Tag: fiction

Postmodern Cantonland: a review of ‘South China Morning Blues’, by Ray Hecht

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The Gibson-esque Sprawl exists, and it’s here. We’re sitting in a postmodern
Cantonland. Culture and identity can’t keep up, and everything gets
spread thinner and thinner. Tens of millions of migrant workers enter
the area every day, and hundreds of thousands of us aliens from overseas
mix in too. Maybe this is what the future of globalism looks like. It’s
prosperous to be sure, but not very romantic.

In the summer of 2008, I received an email. If you’ve ever taught English in China, then you know the email, and its promises. Free apartment, travel money, paid holidays, and my favorite: the opportunity to experience life in a developing, dynamic country.

In South China Morning Blues by Ray Hecht, we hear from twelve people experiencing life in China, the developing, dynamic place for expat reinvention since 1979.

The book opens in Shenzhen with Marco. Marco isn’t just an expat businessman, he is the expat businessman, a failure in the West who has come, has seen and is all set to conquer:

“Jackie”, my workmate (Chinese people and their English names, am I right?), bobs his head up and down. Looking so damn out of place, he wears the same white dress shirt, with the outline of a wife-beater underneath, which he wears every day. Badly in need of a haircut and with long pinky nails, he looks like he couldn’t get a job here serving drinks, and yet I know that he makes a salary four times the national average.

Marco never learns Jackie’s real name, and by the time Jackie steals Marco’s clients and leaves him high and dry, it’s too late; Marco shows up in Guangzhou, heavier and humbled.

There are twelve narrators whose chapters are marked by their Chinese zodiacs. Most of them want to be someone else, someone “successful”, what they want to see in the mirror instead of what they actually see. If I tried to sum up everyone’s stories, I’d never finish this review.

So I’ll touch on a couple:

Sheila and Lu Lu are young Chinese women caught between modern life and tradition. Both bend, and it’s Lu Lu who breaks, marrying a policeman she met while working as a KTV girl. She cheats on him, staying stays in a loveless marriage for the financial support, which comes in handy; her husband arranges everything, and Sheila helps her give birth in Hong Kong, ensuring that her child will have all the benefits of Hong Kong citizenship.

Terry is a Chinese-American writer who works for a local magazine by day, by night putting together “the great expat novel”, Cantonland. He becomes involved with Ting Ting, an artist who has moved to the Pearl River Delta region from Beijing. Not content to merely practice art, Ting Ting treats herself like a work of art, coloring her hair and recoloring it when her natural roots show through. She yearns to be an instrumental part of the next great art scene. Ting Ting is too concerned with appearances; she spends hours coloring her hair for her date with Terry, and he never comments on it.

The party at Lamma Island closes out the book, but while the book ends, everyone’s stories don’t stop.

We do.

We stop hearing about these people as their lives go on: Terry is a step closer to writing his book, Lu Lu has given birth to her baby and Marco?

He sits unnamed on the ferry, a shell of diminished importance.

***

Some people have lamented the lack of a “great” expat novel; they wish to see an expat equivalent to The Sun Also Rises. Another reviewer brought this up concerning Quincy Carroll’s excellent Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside.

Instead of looking back and making comparisons, let’s look forward. Along with Up to the Mountains, books like Harvest Season and South China Morning Blues set the standard for fiction from a transient class of lifelong outsiders.

Available at Amazon and the publisher’s website.

Migrant Laowai: a review of Quincy Carroll’s ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside’

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She continued to badger him in Mandarin. She asked him why he had come to China and, more pointedly, what he was doing in Ningyuan. Daniel told her that he was bored of America, and when he spoke, the others started, taken aback. They considered him as if he were crazy.

One of the things you learn about China, once the initial excitement wears off and having a white face is no longer a novelty, is that you are an outsider. Master Chinese or not, you are still an outsider.

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is the story of two outsiders. Daniel is a young ESL teacher who tries to ingratiate himself with China. He has great Mandarin, understands the culture and takes his job seriously.

Thomas has recently arrived from a kindergarten in Changsha, where it’s implied that his departure was not by choice. Daniel gets him signed on at the last minute, and Thomas is not the least bit grateful. Quite the opposite: he believes it is the school’s duty to hire him, China is his playground.

