Isham Cook's Blog: Isham Cook, page 5
November 1, 2017
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 17: Xinluoma
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“Poxie! Chou biaozi!” cursed the naked man as he punched and kicked the prostitute. “Ni ge jianbi! Ni die wo yijing ba ni bi cao lan le!”
“Bie da wo le!” she begged him.
Malmquist was just as startled by his sudden appearance in the attic brothel as they were, but he recognized the man and the man him. Dispensing with formalties, he knocked the wind out of the man with his fist, put his head in an armlock and bashed his face against the wall until he grew limp.
“Shenme yisi?” said the startled proprietor as Malmquist dashed down the ladder and out of the eatery.
The prostitute appeared on the steps to announce while pointing at Malmquist, “Nage nanren feichang ouda keren le. Kuailai ba!”
He had already disappeared down the lanes across the Palatine in the direction of the Circus Maximus.
At Zhang’s domus, he knocked on the door and was let in. Zhang stepped backward. Lounging in the atrium were three Chinese police officers. They too were surprised to see Malmqist.
“Jiu shi ta ma?” one asked Zhang.
“Shi de.” To Malmquist she said, “You came back.”
“Yes, I’m back. They’re here for me?”
She nodded.
The officers exchanged more words with Zhang in Mandarin. They seemed in no hurry, regarding Malmquist with contemplative expressions.
“They want to know about the poison you put in big bath,” Zhang said to him.
“You mean the drug? It’s not poison. It’s a hallucinogen. It bends your mind but is physically harmless. It got into my tunic in Ancient Rome and it was an accident.”
“They say you no cooperate, you can be executed.”
“How can I cooperate?”
“They want more.”
“More what?”
“The drug.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. But you get more drug, you not executed. How you can get more?”
“It’s in the tunic I gave to Delilah, and she’s back in the US.”
“Yeah, how you know that?”
“They told me. I told you I’m from there.”
“Where you get the drug before you put in tunic? You got from there?”
“It’s from here.” He pointed to Zhang’s groin.
“What? Why you talk nonsense?”
“That’s where the drug comes from.”
“Ta shuo shenme?” another officer asked.
“Wo ye bu zhidao. No time for nonsense,” she reiterated to Malmquist.
“Let me try, okay? I can’t promise it will work. And if it doesn’t work, I have to go back to ancient Rome to try to get it.”
“Old Rome? No more old Rome. You crazy? Ta shuo ta dei qu guluoma zhaodao dupin.”
“Shenjingbing,” said the third officer scornfully.
“You say drug in my pussy, then you say in old Rome. What’s the matter with you? You took the drug now?”
“If it doesn’t work with either of you, I will need a woman in Ancient Rome, maybe the same woman I originally got it from there. Let’s try first with Giulia.”
He removed his message tunic and lay it on the floor and motioned her to the couch. Putting his arm around her, he said, “Giulia, do you want to go back to your origin, your roots?”
“Che cosa?”
“Real Rome. Roma.”
“She go with you to old Rome?” said Zhang.
“We’ll bring back some Roman coins as proof.”
He lifted up her tunic over her hips, shifted her thigh onto his lap and began tugging at her pubic hair and teasing her labia.
“Ah? Cosa fai? Non capisco,” she protested.
Malmquist paused to mime his intended actions. He drew his hand from her groin over to the tunic on the floor as if drawing something out of her. With his fingertips he wrote the word “Roma” just over the tunic without touching it. Standing up he warned her, “Don’t breathe in the fumes.”
“Cosa?” said Giulia.
He moved his hand upward from the tunic toward his nose, shaking his head with a “No!”
“Ta juede wode weidao buhao, wo hui dedao nage changpao zang?” she asked Zhang.
“She think you criticize her body smell.”
“No, not at all. Explain to her the tunic can release the drug if I write on it with her pussy juice. But it’s very important not to breathe in the fumes or the drug will get into her brain.”
Zhang relayed this to Giulia, who complained, “Wo buneng fangsong.” Glancing at the officers she then said to Malmquist, “Non riesco a rilassarmi.”
He ran his nose over her hair, arms, breasts, belly, and pussy with devotion, inhaling her smell, as he worked his fingers into her vagina. She rocked her hips, slowly at first, her face scrunched in concentration. Before long she suddenly grew very wet. Malmquist took his dripping fingers and wrote on the tunic.
But there was no smoke. No chemical reaction.
“Non riesco ancora a capire cosa diavolo sta succedendo,” she said blankly.
“Well, time for Plan B.” He grabbed the tunic off the floor and put it on over his travel tunic. From his pocket he handed Giulia the other travel tunic. “Take yours off and just wear this one. I want to make sure it works.”
As she pulled her tunic off her upper body her breasts flopped out. There was no display of self-consciousness, yet she answered the officers’ gaze with a noble posture, as if they could hardly boast anything better.
“Now write the word ‘Roma’ here,” he said, once she had the travel tunic on.
As she wrote on Malmquist’s chest he held her other hand. They vanished.
“Ta yiqian zuoguo,” Zhang told the stunned police officers.
There was a knock at the front door. Zhang went to open it. “Dilaila! Why you come back?”
“Hi, Ms. Zhang. Can we come in?”
“And who is this? Ni shi nawei a?” Zhang said to the Chinese woman accompanying Delilah.
“Gwai sing aa?” she said to Zhang.
“Yueyu a! Xianggangren?”
“Nei hai bindou lei gaa?”
“She speaks Yueyu, you know?” Zhang said to Delilah. “Hong Kong Chinese. I only understand little.”
“You can’t understand each other?”
“We speak correct Chinese here, Putonghua. She speaks dialect, almost different language. Who is she?”
“Um, she’s a police officer.”
Wingyee entered the domus and starting looking around.
“Nihao,” the officers addressed her.
“Neihou,” she replied.
Zhang escorted Delilah by the arm over to the officers and said, “Ta shi wode meiguo pengyou.” Pointing to Wingyee she added, “Ta shuo ta shi jingcha.”
The officers burst out laughing. “Ta shi ge jingcha?” one said, his jaw agape.
Wingyee approached the officers with a steely gaze. “Ngo jan cyunjyut sihung dou zeleoi cung 2115 nin dik sihau.”
“Shenfende zhengming?” one of them asked.
“Zingming?” She took off her tunic. She was naked underneath except for double-harness shoulder holsters, one with a Bowie knife and the other with a sleek unidentifiable gun. The holsters were joined in front by a belt under her breasts, in the center of which a badge with her photo and identification in Chinese characters was affixed.
“Wasai!” the officers said, as they came up to examine her identification. “Shi 2115 nian! Zenme keneng? Ni jiao Yuan Yongyi shi ba?” they asked her, reading out her name.
“Yuen Wingyee.”
One of the cops stuck out his hand toward Wingyee’s gun, requesting it. She avoided him and walked over to the veranda facing the Circus Maximus, presently resounding with a chariot race. Pointing at the race she asked, “Gogo hai me?”
“Xiaojie,” said the cop, gesturing again at her gun, “Gei wo qiang.”
“Bit haaujim ngo,” she responded sternly.
“Ni shuo shenme?” he asked, not comprehending.
She wrote out the words she had just spoken in the air.
“A, mingbaile. Bie kaoyan ta,” the cop said with a smirk, repeating Wingyee’s remark in Mandarin to his partner.
“What’s going on?” asked Delilah.
“She draw the characters with her finger, make them understand. Chinese characters same for all Chinese people,” said Zhang.
“What are they talking about?”
The cops got up and approached Wingyee. Thereupon she aimed her gun at the Circus Maximus, lowered it and placed it back in her holster. The crowd’s roar suddenly hushed. All except Wingyee looked out the veranda.
“Oh, my god!” exclaimed Zhang. “Fangjianbei bei cuihuile. Qiao, shangban bufen yijing meile, quandou sui bei cheng zhale.”
“What happened?” said Delilah.
“The tower—what you call fangjianbei?—is destroyed. See, in the center, like the same tall tower at the end.”
“You mean that obelisk?”
The chariots were unaffected and kept their course, but there was commotion around the collapsed obelisk. The cop took advantage of the moment to make a move on Wingyee’s gun. To get at it he grabbed her breast, which was draped over the gun. He found himself flipped upside down, his back slammed against the marble floor and her knife against his throat. He stretched out his arms in surrender. She dropped the rest of him on the floor, aimed the gun at the Circus again and back at the cops. “Zezi coeng deoi zezo taap zouliu neje, to wui deoi neimun!”
“Her gun destroyed that obelisk? No way,” said Delilah.
“Buhui ba!” Zhang said to Wingyee. “Ni qiangle qiang ma?”
“Gikgwong coeng makmakdeng jikgik.”
“Jiguang qiang ya! How do you call, electric gun?”
“A laser gun? But there was no beam.”
“She fired it. No sound gun. You can’t see or hear.” Then turning to everyone Zhang clapped, “Hao ba! Women dou shi pengyou. Wo qing dajia yiqi chifan. We will have a meal together now.”
Everyone sat down on the Roman-style sofas, Wingyee included, her tunic now back in place, while the servants got to work preparing the meal. The cop who had made contact with the floor was rubbing his shoulder in discomfort.
“Nei mouje me?” Wingyee asked him.
Zhang ordered a female slave to massage the cop. The slave straddled his lap and pulled off her tunic. “Bu yongle ba,” he said, dismissing her. He said to Wingyee, “Ni weishenme lai zheli?”
“Ng hiu,” she said, uncomprehending.
“He wants to know where she come from. Where you find her? Why you bring her here?” Zhang asked Delilah.
“It’s a missing person case, and the suspect was last seen here.”
“Who is missing person?”
“Me.”
“You? What you mean, you?”
“They’re looking for me when I was 72 years old.”
“What kind of nonsense you talking? You just like Jiefu. Always talk nonsense.”
“You saw her police identification. We just came from the year 2115. I was 72 then. I mean I will be 72 then.”
“So now you should be—17. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is they think I got lost in the past—now, that is. We’re trying to find me here when I was 72.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t either, frankly.”
“Who is suspect?”
“Jeff. Jeff Malmquist.”
“Jiefu? I know he suspect. That’s why they are here,” Zhang said, pointing to the cops.
“I don’t mean that case. He’s a suspect in my case. Even if we can’t find me, we can question him when we get back to New Gary.”
“He’s in US? No. He just here but he left with Zhuliya. They went to old Rome.”
“Ancient Rome? No, he just came from there. He brought a Roman woman named Attica with him to New Gary. It was his idea to send me to Chicago in the future. But I didn’t know he was a suspect in my disappearance until Wingyee told me. So we came here first to see if I’m here.”
“No old lady like you here. Maybe you go check old Rome too.”
*
“Non capisco cosa sia successo,” said Giulia as she mashed the warm loaf of bread in her mouth while staring wide-eyed at Malmquist. “Cosa sta succedendo!”
“Relax. We’re in the past, Giulia. Roma. Your roots.”
“Delizioso,” she said to the baker.
“Scilicet,” he smiled. “Celebre sumus.”
“Che cosa?”
“In pistrino eum ventus imperatoris.”
“Dell’imperatore? Non capisco.”
“Unde venistis? Daciam?”
“Non capisco.”
“Panis est bonum?”
“Il pane è buono? Molto bene!”
“You can understand each other?” asked Malmquist.
Syria, who had just approached from across the street, landed Malmquist a mild smack on the face. “Redisti!” she said, while staring at Giulia. “Oramus, si forte non molestum est, demonstres ubi fuerint tuae tenebrae. Argi nempe soles subire Letum? Et ea? Unde nanciscere haec puella pulchra?”
“This is Giulia. She’s visiting from China, but she’s actually from Italy. From here. Rome. She knows her way around.”
“Julia. Veni, Julia.” Syria led Giulia and Malmquist into the brothel.
“Wait, I didn’t bring her here to work for you.”
Syria lifted Giulia’s tunic and cast scintillating eyes over what she saw. “Pulcherrimae papillae quidem,” she said, tweaking a nipple and stroking her hair. “Facies et ingenue.”
“È un bordello? No, non lavoro come prostituta,” retorted Giulia.
“Unde venisti, carissima?”
“Vengo? Vengo dal futuro.”
“She comes from the future, like me,” said Malmquist, pointing at Syria’s sundial watch.
“Futura? Postera?”
“Yeah.”
“Vobis ab posteris? Incredibili.”
“Et est etiam ab extremis terræ?” said Attica, joining them.
“Sì, veniamo dalle estremità della terra – dalla Cina.”
“Volo ire est.”
“Hey, why don’t you two guys switch? Giulia, you stay here and you can explore the real Rome, and I can take Attica to Chinese Rome, which she’ll find just as fascinating. No, wait. We’ll have to take a detour first.” Turning to Syria, he said, “I promise I’ll show Attica Chinese Rome and eventually get her back here safe and sound. You take care of Giulia in the meantime. Be nice to her.”
“Quid dicis? Non capio.”
“Anche io non capisco,” said Giulia, also at a loss.
“Trust me. Giulia, give Attica your tunic and put on her body necklace. Oh, wait. I almost forgot. We need to try the drug thing.”
“Voglio ancora un po ‘di questo pane,” said Giulia.
“What?”
“Questo pane.”
“Panem. Et magis volt panem,” chimed in Attica.
“Oh, you want more of this bread. I don’t have any Roman coins with me now,” said Malmquist, feeling in his tunic pockets. “Must have lost them.”
“Posso usare questo denaro?” asked Giulia, producing a coin of Chinese Rome.
“Quid est quod pecuniam? Non est denarius,” said Syria, fingering the coin. “Sestertius?”
“Hic nummus est plane rotundus. Est magicus!” said Attica. “Volo ire ad hoc dicitur quod terra ‘Futurum.’”
“The coin is newly minted. See the year 2060? Oh, what would that be in Roman numerals?…MMLX? Yeah, that’s it.” Malmquist wrote out the numerals with the dust on the floor and repeated to Syria and Attica: “Me. Her. A.D. MMLX. I remember that much Latin at least. You understand A.D., Anno Domini?”
“Anno domini?” said Syria.
“Vestri imperator est hoc?”
“Non l’anno dell’Imperatore, ma l’anno di Dio,” Giulia clarified to them.
“Vestri imperator deo est?”
“No. Il nostro imperatore non è un dio.”
“Ah! Intelligo,” exclaimed Attica. “Vestri imperator magus est. Magus potest facere nisi ex nummo plane rotundum.”
“They’re talking about magic?” asked Malmquist.
“Pensa che il nostro imperatore sia un mago perché solo un mago potrebbe rendere questa moneta perfettamente rotunda,” Giulia explained, though to little avail.
Attica ran across to the bakery and back with another loaf of bread for Giulia. Malmquist then got Attica to lie back on the bed and placed his outer tunic between her legs. He instructed Giulia to stimulate her. As both were already experienced at this, Attica quickly came and squirted onto the tunic. The fabric smoked and crackled. “Great, it works. Stand back.”
He grabbed the tunic and patted it on the floor upside down to stop the burning, covering his mouth to avoid the fumes, and then fanned it in the air outside before putting it back on. Giulia was too curious about her new environment to put up any protest as Attica guided the tangle of gold chains around her limbs like some exquisite shackles. As soon as Attica had worked over her hefty hips Giulia’s tunic, Malmquist grabbed her hand, wrote the words “New Gary” on his own tunic, and they were gone.
* * *
Previous chapter: Ch. 16: Chicago
Next chapter: Ch. 18: Zigaago (upcoming)
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
[image error]Forthcoming Fall 2017:
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel
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Filed under: Fiction Tagged: China fiction, Dystopian satire
October 30, 2017
Foreign devils on the loose in China: A review
One million foreigners currently reside in China as of 2017, an astonishing tenfold rise since 2010. With this increase, the number of expat books set in China has taken off as well. I imagine a decade down the line we will have a veritable literature on our hands. Yet the Great China Expat Novel (or Memoir) is not an easy feat to pull off.
One reason for the relatively rare occurrence of memorable expat books, literary talent aside, is a simple insight lacking among the majority attempting the task: the perils of solipsism. Your run-of-the-mill expat tale revolves largely around the narrator’s own world, often with precious little to say about his or her interactions with the Chinese. The particular balance struck between the self and the other may vary; the mistake is to draw no larger symbolic significance from the lessons learned. The clash of cultures – East and West, Old World and New – remains ever-present at street level in China. This remains a country that has been slow to adopt some of the more internationalized notions of freedom and lifestyle taken for granted in say, Japan, Korea and Thailand. The best expat authors intuitively grasp the larger significance of this in their storytelling. They capture and dramatize China’s fraught relationship with the West in microcosm, down to the most personal interactions and conflicts, and in doing so succeed in transforming the casual and the banal into the universal.
In the following, I review four previously published, noteworthy China expat books (three memoirs and one novel), before examining a more recent addition to the literature to see how it measures up.
Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Earnshaw Books, 2007; originally published in 1940) is from another era and quite different from the other publications to be discussed, which are all from the twenty-first century. I include it for historical contrast. We have a paradox of a book here, a compelling account of China with virtually nothing to tell us about actual life in China or the Chinese. How does Crow, the famous Shanghai newspaper editor and American China hand of twenty-five years, pull it off? We are given the bigger historical picture, a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The narrative then circles inward to give us a close-up view of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the twentieth century – right up to the day the author is forced out of the country during the Japanese invasion in 1937. It is a fine historical introduction written by the sure hand and balanced objectivity of an experienced journalist.
But we soon realize that despite being less than a hundred years ago we are encountering an era as strange as that of Marco Polo’s, or the US antebellum south, or the world of “gay cocktail parties” penned by Crow’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, when “gay” had a different meaning from what it does today. Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age. This was a time after all when it was still fashionable to be racist. It is a China peopled by expat bachelors, bored bridge-playing wives of the expat married, their China “boy” servants, amahs and anonymous kitchen hands. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor any even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one “Ching,” a servant of Crow’s hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy Chinese occupy the narrative background as ciphers, so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus.
We do note changes in prejudices and attitudes. Before the First World War, when Shanghai was divided into the French, British and American concessions and effectively walled off from the rest of the city, with one park reputed to have a sign forbidding entrance to “Dogs and Chinese” (or so the rumor goes; Crow himself disbelieves it but it dies hard for the simple reason that such a sign was entirely plausible at the time). It would never have occurred to anyone on either side to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities. This was not terribly surprising, considering the “very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people.” After the war and start of the Republic, things began to relax and there was more mutual curiosity and gesturing across the cultural divide. But the Chinese remained as unknowable as ever.
Even in its heyday of excitement and notoriety, gay Shanghai, the Paris of the East, seemingly had very little to do with China. The foreign community was too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and drinking and yachting clubs to be much bothered with anything else. Crow spends considerable space detailing the petty controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs – the restrictions on proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks. And yet it is these particulars that are oddly fascinating in their very remoteness to our own experience in the present-day, more internationalized China, where interaction of foreigners and locals at Starbucks or online and the burgeoning cohabitation and intermarriage is widespread.
Crow succeeds with his knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn’t reflect too well on the author himself. He relates without irony being once picked up by a taxi driver whom he failed to recognize he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years! Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep personal relations impersonal, such as between this American bachelor and his servant: “Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out.”
Walls remain in the entrenched attitudes among many Chinese and foreigners even today: the parents who forbid their daughter to marry a foreigner, locals who are easily whipped up into anti-foreigner nationalist frenzy, foreign expats who after many years in the country can’t count to ten in Chinese. One quote from the book could be lifted out and inserted into any current Western account of China, as we have all known expats like this: “The foreigner was rarely tempted to try Chinese food and many of them lived a lifetime in China without every tasting roast duck or sweet-and-sour pork.” What distinguishes Crow’s narrative from the more amateurish or narcissistic China expat bar-scene ramblings that crop up in print today are precisely such telling, ironic, anguished observations of the East-West divide playing out at the personal level.
[image error]It doesn’t seem like all that long ago, but China in the 1980s was only just creaking open its doors to foreign travelers for the first time since Carl Crow’s era – initially to package tours and later in the decade to individuals. But if the Government was ready to receive foreigners and their hard currency and quickly slapped together expensive hotels for this purpose (where backpackers on a shoestring often had no choice but to room), most of the rest of the country was not. It was a forbidding place, necessarily so, with the largest population in the world living in a bleak wartime-style economy resultant upon decades of the catastrophic policies of a lunatic leader. To handle so many people under such extreme conditions, such a society was structured very differently from what we are accustomed to, with drastically curtailed lifestyle choices (the very term “lifestyle” would have been incomprehensible to the Chinese then). I sampled the tail end of this era on my first visit to the country in 1990 for an exhausting two-week, six-city tour. The place was fascinating in its utter strangeness. China is a much more foreigner-friendly place these days, to be sure, but it has been a long time in coming.
