is crouched, mopping the floor. With her sleeves rolled up, the nanny wipes every dusty corner clean. After waiting for the wooden floor to dry, she spreads a thick blanket on the floor and lays the baby on it. She remembers to put a few toys that the baby likes within its easy reach. After a while, she stacks up the empty containers of baby food and takes them into the kitchen. Even while doing the dishes, she often turns her head to see if the baby is all right. Her eyes are thoughtful and kind. After washing the dishes, she shows the baby a toy book made of cloth. As if to erase the last shadow of a doubt from her mind, the woman brings the nanny’s hands into a close-up. And she continues watching them for a long time until the nanny goes into the baby room, holding the baby in her arms. You, too, keep watching the woman who turns her head following the movement of the nanny on the screen.

It is still early in the morning. It seems that she hasn’t been able to take even a sip of the coffee she made for herself. A bag of pastry she has brought perhaps to eat with her coffee is on the desk, untouched, though the bag is torn open. Beside the main computer and laptop screens are a thick file of documents – left open with some pages turned over, probably still in the process of reviewing – and a pile of books. The woman’s face looks a bit puffy; perhaps she couldn’t get enough sleep last night and feels under the weather this morning. Or perhaps the nanny may have said something, which was best left unsaid, to her when she turned around to leave home this morning. Or the woman may have witnessed something out of the ordinary in the nanny’s behaviour. Or she may have got a phone call from one of those heavy breathers. Anyway, you can see that she doesn’t feel well today and cannot wait until she gets back home to have a lie-down. Rubbing her bloodshot eyes, she seats herself close to the laptop monitor and fixes

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her eyes on the main monitor and the CCTV screen of the laptop in turn. It so happens that there is no one in the office to suspect that she has been doing something irrelevant to her task for over an hour. Seen through the lenses of the CCTV cameras installed here and there in the office, she looks like a person who is preparing for an important meeting scheduled for that afternoon. You, however, already know that the woman’s eyes are busy trying to find the nanny who has suddenly disappeared from the screen. The nanny is nowhere to be seen.

The woman squints her eyes more narrowly and sharply than ever. You can detect a heightened sense of anxiety and impatience in her eyes. She bites her dry lip. She is reduced to responding nervously to even the subtlest flickering of the blue screen. After a while, a dark-haired head appears abruptly in a corner of the screen. With the body hidden from view, it merely looks like a black blot on the monitor. The nanny is in the blind spot of the CCTV cameras at the moment. Even in broad daylight, the passage leading to the laundry room is dark and gloomy. The woman suddenly leans forward closer to the monitor, as if she is trying to look into the blind spot.

Before long, her lips start twitching. What on earth is she doing there? While the woman examines alternately the blot-like head and the room where the baby is asleep, the nanny appears in the living room with a vacuum cleaner.

Even the dust-remover brush is already fitted into the vacuum cleaner.

Unexpectedly, the nanny begins vacuuming. Earlier this morning, her place has already been cleaned. Moreover, it is the time of the baby’s nap, which is the only chance for the nanny to take a rest. Since the baby has just fallen asleep, it will be quite a while until the baby needs the nanny’s attention again. It is a period of time reserved for the nanny since no home-delivery man shows up and no fish or fruit trucks clamour around the apartment building. And yet, the nanny unnecessarily displays diligence, as if to urge herself on.

The woman tilts her head to one side showing a look of confusion. The nanny, who is oblivious to the expression on the woman’s face, appears in one split screen after another, from the baby’s room to the living room, from the living room to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the master bedroom.

She seems resolved never to stop vacuuming until all the dust inside the apartment has been sucked up. Strangely though, she keeps looking up at

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the clock while vacuuming. She seems restless for some reason. After she has done with vacuuming, she moves on to the other tasks one after another.

All the while doing laundry, washing dishes, hanging the bedding out in the sun, and watering the flowerpots, she frequently looks up at the clock.

It is a few minutes after eleven.

Soon, the intercom light begins flickering in the living room scene.

Looking startled, the nanny appears in the living room scene. A visitor is outside. At first, the nanny seems reluctant to open the door. She hesitates for a long time. Only after the intercom light has flickered several more times does she finally open the door. There stands a man, a stranger. The man’s face is hidden from view by the nanny’s back. Only the man’s shoes with muddy toecaps and ochre trousers can be seen. You and the woman knit your brows at the same time. The nanny’s letter of self-introduction that the woman was reading flashes into your mind. Could it possibly be her ex-husband? The one who has been missing after he ran away from home, leaving his gambling debts behind? Indeed, the stranger’s shoes look shabby enough for the sort of man who would go gambling with the money made by mortgaging the house where his wife and child lived. The woman glares at the back of the nanny’s head, which is facing the stranger. There is a palpable tension between the strange man and the nanny, and between the nanny and the woman. The air is filled with something ominous and offensive. The lapse of time feels long and uncomfortable. Putting her hand on her chest to calm her heart that is throbbing hard to the point of bursting out of her body, the woman swallows her gargantuan fear. While the woman clears her throat and takes a sip of water, the nanny receives an envelope from the man. The woman brings the nanny’s hand holding the envelope into a close-up. Nonetheless, it doesn’t give her any clue at all. She bursts out sighing. You cannot tell if the sigh is out of the woman’s mouth or your own. Even after the stranger has gone, the nanny remains standing still in the entrance hall for a long while. She looks like a person who is lost. She then turns around and nervously stares around the small living room, no bigger than ten pyeong, as if she has just got off the train at the wrong, unfamiliar station. She has never shown that kind of nervousness to either the woman or her husband. At last, the nanny goes into the baby room.

The baby is still sound asleep and doesn’t stir. With the blinds pulled down,

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it is dim in the room. There is something unnatural about the Mickey Mouse wallpaper shown behind the nanny. The tail of Mickey Mouse seems to stretch up from the nanny’s thigh. It gives a rather grotesque illusion that the tail belongs to the nanny. The woman is startled to see a long-tailed nanny carefully looking down at her sleeping baby. As if to wake the baby up, the nanny gives its cheek a few gentle strokes, but in vain. Even after it is patted several times, the baby doesn’t wake up. Shortly, the nanny’s lips begin to move. Perhaps she is singing, or talking to herself. Again, her conversation partner is not to be seen from any angle of the CCTV cameras.

Clouds hang low and heavy, threatening a downpour of rain any moment.

From the office windows, the branches of the trees lining the streets are seen swaying in the wind. Because of the wind, it looks quite chilly outside.

