He pulled open the drawer slowly, the old clothes carrying the smell of years ago. The passage of the drawer roused little from this place, just from his heart. He unfolded the letter and looked over it in the dark. Then he folded the letter, put it back under the clothes and closed the drawer.
He put one hand over another at his waist, and lowered his head.
Gao Wen was up early. He collected the bristlebroom from downstairs and swept his room clean. He repeated for the upstairs walkway and then went down to the bathroom.
They had running water in a pump beside the bathroom. Cold water. He got the water heater and a large bowl from beside the coal stove in the kitchen and cranked the pump until it filled the bowl full. Then he ran a cord from the kitchen and connected this to another cord that he ran into the bathroom. He plugged in the heater, lowering it to the water’s surface. It hung there. He’d heard from his classmates that a boy across town had electrocuted himself using one of these, not to mention that fire in Shanghai. Gao Wen’s cheeks puffed. He dipped the heater in. They swelled.
Then they relaxed. He lowered the rest of the heater in and waited. When the water started bubbling, he pulled out the heater and undressed and flung the dead mosquitos off the soapbar and lathered up. He tipped the bowl over himself. Then he dried off, put his clothes back on and put everything away.
He headed out. Migrant workers were busy on some newlyweds’ home and a man in gray clothes with a lit cigarette in his mouth heaped spoonfuls of concrete mixture into a tray and carted it over to a brick wall while above him his coworkers lathered bricks. Further down, a woman sat holding a baby to whom she sang in Putonghua as her other child pushed a pebble across their broken porch and crawled after it chirping.
He took a right. Merchants lined the backstreet. Some had been here since before sunrise. From their homes down the road, from cots in the back. They propped bland tarps and tarps cut from the rainbow and other tarps cut from the blind man’s rainbow on bamboo poles and some outside smoking and chatting and a woman knitted a quilt a puppy at her feet and a lean man in blue tugged a metal cart along, stopping to load garbage into it.
Gao Wen cut a path through the dawnbreak crowds to his parents’ store. Father was talking to that same uncle. Gao Wen got some money from mother, along with this: one of the uncles planning to buy the house had gone to the abandoned structure already there and broken everything he could find.
Now that uncle was out of the picture. And this uncle was trying to get his parents in. The boy listened. As before, father did not say yes or no, and soon, Gao Wen went to school.
While his teachers read from their books, he thought of the foreigner but kept their meeting to himself. If he didn’t, his classmates would ask him questions. They would expect answers the boy just couldn’t give.
During recess, Gao Wen and his classmates played a few games of he hua he hua ji yue kai. Five of them circled around one kid. He counted off the months and finished on one, any month he liked, and then they all chased the kid who would be next to kneel in the center, next to count.
After recess, he went to English class. In his grammar book there was a picture of a small boy fishing on a lake. And as the teacher lectured in Chinese about English grammar and all the students copied down everything he said, the boy’s eyes kept drifting over to that picture, to the boy trapped in it. And a question kept popping up: could he turn into a fish? If so, where would he go?
Gao Wen thought about this the rest of the day.
What [Mi-ran] didn’t realize is that her indifference was an acquired survival skill. In order to get through the 1990s alive, one had to suppress any impulse to share food. To avoid going insane, one had to learn to stop caring.
Nothing to Envy follows the lives of “ordinary” (i.e., suffering, i.e. everyone not Kim Jong-Il) North Koreans. The title comes from a North Korean propaganda song. When it comes to patriotic songs in the hermit kingdom, what’s featured of it in the book seems fairly tame when it comes to xenophobia. Others, not so much:
One of the songs taught in music class was “Shoot the Yankee Bastards”:
Our enemies are the American bastards
Who are trying to take over our beautiful fatherland.
With guns that I make with my own hands
I will shoot them. BANG, BANG, BANG.
The author does a fine job in setting up the most horrifying aspects of life in a country whose ruler proclaims that his people live in paradise, a paradise in which they must grind treebark until it’s edible just to have a meal that day. The enforced belief in this place is that they are not unlucky — quite the opposite, they are taught that they are the luckiest people in the world:
In the years before her defection, [Mi-ran] had worked as a kindergarten teacher in a mining town. In South Korea she was working toward a graduate degree in education. It was a serious conversation, at times grim. The food on our table went uneaten as she described watching her five- and six-year-old pupils die of starvation. As her students were dying, she was supposed to teach them that they were blessed to be North Korean.