Enter in 1986, among that first wave of solo foreigners allowed into the country, Jane and Claire, two spoiled young American females fresh out of college, neither previously having set foot outside of the US. They embark on what they planned to be a yearlong worldwide tour, beginning with an indefinite stay on the Chinese Mainland. After a brief stopover in Hong Kong, they last a respectable six weeks before they are spat out, their global romp aborted, after Claire literally goes psychotic and has to be accompanied on the flight home by a registered nurse, as grippingly recounted in Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).
Things get off to a panicky start with a turbulent flight, before even landing in Hong Kong (neither has much flying experience). Things only get worse amidst the squalor of their Chungking Mansion cubbyhole when Jane threatens to head right back home and needs to be slapped into reality by Claire. I worried the author’s histrionics would prevent me from making it past the first ten pages. But it turns out to be a clever foil framing the rest of the narrative, as we discover it’s Claire who has the bigger difficulties adjusting to their shockingly different reality on the Mainland. While the two are shunted around from one mysterious, disorienting location to another by shady locals who may or may not be trying to take advantage of them, dealing with hostile hotel staff with no English ability, unpalatable food and nothing to do, Claire grows increasingly paranoid not just of the Chinese but the CIA, Mossad and other nefarious agents she thinks are out to get her. She stops eating and becomes ill and delusional. By this time we are in the more hospitable surroundings of a Western hippie enclave in the city of Guilin. Just as Claire meets and falls for a hot male traveler from Germany, Claire wades naked into a river in a suicide attempt. The tense final pages of this psychological thriller-cum-memoir have Jane and the German frantically contacting the police to locate Claire. They find her and things are brought to a breathless conclusion.
[image error]For another tumultuous perspective on the 1980s, we have Robert H. Davies’ memoir, Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream Publishing, 2002). Englishman Davies recounts an enviable and exciting time for foreigners in China’s Western Xinjiang Province, when it was still very much China’s Wild West, running bars and tourism ventures and marrying a beautiful Muslim Uighur woman, before he is arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for eight years. These years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade, with all kinds of characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of expats to be made an example of.
The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control – but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace. “Re-education” camps from whatever time period in China, prisons, schools, etc., differ only in the degree to which they seek to erase the personality and substitute sheer mindlessness. There is never any “re-education”; there is simply mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. I’m pessimistic China will ever really open up in any substantive way: the population has been dumbed down to such an extent that I fear it may lack the imaginative capacity to change. However, the fact Davies survived with his mind intact is very reassuring and reason for faith in the creative human spirit. I have met enough wise Chinese as well to know that the system doesn’t crush everyone’s mind and spirit.
Apart from these lessons, I should add that Davies’ account is very well written – particularly the chapters during his prison stay when he applies the same colorful detail to his regimented life in prison as he did to his love-making with Sharapet back in Xinjiang. It is a highly readable if unlikely introduction to Chinese culture and society – from within the belly of the beast. In fact it is probably the single most eye-opening book on China I have ever read.
[image error]Partway into Chris Taylor’s novel Harvest Season (Earnshaw Books, 2010), there’s an unlikely sex scene, so fleeting, awkward and intimate I’m hesitant to describe it except to say that while not a direct cause, it heralds a sequence of events that gradually spin out of control. Matt, the narrator, a British expat living in an idyllic mountainous region of southwest China, is torn between two women, Fei-fei and A-hong, but unable to act decisively with either of them. Likewise the community of hippie expats wile away their days hanging out in Shuangshan, their self-styled Shangri-La, doping themselves up with beer, ganja, acid, ecstasy and anything else they can get their hands on. The direct catalyst that moves events toward the inexorable, Greek tragedy-like conclusion is the arrival of a Western anarcho-hippie contingent from Thailand, aka. the “Family of Light” or “Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes,” extreme lifestyle communalists, dreadlocked vegans who live in tepees, don’t believe in bathing and also don’t know what they’re getting into by setting up shop in China. I myself have attended two Rainbow Gatherings, in Kentucky in ’93 and the French Pyrenees in ’03, enough to know what they’re about and found them likable but a bit too strange for my own comfort. Euro and American local authorities already have to contend with them (I recall the police helicopters hovering over us at the Kentucky gathering); one can imagine the incomprehension of both the authorities and locals in China.
Taylor’s novel breathes with such realism I’m convinced it all really did happen as recounted. I begrudge fiction publishers their standard but nonetheless annoying and disingenuous disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction and any resemblance…”, when it’s plain the only thing that’s been altered is the names of the characters. Which brings up the question, why fiction? What makes it qualify as a novel? The telling, of course: the melding of distinct characters and events into a unity forming a compact little universe and an unforgettable atmosphere that lingers. Taylor’s narrative is laid out in uncomplicated linear format, as if no other narrative style was appropriate for sorting out reality amidst the drug-and-booze haze. The style is clipped and concise, plain but economical (with the occasional tendency to telegraph too much into characters’ thoughts), the characters memorable in their own way. Harvest Season exemplifies why novels do a much better job than nonfiction at conveying the character of the times. It’s not exactly a cross-section of expat life in China but a small slice of some very odd and oddly endearing people.
[image error]The same can be said for the recent novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (Inkshares, 2015) by Quincy Carroll, with which Harvest Season shares a few features: the obscure Chinese locale and gritty backwater atmosphere, eccentric, forlorn Western characters drawn to China as if to their alter ego, and a sequence of unlikely events that bring things to a decisive and, if not quite disastrous, resonant conclusion. With its three central characters, there’s an intimacy to Carroll’s novel that would lend it to a screenplay or to the stage: Daniel, an idealistic loner in his twenties from the US but fully in his element at a rural college in Hunan Province; Bella, one of his students, a goofy, naïve loner in her own right who gravitates to foreign male teachers for companionship; and Thomas, an aging, cynical American with a crippled leg and a dodgy CV, seeking out English teaching jobs wherever he can find schools willing to hire him and who winds up at the same college. Expats who have taught in China have all encountered these three types in one incarnation or another.
The action turns around Thomas and Daniel’s bristling dislike for each other, and Bella’s conflicted and rebuffed attempts to enter their lives. Under friendlier circumstances, had they for instance one of the teepees in Taylor’s Harvest Season to play around in (Daniel builds an Aeolian harp on the rooftop of his campus apartment), the trio might have made for an intriguing hippieish threesome. But they bring out the worst in each other. When Thomas accidentally smashes Bella in the face with a pool cue while drunk in a bar, the delicate balance between the three begins to unravel, with consequences I won’t reveal here. It’s a moving narrative, as Carroll succeeds in limning his central characters with deftly etched realism (drawn I assume from actual people encountered in China). We even feel affection for the thoroughly unlikeable Thomas and somehow grow to care about what happens to him. I hope Carroll can pen a sequel, with the old grouch’s subsequent adventures in Thailand where he winds up at the novel’s end, final resting point of so many aging expats whose will to live remains stubbornly intact.
Also enriching the novel is the strong supporting cast of secondary characters we get only a glimpse of but are curious to know more about. In a lengthy middle chapter, one of the novel’s most successful set pieces, Daniel escapes to the city of Changsha over the Christmas holiday to visit an acquaintance, Neil, a tall heavy-set wannabe businessman from the UK. The haphazard, contingent manner in which these expat types with a more tenuous philosophy of social commitment hook up and interact is beautifully captured, as Neil fails to respond to Daniel’s efforts to reach him by cellphone upon his arrival. Daniel tracks him down near his apartment, only to be dragooned to the private English conversation school where Neil teaches for an impromptu class to fill in for a missing teacher — and to ogle female students of the sort familiar to expats who have taught at such venues: generally in their 20s and 30s and single, their primary goal to land a foreign teacher boyfriend and only secondarily to improve their English. Daniel is hit on by two of them in short order; a “buxom” and “raven-haired” Zenith, and the manager as well, with alluringly unkempt hair, Angela.
Daniel proceeds to Neil’s favorite bar run by an expat friend where a Christmas costume party is in full swing. The owner’s Chinese wife is in a bikini made out of coconut shells and grass and doesn’t speak English. Of course, it’s rarely expected of the expat to speak Chinese, though Daniel is fluent; Thomas’s ability is confined to a few phrases. Daniel gets into a testy exchange, which almost erupts into a fight, with a morose Welshman fond of sarcastically belittling fellow expat teachers (Carroll employs a dialogue style without quotation marks appropriate to the novel’s aesthetic):
Daniel frowned. Do you have some sort of problem with me? The man lit a new cigarette, then ashed it into his mug. What do you do? Wait, let me guess. A teacher? The question was dripping with condescension. As a matter of fact, yes. You have something against teaching? The man shrugged. He picked up an imaginary object and presented it to the table. WATER, he drawled, loudly. Either because he was drunk or trying to act like a fool, he spoke like a moron, distinguishing each syllable. JUICE, he continued. The girls regarded him uncomfortably, staring down into their cups, like tea readers. He pointed to a spot on the table in front of Daniel. APPLE. BANANA. Seriously, he said. The job is an absolute joke.
In a fitting conclusion to the evening’s tawdry events, Neil departs early for his studio apartment with a woman he picked up at the bar and refuses to let Daniel in later because it’s interrupting their sex. Daniel hops in a taxi and gets off on a random street to spend the rest of the night with a prostitute in a hair salon cubbyhole.
We are left with complex, nuanced portraits of the three main characters. Daniel is young, good-looking, enthusiastic about his job, and respectful of his students, his host country and its culture. He also doesn’t quite fit in, which is why he’s happiest at this most undistinguished rural college, with the space to do his own thing and few other foreign colleagues to get in his hair. He keeps the one student who tries to get closer to him at arm’s length, and we’re not left with much confidence, finally, that he is able to connect intimately with anyone, apart from sex workers. Thomas is depicted as an unsavory misanthrope who at this point in his life is thoroughly unfit for teaching, if he ever was. Yet there are glimpses of friendliness, when for instance he grudgingly allows Bella into his apartment to cook a meal for him (this after the violent injury he gave her). Gradually we see that his negativity seems to originate from a deep, unspeakable pain within, rather than from sheer hostility, and if one got to know him well enough another more likable side might emerge. Bella for her part is neither beautiful nor academically gifted but endearing nonetheless in her steady childlike optimism, a purity of character one often encounters among Chinese youth, less so among their more jaded counterparts in the West. Carroll refrains from praising or judging his characters but simply lets them loose on the stage and stands back to let us watch. Though it’s not a didactic or moralistic tale, there are lessons to be learned on the communication pitfalls of even the best-intentioned Westerners who venture into China.
* * *
More book reviews by Isham Cook:
Lotus: Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel
The 1.3 billion-strong temper tantrum: Review of Arthur Meursault’s Party Members
The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd
The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China
Foreign Devils on the Loose in China: A Review
One million foreigners currently reside in China as of 2017, an astonishing tenfold rise since 2010. With this increase, the number of expat books set in China has taken off as well. I imagine a decade down the line we will have a veritable literature on our hands. Yet the Great China Expat Novel (or Memoir) is not an easy feat to pull off.
One reason for the relatively rare occurrence of memorable expat books, literary talent aside, is a simple insight lacking among the majority attempting the task: the perils of solipsism. Your run-of-the-mill expat tale revolves largely around the narrator’s own world, often with precious little to say about his or her interactions with the Chinese. The particular balance struck between the self and the other may vary; the mistake is to draw no larger symbolic significance from the lessons learned. The clash of cultures – East and West, Old World and New – remains ever-present at street level in China. This remains a country that has been slow to adopt some of the more internationalized notions of freedom and lifestyle taken for granted in say, Japan, Korea and Thailand. The best expat authors intuitively grasp the larger significance of this in their storytelling. They capture and dramatize China’s fraught relationship with the West in microcosm, down to the most personal interactions and conflicts, and in doing so succeed in transforming the casual and the banal into the universal.
In the following, I review four previously published, noteworthy China expat books (three memoirs and one novel), before examining a more recent addition to the literature to see how it measures up.
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Carl Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (Earnshaw Books, 2007; originally published in 1940) is from another era and quite different from the other publications to be discussed, which are all from the twenty-first century. I include it for historical contrast. We have a paradox of a book here, a compelling account of China with virtually nothing to tell us about actual life in China or the Chinese. How does Crow, the famous Shanghai newspaper editor and American China hand of twenty-five years, pull it off? We are given the bigger historical picture, a sweeping discussion of the centuries of maritime trade up through the opium wars, the occupation by the Western powers and the collapse of the Qing Dynasty. The narrative then circles inward to give us a close-up view of life in foreign-occupied Shanghai over the early decades of the twentieth century – right up to the day the author is forced out of the country during the Japanese invasion in 1937. It is a fine historical introduction written by the sure hand and balanced objectivity of an experienced journalist.
But we soon realize that despite being less than a hundred years ago we are encountering an era as strange as that of Marco Polo’s, or the US antebellum south, or the world of “gay cocktail parties” penned by Crow’s contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, when “gay” had a different meaning from what it does today. Crow is not entirely able to extricate himself from the biases of his age. This was a time after all when it was still fashionable to be racist. It is a China peopled by expat bachelors, bored bridge-playing wives of the expat married, their China “boy” servants, amahs and anonymous kitchen hands. Not a single fleshed-out Chinese person is described in the entire book, nor any even named, apart from the brief, touching mention in the final pages of one “Ching,” a servant of Crow’s hastily delivering some food as he and his family flee the Japanese attack. The remaining cast of hazy Chinese occupy the narrative background as ciphers, so many shadowy and inscrutable Fu Manchus.
We do note changes in prejudices and attitudes. Before the First World War, when Shanghai was divided into the French, British and American concessions and effectively walled off from the rest of the city, with one park reputed to have a sign forbidding entrance to “Dogs and Chinese” (or so the rumor goes; Crow himself disbelieves it but it dies hard for the simple reason that such a sign was entirely plausible at the time). It would never have occurred to anyone on either side to extend social intercourse beyond business relations or transactional necessities. This was not terribly surprising, considering the “very large class [of foreigners in China] who looked with considerable disdain and disgust on all Chinese people.” After the war and start of the Republic, things began to relax and there was more mutual curiosity and gesturing across the cultural divide. But the Chinese remained as unknowable as ever.
Even in its heyday of excitement and notoriety, gay Shanghai, the Paris of the East, seemingly had very little to do with China. The foreign community was too busy with their ponies, polo and racing matches, golf courses and drinking and yachting clubs to be much bothered with anything else. Crow spends considerable space detailing the petty controversies preoccupying the exclusive foreigner clubs – the restrictions on proper dress and the knotting of ties, the election of new members to a club, the etiquette of buying rounds of drinks. And yet it is these particulars that are oddly fascinating in their very remoteness to our own experience in the present-day, more internationalized China, where interaction of foreigners and locals at Starbucks or online and the burgeoning cohabitation and intermarriage is widespread.
Crow succeeds with his knack for the telling anecdote, even when it doesn’t reflect too well on the author himself. He relates without irony being once picked up by a taxi driver whom he failed to recognize he had previously employed as his personal chef of four years! Or the bizarre methods of communication designed to keep personal relations impersonal, such as between this American bachelor and his servant: “Seated at his breakfast table he would strike the table bell as a signal to put the eggs in boiling water and, watch in hand, would strike it again when it was time to take them out.”
Walls remain in the entrenched attitudes among many Chinese and foreigners even today: the parents who forbid their daughter to marry a foreigner, locals who are easily whipped up into anti-foreigner nationalist frenzy, foreign expats who after many years in the country can’t count to ten in Chinese. One quote from the book could be lifted out and inserted into any current Western account of China, as we have all known expats like this: “The foreigner was rarely tempted to try Chinese food and many of them lived a lifetime in China without every tasting roast duck or sweet-and-sour pork.” What distinguishes Crow’s narrative from the more amateurish or narcissistic China expat bar-scene ramblings that crop up in print today are precisely such telling, ironic, anguished observations of the East-West divide playing out at the personal level.
[image error]It doesn’t seem like all that long ago, but China in the 1980s was only just creaking open its doors to foreign travelers for the first time since Carl Crow’s era – initially to package tours and later in the decade to individuals. But if the Government was ready to receive foreigners and their hard currency and quickly slapped together expensive hotels for this purpose (where backpackers on a shoestring often had no choice but to room), most of the rest of the country was not. It was a forbidding place, necessarily so, with the largest population in the world living in a bleak wartime-style economy resultant upon decades of the catastrophic policies of a lunatic leader. To handle so many people under such extreme conditions, such a society was structured very differently from what we are accustomed to, with drastically curtailed lifestyle choices (the very term “lifestyle” would have been incomprehensible to the Chinese then). I sampled the tail end of this era on my first visit to the country in 1990 for an exhausting two-week, six-city tour. The place was fascinating in its utter strangeness. China is a much more foreigner-friendly place these days, to be sure, but it has been a long time in coming.
Enter in 1986, among that first wave of solo foreigners allowed into the country, Jane and Claire, two spoiled young American females fresh out of college, neither previously having set foot outside of the US. They embark on what they planned to be a yearlong worldwide tour, beginning with an indefinite stay on the Chinese Mainland. After a brief stopover in Hong Kong, they last a respectable six weeks before they are spat out, their global romp aborted, after Claire literally goes psychotic and has to be accompanied on the flight home by a registered nurse, as grippingly recounted in Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven (Grand Central Publishing, 2010).
Things get off to a panicky start with a turbulent flight, before even landing in Hong Kong (neither has much flying experience). Things only get worse amidst the squalor of their Chungking Mansion cubbyhole when Jane threatens to head right back home and needs to be slapped into reality by Claire. I worried the author’s histrionics would prevent me from making it past the first ten pages. But it turns out to be a clever foil framing the rest of the narrative, as we discover it’s Claire who has the bigger difficulties adjusting to their shockingly different reality on the Mainland. While the two are shunted around from one mysterious, disorienting location to another by shady locals who may or may not be trying to take advantage of them, dealing with hostile hotel staff with no English ability, unpalatable food and nothing to do, Claire grows increasingly paranoid not just of the Chinese but the CIA, Mossad and other nefarious agents she thinks are out to get her. She stops eating and becomes ill and delusional. By this time we are in the more hospitable surroundings of a Western hippie enclave in the city of Guilin. Just as Claire meets and falls for a hot male traveler from Germany, Claire wades naked into a river in a suicide attempt. The tense final pages of this psychological thriller-cum-memoir have Jane and the German frantically contacting the police to locate Claire. They find her and things are brought to a breathless conclusion.
[image error]For another tumultuous perspective on the 1980s, we have Robert H. Davies’ memoir, Prisoner 13498: A True Story of Love, Drugs and Jail in Modern China (Mainstream Publishing, 2002). Englishman Davies recounts an enviable and exciting time for foreigners in China’s Western Xinjiang Province, when it was still very much China’s Wild West, running bars and tourism ventures and marrying a beautiful Muslim Uighur woman, before he is arrested for hashish smuggling on partly trumped up charges and sent to a Shanghai prison for eight years. These years were the height of the Xinjiang hashish trade, with all kinds of characters drawn to the area like a magnet, and Davies and those busted with him were the first group of expats to be made an example of.
The Chinese prison experience is all about regimentation and psychological control – but then so is the entire Chinese education system and workplace. “Re-education” camps from whatever time period in China, prisons, schools, etc., differ only in the degree to which they seek to erase the personality and substitute sheer mindlessness. There is never any “re-education”; there is simply mass lobotomization achieved without invasive surgery. I’m pessimistic China will ever really open up in any substantive way: the population has been dumbed down to such an extent that I fear it may lack the imaginative capacity to change. However, the fact Davies survived with his mind intact is very reassuring and reason for faith in the creative human spirit. I have met enough wise Chinese as well to know that the system doesn’t crush everyone’s mind and spirit.
Apart from these lessons, I should add that Davies’ account is very well written – particularly the chapters during his prison stay when he applies the same colorful detail to his regimented life in prison as he did to his love-making with Sharapet back in Xinjiang. It is a highly readable if unlikely introduction to Chinese culture and society – from within the belly of the beast. In fact it is probably the single most eye-opening book on China I have ever read.
[image error]Partway into Chris Taylor’s novel Harvest Season (Earnshaw Books, 2010), there’s an unlikely sex scene, so fleeting, awkward and intimate I’m hesitant to describe it except to say that while not a direct cause, it heralds a sequence of events that gradually spin out of control. Matt, the narrator, a British expat living in an idyllic mountainous region of southwest China, is torn between two women, Fei-fei and A-hong, but unable to act decisively with either of them. Likewise the community of hippie expats wile away their days hanging out in Shuangshan, their self-styled Shangri-La, doping themselves up with beer, ganja, acid, ecstasy and anything else they can get their hands on. The direct catalyst that moves events toward the inexorable, Greek tragedy-like conclusion is the arrival of a Western anarcho-hippie contingent from Thailand, aka. the “Family of Light” or “Rainbow Gathering of the Tribes,” extreme lifestyle communalists, dreadlocked vegans who live in tepees, don’t believe in bathing and also don’t know what they’re getting into by setting up shop in China. I myself have attended two Rainbow Gatherings, in Kentucky in ’93 and the French Pyrenees in ’03, enough to know what they’re about and found them likable but a bit too strange for my own comfort. Euro and American local authorities already have to contend with them (I recall the police helicopters hovering over us at the Kentucky gathering); one can imagine the incomprehension of both the authorities and locals in China.