Nevertheless, the woman is in a cold sweat. She keeps wiping her sweaty palms on her trousers. Who was it? Was it a salesman? Or, was it just some person who happened to come to the wrong address? Or, is he in fact the nanny’s ex-husband? Who on earth is that man, that dangerous-looking man? You can easily see that the woman’s head is echoing with this one question. After watching the sleeping baby for quite a while, the nanny enters the kitchen nonchalantly, as if she thinks nothing of what happened just now. The refrigerator door opens slowly and the dining table is set with nothing but a bowl of rice and a dish of kimchi. From the beginning, the nanny’s meal was supposed to be meagre. An unspoken rule as it may be, the food inside the refrigerator is reserved only for the woman, her husband, and their baby. The woman watches the scene, pretending to be ignorant of the rule. She looks as if she couldn’t remember the nanny’s hands tossing kimchi salad, her favourite, and kindly putting a piece on her rice for her.

The nanny lifts the spoon silently. But then, she just looks down at the table vacantly, her hand suspended in the air and her mouth agape. Once more, there appears a stir in the woman’s eyes staring at the scene. Then the nanny’s mouth begins to move again. It certainly looks as though she is having a conversation. The woman repeatedly confirms the fact that the baby is sleeping, that there is no one but the nanny and the baby in the apartment, and that there is no phone in the nanny’s hand and no earphone in her ear.

Then the woman glares at the nanny’s mouth. The nanny doesn’t look like she’s singing a song. She is speaking in a foreign language, judging by the

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unfamiliar shapes of her lips. Her mouth is making increasingly bigger shapes, opening wider and wider. She could be angry and yelling at someone. The woman swallows hard. Isn’t she railing at someone? the woman wonders, and unwittingly begin muttering in a voice barely audible: ‘Te-te-terrible people. They stuff themselves with only the good things.’

The woman is convinced that the nanny’s lips on the screen are moving in sync with her voice.

‘It won’t do you any good, will it?’

Again, the woman voices the movements of the nanny’s mouth. She repeats the sentence, this time imitating the cadence typical of the KoreanChinese when they speak in Korean.

‘Do we look nobodies to you just because we are Korean-Chinese?’

The woman believes that the nanny’s lips and her own are making similar shapes. As the nanny moves her head, raises her hand, and opens and closes her mouth, the woman voices the movements as if she were a dubbing artist.

‘You and I, we are not different at all. You should treat me at least with some humanity, shouldn’t you? Everybody’s out to belittle me and trample me down. I’m just a person struggling to survive somehow or other, trying to hang on with all my might.’

The woman’s voice, much sharper than before, escapes her cubicle and breaks the quiet of the office. At her sudden monologue, several heads bob up over the partition walls, only to disappear as quickly. She is now afraid to look at the screen. Her face reveals her suspicion: she cannot believe the nanny’s claims that she graduated from college, that she has a daughter who is a university student, and that she has taken good care of the babies of the other families. When was it that I began trusting the nanny who had shown me nothing but some unconfirmed personal information? It’s strange, it’s strange, it’s so strange, the woman repeats, with her eyes still glued to the screen. Now, she looks like a person who has already sensed an approaching danger.

Half past three in the afternoon. The raindrops pattering on the windowpane are getting heavier. The buildings outside the window look blurred through the spray of rain; in the end, the entire cityscape the office overlooks is screened from view with the pummelling sheets of rain. The ringing

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phones, clatter of keyboards and quiet conversations are all swallowed up by the sound of rain.

Although she has calmed down a bit, the woman still keeps wiping her hands, clammy with cold sweat, on her trousers. Already, her monitor shows a long list of search results, all related to the horror story of the Chinese nanny. The headlines are colourful: SHOCK! CHINESE-NANNY VICTIM COUPLE COMMIT SUICIDE, WHAT’S BEHIND THE MAMMOTH ORGAN TRAFFICKERS IN CHINA, BABIES DISAPPEAR FROM KOREA, FOUND IN YANBIAN, THE SECRET OF HUMAN-FLESH CAPSULES, CHINESE BABY MAFIA, etc. The woman carefully reads some of the articles written in the style of testimony. And she murmurs to herself, ‘Not that anything bad has actually happened to me. I’m just taking precautions, that’s all.’ She tries to persuade herself that she only needs to confirm some of the information provided by the nanny. ‘Facts, facts, facts!’ she mutters, trying to clear her hoarse voice.

A look of resolution comes to her face. She picks up her mobile phone.

Her hands are trembling. The light from the phone makes her face look pale. Holding her breath, she glares down at the phone number printed on the document. It is a long, unfamiliar array of numbers. What will the voice be like beyond the last digit of the phone number? She enters the number.

What is she going to say? What will she be able to confirm? You would very much like to know, too. And you expect to see an intriguing event unfold before your eyes. After silently holding the phone to her ear for a while, she presses the number once more. Her face darkens. Several times, she compares the number on her phone to that on the document. Her hands are trembling more violently. Cold sweat stands upon her brow.

She calls the agency that introduced the nanny to her, in vain. Instantly, a terrible vertigo assails her. She holds onto the armrests of the chair. Her breathing becomes short. Now, everything becomes lucid to her. As if she has made up her mind, she jumps to her feet. The chair gets violently pushed away from her legs. Some of the documents that have been scattered on her desk fall to the floor. She has no time to pick them up. She scrambles into her overcoat and picks up her purse. At the very moment she is about to rush out of her cubicle, she suddenly freezes. The living room CCTV screen that is now nothing but a black patch has caught her attention. Her eyes are riveted on the dark patch now, even though her body remains turned

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halfway toward the entrance of her cubicle. The black thing on the screen appears to be something dry. It is hard to say whether it is soft or hard, though. It looks moving, or maybe not. What’s that? The woman’s mouth twists. All her nerves surge to her brow. Not knowing what that thing is – that dark thing looking alive one moment and dead the next, she won’t make a rash move.

At last, parts of the dark screen become light. And for a while, the screen turns dark and light alternately. At times, the screen becomes shaky, and white colour pushes the sleek black out of the screen. Something keeps snapping up and down, too. Extreme fear makes the woman’s body convulse. Her calf muscles tighten up and twitch as she tries to stay ready to dart out of her cubicle. She will do so as soon as she gets a clear picture of that thing on the screen. Then, as if to make a grab at it, she steps up to the screen. Your eyes and the woman’s blink. At the moment, the screen also blinks. Immediately, a horrible scream bursts out of her throat. A few heads emerge from behind the partition walls, looking around nervously. Next moment, the screen is filled with a clear image, round and black.

A pupil.

The woman stifles her breath. The black pupil on the screen blinks. The way the woman violently leans closer to the pupil creates an impression that she may be confronted with a hound that is growling wildly. The black, dry pupil repeatedly comes in and out of focus. The woman swallows hard. The juxtaposition of white and black occurs increasingly frequently on the screen. The woman’s breathing quickens. The screen at last shows the blurred outline of a face – a big face. The woman’s vision blurs. The face on the screen, though out of focus, tilts to the right. Surprised, the woman takes a step back. Once more, the long and unusually black eye fills the entire screen. The woman’s lips start moving.

‘You dare to touch my baby, and I’ll kill you.’

Her wide-open eyes quiver with anger.

