Judith Huang's Blog: Jud: The Blog, page 3

I won the first Rosetta Award in SFF Translation!

So, my translation of Roesin by Wu Guan won the short form Rosetta Award for SFF translation! I was so honored to win this award because this was my first introduction to translating SFF from Chinese, and it was also a very challenging piece to translate. The Rosetta Awards are given by the Future Affairs Administration (FAA), to recognize the burgeoning field of SFF translation around the world.

You can read the award-winning short story in Future SF, a wonderful magazine that brings Science Fiction and Fantasy from other languages into English. It’s been an honor working with Alex, the editor, on the piece.

First of all, it was a very tricky piece to translate because the author replaced a lot of the “ren” (man/human) radicals with “jin” (metal/gold) radicals throughout the piece. I invented a set of pronouns for the machine characters that had these changes, as well as appending -tron to the nouns that referred to them. The story itself is mesmerizing and a total page turner, about a machine artist that trains a humiliated human to become his double in a John Lennon/Yoko Ono-esque piece of performance art. If that doesn’t pique your curiosity I don’t know what will!

Finally, the Rosetta Archive is a print volume that collects the shortlisted works and other notable stories in translation, for those of you who prefer reading in print!

The Way Spring Arrives Tor anthology out!

The Tor anthology of Chinese women and nonbinary science fiction and fantasy, The Way Spring Arrives, is out now! I have a piece of translation in it, The Woman Carrying a Corpse, by Chi Hui! This was a very mythological piece, with great archetypal resonance and I had a good time working with the author on it. Look out for it in bookstores and online now!

Here it is on Amazon

just read ‘ants’ for rattlecast X Spittoon

So the amazing, humble and talented Anthony Tao was the guest on Rattlecast #83.

The man was working at Beijing Bookworm (a fabulous bilingual bookshop in Sanlitun) before it got shut down and helping to run the legendary literary festival there. Now, he’s still in Beijing and has just taken the mantle of Spittoon Beijing, the collective I was a member of from the start in 2015 when the magazine first launched.

There was also an open mike! So I called in and read “Ants” (1:29:39), which was perfect because it has so much soundplay, conceit and homophonic cacophonic music and was written about Singapore after returning to the island from China. I also received a lot of insecticide recommendations from my concerned relatives in Singapore when I published this on social media. Anyway, do check out the broadcast it is there for good

And here is my Loreli interview for back when the amazing naked molerat Max Berwald interviewed me for Loreli here.

http://www.loreli-china.com/readsepte...

Fiction by Judith Huang

by Max Berwald for Loreli

Judith Huang is a Singaporean writer and translator living in Beijing. She is the three-time recipient of the Foyle Young Poet of the Year Award, with works appearing in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Cha, and elsewhere. She is the translator of four volumes of poetry by Singaporean Cultural Medallion winner Yeng Pway Ngon, published by the Literary Centre of Singapore.Ants was first read at Spittoon Fiction in August, 2016. An interview follows the work. 

Ants 

The first thing you notice about this place is the ants. Ants on the walls. Ants on the floor. Ants on the ceiling, between the crack between the lights. Ants in the kitchen, ants in the dining room, ants in the living room, ants in the bedroom. Ants on the flowers you pick. Ants on the cup you put down. Ants on the soles of your slippers. Ants on the seat of your chair. Ants on your arm when you lean against a tree. Ants, reddish brown, tiny as a fullstop with tinier feelers. Ants, in a line, bringing reinforcements. Ants, mulling around a puddle, feeling it out, and then winding around it. Ants.

Ants. Ants. Ants.

The ever-present soldiers of rot, of decay, of furor, of the ever-looming ever-present near-ubiquity of death.The death of an evening, the death of a week, the death of a year of Mondays through Sundays. The death of you, the death of me, the death of the forest, the death of the city.

Ants, heading a pity-party daisy-chain hailing the fact that everything’s rotting, quickly so quickly, in the fulsome decay of the tropical sun.Bury your grandma, and within a minute you can be sure she’s a feast, a feast of her eyes, her ears, her nose, her hair. Ants at her neck, ants at her throat, ants on her tongue, ants in her vagina, ants knocking at the unlockable door of her teeth.