Taylor’s novel breathes with such realism I’m convinced it all really did happen as recounted. I begrudge fiction publishers their standard but nonetheless annoying and disingenuous disclaimer, “This is a work of fiction and any resemblance…”, when it’s plain the only thing that’s been altered is the names of the characters. Which brings up the question, why fiction? What makes it qualify as a novel? The telling, of course: the melding of distinct characters and events into a unity forming a compact little universe and an unforgettable atmosphere that lingers. Taylor’s narrative is laid out in uncomplicated linear format, as if no other narrative style was appropriate for sorting out reality amidst the drug-and-booze haze. The style is clipped and concise, plain but economical (with the occasional tendency to telegraph too much into characters’ thoughts), the characters memorable in their own way. Harvest Season exemplifies why novels do a much better job than nonfiction at conveying the character of the times. It’s not exactly a cross-section of expat life in China but a small slice of some very odd and oddly endearing people.
[image error]The same can be said for the recent novel Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (Inkshares, 2015) by Quincy Carroll, with which Harvest Season shares a few features: the obscure Chinese locale and gritty backwater atmosphere, eccentric, forlorn Western characters drawn to China as if to their alter ego, and a sequence of unlikely events that bring things to a decisive and, if not quite disastrous, resonant conclusion. With its three central characters, there’s an intimacy to Carroll’s novel that would lend it to a screenplay or to the stage: Daniel, an idealistic loner in his twenties from the US but fully in his element at a rural college in Hunan Province; Bella, one of his students, a goofy, naïve loner in her own right who gravitates to foreign male teachers for companionship; and Thomas, an aging, cynical American with a crippled leg and a dodgy CV, seeking out English teaching jobs wherever he can find schools willing to hire him and who winds up at the same college. Expats who have taught in China have all encountered these three types in one incarnation or another.
The action turns around Thomas and Daniel’s bristling dislike for each other, and Bella’s conflicted and rebuffed attempts to enter their lives. Under friendlier circumstances, had they for instance one of the teepees in Taylor’s Harvest Season to play around in (Daniel builds an Aeolian harp on the rooftop of his campus apartment), the trio might have made for an intriguing hippieish threesome. But they bring out the worst in each other. When Thomas accidentally smashes Bella in the face with a pool cue while drunk in a bar, the delicate balance between the three begins to unravel, with consequences I won’t reveal here. It’s a moving narrative, as Carroll succeeds in limning his central characters with deftly etched realism (drawn I assume from actual people encountered in China). We even feel affection for the thoroughly unlikeable Thomas and somehow grow to care about what happens to him. I hope Carroll can pen a sequel, with the old grouch’s subsequent adventures in Thailand where he winds up at the novel’s end, final resting point of so many aging expats whose will to live remains stubbornly intact.
Also enriching the novel is the strong supporting cast of secondary characters we get only a glimpse of but are curious to know more about. In a lengthy middle chapter, one of the novel’s most successful set pieces, Daniel escapes to the city of Changsha over the Christmas holiday to visit an acquaintance, Neil, a tall heavy-set wannabe businessman from the UK. The haphazard, contingent manner in which these expat types with a more tenuous philosophy of social commitment hook up and interact is beautifully captured, as Neil fails to respond to Daniel’s efforts to reach him by cellphone upon his arrival. Daniel tracks him down near his apartment, only to be dragooned to the private English conversation school where Neil teaches for an impromptu class to fill in for a missing teacher — and to ogle female students of the sort familiar to expats who have taught at such venues: generally in their 20s and 30s and single, their primary goal to land a foreign teacher boyfriend and only secondarily to improve their English. Daniel is hit on by two of them in short order; a “buxom” and “raven-haired” Zenith, and the manager as well, with alluringly unkempt hair, Angela.
Daniel proceeds to Neil’s favorite bar run by an expat friend where a Christmas costume party is in full swing. The owner’s Chinese wife is in a bikini made out of coconut shells and grass and doesn’t speak English. Of course, it’s rarely expected of the expat to speak Chinese, though Daniel is fluent; Thomas’s ability is confined to a few phrases. Daniel gets into a testy exchange, which almost erupts into a fight, with a morose Welshman fond of sarcastically belittling fellow expat teachers (Carroll employs a dialogue style without quotation marks appropriate to the novel’s aesthetic):
Daniel frowned. Do you have some sort of problem with me? The man lit a new cigarette, then ashed it into his mug. What do you do? Wait, let me guess. A teacher? The question was dripping with condescension. As a matter of fact, yes. You have something against teaching? The man shrugged. He picked up an imaginary object and presented it to the table. WATER, he drawled, loudly. Either because he was drunk or trying to act like a fool, he spoke like a moron, distinguishing each syllable. JUICE, he continued. The girls regarded him uncomfortably, staring down into their cups, like tea readers. He pointed to a spot on the table in front of Daniel. APPLE. BANANA. Seriously, he said. The job is an absolute joke.
In a fitting conclusion to the evening’s tawdry events, Neil departs early for his studio apartment with a woman he picked up at the bar and refuses to let Daniel in later because it’s interrupting their sex. Daniel hops in a taxi and gets off on a random street to spend the rest of the night with a prostitute in a hair salon cubbyhole.
We are left with complex, nuanced portraits of the three main characters. Daniel is young, good-looking, enthusiastic about his job, and respectful of his students, his host country and its culture. He also doesn’t quite fit in, which is why he’s happiest at this most undistinguished rural college, with the space to do his own thing and few other foreign colleagues to get in his hair. He keeps the one student who tries to get closer to him at arm’s length, and we’re not left with much confidence, finally, that he is able to connect intimately with anyone, apart from sex workers. Thomas is depicted as an unsavory misanthrope who at this point in his life is thoroughly unfit for teaching, if he ever was. Yet there are glimpses of friendliness, when for instance he grudgingly allows Bella into his apartment to cook a meal for him (this after the violent injury he gave her). Gradually we see that his negativity seems to originate from a deep, unspeakable pain within, rather than from sheer hostility, and if one got to know him well enough another more likable side might emerge. Bella for her part is neither beautiful nor academically gifted but endearing nonetheless in her steady childlike optimism, a purity of character one often encounters among Chinese youth, less so among their more jaded counterparts in the West. Carroll refrains from praising or judging his characters but simply lets them loose on the stage and stands back to let us watch. Though it’s not a didactic or moralistic tale, there are lessons to be learned on the communication pitfalls of even the best-intentioned Westerners who venture into China.
* * *
More book reviews by Isham Cook:
Lotus: Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel
The 1.3 billion-strong temper tantrum: Review of Arthur Meursault’s Party Members
The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd
The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China
Filed under: China Tagged: China books, China expats
July 23, 2017
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 16: Chicago
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“Haidou dangzyu ngo,” she said.
“What’s going on? You’re putting me in a jail cell full of guns!” Malmquist said, grabbing her by the arm.
“Ng.” She pulled away.
“Wing-yee, please don’t leave me.”
She was already gone. The cell’s bright lighting dimmed and all that remained was the dull glare of a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. It was a basement. Industrial steel shelving housed a comprehensive gun collection and stacks of ammunition. Dug out of one wall was a hole big enough for a person to go through. Malmquist went up the basement stairs and placed his ear against the door at the top. Fragments of a conversation were audible.
“….What’s bandage head’s name again? Heard he’s in the area….”
“….Set the sick fuck on fire….no trace….blow him away.”
“….Lemme get the….”
One of the voices grew louder and closer. “What’s he got to do with it, rectum face?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“You stupid cum-eating dumster mouth feedbag fucktard!”
The door opened. From behind the stairway where he had hidden himself just in time, Malmquist could see someone’s legs trotting down through the steps. They stopped halfway, then headed back up.
On a table Malmquist recognized one of the guns, the Matador. He grabbed it along with a flashlight helmet also on the table and disappeared into the hole. He worked his way along the tunnel, which stretched as far as the light illuminated. When he heard the steps again he switched off the flashlight and pointed the gun at the entrance. He saw Danny pass by the hole and back again and heard him running up the stairs. Breathing a sigh of relief, Malmquist switched the helmet back on and proceeded down the tunnel, Matador in hand. A few minutes later he came up against a dirt wall where the digging had stopped. Exhausted, he extinguished the lamp and fell asleep.
A shovel punching through the wall jolted him awake. He scrambled for the Matador and the flashlight as the wall collapsed in a pile of dirt, revealing the man with the shovel. They both screamed, lurched backward and readied their guns.
“Back off, pedo! One move and you’re dead!”
“Who the fuck are you!”
“So it’s true. You guys are trying to invade my property!”
“You’re invading this property too.”
“I’m taking preemptive action against that boy pedo who’s been stalking my little girl. You must be his father. And you’re wearing a dress! You’re in it together. I swear one move and I’ll blow you the hell out of this tunnel!”
An AR-15 was poised mere inches from the Matador.
“Let me explain something, sir,” said Malmquist. “We can blow each other out of this tunnel and you won’t be a father anymore. Is that what you want for your girl? And this gun will take out not only you but the foundation of your house as well.”
“What are you doing with an anti-tank weapon anyway?”
“It’s Danny’s collection. I stole it. Moreover, the commotion will bring Danny back down and he’s got enough weapons to start a revolution. If that happens and I’m still alive, I will have to take out Danny. We don’t want that, because the munitions packed in that little armory of his will blow up this house, the neighbors’ houses and this tunnel sky high. Let’s talk this out calmly.”
“How could you steal it if you’re his father?”
“Who said I was his father? Do I look like his father?”
“Then who are you?”
“Wait a minute. You’ve never seen Danny’s father?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know he has a father?”
“You’re right. He could be an orphan. Orphans are born pedophiles.”
“He doesn’t have a mother?”
“I haven’t seen one.”
“So a twelve year-old is living here by himself?”
“I guess. How do you know he’s twelve?”
“He told me.”
“Ah, yes. Of course. I know all about you, Jeff Malmquist. You’re a wanted pedophile. You snuck into that boy’s house and abused him and now you’re trying to escape into mine! Don’t you even think about making a move. I’ve got my sights trained on you and the police are on the way.”
“How do you know my name? A second ago you thought I was Danny’s father.”
“Just got an update in my viewfinder. You’re notorious. And I get a bounty for capturing you, Jeff Malmquist.”
“I won’t deny it’s me. Now listen. If you trust me, I will explain how I found myself here. But first we need to get out of this tunnel where we are both currently in extreme danger if Danny comes back. Take me inside your house. I will prove to you I am innocent, and you will believe me. I will also show you how we can get rid of Danny for good — cleanly and without guns, and without either of us being implicated in his disappearance.” Malmquist set his weapon down behind him and held out his hand. “Deal?”
“How can you possibly do that?”
“Trust me. I am at your mercy. But wait. Don’t go calling the cops on me. All they will do is send me back to Indiana. Once I’m in New Gary, I’m safe.” He added pointedly, “I know how to get back to Chicago. Next time I won’t be coming round to help you out again. This is your only chance.”
“I told you the cops are already on their way.”
“No, they’re not.”
“All right. Turn your gun toward you and hand it to me. Slowly now.”
Malmquist crawled after the man down the tunnel and into his basement. They were greeted by his wife and daughter. “Oh, wonderful, Marvin, you’ve caught him,” said the wife. “My God, he’s wearing a dress!”
“Is it a real pedo, daddy? Is it? I’ve never seen one before.”
“One hundred percent grade-A pedo.” He handed his wife the Matador. “Here, honey, take this gun and watch him.”
“It’s not a dress but a tunic,” said Malmquist, dusting himself off.
The girl lifted the tunic, exposing Malmquist. “Oh, no, he’s naked underneath!” she squealed.
“Jesus,” spat the wife. “Look what you’ve brought in here, Marvin. He has to be apprehended and fast! Where’s the pedo cage?”
“I can’t remember where we stored it.”
“Now would you all please calm down? By the time I’ve explained everything to you over dinner we’ll be great friends.”
“You’re delusional if you think we’re inviting you to dinner.”
“Fine. Sorry I asked. But you really have nothing to fear from me. I’m harmless. I have zero interest in your daughter. But I do have a lot to tell you guys. If you’re interested.”
“Can you tell us more about the boy pedo in that house?” asked the girl.
“Yeah, how did you get to know him?”
“Danny thinks you are a pedo who’s stalking him,” Malmquist said as he scoped out the basement space. “Are you going to keep me down here or can we go upstairs where it’s more comfortable? No, wait — I can’t be seen from your front window or that’ll be the end of us. We’d better stay put here.”
The father set up a card table and folding chairs. He was a fat white man with a pale face and a huge sandy blond afro, as if there was something fashionable about it. The wife had the aspect of a deeply aged teenager. The daughter looked about ten and wore a dress coincidentally not all that dissimilar from Malmquist’s tunic. She trained a Mauser on him, while the parents took seats across from him.
“Okay,” said Malmquist. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to make a few upsetting points of clarification at the outset. Please bear with me. And don’t shoot me.”
“How’d you sneak across? It’s impossible.”
“I’ll explain all that in due course. First, I am not a pedophile. I have been wrongly implicated. I was wrongly apprehended in Chicago and they put the nanochip in me even though I’m innocent. Second, believe it or not, most convicted ‘pedophiles’ in New Gary have been wrongly convicted. Third — ”
“Don’t believe a word of it, Marvin.”
“Third, this is not a dress but a man’s tunic from a gift shop in a fake Ancient Rome in China. It’s a replica of the tunics traditionally worn by slaves. I’m a slave there and my master bought it for me. It’s a magic tunic. It can be used to communicate and it somehow enables me to be teleported back and forth between here and China. I have another magic tunic which can teleport me fifty-five years into the future and two thousand years back into the past.”
The three were laughing. “He’s a total basket case.”
“Do you want to know your future? This is what’s going to happen. In a few years, the USA will collapse into paranoia and anarchy. Everyone will suspect everyone else of being a pedophile and start shooting and killing each other indiscriminately. It looks like you and Danny are on the verge of doing this now. The Chinese, who are presently running this country — not sure if you already know that — will have had enough. They will take over and rid the USA of all the guns and the violence. In fact, they will rid the USA of the USA.”
“What?” The family stared.
“The entire Western Hemisphere is to be turned into a huge slave colony called AMSAR. The former USA will cease to exist and you will wake up one morning to discover you’re living in China. It will all take place quickly. By the time you’ve realized what’s happening you will already be slaves. Within a generation, everyone will be speaking Cantonese.”
“Over my dead body!”
“Marvin, relax. This is what pedos do. They’re wily and clever and know how to spin tales of deception to confuse us.”
“If you dare try to make a sudden move on my daughter while you’re distracting us — ”
“Don’t worry daddy, I’ve got him covered.”
“Are you crazy? Do you really think I’m about to go after her? Here, now, in this basement? The only thing on my mind is how to get out of here.”
“Hey, wait a minute. If what you say is true that all our guns will be taken away, how can we protect ourselves? The pedos will soon overrun us. What will the Chinese do about all the pedos?”
“New Gary will be freed. That’s all I can tell you. And people will be judged on their capacity to love.”
“How did you sneak into Chicago?”
“I was teleported here.”
“I’m losing patience with your shenanigans. How did you really make it over here?”
“Let me prove to you this is a magic tunic. See, watch. I’m writing the words, ‘MELYNCHUK YOU THERE?’ on it. He’s the chief inspector in the New Gary Police Department. He knows I’m innocent and is watching out for me. He has one of these tunics too and he’ll respond as soon as he sees my message. I can’t promise he’ll write back immediately but he eventually will, if you’re patient. Oh, great, he’s there now. Look.”
They watched as words mysteriously traced themselves out on Malmquist’s tunic:
YES WHERE ARE YOU?
Malmquist replied: “TRAPPED IN FAMILY’S HOME IN CHICAGO. OPPOSITE 666 WEST 26TH.”
CAN YOU USE TUNIC TO ESCAPE?
“This is wild. I’m about to turn you in, and you’re turning yourself in,” said Marvin.
“Not exactly. Now watch me write ‘ZHANG IS BACK IN CHINA,'” he said as he spelled out the words vocally.
DELILAH POWER IS BACK TOO
“TELL MY CAPTORS NOT TO SHOOT ME.”
JEFF MALMQUIST
IS NOT DANGEROUS
“Did you pick up his profile, Marvin?” said the wife.
“Yeah, that’s his name. This messaging system of yours is cool,” he said to Malmquist, lighting some cannabis.
“Can I sit down?”
“Where can I get one of those tunics? How does it work?”
“HOW DID DELILAH GET HOME? SHE HAD WRONG TUNIC,” Malmquist wrote back. He took the joint offered by Marvin. “We just write to each other. Next time I’m in fake Ancient Rome I’ll pick one up for you. What kind of bud is this? It has a skunky smell.”
“Plane Crash.”
“That’s what this is called? Skunk was going out of fashion back in 2015. It’s odd this stuff is still around. The dead animal smell.”
“Buds is buds,” said Marvin, his face relaxing for the first time.
“What the hell?” said Malmquist, when he noticed Melynchuk’s reply:
SHE FLEW BACK
“You still haven’t explained how it works.”
“There are two kinds of tunics, active and passive. This is a passive tunic. It’s used for sending and receiving messages — wow, is this shit ever strong. Weed strains have definitely increased in potency over the past half century. That’s why you guys are so paranoid about all this pedophilia shit — So anyway, active tunics are used for teleportation. Except that I can shift back and forth from China with this passive tunic, and the first time I didn’t have a tunic. Come to think of it, the first time I went to the future I didn’t have a tunic either.”
“Maybe you haven’t traveled anywhere, but the places have,” said the kid, as she took a toke on the joint.
“What? You let her smoke this shit?”
“You’ve always been in Chicago,” she added.
“I’ve already thought about that. Or I’m in all of these places at the same time. But in fact that’s not correct. Hard to explain. Especially as I don’t yet know how to control where I’m sent to next.”
HAPPY BIRTHDAY
CAME AND SEES
“What’s that all about?” said the wife, pointing to Malmquist’s tunic.
“It’s communicating in pedo code. We’ve been warned about these kinds of messages at school,” said the daughter.
“No. It means the inspector just went offline. When he’s offline the tunic shows random nonsense language.”
“It changed again.”
THE THING WHICH IT WANTS
TO DO FREELY IS ONLY DONE
“This is too cool,” said the father. “It’s like one of those AI poetry machines. Hey, maybe it’s a code for controlling where you’re going next.”
“I’ve thought about that too. But there’s no pattern to the language. Sometimes it’s grammatically correct nonsense, other times it’s just ungrammatical. Like what it’s saying now.”
SINCE WEARA BRAND
THE SPIRIT THAT WEARIT
“I’m a semiotician by profession,” Malmquist continued, “and even I can’t see any patterns or codes. What I do know is I can’t go back or forward in time with this tunic.”
“What about your other tunic? Does it show messages?”
“No.”
“Where is it?” said the wife.
“I have two of them. Here in these pockets.”
“Can we see?”
Malmquist pulled one out of his pocket and gave it to the girl. “Don’t put it on or you’ll disappear and may never come back.”
“Will it send me to a pedo colony?”
“Didn’t you say you could help me get rid of that boy Danny? You could try putting the tunic on him,” said the father.
“That’s what I was getting at. But I don’t know where he’ll end up.”
“Hey, what if you wear the two different tunics at the same time?” said the kid.
“It doesn’t matter where he ends up. If you go together, you can steal his tunic so he’s stuck there forever and you just come back yourself.”
“How in the hell am I going to get him to put it on with all his guns?”
“We could lure him here and trap him and force him to put it on at gunpoint.”
“And what if nothing happens? What do we do next? You could be charged with kidnapping a child, and all of you will soon end up in New Gary yourselves.”
“Yeah, let’s go there. I’ve heard so much about it. I’m really curious,” exclaimed the girl.
“I can tell you one thing,” said Malmquist. “It feels safer there than here. Everyone’s unarmed.”
“Why does that feel safer?”
“I’ve just never understood the mentality of people like you that you only feel safe if you have a gun.”
“We need our gun to buy things.”
“What?”
“We pay with our guns.”
“You mean, like, scanning a bar code?”
“You hold your gun up at the cashier and it pays for what you’re buying.”
“Unfuckingbelievable.”
“It’s also a fashion statement. See my matching diamond-studded pink pearl Colt revolvers,” said the wife, proudly tapping the pistols in her open-carry holster.
“I like your kid’s idea of wearing both tunics at the same time. But I don’t think it’s going to work. Let me try.”