In that way Thomas is like many older men I worked with in China. Compared to Daniel, Thomas is cynical, making no effort to understand China. He passes cold judgments and gives his teaching duties the same enthusiasm you would muster for sweeping a dirty floor.

Daniel is the young optimist, less set in his ways. Throughout the book he displays a fondness for Chinese culture absent in Thomas. For Daniel, as for many expats, China is a place for discovery. For Daniel, that dream is still vivid:

They asked [Daniel] about China, but he could not articulate how it had changed him, for, despite trying his hardest, he could not explain it to himself. There was a wildness to the country that fulfilled certain promises in his heart, promises he had made to himself as a boy but had long since forgotten.

The China described in this book was brimming with possibility, opportunity, and the barriers that held you in check back home are gone. Daniel seeks what he wants, understands what he doesn’t want: to live a quiet life of work like his friends. As for what he does want, he decides the best solution is to integrate himself into Chinese culture.

Thomas makes no effort, thumbing his nose at everything they do, barely speaking Mandarin. Tension between Daniel and Thomas grows, climaxing at a Spring Festival dinner. After Daniel calls out Thomas for being a creepy lecher, Thomas points out:

After all is said and done, he’s here for the exact same reasons as the rest of us: easy living, zero responsibility, and a chance to make himself into whatever he wants.

The truth of that statement cannot be glossed over. No matter what Daniel tells himself, the Middle Kingdom is a place where Daniel can work little, live freely and dream the eternal dreams of youth in a developing Never-Never Land where responsibility comes to die.

Daniel understands that Thomas has a point, that Daniel is also an outsider no matter how hard he tries. He gets a taste of this earlier, before argument with Thomas. Daniel is close to the carpenter and his family — the carpenter’s son shares his English name — and Daniel agrees to celebrate Spring Festival at their house, bringing the carpenter some whiskey.

Over dinner they commend Daniel on his Mandarin, and we slowly see what Daniel is: an oddity. A show. They pressure him into eating a dog’s paw, and after a heavy round of drinking the men turn on their new karaoke machine. Daniel doesn’t want to sing, but…

When Hong noticed him standing there, he stood up and started pointing — first at Daniel, then at the screen. He pulled him by the forearm to where he had been standing, then gave him a microphone and sat down. Laowai chang! he shouted, to the approval of everyone else. Then he started chanting: Laowai chang! Laowai chang!

They want Daniel to dance for them. He refuses, but in the end he does what every other laowai does, no matter how hard they try to resist.

He dances.

***

All of us who teach English in China are migrant laowai. Some just acknowledge it. For all of Daniel’s attempts to integrate himself, one must ask, is he successful?

Thomas isn’t, and it is clear that he stopped trying years ago. While Daniel is a migrant laowai in denial, Thomas understands not only what he is, but that it is too late to change. After Thomas wears out his welcome, he pulls a midnight runner; we then find him in Bangkok, ready to start fresh:

Hailing a cab, he paid the driver using the last of his money, then climbed into the backseat and nodded off, dreaming of Bangkok. He knew that he would have a drink in his hand soon enough, and, after all, he had always been a believer in second chances.

East Asia offers many men second chances. For men like Thomas, it offers third and fourth chances too. Men like Daniel are still on their first.

Men like Thomas better hope the supply never runs out.

***

Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside is available at Amazon and Inkshares.

You can learn more about author Quincy Carroll by following him on Twitter and liking his Facebook Page.

A Step Ahead (from a WIP)

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William Benson, a United States Sailor, learns he can travel short distances into the future.

“Ice Valley,” William said. “From Metroid Prime.”

He crossed his legs. He and Mario — CTT1 Mario, a newly minted Petty Officer First Class — were listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos on William’s iHome speakers.

“Everyone draws inspiration from the classics,” Mario said. “There’s nothing new under the sun. All music can be sourced to like four fucking songs.”

“We don’t know about ancient music.”

“Yeah we do. Go on YouTube.”

“Those are reconstructions.” William ought to know. In grad school, his thesis advisor had produced a reworking of Babylonian music. Here’s what I think it sounds like . . . and a man with a PhD in music, one of the lucky few to have tenure, had spent five years working on it, years William could compact into minutes.

“Well obviously they can’t hop in the DeLorean and — what?”

“Your age is showing.”

“My age? How old are you again, thirty?”

