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.
I got the review copy for this book back in December. I wrote the review in April and now I’m posting a shortened version of that bloated mess here, in October.
You can’t say I don’t finish what I start and here we have The Flock of Ba-Hui (And Other Stories), a translation of a series offbeat and original horror stories set in the Lovecraft universe by Chinese authors. I’ll admit I’ve never read anything by Lovecraft–my horror experience began with Goosebumps in elementary school, jumped to Edgar Allan Poe in junior high, and then pole-vaulted over Lovecraft all the way to The Stand. So I don’t have an opinion of Lovecraft’s work to influence what I think of Ba-Hui, and while if you spend two seconds googling Lovecraft you’ll no doubt be shocked to learn that a white man born in the 19th century harbored some racist leanings, it has nothing to do with this review.
Like I said, The Flock of Ba-Hui is a translation of a series of Lovecraftian stories. What makes these stories different is that they’re set in China, written by Oobmab, a fan who originally posted them on the Call of Cthulhu subforum on The Ring of Wonder (http://trow.cc), an online fantasy and gaming community. Doing the translating are Arthur Meursault and Akira, two dedicated Lovecraft fans themselves, who had the tall task of translating these stories while preserving the tone of the originals and making them understandable for Western audiences.
The four tales of horror range from the mountains of Sichuan province (the titular story, The Flock of Ba-Hui) to an ancient tower (Nadir) to the former German colony of Qingdao (Black Taisui, with a nod to Xu Fu, whose ultimate fate might’ve been as Jofuku in Japan to Tibet (The Ancient Tower). To help explain certain references to Western audiences, the translators have provided footnotes and a framing device linking all stories together, with a nice ending.
If you enjoy action-packed horror, look elsewhere. But if you like atmospheric slow burns, then you’ll have a great time with The Flock of Ba-Hui. For me, I can appreciate the atmosphere, as well as the dedication needed to translate these stories in the first place. I thought the titular story was the best, and I hope The Flock of Ba-Hui will provide an impetus to rescue other Chinese stories from obscurity. There’s much to be discovered, and we can’t let big publishing force-feed us the same boring, workshopped shit forever, right?
Check out The Flock of Ba-Hui, and get the paperback copy; leaving it out on your desk at work sparks some interesting conversations.
Watched The Fellowship of the Ring recently with my six-year-old daughter. Some thoughts:
– Uneven film overall. I feel about the first hour and a half or so (up until the Hobbits arrive at Rivendale) in 2018 the same way I felt when I saw it in theaters: some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen (and by the way, you can tell a lot about a person based on how they describe movies they like: One of the best movies I’ve ever seen or Some of the best filmaking I’ve ever seen or Some of the finest cinema ever made).
Seeing it in the theater was an amazing experience. I didn’t read the books before I saw the movie, and I found out about it in the old way, in the days before spoiler websites were clamoring for everyone’s traffic: in a magazine.
Yahoo Magazine, if I remember correctly, bought from the old WalMart in Springfield. They had a nice feature on the film, I thought it looked nice, and I later saw a trailer.
Seeing the movie in theaters allowed me back then to overlook its faults. My daughter and I watched the original edition. I’ve only seen the Extended Editions of Fellowship and Towers. To this day, I’ve never been able to sit through Return of the King’s half-day epic.
– Galadriel doesn’t work. The performance is over-the-top. Read this, sounding as intimidating as you can:
“In place of a Dark Lord you would have a Queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair!”
A campy performance mixed with a special effects failure, but reading that, you get the impression that Laurence Olivier himself couldn’t make that work.
– Someone on a forum described the Gandalf-Saruman fight as two lightsaber-less Darth Vaders fighting each other. I can’t view this scene without thinking about his description. Thanks, random forum user from 2001.
– Gandalf’s death. This hit my daughter hard. She didn’t cry, but she kept asking me why Gandalf had to die. I explained it to her and she was very quiet afterwards. The emotional impact Gandalf’s sacrifice has on the story, not the mention the stakes it builds…to see how this effects someone who doesn’t know he comes back, I agree with George R.R. Martin: Gandalf should have stayed dead.
– Boromir’s death. “I would have followed you, my brother. My captain…my King.” Gets me every time.
– and Viggo Mortensen is Danish. Why did I think he was Australian this whole time?
Watching the movies has another effect, same as it did in 2001: I want to read the books. Say what you will about how slow the first book is, it provides wonderful escapism. The world Tolkien constructed is unlike any before or since, and calling GRRM the “American Tolkien” could be interpreted more than one way. For as rich and engaging as the Game of Thrones world is, it can’t rival Middle Earth.
She was thirty-eight, I was twenty-two. We met in a linguistics class.
She
had a thing for younger guys. Her boyfriend, a grad student from
Germany, was twenty-six. I went to her house for Thanksgiving. She had
two kids.
It
was the weekend before I went to China, August, 2008. I sat in the
Sassy Ann’s parking lot waiting for her. The sign flashed in my
rearview, Dead Cat on the Line played on a local Knoxville station.