Malmquist put one on of the travel tunics over the message tunic. “Nope, nothing.”
“It must be because you can’t see the writing now. The writing tunic needs to go on top,” said the kid.
“I can’t reverse them unless I strip naked.”
“Darling, you go on upstairs, now.”
“No! I want to watch,” said the daughter, stamping her feet. “I’ve already seen him naked anyway.”
“What’s that noise?” said Malmquist, bending down to listen at the tunnel. “I hear voices coming through.”
As the family peered into the tunnel, Malmquist quickly switched the two tunics. When they turned around he was already gone.
* * *
[image error]
Previous chapter: Ch. 15: Zigaago
Next chapter: Ch. 17: Xinluoma (upcoming)
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
Forthcoming (September 2017):
The Kitchens of Canton
You might also be interested in:
Reset, a play
Newsex, a play
Lust & Philosophy, a novel
Filed under: Fiction Tagged: China fiction, Dystopian satire
July 1, 2017
Massage diary: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam
China: Kunming
As my jumping-off point for a four-country Southeast Asia tour, I thought I’d begin with a few words about the massage scene in one of China’s more attractive cities, Kunming, in southwestern Yunnan Province, conveniently located a few hundred kilometers from the borders of Vietnam, Laos and Burma. There is a key point of contrast between massage in China and the rest of Southeast Asia, however. Although it’s big business in both regions, in the former it is largely targeted to domestics, in the latter to foreigners. In your typical Southeast Asian hotspot, massage shops proliferate wherever tourists are to be found, jostling for attention, with similarly catchy English-language signs and menus, among all the bars, cafes and restaurants, while in your typical Chinese city, massage shops are scattered uniformly in most neighborhoods, touristy and not, and their shop signs are typically in Chinese (though the word “Spa” is standard code for the full panoply of massage services).
As a longtime China resident, I can speak with some authority on the Mainland massage experience (see for starters “The curious benefits of neurosis” and “Massaging the masseuse in Beijing and Bangkok“). I can attest to some interesting aspects of the profession here. Firstly, there is no clear division between sexual and nonsexual massage services; you cannot tell from the outside of a shop much about the activities inside. But it’s not as if anything goes. In both policy and practice, the vast majority of China’s massage venues are no-nonsense, non-sexual therapeutic services. They function as a needed neighborhood facility. As many women patronize them as men. The phenomenon of the Chinese female massage addict is not uncommon — attested to by those I regularly see at the same shops I frequent as well as those who have confided the predilection to me.
Overt prostitution (i.e. intercourse) is rare at massage venues; it tends rather to gravitate to the KTV bars, “rest & relaxation” businessmen hotels, and house-call and escort services. Prostitution massage parlors can be found in the seedier areas of certain cities, typically in the south (Shenzhen, Dongguan, etc.), but they are far from the norm. The fashionable falsehood pedaled by anti-prostitution activists that all Asian massage parlors enslave and brutalize their massage workers bears little relation to life on the ground, if my encounters with hundreds of masseuses in almost two decades of living in China is anything to go by. If all masseuses are enslaved, why has not one ever mentioned being so? What explains the high turnover rate at many establishments, not to mention their detailed conversations with me about what’s going on in their lives, what they were last doing and what they plan to do next? If they’re all duped, coerced or kidnapped into the sex trade, why do they frequently slip in and out of various professions (beauty salon work, nursing, the apparel business, etc.)? Why do others seem content with their present massage job and unwilling to change employer? In fact if we look at the lower echelons of the massage business, probably the largest category are the blind (male and female) from rural areas, who would not otherwise have any means of employment and are grateful the opportunity to find work. Though they are not always adequately trained or suitable for the job, their work is confined to strictly therapeutic massage. These “Blind massage” shops are scattered throughout every city; by all means check one out if you visit the country.
This is not to say massages are never sexualized. But there is a full gamut of possibilities along what I term the “chaste/erotic” continuum (described in “Massaging the Yin-Yang in Pattaya“), from intensely physical nonsexual bodywork to light erotic teasing to the handjob. Anything can and does happen inside doors, in the secret negotiations and personal vibes between massage worker and customer. It is this very drama and suspense that provides the Asian massage venue with its fascination. The astute masseuse knows that each customer has different needs and expectations. The masseuse likewise has her repertoire of techniques, and her limits. It’s a question of a good fit between technician and client. As long as she can satisfy enough customers with her skilled handiwork, she can do good business.
[image error]The artist Luo Yi in Kunming.
Shanghai tends to have the best of everything, both in range and quality of services. At midrange shops a sixty-minute oil massage runs between 200-300 yuan (USD $28-$43); the more New Agey the decor, the higher the price. One chain, Yu Massage, specializes in the delightful “Double Rejoicing” (four hands) massage, performed by two masseuses who synchronize their stroking (420 yuan). The venue is popular among Caucasian couples. Yet single males might be massaged a bit more erotically, as I was when one masseuse reached between my legs and stroked my perineum — the huiyin of traditional Chinese acupressure. It’s not that she was necessarily crossing the line of respectability or legitimacy. Such lines are notional constructs, more fluid in cultures outside the Puritanical Anglo-American West. I say “might”; that was the only masseuse at this chain to caress me so, which would otherwise wish to maintain its reputation for politeness among its largely Anglo-American clientele. The chain is also located in the upscale French Concession area and is one of the few to break new ground and cater to foreigners.
[image error]A painting by Luo Yi.
Elsewhere, the massage industry can vary considerably from city to city, largely due to periodic police crackdowns and clean-up campaigns, with legitimate establishments unfairly caught up in the sweeps and thrown out of business. This appeared to be the case in Kunming on my stay there on this trip in late 2016. Two days of scouring the city turned up nothing except a single shop specializing in muscle ailments. I would certainly have found more shops had I more time, but given the plethora of quality massage venues in the city where I live, Beijing, I had no pressing need, and chose to save my money for Southeast Asia. I have other interests as well, coffeehouses and cafes, reading and writing, and my artist friend, Luo Yi, to visit. A feminist in the most meaningful sense of the term, not in denunciations of men but in the uncompromising independence and freedom which guides her life as a female painter, she represents to my mind another important aspect of the social erotic, the aesthetic, which among other things has involved spontaneous nude performances with fellow artists at a Shanghai teahouse.
Laos: Luang Prabang and Vientiane
North Americans (namely US citizens, less so Canadians and Mexicans) are the most likely to reject the idea out of hand that it could actually be a human right to be naked outside one’s residential confines. On the contrary, such Americans commonly affirm their right to be free from the sight of naked bodies, by definition ugly unless young and of fine physique. The naked body in this parochial view is either highly sexualized and frightening or decrepit and offensive; there is no middle ground or alternative view. The social power of these negative attitudes is such that even breastfeeding mothers are reluctant to expose their nipple in relatively enlightened New York City, where not just the breasts but public nudity is actually legal (though only performance artists dare go naked). It is indeed telling as much as it is incomprehensible that no other developed country in the world is as intolerant of public breastfeeding as the United States.
On the bus from Kunming through the Laos countryside to my first destination, Luang Prabang, we were passing through one of innumerable mountain villages when I saw a woman standing by the roadside in a makeshift shower with nothing on but her sinh (the Lao sarong), as she poured water over her magnificent naked breasts and casually looked up at us in the bus (I wasn’t able to snap a picture in time). Laos is a traditional society and can hardly be expected to be sexually progressive. Yet in this one respect they are freer than the rest of us in the developed world.
[image error]A mountain village in Laos, much like the one where I saw a woman bathing herself by the road.
Public nudity is allowed and socially accepted in some developed countries, where it has an apparently ulterior, progressive purpose, that of short-circuiting the cultural sexualization of the body which other societies rely on to confine, control and repress sexuality. Northern Europeans thus uphold the freedom to be naked in public, the Germans in particular, but also the Scandinavians and Finns, who entertain family and friends of both sexes naked in the sauna, including children and adolescents. Many families go naked in the house. Nudity is taken for granted as a completely natural mode of social interaction. When I lived in Germany in the 1970s, I was invited to go skinny-dipping with my male and female high school classmates, a routine pastime. TV series directed at teenagers contained full-frontal nudity. Unbelievable as it may seem, women went braless in gaping shirts that fully exposed the breasts along the sides (and which Tacitus notably described as a dress feature of Germanic women 2,000 years ago). This was not to seduce males but to allow the breasts to be unbound and unencumbered. It was simultaneously an act of sexual equality, giving girls the same right to show off their chest as boys (on proudly displaying the breasts: “The breast etiquette project“).
Some of these practices have been ground away under the corrosive influence of puritanical Hollywood and the broader media-disseminated US culture (already the cheesy TV series Dallas was enthralling the Germans when I was there), along with the infantilizing of the adult female body by shaving the erotic body hair off the legs, underarms and pubes. Thankfully, the respect among the Germans for social nudity is still largely entrenched. Not just in public beaches but many parks in cities, including for instance the famous English Garden in central Munich, nudity is enthusiastically partaken of the masses. If foreign visitors are offended by this, it’s they, the gawking clothed, who are offensive.
There is no argument against public nudity. There is only the futile question as to why it’s not universal. However, while Germany is perhaps the most enlightened country in this respect, it’s not necessarily enlightened sexually. It can’t beat Thailand on massage (actually the Germans are the most curious and industrious students of things like Tantric sex massage). Indeed, I would point out the paradox that the taboo against any show of sexuality is never stronger than in the domain of public nudity. Until we evolve to a more enlightened society, the two are simply too volatile to co-occur anywhere. This is emphatically the case where nudity is allowed in the US — the handful of naked beaches (carefully cordoned off from the clothed sections) and private nudist resorts scattered about the country in those states where it’s permitted: in no other space is sexual expression in any guise more threatening.
I have long believed that many more people would go naked than is normally supposed — for the sake of the simple freedom of it, or the sheer pleasure of showing off their body — if only they had the chance. Nudity is an expression of honesty, and that’s why it should be vigorously defended, supported and advocated. There is a wonderful openness of character to people who invite you to be naked with them. We all expect nakedness of the face. Who feels comfortable with someone you’re meeting for the first time who refuses to take off their sunglasses? Similarly, we want to see the “face” of the body. The most diehard American nudophobics would probably not be scandalized at the sudden appearance of a hot and sexy naked body (as long as the kids aren’t around). The challenge is to extend and democratize this acceptance to everyone, including the unshapely and bodies ravaged by age. Aren’t old people’s bodies reassuring in their own way? They’re telling you, “You’ll arrive at this point in due time, and when that comes you’ll be happy to know you will still be going strong like us!”
Laos, like most countries, has its contradictions. The relaxed approach to female nudity in the hinterland stands in stark contrast to sexual mores in the tourist areas, particularly the massage business. It seems in no other country is there such a contradictory attitude toward the practice; or to be more precise, the government’s contradictory attitude. Massage — along with guest houses, restaurants, and nature tourism — is a cash cow in the rapidly expanding tourism industry and must be allowed to develop, yet at the same time rigidly controlled. Burma, which I visited in 2014 (“Coffee and massage in Burma“) makes for a useful comparison here. In that country the massage arts had a long tradition until virtually stamped out under the military regime. It’s only now slowly making a comeback, again to satisfy the proclivities of Western tourists. Perhaps things have changed over the past three years; there wasn’t much when I was there. In Laos by contrast, there’s a lot of massage in the country’s prime tourist haunt of Luang Prabang. It’s just not very good. The trappings are there, not the genuine article.
Luang Prabang is a lovely little city, with tourist guesthouses, restaurants and massage shops spread out along the Mekong for a mile. On the main boulevard parallel to the river a few blocks up, Sakkaline Road, Buddhist temples with stacked roofs commingle with historic homes built by the French. The colonial tradition is still evident in the high quality of the coffee, wine and bread, and not a few French restaurant proprietors. If you’re a writer or an irrepressible romantic, you’ll find it an idyllic Asian haunt to hide away in, even without the prospect of a partner — or a decent massage. I spent four days there and could easily have spent more, even as I grew increasingly flustered in my massage research.
I started off with a few shops on Khem Khong Road along the river. They all had open fronts. The masseuses sitting in the entrance at the first place I stepped into acknowledged me without evincing any enthusiasm. I was led upstairs to a small shabby room on the second floor by a young woman in her twenties with hair dyed blond. She gave me an indifferent and wholly chaste massage with one hand while she played with her cellphone with the other; at one point she interrupted the massage to leave the room and take a call, returning a full five minutes later. At the next venue I took a chance on, the young lady massaging me was so inept that I was compelled to do something I rarely do, quit halfway through. I paid part of the fee and left immediately before any further dispute arose (in China they’d demand I pay for the full hour, but I can handle them with my ability in the language).
At the far end of the town and around the bend where the Nam Khan River flows into the Mekong, the quality of the housing suddenly improves and the massage shops were larger and more upscale, some with a coveted TripAdvisor placard. Many occupied the traditional A-frame teakwood housing you can also see in Thailand. I chose one. A variety of massage essences were offered, and even the shower was elegant and immaculate, with fluffy towels. A competent and thoroughly unmemorable massage followed in the steep-raftered room by an attractive young lady adorned in a sinh. I suppose if I had not had such high standards and it was my first time, the experience would have been exotic and thrilling and stamped indelibly in my memory of the country. But when you’ve had hundreds of massages in a variety of countries under your belt (I’m approaching two thousand), you become picky. Hers was a one-size-fits-all service, exactly the same massage she must have given to all of her customers. In the massage arts, however, the usual notion of quality control — maintaining identical standards in a product line — doesn’t apply. She lacked, as all but the best masseuses do, the ability to read the customer and grasp what he wants. We are not the product; her performance is.
I tried several more shops over the next few days and the massages were all noted for their sameness, down to they way they always start working upward from the calves (what state-run massage training school was teaching them that?). Generally the older and less attractive the masseuse the better, and finally at one teak establishment I found a middle-aged woman who gave me something approaching a satisfying treatment. She got her fingers firmly into the ridges of my groin and me solidly hard, while refraining from any direct genital contact — delicious enough for me to request another half hour. With her nonexistent English, a comical scene ensued. I tried everything — pointing to the clock, writing down the times — but failed to convey my request. If an Asian masseuse knows any English at all, it’s the words “sixty” and “ninety,” “half hour” and “hour and a half.” The Lao are not yet all experienced enough in the business to anticipate and expect customers’ common desire to extend their massage. We had to interrupt the session while the woman went off in search of the boss, who was momentarily out. Fifteen minutes later she arrived and successfully got my message across to the masseuse.
The first few hours south out of Luang Prabang toward the capital consists of winding mountain roads. I had my camera at the ready this time to catch a bathing babe, but none showed her face. No matter, the scenery was spectacular enough. Hours later, most of the foreign passengers got off at the popular backpacker town of Vang Vieng, with its hiking and kayaking. Your massage researcher was the only foreigner left on the bus for the remaining stretch. We pulled into Vientiane after dark. I had a tuktuk driver to take me to the city center, and he dropped me off at a hotel with a lively front restaurant, the Mixok Guesthouse. A few kilometers back, however, we had passed by a very curious sight, again before I had time to take it all in or snap a picture: a shop with the word “Massage” and another word before it beginning with the letter “E.” I could have sworn it said “Erotic.” At that very moment, a shapely woman emerged out of the shop wearing a sheer net dress, her breasts and panties (or lack of them — it all happened in a flash) starkly illumined by the streetlight. If this quasi-communist state forbade the entire massage industry from crossing the line into sexy no-no land on pain of some dreadful punishment, which appeared to be the case, this brief vision, if it was indeed real, was startling.
As with many authoritarian states, much of Vientiane’s city center is swallowed up by broad boulevards, monuments, and billboards adorned with the country’s leader. My guesthouse was located in the compact international nightlife area, a group of crisscrossing streets several blocks in scope. There were plenty of massage shops around, but I did not partake. I was tired of wasting money on disappointing massage. In retrospect, I should have stayed a few more nights to let the town soak in and things to pop out of the woodwork, a few locals to meet and perhaps a woman to get lucky with; there were several chatting up foreign men in the guesthouse restaurant. The quality of the cafes was again impressive. But I was too impatient to cross the Mekong to the other side, where the action was.
Thailand: Nong Khai and Udon Thani
A short bus ride across the bridge, an hour’s slog through a crowded customs, and I was in Nong Khai, my second visit to Thailand in three years and my first to Isan, the country’s least-developed region. What made me intensely curious about the northeast was that almost all of my masseuses on my previous stay in Bangkok had told me they hailed from Isan. Isaners were commonly described as scrawny, dark-complexioned and impoverished. Their migration into the sex trade is not in dispute, but I had envisioned swaths of arid farmland and the population living in huts and dressed in rags. I wanted to witness the place for myself. Rural Asians — in China as well — are routinely stereotyped in their own countries as dark-skinned and the well-bred as fair-skinned. Laos has long been an insular culture and due to national inbreeding the people often resemble one another. In fact northeast Thais are ethnically Lao and you can see a resemblance in some. But you can also see in the northeast the same wide range of hues and facial features as in the rest of Thailand. And when it comes to the bodily pleasures, Thailand is a very different universe from Laos.
I had no idea where to stay in the small city and hadn’t reserved anything. A tuktuk dropped me off in the center several kilometers away. I had a map showing a concentration of guesthouse along the river but had no cellphone signal. A coffeehouse nearby got me back online, and the GPS map suggested I was reasonably close to the river. The staff pointed me in the right direction, yet I saw nothing but dusty streets in the distance. I stepped into a convenience store to ask for help again. An attractive and well-dressed customer at the checkout invited me into her car and conveyed me right to where she knew I was headed. I was grateful for the act of kindness and would very much have liked to get better acquainted. She spoke nary a word of English, and I didn’t know how to break the ice.
The foreigner enclave amounted to a single narrow street along the river stretching for a block, with a handful of guesthouses and open-air restaurants. I could see that Nong Khai would be too small for me. Still, things got off to a brisk start. The first guesthouse I stepped into had placed at the reception desk a large poster advertising 400 Bhat/hr ($12) massage room calls. I got settled in my room and there she was a few minutes later, in her forties, hefty with huge hips, possibly pretty when she was younger but no longer. On top of having very good technique, she quickly drove things into erotic territory (it’s remarkable how often they co-occur). Though she had covered my midriff with a towel, she pushed my legs up higher and higher with one hand while massaging my ass with the other, until my erect shaft was fully exposed. Now, a massage doesn’t have to collapse halfway through. I prefer it brought right to the edge and held there in a state of arrested sexual tension for sixty minutes, not to mention that fucking tends to mean a higher outlay of funds. Things collapsed into fucking anyway. She clearly enjoyed it and didn’t ask for a tip. The house call was so outrageously cheap I gave her one anyway.
I wandered out of the foreigner enclave and tried out several more massage shops. One place had a placard in the window for “oil massage” but it looked more like a beauty salon. An attractive woman in her thirties was working on a customer and told me to come back at six o’clock. I backtracked down the street to a tiny coffeehouse where I waited out the hour. When I returned, she was ready, the shop to herself. She led me to a back room with a row of tables. She wasn’t very good at massage and offered to fuck for an extra fee. She had a marvelous body and I gave her a massage instead.
[image error]Massage lady in Nong Khai.
An hour’s ride south brought me to the largest city in Isan, Udon Thani. The US military had a base there during the Vietnam War for staging operations in the secret war in Laos. I have no idea what the city was like back then, but the main drag with all the Western pubs and go-go bars remains quite lively today, while the composition of the expat community has shifted to retired Brits. It’s much larger than Nong Khai and the selection and quality of Western restaurants is impressive. During my two days in the city, I visited a handful of massage shops. They ran the usual gamut from no-nonsense chaste to the erotic. And as in China, it didn’t matter what the shop looked like on the outside or where it was; shops of both extremes sat next to each other, even on Prajak Sillapakom and Samphan Thamit streets, the heart of expat activity. Sometimes it all seemed to come down to whether a masseuse took a fancy to you. But rather exhausted by massage at this point, I preferred to spend my time with the lovable middle-aged waitresses at the Smiling Frog restaurant pub, who looked like they might have been sex workers during the war days, except they weren’t quite old enough for that. The pub served the best Margherita pizza I’ve had since Otto Pizzeria at the Venetian in Las Vegas in 2012.
[image error]Waitress at the Smiling Frog Bar & Restaurant, Udon Thani.
[image error]And their divine Margherita pizza.
Thailand: Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai
Commercial massage is more relaxed and liberal in some countries than in others, and Thailand is where the art of massage has been permitted to flourish more than anywhere else. All cities in this country have an endless supply of massage services, but Pattaya and Chiang Mai stand out. Pattaya is notorious as Thailand’s most swinging “sin city” (open-air bars, go-go bars, soapy massage), to be compared not with Bangkok but something raunchier, like Angeles in the Philippines. Chiang Mai, by contrast, is not known as a sex mecca. On the contrary, it tends to draw tourists who come to the country for all the other reasons, the “culture” and laid-back atmosphere, the golden conical pagodas and orange-robed Buddhists strolling the streets, the food. Yet Chiang Mai crawls with massage. So much so that there almost seems something funny going on, as if every time you think you’ve finally found a street free of any massage shops, yet another peeks out with a “Hi there!”
