5 Quick Questions for H.A.L. Author Renée Reynolds

Renée Reynolds grew up between Chicago and Los Angeles. She writes short fiction and paints long images while working as a freelance writer in Shanghai.

1. What are you working on right now?
Approximately ten to twelve first-person narratives who have entered late anaphase.

2. Tell us about something in Shanghai that inspires your writing.
Extreme levels of anonymity and distinction ebbing and flowing with subways, bicycles and foghorns.

3. What’s the biggest distraction to writing in Shanghai?
My self.

4. Quick. A reading list. 5 books:
“Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir”  by Lauren Slater

“The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester

“In Praise of Shadows” Jun’ichiroTanizaki

“Listen, Little Man!” by Wilhelm Reich

“The Epic of Gilgamesh” (Unless you decipher cuneiform, I recommend the Nancy K. Sandars, Stephen Mitchel and David Ferry versions — in that order)

5. Better City Better Life – yay or nay?
Coke. No, Pepsi! Actually…TAB.

The Crowd

Featured H.A.L. Artist: Efstathia Milaraki

“Untitled,” 240 x 90, acrylic on canvas, 2008 Continue reading…

Motorcycles

We watched her fall. Or rather, the cars in front of us watched her fall; we just watched her. Her stillness held the fall itself. Her body, limp, and the motorcycle, splintered, lay in the intersection of Shore and St. George. Mom in the passenger seat starts crying and I run the red light so we won’t have to watch her die. Because it looks like she’ll probably die. Mom won’t stop crying, because of motorcycles, she says. “So scary” and “you’re never allowed to ride one.” John tried to teach me once. This was when they first married, when he was trying to appear more as a friend than a father. Mom was out west on business as I pushed the little green Honda around an Episcopal church parking lot.

The woman is swollen, though not from trauma. She’s just fat and dressed in ugly clothes—light washed jeans and a sleeveless shirt. Where her arms should have been peach, they are now a sinful tile white. She just fell. Blood was still on its way to the street. I craned my neck to see if her eyes were open, but she was face down.

Although she was in the intersection, she is only blocking the turn lanes. Cars drive by.

We checked the newspaper the next morning. No article, so she’s okay. Then Mom starts talking about motorcycles again—the dirt bike track that her mother owned while she was in high school. “Just a field out in Deep Creek I guess, looking back.” But kids would come on their spray painted bikes. Cracks of lawnmower engines. No helmets.

“That’s why I never did drugs,” she said. “One night Mom and I came across some kids who had been smoking pot. They were from out of town. One of the them, a tall boy with long hair, got on his 100 cc and drove it straight into an elm tree. The bike flipped back on top of him, its hot pipes burning his legs. The others lost their minds laughing. They never told him they had cut the weed with something, probably PCP. Hunter, I tell you, I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

I sit there, not thinking about PCP or about that broken and dead woman who is now alive again, but only how my mom calls my grandma mom and how she was young once and how she was alive before I was.

On Death

“I will spend my life trying to understand the functioning of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.” —Sans Soleil

“She was so depressed she just walked into the river. Drowned herself right there in the water behind you. You know how bad it must be to convince your body to sink, not float?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning no. “I guess I do.”

Saying you have a lot of deaths in the family is like saying you have a lot of births. But suicides? And how should you remember those who wanted to be forgotten? And when you finally do forget, when their faces are lost to clouds and then just gray, how do you describe what they once were, and what they’ve done since? There are so many types of death—all affect the dead the least. The woman that walked stubbornly into the shallow waters of the Lynnhaven was my great aunt. And this part of the river is shallow. Nothing but reeds and mud for at least fifteen yards.

This happened in 1962, around the time that Princess Anne County was rechristened Virginia Beach. She woke up early one morning and walked into the river. Maybe she never went to sleep the night before. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that forty-five years have come between us, and I don’t know her name. My grandmother, Esther Byrd, has told me, rather quickly and faintly, but it never sticks. What I know is a presence chalked by its absence. Lo, my great aunt’s daughter, took it worst. After her were those in the house that morning—those who called the ambulance, as if speed were a factor with a body that cold. And then nothing happened. For over forty years nobody really spoke of it. I don’t suppose it was a conscious choice; mourning just takes too much energy. Another generation came around. Then a few days before last Christmas my sister was rushed to Virginia Beach General after swallowing a half bottle of Adderall. And people started talking about 1962 again.