Nothing stays, not the condos, not the semi-Ds, not the bungalows, not the HDBs, everything is one fecund, rotting, shifting, collapsing thing.Ants move in and build a nest. They knock down and they build up. They are building museums one day, and catacombs the next. They are building MRT lines, they are building library skyscrapers, they are building roads that lead nowhere and everywhere at once. They are building shopping mall after shopping mall after shopping mall. They are building hipster coffee shops, they are building sky gardens, they are building infinity pools, they are building lego sets, they are building simulated high-tech break-neck metropolises, they are building high-end luxury villas for the billionaires of the world to unite in the carefully constructed tax havens of the cove.

Ants, everywhere ants, they are tearing them down, they are going to town, they are knocking down schools, they are tunneling through libraries, they are demolishing skyscrapers to make room for even higher towers of glass bridged by bridges of glass, they are unearthing your ancestors to build high-rises on the wounded exhumed lands of the dead.

Oh restless land, heaving with the absolute biomass of ants, ants, ants, building your carefully commissioned babies new cribs in the sky, building a sky high fantasy eye to eye your sky as it wheels by.

Ants, eating away at the prophecy of the old man, tearing away at his legacy to make it more perfect, more cunning, more insidious than ever before. Ants, working to put together the labels on museums, the programs for concert pianists, how it will be legato in this era and staccato the next, determining which species of trees we will grow on the sides of the roads in robust and cacophonous harmony.

Ants – laboring to the rhythm of the silent obese queen, issuing orders through pneumatic pipelines. Ants on my bed, feeding the gifted with royal jelly, keeping the drones in their amniotic sacs even as poets emerge in full chorus, on cue, in your third generation.Ah, ants, you have crawled over my crevices, you have exhumed my graves, you have stalked up my banana ghosts, wafting like frangipani hosts in the middle of a wet petal.

Every damn where, ants, what have you done with my grandma, all you’ve left of her sweet old face is the brittle bone, the hole where her nose used to be, the hole where her lips used to be, the hole where the head of my father first emerged into this world, obliterating all love of and knowledge of history with the hard forgetting light of life. 

Ah yes, ants, tap dancing on the way to infinity on a closed loop with no possible feedback, ants, in the musical of the life of our founder, the founder of the colony, the founder of the party, the founder of every last drip and drop of our nether end, ants, saying nothing original, only a soup of letters to feed as pap to the embryos that hatch every year into batches of prepaid preconceived dots joined to dots joined to dots that are our offspring, that are our past and our present and our future, a blank after blank of ants after ants after ants.

Ah doyennes of recycling! Multitude of multitudes! Ants from end to end to end to end, beginning at the very moment of the end, poised on the cusp of every last future, zigzagging around this and then that corner of the world, sending scouts out and then flooding in armadas of puny heavy-lifting champions.

Ah yes, we are ants, flying in pairs on the wings of love to an inevitable descent by the moon of the fluorescent light, waiting for our chance to replenish the genetic stock of the colony.

We are ants, sniffing out the trail of opportunity, the chemical trail left by ants of yore.

We are ants, never resting, never sleeping, questing continually on our equatorial island for the very edges of time, stretching its form to the limits of regularity, building to the very edge of space.

And when we have flown beyond our inevitable tower, a satellite fixing its gaze upon the pinpoint of our origin, may we look back and gasp, and see on the swarming dot of our land the heaving mass of ants, ants, ants.

-Q&A

MB: I love bugs. You like bugs?

JH: I like bugs, obviously, as a departure point for writing. They are so other that they are often the inspiration for science fiction aliens. And the whole superorganism thing just freaks Western individualists out. Which is kind of fun. I think Westerners think that Asian people may have some kind of hive mind that they don’t, and that scares them. By the way, naked molerats are also part of a superorganism but they are not bugs.And as for the other kind of bug, their existence feeds my paranoia. I don’t like the fact that I may be bugged. Of course I have already given away all my information in exchange for free services anyway. But bugging is not cool.

MB: With ants you’re using a series of devices to look back at Singapore. Where did you originally write Ants? (Was being wherever you were important?) 

JH: I wrote Ants in two and a half intense bouts of writing while I was back in Singapore for a few days this month. It was very important that I was in Singapore when I wrote it because being physically there prompted me to write it: it stemmed from my observation that wherever you go in Singapore there are ants. This is a real thing. But it is not a thing that you would observe if you were a Singaporean living in Singapore all along, because to you that would just be normal. But as an overseas Singaporean returning to my country I saw it as odd and different. That was the point of departure for me. And of course the whole piece is really about Singapore, although I’m sure anyone in a modern metropolis would also find it resonating.