To newbies, these shops go from family friendly to frightening within the space of a few meters. They generally have open fronts, where you can see couples and even their children getting their feet massaged in reclinable chairs as you pass by. In the room behind or the floor above, floor mattresses are at the ready for Thai-style massage, performed by a girl who uses her body weight and her knees, elbows, feet to elasticize you. You are clothed so there is no pressing need for privacy here either, but curtains partition each space to assuage the skittish Anglo customer.
And then in private back rooms or cubicles there is oil massage, performed on a dedicated massage table with a face rest. You strip naked and lie prone (no fussy disposable shorts here provided as in other Asian countries). When the masseuse enters she’ll drape you with a towel, if you haven’t already done so. Once the massage begins the towel may come off (unless you insist on keeping it on). In the presence of the Thai masseuse, we’re dealing with a special form of intimate social nudity. Male and female customers alike can expect a massage over the entire body, normally but not always excluding the genitals. Some masseuses keep things consistently chaste; others are happy to deliver more to those who want it. For men, this may mean a laxer draping procedure, the inner thighs worked closer to the groin, exposing your scrotum or letting your erection pop out. From there on it’s a dance of re-draping or sloughing off of the towel altogether; the towel functions less as a veil than an instrument of wordless dialogue, a gentle matador’s cape. But even if you end up fully naked, the massage is not necessarily eroticized. Or it is and your penis is folded into the treatment but not to the point of ejaculation. Or she drives things home and releases you in orgasm. In the latter case, she may ask for a tip beforehand or afterwards, or not at all.
In the window of one Chiang Mai shop near my guesthouse, a sign in English warned foreign men: “We only offer proper massage here. Please do not ask for anything else.” I was led to a back room, and a masseuse began to work my legs and buttocks. Not quite sure why, but a few minutes later, another showed up and took over (my theory is she was highly valued and on call and they found her a customer). In her thirties, Dang was an Asian version of Judy Garland, fair-complexioned with wide-set eyes, dressed in a tight black shirt and blue sarong. Guided by thoroughness, the supreme technique, she proceeded to deliver one of the most explosive massages I’ve ever had. The usual massage worker is given to fast stroking. I always have to tell them to slow down. Conserve your energy! She was a master of the slow massage. It took her only several hundred strokes to use up the hour. If that sounds like a lot, the usual masseuse expends several thousand strokes. She had dispensed with the towel early on, and I was naked when I turned over. She worked from my limbs toward my solar plexus, from the legs upward and the chest downward, deeply, strongly and purposefully, as if plowing the soil, before terminating the hour with a precise number of upward strokes along my erect member. The way she was able to build up erotic tension in layers and suspend it there without relief made all my other massages in Chiang Mai pale in comparison. She was that rare poet of the hands.
[image error]A massage shop viewed from my guesthouse window in Chiang Mai.
It was an experience that females too should experience, though of course few women go for commercial erotic massage, an unfortunate consequence of universal sexism. In Thailand (as opposed to say, the US, where stringent laws prohibit any form of sexual touching) it is indeed a problem of the imagination and openmindedness, but mostly on the part of customers. Since so few females ever request erotic massage, no masseuse (or masseur) dares venture there and risk causing a serious misunderstanding. I suggest that a female desirous of being massaged sexually could start with a breast massage — Thai masseuses have no problem with that and the practice is common in China as well — and if she intuited the vibes were right, explicitly request more. Some masseuses might balk; others not.
Chiang Rai, a three-hour drive north of Chiang Mai, is a miniature version of the latter, with a smattering of famous temples, a handful of impressive cafes and restaurants, and an expat-backpacker enclave a few streets in extent and as expected, chock full of massage parlors. Chiang Rai is also home to the extraordinary White Temple, built by the eccentric architect and artist Chalermchai Kositpipat, who continues to add wild structures and futuristic ornaments to the temple complex. For reasons that aren’t clear, it’s extremely popular with Chinese tourists, though Chiang Mai is also deluged with Chinese tourists; they now seem to outnumber tourists from all other countries combined. A few years ago the temple got in the news after Chinese tourists’ messy toilet habits angered the temple and in response a separate Chinese-only WC was set up (bad press soon reversed this move). As if to make a point, the temple then built an elaborate and bizarrely ornate WC right in the center of the complex; it’s now one of the main attractions for the Chinese tourists. The temple and Kositpipat’s gallery of paintings are worth a trip to Chiang Rai alone. As for the massage scene, it’s a mere extension of Chiang Mai’s, which is to say there’s a lot, enough to keep you busy for a few days. Some strips closer to the main drag cater to single men or couples, those further back to men only. By this point, on this massage research tour, I was too exhausted and jaded to try a single one.
[image error]Masseuses at a Bangkok massage shop celebrating their TripAdvisor promotion.
Cambodia: Siem Reap and Phnom Penh
I was presently due for a change of scenery and after a brief stay in Bangkok to see a friend, I grabbed a bus to Cambodia and my first visit to Angkor Wat, the world famous, sprawling ruined temple complex. It was certainly worth it and thoroughly fascinating, but with volumes written about it this is not the space to add any more verbiage. The nearby city for accommodation, Siem Reap, I had expected to be a dusty outpost in impoverished and devastated Cambodia. It turned out to be one of the liveliest small-scale cities I’ve encountered in Southeast Asia, a bustling, disorienting congeries of chic restaurants, nightclubs, bars, cafes and massage parlors in every direction. I gather some expats like the place enough to buy property and retire there.
The several massage joints I sampled there were quite similar to their Thai counterparts in services and price but rather underwhelming, with the exception of the room call service at my upscale guesthouse. The central patio housed a swimming pool surrounded by palm trees, crowded with tanned Western couples throughout the day and evening. The atmosphere was polite, and I did not expect anything less than the primmest of massages. My masseuse was middle-aged and ordinary looking. She had no problem massaging me fully naked, brought me off and discreetly departed without asking for a tip (I made sure she got one down at reception when I checked out).
[image error]A lovely cafe in Siem Reap.
Phnom Penh was a different scene, considerably larger and more populated, with a more established expat crowd and a lively nightlife scene along the Mekong riverfront. It has a gritty, old-world atmosphere, with bar names like Olala, Pussy Cat, and Dirty Old Sailor. There was a “spa bar” with liquor and massage on the menu, a novel combination, but it seemed rather predictable at this point. The timing was off. I was all massaged out from Thailand and wasn’t much in the mood. As well, I was still powerfully intoxicated by Dang’s massage back in Chiang Mai and enveloped in its lingering glow. I tried out a shop next to my hotel with thin New Agey trappings but the massage was fussy. I’ll have to do the whole trip again one day in reverse, beginning with Vietnam and Cambodia, starting out with a massage-deprived spirit of adventure.
The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the high school used as Security Prison 21 by the Khmer Rouge, made a strong impression on me. The horrible photos revealed the connection between sex and terror. With remarkable consistency, such regimes in their torture routines strip political prisoners naked and bind them to tables, or iron bed frames as in this prison, male and female victims alike reduced to bloodied blobs of flesh at the hands of their male torturers. When terror is applied to individuals, it becomes perversely intimate. It’s the sadomasochistic relationship with the playacting removed. It’s sex at its most humorless. If rape is sex enraged, torture is the tragic corollary of massage. That’s why massage is so frightening for many neophytes: to mount a table naked and surrender your genitals to potential attack.
[image error]136 Street in Phnom Penh.
Vietnam: Saigon
My first stop in Saigon was the War Remnants Museum, and more horrendous photos of mutilated bodies, this time at the hands of the US military. It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around the massive disparity in deaths between the two countries from the war: two to three million Vietnamese (some estimates run higher), more than half of whom were civilians, versus a mere sixty thousand US personnel. Fifty Vietnamese for every American. Most Americans have never really processed the profound moral aspects of this problem, the ease with which we can march into distant countries with our superior military toys to teach them a lesson, blithely oblivious of the consequences and the scale of the slaughter and destruction.
This was my second trip to Vietnam in ten years; I had previously been to Hanoi, a crumbling but charming city, with a fledgling massage scene. I had heard Saigon was a crowded, chaotic urban mess. I found it to be nicely laid out and pedestrian friendly (at least by Asian standards). The nightlife street associated with US troops back in the war, Đồng Khởi, is now lined with five-star hotels and exclusive boutiques. On that street I sampled an “Oriental”-themed massage parlor next to an artisan coffeehouse. While I was waiting for a free room, a pair of male and female police walked in and politely went over the store’s account books at a table next to me. They paid me no attention. As expected, the massage was competent and chaste, and affordable for an upscale venue, more expensive than Thailand but cheaper than China.
[image error]A massage lady in Saigon.
I tried out three other places over the next two days. Bùi Viện Street is the main nightlife drag, packed with people-watching restaurants, fire eaters, and massage shops in the labyrinth of inner lanes. In one such shop, oddly only dry massage was on the menu — until the masseuse pulled out a bottle of baby oil in the last few minutes and offered more for an extra fee. Generally I turn down happy endings if the massage itself is lackluster. Apart from the Bùi Viện area and probably a few other red-light haunts I didn’t have time to discover, massage venues are relatively few and far between in Saigon, at least compared to Southeast Asian hot spots generally. I did find one on a street near my hotel a few kilometers away, and it turned out to be the best. A jeans-clad woman with shapely hips by the name of Thao led me up a narrow staircase to an upper room with a dedicated massage table, put on a Rachmaninoff concerto and delivered a satisfying oil massage. She spoke only a smattering of English but was into me and the massage was good enough that I allowed her to release my erection, at double the session’s price. Even that wasn’t enough. Her boss, an older woman with straight bangs, confronted her outside the door and they had a testy exchange in whispers; I was nonetheless spared further fees. We exchanged contact information. I still get emails from Thao asking me when I’ll be back in Saigon.
I need a city large enough that It can never be exhausted. Between Bangkok and Saigon, I would choose Saigon to retire in. The Thai are renowned for their friendliness and hospitality, but a wall stands between. They are very good at making tourists feel at home, but outside the foreigner enclaves all signs of the West disappear. I also gather from those with considerable experience in the country that Thailand is riven by class prejudices, and the well-bred are less enthusiastic about mixing with foreigners. My experience in Vietnam is also limited, but it just feels more laid back and familiar. This is presumably due to extensive contact with the West going back generations (the French were there long before the Americans). Whatever the case, walking on the street, the locals look you in the eye more spontaneously than in other Asian countries.
[image error]Bùi Viện Street, Saigon.
On my last day in Saigon near the Bến Thành Market, I passed by a hot woman in her thirties in a tasteful gray dress. “Massage?” she said with a completely winning smile. That never happens in Thailand except when passing by a massage shop. It rarely happens in China, and they never say it with a smile but more of a taunt. Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch and not enough time, or I would have immediately gone with her.
* * *
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Filed under: Miscellanea Tagged: Asian massage, Cambodia massage, Laos massage, Massage, Southeast Asian massage, Vietnam massage
May 19, 2017
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 23: Xinluoma
[image error]
Zhang opened her front door to discover two bruised women holding rags to their breasts. “Dilaila! What happened to you? Who is this?”
Delilah burst out crying as soon as they stepped inside.
“What’s the matter, baobei?”
“A cop attacked us and beat us.”
“Oh, look at you.” Zhang touched Attica’s swelling eye. “Where you find her?”
“She’s from Ancient Rome.”
“Guluoma? What is ‘cop’?”
“A policeman.”
“Policeman? Where?”
“Chicago. The Chief of police.”
“Why he beat you?”
“I don’t know. He went crazy. He threw me down and my hand is hurt from landing on the floor. Has my nose stopped bleeding?”
Attica was likewise caressing Zhang on the eye. “Peregrino est. Ex quo est? Ab Oriente?”
“No bleeding. Who this beautiful woman?”
“Attica.”
“Atika? — Dai zhang yiliaoxiang!” Zhang ordered a servant. “Where is Zhuliya? Why you not bring her back?”
“She didn’t want to come back. Attica came in her place and she can take over Giulia’s job.”
Attica had forgotten about her developing black eye and walked spellbound around Zhang’s house. “Haec domus est quasi Roma?”
“What she speaking, Italy language?”
“No, Latin.”
“Oh, old Italy language. Ladingyu. So what happened to the policeman? He was caught? How you escape to here? Anyway, you safe here. Why don’t you live here all the time? No more America problems for you. We heard big trouble there now.”
“He’s here.”
“The policeman? Where?”
“I don’t know. He stripped us naked in the Chicago police station and was beating us. Attica got a piece of our tunics around his neck and started strangling him. I managed to write out the Chinese words on the tunic in time to teleport us. But he got sent with us! We found ourselves in a dark room with a lot of young men. We thought they could rescue us and Attica released him. When he got his breath back he started screaming and attacking everyone. There was a struggle and the door opened and more people rushed in. We took advantage of the confusion and escaped. It was a big rich house like yours but bigger. But we ran out and just ran. I don’t even know where we were running. Then I recognized a street and found where you live.”
“Oh, this a problem. Big problem. You must remember where he is. We need to stop things now before police involved. Otherwise no end to trouble. Think. We go there now.”
The servants attended to the girls’ injuries and dressed them in fresh tunics. They were hungry and a quick meal of Chinese stir-fry was dished up. Attica was confounded by the chopsticks and stabbed the bits of meat and vegetables with their ends before using her fingers to scoop up the food. She was given a spoon.
The three of them departed and traced their way back along the streets whence they came, until Delilah stopped. “I can’t remember which way now.”
Attica pulled them along. “Scio ubi ire.”
“She know the way?”
“She must. When we escaped that house she was looking all around and asking me lots of questions. She wanted to take me somewhere else but then I saw how to get to your place. There, that’s the house,” said Delilah.
“I know this place,” said Zhang. “This Zhuliya’s old house! Okay, let me take care of it. You two go to that restaurant and wait.”
“Oh, no, the restaurant where they kept me as a prostitute? I don’t want to go back there. They’ll recognize me.”
“No worry about that.”
Zhang escorted them there herself and the staff needed no explaining. She then retreated up the street to the old eunuch’s domus. A few minutes later she was back. “He no longer there. They threw him out.”
“Where did he go?”
“They said someone maybe took him to police in Subula.”
“Where is that?”
“Follow me.”
They descended the Palatine Hill and crossed the Forum.
“Subura!” exclaimed Attica as they walked down the Argiletum. Further on, she stared perplexed at the spot where her brothel should have been, now a shop selling sports shoes. “Noster lupanar est in hoc via, autem iam abiit.”
There was a brothel across the street. A public slave with a snake tattooed around her thigh and mons pubis parted the hanging beads in the doorway and locked eyes with Attica, who pointed and said, “Lupanar.” Then she walked up to the woman. “Quanta pecunia meres?”
“Mi stai chiedendo quanti soldi guadagno? Almeno quanto te,” the prostitute replied with arched eyebrows.
They entered the police station, where the US Embassy was hosted. As they passed through the lobby they were greeted by a familiar voice. “Aa haai, nei faanlei laa, hailaa?”
“Wingyee! What are you doing here?”
“She here a lot. She meet with police about Jiefu’s case,” said Zhang.
She spoke to Wingyee in Mandarin concerning the bizarre events with the Chicago cop. Wingyee answered in Cantonese. As they scarcely got the gist of each other’s speech, Wingyee fetched a male interpreter who had been assigned to her. Surnamed Xu, he had a typical southern Chinese face with wide-set, downward-slanted eyes and upturned nose, much like Wingyee’s herself but lacking her sultry eyebrows. The latest information was recapped and clarified.
“So strange,” Zhang announced to Delilah. “No more American Embassy.”
“What happened to it?”
“Closed. Shut down.”
“Why?”
“They don’t know. Government shut it down.”
“Where was the Embassy?”
“Right here.”
“In this police station?”
“Yes.”
“Did they move it somewhere else?”
“No more American Embassy in China. They said big White man in your country’s police uniform brought here short time ago by servant from that house. But they leave when they see Embassy gone.”
“No one knows where they went?”
“No. But I have idea. Let’s go.”
“Ngo soeng jatzi heoi,” said Wingyee, who invited herself and Xu to join them.
The five entered a small building nearby. A blast of hot steamy air greeted them inside.
“Balneum!” exclaimed Attica.
“Yeah, bathhouse,” said Zhang. “This where I first met Jiefu. He found massage job here.”
She and the proprietor exchanged words. He shook his head. She then announced, “Okay, we try big bath now. I don’t know other place to look. Unless he wandering around no direction.”
They headed toward the Diocletian Baths. When they arrived at the gates, Attica gazed in confusion at the bath block. “Thermae Antoninianae? Locus est falsus. Ego non somnio? Roma enim mutatus est.”
“Nigo heoi kamkam ge dengfong haime?” a stunned Wingyee chimed in.
“Daikelixian wenquan. Wenquan,” said Zhang, writing the characters in the air.
“Aa, wancyun. Gam taai?”
The first stop was the gift shop. “You need new writing tunic,” Zhang told Delilah. “Maybe you can use to talk to your police station, where they took me. What his name?”
“”You mean Inspector Melynchuk?”
“Yeah. He the one who beat you?”
“No, he’s the New Gary police. The man who beat us was the Chicago police.”
“You put this on later when we leave. We go to women’s changing hall now.”
Wingyee was highly reluctant to part with her weapons as they disrobed, and it took Zhang some effort to convince her the locker was secure. The naked women met up with Xu in the foyer and they entered the huge natatio. Zhang instructed them to keep their eyes out for a suspicious-looking Caucasian fitting Delilah’s description among the thousands of bathers ambling about or immersed in the pools. “He will be alone, no master with him. No tunic.”
“By the way, why wasn’t he arrested at the police station? Didn’t Wingyee notice him?” asked Delilah.
After querying the interpreter Zhang said, “She doesn’t know why. Because she was in inside room didn’t see him. They only talk with servant. They thought it’s servant’s master business. If master’s own business, no crime.”
They quickly realized there were far too many people to even attempt to scan the premises. They got dressed and Wingyee and the interpreter used their credentials to get access to the complex’s security department, where they explained what they were looking for. The stray slave who had the nerve to wear tight black clothes with ridiculous insignia had been noticed as soon as he had entered the complex, it turned out. So had the Chinese “tongzhi” by the name of “Youliwusi” who befriended him in the sauna.
“Youliwusi?” asked Zhang. “I remember that name. Where I remember that name?”
“Youliwusi Kaisa. Ta shi ge boli. Jilao. Tongxinglian,” said security.
“Zhidaole.”
“Aa, geilou,” said Wingyee.
“They saw him on camera,” Zhang explained. “He leave bath together with Chinese homosexual man. This man name himself Roman Emperor, Youliwusi Kaisa.”
Delilah processed that for a second. “Oh, Julius Caesar?”
“Yeah.”
“Gaius Julius Caesar?” said Attica.
“How do they know he’s homosexual?”
“He famous. How you say ‘bad famous’ in English?”
“You mean infamous? Notorious?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“They say slaves who go with him never come back. Never seen again.”
“Why didn’t they do anything?”
“They left before they do anything.”
“I mean why don’t they do anything about him? Why don’t they investigate this Chinese guy?”
“Something happen to slave, no crime. But I tell them we must find them. They know where homosexual man live. We go there now.”
Meanwhile Delilah had written to Melynchuk on her new tunic to get an update and received a response:
THE CHICAGO POLICE CHIEF
WAS ALREADY REPLACED
BY CHINESE POLICE CHIEF
It was the next, final line of the message that shocked Delilah as it rolled across her tunic:
BEFORE YOUR ASSAULT
“WHAT?!” she wrote back.
Accompanied by two of the baths’ security officers, the group headed out of the Diocletian grounds and arrived at Julius Caesar’s a few minutes away on foot. Like most of the city’s residential buildings, it was a replica of an Ancient Roman low-rise apartment block of five stories, with street-front shops occupying the ground level. Julius lived in a modest one-bedroom flat on the second floor. He invited them in. Wingyee explored the bedroom and then exited the flat, as if looking for something. Julius shook his head at the officers and their inquiries. They seemed displeased with his response. They sat down and waited for him to divulge more. One of them got up and walked around, picking up and examining various objects, before he drilled his eyes into Julius and said, “Women dui ni hen liaojie.”
In the ensuing silence Zhang whispered, “He said he brought stranger up here but he left as soon as Julius wanted sex. They say they know everything about him.”
Gesturing scornfully at the apartment, Attica exclaimed, “Qualis hic locus? Vere parva. Angustus. Haec insula pecuniam habet.” Pointing to Julius and rubbing her fingertips together she said, “Is pecuniam habet. Dives est!”
