My new book is out, so I guess I’d better say something about it before my website gets hacked again.
The Boy with Blue Eyes is about a boy (with blue eyes) who goes on an adventure in a smoggy metropolis, the metropolis in this case being an unnamed Wuhan, where I spent three years in the late 2000’s. But it’s about more than that: the boy is half-American, half-Chinese, and he looks fully Chinese, minus a pair of striking blue eyes. He is the son of a jianbing cook and an alcoholic, failed writer who hasn’t been living in China legally for quite some time. His father drinks and spends his nights banging away on a typewriter, his mornings puking last night’s excess. His mother does her best to take care of them both, cooking jianbing for a living and yelling at her husband for being such a shitbird.
The plot kicks off after the boy’s father suffers a fatal stroke. Though the boy’s mother has warned him never to go out by himself (he has no hukou and can’t go to school), he heads out to find her, only to get carried away by the people sea. A run-in with the police leads to him being “rescued” by a man who also looks fully Chinese…minus a pair of striking blue eyes. From there they do work for a corrupt official, and the man might not be quite who he seems…
I told the story in an unconventional style, inspired in part by Requiem for a Dream and ee cummings. Other influences include Blood Meridian and Manhattan Transfer. I tried writing it in 2012, naming it Street Children in Wuhan and intending it as a very different story…the eight-year period has seen a lot of changes, and though I didn’t work on it constantly for eight years, I’ll claim I did–it makes the book seem better somehow, the product of years of grueling labor.
Every book is a labor of some kind–of love, of hate…and though you might find the style hard to follow, we can’t all be workshop drones, describing our characters’ hair color every time they speak and besides, this isn’t exactly Finnegan’s Wake.
Buy it here.
