Tag: writing

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.

Book Passage of the Week – from Hold the Dark, by William Giraldi

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I’m digging the prose in Hold the Dark, about an ailing old man who helps a grieving mother track down the wolf that killed her son in a remote Alaskan village.

He’d seen his daughter only once in the last three years, when she came home the morning after her mother’s stroke. Three crawling years. Life was not short, as people insisted on saying. He’d quit cigarettes and whiskey just before she was born. He wanted to be in health for her and knew then that ten years clipped from his life by drink and smoke were ten years too many. Now he knew those were the worthless years anyway, the silver decade of life, a once-wide vista shrunk to a keyhole. Not all silver shines. As of this morning he had plans to return to cigarettes and whiskey both. He regretted not buying them at the airport.

Book Passage of the Week – from The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield

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Lately, I’ve been spending less time on social media and more time reading and writing. I know I’m missing bouts of fashionable outrage and status signaling, and you know what? I don’t care. You can have it, and you can keep it.

I have read Steven Pressfield’s magnificent The War of Art so many times that I can quote most of it offhand. As I finish City of Mirrors and prepare to start Swimming in Hong Kong, this particular quote kept popping up in my head. I hope you enjoy it, and do check out The War of Art. Mr. Pressfield also runs a blog, Writing Wednesdays. If nothing else, read Find What You Love and Let It Kill You and Collectively-Enforced Mediocrity. You’re welcome.

On to the quote:

In my little house I had no TV. I never read a newspaper or went to a movie. I just worked. One afternoon I was banging away in the little bedroom I had converted to an office, when I heard my neighbor’s radio playing outside. Someone in a loud voice was declaiming “…to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” I came out. What’s going on? “Didn’t you hear? Nixon’s out; they got a new guy in there.”

I had missed Watergate completely.

How’s that for #amwriting?

Book Passage of the Week – from Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

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Suttree and A Death in the Family are the two famous Knoxville novels. They even have similar openings; Agee’s book gives us Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and McCarthy gives us:

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.

Seven un-indented paragraphs of that, introducing us to Suttree’s Knoxville.

I’m in the middle of reading Suttree. I can’t say I enjoy the book — my favorite remains The Road  — but there are some nice passages:

In the long days of all they went like dreamers. Watching the sky for rain. When it came it rained for days. They sat in groups and watched the rain fall over the deserted fairgrounds. Pools of mud and dark sawdust and wet trodden papers. The painted canvas funhouse walls and the stark skeletons of amusement rides against a gray and barren sky.

And:

A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. The rusting carcass of an automobile passed slowly on his right. Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan inkwash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.

And this, from a fever dream. Shades of The Road?

By the side of a dark dream road he’d seen a hawk nailed to a barn door. But what loomed was a flayed man with his brisket tacked open like a cooling beef and his skull peele, blue and bulbous and palely luminiscent, black grots his eyeholes and bloody mouth gaped tongueless. The traveler had seized his fingers in his jaws, but it was not alone this horror that he cried. Beyond the flayed man dimly adumbrate another figure paled, for his surgeons moved about the world even as you and I.

While you’re here, check out Yelping with Cormac. My favorite is The Apple Store.

Wuhan Style Streets

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This post originally appeared on Medium.

Germany Style Street: a trio of Bavarian dancers.

Italy Style Street: a suspicious-looking Mario and pizza.

Spain Style Street: a matador on the run from a bull.

This is what greets you when you leave Guanggu Wuchang and enter the rest of the mall: Optics Valley Walking Street, the part they were building when I last lived in Wuhan. Each area is marked for the country it mimics, and there is a mock cathedral for weddings.

At the end of the Style Streets a small train hauls children around a pack of animatronic dinosaurs who screech at timed intervals. Beyond this a wall with cartoon characters promise a Children’s Park and much more, and looking at the dinosaurs and the wall and the sheer size of what was once a nice outdoor mall turned consumer wonderland, the old line from Jurassic Park occurs to me.

What else have they got in there, King Kong?

Style Streets is an appropriate name because this place has its own style. It’s not Italy or Spain or Germany, images of European life it hopes to conjure in the minds of the Chinese nouveau riche. This is a uniquely Chinese style, a monstrous maze of shops and restaurants and cafes, stacked so close you wonder how anyone ever turns a profit. This is not a billion Chinese jumping.

This is a billion Chinese swiping Union Pay cards, the middle class and their hopefuls keeping the economic bubble well-inflated.

In 2008 Guanggu Wuchang was relatively new. Incumbent foreign teachers spoke of a time before the huge mall, with its giant Starbucks cup and dusty Epcot center bubble. Behind Guanggu it looked like they were building apartments. Walls were raised. Construction crews were called. Money changed hands and the corporate planners stood by, awaiting profit.

Seven years later they have it.

The Style Streets aren’t the only thing that’s new. New World Plaza arose while I was gone. A mall like any other, the fourth floor of New World is dedicated to children. Children’s development centers, clothes stores, a children’s train that does a complete lap around the floor, a play area and a Toys R Us.

The Toys R Us is a compact version, but as a compact unit it crams in quite a bit; they have all the toys and games we have, at high prices. 779 RMB for a Lego set, 99 RMB for a small Winnie the Pooh doll. Big Pooh goes for 199. I don’t know about Piglet.

BalaBala, Me and City Kids and the other children’s stores are similarly priced. Custom-made children’s desks go for 1149 RMB and up. An English Library (爱说读) in the middle of the hall has shelves of children’s books in Chinese and English, and two child development centers will have your kids ready for Harvard before they’re potty-trained.

There are three play areas. One is an obstacle course, the other has a carousel and a small train.

The other is Happy Bar: Baby’s Paradise.

50 RMB per person grants you entry to a crowded play area. You remove your shoes but keep on your socks. Some parents come in while others stay at the counter, watching Chinese dramas on their phones or staring vacantly into antiquity as their children wear themselves out on a boat that rocks back and forth, plush ABC blocks, an obstacle course, four slides, a sand pit of fine grains, nine swings and a ball pit. An HDTV lords over a small stage. Children are doing ballet on a continuous loop or synchronized dances to classic Chinese children’s songs and doting grandparents lounge by the ABCs while their grandchildren dash up and down stairs and jump on trampolines and in the ball pit a toddler is crying while a fat boy keeps throwing balls at him, ignoring his mother’s gentle suggestions to stop. A child crashes his toy car into your shin. Sweat beads pop soundlessly on your collar. The letter B has gone missing.

In the middle a giant inflated polar bear spins ceaselessly.

The dinosaurs at the end of Optics Valley Walking Street screech. People take pictures with the dinosaurs and two girls exit Mean Dessert carrying cupcakes. I look over. A replica of a London tour bus is permanently parked in front of a cafe. Then I look back at the wall and the promise of more to come and I think it’s true.

King Kong isn’t far behind.

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