They grasped her bafflement over the smallness of the flat. She got her exact meaning across by drawing the building with her finger on the tabletop, starting with the row of shops the floor below. Then she outlined three apartment units on the present floor, twice as many on the floor above, and twice as many again on the next.
“Oh, I get it,” said Delilah. “The apartments get smaller and cheaper each floor up. There are only three apartments on this floor. His should be big and luxurious but it’s cramped and tiny. It should be taking up a lot more space.”
Wingyee had already been nosing around the long hallway and re-entered just as the others went out to have a look. The three apartments were spaced a good distance from each other. The security cops went back in to grill Julius. He continued to offer little information and was poker-faced, though beads of sweat were forming on his brow. “Ni chengren ba!” they urged him.
“Ah? He says neighbors and landlord never there. They tell him they know who landlord is and it’s him. He is landlord! He owns building. But he won’t admit,” said Zhang.
“Aa! Jatbin. Lei nidou!” yelled Wingyee from the bedroom.
They ran in. She had found a secret set of doors and knocked them open with her laser gun and was illuminating what was on the other side with the built-in torch, her finger depressed on the gun’s white button. Hundreds of naked slaves were revealed in the pitch darkness shielding their eyes from the bright beam. A vast pool was also visible. The building’s entire second floor save Julius’ flat had been turned into a bath; the pool descended into much of the first floor as well. When the captives realized they were being rescued, a clamor broke out. “Bangzhu women! Rang women likai zheli!” they shouted.
The officers called the municipal police, secured Julius and asked him to turn on the lights in the bath.
“Meiyou deng,” he said.
“Oh, my god,” said Zhang. “He keeps the slaves in darkness whole time! He says no lights in bath.”
“No way!” said Delilah.
“Oh, am I glad to hear a voice in English,” said one of the slaves. He came up.
“He’s the Chicago cop!” said Delilah. “He’s the one who beat us.”
The police told the captives to wait and they would soon be released. They appeared extremely disoriented by the light and shrunk back in any case. They were asked how long they’d been held. Weeks, months, years, they variously said. How were they fed? Through a trough where stir-fried rice was dumped every day, the same trough they relieved themselves in. It wasn’t quite as horrible as that — water was regularly passed through to clear its contents — yet Zhang, Xu and the cops gasped.
Then pulled the Chief inside. Attica slapped him hard on the face. He buckled to his knees. “Please get me out of here and help me get back to Chicago. Please. I’ll do anything,” he sobbed.
“How long were you in there?” asked Delilah.
“I don’t know. A few hours. I lost sense of time. Has it been longer? It’s completely dark in there. You can’t see your own hands. I didn’t know there was a pool and fell in. The water is dirty, with urine and feces I think. Oh, it was awful. They were all speaking Italian. Why are they speaking Italian?”
“What happened? How did he get you in there?”
“I don’t know. I was sitting with him on the couch. He was chatting and turned the TV on, a holographic TV. I don’t what happened. The next thing I know I woke up in pitch darkness. I must have been gassed or something. He started speaking to me really slowly. Maybe he hypnotized me.”
“Where’s your uniform?”
“I don’t know.”
Julius was forced to reveal where he kept the captives’ clothes. He opened a large closet with numerous shelves neatly stacked with folded tunics, each coded with a number. The cop’s uniform was retrieved and he put it on. Wingyee stared hard at the police badge and yanked it off his chest. “Ngo jingceot zo keoi gingfai. Hai Zigaago colou!”
“She says it’s Chicago police logo,” said Zhang.
Wingyee pulled up her tunic and showed him her own police badge, which though altered somewhat still resembled the Chief’s five-pointed star design.
“What’s going on? What is she doing?” he asked.
“She’s also Chicago police,” said Delilah.
“Are you kidding me? This exhibitionist?”
Wingyee didn’t like his attitude and grabbed his uniform in her fist under his chin. “Ngo saudou fung nei zoengdi jyuzi ge fongsik. Ngo ng zungji. Jigu nei jan ngo ge syutwaa. Jyugu ng hai, ngo zoeng daai nei heoi meiloi ge Zigaago!”
“She tell him he don’t listen to her, she take him to future Chicago,” said Zhang.
“She really is from the future. And she still has her job. You don’t,” said Delilah.
“I know,” said the Chief mournfully, who was staring at Delilah’s tunic, which had received a new message from Melynchuk:
MARTIAL LAW JUST
DECLARED NATIONWIDE
CHINESE TAKEOVER
* * *
Previous chapter: Ch. 22: Chicago
Next chapter: Ch. 24: Zigaago
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
[image error]Forthcoming February 2018:
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel
You might also be interested in:
Reset, a play
Newsex, a play
Lust & Philosophy, a novel
May 18, 2017
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 22: Chicago
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Malmquist took a long hot bath. He washed his two filthy tunics in the tub, rinsed them out and hung them up to dry. No writing was visible on the wet outer tunic. He slipped into Ray’s bed naked and had a long sleep. In the morning, he rummaged around her kitchen and fridge. American items — cheddar cheese, whole wheat bread, eggs, butter, the basics. There was no branding on any of the packaging, though jars of condiments bore Chinese characters printed on simple white labels. “Some kind of hot pepper jam,” he said to himself, dipping into one with his finger.
He fixed himself a grilled cheese sandwich, brewed some coffee in a percolator, and lit up an unfinished ganja roach sitting in the ashtray on the kitchen table. He took a closer look around the room. The books on the shelves and scattered magazines were all in Chinese. He fetched the bound tunics from the bathroom and hung them up on the wall across from the bed. The outer tunic read “WITCHES UNDERWEAR PARTY,” as it originally had when he first acquired it. From the kitchen he retrieved the condiment jar and traced out the characters from the label — “辣椒酱” — onto the tunic. “C’mon, Ray, where are you?” he muttered.
“Nei hai bingo aa?” said a young man with a red beard who had stepped into the apartment.
Malmquist jumped. “Who the hell are you? You scared the shit out of me.”
“Ngo hoji japlei aa?”
“Yeah, go ahead.” Malmquist motioned him in.
“Ngo hai soengmin ge pindim gungzok. Ngo zi hai soeng ze Ray jat zoeng pian.”
“Oh, you want to borrow one of her records? You work in the shop above?”
“Deoi. Ngo giu Mason,” he said, as he latched onto Malmquist’s penis.
“Yeah, I think I remember you working behind the counter when I first passed through the shop.”
Mason stared at Malmquist kindly while continuing to caress his cock. “Nei houci hou guduk,” he continued. “Nei zungji peidung singngoi maa?”
Malmquist looked down at the tumescence forming in the man’s fingers and back at him. “What are you doing to me? Are you gay?”
Mason beaked the fingers of his hand and made a stabbing motion at Malmquist’s groin. Then he repeated the gesture with his fist. “Kyungaau sigwat.”
“What?”
“Kyungaau,” he reiterated, pumping his fist. “Ngo hou sinzoeng.”
“You’re going to slug me in the balls if I don’t have sex with you?”
“Dang jathaa.” Holding up a finger, he dashed back upstairs.
Malmquist noticed a message on the tunic:
WE ARE IN TROUBLE
THEYRE FIREBOMBING US
AFRAID TO STAY OR LEAVE
DELILAH
“WHAT’S GOING ON?” he wrote back.
Mason returned, holding up a tube of some kind of cream. “Sehoengjau.”
“What’s this?”
Placing his thumbs at his temples, Mason expanded both hands over his head like a clown’s tease. “Luk, zidou maa?”
“You’re making fun of me?”
“Luk.”
“I am looking at you.”
Mason pointed to an image of a deer’s antlers printed on the tube. “Luk.”
“Oh, you mean a deer. Why a deer? What is this stuff? Really, I have no idea what’s going on.”
He guided Malmquist onto the bed and spread his legs.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“Fongsung.”
Smothering his fingers with the silken contents, he began to work them into Malmquist’s anus, first one, then two, before slowly, inexorably, as gracefully as a snake as thick as an arm, the whole hand slid in up to the wrist. Mason slowly pumped while Malmquist moaned. Then he noticed Delilah’s response on the tunic:
MY WINDOW IS GONE
I’M SCARED
WHAT DO I DO?
A young woman appeared at Ray’s door and asked Mason, “Nei jiu lau geinoi aa? Ngodei jau haakwu.”
“Hey, can she come over here and help? Hold that up in front of me so I can write on it.”
After some confusion she figured out she was to bring the tunic before Malmquist. On it he wrote: “CAN YOU HOLD ON TILL NIGHT THEN SLIP OUT? THE FENCE HOLE SOUTH NEAR EXPRESSWAY.”
“Vidi, vici — “
”Veni,” completed the parrot. Cornelius had arrived as well and squatted at Malmquist’s side.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘veni, vidi, vici’?”
“I saw, I conquered, I came. Standard greeting. Polite acknowledgement when chancing upon folks caught in flagrante.”
“Ouch! Slow down, will you? I’m not used to this. Will you please ask him why he is doing this to me?”
“You’re in the hands of a pro. He must have taken one look at you and knew you needed it.”
“Keoi seoijiu peidung ge singhong wai,” said Mason.
“He says your body was screaming for passive sex.”
“What’s that?”
“You have it done to you without worrying who’s doing it.”
“I have to say he’s good-looking enough.”
“He’s Belinda’s sister.”
“The waitress in the Heartland? No kidding.”
“You bet.”
“What’s the cream on his hand?”
“Oh, that’s musk oil. You know, from deer. A lubricant.”
Cornelius knelt down next to Malmquist and settled his scrotum sack on Malmquist’s shoulder. His lengthy tattooed member flopped across his chest and was within easy reach of his mouth.
“Are you gay too?” asked Malmquist.
“Ah, a word long out of use. There are no sexual divisions between people anymore. We’re equisexual. You offer yourself freely to anyone without prejudice.”
“Do I have to agree?”
“As long as you — ”
“cooperate,” said the parrot.
Two more women appeared in Ray’s doorway. “Neidei jigu mong ng mong aa?”
“Ngodei zikhak zau jiu jyunsing zo,” Mason told them.
“He’s keeping the customers waiting?”
“Dang ngo jyunsing keoi laa,” said one of the new arrivals, as she stepped onto the bed, pulled up her tunic and prepared to straddle Malmquist.
“See? She’s going to finish you off. Take your time. There’s no rush,” said Cornelius.
“Aa, yat bin!” said the girl holding up Malmquist’s tunic.
They all turned toward the tunic. In place of the usual writing was an image of a burning fire.
“Nigo hai jatgo fozuk ge singsi maa?” said Mason. He had withdrawn his fist from Malmquist’s extremity.
“Wow,” said Malmquist. “It’s so realistic. The flames are moving. It’s a city on fire. Chicago’s burning.”
“Must be the Great Chicago Fire of 2060,” said Cornelius.
“It’s a message from Delilah.”
*
“We’ve got a new arrival from New Gary, Chief. A girl.”
“I’ll get to her in a minute. This suspect is taking longer than usual. Hey, Ramirez, maybe you can help. She doesn’t speak a word of English. Or she’s bluffing. Can you figure out what language she’s speaking? Doesn’t sound like Spanish to me but maybe it is.”
“She don’t look Mexican. Es usted de México?” he asked the beautiful blonde with eyes as clear as ice. For a detainee, she wore an oddly impersonal expression.
“Quid est?”
“De dónde es usted?”
“Non intellego.”
“Crees que no eres inteligente?”
“Non intellego.”
“She says she thinks she’s not smart.”
“That does sound like a kind of retarded form of Spanish. Do you think she’s making it up as she goes along?”
“I can understand her but it’s not Spanish.”
“What is it? Dago talk?”
“You mean Italian? Don’t think so. Well, maybe it is. Eres italiano?”
“How’s she going to understand you if she’s Italian and you’re speaking to her in Spanish?”
“I think it’s the same word. De qué ciudad eres?”
“Vere ego non intellego.”
“Yep, she must be retarded.”
“She used the word ‘ego.’ Isn’t that Latin?”
“Yeah, it means conceited. Now she’s saying she’s conceited? Where are you from? Mexico? Italy? Rome?”
“Venio a Roma.”
“Oh, you’re from Rome, are you. Dumb, blond and conceited. Wherever the hell you’re from, how did you ever hook up with Malmquist?”
Another cop entered. “Chief, the girl we picked up a while ago admits knowing Malmquist but other than that isn’t talking. She does say she’s looking for a blonde named Attica. This wouldn’t be the gal, would it?”
“Bring her in.”
“Oh, Attica, there you are,” exclaimed Delilah as she was led in.
“Mi carissima!” said Attica, standing up.
“They say you’re involved in the Malmquist affair. What’s your role in all this?” asked the Chief.
“She’s innocent, I can tell you that. She got caught up in this and doesn’t know what’s going on. She’s from Ancient Rome.”
“You’re kidding,” he grinned.
“Well, she speaks Latin, doesn’t she?”
“Miss, she’s a suspect in a triple abduction and murder, and you’re a fugitive pedophile,” said the cop.
“I told you I have no idea what all this is about, nor does she. There’s no way she could have cooperated because she doesn’t speak English and she doesn’t even know what a pedophile is. And I don’t believe Jeff shot anybody.”
“Your good old friend Malmquist and this Roman gal here broke into a home at gunpoint and attempted to abduct the family’s daughter but were surprised by the parents. There was a struggle. He shot and killed a boy the two of them had kidnapped and then escaped with another boy they had kidnapped. She got left behind.”
“Yef non occidit illum puerum,” said Attica.
“Who was killed?” asked Delilah. “Gunther?”
“Tuus puer occisus est!”
“Gunther’s dead? No! How?” cried Delilah.
“Alter puer occidit puerum!” gesticulated Attica.
“See! It wasn’t Jeff who killed the boy. It was the other boy who killed him. Jeff would never kill anyone.”
“But he disappeared with the boy. Do you have any idea where they might have gone? Hiding out at your place, perhaps?”
“I just came from there.”
“We know that.”
“Do you officers have any idea what’s happening? We are being attacked by you. My building was firebombed. Someone blasted into my apartment through the window.”
“Where did you get the FN P90?”
“The what?”
“The submachine gun you had with you.”
“Oh, that. An obese teenage boy. Younger than me. He was the one shooting into my apartment. But friendly fire got him first. His dead body was half hanging inside my basement window and blood was streaming out of his mouth — ”
“You’d better hope it wasn’t you who shot him.”
“Check the bullet in his body when you get around to it. I couldn’t get out of my apartment. The building was on fire and the smoke poured in when I opened the door. His body was blocking the window. The only way I could escape was by pulling him all the way through. He must have weighed 300 pounds. I don’t know how I managed. Finally I dragged him through and that’s when I saw where he’d been shot — in the ass! I crawled out the window and ran for my life. Can you blame me for grabbing his gun and trying to save myself? There’s a hole in the fence in a hidden place where there’s no shooting going on. I figured Chicago was now safer than New Gary. Why are we being attacked anyway?”
“Where were you planning to take the aircab?”
“To the address where I was told I could find Attica.”
“You knew that was futile, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I knew I would be tracked but I had a window of opportunity. Or I thought I did. It rejected my payment but started flying anyway and brought me — ”
“Right here. All pedophiles are entitled to a free tour of Chicago’s major attraction — the Pedo Unit. We want you to tell us what you know about the Malmquist abduction.”
“I told you guys I know nothing about it. I spoke with Jeff just yesterday and all he said was he was in trouble in Chicago. He didn’t give any details.”
“Where is he?”
“Chicago. Fifty-five years in the future.”
“Don’t test our patience.”
“What is your relationship with him, anyway?” said the Chief.
“We’re friends.”
“You realize, don’t you, that he’s a middle-aged man and you’re a minor?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Were you two in a sexual relationship?”
“None of your business.”
“Don’t forget where you are, Delilah Power. As a convicted pedophile, you have no rights.”
“So what? Go ahead and send me back to New Gary. You can’t scare me.”
“No, we’ll just keep you here. Forever. No one will ever know. We can do anything to you.”
“Chief, the crowd outside is getting a bit unruly,” said a third cop who had entered.
“Crowd? I thought it was just a group of them.”
“Yeah. Looks to be about a thousand now. And they’re all heavily armed.”
“Damn it. What do they want?”
“They’re demanding we turn all pedophiles in our custody over to them.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Should we burn them?”
“Yeah. Keep it less lethal, though. I thought the Commissioner was dealing with this.”
“He and the Mayor, Sir, they got their hands full with all the fires and the riots going on.”
“Let me take care of these two first.”
When the cops had left, the Commissioner turned back to Delilah. “You and your little cabal have created one helluva mess.”
“What mess?”
“Chicago’s up in arms.”
“Why?”
He slammed the table with his fist. “Because of the triple abduction and homicide carried out by your armed-and-dangerous boyfriend or whatever he is and his foreign agent here!”
“Abductio et homicidium?” said Attica.
“Yes, homicide. So she does understand English. Do you admit to the abduction and homicide?” he asked Attica.
“Admitto? Non admitto!”
“I’m telling you it’s impossible she could have committed murder. Neither did Jeff. He was framed and it was that other boy. I’m sure of it. And if you do anything to me, Inspector Melynchuk will find out, because he’s in charge of us in New Gary. In fact I’m going to contact him right now.”
“Oh, my god, the naivety. You think a two-bit cop in New Gary is going to be of any help to you?”
Delilah traced out the words “INSP MELYNCHUK I NEED NEW ROME IN CHINESE. DELILAH.”
“What are you doing, playing with yourself?”
“I’m sending him a message.”
“What is that, some kind of pedo code?”
“Wait.” Delilah took the new travel tunic out of her pocket and handed it to Attica. “Here, put this on.”
Attica took off her T-shirt and skirt and slipped the tunic over her naked body.
“Oh, so you’re putting on a strip show for me now?” said the Chief. “Maybe we should take her outside where she can have a real audience. That’ll pacify them. In fact both of you putting on a show for them might just send them on their way.”
“HURRY PLEASE INSPECTOR,” Delilah wrote on herself.
“Hey, can I have some fun playing magical crayons on your titties too?” he said, dragging his finger back and forth across Delilah’s chest and poking her breasts. “Oh, yeah, baby, you like playing with yourself? Can I play too? Ooh, I like it, such big soft baby flesh — ”
“Stop it!” Delilah took off her outer tunic. “Attica, put this on too.”
As soon as Attica had the tunic in place, a message appeared on it:
新羅馬
“Yeah, baby, give it to me! And braless yet. Look at that bounce,” the Chief said.
As he continued to rough up her bosom, she started to trace over the characters on Attica’s chest. He pulled her hand away and placed it on his groin. “Hey, don’t I get any respect? Don’t write on her, write on me.”
“Please, officer, let me finish writing my message, and you can do anything you want with me. I promise,” she told him. “I’ll even sleep with you if you want.”
“Are you trying to bribe me? You know everything you’re saying is being recorded.”
“No, it isn’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t be compromising yourself with a minor.”
“All right, let’s just keep things nice and quiet, baby. How about you just give me a little strip show like she did and you can finish your message.”
Delilah pulled her tunic off her shoulder and exposed a breast.
“Yeah, show it to me, baby, all of it. Ooh, yeah.” He tweaked her nipple and yanked the tunic down off the other breast. “Fucking show it to me baby! All of it, you dirty cunt! You think you can fuck with me? Do you know who I am?”
His tweaking grew more spirited, until he was tugging at them violently and slapping them. He ripped off her tunic and began tearing it to shreds.
“What are you doing?” Delilah screamed.
“What is this fucking thing you think can be used as a communication device? Who do think you’re fooling?” he yelled. He slapped her in the face and knocked her down. “You think you can fuck with me!”
“Desine! Noli eam battuere!” shouted Attica.
“You telling me what to do, you fucking Dago whore?”
He punched Attica in the face and tore off her tunics as well. As he proceeded to shred them, she grabbed a long piece off the floor, looped it around the cop’s neck and pulled. He fell down, his legs kicking as he struggled to grasp at the cord. Attica sat on his chest and tightened it, while Delilah sat on his legs behind her, placed the front patches of the tunic on his torso and traced out the characters.
The three of them vanished.
* * *
Previous chapter: Ch. 21: Gwongzau
Next chapter: Ch. 23: Xinluoma
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
[image error]Forthcoming January 2018:
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel
You might also be interested in:
Reset, a play
Newsex, a play
Lust & Philosophy, a novel
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 21: Gwongzau
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People build their lives out of a mixture of reality and symbols. I’ll provide an example from my earlier Chicago days. I once rented the upper floor of a house; the owner lived on the lower floor. He was out of town one winter and asked me to keep an eye on the central heating unit’s pilot light to make sure it was always on. That much at least, the reality principle guided his life. One day I was back down in the basement and noticed the smell of gas coming from a gas line along the ceiling. The most prompt and reliable public service in any city, even faster than an ambulance or the police, is the gas company when you call their emergency number. They were there in a few minutes. They shut off the gas and unscrewed the leaky pipe. “He put his pipe in bare? What the hell is he doing attaching pipes without pipe dope!” they yelled, as they applied glue to the threads and screwed it back in.