It is a celebration and condemnation of Singapore in the same breath. Being on home soil gave me this vibration, this energy, this sense of connecting with the place’s spirit, which is a restless, heaving thing, constantly in the middle of remaking and also constantly, physically, overturning and rotting.

Because in the tropics everything is always in imminent danger of collapse from termites and rot, and your neighbours are always renovating. The drilling never stops.

MB: Would you prefer to be at/inside of a given location while writing about it, or is the distance productive?’

JH: You know, the last time I was living in Singapore, and was thinking of leaving again, a friend who is also a writer said, “Just do it. Sometimes you have to leave Singapore to write about it”, and I think he was right.

Sometimes when you are in the middle of a place it doesn’t seem strange enough to you to spark an occasion to write about it. It’s just what’s normal. It’s just like being a writer in China makes people think you’re writing about China, but really I don’t think I’m writing that much about China. Of course the details of living in China seep into my writing, for example slipping in state-owned enterprises into scifi stories about morality-regulating cute animal companions, but it’s harder for me to get the big picture about the country when I’m actually in it.

I think writers, like historians, need a certain distance before they can write about something. But on the other hand sometimes the immediacy of the place impresses itself upon you when you are in it, so you channel the spirit of the place, which is what happened with the writing of Ants.

Maybe that’s the ideal – to have been away from the place for a while, and then suddenly intrude upon it, so it both impresses you with its newness and its familiarity.

This is especially so for Singapore for me though, because I have an ongoing lovelorn quarrel with the place. 

MB: At first I thought this ant business was just about decay and the omnipresence of death, but then you get the idea that the ants are a constant, which makes me think there’s something that’s outside the reach of decay? (Then, later, the ants appear to be standing in for humans. Any comment on mixing metaphors?) 

JH: It is a cliche, but the constant is change. One thing giving way to another. And the inescapability of the ants. The ants are change. And death is the ultimate change. What endures is change.The ants were always a metaphor, it’s just that the vision of the piece telescopes from the individual’s point of view to the satellite’s point of view, and then what you see the humans as ant-like, and then finally the island itself is an ant.

It is not so much a mixed metaphor as an extended one, like a conceit. 

MB: I saw you post the entirety of this text on Facebook. What’s that about? (Are you excited about the potential for direct sharing or is the context in which a work appears just generally not that important? Or is Facebook the perfect context for this work?)

JH: Actually, because I haven’t really been using Facebook for the years I’ve been in China, posting writing on Facebook is kind of a losing proposition for me because the Facebook algorithm has pushed my posts far, far down the pipeline on any of my friends’ feeds.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I get a measly handful of likes. It’s really sad. I don’t think it’s much of a statement for me to post my writing on Facebook because the moment I’ve done it, I’m immediately incredibly insecure that nobody is going to like it, and then I’m stuck in a horrible feedback loop where I keep checking Facebook to see if anyone’s liked it, and if they haven’t, I’m like oh no! I’m a failure.

So yeah. It’s not like I have a comprehensive social media strategy or anything. 

But there ARE pieces that should be perfect Facebook poems, like my poem “Things Facebook thinks I’m interested in”, but I haven’t, ironically, posted that on Facebook.

I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. On the one hand, Facebook listed “Communist Party of China” and “People’s Action Party” as my Lifestyle and culture interests, so obviously they have some kind of oracular insight into my inner soul, on the other, how can I love a site that constantly curates my acquaintances’ professional, artistic and romantic accomplishments to serve up as fodder for my self-loathing on a minute-to-minute basis?

If Facebook parses my poetry accurately for marketing info, and somehow knows that what I need most in my life is Masterclasses by Aaron Sorkin, does it mean it knows me better than my best friend?

Does it mean that Facebook IS my best friend? And should that mean I should post more often? Sometimes life on the other side of the Great Firewall is good.

However, when I do manage to draw some comments my friends always end up on some groan-worthy pun contest, so there are upsides to posting writing on Facebook.

[e.g.

on Ants:

EB: What drugs were you on?

JH: Antasy.

EB: Then you’d love that attraction that used to be on Sentosa. What was it called? Antasy Island?

JH: *groan*

EB: I heard they closed because of some antics.

JH: I guess now it’s an antique.]

Also “Ants” got me some killer recommendations for insecticide, because of course some of my pragmatic Singaporean friends wanted to help me out with my ant problem.