There were a few moments, here and there, which it seems the author is dramatizing. Hard to say, since she is apparently taking these stories from people who have defected, and was not present most (if anything) that happened.
A minor issue with an otherwise fine book. I would have been interested in a longer exploration of the problems North Korean refugees face when integrating to the South, as well as the attitudes South Koreans have towards them.
Highly recommended. 4/5 stars.
I’m really digging the work over at Laowai Comics. It says A LOT about what it’s like to live as an expat in China, and in fact, if you’re considering going there, you might want to check it out. Just start at the first post and go from there. With the visual medium, it’ll do a better job at preparing you than any written guides out there.
Highly recommended.
The Old Knight
The old knight wasn’t sure how many days he’d roamed the hill country. He had once kept track of the days since his dishonor. But one day he forgot, and since then he didn’t know. The best he could say was years.
Once he was the legendary knight. He had fought men to the death with his hands, bears, tigers and other animals so exotic they lacked names in the common language of Madri. He had fought not for the money but for the cheers of the thousands packed in to watch him. Now he roamed the hill country, a rambling, disfigured wreck. Monster in a mask, one-armed, he ate what he found, drank what he stole, his beds dried-out creeks and muddy hills.
And he might have gone on this way, if not for the girl.
The hill country existed beyond the crown, a haven for criminals and outlaws. The old knight spotted the girl wandering along. So different from the sorts who lived here. A refugee from a raided caravan? A runaway? Despite her dirty clothes she had the look of a noble. A little girl who looked like a noble. Just the sort that attracted attention in these parts.
The old knight kept to her backtrail. The brigands waited until nighttime to set upon her and they carried no torches, just blades and bolts and other instruments of death. She screamed. The brigands fanned around her in silence.
The old knight came running out of the woods in his stinking stolen robes like a wildman from a nuthouse. He stood between them and the girl. Raising his remaining arm, he offered the criminals a chance to disperse.
They laughed.
They attacked.
When it was done, the girl shied away from him. He found the brigands’ camp a few taps east and managed to get her some food. He built a fire to warm her. After awhile, he coaxed her name, why she was here. Turned out she was not a noble at all but a local farm girl, who in a game of hide and seek had wandered too far, getting turned around in the woods.
“How long have you been missing?” the old knight asked.
“A week. Maybe. Maybe more. I don’t know.”
“You didn’t keep track?”
“I tried. But one day I forgot, and ever since…”
“I know,” the old knight said, and showed her to a creek, to get some water.
He helped her find her farm.The smells of lunch wafted over quiet gardens patrolled by squat black dogs. He stayed behind in the woods and watched her wander into the yard, watched the dogs run up, sniff and then lick her hands. He heard her call out and her parents came outside and rushed to her, holding her close. When she pointed back towards him, he left.
He had once been the legendary knight, and only a mistake had sent him into exile. Now the world was a different place. Talk of war in the air. He had once been the legendary knight, and he was not dead.
He thought he might not find the spot. It took him days and when he finally found the tree he dug up the chest with his hand. It took all day and most of the knight, and he popped open the chest. Slants of moonlight danced up from crooked shards within. He remembered the day he’d held this up. The day he had conquered his shade, taken the great crystal into his flesh, and received his first bow from the mentors who’d helped train him. Once teachers, now brothers, forever linked by the warmth of the crystal.
And perhaps, the old knight thought, it was not too late. The world needed knights. It may need him. His path. It had taken a young man from a small northwestern village across Madri to the knights’ training grounds. Then another path had opened to bring him here.
Had a new path opened?
The old knight vowed to find out. First he’d find a swordsmith to mend this broken sword. Then he’d find his brothers, to perhaps mend this broken knight.
To see if the legends could match the man he’d become.
Midnight he woke up to the end of the world.
He shot up and made his way to the window. A flashing silver band belted around the village and soft pops and loud pops and other sounds like a giant popping his knuckles and elsewhere high whines seared the night, silenced in claps sudden and brutal and final. The noise died down. A few scattered remains. Then silence reclaimed the night for at least another year.
I recently did an interview with The Indie Book Blog Database.
What tools do you feel are must-haves for writers?
Patience and determination. Specifically, the patience of Job and the determination of the Terminator.
Originally published in Terracotta Typeweriter issue 9.
“I was married once,” David said. “Guys here, they’ve been married three, four times. Just once for me.”
He stopped eating, lit a cigarette. He shook another free from his pack, handed it to Jarrett and lit it for him. “Yeah,” David said with some smoke. “I was married once.”