I got on the phone to inform my landlord he had to have all his gas lines refitted with pipe dope as soon as possible.
“Pipe dope?”
“It’s a glue, a sealant, to prevent gas from escaping through the joints.”
In other words, his house was possibly days or hours away from being blown sky high. That didn’t stop him too from yelling at me. He was outraged I had approved the gas company’s bill for the service without consulting him first. He was moreover incredulous he could possibly have improperly fitted his own gas lines. Again I tried to explain it was the gas company, not me, that fixed the leaky pipe, and as it was an immediate public threat they didn’t need his permission. No matter. How dare I authorize an unjustified intrusion on his property? It was as if his very identity had been violated. I had messed with his independence, his self-sufficiency, his rights — his symbols. He did finally swallow the humiliation and accepted the need to refit the pipes, but it goes to show how strong resistance to reality can be among symbol-driven types.
Whole countries can be symbol dominated, less beholden to the dictates of reality than elsewhere. The USA was particularly invested in symbols. This increased over time with the nation’s rightward drift and decline of the economy. Down the decades, specters driven by their own logic began to overshadow reality. Americans were traditionally known for a host of admirable qualities — openness and optimism, hospitality and trust, adventurousness and ingenuity. But these national traits became twisted into naivety, stupidity, hostility, recklessness, and the like. People retreated into their homes in a growing collective paranoia, distrustful of their neighbors. Hatred of government, always simmering, reached a boiling point, and the citizenry stopped paying taxes en masse. Though the incident with my landlord was hardly a factor, the rise in residential gas explosions was one conspicuous consequence of the collapse in municipal services. Many of these explosions were catastrophic, given the huge stores of firearms and munitions people hoarded in their basements. It all culminated in the Great Chicago Fire of 2060.
The obsession with guns was fueled by another cultural phenomenon that had gathered momentum over the decades, one which the Russians and the Chinese were quick to exploit. They saw the potential in the blissfully vulnerable American psyche and came up with a grand scheme as brilliant as that of the East India Company’s opium-for-tea trade in the nineteenth century. The Russians had already caused the Internet to morph into something completely different from its innocent heyday; its bustling surface now merely reflected the criminal activity underneath, like a corpse vibrating from its teeming colonies of worms and mites. The malign manipulation ranged from sex scammers milking American men of everything they had to presidential elections. But far more was at stake.
Americans held a strong moral streak, an untapped free-floating energy ever seeking righteous expression, a drive for justice that could be unleashed. They were known as well to have had a long, fraught, schizophrenic-like attitude toward sex, celebrating it with one hand while slapping it down with the other. Ritual social bloodletting required the regular identification and shaming of sexual deviants. Only the nature of the offenses changed over the eras, never their extent or the perpetual need for their public airing. It was well known whom Americans across the entire political spectrum, from antifa anarchists to survivalist militias, regarded as the worst of the worst. The only problem was there weren’t enough of them. Untold legions there surely were yet in hiding, in their secret societies. They needed ferreting out. There were only occasional scandals in the news when there could be a media explosion. The Chinese had the Internet expertise but lacked an understanding of the Western soul. The Russians did not lack for this understanding. They knew what turned the US on, and not only did they have the computer expertise, they did it for sport. They hacked for fun, one savvy technoteen for every dumb American. And then when they had a eureka moment and connected the dots, the hacking became a lot more lucrative.
The Russians were fully at home in the dark web, the wilds of cyberspace where illegal activity flourished. So were the pedophiles. Why not flush them out for profit? It was easy enough to track them down in the web’s obscure corners where they lurked. Soon every pedophile who had ever ventured into the virtual underworld got the unpleasant news over morning coffee: their identity would be revealed if they didn’t fork over a sum equivalent to their annual salary. Since few could pay up, they were promptly outed to the media and the local authorities, while their community, through a new “pedophile” tax (the one tax enjoying popular support), paid the ransom on the suspect’s behalf. Tentative pedophiles who merely engaged children in online conversation were easy bait as well, as were those who fell for Russian teens posing as adults for pay. It was only a small step to shadier means of rounding up child molesters: manufacture them. Average Joes guilty of no more than dabbling in adult porn had their identity attached to toddler porn. They too only learned about it when the ultimatum flashed across their screen. It’s not easy to clear your name once your identity has been stolen, all the more so after it’s been smeared, your mugshot on the nightly news, your electronics seized by the police. The identities of innocent adults working as primary school teachers, sports coaches of juveniles, music tutors of children, and every single minister and priest were next in line to be tampered with and incomprehensibly compromised. Anyone whose employment or activities provided any kind of circumstantial evidence was fair game.
Quite a few Russians became exceedingly wealthy on the tens, indeed hundreds of thousands of Americans zoned or driven out of their neighborhoods and cities and exiled to rural trailer parks. But the biggest prize was legislation passed by Congress to raise the age of consent from eighteen to twenty-one — in line with the drinking age. To be sure, this was most draconian and un-American and garnered scant popular support, despite the celebratory atmosphere of the great pedophile cleansing. It passed when the Russians agreed to share the profits from this huge new demographic with the lawmakers. A six-month grace period was proffered to defuse the anticipated resistance, enough time for those in the age range to either extricate themselves from any relationship or legitimize it in matrimony before they once again became minors. Nevertheless, the outrage against this basic assault on rights and freedom was deeply underestimated. Pedophilia was one thing; criminalizing legal adult relationships was another. Millions planned to disobey and flaunt their sex life on principle. What could the authorities do about it?
Plenty, it turned out. All the evidence that was needed was elegantly assembled through a combination of GPS tracking, facial recognition, financial transactions, and self-incriminating personal messaging. The half-year window gave the hackers ample time to compile comprehensive sexual histories of every American in the eighteen-to-twenty cohort and older who were tied with them. When the big day arrived, the fate of the millions who declined to sever relations with their intimates was already decided. They were expelled from universities, fired from their jobs, and evicted from their apartments. But there was not enough space in the trailer parks to house the newly exiled masses. Concentration camps the size of cities needed to be quickly constructed. Here again China offered its expertise in the rapid mobilization of displaced populations. The newly reigning superpower was delighted at what the Russian devils had accomplished and would be reaping much of the windfall, since the US was at a significant disadvantage in the business arrangement.
The exiles themselves were put to work in the great construction boom and paid prison wages, while developers and suppliers made fortunes. The profits were funneled back to China, invigorating that country’s leisure industry, with the new fad for erecting full-scale replicas of ancient capitals: initially that of Chang’an and later the great cities of Western antiquity — Rome, Athens, even a Babylon. Italians, Greeks, and Iraqis respectively were invited to escape their moribund economies to help build the curious cities. But they had been deceived and while housed and fed were never paid for their labor. Disillusioned, they then found their plans to return home stymied by unforeseen complications: their passports were confiscated. They were now needed to man the cities as “natives,” and that’s where they were to remain. Their feeble protests were brushed off. They had done their homelands a patriotic service by slashing domestic unemployment, and their embassies intended to keep things that way. China for its part, having already bought up most of the world’s economies, was too powerful to be pushed around anymore.
Meanwhile, the guilty millions not dragooned into construction were employed in gargantuan gun factories, another expanding industry. No propaganda campaign was necessary to persuade freaked-out Americans to panic-buy arms against the looming pedophile menace. You’d expect people might have sighed with relief now that the monsters had been largely cleared out of the cities. Paradoxically the opposite happened. The more of them were flushed out, the more there seemed to be, and the more fear of them grew. If people had a lot of guns back in 2015, multiply by a factor squared and that’s what every citizen from children on up now boasted. Loaded pistols hung on Christmas trees as ornaments and stockings were designed to hold rifles. One would think Americans were gearing up for a new civil war. That is exactly what transpired.
When every last purported pedophile had been identified and driven out, the uncertainties and the unease only skyrocketed. Surely they were massing for revenge. Would they soon rebound supercharged like an army of zombies? Was it not a terrible mistake not to have had them all done away with at the start instead of merely exiling them? The concentration camps where they were now pullulating were a mounting peril. Were they not stealing guns at the factories and arming themselves? Were they not already sneaking back into the city to destroy us? The logical thing to do was to bring the war to them, to the concentration camps, while there was still time. But there were obstacles. The government wouldn’t countenance a disruption of business with the Chinese and the Russians, and American citizens were too suspicious of each other anyway to organize more than vigilante mobs.
An unfortunate incident confirmed suspicions and overturned the uneasy state of affairs, when a New Gary pedophile snuck into Chicago with the aid of a European female to stage a brazen triple abduction of two boys and a girl from three separate homes before being caught in the third, but not before killing one of the boys and making off with the other. They were never found and the case was never solved, but galvanized into action the mobs wasted no time in going after the phantom fugitives. At the very moment the roaming armed were kicking open doors in their neighborhoods hunting down molesters supposedly sheltered in basements, their own basements were being ransacked. Many fought back, and many were killed, along with their children. No one was charged with homicide, as everyone could claim self-defense. Heavier munitions in the form of anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns pulverized houses and caused explosions from stockpiled ammo and ruptured gas lines. Community conflagrations dotted Chicago and only a miracle enabled the diminished fire department — one of the few public services left — to gain the upper hand and prevent a city-wide firestorm.
Meanwhile, the Chicago incident sparked riots and burnings in cities across the country. Things were coming to a head, as millions lost their homes to the fires and had nowhere to go. The heavily armed refugees began to merge into angry columns and fanatical parades which wended their way through the smoky streets toward the same destination: the concentration camps. New Gary was the first to be breached; other cities followed.
This much was recognized: business as usual was clearly unsustainable. Americans’ bizarre stockpiling of guns had become a calamitous vicious circle. The Chinese stood much to lose unless things were quickly contained and martial law declared. Their military stepped in and rational policy took over. In a swift, efficient and remorseless nationwide operation, they confiscated the guns, criminalized gun ownership and dismantled the US Government. The ultimate form of control is through language. As this can’t be forced at gunpoint, Americans were gradually weaned off English over the following decades. You could continue to speak English, but your children were educated in Cantonese-medium schools; and then your generation died off. Victory has its own logic, and the Chinese went on to replicate their model across the Americas and on other continents.
Thus much I learned from the holographic history I’ve been entertained with of late and will be indefinitely. Now that it is all over, I have never felt more clear-headed and relaxed. But first things first. For the record, I will admit having abducted Danny, but I emphatically deny killing Gunther, and I deny attempting to abduct Marvin’s daughter; it was they who abducted me. I am after all the prime witness. Nor did that affair have anything to do with how I wound up in Canton. Not because it took place fifty-five years ago, but they never caught me.
Let’s get back to the present, for something dramatic took place today. I had my first visit from Ingmon and the “boss” (you recall it’s Ingmon who was discovered to be the boss). It was so gratifying to see their faces.
“Neihou maa?” said a cheery Ingmon. “Nei kutjing san waanging aa?”
I guess she wants to know how I’m adapting to my new surroundings. Even if I did understand her exact meaning, I can’t respond. Our ears have been electronically wired to receive audio signals through an outside microphone, but we can’t speak. Though I am fully conscious, I can’t even blink my eyes. I try to emote through my face and maybe subtle expressions are visible to them but I don’t know. From my field of vision, which is fixed straight ahead, I can only see others like myself preserved throughout the chamber, and their occasional visitors. I cannot look up or down, and wouldn’t see much anyway, below the glass box enclosing my head in a liquid matrix. I can turn on the hologram with a thought command and tune in to anything I want. A world of knowledge is at my mental fingertips, enough to keep me busy for eternity. However, the presence of a human visitor is obviously preferred. How lucky I am to have Ingmon and the boss, luckier still if Wingyee or Ray happen to make it one day.
As if on cue, Ingmon produces a plastic paper and holds it before me. It contains a message in English, which reads: “Hi Jeff. Wingyee made sure I got this to you. How are you doing over there? Really sorry to hear about the verdict. I had no idea. Anyway I finally figured out what happened to myself, my disappearance and all that and the gaps in my memory over the years. In case you haven’t heard, I was finally able to escape from the fake Ancient Rome of 2115, not that of 2060 you recall from your times there with good old Delilah. To make a long story short, I was there all along! Next time I’ll tell you what to happened to me after you left in more detail. I just wanted to make sure you got this for now. Miss you. Be lovable, Ray. P.S. Cornelius says hi.”
* * *
Previous chapter: Ch. 20: Roma
Next chapter: Ch. 22: Chicago
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
[image error]Forthcoming January 2018:
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel
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Filed under: Fiction Tagged: China expat novel, Dystopian satire
May 16, 2017
Lotus: Updating the great Chinese socialist realist novel
With the Communists fighting both the Japanese invaders and the Guomindang reactionaries in a triangular war, the 1930s-40s was a tumultuous and extraordinarily violent period in the country’s history, resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese, mostly civilians. Such an earth-shaking era was story-worthy to say the least, and revolutionary authors applied their firsthand experience of the war years to penning firey, action-packed pageturners in the tradition of socialist realism. Among the best-known of these novels were Liang Bin’s Keep the Red Flag Flying (红旗谱), Qu Bo’s Tracks in the Snowy Forest (林海雪原), Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth (青春之歌), Liu Qing’s Builders of a New Life (创业史), and Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan’s Red Crag (红岩), all written in the late 1950s-early 1960s (also published in English by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing). This flowering of communist fiction dried up during the Cultural Revolution. To Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao, nothing was quite revolutionary enough to pass muster and she banned virtually everything, including the aforementioned novels.
The decades since have presented a quandary for Chinese writers. With socialism firmly established and war and devastation a thing of the past, in the absence of some new vital struggle or national emergency, it must have been, and continues to be, a tall order to revisit the authentic socialist realist novel. That is until the contemporary female writer Zhang Lijia saw what was staring at us all along and has now fashioned into an impressive new work of socialist realism, the novel Lotus (Henry Holt & Co., 2017). What momentous cause was this up-and-coming author the first to bring into urgent focus? None other than the great scourge of prostitution and sex work.
Mao succeeded in eradicating prostitution from China in the 1950s, and the country remained free of the cancer until the Opening Up after 1978. It seems you can’t have economic growth and free markets without allowing the bad in with the good. Over the past four decades the number of prostitutes has rebounded with a vengeance. Millions have become entrapped in the sex trade, forced by poverty to hand over their autonomy and dignity to the pimps and madams running the brothels, KTV venues and massage parlors lining every city and town in the country. While Chinese women generally enter sex work of their own accord (kidnapping and child slavery appear to be a greater problem in South Asia), the cycle of economic hardship tends to keep them in this occupation throughout the prime of their life.
Until the release of Lotus, few books or publications shed light on the industry on the Mainland, as no state-approved publishers would permit frank discussion of the topic, even when fictionalized. Originally, this taboo stemmed from the official claim that prostitution did not exist in China; to write about it could have gotten one in trouble for spreading false rumors. Today, sex work is officially acknowledged, but because it’s illegal, what writer wishes to implicate herself in the trade by divulging intimate knowledge about it, even from a critical perspective? Zhang surmounted this hurdle by writing in English and publishing her novel abroad.
Interestingly, as well, Zhang adapted her story to the socialist-realist format. It might be assumed the subject matter would be better suited to a straightforward investigative-reportorial style in the gritty, realist novel tradition of say, early twentieth-century American fiction (Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, etc.). After all, Zhang’s book is based on reality; she thoroughly researched the industry and interviewed sex workers in a variety of venues to create the composite massage parlor where Lotus, the book’s heroine, is employed. Unlike realism, however, the socialist realism does not seek to represent a faithful picture of surface reality, such as what a photographer or news reporter might see on the scene. The problem with the so-called impartial or objective documentarian approach is that the confrontation of the abject is liable to plunge the reader into cynicism or despair. Socialist realism, by contrast, has a motivational, indeed militant, consciousness-raising purpose; it clearly demarcates the revolutionary from the reactionary and casts class struggle as optimistic, inspiring the reader and setting an example to follow.
[image error]In socialist realism, characterization is starkly delineated into good and evil prototypes, even to exaggerated effect where necessary. For example, the righteous rage felt by the peasants in Liang Bin’s Keep the Red Flag Flying, whose lands are left unprotected from flooding because evil landowners have stolen the funds intended for dyke construction, is foregrounded at every turn: “Zhu’s nostrils flared and he charged, his arms like flails. He caught Feng’s wrist. ‘Damn you, Feng! Say that again!’ His eyes nearly burst from their sockets. He was panting with rage.” To reinforce the violence of such emotions for the reader, they must be continually repeated: “Zhu Laogong’s lungs nearly burst with rage. Glaring at Big Heart, he spat out two mouthfuls of blood. Then he fell to the ground, his face the color of wax.”
Zhang Lijia similarly thrusts stage center an updated version of class conflict in China, embodied in the figure of the hapless peasants of Lotus’s village in Sichuan. Communist Party corruption is ubiquitous above all in the provinces. It’s precisely the harsh conditions of rural poverty that drive Chinese girls such as Lotus into sex work in the first place. Note again the telling visual details that serve to create a memorable visual tableau which sticks in our mind and raises our consciousness in the process:
Luo Kecheng pushed his sleeves farther up, as if ready for a fight. “In this place, ‘heaven is high and the emperor is far away.’ The local officials are all corrupt. They build grand office buildings for themselves and always have lavish banquets. Where’s the money from? From us, from our blood and sweat….agriculture tax, irrigation taxes, family planning administration fees, and ‘donations’ for a road that had never been built.” Luo Kecheng continued…the veins in his neck bulging. “When I refused to pay the extra tax earlier this year, guess what happened? The village officials sent thugs to beat me up, as if I were a criminal. Those tamade turtles!” He spat hard on the ground. His phlegm rolled into a dust dumpling.
[image error]Another important technique in socialist-realist is transparent correspondence between personality and physiognomy or physique. We do not want to confuse the reader with complex or ambiguously rendered characters whose appearance can’t be immediately “read.” Revolutionary male heroes must be depicted as tall, strong and handsome, with dark brows and honest, penetrating eyes; revolutionary heroines are of course beautiful, which follows from their unblemished nature. To take an example from another novel mentioned above, Qu Bo’s Tracks in the Snowy Forest, the young heroine, White Dove, is “very pretty, with cheeks as pink as roses. Deep dimples flickered in the corners of her constantly smiling mouth. Her large beautiful eyes flashed so gaily it seemed they could almost speak. White Dove wore braids which hung beside her ears, and feathery tendrils of hair played about her forehead and temples.” Likewise, a brief glance at this description of the female KMT bandit Butterfly Enticer reveals her as evil physically incarnate:
An incredibly long head perched on her neck like an ear of corn. In an attempt to disguise her fantastic ugliness, she covered her enormous forehead with bangs right down to her eyebrows….The combination of dry yellow skin and the black freckles made her face even more revolting. She coated it with powder, so thickly at times that the powder flaked off when she blinked her eyes. Because her teeth had turned black from opium, she had them all crowned with gold. When she smiled, the glare was painful.
That Lotus, the heroine of Zhang’s novel, is beautiful goes without saying, though again it’s not the sophisticated glamor of the city girl but the natural innocence — her face “the shape of a sunflower seed” — of countryside feminity: “She wasn’t the showy sort who lured people into turning their heads in the street, but rather the sort that could endure scrutiny: the longer Bing looked at her, at those symmetric features as delicate as the finest embroidery, the more beautiful she seemed.”
The males patronizing Lotus are inevitably suspicious and degraded types, their nature necessarily outwardly manifest in their very appearance and manner. The client nicknamed Funny Eye, though endowed with a good physique, has a “squint eye” and a “lopsided smile.” Others are “thuggish” and violent, or merely unappealing losers, such as the businessman with “pathetically thin legs and a potbelly,” his male member also repugnant: “It was red and shining, especially its turtle head. After five minutes, which seemed like an eternity for Lotus, the client gave up. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ he said good-naturedly. He then finished the job himself.” Likewise the sordid description of the rapist who took her virginity, who “opened her legs like a pair of scissors….Moments later, the man let out a short and high-pitched groan and collapsed on top of her. He smelled of sweat, cigarettes, and grease.” In a police lockup after being arrested in a brothel raid, Lotus is forced to strip in front of an officer. She “caught sight of the bulge in his uniform pants. His face was now the color of a pig’s liver.” The paid-for sex act is invariably absurd as well, exemplified for instance by the client ironically named Family Treasure: “’Oh, my Little Heart, I spent the whole day looking forward to this.’ He pounced on her, like a hungry dog jumping on a piece of juicy meat, and planted more wet kisses on her face and neck. ‘Now tell me: am I your first for today?’ he asked.”