I do have a Wechat channel (plug!) but that’s another story. 

MB: Is there any relationship between your work as a painter and your work as a writer?

JH: Well I did write poems at the places where I painted some of the paintings I’ve made, and it’s interesting to juxtapose the two different types of art produced from the same inspiration.

And then I’ve tried illustrating my own writing, for example I did a sketch of the Turtle Man from my flash fiction The Turtle.

But I would say it is an evolving relationship. One thing that they have in common is that, as you pointed out before, both forms of my art are quite narrative.

That’s why I think of myself sometimes more as an illustrator than as an artist. But I’ve illustrated more of other people’s writing than my own. (See http://www.judithhuang.com/art.html)

MB: You’ve done some translation. Does the act of translation (or the preparation that goes into it) inform your writing?

JH: I translated four books of poetry by Singaporean Cultural Medallion winner Yeng Pway Ngon, which were published by The Literary Centre in Singapore, and more recently I’ve been working on translations of 徐钺 and Xiao Shui.

Translation opens whole new vistas of literature to me as a writer. It is hard work, and a very collaborative process, which makes it quite different from writing your own stuff, but it makes you very aware of word choice and grammar, as well as all the cultural connotations of certain words that may not be translatable.

One of my friends is in the middle of translating “Ants”, and because she’s mainland Chinese and not Singaporean some of the Singaporean terms and contexts needed to be explained to her.

When I had poems translated from English to Chinese there was a similar thing – how do you translate something like “Chinatown”, for example? Chinatowns are known by different kinds of names in Chinese depending on exactly which one you mean – Boston’s Chinatown, Singapore’s Chinatown (Niu Che Shui), New York’s Chinatown. When Felix Wong translated my poem “Chinatown Bus” (which refers to the service between Boston and New York) he chose to translate it as “風X巴士” which was wittier than my original title because one of the Boston Chinatown buses was the Fungwah bus, but then having the Phoenix in there also referred to the chicken feet in the poem, and the X conveys the idea of crossing from one city to another. So translation opens up a lot of space for wit.

MB: I know this is Ants we’re talking about but can you tell me about how Caliban came about? When and how did you decide to write it, how long did it take, etc.?

JH: Caliban came about in one blurt as well, like Ants, with perhaps one or two stanzas composed later in the same vein. Probably one and a half blurts. So it maybe took about 30 minutes, and then lots of tinkering afterwards. I wrote it on a plane, between Boston and London, and suddenly this Shakespearean iambic pentameter epic as you say, fanfiction just came tumbling out.

I had been reading a lot of Shakespeare that semester, and my favourite play is the Tempest, with its bitter warped magical beneficent hallucination of colonialism, and I had also been trying to write a series of poems about sidelined characters in canonical works, just imagining their interiority, but things really coalesced with this one – all that postcolonial theory, just the experience of being about to land on the metropole as someone from a former British colony, thinking what if Caliban were uber literate and the empire writes back.

I wanted to address the continued legacy of white-worship and adulation you still see in former colonies, which you see here in China, which was not a colony (except Hong Kong and parts of Shanghai), how we are still very much not postcolonial in our minds.

As an interesting addendum, Caliban was heavily plagiarized by another poet to describe the experience of Vietnamese boat people, which I think is kind of a strange alternate universe life the poem took on.

And as an additional addendum, I read Caliban out loud to my Nigerian-American friend while I was in Nigeria and felt thoroughly ashamed of appropriating the language of darkness and blackness while I was “white” there. He didn’t feel that way but I did while reading it out. Which just goes to show how the text shifts according to context.

MB: You frequently read your work aloud in Beijing. Does that inform your process, influence your work at all? (How?)

JH: Yes. I think Beijing, and particularly Spittoon, which Matt does such a great job of organizing, is kind of a safe space for me. I feel that the atmosphere is friendly and experimental enough for me to try out things, even raw things, things which are not completely formed. I first started out reading old work that I was very confident about, but now I’ve been testing out new things, and having a space to read it aloud gives me insight into the work and how it can be improved. I also get feedback from some of the writers who have become my friends, and I think we have a bit of a community going which is thrilling.

MB: What are you working on now?