‘It’s a piece of cake to catch you and ruin your life.’

Her pupils, looking as solid as a rat’s, dart after the image on the screen.

‘Remember, you also have a daughter. I’ll chase after you to the end of the earth.’

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The woman’s darting eyes come to a sudden halt. Then a grotesque wail begins pouring out of her throat.

‘I-I’m sorry. I’ve wronged you.’

The pupil moves away from the camera lens.

‘I’ll make amends to you for all my wrongdoing in the past.’

The nanny’s face fills the screen once more.

‘I had no ill intention. Please, forgive me. Please, don’t – not my baby.’

The nanny on the screen tilts her head to one side. The woman’s shoulders begin to shake up and down. Eventually, she collapses on the floor, sobbing terribly. The nanny, who looks confused, walks away from the camera lens again. And shortly, the living room scene becomes shrouded in complete darkness. A few minutes later, the woman’s mobile phone rings.

She rummages hastily in her pockets. The living room CCTV camera no longer shows anything. The screen remains pitch-black. Failing to find the phone in her pocket, she slips the purse from her shoulder and turns it upside down. The contents of the purse fall onto the floor with a crash.

More heads appear over the partition walls. The sobbing woman finally finds her phone. She reads the number on the phone. It is her home phone number. She turns her eyes back to the CCTV screen. In a corner of the kitchen scene, where the way leading to the laundry room begins, she finds a black dot moving. It is a black-haired head, blinking on the screen like some sort of cursor. What is beyond the corner is in the dead angle from any of the CCTV cameras. Now, most of the people working in the office are craning their necks over the partition walls. Tens of eyes are fixed on the woman sitting on the floor with her phone pressed to her ear. She seems to be frozen stiff in that position.

Her face becomes distorted in pain. After listening silently for a while, she utters, as if to finally breathe out, ‘Please, please, spare my baby’s life.’

Her words must have come from her acceptance of the inevitability of the situation she is in. ‘I’ll do whatever you want me to. I’ll never report it to the police. Please, don’t hurt my poor baby,’ she pleads. Her face is already covered in tears and snivels. With her shoulders shaking violently, she keeps repeating, ‘Please, please, please.’ The people watching her from behind their partition walls begin to stir, whispering to one another. The woman throws down the phone, jumps to her feet, and bolts out of her cubicle. As

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if she had no time even to breathe, she runs as fast as she possibly can.

Through the aisles lined with partition walls, along the glass-floored corridor she runs, as the fierce November rainstorm rages beneath her feet.

The purse that has been loosely slung over her shoulder drops to the floor, landing far behind her. The woman couldn’t care less as she races at full speed toward the elevator. Desperate high-heel footsteps echo through the corridor.

The office falls into a commotion. An atmosphere of mellow curiosity and half-hearted sympathy wafts along the rows of cubicles. Some of those who have poked their heads from behind the partition walls are now snooping around the woman’s cubicle. Scattered on the floor inside her cubicle are some documents, personal effects, a mobile phone and a few calling cards. One of the snoopers steps into her cubicle. He is the one who has been watching from the cubicle next to hers. The man begins to pick up the things from the floor. He puts in a neat pile the documents written in Chinese, a college diploma crudely embossed with a golden logo, and a few slightly crumpled calling cards. He then gathers up the woman’s belongings that had poured out of her purse and puts them into the pouch found fallen in a corner of the cubicle. Next, he pushes the coffee cup and the opened pastry bag to one side of the desk. After placing the pouch on the desk, he puts the documents in a drawer. He even displays kindness by writing down on a piece of Post-it where the documents are, so that she can find them easily later. Lastly, he picks up the chair that has been lying on the floor some distance away and pushes it under the desk. Having done all that, he looks around and notices the CCTV screens that have been left open by the woman. You recognise the curiosity in his eyes. After staring at the screen for a while, however, the man loses interest since nothing happens in the scenes. All he can see there is a dimly-lit baby room and someone walking up and down restlessly in it. The man recognises at once anxiety and hesitation in the thin old woman’s pacing. She seems to be looking for something, or perhaps not. At times, she stares at where the CCTV camera is. The man appears to be under an illusion, though only briefly, that his and the old woman’s eyes meet through the camera lens. But curiosity quickly fades from the man’s face. Leaving the laptop still open, the man

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walks out of the woman’s cubicle. And he goes straight to the staff lounge and switches on the coffee machine with a fresh pot of water.

While the coffee is brewing, several colleagues ask him about what has just happened in the office. The man gives them a summary of the information he has got: something more serious than expected seems to have happened; it may be related to some kind of crime; and sooner or later, the police may pay a visit to their office.

Outside, the rain still pours down, the wind refuses to abate, thunder roars, and lightning flashes now and then. You, who have been waiting for some exciting event to occur, get disappointed as soon as you look at the nanny’s eyes. They are helpless eyes that can do absolutely nothing but blink.

You already know the conclusion of this story. Probably, the nanny will have to look for another job. She may not work as a nanny anymore. Instead, she may keep changing from job to job, perhaps from one barbecue restaurant or dry-sauna house to another. At those places, she will still be hardworking and sincere to a fault. And someone will be watching her again. You don’t like the story to end like this. You want the production of more dramatic stories in which you are not involved. For instance, the behind-the-scenes stories of the people who, out of the blue, find their babies missing; the masterminds behind the kidnappers; the numerous parasitic stories feeding on the background of the tragedy. You are quite familiar with the proper temperature and humidity in which these stories are mass-produced.

Be careful with a woman who sings strange lullabies, you tell someone. That woman – with a narrow forehead, single-lid eyes, prominent cheekbones, thin lips, small physique, and solid-looking limbs – will sing grotesque lullabies that sound like the incantation of some tribe in China. You also warn that the diploma from a nameless college and the copy of her family registry she carries should never be trusted. In fact, the woman cuts dead babies into small pieces, dries them in the shade and makes power or pills with them, to sell. A baby she kidnapped from some family is still hanging from her waist. Whenever she walks, one can hear the unpleasant rustling noise of the plastic bag, coming from somewhere around her waist, you say.

The tone of your voice is lower and calmer than ever.

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Poetry

Brian Ng

Br ian Ng

Civic Patience I. July 1, 2008 ANNUAL JULY

1 DEMOCRACY PROTEST BRINGS LOW TURNOUT

The moment was not pivotal. A protest in a popular year, our crowd a mere middle-class ragtag, our concrete demands (‘END DISCRIMINATION OF MENTALLY DISABLED STUDENTS NOW’) as minor as the chopstick-flags, the air so muggy that we snuck out halfway.

Most of us knew everyone, anyway, held unsavoury opinions of each other.

Irrelevance: a hapless burden.

Yet would you refuse belief alone, or with us submit to the camp of exuberance? Our noise the product of opinions drawn to uneasy draw, pitted against each other with shouted words, a quickening sketch that palpates through fleeting relief a general will:

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imagine a picnic blanket, an indifferent diaphane that flowers prod out from to bloom. One hastens to call this courage: ‘We’ve done this many times.