“Twenty-nine.” And William had joined the Navy at twenty-seven, after dropping out of the Master’s program in Music. Years spent toiling under old men who constantly told him “it gets better” with the sincerity of a late-night pitchman. Except it never did. Those years William hadn’t been able to speed up, and even if he could have, what would he have sped them up to? This? Waiting on a floating dumpster for the poor lower ranks to finish off-loading trash while the squadron assholes just sat around?

“Rough Riders this is the CMC,” came the voice over the 1MC. “We still have a lot of trash. If you’re just sitting there in the hangar bay, waiting for liberty call, we’d appreciate it if you’d help out. No one’s getting off this ship, repeat, no one’s getting off this ship until we get all the trash off, so I need everyone’s help. CMC out.”

William got up.

“Oh? Going to help out?”

He shrugged. “You know me. Super Sailor.”

William climbed the ladderwell to the next deck. The head was separate from the berthing, beside a hatch leading to the forward mess decks, and it had a lock. The combo used to be secret. None of the deck apes the Navy had rescued from the welfare line could go in and trash their head. Then one day the CMC decided that all head combos must be 1-2-3-4 because he didn’t believe in locked heads. Since then . . .

William put in the not-so-secret combo and went inside, bracing himself for the worst. William had come in here before to find all three stalls taken. He’d come in here and smelled smells not meant for human nostrils, smells to wilt your nose hairs, all because the CMC did not believe in locked heads.

It was one of the few policies he could create himself — usually he just enforced whatever the CO and the omnipresent Big Navy said — so the CMC was sticking to his guns. William understood. He didn’t hold it against the man.

William went into the last stall. He locked it, keeping an eye on the iron angle. One morning he’d banged his head on the edge, and the pain had lasted all day. When designing this ship, human comfort had come second to how much shit they could squeeze into one space, and God help you if you were tall.

William sat on the toilet, pants on. He clasped his hands, lowered his head and closed his eyes.

What a trick to learn, what a gift to have. If he’d known this earlier, how much tedium he could have saved in boot camp. He’d discovered his gift in A-school, and when the asshole in charge of barracks room inspections failed half the students over petty bullshit, it took no time at all for William to finish his extra cleaning duties. Clean for five minutes, then go sit somewhere alone.

Concentrate.

William concentrated. He felt slightly buzzed when he did this. He didn’t open his eyes — that would ruin everything. He was moving through a tunnel, and he heard nothing. The world quietly awaited his return.

William stopped moving. He opened his eyes and checked his watch. He’d sent himself ahead two hours. Was that enough? He went down to the berthing.

Everyone was gone but Mario.

“Figured you’d be out too.”

“They called E5’s?”

“Yeah, but I got duty tomorrow, so . . . ” He raised his middle finger up and down.

William nodded. “It’s alright. My speakers can keep you company.”

Check out my short story, ‘A Long Fall’, now available for free!

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A Long Fall, published in the autumn 2015 issue of The Colored Lens, is now available to read for free: http://thecoloredlens.com/?p=39573

Set in the near future, when Patricia’s husband dies in a freak accident, she uses her life savings to have a clone grown. But when the clone begins to fall apart, she has to deal with losing him all over again.
Big thanks to the editorial team at The Colored Lens!

Book Passage of the Week (2/6/2016) – from The Old Man & the Sea

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The first Hemingway I read was The Old Man & the Sea.

I didn’t read it in high school, or college. I read it in China, summer 2009. I’d bought it from a Hong Kong bookstore earlier that year. Back then (and maybe today, it’s a safe bet) Wuhan did not have a wide selection of English books. Even the much-touted store on Zhongnan Lu had little more than classic books.

I did most of my book buying through Albiris and later Thriftbooks. I did grab a few from some street vendors in Wudaokou on trips to Beijing, which netted me a copy of the fabulous Time Traveler’s Wife, a pirated copy whose text began repeating near the end.

Here’s a passage I underlined almost seven (seven!?) years ago:

He looked across the sea and knew how alone he was now. But he could see the prisms in the deep dark water and the line stretching ahead and the strange undulation of the calm. The clouds were building up now for the trade wind and he looked ahead and saw a flight of wild ducks etching themselves against the sky over the water, then blurring, then etching again and he knew no man was ever alone on the sea.

Beautiful, isn’t it?