JH: I am working on, or probably more accurately, sitting on a poetry manuscript. I am also working on a science fiction short story, flash fiction, creative non-fiction and trying to sell postcards of my paintings – which I will be selling at Loreli’s Art Market, btw, as well as produce more paintings. I’m on a roll!

linguistics, CoDE, SUN TZU’S ART OF WAR in SFF TRANSLATION

Man, I am having SO MUCH FUN reading/interpreting Ti Sha’s “Final Test”, a short story first posted on a Wechat channel in China which I’m translating for FutureSF Magazine’s upcoming issue! The story is a brilliant take on a Turing test – except that the Turing test is set presumably by an AI society for an AI as a kind of classic Chinese graduation exam to get to the “next level”. The AI must prove that it has free will before it obtains citizenship, and its test takes place in a VR setting. Will he pass?

I am kind of a sucker for exam stories, because my first published fiction short story, which is on QLRS, is about taking a final exam, an oral exam, in Singapore. There may be a genre of just “exam literature” in Chinese, I wouldn’t be surprised, since it’s such a huge part of the culture, from imperial exams to the present day gaokao. There is just something about the rush of solving problems in a real time crunch scenario… helps that I was good at them.

But anyway, Ti Sha’s story is both funny, poignant, frightening, prophetic and deeply disturbing. I am going to run rings around the translation and add my own flair to the English version by trying to use a combination of typography, linguistic maneuvering, puns and maybe sneak in a little Singlish even, in order to capture the beauty of the original with the Chinese characters, with reference to Orwell’s wonderful analysis of doublethink/using language as tools for thought control in 1984.

Actually, translating this piece gave me a new appreciation for my second language, Mandarin, because of its beauty and ambiguity. When you have so many components, from

radical > character > word > wordphrase > phrase > idiom > slogan > >>>

can you really censor thought? There are so many layers of ambiguity, and so many layers of reality in this story, and I think that is the beauty of it. It really makes you think!

That’s my thought for tonight while I’m at the 50% point. Hope that’s tantalizing enough for you to check it out when it comes out in Future SF!

Thank you Ti Sha for writing such an amazing story.

I’ll be Guest of Honor for Flights of Foundry 2021!

Dream Foundry’s Flights of Foundry Con 2020 was really when I found my people – it was my first ever SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) Convention and I attended as a panelist. It was a blast! I think I’m actually rather fortunate to have been initiated into cons through the Covid-19 virtual con scene. It’s actually perfect for me since I get to sit in my nice safe house by myself and entertain people from my room. I love traveling, but huge groups of people and the stress of going to a hotel in a strange city seems rather overwhelming, not to mention potentially unsafe sometimes, and I also just don’t have the funds to travel for the sake of a convention alone.

I got so much out of the con – I met other fellow nerds and fans, I got to share my book and the other work I was doing, like the short stories and my exhibition piece in the Singapore ArtScience museum, and I learned about filk!

So it is my great pleasure to announce I will be Guest of Honor at the second ever FoF Con – 2021! I’ll be translation GOH, and I hope to expand the idea of translation to beyond language-to-language through some activities, workshops and panels as well as a talk. Hope to see you there! Get involved with Dream Foundry here.

Out Now! Roesin by Wu Guan at Future SF in my translation

I’m really thrilled to announce that the short story Roesin by Chinese scifi author Wu Guan is now up at Future Science Fiction here.

This was one of the more challenging stories I’ve ever translated because of the linguistic play the author made with radicals. Wu Guan’s original made use of the metal radical “jin,” throughout the text, substituting it for the human radical “ren” wherever it appeared and referred to machines in pronouns, nouns, tenses and verbs in order to reflect linguistic change in a post-human machine society. Radicals are components of Chinese characters that help indicate the meaning of the character or its pronunciation. The characters he used with the “jin” radical are largely archaic and disused characters, some of which were invented by one particular Ming dynasty emperor for his family members. I endeavored to reflect this in English by inventing a set of pronouns for the machines and appending –ron (short for iron) to several nouns.

I was also working in close consultation with Wu Guan for this piece, and in the original, the name of the protagonist and his human collaborator are identical. They are “松香“, which means Resin/Rosin in Chinese. Wu Guan suggested that since “Resin” can be either natural or synthetic, while “Rosin” can only be organic, we name the machine Resin while the human would be Rosin, and I suggested letting them fuse into “Rœsin” by the story’s end. An example of enhancement through translation!

Otherwise, this story reminded me a lot of Alastair Reynold’s Zima Blue, one of the first short stories I discussed with the science fiction group that met in Beijing while I was living there. So it’s kind of a nice circle for me to have translated it for a Western magazine. I hope you enjoy!