But it needs doing.’

II. December 17, 2014 UMBRELLA MOVEMENT PROTESTORS ARE CLEARED THE ROMAN SATURNALIA BEGINS

‘The radio said to depart early to leave time for bus re-routes. It turned out the crowd went all the way back to Kadoorie Avenue through where we lived. As for their cause, I can’t say much. It thrills my son.

Often I wander among them after work, pick a quiet spot among the tents, and lie among the loudspeakers and the stars.’

Now, buses strike us from the testimony.

Above cowering trestle, beneath vying light-shards of restless industry, the bridge once occupied. Along its grey chassis, ribbing in lofty thrum, it hosted that mass whose beauty needs no civic leash.

Upon it once our ruthful vigour swelled and reeled in useful love. Now in its place brash red streaks scatter among us a fine silence.

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III. September 28, 2015 ANNIVERSARY OF THE HONG KONG UMBRELLA MOVEMENT DAY AFTER MID-AUTUMN FESTIVAL

‘The moon burnishes my companion’s beauty That beguiles me, and ruminates upon my heart.

Repeat to me; repeat to me our sentence again.

‘As if the event were class struggle, hubbub, riot, flash of colour, as if a moderated caucus would set it right, as if in sudden scrutiny our cause The moon honours my companion’s charms That vex me, and stir my heart.

Repeat to me; repeat to me our sentence again. would gently die, as if between shifting sympathies our crucial acts would be brought to end, as if I could ally these words to set it free, and that some The moon exposes my companion’s brilliance That lightens me, and wracks my heart.

Repeat to me; repeat to me our sentence again.’ difference would be made among the halftone crowd.

They do not think whom they souse with spray, They do not think what they have exposed for us to see.’

There is no liquid water on the moon, Its atmosphere is vacuum.

All its bloodless thoughts will soon Overwhelm our volume.

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Let our well-trained doctors tell You every citizen’s fate: What you brave and suffer well You will, in time, dictate.

Repeat to me as if observed: I remember, but I will learn nothing by heart.

Repeat to me; repeat to me our sentence again.

Notes: I. Civic patience is the notion of repressing a private urge in order to bring about societal or cultural change.

‘General will’ refers to that outlined in Rousseau’s The Social Contract; the perpetual, intangible will of the people.

II. ‘A fine silence’ (1 Kings 19:12) is the means by which God speaks to Elijah.

III. Section 3 contains a re-imagination of ‘Yue Chu’, a poem in the traditional Chinese Book of Odes.

‘They do not think whom they souse with spray’ is the last line in section 11 of Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself ’.

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The Backroom Angels Boogaloo The B ackroom Maria Angels Carm B oog enaloo A. Sarm iento

Maria Carmen A. Sarmiento

N

o one, least of all her schoolmates at St Celestina’s Academy, would have pictured Chona Laon Badoy as the future mayor of San Semilla in Negros Occidental. Chona herself had never aspired to political office – only to public service, as her in-laws loftily put it. However, her rise had not been entirely unexpected: her husband Erwin Badoy was the sole district representative, as his father and his grandfather had been before him. Due to an unfortunate quarrel between Erwin and his younger brother Dennis over the management of certain Badoy family corporations and the benefits from some choice government concessions, Dennis had refused to settle for mayor, but went up against his older brother for the single congressional seat. Worse, Dennis had allied himself to a political rival who was running for mayor of San Semilla. Thus Erwin had insisted that Chona run for mayor against Dennis’s ally. Dennis’s own wife was already mayor of her own hometown across the Madyaas Mountains, so it was an especially sweet triumph when Chona became a mayor too.

Erwin and Dennis Badoy had raced to herd as many workers from their haciendas, rural banks, construction firms, feed and sugar mills – along with all their family members who could vote – onto farm vehicles, buses and trucks, and ferried them to and from the polling stations. Many voted several times under the watchful eyes of foremen and supervisors loyal to either brother. They did not really mind, as they received P50 each (more than what they would have earned in a day) and an ample merienda as well.

Elections were an occasion for merriment and mayhem. Some houses were burned down and a foreman at El Dorado Sugar Central, which

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Dennis controlled, was killed – while a driver from Erwin’s Consolidated Concrete Aggregates disappeared. But blood was still thicker than water and the violence was limited to their underlings, in keeping with the proverbial ruse of slaughtering the chicken to frighten the monkey. In San Semilla, the monkeys told no tales.

Rock bands from Olongapo and Angeles, and actors and singers from Manila, were flown in to entertain the crowds of prospective voters at campaign rallies. Chona found it tiresome. The entertainment was not up to her standards. She despised most local television programming and had a satellite dish at home. And the endless shaking of hands was such an unhygienic – though necessary – practice. A distant cousin on the Badoy side, a retired accountant known as Aunty Meding, was assigned to be Chona’s personal assistant. Aunty Meding had spent all her life in San Semilla. She would be responsible for coaching Chona, who had spent most of her life in Forbes Park rather than in her native Pontevedra, on how best to get along with her constituents. Though Aunty Meding with unfailing sweetness called everyone palangga, she knew how to make them toe the line.

Aunty Meding saw to all of Chona’s necessary comforts, ensuring that there was always a well-stocked cooler of drinks and snacks in the campaign RV. Whenever they left a bag of rubbish at a barangay, the children happily swooped down upon their empties, dribbling the last drops of soda from the cans into their laughing mouths, licking the rims, scrabbling after the empty cardboard canisters of chips and scooping up the crumbs with their grimy fingers. The sight made Chona feel faint with disgust but she tried not to show it, just as she had learned that she must never let the peasants see how she vigorously rubbed her hands with ethyl alcohol after every hand-shaking campaign sortie. She tried to make use of what she had learned in those meditation classes with a Vietnamese monk near Zurich, where she had gone to finishing school. She practised breathing from her hara with gentle exhalations to avoid visibly stiffening whenever some overly-enthusiastic peasant thrilled at being so close to their congressman and landlord’s pretty young wife managed to wriggle past her burly bodyguards to actually embrace her, or to stroke her forearms adoringly while

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marvelling: Kaguwapa gid kay inday – daw sa artista! (How pretty our Inday is – just like a movie star!)

The election battle between Dennis and Erwin was protracted, with Dennis filing an electoral protest. Meanwhile, Chona was proclaimed mayor of San Semilla and sworn in by her father-in-law, the governor. Hector Badoy was not pleased by the rift in their family and blamed Dennis for failing to defer to his manong Erwin.

After the rigours of the mayoral campaign, Chona was aghast that Erwin expected her to report to the mayor’s office every day, and to preside over all the municipal council meetings. He was so serious now, unlike the fun-loving and easy-going beau of their schooldays. It has been so long since they had had a real party, the kind where they would serve various psychotropics in tiny condiment dishes, just like appetisers, for their guests.