Inside
the Olympics were playing on TV. Another writer might work that into
his China story, which every expat can tell, to some degree or another. I
won’t because it didn’t effect me, and to pretend otherwise would be to
do us a disservice. I ordered a beer, watched the Olympics. She showed
up. We went to another bar, drank.
We went back to her place.
That
was Friday night. Saturday night on the Strip, too many beers. I
carried my bottle outside and threw it in the bushes when I saw a cop. I
remained calm, and the cop let me go with an ass-chewing. My friends
took care of me. I blacked out. The next morning there was puke on the
outside of my friend’s SUV.
Sunday
I saw another friend. A hangover stagger into an afternoon Nashville
flight, a connection from LAX, to Beijing and Wuhan, touchdown on August
26, 2008.
Even
today the smell of fresh asphalt returns me to Wuhan, Dawn of the First
Day. No one forgets that first day and sometimes on the edge of dreams
you wake up there, twenty-two again.
That was China in 2008.
Here’s Japan in 2018:
No one knew anything, a good start.
Deadlines
passed, waivers were granted, paperwork filed and meddling occurred,
and my wife, daughter and I boarded an AMC flight from Seattle to Yokota
Air Force Base.
First
we spent the night in the USO. We staked out rocking chairs early, and I
divided my time between resting my eyes and working on writing as the
place filled up. We landed in Seattle at 1600.
Our AMC flight left at 0715 the next morning.
There
were three categories of travelers on AMC flights: Unaccompanied,
Accompanied and Space-A, people who have to take what’s available. The
plane is built like a commercial flight and more or less operates like
one, except you have less space. We had to take stuff out of our bags to
get them to fit in the overhead, and as for under the seat? This was
the first flight I’d ever been on where the flight attendants gave a
shit about your fitting under the seat. We took stuff out of those bags
too.
We refueled in Anchorage, where we spent a couple hours in a terminal as empty and quiet as something out of The Langoliers. Then we flew to Yokota.
You
get your bags and sign up for an appropriate shuttle, taking you to
your base. Others stay behind, to catch a flight to Korea. We got on the
shuttle. In 2008, I drowned in Wuhan’s humidity, the van driver rolling
through Wuhan like a maniac.
In 2018, the shuttle fit all of us comfortably and I fell asleep on the way to base.
I
went up to the Chinatown in Yokohama the other day. Nothing too
special, tourists and baozi restaurants, it’s still a step above LA’s
Chinatown but you’ll find the fucking China King eatery down the block
is a step above LA’s Chinatown. What’s below bottom? World -1?
My
wife, daughter and I bought some baozi. After we finished I looked for a
place to throw our trash away. We walked down the street, I spun in
circles, and I stopped in in front of a man in Manchu-era clothes
shouting his restaurant’s specials into a headset.
Are there seriously no fucking trashcans here?
I’ve
been in Japan a little over a week, with a full month off the
watchfloor. I’m trying not to romanticize things here, but I can’t tell
you how much of a relief it is to be free of that place. Working seven
days in a row breeds the worst in people, and it only gets better than
you’re threatened into sacrificing your few off-days to come in and do
non-mandatory training, all in order to make someone else look good.
When
I arrived in China, I did a few first-week observations. But coming to
Japan isn’t quite the shock that going to China was. A young Sailor on
the bus felt differently, away from home for the first time. He tried to
Facebook Live the experience, and when that failed, he turned to
pictures.
“This
is so fucking cool,” he said, snapping a photo of a billboard. “Even
their abandoned houses look nice.” He perked up, on the hunt for a speed
limit sign. I pointed one out to him.
“Awesome.” He snapped a photo.
What can you say? When the magic’s there, it’s there.
I envy him.
So, some first-week observations for Japan:
– clean. With no trashcans, your choices are either throw it on the ground or pack it up.
– small. The cars are small, the vans are small, even the dumptrucks look like overgrown Tonka toys. ‘Murica, this ain’t.
– vending machines. Everywhere, and they even provide hot coffee:
– Chinese characters. Before coming here, I thought the balance tipped more towards hiragana. Nope.
That moment when you want to read all the Kanji with their Chinese pronunciations…
There’s
more to come. Either this is new to you or it isn’t, and maybe Japan
has the same sort of jaded expat douchebags as China, or maybe not; the
key is to get off base, and integrate yourself with the local culture as
much as possible.
In
China, it was the expat bubble. Here, the bubble’s much bigger. I’m not
exaggerating when I say you don’t have to leave base for anything, and
I’m sure there are people who don’t.
But
I’m not one of those people. When it comes to the quaint concerns in
America, what can I say? I had little interest before, and now that I’m
here, that little interest has shrunk to none.
I’m
done, I guess you could say. I don’t care about the daily outrage and
how offended you must feel on someone’s behalf. I don’t care about your
Trump hysteria or your slacktivist causes or any of that stupid shit.
Cram your hashtag lynchings right up your ass — I haven’t logged onto
Twitter since I got here.
Attitudes
shift, times change and life sneaks up on you. I don’t know where I’ll
be after this, but for the next few years I’m stationed in Japan, and
I’m going to take advantage of everything I can here.
With attention to the mistakes I made in China. 22 vs 33.