[image error][image error]The man who is to eventually rescue Lotus is a more sympathetic and attractive, if somewhat flawed figure, his credentials not wholly impeccable yet sufficient for the purpose of the narrative. Cultivating a bohemian look with a ponytail and goatee, Bing abandons the pressure-cooker world of shady business-dealing to become a freelance photographer in Shenzhen, a city with a vibrant sex trade. He is fascinated by the female nude, and lives in shabby neighborhoods to try to get in the good graces of sex workers he can persuade to photograph. Lotus at first flatly refuses, but feels indebted to him after he bails her out from the police, and poses nude for him. If this might seem to represent a kind of prostitution, there is a key difference. At no point during his sojourn in Shenzhen’s underbelly does he ever compromise his principles and pay for sex, even massage, with any of the women he intermingles with. “A decent man with his own firm moral grounding and clear conscience,” he refuses to cross the line and exploit a woman sexually, least of all Lotus, whom he falls in love with. She gradually opens up to him as well. When they do finally make love, it’s untainted by any history of monetary exchange. Accordingly, Bing is portrayed as a physically attractive enough figure, and grows more so over time as he matures spiritually: “Now, in his middle age, his body had filled out and he felt more comfortable with his more sturdy, sophisticated appearance. And one day soon his ex-wife would realize how she had underestimated him.”
Nevertheless, the potential of their relationship is ultimately thwarted by a significant flaw in Bing’s character — that of vacillation. Instead of committing himself to Lotus in marriage, and thus once and for all rescuing her from her perilous profession, he leaves Shenzhen for a photography assignment in Beijing that can significantly advance his career. She is left in the lurch, and though he later returns to try to patch things up, she has moved on. The novel ends on an uncertain note, with Lotus achieving a degree of self-clarity and autonomy in her new role as an informal schoolteacher of migrant children, but at the cost of a fuller self-actualization that might have been realized with greater guidance. While no longer in the sex trade, she remains finally a solitary creature. This ambivalent ending, as opposed to a more decisive or victorious one, also constitutes the novel’s central limitation.
[image error][image error]Here we might make an instructive comparison with what is generally considered to be the finest of the Chinese socialist-realist novels, Yang Mo’s The Song of Youth. The two novels have some interesting parallels. Both chart the coming-of-age of a heroine, Lotus, and in the earlier novel, Lin Tao-ching. Both heroines are fortunate enough to encounter influential men who open their eyes, but in the case of Tao-ching it’s more complicated. She first meets — and marries — the scholarly but politically apathetic Yung-tse. He awakens her to the world of books but not to the calamitous events happening around them with Japan’s advancing occupation of China. Her instinct gets her swept up in these events anyway, and she quickly falls in love with a brave and handsome patriot, Chia-chuan, who introduces her to revolutionary literature.
Things are brought to a head in a decisive scene when her husband tries to strongarm her back into her domestic role as submissive wife:
“Tao-ching, how lovely you are! Like crab-apple blossom or a beauty waking from a dream in spring….” Yung-tse, who had slipped quietly into the room, was gazing at her graceful figure as she lay there.
Tao-Ching, ignoring him, picked up a book and buried her face in it. He went up to her and took the book from her hand, pulling a face at the title, Capital.
“What problems is this great disciple of Karl Marx studying now?” he asked with a smile.
“Why must you make fun of me?” she cried, her glance resting on him for a moment with the conviction that the Yung-tse whom she had loved had turned into someone quite vulgar and loathsome….Flinging her book on the bed, Tao-ching turned her back on him contemptuously.
Tao-ching arranges to hide Chia-chuan, on the run from the police, at her home. She cannot do this, however, without Yung-tse’s knowledge. In deft socialist-realist style, the author paints a telltale visual contrast between the two men in their encounter, the calm revolutionary and the anemic and agitated reactionary: “Chia-Chun looked quietly at Yung-tse’s bony, stooping shoulders — in his agitation he had not even troubled to take off his hat and the shadow of his head on the wall was like a large black mushroom, his lanky body representing the stalk.” Tao-ching quickly divorces Yung-tse, but not before he betrays Chia-chuan to the police. He is soon arrested and killed in captivity, and tragically they are not able to consummate their love. But he is the chief inspiration that sparks her political consciousness and provides the driving force for the remaining narrative. And it hardly bothers the author that the bulk of the novel is devoted to the rapidly developing political events rather than a love story, for “how can love compare with our revolutionary cause?”
[image error]Unlike Lotus and Bing, who are left drifting and unmoored from any political cause, Tao-ching understands she is no longer “an isolated individual” but “a fearless fighter in the vanguard to liberate her country and people.” Having joined a community of fellow activists and progressives, she is energized. This animates the narrative and suffuses the dialogue with intensity, purpose and fascination. As Shu-hsiu, a young revolutionary girl mentored by Tao-ching, announces, “‘You want to know where I’m going? You’ll never guess! The Party has agreed to my request — I’m to stop studying and go to a factory to work with the factory hands. Can you believe it? I’m going to be among workers!’ Excitement had made her almost incoherent.”
The gripping experience of reading The Song of Youth clarifies what’s missing from Zhang Lijia’s Lotus. She didn’t get the male protagonist Bing quite right, failing to imbue this halfhearted aesthete and drifter with sufficient purpose, though she might have developed him into a strong, motivational figure and thereby transformed the story into a more consequential novel. What the author should have done, that is, was to inject her hero and heroine with political inspiration: what needed to be done and what action to take, namely to launch a campaign to banish the sex trade from China, starting with grassroots organizing at the local level and eventual mobilization of the masses. Then the problem of the trajectory of their relationship would have been solved. No longer the central preoccupation of the story, it would have disappeared into the background, as the focus shifted to the larger of event of women’s emancipation from prostitution.
* * *
More book reviews by Isham Cook:
The 1.3 billion-strong temper tantrum: Review of Arthur Meursault’s Party Members
The literature of paralysis: The China PC scene and the expat mag crowd
The ventriloquist’s dilemma: Asexual Anglo travelogues of China
Filed under: China Tagged: Chinese prostitution, Chinese revolutionary novels, Chinese socialist realism, Zhang Lijia
May 9, 2017
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel. Ch. 20: Roma
[image error]
“Stop shooting!” yelled Malmquist.
“What happened?”
“Get out of the cage.”
“It’s not a cage. We’re stuck under a board. I can’t move my arm.”
Malmquist crawled out from under the board. It was a toppled litter. He extracted Danny’s arm and dragged the rest of him free. There had been screams. A pair of Roman ladies lay flung on the ground next to them. Several slaves bent over another person who was prostrate. A growing pool of blood and commotion. Voices exclaiming, “Quid accidit?”
“Let’s get out of here, now! Follow me.”
“Where’s my gun?”
“We have no time to talk.”
Confusion and the crush of the crowd enabled them to escape. Malmquist’s tunics were both torn open and he grasped them to hide his nakedness as they dashed out of Trajan’s Forum and through the marketplace in back.
“Don’t you tell me what to do, bandage head. You were trying to assault me just now! Where the fuck are we?”
“Listen, you brat. This is Ancient Rome. One of your gunshots caused that pool of blood just now. You’d better pray it was only a slave or we’re going to be executed on the spot. I’m taking us somewhere safe.”
Danny looked around him at the dizzying squalor of the Argiletum. “Where are we? What’s with the scag clothes? Who are all these filthy people in sheets and rags?”
Malmquist made a beeline toward Syria’s brothel, dragging Danny by the arm. “I told you, Ancient Rome.”
“Give me a break. And what’s all this scuz and sewage on the street? Is it jism?”
“What?”
“It’s jism, all right. I know the smell of jism, turd face. That’s pedo waste flowing along the street and you’ve ambushed me in a street full of pedos.”
Danny broke free of Malmquist’s grasp. He produced his Magpul FMG9 folding machinegun from his back pocket and pointed it at him, voice quivering. “Now I know what’s going on. You kidnapped me. You knocked me unconscious in that cage and smuggled me into New Gary. If you don’t get me back to Chicago immediately, I’ll blow you away along with everyone else on this street!”
“You brought that gun as well?”
“I should have blown you away that day in Munchees. I could have in self-defense and gotten off scot-free, and that’s what I’m going to do now. You have ten seconds to get me out of here.”
“We are not in New Gary, Danny. I’m the only person who can get you out of here and if you kill me you’re stuck here for good. And that gun won’t do you much good against Roman sharpshooters with bows and arrows.”
“To hell with you, pedo! The Chicago police will rescue me and they’re on the way.”
“Put your gun down, Danny.”
“Quid agis?” said Syria, who had stepped out, along with a naked Giulia in gold filaments and a tall lad dressed as a female, who had apparently been in the midst of someone’s intimate ministrations, for poking out of his robes was a semi-tumescent bejeweled penis.
“Ah, Jeff, sei tornato,” said Giulia. “Chi è il ragazzo?”
“You’re bringing me to these perverts?” said Danny, now in tears. “Fuck you, asshole! You’re dead — ”
As Danny pulled the trigger the gun was snatched away by a burly man dressed in an immaculate toga, and the bullets missed their target. The recoil of the discharge sent the gun flying. Smacking Danny away with his hand, the man picked up the gun and looked at it with curiosity.
The tall lad approached. “Qui est puer?”
The burly man picked Danny up by the hair and brandished a knife. “Imperator, interficiam eum?”
The lad caressed Danny’s face. “Numquid times ne tibi non placeam, bellus puer?” Pulling him into Syria’s brothel by the edge of his pants, he added, “Quid dicis, muliebris patientiae scortum, cuius ne spiritus purus est?”
“Who the fuck are you? Oh, no, your dick is sticking out,” said Danny.
“Quod vestimenta sua novis?” wondered the lad, tugging at Danny’s jeans.
“Giulia, the kid doesn’t know where he is. Don’t let them hurt him,” said Malmquist.
“Cosa vuole fare?” she asked.
“Vere, quia a pulcher puer,” said the crossdressing lad, stroking Danny’s blond locks as the man in the toga held him aloft. “Mi carissime.”
Danny squirmed under the man’s grip. “Keep off me, you fucking pedo!”
“Digli di comportarsi bene. È l’imperatore,” Giulia cautioned Malmquist.
“I know.”
“Inimica est,” said the lad, pouting. “Comprehende eum.”
The man in the toga whisked Danny back to the street and instructed Malmquist to follow. Just then another toga-clad man approached in urgency, exclaiming, “Imperator, dux occisus est.”
“Quid est?”
“Celeriter!”
Syria held Giulia back as the others rushed up the street. “Mane.”
“Cosa sta succedento?” asked Giulia.
“Age tuum negotium.”
A crowd was gathered across from Nerva’s Forum. A toga-clad man lay on the ground in a pool of blood next to a horse. More muscular types materialized out of nowhere and cleared a path for the tall lad, trailed by Malmquist and Danny. The crowd spoke in hushed voices, “Praetorianus occisus est.”
“Quis occidit eum?” asked the lad.
“Nescimus.”
“He did it!” yelled Danny, pointing to the burly fellow holding his FMG9.
The man glanced at the machinegun and back at the body in confusion.
“Quis est puer?” the crowd asked. “Quomodo audeat accusare eum.”
“Quod telum est?” said the lad, pointing to Danny’s gun.
“Non certus,” said the burly man, who was examining the gun. “Iacit sagittas invisibiles?”
“Look at the mess you got us into, bright boy,” said Malmquist. “They don’t get it. But we will finally be held responsible.”
“Look what he’s doing. He’s pointing the gun at himself. Don’t look into the barrel, you moron!” yelled Danny.
A moment later there was a loud crack and a spray of blood. The man had shot himself in the face. The ladyboy fainted and was caught in the arms of a toga-clad bodyguard. Seconds later he revived and issued a command. They all now headed in the direction of the Roman Forum, whisking Malmquist and Danny along.
“Where are we going?”
“To the palace, I assume. Either that or a dungeon,” said Malmquist.
“Who are these men?”
“The Praetorian Guard. That teenager dressed as a lady is the emperor. I suggest you be on your best behavior.”
“I want my gun back.”
“Fat chance of that. Start getting used to being unarmed.”
“They will give it back when they’re out of ammo and need my help to get more.”
They passed through the Forum and headed up the Via Nova.
“I recognize this street,” said Malmquist. “We’re going up the Palatine Hill. Who knows, if we survive this ordeal, you might eventually get to see the Circus Maximus on the other side. They have wholesome activities there like chariot racing, more suitable for someone your age than collecting guns.”
“I know what chariot racing is, ass wipe. Guns would make it a lot more fun, like cowboys and Indians. Blow the drivers right out of their chariots.”
“At least you’re getting the greatest history lesson ever. Do you even attend school?”
“Estis fugitivi?” one of the bodyguards asked Malmquist.
“No, we’re not fugitives.”
“Quid agitis? Germanici?”
“No, we’re not Germans.”
“Britannici?”
“Close enough.”
Malmquist and Danny were sent into the palace and dumped on silver-framed sofas in a large gold-lined hall porticoed with crystal columns. Rose petals wafted down from a ceiling of finely sculpted ivory; a dome made of sapphire suffused the hall in a dusky blue glow. Tigers and leopards ambled about, caressing the new guests with their tails. The guards laughed as Danny hyperventilated in a panic.
“They must be tame,” said Malmquist.
The emperor made his appearance minutes later in a chariot drawn by four naked women. He was dressed in a toga woven of fine gold thread and wore a jewel-encrusted diadem on his crown. He held Danny’s machinegun upright like a sceptre. As soon as he sat down across from the two guests, their cushions deflated and they dropped through the sofa frame onto the floor. The emperor and everyone else present laughed hysterically.
“Ubi hoc telus adeptus est?” the emperor asked them.
“Non linguam latinam loquuntur,” one of the toga-clad men responded on their behalf.
“Unde venerunt?”
“Nescimus.”
“Quam linguam loquuntur?”
“Nescimus.”
“Convocate interpretes,” said the emperor.
“I think they’re trying to figure out what language we speak,” said Malmquist.
The two were served a platter with several steaming cone-shaped objects. They were instructed to slice them open with knives and partake.
“What are these?” Malmquist asked.
A grinning servant mimed a woman’s breasts.
“Are these tits? No fucking way am I going to eat this,” snapped Danny.
“I think they’re sow’s teats, in fact,” said Malmquist. “I hope.”
He cut into one and something shiny spilled out — gemstones. Another general burst of laughter. A servant spiced up the dish by flinging a fistful of gold dust on it. More laughter.
“You need to play along and not get angry,” Malmquist nudged Danny.
The emperor was distracted and fiddling with the gun. A round shot off and the strange black object that was lighter than iron flew out of his grasp from the recoil. They all looked around and nobody seemed to be hurt.
“They have no fucking idea how to fire a gun.”
“Of course, they don’t.”
“I need to teach you idiots. Here, give me the gun.”
“Noli dare ei telum, imperator. Etiam periculosum,” warned one of the bodyguards.
“Utique,” said the emperor. “Tenete eum dum docet me quomodo uti.”
“Don’t make any sudden moves, Danny, or we’re both dead.”
A knife at his throat and his arms grasped by the guards, Danny instructed the emperor on how to brace the rifle against the shoulder. He also learned how to lock and unlock the safety, and how to fold up and unfold the gun into its little self-contained box, all of which mesmerized the men in togas. A guard grabbing Danny’s shoulder noticed something under his shirt and pulled it off.
“Give me my shirt back, asshole!”
His torsos and legs were crisscrossed with belts of magazine clips — enough ammunition to keep the gun in operation for some time. This was quickly figured out and Danny was stripped down to his underpants. “No!” he yelled, crying. “Give me back my ammo.”
The interpreters were brought in, but the emperor had gone off somewhere with his new toy.
Soon a dreamy, high-pitched voice could be heard from another hall, calling out, “Puer carissime!”
The faces of the guards and attendants were strained with suppressed laughter.
“Veni, puer carissime. Veni,” the voice echoed.
“What’s that?” asked Danny. “Someone singing?”
“I think someone’s being summoned.”
The naked sylphs then rolled the chariot up to Danny. “Escende,” the guards urged him.
“Veni, puer carissime,” the voice repeated from afar.
“What’s going on?”
“You’re being ordered to ride the chariot.”
“Why?”
“It doesn’t matter why. You don’t have much choice.”
“I can’t ride this fucking thing. Won’t you come with me? I’m scared.”
Danny in his underwear and Malmquist in his torn rags ascended the carriage. The jiggling slaves swept them into another chamber considerably bigger than the former, resembling the frigidarium of the Caracalla baths but vaster still. The airy space contained a lake surrounded by woods. An oculus in the glass roof ushered in a beam of moonlight which fell on a shabby little structure on an island in the lake, a hovel with telltale lanterns hung over the entrance — and the illumined face of the emperor poking out of the curtained doorway.
“I recognize those lanterns,” said Malmquist. “It’s a brothel. He built a brothel in the palace!”
The chariot rolled over a bridge and pulled up to the hovel’s entrance. The emperor was back in female apparel. “Ah, venisti, mi carissime,” he said, reaching out to the boy.
“Help!” screamed Danny, as he was pushed into the hovel’s entrance by the giggling girls. A leopard slipped in after him.
“As for myself, I’m getting the hell out of here,” said Malmquist to no one in particular, while writing the word “ROMA” on his tunic. A moment later he was in Trajan’s Forum. “Great, it worked.”
Syria and Giulia were shocked to see him back at the brothel, having assumed he and the boy might never be heard from again.
“Quello che è successo?”
“Ubi est puer?”
“I may not have much time,” said Malmquist, catching his breath. “Can you fix these tunics? You can just sew them together as one for now.” Syria went to get a needle and thread. “No, wait. Syria, can you watch the street?” He pointed toward the Forum. “Giulia can sew this up.”
“Remeabunt?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t take any chances. Giulia, do you like it here? Do you want to come back with me or stay here for good?”
“Mi piace essere quì. Non sono ancora pronto per tornare indietro.”
“Quando Attica remeabit?” asked Syria.
“She’s not ready to come back yet.”
“Quid?”
Giulia particularly seemed to miss Attica. “Che cosa intende?”
“Actually she hasn’t seen New Rome yet.”
“Che cosa?”
“I can’t explain now. I have to go back first.” He held her face between his hands. “Giulia, I don’t know if I’ll be coming back here. But Delilah can come and get you if you want.”
“Dilaila?”
“Yeah. We’ll have her sent here to check up on you, and she’ll have a new tunic with her in case you can’t get your tunic back from Attica.”
“Attica ha preso la mia tunica?”
“If she doesn’t come back, that is.”
“Non tornerà?”
“I don’t know.”
“Non capisco.”
“Someone will be back for you, trust me.”
Giulia finished sewing up the tunics and then exclaimed, “Cosa significa?”
A message on Malmquist’s tunic read:
YOU THERE JEFF?
FOR YOUR SAFETY
DO NOT RETURN
TO NEW GARY
OR CHICAGO
MELYNCHUK
When he inquired back as to why, he received the following response:
YOU’RE WANTED
FOR MURDER
AND ABDUCTION
IN BOTH CITIES
ALL OVER THE NEWS
“Oh, shit. What do I do?” He considered for a moment before writing back, “WHAT’S THE CHINESE FOR CHICAGO? ASK THE ANDROID. NO. NOT CHICAGO. NEW GARY. GIVE ME THE SAME CHARACTERS AS LAST TIME.”
When Melynchuk responded, Malmquist traced over the characters with his finger and found himself deposited in a vaguely familiar location: the New Gary cafeteria, year 2115.
He quickly abandoned the restaurant before attracting any unwanted attention and made his way over to Delilah’s place. The tenements had undergone extensive gentrification over the preceding half century. At least that’s what the dazzling painted colors causing each building to shine like a peacock and the rich flora and vegetation sprouting from the windows as organically as body hair from a girl’s armpit suggested. He went over to peer through the windows of the flat she had occupied and saw a group of young people sitting in a circle and fondling one another’s genitals. Delilah was not among them, either the younger or the elder, and her apartment’s décor was missing as well.
He made his way over to Broadway. There was no bar where the bar had been. He followed the flow of people toward the lake and figured out the means of getting to Chicago by ferry, and eventually, the Heartland Café Museum.
“They just left,” said Cornelius.
“Where did they go?”
“To that fake Ancient Rome you told me about in China. They’re trying to find Ray.”
“I know.”
“And Wingyee is looking for you as well.”
“I want to go to Ray’s place. You can tell Wingyee that I’m here, and will cooperate fully with the investigation.”
“Do you have any idea where Ray might be?”
“Chinese Rome, 2115. And I have no idea how to get there.”
* * *
Previous chapter: Ch. 19: New Gary
Next chapter: Ch. 21: Gwongzau
Chapter 1: New Gary, IN
[image error]Forthcoming January 2018:
The Kitchens of Canton, a novel
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Filed under: Fiction Tagged: Chinese expat fiction, Dystopian satire