Forthcoming Translations: The Way Spring Arrives and Rœsin by Wu Guan

I’m really excited to announce that I am one of the translators in the upcoming Tor anthology of Chinese science fiction by women and nonbinary authors, The Way Spring Arrives. I translated a beautiful story by Chi Hui called The Corpse-Carrying Woman. The anthology features all female and nonbinary creators, translators and editors and will be a first for the burgeoning field of Chinese scifi in translation. You can read more about it here. Expected in 2021.

I have also translated Wu Guan’s (long) short story Rosin which will be coming out in the special East Asian focused edition of Future Science Fiction Digest, one of the premier markets for SSF, coming out in December.

So look out for these! I would love to translate more Chinese language SF, so if you have a project in mind, do drop me a line.

On the Other Side: poem for circuit breaker in Straits Times

I was commissioned by the Straits Times and Singapore’s National Arts Council to write a poem, “On the other side”  about the pandemic and what’s been going on. My piece came out today here 

It is also narrated as part of the “When all this is over” podcast also by Straits Times here alongside other writers’ takes on the pandemic.

 

2219: How the Lion brought down the City

 

 2219

How the Lion brought down the City

Judith Huang

 

Shou Hui drew the trailing sleeves of his daopao up as his ship glided to the dock, so he could step onto the landing without tripping over the gauzy material.

 

No one was expecting his arrival on the island, and the stars glimmering overhead were silent. All was going according to plan. He had not stepped foot in the Imperial capital for twenty years, and of course everything looked completely different – the giant hovercraft Canopies were larger than ever and encrusted with jewels, and the snaking river now glowed with bioluminescence. At this elevation, he had a satellite’s view of the capital, and though his eyes had not taken in the city for two decades, his surveillance team recorded every minute movement on the island.

 

He had been careful to activate his autonomous ship’s mirrorshields to avoid detection, but still, he had seeded false rumours that he was still at the Swiss chalet, and had even planted a body double as an extra precaution. He knew his aunt tracked his every move, and was extra cautious every time he imbibed any laksa sauce, since the fragrant coconut milk was perfect for masking the Imperial family’s favourite poisons. Although he had not seen the Empress in twenty years, he knew her well. It was not in her interest to have him anywhere near the capital.

 

An enormous hovercraft docked at the next gate, and out spilled a retinue of Nigerians, with geles stiff and shiny with the latest technofabrics that incorporated ruby dust, a couple of silver hijabs and a dizzying array of hairstyles. It was clearly a diplomatic mission, as the gold sculptures borne by the men were of exceptional quality, and the Mandarin tripping off the tongues of the women was mellifluous and precise. Bringing up the rear of the contingent were four men bearing a beautiful bronze leopard from the kingdom of Benin, with an intricate pattern of spots all over its body.

 

Shou Hui approached one of the women in the retinue. She was wearing a stunning gele pleated to look like a setting sun, with a matching dress. Silver pearls were draped around her neck, clearly iridium, or perhaps one of the newer alloys her country had developed.

 

“Excuse me,” said Shou Hui in passable Yoruba. “Are you part of the delegation to see the Empress?”

 

She looked Shou Hui up and down. His topknot was dishevelled and his cloth shoes worn, but what interested her most was the tiny piece of jade that hung from his belt with a tassle designed, she knew, to hide a miniscule microphone.

 

The jade was lustrous and pale, mutton fat nephrite that hadn’t been mined in five centuries, and it had clearly never touched Burmese soil. It was carved into a tiny dragon.

 

“If you are who I think you are, then you already know the answer to that question,” she said in the plummy tones of the deposed British aristocracy. Shou Hui swept the piece of jade beneath his robes. He had been careless.

 

“Not everything is as it seems,” said Shou Hui, still in Yoruba. “You have come for the G8 summit, yes? But let me tell you – there will only be six at the table, and even if you are granted an audience with the Empress, that may mean nothing in six months.”

 

The woman tilted her head and folded her arms across her chest. Her retinue was already moving towards the gates where imperial diplomats received them.

 

“Ile oba t’o jo, ewa lo busi,” said Shou Hui in a low whisper. When a king’s palace burns down, the palace rebuilt is more beautiful.

 

The woman looked him straight in the eye, then held out her hand.

