Category: Books

Memories that Matter

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In the Navy, “First Class” means someone at pay grade E-6, a leadership position more or less equivalent to middle-management.

I take a taxi back to the hotel and retire to my room. I check Messenger. No response from Ashley, though the mini-profile photo in the corner tells me she’s seen the message. I check the time. The Philippines is one hour behind Japan, so right now Sophie is taking her shower. We stopped bathing Sophie ourselves when she was four. Some kids need more help than others, but Sophie’s always had an independent streak. When she was five I poured the milk in her cereal and she kept saying Let Me Do It until one morning, I did: I handed her the milk jug. She filled up the bowl, and splattered a bunch of milk on the table. We laughed as I wiped it up.

It’s memories like these that matter. I see a lot of parents posting pictures of their kids’ embarrassing moments on social media, and I have to ask: why? When I was in San Diego there was a female First Class who complained about her son at work and I don’t mean she vented like parents sometimes do, I mean she complained loudly and obnoxiously, ranting about the “weird shit” that poor boy did, and the question just comes back to me: why? Why treat your children like this? The boy threw a temper tantrum. She posted it on Facebook and it had a dozen likes, many laughs and even a few loves…and I think of moments with Sophie like the milk, I look at my iCloud photos and I could never fathom doing something like that to her. Who could?

That female First Class, for starters.

All the people who liked her Facebook post, for another.

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The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening

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The boy squats in the dust and the roadgrime tracked in on their shoes. He has his mother’s raven hair, eyes as blue as a fabled sea. They call the boy a mixed blood and he watches father, aging reminder of a faraway land he will never see, the room dark day or night. Eight years old. Already the boy understands much. He sees and he listens.

Father drinks. He speaks the common dialect poorly and when he isn’t drinking he takes the boy out and shows him the city. Cramped backstreet restaurants and shops, father’s memories strewn across a chaos of hammers and horns. Holding the boy’s hand at the city’s many lakes, distant cranes and buildings across the silver waters, skeletal sketches of New China halfbloom in the construction dust.

The haze floods the sky and swallows the sun. Read more “The Boy with Blue Eyes – Opening”

The Boy with Blue Eyes

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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.

New ‘Expat Jimmy’ review, courtesy of Becky Ances

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Another good review of Expat Jimmy:

Expat Jimmy is a novella, only 60-something pages and is an enjoyable and easily digestible book. It takes place all in one day, the day a new foreign teacher arrives in Wuhan, China and is shown around by a more cynical/jaded teacher named Adam.

Huge thanks to the wonderful Becky Ances. I’m a long-time reader of her blog, Writer. Traveler. Tea Drinker. and I’m thrilled to see her review.

Read her full review here.

Expat Jimmy, a seedy account of someone’s first day in China with a jaded seven-year laowai, is available at Amazon.