They no longer saw many of their old friends, just his partners, political cohorts and the dull, on-the-make Chinese businessmen who were his financial backers.

From Erwin’s point of view, he had simply grown up. He warned her not to stand in the way of his greater ambitions. She was expected to pull her weight. ‘Your family will benefit too,’ he bluntly told her. ‘I know all about their loans. We have to show that we are in control. There are always wolves waiting at the door, ready to pounce on you and tear out your throat as soon as you show you’re weak.’

He quite terrified Chona when he talked to her that way, and she longed to be able to take a break in Manila – especially now that Digna, her first cousin twice over, was visiting from Singapore.

Digna was often in Manila to consult with her interior decorator. She had decided to redecorate the veranda of their large, luxurious home in Katong with Filipino fabrics and modern art. She urged Chona to come over so that they could take a quick shopping trip to Hong Kong for new wardrobes. As a mayor, she should have more mayoral clothes, Chona mused, so Erwin might relent and allow her to take that trip after the municipal board meeting that week. There were covert whispers among the councillors that the mayora was not even a college graduate, so she had at least to look the part.

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After high school at St Celestina’s, Chona and Digna had spent two years at the Villa Alpin Blanc, a finishing school in Zurich where they had learned to ski and had mastered the intricacies of eating a banana with a knife and fork, and sectioning an orange on the plate so that the rind fell away like the petals of an opening flower. Again there were nasty jokes from their political and business foes, suggesting that the lowly hawkers on the streets of Manila who sold pineapples and green mangoes from wooden carts had acquired the same skills without having to go to a Swiss finishing school.

Though Chona could converse in passable French, this meant nothing in San Semilla society, where the lingua franca was either Cebuano or Hiligaynon.

She was especially irked when those thick Bisayan tongues addressed her as Mayor Baduy or even Badu-uy, Filipino slang for uncouth and tasteless.

She was certain that many of them knew how to pronounce her name properly but chose not to. She had tired of telling them: ‘It’s “oy” as in “boy”, so it’s “Badoy” ’ – but they persisted in pronouncing it as Bah-du-uy.

She suspected they were secretly amused by her discomfiture.

During the first provincial board meeting, the matter arose of that repulsive Reuters photo of the emaciated boy from the tiempos muertos. It had been published in reputable newspapers all over the world – the New York Times, Le Monde and the London Observer. All that they had in the Philippines was photocopies of the alarming publications, or articles smuggled in by travellers or secretly mailed by trouble-making Filipinos abroad.

The image was undeniably disturbing – one would think the Philippines were Biafra. Often, the offensive image was juxtaposed with photos of the legendary and flamboyant First Madame in her jewels and ball gowns. The accompanying article was far worse: an oft-repeated refrain condemning the alleged persistence of the evils of the hacienda, and particularly of the sacada system and the great social inequities of the Philippines as epitomised in the sugar-producing provinces.

The plight of the starving children of sugar plantation workers was an international scandal. Like other towns that depended on sugar, San Semilla had smarted at the implication of its guilt, and at the judgmental international finger-wagging. It was small consolation that the child was from one of the other haciendas and not from any of the farms belonging to either

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the Badoy or Laon families. They, at least, knew better than to allow any journalists in.

‘Those media people are all tonto, mga demonyo,’ Hector Badoy, Chona’s father-in-law, had virtuously warned. Now that Erwin was congressman, he could relax as the provincial governor, and mostly played golf or went to cockfights. He had a farm full of fighting cocks. Recently, a popular broadsheet columnist had asked him, through an intermediary, for two of his prize-winning cocks as a gift; and this was why the Gob, as they called him, felt so strongly on the subject of mulcting media men. The gift was a preventative measure, to suppress any publicity of the Gob’s rumoured role in the smuggling out of sugar and the smuggling in of cigarettes and gasoline. The intermediary had assured him that the gift would be cheaper in the long run than having to cope with damage control – or worse, the aroused suspicions of government authorities that the Gob might be holding out on them.

‘The media are all ACDC: Attack and Collect, or Defend and Collect, especially the ones on the radio. The radio stations shouldn’t have been allowed to reopen. Right after Martial Law, it was so peaceful. Now they keep talking about Negros as a social volcano. It has been like this for over a hundred years, but it has never erupted. Those idiots don’t realise that this volcano is extinct.’

In the wake of the swirl of unflattering news stories about the sugar industry and the lifestyles of the sugar barons, there came a delegation from a conference called the Asia Pacific Women’s Consortium Against Poverty and Underdevelopment, or AWCAPU, an acronym that sounded to Chona like an exotic Australian bird. Spurred by that unfortunate photo, they wanted to conduct a fact-finding mission on the conditions of women farm workers in the sugar cane plantations. The Indian delegate had airily declared that she wanted to enter the hovel of a typical farm labourer so that she could see for herself what Filipino poverty looked like. Aunty Meding and Chona could not dissuade her and had no choice but to stumble after this determined Indian PhD as she hoisted her sari up to her calves and merrily sloshed along the muddy trail to such a worker’s house.

They crossed the worn bamboo threshold and stood in their muddy shoes

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on the hard earthen floor, packed and worn smooth by bare feet. The surprised peasant wife who lived there had scrambled for a piece of clean clothing to use as a rag and knelt before them, apologetically wiping their shoes while her children, too young to be in school, cowered together and looked on the odd strangers with frightened yet fascinated eyes.

Chona had never been inside a farm labourer’s house before and felt a vague unease. She whispered weakly, ‘Indi lang, tiya’y. Wa-ay kaso.’ (Please, aunty, it’s really nothing. Don’t trouble yourself.) But the peasant woman doggedly continued to dab at her ruined Gucci slides. Chona could not bear to look at the woman’s bowed head and her hunched, narrow, quivering shoulders, and so she surveyed the tiny room instead. On the wall over a low table there were tacked three sheets of white paper where a shaky hand, palsied perhaps from a lifetime of pulling weeds or hoisting sheaves of sugar cane, had painstakingly traced with a pencil three kinds of flower: red hibiscus, yellow frangipani and pink pitimini rosebuds. The petals and leaves had been delicately coloured in with the lightest of touches and uniform slanting strokes, with the intent of using the precious crayons sparingly, to make them last as long as possible.

Chona realised that even in these sparse surroundings there was an attempt at witnessing beauty and rendering it – pathetically clichéd and stilted as this attempt might be. She decided that ‘Beauty by Badoy’ would make a nice slogan for her administration. The First Madame claimed to be a champion of goodness, truth and beauty, so her efforts in San Semilla would surely endear her to the omnipotent one and give Chona an edge over all the other high-society darlings as they jostled and jockeyed to get in closest to the most powerful woman in the land. Chona, as a pretty, young elected government official with the right family pedigree, would be a winner.