 

“My name is Kehinde,” she said.

 

Shou Hui bowed slightly as he shook her hand. “Your elder twin. Brother or sister?”

 

“Sister. And two younger brothers. But the last one is no more.”

 

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Shou Hui. “I am the firstborn myself and I know how difficult it is to lose a younger sibling. My name is Shou Hui. I have not been back to the island for twenty years, until tonight.”

 

“You must be hungry for some laksa, then,” laughed Kehinde.

 

“You have no idea. I don’t know why, but the Singaporean diplomatic restaurants in Boston are pretty rubbish.” He was relieved that they had switched back to English – he had pretty much exhausted his Yoruba by this point.

 

“Well, if you haven’t had dinner, I know a place near the Nigerian High Commission that does a decent laksa,” said Kehinde.

 

“Paiseh,” said Shou Hui. “I should be recommending laksa places to you, not the other way round.”

 

“At all at all- o,” said Kehinde. “If we were in Boston I would grill you about where to find decent pepper soup, but I’m in Singapore so often I’m practically a local. Come lah.”

 

 

 

——

 

 

 

The Empress slept fitfully in the huanghuali bed. The moonlight was spilling over the silk sheets, glaring into her eyes, but she didn’t want to activate the blinds because she wanted a direct view of the port.

 

A dream had woken her – and though it faded upon waking she recalled the shattering of an ancient pot, so the water gushed out in an extravagant spray.

 

The Empire was secure, of course. The Zhenghe missions to the lunar and planetary colonies had been a diplomatic triumph, and the weaponised moondrop demonstration at the August Imperial Day Parade hadn’t hurt. She held all the worlds in the palm of her hand, and Singaporean citizens were so revered everywhere that there was hardly any need to quell unrest in the Voids.

 

24G succession was going smoothly for the rubber stamp parliament, where the commoners aired their petty grievances and drafted petitions. The only real challenge could come from just one place – Boston, that stubborn province that still refused to capitulate to her cinematic empire, where people bizarrely insisted on relying on opera troupes, theatre practitioners and live musicians as their primary source of entertainment.

 

The Empress was painfully aware that her nephew had something to do with this. She deliberately ensured that all the laksa in that provincial backwater was virtually inedible. But this was not enough to flush the exile out.

 

It also had the undesired side-effect of affording fewer chances to do away with him altogether, and unfortunately he was as wiley as the mousedeer his famous ancestor was often likened to.

 

Perhaps the Yoruba girl would finally manage to do him in. But there was a distinct danger that she might turn, too, since Kehinde’s twin sister was a power broker in the People’s Republic of Ethiopia, though she maintained a low profile at the Institute for Political Science at Addis Ababa University, which was a hotbed for resistance to Imperial encroachment on that continent. Although that particular university did also provide the technology for the Zhenghe missions. Such hypocrites, all of them.

 

The Empress was used to being able to control almost every aspect of her subjects’ lives. But there was still the human element. And there was another thing she could not control – Death itself.

 

Her timepiece, embedded in her wrist, with its exquisite mechanical movements tracking the paths of the stars, also measured her remaining heartbeats. Everything had to fall in place in six months. Her grandson, aged just twelve but enhanced with wisdom implants, would ascend the throne. The ballet of diplomatic gifts and tributes would commence. All her trusted Imperial advisors had family members in secret prisons throughout the Empire to keep them in line. Everything was going according to plan. 

 

 

 

“Please excuse me, I need to powder my nose.”

Kehinde slipped off the round wooden stool, leaving Shou Hui with his elbows on the marble table.

Two steaming bowls of laksa arrived, borne by a small boy wearing a white singlet and shorts, a Good Morning towel tossed over his shoulder. Beads of sweat shone on his forehead.

Shou Hui looked at his bowl, and immediately saw there was something wrong. Aside from the two shelled prawns, the half boiled egg and thinly-sliced fish cake, there was a large fishball in the middle of the orange soup.

He took his chopsticks and prodded it, then split it open.

A tiny slip of paper nestled inside. His fingers trembled as he pulled it out.

“Merdeka at midnight. Run!”

Shou Hui consulted his timepiece. It was 20 minutes til midnight.

A low level war had been raging in the Voids for months now, and the bodies were piling up. This was why he had come. This was what he was born to do. He couldn’t just turn around and fly back to Boston now.

Was Kehinde in his aunt’s employ? Was this meant to be a final warning? Where was Kehinde, anyway? It didn’t take that long to powder your nose.

