Fiction

My Old Faithful

Yang Huang

The botany of a marriage – fiction by Yang Huang

As soon as I set foot in the nursery’s garden I find the auspicious flower: a red double peony. Its huge blossoms burst forth as if brimming over with rose-red joy. I stand in awe, while the store clerk tells me its strong stems never fall, even in the harshest weather. Its name, Old Faithful, makes it perfect for my home, as my husband and I are going to have our thirtieth wedding anniversary in two weeks.

“Yes,” I say.

I carry the potted peony to the storefront. My husband is talking to a young woman with a fluffy, chrysanthemum-like hairdo. “Can you give me a hand?” I call out to him. The woman glances at me, backs away into the crowd, and boards the bus.

My husband takes my heavy pot and clamps it onto the back seat of his bike. “You scared away some business,” he tells me with a smile.

“What sort of business?”

“The bawdy kind.” He crisscrosses the pot with a nylon rope and fastens a dead knot. “I’m pretty sure she was a prostitute.”

Reviews

In the Gutter, Looking at the Stars

Harvey Thomlinson

Harvey Thomlinson reviews Happy Dreams by Jia Pingwa

Among the middle-class denizens of the literary city, outsiders like Jia Pingwa often feel a responsibility to inscribe their own people within its walls. Some such sense seems to have informed Happy Dreams, which follows poor laborer Happy Liu from Freshwind – a Shaanxi village like the one where Jia grew up – to the provincial capital of Xi’an, where Jia now lives as a successful author, his international reputation currently cresting.

The novel persuasively sketches the continuities that bind city and countryside in modern China as Happy and his friend Wufu are received by their mercurial fellow villager Gem Han, who has made it big as one of Xi’an’s four kings of trash. They are assigned a patch of Prosper Street to pick trash, and lodgings at Leftover House, in a muddy urban village where migrants survive amid squalor. Jia Pingwa’s perceptiveness shines through in startling details about the bare boards the poor sleep on, the stale food they eat, the hurtful contempt they suffer. The descriptions of maggoty toilets will stick in some readers’ throats like the moldy bread that Happy and Wufu subsist on.

Dispatches

Searching for Home

Peta Rush

Family footsteps retraced – Peta Rush

It’s Chinese new year, which means auspicious red paper decorations and lanterns are being hung up, and fireworks can be heard going off every evening. For those who live away from their laojia, or ancestral home, it also means taking the bus, train or plane in the largest annual human migration in history, as people return to their family homes for the holidays.

I might do the same, if I knew where mine was.

Essays

Blade Runner with Bicycle Rickshaws

Brendan O’Kane

Cruising the Shenzhen strip for a nosh  – Brendan O’Kane

Needless to say, there was a problem.

The signature strip on the back of my card had worn off from a year’s worth of pocket-borne abuse (I guess I’ll have to start keeping my sandpaper in the OTHER pocket). And without my signature, nothing – not the signatures on my passport or voter registration card or school ID or expired learner’s permit; not pleading; not whining “Come on, be a pal!” in Mandarin; nothing – would convince the bank teller to let me withdraw cash.

Hidden History

The Rite Stuff

Jeremiah Jenne

How a Christian missionary fell foul of the Chinese Emperor – Jeremiah Jenne

Every expat living in China has bad China days, but surely none of them could compare to that of French missionary Charles Maigrot, when arguably the most powerful emperor in Chinese history openly mocked his bad Chinese in front of the entire court.

Charles Maigrot (1655-1730) was a 20-year veteran of missionary work in China on behalf of the Missions Etrangères de Paris. In the summer of 1706, Maigrot traveled to Chengde, the vacation home of the Kangxi Emperor, at the invitation of the Vatican’s new representative in China, Charles-Thomas Maillard de Tournon, also a Frenchman. It was Maigrot’s unfortunate assignment to assist Tournon in relaying a Papal decree, which set the emperor straight over just who had the final say when it came to China’s growing number of Christian converts. This meeting would set up the ultimate cosmological steel-cage match: the Son of Heaven vs. the Supreme Pontiff.