The Indian PhD had stood still to permit the peasant woman’s ministrations. The mud soaked through the flimsy cotton T-shirt the woman was using as a rag, and she had to use yet another of her family’s few clean items of clothing. With her imperious academic’s gaze, the Indian PhD studiously took in the bareness of the single room with its lone, frayed sleeping mat tightly rolled up and standing in one corner. The family’s threadbare blankets and their meagre store of clothes were neatly folded and kept inside

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an old milk carton that served as their closet. Aunty Meding had to translate the Indian delegate’s many questions and the peasant woman’s hesitant, shyly whispered answers about the composition of the family, the incidence of contagious diseases, the average number of years of schooling children had had, and so on. ‘So poverty in the Philippines is not much different from India,’ she had noted approvingly as they left.

Still, there was a positive side to this revelation to the world of the scandalous existence of starving and stunted children amidst the antebellum mansions of the wealthy plantation owners. International aid and development foundations that had made it their business to help the poor of the so-called Third World had swarmed upon the haciendas, and their offers of support for the plantation labourers during tiempos muertos had reached San Semilla. As the workers were not organised, the foreign foundations had to go through the hacienda owners. Aunty Meding had a native perspicacity honed by years of sharp accounting practice, and a hardened old maid’s intuition for finding ways to make a little something extra to add to her already substantial nest egg. (For who else would provide for her in her old age, after all? She was certainly not about to become a burden to her many nephews and nieces.) So Aunty Meding had immediately seen how to get foreign charities to put up the capital for the hacendero wives to set up their own little workshops and ateliers.

‘Inday Chona, as the first woman mayor of San Semilla, you should champion our gender and involve the women. It is up to you to empower the poor mothers who must feed their children,’ announced Aunty Meding loftily. She could already taste the opportunity to exploit this newfound resource: the farm women. Their men had been bled dry, many in debtbondage to the contratista for longer even than the Biblical three score years and ten – an age that few of them ever reached. Some were burdened by debts they had incurred. Further debts were the only inheritance bequeathed upon them by their dead forbears or as loan co-makers or guarantors to co-workers who had defaulted. The women were a natural target, as sewing and handicrafts were still in the realm of women’s work. During tiempos muertos, many of the men would resort to fishing or hire themselves out temporarily as construction workers in the cities, while the women continued with their unpaid housework and tended their gardens.

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Already Aunty Meding envisioned how the lollygagging peasant wives and daughters would be trained and transformed into the well-oiled cogs of a fledgling handicrafts export business to be initially funded by foreign aid organisations. As an ostensibly charitable social enterprise, she was certain this would be virtually tax-exempt. The women would be put to work on a quota basis. They were unskilled, so while they learned (which might take them weeks), they would not have to be paid. But their training, of course, would be free. After their training, anything that they made that still failed to pass the standards set by quality control would be rejected, and they would not have to be paid for those either. In order to instil discipline and a sense of good Christian stewardship, any materials that they wasted would be deducted from their quota.

‘If they were only more resourceful, they could feed their families with coconuts, you know,’ Chona observed. She had never considered herself business-minded but prided herself on being open-minded. ‘I read somewhere that the fruits of one coconut tree can feed a family of three for a year. They must also have a source of Vitamin C for a balanced diet, so perhaps they can drink boiled batwan, or kalamansi juice. But they would need several coconut trees, I expect, since most of them have more than one child, and that’s another problem – all these children that they cannot feed or send to school. They are so funny that way,’ she added. Funny, as in ka-funny gid, a favourite expression of light exasperation and dismissal among the soignée members of Chona’s class, charged as they were with exercising noblesse oblige.

Aunty Meding nodded vigorously. ‘There are other opportunities, especially in livelihood and skills training,’ she pressed on. ‘There is a proposal for capacity-building from Halong Bisaya which is funded by the Third World Development Foundation.’

Chona was all for building up and encouraging any capacities that the plantation womenfolk might possess. Then, perhaps, they would be less likely to starve so scandalously and so publicly in front of the watching world. This might also bring in some favourable publicity for her as the forward-looking and innovative first woman mayor of San Semilla, in complete antithesis to that wretched starveling boy. She would epitomise Beauty by Badoy – she liked the sound of this even more. She would convince

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Erwin that a little well-managed publicity could only be good for their province.

Then, in what she considered an Aha! moment – a moment of destiny – Chona opened the pages of a local fashion magazine to a colour spread featuring her old friend and fellow Celestinian from their long-ago schooldays: Mayita Dela Strada of San Miguel, Bulacan, now Mayita Biscocho.

It was titled ‘Here Come the Brides, All Dressed in Native Fibre . . .’ Mayita had an atelier that specialised in wedding dresses with yards and yards of embroidered, cutwork calado and applique on the fragile hand-spun native fibres woven of banana and pineapple silk. Something clicked in Chona’s pretty head. This was just the sort of thing that the plantation women might be taught how to do. Weaving had once been a thriving cottage industry in the Philippines, before the cotton mills of Manchester had made superfluous and inefficient the laborious production of the hand-loomed cotton patadyong that every Filipino woman had worn as a workaday skirt or shift.

Many of the plantation women were young, with good eyesight. There was a purpose and a plan in all this, after all. Chona felt inspired. Beauty by Badoy might become a byword yet.

Mayita was pleasantly surprised to have Digna Laon call on her one afternoon with the message that her cousin Chona wanted them both to visit her in San Semilla to discuss a big project. It was a greater surprise to learn that the flighty Chona was now the mayor of her in-laws’ hometown.

‘I cannot imagine it either,’ Digna shrugged. ‘We should go just to see how she’s doing. It’s refreshing to take a break in the province now and then.

I think the First Madame might even be visiting next week to show the media that things are not as bad in the sugar plantations as the communists want everyone to believe.’

It was a long drive from the airport to San Semilla so they rested at the Badoy beach house over the weekend. Aunty Meding was there to fuss over them. Mayita experienced a level of comfort and servility that impressed even she, who had grown up having her bottom washed by servants until she was an adolescent set to enter St Celestina’s Academy as an interna. The San Semilla staff were diligently obsequious and perpetually smiling, as

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though nothing pleased them more than to perform menial tasks such as gently plucking the hairs from Digna’s armpits, or kneading Mayita’s flaccid belly after she had indulged in several helpings of local sticky-rice cakes served with dollops of muscovado and sprinkled with tender, grated young coconut and roasted sesame seeds. Erwin was away in Manila, so along with their evening cocktails, Digna and Chona smoked weed. Since she had gone in to politics Chona only did this at weekends or when she had special friends over.

On Monday, Chona took Mayita and Digna to see her office in the municipal hall. They murmured in polite admiration at the religious artefacts and Chinese trade ware that they said were worthy of a museum.