 

 

Puteri Kemala Delima knew that the typhoon was artificial. She was well-versed in the arts of the tempest herself. However, that didn’t prevent her from getting drenched. As she stood at the helm of the ship, she held up the elegant gold crown that had been in her family for time before time. Its seven curved spikes resembled one-eyed fish with delicate floral patterns carved into their flesh. She would need it to challenge the Singapuran upstarts, but the storm was more pressing. Her crew was already panicking, despite being the best mercenaries money could buy in Palembang.

 

With one grand gesture, she let the crown go. It plunged into the ocean, flashing in the lightning before the water swallowed it. Like magic, the sea flattened out. She knew the Empress had designed this trap precisely to make her life more difficult. No matter – her bearing alone was enough to announce she was the rightful ruler. She would fight all the other contenders to the death if she had to.

 

But of course, that would not be necessary.

 

Adebola, or Bola, as she addressed her when they were intimate, had ensured that the uprising would occur at midnight, just as she reached the shores of the Voids. Her twin would ensure that that Li boy would not interfere. The Ethiopian technology in all the Singapuran weaponry would fail when turned upon the people, and all the Imperial subjects would kneel at her feet, for only she would control every device on the island – indeed, every device throughout the Empire.

 

Except for the Empress’ timepiece. That was unhackable, running purely on mechanics first developed by the ancient Swiss. Only the blade of the parang would rob that woman of her life. But if the rumours were true, she was not long for this world, anyway.

 

As for the young crown prince, he was only twelve, and she would adopt him in a gesture of motherly benevolence. Wisdom implants were so easy to hack, and he would be reprogrammed within months, if not days. There was no need for the barbaric methods of these Li’s – hers would be a more enlightened regime.

 

That stupid woman never did understand mythology.

 

 

 

 

 

The House of the Harimans had been silent for generations. But the heart of the forest still beat in the dark. Chairman Hu still sent regular reconnaissance missions to the island capital – tigers were good swimmers, and crossing the Straits was never a problem.

 

The Harimans had withdrawn from the human economy generations ago, but still retained an interest in island politics. Their main concern was the devastating loss of their habitat, which even the Imperial dynasty had come to see as a mistake. 

 

“Go to the princess,” said the Chairman to his youngest son, “and show her your true form at midnight. Swear your alliegance. She will need an army, and ours is not the worst she can find. When she ascends the throne, she will remember us. I will give you the white stone. Do not reveal its true name until she is Queen.”

 

“Our people are the true guardians of the island, although we have been exiled for an age and a half. Without our blessing, none can rule. Without our blessing, regardless of her signet ring or her bloodline, the princess’s Empire will fall.”

 

“The Empress is blind. She thinks the Nigerians are on her side, but the twins’ youngest brother killed himself when the last of our cousins died in the razing of Old Oyo National Park. The beams of its greatest trees hold up the Empress’ own throne. His name was Ogidan, and he was the greatest lion of them all.”

 

“We let the Imperial Family rule for a time because it was necessary. But they have forgotten the true meaning of the island. The exiles must return.”

 

“And what if she tries to kill me?”

 

“Show her the stone. If she is truly who she says, she would never lay a hand on a tiger.”

 

 

 

At the stroke of midnight, the moondrops rolled onto the Padang – sleek lines that gleamed silver in the moonlight.

 

The denizens of the Voids froze, their chants fading to silence.

 

A woman, her hair wet from the rain, placed one golden slipper onto the land.

 

A tiger flashed through the air like lightning.

 

A man in daopao bowed before bringing his lips to her hand.

 

In the Istana, a heart stopped, as a timepiece ticked down the nameless stars.

 

This story is part of the 2219: Futures Imagined exhibition at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore, imagining Singapore and the world 200 years in the future. Copies of the story published by Mathpaperpress are available at the exhibition, and a portion of the story has also been engraved in acrylic as an exhibit as part of the “Library of Necessary Books” portion of the exhibition.

 

2219 exhibition at ArtScience Museum extended

So my short story, 2219: How the Lion brought down the City, is part of the really cool 2219: Futures Imagined exhibition currently on at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore. However, thanks (no thanks) to COVID-19, the exhibition is currently suspended. No worries though, here are some photos, and I’ll be releasing the short story on the site for people to enjoy – at least until we’re able to get to museums again!