They’d given their final exams yesterday and caught the first bus out of Wuhan. They were in Jingdezhen, a city famous for china, in Jiangxi province. They planned to spend a week seeing Jiangxi before heading south.
The restaurant they were in was a seafood restaurant with aquariums out front full of tortoises, crabs, fish and eels. Jarrett had at first joked that you could just point at what you wanted. Looking at the flayed fish before him, he wondered if that wasn’t too far from the truth.
“I met her in Beijing,” David said. There was a glass ashtray by Jarrett. David reached ahead and pulled it until it was about halfway between them. He flicked his ashes free. “I met her my first day there. My company transferred me there and first day, I run into her. Amazing, where your life takes you.”
Jarrett pointed his chopsticks at the fish head, with its eyes intact. “Just so you know: I’m not going to wrestle you for that. You can have it.”
“It’s for the guest of honor. That’s you, son.”
“I’ve been here two years. I’m hardly a guest anymore.”
David’s eyes flashed. He took a long drag, then said, “We were in Beijing for about six years. Her parents spoke no English, but they took good care of me. And they loved our children.”
“How many children did you have?”
“Two. One, now.”
“I’m so — ”
David was waving him away. “No, no. Just stop that. Shit happens, and that happened. I guess you could say it’s just what happens.”
“Still — ”
“And it’s appreciated.” David finished his beer, popped another. Jarrett was just getting done with his first.
“You know,” David said, “when I retired I got my TEFL certificate. I didn’t think of any other place but Beijing. First place I went was her parents. They were in their eighties then, and her brother was taking care of them. I brought them gifts…I was worried it might offend them. You know, it might be tacky.” He licked his lips. “Although they did not say anything, I knew they’d rather have her sitting in front of them than me. Can’t blame them.”
He took a long drink.
“I guess I thought that by going back to Beijing, I could somehow re-walk those paths I’d walked when I was young. What I didn’t know is that I was chasing a ghost who is much younger, and much faster than me. When you walk around the city, just about everything reminds you of back then, especially what’s changed. You wonder where the time has gone, and you realize it snuck out when you were busy looking the other day. You can’t get it back. Best you can do, I think, is to just pay more attention.”
He killed this bottle, popped another. Jarrett was on his second.
“So how long did you stay in Beijing the second time?”
“Little over a year. Then one day, I decided to come to Wuhan.” He laughed hollowly. “You were an accountant?”
“I was an intern. So I got the accountant his coffee.”
“You ever intend to become one?”
“Well…I have thought about taking the CPA exam.”
“It’s hard.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
They drank. They drank the crate empty and David ordered another.
“Have you been to Wuhan before?” Jarrett asked.
“No,” David said. “The good thing about Wuhan was, it’s that I thought there were no ghosts here, and one day, I saw them.
“They were walking down the street, holding hands, a young foreign man and a young Chinese woman. I see them from time to time. I’ll stop, watching, trying to figure out where they’re going. I don’t know where, but I think wherever it is, it’s a place they want to go to. They know who I am and I can sort of remember the young man. I know if I go to where they’re going, then I’ll remember everything. But I don’t. Instead, I turn and head to my apartment with a beer.”
David looked away, drank. “So, ghosts? Don’t ever kid yourself. There are ghosts no matter where you go.”
END
Our children will never know hunger, she thought. It was hunger that drove me into science, hunger that kept me working hard through each obstacle and set-back, hunger that made me the best. Without hunger, what are we?
Scientist Anselm Beck invents a machine that can copy anything. Food, money, weapons, it’s all up for grabs, except, it seems, people.
Thus comes the central question Maria Violante poses in her new short story, Scarcity: what effects would such a machine have on the economy? On the world? As Dr. Beck’s partner, Grace Kane, puts it:
No scarcity, and what do you get?
And like any good speculative sci fi, the answers are complex, and well thought-out. This could have filled a novel, but as it is, we’re left with just enough of a taste to fill in the gaps ourselves.
An intelligent, quick-read which will appeal to science fiction fans. Highly recommended.
5/5
Scarcity is available for the Kindle. For more by Maria Violante, visit her website: http://mariaviolante.com/books/
There’s a new review up, by Maria Violante, author of the De La Roca Chronicles, available for all e-readers.
It’s an interesting, quick read with an excellent style and a unique voice. I particularly enjoyed seeing the scenario through a child’s eyes, where the boundaries of reality and fantasy aren’t always so clear.
Read the full review here
The Journey through Nanking is available on Amazon and Smashwords.