From the open capiz-shell windows, they could see the public market and the quay. The mournful yowling and anguished yelps of several dozen dogs imprisoned in crates, all piled up one on top of the other, floated to them on the sticky breeze. The dumb brutes were mourning their fate: they were about to be shipped off to Manila as meat. Aunty Meding ordered the windows shut and the air-conditioning switched on full blast to muffle the doomed dogs’ cries.

With the hum of the air conditioner and Vivaldi’s Spring played over the mayor’s sound system covering the street dogs’ agony, the three Celestinians, happily reunited, heartily agreed that one should not have to think about beauty in order to get it. It had to be a beauty that the masses could comprehend because they must be edified and uplifted by it, which was why each barangay, town, district and province had its own beauty pageant.

Beauty should not be incomprehensible, like abstract art – or worse, the so-called installations and happenings that were being perpetrated by the avant-garde pretenders in Manila. These somehow involved mind trickery and intellectual sleight of hand. Art, like beauty, should be up-front and immediately recognisable, not suspect and bogus or esoterically obscure.

There was a diffident but persistent knocking at the door, like a small animal scratching. Aunty Meding was not there to open it, as she had joined the women catechists at merienda. The door opened a crack, and Chona

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recognised the treasury clerk who had been coming to see her since last week. She could not immediately recall his problem; just that it was annoyingly complex. With him was a middle-aged woman with the drawn look of one who has been sleepless and weeping. Her desperate eyes locked in anguish on Chona’s, who could not help but turn her gaze away.

‘Sorry to disturb, Madam Mayor, but I have brought my aunt Mrs Halcon just as you said I might last week,’ the clerk said, with nervous twitching smiles and many half-bows. Mrs Halcon’s lips and cheeks trembled and she whispered a strangled good morning.

Behind the clerk and Mrs Halcon pressed a small contingent of uniformed men, a mix of regular army and civilian home defence para-militia, all crowded into her anteroom. A grinning soldier peered through the doorway over Mrs Halcon’s shoulder.

‘Come inside, please,’ Chona said, and this seemed the only thing she could do, as Aunty Meding had not yet returned.

The soldiers pushed past Mrs Halcon and the clerk. Mayita and Digna, daintily poised on the cushioned chairs against Chona’s desk, stared in perplexity and drew back. Two of the men held a young girl firmly beneath her armpits, while Mrs Halcon stood behind her, clasping her shoulder and stroking her hair. The girl’s head was bowed, and her shoulders heaved with muffled sobs.

‘Good morning, Madam Mayor Badoy. Sgt Imbudo at your service, Ma’am,’ snapped a short, stocky soldier with a broad flat nose and aubergine lips who appeared to be their leader. The treasury clerk scurried to his side and explained the motley delegation’s presence to Madam Mayor in eager but broken English.

‘Madam Mayor, this is the sister of Diego Halcon, the one who is working now in the in the Barangay Health Centre. Pleased be to remember he was amnestied before because he is not a real communist, so he was employed there but only as contractual. But there is those still not believing he has transformed. You know, Madam Mayor – always there is so many intrigues.

Maybe someone else wants Diego’s position. So now his sister who is also my cousin is detained because they be saying she is an NPA. Diego went to you last week and yesterday, Ma’am, to ask if you are helping please for his sister to be released. She’s knowing nothing about the movement but is just

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a former student and the youngest and only girl in their family. He saying they are using his sister to force him to tell what he knows about the others in the movement but he is not knowing anything also because he is not with them ever since.’

‘Where is this Diego Halcon now, as it seems this concerns him in the first place?’ Chona asked, pleased to show she had been listening. ‘Is he absent?’

‘No, Madam Mayor. He have done something for the Health Office so he gone to San Dionisio proper very early this morning. He’s only contractual and knows he cannot be absent. It’s like an emergency, Ma’am because there’s flash flood and mini mudslide so they sent Diego to brought relief goods for the evacuation victims.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t be absent. Jobs are very hard to come by these days,’ Chona Laon Badoy, who had never had a real job in her life, virtuously declared. ‘Anyway, in the spirit of reconciliation, I suppose everyone deserves a second chance, even if he used to be an NPA.’ ‘He is not an NPA and he is not absent, Ma’am,’ the clerk repeated with quiet insistence. ‘He’s just on special assignment because of the state of calamity.’

‘What is this case about again?’ Chona asked impatiently. ‘You know I have several appointments for today. We have guests here from Manila who will help San Semilla with income-generating livelihood projects so we can have progress for all. We still have to visit the weavers in Barangay Timawa.’

‘Please, Madam Mayor, it is a case of mistaken identity. They say she is a student activist. My daughter is not even studying now because we have no money for her matriculation. My husband cannot work anymore, Ma’am.

He had a stroke, and now this. . . .’ Mrs Halcon’s voice, in a mix of Hiligaynon and Kinaray-a, trembled and trailed off helplessly.

‘What mistaken identity?’ Sgt Imbudo chuckled. ‘We have our intelligence sources. You are questioning our methods and our capabilities.’

‘Inday,’ Mrs Halcon loudly whispered in her daughter’s ear. ‘Tell Madam Mayor that you are innocent. Tell her it is all a mistake.’

For the first time, the girl raised her head and the three Celestinians were uniformly stunned at the delicacy of her features, at how luminous her dark eyes were and how perfectly shaped were her nose and brows. Even in her

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dishevelled state, her youthful beauty shone through, turning the Celestinians’ expensively cultivated and contrived perfection to shoddy counterfeits of nature’s mastery. It was as though the clouds had parted and the light of the sun now showed things for what they really were. Chona Laon Badoy stared at the young prisoner sullenly, hating her without realising the vehemence of her feelings. Her impeccably manicured fingers unconsciously clenched and unclenched on the sheaf of papers that Sgt Imbudo had laid upon her desk.

The vision of this young girl’s unspoiled beauty made her realise why her brother-in-law Dennis – and perhaps even her husband – were said periodically to take their four-wheel-drive vehicles to the remotest barrios and farms, searching for such rare combinations of natural pulchritude: the rare fruits of the libidinous adventures of Chinese traders, Moorish pirates, Spanish friars and even American riflemen crossbred with native IndoMalay stock. The girl bore an uncanny resemblance to the mistress of one of the Badoy family friends, a popular racing car driver. He had plucked his treasure, then a fourteen-year-old barrio lass just past puberty, from one of the mountain communities near San Semilla and had kept her in Manila, hidden away from his wife and his seven daughters.

As the Celestinians stared stonily at her, the girl’s full-lashed eyes brimmed with tears and her whole body quivered. Her lips parted and she spoke softly in the Kinaray-a dialect of the mountain towns.

‘What’s this? I thought she was a college student. Tell her to speak in English, or in Filipino or Hiligaynon. I don’t understand a word she is saying.’

The girl suddenly wailed and heaved. Broken phrases tumbled out about being made to dance the cha-cha naked, and about her mother not being allowed to see her until today, and pleas to the mayor to be allowed to go home with her mother. Chona busied herself with leafing through the folder that was supposed to be about this particular prisoner.

