Hitotoki – Shanghai Zhongxue Guojibu

by Ryan Carter

June 12-13, 2010

I’d like to say it was a test of their ability to deal with genderbending, premeditated, but really no such plan came to my head. I was looking at Renata’s nails lacquered green and needed something to break up the monotony of a seven-day week, mostly for them, because into this week we also had to cram nearly everything. Angel Liu had drifted to the front row and I asked her, for me, casually, “what color nail polish would you have?”  She looked down hard for a minute and then she defiantly as she always does- for here is a woman with a backbone through which you cannot pass your hand, and maybe the only one in her class-” dark pink”, she says. Tomorrow I’ll paint them for you, she says. Continue reading…

The Beat Coffee House

by D.

Downtown Las Vegas36° 10′ 8.8716″ N, 115° 8′ 25.5264” W
Date: June 21, 2010   Time: 4:30 pm

Inside, coffee shop. Outside, desert filth. The Okies had the Dust Bowl. We Lost Vegans get the Dirt Bowl, and it is this valley.

Dirtball. That is me: I’m grit-coated but sheltered by central air and good music. Coffee aroma and hipsters surround at other tables. The summer city is tough and sleazy, a neon and pavement oven electric, sandblasting us all with what must be economic decay. Granules of the End of Times. The air was not this sandy before the recession. It was hindered and frozen, paved over and tamed by progress and prosperity, but the desert must be reclaiming the concrete ghost town edges. This is the most abandoned town in the United States. Nature never takes long. Continue reading…

Hidden Treasure

by Lincoln Daw

Ok, ok here we go, he’ll love this one! Adjust the microphone. Do you get it? We haven’t got around to hooking up a webcam but the blank screen I’m staring into is indicative of his reaction. How to proceed? I feel as if I’ve stubbed my toe at the beginning of a long corridor, we hobble to hang up.

Continue reading…

Old Yang’s Noodle Shop

by Justin Corbitt

It didn’t look like the ashes came from an urn.

I mean, then again, it’s hard to say if that is completely accurate.  I’ve never seen ashes from an urn.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever know anyone to be cremated, or seen the cremation process, or seen the end result.  In short, I can only imagine the remains of someone, who chose to be set on fire once they expired, as a super fine white-gray ash.  More like the sand on a beach at some far off exotic locale than say the end of a burnt up cigarette.

The earthly remains of Mr. Yang’s Noodle Shop did not fit the bill at all.  The charred mass of a skeleton gave no indication of peace.  Dirt and mud mixed and coated the collapsed structure, whilst a cloud of ash and dust hung in the air and settled in little swirling pools.  Burnt, blackened wood debris, still smoldering and sticking out amongst the rebar and shattered glass, gave the ghastly appearance of a broken, misshapen spinal cord, as if the small building had broken its back when it tried to roll around on the ground and put itself out. Continue reading…

The Soup Shop

by Katrina Hamlin

‘Is this mao cai?’

The man in the cap heard the halting words. He looked at the foreign girl.

‘No.’

His Mandarin was careful. She needed it. So did he. He missed his home dialect in this city.

‘What is it?’

‘Malatang.’

The words were alien. Still, she thought she knew the scent and the colour of the soup; and she wanted something known.

‘From Sichuan?’

Behind a boy prepared trays of cold nuts and beans. The boy paused to listen to the unfamiliar tones. He couldn’t understand the common tongue yet.

‘Yes.’ Continue reading…

The Bund/Guangdong lu – 28th of December, 2008

by B.

Picking up my coat and scarf from the bar chair and collecting my Zhongnanhai 8’s, I down the last lonely Glamour Bar mojito for the evening, and to the muffled beat of what I think could only be Soulwax, I take the elevator down to the ground floor. The lobby’s divided staircase in plated gold lead takes me to the street, and dodging the Anhuinese beggar woman by the taxi stand, I turn left on to Guangdong Lu, and without really thinking I walk the 30 meters or so to where the Bund once used to be. The December cold is biting this year, and I pull my scarf tighter, reminding myself for the millionth time to buy a pair of proper gloves. Shanghai isn’t Northern Scandinavia, but I can’t remember ever the minus 20 degrees at home feeling as cold as these supposedly modest plus 3.

Continue reading…

The Year

by Dena Rash Guzman

And we met in the dark, on the bar patio. The stars barely flitted through the smog so that no stellar light reflected in your eyes, only the red end of your cigarette, which you held the wrong way like some naughty little SS agent. I didn’t like your nose and your purse didn’t go with your coat. This is how the lonely start fighting: I knew you’d never be good enough for me. I’d rather have been at home in my slightly shitty underwear unable to find porn wrong enough to get me off, frustrating myself like a cold and ruthless spouse. This is what I think of you and this what I’ve thought from the moment we met, and yet I asked you some stupid question to get you to talk to me. Continue reading…

Hitotoki-Hankou and Jiangxi Rds, today

by hellowatch

I saw a dead guy today. He was in his early forties, dressed in the collared blues of a workman’s uniform. He was lying on the pavement at the base of an office building. I stopped to watch him from behind the fence. His legs and arms were bent and contorted in such an odd position that to see them, one just had to stop. If you can imagine: his left elbow and right knee were pointed directly upward, as was the limp hand of his right arm, on which his head had fallen, and his left knee was bent and flat on the ground. It looked like he might be a swimsuit model adjusting her pose for a steamy photo shoot. That is, if you block what you’re really seeing and feeling out and keep your shallow wits about you. Continue reading…

Hitotoki: Fahuazhen Lu/Huahai Xi Lu, June 13, 2010, 5:30am

by ferret

I’d stayed up all night, and I was surrounded by the morning hush. For this brief hour, the city had crashed, fallen into a deep slumber. The revelers and party demons had retreated, and the drivers, the busybodies and the makers of the day had yet to arise and meet the morning. All that shuffled about were the soy milk servers and newspaper couriers, working in silence, as if the city were a temple.

A man brushed by me on my way down a wide avenue, babbling to himself, using the silence as a sounding board. I regarded him with some interest, but I found nothing strange in his behavior. I was talking with the silence as well.

How could I not? In these moments, the world was spread out before me, unified in that silence, bereft of differentiation, blurred from right and wrong, existing as itself and nothing more. Continue reading…

Hitotoki: The junction of Wulumuqi Lu/Yuyuan Lu

by S. C. Gordon

Time of story: Midnight

It’s raining. Wulumuqi Lu stretches behind me and beyond – a wet black ribbon. The rain is a blizzard; the trees are full of it. At the junction of Yuyuan Lu I stop at the traffic lights and remove my shoes, tucking them into the basket on the front of my bike, under the bright yellow spread of my cyclist’s raincoat. (It is more of a costume than a raincoat. Or a plastic niqab. It covers me completely, apart from my feet. I have tightened the toggle above my nose, so my field of view is a narrow slit under the inbuilt peaked cap.)

I touch my bare feet to the glossy tarmac as I wait for the lights to change. A man on a scooter pulls up beside me and stares. For once, the stare is unaccompanied by a muttering of laowai. He has no idea I’m not Chinese. My eyes are hidden beneath the peak of my canary-yellow disguise. My only strangeness is my bare feet.

It’s a rare anonymity. It’s liberation. Maybe it’s only the masked ones, the ones who are disguised, who are free.

The lights change to green beyond the fuzz of the rain. I claw my toes around the pedals and push on.