Hard Seat from Shenzhen to Shenyang Chapter 1

Er-Guo-Deas

by Katrina Hamlin

She woke up to the smell of chicken bones and fangbian mian. She tried to sit up.

Her head hit the thick metal springs. She had been sleeping underneath the seat.

The night before, she had met an American boy celebrating the end of his teaching tenure and the beginning of his winter travels. He’d been gifted two bottles of baijiu from the school. They finished the first one together.

She remembered being very sick, and declining his offer to share a joint in the squat toilet.

He had left the train at one of the small dark stations in the early hours.

She had tried to sleep in the carriage aisle; but the rice trolley couldn’t get by, so the other passengers rolled her under the seat, with the chicken bones and discarded fangbian buckets.

Continue reading…

All I Want for Christmas

by Christine Forte

Several journalists have interviewed me about the events that happened in December 2010 and for the most part they’ve later gotten the story completely wrong. So I’ve decided to write my own account of what happened in an attempt to set the record straight. Any details that were left out have been done so because the editor deigned them not suitable to print. I say this to highlight the fact that I’m not trying mislead anyone about my innocence or role as a bystander, I simply want to tell the story from my point of view.

Continue reading…

Shanghai Super Swedes

by Christine Forte

Continue reading…

The Broken Comb

by Katrina Hamlin

I live alone, apart from the cockroaches. My room is on the ground floor, down a lane. The house is as old as the People’s Republic. Damp is climbing up the walls, and the paint is peeling. I lock up my bicycle outside. At night, someone tucks it in under a blue tarpaulin. I have never seen who does this.

A line of chamber pots sits along the wall behind the bikes, drying in the wind. Further along the lane, the elderly couple keep tortoises in a porcelain basin. They settle a plank over the basin at night. The couple has a friend from one of the upstairs rooms. The man is old in an ageless way – he could be fifty, or one hundred and fifty. He comes down to the lane in his slippers. If the weather is warm, he doesn’t bother with trousers: He teams a bobbly sweater with dirty white long johns.

Around the corner from the tortoises’ basin, by the main entrance, there is a passageway to the street. Every morning a shabby mash of boxes unfurls into a dumpling stall. They sell vegetable jiaozi, tea boiled eggs, toufu patty and pickled greens. I think the proprieters are somehow related to the elderly couple. I exchange courtly nods with them  on my way to work, and the customers scoot on their stools to let me pass.

When the gate is shut at night, and my heavy door is locked, I feel as though I am in a fortress. Or a prison cell. I don’t really have windows, just little chinks the size of a catflap, too high for me to look out. That’s why I couldn’t see what was happening, though I heard everything.

Continue reading…

Next Time

By Miller Wey

A groupthink tribute to the Great White Buddha.

I had a Singha Beer yesterday at the Thai place on Yongjia Lu where we met the night before you left and it’s got thinking of escape now. A little hot weather and excess and women and drugs and booze and booze mixed with drugs to make you forget. Is it true about the speed margaritas? Not sure I’d really do it, but Bangkok is a new city and a new me. Before coming to China, I knew I had to move over the horizon to the next place. East coast to west coast and then a little time in Mexico before I got tired of it and I moved back to the west coast before deciding to come to Shanghai. I saw the old Spielberg film and some seventies kung fu stuff. There was usually something on TV back in the States, too. An exposé into ‘Hidden China’ or a friendly, safe profile about the aspirations of average Chinese or people trying to save some near extinct art or song and dance. Continue reading…

Mind Tamer

by Darcy Fischer

I am a trainer

Standing on a tall platform whipping my voice

Defending myself from the wild beasts

Who attack my patience with their sharp high pitched screams.

I stand on the platform with a mission

to educate  minds who are not in the environment to learn.

Who are fenced in a room of concrete walls and steel windows

A prison caging young wild imaginations

I stand on a platform with my tools to train the brain

To be obedient, orderly and adjusted to the rules

Walking like puppets

Strings held by their conscious

Tangled by order and formulas developed in curriculums studied

Programmed to act and react in a specific way

And punished for being different

Traveler’s Rest

by Miller Wey

Shaoxing Road? Was that the one? He couldn’t be sure. The names weren’t entirely alien, but nor were they familiar. Maoming was one he thought was easy to remember. It was like Mao Zedong’s mom. Maommy, maoming. No one else thought it was funny. But that’s how he remembered. The others he would forget or confuse. He often said he would take the time to write out directions, but he always hoped never writing things down would force him to commit things to memory. While it hadn’t worked yet, he held out hope that one day it would.

Turning a corner, he found himself somewhere new. For him, anyway. How could there be this much tall grass in the middle of the city? Under the dull orange light, the tall grass swayed along the sidewalk. It was darker ahead. Darker and unfamiliar. This was Shanghai, though, not Atlanta. A dark, unknown road didn’t hide thieves or gangs or crackheads or anything else he was raised to believe was waiting for him outside the suburbs. He only had maybe two hundred kuai in his pocket, anyway. Safe enough to keep walking. Continue reading…

All the Beauty in China

by Christine Forte

In the year of our Lord 1295, my first husband Giovanni celebrated his 40th birthday. I remember this because it was the same year that Marco Polo returned to Venice from his travels in Asia. In my husband’s honor, Duke Contarini threw a gala in the Palazzo Ducale, inviting all the most important merchants and politicians from the city as well as whichever foreign dignitaries and merchants were in town. Being only 18 myself, I was too young and naïve to understand that actually the gala was a ruse for the Duke to raise money for the war that he planned to wage against the Genoans. Nonetheless, it was the largest event the newly completed palace had ever seen and people talked about it for many years after. There were silk tapestries made specially for Giovanni, tables and chairs were handcrafted, dozens of musicians hired, gigantic barrels of wine rolled in. Continue reading…

The Descendants

by Stefan Schear

Cold night air bit at her rosy cheeks. The stairway to the train was a surging swamp of bodies. Kuan surrendered to the pull of the crowd, allowed herself to be lifted upward and carried like a rag doll to the platform. She let the tension and myopia of work seep from her muscles, and dreamed of home.

Just through the doors and they groaned shut, ripping jackets and dividing families. There was always the next train, she thought. In six hours. Maglevs heading west to Tibet ran on a sparse schedule, so once every six hours wasn’t bad for New Year’s traffic. She pulled the hood of her sweatshirt tight and closed her eyes, losing herself in the grind of metal on the cheap headphones.

Kuan was traveling alone. She hated crowds, which was unfortunate for a factory worker living in the Shanghai sprawl. This was the only time of year when she could return to the relative open space of Tibet, to the mystical clouds of her childhood. Continue reading…

I Think She’s Kind of Ugly

by Dena

Her voice on water
comes across the table,
seething round the rim of
her glass. The waiter
tips more, no ice. Her
voice on no ice is colder.
The starch between us is
miles of muslin tundra, acres, too big
for an explorer to scotch, cover, pass.

What starts hot ends cold. She likes
the snow, the rot underneath when
the sun comes around again. Me.

There is no me. I vanish into each
year, bloody and more lavish than
a golden ghetto coke spoon. Her
breasts quiver in their sweet cage. I
prickle at their salute. I fuck off.