‘But what about your involvement with the New People’s Army, as stated in the reports? You know our people are very careful about these things.

They do not go around just picking up innocent people on a whim.’

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Chona frowned at the treasury clerk and thrust a box of Kleenex at him.

‘Give her some tissues, please, and tell her to control herself. She’s making such a mess.’

The weeping mother dabbed at both her face and her daughter’s. The girl defiantly shook her head muttering that these were all lies.

‘Apologise, just apologise,’ her mother begged. ‘Ask for mercy from the Madam Mayor so I can take you home.’

‘What is this about your training to be an operative of the NPA youth at school? Are you out to recruit more communists, hija? Don’t you think we have enough problems as a nation? We need unity, not division. You should stop making it worse and try instead to be part of the solution.’

The soldiers nodded and there was a chorus of agreement as they tried to cajole the girl to stop weeping. She only grew more agitated and gasped brokenly about her human rights.

‘Naku! Are you threatening our mayor, our congressman’s wife, with violating your human rights after she agreed to see you like this? You should be ashamed,’ shrilled Aunty Meding, who had just entered Chona’s office.

‘It’s all right. It takes more than threats to scare me. But what I don’t understand is what am I supposed to do with her? I don’t think this is under the jurisdiction of the mayor’s office. This is a matter of national security – and she’s not helping any, incoherent as she is. I can’t even understand what she’s saying. Where is her lawyer?’

The clerk stammered something about his cousin’s volunteer lawyer having been called to Bacolod for an emergency.

‘Ay-yay-yay – not another communist client?’ Chona sighed. ‘How they keep multiplying! We have to follow the proper procedure in these matters.

After all, we are three separate but equal branches of government and I don’t want to go beyond my jurisdiction. I think we should just wait for her lawyer to handle this.’ She quite liked the sound of that. It was always good to have lawyers present to make things seem legal.

‘Please, Madam Mayor. Let me take her home and we will report to the station commander or to your office every day so that you can see that my daughter is doing nothing wrong. She is innocent. It is all a mistake.’ Mrs Halcon suddenly cried out, her arms wrapped tightly around her daughter.

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‘No need to shout, Tia’y,’ Aunty Meding interjected. ‘This is not the plaza or the market. This is the mayor’s office.’

‘At any rate, I don’t think I can do anything without proper legal advice,’ and, pleased with her even-handedness and cool professionalism, Chona indicated that the audience was over.

Realising that this was it for her, the girl threw herself upon the carpeted floor between Mayita and Digna, and desperately clutched at the delicate legs of Chona’s Queen Ann escritoire. Many pairs of strong arms roughly pulled her back, dragging the desk along with her while her wailing mother tried to shield her with her own frail body. Chona and Aunty Meding screamed that the things on her desk would fall and break, while the mother and her daughter both wept and shrieked even louder, begging that the girl be not taken back to the stockade, or at least for her mother to be allowed to stay with her.

‘Ay, que scandalosa – a real Amazon, this one!’ Aunty Meding cried out disapprovingly. Mayita and Digna scrambled out of their chairs while the soldiers surrounded the girl and her mother. They pried her fingers off the furniture and roughly threw her mother aside. The girl tensed her thighs and dug her heels into the carpet but they were just too many and too strong for her. They actually laughed and, taking Aunty Meding’s cue, raucously called her their Kinaray-a Amazona. Her helplessness fed their masculine superiority. The girl’s strength was nearly spent and her voice was barely audible, reduced to the merest whimper. Someone said she was also a pothead and that it served her right. She was carried away in an ugly parody of those writhing bodies flinging themselves into mosh pits at rock concerts while her anguished mother scurried after her. The clerk who had accompanied them bowed and apologised and followed them.

‘Too heavy,’ Digna sighed, her eyes large with wonder. ‘Too much drama.

Sweetie, I could never do this. I am so proud of you.’ And she embraced her cousin.

‘I suppose it is part of the job, of being a public servant,’ Chona replied.

Aunty Meding confirmed that the First Madame would be flying in later or perhaps tomorrow in a helicopter. They would show her how truly benign conditions were in the sugar plantations. Mayita was pleased that she would be meeting the First Madame under such auspicious circumstances and that

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she had brought several samples of evening purses and wraps, fashioned from native fabrics or embroidered in Filipino motifs of anahaw leaves and sampaguita blossoms. She would give the First Madame whichever of them pleased her. She had met her before but now she would have the chance to make an impression on her. It was wonderful what marvels the right connections might lead to. They would lunch at the golf course, then wait for the First Madame to arrive. Mayita would be introduced as the schoolmate of the Laon cousins from the prestigious St Celestina’s Academy and a niece through marriage of Flory Ting, whose husband Larry had a virtual monopoly on port services. Her handicrafts samples would shine as a beacon for the hapless women during the darkness of the tiempos muertos.

It was fated. How could anything go wrong?

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Poetry

Stephanie Chan

Stephanie Chan

Back Again Chain-smoking karang guni guy pushes his bike on the leftmost side, along the double yellow lines as taxis slither past.

I admit I missed your diesel smell, waking up to hear the mee pok auntie yell as rush hour traffic on your highways swell to the rhythms of reversing rubbish trucks.

Above me, the rain trees roll their eyes, they know I can’t help but romanticise everything I see and feel and hear: it was only yesterday that I returned to you.

I’ll admit I enjoyed that stranglehold you held me in outside the Changi airport cold, how your sticky arms never seem to let go:

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it is as if you’ve always known how I really only want to cuddle.

I want to lie in bed and breathe you in, hope you won’t mind my faded tan from all those months I spent snowed in, all those months spent trying to blend in you know I was only compensating, living all those miles away.

But will you take me back for what I’ve become, the taste of English strangers still on my tongue, the smell of American Spirit tobacco still clinging to my clothes?

I want to lie naked in your peripheral vision, the one marked STATE LAND, exposed to all the ants and pigeons and policemen who will quickly pull me away while you sit and watch, grumbling, Why do you have to be so weird?

I told you this would happen.

And I’ll say, It’s a performance art-slash-direct-action-kind-of-thing.

I saw it in Berlin.

But today I want to climb all your acacia trees, take grassroots polls from your citizen monkeys about the recent traffic jams on the BKE and how it affects their work-life balance.

And the monkeys will pat my head and laugh at me, they know this is all just temporary,

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that I’m still high on this humidity and your fermented shrimp-paste perfume.

They know that in a week or so, your stranglehold will start to dig in deeper around my throat, and you tell me I’ve changed, that my accent’s got strange and I will remember why I left.

But for now, when your East Coast coconut palm does that thing with its fingers on the back of the setting sun, my wires get crossed, all memory gets lost, all I can do is watch as their shapes entwine and pull me all the way back in.

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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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Tiger Under Pipal Tree

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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RK Biswas

‘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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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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