In a family that doesn’t believe in God, death is tricky. My grandmother, after watching the slow unraveling of her invalid mother, made us all swear to make her drink rusty nails until she too could walk into the river. She was serious. Death means forgetting. Mourning—remembering. By this, everyday is death. I never knew my father. He’s dead to me, but I can still hope for some Golgotha moment where everything wrong will right itself. My mother has disappeared to the Baghdad desert; she too will be back. But I’ve already started to forget her face. As for 1962, the voluntary death, this makes it harder. I just remember that there was something I wasn’t supposed to forget. Do those who take their own lives want to be mourned? When they get right up close, do they want to go through with it? I read somewhere that with people who commit suicide by jumping, many of the autopsies reveal tears in their shoulder muscles. Because most don’t leap from the window. They lower themselves from a ledge and wait for courage. Only when they change their minds do their arms quiver and fail. And they drop. Like walking into a river. Sink or float.

Introducing H.A.L. author Hunter Braithwaite

Hunter Braithwaite was born in the Philippines and raised in Germany and America. He studied literature at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. He’s worked as a travel journalist, arts writer, and dishwasher. Past publications include National Geographic, City Weekend, and Time Out Shanghai. He’s currently working on a collection of short fiction.

Phone Calls (from Groupthink)
Sometimes I work backwards to create premonitory dreams. I look for auguries. Clouds moving quickly or the eye contact of strangers. Omens help because they point to reason. Nothing is tougher than unreasonable loss.

The night the police came I might have been dreaming a banging noise. I think of crunching ice with my teeth, bits of broken ice sliding down my face until they melt. Then my teeth bite stones until they begin to break themselves. The noise brings me back to the real world, the one without symbols, and becomes the sound of a gloved knuckle rapping on our oak door. The doorbell rings too. I went downstairs–I remember the feeling of each one. The carpet mashing beneath my weight, and then springing up again. Continue reading…

On Death
“I will spend my life trying to understand the functioning of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining.”—Sans Soleil

“She was so depressed she just walked into the river. Drowned herself right there in the water behind you. You know how bad it must be to convince your body to sink, not float?”

“Yes,” I said, meaning no. “I guess I do.”

Saying you have a lot of deaths in the family is like saying you have a lot of births. But suicides? And how should you remember those who wanted to be forgotten? And when you finally do forget, when their faces are lost to clouds and then just gray, how do you describe what they once were, and what they’ve done since? There are so many types of death—all affect the dead the least. The woman that walked stubbornly into the shallow waters of the Lynnhaven was my great aunt. And this part of the river is shallow. Nothing but reeds and mud for at least fifteen yards. Continue reading…

Motorcycles
We watched her fall. Or rather, the cars in front of us watched her fall; we just watched her. Her stillness held the fall itself. Her body, limp, and the motorcycle, splintered, lay in the intersection of Shore and St. George. Mom in the passenger seat starts crying and I run the red light so we won’t have to watch her die. Because it looks like she’ll probably die. Mom won’t stop crying, because of motorcycles, she says. “So scary” and “you’re never allowed to ride one.” John tried to teach me once. This was when they first married, when he was trying to appear more as a friend than a father. Mom was out west on business as I pushed the little green Honda around an Episcopal church parking lot. Continue reading…

Letters to Chinese Society 1 – CPC

by Betty P

Happy Friday everyone, and a warm welcome back to spring weather! To celebrate, we give you below the first of many Open Letters to Society to come. This category will be reoccurring, and we would like to invite you to send us your own letters to chosen parts of the PR. Or simply post below in the comment section.

Shanghai, China
17 January 2010

Dear CPC,

I am under no illusion about the vast number of letters that you receive on a daily basis, but I hope very much that you deem my humble epistle worthy of contemplation.

I write to express my sincere congratulations to you and your Party and further, to proffer my encouragement in the hope that it will steel the hearts and minds of those in your ranks to pursue feats of equal greatness.

Continue reading…

bus number fourteen

by ling’ling

As an infinite number of grapes ripen on the vine and fall at the various stages of their striving journey towards a Platonic perfection yet only one manages to fall at the precise moment of the ideal, so an angel astride a

Flying Pigeon weaves her way up Fumin Lu blissfully unaware that in her the gods have violated the contract of their non-existence in a cumulative expression of perfection to exceed even their own pedestrian fantasies.

To see her face is to know that in her the universe has suddenly, unexpectedly and with absolute finality manifested its singular purpose in the curve of her delicate figure. Every history, every art, every violence, every sex, every thought ever conceived revealed as but a gloriously blind, witless stagger towards this moment.

Continue reading…

Here I Am

Jazz Man on Building Head